Brew City Brawler

Scott Walker is a dumb, antidemocratic failure and nobody likes him

"He's a weasel," ma Brawler, a lifelong Milwaukee resident, declared earlier this week  over dinner.

She was referring, of course, to Scott Walker.

How is he a weasel -- or as I say in the headline a "dumb, antidemocratic failure" who no one likes? Let's count the ways.

1. Walker is Dumb. This is Folkbum's assessment in wake of Walker nixing the sales tax referendum, and the Brawler agrees.

2. Walker is antidemocratic. As the Brawler noted previously, Walker was in favor of referenda -- and opposed to backroom deals and machinations -- before he was elected as county anti-executive. Now he opposes one when it doesn't fit  his ideological agenda.

3. Nobody likes him. Dan Bice, not for the first time, follows the Brawler's lead! Last Sunday the Brawler -- armed with nothing but a friend's email, common sense, anecdotal observation and the result of a south side election -- said he suspected people of the county harbored a "deep reservoir of well-deserved contempt" toward Scott Walker. 

Mere days later, Bice reports the results of a survey by Progressive Majority Wisconsin showing a mere 43 percent of county residents say they're likely to vote for Walker in spring's election, compared to 64 percent in January 2004. Moreover, 58 percent of people say the county is on the wrong track.

Let's be clear: These numbers suck.

Bice points out that Doyle's support numbers in polls leading up to the election were below the magic 50 percent, which is true.

But here's a big difference: Walker's numbers are in the turlet despite the fact he receives the equivalent of tens of millions in free PR from the barkers at WTMJ and WISN. These same stations, of course, slandered Doyle and no doubt hurt his poll numbers.

A Walker flack suggests people will be more jazzed about Walker once the campaign kicks into high gear and he talks about all the great things he's done (like missing the latest pension scandal). The Brawler gives the flack credit for presumably saying this with a straight face, assuming he did. But the Brawler suggests the flack is delusional if, in his heart of hearts, he believes that.

Why?

Because:

4. Walker is a failure. That sounds harsh, don't it? But take a gander at how Walker described the three most critical issues facing Milwaukee County to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel back in 3/24/02:

After acting to restore public trust in the work of county government, the three most critical issues facing Milwaukee County are jobs, transportation and quality of life.

We need to create jobs, protect current jobs and connect jobs to the people seeking them. More jobs means a better economy, which should lead to a lower tax burden for all.

We need to link people who want jobs to the places where those jobs exist by building a great transportation system, which also will attract more jobs to the area. This means working beyond county government with the private sector, community organizations and other levels of government.

We need to improve the quality of life in Milwaukee County by empowering people to take advantage of the resources that can improve their lives. We also need to address these issues knowing that the county is facing a major fiscal crisis that will take some time to correct.

Can anyone seriously argue that, five years later, Walker has seriously addressed -- not solved, just taken steps to solve -- any of these "critical issues"? And no, spinning out a parks district is not addressing the issue --it's passing the buck.

I mean, given he missed ongoing pension abuses, can he even say he restored the public trust?

In conclusion, the Brawler wants to hoist a comment from a previous post by the worthy Capper:

The thing that is truly exasperating is that Walker acknowledges that the County needs a new funding source, i.e. higher taxes or a sales tax. This is evidenced by his more than willing approach to creating a parks district with taxing authority and wanting to pawn off the transit system to a regional system with a taxing authority. If he was truly anti-tax increase, he would hold onto these systems in his stranglehold until they were utterly destroyed.

Like ma Brawler said: Weasel.

Milwaukee's got a new crybaby businessman!

It seems like only yesterday John Jazwiec, top dog at RedPrairie, was complaining about Wisconsin's lousy business environment and how it was difficult to attract talent. This is despite previous pronouncements that the company was able to attract the best talent around.

That was last summer. Now a new crybaby executive has emerged, one Christopher Carter. He heads up CCI, a software  consultancy for companies running SAP software.

Essentially he whines about how bureaucrats in Texas -- where he recently bought an oil and gas company -- were nicer to him than the bureaucrats in Milwaukee. And you know what --the money generated by the company he bought "is going to stay in Texas." And we better be thankful that he stays here at all!

Naturally, Charlie Sykes has been touting Carter's complaint. (Shouldn't he be telling him, per his latest book, that life isn't fair? Or are there different rules for executives?) So has Ol Lady Owen Robinson.

But if Milwaukee is such a lousy place to do business, Christopher, why did you happily announce in June that CCI was building a data center here? And how could you have managed to open a training facility in this godawful climate?

