Are Voters really "reserving their copy of Scott Walker's #ObamaCare repeal and replace plan?"

I rarely agree with blogger Christian Schneider, but his targeted tweet at Scott Walker nailed it:

Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin is known for taking an endless amount of time writing very long books, which frustrates his fan base...similar to "Stand with Walker" believers I'm guessing.

Walker's plan will no doubt be a regurgitation of every free market, "patient centered" GOP idea we've rejected for years. The problem: the failed individual market (the ACA replaced it) was based on free market principles that resulted in dropped junk policies, weeded out those with preexisting conditions, and saw double digit premium increases that screamed collusion within the industry. Yea, lets try that again. 

Citizen Action of Wisconsin notified the public of this bit of "ObamaCare" irony: 

On Tuesday August 18th, Scott Walker's Presidential Campaign is going to release his plan to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act. It is not often you get advanced notice of a major gaffe, but this is one of those times.

The reason is that, of all the places the Walker Campaign could choose to release their healthcare plan, they pick the one state that shows how to properly rein in insurance companies - Wisconsin's western neighbor Minnesota. Minnesota has the most affordable health coverage in the country, while Wisconsin has the most expensive Silver plans in the Midwest.
 In fact, the cost disparity is so bad that the small business in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center where Walker is announcing his plan would likely be paying from $500 to over $1,000 more per employee if they were based in Milwaukee County, where Walker used to be County Executive. Minnesota uses rate review to police insurance company rate increases to root out excessive costs. 

Average Silver plans are 60% more in Wisconsin, averaging $1,692 more per person per year, and the average Silver plan in Wisconsin has a $600 higher annual deductible.

Scott Walker's idea of Local Control: Floats idea of overriding liberal voter rights states with strict Voter ID laws.

He wants it all folks. John Dean didn't pick Scott Walker as a the best example of a rightwing authoritarianism for nothing.

Here's Scott Walker's nationwide, one-size-fits-all voter suppression idea, that abandons individual state control for the sole purpose of smashing and eliminating blue state opposition. Walker doesn't just beat the opposition, he destroys them too. Consider yourself lucky on this one; Walker usually springs stuff like this on the public without warning:

Wind Energy, both power and jobs, is happening despite what backward Wisconsin Republicans and WMC tell us.

I made an amazing discovery the other day while paging through a really old alternative Milwaukee newspaper, the American Bugle. The 1975 weekly featured an article about wind energy, pictured below. Imagine where we'd be today if big energy didn't keep wind from becoming a serious player. Of course they're still at it, with doom and gloom warnings about killing business and rising customer utility bills, never mind their continual requests at the PSC for hikes using cheap coal. So what's that all about? 

That myth gets trashed in the current article at the bottom that proves wind energy isn't just affordable now, but a job creator to boot. So let's take a look at what the "21st Century" will like. Click on the picture here to enlarge:

Now here's the latest good news that will once and for all end premature deaths due to fossil fuel pollution:

WaPo: Two new reports published Monday by the Department of Energy find that one key renewable sector — wind — including the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report, published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — suggest that wind is being installed at a rapid rate, that its costs are plummeting, that its technologies are advancing, and that it is creating 73,000 jobs to boot.

Sad to say, Wisconsin is not one of those job creating states. Easing our energy dependence on coal isn't even a thought, and neither is being more self sufficient producing our own energy:

Wind energy in the U.S. is now providing roughly 5 percent of total U.S. electricity demand (66 gigawatts). And 13 more gigawatts are now “in the construction phase” and set to come online by 2016.

According to the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, “It really dispels some of the past myths that you cannot have significant amounts of wind energy in the system — a variable source in the system — without really affecting the overall efficiency.”  

And most striking, it found that the wholesale cost of wind energy — bought under a “power purchasing agreement,” or PPA, in which a utility or company buys power from a wind farm under a long term contract — is now … cheaper than the average price of wholesale electricity in many parts of the country,” says Ryan Wiser of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a lead author of the new report. Granted, it’s important to note that costs would not be so low without the wind production tax credit. Still, it’s impressive. With the wind production tax credit expired, beyond 2016 there may be less wind growth.

