A cold, wet, snowy and loud Wisconsin welcome for Sarah Palin

Palin spoke at today's rather sad little Tea Party rally at the Capitol. There looked to be no more than 500 Tea Party participants at most, and anywhere from 10 to 20 times that many anti-Tea Party demonstrators. (Let's not call them counter-protesters, please. The pro-democracy, pro-union protesters have been here for two months. It's the Tea Party protesters who are the actual counter-protesters.) Here the former governor of Alaska, who set a precedent we can only hope Scott Walker emulates of quitting before finishing her first term, is babbling about Obama "redistributing the deck chairs on the Titanic." Huh? (Guess I don't know the secret code.)

I know it's just what Palin wanted, and will add to her chip-on-the-shoulder sense of victimization, but it sure felt good to yell back at her. I wonder if the Koch brothers front group Americans for Progress, which sponsored the event, felt they got their money's worth. Palin's reported speaking fee of $100,000 came to about $200 per true believer.

Update: John Nichols writes about the event in more detail in The Nation, borrowing a metaphor from Tom Paine: "Winter Soldiers Outshine Sunshine Patriots as Palin's Madison Rally Is Overwhelmed by Protest Crowd."

Some questions about Ryan's plan to save Medicare by gutting it. Maybe Palin can answer them.

I wonder if Rep. Paul Ryan checked with senior members of his base or senior members of the Tea Party (both of which seem to be pretty much the same people) about his ideas concerning Medicare reform that are contained in his budget bill the House passed today. Polls consistently show that senior Americans want politicians to keep their hands off Medicare, a program that is very popular with seniors. I would think they might have some of the same questions that I have about his plan to save Medicare by gutting it.

1. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Why do you want to replace an efficient, popular program like Medicare with some cockamamie plan to give seniors vouchers to buy private health insurance.

2. You say you're giving seniors more choices, but more choices is exactly what many seniors don't want and increasingly can't handle as they grow older. Say you're 90 years old and you're in bad health. Do you really want to start wading through fine print and exclusions and go shopping for the best insurance deal? Will you even still be alive by the time you find the deal that's best for you?

3. Under today's Medicare, seniors can rest assured that most reasonable medical care will be covered. You'd ask them to start choosing what they can afford instead, with the best care reserved for those wealthy enough to pay for more than the basic vouchers cover. Also, vouchers are going to lose their value over the years, leaving seniors ever more exposed. Why?

4. Currently, the administrative costs of Medicare are about five times lower than those of private insurance plans -- not surprising, when you think of the confusing of competing formats, policies and coverages that all need to be processed by private insurers. What do you have against efficiency, especially when we're confronting a budget crisis?

Paul Ryan will not be in Madison tomorrow, as far as I know. But Sarah Palin will. She used to be a governor. She must understand these issues. I wonder if I could get some straight answers from her tomorrow?

I'm not holding my breath.

The US learned from Vietnam that we can't have both guns and butter. We did away with butter instead.

President Johnson famously tried to have both guns and butter during the Vietnam war -- expanding the War on Poverty and other social services while fighting an expensive war abroad. The result was the disastrous inflationary spiral of the late seventies.

As a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) details, the US spends nearly as much on military expenditures as the rest of the world combined (aprox. $700 billion vs. worldwide military spending of aprox. $1.6 trillion). The Iraq and Afghanistan wars haven't been cheap, and US military spending increased by 81 percent from 2001 through 2010.

The rate of increase in US military spending slowed in 2010, to 2.8 percent in real terms compared to an annual average increase of 7.4 percent between 2001 and 2009.

However, the USA continues to be exceptional in terms of its military spending. As well as being overwhelmingly the largest spender in absolute terms, with 43 percent of the global total, six times its nearest rival China, it has led the way in the global increase since 2001, with an 81 percent rise in real terms compared to 32.5 percent in the ‘rest of the world’. Moreover, the share of US GDP devoted to the military—the ‘military burden’—has increased sharply, from 3.1 percent in 2001 to an estimated 4.8 percent in 2010, while in the majority of other worldwide the military burden has fallen or remained steady.

Although the Forever War seems to drag on without end, it has not resulted in the kind of inflation we saw in the Vietnam years. It's as if our warmakers looked at what happened back then and said, "Guns and butter don't work. So get rid of the butter."

Much as we try to avoid discussing it, that (and tax cuts for the rich) is why we're fighting over scraps for social programs. And why budget cuts (for everything but military spending) are hot topics on the state and federal level. Wonder why the richest nation on earth can't afford to match our European peers in healthcare, education and public services? This is why. This is where the money goes.

Germany learned from the mistakes of its past. Its estimated annual military spending is $45.2 billion, or 1.3 percent of its GDP. We're a much bigger country. If we spent 1.3 percent of our GDP on defense, it would total $189 billion -- still more than any other country in the world. But we would have more than $500 billion dollars left over, available for health, education and social services. This year and every year. Without any increases in taxes.

