A fun snowy Saturday at the Camp

Yeah, it was snowing and sub-30 degrees yesterday, but it sure made for a cool view from under the upper deck yesterday at Camp Randall.



And it isn't very cold at all when you see your alma mater administer an epic BEATDOWN, and you get to see history being made.



From 17-3 down to 59=-17 up in about 2 1/2 quarters. And not against Little Sisters of the Poor, but a nationally-ranked Nebraska team that was 8-1 going into the game. That what a hell of a lotta fun to watch, and shockingly easy.

Let's see if the Pack makes it a complete sports weekend this afternoon. I know more than a few people that were pulling the Camp Randall/Lambeau "double" this weekend, including some guys I spoke to from Philly who made the trip down to Madison as a prelude to seeing their Eagles on the Frozen Tundra. Hope they enjoyed the Saturday show from Mel Gordon and company, and that they don't find the game today as enjoyable.

This week in WisGOP corruption- frack the Bucks and the DOT

Here are three cases from the past few days that shows just how far Wisconsin has fallen from the “clean government” reputation it used to have.

1. The first issue deals with the possibility of replacing the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks arena at the Bradley Center with a new arena, allowing the team to stay in town. If there are any changes in local sales tax or other development laws related to a new Bucks arena, the GOP-run State Legislature will have to sign off on it. Well, Assembly Speaker Robbin’ Vos went on Mike Gousha’s show in Milwaukee, and openly shook down new Bucks owner Mark Lasry, claiming Lasry’s past support of Democrats will hurt any chances of getting the state to help pass any legislation related to funding of a new Bucks arena.

John Peterson at Democurmudgeon has a good breakdown of this, and I’ll include the following passage from Robbin’.

Gousha: “Why should that bother you? You know he’s been a long time Democratic donor, why does that bother you?

Vos: “It sure does bother me because as you’re coming to us saying you want to be an active participant in the community, picking a team is something like me not picking the right team. Um, I don’t care what his political benefits are, but coming to us saying they want to have hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies, and not taking the wherewithal to say, I’m not gonna get involved to part in the political discussion in Wisconsin when I don’t have too, sure would have been a better decision from my perspective.”

Gousha: “It bothers you?”

Vos: “It does, I think it makes it harder for me to sell to our caucus. Don’t forget, for people who live in most of the rest of Wisconsin, they look at Milwaukee as a place that already gets too much of our money. And now what you’re doing is making an even more difficult decision happen for a lot of folks around the state. So they’ve got to be a lot smarter with their technique. I mean, I want to bring those jobs and keep them in Wisconsin, but having us give hundreds of millions of dollars to big-time donors who give to Democrats, but also have billions of dollars of their own? That’s a hard sell. So I don’t think they need to do anything that makes my job more difficult."

In addition to Vos’s obvious underlying message of "fuck you, pay me!," it seems to matter more to Robbin’ that Lasry plays ball with the state GOP and kisses the Speaker's ass than it does to debate the merits of any package relating to the Bucks arena. If that doesn’t show how petty and self-centered this GOP crew is, nothing does.

The race-based Milwaukee-bashing is also very telling (“too much of OUR money”???) Someone needs to remind Robbin’ that Milwaukee County attracts more tourist dollars than any other county in the state, and that many of us who care for that city would love the chance for it to be able to generate its own revenues instead of having its hands tied by 262 suburb boys like Vos.

2. Here's some other possible pay-for-play here. The state’s plans for the Department of Transportation’s Hill Farms building and property continues to go on behind closed doors. I touched on how sketchy I found this potential no-bid setup to be when the Capital Times first reported on it back in October, and it’s looking worse now. Channel 27 in Madison followed up on this, and reports that Scott Walker’s Department of Administration continues to say that this massive potential land deal is none of the public’s business.

In June 2013, [developer Terrance] Wall sent a letter to Governor Walker expressing an interest in buying several state properties, including Hill Farms. Wall also signaled his support for Gov. Walker's desire to eliminate the competitive bid process used to sell state properties. The state legislature passed a measure eliminating competitive bids just a few weeks later….

On October 13th, 2014, DOA posted an RFP for the Hill Farms property on its website. It required anyone interested in submitting a proposal to register for a tour of the facility by October 15th.