In terms of how we're lucky to have you here, as opposed to you packing up and moving to Atlanta or Texas: You might want to tell your Wisconsin-area clients what you're planning to do before you get on a plane. Tell us how that goes!

Finally, if you don't want to be here and you want to go "to another state with no state taxes or even the scent of a universal health care program" -- leave. And take Jazwiec with you.

Badger Blues has more.

Boots and Sabers: Looks like Owen fell for "another Rovian trick" in Iraq

On Sunday Ol Lady Owen Robinson at Boots and Sabers crowed about this sign of "progress" in Iraq:

Iraq's top Shi'ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key measures seen as vital to fostering national reconciliation.

Foreign affairs experts and B&S commenters including Joe and Kevin Binversie agreed this was progress. (Curiously, Joe seems to believe that the winning of the peace in Japan and Germany lasted "decades" as violence lingered on. The Brawler has no idea what Joe is talking about -- is he thinking about the much-hyped Nazi "werewolves" cited by disgraced former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? Joe: there was no meaningful resistance, organized or otherwise, to the US occupation in Japan or Germany. The US maintained a military presence in those countries to check communist expansion, not to suppress resistance in those countries. And there was no meaningful "violence.")

The Brawler  -- who tends to be suspicious of "good news"  coming out of Iraq, particularly if its timed in a manner that fits in with the administration's talking points -- gently suggested that Owen was jumping the gun a bit.

And, shocking no one, the Brawler has been proven correct once again.

From Time Magazine:

Late on Sunday five Iraqi politicians, representing the country's Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish constituencies, announced a deal to allow some former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party to return to government jobs, which has been a key demand of Iraq's Sunni Arabs. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker called the announcement a "positive and encouraging message."

But a day after signing the deal the country's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, announced that the Sunni bloc that walked out of the government August 1 still had no plans to return. "Our previous experience with the government has not been encouraging," he explained, "and we will not go back just because of promises, unless there are real and tangible reforms."

Meanwhile, commenting on Washington Post 's coverage of a GAO report that shows the Administration is blowing its benchmarks on Iraq, Spencer Ackerman at Talking Points Memo observes:

On Monday, President Bush gave a speech praising a recent accord among the Shiite and Kurdish political parties of Nouri al-Maliki's government -- which has no Sunnis, who, along with the Sadrists, have withdrawn from the cabinet -- pledging to play nicer with the Sunnis. (Tariq al-Hashemi's Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni political entity, signed the accord, but hasn't brought his party back into the government and the other Sunnis doubt Maliki's sincerity.) The cost-free accord for Maliki smelled a lot like an illusory political deal intended to bolster the Petraeus/Crocker assessments next month to Congress. Sure enough, the GAO finds that Bush's public statements about political progress by the Maliki government are entirely contradicted by internal studies:

An internal administration assessment this month, the GAO says, concluded that "this [Sunni] boycott ends any claim by the Shi'ite-dominated coalition to be a government of national unity." An administration official involved in Iraq policy said that he did not know what specific interagency document the GAO was citing but noted that it is an accurate reflection of the views of many officials.

Of course, the Pentagon is saying the report is overly pessimistic. The Brawler supposes Owen Robinson is among that shrinking part of the electorate still gives credence to the people who brought you tales of Jessica Lynch's heroism.

Truman's words on health-care reform resonate 60 years later

The first drive for fundamental health-care reform that had any meaningful chance of success was under Harry S Truman. In retrospect, the odds always were stacked against it. Getting it through Congress would have been difficult in the best of times -- Taft's Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats were dead against it. Moreover, a then-massive, multimillion dollar PR blitz by the AMA -- which denounced national health care as "socialized medicine" (yup, Leah Vukmir et al are relying on some pretty old tropes in vilifying health care reform six decades later) -- successfully demonized it.

Instead corporate America and their political allies embraced employer sponsored health care.

In reading Harry S. Truman vs. the Medical Lobby by Monte Poen (a solid, if dry, work by a Truman fan that provides a good overview of the internal workings of the administration as it pushed health care reform), the Brawler was struck by words from a Truman address on Oct. 15, 1948 (p. 130):

What did the Republicans do with my proposal for health insurance? You can guess that one. They did nothing! All they said was -- 'Sorry. We can't do that. The medical lobby says its un-American.' And they listened to the lobbies in Congress.

I put it up to you. Is it un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted, or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity.

Does cancer care about political parties? Does infantile paralysis concern itself with income? Of course it doesn't.

The Democratic Party holds that the people are entitled to the best available medical care. We hold that they have a right to ask their Government to help.

With some editing -- thanks to Big Government, infantile paralysis looms less large in the American scene -- that speech could be given today.

