You Know What We Should Try?

We should try running Wisconsin like an effective, profitable business. That's what we should try.

Signing the contract for Michael Best & Friedrich was attorney
Raymond Taffora, a month after he left his job with the state attorney general's
office, which usually represents the state on legal challenges.

Walker missed the estimate by 500%.

Contrafactual Action

Wisconsin used to be so much better -- and smarter -- than
this.

The Wisconsin that Walker--and Suder--believe in is a stupider, meaner, less effective one.

"Justice Prosser...Declined Comment"

I wish there was a way to say, "I told you so," that didn't feel so hopeless.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser allegedly grabbed fellow
Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck in an argument in her chambers last
week, according to several knowledgeable sources.
[]
They say an argument that occurred before the court's release of a
decision upholding a bill to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public
employees culminated in a physical altercation in the presence of other
justices. Bradley purportedly asked Prosser to leave her office, whereupon
Prosser grabbed Bradley by the neck with both hands.

Just Remember

When you see a pro-mining article by Tim Sullivan touting all the jobs he's "creating" in Wisconsin you need to remember that he's not telling you the truth.

Wisconsin's Constitutional Crisis

What happens when ideology trumps the Rule of Law?

However, when the Chief Justice of the State’s highest court accuses the
majority of highly unethical behavior and political motives when making law, and
does so in the writings found in a decision of the court, there is no court in
the state – nor citizen seeking to follow the laws of the state – who can give
credence and credibility to the high court’s rulings. Every ruling of the
Wisconsin Supreme Court, so long as it is composed of its current Justices, will
result in precedents that are instantly suspect due to the charges that have
been levied by members of the court.

Remember that Governor Nitwit has promised to improve the Bidneth Climb-ate but note that he seems to have forgotten the one thing business owners desire most of all--stability. Business doesn't flow to states that are in turmoil. Unless there are assurances that governments are stable they shouldn't look for an influx of new business.

While the State of Wisconsin has a lot on its plate in the recall
department, I’m afraid they now have little choice but to consider taking a look
at some of their Supreme Court Justices for similar action.

Not because the court handed down a ruling that will make people unhappy – but because the people of Wisconsin now have every reason to believe that their Supreme Court has been corrupted and their opinions subject to invalidation.

Make no mistake. This is not about a judicial philosophy with which I might
disagree. Reasonable, learned judges can – and often do – apply the law to
a fact situation and come up with different opinions and they do so in the
utmost of good faith and their best understanding of the law.

However, the minority opinion issued yesterday in the Wisconsin Supreme Court did not charge mistaken application of law. The opinion charged perversion of the facts and the law to meet a desired result.

If this is true, this is court corruption at its absolute worst and the people of Wisconsin cannot permit this to stand.

The system of checks and balances has broken down in Wisconsin and has been replaced by a Government of the Purse. Paybacks to WMC, AT&T, the roadbuilding lobby and beer distributors have taken precedence over the working families of Wisconsin.

Miserable Human On The Loose

What more can you say after you express abhorrence? A GOP Rep in Massachussets has gone on record as saying he'd favor creating a class of women who could be raped without fear of repercussions.

Asked if he would be concerned that a woman without legal immigration
status was raped and beaten as she walked down the street might be afraid to
report the crime to police, Mr. Fattman said he was not worried about those
implications.

“My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid
to come forward,” Mr. Fattman said. “If you do it the right way, you don’t have to be concerned about these things,” he said referring to obtaining legal
immigration status.

I'm flabbergasted, but sadly unsurprised.

The Prescience Of Our Founding Fathers

Apparently, they thought of everything. [David] Barton declared,

"As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the
entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the
least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the
classroom. Scientific method demands that!" Paine died in 1809, the same
year Darwin was born.

You know David Barton. His "textbooks" are listed on Wisconsin Homeschooler and he was the first lecturer at Glenn Beck's "university."

Well, yeah. Me, too.

But shouldn't Reince sweep his own house clean before he bitches about the neighbor's?

GOP chairman demands Weiner resign

David Vitter.

Newt Gingrinch.

Darrell Issa.

His caucus looks to be rich in opportunities for his high dudgeon.

Aww, Geeez

It's time to move along, Anthony.

At least we know now that Breitbart is all over the "men's underpants" news.

The Ghettoization Of Rural Wisconsin Continues

When you see those commercials telling you that AT&T's assimilation of T-Mobile will usher in an age of unicorns and lotus flowers rememebr this monster that was slipped into the Omnibus Budget bill by JFC on a (wanna guess?) 12-4 vote late Friday afternoon.

