How strategically important is Wisconsin to the libertarian-conservative national plan to strip collective bargaining rights from workers?
If top Republican lawmakers move forward Tuesday with a plan to pass the state budget in “extraordinary session,” it will be the first time lawmakers have used this speedy political maneuver to pass a budget in at least 80 years.
Several budget adjustment bills were approved in a “special session” – a Legislative session that only can be called by the governor for a specific purpose – but senior analysts with the Legislative Reference Bureau could find no evidence of one being passed in an extraordinary session.
Assembly Majority Leader Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, said at a press conference Monday that Assembly Republicans will put the collective bargaining bill back in the budget as an amendment by calling an extraordinary session if the State Supreme Court doesn’t act before Tuesday afternoon. The bill would strip most collective bargaining rights from public workers.
During a normal legislative session, lawmakers must provide a 24-hour window between the time one house amends a bill, and the other takes it up. The only way this rule doesn’t apply is if members bypass this rule by a two-thirds vote.
When in extraordinary session, an amended bill can move directly from one house to the other, bypassing the 24-hour waiting period.That means if the Assembly does add the collective bargaining bill to the budget Tuesday, the budget bill would move immediately to the Senate. “People have regular lives. They have jobs, they have kids,” said Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha. “How will the public follow what is happening?”
“The Republican strategy is indefensible in my judgment,” Barca said. “It makes me suspicious. It makes me wonder what they are trying to hide from the public.”
So much for transparency, so much for sunshine laws, and so much for the much-ballyhooed conservative respect for state tradition and norms.
National conservatives want collective bargaining rights stripped in Wisconsin and other states, they want that demand met now, today, and the only question Wisconsin Republicans had when given the directive to jump was “how high?”
Culture of Truth
Hey, they’ve got an agenda and they’re following through.
kdaug
On a related note: Minnesota Shutdown Looming.
How can you look at “Only Cuts, Never Revenue” and come away with anything other than “sociopath”?
It’s the mantra, taken as gospel, but all these right-wingers ain’t that damn rich.
“What’s The Matter With Kansas”, writ large.
Kay
@Culture of Truth:
I bet they do. God knows what happens to them if they defy the national directive, and serve their state.
Linda Featheringill
In Wisconsin as well as in other places, the Reps are in such a hurry to achieve their agenda. At any cost. I wonder why they are in such a hurry. Is there a deadline that we don’t know about?
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
And if they manage to get this through, then it’ll probably take at least a decade to undo, so…big success! Even if they lose in the recalls, they’ve successfully castrated unions for good!! HUZZAH! FREE MARKET UBER ALLES!!
Cacti
@Kay:
Those would be the same Fitzgeralds whose retired Daddy was appointed to head the State Police at $105,000 per year.
Austerity for thee, but not for me and mine.
Dream On
As my relatives in Wisconsin would say – they always do – “well, that is different”.
cleek
Ram It Down their throats!
NonyNony
@Linda Featheringill:
Well there’s the deadline we DO know about – the recall elections in Wisconsin. If they’re successful that puts a stop to their ability to ram their agenda through.
Their behavior is perfectly consistent with a group of people who care more about ideology than keeping their own jobs. Which is more evidence for the idea that the Wisconsin Republican legislators have been promised that they’ll be “taken care of” by the conservative movement so long as they deliver the goods before they’re kicked out of office.
Southern Beale
Apparently there is a discipline called behavioral economics? This is new to me. Anyway, just read this guy’s column on Ayn Rand. I can’t really make heads or tails out of it.
kay
@Cacti:
I love the veiled threat to the court. Rule our way today or we’re going around you anyway.
This is really libertarianism and conservatism at it’s finest, don’t you think? What’s the “thought experiment” here? What’s the lofty, abstract meditation on the conservative soul?
There are some thugs throwing their weight around in Wisconsin, but they aren’t union members.
Bender
What a load. (If you can’t trust the “Cap Times — Your Progressive Voice” to be fair and honest about the facts, what dishonest shill of a internet-only source CAN you trust, eh? But keep whining about people who cite Fox News!)
So, by never mentioning the GOP recalls in Wisc, are Big Union Corruptionists just pretending that Wisconsin is in the midst of a normal, run-of-the-mill legislative session, and that Big Union isn’t in the process of circumventing the will of the voters (and the decency of the electoral process) through the recall of the Senators who don’t roll over and accept a thoroughly corrupt Democrat-bribes-for-Union-support system?
