No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for the 'Politics' Category

April 20, 2011

New NRE Poll – When will Prosser’s win be official?

by @ 17:42. Filed under Grand Theft Courts, NRE Polls.

Since JoAnne Kloppenburg has asked for a recount, and strongly hinted that she would pursue a post-recount judicial appeal if she doesn’t somehow overcome a 7,316-vote deficit, it’s time to fire up the NRE Polls once again. If you’re wondering why the answers are presented in the order I presented them, they are, in my humble opinion, in decreasing lprobability.

When will the Prosser victory over Kloppenburg be made official?

Up to 1 answer(s) was/were allowed

  • By hook and by crook, Kloppenburg will be declared the winner (34%, 37 Vote(s))
  • When Kloppenburg accepts her recount-affirmed defeat (25%, 28 Vote(s))
  • When the federal 7th Circuit Court of Appeals smacks down the state-level kangaroo court and SCOTUS upholds (15%, 16 Vote(s))
  • When the Abrahamson-appointed judge shocks the world and upholds the recount-verified victory, and the 4th District Courtn of Appeals upholds (11%, 12 Vote(s))
  • When SCOTUS smacks down the state-level kangaroo court (8%, 9 Vote(s))
  • When a federal district court smacks down the state-level kangaroo court and the higher federal courts uphold (4%, 4 Vote(s))
  • When the state 4th District Court of Appeals smacks down the state-level kangaroo court (4%, 4 Vote(s))

Total Voters: 110

Loading ... Loading ...

Revisions/extensions (6:32 pm 4/20/2011) – If you’re wondering why I don’t have the Wisconsin Supreme Court included in the poll, while the state-level appeal would eventually end up there, it would be before a 3-3 divided court due to either Prosser recusing himself as he would be a party to the suit or Prosser’s seat being vacant after July 31. If you doubt that the result would be a 3-3 split, just look at the liberals’ attempt to toss Justice Michael Gabelman after he ousted “Loophole” Louis Butler (who, ironically, is likely going to be the reserve judge Lawgiver-In-Black chosen by Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson to all-but-certainly deliver the outcome Abrahamson and her former clerk Kloppenburg have a vested interest in).

Behold the return of Grand Theft Courts

by @ 16:11. Filed under Grand Theft Courts.

It is still a bit early to officially bring the “Grand Theft Courts” category out of retirement, but in her press conference today announcing her decision to seek a full statewide recount, JoAnne Kloppenburg tipped her hand on what will happen after the recount affirms her loss to Justice David Prosser. She strongly hinted that her post-recount judicial appeal will seek to have the results from the entirety of Waukesha County, and not just the city of Brookfield, declared null and void.

Damn if I didn’t predict that.

Revisions/extensions (4:23 pm 4/20/2011) – Kloppenburg claimed that the Government “Accountability” Board will join her in court tomorrow to ask for a full hand recount of at least several counties, and she asked for a special investigator into the actions of Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickoulas (the basis for my analysis of what will happen after Prosser wins the recount by somewhere between 6,816 votes and 7,816 votes, and likely closer to the 7,316 votes that it is now). I guess it isn’t too early to bring “Grand Theft Courts” out of retirement. Now if I could remember what I did with that graphic,….

April 19, 2011

Government Motors flaming out – both figuratively and literally

by @ 18:52. Tags:
Filed under Business, Politics - National.

Item #1 (H/Ts – Kevin and Fausta) – The same Chevrolet Volt involved in a garage fire last week burst into flames a second time Monday.

Item #2 – The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Treasury is looking to dump the remainder of its holdings in Government Motors (500,065,254 shares) over the summer. At the current trading price of $29.51, that would mean we the taxpayers lost over $14 billion on just the auto-manufacturing part of the GM bailout while (assuming GM makes it to the end of 2014 and the UAW fully cashes out), the entity that was most-responsible for the collapse of Old GM, the UAW, would make $12.55 billion on the deal.

That led Warner Todd Huston to unveil the last car from the current version of GM – the Government Motors WeeKan.

April 18, 2011

Nobody’s Senator raised no money this quarter. In other news, water is wet.

by @ 17:11. Filed under Politics - National, Politics - Wisconsin.

Since The Hill decided to breathlessly report that Herb “Nobody’s Senator” Kohl raised $0.00 in the first quarter of 2011, Baseball Crank decided to ruminate on it, and Allahpundit put it in the Hot Air Headlines, I’ll explain why it means NOTHING for everybody.

Let’s first go back to the ends of 2004 (just under 2 years before Kohl’s re-election in 2006) and 2010 (just under 2 years before Kohl is up for re-election again). By the end of the 2003-2004 cycle, Kohl raised $2,148 in individual contributions, contributed $185,000 to himself, and had $1,493 cash on hand with no debt. By the end of the 2009-2010 cycle, Kohl raised $270 from individual contributions, contributed $281,500 to himself, loaned himself $1,000,000 and had a net of $4,348 cash on hand (after removing the $1 million in self-debt). The situations were, outside of Kohl’s early loan to himself this time around, similar 2 years out.

