If I recall, there was some confusion a couple of weeks back on the definition of "pay-to-play." For example, if someone contacts an aide to a prominent politician and asks for something, and then doesn't get it, that's not "pay-to-play," no matter what the "optics" make it look like in the "narrative." Of course, if, say, a state attorney general gets a campaign contribution and then calls off an investigation of a scam that the contributor may have been running, that's a little closer.

And then there's this thing, which comes out of the evidence bomb that The Guardian dropped Wednesday on the head of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, as reported by The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Citing leaked documents gathered during a now-shuttered investigation into the governor's campaign, the Guardian U.S., an arm of the British newspaper, reported that Harold Simmons, owner of NL Industries, a producer of the lead formerly used in paint, made three donations totaling $750,000 to the Wisconsin Club for Growth between April 2011 and January 2012. Simmons' donations were made before and after Republicans approved two laws helpful to the industry — one in January 2011 and the other in June 2013. The 2013 measure was inserted in a budget bill in the middle of the night despite warnings about its constitutionality. The documents confirm earlier reports that Walker solicited millions of dollars for Wisconsin Club for Growth, a group then run by R.J. Johnson, one of his top campaign advisers. The Guardian story says Walker was even warned him in an email about potential "red flags" with Simmons, who died in 2013, including a magazine story that described him as "Dallas' most evil genius."

Lead paint? Jesus, we can all agree that lead paint is a bad thing, right? (Julius Fcking Caesar knew lead paint was a bad thing, but he didn't know why.) You take money from people who make lead paint and then you make it easier for them to duck responsibility for the poisoning of your state? Apparently, not.

For instance, in an overnight meeting in June 2013, Republicans on the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee inserted a provision into the budget long sought by the lead paint industry that was meant to block lawsuits pending against them by 171 children sickened by lead paint. But in July 2014 a federal appeals court ruled that a lawsuit by one of those children could continue despite the 2013 state law. The boy who suffered lead poisoning can sue a half dozen major manufacturers of paint used on the Milwaukee house where he lived, based on a theory approved in a controversial 2005 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled. In an interview Wednesday, the boy's attorney, Peter Earle, said he was "trembling with rage" at the news of the contributions by the industry, saying that they were meant to block claims by "the most vulnerable among us." He said that Republican leaders in Wisconsin had benefited from industry money and then acted to try to retroactively block lawsuits by children harmed by lead paint.

Jesus, these people…

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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