Dear Gov. D-bag of WI: (Page 26)

More strong words.

"All's fair in love and war (and politics)"

It's a well known idiom, and by definition idioms are not to be taken literally, rather figuratively. I think you see where I was going with it.

I respect you clarifying that you were judging "actions not people", that's totally understandable.

Intelligent people can disagree on this (And are all over the country BTW)...

You see them fleeing/shirking responsibility to avoid consequences. I see a group standing for what they believe in and utilizing an available strategy to reach a more desirable outcome.

It's entirely possible that we are both right.

Political propaganda from the "other" side.  Interesting.  It compares to a politician getting big money/incentives from a rich private sector or special interest group.  What's the difference?

It's all based on who's side who is on.

That's why I hate politics.

It's a fairly good explanation of the basics of collective bargaining, however the way people have been arguing for and against CBA's lately, I would assume you have a much greater knowledge of how unions and specifically CBA's work. This is the barebones, one-sided view of CBA's and as someone from the anti-bill side who has said that CBA's need to be drastically altered (just not to SB-11's level), I will say that this is not nearly enough.

The demonizing of unions and the "proof" that they're bad with the increase of public-sector and decrease of private-sector is also absolutely hilarious. Enjoy the 8-hour workday? Unemployment comp?

At the end of the day, this bill is about so much more than collective bargaining.

65,000 of the lower-middle class (aka: the working poor) will lose health coverage.

Education is taking over a half-billion dollar hit.

Recycling programs are being shut down.

Clean water action is going to be eradicated.

My university is going to be split from the UW-System so that it can also become "more flexible", which is just fancy talk for raise tuition and isolate smaller colleges throughout the state. What about the 37 extraneous jobs of 6-figures+ that Walker is putting into UW-Madison? He is essentially adding a stage between president and vice-president FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON OTHER THAN POLITICAL POWER.

Lower capital gains taxes.That's gonna cost us $36 million.

Multi-state corp with tax liability? Oh what the heck, let's give you some more time to find a way to finagle out of it. That's gonna cost us $46 million. $46 million in addition to the $100+ million already approved this year.

Not getting enough convictions? Well then let's raise prosecutor pay so that they put more people in jail! There's a million dollars well spent.

That's just some of it. If he doesn't like how it looks after it goes through legislature, he can break out his fancy WORD-ITEM veto. Yes, the state of Wisconsin, in all of its infinite wisdom, grants the governor the power to remove words from bills before he passes them into law. But Scott Walker has clearly shown his love for law, his high moral and ethical grounds and would never resort to something like that, so nothing to worry about there.

Can someone...and I really mean someone...explain to me why the same people that defend Wall St., bailouts, upholding of contracts for CEO's of businesses that launched a worldwide recession, are the VERY SAME PEOPLE that say that we don't need to uphold private sector contracts, we don't need to bailout people who can't afford to live day to day??? Where the heck are your priorities?

And before we launch into that tired, "Pick yourself up by the bootstraps" conversation, please at least have a clue about what it means to be in the working poor.

Finally, why are we talking about how politically corrupt unions are (which I will absolutely grant you), without discussing how corrupt corporations are? They're the exact same thing, except corps have been doing it since the 1800's and unions have been doing it for about 15 years. Corps are better funded and have CREATED THE TEA PARTY! How they've disseminated this fear of taxation to the citizens, as a guise for their own ability to dodge every imaginable tax (and create dodges), is just absolutely amazing. It really shows the power of telling people 7 different times in 7 different ways. The Tea Party is a marketing campaign for people that don't care to think on their own. And WOW, is it effective.

Wait, what? Are you at all familiar with lobbyists, or are you just a fan of trickle down economics?

Thank you for that! Someone actually recommended that book to me the other day and I forgot to write it down. It was very interesting to hear how social issues were moved to the forefront of the political conversation and subsequently inflamed the religious into the religious right.

That is a fair point, but it is essentially pointless. Semantics at best. The fact of the matter is that you are decreasing tax revenues from the wealthy and increasing tax revenues on the poor. And why is it that people only choose to respond to very small subsets of what I'm saying? Because you don't have punchy rhetoric available?

OK, fair enough. I've been guilty of that myself. Do you then care to defend your point about taxing the poor and giving tax cuts to the rich, or is that just something that you acknowledge as a given and agree with? Which is a perfectly acceptable response, of course. Not one that I agree with, but that's neither here nor there I suppose.

Another note...I feel like I saw something about the alleged $7 million in damages that we've caused to the marble. Those awful union painter jerks contend that point and say they are willing to provide the resources to restore any damage to the Capitol.

http://www.wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=229057

Perhaps it is because we realize that arguing with someone who is so completely convinced of the righteousness of his own cause is a complete waste of time.

The voters spoke in November when they elected the guy along with a republican house and senate. This is the way they see fit to balance the budget. Get over it.

Much like the dems screwed us all with this ridiculous health care bill, Obama's appointees to the Supreme Court and a number of other irreversible bad calls. The majority spoke and voted them in, now we have what I consider to be a mess. Me going on and on in an internet forum is not going to change that. Much like you dancing around in the capitol building and ranting on the internet is not going to change Walker and his supporter's minds.

The dems had their two years, now the repub's have theirs, and all the internet ranting in the world is not going to affect the decisions that they make.

Percentage of income as a defense of the wealthy is not a good argument. 10% to me is not 10% to someone who makes $500,000/year. I'm not interested in how much the wealthy are taxed; they should be taxed more. Or, we could raise the minimum wage to the minimum living wage, adjusted by city. That won't happen though, because that would assault the middle class. So, really, the only option is corporations and those making $250,000+/year.

I translate your statement based on the fact that we do not have a surplus in Wisconsin right now. If you are cutting taxes (and thus preventing tax revenue to flow in the door), you need to offset that with a tax increase somewhere else to bring in tax revenue, unless you are running a deficit. You could also attempt to make the government more efficient by shedding unnecessary costs, which is what we're sort of seeing Walker do. So the reduction of take-home pay to public-sector employees will be in the range of 6-12%, because Walker likes giving tax cuts to corporations. If he kept things static, why we'd have an extra $170 million this year, which just happens to be around how much he expects to save from the elimination of collective bargaining rights and reduction of contribution.

So my question to you is, how the heck do you not see the correlation there?!

And thank you for demeaning what I've been doing at the Capitol to the level of "dancing around." What I've actually been doing is documenting the protests, as well as forming a movement within the Assembly Democrats and the local media to mobilize these protests.

Oh and don't think that ranting and raving, via the Internet or whatever medium you'd choose, is not effective. These protests have caused sane governors in every other state that was looking to axe CBA's, to back off a bit and make concessions/say that they never intended that in the first place.

Cutting capital gains almost always increases tax revenues. People who see a high capital gains tax often do not sell - when there is a lower CG Tax people sell and more revenue compes in.