It's past midnight on the night before the recall election. David Shuster of NBC News broke a story over the weekend that Governor Scott Walker is now a target of the "John Doe" investigation in Milwaukee into criminal misuse of government funds.

This news does not seem to have made any significant impact on Wisconsin news media, which doesn't actually surprise me. The recall election is the big news--actually, the recall elections, plural, for governor, lieutenant governor, and four state senators.

Whether or not Governor Walker was involved in the scandal that has already resulted in indictments of some of his aides, the fact remains that he has already accumulated a legal defense fund totaling more than $160,000. He has acted in ways that do not seem consistent with someone with nothing to hide, insofar as he has claimed to be cooperating completely with the investigators, while in fact refusing to turn over his emails to the investigators.

Tonight, on the Rachel Maddow show, I saw a video clip of Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch. I have only seen her twice before, both times on ads for her defense against recall. They portrayed her as a smart, effective person who spent a lot of time doing her best to attract new business to Wisconsin.

The clips on the Maddow Show, however, were very different. In one clip, she said, "Republican candidate for Wisconsin Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch compared same-sex marriage to marrying a clock during a radio interview.

“This is a slippery slope,” Kleefisch said. “In addition to that at what point are we going to be okay marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table or this, you know, clock? Can we marry dogs?

“This is ridiculous,” continued Kleefisch. “And biblically, again, I’m going to go right back to my fundamental Christian beliefs marriage is between one man and one woman.”

“She’s perpetuating the idea that it’s not okay to be gay,” said one protester.

“The people of Wisconsin are against gay marriage,” Kleefisch later told FOX6′s Real Milwaukee. “The people of Wisconsin spoke on this issue, as you guys are aware, in 2006 passed a constitutional amendment that said marriage is between one man and one woman.”

Asked how she felt about Wisconsin’s amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, Kleefisch responded that she is “against gay marriage as well” because it is a “fiscal back breaker.”

“The legislative fiscal bureau announced about five days ago that we are actually $265 million dollars further in the hole than we expected to be this year,” said Kleefisch. “We just don’t have the money to be giving out for extra benefits right now. It’s a fiscal back breaker.”

Later she apologized for saying things that were offensive to gay people. However, one of her uncles did not believe that she  was sincere in her apology, and to  showed his support for gay rights, donated $500 to Tom Barrett's campaign in the recall election.

What is clear is that Ms. Kleefisch is at least as radically right-wing as Governor Walker, and that if Governor Walker is either defeated in the election or wins, but is later impeached, a Kleefisch governorship would not be any better than Walker's has been.

I also heard this morning that the governor, and Reince Priebus, too, raised the specter of voter fraud. Which is ridiculous, as is Priebus's contention that "unions have come in from outside and hijacked the election." Considering the enormous advantage in spending the Republicans have, it seems clear hat from any objective point of view that if anyone is "hijacking" the election, it is money from Republican backers from out-of-state.

It is very difficult to overcome the overwhelming volume of pro-Walker, anti-Barrett ads, especially since there are a certain number of people who, like a friend of a friend who, when told that an ad in which Barrett was accused of wrongdoing of which he is verifiably innocent, said, "But if it got on TV, it must be true."

If it got on TV, it must be true. 

I don't know how one can argue with such un-critical acceptance of everything seen on TV. 

We can only hope that people who are still thinking will look at the volume of Walker's ads and wonder why the governor has gotten such a vast amount of money for ads, if he is as honorable and as supportive of Wisconsin's "forward" tradition as he claims. 

If people will ask themselves that question, perhaps they will be open to the truth about the governor's agenda, and about Tom Barrett's real qualification for the governorship of Wisconsin. 

Walker has continuously claimed that the people of Wisconsin are behind him. Something that has been lost in all the recall  excitement is the fat that in the 2010 election he and his corporate allies outspent Barrett by a huge factor to win that election. Walker has always had the corporate agenda he constantly denies. Barrett simply wants to help Wisconsin back to a sane, balanced state of governance. 

Its almost as simple as that.

In the field, canvassing, today

That was Saturday, and until I go to sleep and wake up again, it isn't entirely Sunday.

I spent three hours canvassing for Tom Barrett and Mahlon Mitchell in Fitchburg. Literally pounding the pavement, ringing doorbells. It's not easy for me to do this, especially at first, but once I have rung a few doorbells and talked with a few people, it gets a bit easier. People don't think I'm shy, but ringing the bell of someone I don't know at all is just not natural for me.