Boots and Sabers ... and sexy pictures!

When he's not mangling the history of health care or Social Security or seeing mirages of progress in Iraq, Owen Robinson of Boots and Sabers can be counted on to denounce the moral turpitude of young hussies who bear "tramp stamps" or who write about, uh, entertaining young men in bathroom stalls.

Given Owen's belief in the importance of marriage and horror at wanton behavior, the Brawler was somewhat surprised to see that Boots and Sabers carries an ad for a retailer of "patriotic" T-shirts that relies on T&A shots to move product.

Click through to the Ranger Up site, and you're first greeted by this image:

It seems difficult to reconcile this picture with a fervent belief in family values and horror at the sexualization of American culture -- I don't see any of these three parties wearing a wedding ring.

But I suppose it's possible the blonde is wearing one -- and the brunette is an upstairs neighbor who just fell through their ceiling!

Boots and Sabers: The Brawler helps out on a question

Owen Robinson:

Over at Boots and Sabers, you link to a story you're sure is great news from Iraq.

You quote from it:

Iraq's top Shi'ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key measures seen as vital to fostering national reconciliation.

In the post you ask, "Could someone call this progress in Iraq?" Then add, "Naaaaah ... it's just another Rovian trick."

Owen: You are correct. This is just another Rovian trick to make it look like the political situation in Iraq is improving on the eve of the White House briefing Congress on...how the political situation is improving.

That would have been clear to your readers if you had quoted this part of the story as well:

The laws need to be passed by Iraq's fractious parliament, which has yet to receive any of the drafts.

Capturing Hussein, holding elections, killing Hussein, killing Zarqawi -- weren't all these signs of  "progress in Iraq" as well?

Glad to help.

Your Buddy,

The Brawler

Milwaukee County deserves better than Scott Walker

The Brawler was somewhat puzzled by a recent (fine, relatively recent) Journal Sentinel story that, deliberately or not, sought to create an aura of inevitability about the reelection of Scott Walker as Milwaukee County executive. The JS's reason: No one has stepped up to run against him.

It was as if a wannabe crony of Walker, backed by Walker, hadn't recently gone down in defeat in the south suburbs.  A fact totally ignored in the JS story.

Capper hit the high points of what's wrong with calling things too early. (The Brawler wonders when the JS will run a "Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler appears tough to beat" story given no credible challenger has stepped up in the Supreme Court race. Excepting of course a trial balloon by Paul Bucher, a man whom the wife of a widely read rightwing blogger once described as a bitter, childish little asshole.)

The only thing the Brawler would like to add is that the JS article ignored, or didn't take into account, what the Brawler suspects is a deep reservoir of well-deserved contempt  by the people of Milwaukee for Scott Walker and his profound lack of leadership.

Indeed, as the Brawler read Capper he recalled a mass email he received back in March from a friend, a regular citizen who's no radical activist or "moonbat" but just another Milwaukee native appalled by Scott Walker.

The Brawler dug up that email. Here's an excerpt:

Scott Walker affects our lives. As long as we play softball, take the bus, drive on roads, or breathe in this county. So let me tell you about his irrationality. And then please encourage everyone you know to run for his position in hopes we come up with someone to oust him.

This is from Bruce Murphy's column:

During a meeting with the JS Editorial Board last week, County Executive Scott Walker said he would like to grow the local economy enough so lower-income people don't have to rely on transit and could instead afford to buy cars.

Ah, Earth to Scottie. We live in a society with a large population of working poor who can’t afford a car. Growing the economy is a nice thought, but there’s no guarantee any newly created jobs will pay enough for these folks to afford a car. And in the meantime, while they wait for this never-before-seen economy to arrive, how will they get to work, the store or anywhere else?

As county executive, Walker is entrusted with the responsibility of making sure the county’s bus system, once one of the most successful in the country, continues to serve low-income people who need it. That will take some hardheaded strategizing, not some blue-sky libertarian rhetoric about an auto utopia.

That is where Bruce ends.

Here is what I say: what about kids, disabled people, people whose cares are undergoing major repairs, tourists, foreigners here legally or otherwise, some of whom can't get licenses or wouldn't have access to a vehicle if there are just studying here for a month, people who live on the east side and have no goddamn place to park their cars if they even had one, especially during storm  emergencies. Funny that this comment is coming from the person who has been so hard headed about not raising taxes (you know, unless they are liberal park people fees) that he thinks somehow there is money out there to pay everyone a minimum of $30,000 a year. Yeah. That'll be the day.

Again, this is an excerpt from an email a regular citizen -- someone who loves her native city, not a blogger, not a political junkie -- sent out to friends. Few county bosses generate such action.