We are repeating the mistakes of every other great empire in the history of the world -- impoverishing our people at home and sucking the life out of our economy to support the military cost of foreign adventures.

If we want real reform, this is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. If we don't, we're simply spinning our wheels, all while fighting with each other over the leftovers.

Dispatches from the Ian's Pizza Revolution

"Stop crying, I've got 14,000 votes from Waukesha."

Ian's Pizza on State Street played a key role in the Capitol protests against Scott Walker's union-busting budget repair bill and the events that followed. Not only did Ian's take pizza orders for the protesters from all around the country and the world, but their white boxes with the red logo became prized sign material. The Ian's logo became a de facto guarantee of authenticity. almost like the wax seals on diplomatic dispatches in the olden days. Some people are still making signs on Ian's boxes -- these new ones were photographed last Saturday outside the Capitol.

Election Fraud-O-Meter redlines in Waukesha

I'm sorry. I've tried to keep an open mind. Humans make mistakes, Kathy Nickolaus is human, and nothing that has happened in Waukesha County so far proves fraud (although it doesn't disprove it either). But this is insane. Ramona Kitzinger, the 80-year-old member of the Waukesha Board of Canvassers who so famously said at the press conference last week that the "numbers jibed" has stepped forward with her account of what really happened.

Once the canvass had been completed and the results were finalized, I was called into Kathy’s office along with Pat (the Republican observer) and told of an impending 5:30pm press conference. It was at that point that I was first made aware of an error Kathy had made in Brookfield City. Kathy told us she thought she had saved the Brookfield voter information Tuesday night, but then on Wednesday she said she noticed she had not hit save. Kathy didn’t offer an explanation about why she didn’t mention anything prior to Thursday afternoon’s canvass completion, but showed us different tapes where numbers seemed to add up, though I have no idea where the numbers were coming from. I was not told of the magnitude of this error, just that she had made one. I was then instructed that I would not say anything at the press conference, and was actually surprised when I was asked questions by reporters.

The reason I offer this explanation is that, with the enormous amount of attention this has received over the weekend, many people are offering my statements at the press conference that the “numbers jibed” as validation they are correct and I can vouch for their accuracy. As I told Kathy when I was called into the room – I am 80 years old and I don’t understand anything about computers. I don’t know where the numbers Kathy was showing me ultimately came from, but they seemed to add up. I am still very, very confused about why the canvass was finalized before I was informed of the Brookfield error and it wasn’t even until the press conference was happening that I learned it was this enormous mistake that could swing the whole election. I was never shown anything that would verify Kathy’s statement about the missing vote, and with how events unfolded and people citing me as an authority on this now, I feel like I must speak up.

The "human error" excuse is getting more than a little threadbare. When a human error of this magnitude comes up, you would think the first person Nickolaus would share it with would be her fellow members of the Board of Canvassers. If not, you certainly want to know why not. We need a recount. But we also need a criminal investigation.

Carl Gibson of US Uncut asks in Madison why not make rich pay their share instead of cutting services?

The founder of US Uncut spoke at the Capitol rally yesterday. At one point he held up a dollar bill to demonstrate that many American corporations paid less than that in income taxes last year, including GE. In 2010 GE reported US profits of $5.2 billion -- and received a $3.2 billion refund. US Uncut was inspired by the British citizen-action organization, UK Uncut. Both organizations favor collecting a fair share of taxes from the rich as an alternative to drastic cuts in social services.

In Britain the Conservative Government of David Cameron proposed the most draconian cuts in UK education, health and social services in more than 80 years. For example, university tuition is expected to triple. The proposed cuts were not popular, as Johann Hari wrote in The Nation.

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

As people see their fellow citizens acting in self-defense, these tax-the-rich protests spread to even the most conservative parts of the country. It becomes the most-discussed subject on Twitter. Even right-wing media outlets, sensing a startling effect on the public mood, begin to praise the uprising, and dig up damning facts on the tax dodgers.

Instead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism. It shows that there is an alternative to making the poor and the middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich. It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.

The article describes in some detail how the organization UK Uncut arose to fight the cuts and how it organized local actions on Twitter that were surprisingly effective. The article in The Nation inspired 23-year-old Carl Gibson in Jackson, Mississippi, to start an American version, US Uncut, in February.

Now, in the best tradition of advocacy journalism and the core values of The Nation, Hari’s article has sparked the potential powder-keg of disenchanted Americans. As the Guardian reported today, Carl Gibson of Jackson, Mississippi recently started the first US UNcut group after reading Hari’s piece in The Nation, and there are now at least twenty chapters coast to coast.

“The folks in the UK who decided to stand up, organize and speak out are a daily inspiration to me and the rest of the movement in the states,” said Gibson, 23, to the Guardian. “The message is simple—before you sacrifice hard-working public sector employee’s jobs and necessary public programs, why not first make the richest of the rich pay their fair share in taxes?”