27 News made an open records request with DOA seeking the names of the people who took that tour, but was denied …

27 News wanted to know who was on the tour, because nine days after the registration deadline for it, Terrance Wall made a donation of $9,975 to Gov. Walker's campaign.

I notice that the "Unintimidated" Walker Administration has now backed down, and apparently will reveal the proposers on Monday- more than a week after the RFP deadline. As a guy who has worked on developing and evaluating RFPs for the state, revealing the names of respondents and attendees at required meetings is something that is public record (in fact, the Walker Administration and DOT put this on themselves by making that October 15 tour mandatory), and only allowing a few days of notice for the tour and three weeks to make a proposal on a mega-project could be construed as unfairly slanting the field toward certain bidders - a giant no-no when it comes to state procurement rules. Add in WKOW’s revelation of developer Terrance Wall’s near-max donation to the Walker campaign one week after the tour of the building, and how can you not think there is something fishy going on?

3. And the crookedness isn’t just affecting things in the big cities. Today’s story from Wisconsin Public Radio shows the DNR is letting the state’s frac sand operations go on without inspections, leading to a lack of information when it comes to pollution levels near these sites.

Fewer than 10 percent of frac sand mining operations in Wisconsin are monitoring how much dust is blowing from their sites, thanks in part to monitoring exemptions the DNR has granted to most companies that have requested them since 2012

Larger frac sand mines and processing plants are required to install ambient air monitors nearby that can measure tiny particles coming from smokestacks, sand piles and trucks. But only 11 air monitors have been installed by frac sand companies since the industry began expanding in 2010, meaning that around 90 percent of companies aren’t being monitored.

Companies can ask for an exemption from monitoring if they can make the case on paper and through computer modeling that the general public will not be harmed. According to data obtained through an open records request, there have been 20 applications for air monitoring exemptions in the last two years. Of those, 15 have been granted by DNR.

And the results of this lack of DNR regulation and observing of pollution levels are starting to become known. WPR also reported earlier this week that researchers from UW-Eau Claire have noted that dust levels around these mines are well above the levels deemed acceptable by the federal government.

For six years, students at the school’s Environmental Public Health Program have been working under Dr. Crispin Pierce to measure fine silica particles blowing from frac sand sites. The particles are called PM 2.5, meaning they’re 2.5 microns in diameter. A human hair, by comparison, is around 60 microns.

Pierce said that the program is monitoring the PM 2.5 because the Department of Natural Resources doesn’t do so. He and his students used ambient air monitors on loan from the University of Iowa to measure four frac sand sites in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Pierce said they found concentrations that were four times higher than federal standards. However, he said more study is needed.

“I don’t think that based upon the results we’ve found so far there will be many acute hazards for people living around frac sand plants,” he said. “But we are concerned about long-term exposure, dirty air over a long period of time increasing things like cardiovascular disease and lung cancer.”

Funny how these things all start coming out within 10 days of the election, isn’t it? And given how drunk with power the Wisconsin GOP is (despite only getting the votes of 28% of Wisconsin voters), you can bet these guys won’t just ignore this corruption being exposed- they’ll do more to make sure this type of pay-to-play is made into Standard Operating Procedure.

These guys won’t stop this act until they’re either charged in court, or the people rise up and throw them out. Which makes me wonder when that happens, and who will be the ones that make it happen.

Given the guv's race, did the Wis Assembly and Senate go as expected?

The backroom dealings at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin have been intriguing in the wake of the losses in last week's election. As part of these discussions, Assembly Dem Leader Peter Barca was challenged for his leadership, and made the following claim to bolster the case to keep him on as the top Dem in the Assembly.

Barca told the caucus the next two successive elections -- one in a presidential year, the other with U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on the ballot -- would be better for the party, noting the "headwinds" facing Dems both at the top of the ticket and nationally.

He also said vulnerable members met their goals for resources and outreach, and that each of the three Dem incumbents to lose out-performed the top of the ticket.

"If our candidates that just ran did poorly and the rest of the ticket did well, I wouldn't even ask for your vote,” Barca said.

