Friday, February 24, 2006

Jensen: Screwed Blue and Tattooed

Scott Jensen is not one of my heroes. He's being tried for offenses which are perhaps technical, but are not without substance--the substance being that State TAXPAYER dollars were used to pay people who did political stuff. In a nutshell, it was Party of Government on steroids.

Having said that, there's something wrong with this picture:

District Attorney Brian Blanchard who seems quite willing to put people in jail for using state paid graphic artists to create campaign literature, decided to let Assistant AG Roy Korte examine Grant. Was that because Blanchard himself received graphic design services from the Senate Democratic Caucus staff? Was Blanchard feeling even the slightest twinge of guilt when Korte showed Grant a nomination paper he had designed for an Assembly candidate?

Funny how the state gets to call witnesses to testify about what was done in the past but the defense team can’t bring up the past “uncharged activities" of others to make their case that the rules were unclear.If the defense could raise these kinds of issues, they might talk about how former Doyle Campaign Manager Andy Gussert directed Senate Democratic Caucus staff to provide voter lists and nomination paper design work for Brian Blanchard’s campaign for Dane County District Attorney, or how current Doyle Campaign Manager Rich Judge directed graphic artists to create campaign literature for Democratic Assembly candidates every day when he was a caucus director, a decade after Scott Jensen served in that capacity.

And that pesky defense might want to know why Blanchard redacted most of the testimony of Assembly Democratic Caucus artist Lisa Lindner along with the entire report of selected copies of political materials she created at the ADC…Did that work include graphic design for Jim Doyle, Peg Laugtenslager or Brian Burke's campaigns?

To be frank, Blanchard smells, and the odor is seeping under the door here in Brookfield, 70 miles from that courtroom.

It is NOT a defense to state that "The other guys did it, too!"--but knowledge of the WHOLE picture will be useful to a jury, and for that matter, the rest of the State.

Maybe the MSM will catch up with this someday....

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