NBC News and Marist managed to poll cell phone users this week in Florida, Ohio and Virginia. The numbers were enlightening, but not surprising.

In Florida, landline households prefer Mitt Romney 48% to 45% for President Obama. But cell phone-only households prefer the President 57% to 34%. Virginia, landline households favor Romney 47% to 46%, while cell-onlies like Obama 54% to 34%. The President leads on landlines in Ohio, 44% to 41% and increases the lead to 47% to 37% for cell users.

In Ohio and Florida, 28% of those responding to the poll use cell phones only, and 27% of Virginians. That’s below the national number for those households that use only cell phones, which is 31.6%. The last statistic available for landline-only homes was in 2010, when they had dropped to 12.9% of American households. Roughly 55% of us have both landlines and cell phones.

It really is impossible to equate cell phone usage with any particular demographic. Many think that cell phone users are younger and more affluent, while landliners are older and poorer. Others bitch constantly at how welfare recipients and the homeless have cell phones. There are more dynamics involved than age or income. We went all cellular because I got tired of the too-familiar repairmen from BellSouth knocking on my door and just saying “dead squirrel” or “tree trimmer.” Geography can have a major impact on the choice to go cellular. The city I lived in had not upgraded their phone wires since they were installed during World War II. Geography can have a lot to do with the choice as well. The homeless buy prepaid phones so they have a phone number to give on job applications. It can be cheaper to have a cell phone if you make a lot of long distance calls, as we do.

What matters in this poll is not some attempt to connect the type of phone service people prefer with some voting bloc. What matters is that a missing 31.6% of voters are being reached to be polled.

Frankly, my math skills are not good enough to work out how to add those results and arrive at a better result for all responders. Get me past ordinary averages and percentages and I’m a lost cause. But if the polls are finally making the effort to include cell phone-only households, we may be able to get a better gauge of what is going on in this election.

Related articles

• Cell vs. Landline: Where do you take your calls? (grasshopper.com)

Mitt and Ann Romney campaigning

Aware that he is having problems connecting with women, even with his wife explaining how much work goes into raising five sons, Mitt Romney is trying to bridge his gap with “personal” stories of women he has met and spoken with at small, private gatherings away from the press. He has quite a collection.

The press is not permitted to meet these women or to have names or addresses to verify their existence. And in some instances, those omissions raise questions about how these women’s stories relate to the policies Romney advocates. At a fundraiser last week, Romney explained to potential donors that “In some towns that I go to, I ask to get a group of women business owners, and I meet with them. I have them describe their experiences.” So, here are some of the stories he presents to rallies and fundraisers…

Romney describes the woman whose unemployed husband signed up for an upholstery class. When she queried her husband about his choice of retraining, he explained that there was a shortage of upholsterers in their area. She realized he was right, and opened an upholstery business where she employs her husband and 40 others. Romney thinks that was “pretty impressive.”

The first question I want answered is when did this happen? Forty employees is not something one starts off with, it’s something that is built up to. And then, where? I used to live in a small city in Georgia, population 17,000. There was an upholsterer in town, total personnel four people. Most of the furniture refinishing businesses I’ve known over the years are very small operations and upholsterers are even smaller. We have become a society that replaces furniture instead of refinishing it or reupholstering it, unless it’s an irreplaceable piece, an antique or something with great personal value. So, where and when, please?

Next up is a woman married to a caricature artist. As Romney explained, “It’s hard to make a great living out of just being a caricature artist. He does caricatures at county fairs and so forth.” So, the woman decided that she had to become the primary breadwinner. Having been born in Mexico and being fluently bi-lingual, she got a job translating construction manuals from English to Spanish. It’s “just remarkable!”

Really? How about visiting a Federal Court in the near future? You will find freelance translators in a variety of languages who are contracted for suspect interrogations and court proceedings. Pick up a newspaper or check jobs websites in any state with a large Hispanic population. You will find ads for bi-lingual employees. I’m not putting down this particular woman, but her story isn’t really all that remarkable. It is somewhat remarkable that she chose to support an artistic husband. It’s a pity Romney didn’t ask her about birth control which makes it possible for her to pursue her career instead of being perpetually pregnant and stuck at home collecting welfare or forcing her husband to go flip hamburgers and abandon his art.

One of Romney’s favorites, because it is twisted to his party’s narrative, is the lady who owns a trucking company. She used to buy new trucks every year and employs both men and women to drive them. But, now, she is waiting to buy new equipment, she is “uncertain how many new regulations or taxes the Democrats might force upon her in the coming months and prefers to wait to purchase big ticket items until a Republican is in the White House. She runs the place with a very strong hand, a very successful hand.”

New regulations, huh? She must be a Fox News viewer or has right wing radio on at work all day. President Obama has pushed to streamline business regulations, not increase them. She’s a small business owner. Her taxes have been reduced by this administration. The administration wants to make taxes more fair, not just heap new taxes on people, and there are new tax incentives for her business, like the credit for hiring unemployed veterans, many of whom have great experience at driving trucks. Interest rates are at nearly historic lows, so this is a perfect time for making large purchases. They will cost less over time. I’ve known truckers. The trucking industry suffers when gas prices are high. Long haulers are expected to take larger loads in less time. In a recession, with businesses closed and factories stilled, there is less cargo being shipped. There are a lot of reasons for this woman’s business to be suffering, but the threat of new regulations and phantom tax increases are not among them.

Now, this one defies explanation for why Romney includes it. He says he met a woman in Cleveland who just graduated from college, but is going back for a second degree because she can’t get a job in her field and can’t afford to make payments on her student loans, which are currently sitting at $40,000. If she goes back to school, she can put off making payments on her loans. Romney explains “She can’t find a job, so she’s doing three part-time jobs. She doesn’t know how they’re going to make it. She’s having a hard time.”

Oh, let me at it. She can’t find a full-time job because of four lovely people at the top of the Forbes 400 whose company showed American businesses that if they limited their employees to part-time, they would not have to provide benefits. It’s called “the WalMart model” inside the retail and hospitality industries, and it has spread to health care now. Kids who were working in supermarkets during college are still working there because they can’t find full-time jobs. Three that I knew had their degrees in education, where we are losing jobs instead of recovering them as states and town tighten their belts. And let’s not forget, Mitt Romney told students to get a loan from their parents to go to school or start businesses, and the Republicans are insisting on cutting programs to pay for lower interest rates for that woman’s student loans. Just how the hell is anything the Republicans are offering going to help this woman, or the millions of students and graduates out there who are holding a total of nearly one trillion dollars in debt?

Finally, Romney talks about a woman he met in Appleton, Wisconsin. She sells perfume in a department store. She and her husband had planned on being retired at this point, but the real estate they bought, two duplexes, have decreased in value. He says he has met other older women who are finding retirement eluding them.

I really don’t understand the duplex lady. How did the decrease in her property values decrease her income from three rental properties? Did her mortgage payments rise? If she lives in Wisconsin, I know that her property taxes have not risen in the past year, but did state property taxes impact their profit from the rentals? If the expenses of the properties rose, why didn’t they raise the rent? Any other landlord would have. This story makes less sense than any of the others.

When I look at my own situation, facing eleven months when my husband will be on Medicare and we don’t know how we will be able to afford medical insurance for me; when I get ready for work or watch my husband go off to work instead of enjoying a comfortable retirement, that’s when I remember something that happened in 1992. H. Ross Perot was running for President and had to release his tax returns. In 1991, Perot threw a million dollar wedding for his daughter Margo, but he paid less actual money in Federal income taxes than my family did – a family of four at a median income. Today, both Perot and his son are in the Forbes 400 billionaires list and my husband and I are working part-time to supplement his Social Security and pension. I don’t resent Mr. Perot’s wealth. I resent the taxes he didn’t pay and the entirely legal way he avoided paying fair taxes. And I resent the idea that I’m supposed to suffer cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare to pay for men like Henry Ross Perot to get even bigger tax breaks and better ways to avoid taxes.

Mitt Romney suffers from something greater than being out-of-touch with ordinary Americans. He’s intellectually lazy. He has this set of beliefs and he fits what he hears into them, even if he has to chop bits off the round peg to put it in the square hole. He only half-listens to what people are saying to him and has no point of reference to evaluate what is being said. I’m not sure which is worse, Mitt’s problems connecting with reality, or the fact that the Republican Party and their well-paid media shills have done such a spectacular job of turning their followers’ brains to mush.

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• After backing Romney in 2008, Ross Perot declines to endorse anyone for 2012(trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com)

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• Mitt Cites Perot (thepage.time.com)
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The President will be inaugurated on January 20, 2013. The automatic spending cuts go into effect on January 1, 2013, and the expiration of the tax cuts happens on December 31, 2012. The two laws involved do not have any “grace period” built into them.

Could someone please explain to this man how to read a calendar and how our Federal government works?  On second thought….

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• CBO warns Obama, GOP about tough tax choices – USA TODAY(content.usatoday.com)

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• Romney says Congress should wait to act on economy (wcnc.com)
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• Cutting Boehner’s Expectations And Non-Threats (lezgetreal.com)
• Tax Cuts Disguised as Reform (economistsview.typepad.com)

From Creative Commons

I just found a fabulous website. It is run by a lady who only identifies herself as Middle Molly. She resides in Chicago, and she has posted less personal information about herself than I have, and I refuse to post a profile. Molly has the most concise, precise analysis about unemployment in America that I have ever seen. You can find her at mollysmiddleamerica.blogspot.com.

Quick summary, so visit Molly for the detailed analysis –

When Barack Obama took office, we had already lost 4,462,000 jobs, a million more than the Bush administration had admitted to.

In the next few months, we lost 4,317,000 additional jobs, all before a single Obama policy could take effect.

During the recession, we lost a total of 8,779,000 jobs.

We have gained 4,248,000 private sector jobs since February, 2010.

However, we have lost 503,000 public sector jobs – school teachers, road maintenance, police and fire fighters, library workers – almost all at the state and local level.

The net job gain for the Obama administration is 3,745,000.

We still need 5,034,000 jobs just to break even with what we have lost. That number does not take into consideration the new jobs needed for people who have graduated high school and college or immigrated to this country legally since 2006 when the recession began.

So, the question facing Americans is really very simple – do we want to return to the policies that cost us 8,779,000 jobs or continue with the guy who has helped to restore 3,745,000 of them?

Visit Molly monthly to track the jobs numbers and get that most elusive of things in this election year – real, honest, unbiased facts.

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Ricketts' proposal cover

Pardon me for rolling on the floor, but do you know who besides the President is considered a model of metrosexualism? Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock.

The Romney campaign is officially rejecting the offer of a series of character-assassination ads proposed by billionaire Joe Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs. Let’s get that part out of the way. This has nothing to do with Mitt Romney and everything to do with the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court.

The New York Times uncovered a proposal by Ricketts’ private little SuperPAC, “Ending Spending Action Fund,” to create a $10 million ad campaign, titled The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good. that would portray President Obama as a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” Now, let’s dissect that supposedly defamatory description.

A “metrosexual” is a well-groomed, well-dressed man who smells of Bulgari instead of sweat, has manicured fingernails and…well, in addition to the aforementioned Dwayne Johnson, who was dubbed a metrosexual a few years ago, what comes to mind is the description of Ranger in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. And though the President has embraced his black heritage, the fact is he’s bi-racial. News flash for the right wing, the President’s mother was white and he was raised mostly by his white grandparents.

As for comparing him to Abe Lincoln? That makes no sense. Our 16^th President is a national icon, a martyr to our nation’s unity, immortalized on the Mall, the Great Emancipator….oh, now I get it.

Rickett’s team wants to equate the President with everything a swamp-dwelling knuckle-dragger from East Armpit would supposedly hate – men who are educated and well-groomed, black men and the man who not only freed the slaves but defeated the Confederacy. The Tea Party wants to “take our country back” to the days before the Constitution, to the failed Articles of Confederation that the Southern states tried to restore in 1860, so, let’s equate the President with the man who prevented the proto-tea partiers from fulfilling their vision of a crippled pseudo-nation.

The Ricketts proposal also plans to stress President Obama’s connections to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., who delivered at least two inflammatory speeches in his Chicago church while the First Family were members. The President has written in his autobiography that Rev. Wright brought him to Christ and was a strong spiritual advisor for years. But, not a single accuser has been able to prove that the First Family were in the pews when Wright delivered those two speeches. The Rickett’s proposal calls Wright an espouser of “black liberation theology,” and says “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way.”

Excuse me, but what planet were these people living on four years ago? What rock have they been living under for the past four years? This is like all those right wingers who state that President Obama was not properly vetted four years ago. Really? I thought the only thing they didn’t dig up or elaborate about him was that famous Clinton question, “Boxers or briefs?” Maybe they did and I missed it.

We saw the right wing, and Sarah Palin in particular, pound away at two things about Barack Obama – his brief time working for a community organizing group between college and law school that allowed her to call him a “community organizer” and ignore his twelve years as a university lecturer; and his association with Bill Ayers, the never-convicted “domestic terrorist” who served on an education committee with Obama in Chicago and whose home was the place where Obama announced his first campaign for public office. Now, Ayers was involved in his “domestic terrorism” between 1969 and 1972. He has admitted to participating in several bombings, but when it became known that the Nixon administration had authorized an illegal anti-protest group called COINTEL, all pending federal charges against Ayers were dropped, though his wife turned herself in in 1980 and was fined $1,500 and served three years probation. While Ayers was active, Barack Obama was living in Indonesia with his mother and step-father. When the President knew Ayers, he was a respected university professor and advocate for education reform. But, Sarah Palin often referred to Ayers, who was 64 during the last election, as a domestic terrorist and bosom buddy of the President. But, admitting that the President’s association with Ayers stemmed from them both being members of the University of Chicago faculty would have meant admitting that Obama did something with his life besides being a community organizer.

That’s the way things have gone for the past four years or more. If anyone questionable was in the same stadium with the president twenty years ago, the right wing dug him or her up and used that person to smear the President.

There was an author named Saul Alinsky. Mr. Alinsky is the acknowledged father of grassroots organization and community outreach, and his books are pretty much required reading for anyone in those areas. Dick Armey handed out Alinsky’s books to the people who worked with him in the Tea Party Express. The right wing started out by re-defining Alinsky as a “socialist activist,” which was not true. Mr. Alinsky was completely apolitical and thought socialists were idiots, according to his son. Then, because President Obama had, either in college or working in community organization, read Alinsky’s books, they called the President a “student” of Alinsky, implying that he had sat at Alinsky’s feet in rapt attention. Not bloody hardly. Alinsky died when the President was 11.

What Rickett’s high-priced consulting firm has come up with, the methods they are recommending for discrediting him to America’s voters, are old news. We’ve heard all this nonsense before, over and over and over. Not a day has gone by since Barack Obama took the lead in the Democratic primaries four years ago that Fox News or right wing radio has not repeated some portion of this character assassination — he won because illegal immigrants voted for him, he was born in Kenya and the birth certificates and newspapers notices were an elaborate forgery, he subsidized ACORN’s voter fraud activities, he has stolen money from the taxpayer, he has ties to the New Black Panthers and shut down the federal investigation into their voter intimidation in Philadelphia, he hates America….on and on. There are those who believe this garbage and the rest of us rational human beings who know the facts and know how to use the search engines on our computers to obtain facts. Ten million dollars of smear isn’t going to change our minds about the veracity of these allegations. We know how far the right wing has stretched Six Degrees when it comes to the President and that they have not one honest fact with which to back up their assertion that he is a socialist who is destroying America.

Those who have not made up their minds in this election are those who want to hear the issues being discussed – taxation, the debt, the deficits, economic recovery, plans to “save” social security and medicare, education. They will not be persuaded by character attacks from either side. They don’t care if Mitt Romney’s grandfather had five wives and immigrated to Mexico to avoid anti-polygamy laws in the U. S. All they care about is how Romney would deal with the drug war in Mexico that threatens American citizens.

The proposal presented to Ricketts calls for television ads, full-page newspaper ads, aerial banners during the Democratic Convention, as well as the hiring of an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to offset charges of racism. Okay, attack the President for being too literate, well-groomed and educated, but hire his mirror image to attack him.

Ricketts should fire the firm that prepared this proposal. They wasted his money. Romney’s campaign people are right, there is nothing new here, and what is here would smear Romney worse than it would smear the President. The consultants couldn’t even sell this bullhockey to Glenn Beck. He’s said it all before and it didn’t cost him millions to have his researchers invent these disingenuous fabrications.

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• “Joe Ricketts is a registered independent, a fiscal conservative, and an outspoken critic of the…”(shortformblog.com)

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• Joe Ricketts ‘Rejects’ Jeremiah Wright Smear (towleroad.com)
• Another Right Wing Billionaire Plans Another Race-Baiting Smear Campaign (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• How Toxic Was “The Ricketts Plan” on Jeremiah Wright? This Toxic. (motherjones.com)
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• Romney, The GOP SuperPacs, Joe Ricketts & The Rehashing of Rev Wright | MAJOR FAIL! (3chicspolitico.com)
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Speaker John Boehner, by Donkey Hotey

Yesterday, everyone was buzzing about the underlying threat of House Speaker John Boehner’s remarks about the debt ceiling, though he was busy explaining that he wasn’t threatening default. We were anticipating another case of brinksmanship, with the Republicans using the threat of defaulting on our debt service payments to force concessions from the White House on budget issues or shut down our government. With deadlines on the Bush tax cuts and the automatic cuts to the budget set for January 1, the debt ceiling battle was expected to get seriously vicious.

