After a year and a half of heated debate, many brutally cold winter days and plenty of heroic, hard work, it’s judgement day in Wisconsin.

I hope for the best (a Tom Barrett win) but expect the worst (polls are tight, but favor Scott Walker), so first a little levity:

A CEO, a Tea Partier and a union organizer sit down at a table, on which there is a dish of 12 cookies.The CEO takes 11 of the cookies and says to the Tea Partier, “That union guy wants part of your cookie.”

Remember that joke, it’s going to come in hand—quite a bit, probably—in the coming years…

In the final stretch of the recall election, it cannot be denied, the Republicans did what they do best: They divided and now they look set to conquer. Who would have thought that even a $30 million dollar war chest would have been enough to turn the tide that saw well over a million signatures on Walker recall petitions?

Not me, to be honest. I should stop underestimating the GOP, I really should.

Why Scott Walker could be the new Nixon.

Walker himself said the other day that he’s meeting people all over the state who tell him how RESENTFUL they are that public sector employees have better benefits than they do.

So hey, lets cut ‘em down to size, and give some tax breaks to the Koch brothers and that billionaire plastic surgery disaster who is Walker’s single biggest donor?

Woo-hoo! Now THAT is a plan!

A plan for DUMMIES and people who’ve had 30 million dollars worth of cynical propaganda and bullshit fill their mental space for months now… 

Obviously there IS a class war going on in America today, but in Wisconsin, the GOP has (brilliantly) hit upon a new recipe for (probable) electoral success: Pit working class people vs OTHER working class people.

If Walker does manage to hold onto his job today, expect much more of this exact same strategy in the future, in other states and even on a national, presidential level. Wisconsin was a laboratory of how to subvert democracy and a popular uprising with lies, cynicism and lots and lots of money.

Whether or not it’s Walker or Tom Barrett who wins when the votes are counted tonight, the GOP has learned a seriously fucked up new trick that has grave implications for American democracy.

Pit the middle class against each other! It’s a genius move. The politics of resentment are in full flower in Wisconsin today.

The GOP will hold the red states until the end of time with that strategy.

This, I think is the biggest take-away lesson of the entire process, especially for the Republicans. A certain segment of Wisconsin’s population has been successfully “moronized” (in the sense that “father of the New Left” Herbert Marcuse used the term in the 1960s). They’ve got a working blueprint for doing it. Win or lose this one, the implications are fucking enormous for well-funded, state-of-the art Republican political campaigns moving forward.

If Walker wins today, as expected, team GOP will have pulled off an election miracle (albeit a very well-funded miracle). When you consider how the palpable anti-Walker tidal-wave that saw over one million signatures gathered on the recall petitions and compare that with where we are today, when the polls are all telling us that Walker will squeak by and get to hold his job… I mean fuck it, it must be said WELL DONE REPUBLICANS.

They might be evil geniuses, but they are geniuses, nevertheless.

Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce summed up, very eloquently, the, I suppose, existential reality on the ground in Wisconsin this morning in a piece called “Beyond the Money, the Great Wisconsin Recall Election of 2012 Has Been the Fight Our Democracy Deserves.” His pre-vote observations about what has happened in the deeply divided state of Wisconsin—ironically a state known, until recently, for the geniality of its residents—were striking, indeed,:

Later, as night fell over Milwaukee, Walker rocked the Serb Hall, presenting himself as a man of courage and big ideas who is trying to move Wisconsin forward, only to be stymied by backward-thinking Democrats and out-of-state “special interests.” (We pause here for a moment to laugh loudly enough that the Koch Brothers to hear us.) The governor’s speech was just as spirited as Barrett’s was, but oddly disjointed. “Isn’t it amazing,” he asked the crowd, “that politics is the only business where you get credit for courage just for keeping your word?” He also deplored the recall for what he said was the uncertainty it had created among the “job creators” and the small-business community in the state. “Truth,” he told the crowd, “is on our side.”

Out in the parking lot, I fell into conversation with Phil Waseleski, who was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the U.S. Postal Service that was festooned with Scott Walker buttons. Phil was a letter carrier in the neighborhoods around the Serb Hall for nearly 40 years, but he retired last year when his days were cut back to three a week as part of the fiscal crisis forced upon the USPS by Republican legislators who would like to see it go away entirely.

