If embattled WI Governor Scott Walker can’t win fair and square at the ballot box in the now all but inevitable recall election he faces—WI Dems are making a big announcement on Thursday about the recall campaign’s progress—then why not try something immoral and shysty?

I’ll tell you why NOT, Scott: It makes people hate your fucking guts even more and it makes them all the more determined to kick your ass to the curb. 

For every story of voter suppression and menacing of Recall Walker volunteers by brain-addled reichwingers, there are more people making up their minds by the minute to boot this toxic motherfucker out of office.

It’s odd that it didn’t occur to to Walker and his weasely Republicans cronies that this kind of story might prove to be a bit of a public relations NIGHTMARE and that there would be push-back—and plenty of it—with this sort of extremely ill-advised move. From People’s World:

For more than 60 years Ruthelle Frank has not missed an election in her town, her state and her country. She first voted in 1948 and has voted in every single election since then.

She is herself an elected official in her hometown of Brokaw, Wisconsin. She is a member of the Brokaw Village Board.

Now, however, because of the new Republican voter ID law in Wisconsin, 2012 will be the first year Frank can’t vote.

Under the new law people must carry a new state issued photo ID in order to vote. The ID itself is free but one must have a birth certificate in order to get the free ID. Birth certificates, for those in Wisconsin who don’t have them, cost $20. Opponents of the Republican voter ID law argue that this, by itself, amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax.

Frank’s first problem is that she does not have a birth certificate. People born at home in the 1920s in Wisconsin did not receive official birth certificates. Like many others in 1927, Frank was born in her own house.

The ACLU have stepped in on Ruthelle Frank’s behalf to challenge this vileness in court.

WHO would think something like this is smart politically??? Well… Republicans apparently. If you can’t beat ‘em, CHEAT ‘em.
 

 
Taking current GOP front-runner, Newt Gingrich—and his plan to put inner city children to work as janitors—to task, Crooks and Liars managing editor Tina Dupuy writes of her own experiences working as a child janitor for the princely wage of $4.25 an hour (she made $75 a week before tax!). As Dupuy writes, it’s not that America’s poor children need jobs to discipline them and to make them better workers, it’s that the jobs need to be better for America’s adults!

Full disclosure: I, too, worked as a janitor at a municipal park in West Virginia at the age of 14 and made this exact same wage. I don’t really think it harmed me in any way. In fact, I wanted to do it so I was able to buy punk rock records, marijuana and LSD, but that’s not the point here: It’s that apparently Newt Gingrich thinks that America’s adult workforce should be competing with their own children for jobs that pay a third world wage.

Why isn’t it being framed like that in the media? It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?

You’d have to be a fucking Republican to believe such nonsense…

Now 49 million Americans live in poverty – with 2.6 million falling into the category last year. That’s 16 percent of Americans. There are more Americans living in poverty than there are Canadians on the planet.

Gingrich is trying to equate poverty with a moral shortcoming. It’s a warped offshoot of the prosperity gospel – riches are a sign of god’s love – poverty is a sign of his indifference.

But also in this richer-and-therefore-holier-than-thou diatribe of Gingrich’s is an attempt to bust unions. He suggested firing union janitors to hire children to clean their own schools. Yes, a janitor with a job that pays him enough to live on is, in Gingrich’s eyes, a problem. In the call for hiring children and ending child labor laws is the call to end working for a living.

All the anchors of a middle-class living (pensions, benefits, decent salaries) are being dubbed “luxuries” by Republicans, to be sacrificed so magical “job creators” can be cajoled into saving us all.

Because, really, the greatest threat to America is that janitors are paid too much. Please. Wealthy janitors are, to borrow Gingrich’s phrase, “an invented people.”

Gingrich has a dark vision for a Shining City Upon a Hill: where poor children work in place of union labor. It’s basically the 20th century played in reverse.

Working (even scrubbing toilets) should mean making a living. If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.

The best example of this is also the biggest private employer in the country: Walmart.

If Newt and his Republican same-thinks want to go after Welfare Queens and those who don’t value work – go after the Walmart heirs. According to economist Sylvia Allegretto in 2007 the six Walmart heirs own more than the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And that was four years ago when their wealth was estimated at $69.7 billion, now it’s thought to be around $93 billion.

KA-POW. ‘Nuff said.

And this evil piece of shit is the Republican front runner!

On point, it’s hardly because GOP primary voters are rejecting Mitt Romney for a more conservative candidate: They just want someone MEANER!

Confessions of a Child Janitor (Crooks and Liars)
 

 
Wisconsin Tea party favorite, Sen. Ron Johnson, defended his vote against raising the minimum wage on Sunday by suggesting that only “bad workers” earned minimum wage.

