Plaisted Writes

The Illusory Tenant Has Left The Building

2012-01-18T22:48:00.000-06:00

Sad news from the blogosphere. Just when we need him most, Tom Foley has headed off to gloriously greater climes, taking a good job in an exotic location and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves as the denizens of FitzWalkerStan kick and scratch and cheat to try to maintain their ungodly grip on Total Power. In a typically short, obtuse and self-effacing final post, he leaves us only with the glorious solo piano of Art Tatum playing "Over the Rainbow". Which is where Foley is going, by the way. I've seen pictures.

With all due respect to everybody else who is trying to make some sense and points with their various blogs out here, nobody holds a candle to Tom. He is consistently brilliant, hilarious and right on-the-money. A king of the short-form post, when he puts his mind and time to it, he can write a devastating long treatise on complicated legal subjects that entertain as well as destroy the pompous musings of a certain part-time law professor.

Speaking of Rick Esenberg, the latest winner of the Right-Wing Money Sweepstakes (his newly-minted "Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty", neither an "institute" nor much interested in law or liberty, is funded by the Bradley Foundation and other right-wing moneybags) tries to counter Foley's arguments by personally attacking him in his latest post. The well-heeled Esenberg botches a snarky aside to Foley, writing nonsensically about a "law school graduate (and suspended lawyer)" without naming him, before lurching into yet another defense of the embarrassing middle-finger-to-ethics Justice Michael Gableman and how he didn't get the free legal services from Michael Best that he certainly got. What are you going to believe, says Esenberg -- me, or your lying eyes? Esenberg is obviously going to keep trotting out this line of apologist bullshit until somebody believes it.

Pointing out Foley's irrelevant state bar status is the kind of politics-of-personal-destruction diversion you expect from right-wingers who are losing the argument (which Esenberg always is). The fact is that Tom -- who I have had the pleasure of showing around the Courthouse and could tell would have been a good lawyer if someone would have just hired him -- let his law license lapse when he realized he was moving on to better things. The fact he isn't a current member of the bar doesn't affect his well-reasoned arguments on any subject one bit. The fact Esenberg would resort to catty asides like this shows how weak he thinks his doomed position really is.

Tom Foley regularly had the goods on both Esenberg and Gableman -- not to mention Walker, the Fitzgeralds and everyone else making our lives miserable, locally and nationally. I have encouraged him to use the wonders of what he called "the internets" to stay in touch with Wisconsin politics in this critical year and keep posting. Alas, he has declined, for now, not knowing the state of technology in his future slice of Paradise and figuring he'll be too busy working in the bright tropical sunshine. But I hope he finds some time to share with us his unique and brilliant perspective. Or at least drop us a line from time to time.

I'll miss his friendship and his bass and keyboard playing in my ad hoc semi-annual bands (we kicked ass on "Like a Rolling Stone" at Nod to Bob this year). We'll all miss everything else -- his essential contribution to the Wisconsin conversation. Terribly.

Why Does Marty Kaiser Want To Be My Friend?

2011-12-28T07:59:00.000-06:00

I have written a lot of awful songs through my many years of amateur folk-rock pretension. But one I wrote over 30 years ago seems to have some staying power, even though the subjects of the song have not. It's an ode to the three network anchormen (yes -- men) who dominated TV news dissemination from their desks and chairs after the pioneering days of Walter Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley had passed.

These were the days before Ted Turner's revolutionary CNN created the 24-hour news cycle, eventually leading to the current niche-ification of the news, where you can now browse per your preference for the trivial (sadly, CNN), the (sometimes) thoughtfully substantive MSNBC and the nut-right fact-and-attitude alternate universe of Fox News. As helpfully instantaneous as these news outlets often are to the chronically vicarious ("Let's go live to Los Angeles, where a car appears to be going the wrong way down a one-way street...wait, we are breaking away to Ames, Iowa, where Newt Gingrich's head is about to explode..."), more means less in a world where there is no longer a standard set of news-facts we can all argue about and work to change.

Anyway, my song -- "(Why Does) Dan Rather (Want To Be My Friend)" -- is about the three network news anchors as they existed in the post-Cronkite, pre-cable '80s and how they tried to sell themselves to a too-salable public. As essential rock critic Robert Christgau used to write (or still does), here are some Inspirational Verses:

Why does Dan Rather want to be my friend?
I can tell by the way he smiles right at the end...

Why does Tom Brokaw wanna get to know me?
If he's got some news, man -- I wish he'd show me...

Why does Peter Jennings want to read my mind?
I'm just a demographic -- I'm just a certain kind...

...and so on. These days, only Brian Williams on NBC maintains the traditional anchor gravitas, albeit with the occassional knowing smirk. The revolving chair at CBS has made the Cronkite network irrelevant and over at ABC, former Nixon speech writer Diane Sawyer is still, well, Diane Sawyer. But the network anchor as cultural icon or anything but an occasional curiosity is over.

But, in this post, we are not concerned with TV heads trying to charm us (or, in the case of Fox and Friends, right-wing nobs providing us enough comic fodder for a month of Daily Shows). We are immune to their supposed charm anyway, bombarded as we are with promotional shots of news show hosts posing in front of the Hoover Dam or in coffee shops.

No, today, Journal Sentinel President/Publisher Elizabeth Brenner and Editor Martin Kaiser are the ones who want you to like them -- really, really like them. The newspaper, you see, is about to jump off the cliff of pay-for-content in its on-line offerings, starting January 4th. To prepare you for this abrupt change of paying for the crap you now get for free, the paper ran a full-page ad for itself this morning [can't get a link to it], explaining (sort of) the change and trying to convince you how great it is. Details about how to give them your credit-card information to begin the extractions will follow in due course.

In the ad, er, "letter" (not available at JSOnline and, although there was no companion story in the business pages or anywhere else in today's paper, a story popped up on-line this morning), "Betsy" and "Marty" are featured in glossy pictures like the kind you would see in a Flomax or funeral home ad. After patting themselves on the back for making themselves irrelevant by endorsing Scott Walker and fighting the recall campaign -- oops, I mean for winning Pulitzers and covering the Brewers' and Packers' playoff runs (tough job, that), they drop the bomb. "Now, it’s time to look ahead," they write. Oh, oh. Here it comes. Hold on to your wallet or prepared to be less informed about the Journal Sentinel's version of Milwaukee and Wisconsin.

The pay-for-content scheme is branded as JS Everywhere -- who, after all, could argue with that, being everywhere, isn't that wonderful? The dwindling number of people who subscribe to the dead-tree version of the paper can be everywhere for no additional cost. And, like the current scheme at the New York Times, you can be everywhere on the website, until you've hit 20 links in a month, then ya-gotta-pay, somehow. Wonderful apps are promised for all mobile devices "or whatever the next big thing is". Oh, that Journal Sentinel -- always looking forward, except when it comes to radical Republican governors who they could have predicted would run roughshod over Wisconsin tradition, progressivism and bipartisanship.

I understand all legacy news content providers (i.e.: newspaper companies) around the country are stuggling with a new world where people no longer need their publications to stay what they consider to be informed. And there is no substitute for the numbers of reporters built up over the years (even with the decimation of staffs at the J-S and everywhere else) to report on local, national and international events. The economic model has obviously collapsed.

But much of the Journal Sentinel's increased local coverage (encouraged by newspaper industry consultants to sustain relevancy) has devolved into simply providing hysterically sensationalized stories to give right-wing talk radio something to talk about. This is especially the case when it involves the struggles of underclass African-Americans, whether it's co-sleeping or child-care providers. Interesting information to a point, but there is nothing a racist like Mark Belling enjoys more than sneering at the failures of blacks in the inner city.

As long as Journal Communications Inc., through Charlie Sykes and its other wing-nut squawkers on the radio, the rest of their properties -- including the Journal Sentinel -- will always be compromised. JCI also contributes to the poisoning of the airwaves in other parts of the country, sending the reprehensible J.T. Harris to its station in Tucson and former WISN part-time wing-nut Nick Reed to Springfield, MO. The question isn't whether the Journal Sentinel will survive in its increasingly-digital form, but whether it deserves to.

As James Brown once said, Take it to the bridge:

I grew up -- with space shots and assassinations
Saw riots in the street -- I watched with fascination
I watched the revolution -- on my TV
Watching Walter Cronkite at my daddy's knee

There, on the floor while we watched Cronkite, were the afternoon Milwaukee Journal and the Sheboygan Press. That was back when newspapers were newspapers -- not audience-seeking multi-media conglomerates, using consultants rather than news judgement to squeeze every last dollar out of their collapsing circulation. The Journal Sentinel's pay-to-read experiment will rise or fail on the merit of its content, not because of Betsy and Marty's sugar-coating their own harsh reality.

620 WTMJ Can Run But It Can't Hide

2011-12-20T08:08:00.000-06:00

Democratic Spokesperson Graeme Zielinski is on to something with his direct challenge to the WTMJ radio station for its pathetic hosting and promotion of Charlie Sykes on their valuable airwaves.

If you haven't heard his excellent sandbagging of the hapless 620 news dweebs last week, take 5 minutes and listen to it now.

Here it is.

Zielinski digs in from the get-go, lumping news director Jon Byman and morning host Gene Mueller (who he repeatedly calls "you guys") in with Sykes, whose daily Walker Protection Show immediately follows them on the Journal Communications Inc. flagship biggest-stick-in-the-state radio station. You can almost hear Byman and Mueller's eyes roll as they try to control the unexpected and badly-needed attack on their straight news credentials. As the obedient Byman tries to promote the GOP-designed multiple-signature-and-Mickey-Mouse-signing meme to smear the recall effort, Zielinski was having none of it. "You guys are doing a great job hyping the case," he said. "You guys are running around 24 hours a day with this false narrative...promoted by your friends at the MacIver Institute..." The whole performance was a beautiful take-down of the TMJ brand, which has been forever tarnished by their association with the likes of Sykes, Jeff Wagner, and all of the other False Prophets of The Nut-Right.

Gene Mueller has been a welcome voice on Milwaukee morning radio for decades -- especially his many years teaming up with the legendary Bob Reitman on the late WKTI. His everyman-from-Sheboygan shtick is still a welcome addition to the 620 morning show, but, as Byman tries to getting a word in edgewise with the on-a-roll Zielinski, Mueller says the stupidest thing in the segment. "Graeme, what happens on this station after 8:30 is none of my concern," he said. This from the guy who makes happy-talk with Sykes about his upcoming lies at 8:25 every morning. This from the guy who often sticks around to provide supposedly straight news reports during the Sykes hours. If the kind of poison Sykes spews into the air every day after 8:30 is really none of his concern, maybe he should make it of his concern. Gene Mueller's formerly rock-solid reputation as a regular-guy-on-the-radio and a half-decent newsman is put in jeopardy every time he engages with or promotes the Garbage Within his own radio station.

TMJ radio honcho Steve Wexler -- who is responsible for much of the poisoning of the Milwaukee airwaves, from his days at WISN where he promoted, if not hired, the reprehensible Mark Belling, to today where he promotes Republican causes through Sykes, Wagner, (until recently) the ridiculous J.T. Harris, and runs national wing-nuts such as failed comedian Dennis Miller and the knuckle-dragging Michael Savage -- responded to Zielinski's hijacking of the segment by claiming "Our listeners are smart enough to understand that our news programs consistently present opposing viewpoints but that our talk programs have a different mission."

Well, no. First of all, anybody who listens to Charlie Sykes and believes any of the GOP talking-points he drives on a daily basis isn't "smart enough" for anything, much less making a distinction between straight news and Sykes' blather. And, what exactly is the "different mission" of the talk shows? It must be the promotion of nut-bag radical Republicanism and the protection of the FitzWalkerstan. Nowhere does the station provide a disclaimer, such as "Charlie Sykes' insipid reading and artistic rendering of Republican press releases does not represent the views of station management..." Which can only mean it does.

On all the Journal Communication entities -- including and especially the newspaper -- talk-radio is the tail that wags the news dog. From Byman and Mueller in the morning to John Mercure in the afternoon, the so-called "news" programs are only there to provide context and material for the Sykes show, setting up stories he wants to talk about to continue his Save Walker campaign. [Another great element in the Zielinski rant is his reference to "millions of dollars of in-kind contributions" that the station provides to the Walker campaign via the Sykes show.] Do you think, if they wanted to, one of the news guys (I'm looking at you, Gene Mueller) could get on the air and speak un-Sykes heresy or, god-help-us, do a PolitiFact-type fact-check on Sykes' daily lies?

Don't kid yourself. Sykes is TMJ's biggest asset in the angry-white-man demographic and is paid accordingly. He is the Face of WTMJ and every other on-air personality is just his support staff.

As if to prove Zielinski's point, Scooter Walker himself visited the WTMJ studios this morning for a full-fledged love-fest with the supposed newspeople. Hey, Governor -- you who destroyed careers and schools, drove your agenda like a bulldozer through a pliant legislature, who is about to kick tens of thousands of poor and working class children and adults off of BadgerCare, who is about to remove women's access to cancer screenings -- let's have some of those yummy frosted pecans of yours. After more than three minutes of this happy holiday drivel, the Sykes Support Group on the morning show set up a few softballs for their beloved Scotty, with no follow up to his deliberate lies about the source of the recall effort (out-of-state union "bosses" and blah de blah blah) or anything other questions worthy of a radical, damaged, beseiged soon-to-be former governor.

After that, the morning team handed Walker off to -- you guessed it -- Charlie Sykes, who "interviewed" the governor in the same studio, with the extra enhancements, I would hope, of mood music, scented candles and flavored oil for the romantic encounter to follow. I mean, I hope Sykes had the good sense to warm him up a bit instead of just diving right in. He was hosting, after all.

Yesterday, the Democratic Party launched a brilliant fundraising effort based on the Sykes/TMJ pro-Walker team, encouraging recall supporters send in $6.20 to support the recall effort. I think we can do better than that: how about $6.20 squared. That would be $38.44. Graeme Zielinski, congratulations. The check is in the mail.

Recalling Walker Against All Odds...and Journal Communications Inc.

2011-12-05T21:04:00.001-06:00

The growing network of Koch-Scaife-Bradley-ClearChannel-funded media outlets in Wisconsin are in full defense mode to protect the radical regime of Gov. Scott Walker from the recall he has so richly earned.

The complete stable of radio clowns on WISN aren't so funny anymore as they provide in-kind contributions to the Republican cause on every hour of every show every day, driving talking points generated by their GOP script-writers in Madison and Washington.

New "organizations" have appeared from the depths of Republican hell, with pretty names like "MacIver Institute", "Media Trackers" and "Wisconsin Reporter". The phony fronts, following the lead of the fake-news pioneers at Fox News, are created of lies and whole cloth, all designed to poison the well of the straight media and to provide the radio squawkers with conveniently false and slanted content, propping up Walker and smearing the loyal opposition.

All of this is made possible by plenty of money from the various Monte Moneybags active in keeping the world safe for the Rich, desperate as they are to prevent reality from intruding on their shrinking privileged world. From the dirty Koch Brothers to our own local source of national shame -- Michael W. Grebe of the Bradley Foundation and the Walker campaign -- these self-appointed Kings of Industry have radically politicized not only the media, but also traditionally non-partisan organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, into polarizing, Us-vs.-Them campaigners. They were defending the 1% for years before anyone thought to point out that maybe the other 99% should, like, have a voice.

But, for all of the deliberate lies and ridiculous spin generated by the bought-and-sold other right-wing-by-design media conglomerates, the real Big Dog in the Protect Walker consortium is Journal Communications Inc.

The most obvious gift JCI gives to the Walker Survival Effort every day is their proud presentation of the Charlie Sykes radio show, in which the formerly respectable journalist wallows in the muck of his own filth for three-and-a-half hours every day. Well-paid (as all the right-wing mouthpieces are) by not only JCI but the Bradley Foundation through his position as "editor" (heh) of a publication of yet another pretend think-tank, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, and god-knows who else, Sykes uses his snarky "charm" to sell all manner of pro-Walker/anti-recall lies over the formerly respectable WTMJ-AM airwaves. The JCI radio station also recently took national consumer talker Clark Howard off the afternoon schedule in favor of an extra excruciating two hours of talentless local wing-nut Jeff Wagner, showing, if anyone doubted it, their firm commitment to the Walker campaign in the run-up to the recall.

But Journal Communications provides its most important support to the governor they refuse to apologize for endorsing in the pages of its flagship newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. There, the newspaper that not only validated but approved and promoted the recall of Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament for the sin of believing some bad accountants now stands opposed to any recall of any official associated with the radical Republican jihad that took power in January of this year.

Earlier this year, the paper's editorial page officially stayed out of the Senate recalls. Pooh-poohing and tut-tutting the constitutional process the whole way, the J-S refused to endorse in any of the recall elections that resulted in an important narrowing of the Republican margin to one seat (and soon to result in a Democratic majority after more recalls next year).

With the long-awaited Walker recall effort finally underway, the Kings of State Street have become a little more perturbed about their readers ignoring their anti-recall bleatings. "Recall fever and other illnesses", they call it dismissively, concluding "We don't think Walker's opponents have made a compelling case to recall the governor." Well, that's easy for them to say, since they insist on getting the motivation of the recall effort all wrong. "And make no mistake," they claim in the same editorial, in words echoing Republican talking points, "the recall is proceeding over one issue: Walker's decision to sharply limit collective bargaining for most public workers."

No, the recall is not over a single issue or even about a number of policy differences. It is about the entire radical Republican agenda, driven not by Wisconsinites, but by Washington think-tanks and Koch-type elites. It is about the way the Republicans drove through their attack on Wisconsin workers and the democratic process (through voter-suppression and gerrymandered redistricting), without review in committee, in the dead of night, without notice, without quorums and without shame.

The Lords of the Journal Sentinel pretend not to understand the radicalism of the Walker Republicans or the legitimate outrage their actions and processes have produced. But, like all of the radio talkers who are smart enough to know better, their feigned ignorance and pretended offense at those who would dare to recall is just a facade. They know they made a big mistake endorsing Walker and refuse to admit (in the case of the Walker regime's forthcoming decimation of BadgerCare) the blood that will literally be on their hands. So, they defend Walker by pretending to be anti-recall as a general policy. But then there was that Ament thing...well, that was different. Somehow.

Not satisfied with pissing on the recall effort in its editorial voice, the newspaper handed over some of its valuable opinion page real estate this past Sunday to the most insipid, childish garbage to run in the Journal Sentinel opinion pages since Patrick McIlheran went on the government dole to shill for our embarrassing Sen. Ron Johnson. In the column, Tim Keane, the apparently delusional "Entrepreneur in Residence" (heh - really, check the link - it's hilarious) at Marquette University (makes you wonder about them, too) trivializes the very ability to recall. "And," he "writes", "if you're unfortunate enough to wind up in court, well, just get going on recalling those nasty judges. If they rule in ways we don't like, out they go." He goes on to compare the recall movement to "the path to the dictatorship...first plowed unknowingly but unerringly by Tiberius [Gracchus]".

It's a ridiculous, crap piece. And, from what I can gather, he doesn't even get the history right. "The killing of a tribune [Tiberius] by the senators was as much an illegal act as was the deposition of Octavius [by Tiberius]. Both parties had disregarded the law, and the revolution was begun." What has that got to do with anything? Nothing the recall movement is doing is illegal -- in fact, the process itself is ensconsed in the Wisconsin Constitution for just such circumstances as this -- an out-of-control, radical governor and legislature, doing real damage to Wisconsin itself.

But the Journal Sentinel runs Keane's putrid column to drive another part of the Republcian talking points -- that the recallers only want chaos -- not real, legitimate change. If they keep trotting out people like Keane, I don't think the Journal Sentinel is going to stand on the sidelines on the Walker recall. I fully expect them to endorse him -- again -- when the recall election inevitably occurs. The newspaper has hit the bottom of its long slide, from community leader to obstacle. It is yet another obstacle that we will overcome.

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OK. I'm back. Miss me? No more Mondo Media -- back to Plaisted Writes. I'll try to write regularly.

Gun-Nutty Republicans Go Bananas

2011-05-28T14:16:00.001-05:00

In the race to see who can be more ridiculous taking advantage of the radical Republican stranglehold on Wisconsin government, it’s hard to top the sponsors of the concealed-carry bill currently on its way to the Senate floor.

Even the primary lobbyists for the manufacturers who would supply the killers and potential killers on the fringe of the gun-totting world, the NRA, have always supported some kind of background check and/or training and/or permitting before setting the twisted victims of Small-Man Syndrome loose in the general public with loaded guns in their pants.

But not those Wisconsin Republicans, no-siree. They aren’t going to be talking into half a bad idea when they can have the whole thing. Permits are for pussies – do I get to carry my piece, or what? I don’t need no stinking permit. Churches, day care centers, domestic abuse shelters, the Capitol – no place of peace or protection is too good for a little hot lead at the ready, just in case.

Naturally, the NRA has now has reversed itself on permitting and supports the anything-goes, Wild-West version that has made it through committee. All the better to get more guns sold to more people faster, the safety of the general public and innocent bystanders be damned. The out-of-state interests in the death industry driving the NRA even poll-tested a friendly label for the notion that nobody needs to review exactly who is walking around with itchy trigger fingers – “constitutional carry”.

According to the Cap Times, “A relatively new trend as far as gun-related legislation goes [read: a new way to sell a bad idea], constitutional carry is based on the premise that it is a citizen's constitutional right to carry a weapon. No training, permits or license are required to do so”. This is like saying there is such a thing as “constitutional speech” that you can use to cry “fire” in a crowded theater or maliciously libel someone for personal gain.

It is amazing how quickly the phrase “constitutional carry” has crept into the discussion in the Journal Sentinel and other publications, without quotation marks and without peels of laughter at such a ludicrous notion. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether the Second Amendment creates an individual right to own firearms (I disagree with the conservative wing of the US Supreme Court that ruled it did), any constitutional right can be controlled or restricted for a legitimate purpose. It is not surprising that the thumb-sucking “I can do what I want” demand of the loud bullies promoting the bill has had such an effect on the Republican legislators who are spurred to action by supposed “purists”, lest they be labeled RINOs or, worse, reasonable.

After reading internal polls showing independents running away from the GOP in droves at the very notion of the completely unregulated arming of a particularly angry part of the public – much less young men in their 20s, who in Milwaukee County currently get 60 days to six months in jail, just for having a gun in their car – many of the well-paid Republican operatives polluting the airwaves, newspapers and blogs in Milwaukee are advising their fellow travelers in the legislature to come to their senses – on this issue, anyway.

Radio clowns Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling are encouraging Republicans not to commit political suicide by permitting would-be civilian Dirty Harrys not to be permitted. Rick Esenberg has taken a break from offering his bad advice to the Walker legal team fighting to bust unions in the state to issue his personal tut-tut (“a sound principle too far”, he says about the unsound taken to its logical conclusion). The bill is even more the Journal Sentinel’s in-house wing-nut. Patrick McIlheran, can stand. The nut-bag state senator pushing the bill, Sen. Pam Galloway (R-Wausau), is “right in principle and wrong in practice”, he says, admitting to the lack of adherence to principles he regularly berates in others.

But the self-appointed monitors of radical Republican ideology can’t get off the hook that easy. If Galloway is “right on principle”, as Esenberg and McIlheran say, then what is their problem with her following through on that principle? Their encouragement for her to be unprincipled is simply borne of political expediency – they “know” she’s “right”, but following her there is just too much for the preservation of Republican power. They are stuck with the people they have promoted to power and the logical results of their own sanctimony.

With the radical Republicans in Madison going gun-crazy, the 10th annual Peace Through Music benefit for the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort (WAVE) and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence couldn’t come at a better time. Join us at Linneman’s this Sunday night, May 29th, for a night of great local music, starting at 7 p.m. and going all night. I will be hosting all night and playing with Fat Pig at 9. In the words of my great friend Marcus Smith: Don’t meet me there – BEAT me there!

Recall the Journal Sentinel

2011-05-24T23:17:00.001-05:00

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has obscenely served as handmaiden and enabler as the radical Republicans in Madison continue to take a blunt ax to state government and democracy. The paper has sat on the sidelines, alternately cheering, offering encouragement and laughably trying to talk some sense to the nonsensical. Having endorsed Scott Walker for governor, the Journal Sentinel will have nothing but blood on its hands as the Republican jihad continues to damage the middle class and the working poor, while lavishing supposedly scarce state funds on the rich and the road builders.

On its news pages, the paper has been bad enough. Its PolitiFact project has run interference for Walker and his fellow travelers (not the least of which: would-be Medicare-killer Paul Ryan), “ruling” that black is white and red is blue on numerous occasions – always for the benefit of some Republican scheme or personality.

When state school superintendent Tony Evers had the temerity to call out the school choice scam as the fraud that it is this week – especially when the public schools are taking an $834 million hit in Walker’s radical budget document – the news story on the entirely justified rant by Evers was staged as a point-counterpoint exercise where everything Evers said was allowed to be countered by some dweeb at the heavily-right-wing-funded School Choice Wisconsin prop “organization”.

“Low-income students in MPS have higher academic achievement, particularly in math,” says Evers; “choice” “students” graduate at a higher rate, says the flunky. “Choice” “schools” are dependent on public funding, says Evers; an “exaggeration”, says the Koch-funded mouthpiece. It’s an amazing piece of slanted reporting, pitting the elected DPI chief with over 25 years in school advocacy and administration against a hired gun for out-of-state interests interested only in destroying the notion of public education.

But, if you expect bad from the increasingly talk-radio-inspired right-wing tilt of the news pages managed by George Stanley, you can expect the absolute worst from the pathetic editorials supervised by the new editorial page editor, David Haynes.

The latest outrage among many for the editorial “we” in the sad Walker era is a “laurel” the paper bestowed on the governor in Saturday’s paper for an alleged “upswing” in the perception of Wisconsin as a “good place to do business”. The excuse for this undeserved award was a new ranking of Wisconsin in the supposed “best states to do business” in Chief Executive magazine. Wisconsin jumped 14 places in the annual survey of 500 Monty Moneybags running businesses from the rarified air of their penthouse suites and mahogany-appointed offices around the country.

Thus did Wisconsin (24) leap-frog over supposed business hell-holes like Oregon (33), Minnesota (29) and New Mexico (32) to join such august company as North Dakota (21), Kansas (25) and Alabama (26). I mean, what state doesn’t aspire to be as attractive as Alabama? Still literally in the middle of the pack, Wisconsin has a ways to go to claim the same lofty heights as Texas (1), Indiana (6) and Georgia (5). Be ye not too bold Wisconsin – with any luck, next year we can be as “good” as Oklahoma (11).

This is all nuts, of course. Nobody with any sense would choose any of those places over Wisconsin to live or do business. The quality of life has always been the most attractive incentive for people to do business here. The fact that Walker’s attack on the middle class and the environment might make the state more attractive to those who are only interested in raping and pillaging both is not a good thing. Making Wisconsin safe for strip mining should not be anyone’s goal, regardless of how many dirty, dangerous, unhealthy temporary jobs it might create.

But the CEOs who casually position copies of Chief Executive on their office credenzas to read while their assistants fetch their lattes to read up on the best way to spend their perks of power (“the trick to buying second homes is always following your heart — and never having to pack”) are the last people to decide what is best for the state of Wisconsin. As they fly over the dusty flat land of, say, Nebraska (20) in their private jets, they see – if the politicians are cooperative enough – opportunities not to make the world a better place, but to exploit resources and a weakened, powerless workforce without having to deal with the inconvenience of effective government.

For the Journal Sentinel to fall for this bullshit in a glossy niche magazine with a circulation of about 40,000 as evidence of anything is the height of deliberate cluelessness. Unable to call the Madison Republicans out for the radicals they are, the Kings of State Street act as willing fluffers to Scott Walker as he prepares to wind up and deliver the next item on the Koch brothers’ agenda. Their weakness, even when they have to disagree (“legislators need to think carefully” about throwing state money at the rich in the form of venture capital. Whoa, take it easy there, Haynes. You wouldn’t want to be accused of having an un-talk-radio opinion) is pathetic.

“Perception isn't everything, but it does count for something” starts the ridiculous “laurel” to the radical governor. Yes, it does. And the Journal Sentinel stands perceived as a ludicrous enabler of a dangerous, power-drunk Republican party in Madison. Just like “my” state senator, the soon-to-be-recalled Alberta Darling, the paper stands by, makes excuses and, when push comes to shove, props up the wrong people and casts the wrong votes. Darling will be recalled, fired and sent home. The Kings of State Street deserve the same fate.

Darling Signs Up for Attack on Democracy

2011-05-02T07:55:00.001-05:00

After sitting like a stump, glassy-eyed, while Scott Walker and her other radical Republican buddies used illegal legislative tricks to take a blunt ax to public employee collective bargaining and other important aspects of the social fabric, “my” state senator, Alberta Darling, is suddenly pretending to be independent.

Threatened with now-certain recall, she has been given permission by the ruling junta to peel off on minor issues that Walker will win on anyway, such as looting the general fund for the benefit of wealthy GOP donors in the Roadbuilders Association (the state equivalent of the defense industry), the end of the state’s commitment to recycling and the attempt to throw seniors seeking prescription drugs out on the streets of the more expensive, less-adequate and Ryan-threatened federal Medicare program.

But these issues are small, half-baked potatoes compared with the the overall gist of the radical Republican jihad still driving disastrous policies in Madison. For all of her mild scratching at the thin veneer of FitzWalkerstan’s disembowelment of Wisconsin state government as-we-know-it, Darling is all-in for the Koch-driven Unfortunate Revolution. Her handlers have even pulled out spin from the Nixon era, having her declare that a “silent majority” of Wisconsinites are supposedly all for tax cuts for the rich, union-busting, the decimation of BadgerCare, state control over local government decision-making, slashing school funding and shared revenue, giving handouts to the rich to supplement their kids’ attendance at Marquette High School, taking dozens of positions out of the civil service system to provide patronage positions for the sons of Walker contributors and the mistresses of also-recalled state senators, etc.

Despite all of this toadying behavior, Darling will try to flaunt her supposed independence in her upcoming, heavily-funded campaign to save her sorry ass from recall. In fact, her campaign already has ads up on heavy rotation claiming just that. The inevitable protection that will no doubt be provided by the right-wing Journal Sentinel notwithstanding, that should be a hard sell, as she continues to back the worst parts of the governor’s budget and is on-board with all other pieces of the Republican plan to decimate Wisconsin government.

In fact, she has already signed up as a co-sponsor of yet another outrageous power-grab by the Republicans. After a month of relative calm in the Capitol, the radicals roared to life this week, beginning the process of ramming a revised version of the vicious attack on Wisconsin democracy known as the Photo ID voting bill through the legislature. Darling’s sponsorship of the measure designed to disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible Wisconsin voters puts the lie to any notion that she is moderate, independent or anything other than a rubber-stamp for whatever Walker’s puppet-masters in right-wing Washington think-tanks want.

With one of the WMC Four on the Supreme Court (apparently) just barely squeaking by in the April election, it is not a surprise the anti-democracy Republicans would move quickly to make sure that never happens again. The new version of the Photo ID bill (AB7) contains some interesting post-Prosser attempts to disenfranchise potential Democrats far beyond the bad-enough photo ID requirement.

Student IDs were not included as valid identification in the latest bill, necessarily disenfranchising thousands of students who have no reason to run to the DMV while going to school at the various state campuses. Now, the Badger Herald reports (this proud Daily Cardinal alum is quoting the BH, which started as a right-wing prop? Uh, yeah…) that student IDs are now included, as long as they have a current address on them. I’ll leave it to you and your memories of your transient college days to decide how practical that is, assuming colleges statewide change their policies to include a campus address on the IDs.
In recent years, you have not had to declare a reason why you wanted to vote absentee before doing so. This has led to a dramatic increase in absentee voting – from 6% to 21%. All this democracy run amok was apparently too much for the Republicans, who now would now only reinstate the requirement that a reason be stated but also reduce the absentee voting window from 30 to 7 days before the election.
You just moved to your new crib three weeks ago and want to vote in your new district? Good luck, pal – go back to where you came from and vote there. The bill changes residency from 10 to 28 days before the election. Was that place you came from somewhere far away or out-of-state? Aw, poor baby. No voting for Democrats for you.
Hey, let’s take up the challenge of the new bad law and have a bunch of registration drives! Yeah – good luck with that. The bill eliminates the age-old ability of advocacy organizations on all sides to get their members certified by county clerks to seek and collect registration cards. No more. You either go to the county clerk yourself or wait to register at the polls; a process that is retained only to avoid the federal requirement of motor-voter registration at the DMV, another too-much-democracy bugaboo for Republicans.

Alberta Darling is all for this attack on the very democratic process that elected her and that has worked well in Wisconsin to make it easy and effective to exercise our essential right to vote. It is just one part of the radical Republican agenda that should be rejected in the upcoming recall elections and forward.

The only difference between Photo ID and the rest of the radical Republican agenda in Madison is that we knew Photo ID was coming. So much of the rest of it – from the union-busting; to the defunding of education and local government; to the seizing of control from local governments to the state – was not part of the Walker campaign or any of the other Republicans who took power in January. Recall itself is a drastic measure – a re-do made necessary by radical overreaching and the abuse of unchecked power. Lock-step Republican flunkies like Alberta Darling will feel the wrath of an outraged electorate this year. Next year, it’s Scott Walker’s turn.

Recount, Schmecount–Bring on the Recalls

2011-04-25T07:03:00.001-05:00

Alright, so it’s been a while.