Milwaukee County deserves better than Scott Walker, the emptiest of suits.

Best of the Journal Sentinel blog comment sections: The Vikki Ortiz edition

The Brawler wants to say upfront that the best comment section in a JS blog this week -- perhaps ever -- revolves around the Great Erica Perez Dive Bar Debacle. But illusory Tenant, is all over that one.

So as a runner up, the Brawler puts forth a piece of insight offered in response to a Vikki Ortiz post. She asks her readers the allegedly interesting question of whether it's possible to have friends of the opposite sex once you're involved in a serious relationship.

She just doesn't know!

There's barely enough bandwidth in the intertubes to contain the mad science dropped by one "John" -- is that his middle name?

Take it away, "John":

The short answer is no.  I suppose you want me to elaborate.  Fine.  Most of the time a guy and girl are platonic friends, one of them likes the other and one of them doesn't.  The other reasons for these types of friends is that you are a female and friend's with your friend's boyfriend because he has become part of her life.  So as log as they date, he can be your friend, ....but it is really your friend through someone else.  So...back to heterosexual male and female friends...on their own for their own sake...usually one likes the other(no matter what they say) ...and when one of the two friend's gets married...your friendship will fade deep into the background....often only interacting in front of the spouse.  That's just how it works.  And you find new friends, which I am sure is a pain at first.  The only exception to this is if you had a boyfriend and could hang out the 4 of you for quite some time, to keep a friendship going....but unless you can become very close to your friend's girlfriend...against most odds...you will be taking a backseat and moving on...at least until they break up or divorce...a 1 in 2 chance on that one.

Edifying!

The US supported the Khmer Rouge

Bert over at Folkbum does a fine job of piling on about President Bush's historically challenged invocation of Vietnam as a reason for why we should stay in Iraq forever.

Bush forgot to mention that it was the Vietnamese that toppled the Khmer Rouge, sparked by provocations on their shared border.

He also forgot to mention that the US provided support for the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, initially under the Carter Administration and then under the Reagan Administration, as a means of undermining the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.

In other words, the US helped the perpetrators of the killing fields.

UPDATE: Other Side of My Mouth demonstrates how holding a 7-month old may actually fuel righteous anger in responding to lies about Vietnam.

WMC racebaits on health care reform

The Brawler (and this guy and this guy) had a fine time making sport of the WMC/CfG's clownlike attack on Healthy Wisconsin. Bogus polling, empty talking points, a half-decade old "plan" masked as something new .... a veritable three-ring circus of buffoonery!

Still, one part of the WMC's poll literally made the Brawler's blood boil. It was this part:

Seventy-seven percent are likely to oppose the plan when they find out "the plan is expected to attract new residents to Wisconsin who do not work, but want health care benefits."

First off: The use of passive voice -- "the plan is expected to" -- irritated the Brawler. Why? Because it doesn't say who exactly expects this to happen. So far as the Brawler can tell, the people who expect this to happen are a formerly anonymous, moderately amusing blogger who now flacks for the WPRI; a MU law professor who played off him; and a Journal Sentinel columnist who thinks the aforementioned professor is, like totally, smart. Not exactly a Rand study! And Seth Zlotocha, in his cold-blooded nuanced manner, neatly dispatched this argument a while back.

It's true: obfuscatory use of the passive voice does irritate the Brawler.

But it's the second half of that sentence that set the Brawler's blood boiling: "attract new residents to Wisconsin who do not work, but want health care benefits."

This is transparently racist code. Utter these words to more than a few voters -- particularly, the Brawler suspects, the Republican base -- and you conjure visions of black and brown people. Shiftless black and brown people whose only ambition is to pack up everything and move to Wisconsin to live off our fat benefits.

Why does the Brawler say this? Did he read it in a book? No. The Brawler heard the original version of this slur literally dozens of times growing up in Milwaukee in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then it was: "Black people move up here because of welfare." Though of course, the people who said it didn't say "black people." There was no evidence for this of course -- but it sounded good to a certain kind of person and an urban legend was born.

Tommy Thompson then injected a watered-down, but still fundamentally racist version, of this vile slur into the public discourse during the debate over welfare reform.

There never was any proof that Wisconsin's welfare benefits played any meaningful role in attracting people to the state. (Indeed, the Brawler has heard the "Blacks come up here for the benefits" argument in Minnesota, which, of course, was one of the states from which we were allegedly attracting welfare mothers. Truly a smear without borders.) In fact, more evidence argued to the contrary. It is the definition of a big lie, repeated to this day by the likes of Deb Jordahl.

And now by the WMC.