Scott Walker, Public Servant

[Hypatia]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Since when do elephants have a higher bar? Short term profits plutocrats have always been their only standard of morality.

[Hypatia]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

"...a man of integrity"
Wow! A politition managed not to hang himself with his words. That's skill, not integrity. Remember he did admit to concidering planting "trouble makers" among the protesters. Too bad for Musharraf that he wasn't as low down a dirty skunk as Walker, or he might still be leading Egypt.

[Master Shake]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

The article you site is written by Peter Ferrara. Ferrara works for David Koch (the real one). In addition...

Peter J. Ferrara is an American policy analyst and columnist.

His proposal to privatize Social Security was championed by the George W. Bush administration.[1]

Ferrara took money from erstwhile lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write op-ed pieces favorable to Abramoff clients. (Ferrara did not disclose which pieces he was paid to write, but Business Week noted that he wrote favorable articles in the Washington Times about the Northern Marianas Islands and the Choctaw Indian tribe, both Abramoff clients.) Ferrara argued those writings were entirely consistent with his independently held views, remained unrepentant, and intended to pursue the practice in the future: "I do that all the time. I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."[2]

Ferrara is a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation and has worked for the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. He was a Senior Fellow of the Free Enterprise Fund ("FEF"), a free market advocacy group.

Peter Ferrara is known[3] for his essay, "What Is An American?", published September 25, 2001, just after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.[4] In the essay, he claims that "there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan."

wikipedia

Argumentum ad hominem.

[Verrocchio]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

One take on the Wisconsin showdown is that a fiscally prudent Republican governor wants to balance the state government budget by reducing expenditures from the costs of unionized state employees.

Another take is that the Wisconsin spectacle is meant to point a large, emphatic finger at teachers and other "overpaid" government employees as those who are responsible for the Financial Mess. This conveniently deflects attention from the banksters who are still gulping from the Great Golden Mammary.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

I think it's about the 2012 election cycle and the Citizens United ruling.
Republicans know that unions are now also without limits in direct campaign spending, and are the only large and organized outfits on the left.
They want to destroy the unions ability to collect dues before the next cycle. That's why Walker isn't satisfied with the unions giving every penny of wage concessions he requested for the current budget.
He (and Kasich in Ohio) need to remove the unions ability to raise money for political ads.

[Verrocchio]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

I think it's about the 2012 election cycle and the Citizens United ruling.
Republicans know that unions are now also without limits in direct campaign spending, and are the only large and organized outfits on the left.
They want to destroy the unions ability to collect dues before the next cycle. That's why Walker isn't satisfied with the unions giving every penny of wage concessions he requested for the current budget.
He (and Kasich in Ohio) need to remove the unions ability to raise money for political ads.

Your view that the Wisconsin showdown is cloaked Republican political strategy may be correct. Nonetheless, there has been little or no mention of the role of the banksters in the Financial Mess that has led to the budget woes of Wisconsin and other states. Regardless of the outcome of the standoff, many will conclude that the unions are one of the major causes, if not the major cause of the FM. Convenient, at the least.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Argumentum ad hominem.

Hardly. It gets back to this...

“You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1FCszfdFN

[Master Shake]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Hardly. It gets back to this...

“You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1FCszfdFN

More of the same. You never address the argument, just the motivation of the person making the argument. In rhetoric, that's a FAIL.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Actually, much of what he put forth was refuted by his own link to FDR's complete letter, as was reported in the NYTimes today.

This is all political...."In return for lavish pay and benefits, coporations provide a kickback in campaign contributions and muscle to their political benefactors, financed by the taxpayers."

Changed "unions" to "corporations."

Many pension plans should be reformed. Ones that allow you to retire, take a pension, and then go back to work are suspect. Such double dipping can be absurd. The military wrote the book on it. But public service employees are not bleeding Wisconsin. Their teachers aren't getting rich.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Are These People Overpaid?...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_828077.html

Rick Ungar of Forbes asserts state workers are indeed paying 100 % of their pension and health-care benefits. Even if you're on the other side of the argument you've got to give him credit for sparring with the 500-plus comments.

[oddlots]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

There's another chance to calibrate one's political compass in this profile of Chris Christie in the NYT magazine from today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/ma...agazine&st=cse

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey , places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

Sounds good... but again there's the familiar pattern of tax cuts prior to the demand for sacrifice from a beleagered middle class.

Here's a few comments from one of the Unions involved:

"One afternoon last month, at the modern, airy headquarters of the N.J.E.A., I sat with Barbara Keshishian, the union’s president, and Vincent Giordano, its executive director, and listened as they tried to puzzle out why it was that Christie seemed so determined to humiliate them.

“Frankly, I for one don’t say we’re always 100 percent right on every single issue, and certainly neither is the administration across the street,” said Giordano, a bald and goateed organizer who has been at the union for 40 years. “The difference is the tone and the mean- spiritedness of the way he talks about us. He has made us basically the whipping boy for anything that goes wrong in New Jersey and the country and in Bangladesh if there’s an earthquake. It seems that we’re just the cause of all the problems in our society today.

“I don’t know what he’s got buried down there inside of him that causes him to be this totally driven,” Giordano said. “I don’t think he’s really supportive of a public-education system. If he was, he might send his kids to public school, which he doesn’t.” (Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, a bond trader, have four children, ages 7 to 17, and all attend Catholic schools.) “I think he’s not very enamored with public services in general. Public employees, public education, public pension systems — somehow he’s allergic to the word ‘public.’ Somebody ought to get him some kind of medication that gets him off of that allergy he has to anything that’s public.”

To my mind I thought it was a really admirable piece of journalism.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Thirty something years ago I was a public school teacher. The first year, nothing was deducted from my paycheck for health insurance, but every year there after during “Open Season,” a teacher had to pick a plan and Blue Cross Blue Shield became more expensive and the deduction became a higher percent of gross pay. Once again, that was more that thirty years ago.

1.5 % is total BS as you can see by googling something along the lines of “What percent of healthcare do New Jersey teachers pay.”

Governor Christie:

“Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits?”

This is totally disingenuous pandering, and man, is he good at it.