Playground Exclusive: Copy of Doyle job offer to Breske

Election year hypocrisy, or has John Gard come to Jesus on earmarks?

Frankly, I'm not sure what to believe, but considering that John Gard is a politician, I'm more inclined to believe the former. Gard has, since his announcement, tried to indict Steve Kagen for his successes in getting federal money spent in the 8th Congressional District - improvements that, you know, benefit his constituents.

An interesting strategy by Gard, asking constituents to indict a man for bringing home the bacon for them. What's more interesting, however, is that Gard is criticizing Kagen for doing the same kind of thing he was notorious for doing as a state legislator.
There are many more, but I'll just offer two examples for now - the roads to nowhere. Since Gard was elected to the Assembly in 1987, the construction on Highways 41 and 141 north of Green Bay has been practically endless. First, we spent a s@#load of money to turn the portion of 41/141 from Suamico to the 41/141 split near Abrams into a limited-access highway. Then, there's this ongoing debacle, the expansion of 41 from Oconto to Peshtigo to a four-lane, limited access highway. Mind you, this road is almost never busy. And while yes, it is the only portion of 41 that isn't four lanes, perhaps there's a reason for that? I'm guessing more people traverse 41 from Green Bay to Appleton in a day than traverse 41 from Oconto to Peshtigo in a month.

And then there's this gem, the 141 rebuild from 22 to 64 - because apparently all the wildlife walking along the side of that desolate roadway couldn't handle meandering through Lena, and Coleman, and Pound. The design and construction of this project conveniently fell during Gard's time as either co-chair of JFC or as Speaker of the Assembly. Are we really supposed to assume that Gard had nothing to do with this? That DOT ordered the project over his objections?

So Johnny, if you really want people to believe that you're sincere about earmarks, you're also implicitly asking them to ignore your own record, the one which, among other things, paved the untraveled roads of your old district with gold.

Van Hollen: Put your faith in middle-aged, white, suburban men

WisPolitics offered the following summary of J.B. Van Hollen's convention speech yesterday. While he was busy trying to disprove the assertion that the GOP hasn't adequately targeted younger voters, he proved a different point entirely.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen isn't buying the notion that Republicans have failed to adequately reach out to young people.

He told delegates he looked at his table last night and saw GOP chair Reince Priebus at 36 years old, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan at 38, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker at 40 and himself at 42, the "old man at the table."

"Folks, we've got a future," Van Hollen said, adding that Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch is 43 and 44-year-old John Gard has got a good shot at the 8th CD this fall.

The future of the GOP is safe, folks: safe in the hands of a bunch of white guys born between 1963 and 1973, most of whom have spent the majority of their adult lives as government employees.

Maybe the problem isn't just with the message. Maybe the GOP could stand for a slightly more diverse group of messengers, too.

King Kotex breaks 11th commandment, calls out Huebsch

This morning, from the mouth of King Kotex, Jim Sensenbrenner (via Owen):

"Unfortunately, Speaker Huebsch decided to push it [the budget repair bill] through the Assembly. And he did so in a manner which does not fix the problems of overtaxing, and replaces transportation fees with more state borrowing - exactly the same move which helped destroy the Republican brand. Everyone can see this is a political shell game that simply postpones the hard decisions."

If Democrats are attacking Republicans and Republicans are also attacking Republicans, this is going to be one hell of an election season in Wisconsin. In throwing Huebsch under the bus (and for what, cheap applause?), Sensenbrenner once again proves that the only guy he cares about is Jim Sensenbrenner. He's just another wealthy pig with a nose for the populist breeze, constantly rooting out issues that he can use to exploit Joe and Jane Sixpack, all the while supporting tax policies that pad his own wallet.

Sure, Mike Huebsch's speakership has been chock full of idiocy, but maybe a convention that's supposed to bring the party together is not such a good place to tear its leaders apart.

Well done, Assembly Republicans

Here's what the media has to say about Doyle's vetoes. Now, not only have the Democrats provided some policy goodies for their members, but the over-arching message is also that Democrats are more fiscally responsible than you.

MADISON, Wis. -- Gov. Jim Doyle has used his partial veto power to order state agencies to cut deeper and ensure schools will get promised aid payments on time.Doyle signed a bill Friday designed to fill a $527 million deficit in the current state budget brought on by the faltering economy. The bill called for $69 million in cuts to state agencies, delaying $125 million in school aid payments and refinancing the state's tobacco bonds to capture $209 million.The governor used his partial veto power to order state agencies to cut another $200 million and wipe out another $180 million for road maintenance legislators tucked into the bill. He also vetoed the delay in school payments.

