The Right Hates Big Government, But Loves Those Big Government Jobs

Walkerite Jim Villa is the latest small government guy to latch on to a plum public trough spot.

The Magnificent Cranes That Could Be Killed In Wisconsin Skies

Remember when State Rep. and famished 'Rib-eye-of-the-Sky' big game hunter Joel Kleefisch wanted to shoot Sandhill cranes because they made good eating?

True story.

Even made The New York Times.

Though his story about why he backed the hunt fell apart.

Let's hope this crazy idea stays shelved as these cranes can migrate over Wisconsin.

And as hard it is to believe - - a plan to add a Tundra swan

hunting season in Wisconsin is working its way towards likely approval unless hunting lobbies can be restrained at upcoming statewide conservation congress meetings on April 14th.

Maybe A Good Thing That Limbaugh Got "False," Not "Pants On Fire"

The atmosphere doesn't need that much fresh carbon.

Asbestos FUBAR Shows Walkerites Not As Smart As Advertised

The right hand in the Governor's office did not know what the right hand at the DNR was doing with the life-and-death issue of toxic asbestos poisoning.

While the Governor was presumably sticking it to trial lawyers by signing an industry-friendly bill that limits financial damages that some veterans and other asbestos victims could collect - - 

Walker signs asbestos bill opposed by veterans

 - - the DNR was blithely issuing this "Clean Air Tip of the Week" complete with a signature Cathy Stepp "!" - - a citation about Stepp's email encouraging Halloween costumes at work! - - that is entirely out of step with the seriousness of the subject and the implications of the bill which Walker had just signed:

Clean Air Tip of the Wee

For the week of March 30, 2014: "This year, the ADAA (Asbestos Disease Awareness Association) is celebrating Global Asbestos Awareness Week by posting "7 Facts for 7 Days." View ADAA [exit DNR] each day this week for an asbestos related fact! You can also visit DNR's asbestos page for more information."

If Stepp wants us to pick out a fun fact about asbestos from her linked Awareness Week list, how about this one:

“Asbestos Not Only Kills People – It Destroys Lives” – Julie’s Story

And both Walker and the DNR will, at some point, have to face up to the likelihood that asbestos fibers are destined for the air and near the proposed GTac iron ore mine which Walker has pushed, as The New York Times explains:

Equally troubling [with acid mine run-off potential] was the more recent discovery by Tom Fitz, a geology professor at Northland College in Ashland, Wis., of a highly carcinogenic asbestos-form mineral at one of GTac’s sampling sites. The fibers of the mineral, which would be dispersed in blasting, are like tiny, breathable needles.

Now that deserves an "!" 

Some Election Highlights

Laura Gramling Perez elected a Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge.

Ojibwe tribal elder and former Northland College professor Joe M. Rose elected an Ashland County Supervisor.

And a focused summary from the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters:

So happy to report wins in 6 of the 7 races whereWisconsin League of Conservation Voters endorsed in Trempealeau and Buffalo Counties! Congratulations to the pro-conservation County Board members - Tim Zeglin, Lou Anne Roby, Nettie Rosenow, George Brandt, Jeanne Nutter, and Jon Schultz!

We'll Soon Know If Waukesha Gets A More Conservative Mayor

Update: Shawn Reilly elected: 

Incumbent and iconoclastic one-term Waukesha Mayor Jeff Scrima faced a tough opponent from his right, so we'll know in a few hours whether that city's management wants to look more predictably conservative like the county that surrounds it.

Solid Core Of WI State Senate Heading For Retirement Today

A lot of institutional memory, wise pragmatism and common sense  - - 94 years'  worth - - went out of the Wisconsin State Senator chamber when retiring Democratic State Senators Bob Jauch, Tim Cullen, John Lehman and Republican Dale Schultz finished their last session's final floor debate today. The Senate could turn even farther right after November. Heaven help us.

GOP Congressional Culture Doesn't Even Think About Working...For You

Maybe Paul Ryan isn't a racist after all. The Americans whom he wants government to attact have no racial, age, or gender limitations:

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin on Tuesday will lay out a tough, election-year budget that he says will come into balance by 2024, in large part through steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and the full repeal of President Obama’s health care law, just as millions begin to see its benefits.

Journal Sentinel Documents Continuing Walker Jobs' Fail

Walker's 250,000 new jobs promise looks like your NCAA bracket, the paper notes:  

Here's the bottom line: In a little more than three years with Walker as governor, the state has created an estimated 101,572 private sector jobs. That leaves 148,428 jobs -- or an average of 14,842 a month for the rest of the year -- for Walker to achieve his promise. Since we've been tracking this promise, there haven't been anywhere near that many jobs added in consecutive months.

Alaska Message Should Get Through To Climate Change Deniers

Snow disappeared from iconic dog sled race trail.