A few belated thoughts about the Supreme Court election:

Imagine, if you will, the high-pitched squealing that would be going on right now if a Democratic operative had suddenly discovered 14,000 extra votes lying around on her hard drive, changing an excruciatingly close election into a squeaker win for Kloppenburg. You could hear the shouting from here to Superior. Fitz Sr. would send his troopers over to take possession of the ballots and records. Rather than complaining about the recount process, the Republicans would be treating it like a sacrament. If Kloppenburg would manage to hang on to the razor-thin 7,000 vote margin, the talk-radio yahoos would be treat her as illegitimate and treat the entire election as the greatest example of election theft since the Bushies shut down the recount in Florida. No, wait…
I still don’t know what happened in Waukesha County with the Jensen-tainted Republican stooge either innocently and incompetently not reporting the City of Brookfield on election night or somehow manufacturing enough votes in the dead of the night to give Prosser the win. If I were Kloppenburg, I would have asked for a hand recount in Waukesha only, even if I had to pay for it. Then, at least we can say we know who won without taking the word of a conflicted partisan hack like Kathy Nickolaus for it. I assume it is going to end up being innocent incompetence rather than criminal behavior, but at least we’ll have that county’s votes counted in the light of day, with people watching.
Of course, that’s not what Kloppenburg did – she asked for a statewide recount. Which is her right. Frankly, I’d do it just to stick it to that two-bit blowhard John Troupis, who threatened the day before that he was going to “prevent” the legal recount from happening. That, and the whining from Prosser himself made it hard to resist just making them go through the process. Whether it was a good idea or not remains to be seen. It does seem that the GAB is pretty overwhelmed at this point and they are going to have to ask for an extension on getting the recall petitions certified, which is where the real action is.
Even if Kloppenburg ends up losing by 0.5 percent, her strong near-miss showing is still very ominous for Scott Walker’s radical right-wing agenda in the state Capitol. I was never 100% comfortable with the Walker = Prosser equation, although I get that – this being the first statewide election after Walker “dropped the bomb” on public employees and the rest of the state – this was an opportunity to send a message. And we did, almost winning a race with a less-than-stellar candidate. One of the post-election wing-nut talking points was that “everyone” was predicting a Kloppenburg blowout. Well, no one was saying any such thing and the fact is that we came this close to breaking the right-wing WMC majority on the Court.
I know candidates at all levels are told to go out and declare victory if they are leading in a close race to manage perceptions (one of the many miserable lessons of the Bush theft of democracy in 2000), but sending Kloppenburg out to plan Prosser’s retirement party with a 200-vote margin was ridiculous. Prosser had already taken a slim lead by the next morning, before the Waukesha Surprise. In doing that and announcing the decision to ask for a recount, Kloppenburg had this deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes, as if events had overtaken her own common sense. I’m not where my friend Tom Foley is in getting ready to join the Prosser recount team, and I’m sure she would make a good addition to the Court, law-wise, but, as the public face of her own campaign, she has not helped herself. At all.

The Supreme Court recount will unfortunately be distracting background noise as the recall races get going in the next month. That’s where the action is. Scott Walker is betting the reaction to his radical shock-and-awe attack on state and local government in Wisconsin will die down and he’ll be able to get away with most of his Koch-based agenda. That’s why he and his fellow travellers in the legislature have been laying low for the last month.

He’s wrong about that – people are not as stupid or forgetful as he thinks they are. And there is tons of bad stuff swimming around in his state budget proposal that affects a lot more people than public employees. It remains to be seen whether rightfully threatened senators like my own Alberta Darling are going to sit there with glazed eyes and allow all this radical shit to continue to run downhill, as she and the other Republicans did back in February and March. They’ll let her peel off on minor items like recycling, but, in the end, she’ll help provide the rubber stamp for all the really bad stuff.

That’s why the recall efforts throughout the state are so necessary. The State Senate may well flip some time this summer, but the kind of damage they can manage before then is scary enough.

So What’s It Gonna Be, Governor?

2011-03-29T22:30:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, March 29th, and it’s time for Scott Walker and his enablers to put up or shut up. Can the courts tell you and your lackey legislature what to do, or not? Are you going to knuckle under to a pipsqueak judge in Madison? Come on, Big Boy. Let’s see what you got.

This is our Florida 2000 here in Wisconsin. This is the point at which those who pretend to have the Power see how far they can take it. Will the Republican jihad in Madison have the balls to flaunt the clarified order of Judge Maryann Sumi that the temporary restraining order applies to them and all of them?

The comments of the sputtering Assistant AG outside the courtroom were ominous: the legislation "absolutely" is still in effect, said Steven Means, words he will either live to regret…or not. And then there are the fine comments of DOJ mouthpiece Bill Cosh: “Whether the Department of Administration or other state officers choose to comply with any direction issued by Judge Sumi is up to them.” Well, we’ll see about that. For its part, the official administration position, apart for the DOJ dweebs, is unclear at this hour. Will they comply or not?

No doubt, the great legal minds of the radical Republicans are working hard in the country clubs and the boardrooms of the WMC at this very moment. Pray tell, visiting Marquette law professor Rick Esenberg, what say you at this momentous time of our state’s history? Are you and your fellow travellers willing to roll the dice that the Department of Administration can continue to ignore the judge’s TRO just because, well, she’s “just” a judge and, like, there is “separation of powers” and stuff? Good luck with that.

Oh, here’s Esenberg, quoted as some kind of impartial news source in the morning’s Journal Sentinel:

"There is applicable Supreme Court precedent that a court has no authority to enjoin the publication of a law," he said. "The state has repeatedly cited that law to her and as far as I know she has not only failed to explain herself about why she feels she has the authority, she hasn't even acknowledged there is an issue. That just leaves me speechless."

If only it did leave him speechless.

Before Esenberg or any of the other highly-paid lawyers in the Republican brain-trust put their increasingly vulnerable clients unduly at risk, they’d better think about the effect of their advice on their arrogant clients. How do you think Scott Fitzgerald will feel wearing the jail orange that Esenberg always wanted draped on the backs of your political opponents in the Brave Wisconsin 14? One more stunt like browbeating the LRB to “publish” the union-busting bill, and that’s just where the Fitz in FitzWalkerstan is likely to end up.

And what of DOA Secretary Mike Huebsch? Is he willing to follow the advice of the brainianc that helped bring us Assembly flash-votes in the middle of the night, frivolous lawsuits in Oconto County, arrest warrants going out for political opponents, an illegal conference committee with illegally short notice, a Senate meeting illegally, without the constitutionally-required quorum for a bill with obvious fiscal implications or 24-hour notice, and a rushed Assembly vote that was also without adequate public notice? Does Huebsch look and feel good in orange as well? Given the miserable track record of those like Esenberg giving the radical Republicans this wonderful advice, is he – or Scott Walker, for that matter – willing to roll the dice?

Well, it all depends on what happens a week from tonight, doesn’t it? If partisan sexist hothead molesting-priest-protector David Prosser manages to squeak out a victory in his reelection campaign to the state Supreme Court next week, I’m sure the Republicans will feel perfectly free to thumb their nose at the Rule of Law. The Forces of Evil in the Capitol will know then that they have four justices in the bag – and their benefactors in the “private” sector paid dearly for it.

The last thing they want is an independent voice like Joanne Kloppenburg on the Court who might (I said “might”) put a spike on the tracks of their runaway train. I wouldn’t be surprised if Walker’s administration tried to stall a declaration of compliance with the lawful orders of the judge until it sees how the election turns out. They’ll either breathe a sigh of relief or go running for the hills.

Like the entire nation during the Stolen Election in Florida in 2000, we in Wisconsin are staring, mouths agape in horror, at the unfolding hijacking of Democracy by remarkably arrogant Republicans who fly with the Light of the Just as they try to destroy honest government in a state known for just that. We can’t wait to get to the polls a week from now and in recall elections this summer and next year to, at least, put the brakes on the Walker Disaster.

But first, let’s see what the brilliant Walker legal brain trust comes up with tomorrow in response to Judge Sumi’s orders. You know they are going to be wrong – it’s just a matter of how wrong and in what way. I fear a constitutional crisis is brewing in Wisconsin. The radical Republicans in Madison don’t care what they destroy to serve their corporate masters.

Daddy, Why Does The Bad Man Lie?

2011-03-19T15:59:00.001-05:00

OK, I don’t have a 6 year-old daughter. But If I did, I could imagine her reaction after a ride around in my fictional minivan circulating Darling recall petitions, listening to right-wing talk-radio, or an afternoon surfing her favorite political sites on the web. Her big, trusting eyes would stare up at me, the slight hint of tears forming in the corners.

Daddy, why does the Bad Man Lie?

My heart sags under the weight of this difficult civics lesson. I have tried to shield my precious from the onslaught of Republican talking-point misinformation, but I can’t – it’s everywhere. Even if I could avoid the 24/7 talk-radio hosts who, for reasons I still don’t understand, are allowed to conduct endless, unpaid advertising for right-wing causes and Republican candidates, there are still the issue ads paid for by shadowy out-of-state business interests. Her innocence thus taken too young, I am forced to parent-up and explain the facts of life, too soon.

Because they have to, Sweetheart.

If the Wisconsin Crisis has taught us anything about the quality of discourse in the public arena, it is that the kind of radical right-wing Republicans that currently have a stranglehold on our state government cannot win by telling the truth. They have to propagate lies to win elections and to remain in office. They cannot tell us – before, during or after – what they are actually doing and why. How can you tell the Republicans are lying again? Easy – Charlie Sykes’ lips move.

The right-wing echo chamber was drowned out during the height of the Wisconsin Crisis, as the gruesome details of Scott Walker’s power grab became more evident every day and the organic and organized reaction, in the form of ten of thousands of protesters descending on the Capitol everyday, captured the imagination of the state and the nation. As Walker’s Unnecessary Crisis unfolded in real time, polls showed (and still do) that the majority of the electorate supported the collective bargaining rights for public employees and the unions he sought to destroy. The polls also show the majority disapprove of the heavy-handed way that Walker and his lock-stepping Republicans in the legislature were steamrolling their extreme, Washington-think-tank-generated agenda through a now-declared illegal process.

During the time several weeks ago when the Wisconsin Crisis was leading the national news, the tinny voices of the radio squawkers were drowned out with the truth of what was happening before our saddened eyes. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, the Republican message massagers have regrouped and, no doubt with the help of the putrid Frank Lutz (who came in so the governor could sit on his lap at the height of the Crisis) and others, designed a campaign of lies and exaggerations in an attempt to discredit those who would dare object to Walker’s union-busting designs and to prop up an increasingly-unpopular governor in free-fall.

You can tell when the Republicans have settled on their talking points because literally everybody on talk-radio follows them. From Sykes to Belling, on down to third-rate near-amateurs like Weber, Wagner and McKenna, the right-wing radio clowns are the most unoriginal radio personalities in “entertainment” history. They are willing to give the entire substance of their shows over to the Washington think-tanks, driving the Big Lies into the heads of their blissfully-ignorant angry-white-male listeners.

This week, it was all about the “hate” and “mobs” on the left, attacking their poor, innocent politicians and fellow travelers. Hate mail and hate nails supposedly sent to Republican legislators and an embarrassing (to me) blogger who also happens to be a professor at my otherwise proud alma mater, the UW Law School (see you at the 25-year reunion in September, y’all!). And blah de blah blah. All of these anecdotes are trotted out as supposedly representative of the broad-based anti-Walker movement in the state.

First of all, it is entirely likely that some of this is being generated by right-wing interlopers pretending to be protesters. To the extent one or two or five of the protesters have gone off the rails, it doesn’t mean that any of the hundreds of thousands of others would support the threats or have anything to do with them. One of the radio geeks – I forget who, since they all sound the same and say the same things – claimed on Friday that nobody on the left would criticize the threats because that’s how we operate and that’s what we want and that’s who we are and so on and so forth. Well – although, as a target myself of some overheated shit in my comment section through the years, I think, if they are really offended by any of this (they’re not) they should stop being such big babies – those kind of threats, serious or not, are obviously wrong. That’s easy. But they don’t have anything to do with anything in the larger picture, and the wing-nuts know it. The entire “union mob/thug” meme is a smear and a deliberate distraction.

And then there is the “federal employees have less bargaining rights” Lie. I discussed this in my last post, in the context of a post by Rick Esenberg – who, by the way, did not delete a comment I made on his blog (it went to spam, which says something about my status in the web-filter community). In response, Esenberg backs up on his blog and tries to put the best spin on things. But the Lie continues.

Esenberg misrepresents me as being “upset that I and others suggest that other states and the federal government restrict collective bargaining rights of public employess [sic]”. No, I never said the bargaining rights for federal employees were not restricted on wages and benefits. “Mike's point is that federal employees can bargain over things other than wages and benefits. Fine. I never said otherwise.” Oh, yes he did:

March 9th: Walker’s bill “restrict[s] collective bargaining rights that don't exist for federal employees”. Wrong. The union-busting bill restricts all of the significant non-economic collective bargaining rights (hours and working conditions) that definitely do exist for federal employees.
March 10th: “Most federal employees are sunject [sic] to similar restrictions.” Wrong again. Federal employee rights to bargain everything other than wages and benefits are not restricted in any significant way.
March 14th (comments): Esenberg writes the right to “bargain” over a sliver of base wages, which is all that’s left in the Walker bill, is “equal to or greater than that provided in roughly half the states and for most federal employees” and “still more robust than those enjoyed in half of the states or by most federal employees”. That’s crazy. As I have written before, all that’s left of bargaining under the union-busting bill is a small number that could just as well be written on a cocktail napkin and filed by a clerk with DER (after it gets stamped NO). The only thing it is “equal to or greater” and “more robust” than is nothing, and federal employees retain many more bargaining rights than nothing.

At least Esenberg expands a bit on that last “point” in his most recent post.

“Well, Mike seems to claim, you shouldn't say that Wisconsin public employees would be left with collective bargaining rights greater than or equal to employees in half the states and most federal employees. Why not? It seems to me that, for most people, wages and benefits are the most important conditions of employment.”

In the real world, perhaps. But the public employees in Wisconsin universally agreed to accept the benefit, pension contribution and wage issues during the first week of the Crisis. At that point, the important issues became job security – in the form of effective language and enforcement of discipline, layoff, transfer, contracting-out – and other traditionally-important aspects of a union contract. Indeed, Walker has bragged about how there doesn’t have to be layoffs by seniority after the bill becomes law. Hey, Rick, guess who still has the ability to bargain layoff language. That’s right – federal employees

The Big Lie about federal employees having less bargaining rights supports the Bigger Lie – that all the public employees cared about and what they and their supporters were marching about was the benefit contributions and wage restrictions. That Lie is still being foisted by all the usual suspects, including the secretive (for funding) Club for Growth ad campaign, the one that claims everyone is the private sector is making sacrifices and public employees refuse to. It deliberately misleads about what Walker did and what the outrage of the masses is all about.

But if they would just come out and just say they are using the elimination of virtually all collective bargaining rights for public employees, the annual re-certification requirement and the outlawing of dues deductions from paychecks in order to wipe out public employee unions entirely, we could have that conversation. But that would be considered so radical that it could not be supported. Even with their campaign of Lies, it’s not being supported now.

So, my dear hypothetical doe-eyed daughter, that’s why they Lie. Because they know, without the Lies, their radical agenda cannot stand.

Being Esenberg Means Never Having To Deal With The Truth

2011-03-16T23:55:00.005-05:00

One of the supposed intellectual stalwarts of the right-wing cabal currently trying to dismantle honest government in Wisconsin is calling out Ed Garvey for guessing that the usual suspects already have or will soon pour up to $6 million into Justice David Prosser’s effort to hold on to his WMC-friendly seat on the Supreme Court.

“Fighting Ed Garvey falsely stated that WMC had given six million dollars to Justice Prosser's campaign and ‘bought’ him,” harrumphs Rick Esenberg, Marquette law professor and part of the legal brain trust that brought us Assembly flash-votes in the middle of the night, frivolous lawsuits in Oconto County, arrest warrants going out for political opponents, an illegal conference committee (the Senate never passed anything for the Assembly to “disagree” with) with illegally short notice, a Senate meeting illegally, without the constitutionally-required quorum for a bill with obvious fiscal implications or 24-hour notice, and a rushed Assembly vote that was also without adequate public notice. All brilliant stuff that I look forward to Rick discussing at his next conference at Marquette, or, certainly, at his next regular confab with the WMC political action committee.

Esenberg first called Garvey out on March 12th, huffing, puffing, and demanding that he “substantiate” his claim that the primary non-talk-radio poisoners of the public well in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Manufacturer and Commerce, “put about $6 million into his [Prosser’s] campaign”. Apparently not satisfied with Garvey either ignoring him or providing insufficient support for his statement, Esenberg returned to needle Garvey again on March 14th, headlining that “Being Garvey Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry”.

Well, a million off here or there – what’s the difference? The thing is that we don’t know how much Esenberg’s fellow travellers driving the hard-right agenda of the WMC spend in time, energy and money propping up the justices of the Supreme Court that they think (with good reason) they have in the bag. Due to Esenberg’s Federalist Society cohorts on the US Supremes and their infamous Citizens United opinion, anonymous corporate money is the most protected form of “speech” in history.

But, people in curved-glass buildings (have you seen the new Marquette law school palace?) shouldn’t throw stones. With all the sanctimony of someone wrapped in an academic and corporate cocoon, Esenberg pretends to be holier-than-Ed. “On this blog, if I get something wrong, I fix it,” he writes.

Well, not exactly.

In the midst of defending his indefensible support of the notion that politicians should go around arresting their political opponents for the totally legitimate and historically-validated tactic of quorum-busting on March 9th, Esenberg lit after me for having the temerity to suggest that might not be a good idea, much less legal. Accusing me of incivility and worse – I love it when people helping Scott Walker destroy the lives and careers of thousands of people get sensitive about being called out for their actions – Esenberg lurched, as he often does, onto a right-wing talking point he knows isn’t true. He said I was complaining about “restricting collective bargaining rights that don't exist for federal employees”.

This oft-repeated canard has been a favorite of those on talk radio, Fox News, and elsewhere where they know their audience doesn’t know any better. Their tactic is to repeat the Big Lie until it is believed. But I know – and Rick does too – that most federal employees enjoy the full range of rights to bargain hours and working conditions that are the essence of Walker’s union-busting bill and the protests against them. Federal employees do not bargain on wages and benefits, but they have very effective unions that bargain and enforce contracts that include crucial language on layoffs, transfers, hours, safety, overtime, working conditions, and all the other traditional bargaining subjects that were just so brutally ripped from under feet of the public employees in Wisconsin. To say that, because the union-busting bill allows whatever unions survive to bargain within a thin sliver of base pay, Wisconsin public employees maintain more collective bargaining rights than federal employees is an unfunny joke. UPDATE: And one that Scott Walker himself perpetuates in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Thursday.

Federal employee unions also, by the way, have their member dues deducted from their paychecks and don’t have to recertify themselves every year.

Noticing this and other things in his typically snooty post, I wrote a comment on it. Among other things, I asked him about the federal employee bargaining lie and why he would claim something he knew wasn’t true. In response [deleted bit about him deleting my comment -- he didn't, sorry, see update below] he told the same bald-faced lie in his next post, claiming that “most federal employees are sunject [sic] to similar restrictions”. Then he repeated the lie -- twice -- in this comment thread to the March 14th post. UPDATE 3/18/11: In a comment below and on his blog, Rick says he found my comment in his spam file. Not the first time I have been so classified.

It may be that Ed Garvey’s claim was inaccurate or just premature. But, if there is one person who shouldn’t be calling anyone out on accuracy, it is Rick Esenberg.

How Bargaining Works Now–The State Prosecutors Get Theirs

2011-03-15T23:11:00.002-05:00

Sunday, March 13th marked the end of state employee union contracts throughout state government. On the same day it “dropped the bomb” on February 12th, the radical Walker administration notified all state employee unions that were working on extended contracts – which, since a couple of in-the-bag “Democrats” joined anti-union Republicans and refused to ratify long-delayed contracts in the lame-duck session in December, was every one of them – that it was invoking a clause in the contracts that allowed either side to terminate the extension on 30 days notice. The clause had never been invoked before, but that was an easy one for the hard-working Walker legal team that has been looking for loopholes to screw working people and impose their authoritarian will since before he was elected.

Gone, at the stroke of midnight, were the entire contracts of every state employee union, some with historical language that went back 50 years. Gone was language on discipline, layoffs, hours of work, transfers, contracting-out and that other traditional protections of an earnestly-bargained contract between consenting employer and employees. Gone in a flash was an effective mechanism for resolving workplace disputes, up to and including a hearing before an impartial arbitrator.

If the union busting “budget repair” bill – rammed, as it was, through an illegal conference committee (the Senate never passed anything for the Assembly to “disagree” with) with illegally short notice; a Senate meeting illegally, without the constitutionally-required quorum for a bill with obvious fiscal implications or 24-hour notice; and rushed through an Assembly that was also meeting without adequate public notice and without a brain in its collectively Republican head – somehow survives court scrutiny and takes effect on March 25th, there will never be another state employee contract as long as the law survives. State employee unions – without the ability to bargain more than a sliver of a base-pay increase; facing annual representation elections with oppressive, moving goalposts; collecting dues without deductions from its members’ paychecks; and sitting across the bargaining table from a drunk-with-power bunch of Walker greedheads who will give them nothing but laughter – may as well go into hiatus until Democrats come back into power in both houses and the governor’s mansion rather than dignify the charade.

There is one group of state employees, though, that seems to have made it through pretty well, at least in terms of achieving a long-held goal of, of all things, increased pay through a pay-progression structure. At least financially, relative to every other group of state employees, the members of the Association of State Prosecutors are making out like the bandits they prosecute.

The ASP has a brief, but proud history. Prosecutors in the district attorneys offices in Wisconsin’s 72 counties were employees of the various counties until 1990, when they became state employees. Although they were in not in the classified service, effective lobbying gave them immediate bargaining rights with the state (something their counterparts – staff attorneys in the public defenders office – did not have until 1998). The primary objective of the ASP has always been, as has that of all attorneys in state service, pay-progression – a way to move through the pay range based on years of service. Neither they or any of the other state attorney groups could ever achieve it through collective bargaining – from Republican or Democratic administrations – although it has been at the top of their priorities since before the ASP came into existence.

Until now. In a year when all other state employees’ pay raises will be limited to the rate of inflation, if that, the governor’s two-year budget proposal includes over $1 million in each of the two years for pay-progression for prosecutors. Which leads to an interesting question: How the hell did that happen?

The ASP did not endorse either Walker or Barrett in the governor’s race. Speculation around the courthouse has been that the non-endorsement of Barrett was valuable enough to Walker to promise pay-progression in exchange. The ASP has also been remarkably silent while everyone else in their union community’s ox is getting gored. Others in the law enforcement community who have gotten special carve-outs in Walker’s union-busting scheme have stepped forward and lent valuable legitimacy to the pitched battle in Madison, with firefighter and cops even sleeping on the Capitol floor. Prosecutors have always been sympathetic media figures and their voice would have put additional pressure on the law-and-order Republicans to come to their senses.

But, I guess you can’t blame the prosecutors for lying low and quietly taking what they have wanted for so long. This is what happens when thugs like the people pulling Walker’s strings play groups of employees against each other. The prosecutors know their new pay structure is as fragile as tomorrow’s news. Because it is not locked into a contract, the new pay plan (as yet undefined – is the ASP going to be invited to bargain the details?) can get pulled at any time. This puts the handcuffs and the gag on the ASP, in terms of any criticism of the radical Republicans or support for the broader labor movement they seek to destroy, indefinitely.

In the meantime, the prosecutors have lost all the protections of their expired contract. As unclassified employees, they don’t even have the weak “protections” of the civil service system – no “just cause” for discipline, no layoff or transfer protection, no standards on hours of work – nothing. They now serve at the whim and at the pleasure of 72 district attorneys –politicians of various temperament and competence, and maybe with a few friends who could use a job. Not every county has a fair, solid DA like John Chisholm. It wasn’t that long ago that a clown like Ken Kratz was running an office in Calumet County.

Somewhere, sometime soon, some entirely-competent staff prosecutor will never get to enjoy progression through the pay range, because he or she will have lost his or her job for no reason at all. And, in part, maybe, because they refused to join the fight of their brothers and sisters in the broader movement against the union-busting bill, the ASP won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. But that’s what happens when you make backroom deals with sleazy politicians who are willing to play you against the broader union movement. You got yours – congratulations. What about everybody else?

Scott Walker’s Flop Sweat

2011-03-09T07:59:00.001-06:00

There is something up with the governor and the boot-licking Fitzgerald brothers. They seem to be in a hurry about all this “budget repair” business. The panic on their faces at their press conference on Monday betrayed the desperation of hack politicians who can feel the ground slipping from under their feet. They have bit off more than they can chew with their radical agenda of union-busting, poor-bashing and rich-giving, and now they are faced with either swallowing a loss of control of the Senate through recalls this summer or spitting out their Koch-brained ideas and starting over.

For now, they are plowing forward into their self-imposed abyss, flailing their arms against the strong wind of an enlightened electorate. On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker went after the mild-mannered leader of the Brave Wisconsin 14, Mark Miller, like he was some kind of raving communist, accusing him of being insufficiently grateful and for having the temerity to request a face-to-face meeting with His Wonderful Self. How dare he ask for a meeting, he said, when I have conceded so much to others I have been trying to pick off in his caucus! Just look at the e-mail exchange my staff has had with them. How generous am I!

Yes, well, about those e-mails…It is the height of hubris and arrogance for the governor to release the e-mail exchange between his staff and several Senate Democrats and claim his efforts have been anything but superfluous and pathetic. Throughout the exchange, Sens. Cullen and Jauch make it completely clear that the retention of non-economic bargaining rights for public employee unions was a necessary component of any deal. Throughout the exchange, Walker’s staff rejects any concession on this one essential item; the one that caused the Brave Wisconsin 14 to bust the Senate quorum in the first place and the one item that, if resolved, would bring them home.

Instead of seriously addressing this core issue, Walker’s staff relays offers on token bargaining subjects like overtime and hazardous duty pay, but only as “permissive” subjects of bargaining, meaning that management could (and, in the case of the State, certainly would) refuse to discuss it. In the last “offer” Walker was bragging about during the press conference, his staff refused to include bargaining over anything but base pay; expressly rejecting bargaining over step (experience) and lane (education) progression raises that have been standard for educators (and which Journal Sentinel wing-nut Patrick McIlheran claimed would still be in place). The only other subject of mandatory bargaining in the staff’s last e-mail would be workplace safety, which is so tightly defined in the “offer” that it would restrict bargaining to only making sure the employer didn’t pour grease on the steps of the office building.

In other words, although the Democrats they were talking to conceded way too much in the exchange (recertification elections still required every three years; expired contracts could not be extended), they never backed off of retaining bargaining on non-economic items, such as discipline, layoffs, transfers, contracting-out resulting in layoffs, and the like. They were talking, but were never close to a deal. The governor’s position remained rigid and inflexible – he would not back off on his obvious union-busting agenda. Neither Cullen, Jauch or anyone else in the Brave Wisconsin 14 had any reason to come back to take the measly crumbs His Royal Highness claimed he would let fall from the table.

Walker’s intemperate grandstanding about his supposedly Great Concessions was too much Sen. Bob Jauch. He lit into the Boy Governor in a press release, accusing him of being “not seriously interested in achieving a meaningful solution”, which cannot really be news to Jauch or anyone else. “Any serious leader does not negotiate contentious issues by press conference. His public announcement of what were supposed to be confidential discussions is a serious breach of faith.” Yeah, well, get used to it with this gang. Anyone that thinks Walker will deal in good faith to achieve the radical goals of his handlers is kidding themselves.

Meanwhile, Walker and his increasingly partisan Senate henchman, Scott Fitzgerald, continue to show their desperation by striking out in all directions. Both Walker and Fitzgerald now claim that the only reason the Brave Wisconsin 14 haven’t caved in to their generous offer is because their strings are being pulled by labor unions and the Obama White House. This is pretty funny coming from a couple of corporate tools who can’t let anything fly over their heads, lest their puppet strings get severed and they collapse in a heap. Perhaps, having no principles themselves, they can’t understand anyone who consistently stand on theirs. More likely, the baseless accusation is just another smear from people who, as usual, cannot win an argument on the merits.

Speaking of smears, on Monday Walker also sent out a list of anecdotal horror stories about the supposed effects of collective bargaining, which were dutifully reprinted verbatim and chewed-over by the right-wing echo chamber. Porn-watching teacher gets reinstated! Outstanding First Year teacher laid off! Bus drivers and correctional officers earning overtime! The Horror…the Horror. Anyone who is vulnerable to this kind of union “success” story cherry-picking has already heard or imagined all this kind of stuff before. It says nothing about the daily positive impact of a contract in a workplace, where both workers and management benefit from an enforceable, consistent method of operating and resolving differences.

Stand-up comedians know best what Walker and the lock-step Republicans are feeling now – it’s called flop sweat. “Flop Sweat” is defined as “nervous sweat (as of a performer) caused especially by the fear of failing”. Standing on a bigger stage than he ever imagined or deserved, Scott Walker is like a bad comedian in the middle of bad routine in front of a deservedly hostile crowd. He can’t get off – he’s stuck with where he is because he put himself there. Watching him squirm is entertaining, and the longer he stands out there, tilting at the windmills of an enraged citizenry, the more likely it is that the Senate flips later this year and he gets flipped out of office next year.

Rachel Maddow pronounced on her show last night, only partially tongue-in-cheek, that Wisconsin had already won in its battle with the radical Republican agenda. Well, not yet. But we’re getting there. You only need to see Walker’s flop sweat and obvious desperation to know that it’s just a matter of time.

O. Ricardo Pimentel: The Winners Must Surrender

2011-03-08T08:20:00.001-06:00

I was all ready tonight to dig into Patrick McIlheran and his hysterical screed ripping on historian John Gurda’s surprisingly brilliant piece in the Sunday Journal Sentinel’s Crossroads section. Titled “Smashing Demon Government”, Gurda aptly compares contemporary tea-baggers with the prohibitionists of the early 20th century. But he doesn’t stop there, plowing into Scott Walker for trying to take us “down a rabbit hole to the darkness of class conflict and civic suicide.” Walker “has touched off a bitter and utterly unnecessary war with his incendiary style of governing”, concluding that, even if he wins “it will be all of us who lose”. It is the best locally-written piece that has run in the Journal Sentinel opinion pages in memory.

And it was all too much for the paper’s in-house wing-nut, McIlheran. McIlheran is used to have the field of strong opinions to himself in the Journal Sentinel, and he wasn’t about to cede his apparent birthright to the uppity Gurda. Paddy Mac apparently spent all day Sunday an most of Monday morning in a feverish rage writing a post on his vanity blog that included three color pictures and 1,500 words. After mocking his fellow columnist for writing “vignettes about beer gardens or fur traders” – as opposed to the GOP talking points he regularly regurgitates – McIlheran tosses around his usual nut-right bugaboos like phony sick notes anarchists in the Capitol and makes up a few facts (teachers are going to retain their”annual raises for moving up the experience scale” without the protection of a union contract? Sez who?).

McIlheran is too easy of a target. The increasingly desperate screeches of he and his governor, who are losing in the court of opinion, are the rantings of paper captains with brightly-polished buttons who have lost control of their ship. But, I was all ready to spend some time paddling their sorry asses anyway, especially after Walker came out in a press conference and lost his robot-like cool because he says he thought he had a deal for an end to the standoff with a couple of the Brave Wisconsin 14 who he thinks are squishy.

Turns out that they are not, and Walker can continue to go f*ck himself if he thinks any of them are showing up for a vote that would mean the end of public employee unions in Wisconsin. I’d like to think that some of the Dems were sent out on purpose to string the Boy Governor along and then sandbag him. He certainly deserves it. More likely, Walker and the incredibly toadying Fitzgerald boys are exaggerating any small concessions they were willing to just think about and flailing around trying to sow dissention in the Democratic ranks. As have most of their stunts in the past couple weeks, it backfired.

But I digress. I am rather here to bury, if only I could, the short columnist career of O. Ricardo Pimentel.

I don’t know how I missed it, but last Friday Pimentel, who is delusional enough to think that he is a voice for the working man and woman, posted the most horrendous assault on workers in Wisconsin. Titled simply “It’s time”, Pimentel pronounces the Bus Filibuster of the Brave Wisconsin 14 over and calls for their quick return, so that they and Wisconsin public employees can more readily be kicked in the teeth. Way to go, Ricardo. Thanks for nothing.

The Journal Sentinel editorial board has been disastrously wrong about the Brave Wisconsin 14 ever since new right-wing editorial page editor David D. Hayes knee jerked on the day the 14 brilliantly lit out for Illinois, calling them names and disparaging their bravery and effectiveness since Day 1. You would think that Pimentel – as close to a counter-balance to McIlheran’s scripted right-wing advocacy as the paper allows itself – might see the fact that all the bad stuff in the “repair” bill had not yet happened and worked within the board to bring the Kings of State Street a little closer to seeing the realities of the real world. You would be wrong.

In his ridiculous blog post, Pimentel credits the Brave Wisconsin 14 with every accomplishment except the primary one – that the Bad Bill is not now and might not ever be law. “The absences have outlived their usefulness, though they have succeeded beyond wildest expectations in other respects – to Democrats’ benefit in purely partisan, political terms,” he writes, citing an increase in passion on the left. He does not mention at all that the primary objective – to prevent the Bad Bill from becoming law and to force the radical Republican jihad to compromise and remove the blatant union-busting language from the bill – has succeeded wildly and complete victory is still a possibility. Instead, he encourages the Brave Wisconsin 14 to accept their dire fate – and that of the working men and women of Wisconsin – and accede to the evil designs of Republicans gone mad.

