About Wisconsin - update

Oh look.  Here's something else it's not supposed to be about.

From Democratic Underground - with an embedded link to the HuffPo article.

While there has been significant attention devoted to the fact that Walker's 144-page budget repair bill would strip away collective bargaining rights for public employees, the site "Rortybomb" points out a less noticed provision that would allow the state to sell or contract out any state-owned energy asset in no-bid deals with private corporations.

About That Wisconsin Thing

To be clear, I don't much like unions.  I also don't dislike them.  My thing is always about the balance of power.  I don't like anything that gets too big or too powerful.  So it's about trying to make sure there's always something to act as a counterweight to whoever holds the majority position in the power struggle du jour.

For whatever reason, Gov Walker has picked this fight.  There is, to be sure, a problem with all or most governments' budgets in that they're not taking in enough revenue to cover all the outlays - again, for whatever reason(s).

My point is that the real fight in Wisconsin has practically nothing to do with the current condition of the state's budget.  It's important to remember that almost nothing is ever really about what a politician says it's about.

Walker has proposed a budget that asks public employees either to take a hit on salaries and bennies, and/or to do without any increases - and it appears there's not much push back on any of that.  So we can kinda put aside all of this deflecting nonsense about how the unions are busting the budget with outrageous demands, or killing the chances of the noble politicians to get things back on track, or whatever the consultants have told them say.

What we're left with is another baldfaced attempt to chip away at everybody's rights.  Plain and simple.

Something else to remember:  we're deep into the Supply Side Economy.  It's a fairly simple notion.  If you flood the market with a huge supply of anything, you force the price down.  That goes for Labor too.  The greater the number of people trying to get a given job, the less you have to pay whoever you hire for that job.

We Are All Madisonians Now

It should prob'ly say "We are all Wisconsinites", but then I couldn't draw an allusion to James Madison.

So anyway,  Gov Walker is really under the gun here.  It's fun to watch him try to sell his pseudo-populist bullshit while being so obviously on the payroll of the Privatizing Looters.

I'll try to explain myself in a minute, but first, I want to point to something.  Look at this, by way of Democratic Underground, and then ask yourself, "isn't this what Free Market Capitalism should actually look like"?  Seems to me we've been buying a phoney-baloney substitute for a good long time.

As a hardcore Randian Zealot, I'm not in favor of "the collective", but that's not what's going on here - our understanding of 'evil collective' vs 'righteous competitor' has undergone a polar reversal.  Ayn Rand's big thing was always that power would be balanced naturally thru straight up competition; and that collectives would always usurp power thru the stifling of competition by force of arms.  Guess which 'side' is willing to use the government's monopoly on deadly force to coerce our cooperation with its plans to take, use and maintain power.

I'm not talkin' Dems vs Repubs here, but I have to say (for right now anyway), the Dems are starting to wake up a little; and that I think there're more of them who are a bit more willing to hew a little more closely to principles of honor and public service.  I realize there was a lot of equivocation in that last sentence, but I think it's even more important now than ever that we look for whatever slight differences we can find - and then throw as much support as we can muster behind any politician who's willing to dispense with the usual bullshit and talk to us about real policy choices, and the effects of those choices on real people in the real world.

This is likely to be pretty brutal for a while.

Keep Workin'

Continuing bad news for Boomers.

Be sure to check out the comments - seems to be split among the big 3.
1) Blame the victim
2) Soc Sec is a ponzi scheme anyway
3) We're being robbed

From The Rupert Street Journal:

This analysis uses estimates of 401(k) balances from the end of 2010 and of salaries from 2009. It assumes people need 85% of their working income after they retire in order to maintain their standard of living, a common yardstick.

Facing shortfalls, many people are postponing retirement, moving to cheaper housing, buying less-expensive food, cutting back on travel, taking bigger risks with their investments and making other sacrifices they never imagined.

"Inevitably, we find that, for the average person, there is not enough there," says financial adviser Paul Merritt of NTrust Wealth Management in Virginia Beach, Va., who has found himself advising many retirement-age people with too little savings. "The discussion turns out to be: What kind of part-time work do you want to do after you retire?"

Thanks, Professor

...that was loads of fun.

Bloomberg won't allow the embedding, so here's the link on YouTube.

How Interesting

The revolt is spreading faster and farther than could have been dreamed.  We've seen the glorious uprising of ordinary people against one bullying despot after another - Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria and now even The GOP.  Wait; uh, what?

A day or so ago, Mitch Daniels told a rather skittish crowd at CPAC that Repubs need to reach voters who don't care what Rush Limbaugh says (not quite what Daniels said, but words to that effect).  We've heard grumblings along those lines for years from some pretty big-deal Republicans like Christy Todd-Whitman and David Eisenhower and Mike Steele, et al; and practically all of them were thoroughly dismissed, spanked or otherwise quickly dispatched very loudly and very publicly - most of whom either knelt before His High Rushness to beg forgiveness or just limped away and disappeared.  Now, we have Little Mikey Medved feelin' his oats; and in The Rupert Street Journal, no less.