Next, on to the first quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of 2011. In the first quarter of 2005, Kohl raised…wait for it…wait for it…$195.00 in individual contributions, loaned himself $2,000,000, spent $34,000 on polling, and spent another $20,000 on various other expenses. In the first quarter of 2010, Kohl raised…wait for it, wait for it…$0.00 in individual contributions, spent $42,000 on polling, and spent another $9,000 on other expenses. Again, the situations were similar.

As for the entirety of the 2005-2006 election cycle, Kohl raised $11,342 from individuals, $450 from non-party PACs, $120 from the Democrat Party PACs, and loaned himself $6,250,000. Once again, Kohl proved that the bastardization of his opening campaign slogan of “Nobody’s Senator But Yours” to “Nobody’s Senator” is the operative phrase.

Whether Kohl decides to run again or not is at least as much predicated on the fortunes of his Milwaukee Bucks as the decision is on anything else, and certainly more than on his (lack-of-)fundraising prowess. We in Wisconsin have often joked that the Bucks are a once-every-six-years playoff contender, coinciding with their owner’s re-election cycle.

Wisconsin Supreme Court election – what now?

by @ 7:26. Filed under Elections, Politics - Wisconsin.

In case you’ve been in a cave since mid-day Friday, the county-level canvasses of the election have been completed, and Justice David Prosser has a 7,316-vote (or a 0.4881-percentage-point) lead. The 3-business-day clock is running on challenger Joanne Kloppenburg’s and her campaign’s ability to ask for a recount of any or all of the wards in the state, with the costs to the counties being borne by the taxpayers as the margin is just under the 0.5-percentage-point cut-off. The word on the ether, or at least WISN-AM and the Jay Weber Show, is that the Kloppenburg campaign will have a press conference this afternoon, even though they do have until 5 pm Wednesday to inform the Government Accountability Board (Wisconsin’s state-level election authority) of their decision.

There are two choices the Kloppenburg campaign has at this point. They could decide to not ask for a recount, and let the pending GAB re-canvass be the final word. That would result in GAB announcing on May 15, the date assigned for the announcement, that Justice Prosser has won another 10-year term on the Supreme Court.

They could also decide to ask for a recount. It doesn’t matter how many or few wards they request, because, if they choose this path, the goal is not going to be to overcome the 0.4881-percentage-point lead Prosser has. No recent recount with at least 1.5 million votes at stake has resulted in a change of margin of more than 0.05 percentage points, even with a post-recount judicial challenge to boost the margin-of-change.

Assuming that the Kloppenburg campaign strategy is to “win” by any means possible, their goal, under this scenario, is to get a post-recount judicial appeal into what will amount to a kangaroo court, presided over by a reserve (retired, for those of you outside Wisconsin, and thus no longer accountable to the voters) judge appointed by Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, who has a thinly-veiled vested interest in a specific outcome. Their strategy will be to have declared, at a minimum, the city of Brookfield (which Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickoulas forgot to report to the Associated Press on election night, but which was reported on the county-level canvass) incompetent to determine the affairs of Wisconsin the Kingdom of Dane. Assuming no margin change in a recount, tossing out the city of Brookfield results woudl give Kloppenburg an 87-vote “lead”.

Of course, if the recount finds a further net gain for Prosser (after all, the county-level canvass found, not counting Brookfield, a net gain of 117 for Prosser over the election-night numbers collated by the AP), they might be forced to have declared the entirety of Waukesha County incompetent to determine the affairs of the Kingdom of Dane. Tossing the entirety of Waukesha County would give Kloppenburg a 52,000-vote “lead”.

Any state-level appeal would probably be pointless on its own as it would first go to the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals. They would be expected to uphold whatever novel “judicial finding” the kangaroo court creates out of thin air to justify disenfranchising either an entire municipality or an entire county. At best, since either Justice Prosser would need to recuse himself or the seat would be vacant pending a final disposition, a further appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court would result in a 3-3 deadlock.

However, whatever novel “judicial finding” the kangaroo court would create out of thin air would almost certainly invoke an equal protection claim a federal court could latch onto. I would expect that, no later than the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, that claim would find a friendly judicial panel, and after tens of millions of dollars wasted under this scenario, the result would end up being what it is as of today – a Prosser victory.

The ball is in the Kloppenburg campaign’s court. I urge them to consider that, at the end of the day, they can’t win, and spare the state the pain and expense of a “by any means necessary” strategy.