Sorry, Mr. Boehner – ain’t gonna happen.

It seems the administration has done something very sneaky-nasty. They cut the deficit without the Republicans’ approval or input. They were committed to reducing the deficit by $60 billion in the 2011-12 fiscal year, and at mid-year had already cut it by $50 billion. Whoops. We won’t need to address the debt ceiling until sometime next spring, according to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Sorry, Repubs. You will not have the debt ceiling to kick around before the election.

The Republicans are waxing hysterical about the possibility of the expiration of the Bush tax rates, and particularly over the agreed-to automatic spending which they are trying to sabotage already by transferring the cuts from the military to such things as Meals on Wheels and women’s health. But According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, if there is no new deal for the Republicans to abrogate and those tax cuts expire and the automatic cuts go into effect, our budget deficit problems will end. The ten-year deficits would be cut by over $6.8 trillion and we could start reducing the dollar amount of the national debt.

Letting nothing happen, as in allowing these deadlines to pass without stopping the effects, is not a positive way to get our government budgets under control, but it beats the heck out of letting the Republicans cut domestic spending to the point where people are starving and living on the street while our military expands until it is spending more than the half-the-world’s defense-budget that it already spends. Vastly preferable for those who believe in fairness would be tax reform that removes the thousands of ways companies avoid paying taxes at all and all the ways wealthy individuals reduce their taxes while creating fair, reasonable tax rates. Vastly preferable would be a budget designed to encourage development, repair our crumbling infrastructure and stimulate the regrowth of the middle class. But, barring that, we will probably have to accept the termination of those things that are set to expire on January 1^st or thereabouts.

It must be very disheartening in Republican circles today to realize they don’t have the chance to screw with the economy and destroy the President with the debt ceiling. As they say in the theater, timing is everything, and Secretary Geithner’s timing was pure theater. Bada-boom.

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Senator Sherrod Brown, photo by John Shinkle

Senator Sherrod Brown is the Democratic Senator from Ohio, a state that swung Republican in recent elections and got blessed with John Kasich as their governor. Brown is running for re-election and getting buried in the fundraising department. He somehow managed to incur the wrath of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber refused during the 2010 elections to verify that all the money they were spending on campaign ads was actually American money. There were questions asked about that because the fund they used for super-pacing the campaign also received funds from foreign companies that are wholly owned by governments. The Chamber made a $1.5 million ad buy to run an attack ad against Senator Brown. It was just a part of the $6.5 million in attack ads that have been running all over Ohio. Brown is dealing with the largest funding gap in the nation, and all of the money against him is coming from special interests like the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber put a lot of money into the last elections, and is poised to outspend itself in this one.

It’s not really a mystery why the Chamber wants Brown gone. He has been an outspoken critic of business practices that had caused unemployment and underemployment and tanked our economy. But most importantly, he’s a Democrat. The Chamber wants to assist the Republican Party in taking control of the Senate. There is more effort being put into House and Senate races than in the Romney campaign because Romney has sufficient sources of money, but the real power is in keeping the House and taking the Senate. That way, even if Romney loses, the Republicans would control the government and beat back any attempts to regulate or control business or get tax reform that levels the rates.

Brown is appealing to ordinary citizens to help fund his campaign. There is a dearth of SuperPacs for Democrats. Brown has a good record of service. He has always shown himself to be a man of honor and integrity, things that are sorely missing in Washington these days. He is an articulate spokesperson for liberal and progressive causes in television appearances.

And besides, he’s kind of cute in a rumpled, slept-in-his-hair-and-clothes kind of way. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.

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Deb Fischer and endorser

There were three Tea Party “favorites” vying for the chance to prevent former Governor Bob Kerrey taking retiring Senator Ben Nelson’s seat. Though Attorney General Jon Bruning was the leader last week, it was State Senator Deb Fischer who won the race yesterday.

Bruning had flunked the “conservative purity” test because of liberal positions he held in college. State Treasurer Don Stenberg had the right credentials, but was behind Bruning in money. The Club for Growth and Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund had started providing more funding for Stenberg, but support for him never really ignited. Then Fischer picked up two influential endorsements – Herman Cain and Sarah Palin. Until the endorsements, Bruning had pretty much ignored her and all the experts put her too far from striking distance to Bruning to even consider a serious candidate.

Though Cain’s and Palin’s endorsements may have pushed Fischer into the candidacy, it is helpful to remember that Palin had a 35% loss record for her endorsements two years ago. Bob Kerrey was Nebraska’s governor and senator in the past, but he has lived in New York for the past twenty years. Though he has a good record in the state, it is from a time when Republicans were more centrist and more open to compromise. Nebraska has proven to be very right wing in recent years, especially under the governorship of Sam Brownback. On the other hand, Fischer had never competed in a statewide race of any kind before this primary and has little name recognition.

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Well, he ought to know. He and his party are responsible for the inaction.

He then went on to say, “I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limmit increase.” Principle? I’m amazed the man doesn’t choke on the word. We are talking here about a man who had to be admonished by the House leadership years ago that it was truly bad form to walk around the chamber handing out lobbyist checks to his colleagues and who lived for years in an apartment subsidized by lobbyists.

In 2011, the debt ceiling showdown got the Republicans $900 billion in immediate cuts and $1.2 trillion in triggered cuts, and they have reneged on the deal. Instead of the across-the-board cuts they agreed to, they have decided to shift all the cuts to social programs (eliminating Meals-on-Wheels and health care for women) and increase spending for the military, restoring things and adding things the Pentagon doesn’t want or need.

But the debt ceiling battle drove down President Obama’s approval ratings because the Republicans are so good at controlling the message through their media partners at Fox News and talk radio. Those who believe in the Republican message are fairly ignorant about the realities of economics or taxation or our national credit rating.

Our credit rating was downgraded because of the last debt ceiling battle. Or was it? I looked up the meaning of those ratings and guess what? Being downgraded from a AAA to a AAA- or a AA+ is not a downgrade. A downgrade is being dropped into the Bs, not staying in the As.

I started school when grades were letters, not numbers. Getting an A+, an A or an A- was all of a kind. The difference was negligible. That’s why we switched to number grades. There are three credit ratings agencies, Moody’s, Standard’s and Poors, and Fitch. They use different letter designations to say the same thing. Everything above a AA- or an Aa3 is a nation with a strong to extremely strong ability to pay interest on its bonds. We were downgraded from “extremely strong” to “very strong” by one agency. The rating didn’t increase the interest we pay on our bonds or make investors back away from buying American bonds. It just made good press for the Republicans who never bother to explain facts to their faithful bobbleheads.

And don’t ever try to explain national debt to a conservative. The right wing media and the Republican Party are talking dollar amounts to deflect understanding of the facts. They are screaming “The Sky Is Falling! Our National Debt Is $16 TRILLION!” National debts are never measured in dollars or euros or yen. They are measured as a ratio to gross domestic product, meaning they are measured against the total value of goods and services produced in a country which is a pretty good indicator of a nation’s ability to repay the debt or at least make the interest payments on it.

Here’s a few national debt ratios, for comparison — Luxembourg, 3443% of GDP; Ireland, 1165% of GDP; the United Kingdom, 400% of GDP; and the United States? Well, we’re floating around 99% to 100% and actually decreasing as our GDP rises with the recovery. If we were a European Union nation, we would rank 19^th of 26 nations. In 1946, our national debt was 130% of GDP.

But Boehner will put up a fight over the debt ceiling, not because it is good fiscal policy or because our national debt situation is a crisis, but because the Republican Party has invented this crisis to win power, not to aid the nation in any way. The Republicans didn’t give a shit about deficits or the national debt when Reagan doubled the national debt or when Bush doubled it again. They didn’t demand spending cuts to offset spending when Bush took two wars and a drug benefit off the books and pretended we weren’t paying for them.

Sometime in the past few days I wasn’t completely paying attention when someone on MSNBC said that Americans are prone to collective amnesia. I’m not sure Americans are, but Republicans definitely are. Maybe it goes with all that “low effort thinking” they do.

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La Bandera de la Hispanidad, flag for Hispanic Americans, adopted at the 1933 Pan-American Conference

Originally published May 10, 2012

Americans love stereotypes. You know them from films – the Middle Easterner is a terrorist, the Hispanic is an illegal lay-about, the black is a gangbanger, Italians are Mafioso, Jews are money-grubbers. Movies are difficult enough to live with because they subtly color public opinion. When stereotypes are applied to ordinary citizens in the political arena, they lead to huge campaign mistakes.

Take President Obama’s statement yesterday that he personally supports gay marriage. The stereotype of Hispanics and the conventional wisdom it creates says that his support of gays will diminish his support among Hispanics because they are socially conservative and deeply Catholic.

Both the conventional wisdom and the stereotype are wrong. La Raza commissioned a poll on this subject and found that 54% of Hispanics support gay marriage and among those Hispanics who voted in the 2004 and 2008 elections, the number jumps to 65%. So much for stereotypes.

There are more important issues for Hispanics in this election, and more important issues for the campaigns to concentrate on.

Top of the list for Hispanics is not so much immigration reform as the way immigration and illegal immigration is being used to harass and harm the Hispanic population. While some are not happy with the deportation record of the Obama administration, they are more unhappy with “papers please” laws and inequalities in the law between states and industries. One of the nastier ways that the Bush administration punished New England’s moderate Republicans and the party defector, Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, was to exclude dairy farms from the guest worker programs, so small family dairy farms cannot legally hire foreigners to work the farms. Shrimp and chicken processors could bring in hundreds of Mexicans to work their lines, but dairy farmers couldn’t bring in a few Mexicans to muck the barns and milk the cows. Whereas states like Arizona want cops to stop every vehicle containing anyone who looks Hispanic, states with small dairy farms like Vermont tell their cops not to stop Hispanics.

Hispanics want a unity of laws and requirements across the country. They want recognition that some of them have been here for decades and have raised very American children who want to go to college and want to enlist in the military. The Dream Act is important to Hispanic voters.

Controlling the drug trade and the gangs is important in the Hispanic community, but the harassment of Hispanics has led to distrust of law enforcement that is seriously impacting efforts to control and contain unlawful activity. Like all immigrants to America for the past two centuries, Hispanics want equal opportunity for their children, but the culture of racial hatred that the right wing has fostered is making it harder for Hispanic children in school, no matter how many generations their families have been on this side of the Rio Grande. Many of those Hispanics who have deep roots in the United States want better opportunities for assimilation without loss of culture for more recent immigrants.

The issues are complex, but the bottom line is simple. There are 53 million legal Hispanic immigrants and native-born Hispanic-Americans. They want fair laws and equal opportunities. They don’t want their lives damaged by a political party that is buying bigots’ votes by limiting their rights and painting them as parasites on American culture. They are damned tired of a country that is overboard about Mexican food and has taken a small Mexican holiday and turned it into a second St. Patrick’s Day-style excuse for others to get drunk, while punishing the people for their heritage and color. They have been fighting for equality and respect ever since white Southerners decided they couldn’t live with Mexico’s anti-slavery laws and staged a revolution in Texas, and a rogue general invaded California without Congressional or Presidential approval. And the party that has passed the laws and built their base on hatred of Hispanics is the Republican Party. A simple statement from the President about his personal views on gay rights does not negate all the harm that the Republican Party has caused Hispanics, and no Hispanic or Latino politician who supports the party’s platform and actions is going to change the balance. There are two groups of Americans, groups whose roots stretch back before the arrival of the Europeans, who have yet to achieve equality and respect in the nation that was created on their land and by conquering their ancestors. Native Americans and Hispanics have seen their fights for equality pushed aside by the battles for African-American rights and even gay rights. Together they represent 17.5% of our population, 55 million human beings who deserve all the rights, privileges, responsibilities and respect demanded by all Americans.

One religio-social issue will not override the basic issue of human and civil rights.

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• Barack Obama shift on gay marriage energizes young Hispanic immigration activists(miamiherald.typepad.com)

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• New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez on Romney: ‘Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign’(abcnews.go.com)

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Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett

Originally published May 8, 2012

May 8, 11:05 p.m. EDT: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is projected by The Washington Post to go for the rematch against Governor Scott Walker next month in the Wisconsin recall election on June 5.

In 2010, Barrett lost to Walker 52.25% to 46.48%. Ever since last year’s showdown over Walker’s union busting, one of the most frequently heard thing in Wisconsin has been “I would vote for Barrett if the election were held again.” Now, Wisconsinites get to put their ballots where their mouths have been.

All the polls have indicated that Barrett has a good chance to unseat Walker, turning one of the Republican Party’s brightest “rising stars” into a crashing meteorite. Walker’s budget, which took $1 billion from municipalities and counties to give $1 billion in tax cuts to the rich, hurt a lot of the small, rural towns that voted for him 18 months ago. During the last recall election, Ed Schultz of MSNBC interviewed a young man from northern Wisconsin who told how his small town’s school had to lay off half its personnel. That’s one town that has a big bone to pick with Scott Walker, and they will get their chance to pick it in just 28 days.

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• Tom Barrett’s wife, Kris, accused of unethical political activity(fox6now.com)

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• Scott Walker Up By 9 Points in Latest Wisconsin Poll (thegatewaypundit.com)
• Wisconsin Recall Showdown Decided: Scott Walker to Face Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (alternet.org)

By Donkey Hotey, Flickr

The April jobs numbers have been released. Are they “good for the President” – are they “good for Romney”? Both sides are spinning them to present their view on the recovery.

The economy only created 115,000 jobs in April. It was not a complete surprise. Job creation was down in March as well. Part of the reason was the mild winter. It was possible to hire in February the people who would normally have been hired in March and April.

As “disappointing” as the job creation number is, the other side is the unemployment rate. It fell to 8.1%. So, the administration is saying, “yes, it’s disappointing, but jobs are being created,” and Mitt Romney is saying, “We should be creating 500,000 jobs a month.” Well, maybe we could, if the Republicans would acknowledge that infrastructure spending not only creates jobs for road and bridge builders, but for suppliers and grocery stores and clothiers and tire stores. It would have been a big help if Congress had managed to include a provision in the stimulus bill that limited the use of the funds to infrastructure, instead of “honoring” the rights of states to use it at their discretion. Too many of them used it to plug their budget holes. My state, the only one without a balanced budget amendment, looked at the money and said “Whoopee, let’s build a bridge!” or two or five, and that was before Tropical Storm Irene took out a couple hundred roads and dozens of bridges. And then the lege went back and balanced the budget more or less with our real, normal money. By the way, our unemployment rate is the fifth lowest in America at 4.9%, damned close to the 4% Romney says would be the only rate worth celebrating, and below the 5% that some economist call “full employment.”

Gallup has issued a series of graphs and reports about job creation and loss since January, 2008. They are rather interesting.

Gallup created something they call the Job Creation Index. It is figured by comparing hiring with firing across the entire economy and separated into private and public sector employment. It was +18 in March and +20 in April. The highest they have ever recorded was a +26.

Comparing hiring and firing numbers, the “hiring” figure is at 36%, the highest since August, 2008, and the “letting go” figure is 16%, the lowest since July, 2008.

Regionally, the South is creating the most jobs, with an April Job Creation Index of +23. The Index is +21 in the Midwest, +18 in the West and +16 in the East.

The West has seen the best improvement in the index, up 9 point, while the South has risen 8 points, The Midwest 6 points and the East 3 points.

The employment story is different for public sector workers. The private sector Index was +25 in April, but the public sector Index was -7. No real surprise there. Republicans have gone out of their way to “balance budgets” but cutting public sector workforces. Seems they don’t understand that unemployed is unemployed no matter what one worked at before the pink slip.

All areas of government have seen job losses since late 2011. The Federal government Index in April was -16, state Index -3 and local Index -1.

Gallup’s graphs are a nice visual of the economy and the employment situation, but are missing some very important data, like what kinds of jobs were created or lost and what kind of wages did those jobs pay. If a person loses a $50,000 job and can only find a $25,000 job, that’s almost as bad as not getting hired. One thing that needs to be remembered in all the confusing statistics about jobs is this….the median income in America, the point where half of us earn more and half earn less, has been dropping for a decade. Does it really benefit the economy if nearly all of us have jobs, but they are at minimum wage? As economists have said since the field began, only with a strong middle class can a nation’s economy be strong. Ours is wasting away in the name of “increased productivity” and “right to work” and companies that move from high-wage states to low-wage ones.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (November 13, by Luigi Novi)

Define “education reform.” Most of us agree that the greatest nation on earth should not be scoring behind almost every other industrialized nation in education. We have been having this debate since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957. For 55 years, we have tried every stupid idea that came down the road, all the while pouring untold tens of thousands of dollars into funding repetitive “studies” at university that were supposed to tell us what to do to improve American education. Really, how many times do we have to pay to study the impact of teacher expectation on student performance?

Now, the Republicans are claiming that they are the champions of education reform. We have the answer! At least according to Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. We have the Magic Solution To American Education Reform! Give Us Your Money!

At the American Federation for Children and the Alliance for School Choice policy summit in Jersey City on Thursday, Christie alleged that the answer to America’s education problems was to do what his audience wants – provide government subsidies for private schools in the form of “vouchers” for poor children to attend private schools. After all, he claimed, it is Republican governors who have done exactly that – Christie, Louisiana’s Jindal, Indiana’s Daniels have all pushed voucher systems to put “poor kids” in private schools of their parents’ choosing.

