Cartoon Like a Lion, Out Like a Light

Having learned last week more than you'll ever need to know about the guy who didn't become Calvin Coolidge's Attorney General, today's Graphical History Tour rummages through my basement in search of new and interesting takes on my own old cartoons.

If we're lucky, we may even find some.

March, 2015

Before there was Project 2025, there was the ALEC Agenda. The corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council was founded in 1973 to create cookie-cutter right-wing legislation for state governments from one end of the country to the other.

The Wisconsin politicians in my cartoon are Assembly Leader Robin Vos, then Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, and then Governor Scott Walker. Walker is out of office now; Fitzgerald has gone on to Congress, and you may have seen him as one of the congresscretins confronted by angry constituents at his town hall meeting last week.

The character having the ALEC Agenda rammed down his throat — a term usually used by Republicans to vilify marriage equality, abortion rights, health care reform, and anything else they despise — is the laborer from the Wisconsin state flag.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, March 25, 2015

I didn't get to draw hard-hitting cartoons of Republicans ramming their agenda down Wisconsin throats during my stint illustrating the editorials of the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. Once in a while, however, I got to have a little fun with a topic, such as this one.

Investor Mark Attanasio purchased the Milwaukee Brewers Major League Baseball team from Bud Selig in 2004. The team, which hadn't made the MLB post-season since 1982, had a brand new ballpark, and Attanasio wanted to find out what else it was going to take to attract fans to the game.

The fourth panel is an homage to Richard Guindon, whose self-titled cartoon was a beloved feature in the Minneapolis Tribune when I was in college in Minnesota. Not that any regular readers of the Business Journal had any reason to know that; to my knowledge, Guindon's cartoons never appeared in any Wisconsin newspaper.

While lutefisk night at the ballpark might plausibly be a real thing at Target Field (yet certainly isn't), a more appropriate homage to Richard Guindon would have been for the lady in panel four to have cited her enthusiasm for Bring Your Carp to the Ballpark Night.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 6, 1995

Jumping back another decade, here's another cartoon that would never have run in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. 

This was the first installment of a two-parter, satirizing some image-polishing television advertisements by a certain multinational corporation. Unlike the weeks that have passed between my current episodes of the Max & Leo Show, the student newspaper at UW-Milwaukee published twice a week; so readers could follow the sequel to the Exxtron commercial three days after the first episode.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., March 7, 1985

Finally, let us take a moment to honor the memory of Soviet General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party, Konstantin Chernenko. 

Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, just shy of thirteen months in office, of cirrhosis of the liver, chronic emphesema, and congestive heart failure at age 73. He had come to office upon the death of Yuri Andropov, who had succeeded another elderly Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, only sixteen months earlier.

State-run media in the U.S.S.R. had consistently downplayed reports of the three leaders' declining health. On February 25, 1985, aides hauled the obviously ill Chernenko out of his hospital bed so that he could vote for himself (as candidate for Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) on live television. His last television appearance was three days later to read a brief victory statement celebrating his election.

In completely unrelated news, Donald Полезный Идиот Trump is older today than any of those three Soviet leaders were when they checked into their respective mausolea. 

February on the Ones

I've used some of these Saturday posts to rehash my own cartoons from 30 years ago, which at this point in the calendar, has led up to Gulf War I. My problem this month is that I've already posted most of my February, 1991 cartoons for one reason or another. The cartoon below may very well be the only one previously unrehashed.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, February 12, 1991

So for a theme this week, here are some of my Wisconsin-themed cartoons from 2001 and 2011.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, February 23, 2001

This cartoon, drawn to accompany an editorial in the Business Journal, has a date written on it of February 16, but so does another Beej cartoon. I don't see a cartoon dated February 23, and I think this one is the one with the wrong date.

At any rate, Chuck Chvala (D-Madison) was the on-and-off Majority Leader in the Wisconsin State Senate from 1995 to 2002 — on at this point in time — and the Business Journal thought that a prescription drug bill in the state legislature was doomed and little more than a partisan ploy. Chvala ended up not looking so heroic when he was found guilty of violating campaign finance laws by having Democratic caucus staff do electioneering work on the state dime.

Quaint, aina?

