Since Wisconsin has same-day registration for voting, I’ve had the luxury of delaying a decision on whether or not to bother voting at all in this, the lousiest and least appealing election I’ve ever seen, until the very end. After looking over the sample ballot and weighing my options, I have decided to go perform my civic duty.

But not because I’m voting for a single Democrat, as it happens.

No, the reason I’m going out to the polls is much simpler: we have a couple of ballot initiatives up for voting this year here in the Madison area. One’s on medical marijuana, and one is for a big bond issue for the MATC, a Wisconsin two-year college/system. Both are worth showing up.

None of the Democrats on the ballot are, though.

Let’s start with Barrett. On the surface, Barrett’s supposedly a nice guy; he’s most famous nationally for getting the hell beaten out of him by a thug with a tire iron when he tried to stop said thug from attacking a woman in an alley.

Politically, however, Barrett has some really questionable ideas. Running as a Democrat, his biggest platform plank is to cut a huge chunk out of the state budget; he calls this ‘Putting Madison on a Diet’.

Because what we really need in a depression is to dramatically cut government spending.

Worse still is the manner in which he intends to do this; like his party’s leader, President Obama, Barrett plans to do this in part by coercing poor people into getting lousy health insurance.

Seriously. From his own campaign PDF on this ‘plan’:

Giving BadgerCare Plus Enrollees an Incentive to Select Low-Cost Plans. Now most
BadgerCare enrollees get to choose among competing HMOs, but have no incentive to
select a lower-cost HMO. By giving BadgerCare enrollees a clear, strong economic
incentive to enroll in lower-cost plans — such as charging higher monthly premiums
for BadgerCare Plus enrollees to select a more costly plan and lower premiums
for less costly ones – the state gives the HMOs a reason to lower their prices.
Estimated annual savings: $200 million.2

For those outside Wisconsin, Badgercare Plus is basically Wisconsin’s way of providing health insurance to people too poor for Medicaid but who can’t get insurance through their employer. Barrett wants to slash costs there by charging poor people higher premiums for ‘more costly’ plans, ie, plans that cover your actual medical needs.

Functionally this works just like the Excise tax in the odious Obamacare health bill, only here it’s explicitly targeted at the poor and lower middle class. Cheers!

Barrett also plans to slash health care spending for prisoners, claiming that they get ‘Cadillac’ coverage in jail.

Which is a blatant lie. From the Isthmus:

Barrett, meanwhile, is pandering to popular prejudice against prison inmates by promising to end the “Cadillac health care” services.

The campaign claims it can shave up to $14 million a year in medical services to prisoners — far less than a drop in the state’s $31 billion budget bucket — but does not specify what services would be cut (and did not respond to a request for more information). All evidence suggests the health care provided state prison inmates (at a total cost of just $57.5 million this year, an average of $2,600 per inmate) does not include a lot of frills like aromatherapy and acupuncture.

For instance, a 2009 state audit found that only four of the state’s adult institutions met nationally recommended staffing ratios for prison psychologists. And in August, a settlement was reached between the state and American Civil Liberties Union requiring improvements in health care at Taycheedah, the state’s largest women’s prison.

News reports said the prison had only a part-time physician for its 700 inmates; the settlement requires it to have one full-time doc. How much opportunity does that leave Barrett to chip away at Cadillac care?

Leaving aside the fact that he’s demagoguing on the extremely limited healthcare provided to prisoners and outright lying about its quality, how precisely does Barrett think he can implement this master plan, when the ACLU is already whipping Wisconsin’s ass in court on our CURRENT levels of inadequate staffing?

Barrett’s approach to staffing extends to the rest of the government, though. His ingenious diet plan includes, in essence, not filling vacant state positions as people retire.

Which I’m sure will do wonders for backlogs:

Finally, Tom will ‘right-size’ the state work force. We need to create a state employee
workforce plan to mitigate the impact of a large number of retiring workers that we can expect
over the next decade. The state already reviews positions as they become vacant and has been
working to reduce staffing costs by “right sizing” and reducing middle management. However, a
more proactive approach would include introducing technologies and revising processes to lessen
the need for replacement employees, with an explicit requirement to limit the use of higher priced
contractors. By increasing efficiency through improved use of technology and reengineering
business processes, we can achieve a significant decrease in the rate at which the state replaces
retiring employees. Estimated annual savings: $34 million.18

Barrett’s penny-pinching doesn’t stop there. He’s positively anal when it comes to technology issues, imagining huge savings from migrating to your standard ‘revolutionary’ technologies like VOIP and.. thin clients.

