Walker/WisGOP "school safety plan another cynical, pre-election sham

Today, the Wisconsin Assembly's Education Committee held its one and only public hearing on Governor Walker's package of school safety bills. These bills are expected to be voted on by the committee tomorrow and the full Assembly on Thursday. And not surprisingly, there is a lot that clearly needs to be ironed out if our Governor and the State Legislature truly cares about lessening the chances of mass shootings in schools.

For exmaple, maybe we should listen to those who have actually been in the classroom and deal with K-12 education before we jam this through. Tony Evers’ Department of Public Instruction had their thoughts on what to do with school safety, and it greatly differed from the Walker/WisGOP bills. First of all, on the bill that sets aside a $100 million pot of money for schools to "upgrade school safety", DPI objected to Walker's decision to leave Brad Schimel's Department of Justice to be the ones who decide who gets the grants, and that the funding for safety should go beyond a one-time stunt.

The bill provides the Attorney General (AG) unrestricted authority to set grant criteria and conditions. While the proposed bill provide some restrictions on the use of funds, it exempts the Department of Justice (DOJ) from promulgating rules. As such, the AG could give preference to or limit eligibility to districts that arm teachers or allow conceal carry. This is a bad precedent and deeply troubling policy.

Restricting funds to “hardening” schools and armed officers is a narrow approach not supported by education stakeholders and law enforcement. Law enforcement and education leaders have called for a comprehensive approach including student supports, interventions, programming and infrastructure. Many districts have addressed their physical infrastructure and security staffing, but need resources to address student and family needs.

One-time funds will not provide a sustainable solution. In the almost 20 years since the Columbine High School Massacre, active shooter threats have proliferated. Schools have acted locally, while the Governor and legislature eliminated crucial tools by repealing the school safety revenue limit flexibility in 2011 Act 32. Providing one-time funding will not adequately address this challenge or remediate the extent of the infrastructure issues.

DPI also questioned why there needed to be more bureaucracy in the Department of Justice when DPI already has programs that can deal with mental health and training on how to handle potentially violent situations.

Housing a school safety center in DOJ narrowly focuses this effort on physical infrastructure and law enforcement’s response. Education stakeholders and law enforcement leaders have called for a comprehensive response. Elected leaders focusing on arming teachers is divisive and undermines public confidence in this proposal.

Funds should be allocated to the already existing Wisconsin Safe & Healthy (WISH) Schools Training & Technical Assistance. Providing new staff and resources to DOJ to create a parallel center is inefficient and will create a disjointed approach to school safety. The WISH center and DPI already have staff working in this area.

The Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association also says that the GOP’s “school safety” bill doesn’t do what is needed to be done to diminish threats. The Police Chiefs agreed with DPI that arming teachers was an awful idea, saying “more harm than good” would likely result, and also said the GOP Legislature’s prior restrictions on spending for local governments and school districts should be lifted if we want to have these safety improvements.

Sufficient funds should be allocated to increase the number of school resource officers who are fully trained law enforcement officers and not merely armed security guards, who do not come close to law enforcement training standards. The ability to use lethal force in a school, should only be given to highly trained law enforcement officers. Law enforcement should not be forced to operate under existing revenue caps when the public is clamoring for more safety for their children. Relief from the revenue caps for public safety expenditures, so those communities that need to hire more law enforcement officers to address local community issues, can do so.

• Sufficient funds should be allocated for school security improvements. Improvements needed include: a single secure access point, securely locked exits throughout the school, security cameras which law enforcement can view in real time, metal detectors, school resource officers, and alarm systems on emergency exits and all classroom doors. Many schools are old and outdated. School districts should be allowed to exceed state-imposed revenue limits for security related expenditures.

• Sufficient funds should be allocated for mental health services for teachers, students, and kids who need help.

