I Can't Hear You?

By Jeff Simpson

Potential Gubernatorial Candidate and Madison School Board Member Mary Burke, when she found out that the Madison school's hit with the maximum cut under Scott Walker's Draconian, ALEC inspired far right budget, thought it might be best to scale back the district's proposed 1.5% pay increase to their staff!  

This, as you can imagine, made the righties giddy.  They love it when working people make less money.  Like here, where Dave Blaska, whines about a 1.5% pay raise for teachers and somehow ties it to General Augusto Pinochet's biggest fan Margaret Thatcher(yes it makes no sense to me either).  

Ok I get it they are "fiscal conservatives", as Blaska wrongly puts it(when speaking of the potential Madison School Board tax hike):

Any company that hiked prices by 7.4% would meet massive customer resistance unless it faced a shortage caused by some natural disaster.

(Edit note: 1. Schools are not companies(nor do they want schools to act like companies they just use it as a stupid talking point), 2.  Companies raise prices all the time and shrink services(do you pay attention to the Canadian twinkies you just bought and handed out to your 8 friends?) 3.  When you need to use the service/product you have no choice when it goes up(have you seen gas prices lately?) 4.  Public workers, while performing services for the PUBLIC, already make less than private workers! 5. HOWEVER for the sake of this argument we will take Blaska at his word).

So Mary Burke, David Blaska and a host of others think that we should scale back public service pay because we are "broke".

Now let's take a look at how "broke" we are:

1.  Capitol Police Chief Erwin and his top Deputy Dan Blackdeer, were each transferred to a "dummy job" with the DOA and then back to their position at a HEFTY pay raise of over 11%!

Any word on this from Blaska or Burke?   

2.  Cynthia Archer, who had her front door ram rodded in by the FBI in the John DOe Investigation, was recently awarded with a sweet state job for the state making $101,510/yr with Cadillac benefits and luckily beat out 29 other people for this position.   While, yes Cynthia Archer was never charged, subsequent e-mail releases showed us that at the very least she is highly unethical, if not fully a criminal.  

Yoo hoo....David?

3.   The Governors (ALEC) inspired idea to get rid of the publicly accountable Department of Commerce and replace it with the Wisconsin Economic Development Committee(WEDC), of which he named himself as chair, has LOST over $57,000,000 dollars of taxpayer money.  The Governor recently and secretly gave WEDC secretary Reed Hall a 50% pay raise.  

Anyone, anyone .... Bueller?

4.  Joe Knilans and Nancy Mistele, both failed republican candidates, were awarded for their failure by Scott Walker with jobs making $82,000 a year running the Office of Business Development in the Department of Administration.  This used to be a one person job, now its two cronies making big money to do the job of one.

5.  The Department of Administration, under the horrible guidance of Mike Huebsch, spends thousands of dollars a month washing washable sidewalk chalk off sidewalks.   Honestly! 

And the list goes on and on and on in Scott Walker's Wisconsin.  All to deafening silence from the "fiscal conservatives".  

Now I understand why Blaska parrots and covers for the righties.  He got his pension and state pay and wants to make sure no one else does.   While I do not understand the hypocrisy, ignorance and selfishness, I do get it.

I also do not expect Mary Burke to be the leader on standing up to all of this abuse, UNLESS, she wants to be run for Governor.   If so then the only story I can find on her doing a google search should NOT be that she wants to cut teacher pay again!   She needs to take an active and vocal leadership role ....YESTERDAY!

I also do not hold Burke solely accountable for this.....where is Chris Larson, Peter Barca, Cory Mason, Kathleen Vinehout, et al...  If you want to be our next Governor(and I would prefer that you become Governor in 2014), then it is time to stop the backroom discussion and step up front and center!

Wisconsin needs you!   

These people are waiting to hear from you!

Yuri in the 44th!

Due to time constraints and the republicans continuing their craziness, I have been LAX in writing up endorsements.  Here is my first:  Yuri Rashkin in Assembly District 44.

The poor people of Janesville, it is like they are non existent in government (which is has much to do with why their GM plant closed).   They had been poorly represented by Paul Ryan (R - Wall St) for a while, but now he does not even pretend to care about the people in his district anymore. 

Then statewide they had Mike Sheridan for six years(two years as speaker)who seriously shirked his duties and followed that up amazingly, by a huge step down in Joe Knilans, who not only is supremely unqualified, but thinks so little of his district that he does not even live in it.  

The people of Janesville have a chance to right a long standing wrong and finally get representation in our representative government.   They can make a move to correct that by voting in Yuri Rashkin!

While I will get into much more detail in this race as it goes on, I would like to point out where Yuri won my respect and my endorsement.  Remember back in May, the cowards from CRG put out a despicable anonymous flyer attacking a group of amazing teachers from the Janesville School district! Yuri was quickly one of the most outspoken people denouncing this unwarranted, cowardly hateful attacks on the great teachers in the Janesville School District! 

Janesville has a way to go to recover from the devastation that has been reeped upon it by years of insane trade policies and really bad politicians.   Now is the time to start righting the ship.


Vote Yuri Rashkin on August 14th AND November 6th! 

Janesville Is Getting No Love

One has to feel bad for the folks in Janesville. They can't seem to find a representative that actually wants to live there.

First they had their former Assemblyman Mike Sheridan who, while going through a divorce, ended up moving out of his own district.

Now they've elected Joe Knilans to represent them, but he doesn't have an official address in the district either. He reportedly moved into his brother's basement, but now it doesn't appear to be his real address since it isn't up to code. The Democrats are at least jumping on this one.

Who knew that Janesville had such an apartment shortage?

I'm just waiting for Kevin Binversie, who really enjoyed slapping Sheridan around for this, to cover this story. That is, if the screaming 20 somethings let him.