WisGOP cover-up contnues at Wisconsin Veterans Home

Naturally this was buried on Page 3 of the published version of the Wisconsin State Journal yesterday, but it's becoming apparent that there were even more problems at the Wisconsin Veterans Homes at King than we knew. And even worse, the Walker Administration wasn't exactly forthcoming when it came to telling others and the public about it.

This time it results from an incident in May where liquid oxygen leaked at the King facility, and a whistleblower complaint that was filed on September 30. But the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Administration didn't release the information until last week. And the excuse given for not revealing the incident earlier is absurd.

DVA spokeswoman Carla Vigue said the incident report was not provided at that time because the liquid oxygen leak occurred in nearby MacArthur Hall and “we did not have any records that met that request.” She noted the requester has filed nearly 700 records requests over the past 10 years.

Rick de Moya, the retired DVA administrator who filed the request, said he made the request because he wanted to learn “how this hazardous exposure to staff and residents could have happened and why it was not reported immediately to the appropriate officials and especially to the staff and residents at the King Veterans Home.”

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said “the agency’s denial was clearly in bad faith.”

He said he has seen numerous cases in which records custodians have provided records even if there was an inaccuracy in the request, “and it should have happened here.”

“Clearly, (the agency) knew or should have known what de Moya was asking about and clearly it decided to play word games to keep the record secret,” Lueders said. “It may not have violated the letter of the law but it did trample on its spirit.”

Ah, the old "you didn't ask the question in the right way" trick!

This story about the cover-up of the liquid oxygen incident comes 2 weeks after state health inspectors reported more than three dozen violations at the King Homes. In addition, it was revealed in December the King Veterans Home was fined nearly $77,000 by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services due to substandard care that played a role in the death of a 94-year-old resident, which led to the downgrading of the King Homes' quality rating 10 months ago.

Under federal rules, the public should have learned of the home’s downgraded status shortly after April 15, when an initial appeal by the state Department of Veterans Affairs was rejected.

But for reasons that aren’t yet clear, the change was kept from public view until late November.

The King home on March 9 received an “immediate jeopardy” citation, the most severe violation inspectors can give. It means the home’s practices created a crisis situation placing vulnerable residents’ health and safety at risk, according to the federal government’s inspection manual.

The citation dropped the health rating for the unit where the death occurred to two stars, or below average, but the change wasn’t reflected until Nov. 28 on the website the federal government has set up to help the public compare and make choices among nursing homes.

And I'm sure it's completely coincidental that we are finding out about these disgraces now instead of before the November elections, isn't it?

Just like how Wisconsin Veterans Administration Secretary John Scocos LIED TO told the Joint Legislative Audit Committee in September there weren't any serious problems at King- 6 months after CMS said they were downgrading them. And like it's just a coincidence Scocos announced his plans to leave as DVA Secretary 2 days the November 8 election (in fact, today is his last day on the job).

As usual, it's politics over performance in Walker World, and what a disgusting set of actions to allow these atrocities and risks to be imposed on our most vulnerable people who laid it on the line for this country. Frankly it's not being covered nearly enough by other outlets in the state, which is likely just how the Walker Administration wants it.

Is Wall Street "Trump rally" nothing more than stupid greed?

In the 5 weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, the Dow Jones industrial average jumped 8.5%, and reached 19,900. The Dow leveled off since then and still has yet to reach the magical 20,000 mark, but it's still only 100 points away as I write this, and the runup in stocks has likely helped your 401k and retirement outlook.

But is the apparent "Trump rally" a good thing? CBS Marketwatch's Tim Mullaney doesn't think so, and says stocks are "riding a bull market in corruption," where Wall Street is gambling on a return to an unregulated 2000s-style cocaine party, now that Republicans run all areas of the federal government.

Financial stocks are responsible for much of the U.S. market’s recent move, and the rally in financials is rooted in hopes for government deregulation of the industry. Financial stocks represent about a third of the S&P and are up around 17% since the election. Take them out and there is no rally, Trump or otherwise.

There's the hope that higher interest rates will finally boost banks' interest income. There's even some fantasy belief that higher interest rates will spur loan volumes — except dramatically higher rates for business means less investment, not more.