“A friend once told me, ‘Well, we only need mail three or four days a week,’” Phil told me. “I politely told him, ‘Dave, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree.’ I could have told him, ‘Dave, you know, maybe at that engineering place where you work, they only need you three days a week, and then you could come help us.’

“The politicians, I think, it’s a tough call, because if you don’t keep the postal service in business — you and I will both agree that there’s nothing more personal than taking pen in hand to write to your mother, sister, or brother. Until June of last year, I gave my heart and soul to my job. I worked right through lunch most days.”

Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. “The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end,” he said. “I never got free health care. My brother’s wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, ‘Nothing.’ It should never get to that point where somebody’s getting free health care. Something’s way out of whack there.”

Something IS, of course, out of whack, but it’s not what Phil Waseleski—a man who was himself a GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE—perceives it to be. Why on earth would one working person who himself saw his work days cut back support a union-busting asshole like Scott Walker in order to see that the hard fought gains of other middle-class people LIKE HIMSELF will get erased???

The answer, of course, is that Phil Waseleski and other fucking idiots like him have been cynically manipulated to essentially cast a vote AGAINST other working people so that billionaire “job creators” like the Koch brothers can move on to breaking the backs of the private sector unions, too, and rape and pillage the state of Wisconsin without much further ado.

Phil, that’s what you voted for, buddy. Do you realize how stupid you—a former GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE with a chest full of Scott Walker buttons—appear to someone who is (there is no delicate way to put this) smarter than you are? You don’t quite get it, do you, Phil?

It’s sheer idiocy for the working man to support Scott Walker and the Republicans. Nothing but sheer blinkered, uncut idiocy… and you, Phil, with a USPS tee-shirt and Walker badges could be the idiot’s poster boy…

Phil Waseleski, are you really the kind of man who wants to cast your vote in a democracy to cut other working people down to size and take what was theirs and give that to people like the Kochs and Diane Hendricks who make more in ONE HOUR than you did in your best year ever?

Charles Pierce must’ve puked in his mouth a little when he heard you speak this nonsense, you old coot!

If you find yourself reading this, Phil, can you please explain to the people who read your comments to Charles Pierce (in the comments either here or at Esquire), how you came to think this way. I cannot for the life of me understand how Walker and his billionaire reichwing patrons were able to convince one working person to resent other middle-class wage-earners, wish to see them economically punished and to reward two billionaires who inherited their money in the first place? It all makes zero sense to me. I need your help.

It’s not exactly a secret that the Republican party’s natural constituency is obscenely wealthy people and older, easily-manipulated idiots, especially Fox News watchers. Phil, as an obvious older idiot, would you mind, please, explaining to Dangerous Minds readers what happened in Wisconsin, from your perspective as an easily manipulated fool?

PS Phil, have you ever seen this clip? Which one of these guys is you? This is not a trick question, I promise:
 

 
Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce is one of the best political writers in America today. Hand’s down. He’s truly a great writer in the great tradition of great writers at Esquire (well done whoever hired him to do a daily blog). His prose and insights are so good that it kind of pisses me off that MSNBC, Current TV or even CNN haven’t realized what a tremendous political thinker and writer Pierce is and hire him on to be a featured pundit. He’s got important things to say about American politics and he should be as well-known as Paul Krugman, if you ask me…

Pierce will be closely following the Scott Walker recall election in the coming week and I expect that he’ll be providing some of the best coverage of what I feel is GROUND ZERO for the rights of the working class in America and the single most important thing that the national Democrats should be supporting—no matter what DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz seems to think... (I do hope she watched the Rachel Maddow segment posted below. I suspect she has and I suspect that it had an effect, too: Hello Bill Clinton, welcome to Wisconsin! Where the fuck is your buddy, Obama???).

