Low-wattage GOP pols continue smearing health expert Andrea Palm

After failing to overturn Pres. Biden's legitimate electoral college victory, Wisconsin's two newest and most ill-suited and ill-tempered Republican US House reps - all products of the state's extreme gerrymandering that has embedded ultra-partisan and super unqualified WI GOP legislators at the state and federal levels - have turned their reflexive misogyny towards blocking Senate confirmation of former state Health and Human Services Department Secretary-designee Andrea Palm to a senior health policy position in the Biden administration.

I say "reflexive misogyny" after noting the difficulties some of Biden's female nominees have run into, but I am not overly worried about Republicans' fairness when it comes to matters of gender equity because they have noted expert on such matters Glenn Grothman always on call.

There's a video starring Grothman that sums up that expertise, here.

Note that The Washington Post finds validation in Palm's COVID19-mitigation work in Wisconsin which some of the most undistinguished of our state's GOP state congressional delegation continue to manipulate through distortion and smears. 

How Wisconsin turned around its lagging vaccination program — and buoyed a Biden health pick

Andrea Palm, tapped as No. 2 at HHS, has been vilified by Wisconsin Republicans. But her state’s approach to covid-19 vaccination is working.

I doubt that WI GOP reps Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany

as low-ranking and low-wattage minority party members have the clout to sway a vote their way in the upper US Senate chamber.

Which helps explain why Tiffany's effort to scuttle the history-making appointment of a Native American Secretary of the Interior fell flat. And, again, Tiffany didn't want a former US Congresswoman in the position.

The Tiffany-Fitzgerald broadside against Palm effort is less a way to raise real concerns about her nomination and more about continuing the representatives' partisan attack on the way the Evers administration has handled the COVID19 pandemic despite partisan litigation, propaganda and politicking by Tiffany, Fitzgerald and other Wisconsin Republicans that continues to intentionally hamstring the Governor's public health obligations.

Regardless, Tiffany recently publicly advised his daughters against getting COVID19 vaccinations, while Fitzgerald said during the pandemic that people could choose if they wanted to abide by a statewide masking order, and campaigned without one - see Twitter, Oct. 17, 2020 - while the pandemic was raging.

Two more things about Tiffany and Fitzgerald's exceptionally snotty joint statement which produced coverage that reprised a classless bit of Tiffany's small-minded, state-level xenophobia:

"A native New Yorker, ally of Hillary Clinton's, and Washington, D.C. insider, Ms. Palm understands very little of our Midwestern values or how her decisions have devastated our way of life," he said in May. 

"Native New Yorker." 

Careful, there, bud. Mind your biases.

And I recall no such aversion to out-of-state hires in 2011 when Scott Walker brought in DC insider and former Bush administration official Dennis Smith from The Heritage Foundation to serve in the same post to which Evers had named 'native New Yorker' Palm.

And I'm sure Tiffany was really itching to say that Palm 'understands very little of our Wisconsin values,' but, alas, had to fall back on the more generic "Midwestern values" because he and Fitzgerald and other top Wisconsin Republicans cannot claim to be native Wisconsinites, or fully raised and dedicated here, e.g.

Walker is a Colorado native.

Ron Johnson is a Minnesotan. 

Fitzgerald is an Illinois native.

And, like Johnson, Tiffany was born in Minnesota. 

And I remind Tiffany, et al that vague terms 'Midwestern nice' have been coopted by people who may have become Midwestern without being nice.

RealClearPolitics today [3/28/18] lets "sleeper" candidate Walker, "a preacher's son," bask in being called "nice."

In a recent interview with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Walker addressed those concerns. “Yeah, I’m nice. I’m midwestern nice. There’s no doubt about it,” he said.

No doubt about it?

Let's take a closer look at the multiple groups and people Walker has disrespected:

GOP ideology blocks gov't. success v. COVID; mass casualties ensue.

If a pedestrian were killed by a speeding car at an unmarked intersection, the neighborhood would demand an action plan from elected officials to make sure the tragedy was never repeated.