Distributed wind, like distributed solar, refers to wind energy — typically just one or two turbines — installed by private individuals or companies to allow them to generate a portion of the electricity they need onsite, rather than having to buy it from a utility company. Wind isn’t the only renewable sector booming — at least for rate of growth lately, solar greatly surpasses it, with the electricity generated from solar in the U.S. doubling between 2013 and 2014. However, thus far, wind contributes a larger percentage of our total electricity than does solar.

Walker/Republicans are their own worst enemy in Manufacturing Decline, and it'll only get worse.

The nation could learn a lot from the way Scott Walker is managing Wisconsin, and none of its good.

Wisconsin was once a manufacturing powerhouse. But since we heard that giant sucking sound, where jobs and manufacturing left the U.S. via our disastrous free trade agreements, those days aren't coming back anytime soon.

But you can't tell that to Scott Walker, and voters should find that unsettling. Walker is stuck in the past, working on a manufacturing renaissance in Wisconsin. In fact, Walker is attacking, vilifying and stopping emerging industries he feels aren't part of the Republican Party platform, like wind, solar and mass transit. And that doesn't bode well for a Walker led U.S..

Here are two charts Walker will never look at, to the detriment of everyone else looking for some leadership:

Add to that the GOP push for tax cuts and user fees, as an answer to the complaint, "I don't want to pay for someone else's trip to the state parks; someone else's public college education; someone else's health insurance; someone else's community entertainment facilities; and someone else's freeway improvements.

It's a national movement too. Republicans refuse to pay for a massive job creation no-brainer rebuilding the nations infrastructure. They are also big on new free trade agreements that gave us the horrific looking charts above, all the while resisting a higher minimum wage that will increase demand.

As the Economic Policy Institute's Robert Scott advises:

Taken together, steps to eliminate trade deficits (by ending currency manipulation and unfair trade) and rebuild U.S. infrastructure could easily generate sufficient demand for manufactured products to return most or all of the 5 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2014. Growing trade deficits and the shortfall in demand caused by the Great Recession, and not productivity growth, are the major causes of manufacturing job loss in this period.

Scott Walker thinks he was "pretty smart" dropping out of college in his senior year.

Just a little catching up on my part after a week long vacation; I will not let even one dumb Scott Walker comments disappear without first finding a place on my blog.
   

With jaw dropping short term thinking, Scott Walker got a big thumbs up from RedState’s Erick Erickson (“Excellent answer”) and the low information audience for dropping out of college:

When Walker was asked about (leaving college his senior year), his campaign responded by referring us to a brief comment he made Aug. 8, 2015 at the conservative RedState Gathering in Atlanta. Walker said:

"It's simple. My senior year of college, I got a job offer from the American Red Cross. A lot of my friends who were a year or two older had degrees and no job. I had a job offer, no degree. I'm pretty smart. I took the job."

Pretty smart giving up all the money he spent on three and a half years of college? A "excellent" classic example of short term Republican thinking.  

But did he really leave for a marketing job or a run for political office? I say political office:

In February 1990, shortly before dropping out, Walker took a job in marketing and fundraising with the local chapter of the American Red Cross. It's also possible he was lured from school by politics. In fall 1990, while still living in the campus area, Walker ran against then-state Rep. Gwen Moore, a Democrat now in Congress, and lost.

And Walker's almost legendary emotionally disconnected pat rehearsed answers? Nothing new; as noted by one Marquette professor:

Even in politics class, Walker could appear disengaged.

“He seemed utterly bored,” said Michael Fleet, who taught him in a class on the politics of the Third World. Fleet said he’d hoped to get Walker into debates with the liberals in the room. But it didn’t work. Walker would only give occasional short speeches that made conservative arguments.

“It wasn’t always on key. It wasn’t always in response to anything,” Fleet said. “He wasn’t engaged. It was like he came in with a script.”

Walker, like all GOP presidential candidates, not familiar with hard work! Why do you think they're career politicians?

The unconstitutional act of drug testing Americans for food stamps and unemployment benefits, without cause, proves how misinformed Republicans are about our founding document. It also proves how simple it would be to tinker with and reinterpretation the meaning of the Bill of Rights.

The Onion just posted this not so crazy story:

Combine the drug tests with a narrow elitist view of what constitutes hard work, and you've got a middle class death spiral like we've never seen. And that's what's at stake in 2016.