Except that interest rates aren’t behind most of the rally. Instead, the enthusiasm for financials is more about prospects for repeal of the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill, as well as the Obama administration fiduciary rule that requires financial advisers, brokers, and asset managers to put clients’ financial interests ahead of their own. Just look at how shares of investment managers have performed lately. Giant asset managers such T. Rowe Price Group and Alliance Bernstein Holding AB, rose as much as 22% post-election. Clearly, asset managers aren’t interest-rate plays, dispensing of the notion that rising rates are what’s pumping the financials.

Mullaney adds that bank stocks have also risen in the hopes of a return to the no-limits casino days of the 2000s...which promptly led to the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes. In addition, Mullaney notes that energy stocks have risen due to speculation on OPEC nations limiting oil production (and I'll add that the most GOP legislators being owned by the Kochs and other oil men doesn't hurt this thinking), and drug stocks have gone up now since the Trump Administration is less likely to go after them for excessive profits and isn't likely to force them to negotiate prices with Medicare.

So while the recent "Trump rally" may look nice for a few months in your portfolio, Mullaney adds that it isn't something that's made to last, and it isn't good for the real economy.

The Dow is likely to cross 20,000, but that doesn't validate Trump. U.S. stocks tripled under President Barack Obama. They went up under former President George W. Bush, too — until they didn't — and have risen about 10% a year since 1928. They'll rise in 2017 too if corporate profits beat expectations built into prices already.

The market is usually one of many things that makes you, to borrow Trump's Twitter wording, hopeful to be American, because it's typically a monument to the creativity of our Elon Musks and Steve Jobses. Right now, something else is happening. It's ugly, it’s cynical — and it won't work.

Now add in the expectation of blah job growth in tomorrow's December jobs report, and then note disappointing Holiday-season sales from retailers such as Macy's, Sears, and Kohl's, leading to hundreds of store closings.

It sure seems to me that we are not seeing enough real-world growth to match the idiotic optimism infecting the greedheads on Wall Street, at least not yet. Which makes me wonder when's the point where the temporary "high" wears off, and the mini-Bubble over the last 2 months starts to deflate, or burst.

The numbers behind the study that showed how screwed WisDOT funding is

I hadn’t had the time to go into the study on the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s funding situation that was released last week by consultants at HNTB. There are a lot of things put into this report, both on the expense and revenue sides, and I figured it was worthwhile to explain where things stand at this time, and why we have the transportation funding crisis that we do.

(I’ll discuss tolling possibilities in a later post, because there’s a whole separate paper on how it works, the new costs that would have to be taken on, and whether or not it would even be legal for Wisconsin to do so).

On the “incoming money” side, the HNTB consultants give a good explanation of the stagnant revenue problem that the DOT faces for now, and in the future.

Revenue from the motor fuel excise tax is projected to decrease as gasoline consumption is forecast to decline.Gasoline consumption is estimated to decrease due to a projected 36.4 percent increase in new vehicle fuel efficiency, increasing gasoline prices and modest increases in disposable income….

In FY 16 the Department collected $1.037 billion in total motor fuel revenues. By FY 27 the Department estimates collecting $994.9 million in motor fuel revenues.

Vehicle registration fees, the Department’s second largest state revenue source, is projecting only modest growth from $705.2 million in FY 18 to $788.3 million in FY 27. The small growth is due in large part to a projected 200,000 increase in the number of light vehicle registrations over the 10 years.

So this explains the revenue side of the DOT’s funding crunch.

On the other side, the HNTB consultants brought up three scenarios giving various levels of highway and other DOT spending over a 10-year period. Total revenues under the current level of taxes and fees totaled around $28.09 billion over that time period , and even though you should divide these totals by 10 to get a one-year estimate, what this shows is that even with massive (and unlikely) cuts to highway work, there isn’t enough money to fund things.

•Under Scenario One, expenditures were $28.94 billion, leaving a funding shortfall of $852 million over the decade. System conditions across all modes would decline and a significant number of state and local projects would go unfunded. The Department would not undertake planning for new highway expansion projects until 2055.

Good luck selling that to anyone. This would mean the number of roads rated as “poor and below” would more than double over the next 10 years. An extra problem in Scenario One is that it causes a delay in the proposed I-39/90 expansion near Janesville, which the consultants say would likely result in the state losing a $40 million federal grant that was announced for the project in July and formally approved in September, since the work on 39/90 wouldn’t be done in time.

So let’s look at what we would need for a slightly less sucky infrastructure situation to occur.

•For Scenario Two, the estimated costs of $31.11 billion exceed available revenues by $3.03 billion. System conditions across all modes would decline although not as severely as under Scenario One. The Department would not undertake planning for new highway expansion projects until 2040.

