Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the former
Republican vice presidential nominee argued that conservatives should
let Democrats be the “party of personality,” while “we will be the party
of ideas.”
“I’m optimistic about our chances because the left, the left just
isn’t out of ideas, they’re out of touch,” he explained. “Take Obamacare
— not literally, but figuratively here, okay? We now know that this law
will discourage millions of people from working. The left thinks this
is a good thing.”
Ryan insisted that liberals were only offering people “a full stomach and an empty soul.”
He then told a story of a “young boy from a very poor family” who received free lunches at school “from a government program.”
“He didn’t want a free lunch,” Ryan insisted. “He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown paper bag, just like the other kids.”
“He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown paper bag
had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not
understand.”
Goobernator-elect Scott Walker is sure getting ready for this big old day, spreading the festivities for the whole beginning of the year. But don't worry about what to wear, friends. Working class people living hand to mouth, like you and me, are not really expected:
Yeah, you read that correctly. He wants you to cough up $500 per person to listen to him tell you how great he is and how he is going to create all these jobs and fix the economy and cure cancer...just ignore what he is really doing and listen like good little boys and girls.
Something tells me that they won't be serving ham and cheese sammiches for that kind of money.
Funny, but I don't recall seeing him with this slogan on his brown bags during the campaign:
Walker's been carousing around the state for months touting his rehashed brown bag gimmick (is anyone even buying it anymore?). One one side, he's got some cutesy, borrowed slogan about cutting taxes, even though he's yet to cut one tax that I'm aware of.
But did you ever wonder what's on the back of those bags. I did, and wasn't too surprised by what I found:
At least the bags can serve a useful purpose, after people get nauseous listening to his hypocrisy and flat out lies.
Scott Walker is still going around the state doing the whole brown bag shtick, even though it's common knowledge that it's just a rehashed gimmick from Ohio.
But there are some nagging questions that has been bothering me for a while.
His campaign team has been tweeting this stuff ad nauseum, and all the pictures look the same. A handful of people sitting there looking bored, as exemplified in this news video his campaign is now touting.
No one is nodding their heads and all of them are sitting stiff as boards.
I've been in enough mandatory meetings to recognize the body language.
The questions that have been nagging at me are these:
Are these companies that Walker appears at making these events mandatory or if they are voluntary?
If they are mandatory, does that violate any kind of work rule?
Does that violate any kind of election rules, mandating that someone attend a political event?
Are they at least feeding these poor people, so that their time isn't completely wasted?
Contest one, the folks at BagScottWalker.com have a contest where you can enter your own slogan for the next brown bag:
Here is how the contest works:
Submit your best Bag Scott Walker slogan by May 3rd, 2010
After all the submissions are received, we'll let you vote for your favorite slogan from May 5th to May 17th
The winning slogan will be announced on May 21 -- the date of the 2010 Republican State Convention
At the 2010 Republican State Convention we will update BagScottWalker.com with the new slogan and pass out new "Bag Scott Walker" brown bags with your slogan printed on them
Just a word of warning, I don't see anything specifically banning me, so it should be a lock.
And Zach at Blogging Blue, via Recess Supervisor, has a fun play at home version where we can make our own photoshopped slogan. If you want to leave one, but can't photoshop or don't blog, leave it in the comments or email me with it, and I'll do my best to get them up. But for heaven's sake, let's not get too vulgar, OK?
And thanks to the artistry of Emily Mills and company, we are able to see just when Team Walker came up with the conclusion that using a rehashed campaign gimmick was a good idea:
Has Scott Walker or anyone on his campaign staff ever had an original thought? He does the same one trick pony show of pretending to stop taxes year after year, even though he's raised tax by millions of dollars over his time as Milwaukee County Executive.
Then he brought out a rehashed version of the brown bag gimmick that he borrowed from a governor's race in Ohio.
Now he is dredging up another old campaign gimmick, this time one that was used against him.
Not having anything that is both positive and factual to say for himself or his track record, Walker is still trying to milk the Zoo Interchange construction for all its worth.
Today, his campaign announced that he had put up two billboards regarding the interchange. I have no idea what they look like. Even though his press release on it says that a photo is included, there is no photo. There is nothing on any of his or his campaign staff tweets that I could see. And at the time of this writing, there is no photos of them on his facebook page. (Although there are some crude pictures dealing with President Obama - what that has to do with his campaign is anyone's guess. At least they removed the porno spam pictures.)
