Category: media

Conn Carroll takes apart an utterly stupid Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial:

It is not easy being on the editorial staff at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, especially now that they have been forced to admit that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, which they strongly editorialized against, has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $3 billion.  …

The liberals who run the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel knew that the Wisconsin Democratic Party would be crippled by giving government workers the choice not to join government unions, and government union membership has fallen sharply since Act 10 became law.

But the state budget is now in the black and Wisconsin’s best teachers are being rewarded with lucrative job offers. So since the law has been a complete success, how do the liberals at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel attack Walker? By inventing a fictional parallel universe of course. The editorial board writes:

If Walker could travel to that other universe — the one where he negotiates with unions instead of breaking them — here’s what he would find: The budget deficit is closed through negotiated employee concessions, cuts to programs and a little fiscal magic. There are no new taxes. There are no angry protests around the state Capitol, no nasty threats aimed at Republican legislators. Democratic senators remain in Madison; they do not not run off to Illinois. They don’t have to; they are working with the governor. There are not 15 recall elections, either, and Walker, though disliked by Democrats, is no target. The Democrats know better. … Imagine: labor peace, a balanced budget, a successful governor, a new kind of Republican who works with his political foes instead of crushing them. It’s easy if you try.

Yes, if you ignore reality and pretend that government unions are perfectly willing to just give their members’ benefits away, then sure, Walker’s Act 10 wasn’t necessary.

But back here in the real world, government unions exist only to perpetuate themselves, and for no other reason. They are nothing but a drain on taxpayers, teachers, principals, local governments, and students. Weakening government unions was the wisest and most critical part of Walker’s Act 10.

One quote sums up the editorial perfectly:

The liberal journalists said it themselves in their own editorial: They believe in “fiscal magic.” Walker, who has to live in the real world with the rest of us, can’t rely upon magic,

A lot can happen in four weeks, but as of today this doesn’t look to be a good election for Wisconsin Democrats.

The top of the ticket, gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke, has had a floundering campaign since the revelations that her campaign is based on a grab bag of other people’s ideas. Their attorney general candidate, Susan Happ, has a major ethics problem. The Sixth Congressional District appears to be the only place where they might have a chance of flipping the seat, but even if that happens Mark Harris will be in the wrong party in the dictatorship of the majority that is the U.S. House of Representatives.

Democrats have high hopes of flipping the state Senate to Democratic control. But state Democratic leadership has managed to alienate a lot of Democrats in one of those most flippable districts, the 17th, by recruiting a candidate to run instead of the original Democrat who ran.

Perhaps Senate Democratic leadership wasn’t counting on the frowned-upon candidate’s wife, Rita Wittwer, to start writing letters to newspapers in the Senate district:

This guy certainly had all the experience that a Senate candidate for a very rural district should possess. He had a P.O. box and rented a room in the district for a little over three years. He was mentored by and worked a bit over a year for a U.S. senator who barely remembers him. He was a law clerk of questionable merit for a Republican judge. He has a law degree but has never practiced law. Aside from his university years, he lived his life in urban Waukesha, graduating from a private high school. …

This was the beginning of the disenfranchisement of the voters in the 17th Senate District. In and of itself, a primary is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the Senate Democratic leader didn’t like leaving anything to chance — or, should I say, to the voters. He decided that he should endorse his chosen one and at the Democratic convention purposely failed to mention Ernie as the other candidate. That didn’t exactly go over well with our supporters and they made their feelings known to “his leadership.” Not that their views mattered. They were completely ignored. …

Losing an election is unbelievably painful. Losing an election because of political manipulation is even worse. To add insult to injury, we found out a few days ago that the list of supporters that we fought so hard to get was given to the chosen one without our permission. How special is that? Because our website was created under the Senate Demmocratic umbrella and because we loaded the names of anyone with an email address into our website for ease in communicating, the Senate Democratic hierarchy believes that they own our names and have the right to use them as they see fit.

Meanwhile, Burke probably needs to replace her campaign’s press people after this embarrassment, reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Telling reporters they can’t interview people at a political rally is like trying to take away Ted Nugent’s guns. You might get your wango tangoed.