While policymakers have spent sufficient time studying the broken mental health service delivery system, there has been no comprehensive and sustainable effort to address the insufficient funding for the crushing demands of those in need of mental health services. Provide funds for training, including trauma informed care for teachers, guidance counselors, and school coaches so they can recognize potentially violent behavior from students. Currently, there is “no one” responsible for follow-up with troubled individuals. Additional educational resources for expelled students should be considered. The current system is underfunded, and operations are independent of one another, which is why critical communication is intermittent, uncoordinated, and sporadic. These additional mental health dollars should also cover a law enforcement officer who suffers from PTSD as a result of his or her involvement in dealing with a school shooting. Mirror language just passed by Florida.

The Police Chiefs also called for more coordination between schools and law enforcement as a way to figure out tactical entrances and evacuations, and asked for schools to have more funding for crisis relief.

Oh, and the Police Chiefs recommended another key modification to the Walker/WisGOP’s “school safety” agenda – HAVE MORE SAFEGUARDS TO KEEP BAD PEOPLE FROM GETTING GUNS. This includes universal background checks, with an additional mental health background check for people under 21, and reinstating the 48-hour waiting period for gun purchases that Walker and WisGOP repealed in 2015.

As State Rep. David Bowen noted during today’s hearing, if time is of the essence with this program, why is the Walker Administration starting up a brand new grant program through the Department of Justice? This requires criteria to be drawn up for the grant, then schools must be given time to put their proposals together, and then DOJ would have o grade and award those proposals. How is that going to work in time for the 2018-19 school year to start in 5 months? And the fact that Brad Schimel’s Department of Justice would draw up that criteria and decide what can/cannot be part of these safety grants is a very large red flag. Schimel was claiming today that he could have the whole thing ready to go in less than 3 months, and I find that impossible to believe, unless the grants truly aren't competitive and that the grantees have basically been selected, which makes the whole bill a sham.


Would you trust this guy to do this right? Schimel, I mean.

I also noticed a parent admonished the Assembly Education Committee at today’s public hearing for developing these bills in secret and trying to pass them into law within 72 hours of the text being made available to the public.
And I think the parent's instincts were spot-on. The rushed nature and flaws in these special session bills tell me that this thing needs to be put back in the oven, developed more wisely, and dealt with next year (hopefully with a Governor and AG that isn’t flop-sweating about their sketchy chances for re-election). If we can’t wait that long, then let's do what Superintendent Evers, the Police Chiefs, and legislative Dems want- give school districts the flexibility to spend money on school safety initiatives, and not have those expenses count against the tight revenue caps.

Which is why I don't think Walker and WisGOP are really that serious about actually lowering the chances of a mass shooting in Wisconsin schools. In fact, Scotty gave the game away yesterday at one of his taxpayer-funded campaign stops.

"Let’s just take it up. Let’s just get it done. I don’t care what the format is," Walker told reporters.

That’s because the intent of this legislation is for NRA-owners politicians like Walker to be seen DOING SOMETHING on school safety. It doesn’t matter to these posers if THESE INITIATIVES DO NOTHING TO MAKE SCHOOL SAFER, as long the pictures and claims can be used in campaign ads to distract rubes until November.

Sickening cynicism and desperation. But that's the way it goes with the 2018 GOP.

Staged photo ops ARE NOT NEWS!

Especially when they're in front of captive audiences. Thanks to former Feingold press secretary Jud Lounsbury for calling out Gov Dropout on this sickening, cynical tactic.

If students can't walk out to protest school unsafety, @ScottWalker shouldn't be able to walk in and promote his phony school safety nonsense. RETWEET to tell Walker to STOP CAMPAIGNING in our schools! https://t.co/wNEGh8wldp

— Jud Lounsbury (@JudLounsbury) March 19, 2018

Case in point today

Our School Safety Plan works to ensure safety from any threat. Students at Marathon Elementary School and across our state and nation deserve to receive a quality education without fear for their safety. We are working to make Wisconsin schools safer. pic.twitter.com/wV022EEpOS

— Governor Walker (@GovWalker) March 19, 2018

But when thousands of students and school officials came to the Capitol last week to demand answers to gun violence, Gov UNINTIMIDATED was hiding in a far corner of the state where he wouldn't be asked real questions.

