Those who have followed Recallarama from its 2011 gestation know that Wisconsin’s public employee unions don’t let the truth get in the way of whatever they’re claiming or demanding.
The first example in this blog was the July 2011 assertion that Gov. Scott Walker never said he wanted to curtail public employees’ collective bargaining rights during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign.
Inconveniently for Da Union, this assertion was made before a reader passed on to me the Web address of a Wisconsin Education Association Council-member union newsletter from before the November 2010 election, which shows:
Similarly inconveniently, TRUE Views (now there’s an ironic name) featured two statements from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in June and August 2010, both of which can be verified. And then another teacher union newsletter was revealed with the same information …
… which serves to demonstrate, at best, reading comprehension problems among Wisconsin teacher union members.
A Wisconsin superintendent survey last fall found state budget cuts caused school districts to eliminate thousands of staff positions, increase class sizes, raise student fees and reduce extracurricular offerings.
But this week, Gov. Scott Walker’s office said those results don’t tell the full story and that, in fact, similar surveys from past years show school districts fared better after his education changes went into effect.
Further, the governor’s office contends the organizations that conducted those surveys — the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators and the Wisconsin Education Association Council — were unhelpful, and in some cases actually worked against the administration as staff members tried to compare recent results to past surveys.
“It’s unfortunate that WEAC stands in the way of survey data that they have released in the past, which shows the governor’s changes are working and are good for their members and the state’s schoolchildren,” said Cullen Werwie, Walker’s spokesman.
WEAC refused to share the data, but someone found it and passed it on to Walker’s people, who have not only posted this summary …
… but all of DPI’s data over the past decade. The data shows that all of WEAC’s claims about mass layoffs, grotesquely large classes, and forced cuts of classes or extracurricular programs throughout the state are false. The data does not show where teacher layoffs and huge class sizes are occurring — in the school districts like Milwaukee and Kenosha, whose school boards committed malpractice with public funds by enacting teacher union contracts that asked for no sacrifices at all from their teacher unions.
The State Journal quoted a WEAC statement: “Gov. Walker’s cuts to education — including the greatest reduction in state aid since the Great Depression and the largest combined cut to education in our state’s history — caused unprecedented harm to Wisconsin’s tradition of quality public schools. The effects of Walker’s actions are still being felt now, with record-level staff and program reductions.” Apparently WEAC staff is unable to read bar charts.
This data, by the way, is consistent with my own experience covering schools, beginning in the late 1980s. Class sizes fluctuate every year because of demographics. Teachers get hired and laid off every year because enrollments in grades and in classes go up and down, mostly because of fluctuations in age groups, but in part because of fluctuations of student interest in a particular subject.
(The third and fourth bar charts, by the way, demonstrate the cynical game played by many school boards — when spending cuts have to be made, school boards threaten to cut popular programs, such as high school sports, in order to blackmail taxpayers into approving referenda to waive revenue limits.)
Those who claim that the green bars are where they are because of a large number of teacher retirements in 2011 may be correct, but they are forgetting, or don’t know, that school districts have offered early retirement deals from time to time since at least the late 1980s. Teachers, remember, can retire with full benefits when they reach the “rule of 85” — when their age and years teaching total 85. A teacher can get hired at 22 out of college, teach for 32 years, and retire with full salary and benefits at 54.
Unlike with public safety employees, there is no compelling reason to allow teachers to retire as early as 54, except that those teachers are at the top of the salary structure, and they will be replaced by teachers with less experience and education who thus cost less money. (And until four-year colleges in Wisconsin stop educating teachers, there will always be enough teachers to replace the retirees, although there are some subject-area shortages.) The blanket claim that the more experienced a teacher is, the better the teacher is, which is what teacher unions would have you believe through their Last In First Out maxim, is a claim that is impossible to verify since we don’t evaluate teachers effectively. (An effective teacher evaluation ends with the worst teachers being fired, and that never happens in this state.)
