BREAKING NEWS: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker survives recall effort, NBC News projects
 

Choke on it Wi dems. :)

I had the news on in the background. I figured he would survive, but what is amusing me is in the republican presidential primaries there are five states voting today. In a few of them Santorum is getting between 5-12% of the vote. That has to feel bad for Romney to know that 5-12% of the those in his party would rather have the guy who is no longer running than him.

Right now the republicans are dominating all the senate recalls as well. As the numbers come in there is close to a 20% lead in every race. Obama won Wi. in 2008. Today he would lose badly if the trend here holds.

Six months ago it looked like Obama was unbeatable. Now he is very much vulnerable and if he economy doesn't do some serious improving in the next four months he might just find himself among the unemployed. I don't think the republicans will do any better, but sometimes just changing the leadership is enough of a spark to get things going.

Keep your eye on job growth in Wi, now. I know a lot of business people that have been standing pat on hiring until this recall election was over. As much as democrats seem to hate business people here,it's those people that create the jobs.

I can't believe that prick is winning. Unbelievable.

The power of $34 million in campaign cash for GOP.

Anyone involved in porn that supports the GOP is like a chicken supporting Colonel Sanders.

Job Creation
 

Looks like Gov. Walker might have a new job, making license plates

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-b...media&ir=Media

If you mean someone that believes that union bosses shouldn't be running the states finances into bankruptcy is a prick then you must be a union member or uninformed.

If you are at the bottom of the food chain I would agree. However,not everyone here is at the bottom. We actually run profitable businesses. And whether it's adult entertainment or manufacturing aircraft engines. The same regulations apply.

I guess it's equally fair to all parties, but something seems wrong about an excess of campaign money flowing in from outside the state, to determine the outcome of state politics.

FTFY, buddy.

I agree :thumbsup

I am not bitter about the whole democratic party. Only here in Wi. They lost 2 years ago,and the first piece of legislation that comes up they don't like they all leave the state and hang out in Illinois for a month so they won't have to vote. Then immediately they start recalls against a group of republican state senators, then after that failed they launched these recalls against more state senators and the governor. The democrats in this state are nothing but pathetic.

Yeah, after all, republican president Bill Clinton just would not give up unconstitutional censorship - CDA, CDA II, COPA ...

What's that you say? Clinton, the only president to try to censor online porn is a DEMOCRAT? Never mind then.

My point was that this race has far reaching national implications; not that you are a raging Dittohead.

Another corporate shill bought and paid for by the millionares and billionares of Wisconsin. How any fucking normal, working-class citizen can vote for this guy is beyond me. But, hey, the Republicans won't be satisfied until the middle-class quality of living in America is on a scale similar to that of fucking Pine Bluff, Arkansas, or some other poverty-stricken, backwards-ass right to fire state. Fuck Scott Walker in the ass with a rusty, AIDS covered hatchet. You know what Union leaders need? Union leaders need some good old-fashioned shop guys like Jimmy Hoffa who aren't afraid to strong-arm some fucking people to get what they want, that's what they need. Torch a couple shops and the "job creators" will fall in line. Too bad America is undergoing this pussification where everybody just passively accepts getting fucked in the ass with all these increasingly shitty deals.

I do think it was foolish to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to support a guy who lost by double digits to Walker in 2010; so even as a socialist pinko liberal, I'm not especially fond of Wisconsin Dems either.

Fixed that for ya, too.

That works both ways... Let us know when they find Jimmy Hoffas body.

I think it's laughable how the dems are now trying to say that Walker has been given a strong message by this. Thats baloney. He doesn't give a rats ass about any strong message. It's winner take all.
Can the loser talk, dems. You had a good chance, but put up such a dud that he could never have won.

Wish it had worked, but I still don't even know the democrat dudes name because I dont have cable tv or a desire to look it up.

Maybe the leaders need to end up like good old little jimmy hoffa did... Have nice day idiot..

