Don't get too giddy over Walker's projected state income tax cut that would net you about $2 a week begining next year.
If he and the Legislature add a mileage tax, or raise vehicle registration and license fees, or bump up the gas tax a nickel a gallon, you can kiss that puny income tax savings goodbye.
As the state's transpo task force just did...
Q. Exactly why did Scott Walker assign to former Deputy Chief of Staff Tim Russell the management of a Veteran's Fund - - a fund that Russell then looted, and hence heads off to prison.
Reporter Steve Schultze nicely frames the issue:
In response to questions from [Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David] Hansher, Russell said Walker in 2009 had ordered the management of the event switched from the Alonzo Cudworth American Legion Post to the Heritage Guard Preservation Society to continue Operation Freedom after Walker left the county executive's office.
Hansher pressed Russell to say who besides him had persuaded Walker to make the change, which put Russell in control of the funds raised for Operation Freedom. But Russell said only that he had participated in the decision, without naming anyone else.The point is that the fund was being properly and privately managed before being moved back to County management - - under Russell - - through Walker.
But it still is not clear why Walker chose to give Russell control over the veterans' charitable money, A) after the county's ethics board recommended that the charity's finances be separated from Walker and county government, and, B) after, in fact, those financial responsibilities had been moved to an American Legion post which District Attorney John Chisholm said in the Russell charging document had performed exemplary management, according to WisPolitics.com.
Wow.
President Obama had the audacity in his Inaugural Address to shout-out respect to the constituencies in his winning coalition, and articulate without guile a liberal, 'we're-all-in-this-together' (Obama used the verboten word "collective") agenda endorsed in the voting by an electorate that said "No" to the Romney/Ryan alternative - - and conservatives today are shocked, shocked at some sort of perceived breach in Presidential protocols and proprieties.
Who made up these rules?
You can bet that if Obama opted instead for middling pablum and pious platitudes, the right would have said, 'Ha, ha, boring. No vision...failed oratory,' because conservatives always have to attack Obama.
As they have 24/7 for the last four years, because any praise would be considered treasonous retreat and defeat.
So Milwaukee talk radio this morning was warning listeners about the coming push to the hard left. It's gonna be worse than The New Deal.
The Wall Street Journal told us that Republicans - - masters of gridlock, filibuster and threatened government shutdowns - - had their feelings hurt by Obama's language and tone, as they saw it:
Republicans widely viewed the speech as confrontational. Rather than a new beginning, they saw it as the capstone of two years of divided government in which the two parties have struggled to reach policy agreements.The Journal Sentinel editorially took the President to task with a swipe that wins the award for Most Tortured Lede:
"I am hoping that the president will recognize that compromise should have been the words for today, and they clearly weren't," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). "We were hoping that he would use this day to reach out to all Americans and to all parties. He clearly did not."
Like Abraham Lincoln's hair, the inauguration speech delivered Monday by President Barack Obama was an odd and unruly thing.Others saw the speech as "Lincolnesque," and Obama took his oath of office with his hand on one of Lincoln's bibles, yet the local paper's editorial writers figured out a way to take that imagery away from Obama.
Obama shoves idealism into its graveEveryone take a breath.
The ubiquitous AR-15 - - implicated in the Newtown school slaughter, the Aurora movie theater massacre, the DC snipers' terrorism, the 2007 Colorado New Life Church spree killings, the fatal Portland mall holiday outrage and the upstate New York first-responder ambush - - has been ID'ed among two guns an Albuquerque teen is alleged to have used to gun down five members of his family:
Court documents claim 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego confessed to taking a .22 caliber rifle from his parents’ closet and shooting his mother, Sara, whom he was upset with.
He then shot his three siblings to death: 9-year-old Zephania, 5-year-old Jael and 2-year-old Angelina...
Griego told investigators he then waited five hours and ambushed his father, Greg, with an AR15 rifle.Guns in the home are far more likely to be used against family members or in suicides than against intruders, data show.