•In Scenario Three, the estimated costs of $36.03 billion exceed available revenues by $7.94 billion. The decline in system conditions would still be only partially mitigated. The Department would not undertake planning for new highway expansion projects until 2034.

Remarkably, even in Scenario Three, the consultants claim that amount of state highway miles rated as “poor and below” still would increase by 60%.

Yeah, I think this cartoon is as relevant as ever.



So how do we make up these gaps? From the state side, here is the revenue impact of various options over 10 years.

DOT revenue added from various options
Every $5 fee in driver’s license $37.5 million
Every $5 increase in title fee $71.5 million
Annual $75 “hybrid tax” for registration $141.1 million
Every $5 increase in registration fee $235.5 million
Each 1-cent increase in gas tax $319.7 million
Make registration fee based on value of vehicle $687.8 million
Pay sales tax on trade-in value of vehicle $953 million
Indexing gas tax for inflation $1.29 billion
2.5% “new car tax” $2.60 billion
5 cent gas tax increase, then 8% tax on fuel price $2.94 billion
Paying 5% sales tax on gas/diesel $5.65 billion

Your approval or disapproval of these options may vary.

There are also a couple of other new non-tolling revenue options for the DOT that have a few complications with it.

Move sales tax on motor vehicles, parts, etc. from General Fund to Transportation Fund
Right now when you buy a car, auto parts or other related items, the 5% state sales tax you pay goes into the General Fund like any other good or service. This option instead would put that money into the Transportation Fund, and it would raise a lot of money ($6.38 billion over 10 years).

Of course, the problem with this is that you have to come up with somewhere to fill in the $638 million a year in the General Fund. With the state already facing chronic General Fund budget deficits due to reckless tax cuts and other dumb policies in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan, those problems would multiply under this scenario.

Base registration fee on milage driven
The HNTB consultants describe a scenario where the registration fee for vehicles and light trucks is 1.02 cents a mile instead of the current $75 flat fee (interestingly, heavy trucks aren’t part of this), and the fee is charged for all miles driven between 3,000 and 20,000 miles. So all people who drive over 7,353 miles would face an increase, but the maximum fee would be capped at $204.

The problem is that the consultants note that “IT system development, fee processing, communication and enforcement” requires a sizable amount of start-up costs. In fact, this study says the mileage-based registration fee would lose nearly $10 million in the 2017-19 budget and would only start adding revenues in the following budget. This means that something would have to make up the difference while this system is set up, and if that doesn’t happen, there’s even more needed to be spent to “catch up” on needs in 2019 and beyond.

Obviously, borrowing can cut into the amount of taxes or fees that is needed to be raised to meet these needs. But that’s not such a great option when the HTNB consultants mention the state already is paying a combined $966 million in this budget from the Transportation and General Funds for past DOT borrowing, and interest rates are already jumping ahead of Trump becoming president, making future borrowing more costly.

So barring a massive bailout in the form of deficit spending from the Trump Administration and GOP Congress, you can see how paying for Wisconsin’s transportation is a major problem, and it likely explains why DOT Secretary Mark Gottlieb announced his resignation last week. This thing is a mess and given the Walker/WisGOP tendencies to reside in Fantasyland, blow their Bubble of BS larger and larger and not do much to fix real problems, I could see why a realist like Gottlieb might want to get out of there.

GOP Congress followed pro-corruption, no-oversight Wisconsin model

Many WisGOPs like to brag and claim our previously-progressive state is an example of what Republicans do if they are given all levers in power. Well, we definitely saw the GOPs in Congress try to govern in "The (2010s) Wisconsin Way" today ...and epically fail in the process.

House Republicans reversed plans to gut a congressional ethics watchdog on Tuesday after a backlash that included criticism from President-elect Donald Trump over the timing of the move.

Late Monday night House GOP members voted to dramatically restructure the Office of Congressional Ethics, putting the independent office under the jurisdiction of a congressional committee....

The OCE is currently a nonpartisan office led by lawyers, former members of Congress and others tasked with investigating alleged wrongdoing by members of Congress. The group may publicly release its findings and call for the House Committee on Ethics to take action.

The amendment passed by House Republicans would have limited the OCE's ability to act autonomously and make its investigations public.

And by the way, anyone who credits Drumpf for making the GOP back off is full of crap. Trump merely said that Congress should concentrate more on exploding the deficit with giveaways to the rich care more about tax policy and messing up Obamacare. I have zero doubt crooked-ass Trump would be cool with removal of as much oversight as possible.

