An important announcement at the Funhouse...

Apparently I have more fans than I thought, as I had the following item emailed over to me Friday morning. It took me a couple of days to decide whether to go public with this exciting news, but what the hell.

I've noticed your blog posts over the last few months regarding Wisconsin's atrocious performance under that fascist bastard Scott Walker, and I wanted to have you on Monday's show to explain these statistics further. On the eve of the Wisconsin presidential primary, there are occasional mentions of Scott Walker's reforms and the GOP presidential field's support of those policies, but there has been scant mention of the fact that Wisconsin continues to be last in job growth and was last in 4th Quarter income growth. I think exposing this horrible performance of Wisconsin under Walker could be of serious interest to our viewers, and could get picked up by more national media to illustrate the disastrous effects of these Koch/ALEC-driven policies.

Please call my producer _______ at 212-XXX-XXXX, and we will try to set something up early Monday afternoon.

Sincerely,
Keith Olbermann

P.S. Braun should be fine this year (love his focus and plate dscipline now). Gamel's really got some serious shoes to step into at first base after the loss of Fielder, but if Marcum can stay reasonably healthy and effective, Greinke step up to his Cy Young form in a contract year, and with a back-end bullpen of Rodriguez and Axford, the Brewers should remain serious contenders. I picked them to go all the way last year at the start of the 2011 playoffs for a reason. Of course, a Morgan meltdown or another Weeks injury would be a distinct possibility, and I'd change that opinion at that time.

Sweet! I'm going to be on Countdown at 7pm Wisconsin time on Monday, so you get to see the killer face behind these posts. And we finally will have the national media find out more about the brutal record of Wisconsin under Scott Walker. And maybe someone other than our 5-10 faithful readers will know the brilliance that happens inside the Funhouse doors!

Oh wait, there might be a hangup? Olbermann's fired and replaced by Eliot Spitzer??? And Spitzer's first show will clean the slate of all pre-scheduled interviews? DAMMIT!


Happy April 1, everybody.

Broken record- Wisconsin still last on jobs

Hidden in all the legal and political blows the Walker folks took yesterday is another one that underscores their complete failure. The BLS came out with their monthly state-by-state report, which shows how all the states are doing. And stop me if you've heard this before, but Wisconsin has mainted its position on top... of the bottom.

Over the year, nonfarm employment increased in 43 states and the District of Columbia and decreased in 7 states. The largest over-the-year percentage increase occurred in North Dakota (+6.8 percent). The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment occurred in Wisconsin (-0.6 percent).

And that's undersold, because Wisconsin has lost nearly 8,000 more jobs than its nearest "competitor" in the "50th out of 50" sweepstakes since the age of Fitzwalkerstan began.

Job change Jan. 2011- Feb. 2012
Wisconsin -11,500
Nevada -3,700
Mississippi -1,400
Missouri -1,100
Nebraska -500
Rhode Island -500

And as usual, Wisconsin continues to be in stark contrast to its Midwestern neighbors, who are seeing a major jobs boost in the Obama Recovery.

Midwestern job growth, Jan. 2011- Feb. 2012
Ohio +83,000
Mich +63,100
Minn +42,300
Ind. +39,000
Ill. +35,800
Wisc -11,500

That's right, Wisconsin is 47,300 jobs away from the nearest state in the Midwest. But none of those states have a fool like Scott Walker for governor, now do they? A couple of other notes from this Midwestern comparison stand out.

That closest competitior to Wisconsin is the state Walker keeps telling us we don't want to be like- Illinois. Well given that Illinois is creating 3,500 jobs a month more than us, and given that Illinois gained $3.8 billion in extra income taxes and $4.3 billion in overall revenues last year while Wisconsin is starting to see revenue drop and its budget deficit grow, maybe the FIBs aren't so far off, are they?

Another interesting point to see is Ohio's huge rebound, most of which has been in the last 3 months. Well, what happened in November 2011 in Ohio? Corporate puppet John Kasich had his collective bargaining law overwhelmingly repealed by the voters, a vote that was followed with dire warnings about massive tax increases and layoffs to follow if it was repealed. So what's happened? Ohio has added more than 50,000 jobs in the three months after the voters shot down SB5, and added more jobs than any state in the country in February.

Now compare Ohio's success to Wisconsin's awful record of job creation under Walker, where we started losing out on the U.S. recovery and losing jobs right after Act 10 was passed in March 2011.