A gun in the home -- thus available for self-defense -- is 22 times more likely to be used in an assault or homicide, an accidental shooting or a suicide or attempted suicide.Researchers reached this conclusion by studying hospital admissions, emergency medical technician reports, police and medical examiner files in 626 shootings in or around a residence in three cities: Galveston, Texas; Seattle, Wash.; and Memphis, Tenn., for between 12 and 18 months.The study was published in The Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care, in August 1998, by Dr. Arthur Kellerman of Emory University in Atlanta and four other authors. Their study was supported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We are told the first phase of the iron ore mine enabled by the bill getting a hearing in Madison tomorrow would tear off the Penokee Hills at the headwaters of the Bad River and create a crater four miles long, and up to a mile wide, and perhaps 700-1,000 feet deep.
The iron ore is said to run for 22 miles.
For comparisons, imagine what an open pit mine four miles long, a mile wide and up to 1,000 feet deep would look like across these landmarks, and distances taken from Google maps.
Madison City Hall to the Oscar Mayer plant on Madison's east side - - 3.5 miles.
Milwaukee City Hall to the UWM Student Union on Milwaukee's east side - - 3.2 miles.
Miller Park to the Allen-Bradley Clock Tower (via National Ave.) - - 3.8 miles.
Get the picture?
And if the full 22 miles were dug?
Milwaukee City Hall to Waukesha City Hall - - 19.2 miles.
Lambeau Field to Pulaski - - 20 miles.
Madison City Hall to Lake Mills - - 23 miles.
The search box at the upper left tells me this blog has about 400 posts on the iron mining issue.
I had assembled a list here of links to mining bill posts from 12/2011 - - 3/2012 prior to the bill's defeat - - but I have not updated it.
I wonder if Scott Walker, and his mining industry captives in the Wisconsin Legislature, and their financiers at the WMC saw, heard and absorbed what President Barack Obama had to say in his Inaugural Address this morning about our collective responsibilities for the water, land and forests?
We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snow-capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.And do they understand, on a more practical level, that the President's appointees are in charge of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of the Interior and other water law and treaty rights regulators?
They call it Innovation Park.
Some innovation.
Some park, as Eddee Daniel shows us:
...I behold the chilling operation that is underway.
There was a time not long ago when Republicans in Wisconsin railed against using state power to change the rules to suit the players.
That was before they took control of state power, including the DNR.
Read on...
Five dead. Family members and a chaplain. The alleged shooter is a 15-year-old.
Talk to me again about guns in the home, and that it isn't the guns, its the shooter...
Details, here.
In the summer of 2011, the US Army Corp of Engineers notified the Walker administration by letter that legislation with so-called streamlined mining application reviews supported by the GOP would conflict with existing Federal law and procedures.
This would lead to more costly, longer reviews.
I wrote about it, here.
The Corps again noted the faster-tracked mine permitting application process likely to be included in the mining bill headed for a rushed state legislative hearing Wednesday in Madison will conflict with the extensive and controlling existing federal procedures.
Any mine that affects federal wetlands would need corps approval. State Sen. Tim Cullen, a Janesville Democrat, released a corps timeline Friday that said that process could take between two and four years.So why rush forward with a bill that sets up delay?
15 Nov
Rebecca Kleefisch
Gun Appreciation Day?
Let's make sure there's no Share Your Grenade And Rocket Launcher Day.
UPDATED: 4 People Shot At 3 Different Gun Shows On Gun Appreciation Day
To help replace the pristine Penokee Hills in Northwest Wisconsin with an open pit iron mile at least four-miles long, one-mile-wide and 1,000-feet in from Ashland County to Iron County - - (will they rename it "Irony County?") - - the GOP is getting ready to change long-established rules governing mining application reviews, public hearing procedures and mine waste dumping in or at public waters, just to name a few.
It's always the fine print in these things that have the heaviest hit.
Just another example of the democrats game plan: Change the Rules to Fit the Players.
Shout it with me, now: HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS DEMOCRAT.
This is the likely outcome from digging a massive open pit iron mine near the Bad River in Northern Wisconsin, scientists conclude. Read the entire report, and remember that the hundreds of millions of cubic yards of acid runoff-producing blasted waste rock (formerly the Penokee Hills) will be allowed to be dumped under rewritten environmental rules - - a/k/a Walker's 'environmentally safe' mining bill - - in or at the edge of waterways that drain to Lake Superior.
Summary
Unlike the Precambrian iron formations mined in Minnesota and Michigan, the Ironwood Iron Formation in the Gogebic Range is steeply tilted (ca. 60° to NNW) and has limited natural exposure at the surface.