At least three journalists ran into this restriction while covering Michelle Obama’s appearance in Milwaukee on [Sept. 29] on behalf of Mary Burke, Democratic candidate for governor.

But the White House, if I may refer to the first lady’s communications director that way, says it was a mistake that won’t be repeated.

“It is not our policy. This was an open press event. If anyone either from the Burke campaign or from our team obstructed a reporter from speaking with folks who were there, that was an error,” I was told Thursday by Maria Cristina “MC” Gonzalez Noguera.

There was no security reason for it, and really no reason at all.

“This is a case of an overzealous staff person,” she said.

That excessive zeal infected other Burke and White House staffers at the rally, held at the Wisconsin Center. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Kissinger, who was in the corral of media workers at the back of the hall, was stopped twice as she talked to people over the dividing ropes while waiting for the speeches to begin.

“I thought it was a joke. I started laughing,” she said. Then she spread the word on Twitter and said this on Facebook: “To say that I was creeped out is an understatement. This is what reporters do in America: we speak to people. At least that’s how I’ve been doing things — at all kinds of political events — since 1979.”

I immediately clicked the like button. Her post went crazy on the Internet and was trending all over the place. The Madison chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists jumped in to condemn the curbed press access and cited other times at both Democratic and Republican events when the media were limited on where and whom they could interview.

Fans of press freedom, and, yes, there are some left, praised Kissinger for exposing such a ridiculous rule and then interviewing anyone she darn well pleased. Opponents of Burke seized the opportunity to say, see, she would make a lousy governor who will keep all the people’s quotes for herself.

The partisan attacks worry Burke campaign spokesman Joe Zepecki. He called the Journal Sentinel newsroom and tried to have the mention of press restrictions deleted from the online news article. Editors refused. Zepecki then complained bitterly in emails to Kissinger and said it wasn’t news, nor was her inclusion in the article that people at the rally who needed to sit down were having trouble finding chairs.

Zepecki later told me no other reporters mentioned any of this in their news accounts. That just proves Kissinger is the only one who got it right. We can’t have politicians or their staffs dictating how news is covered, because you know they’d love to.

Afternoon First Amendment violation update: Speaking of “We can’t have politicians or their staffs dictating how news is covered,” Wisconsin Reporter reports on itself:

Wisconsin Reporter was barred from covering a campaign rally Tuesday in Madison for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke and featuring first lady Michelle Obama.

Melissa Baldauff, communications director for the state Democratic Party, informed Wisconsin Reporter on Monday it wasn’t allowed to attend the event at the Overture Center because the online publication isn’t a legitimate news source.

This marks the second time in about a week the Burke camp has dictated press coverage of a campaign fundraiser in Wisconsin headlined by the first lady. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Meg Kissinger reported White House and Burke staff tried to block reporters from talking to crowd members Sept. 29 in Milwaukee.

Free press advocates denounced the decision.

Carol O’Leary, president of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association board of directors, called the handling of Wisconsin Reporter’s request an assault on free press and criticized Obama and the Burke campaign for trying to control information released to the public.

“They are picking who they want to cover their stories … It’s not transparency,” O’Leary said.

The Madison chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which expressed disappointment with Burke and Obama for trying to prevent reporters from speaking to the audience in Milwaukee, supports wide media access to campaign functions.

“It seems to me that Wisconsin Reporter ought to be able to attend the event and report on it,” said Mark Pitsch, president of the local Society of Professional Journalists, a national journalism group.

Baldauff, who agreed to speak to Wisconsin Reporter on Monday outside the offices of the Democratic Party and Burke for Wisconsin, initially attributed the denial to a lack of space — even though a request for media credentials was submitted Saturday, shortly after the Burke campaign sent a news release outlining the logistics.

But that answer changed when Baldauff, who repeatedly declined to explain the process for selecting which media outlets can participate, was told Wisconsin Reporter would be doing a story on press being turned away from the political fundraiser.

“Well, you’re not the press though, so, thanks,” Baldauff said as she left the hallway and closed an office door.