States have limited funds for education, and those funds have been shrinking in the past few years. So, what the Republicans are offering for education reform is the diversion of $10,000 to pay one child’s tuition at a private school instead of repairing the roof of an elementary school which serves 300. Or, using the more modest figure most Republicans use, let’s take $5,000 and pay for one child instead of replacing toilets in a high school or removing mold in a middle school. And they are touting this idea with very limited evidence that it benefits the most number of students for the dollar spent. They offer no proof that vouchering can help children with social, family or learning problems. Private schools rarely want the kid with the addict mother who supplements her income with prostitution and who is dressed by Goodwill. Our public schools are supposed to be the first line of identification of children at risk. Diverting funds from public schools so a handful of high-achieving students can escape, just digs the hole deeper for others. We can, and in many school systems do, serve our high-achieving students very well without harming those most in need of help.

My children have attended public schools in three states, and I attended in two. I have taught in two states, in pre-school in Vermont and as a 12-grade substitute in Florida. A few small observations….

When it comes to education, everyone is talking at each other and no one is listening to each other. Everyone focuses on improving a specific area, without thinking of how action in one area impacts another. A few parents have had too much influence, often with disastrous results, and not enough parents are involved. Very, very few education experts have ever looked at the whole picture and seen comprehensive solutions.

Two men in the 1970s did the best possible thing. They picked a handful of very successful public schools and found out what they had in common. If we won’t look back to the research of Ron Edmunds and Peter Mortimer, then let’s do the whole damned thing again. The results will be the same. Every school that has ever been profiled on the evening news as being successful shares the traits Edmunds and Mortimer found – charismatic leadership, high teacher and administrative expectation, clear goals, a well-maintained facility, parental involvement. It’s not freaking rocket science.

Improving educational opportunity for a few, using government money to subsidize private schools, is not educational reform. It’s harming the many to benefit the few. But, that’s the Republican mantra, isn’t it? All for the few and none for the rest.

Related articles

• Striking new tone, Chris Christie says education reform is led by GOP(abcnews.go.com)

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• Newark Mayor Cory Booker touts scholarship bill that would allow some students to attend private school(nj.com)

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• Getting students out of failing public schools is Gov. Christie’s top priority, he says(nj.com)

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• Gov. Christie: NJEA leaders are ‘bullies’ that use a ‘$130 million slushfund’ (nj.com)
• GOP governor candidates favor school choice; Democrats disagree (billingsgazette.com)

2002 Olympic commemorative pin

This was another case of Mitt Romney’s advisors missing the mark. They let him tell a story with a really bad ending.

At a fundraiser in Virginia Thursday night, Romney was talking about his experience running the Salt Lake City Olympic Games in 2002. He told about being concerned about holding the games after 9-11 and wanted something to acknowledge the national tragedy without putting a pall on the games. “And so, we created a little pin and we notified people that we’re now going to be selling these pins and the proceeds are going to go [to charity]… I just remember going downstaris after it was announced – we were in a big, tall skyscraper in Salt Lake City, and it must have been next door I think where they were selling these pins, and there was line all the way down the street.” The pins showed a stylized American flag with the Olympic logo in the star and said “We Stand United” on them.

Trouble is, they were made in China.

And this little faux pas on the same day that the Obama campaign put out an ad about Romney at Bain Capital “ship[ping] American jobs to places like Mexico and China,” and Bain still outsourcing while Romney was governor of the state ranked 47^th in job creation and when his leading economic advisor, Greg Mankiw, says that outsourcing is a good thing.

It was not a good day for the Republican National Committee either. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times found out that a conference call hosted by the RNC to attack the president for high unemployment was hosted by a Philippine subcontractor of Verizon.

The outsourcing of American jobs is a major issue for voters. The Romney campaign and the RNC seem blissfully unaware of this. Calling them “out of touch” is too mild.

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I guess I should explain first what a Vermont Town Meeting is. On the first Tuesday in March, Vermonters in the smaller towns assemble to vote on the town’s budget, elect town officials, and conduct the town’s business. It is democracy in its purest form. You will find similar town meetings in New Hampshire, but in fewer towns. It is real governance, not the campaign stops that are called Town Meetings these days. Now that we have that out of the way….

On Town Meeting Day, H. Brooke Paige approached the citizens of his hometown of Washington, Vermont, with the petition he needed to get on the ballot. He needed just 50 signatures. He got 101 of the 135 voters in attendance. They felt the same way Paige does, that no one should be elected unopposed, that there should at least be a debate on the issues. So, Republicans, Democrats and Independents all signed Paige’s petition. That’s Vermonters for you. We love Bernie to death, admire his passion for his constituents, but we acknowledge that he’s a bit over-the-top on some issues. From time to time, we would like to remind him that there is something to be gained in moderation and compromise, and that he doesn’t always have to yell to be heard.

Moderation and compromise. That ought to be Vermont’s motto. We tend to elect mixed governments on purpose, though in recent years, with the rise of the Tea Party in the rest of the country, we have swung very Democratic in Vermont. But Vermont remains the only state with no balanced budget amendment, and a budget that usually comes much closer to balanced than those states that have them. Though we have had a few Tea Partiers come out of the woodwork, and have a handful of representatives with ties to ALEC, our Republicans tend to be moderates, old-fashioned Republicans whose ideas precede even those of Reagan.

Brooke Paige is that kind of Republican, more Javits, Rockefeller and Eisenhower than Bush. He readily acknowledges the power of the big pharmaceutical companies have overpowered the needs of Americans and the problems of the cost of our healthcare delivery. He advocates a form of “networking” with low-cost and free clinics acting as satellites to hospitals to divert the uninsured from emergency rooms. Frankly, our experiences with such an idea in my hometown have led us to believe that this idea, while basically good, needs some major tweaking. There is too much reliance on physician surrogates and not enough involvement by physicians in critical care decisions. But the basics of the idea are good. We just need more doctors in this country willing to participate in such a program.  See – both sides can agree on an idea, even if for different reasons. 

Humana HMO used to run such a program in Brandon, Florida. It was extremely good. It attracted newly graduated doctors who wanted time to pay down their student loans before trying to establish private practices and older doctors who wanted out from the burdens of running such practices.

Paige made a good case for reforming the insurance system, but not the health insurance system. His point was the cost of malpractice insurance was driving up the cost of health care. Good point. Doctors pay enormous premiums for malpractice insurance, among the highest are those paid by obstetricians. Even nurses are getting hit with having to carry a million dollars in malpractice insurance. The insurance industry claims these policies are needed because of exorbitant awards made in malpractice cases. Hospitals and doctors claim that they have to order extraordinary tests to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits. Having been a legal secretary in the dark ages, I can tell you that there would be fewer malpractice cases if the medical profession did a better job of policing their own. No doctor should be allowed to continue practicing after having settled a half-dozen cases out-of-court. There should not be a system in place that protects bad doctors because the state medical board is not informed of pending lawsuits.  See — we agree on this one as well, only disagreeing when right wingers insist that there has to be tort reform without protections for patients. 

I would love to include a picture of Mr. Paige in this story, but I can’t find one. Even the state GOP hasn’t posted one. That’s sad, really. Mr. Paige told me that he expects he will not get enough donations to run any television ads, but maybe enough to run a couple of ads in the weekly free newspapers, you know, the local “Shopper.” So far, his biggest contributor has been his mother, who gave him $100. Mr. Paige is under 6 feet tall, a bit overweight (more Gingrich than Christie) and much better dressed than Bernie, who somehow manages to always look like he slept in his suits. He was a small business owner who commuted between a chosen home in Vermont and his businesses in Philadelphia. His campaign headquarters is his home and the address is P.O. Box 41, Washington, Vermont 05675.

I’ll still be voting for Bernie, but it was nice to meet a Republican who understands the self-destructiveness of his own party, who thinks John McCain should have asked Kay Bailey Hutchison to be his running mate instead of Sarah Palin if he wanted a female running mate, who believes in bi-partisan co-operation and compromise. I expect this to be Pat Leahy’s final term, so maybe Mr. Paige might consider running for Congress in 2016. Our Congressman Peter Welch will undoubtedly be running for Pat’s seat, leaving the house seat open. Vermonters tend to think of being in the House as on-th-job training for the Senate. Electing Mr. Paige would restore Vermont’s three-party balance in Washington.

The Federal government could use more than a few moderate Republicans and the last thing this country needs is for New England’s moderate Republicans to just give up, the way Olympia Snowe has. If they believe in their party and the idea that bi–partisan co-operation has produced some of the best ideas in our history, then they should be fighting for the soul of their party, not going toes-up.

On the other hand, speaking as a Democratic-leaning Independent, the more the Republicans keep moving to the right, the more they turn off moderate Americans, so maybe those moderate Republicans should just join the moderate, center-left party that still appreciates their positions – the Democrats. As several old-time politicians have said since 2000, “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me.”

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Newt Gingrich by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons, one last time.

Somewhere in Georgia, Marianne Gingrich is laughing her butt off. Didn’t Newt tell her that Callista would take him to the White House? Wasn’t that the reason he ditched wife #2 for the plastic trophy wife?

Well, at least she got him as far as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

I couldn’t help but thinking that all the “I’ll announce my withdrawal….” announcements over the past week were a desperate cry for someone to beg him to stay in the race. Sorry, no one co-operated, not even Shelton Adelman.

So, there is only one primary candidate left to oppose Mitt Romney – Ron Paul. Forgot about him, didn’t you? Everyone always does. This isn’t Paul’s first time at the dance, but it will probably be his last. In four years, we can expect his son Rand Paul to decide if he will be running to keep his Senate seat (where he has positioned himself as Jim DeMint’s “second” in filibustering) or take up the mantle of libertarianism and run equally fruitless campaigns that serve to get the libertarian agenda into discussion among the right wing.

So, Newt, farewell, adieu, arrivederci, sayonara, vayos con Dios…and this time, could you please just stay gone?

"Free Republic's" Jim Robinson meeting Sarah Palin

Free Republic is a set of on-line message boards where conservatives can gather and bitch about libturds, libtards and the Kenyan-Muslim-Marxist-traitor in the White House. And this week, the founder banned all Romney supporters from the site.

In an e-mail to Politico, Jim Robinson explained that Romney is not reflective of Free Republic’s “pro-life, pro-family, pro-small government, pro-constitution, pro-liberty” ideology. He then went on to slam Romney on every one of those points, finally saying that Romney has “no core values.” In May, Robinson posted that “I’d rather shut the place down than be involved in any effort to install abortionist/gay rights pushing RINOS like Romney or Giuliani into the White House! Do NOT push this crap on FR. Take your business elsewhere!!” Wow. That’s harsh.

Free Republic bans liberals and “other enemies of the constitution” from posting on their site. God forbid they should allow free discussion or debate. Gee, this libtard has enough respect for the Constitution to at least capitalize it whenever I write it, unlike this Robinson guy.

According to Mitt Romney Central, Free Republic isn’t the only conservative site that bans Romney posters. RedState.com does as well.

Warms the heart, doesn’t it? Karl Rove may want to rethink that election map projection of his if deeply committed conservatives won’t even listen to Romney’s people.

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Governor Scott Walker

The Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin’s Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper, headlined the state’s job numbers. They are not good. In the past twelve months, under Governor Scott Walker, the state has lost 6,100 private sector jobs and laid off 17,800 government employees. Only Mississippi and Rhode Island lost 6,000 private sector jobs in the past 12 months, and no state had job losses near Wisconsin’s.

The numbers are easily manipulated. Wisconsin has gained 20,000 private sector jobs in January and February, but lost 4,300 in March, so the net gain was 15,700. Those 15,700 jobs were not a reclamation of the 23,900 that were lost. The state is still 8,000 jobs in the hole. The unemployment numbers are down,from 7.6% to 6.8% over 18 months, but mostly through people losing unemployment benefits, ceasing to look for work or taking jobs way below their former pay scales. The governor is touting the positive end of those numbers as he fights the recall election, while his opponents are pushing the negative numbers. They are also reminding Wisconsin’s voters that Walker was elected on a pledge to bring 250,000 jobs to their state, not lose the greatest number in America.

But it’s not just the numbers that matter here. It’s the who those numbers represent and what those numbers have meant for towns and cities.

Those 17,800 laid off government workers are teachers, firefighters, police, road workers, pothole fillers, office workers who process the paperwork of life. They protect homes and people, educate children, keep towns and cities functioning to provide the services we cannot provide for ourselves, provide those things we need as a society. That is what government is – the means to pool our resources to benefit all people at the lowest cost.

That sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? How can government be the most economical way to do things? Think about this a minute….what if you had to hire someone to teach your children, or had to pay tuition to put them in private schools? That was life in South Korea forty years ago. Only the rich could afford to educate their children. Boys had first place in schools because parents thought they needed the educations to support families. South Korea realized that they were never going to be anything but a third world country if they didn’t adopt a public education system. They have risen to be one of the top rated systems in the world.

Could you afford to hire a judge and jury to settle your legal problems? And what about criminal cases – who would decide guilt or innocence if a judge and jury had to privately hired?

What if you had to hire someone to protect your business or your home? Ever heard of a protection racket? That’s when some thugs come to a business and say, “we’ll protect you or we will destroy you.” Private policing has a history of being corrupt and criminal. What about that street in front of your house? What if each section of it were the responsibility for it were delegated to the houses facing it? Could you afford to fill the potholes, repave every few years? Can you afford to build a bridge?

So, Wisconsin has lost 17,800 of the people who provided pooled services at a pooled cost. For this, Walker cut $1 billion in taxes for the rich, those guys who really can afford private schools and private police and private roads.

Walker can twist the employment numbers any way he wants, and the right wing media in Wisconsin will sell his version of what is going on and be believed by those who only engage in low effort thinking, people who confine their information gathering to the right wing media that has taught them not to trust any other source. Wisconsinites need every source of facts they have, and should be grateful for people like the reporters at the Journal Sentinel. Facts should always be able to trump propaganda. That’s why journalists are protected under the First Amendment.

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The Minnesota Republican Party believes that while homeowners should not have the right to negotiate their indebtedness, the Party should, especially the eight months in back rent they owe on their headquarters. They have received an eviction notice on their offices.

The Party owes $1.2 million to vendors, $700,000 in legal fees from the gubernatorial election recount and another $100,000 in other debts. Chairman Pat Shortridge said, “We’re not going to be evicted.” The Party is “continuing to negotiate on the back payments as well as on a lease that better fits both our space needs and our budget.”

Instead of dealing with the needs of Minnesotans, the party passed an unneeded, ALEC-written voter ID law.

This is the party that thinks it can manage our state and Federal budgets, right? This is the party that preaches about states and the Federal government not living above their means, right? Yeah, right. Decades ago, the Republicans labeled the Democrats the “tax and spend party.” The Republicans have earned the label “the borrow and spend party.” Minnesota’s party seems to have run out of people to borrow from.

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Since the 1970s about 12 million Mexicans have immigrated to the United States, about half of them illegally. But, in the past five years, the influx has slowed and may now be reversing.

Three factors seem to be at play – the weakened U. S. job market, increased border patrols and a decline in the Mexican birth rate. There are also increased dangers in crossing because the older, safer routes are being avoided.

There are estimated to be 11.2 million illegal immigrants in America. Guess what? Only half of them came from Mexico! That information alone is worth this report.

In 2011, there were 6.1 million Mexican illegals in the United States, down from 7 million in 2007. Legal immigration from Mexico rose from 5.6 million in 2007 to only 5.8 million in 2011. The math tells the tale – 900,000 illegals have gone home and only 200,000 legals have arrived. Part of that 900,000 is obviously the increased number of deportations since President Obama took office, nearly 500,000 in 2011 alone, so the Pew Center’s assumption that these people have just gone home may be erroneous. They may have gone home involuntarily.

Around 29% of all current U.S. immigrants are from Mexico. The second largest group, 4.5%, come from India. It is an imbalance that our immigration laws were supposed to prevent, but a system that fixes quotas based on the number of people from a particular country who are already here was bound to tilt unfairly in favor of Mexicans, who not only were in the Southwest first, but who crossed and recrossed the border with almost no controls for decades. The border region actually developed its own subculture.

The most ignored aspect of the Mexican migration is what preceded the anti-immigrant fervor. It parallels conditions on the Canadian border, so the experiences and history here offer an insight. My mother-in-law’s parents crossed the border twice a year – spring and fall. They worked seasonally in the hotel industry, winters in New England and summers in Canada. By the time they settled in Vermont, their oldest daughter was old enough to choose to remain in Canada. Until 2001, the Canadian border wasn’t just porous, it was practically non-existent. People didn’t bother going out of their way to an official border crossing, they just used the nearest crow-flies road. Our earliest immigration laws didn’t even mention Canadians and Mexicans, but were aimed first at Asians and then at Europeans. The first Europeans to explore the Mississippi valley, to explore the Rocky Mountains, were Canadians. The first Europeans to settle the Great Lakes were Canadians. There was a huge trading network created out of Montréal, through the Great Lakes into the Midwest and Colorado, south to Missouri and finally to Louisiana after the Canadians found out how to get in to the Mississippi and not just out of it. Go to the other end of Canada, and you find Alaskans like the Palins who crossed into Canada for health care from Alaskan towns that lacked good medical facilities. There is over 350 years of Canadians and Americans treating the border as an imaginary line that had no impact on their lives. People still commute to jobs in the other country, though it’s a lot harder these days.

Then, there are the First Nations, the Native Americans. The border cut through their historical and traditional territories. There is at least one reservation that straddles the border in New York State (pain in the ass for controlling cigarette smuggling). As far as they were concerned, the “border” was a European thing that had no reality in their lives for centuries.

Things along the Mexican border were less civilized than along the northern tier. There were a couple of wars that carved off parts of Mexico and made them American. There were a couple of treaties to straighten out the border, but through it all, there was a vagueness about the absolutism of the border…until 2001.