This convinced enough Dems to keep Barca in his position, but we actually have the numbers to see if Barca's claim of "GOP year" is the reason Dems in the Legislature lost seats. I wrote an analysis about 16 months ago using the numbers from statewide elections in November 2012, and narrowed it down to the district level for State Assembly and State Senate. So we can use that as a starting point to see how those figures held up (or didn't) in the 2014 elections.

First of all, since Scott Walker currently stands at 52.9% of the GOP vs. Dem vote share (52.3% of all voters, and Walker and Burke got a combined 98.9% of the vote) let's assume that it was a GOP +2.9% year, so any district that was Dem +2.9% or less "should have" gone to the Republicans under this theory. Now, let's look at the "most representative of Wisconsin" districts across the state, and see the results. I'll start in the State Senate while counting the races that were up in 2014 on this list, and I'll use the number above 50% (if the winner went over 50%) to do an apples-to-apples comparison.

Most representative Senate districts
Vinehout (D) Dem +1.5% Result: Dem +2.4%
Schultz (retired)(R) Dem +2.0% Result: GOP +5.1%
Jauch (D)(retired) Dem +3.4% Result: Dem +1.3%
Ellis (R) (retired) GOP +4.1% Result: GOP +7.2%
Moulton (R) GOP +4.5% Result: GOP +11.1%
Petrowski (R) GOP +5.3% Result: GOP +15.7%
Lassee (R) GOP +5.5% Result: GOP +11.5%
Larson (D) Dem +6.3% Result: Dem +9.6%
Leibham (R)(retired) GOP +7.2% Result: GOP +10.0%
Lehman (D) (retired) GOP +7.9% Result: GOP +11.5%

So looking at these numbers, let's point out that the GOP would have been projected to not only hold the 19-14 Senate advantage they will have in January, they would have been up 20-13. But Kathleen Vinehout not only won a race that she "should" have lost 51.4-48.6%, she overperformed the seat's rating entirely. In fact, Vinehout has won on swingy turf all in all 3 of her races, with the last 2 of them being in GOP wave years (2010 and 2014). Maybe an unapologetic populist isn't such a bad candidate, eh?

Also worth noting- the Schultz seat may well have been lost anyway, but the GOP overperformed in that Dem-leaning seat by 4.2%, and you have to think that Chris Larson's interceding in the race and endorsement of Pat Bomhack for the Dem nomination went a long way toward him stepping down as the Dems' leader in the Senate today, being replaced by La Crosse Senator Jennifer Shilling. Bob Jauch's seat up North was made into a close race in reflection of the GOP-leaning electorate, but Dems still held on. Ellis' and Leibham's open seats in Northeast Wisconsin ended up about as expected, (it may actually indicate overperformance by the Dems given how much Walker dominated in that part of the state), and John Lehman's open seat also went about as you'd anticipate, given the statewide result.

The major letdowns for the Dems were in Frank Lassee's district in NE Wisconsin, and Jerry Petrowski's district in Wausau/ North Central Wisconsin. Dems should be competitive in those seats with some wins in a good year, but the GOP candidate got over 60% in both of those races. Also noteworthy is that Larson may have disappointed in running the statewide elections for the Dems, but he did very well in his own district, overperforming by more than 6%. Keep that in mind if Larson tries for more local office in Milwaukee for the near future.

Moving over to the Assembly, you'll see things largely held to how they should have given the outcome of the Governor's race (with a couple of exceptions), which resulted in the GOP expanding their majority from 60-39 to 63-36. Remember, GOP +2.9% was the statewide margin, so adjust each race accordingly.

