Conservatives: What Has Your Republican Party Done for You?

It seems as if most people today are supporting their political party or candidate based on visceral reactions more than on intellectual assessment or logic. People are angry about what other folks have that they don't, like better pensions or more subsidized health care. Some people also seem very upset about what they believe they may lose in the future, but many of those particular fears center around the perceived potential loss of rights rather than actual concrete threats to those rights. For example, many conservatives are afraid that President Obama is threatening their Second Amendment rights to bear arms, when in fact the reality is that he has done nothing since taking office that indicates that he is trying to do so. Although he promised while campaigning in 2008 to reinstitute an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004, he has not done so, and in fact now avoids talking about reinstating the ban. Whatever his views and positions were prior to his election as President, he has done and said nothing since then in support of gun control. In fact, in 2009 Obama signed into law a bill that allows firearms to be carried in national parks, eliminating Reagan's ban on weapons in parks that Bush had overturned in 2008.

So to all these people who support Republicans, including Tea Party members, I feel compelled to ask "What have the Republicans done for you, personally, that makes you continue to support them?" I am not asking what you heard on the internet that they did for someone else. I am also not asking what you know the Democrats did to you, or what you heard they were going to do to you. I do not care about what Republicans have done for this country, unless you personally were affected in a tangible way. I am not concerned with what they have done that does not affect you specifically, even if you support those measures on principal. I am asking what the Republicans have done that has benefitted you, personally and directly, in the past decade.

Unless you are one of the wealthiest people in this country, earning over $150,000 a year, you haven't seen your taxes go down much. You may remember the "Bush Tax Cuts" and assume that you yourself benefitted from those cuts, but you probably did not, not really. Even though the conservative blogs and news sources tell you that you are better off because of those tax cuts, you are not. In 2004, in fact, President Bush's own chief economist found that if you earned less than $75,600 a year, your tax burden increased because of those tax cuts. Those tax cuts were for the wealthiest Americans. It wasn't supposed to work out that way on paper, at least according to the actual tax cut bill passed in 2001, but it did. If you do not believe this, and you still have your old income tax forms, look at what happened to your taxes between 2000 and 2002 (the cuts went into effect in 2002). Do not simply believe the news reports and bloggers who say that you benefitted. Look for yourself, at your own returns, and see if your taxes went down. If you have children and were married, you were more likely to have benefitted. If you were a single parent, though, you were probably out of luck. Those tax cuts were designed to benefit the wealthiest Americans the most, and they did.

You may have received a tax rebate check ranging anywhere from $300 to $1200 sometime between May and July of 2008. That would have been thanks to President Bush, who sent those out to stimulate the economy. That is the kind of concrete benefit that affected you directly that I am talking about. But then see if that amount offsets how much more you paid in taxes starting in 2002. (Incidentally, while you are looking at your old tax returns, see if you paid less for 2008. If you did, that's because of tax cuts that Obama enacted immediately after entering office, which applied to 2008).

You might have benefitted from the repeal of the Estate Tax enacted by President Bush in 2001, but you probably did not. You see, before the appeal, only 2% of Americans who died left enough of an estate to actually be subject to an estate tax. The other 98% of us never earned enough or saved enough to pass anything significant on to our children. You might have heard that people who inherited small farms or businesses lost everything because of the estate tax before it was appealed, but that's actually not true. Most small businesses and farms that were passed down to heirs - 98% of them - were not affected by the estate tax. The important thing in this exercise, however, is what happened to you. Did you inherit more than $675,000 from a parent or relative in the past decade? If not, then the federal Estate Tax never applied to you anyway. It only began to kick in when you inherited an estate valued at more than $675,000. And as I noted above, that only happens to a lucky 2% of Americans.

Since the Patient Affordable Care Act passed, also known as "Obamacare" to people who don't like it and fear that it takes away their freedom to choose their own destinies, there has been a tremendous amount of attention paid to what this bill will do to our citizens. But instead of addressing those fears or issues, I want to ask you what happened to your health insurance since 2000. I am asking whether you, personally, saw any changes in your health insurance policy over the past decade. Did you lose health care coverage or gain it? Did you see your premiums rise or fall? Did your insurance company increase the co-pays for prescriptions or office visits, or did they decrease?