If Pimentel and the Journal Sentinel board had spent half the time beating up on Walker and the Republicans for what they are trying to do and the arrogant, thuggish way they are trying to do it (still, not a word from the editorial board about the flash-vote by the Republicans in the Assembly in the middle of the night), they might have gotten ahead of the voters who are firmly rejecting the Republican tactics and agenda. But the board still can’t bring itself to accept that, by endorsing Walker for governor, they have made the biggest mistake a long history of big mistakes (see its continued support for the school “choice” boondoggle in today’s paper). They continue to expect, with no reason to, compromise from those who have rejected compromise and reason from the unreasonable.

For his sorry part, Pimentel is in a big hurry to get the Democrats back to Madison so the Republicans can finish the job of creating Alabama North in Wisconsin. He insists that those winning the Battle for Wisconsin’s Soul must surrender. He urges the Brave Wisconsin 14 to grab defeat from the clutches of victory. “…the outcome I desire – statesmanship-induced compromise from Walker because of a few changed GOP minds – is not attainable,” he concludes, so we should just roll over and take it. What a pitiful position for a supposed progressive in Wisconsin to take. Pimentel the columnist is a joke – and not a funny one.

Layoffs, Schmayoffs

2011-03-05T22:04:00.001-06:00

So, Friday came and went, and Scott Walker’s layoff threat turned out to be as empty as his well of public support for his radical-right agenda. He sent some 30-day notices to the various unions, a meaningless act without names attached. No doubt there was a bit of nostalgia in the notice – it will, no doubt, be the last notice of any kind sent to a union by Walker’s union-busting regime.

Little noticed in all the uproar about Walker’s attempt to eliminate public employee labor unions in the future is the status of state employee unions in the present. On the same day Walker dropped the budget-repair “bomb” he thought he was bragging to David Koch about, his administration sent out notices to every state employee union, all of them operating under expired contracts (expired only because a couple of Walker tools in the Democratic Senate last year – sell-out Jeff Plale and turncoat Russ Decker voted against them) that the state was giving 30-day notice that they were terminating all state employee union contracts.

That means the Walker administration is liberated from any obligations under the expired contracts, starting March 13th. There was no way they were going to issue any actual notices before then, since any notices sent now would be covered by the contract and any grievances still in process when the contracts expired would still be governed by the contract. So, the governor threatening to send out actual layoff notices Friday if the Brave WI 14 did not return was a lie. All he sent were meaningless letters to unions whose contracts he terminated and whose existence he is trying to eliminate. I bet they had a good laugh in the governor’s office sending those out. Maybe they flew in a real Koch brother so he could lick the stamps.

That means that, if Walker has the guts to actually pull the trigger on any layoffs, they will look much different than they would under the state employee contracts. For the classified service, that means the layoffs slip into being governed by the vaunted civil service “protections” of Walker’s propaganda campaign. While some of the language tracks the contracts, the notice requirements are shorter (14 instead of 30 days) and the Walker stooges at the head of the various agencies get to exempt 20 percent of the group just for being their friend:

The appointing authority may exempt from the layoff group up to 2 employees or 20%, whichever is greater, of the number of employees in the layoff group to retain employees having special or superior skills or for other purposes as determined by the appointing authority.

So, Cathy Stepp, the anti-DNR DNR secretary, can exempt her friends and acquaintances, if she has any, at the agency.

In addition, if any agency just ignores the layoff language of the administrative code and does it any way they want, who is there to stop them? Under a contract, it would be an independent arbitrator. Without a contract, it is the management tribunal known as the Personnel Commission, who will get any question of interpretation wrong, in management’s favor, and take forever to get there.

Oh, and then there are those in the unclassified service, like my friends in the Public Defenders office. After their contract expires on March 13th, staff attorneys can be laid off in any way management chooses. This would have been more of a threat to more senior attorneys about 20 years ago, when the (past) management of the agency was waging war on the Milwaukee and Racine offices. In fact, the first layoff language offered by management when we began bargaining the staff union’s first contract in the late ‘90s was “layoffs shall be conducted in the manner determined by management”. That didn’t last long, and the SPD attorneys have been operating under seniority layoff language under the contract ever since. Until March 13th, that is, when they will have to rely, again, on the kindness of what is currently a benevolent management. Currently.

But Walker is not going to conduct any layoffs, now or 15 days from now. Not while his poll numbers are in the tank and people are going to blame him much more than the Brave WI 14. Besides, there is no emergency – if the failure to pass the financial parts of his “repair” bill actually cost the state some money, it can all be pushed off to the next two-year budget – it always has been.

But, be sure of it – if the Walker regime succeeds in ramming through his “repair” and two-year budget (against public opinion, by the way -- remember how right-wingers used to throw around polling data during the health care debate, saying the Democrats were going “against the will of the people”?) and continues with a lapdog legislature for the next two years, layoffs will certainly come – but not because the state is “broke”. The 500 lb. elephant is the room is the privatization of the work of state employees to sweetheart companies with political connections.

The WPEC contract has this language preventing contracting-out that results in layoffs:

The Employer shall not contract out work normally performed by bargaining unit employees in an employing unit if it would cause the separation from state service of the bargaining unit employees within the employing unit who are in the classifications which perform the work.

This is especially important to WPEC because they represent over 1,500 IT professionals. The Thompson administration was always hot to farm-out those functions of running the state’s massive computer network to his wealthy contributors in the private sector. You can bet Walker is the same way – about computers and everything else that isn’t nailed down – regardless of how his scheme to outsource courthouse security in Milwaukee to his friends at Wackenhut was laughably and predictably reversed by an arbitrator under that group’s union contract.

The two-year budget bill is remarkably silent on any overt outsourcing plans, but you know they are coming. And, they they do, that will be when massive state employee layoff notices hit the mail. With no union contract to protect them against the contracting or the manner of the layoffs, the radical Walker administration will run like a steamroller over the state employees he claims so insincerely to respect. Then, Wisconsin will be “open for business”, alright. And state employee jobs will be for sale, and not to the lowest bidder.

Tonight There’s Going To Be A Jailbreak

2011-03-03T23:50:00.002-06:00

You know, if Scott Walker could, he’d declare some kind of legislative martial law and just impose everything in his union busting “budget repair” bill by gubernatorial fiat. Elections have consequences, after all, so he gets to do anything he wants, whether he campaigned on it or not. Right?

At least that’s what he’s been told by the finest nut-right legal minds, like Marquette law prof Rick Esenberg. Esenberg has admitted on his blog being the brains behind the brilliant effort to have a Republican party official in Oconto County file a “writ of mandamus” to get his Democratic senator to the Senate chamber. The judge in the case summarily dismissed it in world record time (two days), always a proud result for an impact litigation attorney.

Esenberg also admits advising the Senate Republicans on their similarly awesome effort to get their eight-month pregnant colleague and 13 of her fellow Democrats arrested, should they make the mistake of being caught visiting friends and family in Wisconsin. Esenberg, no doubt, was aware of the prohibition in the state constitution against legislators being arrested during a session, except for “treason, felony and breach of the peace”. I’m sure Esenberg also reviewed with the senators that a finding of “contempt of the Senate”, by statute, can only be imposed by causing another member to be arrested; disorderly conduct; failing to appear as a witness or produce documents; or bribing – none of which is involved here. But, the law is a mere inconvenience to these arrogant bastards. And Esenberg is only too happy to facilitate their lawlessness.

Lester Pines appears to have nailed the relevant law in a memo. For his part, Esenberg resorts to name-calling – “the scofflaws - and that's what they are” – which is a poor substitute for law, but, hey, professor spank. I’m guessing Pines has kicked Esenberg’s legal ass before and certainly will again. Esenberg claims to have worked both of these great legal efforts pro bono, which may be true. You get what you pay for.

But the apparent possibility of the brave WI 14 senators being arrested reminds me of other extra-judicial action that has been taken in Wisconsin history in the face of illegal and immoral incarceration. I think we need to prepare for a popular citizen’s jailbreak, in the spirit of Wisconsin hero Sherman Booth.

Sherman Booth had a newspaper back in the mid-19th century called the Milwaukee Free Democrat. In 1854, Booth became aware of the imprisonment of Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave from Missouri, who was being held under the Fugitive Slave Act, a pitiful law that required free states to hold slaves claimed in slave states for their slave masters. Booth ran through the streets of Milwaukee like Paul Revere and convened a mob at the county jail. After asking nicely, the mob stormed the jail and freed Glover. And, you can bet, standing right there, demanding that the mob be arrested and the slave be returned to Missouri, would have been the 19th century version of Rick Esenberg. “The scofflaws - and that's what they are!”

I assume the Senate Democrats are traveling, if not sleeping, with their lawyers in the event that the long arm of the lawless somehow reaches across the state line (you can bet Esenberg and the fine Republican team is trying to find a way to do just that). However, should one of them get caught visiting their grandchildren or hugging their child or going to church or to their obstetrician, they will have to be held in a jail somewhere before they get dragged, feet first, onto the Senate floor.
In such a case, I suggest we organize a posse in each county between Madison and the Illinois state line. When we find out where they are, we storm the building, like the brave Sherman Booth and his mob, and free the political prisoner from the clutches of his or her jailers. Free the Senator! we will shout to the swelling encouragement of the surrounding citizens who have come to see their constitution and their laws restored and enforced, by any means necessary.

In the meantime, I think I found another opportunity to do my own small part through a little identity-bending, a brilliant suggestion by the Stop Scott Walker Watch on Facebook. If I can find one of those "Hello My Name Is..." name tags, I'll be wearing one around the Courthouse this morning. Hello, My Name Is...Chris Larson. Arrest Me! I would hope the law enforcement officers who support the collective bargaining rights the WI 14 are making such huge sacrifices to protect would ignore such an illegal warrant, but, you never know. As Elvis Costello sang: "I'll do anything to confuse the ememy".

Working Together And Cooling Tempers With Scott Walker

2011-03-01T23:51:00.001-06:00

Of all the steaming heaps of BS in a budget and a budget address full of it, the funniest line of Scott Walker’s stilted, Teleprompter-ed speech to three-fourths of the Wisconsin Legislature was this doozy:

“I have been asked a lot over the past week about what happens next. Well, I’m an optimist. I believe that after our budget repair bill passes, tempers will cool, and we will find a way to continue to work together to help grow our economy.”

What a load. Even a script-reading tool like Walker must have struggled to stifle a chuckle over that one. “Tempers will cool”? “Continue to work together”? Earth to Scott Walker: You have burned your bridges with everyone to the center and left of Dale Schultz. There is no way back – not that you were ever there. Tempers will not cool. No one other than your goose-stepping fellow radical Republicans in the legislature is going to work with you, or even pretend to talk to your sorry ass. You have until the recall election in the spring of 2012 to wreak as much havoc as you can on the citizens and government of Wisconsin. After that, I’m sure you’ll have a generous offer to serve as cabana boy for one of the Koch Brothers.

All Walker had to do is look to his left from the podium to see the brave and abused Assembly Democrats sitting on their hands when he was introduced, during all applause lines and when he left to see that any chance of working together with any Democrat, anywhere, is long gone. It was as if the real world the Democrats live in and the alternative reality of Fox News and talk radio were side-by-side in the same room. On the one side (and in a gallery strategically packed with Walkerites), the Boy Governor drew a standing ovation for every nut-right cliché. Across the aisle, the Assembly Dems sat in sorrowful witness of the dismantling of the state, as quiet and dignified as the rightously-empty chairs of the Senate Dems.

And the Senate Dems might want to look into getting out of those hotels and renting a couple of cheap apartments in Illinois. Governor Righteous isn’t budging anywhere soon. Unless they manage to peel off a couple more GOP senators to go along with Sen. Schultz in voting down the union-busting bill, they can’t come back. Walker’s chief henchman in the Senate, Speaker Scott Fitzgerald, found time – when he wasn’t hiding the Dem senators’ paychecks, signing the timesheets of their staff or sending his daddy’s (storm) troopers out to arrest them – to try to back-door some of the exiled Dems to convince them to stab their fellow senators in the back by coming to Madison to give Fitzgerald his goddamn quorum. No way, they said. If anyone’s coming back, they will all come back together. And then, only when the time and the bill is right.

And that may be – never, or at least not until the balance of power shifts in the Senate or Walker is recalled. Even if the union-busting of the “budget repair” bill is resolved, it still leaves all the various radical bombs in the two-year budget to deal with. And, once they get one Democrat in the room, the Senate will never adjourn. It may be that the Democratic senators will have to stay away for months to prevent all the bad stuff from happening – the Republicans being able to do nothing is definitely a better alternative than this band of reckless ideologues doing anything.

The resulting stalemate is all on Walker and the Republicans. Until they realize that they can’t dictate every aspect of every piece of legislation for the next two years (or less, if recalls flip the Senate or the governor), we are all going to have one sorry mess on our hands. “The Republican-controlled Legislature can't just rubber-stamp this budget from a Republican governor,” says the ever-hopeful and clueless Journal Sentinel in a typically mealy-mouthed editorial Wednesday. Oh, yes they can. And they fully expected to, until the small matter of the Bus Filibuster by Senate Democrats and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in and around the Capitol reared their sweet heads.

After what the radical Republicans have already done and what they fully intend to do, Walker is dreaming if he really thinks he will ever be able to be in the same room with any Democrat, much less “work together” with them. But the line in his speech was just another lie – he knows he can’t and he doesn’t care. He and the Republicans will ram through as much crap as they can as long as they can and they don’t care what you think.

A year or four years or a decade from now, it will be up to the grown-ups in the Democratic leadership to pick up the pieces and repair the damage – just like President Obama has had to do after the Disaster that was Junior Bush. In the meantime, anyone with the power to do so should stand in the way. Unfortunately for those brave souls, the burden on the Senate Democrats to stay away as long as they can stand it just got that much heavier.

Walker’s War – Walker’s Layoffs

2011-02-28T23:51:00.001-06:00

Even the powerful handlers in Washington pulling the strings of their puppet, Scott Walker, must be recalibrating at this point. Despite weeks of lying, anti-union propaganda in the right-wing media, national polls show that the public overwhelmingly supports collective bargaining rights for public employees. A state poll finds that, if the election were held today, Walker would lose to Milwaukee mayor and all-round good guy Tom Barrett. And, in a shocking development, Walker seems to have lost, at least for one day, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The Journal Sentinel, which has been kissing Walker’s ass since the day they made the unfortunate mistake of endorsing the guy in last year’s election cycle and has gotten nearly everything wrong during Walker’s War on public employees, suddenly lurches into the realm of common sense on Tuesday’s editorial page. After weeks of calling the brave Senate Democrats who dared to deny the imperial Republicans their quorum every name in the book, the Kings of State Street now think passing the union-busting bell might not be such a great idea. “We support the governor's aim to rein in labor costs but cannot support this bill as written.” Well, now they tell us. Do they realize the only reason this suddenly unsupportable bill isn’t yet law is because the Dems took off to where Walker’s (Storm) Troopers – led, appropriately, by Daddy Fitzgerald – couldn’t find them?

Better late than never, I suppose, but it would also be nice if the newspaper and other opinion leaders made it clear whose fault it will be if the layoffs Walker threatens take place if the Senate Dems don’t return this week (which they won’t – they’re winning, why the hell would they?). Leaving aside the fact that Walker’s threat is probably idle – just another lie in his campaign of lies – he will have no one but himself to blame if the layoffs materialize. He’s had a deal in-hand for two weeks now – the public employees have agreed to what amounts for most to an 8 percent take-home pay cut in the form of pension and health insurance contributions, but insist on retaining their other bargaining rights that have nothing to do with the deficit.

Walker’s handlers have rejected it – they didn’t buy this little twit to get half a loaf. Besides, they don’t give a shit about the deficit – the deficit is just an excuse to drive through otherwise-impossible radical Republican wet-dreams like busting public sector unions. That’s why Walker and his echo-chamber sycophants on talk radio and in the paper’s own pages have to lie about the impact of bargaining working conditions. Ask them about why that kind of bargaining has to be eliminated and they stray into discussions of benefits which, the union leaders have already agreed, are off the table now and in the future. They refuse to engage in a discussion of the other things unions bargain for to improve the workplace. They refuse to admit that what they are really trying to do is to destroy the unions by making them useless.

Another one of the talking points they have been feeding into Walker’s head lately is that municipalities and school boards all over state have been racing to settle contracts before the draconian bill is passed. The contracts do not include the pension and health insurance contributions in the governor’s dictate. “See',” he says, “all they care about is the money.” But the reason they are moving on the contracts is because both sides are used to working within the contract and don’t want to lose that positive way of doing business with each other.

One thing (of many) that is not well known about Walker’s bill is that it is a massive state power-grab of things that have always been under local control. Say you live in a community that might want to maintain the comfortable structure of the union contract and want to continue to bargain working conditions. Under the bill, if municipality or school board did so choose, even on non-economic issues, they would lose all state funding. The governor laughably talks about how the bill is drafted the way it is to give local units of government more flexibility. Instead, it puts them in a straightjacket. They will live in the world designed by the Koch Brothers and the right-wing ideologues in Washington who designed all this. Or else.

So, make no mistake – the insistence of Walker and the Republicans on driving through a radical right-wing agenda to end public employee unions is the only reason we are here today. They, and they alone own whatever layoffs may come. When Walker steps to the podium for his budget speech, Democrats should pick up where they left off when they were last on the floor of the Assembly last week, when Republicans called a quick vote in the dead of the night. They should point to Walker and the other Republicans who have dragged this state through this Unnecessary Crisis, solely because of their petty ideological campaign, and pick up the chant:

SHAME --- SHAME --- SHAME ---- SHAME…

Journal Sentinel: Not a Word on the Assembly Outrage

2011-02-26T01:41:00.001-06:00

A day or so ago, it looked like the Journal Sentinel had finally found a moderate voice in kind-of opposition to the radical effort by its endorsed governor and his goose-stepping legislature to bust public employee unions and otherwise grab imperial powers to privatize state resources and rewrite Medicaid eligibility without administrative review.

After its silly PolitiFact project applied a string of False and even one Pants-on-Fire “rulings” to Walker’s various lies in his ideological drive to remake Wisconsin in the Koch Brothers’ image, the Kings of State Street actually took some mild shots at Walker in two editorials on Friday. Two weeks after the bill was available to read, they suddenly discovered that Walker was trying to grab control over Medicaid eligibility rules to boot as many people off the rolls of the insured as possible. It also suddenly dawned on the paper’s inner conscious that he was trying to sell off state-owned power plants without bids, probably to the Koch brothers or other of his rich contributors who are standing in the governor’s mansion (no room at the Capitol these days) with their hands out and their pants unzipped.

In a separate editorial, they also expressed as much disgust as they could gather for Walker’s bromance phone call with the guy pretending to be right-wing pig David Koch. After pronouncing the revealing stunt “good for a laugh”, the paper goes on to describe things that are decidedly not funny and concludes that Walker’s parting “thanks a million” was the most revealing comment of all.

Although somewhat critical in both editorials, the paper continues its pattern of treating Walker with kid gloves, as if he’ll break if they go after him the way he so badly deserves to be gone after. It doesn’t call for Walker to kill the Medicaid and power plant power-grabs; it says the provisions “should be stripped from the bill and debated separately”, as if the result would be any different with a Republican majority that dictates and does not debate. They continue to treat the governor and legislature as reasonable, rational people rather than knuckle-dragging ideologues. But, still, it looked for a minute there like you might be able to see some daylight between the Journal Sentinel’s nose and Scott Walker’s ass.

Well, that didn’t last long. A day after Republicans in the Assembly made a mockery of the legislative process by shutting down debate without notice and giving members mere seconds to vote in the middle of the night, the paper completely ignores the most outrageous behavior in Wisconsin legislative history in Saturday’s paper. Instead, the paper, yet again, goes after the bravely-absent Senate Democrats for the umpteenth time. They sniff that the brilliant and completely legal and necessary Bus Filibuster is “unethical and constitutes dereliction of duty.” They want Walker to “offer an olive branch” to the Dems by, once again, stripping out the non-budget policy items and considering them “separately”.

Has the Journal Sentinel been paying any attention to how Walker and the radical Republicans have been behaving? Did they watch how the Republicans in the Assembly tried to ram through a vote a week ago? Did they see them sit on their hands while the impassioned Democrats brought up very reasonable amendments for 61 hours, just waiting for their moment to pounce by calling for the quick vote and slinking out of the room like a bunch of cowards? Did they hear Walker tell fake-Koch that one of his plots to lure the Democrats back to the Capitol was to pretend to have a conversation with them?

Seeing how the Assembly Democrats were treated, why would any self-respecting Democrat go the the floor of the Senate to be subjected to the same abuse? Why would the Journal Sentinel want them to? Besides, the Senate Republicans have already eliminated the possibility for any amendment and debate on the union-busting, Medicaid-destroying, power-plant giveaway bill. The Republicans have no right to a quorum. The way Republicans throughout the Capitol have been acting, they don’t have a right to anything.

For two weeks now, the Journal Sentinel has refused to hold Walker or the Republicans to the same standard of cooperation, comity and common decency that it would expect from anyone else. The paper pretends that the Republicans come to the table in good faith to solve the state’s problems. They ignore all evidence that the Republicans are a radical bunch of ideological movement right-wingers, driving a national agenda born in the corporate offices of the Koch brothers and the conservative think-tanks of Washington.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has lost its soul on the floor of the Republican Assembly and Senate and the governor’s office, where democracy has gone to die.

Breaking News: Clarke’s Deputies Clearing Capitol Tonight?

2011-02-25T17:59:00.002-06:00

Funny what you pick up around the Courthouse on a Friday.

Word all around the Courthouse today was that 50 to 60 Milwaukee County Sheriff’s deputies are getting on a bus at 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning. It is the understanding of the deputies who volunteered that they are going to Madison to clear the State Capitol of protesters that have camped out in the building since Scott Walker’s radical power-grab created the Wisconsin Crisis two weeks ago.
This seems to conflict with an announcement by the Capitol Police this afternoon, that would have the building vacated (supposedly for cleaning and maintenance) at 4 p.m. Sunday and reopened at 8 a.m. Monday; an arrangement the protesters have agreed to follow voluntarily. No show of force will be necessary.

Perhaps Walker’s ideological and power-mad soul mate, Sheriff David Clarke, didn’t get the memo – the bus was still scheduled by the time I left the Courthouse late this afternoon. Knowing his megalomaniacal disposition and his penchant for publicity, he may have been too busy polishing the buttons on his coat and grooming his horse for the Glorious Ride To The Rescue he imagines in his own head to check his e-mail today.

Or, perhaps, he’s planning to go anyway. If so, Clarke might face an interesting situation once he gets there. Members of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association announced during the day that they wanted the People’s House to remain open and that their members will camping out with the protesters, beginning tonight. “Er, Officer, we’re here to clear the place in the middle of the night, could you please…never mind.” While his deputies are generally great men and women always do their jobs admirably (while rolling their eyes at their boss and his hilarious lieutenant the whole time), Clarke himself would pussy-out in a minute if faced with real resistance.

Or it could be that the announcement by the Capitol Police of the Sunday closing has put the kibosh on Clarke’s dream of a Darkness at Dawn raid on sleeping protesters. He’ll have to find another way to try to get his Boy Governor out of the political, moral and ethical hole he has dug for himself. That’s fine – as long as he makes sure his deputies get the overtime they earn by following their grandstanding leader on the Road to Nowhere.

Why We Fight

2011-02-22T23:46:00.001-06:00

Even since the lines were clearly drawn over a week ago, Scott Walker and the other Republicans trying to destroy public employee unions in Wisconsin as part of a national campaign by their Koch-corporate overlords have been deliberately telling lies about what the collective bargaining of working conditions means and the supposed protections provided by Wisconsin’s civil service system. Both concepts – bargaining over working conditions and the civil service “protections” – can be a bit nebulous and the lack of knowledge about either is used by those who would use their various right-wing propaganda outlets to mislead and misinform the general public about what both mean.

When Walker’s beady eyes stared into the Teleprompter Tuesday night in yet another effort to pull the wool over the eyes of a state and national audience that is just not buying it, he read the same script he has been on for a week. Part of that script is designed to mislead his listeners that the bargaining that union leaders and Democrats insist on maintaining relate to benefits with a financial impact, such as including WEA Trust as the preferred health insurance provider for teacher locals. The WEA Trust talking-point is a bald-faced lie – it is the local school boards that contract with WEA Trust to be included in their health insurance options, not the unions themselves. Besides that inconvenient truth, Walker completely ignores the fact that, for good or ill, the unions have already rolled over on all bargaining related to pension, health insurance, any wage increase over the cost of living and any other wage and benefit issue with a financial impact.

Regardless of whether Walker and his various lackeys on talk-radio and the legislature want to admit it, the real issue comes down to the elimination of non-financial bargaining. These issues are included in standard, previously uncontroversial language in public employee contracts. As the most familiar example (to me), I will use the current contract of the union I helped to organize and service as a staff rep for the WFT (now AFT-Wisconsin) – that of the great Wisconsin Professional Employees Council (WPEC), a diverse group of professional state employees. The following is just an example of some of the subjects would be removed from any future bargaining or enforcement under the bill. It is also interesting to see how the language of a contract compares with supposed protections in the civil service statutes:

Layoffs are to be conducted by seniority, within a classification within an employing unit (a smaller functional division of the work of an agency). LTEs, project employees and probationary employees have to go before any permanent employees get the ax. Employees have the right to transfer or demote to avoid layoff. Those laid off retain the right to be restored, with the most senior restored first if the jobs come back.

The statutes only require that “the order of layoff of such employees may be determined by seniority or performance or a combination thereof or by other factors.” In the administrative code, the layoff rules generally follow a seniority pattern, but allow agency administrators to protect 20 percent of less senior employees from the layoff group. This is (or should be) known as the “suck up” exemption and is not possible under a union contract.

The Hours of Work language of the WPEC contract includes language relating to the earning and use of professional time and comp time, the scheduling of vacation, telecommuting and other issues that come up often as busy professionals in state service perform their various duties.

There is no language in the statutes or administrative rules that even recognize the existence of comp time or professional time to account for hours worked over 40 hours a week (those employees designated as “professional” are not required to get overtime by federal law). This is an example how individual contracts for different groups of employees can help make adjustments that best suits their (and the employer’s) interests.

Grievances – defined as alleged violations of the union contract, everything from discipline to workplace safety. If not resolved in the agency, the grievance is ultimately heard by an independent arbitrator who decides the matter.

Under the civil service rules, some forms of discipline are not grievable (a written reprimand, a bad performance evaluation; or “the evaluation methodology used by an employer to determine
a discretionary pay award, or the amount of the award”) and those that are end up in the Personnel Commission – hardly an independent arbiter.

….and so on. Regardless of the financial aspects (the parameters of which have always been dictated by the state before bargaining started anyway) life is different without a contract, as WPEC members know all too well. The group now represented by WPEC worked without a contract for most of their careers, until they won the representation election in 1994. They were a skeptical bunch during the organizing campaign, but ultimately built themselves into a strong representative for their members, making a positive difference in many lives in many ways.

Now, the radical Republicans are trying to pull the rug out from under them and the other public employee unions by destroying them with absurd bargaining restrictions, an onerous annual recertification requirement and the elimination of dues deductions from paychecks. If the day arrives when the “budget repair bill” passes in anything like its current form, the Republicans will politely shake hands and pat each other’s backs in public over their grand march towards fiscal integrity. But, once they get behind closed doors, the champagne will flow and the cigars will be lit in the back rooms and the country clubs to celebrate the end of public employee unions in Wisconsin.

This is Why We Fight.

Governor Me And Other Thoughts

2011-02-22T08:05:00.001-06:00

Remember when the Journal Sentinel used to have in-house editorial cartoonists, rather than running the “work” right-wing freaks like Michael Ramirez? In preparation for tonight’s “fireside chat” by the desperate Incredible Shrinking Governor, I offer this, sent to me directly from Stuart Carlson, one of the great editorial cartoonists no longer employed at the paper.
This blog was pretty harsh on the public safety employees carved out for special treatment in Gov. Walker’s historically-divisive union-busting bill. “Law enforcement and fire fighter groups have always been the whiniest bunch of crybabies in the labor movement, and, now that they think they are going to get to keep their ball, they are going to take it and go home,” I wrote. Yeah, well, er, officer, what I meant to say is…The fact is that many of the public employees benefiting from the carve-out – especially the firefighters and the State Troopers – have stuck their neck out in solidarity for their brothers and sisters in the labor movement. The State Troopers have actually come out and announced regret for their endorsement of Walker last fall. The Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin sent me an e-mail, making sure I knew about their opposition to the union-busting aspects of the bill. So, all hail to the brave men and women of the state organizations. As far as I know, the Milwaukee firefighters and police haven’t announced regret for their endorsements or shown any support for anyone other than themselves. If this is not the case, someone let me know and I’ll update.
Speaking of regrettable endorsements, the Journal Sentinel editorial board continues to carry Walker’s dirty water. In an outrageous editorial today, the paper continues to foist the phony premises of Walker’s union-busting, declaring the state’s deficit (half of what it was a couple of years ago) a “fiscal emergency” while using tired right-wing rhetoric, like calling union leaders “bosses” to drive the governor’s radical-right agenda. The paper again refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Bus Filibuster by Senate Democrats – the Republicans have no right to a quorum and they are working harder right now than any of the stonewalling Republicans – and makes a preemptive strike against recall efforts to come against supposedly pro-labor Republicans like Van Wanggaard and Dan Kapanke, both of whom wrote pathetic and pathetically similar explanations for why they stood ready to vote to destroy the public employee unions. Worst of all, the Journal Sentinel refuses to tell Walker to take the deal that is on the table – accept the increase in pension and health insurance contributions while leaving work place collective bargaining in place. In fact, the editorial doesn’t mention the attack on non-financial bargaining at all, unless its statement that “benefits should not be on the bargaining table at all” is a reference to that – again, accepting the Walker spin confusing non-economic bargaining with “benefits”. In the meantime, the editorial calls the obvious union-busting intent of the bill “not necessary” and identifies certain aspects as intended to “cripple unions”, without saying that is necessarily a bad thing. The Journal Sentinel continues to take the side of the Koch-driven union-busters over the public employee.

Scott Walker: Water Boy for the Koch Brothers

2011-02-19T21:49:00.001-06:00

I watched a live Scott Walker press conference for the first time Friday evening and I was amazed by the utter message discipline of the Boy Governor as he used his office to forward the Koch Brothers campaign to destroy public-sector unions.

He’s been saying the same thing in the same way for a week. I heard Ohio’s freshly-minted Koch puppet-governor John Kasich spout the same talking-points on the radio the same night. “We want to give municipalities and school boards the same flexibility…” Same crap. Same script. The only difference is that Kasich has a discernable personality, honed during his part-time gig as a Fox News stooge a few years back. On the other hand, Walker behind a podium looks like a high school forensics contestant doomed to a B.

Since his self-inflicted Wisconsin Crisis has gone national and viral, Walker has shrunken into a defensive crouch. The press, especially the Journal Sentinel, has rolled over, challenging none of his utter bullshit, to his face or anywhere else. I’m sure he’ll do fine on Fox News Sunday, trading knowing smirks with former journalist ands fellow right-wing traveller Chris Wallace.

Ever since Marty Beil and the other union leaders confirmed and the brave exiled Democratic senators of the WI 14 agreed that the increase in pension and health insurance contributions was a dead issue and all the governor had to do was agree to drop his non-economic union-busting provisions to end the stand-off, Walker and the other lackeys of the Koch agenda have refused to directly address the core issue. It really is all about not just limiting bargaining to just a small sliver of wages – it is solely about killing off the unions themselves.

A few provisions of the bill that haven’t gotten enough attention make that intent perfectly clear.

A prohibition against paycheck deductions for union dues. Forget (for a moment – then remember again) the elimination of fair-share, whereby those who reap the benefits of the union’s bargaining but choose not to be a member of the union itself have to pay a high percentage of the regular union dues to support the union’s activities on their behalf. The biggest financial impact on unions (as long as they exist) in the bill is the fact that, for the first time – ever, anywhere – union members would have to send monthly checks to the union rather than have the employer take it out of their checks, at their request. Walker and his handlers at Koch Industries know that this creates an impossible and expensive bookkeeping and collection nightmare for the union. It is by far the biggest, most obvious union-busting f*ck-you in the bill, and the Republicans know it.
A requirement that each union conduct a recertification election every year. The union, each year, would have to win 51 percent (not 50-plus-1) of all those employed in the unit – not just those voting. After the union loses all rights to bargain anything but a cost-of-living wage increase, who in their right mind would vote to continue with this charade year-after-year? Most unions are not enough of a social club to maintain that kind of solidarity for solidarity’s sake. The Koch Republicans know that any union that somehow manages to survive the first such annual election will never survive the second.

These two stick-it-to-em provisions have nothing to do with the budget, certainly, and even less to do with the other severe restrictions on bargaining in the bill. And the miserable thing is that no one can get any Republican in the Assembly, the Senate or the governor himself backed up against a wall so they have to answer the question: Why is that there?

It certainly won’t be the Journal Sentinel, even on its editorial page. In Sunday’s paper, there is not an editorial urging Walker and the Republicans to take YES for an answer on the financials and take out the union-busting provisions of the bill. Instead, they are moving on the larger budget, laughably encouraging Walker to exercise “ideological restraint” with “fairness and compassion” in the proposal he is not delivering on Tuesday. Are they kidding? If there is anything they should have learned this week, it is that such restraint and fairness cannot be expected from the white-hot radical Republicans in the Capitol.

Public Against Walker 2-to-1; Journal Sentinel Buries It

2011-02-18T08:10:00.001-06:00

If you dig deep enough on the impossible-to-navigate Journal Sentinel website, you will find something that should be front-page news. The fact that it’s not tells you all you need to know about the newspaper, its editors and the paper’s continued slide into irrelevance.