Most representative Assembly seats
Wright (D) GOP +0.6% Result: GOP +0.2%
Brooks (R) GOP +0.7% Result: GOP +7.8%
Bernier (R) GOP +1.6% Result: GOP +2.8%
Tranel (R) Dem +1.6% Result: GOP +11.3%
Nerison (R) Dem +1.8% Result: GOP +9.1%
Doyle (D) GOP +2.0% Result: Dem +4.1%
Ripp (open) (R) GOP +2.6% Result: GOP +7.5%
Bies (R) GOP +2.9% Result: GOP +6.8%
Krug (R) GOP +3.0% Result: GOP +6.0%
Klenke (open)(R) GOP +3.7% Result: GOP +6.3%
Vruwink (D) GOP +4.0% Result: GOP +2.8%
Hintz (D) Dem +4.0% Result: Dem +1.5%
Riemer (D) Dem +4.2% Result: Dem +5.7%
Murtha (R) GOP +4.3% Result: UNOPPOSED
Weininger (open)(R) GOP +4.3% Result: GOP +9.1%
Larson (R) GOP +4.5% Result: GOP +10.6%
Smith (D) GOP +4.6% Result: GOP +4.9%
Rodriguez (R) GOP +4.7% Result: UNOPPOSED
Ballweg (R) GOP +4.8% Result: GOP +11.0%
Marklein (open)(R) Dem +5.0% Result: GOP +0.2%*

The only two seats where the "wrong" party won were in Steve Doyle's district near La Crosse (which could be a reflection of the La Crosse area turning Dem in general), and in Howard Marklein's former district in SW Wisconsin (a district filled with ads from the school voucher lobby), a race that's still subject to recount. It also shows that Mandy Wright, Amy Sue Vruwink and Steven Smith lost their seats not because of their deficiencies as a candidate, but because it was a GOP year. All 3 overperformed compared to what they were expected.

So perhaps Peter Barca was correct, it wasn't a lack of performance in swingy Assembly seats on Election Day compared to what was expected. But that also shows the bigger issue- why did the Dems not win statewide after the damage of 4 years of Fitzwalkerstan (and were so scared of the terrain that they didn't even run candidates in a couple of these districts)? That's a failure of the state party to not give a unified message that made people want to go out and pull the lever for the Dems. And that's a big reason why Mike Tate has to go as the Party leader, because with the state gerrymandered in such a way that a GOP +2.9% year leads to big gains for Scott Walker's party, sitting back and accepting those GOP advantages is not an acceptable option- but Tate and the DPW did just that.

These numbers also show the opportunity, because if the Dems can win the state with 52% or 53% of the vote in 2016 (as Obama did in 2012), you can see that many of these Assembly seats go into play, and some should flip back. And given some of the wacky regressive stuff the State Legislature and Walker will likely try to jam through in the next 2 years, 52-53% may be a low figure if things blow up, and the opening will be there for the Dems to jump back in if they play their cards right.

Wisconsin deficit update

We haven’t had a lot of news in the last 3 weeks about Wisconsin’s looming budget deficit, since it was magically hidden until after the elections. But if you know where to look, you can find some extra insights as to where we are. I found one such example of this information today, as the state released plans to refinance nearly $297 million of the state’s debt, with the sale to investors coming in the near future.

If you take a look at the website of this bond offering, you’ll see some updates of key financial documents. The first page you should go to is on Page 19 of the PDF, where they list the differences between the years in the 2013-15 budget as projected, as well as how it actually ended up when the state’s Annual Fiscal Report (AFR) was released for FY 2013-14 last month. What they don’t do is plug in the new numbers for the 2014-15 fiscal year that we know exists today in light of that AFR, which includes the $25.4 million in added funding that must be transferred to the Transportation Fund because it was delayed from its originally scheduled transfer in FY 2014.

Looking at those figures and plugging in the reality, we see the following.

End-year balance FY 2014- +$516.9 million
PLUS Total revenues FY 2015- $15,283.3 million
MINUS Appropriations FY 2015- $15,842.3 million
MINUS Extra transfer to Trans. Fund- $25.4 million
Net balance -$67.5 million.

Seems like not much to worry about, since that figure could be made up by a few extra lapses or tapping the state’s rainy day fund. Except that projection doesn’t match reality, and what we’ve seen so far in the first few months of FY 2015.

First of all, to get up to the budgeted tax revenue amount of $14,724.6 million, the state would have to generate an increase in revenues of 5.57% compared to Fiscal Year 2014. This is a figure nearly twice the rate of revenue growth that the state has had over the last decade, and seems unlikely to reach over the next 8 months.