So if child on a bicycle were killed by another reckless motorist at the same intersection a few weeks later, the municipality would quickly act and install four-way stop signs.

And should a mom and her baby be run over and killed at the same spot a few days or weeks later, local leaders would overnight get traffic signals up and running there and have them controlled by traffic cops for the morning rush hour to stop the carnage - and avoid being run out of office.

Yet somehow, the GOP-run Wisconsin Legislature has managed to escape those kinds of base-level, do-something expectations and accountability during an historically-horrible calamity.

And GOP leaders on Tuesday after months of intentional inaction were still displaying a callously detached and breezy nonchalance -  

"We do not have specific drafted proposals because our intention was to sit down with the governor and actually talk about our ideas,” [WI GOP Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos said.

- in the face of unprecedented suffering statewide from which countless citizens, families, businesses - and the public's confidence in government - may never recover. 

And the more I think about that last casualty - the public's loss of confidence in government - the more I think that is precisely what the GOP Legislative leadership set out to accomplish.

Because if you have been preaching for decades that government is the problem - and even the enemy -  then you can 'prove' your case by making sure that government - especially when you can make sure a first-term Democrat in the Governor's office does not get the chance to do what only the government can bring to the battle the requisite energy and resources and coordination to get the job done.

Imagine if Gov. Evers' 'Safer-at-Home' order and the rest of his pandemic-controlling agenda had been allowed to continue tamping down the virus, and, along with it, Republican propaganda and monkey-wrenching that has relentlessly disrespected Evers, demonized public employees and degraded the value of government. 

You can track the impact of the Wisconsin Legislature's more than seven-month-long failure to convene and act - other than its litigating and general undermining during the pandemic's still-escalating rampage -  using these dates, data points and official COVID19 reports:

* Last day the Wisconsin State Assembly met: April 14. 

Cumulative number of COVID19 cases reported by that date in Wisconsin, 3,555; number of cumulative COVID19 deaths, 170. The data are from the State health department COVID19 website. 

* Last day the Wisconsin State Senate met: April 15. 

Cumulative number of COVID19 cases reported by that date, 3,721; cumulative number of COVID19 deaths, 182. Data from the State health department COVID19 website.

Latest State health department number of cumulative cases reported on its COVID19 website by November 17th, 323,846; deaths 2,741 - a record one-day death toll of 92 (about one death every 15 minutes), and 7,090 new cases.

So COVID19 deaths during the GOP-run Legislature's do-nothing-but-litigate-and-obstruct recess have increased 15-to-16 times and the positive case total has increased about 90 times.

Yet by Tuesday, Vos only hoped to talk about ideas with Gov. Evers. 

And how many hours or days will it take to set that chat up while people in Wisconsin are now testing positive at the rate of 295 an hour (7,090 divided by 24)?

More, here, via Twitter:

WIDeptHealthServices

@DHSWI

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Your #COVIDWI_19 update shows a record number reported since yesterday of hospitalizations at 318 and deaths at 92. The 7-day average of new deaths reported has increased 880% in two months. Dig into the #data and please, help #StopTheSpread: http://dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/deaths.htm…

Add 'vigilantism' to things not clear to Ron Johnson

Ron Johnson is battling brain fatigue again. This is getting distressingly repetitive.



Of course RoJo doesn't know for sure if people playing sheriff, stalking Kenosha streets with battlefield guns and leaving two civilians dead and one wounded are vigilantes - 

11:15 a.m. 'I’m not for vigilantism,' Johnson tells CNN. 'I’m not sure that’s what was happening' in Kenosha 

- is condemnable.

Johnson won't say the word even when asked repeatedly to condemn it.

