Yep, Foxconn Was A Con Job All Along-- You'd Expect Something Different From Trump, Walker And Ryan?

Wednesday morning, Reuters broke an explosive story about how Foxconn is reconsidering the bullshit deal they made with Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Trump "to make advanced liquid crystal display panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin campus, and said it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised."

Announced at a White House ceremony in 2017, the 20-million square foot campus marked the largest greenfield investment by a foreign-based company in U.S. history and was praised by President Donald Trump as proof of his ability to revive American manufacturing.

Foxconn, which received controversial state and local incentives for the project, initially planned to manufacture advanced large screen displays for TVs and other consumer and professional products at the facility, which is under construction. It later said it would build smaller LCD screens instead.

Now, those plans may be scaled back or even shelved, Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chief Executive Terry Gou, told Reuters. He said the company was still evaluating options for Wisconsin, but cited the steep cost of making advanced TV screens in the United States, where labor expenses are comparatively high.

...“In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment,” Woo said.

Earlier this month, Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple Inc., reiterated its intention to create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, but said it had slowed its pace of hiring. The company initially said it expected to employ about 5,200 people by the end of 2020; a company source said that figure now looks likely to be closer to 1,000 workers.

...Rather than manufacturing LCD panels in the United States, Woo said it would be more profitable to make them in greater China and Japan, ship them to Mexico for final assembly, and import the finished product to the United States.

During the 2018 congressional campaign, Foxconn became a hot topic between progressive Democrat Randy Bryce and Foxconn booster Paul Ryan. Most Republicans, though not all (see Justin Amash tweet above), bought into the corporate welfare plan Ryan, Walker and Trump were advancing. Bryce warned voters that this whole Foxconn deal was a con, a scam, and that it wouldn't work. I asked him about it when the news broke yesterday.

"When the Fox-conn deal was first announced," he told me, "it was not too long after we launched our campaign to take Paul Ryan out. Trump invited Ryan and Walker (who was also about to be taken out as well) to the White House where they all broke their arms frenetically patting themselves on each other’s backs. There was no doubt it was a politically motivated stunt to save their careers. The deal was practically agreed upon on the back of a napkin. Since then Walker promised over 4 BILLION dollars to the Taiwan-based company. This at a time when public education had been stripped of nearly 1 billion. Income inequality at it’s all-time worst. The Middle class leaving Wisconsin quicker than any other state in the country. Walker postponed infrastructure projects claiming we can’t afford to make our roads and bridges safe but at the same time vowed to widen lanes from Milwaukee’s airport to the Mt. Pleasant Foxconn location to be used for AUTOMATED trucks to deliver goods."

Bryce continued, "Now that we have a new governor-- Tony Evers-- the same old grifter network is at an end. It’s no surprise that we find out just how big of a scam it was. The sign welcoming people to Wisconsin used to read 'Open For Business.' Now that we’re 'open for everyone,' the corporate gravy train is over. It’s time to use taxpayer money to benefit the citizens-- not the corporations who see us as their servants."

Another Democrat who recognized the whole deal was bogus from the start was state Senator Chris Larson, who is eager to create good middle class jobs in the area he represents south of Milwaukee, but wasn't buying into the con-job the GOP was offering. "Wisconsin taxpayers shouldn't invest our future or our funds in a company that isn't invested in Wisconsin," he told me yesterday. "That will be the legacy of the failed FoxConn deal. In the meantime, we'll continue to have to put up with the tortured explanations as to why the jobs won't materialize, why they can't follow our environmental laws, why they choose to put all our money in a foreign corporation instead of in our kids' education, and today, why they don't actually want to build here anyway." And he was just getting started.

Beware Wisconsin Republican leaders promising job creation for handing out massive tax subsidies. As it so happens, taking an agreement written on a bar-room napkin as gospel is not the brightest idea former Governor Walker and legislative Republicans have had. Foxconn was never going to build a manufacturing plant, they were never going to invest $10,000,000,000 here, and they were never going to create 13,000 jobs. The Foxconn boondoggle was an election year fantasy designed to hide the fact that the extreme Republicans who have had a gerrymandered stranglehold on Wisconsin have never had a real economic development plan.

It is telling that despite having delivered a historic $1 billion cut to public education, having local roads and infrastructure in extreme disrepair, and being told that regional public transit is just “too expensive,” Republicans always find the tax dollars for their corporate buddies. Over the last eight years, Wisconsin had the opportunity to invest in ourselves but time and again Republicans chose to invest in millionaires and billionaires.