Charles P. Pierce writes:

The most telling moment came when Barrett treed Walker on the question of whether he plans to transform Wisconsin wholly into a right-to-work state, as Walker appeared to say to a wealthy backer on a videotape released back on May 10. Walker has consistently ducked the question, and he did so again last night, saying that a right-to-work bill would never reach his desk, and that he refused to comment on a “hypothetical”:

“I’ve said it’s not gonna get there, you’re asking a hypothetical..And the reason I say that is I saw what happened over the last year and half. And I don’t want to repeat that discussion. I think most people in the state, Democrat and Republican alike, want to move forward.”
There are enough weasels in that sentence to make a coat. What, exactly, does “moving forward” mean in this context? Does anyone seriously believe at this point that Walker would be reluctant to sign a right-to-work bill because of what’s happened in Wisconsin since he blackjacked the public employees, that he’s in any way chastened, that the people who groomed him and who are financing his campaign now to the tune of $30 million aren’t in this for the long haul? How many people does Scott Walker think will be driving to the polls on Tuesday on a turnip truck?

For his part, Barrett was having none of it:

“If that bill hits his desk, he’s signing it. I say it right here in front of Wisconsin…The Thursday before the Super Bowl, Mitch Daniels made Indiana a right-to-work state. Mark my words, he’ll sign it.”

Dawn breaks, finally, over Marblehead. The recall is specifically about Wisconsin’s attempt to rid itself of a governor whose primary political strategy over his entire time in public office has been the bait-and-switch.  But its true national import is not what it may or may not mean to the president’s campaign in November.

In 2010, in addition to handing the House of Representatives over to a pack of nihilistic vandals, the Koch Brothers and the rest of the sugar daddies of the Right poured millions into various state campaigns. This produced a crop of governors and state legislators wholly owned and operated by those corporate interests and utterly unmoored from the constituencies they were elected to serve. In turn, these folks enacted various policies, and produced various laws, guaranteed to do nothing except reinforce the power of the people who put them in office. This is the first real test of democracy against the money power. Its true national import is that it is the first loud and noisy attempt to roll back the amok time that Republican governors and their pet legislatures have unleashed in the states at the behest of the corporate interests who finance their careers. It is the first serious pushback not only against Scott Walker, but against Dick Snyder’s assault on democracy in Michigan, and Mitch Daniels’s assault on unions in Indiana, and Rick Scott’s assault on voting rights in Florida. None of this was in any way coincidental. It was a national strategy played out in a series of statewide episodes, aimed at establishing the habits of oligarchy on a local basis. If Barrett has finally realized that, then he’s finally really in the game because he’s finally grasped the mortal stakes he’s playing for.

Bill Clinton’s out there for him today, raising roofs and raising hell, a day late and a dollar short, if you really want to be cynical, but still utterly overmatching the Triple-A team of Republican surrogates — Bobby Jindal? Nikki Haley, who’s grateful to have fled South Carolina one step ahead of an ethics investigation herself? — that are out stumping for Walker this weekend. Friday morning, on the spot with Fr. Jacques Marquette first made camp, Clinton talked about creative cooperation, and he ran his riffs about how people come together in small towns, but he also hung on Walker the responsibility for the confrontational politics elsewhere around the country, which is the only national message in Wisconsin worth mentioning. There the blog goes on the road this weekend to see what it can see. This thing is so tight I’m going to need Dan Rather’s help with the metaphors.

What happens in Wisconsin is of national, even generational, importance. This is not merely something that should be seen as a “state level” election at all. If you don’t know why I say this, you’re not paying enough attention!

Charles P. Pierce’s Esquire blog will be essential reading in the coming days for everyone who cares about democracy in America. Get into the habit of reading him and being able to savor his writing through the election, you’ll be glad you did.

