The Torsion wrote: Spin? Would you call someone wealthy who donated 40 grand to an Al Franken campaign his "corporate master"? You know what, you're right, it is spin. You can literally prank call someone, record the conversation and hype it out the window despite the fact that it contains no information besides the same basic talking points because people already have their minds made up. Boogeyman politics.
Exactly. You have got to be smart enough not to fall for it. Didn't Palin get pranked during the election too?
And comparing Koch's hard and soft money influence, particularly the latter to a typical or even higher level, Franken supporter (check Open Secrets, not one individual donated even $10K to Franken's campaign, if that). Franken's only total campaign contributions from "single sources" are the combined employees of GE, the combined employees of Time Warner, the combined employees of the Univ. of Minnesota and Act Blue, a donation pooling operation consisting of tons of small donaters. Again you can factor in the soft money on Franken's side (unions buying issue advertising), but this is dwarfed many times over by Koch's operations (Americans for Prosperity is running a $350K ad buy in Wisconsin). And this scale repeats itself country-wide.
As for your downplaying of the "gets" of this particular call, the call itself or a stunt like it up-plays them or hypes them because it is in fact a quite a bit beyond the talking points to the extent I am actually sure you are commenting on this without having heard the tape or read the transcript.
Was Walker publicly crowing about all the petty little punishments he is meting out on the 14 Dems? No, but to impress Koch:
The very next sentence "Koch" refers to the Democrats as bastards and Walker plays right along. Again, it's a lot easier to make a case (either case) when you have the asshole on tape, shucking and grinning along. Then there's this gem:Walker: The Senate organization committee is going to meet and pass a rule that says if you don’t show up for two consecutive days on a session day, in the state Senate, the Senate chief clerk-it’s a little procedural thing here, but-can actually have your payroll stopped from being automatically deducted-"
Murphy/Koch: Beautiful.
Walker: -into your checking account and instead-you still get a check, but the check has to be personally picked up and he’s instructing them-which we just loved-to lock them in their desk on the floor of the state Senate.
Again, using layoffs and then additional layoffs as a political pressure tactic, I don't remember that in any of Walker's press conferences. Or this lovely exchange:The other thing is I’ve got layoff notices ready. We put out the at-risk notices. We’ll announce Thursday, and they’ll go out early next week. And we’ll probably get 5 to 6,000 state workers will get at-risk notices for layoffs. We might ratchet that up a little bit, you know.
Uh, yeah, talking points.... i'm not even counting the tacit approval and consideration of agent provocateurs.Walker: And my sense is, hell, I’ll talk to them. If they want to yell at me for an hour, you know, I’m used to that, I can deal with that. But I’m not negotiating.
Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.
Walker: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I got a Slugger with my name on it.
So after hearing this, if you already hated Koch/The Bill, you have a whole new pile of ammunition, if you supported Koch/The Bill you may feel a bit more sleazy doing so openly, and most importantly if you were on the fence, all the hyperbole the opposition spouted about Walker is confirmed straight out of the horse's mouth, and you start leaning. And they have started leaning. Significantly, and that too is starting to repeat nationwide.
This is in the same spirit as Obama's "Clutching to guns and religion" gaffe, only moreso. For example, if instead Obama was caught on tape with Soros, saying "Yeah, we'll have these, like Death Panels....and I have a taser ready for those pro-life bastards" that is basically the equivalent of what a monumental fuck up this is.
All politics is boogeyman politics.