If you are like many other Americans, you may have lost your health insurance coverage between 2000 and 2006, because 8.6 million of us lost our coverage between those years, while Republicans were in control of the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. For those of us who still had health insurance, we all started having to pay a lot more for it. For a baseline, in 1996 those of us lucky enough to have health insurance plans through our employers saw those premiums rise by only 0.8% that year. But in 1999, our premiums rose by 5.3%. In 2000, premiums went up another 8.2%, in 2001 they went up by 10.9%, in 2002 by 12.9%, and in 2003 we Americans on average saw a whopping 13.9% increase in our health care premiums. So that this is clear, that is the amount by which insurance companies increased their premium charges for employer-sponsored plans. That's not how much more your boss made you pay, even though he or she did not have to pay more for your plan. That's how much insurance companies in this country increased their premiums each year for the health care plan your employer offers to you as part of your benefits package, if you are lucky enough to get one.

If your health insurance premiums went up between 1998, when the significant rate increases began, and 2003, when they skyrocketed out of control, that is something that your Republican Party did for you. Between 1995 and 2007, Republicans controlled the Senate and the House of Representatives. Without getting into a complicated discussion of deregulation, health care costs, inflation, and so forth, I think it suffices to say that things that happened starting a few years after 1995, when the Republicans took control of Congress, and 2006, when they lost control of it, are the result of Republican rule. So if you were paying a lot more for your health insurance in 2006 than you were in 2000, thank your Republican Party.

I am fairly confident that Republicans have not benefitted you personally with regards to abortion. If you are like most Republicans, you are anti-abortion. You believe abortion is wrong, for any number of reasons. You, therefore, will not have an abortion under any circumstance, or perhaps only in the case of rape or incest or if your life is in danger. It therefore does not matter to you, personally, whether abortion is legal or illegal. You will not have an abortion regardless of its legality. If Republicans acted to make abortion legal forever, that would not affect you personally because you would not choose to have one. Likewise, if Republicans made abortion illegal, that would also not affect you, since you would not be having one anyway. So whatever restrictions Republican legislatures around the country have enacted that restrict access to abortion, you personally are not affected. Therefore, they have not done anything to benefit you personally with regards to abortion.

If, however, you are one of the minority of Republicans who believes that abortion should be legal, then the Republican party's efforts to progressively restrict access to abortion might impact you personally and directly if you find yourself with an unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancy. You might not be able to afford to take two or more days off of work in order to fulfill the "waiting periods" that half of all states have enacted under Republican legislatures. You also might live in a state where abortion providers have been murdered specifically because of the service they provide. This is a case in which your party's policies and laws might have had a direct impact on you, albeit a negative one.

I also suspect that you personally have not benefitted from the Republican support of traditional marriage. Why not? Because if you are like the majority of Republicans, you are heterosexual, and every institution in this country, religious or secular, public or private, already fully supports and endorses heterosexual marriages. The Republicans have not won you, personally, the right to marry your opposite sex partner. You already had that right, and the approval of the entire country to do so. In fact, you have had that privilege for centuries. You also did not ever face any discrimination against you because of your heterosexuality. You have always been able to serve as an open heterosexual in the armed forces. You have been able to add your opposite sex spouse to your health insurance plan if you wanted to do so. You have always been able to marry your opposite sex spouse in any state in this union, and have it legally recognized. Therefore, the Republican "Defense of Marriage Act" did not affect you personally. You already had the right to marry your opposite sex partner, and remember, in this exercise I am asking what the Republican Party had done that has directly affected you, not what it has done to other people. The "Defense of Marriage Act" did not protect your personal right to marry someone of the opposite sex. You already had that right. It only affects someone who is not heterosexual, so for the majority of Republicans, it does not impact you.

As for the minority of Republicans who are LGBT, I admit that your party probably has had a direct effect on you. Your Republican Party has tried to keep you from serving in the armed forces as an open gay for years. When the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" repeal of 2010 was brought to a vote, all but 8 Republican Senators voted to keep that policy intact. When the federal "Defense of Marriage Act", which defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman, passed in 1996 not a single Republican senator voted against it. Your party also does not want to protect you from hate crimes that might be perpetrated against you simply because you are gay. When the "Matthew Shepherd Act" was passed in 2009, expanding hate crime laws to include those based on sexual orientation bias, only four Republican senators voted yes. Twenty-eight Republican senators voted no, in order to prevent crimes that are a result of sexual orientation bias from being considered hate crimes. Seven Republican senators didn't even bother to vote. I think that it is safe to say that as a gay Republican, your party has clearly done some things that may have affected you personally. However, I would not say that those things have benefitted you. 

