WI updates

1. Capitol building’s closed, Capitol building’s open. Never a miscommunication.
2. According to the right-leaning polling company Rasmussen, Gov. Walker’s approval rating is down to 43% amongst likely WI voters.
3. Even Forbes magazine is saying that Walker has lost the collective bargaining battle.
4. Murphy went to Madison.
5. So did Michael Moore. Here is the speech he gave at the Capitol.
6. Anonymous can haz boycott of Koch Industries products.
7. The Wisconsin AFL-CIO is using excerpts of the Walker/Koch call in an ad.
8. Voters are starting a campaign to recall 8 Republican state senators. If you live in WI, consider helping by collecting signatures.
9. Mary Lazich is one of those 8, and she is a co-sponsor to a bill which would make it illegal to impersonate someone else over the phone if it hurts someone’s feelings.
10. The 14 out of state Democratic WI state senators are again appealing to Gov. Walker for a meeting to negotiate.
11. Robert Jauch (D-Poplar) says they will be returning soon anyway in order to give up and let the Republicans win, hoping that it will result in a backlash. Not too surprising since capitulation is just what Democrats do when the public is on their side.
12. But the 14 senators themselves are denying the above report, saying they have no intention of returning anytime soon.
13. The WI state Democratic Party is going to file a complaint to the state Government Accountability Board calling for an investigation into things Walker said to fake Koch of questionable legality.
14. Scott Walker will speak at an annual tourism conference today. Hopefully he will take advantage of this opportunity to claim that the whole thing was a big ploy to get people to visit Wisconsin in the winter.
15. Another poll, this one by a right-wing think tank, shows that the teachers’ union has a higher approval rating than the Governor.
16. Democrats in Wisconsin are exceeding their signature-collecting goals for the recall campaign.
17. And in totally unrelated news, the state senate’s GOP leader is trying to make the case for the illegitimacy of the recall statutes.
18. Walker uses government power to enforce new rules of behavior at the Capitol, probably because he’s a socialist. Now visitors will not be allowed to talk, have signs, read books, smoke, eat, drink, carry backpacks, bring chairs, take pictures, record audio, have cell phones on, or pretty much do anything else at all.
19. Sen Jauch says 6 of 7 Republican state senators don’t want to strip public unions of their collective bargaining rights. Don’t know if that’s for real or another political trick though.

The SPJ and undercover journalism

The “Society of Professional Journalists” is pretty upset with the way that nobody covering the story seems to get angry enough about how Murphy was deceptive in his talk with Governor Walker. They cite their own ethical code in that journalists should be “honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting news.”

So Murphy clearly violated the SPJ’s ethical code as far as not being honest since he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. But if you’re going to whine about every time a journalists lies in order to obtain information, then that effectively make all undercover journalism “unethical” according to the standards of the Society of Professional Journalists. In fact, let’s see what the SPJ’s Code of Ethics has to say about undercover journalism:

Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.

If someone at the SPJ were to actually read the story, they might have noticed that the very first thing they will read is a quote from a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin saying, and this is a paraphrase, that traditional open methods of contacting Governor Walker in order to obtain information vital to the public have not yielded results. So my question to the SPJ is: How exactly does Murphy’s story not qualify as an exception to the SPJ’s “no undercover work” rule?

Traditional open methods had not yielded this information, contrary to what certain pols and politicians have been saying (more on that later). The information we uncovered is vital to the public. This should be a textbook case of acceptable undercover journalism according to the SPJ’s own standards.

Wisconsin

The Republican governor of Wisconsin is trying to push through legislation which would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. You’ve probably heard about this by now.

In response, thousands of protesters have filled the streets of Madison. Here are some of them:

Good times. Anyway, Glenn Beck weighed in on the subject and did that random association thing he does. According to Beck, the Wisconsin public unions are collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood because Midwest teachers, police officers, and other public servants have a lot in common with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group which (unfortunately for Beck’s conspiracy mongering) has only 15% public approval in Egypt.

Here’s how it works: See, in Egypt, they had demonstrations protesting against what the government is doing. And now in Wisconsin, you’ve got demonstrators  protesting against what the government is doing. Obviously the two groups must be in cahoots! For some reason, Beck doesn’t use this kind of brilliant analysis to compare protesting teabaggers with protesting Muslim extremists, even though they share much of the same ideology.

At this point, the only thing stopping Glenn Beck from being as much of a loon as Alex Jones is his refusal to get involved with 9/11 troofer bullshit.

Governor Walker claimed he needed to try to bust up public unions because of budget problems. We’re broke and the sky is falling so we need to cut benefits from skilled workers. It’s just how it’s got to be, because of the BUDGET. Ah, if only if weren’t for that budget, everyone who works for a living would get a retirement and decent health care and stuff like that. In fact there’s even a number associated with the budget problem. They are $137 million in debt. But then some people started investigating why there’s so much of a budget problem in Wisconsin. From One Wisconsin Now:

Republican Gov. Scott Walker plans to pay for $140 million in new special interest spending signed into law in January by extending the state’s long term debt in a “scoop and toss” refinancing scheme that will cost untold tens of millions of dollars in additional debt for Wisconsin.

In other words, the only reason they’re in so much debt is because now Walker has to pay off the corporations which helped him get elected. In order to do that, he has to redistribute the wealth from the working poor and the middle class to his extremely rich contributors. Apparently you only get to call it socialism or communism when you’re redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. When it’s the other way around – as it is in this case- it’s an “emergency budget measure” or some other such nonsense. Got that? Giving money to the poor = communism. Giving money to the rich = tough-minded pragmatism. That’s how conservatives think. Seriously.

Yesterday, in an attempt to delay or kill the proposed bill, Democratic state senators fled the state so that less than the necessary 3/5 wouldn’t be in attendance. Reporters tracked some of them down to a Best Western in Rockford, IL. Wonkette points out that that hotel has an awesome water park and a pub, so that makes it a win-win for the state senators who made it there.

Probably will have more on this later as it develops.

Russ Feingold knows where Washington, DC is on a map

This is just a very funny Onion article “by” Ron Johnson, the challenger to Russ Feingold’s US Senate seat. But seriously, he’s in a very close race. I don’t much care for the Democratic Party as a whole, but Feingold is one of the only high-ranking politicians with any sense at all. He was against NAFTA. He was the one and only Senate vote against the USA PATRIOT Act. He was against deregulation of the financial industry when both parties were for it. And if he loses, it’s going to have this nauseating effect on the news media where they adopt a narrative of progressives being left behind as the country moves even further to the right.

On the other hand, if Feingold wins and the more conservative / corporatist Democrats lose, that will indicate that sticking with real progressive values like Feingold has is a sure way to stay in office for an honest politician.

And by the way, Johnson is against prosecuting child rapists in the Catholic Church.

So please please PLEASE go and help Feingold out. And if you live in Wisconsin, you better fucking vote for him next week.