Just go read Krugman, and read this by him too.
If there is a bright spot to the financial meltdown, it is that Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan has lived long enough to see his reputation collapse like those Ponzi schemes he thought were impossible in his magical free market.
You should read his whole post about what is going on in Wisconsin, but in the last paragraph, he asks the important question:
Where the f%$# is the President? Where the f%$# is the President? Where the f%$# is the President?
(%$# mine)
The answer, of course is that the President is busy, “Winning the Future,” because pursuing a lame ass slogan in order to be reelected in 2008 is more important than defending the rights of the ordinary working man.
The lower house of the legislature passed it today.
There are some real questions as to whether this is is legal, so the Wisconsin Supreme Court, currently 4-3 Republican, may very well have the final word.
The reason that this is important is that Wisconsin elects its supreme court justices in partisan elections, and there is an election on is April 5 with Democrat JoAnne Kloppenburg facing incumbent Republican David Prosser.
Given that this is generally a low turnout sort of election, and that liberal groups are flooding the zone generally right now, the Dem has a real chance of winning, particularly because Prosser was one of the people who chose to ignore the US Supreme Court ruling and let a fellow state Supreme Court judge off for not recusing himself when a major donor to his campaign appeared before him.
Recall time!So, the Wisconsin State Senate just pulled the anti-union provisions out of the budget bill, and then, since they did not require a quorum, since they were non-budgetary, they passed it with an 18-1 vote.
I will note that the motion appears to be in violation of the state constitution:
The measure approved Wednesday forbids most government workers from collectively bargaining for wage increases beyond the rate of inflation. It also requires public workers to pay more toward their pensions and double their health insurance contribution, a combination equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut for the average worker.
Those savings would appear to be budgetary to me, and hence subject to the state constitution’s quorum requirement.
Firedog Lake’s invaluable David Dayen has some more of the finer points, and it appears that this is definitely headed to court, though the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is heavily Republican.
If you want to donate to the recall efforts, you can go to my Act Blue Page. There is a link there for donations.
Also note that in the middle of the most important fight for ordinary working Americans in decades, the Obama administration has decided that they don’t want to be involved:
Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.
Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.
I guess that someone in the administration finds unions, and ordinary working people to be icky. After all, they expect to spend a billion dollars in 2012 on the Presidential election, and the working man just does not have that kind of money.
Barack Obama is very lucky that the Republicans are as awful as they are, because otherwise, as awful as he is, he’d have a serious primary challenger right now.
What can I say, when Mitt Romney is the class act in the room, you have a very scary political party.
And I know the guy who did it, James “Jamie” O’Keefe:
The Massachusetts Election Division has approved the Massachusetts Pirate Party as a political designation, allowing voters in the state to register as a “Pirate.”
The party strives to increase government transparency, promote personal privacy, reinforce the spread of knowledge through copyright reform, and abolish patents.
“We live in a country founded on the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the Massachusetts Pirate Party said in a statement. “For many people, those ideals are not real. The Supreme Court and Congress have expanded the power of corporations and made them more powerful than people. Increasingly government officials ignore open meeting laws, make deals favorable to corporations behind closed doors and sell off our public information to private interests.”
I went to UMass with him.
Note, as the article does, that Jamie is not the criminal asshole who cooks up fraudulent videos.
Note that my inclinations on IP are very similar, though perhaps a bit more moderate, than those of the Pirate Party.
They were reporting that the Wisconsin State Democratic Senators were returning to the capitol shortly, which was emphatically denied by the state Senators in question.
This was clearly planted because as time goes on the Republicans are losing ground. For example, one of the more prominent teabagger PACs is begging for money because they are losing this fight, and a counter protest, complete with Koch brothers free bus service, could only muster 700 attendees.
The lesson to be learned here is that when you make nice, no one notices who was on what side, but when you fight back people do notice, and if you are on the sane side of the argument, you win.
