When it came out last week that Milwaukee mayor (and Wisconsin Democratic candidate for governor in the upcoming recall election) Tom Barrett had skipped out on two ceremonies honoring Milwaukee police officers, there was some questions about what Barrett thought could possibly be more important that going to, say, a memorial service for slain Wisconsin policemen. It probably didn’t help either that Barrett was so evasive about the answer, either – to the point of convenient memory loss. Well, it turns out that Barrett probably wanted to forget the answer of where he was doing instead of honoring fallen officers, given that the answer was… ‘ making a stump speech :’ …Mayor Barrett was actually speaking at a luncheon for retired United Auto Workers in Oshkosh at the exact same time that the fallen officers memorial was taking place in Milwaukee. Barrett spoke to a room of about 50 UAW union members. I acquired a link to the video of the event that Barrett spoke at: it is unpleasant viewing for those with both a basic ethical sense, and an awareness of the context. ( Link .) Which, to be fair, probably includes a non-trivial percentage of the UAW retirees; I’m morally certain that many if not most would have been much less enthusiastic about Barrett’s accusing Governor Scott Walker of putting politics over his job if they knew that Bartlett had shrugged off his own duty to fallen police officers in order to stump for money and support. You know, the banality of this is what is so offensive. Tom Barrett skipping a memorial service that includes honoring police officers killed in the service of his city? That’s bad. Barrett instead taking the opportunity to try to squeeze some money and support out of the unions that preferred his opponent? That’s worse (although it’d be more so if it weren’t quite so utterly expected). But do you know what grates? It’s such an utterly pedestrian speech. I mean, if you’re going to spit on the memory of dead cops for the sake of your doomed political career, at least be a proper villain about it. Which is to say, not a Tom Barrett. Moe Lane ( crosspost )
Original post:
Tom Barrett (D CAND, WI-GOV RECALL) passes on honoring slain cops to… stump-speech the UAW. #recall
[Posted by Karl] The latest column from David Brooks attempts to diagnose the fiscal crisis in Europe and the growing fiscal threats in America: [M]any voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs. Like any normal set of human beings, they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay. The consequences of this shift are now obvious. In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. American and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past, but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function. The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint. Of course, there are many Americans who still have an ethos of self-restraint. Those Americans have elected people to the House and Senate in an attempt to restrain and reform the entitlement state. And David Brooks has metaphorically compared them to Nazis , uninterested in governance. How does Brooks square that circle? By assuming that the problem is gridlock, which he blames on the tougher position the right is now taking as the fiscal cliff draws ever closer. (I know; it’s just craaaaazy of the right to do this, amirite?) Mind you, the big-taxing, so-called “balanced approach” to addressing sovereign debt problems is failing where it is being tried in Europe. The wingnutty wingnuts at the OECD and the IMF already knew it would fail, and that solutions which rely overwhelmingly on controlling spending work. Yet Brooks bitterly clings to the center-left establishment mindset that has led America to the situation he now despairs. Jonah Goldberg addresses this ideology in The Tyranny of Clichés : If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist I’ll tell you that the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does. The extremists have a serious disagreement about what to do. The independent who splits the difference has no idea what to do and doesn’t want to bother with figuring it out. Goldberg does not identify centrism as an extreme ideology, but the quoted example (and others given in the book) graphically demonstrate it can be at least as impervious to logic or data as any other ideology. Anyone who finds those examples a straw man should consider the very real examples compiled by the NYT’s Ross Douthat : It wasn’t the Tea Party that decided to create two new health care entitlements (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) just as America was about to go over a fiscal waterfall. It wasn’t kooks and reactionaries who got the European Union into its current mess . It wasn’t the radicals of the left and right who risked the global economy on a series of disastrous real estate bets, or locked our government into a permanently symbiotic relationship with the banking and financial sectors, or created a vast labyrinth of unaccountable bureaucracies in the hopeless quest for perfect security from terror attacks. And to bring things up the present day, it wasn’t the more “extreme” members of the Senate — be they Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn on the right, or Bernie Sanders on the left — who just voted for more short-term spending and tax cuts without any plan to pay for it. ***[W]hat Jesse Walker has dubbed the “the paranoid style in center-left politics” *** seems like a rather odd response to a political moment in which nearly all of our overlapping crises are the result of disastrous misgovernment at the center ***. The Tea Party’s politics are not my politics, but the movement has virtues as well as vices, and at the very least it represented a possible alternative force at a time when our politics desperately needs alternatives, whether right-wing or left-wing or something else entirely, to the policies that have led us to our present pass. Nothing good may come of it, but an awful lot more ill has come from politics-as-usual of late than from grassroots populism. Brooks and his ilk are a particularly odious sort; they have urged and pursued a ruinous course of misgovernment, all the while deluding themselves that they are not extreme and demonizing the people who are not responsible for the West’s current malaise. –Karl
