Wisconsin and the aftermath

What’s New Today

 he Wisconsin recall.  #2 is an emotional look at what happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday.  #3 spells out who are the winners and who are the loser from Wednesday’s recall.  Who do you think is the one person on both lists? #4 asks what it the consequences for unions in general from the recall.  #5 is akin to Jay Leno’s question to Hugh Grant when he was dating Elizabeth Hurley and was caught with a hooker in his car.  “What were you thinking?”  This article asks the democrats the same question.  #6 is a quick video which shows you what delusional is.  #7 tells of Obama's membership in the far left New Party. 

Today’s Thoughts

Democrat pundits are citing exit polls in Wisconsin that said Obama holds a 10 point lead over Romney.  Of course these are the same exit polls that said the 7 point Walker win was tied.  

After one week, June is already looking like a disaster for President Obama: first the unemployment numbers and then the Wisconsin recall.  But it could be worse.  SCOTUS will rule on the Constitutionality of Obamacare later this month.  

Howard Dean sees the Wisconsin recall vote as the beginning of the undermining of American democracy.  Actually Howard, “This is what democracy looks like.”

Obama’s decision to go the Hollywood for fund raisers on D-Day’s 68^th anniversary marks his 150^th fund raiser while in office. 

1.  The Wisconsin Recall and Money

The spin from the left on the morning after their disastrous Wisconsin recall election failure is that Governor Scott Walker (R-WI), who walked away with the election, did so because he spent oodles of money.

Politico’s takeaway: “Money shouts.” “Walker wins one for the plutocrats,” trumpeted Joan Walsh of Salon.com.  “Outspent 7-1, Democrats couldn’t beat Scott Walker with a strong ground game.” Media Matters’ favorite Washington Post columnist, Greg Sargent, cited the Citizens United decision allowing corporate political spending no less than five times in his recap of the election – despite the fact that not one dollar spent in Wisconsin would have been illegal before Citizens United. The Post’s Chris Cillizza said, “Being outspent 10-1 (or worse) is never a recipe for success in a race. Democrats cried foul over Walker’s exploitation of a loophole that allowed him to collect unlimited contributions prior to the official announcement of the recall in late March.” Daily Kos said that with Walker’s spending edge, “It shouldn’t even be close.”

This is false.

Overall, over $63.5 million was spent on the recall effort by various parties. Walker spent about $30 million; Barrett spent about $4 million. Most of the money spent by Walker came from out-of-state sources – The Republican Governors Association spent about $4 million, almost all from out-of-state; the Kochs gave $1 million; the Chamber of Commerce gave $500,000. On the surface, then, it appears that Walker had a tremendous cash advantage.

Not so fast. As it turns out, labor unions spent an additional $21 million on the recall election. When it came to state senate recall elections back in September 2011, Democrats outspent Republicans $23.4 million to $20.5 million….

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/06/06/Media-Spin-Recall-As-Money-Suck

If you go beyond the spin I think unions are flummoxed by Citizen United and the Tea Party.  Normally, the Unions would have had a huge financial advantage as well as a huge advantage in the ground game.  In this election they didn’t, but found themselves facing an equal opponent.  In this case they lost and they lost big. 

2.  People United Goes Down in Flames

The American left as we have come to know it suffered a devastating blow in Wisconsin last night. The organized heart of the left gave everything it had to the fight against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker: heart, shoe leather, wallet and soul. The left picked this fight, on the issue and in the place of its choice; it chose to recall Walker because it believed it could win a showcase victory. That judgement was fatally flawed; it is part of a larger failure to grasp the nature of American politics and the times in which we live.

The left gave this fight everything it had. It called all the troops it could find; it raised all the money it could; it summoned the passion of its grassroots supporters, all the moral weight and momentum remaining to the American labor movement and every ounce of its strength and its will.

And it failed.

The tribes of the left danced and rallied in the streets of Madison. They knocked on doors. They staffed phone banks. They passed fliers. They organized on social media. They picketed. They sang. They brought in the celebrities and the stars; they marched seven times around the city blowing the trumpets and beating the drums. They hurled invective; they booed; they cheered.

And they failed.

For labor, this was a key test of strength and clout. Scott Walker attacked the American labor movement where it lives: the public sector unions are the only bright spot in the dismal world of modern American unions. They have the growth, they have the money, they have — or they had — the hope.

The Walker reforms hurt AFSCME in Wisconsin almost as badly as Ronald Reagan hurt PATCO, the air traffic controller union he famously crushed in 1981. Public sector workers have deserted their unions in droves since the state clipped union bargaining rights and stopped automatic collection of dues. After a string of bitter, humiliating and expensive defeats, labor in Wisconsin will now be a shadow of its former self, lacking the troops, the money and the morale….