David Dayen notes that, “A Liberal Is a Villager Who’s Been Screwed By a Mortgage Servicer, and if this is the case, Washington Post hard core villager Dana Milbank has just discovered liberalism:
Behind the foreclosure crisis, big banks’ reign of error
By Dana Milbank
Sunday, March 6, 2011;The problem in the nation’s housing market now isn’t subprime lending. It’s subpar lenders.
Last fall, my wife and I refinanced our mortgage with Citibank. Sixty days later, we received a “cancellation notice” from our homeowners insurance company “for non-payment of premium.”
Turns out Citibank, which had been collecting hundreds of dollars a month from us to pay the insurer, hadn’t made the payments. It was, I later learned, one of the usual tricks mortgage servicers use to squeeze more cash out of their customers. About a month later, I learned of another trick: Citibank informed us that it was increasing our monthly payment by nearly $300.
Along the way, a simple refi became a months-long odyssey: rates misquoted, interest charged on a phantom account, legal documents issued in wrong names, a mortgage officer who disappeared for days at a time (first it was his birthday, then his laptop was in the shop), a bounced check from Citibank’s own title company, and the freezing of our bank accounts.
For me, this amounts to no more than the hassle of arguing with Citibank to fix its “mistakes.” But consumer advocates tell me these are typical of the screw-ups by the big banks that service home mortgages. And these errors – accidental or otherwise – are driving large numbers of people into default and foreclosure when it otherwise would not have happened.
It’s a bad situation – and the new majority in the House is poised to make it even worse.
He got seriously boned by his bank, and now he realizes that it ain’t just a bunch of deadbeats who are trying to stiff the banks.
Unfortunately, he’s also singing the praises of HAMP, which was clearly constructed for the benefit of the banks at the expense of homeowners by Obama and His Evil Minions™, so he’s still that lovable clueless scamp we’ve always known.
Fresh on the heels of claiming that Afghan parents burn their own children for crall political purposes, little Davey Petraeus is apologizing for a helicopter strike that killed 9 children who were collecting wood:
A NATO airstrike that Afghan officials said Wednesday killed nine children collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan the day before became the latest irritant in the tense relationship between President Hamid Karzai and the international force in the country.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top NATO commander here, issued an apology for an error that military officials attributed to faulty communication as an air weapons team responded to an attack on a NATO base Tuesday in Konar province.
“We are deeply sorry for this tragedy and apologize to the members of the Afghan government, the people of Afghanistan and most importantly, the surviving family members of those killed by our actions,” Petraeus said in an unusually contrite written statement. “These deaths should have never happened and I will personally apologize to President Karzai.”
The strike increased the already high tension between Karzai and NATO commanders, who came under scrutiny late last month because of another case in which Afghan officials alleged that dozens of civilians were killed in a U.S. military operation, also in Konar province.
Why does he hate America?
Doesn’t he know that whenever we blow up innocent civilians, it’s because they were trying to get killed, because it helps the Taliban?
“Unusually contrite” my ass.
I’m not sure why he isn’t following his usual pattern, lie, release phony facts, and a few weeks later issue a correction on the weekend, but somehow or other the truth got out despite his best efforts.
This is not typical behavior for him.
After a couple of weeks of a growing grassroots effort to initiate recall campaigns against 8 Republican state Senators, the Wisconsin Democratic party has officially joined the effort:
The Wisconsin Democratic Party has decided to throw its weight behind a nascent grassroots drive to recall a number of GOP state senators, a move that will considerably increase the pressure on them to break with Governor Scott Walker, the Dem party chair confirms to me.
“The proposals and the policies that Republicans are pushing right now are not what they campaigned on, and they’re extreme,” the party chair, Mike Tate, said in an interview. “Something needs to be done about it now. We’re happy to stand with citizens who are filling papers to recall these senators.”
Previously, Wisconsin Dems had not publicly supported talk about recalling GOP Senators, in hopes of privately reaching a negotiated solution to the crisis. The Wisconsin Democratic Party’s decision to support the recall drives represents a significant ratcheting up of hostilities and in essence signals that all bets are off.