You've been outflanked by the Democrats on BOTH sides. Way to go. It takes real political talent to be so moribund as to allow the other side to simultaneously be more liberal AND more conservative than you.

Please invite me to the funeral in November. I'd like to give the eulogy.

A hint for the AssGOP: nobody cares about the transportation fund

Perhaps the funniest moment of today's budget debate in the Assembly was when Little Brother, Jeff Fitzgerald, got up and spoke after Mark Pocan following the vote. You can find the footage on WisconsinEye, but the gist of his message was "you better watch out, if the Governor messes with the transportation fund, we're going to be back for a veto override, and oh boy, won't you be sorry then."

Here's a tip for you, Little Brother - because I care and because I remember when your caucus had competent leadership. When the economy goes in the tank, and people are struggling to pay for things like gas and health care and food and all that other good stuff, you know, provided they still have a job, they don't really give a f@#$ about whatever pet road project you might have lined up for your district. They don't care if you're putting in a turn lane or a median or widening the road if they can't afford the gasoline to drive their car on it. And they sure as hell don't give a rat's ass whether you're paying for it in cash or whether you're bonding for it.

So if you think your caucus' big ace-in-the-hole for this fall is a bunch of veto overrides on matters related to the transportation fund, you need to spend more time talking to real people and less time talking to lobbyists. You could push off every road project on the books for five years and 85% of voters probably wouldn't bat an eye, as long as you were maintaining the roads we've already got.

I get that you're puffing out your chest for the roadbuilders to make them happy, since you all dicked them over hard last session when you pitched gas tax indexing out the window. We're all very impressed.

Now pick your bucket back up and keep bailing the water out of the sinking ship. Maybe if you bailed just a little bit harder it would sink more slowly?

NRCC problems mirrored by RACC/CERS? Maybe.

In light of the most recent House GOP loss, this one in a conservative district in Mississippi, I bring you this from RCP:

A top adviser to a Republican incumbent who has a difficult race in November already says his boss is not looking to the NRCC for the same help he got in 2006. "This chairman badly underestimated how important it is to have top-flight staff," the adviser said, adding that some NRCC staffers are "toiling" under supervisors with less campaign experience. "We had been planning all along to operate without much help from them."

This internal indictment is funny because it's the same thing that I hear people complaining about in regards to RACC and CERS: that leadership and their inner circle are going to be overseeing a field staff that will barely be of drinking age. Top-flight staff are fleeing the scene or refusing to go out because leadership won't pay to keep them around or offer them any kind of security, and unlike the Democrats, who seem to have a gazillion 501s and 527s to send people off to assist, the Republicans have no parallel structure to keep its talented foot soldiers around.

Part of the Democrats' success owes to the fact that they've managed to effectively re-create the work of the caucus outside the building. Groups like One Wisconsin Now, Fair Wisconsin, and the Greater Wisconsin Committee are able to work on a parallel track with DPW, the ADCC and SDCC to accomplish much of the lifting formerly done by caucus staff (allegedly). While coordination may be illegal, knowledge sharing is quite commonplace. People, being human, talk. Meanwhile, conservative groups like Club for Growth and CRG are run by a bunch of hacks who are more interested in agenda peddling than getting people elected. Everyone on the GOP side is pulling in a different direction.

It will be interesting to see to what extent Republican field efforts at the state level are hampered by the same types of problems that apparently exist at the federal level. Similar disorganization could put a number of additional seats in play.

What's going on in there?

The Senate Dems are still in caucus. Maybe Russ should've been nicer to Nurse Judy when he decided to depose her last year.

Payback's a bitch, no? Looks like someone better find you a cure for the Nurse Judy blues, Russ - or you can update your resume to show that you shoot bricks as well as lay them.

Karma?

One weekend, you're dumping urine and excrement on your "brothers," presumably while taking a break from spanking each other with your little wooden paddles in some awkward display of homoeroticism.

A week and a half later, your frat house burns down.

My advice? Don't look back. Your little playpen has already been smote. Looking back might get you turned into a pillar of salt.

Dissecting the typical Boots and Sabers comment thread

As I was reading Owen's blog, I noticed how perfectly a comment thread on ethanol mirrors the dialogue often found on B&S.

