The Chief

Scott Walker's Non-Denial Denial in the John Doe Investigation

2012-01-27T20:15:00.000-06:00

Here's Scott Walker answering questions about the John Doe investigation today. Note the carefully chosen language:

"I think it's very clear when all of this is done, no matter how much time it takes, and again my campaign has been involved with cooperating with them for more than a year, I have every confidence that when this is completed, people will see that our integrity remains intact," Walker said.

Emphasis added, of course.

You know what words I didn't read? I did not participate in any illegal campaigning on taxpayer time, or I did not coordinate any illegal campaign activities while county executive, or I unequivocally reject as false any accusations that I abused my previous office, etc. Instead, Walker answers with a response that was obviously clearly by his counsel.

There are some other gems in the piece, at least one of which is obscured by the secretive nature inherent to John Doe investigations. Like this one:

Walker declined to answer a question about whether he or his attorney had been contacted by investigators. By contrast, he said last week that he had not yet talked with anyone in Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm's office.

"I have not, and I certainly would be willing if they asked me to in the future," Walker told the Journal Sentinel last week.

[...]

Walker said if he had been aware of any other county employees doing political work with county resources on county time, he would have acted the same way he acted in the Wink matter.

"If we had known about anyone else, we would have taken the same action," Walker said.

Asked about the proximity of his office to space occupied by Kelly Rindfleisch, his then-deputy chief of staff in 2010, and whether he knew what Rindfleisch was doing, Walker declined to comment, saying he wanted to abide by the rules of the John Doe probe and not provide details publicly.

If Walker hasn't been contacted by the investigators, then I don't think he is necessarily bound by the same gag order that prevents those involved in the proceeding to keep quiet. I'm not sure about that, but it does seem to follow. If it is true, he's either lying about not being contacted by the investigators or really doesn't want to have to answer any questions about Rindfleisch at all.

Seeing as his closest associates are the one being served with subpoenas these days, it should be clear by now that Walker is a possible, if not probable, target of the investigation. It's a Little Big Horn strategy that can only really point to one individual. Walker's words today are the first public sigh that I've seen that he knows he's in a ton of legal trouble. It's usually the first sign of someone who is going to be in a lot of trouble in the near future. Maybe that has something to do with Darlene Wink's agreement to cooperate in the investigation.

As for Brett Davis -- his words today seem to have marked himself as impending roadkill. He gave the only answer worse than a non-denial denial: he gave a "no comment." That's never a good sign.

The Attacks on Charles Franklin are Baseless and Need to Stop

2012-01-26T17:42:00.000-06:00

The recent attacks against Charles Franklin's poll for Marquette Law School are beyond idiotic. They're so stupid that I'm actually embarrassed for the people making them as they have revealed themselves to be so filled with rage at Scott Walker that any deviation from their own worldview appears to be reason enough to lash out at the messenger.

Perhaps the silliest attack is that Franklin is himself a conservative, and thus has a motive to skew his polls as such, based solely on two pieces of evidence: he conducted the poll for Marquette Law School (an institution so conservative that it employs noted reactionary Russ Feingold) and that he once conducted a poll for WPRI. If this were true, then Franklin would also be a flaming liberal because he sold Pollster.com, of which he was a co-founder, to the Huffington Post. He can't be both.

The second criticism has been about the ideological weights of the sample used for the poll, which runs something like this:

Conservative = 41.6%
Moderate = 32.5%
Liberal = 20.7%

Liberals are whining -- and there really is no other word for it -- that this weighing system is unfair. It's not just fair, it's reality. The most recent Gallup poll of American ideological identity ran this way:

Conservative = 41%
Moderate = 36%
Liberal = 21%

Which looks an awful lot like the sample Franklin took. Last October, when Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, surveyed the state it used the following sample:

Very/Somewhat Conservative = 42%
Moderate = 30%
Very/Somewhat Liberal = 19%

There was no outcry then. You can find four other recent polls conducted by PPP in Wisconsin with the exact same weights here, here, here, and here. In fact, it appears that PPP always uses those weights when polling Wisconsin. I would post the ideological breakdown of the St. Norbert's poll from November that concluded 58% of Wisconsinites wanted to recall Walker, but they didn't even publish how they weighed their sample. We could go on and on and on like this, pulling out examples from just about every pollster whose done work in Wisconsin in recent years, but the the weights really aren't going to change all that much because they're consistent with industry practice.

Charles Franklin's academic credentials are damn near unimpeachable. He's one of the world's foremost authorities on polling and he didn't get that reputation by being a partisan hack -- he earned it by being a scientist and as such he's all about the data. In recent years he's gone out of his way to explain the science in terms the public can understand. Franklin is exactly what the creators of the Wisconsin Idea had in mind when they came up with the concept. Accusing him of slanting his polls to conform with the supposed ideology of his temporary employer strain credulity and betrays the fact that the accuser doesn't understand much about polling.

Polls are both tools and weapons. The folks who are criticizing Franklin only seem to understand the latter. It's one thing to rip on a poll like Rasumussen for it's consistent "house effect," but to essentially accuse Charles Franklin of fraud -- which is exactly what his detractors are doing -- is asinine. If Wisconsin progressives want any prayer of recalling Scott Walker they are going to have accept uncomfortable realities on occasion. Franklin's poll has one simple findings: there's still a lot of work to do. If the left is going to attack any messenger who brings them this news in the future, they should give up right now because they will fail.

How Many More 2,750 Word Front Page Articles on on the John Doe Investigation do You Think Scott Walker can Take?

2012-01-25T01:03:00.002-06:00

All of these stories seem to fly around a nucleus like so many electrons.

Enter The Chief's Recall Total Pool

2012-01-16T16:59:00.001-06:00

The rules are simple:

Estimate the total number of signatures United Wisconsin will submit to the GAB tomorrow in the comments section below. Forecast any of the individual races or go for the grand total.

The winner gets a limerick composed in their honor written by yours truly.

The Chief's official guess is 789,623 for Walker. 532,687 for Kleefisch. 22,777 for Moulton. 23,337 for Wangaard. 23,783 for Galloway. 25,448 for Fitzgerald. That's a grand total of 1,417,655.

How did we arrive at our guess? The Dems passed along that they are in possession of over 3000 pounds of signatures in a fund-raising plea today. I assume that's for everyone: Walker, Kleefisch and the four senators.

If we assume that each petition was printed out on twenty pound bond paper, which is standard for copying paper, then the Recall Effort will have collected no less than 295,857 sheets of paper -- presuming that one ream (or 500 pieces) weighs 5.07 pounds.

And this is where things start to get dicey. Some petitions have enough room for five signatures, some ten. Assuming each petition is filled out completely (an extreme unlikelihood), that gives us a window between 1,479,285 -- hypothetically more than enough to initiate recalls for all six targets -- and almost three million.

If the drive does exceed our expectations -- and here we're just talking about the Walker drive -- these are a few important milestones:

1,004,303 -- The number of people who voted for Tom Barrett in 2010.

1,080,480 -- 50% of voters who voted in 2010

1,128,159 -- The number of people who voted for Scott Walker in 2010.

1,350,000 -- Total, if the rate at which the first month of signature collection continued during the second month. This is almost certainly not going to happen.

We'll explain how we arrives at our numbers on Wednesday. Spoiler Alert: it was mostly guessing.

Ron Johnson's Misguided Obsession with Domestic Oil Production

2012-01-12T22:34:00.000-06:00

When Ron Johnson was running for office in 2010 he made one of his first policy gaffes came when he made comments that could be interpreted that he supported potential oil drilling in the Great Lakes. This was right around the time it was revealed that Johnson owned six figures worth of stock in BP, stock he promised to eventually sell, a promise he ultimately reneged on, then sorta followed through with following the election when he sold of his entire stock portfolio. Last May Johnson voted against a bill that would have stripped oil companies of several billion dollars worth of government subsidies, which Johnson has routinely opposed on principle.

The moral of the story is that Johnson's relationship with the oil industry is checkered, at best.

Most of this oil business happened during the early months of summer 2010, when no one was paying attention, and as a result domestic drilling never really become much of an issue. Since Johnson took office, however, he's made it a point to champion domestic oil production in most of communiques with the masses. It's not terribly surprising since it's been a pet cause among conservatives for the last decade, and it might be seem odd coming from Johnson given his political past with the issue and the fact that he has no expertise with the matter at all, so why does Johnson appear to be making domestic drilling his issue de jour?

First of all, Johnson's drilling agenda is about five years old. He accuses the President of "limiting energy development" in the U.S. in his column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal and adds:

The administration has squandered billions of dollars on politically connected, green-energy boondoggle projects, while at the same time maintaining a de facto moratorium on off-shore drilling, and dragging its feet on granting permits for other energy utilization projects such as the Keystone XL Pipeline and restricting and limiting leases for offshore energy production. Republicans could propose a plan to utilize crucial domestic resources, including oil, natural gas and coal, to produce energy and create jobs.

(For the record, Obama has actually pledged to to increase lease sales both off-shore and in Alaska.)

He elaborated on that thought in an interview with Newsmax today:

Johnson accused Democrats of being beholden to extreme environmentalists in their rejection of both drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Alaskans want drilling and their view about their own environment is more important than those of people in California, New York or Massachusetts, he said, declaring: “If Alaskans want to drill in ANWR, we should let Alaskans drill in ANWR.”

The pipeline will be built unless Obama declares it against the national interest, Johnson said. “If you take a look at the 20,000 jobs the construction would create; you take a look at the $20 billion in private sector investment; you take a look at the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created long-term; and the impact on our energy prices, I think it will be very difficult for President Obama to make that determination.”

So Johnson domestic oil production plan revolves around three different elements: off-shore drilling, drilling in ANWR and the Keystone pipeline.

But let's take a look a what is actually happening to oil production in the United States, which has actually increased since Obama entered the White House:

So far from "limiting" oil production, it's actually picked up and without drilling in environmentally sensitive areas. Last year, for the first time in six decades, the U.S. became an oil exporter. All of this has happened despite the disruption in off-shore drilling Johnson decries.

This has occurred largely because of drilling in the Bakken Oil Formation in North Dakota. The discovery and subsequent exploitation of this cache has completely transformed the way we think about energy in America. The USGS estimates that there are "only" 896 million barrels of oil under ANWR, but there are 18 billion barrels in the Bakken. That's just recoverable oil using today's extraction technology, the estimate has actually been growing as the technology is reconfigured to meet the needs of the location. The estimates of the total oil in the formation range from 167-503 billion barrels.

There really is no comparison between the reserves in ANWR compared to those in the Bakken.

The oil in the Bakken formation is one of the big reasons green tech firms are dropping like flies these days. Most of these firms were founded prior to 2008 when Bakken oil boom began and acquired much of their seed capital from investors expecting sky-rocketing gas prices in the years ahead. That's not going to happen now. This poses a huge problem for environmentalists who can no longer lean on the "energy independence" and/or "national security" aspects of green energy promotion, which tended to be their strongest arguments.

If conservatives were smart that would drop ANWR all together on focus on Bakken because vigorous development of that formation is going to happen regardless of who's in power. It's an easy win. To an extent Republicans are kind of doing this by harping on the Keystone pipeline, but why ditch a perfectly good talking point when it's still moving voters, right?

During his first year in office Johnson has tried -- without any success whatsoever -- to find an issue that he can latch onto and call his own. He's tried to become a point man on the deficit, on regulations (and specifically banking regulations) and even on senate procedure, but has failed to find a cause that can separate him from the rest of the pack. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Johnson has eventually made his way to energy. If energy isn't your cup of tea, don't worry: Johnson will likely be opining on another completely unrelated topic in about six weeks or so.

This is becoming one of the most fundamental problems of Johnson's tenure: his impatience with the issues. There's very little doubt Johnson believes he has the answer to all that ails Washington, but in attempting to be a master of all issues he's become an expert in none of them. Instead of adopting a cause and sticking with it for the long haul, Johnson seems to be test-driving as many as he can handle in order to find the one issue where others will actually follow his lead. This why Johnson fills his op-ed pieces with shallow discussions of between 5 and 12 issues when he really should be focusing on just one.

Ron Johnson unveils another Doomed Initiative called "America's Choice"

2012-01-11T10:59:00.001-06:00

Oh, Lord. Fresh off the heels of a disastrous first year in the U.S. Senate, Ron Johnson decided to kick off his second year in office with a plan to transform Congress into a partisan Thunderdome spectacle designed solely to "highlight the differences" between the two parties. Seriously, those are his exact words.

Here he is in today's Wall Street Journal:

Americans are frustrated over Washington's inability to address our nation's economic and fiscal problems. That's why I have been working with a growing group of senators and House members to develop a plan that can build public support for solutions. It's called "America's Choice."

One quickly discovers that Johnson and his team spent more time working on the branding of this "plan" than on the plan itself.

America's Choice seeks to highlight the differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party led by President Obama.

If the entire piece can be reduced to one sentence, here it is. This plan does not appear to advance an policy goals, has no ambitions to put people back to work and is not supported by any data, but is designed to embarrass the President during a re-election. The only good thing about this plan so far is the brazen transparency of it all.

It could do so over the coming months by presenting to the country, through a series of votes in the House of Representatives, the battle between those who believe in broadest terms in limited government and freedom and those who promote government control and dependency.

Could do so? It doesn't sound like Johnson thinks enough of his niftily-named plan to actually think it will have any hope of doing so, but then again his plan calls for votes in a House of Congress to which he does not belong. Why Johnson is asking the House of Representative to carry the water when he is a member of the Senate is a bit ridiculous, but not entirely inconsistent with Johnson's M.O. Johnson does subscribe to the inane belief that a supermajority is required to get anything done in the Senate, a tenet that runs counter to his consistent whining that the Senate never gets enough done and this very plan. Go figure.

What are the choices these votes could present? Growing government spending and debt or growing the private sector and reducing government. Limiting energy development or using America's energy resources. Punishing success or pro-growth tax reform. A government takeover of health care or repealing ObamaCare and replacing it with patient-centered, free-market reforms.

Blah blah blah... We've heard this all before: the Manichean worldview of government coming from Johnson is as unproductive as it is tiresome.

The alternatives are stark. President Obama's faith in government is so strong that he has increased its size to 24% of gross domestic product from 21%, and increased our nation's debt by over $4 trillion. Republicans, on the other hand, believe long-term self-sustaining jobs are created in the private sector—that government cannot tax, spend and borrow our nation to prosperity.

Just because Johnson and his Republican cohorts keep saying it, doesn't mean it's true:

And on taxes, Obama's lowered those too.

Will green energy power America's future? The administration has squandered billions of dollars on politically connected, green-energy boondoggle projects, while at the same time maintaining a de facto moratorium on off-shore drilling, and dragging its feet on granting permits for other energy utilization projects such as the Keystone XL Pipeline and restricting and limiting leases for offshore energy production. Republicans could propose a plan to utilize crucial domestic resources, including oil, natural gas and coal, to produce energy and create jobs.

To be fair, the green jobs initiative has been something of a bust, but it should be noted that it does conform to Johnson earlier demand for "using America's energy resources." Clearly, Johnson was only talking about fossil fuels.

The problem with the green jobs initiative has been the recent oil boom in North Dakota, which has kept oil prices down in the U.S. below the point where spending on green tech -- much of which is still in the expensive R&D phase -- is profitale. Last year the U.S. became an oil exporting country for the first time in over 60 years. The fact is that we are developing our oil resources here in the United States, as fast as humanly possible. Johnson is still speaking the coded GOP language calling for drilling in ANWR and off the shore of Florida even though, at the moment and like the green tech industry, neither of those are necessary.

Regulatory overreach in this administration has been breathtaking. Executive agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor have been in hyper-drive, adding to the already job-crushing $1.75 trillion annual cost, according to the Small Business Administration, of federal regulatory compliance. Republicans could propose a regulatory moratorium to give businesses a chance to recover, and then enact real reform to achieve common-sense regulatory balance.

Another series of rote talking points Johnson includes in everything he does...

President Obama has launched a divisive campaign pitting one group of Americans against another.

Which is exactly what this "America's Choice" plan seems to aspire to do. You remember that "plan," don't you? The one Johnson opened up his op-ed piece discussing, but hasn't talked about since, even though we're now half way through the piece? Yeah, that one.

Yet 10% of Americans already pay 70% of all income taxes.

And here's Ron Johnson, once again, valiantly sticking his neck out for the upper marginal income earners. This is a mathematical reality of a progressive tax system. We've discussed this before here and here.

Increasing the tax burden on that group is counterproductive. Sowing class division is an act of political cynicism producing terrible economic consequences. Significant pro-growth tax reform is the better path to build our economy and create jobs.

It'd be great if Johnson used this incredibly value space in a national newspaper to outline such a tax plan, but instead we get an electioneering strategy.

The next part just rags on Obamacare:

Government takeover of our health-care system has been a liberal-progressive dream for decades. President Obama and Democrats in Congress passed the partisan Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It neither protects patients, nor does it make health care more affordable. But it will lead to a government takeover of one-sixth of our economy, and it will blow a hole in an already horribly broken budget.

Republicans are united in our commitment to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with patient-centered reforms. Malpractice tort reform, health savings account expansion, insurance purchase across state lines, reduction of government mandates, and equalized tax treatment of insurance premiums are some of the key changes we will propose to the country.

Now back to "America's Choice:"

America's Choice would clearly present two different visions of the country's future—one represented by the Republican Party and the other represented by the Democratic Party and its leader, President Obama. Once Congress returns from recess later this month, the Republican majority in the House could focus on one major area of domestic policy at a time. For example, February could be used to debate, craft and pass an energy utilization policy.

It should be clear by now that Johnson is using his word count to propose a plan that he has not discussed with any other members of Congress. Johnson doesn't offer much in the way of detail because Johnson is completely oblivious to the fact that this is an election year for everyone in Washington except for himself (and 65 colleagues in the Senate). It's every man for himself.

When the House debates and passes an agenda item, Republican senators, candidates and conservative groups could concentrate on the same issue, using the same powerful facts and figures to inform and persuade the American public. Coordinating our focused efforts improves our ability to compete with the presidential bully pulpit and counteract media outlets that often work to marginalize us.

This would have been sage advice ... about 20 years ago. This is actually what the conservative movement does extremely well. The only thing this paragraph goes to show is that Johnson doesn't get invited to the important meetings.

In 2011, President Obama stopped running the country and started running his re-election campaign. In his cynical attempt to divert attention away from his record by dividing us, Republicans have been put on defense. The America's Choice agenda would put us on offense.

If done well, we just might put enough pressure on Senate Democrats and the president to actually pass legislation that will begin to solve our problems. If not, Republicans will have provided Americans with a clear choice in November.

Again, in the end it's all about politics.

This op-ed just continues to drive home what a lousy Senator Johnson is. This plan is nothing more than branding, an empty catch phrase that has no details to consider carefully, no support from his colleagues and nothing to offer his constituents. There's a complete lack of focus on the issues -- Johnson mentions about eight of them during the course of his word limit and they seem to roll of the pen like poll-tested talking point rather than actionable items.

Expect "America's Choice" to wither on the vine until being blown away by a stiff autumn wind. This will be yet another one of Johnson's fail attempts to do his job.

MORE: It's been about 36 hours since Johnson's op-ed dropped and so far it's gotten very little traction. Only one of Johnson's senate colleagues has publicly signed on to the program and largely because it "was his idea first." Jennifer Rubin, WaPo's conservative blogger had this to say about the proposal:

Johnson’s very public style of marketing legislation, he conceded, is not how government usually operates. To someone coming from the private sector, however, as he did, “it is obvious” that lawmakers have to development a coherent message and sell their ideas to the public. At the very least, Johnson’s goal is to line up with that of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.): Lay out a vision, explain it to voters and contrast it with the president’s.

That's about as delicate a way a sympathetic journalist can possibly say, "this guy doesn't know what the hell's going on in Washington."

Does Tommy Thompson work for a Private Equity Firm that uses an Off Shore Tax Shelter?

2012-01-10T20:58:00.000-06:00

Wow, could we possibly hear any more about private equity than we have this last week?

Of course, we can!

It probably will come as little surprise that Tommy Thompson has dabbled in the Private Equity business. He joined the Boston-based Peak Ridge Capital Group in 2010. It looks like PRCG was so happy to have Thompson aboard that they created an office in Madison, but the Wisconsin branch office isn't nearly as interesting as the one in Hamilton, Bermuda, which is well-known as a popular tax haven.

Unfortunately, PE firms are notorious for their lack of transparency. They are, after all, private firms and don't usually have to file SEC papers and what have you (there are exceptions). I actually had a monster of a time just trying to find which companies were in Peak Ridge's portfolio and no luck trying to find where they are incorporated. They seem to have registered with the Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth, but did so in 2007, seven years after they were founded.

Anyway, most Caribbean tax shelters have a couple of rules for using their countries to hide revenue from Uncle Sam. The first is that the business has to establish a physical presence on the island, usually in the form of a P.O. Box. The second, and I'm told this rule varies from island to island, is that the company must hold at least one board of directors meeting on the island every year. Both are true of Bermuda. The take-away here is that firms don't set up offices in Bermuda unless they're doing business in Bermuda, and the only businesses in Bermuda are wearing kick-ass shorts once a year and sheltering taxes.

This is probably one of those things more respectable people should look into.

Walkergate Update

2012-01-05T22:06:00.000-06:00

Bottom line: worst than anyone anticipated, even Walker's most vehement detractors.

Allow Jake and Zach to take of the details, but here are the take-away points from the allegations:

Veterans were (allegedly) defrauded for a very small amount of money (relatively speaking).

Children were preyed upon by an (alleged) sexual predator.

Scott Walker apparently never learned that "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" and continues to twist his involvement in ways that would make a contortionist blush.

All of this dropped while Walker was in DC giving a speech at a conservative "think tank" this morning.

I recommend taking a look at Jake's very serious reading of the complaint. It's absolutely devastating. These are the kinds of allegations that keep high-rolling lawyers well-fed for years.

If Ever there were a Statement that Screamed "Fact Check Me!" -- it's this One

2012-01-05T15:58:00.000-06:00

Before we end up with one of these "half true" rulings from the Journal-Sentinel, let's parse what was said:

Johnson said the United States has created a "very compassionate society," but in Wisconsin that same compassion has created a welfare state that encourages people not to work.

"A family unit can't survive on $22,000, but after they receive all of their government entitlements they receive more than $62,000," he said. "We have a safety net for the poor, but not for those who are out there working."

This seems to suggest that a family of (no size given) is eligible for $62,000 worth of state aide. Notice how Johnson says "receive," not "earn" or "make" or ""acquire."

But much of this is undoubtedly the cost of programs like BadgerCare, which could be expensive if the recipient is ill, but that isn't money a recipient is "receiving," per se: it's a service deemed to have a certain value. Johnson makes it sound like poor folks making $22,000 a year are being given an additional 200% pay raise -- in cash -- just for sitting on their assess. This is almost certainly not true.

Furthermore, I'm not sure where Johnson thinks his hypothetical family's initial $22,000 came from. He seems to think one can just acquire it by doing nothing. In actuality, if a person working for the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) 40 hours a week all 52 weeks a year, the kind of real lazy bum who didn't take any vacation time, that person would make exactly $15,080. He'd have to work another 636 hours worth of overtime (at $10.88 an hour) to reach the $22,000 threshold.

That translates into just over a 52 hour work week every week of the year without any time off just so that they can reach an income Johnson seems to believe materializes out of nowhere.

Levity (this Blog could use some)

2012-01-05T00:36:00.000-06:00

First, the local/instant YouTube classic almost eight years in the making:

And secondly, action from the Texas 5A Division II high school championship at Cowboys Stadium:

There's actually another angle from which the above splendor can be seen. I encourage you all to check it out.

Don't Buy Scott Walker's Chest-Pounding over the New Shopko Merger Jobs

2012-01-04T16:28:00.000-06:00

There's some good news for folks in Green Bay tonight, as giant area retailer Shopko is creating about 120 new job via a merger. The news is so good that Gov. Walker's team is all over it with a press release:

MADISON—Governor Scott Walker today announced that Shopko will commence a corporate expansion project with assistance from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) that will result in the creation of more than 120 new positions at its corporate headquarters in Green Bay.

"My number one priority is helping Wisconsin businesses create jobs," Governor Walker said. "I am pleased we were able to work with Shopko to support their expansion and ensure it will take place in Wisconsin."

“We appreciate the WEDC working with us to support our growth and bring new, good paying jobs to Wisconsin,” commented Paul Jones, President and CEO of Shopko.

Founded in 1963 and headquartered in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Shopko is a $2 billion retailer that operates 149 stores in 13 states throughout the Midwest, Mountain and Pacific Northwest regions. The company announced today a merger that will result in a significant investment in Wisconsin and creation of new positions at its corporate headquarters in Green Bay. The creation of more than 120 new jobs will be assisted with an award of up to $2 million in Economic Development Tax Credits administered by the WEDC.

That's lovely. $2 million can pay salary and benefits to between 15-20 low to mid-level executives for about a year. But, really, how did those jobs end up here? Here's a more plausible explanation:

Over the past two years, Shopko has purchased seven stores from Pamida and successfully transitioned them to the Shopko Hometown format. These locations have delivered an improved customer experience and have seen a significant increase in store traffic, sales and profitability, the release stated.

Once Pamida’s chain-wide conversions are complete, the company plans to accelerate the addition of new Shopko Hometown stores in the second half of 2012 and into 2013, Burns said.

Both companies are owned by affiliates of Sun Capital Partners, Inc. a private investment firm focused on leverage buyouts, equity, debt, and other investments in market-leading companies.

Pamida has been owned by Shopko since 1999, and for the last six years they have both been owned by the same private equity firm who finally decided to reduce redundancies, increase shareholder value and all that jazz. Actually, Sun Cap looks like they started the merger process, or at least investigating the viability of a merger, two years ago, before Walker was in office or WEDC even existed.

Why this merger is getting tax credits might be an interesting issue to discuss. Shopko has twice the revenues of Pamida and it's almost always the case that the smaller guy has to pack his bags and move to the bigger kid's backyard during a merger. I'm not sure how floating $2 million Shopko's way does anything to create jobs that weren't already coming here. $2 million is 0.1% of Shopko's annual revenue, so it's really nothing to them; in fact, it's such a negligible pittance that Shopko didn't even mention WEDC's involvement in their press release on the merger. The $2 million Walker gave Shopko is little more than a gift basket from the neighborhood association's welcome wagon.

Without knowing much more about the deal itself or WEDC's involvement, I can only comment on what it looks like from the outside and, frankly, it looks pretty weak. The tax credits appear to be something WEDC floated Shopko's way solely for the sake of being able to claim that they are involved in job growth here in Wisconsin even though the state probably did absolutely nothing to bring those jobs here. That's one expensive press release.