Dan Bice – a decent reporter once he was separated from Cary Spivak, who is always front-paged when he is making a Democrat look bad – has some crucial information on the lack of public support for the Republicans’ radical union-busting agenda. By a margin of 2-to-1, the poll commissioned by Building a Stronger Wisconsin, Wisconsinites oppose Gov. Walker’s effort to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees and strangle the unions. Bice’s post flags the poll in the headline as being done by a “liberal group” – an identification that would never be attached for a right-wing poll until deep in the story – but the poll itself seems fairly straightforward and is probably a good indication of where things stood mid-week.

But, knowing the contorted twisting of the newspaper this week as it tries to avoid the real issues in Walker’s mad power-grab, we know a couple of things, don’t we?

If a similar poll, even by a blatantly nut-right front-group like Club for Growth had come out with a poll showing support for the governor’s union-busting, it would be trumpeted on the front page of the paper and used by the paper and its corporate brothers on right-wing radio to bludgeon the Democrats and unions into submission.
The rich right-wing “think tanks” have conducted similar polls this week, got similar results and buried it.

In defending his indefensible attack on public employees this week, Walker has said repeatedly that the “majority of Wisconsin voters” are behind him. He knows from his own internal and external polling that this is not true. The Journal Sentinel has the information, written up, nice and pretty, by its own reporter and buried it.

A more interesting poll at this point would be, now that you’ve had a month-and-a-half of his maniacal driving of the state off a radical-right cliff, if the election was held today, would you vote for Scott Walker for governor? Even with the continued campaign of support on talk radio and in all pages of the Journal Sentinel, would he even get to 40 percent? And, if he didn’t, do you think the Journal Sentinel would report it?

Senate Democrats: The Bus Filibuster Heroes

2011-02-18T00:05:00.001-06:00

The brave, selfless action of the Senate Democrats, exercising the only power they have by refusing a runaway, radical Republican Senate a quorum, was the best news of this long, gloomy week. It was a brilliant move, the equivalent of a tactic used every day by Republicans in Washington – a filibuster by bus.

I wish I could have seen the face on Scott Walker when one of the Fitzgerald boys slunk into his office to give him the news. Naturally, they went with the first impulse of power-mad thugs everywhere – calling for the police to arrest the wayward Dems and drag them in handcuffs to the Senate chamber. Of course, it helped to have the Fitzgeralds’ father running the State Patrol to send out the orders. It didn’t matter that the Democrats were already out of the state by the time the APB went out – no self-respecting trooper was going to pay it any mind, anyway.

Around the Courthouse this week, many of those most affected by the union-busting treachery of Walker and the lock-stepping Republicans had already resigned themselves to a 8% cut in their take-home pay and an end to all their hard-bargained job protections and work rules. As I have discussed before, Walker’s claims that those in the classified service have sufficient job protections are a joke because the broad language of the statutes and its enforcement through the management-friendly Personnel Commission are not nearly as effective as the same protections under a union-enforced contract. But the assistant district attorneys and the public defender staff attorneys I work with everyday are not even in the classified service – they would have nothing to protect them under the bill’s draconian measures. But, on Thursday afternoon, they and the hundreds of thousands of other public employees in the state breathed a sigh of relief knowing that someone had stuck a stick in the spokes, however temporarily, of the radical Republican steamroller.

Meanwhile, over at the mostly-vacant Journal Sentinel building, the Kings of State Street continued their week of utter cluelessness. Continuing in its news pages to repeat Walker spin about the bill being about the budget rather than the undisguised union-busting everyone else has recognized since at least Monday, the paper tried and failed to keep up with unfolding events in Madison. The hapless PolitiFact team churned out two “rulings” a day, finding – as always – Democrats saying totally legitimate things with their Pants-on-Fire (Walker certainly did threaten to call out the Guard if things didn’t quite go his way) and Walker and other Republicans telling far more obvious lies that were only False.

On the editorial page, the paper had a strong message of support for Walker and his partisan tactics. Saying that Walker had “picked the right fight” and was moving toward “fiscal integrity”, the editorial board largely ignored the union-busting elephant in the room. The paper also loaded-up on supportive op-eds from what passes as the right-wing intelligentsia in town, reaching out to voices as undiverse as Rick Esenberg, Christian Schneider, Alberta Darling and their own ridiculous Patrick McIlheran (twice), without hardly any voice in opposition (Pimentel doesn’t count – boy, does he ever not count).

So it comes as no surprise that the Journal Sentinel would scold rather than celebrate the Senate Democrats’ Bus Filibuster and the sick-out of various teachers across the state. Calling the Dems’ action belittling terms like “tantrum”, “prank” and “snit”, the editorial mimics the familiar talk-radio talking-points of their corporate brothers at WTMJ and other right-wing media outlets. “Both Senate Democrats and teachers should get over their snits and get back to work,” sniffs the newspaper in a snit of its own, apparently unable to stomach the exercise of the only power the Democrats in the legislature have.

Although the Journal Sentinel has never harshly criticized the Republicans for their unprecedented use of the Permanent Filibuster in Washington and never miss an opportunity to berate President Obama for not being sufficiently bipartisan, the paper refuses to hold the radical Republicans in its own state to any standard whatsoever. The paper has never implored the new Republican leaders in Madison to use their new unchecked power in the spirit of compromise or consensus, or to reach across the aisle try to work together to solve the state’s serious problems. They have nothing to say about the governor whose focus is supposedly all about “jobs, jobs, jobs” creating an extremely divisive diversion from that agenda by stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights and deliberately destroying their unions. They have no criticism for the fact that Walker had absolutely no conversations with any union or Democratic leader about the supposed gravity of the state’s “crisis” and his proposed solutions before dropping the nuclear bomb he dropped on public employees a week ago.

Well, they have to talk now, don’t they? How long the Senate Democrats remain in exile is entirely dependent on the Republicans and whether they come to the table (or, at least, the cell phone) and talk and compromise about the details of their radical agenda. In the meantime, the radical Republicans can do no more harm. And the Senate Democrats are the heroes of the hour.

The Wolf In Wolf’s Clothing

2011-02-16T08:25:00.001-06:00

The thing about Republicans is that they never engage on the real issue. Unable to prevail if they would just tell people what they are doing or want to do, they craft their actions in intricate, strategic dodges that divert voters from their real intent. Once it is discovered what they are really up to, they hide behind chats with their pliant sycophants on talk radio and Fox News, where it looks like they are talking about things, but they really aren’t.

If dragged into a discussion with real journalists, which they avoid like the plague, they maintain extreme message discipline, staying on their poll-tested talking points until they get what they want or the storm passes. Then, it’s on to the next deceptive campaign of lies designed to achieve another goal that would never be accepted by the public if it was ever discussed out in the open.

In Washington, the party that ran up record deficits under Reagan and Junior Bush complains about debt not because they give a damn about debt, but to starve the beast and prevent a Democratic administration from doing anything that might help anyone other than their corporate handlers. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was framed as a war of necessity over WMDs, those hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and thousands of our own soldiers died and were maimed for the maniacal geopolitical schemes of Dick Cheney and the neocons and petty revenge for the perceived weakness of Bush Senior.

Through it all, Republicans refuse to discuss why they are really doing what they are doing. Given truth serum, they would admit that they do most of what they do because their strings are being pulled by wealthy corporations who have too much to lose from regulation, fair taxation and control on the pollution and poison spewing from their plants and products. The rest of what they do is simple nepotism, providing jobs for themselves and the sons and daughters of their contributors, propagating the herd to spawn the next generation of government functionaries whose only mission is to destroy government.

This sadly-effective Republican strategy is being played out with a vengeance in Wisconsin right now, as an out-of-control governor and legislature rapidly destroys state government on behalf of their corporate masters who have hired the GOP stooges to make sure they will never again be adequately taxed, regulated or sued.

Under the guise of job promotion, they ram through a decimation of the law of personal injury. The law creates not one job. But it does ensure that the deadly calculations used by soulless corporations for whom the injuries and death predictably caused by their products are just a cost of doing business are just that much easier to take. Reducing the available punitive damage awards to pocket change, Smithers? Exxcelllent…

Another “jobs” bill that allows the unchallenged destruction of a small wetlands area in Green Bay has nothing to do with jobs (especially after Bass Pro Shops said they wanted nothing to do with destroying the environment) and everything to do with paying off a wealthy contributor for his help during the campaign. The pending Photo ID bill has nothing to do with voter fraud that doesn’t exist and everything to do with suppressing the vote of thousands of legitimate voters in Democratic strongholds.

And so it is with the union-busting effort being rushed through the legislature this week under the by-now laughable pretense of a “budget repair bill”. I was talking to a Republican yesterday and asked him how he could justify the deliberate destruction of collective bargaining for state employees. “Well, the budget has to be fixed…” I stopped him mid-talking point. It’s not about the budget and you know it, I said. If you want to bust the unions, why don’t you just come out and say it and we can fight through that discussion on the merits? So he came out and said, sure, union-busting is just fine with him. So there we have it. I won’t say who it is – I wouldn’t want him drummed out of his Republican circles for telling the truth.

Scott Walker would have lost the election if he would have described his radical intentions for the destruction of state government. If he came out during the campaign and presented the union-busting language of the bill, which – no doubt, was drafted and fully-formed by the WMC before the election – Walker would have been defeated not only by an energized union movement, but by moderate and independent voters who do not want to see such a radial change in the public employer-employee dynamic.

But, instead of being honest about his intentions, he hid behind vague notions of fiscal responsibility and job creation through the magical private sector. He and his corporate handlers knew his plans and those of the drooling Neanderthals in the legislature should they get their hands on the government they seek to destroy. This was their plan all along. That’s why Republicans in the legislature this week are hiding in their offices, ignoring the impassioned e-mails of their constituents, turning off their phones and sitting mutely at the pro-forma Joint Finance Committee hearing, like Clarence Thomas at Supreme Court arguments. If they engage, they lose, and they know it. They are waiting for the storm to pass so they can rubber-stamp the bill and move on to the next outrage they didn’t tell us about.

Of course, it would help if the few remaining local media outlets that employ real journalists would dig through the bullshit – it’s not that hard to figure out – and broadcast what is actually going on. Instead, we get the Journal Sentinel, praising Walker for picking “the right fight” as a move toward “fiscal integrity”. They offer mild criticism of moves that only “smack” of union busting rather than the real thing. They let charter members of the local Republican echo chamber like Patrick McIlheran and Rick Esenberg, blather on about how great Walker’s union-busting moves are, while progressives are stuck with the mealy-mouthed O. Ricardo Pimentel, whose one-the-one-hand-then-the other equivocation and I’m-sure-they-mean-well disposition does nothing to counter the GOP message discipline of the paper’s omnipresent right-wing columnists.

No, we’ll have to figure it out on our own, as the Republican jihad continues. I guess I’ll just have to, as a major local politician encouraged me on my voice-mail yesterday, keep writing.

Lies, Damn Lies and the Personnel Commission

2011-02-14T21:52:00.004-06:00

When Gov. Scott Walker introduced his radical union-busting language last Friday, it was deliberately hidden behind a diversionary and, ultimately, uncontroversial increase in public employee contributions to their pension and health insurance costs. Called, laughably, a “budget repair bill”, gullible news organizations like the Journal Sentinel and even the New York Times headlined the “cuts or layoffs” spin of the Republicans, while treating the decimation of collective bargaining rights as an annoying sidelight.

As Walker spent his whole day Monday taking advantage (as he did every day of the campaign) of the free advertising for his agenda offered by right-wing talk radio, all he talked about – and, of course, all he was asked about by the obedient script-reading wing-nuts – was the pension and health insurance changes and how state employees have to bear part of the burden and blah blah blah. But hijacking the collective bargaining system on those issues, while offensive enough, is not anywhere near the worst of it, and Walker knows it. That’s why he keeps talking about the money, because his destruction of the collective bargaining framework on other issues is indefensible.

But, in the rapidly-moving story about the speeding steamroller about to flatten public employees with a vote on the legislature scheduled for Thursday, it is possible the real issues are coming into sharper focus. The Journal Sentinel news page finally gets off the Walker talking points in the Tuesday paper, with a front-page, above-the-fold headline that says “Rights, not benefits, at issue”. Both labor leaders and workers are quoted saying they could live with the cost increases. But they want their bargaining rights on other issues retained. "This is about busting unions and there is no nicer way to put it," union lawyer Willie Haus tells the paper. "It's not about money. This is a hate crime."

After highlighting the real issue of Walker's draconian evisceration of collective bargaining on the front page, the Journal Sentinel again wimps-out on the editorial page today. "The state Legislature should take a thoughtful look at Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to neuter state public employee unions," says the issue-straddling clueless editorial board, as if the lawmakers just need to look both ways before crossing the union-busting street. "Walker's proposals overreach in some respects." Whoa -- slow down there, pal. You wouldn't want to be accused of actually saying anything against your endorsed Boy Governor with the Mubarak complex.

The editorial blathers on: "Other provisions that would require unions to take an annual vote to maintain their status or ban public employers from collecting union dues smack of union-busting." "Smack of?" No, they are union-busting. The legislature "should be wary of some of Walker's more radical ideas." What a pathetic abdication of the Journal Sentinel's obligation to take a stand in the midst of madness. Well, I think what I'm going to do, as a thoughtful former subscriber, is be wary about ever overreaching and spending another ~~dime~~ dollar on that increasingly lousy excuse for a newspaper.

When asked about the end of union-bargained contract language relating to job protection, layoffs, hours, sick leave, working conditions, discrimination and other important aspects of public employment, Walker told the swooning radio hosts and a press conference with (mostly) real journalists on Monday something to the effect that Wisconsin has “the strongest civil service system in the nation” and that gives them “all the protection they need”.

But that system only exists for state employees. Teachers and municipal employees can go pound sand if they have a conflict with their bosses. This is also true for the unclassified service in state employment, which includes TAs and RAs in the UW system; assistant district attorneys and, as I know all too well, assistant state public defenders. Those employees will end up with absolutely no job or any other kind of protection.

My friends in the various district attorney offices across the state have always had a contract and now all their job protections would be gone. The staff attorneys in the public defenders office have only had the right to bargain since 1998 and have only been working under a contract (the first of which I help bargain with them as a staff rep for WFT) since 1999. Before they were represented, some staff attorneys (who shall remain nameless)were treated like shit by a temporarily oppressive administration trying to make a point about how they can treat people like shit. After the contract, that kind of treatment was no longer possible.

And, even for state employees in the classified service, the enforcement of their limited rights through their various agencies and, ultimately, the toothless Personnel Commission, is a joke. As an organizer for the Wisconsin Professional Employees Council (WPEC), the AFT-affiliated group that organized a diverse group of professional state employees, I represented some of the members of the unit before they had a contract, under the statutory civil service rules, before the Personnel Commission. The difference between that experience and grievance-handling in the workplace and before an arbitrator under a contract was like night and day.

In addition, employees are on their own before the Personnel Commision to hire their own lawyers at great expense or represent themselves. Removing union stewards and staff reps from the grievance process in the workplace and at the commission would create a messy, unsatisfactory process that pleases no one.

The Personnel Commission was and, I assume, is now a thinly-veiled prop, with only the interests of management at heart. Anyone (Walker) who says the enforcement of the civil service rules there is just as good as enforcement of similar rights under a labor contract is playing you for a fool.

A final thought:

Sec. 111.80 of the Wisconsin Statutes is the “declaration of policy” of the state as it relates to its own employees. That section includes the following language:

“…there are 3 major interests involved: that of the public, that of the employee and that of the employer. These 3 interests are to a considerable extent interrelated. It is the policy of this state to protect and promote each of these interests with due regard to the situation and to the rights of the others.”

“Orderly and constructive employment relations for employees and the efficient administration of state government are promotive of all these interests. They are largely dependent upon the maintenance of fair, friendly and mutually satisfactory employee management relations in state employment, and the availability of suitable machinery for fair and peaceful adjustment of whatever controversies may arise.”

“…negotiations of terms and conditions of state employment should result from voluntary agreement between the state and its agents as employer, and its employees. For that purpose an employee may, if the employee desires, associate with others in organizing and in bargaining collectively through representatives of the employee's own choosing without intimidations or coercion from any source.”
“It is the policy of this state…to encourage the practices and procedures of collective bargaining in state employment…by establishing standards of fair conduct in state employment relations and by providing a convenient, expeditious and impartial tribunal in which these interests may have their respective rights determined.”

Wow. That is a quite laudable statement of goals and ways to promote peaceful, productive relations between the state as an employer and its employees. Who could possibly disagree?

From the “budget repair bill”, page 86:

111.80 of the statutes is repealed.

J.T. Harris: Public Safety Carve-Out Is Temporary

2011-02-13T22:00:00.001-06:00

So, what’s it going to be, police, firefighters and state troopers? Are you going to stand with your brothers and sisters in the union movement who fought and died for your right to collectively bargain in the first place? Are you going to fight for the rights of your fellow public employees to have the same collective bargaining rights you are supposedly going to retain, that have served you better than any other group through the years?

The answer, so far, is: no f*ing way. Law enforcement and fire fighter groups have always been the whiniest bunch of crybabies in the labor movement, and, now that they think they are going to get to keep their ball, they are going to take it and go home. You’ve just lost all your collective bargaining rights? Aw, poor babies. Can I get you a tissue? I got mine. Get yours back, if you can, but don’t look to us big strong (mostly) men for help. Losers.

According to an AP story, “Both the police and firefighters' statewide unions as well as the Wisconsin Troopers' Association issued statements praising Walker for recognizing their members' jobs are important and unique.” Yes, aren’t they special?

Dave Seager, president of the Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association, denied the exemption was a quid pro quo in any way, saying it simply shows Walker respects local public safety workers. Seager said it wasn't his job to decide whether the exemption was fair.

No, it’s not your job to decide what is fair, you jerk. But it is your job to fight for what is fair stand with others beyond your self-interested little clique, especially when the entire concept of the right to collective bargaining for public employees is hanging by a thread.

Here’s a wake-up call for all those selfish pricks in uniform: your goose is as cooked as anyone else’s in public employment. Just ask one of the governor’s brown-nosing talk-radio buddies. As we have discussed before, James T. Harris is an embarrassing caricature of a part-time radio wing-nut, who nevertheless has managed in recent years to squeeze himself onto alternate reality programs on Fox News and even mainstream TV shows as a predictable regurgitater of right-wing talking points. This Sunday afternoon, I caught about five minutes of his drivel while driving around and discovered something quite interesting – which is certainly a first for a Harris program. It seems – dear, saintly cops, firefighter and troopers – that your special dispensation, despite your efforts to buy permanent special treatment, is going to be quite short-lived.

According to Harris, he had a conversation with the governor. By the way, he calls “Scott” – all the talk-radio Republicans call him “Scott”. Could you imagine if anybody else on the radio referring to President Obama as “Barack” or Gov. Doyle as “Jim”? But I digress… Harris supposedly asked the governor,about the carve-out for the cops and firefighters because it “didn’t smell right”. The governor (Scott, Scooter, whatever) told Harris that his law-and-fire reward to the only unions stupid enough to endorse him is only temporary.

From the podcast of Harris’ show (yes, they waste server space for this clown), about 55% in:

But I can tell you what was conveyed to me from the governor…They’re on the bubble. It’s coming. But the reason is, my understanding is that Scott, er, Gov. Walker lets them out of this is because they’re – the union is threatening walkouts. And they’re going to need the National Guard, they’re going to need police and fire to be available. And so, he said that they have enough people to cover it, in case they even take that action. But that was part of why he did not include them in the initial cuts…This was the rationale behind it.

Now, there may be other things going on here other than what Harris thinks is going on. It is entirely possible that Walker told Harris that because he knew he was stupid enough to believe it and it would end what must have been a tedious conversation with him. It doesn’t make sense to wait just because the cops might stage a walkout – what, is the National Guard busy cleaning their guns or something?

It may also be that Harris is telling tales out of school and he isn’t supposed to be squawking the governor’s devious plans to his 7 radio listeners. If that’s the case, he’ll be dropped by the Walker-loving WTMJ management before you even finish reading this post.

Either way, are you willing to take that chance, coppers? Who is going to stand with you when the other shoe drops in the next few months (which is the timeframe Harris claimed)? When that time comes, you may well find yourself out on your own, without the support of the broader labor movement you should now be supporting. How’s that famous quote go? Part of it is “Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a trade unionist…Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak out for me.” You know the rest (and who Niemoller was talking about), don’t you?

Good luck when that happens. You have to decide which side you are on now. Tomorrow is, quite literally, too late.

The Iron Fist of Governor Mubarak

2011-02-13T12:26:00.001-06:00

Well, it’s the weekend and time to look in the old mailbox. Two of these letters are from actual comments on my last post. See if you can guess which ones.

Dear Mondo Media: I realize there are laws dictating the options available to public unions, e.g. disallowance of strike, but would not Mr. Walker's unilateral disemboweling of union protections lift those legal constraints? – jimspice

Dear jimspice: Well, you’d think that employees who made the compromise of working under a no-strike statute in exchange for standard and previously uncontroversial collective bargaining rights would then retain the rights of other free humans once their right to bargain is eviscerated in a “budget repair bill” that has nothing to do with the budget. You would be wrong. Besides threatening to sic the National Guard on misbehaving state employees and leaving untouched the prohibition on strikes, the “budget” bill, amends the statues to allow for the firing of those who take just three days off, slows down, makes a face…well, let’s let the governor’s bill-drafters at the WMC take it from there:

“during a state of emergency declared by the governor under s. 323.10, an appointing authority may discharge any employee who does any of the following: a. Fails to report to work as scheduled for any 3 working days during the state of emergency and the employee’s absences from work are not approved leaves of absence. b. Participates in a strike, work stoppage, sit−down, stay−in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the operations or services of state government, including specifically participation in purported mass resignations or sick calls.”

Get it, state employees planning to take a personal day this week, when rallies have been scheduled for the State Capitol? You can also look forward to a threatening reminder in your inbox on Monday morning, reminding you about the prohibition against personal use of e-mail in the workplace (or imposing a prohibition if one is not in place), along with the governor’s “emergency” declaration. Planning to wear red to work in solidarity with the protest? Better be ready to defend that to the incredibly weak Personnel Commission after you get disciplined. Most amusing is the prohibition against “mass resignations”. You can’t even quit. Did someone get laughed at for saying something about slavery?

You would think, dear reader, that a party in total control of the government that is making radical changes to the very structure of its relationship with its employees would allow those employees to at least vent and work to affect the political environment under which they work for all the people of Wisconsin (not just those in power). Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak would still be in charge if he had just allowed a modicum of pretend-democracy and a legitimate voice for the opposition. Instead, he tried to bottle it up and outlaw dissent, leading to his demise just this week. The only difference between Mubarak and Walker is that Mubarak has now learned his lesson and Walker has not. Yet.

Dear Mondo Media: I am on the editorial board for a major metropolitan newspaper with dwindling circulation. Although our paper endorsed Scott Walker for governor, the majority of the editorial board has disagreed with many of his radical law changes and the destruction of state government disguised as “jobs” and “budget bills”. This is not a surprise, since we disagreed with him on most issues during the campaign. However, since we endorsed the guy, we find ourselves having to support many of the initiatives of the Republican jihad since it took power. We offer grudging, weak criticism (“we wish he wouldn’t” disenfranchise thousands of voters through Photo ID; blowing up public employee bargaining is “not needed”) when we find, through an examination of our former principals, that we disagree. After all – he’s our Boy. However, with radical tea-party-talk-radio Republicans in control of both houses of the legislature walking in lock-step with the agenda emanating from the salons of Washington and the WMC, we are concerned that we might have to actually take a stronger stand against the regime, incurring the wrath of the more-powerful talk-radio side of our parent company. In addition, what’s all this about the National Guard? Do you think the tanks can find State Street on a map? – JS

Dear JS: You are badly in need of an intervention. Seek professional help immediately. In the meantime, look at your lesser peers in the state media (for instance, the Cap Times) and try to figure out what they get that you don’t. Remember – you are one of the last grown-ups still existing in a media environment ravaged by talk-radio, sensationalist children and empty-headed, transient TV personalities. You have an obligation to everyone in the state to get off your defensive stance and rediscover your common sense roots.

Begin by repenting for your endorsement of Walker for governor. Scott Walker is not doing anything as governor you could not have predicted from his years sniffing after Scooter Jensen in the legislature; his years of non-governing and political posturing as Milwaukee County Executive; and his five hours of talking on the phone to talk-radio hosts every day of the campaign. You knew he was an empty suit with an agenda drafted in the right-wing “think-tanks” in Washington and the WMC when you endorsed him. Alright, so maybe you didn’t know for sure that the legislature would turn from Dem to Rep and act as a goose-stepping rubber-stamp for his radical agenda. But you chose to ignore that you mostly agreed with Tom Barrett and, instead, gave your valued imprimatur to Scott Walker. Repent. Souls can be saved, or so I’ve heard.

After that, it should be easy to get on your high horse and scream about what the hell Walker and the Republicans are doing to destroy government in Wisconsin. Such an acceptance of your failings will mean the end of the type of ludicrous editorial you posted today, praising Walker for unilaterally requiring public employees to make increased contributions to their pension and health care costs they would have bargained for anyway and ignoring the elephant in the room of the death of collective bargaining in Wisconsin. “If the point is to balance the budget, these provisions are not needed.”. “Not needed”?? No. “Not needed” would be something like eliminating wetlands protection for a parcel in Green Bay for a company that will not build on it, no matter what your rich contributor says. Blowing up collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin is a radical, unprecedented power grab by an out-of-control ideologue who doesn’t care what you think.

Once you take this crucial step, JS, you will be well on your way to a happier existence and, unlike Republicans, you’ll sleep better at night, knowing that you are supporting good government in Wisconsin rather than destroying it. Staying on your current path can only lead to deeper sadness – both for you and the people of Wisconsin.

Dear Mondo Media: to jerk-off aka x*** grow up with your retarded comments, 70% of Wisconsinites support Walkers attempt to Make state union workers to pay a modest increase in there bloated benefits pkg. Walker is doing a great job. Mike go f**k yourself loser!

Always good to hear from what passes for a mainstream Republican these days. Thanks for sharing and letting us all know what kind of reasonable people you really are.

Scott Walker To Public Employees: Drop Dead

2011-02-12T00:29:00.001-06:00

Under the phony guise of a “budget repair bill”, radical right-wing Republican Gov. Scott Walker has proposed to blow up the business relationship that has existed for four decades with the state’s public employees. If passed as-is by the goose-stepping Republican legislature, it means the death of collective bargaining in Wisconsin government. For state, local government and public school employees, the bill would mean the end of any right they have to have a voice in the workplace, to address discipline and other grievances and to bargain anything but a laughable wage increase.

Although supposedly part of a short-term budget fix, the relatively small-potatoes $30 million estimated savings by the state government in this fiscal year is the molehill that is vaporized by this atomic bomb. The 5.8 percent employee contribution to pensions and the (minimum) 12 percent employee contribution towards the cost of health insurance – figures the Boy Governor has talked about throughout his campaign and beyond – could have and probably would have been successfully negotiated with the state employee unions without much difficulty in the normal course of good faith negotiations. Walker never even tried.

Just like the evisceration of personal injury law had nothing to do with job creation, the destruction of collective bargaining for public employees has nothing to do with the budget. It is rather a mad power grab by a ruling elite that will change any rule to make sure they win. It is also a continuation of the nationwide campaign by Republicans to destroy all what is left of the labor union movement on behalf of the wealthy corporations who pull their puppet strings and pay their bills.

The details of the bill as it relates to public sector collective bargaining are staggering in their implications and in their sheer fuckyouitude. Besides dictating the by-now uncontroversial changes to pension and health insurance contributions, the draconian bill eliminates bargaining on every traditional subject of collective bargaining (except wages) and puts extraordinary roadblocks in the path of any labor union trying to do anything at all for its members. Some of the disgusting details:

The bill allows for bargaining on wages – and nothing else. That means union contracts will no longer have language on layoffs, discipline, workplace conditions, hours, vacation, sick leave or any other of the standard conditions of employment that have helped keep labor peace throughout the years. All of those terms will be dictated by the employer. Union contracts that often run hundreds of pages will now fit on a cocktail napkin – or on a couple of squares of toilet paper in the governor’s mansion.
Bargaining on wages – the only allowable subject of bargaining – will officially be a joke. Pay raises will be limited to the rate of inflation. Any unit of government that wants to treat its employees to better than the rate of inflation has to run a referendum with the relative electorate. If the state ever fell into sane hands again, a state employee raise above the inflation rate would have to be approved in a statewide referendum. Public employee unions will be like a bound-and-gagged prisoner who is supposed to be glad they get to wiggle their fingers under the handcuffs.
Public employee unions have to run a re-certification election every year in which they have to win the votes of 50 percent of all eligible employees (not just those voting) to avoid decertification.
Union dues cannot be deducted from public employee paychecks. Members will have to send checks to the union by themselves.

Oh, and, by the way, all those cops and firefighters whose unions endorsed Walker? None of this applies to you. Thanks a million (or two). We’ll see how the law enforcement and firefighters, who have benefited more than anyone else in the public sector from the right to collectively bargain, react to their brothers and sisters in the union movement being steamrolled by the Republican jihad in Madison. It might be time for them to step up and think about someone other than themselves for a change. I’m not holding my breath.

For everyone else who didn’t help Walker get elected, the bill means the end of collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees. It will be interesting to see how the union movement responds and to see if they can peel off enough Republicans in the legislature (the Fitzgerald brothers represent a lot of prison guards in Waupun – perhaps they can arrange a little carve-out of their own) to at least make some changes.

But, unfortunately, union leaders have been so caricatured and marginalized over the years by the right-wing echo chamber, it may be hard for them to get any traction in the public arena. It will be up to those of us who are not union members to speak up and fight for what is right and to protest Walker’s latest and (so far) most outrageous power grab.

Journal Sentinel Cheers For Citizen Hell

2011-02-02T21:35:00.003-06:00

Boy, the Journal Sentinel’s increasingly ridiculous and apparently (sadly) permanent PolitiFact project really gave it to One Wisconsin Now for having the temerity to call out the radical Republican regime in Madison for adding “over $140 million in new special interest spending” to the state budget hole they keep whining about.

Using the “Pants-on-Fire” scarlet letter that they reserve only for supposedly false claims from the Democrats or the left (right-wing politicians telling real fibs usually only manage a “Barely True” or, at worse, “False”), the paper declares that throwing money in the form of tax giveaways to the already-wealthy interests who clog the GOP money machine with gobs of thousand-dollar bills is not “spending” because, well, it isn’t. Taking the word of highly-conflicted wing-nut enabler George Lightbourn (fresh from his star-turn with a Scott Walker puff-piece in Sunday’s Crossroads section), the J-S boldly determines that taking money everybody anticipated being in the treasury and scattering it among various GOP constituencies in the form of tax breaks is not “spending”, and anyone who says it is is a damn liar.

OK, government has a defined pot of money. There are two ways to “spend” that pot. One is by paying money out to attend to the needs of government programs; the other is to take tax revenue out of the base to encourage certain behavior (or, in Walker’s case, to reward the greedy Republican base). In the national political parlance, throwing money out of the treasury to the overprivileged is always referred to as “spending money on tax cuts”. There is nothing outrageous about One Wisconsin Now, Xoff, or anyone else calling gifts to the rich “spending”. The paper even admits as such, conceding that even Scott Walker described Obama’s stimulus bill as “spending” although one-third of the cost was tax cuts. “But two-thirds was spending,” scolds PolitiFact. Oh, well then the one-third consisting of tax cuts could not have possibly also be called “spending”. He who controls the definition controls the argument. Or, he who refuses to concede the legitimacy of a legitimate label – as even the right-partisan Lightbourn does – calls liar, liar, pants on fire.

Meanwhile, Walker tells bald-faced lies about “survey after survey” showing that one of top concerns of businesses considering a move to the state is the “litigation climate” (they don’t, and he knows it), and the PolitiFact poo-bahs can only bring themselves to brand the deliberate lie “False”, rather than “Pants-on-Fire”. Why? It can only be because Walker is a Republican.

And, also, because such is the “coverage” of Gov. Walker in the Journal Sentinel. Every bad bill greased through the rubber-stamp legislature is a “triumph” for the Boy Governor. The paper seems more interested in keeping track of Walker’s “victories” and whether he keeps all of his bad promises than examining the wisdom of, say, cutting loose the nursing home industry from the nuisance of effective lawsuits. When the editorial board that foolishly endorsed Walker disagrees with the wildly misplaced priorities the unfettered Republicans have shown in their first month of tax cuts for the rich, the decimation of personal injury law (gee, hope something bad never happens to them) and efforts to destroy Wisconsin election law, the strongest they can come up with is “gosh, we wish you wouldn’t”.

Editorializing on the Bergstrom Blow Job bill, the board politely suggests that Walker and the Boys “step back”. “Let's have a debate”; “let's not sidestep” the rules and blah de blah blah. On the anti-democratic effort to install the most rigid Photo ID law in the country, the Journal Sentinel takes the “if rape is inevitable” route. “If voter ID is going to happen, the Legislature should get it right,” wimps-out the editorial board. No. You can’t get the wrong right. Trying to get any form of Photo ID – which will necessarily end up (as intended) disenfranchising thousands of legitimate voters – “right” is like trying get the invasion of Iraq “right”. Wrong is wrong. It can’t be done.

But, that’s what happens when an editorial board reaches decisions by consensus and has a chartered member of the wing-nut establishment like Patrick McIlheran hanging around. The editorial board needs take more and stronger stances as the Republicans run amok. So what if Paddy Mac runs screaming from the room? Otherwise, they have no right to complain about the results of the radical Walker Republicans they helped bring to power.