That sounds, I don’t know, a little dishonest, just so you can get your little fake outrage on.
And that little shit Barca has some brass balls to be talking about the GOP “suspicious” strategy of trying to pass the laws that they were elected to pass. The Union-Shill Democrats RAN AWAY TO ILLINOIS for three weeks during the legislative session.
cleek
@Bender:
you’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.
Bender
@cleek: I’ll use smaller words next time, so you can understand.
Joel
What is this, Calvinball? How many super special sessions do these clowns get?
Mattminus
These guys are legislative suicide bombers. That is all.
Jesse
@Bender: Is it fun being a “contrarian”? I ask because you’re always (coincidentally, I’m sure!) in favor of fucking over poor people whose interests align with organizations you don’t like, while you staunchly support (again, purely by coincidence!) rich folks who don’t need your help.
Let me make sure I understand: when a Republican spends money on the legislature, that’s “lobbying” or “free speech”, but when a Democrat (or, gasp! a UNION) does it, that’s a bribe?
If a rich individual does it, that’s fine, but if you pool a lot of not-so-rich people’s money, it’s illegitimate? I don’t remember seeing you bloviate when the Koch brothers were holding the money spigot open.
By definition, a recall election is not “subverting the will of the voters.” There’s this thing you do in a recall, what is it, it’ll come to me… oh yeah, you *vote*. What a toad you are.
aimai
So Bender is saying that the Wisconsin Republican party so represents the will of the voters that they are rightfully terrified the voters will vote them out in two months? OK.
aimai
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Mattminus:
If only. Sadly, they’re only committing specific career suicide. Their success here will only mean they get to have a new career afterward as one of the great stalwart business protectors, just like Evan Bayh.
Failing upward and a shared willingness to fuck over anyone outside of the top brackets are the cornerstones of the GOP these days.
kay
@Bender:
Jesus, Bender, hit a nerve?
What facts in the story are you disputing? List them. Are you disputing they are using an extraordinary legislative maneuver? Because that’s what the piece at the top of the page says. Are you disputing that the original rule violation on the part of Wisconsin Republicans was a violation of state sunshine laws? Because it was. Are you disputing that national libertarians and conservatives have been involved with every aspect of the midwest state’s strategy on collective bargaining? Because they are.
As far as politics, yup, you found me out. I’m a liberal. I’m also an Ohio liberal, and I’ve found in talking with local people that they resent and distrust the interference of the Koch brothers and the rest of the libertarian corporate shills here in Ohio.
So, Bender, I use that against libertarians and conservatives, as a persuasive tactic. It’s effective. Which is probably why you blew a fucking gasket when I used it here.
I intend to keep on using it, you whiny cry-baby. Poor widdle Koch brothers are being ATTACKED by a single person in Ohio. The outrage!
Ash Can
@ Bender: Seriously, WTF are you talking about? If you can legitimately refute any of the points Kay is making, fine, but if all you’re going to do is spew a load of anti-union propaganda, then why are you wasting your time and ours?
scav
Now remember, bender, like many of his ilk, knows he speaks for the will of the people despite all evidence to the contrary because the voices in his head assure him of this. With all of them thrown in, his opinion simply must be worth more than those mere mortal beings that physically show up outside of capitol buildings for days. Invisible voices are worth more than others because they are attached to the sacred invisible hand.
Jesse
@kay: Come on, Kay, you can’t expect oil billionaires to tolerate disagreement with their agenda. They’re rich, so they’re right! I mean, duh.
Chris
and
As mentioned previously today – you’re forgetting that Bender and his ilk either think they’re the only American People, or think they’re entitled to be treated as if they were. Anyone whose opinion goes against theirs doesn’t count, because they’re either immigrants, or unioners, or “black racists,” or Muslims, or city liberals, or something.
Jude
Bender is, apparently, a firm believer in Worthington’s Law.
I like the Futurama Bender much better.
lovable liberal
@Bender: Recommend you use smaller words so that you understand.
kay
@Jesse:
Bender wants it fair and balanced! Union members are in Wisconsin too!
