WSJ's Chris Rickert: "Walker's brand of workaday corruption...(is) 'exactly what's wrong with the political process.'"

Wisconsin State Journal columnist Chris Rickert finally got one right.

In fact, I’m sorry that the Democratic Party didn't come out with the following statement first. Every word should be repeated over and over throughout the entire campaign season.

“…Walker’s brand of workaday corruption seems to attract dull-witted politicos and thinly veiled racism, classism and other -isms that pander to our worst natures and discourage the renewal of an American democracy beset by low voter turnout and negative campaigning.

Hearing Walker criticize the reaction to the emails as “exactly what’s wrong with the political process” is funny because his 2010 campaign appears to be a textbook case of exactly what’s wrong with the political process.”

Rickert wasn't done:

Here’s Rindfleisch and a paralegal with a Republican law firm chuckling over minority recipients of public assistance, and another Walker aide on how awful it would be to be black, disabled, gay and — horrors! — a Democrat.

Not sufficiently sexy or succinct for a 30-second attack ad seems to be the verdict of the national punditry. State politics-watchers don’t think there’s enough there to change the kinds of love-him-or-hate-him responses Walker tends to inspire.

Maybe so. And yet in the long run, Walker’s brand of politics is more corrosive to representative democracy than a whole closet full of blue dresses.

WSJ Columnist Chris Rickert: "...having ALEC on your resume may well be a feather in a prospective president’s mortarboard."

Was he drunk? The Wisconsin State Journal’s conservative columnist Chris Rickert is the most ridiculous writer in the state, and that’s saying a lot considering all the mindless political stuff pouring out of the MacIver Institute.

This is head slapping stuff too. Rickert, for whatever reason, was trying to defend one of the former candidates for UW president, Robert L. King, (who is currently) president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.

What spills out of Rickert’s nonsensical twisted logic are some real gems:

King, an attorney, Lacking the Ph.D. would have been “problematic” for some faculty, according to UW-Madison professor Barry Orton “…university faculty whose professional lives are organized around the teaching and research that form the foundation for the granting of degrees have a strong bias for university leaders with earned degrees,” he told me.

Rickert’s response:

King’s lack of acceptably high levels of book-learning, along with the bit of Republican blood running through his veins, might not have been such bad things.

That’s right, who needs a degree to run a university?

But it's this candidates history with ALEC:

King’s stint on an (ALEC) American Legislative Exchange Council task force some 25 years ago, while a Republican New York state lawmaker, also set off alarm bells … a group that brings politicians and corporations together to craft conservative and corporate-friendly model bills and has become something of the root of all evil for certain people on the political left.

Who would think it's wrong for lobbyists crafting corporate friendly bills by politicians representing people? You may have to sit down for this one:

Heck, with a crowd like the one in control at the Capitol these days, having ALEC on your resume may well be a feather in a prospective president’s mortarboard.

Which is not saying a lot about our current one party system. The only thing that made any sense at all was this comment:

Or as Senate President Mike Ellis put it in one outburst during the flap over the System’s financial reserves last year: “They all think they’re Ph.D.s and we ought to be working at Jiffy Lube. ... The Legislature’s a heck of a lot smarter than they’re giving us credit for.”

Not from what we've seen so far. 

Would Penny Pinching Conservatives buy the print version of talk radio tantrums from the likes of Charlie Sykes?

WTMJ's Charlie Sykes must really hate passing along his insights and wisdom to so many right wing listeners for free, when he can make a buck off them instead. With stories like the horrors of the Hoan Bridge's LED light show and the burden that freeloading conservatives have to bear on tax day, there are few surprises in the "subscription only" echo chamber below.

I remember the free email newsletters leading up to the exploitative "pay or go to hell" changeover, and their contorted story content that only a paranoid penny pinching, gun toting psycho would believe. The only thing worse would be something from the screeching banshee, Vicki McKenna, who can't put a thought together without a lot of bullshit and chicken wire.

Even the "less than reliable" committed partisan columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal, Chris Rickert, tried to make a comparison between One Wisconsin Now (which uses facts and statistics to prove their point) to the strictly fictional accounts told by Right Wisconsin. That's like believing what Ayn Rand wrote would actually work in the real world.

I'm poking fun at Rickert because in an email exchange we had over a column he did on vouchers, he started his second response to me with "John: You're a committed partisan and, as such, less than reliable." 

Considering the fact that we both offer our opinions, peppered with research and facts to back up our conclusions, the only difference I can see between him and me is a paycheck from his employer. I unfortunately don't make an income, which means...Rickert's got the better gig.