Many things are unclear to our senior US Senator who's uncertainties should definitely disqualify him from approving US judges, voting on the Federal budget, sitting as a juror during a Presidential impeachment trial and chairing the Homeland Security Committee, including:

* Law and order at the highest level  - and that breaking the law is definitely grounds to remove an impeached President;

* Sexual assault by a legislator against a staffer - and that notifying the police was the proper response when Johnson was directly told of the assault by the victim;

* Foreign interference in US elections - and that calling Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election "overblown" after his visit to Moscow raises more red flags that move through Red Square during a Red Army parade;

* Mass pandemic death - and that framing his estimate of more than 11 million US deaths from COVID-19 as acceptable is absolutely not acceptable.

* Science and facts - including what is causing climate change (no, it is not sunspots) - and environmentalists are not Stalinists. He could have gotten that cleared up on his now-infamous trip to Moscow but he's been too busy never explaining what the heck he and seven of his closest GOP colleagues were doing there over the July 4th, 2018 holiday:

“What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom,” Sen. Ron Johnson chirruped on Twitter on Independence Day.

For the Wisconsin Republican, it meant, specifically, the freedom to spend July 4 in Moscow with seven other Republican lawmakers posing for propaganda photos with Russian officials. 

On the same day it was reported in Britain that two more people had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent British officials say came from Vladimir Putin’s regime. 

On the day after the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.

Trump's gun-toting 'guards' to WI? Others served GOP allies here before

Imitating his favorite despots, Trump has dispatched unaccountable armed troops to beat and snatch protesters on Portland streets.

And Team Trump has threatened to send Trump's taxpayer-paid personal army to Milwaukee during the Democratic National Convention where they could provoke violence and stage manage GOP election propaganda.

If armed outsiders do show up in Milwaukee it would be thesecond time in recent years that big-caliber guns carried by outsiders with sketchy credentials were coordinated in Wisconsin for GOP partisan interests during a campaign.

Do you remember when, without warning, armed guards in forest-blending camouflage uniforms appeared in the North woods ostensibly to secure the perimeter on state-subsidized land which Walker and the GOP had been ram-rodding?

Photos of three guards in masks and camouflage carrying semi-automatic rifles made a splash in local news and went viral on the Internet, stoking a heated debate over the proposed Gogebic Taconite mine. 

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker pushed controversial legislation that fast-tracked the mine by weakening environmental regulations and superseding local government control. The armed guards personified local citizens' sense that outside forces were seizing control of the land in Wisconsin where the GTac mine would go.

"We are calling on you to immediately remove the heavily armed masked commando security forces currently hired to protect your company's property in the Penokee Hills," wrote Wisconsin state senator Bob Jauch (D) and Rep. Janet Bewley (D) in a July 8 letter. "The images are horrifying. ... These kinds of security forces are common in Third World countries but they don't belong in Northern Wisconsin.

The mining company's owner also quietly sent Walker's 2012 recall campaign $700,000 through a third-party conduit designated by Walker to receive the money, records showed.

Further, do you remember that two key WI GOP state legislators at the time but who are now serving in Congress - Glenn Grothman and Tom Tiffany - tried unsuccessfully to assist the armed guards' mission with a special state law - 

Bill would bar public from forest around mine site

A heavily armed, camouflaged security detail guarding the site was pulled out in July for lack of proper licensing from the state, but was approved to resume work in early August. 

- even though the forest land had received substantial state tax breaks in exchange for public access to the acreage?

Mike Wiggins, the region's Bad River tribal chairman, succinctly summed up the guards' presence at the time, and his words fit Trump's troopers if they roll into Milwaukee:

“I’ve got two words: unjustified and unnecessary, Wiggins said.” 

Fresh WI voting restrictions mean hard work to minimize risk, guarantee turnout

Here we go again; voting made unnecessarily risky during Covid time.

A long-delayed series of reactionary rulings by a GOP-friendly Federal Appeals Court panel means more intensive organizing ahead for progressive organizers in Wisconsin, and principally in urban Democratic strongholds where expanded early absentee voting to better spur along democracy is being rolled back to a uniform, two-week window statewide.

