The People vs. Scott Walker

This morning when I woke up, I checked online and saw that Darling beat Pasch to take the fourth retain. Twas a disappointing morning.

But the more I think about things, the fact that at least two seats flipped over against big odds - pretty impressive feat for the people of Wisconsin that worked hard to see yesterday. Tens of millions of dollars of money from conservative front groups (such as the Koch's) were poured in - spent on advertisements and smears. Keeps the sheep like chicagorooer in the fold. Keeps uninformed idiots like my mother voting straight down the R line on the ballot.

If anything, this should make us fight harder. We the little people are under attack from these billionaires. These oligarchs and plutocrats. They do not care about their fellow man, they do not care about America and any of its communities. They only care about greed and power, and they sure have done a good job wrestling a lot of that away from the rest of us.

I applaud Kdogg for getting out there and trying to make a difference in this fight for the middle class. If I only did 1/500th of what he's done in 2011 - I'd be a much better person. Instead, the best I've done is make one appearance at a Bernie Sanders townhall and drunkenly scream out "Recall Walker" at a Brewers game. Shameful.

Yesterday should have been our wakeup call nationally. Unfortunately it's not. The media is making this as a confirmation of a Tea Party mandate, four of six Republicans retaining. They continue to ignore the war on the middle class, since they are supporters and PR arms of the plutocrats. Thankfully a large number of the people of Wisconsin are fighting back.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this now, so I'll just leave it at this: Forward, and recall Walker...

The Day After updates:

I first want to say that I have yet to see anything to suggest Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nickolaus engaged in any shenanigans during this election. It can be hard to tell. Speaking as a frequent election watcher, she seems to operate by different practices than other clerks, and let's just say that I don't necessarily think they are best practices. After the Kloppenburg election in April and subsequent recount, I'd say any election in which she's involved deserves an asterisk.
Of course, this many hours after polls closed in April, she hadn't magically found those 14K votes in the supreme court race either...


There were tabulation errors in the district 2 race between Sen. Robert Cowles & challenger Nancy Nusbaum. Cowles no longer won with 60% of the vote, but 56%. His loss wasn't surprising; he's pushing thirty years of holding this seat. What did surprise us was how quick the media called this race last night. By the time I got to the Majestic to watch results, two races had already been called and this was one of them. Turns out the correction was needed for a database error marking Democrat Nusbaum down for zero votes in several precincts. Link to full article.


The Cowles/Nusbaum correction makes for an interesting commonality between all six races yesterday. In all six races in these Republican districts, the Democratic state senate candidate outperformed Tom Barrett, Milwaukee mayor and 2010 Democratic gubernatorial candidate.


Robin Vos, prominent Assembly Republican, announced today that he is drafting a constitutional amendment proposal which would alter the state's recall process. Curious timing.


More than $35 million has been spent on these nine recall races thus far. In 2010, when roughly half the state senate was up for election, the total spent on these races was $3.5 million.


Scott Walker's response was basically saying it means the voters of Wisconsin want to see more bipartisanship. Worth noting here is that his party controls all branches of government in this state, so I don't think this sentiment can be construed as approval for Wisconsin Republicans' direction.


Russ Feingold has said he will make a decision about any potential 2012 run for political office (be it Wisconsin governor or U.S. Senator) sometime after Labor Day. I know he has been busy in the meantime. He's been writing a book, which is expected to be completed around then, and has a daughter expecting a baby in early September.


Next up: Democratic senators defend their seats on Tuesday, August 16th in the final two elections of Recallapalooza 2011.
Sen. Jim Holperin faces Tea Party activist Kim Simac up in the North Woods.
Sen. Robert Wirch faces attorney Jonathan Steitz in the Racine/Kenosha area in the southeast corner of the state.

I assume I'll be helping close down our office the day after those elections. I have no idea what I'll do with myself once I find myself with free time on August 18th.

Wow emoney. Congrats on a simplification that would make Rush Limbaugh proud.

Child labor may have gone by the wayside but I think discrimination is rampant in too many forms to list. As some people have stated and I personally agree with, unions have been their own worst enemy. Does this mean they should be abolished? Not from my perspective. They still do good things for workers who would be treated like dirt by greedy corportations.

And no one more so than chicagorooer

the people of Wisconsin don't find my arguments to be silly. They have proved these 2 times over now. Most of the nation didn't find my arguments silly either as many long standing dems and republicans no longer call congress home

Times are changing and yes I do agree with Bama. In the past unions did stand up to corporations and got a lot of workers’ rights passed.However that has been my point. Unions are no longer needed. Most if not all workers rights are not federal law. In addition you have many state laws that also give workers rights.

