Weathering the storms

Last night featured some nasty tornadoes that blew through Southern Wisconsin, with winds up to 120 miles an hour. This caused serious damage to many buildings on and around the UW-Platteville campus, as well as in Verona, where an elementary school was among those places damaged. Madison also had several homes suffer damage (we were spared, fortunately), and power outages were reported throughout these areas.



Gov. Walker surveyed this elementary school in Verona as well as the UW-Platteville campus to give a more thorough accounting to the feds, so the state can give that information to the feds in the hopes of getting a federal disaster declaration, much as Walker did 2 years ago in light of massive flooding near Superior. The storm will lead to huge costs for UW-Platteville andthe Verona school district, with new expenses for previous unforeseen repairs being required. An interesting sidelight to this is that the UW System's budget was just approved by the Board of Regents earlier this month, including all tuition and room and board rates. Obviously, this was with the assumption that Platteville's dorms and football stadium would be operating at full strength, and if that is not the case when school starts in 2 1/2 months, there could be some serious budgetary adjustments to come if there is not state and/or federal aid coming, and not just at the Platteville campus.

In addition, the tornadoes are causing numerous disruptions to homes and streets, and the extra up-front costs involved in these expenses could also cause a burden without other outside assistance. There may be an assumption of risk and regular "Act of God" funds set aside, but I have a hard time believing individuals, insurance companies and the communities that got hit by the storms were counting on something this severe.

Ironically, there was another story on weather-related budget issues in the news today, as the Appleton Post-Crescent mentioned several communities in their area are already feeling a budget pinch from the Polar Vortex winter.

...the phenomenon also took a heavy toll on snow- and ice-removal budgets in Appleton, Kaukauna, Menasha and Neenah.

A review by Post-Crescent Media shows the four cities overspent their 2013 snow- and ice-removal budgets by 17 percent to 44 percent.

It also shows the cities largely have spent their 2014 snow- and ice-removal budgets in the first few months of the year, leaving little or no money for winter storms that might occur in November and December.

“This is as bad as I can recall,” Neenah Finance Director Mike Easker said. “It’s not only what happened at the end of December, but all of a sudden we’re behind the eight ball in the beginning of the year. We’ve literally spent the entire weather budget in the first three months of the year.”

Those cities were able to cover their large expenses in 2013 by moving money from other areas of the budget, such as not buying pieces of equipment or by using savings in other departments. But that also means that it becomes much more difficult to pull from those sources if we get more snow before the end of this year, and deferred maintenance and equipment now means more expenses that have to be paid for in the future.

So far, the State Legislature hasn't made a move to make up the difference caused by excessive local street maintenance costs in 2014, but communities in Wisconsin will see an increase in state aids of a little over $7 million statewide for 2015 (as noted on Page 14 of this report). Also, there is $9 million set aside for

...a sum sufficient appropriation from the general fund to fund a transfer to the transportation fund in the second year of each biennium equal to the amount of disaster aid payments made in that biennium in excess of $1 million for any single disaster event. Estimate the transfer at $9,000,000 GPR in 2014-15, which would increase estimated transportation fund revenue in 2014-15 by the same amount.

However, it remains to be seen if that $9 million is enough to handle the damage and repairs to state facilities that result from this storm alone. And that's before bringing up extra costs from the winter, or other natural disasters that have happened in the last year and are sure to happen in the next 12 months.

It is fortunate that we are only talking about repairs from the tornadoes today as opposed to loss of life like we did in places like Joplin, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama in recent years. But there is no doubt that these Wisconsin weather events are carrying a price tag, and in a state that already has budget deficits and major road work looming, the need to clean up and fix structures damaged by these storms just adds to those fiscal problems.

More on that New Republic article and the #wiright cesspool

1. I wanted to discuss the amazing New Republic cover story on "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker" a bit more. There are other passages that I didn't have the time to go into this morning that show just how integral racism and propaganda are to Walker's political existence, and the Wisconsin Republican Party. Let's start with this one, where author Alec MacGillis visits the GOP convention that was held last month.

I arrived in Milwaukee on the weekend of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s convention. The crowd assembling at the Hilton was mostly male and nearly all white. The only visible diversity was in the age of the participants, with a large contingent of blue-blazered College Republicans milling alongside older men with canes. During a break in the proceedings, Jeff Johns, the genial chairman of the Ozaukee County Republican Party, warned me about Fond du Lac Avenue, which bisects the black swath of northwest Milwaukee. “You don’t want to travel that at night,” he says. “You’re basically traveling the colored section.” He also voiced suspicions about Democratic turnout operations in Milwaukee, with campaigns “picking people up for their votes” and rewarding them with “free meals and benefits.”

And how is Mr. Johns so sure the people in the "colored section" get these "free meals and benefits"? Why, Charlie Sykes and his comrades on Milwaukee's airwaves told him.

On Sunday morning, as the convention concluded with a closed-door prayer breakfast (because Jesus hated helping poor outsiders...), I headed to my hotel and flipped on the television, just in time for Charlie Sykes’s weekly show. One of Sykes’s panelists raised the issue of “an incident in the fifteenth aldermanic district where supporters of a liberal candidate bought meals for voters.” The fifteenth district is mostly black, the candidate is black, and the former acting mayor who provided the lunches to voters is black. But the panelist didn’t mention any of that. For his audience, who live beyond Fond du Lac Avenue and its check-cashing outlets and shuttered storefronts, over the city line where the humble frame houses and bungalows give way abruptly to McMansion subdivisions with names like Harmony Hills and River Heights, he didn’t need to.

Walker's supporters in the 262 know their "facts", despite the fact that they have nothing close to direct contact with those minority groups they denigrate, and differences of opinion are not tolerated. It results in a scary groupthink that has all but eliminated decent, everyday Republicans we were acquainted with, and has replaced them with Walkerbots that demand purity and acquiring power by any means necessary.

In the past dozen years, two moderate state senators in metro Milwaukee have lost their jobs in Republican primaries after falling out of favor with SykesBelling, while a third has moved sharply right to avoid their wrath. “The listenership is just so much higher here,” says Scott Jensen, the former Republican speaker of the state Assembly. “And the ability to get people to march in step when [the shows] are all hammering the same themes is extraordinary.” Dale Schultz, a moderate Republican state senator in southwestern Wisconsin who is retiring this year, is blunter. “Talk radio gets going and some of my colleagues end up wetting themselves,” he says. “It’s appalling.”

2. There's a good reason convicted criminal and voucher lobbyist Scooter Jensen notes that right-wingers are able to "march in step" in SE Wisconsin- because they all work for the same people. In addition to the article's revelation of Walker working hand-in-hand with the SykesBelling monster, remember Bruce Murphy's article from last October in Urban Milwaukee talking about how the Bradley Foundation and other Wisconsin right-wing organizations had created a propaganda behemoth. In case you wonder why right-wingers seem to operate in a different world than the rest of us, this bubble-world network helps to exaplin why, as groups such as the Bradleys and the Kochs fund "news" organizations like MacIver, the Wisconsin Reporter, and Media Trakkkers.

The overlap between these various groups is remarkable. The managing editor of Right Wisconsin is Brian Fraley who helped launch the MacIver Institute, where he continues to serve as a Senior Fellow. The Associate Editor of Right Wisconsin is Collin Roth, who worked for two years for Media Trackers. Then there is the ubiquitous conservative blogger James Wigderson, who also does columns for MacIver Institute and Right Wisconsin.

When it came to the fabricated story by Media Trackers on the supposed harassment of a gay Republican, Sykes had writer Brian Sikma, who hatched the story, on his show, and read some of the erroneous information on the air.

But to complete the circle here, you have to bring in the role of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Its columnist Christian Schneider wrote a column spreading the story on the supposed harassment of the gay Republican and Schneider and the newspaper later removed the column from the JS website.

