Man MKE's blog

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's banner story today was about Gov. Scott Walker's breathtaking effort to gain unilateral power to sell state buildings and other public property. You can read this well-reported story yourself at the link below. Walker wants the power to sell state-owned power plants, unused lands -- even University of Wisconsin campus buildings that were paid for with dedicated private donations or student fees. Bye-bye, Kohl Center, maybe, or perhaps UW-Madison's student union. They'd fetch a fine price, dontcha know.

The story documents how some state property sales might make bad economic policy. Sure, the sales would bring in some quick cash to help the governor balance his budget. But in the long run, operating costs to the state might very well increase. Worse, the governor wants power to arrange sole-buyer deals without first seeking public bids.

Fairly unbalanced?

A newsroom memo informed Journal Sentinel staff Monday that David Paulsen will be joining the paper in a week to become breaking news editor. The memo added:

For the last five years David has run the evening and overnight operation at FoxNews.com in New York. At Fox he was in charge of a team very much like our Newshub, shaping its urgent response to national and international breaking news. He had responsibilities over story assigning and editing as well as production and news placement on the site.

Women journalists at the paper are not amused, especially since the paper continues its recent tradition of placing men in all the important editor jobs. The memo was leaked to blogging national media watchdog Jim Romenesko, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter now based in Evanston, Illinois. See link below for the full skinny.

Republicans just can't help themselves. They love meddling in Milwaukee's affairs. That's why they:

* Take away the city's residency rule for its public employees (but take them away for all local governments in the state to mask the party's real focus for the state's largest city).

* Take away money from public schools in the city, then complain when they only perform slightly better than the private voucher schools that have received tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

* Swipe tens of millions of dollars intended to help the city deal with thousands of boarded up residential homes, whose owners were thrown out thanks to the Great Recession's mortgage meltdown.

* Seize most power from the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors and invest it in a strongman county executive who will answer to almost no one. What could possibly go wrong?

The ultimate example of conservative heads exploding:

A public employee union representing faculty, counselors and professional staff at the Milwaukee Area Technical College negotiated a one-year agreement with the school, which the MATC board approved. Officials say the deal will save the school $122 million over the next 25 years, due to long-term reductions in early health benefits that will go forward. A one-year deal that saves a nine-figures amount of tax dollars ... Now THAT is good government. Unless, of course, you're a Republican.

Conservative reaction (summarized): This deal is an outrage! Schools can't negotiate with defrocked public employee unions, even if a judge rules they can! The Wisconsin Republican Party made it so!

Conservative action: Sue MATC! That'll make things better, oh yeah.

That supposedly awful, incompetent, nit-picky Milwaukee County Board, so infested with (gasp!) duly elected Democrats and minorities that Republicans in the legislature are now busy dismantling it? Well, the board's policies, hard work and votes mightily figured in a new report: Milwaukee County has a nearly $25 million surplus from 2012 operations and the five-year budget outlook is encouraging. That's according to county Budget Director Craig Kammholz.

One of the key arguments in the continuing legal battles to overturn Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union law is that citizens of this state and country have the right to associate freely. By arbitrarily "decertifying" public employee unions that refuse to jump through Walker's expensive, time-consuming legal hoops in order to gain virtually nothing, Wisconsin Republicans want to pretend that those unions and the employees they continue to represent are somehow now "illegals," just like many of those lawmakers regard undocumented immigrants brought in by businesses to work on the cheap.

London's Daily Mail [URL below] is out with a story detailing increasing American poverty, caused by declining wages, aggravated by the Great Recession and budget cuts that already have curtailed social safety net programs. After explaining why 20 percent of all American children are now officially poor, a level not seen since the 1960s, The Mail's reporter went to the chief architect of further budget cutting, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), chair of the House Budget Committee.

Gary Bauer, an evangelical conservative with strong ties to fundamentalist religious organizations, let the cat out of the Republican Party bag the other day. In the process, Bauer effectively demolished just about everything that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has said in his role both as House Budget Committee chair and former GOP vice presidential candidate. Bauer: