And after years of chronic unemployment impoverished activism, Goldy really earns his paycheck. And man, when he gets a fire under his ass, he can perform!
Check out this outstanding feature for the current issue of The Stranger.
Goldy takes an in-depth look at a Governor Rob McKenna, and what McKenna’s own words and actions suggest would happen during his stay in the Governor’s mansion.
I won’t even offer a blockquote-bite here, but let me just tease you with, Hello…Wisconsin! For the full skinny on McKenna, head over to The Stranger, right now. There you will learn the nightmare-provoking truth about the many faces of Rob McKenna.
If, by chance, McKenna doesn’t capture the Governor’s mansion in 2012, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) will deserve most of the credit. Goldy’s piece gets most of the rest.
(Full disclosure: Goldy is an occasional contributer to this blog.)
I think this is just the type of reporting we need. Don’t leave it to the other candidates to do “opposition research”, make sure all the potential Republican candidates anytime in the foreseeable future can’t hide their stripes during an election. Voters should be well aware of their character long before the primaries begin. And that goes for the Democrats, too – there’s no excuse for us to be side-swiped with a surprise of the Edwards type (at least we dodged THAT bullet)!
How would you feel if your own lawyer said this after losing your case:
“McKenna’s first appearance before the US Supreme Court was an appeal of a state supreme court ruling that had granted teachers’ unions the right to use members’ dues for political purposes. After the Bush-packed conservative court overturned the state ruling, McKenna hailed the decision as an “extremely important” precursor that “clears the way” for new legislation to enact further restrictions of union political spending.”
Well, that was our state’s lawyer, charged with defending our state’s law. Can you say conflict of interest? Personally, I’ve never argued an appeal I wanted to lose. McKenna apparently has. That is hard to fathom.
If, by chance, McKenna doesn’t capture the Governor’s mansion in 2012, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) will deserve most of the credit. Goldy’s piece gets most of the rest.
Whoever runs against him might deserve a tiny bit of credit.
Jay Inslee would be a great governor. Gregoire’s been a good one, but she needs to be a team player and announce she’s not running again (just after the legislative session is over). Jay gets people, issues, and the future. His lack of executive experience matters not.
Carl @ 3,
“Whoever runs against him might deserve a tiny bit of credit.”
La la la la la. I can’t hear you….
He would clean up this mess, just like WI is doing!
Yep, there’s no way Gregoire can win a third term. She’s already taken a hit for the team in having to make some unpopular decisions this term, and it’s probably time for her to take an administrative job elsewhere (possibly in a 2nd Obama term).
@6: You mean the mess he created? ~$120 M of the $165 M budget hole was created by Walker in his first months in office.
Not his first time ginning up economic crises in an effort to disenfranchise and break the middle class at the behest of his corporate masters.
@7 re @6: The thing about wingnuts is they never realize the stink in the outhouse was created by their own shit and the flies are there because they were there.
I thought the main takeaway from Goldy’s article is that McKenna, who is sold as a “moderate,” is not a moderate — he’s a hard-right fascist thug whose patrons are the Russian-style criminal oligarchy that has taken over America.
They tried this stunt with Suzie Hutch, too, whose handlers went to extreme lengths to convince voters that the “nonpartisan” ballot label engineered by the wingnut faction of the King County Council somehow means “nonpolitical” and therefore not crazy-whackjob-hard-right-nutcase, which is in fact what Hutch was/is. Voters around here aren’t stupid and saw through it.
They’ll see through McKenna, too. This guy is only one shallow breath removed from being a birther. My guess is he probably is a birther, but only his immediate family knows it, because he’s a public figure and therefore has to hide his true leanings.
Republicans of any stripe always have to hide their true leanings, because they’re all of the same stripe, and no one would vote for them if the electorate knew what they’re really thinking — and intend to do in office. Republican candidates, every last one of them, are nothing more than waterboys for the 1% of the population that is very rich and get that way by robbing the ret of us. One percent obviously isn’t an electoral majority, so a one-percent strategy works in real-life politics only if you can turn it into a fifty-one-percent strategy by concealing who you really are and deceiving the voters about what you’re really do with political power if you get your hands on it.
It’s not working. The whole world, not just Wisconsin public workers, now knows that Scott Walker is a liar. His bill has nothing to do with balancing the state budget and everyone knows it. He has already spent the givebacks public workers voluntarily tendered to them by lavishing new tax breaks on businesses he’s hoping to poach from Illinois, which if he’s successful will throw Illinois families out of work. The latest polls show two-thirds of the state Walker purports to govern is against him. Polls and massive demonstrations prove this guy got into office through deception and would lose an election held today.