The conservative-libertarian idea of a fair fight is if the other side sits down and shuts up. They don’t have a big enough megaphone, right? They demand silence when they’re running roughshod over these states, the better to hear their thousands of paid shills, with their incessant freaking self-examination of their own “souls” and their faux-intellectual “thought experiments”.
Jesse
I also forgot to mention how awfully convenient it is when a county clerk who used to work for you finds eleventy thousand votes for you under the sofa cushions. But remember kids, the Democrats are the corrupt ones.
buckyblue
Expect every right-wing wetdream to be law in WI by the end of the week. In this bill, the Koch bros will be allowed to strip mine the Dells for personal gain and profit.
Martin
@Southern Beale:
Yes. I believe Austan Goolsbee is a behavioral economics.
The gist is that they acknowledge that there is no perfect knowledge in an actual market and that rational self interest doesn’t really go very far, so they look at what behaviors lead to certain outcomes and what economic policies can be enacted to get certain behaviors.
They focus on big things – like making retirement plans opt-out rather than opt-in recognizing that people are A) lazy, B) unlikely to initiate a change that they don’t fully understand, and new workers don’t understand retirement options. But basically it’s a way to significantly boost retirement saving across the populace that has no cost, doesn’t require additional tax credits, etc. It just takes advantage of people’s likely behavior. And companies have an incentive to make them opt-in because they may advertise a corporate match but not want to actually pay it. Opt-out doesn’t exactly force the companies hand on that, but it make reality match the recruitment pitch a lot better.
singfoom
Don’t you people see? Rich people are better than you. When Rich people give money to politicians, that’s part of the normal order. But when normal people band together in a union and do so, that’s corruption, because they’re not rich, and therefore not good.
Jesse
@kay: See, again: when Charles Koch examines his “soul”, his soul is worth thousands of times what yours is, because he’s just that much richer than you! Your soul is proportional to your bank account. I think that’s in Matthew somewhere.
kay
@Jesse:
That was incompetence rather than fraud. I know it’s hard to tell, examples of both abound on the Right, but she just had no idea how to do the simplest aspects of her job.
She still doesn’t. She’s been reprimanded before, and she keeps on with her own bumbling invented election process. She’s a moronic maverick. Never a great combination.
kay
@Jesse:
All that bullshit they churn out about “the conservative soul” is meant to distract from the…less soulful aspects of conservatism. Like policy and practice.
NonyNony
@Jesse:
Charles Koch knows exactly how much his soul is worth. It’s all in the contract he signed. All nice and neat and legal…
scav
@kay:
Actually, sounds electable in certain examinations of past observed behavior. And all that without disputing the second sentence.
Jesse
@kay: Well, if you’re sure, I defer to your superior knowledge. I don’t think anyone can blame me for being suspicious though. Even if it was on the up and up, it sure looked weird.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I know! I know! They lose their promised wingnut welfare. That’s today’s Republican party. The Wingnut Welfare circuit serves as a kind of standing bribe to all Republican elected officials above a certain level. The higher up Republicans are all afraid of going against the plan because they don’t want to lose the payoff, and the lower level ones are afraid to go against it because they know they can only rise by obeying their higher ups.
Jesse
@NonyNony: Some primitive people actually thought Daniel Webster was doing a *good* thing by disputing a contract with Satan, but libertarians know better. Contracts are sacred, and “duress” is just a funny nonsense word.
BDR
Bender clearly makes some good points because SHUT UP THAT’S WHY!
kay
@Jesse:
I think it was on the up and up. I read the transcript of the last time she ignored state law and used her own invented election rules. She was reprimanded for laughing during the hearing. It’s just not a concern for her. Ha Ha Ha.
I don’t think she’s getting this. It’s been years.
Might be time to appoint some other Tea Party incompetent. Switch it up a little.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Somebody point this out to the mushy independents, would they? That the Republican Party has become a political machine to end all political machines, ignoring the voters and answering to no one but those who pay its bills and ensure the cushy creature comforts of its members?
Yeah, yeah, I know, the “both sides do it” machine will probably nullify any headway we can make in that direction, but Jesus.
Villago Delenda Est
Bender is just a serf doing his job of spouting Galtian overlord talking points.
He’s a wretched little lickspittle.
