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.

John Cole, October 12th:

That isn’t taking the side of the banksters, that is taking the side of common sense. What possible use could there be for a nationwide halt to foreclosures?

(emphasis mine)

Me, October 12th:

Why should there be a national foreclosure moratorium? Because only 23 states deal with foreclosures in the courts, and for the rest of us, tough luck. There’s no oversight at all.

(emphasis mine)

John Cole, responding to me later that same day:

Forty state AG’s are on the ball, what exactly could a national moratorium do? The idea is to stop the bad foreclosures, not grind every single transaction in this sector to a damned halt.

You aren’t hurting the banksters when you do something like that. You’re hurting every single buyer and seller in the market.

(emphasis mine)

Me, still later, in response:

See, here’s the thing; the market isn’t functioning now. It’s rapidly worsening, digging itself in deeper by the day. It’s not a little technicality when you sign a false affidavit or ‘borrow’ someone else’s notary stamp, and the courts aren’t likely to see it that way. Combine that with the countless tales of horrific abuses, easily located by anyone with half a brain and Google, and you quickly realize that this is an emergency. Whether the Feds or the states intervene, the outcome is going to be the same; the mortgage market is DOA until this is sorted out. Title insurers are already balking, and 40 states are digging. Real estate lawyers probably need a smoke after the repeated serial orgasms they get after reading the news each morning. Face reality for a change: this moratorium is happening.

We have but two choices: do it in an orderly fashion, with rule of law, or let it happen in anarchic disarray, and cross our fingers. Hoping that the same individuals who hired hair stylists to forge legal documents by the thousands will suddenly have a change of heart and ‘fix’ this is fantastic delusion akin to believing Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States of Americ… oh wait. Darn.

Look who I’m talking to.

(emphasis mine)

October 22nd:

The Foreclosure Mess Hits Home

by John Cole

Is there anyone out there who can help Kirk out?

Explanation from Kirk, excerpted:

Example one, today. I got a phone call from the BoA team that informed the house was still under foreclosure. “What about the foreclosure freeze?” “It’ll end November 1st.” Wait, what? See, in Georgia they can only sell the house on the second Tuesday of the month. They announced the freeze just after the first Tuesday of October, and they’re telling me (but not the press) that they’re going to end it on the first Monday of November — meaning the sale isn’t delayed at all. But I was speaking of the home workout.

…

If this were a judicial state, by the way, that would be enough to challenge the whole issue of foreclosure on the question of where the note might be. It would be enough to do so in many other non-judicial states as well. Here in Georgia it’s not enough. Servicer can proceed. Trust me, I’ve asked.

It’s quite apparent BoA doesn’t want to do a workout, and will reject even due to its own mistakes.

I expect to lose the house – I’m rather resigned to it, actually. Angry, but resigned. But I will never trust any of the banks that are involved in this mortgage mess again. I cannot trust them to act in good faith.

I suspect I’m not alone.

(emphasis still mine)

I’ve said it before about the continued naivete of Obama supporters, and I’ll say it again: the tragedy is that the harm they help him inflict with their idolatry isn’t limited to themselves.

The news that the huge government bailout of the banking sector has turned into an enormously costly mess will surprise nobody smarter than Matt Yglesias, but the details are worth pointing out:

The federal bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could more than double in size during the next three years, according to projections from the companies’ federal regulator.

Fannie and Freddie, the federally-controlled mortgage finance giants, will likely need at least another $73 billion and perhaps as much $215 billion from taxpayers in the next three years to meet their financial obligations, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said.

You mean, having the Federal Government buy up enormous piles of underwater and fraud mortgages with no oversight, intentionally paying far more than they’re actually worth, might be *costly*?

Nah!

Dday hits the nail on the head here:

Quick question: Where are the Fannie and Freddie losses coming from? Answer: bad loans they bought. Quick question: Where did the bad loans come from? Answer: the banks.

I love this line in the piece: “The projections of additional bailouts for Fannie and Freddie are in sharp contrast to recent discussions by the Obama administration about how the bank rescue known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program, originally valued a $700 billion, is expected to cost taxpayers less than a tenth of that.” Yeah, there’s a reason for that “contrast.” It’s because the losses of TARP are being realized in Fannie and Freddie.

Here’s how this worked: the vast majority of the actual bank bailouts didn’t occur in TARP; it occurred through a wide array of other special programs that shoveled money onto banksters’ books or took off toxic garbage from those same books, along with accounting trickery like ending mark to market. (Dday pointed out some of this in an earlier piece, along with the fact that the AIG losses we’ve had to pay should count against the ‘profit’ from TARP, that a no-strings attached bailout now encourages more recklessness in future, etc)

Not that this entirely predictable turn of events will trouble Matt Ygelsias, who claimed that TARP would have a ‘negative cost’ to government. Right. Negative tens, perhaps hundreds of billions, Matt?

Or DougJ at Balloon Juice (motto: If We Say It’s Sunny, Please Bring Your Umbrella), who said of TARP (while adding a small proviso about AIG losses):

It didn’t cost $700 billion either, in the end, it’s pretty close to break even. Yeah, they should have settled AIG’s credit default swaps for 60 cents on the dollar (or something like that), but it wasn’t a pointless $700 billion give-away to fat cat bankstas.

Or Mistermix at BJ, who today was trumpeting the entirely fictional 8.25% rate of return on the bank bailouts while asking if, considering the enormous, Earth-shattering risks we took on to bailout Wall Street, perhaps we should have gotten slightly more cash.

Once again I can say I was right on this issue early thanks to Ian Welsh, who kindly took the time to explain, way back in August of 2009, why TARP’s ‘profits’ were and would always be nothing more than accounting sleight of hand:

TARP is making money because it was decided that it had to make money. So instead of forcing banks to take losses, or withdrawing special loan facilities, or ending concessionary rates, or making banks retire guaranteed bond issues and reissue them without the guarantee the banks were encouraged to “repay” TARP.

But if you think that means that the overall panolpy of government aid to banks was profitable, you aren’t looking at the whole picture. It’s like making 5 loans to your deadbeat cousin, and he pays back one while not being able to pay back the others and you say “I made a profit!” Not yet.

But I’m sure Bernanke and Geithner are pleased that so many folks have fallen for their shell game.

There’s a sucker born every minute, and half of them grow up to shill for Obama.