One of the Republican’s Big Lies that they used to claw their way to power is that Wisconsin is a Tax Hell or Business Hell. It has never been any such thing. However, by the time the Republicans get done with it, our formerly progressive state will be a Citizen Hell. And there will be the Journal Sentinel, cheering each bad law as a “victory” for Walker, giving the Republicans unearned credit for good intentions, and trying to nudge the right-wing zealots towards “justice and moderation”, as it laughably does in reviewing Walker’s State of the State address. If they really think bullshit like that is going to work, they obviously have no idea the kind of radical ideologues they are dealing with.

Journal Sentinel Trolls For Naughty Lawyers

2011-01-30T22:15:00.002-06:00

On a hot summer day in 1966, I rode my bike down the slopping hill of Wisconsin Ave. in New Holstein, Wisconsin on what turned out to be an impulsively criminal mission. I was headed to a small appliance store, which I had recently discovered was the only place in town that carried 45s and albums. I walked into the store with empty pockets…and a headful of ideas that were driving me insane.

Damn Monkees. Ever since my loving sisters brought the revolution home with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I was one hook-and-guitar loving fool. I was also entranced with the Beatles’ charm and sense of humor. The pre-fab Monkees had all of that -- not by nature, but by design. Neil Diamond and Bice & Hart wrote their best music, some other guys played their instruments (at first) and Bob Rafelson wrote their lines, but they had me completely snowed. I reveled in every joke on the TV show and sang every song in my head (except slop like Daydream Believer – even a starry-eyed fan like me could see through that Davey Jones crap).

The store only carried like twenty records total, so the chances of them having what I was looking for were pretty slim. And yet – there it was: a pristine, first-edition printing of I’m a Believer/ (I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone – the greatest A/B-side record pairing since I Want to Hold Your Hand/I Saw Her Standing There. Overcome by the devil in my 10 year-old rock-and-roll soul, I glanced quickly at the older woman running the place behind the counter. I held the precious 45 in my hands and waited for her to turn away. I thought she did and I slipped it clumsily behind my back, under my tucked-in T-shirt. I browsed empty handed for another five minutes, real cool, as if I hadn’t found what I was looking for, and calmly walked out the door.

I looked up and saw the woman standing at the door, just looking at me. I was so busted. I got on my bike anyway. As I did, I felt the thin vinyl record fall out the back and land on the hot concrete. She gave a heavy sigh as she bent over and picked it off the sidewalk. I could imagine the look of panic and terror I had on my face as I saw my future and a certain date with a hairbrush in my immediate future. My dad’s law office was only a block away. I didn’t know her, but I bet she knew me. Resigned to the fate of the small-town shopkeeper, she shook her head and walked back into the store. I got on my bike and rode as fast and as far as I could, in case she changed her mind.

I thought about my uncharged criminal past as I imagined some poor slob at in the Journal Sentinel Watchdog team CCAPing me as part of their journalistic ambush on lawyers with records this Sunday. Of course, I was only one of 24,000 names (!) that the paper ran for state and federal scofflawness, but, getting CCAPed by a stranger is still pretty creepy. I mean, it’s not like I’m dating them or something.

As is the case with most of these sanctimonious Watchdog reports, the entire tone is like something is wrong. “Convicted attorneys are still practicing,” blares the front-page headline, as if something is wrong with that. What is the point of this latest campaign – that people with criminal records or traffic offenses shouldn’t be practicing law? Other than one ethics crank from Georgetown, who says that? To get their license back, even after a short suspension, lawyers actually have to prove some rehabilitation and pay some heavy dues. No other profession has those kind of requirements to get their tickets re-punched.

For his trouble at the Capitol, a great guy like Brian Burke ended up with a felony conviction and, once he got his license back, a starting-salary job at the Public Defenders office. Scott Jensen got a sweetheart dismissal of his felony charges by the political hack DA in Waukesha County and is now dancing in the endzone with the other Republicans currently polluting Madison, albeit in the shadows as a “consultant”. Lawyers are held to a higher ethical standard than any other profession. Consultants are held to the lowest standards of whoever will write them a check. [Aside to my consultant friends and family – not your kind of consultancy, obviously.]

But, the Journal Sentinel has apparently decided that the politics of envy works, as their fingernails cling to the cliff of their dwindling subscriber base. 24,000 lawyers checked and they could only come up with twelve lawyer mugshots? That’s the point at which an ethical editor might conclude there is not much there to justify the pre-planned hysterics.

Maybe, as an ethical editor, you might want to go beat up on another bunch of daycare providers or – here’s an idea – how about going after “choice” “school” scam artists? The paper runs all these small stories about “providers” getting bounced from the program from time to time, but we never hear about how bad their warehousing of poor students really was or the small group of vultures that fund and profit from the pretend-schools. There you go – sic your watchdog on their sorry asses. But that would fly in the face of the Journal Sentinel's right-wing stance on “choice”, a stance that the paper will take, quite literally, to its grave.

As for the lawyer disciplinary system, there is nothing wrong with it. The Office of Lawyer Regulation and the Supreme Court does a fairly good job sorting through often-complicated facts and issues. Like the jury system, it’s not perfect, but it works. You don’t need to call the individual members of the Supreme Court – as the paper ridiculously suggests by giving out the numbers of each justice – to get decent lawyer regulation. It already exists.

Bass Pro Shops to Walker: No Thanks

2011-01-29T12:23:00.002-06:00

The environment-raping Republican juggernaut in Madison met an unexpected bump in the road yesterday when the intended tenants of John Bergstrom’s wetlands pave-over in Green Bay announced that they would have nothing to do with it.

"We don't build on wetlands," said a spokesperson for Bass Pro Shops, an apparently successful hunt-and-fish-and-gun retailer that car-dealer Bergstrom wanted to bring to the wetter vicinity of Lambeau Field. Apparently, the logic goes that, once the Elmer Fudds and Jared Loughners of the world ammo-up at the store, they might want to go out and actually have nature to spoil their own damn selves, rather than have developers do it for them with with special-favor legislation and bulldozers.

Not that Bass’s passing on the project at that location is going to have an effect on Scott Walker and his lock-step legislature’s drive to get Bergstrom his payback for the thousands of dollars he poured into the Walker campaign. Something is going up over that soon-to-be-former home to natural species, damn it. Look out, Highway 41 and Lombardi Drive – here comes another Wal-Mart!

And, because Republicans never have to follow the dictates of the documents they pretend to revere, never mind the Wisconsin Constitution’s prohibition against private bills (Article IV, Sec. 18). The Republicans try to dodge the constitution by drafting it so that wetlands protection is removed for “wetlands that are 3 acres or smaller…within a tax incremental financing district in Brown County” rather than simply calling it “The Bergstrom Political Contributor Blow Job Bill”. I’m getting in a little bit over my legal head here (I did take a course in Legislation, but that was sooo long ago. I need help -- IT, phone home), but doesn’t this smell a lot like the stunt Tommy Thompson tried to pull that was found unconstitutional in City of Oak Creek v. DNR, 518 N.W.2d 276, 185 Wis.2d 424 (Ct. App.1994)? There, (short version) Oak Creek wanted to ignore DNR regulations and re-direct Crawford Creek. Thompson’s (typical) power-grab statute in a budget bill (also typical) said the statewide DNR regulations don’t apply to Oak Creek or Crawford Creek. Nope – unconstitutional, said the Court of Appeals.

Walker is probably betting that, even if the gift to Bergstrom was obviously a “private bill”, there would be no one with the standing to challenge it. The Oak Creek challenge was brought by the Wisconsin Public Intervenor, an independent watchdog agency that allowed the state of Wisconsin to sue itself in the interest of protecting its own natural resources. Well, Thompson had enough of that after the Oak Creek and other annoying prosecutions showing how wrong he was and eliminated the office in 1995. For whatever reason, it was never revived by Jim Doyle. Now, no one short of the Lorax can speak for the trees and the other living things threatened by the Republican contributor-funded steamroller. Although Jim Rowen is giving it a heck of a try.

It is amusing, though, how much the business community that Walker pretends to know and love so much refuses to cooperate. Bass Pro Shops has enough of an environmental demographic to step away from the land-rape Walker thinks they should be thankful for. Burgeoning wind turbine manufacturers visited by President Obama in Manitowoc would rather Walker not insist on industry-destroying set-backs designed only to preserve the continued dominance of fossil fuels. Wisconsin should currently be gearing up for $800 million of track-and-train construction; instead, Talgo is taking its train and going to Illinois. National nursing home chains, now freed from the burden of lawsuits that might adequately protect their elderly residents from neglect and abuse, can now start cutting staff to the bare bottom-line bone, creating more lost jobs to the negative Walker ledger.

Wisconsin is open for business, alright -- as long as your business of the right kind, with the right connections and the adequate buy-in. If not, good luck. You'll have a harder time under Walker than you ever did under Doyle.

-------

OK, now, what did I say about a regular publication schedule three weeks ago? Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. right? What is today, Saturday? I’ll get on it. He said.

Absolute Power Corrupts the Already Corrupted

2011-01-08T07:31:00.003-06:00

We all knew that the right-wing radicals who pass for Republicans these days would run amok when they took over every wing of the state capitol this week. There is no check, no balance, no anything to stop the Talk-Radio-Tea-Party (TRTP) Republicans from taking and filling orders from the Rich (read: WMC) who bought them and brought them to Madison, doing their bidding and reading their scripts. This is not a surprise to anyone paying attention during the recent election cycle, a group that excludes most of the electorate.

Jobs jobs jobs, they say, but the Republicans exist to advance the interest of those who are nothing if not anti-job. The corporations that run America in general and the Republican Party in particular could care less if you have a job. They lost their collective souls years ago, when the first manufacturer figured out that the cost of using cheap slave/child/desperate foreign labor and shipping goods from overseas was cheaper than providing the Americans who bought their goods a living wage. Since then, consultants and shareholders have insisted on a race to the bottom in the service of the bottom line. What is the best way for a company to get a bump in their share price? Announce 30,000 layoffs and a new factory in Mexico.

Scott Walker’s proposed decimation of personal injury law has nothing to do with the promotion of jobs in the state and everything to do with the protection of negligent businesses who don’t care if you get injured or not. The logic goes that, if it is easier for corporations to get away with murder, poisoning and maiming members of our populace, then more of them will come here to murder, poison and maim. They might even employ a few people before shipping those jobs out-of-state and the country, but, hey. ABC Chemical of Oklahoma might decide to come here to rape and pillage the people and the environment, and isn’t that a good thing? Stop complaining about that hacking cough -- you want jobs or not?

But Walker and the Republicans are making it perfectly clear that the first order of business for their regime is not jobs. They are primarily concerned with locking in their own power; making permanent their control of state government for years and decades to come. And they are not even going to pretend to play fair.

We have already discussed their attack on democracy by a radical revision of Wisconsin’s election law; changes that will have the desired effect of eliminating the votes of thousands of eligible voters in demographically Democratic districts. The second prong of the GOP’s mad push for permanent power is in the more traditional route of redistricting. As if the situation wasn’t bad enough, given the numbers involved, the Republicans have made the unprecedented move to shut out the Democrats from having any input at all into the decennial drawing of the lines. As Republicans lawyered-up for the process, they expressly prevented the Democrats from doing the same thing.

You don’t need lawyers to draw district lines. That will be done in the background by Republican demographers (probably in Washington) who will try to design the greatest number of safe districts for the party in power. The lawyers are only necessary to make the newly drawn lines stick. Lawyers for the party out of power are essential to at least try to convince the GOP lawyers that their lines are somehow illegal (such as the creation of racially-segregated districts designed to ghetto-ize Democratic voters). Keeping Democratic lawyers out of the process at the outset increases the chances of expensive litigation once the redistricting is imposed by fiat. The supposed fiscal conservatives apparently don’t mind throwing millions upon millions at their friendly law firms.

As a Republican, you know you have gone off the rails when even the Journal Sentinel’s resident wing-nut, Patrick McIlheran, can’t stomach your tactics. In a short post on his blog that avoids his usual lengthy prattle, Paddy Mac mildly advises his fellow travelers that the lawyer-barring “does not seem gracious or deliberative”, like he ever cared about that before.

For its part, the other members of the Journal Sentinel editorial board also weigh in with an editorial. Titled “Beware Overreaching”, the paper tells those who had already overreached that they “might have forgone the high-priced law firm this year and opted to have the Legislative Reference Bureau do the work”. The mere suggestion that redistricting would be submitted to a neutral body like the LRB must have produced peels of laughter in the dark recesses of the GOP boiler room.

The editorial also outrageously blames the Democrats for their own beating. “Democrats are crying foul. But they should look in the mirror,” scolds Journal Sentinel. Not that the Dems have ever tried a stunt like this before – they haven’t. But, apparently, they were supposed to have “reformed” the redistricting process when they were in power, something that has never been on anybody’s agenda, much less the newspaper’s. If anyone needs to look in the mirror, it is the Journal Sentinel editorial board, who endorsed Walker and now has to rationalize every radical step the unfettered Republicans take.

On its news pages, the paper also tries to provide the Republicans with an out for their legal gamesmanship, “reporting” that, while their work on redistricting was pre-approved, the GOP’s lawyer bills weren’t paid by the Dems because they were not detailed enough (I guess it’s hard to find a way to bill all those phone calls to the RNC political office to the state, but they’ll find a way). The headline of the story (which is all most people ever read) – “Democrats refused to pay Senate GOP’s attorneys for redistricting work in last session” – gives the deliberately misleading impression that the Democrats have done the same thing as the Republicans are doing this year. They didn’t, but that hardly matters to the paper’s right-wing editors.

This plague-on-both-their-houses meme is not new to the Journal Sentinel in their defense of Republican behavior. But they are going to have a hard time maintaining it as the radical Republican agenda unfolds.

Election Day 2010 – The End Of An Era

2011-01-04T23:22:00.003-06:00

The last freely democratic election day in Wisconsin began before 7 a.m. in the lobby of Christ Memorial Lutheran Church at 31st and Thurston on the near northwest side of Milwaukee.

The chief inspector for the day in Ward 157 was Pat (OK, I’m bad with names. I think it was Pat. Let’s call her Pat.). Pat is a retired but hardly elderly woman who spent the entire day treating her staff, all election observers and her beloved voters with respect, understanding and – yes – love. I got there shortly before 7 and stayed out of the way while Pat’s staff of seven or eight made their final preparations and a small group of voters gathered patiently at the entrance. At 7:00 a.m. sharp, Pat invited the voters to the tables where her workers were ready with voter lists; checking off names, handing out ballots, and proceeding with the smooth administration of the ultimate exercise of their sacred franchise.

After the first flush of voters came and went, Pat took the time to come over and talk to me, moving her face closer than you’d expect from a stranger, but that was Pat – she talked that way to everyone – even the Republicans who were there off and on during the day (always in pairs – what did they think was going to happen? Didn’t they trust each other?). A charming woman with a story to tell if you had the time – and, boy, did I ever have the time – Pat chatted about what she and her husband did before retirement, about how long she had been running these elections, about anything you wanted to talk about – except politics.

Once in a while, she would spot a familiar voter and give them a big hug and spend some time catching up on the kinds of things people catch up on during these too-few civic gatherings. A rejected ballot would immediately get her expert and kind attention. She would take the voter aside and explain why the machine spit it back (usually an overvote – voting for more than one candidate in a particular race), give them a fresh ballot, always making sure, as best she could, that the voter accomplished what they came there to do – record a vote for the candidate(s) of their choice.

In other words, Pat wasn’t there to be a Photo ID-checking traffic cop – she was there to help people vote in a biennial ritual of community decision-making. Who knows how many of the mostly working-class African American and elderly voters in Ward 157 who properly stated their name and address and received a ballot would have found themselves without a photo ID and been turned away under the state Republicans’ promised voter suppression scheme?

There was at least one undeniably eligible voter from November 2nd who would not have been able to receive a ballot under Photo ID, much less with the elimination of on-site registration also promised by the local puppets of the RNC. A woman came in mid-day and, as she probably had every two years for the past 20 years, gave the workers her name and address and asked for her ballot. One problem – her name had mysteriously disappeared off the rolls. After a half-hour of phone calls, she was told that her registration was moved to another ward, to an address of an income property that she had bought in the past year. She still lived in ward 157 – never moved her residence. But the city, in it’s wisdom, somehow moved or eliminated her registration by mistake.

So, what’s a voter to do? Should she have driven over to the ward of the rental property she owned? I can hear Belling’s screeching now – woman votes where she doesn’t live! She wasn’t going to do that. All she wanted was a damn ballot – her ballot, after all. But wait! You get knocked off the rolls by accident, there is (or was) an easy solution – she can re-register on-site! But she didn’t bring a photo ID or a utility bill or any of the other proof of residence allowed under current law. I suggested that someone vouch for her, which is my favorite last-resort aspect of the law -- if a registered voter (with ID!) knows you and knows you live at the address you give, they can vouch for you without you having to come up with any documentation. Alas, she had come there alone and nobody could vouch for her.

She was pissed – what was supposed to take 5 minutes was now stretching into an hour. She didn’t want to go home and get her damn ID and come back – why should she have to? She left and no one knew if she would return. But she did, about an hour later. Registered on site. Voted. Another disenfranchisement avoided by Pat, her crew and Wisconsin’s progressive election law.

There would be no recourse for her under the new Republican regime. Her vote would be lost and the historical purpose of Wisconsin election law – if you’re eligible, you get to vote – would be defeated.

There’s another story about an elderly black woman who I gave a ride to from an assisted living facility that day. That wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, but a call came in to one of the poll workers that she needed a ride and I needed some fresh air anyway, so I volunteered. Very kind, polite and fragile, it took an hour to get her from the home, into the voting booth in her walker, and back to the home again. She was old enough to remember a time when she was not allowed to vote – if she was down south, definitely so. No one else at the assisted living facility seemed to be all that fired up about it, but she seemed to feel it was her duty. Imagine next year, when she goes to the polling place and finds out that she can’t vote because she doesn’t have a photo ID. What sense does that make?

Not that the Republican’s care. Every missed vote in a place like Ward 157 is a victory for them. There was a white Republican voter who showed up in the middle of the day and made a point of showing his driver’s license to the workers, waving it around to all of them in the room. “See, it’s me,” he bragged, making his point that everyone should have to show it. The workers shrugged, gave him his ballot and off he went. He’ll always have his goddamn ID. So what? It doesn’t make him a better citizen than the elderly black woman or anybody else. But he sure thinks it does.

One thing you didn’t see in Ward 157 that day was any hint of fraud. The voters came in and took their duty seriously. The workers were diligent and checked the rolls and counted the ballots. Various quiet dramas were resolved, with no fanfare. The voters were presumed honest and eligible, with no reason to believe otherwise. The day ended as it began, with careful calculations and protection of the ballots. And a hug from Pat.

Things are going to look much different in Ward 157 and every other polling place in the state when the new restrictions on voting take effect. Voters will be presumed guilty until proven eligible. Photo ID and prior registration will be demanded. Thousands of eligible voters will be turned away or, as the Republicans want, won’t try to vote at all. The first election under the new law will be a dark day indeed.

Republicans to Democracy: Drop Dead

2011-01-02T19:43:00.003-06:00

Wisconsin is about to enter an extraordinary experiment in the radical right-wing destruction of state government. With the complete takeover of both houses of the legislature and the installation of GOP establishment puppet Scott Walker, as governor, powerful business interests and Republican political operatives from outside and inside the state are about to create an ugly new era of government by and for the Rich.

And, for the Rich, there will be no end to the return on their investment in the Boy Governor and the lock-step legislature they bought in 2010. The environment will be exploited and destroyed; state functions will be privatized and handed to well-connected contractors on a grand scale; the poor and working class will be targeted with huge cuts to medical care, child care, food stamps and rent assistance; regulations that protect the health, welfare and natural resources of Wisconsinites will be unenforced and outright eliminated; and public education will be defunded and undermined. And, of course, there will be the right’s favorite kind of income redistribution: tax cuts. Money that used to be spent on your Badger Care Plus will now fund the new motor on John Menard’s boat. Without so much as a “thank you”.

Yep – Wisconsin is Open for Business, alright, and screw the rest of y’all. But, for all their supposed faith in Trickle Down economics and alleged focus on jobs, jobs, jobs, the Republicans have something more important as the first order of business on Day 1. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald promises to skip all the silly jobs stuff (perhaps knowing that throwing money at the Rich isn’t going to create one job, anyway) and go straight to the destruction of democracy in Wisconsin. Job One: requiring Photo ID from voters and eliminating on-site registration.

Having spent three of the last four election days as a poll-watcher in Wisconsin polling places – in Crandon in ‘04, and the last two in the City of Milwaukee – I will mourn the death of the free, uncomplicated, friendly process I have had the privilege of observing as a member of the Democratic Party’s Voter Protection program. All of our training – open to any Republican or Tea Bagger who cared to attend – was designed to make sure anyone who showed up at the polls was able to vote if they were eligible. The presumption in every polling place was that citizens were coming in to exercise their sacred franchise in good faith. As it should be. But, in a bold and cynical move to preserve their own power now and, perhaps, forever, the Republicans are going to turn that presumption on its head. Starting as soon as next month in the spring primary elections, you will be presumed guilty of voter fraud until you prove otherwise.

Despite endless squawking off of GOP talking points by talk-radio Republicans who know better, this has nothing to do with voter fraud and everything to do with voter suppression. That we know of – and, believe me, you would have heard about it – no one has ever misrepresented themselves and voted under somebody else's name. No one has been caught abusing the on-site registration system by voting somewhere other than where they live. A few felons and other people who weren’t supposed to have voted, but, out of the millions of voters in Wisconsin every cycle, you can almost count them on two hands. More importantly – and contrary to the constant claims by GOP shills like Mark Belling Charlie Sykes that Democrats have “stolen” elections – no one has ever shown that any of the scofflaws were part of any organized campaign of voter fraud.

Photo ID is not even a solution looking for a problem; it is a hijacking of the electoral system by a party that knows no shame in their blatant propagation of lies (through talk radio and Fox News) to suppress voters who might not support them. The Journal Sentinel editorial board – who, due to their idiotic endorsement of Walker, will have the forthcoming death of Wisconsin’s progressive government on its bloody hands – is too kind in its mild wrist-slap of Fitzgerald’s rush to grab ballots out of the hands of the poor, the elderly and the unphotographed. The editorial presumes a modicum of good faith by those who have none. Photo ID doesn’t just have “the potential to dampen more legitimate votes”. It is designed to do just that.

But this is only the beginning. The Republicans who are about to take over the State Capitol are not your father’s GOP, or even your older brother’s. Tommy Thompson was a greedy thug who rewarded his friends and punished non-supporters back in the ‘90s, but he kept the basic structure and mission of the state government in place. These guys coming in tomorrow are a new generation of radical right-wing revolutionaries, who will destroy state government as we know it; and make sure – through old schemes like redistricting and new ones like Photo ID – that they hold on to power for a generation. You won’t be able to recognize your polling place in the spring. And you won’t recognize your state government after they are done with it.

Atop the Capitol, Miss Forward will strain to maintain her composure as the Republicans open the blueprints devised by GOP consultants in Washington and begin to dismantle state government in the service of their corporate masters. On January 3rd, at noon, shed a tear for her and for us. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

UPDATE: One thing I didn't think I missed during my hiatus were the comments I often got from unbalanced anonymous Republicans. Many were stupid, which you'd expect, but others were uncomfortably hostile (the worst of which did not survive my screening -- here's a sample). But, I must say, this one I got today takes the cake:

You forgot Mike...not only is it easy for the "teabagger" as you put it to vote but (here is where we find out how tolerant you are) it is easy for the "acorn nigger or spic" to steal that vote by doing it illegally. We have names of those that voted illegally either more than once or in the wrong district so the Barrett crowd of only one name does not work cause we have names...of those that voted, and thereby stole my vote, illegally.

Brilliant, no? No. But the comment offers the kind of clarity you don't often see about who they (or too many of them) are and why we fight.

Welcome to Mondo Media

2011-01-01T22:47:00.001-06:00

After an extremely depressing November election -- especially in Wisconsin, where our tradition of progressive government is about to be destroyed by a determined cadre of radical right-wing unchecked Republicans -- and a long, clean break from my erratic posting as Plaisted Writes, I have decided to jump back into the fray.

This page has a new name (but the same address, just so it's easier for my previous readers to find me). Mondo Media is the name of a column of media commentary I had back in the early '80s at the Daily Cardinal. I also used it axs one of several titles on a vastly-unread Salon blog I had before this one. I tried to find something more clever and less used. Generation of Swine was a contender, aptly describing, as it does, the Republicans about to descend on Madison; but, who wants to get in a conflict with the Hunter Thompson estate? Not with all those guns still, no doubt, stored and ready at Woody Creek. Revolution Blues was another possibility; but that Neil Young chestnut about the musings of a Manson-ish clan member ("I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars") can be, well, misunderstood. So, Mondo Media it is for now, but I'm open to suggestions.

The focus will remain somewhat the same, but I hope to mix it up a bit. Another goal I have is to have a regular publication schedule, for the benefit of both my readers' expectations and my own disciplinary needs (which are many). I'm thinking about a Tuesday/Friday/Sunday schedule. It would all depend on work and family priorities, but it might work most of the time. I can't do the short stuff (for that, I again recommend the brilliant IT), so I'll probably stay with longer essays, much to the consternation of my most trusted advisers.

In any event, tomorrow's post will take the radical Republcians to task for their direct attack on democracy in Wisconsin, which they have pledged to make their first order of business.

Thanks to all those who wanted to read more of my writing. I hope to provide a better and more consistent place for me and my readers to write, read, think, argue and comment. See you there (here).

The End of Plaisted Writes

2010-11-04T08:20:00.000-05:00

You can't fire me -- I quit.

I first put up a blog on February 15, 2003. It was on a Salon platform -- I had to pay $30 a year or something for the privilege. It was mostly about Bush and the Stupid War on Iraq, leading up to the 2004 election. Alternately called Mike Plaisted's Anti-War Blog, Stop Bush in '04, Bush Surrogate Watch and Mondo Media, it was a casual writing exercise that literally nobody read. Just like Plaisted Writes, it was long-form essays -- I could never manage to do the short-hit things, pointing to videos or other interesting pages (for that, no one beats the brilliant Illusory Tenant). After the excruciating 2004 election of Junior Bush (not a re-election -- don't get me started), I didn't even bother to sum up after the returns were in. The last post on Mondo Media was a eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson, of which I am still somewhat proud.

I started Plaisted Writes (pretty lamely) on New Years Day, 2006. Eventually, I hooked into some decent vibe on the governor's race that year. In 2007, I was fairly well-read by a small but influential readership on the disgusting, racist campaign of Michael Gableman against my friend and far-superior Justice, Louis Butler. I wrote the most posts in 2008, leading up to the election of President Barack Obama.

Following the pattern of becoming dormant after presidential elections, my posts since then have been sporadic, at best. There may be various personal, business and interest-level reasons for this, but I have really lost my writing mojo, apparently, and couldn't even get much up for the disastrous mid-terms that slammed into our nation and state yesterday.

Not that there weren't enough outrages from mainstream talk-radio and the increasingly-appalling Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to write about. For instance, a new low was reached for only paper in town last Sunday with their ridiculous endorsement of Scott Walker for governor. Really, Journal Sentinel? Did you look at the comparison of the two candidates on the issues you ran the next day and realize that -- except for your support of the school "choice" scam -- Walker disagrees with your editorial board positions on everything, from stem-cell research to Badger Care?

The relentless pummelling of the truth by the now-dominant right-wing media has simply worn the electorate down. Now that they have played a major role in bringing Republican rule to every inch of Wisconsin state government, we'll really see what a state-controlled, sock-puppet media looks like. The hours of free advertising that Walker, Johnson and the rest of the Republicans benefited from during the campaign on talk-radio will be followed by hours of support, excuse-making and undue-glorification once they take over the Capitol.

And, you know what? They can have it. There is something about power in Washington and Madison that is important enough to Republicans that they will do anything to get it and keep it. They are driven not by the naive, stupid people in funny hats that populate their astro-turf tea party events; but rather by wealthy polluters and money manipulators in the dark back rooms of country clubs. All of these bastards on the radio and on right-wing blogs are very well-paid for their work, one way or another. There is no way we can compete. With redistricting coming up, they will unmercifully use their power to institutionalize their permanent rule. Our goose -- and, more importantly, the goose of the needy, the sick, the environment, our individual rights (yes -- our Freedom) and good government -- is cooked.

With this blog, I hoped to serve as a small antidote to the garbage spewed on mainstream talk-radio and the Journal Sentinel. I'm not going to pretend to have an impact anymore. Some of this failure is my own lack of capacity these days to write consistently and often enough to build an ongoing argument, as I managed to do in fits-and-starts in the past. But much of it is also because the right-wing has a steamroller that they are not ashamed to use to mow down everything and everyone in their path. I don't mind the headaches sometimes, for a good cause and if there is a chance of moving the needle, but otherwise I'd rather not keep banging my head against the wall.

The dream of progressive government in Wisconsin is dead for now and it's not looking so good in Washington, either. Government in Wisconsin will now be a subsidiary of RepubliCorps, run by and for elite millionaires and other powerful interests. As a result, the community that I serve as a criminal defense lawyer will necessarily expand, as public-service jobs are lost, public education is destroyed, health care is denied and regulations are abandoned. I'll deal with the carnage one client at a time, as the underclass falls further from the ranks of a straight society that has turned their backs on them. As long as Walker keeps his hands off the excellent public defender system in Wisconsin, I'll have plenty to do.

I know this blog has been appreciated by many people I respect enourmously. As my production fell off in recent years, they would come up to me in the Courthouse and elsewhere and ask when the next post was coming. I really enjoyed at least the sense of getting my nose under the tent and having even a slight impact on the political discourse. I hope those who liked what I did here understand.

I am, at heart, a writer and I think a pretty good one at times. I'll build another blog at some point, I'm sure. But, for now, I'll save my thoughts in quick hits for my Facebook friends (you can be too, if you just ask). When I do build a new page, I'll announce it here.

Other than that, I'm out. Good luck, Wisconsin. We're going to need it.

Screw Juan Williams...

2010-10-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

...and Bob Beckel and Susan Estrich and Pat Cadell and Doug Schoen and Alan Colmes and all those other Fox-enabling Democrat/Liberal whores who appear on Fox News. This Fox stable of washed-up Dem politicos, who could not get hired by a current campaign if their life depended on it, grant legitimacy to the illegitimate alternate factual universe of Fox, where up is down, black is white, and an overly market-based solution to a severe health insurance problem is a socialist government takeover. They sit in studios with putrid people like Sean Hannity, Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, agree too much with the wingnut hosts, and pretend the difference between left and right is just a matter of degree. Screw them all.

The difference between the rest of these soulless skanks and Williams is that Williams was also employed by a real journalistic institution with ethics, standards and credibility it sought to protect. Why NPR let Williams do his sickening "I sometimes disagree with you, but you're a great guy" routine on Fox for so long is beyond me. Just the phase "Juan Williams of National Public Radio" (or, for that matter, milquetoast Republican Mara Liasson) granted undue legitimacy to the Fox News opinion panels as somehow "fair and balanced". Anyone that can sit in the same room with the likes of Brit Hume, Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer on a regular basis and not run out screaming is simply not the real journalist they pretend to be.

NPR had a specific code of ethics that they did not enforce strongly enough with Williams as he not only appeared on Fox' fake "news" programs, but also on Hannity and O'Reilly's screedfests as well. In fact, he is a regular fill-in for O'Reilly, facilitating the promotion of ridiculous right-wing story-lines just like the regular host. No legitimate news organization would allow their reporters or even their part-time commentators (Williams was not on NPR much, anyway) to get on TV with overheated nutbags and engage them in opinionated banter. Williams' stupid, bigoted statements about peaceful Muslims on planes was just the last straw. They should have tossed him out on his ear long ago. He never had that much interesting to say anyway.

Now, Williams is a cause celeb for the right-wing, allowing himself to be used as a poor victim by the nation's most sinister forces. He has dropped all pretense and signed a $2 million contract with Fox, leaving whatever dignity he had left as a reporter and commenter in the real world far behind. Thus does the whore move in to the mansion. Beckel, Cadell and company should be so lucky.

Screw Juan Williams. Good riddance.

PolitiFact Adds Puff-Pieces To The Mix

2010-10-11T23:45:00.000-05:00

I don't really want to spend the rest of the campaign season writing about the Journal Sentinel's disastrous PolitiFact project, but they really give me no choice. Since its inception and every day now for over a week, the PolitiFact editors and writers have made outrageous "rulings" against Democrats, let lying Republicans off the hook numerous times, and generally shown itself to be an incredibly biased series.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that this result is no accident. It is by editorial design. How else would you explain the two entirely unnecessary pieces that ran last week and this Monday, concluding that two self-serving and (more importantly) unchallenged claims by Republicans were True and Mostly True?

Who ever said that Scott Walker didn't perform the political stunt of giving $370,000 of his salary back to the county? No one, that's who. But that didn't stop a PolitiFact editor from assigning one of the reporters to examine the truth of a claim that no one had challenged. The result was predictable. Message #1: Scott Walker is Truthful. Message #2: We should care that the most politically opportunistic empty-suit in Wisconsin history, who has been running for governor since he was a radical-right lieutenant in Scooter Jensen's political machine, would play games with his own income for the sake of making a meaningless claim about fiscal austerity during just this campaign.

Similarly, who ever said that loopy tea-bagger State Senate candidate Leah Vukmir was wrong when she pulled a meaningless statistic out of the air that there are sometimes more government than manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin? Nobody, that's who. The claim, even if true, was widely ignored as irrelevant. What, Leah? Is there something wrong with firefighters, cops, teachers, National Guard?