The sooner we ignore the snake oil salesman (and the politicians that ogle their cash) and instead start plotting our own way forward, the better off we'll be.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reminded Wisconsinites about a statement they got last November from Mark Maley, spokesman for Scott Walker's Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. "The state of Wisconsin is investing in a once-in-a-lifetime economic development opportunity that will be transformational as the state will become home to the only LCD manufacturing facility outside of Asia." Maley (and the Walker administration-- since sent packing by the voters) lying? You bet they were, right along with Trump, Ryan, Ryan clone Bryan Steil and Sean Duffy. "Foxconn," reported the Post" has a history of walking back its hiring announcements. The company grabbed headlines in 2013 when it unveiled plans to invest $30 million and generate 300 jobs at a new high-tech factory in central Pennsylvania. The state’s governor applauded the news, and economists predicted Foxconn would lead a local manufacturing revival. But after the spotlight faded, Foxconn quietly dropped its plans in the state. Trump and Walker’s deal with the company also sparked criticism. Wisconsin’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau forecast the move wouldn’t bring profits to the state until 2042. Walker lost his race in November to Democrat Tony Evers, who has slammed the Foxconn deal a as a 'Hail Mary pass on the part of the governor.'...Wisconsin’s offer of economic sweeteners to Foxconn was unprecedented in scale, analysts say. The bundle of financial incentives was larger than what New York, Virginia and Tennessee collectively pledged to Amazon.com to win its new offices."

Lame Ducks Are Outdated And Should Be Abolsihed

American lame duck periods-- between early November's election and early Jannary's inauguration, are usually extremely dysfunctional-- but they were even worse before 1933 when they lasted until March. In 1933m the 29th Amendment to the Constitution moved the beginning of the new Congress to January 3 (and the inauguration of the president to January 20), shortening, but not eliminating the lame duck period. Now we need to amend the 20th amendment. Remember, a lame duck-- whether an executive or a legislature-- is free to make decisions that exercise power with little fear of consequence.

Yesterday Wisconsin's lame duck governor, Scott Walker, signed the lame duck legislature's lame duck anti-democracy bills that are examples of what lame ducks can do to fuck with the newly elected officials. What Republican legislatures and governors are doing in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan make the case for stripping defeated politicians of their powers immediately after defeat.

Outgoing Gov. Scott Walker signed lame-duck legislation Friday that will scale back the authority of his Democratic successor-- approving the entire legislation after saying he was inclined to veto parts of it.

The move came a day after Walker announced a $28 million incentive package for Kimberly-Clark Corp. using powers the legislation strips from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. If Walker had signed the legislation earlier, he wouldn't have been able to cut the deal with Kimberly-Clark without permission from lawmakers.

The legislation also puts limits on the incoming attorney general and curb early voting-- provisions that will likely ignite legal fights.

...In a statement, Evers said Walker "chose to ignore and override the will of the people of Wisconsin."

"This will no doubt be his legacy," his statement said. "The people demanded a change on November 6th, and they asked us to solve problems, not pick petty, political fights. The people of Wisconsin expect more from our government than what has happened in our state over the past few weeks."

...[T]he measures mean Evers and incoming Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul would have fewer powers than all of their predecessors, Republican and Democrat alike.

The laws Walker signed-- passed by Republicans last week in an overnight session just four and a half days after the package was made public-- trim early voting; give Republican lawmakers control of the state's job-creation agency; and hem in Evers and Kaul.

The legislation also gives GOP lawmakers control of a litigation authorized by Walker to try to overturn the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Evers and Kaul campaigned on getting the state out of that lawsuit.

...Republican lawmakers will gain the ability to more permanently block state rules written by the Evers administration. Such rules are more detailed than state statutes and carry the force of law.

Under the new law, Evers will need to get permission from lawmakers to make substantial changes to health care and public benefits programs. Republicans sought those measures to prevent Evers from shelving work requirements and drug screening requirements.

The system is particularly venal because Republican gerrymandering has given 64% of the seats in the Assembly over to Republicans, who only won 45% of the votes. 53% of Wisconsin voters cast ballots for Democrats, who wound up with just 36% of the seats.

Last week, Ian Millhiser, writing for ThinkProgress, summed up the reasons why lame duck sessions should be abolished-- on every level of government :Defeated lawmakers with nothing left to lose shouldn't be able to set the capitol on fire on their way out the door.. Other countries have already gotten rid of dysfunctional lame duck sessions which were established to take into account how long it would take a newly elected official to find out he had been elected in pre-telegraph days and then ride his horse all the way to the state capital to take a seat.

There are good reasons why a nation may need several days or even a few weeks between an election and the ascension of its new government. Counting all the ballots takes time. And, in parliamentary systems, it may take a while for the leader of the dominant party to pull together a large enough coalition to form a government.

