Some species eat their young. GOP eat their old.

Nikki Haley, South Carolina's governor

Nikki Haley, the newly elected governor of South Carolina, has reacted vehemently to the comments Newt Gingrich made Sunday on "Meet the Press" about Paul Ryan's Medicare reform plan.  Newt called it "Right-wing social engineering."  Mr. Gregory asked if that reply indicated that he wasn't in favor of the Ryan plan:

MR. GREGORY:   But not what Paul Ryan is suggesting, which is completely changing Medicare?

REP. GINGRICH:  I, I think that, I think, I think that that is too big a jump.  I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options, not one where you suddenly impose upon the--I don't want to--I'm against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.

CNN describes Haley's response to the interview:

What he said was absolutely unfortunate," Haley told CNN in a phone interview. "Here you've got Representative Ryan trying to bring common sense to this world of insanity, and Newt absolutely cut him off at the knees."

For better or worse (put me quietly down for "worse," despite being a native son of the Palmetto State), South Carolina's Republican primary has picked the winner of the GOP presidential nomination in every election since 1980.  So Newt may want to think about making nice with Governor Haley, who is apparently quite popular with her party in her home state. 

The Republican party remains tied up in a tizzy.  The party can either continue to pander to its right wing base, and be seen as throwing seniors under the bus to protect the tax cuts of millionaires, or come up with some workable combination of entitlement program benefit reductions, means testing and tax increases to make the social safety net work.  Unfortunately, every major leader in the Republican party is sticking to a stated policy of no increase in taxes that can't conceivably work for reducing the deficit without radically gutting social security, medicare and medicaid.  The math simply compels the conclusion.

Democratic Stimulus = Bad. GOP Stimulus = Great!

Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben  Bernanke, spoke yesterday about the decreasing financial support that the federal government is providing in the area of research and development.  He spoke of federal funding representing about 26 percent of total spending on R&D in the United States in 2008, when it had been about 50 percent over the previous three decades.  He also spoke of the difficulty in knowing the best ways to use government funds effectively to support economically valuable innovation:

“We know less than we would like about which policies work best,” Mr. Bernanke said in remarks to a conference on innovation at Georgetown University.

The private sector has the ability to pick up some of the slack in innovation funding through angel investors and venture capital firms.  Apparently the Republicans in the state legislature aren't completely willing to trust private capital markets to make the right decisions on which new idea or product deserves to thrive and which ones need to wither on the vine.  So they have decided to step into this marketplace by providing incentives to private capital markets to "buy Wisconsin."

Recently the governor, Senator Fitzgerald and others issued press releases touting the imaginative approach that Senator Randy Hopper was proposing in a new bill he co-authored called the Wisconsin Venture Capital Authority Act.  A recent Journal Sentinel article on the proposed law is here.

The bill as introduced would administer two separate funds with the following features:

The Jobs Now Fund would use a strategy of investing in state businesses quickly. It would issue $200 million in tax credits over time for insurance companies that invested in certified capital funds. The tax credits would be for 80% of the value of the investments made, so $200 million in tax credits could attract $250 million in investments.

Qualified businesses would have to be headquartered in Wisconsin, have 100 or fewer employees, with at least 80% of them in the state, and be primarily engaged in industries other than real estate, banking, professional services or retail sales. The fund would create a source of revenue for the state's general fund over time, said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council.

The authority also would administer a $200 million Badger Jobs Fund, which would focus on longer-term investments. It would solicit as much as $200 million from the sale of bonds, then invest the money in qualified venture capital funds, with no more than 15% going to any single fund. For every one dollar a venture fund received, it would have to raise $3 from other sources.

Venture funds would have to invest all the money from the fund in companies based in Wisconsin.

The bill undoubtedly has some Democratic support as well (the Democrats actually jumped the gun in this session with an earlier bill similar to the one just introduced by the Republicans), but the fact that it is being so heavily touted by the governor and Republican leadership is deliciously ironic. 

For the governor and his Tea Party support group, there was no good to be found in the huge federal stimulus packages of the Obama administration undertaken (very successfully so far, can you say "Volt" and "600,000 new jobs in three months?") to keep the country from swirling around and disappearing into the economic toilet bowl otherwise known as the Bush recession.

