Would The Real Scott Walker Please Stand Up?

Today, on Twitter, Scott Walker and his echo chamber were making a big deal about a CNN clip of Newt Gingrich stating that he thought Walker would win Wisconsin.

Big deal.

First of all, the clip is from four months ago. Secondly, Gingrich has said a lot of things in his time, including marital betrothals of fidelity and undying love to three separate women. We all know how much he meant those.

But Walker raising the Gingrich clip now does set up an interesting question about Walker: Who is the real Scott Walker?

Walker’s propensity for flip flopping on any given subject, such as the federal stimulus funding, is legendary. But now Walker is flip flopping on who he even is.

Last June, Walker was proudly announcing that he was going to be on stage with Gingrich as part of Walker’s perpetual campaign for governor. That was a mixed blessing for Walker. First, Gingrich did not even endorse Walker at the time. Secondly, Gingrich soon became reviled among the neoconservatives as being “King of the RINOs.” Gingrich’s sin was calling for moderation and temperance among conservatives in order to keep the Republican Party intact.

A few months after Gingrich’s appearance, Walker appeared to be completely shifting gears and was going for the extremist vote instead of the normal Republican one when he appeared at a TEA Party at the lakefront in September. To be fair, there was a sizable crowd at said TEA Party, but they did not come to see Walker. There was something better that drew them in.

Walker’s attempts to appeal to the extremist fringe continued when he tries to schmooze Sarah Palin into endorsing him in his perpetual run. But as with Gingrich, Palin also declined his request and just used him for a practice run for her upcoming book tour.

Now we see Walker going back to the Gingrich video (which was actually recorded between his TEA Party and his failed attempt to woo Palin).

Between Gingrich and Palin, Walker is really starting to look pitifully insecure as he bounces from one side to the other, only to be used and then dumped by the side of the road.

But all of this should make any cognitive right winger kind of nervous. How could they possibly endorse Walker when they have no way of knowing if they were going to get extremist TEA Party Scott or Walker the RINO?

Unfortunately for them, Walker probably doesn’t know who he wants to be either.

Call In Day Tomorrow

A message from Peter Drummond, our new “Take America Back” coordinator:

Milwaukee County Members,

Tomorrow is a national call-in day where we will be talking to our Senators about investing in public services.

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act went a long way is saving thousands of AFSCME jobs but we need to tell our representatives that they need to go further.  Economists on the left and right agree we need to invest more in public services and we need to make sure that our Senators here this message.

Please take a moment to open the attached call script and make a call in support of public services.

Peter Drummond

2 10callday

A Perfect Fit

Last fall, I mocked Team Walker when it was learned that he was hiring a non-Wisconsinite to be the communications director for his campaign. Little did I know that it was a perfect fit.

I recognized my error today, when I saw that this morning she tweeted that the city streets were in terrible shape and tried to pin the blame on Mayor Tom Barrett.

It was only later in the day that she admitted that, like most Southerners, she just doesn’t know how to drive in the snow.

I can see now that Jill Bader is a perfect fit for Team Walker. She’s got the hypocrisy down pat.

Walker’s Grandstanding Causes Pandemonium

From Milwaukee County First:

Scott Walker, in another fine example of putting his political aspirations before the common good of Milwaukee County, has started pandemonium among the municipal leaders within the county:

“You’d better be prepared not to have the (paramedic funding) from the county,” Oak Creek Mayor Richard Bolender warned fellow mayors and village presidents at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Council. “I think it’s just going to die. . . . I have a bad feeling about this.”

Bolender said he expected the cash-strapped county to cut off funding for the service within a year or two. Others, such as Franklin Mayor Tom Taylor, were concerned about what would happen to paramedics and other services if state and county officials dismantle or revamp county government, as discussed in a recent report by the Public Policy Forum.

That report, commissioned by the Greater Milwaukee Committee, talks about giving municipalities responsibility for running paramedic service and maintaining county highways, “but I didn’t hear anything about the transfer of dollars or revenue,” Taylor said. Funding also would be a problem if municipalities had to take over county parks, he added.

The problem stems from two things.

One is the fact that Walker, in a grandstanding maneuver that included little forethought except for how it might benefit his campaign, has been touting the idea of dismantling county government.  This is, of course, nothing more than the ultimate abdication of duties by Walker, who has a long history of doing so.

