Milwaukee police urge residents to arm themselves after law enforcement cuts

From Fox News.

Excerpt:

A sheriff who released a radio ad urging Milwaukee-area residents to learn to handle firearms so they can defend themselves while waiting for police said Friday that law enforcement cutbacks have changed the way police can respond to crime.

In the 30-second commercial, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. says personal safety is no longer a spectator sport.

“I need you in the game,” he says.

“With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option,” he adds. “You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back. … Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there.”

[...]But he also said he wanted to call on residents to be law enforcement “partners.” He said he could either whine about budget cuts that forced him to lay off 48 deputies last year or he could get creative.

“People are responsible to play a role in their own safety, with the help of law enforcement,” Clarke said. “I’m here to do my part, but we have fewer and fewer resources. We’re not omnipresent, and we have to stop giving people that impression.”

The mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett, is against arming law-abiding citizens who want to prevent the redistribution of their wealth to criminals. He is a Democrat, so criminals are one of his main voting groups.

Filed under: News, Crime, Guns, Law and Order, Milwaukee, Police, Safety, Wisconsin

Paul Ryan fact check: Was the GM plant in Janesville closed in 2008 or 2009?

CNS News sets the record straight.

Excerpt:

In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) told the story of a General Motors factory in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, accusing President Obama of failing to keep a campaign promise to keep the plant open.

“My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory,” Ryan said Wednesday.

“Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

Ryan’s claims received widespread criticism from the Obama campaign and many liberal media outlets.

“He even dishonestly attacked Barack Obama for the closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin — a plant that closed in December 2008 under George W. Bush,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an email to supporters Thursday.

The Washington Post official ‘fact-checker’ also attacked Ryan’s claims as false, using the same line about the plant closing in 2008:

“That’s not true. The plant was closed in December 2008, before Obama was sworn in,” Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote Wednesday. “Obama gave his speech in February 2008, and he did say those words. But Ryan’s phrasing, referring to the fact the plant did not last another year, certainly suggests it closed in 2009, when Obama was president.”

But Ryan is in fact correct. The Janesville GM factory stopped production of SUVs in December 2008 and closed its doors for good in 2009 – less than one year after Obama promised to keep it open for another hundred years.

In his speech in Janesville, then-Sen. Obama said that if elected, he would support retooling the Janesville plant to make energy efficient vehicles. Despite his administration’s carefully shepherding of GM through bankruptcy, the Janesville plant has not been retooled to make anything.

[...]“Full-size sport utility vehicle production has ended at the local General Motors plant, but medium-duty truck production is continuing—not starting—in Janesville. And it likely will continue into May, when the lights finally go off in the facility that has been producing vehicles since 1923” the paper reported February 2, 2009.

In fact, a GM press release confirms that the automaker had placed the Janesville plant on “standby capacity” – an auto industry term for a factory no longer producing vehicles – in May of 2009.

“Janesville was placed on standby capacity in May 2009 and will remain in that status,” GM said in a June 26, 2009 press release.

In sum, the Janesville plant shut down the majority of its production in December 2008, laying off all but 50 of its approximately 1,200 employees. Those 50 employees remained at the plant making Isuzu trucks for several more months as the plant’s operations wound down.

As a candidate, President Obama promised to support re-tooling the factory to make more fuel-efficient vehicles and keep the plant open for a century. The plant, however, remains closed.

It’s amazing how the left-wing media just flat out lies in order to protect the incompetence of this community organizer President. Recall also that the economy started to decline when the massive spending started under the new Pelosi-Reid plan in January of 2007. Deficits went from $160 billion to about $600 billion as soon as the Democrats took over, and then well over a trillion in 2009 when Democrats controlled the House, Senate and Presidency.

More responses to criticisms of the speech at the liberal Washington Post.

Filed under: News, Auto Bailout, Auto Union, Barack Obama, Democrat, Fact Check, General Motors, GM, Janesville, Liberal Media, Media Bias, Paul Ryan, Speech, Union, Wisconsin

Governors Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker refuse to implement Obamacare

Melissa send me this post from The leftist Huffington Post.

