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Grandstanding in Wisconsin

Friday, February 25, 2011

Scott Walker is engaged in even more nonsense:

Today, Governor Scott Walker signed Special Session Assembly Bill 5 which requires a 2/3s vote to pass tax rate increases on the income, sales or franchise taxes.

But this is not, as Digby thinks, Wisconsin’s version of the California restrictions. In fact, it means nothing. Anything done legislatively can be undone legislatively. That’s not the case in California, which put itself into a constitutional strait jacket. As Walker knows so well, a simple “notwithstanding” will do the trick, as in this little bit of legislative gobbledygook that he was hoping to slip by the people of Wisconsin:

16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state?owned heating, cooling,
and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the
department may sell any state?owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may
contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without
solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best
interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or
certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to
purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is
considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification
of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).

Translation: Scott Walker can sell the Koch Brothers any power plant now owned by the State of Wisconsin for any corrupt price he likes (and then buy the power back at exorbitant prices) notwithstanding a host of laws designed to prevent corrupt bargains. It’s a wonderful, word, notwithstanding, and can work wonders in a piece of legislation.


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My outrage is so fatigued, it’s asleep

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Nothing surprises me when it comes to Republicans, and frankly, I’ve lost my capacity for outrage. I listened to the “Koch”/Walker colloquy yesterday, and heard the bit that got the police chief of Madison upset, but frankly it never crossed my mind to be aghast at the idea of a state’s governor sending in goons to violently disrupt a demonstration. (He decided against it for political reasons, not because it was wrong, and just the fact that he considered it tells you all you need to know) It was only what I would expect from a Republican, so it really didn’t connect that he was admitting that he contemplated criminal behavior. After eight years of Bush and sundry other Republican outrages, hiring a few thugs seemed fairly tame.

The funny thing is, he may never have actually thought about hiring cheese eating storm troopers. He might have just been trying to tell his puppet-master what he thought he’d like to hear.

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True Colors

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Fairly incredible. A hoaxster from the Daily Beast poses as David Koch and calls Scott Walker. There are two parts.

The youtube is titled Koch Whore: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and that pretty much says it all.

The hoaxster, we must hope, did his research to get a Koch sounding voice and mannerisms, because otherwise it’s simply incredible that Walker didn’t see through this.

The fact, however, is that his no-negotiation strategy will work. He will get his way, just like Bush always got his. Not only that, he will have enough money and propaganda behind him to convince the people he’s screwing that he’s doing the right thing, enabled, as he points out, by the New York Times, which sent its reporters into Wisconsin with orders to find some union members that would trash talk the public employees.

Someday, before I die, there will be a Democratic President of the United States, blessed with large majorities in Congress, who will get into office and refuse to compromise on his or her progressive beliefs. Then, we will get some of the things we’ve been hoping for, like real health care reform, union rights, real financial regulation, and action on global warming. Someday that will happen.

No. I’m kidding. It won’t happen.

CORRECTION: My error. The faux Koch was from the Buffalo Beast, not the Daily Beast.


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Lincoln on Labor

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

More proof, in any be needed, that the Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln.

Full disclosure: the brilliant post to which I’ve linked was authored by my second son.


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Heads they win, tails we lose

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

I understand that Jon Stewart has compared the Wisconsin situation to the Bizarro World in Superman, with the protestors being the Bizarro World equivalent of the tea party folks. Superficial, but ultimately wrong, beginning with the fact that the folks in Wisconsin have reality based grievances.

But there is a kernel of truth in his observation.

First let me pause and say that, when all is said and done, the governor of Wisconsin is likely to get what he is demanding. Even if it costs him his job, it will be worth it to him and his backers, as I’m sure the Koch brothers will richly reward him, and the harm will have been done and will not be reversed.

So, back to bizarro world. Let’s compare and contrast.

Obama won his election going away. He came in with large majorities in both the House and the Senate. Yet it was expected that he would and should be “bipartisan”. In fact, he fell right into the trap, trading any chance he had to effectively respond to the economic crisis by liberally smothering the asses of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins with kisses for the sole purpose of acquiring a phony patina of bipartisanship for his economic program. Result: a totally ineffective program, a lost opportunity to solidify Democratic gains, and, mysteriously enough, a permanent consensus among the press that Obama’s problem is that he is simply not bi-partisan enough.