The other school of thought is the obvious application of the political Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Contrary to what WEAC wants you to believe, the billions of dollars we spend on education every year (the top spending item in the state budget, along with public safety) has not resulted in the return on investment it should have. The 85 percent of taxpayers who do not work for government but are paying for government appear unimpressed with continuing and escalating government demands for more money. Otherwise, the November 2010 election results would have been different.
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Readers can imagine that a book called Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It is not a light, airy, cheerful read. (For one thing, the title is much too long, but that seems the case with all nonfiction these days.)
The author of that book, Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, excerpted one of his chapters:
It’s the losers, not the winners, who are writing the early historical drafts of this transformational media moment, while those actually making that history—the people formerly known as the audience, in critic Jay Rosen’s apt phrase—are treating their legacy interpreters not with kindness but contempt. So much misunderstanding and breathtakingly wrong-headed analysis tumbles forth from this one paradox. …
Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.
That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.
It is no insult to the hard work and good faith of either newspaper reporters or media-beat writers (and I’ve been both) to acknowledge that their conflict of interest in this story far exceeds that of, say,academic researchers who occasionally take corporate money, or politicians who pocket campaign donations from entities they help regulate, to name two perennial targets of newspaper editorial boards. We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter.
It is no insult to the hard work and good faith of either newspaper reporters or media-beat writers (and I’ve been both) to acknowledge that their conflict of interest in this story far exceeds that of, say, academic researchers who occasionally take corporate money, or politicians who pocket campaign donations from entities they help regulate, to name two perennial targets of newspaper editorial boards. We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter. …
To those of us whose career prospects did not depend on media behemoths or academic institutions, whose view was not colored by an over-arching fear of economic and political power concentrated in the hands of would-be 21st century media barons, the AOL–Time Warner merger, like all supposedly frightening media consolidations, was only as relevant as our comparatively minor consumption of the new conglomerate’s products. (I would invite every Ben Bagdikian fan reading this to keep a detailed diary of your media consumption for a full day, count up how many different corporations and human beings compiled the stuff you consumed, note which entities did not even exist in the 20th century, and then try ever again to say or write with a straight face the phrase “media monopoly.”) As I wrote when the merger was announced, “If this is the ‘new totalitarianism’…then we’re the freest slaves in the history of tyranny.”
Audience empowerment (to rescue a debased term) is not just about the ability for humans to send text messages or create ad hoc social networks free from government sanction, though both of those developments are revolutionary on their own. Nor is it chiefly about individuals creatively re-packaging the journalistic spade-work of deep-pocketed media institutions, though that, too, has been a remarkably beneficial, not detrimental, innovation (any newspaper journalists who claim otherwise should estimate their number of visits to sites edited by Jim Romenesko). No, the reality rarely broached in the media’s own drumbeat of doom is that members of the formerly captive audience are, on a daily basis, beating the professionals at their own game, in the process rendering hollow the claim that our democracy is imperiled when newspapers tremble.
Does it matter that most people telling us about the state of the media are, either through their professional conflicts of interest or career-long fixations, missing or severely underplaying the liberatory effects of the formerly captive audience becoming sophisticated and productive journalism consumers and creators? Unfortunately, yes. If Steven Brill wants to convince newspapers to throw their content behind paywalls, that’s his (and their) business. (And, as an editor of a magazine that puts all its content up for free, it’s my business, too—hurry up, Brill!) Ditto for newspaper columnists who want to further alienate their dwindling readerships by accusing them of undermining democracy when they read stuff for free. If nothing else, this blame-the-consumer routine is some of the best evidence yet for how an entitled, monopolist-style mentality crept into the worldview of a profession once noted for its cutthroat sense of competition. Instead of begging the audience to stay, the old guard is trying to charge them a steep exit fee.
But the problem here is that the legacy-centric view is bleeding into the sausage-making of public policy. The A&P Organization Men aren’t just spinning their own industrial decline and confusing it with the fate of democracy, they’re actively advising the Federal Trade Commission on how laws might be rewritten to punish news aggregators—from Google to individual bloggers—whose work is perceived to hurt them. Dollars from every single taxpaying American may be redistributed to an industry that until very recently was among the most profitable in U.S. history. And like the last round of newspaper protectionism—the Newspaper Protection Act of 1970—any rulemaking or legislation that comes out of this process will almost axiomatically reward deep-pocketed incumbents at the direct expense of new entrants, all in an effort to delay the inevitable.