Someone should tell Burke that should she get elected, she’s not going to be able to pick and choose which media talks to her.

Eliana Johnson provides an outside-Wisconsin view of the governor’s race:

The daughter of Trek Bicycle founder Richard Burke, the woman gunning for Scott Walker’s job, is the scion of a prominent Wisconsin family who’s had the wealth to flit from one career to another.

In an election being litigated primarily on economic issues, Mary Burke has touted her business experience. But it’s the sort of business experience only an heiress could afford: a couple of years spent toiling at a failed start-up company and two stints working for her father. Between her two tours at Trek, Burke spent a couple of years “as a snowboard bum in Colorado.” (That’d be from the Harvard Business School alumni bulletin, not her campaign website.) At Trek, she ran the company’s European division, and has said she increased international sales by a whopping $47 million, but the company denied PolitiFact’s request to verify the number.

The private sector, it turns out, wasn’t really for her. “While I have the business background, I really — how should I say this? — I prefer the work in the public sector,” Burke told Politico in an interview.

By her mid 40s, she’d left to become a philanthropist and told Democratic governor Jim Doyle’s political team when it expressed interest in bringing her aboard — she was eventually appointed to run the state’s Department of Commerce — that she wasn’t sure she wanted to “reenter the full-time work force.” The only elected position Burke has ever held is a seat on the Madison school board. Now, she wants to become governor.

Burke has cited her Harvard MBA and her business savvy as evidence that she has the know-how to revitalize Wisconsin’s economy. So it says something about her candidacy that large portions of her jobs plan — and of several other plans she has released, on subjects such as entrepreneurship, small-business development, and public-private partnerships, where one might expect her to bring her experience to bear — were lifted word for word from those of several other (mostly failed) gubernatorial candidates.

Burke blamed a Harvard-educated consultant for the incident, and he was promptly fired, but she stood by her borrowed plans, telling reporters that Wisconsin need not “reinvent the wheel.” Burke is offering Wisconsin voters public policy recycled by a political consultant — policy rejected by voters in Virginia and Indiana, to boot.

But the race is tight, and Burke’s latest flirtation with a serious career has given her a real shot to unseat one of the GOP’s top presidential contenders. The most recent Marquette University poll has her tied with Walker, 46 all. How did that happen?

That the race is so close is a testament both to Wisconsin’s political polarization and to the fact that, though it has at times looked purple, it remains a blue state. Walker, like his colleagues Sam Brownback, John Kasich, Rick Snyder, and Susana Martínez, among others, was elected in the GOP wave of 2010. Democratic majorities in the Wisconsin state assembly and the state senate were wiped out that year, too, but 2010 proved to be a political outlier. …

Walker rose to national prominence when he succeeded in getting legislation passed to curb the collective-bargaining rights of the state’s public-sector unions, and he caught the attention of top-dollar Republican donors when he beat back a union-led effort to recall his election. As throngs of left-wing protesters rushed the state capitol, he looked like the adult in the room, and he won the recall election by a greater margin than he was elected with in 2010. …

In an election that has centered on the performance of the state’s economy, Walker’s record has been scrutinized. There are things to boast about: Since Walker took office in January of 2011, unemployment has fallen to 5.6 percent from 7.6 percent. It’s half a percentage point below the national average.

But one of the central promises Walker made on the campaign trail in 2010, to usher in the creation of 250,000 private-sector jobs, has come back to haunt him. Even though the state has seen the creation of more than 100,000 jobs on his watch, the unmet campaign promise looms over him, and Burke is leveraging it in her ads. One Wisconsin Republican likened it to the “read my lips” moment that sealed George H. W. Bush’s fate in the 1992 presidential election.

It’s not just victory that matters for Walker, but the margin of victory. In modern times, all of the governors who have gone on to win the nomination of a major party have not been reelected narrowly but have galloped to victory. “Obviously, he’d like to win by more than five points,” Republican strategist O’Connell says. …

Top Republicans are also quick to point out that Walker has qualities that can compensate for his failure to waltz to victory in November. Though he is the top target of unions this cycle, Walker, who doesn’t have a college degree, has tremendous potential appeal to blue-collar voters, who largely supported him in 2010. That’s a group that Republicans, with Mitt Romney as their standard bearer, struggled mightily with in 2012, and it will undoubtedly become a focus in 2016. The son of a Baptist preacher, Walker is also popular among religious conservatives. And he’s one of the few potential GOP nominees with a foot in both the establishment and tea-party camps.