For some time the Journal Sentinel ran columns by both Schneider and Mike Nichols, though both were getting paid by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, whose major funding comes from the Bradley Foundation. (Sykes has also been paid by the WPRI to edit its “Wisconsin Interest” online magazine.)

After I raised questions about this, Schneider stepped down from WPRI. And last month, the Journal Sentinel announced that Schneider was hired on staff. The position is part-time, according to JS editorial page editor David Haynes.

Shoot, it's the media version of a Citizens for a Strong America/United Sportsmen of Wisconsin "incest and money-laundering" party. The Wisconsin Republican Party should be thought of as a cold machine, both in terms of the top-down hierarchy that calls it shots, and in its uncaring method of "divide and conquer" governance.

3. As usual, Charlie Pierce sums it up well when it comes to our Gov, his spokesmodels in the media, and the mentality that his "divide and conquer" bubble-world supporters have. This closing paragraph also contains honesty that the average Wisconsin media member doesn't have the guts to use.

Now, it can be argued, seriously, that being the white guy who triumphed over all the collected Others of the conservative hatescape is a sure path to success, at least through the Republican primaries. Nonetheless, as MacGillis points out, Walker has been positively slavering in front of some of the worst that the "maintstream" American right has to offer. Read the whole thing. From my own experience that, if anything, MacGillis is soft-pedaling the viciousness of people like Mark Belling, who once said that cannibal murderer Jeffrey Dahmer represented the "logical extension of the gay lifestyle." That's the primordial ooze out of which Scott Walker crawled and into which he regularly returns. He is a beer-and-brat Lester Maddox. I guess the essential question for the country is whether or not this is a good thing to be or not.

It's good if you're part of Scotty's in-crowd and get some money and power sent your way, or if you're a stockholder in a media company that gets big money from the many political ads that result from this environment. But it sucks if you have a shred of decency and actually care about your state improving itself in the 21st Century.

Walker, Milwaukee talk radio skewered for their racism

This is an absolute must-read. The New Republic's Alec MacGillis went in-depth on "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Click here to see the whole thing, and it shows just how connected Walker and his supporters are to race-baiting, and the toxic atmosphere that festers on Milwaukee talk radio. It also shows that this is a model that has zero chance of winning in a nationwide election that features much more racial and media diversity than we get in Wisconsin.

Here's a brief example:

Walker’s growing profile served him well as he advanced through the political ranks. In 2002, the Democratic executive of Milwaukee County, which encompasses the 600,000-person city and 355,000 in its inner suburbs, resigned amid a pension scandal. Walker won the special election and proceeded to spend the next eight years tussling with the Democratic-led county board over taxes and spending. He succeeded in making deep cuts to county parks and public transit; once, he sent layoff notices to county workers so they would pressure the council to buckle to his budget demands. So often did he call in to Belling’s show—to chat on air or to spin the host during a commercial break—that he had access to an emergency-only phone line to the studio that was off- limits to station employees, even for calls to family. “It was essentially the ‘zombies are rising’ line,” says [Christopher] Terry, the former WISN employee.

During this period, the WOW counties continued to expand. But unlike suburbs elsewhere, they had not grown more diverse. Today, less than 2 percent of the WOW counties’ population is African American and less than 5 percent is Hispanic. According to studies by the Brookings Institution and Brown University, the Milwaukee metro area is one of the top two most racially segregated regions in the country. The WOW counties were voting Republican at levels unseen in other Northern suburbs; one needed to look as far as the white suburbs around Atlanta and Birmingham for similar numbers. The partisan gulf between Milwaukee and its suburbs in presidential elections has now grown wider than in any of the nation’s 50 largest cities, except for New Orleans, according to the Journal Sentinel series.

And here's another, which shows just how outsized the influence Milwaukee talk radio has on GOP politics in Wisconsin, as well as the high level of cynicism of a certain WTMJ morning talker.

Christopher Terry, who worked with Belling at WISN and now teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that Belling is more of a “true believer,” whereas “if Sykes thought there was money on the other side of the street, he would sell out in a second.”