Scott Walker would much rather ignore the plight of minimum wage jobs entirely so he can focus all his attention on simply telling people to get higher paying jobs. That's so much easier too. Remember, he recently said that talking about, and dealing with, the racial divide would only make things worse. So the same goes for the minimum wage I guess:

"The left claims that they're for American workers and they've just got really lame ideas — things like the minimum wage. Instead of focusing on that, we need to talk about how we get people the skills and the education and the qualifications that they need to take on the careers that pay far more than the minimum wage."

Walker's Department of Workforce Development issued this similar twisted view:

"Governor Walker wants jobs in Wisconsin that pay two or three times the minimum wage. The department has determined that there is no reasonable cause to believe that the wages paid to the complainants (seeking a hike in the minimum wage) are not a living wage."

What's Work? Most of us can remember the sweat and spirit killing tedium we had to endure in our early minimum wage jobs. Sadly, today's economy has shifted to similar low wage service jobs with no benefits.

So Sen. Rand Paul's offensive and condescending view of these hard working Americans, whether minimum wage or not, gave us all an unfiltered look at what conservatives really think about income inequality:

“The thing is, income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things,” Paul told host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “If people voluntarily buy more of your stuff, you’ll have more money.”

Or Jeb Bush's bizarre advice, assuming Americans don't already working 2 to 3 jobs to get by:

Bush told the Manchester Union Leader “people need to work longer hours” so they can “gain more income for their families.”

Walker compares Iran agreement to unsupervised sons with girls in their room. He really said it...

Scott Walker's grandiose self image, where he pictures himself as a strong disciplinary father figure, would be comical if it wasn't so damn frightening. Seriously, does Walker really think his latest comment about the Iran deal sound anything like the thought process of a world leader, much less a really bad learning segment on Sesame Street:

Washington (CNN)Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Wednesday compared the nuclear inspection proposals in the Iran deal to bad parenting. Walker told conservative radio host Simon Conway:

"I've got two boys in college now, but when they were in high school, we used to have a rule that they could have friends over, including girls, as long as the door to their room was open. To me, the provisions in this deal are like telling teenage boys not only can you have the door closed, but we gotta shout up the stairs before we walk up the steps, 'Hey, we're coming up to check and see what you're doing, I just want to give you advance notice. It makes no sense.

You would't do it as a parent, we certainly shouldn't be doing it with the leading sponsor -- the leading country when it comes to state-sponsored terrorism." 

Sexist Hypocrites: After "RedState" exposed for sexist Clinton comments, they unashamedly welcome Media Matters readers.

Apparently RedState is so desperate for page hits that even when they're exposed as sexist hypocrites for bashing Hillary Clinton, they don't mind getting attention. Here's RedStates condescending comment:

"If Hillary Clinton possesses any unique selling proposition beyond proving even a homely woman can sleep her way into power, it is her tenure as Barack Obama's secretary of state. That seems to be a slender enough reed when polls show the electorate could give a flying rat's patootie about experience and favor a change agent above all."

Here's what Media Matters simply pointed out after RedState banned Trump for his sexist comments to Megyn Kelly:

Here's how shameless hypocrites and bullies respond to getting even more attention (bottom of pic):

Hillary takes aim at Scott Walker's scorched earth educational cuts to the UW and public schools.

Scott Walker's calm sleepy eyed demeanor has successfully concealed his more vindictive personality trait for years. Thankfully, that's about to end.

As predicted, Walker's massive cuts to the UW and public education are now coming back to haunt him. Think Progress: 

Hillary Clinton:“And you take somebody like Governor Walker of Wisconsin, who seems to be delighting in slashing the investment in higher education in his state; in making it more difficult for students to get scholarships or to pay off their debt; eliminating the opportunities for young people who are doctors or dentists to actually work in under-served areas in return for having their debt relieved; ending scholarships for poor kids; and most surprisingly to me, rejecting legislation that would have made it tax-deductible for you on your income tax to deduct the amount of your loan payment.”

Okay, here’s the criticism that always drives me crazy; our free market Republican privateers, for some odd reason, hate the free market when Democrats like Hillary Clinton negotiate speaking fees. 