Revisions/extensions (11:43 am 4/18/2011) – I swear that, while Kevin Binversie and I discussed the Butch Coolidge/Marcellus Wallace question, I didn’t crib from Kevin’s take (both his and mine are featured on this morning’s WisOpnion’s round-up). His close – “Because the worst fear the Kloppenburg legal team truly has, is not ‘losing’ a recount. It’s if Waukesha County is allowed to re-run its ballots through its machines again, and the numbers come out the same.”

Just as a reminder, if Kloppenburg opens the recount door, Prosser will be able to force a recount in any ward Klopenburg doesn’t have recounted before any judicial appeal. Given the last anybody heard of GAB’s investigation into Waukesha County was that the as-canvassed numbers from Brookfield were legitimate, one has to wonder if Kloppenburg wants to politically go down that road.

April 17, 2011

Sunday Hot Read – Keith Hennessey’s “Understanding the President’s new budget proposal”

by @ 16:37. Filed under Politics - National.

If you’re confused by President Obama’s speech/”budget”, Keith Hennessey deciphered it for you. I’ll skip to the quick, but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Here are four broad reactions to the new proposal.

First, this is a short-term budget, not a long-term budget. There are three forces driving our long-run government spending and deficit problem:

  1. demographics;
  2. unsustainable growth in per capita health spending; and
  3. unsustainable promises made by past elected officials, enshrined in entitlement benefit formulas.

The President’s proposal addresses none of these forces. It instead spends most of its effort on everything but those factors. His proposed Medicare and Medicaid savings, while large in aggregate dollars, are quite small relative to the total amount to be spent on those programs, and he lets the largest program in the federal budget (Social Security) grow unchecked. While Bowles and Simpson focused their efforts on the major entitlements and also addressed other spending areas and taxes, the President’s proposal does the reverse, focusing on other mandatory spending, taxes, and defense. That’s a short-term focus.

Second, this proposal “feels” to me like the recently concluded discretionary spending deal. It’s the size of a typical deficit reduction bill that Congress usually does every five or so years. I’m sure the affected interest groups are even now preparing to invade Washington to explain how a 3-5% cut will devastate them. The problem is that our fiscal problems are now so big that they require much larger policy changes.

Third, while framed as a centrist proposal, the substance leans pretty far left. It’s deficit reduction through (triggered) tax increases on the rich, plus defense cuts, plus unspecified other mandatory cuts and process mechanisms that might cut Medicare provider payments. Centrist Democrat proposals do all of these things, but they also reform Social Security and Medicare, usually through a combination of raising the eligibility age, means-testing, and raising taxes.

Fourth, the President’s speech was campaign-like in its characterization of and attacks on the Ryan plan.

The President’s proposal could be the opening bid in a negotiation with Congressional Republicans. When you combine this substance with the President’s aggressive partisan attacks and framing of the Ryan budget, however, it’s hard to see how this leads to a big fiscal deal this year or next. A small incremental bill, which “cuts” spending by a couple hundred billion dollars over the next decade, is possible. But the chances of a long-term grand bargain in the next two years just plummeted from an already low starting point.

Bonus must-read – James Pethokoukis found a Goldman Sachs analysis which shows that up to 60% of Obama’s deficit “reduction” over the next decade comes from tax increases, including an unspecified $1 trillion in new taxes (over 12 years) compared to the CBO “alternate baseline”. That does NOT include either the tax hikes on those making over $200,000 or the “trigger” to essentially eliminate itemized deductions when the debt-to-GDP ratio fails to fall.

April 15, 2011

Must-see TV – Iowahawk and Hammer edition

by @ 9:07. Filed under Budget Chop, Politics - National, Taxes.

I don’t think you’ll be able to take Iowahawk’s advice of “Sleep tight, everybody” after this…

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham dreams of what an audit should be.

Happy </sarcasm> Traditional Tax Day, everybody.

Friday Hot Read: Phil Gramm’s “The Obama Growth Discount”

by @ 7:57. Filed under Economy Held Hostage, Politics - National.

(H/T – Tom Blumer, who has some further stats worth reading)

Former Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal just how disappointing the POR Economy (™ Tom Blumer) “recovery” has been:

Had the U.S. economy recovered from the current recession the way it bounced back from the other 10 recessions since World War II, our per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) would be $3,553 higher than it is today, and 11.9 million more Americans would be employed.

Those startling figures are based on the average recovery rate of real GDP and jobs three years after the beginning of each postwar recession. Some apologists suggest that the current recovery is so weak because the recession was so deep. But the totality of our experience in the postwar period is exactly the opposite—the bigger the bust, the bigger the boom that follows.

On average, three years after the four deepest previous recessions started, real GDP was 7.6% higher than the pre-recession level. During the Obama recovery, real GDP is up only 0.1%. Forty months after the start of the 1953, 1957, 1973 and 1981 recessions, total employment was on average 4.7% higher than the pre-recession peaks, while total employment today is still down 4.7%—that’s a total employment gap of 13.9 million jobs.