From time to time, we have tried to deal with the sheer number of Mexican immigrants with amnesties and guest worker programs, but things didn’t get down-right hysterical until the economy collapsed in 2008. Then, just as has happened every time there has been a bad recession, the first people to be blamed were immigrants. Re-watch Gangs of New York sometime and remember that what fueled the anti-Irish hatred was a trio of recessions, 1847-8, 1853-4 and 1857, which coincided with the Great Famine in Ireland in 1845-52 and the mass migration of Irish to America. You can see the same pattern with other recessions and other immigrant groups. This time, it was the Mexicans who took the brunt of the resentments and scapegoating.

There are still over six million illegal Mexican immigrants in America, but the Pew Hispanic Center has made liars of the Republican Party and the right wing media. We are not being overrun. Quite the contrary, this administration is making real progress at easing our illegal immigrant problem.

Thanks, Pew. Now, can you make sure factcheck.org has a copy of your report?

Related articles

• Report: Immigration From Mexico To U.S. Comes To Standstill(npr.org)

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• Arizona and Immigration(soapbox4all.wordpress.com)

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• Coming To A Border Near You: Tanks And RPGs (lezgetreal.com)
• Arizona “Papers Please” Law Hits Supreme Court This Week (lezgetreal.com)
• Obama Regime Withdrawing Troops…from Mexican Border (mikesright.wordpress.com)
• Response to Marco Rubio’s Comments on The Dream Act (socyberty.com)
• Mexican Migration Reaches “Net Zero” In United States (inquisitr.com)

“Today we are redoubling our efforts on the economic front, a priority that has been the hallmark of our organization for decades. Fostering the exchange of pro-growth, solutions-oriented ideas is precisely why ALEC exists.

“To that end, our legislative board last week unanimously agreed to further our work on policies that will help spur innovation and competitiveness across the country.

“We are refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles, and have made changes internally to reflect this renewed focus.

“We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy. The remaining budgetary and economic issues will be reassigned.

“While we recognize there are other critical, non-economic issues that are vitally important to millions of Americans, we believe we must concentrate on initiatives that spur competitiveness and innovation and put more Americans back to work.

“Our free-market, limited government, pro-growth policies are the reason ALEC enjoys the support of legislators on both sides of the aisle and in all 50 states. ALEC members are interested in solutions that put the American economy back on track. This is our mission, and it is what distinguishes us.”

So, what does all that gobbledygook mean? It means that the efforts of groups like Color of Change to get corporations to withdraw their support of ALEC has been successful. Among the supporters who have pulled out are PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, Intuit, Wendy’s, Mars Inc. and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ALEC has been exposed, first by the Center for Media and Democracy, as the source of many state legislative efforts to pass bills that limit voting rights (that was one of the early objectives of the group.) and of the “stand your ground” laws that have become so controversial in the past few weeks. Nothing works faster to convince a corporation to change its policies like threatening their bottom line, and food is a very easy target for boycotts.

The “economic issues” that ALEC is vowing to concentrate on include union busting, removing or reducing minimum wage laws, right-to-work laws, and just about anything that will benefit corporations and harm workers.

The effort to get companies to pull out support of ALEC was conducted with e-mail and social media campaigns and the lodging of consumer opinions. Now, the effort needs to concentrate on cutting off ALEC from our legislatures. We want laws that originate in our states and in the minds of our states’ citizens, not laws ready-made by outside interests. We need to get that message to the member of our state legislatures that belong to ALEC.

At the ALEC entry on Wikipedia, you will find a list of the state chairmen for each state. I was very disappointed to find that Vermont State Senator Kevin Mullin was on the list. He’s the only Republican I’ve voted for in years.

ALEC’s membership includes more than 2,000 state legislators. 85 members of Congress, 14 former or sitting governors and approximately 300 private sector members, from corporations and foundations. You can find the complete list at

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ALEC_Politicians

ALEC also has a total of 19 international partners, including five members of foreign governments and 14 members of the European Union Parliament. That’s hysterically funny, really, since Republicans are so hot-and-bothered about “taking back our country.”

One small afterthought….when we post our stories to the site, we receive a list of other people who have covered this story.  On ALEC, all but two will be stories from Fox stations.  That says a lot about where ALEC is supported and how much it is still under the mainstream media’s radar.

Related articles

• Those Damn Dirty Apes: Progressives see Victory with ALEC Disbanding Non-Economic Task Force(wyldgoose.wordpress.com)

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• ALEC eliminates task force on social issues (rawstory.com)
• Kraft Pulls Out Of ALEC (lezgetreal.com)

Governor Scott Walker, photo by AP

Somedays, you have to wonder if Governor Scott Walker is surrounded by total nincompoops for election advisors or if he is one. After going on Fox News to whine about all the “out-of-state money” from national unions being used to unseat him, he keeps going out-of-state to solicit support and donations. It’s a little hard to make Wisconsinites upset about out-of-state money when you keep being filmed begging for it yourself.

Walker’s latest venue is the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in St. Louis, Missouri. It is Walker’s second best kind of crowd, after anti-union billionaires. Before he spoke, Walker was awarded an NRA “Defender of Freedom” award, which he got for making Wisconsin the 49^th state to have a concealed carry with permit law. (By the way, Vermont, the “most socialist-libtard state in the Union” has no gun control laws except the Federal ones.) Wisconsin has a 48-hour waiting period on handguns and a permit is required for concealed carry.

Walker told an audience of about 5,500 in the Edward Jones Dome that “I am proud to have a rifle, a shotgun and even a bow.” The NRA claims that 70,000 people will attend their convention this weekend.

Walker spoke on Friday, before Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, failed candidate Newt Gingrich and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. The NRA is considered pure Republican territory, though Democratic Presidential candidates have been known to make the attempt at wooing them. The present position in the Republican Party is that President Obama is coming to take their guns away, any day now, just you wait, it’s going to happen, don’t be fooled by the fact that he’s never said buttkiss about gun control not even after that little incident in Tucson, no sirree, he’s coming to take them away.

Walker did his usual routine, telling the crowd, “The advocates of big government view me as a threat. They want to take me out. Our opponents are targeting me because I stand in their way of getting their hands on money and power.” No, not really. They are targeting him because he gave away a billion dollars in tax cuts to his supporters while cutting a billion dollars out of education, roads, police departments, fire departments and, just incidentally, trying to limit voting rights and destroy public sector unions. But, never let a few facts get in the way of begging for money from anyone dumb enough to hand it over. After all, if it doesn’t pay for his recall election, it can always go to his legal defense fund for the ethics investigation that’s closing in on him.

Most politicians who are up to their asses in felony charges brought against their election campaign and office staffs, who are trying to play the victim being done to death by national powers, don’t repeatedly junket out of state to solicit funds from national powers. But Scott Walker isn’t most politicians. He’s either one of history’s dumbest or one of it’s most blindly arrogant.

Related articles

• NRA Running Out of Ammo? (thedailybeast.com)
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• Warnings of Obama re-election at NRA convention (twitchy.com)
• Bloomberg Launches National Campaign To Repeal “Stand Your Ground” Laws (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• NRA official: Media sensationalized Trayvon Martin case (nj.com)
• Romney woos NRA (upi.com)

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Congresswoman from Florida and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, took aim at the Republican Party during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley. The topic was the anaemic jobs creation in March. Some analysts believe that with unusually warm weather in February, many of the jobs that would have been created in March were created in February instead. Vermont was a perfect example of this, as our governor, Peter Shumlin, noted last week. The repair and replacement of roads and bridges damaged in Tropical Storm Irene is months ahead of schedule because of the unseasonably warm weather and low snowfall amounts this past winter.

In response to Crowley’s questions, Wasserman Schultz shot back, “We have got a ways to go. We need to keep pushing. But what’s really bothersome to me, Candy, is that it almost seems like my Republican colleagues in Congress and Mitt Romney are rooting for economic failure. I mean, they’ve been hyper-focused on one job, Barack Obama’s, for really the last two years. And we all need to be pulling together to focus on moving the economy forward for the middle class and for working families.”

The economy only added 120,000 jobs in March, instead of the hoped-for 210,000. Mitt Romney blamed the President for it, calling the report “very troubling” and proof that “the Obama economy is not working.”

Wasserman Schultz also brought up the way Republicans are “turning back the clock for women.” The Republican agenda since they took over the House of Representatives has focused on women’s issues like defunding Planned Parenthood and criminalizing abortion. Now the issue at the national level is birth control and Wasserman Schultz says said that shows “how callous and insensitive they are towards women’s priorities.” She also took issue with Wisconsin Governor’s almost stealth signing of the law repealing Wisconsin’s equal pay law, which hurts women and minorities.

Wasserman Schultz is a very articulate woman and known for her passion. She was a very good choice to chair the DNC.

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• Republicans ‘rooting for economic failure?’ (respectinpolitics.org)
• DNC chair says Republicans rooting for bad economy (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
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• Breitbart Blogger Ben Shapiro Calls Rep. Wasserman Schultz a ‘Bag O’ Scum’ (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Message From Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz Chair Democratic National Committee (browardsblog.blogspot.com)
• Video | U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz tells LGBT youth that ‘bullying sucks’ and It Gets Better (miamiherald.typepad.com)

It doesn’t sound like a lot, only about 5% of the voting delegates, but the polling is showing a strong preference among them for Mitt Romney, and added to the number of delegates he has won in the primaries, it is their belief that Mitt Romney is the nominee.

The super delegates are far more likely to be pragmatists, people willing to recognize that Romney has the best chance of winning independent voters, even though the national polls still have him trailing President Obama.

Romney has shifted his campaign from fighting Rick Santorum to taking on the President. First, he has to fight his own record, which is so filled with conflicting positions that no one can say for certain where he stands on anything. The etch-a-sketch analogy was a good one. Romney has to wipe his slate clean and determine who he is and what he stands for. More importantly, he has to figure out what Americans want.

Romney has fairly consistently tried to focus on the economy and not get bogged down in the social issues, but the social issues have dominated so much of the Republican Party for the past two years that it is almost impossible to disconnect from them.

Reinventing oneself may be good in the entertainment industry, but it doesn’t always work in politics. It works even less today when every word every politician has ever said is immortalized somewhere and will be found and played on the web and on the news. Remember how Bill Maher came up with all those tapes of Christine O’Donnell talking about witchcraft? Romney has a lot of immortalized dirty laundry going into this election and it will all be dug out and aired.

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Governor Scott Walker

Scott Walker must really hate being governor of Wisconsin. That’s the only explanation for what he pulled Thursday. He quietly signed a law that repeals Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

The Act was created in 2009 to allow Wisconsinites a way to fight pay discrimination at a lower cost and more quickly than through the Federal Court system. As slow as the Federal Courts were with civil cases in 2009, it has gotten much worse since then. The Senate Republicans filibustered all appointments of judges to the Federal bench, making the courts desperately short of judges. In the past, when Senator Jesse Helms stopped all of President Clinton’s appointments, Chief Justice William Rehnquist publicly took Helms to task for creating a crisis in the Judiciary. Our current Chief Justice, John Roberts, can’t be bothered to fulfill his role as the administrator of the Federal Courts and push the Senate to approve the appointments. He puts party politics over his obligation to the judiciary.

This bill doesn’t remove the possibility of a person suing over pay discrimination, it just makes it harder. It hits women in Wisconsin more than minorities. Nationally, women earn 77% of what men do in identical jobs. In Wisconsin, it’s 75%. Remember the movie Nine to Five, when Lily Tomlin’s character complains about a man getting promoted over her and she’s told “he has a family” and she has four kids to support? That’s what is at stake here. More and more, women are either the main wage earner in a family or the only wage earner. When they are paid less, it hurts their families.

But, the Equal Pay Enforcement Act is much loved by corporations. They don’t want to pay their female employees any more than they have to, and in retail, hospitality and health care, women make up the majority of a company’s employees. And Scott Walker is a company man. Whatever corporations want, corporations get from Walker, and the Republican leaders of the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate, the Fitzgerald brothers, Jeff and Scott.

Jeff Fitzgerald is a candidate for the Republican ticket for Wisconsin’s open United States Senate seat. Killing the EPEA might sit well with the Republican base, but it will be a weakness if he wins the primary (he is polling at half the numbers of former Governor Tommy Thompson) and has to face Rep. Tammy Baldwin in November.

Baldwin must be dancing a jig over this latest assault by Walker on labor rights. This on hurts women and Baldwin can really play to that in the Senate race.

As for Walker himself….well, its hard to understand his thought processes. No intelligent politician, facing an election of any kind, attacks a particular voting block so openly and blatantly. Walker was supposed to be the perfect Republican governor, a rising star in the party. Instead he has turned into one of the Democratic Party’s best assets – a man who didn’t know how to keep the people from looking behind the curtain and seeing the little man instead of the great Wizard.

One last note from Wisconsin….Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, she of the screwed up elections, has stepped down from her post.  About bloody time.

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• Wisconsin’s Scott Walker Repeals Wisconsin Equal Pay Law (themoderatevoice.com)
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• Scott Walker hopes you won’t notice he repealed Wisconsin’s equal pay law (dailykos.com)
• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Overturns Law Meant To Prevent Pay Discrimination Against Women (thinkprogress.org)
• Republicans just don’t get it (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Waukesha County, Wisconsin, Does It Again (lezgetreal.com)

Waukesha County Clerk, Kathy Nickolaus

If there is a way to totally screw up an election, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus has found it already. That’s a better record than she has for finding ballots after an election.

Last time, during the election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg was declared the winner. The next day, Nickolaus suddenly “found” a missing 7,500 votes, all for the incumbent, David Prosser, or at least that’s the way the situation played out. All hell broke loose and there was a lengthy recount, tainted by reports that the bags of ballots in question had been unsecured and unsealed before they were magically “found.” Prosser is facing judicial ethics charges and Kloppenburg has since been elected to the state court of appeals.

Well, it wasn’t Nickolaus’ first screw-up and it hasn’t been her last. The new counting system she initiated for Tuesday’s primary failed utterly. She manages somehow to over complicate the counting process and it hasn’t been the same way twice ever since she took office. When last seen, the ballot counters in Waukesha were hand-tabulating the votes from the paper copies created by the voting machines – paper copies that resemble a grocery store register tape that is never torn off. There were yards and yards of these paper tapes hanging from the walls where the votes were being counted.

No one expects the final count from Waukesha to effect the most watched result. No matter what happens in Waukesha, Mitt Romney won the Wisconsin Republican primary. It may impact local races that were conducted on Tuesday and the primaries for some state-wide offices. More importantly, it may force Kathy Nickolaus from office. At last. There was an outcry last year for her removal based on all the voting screw-ups in her county. But, she is close to Governor Scott Walker, from their days in the State Assembly, so she feels safe in her incompetency. Now, however, even Republicans are turning on her. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state’s largest newspaper and a firm supporter of the Republican party in the state, has called for her removal.

At the very least, the Government Accountability Board needs to step in and run the May 8 recall primary and the June 5 recall election in Waukesha County. There is too much at stake in this recall for one county to mess up the whole process because their County Clerk is a dithering, arrogant idiot who can’t follow the same simple procedures every other county does.

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Vote (Photo credit: Alan Cleaver)

The prediction had been that Wisconsin’s Republican Primary would draw out 35% of the state’s registered voters. The turnout fell far below the prediction.

With a total of 704,288 votes cast, the turnout was only 20.6%. A 35% turnout would have been 1,196,694 votes.

Worse news for the Republicans facing recall elections in May, exit polls showed that 11% of those who voted yesterday were Democrats and 30% were Independents. That means only 12.16% of Wisconsin’s registered voters identified themselves as Republicans and showed up for the Presidential primary.

Now, this could just mean that Wisconsin’s Republicans didn’t really care about the primary or it could mean that fewer Wisconsinites are now identifying themselves as Republicans. The recalled governor, lieutenant governor and three senators will need to get out more Republicans if they hope to retain their offices.

As for those Democrats, well, most of them voted for Santorum. That’s the fun of living in an open primary state. Poor Rick, he can thank 77,472 Democrats for his at least one of his nine delegates.

The Chevy Volt

General Motors announced yesterday that over 40% of their sales in March were for fuel efficient vehicles, those getting at least 30 miles per gallon. Four years ago, fuel efficient vehicles accounted for only 16% of their sales. Furthermore, GM said that they are lifting their temporary hold on production of their hybrid, the Chevy Volt, a week ahead of schedule. The five-week shutdown (March 19 to April 23) was designed to reduce dealer inventory before replenishing it. The Volt sold a record 2,289 units in March.

Mitt Romney didn’t get the memo.

Romney has been denigrating the Volt for months. In December, in an interview on a radio show in Boston, he said that the Volt was “an idea whose time has not come.” And yesterday, in Wisconsin, he said, “I’m not sure America was ready for the Chevy Volt. I mean, I hope it does well. I don’t want to disparage any product coming out of Detroit, but I think instead of having politicians tell us what kind of cars we ought to make, we ought to let the people who are trying to understand the market make that decision.” The idea is to link President Obama to the Chevy Volt, which isn’t hard for a Republican to do since the base will blame this President for anything and not bother with any facts.

The Chevy Volt was introduced in January, 2007. The tax incentives for purchasing high-efficiency and hybrid vehicles was passed under President George W. Bush, not under President Obama. Worse yet, for Romney at least, his big-name endorser, former President George H. W. Bush, just bought one as a gift for his son, Neil.