The governor and his legislative buds are the same folks that turned their back on the transportation innovations and job creation that would have flowed from the state being a major part of a high speed rail network in the upper midwest, and receiving $800,000,000 in almost immediate federal stimulus money, because they didn't want to run a risk that the state might have to invest as little as $750,000 a year to support operating expenses of the Milwaukee-Madison rail line in future years to come.  Now we are planning to give away $400,000,000 to Wisconsin insurance companies and GOP selected venture capital funds for their agreement to invest in innovation in Wisconsin that may or may not create viable companies or significant numbers of jobs. (If venture capital wasn't such an inherently risky business, the bill's huge financial incentives wouldn't be necessary.)  This will shift the burden of creating general tax revenues away from the insurance companies and onto John Q citizen. 

Worst yet will be if the program for the Jobs Now Fund is set up as it was described in an earlier Journal Sentinel article, where the insurance companies trade their $250,000,000 in money for $200,000,000 in tax credits and hand the $250,000,000 over to a state agency that picks and chooses the venture capital funds to which it gives the money to invest. The bill (as described by the Journal Sentinel) provides for the governor to select a majority of the board members of the new Authority, and thus the winners and lossers for the $400,000,000 in state aid will be politically beholding to the GOP.  What are the odds that while labor union financial support for political candidates dries up under the new union-busting measures of the GOP, the GOP won't be the object of substantial largesse from the companies that benefit from this new stimulus package?

So what Ben Bernanke says is a very difficult task, making the right decisions on how to fund innovation with public dollars, will now be handled by a new Wisconsin bureaucracy that will apparently know better than the competitive marketplace which companies should be supported with capital.

Ayn Rand must be rolling over in her grave, and not just because "Atlas Shrugged" was such a huge box office bust.

Secretary Perez moves on to greener pastures after a scant 5 months.

Manny Perez, now departed (yet alive) Secretary of DWD




Job creation is the signature issue (and promise) of Governor Walker.  Thus the governor would presumably want to have strong capable leaders in place at both the Commerce Department and the Department of Workforce Development, two administrative agencies that are intimately involved in job creation.  You would assume that the new leaders of both agencies would be well-vetted in advance of their appointments.  You would assume that they would only be appointed if they had convinced the governor that they were committed to staying in charge of their agencies through at least one term of office.

So it was a little surprising to see that Manny Perez resigned as head of DWD via an email distributed to his department staff yesterday.   Mr. Perez claimed he had decided to return to the private sector, and made his resignation official immediately. 

Although the Governor's statement did not appear on the press releases on his official website, Wispolitics.com reports the governor as saying:

“I appreciate Secretary Perez’s willingness to serve Wisconsin,” said Governor Walker. “The Department of Workforce Development is vital to our mission of creating 250,000 jobs over the next four years. Already we have made important strides; in our first few months in office we have seen more than 24,000 private sector jobs created, including more than 11,000 manufacturing jobs. Recently, CEO magazine recognized Wisconsin as having the most improved business climate in the nation. We’ll work diligently to make sure that DWD’s leadership team continues to be able to help our economy grow.”

Usually when a resignation is announced "effective immediately," someone is pretty unhappy, either the boss or the employee.  I have no idea if this is the case with Secretary Perez' departure.  But I am very confident in saying that we will eventually learn more information about the departure.  That is one of the few benefits to the public of having a government leader who demonizes the public employees he leads.  It breeds a cadre of folks chomping at the bit to become whistle-blowers, whether about lobbyists' children getting high-paid jobs they aren't qualified to do, girl-friends of married legislators jumping over other candidates and being handed a nice position, or a department secretary walking away after five months.

Texas GOP Legislature OK with Certifying a New Crop of Texas Public School Teachers without any Practice Teaching Experience

Gail Collins is the funniest columnist in America.   If you could isolate the strands of DNA responsible for her wit, cleverness and common sense, you would consider mass producing them in petri dishes to be surreptitiously injected in the dark of night into Republican politicians and Tea Party leaders everywhere.

This morning Ms. Collins column is on the GOP's big push for privatization of "public" education.  Texas is always held out by GOP politicians as a shining example of a state that is "Open for Business" due to the  acumen of Governor Perry and the Republican legislators in the Lone Star State.  Gail Collin's column on educational reform in Texas (and Ohio) is here.