Now all unions do is stand up for their members and sue if they try to fire a member for things like drug abuse, late to work ect. The UAW union members many got busted drinking and smoking on lunch. Sure the union was there to make sure the worker wasn't fired!!. The workers should have been terminated on the spot

Unions care about 1 THING. Collecting union dues. The states can no longer afford these inflated pensions and healthcare benefits. Union or no union there isn't any money. This is why restructuring is needed.

Also I think it's horrible that in order for me to teach in illinois I have to join a union? I have to accept that I get paid the same wage as the next guy based on when I started NOT how good of a job I am doing. The days of zero accountability are gone

I grew up in a union house. I seen the good and bad of the unions. However my father and many like me all concluded the unions have been their own worst enemy

Really? I wasn't aware that voters were asked "How well do you think chicagorooer represented the anti-union stance on the popular web forum Inforoo (tm)?"

BTW you're at exactly -420 karma right now, how cool is that!

Union decline isn't solely done with the unions as their enemy. There are others. The proportion of unionized employees in this country today is about a quarter of what it was when Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers. It wasn't just the unions' undoing.
The wealthy elites in this country have been pushing an agenda proactively for decades, much more so since Ronald Reagan united these laissez-faire economists in a coalition with the religious right and defense hawks. It ushered in Reaganomics, which funneled the wealth upward without trickling down the promised benefits to a greater number of people. I feel that wealth in this country under this system grows in a manner similar to cancer cells in a body. In addition to this, the corporate interests have steered our policies away from investing in our nation toward investing in their profits. This happened through "free trade" deals like NAFTA which outsourced/hemorrhaged our jobs (many of them union) out of our nation, and participation in supranational non-governmental organizations such as the WTO which advocate for such policies.
Our national debt when Reagan was sworn in was one trillion dollars. It is fourteen trillion now, and growing by the day. The presidency, and the president is the one who proposes the budget, has been controlled by Republicans for twenty of my thirty years of existence. During that time, our debt has grown more greatly under Republican rule than under Democratic rule. There is a problem, yes, but I feel it is irresponsible to entrust those who contributed a greater share of the problem with finding the solution.

Bringing this back to the home front...

One of my best professors at that great state University of Wisconsin in Madison was Ed Friedman, who I had for a course called Politics And World Economy and regretfully nothing else. He exerted greater influence on my existing political beliefs than most teachers through whose classroom I passed; his influence made me nearly half as liberal and twice as libertarian as I was going into his class.
He stressed one point more than all others in his course, in multiple contexts throughout the semester, always highlighting it as the way forward for nations in economic transition and/or crisis. I feel it more simply and accurately defines what our economy needs more than just about anything I've ever heard. That phrase?

Growth with equity.

I feel that inequitable growth is the root problem. I feel the dominant economic paradigm in my lifetime has worked to undermine growth with equity. It is this inequitable growth which leads me to compare wealth generation under Reaganomics with a cancer upon the body economic. Wealth inequality in our country is nearing levels not seen since the onset of the Great Depression. I don't think this is coincidence. The only time during my thirty years when wealth inequality in America actually shrank was during the Clinton presidency. He did this by passing budgets with equal parts spending cuts and revenue generation. Every tax bracket saw their incomes rise under this approach, and our nation went into surplus.

Today, our GOP staunchly advocates no tax increases whatsoever.
I should hope some readers are aware of Grover Norquist, lobbyist and head of the advocacy group Americans For Tax Reform - another of these groups promoted/funded by the wealthy interests undermining our nation.
He is best known for his quote "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Norquist has a pledge that he asks all Republican representatives to sign, stating that they will oppose tax increases of any sort. Signed on to this pledge are 41 Republican U.S. Senators and a supermajority of House Republicans.
During our recent debt ceiling debate, President Obama and Sen. Reid had an offer on the table - "the grand bargain," they were calling it. Between spending cuts and revenue generation, the grand bargain totaled four trillion dollars. With revenue generation, the grand bargain was politically unfeasible to House Republicans. It was scrapped in favor for the ultimate deal, cutting one trillion in spending.
I can't necessarily trust Standard & Poor's, considering their AAA ratings of collateralized debt obligations which were toxic to the economy, but they did cite our Congress' stubbornness on revenue generation in recently downgrading the United States' credit rating from AAA to AA+. I feel this was in part due to the inequitable political power exerted by those with inequitable economic power.

It is those who have amassed such power over the past three decades that are pushing this agenda. They fund both parties to an extent, but definitely favor one party more than the other. They buy state candidates in advance of their election, and utilize organizations like ALEC to draft and disseminate legislation furthering their aims, and have these policies implemented on a national level. Their purchased politicians include Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and key members of the state legislature, who are merely implementing the agenda of their out-of-state puppetmasters.

