Progress Now Action

This week Senator John McCain is focusing on the environment and climate change. Although he has been vocal about the issue on the stump, his actual voting record is both inconsistent and severely lacking. In reaction to McCain’s speech Monday, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski commented that “he has not substantively improved his plan over the bill he introduced years ago – legislation that the science now shows is out of date.”

John McCain’s lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters is a pathetic 24 percent. Despite his focus this week, he has managed to miss every major vote on the environment during the 110th Congress. That telling record gives him one big ZERO on the most recent LCV scorecard. Given McCain’s record on the environment, it is difficult to take anything that he says seriously.

Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's first openly-mulletted governor, is making the trip to Wisconsin later this week to visit his pals during the state GOP convo in Stevens Point. And if he speechifies as good as he interviews, it should be a raucous affair.

Consider this gem from a Saturday radio show: "I have a wife who genuinely loves to fish. I mean, she will take the lead and ask me to go out fishing, and joyfully comes here. She loves football, she'll go to hockey games, and I jokingly say, 'Now, if I could only get her to have sex with me I'd really have it made.'''

Hi-lar-ious! The poor hubby whose wife won't meet his needs -- a joke as timeless as it is classy.

Wispolitics is reporting that a deal has been reached on a budget repair bill. They report that the deal would use $209 million from tobacco securitization payments and would delay $125 million in school aid payments into the next biennium. The compromise would also close a corporate tax loophole being used most notably by the largest corporation in the world, Wal-Mart. Wispolitics is reporting that addressing this loophole will add $15 million in revenue to the state budget.

Holding large corporations accountable by closing this loophole is a good start, but there is a much larger corporate loophole that still looms. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue estimates that the “Las Vegas Loophole” costs the state $260 million a year. In using this tax loophole corporations set up dummy corporations in places like Nevada to avoid paying their fair share in Wisconsin. Closing this one corporate loophole could have solved our current budget gap all by itself.

Corporations take full advantage of our state’s infrastructure and other assets. They should also take full responsibility at tax time. The time of shortchanging the State of Wisconsin and passing the buck to individual taxpayers should end. Closing the “Las Vegas Loophole” would have not only solved our short term budget issue but also the long term inequality that is currently built into our tax system.

On Wednesday afternoon the House of Representatives voted 412 to 0 to pass a resolution, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day.” Just after that unanimous vote, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) jumped up in protest asking that the vote be reconsidered. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) then moved that his request be tabled. This essentially set up a revote on the “Mother’s Day” resolution. Even though it passed the first time unanimously, on the second go-round 178 Republicans in the House voted against the “Mother’s Day” resolution.

Even F. James Sensenbrenner had enough sense not to join the 178 in their vote against Mothers. The same cannot be said for Congressman Paul Ryan, as he supported the legislative attack on Mother’s Day.

A Washington Post column explains that Ryan and Company have been using procedural tactics like this all week. The apparent goal has been to bring the House to a standstill. Apparently nothing is sacred when the partisanship flags start flying in Congress. Look for Ryan’s next targets to be baseball and apple pie.

Digging a little deeper on Sen. John McCain’s environmental record yields some scary remains indeed. Turns out he’s pretty much buried any previous attempts to work on environmental concerns, and any comments he makes on global warming, energy and the environmental are little more than double talk.

According to the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), McCain’s lifetime LCV score comes in at a paltry 24 percent, showing what the organization calls “a wavering commitment to America’s environment."

Want to help unearth the truth about McCain?

Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, wants to know what it’s like to be a working woman in America. Today, they are launching their 6th Ask a Working Woman survey online at www.askaworkingwoman.com.

They want feedback on things like equal pay, sick day benefits, health care coverage, pensions and flex time. What are the most challenging issues for women in the workplace? The last time, Working America received feedback from some 22,000 women.

After they finish gathering the data, they will crunch the numbers and forward what working women have to say to the politicians with the power to make it better. The survey is open to all and will be available on line until June 20 at www.askaworkingwoman.com  or http://aaww.questionpro.com/ .

During the month of May Labor 2008 will kick off its biggest mobilization effort. Union activists all around this country will be talking to union households about Sen. McCain’s anti-worker record. In Wisconsin people will be busy recruiting for member-to-member walks and phone banks. The walks begin Saturday May 10th in Milwaukee and May 17th in Wausau, Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Eau Claire and La Crosse.

Much of the effort will focus on John McCain’s healthcare plan and how it leaves Working Families on Their Own. Soaring health care costs are forcing wages down for people lucky enough to have insurance. Another 47 million are uninsured. Although John McCain says he intends to combat rising costs, his proposals protect insurance company profits at the expense of working families.

