The legal system is one big job creation machine? (It is for me...) (Publicus Proventus)

I'm not a one-trick pony and don't spend all my political thinking on pointing out that Gov. Patsy Walker -- whose list of illegal activities is growing by the day, impressively -- faked a death threat to get sympathy while trying to sell Wisconsin's power plants to the Koch Brothers using anti-union legislation as a smoke-screen.

That, by the way, is a perfectly acceptable sentence.

I also, politically speaking, pay attention to things like the election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice that's coming up next Tuesday, April 5. (As you'd expect, given my job.). So I thought it was interesting that Justice For Now David Prosser complained about an ad that was running in support of challenger Joanne Kloppenburg. Here's the ad:



Prosser complained about that ad, but he's being hoist by his own petard: he voted not to punish Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, a decision the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel decided was a license to lie. And Prosser himself decided that civility was not the highest and best goal of the judiciary when he called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a "bitch," and later said that his epithet was warranted.

Now Prosser has responded via an apparent third-party ad that began airing, at least on radio around Madison, this morning; the ad is remarkable in that in it, the group supporting Prosser repeatedly refers to Joanne Kloppeburg as a "government" lawyer, using government almost as an epithet. That alone would be a bad enough pander to ignorant voters -- Prosser, after all, is a government lawyer himself, having been a justice, a District Attorney, and a legislator -- but the ad goes on to attack Kloppenburg for filing lawsuits "against farmers" and others "who create jobs," and urges voters to call Kloppenburg and say we need more jobs and fewer lawsuits.

Which is to say: David Prosser is trying (or at least complicit with those who are trying) to convince voters that working for the government is a bad thing - -as he tries to stay working for the government. And he's suggesting that the role of the Department of Justice (where Kloppenburg works) should be to foster job creation; and, he's implicitly saying that the Supreme Court of Wisconsin should be focused on job creation. Two good rules to know if you're going to be arguing a case in front of the Court anytime soon: 1. lying is okay, and 2. the justices want to create jobs.