In 2006, remarking on the suddenly troubled fates of the formerly indestructible duopolist film processor Eastman Kodak, The Wall Street Journal’s William M. Bulkeley put the problem succinctly: “Photography and publishing companies shouldn’t be surprised when digital technology upends their industries. After all, their business success relied on forcing customers to buy things they didn’t want.” The customers have moved away from yesterday’s news bundle, and from the mentality that fetishizes it, but instead of abandoning news they’ve dived into the production process with both feet. Instead of blaming them for ruining the past, we should be thanking them for inventing the future. And above all, we should do nothing to get in their way.
One of the comment threads expands on this:
I would say that a big part of this is that most journalists are natural-born employees, and that warps their overall worldview.
The idea that someone could build an audience is completely alien to them. To a natural-born employee, the way you get an audience is by winning all the right prizes at school, and then a big hand reaches down from the sky and picks you up and places you in a position where you have an audience.
If those giant, pre-existing audiences aren’t around any more, or are declining precipitously, the big hand might not come one day.
These are the same sort of people who write articles saying that book writing is dying, when more people are selling books to readers than ever before. If the giant hand didn’t do it, it didn’t happen.
That might be an unintended explanation of the tendency of journalists to be anti-business. Business people not only take risks, as opposed to “employees,” but business people are also concerned about what their customers think, possibly behind only their bottom lines. Old-style journalists would not only consider that sucking up to the boss, but pandering to your audience; it was described to me more than once as the difference between what readers want to know and what readers need to know.
The need for the information newspapers contain isn’t going to go away. The form will change. The same can be said about radio and TV news. I’ve predicted for a few years (which means I will eventually be proven correct, right?) that we’re going to see the merging of newspapers, radio and TV into an Internet-based source of information in the news consumer’s preferred format — text, print, graphics, audio or video — for the consumer’s preferred media device. (Which is something Journal Communications could do right now with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and WTMJ radio and TV.) That would rejoin what the Federal Communications Commission forced asunder; the owner of The Post~Crescent in Appleton (in its pre-Gannett and pre-Thomson days) also owned WLUK-TV, the Green Bay Press–Gazette owned a radio station (I believe what now is WNFL radio), The Capital Times in Madison started WIBA radio, and WISC-TV in Madison used to own what now is WTDY radio.
The barriers to entry to the media are now as low as they have ever been, however. I need no license for this blog. The cost to produce this blog, other than my time, is the cost of our Internet connection, the annual cost of the domain name, and the cost of the electricity that powers this laptop and our modem and router. (The latter of which is much less than what a newspaper that owns a printing press or a radio station pays for its electricity, let alone a TV station.) My cellphone has a passable audio recorder and camera if I wanted to add audio and video here, or I could use my son’s iPod:
Of course, you can’t buy credibility, which is what a commenter on Welch’s piece called the “legacy media,” has, or had. You can, however, losecredibility, which is what the “legacy media” is busy doing these days. That’s a lot of good work to be wasted, but if you’re not willing to keep up with the times in the less important areas (as in how you deliver your information), and you haven’t figured out the importance of your work’s integrity, your work in the more important areas (what information you deliver) will be delivered to a shrinking audience.
The reason I chose this headline is that the School of Journalism bachelor’s degree we UW students earned in the late 1980s prepared us well to work in the news media, but not to be managers in the media, and not to be media entrepreneurs. (I’ve seen enough sales managers in the media to know that the most important word in the title “sales manager” is “manager,” not “sales.”) Anyone in business can tell you the difficult part of being in business is not providing the products or services for which the business exists; it’s performing the business functions central to any business, regardless of its products or services.