In short, the White House record of more than 200 years shows plenty of bad decisions but no bad men. For all their foibles, every president attempted to rise to the challenges of leadership and never displayed disloyal or treasonous intent.

This history makes some of the current charges about Barack Obama especially distasteful—and destructive to the conservative cause.

He goes on to take aim directly at Limbaugh, calling attempts to paint Obama as a willing destroyer of Mother America "almost perfectly imbecilic".

So how long before we hear from Limbaugh about Rupert Murdoch's vicious campaign against poor humble Rush?  How long before we hear mention of it on DumFux News itself?

SCOTUS Update

I just got off the phone with somebody in the public info office - the message on the main number listed on the website says to call 202-579-3000 and ask them to page a representative.  The lady was nice enough, but she said they have no intention of issuing a statement on Thomas's problems, and that there's no press availability scheduled either; and that if I want to ask questions, I have to call during business hours and ask for a regular PIO (Public Information Officer).

I have no idea what kind of protocol might be in place for this.  I do think it would be cool in the extreme if huge numbers of regular US citizens started making personal calls to SCOTUS to ask them to explain themselves to us.

SCOTUS

Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have both been implicated in some "minor" scandals the last few years.  Now we may have a major problem because ol' Clarence did quite a bit more than drop by a little get-together with the Koch Brothers in California.  ("a quick drop-by" is how the SCOTUS spokesmodel put it when asked by Common Cause).

Read it and weep.

Herald-Gazette (Knox County, ME)

Here's the full text of an article that seems to have mysteriously disappeared from NewsVine: (I got to it thru Google's cache archive - yay Google!)

What more does the Justice Department need to launch an investigation into the possible conflict of interests surrounding Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and their votes in the Citizens United case?

Maybe they need to hear from you.

We've asked Attorney General Eric Holder to meet with us to discuss all that's been uncovered in recent weeks, but we haven't gotten an answer yet.

Please call Holder's office today at (202) 514-2001 and ask that he meet with Common Cause! Click here after you've made the call.

We are simply asking for a brief meeting to discuss whether Justices Scalia and Thomas should have recused themselves from ruling on the Citizens Unitedcase, which opened the floodgates to corporate spending on election campaigns when it was decided in January 2010.

We already know that:

• Both justices attended secretive political strategy sessions sponsored by Koch Industries, a major beneficiary of the Citizens United ruling. Koch is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that has invested millions of dollars in political campaigns and causes.

• Justice Thomas failed to disclose more than $600,000 of his wife Virginia's income from the Heritage Foundation (he has recently amended his filings to reflect this income), or any of her unknown salary from Liberty Central, a political action group that was actively involved in the 2010 midterms.

• Justice Scalia recently met behind closed doors with the head of the House Tea Party Caucus, and Virginia Thomas is now promoting herself as an "ambassador to the Tea Party movement."

All these facts create a troubling appearance of bias. Attorney General Holder, as the head of the Justice Department, has a duty to review these issues and to make a decision regarding the launch of an investigation.

And we want a chance to lay out our case to him. Please call the Attorney General's office today at (202) 514-2001 and ask that he meet with Common Cause. 

Then, click here after you've made the call.

 (the link goes to Common Cause)

Curveball Lied

It's not exactly news, but at least somebody is trying to dig out some of the truth for us.  Unfortunately, it didn't matter to enough of us then, and it prob'ly won't matter much now either.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

My biggest fear right now is that we're allowing the system to lose its capacity for self-correction.  There are glimmers and flickers once in a while - Dick Cheney got heckled with shouts of "war criminal" at his speech to a CPAC session, and there's the tiny fraction of Tea Partiers who actually aren't stupid bigoted assholes - but for the most part, the big power players know they can pull some pretty horrendous shit and still count on getting cover.  The Hard-Right Radicals in particular know that DumFux News will polish their turds no matter what.  So once in a while we get a public hanging (Mark Foley, Chris Lee, William Jefferson, et al), and that helps us believe the lie that the Koch Bros and Wall Street - The American Aristocracy - aren't really running the joint and that we don't have any thing to say about it at all.

And Jesus wept.

Hoping For Egypt

The final outcome (if there is such a thing) in Egypt is something we won't know for a while, but here's a thought: Egyptians booted out a quasi-dictator with 18 days of protests that were mostly pretty relaxed and groovey.  There was no armed resistance; no guerilla tactics; no bombings; no terrorism - just growing numbers of everyday people gathering in different places to tell their government they weren't going to get pushed around any more.  The only real violence came when somebody (probably on Mubarak's side, if not at Mubarak's behest) decided to start a fight in the hopes of scoring some propaganda points.  People got hurt, and some hundreds killed, but it didn't work.  The people were unarmed; they defended themselves just enough to keep the crowd together, but they didn't counterattack and so far, I haven't heard anything about retaliation.  And most importantly, the military leadership was smart enough to know they couldn't win anything by ordering Egyptians to shoot Egyptians.

Here's my main take-away:  The notion that an armed citizenry is what ensures freedom is proven again to be a lie.