His personal press release amplifier, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has a story on it, with a link on the word "billboards," but the link only takes you to his campaign site that also fails to have a picture of the billboards.
In fact, the closest I found was his campaign's new website, which they call Barrett's Bypass, which has a photoshopped picture of a construction sign that reads "Blame Barrett."
According to the MJS story, one of the billboards reads "Tired of Traffic? Blame Barrett."
This is more than slightly reminiscent of the beginning of the county executive race from two years ago, when Walker was challenged by State Senator Lena Taylor.
In that race, some "shadow group" posted a series of billboards around the county. The billboards each pointed out to an area where Walker was failing in his leadership and added the tag line, "I blame Walker." Here is a video of said billboards, which I might add, are even more true than they were then:
These billboards got Team Walker in a real snit over them. So much so that he had his pet attack dog, Charlie Sykes, snarling about it on his show for days and on his blog. Walker and his echo chamber of sycophants attacked the ads as sleazy and as a sign of how desperate Taylor was supposed to be.
So what does Walker's blame billboards say about him?
But there is something particularly jarring about Walker presenting himself as your average working guy carrying a bag lunch.
It’s all those average working guys with bag lunches employed by Milwaukee County who have been laid off or had their wages and benefits slashed with unpaid furloughs and other contractual givebacks.
Walker has claimed the right to refuse to live up to county contracts negotiated with unions under special “emergency powers” as county executive. The emergency was that Walker was running for governor and did not want to raise taxes enough to pay the county’s bills.
Walker, who has eliminated jobs throughout his tenure as county executive and heads a government on the brink of bankruptcy, now claims to have the power to create -- citing a totally made-up number -- 250,000 jobs as governor of Wisconsin.
A whole lot of Milwaukee County workers believe job creation should begin at home.
A working class hero Walker is not. His lack of respect for the basic principles of labor relations was demonstrated when Walker submitted a county budget that included drastic wage and benefit reductions that had never been negotiated with county unions.
Rather than bargaining in good faith with unions to reach a mutually beneficial agreement through a process of give and take, Walker expects union leaders to enter into sham negotiations where working people do all the giving and Walker does all the taking.
Working people in Milwaukee County who really do have to eat bag lunches saw their family-supporting jobs disappear as Walker outsourced their work to private, profit-making companies operated by wealthy campaign contributors.
McNally once said that he doesn't read blogs, but one's got to wonder...
We all know how Scott Walker has been going on and on and on and on about how "frugal" he is, using that recycled and rehashed brown bag nonsense.
Unless he is talking about his campaign food habits, of course.
Apparently it does not applied to his dinners either.
Walker tweeted how he went out with his wife and some friends for some pizza. (Pizza on Fish Fry Friday, the week before Good Friday? Unheard of in Milwaukee!)
As you can see in the photo, they went to the Riverfront Pizzeria Bar and Grill. Looks like a nice place, but I've never been there. Out of curiosity, I Googled them and found their website.
My first reaction was "Wow! That pizza better be pretty damn good for those prices."
If he wanted to be really frugal, he would have gotten twice as many pizzas at Papa Murphy's for the same price. Then again, If he wanted to be really truly frugal, he would have just stopped at Aldi's and picked up a couple of frozen pizzas.
Maybe they went out because their friends are tired of having to bring their own toilet paper.
The AP did some real journalism and found that Scott Walker's Brown Bag Movement isn't an original idea. In fact, Mr. Frugality spent some $336,000 dollars for these recycled bags:
Both Walker and Voinovich's fundraising letters, signed by the candidates' wives and mailed in a brown bag, were devised by the same New Hampshire-based direct mail consulting firm, SCM Associates. Voinovich's brown bag letter, used in his first race for U.S. Senate in 1998, netted SCM an American Association of Political Consultants' Pollie Award that year for best campaign fundraiser.
SCM isn't running from the fact that it came up with both campaigns. It even bragged about it on its Facebook page in a Feb. 26 posting: "Brown bag movement takes off in Wisconsin. Our client, Scott Walker, running for Governor starts a movement based on an SCM Associates mailing. But Walker is the real deal, he brown bags two ham and cheese sandwiches on wheat every day."
Staying true to their nature, Team Walker then tries to spin their way out of this by doing what they do best - lying:
Walker campaign spokeswoman Jill Bader said the brown bag theme idea for Walker didn't come from SCM but was devised during a brainstorming session with campaign staff in Wisconsin. Bader said when the campaign discussed its ideas with direct mailer SCM, the firm mentioned it had done a similar ad for Voinovich.
She said the campaign was looking for ways to express to voters how fiscally conservative Walker is and settled on the brown bag image.
"It touched people because it was incredibly genuine," she said. "Scott is the person who he says he is."
This fine piece of investigative journalism stems from another fine piece which showed that Team Walker wasn't exactly telling the truth about his frugality. Despite the Walker apologists who claim that Walker's claim is that he would be frugal with the tax payers money and not his own, that is not in sync with the brown bag mailer that my wife had gotten months ago or with his whole premise that he would spend our money like it was his own.
If that was true, where Walker spent big bucks on his house with the giant cement pond, then the County wouldn't have a crumbling infrastructure or have its parks and pools in such disrepair. Not only that, but I and my fellow county workers would get a 40% raise like the one he gave himself.
The original AP story showed that Walker was quite the spendthrift with his campaign finances:
But campaign finance records show Walker's campaign had no problem affording multiple meals for the candidate, his aides, their supporters and others at restaurants and events across the state.
Walker campaign spokeswoman Jill Bader broadly defended the campaign's spending as appropriate and denied any hypocrisy. At the same time, she would not answer questions about specific bills, such as why the campaign spent $2,182 for "meeting expenses" at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Middleton in October or $805 at Timmer's in West Bend the same month.
The campaign rang up bills of $244 at the Bay City Smokehouse in Green Bay, $230 and $193 at Carrabba's Italian Grill in Greenfield, $230 at the Capital Grille in Washington, D.C., and $149 at the Waterfront in La Crosse, among others. The campaign also paid bills of more than $30 apiece seven times at the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee.
The campaign also paid for Walker's meals at Subway locations 15 times in a four-month span, and spent a total of $1,070 at Johnny V's Classic Cafe in West Allis over 30 separate occasions, records show.
As a friend had pointed out, "Why would a race for Wisconsin's governor go through the Capital Grille in Washington, D.C.?"
But sad to say, this is not the only time Walker has used recycled material and recycled hypocrisy.
The whole "Believe in Wisconsin" meme is also recycled, at least a couple of times.
In 1998, when Walker was running for his third term as county executive (even though he promised he wasn't going to) his campaign meme was "I believe in Scott Walker." Remember this commercial?:
It tuns out that his "I believe in Scott Walker" meme was a remake of Mayor John Norquist's "I believe in Milwaukee" campaign:
In the wake of the new TV ad from Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, with a mantra of "I believe in Milwaukee," a longtime political observer notes the ad picks up a theme used in past local political campaigns, including the 2000 re-election campaign of then-Mayor John O. Norquist.
That race, in which Norquist won a fourth term over downtown businessman George Watts, included a "We believe in Milwaukee" theme in TV ads and campaign literature.
It should also be noted that Walker's then campaign manager, Tim Russell, who is now Walker's Assistant Chief of Staff (and former Economic Development Director, between campaigns), said that the people in Walker's commercial were "real people."
Well, they were. They were real actors portraying real people, as Bill Christofferson pointed out, catching that at least one of the actors had appeared in another commercial (TV spot #2).
This, of course, makes one wonder about those "real people" that appear on Walker's campaign web site and if they are also paid talent.
One thing is for certain. Whether you are talking about Walker's recycling of other people's campaigns, his hypocrisy or his overall dishonesty, you have to give him a certain amount of credit...he sure is consistent at it.
Maichle, who describes himself as "I am work full-fledged in politics and I also enjoy other things too," needs to work on his videography besides his grammar.
For example, if you are trying to convince people that your candidate is so gosh darn popular that people can't get enough of him, you may not want to include pictures of him speaking to an empty room, like this one, taken from said video:
And while it is perfectly understandable why someone would want to portray their favorite candidate in the most favorite light possible, it is never a good idea to go overboard on it. Just as the right had a valid argument that the videos of school kids singing Obama hymns was a bit creepy, so is this:
Posts