Where is the media going? Twenty-five years ago, few people had heard of the Internet, and Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay had two daily newspapers each. Twenty-five years from now? Try predicting two years from now.
One is shown in Eric Jackson‘s tribute to CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace, who died Sunday after a career that was longer than TV, on Forbes.com:
If you don’t wake up in the morning excited to pick up where you left your work yesterday, you haven’t found your calling yet.We all have a calling in life. For some of us, it’s to play professional tennis; some it’s manage money; and for others it’s to seek out truth (with a capital T) in their investigative work. A person’s calling only has to be to them; it’s not for others to judge its importance. Mike believed passionately that his job was the most important job in the world. Just imagine what kind of world this would be if we all woke up feeling that every day.
That’s one view. Then there’s this view from Bradley J. Moore of The High Calling:
… I often find myself thinking hard about the choices stacked up against the years I have left. I wonder, what would it be like to run full throttle towards the things I really love doing – writing, for instance, or other creative endeavors?
Why not risk it all and pursue what I love? Isn’t that what God wants for me? …
Pursuing one’s creative dreams may sound glamorous, but the reality is that the top of the economic pyramid for those in the arts is so tiny, with the vast majority of talented people planted firmly at the lower-echelon base.
The difference between doing what’s important and doing what you want is that the important stuff is usually harder. It’s not so much fun. It won’t generally fulfill all of your deepest personal longings. Working a boring job to provide your family with financial security often gets a bad rap from motivational wonks who would have us drop everything to pursue our dreams, but I believe there’s something valiant, even noble about it.
Some mistake their desire for creative expression as a divine calling from God. Don’t even get me started on this. God never guaranteed that all of our deepest career fantasies would be fulfilled like an American Idol episode. There is no magical, theological formula for forging your vocation. You just have to figure it out like the billions of people who went before you. All I know is that shirking family responsibilities to chase some fantastical dream is immature and self-centered. …
So, stay at your dull job, give it your best shot, and save the music gigs for the weekends. You never know — the path of greatest significance may be right there in front of you, if you give it enough attention.
Reality for most people is somewhere between those two poles. I wrote when I started opinion-blogging that you should not love your job, because your job does not love you. (See “Marketplace Magazine, 1989–2011.”) In my 10 years at Marketplace I met a lot of people who claimed they had not worked a day in their lives, because they enjoyed what they did too much to consider it work. I’ve never hated what I did, but I’ve never loved it either. And I don’t think that’s because I have a poor work ethic, because I don’t. If you hate what you do, you’re not going to do your job well, and you are therefore cheating the person paying you. If you’re one of those who truly loves what you do, you should get on your knees every day and thank God, because most of your fellow human beings are not so fortunate.
There are some (perhaps Jackson) who espouse the school of You Are As Happy As You Decide to Be. That seems somewhere between unrealistic and self-delusional, depending on what’s going on in your life or the lives of those you love. (Despite being known as perhaps the world’s preeminent investigative reporter, Wallace suffered from depression and once tried to kill himself.) At the risk of appearing afflicted with anhedonia, I doubt our ancestors who risked their lives and gave up what they knew in their lands of origin for a new no-assurances life here spent much time wondering if they were happy. Read the Bible, and you will find that God wants us to be holy, which is not the same thing as “happy.” Nor is true happiness very likely on this flawed planet full of flawed human beings and flawed human-created institutions.
Today in 1964, the Billboard Hot 100 could have been called the Beatles 14 and the non-Beatles 86, topped by …
The number one single today in 1970:
Today in 1977, Alice Cooper played a concert before 40,000 fans, the largest concert in the history of Australia.
Afterward, Cooper was placed under house arrest until he posted bond of $59,632, which totaled the money a promoter claimed to have paid Cooper for a 1975 tour that never took place.
On the other hand, the promoter didn’t fulfill his end of the deal either, which later prompted a settlement.
The number one single today in 1981:
Today in 1988, Cher won an Academy Award for “Moonstruck,” proving that singers can sometimes act, even though actors usually can’t sing.