Eight Republican Senators are eligible to be recalled right now, [the state Senate has staggered terms, and you cannot initiate a recall in the first year of a term] and various groups around Wisconsin are beginning to file papers to make it happen. Tate told me that the party would throw its organization behind such efforts.
You know, I think that when the base is motivated, this might be a better idea than what they do in DC, which is to try to defang motivated Democrats, and call them names like “Professional Left.”
Then again, what do I know. I don’t have experience engineering the biggest electoral reversal for Democrats in history with the realities of politics.
Maybe deliberately demoralizing the party faithful actually works.
And maybe I’m Charlie Sheen.
Following revelations by Anonymous that HBGary Federal was developing a plan of Nixonian dirty tricks, with false identities, forged documents, and other disinformation, the CEO of HBGary Federal has been fired resigned:
Aaron Barr’s departure as CEO of HBGary Federal represented the latest twist for the company and its Sacramento affiliate, HBGary Inc. A spokeswoman for the Sacramento company confirmed the resignation.
According to numerous reports, Barr’s company, which is based in Colorado and Washington, D.C., proposed conducting a disinformation campaign against critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The plan was presented to the chamber’s law firm, but the chamber says it wasn’t aware of it.
The plan was aborted after the hacker group Anonymous stole tens of thousands of e-mails from both HBGary and HBGary Federal – and posted many of the messages on the Web.
And now Democratic members of Congress are calling for an investigation of these activities.
Of course, there won’t be an investigation in the House. The Republicans are busy looking for a blue dress.
In an effort to remove demonstrator from the Wisconsin capitol, Scott Walker had the windows welded shut to prevent people passing food in.
In related news, a district judge has issued an injunction against Scott Walker’s order to shut the capitol until a full hearing can be held.
Is it just me, or does dealing with Republicans remind one of the O. Henry story, The Ransom of Red Chief?
The official hed is that the Democratic National Committee has passed a resolution calling for an accelerate withdrawal from Afghanistan, but when you consider the fact that the sitting president, who has doubled down on escalation, and soft pedaled any exodus for both Iraq and Afghanistan, reclassifying soldiers there as “non-combat” and directing a torrent of private military contractors (mercenaries) into both nations, it is pretty clear that this was a deliberate challenge to Barack Obama.
Former Prime Minister, and former Fianna Fail head, Brian Cowen, in an unintentionally apt photographSo, Fianna Fail, having been in government for 60 of the past 79 years, has been tossed out by a resounding margin.
They fell 59 seats to 18 in Parliament, and the Green party, its coalition partner, lost all of its seats, while Fine Gael picked up 19 seats to 70, the Labour Party picked up 16 seats to 36, Sinn Fein(!) picked up 9 to get 13, the United Left Alliance (a coalition of various socialist parties) picked up 5 seats, and the new “New Vision” Party picked up 1 seat.
This is obviously a crushing defeat for Fianna Fail, and for the bank coddling policies, where the indemnified not just the depositors, but the banks’ bond holders, thereby committing the Irish taxpayers to what can only be called “debt slavery”.
What is interesting here is that Fine Gael is actually a further right party than Fianna Fail, and what the voters were really calling for were basically three policies:
Whether this electoral landslide has any long term effects has to do with whether the people who voted for real change actually see it.
While there is both a moral and treaty obligation to make the account holders whole (up to something around €20,000), the idea that the Irish are impoverishing themselves in order to prop up foreign bond holders, largely British and German, who received higher returns than they would have at home because of the higher risk, banks is clearly something that the average Irishman finds unacceptable.
A lot of people are talking about how this is a seismic reshaping of the Irish body politic, but I doubt it.
My guess is that Fianna Fail will be back in the majority in the next election, because now that the opposition has control of government, we will see half measures, and coddling of both the Irish banks and their foreign creditors, which will result in a tsunami in the other direction in the next elections.
As has been noted, a, “deeply indebted economy with just 1.8 million people at work cannot underwrite private banking liabilities of €200bn.”