McKenna is all about deception, too. McKenna is a liar and always has been. He’s always been a hard-right nutcase who panders to oligarchic money and redneck ignoramuses who put stupidity on a pedestal and worship it. He may still be fooling a few people, but he’s already not fooling most people.
I predict a cakewalk for Inslee in ’12. But we can’t take that for granted and should not get overconfident or complacent about it. These lying bastards will come at Inslee with everything they’ve got, not least the rivers of money that pour from the ocffers of corporate fascism, and we will have to do the hard work of electing Inslee so that Washington doesn’t end up with its own Scott Walker.
And when you get right down to it, the GOP is a top-down organization just like the KGB, and guys like Walker and McKenna are merely salaried office boys who do what they’re told by the shadow government run by the likes of the Koch brothers who go to great lengths to avoid being seen, and because of that there’s no damn difference between a Walker or a McKenna because they’re all working from the same script.
There’s no open thread in sight, so I’ll use this one for today’s news roundup. After all, this is a political blog, and tomatoes are about as apolitical as you can get — at least, until police start busting people for possessing tomato plants. (Watch out, Goldy, you may be next.)
Okay, let’s get on with the news.
Item 1. The stock market is up 200 points and I’ve made $2,800 this morning. It’s true that I lost $4,000 last week, but thanks to the miracle of capitalism and irrational exuberance, I’ve gained it all back and more, so my stock portfolio has set a new high this morning — well above its previous October 2007 high.
First of all, I want to personally thank each and every one of you who is buying $3.60-a-gallon gas from my companies. An oilfield sevices stock I bought in 2005 is now worth nearly 4 times what I paid for it. My Chevron stock is up 46% since I bought it in February 2010. My Exxon stock, which I bought on January 31, is up almost $6 a share in a little over a month. I really like free money. Sleeping in until 11 AM and making $2,800 by sitting on my ass in front of a computer screen doing absolutely nothing sure beats burning $3.60 gas in commuter traffic and spending the day in a closed-in cubicle that makes a Guantanamo cell look palatially large working for the wages Republicans want to pay!
Okay, so what’s with the stock market? Besides its wonderful ability to redistribute wealth from idiots with money to rabbits who aspire to live like Republicans and plan to get there by being smarter than 98% of other investors, which is much easier than you’d think, because most investors (including the professionals who run mutual funds) are far stupider than you can imagine.
The financial press punditry assures us the market is leaping skyward this morning because of the latest jobs report. Some time ago, I read a prediction by an Economic Thinker Of Some Repute (whose name I can’t remember, which is why I’ve used the generic description of his ilk) that the economy will soon experience explosive jobs growth.
Personally, I think there’s something to that. Analysis of employment data from past recessions shows that deep troughs invariably are followed by steep climbs. It’s no secret that corporations are sitting on mountains of unspent cash. For various reasons, corporate managers don’t necessarily think it’s in the best interests of their shareholders to spend this cash by giving it to shareholders through dividends or stock buybacks. The reasons are too complicated to explain here so I’ll skip that. Some of that money will go into mergers and acquisitions, but let me just bottom-line this discussion by saying the stock market is up today because a lot of people on Wall Street are thinking the same thing I’m thinking, which is that the Economic Thinker Of Some Repute is right and we’re on the verge of a hiring boom.
What convinces me of this, more than anything, is the pall of gloom and doom hanging over everyone. Anyone who has been investing for more than a couple of years knows that the best time to buy stocks is when everyone else thinks Armageddon is nigh. The physics work this way: The moment when the night is darkest is always the precise moment when it starts to get lighter.
Item 2. A 13-year-old girl feared kidnapped by an online predator has been found. She ran away and a relative was hiding her because her Pakistani father wanted to haul this blonde and blue-eyed kid with white skin and an American name to his native Pakistan to deliver her into an arranged marriage. Authorities are investigating and he may be facing U.S. prosecution and time in an American jail for what seemed to him like a perfectly normal act in his own culture. Add him to the long list of people (including Americans serving time in Italian and Turkish or getting caned in Singapore jails) who somehow fail to comprehend that when you live in a foreign country you’re subject to that country’s laws and have to do things their way — or else.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03.....stan-marr/
To my American friends, I would advise this: If you’re planning to go to Canada, or England, or France, or Italy, they don’t have a First Amendment. You don’t have our free speech rights in those countries. In particular, if you’re planning to go to Italy for any reason, when you get there don’t criticize their cops. In that country, that’s a felony. The bright side is that Amanda Knox’s parents will be able to visit their daughter every day from now on — by living in the cell next to hers.