Birthdays today include Richard Berry, writer and original singer of …
Vocalist/guitarist Stuart Adamson of Big Country:
Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi:
Lisa Stansfield:
One death of note today in 2006: June Pointer of the Pointer Sisters:
Add to that list another group: Attorneys in the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office, as noted by Media Trackers:
Media Trackers is able to confirm that 43 current employees of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office signed the petition to recall Governor Scott Walker. … The employees signing the Walker recall petition range in stature from a Deputy District Attorney, to at least 19 Assistant District Attorneys, and a host of support staff.
Highest ranking among the officials signing the Walker recall petition was Deputy District Attorney Lovell Johnson Jr. Johnson is one of five Deputy District Attorney’s who report directly to DA John Chisholm.
In addition to DDA Johnson Jr., Media Trackers was able to confirm that 19 Assistant District Attorneys (employee status provided by the Milwaukee DA as of March 26, 2012) signed the Walker recall at the time of publication. …
Perhaps one of the most interesting employees at the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office who signed the Scott Walker recall petition is Janet Oelstrom, a secretary for the Public Integrity Unit. The Public Integrity Unit is responsible for anti-corruption probes and the now-familiar ‘John Doe’ investigations. …
A total of 23 support staff for the Milwaukee District Attorney’s office were confirmed to have signed the recall petition. One recall petition was circulated by support staff employee Mary Ann Onorato and included ten Milwaukee County DA support staff employees who signed on Friday November 18, and Monday November 21. …
Some Milwaukee County DA employees expressed their disapproval of Governor Walker on social media by joining anti-Walker Facebook groups such as ‘Scott Walker is a Douchebag’ and ‘Boycott Scott Walker Contributors.’ Others posted disparaging comments about Governor Walker on Facebook, another has the now-famous Wisconsin ‘Blue Fist’ as her Facebook profile picture, and one ADA had a picture of a ‘Recall Walker’ yard sign as a profile picture.
A support staff employee told Media Trackers that she did not know of any policy whereby Milwaukee District Attorney support staff employees were forbidden from signing the Walker recall petition.
So not only do we know you can’t get justice from certain circuit judges in this state, you can’t get justice from the Milwaukee County DA’s office either. (I’d add the Dane County DA’s office to that list, but I haven’t seen any of that office’s signatures reported. Yet.) That is yet another unintended consequence of Recallarama. (In addition to the exposure of the depth and breadth of ignorance among prosecutors, judges and the media as to what the Open Records Law includes.) Why exactly should either a plaintiff in a civil action or a defendant in a criminal complaint or civil action assume he or she can be fairly treated in the Dane or Milwaukee county courthouses?
About the mysterious John Doe investigation into Walker’s staffers’ activities when he was county executive, an emailer to WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes writes:
These disclosures show that the Milwaukee CountyDA’s office is undeniablyand irretrievably compromised in terms of partisan political bias. An office with this many individuals directly and publicly involved in an effort to politically destroy Governor Scott Walker simply cannot be entrusted with an investigation of current and former members of the Governor’s staff thatcould be – and arguably has been – manipulated for directly political ends.
The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office has been exposed as a hotbed for political recall activity against Governor Scott Walker. As such, it has disqualified itself as an objective arbiter of law and fact with regard to activities of the Governor and his current and former staff.
“My understanding is that none of the attorneys in this office involved in politically related investigations has participated in the recall process,” said Chief Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern. …
Lovern said his office does not have a policy restricting employees from signing recall petitions.
“It would be against Wisconsin law for the District Attorney to prohibit employees of the office from participating in the democratic process,” Lovern said in an email. “Depending on their specific assignments, attorneys may have ethical or conflict considerations that prohibit them from actively participating in politics.”
So the John Doe investigators didn’t sign, but it would be OK if they did because their constitutional rights are more important than their responsibility to those paying their salaries. That’s how I read what Lovern is quoted as saying. As usual, the concept “appearance of impropriety” completely escapes the government employees working in the Milwaukee County D.A.’s office, as it appears to have escaped every public employee, elected official, and member of the news media who announced to the world that they hate Scott Walker and want him removed from office.