The other issue is that Walker and the County Board passed an illegal budget that only continues to worsen with each passing day.

Frankly, I don’t blame these municipal leaders for being very concerned about the future of Milwaukee County and the support it has given to them.  The county government is in complete disarray, and our elected leaders are too busy either trying to run away from the county as fast as they can or trying to point fingers at others and not trying to fix the issues at hand.

Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzke shows how far their trust as been strained in this quote:

Also at the meeting, County Treasurer Dan Diliberti defended the role of county government, saying it streamlined services and saved money by avoiding duplication.

Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzke replied that the county had a chance to play the role Diliberti outlined, but “it sort of blew it. . . . I’m just personally not prepared to give the county another shot.”

And as I had pointed out a long time ago, in a blog far away, merging the redundant municipal services into one larger, more efficient and more cost effective system is proving to be difficult due to politicians not willing to give up the least bit of control of their own little turfs:

St. Francis Mayor Al Richards lashed out at County Board Chairman Lee Holloway’s support for merging municipal health departments into a county agency. Richards called Holloway’s comments “divisive,” and compared them to the city-suburban tensions in the days of former Milwaukee mayors Henry Maier and John O. Norquist.

Terry Cooley, the board’s chief of staff, said later that Holloway was simply advocating the economies of scale that other counties achieve through their countywide health departments.

I sincerely think that if we had a responsible leader that was dedicated to Milwaukee County and not their own interests, the consolidation of services could easily be done.  But that would require someone to put in the time, the energy and the proactive thinking necessary to develop a plan for this to be done and to point out to the municipal officials that they could be saving their constituents money by cooperating with each other and the county instead of having petty turf wars.

Views From Scott Walker’s Handbasket

Over the past eight years, we have seen Scott Walker attempt to system-atically destroy Milwaukee County.

He has continuously denied his responsibility towards the parks, cutting funding every year, until we have over $200 million in deferred maintenance and repairs.

Likewise, he has continuously cut routes and raised fares for the transit system, to the point that it is now 80% of what it was when he took over and on the verge of collapse.

He has kept cutting mental health services to the point where there is insufficient beds at the mental health complex and people in the community who have mental health concerns are literally being put in harm’s way. He only started to change this patter after a series of condemning articles ran in the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal.

He ran the House of Corrections into the ground to such a point that it received poor grades in a federal report. Instead of fixing the problems, Walker abdicated his responsibilities and dumped the whole thing off on the Sheriff’s Office.

Walker’s pattern of failure has been repeated year after year and in department after department.

This pattern of failure only worsens in the years that he is running for re-election or when he is trying another one of his attempts to be governor.

This year is already shaping up to be Walker’s worst year ever, and it is something that he has been setting himself, and the citizens of Milwaukee, up for for over a year and a half.

The contracts for most, if not all, of the unions expired December 31, 2008. In the fall of 2008, the unions came to the negotiating table, as was agreed upon and a long standing practice. However, the County was not ready to contend with them. Having dealt with similar behaviors from Walker and his staff in 2006, when Walker had his first failed attempt to be governor, the unions were prepared for this and started looking at going to arbitration right away.

After a lot of false starts and obstructive behaviors by Walker and his administration, the unions and the County Board’s Personnel Committee were finally able to come to terms and forged a proposal both sides could live with. The proposal called for no pay raises for two years and an increase in health insurance costs to be paid by the employees. In exchange, the unions would get a no lay off clause. This proposal was very similar to the one that AFSCME had just signed with the City of Milwaukee and many other municipalities around the area.

The Tentative Agreement was ratified by the unions in rather overwhelming numbers and it easily passed through both the Personnel Committee and the Finance and Audit Committee.

Unfortunately, by the time that the Board as a whole was to vote on it, Walker had presented his proposed 2010 budget which had a $32 million deficit built into it, which is a violation of state and federal laws. Instead of doing the right thing and sending Walker’s illegal budget back to him, they took it and tried to craft something out of it. They failed to completely overcome Walker’s gaping deficit. The concerns of trying to overcome this illegal budget led them down the path of rejecting the Tentative Agreement and doing their own illegal budget as well as bad faith bargaining. (In last week’s 4th Street Forum, Supervisor Jursik admitted that they passed a deficit budget, which is, as I already mentioned, illegal.)