Appeals court limits Wisconsin early voting to 2 weeks before election, stops voters from receiving ballots via email, fax

It's another win for Republicans who have for nearly a decade limited ballot access with roadblock after roadblock, beginning with the imposition of voter ID in the name of preventing voting fraud found only in GOP fear-mongering propaganda.

Two of the Seventh Circuit judges who made the ruling had earlier helped validate the voter ID law in a separate opinion.

Rational judges and fair-minded lawmakers during a pandemic that has imposed all sorts of limitations on in-person voting should be going out of their way to make obtaining a ballot and casting it as easy, simple, and stress-free as possible.

Gov. Evers is under pressure to expand the sites where voter ID can be obtained, according to a release from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

All Voting is Local Wisconsin and 28 voting rights groups, including the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, called on Gov. Tony Evers to enforce his own Executive Order and compel the state’s Department of Transportation (DOT) to expand access to photo ID by increasing locations and hours where voters can obtain the identification necessary to cast a ballot. 

The paucity of voter ID outlets and hours of service statewide was a deliberate Walker tactic that I've written about before.

But the Monday court ruling shows that right-wing policymakers in the legislature and on the bench will do just about anything to stymie the fullest participation in elections to harden the self-serving status quo.

Let's make sure that the progressive turnout on November - and beyond - is a repeat of the April tallies which bounced incumbent right-wing State Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly even after the right forced many electors to risk their health by voting in-person with the Covid-19 virus lurking less than six feet away.

New limitations on early voting guarantee that some Wisconsinites will be right back in lines like these in April to cast ballots which a more safety-conscious legislature and judiciary should have ordered for November.

That cynical game plan backfired once; it can be turned around a second time in November, and beyond.

Trump operates above the law. Ron Johnson helped with that.

As Trump continues to throw the country into repeated and dangerous, pre-election constitutional crises, it's worth revisiting Ron Johnson's blanket blasé excuse-making that kept Trump from being removed after his impeachment. 

Johnson: Finding That Trump Broke Law Not Relevant In Impeachment Trial 

US Sen. Ron Johnson Says He Will Vote To Acquit Trump On Both Articles Of Impeachment

This is a United States Senator, on the record -  

- excusing law breaking by the President of the United States. Something Trump, as well as numerous campaign aides, staffers and Cabinet officials have made routine for nearly four years as they have been allowed to operate above the law.

Johnson and other ultra-rightists in the US Senate have traded golfing invitations, tax breaks and federal judgeship approvals handed to like-minded privileged authoritarians for once-routine democratic values, citizen protections and the public interest.

Johnson was among GOP Senators praising Trump's brutish tone prior to his attack on citizens in a park near the White House for the filming of campaign-style propaganda:

"So hopefully, you know, the president talking that way will put a little spine in some of these governors that aren’t calling out the National Guard, to the extent that they need to restore order,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Covid-19 is not the only epidemic which Trump, Johnson and other Republicans are letting run rampant in America.

Republican math troubles are all about propaganda that hides facts

Republican math is looking bad again - - because the facts again are worse.

Trump last week said Coronavirus cases were at 15 (when they were much higher) and predicted they'd soon go "close to zero." 

The latest count is over 700 - - that trend, like the death toll, is worsening - -  and wait until those long-delayed test kits which Trump also had earlier mis-estimated and under-supplied begin to produce unfortunate, reportable results.

Trump's self-protecting manipulations are hardly surprising, as we watched Trump and his loyalists lie against the obvious photographic evidence about the size of his inauguration crowd, and, more lately, about the size of many of his campaign rallies:

For example, Trump claimed 50,000 people were outside a rally in Houston because they couldn’t get in, but the city’s police chief said the number was much lower: 3,000. In Cleveland, Trump claimed “thousands” of people were outside because the venue was packed. But Twitter users at the event posted evidence that Trump didn’t fill the venue and that only a handful of people were milling around in the parking lot.

Regrettably, this is not just a Trump situation - - it's a Republican Party phenomenon and Wisconsin's GOP 'leaders' have provided many of their own fact-based challenges, including.