It was a positive experience. People I talked to were generally for the candidates I'm for, and that helps, of course. And there were a couple people who were worried about the outcome, and that is entirely natural. When the opposition lies about virtually everything, from his agenda to his achievements to his opponent's record, and has an advantage in funds of 25 to 1, it would take a fool to be sunnily optimistic.

However, some really interesting things have emerged from the day that put things in clearer focus for me. First of all, I realized that there is a lot about Tom Barrett that has gotten completely buried by Scott Walker's--and Walker's friends'--propaganda.

Walker and others who propagate ads on tv and radio that trash Tom Barrett always refer to him only as the Mayor of Milwaukee. And Barrett is, indeed, the Mayor of Milwaukee. But his experience in government is far broader than that. He served two terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, then served in the State Senate, and then four terms as a Congressman from Wisconsin, before being gerrymandered out of his district. He then ran for mayor of Milwaukee, and won. But more intriguingly, he won reelection by an enormous majority--over 70%--twice!

It is telling that while Scott Walker, who was the Milwaukee County Supervisor all the years that Barrett was Mayor, until Walker became governor, trashes Barrett, but the voters of Milwaukee seem to think that Barrett has done a very good job. And though Barrett lost to Walker 52% to 48% for governor in 2010, he won Milwaukee by a 2-1 margin.

What Scott Walker has going for him is very, very wealthy friends. While he claims to be taking Wisconsin forward, in fact, he has really taken it backwards in terms of the government's service to the people, with his extreme cuts to education, health care, salaries for government employees and many other measures. He even managed to lose $800 million in Federal grant money to the state, before he even took office, by announcing that he would reject the money, which was supposed to help build a high-speed rail link between Madison and Milwaukee, which would have been a huge economic boon to the state, creating jobs, and also encouraging economic development along the rail corridor. It also would have gone a long way toward re-invigorating Scott Walker's home base, Milwaukee.

Why did Walker reject the money? I don't know for sure, but I have noticed that he has given state subsidies to firms that are engaged in construction of highways. There may be a connection there, but I can't know for sure.

But the bottom line here is simply just that. Walker is all about the bottom line. Can anyone whose eyes are open really think that the vast amount of negative advertising paid for by groups that are not his campaign's own but which are aimed at discrediting Tom Barrett is merely the pleas of a concerned electorate?

All one has to do is notice the bus tour of "Americans for Progress," the organization funded directly by the Koch Brothers who have stood behind Walker, and who own the largest privately held oil and energy company in the United States. Can anyone really believe it is a coincidence that these people launched a ten city bus tour of Wisconsin a week before the recall election? They claim there is no connection, and that they are not campaigning for any political candidate.

That may be technically true, but their message is absolutely clear. Their way is Walker's way. And their way is the same way as the way of the far-right conservative Republican way. They claim that we need lower taxes . . . but they've been saying that for ten years, and we have had lower taxes in these ten years, and the results have benefitted only one group of Americans--those who are already most wealthy or most profitable, in the case of businesses.

Tom Barrett has been an able public servant. He has shown an ability to cooperate with others in government, on both sides of the aisle. Even a Republican as conservative as Paul Ryan said nice things about Barrett, when they were both in the U.S. Congress.

We have all--voters, media, everyone--been bombarded by so much negative campaignage by Walker and his friends that Tom Barrett's real virtues, and the many positive accomplishments he has had in a much longer and more effective political career have been terribly obscured. All that Walker has shown is an inclination to bully those he can bully. With a Republican majority in both houses of the legislature, he decided that he could simply eliminate what, to him, was the inconvenient presence of unions in the public sector. No governor of Wisconsin, Democrat or Republican, has ever felt the necessity to do away with negotiations with unions. Every single one of them has managed to govern without eviscerating the function of unions.

And while he claims to have balanced the budget while lowering taxes, that is not entirely true. He has raised taxes for older people; he has lowered government contributions to health insurance for state employees. And he has consistently lied about the role of unions in their relationship to state government, claiming that state workers did not contribute to their retirement funds, when in fact this was never true.