If that's the case, then Walker et al. are incompetent at either 1.) messaging that they missed a golden opportunity to tell everyone that the economy is looking up and that jobs are coming back to Wisconsin without state government involvement (something I'm routinely told conservatives are quite fond of); or 2.) job creation that they can't count on private businesses to extol the Administration's leadership and/or policies without having to pay them.

Taking credit for something he had nothing to do with is quickly becoming a Scott Walker calling card. Lately we've had his heroic "expansion" of Family Care and now his fiat creation of jobs in Green Bay -- Walker truly seems adept at nothing than his own self-promotion.

It's a good thing that good jobs are coming to Green Bay and, yes, those jobs should be counted toward Walker's promise of 250,000 new jobs in the state by the end of his term; but Walker shouldn't pound his chest too much because he likely didn't do much -- if anything -- to bring them here.

MORE: Jake reminds us all of the eerily similar Spectrum Brands incident from not too long ago.

Did Rush Limbaugh Really just Accuse the GOP of Rigging Last Night's Caucus for Romney?

2012-01-04T15:17:00.001-06:00

Is there any other way to read this?

RUSH: I can't tell you the number of people -- and I stayed up all the way until they found the votes. My gosh, I thought I was watching the Democrats last night. Ninety-nine percent of the votes in and they can't find the votes from two counties. They couldn't find 'em. They didn't know where the guy who had the votes was, and everybody knew what was going on. At this point Santorum held, what was it, an 18-vote lead. Everybody knew that what was going on here was a way to find a victory for Romney. So fine, the total number of votes doesn't really matter. Santorum won last night. I mean that's the bottom line here.

That's pretty serious accusation to just shrug off with ""Pffffft, whatever!" or, excuse me, a "so, fine."

A Genuinely Idiotic Defense of Ron Paul

2012-01-03T10:53:00.002-06:00

Ahead of tonight's Iowa caucuses, Jonathan Krause does a characteristically lazy job of explaining his support for Ron Paul:

I had someone ask me recently what is the appeal of Ron Paul as a Presidential candidate. Paul heads into the Iowa Caucuses tonight neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney for the lead in the polls--despite getting ZERO attention from the cable news networks. I gave that person my new answer to explain Ron Paul: He is Barack Obama for people who actually know something about politics. By that, I mean that when Ron Paul speaks everybody is able to hear what they want to hear.

Saying that the appeal to both Obama and Ron Paul are based on their Rorschach-test-personalities is asinine. In terms of policies, both candidates ran campaigns that jived with their legislative records and were very specific about what kinds of goals they hoped to achieve while in the White House. The appeal of each candidate lies mostly in the presentation of their personalities. In 2008 Obama painted a portrait of the future that promised to unify the country and move passed the contentious years of the Bush Administration, and he did it with soaring rhetoric. Since the mid 1970s Ron Paul has waded into the fever swamps of some of the worst elements of American politics in order to grow a movement based on apocalyptic fear and resentment.

But just what the hell does "when Ron Paul speaks everybody is able to hear what they want to hear." mean? Here Krause's weak explanation:

For those of us Deficit Hawks we hear him talk about reducing government spending and balancing the books (the only candidate to do so in the 2008 campaign).

Paul is noted for being a "deficit hawl" only by accident. What he does want to is cut government spending, not on fiscal grounds, but on ideological grounds. One former congressional budget expert gave his budget plan a solid F for missing the entire point of budget "balancing" altogether:

Paul says he wants to eliminate the income, estate and capital gains taxes. That would be fine if he also at least mentioned in passing that he'll also need to eliminate almost everything the federal government does to prevent the deficit and debt from rising. He doesn't.

The unfortunate thing about this analysis is that it underestimates Paul's inclination eliminating the Federal government, of which he has claimed up to 80% is "technically unconstitutional."

Those opposed to expansion of government hear him talk about limiting Federal powers to those only contained within the Constitution.

See above. Paul's "interpretation" of the Constitution is something of a joke in the legal community, where it is widely considered to be so narrow and arbitrary so as to be only useful to militia members and "sovereign citizens" acting as pro se council.

Krause is also tacticly adopting the classic "state's rights" argument here, which historically speaking, has been fraught with contradictions at best, and malicious intent at worse.

The anti-war crowd hears him talk about bring the troops home immediately.

Nope. Paul's appeal is strictly to isolationism, which another contradiction of Paul's brand of Libertarianism that exposes a nasty and ugly xenophobia while simultaneously betraying an apparent hatred for "free markets" on a global scale. Paul is titanically out of his element on foreign policy.

The Occupy crowd hears him talking about doing away with the Federal Reserve and breaking down the big banks.

This statement betrays the fact that Krause knows nothing about banking. Paul is dead set against breaking up big banks. He's against bail-outs, which would lead to mergers that would actually increase the size of some banks given another situation like the meltdown of September 2008. Paul's opposition to the Fed would actually make banks more powerful.

The potheads hear him talk about ending the war on drugs. Gay rights activists hear him say he doesn't care who gets married to whom. The Tea Party hears him talk about doing away with the IRS.

Again, see the above discussion re: budget-cutting.

Even the anti-Semites hear him talking about ending unquestioned support for Israel.

I don't even know where to begin discussing this line. We can argue about the policies and merits of all of the groups mentioned above, but anti-Semites have no value whatsoever. Krause wants to treat them like just another constituency. This is deplorable.

But Krause's arrant slip is telling: Paul's brand Libertarianism is really nothing more than an aggressive version of post-modernism tied up in "conservative" packaging. Paul goes beyond just telling crowds that they can live better with less government, he tells them that whatever they think about very important concepts like morality, justice, ethics, etc. -- they're right. Everyone's right in Paul's Libertarianism because everyone is an individual. This has horrible consequences that allows some of the worse elements of society to justify racism and other truly contemptible notions.

Like the Apostles who spoke in tongues in the Bible--everyone hears Ron Paul talking their language.

And that language is relativism. That's the big picture point Krause is missing here. Ron Paul is the great 21st century evangelist of conservative relativism.

Krause continues:

But by being everyone's candidate, Ron Paul is no one's candidate.

Well, if that's not the stupidest and most meaningless thing I've read in a long time, than I don't know what is.

Now, the next part is such a blatant tautology that it defies my already exceedingly low expectations:

Even if he was elected by some major miracle, he would have ZERO political base in Washington. As other pundits have pointed out, there is no "Ron Paul Caucus" in Congress. Outside of the deficit reduction idea, he would have no chance of passing any of the other legislative ideas he proposes--and Washington would be plunged into even deeper gridlock.

Got that? A victory for Ron Paul would mean chaos in Washington. It would mean that all the things Paul stands for would never have any hope of actually being realized. It would mean absolutely zero progress for all of his causes. It's a Catch-22 that all Libertarians must reconcile before placing their votes with Paul. Krause has spilled the beans here: a vote for Paul does nothing.

But that's not going to stop Krause from voting for him:

I voted for Ron Paul in 2008 as a form of protest against two other candidates who were only talking about new ways to spend even more money we don't have. If he somehow was the GOP candidate in November, I'll be writing in Paul Ryan on my ballot--as a form of protest against two candidates who have no ability to lead a country.

See, Krause will be voting for the guy he has just has no possible chance to effectively lead the country to protest the blah blah blah. Now recall Krause's introduction to his post: "Ron Paul: He is Barack Obama for people who actually know something about politics."

Does this kind of reasoning sound like Krause knows the first damn thing about politics?

Or anything, for that matter?

Ron Paul appeals to folks like Jonathan Krause because Paul's message is simple: you know better than anyone else how to live your life. That's fine up until a point where the individual must function with others. This is the point where many Ron Paul supporters struggle in life and the frustration from that struggle results in a lot of resentment. Ron Paul provides these people with justification for that resentment and an alternative to the status quo. That's the central message people hear when they listen to Paul, not his stand on the War on Drugs or the Fed.

This is a major part of the reason Paul appeals to conspiracy theorists: Paul's message validates what they believe. It's also one of Paul's major selling points to Krause, who isn't a conspiracy theorist (so far as I know), but does not let his ignorance of any subject get in the way of proclaiming his expertise. Not so long ago, conservatives railed against this kind of relativism. Now they celebrate it.

MORE: Boy, did I fuck up the landing on this one. See the comments below for more.

What's with Libertarians and Conspiracy Theories?

2011-12-29T21:34:00.000-06:00

Now that people are finally paying attention to some of the really weird things Ron Paul believes, let's ask what the hell is up with Libertarians?

You'd be astonished by the sheer volume of the conspiracy theories that fall under the Libertarian banner. Here's just a quick primer: Agenda 21, FEMA camps, the North American Union (the "Amero" and the "trans-American Superhighway), the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberger Group, the Moon-landing "hoax," Barack Obama wasn't born in American, 9/11 was an inside job, the Federal Reserve will eventually turn over America's wealth to the New World Order and on and on. If you'd like to hear them all just listen to the lunatic Alex Jones or join the John Birch Society.

Just about every Libertarian I have ever met has had a very personal and very visceral problem with authority that pre-dates their adoption of Libertarianism. In fact, it often seems that Libertarianism was constructed to provide an intellectual framework to what is essentially a gut feeling that starts at an early age. Unfortunately, Libertarianism doesn't really make much sense outside of a sophomore poli sci seminar.

But instead of abandoning or correcting their flawed philosophy, Libertarians find scape goats among the authorities because it serves two purposes: 1.) it validates their distrust of the powers that be and 2.) it allows them maintain a philosophy that vindicate the idea that they can pretty much do whatever they want. That's the generic psychological answer, one that can be grafted on to any that espouses conspiracy theories. There are also historic influences, chief among them is Joseph McCarthy.

It goes without saying that McCarthy was anti-communist, but his heyday happened to coincide with the beginning of the contemporary Libertarian intellectual roots. One of McCarthy's biggest fans was Murray Rothbard, the economist who would serve as something of an intellectual mentor to Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell. McCarthy, the original conspiracy theorist, only we don't call what he believed about communist infiltration of the government a conspiracy theory today -- we say he was lying, exaggerating, ginning up an issue for political purposes, engaging in demagoguery, or was drunk. The Birchers, of course, adopted McCarthy's vociferous hatred for anything that resembled communism and did what they could to defend their patron saint, who had died the year before the group was founded in 1958. This also meant adopting McCarthy's conspiracy theorizing.

Rothbard backed up some of the nuttier Bircher conspiracy theories, albeit for different reasons. When lead Bircher Robert Welch began the fluoride-in-the-drinking-water panic, he said it was a socialist plot to dull the minds of Americans into submitting to a further expansion of government. Rothbard, on the other hand, just cut out the brainwashing talk and argued that said that fluoride was just creeping socialism.

Why did he do this? It's hard to say. Rothbard's view likely kept him out of the elite academic jobs and without much political influence, so it's entirely possible that he was a true believer. There's also reason to believe that he was courting conspiracists as part of a strategy to build a broader Libertarian movement (Rothbard was obsessed with this kind of political activity, which shows up frequently in his writings).

Libertarian conspiracies all follow the same formula: they start with the expansion of the state, end with the loss of individual rights and portend a future of Communist domination -- just like Joseph McCarthy's "infiltration" of the State Department. Conspiracy theories are rooted in Libertarianism's DNA. It appeals to radical individualists who are apt to see any kind of association as a plot to infringe on a man's desire to be left alone. These are folks who think they're entitled to do whatever they want to do without being subject to burdensome restrictions, even creating their own realities.

What the War on Crime can Teach us about Winning the War on Unemployment

2011-12-27T10:03:00.000-06:00

Charles Lane has an interesting piece in the Washington Post about the decrease in crime rates in America in the last 20+ years. His general point is that we have yet to identity the reason for the precipitous drop and to the best of my knowledge, he's correct: there really is no consensus on just why crime is down. There are likely many reasons, and Lane mentions a few of the them, but I'd like to put forth three ideas -- one that Lane touches briefly upon and two others that he doesn't even mention -- as possible parts to a greater answer:

3.) Better Policing: When New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton implemented the CompStat, police departments all over the country finally discovered a tool that could help them almost predict where and when crime was going to happen. That created a fundamental change in emphasis from ex post facto enforcement to prevention. Comparing this story to a Moneyball-esque shift in thinking is only out of line because life and death was actually at stake during the early days of CompStat.

Police departments all over the country have become more professionalize and trained in the last 20 years. Being a cop once was considered a blue-collar, working class job. It's now one that requires a college degree. This has led to less (or, at least, cyclical) corruption and a better working relationship with the people the police serve. The public's attitudes about cops have also changed. Some of this has to do with 9/11 when much of the country was vividly reminded just how heroic some of these guys have to be at times.

2.) Gentrification/Suburban Ennui: It took us most of the 20th century, but Americans only started learning how to care for our urban areas once we realized how painfully dull suburban life is. In the early and mid-1990s, most major cities in the country began to revitalize themselves -- renovating waterfront, building ballparks, turning warehouse space into loft apartments, etc. People, and younger ones in particular, had grown up in the suburbs and were so dead set against living there as adults that they were willing to spend money and risk some degree of their safety to not do so again. The fact that cities were beginning to clean themselves up made urban life seem all the more attractive.

1.) Globalization: Americans have literally outsourced our gang violence across the border to Mexico. The decrease in crime and violence in America cannot be seen as unrelated to the drastic upturn in violence in Mexico, where a war is being waged by various drug cartels over access to the American market. This is not unlike the gang crime we saw in urban areas in the 1980s, only now it's far more sophisticated, better funded and taking place in a country with far fewer law enforcement and economic resources to fight back.

All three of these reasons are inter-related, and perhaps it's unfair to rank them in order of importance, but I did so because they each represent essential ways of looking at the problem: #1 is the global or mega-economic outlook; #2 is the macro-economic outlook; and #3 is the micro-economic outlook, or how crime-fighting occurs street to street, house to house in America.

The great lesson to be learned here is that Americans tackled all three of these levels simultaneously beginning in the early 1990s: we changed the way we policed our cities, we changed the way we lived in our cities and we went after the supply with an aggressive counter-narcotics strategy that targeted the over-seas source. We now have less influence over level #1 then we did 20 years ago, but have made such huge strides with levels #2 and #3 that we've been able to mitigate this lack of control.

The War on Crime has largely been a success where two other domestic struggles -- the Wars on Drugs and Poverty -- have been failures. Given the current economic climate, it's probably time to look at the methods used during the War on Crime and see if they can be applied to the War on Poverty, or at least the War on Unemployment. If we look closely we can find a good deal of crossover.

There is already a great deal of intervention and activity by the state in levels #1 and #2, but it's important to recognize that level #3 is fairly under-served and this should be a problem because, according to every politician every, small business are the real job creators. Unfortunately, they are also responsible for most job losses, as well. Given that so much job loss and production occurs on the micro level, or the level of each individual small business, it's astonishing that there isn't more attention paid to it.

There's really no reason why we can't use statistical modeling to anticipate where unemployment will occur next. For example, if you're in a paper-making industry job in the state of Wisconsin, you're job isn't safe. Period. Now the last thing a struggling business in a dying industry wants to see is a government official stopping by and asking "So, how are you going to wind this down?" and this should in no way happen, but perhaps some kind of program can be created that slowly (and confidentially, so as not to frighten customers) transitions workers into new fields before jobs just suddenly evaporate.

These type of models have existed forever on Wall Street and investors use them all the time to evaluate industries and specific firms. "The Market" will always know who is dying well before the state, or anyone else for that matter, does. If we can "predict crime" then we should also be able to do the same with unemployment. I know there is a significant difference between the volume of data in each category, but I still think it can be done. If a mom and pop restaurant files three consecutive years worth of loses to the state DOR, it's probably not long for this world.

One of the ways police were able to curb murder rates in the 1990s was to anticipate retaliatory violence. They beefed up patrols in neighborhoods and even knocked on the doors of potential retaliators just to inform them they were being watched a little more carefully. (Some of the first criminological work into social networks helped develop this strategy). Civil libertarians blew a gasket from every quarter: everything from "racial profiling" on the left, to "big brother police state" on the right. Perhaps they were right, but those concerns are almost completely forgotten today. (Much of which had to do with the beat cops in rough neighborhoods spending years developing personal connections and goodwill in those communities. It was painstaking work that was literally conducted street by street, block by block and house by house.)

There will, of course, be fierce objections to this kind of anticipatory action. The civil libertarians of yesterday will be replaced by the economic libertarians of today, and this group has always enjoyed significantly more political power. These folks will cry "socialism" and worse. They also will have a point: when businesses fail, someone gains from the decrease in competition. It's important to understand that this is not a proposal to prop up failing businesses with state funds, but with help them wind down with "optional transitional support" to another line of work.

This is about moving people from one job to another before unemployment ever happens or an unemployment check is ever sent. One sentiment you'll hear often from the unemployed is that they don't need "job training" so much as they need "unemployment training," that is, instruction on how and where to look for work and fill down time productively. There are few things worse then looking for a job: it's a daunting, frightening and humiliating task, and when people are left to themselves they can easily be overwhelmed.

Again, this is going to require a sea change in how we view unemployment. Currently, the left sees the unemployed as victims of social and business circumstances, while the right sees them as either lazy or failures. Neither view is correct.

It's time we look at unemployment the same way we look at crime and to attack it like we attack crime. For this to work, any kind of municipal agency devoted to this task has to adopt the same principle police used in the roughest cities in America:

Developing close relationships with business owners in specific neighborhoods or communities so that they can understand their shifting employment needs, just as beat cops earned the trust of locals in rough neighborhoods.

Intervene at the early signs of trouble.

Demonstrate results professionally and consistently.

Essentially, what I'm recommending is the creation of a highly-trained force of economic "social workers" or better yet "agents" -- yes, in the Hollywood sense of the word -- for the unemployed. These would be people struggling business owners can turn to to help re-locate employees in the event of a closure with actual jobs. Think of these folks as Human Resources ninjas.

This wouldn't even necessarily have to be a government-run organization. It cold just as easily be a philanthropic organization in the same vein as, say, Teach for America. This organization could recruit from recent college graduates, drop them into cities and give them a plan to follow. A program like this would be almost ideal for future MBA students since the skill set required to be successful in this kind of occupation are immediately relevant to a future in business. (Plus, they would be observing, first hand, how businesses fail.) Ideally, this program would be a stepping stone to a much more lucrative job with one of the connections any given "agent" made in the private sector. This could create an incentive that will attract the best and brightest.

For centuries Americans viewed crime in almost strictly punitive terms: you do the crime, you get what's coming to you. Unfortunately, we've also viewed unemployment in similar terms. American started to tackle crime comprehensively in the 1990s. We threw the kitchen sink at the problem: We banned assault weapons and yet simultaneously passed concealed carry laws. We put 75,000 new cops on the streets (far more than was actually needed, but still 25% less than the 100,000 in the original plan). We started midnight basketball leagues and community watch organizations. We imprisoned scores of thousands of young people and yet finally started focusing on treatment for drug abusers.

Lane calls the drop in crime "the most important social trend of the past 20 years" in America. I actually think he's under-selling the accomplishment: it's nothing short of a contemporary Apollo project. Lane goes on to say:

Plunging crime rates also debunk conventional wisdom, left and right. Crime’s continued decline during the Great Recession undercuts the liberal myth that hard times force people into illegal activity — that, like the Jets in “West Side Story,” crooks are depraved on account of being deprived. Yet recent history also refutes conservatives who predicted in the early 1990s that minority teenage “superpredators” would unleash a new crime wave.

Government, through targeted social interventions and smarter policing, has helped bring down crime rates, confirming the liberal worldview. Yet solutions bubbled up from the states and municipalities, consistent with conservative theory. Contrary to liberal belief, incarcerating more criminals for longer periods probably helped reduce crime. Contrary to conservative doctrine, crime rates fell while Miranda warnings and other legal protections for defendants remained in place.

On the whole, though, what’s most striking about the crime decline is how little we know about its precise causes. Take the increase in state incarceration, which peaked at a national total of 1.4 million on Dec. 31, 2008. This phenomenon is probably a source of success in the war on crime — and its most troubling byproduct. But increased imprisonment cannot explain all, or most, of the decline: Crime rates kept going down the past two years, even as the prison population started to shrink. Crime fell in New York faster than in any other U.S. city over the past two decades — but New York locked up offenders at a below-average rate, according to Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe.”

Looking for causes of the decline is, indeed, important, but I think the real take-away lesson is that we tried everything, regardless of ideological origin. This is not how we're attacking unemployment. We're neglecting the micro-economic level and it would not surprise me if we achieved the same decline in unemployment that we saw in crime if we adopted the same hands-on, house by house, person to person, go-to-the-unemployed-don't-wait-for-the-unemployed-to-come-to-you tactics.

Ron Johnson's Disastrous First Year in Office

2011-12-27T00:16:00.000-06:00

Toward the end of his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Ron Johnson eschewed his hide-and-seek media strategy and met with the editorial board of the Green Bay Press Gazette, universally considered to be one of the most conservative (and therefore, sympathetic) boards in Wisconsin. During the meeting Johnson was asked a fairly straight forward question that created a moment of uncomfortable awkwardness that rivaled anything we've recently seen from Republican Presidential candidates Rick Perry and Herman Cain. In case you've forgotten, here it is:
Within hours the Press Gazette announced on it's web site that it was endorsing Johnson's opponent, Russ Feingold. The incident proved to be portentous.

Johnson has largely flown under the radar, thanks to the polarizing policies of Scott Walker, and he's escaped a great deal of the scrutiny and criticism that come with his office, both from the media and the state Dems, who have devoted all of their energy to Walker. In the absence of that kind of attention, it's easy to appreciate just how poorly Johnson's first year in office has gone.

Johnson's approval ratings as of November are a dismal 36% or 37%. What should trouble Johnson more is the fact that between 30-40% of respondents don't know who he is or aren't sure what to make of him yet. These are people who will learn about Johnson from his performance in office, and to date performance has been awful.

Here's a quick look back on Johnson's first year in office:

In January Johnson took to the pages of the Journal-Sentinel to write an open letter to President Obama sarcastically welcoming him to Wisconsin ahead of a visit. It was an uncomfortable moment for someone who was still unknown to many in the state and held very few public events during his campaign for office.

In April, shortly after Rep. Paul Ryan released his controversial budget plan, a plan that was so toxic that the GOP leadership wouldn't even touch it, Johnson said it didn't go far enough.

In May Johnson voted to continue massive tax breaks for the major oil companies.

In late June FEC reports revealed that Johnson gave himself a $10 million severance package when he left PACUR, a sum that seemed suspiciously close to the $9 million Johnson spent on his own campaign for Senate. Johnson did not answer questions regarding the matter very convincingly and the only reason the issue hasn't been a bigger deal is because the FEC is essentially a toothless enforcement agency.

A few days later, Johnson tried to take ownership of budget deficit issue and failed miserably. First he published an incoherent op-ed (seriously, just look at the chart) at the Daily Caller that, far from suggesting a solution to the budget problem, seriously called into question his own understanding of the deficit.

A week later he tried to bring the business of the Senate to a screeching halt over raising the debt ceiling and was rebuked by the GOP Senate leadership in a private conference on the Senate floor. Johnson's temper tantrum seemed to personify the recklessness of the GOP's game-of-chicken strategy which caused the public to blow a gasket.

Two weeks later, Johnson flip-flopped and began a full-throated advocacy of a budget proposal he earlier dismissed as draconian.

In August, Johnson laid out 12 economic policies that he called "necessary components" to "get our economy moving again." To date Johnson has shown barely any progress on any of these policies.

Johnson has developed a reputation for hyper-partisanship:

In the interview, Johnson insisted that he’s open to working with Democrats and “that if you want to accomplish things in this country, … you have to work with the other side.”
But even on the select occasions McConnell has been forced to work with the other side to keep the government running and raise the national debt ceiling, Johnson objected.

That being said, one of only three bills Johnson authored this year is the so called Regulation Moratorium and Jobs Preservation Act of 2011 which is a deeply cynical bill without any actually policy value designed solely to embarrass the President politically.

Johnson's decision to block to appointment of Victoria Nourse to the federal bench has been widely criticized, even by members of his former campaign staff.

Johnson's developed a reputation for complaining about the rules of the Senate.

“Johnson is always a big critic of how things are being run, but he has yet to show that he understands how to get things done in Congress,” a senior Republican Senate aide said. “Just being a vocal critic may not be enough of a selling point to a caucus that wants to see real results on some very tough issues.”

In October Johnson teamed up with a former banking CEO and fellow Ayn Rand fan-boy to write a brazen op-ed that announces in no uncertain terms that Johnson represents the interests of the banking industry.

Later that month the Journal-Sentinel revealed that Johnson had purchased a $1 million house near Capitol Hill.

If that wasn't enough, Johnson capped off a busy October by writing an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing for a "return" to super-majority rule in the Senate, a position that will surely come back to haunt him if the GOP takes over the Senate (as some people believe they will) next year.

In December Johnson was defeated for a leadership position in the Senate.

Then he voted against widely popular bills to end Congressional insider trading and the payroll tax extension that the GOP subsequently got steam-rolled over.

The most important year of any Senator's time in office is his or her first. The above are not examples of a successful Senator. Time and time again Johnson's come out of Washington looking like he's completely out of his league, at best, or like a bought-and-paid for shill for wealthy interests (at worse). Whichever scenario you prefer it's next to impossible to not paint Johnson as an out-of-touch elitist with no regard for those below his own economic station. To this day he has not answered the question asked by the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Yes, Johnson has solutions for economic recovery, but these involve giving rich people more money through tax breaks and telling working class folks to work harder.

Most importantly, Johnson has been on the losing end of the three biggest GOP legislative disasters of the last year: The Paul Ryan budget, which Johnson claimed didn't go far enough; the debt ceiling debacle, which Johnson behaved petulantly during; and now the payroll tax imbroglio, which Johnson voted against. Each of these incidents brought measurable and immediate declines in GOP congressional approval ratings. Don't think for a second this stink hasn't already rubbed off on Johnson, who enjoyed an approval rating of 44% as late as July.

Even one of Johnson's two most visible legislative successes -- the bipartisan expansion of the APEC travel card program -- is essentially a program that allows frequent business travelers to circumvent long security lines in airports when flying to participating countries. It's a perfectly legitimate program that's just smart policy, as anyone who's traveled overseas lately can attest, but at the same time it is a program that literally lets the rich folks cut in line ahead of the rest of the hoi polloi.

And that's a perfect metaphor for what appears to be Johnson's governing principle.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Johnson's first year is his utter and complete lack of patience and rather pronounced desire to have things done his way. These are not good qualities to have in a legislative body designed to be lumbering and deliberative. Johnson remains a very sarcastic voice with a conspicuous contempt for those who disagree with him, combining those qualities with a questionable competence and deeply unpopular policies is a recipe for a one-term career filled with irrelevance.