In this long, but absolutely essential piece, Rachel Maddow lays out a seriously DARK prognosis for the future of this country if the Koch brothers money is able to drown out the Tom Barrett campaign and the Walker recall effort fails. This aired right before the holiday weekend, and I don’t think has gotten around the way it should have. Once again Maddow proves herself to be one of the premiere journalists of our time. I think Ed Schultz has done some great work in Wisconsin, too, but no one can build a case quite like Rachel Maddow can. She’s a national treasure (How did someone so smart get to be on American TV, anyway?):
 

 
A contemplative article by Dan Kaufman in The New York Times Magazine, “How Did Wisconsin Become the Most Politically Divisive Place in America?” tries to make sense of what’s happened there since Scott Walker was elected governor of the state in late 2010:

This past March, standing outside a Shell station in Mellen, Wis., in the state’s far north, Mike Wiggins Jr. told me about a series of dark and premonitory dreams he had two years earlier. “One of them was a very vivid trip around the North Woods and seeing forests bleeding and sludge from a creek emptying into the Bad River,” Wiggins said. “I ended up at a dilapidated northern log home with rotten snowshoes falling off the wall. I stepped out of the lodge, walked through some pine, and I was in a pipeline. There was a big pipe coming in and out of the ground as far as I could see.

“I had no idea what the hell that was all about,” Wiggins continued. But he said the dream became clearer when a stranger named Matt Fifield came into his office several months later and handed him his card. Wiggins is the chairman of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and Fifield, the managing director of Gogebic Taconite (GTac), a division of the Cline Group, a mining company based in Florida. He had come to Wiggins’s office to discuss GTac’s desire to build a $1.5 billion open-pit iron-ore mine in the Penokee Hills, about seven miles south of the Bad River reservation. The proposed mine would be several hundred feet deep, roughly four miles long and a half-mile wide; the company estimated it would bring 700 long-term jobs to the area. Fearing contamination of the local groundwater and pristine rivers, Wiggins told Fifield he planned to oppose the mine. He didn’t know at the time that the company’s lawyers would be working hand in hand with Republican legislators to draft a bill that would weaken Wisconsin environmental law and expedite the permitting process.

What followed was a drawn-out fight that resembled other statewide battles over labor, education and voter-registration laws — all of which have been introduced since the election of the Republican governor Scott Walker in 2010. The most bitter of these fights began in early February last year, when Walker proposed eliminating virtually all collective-bargaining rights for a vast majority of the state’s public-employee unions. Around the time that Walker announced the measure, similar laws were introduced in Michigan, Ohio and Florida, and a nationwide demonization of public employees caught fire. Within two months, the National Conference of State Legislators had tracked more than 100 bills, initiated across the country, attacking public-sector unions.

From the beginning, Walker, who declined to comment for this article, seemed cognizant that his move to end collective bargaining placed him at the forefront of a national conservative strategy. His attack on public-employee unions was lauded by Mitt Romney, John Boehner and Karl Rove, and he has received significant financial support from the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch. In a widely publicized prank phone call with Ian Murphy, a blogger impersonating David Koch, Walker described a dinner he held for his cabinet at his Executive Residence on Feb. 10, the night before he announced the collective-bargaining measure. “It was kind of the last hurrah, before we dropped the bomb,” he said to the faux-Koch. At the dinner, Walker held up a photograph of Ronald Reagan and told his cabinet that what they were about to do recalled Reagan’s breaking of the air-traffic-controllers’ union strike in 1981. “This is our time to change the course of history,” Walker said.

The June 5 recall election against Walker and four Republican state senators will be a decisive and momentous day in American history—no matter which side of the political divide you are on—and not just for residents of Wisconsin. If the reichwing and the Koch brothers get beaten back, it’ll send a definitive message to Republicans—and draw an iron line in the sand—letting them know how far is TOO FAR and what NOT to do if they don’t want to end up like Scott Walker. If Democrats take back control of the statehouse, I get the sense that things would largely calm down in Wisconsin, after two years that have seen friendships ended, family arguments and nasty, nasty local politics, vandalism, etc. Clearly in this way, Scott Walker has been a disaster for life in his state. How many people who live there, no matter what their political affiliation is, would argue that the mood in Wisconsin has improved under Walker?

However, if the Democrats and the unions lose, and it appears that they will lose, it’ll be a sad day indeed and will be seen as a demoralizing lesson in just how DEAD democracy really is when billionaires and out of state interests can come in and defeat the determined solidarity of tens of thousands of Wisconsin’s most politically engaged progressive citizens. If Walker wins, it will be a significant blow to the labor unions and progressive morale in general.