Over time, the two shows became known by a single name: “SykesBelling.” In the halls of the statehouse, Milwaukee City Hall, and area county governments, elected officials, particularly insufficiently conservative Republicans, lived in dread of denunciations by the hosts and the tsunami of angry calls from listeners that would follow. Sykes is credited with, among other accomplishments, having blocked public funding for needle-exchange programs and having helped drive into bankruptcy an urban mall after harping on security issues there. In April 2013, he played a clip of “It’s Free (Swipe Yo EBT),” a viral video produced by a right-wing activist in which an African American woman raps about liquor stores where one can allegedly use a food-stamp card. Returning to the same theme later in the year, Sykes declared, “The number of Americans who receive means-tested government benefits— welfare—now outnumbers those who are year-round full-time workers.” No other midsize city has this kind of sustained and energized conservative forum for discussion of local politics. The only counterweights on the left are Wisconsin Public Radio, with its implicit but restrained liberalism, a lefty F.M. talk show in Madison with limited reach, and two African American talk-radio stations in Milwaukee, one of which recently went out of business.

Now here's my question- where's the rest of the media stepping up to do something about it? This toxic, divisive brand of Milwaukee talk radio has helped cause an environment that has the Milwaukee area lagging in terms of competing for talent and quality of life. And that "divide and conquer" mentality in the Governor's office since 2010 has led Wisconsin towards the bottom in Midwest job creation and other economic measures.

Does the prospect of more ad money trump all when it comes to Journal Communications, Lee Enterprises, Gannett, and other media companies, even if it means the state and its democracy goes down the drain? So far, that answer has been yes, and those organizations should be held every bit as responsible as Scott Walker for the damage they have inflicted onto this once-great state.

And here's another question. Since the article makes it clear that SykesBelling are working in tandem with Walker, doesn't that mean Walker should be associated with every race-baiting and inflammatory comment made during their daily hate-a-thons? I say yes.

Dropping out of NYC

Hanging in the La Guardia airport after a long weekend taking trains up and down Manhattan. The infrastructure and planning involved in the subway system is mind-boggling, with 3 and 4 different lines running at different levels in the same place. It shows that great public works aren't things that can't be done (unlike what many 262 types say), but it's a matter of priorities and will.

It's also a lot harder to be fat in NYC, because walking and stairs are such a part of everyday life. Also being in contact with other cultures is unavoidable, but you can also insulate yourself into your own social class quite easily, depending on where you shop, eat, and live.

Glad to be heading home, but it's been a great getaway (other than the 8.75% sales tax-that's quite a kicker).

Dropping into NYC

Just landed at La Guardia, as me and the missus are celebrating 1 year of marriage and hopefully a Brewers series win over the Mets. So don't expect much in posting the next few days.

In the meantime, I'd rather you groove with some of the greatest ambassadors NYC has ever had.


Sent from my iPhone

Wisconsin GDP lagging. Badly.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released their annual GDP by state report today. And it offered more proof that no, Fitzwalkerstani policies are not "working" in Wisconsin.

At first glance, Wisconsin's 2013 GDP seems merely mediocre, 27th in the nation at a growth rate of 1.7%. However, that was below the U.S. GDP growth rate of 1.8% for 2013, and was the second-lowest in the Midwest.



But what makes this report look worse is the fact that previous years were also revised in this report, and 2012 was revised way down, which makes the 1.7% in 2013 come from a lower base.

Revisions to Wisconsin GDP 2010-2012
2010- Previous: +3.1%, Revised: +2.8%
2011- Previous +1.3%, Revised: +1.7%
2012- Previous +1.5%, Revised +1.0%

That 1.0% growth in 2012 was the slowest growth in the Midwest, and well below the U.S. rate of 2.5%. So in two full years of Act 10 and Walker budgets being in force, the result is growth of 1.0% and 1.7%. And when you look at the three years Walker and WisGOP has been in power, Wisconsin is a clear laggard when it comes to overall GDP growth.

