One Good Reason to Raise the Minimum Wage: the 99% Want Their Money Back

What's a big factor in driving up deficits and government spending? Lazy, no-good moochers on welfare, getting a free ride.

Aljazeera America: State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.

Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.

Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.

The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.

Meanwhile, families in poverty are having trouble getting by -- because government supposedly can't afford to pay for things like food stamps or the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Welfare reform was supposed to lift people out of poverty, but it's done the opposite. And it was all predictable.

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Better Pay, More Independent Workers -- No Wonder GOP Hates Obamacare

The bad news keeps coming for the anti-Obamacare right. Not only did a Congressional Budget Office report released yesterday detail how the Affordable Care Care would empower workers to work fewer hours if they chose, but further examination of the report finds even more good news for America's working people. Talking Points Memo's Dylan Scott is once again on the ball:

TPM spoke with... top economists who agreed with [this] analysis: People choosing to work less because of Obamacare, as CBO projects, would mean higher wages.

"That stands to reason. You get this sorting effect," Dean Baker, co-founder of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. "You have a lot of people working now who don't want to work. The only way they can get insurance is through their employer."

Those people retire or cut back their hours or otherwise lower their participation in the labor market -- a possibility that CBO raised itself -- reducing the labor supply. Over the long term, that drives up wages. Baker said that CBO said as much in its analysis: The report projected that total hours worked would drop by as much as 2 percent by 2024 because of Obamacare, but total compensation would fall only 1 percent.

Supply and demand: reality's greatest defender -- at least, in matters economic.

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Republicans Mugging Republicans

It's been said that a Republican is just a liberal who's been mugged. Of course, it tends to be Republicans who say this, since it makes very little sense. Being the victim of a crime may change your opinions about law enforcement or gun control, but why would being mugged make you oppose abortion or women's rights or same sex marriage. Why would being mugged make you more accepting of the Wall Street corporate crime wave? Why would being mugged make you think that labor unions must be broken and the minimum wage left at a pittance? And why would being mugged make you decide that giving everything to the rich and nothing to the poor is a good idea? Is the argument that being mugged makes you stupid?

A truer take on that cliche might be that being mugged turns you Democrat -- at least, when those muggers are Republicans.

ThinkProgress: On Tuesday, a potential agreement to extend benefits for those who have been out of work for six months or more fell apart over squabbling about procedural disagreements in the Senate. That fight came two and a half weeks after those checks stopped going out to millions of Americans, and it doesn’t look like it will be resolved in the next two weeks. Congress let the program lapse at the end of the year, which offered support to the jobless after their state benefits ran out, drying up a lifeline for those who are struggling to find a new job.

The people who have been left without that support are incensed, and the anger reaches across party lines. In an email to ThinkProgress, Peter LeClair, an out of work investment manager from New York, said he has been a lifelong Republican. But he “will never vote for a Republican, as long as I live” after watching them say that relying on unemployment benefits makes people dependent. “I am incensed with this Rand Paul,” he said, who has said extending the benefits would “do a disservice” to those who were relying on them. “He says I am lazy... I am not lazy, how dare he. He doesn’t even know me.”

LeClair says he has sent out over 2,000 resumes and been “rejected on a daily basis.” The benefits, which he pointed out he paid into while he worked for more than 20 years, were the only think keeping him “glued together financially.” He said he is “absolutely shocked and dismayed” with Republicans, reiterating, “I will never, so help me god, vote for a Republican again, period.”

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Boehner Demands That Someone Else Shoot a Hostage for Him

John Boehner will never be described as a Profile in Courage.

Yesterday, Boehner issued a statement following a senate cloture vote to advance an extension of unemployment benefits. "One month ago I personally told the White House that another extension of temporary emergency unemployment benefits should not only be paid for but include something to help put people back to work," a written statement reads. "To date, the president has offered no such plan. If he does, I’ll be happy to discuss it, but right now the House is going to remain focused on growing the economy and giving America’s unemployed the independence that only comes from finding a good job."

So basically, Boehner says he wants another hostage shot before he'll release this particular hostage. "There’s quite a bit wrong with this," says Steve Benen. "For example, Boehner knows jobless Americans need these benefits and knows cutting off aid will hurt the economy, but insists on spending cuts to offset the costs. Why? He didn’t say. What needs to get cut? He didn’t say. Why have Republicans supported previous extensions without offsetting cuts, only to change course now? He didn’t say."

He wants something cut. He knows there are no popular cuts to make. So he demands that someone else do the dirty work. Choose what gets cut for him or the long term unemployed get it. He wants an unpopular slashing of something or other -- simply for the sake of appearances -- and he wants to be able to walk away with the appearance of clean hands. He wants the extension paid for, but he wants someone else (preferably the White House) to take the blame for that offset.

As I said, no Profile in Courage here.

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America Needs a Raise

For me at least, the most interesting story over the holiday weekend was Black Friday mayhem. Running the search term "Walmart Police" through Google News gained me this little screenshot, which I think sums up the spirit of the day pretty well -- people shot, stabbed, and beaten over prices that are really no better than those in any other sale throughout the year. False scarcity and media hype about "can't-miss" deals can drive people to do things they may not be very proud of in the sober light of Cyber Monday. Our consumerist culture is by nature predatory, with the corporate predators tricking the prey into thinking they're predators too -- which leads to predictable outcomes as consumers compete to "hunt bargains."

Another type of corporate predation was also in the news, as Walmart workers staged Black Friday demonstrations to protest low wages. They're starvation wages, really, which have Walmart employees running food drives for each other and relying on food stamps to survive. What's surprising to me is how little bleed-over there is from one story to the other, despite the fact that they're clearly related. Not only do Walmart workers earn far, far too little for their labor, but the Black Friday chaos stories demonstrate just how lousy a working environment the company's willing to tolerate in order to sell someone a toaster oven. Anyone who can read about the Black Friday frenzies across the nation and think that people who have to deal with that don't deserve a raise... Well, they've got a real interesting definition of "deserve."

And of course, the myth that low wage workers have undemanding, cushy jobs is exposed as BS.

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Rush Limbaugh, McCommie

As you most likely know, fast food workers in several cities staged a strike yesterday. The main demand: a rate of pay of $15 an hour -- a little more than double the federal minimum of $7.25. "When they work hard every day for all day long and they don't get paid enough wages to put food on the table and to support their families, then we as a community suffer," explained  Fran Quigley, a clinical professor at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, who joined workers on the picket line.

But why should Quigley care? After all, you have to assume he makes a bit more than the average fast food worker. If we rule out the fact that he's just a good person and assume he's motivated only by self-interest, he still has a compelling reason to support higher wages for these workers, as USA Today reports:

Taxpayers subsidize workers who earn too little, he said, by paying for food stamps and other entitlement programs in which many low-wage workers participate. Profitable corporations employing such workers often make enough money to increase those workers' wages, Quigley said.

This is the conservative case for raising the minimum wage. And it's a case that conservative blowhard Rush Limbaugh doesn't seem to understand.

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Demand Drives Hiring. Period. End of Story.

Last week, we got one of those good news/bad news jobs reports we're so used to seeing by now. The good news is very good news: new jobless claims are at a 6-year low, suggesting that employment has stabilized and that the days of massive layoffs are behind us. The bad news, according to the Associated Press:

[W]hile most companies have stopped cutting jobs, many remain reluctant to hire. That’s bad news for the roughly 11.5 million Americans who are unemployed and a major reason the unemployment rate is still so high four years after the recession officially ended.

"We have seen a disconnect between the level of hiring and firing," said Bricklin Dwyer, an economist at BNP Paribas.

Ask any rightwinger what's going on here and they blame Obamacare. Healthcare reform is creating the dreaded uncertainty and that uncertainty is keeping employers from hiring.