An excellent example of the pathetic little peasant totally unworthy of the freedoms this country has to offer that so many have fought, bled, and died for.
ruemara
@Southern Beale:
It’s damn good analysis there.
Keith G
Good for you GOP, good for you!
You have goals and you have a narrative. You have spokesfolks at. every. level. of national discourse underlining why this is necessary and why this is fair. And your efforts have created an alternative populist reality that seems to have a bit of traction even when it is neither populist or real.
Meanwhile my people, the Dems, well we do talk amongst ourselves with some passion.
The party that holds the White House is supposed to have a rather sound head start at party organization and messaging since that party’s leader is also the nation’s leader. This time around, not so much.
The cost of not taking on the these battles early on with all our party’s energy will be high indeed. It may take a decade if not longer to reverse these statutes and quite frankly, given what I have seen of Democratic back bone, some may become accepted parts of the political landscape. This may well become the truly significant political story of 2009-2012.
Ash Can
@ Jesse: Contracts are sacred to libertarians except when they require a business to cede something to its workers. Then they’re evil and must be destroyed.
Jesse
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh, come on now. He legitimately admires the Koch brothers. They had the drive and moxie and can-do attitude that let them inherit an oil company! I mean, who can make money selling oil?
Jesse
@Ash Can: Oh yeah, I forgot. If you made a contract with a teacher’s union, tear that motherfvcker up and make it illegal to negotiate another one, pronto!
(Sorry for derailing. I just snapped. You know how it goes.)
Bullsmith
Laws are to keep lefties in line. Wish I were joking.
Jesse
@Keith G: Do you really think Presidents are thunderously partisan, except for this one? That does not match my recollection of any president, with the possible exception of a man in the running for Worst President Ever.
(Dammit. Can’t shut up.)
piratedan
perhaps when these asshats voted out of office the Dems can simply go ahead and categorize them all as enemies of the state and have them shot, after all, karmic payback is and should be a biotch ;-)
artem1s
@kay:
in the spirit of full disclosure you can make it at least 2. ;)
cleek
@Keith G:
is that a prophecy you intend to fulfill ?
Yutsano
@kay: Sigh. Poor Bender. STILL thinking that some day his Horatio Alger story is going to come true and he’ll become one of the Big Boys. Delusion does occasionally have comedic outcomes.
Villago Delenda Est
@piratedan:
No, no, no!
Wrong framing.
“Enemies of the people”!
C’mon, you know the drill on all this. They are called the “People’s Republic of China”, “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea” for a reason, ya know?
Roger Moore
@Martin:
It’s more than just that. A big part of it is that we know people aren’t rational optimizers, but we don’t know what they are instead. Behavioral economists are trying to figure out how people behave in the real world- or at least in controlled experiments intended to mimic the real world- so we can build more realistic economic models.
My impression is that a lot of what they’re finding is that people behave in ways that make sense if you understand them as heuristics for dealing with imperfect information. For example, there’s a great experiment where economists offered their subjects one of two prizes (I think it was a candy bar and a coffee mug) as a reward. As a group, the people preferred one prize over the other by a substantial margin. But when they gave the people the less favored prize and then offered to trade it for the more favored one, few of them accepted the trade.
It doesn’t seem to make sense. People should be happy to trade, since it results in the same outcome as if they had been given the preferred item in the first place. If you think in terms of dealing with imperfect information, though, it makes sense. When you own something, you gain knowledge about it, and that knowledge has real value. When you trade it away, you lose that extra value. Meanwhile, you don’t know that the thing you’re trading for is as good as promised, so you have to discount its nominal value some to account for the possibility it may be defective. The result is that people are unwilling to engage in some apparently beneficial trades.
kay
@artem1s:
Oh my God. Two of us! Now we’re an angry mob.
The local paper had a short piece on yet another fake-grass roots libertarian outfit springing up, and right along the column they had photos of the Koch brothers. Since the local paper is owned by wingnuts and staffed by cowed supplicants to wingnuts, I think Koch = union busting has entered ordinary knowledge.
It’s not my fault shady libertarians decided to run rampaging over the great lakes states. They’re infamous, now. That’s the price they’ll have to pay for buying state legislatures.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
In political and economic terms, that largely explains why people love Social Security and Medicare, but are so deeply skeptical of the hypothetical Mediceveryone plans that’ve been proposed over the years, even though they’re basically the same exact thing.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore:
Are you an economist?