Item 3. Okay, this brings me to Item #3 which is the odious dictator of Ivory Coast, who is now murdering women protesters in the streets. Until now, he was only murdering adult males who voted for his opponent, who won the election but in a country like Ivory Coast winning elections doesn’t mean anything unless you have an army you’re willing to use. I’m not as pacifist as some of my liberal friends. I think it’s time to send U.N. forces into that country to drag this guy out of his palace and hand him over to The Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. That would be doing him a favor compared to, say, handing him over to his own subjects, who undoubedly would give him the Mussolini treatment.
The reason this is newsworthy is because the U.S. government, which currently is run by a guy who calls himself a Democrat and wants us to think he’s a liberal, tried to buy this thug off by offering him a professorship at a Boston university.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03.....ory-coast/
The only good thing that can be said about that is this dictator is so arrogant he turned down what is by far the best offer he’s ever going to get. American academia dodged a bullet when this mini-Hitler declined to soil their ranks with his presence in the mistaken belief that his own people will allow him to continue murdering their women in the streets indefinitely.
Item 4. Louisiana’s GOP governor’s wife set up a charity to help kids and guess who’s donating millions to this worthy cause? Big Oil and everyone else who hates Louisiana’s environmental regulations.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03.....ttracts-c/
In other news:
The Wisconsin Senate just passed a resolution calling for the Sargeant at Arms to use the Wisconsin State Police and any other police agencies to arrest the Democratic Senators who are exercising a form of a filibuster by staying in Illinois to prevent the Senate from meeting it’s mandatory quorum count. The resolution calls for them to be “compelled to return” to the Senate, presumably in custody and handcuffed.
Of course, such an action is completely in violation of the State Constitution. The officers could be charged with kidnapping. Wisconsin Republicans argue that it’s allowed because it isn’t a “criminal or civil” action against the missing senators. Which just makes it even more unlawful. And if the Senate doesn’t have a quorum, what justification is there for the resolution anyway?
So it’s no surprise that the union representing Wisconsin police agencies has said that it’s officers won’t be enforcing the resolution.
@12 Yep, the Wisconsin Rethuglicans have ignored massive demonstrations and polls showing voters support collective bargaining for public employees by a 2-to-1 margin, and passed a resolution ordering police to drag Democratic Senators back to Madison by force.
Their legal authority to do so is a legal memo written by a Republican attorney hired by the Republican caucus to tell them what they wanted to hear. Wonder if this is the same guy who told Bush torture is legal?
The whole world is watching. And what the whole world sees is that Republicans are bullies who don’t believe in democracy. They believe in fucking the little people so the one-percenters can get even richer.
Personally, I think the Democratic senators should fly out of the country and seek political asylum in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
If the Rethugs can’t find a Democratic senator to kidnap and render to Madison inside a windowless black van, they’ll pass another resolution suspending the state constitution and authorizing themselves to vote on their union-busting bill without a quorum. Conceptually, this sort of maneuver is no problem for these guys, because they don’t believe in the rule of law to begin with.
# 15: Gee, if the Republicans can pass a resolution without a quorum, why can’t the Democrates do the same thing?
I think it would be hilarious. They could meet in the restaurant of a Holiday Inn in Illinois, use the same memo which the Republicans use to proclaim that they are authorized to proceed, and then declare the Senate is in session and proceed to pass legislation.
While they are at it, they could vote to censure every State Republican Senator, instruct the Seargent at Arms to arrest them, and while they are at it they could vote remove Walker from office.
Hey once you decide to ignore the Constitution, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
@16 I agree. As long as I’ve been on this blog, my biggest beef with Democrats has always been that they don’t behave like Republicans. It’s time they did.
If you want to watch live stream video from Madison, here’s the link:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/afl-cio-2010-rally
In the meantime, Newt Gingrich has announced – a website.