Now Chvala podcasts political punditry with former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (R-Waukesha), who had his own run-in with ethics laws.

2011 was a tumultuous year in Wisconsin politics; Scott Walker took office as Governor with a Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature. Backed by an ad blitz from anti-union oligarchs, they launched an all-out assault against public employees (notably excepting the police and fire unions, the only unions to have backed Walker's campaign).

Wisconsin Club for [Cancerous] Growth took the lead in TV and radio advertising. One of their ads highlighted the wage and benefit cuts that unions at various private firms had been forced to swallow during the 2008-2009 economic crash, thanks to management's contempt for their own communities. Mercury Marine, for example, could threaten to close down its Fond du Lac plant and open shop in Bumm Fork, Alabama, instead; but the same can't be done with schools and snowplows, prisons and parole officers. So the voice-over announcer complained that public employee unions were not sharing in privately employed workers' pain:

 "All across Wisconsin, people are making sacrifices to save their jobs: frozen wages, pay cuts and paying more for health care. But state workers haven't had to sacrifice; they pay next to nothing for their pensions and a fraction of their health care. It's not fair. Call your state legislators and tell them to vote for Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill. It's time state employees paid their fair share, just like the rest of us."

It was cute that the folks at Wisconsin Club for [Cancerous] Growth included themselves in "the rest of us."

Act 10, as Walker's "budget repair bill" was officially called, gutted public employee unions' ability to negotiate salaries and benefits, banned those unions from collecting dues from public employees who chose not to belong to the union (but would continue to be included in whatever union contracts would follow). Having made union membership pointless, Act 10 also made mandatory annual recertification votes, further encouraging employees to bust their unions.

All in the name of fixing Republicans' "hole in the state budget."

Well, folks, as appreciation for your indulgence while I wallow down memory lane today, here's a February, 2021 cartoon featuring three members of Wisconsin's illustrious delegation to Washington, D.C.: Congressmen Glenn Grothman and Scott Fitzgerald, and Senator Ron "This Didn't Seem Like an Armed Insurrection to Me" Johnson.

An Apple for Evers

Here in Wisconsin, State Superintendent of Public Schools Tony Evers is the Democratic gubernatorial candidate running against incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker.

Having made it difficult for urban public school districts to fund themselves and simultaneously diverting public funds to private schools, Walker now touts himself as a leader in education. Whatever gains have been made in Wisconsin education he has claimed for himself, while blaming Evers for everything that has gone wrong.

Third-party ads by shadowy outside interests — Republican groups have outspent Democratic groups two to one — accuse Evers of not using his office to illegally revoke the teaching licenses of some teachers who were caught using school computers to view pornography. (In the most prominent case, the teacher's sister had sent him risqué emails, which he passed along to other staff.) In fact, state law at the time only addressed sanctions against teachers whose conduct directly affected students; Evers supported resulting legislation to expand the law to include sexual misconduct in which no actual student was involved.

Polls have suggested that the race is a toss-up, but I tend to believe that Walker still has the edge here. Including the effort to recall him in his first term, he has won statewide election three times. Suburban and rural resentment of Milwaukee and Madison, the disappearance of good-paying union jobs, and a steady sprawl of exurbanites from Chicago and the Twin Cities are turning Wisconsin more red than purple.

The Democrats' argument against Walker in past elections, that Wisconsin's economy has lagged behind neighboring states, doesn't work for them this year. (Apparently, it didn't work for them in past years, either, but let's move on.) Instead, Democrats now complain that current employment gains have come at the cost of profligate give-aways to firms such as Uline, Amazon and Foxconn.

Another Democratic campaign theme is that our roads are falling apart because Walker refuses to pay for their upkeep. And the savings get passed on to you in the form of auto repair bills!

Doing anything about shoring up public education, trimming corporate welfare, or fixing potholes costs money, and if Republicans are about anything, it's whipping up preemptive sticker shock. Fighting back against being painted as a Taxandspendliberal is going to require more charisma and dynamism than I've seen out of Mr. Evers so far.

Even if Evers should win in November, he'll face a legislature gerrymandered to tilt so Republican, there would have to be over a dozen Republican legislators each caught in bed with a dead girl, a live boy and a Colin Kaepernick jersey for Evers to get any of his agenda passed.