Excerpt:

 Just because the Supreme Court affirmed that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, doesn’t mean that Republican governors are rushing to follow it.

“We’re not going to start implementing Obamacare. We’re committed to working to elect Governor Romney to repeal Obamacare,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) Friday morning on a call with reporters hosted by the Republican National Committee.

The Affordable Care Act requires states to set up health care benefits exchanges to help Americans buy insurance. If a state fails to act, the federal government will operate that state’s exchange program.

States have until Jan. 1, 2013, to demonstrate to the Department of Health and Human Services that it has a plan in place for the exchanges, which are required to be up and running by Jan. 1, 2014.

“On the exchanges, we’ve continued not to implement the exchanges in Louisiana. We’re going to work very hard to get Governor Romney elected so this law will be repealed long before the effective dates,” Jindal added.

[...]On Thursday, another leading Republican governor — Wisconsin’s Scott Walker — similarly said, “Wisconsin will not take any action to implement Obamacare. I am hopeful that political changes in Washington, D.C., later this year ultimately end the implementation of this law at the federal level.”

[...]“Here in Louisiana, we’ve not applied for the grants, we’ve not accepted many of these dollars,” Jindal said. “We’re not implementing the exchanges. We don’t think it makes any sense to implement Obamacare in Lousiana. The next opportunity we have to get rid of this law is to get Governor Romney elected, and I absolutely believe that he will be elected in November, and one of his first actions will be to repeal and replace this law.”

It’s good to see some Republican governors in tune with the mood of the public.

Filed under: News, Bobby Jindal, Compliance, Exchange, Governor, Health-care, HHS, Louisiana, Obamacare, Scott Walker, Wisconsin

Scott Walker defeats Tom Barrett to win 2012 Wisconsin recall election

Wisconsin Recall Election Results 2012 Map

Human Events reports.

Excerpt:

The cheers were almost deafening at the Expo Center, Gov. Scott Walker’s headquarters, Tuesday night as CNN projected that the Republican governor had won Wisconsin’s nationally-watched recall election.

[...]Walker’s fellow Republican, Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, appeared headed for an easy win.  However, results in the four Republican-held state senate seats on the ballot remained uncertain and a Democratic victory in either could end the GOP’s control of the now-evenly divided state senate.

Most GOP activists and state political pundits who spoke to Human Events credited Walker’s political team with energizing party activists throughout the Badger State and turning out his likely backers. In addition, national Republicans led by Republican National Committee Chairman (and Walker’s fellow Wisconsinite) Reince Priebus, weighed in for the embattled governor.  All four Republican presidential candidates voiced solidarity with Walker when they stumped in the state’s presidential primary earlier this year, and GOP Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Nikki Haley of South Carolina stumped for Walker in the special election.

[...]Perhaps sensing defeat, national Democrats aside from Clinton distanced themselves from Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.  Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told reporters on May 25 “there aren’t going to be any repercussions nationally” if Walker wins and, five days later, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney seconded her opinion.  President Obama did nothing for Barrett until the day before the voting, when he sent out a one-sentence endorsement of him on Twitter.

The current results as of 10:30 PM show 58-41 in favor of Walker.

It’s very important to understand that this victory will have national repercussions for Barack Obama and the big-spending Democrats.

Look:

But Walker’s triumph may yield other benefits for the GOP in Wisconsin and the conservative movement overall.  Although Barack Obama carried the state’s 10 electoral votes in 2008 and leads Mitt Romney in most statewide polls, Republicans are now expected to make a major effort to put Wisconsin in the Romney column in November.  With the number of reliable campaign volunteers clearly enhanced and motivated by the Walker effort,  the Romney camp’s chances of wining the state are enhanced.

As Steve Walters, senior producer of the Wisconsin Eye public television program, told Human Events: “I can’t believe Romney won’t make Wisconsin a priority after tonight.”

Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas, whose county had a turnout of more than 70 percent and supported Walker handily, agreed, predicting “Romney will be here next week.  The state went from being leaning blue to leaning red overnight.  Gov. Walker put fire in the belly of a lot of people.”

Among Republican activists we spoke to, there was also a fresh confidence in the ability of any of their four candidates this fall to pick up the open Senate this November.

What has been really encouraging for me to see is how the majority of union workers stopped paying dues to the unions as soon as Walker enacted the right-to-work reform which allows people to work without being forced to pay dues to wealthy, corrupt union bosses. I think it really opened my eyes to the fact that just because a person is a member of a union, it doesn’t mean they like it.

Here is a map of the results county-by-county. You can also read my previous post about Scott Walker’s pro-business reforms which lowered the unemployment rate in Wisconsin.

Filed under: News, Labor Unions, Recall, Recall Election, Result, Results, Scott Walker, Tom Barrett, Unions, Wisconsin

Should Wisconsin voters recall governor Scott Walker?

Central United States

A couple of articles to get you situated, in case you haven’t been following the recall election. Basically, Republican governor Scott Walker saved a leftist-dominated state from bankruptcy, and now the labor unions want his head on a platter.

Here’s George Will in the liberal Washington Post:

On Tuesday, in this year’s second-most important election, voters will judge the attempt by a populism of the privileged — white-collar labor unions whose members live comfortably above the American median — to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

[...]Wisconsin, normally a paragon of Midwestern neighborliness, has been riven by furious attempts to punish Walker for keeping his campaign promise to change the state’s unsustainable fiscal trajectory driven by the perquisites of government employees. His progressive adversaries have, however, retreated from their original pretext for attempting to overturn the election Walker won handily just 19 months ago.

He defeated Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. A recall is a gubernatorial election, and the Democrats’ May primary was won by . . .Barrett.

In 2010, government employees unions campaigned against Walker’s “5 and 12” plan. It requires government employees to contribute 5.8 percent of their pay to their pension plans. (Most were paying less than 1 percent. Most private-sector workers have no pensions; those who do pay, on average, much more than 5.8 percent.) Walker’s reform requires government employees to pay 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums (up from 6 percent but still less than the 21 percent private-sector average). Defeated in 2010, the unions now are demanding, as frustrated children do after losing a game, “Let’s start over!”

Here’s Tim Stanley in the UK Telegraph to explain whether Walker’s plan worked:

On the one hand, last year Wisconsin lost more jobs than any other state and private sector growth has been sluggish. Walker cut tax relief to low income families and the state’s Medicaid program. He also forced Planned Parenthood to restrict some of its services. Anti-union, anti-women and anti-spending – no wonder Justin Beiber is so angry.

On the other hand, unemployment has actually fallen in the state and the budget is balanced. That last thing was a major achievement, because Walker inherited a deficit of $3.6 billion when he took office in 2010. By reducing the cost of public services, the Governor has not only held the line on taxes but also cut them.

I don’t see what’s wrong with either of those hands. I like them both!

More:

…Walker earned his narrow lead by breaking the Democrats’ inbuilt advantage in state politics – perhaps permanently. He did it with one simple reform. Before Walker, union member dues were paid straight from the employer to the union. The member never got to see the money and, likely, never thought about how much he was losing. After passage of Walker’s reforms, the money now goes into the employee’s pay packet first and they then get to choose whether or not to give it to the union. Unsurprisingly, workers have taken one look at the substantial contributions they have been asked to make and… said, “Hell no!” To quote the Wall Street Journal, “Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — the state’s second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers — fell to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011 … Much of that decline came from Afscme Council 24, which represents Wisconsin state workers, whose membership plunged by two-thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.”

The latest polls from PPP and Angus Reid show governor Scott Walker leading Barret by three points and six points, respectively. I urge all of my Wisconsin readers to vote FOR Scott Walker. People should have a right to work for a living without being forced to fund political organizations.

Filed under: News, Labor Unions, Recall, Recall Election, Scott Walker, Tom Barrett, Unions, Wisconsin