(That sound you hear is the sound of minds changing about government budget cuts of any percentage up to and including 100 percent. If government employees aren’t working for you, why should government employ them?)
That brings an interesting (at least to me) point to mind. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s not as if election-related petitions being public records are a recent development. Petitions on behalf of candidates or referenda have been public records since at least the 1970s, when the Open Records Law and Open Meetings Law became law. Petitions to get candidates or referenda on the ballot have been open to the opponents of the potential candidates or referenda for the obvious reason of getting invalid signatures off petitions. This has not only been the law for a long time; it’s not even been controversial before now. That’s why one of the first rules of running a campaign is to get as many signatures close to the maximum as possible, not merely enough to meet the statutory minimums, in case of invalid signatures.
One therefore wonders if a future Legislature or legislator will seek to remove ballot petitions from the Open Records Law. (Or, perhaps more expediently, to find a circuit judge — and here are some possibilities — to rule that the Open Records Law does not apply to ballot petitions.) The line of reasoning, I suppose, could parrot the claims of petition signers who were surprised to discover that their signatures are public record — that since voting is a private activity, petition-signing should be too.
The logical consequence of election-related petitions no longer being public records is that ballot access laws will necessarily be invalid, and anyone who want to get on a ballot, or anyone who wants a referendum on a ballot, will have to have the right to do so. (The latter pretty much describes California.)
While the right to petition is part of the U.S. Constitution, there is no right to political activity outside of public eyes, other than voting. (Note the signatures on the Declaration of Independence a decade before the Constitution became the law of the land, and you can conclude that the Founding Fathers intended no private political rights besides voting.) And there is no reading whatsoever of the First Amendment to shield those using their constitutional rights to express themselves from the consequences of their actions.
Tim Nerenz on the latest Democrat gubernatorial recall candidate, Milwaukee Mayor (and 2010 gubernatorial election loser) Tom Barrett:
Mr. Barrett says he will put an end to the “civil war” that Governor Walker started in this state. That’s funny stuff. There is indeed a civil war being waged, but it is not confined to the state of Wisconsin, and it did not begin when Governor Walker was sworn in. He was sworn in after one of its battles was won; he is one of victory’s spoils.
Our second civil war is national, state, and local – it is the struggle between the taxpayers and the tax-eaters; it is the state and its wards versus the people who create the wealth and pay the bills. It may look like the usual Democrat/Republican scrum to those who can’t see beyond; but those brands merely attached themselves to the side they hope will prevail. …
We have hit the wall. A shrinking base of taxpayers has had enough of doing the heavy lifting for an increasingly ungrateful segment of society obsessed with taking an even bigger share of our incomes in order to obtain through state confiscation the things they refuse to purchase for themselves.
That is not a hateful thing to say; it is merely an observation that anyone can make for themselves any day of the week. If a kid with the latest fashions and hottest sneakers listening to his iPod while gaming over the internet doesn’t have a sandwich, the guilt trip should not be laid at some other working family because they didn’t pay enough tax.
So please, Mr. Barrett, tell us how you propose to end this civil war?
Will you tell the tax-eaters they must live within their means and pay their fair share? Or will you tell the taxpayers to be grateful you have left us with any of what we earned? A war ends when one side wins and the other side surrenders – which America do you think is ready to throw in the towel because you have decided it’s time?
This is not about Mayor Barrett, or Governor Walker, or President Obama. This is about you. This is about your liberty, your family, your prosperity, your future. Our civil war needs to be won – not with bullets and blood, but with ballots and blogs. And it needs to be fought now, while we can still talk with each other, not later, when desperation moves people to violence.
No one ever thought they would be killing each other in Greece, either. That’s where we are headed if we do not stop pretending that the same socialism that failed everywhere else in the world will somehow work here. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
Before Barrett gets the nomination, of course, he will have to explain how and why he opposed, then used, the collective bargaining reforms pushed for by Walker and enacted by the Legislature.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 