FDL County proposes corporate food stamps for Mercury Marine

If you ever wondered who really pays the tab for all the bribes that private sector corporations extort from government, this makes it pretty clear.

If Mercury Marine accepts local government's incentive package to keep its headquarters in Fond du Lac, a county sales tax would likely be imposed for the first time to help pay the costs.

Fond du Lac County is one of 11 Wisconsin counties without a county sales tax.

"A sales tax would be an absolutely essential part for Mercury (incentives) — any of it," said Fond du Lac County Executive Allen Buechel.

By law, a county sales tax would add one-half of 1 percent to the existing 5 percent state sales tax.

Estimates are that a county sales tax in Fond du Lac County could generate $6 million to $7 million annually.

So now the county executive thinks the overwhelming majority of Fond du Lac County residents who don't work at Mercury Marine should pay a sales tax so that Mercury Marine might be bribed into keeping a couple hundred desk jobs around a while longer? Now there's a brilliant economic development idea. Force taxpayers to fund corporate welfare for a single company that wants to get the hell out of town anyway.

Perhaps Wisconsin politicians should focus more on lowering corporate tax rates instead of using tax revenue to selectively entice withering, dying industries to stick around a little longer.

Inhofe admits he's a lazy SOB

This sadly personifies so many politicians, regardless of party and regardless of topic.

At a town hall meeting Wednesday Sen. Jim Inhofe told Chickasha residents he does not need to read the 1,000 page health care reform bill, he will simply vote against it.

"I don't have to read it, or know what's in it. I'm going to oppose it anyways," he said.

Inhofe said public opinion and information provided by news media have helped him become a staunch non-supporter of the bill.

Why bother to do your own homework when you can just let Glenn Beck decide things for you, right?

Senator Ted Kennedy dead at 77

"The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live."

The words Sen. Kennedy spoke at his brother's funeral 41 years ago still ring true today.

The motive gap

It's been enjoyable this weekend watching conservatives break out their best "boo unions!" arguments after workers at Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac rejected a new contract offer from their employer. Be mindful, of course, that the workers have a contract through 2012, and the company came to them asking to reopen an agreement they just negotiated a year ago.

Why? Well, probably so that they could lowball the employees and set about on their merry way to Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Conservatives gnash their teeth and moan. "Isn't some job better than no job?" they say, as though for workers, capitalism is one giant race to the bottom and they should all be thankful for whatever scraps the bourgeoisie is willing to throw in their direction.

But as Steve Jagler explains on the BizTimes website today, many of Mercury's employees are likely better off to continue under the terms of their present contract and walk off into the sunset in 2012.

In recent years, Mercury Marine had laid off about 600 people from the Fond du Lac plant and shifted production to China. The laid off employees could not participate in Sunday's contract vote.

The layoffs left the Fond du Lac plant with a senior-laden workforce. Most of the employees who still have jobs there have 25 to 30 years of experience at the plant. For many of them, retirement is on the near horizon.

Put yourself in their shoes. You are very near retirement. You are making a fine living wage. You have negotiated health care and pension benefits. The company is proposing a new contract that will slash your pay and eliminate most of your benefits, including severance pay for outgoing workers. The contract will cut benefits for retirees and will cut wages for new hires.

Even if the contract is rejected by the union, the company will need two to three years to move all of its production out of Fond du Lac to Oklahoma. If you can ride that time out, you'll walk away with the severance pay from the current contract. And then you can retire.

Or, you could take the figurative kick in the teeth - a pay cut and loss of benefits, including severance - and retire with less.

Seems like the answer here is logical. Community members can talk all they want about how much they support these workers, but the fact is that those people aren't going to be ponying up squat to help Mercury workers with their lost pay or their pension cuts. They just think the Mercury workers should suck it up for them, so their own non-union jobs aren't on the line. Watching them attempt to conceal their own greed and selfishness in the banner of community is hilarious.

To the workers, I say look out for your own best interest, whatever that is. It's clear that your company doesn't have your back, and your community doesn't either. Outside your families, you don't owe anyone anything.

Crazy anti-reform chick tells Jew to "Heil Hitler"

You birther-types continue to amaze me. This is possibly the least classy display I've seen to date at these mob gatherings - even better than the swastikas or the guys openly carrying automatic weapons or the old people asking Congress to keep their government hands off Medicare.

Stupid bitch. And he's totally right about the mattress sales.

And the other shoe drops...

Looks like Governor Doesntgiveashit really doesn't.

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle has told associates he will announce this week that he won't seek a third term in 2010, POLITICO has learned.

By deciding against a run, Doyle, a Democrat, sets off what could be one of the most competitive gubernatorial races in the country next year.

The governor has been coy for months about his intentions, stockpiling money but at the same time not saying publicly whether he would run for re-election.

But sources familiar with his decision not to seek a third term say Doyle recognized the difficulties he may have faced next year.

No big surprise I suppose, but it does explain a lot of things. Doyle's absentee governorship for instance. Or the relentless manner in which Democrats are pursuing Dan Kapanke over the smallest things. That makes more sense if one is preparing to run a candidate in an open seat, just in case Rep. Ron Kind should run for governor.

One other thing to consider is that lame duck governors are often at their most dangerous. If Jim Doyle is no longer accountable to the voters, who knows what he might try to tackle in the next eight months. He could tackle school finance or any one of a number of other major issues knowing that he can afford to take all the negative fallout for the proposals.

Either way, this will certainly make Wisconsin politics more interesting for the next year.

If Jim Doyle were an Indian...

... I think his name would be Governor Doesntgiveashit.

