"Proctology Exams?" No need without A-holes.

A few comments from leaders on the right in response to November 6th:

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and next Chairman of the Republican Governor's Association:

We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything.  We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.

It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

This guy is a Rhodes Scholar.  He deserves to be listened to.

Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard editor, on Fox News Sunday the Sunday following Obama re-election:

I think honest debate, fresh thinking, leadership in the Republican party and the leadership in the conservative movement has to pull back, let people float new ideas. Let’s have a serious debate. Don’t scream and yell over what one person says.  You know what?  It won't kill the country if Republicans raise taxes a little bit on millionaires.  It really won't, I don't think.

I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer to freeze taxes for everyone below $250,000. Make it $500,000, make it a million. Really?  The Republican party is gonna fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democrat, and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile to Republicans?

Haley Barbour, former Governor of Mississippi and former RNC chairman:

The ground game is really important, and we have to be, I mean we've got to give our political organizational activity a very serious...Proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.

 Barbour, speaking about immigration reform:

What are we going to do? Send them home? Send five million people home and then try to figure out how to replace them? We need those people to do those jobs

Was 2010 the high water mark of the Tea Party movement?

Dank Shot. No, not dunk shot. Dank Shot.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's amazing goal in Sweden - England friendly last Wednesday:



Liverpool's Steven Gerrard, earning his 100th cap for England in the game, called it the best goal he had ever seen.

The New York Times was inspired by Ibrahimovic's goal to put together a retrospective of great goals over the years. I am partial to Zidane's. But Maradona's is considered the best ever by most.

The Wisconsin Nine: Helping to Demonstrate Why the Republican Party is The Party of the Unbalanced.

Chris Kapenga, Republican State Assemblyman from Deerfield.






To paraphrase Mark Twain:  "Politicians are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet."

Nine Wisconsin GOP legislators want to introduce a bill to have arrested any federal officials who enter the state of Wisconsin to help implement the Affordable Care Act.   That is just the tip of the iceberg of new legislation the nine are proposing.  At least one of them, Chris Kapenga, of Deerfield, apparently takes the position the ACA is unconstitutional, notwithstanding the decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.  Heaven only knows where Mr. Kapenga was back in June, when the Supreme Court ruled.  Here is what he had to say this week: "Just because Obama was re-elected does not mean he's above the constitution,"  Hopefully two years from now the citizens of Deerfield and other communities in his district will give some serious thought to whether Mr. Kapenga is intelligent enough to ably serve their interests in the assembly.  None of the nine has indicated whether they intend the legislation to mandate the president's arrest if he chooses to come visit the Badger State again. 

These nine devoutly dumb legislators are among the latest in a long string of bizarre folks the GOP has given us to lead at the local, state and federal level.  Until more mature and prominent leaders of the GOP are willing to promptly call out these kinds of folks for talking as if they have the intelligence of rocks, even at the risk of offending the far right base of the party, the Republican party can expect to have many more election nights like November 6 in the future. 

So what did Governor Walker or the leadership of the Senate or Assembly have to say about the silliness of the nine?  No statement was issued by Scott Fitzgerald or Robin Vos.  New Assembly speaker Vos was too busy threatening to cut UW-Madison funding for hosting President Obama's rally last month.  The best Governor Walker was willing to do was to parade out a spokesman on Thursday to say: "Governor Walker doesn’t support arresting people for implementing federal law.”   Gee, I'm glad we got that reassurance.

The GOP will continue its downward spiral  if its party leaders continue to refuse to rebuke the kind of crazed rhetoric that continues to issue from its elected officials and its Tea Party base.  Here are some recent examples of the craziness:

Alan West, Republican congressman from Florida who has refused to concede defeat in the 2012 election, at an April town-hall meeting of constituents:

"That’s a fair question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party,"

Joe Walsh, Republican congressman from Illinois who was defeated by Tammy Duckworth last Tuesday:

"Abortions are absolutely never necessary to save the lives of pregnant women.  With modern technology and science, you can't find one instance." "There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing."

Paul Broun, Republican congressman from Georgia, whom the party caucus named to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, speaking at a church gathering last month:

"God's word is true, I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell."

The folks in Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is located, knowing that Broun was a shoe-in based on the electorate outside Athens, mounted a campaign to have Charles Darwin receive write-in votes.  The  British scientist now dead for 130 years, received some 4,000 votes.  I marveled in a previous post over a year ago about Representative Broun.

The Republican State Senate Caucus in Georgia (group inanity award!) had a four-hour briefing at a closed door meeting on the following topic:

How President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as "Delphi" to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities . . . and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth.

This doesn't even begin to touch the zaniness about climate change issuing from right-wing politicians. A topic for a future post perhaps.

Not Mississippi, but Darn Close. Wisconsin is 47th in Economic Growth Since January 2011

Here is the pledge Governor Walker made at the start of his inaugural address:

And as your Governor, I make this pledge:

Wisconsin is open for business. We will work tirelessly to restore economic growth and vibrancy to our state. My top three priorities are jobs, jobs, and jobs.

