Uppity Wisconsin

"I am not going to run for president. I'm just not going to do it. My head's not that big, and my kids are too small.

- U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan to Mike Gousha.  .

Or don't read in the papers, depending upon which ones you read.

If you read the Chicago Trib, you might have seen this from the AP: 

MADISON, Wis. - Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold entered this election year with $3.65 million cash on hand for his re-election bid.

But if you rely on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel exclusively (and many still do), all you'd know about Feingold is that some guy wearing a Brett Favre jersey and a cheesehead might run against him.

Darn!

Just when the nuclear industry is doing such a great job of selling its "renaissance" as the way to fight climate change, along comes another irritating little problem.

As my mother used to say, there's always something to take the joy out of life.

This time it's a tritium leak at a Vermont plant -- something that's already happened in Wisconsin at Point Beach and Kewaunee, as noted in the map above. The AP reports:

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen discovered in potentially dangerous levels in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, has now tainted at least 27 of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants...

Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts.

Is it anything to be concerned about?

Bill Richardson of Middleton, the media coordinator for the Dane County Republican Party, greeting the news that Wisconsin will get $810-million for a rail initiative linking Madison and Milwaukee:

"Trains are a 19th century wonder," Richardson said. "To offer a train in the 21st century is like offering the public a telegraph instead of an iPhone."

Richardson must not get out much -- not even as far as Chicago, let alone the northeastern US, France or Japan.

Someone is indeed living in the dark ages, but it's not the railroads.

Dizzy yet from all of the spin about the campaign finance reports filed by candidates for governor?

One thing we can all agree on: They are raising a lot of money. After that, the analysis is up for grabs.

Scott Walker claims he had so many donors that his report caused the Government Accountability Board's online reporting system to crash. That caused the GAB to put out a statement saying Walker's claim wasn't true.

Bad group to get into a back and forth with, methinks. Who you gonna believe, a politician or the people who enforce the ethics laws?

Walker made much of the fact that he raised $1.75-million and has $2-million in the bank on Dec. 31. And -- imagine this -- he didn't owe anyone a single dollar on Dec.31, which let him hit the $2-million mark with $14,000 to spare. Why do I think there's a drawerful of unpaid invoices somewhere from vendors whose checks were written on Jan. 2?

But that's minor. The real story in Walker's report is the unmasking of Big Spender Scott.

For a guy who's running on proimises that he'll cut state spending, he isn't demonstrating much fiscal restraint in running his campaign.

Yes, the campaign raised $1.79-million in six months. But it spent almost $900,000 during that time.

Our friends at Republican Reports --oops, I meant Rasmussen Reports -- have made some news in Wisconsin this week with two polls showing Republicans leading in the races for governor and US Senate.

You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little skeptical. 

Rasmussen Reports is one of those firms that does polling without actually speaking to any voters.  It's all automated.  That methodology is questionable enough that a number of media outlets won't even report it.  The Wisconsin Associated Press is  among them.

The firm tries to establish its bona fides by citing past Wisconsin polls where it correctly predicted the winner. As Brew City Brawler pointed out, even when getting the result right Rasmussen consistently underestinated the democratic candidate's vote.  It also has a history of showing Republicans doing surprisingly well early, then producing some more realistic numbers closer to election day, perhaps to maintain some credibility.

It may be impolitic to say this while we are encouraging people to attend public hearings on the Clean Energy Jobs Bill, but the first public hearing on the bill, held Wednesday by a special State Senate committee, was a nightmare if you were a member of the public trying to have a voice.

Most of the activists from the Carbon Free Nuclear Free campaign, opposed to the nuclear section of the bill,waited more than eight hours to testify for four minutes in a nearly-empty room with almost all of the committee members gone. Environmental groups, who supported the bill, didn't fare much better.

If you had the misfortune to be a woman, or a person of color, you were at the absolute bottom of the barrel. With a single exception, a parade of white men in suits testified for the first eight hours. The one exception was a woman representing an electric utility.

The hearing on the comprehensive 174-page bill drew a full house in one of the State Capitol's biggest hearing rooms. Many of the CFNF representatives -- which included most of the women in attendance -- got there early and registered before the hearing started at 10 a.m., when the room was less than half full.

So let me get this straight.

Wisconsin's facing a budget deficit of something like $2-billion, and Scott Walker's idea is to dig the hole deeper with a big corporate tax break? And the news media treat him seriously?

As Gov. Jim Doyle was getting ready to deliver his State of the State speech, Walker, surrounded by a bunch of Republican leggies, proposed repealing the state's combined reporting law -- the one that plugged what was widely known as the Las Vegas Loophole.

The Las Vegas Loophole let corporations avoid paying taxes on income they made in Wisconsin by registering their business in some other state, like Nevada, without a corporate income tax. Re-opening the loophole would add another $375-million to the deficit in the next budget cycle.

 How would Walker balance the budget while giving hundreds of millions in tax breaks to corporations?

by "redefining the way we provide government, looking at wages and benefits." He said all options would be on the table.

Everyone always says all options are on the table, but it's pretty clear that Walker wants to take the money out of the hides of state workers, following the same anti-worker, privatization policies he's used to create a disaster in Milwaukee County government.

The $375-million is just the tip of the iceberg, by the way.

Tommy Thompson for US Senate?

Really?

I'd like to think Tommy is more politically savvy than to take on Russ Feingold, but it's possible that, with enough encouragement and flattery from Republicans who don't like their current candidates, that he could talk himself into running this year.

One thing we know for sure: He likes to be touted. I've never known a political figure who didn't like to be mentioned for some higher office. Tommy takes it a step farther and starts the buzz himself.

There's a certain Brett Favre quality to it. At least half a dozen times since he left the governorship in 2001 -- and left Wisconsin in a deficit hole it has never been able to dig out of -- Tommy has floated the idea he might run for something. "Governor, US Senator, Mayor of Elroy," he likes to say. "Who knows?"

We can rule out mayor of Elroy, although he still owns a home there. And it's a little late for the governor's race, with Scott Walker and Mark Neumann already in, and most Tommyites already committed to one or the other.

Then there's the US Sente race, where the guy who appears to be the leading GOP candidate, multi-millionaire Terrence Wall, has only paid personal state income taxes once in the last 10 years. That could be a problem.

Without comment, excerpts from two news stories this week.

The AP reports:

[State Sen. Glenn] Grothman issued a statement saying Wisconsin has seen two consecutive colder-than-average winters and the panels should suspend their work for two years until global warming is proven.

The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005.