Total GDP growth, Midwest 2010-2013
Ohio +7.70%
Minn +7.50%
Iowa +7.15%
U.S. +6.06%
Mich +5.82%
Ind. +4.92%
Wis. +4.48%
Ill. +3.96%

This is why it blows my mind when I read state polls and more than half of the state thinks the state is "going in the right direction." Other than hometown pride, how can you look at economic numbers like this, combine it with the $1.8 billion in shortfalls that have to be made up in the next budget, and possibly believe things are OK? It is disgraceful how far back we are compared to most of our neighbors, and I don't know why we accept a level of subpar performance in our economy that we'd never accept from the Brewers, Packers, or Badgers.

Vegas cop killing- it's not an isolated vaccuum

The story about the Las Vegas cop killers would have infuriated me had it happened a couple of years ago. But nowadays, it's just another mass shooting by another white guy driven over the edge, just like it was when Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona and when all those children were massacred in Connecticut. And unlike those other 2 incidents, the connection between this incident and right-wing rhetoric is pretty obvious.

Witnesses told police one of the shooters yelled “This is the start of a revolution” before shooting the officers. Gillespie later said he could not confirm that.

The shooters then stripped the officers of their weapons and ammunition and badges, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. They then covered the officers with something that featured the Gadsden flag, a yellow banner with a coiled snake above the words, “Don’t tread on Me.”

The flag is named for Christopher Gadsden a Revolutionary War general who designed it. It has recently come back in vogue as an adopted symbol of the American tea party movement.

The couple that carried out the killings also made the trip to the Cliven Bundy ranch when he attempted to defy federal agents who asked him to pay debts he owed the government, and had numerous posts on social media discussing guns, revolution, "big government", and a need to fight against the New World Order.

Gee, where do you think this got those ideas from? Couldn't have been a result of the poison that's pushed all day and night on Faux News and AM radio could it? It couldn't be the propping up of deadbeats like Cliven Bundy as some kind of "patriot" on Faux News that made these guys sympathetic to the cause, did it?

Somehow, I'm not thinking Roger Ailes is thinking about the effect his corrosive, dishonest network is having, and is calling in BillO and company to "clean up their act." Not after smearing a returned POW and his family over the last week, as well as delivering racist, anti-Muslim rhetoric on top of it. Jon Stewart did a great job showing that disgusting act yesterday.

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I'll also remind you that less than 2 years ago, Wisconsin had our own mass killing on a Sunday, as a white supremacist shot up a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek and killed 6 people before killing himself. And did that slow down the hate mongers in the Wisconsin GOP? OF COURSE NOT! Sen. Ron Johnson is still calling Obamacare the "greatest assault on freedom in the nation's history." In addition to the ridiculous mentality that somehow equates more people getting health care and the resulting control over their lives as "an assault on freedom", it also sends the unspoken message that the Obama Administration is a group of people that should be actively fought against. Combine that with deciding to take Barry Goldwater's statement of "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" literally, and why do we get shocked that these people get driven over the edge and perform these violent acts?

And because Republicans and GOP media don't care to exercise even a modicom of forethought over what happens after they make certain statements, and because our gutless media refuses to make them take responsibility for the inevitable violence that follows, this cycle of poisonous hate and division continues. May I remind you of who still gets 3 hours of airtime every day on AM 1130 in Milwaukee and AM 1310 in Madison?



And let's face it, if you're listening to Icki McKenna, you're not exactly a rational, decent person to begin with.

So I think it's well beyond time to take the GOP and their media enablers to task, and it's time to make every one of these cynical a-holes pay for riling up a stew that is rotting this country from the inside. We should take the names of advertisers and donors who support this rhetoric and expose it to the general public. Anyone who starts spouting off about prepping for "when the shit goes down" and fetishizing guns on Facebook? We gotta call that stuff to the cops, because it's stopped being figurative hyperbole far too often.

I'm done with it. It isn't a fucking game, and it isn't fucking "entertainment."