In fact, the bond issue document can give us more clues as to where we stand so far in Fiscal Year 2015. Moving onto page 30 in the PDF (or Page A-14), you can see what revenues came in at for 2013-14, and what they’re expected to be for 2014-15. It also gives a year-over-year comparison for the June 30-September 30 time period for each fiscal year. Using those numbers, we can see that so far:

·Income taxes are down as a total, but if you add $55 million a month to account for lower withholdings (what, you didn’t notice that extra $5 a paycheck?), they’re up about 4.33%. The problem is that they need to be up more than 6.4% to match projections.
·Sales taxes are up just over 4.9%, slightly above expectations.
·Corporate taxes are down less than 1%, and they’re supposed to jump up by 13.7%.
·Excise taxes are down -4.36%, and they’re supposed to stay steady.
·Insurance company and miscellaneous taxes (combined) are up 9.28% instead of the 6.6% they’re projected to rise by.

So project this same trend out for the year, and here’s what I get.

Income taxes: DOWN $146.95 million vs projections
Sales taxes: UP $47.54 million
Corporate taxes: DOWN $132.71 million
Excise taxes: DOWN $28.78 million
Insurance/ Miscellaneous: UP $6.21 million
COMPARED TO BUDGET: DOWN $254.69 million.

This would still be a revenue increase of 3.74%, slightly above the 3.48% that LFB projected earlier this year. But it still means a significant revenue shortfall that would drive up the budget deficit for this year, as well as future years. If you plug that revenue shortfall back into the numbers from earlier, you see the current –year deficit grows to $322.2 million, which is well past the $79 million deficit that is required to trigger a budget repair bill.

It also starts the state off from a lower base for the next budget- helping to lead to an even higher structural budget deficit for 2015-17 than the one that was projected in May. Plugging in the lower revenue figures for the future years gives a structural deficit of just over $1.25 BILLION. And if GOPs try to play the “but…revenue growth” game, I’ll add that there is now over $1.8 billion in additional spending requested by state agencies, including the additional $695 million that the Department of Public Instruction just requested to keep schools adequately funded. The requested increase in spending by state agencies is double what $900 million in revenue growth would be over the next 2 years(using the 2.9% average), and it would push the budget deficit well over $2 billion for the next budget.

We’ll see what kind of magic assumptions Walker’s Department of Administration tries to pull next week when it releases the overview of all the budget estimates and agency spending requests (here’s a copy of the one from November 2012 for the last budget). But if these first three months of reports are any indication, we’re still way down in a budget hole and it’s going to take a whole lot to pull our way out of it.

Turnout a minor factor in 2014 WisGOP win, vote shift a bigger one

A lot of attention has been given to the low turnout in last week’s midterm elections nationwide (estimated at 36.4%). And while Wisconsin’s turnout was well below the levels in the 2012 presidential election that led to more than 3 million votes being cast, we actually held up quite well when compared to the dreadful numbers in the rest of the nation.

The turnout for last week’s election in Wisconsin is estimated at a little over 54% based on the unofficial vote total of just over 2.4 million. This is slightly below the 2012 recall election turnout of 57.8% and 2.52 million, but well above the sub-50% levels of 2010, when only 2.16 million votes were cast (in fact, Mary Burke got almost as many votes last week as Scott Walker got in his “landslide” in 2010).

But what I want to look into is to compare these gubernatorial turnouts with the presidential turnout that gave Barack Obama 53% of the vote in Wisconsin in 2012, and see if there is some kind of correlation with the turnout. Conversely, if there is not a major turnout differential between certain parts of the state, that might tell you that the reason Walker has won has more to do with shifts of voter preference vs. a straight turnout game.

First of all, let’s look at the composition of the electorates by geography. What I will do is take the 2012 presidential turnout of the top 10 counties and/or areas of Wisconsin that cast the largest number of votes, along with the number from the rest of the state. Then, I will compare it with the 2014 turnout figures (unofficial). For the sake of comparison, I am splitting up the City of Milwaukee (very blue-voting) from the rest of Milwaukee County (varied, but with a slight GOP lean). I am also going to consolidate the “Ring of Fire” pro-GOP counties bordering Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, or the “WOW Counties”), and then see what we get.