But where I've seen ideas like removing independent arbiters of ethics before? Oh yeah, the Wisconsin Legislature in the last session.

The bill to repeal the GAB would replace the retired judges with partisan appointees, create separate entities for ethics and elections, and give the legislature the authority to cut off investigative funding if it sees fit.

Republican Assembly Member Joe Sanfelippo penned an op-ed last month saying that the GAB should operate more like the FEC. “If it works for the Federal Election Commission, there’s no reason it won’t for Wisconsin as well,” he wrote. The problem is that it doesn’t work for the FEC. The commission’s chairperson has said that due to crippling partisan gridlock (by law, it has three Democratic and three Republican commissioners), the FEC can’t enforce federal campaign-finance laws. As the Campaign Legal Center’s Larry Noble told the Wisconsin State Journal, "It's like setting up a disaster-relief agency and saying you're going to use the FEMA handling of Hurricane Katrina as your model."

And the DC GOPs trying to gut the OCE in the middle of the night and seeing public anger cause it to backfire is reminiscent of a similar late-night scummy GOP move to limit accountability in 2015.

A vote by Wisconsin's budget committee to dismantle the state's open records laws has caused an uproar across the Badger State.

Under these measures, lawmakers would be able to draft bills in secret and hide their communications from the public. The changes would also apply to local government officials, including school board members.

No other state in the country would have similar statutes, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan agency that helps legislators draft laws.

The Joint Finance Committee passed it 12-4 on a party line vote. Republicans refused to say who initiated the measures and the reasoning for it.

And just like how you know that the Wisconsin GOP will try to fuck with open records laws at some point in this session, GOPs in DC will try to immunize themselves and Trump from being held to standards on conflicts-of-interest, if the voters let them stay in power.

Members spilling out of HC-5. Say the OCE change is dead for now but not forever. Many want to return to this issue soon...

— Robert Costa (@costareports) January 3, 2017

All today's GOP understands is power and money, and the only way they stop in that march toward grabbing more power and more money is if either are threatened. And the only way that is threatened is if other people rise up and make them realize they will face consequences- particularly at the ballot box, or in the courtroom. As I said 2 days ago- the real 2017 New Year's Resolution has to be in holding these thugs accountable. It's the only way this downward spiral will end.

At least Wisconsin stays on top in one area of life

Yeah....



Hells yeah....


We may be a crooked economic laggard, but we can still play football in Wisconsin. Gotta take the good things when you can get them in 2017.

Upon further review, recount was worthwhile..and cheaper

The recount of the presidential election in Wisconsin may have been certified 3 weeks ago, and even though the final results didn't change all that much, with Donald Trump extending his lead over Hillary Clinton by 571 votes to win the state by 0.76%, that doesn't mean things can't be improved.

That's reiterated from an in-depth article that appeared over the weekend by the State Journal's Matthew DeFour which discusses a number of issues that came up while the votes were being recounted.

At least 9,039 presidential votes weren’t counted correctly on Election Night, and only were added to the official results because of the recount, the State Journal review found. Another 2,161 votes were originally counted but later tossed out for reasons including to square vote totals with the number of voters who signed the poll book.

The more than 11,000 changes to the original vote total represent a minor 0.38 percent error rate out of the nearly 3 million votes counted.

State election officials, who cast the 12-day recount as a complete audit of the state election system at no cost to the public, say the changes are mostly the result of human error, not a problem with the voting equipment.

The analysis found one type of voting machine — the Optech Eagle, which processed about 10.6 percent of the ballots in the state — produced an error rate of 0.8 percent, likely because some voters didn’t comply with instructions to use a certain kind of ink or pencil.

Eau Claire County, one of the few still using the machines, is planning to replace them.

It's not surprising that some voters would think that using their own pen or marker to fill in a circle on the ballot would be sufficient, especially if they received a ballot at home and mailed it back in. I don't think we need to be blaming citizens for this- we need to be getting rid of machines that won't count the vote.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has a list of other problems and disparities that were found during the recount across various municipalities, including local elections officials writing down and/or reporting the wrong number for a candidate, and absentee/early votes that were left in sealed envelopes and not counted until they were found during the course of the recount. These errors are innocent, but they are items that seem to be in need of clarifying legislation or directions from the Elections Commission so that they happen less often.

