Christian Schneider: The Conservative Agenda Is Not Working

We all already know that Christian Schneider is nothing more than a paid propagandist. And he's not a very good one at that.  He's been caught fabricating stories and when he does try to deal with facts, he gets burned by people that really know what the truth is.

Yet the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel keeps him on as a regular calumnist because his drivel matches their corporate media agenda.  But sometimes, Schneider's overreaching on some subjects can backfire.

His column in today's paper is a prime example of that.  Schneider tries to defend Scott Walker's dismal record on job creation by saying that Walker is able to cherry pick numbers to make them look much more positive than what the reality is.

Schneider also tries to reassure the masses of sheeple who support Walker by saying the other GOP hopeful won't attack Walker on his lacking in job creation or on Wisconsin's flailing and failing economy because reasons:

Perhaps most important, Walker's challengers won't attack him on the Wisconsin economy because to do so would be to attack the efficacy of conservative policies in general. Walker is a down-the-line conservative; criticizing his governance would be to criticize exactly the kind of leadership Republican voters want to see in a candidate.

If Jeb Bush wants to say Walker isn't effective because Walker cut taxes, expanded school choice, took on the public sector unions, expanded the right to carry concealed weapons and implemented voter identification, exactly what does that say about what Bush stands for? Which of those Walker initiatives is Marco Rubio going to say Walker got wrong?

That doesn't mean Walker isn't susceptible to other attacks. If the other candidates are raising and spending tens of millions of dollars to run, they won't exactly adhere to Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican"). Maybe Walker will fend off charges that he's weak on foreign policy or that he's less electable than Bush or Rubio.

But criticizing Walker for being too much of a doctrinaire conservative is almost certainly a dead-end in the GOP primary. Republican presidential aspirants who attack Walker on jobs might just be disqualifying themselves from the one they want the most.

Now, what concealed carry or voter suppression has to do with the economy, I don't know.  Methinks that Schneider got so carries away with serving his word salad and was so desperate to defend Walker and so short on things he could use that he simply decided to throw everything in there to see if something worked.

But that is not the key point.

The key point is that Schneider is saying that the other Teapublicans don't dare attack Walker on his epic failures because Walker is the personification of the conservative agenda.

In other words, Schneider is basically admitting that the conservative agenda, otherwise known as plantation economics, is not working.  But Walker's abject failure doesn't matter because this is what their corporate masters want.

Was Attack On Milwaukee County District Attorney A Campaign Stunt?

A couple of weeks ago, just as the Federal Appellate Court was about to rule on the lawsuit filed by Scott Walker's collaborators - the Wisconsin Club for Growth - a vile hit piece against Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm was published by a right wing propaganda group.

This smear job tried to portray Chisholm as being motivated to enforce the law by the virtue that his wife was a union steward and understandably upset by Act 10.  (Never mind that any rational person who loves Wisconsin was upset about this.)  The author of the tabloid column, Stuart Taylor, also tried to portray the District Attorney's Office as some sort of union hall, although no one could or would support these wild accusations.

At the time, I questioned the legitimacy of the article:

Given the all of the story's inconsistencies, conjectures and fallacies, it's hard to give it any credence. 

It smacks more of an act of political desperation.  Considering that Walker is trailing in just about every poll, is receiving bad economic and/or job creation news on what seems like a daily basis and could very well face the continuation of the Walkergate investigation, it is very believable that Walker and his supporters are scared to death.

This story appears to have all the reliability of Kyle Wood's accusationsagainst US Representative Mark Pocan's partner. 

And just as in the Wood's allegations, it's particularly disgusting that they have to drag Chisholm's wife into it.   Then again, if they had any sort of decency, there wouldn't have even been a need for the investigation in the first place.

Sure enough, a couple of days later, it came out that the source for this smear was a former cop named Michael Lutz who has struggled with life after being shot in the line of duty. He supposedly suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Instead of coping with this in a healthy fashion, Lutz apparently had decided to self-medicate with alcohol and making death threats to Chisholm and his family.

Now it is being reported that the CEO of the propaganda group is using these false accusations as a launching pad to promote Walker's presidential aspirations in order to further his anti-union, pro-plantation economics agenda:

"If he survives re-election, he might well become the number one Republican candidate," Richard Miniter, chief executive officer of American Media Institute, in a Tuesday article on the evangelical Christian website One News Now. The piece is entitled, "A union nightmare: Scott Walker in the White House."

Miniter's group commissioned two stories by Stuart Taylor Jr. that accuse Milwaukee's Democratic district attorney of conducting secret investigations of Walker and his staff because of  Chisholm's wife's pro-union agenda. The source for Taylor's stories was Michael Lutz, a controversial ex-Milwaukee cop who spent less than six months as an unpaid aide in Chisholm's office in 2011.

Miniter told the conservative website that the first-term Republican governor is under attack in the current gubernatorial contest because he took on labor unions in the state. Recent polls suggest Walker is in a statistical dead heat with his opponent, Democratic candidate Mary Burke.

"Unions donate a tremendous amount of money to the Democratic Party," he notes. "So calling for any kind of reform is a threat to the lifeblood of the Democratic Party."

Sadly, Dan Bice, who wrote the article about Miniter, failed to mention a few facts about Miniter, such as that he had been caught blatantly lying about President Barack Obama's record, claiming that several items on Obama's agenda failed when in reality they were successful.  Or that Miniter was such a goof that he was fired from the New York Times.