The largest differences here involve the diluting of the high-turnout WOW Counties and blue-voting Dane County in the 2012 presidential election- especially the WOW Counties. Those 2 counties added a combined 1.3% of the share of total votes in 2014 vs 2012 (23.57% vs. 22.27%), while the City of Milwaukee lost 0.76% of its 2012 share in 2014. The blue-leaning counties of Rock and Kenosha also had a sizable increase in their vote share in 2012 compared to 2014, so there is an argument to be made that the Dems failed to maintain the turnout advantage in those areas that helped the state re-elect President Obama.

This is another way of showing the changes in the share of the votes for these large counties and areas in Gov Walker’s three elections, to see how this works in those lower-than-presidential-turnout elections. As you’ll see, the WOW Counties grabbed a huge share of the electorate in 2010, and while it’s still the largest, some of that advantage is being slowly eaten away, while Dane County is grabbing an increasing share. This will also show that the rest of Milwaukee County is another place whose influence has gone down over the last 4 years.



And while all areas of Wisconsin had drop-offs in turnout in 2014 compared to both the November 2012 presidential election and the June 2012 recall election, this chart will show you that some places dropped off more severely than other.



Note that the City of Milwaukee, Rock County, Kenosha County, and Racine County had turnout drop-offs of more than 30% in 2014 compared to the 2012 presidential election. Each of these places include four of the five counties in Wisconsin that have an African-American population of more than 5% (Dane County and the non-City portion of Milwaukee County are the only two other areas of the state that have an African-American population above 5%), and that might be something worth keeping an eye on in 2016 with Obama not being on the ballot. On the flip side, the WOW Counties and Dane County had the smallest dropoffs (WOW at 19.87%, Dane at 20.81%), and everyone else was largely in the mid-to-upper 20s in percentage of dropoff.

What these charts indicate to me is the following.

·Dem turnout did drop off in key areas of Southeastern and South Central Wisconsin compared to other areas of the state.

·The red-voting areas of suburban Milwaukee are being slowly diluted, especially as overall turnout around the state goes up with presidential elections.

·Scott Walker used a turnout advantage in the WOW Counties and other red-leaning areas of the Milwaukee Metro Area to win in 2010, but won in 2012 and 2014 by shifting voters toward his side in other parts of the start, especially in Northeast Wisconsin (noted in this post).

So bottom line- for Dems to win in 2016 and beyond, they can’t rely on higher turnouts and favorable demographics to carry them through. They will need to also convince some voters to their side, which would hold down large GOP leads in certain areas for statewide elections (particularly in the eastern half of the state), and would win back seats in the Legislature. Turnout has not turned the outcomes in those areas toward the GOP - voter preference has - and as part of the autopsy of this election, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin should figure out why that has happened.

No Scotty, recalls did not hold Wisconsin jobs back. You did.

I headed down to Indiana this weekend to see Bucky take home another win and see some friends, and also so I could decompress from a bad week for my home state and the country at large. And fortunately, I was busy hanging out with friends on Sunday, so I didn't have to watch our fair governor desperately try to get national ink with an appearance on "Meet the Press" with Chuck Todd (not that I'd watch those DC shows anyway).

On Sunday's show, Todd asked Gov Walker about Wisconsin's bad jobs record, and Gov Walker tried again to claim that “uncertainty” before the June 2012 recall elections caused Wisconsin’s job growth to be so below-par during his tenure in office. But a quick check of the actual numbers shows this not to be true. We’ll start the clock with Walker’s inauguration in January 2011.

Wisconsin private-sector job growth
Jan 2011- June 2012 +51,200 (+2.20% total, +3,012 a month)
June 2012-Sep 2014 +70,800 (+2.98% total, +2,622 a month)

As you can see, since the June 2012 recall election, private sector job growth in Wisconsin has slowed down by nearly 400 jobs a month. If what Walker is saying is true, you’d have seen the private sector job numbers “take off like a rocket” (as Assembly Speaker Robbin’ Vos famously claimed in Spring 2012).

This failure to increase job growth is especially striking when you consider that U.S. job growth has stayed strong in the same time period under the Obama Recovery. This includes the upward revisions that were in last Friday’s U.S. jobs report.