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/06/06/the-people-united-go-down-in-flames/

This past week we had two significant events: the Unions loss in Wisconsin and the 70^th Anniversary of the Japanese loss at Midway.  I think the parallel between the two is significant.  Midway didn’t end the war, but before Midway, the Japanese had been undefeated.   After Midway they never won another battle. 

3.  Wisconsin: Winners and Losers

…Any time there are such high stakes in an election, there are people who win big and people who lose big. And we at the Fix love nothing more than sifting through the results to go beyond the obvious “bests” and “worsts” of the night to find a few winners and losers you might not have thought of.

Below is our attempt to do just that. If you have winners and losers of your own from the race that was in Wisconsin, the comments section awaits your thoughts.

WINNERS
 
* Scott Walker: Walker would have preferred not to have had to fight for his political life 18 months after he first won the governorship. But, fight he did — and did it well. Lost in all of the chatter about Wisconsin is the fact that Walker proved himself as a damn good candidate who successfully turned the debate in the recall from his move to strip public section unions of their collective bargaining rights to one centered on his stewardship of the Wisconsin economy….

* Republican Governors Association: The RGA was in early and often on Wisconsin — grasping quickly just how much a Walker win (or a Walker loss) could impact the national playing field heading into the fall election….

* President Obama: Staying away from Wisconsin was, in hindsight, the right move for the President….

LOSERS
 
* Organized labor: There is simply no way to spin this in a way that looks good for unions — though that doesn’t mean they won’t try. Labor was the catalyst of the Walker recall effort and throughout the process cast it as the re-awakening of a political giant. They pursued the recall against the wishes of many Washington Democrats who thought that the best course of action was to wait until 2014 when Walker was set to stand for re-election And, although labor households represented an increased share of the recall electorate as compared to past elections in Wisconsin, Walker managed to expand his margin from 2010. (And did we mention that labor dumped a bunch of money into a losing Democratic primary fight against Walker roughly a month before the recall? Yeah, so that happened.) Coming on the heels of a high profile loss in a 2010 Arkansas Democratic Senate primary and the failed attempt to retake the Wisconsin state Senate in 2011, labor’s influence looks badly reduced heading into the fall election.

* President Obama: Yes, you can be a “winner” and a “loser” in the Fix’s judgment. …

* Early exit polls: …

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/wisconsin-recall-winners-and-losers/2012/06/06/gJQABC2qIV_blog.html

What really struck me is the write up about Scott Walker.  As the author said, “successfully turned the debate in the recall from his move to strip public section unions of their collective bargaining rights to one centered on his stewardship of the Wisconsin economy.”  Contrast that to President Obama’s focus of trying to turn the debate from his stewardship of the US economy and his record in general to Bain Capital or for that matter anything else.

4. What Wisconsin means to the Unions

The results are in, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has beaten Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett in the recall election. That’s in line with pre-election polling, though not the Election Day exit polls. Even before the results came in, we knew one thing, and that is that the Democrats and the public-employee unions had already lost the battle of ideas over the issue that sparked the recall, Walker’s legislation to restrict the bargaining powers of public-employee unions.

That’s supported by a Marquette University poll showing 75 percent of Wisconsin voters favoring increases in public employees’ contributions for health care and pensions. The poll also showed 55 percent in favor of limiting collective bargaining for public employees and only 41 percent opposed.

But the strongest evidence is that Barrett and the Democrats avoided the issue. They had tried to make the election about anything else, such as an investigation of staffers who worked for Walker when he was Milwaukee county executive.

A defeat in a state where public-employee-union bargaining was authorized in 1959 has national implications.

Unions spent $400 million in the 2008 election cycle to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats. More than half of all union members nationally are public employees.

Public-employee unions insist that dues money be deducted from members’ paychecks and sent directly to union treasuries. So, in practice, public-employee unions are a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of taxpayers’ money to the Democratic party.

Walker’s law ended this practice and gave public employees the choice of whether to pay union dues. The Wisconsin membership of AFSCME, the big union of state employees, fell from 62,818 to 28,785….

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302019/walker-changes-attitudes-public-employee-unions-michael-barone#

The very last paragraph I’ve posted it the crux of the issue.  Unions without the power to force a Union shop, lose members and money.  And Democrats who get money from Unions lose contributions, big contributions.  And the fact that polls show the public is not supporting unlimited collective bargain rights for public employee unions is another blow to the system that has fed the Democratic Party since FDR. 

