The Capital Times advises: Take the money and run

Any day now, the nicest guy in the world, Capital Times emeritus editor Dave Zweifel, will write a paean to a kinder and gentler politics, civil discourse, and the Chicago Cubs. Until then, his newspaper is talking more trash than Donald Trump on a tweet storm.

Their new name for their arch-nemesis is “Crooked Scott Walker.” Tit for tat, you Hillary haters!

In service of the nine or 20 Democrats running to replace Walker (we include “Cross Plains Woman”), The Capital Times bad mouths the governor’s proposed, one-time $100 tax rebate to parents and his one-week sales tax holiday. Fair enough. The white lab coats at the Policy Werkes happen to agree that tax one-offs are bad policy.

But Dane County’s Progressive Voice is so unhinged that whatever thread of reason finds its way into its editorials gets drowned out by carpet-chewing, partisan bile. The following passage, as one example, goes beyond hyperbole into spittle-flecked hate:

Wisconsin’s governor is never going to do right by working families because he doesn’t serve them; he serves his campaign donors. The Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other out-of-state millionaires have paid for his political viability since he emerged as a statewide political figure. The only flexibility that Walker’s masters permit him is at election time, when the career politician is allowed to tinker with sales taxes in order to try to win a few votes.

“Walker’s masters!” What a hoot! That’s right, Scott Walker is really a Derail the Jail social justice warrior who made a Faustian bargain with the sulfurous Koch boys and is now trapped in their web. 

“Never do right by working families?” Hey, working families, how do you like:

• University tuition frozen six straight years
• Property taxes reduced to the lowest relative level since World War 2
• Income taxes on middle class families less than when Jim Doyle left office
• 3.0% unemployment, the lowest in 18 years
• Wage growth the 12th highest in the nation
• More funding for K-12 education than ever ($11.5 billion) — up $636 million
• Top 10 ratings among the states for high school graduation, quality of health care, and jobs for the disabled
• Wisconsin’s bond rating upgraded to Aa1 by Moody’s for the first time since 1973?

Regurgitating Democrat(ic) party talking points

Dane County’s Progressive Voice is a corporation that exercises its right to coordinate, collude and conspire with any politician or political party it favors without fear of pre-dawn visits from the speech police and their battering rams.

Their speech does not have to be truthful, accurate, or fair. That’s its First Amendment right. Whether it hurts or helps its own cause will come out in the wash this November. The best jury consists of the voters, who have elected Scott Walker three times in the last eight years and went for Trump in once-blue Wisconsin. (Ron Johnson over “career-politician” Russ Feingold, priceless.)

The Capital Times has been such a partisan attack dog — and rabid, at that — for so long it has forfeited any credibility. Who do they persuade who isn’t already convinced? In which case, their rants become mere pandering to their base, Segway Boy, Thistle, and Hippie Bongstocking among them.

You are correct, former colleagues, “Sales taxes ARE inherently unfair. They DO place a greater burden on working families than on the rich.” So Walker is trying to give those taxpayers a break. A break that The Capital Times opposes!

Never met a tax hike it didn’t like

Did The Capital Times oppose a sales tax when Democrat Gaylord Nelson instituted one in 1962? No it did not. When Democrat Tony Earl made the increase to 5% permanent? No it did not. When Dane County adopted a 0.5% county sales tax? No it did not.

A flat wheel tax could be said to unfairly place a greater burden on working families than the rich, given that the unemployed guy driving a beater pays the same $28 as the Tesla leaving the Madison Club. The Capital Times remained silent as the liberals, progressives, and socialists on the Dane County Board gave their assent last November.

The Progressives can name check the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson all they want but what does that really say? That Wisconsin voters — deplorable fools that they are — three times have been hoodwinked?

In case those voters are as stupid as The Capital Times thinks them, the Progressive Voice advises take them to take Scott Walker’s rebate, just the same.