U.S. private sector jobs
Jan 2011- June 2012 +3.474 million (+3.23%, +204,353 a month)
June 2012- Sep 2014 +5.529 million (+4.94%, +204,778 a month)

Both of these figures are faster than the rate in Wisconsin, and that the gap grows after the 2012 recall election from just over 1% to nearly 2%. Another chart will show this even clearer. In this case, I will use the 24 months before the June 2012 recall election, and the 24 months after the recall election.



Note the trendlines for both. Wisconsin’s goes down, and the U.S.’s goes up. So not only is Gov Walker’s claim of “recall elections hurt Wisconsin’s job growth” not true, the converse could be more easily argued- that retaining Walker in the June 2012 recall election slowed down Wisconsin’s job growth, and caused it to further lag the U.S. recovery.

And with the upwardly revised jobs numbers for August and September, it means that the Walker jobs gap has grown yet again. It’s now at more than 71,000 private sector jobs, and over (63,000) total jobs. The state needs another (4,000) in the October jobs report just to keep from falling behind even further.





You’d think a numbers guy like Chuck Todd would be interested enough to predict Scott Walker’s mendacious claims on job growth and be able to slam him to his face if Scotty even tried this BS of "recalls are the only reason job growth was slow in Wisconsin." But then again, you might remember Chuck Todd infamously pulling this act last year.

MSNBC host Chuck Todd said Wednesday that when it comes to misinformation about the new federal health care law, don't expect members of the media to correct the record.

During a segment on "Morning Joe," former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) speculated that most opponents of the Affordable Care Act have been fed erroneous information about the law. Todd said that Republicans "have successfully messaged against it" but he disagrees with those who argue that the media should educate the public on the law. According to Todd, that's President Barack Obama's job.

"But more importantly, it would be stuff that Republicans have successfully messaged ag1ainst it," Todd told Rendell. "They don't repeat the other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say, 'Well, it's you folks' fault in the media.' No, it's the President of the United States' fault for not selling it."

So why aren’t we surprised to see Chuck Todd stand by and say nothing when Scott Walker falsely claims that recall elections held back Wisconsin job growth, because Chuckles is more interested in how convincingly Walker is spinning his reasons instead of caring about whether it is true or not.

This country is in a very dangerous place because attitudes like Chuck Todd’s and Scott Walker’s have devolved politics into a place where marketing is able to trump results. We just saw last week in Wisconsin what happens when people vote for candidates based on messaging and anger as opposed to voting for candidates that they agree with on the issues. Now we will all pay a big price for that weakness and lack of accountability from and by our media.

Why are Wisconsinites not voting for what they believe in?

On a large numbers of questions, when you put out the progressive-preferred option, most Wisconsinites will pick it. And the numbers indicate that it includes a sizable amount of people who also voted for Governor Scott Walker, who won't put those policies into law. Take a look at the numbers from a chart put out by Public Citizen on Wisconsin regarding the numerous county-wide resolutions that asked if the state should expand Badgercare as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare.

BadgerCare YES Votes

Percent Votes for BadgerCare/ Percent Votes for Walker

STATEWIDE 747,031 73%/52.30%

Bayfield County 5,747 78%/38.36%

Chippewa County 13,975 61%/53.75%

Clark County 6,036 58%/65.00%

Dane County 195,596 82%/29.23%

Douglas County 11,911 79%/38.12%

Dunn County 7,592 63%/53.04%

Eau Claire County 25,442 64%/48.26%

Florence County 1,232 64%/67.48%

Iron County 1,369 70%/61.06%

Jefferson County 20,473 62%/60.01%

Kenosha, City of 21,722 77%/50.30%*

La Crosse County 32,768 71%/46.11%

Lincoln County 7,576 67%/56.54%

Milwaukee County 241,591 76%/36.10%

Oneida County 11,114 69%/59.05%

Outagamie County 42,231 61%/59.46%

Portage County 20,636 72%/48.30%

Rock County 36,365 65%/42.77%

St Croix County, 22,479 70%/59.45%

Wood County 21,176 61%/57.31%


The same pattern repeated with the sizable amount of communities that approved of advisory questions asking for a higher minimum wage. And now we're going to be stuck with a Governor who won't listen to the wishes of the people (much as Scott Walker did as Milwaukee County Executive when the voters asked for 1% sales tax for transit, parks and other cultural items).