From The Raw Story:

“Bottom line: when you’re a good worker you don’t stay at minimum wage for long,” he said. “Trust me on that. It’s not universal, but trust me as an employer, as an employer I certainly didn’t want to lose good employees. And so you actually have a better marketplace. And so if your employer is not paying you good wages and you’re a good worker, you go look for other places.

“Now that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do when we have such high levels of unemployment. But again I would get back to we don’t have a very attractive place for business investment.”

Johnson added that he earned minimum wage while working during college and lived in his parents house.

And then he married a woman from a family worth millions!

Every minimum wage worker should follow Ronnie’s example!

Johnson only spent $8.2 million—64% of total campaign contributions—buying the election in 2010. It’s because of elected officials like Ron Johnson that America is the laughingstock of the entire world.

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate blasted this pathetic fool with a withering statement:

“We know he doesn’t like workers and we’re not even sure if Ron Johnson supports a minimum wage, but the least he could do is keep his mouth shut on the subject when his fortune came not because of his hard work, but because of a fortunate marriage. Being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple has led Ron Johnson to dangerous ideas that would shred our social safety net and drive wages into the dirt all to appease a master class of people that sees fit to celebrate its riches while the rest of America suffers in rags.”

THIS is the guy who defeated Russ Feingold? Man, WTF was Wisconsin thinking in 2010?

As I was reading that item, an image of Senator Johnson on the ground in a fetal position being kicked about the face and neck by a hostile mob of people wearing McDonald’s uniforms popped into my head. I wonder why?
 

 
SUPERB! Pure class, ladies!

“A lesbian married couple and their two daughters powerfully address Troy, MI Mayor, Janice Daniels, at a city council meeting about her derogatory Facebook posting about “queers” marrying in NY.”

They get a well-deserved standing ovation at the end, too.

This Janice Daniels is an embarrassment to her town, the Tea party and to herself. She needs to resign and crawl back under the rock that she came from…

This clip is destined to become a classic. It’s a blueprint for WIN!
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
Patrick Meighan is “a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom Family Guy, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.” He also was arrested by the LAPD at the Occupy Los Angele encampment at City Hall. He’s posted the story of what happened when the camp was upended and of his experiences in jail.

His conclusions about the experience are not to be missed:

Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.

As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.

Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.

If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.

If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.

But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.

The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?

In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it either).

I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.

My Occupy LA Arrest, by Patrick Meighan
 

 

 
Via Crooks and Liars

 
Watch the thin-skinned blowhard—who REGULARLY sends his producers to stick a camera in people’s faces—lose his cool and then try to get the other guy arrested!.

Via Right Wing Watch:

Bill O’Reilly, reportedly walking out of a Newt Gingrich fundraiser held last night in DC (see update below), is asked by Wisconsin community organizer Brendan Lane if he attended the fundraiser. O’Reilly ignores him and then, with no prompting, strikes Lane with his umbrella. He then says, “Hey, sorry about that.” O’Reilly, with Lane following at a distance, then walks with his now-broken umbrella over to a Capitol police officer. Incredibly, you can hear O’Reilly say that he wants to press charges against the man he just struck.

It’s a good thing for Lane that he caught O’Reilly’s temper tantrum on tape, otherwise he could have ended up in prison, falsely accused of assault. As for O’Reilly, it’s revealing that he not only struck Lane – on tape no less – but then sought to press false charges. Will there be consequences?

UPDATE: TPM reports that O’Reilly was staying at the same hotel as the Gingrich fundraiser but did not attend.

I’d imagine that chances are pretty good that this particular video of O’Crybaby will end up on The Daily Show tonight, what do you think?
 

Ties are supposed to be “slimming.” Doesn’t work too well with Newt’s toned physique, does it?

The organizers of New Gingrich’s big money fundraiser in Washington, DC last night had the misfortune of choosing a location that has glass doors facing outwards on both sides of the ballroom. Dozens of mostly unemployed workers affiliated with “Take Back the Capitol” gathered at the entrance of the swanky Willard Hotel in downtown D.C., passed out fake $100 bills with Gingrich’s swollen head on them and chanted “The poor get poorer, the rich get rich, that’s the platform of Gingrich.” Earlier in the day, the group brought traffic to a near-standstill on K Street.

From a firsthand account of the protest from Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll:

Earlier, protesters had gathered outside the front doors of the Willard, chanting, “The poor get poorer, the rich get rich, that’s the platform of Gingrich.” They hoisted a “We are the 99%” banner, and the hotel locked several of its entrances.

