"Homer" Schimel would have defended ban on Interracial Marriages.

It’s amazing how open Republican DA and AG candidate Brad Schimel is about settling in as a rubber stamp for the Republican legislature. He won’t question anything. A shocking attitude for anyone in that position.

He would have even worked against interracial marriage because, what the hell, it’s the law:

The cable access program "Eye on Oshkosh’s” interviewer asked if he had been attorney general in the 1950s in a state that didn't allow interracial marriage whether he would say such a ban is wrong. Schimel said he might find such a ban distasteful but he can't choose what laws to defend.

Here are the actual words of “Homer” Schimel, and a second opinion from another former AG, Peg Lautenschlager. The difference is noticeable, and sad for Schimel.

Walker, Vos dance to tune of Wisconsin Club for Growth, propose disbanding independent GAB oversight.

Who controls Scott Walker and our state legislature? The conservative party bosses at Wisconsin Club for Growth, that’s who.

And when the Club bosses are unhappy, Republican legislators develop new and aggressive "leadership" skills, that coincidentally fall in line with the Club.

After rearranging the bits and pieces in the Journal Sentinel article by Patrick Marley, you’ll see why. From the very beginning, Rep. Robin Vos has bashed the Government Accountability Board because he thinks that they, or any independent group, cannot actually be nonpartisan. That's impossible. Under that false premise, Vos thinks the controlling party should make all the partisan appointments they want, same difference. Checks and balances:

jsonline: Prosecutors and the Government Accountability Board have been looking into whether the club or other conservative groups illegally worked with the campaigns of Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans during the 2011 and 2012 recalls.

You don’t threaten or challenge conservatives. The clubs boss Eric O'Keefe sued the Milwaukee DA, making it clear he wasn't happy with Republican inaction. Vos sprung into action, and sued the accountability board because of their redesigned ballot and to make them look bad. It was stupid, so even a conservative Waukesha County judge dismissed the case. In an uncontrolled hissy fit of authoritarian rage, Vos declared on the Wisconsin Radio Network (audio from WPR):

"Kevin Kennedy (head of the GAB) has to go. He needs to be gone, he is an embarrassment and I can't say it any more emphatically than I am right now. I promise you that two years from now when we're sitting here the GAB will not be in the current format that it is currently put together. It is dysfunctional, it is unresponsive and it is totally undemocratic."

Vos, under pressure from the Wisconsin Club for Growth's party bosses and others, said he will change the elections board to one that is loyal to the authority. A sure fire way to instill confidence and integrity in our elections. 

In the meantime, party boss O’Keefe will use its vast financial resources to make an example of the GAB and the DA's office, not because of their duty to provide oversight, but because they had the gall to picked a “fight” with the real party bosses.  

O'Keefe said Chisholm had started the fight over campaign finance laws that he claims has shut out conservative voices from the state's political debate. But "my team will decide when it's over," O'Keefe said.

And like every Republican "plan," there isn't one:

Phony GOP Partisan Problems

Vos said he's unlikely to have a concrete proposal for changing or replacing the accountability board before the election.

Of course this is all speculation, based on the purely coincidental actions by Vos and the Club's party boss.

And what kind of guy is Eric O’Keefe? Check out his comments on conservative talker Vicki McKenna’s radio show:

 “I have read some about rape and I have talked about rape and I am saying this deliberately. The reactions that I got from the people I interviewed were similar to a rape victim.”

Shocker!!! Walker says thanks to taxpayer supported government assistance, Minimum Wage doesn't need a boost.

With a state law requiring Wisconsinites a living wage, we thought we had Scott Walker on this one. Guess again. 

jsonline: State law requires that Wisconsin's minimum wage "shall not be less than a living wage." The liberal Wisconsin Jobs Now and 100 workers had sought to use the little-known clause in state law to raise the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or at least force Walker, a Republican, to publicly oppose such a move just a month before the Nov. 4 election.

Amazingly, Walker doesn't just oppose enforcing the law, he used government aid, taxpayer assistance, to prove his point. Hey, isn't that’s the same government aid he’s trying to cut right now?

Gov. Scott Walker's administration has denied a complaint by a labor group seeking to force an increase in Wisconsin's minimum wage. The state Department of Workforce Development said it considered those factors as well as others, such as that some of the complainants make more than minimum wage, receive public aid and brought up items beyond their basic needs. "The department has determined that there is no reasonable cause to believe that the wages paid to the complainants are not a living wage," Robert Rodriguez, administrator of DWD's Equal Rights Division, wrote in the denial letter.

That drew an immediate rebuke from Wisconsin Jobs Now: "…for the governor to brazenly say to the working families of Wisconsin that $7.25 an hour is enough to sustain themselves is not only misguided, it is incredibly ignorant and willfully obtuse," the group said in a statement.

Walker's use of taxpayer assistance to justify the livability of the minimum wage in stunning.

GOP candidate Fitzgerald offers "change" and "jobs." Does he know his party runs things now?

I’m loving this. Republicans are the least self-aware people in the world.

Without thinking, Republican candidate Brian Fitzgerald is still using the same slogan used by his party when they ran against Democrats. Fitzgerald is running on "change in Madison," even though his party has been in complete control of everything, including job creation for the last four years.

Change...to be more like Democrats?

Guys like Fitzgerald don't even bother to repackage their message despite their much bragged about majority hold on our now booming state "comeback."

The only thing Fitzgerald has going for himself are his surreal ads that sadly use the party’s standard list of talking points as the jokes they've become. If anything, Fitzgerald is being unintentionally truthful:  

Cap Times: Brian Fitzgerald is running against Democratic state Rep. Janis Ringhand to fill retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Cullen's seat. He is running, he said, because he wants to see change in Madison and throughout the state. The biggest issue in his district, by far, is jobs, he said.

Watch and be amazed. Think if a Democrat ran this stuff...what a conservative talk radio field day it would be:



Oh, and the Irish stereotype, beer belly, wonder through the pub approach Fitzgerald took? Real funny too.

Voter Suppression message is this: Why vote, what difference does it make and why let dumb people have a say?

As Republicans continue to complicate the voting process in each succeeding year they’re in power, perhaps someday we’ll just say, the hell with it. That’s the hope, as you see below.

Let’s face it, the right to vote is slipping away. Republicans have used their activist conservative courts to legitimize right wing extremism that claims that voter fraud exists, even without any proof. It plays very well with the natural conservative fear that somebody’s taking something away from them-like their vote.

With voter ID come’s a regulatory mess of convoluted hours, days and requirements to register and vote. And oddly, with the courts approval, nothing is too inconvenient anymore either.  

Again, the idea is to make voting a troublesome and an almost unnecessary act that in the big picture isn't worth the effort. “Maybe not this time” we'll say, due to that 20 minute drive to the other side of town where we’ll wait in a 3 hour line.

National Review loser and correspondent Kevin Williamson expresses what GOP politicians are suggesting all the time, and what we’re seeing in conservative tweets and Facebook sites as well.

If you would like to be filled with despair for the prospects of democracy, spend a few minutes attempting to decipher the psephological musings of Lena Dunham, the distinctly unappealing actress commissioned by Planned Parenthood to share with her presumably illiterate following “5 Reasons Why I Vote (and You Should, Too).” That’s 21st-century U.S. politics in miniature: a half-assed listicle penned by a half-bright celebrity and published by a gang of abortion profiteers.

Miss Dunham, reflecting celebrity culture at large, makes a fetish of voting, and it is easy to see why: Voting is the most shallow gesture of citizenship there is, the issuance of a demand — a statement that “this is how the world should be,” as Miss Dunham puts it — imposing nothing in the way of reciprocal responsibility. Power without responsibility. 

As a procedure for sorting out complex policy issues, voting is of distinctly limited value: If you wanted to know whether the compressive strength of a particular material were sufficient to support a bridge over Interstate 20, you would not go about solving that problem by bundling that question with 10,000 other equally precise and complex but largely unrelated questions ... to the least-informed few million people you could identify ... That would be a bad way to build a bridge — a homicidal way, in fact — and though it is a necessary instrument of accountability in a democratic republic, voting properly plays a very limited role.

For instance, we have a Bill of Rights, which could with equal accuracy be called the List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On.

But for Miss Dunham et al., this isn’t a question of citizenship — it’s a therapeutic matter. Voting, she promises, will offer “a sense of accomplishment,” knowledge that one has done the right thing, even “joy.” But checking a box is the most trivial accomplishment imaginable; having done so is no guarantee that one has done the right thing, inasmuch as voters routinely make bad decisions for evil reasons.

She writes: “The crazy and depressing truth is that there are people running for office right now who could actually affect your life. PARTICULARLY your sex life. PARTICULARLY if you’re a woman. Yup.” The very conservative editors of this magazine are in fact trying to make it easier for them to do so with over-the-counter birth control … so allow me to pass along the message: We really, truly, sincerely do not wish to be involved in your sex life.

Yup, and that must mean conservative men don’t want to be involved in their own sex life or use birth control. But just be clear...

I would like to suggest, as gently as I can, that if you are voting as an act of self-gratification, if you do not understand the role that voting in fact plays in a constitutional republic, and if you need Lena Dunham to tell you why and how you should be voting — you should not vote. If you get your politics from actors and your news from television comedians — you should not vote. There’s no shame in it, your vote is statistically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election. 

Pretty easy message to understand. Who cares about voter suppression, since we "should not vote" anyway.

Conservative brings up Hanging as the solution to end abortions!!!

I always thought it was odd that the abortion debate often excludes the role men have. If men were included as the responsible “other half” of unwanted pregnancies, we wouldn't have this dumbed down discussion that sounds like something straight out off the ISIS platform.

Case in point, another revealing look inside the mind of right wing authoritarian conservatism:

RH: This weekend, Kevin Williamson, whose Twitter bio describes him as a “roving reporter for the National Review,” declared on Twitter that all abortions should be treated as premeditated homicide, and that women who have had abortions should face capital punishment, namely hanging. No exceptions.

He claims a “consistent life ethic,” which would mean he is against capital punishment per se but believes there are circumstances in which capital punishment should be employed anyway. He is either unaware of or irresponsibly ignores the fact that in many states in this country women are today being arrested for miscarriage and pregnancy loss on the basis of “suspected abortion.” 

Given the chance to control the country, Republicans won't shy away from it's ideas like this.  

Republican Freeloading winning over the hearts and minds of Wisconsinites.

The longer we muddle along in red state thinking, the more we get comfortable with freeloading off the previous generations gift of roads and infrastructure.

The lunacy of saving our kids from future higher taxes by instituting austerity measures now defies common sense and logic. What we don’t do now will have to be done by the next generation. And that means higher taxes to pay for it.

Republicans like Scott Walker are winning the “lets freeload” small government argument.

The new Wisconsin Economic Scorecard statewide poll shows widespread opposition to a 5-cent-per-gallon boost in the state gasoline tax 71 percent of registered voters polled opposed that option. But when it comes to covering a large projected shortfall in the state transportation fund, there is no clearly-preferred option:

*Tax/user fee increases are preferred by 31 percent;    *Introduction of toll roads gets 30 percent approval,     *And delaying major construction projects garners 31 percent of respondents.

However, the latter option provokes the least intense opposition.

"Least intense?" Nothing says freeloader like that response. This is what happens when the goal is to target a national tax ranking as opposed to pay for and improving your quality of life.

State Republicans against Voter ID ad Campaign, say "That's a lot of money to spend on trying to inform people."

Republican state lawmakers are now trying to run government by word of mouth. Yes, on their own verbal orders. 

WSJ: The heads of the Legislature’s budget committee told the state elections agency late Friday to go ahead with a public information campaign to tell voters they need a photo ID, such as a driver’s license, to vote on Nov. 4 …

Oh sure, go ahead, who needs the formality of law to provide GAB funding. This incredibly irresponsible action has only caused confusion. Republicans are intentionally dragging their feet, with just a month before the election.

GAB spokesman Reid Magney said the letter from Sen. Alberta Darling and Rep. John Nygren does not release the requested funds. He didn’t know Friday if the agency can conduct a campaign without committee action.

Their real intentions were made clear by the same arrogant big mouth that declared Walker’s union busting the best way to defund Democratic campaigns; Sen. Scott Fitzgerald:

Some Republicans have raised objections to spending $460,800 on the campaign, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said in an interview late Friday. Fitzgerald said he’s talked to Republican senators who worry “that’s a lot of money to spend on trying to inform people” about something that has been well-publicized in news media, such as television, radio and newspapers.

Another words, Republicans are making the case it's too expensive to inform voters . With 4 weeks to go…

“We don’t have consensus on whether or not it’s needed,” Fitzgerald said.

I know, let's discuss this for a week or two. Unfortunately Fitzgerald never read the law:

In their letter to the agency, Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, and Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, noted the public information campaign is required as part of the voter ID law.

Need proof these guys not only didn't write the voter ID bill, but never read it before it before passing it? And yet they will get away with this without a whimper from the press.

PolitiFact says Walker's jobs performance improved, moving Wisconsin out of last place. Pants on Fire!

We know Scott Walker broke his outrageous campaign promise to create 250,000 jobs, THE big lie that won him an election, because of the state's last place position in job creation in the Midwest.

But PolitiFact decided to split hairs with a big “Untrue” rating for Burke, who insisted Walker was still last.

For the first three years of Walker’s term, Wisconsin did rank last in the Midwest -- both for the three years as a whole, and in each of the individual years. That’s a true statement, and we have rated it as such … this claim from Burke has remained stuck in the past … ignores the most recent 12-month performance -- a common yardstick for economists -- that says Wisconsin’s performance improved and was better than two other Midwest states. We rate the claim False.

But if we want to be completely accurate about Walker’s “performance improvement,” is would be helpful to include the fact that Walker’s performance DIDN’T improve after all:

The state's job-creation pace was virtually unchanged from the previous quarter, when Wisconsin added jobs at a rate of 1.27%. Its rate during the latest period surpassed neighboring Illinois and Minnesota, however, because job creation in those two states slowed.

Which in turn helped raise its Midwest ranking. I rate Walker's improved performance .................

"DEATHS FROM MEDICAL ERRORS ARE EQUIVALENT TO 10 JUMBO JETS CRASHING EACH WEEK" Yet GOP wants Tort Reform.

The title is a line out of story analysis at Voxdotcom about our current state of health care. Obviously, it's not good.

It demonstrated to me how ridiculous the Republican "solution" is, tort reform, because it seeks to reign in malpractice lawsuit settlements instead of eliminating the problem at the front end. Fewer errors, fewer injuries and fewer deaths, a much healthier way to solve the problem than vilifying people killed or injured by a faulty system.

DEATHS FROM MEDICAL ERRORS ARE EQUIVALENT TO 10 JUMBO JETS CRASHING EACH WEEK: We don't know exactly how many Americans are killed in hospitals each year, but we do know that it is a lot.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published a seminal report titled To Err is Human, which estimated that at least 44,000 patients — and as many as 98,000 — die in hospitals each year as results of medical errors.

Even using the lower-bound figure, that would mean medical errors in hospitals kill more people annually than "such feared threats as motor-vehicle wrecks, breast cancer, and AIDS."

A follow-up study published in 2013 argued that the IOM numbers were a vast underestimate, and that medical errors contribute to the deaths of between 210,000 and 440,000 patients. At the lower bound, that's the equivalent of nearly 10 jumbo jets crashing every week — or the entire population of Birmingham, Alabama dying every year.

 And hospitals don't really care:

Commonwealth Fund's Blumenthal argues that the problem with hospital errors has much to do with medical culture, in which doctors rarely discuss their mistakes. Blumenthal remembers, shortly after the landmark IOM report came out, trying to start up a consulting business that would teach hospitals how to reduce errors. "I thought it was this great little consulting opportunity," he says. "But there was just no interest. It was sobering, and it made clear that abstract data was not going to change the behavior of complicated health care institutions."

Shifting health care from an accountable government to the individual is one way to hide each and every problem. What we don't know about, won't hurt us right?

And on their own, patient deaths are small events that often happen with little notice or fanfare, making them less noticeable than other events. "Even here in Houston, if a small plane crashes by the airport, that makes the evening news," says John T. James, founder of Patient Safety America, who authored the 2013 report. "But people dying in hospitals are happening one at a time and in insolation, and we pay less attention."

James has argued that the United States should have something akin to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates every plane crash in the United States, except for patient deaths from medical errors. Even if it couldn't get to each and every case (there are thousands more patient deaths than airplane accidents), it would create some federal oversight that, right now, does not exist.

The Bubble World morphing into something Real!!!

Conservative bubble inhabitants may have been criticized for their buy in to all the phantom issues and empty concepts wrapped around words like freedom and liberty, but I'm suddenly realizing that if you wish hard enough, your twisted dreams can become a reality.

Like this ridiculous media encouraged bullshit, playing off the nonstop doom and gloom rhetoric by Republicans that things are worse than ever. Sadly, polls show it working;

AP: President Barack Obama gave Republicans a gift of sorts by confirming their midterm election narrative that next month's balloting is a referendum on his policies. Within hours, GOP candidates across the election landscape capitalized on his words with ads tying their Democratic opponents to the unpopular president.

The horror of the recovery? Not bad after the GOP's free market disaster-the Great Recession. Plus, unemployment is at 5.9% and growth was . Obama even uncharacteristically bragged up the positive:

Today, our businesses are hiring 200,000 Americans a month. The unemployment rate has come down from a high of 10% in 2009, to 6.1% today. Over the past four and a half years, our businesses have created 10 million new jobs - the longest uninterrupted stretch of private sector job creation in our history. Right now, there are more job openings than at any time since 2001. All told, the United States has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and every other advanced economy combined.

Still Americans, pummeled by the one minded Republican meme that everything is worse under Obama, are buying into the fantasy and wishful right wing thinking. In reality, people are feeling hopeless because of the growing income gap, another Republican gift:

If Republicans take the senate, than through "reconciliation" they will push cuts that will only make things a whole lot worse, possibly forcing a government shutdown.

Scott Walker; friendly Dictator. Hey folks, give it a try. "If you don't like it, put another party in."

Here’s a definition that should send chills up the spines of most Americans, especially if they find out one particular would be presidential candidates is talking about it as his plan for the country:

“A dictatorship is a form of government where political authority is monopolized by a single person or political entity, and exercised through various oppressive mechanisms.”

That's our Scott Walker, and we've already seen him in action. As reported by NBC News yesterday, they're reminding us when Scott Walker nonchalantly presented this bold dictatorial vision last year as the solution to partisan gridlock in congress. Which by the way was created by his own divisive party.

He seems to embrace partisanship, unlike most politicians, who try to avoid describing themselves as tightly tied to their party. Walker has been able to enact such a conservative agenda in Wisconsin because his fellow Republicans control both houses of the legislature, and he thinks that’s a model for the country.

“Conventional wisdom in Washington for years has been that divided government is good because of a check and a balance. What I believe happens all too often, regardless of which party — because the same sorts of things happened to George Bush when — at the end of his term, when Democrats were in charge of the House and the Senate — is there’s gridlock. And I think the better argument is give one party a chance, give them a chance with a House and a Senate and a president. Give them a few years to see what they can do. And if you don’t like it, put another party in.”

That supposes our one party dictatorship doesn't make the system impossible to change back. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are already early indicators of where they're heading.

GOP Free Market health care model sacrifices people for profits, and ObamaCare repeal is a first big step in that direction.

The irrational Republican hatred toward the Affordable Care Act is a window into what really makes the conservative party click. Can they really be “fiscally conservative” and still oppose cost cutting efforts? Of course. 

For profit health care isn't patient centric, its money centric, and very costly. Free market advocates don't have a problem with that. And Republicans are bashing any efforts to rein in rising costs, all the while complaining about it. It's a ruthless calculation. 

For example:

NPR: Medicare this week began docking a record number of hospitals for having too many readmissions. Over the next year, 2,610 hospitals will lose some of their payments for each Medicare patient they admit. 

Readmission are bad right? Nope. GOP efforts to repeal ObamaCare would dump this and any other “regulatory” effort to save money. Their plan shifts the costs from the government to the individual, which accountability wise, makes the problem magically disappear.

A free market health care system that sacrifices American lives for money is the darkest side of capitalism:  

Some hospitals may not be trying too hard, because readmissions are good for the bottom line even if they're bad for patients. "It's a quagmire," an anonymous hospital official was quoted as saying in a study published this month in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. "If you affect the population correctly, you will reduce both readmissions and overall admissions, which is good for the patient but financially bad for the hospital."

That’s the free market model you’ll be hearing so much about if Republicans have their way in congress. And the clueless press won’t know enough about this topic to ask why.

Republicans hold up ad telling voters they'll need an ID at the polls. Yawn, Can't find the time...

No big hurry, we'll get to it. What's the rush?

You would think the protectors of voter integrity would be rushing out, trying to get as many people to vote with a valid photo ID because that would be the right thing to do? Ah, guess not... 

At a turtles pace, voter ID ad waits for GOP approval!

jsonline: State election officials are asking the Legislature's budget committee to provide more than $460,000 to run an ad campaign tell voters they will need a photo ID at the polls Nov. 4. The accountability board on Monday asked that the money be passed onto the agency so it could run the ads.

Unlike the legal rush to push the courts for an immediate decision, Republicans Sen. Alberta Darling and Rep. John Nygren are taking their ever lovin’ time informing the voters about how they can get their ID’s and navigate around the new rules. 

In fact, they're going to throw away two weeks and possibly thousands of potential votes playing their waiting game:

AP: The Legislature's budget committee plans to meet Tuesday to consider a request to spend about $461,000 to educate voters about the voter identification law before the Nov. 4 election.

Anyone else even just a little shocked?

The College Republicans target women with stylish "Tim Scott" dress, made from new ideas!!!

The following surreal College Republican ad campaign inadvertently plays off the current controversy over the supposed plagiarized elements of Democratic governor candidate Mary Burke. It touts all the "new ideas" pouring out of the GOP governors nationwide. The GOP would never think of using the same add everywhere. Oops...see pic to right.

You might say they're "dressing up" an aging agenda that isn't working. It's a humorous attempt to save endangered GOP governors who've failed miserably with their "new ideas," like Scott Walker.

It appears there was a "Yes to the Dress"-themed ad planned for Gov. Scott Walker, but the public may not get to see it.

Ironic too is the fact that no one has asked Scott Walker to point out the new ideas he's brought to the table that won't break the budget and will create jobs and new businesses. 

Gov. Sam Brownback was asked that very question. You'll be shocked at his honesty and fairly redundant answer:

This is jaw dropping fantasy that more than anything challenges the media to ask Republican candidates what unique new ideas are in their plans. Trolls, any help? We'll be fact checking:

jsonline: The College Republican National Committee cut ads for a number of GOP candidates for governor that plays off the TLC reality show. In the ads — which some critics have panned as bizarre and sexist — a young woman tries on a dress that has the same name as a GOP candidate, saying it is perfect because the candidate "has new ideas that don't break your budget."

Ryan's free market "patient centered" health care plan is anything but. Here's the breakdown...

Your everyday newspaper, TV and radio reporters don’t know squat about health care. That means a lying politician can spout pure drivel and never get called on it.

Take Paul Ryan for instance. In today's 1st District profile of the candidates, Ryan repeated his call to end ObamaCare and move to his “patient centered” reform plan...a free market experiment. It’s a plan dummy reporters have allowed to gain traction by never pointing out how ridiculous and

contradictory it was. Let's do a little pointing.

Big Example #1: Ryan makes free market privatization sound like single payer health care:

“Obamacare should be replaced with patient-centered reforms that empower individuals and their doctors, not bureaucrats and insurance companies.”

What, insurers can't get in the way...of their own plans? That’s pretty hard to do when you get your doctor through your insurer. Not to mention the small, legalese that keeps your doctor on a tight leash. So Ryan is lying about his plan. It can't do what he says it will do. But it sounds great.

Big Example #2: Losing your doctor is nothing new if you've been buying your insurance on the individual market. ObamaCare is marketplace reform. 

"Wisconsinites have experienced the painful consequences of Obamacare: losing their doctors"

Doctor retirements and insurer rate increases were forcing people like me to change insurers all the time before ObamaCare, something the press didn't know. And many times that meant a change in doctors too. 

Big Example #3: Part time jobs are not replacing full time jobs because of the individual marketplace.

"...full-time jobs cut to part time..."

The Small Group Marketplace is about to go online, but even in preparation for that, smaller companies are not contorting themselves around a part time work force. The graph to the right shows that. Again, Ryan is lying about the consequences of the Affordable Care Act. The Great Recession (free market failure) did more to reduce full time work, since big businesses reduced full time employment by bringing in part time workers during peak periods of demand.     

Big Example #4: Increases have slowed dramatically: The ACA has kept rate increases historically low, and Ryan's reference to "expanding access" simply means health care is there...if you can afford it. And "affordable" means his plan allows you to buy only what you can pay for, leaving you with a junk policy that doesn't cover what you don't buy: 

“…and paying more for coverage. We deserve better. That’s why I will continue to offer solutions that expand access to affordable, quality health care.

One caveat about future cost increases: Because we're dealing with the private sector, insurers are finding ways to game the system, charging more, separating out drugs, and weeding out high risk patients again. This has nothing to do with the ACA, and everything to do with the private sector, where Ryan wants us all to be. 

High copays and outrageously high deductibles were created for the individual market and encouraged by Republicans as a way to make sure patients had a little skin in the game (health savings accounts). The sick had to shell out more money so they didn't overuse their health care benefits. Now Republicans are pretending to whine about ObamaCare's copays and high deductibles. More phony baloney the media failed to recognize.

Replace Ryan with Democratic candidate Rob Zerban (zer-bon).

"The ACA was an important first step toward universal health care. But I think we should work toward a fairer, cheaper and more efficient system: Medicare for all. We need to ensure coverage for all Americans so that we can control costs, improve quality and give American companies a competitive advantage internationally by reducing their health care costs."

Did anyone think to ask Scott Walker what part of his jobs and business plan is his own "Unique Idea?"

We know there isn't anything he contributed that was his.

Reporters? Ask.

Walker blocks conservative rural voters from getting voter ID's.

I like it; a little Democratic reverse psychology working against Scott Walker. Yes!!! And Scott Walker is saying no, as usual, to keeping the rural DMV's open longer for voter ID's.

If I had my way, I would let the rural areas suffer and drift away under the voter suppression efforts put in place by Walker and his band of pirates. Walker has short changed rural families and farmers (except for a major tax cut) since he became governor.

Since Democrats would like longer DMV hours, Walker is blocking that, saying it’s a solution looking for a problem. Yea, like voter fraud? I digress.

But unlike the Democrats, I say leave these predominantly Republican voters alone. After all, they think only Democrats are the targets. Fine with me. From WKOW's Greg Neumann:

Are the Democrats using reverse psychology knowing Walker would instinctively say no way? I’m hoping.

35 Democratic lawmakers say people who live in the country won't have the same opportunity to get a photo ID by November 4th as people living in more populated areas, and they're asking the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to fix that.

In Jefferson County, there are two Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices.  The office in Watertown is open two days a week, while the one in Fort Atkinson is open just two days a month. "Right now, under these conditions, I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people who aren't gonna acquire that ID and aren't gonna be able to vote.  And that's just wrong," said Rep. Andy Jorgensen (D-Milton).

More than 40 counties have DMV centers that are open two days a week or less. 

Rep. Jorgensen said,  "Let's do some mobile DMV centers to places we know that we need to get to because there are people that need our help." 

Here’s the interesting thing; our incidental governor is keenly aware of how many people are turning out to get voter ID’s. How would he know that, and why? We know why, don’t we:

But Gov. Scott Walker says that's a solution in search of a problem. "I think you're gonna hear a lot of talk about it, but in the end, we've actually seen fewer people seeking free ID's recently than we've seen in the past couple years. There's no barrier.  That's a lot of hype and hysteria by some on the left."

Think the governor is counting on "fewer people seeking free ID's?" And who's “the left?” “The left,” as a pejorative, is how Walker views his enemies. 

Still, I'm with Walker. Don't keep those DMV's open any longer than a few days a week.

Marquette Poll results show Walker leading Burke. Happ also trails mind numbing Schimel.

It looks like Scott Walker is pulling ahead of Mary Burke in a number of areas, according to the Marquette University Poll. Walker leads:

-support from men (62%) to Burke's support from women (54%),  

-voter ID approval (63%)

-Walker leads among voters with incomes over $40,000.

-  Walker leads in the Milwaukee market outside the city by 62-32 and in the Green Bay market 52‑43. Burke leads in the city of Milwaukee 69-24 percent and in the Madison media market 66-31 percent. In the rest of the state, Walker leads 58-39 percent.

Why Democrats don't bring up the fact that Walker gave Medicaid the ability to go after family farms to recover money owed by deceased owners is anybody's guess. That wasn't part of any federal requirement, that was a gift to the expanding corporate farm industry.

And shame on the Democrats for the following results regarding drug testing for assistance...my god it's a rudderless party:

56% of registered voters support drug testing for recipients of unemployment benefits and food stamps, while 41% think such testing would “be a waste of money with little impact.” 

Support for testing is strongest among Republican voters by a 78-20 percent margin, while independents support testing by 50-46 percent and a majority of Democrats oppose testing (40 percent in support and 55 percent in opposition).

And on jobs:

-18% say that the Burke jobs plan story makes them less likely to vote for her, while 73% say that it makes no difference and 7% say that it makes them more likely to support her. 

-For the story on ranking in jobs growth, 26% say that this makes them less likely to vote for Walker, 65% say that it makes no difference and 8% say that it makes them more likely to vote for him.

The Susan Happ and Brad Schimel AG race:

Among likely voters, Republican Brad Schimel receives support from 41% and Democrat Susan Happ from 39 percent, with 19% saying that they are undecided or don’t know for whom they will vote. Among registered voters, Schimel receives 37% and Happ 37%, with 22% yet to choose a candidate.

Judges say you're not a serious American if you "haven't taken the necessary time" to get an ID and vote. Hey, who said life was easy?

The majority of state constitutions, including Wisconsin's, must say something like this about voting: "Voting is a complicated, difficult maze-like right we should all spend lots of time doing." Well, that's how our judicial branch is interpreting the law.

Conservative judges and justices majority opinions are telling us an awful lot about their warped politicized vision of this country, and the resentment they have toward thevoting public they serve. 

From the activists conservative Supreme Court to similar right wing judges nationwide, there's no real limit to the hoops Americans will have to jump through to exercise their constitutional right to vote. There's nothing to complicated or inconvenient, if you're serious about being a real patriot. 

All you have to do is get a photo ID, find a distant polling place before you get off of work, and stand in line for hours like the dog these judges believe you to be. If you "haven't taken the necessary time," they say, then you're not disenfranchised. 

An amazing leap of illogic? That's what makes the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals majority opinion so mindbogglingly bad. Judges are greasing the skids for their fellow Republicans lawmakers in the legislative branch, and they're not hiding their collusion one bit:  

WISC: The written decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Frank Easterbrook, Diane Sykes and John Tinder; "the public is interested in using laws enacted through the democratic process, until the laws' validity has been finally determined. If seven weeks is too short, then state officials need not make any change and nothing has been 'imposed' on them," the judges wrote. The three judges said they did not believe some 300,000 registered voters estimated not to have a qualifying photo ID would be disenfranchised
 "The number of registered voters without a qualifying photo ID thus appears to reflect how many persons have not taken the necessary time, rather than a number of persons who have been disenfranchised," the panel said. "We do not apply the label 'disenfranchised' to someone who has not elected to register." 

A breathtakingly arrogant backhand to us voters, who they accuse of not being willing to work a little harder to cast a constitutionally guaranteed ballot. Odd, the right to bare arms has a whole different set of standards. You'll notice the logic of the dissenting judges below no longer has a place in society these days:

In a strongly-worded dissent, Judge Ann Claire Williams writes that the panel "should not have altered the status quo in Wisconsin so soon before its elections. And that is true whatever one's view on the merits of the case." Williams said the court "brazenly" said that "more than 90 percent of Wisconsin's registered voters already have a qualifying ID" and it would have little impact on the majority of voters.

"But the right to vote is not the province of just the majority," Williams wrote. "It simply cannot be the answer to say that 90 percent of registered voters can still vote. To say that is to accept the disenfranchisement of 10 percent of a state's registered voters; for the state to take this position is shocking."