Politicians and the tax incentives have little to do with the increase in sales in fuel efficient and hybrid vehicles. The price of gas is the deciding factor. No matter what the Republicans are promising, somewhere in the deepest parts of their minds, Americans are beginning to understand that we will never see $2 a gallon gas again. “Drill, baby, drill” would be a nice idea if two things were in play – if we owned the oil and if it was being extracted from traditional land wells. We as a nation do not own the oil that is being extracted from our land and water. It is owned by the oil companies who place it on the international oil market where we have to compete for it with other countries. And secondly, the “drill, baby, drill” gang is not talking about how much more it costs to extract oil from sand or to go two miles down to ocean floor before drilling two miles to find the oil. It is the higher price of crude and the increased demand around the world that has made it economically feasible for oil to be extracted from oil sands like the Athabasca site in Alberta, or from beyond the Continental Shelf like the blown Deepwater Horizon well. The same holds true for fracking for natural gas. We are using more exotic methods to extract fossil fuels, the costs are higher and the supply will not lower prices.

The Volt has caught up with imported hybrids, which have dominated the market since their introduction. This is good news, both for general auto sales and for the environment.

General Motors has just proven that George Romney may have been an auto industry legend, but his son doesn’t know squat about the industry today. But, no one can seriously expect a one-percenter to care how much it costs to fill his tanks, however many of them he owns.

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Rep. Paul Ryan at the 2011 CPAC conference (by Gage Skidmore)

Poor Paul Ryan. He gets all the blame for the Republican economic agenda. He watched his name used in angry town meetings all over the country in 2010. “The Ryan Budget”came to be equated with killing Medicare and Social Security. And just when he thought the endorsement of the Republican Presidential candidates for his “social engineering” budget would get him a little breathing room, here comes a poll from his home state.

They don’t like him as much as they once did.

In a state-wide survey, Ryan’s favorability rating was down to 41% with unfavorability at 46%. In a hypothetical presidential match-up, Ryan loses to the President 50% to 43%. The survey was limited to Wisconsin registered voters and has a 2.4% margin of error.

Three month ago, Ryan’s favorability was at 36% to 35%. Six months ago it was 38% to 30%. More Wisconsinites have an opinion of him than in the past, 87% from 71% and 68%, which means his recognition is way up, just not for a very good reason.

Ryan decided not to run for the open U. S. Senate seat in Wisconsin this time, a decision that is proving to be a good one. What matters, however, is how he is viewed in his district. The entire state does not vote on him, just the 1^st District, which includes the cities of Racine, Kenosha and Janesville. He will be keeping an eye on the recall election of State Senator Van Van Wanggaard, whose 21^st District covers much of the same area.

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Candidate Mitt Romney

Funny thing about today’s primary schedule. All the media attention has been focused on Wisconsin, but there are also primaries in Maryland and the District of Columbia. The Texas primary was moved to May 29 because of litigation involving their gerrymandering of new districts. They probably should have moved the Wisconsin primary as well. Wisconsin voters are being warned to keep watching or listening to the news all day because at any time the State Supreme Court could rule on the issue of voter ID in Wisconsin. The new photo ID law was stopped by two state judges because it violates the Wisconsin State Constitution’s guarantees of one person-one vote.

The physical weather may be decent in Wisconsin, but the political weather is a tempest.

Those who bet on such things are saying Mitt Romney will pass the half-way mark for delegates today, and the Romney campaign is moving away from swatting at Santorum to attacking the President. Santorum, on the other hand, is still concentrating on Romney with a new ad that claims Romney created $50 abortions in Massachusetts and left the state deeply in debt. Neither claim is true. Also no true is Santorum’s claim that California universities do not offer courses in American history. Only one doesn’t, the University of California at San Francisco. It is a school entirely devoted to health science degrees and offers no liberal arts classes. So, your UCSF nurse might not know the details of the Battle of San Juan Hill, but he or she will certainly know nursing.

Santorum has the gall to lecture on Presidential-level behavior, saying that Romney isn’t presidential enough. But repeatedly, Santorum is caught in bald-faced lies about other countries (The Netherlands does not have involuntary euthanasia) and those boogie-man liberal states like California and Massachusetts. There is nothing presidential about a liar. Just ask any Republican. They will tell you that when a President fails to fulfill a campaign promise because the situation is not what was expected, then that President is a liar. They accuse President Obama of this all the time.

How long this circus goes on is entirely up to Rick Santorum. Ron Paul will stay in because the Presidential campaign is the best forum for his message, even if he has spent $1,000,000 for each delegate he has won, around ten times what the others have spent. Newt Gingrich stays in for his ego.

There are three months left of the primary season. Today is D.C., Maryland and Wisconsin. April 24 is Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. May 8 is Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia. May 15 is Nebraska and Oregon. May 22 is Arkansas and Kentucky. May 29 is Texas. June 5 is California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. And finally, Utah holds it primary on June 26. Santorum has a chance in the Carolinas, West Virginia, Nebraska, Arkansas, Kentucky, Montana and Texas, but not in the other eleven. Except for Texas, the delegate numbers favor Romney.

Of course, by that time, we’ll all be bored to death.

.

Related articles

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Tomorrow, for the Republican primary and a few local elections, there will be DoJ observers in Milwaukee assuring that the state is complying with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other federal voting laws. It can also keep an eye out for violations of Wisconsin’s voting rights, which are even stricter than the Federal ones. The monitors will keep an eye on the basics, discrimination in the voting process based on race, color or membership in a minority language group. Federal law does not include membership in a political party under its anti-discrimination rules, though it might need to at the rate the Republicans are going.

In addition to the Republican presidential primary, in Milwaukee, Mayor Tom Barrett is running for re-election. He also announced on Friday that he is running against Scott Walker for the governorship, again. His primary for the recall election is scheduled for May 8. Barrett has not withdrawn from the mayoral race.

As for the Republican primary, the polling is tending toward Mitt Romney, but Rick Santorum has said that no matter what happens in Wisconsin, he is staying in the race. Wisconsin would only give Romney enough delegates to top the half-way mark to the nomination. It is predicted that the primary will draw about a 35% turnout.

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Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has delayed deciding if he would go for a rematch with Scott Walker. He finally decided on Friday, just hours after the Government Accountability Board certified the recall petitions and set the dates for the recall elections.

Barrett had been the desired candidate all along. He only lost to Walker by 5.77% of the vote, 1,128,941 (52.29%) to 1,004,303 (46.52%) in 2010, a total of 124,638 votes. But, the unions which started this recall battle have already endorsed former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk. Barrett’s late entry makes the recall primary a much closer event than previously expected.

The recall primary will be held on May 8. Currently, the only primary battle arising out of the recall elections will be the Democrats fighting for the right to go up against Scott Walker. The Senate recall races do not have multiple candidates, and it is not expected that the Republicans will do what they did last year and put up some fake Democrats to foul up the process at the primary level. That tactic didn’t work then.

Two other Democrats have also announced for the recall, Secretary of State Doug LaFollette, who carried with him a long family history of state politics as well as a certain cachet as a battler against the Walker-Fitzgerald juggernaut, and State Senator Kathleen Vinehout of Alma. But Falk had the lead in all the polling and the backing of the unions. Barrett has seriously skewed the odds.

Are there 125,000 Wisconsinites who would change their vote from those cast in 2010? Undoubtedly. That’s what all the polls have shown and that is why so many Democrats wanted Barrett in the race. The difficulty is money. The Democrats don’t have the bottomless war chest that Walker has. The Koch brothers have promised Walker anything he needs to win this election. The stakes have risen because so much of the Koch-ALEC agenda that Walker has put in place is being dismantled by the Courts. He has lost parts of his anti-union law and the entire voter photo ID law. At this point, with the Courts lining up against Walker, the Kochs should be wondering if he is worth their investment.

In spite of the conflict Barrett has created for the unions, what is important now is keeping the recall primary as low-cost as possible and consolidating around the candidate on May 9. Defeating Scott Walker is the goal, not shredding the Democratic Party.

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The Wisconsin Statehouse, Madison

Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board has reached a decision. The recall election for Governor Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch is a go!

Walker has done everything possible to delay or deflect the will of the people of Wisconsin, at one point whining that the taxpayer should pick up the tab for his people to verify every single one of the one million signatures on the recall petitions because it simply wasn’t possible that that many Wisconsinite could want him out of office. According to the GAB, at least 900,938 do. That’s the number of verified signatures they have determined for the recall, when only 540,208 were required.

Having already verified the recall petitions for four Republican state senators, the hope was that the verification process would be finished in time to book the Walker/Kleefisch vote for the same dates as the senate votes. It is and they will.

Primary elections for these recalls will be held on May 8. The final elections will be held on June 5. This is less complicated than the recall elections last year which involved both parties and staggered votes until they finally reached the important ones, the recall of six Republican state senators.

For the governor’s race, there are three currently declared Democratic candidates: former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, State Senator Kathleen Vinehout and Secretary of State Doug LaFollette. LaFollette has the highest name recognition among Democrats, having been in the vortex of battles over implementation of Walker’s union busting law, and seen by many Democrats are a champion of legality over party. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who lost the governorship to Walker in 2010, has been mentioned as a possible candidate, but he has not declared his intention to run. His announcement is expected next week. In the lieutenant governor’s race, Madison firefighter and state firefighters union president Mahlon Mitchell is the declared candidate against Kleefisch.

In the Senate races, Sen. Pam Galloway resigned recently, leaving her 29^th district an open election. Rep. Donna Seidel is the announced Democratic candidate for the district. The 29^th is in the upper left quadrant of the state, the large pink district on the map below. It is a largely rural district. Sen. Van Van Wanggaard represents the 21^st Senate District, which is the small green district on the southern shores of Lake Michigan. It extends from the city of Racine and its satellite cities to the city of Rochester in the west. Former Sen. John Lehman is announced as the Democrat for this recall election. The 23^rd Senate District is south of the 29^th, the gray area at the bottom of the left upper quadrant. It is also primarily rural and currently represented by Terry Moulton. Former Representative Kristen Dexter is running to replace Moulton. The Democrats have not, as yet, recruited anyone to run against the Senate Majority Leader, Scott Fitzgerald, who represents the 13^th Senate District. It is in the lower right quadrant, the brown district. It is also primarily rural. The pattern of representation in Wisconsin is very typical of the country – rural areas have Republican representation while urban areas have Democratic reps. Racine was anomalous.

With the resignation of Sen. Pam Galloway, the Wisconsin Senate is now a 16-16 tie between parties. To gain the majority, the Democrats need to win two of these recalls, not one. District 21 has the best odds because the larger municipalities have suffered the most under Walker’s budget cuts, but the rural areas have seen his cutbacks reducing school personnel and law enforcement.

The Democrats opted to avoid doing any advertising until the verification process was completed in all the races. This has meant Walker has had a clear field to sell himself to the voters, with ads touting his great accomplishments and frequent appearances on Fox News where he gets treated with kid gloves and positive vibes. Against the Walker blitz is the real news, his trips out of state to attend Koch brother-sponsored fund raisers, the ethics investigation that has resulted in the arrests of over a dozen of his personnel from the Milwaukee County Executive’s office during the 2010 election, the economic news which proves how little his policies have really accomplished. Wisconsin has lost jobs every month since Walker took office.

Walker has a huge campaign chest compliments of his out-of-state cronies, though he whines about how much month the national unions can throw against him. But the recall forces have personnel, volunteers to go door-to-door and engage voters in the best way. Personal contact beats ads every time.

In the meantime, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court needs to rule on the lower court rulings that stopped the photo ID law from being enforced, and needs to do so quickly. Wisconsin’s normal primary for the Republican presidential candidate is scheduled for Tuesday, April 3. Though all the attention has been on the recall elections, the state has hundreds of other elections in the pipeline between here and November 6, including primaries for the United States Senate seat, all the Congressional seats and state, county, city and town elections. There must be times when Wisconsinites think all they do is vote.

Related articles

• Recalled Wisconsin State Senator Quits (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin As “Waterloo”? (lezgetreal.com)
• Things Just Keep Getting More Interesting In Wisconsin… (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin Supreme Court To Hear Voter ID Law Appeals (lezgetreal.com)
• Recall vote scheduled in Wisconsin, Republican ad war continues (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• Wisconsin GOP Wants To Change Recall Laws (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin Governor Recall Vote Is On – Dems will seek to unseat Scott Walker in June election (tribuneofthepeople.com)

Irish-born American populations, 1872

Not all Republicans hate immigration. They just hate immigration from the “wrong places.” There is nothing new about this. The very first immigration laws passed in this country were designed to stem the influx of Eastern European Jews. Immigration laws since 1921 have been very prejudicial towards persons from certain locations and very open to others. The political immigration laws are even more unconscionable. The designation of political refugee is not based on whether or not a person is in danger in their home country, but whether or not the home country is an “ally” or “enemy” of the United States.

One of the things President Obama has asked of Congress (spitting in the wind as always) has been a revision of the immigration law to give preference to educated immigrants with vitally needed skills. So far, only one such group is being considered for an easing of the immigration quota.

Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts is supporting a bill that would give 10,500 additional immigration visas to Irish nationals every year.

Let’s see – Massachusetts, heavy Irish-American population, hard-scrabble re-election campaign against a strong opponent – yup, Brown wants to open our doors to the Irish. Talk about pandering for votes.

Brown isn’t the only member of Congress pushing for the increase in Irish immigration, but his support is the one most linkable to his re-election campaign. It’s the one that reeks to high heaven of trying to influence voting decisions with an emotional issue. Maybe. Or, it’s a big mistake.

On the one hand, people including the president see the need to open our doors to bright, educated, skilled, enterprising young people who want to start businesses and improve our economy. On the other hand, while there is so much opposition to the influx of illegals and Latin American immigrants who take unskilled labor jobs, there is just as much opposition to opening our borders to the people who would compete for jobs and business opportunities that are being denied to the thousands of our recent college graduates who are flipping hamburgers, packing groceries and moving back in with their parents because they can’t get jobs in their field.

Supporters of the bill say that it seeks to end a discrimination against Irish immigrants that arose from the revisions of the immigration laws in 1965. Those revisions reversed biases against Latin American, African and Asian immigrants. But it wasn’t just Irish immigrants who had their share of the quotas cut, it was all Europeans. The circumstances in Europe have changed dramatically since 1965. The Soviet Union fell, freeing half of Europe. A couple of wars developed because of that. Some former communist nations became strong capitalist economies. Ireland was lagging behind Europe economically in 1965, and by 1995 was one of the strongest economies in the EU. Then, it slipped, and slipped badly. Now, their national debt is 1165% of GDP and they are next in line for a major assault by the EU’s national debt police. A desire of Irish nationals to immigrate now is anchored in the economic problems of their own country and that old idea that America is the land of opportunity. But our economy cannot really absorb these people without hurting our own people.

My in-laws were immigrants. My paternal grandmother was an immigrant, as were her three oldest sons. My maternal grandfather’s parents were immigrants. I grew up in New York City, surrounded by immigrants and their cultures. I understand the enormous contribution that immigration has made to the uniqueness and diversity of this nation. But I also understand that this is not the world before the two World Wars. Now, when we provide one group of people an escape route from their home country’s problems, we keep those other countries from benefitting from the presence of educated, skilled, intelligent people who could solve that country’s problems. Does it benefit any African nation when we accept as immigrants the best educated of that nation? Does it aid our own economy to put these educated people in competition with our own under-employed and un-employed.

Immigration is a complex issue, and it will not be helped by a Senator trying to get votes by singling out one nation to get more visas than another. Immigration to the United States needs to be seen in context, not just with our own economic problems, but with the conditions in the nation people want to immigrate from. Would their countries benefit if they stayed and worked to improve conditions there instead of running away? One of the greatest problems in our country is the inability of our politicians and most Americans to see the world in terms of connections and mutual issues. We can not change the immigration rules for one group just because there are so many people in this country who are descended from that country. Applying that illogic would mean we cannot justify clamping down on the Mexican border. After all, there are far more Hispanics in this country than Irish-Americans, even on St. Patrick’s Day.

Related articles

• Brown pushes Irish work visas bill (cnn.com)
• ABA Amicus Against Arizona in SB 1070 Case (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
• Immigration law targeting renters costs town $5M (latino.foxnews.com)
• Important Meeting (teddyoshea.wordpress.com)

Pre-2011 Gannett Logo

The Gannett media group, which owns several newspapers in Wisconsin, broke the story a few weeks ago that 29 Wisconsin Circuit Court Judges signed the recall petitions for Governor Scott Walker. The state’s code of judicial conduct says, “No judge or candidate for judicial office or judge-elect may….participate in the affairs, caucuses, promotions, platforms, endorsements, conventions or activities of a political party or of a candidate for partisan office.” The code also bars judges from being members of a political party, or soliciting funds for a candidate or party, along with a vague instruction to avoid “the appearance of impropriety in all of the judge’s activities.” Wow, Wisconsin has stricter rules than we have for our Supreme Court justices.

Prior to signing the recall petitions, several judges contacted the Wisconsin Judicial Commission’s executive director, Jim Alexander, to make sure they could do so without violating the rules. Alexander told them that the petitions were not covered by the code.

But, exposing the signing of the petition by the judges apparently upset a few people (three guesses) and it has now been disclosed that 25 employees of the Gannett group also signed the petition.

The editors-in-chief of the Gannett papers in Wisconsin have issued apologies for the conduct of their staff members, saying that signing the petitions violated Gannett’s code of ethics. The employees will be facing disciplinary action. Kevin Corrado, publisher of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, also told readers that no one involved in disclosing the judges or in “our news or political coverage” had signed the petition.