If Fine Gael, (and one their likely coalition partner Labour) do not understand this, and do not force haircuts on the bond holders through threat of default (which has the added benefit of transferring the pain to the feckless Angela Merkel ), the voters will turn on them.
For a recent political case study on the wages of timidity in this sort of a crisis, one need only look to the US, and the Democratic Party under the leadership of one Barack H. Obama.
Judith Regan, who literally f%$#ed Bernie Kerik at ground zero in Manhattan, settled for a few million dollars after being fired by Rupert Murdoch, and got an apology, in which News Corp formally disavowed the original accusation of anti-Semitism that was the ostensible reasoning for her firing.
Well, now we know why Newscorp caved, because Fox News chief Roger Ailes got caught on tape advising her to lie to federal investigators:
It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary.
Ms. Regan had once been involved in an affair with Mr. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner whose mentor and supporter, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in the nascent stages of a presidential campaign. The News Corporation executive, whom she did not name, wanted to protect Mr. Giuliani and conceal the affair, she said.
Now, court documents filed in a lawsuit make clear whom Ms. Regan was accusing of urging her to lie: Roger E. Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News and a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani. What is more, the documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discussed her relationship with Mr. Kerik.
It is unclear whether the existence of the tape played a role in News Corporation’s decision to move quickly to settle a wrongful termination suit filed by Ms. Regan, paying her $10.75 million in a confidential settlement reached two months after she filed it in 2007.
Yeah, it’s “unclear”.
Would not have come up, except for the fact that Regan fired her lawyers just before the settlement, and they were accusing her of doing so to avoid paying a contingency fee, and in the lawsuit, her lawyers’ affidavits mistakenly became part of the public record:
“In fact,” the complaint said, “a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”
Mr. Redniss, in his affidavit, referred to “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.”
It appears that Fox in general, and Ailes in particular, found supporting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign to be imperative, and so told her to lie in order to keep the dirt off of Rudy.
An interesting side note to all of this:
The court records examined by The New York Times this week, which have subsequently been taken out of the public case file, also reveal another interesting footnote. After Ms. Regan fired her lawyers, a seemingly unlikely figure came forward to help settle the case: Susan Estrich, a law professor and a regular Fox commentator whose book Ms. Regan had published, according to Ms. Regan’s affidavit.
Susan Estrich has been an absolutely useless horror show on the American body politic since she handed the presidency to George H.W. Bush on a silver platter as Michael Dukkakis’ campaign manager.
So, the Republican Party’s next “Great White Hope,” Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s assault on the right to unionize, has gone from the Republican’s best plan for tearing down the base of the Democratic party to a rather unpopular farce.
First, attempts in Indiana Republicans to ape* Wisconsin led to Indiana lawmakers fleeing the state to stop the effort.
I don’t know what this sh%$ is doing for the economies of Wisconsin and Indiana, but it sure is boosting the hospitality industry in Illinois.
Also, it is becoming increasingly apparent that these actions are unpopular, the polls are pretty strongly against it, and Republican notables are backing away from the idea, with Indiana governor Mitch Daniels telling the ‘Phants in his legislature to kill the bill, and Florida governor, and über-Teabagger, Rick Scott coming out against the idea.
So it already looks like this strategy is playing a lot like the 1995 government shutdown, and now Scott Walker got punked by the editor of the Buffalo Beast, who pretended to be David Koch.
The interesting take aways here is that he’s not seeing any need to compromise and is planning to:
So, he’s now on tape admitting that he cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith, the quote is:
I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly…legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum…so we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capital with all 14 of them…
So he’s been caught on tape admitting that he would basically launch a sneak attack during peace talks, good luck getting anyone to trust you ever again.
*No offense intended to primates. I’m using the verb form, and I can understand how simians might find comparing them to Republicans to be offensive.