Not an April Fool's story.

Grim Day For GOP: Obamacare Signs Up 7+Million

And may they all live longer, healthier and more Democratic lives.

Obama 2016.

Details, here.

Bill Kaplan Hits Walker for Dumping Low-Income Insureds

Hard to argue with any of this, which is regrettably not an April Fool's Day prank:
...Walker's "plan" is throwing nearly 80,000 Wisconsinites off Medicaid, and with the help of a letter and a phone call, telling them to find their way to the federal exchange. Many will enroll and be eligible for ACA federal tax credits, thanks to the heroic efforts of groups like the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. But Sen. Baldwin rightly said rejecting federal Medicaid funds will result in higher state spending, burden the poor with out-of-pocket costs, many of whom will fall between the cracks, risking worse health outcomes... 

When Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich expanded Medicaid he got emotional talking about helping the disabled, poor and sick. Not Walker. It's all about his political ambitions and pleasing the Tea Party. Wisconsin is being left behind in the dust. 

Wisconsin Progressives Could Score Big Wins Tuesday...

If they'd boost the turnout above the statewide 12% that officials are predicting.

The Journal Sentinel Touts The Drinking Culture

The Journal Sentinel has devoted reams of copy to Wisconsin's many-faceted, multi-billion-dollar struggle with alcohol abuse, so editors should take a closer look at what the paper is leading with as Open Day returns Major League Baseball to Milwaukee. 

Does celebrating cold beer for breakfast make the paper part of the problem or part of the solution?
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Springtime in Milwaukee: Beer, brats and Brewers opening day

There's cold beer and hot brats for breakfast and a baseball game after lunch as Monday's opening day tailgate is well underway in the parking lots surrounding Miller Park. | Updated: 11:00 a.m.

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Update: I don't know when the headline changed, but "Fans hit the parking lots early at Miller Park before the Brewers’ home opener" sends a better message.

I've been to many an opening day game, and I take second-place to no one's lige-long love of the game, but for too many fans, the drinking at the stadium often takes precedence over baseball on the field - - to true fans' aggravation.

Here's a true story:

A few years ago, I went to opening day with a friend from out of town. He worked for a high-profile professional sports franchise - - I will not be any more precise for obvious reasons - - and for business reasons wanted to observe baseball in Milwaukee.

As we were walking to the stadium from the parking lot off Canal St., my friend stopped, in shock at the drinking.

Not the tailgating. He'd seen that before.

The drinking.

Like he had not seen.

He took out his cellphone and began recording images.

The scene he found the most unbelievable was a drinking game taking place at the back of a rental truck.

In the truck was a half-barrel of beer, a card table with glass pitchers filled with beer, and a long piece of plastic tubing topped with a funnel.

A guy standing at the back of the truck on the lift was pouring pitchers through the funnel and tubing; the 'game' was to see if young women could open-throat-swallow a pitcher of beer gravity-fed through the funnel

With a crowd of about 15 people watching - - mostly young men - - we saw one young woman actually swallow an entire pitcher of beer as onlookers chanted "drink, drink, drink."

My friend was surprised that stadium management tolerated the behavior - - an indication of what is more widely-permitted, even encouraged, in a state always ranking at or near the top on various rankings of binge drinking, drunk driving, and other alcohol-related negatives.

Years ago the team had a campaign against the two-fisted slopper - - the fan who sloshed you with beer as he brought multiple beverages back to his seat.

I do think the team is doing a better job of alcohol-control inside the stadium, thought I think it's still a mixed bag outside given the weird scene I saw after a game two summers ago when a very drunk young man ran full-speed into the side of a taxi parked in the queue working its way toards the stadium gates.

But my posting today is directed at the newspaper.

Be truer to your larger mission - - "reshaping the culture" - - as the editorial board defined the state's challenge after a year's worth of investigative reports called "Wasted in Wisconsin" - - by starting at home.

Cross-posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Noting Park East Development, And A County Golden Oldie

Tom Daykin catalogues the development going on in the Park East corridor.

One of the obstacles to getting projects started there had been Milwaukee County government's inexperience or unwillingness during the Ament and Walker years to do development and real estate marketing.

Walker's disinterest in Park East redevelopment ran deeply.

He felt the need to monkey-wrench anything that then-Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist had set in motion, like the Park East tear-down, the downtown trolley or anything smacking of progressive New Urbanism, despite Walker's talk about jobs and business growth.

For Walker, running County government was a step to the Governor's office, so the inside political game that led to the operation of a secret communications system in his office suite to coordinate with campaign operatives too precedence over nuts-and-bolts public policy and service delivery.

He had no County agenda. He had a Walker & Co. agenda.

And look whom Walker had appointed to 'manage' County economic development in general and the Park East acreage specifically: Long-time Walker crony and now-convicted felon Tim Russell:

Russell's highest-paying county stint was as associate economic development director, starting in April 2003. 