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
One of the consistent flaws in “free market” theory, and even Adam Smith wrote about it, is the problem that there is no such thing as perfect transparency, perfect intelligence, “perfect liberty” (to use Smith’s own phrase).
Yet the advocates wave these very real problems off and hope that no one notices the extremely lame Jedi mind trick attempt.
The trade example you cite is a superb example of the fact that a lot of people REALIZE they don’t have perfect information, may have experience with such a transaction in the past and apply that experience to the current proposed transaction, and are wary. “But I’m offering you a great deal!” the trader protests, and the response is “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”, with the under the breath “asshole” implied at the end.
Judas Escargot
@Bender:
Your words are fine.
It’s your tiny “ideas” that folks have a problem with.
NonyNony
@Jesse:
It’s funny, but I think a lot of folks think that all Presidents were like W. Most of them have actually been like Obama – even Reagan kept the partisan vitriol to the campaign trail for the most part. HW Bush rarely made partisan attacks outside of his explicit campaigning, and I only recall Clinton getting heavily partisan when the Republicans in the House went partisan first – Clinton was all about reaching out to the GOP in ’94 and they responded by making partisan attacks.
W was such an outlier because he was SO explicitly partisan and so contemptuous of the Democrats for almost the entire time he was in office. But that’s because he was in perpetual campaign mode – the man never “turned off” the campaign because it was the only part of presidentin’ that he actually liked. Obama is much more like our typical presidents – separate the campaigning from the governance, push your agenda but try to make it neutral as much as possible, talk a lot about the “good of the country” instead of party politics.
That’s actually where I think Obama falls down a lot. Because he keeps trying to make his agenda “bi-partisan” when the truly successful good presidents succeed in getting their agenda through by making it “non-partisan” for the most part. “Bi-partisan”-ship is a red herring – if you make your agenda popular with 75% or so of the country then both parties can go hang for the most part. (Again W is the outlier here – he pushed his agenda through mostly on the back of 9/11, but even there the public consumption was “rally round the flag” for the “good of the country”, even if he remained contemptuous of the Democrats in congress for the most part.)
OzoneR
@NonyNony: I never even thought W was all that partisan either, especially at the beginning.
Jesse
@NonyNony: I’m not so sure Obama is “falling down”, because I can’t see someone actually getting better results. Not “trying harder”- you can always follow the W. example and never stop campaigning- but actually passing more of his agenda.
If you believe it’s all about employment numbers in November 2012, that’s one thing. I don’t. I think Obama is pretty good at the Presidentin’, and hell on wheels as a campaigner.
We shall see, eh?
ppcli
@kay:
Hey, congratulations! According to the Fox News Style Manual, you are to be collectively described as “thugs”.
artem1s
@kay:
if we get a third then we can be part of the Axis of Evil and for sure McCain/Palin will want to invade. Hopefully they will contract with Black Water and send us flats of 100 dollar bills. They won’t even have to bother with carpet bombing ’cause most of the infrastructure is falling down on its own already anyway.
Yea, its been freaking me out a little bit that the Columbus Dogpatch and even Crain’s Cleveland have decided to ‘notice’ whats up with Koch and Kasich, et al. I can’t figure it out. It’s like the brown shirts woke up one day and decided some talk therapy might be a good thing.
schrodinger's cat
What I wonder is, why no one in the press asks Republicans running for office, why they want to run and be a part of an organization(state, federal or local government) that they despise?
agrippa
They have an agenda ( on a mission!). They have to get it done as quickly as possible: recall elections are coming up.
rikyrah
nobody ever believed that bullshyt about respect for law, except for the ones dumb enough to vote for those fuckers
agrippa
Good question:
Why do Republicans want to be part of something they hate:
government.
OzoneR
@Jesse:
This issue with “trying harder” is you have to believe you’d get credit for “trying” when you don’t succeed. There is no example in politics of that ever being true. You either win, or your lose, because if you lose, your supporters will always tell you “you would’ve won if you had done X, or tried Y harder” There will NEVER be a situation where one says “oh, well, it was a gallant effort!”