The (legal in Wisconsin) tape of the phone call and the transcript after the break:
Part 1
Part 2
Transcript follows:
Walker: Hi; this is Scott Walker.Koch: Scott! David Koch. How are you?Walker: Hey, David! I’m good. And yourself?Koch: I’m very well. I’m a little disheartened by the situation there, but, uh, what’s the latest?Walker: Well, we’re actually hanging pretty tough. I mean—you know, amazingly there’s a much smaller group of protesters—almost all of whom are in from other states today. The State Assembly is taking the bill up—getting it all the way to the last point it can be at where it’s unamendable. But they’re waiting to pass it until the Senate’s—the Senate Democrats, excuse me, the assembly Democrats have about a hundred amendments they’re going through. The state Senate still has the 14 members missing but what they’re doing today is bringing up all sorts of other non-fiscal items, many of which are things members in the Democratic side care about. And each day we’re going to ratchet it up a little bit…. The Senate majority leader had a great plan he told about this morning—he told the Senate Democrats about and he’s going to announce it later today, and that is: The Senate organization committee is going to meet and pass a rule that says if you don’t show up for two consecutive days on a session day—in the state Senate, the Senate chief clerk—it’s a little procedural thing here, but—can actually have your payroll stopped from being automatically deducted—Koch: Beautiful.Walker: —into your checking account and instead—you still get a check, but the check has to be personally picked up and he’s instructing them—which we just loved—to lock them in their desk on the floor of the state Senate.Koch: Now you’re not talking to any of these Democrat bastards, are you?Walker: Ah, I—there’s one guy that’s actually voted with me on a bunch of things I called on Saturday for about 45 minutes, mainly to tell him that while I appreciate his friendship and he’s worked with us on other things, to tell him I wasn’t going to budge.Koch: Goddamn right!Walker: …his name is Tim Cullen—Koch: All right, I’ll have to give that man a call.Walker: Well, actually, in his case I wouldn’t call him and I’ll tell you why: he’s pretty reasonable but he’s not one of us…Koch: Now who can we get to budge on this collective bargaining?Walker: …I think the paycheck will have an impact…secondly, one of the things we’re looking at next…we’re still waiting on an opinion to see if the unions have been paying to put these guys up out of state. We think there’s at minimum an ethics violation if not an outright felony.Koch: Well, they’re probably putting hobos in suits.Walker: Yeah.Koch: That’s what we do. Sometimes.Walker: I mean paying for the senators to be put up. I know they’re paying for these guy—I mean, people can pay for protesters to come in and that’s not an ethics code, but, I mean, literally if the unions are paying the 14 senators—their food, their lodging, anything like that…[*** Important regarding his later acceptance of a Koch offer to “show him a good time.” ***][I was stunned. I am stunned. In the interest of expediting the release of this story, here are the juiciest bits:]Walker: …I’ve got layoff notices ready…Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. Gotta crush that union.Walker: [bragging about how he doesn’t budge]…I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly…legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum…so we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capital with all 14 of them…Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.Walker: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it.Koch: Beautiful.Walker: [union-bashing…]Koch: Beautiful.Walker: So this is ground zero, there’s no doubt about it. [Talks about a “great” NYT piece of “objective journalism.” Talks about how most private blue-collar workers have turned against public, unionized workers.]…So I went through and called a handful, a dozen or so lawmakers I worry about each day and said, “Everyone, we should get that story printed out and send it to anyone giving you grief.”Koch: Goddamn right! We, uh, we sent, uh, Andrew Breitbart down there.Walker:Yeah.Koch: Yeah.Walker: Good stuff.Koch: He’s our man, you know.Walker: [blah about his press conferences, attacking Obama, and all the great press he’s getting.] Brian [Sadoval], the new Governor of Nevada, called me the last night he said—he was out in the Lincoln Day Circuit in the last two weekends and he was kidding me, he said, “Scott, don’t come to Nevada because I’d be afraid you beat me running for governor.” That’s all they want to talk about is what are you doing to help the governor of Wisconsin. I talk to Kasich every day—John’s gotta stand firm in Ohio. I think we could do the same thing with Vic Scott in Florida. I think, uh, Snyder—if he got a little more support—probably could do that in Michigan. You start going down the list there’s a lot of us new governors that got elected to do something big.Koch: You’re the first domino.Walker: Yep. This is our moment.Koch: Now what else could we do for you down there?Walker: Well the biggest thing would be—and your guy on the ground [Americans For Prosperity president Tim Phillips] is probably seeing this [stuff about all the people protesting, and some of them flip him off].[Abrupt end of first recording, and start of second.]Walker: [Bullshit about doing the right thing and getting flipped off by “union bulls,” and the decreasing number of protesters. Or some such.]Koch: We’ll back you any way we can. What we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.Walker: You know, well, the only problem with that —because we thought about that. The problem—the, my only gut reaction to that is right now the lawmakers I’ve talked to have just completely had it with them, the public is not really fond of this…[explains that planting troublemakers may not work.] My only fear would be if there’s a ruckus caused is that maybe the governor has to settle to solve all these problems…[something about ’60s liberals.]…Let ‘em protest all they want…Sooner or later the media stops finding it interesting.Koch: Well, not the liberal bastards on MSNBC.Walker: Oh yeah, but who watches that? I went on “Morning Joe” this morning. I like it because I just like being combative with those guys, but, uh. You know they’re off the deep end.Koch: Joe—Joe’s a good guy. He’s one of us.Walker: Yeah, he’s all right. He was fair to me…[bashes NY Senator Chuck Schumer, who was also on the program.]Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. You gotta love that Mika Brzezinski; she’s a real piece of ass.Walker: Oh yeah. [story about when he hung out with human pig Jim Sensenbrenner at some D.C. function and he was sitting next to Brzezinski and her father, and their guest was David Axelrod. He introduced himself.]Koch: That son of a bitch!Walker: Yeah no kidding huh?…Koch: Well, good; good. Good catching up with ya’.Walker: This is an exciting time [blah, blah, blah, Super Bowl reference followed by an odd story of pulling out a picture of Ronald Reagan and explaining to his staff the plan to crush the union the same way Reagan fired the air traffic controllers]…that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall because the Communists then knew Reagan wasn’t a pushover. [Blah, blah, blah. He’s exactly like Reagan. Won’t shut up about how awesome he is.]Koch: [Laughs] Well, I tell you what, Scott: once you crush these bastards I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time.Walker: All right, that would be outstanding. [*** Ethical violation much? ***] Thanks for all the support…it’s all about getting our freedoms back…Koch: Absolutely. And, you know, we have a little bit of a vested interest as well. [Laughs]Walker: [Blah] Thanks a million!Koch: Bye-bye!Walker: Bye.
So, we are seeing huge, and growing, protests, with a teacher sickout to attend the protests growing, it has now shuttered both the Madison and Milwaukee school systems, and the Democrats in the state Senate have left the state, to prevent quorum for voting on the bill, while, in a bit of traditional religious silliness, religious leaders are offering sanctuary for them if they return to the state:
Religious leaders in Illinois and Wisconsin are offering sanctuary to Wisconsin Democrats as they boycott a vote on a Republican bill that would strip public workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights.
Actually though the most surprising development is that Barack Obama has actually felt the need to make a declarative statement on all this, as opposed to trying to make nice, and split the difference, calling it an, “assault on unions.”
What, Obama isn’t trying to split the difference and being hopey-changey? That’s like a f%$#ing sign of the f%$#ing apocalypse.
It would be nice if we would see some more of this, because the Republicans aren’t getting any more reasonable in response to his standard modus operandi.
You know, I’m not entirely sure how they are alike, but recently elected wingnut governor Scott Walker looks like he might be joining Hosni Mubarak is some form of internal exile soon.
You see, in his new budget, he proposed completely gutting the right of public sector employees to unionize, forbidding unions from requiring that dues be paid, forbidding them from negotiating about pensions, healthcare, or even asking for a pay hike above that of inflation, and requiring an annual recertification vote.