Later on in the article, DeFour mentions that Dane County Clerk Scott McDonnell told him that some ballots were thrown out because a voter filled out the circle for a certain candidate, then filled in that candidate's name on the write-in line, which said it was an illegal "double vote". Those votes were able to be "saved" and counted because of the recount. If you dig into the changes from the "certified" numbers and the recount totals, it appears that write-in votes were frequently ignored by local election officials on November 8, and one write-in candidate in particular grabbed a lot of new votes as the recount was completed.

Wisconsin president, 2016
Trump 1,405,284 (+1,284 vs Nov certification)
Clinton 1,382,536 (+713)
Johnson 106,674 (+89)
Stein 31,072 (+66)
Castle 12,162 (+6)
McMullin (write-in) 11,855 (+1,857)
Total votes counted 2,976,150 (+837)

Nearly 2,000 more votes were found for McMullin, as people reviewed ballots during the recount, and realized that voters had selected the write-in. In fact, the reason there was only growth of 837 total votes while the top 6 candidates got an additional 4,000 votes is because they took away from what the Wisconsin Elections Commission calls "scattering", which is supposed to be for write-in votes that don't correspond to an official write-in candidate (i.e. voting for Mickey Mouse). Combone this with Clerk McDonnell's notes about how many discarded "double votes" were really for candidates on the ballot, and it tells me that all write-in votes need to be tallied and recorded, even if they are for Mickey Mouse. And local election officials need to be given the latitude to recognize when official candidates names (those on the ballot or otherwise) are being written, and count those votes. Even if that slows things down a bit on Election Night, so what? At least voters get their choices counted.

Oh, and this tidbit about the recount also dropped over the New Year's weekend.

Reimbursement requests submitted to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by 69 of the state’s 72 counties show the actual cost of those clerks doing the recount was just over $1.8 million – well below the almost $3.9 million clerks had originally told the state the recount would cost.

The three clerks who have not yet reported numbers to the state are from Brown, Kenosha, and Pierce counties, which had combined cost estimates of just under $510,000. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Mike Haas said Milwaukee County’s final numbers were also preliminary, due some pending invoices.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein requested and paid for the recount, which wrapped up earlier this month. Her campaign already gave the state $3.5 million. Any money left over from that payment will be reimbursed to the campaign.

If you want to have some fun, take a look at the spreadsheet organized by the Wisconsin Radio Network that shows the difference between the estimated costs by Wisconsin counties, and the actual costs. Turns out several counties overestimated their costs by 2-5 times, and Oneida County, blew their estimates by nearly 20 times! ($178,000 estimated, $9,000 actual).

So all the right-wing scare tactics and lies over the last month about how "costly" the recount was? Not so much! And even more heinous are the right-wing lies that were spread about how Wisconsin taxpayers somehow paid for this (THEY AREN'T PAYING A DIME). What we should be talking about is why many counties blew their estimates so badly, and how many of them were "tabulated" by GOP county clerks that wanted to discourage the Stein campaign from doing so. Do I think these facts and questions will be presented to the dimwits listening to GOP-perganda radio and Internet? HELL NO!

Bottom line- the Wisconsin recount was a worthwhile endeavor, as we have found real problems with our election procedures and vote-counting that need to be cleaned up. Putting those issues and procedures under the state and national microsope was well worth the $11 I sent to the Stein campaign to help make it happen, and it should be pounded on in the next legislative session to improve trust in a voting system many of us don't have confidence in.

2017's New Year's Resolution- REPUBLICAN ACCOUNTABILITY

Happy 2017 all. This is a great list from Think Progress on 4 things that were supposed to happen by 2017 because Obama was reelected, and didn't. I feel comfortable violating fair use by giving more detail with these 4.

[1.]
In March 2012, on the floor of the United States Senate, Mike Lee (R-UT) predicted that if Obama was reelected gas would cost $6.60 per by the end of Obama’s second term. Lee said that gas prices would rise 5 cents for every month Obama was in office.

Lee was not alone. Newt Gingrich, running for the GOP nomination, predicted that if Obama was reelected he would push gas to “$10 a gallon.” Gingrich said he would reduce gas prices dramatically by reversing Obama’s energy policies. Gingrich flanked himself with campaign signs promising $2.50 gas if he was elected.

To be fair, gas has risen about 10-15% since Trump's election...to $2.30 a gallon here in Wisconsin. Oops.