Another key omission by Bice is that Miniter worked hand in hand with Marc Thiessen, the author of Walker's "autobiography."

Once all the information is presented, it becomes obvious that this whole thing was just another scheme to further their fascist agenda.  They have no more credibility than Brian Sikma, James Wigderson or Charlie Sykes.  And like the local mugs, they have no qualms about ruining the reputations of a good man and his innocent wife, just to advance the agenda of their dark money masters..

I would call on Scott Walker to condemn these people and their underhanded tactics but something tells me that a future investigation will reveal that Walker was actually in on this stunt.

The Right Wingers Who Cried "Wolf!"

For years, the right wingers have been trying to portray themselves as martyrs.  Radio squawkers like Charlie Sykes and Vickie McKenna and propaganda groups like Media Trackers or MacIver Institute have been feeding the same lines to the handful of people that actually pay attention to them that the right wing has been the victims of government overreach.

The two things that they love to mewl the most about are how the Walkergate investigations are partisan witch hunts and that President Barack Obama has been abusing the powers of his office by having the IRS target them.

Jeff Simpson has already shown their ridiculousness about the Walkergate investigations by pointing out that some of the District Attorneys behind the investigations are Republicans, that the GAB who called for the investigation consists entirely of Republicans and that the special prosecutor in the case had actually voted for Scott Walker.

Now, via Anomoly at FreakOutNation, their claims about being targeted by the IRS has been shown to be nothing more than crying "Wolf!":

A series of IRS documents, provided to ThinkProgress under the Freedom of Information Act, appears to contradict the claims by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and his House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that only Tea Party organizations applying for tax-exempt status “received systematic scrutiny because of their political beliefs.” The 22 “Be On the Look Out” keywords lists, distributed to staff reviewing applications between August 12, 2010 and April 19, 2013, included more explicit references to progressive groups, ACORN successors, and medical marijuana organizations than to Tea Party entities. [...]

[T]he actual IRS records indicate that at least some additional scrutiny was required for groups of all types that had names that sounded political — and that the explicit heightened scrutiny for left-leaning groups was even longer-standing than for Tea Party groups.

That the right wing squawkers and propagandists would lie about this is not surprising. It is what they do. And even though the evidence shows that that they are the lying liars that lie, they will continue to lie about these things, because again, it is what they do.

What makes it even more egregious though is the fact that these would be martyrs are so damn hypocritical about it.  Even as they are trying to play the victim, they are the ones that are constantly practicing McCarthyism and trying to smear anyone and everyone on the left, no matter how much they have to conflate and confabulate things.

Team Walker Terrified By School Children

Ryan Ekvall

Kati Walsh is an art teacher in the Madison area.  Like many Wisconsinites, she wasn't particularly active in politics or in her union until two and a half years ago, when Scott Walker and his Teapublican allies announced their full scale war on the working class by trying to bust the unions.  Since Walker dropped "the bomb," Kati has become much more active and has been very involved with her union, helped with the recall and recently graduated from the training program offered by Emerge Wisconsin.

The fact that she is intelligent, motivated and - gasp - a woman, this makes her an immediate threat in the eyes of Team Walker.

So enter professional propagandist, Ryan Ekvall of Wisconsin Reporter.  Ekvall is the latest of a number of the usual trolls being cycled through the Koch front group, apparently replacing Kevin Binversie who left under unexplained circumstances.

Ekvall went trolling through Walsh's social media until he found something that he could conflate.  What he found was a blog post by Walsh in which she described a lesson she gave her students about the art of political cartoons.

Because the children chose to draw their cartoons about Scott Walker, Ekvall decided that he not only had to try to discredit Walsh but showed his true nature when he attacked the children as well:

Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madison public schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School District in July posted some of her students’ drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts’ ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air.

So, in Ekvall's warped mind, one lesson means a career or mental health issues?

I suppose we shouldn't expect much from Ekvall who actually tweeted that milk is bad for cows:

Ekvall is a good fit for Wisconsin Reporter though.  Wisconsin Reporter has a long history of being less than accurate with their sensationalism and distortion.  You could find more reliable reporting in the tabloids at the checkout lane in a grocery store.

They ran one of their "legitimate" news stories based on a hearsay story told on a squawk radio show.

At the beginning of 2012, I exposed Wisconsin Reporter to be nothing more than a front group for the Franklin Center, which in turn is nothing but a front group for the Koch Brothers and similar oligarch groups.   I further pointed out that this group was being operated by Walker financial donors and consultants to Walker's campaign.

This was followed up by an independent investigation by Erik Gunn, who also found them to be rather sketchy at times.   Gunn found that the facts which I reported were accurate.

Even though this propagandist group has no integrity and no reliability, their pretense of being an actual news agency is enough for other Koch-like-funded groups to produce misleading stories which could be used on campaign advertisements.

Ekvall's story against Ms. Walsh and her students should be taken in the light of who they really are.  What this story really conveys is what I'm pretty sure they didn't mean to convey - that Walker is so vulnerable in the upcoming election that they are willing to attack and smear innocent teachers and their students, in a feeble and vain effort to drum up support for Walker.

Why I Love Twitter!

By Jeff Simpson

The comedic value of course! 

@TamraTellsIt I'm not going to be a propagandist, and I'm not going to apologize for telling the truth. Go watch Sean Hannity.

— james wigderson (@jwigderson) July 11, 2013