gop misinformation machine ramble

Walker and the GOP misinformation machine are telling plenty of lies about everything from the true cost of employee pensions to the cause of our nation's current financial troubles. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the United states 170 billion dollars in 2011, for a total of 1.29 trillion since 2002. This breaks down to approximately $100 per household per month. The wars are a big drain on our national economy, and taxes have not been raised appropriately to compensate for the added cost. Instead it seems that the GOP is launching a national attack on public employees attempting to use the unbalanced budgets not to bring military spending under control (even in peacetime, the military makes up a huge percentage of the national budget, and is a major expense) but rather to convince the public that public sector unions are greedily taking more than their fair share of benefits and perhaps even salary, though there is a lot of data to counteract this...My conclusion is that the GOP is desperate to win the next presidential election. The military spending is the main problem, but their constituents support military appropriations, so the new scapegoat is public sector unions.

Much like the 'Welfare Queens' of the 1990's Public employees are an easy target. There already exists resentment and prejudice against the upperclass moderately well educated teachers, librarians, professors, and other public employees. They are do deal with the public, so many people have anecdotal stories of a lazy or stupid teacher that they can point to when deriding the incompetence of librarians or professors. They do belong to unions, and like any large organization some of the bureaucracy gets in the way of common sense. These instances are the exception rather than the rule; Most of the time the union protects veteran teachers from being fired for not following the latest fad in education reform (and everyone seems to know how to improve teaching these days, except of course for those actually trained to do it).

Perhaps the public sector workers in Wisconsin will weather this storm, I am fighting for them, but in reality there is a lot of anger and resentment out there over this economy, people are angry that a black man is in the White House. The GOP is conveniently channeling this anger away from the war that is draining our resources, towards public employees. It might work, as there are a lot of stupid people out there. But I am fighting for the rights of public employees, and I will fight this misinformation machine. They are lying, and the truth will out.