The Story of the Real Ebenezer Scrooge

2011-12-24T16:24:00.000-06:00

Really just too wonderful not to pass along [via Brainiac]:

The story goes that Charles Dickens was visiting Edinburgh to give a public reading of his work in 1842, and spent some time looking around the Canongate church graveyard. He saw one grave that made him shudder. The name on the grave was Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie--mean man." According to Peter Clark, a British political economist who seems the starting point for this story, Dickens misread the inscription. It actually said "Meal man," because Scroggie was a corn merchant.

But Dickens was shocked by the inscription, and apparently noted it in his diary. A geneology website reported Dickens's comment this way in 2010: "[T]o be remembered through eternity only for being mean seemed the greatest testament to a life wasted." In a 1996 telling, Clark reported the comment from Dickens diary in this way: "How bleak to have one's shrivelled soul advertised forever. It made me shudder. It made me feel for the flesh corrupting beneath me." Shortly afterwards, Charles Dickens published "A Christmas Carol," with a main character named Ebenezer Scrooge, and the plot revolving around what it would be like to be forever stamped as a "mean man," when there was still time to change your ways.

Apparently Ebenezer Scroggie was about as far from his fictional namesake as one can get. A "History of Leith, Edinburgh" website reported in 2010: "In life, Scroggie was apparently a rambunctious, generous and licentious man who gave wild parties, impregnated the odd serving wench and once wonderfully interrupted the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by grabbing the buttocks of a hapless countess." However, for those seeking to link Ebenezer Scrooge more tightly to the heartlessness of economics, it may be comforting to know that Scroggie was apparently a cousin of Adam Smith. A 2004 article in the Scotsman newspaper reports: "Scroggie was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife; his mother was the niece of Adam Smith, the 18th century political economist and philosopher." There is now some talk in Edinburgh of erecting a monument to Scroggie, although his actual gravesite was apparently removed for redevelopment of the port back in the early 1930s.

Merry Christmas.

Why is the "Christian Civil Liberties Union" (No, Seriously) Shilling for Mining Interests by Engaging in Quasi-Election Fraid?

2011-12-21T16:44:00.001-06:00

Jim and Ginny Maziarka are a lunatic couple of Christian fanatics from West Bend who advocate book-burning. They are the kind of psychotic dipshits who think the Harry Potter books promote witchcraft. I can only imagine how terribly wretched and shallow their lives must be to invent new things to be outraged about to compensate for whatever ongoing series of failures have crippled their intellects.

Here's Ginny's blog. It's hilarious.

Ginny's claim to fame is a little scuffle she started a few years back regarding books she believed to be "inappropriate" at the West Bend Public Library. The whole incident turned the city of West Bend into something of a national laughing stock, instead of just the regional laughing stock it normally is. There's actually no end to the accounts of her antics available on the web and they would all be just as hilarious if somewhat important people didn't take her and her ongoing effort to return the world to the dark ages seriously. Here's an interview she conducted with Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, prominently displayed on the then-candidate's web site.

Anyway, it was during the Library fiasco that Maziarka was joined by an organization called the Christian Civil Liberties Union who helped her pursue her latter day Bonfire of the Vanities. The CCLU has its "headquarters" in Milwaukee ... at 2634 W. Vliet Street. Normally that's neither here nor there, but I couldn't help but notice that it's the same address being used for an ad hoc organization called Mines for Wisconsin in this photo of a flyer found in West Bend currently making the rounds.

The "Bob" listed as a point of contact is most likely Robert Braun, the, um, head of the CCLU.

I seriously doubt this is a very productive way of hatching a less than sophisticated plot to sway an election, but the multiple angles this flyer appears to encapsulate -- evangelical nutcases shilling for big business by attempting to engage in election fraud -- really just sums up the contemporary state of the Republican "grassroots" quite nicely. If activists like Ginny here didn't have AFP or the Eagle Forum, of which she and her organization claims to be affiliated, this would be the best they could do.

The Ryan-Wyden Meicare Plan

2011-12-15T20:38:00.002-06:00

Here it is. Comments below.
WydenRyan

The document above is fairly short of numbers, projections and other important data, so I'll have to reserve final judgment on the plan until an independent analyses start coming out.

So far, there's a broad consensus developing that Wyden's participation with Ryan in this new Medicare plan is a gift to the GOP. That might be true, but I think that it misses an important point: Ryan didn't need Wyden to amend his own plan. He could have done it all by himself and Dems would have been forced to adjust their attacks according to the new scheme.

Avik Roy describes the "competitive bidding" aspect of the plan:

The basic idea behind competitive bidding is that, say, on a county-by-county basis, you let private plans and traditional Medicare offer plans with the same actuarial value compete, to see who can offer the same package of benefits the most efficiently. Each plan in a given county will name a price for which they are willing to offer these services, and seniors are free to pick whichever plan they want. However, the government will only subsidize an amount equal to the bid proposed by the second-cheapest plan. If you want a more expensive plan, you have to pay the difference yourself.

Fair enough, but I'm not convinced competitive bidding alone will be enough to keep costs down (Roy notes that the cost containment measures are basically meaningless and I tend to agree).

Johnathan Cohn discusses the key conservative ingredient of the plan, "premium support:"

The Ryan-Wyden plan is the latest twist on an idea called that wonks call “premium support.” Today, most seniors enroll in the traditional government insurance program. Those who want other options are free to shop around for alternatives through what’s known as the “Medicare Advantage” program, in which private insurers make available regulated insurance policies. Under a premium support system, all seniors would shop around. The government would simply issue every person over 65 a voucher (at least in the figurative sense). In most schemes, seniors would pay extra for joining plans that cost more than the vouchers and receive rebates for joining plans that cost less than the vouchers.

Cohn later goes on to point to a report that argues premium care will lead to a tiered system of care. I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, so long as the lowest tier is of a high quality.

This is where we need more information. What percentage of senior does the plan expect to take advantage of premium support over the traditional Medicare model? What kind of projected savings are we looking at from this group? Can they create a model that doesn't increase overhead costs (not likely, but we'll see)? Joe Klein notices, just as we did last night, that the plan lacks any medical cost control measures, which will makes these questions among the more important.

All in all, I think Kevin Drum has a pretty good take on the scheme:

Bottom line: this isn't necessarily a bad plan. Unfortunately, it's also not clear if it's really a very effective plan either. But I'd certainly put it into the broad bucket of plans that are reasonable starting points for conversation. Given Paul Ryan's immense credibility with the tea party wing of the Republican Party, it's significant that he's put his name to this. It's worth a conversation.

And that's ultimately the most intriguing aspect of the plan: it's very obviously a starting point and not a destination. This is probably as good a place as there is to start having a Medicare reform conversation.

Ron Johnson's Very Bad Week

2011-12-15T17:02:00.001-06:00

Ron Johnson is having a very bad week.

First, he lost his party leadership bid.

Then he made an unfortunate statement regarding workers on minimum wage that probably runs contrary to many employees experience (especially mine and, apparently, even Johnson's own).

In same meeting he declared his opposition to unemployment benefits.

Lastly, Johnson voted against a bill that would restrict insider trading among congressmen then vowed to filibuster.

On the bright side, Johnson did get to kick back with a few colleagues at a lobbyist-infested fundraiser at a swanky DC hotel.

Usually these kinds of setbacks take place over the course of a few weeks if not months. When they happen in the course of just a few days they reinforce a narrative of someone who is working to protect the status quo for both politicians in Washington and money-interests everywhere.

This was a pretty shitty day in general for state Republicans. Other highlights include:

Walker's policies are killing jobs in a variety of ways: one report from a liberal think tank outlines how Walker has cost the state 18,000 jobs this year. Another describes how Walker's anti-wind energy policies have cost 1,000 jobs. Yet another plant closed, this time in Two Rivers, costing the state another 190 jobs.

Wisconsin lost 14,600 jobs in November, the fifth month in a row that job numbers have been down on Walker's watch.

Yet another Walker supporter was arrested for voter intimidation.

The first arrest was made in the interminable John Doe investigation into the Walker administration.

It became clear that Walker's rejection of rail funds is now costing tax-payers more than what the state would have needed to contribute had Walker accepted them.

The sketchy GOP mining bill was meet with large and vociferous opposition during a hearing in Milwaukee.

Walker's education cuts are reeking havoc on the state's school districts and his claims to the contrary are proving too hard to believe for most fact-checkers.

Thanks to revised federal labor figures, it turns out Wisconsin only lost 2,400 jobs in October. Better than initially thought but still moving in the wrong direction.

Dems announced that have collected over 500,000 signatures in their drive to recall Scott Walker.

Jeff Fitzgerald decided to kick off his campaign for U.S. Senate by trying to revamp the GAB, a move that's impossible to see as anything other than petty and changing the rules in the middle of the game.

Paul Ryan significantly revised his Medicare reform plan and crafted a plan that looks more like Obamacare (at least to Ezra Klein) than it does Ayn Rand.

A prominent Madison Dem pollster shows Paul Ryan's popularity slipping in his district and a path to victory for his opponent.

Noted Wisco GOP mouthpiece Christian Schneider when he compared unreported rapes to juiced up major league baseball players during the pre-steroids testing era ... for some reason.

The ACLU filed a suit that may have some legs over the draconian voter ID passed that's already losing in the court of public opinion.

So, yeah, it's been a busy week.

Paul Ryan is Born Again!!!

2011-12-14T20:40:00.000-06:00

We may have been a bit too harsh on Paul Ryan.

Ryan is apparently getting together with Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, to put together a new Medicare proposal and it actually looks ... reasonable! Or at least far more so than Ryan's earlier package. Some details:

Like the Ryan plan adopted in April, it would shift the fundamental structure of Medicare from a "defined benefit" program to a "defined contribution" program, in which the government would subsidize health care premiums for seniors, and those seniors would use the subsidy to purchase health insurance from a menu of government-approved private plans. But a traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan would be among the options seniors can choose from. Private plans would be competing with traditional Medicare to cover seniors, according to the plan.

That basically makes Medicare a "public option" among many others.

More importantly:

Compared to the earlier Ryan plan, the new proposal also takes a different approach in how it sets the premium subsidies for seniors, and the rate at which those subsidies could grow over time, as medical costs rise.

One of the chief criticisms of the Ryan plan passed by the House is that with increases in premium subsidies indexed to overall inflation, and health costs rising much faster than inflation, beneficiaries over time would be forced to pay the difference. In other words, the buying power of the premium subsidy would steadily erode.

That's good ... or at least much, much better. Our preference would be to put in cost controls for medical costs, but being realists we know that's probably never going to happen.I know there will be more than a few Dems who call this kind of Medicare reform health care apostasy, but they should at least take a look at the projected numbers: it could -- and let me stress that again -- could have the effect of diverting funds that would go to wealthier seniors who could pay for their own health care to senior who retired with lesser wealth (or just used to pay down the debt). My suspicion is that private health insurance companies will not be as anxious to insure seniors as most law-makers anticipate, so I guess we'll have to see how that shakes out.

This is, of course, just a quick snap shot of the proposal. We'll have more to say when we look at the details.

But this development obliges us say that this is a good sign from Ryan. It shows a willingness to amend policy according to both economic and political reality. There is likely no way that something as contentious as Medicare reform is going to be passed along a party-line vote.

If this is the sign of a New Paul Ryan, we welcome it with open arms.

Europe: Armageddon's Powder Keg

2011-12-14T11:44:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Krause has a silly little piece up today forecasting the imminent, and literal mind you, "debt wars" or a series of armed conflicts started by sovereign debt crises. If this does happen it will be the first time in human history nations have gone to war over something like one country owing another a great deal of money. Usually nations default and essentially liquidate themselves before armed aggression ever becomes possible.

Here's Krause's ridiculous doom and gloom prophesy:

[I]t's beginning to look like the new source of international tension will be debt. More specifically, sovereign debt owed between countries. Like World Wars I and II, the seeds of this battle have already been sown in Europe. Nations freed from the burden of self-defense by NATO and the US, embarked on unsustainable financial policies funded during the economic growth of the last three decades by borrowing money from their neighbors.

What Krause is forgetting is that recovering huge debts from the Weimar Republic in the form of war reparations is what eventually lead to the rise of the Third Reich. This lesson was so acutely learned by the victors of WWII that the United States did the exact opposite following the war when it instituted the Marshall Plan. Just a reminder, under the Plan the U.S. gave -- let me reiterate that, gave -- Europe a little over 1% of it's GDP every year for four years. In 2010, total U.S. foreign aide was 0.19% of GDP.

Nations know that letting one country fall into economic collapse in bad for their own economies, especially in an interconnected, globalized world. Most governments understand this is the price of globalization. Shortly after NAFTA was codified, the U.S. bailed out Mexico in a move that was tremendously unpopular north of the border, but eventually made the U.S. a tidy $500 million profit once the loans were repaid. Countries just don't go to war over debt. I can't find one historical example of a conflict where debt was a direct casus belli (granted, there have been a lot of wars and I'm likely to have missed a few).

I also want to point out that the current crises in Europe is taking place among countries that Krause himself says are "freed from the burden of self-defense by NATO and the US." Most of Europe does not maintain an aggressive war machine. Germany's constitution is fairly constrictive as to where the Bundeswher is allowed to fight and the armed forces has had it's own readiness issues in the recent past. The story isn't much different in other European countries who have largely let defense spending slide since the end of the Cold War. Now Krause thinks these countries are going to wake from their years of relative peace and start fighting each other? The idea is laughable.

The seeds of that discontent are about to get watered and fertilized by the measures agreed to in the Eurozone summit last week--as those profligate nations agreed to the debtor nations' demands to get their financial houses in order--even if that means budgetary oversight from outside agencies. If there is one thing we have learned over the centuries, people don't like having other nations telling them what to do--especially when those demands mean they might have to work harder and longer. The public unrest aimed at the debtor governments will soon turn against the lenders--and the drums of war will begin to beat.

There is a degree of truth to this, a very small one, but one that ignores the fact that the debtor relationships between countries were codified by treaties almost a decade ago. There are many legal obstacles preventing war. Besides, the typical Greek is not going to be so angry at Germany because they no longer enjoy some pretty sweet retirement benefits, he's going to get angry at his own government first.

Just like in the 1900's the dominoes are lined up to take the regional conflict global.

One assumes that Krause is referring to the World Wars here but the most recent example of armed conflict in Europe, the Balkin Wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s seem to refute that premise. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment that worried those wars would ignite an entire continent wide conflict, but that never happened. Indeed, depending on how you look at beginning of hostilities of WWII, one could argue that there was no "domino effect"that plunged the continent into war, but rather an aggressive push made by a single actor.

Since WWII, regional conflicts have stayed regional, even when they were essentially proxy fights conducts by Superpowers. The only organizations that have taken their wars globally have been terrorist groups, whose asymmetrical allow them to move freely and with flexibility, especially through open societies, but whose ability to wage war if frequently hindered by the success of a few notable actions. (This is a huge problem in the "business model" of terrorism. In conventional war, success on the battlefield gives the victor more ability to conduct further operations because of new strategic positioning and diminished capacities of the opponent. In the case of terrorism, it's just the opposite.)

The oil producing nations of the Middle East will have to choose sides--likely joining the countries that actually have money to pay for that precious crude. And then there is China--who has become the 21st Century superpower by buying up everyone's debt. Who do they align with in the Debt Wars? And will it be on the same side as the United States? I tend to doubt they are going to keep loaning us money to do battle against them.

The one positive thing is that barren, radioactive wastelands tend not to repay their debts--so we probably won't have to worry about WW3 being a nuclear conflict. Now we can just concern ourselves with learning the Mandarin language of our future masters.

Krause is promoting a misconception about Chinese ownership of US debt that does little good for the conversation. Here's a quick look at just whom holds U.S. debt:

China owns about 10%. That's nothing to scoff at, to be sure, but it's hardly reason to begin stockpiling Rosetta Stone CDs, as Krause suggests. Japan owes almost as much debt as China does, but we never hear much about them. That's largely because China's big, scary and ascendant and Japan's, well, not.

These days, wars create debt, debt that is almost never repaid in an economically beneficial way to the aggressor. That has a lot to do with the much smaller scale on which war is presently conducted when compared to WWII. Lots of debt is less preferable to no debt at all, but Krause's apocalyptic fever dream has little grounding in any understanding of the global economy or the reasons why international conflicts begin.

What does Ron Johnson's Loss for the Senate Republican Caucus Vice Chairmanship Mean?

2011-12-13T20:04:00.000-06:00

Well, isn't this an absurd thing to speculate about?

Yes, of course it is, but that's not going to stop us from doing so.

Johnson lost his race to become the Senate GOP's fifth ranking member today. No, seriously, we're actually talking about this. So what does it all mean? Here are a few interpretations.

1.) The Tea Party has been marginalized. Johnson received the backing of several prominent conservatives yesterday, including Erik Erikson of Redstate.com, who hilariously called the race the "conservative fight of the year," and a positive write-up at National Review. Even FreedomWorks got into the act on behalf of Johnson. None of that was apparently enough to sway enough GOP Senators.

2.) The vote was close. 25-22 is pretty close, but given the size of the electorate a close vote was likely. The vote does suggest a narrowly divided GOP, but one in which the Tea Party is still a minority.

3.) Alternatively, the Tea Party could be growing in power. The press are playing this thing off as a rebuke to the Tea Party, but there's just as likely a chance that it's actually a demonstration of the Tea Party's growing influence. If the GOP takes over the Senate next year, as many folks project, one would imagine that they will do so with Tea Party folk. If this happens a leadership vote this time next year will likely have a very different result with much higher stakes.

4.) Johnson has yet to win over many of his colleagues. Every last one of the Senators who publicly supported Johnson's bid had a very clear reason for doing so: all of them would have endorsed the "Tea Party candidate" no matter who it was.

5.) Johnson's loss may prevent him from pursuing future party leadership positions or leadership opportunities in the Tea Party. Losing never looks good on a resume.

6.) Johnson's statement following the loss was not very gracious. In fact, it rather obviously oozed with bitterness and resentment. If he hasn't yet mastered how to cajole and work his colleagues, this is not a good sign that he will be able to do so in the future.

7.) FreedomWorks may not have been supported Johnson so much as it was campaigning against Blunt. Why? Blunt was an ally of Tom DeLay during the latter's time a majority leader in the House. FreedomWorks is run by Dick Armey, one of DeLay's principle rivals.

8.) Paul Ryan really doesn't have much influence in the Senate. Ryan made an unprecedented endorsement that didn't seem to make any difference. There have been whispers about Johnson being little more than a mouthpiece for Ryan in the Senate. The endorsement probably did little to quell those rumors.

9.) It was foolish for Johnson to go up against Blunt. Roy Blunt is now in his third decade on Capitol Hill. His family is political royalty in an important swing state, he's connecting to K Street up the wazzou, and actually has legislative leadership experience. These were all supposed to be reasons against Blunt's candidacy, but in the end they seemed to have served him pretty well. Some folks are calling Blunt's win "inevitable."

11.) The loss weakens Johnson's already weak position. Unless Blunt is an incredibly magnanimous human being, he'll likely punish Johnson in small ways for challenging him (not inviting Johnson to leadership meetings, etc.).

12.) If Johnson does find himself in the doghouse, he'll have a hard time getting out. Johnson is not known as a fundraising dynamo nor has he demonstrated any policy expertise that would make him a go-to guy on any particular issue. Finding friends will be pretty tough when you can't offer them anything.

13.) Johnson's image as a "citizen-legislator" is over. Johnson has always portrayed himself as an outsider, but he made a play to be an insider. The price of making that play was Johnson's status as an outsider. Now he's lost both his outsider status and his position in the Senate GOP leadership.

14.) Johnson may have positioned himself to win a leadership position after the 2012 elections. Of the five leadership positions in the GOP Senate caucus, one is being vacated by Sen. John Kyl when he retires following this term. That means the three members behind him could all move up a position, freeing up the vice chairmanship for yet another election. Having done it before, and gotten a little more seniority under his belt, Johnson might be in a better position to win the leadership pot next year.

15.) Don't bet on #12. Many of the Senate candidate that did endorse Johnson are considered "long-shots."

16.) That being said, Johnson just missed a golden opportunity to win the #5 leadership position today and turn it into the #4 leadership position a year from now doing nothing but keeping out of trouble.

17.) The loss calls into question Johnson's ability to get things done in Washington. To date Johnson has sponsored a grand total of three bills and one resolution since taking office. Only his resolution "supporting the goals and ideals of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and raising awareness and enhancing the state of cybersecurity in the United States" has gotten anywhere. There have been at least 1944 bills introduced in the Senate alone this year: that's an average of 19.44 per Senator. Johnson's work product is well behind the rest of his colleagues.

18.) The run calls into question Johnson's priorities. Johnson announced his bid on September 21st of this year. The three bills he introduced were all submitted after his announcement. One wonders if is effectiveness in passing his legislative agenda was hampered by his leadership ambitions.

Scott Walker Confuses Magazine Rankings with New Jobs Figures

2011-12-12T17:30:00.000-06:00

This is the text of an actual press release from the Walker administration:

Gov. Walker: A year of progress for Wis.' job climate
12/12/2011

Madison—Today Governor Walker released a statement on Wisconsin’s year of progress in improving its economic environment.

“We’ve worked hard this year to create a business environment that encourages job creation,” said Governor Walker. “Business rankings are one way to show the progress we’ve made in moving Wisconsin in the right direction. They also remind us that we must keep working to encourage job creation in our state. Our most important goal remains helping Wisconsin families prosper; these rankings show we are laying the right foundation.”

Earlier this month, the new Forbes 2011 Best States for Business ranking was released. Wisconsin improved to 40th, moving up from 43rd in 2010 and 48th in 2009. Illinois fell behind Wisconsin for the first time in 3 years, falling to 41st. Illinois was 37th in 2010 and 24th in 2009.

Earlier this year, CNBC ranked Wisconsin 25th---up from 29th in 2010.

The Chief Executive Magazine ranking placed Wisconsin at 24th, up from 41st in 2010. Wisconsin’s improvement was the biggest jump in the nation and in the history of the magazine.

All three business rankings improved in 2011---after falling under the previous administration.

Wisconsin also recently ranked 24th in the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council’s Small Business Survival Rankings. Wisconsin moved up from 31st in the previous year.

Magazine rankings -- on any subject -- are notoriously subjective. Just using the examples that Walker cites above, Wisconsin is either in the top half or bottom ten of "states for business," whatever the hell that means. The most striking thing about this press release is the complete and utter lack of jobs numbers.

It seems particularly nonsensical to release this kind of statement a week after nearly 1000 jobs vanished from the Wausau area.

The fact is that Wisconsin's job creation figures in the last three months are abysmal:

Jake at the Economic TA Funhouse has more.

Wisconsin Dem Bloggers Need to Knock this Bullshit Off Immediately

2011-12-08T23:54:00.001-06:00

This type of idiocy needs to end now:

Expect the famous prank call to Scott Walker from "David Koch" to be back in the spotlight, as State Sen. Tim Cullen says he's launching a campaign for governor.

Walker, in the end, says Cullen's "not one of us," and is "just a pragmatist," but Cullen, the state senator who says he's going to run against Walker in a recall, might get a few questions from Democrats about this.

Hmmmm?

It was Cullen and State Sen. Bob Jauch who conducted their own negotiations with Walker's office when the 14 Democrats were in Illinois to prevent passage of a union-busting bill.

From the outside, Cullen certainly looked like the one trying to cut a backdoor deal.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- except the backdoor part, and the fact that the Democratic base now wants Walker's scalp, smells blood, and is not likely to unite behind a pragmatic compromiser who Walker says good things about.

Honestly, I felt embarrassed for xoff when I read this. Then I cringed when I read that this nonsense left Steve Carlson "speechless."

For starters, using Walker's prank call against a Democratic candidate makes no logical sense whatsoever. Many bloggers on the left, xoff among them, have spent years, and this last one in particular, calling Scott Walker a liar. Why any of his opponents should start parsing his words for the appearance of someone trying to make a "backdoor deal" now makes no sense and reeks of opportunism. If you don't like Cullen, come out and say it. Don't pussy-foot around it. These types of insinuations and leading conjectures are what conspiracy theorists do.

Next, the whole argument against Cullen is that Walker may kinda sorta like him, which is at best a stretch given the transcript's text. But let's posit for a moment that it's true. Is having a functional working relationship with a member of the opposite party a bad thing? It sure as hell shouldn't be and in xoff's case it isn't ... at least when its a Republican siding the Dems. Consistency and intellectual honesty are good things and without them we may as well oppose Cullen because he shares a surname with a character in those fucking Twilight books.

Lastly, this is pretty bush league stuff, and I mean lower than ticky tack. One of the most potent arguments the Democrats have in recalling Walker is that they are the adults in the room, but when Dems start attacking each other with horseshit like this that argument evaporates like a proverbial fart in the wind. And that's really what this Walker prank call business is: a phantasm created out of thin air that's really nothing. Wisconsin will not use a recall to exchange one extremist for another and that's a very important point that I see quickly escaping many of the more voluminous voices on the Left. If this recall is strictly about claiming scalps and inflicting revenge it will be a waste.

Right now the Dem base is whipped up into a berserker frenzy. That might be a great way to get people to the polls, but it's a shitty way to govern. Just ask Scott Walker. When Dems start playing these trite opposition research gotcha! games they're signaling to voters that they're not interested in doing the hard work it takes to govern.

So, if I haven't made myself perfectly clear, then let me do so: anyone candidate who uses Walker Prank Call tape as any kind of evidence against any candidate isn't worthy of anyone's vote and anyone who suggests as much shouldn't be taken seriously. I know emotions are high right now (and this post is a perfect example of just how high they really are), but Dems need to hold themselves to a higher standard, especially when it comes to internal affairs.

It's OK to oppose Tim Cullen, but do it on legitimate grounds. Use Cullen's words and actions, not Scott Walker's. Don't create controversy where there isn't any. Don't strain to create a quasi-Walker endorsement of Tim Cullen -- which is exactly what xoff is trying to do in his post -- out of thin air. If these are the kind of bush league antics we can expect during the rest of the recall then the Dems will have already lost before the contest even begins.

The Futile Attempt to De-legitimize the Wisconsin Recall Process

2011-12-08T19:30:00.000-06:00

Since the Recall Walker effort announce that they collected 300,000 signatures in the first 12 days of the collection period Scott (on Nov. 28th), Walker's allies have gone on the offense to try and discredit the signature drive. There's a graph in yesterday's Christian Schneider piece in NRO that summarizes the principle point:

[I]f someone signs a petition 30 times, 29 will be invalid — but only if Scott Walker’s campaign can manually enter all 540,000 signatures into a database and weed out the duplicates in the 10 days in which they have to challenge. Fabricated names and addresses will all be considered legal unless Walker’s volunteers can pick through hundreds of thousands of signatures and weed them out in the allotted time period. (In Ohio recently, 351,000 — or over 25% — of union-submitted signatures were found to be invalid.)

Fair enough, but that's Ohio and there's little reason to use another state as a reference point when when we have recent data right here in Wisconsin (unless, of course, you're more interested in taking a pot-shot at unions, which is clearly Schneider's intention here).