Thanks to WSJ yesterday for this great response to the Supreme Court's Indiana voter ID ruling.  The editorial noted:

Wisconsin votes at just about the highest rate in the nation. Seventy-three percent of Wisconsin's adult population cast ballots in the 2004 presidential election.

...

Wisconsin is virtually the best state in the nation at voting. Our Legislature should strive to keep it that way.

Looks like I got my amen. 

A new Badger Poll released Tuesday examined Wisconsinites’ opinions on health care reform. Once again it served as another reminder that conservatives are completely out of touch with the average person. Conservatives are perpetually complaining about government programs but 76 percent of respondents favored expanding the eligibility of programs such as BaderCare and Medicaid. Although conservatives chant their “socialist” mantra whenever a proposed reform includes a government component, 61 percent of Wisconsinites said that they favored replacing the current system with one totally run by the state government.

Wisconsinites remember how conservatives ignored the healthcare crisis when they controlled the entire legislature and now they are rejecting their narrow ideologies on the subject. This new poll shows that the constant conservative talking points on healthcare are not working. The public wants substance and solutions to our healthcare crisis not blind ideology and bumper sticker slogans.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that Indiana's voter ID law is constitutional, about 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph. 

Another person who attempted to vote with a federal ID card was turned away because the card had no expiration date on it, and a woman who was newly married was turned away because her driver's license name didn't match the one on her voter registration record.

You can check out the full story here.

Marquette Professor John McAdams might be too busy silencing speech to comment, but two more studies have determined that Wisconsin leads the nation in yet another dubious category. The studies found that African Americans in Wisconsin are 42 times more likely than whites to receive prison terms for drug convictions. The stat is the highest racial disparity in drug sentencing in the nation. The studies also found that the City of Milwaukee has the second-highest racial disparity for drug arrests among all major U.S. cities.

The new national studies largely validate an analysis done by the Wisconsin Sentencing Commission last year. At that time, by “creative” use of numbers, John McAdams was able to crow bar his preconceived notions into the data. It was his confused attempt to belittle what are clear disparities in our criminal justice system. When he finally finishes his crusade against a comedian, McAdams will likely turn his biased analysis back to why these racial disparities are no big deal. While he is in the mood to censor stuff, that would be one presentation that I would like to nominate.

The Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals released the results of a survey Monday. It was about the working conditions faced by nurses in the Metro-Milwaukee area. The survey was taken from over 1,500 nurses and reveals that working conditions are leading to worsening quality of care issues.

A key to the problem are the high workloads, forced overtime, and even going without meal breaks. According to the survey, these things are widespread and are contributing to errors in patient care. Over 500 of the nurses gave specific examples of errors that have occurred as a result of nurse fatigue.

While the staffing problems are creating safety issues all across the healthcare system, the issues at hospitals are the most severe. Over ninety percent of hospital nurses in the survey say that there are units in their hospital that they believe are actually unsafe for patients. Seventy percent of hospital nurses say that they would worry about their own families receiving care at their own hospitals.

Senator John McCain has talked about the need for transparency in government but his own actions have not lived up to his rhetoric. When McCain finally released his tax documents he only included two years. He also failed to release his wife’s tax information even though she holds most of the family’s wealth. As evasive as John McCain has been with his financial records, he has been just as secretive about his medical information.

Voters deserve to have all the information about a candidate before they make a decision. It is not out of line to expect what would be the oldest president ever elected to release his medical records. Then add the fact that McCain is a survivor of an aggressive form of skin cancer, and the release should be a no-brainer. Yet, just like releasing his tax records, McCain has been delaying this transparent act for months.

The New York Times wrote an editorial over the weekend about John McCain’s stonewalling on his tax and medical records. In it they comment that “the extent of a candidate’s candor is a good measure of how candid he or she will be in the White House.” If that is the case, McCain’s continual problems with “missing” records might be more problematic than they now appear.

On Friday, the Wisconsin State Journal fawned over Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen in an editorial. It was about a recent opinion that he issued regarding open records on traffic accidents and crime in local communities. While the paper praised Van Hollen for sending a “strong signal” it would have been nice if they also called for a consistent one. Neither Van Hollen nor his office have been the sterling example of openness that the WSJ portrays in its editorial.

One good example of inconsistency involves an open records request for state emails from One Wisconsin Now to Burnett County Judge Michael Gableman. We requested any emails on his state email account that fit a list of mostly political names and terms. After seeking counsel from J.B. Van Hollen’s Department of Justice, Gableman determined that eight of those emails could be classified as “purely personal.” As a result, Gableman refused to turn over those emails from his taxpayer funded email account. We submitted a scaled down list of keywords and even suggested that Gableman redact any “purely personal” items in the eight emails. Unfortunately they just ignored our requests, using the advice from the DOJ as the basis for hiding the public records.