Madison reflections (photo: re_hurd/flickr)

Amid all the blame-gaming going on, and the efforts by hidden-agenda folks to push certain non-factual narratives, there is one key fact that stands out about the Wisconsin recall vote this week — namely, this one:

Sixty percent of Wisconsin voters in today’s recall election say recall elections are only appropriate for official misconduct, according to early CBS News exit polls. Twenty-eight percent said they think they are suitable for any reason, while nine percent think they are never appropriate.

In other words, most Wisconsin voters likely saw this second recall effort not as a legitimate action against someone unfit for office, but as pure revenge or political payback.

Now, one can argue over whether the forces aligned against Walker could have done a better job making the case that Walker is indeed unfit even without the indictments that have been broadly hinted were withheld to avoid influencing the election. But as David Dayen notes, John Nichols, who knows the Wisconsin political scene as well as anyone, told Dayen back in February of 2011 that the recall effort against Walker would likely not succeed:

He understood the shift in the power dynamic here. The unions were punched in the gut by Act 10, and they had a series of poor choices, which they bungled in their own right. This may have been a wake-up call to the left, but that should have happened the moment that Walker stripped workers of their collective bargaining rights.

One suspect that if Nichols understood the effort against Walker to be doomed back in February 2011, a number of other people also did, and thus decided not to join it. Hell, even 36% of union households voted for Walker in the recall, a percentage similar to the percentage of union households that voted for him in 2010. Granted, a lot of unions are conservative ones like police and fire unions, but it’s still surprising that the unions weren’t able to bring more of their membership to back the recall.

But even though the effort to remove Walker didn’t work, he’s still hobbled for at least the rest of the year by the impending Democratic Senate majority, which came about thanks to recalls pursued against several Republican state senators. Walker had been crowing about his plans to do what he did last year: call a special session, once he survived the recall, so he could ram through “right-to-work” (aka right to starve) legislation, a mining bill, and other nasty stuff. That’s not going to happen now.

So pardon me if I’m not putting on a hair shirt over this. Darn things itch, anyway.

US Representative Keith Ellison (in red CTUL shirt) and Minnesota Representative Jim Davnie join CTUL hunger strikers on the picket line, Sunday, May 29, 2011. Courtesy CTUL.net.

When I was growing up in the ’70s, I shared a paper route with my brother. He did the mornings, I helped him in the evenings, and our parents sometimes helped us on the weekends — if nothing else by making sure we got out of bed on time.

The paper we delivered was the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the morning and the St. Paul Dispatch in the afternoon; the two papers were once separate entities, but were both bought by the Ridder company in 1927, and ever since then were essentially the same paper. In 1990, as TV news continued to eat into print media’s market share, the Dispatch was shut down and the PiPress has been a morning-only paper ever after.

The Pioneer Press was and is a “union” newspaper, in that its reporters belong to a union, the Minnesota Newspaper Guild. Most major newspapers have a unionized reporting staff; this has been the case for decades. The people who deliver the paper to your front door, however, are not unionized employees of that paper. In fact, they’re technically not even employees of the paper, but “independent contractors”, which in essence means they get paid a pittance (and in our case the pay depended on going door-to-door each month to collect the subscription fees, which we didn’t mind doing as at least that way we could get tips or even Christmas bonuses, which didn’t happen when subscribers opted for automatic renewal by mail or credit card).

The “independent contractor” concept shows up in other fields, too. Did you know that Vince McMahon’s wrestlers aren’t actually employees of the WWE, but “independent contractors”? That means that Vince doesn’t have to do diddly in terms of providing benefits, sensible work hours, or job security. That means that he can overwork them as much as he wants without letting them have time to rest and recover — and that means that alcohol and drug use and abuse is rampant, as it’s hard to take such a punishing schedule unless you’re sloshed or doped to the gills, and often not even then. (Jesse Ventura’s first brush with politicking was when he attempted to form a union in the 1980s back when he worked for Vince McMahon — oh, pardon me, I meant was “an independent contractor whose paychecks just happened to come from Vince McMahon”.)
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I’ve long since got used to seeing the Republican-leaning “mainstream” media go out of its way to ignore or minimize progressive protests and parades — such as the massively-well-attended pro-immigrant ones that have taken place in several US cities over the past few years — while chasing after any old handful of right-wingers gathered in a single spot long enough for the camera crews to immortalize them on film, video or pixels. We saw this most recently in Madison last month, where Russian TV crews did a better job covering the protests than did most national media, which for the most part averted its eyes when nearly 100,000 people converged on the Wisconsin State Capitol on February 26.