If the Board had agreed to the contract, they would have had saved over $3 million in salary costs and several more millions in savings on health care costs. If they had passed this at the beginning of 2009, there would have been a surplus of several million dollars last year and no deficit in the budget this year. But that is all woulda, coulda, shoulda.

Due to all of this bungling, Milwaukee County started the year with a $20 million deficit and no way to plug the hole except to hope that the unions forget all of the bad faith bargaining and everything they stand for and agree to massive concessions in pay and higher costs and to lay offs.

I doubt very much this will happen for a number of reasons. The first one is that it would be very difficult for the unions to get its membership to agree to all of these concessions and get nothing in return.

Secondly, Walker is already grandstanding, trying to obfuscate the reality that his budget is illegal and irreparable. (The problem Walker has with trying to blame AFSCME for his budget problems falls flat when one realizes that AFSCME isn’t asking for anything more than he already agreed to give to other unions.)

Thirdly, even if the unions would agree to all of the demanded concessions at this very moment in time, about 350 workers would still have to be laid off. By the time that any such vote could be coordinated, voted on, ratified, and approved by the County Board and then Walker, the number will probably over 400 workers gone.

And if the unions take it to arbitration and wins (which everyone from Supervisors to the negotiator believe would happen), that only means more workers will be laid off.

And therein lies the problem.

He cannot cut that many workers without seriously affecting services and without exasperating the budget problem.

If he cuts out all the parks workers, he still wouldn’t save enough money. And he would lose out on all of the expected income from the parks including golf fees, rental fees, etc.

If he cuts into transit, that will implode the economy and greatly increase the number of people applying for income maintenance aid.

Some insiders have told me that Walker might be targeting social services. But to reach that number of workers, he would have to lay off all of the target case management workers, all of the community support workers and all of Disability Services. And this would still not get him nearly the numbers he would need. It would also greatly affect the income the County receives for providing these services and would effectively destroy Family Care, something which he has been touting for years.

Even if Walker would try to do across the board cuts, programs are going to be put in serious binds and money will be lost.

And people, not just the workers, but the entire community will be greatly and negatively impacted by the cuts Walker has to now make. And even then, there is no guarantee that it will be enough to balance his budget and to fill the hole he created.

The cuts will have to be so severe that upstate news media will notice. And even if they didn’t, you know that Mark Neumann and Tom Barrett will be sure to bring it to everyone’s attention.

The only thing that surprises me is that Walker never thought far enough ahead to realize that as he was taking Milwaukee County to Hell in a handbasket, he was going along with the rest of us.

Call To Action – Make The Call Today!!

Fellow Supporters of Milwaukee County-

Things are really starting to move in regarding the much needed dedicated funding for our transit system and our parks system.

The state legislature is poised to consider two very important bills.

One is SB-511, which is the bill that would allow Milwaukee County to pass the half-cent sales tax for the transit system as the prelude to the RTA.

On January 19, Governor Doyle was joined by many of the area’s business leaders, each of whom pointed out that a sustainable, and even extended transit system would be good for not only their businesses, but for the entire regional economy. Without a doubt, the fact that our transit system, which has been cut by some 20% over the last few years, has contributed to the fact that the Milwaukee area lost nearly 50,000 jobs in the last year, as well as why we are lagging in our economic recovery.

No less important, even though it is receiving less attention, is AB-504, which would provide the vehicle for getting dedicated funding for our parks system. And as has been proven in New York City, parks are also vital for a thriving economy:

Such cuts could turn out to actually cost the city money. Fine parks contribute to the economy by increasing property values and, as a result, real estate tax receipts. A 2008 analysis found that the completion of the Greenwich Village section of the Hudson River Park raised real estate prices in the adjacent two blocks by 20 percent.

[...]

Parks also attract tourists and residents who come to events and activities or who just want to enjoy the surroundings, generating economic activity inside and near the park. Central Park attracts more than 25 million visitors a year, about one fifth of whom come from outside the city, according to “The Central Park Effect,” which was prepared by the economic analysis firm Appleseed for the Central Park Conservancy. The study determined that in 2007, spending by visitors and enterprises in the city’s most famous park directly and indirectly accounted for $395 million in economic activity. This activity, as well as increases in property values near the park, generated $656 million in revenues for the city in 2007.