Besides, see how your auto repair bills boost the private sector economy?

Drawing Board of Education

Your kids may be on spring break, but here at Bergetoons, it's Back-to-Schoolback Saturday.

I started my editorial cartoon career forty years ago by drawing about our education system — a topic of interest to me since I was still in school at the time. The 1970s in my hometown were marked by union strikes interrupting every other school year, starting with a custodians' union strike in 1970. Most of the strikes lasted a couple of weeks, but a teachers' strike my senior year lasted 50 days — starting in January and lasting all the way through February and into March.

With plenty of time on my hands, I took ballpoint pen to paper and drew the next two cartoons, my first editorial cartoons to be printed in an honest-to-goodness daily newspaper. (Caricatured on the left of this first one is union negotiator Jim Ennis, who had a conveniently round face; on the right is school board negotiator Thatcher Peterson, who didn't.)

To make up for lost school days once classes finally resumed, the district scheduled classes on Saturdays and extended the school year until June 30. We seniors were graduated weeks earlier, however, in order for schools to send our records to colleges and universities on time. It also gave us a slight edge getting summer jobs.

Racine's experience with teachers' strikes was hardly unique. Between 1969 and 1974, there were 50 teachers' strikes in Wisconsin, most notably the 1974 strike in Hortonville, during which the school district summarily fired 86 of its 88 teachers; townsfolk formed vigilante groups against the union members, and the union leader was hanged in effigy from the town water tower. Teachers unions from around the state sent members to support the Hortonville strikers, but to no avail. The Hortonville teachers appealed their firing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found in favor of the school district.

I've encountered quite a few people locally whose sour opinion of labor unions is directly a result of  those days. A  jaundiced view  of schools and a reluctance to fund them adequately, on the other hand, predates the union issue. Funding schools through local property taxes makes sense from the point of view of having community-wide support of a community service, but it does require convincing property owners who have no children in school of the value of other people's education.

My generation went through four years of "split shift" middle schools because the community hadn't built enough schools to accommodate the baby boom. Even after we were graduated out of the system, voters only very grudgingly voted to repair or replace older schools that were literally crumbling to pieces.

Sex education has always been a thorny issue for schools. How much information is too much? How much education is not enough?

Sex Ed has been one factor pushing some parents to take their kids out of the public schools; not wanting their kids taught science is another. It furthermore stands to reason that children do better in schools where the whole class is motivated and all parents are invested in the kids' education. Public schools must teach the talented and the indifferent alike, whether the parents have the time or inclination to get involved or not.

Along the way, private school parents have become convinced that it's not fair that they should still have to pay for public schools as well as their private tuition. Thus arose the idea that kids going to private schools should be entitled to public tax dollars, too; its proponents gave their voucher programs the name "School Choice."

The above cartoon fairly encapsulates one of the problems I have with subsidizing private schools. But when I was drawing for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, their editorial stance was firmly in favor of school choice, and they occasionally wanted cartoons that reflected that viewpoint. It can be a good exercise every once in a while to try one's hand at drawing a cartoon with which one disagrees, although I wouldn't recommend making a career of it.

Along came Scott Walker and Republican control of all levers of state government after the 2010 elections. Recognizing them as the last institutional support of the Democratic party, teachers' and other public employee unions were the Republicans' first target. Koch brothers radio and TV ads stoking public resentment of public sector workers. For 30 years, private sector workers had seen their jobs sent overseas and their wages, at best, stagnant. The students of Hortonville and all the other stricken schools in the 1970s were now all grown up and ready to pay those teachers back.

With Republicans now in charge of all levers of the federal government, this will become a national issue yet again. I just posted this last cartoon only a month ago, but I think it's worth another look, since mercurial American President Donald Trump hasn't flip-flopped on subsidizing private education.

Yet.

Q Toon: Certainly Not GOP Shy

This cartoon was drawn last Saturday and Sunday, and sent to my editors on Monday morning, well before a certain story leaked out about a particular president-elect of the United States.

So what is it about Republicans and their obsession with excretory functions?