Gramm goes on to further contrast the POR Economy to that of the Reagan recovery, including a laundry list of sabotage undertaken by Obama.

There is a further bit of required reading from Tom – what jobs have been gained since the “official end” of the recession has been entirely temporary work. That’s right – since June 2010 2009, a seasonally-adjusted 263,000 non-temporary jobs have been lost.

That’s the reason why Shoebox started the “Economy Held Hostage” series.

Revisoins/extensions (4:05 pm 4/15/2011) – Corrected a typo. D’OH!

April 14, 2011

I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday $25B in 2021 for a hamburger $18B in new spending today

by @ 16:13. Filed under Budget Chop, Politics - National.

I briefly touched on this as part of my third revision/extension to yesterday’s post that found that the federal government, under the “Grand Deal of 2011”, will be spending $18 billion more in discretionary funds in FY2011 than it did in FY2010 using the bottom-line outlays. I decided it needed its own post.

The CBO explained today that the reduction in non-emergency FY2011 budget authority will, assuming it gets adhered to in future budget years, eventually result in between $20 billion and $25 billion of reduced spending through FY2021 compared to leaving the budget authority at FY2010 levels. Of course, that assumes that Wimpy Congress actually remembers when it’s Tuesday that the budget authority was cut. It also is in current dollars, which means that once inflation is figured in, it’s likely that the $18 billion in new spending today won’t be fully-covered by the potential $25 billion in reduced spending over the succeeding 10 years.

It’s actually two situations. The future savings, that may or (more likely) may not come, is based on the Wimpy principle of saying, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” The old “Popeye” cartoons never did resolve that, but you can bet your bottom grain of smokeless gunpowder that the Congressional equivalent, especially as long as either half of the bipartisan Party-In-Government has control of so much as one House of Congress, will simply declare Tuesday as not existing.

The present situation is sort of like the carpenter example that Jeff Dunetz outlined:

The difference in the numbers are the difference between outlay and spending authority. Look at it this way. Say you are a carpenter and have been given $100,000 to redo someones kitchen. After one week’s worth of work you have allocated $75,000 to specific items but you haven’t purchased anything as of yet. The home owner comes to you and says you can only spend $70,000. You have cut the budget (or spending authority) by $30,000 but cut outlays by only $5,000.

The problem is that the outlays are actually the cost overruns, which, because Congress is the opposite of progress, will be fully-funded. With that in mind, let’s restate the example:

Say you are a carpenter and have been given $100,000 to redo someone’s kitchen. You’ve been asked by the homeowner and his wife to keep the spending to a maximum of $75,000 (i.e. budget authority) because that’s what the two agreed it would cost, but he agreed to cover any and all cost overruns out of a “separate” account his wife knows nothing about (hence the $100,000 in outlays). After a week, you discover that it’s actually going to cost $105,000 and take an extra week. Because there’s a penalty in the contract negotiated by the wife, the requested maximum has been cut to $70,000, but because the the homeowner also signed a provision putting him on the hook for the entirety of the cost overruns, it’s still going to cost $105,000.

April 13, 2011

Having Balls

by @ 20:05. Filed under Budget Chop, Politics - National.

When running for the 2010 elections, Republicans attempting to harness the Tea Party enthusiasm promised that they would cut $100 B from the budget.  Barely had they gotten elected and the Republicans backed off their $100 B promise and said they could only get something in the $60 B range.  When it came to actually getting an agreement, they managed to hold on to a cut that was advertised as $38 B, but quickly identified as only $14 B.

Now that folks have had a chance to read the actual legislation, it turns out that none of the previously touted numbers are the real reduction that Boehner was able to negotiate.  According to numerous sources, the actual amount of deficit reductions that Speaker, “We are going to cut $100 billion in discretionary spending next week” Boehner managed to get was only $353 Million…MILLION!

When it became apparent last year that the Republicans would retake the house I had conversations with several people who are much more knowledgeable of Republican leadership than I.  I told them my reservations about Boehner becoming speaker and how everything I had seen from him lead me to believe that he was another Washington lifer who would say or do what he needed to to keep his position.  I was told by several of them that Boehner was the “real deal.”  While now living in Kentucky, I agreed to be from Missouri and be shown that Boehner was a conservative.

No more!

I am now on record as saying that Boehner is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the Republican party.  Boehner is either a charlatan or ignorant.  Regardless of which, he is not worthy of leading a party’s effort that is overwhelmingly made up of a base that desires, no, DEMANDS reductions in government spending.

This continuing resolution needs to be voted down.  Boehner needs to be personally repudiated by any true House conservative for putting them in a position of having to support this sham of an agreement.