Here's Walker's embarrassing anti-free market response to Clinton's criticisms:

Clinton has come under fire for collecting lavish speaking fees from universities. 

Republican policy is rife with easy answers to amazingly complex problems, like Walker’s tuition freeze. Is that a solution to crippling student debt and the rising cost of education? Didn’t think so:

But even Walker’s attack on Clinton doesn’t escape scrutiny. University officials have pointed out that freezing tuition eliminates one option to make up for Walker’s large budget cuts. Walker also proposed a $127 million cut in primary school funding in January and Wisconsin’s decrease in per-pupil spending from the 2010-11 year was the highest of all 50 states, according to a 2014 U.S. Census Bureau report.

Again, the easy Scott Walker answer is freezing tuition at public universities. But cost conscious conservative voters should ask themselves why they should trust expensive for-profit private colleges more, when they lack accountability for promises made to students. Their record isn’t good, and victimized students are swimming in debt. 

Walker is pushing that business model. He's asking for easy accreditation for private colleges, not for the benefit of students, but for increased profits and fatter bottom lines:

Scott Walker, in a post on Red State, called her a “deceiver-in-chief” when it comes to her higher education policies:

“America needs real reforms in higher education, including putting in place incentives to keep costs low, confronting the accreditation cartels that limit options, and improving federal government data so students and families have the information they need to make the best decisions possible.”

As Think Progress rightly pointed out in a case that should give pause to tightwad conservative voters:

Their mention of accreditation is likely a reference to making accreditation easier for for-profit colleges. Corinthian Colleges have been guilty of misrepresenting job placement data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education and have closed campuses afterward. 

Yes, Scott Walker is a Big Government Republican, say Wisconsin School Principals.

Calling Scott Walker a big government Republican wasn't just my way to slam our sociopathic governor, I honestly meant it after seeing how quickly he signed away local control.

The party that celebrates "opposite day everyday," said they were giving school boards more local control, freeing them from Washington special interests, namely union bosses.

But that's not what happened say Wisconsin principals:  

Some 35 school principals from Wisconsin have sent a letter to Gov. Scott Walker — who is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination — saying that state education policies and budgets are hurting their schools. And they told Walker that his war on “big government” isn’t really returning power back to the people but actually making it harder for communities to have a say in local education decisions.

The principals said they're concerned about how changes passed under Walker forcing schools to compete will result in more segregation. The model will result in an exclusionary system between the "haves and have nots," they wrote. And they point to how Walker has pledged to reduce big government, yet they feel power "of the people, by the people and for the people" is less in the people's hands than it once was. 

"The people in local communities have far less voice today than they did only a few decades ago," the letter states, saying that school boards have less power now to make policy, funding and testing decisions. "Since the onset of revenue limits in 1992, our school districts have been reducing and eliminating programs and resources. We are burdened by the cumulative effects of budget cuts resulting in increased class sizes, cut programs and deferred maintenance plans."

Something I didn't see coming was this: Republicans are now quietly separating out school funding, slipping more money to rural districts, their voting base.  Don't get me wrong, they need the help, but so does every schools across the state. But this is ripe for abuse and voter bribery. From WISC:



Here's the principals letter (click to enlarge):

Liberal Progressive hell-hole Madison, filled with smarty pants educated citizen elite, ranks 3rd as most educated large city.

We're number 3 and it's not because of the Republican trash hanging out at the Capitol. Despite the freeloading GOP presence, Madison is hanging tough, trying not to dumb down too much. 

Of course it's not like Republicans haven't tried to fill our local schools with unqualified teachers, or defund the UW system as payback for being so smart:  

jsonline: Madison ranks No. 3 on list of most educated large cities in America … on NerdWallet's latest list of the most educated large cities in America. In Madison, 94.9% of residents have at least a high school diploma or associate degree, while 53.7% have a bachelor's degree, 15.5% gave a master's degree, 5% have a doctorate and 3.9% have a professional degree, according to NerdWallet's analysis of U.S. Censu Burea data on educational levels.

Milwaukee came in at 91.

Minneapolis ranked No.13 on the list. All the other most educated big cities on the NerdWallet list were outside the Midwest. Nationwide, about 86% of Americans 25 or older have at least graduated from high school, and 29% hold at least a bachelor's degree.