5.  Democrats delusion

The irony of the spectacular failure to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in Tuesday’s special election was this: It was even more spectacular because it was so utterly predictable.

Walker had led in the polls for months, and at or above 50 percent. Even more telling were actual electoral results in Wisconsin over the past 16 months — results that followed the eruption of the civil war in the state between Walker and the public-sector unions whose power over state government he’d curbed.
In an April 2011 dry run of Tuesday’s race, exactly the same anti-Walker forces had sought to oust a conservative state Supreme Court justice in a special election — and failed to pull it off.

Later that year, various recall efforts against state senators failed to wrest control of Wisconsin’s Legislature from the GOP…

….And yet liberals still managed to look, talk and sound utterly gobsmacked on Tuesday night. And to act like — there is no other word for it — fools.

Only 15 minutes before his own network called the race for Walker, MSNBC host Ed Schultz triumphantly tweeted: “All you right wingers . . . a little nervous aren’t you boys? . . . your boy can’t close.”

A little later, after the victory was assured, Schultz was emotionally prostrate. “How could this happen?” he demanded before asserting with no evidence that Walker “could be indicted” within days.
Finally, he stared into the camera and offered these words of wisdom: “It’s a tough one to take, but it’s about being in the fight. It’s about believing what you believe in and sticking to your guns and not giving up. There’s no shame, there’s no embarrassment in the way this has been played out in Wisconsin.”
No, there’s only shame and embarrassment in the way this played out on MSNBC….

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/democrats_delusions_Oa80ol18vgFWSbx3xn1oOP#ixzz1x6xTfwzj

There is a strong string of denial in the Democrats not just in Wisconsin but across the country.  We hear they know November is going to be a tough and close race, but it’s only beginning to sink in that Obama might lose (actually he probably will lose and lose big).  If you look at the signs right now the probability is exactly that. 

6. Hapless Wisconsin Protesters in Deep Denial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro6Qfm1ySKQ&feature=player_embedded

As they said, “We didn’t lose.”  It’s hard to lose when you’ve already lost your mind. 

7. Obama and the New Party

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital , Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office….

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302031/obamas-third-party-history-stanley-kurtz

I guess you can’t find skeletons in a candidate’s closet if you deny he has a closet which is what happened last election.  The more we learn about BHO, the less surprising his failure as the President is.

Romney Leaps ahead of Obama

What’s new Today 

Story #1 has Romney’s advantage as Obama moves further to the left.  #2 shows the latest Rasmussen Poll with Romney up by 7%.  #3 has a heartwarming story for the book The Real Romney.  #4 is an interesting article on government regulations.  #5 looks at left wing nationalization of industries in Argentina.  #6 looks at the improvements in Wisconsin before the recall.  #7 looks at unionism and reality. 

Today’s thoughts

Wisconsin to the general election may be analogous to the Spanish Civil War to World War II that is a preview of what is to come. 

Bill Clinton thought so little of President Obama — mocking him as an “amateur” — that he pressed his wife last summer to quit her job as secretary of state and challenge him in the primaries, a new book claims.  It’s worth reading about here.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/bill_blockbuster_an_amateur_XJHYdaV5LT1vpr5I39IKrN#ixzz1uYpUPjR7

The polls are starting to turn significantly against the Democrats.  Rasmussen has Obama down by 7% and Scott Walker up by 5% in Wisconsin.  This shouldn’t be a surprise.  Unemployment is above 8% even the way the government figures it and more and more Americans are dropping out of the labor force. 

1.  Romney’s advantage and Obama’s dilemma

…Romney in this process has one advantage: Obama had to move left on policies and turn up the left-friendly rhetoric to get back his base, thereby potentially turning off critical moderate voters in swing states. Romney essentially (and ironically) has been able to keep his tone and positions consistent. He remains the “can fix it” businessman who is conservative in temperament but not ideologically driven. In other words, Romney hasn’t sacrificed his appeal to moderates while getting back his base, in large part because between Hilary Rosen and Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage, his base came to him.

When you see a Web ad or hear an interview with one of the candidates, you should imagine how, for example, an under-employed worker in Ohio, a mother in Florida, a financial adviser in the Philly suburbs or a Hispanic small businessman in New Mexico would react. Those may be the voters in the sorts of places who haven’t already lined up with a candidate. They are influenced not only by the economy, but also by intangibles (Is this guy responsible? Could I stand hearing that one for four years?)

Given that those are the people in play, Romney has the advantage for now in focusing on the issues those particular voters care about. He also has an effective argument that on the issue they care most about, the economy, the president isn’t up to the job. Obama’s problem with these voters — who are indifferent to or slightly hostile to the idea of gay marriage, don’t much like a lot of name-calling and have been hobbled by the anemic recovery — remains: What is he going to say to them?