I hate Nancy Pelosi.  I despise everything about the woman.  Even with my level of disdain for her I give her props for one thing; she has a set of balls as big as two moons hung side by side.  Nancy has balls and Boehner is a eunuch!

Going from $100 billion of spending “cuts” to $18 billion of new spending – UPDATE – And maybe $20-25 billion of savings down the road

by @ 18:31. Filed under Budget Chop, Politics - National.

(H/Ts – Allahpundit and Ace)

The Associated Press (as carried by the Washington Post) reported on a Congressional Budget Office report of the purported $38 billion cut deal reached by House Republicans, Senate Democrats and Barack Obama last weekend, and found that not only is the actual outlays authorized only a (wrongly-estimated) $15 billion cut, but that the impact to the deficit is…wait for it…

…Wait for it…

$352 million (this on a roughly-$1,600,000 million FY2011 deficit).

But wait, it gets worse. While I haven’t been able to find the CBO report referenced by the AP, I did find a 1-page estimate of the FY2011 discretionary spending amounts in the deal. Take a good look at the number at the lower-right corner – $1,364,714 million (or if you prefer, $1,365 billion after rounding to the nearest billion). That is the total amount of outlays that will take place in FY2011, including $76 billion for “emergencies”. In FY2010, the federal government had $1,347 billion in discretionary outlays.

Fucking brilliant, Boehner. I hope this deal fails and the government shuts down, then I hope somebody primaries Boehner right out of his district.

Revisions/extensions (6:34 pm 4/13/2011) – Somehow forgot the link to the article. Fixed.

R&E part 2 (9:25 pm 4/13/2011) – National Journal dug up (H/T – Dad29) a further document from the CBO comparing the total discretionary spending outlays in the “deal” to those called for in all the previous continuing resolutions for this year. Roll tape of the bottom-line projected full-year outlays of the continuing resolutions that had ending dates in 2011:

  • The CR through 3/4/2011 – $1,361 billion
  • The CR through 3/18/2011 – $1,360 billion
  • The CR through 4/8/2011 – $1,359 billion
  • The CR through 4/15/2011 – $1,368 billion (fucking brilliant – a $9 billion increase just to “save” the federal government for a week)

Oh, did I forget to mention that even HR1, the supposed $100 billion $61 billion non-security discretionary-spending cut, had a total projected discretionary outlay of $1,356 billion (once again, higher than FY2010’s $1,347 billion)?

R&E part 3 (3:30 pm 4/14/2011) – (H/T – Jeff Dunetz) The CBO explains how, assuming Congress doesn’t simply add all the spending back in, there MIGHT be a cumulative $20 billion-$25 billion in actual spending reduction over the next decade versus doing nothing. Of course, once one figures inflation into that, even the $25 billion in savings down the road won’t match the $18 billion in new spending today.

Shorter Obama budget plan

by @ 15:45. Filed under Politics - National.

The classic galley ship scene from “Ben-Hur” describes perfectly what Obama thinks the budget needs to be…

Of course, there is one difference – unlike Arrius, I don’t think Obama will eventually tire of ordering ramming speed from we the rowers.

April 11, 2011

Tipping the hand of the largest post-election theft in modern history

by @ 14:52. Filed under Politics - Wisconsin.

WisPolitics reports that the Waukesha Democrat Party vice-chair, and Democrat representative on Waukesha County’s canvassing board, Ramona Kitzinger has retracted her statement from Friday saying the canvass in which the city of Brookfield votes were re-added to the unofficial total reported Tuesday was correct. All that is needed now to steal an election that was “won” by an order of magnitude larger than any previously stolen election since Reconstruction is a complicit Lawgiver-In-Black.

Revisions/extensions (5:12 pm 4/11/2011) – WisPolitics reports that, while the GAB investigation into what happened last week in Waukesha County continues, the final canvass numbers from the city of Brookfield matches what was reported by the city clerk on Tuesday.

With 71 of 72 counties canvassed…

by @ 13:08. Filed under Politics - Wisconsin.

In case you missed the big news of Thursday, Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickolaus forgot to save the vote totals from the city of Brookfield on Tuesday night, turning what looked to be a razor-thin Joanne Kloppenburg margin into one favoring David Prosser by almost the margin-of-“free”-recount. WisPolilitics reports that, with just Milwaukee County to complete its canvass of the votes (and four three, with Kenosha now posted other counties yet to have the canvassed results posted to the GAB site), Prosser has a 7,304-vote lead.

James Wigderson and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board don’t often agree, but they agree that given the current margin, a recount would be a waste of time and money. Of course, since a recount is the only gateway to get it into a court with a reserve judge appointed by Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson (side note; did Loophole Louis Butler remember to file to become a reserve judge after he was tossed from the Supreme Court), I don’t think Kloppenburg will go as quietly into the good night as her campaign’s private canvass of Waukesha County.