A stably benched 200-300 m deep open pit mine in the Ironwood would therefore have a very large surface area and would require the removal of an immense volume (on the order of 330 million m3) of waste rock. Responsible monitoring and managing such a volume of waste rock, and a pit of such depth, over the long term would pose significant engineering challenges.
Although the economic target mineral in the Ironwood Formation is an iron oxide (magnetite), the overburden rock that would be stockpiled as waste (the Tyler Formation) contains significant amounts of reduced iron as sulfide (pyrite, pyrrhotite and related minerals), which could react with oxygen to generate acid mine drainage. The iron carbonate (siderite) present in small quantities in the Tyler Formation would not help to mitigate acid production, and the fine grain size of the rock would accelerate the generation of acidic solutions.
A 3-meter thick pyrite-bearing layer within the Ironwood Formation itself also has the potential to generate acid drainage, given the fine grain size to which the Ironwood would be crushed onsite for the magnetic separation process. The Tyler and Ironwood Formations also have surprisingly high phosphate concentrations, and mobilization of this material could lead to eutrophication of water bodies...
The scale of a modern open pit mine in the Gogebic Range would be completely different from historic mines in the region, which were localized, primarily underground mines that targeted high grade ore and did not involve excavation of the Tyler Formation.
Scott Walker has repeatedly tied his job-creating failures to that which the private sector hates the most - - uncertainty.
Walker has pointed to the uncertainties present in Obamacare, his recall election and federal fiscal matters - - so he's probably objecting on the phone right now to Paul Ryan over the House Republican plan to raise the federal debt limit for only 90 days.
And then what?
It's all too uncertain.
Oh, the humanity!
If Walker and the GOP-led Legislature hadn't gone to war against public sector employees and slashed state funding of local schools, the state would have enjoyed a major, estimated gain in overall employment last month.
Deduct 3,200 public sector workers lost in December from 4,500 new private sector jobs and the state netted a modest monthly workforce gain of 1,300, reports the Journal Sentinel.
You would think the Grand Old Party would have been snapped into sanity and propelled on to a changed path if for no other reason than simple self-preservation by its repeat loss in November to nemesis Barack Obama.
You would have thought that the GOP would have been forced to grasp the real math, and the true map, and understand, finally, painfully that voters rejected their ideas, plans and standard-bearers as extreme, narrow-minded, archaic, tone-deaf and increasingly irrelevant.
You'd have thought that. And you'd have been as wrong as they are proving themselves to be.
GOP politicking since the election, and particularly after the shootings of first-graders and school staffers in Newtown, CN is proving that party leaders, talk show propagandists and many, if not most of its elected officials, have neither brains nor hearts nor common-sense, survival instincts.
Since Newtown, the GOP and its machinery have been out there whipping up firearm-owner fears by calling Pres. Obama a gun-confiscating, Constitution-trampling tyrant and even King - - real fighting words to replace Kenyan, socialist, communist, Muslim - - for signing Presidential orders on administrative matters related to firearms, law enforcement, gun safety and science that are completely within his executive purview as the elected Chief Executive - - just as past Presidents of both parties had done routinely on a multiplicity of issues.
The GOP and its publicists are playing a dangerous, reactive and incendiary game frightening anti-Obama voters and gun-owners by throwing out calls for secession, nullification, rebellion.
Do they want Civil War, The Sequel?
Anger, demagoguery and intentional Knownothingism can't possibly be the agenda of a modern, national political party - - an organization and legacy that has devolved from the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower to the party of Ryan and Bachmann, Limbaugh and Priebus, Gohmert and Rove.
The two most recent Presidential elections should have made clear to the GOP - - and polling further backs it up - - that extremism in the pursuit of partisan power in the Year 2013 is just that: Extremism.
Counterfeit. Unworthy of the country. Toxic.
Rejected.
The GOP may hang on to legislative districts cherry-picked and preserved for ephemeral advantage through gerrymandering, but escalating, irreversible demographic changes and grassroots revulsion at contemporary Republican tactics - - from carrying the NRA's post-massacres' water to organized, perilous obstruction of climate change science to withholding timely aid to Northeast storm suffers to promoting "self-deportation" of immigrants to undermining women's reproductive rights and equal pay to threatening defaults and economic ruination over Congressional spending already out the door - - are speeding the GOP's self-destruction.
Sayonara.