Thing is though, employers and capital investors aren't panicky types who need hand-holding and therapy before they take a risk. If they were, they'd be in a different line of work. It turns out that, historically, periods of uncertainty have been moments of opportunity, when the opportunistic investors and employers actually have hired more workers in order to take full advantage.

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Economic Hardship; the Other Demographic Shift that Dooms the GOP

It would be hard to think of a more poorly placed set of priorities. While Americans struggle to get by in an economy that seems to be recovering only for a few, Republicans wage ideological warfare. When employment and the economy should be job one, the GOP has wasted time with nearly forty votes to repeal Obamacare, chased around phantom "scandals," and worked on measures to restrict abortion that have zero chance of ever becoming law. It's bad out there, but the party is acting as if all other problems have been solved, freeing them up to dick around with trivial pet projects.

How bad is it? This bad:

Associated Press: Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.

Add this to the slow-motion suicide the Republican Party has been committing by trying to alienate everyone. Other than the trickle-down BS that has been disproved by practice so many times,  a hallmark of conservative economic mumbo-jumbo is the belief that people in poor economic situations are there by their own choice -- and if you punish the poor for being poor, the unemployed for being unemployed, their situation will improve. You slash spending on food stamps, cut off people from unemployment benefits, and they'll soon discover that it's too difficult to be poor or unemployed, "pull themselves up by their bootstraps," and just stop be poor. The conservative conception of economic hardship seems to be informed entirely by Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" myth, not by anything resembling the real world.


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But why is this approach to economics suicidal for the party of the rich white people? Well, because rich white people are becoming an endangered species. According to the AP, "Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy 'poor.'"

The "welfare queen" story has always been about dog whistle racism. The politics of division had previously worked so well for Republicans. But now the people struggling to get by are the people they seek to appeal to, while pushing the most unappealing economic policies imaginable to those same people. There are plenty of poor whites who vote Republican -- without checking, I'd guess the majority of them who actually vote -- but at a certain point the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you begin to run out of chumpish poor people. Right now, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that "83 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress' job" and "nearly six-in-10 voters say they would vote to defeat and replace every single member of Congress if they had such an option on their ballot."

MSNBC reports that "Republicans are shouldering more of the blame for the situation in the nation's capital: just 22 percent say they believe the GOP is interested in unifying the country in a bipartisan way, versus 45 percent who say the same about Obama."

Those aren't numbers you can win with.

Any those numbers can only get worse. White Americans are learning from personal experience that being economically disadvantaged isn't the sweet deal that everyone in the GOP says it is. Trying to get by on food stamps or unemployment benefits isn't the gravy train and cutting those benefits is the opposite of being helpful. While the racial divide in economic inequality still exists, there's a lot of crossover now and GOP lies are exposed. It's awfully hard to tell someone who's fallen into the social safety net that that net is actually a cushy "hammock."

If it didn't hurt so many people, I would invite Republicans to continue to be economic flatearthers, continue to attack consumer demand wherever it rears its head, and throw themselves off that particular cliff. But the fact is that as the GOP sinks with their own fiscal mismanagement, they're taking a lot of innocent Americans down with them. Unfortunately, they really don't have anything else left. They've mocked real world economics for so long that they can't win a primary espousing anything other than Reaganaut fantasy -- the base demands to be lied to.

So they continue along, ruining lives and harming America, until their con finally runs completely out of steam. Given what that con is doing to the country right now, that end can't come soon enough.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]


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Walmart's Phony Low Prices

It's pretty clear by now that Republican economic policies can be boiled down to "penny wise, but pound foolish." The idea is that it's possible to save your way to prosperity. This ignores simple math: if you don't make enough to be wealthy, no amount of saving will make you wealthy. It's a question of incomes, not savings. Rich people are rich because they make a lot of money. And you make a lot of money by spending wisely.

Of course, Republican economic policies make no sense because they're rationalizations for the transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Some really do believe this math-challenged mumbo-jumbo -- perhaps even most Republicans. But those few who understand don't expect it to actually help everyone. It's just a con to help those few at the top. Tell the chumps the wealth will trickle down and, if the question of when actually ever seeps into their sheepish brains, tell them it'll happen any minute now, just you wait. Because Reagan.

But what's the penny wise and pound foolish thinking look like in the wild? Pretty the opposite of this:

Mother Jones:

Chances are you missed this particular bargain on Black Friday: Agree to spend 15 cents more on every shopping trip, and Walmart, Target, and other large retailers will agree to pay their workers at least $25,000 a year.

Big box retailers aren't actually offering that deal, but a new study by the liberal think tank Demos argues that it would be a great bargain for us all if they did. Increasing the average wage at large retailers from $21,000 to $25,000 would probably cost you less than $20 a year at the register yet lift some 1.5 million people out of poverty (including your cashier), create 100,000 new jobs, and boost GDP by some $13.5 billion.

Demos argues that retailers would benefit, despite higher labor costs, because their low-wage employees could suddenly afford to buy more of the basic necessities that they scan and load into plastic bags every day.

If you're like me, this is the part where you release a loud and resounding, "Duh!"

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Reality-Based Economics

It's obviously largely coincidental, but it seems like reality is trying to punctuate a point Bill Clinton made last night -- that Democratic presidents vastly outperform Republicans in terms of job creation. "Since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24," Clinton said. "In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 [million]." PolitiFact rates the statement as true.

And today, the Department of Labor reports that "First-time claims for state unemployment benefits declined by the largest amount in more than a month in the latest week."

"The number of initial claims in the week ending Sept. 1 fell 12,000 to 365,000," MarketWatch reports. "The consensus forecast of Wall Street economists was for claims to fall a slight 1,000 to 373,000."

Steve Benen explains, "In terms of metrics, when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it's considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are being created rather quickly. We've only managed to dip below the 370,000 threshold seven times in the last 22 weeks, but the more encouraging news is that we've been below 370,000 in six of the last nine weeks."

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Republicans Whine About Republican Job Losses

OK, this is dumb:

Talking Points Memo:

One claim Republicans make to support their proposition that the country’s worse off than it was “four years ago” is that there are fewer jobs in America today than there were when President Obama took office.

“[H]e hasn’t created one single net new job since he’s been president,” Mitt Romney’s spokeswoman Andrea Saul said on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon.

The keys here are the words “net” and “since he’s been president.” And by that extremely narrow and literal reading, the claim is true — there are fewer net jobs in the country today than there were on the day Obama took office...

Of course, the problem here is that there are a lot of job losses that the president shouldn't take the blame for. As he took the Oath of Office, job numbers were crashing at a terrifying rate -- are those losses Obama's fault or Bush's? As is always the case, we'll stop blaming Bush for things like that when they stop being Bush's fault. In fact, as Steve Benen points out, one prominent Republican had previously argued that Obama shouldn't be blamed for those losses.

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Mitt Romney's Speech: Lukewarm Mashed Potatoes and a Plan to Create the Sunrise

Last night's acceptance speech for the nomination to the top of the Republican ticket was, by most accounts, a plate of warm mashed potatoes. Not too hot, not too cold, not overly seasoned or anything to get excited about. It was a speech, he didn't trip over the podium and fall into the audience in giving it, and the absence of humiliating failure is a success of sorts. What will be remembered will be Clint Eastwood's rambling, incoherent stand-up routine (at least, I think it was supposed to be comedy of some sort). Advice to future convention planners: if a prominently scheduled speaker can't give you any advanced copy of a script, do not let them go on. I don't care who it is or how starstruck you are -- if it's not in writing, it doesn't get broadcast. Abraham Lincoln, risen from the grave by the personal hand of God had better have a stack of 3x5 index cards someone can look over. If not, hit the road you spooky undead emancipator.

Inspiring it was not. It will never be quoted by someone with tears in their eyes. Jonathan Bernstein pretty much nailed it when he summed it up this way: "A generic speech and a generic convention for a generic Republican candidate." It was a speech by a guy who's running for president. Not the first and not the last and certainly not noteworthy. If speeches had a color, this one would be beige.

Unfortunately, it was also the generic speech for a generic Republican in a way worth remarking on. While it steered mostly away from substance and toward humanizing a seemingly robotic candidate, you can't have a completely substance-free acceptance speech, no matter how badly you might want one. You're going to have to talk about your opponent. You're going to have to talk about policy. You're going to have to make a case beyond, "No really, I do have a pulse."

And it was in those moments that Mitt slipped into the old habit of slinging the BS.

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Weathering the Economy

The slow recovery gets a little slower.

The Hill:

The nation's economy added 115,00 jobs in April while the unemployment rate dropped one-tenth of a point to 8.1 percent.

The figures are lower than a month ago and were also below what many analysts had expected.

They will add to the sense that the labor market is cooling down after months of stronger growth, and come as unwelcome news for President Obama, who is formally launching his reelection campaign on Friday with rallies in Virginia and Ohio.

But is it actually slower -- or are we experiencing a correction after a period of unnaturally faster than normal growth? It turns out that we can probably blame the weather -- of all things -- for our current bumpy ride.

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GOP Economic Incoherence

One of the great triumphs of Republican spin has been their ability to convince their base that they don't work for the government. To illustrate this, let's look at the common Republican argument that government doesn't create jobs. They stand there in their suits bought with a government paycheck, in a government-supplied office, with government-supplied staff, telling us -- in all seriousness, mind you -- that the government has never created a single job. Meanwhile, Republican candidates -- at least, those who happen to be governors and former governors -- compete over which created the most jobs in their states. Cognitive dissonance rules the day, as Republicans try to live in what would, to any rational person, be a confusing whirl of conflicting messages and beliefs.

The oddest thing about this is that GOP austerity is actually shedding jobs in the public sector and adding to unemployment.

Washington Post:

[An upcoming report from the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers] says that although state general fund revenue increased in 2011 and is expected to increase 2012, it remains $21 billion below 2008 levels. In addition, states are bracing for further reductions in federal aid that are likely to come from Washington’s efforts to slow the growth of the deficit.

The fiscal pressure on states has become a drag on the job market; local and state governments are shedding jobs, even though the private-sector job market has shown signs of improvement.

State and local governments have cut 455,000 jobs since the beginning of 2010, and public-sector jobs account for the smallest share of the nation's employment since the 2008 financial crisis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Conservatives and the Politics of the Tattletale Child

It's all so terribly unjust. It turns out that, if you unfairly characterize people as "thugs" and "goons," those people will have a poor opinion of you. They might even want to beat the people you're supporting in elections. It's shocking, I know. Who would expect the rhetoric of demonization to come with consequences? Surely not the Tea Party and surely not Fox News. And, since consequences are only for non-'bagger non-supermen, Fox was there to make sure those consequences didn't exist.

OK, OK, OK... Let me get it together here. I'm still in stitches over the claim that the Tea Party doesn't say things like that. Right. And Dean Martin never drank. And, of course, calling Hoffa a "thug" and comparing him to mafioso Tony Soprano is totally justified, given the context.

Context is key here. Because the context presented by Fox News was not the context presented to reality. Using what Media Matters describes as a "dishonestly cropped video," Megyn Kelly and Fox offered a version of Hoffa's speech that was easy to completely misunderstand. "Everybody here's got to vote," Hoffa said in the fuller context. "If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong! Thank you very much!"

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Reality-Based Budgeting

The budget deficit is a multi-generational problem. At least, that's the impression you get if you listen to some in Washington or pretty much any random talking head. If we don't get crazy with the budget scissors, our children and our grandchildren will pay the price. If we do nothing, the nation will be... I don't know, in flames or something.

But yesterday, Annie Lowrey at Slate crunched the numbers and found the real consequence of doing nothing -- eliminating the budget deficit in eight short years.

