Today's Blog: Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie My husband and I and a couple hundred friends watched in Green Bay as ...(more) Search Archives

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Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie (6/28/2011)

Time for Gov. Walker to talk more about the cake (3/4/2011)

Today, reality hits home (3/1/2011)

FoxPolitics News going on hiatus (1/28/2011)

Brown County Executive candidate forum Feb. 8 (1/28/2011)

Education done right (1/27/2011)

To Obama, the ‘We’ is Government (1/27/2011)

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• Move toward health insurance for every resident of Wisconsin. That means the government needs to do its part in controlling health care costs and in subsidizing insurance costs for low income households.
• There is no better social program than a job. (Not too original, but true.)
• Wisconsin has the best cows. (Well, why wouldn’t that be true?)

Stuff I was insulted by: (It’s not an exhaustive list – there was just too much stuff thrown at the wall for me to mention it all)

• Governor Doyle is still claiming he balanced the last two biennial budgets. What is this guy smoking? Doesn’t he get it? Wisconsin is in deep budget trouble, unlike any other state in the nation.
• Repeated dissing of “big oil” and “big tobacco.” This is chicken bravado – and whining besides.
• He bragged again about how he held local property taxes to the smallest increase in a decade. You, of course, know why this happened because you read FoxPolitics. If, in an election year, you add lots of dollars to fund schools via the Frankenstein veto that confiscated monies in the Transportation Fund, local school spending has to go down (or not go up as fast). Do they call that complementary equations or something like that?
• Smoke and mirrors revenues – like eliminating duplicative HR systems, “using technology to save $100M”, and expanding BadgerCare by becoming more efficient. Why didn’t he do that four years ago?

And then… the really tough choices:
And now, we “must make hard choices”… and this “begins with hard cuts.” Like cutting prisoner health care. Not much of a constituency there to complain, is there? But kids. Now that’s a different story. It was Hillary Clintonesque to hear Doyle describe “the day I walked our first child to school….my eyes welling up with tears…… we all took a leap of faith and entrusted our children to the public schools.” Oh my gosh.

Prisoners vs. your first grader. Can you make that tough choice?

With all the talk about education, one thing I didn’t hear was word one about accountability. Nothing. Just about how wonderful and precious our children are and how much more we’ve got to continue to fork over for public education systems.

And then – blame “big oil” for all your budget problems. Evil, evil big oil and record profits. Such an easy target for a new tax. Just for the record, Exxon Mobil nearly always earns more money than any other company on the Fortune 500. But that’s because it’s the largest company in the world! But looking at gross profit margin, it ranks well behind in the pack. Financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies and tobacco conglomerates typically earn significantly greater gross profit margins than “big oil.” And measure profit per employee and “big oil” doesn’t come even within fumes of the top of the list.

And that's another thing. Tax "big oil" and then say we're going to "help the nation kick its addiction to foreign oil." Now that makes sense, doesn't it?

All that spin. Opportunity. Investment. Middle class tax relief. A “special and sacred obligation to the children of this state.” “We shouldn’t have to choose between teachers and police officers.” Protect our kids. As Frederica Freyberg, Wisconsin Public Television, surprisingly said before the speech, “If you’ve got a problem in Wisconsin, the governor’s got a program for you.” Hear, hear.

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