Sure, you can try to say "correlation doesn't equal causation," but you certainly can't say taking away collective bargaining rights helps to GROW a state's ecnomy, and that reinstalling collective bargaining rights would slow a state's economy. That reality contradicts what the Walkers and Kasichs of the world have tried to sell us, and they must be held to account for it.

And that's why I continue to do this monthly update on Walker's total failure to create jobs and illustrate how much Wisconsin has fallen behind its neighbors in the last year as a result. Because our media refuses to tell this big story, and the Dems honestly haven't been doing enough to keep it in people's consciousness. Even the national media has ignored this angle with the Wisconsin presidential primary only 3 days away, it's like they want to generate a storyline of "he said, she said" conflict to drive election spending instead of tell the unambiguous story of the RESULTS of these huge changes - which is ABJECT FAILURE.

We need "50th in jobs" and "50th in income growth" to be a constant drumbeat for these last 2 months, to drive it through people's heads that no matter what AM 620, 1130, and 1310 and milllions of Koch-infused ads might be saying, it ain't working for Scott Walker.

Not a bad way to end the quarter

No sense going into a long post about a couple of recently-released reports. I'll have plenty of time the next few days to do that.

The obvious media story is the historic recall elections being called today. Not a huge "new news" headline in itself, but when you realize only 3% of Walker signatures got tossed (when most figured it would be 10-15%), it shows how good a job the Dems and United Wisconsin did in weeding out suspect and duplicate sigs. And now they have all those signatures and names on file for May 8 and June 5 to find and get out to the voting booth.

But then you get alleged Walkergate criminal Kelly Rindfleisch getting slapped down in court and forced to stand trial in Milwaukee County...instead of her home in Columbia County (where she illegally kept her residence while being paid by Milwaukee County). So far, not so bad.

And then you have more news that the FBI is on the heels of Herman Cain's "Smoking Man" Mark Block and seeing if he and his Koch-funded front groups violated the tax code as they made campaign contributions to Walker and other Wisconsin GOP candidates in 2010. Then you remember that Tim Russell's criminal complaint mentions Walker's buddy/campaign worker flying down to Atlanta to meet with Block and Herman Cain after Walker's election, and the pieces seem to fit quite well, don't they?

Oh, and now the worst nightmare for Scott Walker and Kathy Falk jumps into the guv's race (not named Feingold, of course). And Tom Barrett doesn't have to run on "not being another Jim Doyle" this time, he now can run on "not being Scott Walker." If Tom runs hard, brings fact and truth abut Walker's record, and brings the honesty we know he has, he'll be in good shape. Note, this is not an endorsement of Barrett, because I have no assurances he'll run harder than the defensive, half-assed campaign he ran in 2010. But I also think things have changed a bit, for him, for Wisconsin Dems, and especially for the now-exposed failure that is Scott Walker as Governor. If that's true, these next 67 days should be a lot of fun, culminating on June 5.

And there will be less of Act 10 to repeal once Walker gets replaced. The parts that were struck down include the state's withholding of union members' dues and the absurd standard that required unions to have 51 percent of all members (including those not voting) to recertify every year, and to make the unions pay for those elections. In addition, the decision notes that the politically-motivated decision to leave out the police and firefighters' unions were a big reason behind the change in the now-unconstitional rules so now any attempt to reinstate these measures will have to include those public safety unions. Good luck with that, GOP.

You know, I like living in this state on bad days, but when a day like this comes around, it becomes even more amazing than usual.

Nope, not working. Wisconsin dead last in income growth

Another economic report out today illustrating the failures of Scott Walker. This time it's the Bureau of Economic Analysis' report on personal income, which features both full-year 2011 stats, as well as the 4th Quarter stats. And much like we've seen with the unemployment reports, Wisconsin gets its name mentioned...and not in a good way.

State personal income averaged 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, the same as in the third quarter. Growth ranged from 0.5 percent in Wisconsin to 1.5 percent in North Dakota.

In other words, Wisconsin was DEAD LAST for income growth in the U.S. from October-December 2011. 50 out of 50.

Table 10 of that same report shows that Wisconsin was also dead last in the U.S. for increased earnings by employees in the 4th Quarter of 2011, at 0.79% increase in wages, supplements, and self-employed income. This puts Wisconsin well behind its Midwestern peers for the same time period.