Let's look at the numbers from last spring's senate recalls:

Of the six districts that eventually held elections a total of 97,997 signatures were required to initiate those recalls. By the end of the collection period approximately 148,700 signatures had been collected (according to media reports, the GAB never released the number of signatures submitted). That's 51.7% more than were required. The GAB validated 136,823 of those signatures (or 39.6% more than were required), which gave the recall effort a 92% validation rate.

There are other ways in which Walker allies are trying to de-legitimatize the process. Scott Walker himself has repeatedly portrayed the collection effort has being "paid" for by someone of something, despite a lack of evidence. Then there's the the Verify the Recall effort being organized by a pair of Tea Party groups, which seems like it plans to conduct its own verification project. The folks at the McIver PR firm are trying to de-legitimize the GAB itself.

The fact of the matter is,according to the GAB itself, is that the "step-by-step processes are still be[ing] finalized." Given the delay and logistics problems that arose last spring during the senate recall validation process, one would assume those processes aren't going to be resolved until the signatures are delivered. [MORE: Wouldn't you know it, the GAB just came out with a pretty detailed memo on how the recall signatures will be verified this evening.]

If the only thing the GOP has going for it at the moment is a desperate attempt to de-legitimize a process that continues to move forward, then they are in effect whistle past the graveyard. I certainly had my doubts, but as the recalls proceed it becomes more and more evident that the Dems developed a very intricate long term plan and have generally kept to it. I don't get that impression from the state GOP. IN fact if the Dems dropped a truckload of signatures off at the GAB this afternoon, I'm pretty sure Walker et al. would be caught flat-footed.

Now that Albert Pujols is no Longer in the National League, why not go for Broke and Pay Prince Fielder?

2011-12-08T16:34:00.001-06:00

There are so many reasons for the Brewers just to kick the dirt and watch Fielder sign a fat contract elsewhere, believing there is nothing they can do about it, but now that Albert Pujols has left St. Louis it's time to consider the reasons to go for it and sign Prince to a huge contract that might even seriously jeopardize the Brewer's bottom line.

The NL Central is a weak division and likely to stay that way for a while. St Louis was the only remotely competitive team last year and with both Pujols and LaRussa gone, they'll likely spend the next few seasons rebuilding. The Brewers could be playoff contenders for the better part of the next decade if they manage to keep their core line-up intact.

Even though they're a small market team, the Brewers have much more money to play around with when they winning and filling seats at Miller Park. I don't know what kind of return Fielder was on the club's investment last season, but a bold and gutsy gamble would drive fans wild and they'd likely see more returns.

Anyone who watched Fielder play last year knows just how hungry this guy is. The odds of this guy shirking after signing a big contract are pretty slim.

I case there's any doubt I am indeed recommending that the Brewers float Fielder a 7-8 year contract somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million, which would be only about $25 million less than the entire team was bought for in 20034 and that if the deal didn't pan out it would financially ruin the team, but who cares? Financial ruin isn't the end of the world. The Texas Rangers went bankrupt a few years back and they've only been the World Series each year since.

Don't get me wrong, I know exactly how enormous this gamble would be, but sometimes you have to just say "Screw it! Let's go for it!" If every there was one of those time in the history of the Brewers, it's now.

MORE: I'm watching SportsCenter's special coverage of the Winter MLB meetings and John Kruk and Terry Francona were suggesting the same thing. Interestingly enough, neither of them mention the Yankees or the Red Sox as a possible destination.

A quick addendum: The Cards thought they were safe floating Pujols a $210 offer, thinking that would clear the projected $200 million other teams were going to pony up. The Angles blew those figures out of the water. There's a good chance that the Brewers will now have to contend with some other team upping the ante by an equally ridiculous degree. Do we still think the Brewers should try to top it? Damn straight we do. Even if that means "over-paying" him? Yup. Even if it means putting the team in debt that no amount of winning could possibly pull them out of? A thousand times yes.

Just looking at these figures from after the losing 2010 season seems to suggest that the Brewers can come up with an additional $10-15 million for Prince.

The Chief's 2011 People of the Year: The Wisconsin Republican Rogue's Gallery

2011-12-08T03:00:00.000-06:00

During one of his more memorable stand-up acts, Bill Cosby told his audience the word his father told him when the comedian was just seven years old: "You know, I brought you in this world, and I can take you out."

Those words should be etched in stone above the entrance to the Wisconsin Republican Party headquarters.

As everyone knows, the Grand Ole Party was given life right here in a tiny, white school house in bucolic Ripon, Wisconsin. It is now currently run by individuals who seem hell-bent on destroying that party. Many of these Wisconsin Republicans hold powerful positions within the national party and the ones who don't seem to personify some of the worst traits of the 21st Century GOP.

These folks are The Chief's 2011 People of the Year.

* * *

Scott Walker

With the state of Wisconsin as polarized as it is, it seemed something of a miracle that Walker came into office with most of the levers of government firmly controlled by Republican hand. Both house of the legislature had comfortable GOP majorities, the Supreme Court tilts conservative, the Attorney General is a Republican, etc. Despite few obstacles standing in the way of his agenda, Walker arrogantly pulled a bait and switch that cost him a compliant state Senate and may soon cost him job in a few months. His administration has acted like little more than a PR machine that has no interest in actual governing.

For those of us that have followed Walker's career, this comes as no surprise. Walker has never been about getting results, but has always been about the making moves necessary to move to the next job. His supposed emphasis on jobs is floundering behind negative job grow during his administration; a Department of Workforce Development now on its third Secretary in ten months; not one, but two, emergency legislative sessions designed to focus on job creation that instead revolved around pushing through the conservative social agenda, an ultimately embarrassing spat with the state of Illinois.

And all of this while being under investigation for abusing his previous office and possibly breaking campaign finance laws during his campaign for the governor's mansion.

But Walker's really contributions to posterity will live on in two ways, one nationally, the other here in Wisconsin. Locally, Scott Walker is the architect of the single most polarized and vitriolic political period in living memory. In an environment this toxic most leaders would have at least made small public efforts to mend fences, if for no other reason than to appear to be the bigger man. Not Scott Walker, who has continued to poison the well with nearly act. It's clearly an intentional strategy designed to provoke the opposition into doing something stupid (thus winning his side sympathy from independents) and to keep his base in a constant state of alert.

Nationally, Walker's war against public unions may cost the GOP the White House. When Walker's attempt to gut public unions was attempted in Ohio, a key swing state, the plan was rebuked in a referendum and galvanized labor just in time for campaign season. If Ohio stays blue, the commentariat will look back and point fingers at Walker, justifiably or not. One can even make the case that Walker is the father of the "Occupy" movement.

Scott Walker has been running for Governor of Wisconsin all of his life. The most hard core conservatives in the state began rallying around him as long a eight years before he won the office. Just about every Republican in the state, save only a handful, made a loud public display of support for Walker earlier this year and it's all but certain that those displays are going to come back to haunt them in the future. If Walker is recalled, it won't just be a rebuke against his agenda, but he will have poisoned the Republican well for the next decade.

Justice David Proesser

Normally Supreme Court races are slam dunks for incumbents, but Prosser decided to shake things up a bit by creating a perfect storm that almost changed the entire slant of the court. While the state was still in an uproar over Scott Walker's efforts to neuter public unions, Prosser ran an incompetent re-election campaign in which it was revealed he called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson "bitch" then threatened to destroy her late in 2009. A hot head dating back to his days as the speaker of the state assembly, Prosser actually sad the following when asked about the incident by the MJS:

"In the context of this, I said, 'You are a total bitch,' " Prosser said.

No, no, no: you got it all wrong! I didn't call her a "bitch," I called her a "total bitch"!

This was on top of having openly admitting to participating in the Caucus Scandal, from which he received immunity. It's no wonder he narrowly ekked out a victory after a contentious recount (see below).

But was most astonishing was Prosser's behavior when he resumed his office following the election when he was accused of chocking Justice Ann Bradley. The accusation led a local Madison reporter to file this single most stunning interview I've ever seen on local Wisconsin TV:

It's also the most awkward elevator ride in the history of the state.

Today the Wisconsin Supreme Court is so dysfunctional that it's legitimacy is in serious question and Prosser is largely the reason.

Paul Ryan

Forget being named "policy-maker of the year" or one of "100 global thinkers" -- Ryan is proof that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Paul Ryan's cult in the GOP is largely the result of being the only Republican who is not a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-intellectual, but Ryan is little more than a supply side ideological apologist: he starts with the solution (tax cuts) and works backwards from their until the problem (the budget deficit) has been solved, even if that means creating fantastical hypothetical world in which only his solution can exist (grossly exaggerated revenue streams). This is not how effective policy is made.

Ryan's budget and proposal to scrap Medicare in exchange for weak voucher program are just the kind of ideas that win praise from Beltway commentators for being "bold" and "outside the box" thinking, but they're also the kinds of policies that cause voter revolts once the details of are fully explained. Ryan may think his plan balances the budget -- 75 years from now! -- but even if the plan is graded solely on it's ability to level the nation's balance sheets it's a disaster that created a larger deficit of potentially $62 trillion by 2080, and all while gutting the social safety net.

We've discussed Ryan's intellectual dishonesty ad nauseum at this blog. We've noted how his rhetoric runs completely contrary to his voting record, so instead of rehashing old arguments, let's just point out the most recent example.

Before Congress left for Thanksgiving the House voted on a Blanaced Budget Amdentment to the Constitution, something Paul Ryan has been adamant in supporting over the years. The Amendment had little chance of passing , but Ryan was still one of only four Republicans who voted against it. Why? I'll let him explain:

“I’m concerned that this version will lead to a much bigger governmentfueled by more taxes." said Paul Ryan in a statement to the WashingtonExaminer, "Spending is the problem, yet this version of the BalancedBudget Amendment makes it more likely taxes will be raised, governmentwill grow, and economic freedom will be diminished. Without a limit ongovernment spending, I cannot support this Amendment.”

That's fine and we can even sympathize with the sentiment, but given Ryan's stature as the most "serious" member of the Republican caucus in the House and that his pet issue is the budget, how in God's name did a Balanced Budget Amendment get to a full floor vote without him approving the language of the bill? It is just another example of how Republicans are far more content to talk about the issues than they are about actually doing anything about them.

Ryan is the only Republican proposing new policies these days. The only one. The rest of actual Republican policy is constructed in "think tanks" that are rapidly devolving into PR machines for donors. Ryan's policies are really no different: it's a pseudo-intellectual sheen on a extremist ideology.

Mark Block

Block was given something that most people in politics only dream of: national attention. It's hard enough being a well-qualified candidate with stellar credentials running for President (just as John Huntsman), but Block helmed a campaign built around his candidate's promise to surround himself with the best and the brightest and then promptly became Exhibit A among the evidence that Herman Cain couldn't identify talent if it fell on him from the sky.

Here's Jonathan Martin's assessment of the campaign:

Herman Cain is in the midst of “reassessing” whether to continue his 2012 bid,but its legacy is already settled: His campaign will go down as one ofthe most hapless and bumbling operations in modern presidentialpolitics, setting a new standard for how to turn damaging presscoverage into something far worse.

The botched responses toallegations of marital infidelity, sexual impropriety and his owngaffes — not to mention the puzzling strategic decisions — have, in theeyes of many veteran strategists, reached record levels of ineptitude.

Perhaps the nadir of Block's time in the national spotlight was when he outright lied about a reporter being a relative of a woman accusing Cain of harassment.

But don't think this is going to turn the Herman Cain Experience into an object lesson in how not to run a Presidential campaign. Cain did manage to break away from the pack based on what Republican flavor-of-the-month voters largely based on on perceived charm, outsider status and a marketing gimmick wrapped in the trappings of actual policy (the "9-9-9 Plan"). Don't be surprised if future GOP fields are cluttered with charlatans looking to sell books or get their own late light talk show on FOX following that same formula. Right behind them will be hack campaign managers more interested in selling themselves than their candidates that owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Block for blazing that trail.

Reince Priebus

Largely quiet for most of this year, Priebus (the white one above) kicked off 2011 with one of the more shameless acts of backstabbing when he ran against then-RNC chairman Michael Steele, the very man whose campaign he managed two years earlier ... and who was a close adviser for much of Steele's term. Granted, Steele's tenure was something of a disaster, but instead of that reflecting of Priebus' judgment among his peers at the RNC, it won him his boss' job. Go figure.

Priebus has spent much of the year trying to rebuild the RNC coffers, with varying degrees of success, which is not saying much given the fundraising revolt caused by Steele. This year, Priebus may have to preside over a party with a Presidential nominee no one likes or, in the worst case, a brokered convention. For as unlikely as the latter possibility is, the former could further lead to the ongoing radicalization of the party as donors look to outside organizations to speak for them.

Ron Johnson

In Johnson's first year in office he's done little to disprove he's anything more than an empty suit. The only piece of legislation he has authored is an embarrassing work of bush league policy masquerading as policy. He's barely made any public appearances (the only two -- that's right, two -- that we know of were at tea parties sponsored by AFP) and the only time he bothered to sit down with a newspaper's editorial board was shortly after hiring a member of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's editorial board to his staff (if memory serves us correctly).

When he has stuck his neck out, usually in the form of the periodic op-ed piece, Johnson has shilled for the deregulating the banking system. Johnson has completely bought into what Barry Ritholz calls "the Big Lie," the absurd premise that the financial crisis was caused by a bill designed to curb relining in urban areas in the 1990s, largely because his blind faith in the so-called Objectivism of Ayn Rand tells him that it's always government's fault. In other words, Johnson has made clear that he has no interest in facts and that he will legislate on ideology alone.

Not that he's alone. To his credit, Johnson seems to understand that he's not a policy wonk and has kept his authorship of bill to a minimum. The flip side of that coin is that Johnson still needed to find a way to remain relevant in the Senate and he discovered that way in being a political player and running for the vice chairmanship of the Senate Republican Caucus, the third most powerful position in the party in that chamber.

So much for being a "citizen legislator." Johnson's opinion pieces and moves in Washington have revealed that he's more interested in power than in solutions.

Kathy Nicholaus

The poster woman for Republican bureaucratic incompetence that borderlines on corruption, Nichalaus is Wisocnsin's Michael "Brownie" Brown. After monumentally fucking up a contentious Supreme Court race in April, Nicholaus did little to resotre confidence in her ability to carry out her duty during the Alberta Darling recall election later in 2011 when, once again, Waukesha County's ballots were the last to be certified. Although she couldn't have been guilty of ballot tampering, it should as hell looked sketchy and for a party that's spent the last decade waging a jihad against the imaginary scourge of voter fraud, one would imagine they would be more sensitive to the mere appearance of wrong-doing. Not so much, it turns out. The fact that she was almost incapable of initially explaining her inability to account for all the ballots on election night was dumbfounding.

Nicholaus also demonstrates that competence pales in importance to ideological purity. Despite being admonished for using shoddy methods in the past, Nicholaus' connections and track record as a team player proved to be enough for Republican stalwarts to back her, even though she would have been canned for similar incompetence in the private sector, a well worn argument among the GOP.

Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald started the year as the man with the job of shepherding Scott Walker's agenda through the legislature. He made arguably the single biggest tactical error in state legislative history when he tried to ram Walker's union-busting while being one vote short of the qourum needed to bring the bill to a vote. Fitzgerald, by then clearly acting on the instructions of the Governor, compounded his mistake with a series of heavy-handed tactics that made a bad situation worse.

When the union-busting business had been settled, Walker again looked to Fitzgerald to pass jobs creation legislation during two special sessions supposedly devoted to that activity, neither of which produced anything close to legislation that could be called significant jobs-producing laws.

Since two senate seats flipped following the recalls in August, Fitzgerald has appeared as quiet as his seems clueless about what to do with the new political reality in his chamber. That should come as little surprise given how servile he appeared during the craziness of last spring.

Also, appointing Fitzgerald's father to be the head of the state patrol did little to help the GOP's advancement of a meritocractic world.

Jim Sensenbrenner

This is probably something of a lifetime achievement award since Old Sensenbrenner is on the downhill run of his career, but it's worth pointing out his two most notable contributions to public life in America during his over thirty years in Congress.

The first was his role in Bill Clinton's impeachment, for which he was a "manager" largely because of his position on the House Judiciary committee.

But it's Sensenbrenner's legacy as one of the chief architects of the GOP draconian immigration tendencies that will have the most lasting effect on the party. Sensenbrenner's anti-immigrant crusade may have won him applause from the right wing base -- it did win him the Human Events magazine Man of the Year award in 2006 -- but it negated all the work the outreach work the GOP had previously done to the Latino community and brought out the worst nativist tendencies in the party which, five years on, shows no sign of relenting. Given the demographic shift expected to take place in the next generation, this could have a devastating effect on the GOP in the long run.

As proof of that, Sensenbrenner's bill inspired the single largest series of mass demonstrations in this country in decades. 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles alone. Their numbers dwarfed anything put together by either the Tea Party or the Occupy folks and the protests went on for weeks.

Think of it this way: In 2008 John McCain won Texas with 4.5 million votes to Barack Obama's 3.5 million. That may seem like a huge gap, but it gets a lot smaller when you consider that there are over 2 million Latinos who are eligible to vote in Texas, but just aren't registered. Latinos already make up 33% of the voters in the state where they already compose a larger voting bloc than in California. Between 2000-2009, Latinos represented 63% of the population growth in Texas. By the end of this decade, the will be as many Latinos as Anglos in Texas:

That means that Texas, the quintessential Red State during the last decade will probably be a Blue State by 2030, if not sooner. That development will severely impair the GOP's electoral math.

Sean Duffy

The first reality TV star to be elected is damn near close to the epitome of style over substance. Watch Duffy during the first few seconds of any time he speaks on the floor or does an interview on television: a strange smile emerges emerges from his mouth that might look strikingly familiar to anyone who has lived with loved ones suffering from substance abuse issues. It's almost as if Duffy gets his fix by getting in front of a camera.

To be fair, there's little that can be expected from a freshman member of the House, but consistency is not too much to ask for. In October Duffy sponsored a "jobs fair" of the kind that he had previously voted to defund earlier in the year. No one's ever accused Duffy of being a mental sequoia and now we know why: he far more comfortable being seen than heard.

* * *

We haven't even gotten to the perennial asshats like Glenn Grothman andFrank Lasee or the flock of freshman tea partiers now roaming the hallsof the Capitol in Madison.

If any Republican readers have made it this far, I'm sure they're saying to themselves Yeah, but elections have consequences! This is precisely the problem. This is a leadership cadre that is hellbent on petrifying the GOP to the point of inflexibility. They can get away with it here in Wisconsin, where the polarized political environment and the demographics are not likely to change for the foreseeable future, but this isn't the case elsewhere.

During his time as Governor, Tommy Thompson changed welfare in the state, created Badgercare and promoted mass transit and Amtrak. In the 1980s Lee Dreyfus signed the first bill banning housing discrimination against gays. In the 1970s William Steiger was instrumental in the creation of OSHA.

It's disappointing to look back and see how the last generation of Republicans had almost no influence on the current one, which seems to have been glued to talk radio and FOX in lieu of any sort of real apprenticeship with party elders. This can't bode well for the next generation of Republicans. If this crew is their leadership model the situation in Wisconsin, and likely nationally, will only get worse.

If there were a Mt. Rushmore for Campaign Managers, Mark Block could now Apply to be the Janitor there

2011-12-03T16:47:00.001-06:00

Cain out:

“That Cain’s candidacy was taken seriously for longer than a nano-second in a time of genuine crisis for the country raises fundamental questions about the health of the political process and the Republican party,” Schmidt said.

MORE: Sweet Jesus, this is insane:

After the smoking ad briefly made Block well known in the political world, he asked his staff to inquire about securing him a live spot on NBC'S comedy show "Saturday Night Live" where he could self-parody the ad, the former campaign official said.

There are no words ... except that it only gets worse:

Once Cain surged to the top of the polls in the early fall, his campaign began to burn through the $9.4 million third-quarter fund-raising haul that legitimized Cain as a contender for the nomination.

Cain's camp rented a G4 private plane to accommodate the candidate's entourage that included Block, spokesman J.D. Gordon, a videographer and two historians Cain was paying to document his campaign for a book, according to the former official.

G4s run about $7500 per flying hour.

Badger State Polarization

2011-12-02T18:01:00.001-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned race as being one of the ongoing factors effecting the concept of "good government." Here's a more concise explanation of that phenomenon:

[W]hy all this excitement in Wisconsin? I suspect what we're seeing is a manifestation of the remarkable mix of political traditions that has long defined that state, with on the one hand, its deep progressive, even socialist, roots going back to the transplanted Yankees and northern European immigrants who settled it; and on the other hand, its nearly as well-established strain of deep conservatism that has at moments strayed into nativism and demagoguery, most notably in the person of Joe McCarthy. Jason DeParle's superb history of welfare reform, "American Dream," set in Milwaukee, notes another feature of the state that surely helps explain its polarized politics: the Great Migration got to Wisconsin later than anywhere else. While Southern blacks were pouring into othern northern cities at midcentury, Milwaukee was still overwhelmingly white in the 1950s; it was only later, in the 1970s and 1980s, that a second wave of migration carried African-Americans to Milwaukee, mostly from Chicago. This means that metro Milwaukee is further behind in the cycle one has seen in other cities, where, after an initial white flight, the suburbs are now themselves growing increasingly diverse and Democratic. Milwaukee hasn't moved as far from its initial white flight phase, and its suburbs -- not all, but most -- remain a hotbed of Republican votes (and, not incidentally, home to some virulently conservative talk show radio shows.)

The Haplessness of the Indianapolis Colts

2011-12-02T09:58:00.001-06:00

Yikes:

On top of all of their other woes, the Colts have the worst special teams in the N.F.L. Their punt returners average just 2.2 yards per return; factor in 14 fair catches, and that average drops to 1.3 yards. The primary return man, Blair White, is 2.06 yards tall, so he would be better off catching punts and falling straight forward than doing whatever he currently does.

Does United Wisconsin Already have Half the Signatures Required to Recall Scott Walker?

2011-11-27T16:19:00.001-06:00

So says Nelson Goodson (via DW):

After the Black Friday statewide signature petition drive, recallorganizers projected that most likely they have surpassed the halfwaymark of the 270,000 signatures needed or will reach the halfway targettotal within days to force an election recall against Governor Walker.

Within the first week of the Walker recall, organizers and volunteerscollected at least 105,000 to 107,000 petition signatures within fourdays of the initial start date (Nov. 15).

Incidentally, the second week of the signature collection period this spring was the most bountiful week of the whole 60 days. Back in March, the Dems were able to collect 45% of their target in 12 days. However, they needed 11 more days to break the 50% threshold. Once they were over the hump, the signatures rolled in at a much slower trickle.

That's probably not going to happen this time around. Last spring, Dems were collecting in reliably GOP districts. This time they can mine Democratic strongholds too. This brings up an interesting dilemma for the Dems: if they have reached the halfway point, then at the current pace they will collect the required signatures on December 9th or 10th, giving them a month to continue to collect signatures. The Dems might want to continue to gather signatures, if for no other reason then to identify their voters.

1,128,159 people voted for Scott Walker in 2010. At the current collection rate Dems will reach 1,350,000 signatures by January 15th. If those people are guaranteed votes against Walker, then he will recalled. That kind of opposition is just too much for anyone to overcome in Wisconsin. That's probably not going to happen, since there will likely be a drop-off in the collection rate as the effort continues, but it goes to show that there's real benefit to collecting names.

Just as an aside: the anti-recall TV spots Walker's people are running make no sense to me at all. They're not converting anyone, they are reminding opponents that the recall is on and the two women who are featured in them come off as almost whining. I'm not sure how they're effective -- particularly the "sour grapes" spot -- and it just goes to prove that Scott Walker seems incapable of doing anything without pissing off the opposition unnecessarily.

Looking Back on Scott Walker's Childish Campaign to Convince Illinois Businesses to come to Wisconsin

2011-11-23T19:19:00.001-06:00

Shortly after Scott Walker took office last January he embarked on an aggressive campaign, not against state employee unions, but against an entire state itself: the state of Illinois. Now, hating on the Land of Lincoln is not rare thing among Wisconsinites, but Walker had a particularly public venue to air his grievences and he took full advantage of them.

Walker had been in office just over a week when Walker started to stick his foot in his mouth:

Madison, Wis. - Gov. Scott Walker tried to take full advantage ofIllinois lawmakers passing dramatic tax increases Wednesday, sayingWisconsin would welcome any businesses from its neighboring state thatcare to relocate.

Absent from Walker's sales pitch was the factthat Wisconsin's top income tax rates remain higher than Illinois evenunder the increase.

Even so, the Republican Walker was reveling in drawing a comparisonbetween Illinois, which has a Democratic governor, and his agenda tocut taxes.

"Years ago Wisconsin had a tourism advertisingcampaign targeted to Illinois with the motto, 'Escape to Wisconsin,"'Walker said in a statement. "Today we renew that call to Illinoisbusinesses, 'Escape to Wisconsin.' You are welcome here."

Walkerreferenced Illinois' problem in a speech to business leaders onTuesday, issued a statement hours after the tax increase vote onWednesday and then called a news conference to talk about it as well.

Wisconsinlawmakers were picking up on it as well. Rep. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia,said he welcomed any chance to "kind of stick it to them" in Illinois.He said lawmakers there raising taxes played right into Walker's hands.

It was an early show of the tact and skill with which Walker and his comrades would hand seemingly all of their business. It also didn't take long for Walker's strategy of arrogance to backfire spectacularly. But that didn't stop Walker from continuing his campaign on idiocy against Illinois one more time in May.

Almost a year later, the employment figures for the two states couldn't be more different. From yesterday's MJS:

Wisconsin posted the nation's biggest payroll losses, withemployment dropping by 9,700 jobs in October compared with September,according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Tuesday.

Thebureau said Wisconsin was the only state with a statisticallysignificant decline in employment, dropping from 2,757,200 jobs inSeptember to 2,747,500 jobs in October. However, the state unemploymentrate, which doesn't include jobless people no longer actively searchingfor new work, dropped to 7.7% from 7.8%.

Wisconsin saw a job increase in the leisure and hospitality sector, according to the bureau's seasonally
adjusted data.

Butthere were declines in several other sectors: construction;manufacturing; trade, transportation and utilities; financialactivities; professional and business services; education and healthservices, and government.

NewYork had the second-largest payroll loss, at 8,300 jobs. That mightreflect cutbacks in the financial services industry, which is "in avery tough cost-conscious mode right now," said Steve Cochrane,director of regional economics at Moody's Analytics Inc.

Illinois led the nation with a 30,000 gain in jobs...

It's worth looking again at the two paragraphs in the middle of that story:

Wisconsin saw a job increase in the leisure and hospitality sector, according to the bureau's seasonally adjusted data.

Butthere were declines in several other sectors: construction;manufacturing; trade, transportation and utilities; financialactivities; professional and business services; education and healthservices, and government.