* Walker's boast about creating 250,000 new private sector jobs in four years. 

Didn't happen.

* Or Robin Vos's claim that Wisconsin's economy would take off like a rocket were Walker to win the recall election - - a boast which Walker himself had also made:

WI Republicans repeating failed Walker/jobs' fairy tales

...Walker himself mouthed the self-serving talking point about how his plans would spectacularly bring new jobs to Wisconsin:

Gov. Walker says business hiring will skyrocket after he wins recall election

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 

SPRINGFIELD, IL (WTAQ) - Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker told an Illinois business conference today that quote, “like a rocket, you’ll see businesses hiring” after the June fifth recall election. 

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2013 

As Wisconsin's Economy Remains Stalled, We Remember... 

The economic prediction of state legislator Robin Vos, now Assembly Speaker, who spoke with certainty in April 2012 about the coming boom in Wisconsin once Scott Walker nailed down the recall win: 

Once June 5 hits and Gov. Scott Walker is securely re-elected, “our economy is going to take off like a rocket,” state Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said Monday during a meeting with The Journal Times Editorial Board.  

So, why does Forbes rank Wisconsin 41st for business?  

Gee, how come such trouble with numbers, and therefore about matters of finance and economics, which are sciences based on, you known, numbers, er, data.

Because The Walkers and Voses and Johnsons and Trumps of the political world think that propaganda can magically make things real - - better to lead gullible supporters around by the nose, and perhaps some donors, too - - when, in fact, numbers are facts that represent and explain greater facts - - a reality that Republicans shrug off the way they have twisted, abused, denied or buried facts about everything from coronavirus infections to redistricting to Foxconn and 13,000 [Sic] jobs - - 

From NBC Nightly News, 7/21/19

- - to climate change to wage growth during President Obama's tenure to science altogether.

And if all else fails, if there is something incontrovertibly scientifically all-facted-up because a machine is measuring it in real time, then just move the da*n machine to a place where it will gather different facts and tell the story which GOP special interests want told, and, presto! - - alternative fact - - problem solved, Walker and Trump and all Republicans move on, happy:

A bill to block use of an air quality monitor in Kohler-Andrae State Park has touched off a scientific and political debate. The discussion comes as Sheboygan County is trying to become the last full county in Wisconsin to meet federal standards on ozone pollution. 

The Republican-sponsored legislation would ban state funding of the air monitor and ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to stop using readings that show Sheboygan County exceeding federal ozone limits.

Trump's 'Eighth-Wonder-of-The-World' SOTU speech

When Trump riffed and rambled and repeated self-aggrandizing lies in his State of the Union Speech Tuesday - -  

President Trump’s State of the Union speech once again was chock-full of stretched facts and dubious figures. Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them. Here, in the order in which he made them, are 31 statements by the president.

- - all I heard was an expanded version of the FUBAR Foxconn fiasco he came here selling as "The Eighth Wonder of The World."

 

Wisconsin's Massive Foxconn Boondoggle is Getting Worse

Eight years of preening, self-serving 'Eighth Wonder of The World' propaganda is dangerous and unthinkable.

Possible new group: Republicans for Shorter Lifespans

Irony and self-abasement are alive and well in Wisconsin man's Twitter feed.

And note that it takes a special kind of hypocrite to turn down $1 billion in federal funds to fully expand Medicaid health care coverage to eligible Wisconsin residents - - money which, by the way, would have brought treatment services to opioid abusers during an epidemic which took hold during the hypocrite's tenure in office  

ER Visits For Opioid Overdose Double In Wisconsin

- - to then retweet GOP propaganda critical of universal Medicare coverage.

Who might that be, and why are Republicans continuing their war against health and longevity they've been waging since the earliest attacks on Social Security and Medicare?

Scott Walker

@ScottWalker

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21h

Check this out:

Quote Tweet

Senate Republicans

@SenateGOP

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A lot of talk about Medicare for All today. Here are the facts: