WISCONSIN POLITICS GOP’S alarming approach prompted recall election

Recalls and impeachments are a remedy of last resort. Mostly, voters who don’t like an incumbent choose to live with the politician until the next election, on the theory that fixed terms of office and regular elections are checks on abuses of power and extreme policies.

The question facing Wisconsin’s citizens is whether Gov. Scott Walker engaged in such extraordinary behavior that setting aside his election is both justified and necessary.

Walker’s opponents forced Tuesday’s recall vote by using the state’s laws in an entirely legitimate way. They gathered more petition signatures than they needed, signaling that discontent in the state was widespread.

The result has been a fairly conventional campaign in which Republican Walker once again confronts his 2010 Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. At this point, preferring Barrett, an affable moderate liberal, to the conservative Walker is reason enough to vote the incumbent out, but the broader case for recall is important.

Walker is not being challenged because he pursued conservative policies, but because Wisconsin has become the most glaring example of a new and alarming approach to politics on the right. It seeks to use incumbency to alter the rules and tilt the legal and electoral playing field toward the interests of those in power.

The most obvious way of gaming the system is to keep your opponents from voting in the next election. Rigging the electorate is a surefire way of holding on to office. That is exactly what has happened in state after state — Wisconsin is one of them — where GOP legislatures passed new laws on voter identification and registration. They are plainly aimed at making it much more difficult for poorer, younger and minority voters to get or stay on the voter rolls, and to cast ballots when Election Day comes.

Rationalized by claims of extensive voter fraud that are invented out of whole cloth, these measures are discriminatory in their effect and partisan in their purpose.

But Walker and his allies did more than this in Wisconsin. They also sought to undermine one of the Democratic Party’s main sources of organization. They sharply curtailed collective bargaining by most public employee unions and made it harder for these organizations to maintain themselves, notably by requiring an almost endless series of union elections.

The attack on unions was carried out in the name of saving state and local government money. But there is a difference between bargaining hard with the unions and demanding more reasonable pension agreements, and trying to undercut the labor movement.

This recall should not have had to happen. Its root cause was not the orneriness of Walker’s opponents, but a polarizing brand of conservative politics that most Americans, including conservatives, have reason to reject. • To provide an open forum of community voices. • To offer a balance of views. • To seek solutions to important regional problems.

A very strange story, a 6,000-word frontpage New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama runs the assassination campaign. On-therecord quotes from the highest officials. This was