Tea Party

Future MKE streetcar

The City of Milwaukee continues to fight for the right to use federal funds awarded to it for a new downtown streetcar loop, but remains stymied by conservative and corporate opposition. It's as when Gov. Scott Walker rejected the $810 million federal grant to build a high-speed passenger train route between Madison and Milwaukee; now, other Republicans are still trying to kill the city's streetcar. Walker started that fight as Milwaukee County executive and then moved on to the statehouse, leaving his pals behind to keep impeding progress. They've joined already to destroy the proposed KRM intercity commuter rail service linking Milwaukee with Chicago.

Sen. Ron Johnson, the guy who married the third basewoman and thought he hit a triple, says he is an "impatient" lawmaker who wants to have an impact. So he's running for a Republican leadership position in the Senate, in what Roll Call describes as a Tea Party vs. Establishment contest. Johnson, of course, is the Tea Party candidate.

We'll let Roll Call tell the story:

Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) has quickly secured the support of conservatives in his bid for GOP Conference vice chairman, but Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.) could still prove to be a tough opponent in any head-to-head matchup if leadership members and other establishment Republicans side with him.

Blunt said Monday that he is still considering whether to join Johnson in the race for the fifth-ranking Republican leadership position. The election is in early January.

I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

The truth can now be told.  I wasted a beautiful Friday afternoon in Hudson with the Tea Party Express.  I have nobody to blame but myself.  I went in somewhat the same way that you can't keep yourself from looking at a car wreck on the side of the road. You know you don't want to see something bad, but as long as it's right there you want to see how bad it is.  It was really more odd than threatening in the grand scheme of things.

Harsdorf special interestsHeadliner Joe the Plumber unfortunately could not make it.  But since he's neither a Joe nor a plumber, I guess I'm just as well of fixing that kitchen sprayer myself as trying to hire him.  I'm certainly not taking economic advice from him.  But there were plenty of other Tea Party stars on the bus. At least once they started coming out.  Two things were obvious right out of the gate - there weren't a lot of people on the bus, and they weren't in any hurry to confront the sizable group of protesters that were waiting when the bus showed up. The other thing that was obvious is that someone cannot spell, as the bus proudly proclaimed that the next Tea Party Express tour was taking place in August and Setpember. At least they were on message, as it was mis-spelled on both sides of the bus.  Cries of "Spell  Check" arose from the crowd.  Which again shows that if you're going to piss off schoolteachers you need to be careful with spelling and grammar.

Hudson is a genuinely pleasant Wisconsin river town, and has more good restaurants than any city of this size deserves along with a charming riverside park which was the home of the rally.

Approximately 300 people were at the rally at the time we tried to count, and it appeared that the number of Tea Party supporters and the protesters were fairly even (we counted a few more people we thought were protesters, but it was hard to distinguish who supported what in a a lot of cases).

The first few speakers were pretty well accepted by the protesters, who mostly stayed at the back of the crowd at the beginning.  But when Tea Party Nation founder Judson Philips referred to the protesters as "birth control gone wrong" the gloves more or less came off and the protesters became more raucous.

Good news for Democrats: The Tea Party is coming to town to try to help Republicans in Tuesday's recall elections. That should be the kind of help they could do without.

 Roll Call:

Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation plan to hold nearly a dozen rallies this weekend as part of a bus tour to defend six Republican state Senators in special elections Tuesday. This tea party pair represents a wide swath of the national tea party movement, and together the groups control millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, today's NY Times reports:

The percentage of people with an

Tea Party activists plan to show up in force at Congressional town hall meetings to push for passage of Paul Ryan's plan to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a sort of voucher system that will force  seniors to pay much more for health care -- if they can afford it at all.

Polls point to broad public support for preserving Medicare in the deficit debate, with majorities favoring higher taxes for the wealthy over program cuts. But a CBS poll showed nearly 60 percent of Americans know little about the changes proposed by the Ryan plan. ..

It could, of course, also be bad news for the Democrats if they don't get their act together and agree on a message about why Medicare isn't going broke and how terrible Ryan's plan would be for seniors.

(FNS - Washington, New Germany, April 17, 1947) America’s new Führer, Adolf Hitler, announced today that his official War History would in fact acknowledge that one of the biggest contributing factors to the defeat of the Allies was the insistence of the former United States of America on sticking to its Balanced Budget Amendment, which left them unable to fund the wartime conversion of the US economy for the benefit of the Alliance.

“All those ideas Mr. Roosevelt spoke of”, said Hitler, “Lend-Lease, modular shipbuilding, War Bonds, secret weapons…in the end, all of them were just words, since the Americans’ Congress was never willing to allow the country to fully fund its war effort.”