He then followed this up with a threat to use the national guard against strikers, and there were somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand protesters in the capital, Madison.
We are already hearing calls for Walker to be recalled, but state law requires that a year follow his swearing in before petitions can be turned in, so that’s off the table for about 10½ more months.
Medicare fraudster, and Florida governor, Rick Scott has decided to cancel a high speed rail project between Orlando and Tampa Florida:
Florida’s congressional delegation, state officials and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer are pushing back against Gov. Rick Scott’s decision Wednesday to reject $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money to build a high-speed train between Orlando and Tampa.
“This is a century-type decision that needs to be vetted,” Dyer said. “I don’t think it was given a fair hearing.”
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood intends to meet either in person or by phone Friday with Florida elected officials, likely including Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Reps. John Mica, R-Winter Park, and Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, to discuss ways of keeping the project alive even as California, New York and Washington state offered to take some of the money.
And some officials were bitterly critical of Scott for pulling the plug even before bids had gone out to build the 84-mile system. Eight consortia of companies from 11 countries had indicated they would be willing to put up some or all of the state’s $280 million share of the project, while the bid terms would have required them to absorb cost overruns and any operating losses for 20 years.
So, let’s look at this, it would:
So, why did he cancel it? Because in so doing, he’s pissing off Democrats and liberals.
When looking at Republican policy making, one needs to realize that there is an imperative, pissing off Democrats, that frequently subordinates good policy, and sometimes even good politics.
Basically, Republicans are dicks.
No, they aren’t dicks, a dick has a head.
HehThis reminds me of a cartoon of Smokey the Bear shooting the FTD man while shouting, “Remember, only you can prevent florist flyers.”
H/t JR the Stellar Parthenon BBS
If there was a Republican who was unelectable in 1967, it was Richard “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” Nixon.
Following his surprise loss to Pat Brown in 1962, he signed off with a level of nastiness that seemed to be the final nail in his political career.
But 2 years later, he was president of the United States.
He was President because Lyndon Baines Johnson, and his Vice President, and designated heir, Hubert Humphrey, were unable to recognize reality with regard to the Vietnam war, at least publicly, because they felt the need to appear hawkish to take away the perennial Republican talking point that Democrats were “soft” on defense.
Well, we are seeing it yet again with Obama, who is poised to let Afghanistan define his presidency.
It’s actually worse than Vietnam, because Afghanistan has never been a viable nation state, but rather is a void on the map where neither the Russians nor the British were able to maintain power in their “Great Game” for that part of the world, and we are in there supporting one side.
Additionally, we have the fact that, as mind boggling as it sounds, the regime that we are supporting is even more corrupt and ineffective than any that we ever supported in South Vietnam, and that we also have religious overtones in this conflict that were largely lacking in the ‘Nam.
And now we have one of Obama’s biggest supporters in the Senate, John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is saying that we need to get out now:
One of the Obama administration’s key allies in Congress, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), is breaking with the president on Afghanistan and saying the strategy in the war needs to be revised. The development, coming from someone who was once a strong backer of Obama’s decision to increase troops in Afghanistan, could deal a significant blow to support for the administration.
“What I don’t want is to be party to a policy that continues simply because it is there and in place,” said Kerry in an interview with the Boston Globe about his evolving views on the war. “That would be like Vietnam. And that is what I am determined to try to prevent.”
Kerry, according to the Globe, is calling for “a more limited focus and fewer American troops than the 155,000 that are in place now.” In the coming months, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be holding a series of oversight hearings on the Obama administration’s strategy.
Kerry is a creature of the Senate, and so is mild in his disapprobation of the current policy, particularly since he shares a political party with Obama, but this is very clear. He is saying that we need to get the hell out now.
He’s right too. Afghanistan is not called the “Graveyard of Empires” for nothing.
I do not expect that Obama will take this advice to heart though: He is too concerned with political calculation, where he thinks that being hawkish will take away a Republican talking point (sound familiar?), and is simply unwilling to override the desires of careerist generals in the Pentagon, for whom the war is a path to advancement.