It easy for people to say after the fact “oh well, if Obama had TRIED HARDER,” but c’mon, no one can really believe that…especially the way the left completely ignored the month-long blitz Obama went on trying to end the tax cuts for the rich.
Think about how many candidates were seen as amazing progressive heroes right up until they lost, then the next day there were 1,000 reasons why they were always doomed to lose. “Bad campaign” “didn’t message well” “wasn’t exciting”
NonyNony
@Jesse:
Depends on what you mean. Now? No, now it’s too late for a non-partisan approach. But I think the non-partisan approach would have worked better than the bi-partisan approach to get the fence-sitters onto Obama’s side early on. Instead of reaching out to the Republican party to try to cut deals purely to show Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln that you were “reasonable”, spin your case so that it’s explicitly a non-partisan issue and THAT’S why you’re the “reasonable” one. Hard to do, yes, but the bi-partisan approach is the wrong one to take with Republicans (as the health care “debate” shows and as anyone who watched the Gingrich Congress should also have realized).
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m not an economist, but I’ve participated in some experiments run by behavioral economists. It’s one of the strengths of the Economics department at my alma mater. The experiments were very popular among the student body because they converted the in-study money into real cash at the end as an incentive to try your hardest.
@Villago Delenda Est:
There’s also a whole lot of hoary old sayings about horses mouths and pigs in pokes whose basic point is that you have to be careful when trading for something of unknown quality. Even the Bible has a bunch of stuff about keeping an honest scale and using the same weights whether you’re buying or selling. The irony is that the main reason people can believe in the myth of a free market is because the government spends so much time and effort enforcing market transparency rules.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Hmm. That, and on the same note, the fact that every time the unregulated market flies itself completely off the rails, the government’s there to bail it out and clean up after it. (Imagine what the economy would look like now with NO bailouts at all, if the feds had followed teabagger procedure).
Poopyman
And then there were … oh hell. I’ve lost count.
Huntsman is in.
Keith G
@NonyNony: I agree with some of what you posted, yet:
This seems to me to be a false-choice bifurcation. All presidents in my lifetime before Obama (10 of them)were absolutely vigorous in championing the principles of their party (which I would hope they believed were the best choices for the country). Few used vitriol regularly.
They were often quite assertive and even relentless. They believed in their party and they acted as if they were certain that there were good choices and bad choices. Importantly, most created and supervised infrastructure to get the message out and to encourage cooperative behavior as well as to confront the opposition.
@cleek:Que?
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Smith makes this point over and over again…that the invisible hand needs help to work.
But then again, most “free market” types have never read Smith.
kay
@artem1s:
Kasich kept saying he was on the phone with Walker, which I thought was absolutely hysterical.
If the accusation is they’re running a three state/national strategy and not actually considering their respective states, and it is, Kasich decides to rebut that by volunteering that he’s on the phone with Walker all the time.
I think it’s best for us when Kasich is out and about, just working his magic. He can’t shut up. His GIANT EGO insists he give us a play by play.
artem1s
@Villago Delenda Est:
they also never, ever want to admit that the existence of the non profit and government sectors is due to the failure of the private sector to provide a desired service or act on behalf of the consumer. Every thing happens in a vacuum in the unicorn, fairy dust Land o’ Galt.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Yutsano:
Funny thing about Alger. Before him, the idea of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ was an idiom for ‘doing something impossible’.
In a way, it still is, just no one seems aware enough to notice.
Keith G
@agrippa:
They do not hate government. They just hate government that regulates capital and guns.
Martin
The free market is better at everything:
They logged into the site, then replaced their account number in the URL with your account number and accessed your account. The system never checked that the login credentials matched the account information.
That’s not ‘sophisticated’. My 10 year old daughter has tried that trick on one of her ‘play games as your stuffed animal’ websites and asked me why it didn’t work. That’s the most primitive type of website security that Citigroup failed to employ on their credit card account portal.
brendancalling
I remain surprised,
Bob
If the R’s in Wisconsin pass this in a budget bill, don’t the changes disappear at the end of the fiscal year?
Davis X. Machina
@agrippa:
Disorganized crime mugs you and takes your wallet.
Organized crime suborns your accountant, and burns your business down for the insurance.
Really organized crime has its tame legislature write larceny out of the statute books.
The GOP is really organized crime.