Seriously.

Moving to Thin Client technology. Michigan recently changed 27,000 state employees
over to Thin Client Technology – which replaces normal PCs with cheaper devices
relying on remote processing capacity – and is saving between $3 million and $5 million
within its first year of operation. For a state Wisconsin’s size, that would provide
estimated annual savings of $2.1 million.

Thin clients are a complete and utter joke, a rebranding of the far more accurate term ‘dumb terminal’. There’s a reason nobody in the ‘real world’ wants to use them, and it’s because they’re far more trouble than they’re worth. Slow, limited in functionality, virtually impossible to upgrade and often proprietary, thin clients are only as useful as the ‘remote processing capacity’ they are completely reliant upon to function.

There’s a good reason the world runs on PCs now, and Tom Barrett obviously never learned it. Here, I’ll let the Bastard Operator from Hell explain why using machines like these is a bad idea in a work environment:

“These network computers are great,” he gasps, flashing a glossy brochure.

“And why is that?” I ask.

“Because they act just like PCs without disks,” he cries. “They’re good because everything they need to operate is loaded from the computer.”

“Sort of like a dumb terminal, with graphic and sound capabilities.”

“Uh… no, much faster, and in colour.”

“So it’s a bit like changing a black and white TV for a colour one.”

“Uh… Not exactly.”

“So we’re going to move from independent computers to ones dependent on a server – like ASCII terminal days. So when the main machine is down, no work gets done. Isn’t that why we got desktop machines?”

“Ahhhh… No, not really.”

“Oh. So they’re different from, say, an NCD in what way?”

“Because we’ll never need to upgrade the equipment. It’ll be like your colour TV set,” the boss blurts triumphantly. “Once you’ve got one, it’ll never need upgrading – just upgrade the server software.”

“Not even when the software grows and needs more memory?”

“No.”

“Not even when the software wants to make use of whizzy new features like Nicam stereo, Dolby surround, and wide screen?”

Barrett’s platform is full of this sort of nonsense, a series of magic bullets that are already held out as ridiculous by most of the civilized world, but hey, maybe they’ll work here and save us a mint!

He even, and I swear to the dark Gods, believes in the ‘paperless office’ concept, which is properly discussed alongside other mythological concepts like centaurs and unicorns.

Reducing paper use and going “paperless.” There’s a reason state employees are
sometimes referred to as paper pushers – government sometimes seems to run on the
stuff. However, in our increasingly electronic world, more information is shared through
email and file sharing, research is conducted and records kept electronically, information
is provided to consumers on-line, and transactions are processed there as well. As
Governor, Tom will require all agencies to examine their processes to look for ways to
“go paperless” – or at least move to “paper on demand.”

He even presents the idea of remotely turning off computers, ie ‘power management solutions’, as a major initiative.

Brother.

Other Barrett ideas include shuttering many state offices one day a week (thus yet again gouging state employee’s paychecks while adding to the backlog at offices – I hope you like your DMV lines!) and wasting money on ethanol while building offices on contaminated land:

Buying only the most fuel efficient vehicles for the state fleet and purchasing
home grown fuels whenever possible.
o Encouraging the redevelopment of Brownfields sites for re-use as office parks
when they are located in areas that are already connected to water, electricity and
roads.

This is our Democratic candidate for governor, ladies and gentlemen. Obsessed with magic bullet technologies, full of proposals to slash public worker pay, pensions and benefits, convinced that cutting jobs in a recession will somehow promote economic recovery. Barrett wants to balance budgets on the backs of public servants, and while he has proposals to cut down on tax cheats, he certainly doesn’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, heavens no. It’s better that state offices close 20% of the time and that we don’t replace retiring staff, while we simultaneously abuse prisoners with even more medieval health care than the ACLU already beat Wisconsin’s attempts to defend in court.

As bad as Barrett’s positions are, his campaign has been worse. Both Barrett and his Republican counterpart, Scott Walker, have been serial liars to an astonishing degree, as the Isthmus described in a recent feature article:

This is, of course, how politics is often played — constant friction over accusations, traded back and forth. There’s just one small problem with this approach, and, ironically enough, it’s something that creates a common bond between the two contenders: They’re lying.

They’re lying about how terrible they regard the other to be. They’re lying when they heap blame on each other for vast problems they know have multiple causes. And they’re lying about the claims they make about themselves.

…

So the bad news is they’re lying. The good news is they’ve been caught –– on many occasions, and by many different observers.

On top of all his bad policies, Tom Barrett’s a serial liar.

He’s one very good reason I’m not voting Democratic this year.