Sounds like a plan. Here's US Uncut's website if you want to find out more.

After an unusually hot day, tornado weather

At least that's what the weather peeps keep saying as they break into normal TV programming. Very hot day today, low eighties. Now a cold front is moving in. Big temperature gradient, and with it, lots of storms. When I took the photo I was standing under a clear, moonlit sky watching the storms pass just to the north of us. Now it has clouded over, but Madison still seems to have dodged the worst of it.

SOS Doug La Follette telling rally yesterday we're not broke, but here's why people think we are

Hint: Rhymes with "coke." And other sound bites you don't usually find on TV news. Wonder why.

Note: At the end of his talk, La Follette mentioned that the Governor's budget bill would take away some key functions that have been assigned to the Secretary of State's office over the years and transfer them to other state agencies. For more information, see the home page of the Secretary of State's website.

Votes are easy to find, it seems

It's easy. Most anyone could find some "missing" votes laying around. Even a known bungler.

What if bank accounts were run by the "errors average out in the end" standard used for elections?

You know the argument: People are fallible. They make mistakes. But the errors average out in the end. Don't worry about it.

What would your checking account look like if it were run that way? Probably something like this:

When your paycheck arrived in your account by direct deposit, sometimes the amount would be higher, sometimes lower, but the average would remain about the same. Every time you checked your balance, the total would be just a little bit different. Usually the difference would be just pennies on the dollar, but now and then a few bucks would go missing. Sometimes a few extra bucks might show up. It would be sort of like winning ten bucks on a two-dollar scratch-off lotto ticket.

But every once in a while, perhaps when you really needed the money in your account, like when you're shopping for Christmas, it would be off by a really big amount, maybe hundreds or even a thousands of dollars. You would complain to the bank and you would be politely told that of course they would look into it, but people are only human and do make mistakes, and besides -- your past spending patterns show you spend a lot of money at Christmas. Your balance seems pretty much in keeping with what you usually have in your account this time of year. Why don't you settle down, go back and look at your receipts and make sure you didn't make a big purchase you forgot about. After all, this is the best banking system in the world, and who's more likely to be right, you or the bank?

Doesn't sound too great, does it? It's funny how we've been conditioned to accept one level of accuracy for bank accounts and another for votes. Computers keep track of millions, actually billions, of dollars pretty much down to the penny, with only occasional errors that can normally be rectified because there's a complete audit trail. When it comes to votes, the standards of acceptable accuracy are much more lax and, again, pretty much come down to "it all averages out in the end."

Why do we tolerate this? Election fraud experts say elections can be made much more secure, but that real reform tends to be resisted by both major parties because they're afraid to give up what control they have over the process -- such as putting partisan elected officials in charge. Most often they're completely honest, but occasionally there's a bad apple who is inclined to weigh things in their own party's favor.

Maybe it's time to think about a higher standard. If there's one thing computers can do better than people, it's counting accurately. And as banking demonstrates, systems can be developed that ensure both accuracy and an audit trail that can't be tampered with. Wouldn't it be great if we could have as much confidence in our vote totals as our bank balances?

What? Kathy Nickolaus found another 92,500 votes for Prosser? Oh, no -- CNN found them.

Thanks to M for pointing me to this CNN Political Ticker blog post, Wisconsin Supreme Court race canvass continues.

The results from Waukesha County became official Friday, and were added to the Wisconsin state Government Accountability Board's website of officially reporting counties. Ballots from the city of Brookfield that had been left out of unofficial vote totals were discovered, changing the final vote tally and swinging results in the favor of Prosser in that county.

The Wisconsin state Government Accountability Board has added canvass results from 53 counties and 19 still remain. Vote totals tabulated from each county of the 53 reflect that Prosser leads Kloppenburg by roughly 100,000 votes. Of the nineteen counties remaining, canvass vote totals from populous Milwaukee and Kenosha are still outstanding.

That lead of about 100,000 would be about 92,500 more than the roughly 7,500-vote lead most sources are reporting as a result of the Waukesha revelations.

The problem, of course, is that CNN is using the word "lead" in a very misleading manner. It's misleading to talk of a lead with the county canvasses only partially completed and stopped for the weekend without giving some idea of what the reported election returns were for the remaining mostly Democratic counties that haven't finished their canvasses yet, and whose vote totals would put Prosser's "lead" back in the widely reported 7,500 range.

Better yet, don't speculate on the outcome of the GAB canvass until it's complete next week. Any kind of running total is just misleading at this point. Better to do what AP has done, which is just not update its election night total until the GAB canvass is complete.

Instead, CNN temporarily gives Prosser not a narrow lead, but what -- under the circumstances -- is a landslide. No small matter, given all the spinning that is going on right now. But, hey, CNN -- what's going on? This wouldn't be surprising coming from Faux News. But CNN?

But then, what did I expect? The nuances of what's been happening in Wisconsin the last two months seem to have consistently eluded the national media. Just one more example.