We are way overdue to find out how much Wisconsinites are paying for all of these staged campaign events that Walker has pulled in the last year. Let's see if Scotty lives up to his "Government Transparency" award when asked about this subject.

Are we in '73, or '74 these days?

My wife sent this book to me after I brought it up a couple of weeks back. Seems fitting for these times.



I started by reading the end, when Nixon is about to resign,and it describes a meeting between Nixon and White House lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt.

"If they want to put me in jail, let them," Nixon said. "The best writing done by politicians has been done from hail." He mentioned Gandhi.

Brave talk notwithstanding, the President seemed deeply worried. He wanted to sound Buzhardt out on the legal situation. Again he likened himself to Gandhi. If he went to,jail, he would be a sort of political prisoner, he implied. Really, he had been persecuted.

Buzhardt agreed. If any other President had been,investigated so thoroughly, he said, similar or even worse abuses would have been uncovered. If the Republicans had had a majority in Congress, the investigations could have been stopped; the Senate Watergate Committee would never have been established and the House Judiciary Committee would never have begun impeachment hearings. The normal restraint of the press had been relaxed in Nixon's case, because the publishers and editors didn't like him.

Same whiny persecution complex with these crooks, same abuses of power, same desire to cover things up and rig justice, if they have the opportunity to do so.

Republicans in DC haven't changed in 4t years, don't believe otherwise.

“Nixon Blasts ‘False Charges’”: pic.twitter.com/A3ERM8NMMx

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) March 18, 2018

The only difference today is that they have a majority in Congress in 2018 to try to slow-walk and suppress the awful truth, and they have a Faux News universe to try to keep enough rubes confused by "alternative facts."

But the GOP is not the majority in America. 54% of those who went to the polls did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. GOPs have lost 3 seats in the Senate in 2016 and other elections since then, and they also have lost seats in the House in that time.

Combine that with an 8-10 point Dem advantage on the Congressional ballot, and I DARE the GOP to keep covering up Trump-Russia for the next 7 1/2 months.

We are in a repeat of 1973-74. The big question is how far along is Robert Mueller vs Leon Jaworski.

The comics tell the truth- right-wing idiots keep getting hired

With the hiring of Larry Kudlow as a top economic advisor- a coke-addicted hedge funder in the '80s and early 90s, and someone who has been wrong about the US economy pretty much ever since - the Trump Administration is continuing a fine right-wing tradition of the 21st Century. And that is hiring shameless incompetents who keep getting promoted despite their failures.

The Daily Show's Trevor Noah pointed out Kudlow's foolishness on Thursday's episode of The Daily Show.

I particularly love the scene where Kudlow interrupts Paul Krugman in 2005 to insist there was no housing bubble and that there would be no problems in the economy if rising prices and employment ever ended. As UW's Menzie Chinn noted last week, Larry was WAY off on the housing market, and on his pooh-poohing of the looming economic collapse in late 2007.



Noah's segment on Kudlow reminded me of one of my favorite Daily Show segments of the Jon Stewart era. It took place 9 years ago last week, as the DOW Jones Industrial Average was bottoming out below 6,500 during the Great Recession that Kudlow failed to foresee (it has nearly quadrupled in the 9 years since). And Jon noted how many of Kudlow's fellow CNBC personalities failed to see the crisis coming (possibly because their interests told them to look the other way), and then blamed the wrong people once the crisis began.

Also noteworthy is that Jon began the segment discussing the "Rick Santelli rant", where Santelli went on the air blaming low-income "loser" homeowners for not being able to pay their mortgages - a situation we later found out was often due to banks fraudulently filling out mortgage applications and giving out sizable loans to homeowners that they had no business doing.

Oh, and have we mentioned that it later came out that Santelli was basically fronting for the Koch Brothers to try to keep banks and other businesses from being further regulated, and because of concerns of "major deficit and debt increases" (remember when Republicans cared about these things?). The next year, Citizens United came out, and our country's politics have been tainted by Koched-up crap ever since. And Scam-telli never lost his job nor did he ever have to apologize for being a fraud.