It's worth pointing out that Walker's jihad against light rail, wind power, public education and all forms of government account directly for the loses in those sectors and it's more than likely that the political chaos that Wisconsin has become famous for during his term has made the state a less than desirable place for other businesses to relocate.

Paul Ryan's "American Idea" in neither very American nor much of an Idea

2011-11-21T21:11:00.001-06:00

Last week Rep. Paul Ryan returned to one of his favorite haunts, the Heritage Foundation, to give a speech on "Saving the American Idea." If Ryan's track record is any indication, the speech outlines a new phase in the rhetoric Ryan will be deploying to promote his extreme budget policies.

During the last few years, Ryan has looked to the future and painted a dreary, almost apocalyptic, picture of an imminent "tipping point" just over the horizon, a moment of financial reckoning that will expose the social safety net as an inherently unaffordable enterprise. This undertaking is little more worthwhile than carrying around a sandwich board that reads "The end is nigh!" around Capitol Hill, so it probably should come as no surprise to Ryan that his budget has gotten as much traction as, say, the budget policies of any other doomsday crier wandering the streets. That's not an accident: people are inherently distrustful of those who claim to see the future.

But we absolutely love people who can look into the past.

There comes a point in the promotion of an radical or extremist ideology when the evangelist realizes that audiences are scared of change, but are not so afraid of change to reconsider the past. That's why there's been a concerted effort in the last generation to promote the idea that America was founded as a "Christian nation" according to principles that look remarkably similar to a 21st Century Evangelical fundamentalism that simply did not exist 220+ years ago. This transforms the proposed change from an alteration of a familiar routine into an agent of redemption. Just as fundamentalists insist America was founded on religious precepts, Paul Ryan will likely spend the coming months telling America that it was founded on the kind of extreme economic policies that, just coincidentally, he happens to be promoting. It's an argument from authority riddled with absurdities.

Perhaps nowhere are these absurdities more evident than in the glimmering catch phrase Ryan will no doubt be thumping at all his upcoming speeches to think tanks: the American Idea. It''s not an entirely new phrase, to be sure, but we don't generally speak of America as having an "idea" as we do speak of it having a "dream." (The difference is stark: 3 million Google hits for "idea" versus 16 million hits for "dream," for example.) There is, however, a Wisconsin Idea, which is something that Ryan would be familiar with as a Congressman from that state.

This Wisconsin Idea is antithetical to Ryan's worldview:

The Wisconsin Idea is the political philosophy developed in the American state of Wisconsin that fosters public universities' contributions to the state: "to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing information and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities." A second facet of the philosophy is the effort "to ensure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefitting the greatest number of people."

To put it another way: the Wisconsin Idea is the gospel of technocracy: good government works best when it creates policies through the systematic evaluation of data and empirical evidence. Ryan's "American Idea" is that policies should be made according to ideology, namely the radical economic agenda he's become famous for thumping during the last decade. (I encourage you to devote particular attention to the section Ryanhilariously calls "the Brick Wall of Math," where he accuses thePresident's policies of failing the laws of basic arithmetic when, time after time, Ryan's own proposals seem to defy those very same laws.)

That Ryan should be conflating the Wisconsin Idea for what he claims is the American one is not a rhetorical coincidence. Ryan very clearly wants to replace the Wisconsin Idea for what he calls the American one, which is really nothing but the Paul Ryan Idea (which is actually the Ayn Rand Idea). It's a rather audacious slight of hand.

Ryan's American Idea is, of course, the product of the contemporary Republican concept of American Exceptionalism:

[T]he principles of free enterprise, limited government,individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong nationaldefense. These are the principles that define the American Idea, andthis mission has never been timelier because these principles are verymuch under threat from policies here in Washington.

TheAmerican Idea belongs to all of us—inherited from our nation’sFounders, preserved by the countless sacrifices of our veterans, andadvanced by visionary leaders, past and present. What makes Americaexceptional—what gives life to the American Idea—is our dedication tothe self-evident truth that we are all created equal, giving us equalrights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that meansopportunity.

Except this is, at it's very heart, a speech about economics, and no one -- not even the craziest right wing loon -- looks to the Founding Fathers for advice on how to negotiate a 21st globally-integrated economy. Not yet, at least (though one can reasonably assume that the Right's fetishization of the Founders will inevitably lead them in that direction). Ryan's speech is actually just an extended critique of Obama's tax policies and some finger-wagging at the "tone" in Washington and the Congressman is now claiming that his answers are the very solutions the Founding Fathers themselves would have prescribed.

Except this is manifestly not true. In fact, Ryan's extremism would have been rejected by his own party as recently as a decade ago. Here's David Frum reflecting on the rightward lurch the GOP has succumbed to in this week's New York:

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts tocut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backsof the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complainingthat the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITCoffsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had leftthem with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the firstplace. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues,and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing theconstruction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted anew prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but fourRepublicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdrawthe Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’spushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth isclose to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by The Wall Street Journal.In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatestcentral banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’smentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combinesregulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies forthose who need them is considered unconstitutional and an openinvitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reformwas the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today,stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost everyAmerican is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy thatincluded tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recoveryprogram.

Pretending that Ryanomics has been an immutable truth of the American Experience since 1776 is complete bullshit. It hasn't even part of GOP dogma at the beginning of this century, let alone the 18th. There are good political reasons for leaning on the American Exceptionalism crutch, but no honest intellectual ones. It should call to mind the adage coined by Samuel Johnson that "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels." When it comes to crafting policy, which has a nasty habit of ignoring sentiments of nationalist pride, this seems especially true.

Be prepared to start hearing a lot more about this so-called "American Idea." Ryan ran with the "tipping point" theme for what seemed like ages. Ryan's reputation for being a thinker is vastly over-rated. He's a marketer, someone who develops a catchy jingle or a lovely catch phrase and the only "idea" anyone should be ascribing to Ryan is that he is out of them.

Is Scott Walker's Support among Republicans Declining?

2011-11-15T20:47:00.001-06:00

This poll has to be an outlier:

The Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert College Survey wasreleased the same day that Democrats, labor unions and others,angry over his moves to curb union rights, began circulatingpetitions to get the 540,000 signatures needed to force a recallelection next year.

The poll showed that 58 percent of respondents believe Walkershould be recalled from office. That compares with 47 percent whosaid in April that he should be recalled.

The growth in support for a recall came, surprisingly, fromRepublicans. In the spring, only 7 percent of Republicans supportedrecalling Walker but that grew to 24 percent in the fall. Supportamong Democrats held mainly steady at 88 percent in the spring and92 percent in the fall.

Pollster Wendy Scattergood said Republicans who supportrecalling Walker are younger, have a lower income and are lesseducated than the rest of the sample in the poll. They alsodescribe themselves as less conservative than other Republicans,she said.

But if it's not, if it is instead a harbinger of things to come, this recall just got a whole lot more interesting. 24% of Republicans seems awfully high to me, but maybe we've been looking at the Wisconsin electorate all wrong over the last year. Maybe, instead of there being a highly polarized environment exasperated by a razor-thin bloc of independents the center-right has had enough. They've reached their breaking point and now want out. If that's the case then it likely has little to do with opinions on collective bargaining, but rather with the disastrous tone that's dominated discussion in Wisconsin since January.

Those are some big ifs and I'm going to reserve judgment until I see another poll with similar figures. These are the kind of numbers that get potential Dem candidates' attention.

Only 5% of Ron Johnon's $1.4 Trillion in Federal Budget Cuts actually came from Ron Johnson

2011-11-15T16:56:00.001-06:00

Ron Johnson took to the pages of Journal Sentinel on Tuesday to discuss the federal budget deficit. Now, in the past we've criticized the Senator for omitting data from his missives to the masses and Johnson seems to have taken this criticism to heart. Unfortunately, he's basically compensating for all the prior lack of data with an overload in this op-ed.

Johnson spends the first 4/5ths of the essay explaining the current budget deficit using numerous facts, figures and statistics before arriving at the crux of his argument:

What I have described above is a problem of spending too much, nottaxing too little. So the solution lies in finding ways to limit thegrowth in government, not figuring out how to take more fromhardworking Americans. Recent reports out of the supercommittee are notencouraging. Even though there have been hundreds of suggestions forcommon-sense ways to restrain spending and limiting the growth ofgovernment - including $1.4 trillion in reductions that I haverecommended - it appears Democrats are insisting on tax increases asthe price for any meaningful spending restraint.

Irealize that it might be politically popular to insist on tax increasesfor the "rich." But I hope Americans - and supercommittee members - aska simple question regarding any proposed tax increase: How many jobswill that tax increase create and how will it help our economy grow?

Answering this question for his readers seems to have escaped Johnson. It's only the massively important detail upon which his entire argument hinges, but let's save that for another day.

In the previous paragraph Johnson plugs his $1.4 trillion spending reduction pan. The problem with Johnson's plan is that it doesn't cut the budget deficit at all.

Johnson's proposed cuts are over ten years and apply only to non-discretionary spending. He doesn't include any cuts into mandatory spending programs like Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security -- the Holy Trinity of on entitlement programs -- which cost an additional $4.796 trillion between 2012-2020 on top
$1.568 trillion we'll be spending on those programs this year. So even if all of Johnson's cuts gutted the budget, we'd still be -- at the very minimum -- $18.4 trillion in the red. The deficit would likely be in even worse shape since Johnson also wants slash revenue, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Johnson's thumbing his chest over a plan that would make the very problem he's trying to address worse.

Making matters even more ridiculous, Ron Johnson's plan isn't even Ron Johnson's.

First of all, here's the report which details the proposed $1,383,044,000,000. Don't feel like you need to do anything more than skim it for the time being.

Sen Johnson Report

Johnson's "report" is really just a list of 58 ways to reduce federal non-discretionary spending. Most of the proposals, like "eliminate redundant information technology at the Dept of Interior," sound inoccuous. Other, like "Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act," are most certainly not. But what most striking about the report is just how little Johnson's contribution to it is.

The report is largely based on recommendations from only nine previously published sources, three of which are only mentioned once (a trick every high schooler knows is the best way to pad a bibliography), and relies heavily on a similar report published by Sen. Tom Coburn's office. In fact, Coburn's recommendations account for a whopping 45.8% of the value of the suggested cuts (about $632 billion). Johnson's staff's contribution to his own report accounts for only 5.4% of the report's total recommendations (just over $74 billion). No wonder Vicki Mckenna said "it wasn't even hard" to find so much savings -- someone else had already done the hard work.

Or, to put it in the lingo of Ayn Rand: Ron Johnson is policy looter.

Johnson has been guilty this kind of policy plagiarism before. During his 2010 run for office his campaign repeatedly used a "report" from Sens. John McCain and -- you guessed it! -- Tom Coburn which outlined supposedly wasteful projects. Why Coburn? Probably because he's serving as Johnson's mentor during his first year in the Senate.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to draw heavily from the works of others or to wander through the cafeteria of ideas picking freely from an a la carte menu, but this "report" betrays an intellectual laziness and dependence that's tantamount to trying to get the answers to the test from the kid sitting next to you. In his Journal Sentinel op-ed Johnson claims that some of the "common-sense ways to restrain spending and limiting the growth of government" includes the "$1.4 trillion in reductions that I have recommended." He's done no such thing and be called out for it.

The Scott Walker Recall & the "Ron Johnson Strategy"

2011-11-15T01:00:00.000-06:00

He claims not to have used it:

Gov. Scott Walker said he didn't take advantage of the early period forunlimited fundraising triggered more than a week ago and was waitinguntil tomorrow to start his official push against the recalls.

Aearly recall filing from "Close Friends to Recall Walker" allowedWalker to begin raising unlimited dollars prior to the official Nov. 15start planned by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

"I've madeit clear our focus is on the 15th," Walker said in a press conference."We haven't done anything in response to the early recall paperwork."

Walker did cancel a fundraiser in Kansas this weekend, so that statement might be technically true, but the fact is that no one will be able to know until the campaign finance reports are filed.

But that still doesn't explain why his team opened the fundraising window in the first place.

The next few months are going to be nothing short of a fucking nightmare, a nightly six o'clock news headache. The recall hasn't even begun and we're already talking about sham candidates, fake petitioners destroying papers and now DDS attacks (which are in many ways the digital equivalent to phone-jamming). God only knows what other tricks are in store.

I have no idea whether the Walker recall is a good idea or not. A few weeks ago, I thought the numbers against Walker just aren't bad enough to warrant the time and energy needed to wage a scorched Earth campaign against him. Then again, that just might be the political reality we're all living with these days.

Today, I think it's, at best, a 50/50 proposition. Let me reiterate that again: at best. Walker's special jobs session was a disaster. His clown car of Workforce Development Secretaries is embarrassing. There's been no negligible measurable decline in unemployment despite unspeakably divisive policies. Basically, Walker's mouth wrote (unemployment) checks during the campaign that his ass can't cash while governor.

Nevertheless, no matter how flawed the Dem strategy may (or may not) be, the Wisconsin GOP's may be worse. Right now, I would think that the GOP's best game plan would be to get the recall over with as soon as possible, but doing this would suggest that they think otherwise:

Fitzgerald says Republicans will wait until after Democrats turn intheir recall petitions in January to decide whether to launch anyrecall efforts of their own.

Any court challenge could possibly delay election day. Whether that's a good thing for Republicans is debatable. Personally, I would think they would just want to get it over with as soon as possible and before any further developments in the ongoing John Doe investigation, which may very will be the X-factor in this entire equation. Also, the last thing Walker needs is 3-6 months of bad economic numbers.

Honestly, who knows what's going to happen. Recalling legislators has not gotten any easier (regardless of what editorial boards may think). The final results will likely be razor thin. But this isn't just a "no confidence" vote for Walker. The Dems need to find a candidate. Walker is much better with an opponent than he is doing pretty much anything else. I would personally find it hilarious if the Dems could find a blank slate who had a very small paper trail and just decided to keep a low profile during the entire campaign. Someone who hid out and avoided any pretense of answering tough questions or developing a coherent program for his term in office.

An empty suit who took advantage of voter rage alone.

That would be pretty amusing.

What does Herman Cain Gain by going to Tonight's Packer Game?

2011-11-13T19:55:00.001-06:00

The decisions Mark Block has been making as Herman Cain's campaign manager are nothing short of astonishing, and today is a perfect example of just how far this guy is in over his head.

For starters, Cain is spending the day in Wisconsin. There aren't really many good reasons why Cain should be doing this, since Wisconsin has moved its presidential primary make to April and will not likely play much of a role in deciding the GOP nomination. Nevertheless, fund-raising is a good reason. From the MJS:

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is coming to Milwaukeefor a lunch fundraiser Monday at the Milwaukee Athletic Club.

Peoplecan attend a VIP reception with Cain at the club at 758 N. Broadwayfrom 11:30 a.m. to noon for $999. The general reception from noon to1:30 p.m. is $500.

OK, fine: that makes sense. Mark Block is from Wisconsin and it would only be reasonable that Block taps into his own local network of donors for his candidate. This seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable use of time and campaign resources ... but then Block scheduled an editorial meeting with the Journal-Sentinel that, predictably, did not go well:

With his basic challenge convincing sympathetic Republicans that he's a plausible president, this doesn't help:

Journal Sentinel: So you agree with President Obama on Libya or not?

Cain: Libya. President Obama supported the uprising, correct?President Obama called for the removal of Qadhafi. Just want to makesure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, yes I agree, Iknow I didn’t agree. I do not agree with the way he handled it for thefollowing reason – no, that’s a different one. I gotta go back to … Gotall this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are youasking me, did I agree or not disagree with on what? … Here’s what Iwould have – I would have done a better job of determining who theopposition is and I’m sure that our intelligence people have some ofthat information. Based upon who made up that opposition – based uponwho made up that opposition, might have caused me to make somedifferent decisions about how we participated. Secondly, no, I did notagree with Qadhafi killing his citizens. Absolutely not. So somethingwould have had to be – I would have supported many of the things theydid in order to help stop that. It’s not a simple yes-no, because thereare different pieces and I would have gone about assessing thesituation differently, which might have caused us to end up in the sameplace. But where I think more could have been done was, what’s thenature of the opposition?

Check out Smith's link for the video.

So what's Cain going to do the rest of the day? Fly down to Iowa and shake some hands? Nope. Move on to New Hampshire to cover his bases there? Negative. He's going to Green Bay to watch the Packers game.

Afterthe lunch, Cain is traveling to Green Bay to attend a Green Bay Packerstailgate party at 1141 Lombardi Access Road, two blocks west of LambeauField, in Green Bay from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Both events are hosted by Friends of Herman Cain Inc.

Unless I'm missing something, doesn't hosting a tailgate party for a bunch of people who will not likely have any impact on the election seem like a poor use of a candidate's time and resources? Why would Block arrange a meeting with the Journal-Sentinel, which is primarily a regional newspaper that only people in Wisconsin read, people that, again, will not likely play much of a role in deciding the GOP nomination? The only only thing that will turn anything Cain says to the MJS into national news is if he screws up. The risk is exponentially higher than the potential reward.

To make matters worse, Cain came out in support of collective bargaining for public employees, which isn't going to win him any new conservative fans, especially doing so on the eve that Democrats launch their recall of Scott Walker.

I'm half expecting Block and Cain to one day to look at each other and nod during a televised interview before one of them says, "And ... scene!" Then they would sit in director's chairs and explain to the country how the whole campaign was some kind of deconstruction of the modern American political blah blah blah. But I don't think that moment's coming.

Sunday Afternoon Link Orgy

2011-11-13T13:18:00.001-06:00

Packers play tomorrow and the weather sucks outside, the perfect recipe for wiling away the afternoon with some reading. Enjoy:

If you live in Wisconsin, you absolutely must read today's Journal-Sentinel cover story on the economic causes of Milwaukee's increase in infant mortality.

On the cover of the Timesis the interesting history of Bain Capital's -- and Mitt Romney's --involvement with Dade International. If that gets you going, be sure toread New York's cover story of Romney's career as a private equity pioneer, but be sure read the Economist's take on the piece for more context.

DavidFrum makes the case that German should bailout Greece because theEurocrisis is basically a consequence of Germany creating the Euro inthe first place (sorta -- just read it.)

Is the McRib an enormous arbitrage scheme?

The rise of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel. Brings to mind Peter Bienart's essay on the growing ideological divide in Israel last year.

Dick Wheeler, Wisconsin's First Blogger, Passes on

2011-11-11T12:06:00.001-06:00

I never met the man, but Dick Wheeler's newsletter was essentially the state's first blog, only in analog form and without the superfluous commentary (of which we at the Chief still have much to learn from his example).

The 2011 Mustached American of the Year is ... John Axford

2011-11-09T20:54:00.000-06:00

Of course it is.

The story/press release/blog post or whatever it is may have the best subtitle ever written:

Controversy Erupts As Canadian Wins Award Named for Canadian, But Not Supposed to be Won by Foreigner

What Ever Happened to Good Government in Wisconsin? And How Can We Fix It?

2011-11-09T16:24:00.000-06:00

I didn't make it to the "What Ever Happened to Good Government in Wisconsin? And How Can We Fix It?" panel discussion at UW-O on Monday, so I really can't speak to what ground was covered during the discussion. The only write-up of the event I could find came courtesy of Jonathan Krause, who provided a characteristically insipid account of the affair. (Can anyone make sense of his incompressible Mark Cuban analogy?) So at the risk of rehashing arguments that have already been made, here's our answer in order of importance.

1.) The Globalized Economy.

The US is not the economic juggernaut it was during the generation following WWII. There are many good reasons for this, one of which was it took about that long for Europe and Japan to rebuild themselves after the war, and about twice as long for China to propel itself into modernity. Everyone is now working on a level playing field (or "flat world," as Thomas Friedman would say), and that now includes India, Latin America and Russia. There is more competition for goods and services Americans excelled at supplying during the 20th Century and this has led to stagnant wages, income inequality, a decline in social mobility and a whole lot of resentment. Since there is little use in assigning blame to sweat shop workers half a world away, we tend to point fingers at our neighbors. Wisconsin has been particularly hit hard by this phenomenon given the central place of manufacturing in our economy, historically speaking.

2.) Lingering Racial Divisions

For a state that is well over 90% white we sure do have a lot of hang-ups regarding race that date back to white settlers' relationships with Native Americans and extend all the way to tensions involving Hmong refugees that settled in the area after Vietnam and the current crop of Hispanic migrant workers who come to the state to work on our farms. If you don't think this is an issue, just recall the shitstorm that broke out over removing race as a factor for awarding college scholarships recently.

Nearly a third of all voters in Wisconsin live in the six counties that make up the Milwaukee metro area in the southeast corner of the state. It's the most segregated area of the country and it didn't get that way by accident. The conservative stronghold that is Waukesha County largely got that way thanks to white flight and stays that way thanks to a variety of housing discrimination practices. The effects of this lingering racial resentment stretch well beyond hot button issues like school vouchers, affirmative action and voter ID and impact matters that should be colorblind all together, like transportation. The proposed high speed rail stimulus project was shut down largely to appease voters in Waukesha County who don't want to give minorities or poor people easy access to their gated community. The emphasis in highway spending in the Milwaukee area serves to provide a buffer between suburbanites and the poor/minorities who can't afford a car to get to a possible job outside the city.

The recent passage of concealed carry and the castle doctrine? Largely sold using language specifically designed to evoke some of the worst racial prejudices, like "street thug" and "home invasion." The bills weren't lobbied for because of an increase in crime, but to appease gun owners who were once banded together to preserve Wisconsin's hunting culture, but now do so out of fear of minorities with ... guns.

It's not just a legislative issue or one confined to the major minority population centers of the state. An event like Black Thursday in Oshkosh in the late 1960s has caused damage between the community here and African-Americans that UW-O is still trying to mend decades after the fact.

We could go on and on and on...

Race was the issue that began redefining the two major political parties from regional entities to ideological ones, a process that's almost complete on the national level, but is still evolving slowly here in Wisconsin. It was something of a prelude to the Culture War, which to date has been a rather lop-sided affair that has caused tremendous resentment among conservatives. It's an enormous deal that we all too frequently don't even realize we're discussing in Wisconsin.

3.) The Epistemological Relativism of the Information Age

The absolute deluge of information that individuals are subjected to every day makes it nearly impossible for ideas to break through the white noise and has provided media personalities with every incentive for crass, but eye-catching, behavior to connect with an audience. This is how talk radio has devolved into a cesspool of entertainment and misinformation masquerading as "news." It's really no better than eavesdropping in on a conversation in a high school locker room: just as prurient as it is exaggerated. And this is now the same business plan used by cable TV and most web sites on both side of the ideological divide (but, let's face it, more so among conservatives).

This isn't exactly a new problem. Media in the 18th and 19th centuries were very partisan, but were always limited by the amount of content that could be created and mass-produced in a given period of time. Today the sheer volume of content one has to choose from could keep a person occupied on their own little ideological island for the rest of their lives. And it turns out there's a large segment of news consumers that are perfectly happy occupying that island. This has proven to be a very profitable business for some media outlets and so long as that's the case, there's little incentive for them to change their business models.

This is a huge problem because the increase in media options results in a larger onus being placed on the individual to discern what is fact and what is bullshit. The good news is that there are more tools available to help individuals to make that decision. Unfortunately, its a time-consuming and laborious process that most people over the age of 40 have relied on other outlets to do for them for most of their lives.

4.) The Expanding Power of Interest Groups

We're not just talking about PACs or 527s or even SuperPACs -- but also about trade associations, unions and even non-profit lobbies. These groups, with their ability to draw from a state- or nation-wide donor bases have an out-sized influence over law-makers and if they don't already have more influence then a legislator's constituents, they soon will.

That's not good. The folks who operate these groups are completely unaccountable to voters, frequently ignored by the media and increasingly free from transparency. Running for office in America is expensive. I once heard on the radio that it costs more to run for city council in San Antonio than it does to run for Parliament in England, and as long as these groups can direct large streams of money to candidates, they will get what they ask for, and frequently at the expense or a legislator's constituents.

But it's not just the money they offer, it's also the services they provide. A vast majority of negative campaigning that occurs during election comes from these groups. They have now made themselves an indispensable part of many legislator's election program, even though they are forbidden to coordinate (wink, wink). The third parties do the dirty work for the candidate, and candidate rewards them once in office.

An absolutely fascinating experiment would be for three small business owners who each wanted legislation crafted that might help their respective businesses. The first would meet with his local state legislators and present his argument. The second would do the same, but also contribute the maximum to their re-election campaign. The third would by-pass his legislators all together and work exclusively with his trade organization or lobbying group. There is little doubt in my mind the third person would achieve his goal faster and with more certainty than the other two. It may cost him much much, more but lobbying is one of the best investments anyone can make: the rest in government largess almost always dwarfs the initial investment by several orders of magnitude.

Aside from this being bad public policy, it also has the effect of inverting the purpose of government. Law-makers are supposed to make for the entire state or country, but all too frequently they are being asked to assist individuals or very small groups of people. It's no wonder we hear very little about the common good these days and are more likely to hear paeans to mythical Randian overlords.

5.) The Erosion of Privacy

Most voters now expect public officials to be damn near saints in their private lives. With regards to how they carry out their jobs, that's a good impulse, but where that line is drawn is increasing vague.

We're not just talking about extramarital affairs, DUIs and other standard skeletons in the closet, but in an age of cell phone cameras otherwise private moments are now fodder for gaffes that are guaranteed to get blown out of proportion. This means being a law-maker is a 24-hour-a-day job with a high risk for public embarrassment. This keeps good people out of public service and creates an attractive environment for the shameless or the exhibitionists who get off on that looming sense of peril, both of whom make better partisans than policy-makers. They're also people who are more likely to be taken by the trappings of power and thereby abuse it.

But not only are good people discouraged from running for office, they're frequently discouraged from speaking out in public about an issue important to them for fear of earning the wrath of someone or group that disagrees with them. We're always astonished at how often this sentiment is expressed by people and to be honest, we can see the time quickly approaching where the politics of personal destruction trickles down to even the local level, wherein the sins of letters-to-the-editor writers are aired publicly in an effort to discredit their arguments.

* * * * *

None of these factors have easy "solutions." In fact, just about all of them are more permanent conditions that we now must all live with rather than problems than can be solved. They exist and effect every state in the union, so why has Wisconsin been hit particularly hard? Wisconsin's been a consistent swing state for decades now and since the Caucus Scandal broke about 10 years ago the political environment has festered with discord, cynicism and frequent recriminations. This is an issue we've discussed before.

We genuinely don't know if the current troubles in Wisconsin can be fixed. It may take an extremely gifted politician who can work on both sides of the aisle before that can happen. That man was, not too long ago, Tommy Thompson. But today Thompson's party, which is disproportionately held captive by the forces noted above, would never allow that to happen. This should say a lot about who is to blame for the current mess.