The Gingrich fundraiser protest was part of “Take Back the Capitol,” a five-day, 99-percent-themed series of protests targeting lawmakers at popular fundraising and deal-making spots in DC, including the Capitol Hill Club, a GOP haunt, and Charlie Palmer Steakhouse, a favorite lunch spot for lobbyists and legislators a stone’s throw from Capitol. On Tuesday night, protesters lined the entrance to the swanky Lincoln restaurant to protest a fundraiser thrown by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). At least a dozen were arrested on Wednesday during a march on K Street, the symbolic heart of DC’s lobbying industry.

The protesters’ schedule includes a full day of events on Thursday, including actions at the Capitol Hill Club and elsewhere around DC. But no 1-percenter knows where they might strike next.

Beautiful. Turn up the heat on these bastards. Boil that Newt!

Earlier this week: OWS Takes the Fight to GOP Donors at Cantor Fundraiser (Mother Jones)
 

 
Of course I realize what the answer is to the question (“Because he’s a fucking idiot”) before I ask it, but why does Rick Perry think that a silly TV ad discussing the war on Chris’mus and teh gayz in the military is something that is going to endear him to Iowa caucus voters at a time when a record number of Americans are on food stamps?

And here I thought Republicans had appealing to dummies down to a science. If the Perry campaign is anything to go by, they’re slipping:

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion, and I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again. I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.”

As a supposedly “national” pol, perhaps Perry should be ashamed to admit that he approved this message. He really makes himself look absolutely fucking pathetic here. And really desperate, too.

According to every single polling I’ve read, even Iowa GOP voters who identify themselves as Tea party supporters do not have a strong interest in social issues with the economy in a state of shambles. Once again Perry ably demonstrates his political tin ear and why he’s just another Republican no-hoper in the party’s quest to oust Obama from the Oval Office.
 

Above, Janice Daniels, the beleaguered idiot mayor of Troy, MI.

Tea party favorite, Mayor Janice Daniels of Troy, Michigan, won her first elected office last month. She made national news recently when an unintelligent, unfunny comment she made about gay marriage in New York on Facebook over the summer came back to haunt her:

“I think I’m going to throw away my I Love New York carrying bag now that queers can get married there.”

Daniels’ low IQ “witticism” has gotten her into hot water in Troy. From Detroit News:

Although Daniels has apologized weakly several times, always with caveats, she has yet to suggest she actually understands how she offended real people who live, shop and work in Troy and who are her constituents.

She is getting a short, not too happy, education in the facts of political life — specifically that the kind of sweeping stereotypes that fringe groups applaud don’t play well with the wider electorate, who may include the CEOs of major corporations or the local chamber of commerce.

While Daniels says “I love all people,” her Facebook post emitted the kind of “those people” vibe that created a barrage of Facebook jokes about Troy hairdressers and waiters exacting revenge on the mayor.

“We don’t regard this as statesmanlike or leadership,” said Michele Hodges, president of the Troy Chamber of Commerce. “We’ve been deluged by emails and calls, but we want people to direct their anger, their justifiable anger, at city hall, not at local business.”

Maureen McGinnis, the mayor pro tem, said City Council members had received hundreds of emails, including those from people who said they wouldn’t shop in Troy stores or eat in Troy restaurants.

Hilariously, dum-dum Daniels claims that she is hearing from people who “want to move to Troy” because of her bigoted statements. When Detroit News columnist Laura Berman asked her if she meant that the folks who sent her emails were doing so in support of her small-minded bigotry, Daniels responded with “They agree with my view of moving the city forward.”

How could even a shit-for-brains teabagger like this fruit-loop think that this incident would or could in any way be considered a “win” for the city she represents? If you were a local merchant, how would you feel at having this foolish woman incur a boycott on the town?

There’s only one dignified option for Janice Daniels: RESIGN.

But if she doesn’t, then Daniels’ political platform of advocating for unlimited public comment at Troy City Council meetings when she ran for office, is sure to backfire on her, providing for some uncomfortable, angry confrontations with her LGBT constituents, their families and other correct-thinking residents of the city of Troy, MI. NOT TO MENTION LOCAL MERCHANTS, Mrs. Mayor! It’s already happening, as you can see in the video below.

But just watch, once she’s out of a job—and she’s not going to survive this, nor should she—Fox News will probably race to sign-up Janice Daniels as a commentator on gay and lesbian issues! I mean, wouldn’t she be a great spokesperson for all those Americans who have had their First Amendment rights stomped on by TEH GAY AGENDA?!?!?

Or perhaps there’s a spot for her on Victoria Jackson’s new brain-damaged version of The View? In any case, Daniels says she’s not going anywhere. I don’t think it’s going to play out that way, Mrs. Mayor:
 

“That Cain’s candidacy was taken seriously for longer than a nano-second in a time of genuine crisis for the country raises fundamental questions about the health of the political process and the Republican party,”

—Steve Schmidt, campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid.

There are other things one could add to that, but why bother?