To their credit, Team Doyle showed themselves to be shrewd and adept competitors in the political arena for the first six years of his tenure. But lately, I can only wonder if anyone in that office still gives a crap about 2010, or if they're all just phoning it in because the big guy is going to hang it up.

First, we were treated to Doyle's near-absentee performance on the state budget, which consisted of him dropping off the ball in February and then hiding under a rock until it was passed.

Then, there was his no-bid tango with Talgo, which earned him raspberries from Democratic legislative leaders for not even bothering to inform them what was going on.

Now, he hires Mark Miller's daughter, a Berkeley grad, to work in his office of legal counsel, and then pushes her under the bus when people complain that she hasn't been licensed by the bar yet - even though pre-licensure hiring is rather routine in the legal profession, and by all accounts of the Doyle administration, she passed the exam. Sounds like a great way to get a Christmas card from the Senate co-chair of JFC.

Budget crises are never fun and nobody comes out smelling good, but has Doyle made even a single effort to fight off his swooning approval rating, now in the low 30's? Or is he just conceding at this point? His political team is demonstrating the same sort of cluelessness we saw from Scott McCallum in 2002, when he apparently thought it was okay to just accept the use of a free boat provided by Mercury Marine because Governor Thompson had a boat and, well, he wanted a boat too.

Does anyone think Doyle is running at this point? And if he's not, is this the kind of sloppy, derelict governance that Wisconsin has to look forward to for the next 16 months?

Bill Maher stumbles into the truth

Not a huge fan of Bill Maher, but boy did he nail it with his new rule, "Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country."

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket...

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks...

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care... "Inside the beltway" thinking may be wrong, but at least it's thinking, which is more than you can say for what's going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that "pure democracy" doesn't work because "there is nothing to check... an obnoxious individual."

Isn't it ironic...

... that all these old, breezy windbags caterwauling at town hall meetings don't seem to have any problems with Medicare (which is a single-payer system) or the Veterans Health Administration (which is socialized medicine in its purest form)? No, when it comes to their government funded health care, the rest of us just can't spend enough on these silver-haired, money grubbing jackals. Wonder how many of these brazen hypocrites were calling their representatives a few years ago demanding the government buy their prescription drugs for them? I'm guessing a lot of them.

I don't support a public option personally, but I'm also not standing up with the assistance of my government-purchased walker and complaining about socialized medicine either. If I ever go to one of these, I may have to kick someone's oxygen tank down the hallway.

Sarah Palin cites Michele Bachmann. The humor never stops.

Big surprise, Sarah Palin hates health care reform because it's bad for her retarded baby. Man, the victim mentality just never ends with this woman.

Oh, and then she gives props to Michele Bachmann, perhaps the only GOP woman crazier than Palin. Fantastic stuff.

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," Palin wrote. "Such a system is downright evil."

Palin also cited the recent floor speech of conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann, which the former governor said "highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff."

Here's the Bachmann video. Hey Minnesota, can you do something about this lunatic?

If only one birther showed up at a town hall meeting...

... this is what it would look like.

Two more things wingnuts hate: fire codes and manners

This video of a town hall meeting in Florida is hilarious.

I <3 flag@whitehouse.gov

The Obama administration's attempt to track all the lies being spread by the helicopter-spotting lunatics on the right is making my day. Just watching all the crazies get up in arms, blowing the whole thing out of proportion, is really high entertainment.

Fact is, if it's a claim being made by the right and it sounds a little off, it's almost certainly a lie. Make arguments about cost, make arguments on principle, that's all fine. There are honest arguments to be made, for sure.

Problem is, most of the people sabotaging town hall meetings wouldn't know an honest argument from a bald-faced lie if it punched them in the face. They just believe whatever Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin tell them. So I get to continue to listen to people who honestly believe that Congress is going to outlaw private insurance, tell old people that they should kill themselves, force 120 million people to change their insurance, and so on.

As we all learned when we read Mein Kampf, the big lie is the easiest kind to sell. Conservative blogs are peddling them like there's no tomorrow, and uneducated sheep are swallowing them whole.

For the record, this isn't an endorsement of anything Congress is trying to do. It is, however, an endorsement of intelligent debate. And not that the Democrats are perfect in that regard, but they're doing a much better job of respecting the intelligence of the average American than the teabaggers and birthers are.

I can only hope that, like McCarthyism, this leads to a master list of idiots that our government can aggressively attempt to deport. The idiots are a much bigger threat to democratic governance than illegal immigrants anyway.

Playground to Murdoch: Nobody needs your stuff anyway

Rupert Murdoch better hope everyone follows his lead, or this is going to be as big a failure as when The New York Times tried to make online readers pay for editorial content.

(CNN) -- Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move which analysts say could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.

Murdoch can charge for The Wall Street Journal and subscribers will put up with it because the WSJ fills a unique content niche in American journalism and it caters to a professional audience. The same can't be said for the New York Post or most of Murdoch's other tabloids. Their content is too easily replicated elsewhere, something the NYT discovered with their TimesSelect experiment. Nobody wants to read Paul Krugman so badly that they'll pay money to do it.

What can the New York Post do that Google News can't?

Compare and contrast...

GOP Birthers are clueless about science too!

The best part of the Daily Kos poll that showed the majority of Republicans are crazy Birthers isn't even the question regarding where President Obama was born. It's the question "Do you believe that America and Africa were once part of the same continent?"

And how badly did those who identified themselves as Republican fare? Worse than any other segment of the population, whether divided by race, age, or geography! Score!

It's one thing for conservatives to buy into the latest black helicopter theory. It's another thing to just be ignorant or in plain denial of basic middle school science.