Wisconsin: Union invaders meet the Koch invasion

WATCHING WISCONSIN GOV. Scott Walker complain about out-of-state union officials who are invading Madison to foment the protests was a teachable moment for me. It was then that I learned the distance that this zealous crusader would travel to destroy the back-channel facts in the case. I mean, these unionists were not illegal aliens or anything like that. And if labor sent a thousand out-of-staters, they would still be no match for two out-of-state brothers who influence Walker's every movement: Charles and David Koch, the billionaires (35 times over!) who own Koch Industries.

The Kochs own a lot of stuff, in addition to the pols who are expected to protect it. A shopping list of their possessions are oil refineries, 4,000 miles of pipeline and countless other things from Dixie cups to paper towels. They have an anti-union gorilla-like presence in Wisconsin in the energy field. One study by a research institute at the University of Massachusetts listed Koch Industries as one of the nation's top 10 polluters. These fellows have supported Walker with campaign cash passed through a number of fund-raising channels, including an outfit patriotically called Americans for Prosperity. Among their goals is the elimination of environmental regulations and unions, and only concede no more than minimal services for the needy, reports the New Yorker Magazine.

Any wonder that with a pot-of-gold behind him, the governor is fully confident that he can stare down the protests? Whatever else they might be telling you about Wisconsin's budget deficit, nearly half of which arrived with the governor's pet tax cuts soon after he was seated in January, you can shove it. This is all about union-busting and that will make the brothers Koch quite happy.

Speaking of brothers, what's Sarah Palin talking about when she asks her "fellow union brothers and sisters" to oppose union bosses and fight instead for the "right causes in our great country." Somehow, I can't connect the dots between this multi-millionaire wannabe Big Sister and commoners like union brothers and sisters.

Palin's brain is in the palm of her hand

PRESIDENT PALIN'S incomplete education in the world of 21st Century American politics has denied her an understanding of how technology can both create you and destroy you. You may have seen her at the TV'ed Tea Party Convention roasting President Obama for using a teleprompter. But her hypocrisy became clear during the Q.& A. afterward when a camera caught her looking into the palm of her hand. There she had scribbled such words as "energy," "tax cuts," and "lift American spirits" to cue her response to questions. It even raised suspicions that she had been given the questions in advance. Well, it was their road show of magical acts so I guess they were were entitled to a bit of sleight-of-hand conning. But by now you'd think that she was capable of memorizing her answers out of the sight of cameras. You would think that, and you would be wrong. At least, we are all aware that Obama uses teleprompters. By the way, did she also have one of those lumpy Bush-style gadgets strapped to her back?

Have you 'we-weed' up lately?

Sarah Palin, the Neo-Webster of Wasilla, claims critics of her Op-Ed piece in the Washington P0st (in which she declared global warming was junk science) got all "we-weed" up. What the hell is that supposed to mean? I couldn't find the term in any of my dictionaries, so Sarah has broken new ground on her insightful use of the English language. Does it mean wetting one's pants? And she's running for president? That, I'd say, is reason enough to wet one's pants.

And the earth may very well be flat

VACANT MINDS do have something to offer to others on drab, overcast days. They have a way of easing the load of the calamitous issues bearing down on the world. I find that's particularly true of Steve King, the daffy Iowa Republican congressman whose quotable quotes form a chaotic mosaic of a modern Tower of Babble. Funny, really. His latest offering widens the playing field for America's cult of socialist-watchers with a new dimension of right-wing gibberish. Rep. King warns that same-sex marriage is a "purely socialist idea". Conservative adulterers beware. You're next.

Jim Traficant, the tufted former Ohio Democratic congressman is a free man again and I would think that it should be worrisome to the quotable crackpots in our midst. No sooner did Traficant start showing up in the national media after a 7-year prison term for public corruption than he started dropping massive boulders into Capitol Hill's downspouts, one of which referred to Congress as a "big whorehouse" while apologizing to hookers for the unseemly reference to their line of work. On the stimulus package, he advised President Obama to "stimulate this" and said he wanted to kick the IRS in the crotch. He is obviously mad as hell, spending some of his time at Tea Parties. Democrats should be worried, too. He says he may run for office again, and the reports from the Youngstown area indicate he has an overwhelming following there. How will the Dems manage to live with that?

No wrapup of loony moments can ignore Sarah Palin, who was on a handsomely underwritten visit in Hong Kong, slamming the American government's way of doing business these days to a world conference of well-heeled investors. She wanted them to know that she was delivering the honest-to-God goods from "Main Street USA" - her latest geographical point of departure now that it has been proven that you can't see Russia from her front porch. She seems to be preparing more and more for a third-party presidential candidacy. We can hope.

Sen . McConnell: The hapless hypocrite etc.

HAS THERE EVER been a more hapless hypocrite than Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate? McConnell a Medicare-eligible deadpan who should have been dismissed to his Old Kentucky Home years ago, has been an ardent critic of the stimulus program and once sniffed: "You do have to wonder, though, whether the stimulus has had any impact at all."

Yet, there he was, at the Blue Grass Army Depot construction site in Madison County, Kentucky, puffing up his efforts to finance the site, boasting: " This is going to be a source of significant employment. At the peak, we could have up to 600 people working on this, and we believe the substantial majority of those workers will be Kentuckians."

Guess what? No fair. You peeked. The stimulus package picked up $5,876,000 of the construction tab. Such hypocrisy has become quite common for stimulus opponents, from McConnell , Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford down to the Tea Partying Robart Administration in Cuyahoga Falls. As for McConnell, don't you think he should stop wondering?

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What's that!?!?!!? A new phrase has arrived to describe the health-care debate: Honest truth.

The redundancy appeared in a headline above an Op-Ed Beacon Journal column by conservative Charles Krauthammer, as in: The honest truth about end-of-life counseling. If any of you are aware of a rogue dishonest truth, I'll be happy to post it.

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The passing of Ted Kennedy has already given the Republicans' fascination with death a new platform to resist health-care reform in nefarious ways. The latest to speculate on what Kennedy would have done to defog the so-called debate is Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, another of the party's safely ensconced Medicare-eligible white guys who are out to spare America from

outrageous fortune. Without fear of contradiction from the deceased, Bond now presumes that Kennedy would be the man of the moment in resolving the health-care stalemate. Says Bond:

"I believe that Ted Kennedy, if he were there, would signal time out and let's go back and work together."

How collegial, even if it is fiction. Kennedy is no longer there, so what else do you now have in mind, Senator, to reassemble the inertial proceedings? By the way, LBJ isn't available, either. And by the way a second time, what's a good Missouri Republican doing saying nice things about a senator who declared at the Democratic Convention that universal health care is a right, not a privilege - the opposite of what the Republican mantra would have us believe these days. ?

PS: The reason I make occasional reference to "Medicare-eligible white guys" is that it is pregnant with meaning. The guys are, in fact, crinkly white, and are, in fact, Medicare-eligible. You have to pass a certain age for the latter. .