It was a pretty classic Democratic circular firing squad, unfortunately. I'm thinking of switching my registration to Republican just so I can gloat once in a while...

He's Canadian.

By the way I think it's pretty sad that they got over twice the needed signatures to do the recall, but couldnt keep up the momentum to overcome what was an obvious pile of GOP money and effort to keep this jack wad in power. Sorry if jack wad offends anyone. I'm only referring to him, not you.

They ran a loser against a winner, fucking idiots.

Yeah I heard that Obama wasn't going to campaign for him because if/when he lost, it would only hurt Obamas campaign. Good call there I'd say.

Yeah, but at the end of the day, you live in Wisconsin :1orglaugh

Bama's guys are smart. He'll win this thing in November, but he'll be out of breath. I think the debates will be interesting, watching Thurston Howell the 3rd talk shit to Ba-lack Obama in person will be a damn sight different than making silly speeches.

I heard that a shitload of private sector union members turned out for Scott Walker; which, if it's true is fucking crazy. If his divide and conquer tactic works they're heads will be the next on the chopping block out there.

Do you know how many signatures were required? Chump change . . . .

True...but I live quite well.

That does put it into perspective.:thumbsup

That was a risk he might regret. It won't take a lot of democrats that lost enthusiasm for him to lose this state in November.

Yes, compared to # of voters, but it's still not very common for recall petitions to circulate and get twice the needed number. I was trying to use that to say the dems had momentum that fizzled short of their goal. They put up some guy who seems like the principal from welcome back kotter.

Maybe they didn't think it was right for people to be forced to join unions, or forced to have union dues taken out of their pay checks.....


...or to have their tax dollars cover 95% of someone else's retirement, when they are forced to pay for 100% of their own retirement....



:2 cents:

Still, beyond various idealogical descrepancies, Scott Walker is just a generally bad choice for any voter... wtf is wrong or the logic behind voting for the guy?!?

:D

I grew up in Wisconsin - and attended its state university for two degrees - and was so deeply involved in its politics to have been elected a Republican committeeman there when I was 18 years old. My family has been there so long that some of my relatives held office in Milwaukee in the Nineteenth Century. When I grew up in Wisconsin, it was a state with a proud tradition of open government, honesty, integrity, and a strain of progressive legislation that inspired the rest of the country. (Worker's Compensation laws, comparative negligence in tort law, and unemployment compensation all started there along with many other innovations that are commonplace throughout the country today.) Fightin' Bob LaFollette, and all that. And it's a state that produced - and survived Fightin' Joe McCarthy, too. Significant chunks of the people who founded and ran the John Birch Society came from Wisconsin, too.

It saddens me beyond belief to see what Wisconsin has become during the past two years - Governor Walker has ripped this state in half as though with a butcher knife and it will bleed profusely for a long time to come. It historical legacy as a laboratory for the idealistic exploration of new public policy to better serve society is already gone. It has become a place of political brutality, the battleground of a war paid for by the infusion of tens of millions of dollars from outside the state, and its people have become pawns in a battle being stage-managed in corporate board rooms across the country.

What troubles me more is that people I knew and grew up with, in what seems to me to be another lifetime ago in the Young Republicans, are at the center of this self-destruction. I distanced myself from them long ago, sensing something about them even then that troubled me, a certain meanness and recklessness and eventually I stopped being a Republican at all. It now embarrasses me that I was ever part of that.

This election has resolved nothing; it has made the rupture a semi-permanent feature of the Wisconsin landscape just as much as the ruins and residue of World War II bombing survived in European cities for decades after the war. The good people of my home state will some day begin to pick up the rubble and rebuild. But before that happens, the war must come to an end, and I see no signs of that taking place for a very long time. If you have a religious bent, pray for Wisconsin, because even harder times and harsher treatment of workers there seems quite inevitable from yesterday's result.