“Prohibits the Board of Regents, the UW System, and UW Institution, or the
UW-Extension, directly or indirectly, from doing any of the following: receiving
funds from any award from the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA) under the U.S. Department of Commerce for the Building
Community Capacity through Broadband (BCCB project; disbursing, spending,
loaning, granting, or in any other way distributing or committing to distribute
any funds received with respect to, budgeted to, or allocated for the BCCB
project, and participating in the planning, organization, funding,
implementation or operation of the BCCB project.”

That means that any money that was collected by grant, any money that has already been budgeted or committed to bringing broadband communication technologies to rural Wisconsin is to be forfeit in the same way that the money for the MKE-MSN rail line was given up.

This is tantamount to standing in the way of rural electrification in the 1930's and will set rural development back decades for the sake of making AT&T's lobbyists happy.

The Darling-Vos led cabal has offered up big paybacks to the roadbuilders in this bill, they've paid back their beer distributing contributors at the expense of small brewers and now they're killing a program that directly supports jobs in rural Wisconsin for the benefit of AT&T.

The recalls can't come soon enough to stop these assaults on Wisconsin industries.

"He Ain't So Tough."

Putative Presidential candidate Rick "Google" Santorum (R-In His Dreams) has said that Paul "No Bibles For Me, Thanks" Ryan (R-Way over in the right-hand corner) just wasn't randy, er Randian enough.

Santorum not only says that Ryan doesn't go after cuts in Social Security. He adds that Ryan seems unwilling to personally kick individual widows and orphans when they're down, although the defeated Senator does admit that Ryan's plan may be best for keeping crutches out of the hands of the lame and the halt.

Crossposted

Have You Heard?

Have you heard WMC's radio ad extolling the virtues of a 21 mile-long strip mine in "Little Iron County?" I'm told there are several versions of it running around the state touting the Jobs and Unicorns Bill or Jobs Forever and Ever, Amen Bill or some such misnamed nonsense.

WMC claims thousands of jobs for decades while making claims for some sort of environmental protection. "Minnesota and Michigan have done it," they declare, without any acknowledgement of the degradation of the land in those places; the rust-colored ground water and the tap water that tastes like a bloody nose.

There's a new movie out that explains a lot about modern mining.

“If you try to do what they do in West Virginia in the Berkshires, the
Catskills or the Sierra Nevadas, or in Utah or Colorado, people would just put
you in jail,” [Bobby} Kennedy told us.

“Over the past 10 years, they’ve blown up and leveled an area of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia that is larger than the size of Delaware. They’ve blown up the 500 biggest mountains in West Virginia. They explode everyday 2,500 tons of dynamite, or ammonia nitrate explosives. It’s the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb once a week. And they take the rock and debris and rubble and dump it into the adjacent river valley.”

But surely, you say, they won't do all that much blasting in Iron County because they'll have all those 2000 men and women in the pit. That's not the way modern mining works.

Haney told us that the industry’s argument that they need to engage in
mountaintop removal to protect jobs doesn’t hold up when you realize that
companies are extracting more coal with fewer workers.

“We’re both sensitive to the fact the economy is in a vulnerable place and that Americans need work. But it’s also a giant mythology,” Haney said. “The reality is that the coal industry has been using these explosives that Bobby was just talking about to eliminate jobs.”

How do they get away with it? Why do these things happen in West Virginia?

“They get away with it in West Virginia because as in every place where you
see large scale environmental injury, you’ll also see the subversion of
democracy. And at every level democracy has been crushed by these large
corporations in West Virginia,” Kennedy continued. “It’s distressing for
everyone in this country.”

And, that's why having a Governor at the beck and call of the Koch Brothers is a bad thing. Not because business is inherently evil but because government controlled by business is unable to act in the public good. The politics of Big Coal or of Big Iron is the same. They show fewer symptoms of conscience or discretion than a 19 year-old boy on MD 20-20. It's their nature. It's what they do.

Why does it matter here? Why should you care about coal in Kentucky or waste in West Virginia?

“West Virginia is really the template of where our nation is headed, which
is away from the democracy that our founders believed in and towards kind of a
corporate control of the decision-making at every level of government,” he said.
“And I think that’s one of the questions that this film really poses to the
American people.”