The corporate puppets in office started earning their campaign cash in February, when they announced this bill. We know how things have proceeded since then.
Protests started and grew, yes... but to suggest that unions were the engine behind it is wrong. Those protests caught the Democratic Party and labor unions off-guard, and they weren't as quick to act as they should have been. Two of the biggest unions, AFL-CIO and SEIU, refused to even talk to one another at the height of these protests. I find it ludicrous to suggest that the Democrats or the unions were behind the protests. These protests overwhelmed them, too.

I wasn't out there because I believed in the union.

The first time I made my own sign for a protest was in 2002. It, too, had a concise three-word explanation for my position. It read "People Over Profits." I think that phrase captures the essence of the justification for most political actions I have ever taken.

If the problem is inequity, the solution is attacking the source of that inequity. That would be the man behind the curtain. It just so happens that the man behind the curtain is also the man behind Scott Walker and too many others.

Thank you, I did that.
to be honest, I was a little giddy when I saw -419

Well said Jury!

Carry on.

medicare and the veterans administration are both run by our government and cost less, provide more access to services, and have higher beneficiary satisfaction rates than private insurance. so yeah, i want more government involvement in that.

this boilerplate 'get the government off my back' is ridiculous. of course i don't like paying taxes and a large wasteful government. no one i know does. but in return for paying taxes i get to be an american. i leave my house and feel secure. my monetary investments are insured and monitored for bad behavior to provide me with a fair opportunity. clean water comes out of my tap. the food, medicine, and products i buy in a store will probably be very safe. i got a free education and a rate on my student loans from the government that were lower than the private market would have given me. the contractors who built the house i live in were licensed and it was inspected to make sure that it would not fall apart or catch on fire. i can call the police or fire for no charge if there is a problem. if there is injustice, i can take it up in a court of law. in short, thanks government.

Here I am wanting to talk about our big couple of days with GOTV and got sadly sidetracked.


The office I work in is a Madison field office of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Our role is to utilize local volunteers in supporting Democratic candidates in the recall elections around the state. We make the majority of the calls going out on behalf of DPW in the state.

We have an office about a half-mile from the capitol. We wound up at Laborers Local #464 about three miles away to accommodate the surge of volunteers. We had over one hundred volunteers making phone calls for one shift on Monday. Overall, over those four days, our office made nearly 100K phone calls (or actually hit it, we haven't yet processed all the data since I last checked) into recall districts for the GOTV effort.

I got the short end of the scheduling stick. I was in the office a week ago Monday & Tuesday, but my discussion with Nick was pretty much limited to my trip to La Crosse to deliver Shilling campaign/election materials. Nick wasn't around when I was Wednesday, and by the time we crossed paths Friday he just put me down wherever other people hadn't already been scheduled.

I worked Saturday/Sunday, so I only got to take part in the last two days of GOTV. I was one of the Greeters on Monday. Primary duties involved directing volunteers to our temporary location off a main thoroughfare, guiding into the right parking lot and leading them into the sign-in table. Since the primary Greeter duties clustered around shift changes, we made phone calls and checked on the outdoor volunteers in between. It was nice out, and on both nights we had upwards of two dozen volunteers making their calls from outside. We had so many volunteers come in during GOTV we had 145 pizzas delivered to us those four days.

Other roles included Sign-In Desk, volunteer Trainers - both primary and reserves when they were needed off of phone banking, the List Masters, the Conductor (to direct volunteer traffic after sign-in,) the Comfort Captains (handing out drinks/refreshments between calls,) Debriefers who gathered up phones/packets at the end of shifts, and a Redirect person to keep watch over the usual office space... in addition to the two staffers, Nick & Zach. There was a national-level Organizing For America person there who told us all it was the best-run phone banking operation she had ever seen at the end of Tuesday night.

I had two Greeter and a flex shift on Monday, and a Greeter, flex & Comfort Captain shift on Tuesday. I also got to do some of the social media volunteer recruitment, hitting up Twitter/Facebook/Craigslist/local sites looking for volunteers, while I was making these calls. I had other random tasks like driving people to the main DPW HQ as well. At the end of it all, I had made arrangements to borrow Mom's van to help haul our operation back to the regular office before we went to the official victory party.

At about 3pm Tuesday, we pivoted hard toward the Hopper-King race. We think we made enough GOTV calls those last five hours polls were open that we arguably helped her win her state senate race.

How all that went down is a subject for another time. I swapped shifts, Tuesday for tonight, which enabled me to have my schedule clear for the big day. I have to go fulfill my half of the bargain now.

History books tend to ignore a lot of the struggles about power and money, or glorify some other secondary detail and make it the primary.

I wasn't aware of the mills/cotton part of the story until just reading it now. But, it doesn't surprise me. But where does all the states rights stuff come into play, or was that secondary also?

You didn't see KDogg at the brunch dude? He was right next to us at one point and I have a photo or two of him with cursedlono.