But the United States has an unusually long lame duck period -- about two months at the federal level, and a similar amount of time in most states. And it still has this lengthy interregnum for no good reason. In the horse and buggy days, when it might have taken weeks for a new member of Congress to travel to the capitol, there was a logic to keeping outgoing lawmakers in place if an emergency should arise. Even state lawmakers might have needed time to get their affairs in order-- and to figure out who would manage their finances at home while they were largely out of contact at the state capitol.

...On May 7, 2017, Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential election. He took office seven days later. Canada’s Liberal Party won a parliamentary majority on October 19, 2015. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office on November 4 of that year. The last time power switched partisan hands in Great Britain, former Prime Minister David Cameron took office just five days after the general election.

Republicans are using lame duck powers to purposefully subvert democracy. That's got to end.

How Many House Republicans Will Trump Drag Down With Him In 2020?

Will voters have had enough of the circus in 2020? In a recession?

In a manner of speaking, 2020 is just around the corner. As long as the Democrats don't commit suicide by nominating another horribly flawed status quo kind of candidate like Biden, Gillibrand or Bloomberg, Pig Man should be a goner. So what about all those enablers and rubber stamps in the House? Can America be rid of them as well? Some but not as many as we would like. But... first let's look at John Harwood's supposition for CNBC that Trump may well be running in a recession his policies (and, to be fair, personality) are rapidly bringing on. And, as Harwood reminds his readers, "Trump's weak public standing leaves him no political cushion if the economy turns down. As he braces for Mueller's findings and the new Democratic-controlled House, his most recent Gallup approval rating was just 40 percent."

Harwood asserted that beyond his legal problems, he's faces "rising odds of becoming the first president to seek re-election during economic recession since Jimmy Carter... [T]he uncertainty on display in gyrating financial markets this week has darkened expectations for Trump's last two years. In the fourth quarter of 2018, forecasters already see growth slowing from the 4.2 percent and 3.5 percent recorded in the second and third quarters, respectively. For 2019 and beyond, they expect growth to slow progressively further as fiscal stimulus from lower taxes and higher spending winds down. Many predict the economy will lapse into recession in 2020."

"A strong dollar, weaker growth abroad, mounting corporate debt, a slowdown in housing and the ongoing havoc that tariffs are wreaking on global supply chains are each taking a toll," Diane Swonk, chief economist for Grant Thornton LLP, wrote this week. "No one knows for sure which straw will break the camel's back, only that they are piling up."

Swonk has accelerated her previous prediction of recession from the second half of 2020 to the first half. In October, the National Association for Business Economics reported that two-thirds of forecasters it surveyed expect recession by the end of Trump's re-election year.

That would represent a historically rare event-- and an ominous one for the president's chances of a second term.

And not just for Señor Trumpanzee. There will still be around 200 Republicans in the House, give or take a couple of prison terms. There will always be non-statistical circumstances in every election but these districts below were won by Republicans with less than 55%, making them, at least classically, vulnerable.

• Alaska- Don Young- 53.3%
• AR-02- French Hill- 52.1%
• CA-01- Doug LaMalfa- 54.9%
• CA-04- Tom McClintock-54.1%
• CA-22- Devin Nunes- 52.7%
• CA-50- Duncan Hunter- 51.8%
• CO-03- Scott Tipton- 51.7%
• FL-15- Ross Spano- 53.0%
• FL-16- Vern Buchanan- 54.6%
• FL-18- Brian Mast- 54.3%
• GA-07- Rob Woodall- 50.1%
• IL-12- Mike Bost- 51.8%
• IL-13- Rodney Davis- 50.5%
• IN-02- Jackie Walorski- 54.8%
• IA-04- Steve King- 50.4%
• KS-02- Steve Watkins- 48.1%
• KY-06- Andy Barr- 51.0%
• MI-03- Justin Amash- 54.4%
• MI-06- Fred Upton- 50.2%
• MI-07- Tim Walberg- 53.8%
• MN-01- Jim Hagedorn- 50.2%
• MN-08- Peter Stauber- 50.8%
• MO-02- Ann Wagner- 51.3%
• Montana- Greg Gianforte- 50.9%
• NE-02- Don Bacon- 51.0%
• NY-01- Lee Zeldin- 52.5%
• NY-02- Peter King- 53.3%
• NY-24- John Katko- 53.1%
• NY-27- Chris Collins- 49.4%
• NC-02- George Holding- 51.4%
• NC-09- ?
• NC-13- Ted Budd- 51.6%
• OH-01- Steve Chabot- 51.8%
• OH-12- Troy Balderson- 51.6%
• PA-01- Brian Fitzpatrick- 51.3%
• PA-10- Scott Perry- 51.4%
• PA-16- Mike Kelly- 51.5%
• TX-02- Dan Crenshaw- 52.9%
• TX-03- Van Taylor- 54.3%
• TX-06- Ron Wright- 53.1%
• TX-10- Michael McCaul- 50.9%
• TX-21- Chip Roy- 50.3%
• TX-22- Pete Olson- 51.4%
• TX-23- Will Hurd- 49.2%
• TX-24- Kenny Marchant- 50.7%
• TX-25- Roger Williams- 53.6%
• TX-31- John Carter- 50.6%
• VA-05- Denver Riggleman- 53.3%
• WA-03- Jaime Herrera Beutler- 52.9%
• WI-01- Bryan Steil- 54.6%