Scott Walker wins an election, and acquires a large Republican majority. He immediately pushes through a tax cut for the corporations, without even trying to be “bi-partisan”. That tax cut causes a near term budget shortfall. He then uses that shortfall as an excuse to destroy the public employee unions, without even trying to be “bi-partisan”. But there’s no call in the press for him to be bi-partisan. Now we are told that elections have consequences, and instead of calls for bipartisanship we see this sort of thing:

But the dramatic strategy that has clogged the Capitol with thousands of protesters clashes with one essential truth: Republicans told everyone months ago that unions would be one of their targets, and the GOP now has more than enough votes to pass its plans once the legislature can convene.

The filibuster strategy clashed with the same essential truth, but somehow that never seemed to call it into question. So, you see, when they win elections it means they get what they want. When we win them, it means we should let them get what they want.

So Stewart’s right in a very real sense. It’s just difficult to decide which is the bizarro world. Or maybe they both are.


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Friday Night Music: Leningrad Cowboys & Russian Red Army Choir

Friday, February 18, 2011

Sometimes, in my quest to fill this slot, I stumble on stuff that just makes me feel good. I found this video several weeks ago, but the version I found had embedding disabled. This may be a different performance, but it’s the same song. A Finnish Rock band teams with the Russian Red Army Choir to sing a song penned by an American songwriter. One of my all time favorite tunes, which adds to the pleasure.

And here’s a bonus, same performers, doing a song by a couple of lads from Liverpool:


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Gud Wryting at the Dey

Friday, February 18, 2011

Punditry can be a demanding avocation. Today, for instance, I tried to pen something about Glenn Beck, Wisconsin, the Koch Brothers, and the infinite capacity of American’s to be deluded into voting for their own oppressors, but it just didn’t come together. All that work, and nothing to show. The article will remain forever embedded on my ISP’s server as a humble draft, never to glow on anyone’s screen but my own.

So, instead of inflicting a piece of crap on the world, I’m going to make fun of someone else’s piece of crap. Today’s Day contains an op-ed piece by one Michael A. Pace, a six term first selectman from Old Saybrook, CT., who uses up a goodly amount of choice Day real estate to defend himself from unspecified attacks from unidentified persons with an incomprehensible apologia. I read the whole thing and I can’t figure out what he’s talking about. Don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself. If you can figure it out you’re a smarter person than me.1

But his screed is not merely content free. In the process of saying nothing, Mr. Pace brutally attacks the English language and leaves it for dead. I don’t use a grammar checker myself, but I heartily recommend that Mr. Pace try using one. Consider the following attempted sentence, picked more or less at random:

Scratch the surface and you may find those who stay out of public view, but who sponsor and contribute to bad behavior, for they have personal and political gains at stake.

Or this one, which qualifies as a real sentence, but doesn’t really say what I think Mr. Pace intends:

Well, the reality is that my administration has resolved issues that had long gone unresolved, dividing the town and costing it huge sums of money.

Personally, I can see why his opponents are complaining, if he has resolved issues by dividing the town and costing it huge sums of money.

Now, I confess, when I read this column I experienced a strange ambivalence. My first reaction was: “I hope he’s a Republican”. But I immediately checked myself. That would be an unkind thing to wish on the good people of Old Saybrook: 12 years of administration by a Republican idiot. Democratic idiots may not be great, but they’re marginally better than their Republican peers.

On reflection, though, I ended up rooting for him to have an “R” next to his name. That way, I wouldn’t have to even consider giving him a pass. Besides, I don’t live in Old Saybrook, and if they continue to elect this guy they deserve what they get. So, I resorted to the Google (the Day did not specify his party affiliation) and I found that he does indeed reside in the party of Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, the natural home of the proudly ignorant.

I would be extremely interested to know why the Day printed this unintelligible crime against language. Were they lending him some rope to hang himself, or are there levels of meaning there that I can’t see?

  1. Let it be known that, not wanting to commit a grammatical faux pas, particularly in a piece such as this, I consulted the Google to settle the burning question of whether I should use the word “I” or the word “me” at the end of the footnoted sentence., only to find that the subject is one that is heatedly disputed. After much consideration, reading and cogitating, I decided that “me” had better support, and anyway, it sounds better.?


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We are all Badgers!

Thursday, February 17, 2011

It is not my fault that we must make common cause, at least emotionally, with a state that chose to adopt the badger as its mascot, but the contingencies of history cannot be controlled. Those folks demonstrating in the streets of Madison also cannot be blamed for a decision made long ago, though many of them can be blamed for decisions made more recently, as many of them voted for the man whose first act in office was at attempt to strip them of their rights. Who could have predicted such a thing, other than a reasonably aware sentient being? Can you say PATCO?