North Carolina Republicans passed their notorious HB2 last year, and even faced with the loss of business, coveted sports events, and the governorship, decided that regulating transgender persons' use of public lavatories was more important than any of that. Charlotte rescinded the equal rights ordinance at the center of the HB2 controversy as part of a deal with Republicans to repeal the state law; but when it came time for Republicans to hold up their end of the deal, they refused.

This year, Republicans in several state legislatures have rushed to the side of their Tarheel brethren, introducing a slew of bathroom bills of their own. In a few, such as Virginia and Minnesota, the bills stand little chance of getting past a Democratic governor. But in others, such as Texas, there is no such check on the legislature, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick there is a vocal proponent. Here in Wisconsin, we have plenty of experience of Gov. Scott Walker quickly signing Republican legislation that he earlier claimed was "not a priority."

So Republicans are all in to confront the non-existent threat of transgender persons launching a wave of sexual assaults in public rest rooms. What can we do about it?

Tell them to piss off.

Ten, Twenty, Thirty

The old calendar on the wall tells me that it's Snickerback Saturday yet again, and I haven't got a theme I'm raring to fulminate about. So, for no reason in particular, I'm hauling out cartoons I drew ten, twenty, and thirty Aprils ago.

Starting with the oldest:

In April of 1986, the House passed a bipartisan bill supported by the Reagan administration and pushed by the National Rifle Association (but opposed by law enforcement officers) to repeal many parts of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Senate had already passed a similar bill ending federal control on the sale and transport of rifles and shotguns and creating the "gun show loophole." The McClure-Volkmer Act further protects dealers from federal prosecution unless authorities could prove "willful" violation of remaining gun laws, and prohibits any state or federal government from keeping "any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or disposition."

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By this point in April, 1996, the presidential primaries had settled on the major parties' nominees. President Clinton had no significant opposition for the Democratic nomination; that the Republicans would nominate Kansas Senator Bob Dole did not come as a surprise. The Republican nominee-apparent did, however, present a challenge in one part of the world:

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With this cartoon from April, 2006 we tie together sex and an oblique tangent off the first cartoon's theme of terrorism:

In order to cast DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff as Moe of the Three Stooges, I employed a cartoon cliché for depicting surprise and shock.

The Brian Doyle scandal was one of those quickly forgotten peccadilloes of the George W. Bush administration. Amid the ineffectual response to Hurricane Katrina and some careless treatment of an envelope containing white powder, the Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was caught soliciting sex from minors on the internet. Doyle, 55, was found guilty of seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and sentenced to five years in Florida state prison for inappropriate e-mails he sent to an under-cover officer posing as a 14-year-old girl.

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While researching the background of the 1986 cartoon above, I happened to run across a letter to the editor in the April 21, 1986 issue of Time magazine from a 20-year-old Delavan lad who would someday become governor. I draw no conclusion from this and have no snide remarks to make; I simply share it for the sake of trivia:

Support Your Right to Explode

Dateline Shigagowinj, WI (IPU): At the National Rifle Association and Wisconsin Wisconsin Firearm Owners, Ranges, Clubs, and Educators Inc. (FORCE)  annual convention in Weston this month, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) signed a bill into law that allows suicide vests, five years after the state approved concealed firearms and seconds after a bill to allow carrying switchblades.

Manufacturing, selling, transporting, purchasing or possessing a suicide vest has been illegal in

Wisconsin since frontier days.

The bill also lowers the minimum age for wearing a suicide vest to three months and bars local governments from enacting suicide vest regulations stricter than state law.

The bill’s author, Kathleen Van Kooykmir (R-Idiculous) told reporters, “Local ordinances more restrictive than state law only serve to confuse or entrap law-abiding citizens traveling within or through the state. Preemption ensures that citizens can expect consistent enforcement of state suicide vest laws everywhere in Wisconsin.”

Suicide vests may now be worn in Wisconsin schools, houses of worship, bars, restaurants, sports arenas, public transportation, airports and amusement parks. The one place suicide vests will still be banned is the state capitol building.

“We may be wild and reckless,” said State Senator Ron Onionson (R-Eilavac), “But we ain't nuts.”

The Donald on Line One

Okay, this still counts as the third installment in my series of caricatures of 2016 presidential candidates, because Scott Walker was still nominally in the race when I posted the one of him on Sunday.

