Politics

Are Texas-based tea party groups being unfairly singled out for persecution by crazed IRS agents? Or, rather, are they in fact actually violating federal election laws and thus deserving of careful scrutiny? If you read Milwaukee's daily newpaper, you might think the former; but if you read Houston's daily paper, you might think the latter.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel jumped into the continuing fray over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of tea party requests for tax-free status last week by localizing the story. The paper's prominently placed headline fairly shouted: "IRS asked about Wisconsin recall, Texas tea party group says". The story went on:

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.

Such libel she perpetrates against a couple of hundred thousand innocent Wisconsin voters!

We're talking about State Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, who, during a post-election interview on WISN-TV in Milwaukee, suggested that the GOP voter-fraud bogeymen gave President Obama his win in the Badger state. Darling said that had the GOP's silly Voter ID law (forestalled temporarily by court order in a pending case) been in place Nov. 6, it would have "absolutely" made a difference in the final tally:

Royally screwedIn poker it's called a "tell" -- an unconscious sign from your opponent indicating what's really going on in his head. The fellow licks his lips and you may have figured out from keen observation that means, for example, that he's planning to bluff.

Well, here's another "tell" for Gov. Scott Walker and his administration. To begin with, the Walkerites are infamous mouthers. Walker PR people will wade in at the slightest news of interest and turn out long, mostly ideological statements that may be off point but serve to soothe the boss and his enablers while reasserting his wrong-headed ideology. So whenever the Walker administration remains absolutely silent on a relatively big issue, that's one huge "tell." They don't just have nothing to say, they've less than nothing. For (and this is something Mitt Romney has in his presidential campaign been struggling to avoid, lately) if they uttered word one, it would be the wrong word and instantly show them up as the charlatans they are.

Two examples: One, the John Doe probe of the Walker administrations (both his Milwaukee County executive's tenure and now the state executive branch). He's not talking about the Doe, these days, because whenever he talked in the past about how he wasn't a target of the probe or how he was cooperating fully, his misstatements and misdirections always caught up with him.

If there is one public policy  issue on which Scott Walker and Republicans in general are totally out of touch with reality, it's mass transit. They actively oppose a balanced state and national transportation policy that makes sense for the 21st Century. And in Wisconsin's case, that opposition is going to cause environmental and economic harm, across the state and especially our cities.

That is becoming increasingly clear as policy experts examine how public attitudes are changing towards transportation and the way communities are designed. From the Reuters news service:

Phil Scarr over at Blogging Blue came up with this excellent chart showing the difference between the normal manner in which job growth is measured in Wisconsin and nationwide and the method now (but not always) preferred by Gov. Scott Walker and his administration. A third line shows the overall national job creation trend. The simple takeaway: Even granting greater accuracy to Walker's use of quarterly statistics, this state still badly lags behind the rest of the nation in job growth, even though a jobs recovery was already putting Wisconsin ahead of the curve as he came into office.

Kelda Helen Roy's speech from last night about the continued war on women in our legislature. I've come to think of it as the "Women and Children Last" session.  This was one of many such speeches last night (and in to today).