There are, of course, some conservatives who will be able to report that the Republican Party has had a direct positive effect on them over the past decade. Those people who are in the top two percent of wage earners in this country have benefitted directly through tax cuts, as have the children of those top 2%ers if they inherited a large estate in the last decade or so. And although I will not discuss the banking system deregulations enacted by Republicans in the late 1990's, or the massive tax breaks for corporations and hedge fund managers that the Republicans have passed into law, those certainly might have had a direct positive impact on you if you happen to be the CEO of a large national bank, or the manager of a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. However, I again have to point out that the vast majority of us Americans - all but 1% of us, that is - did not directly profit from those laws and deregulations.

In doing the math, the actual numbers of people who have themselves been directly helped by the Republican Party is almost insignificant. If less than 2% of Americans have benefitted financially from the legislation and policies of the Republican Party, substantial numbers have been harmed with increasing costs of health insurance and increasing tax burden, many have lost health insurance as a direct result of their party's legislation, and few have benefitted personally from their social agenda, why do you continue to support them, elect them to office, and thereby continue to contribute to your own worsening financial status?

One of the few explanations that makes sense is that the Republican Party has waged a campaign to make ourselves the enemy, and we are buying it. The Republican Party passes laws that routinely and uniformly benefit the upper class. The Bush tax cuts, the repeal of the estate tax, the corporate tax breaks, the deregulation of the banking industry, all directly benefit those among us who comprise the top 1% of earners in this country. Similarly, the Republican acts to repeal or defund laws that increase costs of manufacturing, like the Clean Air Act that requires industries to limit their toxic air emissions, save those corporations money. They do not, however, save you, the average American, any money. In fact, polluted air makes you more likely to be ill with asthma and bronchitis, which means that you must call in sick more and therefore lose income.

As tax-paying, air-breathing Americans of the middle class, you should be asking why the wealthiest of Americans have the best tax deals, but you don't. There is a theme among conservative bloggers and pundits that liberals "envy" the wealthy. Liberals are portrayed as being motivated by jealousy, as if that is the primary reason for their arguments that the wealthiest Americans should be paying more than they are in taxes. It is much easier to dismiss an argument without debate if you can classify it as a deadly sin or a moral character flaw, rather than a legitimate concern based on tax code inequity. Asking why you pay more taxes as a proportion of your income than a multi-millionaire does is selfish and morally questionable, according to the Republican Party, not a legitimate question to propose to your legislators.

The Republican Party also divides the middle class by pointing out the "privileges" that some citizens have that others don't. Public sector workers have consistently had better benefit packages than private sector employees, with larger employer contributions to their health insurance and pensions. Private sector employees, on the other hand, have had their pensions all but disappear over the past few decades, and in the past ten years have had to make larger and larger contributions to their own health insurance. But instead of asking why and how this happened, conservatives encourage you to simply look at who got the best hand after the dust settled. Private sector Americans are angry that the public sector employees managed to hang on to better benefits when they were not able to do so. Unionized employees, private and public, have continued to bargain for the best packages for their members, while non-unionized Americans began to lose their benefits packages years ago. But rather than viewing that as a failure of the non-unionized Americans to maintain the best possible wages and benefits, it is instead portrayed by the Republican Party as an unfair, unwarranted, and unearned coup of unionized workers.

What would be in the best interest of the private sector employees would be to improve their own wages and benefit packages so that they are on a par with those of the public sector. However, that is not even considered fleetingly as an option. Instead, the Republican tactic has been to encourage the private sector employees to pull the public sector down to their ever-worsening level. That strategy has been played out recently in Wisconsin, where the Republican Governor Scott Walker has proposed a budget that, among other things, strips the rights of most public sector employees to collectively bargain. The public sector unionized employees have been portrayed as privileged and lazy by the Republican legislators and governor, and the Republican party has squarely placed the blame for the private sector citizens' financial struggles on the heads of the unionized Americans. The Republican Party insults liberals for being envious of the wealthy, but encourages envy in its own constituents when it advances the Republican agenda.

As Abraham Lincoln said in 1858, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The Republican Party knows that a middle class, divided, cannot work for our common best interests if we are fractured by in-fighting. Since the interests of the Republican Party are not aligned with the best interests of the middle class, they have therefore encouraged divisiveness amongst us. So again I pose the question to conservatives, what has your Republican Party done that has directly benefitted you? Before you head to the voting booths next or open up your checkbook for a donation to your political party or candidate, look at the specifics of what your party has done for you over the past decade. If you are like 98% of us, they have not done anything that has benefitted you. Perhaps it is finally time to rethink your political affiliation.

Conservative News Sites Misrepresent Wisconsin Protests

Although numerous "news" sites throughout the country claim to be "balanced and fair", that is rarely the case. Some of those sites in Wisconsin are either blatantly misrepresenting the Madison protests, or selectively reporting facts so as to portray the protests inaccurately.

Yesterday evening, WBAY, a news service based in northeastern Wisconsin, reported that "a sizable number of protestors on both sides of the governor's budget repair bill brought their rally cries to Madison". After noting that the "crowd was estimated at nearly 70-thousand people" the report goes on to note that "supporters of Governor Walker chanted 'Pass the bill, pass the bill'" in a "sea of unity". They then quote several pro-Walker supporters who talk about "taking back our nation" and "the capitol building being dis-seized by union forces". They offer no actual estimates of the number of counter-protestors, no quotes from protestors, and no explanation of the complaints the protestors have with the bill. Had they reported facts, they would have needed to acknowledge that the Walker supporters were vastly outnumbered by the anti-bill protestors.

Wisconsin News Outlets Misrepresent Madison Protests

Although numerous "news" sites throughout the country claim to be "balanced and fair", that is rarely the case. Some of those sites in Wisconsin are either blatantly misrepresenting the Madison protests, or selectively reporting facts so as to portray the protests inaccurately.

Yesterday evening, WBAY, a news service based in northeastern Wisconsin, reported that "a sizable number of protestors on both sides of the governor's budget repair bill brought their rally cries to Madison". After noting that the "crowd was estimated at nearly 70-thousand people" the report goes on to note that "supporters of Governor Walker chanted 'Pass the bill, pass the bill'" in a "sea of unity". They then quote several pro-Walker supporters who talk about "taking back our nation" and "the capitol building being dis-seized by union forces". They offer no actual estimates of the number of counter-protestors, no quotes from protestors, and no explanation of the complaints the protestors have with the bill. Had they reported facts, they would have needed to acknowledge that the Walker supporters were vastly outnumbered by the anti-bill protestors.

Channel3000.com, based in Madison and affiliated with WISC-TV, posted a story early this morning titled "Tea Party Members Rally on the Capitol Square: Walker Supporters Work to Make Voice Heard".  They noted that Walker supporters "finally got their say" as "thousands came out to the Capitol Square to try to drown out the anti-Walker rhetoric". One Walker supporter was quoted as saying that "it's kind of amazing that a minority of the union bosses and some of the union activists are against this bill". Unfortunately, this "news" site does not bother to note that in fact many "union bosses", including those of AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, WEAC, other local teachers' associations, IronWorkers, Custodial Workers, W-AFT, United Steelworkers, Electrical Workers, and the Teamsters, all of which were represented by members at the rally on Saturday, are all opposed to this bill. Even unions exempted from the bill, such as the LaCrosse Firefighters Union, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, Madison Professional Police Association, Racine Police and Firefighters, Milwaukee's North Shore  Firefighters, and Madison Firefighters are opposed to it as well. The article also fails to note the number of protestors and counter-protestors. It simply states that there were a total of 60,000 people, without clarifying that even the most generous Tea Party estimates place their numbers at about 5,000. There were no interviews with bill opponents done by the reporter, or at least none that were quoted. However, the article does admiringly mention the contribution of "Joe the Plumber" who was flown in to support Walker.