He was paid about $83,000 a year in that post. Walker also nominated Russell to lead the county's economic development office in late 2004, but county supervisors voted down the Russell appointment the following April on a 12-7 vote amid complaints that Russell was unqualified and a Walker campaign functionary.

Walker took the unusual step at the time of sending a letter beseeching County Board Chairman Lee Holloway to back Russell's appointment, saying he was needed to provide continuity on the county's efforts to market vacant Park East Freeway corridor land. 

Supervisor John Weishan Jr., a frequent Walker critic, said Thursday he and others were irritated at Walker repeatedly placing Russell in county posts despite concerns Russell did campaign work on county time.

Oh, Canada. Oh, Wisconsin

The New York Times has outdone itself over the last two days, running a strong op-ed about Canada's demolition of its environment to extract and sell tar sand crude oil, and a separate opinion piece about the proposed GTac open-pit iron ore mine that would wreck the Bad River watershed in Northern Wisconsin.

And it's hard to miss a crucial similarity: in both Canada and Wisconsin - - despite long stewardship histories - - governments have rewritten and weakened laws to enable resource extraction regardless of the consequences to land, water and environmental legacies. 

About the Wisconsin situation, author Dan Kaufman writes:

To facilitate the construction of the mine and the company’s promise of 700 long-term jobs, Gov. Scott Walker signed legislation last year granting GTac astonishing latitude. The new law allows the company to fill in pristine streams and ponds with mine waste. It eliminates a public hearing that had been mandated before the issuing of a permit, which required the company to testify, under oath, that the project had complied with all environmental standards. It allows GTac to pay taxes solely on profit, not on the amount of ore removed, raising the possibility that the communities affected by the mine’s impact on the area’s roads and schools would receive only token compensation.

About the Canadian situation, author Jacques Leslie writes:

After winning an outright parliamentary majority in 2011, Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party passed an omnibus bill that revoked or weakened 70 environmental laws, including protections for rivers and fisheries. As a result, one proposed pipeline, the Northern Gateway, which crosses a thousand rivers and streams between Alberta and the Pacific, no longer risked violating the law. The changes also eliminated federal environmental review requirements for thousands of proposed development projects.

It all comes full circle, as the Koch brothers are major lease holders in the Canadian tar sand territory and they back Scott Walker.

Walker tells Pres. Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and Canadian crude leaks into Lake Michigan.

It's clear that special interests and major corporations are running the show in Wisconsin and Canada, at the expense of land, water and law.

Another Bad Ranking For Walker's Wisconsin

Wisconsin is going in the wrong direction under Walker, as we're 35th in personal income growth since the Great Recession and 35th in job-creation over the most recent 12-month period tabulated by the feds, data show.

And over the last month we're #2 in another ranking - - 2nd-worst job loss in the nation.

Tax cuts for business, mini-tax reductions for wage-earners and a raft of news releases by Walker's troubled Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation cannot make up for the damage he did to the middle-class and the overall Wisconsin economy by ideologically-motivated austerity.

Another UN Warning On Climate Change

Expect this important story to be discounted by talk radio entertainers-turned-scientists Monday:

The world’s leading environmental scientists told policymakers and business leaders Sunday that they must invest more to cope with climate change’s immediate effects and hedge against its most dire potential, even as they work to slow the emissions fueling global warming. 

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that climate change is already hurting the poor, wreaking havoc on the infrastructure of coastal cities, lowering crop yields, endangering various plant and animal species, and forcing many marine organisms to flee hundreds of miles to cooler waters. 

But the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group said that climate change’s effects will grow more severe and that spending and planning are needed to guard against future costs, much as people insure themselves against possible accidents or health problems. 

The report said that damage from climate change and the costs of adapting to it could cause the loss of several percentage points of gross domestic product in low-lying developing countries and island states. It added that climate change could “indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence” by “amplifying” poverty and economic shocks.

In Light Of Breakthrough NY Times Mine Expose...

Let's remember that in addition to the company-written, environment-degrading iron mining bill given major exposure in Sunday's New York Times, there have been several bills prompted by Walker and approved by his corporate servants in the Legislature that attack the public's ownership of and access to wetlands, rivers, streams, lakes, and shorelines statewide.

And, again, a big salute to the Times. May every official at the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Justice Department, the Congress and White House read and absorb every word.

Walker's Tweet After Badgers Win Suggests He Was Elsewhere

Was he in Las Vegas begging for Sheldon Adelson's millions? In the air flying back, as he puts it, "last nigth"?

If this is the best he can hurriedly Tweet it suggests Walker missed the show. 

Governor Walker ‏@GovWalker  35m

My son said the UW campus was electric last nigth after Badgers win!