Republicans sow anger, frustration and desperation just to get elected.

The Republican frame on issues continues to dominate media coverage in the presidential race and of politics in general. Forget about the barrage of fabricated outrages, lies and myths that for the most part have been exposed as absolute nonsense.

The Fiscal Times article below is the prevailing thought process on the right. Voters assume all the confident declarations made by their candidates and politicians must be true, even just a little bit. 

Let’s briefly dissect the articles list below, starting with the right wing authoritarian Republican agenda; ramming their austere fiscal policies down our throats, borrowing, the “not-so-small government” takeover of local governments, overall privatization, vilification of the poor/teachers, and wild west gun laws. Republicans will say the Democrats “rammed” through “ObamaCare,” but is getting a super majority of 60 votes really considered ramming? 

Most of the whining below was intentionally created by Republicans to impose their one party dream on everyone else by frustrating and angering people:

6 years of Obama forcing unpopular policies down Americans’ throats.

Six years of lies and misdeeds by unaccountable bureaucrats (projection including total fabrications).

Six years of lame growth and resulting wage suppression (Republican oppose minimum wages).

Six years of appeasing our enemies and facing down our friends (endless wars/lost American lives).

Mainstream Americans feel marginalized, pushed to the back of the pack, while the plight of transgenders in the military or imprisoned blacks takes center stage (blatant bigotry and racism from the right wing, continuing into the next point…)

Under President Obama, Americans have become more polarized on race relations and immigration, and nearly every other issue as well. Obama has hinted that white Christian Americans are racist, indifferent to the travails of blacks and Hispanics and unreasonably hostile to Muslims (Republicans have rationalized away racism by blaming Obama for this polarization).  

Republicans have been so successful with their narrative of lies, that polls now reflect their agenda:

This is uncontestable. A poll this past spring showed that 61 percent of Americans think race relations are “bad,” the highest reading since 1992 … In the summer of 2008, before Obama’s election, 53 percent of the country considered race relations good and only 37 percent considered them bad. That’s quite a turnabout. 

Nearly two-thirds of the country thinks we are on the wrong track, while only 29 percent think things are going well. 

The article sums up this right wing lunacy with the following list that exposes the failure of the GOP’s austere free market shift:

The frustration at the sorry plght of our public schools (massive GOP cuts), the deterioration of our infrastructure (no money due to tax cuts), the weakening of our military (still believe in the military industrial complex), our bloated and unsustainable entitlements programs (thanks to trade policies), massive cybersecurity breaches (in the private sector) and so on. 

Republicans exploit Planned Parenthood videos to kill off Biotech Industry in Wisconsin. What a jobs plan.

It's been a common theme under Scott Walker to oppose all things that hint of liberalism, science, and logic. Walker destroyed a regional concept tying Milwaukee with Chicago by opposing high speed rail and the development that went along with that (also between Milwaukee and Madison), trashed attempts to expand and develop an alternative energy industry, and made major cuts to the UW system because those radical liberal eggheads continue to indoctrinate our kids.

Here we go again. The world acclaimed biotech stem cell research at the UW is the next victim of Walker's ideological one party nationalist agenda, pushed by Republican Neanderthal State Rep. Andre Jacque. Jacque found freeloading off the taxpayers much easier than getting into life saving medical research.

Exploiting the Planned Parenthood video tapes showing nothing illegal or unethical, Jacque compared the use of fetal tissue to Nazi research. For some reason, and despite actual similarities to past nationalist socialist societies that have threatened world peace, Republicans continue to compare Democrats and scientists to Nazi Germany with impunity. Audio from the Devil's Advocates show:

Jacque: "Respect for human dignity is essential to the authorization of scientific research, a fight underscored by numerous and horrific past failures to establish or follow such protocols, such as Josef Mengele's  atrocities at the Auschwitz concentration camp..."

Jacque wasn't done making outrageous, base agitating, bizarre comparisons:

"I suppose a similar philosophy would justify the likely continuing mass occurrence of forced organ harvesting and transplantation from executed political prisoners to the well-connected in China."

Here's the coverage from WISC and WKOW: 

The Assembly's Criminal Justice Committee held a hearing on a measure Tuesday that would outlaw selling, donating and experimenting with fetal body parts in Wisconsin.

The dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Wisconsin Medical Society, the Medical College of Wisconsin and a trade association representing biotech companies are all lobbying against the measure. Dr. Robert Golden, dean of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said, "This lifesaving research would come to a complete abrupt stop in Wisconsin with a devastating effect on our state's capacity to attract and retain biotechnology."

Little Houses Melissa Gilbert getting ripped by press, because she's a Democrat and celebrity, running for Congress.

Funny thing about liberal actors becoming politicians; they can't be taken seriously and they're ridiculously liberal.

But Republican actors going into politics, they're legendary and encouraged:

Scott Walker rolls out grand One Party Vision, ignoring solutions for Racial and Economic Disparity.

I thought it was odd that those “big Washington special interests” Scott Walker is always talking about were only made up of unions, and not the multitude of GOP special interests, like big energy, big banks and big corporate special interests. And that's by design. Since business is the magical cure for what ails the country, Walker thinks focusing on real solutions will only make our problems worse.

For Walker and every other Republican, self worth is derived from serving an employer and being employed. But if you're at home taking care of a family, between jobs or even just working a minimum wage job, you're not included in Walker's grand plan. 

Walker's recent comment about racial tensions highlights his attitude about every problem tearing this nation apart:

"One, I think in general if anyone focuses on racial discord we’re going to get more."

So ignore the problem, don't bring it up, and it will disappear automatically under Walker's more positive message, which is to demand unity. Oddly, as I've point out in the video clip below, he must first unite us by carry out his master plan to divide and conquer us:

Huffington Post-Don't Focus On 'Racial Discord' Or You'll Only Create More: "If we focus on unity we’re going to get more of that. The families of the massacre in Charleston showed us the way. I think it’s a prime example if we focus on things that unite us, ways to share the American dream." 

Walker's determination to roll out his purely ideological vision, with no real world solutions, goes even further than his wacky GOP opponents and corporate billionaires:

Other presidential candidates -- Republican and Democrat -- have called for a broader conversation about systemic racism in the nation's justice system in the wake of high-profile shootings of unarmed black men across the country. Bipartisan calls for criminal justice reform have also grown in and out of Washington, with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the conservative billionaires David and Charles Koch joining in. 

Walker's vision of accountability and a government in the hands of hard working Americans, can only be attained through the benevolence of big business. But business now has the ability to force us live a "healthy lifestyle," make religious decisions in our personal lives, and uses their corporate size against us to push their agenda in Washington.

Knowing all this, here are a few Walker quotes (lies) meant to distract voters from his real and frightening agenda:

Gov. Scott Walker has said the GAB should be dismantled, replaced with “something completely new that is truly accountable to the people of the state of Wisconsin.”

"We’re bringing new and bold leadership from outside of Washington that takes power away from big government bureaucrats and union bosses and puts it back where it belongs: in the hands of hard-working Americans."

"Common sense reforms to create a government that is limited in scope and—ultimately—more effective, more efficient, and more accountable to the public."   

Walker's inane nonsensical Tweets are crazy, if not just flat out dishonest!!!

Scott Walker continues to use Obama's national economic policies to boost his own failed performance and image in the state. We'll see more of this if what I read someplace is true; that only 39% would reelect Walker as governor.

The only thing Walker can state for real are the unemployment numbers, which by the way are rising, getting worse...oops; from 4.5 to 4.6%. Obama's unemployment stat depends a great deal on GOP states functioning correctly, employing people, which they're not. Obama's numbers look good, but could be better if not weighted down by austere Republican state policies.

And Walker thinks we're dumb enough to believe he can make such a comparison, especially after making unemployment harder to get and kicking everyone else off.

His tired old meaningless graphic drives me crazy. Is he that dishonest or what? I'm posting it here because it should embarrass him and his campaign on a more national level:
:

Republicans pushing idea that raising the minimum wage makes workers unhappy! Does that work for CEO's too?

My conservative friend in Milwaukee emailed me a "I told you so" story about the horrors of raising the minimum wage, in this case at WalMart. I'm guessing he doesn't read these stories or he just doesn't understand them. Here's the scary headline:

"An Unintended Consequence of Wal-Mart Pay Raise: Unhappy Workers"

The higher minimum wage doesn't make workers "unhappy," it makes senior employees unhappy knowing their wages are now closer to less experienced worker wages. Another words...ENVY.

Nothing has changed for more experienced workers; they didn't lose any money or take a lifestyle hit. But envy, pushed by Republicans at every turn in the last decade, is now the norm: 

In interviews and in hundreds of comments on Facebook, Wal-Mart employees are calling the move unfair to senior workers who got no increase and now make the same or close to what newer, less experienced colleagues earn. New workers started making a minimum of $9 an hour in April and will get at least $10 an hour in February.

The whole story tells us something different, which my conservative friend must have skipped over:

Along with bumping up the minimum wage, it increased the amount workers receive when promoted, boosted pay for some managers and raised the maximum pay for all hourly positions.

The point is this: Raises, like the hike in the minimum wage, have been around since the dawn of man. If hiking the minimum wage is so bad, isn't any raise at any income level just as bad? Of course, but the wealthy just get richer because they deserve it, unlike the poor who don't. And it is pitting people against people, just like it has for centuries.

It's only an issue when the poor make more money. Funny how that works.

Dumb Ron Johnson Trashes Senate Ethics Code by Trashing Opponents on his Official Government Website.

It looks like Dumb Ron Johnson is not an ethical guy. Of course we always knew that, and that he wasn't very smart either, so showcasing his conspiratorial rants on his official Senate website only confirms all that. 

Now Johnson might be...nope, scratch that, should be in trouble:

Blog posts on Sen. Ron Johnson's official Senate website, including one that a watchdog group complains violated ethics rules, have mysteriously been taken down. Johnson violated the Senate Ethics Manual’s Internet policy, which says senators and staff members cannot use Senate Internet “for personal, promotional, commercial, or partisan political purposes.”

And that's what he did, as the Huffington Post article pointed out below:

One of three blog posts that have disappeared recently was Johnson’s response to a Huffington Post story about him arguing that “The Lego Movie” is part of an “insidious” anti-capitalism propaganda campaign. Johnson's post calls out HuffPost’s Ryan Grim, or “some liberal writer at The Huffington Post,” saying he “can’t seem to figure out why I or anyone else would say this about ‘The Lego Movie,’ and he insinuates some kind of conspiracy. The strange thing isn’t that a kids’ movie was anti-business, it is that someone claiming to be a journalist never encountered the idea before.”

Funny thing, my 16 year old son quickly pointed out how Lego is the ultimate capitalist; stores everywhere, movies, TV shows, overpriced products, and early indoctrination in their robot building Lego League competitions. You get the idea.

But Dummy wasn't done breaking the Senates ethics code yet:

A different blog post ... arguing that “Senator Johnson blatantly used his Senate website to attack a political opponent” when his staff responded to a fact-check article by PolitiFact Wisconsin. Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D) (said) that Johnson is “opposed to all government-assisted student loans.” The organization rated Feingold’s statement as “mostly true,” citing numerous interviews and news reports in which Johnson takes a firm stance....

The complaint alleges that much of Johnson's blog post responding to the article was directly aimed at Feingold ... Johnson’s Democratic opponent in 2016 ... “Had Senator Feingold said that Senator Johnson has consistently pointed out that Washington policy on college assistance has serious negative unintended consequences, then he would have been right,” reads the deleted post.

I wish PolitiFact had been more precise, because as we all know, Republican defunding at the state level raised tuition, not access to student loans. 

But the vilification and marginalization of Democratic liberal thinking by our right wing authoritarian dictators knows no bounds:

PolitiFact ... “seems to have a hard time being honest about what words mean.” It tries to tie PolitiFact to Feingold, concluding that it "apparently sees the world in exactly the way a left-wing Democrat who spent 18 years in Washington would.”

Remember, you don't want to question authority in our one party system of government.

The third post that has been removed also took aim at a PolitiFact report, this one on Johnson claiming that Feingold was “the deciding vote” when the Senate approved the Affordable Care Act in 2010. PolitiFact deemed Johnson's assertion “mostly false.” Johnson’s post mocked PolitiFact’s fact-checking and rating system by giving his own “ruling” on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which runs PolitiFact Wisconsin.

