Wasn't Scott Walker supposed to be indited for something? Not that there's anything wrong with that....
I didn't realize how relatively large Milwaukee was - I had assumed it was either smaller than or on a par with Madison.
Somebody should write--maybe already has--about the disproportionate number of right-wing talk radio hosts whose personal roots are on the left, like Belling and Sykes in the OP link.
The paradigm is often the same, guy now in his 50s, maybe 60s, disillusioned or maybe bullied because of some situation his parents' politics put him into or didn't prepare him for. Seems to me I remember Howard Stern's life having, in his own telling, some such experience, of having been left the only white kid, vulnerable as such, in some school his parents left him in because of their politics.
Maybe, someday, this too will be traced back to leaded gas--and I'm not being facetious. If the violence epidemic made what should have been admirable choices dangerous and foolish, for yourself and your children, then this would be a consequence.
It is just amazing how much people in the affluent suburbs of a major city hate the people who live in the city.
Yeah, I had no idea how stark and bonkers Milwaukee is. It's staggering.
Also the talk radio aspect is unreal.
I was generalizing in 4, not specific to Milwaukee.
My Tea Party Father in Law (my sister's actually) is an avid consumer of Fox and talk radio. The degree to which he has his own complete (and wrong) set of facts about the world is staggering. It's not just BENGHAZI!!!, it's a whole set of crucially important yet utterly silly things like welfare queens eating lobster regularly and home invasion robberies being common as dirt.
The "knockout game" is the big one I hear.
DailyKos Elections refers to Waukesha and Ozaukee as the "Circle of Ignorance". (I think this term arose during the probably-simple-incompetence-rather-than-ballot-box-stuffing excitement during the last state Supreme Court election, in which the Republican county clerk found 14,000 mostly Republican votes two days after an election that the Democrat had apparently won in a squeaker. (Fun quotes like Hotz said poorly sealed bags or torn bags appear to be a common problem, but they were evident on five of six Brookfield bags that were counted first thing Thursday. He objected to the counting of those ballots where bags appeared to be open. then followed.) After another incompetently managed election, Nickolaus lost her job as county clerk, and promptly got hired by the city of Waukesha to be their town clerk.
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The balance is restored! Sorry, togolosh, your 11 will forever be lost to time.
2: This led to the greatest scene in NewsRadio history.
Bill: You're not in Wisconsin, Dave. The big story isn't about a cow wandering into the town square.
Dave: Bill, I worked in Milwaukee, you know. It's a city with a population of a million people.
Bill: So that must have been quite a hub-bub when that cow got loose.
That was a good, helpful article. A lot like the Almanac of American Politics, which used to be great (maybe it still is, I haven't read it for many years but Im assuming its declined since Mike Barone has turned into a full on nutter)
4: My parents talk about that one a lot. They grew up in Queens, and moved into Manhattan while their cohort moved out to the suburbs. And they used to bitch about (in the '70s and '80s, back when NYC was gritty and frightening rather than the giant pile of money it is now) going to barbeques or whatever and getting into conversations about 'those people' in the city, which left them bristling: "Hey, we are 'those people'!"
One of my WI aunts is really into the Solidarity Singers and has participated as her health allows. My WI relatives sure do span the political spectrum, but I think that's a result of class differences and varying mental health diagnoses as much as anything, maybe.
That article was a good read. I had no idea about Milwaukee being so polarised, nor about Walker's idiosyncrasies; primary season's going to be interesting.
My Tea Party Father in Law (my sister's actually) is an avid consumer of Fox and talk radio.
Kevin Drum on Fox News:
I wish I had something really insightful to say about this, because for all the attention it gets, it still deserves more. Over the years, the more that I've thought about the evolution of conservative politics over the past few decades, the more I become convinced that Fox News is really at the center of it. Sure, it all started with a base of Reagan and the Christian Right and talk radio and the Republican takeover of the South. But Newt Gingrich was the game changer. He's the one who brought conservative politics to a truly new, truly unprecedented level of toxic rancor.
Here's the thing, though: As critical as Gingrich was, he lasted only a few years before flaming out and becoming a historical footnote. It was Fox News that became the ongoing, institutional expression of Gingrichism. The Republican Party would have turned right in any case, but without Fox I'm just not sure Gingrichism would ever have developed a critical mass. Without Fox, our politics never would have gotten so astonishingly toxic that a significant fraction of the nation--not just a fringe--honestly believes that we have a lawless, America-hating tyrant in the White House who's literally committed himself to destroying the country from both within and without.
Drum quote in 18 gets it right. Even many/most of the relatively non-political at my workplace believe some of that in a casual, completely unexamined way because it's "out there."
And Jake "How are they any different from, say ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?" Tapper* has a lot to answer for. Or take this bit of drivel from Dylan "fucking fuckhead" Byers:
When MSNBC President Phil Griffin decided to turn his network into a liberal answer to Fox News, he was betting that there was a progressive audience out there to match the conservative faithful on the other side. That audience may exist. But people don't simply watch opinion channels because the programming matches their partisan views. The programming has to be compelling. I'm sure Griffin understands that, but unlike Roger Ailes, he hasn't been able to execute.*I.e. the mainstream media, synechdochically speaking, sort of.
Without Fox, our politics never would have gotten so astonishingly toxic that a significant fraction of the nation--not just a fringe--honestly believes that we have a lawless, America-hating tyrant in the White House who's literally committed himself to destroying the country from both within and without.
Yes, but from 2000-2008 I honestly believed we had a lawless, America-hating tyrant in the Whitehouse, committed to destroying the country.
Yeah, but no one made any money convincing you of that. People told you how awful Bush was for free!
The Tums people probably made some money off me, but so far I have no reason to believe they perpetuated any of the bad news.
Am I right that after stomping twice on this post within five minutes, you then accuse this post of scooping you? This poor post.
Nick's link to Drum, which is what I was going to post about.
after stomping twice on this post
Heebs, have you seen Ogged's feet?
I can't tell if you're praising him or not.
Some pun connecting an FPP with bears.