Here is the crux of her column:

Now let’s take a look at Texas, which has been leading the way in putting for-profit companies in charge of certifying teachers.

“Very interesting and very disturbing,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford who studies teacher certification issues. Darling-Hammond says that when the federal government began demanding certified teachers in every classroom, Texas was among the states that responded by creating alternative certification programs, some of which have requirements slightly less rigorous than those for the trainers at neighborhood gyms. Most of the new teachers in Texas — particularly at schools in poor neighborhoods — come from alternative certification programs.

Then, the Legislature invited for-profit businesses into the game. “Ever since then, the innovation and competition has been phenomenal,” claimed Vernon Reaser, the president of Texas Teachers, the largest of the state’s alt-cert companies.

Here is one indicator of how innovative things are getting. Texas is currently considering — although not with any great intensity — a bill that would require that people who go through these programs spend a couple of days practice teaching before they are turned loose in their own classrooms.

The sponsor is Representative Mike Villarreal of San Antonio. Villarreal first came to my attention as the legislator who proposed requiring that the course content in public school sex education classes be medically accurate. The man is a positive genius for coming up with bills to make the Texas education system do something we really had assumed it had been doing all along. None of which make it out of committee.

At a public hearing on Villarreal’s bill, Reaser vigorously denounced the idea of requiring would-be teachers to actually get classroom experience as part of their training: “Practice teachers in front of kids that aren’t practice learning!”

To get an alternative teaching certificate in Texas you need to take coursework and have 30 hours of “field-based” experience, 15 of which can be spent watching videos.

Villarreal says some programs fill up the other 15 with things like chaperoning field trips. It’s not clear how many people get hired as full-time teachers without ever having stood in front of a classroom for a single hour.

The $4,195 Texas Teachers program (its ubiquitous billboards read: “Want to Teach? When Can You Start?”) is a little opaque. For instance, Reaser assured me in a phone conversation that his students were required to have a variety of in-person interactions with their instructors even though the Web site says you can opt for “fully online instruction.” “On our Web site, we intentionally don’t say everything,” Reaser explained. “It’s basically to get you to call us and ask us.”

This is where the Republican party is taking us with privatization.  To a bright future where we entrust our children to new teachers that have never had to first student teach with experienced teachers.  "God bless us all, and God bless the United Corporate Donors of America!"

Newt Announces But Gets Scarce Notice Compared to Governor Daniels' Wife, Cheri

Cheri Daniels milking a cow in a milking contest at the Indiana State Fair.


Newt Gingrich announced his bid for the presidency late yesterday, which earned him two very modest column inches in this morning's New York Times, tucked into the "National Briefing" section on page 17.  That's the "ho-hum, here some other miscellaneous stuff that's happening" section.  The reporter began the story: "after flirting for years with running for the presidency," a lead-in that was likely written with tongue firmly in cheek, given Newt's past personal tribulations. 

Meanwhile, back on page one, there was a lengthy article about Cheri Daniels, the wife of Indiana Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, and whether the fact that she was about to give her first public speech ever, the keynote address to the Indiana Republican Party's spring dinner no less, might be signaling that she is giving the green light to an future announcement by her husband to run for the presidency.  It seems that Mrs. Daniels eschews the limelight, even to the extent of having never campaigned for her husband in either of his successful races for governor. 

To date, there are no serious and electable candidates who have announced for the presidency on the GOP side.  Had there been any, they would have surely made their way down to the GOP debate in South Carolina on May 5, to impress the local folks whose primary has picked every GOP presidential candidate since its inception in 1980.  Instead the folks in Greenville, and watching on Fox News, had to settle for Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Herman Cain and some guy named Johnson who used to be New Mexico's governor.  Cain, the black former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, scored highest with the Fox News focus group in post-debate analysis.  One of the respondents said he liked the "the guy who was governor of Minnesota, I can't remember his name."

Desperate for a serious candidate, key national GOP donors are sending delegations into Indiana to try to convince Daniels to run.  He is viewed as reliably conservative, but also blessed with a healthy dose of political pragmatism.  I noted that pragmatism a couple of months back when pointing out that Daniels had killed off a legislative effort in Indiana to pass "Right To Work" union-busting legislation because it had not been given any public scrutiny in the recent Fall election campaigns.  Governor Daniels:

Into this a few of my allies chose to toss Right to Work (RTW).  I suggested studying it for a year and developing the issue for next year.  No one had campaigned on it; it was a big issue that hit the public cold. 