Amir_Khalid
@brendancalling:
A most inappropriate thought, no matter how vile you think the man is.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
The thing about Horatio Alger is that he is a supplicant, who has a Galtian overlord sponsor who provides some mentoring for his boostrap pulling.
He’s not a true rugged individualist, doing this with no help at all. He’s got a patron who tough loves him out of the gutter to the top of the gutter. Where he should stay, if he knows his place.
ppcli
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: Also, the Alger books typically feature the theme, not of attaining success on your own, but rather of attaining success by catching the eye of a rich benefactor who supports you.
Keith G
@brendancalling:
WTF? Seriously.
Edit -I am not for speech deletion, but advocating murder needs to go.
You are so wrong, man.
ppcli
@brendancalling: Pas cool, mon chum. Pas cool.
kay
@brendancalling:
Now why would you write this? It’s guaranteed to stop the whole conversation, and it’s crazy as hell and wrong.
kdaug
@Amir_Khalid: re: brendoncalling
Baiting. Likely paid.
Ignore.
Keith G
The edit function inverted my comment…odd.
Joel
I see Kasich went all “pander bear” on the burning issue of Lebron James today. Fitting that the republican governor takes his stance after all the risk is out of doing so…
OzoneR
@Keith G:
um, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford?!?!? Really?!?!
kay
@Keith G:
This is specific and anecdotal (and not about Wisconsin!) but the Ohio plan re: the union busting is a plan. Unions have a role and the state democratic party has a role, and they’re clearly defined. I just want you to consider that state and national parties are different entities, and they’re used in different ways.
If you’re talking about Obama pushing basic principles with rhetoric, well, fine, but if you are talking about him taking some direct role in this, my impression (and I go to county meetings and such) is that wasn’t the plan.
brendancalling
@Keith G:
sorry, guys:when I read this crap the GOP is doing in WI, it is hard (if not impossible) to hold my tongue. It is infuriating, and I’m watching it begin to go down in my own state of Pennsylvania, where they’re trying to destroy the teachers unions. I don’t even think they count as “republicans” anymore: they are outright fascists, and there is only one way to deal with them. They need to be utterly defeated, destroyed, laid waste before they bring further disaster to all of us.
but no, I’m not a troll or paid. I wish someone would pay me to make inflamatory comments, I’d make a fucking fortune.
Chris
I enjoyed the reaction to this statement.
You guys took me back to January, when the “both sides do it!” argument with regards to Eliminationist Rhetoric was in full swing. The backlash that just happened, against the concept of a politician being shot? Never seen this kind of backlash on a wingnut website.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
I think you’re giving way too much credit to Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush if you really think that they created the Republican media infrastructure we’re up against now. It’s way overcrediting them to even claim it was their plan.
It was the behind-the-scenes folks like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes who set it all up, not Reagan or Bush 1. That’s what the Democrats don’t seem to have — long-term strategists who are not dependent on staying in elected office. We wasted a whole fuckton of time listening to people like Mark Penn and Bob Shrum who kept claiming that they knew how to win elections despite their multiple failures. Notice that when Clinton needed to win his second term, he turned to toe-sucking conservative Dick Morris because there wasn’t anyone on the Democratic side who could do it.
You’re looking at a problem 30 years in the making and deciding that it must be Obama’s fault since he’s the guy who’s in charge right now.
Villago Delenda Est
You don’t want to create martyrs, and that’s what an assassination of Walker would do.
Think it through.
Comrade Kevin
When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled
brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Bender
Xenos
@Villago Delenda Est:
There is a reason why the NYC chapter of NAMBLA is named after Horatio Alger. When HA sponsored young shoeshine boys with pluck and moxie to be groomed for business success he got a few years of blowjobs and anal sex out of the deal.
eemom
@brendancalling:
I feelz ya. I personally have no problem with wishing death upon evil people and I do it all the time. But it’s just irresponsible to make a statement like that on a public forum. Do you want to get our John raided by a SWAT team?
Dennis SGMM
Cut the crap. Sufficient numbers of Wisconsin voters found the Republicans worthy of their vote. Why? Most of the folks commenting here could make compelling arguments against voting R but, Wisconsin, and other seemingly sane states, elected enough Rs to make these multiple outrages possible. How did our party manage to lose state legislatures in a year when legislative districts are being redrawn?
