Category: Politics

Note: Sometimes this old man who runs  the machinery powering my blog — not to be confused with my well-paid consultant in Tokyo, Paul — hits the wrong button. He did it today and published EFD before it should have left the docks. In doing so, it left many words and some of the facts I wanted checked, unchecked. For this, I shall suspend the old geezer for a day without pay and perhaps take his key to the executive washroom.

Once again we zero in on the Cheese Head State of Wisconsin because it is such a target-rich environment, at least its ruler, the Hon. Gov. Scott Walker is such. It seems while the governor has time with nothing better to do — he can’t yet break any unions with the Democratic members of the state Senate holed up in a Best Western in Illinois — he talks on the phone a lot. That can be somewhat embarrassing, especially if he thinks he is talking to a person he believes is right-wing icon billionaire David Koch. That is what the Guv did, speak for about 20 minutes to someone he thought was David Koch of the fabulous Koch Brothers who appear as if they’d like to form a plutocracy in the U.S. But actually Walker was talking to the publisher of the Web site the “Buffalo Beast.” Walker’s conversation might be charitably called “loose lips, sink ships” as he was informing (or bragging) the fake Koch on his anti-Democratic strategy.

It isn’t funny, nor is it innocuous like prank calls of old but it certainly does seem that once the prank was unveiled that it deflated some of the Wisconsin governor’s hot air, whether we could hear it, see it, smell it, or not. Prank calls have done that, though, since the time Alexander Graham Bell asked over his newfangled telephone to Thomas Watson: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you to see Rutherford B. Hayes on the television!” That’s a joke, son. Everyone loves some kind of prank call or another.

Phone pranks are funny. I pulled a couple when I was a kid, like calling a store and asking: “Do you have Prince Albert in a can.” The answer, back then when people smoked that stuff, would be “yes.” So, I’d say: “Well, you better let him out so’s he can get some air.”

Over time phone pranks have become more sophisticated. Phone pranksters have “punk’d” everyone from Queen Elizabeth and the late Pope John Paul II to Hugo Chavez. Some crank callers have become stars with their own cult following, their pranks sold as recordings. The funniest of the genre are those by Roy D. Mercer, who is a fictitious prankster invented by two Tulsa dee jays, Brent Douglas and Phil Stone. Douglas gives Mercer his drawl and, according to a Wikipedia description: “Mercer will demand that the recipient of a call pay him money for some incident, and if the recipient refuses, he will threaten them with violence (usually an “ass-whoopin'”). Mercer has been described as speaking with “a mushy-mouthed Southern drawl” and his style of comedy has been described as “not exactly obscene … [but] border[ing] on offensive”. Many of the recipients of the calls are suggested by their friends who supply Mercer with information about the potential recipients.”

The humor is in the tradition of other Southern humorists of the Vinyl Age such as Andy Griffith and Jerry Clower, who was somewhat less well-known than Andy, but could be caught on humor outlets such as “Hee Haw.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who has been known to hang out with the Rolling Stones, even enjoys a good phone prank. The presidential wannabe joked about Gov. Walker’s punk’d-ing during a speech today.

The call which was made by Ian Murphy, the publisher who played David Koch, is certainly not funny in the way of traditional phone jokesters. It is somewhat funny though. Some may call it funny when those all puffed up get a little air taken out. In these tense days in Madison, it might be fun for some weary teachers, police officers or firefighters to see an important man stripped of a little self-importance. Who knows, perhaps the prank calling might bring the governor a little closer to Earth and left just a bit more in touch with his constituents and with his own sanity.

It would seem the Republican governors who are trying with all their might to bust public service unions in their states would at least have a more reasonable explanation for their insistence that most of collective bargaining disappear.

Governors like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and others in Indiana, Ohio and perhaps elsewhere say that by not allowing collective bargaining on work rules, they are building back up all that money that vanished in their state coffers. And how would that happen exactly? I’ve yet to hear one of these anti-deficit hawks say what specific rules that they would not allow government employee unions to negotiate upon that would help retrieve the money that their fellow politicians blew. The same goes for determining a dollar figure on how much in deficit amounts would union busting exactly bring the Wisconsin or Indiana state treasuries.

The reason is obvious. It’s all one of the greatest bulls**t stories the Republican Party has yet to concoct. Among those pulling the strings of their GOP marionettes are the fabulously wealthy Koch Brothers of Koch Industries fame (oil, timber, paper products, destroying America as we know it).  Ultra-wealthy corporate owners such as the Koch Brothers and the Waltons (not John Boy, but Sam Boy), have no use at all for the unions of any kind. So the corporate world feels as if this would be a good time, while the populace is whipped into a frenzy over deficits of all things, to finally tear down the unions once and for all.