First, everyone's favorite gun-loving Catholic, dad29, jumps in with some me-tooism. Then, the third comment is by a our favorite D.C. wannabe insider, a guy who makes a living holding people's dicks at the urinals over at HUD. I might vote for Obama just in the hopes my tax dollars won't have to pay his salary anymore.

A couple comments later, in comes Bob Dohnal, who once again spews his messianic bullshit about Tom Reynolds. He and JJ Blonien, of course, are the prophets, the hangers-on to Jesus Reynolds, who got nailed to the cross to die for the sins of Dale Schultz and, specifically Keith Gilkes. In Bob's little melodrama, the evil music fades in every time Keith is on screen. We are all reminded that if only everyone were more like Tom Reynolds, government would work better. And also, there'd be a lot more business for people who made kitchen tables out of plywood.

Just one post later, Jack Lohman wanders into the conversation and reminds us all that the real problem is those nasty campaign contributions, and reiterates the point in comments 12, 14, 16, and 18. Lohman reminds me of Matt Damon in the movie Team America. Every time the camera pans to Lohman's marionette, he screams "PUBLIC FINANCING!" in a really retarded voice.

At number 19, Dohnal brags about how his kids are in the military, and then breaks out the non sequitur and launches into a plug for his shitty website which I refuse to link to here.

Then, in comments 22-24, Jack Lohman appears to be engaging himself in debate. Either that, or he's waiting for Dohnal to come back from playing with his Keith Gilkes voodoo doll.

Classic stuff. Highly entertaining.

Supervisor to Juneau County: Seriously guys, WTF?

We all remember the story of Troy and Lee Ann Miller, who were arrested in 2004 after it was discovered that they thought torturing a child with an electric dog collar, shooting her with a pellet gun, beating her with a plastic pipe, and performing impromptu dental work with a hammer was socially acceptable parenting. You know the bar is set low when the county's human services director says "the good news is that she didn't die." Good to see that's where we're setting the bar up there. At least the parents didn't beat the kid to death.

Then there was the story of Eugene Zapata, who killed his wife in 1976 and then buried her body in Juneau County for 24 years before exhuming her and relocating her to a storage locker in Sun Prairie. What, was he concerned that Juneau County was becoming a popular burial ground for murder victims?

And now, we've got a religious sect that left a dead woman sit on the toilet for a couple months while they continued to collect her Social Security checks.

When you drive into Juneau County, you see a billboard that says "Juneau County: Worth a Closer Look." Sadly, the only people who should be looking closer at Juneau County these days are law enforcement or Mary Lazich, for whom Juneau County might be the perfect place to locate all of Milwaukee's sex offenders. They've already got the Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center and a prison up there. Just build an electric fence around the whole damn county and dump all the miscreants in the pen. We can rename the whole damn place Oz, and the correctional institution could be our own little Emerald City.

As someone who travels through Necedah more often than he cares to, I highly recommend you restrict your stops to either the Kwik Trip on the corner of State Highways 21 and 80, or the Subway about 100 yards south of there. If you go to the Subway, for the love of God, don't get out of the car. Use the drive-thru. Under no circumstance should you go near the Immaculate Conception Chapel.

Consider this the Playground equivalent of a State Department travel advisory. If you get out anywhere else, you are likely to be accosted by Catholic nuts or people who will try to convince you that the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge is just a conspiracy by the United Nations to take over their land. These are the kind of people you should only talk to if you're getting paid to talk to them.

Trust me on this. I would know.

Bond, Borrow, and Steal

No, it's not the summer's hot new action flick. It's the "solution" that Wisconsin's political leaders have, not surprisingly, resorted to fix their little budget boo-boo - you know, the one anyone with half a brain saw coming last fall.

We're pushing off some school aid payments, we're raiding the Transportation fund and replacing it with bonding, we're draining the rainy day fund, we're re-securitizing the tobacco bonds (again - how much money can we squeeze out of those things?).

Oh, and we've apparently got a bunch of policy goodies. I'm guessing those are for the Assembly Democrats, whose votes will likely be needed to get this thing passed. Hats off to Jim Kreuser for landing a whole gob of non-budget issues - 4-K, invasive species, $18MM in child care subsidies, tax changes for REITs. Great stuff. Nothing for Papa Fitz and the Senate GOP, because they're unnecessary and completely worthless.

But it gets better. In his release, Mike Huebsch can't come up with anything that Republicans really got out of this. He pats himself on the back for holding firm and saying "no to higher taxes on individuals and families." But he refuses to acknowledge that nobody at the table was actually fighting for those things. Congrats on standing up to the straw man, Mike. Impressive.