Which brings us to our final point: while solutions may continue to be elusive, it should be obvious to anyone when the situation continues to deteriorate and under Scott Walker the situation has definitely deteriorated. Coming in to office Walker had so much power and so much control over state government that there was utter no need to use the aggressive tactics he used to pass his legislation, which made a polarized climate even worse. This strategy of governing for the 50+1 of the people who voted for you, and to hell with everyone else, may be politically savvy (see Rove, Karl), but it's not a leadership style that people remember fondly in the long run.

MORE: Here's the Advance-Titan's story on the event.

Mark Block needs his own Verb

2011-11-09T11:06:00.001-06:00

MARK BLOCK, v.

Pronunciation: Brit. /mɑːk blɒk / , U.S. /mɑrk blɒk/

Etymology: Cognate with Old Frisian merkia to notice, Middle Dutch marken to put a mark on, notice, Old Saxon markon to design, destine (also gimarkon to direct, command, discern), Old High German marchōn to limit, determine (German marken to put a mark on (now rare), German regional (Tyrol) marchen to set up a markstone), Old Icelandic marka to draw the outline of, put a mark on, observe, heed, Old Swedish marka (Swedish regional marka ) to put a mark on < a Germanic verb derived from one of the bases of mark n.¹ Some senses of the English verb are probably directly from corresponding senses of the noun; sense 29 is perhaps reinforced by Old French marchier march v.²

Etymology: In sense 1, apparently < Middle English adoption of French bloc , of same meaning; but in senses 17– 20 taken directly < block v.Old French bloc is, according to Diez and Littré, < Old High German bloh (Middle High German bloch , mod.German block ) in same sense (Middle Dutch bloc , Dutch blok , Middle Low German block , Swedish block , Danish blok ), the origin of which is uncertain. Grimm and others identify it with Middle High German bloch , Old High German biloh (Middle Dutch beloc , beloke ) ‘closure, obstruction, shut place,’ referred to bi-lûkan , < lûkan to close, shut. Kluge considers it a distinct word, and possibly related farther back to balk balk n.¹

Etymology: Joined together to represent the proper name of an American politician active between c.1980-2011.

I. To fail spectacularly.
1. trans.
a. To be utterly incapable of completing the required task.
b. To make a fool of one's self in the process of failing to complete a task.
c. To be exposed as a fraud amid the execution of a scam.
2011 The campaign manager really Mark Blocked his boss when he appeared clueless on a nationally televised interview.

* * * * *

This should be the last straw. It won't be, but then again, I love watching a train wreck in progress:

Herman Cain campaign manager Mark Block, in an appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News just now, insisted that a relative of the second woman to publicly accuse the candidate of sexual harassment in the 1990s works at POLITICO.

"Her son works at POLITICO," Block said of Karen Kraushaar, whose name POLITICO printed earlier today after other media outlets made her identity public.

"I've been hearing that all day - you've confirmed that now?" Hannity asked.

"We've confirmed that he does indeed work at POLITICO and that's his mother, yes," said Block.

Block appeared to be referring to former POLITICO reporter Josh Kraushaar, who left for another outlet, National Journal, in 2010.

Bonus fun fact: Josh Kraushaar isn't even related to the woman who settled with Cain in the 1990s.

Not that this should surprise anyone, but the fact that Hannity and his crack research team didn't take a few minutes to pick up the phone and call either Politico and/or Josh Kraushaar -- something that Hannity himself claims to have "been hearing all day" is pretty extraordinary in term of journalism best practices. Not at all surprising for the kind of incit-ainment that goes on at FOX, but still pretty extraordinary.

MORE: I will settle for a "Mark Block Rule."

Is there Anyone in Wisconsin who can Explain what Abstinence-only Sex Education has to do with Job Creation?

2011-11-03T01:13:00.000-05:00

Anyone?

Just in Case You didn't Already Think Mark Block was the Stupidest Person on the Face of the Earth

2011-11-02T20:37:00.001-05:00

Well, then, this should probably confirm it:

In a cryptic comment made at National Journal’s Election 2012 Preview event Tuesday, Mark Block, Herman Cain’s campaign manager, made reference to an incident involving Cain and a receptionist for a radio talk show host.

Asked by panel moderator Beth Reinhard whether he could guarantee that there’s not more information forthcoming about his past, Block began his answer with a blanket denial, followed by what seemed to be a description of an unreported recent incident involving Cain.

“Mr. Cain has never sexually harassed anybody. Period. End of story,” he said. “As the hours go by, it’s interesting that we even hear from a radio talk show host of Iowa that a receptionist thought that Mr. Cain’s comments were inappropriate.”

Wow. It's like Block said: "Well, if that one chick didn't take offense at that terrible thing Cain said that you all know nothing about yet, then there really isn't any reason to worry about anyone ever taking offense to what Cain says ... because, man, that shit was bad!"

A Quasi-Pessimists Guide to this Week's Packers Game

2011-11-02T13:35:00.000-05:00

A couple of reasons to be worried about this weekend's Packers game:

The SI Jinx:

The Packers made the cover with a headline that just screams "This headline is only days away from being irrelevant!" That's apparently the national edition too, not just the regional cover.

Don't not read the story, of course. There's some great details about Rodgers' demeanor in the locker room and his practice regimen.

Also a good sign: the story is almost entirely about Rodgers, but the cover clearly is not. There's a subtext to the story that suggests Rodgers may have had a big part in making that happen.

Bye Week Blues:

If you happened to have caught the Pats-Steelers game last week you may have heard Jim Nance and Phil Simms talk about Bill Belichick's analysis for why teams coming off their bye weeks were an awful 3-9 going into week 8: the short version was that they were gun shy -- they didn't tackle or hit very well and seemed too cautious bout making contact. Week 8 changed some of that, since teams coming off their bye weeks went 5-1 last week (that one loss going to, oddly enough, the Pats).

Perhaps anticipating this, Coach McCarthy had the team practicing in pads on Monday.

The Chargers are a Notoriously Late-blooming Team under Norv Turner:

They have terrible first halves of the season and then usually get hot in the second half. They're playing the defending champs at home, which would seem like no better catalyst to jump start a play-off run.

The Chargers Really Screwed the Proverbial Pooch last Week:

On an overtime fumbled snap deep in Chief's territory, no less. That's usually one of those things that gets good teams motivated to bounce back. I don't know if the Chargers are a good team this year, but it would suck if this was the week everyone found out that they are.

Neurotic worries aside, the Packers still look amazing. When the Packers have fell behind to Atlanta and Minnesota (both games on the road) it was because of fluke plays and not systemic deficiencies or massive performance gaps among the players. More importantly, they treated playing from behind more like a minor inconvenience rather than reason to panic. The Pack are clearly the superior team, but I wouldn't be surprised if they get off to a sluggish start in the first half and then blow the game wide open in the third quarter. So far this season no team has been better at adjusting it's game plan after halftime.

The Population Bubble

2011-10-31T13:28:00.000-05:00

Stephen Hawking once told Larry King "My biggest worry is population growth. If it continues at the current rate, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder by 2600." It's a very colorful description, one whose claustrophobia makes a distant future of 600 years feel all the more immediate. It was also 11 years and a billion people ago and uttered at a time when the human population had doubled in just 40 years.

Since the world's 7 billionth child is apparently to be born today, there is a deluge of Malthusian dead horse-beating. Malthus was actually a far more interesting thinker than most people give him credit for being. His tale has been told countless times in science fiction during the last 150 years, and in some ways his theories were the beginning of speculative fiction and dystopian near futures. If you've every nerded out to books by William Gibson, PD James, HG Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Anthony Burgess, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding or Stephen King -- all are direct decedents of Thomas Malthus. (For a more nuanced appreciation of Malthus work, listen to this interview.)

But that still doesn't excuse the fact that Malthus missed the mark. Most people like to criticize him for underestimating food production and the ability of technology to increase the productivity of agriculture, but Malthus may have also been wrong about the human species' capacity to continue to reproduce exponentially:

What demographers call the Total Fertility Rate is the average number of live births per woman over her lifetime. In the long run, a population is said to be stable if the TFR is at the replacement rate, which is a little above 2.3 for the world as a whole, and somewhat lower, at 2.1, for developed countries, reflecting their lower infant-mortality rates.

The TFR for most developed countries now stands well below replacement levels. The OECD average is at around 1.74, but some countries, including Germany and Japan, produce less than 1.4 children per woman. However, the biggest TFR declines in recent years have been in developing countries. The TFR in China and India was 6.1 and 5.9, respectively, in 1950. It now stands at 1.8 in China, owing to the authorities’ aggressive one-child policy, while rapid urbanization and changing social attitudes have brought down India’s TFR to 2.6.

This is absolutely fascinating. All these years we've been bracing ourselves for an over-populated Earth with scarce natural resources when, in fact, the real scare resource might soon be humanity itself.

Much of this decline in birth rate will probably be attributed to technological improvements that enhance quality of life, which was essentially the same principle that doomed Malthus' hypothesis with regard to agriculture. But the ability for humanity to suddenly collectively curb its growth could also be a part of some shared evolutionary social psychology -- an aggregate that would include variables like attitudes on child-birth, government policies, enhanced medical science, etc. -- that encourages us to shoot for some kind of population sweet spot that allows for both individual well-being and the ongoing propagation of the species.

That's a profound concept that would have immense implications on our attitudes about everything from sex, marriage and child birth to religion, immigration, national identity, labor and public health policy:

[T]he labor force has peaked or is close to peaking in most major economies. Germany, Japan, and Russia already have declining workforces. The United States is one of a handful of advanced countries with a growing workforce, owing to its relative openness to immigration. But this may change as the source countries become richer and undergo rapid declines in birth rates. Thus, many developed countries will have to consider how to keep people working productively well into their seventies.

India, the only large economy whose workforce will grow in sufficient scale over the next three decades, may partly balance the declines expected in other major economies. But, with birth rates declining there, too, current trends suggest that its population will probably stabilize at 1.55 billion in the early 2050’s, a full decade ahead of – and 170 million people below – the UN’s forecast.

Given this, it is likely that world population will peak at nine billion in the 2050’s, a half-century sooner than generally anticipated, followed a sharp decline. One could argue that this is a good thing, in view of the planet’s limited carrying capacity. But, when demographic dynamics turn, the world will have to confront a different set of problems.

That would mean our policy-makers and dystopian science fiction novelists would have to completely re-orientate their focus in the coming decades and examine a world with a shrinking population instead of an exploding one -- more Children of Men and less Soylent Green. Oddly enough, there's a tinge of Malthusian pessimism to that proposition.

How that future looks to individuals is probably little more than a cultural Rorschach test, but for the sake of leaving the reader with something provocative, let me just suggest that a future wherein the human population has plateaued or is declining is a very bad one for conservatives. If people need to live longer, health policy becomes collective issue, likely through some national health care program. If workers need to stay employed longer in life, there will likely be laws limiting the work week and provide ample vacation time during the year. (Conversely, employers will justifiably expect more productive work days.) When unemployment is low, unions suddenly have more bargaining power. Public education become critical because it would likely occur twice in many people's lives: first as a child, then again in middle age as blue collar workers transition into jobs that don't require strain on their bodies. Immigration is open and encouraged.

It's a world where individuals don't necessarily claw their ways above the unwashed masses, but one where society as a whole must care for each individual. That's not always a good thing. Devoting too much time and energy to sustaining a population means there are fewer resources left over for the development of technology and less competition to push innovation. That's how societies and their qualities of life stagnate.

So who wins in the end? Probably nobody. There's a reason why human beings look into the future and tend to see see doom and gloom. I've always thought this phenomenon was somehow connected to old people's innate hatred of all things new and that we somehow can't get over a subconscious imperative to include our own selves in any future we ponder -- a version of ourselves that is by necessity frail and weak and decaying. It seems only reasonable that that reality should influence our outlook on the rest of the world and make it a very scary place to consider.

Happy Halloween!

Well, Who didn't See this Coming?

2011-10-30T22:10:00.002-05:00

This was only a matter of time:

During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO.

The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

Make no mistake about this one: this wasn't a news outlet doing due diligence, this was an opposition research leak. Politico says they've been working on the story for 10 days now, which is right around the time Cain cemented himself in the top tier of a number of polls. The awesome question now is who dropped the dime?

Was it Perry, who has the resources to fund a top-notch oppo research team and who wants to steal from Evangelical Iowans that may have converted to Cain following the Texas governor's disappointing roll out? Was it Romney, who seems just a little too blase about his Iowa campaign? Was Gingrich jealous that Cain's book tour was doing better than his own? Was it Ron Paul, whose campaign came out with a suspiciously rapid press release vowing to take the high road on the matter? Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the candle stick?

My money's on Team Perry precisely for the reasons stated above.

Anyway, we here at The Chief started to suspect Cain may have a few skeleton's in his closet when noticed a couple of weeks ago that we've never seen his wife or children out on the campaign trail. If you're running for President, you're family has to be on board, front and center (the Huntsman girls know the drill). Keeping your wife on the sidelines is bad form, just ask Judith Dean. We weren't quite sure if that meant that Cain kept women on the side or just believed his wife's place was in the kitchen or, most likely, that his campaign was such an amateur operation that they simply didn't know how to incorporate her into the program. When we read this article in the Times that essentially accused him of being a dick to subordinates, well, we probably should have put two and two together.

This is not something that will go away quietly. It's way too reminiscent of the Clearance Thomas confirmation hearings -- a black conservative and accusations of sexual harassment -- and who wouldn't want to rehash that shit show?

The Reason We all Watch College Gameday

2011-10-29T19:13:00.000-05:00

Take a bow, good sign-maker. Take a bow.

The Disquieting Symbolism of Allowing Guns in the Capitol

2011-10-27T11:48:00.001-05:00

Let's just get the perfunctory caveats out of the way first: We here at The Chief are aggressively ambivalent about concealed carry. Ultimately, we find the hand-wringing on the left about the potential dangers of the policy to be just as over-stated as the right's arguments that try to justify the measure on public safety or philosophical grounds. At the end of the day we think there are far more important matters that will directly effect far more people in Wisconsin that legislators should be working on.

This, however, worries us:

The public will be able to carry guns into most parts of the state Capitol, under a policy being developed by Gov. Scott Walker.

Lawmakers are developing their own policies that would allow individual lawmakers to decide whether to allow guns into their offices.

Under rules planned for one chamber, guns would be allowed on the Assembly floor and in the Assembly viewing galleries, said sources who have been briefed on the plans. That would mean the public could bring guns into the viewing galleries but would still have to adhere to other existing rules, including one that bars the use of still cameras and video cameras.

Allowing guns into a place where men and women meet to discuss the direction of the state is essentially an abdication of the promise of democracy. It says that the peaceful exchange of ideas cannot occur without the threat of violence from the very people we send to exchange those ideas. It's a capitulation of the notion that we can all act like human beings endowed with logical faculties and not animals butting heads to determine the leader of the herd. It's an admission that we really are not all that far removed from the "might makes right" mentality that led to countless duels, jousts and the occasional Thunderdome death match.

In other words, it's an enormous step backwards.

There is no question that there's a certain degree of security risk to legislators, but when they are in session and conducting business on the Assembly floor they are protected by strict rules that govern who can access the floor, decorum in the viewing areas and, most importantly, an armed security detail with full law enforcement powers in the Capitol Police.

There is no legitimate reason to carry a gun onto the Assembly floor. At best, the symbolism of the act says "I don't trust my colleagues to even regard my personal well-being as their own." At worst, it's an act of intimidation. It's an act that cannot say "I will protect my colleagues in the event of danger" because there already is an armed force -- the Capitol Police -- designated for that job. If legislators are so worried about their safety from visitors to the Assembly chambers, then they should consider closing the viewing areas and providing guests to the Capitol with the closed circuit feed of events on Wisconsin Eye.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. It's one that should reflect the larger view we as a state consider to be the the goals of Democracy; namely, the development of the rule of law through peaceful discourse. One of the reasons the legislature holds sessions in ornate and gilded chambers is to remind members and visitors alike that the proceedings are the very highest form of human social interaction possible -- that laws are made using reason and debate and not under the threat, concealed or open, of intimidation.

Now is probably a good time to note that the whole point of concealed carry is rendered moot in a place like the Assembly floor, where a confined physical space makes it difficult to hide a firearm for a long period of time. Also, there's a good chance that one newspaper or another will check public records to determine who has applied/received a license. Outside the Capitol, where even most constituents are likely to have a hard time identifying their elected officials, it's a different story; but these rules are being made about a specific work place environment.

Concealed weapons in the rest of the Capitol is another matter altogether, one that is complicated by a variety of nuances that are not easily reconciled. For example: if concealed carry makes everyone safer by making firearms possession universally ambiguous, how do offices that advertise a "no guns allowed" policy, which some will do for political reasons, retain their protection from those that don't? The Capitol should be a place where no one is afraid to communicate their ideas or those of their constituents, but in this instance the office that puts a sign in it's window becomes less safe than one that invites (or more likely celebrates) carrying visitors.

There is also the issue of how visiting constituents might be intimidated when soliciting their legislators, who are already very powerful people even without the possibility that they might also be packing heat during a meeting. These tend to be very private meetings behind closed doors, where body language is scrutinized obsessively and frequently misinterpreted and where a dissenting visitor's account of potential intimidation will almost certainly not stand up to a legislator's insistence that any sudden moves he or she made during the discussion were not intended to be seen as reaching for his or her revolver.

It will not surprise me that no one considers the typical constituent engaging in the already intimidating task of appealing to a legislator when thinking about concealed carry rules in the Capitol. Putting more distance between legislator and constituent then there already is should not be seen a move in the right direction. This is a problem that will only be exasperated by the following prediction: by January 1, 2013 -- a little over a year after concealed carry goes into place -- there will be considerably more concealed carry permits among legislators than there will be permits issued to the general population on a per capita basis. The only question will be how large the multiplier will be.

All in all, the fact fact that we have to devote all this time and effort to this discussion is absurd when there are already extensive public safety measures in place at the Capitol that could be easily enhanced for the benefit of everyone. The rules, as they are described above by the MJS, create a situation where where some offices enjoy enjoy more power and safety than others, when through minimal sacrifice on their part, every office could enjoy the exact same degree of safety and power (with respect to carrying firearms).

This speaks to a larger issue: the fact that conservative policies are increasingly degrading the community by fetishizing the individual. It's not a good idea to allow concealed firearms into the Capitol. Any public safety expert will tell you as much and then give you dozens of better alternatives, but because conservatives say it can happen, well, then by golly, it must ... regardless of practical consequences. This inequality among legislators is just another example of policies that have promoted vast gulfs of inequity between all kinds of people over the last 30 years.

One of the great things about America is that it's historically been a place where individuals not only have the freedom to achieve, but also the tools to do so at their disposal thanks to collective effort among all Americans. That's how national identities are made and large concepts like the American Dream are fostered. If anything, this "every man for himself" philosophy that leaves major matters like personal security up to each individual, regardless of whether that person can fend for himself or not, is what ultimately rips any community apart and this has become the guiding principle of one of the two major political parties in this country.

That's not healthy for any democracy. In the end, we doubt concealed carry in the Capitol will ever become a serious issue. To the best of our knowledge, there has been only one instance of gun violence in a state capitol building (albeit an incident so infamous that it's stunning no one seems to have brought it up during the "debate" over the matter). Statistically speaking, it's far more likely that someone with a concealed carry permit will accidentally discharge their weapon while visiting the Capitol. But if someone should ever be injured by a firearm in the Capitol, it will be difficult for conceal carry advocates to argue that the victim's sacrifice is merely the cost we all must collectively pay for freedom.

Paul Ryan kicks off the GOP Vice Presidential Nomination Campaign Season

2011-10-26T15:48:00.002-05:00

Just in case you were wondering what this is all about:

Ryan accused Obama of using “class-based rhetoric” in his re-election campaign. Obama’s tactics, he said, make “America weaker, not stronger.”

“Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were the hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy, and resentment,” Ryan said.

Translation: Why, yes, I happen to be available to run for Vice President next fall.

Paul Ryan vs. Vermont (the Winner gets to Craft America's 21st Century Health Care Policy)

2011-10-14T18:11:00.000-05:00

I was going to let Paul Ryan's big health care speech at the Hoover Institute pass without further comment, but his comments about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan made me want to revisit the talk.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that Ryan always approaches health care reform from a budgetary perspective. There's usually very little consideration paid to details like public health and the economic consequences thereof. That's not necessarily a bad thing since there are many aspects to the issue that need attention, but this method of problem solving has a tendency to cause a new problem for every old one that gets "solved." For example, what happens to economic productivity when tens of thousands of old people are forced to move back in with their children to be cared for in their twilight years because the bulk of their fixed income is devoted to treating a pre-existing condition that no private insurer will cover? That's an important question, but one Ryan never really anticipates during his thought experiments.

As we've noted in the past, Ryan knows a good buzzword or catch phrase when he sees one. In the Hoover speech Ryan promotes a concept he calls "patient-centered health care reform" without ever really defining what that exactly means. To be sure, he elaborates on the concept, but never really fleshes it out satisfactorily. This is no small matter since it appears to be the goal his plan aspires to reach.

Regardless, Ryan seems to think that this goal is within reach. The speech is divided into three segments. In the first, Ryan provides us with his assessment of the current political conditions that will make his reform possible. In the second, he provides the details of his plan for reform. Ryan uses the final part as a sort of pep talk to his audience. Obviously, it's the second part that's the most interesting and the one we're going to focus on.

The principles of Ryan's plan seem to be conveniently summed up in two words: choice and competition. In the speech's preamble he summarizes his proposed reforms by saying:

Thanks to the tireless work of health-policy scholars here at Hoover and elsewhere, we know what works and what doesn’t. Simply put, badly designed government policies are to blame for much of what is wrong with health care today, and the solution is clear: We need to transition from the open-ended, defined-benefit approach of the past… to market-oriented, defined-contribution reforms that promote choice and competition.

Ryan's assumption that Government lies at the core of rising medical costs is dubious. Health care costs have exploded since 2000 and now far outpace inflation or wages:

If Government was the problem, they would have begun exploded shortly after Uncle Sam got into the insurance business in the 1960s, but that's not exactly what happened. Medical costs kept pace with the consumer price index until about 1980 then only really began to diverge in the early 1990s:

So what Ryan is essentially say is that it took doctors about 25 years before they finally figured out how to gouge Uncle Sam. Something tells me that with all those advanced degrees it wouldn't have taken so long. Neverthless, Ryan attributes this disparity to Medicare:

In Medicare, the government reimburses all providers of care according to a one-size-fits-all formula, even if the quality of the care they provide is poor and the cost is high. This top-down delivery system exacerbates waste, because none of the primary stakeholders has a strong incentive to deliver the best-quality care for the lowest cost.

Using Ryan's reasoning, private health care insurance should remain stable, or even decline, since there is no government interference and all three stake-holders are directly involved in the decision-making that goes into a patient's care, but even private insurance premiums have sky-rocketed:

This shouldn't be happening in Ryan's world. But it is. Was there some kind of law passed in the late 1990s that granted the government massive intrusive powers into the health care industry. Nope. (But there is an argument to be made attributing the ongoing increase in costs during the early 2000s to the Medicare Part D bill, which Ryan voted for.)

The conundrum posed by the cost of health is that while it is not only a problem, but also one of the great human success stories of the 20th century. Medicine currently is capable of doing things that were unimaginable just decade ago and while that's great for our overall quality of life, it doesn't come cheap. The expensive role of technology in modern medicine is a huge factor in escalating costs. Along the same line are the research and development costs that eventually get built into the cost of a treatment. For uncommon ailments, these costs can be considerable. And that's not a small issue because sick people are living longer thanks to some very expensive treatments. These are good development, but expensive ones.

Medicare is certainly going to be a burdensome expense, but it's just a small part of the problem compared to the projected costs of all health care costs in the near future:

So Ryan's diagnosis ignores the fundamental causes that result in more expensive care. It should be surprising that his proposed solutions do the same.

The solution in each of these areas is to move away from defined-benefit models and toward defined-contribution systems. Under a reformed approach, the government would make a defined contribution to the health-care security of every American, rather than continue to offer open-ended, well-intentioned, but ultimately empty promises.

This is another way of saying vouchers. This has been discussed elsewhere at great length.There are inherent problems with a voucher plan that replaced Medicare with partially subsidized private insurance plans. The most obvious is the likely unwillingness of private insurers to take on elderly customers, many of whom will likely have previously diagnosed conditions.

The growth of these defined contributions should be capped, to reduce the inefficiencies that have led health-care costs to spiral out of control. But they should be adjustable so that more help goes to the poor and the sick, while less financial support goes to those who are fortunate enough to need it the least.

That sounds nice, but all Ryan's plan does is move a pile of money from one hand to another without addressing the inherent costs that make health care so expensive.

Ryan then goes on to contradict himself when discussing the high cost of private insurance, which he blames on taxes:

[O]ur current tax code provides additional fuel for runway health care inflation. Under current law, employer-sponsored health insurance plans are entirely exempt from taxation, regardless of how much an individual contributes to their policy.

This tilts the compensation scale toward benefits, which are tax-free, and away from higher wages, which are taxable. It also provides ways for high-income earners to artificially reduce their tax-able income by purchasing high-cost health coverage – which in turn can fuel the overuse of health services.

So overuse of health services isn't just a problem that results from Medicare, but happens with private insurance as well. Blaming this phenomenon on taxes strains credulity. It's the supply-sider equivalent of the equant.

The most frustrating thing about this brief detour into reality is that Ryan actually touches on the fundamental problem with health care today: the incentive structure for health care providers is out of whack. Health care providers have every reason to run expensive, unnecessary tests when they charge by the x-ray and not the complete treatment. That would put the onus on the private sector to change, though -- a concept abhorrent to Ryan's Randian worldview.

The problem with just about anything Paul Ryan policy is that it evolves from an Utopian ideology and not a critical look at the circumstances as they actually exist. Ryan frequently peppers his speech with the phrase "cost-effective," but if this was actually a goal it would be nearly impossible to not look at other countries that provide comparable universal health care at a significantly reduced cost. Ryan wants a world in which the free market actually works efficiently and rationally and maybe even morally ... and if that world doesn't exist, he'll just have to create it.

Part of the Ryan mystique has resulted from a confusion between substantive ideas and effective marketing. Ryan never misses a chance to supply his plans with web sites, YouTube videos, cable interviews or roll-outs at think tanks and that's a large part of the reason why he enjoys such a highfalutin reputation among his colleagues. The Hoover speech is remarkably free of data and heavy on ideology -- that's never a good sign -- and it wouldn't be the first time Ryan has tried to mold a world to his own specifications.