At some point, if Romney clears the bar that Republican challengers usually face (He’s not a nut, right?) Obama may find it difficult to devise an effective appeal to the most critical voters of all. If you think about it, just about everything Obama has done over the last year has been designed to corral the left. Now, what’s he going to do to win the voters who matter most?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-stronger-the-bases-the-more-the-middle-matters/2012/05/10/gIQAYlCFGU_blog.html

The personal endorsement of gay marriage is not a winning move by Obama and the way he couched it, it appears he knows it.  It’s his personal opinion and it’s really a state’s issue so what it turns out to be is an attempt to satisfy the left that expected much more from him when he was elected in 2008.  He’s trying to goose up their voting numbers, but as this article points out, in doing so he is alienating the critical part of the voting public.

2.   Romney reaches 50% in Rasmussen Poll

Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll has Mitt Romney holding a seven-point lead over President Obama, with a 3 percent margin of error.

From the report:

This is the first time Romney has reached the 50% level of support and is his largest lead ever over the president. It comes a week after a disappointing jobs report that raised new questions about the state of the economy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299692/rasmussen-romney-50-percent-obama-43-percent-noah-glyn

We are still six months away, but this doesn’t surprise me.  IF we were electing most popular, Obama might win.  But President requires more than being a nice guy. 

   

     3.  The Real Mitt Romney

It was shaping up to be a hard Christmas for Mark and Sheryl Nixon. They had recently moved their family to the Boston area. . .and didn’t know many people. And then. . .they got the kind of phone call every parent dreads. [Their sons] Rob and Reed had been driving back from a youth gathering at the Mormon meeting house. . .Shortly after leaving the parking lot, Reed lost control of the red Oldsmobile minivan. The car sideswiped a utility pole, struck two trees, and. . .flipped over. . . .In a flash, the two Nixon boys, standouts on the high school cross-country team, became quadriplegics. . . .

The family suddenly needed a major addition to their house. They needed a special van to transport their sons. Their financial and emotional burdens were vast. Shortly before the holidays. . .Mark Nixon, a professor of accounting at Bentley University outside Boston, got a call at his office. It was Mitt Romney. He said he wanted to help. Would they be home on Christmas eve? 

That morning. . .the Nixons opened their door to find not just Mitt but Ann Romney and their sons. They held large boxes. Inside were a massive stereo system for Rob. . .and a VCR for Reed. They’d also brought Reed a check, not knowing what else to get him. The Romneys stayed for a while. Their sons helped set up Rob’s new stereo. “What a Christmas surprise for the boys,” Sheryl wrote in her journal at the time.

The Nixons were floored. They shared a faith with Romney but didn’t really know him – they weren’t strangers, but neither were they friends. At that point, Romney held no formal leadership position in the Mormon church. He bore no direct ecclesiastical obligation to help. . . .What impressed the Nixons more than anything was that Mitt and Ann, despite their own packed holiday calendars, made a point of delivering the gifts themselves, spending time with family, and, by bringing their children with them, leading by example. . . .

That wasn’t all. Romney had also told Mark not to worry about Rob’s or Reed’s college education; he would pay for it. The Nixons, in the end, didn’t need to help. But Romney continued to quietly lend his hand. He participated in a 5K road race and fund-raiser for Rob and Reed at Bentley the next spring. He contributed substantial financial gifts toward golf tournament fund-raisers in subsequent years. 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/mitt-romney-life-after-high-school.php

With the crumbling bullying story of a teenage Mitt Romney, here’s a real story related in the book The Real Romney. 

         4.   Government regulations:  Do Barbers really need a license?

DO BARBERS REALLY NEED A LICENSE?   Dick Carpenter and Lisa Knepper of the Institute for Justice discuss their jaw-dropping licensing report in the Wall Street Journal today.  Among their findings:  Cosmetologists need, on average, 10 times as many days to fulfill their educational and training requirements (372) than emergency medical technicians (33). In fact, 66 ...

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/142846/

Whenever you discuss regulations with liberals they immediately accuse you have wanting to poison the air and water and kill children.  Perhaps we simply want a chance to get a cheap haircut. 