The journalists told Corrado that they considered signing the petition equivalent to voting, something they are able to do without violating any ethics codes. Corrado said that the media group considered it a matter of becoming personally involved in the story.

Naturally, Walker’s supporters are having a ball with this news. They sent out a fundraising e-mail that read “The liberal powers that be in the news media and the judiciary are determined to do whatever they can to empower liberal and leftist causes, ideals and candidates…We simply can’t let ethically challenged judges or journalists defeat us in the fight to save our country.” The e-mail linked, not to a Walker website, but to CampaigntoDefeatObama.com. Don’t you love the language on that one? Such a perfect example of the right wing propaganda that has persuaded far too many Americans that we are in eminent danger of being turned into the Soviet Union if we have labor unions and increase taxes on the super rich. Dwight Eisenhower must be spinning in his grave.

Related articles

• 25 Gannett Newspaper Employees Signed Governor Walker Recall Petitions (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• The two-edged pen (steveprestegard.com)
• Media (non)-shocker: 25 Wisc. journalists signed Walker recall petition (twitchy.com)
• 25 Gannett Wisconsin Media Journalists Caught Signing Petition to Recall Governor Walker (newsbusters.org)
• Controversy in Wisconsin as 29 judges sign petition to recall Scott Walker (twitchy.com)
• (The appearance of) justice vs. democracy (steveprestegard.com)
• Scott Walker Wants To Waste Wisconsin’s Money On Himself (lezgetreal.com)
• “29 Wisconsin Judges Sign Walker Recall Petition.” (althouse.blogspot.com)

Newt Gingrich campaigning in Iowa

In an attempt to differentiate himself from the other “true, blue conservative” in the Republican primary race, for Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has chosen to criticize President Obama for every thing he does, even when it has nothing to do with policy. His latest salvo was a condemnation of the President’s words of condolence and empathy to the parents of Trayvon Martin. On Sean Hannity’s radio show on Friday, Gingrich commented on the President’s honest statement, empathetic statement that “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,”

Gingrich told Hannity’s audience, “What the President said, in a sense, is disgraceful. It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background. Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban, or if he had been white, or if he had been Asian-American, or if he’d been a Native American. It is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

What I find appalling is that Gingrich so totally misrepresented what the President said, and the fact that he left out Hispanics, the fastest growing minority in America. Puerto Ricans and Cubans are from the Caribbean and neither group is profiled as illegals by those so inclined to ignore the fact that Mexico once owned the Southwest, and there are Hispanics (most of whom are all or part Native American) in the United States whose family trees go back dozens of generations on U. S. soil.

Later, in Kenner, Louisiana, Gingrich expanded on his theme of the president’s appalling behavior. “We have got to get beyond any sense of some American group being ‘the other.’ Every young American is endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And we have to, as a movement, the conservative movement, as a party, the Republican Party, has to be concerned about the quality of life and the sanctity of life of every American of every background. This is very, very important. And I think we have to recognize that all too often there are neighborhoods in which young people don’t have a chance to pursue happiness, they don’t have a decent future.”

That was pure, unadulterated Gingrich – don’t find out anything about the subject matter, don’t understand where and why this happened, just assume that it was some case of a black kid in a bad neighborhood so you can start in again on your idea that we should make kids from low income families scrub toilets at school for pin money and to teach them a “work ethic.”

Most of us understood what President Obama was saying, even when he didn’t go all the way to say it. “I can only imagine what these parents are going through. I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this. My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. I think they have a right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

When addressing the attack on Sandra Fluke by Rush Limbaugh, the President said that he thought about his own daughters. In Trayvon Martin’s case, the President not only understood the situation from a parent’s perspective but as a black parent who was once a young black man, and one who has been the subject of some very heinous racism since he took office. He was able to connect to these two situations through the human mechanism of empathy. It’s more than just sympathy. It’s the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes.

One of the things that made Bill Clinton so popular was the feeling that he had walked in our shoes during his lifetime. His parents had divorced, he had seen spousal abuse, he understood the problems and hardships a family can endure. President Obama’s life has been different from Bill Clinton’s, and from nearly all Americans. But there are still things he can relate to and do so honestly – being the child of a single mother, being raised by grandparents, not really belonging anywhere and having every achievement and accomplishment credited to Affirmative Action instead of personal ability. Most of all, he can relate to loving one’s children more than anything in the world.

Some have accused the President of “pandering” for black votes with that “my son would have looked like Trayvon” remark. This wasn’t about votes or impressing a portion of the electorate. It was purely about saying “I understand your pain and know that only justice will ease it.” It is something every parent should understand.

But Newt Gingrich doesn’t understand empathy. He only understands panning for votes. Empathy is beyond his personal emotional range, so he interprets it the way he would see a similar remark from his own mouth and sees the President’s statement as a disgraceful attempt to divide the nation.

Do you know what they call a person who lacks empathy for others? A sociopath.

Related articles

• Gingrich Finds Obama’s Trayvon Martin Remarks “Disgraceful” and “Appalling” (inquisitr.com)
• Gingrich: Obama’s Comments On Trayvon Martin Were ‘Disgraceful,’ ‘Appalling’ (mediaite.com)
• Unbelievable: Newt Gingrich Calls Obama’s Comments on Trayvon Martin ‘Disgraceful’ (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Newt Gingrich: Obama’s Trayvon Martin Statement ‘Disgraceful’ (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Gingrich Plays Race Card Calling Obama Comment ‘Disgraceful’ (lameducks.wordpress.com)
• Welcome to Election Year: Gingrich Calls Obama’s Comments on Trayvon Martin Killing “Disgraceful” (themoderatevoice.com)
• Mitt Romney Releases Statement On Trayvon Martin Killing: ‘A Tragedy’ (mediaite.com)

Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District, 2000 edition

2012 will probably be remembered by the Bachmann clan as Michele’s “annus horribilis.” Her husband was exposed as a first-class anti-gay bigot, her finances and businesses were opened to the public (who still want a few answers about the payments for foster kids who were her husband’s patients), her presidential campaign flamed out quickly, she is wielding even less influence on her party than Sarah Palin and she had her Congressional District redistricted out from under her. It just can’t get much worse.

Bachmann represented the Minnesota 6^th District. Her district is on the map, right. The state had some population shifts between the 2000 and 2010 census, so her district and the 4^th District had their lines redrawn. The downward hook on the eastern edge of the 6^th District and some of the area around the corner and to the north were absorbed into the 4^th District. Bachmann’s home is in Stillwater, which is in the hook, so she was literally moved out of the district she currently represents.

The 4^th District is represented by Democrat Betty McCollum and includes the city of St. Paul and its suburbs. The 6^th District stretched out to the west and was very conservative. Rather than stay with her town and compete for the 4^th District seat, Bachmann has decided to run in the 6^th. It is not necessary, according to the Constitution, for a Congressperson to reside in his or her district, only that he or she reside in the state.

She already has three Democratic challengers.

Anne Nolan is an attorney and has been dubbed an “Occupy Wall Street Activist.” On the other hand, she is an “anti-choice candidate” – the term being used by Minnesota Democrats apparently. She is running for the Democratic Farmer Laborer endorsement. The DFL is listed in Minnesota news reports as a separate party, though they usually back the same candidate at the regular Democratic Party. Or, maybe it’s the other way around.

Brian McGoldrick, who lives in the district, fits all the platform requirements for a Democratic candidate – marriage equality, reproductive freedom and he says he will self-finance his campaign. Michael Graves is a resident of Minneapolis, which is in the 5^th District, but he was born in the 6^th. He is the CEO of a hotel company and a trustee of a local college in Minneapolis. Both men are courting the DFL endorsement.

The DFL will hold a convention in April to determine which candidate they will endorse, and that will probably determine who will run against Bachmann in November.

Though Bachmann’s constituents forgave her all her national activities in the 2010 election, she is carrying far more baggage this time, compliments of the Republican primary race, and the fact that she no longer lives in the district may weigh against her.

We can only hope.

Related articles

• Bachmann Seeking Fourth Term (lezgetreal.com)
• Bachmann Will Seek Old District’s Seat, Despite New Map (thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Bachmann’s home no longer in her Congressional district (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• Rep. Bachmann Gets a Challenger (blogs.wsj.com)
• Minnesota redistricting map protects Bachmann some, changes little – The Hill (blog) (thehill.com)
• Can an Upstart Occupy-Supporter Compete with Michele Bachmann? (swampland.time.com)

President Obama

I hate politics. I hate it even more when a man I respect gets forced into pandering to the folks out there who can’t follow the truth. It’s been “leaked” that tomorrow President Obama will announce, in Cushing Oklahoma, that his administration will be doing what it can to expedite the permitting process for TransCanada to build the southern half of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. That “southern half” is the part that will be from Cushing to the Gulf Coast of Texas. In January the President denied the permit for the full pipeline, because the northern half was slated to cross the critical Ogallala Aquifer in the High Plains, and some members of the Republican Party in Congress were preparing to blackmail the President into making a quick decision… so he did, just not the one they wanted. After all, a healthy chunk of Speaker Boehner’s personal stock portfolio is directly traceable back to TransCanada.

Ogallala Aquifer - US Geological Service

Now here’s the thing. The Republicans have been going around blaming rising gas prices on the President, and that permit denial is one of the things they wave in the air – ‘Oh, if he’d just approved that pipeline we could be getting all this extra oil from Canada and our gas prices would drop.’ Unfortunately, because it’s a simple and easy to digest rationale, a good chunk of the American public believes it.

It’s a crock. First off, that oil they want to pump to the Gulf isn’t staying here once it’s refined.  Second off, it takes time to build a pipeline, so it’s not a magic bullet for lower gas prices right away. Third, there is next to nothing that the government can do to lower the price of gas or crude oil BECAUSE WE, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DO NOT OWN THE OIL BENEATH OUR FEET.

We don’t own it and we don’t drill for it. We sell leases to oil companies, most of which are foreign conglomerates, and they drill. Then they send it to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and then they ship it overseas… because Europe and Asia pay a whole lot more than we do for gas and crude. Other countries with oil fields own that oil, and in many cases have government-owned companies drilling it and refining it and selling the final products in-country. Do you really think Saudi Arabia has a gas price crisis? Ever?

Since the Republicans started on this latest obfuscation about gas prices, President Obama and the White House have been trying to explain all of this to the American people… but they don’t want to hear the truth. They want to hear that Daddy in the White House is going to wave his magic wand and make it all better. They still haven’t figured out that without the cooperation of Congress, a President really has his hands tied. And the last thing this Congress wants to do is cooperate with the President. Since taking over control of the House, the Republicans have made no bones about the first priority on their agenda: making sure that President Obama is a one-term President.

Existing and Proposed Keystone Pipelines

TransCanada Logo

So TransCanada announced last month that they are willing to go ahead with the uncontested southern portion of the pipeline, which doesn’t need approval from the Feds, as it doesn’t cross an international border. There is currently a bottleneck at Cushing because of the oil arriving from both U.S. oil fields and oil arriving from Canada via the existing TransCanada pipeline. This new southern pipeline will ease that bottleneck and serve to get more crude and oil shale product to the Gulf Coast refineries on a daily basis. Yay. We’ll pick up the temporary jobs from building it, a few permanent jobs maintaining it, a few more IF refineries add to their payrolls to process it and the oil ports will have a bit more ship traffic.

Well, that’s enough to make some easy sound bytes and that’s what the President will be doing tomorrow. About the only contribution the White House can make to ‘expediting’ the permitting process is to lean on a couple of state-level agencies to get off their asses and approve it. The job creation bit will be played up, and he’ll give up on trying to explain the realities of global oil prices to the people.

It’s sad that the realities of election politics are prompting him to give up on teaching the American people about the new global economy we are a part of. We need to understand how the Arab Spring and the growth of the Indian and Chinese economies affect us. We should have had it shoved down our throats that Osama Bin Laden’s most ambitious plans for anti-American terrorism would have attacked our economy. We should understand that the conspicuous consumption of Americans is something unique to us, and it’s not really a good thing. I’m sorry, but no one outside of the military really needs to be driving a Hummer and sucking down all that gas. If you need that 4-wheel drive, get a Jeep. If you need that level of “protection”, move.

Bright Shiny Gas Pumps

Okay, I’ll climb down from that soapbox.

President Obama, on the issue of gasoline prices, is being forced to pander to the ignorant, and tomorrow the Republicans will count coup. They will have made him stoop to their level, and that is incredibly disappointing.

Related articles

• Obama heading to Keystone XL Oklahoma site(cbc.ca)

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• Pipeline from Cushing to Gulf Coast will proceed, TransCanada says(newsok.com)

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• Obama to Visit Oklahoma to Talk About Oil Drilling(blogs.wsj.com)

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Robert DeNiro (by Shankbone)

It was a smallish, invitation-only fundraiser for the President. Actor Robert DeNiro decided to have a little fun with some of the things that were said about Michelle Obama four years ago, the racially inflammatory things that questioned having a black woman in the White House. So, DeNiro said, “Callista Gingrich, Karen Santorum, Ann Romney. Now, do you really think our country is ready for a white First Lady?” Someone among the 90 guests yelled “No!” and DeNiro responded, “Too soon, right?”

It was a play on so much of what the right wing has gotten away with for four years. The slurs that have been made about Michelle Obama are too numerous to relate and some are too disgusting to repeat. And though, from time to time, someone in a prominent position like a lawmaker has been pressured into apologizing, no one ever suggested that John Boehner apologize for someone else’s words.

But Newt Gingrich has decided that calling his wife “white” is offensive and the President should be apologizing for it. He said that the comments divide the country and “if people on the left want to talk about radio talk show hosts, then everybody in the country ought to hold the president accountable when somebody at his event says something as utterly, totally unacceptable as Robert DeNiro said last night. On behalf of both my wife and on behalf of Karen Santorum and on behalf of Ann Romney and that is I think Robert DeNiro is wrong. I think the country is ready for a new first lady and he doesn’t have to describe it in racial terms.”

How about we describe it in moral terms, Mr. Gingrich? It’s been 183 years since Rachel Jackson died before her husband Andrew was inaugurated President. The campaign included vicious attacks on Mrs. Jackson because she had married Andrew believing that her first husband had divorced her and discovered the hard way that he hadn’t. President Jackson blamed the stress of the campaign for the heart attack that killed his adored wife. So, Mr. Gingrich, do you think we are finally ready for an admitted adulteress as First Lady? You told your second wife that Callista could take you to the White House, didn’t you, calling her from your Washington apartment with Callista in bed with you? How long was that affair, six years? Only here in the blogosphere do we say things like that, not on national radio or television. Gingrich should consider himself lucky that no serious political analyst has said Callista would be as unwelcome as Evita Peron was in certain world capitals.

Robert DeNiro was not addressing millions of radio listeners or casting aspersions on the three ladies he mentioned. He didn’t say anything about them that isn’t completely true. They are white. It wasn’t intended to divide the country, as the racist remarks and characterizations aimed at the First Family have been. DeNiro was joking with 90 people, all of whom paid a boatload of money to support the President’s re-election campaign. Unfortunately, a member of the press decided to make some controversial hay with the remark. There is no equivalency with calling a young woman a slut on national radio just because she would like to purchase health insurance that includes contraception or telling that young woman she should post videos of her having sex on YouTube for Mr. Limbaugh’s prurient enjoyment.

Not withstanding the fact that President Obama is in no way responsible for the words that come out of anyone else’s mouth, Olivia Alair, Mrs. Obama’s press secretary told the press that “We believe the joke was inappropriate.”

Gingrich will do anything now to make himself relevant to the primary. He lost in the Deep South, where he was sure he had the homeboy advantage. He’s seen now as nothing but a spoiler for Rick Rantorum – sorry, Freudian typo. Making an issue of a joke is about the level Gingrich is at right now, just hogging a mic for the attention. On the other hand, we can look at his reaction to this joke as an indication of how unsuited he is for a position which requires the ability to let things slide past when taking overblown offense could cause a war. President Obama has had to make nice with a lot of obnoxious people in the past three years. Based on twenty years of observing Gingrich, I sincerely doubt Newt’s that self-disciplined.

Related articles

• Gingrich demands Obama apologize for De Niro joke – msnbc.com (firstread.msnbc.msn.com)
• Newt Gingrich Demands Apology From Robert De Niro, Obama (ibtimes.com)
• Newt Gingrich Goes After Robert De Niro For First Lady Crack [Video] (inquisitr.com)
• Robert De Niro Makes First Lady Joke, Gingrich Demands Apology From Obama (inquisitr.com)
• Ann Coulter’s Surprising Comments About Robert De Niro (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ann Coulter Tweets: Please ‘Explain What Was Allegedly Offensive About DeNiro’s Joke’ (mediaite.com)

Rep. Paul Ryan

There isn’t much point in going into the specifics of Paul Ryan’s latest Congressional Republicans’ Budget because there aren’t any specifics in it. It is nothing more than a Republican campaign manifesto.

We’ll cut tax rates to just two – 10% and 25% and pay for it by closing loopholes. Doesn’t say which loopholes or who will be in each tax bracket.

We’ll cut corporate tax rates to 25% and pay for it by closing loopholes. Ditto – no clue which loopholes.

We’ll cut the federal workforce, without laying anyone off, by attrition. No idea how many federal workers are ready to retire in the next ten years or acknowledgment of the fact that the federal workforce is too small. We don’t have enough people to inspect our food sources or monitor drug tests until after a new drug kills people or process disability claims in a timely manner so the disabled don’t end up on the street or do any of the thousands of things we need government to do for our safety and security.