An archived version of Johnson’s blog shows that the posts were removed sometime within the last month.

Startup Renewable Energy Crushing Big Oil's Billionaire Big Bosses?

Funny thing happens as time marches on, we progress. Things change.  Sometimes we find better ways to do everything, from modes of travel to curing diseases.

The same thing goes for energy. And yet Republicans don’t want to move into the new millennium. I’d like to shake the hand of the guy who convinced conservatives that rubbing two sticks together wasn’t the best way to light a fire. Thanks to Matchboxes Inc., they scientifically proved that was not the case.

So our conspiratorial Republican big oil lackeys rolled out a group of sad sack CEO victims who, like unlike Match Boxes Inc., merely claimed our actual environmental, wildlife and health officials were trying to destroy their industry and charge families unheard of energy price like we’re already paying for fossil fuel. Oh, and forget about the cost of coal going up because fewer companies are mining due to a lack of demand:

Fox News: A Senate subcommittee on Tuesday heard witnesses argue that “sue-and-settle” legal arrangements involving the EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and hyper-aggressive environmental organizations have cut energy suppliers and state regulators out of the discussion, speeded up the agenda to force unrealistic environmentalist priorities on the energy market, and are likely to cost consumers and producers billions of dollars in the years ahead.

Why wouldn’t you believe big oil special interests and their “scientifically” researched fear mongering, their eyes looked so sad:

“The sue-and-settle model takes policy making away from the public and puts it into the hands of one special interest driving an agenda to ultimately prevent the use of fossil fuels,” declared Katherine Sgamma, vice-president of the Western Energy Alliance, a Colorado-based lobbying organization for small oil and gas producers.

See, Western Energy Alliance is obviously unbiased and only trying to protect the 5 mega oil monopolies from a few startup “special interests” moguls in the wind and solar industries, whoever they are.

Adding insult to injury, the heartless Fish and Wildlife Service schemed with environmentalists to protect 404 threatened and endangered species. What the heck?

In lawsuits involving the Endangered Species, Sgamma noted that after the Fish and Wildlife Service made a deal with one environmental organization that involved 404 threatened or endangered species, the same organization came back the next year with demands involving 53 more.

And the lunacy of cutting down on preventable deaths and saving hundreds of billions of dollars in lost work and health care costs, is one reason big oil special interests are so frustrated:

In the case of the Clean Power Plan, the “artificial urgency” of the legal effort has been “key to push the regulations out the door, rush an incredibly complex and expensive rule through standard regulatory review processes, steamroll any potential political opposition, and put pressure on the states to begin compliance activities immediately,” argued Andrew Grossman, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Calling the Clean Power Plan announced Monday a “naked power grab” that imposes national standards on state regulators, Grossman charged that “at every step of the way, EPA has relied on sue-and-settle tactics to facilitate its outrageous conduct.”

Of course you have to believe the courts are willy nilly ruling against big energy for the fun of it, and because of liberal judicial activism. Thank god Republicans still believe in federalism:

“This is not how the regulatory process is supposed to work in a country founded on the principles of the rule of law and federalism.”

Republicans, who've been depleting state environmental agencies for years, are now concerned the remaining staff will be overwhelmed by court ordered environmental compliance before it’s all too late for all of us:

Sue-and-settle “overwhelms regulatory agencies, resulting in settlement agreements and consent decrees requiring agencies to promulgate major regulations within an arbitrarily imposed timeline,” said Senator Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who chaired the subcommittee hearing.

Of course states wouldn’t find themselves in this mess if they just did their job enforcing the law.

In the blog post, General Counsel, Avi Garbow,  declared that “the ‘sue-and-settle’ rhetoric, strategically mislabeled by its proponents, is an often-repeated but a wholly invented accusation that gets no more true with frequent retelling.” EPA, he said, had no control over who decided to sue the agency, and “is not complicit in such lawsuits.”  

Just...a little time off.

Out of town but hope to post something soon, caught in a slow internet area right now.

Oh yea, Walker's SS idea is original? And that Boy Scout campfire story is so old and so not on topic about the EPA regulations from Obama.