[2.] In September 2012, Mitt Romney predicted that if Obama is reelected “you’re going to see chronic high unemployment continue four years or longer.” At the time, the unemployment rate was 8.1% and had been between 8.1% and 8.3% for the entire year.

What would breaking out of “chronic high unemployment” look like in a Romney presidency? Romney pledged that, if elected, he could bring the unemployment rate down to 6% by January 2017.

The unemployment rate today? 4.6%, lowest it's been in over 9 years.

Number 3 can be summed up with a Tweet from someone who deserves a bit of accountability for past, current and future statements.

The stock market and US dollar are both plunging today. Welcome to @BarackObama’s second term.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

The article also notes that "investing expert" Marc Faber predicted on Bloomberg TV at the time that there would be at least a 20% drop in the stock market, because excessive debt by the Obama Administration would drive people out of the market. Uhhh, not so much.

Dow Jones Close Nov. 6, 2012 13,245.68
Dow Jones Close Dec. 30, 2016 19,762.60 (+41.65%)

And now the 4th absurd prediction by righties about the last 4 years, with the perp never being taken off the air or apologizing for being so completely wrong.

[4.]
Rush Limbaugh predicted that “the country’s economy is going to collapse if Obama is re-elected.” Limbaugh was confident in his prediction: “There’s no if about this. And it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be gut wrenching, but it will happen.”

The economic free-fall would begin, according to Limbaugh, because “California is going to declare bankruptcy” and Obama would force states like Texas to “bail them out.” California currently has a $2.8 billion budget surplus.

And I'll add that Tex-ass is now in the bottom third of states for job growth due to the oil bust.

And let's move those predictions over into Wisconsin, where Scott Walker, WisGOP legislators and GOP-perganda media promised that they would be fiscally responsible if put into office, and that Wisconsin would become a model of economic prosperity. As Wisconsin Watch reminded us back in 2012.

Walker, on his official website, maintains an archive of press releases, commentaries and executive orders going back to Nov. 2, 2010, the day he was elected governor. The Center’s review found more than three dozen references to Walker’s pledge to add 250,000 private-sector jobs.

The governor’s first State of the State address, on Feb. 1, 2011, was especially unequivocal: “We are defining success for this administration by our ability to shape an environment where 250,000 jobs are created.”

And at the time, Walker was insisting it would be 250,000 jobs added in his four-year term. Well, if we had kept up with the rest of the US, we would have broken 250,000 jobs around September 2015- not quite getting it done in four years, but not much more, and would be over 300,000 today.

If Walker's policies had truly ignited growth in Wisconsin, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to think we'd have hit 250,000 jobs in 4 years. But that isn't close to what happened. Instead, we aren't even at 200,000 after nearly six years in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan.



By the way, don't bother trying to find records of Walker's "250,000 jobs" prediction, it's been scrubbed from his website- not unlike how Walker's DNR has scrubbed climate change information from its website. GOPs do this a lot with inconvenient truths.

Oh, and here's a similar WisGOP "job growth" prediction, courtesy of Assembly Speaker Robbin' Vos, where he told the Racine Journal-Times that if Scott Walker was retained in the 2012 recall election, "the [Wisconsin] economy is going to take off like a rocket."

Again, not so much.

Private sector job growth, Wisconsin
Jan 2011-June 2012 2,688/month
June 2012-Nov 2013 2,318/month
Nov 2013-Nov 2014 4,058/month (here we go! Walker re-elected)
Nov 2014-Nov 2015 2,867/month
Nov 2015-Nov 2016 2,108/month

Looks like the rocket got one little spark along with the rest of the country in 2013-2014, and then it promptly sputtered out and is now losing altitude.

I haven't even touched on the ridiculous predictions that Republicans made about Obamacare, from it being a government takeover of health insurance (in fact, its main flaws are due to its reliance on the private insurance industry), or Paul Ryan's Pants on Fire lie about how Obamacare is hurting Medicare's solvency (it actually has made Medicare more stable).

My question is- when do Republicans and their hacks in media get held accountable for being wrong? Does it literally take hammering someone in the head for them to admit they've been lying/mistaken? And does that include doing the same to media members who just nod and hold a microphone while Republicans throw any kind of bullshit against the wall without a follow-up of "You know that hasn't happened and won't happen, right?"

You want a New Year's Resolution that has to be followed through on for 2017? Number 1 on my list is RIGHT-WING ACCOUNTABILITY- of and by the media, and this accountability has to be started by the people, because the 2010s has shown that corporate stenographers cannot be counted on.