I had another Donald Trump sketch that I'd been working on, on and off, for months without ever really arriving at something I was pleased with. Then, I started doodling in my notebook between events at the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning on Friday, resulting in this.

The Rise and Fall of Darth Snotwalker

For a while there, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was flying high in neighboring Iowa, where they had heard nothing but glowing reports from Wisconsin media of how Walker had faced down all those uppity school teachers and cut the Democrats out of government. He divided! He conquered! He rode a Harley!

And yet, in the glare of national media attention, all his faults that had somehow escaped the attention of Journal Communications Inc. began to weigh him down. Local TV news might accept the notion of building a wall across the Canadian border, or that taking three positions on a single question does not constitute changing his position, but you can't Face the Nation and get away with that crap.

Q Toon: Terms of Enragement

Given how the assassination of nine Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina's Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church during a Bible study last Wednesday night has dominated the news in the U.S. this week, my Q Syndicate cartoon this week is only very tangential to LGBT issues.

This weekend on NPR's On the Media, Brooke Gladstone noted what she called the media's rules for different races when it comes to mass murder:

"If [Dylann] Roof were Muslim, he would have been identified swiftly and universally as a 'terrorist.' Reporters would focus on his 'recruiters,' which in his case could be a multitude of white supremacist web sites, or one of the many hate groups that exist legally in his own state. But when the suspect is white, he's an 'aberration,' immediately furnished with a name, a family, a history, and a diagnosis. Whereas a black suspect, for instance, accused of far less or nothing, more often is displayed as a nameless emblem of a social disease."

In the days since, The Guardian of Great Britain led American media in unmasking the Council of Conservative Citizens as Roof's on-line recruiter. Digging further, American media found that the head of the CCC, Earl Holt III, has donated thousands of dollars to Republicans over the years (including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Senator Ron Johnson, and Representative Paul Ryan); Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum are among the presidential candidates now stumbling all over themselves to turn away that cash.

Well, who could have known that an organization sharing its acronym with the Coo Clucks Clan would be a bunch of racists? Besides the Southern Poverty Law Center, that is.

And while Republicans have been hastily disavowing Roof's recruiter, Walmart, Amazon, Target and even the state of Alabama have taken the rebel battle flag off their shelves and flagpoles. Anything to keep the subject away from gun control, I suppose. Minneapolis might even rename Lake Calhoun.

I do so hope that Roof is being kept up to date with these developments in the Race War he wanted to spark.

WisToon: Six Degrees of Scott Walker

Paul Berge✒Jan 21, 2015

The other day, Mark E. Andersen posted a blog entry on Daily Kos titled "Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Claims to Have a Master's Degree." Some of my liberal friends were quickly offended by what appears at first glance to be yet another example of college drop-out Walker fabricating fictitious facts — it's kind of like politicians who pretend to be war veterans, isn't it?

I obviously have no sympathy for Darth Snotwalker, but if you read what he actually said — copied right there in Andersen's post — you can easily tell that his ersatz master's degree was not so much a lie as it was as a metaphor:

"I've got a master's degree in taking on the big government special interests, and I think that is worth more than anything else that anybody can point to."

 Still and all, I think there's plenty of room left to lampoon Master Walker for this claim. 

Scott Walker Caricature

It's time for installment #3 in my series of Wisconsin candidates for office in 2014:

Here the incumbent governor, Republican Darth Snotwalker, takes to the classroom to teach the state a little lesson in division.

A Problem Like Maria (Episode 2)

This business of photoshopping Maria from The Sound of Music into other pictures began with a college friend of mine who came home from a vacation through Virginia and posted a photo of rolling hills and distant mountains as his Facebook cover photo. Somebody suggested that the the only thing the photo lacked was Julie Andrews dancing in the foreground.

My friend, who is also named Paul, added Maria singing "The Hills Are Alive" to the photo, and a meme was born.

Paul followed that picture up by photoshopping Maria onto the balustrade of the West Virginia capitol building, which inspired me to replace the "Wisconsin" statue atop the capitol dome in Madison:

Maria should be warned, however, that Governor Snotwalker and his minions have decreed singing to be a capitol offense.