We will right-size state government by ensuring government is providing only the essential services our citizens need and taxpayers can afford. My fellow state workers, I invite you to partner with me in this necessary work.

Reasonable minds might differ on whether the governor has achieved his promise to "right-size" state government.  But it is difficult to find any indication that the governor's policies have restored economic growth and vibrancy to Wisconsin.

This past Tuesday the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank issued its Coincident Index for each of the fifty states for September 2012.   The coincident index is a measure of the growth of state economies.  Since Governor Walker's inauguration in January the economies of the fifty states taken as a group have grown at a rate six times the rate of growth of Wisconsin's economy.  Here is how Wisconsin's economic growth rate compares to our Midwestern neighbors over the twenty months since the governor came to office:




So Wisconsin's rate of economic growth is less than one-tenth that of Ohio,  less than one-eighth of Indiana's, and one-fifth of Illinois'.    Only three states have had slower rates of economic growth since January 2011:  Alaska, Delaware and Mississippi.  Remember back in February and March of last year when protestors around the state capitol in Madison carried signs accusing the governor of trying to remake Wisconsin into the Mississippi of the Midwest, "Wississippi?"  Well, we aren't Mississippi on the Philly Fed's Coincident Index.  We beat them out by one one hundredths of a percent!!

68 Nobel Laureates in the Sciences Support Obama

 Nobel Prize Medal




The New York Times reports today that sixty-eight American Nobel Prize winners in the science fields, including the two Americans who won this year’s chemistry prize have signed an open letter to American voters endorsing Barack Obama for president over Mitt Romney.  Is it any wonder that these distinguished scientists support the president?  The Republican party has become the home of some of the weirdest deniers of scientific facts imaginable.

The New York Times back in March 2011, reported on what Henry Waxman, the former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee had to say at a forum in 2011 at the Center for American Progress, a left leaning research institute:

"But I have never been in a Congress where there was such an overwhelming disconnect between science and policy,” he said. “The Republicans in Congress have become the party of science deniers, and that is profoundly dangerous."

Waxman also said that Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, the new chairman of Energy and Commerce, had joined Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in sponsoring a bill to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that heat-trapping gases endanger public health and the environment. Mr. Inhofe has repeatedly referred to climate change as a hoax perpetrated by an incestuous coterie of climate scientists unwilling to consider contrary evidence.

If you are interested in trying to decide if this seemingly inane GOP opposition to findings about Climate Change  is heartfelt, or purchased,  read this article by Bill McKibben in the July 12, 2012 edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

Deep in the Hole! Walker yet to Create a Net Job in Wisconsin in his First Term

Big Hole in the Ground in the UK.




I have previously (ad nauseum) posted about the Walker Administration's vacillation between two different Bureau of Labor Statistics' job data surveys as providing the most appropriate scoring matrix for the Governor's promise to the citizens of Wisconsin to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in his first term in office. Originally the matrix the Governor was touting was the BLS' Current Employment Statistics (CES) monthly survey of jobs.  When earlier this year that survey proved to be unhelpful in demonstrating any measurable improvement in jobs in Wisconsin, the Governor's staff began to rely on the BLS' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), data that only comes out 6 months after the period of data being reported. (CES data comes out monthly and shows the survey results from the previous month.) 

The Department of Workforce Development issued the September job numbers based on the CES survey today.  Once again its press release doubled down on the QCEW being the far more reliable measurement:

The most accurate count of jobs data, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), is based on a census of approximately 96 percent of Wisconsin employers. DWD last month submitted unemployment insurance (UI) records for the first three months of 2012 to the federal government. The federal government will incorporate the data in its next QCEW release covering the first quarter of 2012 for all states.

Now we are assured that the Governor intends to use the QCEW data to score his job creation promise.  So we have an accepted matrix.  That's the good news.  No more waffling around on the data set to use.  Here is the bad news:  Starting with the December 31, 2010 QCEW data for private job employment, and using the most current QCEW data for March 31, 2012, the State of Wisconsin has lost a net of 19,255 private sector jobs in the Governor's first term.   That leaves the Governor with 269,255  net private sector jobs to create in Wisconsin from March 2012 to December 2014.   We need to see over 8,000 net new private sector jobs created per month for the final 33 months (beginning in March of this year) of the Governor's term.   If that were an event listed on Intrade I am guessing it would probably cost you $9.99 a share.

Not only is the Governor in the hole on job creation but the QCEW also shows that average weekly wages for  Wisconsin workers in the private sector have declined by $13.00 per week from December 2010 through March 31, 2012.  That's $676.00 per year.

You can double-check my accuracy on the data at this page of the BLS.  Make sure you enter the relevant quarter from which you wish to see data, and enter "all industries" and "private" ownership on Map Series "No. of Employed."

The Vagina Whisperer

Colbert, at his funniest. See his Super-ego kick in at 5:01.

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