You clearly have a flare for the dramatic..
I grew up in WI too. Graduated from the UW-Madison in the 70's. What you failed to mention is that those same democrats allowed the state to flounder in debt of over $3b.
The property tax rate is one of the highest in the nation along with the state income tax.
Yet with all that assumed income the dems still drove us to the brink of bankruptsy.

No one here is happy about what is going on politically. But without some serious and immediate changes in the ridiculous entitlements that existed here things were only going to worsen. We as a state realized how bad things were and elected someone that promised to fix the problems. Not simply identify them and make wonder speeches.

I don't understand why it's so difficult for democrats in Wi. to understand you can't continue to spend more than you make.

Walker exempted the cops and firefighters from the collective bargaining stripping.

Because they vote Republican.

While I agree that you make many valid points, Minte; you must also agree that your governor is fighting an ideological fight, not just doing what's best for the state's bottom line.

It's not so much drama as passion. You can blame part of that on being at the UW-Madison campus from 1972-1979.

Wisconsin has always had a really high rate of income and real estate taxation, quite significantly higher than, say Illinois. It worked well for many decades while industry needed the kind of skilled machinists, tool and die makers, etc. with a strong work ethic who could be found only in places like Milwaukee, well-educated, smart technical workers who could do the set-ups on their machines from blueprints and manufacture the parts with a high degree of accuracy and precision. Industry paid what it cost because there was no alternative for decades. Eventually the industrial processes became automated starting with "tape machines" in the late sixties and manual production of parts by skilled workers became gradually unnecessary. That's when Wisconsin's current troubles began. To that point in time its unemployment rates were among the lowest in the nation.

Industry built factories much cheaper to heat in the South and West and used the semi-unskilled labor force there to decrease costs and keep the difference as suddenly huge profits - at the same time, they paid lower property taxes mainly because schools in these regions were not nearly so well funded as schools in the densely populated North and East, serving the children of educated European immigrants and the demands of their parents for high-quality education. It was a whole different tradition of public education in the South and West. Long-time Milwaukee businesses like Allis-Chalmers, AO Smith, Allen Bradley, Master Lock and others either disappeared or became a shadow of their former presence in Milwaukee.

The special trouble is that Wisconsin has a small population - more cows than people in most censuses - but runs one of the largest and best state university systems in the country, consistently runs some of the best primary and secondary schools in the country (its student results on standardized testing have always consistently been significantly above national averages as a result), operates no toll roads, but maintains its highways much better than most other states, and provides a huge number of well manged recreation areas. How can you pay for all of this with such a small population when industry flees south or out of the country in search of cheap labor and new industrial plants, cheaper to heat and easier to run?

To this point in time, Wisconsin has been proud of its excellent educational programs - proud enough to sacrifice much to keep them. The result of paying Arkansas or Mississippi or Louisiana or Alabama taxes must eventually lead to Wisconsin schools becoming far more like those in Arkansas or Mississippi, and to this point, that's been something Wisconsinites have been unwilling to accept. If property taxes decrease, nevertheless the heating costs will still always be higher in Wisconsin, the transportation costs to the big cities on the coasts will always be higher, and for other reasons, Wisconsin will always be at a comparative disadvantage in industries using unskilled labor. The ultimate result of yesterday's election is that Wisconsin will begin, far more, to resemble Mississippi and Arkansas in ways that have been unimaginable until now, and its parents will begin to accept the idea that their children will come home with standardized testing results comparable to those which Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama parents have been content with for decades. The only way out of the hole Wisconsin finds itself in, I think, is to find a way to monetize the good education its graduates receive and the good work ethic its workers have demonstrated historically - in a direction inspired by Switzerland or Austria. It simply can't compete with industries calling for unskilled labor in cheaper, warmer, and more centrally located states. By decreasing the quality of education, I think Wisconsin ultimately eliminates its only path out of its hole with any reasonable chance of success.

Too dramatic for you?