Distilling the Republican “Big Three”

by @ 12:59. Filed under 2012 Presidential Contest.

One of Jim Geraghty’s readers beat me to this observation – “Tim Pawlenty is the Huck/Mitt love child — a telegenic blue state governor with a populist tone.”

Insert your own inappropriate punchline here…

It’s becoming a pattern, federal edition

by @ 10:56. Filed under Politics - National.

The first two big battles of 2011 in Wisconsin both involved big contributors to the Democrat Party (a successful attempt to limit both product and medical malpractice liability, thus reducing the paydays of lawyers, and an attempt to limit the mandatory union dues for public workers that is still stuck in the courts). Taking a page from the Wisconsin Democrats, Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama successfully threatened to shut down federal government unless Planned Barrenhoo…er, Parenthood, which contributed over $1 million to Democrats the last election cycle, continued to receive federal funding.

Yep, it’s all about the money (oh, and forcing a minority, highly-divisive social agenda down the throats of the country).

April 6, 2011

Goodbye Wisconsin, hello Kingdom of Dane

by @ 22:09. Filed under Politics - Wisconsin.

This one’s going to be rambling, partly because I’m out of practice, partly because I still feel like death warmed over, and partly because I’m still loopy from election-induced sleep deprivation. I also promise words that are not going to be safe for work. Most of my thoughts over the last 24 hours have been scattered across the ether, so it’s time to collate them in one place.

On August 1, the signs declaring Wisconsin The Kingdom of Dane closed to business on order of the Wisconsin Kingdom of Dane Supreme Court will go up as Joanne Kloppenburg will join and create a freshly-minted liberal majority. That will put an end to any further action by the still-sitting-for-now Republican majority in the Legislature and Governor Scott Walker, which were already stopped by the opening move by the Democrat Party of Dane County (which is the DPW and has been since 2002) to invalidate and (at least in the hopes of the Left) ultimately prematurely reverse their elections.

I’ve seen the movie of those who at least claim to be right of center showing up for one election and one election only, thinking the job is done, before. Indeed, I lived through the prequel, which featured the same leading politician, Scott Walker. Back in 2002, after an unconscionable 2000-era pension grab by the Milwaukee County politicians in power was discovered, we tossed out the county executive and replaced him with Walker. The bad news – we thought we were essentially done with that and failed to replace more than 6 of the 25 board supervisors with people who would vote to implement the changes Walker wanted. Ultimately, Walker was left with only 3 reliable votes of 19 on the board once it was resized and two election cycles happened.

Fast-forward to the present. While we gave Walker a Legislature who would not be, at the end of the day, a roadblock, we forgot to make sure that the Democrats could simply run away to stall things. Worse, when push came to shove, we once again forgot that the Left considers the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, THE END-ALL, and that this particular election could (and ultimately did) give them the launching point to return state government to the state which they see it: of the lawyers, by the Democrats, for the unions.

Looking over the county-by-county numbers, there is a serious warning light flashing at Sean Duffy. For all the focus, and rightly-so, on how it was Dane County that led the charge, the lowest drop-offs from Tom Barrett’s vote totals in November to Kloppenburg’s, and the highest from Scott Walker’s to David Prosser’s, happened not in Dane County or even in its geographical “sphere of influence”, but in northwest Wisconsin.

By the same token, the Fox Valley proved that their one-time infatuation with Steve Kagen was an abberation. Yes, I know Prosser is from Outagamie County, but the surrounding counties also had, on a percentage basis, more liberal dropoff than conservative drop-off.

For those who want to blame Walker, or the Brothers Fitzgerald for losing the messaging war, fuck you. No, FUCK YOU! Where the fuck were we (and yes, I include myself because I didn’t do long-form post after long-form post after long-form post) when Walker’s office released a week-long series of press releases detailing outrageous exploitations of the collective bargaining system that was dutifully ignored by the legacy press? Where the fuck were we when the Greater Wisconsin Committee threw the utility sink at Prosser? If there’s one thing we should have learned in the age of New Media, it is that WE are the messengers.

For those of you who want to blame the fact that the Brothers Fitzgerald never really did move on voter ID, much less as the first thing, or for moving on collective bargaining, once again, fuck you. Instead of the Left using collective bargaining as their rallying cry, they would have unleashed the same fucking tactics against voter ID with, as far as yesterday is concerned, more success. Indeed, any action on any idea on our agenda, or even inaction would have been used as their “spark”.

Even though the war, at least for the next 4 years, is lost, there are “skirmishes” (battles, really, even though only four people matter in the Kingdom of Dane and these skirmishes will be duly ignored by them) to be won in preparation for the next war – the 2015 Supreme Court race and the liberation of Wisconsin. That it took both the utility sink and a brain-fart-induced apathy for the Left to hit parity is at least somewhat encouraging, even in Wisconsin. It is especially encouraging for those in other states; the lesson of the day is to keep up the skeer because the Left never gives up.