And Saturday Night Live got into the act this week, with Kate McKinnon going on "Weekend Update", and doing an impersonation of Education Secretary (and major WisGOP donor) Betsy DeVos that was both spot-on and cutting.

"I think [I am protested] because I do not do a good job. And I can't, because I don't know how."

"I may not be very good on camera, but behind the scenes, my ideas are much worse."

The comparisons to McKinnon's DeVos and Tina Fey's Sarah Palin are merely coincidental.

What's most frustrating about this Banana Republicanism is the lack of accountability for these right-wing dimwits. People like Kudlow and Scam-telli and DeVos should have been laughed out of any position of influence years ago. But because there is a seemingly unlimited amount of money and Koched-up stink tanks willing to give this discredited garbage a forum, they somehow keep getting seats at a table that they do not belong in.

They need to be booted out of the adults' room once and for all, and kept out for a LONG time.

WIll Walker get one last, foolish spending spree before November?

As the GOP-run State Senate scheduled to have its last regular floor session on Tuesday, with scores of bills to consider in a one-day bum rush of activity, it seems important to step back and see if we actually can afford to hand out all of these goodies and initiatives before they become law.

With that in mind, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau recently released an updated look at the bills that have been signed into law, including the already-signed increases in aid small, rural schools, and increased tax credits for building rehab and start-ups.

Cost of bills already passed
2017-18 $560,000
2018-19 $17,154,200
TOTAL $17,704,200

The LFB analysis also included the costs of bills that are currently being considered in the State Senate, and that price tag is a lot higher.

Cost of bills to be considered
2017-18 $10.3 million
2018-19 $254.2 million
TOTAL $264.5 MILLION

These bills include big-ticket, pre-election gimmicks from Walker and WisGOP such as the $100-per-child tax credit, a sales tax holiday in August, $50 million for Rural WEDC grants, and $24 million to adapt parts of the state tax code to match December's tax cuts in DC.

But if all of these bills were to be shoved through the Senate next week, the LFB says there wouldn't be nearly anything left for the last 15 1/2 months of this year.

Projected General Fund balances under bills 2017-19
2017-18 starting balance $579.0 million
2017-18 projected ending balance $641.3 million
2018-19 projected ending balance $192.0 million

That $192 million is barely enough to run state operations for 4 days.

In addition, those projections show that the 2018-19 deficit would be nearly $450 million, which would carry over as the starting point for a structural deficit for the 2019-21 budget. Then along with that $450 million-a-year deficit, remember that the state is slated to spend $50 million for 2019-20 for Scott Walker's plan to pay insurers in the hopes of holding down premium increases.

Add in the increasing cost of some of these new tax write-offs, and this means that the 2019-21 General Fund budget would have a structural deficit exceeding $1 billion. And that's assuming revenues stay at the strong level that the LFB projected in January, and don't take a turn for the worse due to an economy that is slowing down (and there are already signs it is slowing).

What do you do with a budget surplus? #Wisconsin Governor @ScottWalker has a sea shanty for that. https://t.co/aV3SXHaLSW #drunkensailor pic.twitter.com/YA2cvQ8wfT

— Phil Hands (@PhilHands) January 29, 2018

It seems telling to me that as it became apparent that Walker's pre-election tax cut gimmicks and plans for restructuring juvenile corrections were being disregarded, Walker shifted gears to call a special session to discuss a $100 million plan to increase school safety (which doesn't do anything to deal with the guns that are a main part of the threat to school safety).

Walker seems determined to blow this already-shaky projected surplus before November's election, so he can be seen as doing....something, I guess. What's even more amazing is that NOT ONE CENT of the hundreds of millions of dollars he's trying to throw away would go toward fixing our crumbling roads, or even filling in the $90 million deficit on state highway work that is due to the Walker Admin sending $134 million to the Foxconn-sin region.

This fiscal idiocy and gimmickry is the mark of what you get with a Governor and state GOP more concerned with grabbing headlines and tricking low-info voters ahead of an election than in actually doing something that improves the life and future of Wisconsinites.