Maybe it takes this in your face sort of thing to finally wake up the American people. The right, aided by Democratic fellow travelers and Democratic cowards, has been systematically looting them for years, transferring wealth to the wealthy, and the American people have been quiescent, preferring to think that they will somehow, someway, share in the bounty being diverted to their betters or preferring to be distracted by hot button low idea issues of race, gender or religion.

One great thing about the right wing media, particularly Fox, is the fact that it encourages a lack of self awareness among its habitués and a general detachment from what people actually think. Thus we have Paul Ryan comparing the Madison protestors to the folks in Cairo, blissfully unaware that, other than those ensconced in the Glenn Beck parallel universe, most people sympathize with the folks in Cairo. We learn more about Ryan from his statement than we do about the folks demonstrating in Madison, though we can certainly hope he’s right, and that they will have the staying power of the Egyptian people.

While I sympathize with Malloy, I think he might deserve a bit of the Madison treatment. It wasn’t state workers or their unions that got this country and this state into the mess it is in, but it is those workers that will bear the lions share of the “shared sacrifice”, while the affluent have their taxes raised a sliver. The workers are easy targets, apparently, because they can’t afford to move out of state and Malloy can put them in jail if they strike, just as we in the middle class are prisoners here as well, which makes it easier to impose an increased sales tax on us than to impose a graduated income tax on the truly rich, who blackmail politicians like Malloy into treating them with kid gloves while he broadens the distance between the haves and have nots. Thus do we continue the transfer of wealth under both Democrats and Republicans.

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I stand 100% for English only politics

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

At the last Drinking Liberally get together I was expounding on an observation I’ve made before about Republican Presidents I can personally recall. That is, those that lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue while I have breathed the air of this dying earth.

I have observed that, over time, each Republican President makes his or her predecessors look good by comparison, the only exceptions possibly being the “accidental” Republican Presidents, Ford and the first Bush. Eisenhower was a mediocre President, who now looks extremely good and eminently sane by comparison with his successors. Nixon was bat shit crazy. At the time I thought no one could ever be worse, but Reagan beat him by a country mile. The second Bush, in turn, made Reagan look good, and odds are that if an R gets elected in 2012, she’ll make little Georgie look like a statesman of the first order. God only knows what will come next if the Republic survives the next Republican president.

One of my Drinking Liberally friends wrote me an email riffing off this idea, pointing out (and sending lots of examples) that while the First Bush may have been somewhat less awful than Reagan or his own offspring, he did start a now proud Republican tradition of murdering the English language. We don’t need to document his son’s lapses, and we’ve all got our favorites from Sarah, whose most recent incoherent comments go like this:

“And nobody yet has, nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and no, not, not real enthused about what it is that that’s being done on a national level and from DC in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt. And, in these areas that are so volatile right now, because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with. And, we do not have all that information yet.”

But that’s coherent next to this example from Georgie’s dad:

“And let me say in conclusion, thanks for the kids. I learned an awful lot about bathtub toys — about how to work the telephone. One guy knows — several of them know their own phone numbers — preparation to go to the dentist. A lot of things I’d forgotten. So it’s been a good day.”

Now, I say, that given the Republican party’s support for English-only education, et al., that we can at least expect them to field English-only candidates. And I further say that English isn’t just words from the OED! You have to know how to string them together. That’s why my six years of German never took. I knew lots of words, but I couldn’t string them together to save my life, though at least I knew what they meant, which is more than you can say about Sarah, though she might refudiate me on that.


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Bringing back Paradise

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Life was good for the plutocrats at the turn of the last century, and the Republicans are working their butts off to bring back the good times. Missouri State Sen. Jane Cunningham is no slacker. Here’s her official summary for a bill she’s recently introduced in the Missouri State Senate to bring back our second most evil peculiar institution:

This act modifies the child labor laws. It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed. It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed. Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished. It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ. It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

Why not go all the way and bring back slavery? I know these tea party people claim to revere the Constitution, but they don’t count the thirteenth amendment as any more valid than the 16th or 17th.

But even if the damn federal government won’t get off our backs and we can’t bring back slavery, we can at least get the sons and daughters of those that should be slaves out of our schools and off our streets. It reminds me of a heartwarming poem that I heard while touring Robert Todd Lincoln’s house in Manchester, Vermont, about the golf course within sight of the factories nearby:

“The golf-links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And watch the men at play.”

Those were the days. We’re so close to bringing them back you can almost taste it.


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