Newt announces … a Web site
Sometime in the past couple of weeks (events seem to be moving rather quickly these days) a Pennsylvania student called him on the carpet in asking why his record as an adulter shouldn’t disqualify him for being President. Newt was obviously irritated at the question, and simply dismissed it by saying it was about his past, and he wanted to discuss the future. He also muttered something about having a forgiving God…
But that, of course, avoids the ample evidence that Newt Gingrich has serious personality defects which should disqualify him from becoming President. His narcisim knows no bounds, and he shows some serious signs of bi-polar disorder which in some respects rivals Charlie Sheen.
Gingrich notified his first wife that he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital bed after cancer surgery. He had decided she was “too old” and would hold back his career. He was already having an affair with the woman who would become his second wife.
But even while Gingrich was having yet another affair with a younger woman, an intern, he was hypocritically proclaiming loudly that Bill Clinton needed to be removed from office for his own dalliance with an intern. Later he divorced his second wife so he could marry the new, younger flame.
So now he is on his third wife who, if she has any sense at all, is hiring a private detective full-time to keep an eye on him.
And let’s not forget that even the Republican House had to remove him as speaker as his ethical lapses relating to unreported book income forced even them to take action against him. Even then, an intercepted telephone call was recorded in which he conspired with the Republican leadership of the House to avoid the discipline he had agreed to only a few months earlier.
And finally, there’s the more important matter that he’s simply a dangerous man with dangerous ideas, carrying with him false illusions of intellectual greatness, combined with an ambition to become a demagauge.
@19 I’m not so sure that’s a personality defect — looks more like a character defect to me. But then, Republican voters have never required their candidates to have any character.
RR – watching the live feed, it looks like some police force or other is preparing to clear the capital.
A judge who had ordered the capital to remain open to protesters has had a hearing over the past two days to determine if his preliminary injunction would become permanant. But suddenly today a Univ. of Wisconsin police chief (?????) said that some 40 rounds of live ammunition were found in and around the capital. No guns were found.
To me, this seems like an obvious plant by Walker or his minions when they saw the hearing wasn’t going their way. Sprinkling them around like a con man trying to “seed a mine” with gold dust in order to sell a worthless property, indicates that they wanted to make sure they were found, yet not be so conspicuous that they were spotted doing so.
Now the judge has ordered the capital building cleared for “safety reasons”. Once that happens, Walker will try to put this behind him as quickly as possible – but not by compromising. With the absence of TV media watching the conflict, he will be free to lie about everything that happens hereafter.
Amid the sturm und drang, Business Week has a thoughtful article on public unions:
http://www.businessweek.com/ma.....163334.htm
This conservative business-oriented publication calls Walker’s legislation “nakedly political”:
“It has always been good sport for Republican politicians to lay into public unions, and for union leaders to lay into Republicans. And that’s the shame about the circus in Wisconsin, where all the posturing threatens to obscure a serious issue. America’s taxpayers really do need to reconsider the way they negotiate with their employees. The question is whether restricting collective bargaining is the proper remedy.
“Wisconsin’s bill does not present the best argument in favor of curbing worker rights; it stuffs a clause on collective bargaining into a larger ‘budget repair bill’ that cuts public-worker benefits and restructures the state’s debt. This presents the end of collective bargaining as a fiscal necessity. But if the state can make up its shortfall, Walker loses his reason to restrict unions. Sure enough, both the unions and the state’s Democrats have agreed to swallow the benefit cuts if Walker drops the collective bargaining limits. He has refused to budge.
“Details of the bill look nakedly political. State employers would be prevented from deducting union dues from paychecks. Unions could not require dues and would have to hold annual votes to maintain certification. These are all long-standing demands of anti-union groups, and, as The New York Times has reported, oil billionaires and conservative activists Charles and David Koch were major supporters of Walker’s campaign. Their organization, Americans for Prosperity, is running television commercials promoting the bill in Wisconsin. The legislation also spares local police, state troopers, and firefighters, groups that lean Republican. In the past, unions that represent first responders have held fewer negotiating rights, according to Alex Colvin, who teaches collective bargaining and conflict resolution at Cornell University. Colvin can’t think of an industrial-relations rationale to give collective bargaining to police, but not teachers.”
The article continues by discussing the problem that “binding arbitration” required by union contracts “can tell a local government to raise more revenue even if voters won’t approve a new tax levy” — which Business Week calls “a problem of governance” that requires restructuring how local governments deal with their employees.