So how does doing nothing actually return the budget to health? The answer is that doing nothing allows all kinds of fiscal changes that politicians generally abhor to take effect automatically. First, doing nothing means the Bush tax cuts would expire, as scheduled, at the end of next year. That would cause a moderately progressive tax hike, and one that hits most families, including the middle class. The top marginal rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and some tax benefits for investment income would disappear. Additionally, a patch to keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million or so families would end. Second, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care law, would proceed without getting repealed or defunded. The CBO believes that the plan would bend health care's cost curve downward, wrestling the rate of health care inflation back toward the general rate of inflation. Third, doing nothing would mean that Medicare starts paying doctors low, low rates. Congress would not pass anymore of the regular "doc fixes" that keep reimbursements high. Nothing else happens. Almost magically, everything evens out.

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Scott Walker, History, and Wisconsin

Running kind of late today, so instead of a morning post -- morning being a lost cause at this point -- I point you to a New York Times op-ed by UW professor of history, geography and environmental studies William Cronon about Scott Walker, Wisconsin's progressive history, and how the two are totally at odds.

It's worth reading the whole piece, but here's the meat:

Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men -- their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views -- that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him

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A Setback for the Walker Administration's Union-Busting

When Gov. Walker's union busting bill was passed by the state legislature and signed into law, there was only one thing standing in the way -- Secretary of State Doug La Follette. The law would need to be published by the office of Sec. La Follette and the Secretary decided he'd publish it at the latest date allowable by law, which was ten days after signing.

This was, apparently, nothing new. "I'm doing what I normally do," he explained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which was publish the law at the latest possible date, in order for opponents to have a chance to file legal challenges. La Follette estimated at the time that this was the case with 96% of the bills that come through his office. If it's not an emergency, it cools off for a bit.

It turned out to be a good practice today, as a judge put a halt to implementation of the law:

Wisconsin State Journal:

A Dane County judge Friday issued a temporary order blocking implementation of Gov. Scott Walker's controversial measure limiting collective bargaining rights for public employees, saying a legislative committee likely violated the state Open Meetings Law when it rushed passage of the bill March 9.

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Seriously Scott Walker, What Did You Expect?

After dealing what he probably believes was the death blow to public unions in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker got about as far from Madison as it was possible to get. Way the hell and gone up north, where the only thing separating him from Canada was one great big lake. Way up to the town of Washburn, where he'd celebrate his victory with a representative of the Koch brothers, one reality TV star, and a few big money donors. A big steak and champagne fundraiser, where he'd collect on delivery of his unpopular agenda.

"While thousands of nurses, firefighters and teachers are about to lose their jobs, and Wisconsin's standard of living is driven into the dirt, Hollywood Sean Duffy and Scott Walker find time to raise champagne toasts to their Koch Brothers masters," Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate said in an statement. "It is an obscene display, but at least we see Walker and Duffy now for who they are -- true enemies of Wisconsin's working families."

A little hyperbolic maybe, but it seems to have done the trick. While the Bayfield County GOP chair said he had reservations about having "this controversy to deal with," he was more excited than worried. He had it backwards.

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Wisconsin Fight Not Over by a Long Shot

On Tuesday, Bob Schwoch -- a UW communications professor and a former chief of staff of two Wisconsin Republican state senators -- circulated an open letter to current Republican senators. Gov. Walker was leading his party to ruin, Schwoch warned, and he was doing it for reasons other than a love for Wisconsin.

This governor is not hard to read. He’s a giant fiery ball of ambition. When he sneezes he compares it to how Reagan sneezed. His first major act, after netting a modest 52 percent in a GOP wave election, was to pick the most dangerous and inflammatory political fight he could think of. His next major act was to propose a budget that might get him re-elected in Texas, but not Wisconsin. Why?

Clearly he doesn’t care about getting re-elected in Wisconsin. He doesn’t care about protests, or poll numbers, or recalls. He barely even cares if what he’s proposing passes. So long as he gets attention for proposing it.

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