With repetitive TV and radio ads blanketing Wisconsin’s airways (Walker is spending over 20x what his challenger Tom Barrett can afford) the Koch brothers and the GOP have brainwashed people into supporting policies that would beggar their neighbors, friends and relatives and destroy the hard fought gains of the unions in the state where the labor movement was arguably born merely so that the rich can get richer. It’s not like everyone in Wisconsin doesn’t already know what’s going on and I doubt that many people are still undecided if they’ll be voting for Walker or Barrett with just two weeks to go. The polls are TIGHT, and incredibly—when you consider how his governorship has torn the state apart and Walker’s SHITTY record on jobs—favor the governor. It’s going to be all about the ground game and the side who can get out the most voters (something the Republicans excel at ).

You can kick in a few bucks to kick Walker’s ass at ActBlue. Fingers crossed and GO WISCONSIN.

 
So the recall race is on in Wisconsin, a match-up that once again pits wildly unpopular Republican governor Scott Walker against Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, the Democrat who Walker beat by 125,000 votes in the 2010 election.

A lot has changed since then.

Like massive protests and an unprecedented grassroots organization to send a certain sleazy GOP shithead back to the rock he crawled out from under. What is currently transpiring in WI is one of the single most important things that has happened in American politics and the labor movement in many years, perhaps for a generation. The forces to oust Walker have much in common with the Occupy movement, but Occupy needs to watch what’s been happening in Wisconsin closely and learn a few lessons. Protest is one thing, but getting out the vote, to my mind, seems far, far more important. The progressives in Wisconsin have got it sussed.

Via Salon/AP:

The recall drive was sparked when Walker and Republicans passed a law that effectively ended collective bargaining rights for most public workers and forced them to pay more for health insurance and pension benefits. Walker contends the moves were necessary to help balance a state budget shortfall of $3.6 billion, while Democrats argue the law’s primary purpose was to eviscerate the unions, which tend to back their party.

It’s hard to find anyone in the state who doesn’t have an opinion on the matter, and that interest was underscored by Tuesday’s 30 percent turnout, which was the highest for a Wisconsin primary since 1952.

Barrett told supporters Tuesday night at a victory party in Milwaukee (attended by leaders of the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees Union and other union members) that:

“We will be united because we understand we cannot fix Wisconsin as long as Scott Walker is the governor of this state.”

He’s right, too. There’s no way that the state legislature is going to be able to get anything done with that goofy-faced clownboy in office. He’s gotta go for the good of the people of Wisconsin and he should have had the decency to fucking resign a long time ago. Walker is just too divisive of a figure. This seems obvious to everyone, but Walker himself doesn’t seem to have picked up on the hint: He can’t lead the state. It’s just not possible anymore.

It’s time to throw this Charlie Brown-looking motherfucker on the scrapheap of history and move on, in the process sending a powerful and LOUD message to the rest of the Reichwing Republicans: It could be your job next, asshole!.

And with ground forces like the recall movement has, why not make an effort to defeat Congressman Paul Ryan in the Fall?

Jon Dzurak, a 55-year-old assistant principal in Milwaukee, said he initially was leaning toward Democrat Kathleen Falk, but decided to vote for Barrett because he was up in the polls and projected to fare better against Walker.

“I just would like to see Scott Walker defeated. I’ve never seen a division in our state like this. I’m not talking to some of my friends right now because of it,” he said.

One woman even tried to run her own husband down with her SUV when he tried to prevent her from voting in the May 8th primary. That’s division!

Although Walker has raised $25 million so far, most of it from out of state, natch, I don’t think it’s going to help him all that much, but at least he’ll be spending that bloated Koch Brothers-funded war chest within Wisconsin, so perhaps the Walker camp can even create a few jobs, for once, before WI voters give him the boot.

Is that a fat lady I hear singing in the near distance?

Ask not for whom the fat lady sings, Scott Walker. She sings for thee!

Roll on June 5th general election!

If you’d like to contribute to ActBlue to get this powerful commercial shown on Wisconsin television stations, you can donate here. Watch it. If you agree with the message and support the cause, kick them a few dollars. Even $3 will help.

I’m With-consin, how about you?