We’ll make sure there are no automatic cuts in defense spending. We’ll just keep spending half the world’s defense budget and to hell with education or anything else.

You get the idea. It’s a laundry list of all the things the Republicans claim will recharge our economy, but mostly it’s a list of the demands of the Republican Party’s biggest donors…cut our taxes and cut spending on the safety net. It’s pure “let ‘em eat cake” or maybe just “then let them die and decrease the excess population.”

The last time Ryan presented us with a budget he was very proud of the fact that it was less than 30 pages long, compared to the tome that the White House had presented to Congress. That one was as lacking in detail as this one. It’s what Ryan is good at – broad claims with no specifics, smoke with no substance. As the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, he has a troubling aversion to real numbers.

There should be a simpler tax code. Most economists recommend a set of tax brackets, approximately 10%, 15%, 20% and 25%. But they also recommend killing all deductions, tax credits and tax breaks and folding the payroll taxes into those income tax brackets. Otherwise, those in the lowest bracket would be hit with taxes they have never paid before because they earn so little. Most economists recommend lowering the corporate tax rate. For them, 25% is the high end of their recommended range. But they too want to see the tax code stripped of all tax cuts, tax breaks, set-asides and whatever makes it possible for General Electric to pay no taxes. They also recommend an international system of ending the corporate practice of shifting money around to avoid paying taxes. Every major country suffers from this, while tiny little islands like the Caymens support their entire nation on the pennies they collect from the trillions they shelter. Most economists agree that the only way out of this current economic situation and the only way to reduce the deficits and pay down the national debt is the proven way – grow the economy by spending money now. We are seeing in Europe how their austerity budgets are failing to improve their economies. They are following the conservative line of giving away the bank to the bankers and cutting support for everyone who isn’t rolling in it. It is failing. The real lesson of Greece is not that a socialist structure bankrupts a country, it is that when you cut off income and reduce spending you cut off any chance of recovery.

The Second Coming of the Ryan Budget has not provided any solutions to our economic woes, but it has given us a heads-up on what we can expect the Republicans to be pushing in the next seven months. Now, the Democrats know what they are fighting and can figure out the best way to ridicule and disprove this piece of nothingness.

Related articles

• Paul Ryan Budget Includes $49 Billion More In 2012 Revenue Than Barack Obama’s (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ryan to Obama: I’ll See Your Budget and Raise You $5.3T in Cuts (pjmedia.com)
• House Republican Budget Plan to Call for Overhaul of Tax Code – BusinessWeek (businessweek.com)
• GOP House budget sets up next spending, Medicare fights – CBS News (cbsnews.com)

Rep. Donald Pridemore

I know that Tourette’s syndrome is not contagious, but you really have to wonder about the Republicans these days. They can’t seem to engage their brains before opening their mouths.

Wisconsin Assemblyman Don Pridemore has come out against divorce, for any reason whatsoever. In his view, when a husband has just beaten the crap out of his wife, she should think about all the reasons she fell in love with him in the first place. “If they can re-find those reasons and get back to why they got married in the first place, it might help.” Pridemore told a local news station that while single women may be capable of caring for a family “in certain situations,” fathers are absolutely vital for providing structure and discipline in a family. In Pridemore’s view, children who don’t have their biological fathers present “tend to go astray.”

Pridemore is a co-sponsor of Senator Glenn Grothman’s bill that would punish single mothers and of the voter ID bill that has been shot down by two Wisconsin judges as being in violation of the Wisconsin Constitution.

Grothman, has doubled down on his view that being a single mother is child abuse and women get pregnant out of wedlock to take advantage of the welfare system. Now, he’s claiming that we are responsible for all the ills of society. “There’s been a huge change over the last 30 years, and a lot of that change has been the choice of women.”

Well, he’s right. There have been huge changes. Women are no longer willing to be blamed for being raped. We are no longer willing to have our babies taken from us if we are unmarried. We are no longer willing to stay in marriages where we are used and abused, beaten senseless if dinner is a minute late, kept isolated from families and friends. We are no longer willing to stay in the kitchen and let men make all our decisions for us. We are not longer willing to be abandoned when our husbands decide we are too old, or be infested with sexually transmitted diseases because they are getting their kinks from prostitutes. We are no longer accepting of being pushed to the fringes of society, denied educations and jobs if we are single mothers. We are no longer willing to be less than equal.

Yeah, there have been a lot of changes in society in the last thirty years and we women are responsible for a lot of them. You conservatives need to get over it. We will not back down just so you can live in your little fantasy world, because in the real world, none of what you believe about life in America in the glorious past was the truth. We will not go back. We will not give up what we have fought for. We will not give way on those rights that some of us have died for.

Just a thought here, all you free and equal women in Wisconsin…how about flooding the e-mails of these two jerks with photos of abuse victims? It probably won’t change their puny minds, but it might make you feel better.

Related articles

• Wisconsin State Rep: Abused Women Should Remember Why They Fell In Love In The First Place (alan.com)
• GOP Lawmaker’s Advice To Abuse Victims (huffingtonpost.com)
• According to a Wisconsin Bill, Single Moms Are a Child Abuse Threat (healthland.time.com)
• Wisconsin’s Grothman Calls Unwed Motherhood Child Abuse (lezgetreal.com)
• Punishing Single Momhood (heartiste.wordpress.com)
• Lara Bergthold: Rick Santorum’s Latest Target — Single Moms (huffingtonpost.com)
• Unbelievably Stupid Law Would Declare Single Parenthood Child Abuse (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• Wisconsin’s Grothman Calls Unwed Motherhood Child Abuse (pinkbananaworld.com)

Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, before Waterloo

Like Gigi, Scott Walker must be praying that “…I’ll be Wellington, not Bonaparte.” He told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren on Monday night that his recall election will be a “Waterloo” moment for national unions.

“The national unions, for them this is all about the money. It’s not just about the budget or collective bargaining. We gave nearly every, well, we gave every public employee in the state the freedom to choose whether or not they want to be in a union or not and I think that’s really why this is a Waterloo for them.” Nice piece of revisionist history there, Gov.

The public sector unions in Wisconsin gave the state everything it wanted – greater contributions to health insurance and pension funds to balance the budget. What they didn’t want to give up was their right to collectively bargain. They were more than willing to co-operate in reasonable efforts to curtail costs. If a municipality wanted greater freedom to assign people to other jobs or reduce the work crews where there really were too many people standing around doing nothing, the unions were willing to work that out. But they wanted to retain the right to join their voices together to negotiate with the government, and that is what Walker stripped them of – their right to act as a united front against the power of the government, to be protected from individual abuse and harassment from the government. That’s what unions are – protection in numbers. They didn’t ask to be “liberated” from paying their union dues. The provision that cut off the payroll deduction for union dues was not done for the benefit of the union workers, but for the benefit of the Republican Party which is trying to cut off the primary source of PAC funds for Democrats while building up their war chests with the SuperPACs of billionaires like Walker’s friends, the Koch brothers.

Walker loves to portray himself as a Don Quixote tilting against the horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad unions. He insists that his recall is all about protecting heroes like himself who want to take on controversial reforms and tackle the boogie man of collective bargaining. He said of the unions, “They’re going to invest everything possible to try and take me out to send a message not only to other Republican governors, but I think to a number of discerning Democrat [sic] governors and mayor who look at this and say, you know what? Maybe we can rein in our cost here and be able to balance our budget in a way that’s responsible if we do some of the same things that they’ve done in Wisconsin….I think long term it sets the table for whether me and other governors or even people like my friend Paul Ryan and the courageous things he’s tried to do in Washington. When we prevail, it will send a powerful, powerful message that when people complain about politicians who don’t have the courage to stand up, the guts to take on the tough issues. Our election will show, when we win, that you know what? Voters do want people to take on the tough issues, they do want people to stand up for the taxpayer.”

Yup – the voters want a billion dollars cut out of municipal budgets to pay for a billion dollars in tax cuts for “job creators” who have not only not created any jobs in Wisconsin, but who have terminated jobs in every month since Walker took office. The voters really, truly want to drag teachers and police and firefighters down to the income and benefit levels of Walmart employees. You’ll hear and read that one frequently on the right, “Why should they have something I don’t?” Talk about class warfare. The bobbleheads on the right can’t see that they are being persuaded to resent anyone who is in the middle class, in order to preserve the massive wealth of the 1%. God forbid that the Waltons, whose personal wealth was estimated at a collective $90 billion should let their employees have health insurance or full-time jobs.

Walker has been whining for months about the massive amount of money that the national unions are pouring into the recall effort, even though there is very little outside money coming into Wisconsin to defeat him. There is a lot of outside emotional support, but not a whole lot of money. For the Democrats, that is. Walker would have more luck making that fairy tale stick if he wasn’t being filmed at right wing fundraisers all over the country getting big money donations to his campaign from people who don’t live in Wisconsin and whose only interest in Wisconsin is the destruction of unions, making Barack Obama a “one term president,” destroying what few rights women and minorities have won over the past century, and establishing one-party rule in America.

The Koch brothers have pledged whatever they need to spend of their joint $50 billion fortune to keep Walker in office. They need to. He still hasn’t had the opportunity to sell them the state’s energy assets, a cornerstone of his “budget balancing.” It just wasn’t politically feasible to be seen to pay off his supporters that way until after the recall.

In the meantime, United Wisconsin and the other groups involved in the recall may want to contact the management of ABBA and ask for permission to use their song “Waterloo.” The actual words of the whole song don’t matter. What matters is the single word, “Waterloo” and the music, which is very catchy and sticks in people’s heads. If Walker wants to recreate the defining battle of the European war against one of the men who sought to turn Europe into his personal empire, the opposition should be happy to make the connection for him. Let’s remind Walker that Napoleon lost.

Related articles

• Scott Walker Whining About “Outside” Money To Recall Him (lezgetreal.com)
• Things Just Keep Getting More Interesting In Wisconsin… (lezgetreal.com)
• Scott Walker on recall: This is Waterloo – Politico (politico.com)
• Email Of The Day – Gov. Scott Walker (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Happy New Year, Gov. Walker (lezgetreal.com)
• Mary Bottari: On Anniversary of Prank Call to Gov. Walker, the Real David Koch Wants to “Stop Union Power” (huffingtonpost.com)

Mahlon Mitchell

Mahlon Mitchell, President of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, has announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, to run against Rebecca Kleefisch the recalled Republican.

Mitchell helped organize the union protests in the Statehouse last winter and has decided that instead of rallying the troops for some other candidates, he’d take on the job himself.

The 34-year-old lieutenant in the Madison Fire Department is intelligent, highly articulate, quick witted, and comfortably handsome. He became a media star during the protests in part because he interviews so very well, knowing exactly what he’s talking about. He’d make a good debate partner for Elizabeth Warren. They both have that rare combination of complete command of their issues and an accessible demeanor.

Mitchell likes to start rallies with a chant. He coaches his audience to do a response to his call to action. He hollers “Tell me what democracy looks like,” and they call back “This is what democracy looks like.” It’s a battle cry that melds the crowd into a unit, and in unity there is power. That’s the core belief of all union members.

It is no surprise that his national announcement came on Monday’s The Ed Show on MSNBC. Ed Schultz has been the national cheerleader for the union defense movement, beginning in Wisconsin and carrying over to the other states where union rights are under attack. And it is even less of a surprise that Ed Schultz has endorsed Mahlon Mitchell for lieutenant governor of Wisconsin.

If Mitchell likes the political stage, he could have an impressive career ahead of him. If you wanted to find a single man who is the exact opposite of Mitt Romney – clear in his positions, comfortable in his own person, able to interact with anyone, impressive in a laid-back way – you would build a Mahlon Mitchell.

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• Mahlon Mitchell, Wisconsin Firefighters Union President, To Run For Lieutenant Governor (huffingtonpost.com)
• Recalled Wisconsin State Senator Quits (lezgetreal.com)
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• Tens of Thousands Rally in Wisconsin for Labor Rights and Democracy (the2012scenario.com)

Statre Senator Pam Galloway, Wausau

Citing family health problems, Republican Wisconsin State Senator Pam Galloway of Wausau, has announced she is resigning from the Senate. She represents the 29^th Senate District, a lying-on-its-side-Y-shaped district in the northern center of the state with limited urban areas, mostly concentrated in the Y-leg. Galloway is one of the four Republican State Senators who are being callenged in recall elections this summer, along with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau, Senator Terry Moulton of Chippewa Falls and Senator Van Wanggaard of Racine. Democratic State Representative Donna Seidel, also of Wausau, is announced as an opponent for Galloway in the elections which will held in May or June.

Galloway’s resignation eliminates the Republican majority in the Wisconsin Senate. Following the recall elections last fall, the majority was a single member. Now the Senate is tied 16-16. For the Democrats to take control of the Senate will require winning two of the recall elections.

The election in the 29^th Senate District is expected to go ahead even though it will no longer be a recall election. Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Government Accountability Board which is supervising the elections, said that Galloway’s resignation will not change the state’s plans. The recall election is set for May 8 unless multiple candidates come forward for the seats. If primaries are needed, they will be held May 8 and the election will be held June 5. Scott Fitzgerald is now shopping for a Republican candidate for Galloway’s seat. He has mentioned Representatives Jerry Petrowski of Marathon and Mary Williams of Medford.

Poster by Teamsternation

Meanwhile, in the big race, the one to recall Governor Scott Walker, there is a battle of the polls going on. Pick a poll and you will get conflicting versions of what those polls means.

The raw numbers are these – in poll after poll since last fall, Gov. Walker’s approval rating has been under the 52% by which he won the election in November of 2010. The breakdown averages to 48% Strongly Disapprove of him and 34% Strongly Approve of him. It is the strength of emotion in these polls that is more important than the actual numbers. Polls on approval usually offer five choices – strongly approve, approve, disapprove, strongly disapprove and don’t-give-a-flying-fig. With only 18% of polled Wisconsinites in the mildly approve or disapprove or don’t care fields, the numbers are more relevant than the usual approval-disapproval polls. The strength of approval and disapproval will propel people to vote.

But more interesting is the approval rating among households with children in the public school system. Only 32% approve of the governor and 67% disapprove. Walker’s “budget cutting” included cutting a billion dollars from the funding for municipalities, and much of that came out of schools. It was “off-set” by a one billion dollar tax cut for the wealthiest in Wisconsin. During the recall elections in the fall, Ed Schultz interviewed a young man from Northern Wisconsin whose district was not impacted by the recalls. His interest was in the long-term ramifications of the recalls because his small town had suffered a 50% cut in school personnel because of Walker’s budget cuts. Walker had insisted that cutting benefits for teachers and eliminating their collective bargaining rights would make the budget cuts possible without hurting education. What this young man testified to was the truth of these budget cuts. They have hurt Wisconsin schools. Families with young children are an essential electoral demographic. The decisions they make in party affiliation today will impact elections for decades to come. This is the age – early twenties to mid-thirties – when an adult solidifies their opinions on political matters, not when they are in college. They are living in the real world, not in the idealism of the campus, and they make those decisions based on their real world experiences. These are the voters who are most likely to make their choices based on today’s economy and tomorrow’s prospects for themselves and their children. So, having 67% of them opposing the governor of Wisconsin, a man favored by the SuperPAC monstrosity of the Koch brothers, a man who was on the fast track to national office, is very important.

Slashing out-of-control spending sounds like a great idea in the abstract. It has gotten a lot of Republicans elected in the past three years. But living with the consequences is quite a different story. Now that we have seen what it is that Republicans slash and burn, more people are seeing how bad this whole course of governance has been. Scott Walker will be the first to learn it the hard way. He is too oblivious, too wrapped up in the cocoon of the party to even understand how bad it looks to the people of Wisconsin when he goes out of state to raise funds to fight off the recall that collected a million signature for his ouster, almost twice the number needed.

Related articles

• Things Just Keep Getting More Interesting In Wisconsin… (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin state Sen. Pam Galloway (R), facing recall, will resign (dailykos.com)
• Recall Election To Move Forward In Spite Of Senator Galloway Resignation (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• Wisconsin Republicans Will Lose Senate Majority With Galloway Resignation (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• Recall elections against four Wisconsin Republican state senators to go forward (dailykos.com)
• Wisconsin GOP Wants To Change Recall Laws (lezgetreal.com)
• “Needs Of My Family” Is Excuse For State Sen. Pam Galloway Resignation (dekerivers.wordpress.com)

United States Senate Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

At 5:00 pm yesterday, the deadline for candidates to appear on the June 12 primary ballot officially passed. There is no dearth of folks looking to fill Sen. Olympia Snowe’s seat in the U.S. Senate.

Democrats:

• Matt Dunlap, former secretary of state for Maine
• State Senator Cynthia Dill
• State Rep. John Hinck

Republicans:

• Secretary of State Charlie Summers
• Attorney General William Schneider
• State Treasurer Bruce Poliquin
• State Sen. Debra Plowman
• Rick Bennett ,former Maine Senate President
• Scott D’Ambroise, a  Tea Party candidate who entered the race before Snowe announced her retirement

The big candidate, though, is former independent governor Angus King. King’s background in the public and private sectors appeals to both Republicans and Democrats.

Early polling suggests King is the clear front-runner in the race, which probably explains why no prominent Democrats are running against him. In 2010, the Democratic vote in the state was split between a Democrat and an Independent candidate, allowing a Republican to take the Governor’s mansion with a mere 39% of the vote.

Now that the collecting of signatures is over with, Mainiacs are in for three months of primary campaigning. With nine candidates in that nominating race, it may prove to be almost as entertaining as watching the Republican presidential candidates early on, when we were placing bets on who was going to be the Republican flavor-of-the-week.