April 4, 2011

Monday Hot Read – Kirsten’s “Solidarity Fever’s Fatal Effects”

by @ 13:26. Filed under Politics - Wisconsin.

Over at Piece of Work In Progress, Kirsten tells how AFSCME and SEIU sold their represented workers in Sauk County down the river. In exchange for 33 more months of forced union dues, AFSCME and SEIU both ceded more than what the budget repair bill would have forced (emphasis in the original, typo corrected):

So, according to each of the revised contract drafts (a representative sample of which you can find here), the county would have the power through 2013 to:

  • Implement a 0% pay increase each year
  • Hire and fire at will in the face of economic difficulty
  • Change or even abolish pay classifications
  • Determine type and level of healthcare coverage offered
  • Increase healthcare contribution levels over time
  • Set the level of pension contributions

The kicker – the SEIU and AFSCME sheep went along with it, while the clerical workers in the sheriff’s office turned it down.

April 1, 2011

Friday Hot Read – Stephen Moore’s “We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers”

by @ 8:40. Filed under Economy, Politics - National.

Stephen Moore has a devastating look at why we’re in so much trouble in today’s Wall Street Journal:

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government….

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. (Editor’s note; for several months in 2009 and 2010, Wisconsin had more government workers than manufacturing workers, and the ratio as of February was 435,300 in manufacturing and 424,700 in government) Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Do read the entire, depressing thing.

March 31, 2011

Eating the rich

by @ 18:42. Filed under Politics - National.

In case you, like me, missed Iowahawk’s explanation of how we can get through 2011 on a mere $10 billion a day, Bill Whittle has you covered with a video version…

Of course, as Bill points out, what happens in 2012 when we need $11 billion a day and the rich are gone?

Lawgiver-In-Black Sumi has declared La Follette the Übergovernor

by @ 9:29. Filed under Breaking news, Lawgivers-In-Black, Politics - Wisconsin.

That is the net effect of the latest pronouncement from Dane County Circuit Judge Judge Maryann Sumi, who has also declared herself superior to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which back in 1943 declared that no court has jurisdiction over the publication of an act, even if that act was, arguably, passed in a manner contrary to the state constitution.

March 29, 2011

Tax the rich? We’ve already tried that – part 2

by @ 19:22. Filed under Politics, Taxes.

(H/T – Lance Burri, just because I don’t think a million hits is enough for him, or is it the fact that he used the eggs-in-a-basket analogy)

If I had paid attention on Saturday, I probably would have done this as the Weekend Hot Read. Robert Frank of The Wall Street Journal used the collapse of the rich and the resulting collapse of various states’ tax revenues as the topic of the WSJ’s Saturday Essay. I’ll take a larger chunk than Lance did to get you to read the entire thing:

The story of (Brad) Williams, the former chief economist and forecaster for the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, shows just how vulnerable states have become to the income shocks among the rich, and why reform has proven difficult.

In the mid-1990s, shortly after taking the job, Mr. Williams discovered he had a problem. Part of his job was to help state politicians plan their budgets and tax projections….

Historically, California’s tax revenues tracked the broader state economy. Yet in the mid-1990s, Mr. Williams noticed that they had started to diverge. Employment was barely growing while income-tax revenue was soaring.

“It was like we suddenly had two different economies,” Mr. Williams said. “There was the California economy and then there were personal income taxes.”

In all his years of forecasting, he had rarely encountered such a puzzle. He did some economic sleuthing and discovered that most of the growth was coming from a small group of high earners. The average incomes of the top 20% of Californian earners (households making $95,000 in 1998) jumped by an inflation-adjusted 75% between 1980 and 1998, while incomes for the rest of the state grew by less than 3% over the same period. Capital-gains realizations—largely stock sales—quadrupled between 1994 and 1999, to nearly $80 billion.

Mr. Williams reported his findings in early 2000, in a report called “California’s Changing Income Distribution,” which was widely circulated in the state capital. He wrote that state tax collections would be “subject to more volatility than in the past.”

The essay goes on to note how the states that became most-addicted to the outsized increased revenue from the high-income earners, have become the worst economic basket cases as the POR Economy (™ Tom Blumer) decimated those same people.

$100,000 per commuting beneficiary is still too much

by @ 18:12. Filed under Choo-choos, Politics - Wisconsin.

I’m disappointed to learn that Scott Walker has applied for at least $150 million in Porkulus funds for the Hiawatha Milwaukee-to-Madison line to turn that into a “bit faster than car speed” line. Despite it being one of Amtrak’s top 10 lines and setting a new ridership record of 783,060 riders one-way passenger trips in FY2010 , it still needed a $5.5 million subsidy (90% covered by OtherPeoplesMoney in the form of federal money with a very-minor Illinois contribution) last year.