          5.   Nationalization—so how’s Argentina doing?

…Among the first moves Néstor Kirchner, Ms Fernández’s late husband, made on becoming president in 2003 was the renationalisation of Correo Argentino, the country’s postal service. At the time this was seen as a swipe at Grupo Macri, the concession holder, because the son of its boss had become an opposition politician. It turned out to be the start of a trend: Kirchner later took over the railways, a radio-spectrum operator, a shipyard and a water company. Since succeeding him in 2007, Ms Fernández has netted bigger fish: before grabbing YPF last month, she had expropriated Argentina’s private pension funds and its flagship airline.

 Under public control, the financial results of these firms range from mediocre to dismal. In the past year the government has spent nearly $3 billion to prop them up, and the official budget suggests that figure will double in 2012. AySA, the water company, and Aerolíneas Argentinas, the airline, have been particularly needy: they cost the state $972m and $840m last year. Though the firms lost money in private hands as well, their former owners say they struggled only because regulators subjected them to strict price controls.

The government has tried to downplay the importance of the losses by arguing that nationalisations were intended to provide public services, not to make money. But the companies have served their customers no better than they have the treasury. Buenos Aires and its suburbs have only three waste-water treatment plants for 10m residents, and often suffer flash floods that drench entire avenues. Just 47% of households in the region have sewerage, half the share in greater Santiago, Chile’s capital.

Meanwhile, only 56% of Aerolíneas Argentinas’ flights run on time, and the company sits near the bottom of most industry rankings. On its website Mariano Recalde, its boss—a former labour lawyer whose father is a pro-government congressman—vaunts its change of livery, which now features the national flag’s sky blue. “The Argentine colours rise with every take-off of an Aerolíneas flight,” he writes….

http://www.economist.com/node/21554569

I especially liked the quote “The government has tried to downplay the importance of the losses by arguing that nationalisations were intended to provide public services, not to make money.”  They’ve certainly succeeded in not making money.  Single payer healthcare would provide similar results. 

          6.   Wisconsin’s back from the brink

Wisconsin has pulled back from the brink of fiscal insolvency after Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining and budget reforms, despite doomsday warnings of fiscal disaster.

Neighboring Illinois, whose Democratic governor opted for tax hikes, has not fared as well.

Wisconsin voters appear happy with Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Wisconsin’s economic resurgence. Gov. Walker got 626,538 votes in his May 8 uncontested recall primary, more than the two main Democratic candidates combined.

That total is also more than all the GOP candidates combined in the contested 2010 GOP primary, as well as the highest voter turnout for a gubernatorial primary in 60 years.

Unemployment has dropped from 7.7 percent to 6.8 percent since Walker took office. Unemployment in neighboring Illinois, however, only dropped below 9 percent in March—the first time it has done so in two years.

Wisconsin property taxes have fallen for the first time in 12 years. The state’s adult debt per capita is roughly $687. Illinois’ is about $853.

The two states took divergent paths in 2010 in dealing with looming fiscal insolvency. While Walker pushed spending cuts and public sector reforms, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and the state legislature floated $7 billion in new taxes, including a 67 percent individual income tax increase and a 46 percent corporate tax increase….

http://freebeacon.com/the-wisconsin-boom/

Things are looking good for Scott Walker in the upcoming recall election.  The latest poll had him up 50-45 percent over his Democratic challenger. 

         7.  Union Members Better Wake Up - Fast!

Americans need to be reschooled or in the case of young public school students schooled for the first time on what a business is. It is not a charity but is generally established primarily to make a profit. If it is successful it will be able to hire and pay good wages to hard workers. If it isn't it will either have to cut expenses or shut down.

One would think that in this horrible economy, those employed with a halfway decent job would hold on to it and yet union members are foolishly electing to strike thinking that union leadership have their best interest at heart. 

Last week, Caterpillar workers went out on strike for better wages and health care after negotiations fell apart. I would suggest that they do their homework and look up the case of the Stella D'Oro factory workers in the Bronx and wake up to reality. 

I watched an HBO documentary, "No Contract, No Cookies," which chronicled the 11-month old strike of workers protesting their unfair wages. The company owners maintained that the hourly wages of $18 to $22 an hour and nine weeks of paid leave made the factory unprofitable and demanded significant reductions in wages and benefits.

 

That's when the union bosses stepped in and organized a hard fought strike with picket lines throughout the fall, winter and spring as the recession deepened. 

The union sued the company and won their case in court, winning the right to return to work. Not one worker broke ranks and the documentary showed the glee on their faces as they learned the result of their suit. Happy ending? Not quite. 

Soon after they returned, the owners closed the factory…. 

http://www.irishexaminerusa.com/mt/2012/05/08/union_members_better_wake_up_f.html

To the more left wing reader, the answer seems clear, the government should force the owners to keep the factory going even if it is losing money.  To anyone with any education that idea only works for government jobs.