Public service unions in Wisconsin gave into the fiscal demands made that would supposedly fix the Cheese Head State’s broken economy. Not enough, says Walker. The unions have to give up most of their bargaining rights because it would some how magically fix an economy that’s already been repaired. Besides, say Walker and all the GOP pols, fixing the deficits and battered government economies are part of the mandate sent by voters last November.

I hate to tell you guys, but the voters sent a message about jobs. Deficits? What the hell are those? Fix the deficit and it will give me or my unemployed brother-in-law a job, says Joe Q. Public. Like, bust the union and next week the unemployment rate will plummet to 0.001 percent. Uh huh.

If you are undecided about which side to support in this battle, let me give you a little advice. Should you decide to side with the GOP and the Tea Party, be very careful if you go out to one of their rallies. You will likely step in some of the bulls**t those folks are spreading.  You’ll know it first by the earthy smell.

Methinks I shall keep mostly quiet about the goings-on in Wisconsin for personal reasons, but I urge others to read about what’s going on and try to keep an open mind.

I don’t buy that America would commit suicide by allowing its leaders to gut the unions. We don’t want to go to the bad old days. Nor do we want to go to the other bad old days. The latter I am talking is the strife that accompanied the fight for modern labor, even disturbances such as  the riots among lumber workers of the early 20th century around the area where I grew up in the half of that century. I am not  saying disturbances like the Grabow Riot might happen. That would certainly be a huge setback for the American worker and society. We also don’t need knuckleheads like Glenn Beck stirring the pot to make something dreadful happen which will make him a new Messiah among the right.

Things are better for the American worker today whether you like and support the unions or you don’t. When you hear news about all that is going on with all  these uber-capitalists such as the Koch Brothers who are trying to bring us back to the days of feudalism, who are trying to break the spirit of the union and the American worker, just try to keep an open mind.

Think how far we have come and how far backwards we might go. It’s hard to do, but keep an open mind.

“[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information on the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient….” Article II, Sec. 3, U.S. Constitution

George Washington, rightfully as first president, gave the first State of the Union speech.

“The recent accession of the important state of north Carolina to the Constitution of the United States (of which official information has been received), the rising credit and respectability of our country, the general and increasing good will toward the government of the Union, and the concord, peace, and plenty with which we are blessed are circumstances auspicious in an eminent degree to our national prosperity,” said President Washington in the second sentence of his speech, where many presidents who have followed that first chief executive should have stopped right at that spot and said: “The state of our Union is (fill in the blanks — good, strong, medium well, loathsome, Baroque, Klangarbenmelodie and so forth.)

Thomas Jefferson, the “Second Cousin of Our Country,” decided that with the postal service established by Benjamin Franklin he could just mail the report into Congress. Many presidents followed, not knowing that Congress promptly threw Jefferson’s correspondence in the garbage can.

It wasn’t until Woodrow Wilson, who was better known as the “Great-great-great Grandfather of Our Country,” that presidents once again began making verbal reports to Congress and the nation which later became named “SOTU.”

The opposing parties began presenting a response to the SOTU without an audience and on television in 1966 when the mercurial Richard Nixon, also known as the “Dirty Little Half-Nephew-Third Removed of Our Country” gave his first State of the Union address. The opposing party at that time was called “Democrats.” This year the opposing party will be known as “Republicans.” But wait. Not only are Americans in for the treat of watching the president give the SOTU and the Republicans a response, but the Republicans who are members of what is known as the “Tea Party” will also give a SOTU response.

Yes. This year, perhaps this year only, some say hopefully, the nation will be treated to the peculiarity of the SOTU given by Barack Obama, known as “First Kenyan of Our Country,” the Republican response delivered by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the “First Cheese Head of Our Country,” and for the Tea Party, Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, the “First Psychopathic Ex-daughter-in-law of Our Country.”

America is a big country, with big dreams and big appetites and big debts and has big knees which can be broken if we don’t pay some of our debts soon by a very big man named Vito “the Riged Noodle” Rigatoni. That is why we have now grown from a SOTU to a SO 3.

And, surprise. Tonight will also perhaps begin a new tradition of “Congressional Date Night.” This is a spectacle where members of one party will ask a member of another party to sit with them during the SOTU, uh SO3. It is kind of legislative version of “Sadie Hawkins Day.”

One can only imagine what our “Founding Fathers” would say of all that today surrounds the address by the president to Congress, so mandated so long ago by the Constitution of our United States?

One wonders if they might say a word that includes the use of “mother?”