But, again, a PolitiFact editor assigned someone to examine the truth of a claim that no one had challenged and no one cared about. Now Leah Vukmir has the Journal Sentinel's imprimatur as a Truthful candidate and -- most important for her -- not a statewide laughing stock in a tight race against the much more sane incumbent, Jim Sullivan.

And, no, it doesn't matter that Vukmir's claim about $5 billion in tax increases was "ruled" false on the same day -- that ran as an inconsequential sidebar on page 2, while the story of her wonderfulness in not being wrong about the unchallenged jobs data was one of the few PolitiFact columns that ran on the front page. The Journal Sentinel knows how to use layout tricks to minimize the impact of negative news about their obviously favored fruitcakes.

All in a day's work for the Journal Sentinel's right-wing managing editor George Stanley and the PolitiFact editors, whose apparent mission is to make the world safer for Republicans. This new trend of adding Republican puff-pieces like the one on Walker and Vukmir to the mix of harsh judgements on Democrats and muted criticisms of Republicans will make for an entertaining last couple of weeks of this election cycle, as PolitiFact Wisconsin attempts to make sure the prophesies of their right-wing columnists and radio wing-nuts are self-fulfilled.

PolitiFact Jumps the Shark

2010-10-10T02:51:00.001-05:00

The Journal Sentinel continues to make sure the St. Petersburg Times lives to regret its renting of its PolitiFact brand to the incredible shrinking Milwaukee newspaper. It's one thing to have the balls to hold yourself out as the arbiter of Truth in political advertising. It's quite another to fail miserably, serve as a shill for every shade of Republican and embarrass yourself on a daily basis, as the J-S has done.

On Saturday morning, the local paper's PolitiFact project moved officially from the ridiculous to the absurd. Apparently giving the local writers a breather to get ready for the homestretch of their daily Republican-friendly blather, the J-S ran a column by two national PolitiFact reporters about the not-so-hard-to-understand (unless you are a Journal Sentinel or PolitiFact writer) Republican effort to at least partially privatize Social Security.

This is the third time in a month that the Journal Sentinel has attempted to provide cover for the GOP on this third-rail issue. It has already used its harshest Pants On Fire judgement on the subject twice regarding perfectly legitimate claims by Wisconsin Democrats about their opponents' subscription to the Book of Ryan and his radical plan to throw Social Security funds into the winds of the private market. Just in case you forgot the J-S's previous "rulings" on the subject, the column by the national writers is embellished by not one but two Pants On Fire graphics and recaps of the paper's previous finger-wagging.

A funny thing happened, though, on the way to the J-S's use of the national report to support their protection of Republicans in general and their fair-haired boy Paul Ryan in particular. While using some of the same language and pathetic hair-splitting of the local writers ("Ryan said personal accounts should not be called 'privatized'". Well, alrighty, then.), the national writers reach quite a different conclusion. Those writers concluded a statement by President Obama on the subject -- accusing Republicans of "pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda" -- was Barely True, which is two tics up from POF on the Truth-o-Meter (no kidding -- that's what it's called). And that was only because Obama said the GOP wanted to make it a "key part" of their agenda, when they were clearly running for the hills from Ryan's radicalism, lest they be tainted by its obvious intent.

In fact, PolitiFact licensee columns in other states are wildly inconsistent on the degrees of Truth in the perfectly legitimate privatization accusation. In the Colorado Sentate race, a claim that the tea-bagging Republican candidate wanted to privatize Social Security was at least Half True. And none of the other states' writers rate the privatization claim as any worse than Barely True, even though most of the columns evaluate the same Ryan Roadmap, often using exactly the same language.

So, what is the problem with the Journal Sentinel on this and other issues threatening to Republicans (see also their wimpy Barely True rating of Ron Johnson's "$500 billion cut from Medicare" lie)? Perhaps Journal Communication's other property -- wing-nut radio station WTMJ -- is the tail wagging the newspaper dog. Perhaps, because they are intimidated by the right-wing loudmouths on their radio station and editorial board, they are bending over backwards trying to be "fair" to the party of Lie, Cheat and Buy.

Whatever. But the inconsistent results evaluating the same established facts illuminates what a ridiculous exercise it is to hold yourself out as the decider of political Truth. Political campaigns, their consultants and ad writers are experts in the use of the half-truth and the parsed argument. Certainly, there are some lies told by the right every day on talk-radio, Fox News and Ron Johnson commercials, that can and should be exposed for the outrageous untruths they are.

But the way to do that is in regular news articles, in 72 point font, above the fold. Try this: Ron Johnson Lies About Medicare "Cuts". See? It almost writes itself. Trying to do it as part of a trademarked brand purchased from another newspaper,with a cute logo and meter graphic just trivialize the political claims being examined and the journalistic project itself. Especially when the result just puts on display how much the Journal Sentinel has its collective head up its ass.

Here's a project for you, Journal Sentinel. How about a daily examination about how the Republicans are going to outright purchase this election? How about a think piece about the hours of free advertising and friendly exposure ("Hi, Scott! How good is your county budget?") that is provided every day by talk-radio who slavishly follow the daily talking points provided by the RNC? How about writing about how "independent" expenditures by unnamed rich Republicans -- foreign and domestic -- enabled by a radical-right Supreme Court majority, are going to swamp this state on behalf of Walker and Johnson, making the fundraising figures provided by the official campaigns laughably irrelevant? How about following the money, rather than chasing around a story about whether Scott Walker can actually stop a train?

Journal Sentinel PolitiFact® Fails Again

2010-10-05T15:50:00.000-05:00

I think it's past time for the Journal Sentinel to put its dreadful PolitiFact® project out of its misery.

Day after day for a month now, we have been subjected to ridiculous "rulings" (no kidding -- that's what they call them) on political claims made in the heat of the various campaigns. Throughout the project's sorry history, the J-S writers have repeatedly saved their harshest snarky "Pants-on-Fire" conclusions for completely legitimate claims by Democrats (such as obvious Republican plans to at least partially privatize Social Security) and let Republicans off the hook for every outrageous lie they tell everyday. The Journal Sentinel should give the PolitiFact® trademark back to whoever they bought it from and let someone else have a crack at it.

An excellent example of the creative ways in which the PolitiFact® writers get things wrong is today's review of a Ron Johnson ad that is full of lies about health care reform. Rather than go after Johnson for his tea-bagging recitation of false claims about the "government takeover of health care" and other such nonsense, Dave Umhoffer focuses on what is, at best, a side-issue in the ad -- whether Russ Feingold's support for health care reform was opposed by a majority of Wisconsin voters, as Johnson claims.

The resulting column is a mish-mash of what opinion polls did or didn't conclude about support for the bill at the time, all depending on how the question was worded, and by whom. Conservatives never cared about opinion polls while Junior Bush was in office, recklessly conducting the Stupid War on Iraq and destroying the economy. Now, they waive around manipulative polls by the right-wing Rasmussen and others, insisting that politicians do whatever the majority of those polled say, or stand accused of violating the "will of the people". Umhoffer properly rates Johnson's claims about the polls as "false", at least in part because many of those opposing the bill actually wanted more government involvement.

But the focus on the poll claims misses the point of the bigger lies in the ad. The main point of the ad is that Feingold is being attacked for supporting a "government takeover of health care" that doesn't exist. This is the phrase that the Republican word-smiths have designed to create opposition to health care reform -- but it's a lie. Incredibly, Umhoffer points out that fact as an aside, in the 21st paragraph:

Our PolitiFact colleagues have repeatedly probed the truth of the government takeover charge and found it ridiculously false -- a Pants on Fire. In truth, the health care law creates a market-based system that relies on private health insurance companies.

The column purports to examine Johnson's statement that "A majority of Wisconsinites opposed the government takeover of health care. But Russ Feingold voted for it anyway." Besides claiming that the majority opposed the "government takeover", it also says Feingold voted for "it" -- "it" being the grand "government takeover" bogeyman. By focusing on and headlining the polling data, the column ignores the bigger lie that health care reform was a "government takeover". A casual aside 21 paragraphs down in the story does nothing to change the fact that the takeover lie survives the noise of the rest of the ad, which is really Johnson's main goal -- to demonize health care reform and Feingold's support for it.

This isn't the only thing the PolitiFact® team has gotten wrong, in focus or substance. Just yesterday, they "ruled" that the Democratic challenger to Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, Scott Hassett made a "false" statement in an ad when he said that Van Hollen "did nothing" about allegations he was aware of that my boyhood hometown DA, wannabe sex kitten Ken Kratz, was trolling for babes in DV witness waiting rooms.

Sure enough, Van Hollen's investigators looked at some paperwork and called Kratz up to suggest he turn himself in. But, no charges were issued, no referral made by the AG to OLR. He let it go. In prosecutors parlance, this is known as doing nothing. It doesn't mean you do anything if you think about doing something and still do nothing. You did nothing. And, you can read that whole story and never know that Kratz, like Van Hollen, was also a Republican.

But, that's par for this sorry course. The Journal Sentinel in general and PolitiFact® in particular continues to cover for Republicans by going hard on Democrats (five Pants on Fire declarations against Dems; none against GOP politicians) and letting Republicans get away with slaps on the wrists for big lies (Walker claiming he eliminated waiting lists he had nothing to do with is just fine; Johnson calling Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" is also judged within bounds).

In the past month, the Journal Sentinel PolitiFact® team has proved absolutely incapable of selecting the right topics or getting anything right. A perhaps noble project in the beginning has become a confusing embarrassment.

Secrets of the Whack

2010-10-03T23:19:00.000-05:00

I keep waiting for Wisconsin’s very own Tea-Party-Talk-Radio (TPTR) product, Ron Johnson, to be included on the list of amateur right-wing nut-jobs in the national press. I search in vain for his inclusion on the list of whack over-heated rookies like Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul and the deliciously unhinged Carl “I’ll Take You Out” Paladino.

But, no. The bland-by-design Johnson is merely single-minded, stupid and naive – not entertaining in a no-masturbation sort of way. So Wisconsin has thus far been spared the indignity of having its Republican electorate mocked for having such a lightweight on the ballot for something serious like a seat in the U.S. Senate; against the venerable Russ Feingold, no less. I guess our time to be subjected to national ridicule will be after the election, if we are foolish enough to dump the finest senator in Wisconsin history for an empty-suited creature of the TPTR astro-turf flash-in-the-pan “movement”.

Should that formerly-unthinkable and now simply horrific event occur, it is fair to ask what the TPTR candidates like Johnson are going to do in Washington after they get out on the Senate floor and make their little speeches about imagined threats to Freedom and Liberty and the Peril of Tyranny that apparently resulted from the 2008 election. After their efforts to destroy health care reform, re-deregulate the financial and deep-water drilling industries and otherwise serve their corporate masters fail, what then?

The Big Secret of the TPTR candidates is that, for all of their blather about “career politicians” and the Dangers of Potomac Thinking, any of them that manage to get elected will be more beholden to Washington insiders than any group of new senators in the nation’s history. Knowing nothing but the blind, misdirected rage of the simpleton targets of the manipulative campaigns that recruited them and got them elected, they will be lost in the hard work of real legislation. Faced with the unfamiliar processes of appropriations (yes, tea-baggers, money must be spent), constituent relations (yes, tea-baggers, you are going to have to talk to people other than yourselves) and the other nuts-and-bolts of government, Ron Johnson and the others will have to turn to the supposed experts that want to pull their strings in the first place.

And they won’t have to go far to find that help. Standing right there at their office door when they show up for the transition will be staffers from Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and other right-wing “think” tanks – the same people who created the Tea Party conceit as a re-branding of Republicanism in the first place. Senator Ron Johnson won’t have to reach in his back pocket to find the help he needs because he is already in someone else’s back pocket. All they need to do in his first day in Washington is take him out and attach the strings.

That’s why we have always wanted to know how our candidates think – to try to get an idea how they will deal with the unexpected issues that always arise in the flow of the nation’s work. When you get a candidate like Johnson, with limited experience and even less of an interest in the weighty issues of state, you have someone who needs help. And we know where he’ll get it from – from the same people that produced the debacle of the Gingrich/Bush years. We’d be replacing the relatively-independent, seriously thoughtful Feingold with a bought-and-sold puppet of a vast network of Washington insiders who failed when they were last in power and yearn to fail again.

Johnson has an ad in heavy rotation right now, bragging about his general state of ignorance and the fact that he’s not a lawyer. There is a reason that lawmakers in the Senate are more likely than not to be a lawyer – sometimes it takes that special skill to craft legislation that has the effect you want it to have. There are people from the business community in the Senate as well – Herb Kohl is an excellent example. But Herb Kohl isn’t in the Senate to avenge some slight affecting his single business, as Johnson says he is (to avenge the imagined effects of health care reform). Kohl has always been thoughtful and well-rounded, with a consistent world view that guides his quiet but effective tenure. That a single-issue dweeb like Ron Johnson could become the same is against all the evidence.

If you want independent thought and careful consideration of all issues from all sides in Washington, Wisconsin will never do as good as we are already doing with Russ Feingold. The election of Ron Johnson would put one of Wisconsin’s senate seats in the hands of reprehensible Washington insiders with bad track records, bad ideas and bad intentions.

Never Mind

2010-09-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

Never mind that "Courier Endorses Moews" post, which has been deleted. The article in the Courier as part of their "Candidate Spotlight" series was written by "Supporters of Chris Moews for Sheriff". I didn't look at it close enough. Sorry.

That doesn't change the fact that David Clarke is a right-wing megalomaniacal nightmare who needs to be defeated in the Democratic primary. And I do hope that the Courier endorses Moews in the next couple of days, if they do such things.

David Clarke: Under The Bridge

2010-09-11T23:00:00.002-05:00

Some internal polling must be giving Sheriff David Clarke the willies. Apparently, his campaign is sensing that the mass of billboards and radio and TV ads bought with the generous donations of his rich Republican friends and his daily love-fests and free advertising on local right-wing radio shows might not be enough to pull him through the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

So they ripped the cowboy hat off his head, dressed him up in his sheriff's outfit and sent him out before the TV cameras to address an issue of burning concern in the community: Suicide attempts off the Hoan Bridge.

In a sudden spurt of civic concern, Clarke supposedly dashed off a letter this past Thursday to the secretary of the state DOT, putting on his engineer hat and suggesting that the state might want to put up suicide-prevention barriers when it repaired the crumbling icon of the Milwaukee skyline.

The letter itself is a six-page marvel of intricate research, complete with a chart showing the 16 "successful" jumps off the Hoan since 2001 (why he didn't just say "it's about two a year"...well, not nearly as impressive). There are even footnotes relating to its deep thoughts about the psychological aspects of suicide-by-jumping and the efforts of other cities to deal with the scourge of jumpers.

It's an amazing document, if only for the fact that it was could not possibly have been written by Clarke. Clarke is too busy rolling marbles in his hand and yelling at his underlings about the strawberries; spending hours on the phone with radio wingnuts; attending fundraisers with rich Republicans; screwing up the House of Correction and wreaking havoc on other aspects of Milwaukee County that are really none of his business to whomp out six pages with footnotes and charts. If he really did spend the hours it takes to produce a letter like this, the citizens of Milwaukee County have the every right to ask him what the hell he is doing with his time.

Nor was it written by anyone else in the sheriff's department. They don't have time for this kind of footnoted posturing nonsense -- those in the department not acting as Clarke toadies are too busy picking up after their arrogant boss.

The letter, on sheriff's letterhead, is a obviously a campaign document, probably drafted by a summer intern over at the WPRI. [UPDATE: The right-wing propaganda operation WPRI has a lot on its plate these days. Sadly, it is now setting the agenda for the Journal Sentinel opinion pages.]

But the transparently political essence of the letter didn't stop the Clarke defenders at the Journal Sentinel and local TV stations from treating it like an oh-so-serious and sincere concern by the sheriff. Not only did the J-S cheerfully front-page the PR stunt; there was Clarke standing under the bridge on all the TV news shows on the Friday before the election, using his incumbency like a hammer to drive some gullible free-media nails.

Isn't this what the tea-baggers are always complaining about -- entrenched incumbents using the pliant mainstream media to get fawning, unquestioning coverage? I guess it depends on who the incumbent is, eh, Charlie?

Interestingly, Clarke didn't seem too concerned about being hit by falling bodies as he posed for his holy pictures under the bridge. Given the state of the Mental Health Complex, as run by his soulmate Scott Walker, perhaps he should have been. The care and treatment of the mentally ill residents of Milwaukee County has deteriorated under gubernatorial-candidate-for-life Walker that the rate of suicide of all kinds is an issue that deserves the attention of our serious local officials. If only we could find one in the county executive or sheriff's office.

David Clarke's cynical use of occassional bridge-jumping just to get his mug on TV just before the primary is the worst kind of abuse of his office for political gain. And the media playing along as if he's serious is even worse.

Fluffing Ryan; Ignoring Truth

2010-09-10T22:40:00.000-05:00

There used to be this guy on a certain local music scene in the '70s. He played in local clubs, as a solo act and sometimes with groups. He was an early purveyor of electronic music -- had some nice keyboards, first-generation synthesizers and such. He thought he was funny sometimes; was oh-so-musically serious other times. He dabbled in pop, rock, classical.

And he sucked. He couldn't sing, wasn't very rhythmic -- you certainly couldn't dance to it. His serious pieces were a mess; his pop and rock stuff of no significance. Yet the local alternative rag promoted and praised his every appearance. Even the mainstream newspaper in town would include frequent friendly references to the "local legend" and his perseverance on the music scene, sometimes bemoaning his inability to break out to some unfortunate national audience.

But this is what local media outlets always do to hometown talent that deservedly stay that way. They aren't going to run a review of some local band and rant about how much they stink. The protection of local acts is understandable, but it gives them an unrealistic impression of their self-worth. When they finally strike out to Nashville or wherever and get laughed off the stage, they don't understand why.

The same process has happened in reverse for Congressman Paul Ryan, the right-wing Republican darling, who serves as the pretty face for the Dark Side of the once and future Republican agenda in Washington. Soon after parts of the national mainstream media settled on Ryan as the only Republican they could talk to without throwing up, the Journal Sentinel climbed on the bandwagon (more like a Red Rider, really) -- the local boy done good, a serious player in Washington, and blah de blah blah.

Never mind that, after Ryan presented his vaunted Roadmap, the GOP leadership ran screaming from the room, lest they be tainted with Ryan's radical ideas to at least partially privatize Social Security and shuffle future seniors from the safety of Medicare into the desperate hell that is the private health insurance market. Although they continued to claim the nice-looking (if you like that sort of thing) young man with greasy hair (I haven't seen hair that wet since my sisters' experiments with Dippity Doo) as a present and future star of the GOP, they wouldn't touch his radical Roadmap with a 10-foot pole. But the J-S had their local star in Washington and they weren't going to let a little thing like the facts get in the way of their fawning coverage.

So, when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran a perfectly legitimate ad in David Obey's district, pointing out that former reality TV boob Sean Duffey pledged fealty to the Roadmap and therefore correctly stating he "backed a plan to privatize Social Security", the Journal Sentinel got back on its hind legs to kick the DCCC back from whence they came. How dare they attack Duffy by attacking Ryan's Roadmap!! We'll show them: Liar Liar Pants on Fire!

Trotting out its newly-purchased PolitiFact® trademark, the paper distributed its first full-throated j'accuse at the DCCC for the temerity of calling Ryan's radical plan to take billions out of the Social Security lockbox and dump it into the stock market a form of privatization. Of course it is, and the article strangely admits as such:

"For some, personal investment accounts -- even if they are overseen and managed by the government -- are private, especially when compared with the current system. For others, the accounts are 'privatized' when they are managed by a Wall Street firm. That sounds like the definition Democrats are using."

OK, so fair argument, right? Wrong, claims the J-S. For one thing "an earlier Republican plan calling for 'private' accounts was tweaked after pollsters found the public was more comfortable with the term 'personal' accounts." So, Frank Luntz gives the Republicans some more friendly language to use for the same thing, and its suddenly not private? Oh, and Duffy swears up and down he's not for privatizing Social Security. At least, that's not what he wants to call it.

Since when is something not what it is just because a politician says is isn't? Isn't that what this supposed PolitiFact® bullshit is all about -- sorting out what a candidate says from what the facts really are? Not to the Journal Sentinel. Not if it means that the DCCC can beat up on a Republican by tying them to the political poison that is Ryan's Roadmap. If that's the way it's going to be, they are willing to suspend the facts and pretend the Roadmap is not the privatization nightmare that it is.

The paper continues to do everything it can to protect the Republicans. If this is the way it's going to be with the local version of PolitiFact®, it is going to be a long slog through the Journal Sentinel's political agenda all the way to November. Perhaps the St. Petersburg Times may want to recall its PolitiFact® trademark back from the J-S, lest the Pulitzer committee come looking to get their 2009 award back.

In the meantime, it appears the Journal Sentinel version of PolitiFact® needs a fact checker of its own. I'm here to help. We rate this PolitiFact® report on the BullshitMeter® as:

Doing Clarke's Dirty Work

2010-09-09T08:01:00.000-05:00

The Journal Sentinel just can't bring itself to address the issue of David Clarke's blatantly false declaration of himself as a Democrat on the primary ballot for Milwaukee County Sheriff. But they are all over Chris Moews' attendance at a Junior Bush rally in 2004. Pictures in Bush T-shirts and everything -- they even drag one of his kids into it. Dan "Bulldog" Bice (with apologies to the original Bulldog, who knows who he is) nails it. Moews went to a Bush rally, alright. Case closed.

Bice's piece was an easy triumph for the Clarke campaign, which no doubt threw the photo over the transom in the quiet empty halls of the Journal Sentinel building on State St. And the J-S was all too willing to take the bait and do some pro-Clarke spinning in advance of the laughable editorial board's expected endorsement of the arrogant, grandstanding Clarke any day now. Who cares if Clarke is a pretend Democrat when Moews can't possibly be a real Democrat after attending a Bush rally six years ago? I mean, everyone knows you forfeit your identity as a Democrat by walking in that door, right?

Well, no. Some true Democrats -- especially law enforcement -- have been supporting Republican presidential candidates since Nixon. Republicans have always put up a phony macho posture on issues of war and crime and a lot of folks unfortunately fall for that bullshit. They vote for Democrats down the the rest of the ballot, but sometimes falling in with the GOP presidential candidate because, no matter what they do ("John Kerry, reporting for duty!"), the Dems somehow always get out-butched by the patronizing posturing of empty Republicans.

But that vote for the Republican at the top of the ticket that one year (Moews gave Bice photos of him at a Clinton rally -- where were they in the piece?) doesn't make Moews less of a Democrat any more than the millions of Republicans who voted for Obama in 2008 are less so. The headline of the Bice piece says that Moews is only a real Democrat "sometimes". Wrong. He's a real Democrat, remained so when he walked in and voted for Bush in 2004, and was still a Democrat when he walked out.

I think he was wrong to vote for Bush. But I'm not going to single-issue him for that when there is much more at stake in this race than electoral purity. The unfortunate thing about this kind of Clarke-generated non-issue is that it peels away the support of those who will turn away Moews and fail to recognize the strong victory a Clarke defeat would bring in this difficult year. This kind of story does the double damage of not only letting Clarke off the hook for his fraudulent election tactics, but also diminishes the enthusiasm we should have for this race.

The important issue is that Moews is a real Democrat and will act like one in office. He will respect the collective bargaining process and follow the resulting contracts with his deputies, therefore increasing morale throughout the agency. He will cooperate with, rather than dictate to, other law enforcement agencies in the county. Chris Moews will not spend half his day phoning in to wing-nut talk radio shows or clopping around the courthouse in cowboy boots, looking for the next opportunity to make a bigger name so he can embarass himself by running for mayor again.

And, in the Bice piece, he follows the rest of the paper's lead by glossing over Clarke's radical-right Republican identity. "The incumbent also receives many donations from Republicans. He also has met with Bush and many of his top operatives at the White House. He even spoke at a tea party rally in Milwaukee last year." Left unsaid, because it conflicts with other Journal Communications properties, is that Clarke is a darling of right-wing talk radio hosts like Charlie Sykes.

There can be no question that David Clarke wants nothing to do with the Democratic party, other than to get a D next to his name on the ballot so he can get his sorry ass elected again. Chris Moews, on the other hand, has embraced Democratic ideals and the party itself. For the Journal Sentinel to pretend that there is even a question about Moews' Democratic identity makes it a knowing pawn in David Clarke's dirty campaign.

Journal Sentinel PolitiFact®: We Report – We Decide

2010-09-07T23:43:00.000-05:00

Against all logic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has decided to go out and declare itself the pure arbiter of truth on the campaign trail. Well, somebody’s gotta do it...uh, maybe. But is the flagship property of Journal Communications – the entity that, although they have cast off hundreds of decent reporters and employees and millions in stock value, continues to employ right-wing hacks like Patrick McIlheran and Charlie Sykes – really the right place to call a spade a spade in a heated election environment?

Hardly. The Journal Sentinel has lost so much credibility with its repulsive patronizing of the radical right (with no counter-balance for even moderate local liberal perspectives), you can only expect the dwindling paper to play both ends against the middle, resulting in a mish-mosh of “a plague on both their houses” slop that fails to call out the Republican assault on truth by comparing their claims to those made by the Democrats and finding both “barely true”. And that’s just what you get with PolitiFact®.

Take Scott Walker’s parroting of talk radio talking-points that 8.2 billion gallons of “raw sewage” had been dumped during heavy rains that the Deep Tunnel project – always opposed by right-wingers anyway – couldn’t handle. Predictably – since part of their mission is to protect Republicans – PolitiFact® declares the lie “barely true”. With 95% of the overflow coming from harmless drain and rain water and, at most, 5% coming from toilets, why does the Boy County Exec get to declare all of it “raw sewage”? Get this:

“Is it raw sewage? That term sounds like it’s all coming from toilets. Actually, an estimated 95 percent is rainwater and runoff. Still, it’s untreated and therefore can be considered ‘raw.’”

Oh, fer cryin’ out loud. How about “sewage”? Can it be considered “sewage”? Sewage is defined as “the waste matter that passes through sewers”. “Waste matter”. Is water from rain and runoff “waste matter”? Give me a break. The J-S is going to bend over so far to help Walker get elected they are going to end up kissing their own ass, along with his.

Likewise, rookie tea-bagger Ron Johnson gets another GOP-get-out-of-jail-free “barely true” for claiming Russ Feingold was the “only Great Lakes senator” to vote against an enourmous spending bill that just happened to ban Great Lakes drilling. Two senators from New York also voted against the bill. How is that “barely true”? They don’t know and they don’t care. They don’t have to. They are the Journal Sentinel.

The J-S also guilds the Republican lily in its standard campaign profiles. The important issue of Republican tea-bagger David Clarke falsifying his nomination papers by claiming to be a Democrat is given short shrift in an article Tuesday morning. “Moews has pointed to Clarke's 2009 appearance at a conservative tea party rally as evidence of insincerity about Clarke's political affiliation. Clarke said he was more interested in leadership than politics.” Well, that settles that for the Journal Sentinel. Never mind that Clarke’s Not-A-Democrat problem has more to do with who is funding his campaign and his constant sucking-up to right-wing radio. “Clarke heads into the primary with the advantages of a high-profile incumbency and the swashbuckling image he curries, typified by ceremonial appearances on horseback and in Western garb,” swoons the J-S. Screw poor morale and mismanagement of the agency – that’s enough for us!

The problem with self-serving journalistic stunts like PolitiFact® is that it pretends that both sides offend Truth to the same degree. By concentrating on campaign proclamations, they ignore the real poison spewed daily into the political atmosphere by talk radio and other GOP front-groups. How about a truth-v-lie investigation of just one hour of the garbage generated by their own Charlie Sykes every morning?

I know – there isn’t enough time in the day to track down that load of bullshit. Talk about your raw sewage.

Breaking News: David Clarke Is Not A Democrat

2010-09-03T07:57:00.000-05:00

Imagine I somehow got an appointment as District Attorney in some suburban county from Gov. Jim Doyle. Hey, I’m not and will never be a prosecutor and Doyle doesn’t know me from Adam (although, spotting my name tag at a Louis Butler fund-raiser, he said he “loved” my blog), but, I said, just imagine. Appointed by a Democratic governor, I look at all these white people around me, research some obvious voting patterns and do the only reasonable thing to keep my job in the next election cycle: I identify myself as a Republican and run in the Republican primary for the fall ballot. Across the state, my friends and family lose their lunch in various wastebaskets and cancel my invitations to Thanksgiving, music benefits and various nieces’ plays and graduations.

But, you know, I’m a win-at-all costs kind of guy. I’m not going to let a little thing like an honest declaration of party affiliation come between me and the Firm Administration of the Law. Not to mention those nice health-care benefits. They just don’t elect Democrats out here. So, I suck it up, wear the flag lapel pin, attend a few Rotary Club meetings, win the primary and trounce the hapless Dem by 30 points. Four more years...four more years...After my election, I go back to my flaming lefty ways, attending rallies, promoting Democrats of all stripes and generally using my office won only because of the R next to my name to celebrate my very D-ness.

If I were try such a stunt, the high-pitched squealing from the GOP talking-pointers on wing-nut radio would be heard from here to Superior. I would be exposed county- and state-wide as the fraud I am. The campaign billboards around the county featuring my shiny white face – if not outright defaced – would be countered by giant Koch-financed boards twice as big with a singular and devastating message: Michael Plaisted Is Not A Republican! I would lose the primary soundly to a Tea Party candidate calling for torture and other forms of “instant justice” in the county jail. Radio squawkers and nut-right bloggers would demand an investigation by the state Elections, er, Government Accountability Board and my own former DA’s office (resulting in no prosecution and much hand-wringing over deceptive branding). Shamed and humiliated, I slink home to continue to undermine the criminal justice system in particular and society at-large in general from the relative safety of my secret cell of radical activists and defense attorneys.

So, if such a fate would surely befall me if I engaged in such a transparent politically cynical scheme – and rightly so – why is tea party Republican David Clarke allowed to continue to falsify his nomination papers by saying he’s a Democrat?

Clarke was appointed Milwaukee County Sheriff in the first place by long-forgotten Republican governor-temp Scott McCallum in 2002. That same year, knowing that voters in Milwaukee County would not elect anyone with an R next to their name (Scooter Walker doesn’t count – although he isn’t, the County Exec race is non-partisan), Clarke ran for a full term as a pretend-Democrat. It was soon thereafter the wolf took off the sheep’s clothing and began his regime of tyranny and law-breaking within the department. Clarke never really wanted to be Sheriff – the appointment by McCallum was just a stepping-stone by his Republican handlers to his campaign for mayor of Milwaukee in 2004.

Clarke embarrassed himself in that race, finishing a distant 3rd with 17% of the vote in the primary, despite the 24/7 cheerleading that only his buddies on right-wing talk radio can provide. Since sulking back to the sheriff’s office, he has continued to run roughshod over labor contracts and intergovernmental relations, creating a crisis of morale among the fine deputies that work for him and consternation among local law enforcement agencies, who have seen Clarke insert himself into all manner of municipal issues, declaring that he “out-ranks” chiefs of police all over the county. In the 2006 election, he maintained the “I’m a Democrat” lie, continuing the anything-to-get-elected scheme.

Again in 2010, Clarke has falsified his nomination papers and declared himself a Democrat. But there is a good chance that, this year, the arrogant, lawless sheriff will meet his comeuppance.

For one thing, the strongest candidate to ever run against him, MPD homocide supervisor Chris Moews (pronounced “Mays”, by the way) is a true Democrat, well-funded, and has the support of many in the African-American community that serves as Clarke’s base. When the issue of Clarke’s false identification as a Democrat is raised, his campaign tries to change the subject by claiming (without proof, which is par for them anyway) Moews possibly supported John McCain for president. Even if true, so what? A cop supporting a Republican for president is hardly unheard of and doesn’t mean he loses his overall Democratic affiliation and tenancies.

Unlike Clarke, Moews does not wake up in the morning bed-spooning Charlie Sykes; doesn’t spend half his day on the phone with third-rate irritants like Jay Weber and Vicki McKenna; doesn’t show up at astro-turf tea party events; doesn’t get his campaign funding from the likes of George Mitchell and Rich Graber; and doesn’t spend his evening hanging with the likes of the Conservative Young Professionals of Milwaukee. To single-issue Moews because of some suspected support of national politicians is to miss the point of his current affiliation and the need to rid the county of David Clarke entirely.

For another thing, Clarke has a practical problem running in the Democratic primary this year. Republicans going to the polls on September 14th will be most interested in choosing between a dweeb and a nob for governor in the Republican primary. Once they do that, they cannot flip the ballot over and vote in the Democratic primary for sheriff or anything else. No less than Mark Belling threw Clarke under the bus last week, advising his listeners to go ahead and vote in the Republican primary and let the sheriff twist in the wind. He even admitted that may mean Clarke loses to Moews, who Belling admitted was a solid candidate. But such are the lengths the talk-radio campaigners will go to try to get Scott Walker elected governor.

David Clarke’s very existence on the ballot as a Democrat has been a fraudulent lie for eight years now. It’s time for the Democrats of Milwaukee County to call him out and vote him out.

Glenn Beck And The Politics Of Ridicule

2010-09-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

Now that the commentariat has had the chance to chew over Glenn Beck’s vanity rally in DC this past Saturday, I thought I would throw in my two cents’ worth. It is little known – in fact, only I and my bewildered son are aware – that I am the preeminent Beck scholar in Milwaukee and, probably, the nation.

As much as I can stand it, I have listened to part of his radio show in the morning and watched part of his TV show at night almost every day for a year now (a period of time coinciding with the deterioration of this blog – coincidence? I think not.). I have him all figured out, which I plan to display fully in my new book coming out this fall – Glenn Beck: How Stupid Does He Think You Are? To no one’s surprise, the answer is: Very. And his lazy sheep-like listeners and Fox News zombies have not disappointed him.