Keith G
@kay: Of course, yet there are things that president and the DNC can do/have done to facilitate “favorable” activities at the state level that are subtle yet effective. I witnessed this in central Ohio in the mid 70s and later watching the GOP in Texas in the 80s.
Obviously, national leaders have better things to do than worry about a given state’s decision to change the drinking age or change graduation credits. What we are seeing now is a concerted push by the GOP to make it much more difficult for citizens to join unions, to make political contributuions through their unions, and to even vote.
These have been unusual and troubling times. Maybe we needed unusual and dynamic solutions.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom:
He now has a machete, so he should be fine.
kay
@Keith G:
I’ll just be blunt, rather than hinting at it. I was told, in Ohio, that the repeal effort polled better as a non-partisan “issue” (the theme is “fairness” and the issue is “collective bargaining”) than as a partsan political action.
Because that was how they (unions and Democrats) handled the (state) “raise the minimum wage” effort, as an “issue” that polled at something ridiculously high, like 75% favorable, that made sense to me.
Unions were in that too, and they stayed away from partisan or national actors there, because they felt it would work better as a “fairness” issue. It did, too. They succeeded.
The facts are that something like 40% of union members vote GOP, so maybe that’s part of the calculus too. If they see they have GOP voters jumping ship, they don’t want to get in the way of that.
Again, this is all anecdotal and local. I personally would have mixed feelings if Obama or national Democrats jumped in. I think there’s an upside to that, but there’s a downside risk, too, and not to Obama, but to succeeding at the specific task they’ve set out to do.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
But but but but but but but SOROS!! And his vast, tentacular, all-powerful conspiracy that controls everything in this country! Isn’t that real? Aren’t we, in fact, all powerful and all encompassing?
(There’s a story about a Jew in Tsarist Russia whose liked to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because, he thought, it was nice to imagine how powerful they thought he was).
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:
Claro!!
And Bush 1 did not plan or fight the first Gulf War. He did use the opportunities and resources that were presented to him. A great skill that all presidents need.
Likewise, Ailes and Atwater (and Rove) were resources that could be used, or not, as a president saw fit.
In the previous paragraph, you noted that the Big Dawg nimbly threw out the old playbook and brought in new help at a tough time. Should I expect less now?
And let me state that this is a shared fault, but we do have a team captain who might well be presiding at the time when the Democratic party sees some of the toughest restraints on the political participation of common citizens since the end of Jim Crow.
In light of that, I expect a fucking lot.
Keith G
@kay: Blunt is good and I will tend to defer to your insights as to the current mechinics of Ohio politics.
I left Lucas Co.(Whitehouse) in 1976 and moved to Houston from Columbus in ’82. So in many cases, it is terra incognita.
brendancalling
@Villago Delenda Est:
that is also certainly true.
I also continue to believe that this whole clusterfuck we have going on (kamikaze republican governors who have about as much interest in the public good and re-election as Mohammed Atta had in learning to land a plane) is going to end with violence.
It always does. See Haymarket, Harlan County, ad infinitum.
Jesse
@Keith G: Okay, in all seriousness, I have no idea what you’re talking about here. Bill Clinton, the guy who told us the era of big government is over, was a vigorous and forceful advocate for his party, and Barack Obama is not?
I don’t understand your criteria. Honestly. Not snarking.
I also liked the implication that Obama doesn’t have a communications infrastructure, because I get a lot of emails from that guy.
(Wait, Lyndon Johnson, as a sitting president in the 1968 election, was a forceful advocate?)
Mnemosyne
@Dennis SGMM:
Tens of millions of dollars spent on an underground campaign that got scared old people and people who didn’t vote in 2008 to show up in droves.
It’s what Karl Rove does best — fly under the radar with a scare campaign (gay marriage in 2004, Medicare in 2010) and get his voters to turn out well beyond what one would expect.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Given what a total disaster Morris turned out to be and the stupid policies Clinton put into place under Morris’ influence (like, say, DOMA), I think expecting less would be a good idea in this case.
Provider_UNE
National conservatives want collective bargaining rights stripped in Wisconsin and other states, they want that demand met now, today, and the only question Wisconsin Republicans had when given the directive to jump was “how high?”
I would only change the last two words to “what shark?”
.