The LaCrosse Tribune's article this morning "70,000 people - on both sides - descend on Capitol" even misrepresents the breakdown of participants in the lede. The article notes that the "pro-labor protestors turned the Capitol into a campsite that's started to smell like a locker room", but then notes with relief that  "supporters of Walker came out in force on Saturday" but neglects to mention the actual numbers. Later in the article it is implied that the Walker supporters were far more numerous than they actually were, when the writer states that "throngs of Walker supporters who arrived in Madison...carried signs with a fresh set of messages". The article oozes with bias against the bill's detractors. Unfortunately, the Janesville Gazette, from the town that elected Paul Ryan, picked up portions of this article, including the "locker room" smell bit and the claim that Walker supporters came out "in force".

Articles such as these that seem to intentionally misrepresent the protests are dishonest and harmful. They deprive the citizens of our state of accurate accounts of the situation in Madison, and convey an incorrect picture to the rest of the country and the world about what is really happening here. While Walker continues to claim that all of Wisconsin supports him with the exception of the union workers at the Capitol, the facts suggest otherwise. With the massive funding of the Tea Party, the sponsorship by inaccurately named conservative American Majority, and their impressive ability to organize, it says something significant that they were able to bring only about 2,000 Walker supporters to their official demonstration at the Capitol on Saturday.

Finally, I feel very grateful that the protestors have behaved beautifully throughout the week. Despite a few false reports to the contrary, there have been no arrests this week, and no episodes of violence. Maintaining a peaceful protest prevents the conservative media and pundits from dismissing our protests as "riots" and makes it harder for them to label us "thugs". Their inability to report on violence forces them to cover the issues at hand instead - even if they cannot quite compel themselves to do it with complete accuracy.

Madison, Wisconsin Protest - Saturday Report From the Ground

On Saturday I went downtown to spend my second day at the Capitol protesting on behalf of workers' rights and health insurance for the young and the disadvantaged, and against a bill that Scott Walker intends to use to divide the middle class in order to make us easier to conquer. While the protests on Friday had been entirely peaceful, energetic, and inspiring (see my report), I was slightly more concerned about the tone the protests might take Saturday with the arrival of the heavily funded Tea Party counter-protestors. I therefore left the kids at home, and my partner and I arrived at the Capitol around 11:00 AM.

I should not have worried. The protestors against the bill remained entirely peaceful (as they have been all week) and mostly civil, and the counter-protestors who gathered in support of Scott Walker's union-busting bill were largely peaceful as well. More importantly, though, the counter-protestors were vastly, and I mean vastly, outnumbered. I estimate that the protestors outnumbered the counter-protestors by at least 23 to 1. (***For my method of calculation, see below). We left at 4:00 PM, and the crowd had thinned slightly from its peak at about 1:00 PM, but as of 5:00, the Madison police reported no arrests or other problems during Saturday's protests.

As far as violent rhetoric, I heard none from either side. During McKenna's pro-bill, anti-union speech, I heard plenty of snide comments about "union thugs", "communists", and "vegetarians" (like that's a problem). I also didn't know that being a "university student" could be construed as an insult, but apparently for some Tea Party members it is something worth slandering. Some union supporters did insult teabaggers, and there was a TP member sign that insulted "Teachbaggers", which I assumed to be an attempt at cleverness. The oddest sign I saw was carried by a TPer and read "Walker the Moses of the Midwest". I thought TPers didn't like Jews, but maybe I was wrong.

There were signs on both sides that contained references to odious historical figures. There were two union supporter signs that I saw that showed Walker's face styling a Hitler mustache. There was a TP sign that showed photos of Sadam Hussein, Hitler, and bin Laden and read "They ran and hid too". As far as violent rhetoric on signs, there was very little.

One thing that struck me was the relative lack of organization or obvious funding of these protests. While there were a few speakers in the morning against the bill, there were none for the rest of the day. There was no obvious organizer, no schedule of events, and most of the protest felt spontaneous, as it has for the entire week. In contrast, the Tea Party machine had clearly mobilized. They had speakers with prepared speeches, like McKenna's, audio equipment they had brought to the site this morning, and their counter-protestors were strategically gathered in one area in order to maximize their impact. Having participated for almost 40 years in demonstrations of all varieties, from million participant marches in DC and New York to small gatherings that ended in civil disobedience, and I know funding and professional organization when I see it.

Overall, I was awed by the positive attitude of the protestors, their commitment to changing this fiasco of a bill, and their civility. This is a true grassroots uprising, one that all Wisconsin citizens should view with pride.