But Bluestem Prairie’s Sally Jo Sorensen has alerted me to a first: a newspaper — namely, the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin — giving copious coverage to a right-wing rally that never happened. Really and truly:

The paper published three stories Saturday about the local tea party:

Rainy days or sunshine ahead for Rochester Tea Party Patriots?

Debate continues: Do Rochester Tea Party Patriots help, hinder local GOP?

Rochester Tea Party Patriots: Five questions

What’s the problem? Check out the lede for the first story of the three handed in by Tea party toadie and PB political reporter Heather Carlson:

It appears that only a blustery, rainy forecast has been able to keep Rochester Tea Party Patriots from speaking out.

The group canceled what would have been its third annual tax day rally Friday in Rochester. But while they weren’t out at Soldiers Field waving signs calling for budget cuts and an end to the “nanny state,” Tea Party activists say it won’t curtail the efforts that have made them a growing force in local politics this year. . . .

Yeah, you read that right. The Tea Party Patriots of Rochester cancelled their rally because of a weather forecast (probably assisted by that nanny-statish National Weather Service), but still got three stories in the Post Bulletin.

As Sorensen goes on to note, union members of her acquaintance have told her that the Post-Bulletin routinely ignores pro-labor protests, ones with actual protesters who are out in all sorts of weather and who don’t leave when the news crews do. Yet the sunshine patriots so beloved of the P-B get fawning treatment despite being total no-shows.

It is to laugh.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

The conservatives and their media buddies at FOX and elsewhere are beside themselves with eagerness to cause, for real, the chaos they falsely say exists in Madison, Wisconsin right now. Despite the fact that no protest-related arrests have been made so far, and the planned agent-provocateur moves by various Koch Tea Partiers haven’t happened yet, they want to see bloodshed, especially if they can blame it on the peaceful protesters.

That’s why we’re seeing conservatives like the deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana, Jeff Cox, call on the Madison cops to “Use live ammunition” should they start to clear the Capitol building of protesters. And as Mother Jones points out, it’s not the first time he’s made really stupid, hotheaded, violent remarks.

Just so you know what sort of threat has Cox’s underthings in a bunch, here is a picture of some of the protesters he fears so very much that he wants them shot at with live ammo:

Photo by Lost Albatross (Emily Mills) via Flickr's Creative Commons

Says a lot about the man, I would say.

(Crossposted at Renaissance Post.)

UPDATE: And now we find (h/t Kelly Canfield) that this Tweet did what his previous ten-plus years of obnoxious comments failed to do, and got his ass fired.

It’s hard to determine who is the biggest flipping tool in the giant toolshed that is the GOP/Media Complex. Some days it’s Mike Allen; some days it’s Jake Tapper; and yesterday morning it was Sally Quinn.

But last night, Chris "Tweety" Matthews, the guy whose lemon-yellow Pledge hair fails to hide the fact that he’s in his mid-sixties, had to take his turn on the Villagers’ tool bench with this statement:

What worries me are those who try to manipulate democracy, the pressure groups, the money people who’d like all elections to come down to who can buy the most advertising on television, most of it negative advertising.

What gave me hope last night is that voters don’t like to be pushed around any more that I do. A lot of labor money went into the Arkansas Senate primary and produced a lot of drama — and a real
hero. The kind of stand-alone, what-side-are-you-on woman celebrated in that pro-labor film Norma Rae. The irony is that the heroine, the Norma Rae last night in Little Rock, was the Democratic Senator Labor tried to beat, Norma Rae’s name in this picture is Blanche Lincoln.