Lincoln wouldn't have made history if he'd spoken of a government of the businessman, for the businessman and by the businessman. Don't let Wisconsin sell its heritage for a few tons of taconite pellets.

Xoff has more about the underlying faulty economics in the plan.

Blogroll Updating

I've finally added 4 Quarters, 10 Dimes to my blogroll. David is a History professor, a dad and an all-around good guy. His blog is well worth a visit.

I've also added the All-New, All-Singing, All-Dancing ECT Stagelights blog, just in time for auditions for Fiddler on the Roof on Saturday.

And now, in preparation for The Ghost of Redistricting Yet to Come, we have the relaunch of The Paul Ryan Watch. Check it out often for the wacky adventures of Pompadour Paul Through the Looking-Glass. Who knows? It may be a day when I'm posting there.

How Much Will It Cost Your District To Do Paul Ryan's Version Of "Nothing?"

Handy-dandy interactive map shows the impact to each Congressional District of the Medicare and Medicaid cuts that Paul Ryan is trying to make you believe is really no change at all.

Ryan's 1st District here.

Tammy Baldwin's 2nd District here with just a few highlights.

• Deny 580,000 individuals age 54 and younger in the district access to
Medicare’s guaranteed benefits.

• Increase the out-of-pocket costs of health coverage by over $6,000 per
year in 2022 and by almost $12,000 per year in 2032 for the 117,000 individuals
in the district who are between the ages of 44 and 54.

• Require the 117,000 individuals in the district between the ages of 44
and 54 to save an additional $27.3 billion for their retirement – an average of
$182,000 to $287,000 per individual – to pay for the increased cost of health
coverage over their lifetimes. Younger residents of the district will have to
save even higher amounts to cover their additional medical costs.

• Raise the Medicare eligibility age by at least one year to age 66 or
more for 65,000 individuals in the district who are age 44 to 49 and by two
years to age 67 for 460,000 individuals in the district who are age 43 or
younger.

All the rest.

Crossposted at The Paul Ryan Watch

It's All Part Of the Plan. Relax.

Blatantly stolen from Sandy Underpants at The Aristocrats. Be aware that there's a content warning on that blog.

Too Easy

Mama Grizzly has been taking history lessons from RoJo again. Just listen.






And yet, they get upset when her knowledge and skills are questioned.

The Horror. The Horror.

Grover Norquist is trying to train 150,000 activists to make the pitch for
the plan. “The challenge will be to teach each of our activists to deliver the
Ryan speech," he said.

Just imagine 3000 mini-pompadors in ill-fitting suits criss-crossing each of our states, 42 per county just in Wisconsin, each one armed with AFP vetted charts, graphs and statistics standing on street corners offering to bloviate on the virtues of abandoning the poor and sick.

It's a regular Galtfest.

Crossposted at PRW

Great Moments In Messaging

Flyin' Jim Sensenbrenner defines GOP "brand" as being one of smoking rubble and horrified onlookers at convention.

Sensenbrenner says, "We got our brand back."
He says the challenge now will be to sustain the goals their achieved. He says Wisconsin will be ground zero in 2012...

A Note From the Convention

Meanwhile, Gov. Scott Walker (left) said the state is on a roll, but
Republicans need to win the recall elections this summer to keep that momentum
going.

Mrs. O'Leary said the same thing about Chicago, if only they could get the fire put out.

Do you suppose it ever occurred to Scotty, even for just one moment that, if Wisconsin was actually on a roll, there would be no recall elections?

The Cost Of Cuts In Terms of Human Lives

"The whole cost of our cervical cancer screening program will probably
be less than the care of one hospitalized patient with advanced cervical
cancer."

Walker's budget proposal will mean that more women will die. Is it fair to say that his budget kills women? Perhaps not. Is it fair to say that Walker and his cadre really don't care if more poor women die? That surely seems to be the message he's sending.

The medical director of the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene says
women will likely die of cervical cancer if Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal
eliminating $266,400 for cervical cancer screening prevails.

"I see at least 1 - 2 high-grade lesions every day during cytologic
evaluations," Dr. Daniel Kurtycz says in prepared remarks to be given Wednesday
to the Joint Finance Committee, which will consider Walker's budget request.
"Without follow-up, there is no doubt that some of these lesions will become
invasive. Because cervical cancer takes at least two years to run its course,
sometime after 2015, we will have women dying of cervical cancer as a
predictable consequence of the funding reduction for testing in this
budget."

How long can we afford Walker's callous disregard for the working families of Wisconsin?