Monday, July 7, 2008

The WMC Is Feeling The Heat

Fresh blog wars surround the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), with righty-bloggers aiming their Internet indignation at WMC critic Paul Soglin.

Paul's blog gets you some history.

The WMC brought all this on itself with its television spots that helped bring down sitting State Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler in April, and a year earlier, a separate ad campaign that helped put Annette Ziegler on the court.

The WMC was within its rights to back Ziegler, and Butler's opponent, Burnett County Circuit Court Judge Michael Gableman, no matter how shallow the ads or the candidates they were backing.

The WMC has been throwing its political and financial weight around for years, and surely knows that pushback can be part of the game.

Now that it's happening (disclosure: I sit on a One Wisconsin Now board, and that group also has a WMC Watch effort underway), I think it's interesting that WMC is now not enjoying the game so much.

So it goes.

2 comments:

James Wigderson said...

So do you think Soglin owes it to his readers to fully disclose his funding sources? After all, since he's calling for it from others he must think its something we should all do.

James Rowen said...

That's for Paul to answer.

I don't think he has the same size budget that the WMC threw into the Supreme Court races, which were to influence elections - - hence the public benefit to the WMC's disclosure.

Basically, he's a blogger. Do all bloggers now have to disclose their sources of income?

Do you?