AFP: Hypocrites On Parade

UPDATE: Judging from what I've seen around the blogosphere this evening, once again I was correct.

This afternoon, with the warm weather of the last few days, I saw my first Asian Beetle and my first mosquito of the year. And just like those bugs, the Americans for Preposterousness is having their second Destroying the American Dream session.

AFP is supposed to be an anti-tax, anti-big-government, anti-letting-the-little-people-be-happy type of group. It only makes sense that this group is holding their shindig in downtown Milwaukee, which is supposed to the tax hell in a tax hell state.

And their line of speakers also shows they aren't about to practice what they preach.

They have Scott Walker, who wants Milwaukee County taxpayers to pay for the stimulus dollars, but not receive any benefits from them. Furthermore, he only keeps postponing the day of reckoning for when the bills caused by all of his neglect comes due. I guess they are not going to talk about personal responsibility either.

They also have Sheriff David "I like getting sued" Clarke. He can't run a jail, he can't run a correctional facility, he can't enforce the law. Who knows what he can do?

They also have Rose Fernandez, who doesn't have a clue about local politics, but thinks she can fix it. Not only that, but she wants to raise taxes. One of her proposals include the possibility of breaking MPS into five or six smaller districts. If she thinks one MPS is too expensive, how does she figure five or six MPS's, with all the added costs of separate administrations, separate school boards, separate pieces of equipment, etc, is cheaper than one. She is so bad that she and her supporters have to resort to red herrings and special interests (which visit this site daily to make sure I didn't write anything bad about her - hey, K12 and the rest of you guys - at least click on the ads while your here, or something, huh?)

Then they also have Joe the Plumber. Who's not really named Joe. And who's not really a plumber. He bombed out as a reporter too. He might not have a truthful bone in his body. He actually might just belong there, come to think of it.

There will also be Randy "Soft on Facts" Koschnick. To save me time, I'll just send you to Illy-T, who has been doing an absolutely fabulous job highlighting the foibles of a man who can't even rule on traffic tickets without messing things up.

In toto, it should be a grand waste of time. But on half of myself and the citizens of Milwaukee County, please do spend lots of money while you're here.

Rose's Thorny Idea

I was doing a little reading on the candidates for the state superintendent of public instruction when I saw something that eliminated Rose Fernandez from any serious consideration. In an article that ran a few days ago in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the different candidates, and their ideas, were highlighted.

On paragraph really alarmed me (emphasis mine):

While [Mobley] said he would like to see MPS broken into smaller school districts, he criticized Fernandez's proposal of replacing Milwaukee's elected School Board with a "turnaround team" appointed by the state superintendent, Milwaukee mayor and Milwaukee county executive. He said involvement by three different elected officials would politicize any reform efforts.

I have to wonder whether she is going for shock value, or if she just doesn't know what's been in happening in Milwaukee for the past several years.

City of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker have spend the last several years in a stand off regarding what to do with the $91.5 million dollars of federal money that has been languishing around. Even in these severely troubling economic troubling times, they haven't come any closer to any kind of compromise.

Heck, they can't even agree on who is responsible for shoveling the snow out of the bus shelters.

How does she expect that Walker and Barrett would be able to agree to anything about the public school system? Barrett, on the rare occasion anyone even sees him, is obviously very reluctant to take over the school system. Walker would only want to sell it off to someone and/or blame other people for his failure to even act on fixing it.

And that doesn't even take into the consideration of whether it would be legal for the County Executive to have that kind of influence over a municipality's school system.

But to be fair, I thought I'd go look at her website and found her YouTube video explaining her proposal. Instead of making more sense, she only gets scarier, stating that she believes she would turn around the whole system in only three years, and then dump it back on the City of Milwaukee.

If she doesn't have realistic expectations for MPS, then she wouldn't be able to have realistic expectations for the rest of the state either. If he doesn't want to give serious answers to a serious problem, she doesn't deserve our serious consideration.