“Measuring the Economic Value of a City Park System,” released in April by the Center for City Park Excellence at The Trust for Public Land, analyzed seven ways that city parks provide economic benefits: property values, tourism, direct use, health, community cohesion, clean water and clean air. Starting with conservative assumptions of park use and other variables, researchers calculated dollar values for each of these benefits in a different city.

Even though supporters of Milwaukee County like yourself, as well as the other like minded groups, such as the Park People and the Coalition for the Advancement of Transit, have made many calls and sent many emails in support of these two bills, I have learned that there are some legislators that state they have hardly heard a peep in support of these two vital bills. This is especially true for the leggies that represent the suburban areas.

Please take a few minutes now to call and/or email your state representative and state senator and call on them to support this bill. Everyone needs to do this, but especially those that live in the suburbs.

If you don’t know who your representative or senator is, you can find out by clicking on this link.

We thank you in advance for supporting our community by making these important calls.

Cross posted at Milwaukee County First and other places.

It’s The Nature Of The Beast

Scott Walker, perpetual gubernatorial candidate, like a good candidate, filed his campaign finance report this weekend. Walker says that he did so well, that his report crashed the Government Accountability Board’s system:

There were so many donations flowing Walker’s campaign for governor, that Government Accountability Boards’ (GAB) online system could not process them, Walker campaign staff said today.

“We ended up having to ‘unload’ our report because we brought the system to a grinding halt with the sheer volume of our donations, and other people had trouble filing their reports. The system just couldn’t process how large our donor listing was,” said Walker campaign manager Keith Gilkes.

The GAB, however, said that Team Walker is full of it:

“The Campaign Finance Information System did not crash. It was up and running throughout the weekend. No filers were prevented from downloading information, and the system has remained available throughout the filing period.”

“There was a small issue with the system generating the Walker campaign’s report in PDF format. That issue has been resolved, and the PDF has been posted to the web site. Users interested in viewing Walker’s reports are urged to do so using the system’s ‘View Receipts’ and ‘View Expenses’ functions, which allow the data to be downloaded in Microsoft Word or Excel formats.”

On the right side of the Cheddarsphere, Kevin Binversie thinks that there was probably a problem, but that Team Walker is merely embellishing the situation, afterall, it’s just politics.

On the left side, Cory Liebmann thinks that this is just another reality check for Walker.

I think it is just part of an ongoing pattern for Walker. He likes to take credit for things that he really can’t or shouldn’t, and he likes to do it in the most grandstanding fashion he can think of.

There is a long list of times when he has done this.

Walker claimed to be the one responsible for Family Care, a new way of administering services for the disabled and the elderly. In reality, Milwaukee County is converting into Family Care because it was ordered to do so by Governor Doyle, and the whole process is under the approval of the state.

Walker also tried to claim credit for a $7 million surplus from the 2007 budget. The truth is that was the year Walker had a showboating event at the businesses of one of his campaign contributors, in which he vetoed the entire budget for that year (another election year, by the way). He vetoed it because he thought it was hopeless and he wanted to distance himself from it after the Board overrode his veto:

But Walker has spent the past week trying to distance himself from various board budget actions, and he continued that tack after the vote.

“It’s their budget now,” he said in a statement issued by his office. He added: “Despite my disagreement with the board, the professionals in my administration will work to implement the County Board budget for 2007.”

This list of examples of Walker doing things like this is almost endless. I don‘t know if this is merely a character flaw for Walker or some kind of, narcissistic personality disorder or if he is overcompensating for a deep-seated insecurity issue.

But whatever the cause, this is just the nature of the beast. And in this case, the beast happens to be a weasel.

The Power of Unions

There are many people out there in the right wing of the world that have been hammering at the meme that unions aren’t needed anymore and that they are obsolete. They claim that so many people are making good money without belonging to a union. They also argue that OSHA ensures job safety, etc. etc. etc. However, we keep seeing stories where they are continuously proven wrong.

Retired Delphi management personnel are finding out the hard way the importance of unions:

But his career was cut short after GM spun off parts-maker Delphi Corp., which closed the plant in November 2008. Now, Richards and thousands of other Delphi salaried retirees could see their monthly pension checks cut between 30% and 70% as the government-run Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. has taken over the company’s retirement fund.

As a result, the average Delphi salaried retiree – many of whom were forced into early retirement by Delphi’s bankruptcy – stands to lose $300,000 in pension payments over his or her lifetime.