And apparently some of the areas of the state are OK with voting for a governor who is perfectly fine with the bad things that are going on in their community. One day before the election, this is what happened in western Wisconsin regarding the issue of fracking.

Two towns in Trempealeau County have voted to sue the nearby community of Independence over what they say is an illegal annexation of a frac sand mine.

During a standing-room-only meeting, the town boards of Lincoln and Burnside voted to file the civil suit challenging the rent annexation. Normally, towns have no say in annexations unless they can argue that the land being annexed isn’t touching a city’s boundaries. In this case, the frac sand mine is over a mile away from the city.

Lincoln Town Board Chairman Jack Speerstra said they’ve already lost more than 1,000 acres to sand mine annexations, and that this one needs to be challenged.

“It’s not just the loss of property, but it’s the folks around those mines and don’t have any say over how they’re going to be governed. And that’s just not right,” said Speerstra.

The Trempealeau County Board has also dealt consistently with citizen groups complaining about health concerns and overgrowth of frac sand mines over the last year. So what happened on Election Night? Trempealeau County voted 52-46 for the candidate who has no problem letting the frac sand companies run wild under his DNR- Scott Walker.

You see this pattern repeat in northeastern Wisconsin, where an administrative judge ruled that Walker's DNR was negligent in allowing large farming operations to poison the area's groundwater.

A state administrative law judge who put conditions on a closely watched expansion of a large dairy farm in Kewaunee County has found that numerous contaminated wells in the area "represented a massive regulatory failure to protect groundwater."

The Oct. 29 ruling by Judge Jeffrey Boldt will allow Kinnard Farms to expand in a region with a history of polluted groundwater. But Boldt also directed the Department of Natural Resources to use its authority to prevent more problems by requiring the farm to install monitoring wells....

In Wisconsin, the conflict is deepest in Kewaunee County — home of 15 large-scale farms, known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, that a have minimum of 700 milking or dry cows. The county also features a geology of fractured bedrock that allows water and contaminants to slip quickly into groundwater when layers of soil are thin.

On Oct. 22, environmental groups asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to use emergency powers to investigate groundwater contamination in Kewaunee County, charging that the DNR had failed to protect drinking water. The EPA says it is evaluating the petition.

In 2013, 31% of 483 wells that were tested by the county contained bacteria or nitrates — or both — that exceeded state and federal public health standards.

And Walker's DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp (appointed for her deregulatory "open for business" beliefs) complained about the judge daring to point out that the DNR didn't do its job. So naturally, the GOP got smashed in Kewaunee County on Tuesday night right?

Final result in Kewaunee County: Walker 62, Burke 37

And I don't throw all of this on the local people who vote for candidates that won't carry out what the voters believe in. Because the Democratic Party of Wisconsin didn't put together a coherent message THAT WOULD MAKE THE CONNECTION between Walker/WisGOP policies and the bad situations that people are finding themselves in. And Dems should have actively pointing out that they would be the only ones that would work to keep the people's groundwater clean, that they would be the only ones that would deliver a higher minimum wage, and they would be the only ones to expand BadgerCare and save Wisconsin tax dollars by doing so. They didn't say it nearly enough and without any consistency. Which leaves no party discussing the issues in a manner that the people care about, and as a result, they are willing to look elsewhere.

So people end up voting Republican based on the misinformation of the right-wing GOP-agenda machine, or vote Republican because of hot-button issues like guns or abortion, or they don't vote at all. And now this state is going to go down a road of destruction that may never be able to be repaired because of the failures of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in the 2014 elections. And no one in party leadership should be safe, from DPW Chair Mike Tate, to Senate Dem Leader Chris Larson, to Assembly Dem Leader Peter Barca. The GOP freak show that'll be in control starting in January (which'll be even worse than the group that's led the state to "last in the Midwest" for jobs) is a sickening sight, and one that should not be tolerated. And having the DPW stay in the same defensive posture that doesn't attack these regressive GOP policies and fail to stand up for true progressive VALUES that the majority of Wisconsinites believe in is something that also can't be tolerated any more.