***While estimates from the peak of the rally today put the crowd at about 70,000 total, with about 60,000 people outside the building and 8,000 inside, I have not seen many estimates of the number of protestors in relation to the counter-protestors. Accurate estimates of crowds are extremely difficult to make without aerial photos, but as an amateur I would have placed the total number outside the capitol between 50,000 and 75,000. However, to give an idea of the number of Tea Partiers, the Tea Party counter-protestors were primarily concentrated on a driveway between the Capitol building itself and the road that circles the Capitol square. According to a map, that driveway is about 150 feet long, and by my estimate is 30 feet wide, with two narrow lanes for traffic and two parking lanes. At the building end of it, the driveway was used as the stage for their speakers today, like the intellectual radio host Vicki McKenna, and the crowd was loosely packed into the area between the stage  and the road. I know it was loosely packed because I walked through it during McKenna's speech, listening to the TPers and admiring their clever signs. This would mean that at most the TPers occupied an area of 4500 square feet.

The protestors occupied the entire street surrounding the capitol. They were, on average, packed about as loosely as the counter-protestors, which I confirmed by traveling the entire street twice. The street stretches for 2550 feet, and with three full traffic lanes and a parking lane, is over 40 feet wide, which means that it comprises an area of 102,000 square feet. Conservatively, that means that the protestors occupied 23 times more space than the TPers.

Madison, Wisconsin Protest - Friday Report From the Ground

On Friday February 18,  2011, I took advantage of the second day of school closings in my district and gave my children a lesson in civics, politics, and the rights that are protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution - those which guarantee our freedom of speech and our right to assemble peacefully. I took them to the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin so that we could participate in the protests against Scott Walker's "budget repair bill".  While I had heard reports of "chaos" and the "powder keg" environment, I suspected those might be inaccurate, and they were. When we arrived around 1:00 PM, the Capitol was crowded and bustling. After finding a decent vantage point on the 4th floor overlooking the closed doors of the Senate chamber, I did some exploring around the building.

Any reports of violence or chaos were lies, plain and simple. The thousands of people in the building were energetic, polite, talkative, and boisterous. The crowd was a mix of all ages, with many families and also a good number of university students. Of all the people I spoke with, only one elderly gentleman in the Capitol on Friday was from out of state. He had lived in Wisconsin for over forty years, and after his retirement from the police force, moved to Minnesota to be closer to his daughter. Much of the time the protestors were chanting slogans such as "Kill the Bill" and "This is what democracy looks like". 

Although I had heard conservative reports that things were getting messy in the Capitol, I saw no trash in places other than in trash receptacles, and the bathrooms were far cleaner than the ones at Miller Stadium during a Brewers game. This is largely thanks to a group of UW students who have been spending their time cleaning the Capitol while the protests continue. 

A more important gauge of the crowd's behavior, however, comes from the law enforcement officials who have been on hand at the Capitol over the past few days. The Madison Police Department released a statement yesterday in which they commended "the behavior of those who have gathered peacefully to protest" and confirmed that "MPD officers have made no arrests this week." And as it turned out, my partner knew three of the state troopers who happened to be on duty while we were there yesterday. When they stopped by to talk, they told us that they were pleased with the protesters and the tone of the demonstration so far. They confirmed that they had had no problems whatsoever with any of the demonstrators. They did, however, all express concern about the arrival of Tea Party members Saturday, and acknowledged that they were concerned about the counter-demonstrators' possible behavior. 

We left after four hours. The crowd had not thinned at all, and the chanting was still going strong. Some of the university students I spoke with were planning on staying the night - again - but most of us were leaving and planning to return again on Saturday.

Where's Waldo? Scott Walker Avoids Wisconsin Capitol and Messy Protests

Scott Walker is making himself as scarce as possible right now. After unveiling his budget repair bill that aims to bust unions and threaten the lives of one third of Wisconsin's children on Friday, Walker seemed to suspect that his plans might be unpopular. He notified the media present that he had alerted the Wisconsin Guard to be on alert in case of unrest. He quickly back-pedaled and clarified that he meant to use the Guard to fill in should prison guards strike, but the implication was much more sinister.

Over the next few days, the unpopularity of Walker's budget has begun to show. Protests started at the capitol in Madison on Monday, and a hearing on the proposed plan lasted 17 hours before Republican legislators walked out - with citizens still waiting to speak. Demonstrations continue today, and the Madison school district closed schools today after approximately 40% of teachers called in sick in order to attend the protests at the capitol.