“I am not sure how I am going to survive, going forward, because of this,” said Richards, who as mayor was known for being a fiscal conservative.

It’s especially upsetting given that the pensions of Delphi’s hourly wage retirees, represented by the United Auto Workers, will not be reduced.

That’s because when General Motors spun off Delphi in 1999, it agreed to “top up” the hourly employees’ pensions if their plan ever fell short of what the employees would have earned had they remained at GM.

It’s crappy that these people that worked most of their adult lives for one company doesn’t get that loyalty returned to them. Unfortunately, they gave up the benefits of being a union member when they chose to take the promotion. At the time, it probably made a world of sense, and I don’t blame them for making that choice. It is just too bad that they are paying for it now when they should be able to enjoy life a little more.

The people in Oklahoma also learned the hard lesson when the unions were able to swing a last minute deal, albeit a very crappy one, with Mercenary Marine last year. That deal kept the plant from moving to Oklahoma.

Even the conservatives who like to bash unions at every chance actually unionize themselves, even though they would never admit it. But if you stop and think about it, are these TEA Party events really any different than a union? Or groups like WMC? They are a group of people or groups of people forming a larger group for a common cause, just like workers form a union to fight for their rights.

In these bad economic times, and with so many politicians and businesses playing “Gimme” with our livelihoods, it makes perfectly good sense to still have unions and to strengthen them before we all become victims of the money-grubbers.

A Serious Question For Walker Supporters

Whenever the Milwaukee County budget has imploded (which it has done every single year), Scott Walker puts a lot of the blame on the fact that the state is imposing unfunded and/or underfunded mandates on Milwaukee County.

I actually agree with him that this is a major problem, not for just Milwaukee County, but every county in the state.

Putting aside that he voted many times to do the same thing (shorting the counties) when he was in the state legislature, what do you think he will do if he were to be elected governor? Do you think he would restore full funding for these mandates? Or do you think he would stick to his “tax freeze” or “tax cut” pledges, and create an even larger deficit for the counties having to perform these mandated services, thereby either forcing dangerous cuts to these services and/or forcing local governments to drastically raise taxes to pay for them?

Walker’s Motto

Scott Walker has a motto for his life and his management style: Do unto others, but don’t do that unto me.

This motto has been exemplified time after time in his eight years as Milwaukee County Executive.

For example, Walker has continuously cut deep into park funding, to the point that Milwaukee County is now sitting on over $200 million in deferred maintenance and repairs. He claims that this is to save tax payers some money. But all it is really doing is kicking the can down the road.

But when the State allowed the zoo interchange to deteriorate that it now requires emergency temporary fixes, Walker and his crew were the first ones to point fingers at Governor Doyle, blaming him for not meeting the public’s needs.

Another example would be when he kept cutting corners at the House of Corrections and the Community Correctional Facility. Things got so bad that inmates were escaping and the whole corrections system was lambasted in a federal report.

Despite this track record, Walker chose to tear into Doyle for releasing inmates early and into Barrett for giving MPD two days of furlough. Just days after he tears into Barrett, the news breaks that Walker is four times as bad. On top of furlough deputies for eight days, it was recently found that Sheriff Clarke was considering releasing 120 inmates early and cutting highway patrols because of a $5 million hole in what Walker budgeted for the Sheriff’s Office.

Yesterday, Walker joined with County Board Chairman Lee Holloway in condemning a proposed bill that would put 17 year old offenders back in the jurisdiction of the juvenile court system. Walker’s big beef was that it would add another $24 million expenditure to a budget that he has set up to fail. But I can’t help but remember how he cut back on expenses like first time offender programs and the sports complex in Franklin, which would have helped give the County alternatives to having our youth going to corrections. And those alternatives would have been much, much cheaper.

Walker also has continuously cut back on spending for mental health services. This only means that tax payers are paying more, either through being directly harmed by an untreated mentally ill person or by having to pay their municipal police tons of overtime while they sit with detainees waiting for a bed to open up at the mental health clinic.

As anyone can see, Walker is constantly haranguing and attacking others for the same things he is doing. Maybe Walker should tweak his motto so it is a little more accurate:

Hypocrisy: It’s not a choice, it’s a lifestyle.

Gretchen Schuldt has more on the bill regarding juvenile defenders at Milwaukee Rising.