Increase in earnings, 4th Quarter 2011
Iowa 1.28%
Mich 1.20%
Minn 1.05%
Ill. 0.99%
Ind. 0.96%
Ohio 0.96%
Wis. 0.79%

The state does better on the year-long report, which the Milwaukee Business Journal dutifully reports (while ignoring the "50th out of 50" status for 4Q). Wisconsin had a year-over-year increase in personal income of 5.2%, slightly above the 5.1% for the U.S. in the same time period (albeit below our neighbors in Iowa, Michigan, and Illinois, and just ahead of Minnesota's 5.1%). But even that number shows the damage of Walker policies, as state income grew by 2.3% in the first 3 months of 2011, and then only grew 2.2% for the rest of the year, after the passage of Act 10. Wisconsin also slipped from 24th to 25th on per-capita income, getting passed by Iowa and staying nearly 10% behind Illinois and Minnesota.

We'll see if the media picks up on this new piece of evidence offering further proof that Wisconsin continues to slip economically under Scott Walker, and that any "turnaround" is from the disaster THAT WALKER AND WisGOP CREATED IN THE FIRST PLACE! But if they fail to do their duty, well, that's why people like me are here.

Marquette getting closer, but not quite there

Just read up on the newest Marquette University poll which shows a tight governor's race at this time, with Scott Walker leading Tom Barrett by 2, Kathy Falk by 4, Doug La Follette by 7, and Kathleen Vinehout by 8 (interestingly, Walker is under 50% in all races). This is a closer score than we had with Marquette's last poll, which had Walker up at least 6-7 points on all comers, which caused me to shred Charles Franklin's poll for oversampling right-wingers and old voters.

Well, much like the poll results, Franklin's gotten rid of some of the excesses, but he's still oversampling Scott Walker's voters. And as usual, I'll break down how, and I do want to thank Franklin and Marquette for being transparent enough to show their methodology.

Ther first tip-off comes from the Topline demographics, and I'll break down 3 in particular: gender, ideology, and age.

First of all, the gender breakdown in the poll is 52% men, 48% women, and strangely Franklin gave men a higher weighting, as the actual respondents were 51-49% men. This goes against the largely accurate 2010 CBS News Exit poll, which had the split at 50-50. On the surface, a 2% difference doesn't seem like much, except that you look further at the poll and realize Walker's approval is +12 among men, and -6 among women, and Falk's favorability is -20 among men but only -3 among women. This gender gap is quite obvious in the heads-up races:

polls by gender
Walker vs. Falk men: Walker +12.4, women: Falk +4.4
Walker vs. Barrett men: Walker +8.3, women: Barrett +6.0
Walker vs. Vinehout men: Walker +16.2, women: Vinehout +0.8%
Walker vs. La Follette men: Walker +15.3, women: La Follette: +1.0

Guess that 14-16 point gender gap tells you that Walker is in a world of hurt if women use the superior numbers in the population to get out and vote, doesn't it?

And the leaning towards men is evident in the skewing of some of the other numbers. The higher amount of pro-Republican men also seems to help explain the higher amount of conservatives being part of the poll. Among those answering the question, the ideology breakdown is as follows: 20% liberal, 39% moderate, 41% conservative. Now this is better than January's debacle, which was 22-34-44 liberal-moderate-conservative, but it still doesn't come close to matching the 21-43-36 voters in the 2010 elections.

If there are more moderate voters, it massively hurts Scott Walker's poll standing, as Walker's approval rating is 43% among moderates, and he loses moderates by nearly 18 to Barrett, 11 to Falk, 7 to Vinehout, and 6 to La Follette. In fact, if you use the 21-43-36 parameter in the 2010 exit poll, the Falk and Barrett races become quite interesting indeed.

poll using 2010 exit poll weighting
Falk 46.8 - Walker 46.6
Barrett 47.6 - Walker 44.9
Walker approval- 48.7 - 48.6 (vs. 50.4-46.6)

Think the news stories on the polls might be a bit more interesting if Walker was losing by 3 to Barrett, tied with Falk, and had his approval-disapproval dead even? Again, it's not an egregious error by Franklin and Marquette, but a 4-5 point swing is a lot in the race's perception right now.

Lastly, the Marquette poll only has 7 percent of voters under 30, and nearly 60% of voters at 45 or older, and that's after deflating the actual respondents, of whom 77% (!) were 45+. So let's compare that to the GAB's list of registered voters after the 2010 elections, and the 2010 CBS exit poll.

Voters under 30 and over 45, estimates
Marquette under 30 - 6.9%
GAB under 30 - 9.5%
CBS 2010 exit poll- 15%

Marquette over 45 - 59.6%
GAB over 45 - 57.2%
CBS exit poll - 62%

While the older vote seems to be in the ballpark, the younger vote seems to be underestimated in the Marquette poll, and that's no small deal, because 65% of those polled under 30 years old DISAPPROVE of Walker, Barrett beats Walker 3 to 1 among young voters, Falk beats Scotty by nearly 40, and Vinehout and La Follette beat Walker by well over 30. Needless to say, if young voters get out and vote above their numbers, Walker will have a very tough time winning, but the Marquette poll underplays this huge deficit Walker has among the young, because young people simply don't answer phone calls from weird numbers.

So when you look at the Marquette poll, they've clearly made some tweaks that don't make the numbers seem as absurd as they did 2 months ago, and they get minor credit for that. But they're still overrepresenting conservatives and underrepresenting moderates and young voters - two constituencies that don't like Scott Walker. So when you look at those poll numbers, it may be fair to knock down Walker another 2-3 points, and when you realize that most Wisconsinites have made up their mind when it comes to Scott Walker, that 3 points may put him in a major hole that he can't get out of.

The challenge for the Dems is now to make sure they maintain the fire, and get young voters and women out to the polls on June 5. If that happens, Wisconsin will be likely to make history by being the third state to kick out its governor through a recall. Now can the Dems continue to act in a way that makes people want to get out to the polls and vote for them, or will they be a top-down, backroom-deal group that doesn't understand how the game has changed in the last year? We'll see.

Occupy Wisconsin newspapers! Part 2

I wanted to forward you to a couple of links that showcase a couple of recent examples of how the editorial boards of our state's newspapers continue to cowtow to their corporate masters instead of doing their duty as journalists and demanding a free an open society.

The first is an excellent rundown on Blogging Blue of how Gannett-run newspapers in Appleton, Wausau, Fond du Lac, and other markets across Wisconsin ran the same editorial denouncing employees who signed recall petitions. not only is it McCarthyist to consider disciplining a food writer or sports writer for signing something that does not affect their beat (and is within their rights as a citizen), and disgusting that they used that Texass Teabagger group's illegitimate database to find this out, but there's a bigger issue here.

If these newspapers are all writing the same thing, that tells you that the orders came from the top at Gannett, and they told the editors of these Wisconsin newspapers to write this editorial. So why would a huge chain like Gannett care about what individual citizens do in little communities in Wisconsin? Because they and their corporate advertisers got a lot of money riding on being in the good graces of Scott Walker. Which means they're more interested in the bottom line than putting out a good product that informs Wisconsin citizens.

The second example is in response to the Journal-Sentinel writing another cop-out editorial against recalls, this one supporting ALEC boy Robin Vos' efforts to limit the reasons for recall petitions. We know the J-S is in the bag for Walker in order to continue to curry favor with the MMAC and other Milwaukee oligarch organizations, but even this is beyond the pale for them.

As James Rowen points out in a great article, the J-S contradicts itself on ths editorial, as it openly said Walker was not elected to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers. Rowen correctly adds:

A recall election is the only means available to hold Walker accountable for an out-sized lie of omission: his failure to disclose when it counted - - during the campaign - - that he intended, if he were to win, to do away with most public sector collective bargaining - - a lie compounded by his subsequent insistence to the contrary, PolitiFact has found.

And James also leaves out the corruption in Walker's County Executive's office, where more Walker appointees continue to be questioned about doing campaign work while being paid by county taxpayers, and that the offices of Walker staffers were raided the night before the 2010 elections as part of the John Doe investigation. There's also the "50th in the nation" status on job creation under Walker, and the huge amounts of out-of-state money and ALEC influence that has defined the Walker Administration's agenda. None of this was reported by our media in 2010 (scary thought- "not being reported" does not mean they didn't know), and now that we do know, we deserve the right to decide whether this administration be allowed to spend our taxpayer dollars while in office.