Unlike Ryan's health care reform, which is still very theoretical and will likely never leave Conference Room C of the Hoover Institute, there is a more radical (by American standards, at any rate), though much less publicized, plan that will actually begin covering patients:

Vermont governor Peter Shumlin [has] signed into law a plan meant to transform the private-run health insurance industry into a the nation's first government-funded, government-run health care system that offers a uniform benefit package to every eligible resident. The first phase of the law will extend coverage to all 620,000 Vermonters through the option to participate in the state health benefits exchange called Green Mountain Care, which Reuters reports, "will set reimbursement rates for health care providers and streamline administration into a single, unified system." Per a federal mandate (read: Obamacare) the exchange will offer coverage from private insurers as well as state-sponsored and multi-state plans. The plan also calls for tax credits to make coverage affordable for low-income residents.

This is actually happening. Slowly, but it's happening. The American health care system is becoming far too expensive to be feasible for much longer and countries that have public health care coverage are far more adept at reigning in costs:

As we mentioned earlier Ryan devotes a lot of his speech to surveying the political landscape and discovering that it's a good foundation on which to build. Not once does he mention Vermont. In five or ten years time Vermont will begin to feel the effects of its experiment. If the results are positive, other states will might follow suit (think Minnesota or Oregon). Ryan's plan is all or nothing, which is usually how plans described as being "bold" work, and the closer you look at it the easier it is to see that there's not much there to begin with.

If Paul Ryan takes Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan Seriously, should we keep taking Paul Ryan Seriously?

2011-10-13T18:55:00.001-05:00

It's entirely possibly that there has never been a more ridiculed and completely dismissed domestic policy proposal than Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Tax Plan. Democrats hate it. Conservatives hate it. Even Grover Norquist hates it. Bruce Bartlett says of the plan:

At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distributional monstrosity. The poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase.

Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.

Conservatives are also quick to point out that the plan increases the tax burden on the middle class:

If you have a family of four with an income of just under $50,000, they could end up paying more under the Cain plan. Currently, they are taxed around $3,850 in income tax. Under Cain’s plan, they would be taxed at 9 percent or pay $4,500.

That’s $650 more.

Although the family would save almost $4,000 in Social Security taxes, it would have to give up the child tax credit worth the same amount. Furthermore, it would pay an additional national sales tax of 9 percent on everything purchased, including groceries and clothes, which totals about $2,000.

That means under the Cain plan that family could end up paying $2,725 more.

The poor get it even worse.

Complicating matters further is where the plan came from. Was it the brainchild of a quiet wealth manager from Cleveland? Is it simply a pizza gimmick writ large on a national economy? The product of hours of playing SimCity? It can't be just a political stunt, as Ezra Klein notes:

This plan wouldn’t work. Not as policy and, as I expect Cain will soon find out, not as politics. Moving to an 18 percent consumption tax is, among other things, very bad for older voters, who make up a substantial portion of the Tea Party base. Jacking up taxes on the poor and the middle class even as you sharply reduce them on the rich and completely eliminate them on overseas income for corporations isn’t popular among anyone in the political system who isn’t specifically paid by the Club for Growth.

The subtext of nearly every criticism of the plan, no matter from which ideological quarter it originates, is that Cain and Co. built their tentpole piece of domestic policy around a marketing strategy without ever really giving much consideration to the, you know, consequences. It's nearly impossible to see how this plan evolved otherwise.

But now that every one's lining up to take a whack at Cain's policy pinata, who should come to the rescue but ... Paul Ryan?

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan says he “loves” presidential candidate Herman Cain’s signature “9-9-9″ tax plan.

Ryan told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview that Cain’s plan is a good starting point for debate, and shows the GOP presidential campaign season has entered into a more advanced stage where ideas — not just personalities — have come to the forefront.

“We need more bold ideas like this because it is specific and credible,” Ryan said. “I’m more of a flat-tax kind of a guy.”

The budget chairman went on to say that ideas like Cain’s plan could help shape the debate over tax reform moving into 2013.

“It’s great to see such bold ideas,” Ryan told TheDC.

To be fair, Ryan isn't exactly "endorsing" the plan, as Cain's campaign manager later goes on to claim in the article. Ryan's praise seems to be focused on the "boldness" of the plan, details be damned. But why even touch something upon which so much scorn is being heaped? Even the folks who essentially support the principles of the plan are quick to criticize the particulars. Most people aren't taking it very seriously. How unserious is this plan? Here's an example:

Mr. Cain said on CNBC his plan was "not regressive" in its impact on lower-income workers, primarily because it would eliminate their payroll taxes. And speaking to reporters in Concord, Mr. Cain said that exempting used goods from the federal sales tax would ease its effect on poor people.

This is asinine. Policies that promote growth should focus on creating jobs for the poor, not supplying them with cheaper hand-me-downs. Cain's plan doesn't seem comprehend this concept.

So why on Earth is Paul Ryan giving this idea the time of day?

It's a good question. Arthur Laffer seems to dig the plan too, so maybe it's some act of supply-side solidarity, but this does little to legitimize what is a patently ridiculous tax policy. One would imagine that support for this kind of shallow proposal would call Ryan's judgment into question, especially when it comes to his "Roadmap" budget. But I don't imagine that happening any time soon.

For a thorough examination of the absurdity of the 9-9-9 Plan, check out Edward Kleinbard’s working paper:

2011-10-10 Kleinbard Analysis of Cain's Tax Plan

If You Read Only One Al Davis Obit this Weekend...

2011-10-09T15:00:00.000-05:00

Make sure it's this one.

The only things missing is the just how ahead of the curve Davis was on many football-related issues, including some of his own creation ... namely, the Lane Kiffin situation.

You might remember Davis' rambling press conference, one of the most memorable in football history in my estimation, wherein the Raiders' owner sacked his wunkerkind head coach only four games into his second season with a ferocity that appeared bitter, vengeful, spiteful and/or megalomaniacal. At the time, Davis was almost universally panned for the spectacle. But the the whole thing was actually Al-being-Al, and sticking up for the people who were loyal to him:

[I]t was well-documented that their relationship disintegrated when Kiffin attempted to fire defensive coordinator Rob Ryan after the 2007 season. A source said Kiffin suggested to Davis that the owner had reneged on an agreement that the coach would have control over his own staff. Shortly thereafter, Davis sent a letter of resignation for Kiffin to sign, sources said. Kiffin declined.

Davis denied a report that Kiffin was sent a resignation letter in the past but refused to sign it. The owner said that Kiffin was responsible for getting that false claim into the media. On Tuesday, Davis was asked if Kiffin was trying to get fired so that he would receive the remainder of his salary.

"I don't know what he was doing, but he got me to fire him," Davis said.

Kiffin's decision probably had little to do with Ryan's performance. He wanted to bring in Monty Kiffin, his father (and Ed Orgeron, a coach with ties to Monte), but Monte was working with Tampa Bay at the time. Recruiting Monte would have been coach tampering, something that is illegal in the NFL, but is probably a lot easier to do when family members are involved. Davis, not only wanted to play fair, but he also didn't believe Rob Ryan deserved to be fired, since if ever there was a coach meant to be on the Oakland sidelines, it's Rob Ryan (the current Defensive coordinator of the Cowboys and brother of Jet's head coach Rex) and tossing aside a coach in such a unsporting manner, even though it happens routinely when new head coaches take over, would not have to appealed to his sense of honor.

And that was the beauty of the man: he was a visionary, but also an anachronism. He was maverick, but one who lived by a strict code.

Kiffin, of course, landed on his feet with one of the desirable coaching gigs in college football, the University of Tennessee, where he proceeded to rack up precious few wine, a ton of NCAA violations, and the ire of the entire Volunteer State when he bolted for USC after just a single season. This was undoubtedly a bittersweet moment for Davis: he had been vindicated, but that vindication came as a result of his nemesis winning a job at an institution beloved by Davis:

Al is the one who must be in a trance right now. Either that, or he’s screaming into the air, to the rooftops, to anybody who will listen.

Because Al loves USC, above all other sporting entities except, of course, the Raiders.

(He has two former USC head coaches currently on his staff. Al was an assistant for three years in the late ’50s at ‘SC. Loves USC.)

Al loves USC almost as much as he hates Lane/Lance Kiffin. And yet, suddenly, shockingly, Kiffin is the King of USC, the last place and last job Al would’ve ever wanted Kiffin to land.

It's the kind of contradiction that made Davis such a fascinating character.

Ron Johnson Teams up with a Wall Street CEO to Sell Himself Out in a Spectacular Act of Hypocrisy

2011-10-05T21:19:00.000-05:00

Ron Johnson has nothing but contempt for the people he represents. There's really no other way to any other conclusion after reading Johnson's transparent fraud of an op-ed in Politico today. If you read the piece today and merely thought it was merely a vapid attempt to sell Johnson's maiden work of legislation, don't worry, on the surface it had all the depth of a puddle of spit -- but what it lacked in substance the essay made up for in a stunning ulterior motive.

It's a flagrant attempt to use the people of Wisconsin, and specifically the small business owners of the state, to shill for Wall Street only Johnson doesn't have the backbone to come out and say it. Every last voter in the Badger state should feel insulted by this pathetic attempt to pull a con job by someone who clearly thinks he's more clever than the voters who elected him.

A little background before we get started: During the 2010, Johnson provided the following exchange during an interview:

LIB: That tends to suggest an answer, but let’s just make it clear – what would your suggestions be toward fixing the crisis that we’re now in?

RJ: Well we absolutely have to reform Fannie and Freddie, first of all. And that, truthfully, I would be looking back to banking rules and regulations back since the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s in terms of things working. I would seriously take a look at these banks that are still termed “too big to fail,” and maybe we need to orderly break them up under anti-trust laws.

So last year Johnson was in favor of massive government intervention into financial institutions. Today he believes the banks should be left to their own devices. And who did he decide to team up with to co-author the essay that informed the world of his new policy position? None other than a former Wall Street CEO.

It's as complete a total disavowal of one's independence as you'll ever see.

Johnson's article today completely disavows this position. He doesn't just flip-flop, the act of political conservationism required to pull this requires an audacity level that should awe even the Romanian judge.

It's of paramount importance to keep in mind that Johnson is just the co-author of this piece. His partner in crime is a man named John Allison, who is a former chairman and CEO of BB&T. What's a BB&T, you ask? Good question. Here's how they describe themselves on their web site:

BB&T Corporation, headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., is among the nation's top financial-holding companies with $159 billion in assets and market capitalization of $18.7 billion, as of June 30, 2011. Its bank subsidiaries operate approximately 1,800 financial centers in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland, Florida, Alabama, Indiana, Texas and Washington, D.C. Market share rankings in deposits: No. 1 in West Virginia; No. 3 in the Carolinas and Virginia; No. 4 in Kentucky; No. 5 in Alabama, Florida and Georgia; No. 6 in Tennessee; No. 7 in Maryland and Washington, D.C. (June 30, 2010 FDIC Deposits, SNL).

So it's a massive regional bank in the South (you may have noticed that BB&T does not have a presence in Wisconsin), but that's only half of Allison's story. One of Allison's extracurricular activities includes Ayn Rand worship. From the New York Times:

Speaking at a recent convention in Boston to a group of like-minded business people and students, Mr. Allison tells a story: A boy is playing in a sandbox, only to have his truck taken by another child. A fight ensues, and the boy’s mother tells him to stop being selfish and to share.

“You learned in that sandbox at some really deep level that it’s bad to be selfish,” says Mr. Allison, adding that the mother has taught a horrible lesson. “To say man is bad because he is selfish is to say it’s bad because he’s alive.”

If Mr. Allison’s speech sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated the virtues of reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism while maintaining that altruism is a destructive force. In Ms. Rand’s world, nothing is more heroic — and sexy — than a hard-working businessman free to pursue his wealth. And nothing is worse than a pesky bureaucrat trying to restrict business and redistribute wealth.

Freud would have a field day. Allison's Rand fetish extends, rather absurdly I might add, to funding Ayn Rand classes, studies and the distribution of her works at universities, which, in essence, is charitably giving to teach people how to be selfish. Unwrap that mindfuck if you can.

Allison is as zealous a "free market" evangelist as they come, so much so that he can't even conceive how anything other than the government was responsible for the current economic crisis. I'd link to more examples, but there really is no shortage of Allison pontificating at libertarian mutual appreciation societies like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Ayn Rand Center and other places online.

So in a time of unparalleled economic uncertainty on Main Street, Johnson runs to find his friends on Wall Street. Keep that in mind because every last line of this essay aims to serve Johnson's masters in lower Manhattan, not Wisconsin.

Johnson/Allison start off their their piece with a little joke that you will be forgiven for missing upon a cursory reading:

Most people go into business because they want to make the world better by building something — and, of course, to make money for themselves and the people working with them.

Ha ha. Get it? Money, of course, always plays second fiddle to the altruistic impulses of entrepreneurs everywhere. The winking and elbow-poking doesn't even need to be included in the stage directions of this monologue.

Yet business leaders today are routinely treated as guilty until proven innocent by the bureaucrats in our regulatory agencies.

This is an asinine statement, as we'll demonstrate using Johnson/Allison's own example below.

Our regulatory state strangles economic growth. Regulations bar many voluntary agreements and subject businessmen to constant micromanagement.

Here's Johnson/Allison's thesis: regulation is bad for business Judging by the vagueness of the statement, one assumes Johnson/Allison is referring to all businesses, and that's certainly what they want you to believe, but they're really only talking about the banking forthcoming banking regulations coming soon to house of finance near you courtesy of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Aside from being completely disingenuous, Johnson/Allison's thesis also suffers from two additional problems: 1.) there's really not very much empirical evidence to suggest this is true and b.) regulations tend to be very good for big businesses. Both of these points will be elaborated upon later.

Absent concrete evidence to support their claim, Johnson/Allison provide their readers with stray observations, like:

At the federal level alone, business is subject to tens of thousands of regulations. The federal regulation code, which lists them, currently stands at 160,000 pages. Over the past 15 years, business has been hit with almost 60,000 new federal rules, to say nothing of state-level regulation. Compliance costs alone surpass $1.75 trillion annually, according to the Small Business Administration.

(It's actually called the Code of Federal Regulations, which tells you just how much interaction the authors have with federal regulations ... or the internet, for that matter.)

A quick note about this SBA study from Bruce Bartlett, one of Reagan's senior economists:

When pressed for data to support their argument that deregulation is a magic bullet that will turn the economy around, conservatives often point to a study commissioned by the Small Business Administration and published in September 2010. The study was performed by economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain of Lafayette College. However, there are a number of problems with relying on this source.

For one thing, the analysis stops in 2008. To the extent that the SBA study tells us anything about the cost of regulation, it says that the Bush administration was extremely lax about reducing a burden that Republicans now say is the economy’s biggest problem. A Congressional Research Service study has also identified important methodological weaknesses in the SBA study that cast grave doubt on its validity. CRS noted that some of the sources used to calculate regulatory costs appear to have been misused or misinterpreted, some cost figures were cherry picked to provide the highest possible cost estimate, and many of the estimates are from studies done decades ago with little contemporary value.

So it's a dubious source ... and not the first time that Johnson has relied on one.

Later on, Johnson/Allison will decry regulations as being "job killers," but it actually seems to sound like compliance is something of a growth industry. Regardless, the 160,000 page Code of Federal Regulations covers all federal regulations and only a fraction of it ever actually applies to a given business based on its industry. Johnson/Allison are guilty of shamelessly and vastly exaggerated the problem.

This explosion of new regulations dramatically reduces job creation.

Or, not so much. Here's more from Bartlett:

Efforts to find specific regulations that are hampering business expansion and employment growth have not actually found any. While business groups based in Washington will quickly rattle off a list starting with the Affordable Care Act, surveys of actual businesses paint a different picture. When McClatchy newspapers interviewed a number of small business owners to see what regulations are holding them back, it couldn’t find any.

“None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it,” the McClatchy report found. Monthly surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business show that small business concerns about regulation are lower today than they were in the 1990s when the economy was booming.

Note that Johnson/Allison calls them "new regulations," which, again, refer to those prescribed in the Dodd-Frank Act. If you still aren't convinced of this, the authors are about to say so explicitly:

The more costly it is for businesses to meet regulatory demands, the fewer workers they can hire. When government ramps up regulations in unpredictable ways — see Obamacare, Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency under Lisa Jackson — businesses are more likely to build cash reserves than they are to invest and hire.

Did you catch that? Blink and you missed it, but we've actually just arrived at the heart of this essay: "Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations." Remember: John Allison is a former banker and banks aren't exactly high priorities for the EPA. Johnson/Allison talk about an "explosion of new regulations," which is shorthand for the Dood-Frank bill. That's really the only game in town in terms of newsworthy regulatory guidelines coming down the pipeline.

Small-business owners are asking why banks won’t make loans to help them expand and create jobs. The answer is simple: The banking regulators have radically tightened lending standards. Ask any community banker.

Why ask any community banker when you have the former CEO of a massive regional bank? The fact that Johnson is writing this with a multimillionaire and not, say, a small business owner from Oshkosh speaks volumes about whom he's working for.

Regulatory bureaucracies also stifle innovation, which is the key to economic growth but requires defying convention, experimenting, making mistakes and correcting them. That isn’t compatible with the regulatory state’s demand for obedience to mind-numbing rules. Half the challenge for innovators now is getting past the regulator. As a result, many avenues of exploration just aren’t pursued.

I always enjoy this line of thought: apparently their are brilliant innovators in the world that can invent mind-blowing new products, create awesome new services and, most importantly, solve problems that have plagued mankind from time immemorial, but can't seem to figure out the ancient riddle of the Health Inspector.

Perhaps the regulatory state’s toughest burden, however, is that it discourages our best entrepreneurs.

This chart suggests otherwise:

Productive individuals face a daily grind of trying to comply with an endless number of rules — often arcane, arbitrary and contradictory. By treating entrepreneurs as latent criminals, the regulatory state crushes the creative spirit — and wastes the energy and talents of the job producers and the prosperity producers.

Notice how the entire essay is very much a touchy-feely load of shit about a "productive spirit" and "discouragement" and "creativity," etc.? There isn't a single example of actual data included in Johnson/Allison's piece and the only numbers I see relate to the page lengths of various government documents. Maybe this sort of appeal to the reader's aspirations works on a rhetorical level, but it's shitty policy.

A recent series of studies by the Institute for Justice examined the morass of regulations strangling commerce in many U.S. cities.

What's the Institute for Justice? It's actually more of a law firm than an "institute," but one that eschews private clients to dabble in public affairs. Think of it more along the lines of an amicus brief factory that occasionally whips up a white paper or two.

It's also funded by the Koch Foundation.

In Los Angeles, for example, people who want to open a restaurant may spend months, even years, jumping through regulatory hoops before they’re able to serve their first customer. There are business licenses, zoning requirements, scores of permits and approvals and a seemingly endless number of taxes and fees.

All told, L.A. restaurateurs have to go through at least a dozen government agencies before opening their doors. The process is so complex, the city published a 147-page handbook to explain it.

Here's a list of all the restaurants in Los Angles County that suffered closures due to health code violations during a three month period this summer. It's enormous and includes restaurants like Burger King, Baskin Robbins, Boston Market, Denny's, Dominoes, Jack in the Box, KFC, McDonald's, Panda Express, Pizza Hut, Popeye's, Sonic, Starbuck's, and Subway -- all chains that should be health code compliance ninjas given their resources and experience (to say nothing of the more reliable revenue stream that comes with being a national chain).

Go ahead and see what each restaurant got cited for -- you won't eat out for a month. Now if the big boys can lapse from time to time and fail to find the initiative to keep a tidy shop, what do you think will happen in the really incompetent restaurateurs' kitchens?

One of the many reasons people go to fast food chains, like the ones listed above, is because they have an expectation of healthy and sanitation based on their ubiquity and financial success, but according to Johnson/Allison these "business leaders" are being "routinely treated as guilty until proven innocent by the bureaucrats in our regulatory agencies." It simply does not occur to the authors that the nature of their business may actually make their periodic guilt inevitable.

Would you be willing to go through that to start a business?

Thousands of people are willing to do just that if only they could acquire the money.

When America’s businessmen find themselves discouraged and dispirited, we all lose. We lose out on jobs, new products and a rising standard of living.

Building a business is hard work. As retired businessmen, we can attest to the long hours, sleepless nights, overloaded schedules, ongoing setbacks and other daunting challenges that go into creating a successful business.

This is probably the most interesting graph in the entire essay and the moment when Johnson/Allison interject themselves into the argument. But something's missing, and if you noticed a complete lack of relevant anecdotes from either Johnsons's or Allison's personal experience, you've hit the nail on the head.

The omission exists for several obvious reasons: talking about restaurateurs in LA makes the authors appear more like Everymen and less the millionaires they actually are. Both men have long had others take care of their regulatory issues for them. The example also makes regulations seem like the reach of government is long (literally spanning across the entire country!) and personal. Also, Allison's former life as and banking CEO isn't a very popular profession right now, while Johnson lived a pretty charmed life when he was just a plastics manufacturer from the sticks.

I bring this up because the federal government really can't do anything about the restaurateur from LA's regualtory burden -- those are mostly state and local laws. Johnson may not be able to stick up for Carlos and his Taco Truck on Venice Beach ... but he can do wonders for the former banking CEO who co-signed the byline.

To persevere, business men and women need the freedom to run their businesses by their own best judgment. They cannot function if they have to spend a quarter, a half or even more of their time taking orders from bureaucrats.

So which one is it? Do business folks spend 25%, 50% or even more of their time dealing with Uncle Sam? Johnson's colleague in the House, Sean Duffy, recently made the mistake of trying to assign hard numbers to compliance costs and fell flat on his face, which may have a lot to do with why Johnson plays coy here. Or possibly the numbers aren't that big and vary widely from industry to industry, but only seem to do the most harm to -- wait for it -- the banking sector.

Either way, by now we've identified the problem -- so what's the solution?

It’s time to stop the parade of new regulation until we can begin to roll it back. The new regulation moratorium bill is a good first step. It would block new regulations until unemployment falls below 7.8 percent — the rate when President Barack Obama took office.

Now would be a good time to remind you, once again, that this "parade of new regulation" is the Dodd-Frank Act.

The regulatory moratorium is legislation which Johnson has authored and what we've called in the past "a snotty, deeply cynical bill that is little more than a flaming bag of dogshit left on the White House front porc h." This essay does nothing to convince us that we wrong to say as much. The 7.8% figure is arbitrary, not based on economics, and exists solely for political purposes, just like the rest of the legislation. It's a truly worthless waste of time and energy.

One of the reasons a regulatory moratorium will never happen, to say nothing of possibly work, is because big business actually loves regulations. It's counter-intuitive, but what Johnson/Allison might call "entrepreneurial innovation" Big Business calls "competition" and competition is bad for the bottom line. That's one of the reasons Title 21, Chapter 483 of the Code of Federal Regulations is as big as it is: larger long-term care providers are trying to squeeze out competition by making start-up nursing homes operate on the same playing field, even if they don't have the same resources. No one came to congress with a fresh new prospective on how to reform Nursing Home regulation, but HCR ManorCare sure as hell does and you can bet it includes regulations that would be vastly unfair to the Mom n' Pop Old Folks Home down the street from you.

There’s a lot of talk today about how to “stimulate” the economy. A free economy does not require “stimulation.” It is fueled by the passion and creativity of profit-seeking business leaders.

The problem is not lack of stimulus but the suffocating weight of government intervention. If we want to revive the economy, it’s time to liberate the victims of our regulatory state.

Vice Presidents of Regulatory Compliance of the world, UNITE!

So why all the fuss from Johnson over regulations? It's basically because that's all that's left. Here's Bruce Bartlett yet again:

Republicans have a problem. People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but Republicans have nothing to offer them. The G.O.P. opposes additional government spending for jobs programs and, in fact, favors big cuts in spending that would be likely to lead to further layoffs at all levels of government.

Republicans favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but these had no stimulative effect during the George W. Bush administration and there is no reason to believe that more of them will have any today. And the Republicans’ oft-stated concern for the deficit makes tax cuts a hard sell.

These constraints have led Republicans to embrace the idea that government regulation is the principal factor holding back employment. They assert that Barack Obama has unleashed a tidal wave of new regulations, which has created uncertainty among businesses and prevents them from investing and hiring.

No hard evidence is offered for this claim; it is simply asserted as self-evident and repeated endlessly throughout the conservative echo chamber.

The vast emptiness of Johnson/Allison's essay is certainly a testimony to that observation. Johnson's previously efforts to solve the deficit were embarrassing and clearly not going anywhere. His devotion to the anti-tax voodoo that has held the GOP hostage for the last 30 years shows signs of breaking. Strictly from a policy perspective, what's left after this cover is blown off this regulatory nonsense?

What makes this all worse is that Johnson actually supported breaking up banks that were "too big to fail," possibly the ultimate form of banking regulation, during his campaign during the 2010 campaign. Now he's skipping hand-in-hand with a bank CEO decrying any regulation whatsoever. It was this type of hypocrisy that Johnson claims inspired him to run for office in the first place.

Such sound and fury...

If all that Winning this Weekend didn't get Your Juices Flowing, then Sit Back and Appreciate just how Badly the Vikings Suck

2011-10-03T17:43:00.000-05:00

After a sports weekend as serendipitous as this past one, the entire state of Wisconsin should be pounding its collective chest and waving a giant foam #1 finger around, but if all that winning didn't get you riled up, then perhaps a little Minnesota Vikings schadenfreude will get you over the hump.

The Vikes lost -- again -- to the Kansas City Chiefs in a battle to determine the worst team in the NFL on Sunday ... but earning that distinction just wasn't enough for the hapless Norsemen.

For those that only think about the Vikings when their necks are firmly situated under the cleats of the Packers' defensive linemen. Minnesota plays in the Metrodome, an awful monstrosity of a stadium that wore out its novelty and utility some time ago, which is really saying something since it's only 29 years old. So the Vikes say they need a new stadium and they're probably right. The problem is that Metrodome's other tenants -- the University of Minnesota football team and Minnesota Twins -- recently acquired their own tax-payer funded team specific stadiums which has given voters in Minnesota a case of stadium fatigue.

So every game the Vikings lose decreases the chances that they get their new stadium and increases the odds of a move to LA. It's a delicate PR balancing act that requires skill and luck and tenaciousness and all sorts of other admirable qualities that were in short supply on Sunday.

Not only did the Vikes lose ... for the forth time in four games this season ... to a really bad Chiefs team ... by less than a touchdown ... but then wide receiver Bernard Barrian had to go do this:

Berrian criticized Rep. John Kriesel, R-Cottage Grove, on Twitter for questioning Berrian's characterization of today's game.

"If you want to follow a hilarious twitter account, try @B_Twice (Bernard Berrian) who says that he's open a lot and should get the ball more," Kriesel wrote on Twitter.

Berrian quickly took issue with Kriesel.

"Anytime u wanna watch the film with me. Not just one game but all of them," Berrian wrote to Kriesel. "and if not sit down n shut up!!" Berrian wrote in another tweet.