Walker also likes to say this is his third race in four years and, if he wins in November, his primary selling point may be his proven ability to repeatedly win drag-out fights in a left-leaning state.

And what do non-Wisconsin readers think?

• Ah, the idle rich. Reminds me of the Kennedy’s in many respects. Politics is a toy.
• When the author contacted the Trek company to confirm her quoted international sales number, they refused. In my eyes, if Daddy could back up her claims then he would be very boastful about her accomplishments. The unions will vote against Walker as opposed to voting for a qualified candidate. What’s a little plagiarism among friends.
• Was she instrumental in raising international sales at her father’s company? The company’s not saying. Nor will they talk about whether or not she was involved in the outsourcing of production by the company to foreign locations, displacing WI workers. As to her time in the state commerce dept., the record is what the record is as stated by the author. If there were some fantastic program or project that she created while there, I have no doubt it would be blared out to voters by her campaign – but there is none.
• Real business background – Entrepreneur – as in successful startup, not going to work for Daddy.
• I have met her on several occasions. Years ago, in a context having nothing to do with politics. She is an entitled airhead whose position at Trek was a sinecure with neither responsibilities nor regular hours.
• What is wrong with Wisconsin? Scott Walker should be ahead by 20 points just for his record of breaking the hold that public employee unions had on the state. Instead the polls show that an accomplished governor is in a close race with a dilettante socialite with no real ideas other than those she purloined from other losers like herself.
• Two lib cesspools, Milwaukee and Madison, war with an otherwise small town, rural state. Most people in Wisconsin appreciate the constitution and the value of our dwindling lib oppressed freedoms. Burke does not earn any votes based on her record or intellect. Sadly, half our population is composed of idiots who choose socialism over the benefits of freedom.
• It’s pretty clear that she has very little experience at anything and she was chosen by the Ds as a female candidate that they can build an image around who will do their bidding after election, as she is likely to show as much interest in governing as she’s shown for everything else in her life. Government of the union, for the union and by the union will return to WI with a vengeance.
• It’s a safe bet that if she does win the governorship, her first task will be to reward the unions by returning to the rule that if you wanted to work for govt you had to be a member of the union. Expect Wisconsin to resume its descent into irrelevancy that was interrupted by Walker.
• Mary Burke has nothing to offer. She’s just another useless power grabber — one who can’t run her own life too well, but who has a million ideas how we should run ours and wants government power to jam them down our throats. She has been assisted by a Democrat prosecutor who keeps totally bogus charges against Walker plodding through the courts — the Democrats’ favorite ploy (see also Perry, Delay, Hutchinson in Texas). I’m sick of rich little morons who have theirs and seem to think government’s main job should be killing opportunities for the rest of us, not to mention taxing us to death. No creative thinking here, only two ideas: more regulation, more taxes. When Walker won the recall, I had hoped Wisconsin might shake off its liberal fascist tendencies. Come November, we’ll see how strong the totalitarian temptation still is.
  

• Wisconsin is neither blue nor red. Having recently escaped the cess pool that is Illinois to become a cheeze head, I am struck by the upside-downedness of Wisconsin. The people who ought to be conservative voters in every respect seem to be Democrats. Those who would be liberals under normal circumstances have connected the dots between socialism and the poverty it engenders. Unemployed former union members have an almost universal distrust of Big Labor and a healthy scorn for Blue Sky collectivist promises. They’d rather work full time for minimum wages than be unemployed on a picket line. Meanwhile, farmers and big business here seem to be nuttier than Greenpeace. Any good that Walker has accomplished will be quickly undone with a Burke victory. It’s 50-50. Perhaps the difference will be the recent transplants from my former state who will certainly not be pulling the lever for the bicycle babe. One can only hope.