Once one strips away the 100 people per weekend day from even the projected 850,000 one-way passenger trips, that leaves roughly 1,500 daily commuters who rather like the idea of paying less for getting down to where they really want to be than the average parking rate in downtown Chicago while sucking the difference between what they pay and what it costs out of your pocketbook.

Cash for Clunkers II – Electric Boogaloo

by @ 10:58. Filed under Business, Politics - National.

Kerry Picket caught a change to the $7500-per-electric vehicle giveaway to Government Motors being pushed by Michigan Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow in a proposed bill and President Barack Obama in his 2012 budget. To wit, instead of a tax credit of $7,500 for buying the Chevy Volt (and the all-electric Nissan Leaf), that $7,500 would be taken off at the dealer, with the dealer hoping to get compensated by the government at a later date. If you don’t believe Kerry’s and my assertion that it is Cash for Clunkers II, allow me to lift a couple paragraphs from the story:

In fact, Department of Energy’s David Sandalow told Bloomberg News in February the insta-credit would operate the “same way the 2009 ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program worked.”

The Detroit News reported Vice President Joe Biden said at an Indiana battery assembly plant, “You won’t have to wait,’ it would be like the cash-for-clunkers program.”

No word if the dealers will have to run glass through the engines of any cars traded in for the overpriced glorified golf carts, or whether the compensation for the dealers would be any faster than it was for the first Cash for Clunkers.

It’s also worth noting that Government Motors is currently trading at somewhere under $31/share. If the Treasury could dump its remaining 33.3% of Government Motors now, it will have lost over $13 billion on the venture, most of it transferred to the UAW.

Revisions/extensions (11:31 am 3/29/2011) – There’s more discussion at Sister Toldjah, who suggested a new liberal motto (“If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again”), The PJ Tattler from Bryan Preston, who noted all the Dem-supporting groups who will also be bailed out, and Memeorandum (just because I haven’t linked there lately).

Reinforcing the “Act 10 is law” argument

by @ 0:36. Filed under Politics - Wisconsin.

Yesterday, the Wisconsin Department of Justice filed motions for both the repeal of Judge Maryann Sumi’s temporary restraining order and the withdrawal of its emergency appeal of the case because it asserts Act 10 is now in force and has been since Saturday. I’ll provide the Cliff’s Notes version:

  • With regard to the actual publication of an act, the Secretary of State has but one role – within one working day (i.e., a weekday that is not a state-recognized holiday) of the deposit of an act in his office, designate a date of publishment that is within 10 working days of its enactment. It is the Legislative Reference Bureau, which must publish on that designated date, or if there is no date designated, within that same 10 working-day window, that accomplishes the publication.

    As there is no statutory mechanism for that date to be changed after the first working day after deposit has passed, the “good faith” attempt by Doug La Follette to rescind the assigned date following Sumi’s TRO does not have any statutory weight.

  • As Dane County DA Ismael Ozanne failed to name the Legislative Reference Bureau in his attempt to overturn established case law barring judicial restraint on the publication of an act, it published the act in accordance with state law, and “(t)hat bell cannot be unrung now”.
  • As for the argument that it is a post-publication notice (one that can be as late as 10 days after the date of publication set by the Secretary of State and the act of publication by the Legislative Reference Bureau) by the Secretary of State in the official state newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, that is publication for the purposes of the constitutional requirement to publish, the DOJ notes the distinction in the state statutes between the actual publication of the act and a post-publication notice that includes the date of publication to knock that argument down.
  • As for the argument that a failure by the Secretary of State to designate a date of publishment (or specifically in this case, attempt a recession of designation), the DOJ asserts that, when the various mandates on the publication of an act are read together, the intent of the Legislature was that, unless specified in the act, it is to take effect no later than the day after ten working days after enactment, with a Secretary of State-exercised option to make that date earlier. I’ll quote from the request if this is not the case (emphasis in the original):

    To read these statutes any other way would permit a Secretary of State to delay publication of the act, thus granting far more power to the office of the Secretary of State than the Legislature intended when it imposed a series of ministerial, non-discretionary duties on the office. It would also effectively nullify the statutory directive to LRB to publish acts based upon the time the governor approves of a bill, and not when the Secretary of State acts. And most significantly, it would deprive the legislative of its prerogative to pass laws and put them into force. Goodland, 243 Wis. at 468 (“If a court can intervene and prohibit publication of an act, the court determines what shall be law and not the legislature…. This it may not do.”)

The ball is now squarely in Sumi’s court (no pun intended). If she were honest in her opposition to the act, she would vacate the existing TRO and replace it with one that blocks enforcement. Something tells me, however, she is going to try to retain her ill-conceived seizure of power for herself, the remainder of the liberal wing of the judiciary, and Doug La Follette.

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