One person who hasn't shown up at the capitol, however, is Walker himself. While protestors gathered in Madison on Tuesday, Walker spent time at in Wausau at Wilson-Hurd Manufacturing, where he met briefly with workers then refused to answer any questions afterwards. Although the Wausau Daily Herald paper does not mention any connection between Wilson-Hurd and Walker, all it takes is a little investigation on the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign website to see why he chose this particular manufacturing company. The CEO of Wilson-Hurd, Bill Siebecker, and his wife both contributed to Walker's gubernatorial campaign. To his credit, he also stopped at McDonough Manufacturing near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the owner there, Sue Tietz, did not make any personal contributions to Walker's campaign.

But after Tuesday afternoon, his trail went cold. Although he has not yet made the move to his new mansion in Madison, protestors who marched to demonstrate in front of Walker's house in Wauwatosa last night were met with a dark house.

Walker was scheduled to hold a press conference before noon today in his chamber, but as of 12:15, no such conference had occurred and news is now that it will take place late this afternoon. Apparently the Senate Republicans held a secret meeting this morning , but no word on the outcome has been released. Hey, it was supposed to be a secret, right? Calls to Walker's office received only a busy signal, a widespread problem since the weekend.

Unfortunately, Walker has made no indication that he is willing to alter his plans for budget repair, and the extreme conservative bent of the legislature makes a defeat of the bill unlikely. It is a shame that this outpouring of support for Wisconsin's workers, children, needy, and disadvantaged did not occur on November 2nd of last year, when it would really have made a difference. Now, Walker's plan to bust unions, divide and conquer the citizens of the state, and leave almost a half a million children in the state uninsured seems unlikely to be stopped.

Scott Walker Will Unveil Budget in Front of Political Donors

In a "break from tradition" Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker just announced that he plans to unveil his two year budget at a local Madison business, rather than in a joint session of the Legislature in the State Assembly. He claims that the move is intended to highlight the commitment he made to create 250,000 jobs in Wisconsin over the next four years.

However, as a cynic, I suspect that Walker simply wants a more friendly audience for his unveiling, one that will pander to his "vision" rather than challenge the drastic cuts that will affect the lives of the majority of Wisconsinites. The unveiling is to take place at Vita Plus Corporation, in Madison. Founded in 1948, Vita Plus is an employee owned (read, "no unions allowed") livestock and animal feed supply company. Wisconsin does have a strong agricultural tradition, so I suppose if the Governor wants to conduct matters of the state at a place of business, then one rooted in agriculture might be appropriate.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Walker's tactics that current President and CEO of Vita Plus, Robert Tramburg, was a political donor to Walker's campaign for governor. He gave at least $500 prior to November. More importantly, however, Tramburg is on the Board of the Greater Madison Chamber of Congress, an organization not particularly known for its fondness for unions, although they were on board with the train plans. Also of note, the General Manager of Vita Plus's division SF Transport, John Every, was also a contributer to Scott Walker's campaign, but interestingly Mr. Every did not list an employer - a designation that is required by law.

Wisconsin law states that "all meetings of all state and local governmental bodies shall be publicly held in places reasonably accessible to members of the public and shall be open to all citizens at all times unless otherwise expressly provided by law.”  Wis. Stat. § 19.81(2). In his "Open Wisconsin Meetings Law Compliance Guide" from August 2010, Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen states that "Although there are some exemptions allowing closed sessions in specified circumstances, they are to be invoked sparingly and only where necessary to protect the public interest." Essentially, the spirit of this set of laws is to keep government transparent. 


Given that Vita Plus is a private company, however, and is not public property, I suspect that there is no chance that Walker's meeting at their headquarters will be open to the public. Not being a Constitutional scholar like Michele Bachmann, I do not know if the presentation of a state budget would fall under the laws governing meetings of state government, but it should. 


This seems to me to be Walker's way to circumvent that possibility that pesky protestors might want to be present as he unveils his plans to gouge the majority of our citizens, while protecting corporations, big businesses, and the wealthy. He will use this private business as a comfortable shelter from the unpleasantness of the demands of his constituents. 


What a coward.