Toon: Republican Health Care

The Koch Brothers have an anti-health care ad which shows a young woman arriving at her gynecologist's office and telling her doctor that she has enrolled in "Obamacare." When she gets on the examining table and puts her legs up in the stirrups, the doctor leaves, and a really, really creepy big-headed Uncle Sam brandishing a speculum rises up between her legs.

The Kochs' creepy Uncle Sam tells us three things.

1. that the Koch Brothers haven't been paying attention to what Republican-run states have been doing vis-à-vis women's reproductive rights, 
2. that the Koch Brothers therefore don't particularly care about women's reproductive rights, and
3. that the Koch Brothers really, really, hate America.

I mean, really. Where did they get that Uncle Sam head, anyway? Was it a souvenir from when they were protesting against the Great Satan in the streets of Teheran in the 1980s?

WisToon: Fudging the Numbers

What do you do when you push union-busting laws through the statehouse with a promise that 250,000 new jobs will result, and instead your state leads the nation in job losses?

Why, you change the numbers, of course. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages is still being calculated, but the Walker campaign, er, administration released what appear to be more optimistic numbers than the traditional employment figures from the U.S. Labor Department a month ahead of schedule:

On the eve of the release of the latest official numbers on job creation -- or, in Wisconsin's sad case, job losses -- Walker suddenly announced he had found a new set of data that shows his policies are working. ... he did this one day before official numbers -- which unlike Walker's figures have been reviewed and verified for accuracy -- were to be released.

The reasons for the difference are complicated and wonky -- you can wade through the economic explanations and charts here --  but the reasons for rushing the release of this more favorable set of numbers are obvious: they would otherwise come out after the June 5 recall election. The Walker campaign (and his superPAC supporters) had TV commercials produced and airing before the ink on the Department of Workforce Development release was dry.

Considering that the Walker campaign and the Obama reelection campaign share the same "Forward" slogan, the Cap Times editorial poses an interesting question: how would Mitt Romney and his Crossroads for Growth swiftboating pals respond if the Obama White House tried to sweeten their economic record with the same sort of fudgery?

WisToon: Dubya Double Dose

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate May 18, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

Back in January of last year, documentarian Brad Lichtenstein caught another rare moment of candor from Darth Snotwalker which has just come to light. The video shows Walker literally kissing up to $510,000 donor Diane Hendricks, owner of a cement company, who asks him what he plans to do to bust Wisconsin's remaining unions:

Hendricks: "Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions-- "
Walker: "Oh, yeah."
Hendricks: "- and become a right-to-work? What can we do to help you?"
Walker: "Well, we're going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we get for that is the fact that we've got - budgetarily we can't afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there's no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out. . . . That opens the door once we do that."

We've already seen the "Divide and Conquer" strategy here in Wisconsin. In his so-called "Budget Repair Bill," Walker exempted the fire and police unions, who had supported his 2010 run for governor, from the forced depression of wages and benefits and imposition of new union recertification requirements. His supporters in the Chamber of Commerce produced television ads which basically said, "We screwed workers at Harley Davidson and Merchant Marine and elsewhere, so screwing teachers and other public employees is only fair!"

"Right to Work" is a euphemism for union-busting, and has more with removing the right to bargain than creating any right to work. Call it a right to work at Third World levels of compensation and safety standards.

Now that the "Divide and Conquer" video has gone public, Walker disavows any intention of pushing through a "Right to Work" bill. But his lips are moving when he says that, so you can be pretty sure he's lying.

My Phone Call With Romney

I sat through 20 minutes or so of a live telephone "town hall" call with Mitt Romney on the other end last night. Wisconsin's primary is coming up on Tuesday, and Romney and his SuperPAC are spending heavily in this state. (I haven't seen any ads by the Santorum campaign, although his "Red White and Blue" superPAC has one ad up on TV.)

While I was on the phone call, there was one questioner who thought high gas prices were caused by oil company profiteering. Mitt told her he disagreed and blamed Obama for not drilling, mining and fissioning enough. Mitt saw great potential in natural gas, but avoided any reference to fracking.