The fact that Beck got a piddling 100,000 people to show up in Washington after a year of promoting his 8/28 event means nothing except to reflect his (and Sarah Palin’s) star quality among the Angry White Tea Party set. In fact, all of the astro-turf tea party events are structured around the appearance of some media star or other – it’s part of the directions the professionals at FreedomWorks put out for a successful event. In Milwaukee, a thousand people might show up to gawk at a putrid scumbag like Michelle Malkin. Maybe Milwaukee/Madison radio wingnut Vicki McKenna could get 200 to an event all by herself. Without a featured speaker with the star power created by talk-radio and Fox news, tea party “rallies” would consist of ten people with flags sticking out of their hats standing around, howling at their imaginary socialist moon.

Beck’s usual shtick on TV is to entertain his fearful white-victim audience by trying to convince them that President Obama is a Manchurian candidate, serving as a front for supposedly evil strawmen like UW professor Joel Rogers (of all people), William Ayers and all manner of supposed revolutionary, living and dead. In the weeks leading up to 8/28, he spent an incredible amount of time telling poor, dumb America that Obama’s ascendency was the fruition of a Weather Underground handbook written in 1969.

He pretends that the “proof” for his hysterical smears are outlined on the chalkboards that litter his TV sound stage, where Obama’s face is always seen in the company of dark figures and “scary” organizations like the Apollo Alliance and the Tides Foundation. He leads with his conclusions and never explains how he gets there, leaving the chalkboards as the indictments that are never read. You would think the chalkboards – or at least the substance of them – would be posted on his website so you could check out the details for yourself, since he never bothers to fully explain any of it. You would be wrong. But that’s the way smears work – allusion without proof; the illusion of substance without fact.

But, make no mistake – Beck wants you to be afraid. Very afraid. The 8/28 event was presented by him as the “last exit” off the freeway to whatever Obama Hell he pretends awaits us. “What else do your neighbors need to know?” he pleads to his audience of barricaded shut-ins. Can you imagine even one of his listeners going to the strangers next door and imploring them to “get” what Beck is selling? Beck is also after the children, the most unfortunate of which are herded into his studio every Friday to get a “history” lesson about the Founding Fathers by Beck and David Barton, a phony “historian” and actual preacher who promotes the lie that the Founders were all evangelical Christians.

As 8/28 approached, Beck – perhaps realizing that just having a giant anti-Obama tea party wasn’t going to cut it – lurched into a religious mode, attacking those of every faith who believe in the worthy concept of “social justice”. Beck urged churchgoers to confront their pastors to see if they were promoting such evil thoughts and, if so, to dump that church. He even deigned to pass judgement on Obama’s faith, saying this Sunday during his heavy-petting session with Fox News whore Chris Wallace that Obama’s reasonable belief in “collective salvation” was a “perversion” of Christianity. That’s pretty funny coming from a Mormon who believes in magic underpants and the divinity of historic grifter Joseph Smith.

On the radio, Beck is another kind of animal altogether. Before reimagining himself as a political and religious leader, Beck presided over various Zoo-Crew-type morning radio shows around the country. His radio show still has that kind of vibe – with he and his sidekicks guffawing and feigning concern over the imaginary demons of the Obama era. Even more than the TV show – where Beck is shown standing to the side of a monitor showing Obama speaking, smirking and laughing – the radio show is thick with ridicule of anything and everything Obama.

That’s the thing about the right-wing message machine – for all their talk about Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and the threat it poses to our very existence, it is they that use the percepts of it better and more consistently than anyone else. Alinsky called ridicule the “most potent weapon”, and the right has used it to make you think such substantial people as Al Gore, Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are just big jokes.

But I digress. In the end, Beck’s rally on 8/28 was a dud. Hedging his bets at the last minute, he pulled his punches and wimped out to a vague religious message that was nothing new. Not content to wrap himself up in the flag, he wrapped himself in the Shroud of Turin. In the end, he was exposed; as phony as the shroud itself.

David Clarke Plays the Race Card

2010-08-28T18:45:00.000-05:00

The crowd at the fundraiser for the only real Democrat in the race for Milwaukee County sheriff, Chris Moews, overflowed down the stairs at Brocach this past Thursday. It was a diverse crowd, where law enforcement rubbed elbows with defense attorneys and others in the community united in a vibrant attempt to liberate the sheriffs office from the arrogant right-wing blowhard who currently holds the office. For various reasons related to party affiliations (real and pretend) and his own grandstanding politicization and mismanagement of the agency, David Clarke, at long last, is in trouble.

Moews -- a talented straight-arrow currently managing homicide detectives in the Milwaukee Police Department -- was introduced at the fundraiser by U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, who cheerfully threw her support to Moews in her typically funny, full-throated style. State Sen. and Lt. Gov. candidate Spencer Coggs also appeared, showing -- along with the quarter of the crowd at the fundraiser -- the strong support Moews is developing in the African-American community. This is especially important because, just as he hopes he can fool enough people by falsifying his party affiliation as "Democratic" on the primary ballot (more about that in the next post), Clarke hopes to rescue his flailing campaign by making sure everyone in the inner city knows he's African-American.

When is the last time any local politician thought they were pretty enough to feature their own mug on the billboards around town? But there he is, there in the spots all over the inner city usually reserved for the beer and liquor ads, smiling like no one in the Courthouse or the Sheriffs department have ever seen him lit up. Gone for the brief moment of the photo shoot is the constant sour scowl.

No mention of his nut-right tea party ravings. No admission of his regular appearances on wing-nut radio and his tacit (or express) endorsement of all their often racist arguments and campaigns. No mention of the fact that Clarke's expensive billboard advertising is underwritten by the usual Republican and right-wing moneybags who have poisoned the political dialog in Milwaukee and nationally for decades.

If African-American Democratic voters knew Clarke's record, affiliations and the substance of his political grandstanding better, they would never return him to office. But Clarke is going to make sure they know he's African-American, as he has every right to do. But, alongside every one of those billboards should be a disclaimer: *NOTE: David Clarke is NOT a Democrat. More about that in a future post.

As it is, it will be up to Gwen Moore, Spencer Coggs and the other true leaders of the African-American political community to get the message out about the horrors of Clarke and the positive opportunity to make a badly-needed change in the office of Milwaukee County Sheriff by voting for Chris Moews in the Democratic Primary on September 14th.

Crickets on the Right

2010-08-23T07:58:00.001-05:00

UPDATED BELOW

Dan Bice's story in the Journal Sentinel on August 8th about the outrageous behavior in office of Tea Party Talk Radio (TPTR) sheriff David Clarke generated an interesting response from Clarke's usual friendly mouthpieces on local wing-nut radio.

Crickets.

Apparently, the word went out on the GOP talking points regularly distributed to Belling, Sykes, et al, that there was no defense to Clarke's disturbing meeting with one of his employees who happened to be an officer in the deputies union and that they should just ignore the article. Even bottom-feeders of the free Republican advertising outlet known as "talk-radio", such as Jay Weber and Vicki McKenna, who usually have a direct hot-line to the sheriff any time he wants to promote himself or his phony campaign as a Democrat, kept away from discussing Clarke's profane, boorish and -- in terms of labor relations -- probably illegal behavior. The Silence Edict from whoever feeds these people their unoriginal lines was certainly in effect the first couple days after the story was published and, as far as I know (I can only listen to so much of this crap), they still haven't said anything about it.

And, as is the case with too many of their campaigns and strategies, it worked. Bice's story about the worst personal behavior ever alleged against an elected in Milwaukee County should have been a bombshell, but quickly drifted into the background noise of the gratefully forgotten. Even the outrageous assertion by Clarke stooge Edward Baily, who was present during the tirade, that "the sheriff makes the policies [prohibiting discourteousness]; he's not subject to them" couldn't get the increasingly wimpy Journal Sentinel editorial board off its ass to express the slightest dismay.

Chalk up another victory in the relentless talk-radio campaign to promote and protect Tea Party Republicans in an election year; even if, like Clarke, they falsify their nomination papers by claiming to be a Democrat. The use of Republican talk-radio to frame and ignore the issues on a 24/7 basis is the biggest obstacle Wisconsin faces to clean elections and good government.

UPDATE: It is interesting to hear the response of the Clarke campaign operative -- he knows who he is and so do I -- pitifully hiding behind the Anonymous label to try to change the issue in the comments below. For all the phony tough-guy posturing of his boss, you'd think he'd have more balls and be a little more forthcoming.
And the issue he tries to change to is whether Clarke's primary challenger, Chris Moews -- who is just as qualified as Clarke was before he hitched his political career to the right-wing star -- is really a Democrat because a board he was on endorsed McCain. Even if Moews did cast his vote for such an endorsement, it doesn't make him less of a Democrat - lots of Democrats voted for McCain; a lot more Republicans voted for Obama without losing their overall affiliation.

This phony "issue" is a cheap dodge to avoid dealing with Clarke's cynical political ploy to be listed as a Democrat on the ballot because that's the only kind of candidates that get elected in partisan county-wide races in Milwaukee. The fact is that Clarke's very filing of nomination papers as a fraud and a lie designed to get him elected to a position to which he couldn't possibly get elected if his nut-right tea party Republican affiliations were more well-known.

Also laughable is the campaign stooge's claim in the comments that "Clarke DID respond to the Bice story." Clarke's press release -- put out on Office of the Sheriff, not campaign, letterhead -- was a classic non-denial denial. Most of the tripe in the release is an attack on the deputy that was subjected to Clarke's two-hour temper tantrum as a "political operative". He vaguely states that the meeting was "misrepresented" and that the meeting was "very different", but tellingly does not deny the essentials. In fact, he pretty much confirms his contempt for anyone not named David Clarke by claiming the sole mantle of people-protection; saying he "will aggressively put that responsibility above all others", including, we can assume, the labor contract he is bound to, commmon decency and the law.

What is entirely clear in this entire episode is that David Clarke is an arrogant menace with a badge, which is a bad combination. Who the hell does David Clarke think he is?

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

2010-08-21T13:17:00.000-05:00

The Journal Sentinel has an interesting take on the news generated out of an editorial board meeting it had with Tea-Party-Talk-Radio (TPTR) senate candidate Ron Johnson. During the meeting, Johnson sat on Patrick McIlheran’s lap and mouthed some demonstrable nonsense about sun spots causing global warming. While McIlheran applauded and other members of the board stifled laughter, Johnson went on to babble more WMC talking points, before drifting off into irrelevant facts, such as – he gets his water from a well. I mean, he gets his water from a well, for cryin’ out loud! Of course he cares. Jeez. What about CO2, though, asks a board member not named McIlheran. “It gets sucked into trees and makes the trees grow,” says Johnson. Oh...sure. The next logical follow-up – “What the hell are you talking about?” – remains annoyingly unasked.

Just another day in the life of the gaffe-prone Johnson; the Wisconsin version of the hilarious TPTR Nevada senate “candidate” Sharron Angle. The only reason we don’t get more comedic material from Johnson is because, like other TPTR amateurs across the country, the supposed “non-politician” has been taken under the oppressive wing of career GOP political operatives, who control his every movement and feed him his rehearsed party lines. Like Angle – who the Nevada media has taken to chasing down the street just to get any comment from her at all – Johnson remains sheltered from regular contact with the real-world media by his omnipresent handlers, preferring to submit to the gentle stroking and heavy petting of the right-wing talk radio hosts who pushed him into the race in the first place. So it’s not a surprise that Johnson would put his foot in his mouth, spending five minutes in over his head, fumbling the climate change ball around the room.

McIlheran weighed in on Johnson’s obvious cluelessness on important issues this week, taking pride in the fact that his preferred TPTR senate candidate “lacks some customary tools”. It is “refreshing” to Paddy Mac to see a relative nincompoop carrying his TPTR banner into the fall election. Johnson has “the look of a guy who didn't plan his life around winning office”. Well, he also has the look of a deer in the headlights any time he is asked to discuss the details of a serious issue in serious times. He can’t just expect to show up on the Senate floor spouting meaningless TPTR bromides about “tyranny” or threats to “liberty” and “freedom” from some piece of legislation enacted by democratically-elected congressmen and presidents. Or can he?

Besides – against all logic – continuing to employ McIlheran, the J-S also serves the Republican cause by trying to make excuses for Johnson’s wacky comments on its front page this morning. The paper headlines the “news” that Johnson is “not alone” in being totally out to lunch on climate change. Misery and ignorance apparently love company in the GOP ranks, and that’s good enough for the Journal Sentinel.

Johnson’s “views are in line with those of many Republican conservatives,” writes reporter Lee Burgquist, as if that’s any validation of anything at all. Burgquist does go through the no-doubt tedious and inconvenient process of confirming with a real scientist that Johnson’s position has about as much validity at saying the earth is flat. “Still,” writes Burgquist (“still”??), “‘Johnson is reflecting conservative Republican skepticism about man-made global warming,’” quoting a UW-Madison political scientist, stating the obvious.

This creates a new standard for fact-based political discourse. Apparently, as long as there are enough Republicans with their heads up their ass about a given subject, it doesn’t matter if you have your head up your ass, too. Johnson gets a pass for his idiotic comments because all Republicans make the same idiotic comments.

This opens the door for entire campaigns to be fought out in the alternative universe formerly recognized only on Fox News. For instance, it is a fact that the tax cuts enacted during the still-disastrous regime of Junior Bush are a primary cause of the present and future budget deficits (chart). However, Republicans always say “the tax cuts paid for themselves” and other such nonsense. Ron Johnson, being the good script reader that he is on a good day before a friendly audience, would say the same thing – probably already has. But that doesn’t mean he’s right or that he knows what he’s talking about. Yet, because he’s “not alone” in being wrong, who cares if he’s wrong? Why does the Journal Sentinel even bother fact checking if an entire party is allowed to make up its own facts?

But the Journal Sentinel, as it does every election cycle, accepts Republican spin and repeatedly takes GOP candidates off the hook for gaffes and stupidity, big and small. If a Democrat came out and said something demonstrably false about climate change, the budget deficit or anything else, the J-S would need no help from the TPTR media to pounce and make a big issue out of a politician who does not know what he’s talking about having the temerity to ask for our vote. Because we expect so little from them, Republicans are held to a different standard. Which, if the Journal Sentinel keeps moving the goalposts, will eventually be no standard at all.

P.S.: The brilliant Illy-T has had Ron Johnson and Patrick McIlheran’s number for some time.

Stop the Insanity - Take 657

2010-07-24T23:51:00.000-05:00

I don't know why the Shirley Sherrod saga has struck such a chord in the chattering class. Like Diane Keaton in The Godfather, "This Must End," they say, without really adequately defining what "This" is.

The whole episode is just the latest in the right-wing war against Truth and Obama, taking surreptitious statements by obscure fourth-level non-entities out of context so that they can play their favorite game: Six Degrees of Obama. Van Jones said this, you see, five years ago, and ran into Bill Ayers in a parking lot at the University of Chicago and Valerie Jarrett had lunch with someone who invited Jones to join the White House and, of course, that means that President Obama is a communist. You can see this little game played every day on the Glenn Beck radio and TV programs, where the manipulative little prick draws arrows on chalkboards to "prove" the grand designs of UW professor Joel Rogers (the "Wizard", according to Beck) and Obama to take over the world.

Literally every blogger and MSM commenter, left and right and Broder, in the universe has had something to say about the Sherrod story, saying it very quickly within the 24-hour news cycle, which is now more like a 3-hour cycle. Not only that; they had to blab about it twice -- both before and after the purposefully-edited version was exposed to be the deliberate and predictable Breitbart lie that it was. At his point and before, anyone who takes anything Breitbart or Fox News spews out at face value -- including the apparent buffoons at the Ag Department -- is an idiot. And anyone who is surprised that the entirety of the recording not only exonerates Sherrod, but practically qualifies her for racial-understanding sainthood is just not paying attention to the entirely dishonest way the right-wing media machine operates.

May I offer a couple of angles on this sad story that I haven't read in other places, although I can't say I've looked that hard:

The entire thing was a set-up to embarrass the Obama administration -- no matter how they responded -- from the start. Breitbart and Fox News knew about the whole context and predicted that the administration would over react to their dishonest redaction. That's why, the day after Sherrod was fired, she was on the mouthpiece of the alternative-reality right-wing universe -- Fox News -- with the strangely outraged Megyn Kelly, complaining about her firing. What now? I thought. What does wing-nut Barbie-doll Kelly care about this supposedly reprehensible "racist" getting the ax she deserved? Something smelled fishy. Sure enough, Fox News soon had possession of the magically-redeeming part of the same tape. Now it was Obama-ites who had sinned and thrown this poor woman under the bus. Just another day (or, in this case, week) in the life of Fox News, which exists only to provide fake facts for right-wing talking points.
If the Ag Dept. had not immediately sacked the poor Sherrod, the right-wing media would have gone Van Jones on Obama's ass and squawked for weeks about how he was allowing this unreconstructed reverse-racist to remain employed, looking down her nose at poor white farmers while heaping undeserved services on the privileged blacks of the rural south. If the contents of the entire tape were ever revealed (I'm sure Breitbart thought he had the only copy) or Sherrod managed to get the story out of what she really said, the phony Obama-as-anti-white-racist smear would have already worked its twisted magic, adding another notch on the belt of the right-wing campaign to convince (or, really, allow) white America to think the worst about their first black president.
Compared to the vicious and deliberate sins of the right-wing media whores in this debacle, the clumsy overreaction of the Ag Department is small potatoes (although the consensus of the MSM commmentariat employs far too much of a plague-on-both-their-houses meme). However, was there not one person within the Ag Dept. bureaucracy who, when the frantic wheels are churning on Monday, couldn't have grabbed the organizational megaphone and say, wait a minute, that ain't Shirley? Who knew that Sherrod could not possibly have said such a stupid thing as presented by Beitbart, who may have even heard her tell the same story (these kind of stories are never told only once on the rubber-chicken circuit)? It wasn't necessarily Vilsack who failed her and us as much as it was whoever her immediate supervisor was, who knew her work and her disposition directly, who didn't move to protect her from the headlong political imperative.

This kind of nonsense will go on as long as those who drive the national conversation allow Fox News and the right-wing media establishment to be the tail wagging the dog. Treating Fox News, Andrew Breitbart, or any other of these lying bastards like legitimate sources for any kind of useful information is just the kind of journalistic malpractice that will get bozos like Ron Paul and Ron Johnson elected to high office. "This Must End" is right, but "it" never will as long as the MSM continues to patronize the right-wing media by offering it even faint legitimacy and refuses to call it out as the democracy-killer it is.

Deputy Dawg Goes to Boot Camp

2010-07-14T23:11:00.001-05:00

When I was in Texas last week – even in mellow, musical Austin – you could buy and there were all these people wearing cowboy hats. Very few of them were cowboys, but, for many, it’s part of the mystique and the lies of the “tough guys” of the Southwest – you and me against the world; the Marlboro Man, gun at his side; ain’t take no shit from no one; gristled, unshaven macho bravado covering the pain of impotence against a dry, ugly world. Peering from under the brim of his weather-beaten chapeau, the Southwest man can pretend he’s anyone from Matt Dillon to Toy Story’s Woody – and just as oblivious to pain and feeling. “Reach for the sky!” he shouts, as the Masters of the Economic Universe continue to piss on his head. The sun always sets on his knowing frown as he flops on his canvass cot, boots still on his dusty feet, to await the first light of the new, desperate day.

Milwaukee has its own walking fraud in a cowboy hat. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke can be seen some days strolling the Courthouse with the most ridiculous, ill-formed, straw cowboy hat you can imagine on his head and a constant scowl on his face. Although he is too wimpy to run for office as the tea-bagging Republican he is, Clarke wants you to know he is one tough hombre. And if he needs to pile on some extra bullshit to help his nut-right fellow traveler, Scott Walker, gain some tough-on-crime street cred, he’s more than willing to assist. As he cranks up another campaign as a phony Democrat (the most blatant lie ever foisted on a Milwaukee County ballot), Clake is all pose and little substance -- a cartoon sheriff so self-serious one can only laugh.

Clarke’s newest bright idea is to run a boot-camp operation, adding a little pretend-tough correction in what used to be called the House of Corrections (until Clarke decided not to call it that). It’s a ludicrous idea; a meaningless show that is totally inappropriate for the kinds of prisoners held at the facility. But if there is a way to make those in his charge even more miserable than the mystery meat that they serve as “food” on a regular basis, he’ll do it. Sadly, the Journal Sentinel weighed in in favor of this charade in an editorial on Wednesday. Joel NcNally, still shackled to the dead weight of the Shepherd Express, makes the primary points against the expensive stunt in his column this week better than I ever could, as usual.

One point that hasn’t been explored, however, is how, of the several ways to land in the House of Correction, none of them make the typical prisoner very appropriate – much less receptive – to a dose of Clarke’s fantasy version of Tough Love. Among the various reasons for a temporary residence in Franklin:

Held on Cash Bail: There are many in the House who are held on cash bail while a case in pending. Surely, Clarke can’t think that someone, presumed innocent, sitting waiting for their case to be resolved, should be thrown into boot camp to sing for their meager supper. Hah! Of course he could. He said the program will eventually extend to the whole facility. Waiting for a little technicality like a conviction is for pussies.
Drunk Drivers: Spurred by dramatic news coverage, their own guidelines and a brand new toughening of state law, Milwaukee County judges have been handing down huge chunks of jail time for second, third and fourth drunk drivers (fifth and up -- and, as of July 1st, fourth -- face state prison). You might think that such offenders might benefit from a little rigid correction. But the fact is that drunk driving is one of the few crimes regularly committed by middle-class people. They had jobs before their arrest and they’ll have jobs after they are convicted and during their incarceration. These days (since the demise of the roach-infested CCC), the work-release prisoners stay in the downtown jail. The work they have to do to stay productive in the real world would seem to get in the way of Clarke’s phoney tough-guy play-acting.
Revoked Probationers: Judges don’t want to put guys in the House if they can just behave during a year or two of probation. Alas, that proves too much for some, who can’t keep their often-overbearing probation agents happy. If they can’t follow the (relatively) light structure on the street, what makes anyone think they would respond to having Clarke in his face, yelling about what a scumbag he is? What do you think the punishment would be for laughing at such ridiculous histrionics?
Chronic Petty Offenders: Pop Quiz – how do you manage to get a month or more in jail for petty offenses like retail theft, prostitution and disorderly conduct? Answer – get caught doing it ten or fifteen times. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a judge say “well, I gave you [fill in the blank] days last time, now I guess you need [blank] more days until you get the message”, I’d have a whole bunch of nickels. There people might not do it any more often than some other people, but they are extraordinarily bad at it. So, what would Sheriff Clarke’s School of Hard Knocks do for the kind of poor, often homeless people who find themselves desperate for food, clothing, money and attention? You can see him or his deputy, screaming in the face of the poor, incompetent thief. “You don’t want that loaf of bread, do you? You want to work to buy some food, don’t you? You looove paying for your food, don’t you? Now drop and give me 20!” Yeah. That’ll work.
Non-payment of Forfeitures: This is less of a reason for lock-ups than it used to be, but too many are still locked up for weeks at a time for failure to pay non-criminal forfeitures (it’s only called a fine in criminal cases. Your welcome.) So, how tough are we going to be on the loiterer, the speeder, the first-time weed possessor, the driving-while-revoked?

And so on. As McNally points out, there are some things the jailers can do in Franklin to make the time being served less than dead, such as education, AODA treatment and other real forms of rehabilitation -- programs like the CJRC that Clarke and Walker have tried to stop. The good judges of Milwaukee County would have to sign on to Clarke’s scheme to make it work – why cooperate with the silly program unless the judge says you are able to shave some time off for putting up with it? Having helped save the CJRC, the judges have shown they have more sense than that. Then Clarke will have to find some other way to grandstand.

The Real Independence Day

2010-07-04T20:58:00.000-05:00

One of Ken’s teammates reported that the Bat Bridge experience left much to be desired last night. “Only, like, five of them came out,” he complained, of the million advertised. Relieved, I came out from under the bed where I was hiding and the speculation began why that might be. They are all pregnant, someone had heard (all of them? Then who got them pregnant?). The rain over the last couple of days cuts the mosquito population, which is why they come out in the first place, said another. In any event, at dusk tonight, all eyes will be looking west of the Bat Bridge, where Austin will celebrate Independence Day with a giant fireworks display on the same lake. And, somewhere near there, Willie Nelson is having his Picnic.

Meanwhile, the right-wing nut-o-sphere has already spent much of the day calling for a renewed Independence from the Tyranny of the elected president and Congress, who dare to threaten our Freedom and Liberty, and blah de blah blah. There is no success or tragedy that the wing-nuts won’t try to use for their own nefarious purposes – from the brave, dramatic, irreversible decision of the original (real) Patriots to take the fight to King George to the continuing BP oil disaster (whatever it is, it’s not a “spill”) in the Gulf. They live to fight reality and (through Fox News and mainstream talk-radio) to construct their own in the interests of returning the justly-shamed Republican party to power by any means necessary. And, if that means trivializing the events of July 4, 1776, so be it.

“Happy Independence Day, not Dependence Day. And here's to a speedy recovery for our nation to a return to the founders' roots,” says a badly-deluded friend. This is standard right-wing hooey these days, wherein the predictable results of the routing of the Republicans in the last two election cycles combined with the reasonable actions necessary to recover from the 8-year Bush Disaster is cause for Great Alarm. Such over-the-top comments by him and more prominent loopy-right figures on the radio and elsewhere are par for the course of people couldn’t care less about solving the nation's problems and only want only to return to power to wreak more Bushian havoc. But we are used to these kind of paternalistic sops to the more stupid part of the right-wing’s base. Some poll somewhere tells them this kind of stuff works; otherwise they would never get out on such a ridiculous limb.

It has gotten so bad that these people can’t even appear in polite company. Imagine one of these clowns showing up on a TV show not on their Fox News home base. “You know,” Bozo T. Wingnut tells Chris Matthews, “Obama is a socialist who wants the economy to fail so that he can impose martial law.” You could hear the jaws of Matthews and the rest of the panel drop for miles as the sense of the legitimate meets the lunacy of the absurd. That’s why they never show up in public to debate with anyone other than washed-up whores like Bob Bechtel, Pat Caddell and Doug Shoen – Democrats In Name Only who have sold their souls to Rupert Murdoch for a little cable news face-time with putrid slime like Sean Hannity.

Only in the wet dreams of would-be, two-bit right-wing message managers is this “Dependence Day”. It is a celebration of a real Independence Day; a blow struck against real Tyranny, which resulted in the kind of real Liberty and Freedom where a black man can rise to the presidency and lead a solid Democratic majority to try to solve the nation’s problems and meet the unforseen challenges of the age. The Republicans have absented themselves from the process, which is their choice. What they don’t have the right to do is hijack our history and holidays to make cheap political points against a president who is trying in good and bipartisan faith to fix the problems mostly left behind by the worst president in our nation’s history. The Bush legacy is going to take longer to clean up than even the BP oil disaster. And that’s really saying something.

Live from the Bat Cave

2010-07-03T11:43:00.000-05:00

With four days in here in Austin, Texas to watch my boy play in a national volleyball tournament (go NSMVC 16 White!). As I write, I am looking out from the balcony of the outdoor pool at the Radisson to the Bat Bridge, that extends over (no kidding) Lady Bird Lake (more like a river) . Apparently, at dusk every day, “1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats” come out from under the bridge and fly around for their own nourishment and our entertainment. This draws a crowd every night, it says here. No thanks. Except for Adam West and Christian Bale (sort of) I’m not much for bats. There was one flying around my house once, and my reaction is still a source of amusement for those who shared that magical moment. As Joni Mitchell once sang, “If you want me/I’ll be in the bar”.

I thought this little trip away from all the distractions and prerogatives of my own personal Bat Cave might be a good time to get this damn dormant blog going again. Actually, I had better incentive for that earlier this week when I got a press pass for President Obama’s town-hall in Racine this week. Alas, the imperatives of my busy practice (for experienced, affordable criminal defense representation, call 414-223-4133) intruded to keep me in court all that afternoon, so I missed that apparently very effective appearance (Kringle!). It would have been interesting to compare that visit with the health-care one I covered last year in Green Bay, one year in time and but light years away from now, where his presidency is consumed with unprecedented crisis (none of his own making) and outrageous automatic opposition by the Party of No.

In any event, the news cycle hurtling ever-forward as it will, does it matter if I review what I would have written if I would have written it? Is a prediction related three months after the fact still prophetic, even if the only other person I shared it with in real time was my own inner child? Actually, I have spent much of this year fascinated with the lies and histrionics of Fox News generally, and Glen Beck and Megyn Kelly specifically.

It’s an amazing development, really. In Fox News, the alternate-universe right wing has a pretend-reality “news” outlet that does nothing but try to spin small nuggets of random events and stupid comments developed by Rovian talking-point-memo drafters into major controversies and calls to outrage. Every day for lunch, I try to be in front of a TV to watch Megyn Kelly conduct what Fox News contends is part of the “fair-and-balanced” part of its programming.

Kelly – a lawyer, as she reminds us regularly, who nevertheless gleefully submits to the glammy hair-and-makeup regime that Fox imposes on all the women it puts before the camera – plays the part of the beautiful right-wing EveryWoman, who can’t believe this or that is happening or (as in rigid, heavily-armed border enforcement) not happening. I’ve been trying to identify the look she has on her face as she expresses her frequent sense of outrage. Let’s say, for instance, the reprehensible Dick “Dick” Morris emerges from his smarmy swamp underneath the Fox studios to discuss the obvious danger to Freedom and Liberty represented by, say, the Obama administration’s position on credit-swaps, derivatives, or some such thing. As if on cue (because it is), Kelly’s carefully-drawn eyebrows arch and her eyes express the fire of the hatred she shares for What Is Happening To Our Country. It’s as if someone just told her that the War of the Worlds aliens have hit town and she must head for the root cellar to await Certain Death. No, we must Stand and Fight, her face retorts. Or, maybe not. Next, another in our week-long discussion of Joe Biden’s ‘smart-ass’ remark at Kopp’s. Only on Fox – Fair and Balanced.

And then there is Glen Beck. But the wonders of Austin await.

Peace Through Music 2010

2010-05-26T21:34:00.001-05:00

As I have for the past several years, I have the honor again of acting as the MC for the 9th annual Peace Through Music benefit at Linneman's Riverwest Inn, 1001 E. Locust St., in Milwaukee this Sunday, May 30th. The show, featuring many of Milwaukee's finest musicians, begins at 7 p.m. and goes until 1 a.m. $10 at the door. This event usually includes a raffle and auction of Beatles memorabilia and other fine items.

All performers will be playing the music of John Lennon and/or the Beatles; a tribute to one of the most famous and tragic victims of senseless hand-gun violence in the United States.

Besides my hosting duties, Mike Plaisted and A Band will be playing at 8:25. The band rocks. Come early; stay late!

The show is a benefit for the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort (WAVE) and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

------

...oh, and that blog thing I used to do to a regular basis?....I'll get on it....

Don’t You Know That You Can Count Me Out (In)

2010-03-28T10:42:00.000-05:00

The primary purveyor of violent revolution on local mainstream radio is the putrid Vicki McKenna on WISN. McKenna – who phones in her shtick from Madison, where she has been a thorn in the side of Truth and Common Sense for years – fancies herself a leader of the Tea Baggers. She even manages to get herself on the podium at their dog-and-pony shows, opening for such brilliant orators as Not-Joe the Not-Plumber and Michelle Malkin.

As the loopy right lost its collective mind over the passage of moderate health insurance regulation last week, McKenna was right out there with them, baying at the moon and pretending the People would soon extract Vengeance for this Tyrannical attack on Liberty. Or some such nonsense. McKenna offers up her two hours of free radio time every weekday morning to provide remarkably free advertising for all things Tea and GOP (same thing). Any staged astro-turf “rally” is promoted for weeks on her show. Republican politicians have a free pass to visit McKenna by phone or in studio any time to blather about their latest campaigns or ludicrous legislation. It has gotten to the point that she and Scott Walker should just, well, get a room.

And McKenna had a special message last week for anyone stupid enough to take her seriously, post-health insurance reform. In her standard “come on, people” mode, McKenna said, yeah, we gotta win Congress back in 2010; gotta take back the White House in 2012, gotta repeal and (hah) repair the health insurance legislation. But if she and her band of (now and future) losers can’t win at the ballot box...I mean, obviously, democracy be damned. Early last week, McKenna was forced to try to talk one of her dimmer listeners out of taking a gun to Washington -- for now, anyway. But McKenna’s only problem with that was timing. If we don’t win Congress back; if we don’t take the presidency back; if those elected to office don’t do what we say, well, then....