Yeah, except Jimmy Hoffa was murdered by gangsters, not the so called "job creators" of today - some feeble MIT graduate, Aspergian number-crunching nerd who pores over 12,000 page excel spreadsheets looking for some curvilinear regression formula that will add .0002 cents 8 times out of ten to the result of an equation with 47 variables. Or coming up with some piece of code that will robotically act on some stock price information transmitted from the Nikkei to make 4,000 fake transactions per second that it stops short of actually executing so it can artificially drive up the price of Singapore rice commodities by one one thousandth of a penny a million times per day.

Those are the multi-millionares and billionares of today. All the guys who had the balls to dump a national labor union leader in a vat of boiling zinc in some fender factory outside of Detroit are either dead or doing life in prison. To rip a line from George carlin "these are the people (Republicans) who are against street crime, they want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals."

You know who Mitt Romney reminds me of? Fucking Beldar Conehead. The other day they showed a clip of him talking about the hecklers in his camp showing up at an Obama speech. Hecklers in Obama's camp had shown up at one of his speeches before and he says "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Who the fuck, in the twenty first century, says that? It's like he's a fucking alien sent down from the planet Kolob (Mormon heaven planet) by Joseph Smith himself, only the other aliens fucked up when they gave him his earthling briefing and he got stuck with all kinds of archaic idioms, right wing talking points, and outdated pop culture references. I'm waiting for the guy to quote Dick Van Dyke, or someone, when he's trying to appear hip to all the the young daddy-o's.

Factual. I still reside and run a manufacturing business here. I agree with everything you typed.

However, the solution to fiscal insolvency? That is the real question. There are not many solutions. In fact there is only one solution. When your income drops,no matter what the reason. Your spending has to drop with it.

The previous governor failed to stop the bleeding. The citizens of the state clearly realized that something needed to change. Scott Walker, campaigned on those changes and he did precisely what needed to be done. There were no options beyond getting control of expenses. And to Walkers credit. In the last year our economy has added nearly 35,000 jobs. It's been suggested had this recall election had not happened there would've been many more.

Keep an eye on what happens here in the next six months. The state has gone from a $3.5b deficit to a surplus of several hundred million dollars. If the jobless rate in WI. does not improve dramatically in the next six months I will be the first one to come back here and admit I was wrong.

Nice one !

He already got them down to 6.7 percent unemployment in just the half year he's been in. He also took a 3.5 BILLION dollar deficit and turned it into a surplus.

The guy is doing the right thing. The unions don't care about anything but their money. And as a taxpayer...people's tax dollars shouldn't be used to pay high salaries and great benefit packages for govt. employees.

It should be used as SPARINGLY as possible to keep govt. running and efficient. And hell no there shouldn't be any union salary negotiations for govt. jobs.

When you think about what govt. is SUPPOSED to do....it's just ridiculous. That is people's TAX dollars going to pay for that shit. And since they were in a HUGE deficit, it was being done on the backs of their children in the future.

It's just wrong. Govt. not only needs to be reigned in, but unions do not need to be involved in it in any way.

EXACTLY. How can any business owner be a democrat? I'll answer that for you : One that knows his business is about to fail and gets ready for a unemployment check, that's who.

Keep an eye on standard of living along with employment numbers. 100% employment is meaningless if 95% of those people are unable to afford a home and educate their children. Gutting the institutions that provide financial security for hard working people makes it a lot easier to hire, no doubt. Shifting the profit margin from employee to employer will always makes it easier to hire. Policy would be simple if 'any employment' were the only criteria.

I don't favor the Dems recall idea any more than I favor constant filibusters by the GOP. The real problem is that the GOAL isn't to employ a thriving middle class of hard workers. The Dems want to coddle slackers and the GOP wants to shift as much income as possible to .5% of the population. Until that gets fixed, the rest is all theater...

Except cops and firefighters, they can have anything they want because they vote Republican.