The other questioners lobbed easy pitches like what his first executive order would be, whether he'd consider Paul Ryan as his running mate, whether he agreed that Governor Scott Walker is a national hero, and what he thought of President Obama's "I'll have more flexibility after the election" comment to Russian President Medvedev. For the record, Romney listed five first orders, from stopping "Obamacare" to opening up government contracts to non-union shops. Mitt praised Ryan's budget plan while promising that his own budget plan would balance the budget sooner (and said naming a running mate hadn't occurred to him yet). You'll also be astounded to hear that Mitt applauded Darth Snotwalker and disapproved of that flexibility remark.

If I had answered the call on the phone in the computer room, I could have put it on speaker. I could have live-blogged it and at least not have felt it a complete waste of time. But 20 minutes is about as long as I can stand to hold a phone to my ear and listen to someone else's conversation.

Between questions, a staffer urged us to press "1" if we agreed with Romney and would vote for him. I never heard anything about what to press if I wanted to ask a question. At least when I sit through these "town hall" calls from Paul Ryan, listening to all the questions from birthers who want to press the congressman about what he's going to do about exposing the president as a socialist or to compensate the Notch Babies, they regularly tell you how to ask a question. For Romney's call, I have to assume that even the woman who didn't like oil company profiteering first had to tell the Romney campaign that she liked and would vote for him.

Oh, and the staffer pronounced Mequon "McWahn." (It's "MECK-wahn.")

Did WI Cartoonist Illegally Impersonate Legislator?

On Saturday, February 25, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Steve Nass did not send a press release to the (Madison) Capital Times.

The press release came from Wisconsin labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki. Upset that Nass had successfully forced the University of Wisconsin's School for Workers to cancel a display of posters and artwork from the protests launched in reaction to Governor Darth Snotwalker's attacks on state workers, Konopacki created a fake press release purportedly from the La Grange Republican. Tweaking quotations by Nass and his press secretary, Konopacki's fake press release reported that Nass wanted the Smithsonian Institution to remove pro-labor material from the National Museum of American History.

Konopacki mailed the gag release, appearing under a Photoshopped facsimile of the Assemblyman's official letterhead, to Cap Times editor John Nichols -- who mistook it for the real thing, and reported it on the Cap Times's web site as a genuine news item.

The report was only on line for 40 minutes, but that was long enough for Nass to sic the law on Konopacki for:

946.69 Falsely assuming to act as a public officer or employee or a utility employee...
(2) Whoever does any of the following is guilty of a Class I felony:
(a) Assumes to act in an official capacity or to perform an official function, knowing that he or she is not the public officer or public employee or the employee of a utility that he or she assumes to be.

I can't wait to see whether Sarah Palin tries the same tack against Julianne Moore.

Scott Walker's "Holiday Spirit"

This feel-good ad by "Friends of Scott Walker" has been in heavy airplay here in the Badger State as he seeks to thwart a probable recall election:

As Chris points out, if this governor were not a Republican, Fox News and AM radio would be giving him holy hell for declaring war on the word he and Mrs. Walker fail to utter.

Job Creators Toon

You know those rich people President Obama is talking about taxing at rates unheard of since the boom of the 1990s? No, not those famous actors, heiresses and Wall Street speculators. We're talking about the hard-working industrialists who have spent the last couple of decades making their companies lean and mean by laying off as many employees as they possibly can.

They are job creators now.

Turns out that the only thing preventing them from creating more jobs is that they still have to pay taxes. (We certainly can't wait around for all those laid-off employees to stimulate the economy.) The Bush tax cuts haven't been around long enough to encourage our job creators to get around to any job creating, but never fear. The Republican party is dedicated to making sure that job creators' bank accounts stay fat and contended.

So our Republican governors and state legislators have been hard at work cutting workers' pay and benefits. Republicans in Congress have discovered the federal debt after eight years of ignoring it, and are willing to bankrupt the entire country to get the federal government shut down. They are willing to "broaden the tax base," which sounds better than "raising taxes on the poor, out of work, and elderly," and are eager to stop government spending on -- well, the poor, out of work, and elderly.

Whenever you see one of these Republican politicians, they repeat the same lines about protecting our job creators, cutting taxes, getting rid of government regulations (such as worker safety standards, consumer protections, anti-pollution laws and the like) and making it more and more difficult for anyone harmed by lax safety standards, defective products, pollution, or the like to sue them in court.

And through it all, you never see the Charles Koch's lips move.