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I’m not so sure that’s true. I don’t think you have to take away collective bargaining rights to make expenditures fit revenues. Local governments, like any other entity, can’t spend more than they have. When union contracts setting pay and benefits threaten to push budgets above government’s income, the solution doesn’t have to be attacking workers’ right to bargain for pay and benefits. This problem also can be solved by prioritizing, cutting, and eliminating programs and services. After all, voters always want more than they’re willing to pay for, so political leaders always have to prioritize constituent demands.
Business Week also addresses what it calls the “cognitive dissonance” of voters (a subject I’ve remarked on before in this blog):
“A USA Today/Gallup poll from Feb. 22 revealed that 53 percent of Americans oppose reducing pay or benefits for government workers; 61 percent oppose ending collective bargaining rights. And 71 percent oppose increasing taxes. Whether collective bargaining reform is conspiracy or crisis, American taxpayers have surely conspired to create a different and far more elementary crisis. We love teachers, but we hate taxes; we want to spend more than we are willing to pay.”
The article goes on to recount how Boston police went on strike in 1919 to protest 17-hour workdays and vermin-infested police stations. “Robbery and destruction” followed, and the result was to make Calvin Coolidge president and “the chaos tilted the next half-century of negotiations against the public unions.”
In the years that followed, public workers “in many states won a legal right to bargain collectively — in part because it was seen as a safety valve to prevent strikes.”
Roger Rabbit Commentary: If you take away the right to collectively bargain, you also remove this “safety valve” without resolving public workers’ grievances — which, it seems to me, sets you up for serious labor problems down the road.
Business Week then astutely points out that if your political party doesn’t have union support, your alternative “is to run against taxes.”
And finally, Business Week tells us that some of the pizza for Madison protesters was ordered “by well-wishers in Cairo,” suggesting that anti-worker thuggery resonates with ordinary people literally everywhere.
@21 Yeah, from the commentary, it sounds like the Rethugs are seeking a restraining order to clear the people from the people’s capitol building.
BREAKING NEWS — REPUBLICANS DENIED RESTRAINING ORDER — PROTESTERS CAN STAY IN CAPITAL BUILDING — “THIS IS OUR HOUSE AGAIN” — AND IF GOVERNOR WALKER DOESN’T OPEN THE CAPITOL AT 8 AM TOMORROW GOVERNOR WALKER WILL BE HELD IN CONTEMPT OF COURT!!!
Another Business Week article says good jobs lost in the Republican Depression are being replaced by low-paying jobs, hindering recovery of consumer spending.
http://www.businessweek.com/ma.....902482.htm
22
Business Week’s labeling Walker’s bill as “nakedly political” lays bare just how profoundly he has overreached. These fucks are just so out-of-touch.
It’s not clear what’s going on in Madison, but MSNBC says a judge said he would clera the capitol building “after 41 bullets were found there earlier Thursday.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41.....news-life/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I think I know who planted those bullets.
RR @ # 27: Yep, it’s just like a con man “salting a mine” with gold dust or a nugget or two to make a prospective purchaser think he’s stumbled upon the motheload. The bullets were found scattered in various places, indicating that whoever planted them there wanted to make sure they were going to be found by somebody.
You are all naive sheltered white libtards
29 – Hey right winger here’s how a millionaire walks away from things:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/.....-says.html
Heh.. Multiply that by many rich folks – stuck in a bad deal, they just walk away. But cut his taxes and he’ll “create jobs”…
Pfffft..
Talk about naive…
“Personally, I think the Democratic senators should fly out of the country and seek political asylum in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.”
Good idea. The Republicans can do the same but ask for asylum in a different country. America would be better-off without Democrats and Republicans.
this is be cool 8) youporn sperre umgehen 8765 high quality yuvutu pornkolt xhamster 758 ro like yuvutu vwrib cumshot compilation youporn mhabsj stockings with big tits youporn fnncf busty bukkake milf youporn occebu youporn u k puwval youporn naughty pornstars 8-PPP youporn victoria paris 8-( about yuvutu :-]]]
Gloomy tales teen titans xxx 443 babes teen porn :-[[[ asin teen porn 159 filipino teen porn pics grjlu teen porn japanese %-D teen porn crying >:)) maine teen porn 70835 teen porn anime yzru young girl teen porn 8[ non nude teen movies geta
perfect design thanks teen schoolgirls hardcore porn =] teen lez porn 8-]] teen pissing porn >:(( teen hot sex porn :]] free picture teen porn 689545 hot teen blonde porn >:-PP teen lesbians videos >:-DD jpeg teen porn >:-]] 13 teen porn galleries mgvv free teen grils porn :]]