ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY THE ONLY THING I’M POSTING ABOUT THE BATTLE OF WISCONSIN

There is trouble in Wisconsin.

But you knew that, which is why I’ve avoided posting too much on it. That, and I don’t live there, and because I know better than to get in the middle of other people’s ongoing ideological arguments – especially when there’s always more to these things than the ideological soundbites being chucked around.

But it is worth noting that if Scott Walker wins this battle, it may come at the price of his own political career. If you believe Rasmussen (who tends to skew its polls in favor of conservative politics), Walker’s approval rating has dropped considerably since the budget war started.

That shouldn’t really surprise anyone who pays attention. The Wisconsin situation isn’t just about union rights – it’s about the conservative ideology of small govt, austerity and balanced budgets. That’s important to remember because the GOP found out ages ago that cutting spending is harder than it sounds, especially when you go after the entitlements that make up the majority of the budget.

Look at it this way: from a pure numbers perspective, balancing the budget is easy. You can slash public jobs and salaries and benefits by as much as you need, and you can gut Medicare and Social Security and whatever else. You could do all that and balance the budget in a single year. P.J. O’Rourke once did it in a single morning (p.99).

There’s just one problem (apart from the severe impact on the GDP, the unemployment rate and Halliburton’s P&L, etc): that would be the last term you’d ever serve.

Because it’s not just about numbers – it’s about the registered voters behind those numbers. Balancing the budget to the extreme that the Tea Party wants (and the GOP pretends to want) requires the kind of career self-sacrifice that runs counter to political survival. Sure, fiscal responsibility and scare stories about bankruptcy and government takeovers get votes. But doing the actual cuts necessary to fulfill that goal doesn’t, as the cure is worse than the disease.

Or so history has demonstrated.

Walker is now finding that out in terms of political clout, although he’s certainly got three and a half years to recover from it. It could happen, depending on the outcome of the current budget fight.

And that outcome may be crucial for Republicans blathering on about fiscal responsibility. Up to now, they’ve always known (if not admitted) that they can’t really cut all that much out of the budget without risking their careers. If Walker can pass his budget AND get re-elected (or at least not hurt the chances of other Tea Party candidates in Wisconsin), the GOP may take that as a sign that they can get away with the same strategy in Washington without losing their jobs.

And then the fun will really begin.

Once they take back the Senate and the White House, anyway.

First we take Milwaukee,

This is dF

PEOPLE HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO BE MISLED AND SHOUTED AT BY DINGBATS

There’s been talk about the Supreme Court’s ruling on the First Amendment right of Westboro Baptist Church to protest funerals.

There’s also been talk about the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) being pressured to remove a rule banning broadcast journalists from reporting false or misleading news – supposedly so that a new Canadian news channel called Sun TV with connections to right-wing PM Stephen Harper can start doing for Harper and his followers what Fox News did for the GOP. (The CRTC has since decided not to remove the rule.)

The common thread: free speech limits.

Specifically: (1) do we allow dingbats to protest funerals so long as they’re not directly interfering with the ceremony, and (2) do we allow news organizations to make shit up and pass it off as reality?

The second one is more complicated than it looks because the CRTC issue is actually the product of a 1992 Canadian Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that Ernst Zundel had a free-speech right to tell people the Holocaust never happened, even if it isn’t true. Because of that decision, some govt officials have been petitioning the CRTC since at least 1996 to re-visit its rule about broadcasting false info.

Progressives have framed the CRTC case as a blatant admission by conservatives that Fox can’t operate anywhere that has a rule against false or misleading journalism. Reading the actual news stories (rather than RFK Jr’s HuffPo piece), I don’t think that’s quite what’s happening there, but it does call into question the social benefit of giving broadcast journalism outfits the same leniency as crackpot Holocaust deniers when it comes to truthiness.

That’s a hard argument to make (without looking like a blithering idiot, anyway). On the other hand, it’s complicated, of course – for example, do broadcast journalists have a free speech right to do reports on crackpot Holocaust deniers that willfully spout batshit? And at what point do the “okay, so we got our facts wrong” or “we just reported what our source said so don’t blame us” loopholes no longer hold water?

Anyway, now that the US has swapped objective news for highly subjective news where accuracy is tailored to serve specific sociopolitical biases, it’s probably a moot point.

As for the WBC case, I confess I half-expected it to go the other way – not because of the batshit content itself, but because of the funeral angle. The Supremes have limited speech for all sorts of reasons (many of which I don’t agree with, but a few of which I do – libel slander, fraud, inciting violence, etc), usually in the name of a public good outweighing the 1A’s importance. By most reasonable standards, protesting funerals arguably crosses a line.

On the other hand, as mentioned before, if the WBC had stormed the church or the cemetery and actively disrupted the service rather than doing it from a distance, the justices might have ruled differently.

The upside is that it doesn’t mean you now have to like the WBC or respect their stupid opinions. But the solution to the Phelps Batshit Train isn’t silencing them. It’s mercilessly mocking them.

Laughing at you not with you,

This is dF