He has lied about a lot. And his claims of job gains in the state, while in small measure true--yes, there have been jobs created in the state, bear close scrutiny. First, there have been fewer jobs created in Wisconsin than he claims. But more significantly,  he has been personally responsible for the loss of jobs in the state because of all the jobs he has eliminated in the state government. And no matter how he would like to say it isn't true, the statistics still stand. Under his administration, Wisconsin has LOST more jobs than any other state in the United States.

But his ads--his constant barrage of ads--make it seem as if this is not true.

They are ads. Even the ones that say "facts" are ads. And for every "fact" in those ads, there are many more facts that are conveniently left out of those ads, which completely contradict the "facts" in his ads.

But the worst thing of all may be, as mentioned above, that he has attempted to cloak himself in the progressive tradition of Wisconsin. His ads often trumpet that with Walker, Wisconsin will continue Forward (and with Barrett, Backward). The word "forward" is the motto of the state. And it comes from the Progressive movement. The movement that fostered unions, and worker's rights, and which has been responsible for bringing many laws into being which help to balance the power of moneyed interests by regulating business's excesses and advocating for the rights of workers and the general populace against the enormous powers that wealth and corporate clout muster in the name of profit.

Corporations are made for profit. But that is not the role of government. When people in Wisconsin vote on Tuesday, I hope they will understand that a vote for Scott Walker is a vote in favor of the interests of corporations, not the interests of everyone else. The government is supposed to protect us from corporate overreach. If Walker keeps being governor, we will be surrendering to corporations as never before.

It has been said that we are known by the company we keep. Scott Walker keeps company with the Koch Brothers and with other big business interests. He has proven this in many ways, the most obvious of which was the $130 million dollars in subsidies he doled out to corporations last year when he claimed that he had to eliminate union bargaining rights, cut $800 million from the education budget and eliminate thousands of state jobs. Have those subsidies created a lot of jobs? Not enough to keep Wisconsin from having lost more jobs last year than any other state.

What more proof do we need to know where his interest really lies, no matter what his ads say?

And every time those ads say "Forward," it is a slap in the face to the state motto and the people of Wisconsin.

Last nightWisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his Democratic opponent in the upcoming recall election had a debate, or something like a debate. It was strange, the two of them sitting at a table with a moderator.

Walker is slick. He keeps saying "move forward," which is designed to appeal to Wisconsinites, because we are the state that has the motto "Forward," and we also are the birthplace of the Progressive movement.

But Walker and Forward are like that famous couple, a fish and a bicycle--nothing in common. The only people Walker really wants to move forward are the Koch Brothers, who have donated literally tens of millions of dollars to his last two political campaigns, and have also just sent more than seventy people here specifically to campaign for  . . . well, they don't say for what or for whom, because they can't do that without being in violation of campaign finance fules. But it's a really amazing coincidence that they've chartered buses to visit ten Wisconsin cities a week before this recall election.

Stoom Barrett is not a perfect candidate. As the mayor of Milwaukee, he's had a very difficult task. Milwaukee has never been an easy city to govern, at least since the early 1960s when it lost a lot of its industrial base, and much of its middle-class fled to the suburbs. But he's a reasonable man, a bright, talented man with a strongly progressive agenda, and he's got a good deal of character, and good ideas

Walker runs ads that make him sound like a guy who's been attacked by "special interests," whereas the fact is, he is the king of special interests in Wisconsin. He has taken the classic Republican position of the new millennium: accuse the opponent of having the vices you have. So he refers to Barrett as pandering to special interests. But since becoming governor, Walker has the worst job-creation record of any sitting governor; he has created a crisis in education in the state, about which he lies (class size has not been this large, on average, since 1995); he has tried to privatize the University of Wisconsin, and everything else he can get his hands on; he's helped pass voter suppression laws; he's generally discouraged or made impossible voting by certain groups -coincidentally, largely Democratic-voting groups: poor people, young people, old people, minority voters. Amazing coincidences, eh?

The debate was full of disingenuous statements by Walker, and denials by him of responsibility for anything he has done.

Yes, he was right in asserting that Milwaukee has a problem with crime. But that's about all he could say to argue his points against Barrett. And the fact that he has eviscerated education funding in Milwaukee for more than a decade now has been a significant contributory cause to Milwaukee's crime problem, and its unemployment problems. So his hands are far from clean in those matters he blames on his opponent.

What is clear, however, is that his agenda has not benefited the vast majority of people in Wisconsin. And that's what the election is about.