And further, the J-S demanding that recalls not happen when politicians lie, cheat and ram through legislation that the people do not approve of goes against all marks of a functioning democracy where politicians have the "consent of the governed", i.e., the PEOPLE. What the J-S wants is to have a small society make the rules for the people, and have the media report on how it affects their small Village of friends. Meanwhile, they expect us to follow like a bunch of brain-dead suckers. NO SALE GUYS. Much like I mentioned earlier this month on the state media's failures to hold Walker to account, I'm starting to believe our state's newspapers and editorial boards need to get Occupied in order to start calling it fairly. Apparently cancelling subscriptions might not be enough.

Debunking the Walker "turnaround theme"- Unemployment claims

Greetings from cloudy and cooler La Crosse. Sometimes posts just fall into your lap, and today was a good example of that. As soon as I saw this Scott Walker press release in the Wheeler Report, I knew I had an easy "debunk the spin" post coming.

In Part 1 of what promises to be a pathetic series of attempts to bullshit Wisconsinites into thinking that our economy is "turning around" due to Walker policies (while conveniently leaving out that Walker policies tanked a growing Wisconsin economy in 2011), our fair Governor tries to grab the credit for the state's reduced unemployment claims.

After the first full 11 weeks of 2012, the average new claim total declined by almost one-fourth when compared to the first full 11 weeks in 2010. The average total of new Unemployment Insurance (UI) claims through the first 11 weeks of this year are one more indicator that Wisconsin’s economy is headed in the right direction.

“Helping Wisconsinites get back to work and getting them off of the unemployment rolls is good for everyone in our state,” Governor Walker said. “While I am encouraged by this good indicator that Wisconsin’s economy is turning around, we still have a lot of work to do.”

During the first 11 weeks of 2012, the average number of new UI claims has dropped by 23 percent percent when compared to the first full 11-week period in 2010, and by 12 percent when compared to the first full 11 weeks in calendar year 2011. Wisconsin has seen dramatic decreases in average weekly totals for initial claims, which haven’t been lower for the 11th full week of a calendar year since 2005. In addition, continued claims have declined by 29 percent through the first full 11 weeks of 2012 compared to the first full 11 weeks of 2010.

Well, of course Walker brings up the decrease in Wisconsin from 2010, but passes over the drops that happened during 2010, under Jim Doyle and Legislative Dem policies. And it proves to be a typical Walker lie by omission, because after January the year-over-year decrease in weekly unemployment claims was never below 17 percent for any week in the rest of 2010. It takes some serious brass balls to try to take credit for drops in UE claims that happened before you ever took office!

The second part is also intentionally misleading, because it misses the context that the rest of the country is seeing unemployment claims at their lowest levels in more than 4 years. Wisconsin SHOULD be seeing drops in unemployment as the Obama Recovery continues to pick up steam. Explain to me how that proves it has anything to do with Scott Walker and GOP policies? The obvious answer is that it doesn't, but that doesn't stop Scotty the Grifter from trying to say it does.

In fact, let's compare Wisconsin's year-over-year increase in claims for both the Doyle and Walker years, and see who measures up better. The timing is fortuitous, because we've had exactly 52 weeks of unemployment claim data to check since Act 10 was passed in March 2011, so compare Wisconsin's results with the U.S. in the previous year before Act 10, and then match it with the record vs. the rest of America after Act 10.

Wisconsin vs. U.S. change in jobless claims


As you can see, Wisconsin was consistently seeing drops in jobless claims 10-15% below the national average in the year before Act 10 under policies passed by Jim Doyle and the Dems, and showed little to no difference from the U.S. for much of the year after Act 10 - we lost our advantage under Walker's policies. In fact, the only time you see the streams cross is in the last few weeks, which are the only weeks that don't have Doyle vs. Walker, but Walker vs. Walker! In other words, the only reason it looks like "improvement" is because Wisconsin was coming off Walker's higher-than-they-should-be claims numbers in 2011, which means he deserves no credit for minor improvements over what he already screwed up.

Given the "part 1" reference, you can bet there will be more of these releases filled with statistics that lack context and lie by intentionally leaving key bits of information out. But I'll wager good money that I'll be spending a few posts this week debunking the "Walker turnaround" meme. And you can also bet that a lot of the "turnaround" should be credited to Jim Doyle and Barack Obama - just like the drop in unemployment claims over the last 2 years.