Someone else also thinks he have enough money...

On my old politics blog, Publicus Proventus, I frequently posted items called "We Have Enough Money," in which I pointed out the absurdity of arguing for food stamp cuts when people spend billions watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua, or making Looper, a ridiculously stupid-sounding movie.

Today, on Huffington Post, Karen Dolan, of the Institute For Policy Studies, agreed with me but does so using actual facts and things, so I'm going to repost her column entirely:

The Biggest Losers: Big Bird and the American People

Who won the first 2012 presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama? If you ask the Twitterverse, Big Bird nailed an easy victory.

Huh? In case you missed it, the sole quasi-joke either candidate cracked came when Mitt Romney vowed to choke off the government funding that pays some of Sesame Street's bills. But really, there were no winners tonight.

Moderator Jim Lehrer blew it too, although he seemed to be off to a decent start when he opened the debate with the night's most pressing question of the night: What are you gonna do about jobs?
Obama answered that he loved his sweetie. Romney tried to sound populist but just sounded weird. Things just got worse from there. More lies and insincere etch-a-sketch moments from Romney. More strangely absent and disconnected reactions from Obama.

Lehrer proceeded to let the candidates run roughshod over him, then lost us all when he said "we've lost a pod" as he reprimanded the candidates for taking too long. In an evening devoted to domestic issues, none of the three men ever mentioned women's rights, civil rights, immigration, poverty, climate change, or any other environmental issue.

Most importantly, nobody dared to breathe the truth, lest it actually get out -- America Is Not Broke.
That's right, the debate was an exercise in ridiculousness that produced no insight, no plan, no inspiration, no leadership, no truth. We are rich. We have enough money to put nutritious food on the tables of the one in five U.S. kids who are hungry and undernourished. We have enough money to help the laid-off moms and dads make ends meet until they get another job.

We have enough money to keep grandma, sister, and even every child ("future people," as I believe Romney put it) taken care of through their hard-earned benefits of Social Security and Medicare. We have enough money to help the down-and-out in times of sickness and emergency through Medicaid and help low-income families through refundable tax credits and the last shreds of welfare available to some.

We do. We're a rich country. We're not broke. Not only are we not in an economic position, recovering from the Wall Street-induced Great Recession to be able to tolerate the austerity trumpeted by Romney and half-conceded to by Obama, but we don't need to resort to it.

Here's what someone should have said tonight. Here is the truth denied to the American People...and to Big Bird:

1. We can bring in over $325 billion per year if we simply put a tiny tax on risky stock and derivative transactions; tax corporations and stop tax have abuse; and, tax the wealthy fairly, such as Warren Buffet suggested by taxing CEOs at the same rate as their secretaries

2. We can bring in almost $90 billion per year by actually making our environment more green and sustainable through: taxing the polluting carbon content of fossil fuels; and, ending fossil fuel subsidies.

3. We can save about $130 billion by making our country and globe safer through: closing out our war operations completely in Iraq, closing a third of our global military bases and ending drone attacks; and by ending military waste

These commonsense approaches would garner savings of over half a trillion a year -- far more than either candidate or any Bowles-Simpson scheme would save and would allow us to preserve our earned benefits, safeguard our safety net, keep our nation secure and create millions of good-paying green jobs.

America Is Not Broke. That is the missing story. Until we admit this, we all lose... and, you can definitely kiss Jim Lehrer and that big ole' yellow bird goodbye.


Karen Dolan is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. For more details, please see the IPS report, America Is Not Broke. IPS-dc.org

We used to have elections we could trust. (Publicus Proventus)

I was going to write up something about Paul Ryan being a hypocrite who wants to allow the rich to take from the poor, but then something else caught my eye and I couldn't help but talk about it.

The thing that caught my eye is the suspicion that there might be massive voter fraud... in Waukesha County, in favor of Still-Justice-Maybe David Prosser.

This is verbatim from the One Wisconsin Now website:

Election Returns: What Went On in Waukesha?
After Hours of Silence, Embattled Clerk Reports Wildly-High Turnout in Prosser’s Top County

Madison -- As counties statewide move to certify Tuesday’s shocking upset victory by JoAnne Kloppenburg over heavily-favored David Prosser, unanswered questions remain about returns from Tuesday night in Waukesha County -- the top-performing county in the state for Scott Walker’s self-proclaimed “complement” on the Supreme Court.

“Wisconsin deserves elections that are fair, clean and transparent,” said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now Executive Director. “There is a history of secrecy and partisanship surrounding the Waukesha County Clerk and there remain unanswered questions.”

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former staffer for the Assembly Republican Caucus, has been sharply criticized in recent months for her handling of recent elections. Even the archly-conservative Waukesha County Board has sharply condemned Nickolaus after past elections, demanding an immediate audit of her practices following ominous red-flags that emerged regarding her lack of oversight, failure to create backup files and her stubborn insistence to “keep everything secret.” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8/18/10; 1/17/11]

The County auditors said it was eminently possible -- including historical precedent -- for Nickolaus or a rogue employee to tamper with data. Why? Nickolaus insists on controlling password access and has unilaterally decided to move sensitive files, like election results, onto her personal computer.

Nickolaus has actually scoffed at complying with impartial audits, thumbing her nose at critics. A move that drew a sharp reaction at the time from the County Board Chair:

“There really is nothing funny about this, Kathy,” said Waukesha County Board Chairman Jim Dwyer when Nickolaus willfully ignored complying with the earlier impartial audit. “Don’t sit there and grin when I'm explaining what this is about.” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8/18/10; 1/17/11]

On Tuesday, shockingly-large turnout suddenly emerged from Waukesha County, which did not comport with either the results of previous spring elections, or even internal estimates from city officials mid-day. In fact, a Waukesha City Deputy Clerk said at 1:18pm that turnout was very typical, predicting somewhere between 20 to 25 percent. As Tuesday night wore on, reporting in Waukesha County stopped altogether for hours, leaving observers to wonder what was going on. Then suddenly, results suggesting massive turnout started to pour in rapidly with Prosser adding dramatically to his total by a 73-27 percent margin.

One Wisconsin Now estimates put overall turnout near 38 percent, a wild outlier to historical data and the earlier mid-day estimation of Waukesha’s own officials. In April 2009, turnout was 20 percent; April 2008, turnout was 22 percent and in April 2007, turnout was 24 percent. All of these elections had hotly-contested Supreme Court races as well.

I was all set to dismiss that as exaggeration and/or hyperbole, but then I saw that another county had suddenly come up with pro-Prosser numbers that might change the outcome of the election:

The Associated Press verified unofficial Winnebago County election returns on Wednesday morning, but the county updated its numbers at 2:27 that afternoon to show incumbent Justice David Prosser with 710 more votes and assistant attorney general JoAnne Kloppenburg with 466 more.

(Source.) Winnebago County ran low on paper ballots in some locations, according to this report. Sue Ertmer is the Winnebago County Clerk, and is listed as an "alternate" on the Winnebago County GOP contact list. (That's the picture of the site to the right.)

And then I saw that Waukesha County reported late yesterday having "found" 500-600 votes for Prosser: A Fox contributor and Young Republican sent in a report that the county had found some "lost" ballots to explain a discrepancy between votes cast in a school board race versus votes cast in the Supreme Court election.

What's interesting is that other than Winnebago and Waukesha Counties, the official canvass shows Kloppenburg netting more votes - -pulling further ahead -- in each county. Six other counties' official canvass showed that Kloppenburg was actually pulling ahead. It's just those two heavily-Republican, Republican-clerked counties that found votes.

Not that I'm pointing fingers. I can't -- I'm too busy crossing them hoping that the election won't actually be tampered with.

Wisconsin IS NOT in financial trouble, no matter how many lies Scott Fitzgerald and Patsy Walker tell. (Publicus Proventus.)

While Tea Partiers fantasize about Governor Patsy Walker running for president someday -- he has the only quality they look for in a president [being white] -- the rest of us have to put up with increasing lies combined with the fact that "fiscal conservatives" who are anything but are now starting to fill up the (supposed) gaps in budgets by taxing the poor while giving money to the rich.

The latest liar on the financial front, at least from Wisconsin, isn't Governor Patsy's empty threat to lay off 1,500 workers -- he won't do that -- it's Senate Liar Scott Fitzgerald, who, when he's not trying to turn his family into the Northwoods version of the Daleys, is simply making up facts. On the "Northwoods Patriot" blog, he writes (or is quoted as saying):

This problem is NOW. If we twiddle our thumbs and do nothing, our state will, plain and simple, run out of money in the Medical Assistance program, the Public Defender’s office, and the Corrections Department. The state owes $200 million to the Injured Patients and Compensation Fund, and almost $60 million to Minnesota in reciprocity payments. Even if you don’t count that $200 million debt, and you ignore the $65 million positive balance the state is legally required to carry, we’re still more than $136 million short this year alone.

That ignores the LFB's projection of a surplus this year, and assumes, as I've written, that Wisconsin will pay all those bills by June 30, which I haven't heard it plans or is legally required to do. But we know that Republicans will simply lie and ignore the facts when it suits them.

And Fitzgerald doesn't stop at simply lying; he also misrepresents what will happen if he's not allowed to follow through on his corporate bosses' instructions to break the middle class: he says that the SPD and other offices will "run out of money," but that happens pretty much yearly, as the state never fully funds that office.

Fitzgerald The Liar also ignores the fact that Wisconsin's pension fund is above 99% funded and is considered one of the safest in the nation -- so Wisconsin can meet all of its state employee pension obligations even after the recession and without additional appropriations.

But this is just the beginning, as I've said and others have said. Still not discussed much are the fact that Fitzgerald the Liar, with his GOP buddies working for megacorporations, is going to transfer more power to Governor Patsy, let him make 35 more patronage appointments, and take $900 million away from public schools... and next they'll probably follow the lead of ultraconservative states that are hiking sales taxes, a regressive move that punishes the middle class and poor by taking money out of their pockets.

The budget "crisis" isn't a crisis, and the State could raise revenue through a variety of innovative means, including amending the state Constitution, progressive taxation of luxury goods, and public-private investment. I'll start detailing those ideas as I go along, because I can't just sit and complain.