See the original post:
The ideological extremism of David Brooks
Tell me you’re surprised . Three out-of-state men arrested in a Bridgeport apartment raid days before the NATO summit were charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device, their attorney and police said early Saturday. The arrests were the result of a month-long investigation into a group suspected of making Molotov cocktails — crude bombs usually created by filling glass bottles with gasoline, according to law enforcement sources and police records obtained by the Tribune. Can’t do it, huh? Yeah, well, neither can I. These winners are getting represented by the National Lawyers Guild – you’d think that the Chicago Tribune might have mentioned that the NLG is a far-Left group that never met a group of America-hating would-be mass murderers that it didn’t like – and are claiming that their bomb-making equipment – excuse me; alleged bomb-making equipment – is actually for home-brewing beer. Plus, it’s all a fascist plot to go after peaceful protesters! Jack-booted THUGS! OFF THE PIGS! OFF THE PIGS! …Oops. More seriously, and my cynicism aside, these people are innocent until proven guilty – despite their choice of representation by freedom-hating fanatics, their apparent affiliation with a movement that is increasingly under the sway of a different, more violent group of freedom-hating fanatics, and even their proximity to an event that pretty much everybody is assuming will come under literal assault by various groups of freedom-hating fanatics. It could even be true that Chicago cops really can’t tell home-brewing equipment from bomb-making equipment. Fair’s fair: just because the hardcore Progressive Left can’t stand my country’s and my culture’s values doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t respect those values, myself. Still, and again: is anybody here surprised that arrests were made involving Occupiers and incendiary devices? I mean, is anybody REALLY surprised? Particularly after Occupy Cleveland’s May Day bridge bombing attempt ; we all knew that more outrages could occur from those people. I mean, it’s not like they’re Tea Partiers or anything. Moe Lane ( crosspost )
More here:
Occupiers, NATO, Chicago, & Molotov cocktails.
Today is May 18th. On this date in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte became the Emperor of France. His first official act was to make Andre the Giant illegal. Also on this date in 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted. The column of smoke and volcanic ash rose 80,000 feet into the atmosphere, with debris and deposits from the column spanning 11 states. Reached for comment, the volcano issued this statement: “My bad, my bad. It was a long day, they got my order wrong at Starbucks again , and then some jerk cut me off in traffic. I just blew up!” On this date in 1846, Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé was born. He was best known for his Fabergé eggs. It took weeks for him to lay them all, and he never walked the same again. And finally, today is National Pizza Party Day, when pizzas from around the world get together to dance, drink, and just hang out and be . Consider this an Open Thread . Love, Dad | Letters of Note “In June of 1971, just days before his 26-year-old son, Michael, got married, future-U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent him the following letter of advice. It really is quite stunning.” John Lewis: Republicans making it ‘almost impossible for the average person’ to vote | Right Scoop “What’s unbelievable to me is that John Lewis, who claims to have such a passion for protecting the right to vote, actually has such little regard for protecting this unique privilege and would rather lie to the American people” Comedy Central: ‘Conservative Hashtag Games Are Ruining Twitter’ | Newsbusters “The folks at Comedy Central actually published an article Thursday with the headline ‘Conservative Hashtag Games Are Ruining Twitter’” Did Elizabeth Warren Plagiarize Her ‘Pow Wow Chow’ Recipes? | Big Government “Ms. Warren ‘s campaign has not commented on the suggestion that she may have plagiarized her recipe contributions to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook.” For Obama, Hopelessness is the Key to Lower Unemployment from Dan Hellman . ternate (tur-nit, -neyt): adjective consisting of three; arranged in threes. (via Dictionary.com)
See the article here:
Daily Links – May 18, 2012
…Oh, relax: it’s an old vaudville/movie routine. You know: “That was no lady: that was my wife.” Yeah, that one’s older than my parents , let alone me. Still: why exactly did Democratic Wisconsin recall gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett shrug off ceremonies honoring Milwaukee policemen this week? Including one on Wednesday that honored Milwaukee cops slain in the line of duty ? I ask… well, mostly because I figure that the answer is going to embarrass Tom Barrett; but also because Barrett likes to talk a lot about how Governor Scott Walker is supposedly campaigning at the expense of his job. Which makes Walker’s presence at a function that Barrett was absent from – we can all agree that honoring slain Milwaukee policemen is part of the job of Mayor of Milwaukee, surely? – somewhat, well, awkward. Hey! That describes the Wisconsin Democratic party’s current rhetorical position, too! It’s all cyclic, isn’t it… Snark aside, I’m hearing that the reason that Tom Bartlett might have skipped out of this may not have been for the immediately obvious reason (which is to say, sucking up to a campaign donor who was on a tight time schedule). It may simply be that Tom Barrett just doesn’t like cops or firefighters very much. Moe Lane ( crosspost ) UPDATE: Just got sent this via @jbsatt on Twitter : Barrett passed on honoring cops to… suck up to the unions. It’s not entirely clear whether this happened Tuesday night or Wednesday, but either way… well, when I got sent this the only comment attached to it was “DOOM?” Yeah. DOOM. [Other UPDATE: So, yeah, it looks like that last set of edits didn't go through at all. Oops...]
See original here:
“Who was that lady I saw you with last night,” Tom Barrett? #wirecall