Kriesel, who lost both of his legs while serving in Iraq, is one of a handful of state lawmakers who have publicly advocated for a new stadium for the Vikings. He is also a co-author to the Vikings stadium bill. The Vikings have also posted an interview with Kriesel discussing the stadium efforts on the team's homepage.

I can't imagine that's going to play well.

Making matters even worse, Vikings fans are turning on another Twin Cities institution: the artist currently known as Prince but formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, who, before that, was also called Prince:

The Minnesota Vikings have won only six games since Prince released “Purple and Gold” in the weeks leading up to the NFC Championship game. After 12 men on the field, a full 2010 season and four disappointing weeks to start 2011...has Minneapolis' own icon brought bad luck to the Vikings?

[One can only hope. -- ed.]

“I saw the future,” Prince told former FOX 9 anchor Robyne Robinson, who was given an exclusive advance copy of "Purple and Gold" on Jan. 21, 2010. The song resembled a New Orleans funeral march – a jab at the eventual Super Bowl champion Saints.

So was “Purple and Gold” an unintended funeral dirge for the Vikings? Even the opening line of the song – “the veil of the sky draws open” could be thrown against the collapse of the Metrodome roof that displaced an already beaten and battered Vikings team last season.

Prince, mad prophet of Minnesotan doom. This all really just too much fun.

If Roy Blunt wants to be Vice Chair of the Republican Caucus he should just Email this Blog Post to his Colleagues in the Senate

2011-10-01T14:03:00.003-05:00

This one, right here:

Asked by WisPolitics if he deplored partisanship as much as he said he did during his campaign last fall, Johnson said, "It's sad. I don't see it on the other side. When you have a president that needs to lead, and he's not leading ... so again, in order to work on a bipartisan basis, you need somebody that's negotiating in good faith, that's working in good faith, and currently we don't have that with this president."

Johnson also told the audience that "it's really pretty remarkable how President Obama has pretty well taken over and continued the policies of the Bush administration."

That doesn't mean the freshman Republican senator agrees with Obama on anything.

"We're not getting leadership out of President Obama," he said.

Huh?

It's fairly obvious that Johnson either doesn't quite understand the differences between Bush policies and Obama policies or doesn't have the slightest idea how to communicate those differences in an effective manner. That's usually a prerequisite for someone in a leadership position.

Then again, maybe this sort of inarticulate gibberish is exactly what the GOP is looking for.

We've pointed out a few times that Johnson seems to specialize in snidely dismissing Senate procedure with a sarcasm and at least someone in DC has also noticed:

“Johnson is always a big critic of how things are being run, but he has yet to show that he understands how to get things done in Congress,” a senior Republican Senate aide said. “Just being a vocal critic may not be enough of a selling point to a caucus that wants to see real results on some very tough issues.”

Again, I'm not sure that's necessarily a deal-breaker in today's Republican party.

Weekend Homework

2011-09-29T14:29:00.000-05:00

If there's one piece of long form journalism you decide to read while waiting for the Badger-Nebraska game this weekend, make it Michael Lewis' latest in Vanity Fair. A taste (or, more likely, the very point of the whole thing):

[A]s [City Manager Phil Batchelor] talked about the bankrupting of Vallejo, I realized that I had heard this story before, or a private-sector version of it. The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences.

The Most Comprehensive Scott Walker/John Doe Investigation Timeline You're Going to Find

2011-09-28T22:26:00.001-05:00

2005

The GAB fines Wisconsin and Southern Railroad (WSOR) CEO William Gardner $1,000 for contributing $5,000 to Scott Walker's campaign for governor. As a registered lobbyist, Gardner was prohibited for making any campaign contributions.

November
17: The Walker campaign returns Garder's donation and accepts a $5,000 contribution from his daughter, Stephanie Schladweller.

2009

April

27: Scott Walker officially announces his candidacy for Governor.

September
After meeting on Sugardaddyforme.com, Florida resident Stacie Long moves into Gardner's apartment in Hartford.
November

19: Gardner donates $5,000 to Friends of Scott Walker, asks Walker to call him on his cell phone.

~20: Gardner expenses his donation.

December
10: Gardner recieves an email confirming a breakfast meeting with Walker.

14: WSOR employee Steve Breske donates $5,000 to Friends of Scott Walker at Gardner's request and is later reimbursed by WSOR.

14: Stacie Long donates $10,000 to Friends of Scott Walker. The money was given to her by Gardner.

14: Gardner donates $5,000 to Friends of Scott Walker.

15: WSOR employee Jeff Lombard donates $5,000 to Friends of Scott Walker at Gardner's request and is later reimbursed.

21: Garner meets Walker at the Crowne Plaza in Milwaukee.

Late December: Long and Gardner have a falling out that leads to a prolonged dispute over property of Long's that was retained by Gardner.

2010

February
~February: Garnder solicites WSOR employee Ken Lucht to donate to the Walkercampaign and is given $5,000 to do so, but never does.

3: WSOR employee Bernard Meighan donates $5,000 to the Walker campaign after being asked by Gardner. He's later reimbursed by WSOR.
March
2: WSOR employee David Hackbarth donates $4,900 to the Walker campaign and is later reimbursed.

2: WSOR employee Dale Thomas donates $4,900 and is later reimbursed.

16: Gardner informs Walker campaign fundraiser that Meighan and Lucht will be donating.
April
13: Gardner meets with Walker at Noodles in Madison.

15: Gardner emails Walker to thank him for a meeting, concluding his message:
Keep up the good work and I will do everything I possibly can to get you in the Governors Mansion... ... ... ....
bg
19: Stacie Long contacts the GAB regarding Gardner's donations.

25: Gardener asks two additional WOSR employees to donate $4,900 to Walker's campaign. They refuse.
May
10: GAB begins an investigation into Gardner's political contributions.

13: Darlene Winkresigns her position as a constituent services director in ScottWalker's office for using county computers to post political messageson the Journal Sentinel web site. Authorities later confiscate her work computer and executed a search warrant of her home. She also served as the vice chairwoman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party.

18: Gardner discloses the illegal contributions to the GAB.

18: The Walker campaign returns Gardner's money.

21-23: WisGOP convention in Milwaukee. Walker wins the party endorsement for Governor.

June
24: A search warrant is executed at WSOR.
August
20: Walker aide Tim Russell has his county computer seized by the Milwaukee DA.
September
14: Walker wins GOP primary.

~September: Cullen Werwie joins the Walker campaign after working on Brett Davis unsuccessful bid for Lt. Gov.
November
2: Walker wins general election.

3: Walker campaign treasurer John Hiller is named transition director.

~November: Scott Walker campaign receives a subpoena for campaign emails in the Gardner investigation and hires former US Attorney Steven Biskupic as counsel.

~November: Attorney General JB Van Hollen refuses a request to investigate impropriety in Scott Walker's Milwaukee County Executive office.
December
21: Rose Ann Dieck is given immunity in the John Doe investigation.

29: Walker names his cabinet and senior staffers. Cullen Werwie is named spokesman.

2011

January

3: Walker is sworn in as Governor.

14: Lucht is given immunity in the John Doe investigation.
March

10: Walker signs the controversial budget bill rolling back many collective bargaining rights for public workers. Lost in the controversy is a provision in the bill that transforms 37 civil service jobs into political appointments.

11: Walker administration announces a grants of $3,647,149; $11,084,39; and $1,454,594; and loans of $455,894 and $1,108,439 loan to repair bridges in Wisconsin.
April
11: A criminal complaint is filed against Gardner in Washington County. Gardner pleads guilty two felony counts and agrees to serve two years probation. WSOR agrees to pay a civil forfeiture of $166,900.

14: Walker Spokesman Cullen Werwie is given immunity in the John Doe investigation.
May
11: Department of Workforce Development secretary Manny Perez abruptly resigns his position after just over four months on the job.

11: Walker Campaign treasurer John Hiller is replaced by Kate Lund.

July
18: Long-time Walker chief of staff Tom Nardellisteps down as administer the department of Safety and Buildings andtakes a job as administrator of the state Division of Environmental andRegulatory Services.

21: Tom Nardelli resigns his position in the Division of Environmental and Regulatory Services.
August
19: Long-time Walker aide Cynthia Archerleaves position as deputy secretary of the Department of Administrationto become legislative liaison in the Department of Children andFamilies, a job she was given a day earlier.

22: This is supposed to be Cynthia Archer's first day in her newjob, but she uses six weeks worth of accrued sick leave and delayscompleting the transition.

25: Children and Families Secretary Eloise Anderson interviews Heidi Green for the legislative liaison job taken by Archer.
September
14: Cynthia Archer's home is raided by the FBI.

21: Cynthia Archer is removed from the Walker's Fraud Detection committee.

22: Attorney General JB Van Hollen announces the Department of Justice will not investigate Cynthia Archer.

23: 2001: WisDOT announces a grant of$1,063,200 and $132,900 loan for WSOR.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments.

We also recommend reading the Criminal Complaint filed against Gardner in April, from whence much of the information above was derived.

Paul Ryan Delivers an Economic Speech at a Think Tank Named after Herbert Hoover

2011-09-28T10:38:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the world who finds irony in this juxtaposition because it happens all the time.

Paul Ryan gave a speech devoted to repealing and replacing Obamacare at the Hoover Institute yesterday. As we've noted in the past, Ryan tends to reserve his big guns for speeches at think tanks and in academic settings.

We'll probably get around to talking about the speech and the contents therein this weekend. Or not. If there's one sort of take-away line from the whole thing I'd point to this passage:

The three reforms I’ve just outlined – premium support for Medicare, block grants for Medicaid, and tax reform to correct the inefficient tax treatment of health insurance – must be present in our “replace” agenda.

If we end up with a replace agenda that fails to fix the problem, then we will lose hard-won credibility on the health-care issue as a result.

Say what you will about Ryan, the guy has a gift for encapsulating both the policy and the politics of a heavy issue rather succintly.

Here's the video:

Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Received a Huge Grant from the State the Week their Chief Lobbyist's Immunity Deal was made Public

2011-09-27T09:30:00.001-05:00

This little bit of news came to us by way of one of the comments to our last post:

The day before the news that the chief lobbyist from Wisconsin & Southern Railroad had been granted immunity in the ongoing John Doe investigation Wisconsin and Southern received a substantial grant from the Walker administration:

The state has awarded the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Co. a $6.9 million grant to improve a section of freight rail line running between Saukville and Elkhart Lake, Gov. Scott Walker announced Thursday.

[...]

The money was part of $17.5 million in grant and loan funding awarded this week by the state to construct freight rail-related facilities, and preserve and upgrade rail infrastructure.

"Wisconsin's freight rail system plays a major role in our state's economy, moving raw materials to industry and finished products to markets," Walker said in a news release. "These awards will help support economic growth in communities across our state and help ensure Wisconsin remains open for business."

The grant will cover 80 percent of the project's $8.7 million price tag. The state also will provide an $867,181 loan to assist with the project, while the remainder will be paid for by the railroad and the East Wisconsin Counties Railroad Consortium.

Nice catch.

MORE: Some more WSRR news:

A group charged with oversight of regional rail lines and funds used to improve railroad infrastructure will review financial records from Wisconsin and Southern Railroad for the first time in three years.

The East Wisconsin Counties Railroad Consortium voted unanimously to have the consortium's chairman, vice chairman, treasurer and corporation counsel meet with Wisconsin and Southern CEO William Gardner later this year to review the privately held company's 2010 financial records.

But Gardner has refused to provide hard copies of audits, quarterly financial reports and other documents the consortium is entitled to review under an agreement the parties signed on March 28, 2008.

[...]

Wisconsin and Southern has agreements with the DOT and the consortium that allow it to use the tracks in the region, as well as tap into $30 million in statewide funds and $225,000 in consortium funds to pay for rail infrastructure improvements.

The consortium is made up of nine counties that each contribute $25,000 per year to help maintain rail lines and infrastructure in the region. Each county is represented by two county board supervisors.

If the struggle between keeping proprietary information private and open records law enthralls you, then you'll love the rest of the article.

EVEN MORE: For the conspiratorially-minded, I'd actually consider looking at the above addendum a little more carefully, especially because it was written almost a week before news of the immunity deals broke. A number of questions bubble up in light of the recent events.

The most important are: why would WSRR agree to open it's books to state officials in 2008 and not want to do so today? It's unclear whether WSRR has provided the information to the consortium in the past -- if it has done so, what could have occurred in the interim to discourage them from doing so now?

Everyone's Favorite John Doe Investigation just went from Interesting to Downright Sexy

2011-09-23T18:24:00.000-05:00

If there's such a thing a speculative corruption porn -- and let's face it, there is -- then today's JDI news should be this month's centerfold:

A report from WisPolitics.comout today reveals that Gov. Scott Walker's spokesperson, Cullen Werwie,and two other individuals have been granted immunity in the ongoingJohn Doe investigation (outlined earlier by dane101 here).

"Rose Ann Dieck, a retired teacher and Milwaukee County Republicanparty activist, and Kenneth Lucht, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin &Southern Railroad, have also been granted immunity in matters 'stillunder inquiry' through the secret probe, according to the judgeoverseeing the case."

Why is this news suddenly so sexy? Two reasons:

First, the fact that immunity has been granted means investigators believe the grantees know something. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but the investigators think that granting them immunity will further their case. This says a lot about how far along the investigation is and where it is headed.

Which just so happens to be reason #2. Heretofore, the investigation appeared to be limited to Milwaukee County employees campaigning for Scott Walker on tax-payer time (and possibly using public resources), but the news that immunity has been given to a lobbyist for Wisconsin & Southern Railroad brings back a story most assumed was dead a year and a half ago:

Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Co.'s top official reported tostate regulators this week that he used company money to reimburseemployees for making political donations.

Donating corporate money to political candidates in Wisconsin is illegal.

The situation prompted Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker to return $43,800 in donations on Wednesday.

RobertFriebert, an attorney for railroad President and CEO William E.Gardner, said the donations were made to the gubernatorial campaign ofWalker, as well as other campaigns he declined to name.

"BillGardner has self-reported these incidents and is fully cooperating,"Friebert said. "What occurred was a mistake and were unintentional actson his part."

Yeah, a mistake...

This is a completely different ballgame and suggests, not only misappropriate use of public office, but also wholesale corruption and bribery: the presence of Kenneth Lucht on the immunity roster seems to indicate that Walker may have been aware of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Co and/or Robert Friebert's plan to launder campaign donations through various employees. If Walker was aware of the scheme, and since the "donations" exceeded the legal limits, this could open up the potential for bribery allegations against the Governor.

Now that's all the worse case scenario, but that possibility didn't exist in the public imagination as early as this morning. The scope and the potential consequences of the John Doe Investigation just got a whole lot larger today.

MORE: Dan Bice has more on when immunity was granted for several of the players:

Former Appeals Court Judge Neal Nettesheim, who is overseeing the secret criminal probe, said he had granted immunity to three people, including Cullen Werwie, spokesman for Walker, in this part of the case. Records show he was granted immunity April 14.

[...]

Lucht is the manager of community development with Wisconsin & Southern Railroad. His attorney could not be reached late Friday. He received immunity on Jan. 14.

Dieck, a longtime Republican operative, is listed as the chairwomanof the southwest surburban branch of the Milwaukee County RepublicanParty. She was granted immunity on Dec. 21.

So these folks have had immunity for sometime now. This obviously takes a lot of the dramatic wind out of the news' sails.

More on Tax Equality

2011-09-23T01:07:00.000-05:00

There's something we wanted to add to a post we did the other day in light of some new info. Paul Krugman has this nifty little chart out today that's worth discussing in some detail:

Translation:

Here’s how to read this: 40 percent of taxpayers with incomes between 30K and 40K pay more than 12.9 percent of their income in income and payroll taxes; meanwhile, 25 percent of people with incomes over $1M pay less than 12.6 percent of their income in these taxes. This suggests that there are a lot of very-high-income guys paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

There were a number of things that caught our collective eye on this chart:

The first was that 25% of households earning between $20-30k actually pay more than the 15% their tax bracket requires of them. The effective tax rate for most households is usually less than their bracket and this is the only group for which this appears not to be the case. By our estimate that's about 2.8 million households, all of them in the fourth quintile of income earners in the United State, that are "overpaying" on their federal taxes. These are working class, hourly wage-earners, probably on the young end of things.

This seems odd, though we can think of a few reasons why this is the case. More on this later.

There are a number of effective tax rates that are comparable or higher to the median millionaires' rate for incomes well below seven figures. Krugman actually sells his point short about the number of wealthy people paying lower rates then their underlings: it's not just the bottom 40% of millionaires, it's probably most of them.

Which led us to this curious observation: the median effective tax rate paid by millionaires is actually less than it is for earners making $500,000-999,999 ... and by almost an entire percentage point too. That got us thinking: is this just a bump in an otherwise upward progression or does it essentially mark the crest of a "hook"?

There are a few numbers to suggest that this is actually the case. First, there are the incomes over $10 million:

The number of Americans reporting incomes of $10 million or more also plunged even more than the steep drop in income for the population as a whole.

Just 8,274 taxpayers reported income of $10 million or more in 2009, down 55 percent from 18,394 in 2007. Compared with 2007, total real income of these top earners in 2009 fell 58.6 percent to $240.1 billion, but average income slipped just 8.1 percent to $29 million.

In 2009, the $10m+ club paid a median effective income tax rate of about 22.4%, and among them the whales of the economy paid even less:

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

In 2006 the average rate was 17%.

As luck would have it, Forbes just published it's annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans this week, so these are the folks we're talking about here. Last on the list is the Washington Redskin's less-than-popular owner Daniel Snyder at $1.05 billion.

So it would seem that once you become a millionaire in America, your effective tax rate actually decreases on average. Naturally, it's a little more complicated than that. We broken down some tax data from 2009 and found that the threshold is just a little bit higher:

$1-2 million = 25.3%
$2-5 million = 25.7%
$5-10 million = 25.25%
$10+ million (- wealthiest 400) = 22.95%
Wealthiest 400 = 21.5%*

Here's what it all looks like in graph form:

This shouldn't be too surprising. Rich folks have more tax loopholes and charitable write-offs to take advantage of than the folks who were "overpaying" earlier. Those guys are likely on their own when it comes to tax breaks.

All too often folks defend the wealthy against charges of not paying their fair share by clumping them together in a group, as if they earned their wealth together as some kind of collective. The fact is that wealthy folks are individuals and as such they appear to be paying a lower effective tax rate than millions of people who earn less than they do. This comes after a generation spent giving Americans in the 40-99 percentile of earners more of the federal tax load since 1970, as this chart below shows:

Which looks like this in graph form:

Every time you see a line swerve above the green line in represents a raise in the tax rates. You can see this only happens for people not in the upper 1% of income earners. The rich have had a very nice run of things for the last generation and have given the country very little to show for it. It's time they give a little back.

* I basically took the data from three different years and combined them in order to extrapolate figures for recent years that I could not find. Is this shitty analytics? You bet, but it's the best I could do while killing an hour waiting for a phone call. If you can correct the numbers, by all means, do your stuff.

Jonathan Krause's Tax Policy Boot-licking

2011-09-21T19:42:00.001-05:00

This blog is rapidly devolving into just a series of reactions to the senseless musings of Jonathan Krause and while that certainly does bother me, it doesn't seem to bother me more than the numerous ways in which Krause is wrong on an almost daily basis. Maybe I should pity someone who understands the world we live so little or marvel at the ability of someone so dense to function in society?

Today we were treated to yet another one of Krause oblivious anti-tax rants. As we've noted before, Krause usually confuses economic policy with his own sense of moral indignation and the old boy didn't disappoint this morning:

According to President Obama, 234,000 people are to blame for our current federal budget crisis.

This is entirely incorrect. Krause can't point to one place where President Obama says this, insinuates this, or comes anywhere close to communicating this idea. This is purely Jonathan Krause putting words into the leader of the free world's mouth.

Those 234-thousand people are the households that reported incomes of at least $1-million dollars last year. And--according to the President--they are the ones who did not pay their "fair share" of taxes.

How Krause equates the low tax rates among the highest earners in the country with causing "the current federal budget crisis" is not explained, but there's no need to spend too much time worrying about it: in Krause's mind people who do something wrong must pay a financial penalty. If you're unemployed, it's because you're lazy. If you're paying higher taxes, it's because you obviously must have done something wrong, like destroy the economy.

Those 234-thousand people are the one's targeted by the so-called "Buffett Rule" that the President is including in his new tax increase proposal. The "Buffett" referred to there is Warren Buffett, who claims his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. However, the "Oracle of Omaha" actually doesn't need a change in the Federal Tax Code to rectify that situation. He just needs to raise his salary from Berkshire Hathaway--which is taxed at a rate much higher than what his secretary would pay--and decrease what he claims as income from capital gains and dividends--which are taxed at a lower rate. Voila, Buffett is paying 35% in federal taxes--while his secretary (assuming she makes between 40- and 50-thousand dollars a year) will continue paying 15%.

And here we have yet another perfect example of how Krause simply doesn't understand what the hell he's talking about. The reason why Buffett cites the disparity in tax rates he and his secretary pay is because his secretary doesn't have the option to claim much of her salary as capital gains. No one who derives their earnings from a salary does and that's most of America. Now, not all millionaires can do this, but many, if not most, can. It's also precisely because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than income that Buffet is also pointing out a tax code that is replete with loopholes that benefit the wealthy.

According to an Associated Press "Fact Check" story, the top 10% of wage earners in the US pay 70% of all federal income taxes. The rest is picked up by those of us in the next 44% of wage earners. 46% of all Americans pay nothing in federal income taxes. And that final group is growing every year. Kind of makes you wonder who isn't paying their fair share. Of course, I'm not part of that 46% President Obama needs to scare/placate/over-promise to have any chance of winning election in 2012.

First of all, kudos to Krause for finally learning to cite his sources. Now if he can only learn to process the information he gets from those sources...

Next, let's actually flesh out these percentiles. If you make over $380,000 in 2010, congratulations, you are a part of America's economic ruling class: the top 1%. Among these rare creatures are the millionaires, who make up about 0.13% of all tax-payers. Here's a funky little chart to help us all out (click to embiggen).

Krause seems to think that we already tax the wealthy too much. The fact-checking piece he cites to refute Warren Buffett's claim to the contrary is entitled "The wealthy already pay more taxes." No one denies this and this is not what Warren Buffett was saying. The issue at hand is if the wealthy are paying enough taxes or their "fair share," as the President puts it. Let's look at Krause's numbers one more time:

10% of wage earners in the US pay 70% of all federal income taxes. The rest is picked up by those of us in the next 44% of wage earners. 46% of all Americans pay nothing in federal income taxes.

First of all, the canard that almost half of Americans pay nothing in taxes is a deliberate misrepresentation of basic demographics. According to the last census, 24.3% of Americans were seventeen years old or younger. That means if they did have a job it was mostly likely a part-time job that likely did not earn them to be taxed (In fact, all of these individuals are considered to be dependents and represent tax deductions). Also, 12.9% of Americans are 65 years old or older. These folks are most likely retired and live off a fixed income like Social Security, a pension or what have you. That's 37.2% of Americans right there, so what we're really taking about are 8.8% of working aged Americans who aren't paying income taxes... if we're using Krause's numbers.

But Krause can't even read the source he's citing correctly. Here's what the story Krause cites actually says:

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 46% of households, mostly low- and medium-income households, will pay no federal income taxes this year. Most, however, will pay other taxes, including Social Security payroll taxes.

Got that? Even the most poor will still pay taxes, a concept that usually evades Krause. Also escaping Krause is the changing nature of these folks. The 46% of Americans who aren't paying taxes this year are increasingly people who paid a lot of taxes in prior years. That's because they are very well-educated people who had relatively high-paying jobs until recently. Krause would have all his readers/listeners believe that the unemployed are lazy leaches sucking dry the producers of society. This is increasingly a remarkably irresponsible way of looking at the situation.

For Krause to portray the wealthy in America as somehow being over burdened by their taxes is absurd.

What Krause funadamentally fails to understand is that the wealthiest 1% of Americans control 40% of the country's wealth. Full stop. This was before the recession. Most people think the income ineqaulity in this country has gotten worse. Now the top 1% does account for abut 40% of tax revenue, but that's hardly the tax burden the average millionaire must bare. Again, according to the very article Krause cites:

In 2009, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid on average 24.4% of their income in federal income taxes, according to the IRS.

Keep in mind that nobody's talking about returning the rates to the levels of Reagan's first term, when the upper marginal income tax rate was about 50%. Asking millionaires to chip an additional 2-5% shouldn't seem unreasonable by comparison, especially given the howling conservatives like Krause do over the federal debt. Instead we get rhetoric about how the wealthy are the "job creators," the engines that power the economy, but this just talk. They may the masters of the econmic universe, but there's been no correlation between low tax rates for the wealthy and GDP growth:

Now bare in mind that nobody's talking about returning the rates to the levels of Reagan's firt term, when the upper marginal income tax rate was about 50%. Asking millionaires to chip an additional 2-5% shouldn't seem unreasonable by comparison, especially given the howling conservatives like Krause do over the federal debt.

But somehow it is. Somehow folks like Krause erupt into a fit when they hear plans to tax the upper 0.13% of Americans more, even though they are asked to do very little for their country ... like serve in the military, which draws heavily from lower income households.

Not that Krause has any understanding of lower income earners in America. Time and again he seems under the illusion that there's some kind of Big Poverty lobby that's out to screw him out of the money he earns spitting misinformation out over the airwaves. Few things embody this better then these lines:

46% of all Americans pay nothing in federal income taxes. And that final group is growing every year. Kind of makes you wonder who isn't paying their fair share. Of course, I'm not part of that 46% President Obama needs to scare/placate/over-promise to have any chance of winning election in 2012.

No, Krause is a part of he 54% the other side has to scare/placate/over-promise with pledges to never raise taxes under any circumstances, no matter how unlikely it will ever be that Krause ever reaches the upper 1% tax bracket.

The less income one makes, the less likely that person is to vote. In some places this can depress a turnout rate to less than 33% (and that's just what I found devoting 30 seconds to looking for an example -- there are likely far worse case studies out there). Fighting for the poor is typically bad politics, especially when the government already does so much for the wealthy.

If your a businessman who wants to get into China, you can go to the State Department and they will help you out, just like people who go to City Hall for building permit, only what the State Department does is significantly more expensive than what goes on at City Hall. If you have up to $250,000 in a savings account at a bank that goes under, the FDIC will cut you a check for your loses. The FDIC will also cut a check to some who lost $100 from the same bank, and they'll essentially "insure" both of these sums of money for the same price. People with wealth very frequently don't even have to wait in line to be heard by their governments -- all too often they are the first people consulted.

But let's forget all of this for a minute ... if raising taxes on the wealthy isn't the answer, as Krause so dickishly delineates, then what is? Why doesn't Krause tell us what we should be doing to repair the economy and eliminate the debt, because he's obviously has better solutions than the President, God knows how many real economists and Warren Buffett. I won't hold my breath waiting for anything constructive.