YakBoy.Net

I’m sure everyone has heard about the protests by public sector employees in Wisconsin over efforts by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican controlled State Legislature to pass a bill that would, among other things, remove the right of government employees to form unions.

The ostensible purpose of the bill is to deal with Wisconsin’s budget deficit. The theory being that by removing the ability of state workers to collectively bargain with the government labor costs could be drastically reduced through cuts to salaries and benefits. There is increasing evidence, though, that there is more to it than that. There are several provisions in the bill that seem to be aimed specifically at union busting and even beyond that there is section 16.896 of the bill (PDF) which would give the Governor authority to sell off publicly owned utilities (heating, cooling, and power plants) to private industries “without solicitation of bids, for any amount [determined] to be in the best interest of the state.” What makes this section particularly troubling is the fact that Gov. Walker’s second largest campaign contributor is Koch Industries, a Kansas-based energy and consumer products company which has been buying up power plants in multiple states around the country. Walker’s close relationship with Koch industries was confirmed when he took a call from someone pretending to be David Koch and had a long discussion with him regarding strategies to try and get the proposed legislation passed.

Protesters have been occupying the Capitol for several days now and disturbingly Tracy Fuller, the head of the police union in the state, said that police would “absolutely” carry out an order to use force against the protesters if Gov. Walker were to issue one. He went on to say that he didn’t think that Gov. Walker would issue such an order because the protesters were peaceful. He was willing to admit that it was “possible,” that agitators could be planted among the protesters to start violence, but “any action like that would not be something I recognize as the United States of America. That would be something that dictatorships in foreign countries do.”

Unfortunately, it seems that Gov. Walker doesn’t see it that way. In the transcript of the conversation between Gov. Walker and the fake David Koch there is the following exchange:

FAKE KOCH: What we were thinking about the crowds was, planting some troublemakers.

WALKER: We thought about that.

Terrifying, and the worst part is it almost certainly would have worked.

The whole transcript is quite revealing. I think it removes the last pretense that the anti-union movement has anything to do with budget cuts. It is the Republicans doing yet another favor for big business. Their master’s voice.

As long as “The People” are big oil company executives.

If you haven’t been paying attention in the last few days the House took the following actions:

• Removed funding from numerous EPA projects, including air quality, emissions, and water pollution monitoring.
• Defunded NOAA
• Defunded the Affordable Care Act
• Removed funds allocated to administer the Affordable Care Act
• Defunded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Defunded Planned Parenthood
• Removed FCC allocations for enforcement of Net Neutrality rules
• Stripped federal workers of their salaries in positions within agencies targeted for defunding
• continued $53 billion in oil subsidies

Easy to spot where their priorities are isn’t it? That $53 billion in oil subsidies is slightly more than the entire budgets of NASA, The EPA, The National Science Foundation and the Department of Labor COMBINED.

The good(?) news is that this budget will almost certainly not pass in the Senate but that will set the stage for a monumental cat-fight that will almost certainly be spun by the 24 hour news channels as a battle between the budget cutting Republicans and the tax-and-spend Democrats. Lovely.

What does it say about the state of politics and the news media in America when the only people saying things that make sense are the comedians?

It’s no surprise that some 100 million Americans will watch the Super Bowl next week… 85 million more than watched the last game of the World Series and in that is an economic lesson for America, because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity. And baseball is built on a model with the rich always winning and the poor usually have no chance.

Football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don’t want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they would like it if some kids didn’t have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood, while others get to go to a great school, and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, achieving the American dream is easy for some and just a fantasy for others.

That’s why the NFL literally shares the wealth. TV is their biggest source of revenue and they put it all in a big Commie pot and split it thirty two ways. Because they don’t want anyone to fall too far behind. That’s why the team that wins the Superbowl in the next draft, picks last, or what the Republicans would call ‘punishing success.’

Baseball… baseball on the other hand is exactly like the Republicans. And I don’t just mean it’s incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Superbowl more than anybody. But the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow up and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is forty million. The Yankees is two hundred and six million. The Pirates have about as much chance of getting to the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton.

That’s why people stop going to Pirate games in May. Because if you’re not in the game, you become indifferent to the fate of the game and maybe even get bitter. That’s what’s happening to the middle class in America. It’s also how Marie Antoinette lost her head. So you kind of have to laugh that the same angry white males who hate Obama because he’s “redistributing wealth” just love football; a sport that succeeds because it does just that.

–Bill Maher

Say what you like about Bill Maher in general, but I think he has a point.

We’re on Sarah Palin’s ‘targeted’ list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve gotta realize that there are consequences to that action.

- Gabrielle Giffords, MSNBC interview

There has been a great deal of talk about the possible motivations of the shooter in Arizona. Unsurprisingly many right wing pundits have seized on a comment by a former classmate of the shooter who said that at the time they were in school together the alleged shooter was a “leftwing pothead”. Reading his more recent writings and seeing the material on his YouTube channel though it seems he had become the kind of “leftwing” person who ranted about a second US Constitution, “treasonous” laws, and getting the country back on the gold standard. You know, the Republican kind of leftwinger.

I am usually the first person to step up and call bullshit when people try and blame violent acts on books, video games or Dungeons and Dragons, so how do I reconcile that with my firm belief that the pervasive, nearly omnipresent, eliminationist rhetoric coming out of Fox News and the rest of the right wing media bears no small amount of responsibility for inspiring the shootings in Arizona? I don’t blame J.D. Salinger for the death of John Lennon, why should I blame Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin for what happened this Saturday?

Both Mark Chapman and the alleged Arizona shooter Jared Loughner started from the same place. Both of them clearly felt that there was SOMETHING wrong in their lives.

Chapman read Catcher in the Rye, a book in which the main character rails against all the fakes and phonies in the world. Chapman, in his disordered mind, took that to mean that what was wrong in HIS life were all the fakes and phonies. He then decided, in his disordered mind, that John Lennon was a fake and a phony who needed to be killed.

Loughner, it seems, consumed a pretty serious amount of right wing media. Enough that his on-line ranting contains references that can easily be traced back to that source. He would have been told over and over again that Democrats were what was wrong in his life, that they were destroying the country and a grave threat to the American way of life. From there Loughner decided, in his disordered mind, that the solution was to go out and shoot Gabrielle Giffords.

It’s the difference between telling someone that bad people exist and telling someone that particular individuals are bad people and that something must be done about them.

I admit that this is a pretty fine hair to split but I think there is a distinction to be made. I also hope that, in order for some good to come out of this, the right wing decides that they need to back off their rhetoric a little but I’m not holding my breath.