Good Luck, Maine. May Civility reign.

Related articles

• Retirement Throws Maine’s Senate Race Into ‘Chaos’ – New York Times (nytimes.com)
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Rick Santorum in his favorite milieu (by Lockerz)

In a recent Pew Research Center poll, on 29% of the respondents knew that Rick Santorum is a Roman Catholic, and 38% believe he is a born-again, evangelical Christian. Santorum makes no secret of his Catholicism. The error in perception is based on the manner in which Rick Santorum appears more right wing than the Pope himself.

Santorum is not one of the 88, 000 lay members of The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei, but his home church, St. Catherine of Sienna in Great Falls, Virginia, and the secondary school his sons were sent to are deeply associated with the very conservative Catholic group. A lot fo what people believe about Opus Dei is rumor, myth and exaggeration, but the very conservative nature of the group is not.

Rick Santorum has risen farther in national politics than any evangelical Christian since Pat Robertson, and he has done so at a time when the Republican Party has been using evangelical Christians to increase their vote totals. When Robertson ran for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1988, this nation had not gone through over a decade of the party creating ballot issues over abortion and same sex marriage, we were not being inundated with laws based on nothing but religious fervor. Santorum is our first chance to bring the dialogue to a national level, to see what the future of this nation would be if the religious right continues to eat away at our religious freedom.

Santorum does not believe in evolution, a belief he shares with many evangelical, fundamentalist Christians. But it is a belief that is not part of Catholic teaching. The official position of the Catholic Church is based on the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, who in the early years of the fifth century wrote his Seminal Principles. In it, St. Augustine laid out the Big Bang Theory and the theory of evolution, without ever having seen a fossil or a living example of evolutionary adaptation. St. Augustine wrote that God created a ball of matter, programmed it to become the universe as we know it and ignited it. These days we call it “intelligent design,” and see it as a compromise between belief in an omnipotent God and the science of evolution. But Santorum does not believe in what his own church teaches. In those states with evangelical Christians dominating school boards and textbook committees, evolution is taught as an unproven theory side by side with “scientific creationism.”

The Catholic Church has an official policy banning birth control, but American parish priests have been ignoring it for decades. It finally sunk into them that too many children were coming to Mass without their parents and leaving the church after Confirmation. It is a little hard to keep a church going if it is going to excommunicate 98% of the adults for using birth control. Countries in Europe and South America that are predominantly Catholic have lifted their bans on the purchase of birth control. Rick Santorum has said that he would support any state that outlawed birth control. Santorum himself did not come from one of those classic Catholic families of 12 children. His parents only had three.

The most extreme elements of the anti-abortion movement equate birth control with abortion, even when doctors and experts try to explain that most birth control prevents fertilization and does not kill fertilized eggs. Santorum supports laws that ban abortion in all cases, even in the event of a threat to a woman’s life. He would rather see women die than abort a deadly pregnancy.

Santorum equates birth control with immorality, claims that it encourages bad behavior. He has a real problem with sex for any reason other than procreation. And he places the onus on females to maintain a moral society.

As noted earlier, the Santorums sent their two eldest sons to the Heights School, a private Washington, D. C., secondary school associated with Opus Dei. The Santorums have had eight children, all of them completely home-schooled except the two eldest boys. Their seven living children range in age from 3 to 21, four sons and three daughters. Isabella will tragically probably not survive childhood. Elizabeth is a junior at the University of Dallas. Ironically, their eighth child, Gabriel, was born prematurely at 20 weeks and only lived for a couple of hours. Twenty weeks is the gestational age at which the Catholic Church believed the unborn received their souls and abortion before 20 weeks was not murder, until 1588 when Pope Sixtus V defied almost 1600 years of Church teaching to issue his anti-birth control, anti-abortion edict.

We are all aware that Santorum equates homosexuality with humping farm animals and raping children. That’s old news for Santorum. What is new is the threat that as President he would strip away what few rights gays and lesbians have achieved in the past 20 years throughout the country.

Santorum’s latest stand is “English only,” as expressed to the voters in Puerto Rico. If they want statehood, they should make English their official and only language. For as long as I can remember, Puerto Ricans have voted against statehood, but that is not as important as Santorum’s embracing of the “English only” only agenda. Santorum himself is bi-lingual, English and Italian, compliments of his family. Immigrant families evolve into “English only” over an average of three generations. Only in the Deep South, which has virtually no history of non-English-speaking immigration, is there a belief that immigrants learned English right off the boat. Santorum’s statements are not just anti-Hispanic, they are anti-immigrant. They denounce the very process that his own family went through from his grandfather’s arrival from Italy to himself.

This is a presidential candidate who said that President Kennedy’s statement that he believed in the concept that is the foundation of our pluralism – the separation of church and state – made him want to throw up. This man would deny women the things we have fought for for over a century, whose views of women are as repressive as those of the most conservative Islamic country.

Up to now, we have dealt with the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist Christians and their agenda one state and one law at a time. Rick Santorum is allowing us to see the consequences of this agenda on a national stage. Those of us who live in liberal states cannot ignore Santorum’s views because he is running for President of the whole United States, not just governor of Nebraska. We can’t say “Oh, that’s Idaho’s problem, not ours.” Rick Santorum is everyone’s problem and he has extended the debate beyond the immediacy of a single vote on a single law in a single state.

Santorum has said that there is no place in this nation for a man of faith in politics. That’s one of the great lies of the right wing. There is plenty of room for men of faith in politics. There is just no room for their religious doctrines in our civil laws. Saint Santorum is focusing the debate, making us all aware of how widespread is the impact of the propaganda of the right wing that America was founded as a Christian country, how many people have been flimflammed into believing that liberals are all godless heathens who would shut their churches. In Rick Santorum we finally have someone who can galvanize those who have been unaware, those who think the right wing agenda doesn’t hurt them, those who have been persuaded by the generalizations to support things they don’t truly understand. For that reason, Rick Santorum is the best damned thing that has happened to make us protect the uniqueness and freedoms of our secular state.

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Gov. Scott Walker (from Flickr)

First, the infuriated union members of Wisconsin managed to get two Republican State Senators ousted last summer in recall elections. Then, as soon as it was legal to do so, they collected over a million signatures to force a recall of Governor Scott Walker. Then, a Dane County judge put a hold on the new voter ID law in Wisconsin. Among all the usual objections to photo ID for voting was a very Wisconsin twist – in his “budget balancing” fervor, Walker consolidated the Department of Motor Vehicle offices, removing from several Democratic districts a means for people to obtain photo ID for voting. Walker also tried a variety of legal means to derail the recall, but his efforts were shot down. When one is trying to convince a judge that outside forces are directing the recall, it helps to not be filmed at out-of-state fundraisers hosted by the Koch brothers.

Now, the Republicans in Wisconsin have been hit with a double-whammy. The elections board has certified the recall petitions for four more Republican state senators and a second judge has thrown out the voter ID law completely. The first one just blocked it pending a trial in April.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald

Among the recalled senators will be Senate President Scott Fitzgerald, the guy who shoved the anti-union law through the legislature while breaking the state’s Open Meeting Law on national television. Fitzgerald is from Juneau. The recall needed 16,742 signatures and turned in 18,282 valid ones. Fitzgerald’s kid brother, Jeff, is the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly. For Sen. Van Wanggaard of Racine, 15,353 signatures were needed. The board certified 19,142. The recall of Sen. Terry Moulton of Chippewa Falls needed 14,958 signatures. 18,657 were certified. And lastly, Sen. Pam Galloway of Wausau had 18,511 signatures certified in her recall, with only 15,647 needed.

The Democrats only need to win two of these four to claim control of the Wisconsin State Senate and put an end to the Republican juggernaut that has promised much and delivered only union-busting and lay-offs. Wisconsin has lost jobs every month since Scott Walker took office.

There will probably be an attempt to co-ordinate the recall elections for these senators with the recall election for Walker and his lieutenant governor. One piece of news escaped us here in the northeast. Douglas LaFollette, the Secretary of State, has announced his bid for the Democratic nomination to run against Walker. LaFollette has been prominent in the fights against Walker, standing up to attempts to end-run the proper procedures for implementation of the laws that the Republicans have written. He is also a distant cousin of the late “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, a Wisconsin governor and U. S. Senator of the first decades of the 20^th century.

As to that voter ID law…..

Last week, Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan put the photo ID law on hold pending a full trial in April. Flanagan found that sufficient evidence existed to bring the multiple lawsuits that had been brought before him to trial. His decision was based on the Wisconsin constitution which is more protective of voter rights than the United States Constitution. In his decision, he called the law “the single most restrictive voter eligibility law in the United States.” Tuesday, fellow Dane County Circuit Court Judge Richard Niess went further. He stuck down the law altogether.

Judge Niess, in his eight-page ruling, wrote, “A government that undermines the very foundation of its existence – the people’s inherent pre-consitutional right to vote – imperils its legitimacy as a government by the people, for the people and especially of the people. It sows the seeds of its own demise as a democratic institution. This is precisely what 2011 Wisconsin Act 23 does with its photo ID mandates.”

Wow. What a concept. A government that makes it hard for its citizens to vote is undemocratic. How utterly beautifully simple.

Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen promised to quickly appeal the decision. Of course he did. He’s a Republican and everyone knows that this is the year that Republicans are willing to do whatever it takes to dump as many minorities, poor people, elderly people, students and disabled people from the voter rolls. They are wrapping themselves in the flag, waving around the Constitution and insisting that they are doing this out of love of country and to prevent the rampant voter fraud which has been proven not to exist. The only thing that has been proven is that these voter ID laws are targeted at people with a history of voting for Democrats, have been designed by the right wing American Legislative Exchange Council, and the founder of ALEC is pushing his vision of an America in which only “the right people” retain the right to vote.

It used to be that the most famous things about Wisconsin were the Green Bay Packers, the weather and cheese. In 2011, Wisconsin became ground zero in the battle for the soul of this nation. The people of Wisconsin have fought for our right to assemble peacefully, to seek redress of our grievances with a government, to join unions and have those unions speak with one voice for their members, to retain the right of all our citizens to vote freely, to have our laws followed strictly by our lawmakers as well as our citizens, to place the ordinary citizen’s needs above the dictates of corporations or desires the wealthy few, and to remove from office those whose agendas do more harm than good. They have fought against collusion between politicians and individuals who seek personal gain from public enterprise and who do not even reside in the state. One day, the history books will record that Wisconsin is where America was reborn.

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Rep. Jay Inslee

When one does something can be as important as what one does. That’s the case for Washington Representative Jay Inslee, a Democrat who is running for the governorship of his state.

Inslee wants to campaign full-time to replace the retiring Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire, but he doesn’t want to hand over his seat in the House for a special election. No Democrat is assuming that the past is an indicator of the current political situation. By resigning from the House on Saturday, March 11, he has assured that there will be no special election for the seat and it will stay vacant until the person elected in November is sworn in next January. Leaving the seat to be contested in the November general election increases the amount of money that will be available for the campaign, no matter who is running. A special election would draw off funds for the single race, whereas if the race is one of the many being run in Washington, there will be a pooling of resources for all the House races there.

Inslee will be facing Attorney General Rob McKenna in November. At the moment, McKenna is polling slightly ahead of Inslee in part because he is in-state all the time and able to make more personal appearances.

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The State Assembly passed a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow elected officials to be recalled only if they have been charged with a serious crime or if there is a finding of probable cause that they have violated the state code of ethics. The amendment’s sponsors claim that it is necessary to limit recalls because Governor Walker and others are being unfairly targeted for doing their jobs. In other words, the Republicans are poor, hard working, schmucks being persecuted for being Republicans.

The good news is, Walker has no part in the amendment process and even when the State Senate passes it, and they will pass it, it must be tabled until after the next legislature is sworn in.

Article XII of the Wisconsin Constitution provides the following methods for amendment:

An amendment may be approved by a simple majority of both chambers of the state legislature. The amendment must then be published for three months prior to the next general election (November, 2012). Then, the newly installed legislature must pass it in both chambers by simple majority and then, in the next general election (November 2014) the amendment will be placed on the statewide ballot where it must be passed by a simple majority of the state’s voters.

Or, if a simple majority of both houses agrees, a question can be placed on a statewide ballot to ask if a constitutional convention should be called. If passed by a simple majority, the constitutional convention will be convened in the following legislature. The constitutional convention will then decide if the amendment should be made to the state constitution.

The Republicans have not asked for a constitutional convention, so the earliest that the amendment could be passed would be November of 2014 to take effect in January of 2015. Two and a half years is a long time in a country noted for its short attention span, but denying people their rights seems to be something Wisconsinites feel deeply about – deeply enough that 99,000 more Wisconsinites signed the petition to recall Scott Walker than voted him into office.

Amusingly, the new amendment, if it had been in effect now, would probably not have saved Scott Walker’s bacon. The two-year-old “John Doe” investigation into his activities while Milwaukee County Executive have reached the point where Walker has set up a legal defense fund to raise money for his own defense, an action that suggests the investigation is going to land on him soon and not just on his former staff members, six of whom have already been charged. In his statement announcing this fund raising effort, Walker wrote, “For nearly two years, Milwaukee County officials have been examining issues related to former employees of the County.  I have repeatedly pledged my cooperation with that inquiry. I also made it clear that no public money has been used, or will be used, to pay for the attorneys needed to review documents and assist me in cooperating. To fulfill my commitment, I have today formed a legal fund to pay for the expenses incurred in cooperating with the inquiry. The fund will operate in accordance with the Wisconsin law authorizing these accounts, which was passed almost thirty years ago.” This money is in addition to the funds Walker has been raising all over the country to fight the recall election. His “sponsors” – Charles and David Koch – have pledged their support for that campaign. One of the primary charges being investigated in the “John Doe” is that Walker’s staff, with or without his knowledge, engaged in illegal fund raising activities.

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Pike County, Ohio in red

Americans outside of Ohio tend not to remember, or maybe weren’t taught, that after the creation of the states of Vermont and Kentucky, the first expansion of the original nation was into the Ohio territories. Pike County, Ohio, was founded in 1815 and named for explorer Zebulon Pike who had died in the War of 1812. Pike gave his name to Pike’s Peak on Colorado as a result of his exploratory work for the new nation.

Pike County is mostly rural, with rolling hills and low mountains, the back side, as it were, of the Appalachians. It’s towns and small cities are very similar to those in New England, spanning the late colonial and mid-Victorian eras of architecture. They tap maple trees in Pike County and have glorious fall foliage. It is also the site of Ohio’s great election mystery.

Democratic candidate William Smith

William Smith has won the Democratic primary to run against Republican Brad Wenstrup for the 2^nd District’s seat in the House of Representatives. Wenstrup won his primary against incumbent Jean Schmidt. Smith resides in the county seat of Waverly, apparently with his mother. It was she who answered the phone the day after the primary and told reporters that William,. Age 61, was out of town for the week. William Smith did not campaign. He gave no campaign speeches and held no rallies. No one, except possibly his neighbors, knows who he is. Deja vu! This is South Carolina’s Alvin Greene all over again.

Smith beat David Krikorian of Madeira by only 59 votes out of the 20,000 cast. As soon as the votes are certified, they will go to automatic recount is the vote tally remains that close. Krikorian blamed his loss on robocalls funded by some secret SuperPAC. There might be a much less nefarious reason.

According to the candidates’ profiles posted by Our Campaigns, Smith graduated from Glenwood High School in Canton in 1960 and is a retired tool grinder and abrasive specialist from the Timken Company. He was a member of the United Steelworkers of America for 12 years and served a three-year apprenticeship at Timken, ending in 1963. He attended the U.S. Army Aviation School in 1963 and the Air National Guard NCO Academy in 1970. That information would indicate time in the Ohio Air National Guard, though his bio doesn’t specify that.

He was trained in mediation and arbitration and was elected to four terms on the Stark County Central Committee and has worked for various Democratic campaigns. Stark County is in northern Ohio and surrounds the city of Canton. No information is given as to when Mr. Smith moved to Pike County

All the attention given to Ohio’s Republican primary gave reporters a lot of time to talk to voters in that state

That little bit in his bio about having been a member of the United Steelworkers Union might have been the deciding factor for some voters. All the attention paid to the Ohio Republican presidential primary put a lot of reporters in the state, and that means they had time to ask a lot of questions of voters. What they heard from independent voters was as important as what they heard from Republicans. They don’t like Governor John Kasich.

Kasich may be the hero of the conservatives because he kept his promise to cut the state’s deficit, but he did it on the backs of public sector workers, municipal budgets and public sector unions. His union-busting law, SB5, was overturned by the voters by a 2 to 1 margin in a November referendum. He can’t be recalled because of Ohio’s laws, but he can be stripped of power if the Democrats can take control of the state’s legislature.

Jay McDonald, president of the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police, told reporters that many of the Republican members of his union have changed parties because of that law, and the others around the country, “I’ve got lots and lots of guys who said because of the continued attacks on the unions, they no longer consider themselves to be Republicans.” The police are not the only ones. The sentiment is widespread across the public sector and among other union members in the state.

But there is also the matter of the Democratic election machine. Ohio is considered an essential state for the Presidency, and every Democrat will benefit from the way they can mobilize. The defeat of SB5 was just an early indication of what they can do. Republicans may have SuperPACs, but the power of the unions is in people who can be mobilized for everything from manning phone banks to driving voters to polls.

John Kasich, like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, may be one of the better things to happen to the Democrats in this election cycle.

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