The real Norma Rae (aka the late and lamented Crystal Lee Sutton) is no longer with us, or else she’d be slapping the taste out of Matthews’ mouth even as we speak. Tweety the Corporatist Tool is not only being stupid, he’s also lying — and hiding the truth from his viewers and listeners. Somewhere, Joseph Goebbels’ shade is nodding its head and smiling.

Why isn’t Tweety mentioning the millions of dollars spent by pro-business, anti-people groups (especially the health care industry) on public option foe Blanche Lincoln?

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Ho-hum. Another day, another "free market solution" that just can’t stand on its own two feet:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.

It’s not like this is a new or unusual thing with the charter school movement. The only thing that kept Edison Schools alive was constant propping up by outside sources (such as when Jeb Bush raided the pension funds of Florida’s genuine public-school teachers to subsidize Edison when it was about to go belly-up), as well as a dependence on Wall Streeters to be unusually forgiving of financial failure:

According to the company’s September 2001 proxy statement, the company lent [Edison CEO Chris] Whittle $6.6 million on November 15, 1999 and $1.2 million on April 13, 2000 to exercise options to purchase stock in the company. In other words, the company was loaning him money to purchase stock in itself — not an uncommon practice. By September 30th, 2001 the combined principal and interest on those two loans totalled $9.2 million.

So far so good.

Now what’s interesting is the collateral Whittle put up for these two loans. It turns out it was the shares themselves, the shares he was buying with the loans. As the proxy statement says "The loans are collateralized only by the shares …"

Now the problem is, like the Chicago Bulls and ten year old beer, that stock ain’t what it used to be. In fact, as you can see from this handy diagram, Edison’s stock is now virtually worthless. A year ago shares in Edison went for about $23 a pop. Today the stock closed at 85 cents, its lowest close all year.

What all of this means of course is that there now isn’t any collateral for those loans. That stock is now worth only a fraction of what it was back in the day. In the real world, Whittle would now be facing the dreaded margin call.

So why, if this thing is such an utter failure by free-market, get-government-out-of-our-lives standards, has it been kept on life support for the past decade?

Simple: It’s all about destroying yet another set of unions — in this case, the teachers’ unions. That’s why so many rich people and Third Way (or what we know as DINO) types back it — and why the recent push for unions to organize charter-school teachers is freaking out the people who back these schools.

Here’s a story where the good guys won for a change:

240 union workers at Republic Windows in Chicago were fired with little notice on Dec 5, 2008.  The company publicly announced on December 3 that Bank of America was ending its line of credit, that the company was declaring bankruptcy and shutting its doors promptly and permanently. The company stated that employee health insurance benefits would be terminated on December 31 (employee insurance had, in fact, already lapsed) and that back pay owed would not be forthcoming. The company acted in clear violation of the WARN Act, a Federal law that requires companies to give workers 60 days’ notice before mass layoffs.

200 workers, represented by United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, peacefully took over the Goose Island physical location and staged a sit-in that got widespread media coverage and support from politicians and police. The sit-in was held in order that the workers would receive accrued vacation and sick pay and other benefits rightfully theirs under their contract.

That sit-in — which was supported by then-President-elect Obama — turned out to be a very good thing, as the union workers preserved evidence of gross wrongdoing on the part of Republic’s management. (Among the stunts Republic was trying to pull: Taking the factory’s equipment — which Republic didn’t actually own — and stealing it by moving it to a non-union facility in Red Oak, Iowa, that Republic had recently acquired.) That evidence has now led to the arrest of Republic CEO Richard Gillman.

The Red Oak, Iowa non-union facility failed within two months. The old Chicago facility has had a much different fate: It was bought by Serious Materials, a green building company based in California, which cut a deal with the union to eventually hire back all the fired workers as business conditions permitted, and to allow full union representation. The slow economy is inhibiting rehiring — there’s still a glut of existing housing on the market — but both Serious and the union are confident that all the workers will be called back over time.