“Scott Walker didn’t have the stature, influence or money to become governor on his own or to end collective bargaining on his own,” said Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin A.F.L.-C.I.O. “All of that flowed from Mike Grebe, the Bradley Foundation and a network of influential conservatives, including the Kochs.”
.. Unions were the bane of Wisconsin conservatives long before Mr. Walker first entered office in 1993 as a state assemblyman. After Wisconsin took the landmark step in 1959 of allowing collective bargaining for public employees, state spending grew steadily to help cover negotiated salaries and generous benefits, and so did the criticism from retailers, manufacturers and bankers.
.. No governor in the United States had ever won a recall election, but by that point, Mr. Walker had a national network of conservative donors and groups behind him. Almost 300,000 people donated to his recall campaign, which raised about $37 million, two-thirds of it from outside Wisconsin.
Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause
That’s partly because Sanders’s run for the White House isn’t based on his personal character, or even his record as a mayor, congressman, and U.S. senator. Sanders is running for a cause—a resurgent progressivism that was conceived during decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality, born during the great financial crisis of 2008, and announced on the political stage by the street protests of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the widespread public support they engendered.
.. The political test for Clinton will come in the area of economic policy, where Sanders has put out a comprehensive and, by American standards, quite radical manifesto. It includes reforming the tax code to make the rich pay more, raising the federal minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, reforming trade policies, breaking up the big banks, and turning Medicare into a public health-care system for Americans of all ages.
.. When Sanders unveiled this plan last December, I pointed out that it isn’t all at variance with the policies of the Clinton-Obama wing of the party.
The insider’s guide to Westminster: from Portcullis House to the Burma Road
Westminster is frequently described as a bubble. It’s less fragile than that. Bubbles are more easily pierced. Rather, it is a hermetically sealed environment that encourages introspection and self-importance, and from which the outside world is largely excluded. It is the centre of its own universe. Politicians frequently talk about how much they enjoy meeting the public, but they seldom look more awkward than when meeting real people, and their minders go to great lengths to ensure they don’t have to.
.. Just as the Queen must believe that every toilet in the world is kept in pristine condition with a new lavatory seat installed every day, so too politicians can easily lose touch with reality.
.. In 2001, Jo Moore, a spin doctor in the Department of Transport, was forced to resign after sending out an email on 9/11 that said: “It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.”
.. Having two pieces of good news on the same day is a waste of good news. Bad news, however, is best dealt with wholesale. If the government releases several reports on the same day, it is odds-on that there is something it doesn’t like in at least two of them.
.. Many MPs may frequently have little idea of the nuances of what they are voting on and are unlikely to have been following the debate closely. In these instances, they aren’t being paid to think. They are being paid to vote the way their party wants them to.
.. Much of the grandeur is barely even skin-deep; the roof and ceilings leak, the masonry is crumbling and not even the small army of builders, conservators and contractors who are permanently on site can hold the building together. In political parlance, Westminster is not fit for purpose. What to do about it is another matter. To restore the palace to full working order would cost about £3bn and require the Lords and Commons to relocate for several years. This is not the kind of decision any government wants to make.
.. Sexism is so everyday and institutionalised, most MPs fail to even realise its existence. Even now, some MPs cup their hands across their chest and jig them up and down – off-camera, of course – when a woman gets up to speak.
.. The questions vary week on week but the responses do not. The prime minister is not obliged to answer, merely to say something. Traditionally, Cameron either answers a different question to the one he has been asked or asks why he hasn’t been asked a question about something he has done well.
.. The Tories tend to ask him if he happens to be aware how well his long-term economic plan is working in their constituencies. He does. Labour MPs ask him if he knows that his long-term economic plan isn’t working in their constituencies. He says they are misinformed.
How Fox News Changed American Media and Political
In August 1987, under pressure from Ronald Reagan’s drive for deregulation, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine. A local radio broadcaster in Sacramento, California, named Rush Limbaugh quickly recognized the opportunity this afforded. A strong conservative, he realized that he could now do an entire show consisting of nothing but controversial opinions, without the burden of offering equal time to other views.
.. Limbaugh’s move was fortuitous. At the exact moment he launched his show, the AM band on the radio dial was essentially dying. Since the late 1960s, music programming and listeners had deserted AM radio in droves. The FM dial provided a better signal and could broadcast in stereo, which became increasingly important as musical styles changed. Unable to compete by broadcasting music, AM stations searched for alternative programming. Talk proved to be very viable. Soon there were talkers across the AM dial, many expressing a conservative viewpoint.
.. Studies show that Fox viewers have a distinct set of political attitudes and voting patterns that are as much anti-liberal as they are conservative.
.. Fox is not really about politics….Rather, it’s about having a chip on your shoulder; it’s about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, phonies versus nonphonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, established media against insurgent media.