Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Milwaukee Brand TEA Party Tea: Now Fortified With More Irony

The right wing of the Cheddarsphere is all abuzz with the coming of the teabaggers, Party of No, birthers, and other assorted wingnuts. Of course, this is strictly a grassroots effort, as pointed out by its loud and garish website and despite it being hosted by the misnamed Americans for Prosperity.

The list of speakers is quickly becoming to bear a close resemblance to the patient roster at Arkham Asylum, almost each worthy of a post by themselves.

One of these speakers that adds a high, possibly toxic, level of irony is Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

These TEA parties are supposed to be all about there being too many taxes and too much spending by our government. But Clarke flies in the face of all that.

This past spring, after the Milwaukee County Board had to again correct one of Scott Walker's foolish displays of grandstanding, this time about stimulus dollars, Clarke made damn sure that the Sheriff's Office was one of the first with their hands out:
Another thing that the MJS failed to report was that Sheriff's Inspector Kevin Carr, representing Sheriff David Clarke, a conservative, stated that the Sheriff's office wanted to have pursue several millions of dollars of money to replace the antiquated medical records for the jail and the House of Correction, replacing it with an updated electronic system of record keeping. He also pointed out that the Sheriff's Office needed 50 new squad cars. Inspector Carr pointed out that it would be irresponsible to ask the Board for this money in the fall if they did not avail themselves of the stimulus dollars first.
If that wasn't enough, when Walker called for the recommended budgets earlier this summer, complete with 15% cuts, Clarke not only failed to give any cuts, but then asked for another $6 million just for the House of Corrections, most of which is needed to clean up the mess of it that Walker had made when he had jurisdiction over it:

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is seeking more than $6 million to upgrade the House of Correction in Franklin, including new video surveillance equipment, an Internet-based visitation system and four security gates for closing off areas of the sprawling lockup in case of a disturbance.

The money will be part of Clarke's 2010 budget request and comes on the heels of glowing reviews he has gotten for overhauling operations at the facility since he took it over in January.

Isn't it time that everyone stop pretends that these are events of patriotism or people rebelling against what they perceive as being unfair taxes and call them what they really are: The conservatives continuation of their temper tantrum to having lost power over the last few elections and an excuse for the lunatic fringe to behave poorly.

5 comments:

  1. None of us are perfect, but you may want to grammar check your post next time, or wait until you have had some sleep and time for a bit of proofing in the AM instead of a bit of proof in the early AM.

    I get the point though. You hate Tea Party people and anything conservative, so noted.

    Nothing brings out liberal angst like having Malkin in town.

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  2. You are correct on the grammar, and I have corrected an embarrassing number of mistakes.

    But you fail on the point of the post, which is simply the hypocrisy behind the hype. These groups don't care about saving people money. They only care that our money goes to what they deem to be "the right people."

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  3. So a government worker is going to go to a park funded by the government. A park named Veteran's Park, which is named after veterans who didn't hate their country. And then they are going to chant for a while and hope that their cute little pictures show up on the public airwaves, and then get back on their public buses and ride back to their publicly funded nursing homes and call talk radio and say "I didn't know the Sheriff was black"

    Then some other guys will clean up the park. Is that the irony?

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  4. I was actually going for the more obvious point that they are have a guy that wants to raise taxes and spend millions of that tax dollars speaking at an anti-tax rally.

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  5. What?

    I presume... Clark?

    Yeah, he has long complained about his budgets. All of us do (households).

    We can bitch, or make egg-salad.

    (all colloquialisms avoided)

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