Then – what, exactly? The right-wing talking-point of alluding and winking at violent revolution throughout its echo-chamber got me to thinking – exactly what would that look like? When a supposed military guy like Owen Robinson says that violent revolution in the United States is inevitable, he must have some idea how that might happen as a practical matter (and some idea which side he would be on). I’m no military strategist, but it seems to me the following options are available when the unspontaneous combustion of the astro-prairie fire takes place:

Luxury Tanks and Jet Stream Air Force – I imagine there are still training camps in northern Wisconsin used by the long, lost Posse Comitatus willing to provide space to train the silver-spooned would-be revolutionaries. (The racist Posse guys and the other loopy McVeigh-wannabees are all at the Tea Party, anyway). After a couple weeks of hi-balls and paying the poor slobs who buy their crap to do their push-ups for them, the whole group will load into luxury coaches and private jets to head off to take their rightful place at the seat of power. The first problem will come at the Illinois border, where unanticipated toll booths will slow down the Charge of the Light-Headed Brigade significantly.
Join Us! – In their fevered imagination, the Tea Baggers think all they have to do is grab their torches and pitchforks at the anointed time, head out the door and have the oppressed populace follow them out into the streets to storm the barricades of Washington. I’d like to see them try it. Out in the street, the Paul Revere in their heads pounding like a bad migraine, they will look back and see – nobody. Nobody is going to follow these arrogant clowns into the street, least of all to take away the new stability of their health care coverage. They will see only each other, at the designated place, seeing only the same red-necks who were at the meeting where they planned this fiasco in the first place. Welcome to the revolution. Now, who wants to go for beers
Military Coup – The wet-dream of every political military man like Owen Robinson is to have the military commit treasonous mutiny and overthrow the inconvenient civilian government. Otherwise, how do they expect to overcome the finest military in the world that, if not co-opted would surely defend the government from the violent revolution they imagine? Such an expectation is an insult to the men and women who pledge the support the nation and – most importantly – its Constitution. The fine men and women who serve are not going to risk their reputation, honor and liberty for a bunch of greedheads who only want a change in health care policy to benefit their corporate benefactors.
Terrorism – In the end, since the other types of violent revolution above are doomed to fail, this is really what the Tea Baggers are hoping for – a violent campaign of terror that will cause the sensible among us to crumble under their favorite tactic: FEAR. You could see it already last week in the campaign to break windows of non-pliant Congressmen, in the hateful voicemails, the white powder mailed in envelopes. Pretty funny coming from those who have been the first to wave the red flag of foreign terrorist Fear every time they wanted to curtail a civil liberty or elect a doofus like Junior Bush. But, in the end, it’s the only violent revolution they will have. Terrorism, after all, is the last refuge of the powerless, and the unelectable Tea Baggers are and will remain as powerless as they come.

So, bring it on, would-be violent revolutionaries. As President Obama said about Republicans repealing his moderate health insurance reform, “let them try”. Let’s get this phony specter of violent revolution out of the way by them trying and failing miserably. We shouldn’t even bother locking them up. Just pat them on the head and send them home. Come on back when you get a clue, losers.

You Say You Want a Revolution? Really?

2010-03-24T06:13:00.000-05:00

Still trying to wake from my own posting slump, I had a little fun yesterday in the comment section of Owen Robinson’s Boots & Sabers blog. Robinson, with the help of fellow-traveler Charlie Sykes and others, has somehow developed a side-career as Wisconsin’s premier nut-right blogger. This, even though (when he’s not trying to purify the West Bend school board) his blog consists primarily of pasting-in commentary and news from others with nothing but a pithy “heh” or “wow” comment of his own. His position as the go-to guy for what passes for right-wing “thought” shows how weak the competition is for that dubious honor.

This week, Robinson decided to stretch a bit and expound on the possibility – no, probability – of violent revolution in the United States, now that the democratic process has had the temerity to produce a Democratic president and Congress that has actually managed to accomplish something with health insurance reform. Taking power in our glorious republic by force is apparently something the right-wingers discuss seriously while cleaning their guns over a few beers in Robinson’s garage. Robinson comes down squarely on the “just a matter of time” side, speculating that the Wing-Nut Revolution would come “around 2035 or 2040". This would put it somewhere around Malia Obama’s first term or the Rapture, whichever comes first.

Why then? “That’s when the crushing weight of what we are doing will no longer be able to be sustained and it will only take a small spark to ignite a conflagration,” writes Robinson. Oh. And why is the violent overthrow of American constitutional government necessary again? “We are headed down a path with exploding entitlements funded by taxation and the prospects of a less robust - or declining - economy and a demographic shift. Fewer and fewer people paying more and more to support out of control entitlements that are tweaked at the whims of politicians. It’s a powder keg.”

Well, obviously. I mean, a little entitlement here, a little taxation there...these are the kinds of things that have always sparked violent revolution, like in...ummm...well, nowhere, but who says we can’t be original? It will be the first revolution of the over-taxed landed gentry. To arms! You have nothing to lose but your shrubbery!

I joke, but this is serious stuff for the tyranny-and-liberty crowd. They are so worked up into a lather about the uppity Negro in the White House, they can barely contain themselves. Egged on by the right-wing media into thinking that the Constitution is being subverted by the entirely legal actions of their legally elected representatives, the Tea Baggers stand on the astro-turf of their phony, well-paid grassroots and bark at the moon. Soaking up the unearned attention and legitimacy bestowed on them by pliant real and fake (Fox) news outlets, they hurl racial slurs and spit towards black lawmakers who, like the president, would dare to exercise their well-earned political franchise. Wrapping themselves up in the flag and perverted, self-serving definitions of words like “freedom” and “liberty”, they are the ultimate anti-Americans – unable to win elections and unwilling to accept the results of the democratic process when they lose.

I’d worry about this more if the right-wing wind-bags were more of a threat than they are. As it is, they have painted themselves into a political and social corner, talking only to each other in a language only they understand, constructing arguments based on facts only they believe. Still, I wish they would try to start a violent revolution, just for the sheer entertainment value of their guaranteed failure. “How far do you think a couple hundred of your fellow nutballs will get on the way to Washington?” I asked in Robinson’s comment section. “I’m guessing you get turned around about, oh, Nashville. The Feds aren’t even going to bother to arrest your treasonous asses—just pat you on the head and tell you to come back when you get a clue.”

The whole notion of a violent revolution simply because the American political system is just too much for you is arrogance at its worst. They know better, you see, and if you don’t agree, they will make their point and achieve their selective notion of “liberty” at the point of a gun. Or, as I wrote in comment 30:

“Your problem isn’t that there is no democracy; it’s that your crackpot ideas can’t win in a democracy. So you grab your racist signs and your little toy guns and you try to intimidate us into submission by threatening violence. Typical bully tactics by people who know they are wrong.

And I’ll do what I’ve always done with bullies: Laugh at them. Because you guys are funny. Truly amusing. Especially when you lose. I haven’t watched anything but Fox “News” for a week. You can’t make up comedy like this.”

PLAISTED PLAYS - THIS SATURDAY AT THE COFFEEHOUSE

2010-03-15T20:29:00.000-05:00

Join me and a few old friends for the 28th (!) reunion of the Milwaukee Musician's Co-op at the Coffeehouse. I'll play for 20 minutes sometime after 8. Come early -- stay late. Great people, great music. See you there!

Long Time, No Post

2010-03-09T23:06:00.001-06:00

The statistics that still come to me once a week from some cyber-place I signed up for years ago tell an ugly tale. The number of people still checking this site every day for something -- anything -- new from me has whittled down to a hardy average of 23 soul survivors. In this site's hay-day -- somewhere between Gov. Doyle's trouncing of Mark Green and the racist Gableman campaign against the far-superior Louis Butler -- I had as many as 250 people checking in every day. My posts were discussed on Charlie Sykes' wing-nut radio program. I was a featured blogger on Wisopinion. Gov. Doyle saw at my nametag at a fundraiser once, looked up and said "Hey, I like your blog!"

How times have changed. My output has gone kaput for months now, slowing to a trickle before I found myself looking up at a situation -- now -- where, after managing something every couple of weeks or so, I haven't posted anything for a month-and-a-half. I find those friends and family who used to ask me once in a while when my next post was coming just pass me in the halls of the Courthouse and other places in my life with a silent shrug, quietly mourning what they assume is the end of my attempts to comment on local and national politics and media in an amusing, informative way.

Well, I have to admit, the political demise of the dangerously hapless Junior Bush entourage and the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House did do a lot to take the edge off of the outrage that spurred much of the writing here. In the months after the election and the first several months of the Obama era, the members of the right-wing echo chamber were completely flummoxed by the new president's thumping of McCain and (hah) Palin and his popularity. The highly-scripted wing-nuts on radio and Fox Noise reverted to their tiresome anti-Clinton mode, trying to impose the death of a thousand cuts on a popular president they could not defeat in a fair election. Absurd allegations recycled from the campaign, like the supposed Messiah complex, socialism...please.

All of this would have fallen on deaf ears outside of talk-radio's targeted demographic (Stupid People, 34 -51) if not for the Great Recession created by unchecked capitalist greed and the indifference and deregulation of the reckless regime fronted by Junior Bush. With the powerful banks soaking up and spitting out TARP funds and refusing to extend credit, it could have been predicted that the stimulus would fail to accomplish anything that anyone would recognize over the 24/7 screeching of the lunatic right. "It Would Have Been Worse" hardly works as a political bragging-point, even if true. The Republicans in both house of Congress threw up an amazingly united front, voting unanimously against anything -- anything -- that would have given Obama and the Democrats credit for governing.

Then came the phony Tea Baggers. Driven by a collection of well-paid right-wing functionaries, promoted non-stop by Fox Noise and the vast network of wingnut mainstream radio stations and always featuring manufactured celebrities like Not-Joe the Not-Plumber and the putrid Michelle Malkin, the gathering of several hundred fearful and infirm Stupid People with racist and otherwise insane signs and sentiments has been held out as proof of the "outrage" of average Americans. Seems to me there have been people gathering in the streets for years -- most recently, in opposition to Bush's Stupid War in Iraq -- in much greater numbers without being given credit for speaking for anyone but themselves. Let people like that get out there, and the right-wing portrays them as a bunch of unemployed, loser troublemakers. On the other hand, they make wild claims about a vast consensus of America based on whatever restless crackers respond to weeks of talk-radio promotion and manage to get off their Lazy Boys for a chance to listen to clowns like Vicki McKenna live in person.

Which brings us to Glen Beck.

Beck is the most nakedly insincere demagogue in the history of demagoguery. His contempt for his audience of stupid rednecks is barely concealed under his dripping smirk, as he twists history and logic in knots on a distracting chalkboard of lies and distortion. His guests, when he has them, are universally admiring fellow-travellers, there only to prop him up as an intellectual healer of the nation's wounds and sins. Can't you see what he can see? What's the matter with you?

But Beck and his handlers made a big mistake by inviting a liberal Democrat, Eric Massa, onto the show after he resigned from Congress on Tuesday, a classic hour of political comedy that has to be seen to be believed. Fox Noise booked him because they wanted him on to tell tales about "corruption" and such in the Democratic leadership. But Massa, who has been making all kinds or conflicting irresponsible statements since he announced he was going to resign last week, did not follow the Beck script. Beck response was to sit in stunned silence for most of the hour, ultimately apologizing to his audience of slack-jawed simpletons who are used to having their pablum served in more predictable fashion. "I think I've wasted your time," said the greatest time-waster on the planet. "I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time." Cue the howls of laughter on that one.

...But I digress. I'll try to post more, OK?

The Death of Democracy -- and the Wisconsin Court

2010-01-23T13:35:00.002-06:00

This week brought historically bad legal news, both nationally and locally.

First, the political system of the United States was, for all practical purposes, destroyed by the right-wing of the U.S. Supreme Court. The usual narrow majority of the Roberts Court summarily steamrolled the original intent of the founders (for instance: corporations are not “persons”. Duh.) and a hundred years of stare decisis in deciding that national and international corporations can buy-and-sell elections without restriction.

The radical Citizens United decision is a landmark accomplishment in the decades-long Federalist Society campaign to take over the federal judiciary in the service of their corporate and (by default) Republican political masters. By the time the relatively young, healthy ideologues of the Bush Four – initiated by Bush Senior with Scalia and Thomas; completed by Bush Junior (thanks, Ralph “It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins” Nader, not to mention the then-existing Bush v. Gore Court) with Roberts and Alito, with the help of the gullible Anthony Kennedy (“I get to write the opinion? OK.”) – are done with the nation’s laws, the Constitution will be a dead-letter; its words twisted into unrecognizable knots by those who care not about the intent of the founders or sound reasoning of the 100+ justices that came before them, but of the selfish interests of the greedy bastards who put them in place. Unapologetically, the blind zealots of the Roberts Court continue to provide their handlers with the kind of power they always wanted but couldn’t get elected to do – to shape the nation in their own image, with liberty and justice for them, and for you only if you can afford the buy-in.

In the current economic environment, I suspect most corporations won’t be spending much just because they like a candidate’s good looks. Corporate political spending (before yesterday, using legal fictions in the former law) has always been about each company’s parochial interests – i.e.: they are for anything that gets them more money and against anything that requires them to spend it. As it happens, the companies with the most to lose or gain by the agenda of the Democrats elected to fix a raft of long-neglected issues – the health insurance industry, the polluters and the banks – have the most disposable income (read: obscene profits) to wield the sledgehammer just provided by the radical Supremes to defeat progress of any sort at any time.

Cynically exploiting the soft underbelly of an electorate too distracted by their own Republican-induced misery and too stupid to know who the enemy is, we can expect all manner of smarmy ads in the next election cycle, promoting Republicans (who, after all, not only can, but expect to be bought) and against Democrats (who can’t). In fact, many of those in the politics business expect that messages from the actual candidates for office are the last thing you are going to hear or see, as media buys, especially in small markets with one or two TV stations, become saturated with corporate messages promoting the Republicans who, as only they can, have agreed to carry their water once they get to Washington...

...or, as we now know, Madison. It was a strange but revealing confluence of events that, on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that elections can be bought – unfettered by annoying laws – by corporations, our own elected Wisconsin Supreme Court announced that, once bought, they need not recuse. The right-wing majority of the state Supremes, decided this week that, if quaint, archaic rules about silly things like conflicts of interest (real and the appearance thereof) are getting in the way of their increasingly conflicted existence, they would just change the rules.

The declaration that such obvious conflicts of interests such as Annette Ziegler ruling on anything having to do with the WMC -- who recruited and promoted her (and Michael Gableman) to the tune of millions of dollars -- could be ignored flies in the face of everything we have come to know and love about the historical impartiality of the ultimate court in the state. As a close friend who knows quite a bit about the current Court told me a while ago, anyone on the right (as in correct) side of things who doesn't like the result below and takes a petition for review up to this Supreme Court hoping to get a better result is crazy.

Never before in this state have we had a Court with a majority that is more conflicted, more politically driven and less willing to give every side a fair hearing. I guess, by confirming their purchased bias and promising to go ahead and rule on cases involving their generous benefactors, they get points for honesty. You know what you are going to get with this Supreme Court before you get there. And that is very, very sad.

With the de facto leader of the Court’s right wing, David Prosser, up for reelection in 2011, we’ll get the first application of Citizens United to a judicial race in Wisconsin. No longer will the dark side of Wisconsin’s business community have to hide behind legal straw-men like the WMC PAC. The poison lead paint industry can now come right out and proudly trumpet Justice Prosser’s accomplishments. Other polluters like the asbestos industry can get in the act and try to make their lives a little less accountable. Here come the doctors, whining about medical malpractice claims when they screw up. My guess is that lots of corporations will get into the act, buying the influence that the Court now gleefully encourages, much less allows.

And, as an added bonus, the U.S. Supremes just showed the state Court how easy it is to brush aside all those conflicting and annoying precedents by all those former justices who couldn’t possibly be as smart as they are. Let’s get those lead paint and the medical malpractice cases back up here. Obviously, just like namby-pamby concerns about conflicts of interest, stare decisis is for wimps.

2009 Predictions -- More Right Than Wrong

2009-12-31T21:06:00.000-06:00

On New Years Day this (last) year, I made a few predictions for 2009. It's a silly excercise reserved for people with some kind of media presence who think anyone cares what they think. It's also a reality check to see how well you are tuned in to an unpredictable world.

What'd I say? Oh...

Barack Obama will start his term with a tremendous amount of good will and support for his economic stimulus package – whatever it is – because too many people will want and need it to succeed. True, as far as it went, and the plan has had more positive effect than it has been given credit for. There is no way to know how much the injection of hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy stopped the deadly skid Obama inherited. Except that it did.

If Republicans get in the way on the basis of their usual petty nonsense, they will just dig a deeper hole for themselves. No "if" here. The Party of No has been remarkably unified in their opposition to any hint of grown-up, Democratic accomplishment. They are feeling pretty good about themselves right now, snuggled in the soft bosom of their alternate-universe talk-radio/Fox News circle-jerk, where Tea Bagging opportunists cavort with bad actors like Glenn Beck and bad legislators like Michele Bachmann. We won't really know how deep a hole they are digging themselves until the 2010 elections they have already declared won, when they pick up only a few seats in the House and one or two in the Senate. If they're lucky.

Barack Obama will start his term with a tremendous amount of good will and support around the world as he tries put the nation in a position to recover from the tremendous damage done by the arrogant, radical and reckless Bush administration...Not all of the damage is reparable, but Obama will have an advantage because of his background, because he has Clinton leading the effort and, most importantly, because he is Not Bush. Exactly right, his success in turning around America's image in the world exemplified by the premature awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama's nuanced, intellgent juggling of America's responsibilities in the world has led to a lowering of the anti-American temperature around the globe. And he is certainly Not Bush. And Not Cheney. And Not McCain. And Not Lieberman. And that's all good.

Hillary Clinton won’t be home much as she jets around the globe on a mission to unruffle feathers and get America back to its deserved respected-leader status. Clinton has been Obama's secret weapon around the globe, as she has employed her remarkable talents in the service of American interests.

America and the world will breathe a collective sigh of relief when our brave troops start coming home from Iraq. Iraq? What Iraq? Bush's Stupid War continues to wind down as the focus of our anti-al-Qaeda campaign moves where it belongs; to Afghanistan, Pakistan and -- now, apparently -- Yemen.

Violence there will increase, as the kind of thugs who have always run that country make their move. In the end, Iraq will end up right where it started – with the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the country presiding over a brutal regime. The only difference between that guy and Hussein will be that Iraq will be a theocracy, aligned with Iran, and even more of a potential threat to Israel. Nice work, Bush. Recent celebrations of the success of Iraqi "democracy" in the continued propaganda campaign to validate Bush's Stupid War after-the-fact are drastically premature. When the dust settles in five or ten years, Iraq will be much more of a threat to Israel and our interests than it ever was under Hussein.

Obama will have a chance to appoint at least two Supreme Court justices and, unlike Bush, will nominate people with impeccable legal pedigrees and no discernable ideological tilt, except for the inclination to be fair, which is a lefty trait, anyway. Republicans and their wing-nut lap dogs will pretend they are all lefty socialists anyway, and the general public will ignore them and move on. Well, only one vacancy in the first year, but everything else was exactly right. The public was not impressed with the Republican's childish attack on Justice Sotomayor.

Obama will end the year with an approval rating in the high 60s or higher. Yeah, well, a bit off. Obama has met the perfect storm of 10% unemployment, an unprecedented echo-chamber of right-wing blather willing to tell any lie, and a bunch of snooty lefties who think they could do it better than he can. Under these circumstances, it's amazing he's hovering at 50%.

Talk-radio clowns will continue to be completely flummoxed by Obama’s success and popularity, and will suffer ratings problems as a result. By the end of the year, they will spend more than half their time talking about finances and sports. The wing-nuts found their groove by creating and latching onto the Tea Party concept, which found obnoxious voice for all the imbicles who hate and resent Obama for racist and other reasons. Their demogogory of health insurance reform, including (especially) scaring the elderly about "death panels", has been the most reprehensible performance by mainstream politicians since Florida congressmen like Joe Scarboro defended Bush's theft of democracy in that state in 2000.

Locally, the radio wing-nuts will shill full-time for Scott Walker’s campaign for governor. Their in-kind contributions will not be reported to the Government Accountability Board. Just wait. They are just getting warmed up.

The conversion from analog to digital television in February will be delayed when it becomes clear that the need for a converter box will take free TV away from millions of Americans who still don’t have the box and couldn’t figure out how it works if they did. The first of my predictions to actually come true, as the date was moved to June. Unfortunately, it has now taken place. All over the poor and underclass, TV showing nothing by snow are gathering dust in closets.  Sadly, a little less Judge Judy for everyone.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will follow the lead of the Detroit Free Press and limit home delivery to three days a week. By the end of the year, the paper will stop pretending to have separate sections and fold everything into two sections; maybe one. The paper continues to be flumoxed by its crashing business model, but no limited home deliveries yet. The Local section has been folded into the front page on Monday.  A four-page Business page here, a four-page Cue section there. And after the Packers finish their run this year, can a four-page Sports page be far behind?

The paper will resort to hysterical headlines and endless self-righteous campaigns, like its current one about drunk driving. The paper's various hysterical campaigns against drunk driving, BPA, backups at the Patent Office (wha?), and the inner-city child care industry (while those reaping millions of state dollars scamming the J-S precious "choice" school program remain uninvestigated) continue apace. Last Sunday, the paper spent three or four whole pages telling you how wonderful they were.

If something is missing from the paper, referrals will be made to the on-line edition. All day, everyday.

No matter what happens, the J-S will continue to find room to run 25-inches of Patrick McIlheran's blathering three days a week. By the end of the year, his tedious right-wing talking-point recitals will take up 25 percent of the available non-ad column inches. I think his column in the dead-tree edition are now down to two a week, but Paddy Mac continues to be the most fact-challenged, unaccountable, talking-pointed columnist in the paper's once-distinguished history.  The Illusory One has made tracking McIlheran a hilarious special project, to everyone's benefit.

The Brewers spend money and, maybe, trade one of their young superstars to create a decent-enough starting rotation. Not quite. They could have got some decent arms for Corey hart or J.J. Hardy early in the season, but even they didn't see how far they would fall. The rotation was a mess all year.

Prince Fielder will come into camp having dropped 30 pounds. Wishful thinking, but what a year after a slow start.

Corey Hart will drop his at-bat country music for Nirvana and, this time, have a complete season. Ooops. Sorry.

National League pitchers will continue to be stymied by Ryan Braun, who will hit 45+ homers despite being the most-walked batter in the league. Not Braun -- Fielder.

The Brewers will win 90+ and win the division. No. Not enough pitching.

Despite strong lefty credentials and occasional accidental brilliance, Plaisted Writes will not be recognized by the Shepherd Express' Best of the Blogs page. An easy prediction.

Also, sometime this year, society page embarassments Boris and Doris will be invited to a party where no one but them shows up. They will write it up as a wonderful evening with Lou Fortis, Rip Tenor (as S-E mascot Art Kubalek) and other close friends. All true but the write-up.

Finally, although I didn't predict it, this has been an admittedly shit year for Plaisted Writes. I posted half as much as last year, even though there was plenty to talk about, and what I did write wasn't all that hot. My Blogger page tells me this is my 300th post. Here's to a better, more productive 2010.

God Bless Us, Every One

2009-12-26T11:33:00.001-06:00

One of my guilty pleasures on Christmas Eve day is driving around listening to old radio plays on WISN. For that one day, the primary purveyor of right-wing poison in Milwaukee gives their local and national chuckleheads the day off and runs three holiday-season radio plays from the late 1940s – “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “A Christmas Carol” and “Miracle on 34th Street”. It’s a trip back in time to a lost art form, featuring talented, familiar voices from the past. The material – smarmy and corny as it often is – is crafted for moderately intelligent, thoughtful people who might be in the market to think well of sponsors Campbell’s Soup (“Christmas Carol”) or Lux Soap (“Wonderful Life” and “Miracle”).

This Christmas Eve morning, the historic passage of health insurance reform in the Senate that I watched live on TV that very morning was on my mind as I took off for a long drive. Tuning to WISN looking to amuse myself with wing-nut hysterics about the vote, I instead found the “Christmas Carol” recording; hosted by the great Orson Welles and featuring the incomparable, crusty Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge, being led around by a bunch of ghosts.

I picked up on a detail I hadn’t noticed in the story before. During his tour of the Future, Scrooge is shown the Cratchit family in mourning over the demise of the sickly Tiny Tim. For some reason, Scrooge thinks he can do something about this if he is given the chance to go back to the Present and be a nicer guy. And, indeed, he does somehow “save” him from this apparent fate – according to Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know...but I don't pretend to know Dickens), Tim survives even to attend Scrooge’s funeral.

Now, what could Scrooge have possibly done to affect the length and quality of Tim’s life in such a dramatic way? What else but get the poor kid some damn health care? Dicken’s tale is set in pre-industrial, pre-nationalized health-care England, where the poor and (in Bob Cratchit’s case) underemployed were left to fend for themselves. The pre-ghost Scrooge was the epitome of the social Darwinist, more than willing to let the chips fall where they may on the unfortunate heads of the underclass; even unto death, inasmuch as it “decreased the surplus population”. After his fever-dream, he cares too much – at least about the poor he knows – buying more giant turkey than the Cratchit family can handle. And Tiny Tim must be saved. No doubt Scrooge headed straight to the health insurance exchange and got his employee on his plan (alas, with high deductibles – hey, Scrooge was saved, but not crazy).

If the Republicans, Tea Baggers and their purported intellectual enablers national and local were like Scrooge, we could say their salvation is only a nightmare (or history lesson) away. But they lack Scrooge’s internal consistency. Scrooge was a dick with his money because he thought he had to be – it doesn’t seem he was doing all that great either (certainly not as good as Barrymore’s other iconic role – Henry Potter). He just decided (at least for one night) not to make whatever success he did have on the back of his employee, the long-suffering Bob Cratchit.

Right-wingers, on the other hand, only care about one thing, and that is the reinstitution of their political power. They know as well as you and I do that the health insurance industry is an elaborate, bureaucratic scam designed to siphon money off of people’s (mostly) unavoidable misery. They know the small business people they pretend to champion are suffering under the crushing weight of health insurance policies that are costing more and paying for less.

They had a chance to do something about it when they were in power and didn’t even try. Now, the grown-ups in the room – the Democrats – are finally showing some leadership on the issue, and the shrinking GOP knows it cannot survive if Obama and the Democrats succeed in actually making millions of lives better. Even the weak, incremental, industry-friendly bill that passed the Senate is something that – like Social Security and Medicare – will be a landmark of positive government action that will solidify the Democratic Party as the Good Guys for another generation.

The power-mad Republicans and their fellow travelers know the long-range implications of Democratic achievement, which is why they have unleashed the most repulsive, demagogic campaign of lies and hyperbole in U.S. political history. From the constant screeching about socialism to putting the fear of “death panels” into our seniors, the disloyal opposition has become completely unmoored from reality, floating in its own fetid sea of phony facts, deliberate exaggerations and badly-acted hysterics. Using its all-too-convenient vehicles – talk-radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and their echo-chamber counterparts in the blogosphere – an alternate universe has been created where these people can talk to each other and at their vulnerable target demographic of fearful, stupid people. Most of their commentary would be laughed out of the legitimate media – and are, when they make the mistake of showing their sorry asses in the real world.

But to accuse them of Scrooge-like behavior gives them too much credit. Scrooge at least could articulate the self-interest involved in his previous behavior. The Republicans can't articulate anything except "NO". If Obama was against health insurance reform, they would find a way to be for it. All they know is that if the Democrats succeed at something -- anything -- they lose (again). Succeed Obama did (or will, soon). Lose, they did, the Republicans, all standing together as a convenient and unfortunate whole.

Scrooge saw in the Future the unnecessary suffering and death of Tiny Tim and sought redemption through change. Republicans know a million avoidable medical tragedies are out there and have one word for them -- NO!

Nod 2 Bob - Benefit for Hunger Task Force - TONIGHT

2009-11-24T22:09:00.002-06:00

Join me and many other entertainers TONIGHT (Wednesday) as we pay tribute to the music of Bob Dylan at Linneman's Riverwest Inn, 1001 East Locust in Milwaukee's bustling Riverwest neighborhood. I have the honor to MC the show once again this year and get to play a set myself with a brand new talented band (including the Illusory One and Eric Blowtorch) at about 8:40. This is the 11th annual Nod to Bob, a benefit for the Hunger Task Force. Come early (the show starts at 7 and the place gets packed pretty quickly -- lines out the door last year) and stay late for a great night of music. See you there!

Religious Fanatics Infect Nation's Capitol

2009-11-24T07:11:00.000-06:00

It seems patriarchical religious zealots who often favor medieval robes and rituals have descended on the nation’s capitol recently. Strategically placed in the offices of fearful congressmen and holding brow-beating sessions with parishioners not toeing the selective edicts of their secretive hierarchy, they seek to conform the nation’s secular laws to their random religious preferences.

If such an organized effort was put forth by Islamic clerics or Buddhist monks, investigations would be held as to why our elected leaders are holding audiences with such obvious fanatics, much less reshaping essential legislation to meet their unyielding demands. But these are representatives of the Catholic faith. Those not unduly impressed by their paternalistic zeal to keep women underfoot will be struck like so many of their cloistered nuns wielding metal rulers.

I know these people. I have spent more time on my knees in the service of various Vicars of Christ (mostly John XXIII, as I recall) than most of the right-wing commentators that use Catholic doctrine to beat up on those who would dare to let a woman control her own body. Sure, it was mostly back in the ‘60s, when I was a kid, a dedicated altar boy throughout grade school, back when we had to go to Mass every morning before class. I sang the ritual cants and even played in some of the first guitar Masses at the small parish in my small town.

Back then, the only politics the church involved itself in was a quaint notion of social justice. We gave lip-service to the poor, while spending most of our money on vestments and gold chalices. There was even an anti-war tinge back during that ugly Vietnam thing.

But now, the Catholic church is in the middle of a hard-right swing, careening around in political circles like a bull in a Holy Hill gift shop, slapping down any politician who would dare show independence or common sense on issues related to women’s health. When the House of Representatives was debating a health insurance reform bill a couple of weeks ago, a conservative German “pope” headquartered in Rome sent various functionaries (called “bishops”) – all, incidentally, carrying some fine health coverage – scurrying across Capitol Hill in an effort to scuttle the legislation if it dared to allow coverage for reproductive services, even in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the woman (read: incubator). The foreign, medieval effort was scarily effective, weakening and almost killing the bill.

This week, comes word that one of the scions of the Catholic family that has done more for the church’s historical goal of social justice than any other in the nation’s history – Patrick Kennedy – has been informed by one of the costumed clerics that he shall not be allowed to receive the sacrament of Communion until he toes the religious party line on the disfavored right of a woman to control her own body. “If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things, you do certain things,” declared the bishop. One wonders what would happen if, say, Keith Ellison, the congressman from Minnesota who happens to be Muslim, would receive such a threatening directive from one of his religious leaders. You would hear the screeching all the way from here to Mecca.

But, we allow the Catholics to interfere in the most important issue of our time on the grounds of their narrow, male-centered campaign to rid the women of the world of their right to choose. “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” Florence Kennedy famously said. Such irony is lost on the Soldiers of Benedict as they fan out to undermine social justice in the guise of protection of the “unborn”, even at the expense of the lives and health of adult women. Jesus famously threw the money-changers out of the temple. It’s time for someone to throw the medieval prelates out of the Capitol.

Walker Undermines Courthouse Security

2009-11-17T23:51:00.001-06:00

Scott Walker isn't a County Executive -- he's a cartoon. Every statement, every proposal, every budget he's made since he took advantage of Tom Ament's misfortune to gain an office he never would have otherwise has been an unserious joke, meant only to strike poses for the right-wing base he thinks is going to advance his blind ambition to be Governor. When Walker proposes something, you know it's not going to happen -- the only question is who is going to be the adult that fixes the mess.

Among the proposed victims of the political document he calls a budget and his grandstanding vetos are the mentally ill, bus riders, lakefront tourists, park users and the entire community, who will suffer increased crime because they no longer have the benefit of the rehabilitation efforts by the highly-successful Community Justice Resource Center. Also high on Walker's let's-beat-them-up-for-political-gain list are county employees, who will have to suffer through unbargained "furlough" days, and the citizens who expect the services the employees, on random days, will not be around to perform.

And then there are the county employees in the Courthouse itself that Walker doesn't want around at all. Those would be those who maintain and protect it. Of course, since Walker spends as little time there as possible -- and, when he does, he spends all his time on the phone with wing-nut radio hosts -- what does he care if the place is cleaned or secure? He probably figures he can get the Merry Maids in there for the $125 a week he plops down to get his house in Tosa cleaned and save money by not having all these annoying county cleaners all over the place.

But, of most concern to me as a daily visitor to the Courthouse is his attack on the security staff that have gotten people in and out of the building since early this decade. After 9/11, everyone in the country responsible for public buildings went nuts. In the Courthouse, they put metal detectors at the entrances they left open and closed many others (the Ghandi statue at the MacArthur Square former entrance stares at three permanently locked doors). It took a while to get the system working -- a fellow lawyer and friend of mine once refused to take off his shoes while entering the building, spurring the current system of security passes that get us trusted regulars in the building without the petty indignities suffered by the thousands of visitors who come to the Courthouse everyday.

The veteran security staff gets us passed through and the citizens screened in a pleasant, efficient and professional manner. I am terrible with names in the first place, but I know their faces and they know mine. Besides waving me in, I can see them dealing with the county residents who come to the Courthouse to conduct business; perform jury duty; attend court hearings; get licenses; drop small claims cases on unsuspecting neighbors; get copies of deeds, birth and death certificates, etc. They are absolutely superb in getting people through the metal detectors and directed to where they are trying to get to in the complicated three-building Courthouse complex.

Proposing bringing in third-rate security goons from Bob's Security Service or whatever it would be is insane. The only people who would support it -- other than Bob -- are people who never come to the Courthouse and have no idea what it takes to make the security system efficient and competent. That would be people like Scott Walker and his roving band of goofballs, who are only concerned with scoring vapid political points and couldn't care less about making the county government work.

The Courthouse is one of the few places where almost the entire community has to appear at some point or other for the important or mundane business of life. The visting, taxpaying citizens should be greeted by permanent professionals who have a stake in getting them through and keeping the building safe. The security staff at the Courthouse entrances have grown into a talented bunch who represent our county well. To lose them to the greedy political ambitions of a opportunistic punk like Scott Walker would indeed be a tragedy.