That was a very pragmatic and appropriate thing to do.  A pragmatist in my mind is, at a minimum, someone who doesn't go around thinking that what they know is all there is to know.  We could use more pragmatists in Wisconsin.

Governor Walker: Master of Surprises

Wisconsin Senate President Mike Ellis, Republican from Neenah, who was surprised by the Governor.







I've previously posted on the fact that the attack on collective bargaining in Wisconsin was launched by the Governor without his bothering to run it up the flagpole in his gubernatorial campaign.  It was a stealth issue, and would likely have cost the Governor the race had he been honest with the voters about his plans.  He chose instead to be dishonest.

Today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on the lukewarm reaction of GOP Senate President Mike Ellis and other Republicans to the proposal of the governor to expand school choice into Beloit, Green Bay and Racine.

Money quotes:

"I’m amazed at this. I didn’t see this coming,” Ellis said.

Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon, a key GOP lawmaker on education issues, said he wanted to talk with leaders in Green Bay before deciding on Walker's proposal.

"I'm not interested in dumping something on them that they say, 'No, we're not interested in having this,'" Olsen said.

Sen. Rob Cowles (R-Green Bay) said he was surprised by the proposal, didn't know much about it and wanted to seek more information from constituents.

The governor unveiled his "plan" not in a education policy speech in Wisconsin, or in a memo or letter to his party's leadership in the legislature, but while speaking on education at a May 9 American Federation for Children (AFC) event in Washington, D.C.  AFC is a right-wing group that is affiliated with a PAC that supports candidates on state and local levels to promote school choice.  It was founded by Betsy Devos, the former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and the daughter-in-law of the founder of Amway.  Ms. Devos is the Chairman of the Board of AFC.  Ms. Devos is also a major contributor to the Family Research Council, founded by James Dobson, the right-wing evangelical minister who famously claimed in a Washington speech to Republican congressmen that SpongeBob SquarePants promoted a "gay lifestyle."  The Southern Poverty Legal Center has labeled the Family Research Council a "hate group."  (Ms. Devos's brother, Erik Prince, is the founder of Blackwater, Inc., the private security firm that gained a little notoriety in Iraq.) 

In a future post I will discuss why the Governor might want to be focused on hob-nobbing with the Princes and Devoses of the world, instead of focused on keeping his fellow Republicans adequately informed of his plans for education in Wisconsin.

Classiest Politicians in America - Installment No. 6

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported today on last night's action of the West Bend School Board to vote down a request of the Gay-Straight Alliance to be a school sponsored club.

Money Quotes:

Board President Randy Marquardt, who voted against recognizing the GSA as a club, said he didn't think the board should base its decision on the threat of legal action.

He said he didn't see the need for the group to be school-sponsored.

"I just don't see how we're not in compliance by not allowing this to remain a non-school-sponsored club," he said.  (Sic.)

According to the district's criteria for school-sponsored clubs, clubs must have a curricular tie, national or state affiliation, student appeal and a volunteer adviser. In GSA's application for school sponsorship, its purpose is listed as combating bullying and harassment and "to provide an emotionally and physically healing learning environment for people of all genders and sexual orientations."

For a curriculum connection, the group listed six courses in which homosexual issues are discussed and studied. Before the new policy, Fincke (The attorney for the GLA) said student groups were informally recognized and that, as far as he could tell, every other group that had requested recognition by the school had received it.

In addition to having access to school facilities for meetings, he said club recognition from the school would allow the GSA to use school bulletin boards for notices, get a page in the yearbooks and set up tables in school hallways for fundraisers.

"It's true second-class citizenship," he said of the GSA's current non-club status since 2002, "and it's wrong."

According to one attendee who commented on the JSOnline article, Board member Dave Wiegand said:

"I also know of a good psychologist if one would want to leave this lifestyle."

Weigand and Marquardt successful ran for the school board as a two person coalition of fiscal conservative in 2010 .  Marquardt is the membership chairman of the Washington County Republican Party.