If Assembly Republicans want a quick revenue upper, they should put tomorrow's closed caucus on pay-per-view. Lots of us would pay to watch the fireworks.

What we learned tonight: Gary's May-ah is a Play-ah

Based on his stellar television interviews tonight, the whole world now knows that the mayor of Gary, Indiana, Rudy Clay, is a complete and total idiot. Seriously, buddy, counting votes is easy. People vote on a computer. You ask the computer to spit out results. Ta-da!

It's guys like Rudy Clay that make me worry about voter fraud. Not that there are a bunch of people voting illegally, but that we've got some of the world's biggest morons trying to count the votes. How is it that nobody else had problems counting absentee and early ballots, except for the people who inhabit the great industrial armpit of the Midwest?

Then again, what should Gary expect from a mayor whose nickname is "the pimp"?

More good stuff here.

Real Men of Genius: Don Pridemore

Today, Don Pridemore floated what is certainly among the more inane budget solutions ever concocted:

I am proposing a partial solution to our budget shortfall that could potentially save about $45 million dollars. The attached fiscal note, prepared by Art Zimmermann, describes the details behind my plan of an unpaid leave for all state employees. The idea has evolved into a voluntary program that would allow all state employees including legislators to take up to 3 days of unpaid leave in order to comply with existing contractual obligations. If all state employees would take the three days, the savings would total $52.2 million dollars (without including any overhead costs.)

If administered correctly, this idea could be both simple and easy to administer. If we include ourselves in the budget fix, we will automatically be on the high road and will regain some credibility. Can we all afford to return about 1% of our salaries back to the general fund? It seems that most government employees and programs are sheltered from economic downturns. This is our chance to 'feel the pain' along with the people we represent and to share the burden along with our fellow taxpayers.

This proposal only puts a dent into the budget shortfall, but along with other spending cuts, we can solve the shortfall in a way we can be proud of. We can also go back to our districts and with energy and enthusiasm that we did the right thing. As an added bonus, we could also include a 1% give back of our per diem and office supply budgets. Think of the positive press we can claim if we start the budget shortfall solution with ourselves!

Yeah, that's the stuff of brilliance alright. When history looks back at the sad march of the Assembly Republicans into the minority, the road will be paved with dozens of shitty, meaningless proposals like this one.

First, Pridemore's proposal is unnecessary. State employees can already request unpaid leave. How does Pridemore think legislative staff can transform so effortlessly into campaign staffer and back again? Legislators, of all people, should know that granting unpaid leave isn't hard. They do it for their employees all the time.

Secondly, Don Pridemore can spare everyone the BS about "feeling the pain." Damn straight you better put that in quotation marks Don, because most of your district has no clue what economic hardship is. Now perhaps Don doesn't get around the state much. Or perhaps he doesn't have access to census data, which would remind him that in four-fifths of his district, median household income is about 60% higher than Wisconsin as a whole. Something tells me that Don's constituents aren't feeling too much pain these days. A bunch of $30K a year agency employees are supposed to take time off because some family in Merton making six figures isn't taking its annual Caribbean vacation this year. Whatever.

And finally, if Pridemore thinks that voters give a flip if a bunch of underworked, part-time legislators give back a penny of every dollar they earn, he's got a lot to learn about what motivates voters. Nobody cares if you give back a couple hundred bucks, Don. Nobody cares if you return $3,000 from your office account. Hey, maybe instead you should use it to pay for cable - it might encourage some of your staffers to actually spend more time in the office coming up with better ideas than this one.

So instead of asking your colleagues or state employees to jump first, why not just lead by example? You, Don Pridemore, could be the first leggie to agree to not claim per diem for the rest of the year. The Legislature has concluded its regular business. But for a couple votes, you have little reason to be in the Capitol until January. Think what a role model you could be to your colleagues. In fact, you could even out the dozens of your colleagues who abuse the per diem system. Think of the savings!

But let's not kid ourselves. You probably won't do that.

Anyone see Bill Broydrick today?

Just wondering. No reason in particular...

(CNN) -- Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the "D.C. Madam," was found dead in Florida on Thursday, according to Tarpon Springs police.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey was convicted of running a high-powered prostitution ring.

Palfrey hanged herself in a storage shed on her mother's property, where she had been staying, according to a police statement. Palfrey's mother, 76-year-old Blanche Palfrey, found the body, police said.