I'm angry. Fire spitting, seeing red, and fully enraged at Gov. Scott Walker (R-FitzWalkerStan) and GOP Chairman Reince Priebus taking the words we used to describe our grassroots efforts at stopping the Republican railroad that ran over our state in 2011 and apply it to what they did to us.
This was what awaited me while reading my local newspaper. Have they no shame?
“It’s kind of weird,” Ryan told me this summer about their rapid national ascent, a phenomenon Walker and Priebus call the “Cheesehead Revolution.”
(bolding was mine)
We were the cheeseheads. Us. The grassroots union members, community organizations, teachers, factory workers, members of the building trades, Teamsters, farmers, and just plain average folks who surrounded our State Capitol 24 hours a day for weeks after Scott Walker and his vast Republican majorities in our State Assembly and State Senate started stripping the poor, the workers, the disabled, and the elderly in order to balance the budget after they gave a $160 million dollar tax break to the wealthiest in the state.
And it didn't end with the protests. We gathered sufficient signatures for 2 rounds of recall elections which ultimately turned the State Senate into a majority for the Demcrats while facing more than a hundred million dollars in attack ads by the monied interests and a ho-hum, GOP friendly media that continued to ignore Republican wrongdoing while magnifying anything they could use against us (like the enormous hoo-ha they made of public figures who signed the recall petitions and ignoring the attacks on recallers by their false equivalency of "both sides do it" when only one side did it). We worked GOTV as if our lives depended on it because they did.
The article continues with Ryan talking about himself and Scott Walker:
“We both took on the status quo, which was unsustainable,” Ryan said in an interview before his selection for the ticket.
“In Wisconsin years ago, I and others just made the determination we would build our party around Scott and Paul … People are just starving for people that can lead,” says Priebus. “The party (nationally) looks to Wisconsin for a lot of guidance. It is (about) making promises, keeping promises, having bold ideas.”
These aren't bold ideas. They're a throwback from the past when a few rich Lords ruled over peasants. To get there the GOP is performing a reverse Robin Hood - taking from the vast majority of citizens to give to the rich. They started in the 1980s under Ronald Reagans huge tax breaks for the wealthiest of Americans and large corporations, continued in the 1990s with the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and repeal of Glass Stegall (which allowed the banks and Wall Street firms to merge), and escalated in the 2000s with the Bush Tax Cuts.
They sold the plan as Trickle Down Economics, a lovely sounding lie - give the rich a whole lot more and wealth would trickle down to everyone else. The problem was that as the rich got richer, they didn't explode and rain money down the ladder of success, they just got more and more greedy. For most of us, we just got poorer as wages stagnated, business shifted from guarenteed pensions to self-funded 401 K plans (with plenty of fees going into Wall Street pockets and a huge pile of money for the Wall Street thieves to gamble with), and the costs we paid for benefits increased year after year. And that's just looking at those of us whose jobs weren't shipped overseas to slave wage countries. For those who lost their jobs, poverty quickly followed as decent paying jobs started to become a relic of the past.
Ryan, Walker and Priebus are all forty-something members of Generation X. They came of age as Tommy Thompson was rebuilding the Republican Party in Wisconsin and just after Ronald Reagan had redefined the Republican Party nationally.
“We didn’t know each other growing up. It wasn’t like we were all part of the same group of thinkers. Each of us was definitely influenced by Reagan,” says Walker.
“Paul and Reince and I talk almost all the time, either talk or text or connect. Particularly for Paul and me, we go back and forth quite a bit just trying to affirm the other one … ‘Hang in there, you’re doing the right thing,’” Walker says.
“We all grew up in the Tommy (Thompson) era, and Tommy was the 1990s version of a reform-minded Republican,” says Ryan.
Keene says Thompson’s reign “really did kick-start a generation of conservative activism in the state.”
Reinventing history is a Republican tactic. Tommy Thompson governed as a moderate, not as a "reform minded Republican". And he didn't kick-start any kind of activism in the state. In fact, after he left to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services, his Lt. Governor, who became Governer after Thompsons departure, was replaced by a Democrat, Jim Doyle, in the next election who served for 2 terms until he decided not to run again in the 2010 election.
Ryan and Walker have both benefited from a formidable mosaic of conservative organizations in Wisconsin, among them the Bradley Foundation -- a huge force in funding the movement at the state and national level and in promoting some of the policies identified with Walker and Ryan.
Bradley has been "a big factor in growing the Wisconsin talent and pushing it onto the national stage,” says Keene.
The growth of RW money funded astroturf organizations was a large factor, but the growth of RW hate radio that began to saturate the state with local and national talking points and meme spewing show hosts cannot be overlooked. While progressive and moderate voices are rare, RW radio can be heard over every square inch of the state.
A larger factor was the growing corporatization of our media with a shrinking number of reporters and increasing reliance on sound bites and press releases rather than the in depth analysis and fact reporting that had been the norm. The media was becoming a profit center more than an outlet for factual information. The RW political tilt became evident and increased.
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With the backing of Big Money, RW radio talkers blowing out propaganda with every breath, and a state and local media ready to serve their needs, the GOP prevailed here in the 2010 elections. It wasn't just here, though. The Red Tide engulfed many states for much the same reason.
And everywhere they took over the entire state government, the results were the same: extremist ALEC inspired legislation rammed through over and over and over. The public reacted here to save their states.
And we're still at it in Wisconsin. The real Cheesehead Revolution.
It's made up of poor people, working people, disabled people, senior citizens, community groups, unions, farmers, and others wh believe in fairness, equality, and shared sacrifice that is truly shared by everyone. Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus are Wisconsinites, but they're not members of the Cheeshead Revolution. We oppose them and what they have done to our state.
And now my local news rag decided to allow the GOP to use our own term, Cheesehead Revolution, to describe themselves. They ought to be ashamed. But I'll bet my next pension check they won't be.
If I hear anyone at the Republican Convention using the term Cheesehead Revolution to describe the GOP, I'll lose it.
Just for fun (and comic relief after all the outrage) I'm adding the Poll of Snarkitude.