It also illustrates a "load up debt and then burn it down" mentality that is similar to how the corporate sector bankrupted Toys R' Us and other retailers, which will result in nearly 1,000 Wisconsinites losing their jobs in coming months. And you can bet more losses in services and jobs will be coming in our already-strapped public sector if the voters of this state are stupid enough to keep Walker and WisGOP in power past 2018.

Which might be the intelligence of the design of Walker and WisGOP blowing this budget surplus instead of being truly conservative, and letting things play out and making sure the extra money actually shows up before we spend it.

AM radio made Wisconsinites easy marks for the Russians

Who could EVER have seen this coming?

A Journal Sentinel review found that after the Sherman Park unrest in August 2016, Russian-linked Twitter accounts shared more than 30 tweets stoking racial tension. One account was mentioned in the Mueller indictment. These accounts got 5K+ retweets for MKE tweets.

— Jason Stein (@jasonmdstein) March 15, 2018

"Stoking racial tension" in Milwaukee? How dare the Russians do that! Don't they know that job is left to KLAN radio 1130 and WGOP 620 in Milwaukee, and 1310 in Madison?

Will Jason Stein and the rest of "legitimate" Wisconsin media start callimg those homegrown hate merchants on the carpet? And will ANY member of WISGOP ever publically distance themselves from that corrosive garbage?

(We know this answer- "Not until the GOP start losing elections due to race-baiting and hate")

Yes, Russian trolls are bad and need to be dealt with. But we also need to take out the trash on our AM radio airwaves that has poised the well in Wisconsin for decades.

Spending and wages both stalling out in US

Since Americans started to get larger paychecks in February, the theory would be that economic activity would pick up, because some of those gains would be spent. But it sure didn’t happen last month.

U.S. consumers spent less at auto dealers, gas stations and department stores in February, causing overall retail sales to slip 0.1%.

It was the third consecutive month of declining retail sales, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, though they're still 4% higher from a year ago. Shoppers have opened 2018 with a cold spell after robust spending gains in the months leading up to the holidays….

Auto sales fell 0.9% last month, while purchases at gas stations tumbled 1.2%. Sales at department stores declined 0.9%.

Those declines at stores are a bit alarming because the huge jobs report from Friday said that over 50,000 jobs were added in the retail sector in February (on a seasonally-adjusted basis). I have a hard time believing those jobs will stick around if retail sales continue to fall....if they truly were added to begin with.

So what’s the problem? Another economic report from Tuesday might give a clue.

Real average hourly earnings for all employees were unchanged from January to February, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This result stems from a 0.1-percent increase in average hourly earnings offset by a 0.2-percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)….

Real average hourly earnings increased 0.4 percent, seasonally adjusted, from February 2017 to February 2018. The increase in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.3-percent increase in the average workweek resulted in a 0.6-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over this period.

That’s the 6th month out of the last 7 where average hourly wages have failed to rise above the rate of inflation, which means workers are basically back to where they were in March 2017.



And remember how we were hearing 6 weeks ago about the prospects of a major blowout for 1st Quarter GDP? Those included references to the Atlanta Fed projecting growth of 5.4% to start 2018 their GDP Now forecasting, which would be the highest rate in nearly 15 years.

Well, the DOW was also 1,300 points higher then, and a lot more economic data has rolled in since then. And take a look at what’s happened to the Atlanta Fed’s forecast since then.



That 5.4% has nearly been cut by 2/3 to 1.9% now, and a big reason why is that consumption growth has stalled out, which is reflected in the slipping retail sales.

Hmm, maybe we shouldn’t have given corporations added incentives to hoard profits and have stock buybacks reach record levels due to the GOP’s Pierce of Shit tax plan in DC, huh?

I’ve often expressed concern over what would happen if heavily-indebted Americans would stop spending like it was the 2000s, because that was the only reason growth “accelerated” in 2017. If that spending is now slowing down despite the alleged sugar high that GOP tax cuts were supposed to give the economy for the first part of 2018, what happens in a few months when the buzz wears off?