That's 50 obvious targets to start with-- ten more more than flipped this cycle. Blue America has already been recruiting candidates in some of those districts. We'll let you know who as soon as we get the high-five from the candidates. In many of these districts there were Blue Dogs running, (discouraging Democrats from voting). In others there were totally flawed candidates and in many the DCCC just refused too engage, often because the candidate was a progressive. Ben Ray Lujan was a terrible DCCC chairman-- weak and stupid. The new one the Democrats just picked, Blue Dog Cheri Bustos, is far worse. If we're going to have a tidal wave in 2020, it will be despite the DCCC, not because of them or even-- in all likelihood-- with their help.

This morning, The Atlantic published an essay by Wisconsin Republican Charlie Sykes, Wisconsin Republicans Are Shooting Themselves In the Foot, that warns the GOP that the kinds of anti-democracy stunts they're pulling in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina won't help with voters but will backfire on them "The Wisconsin GOP’s lame-duck power play," he wrote, "was not the death of democracy. But it was bad enough: petty, vindictive, and self-destructive. It was, as the saying goes, worse than a crime. It was a blunder. And for what?”

In its arrogant insularity, the Wisconsin GOP became a national symbol of win-at-all-costs, norms-be-damned politics. Cut through the overwrought rhetoric and what did the Republican legislators actually accomplish? Not really a whole lot; certainly not enough to justify the political damage they’ve inflicted on themselves. They have managed to energize the progressive base, expose themselves as sore losers, and undermine crucial democratic norms. And in return … they got extraordinarily little.

...Signing the lame-duck legislation would be an especially classless way for Walker to leave office; it will tarnish his reputation in ways that I’m not sure he grasps. And, frankly, it’s just not worth it... For the moment, the Trumpist style of smash-mouth, red-versus-blue, play-to-your-base politics is ascendant. What’s happening now in Wisconsin, and similar moves in Michigan, will only escalate the cycle of hyper-partisanship. Polarization is likely to get worse before it gets better.

I started with a saying and I’ll end with another: “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.” It has to stop somewhere. I’d love for it to be in Wisconsin.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Well, the big day is tomorrow, Election Day, Tuesday, November 6, 2018. Will it be a day that lives in infamy?

Having trouble winning on the issues in many districts, and coming up short on the issues in semi-meaningless nationwide generic polls, the Republican Party has made its best efforts in scaring their ignorant, hate-prone, delusional membership with tales of invasions of plague-carrying and crime-carrying brown people and making voting either impossible or nearly impossible for millions of fellow American citizens that they look down upon and fear. Herr Trump is only one thin little line from also claiming that the so-called "caravan" of Latinos and Middle Easterners of every kind also consists of Martians and Amazon jungle women armed with poison blow darts The only thing Republicans haven't tried in their dark efforts to win, yet, is armed MAGA hat-wearing militia blocking people from voting. Maybe they'll turn fire hoses on would-be voters, partying like it's 1965 in Selma, Alabama. Maybe something even worse. Give that time. The more we let Republicans get away with, the more they will attempt in future elections.

This time, in addition to the usual tactics of telling people they need a voter ID and then making that ID virtually impossible to obtain, republicans have come up with some new wrinkles. In North Dakota, where incumbent conservadem Senator Heidi Heitkamp needs the votes of democratic voting Native Americans, the Repug Party run state legislature has decided to require an ID that has a street address, knowing full well that Native Americans who live on reservations don't have street addresses. Neat trick, eh? Heitkamp is no prize when it comes to where she stands on the political spectrum but her winning or losing could be the fulcrum on which control of the Senate turns. That in turn could affect the future of Herr Trump's policies and personal future, but only if a Democratic majority decides to stand up for Americans and the Constitution rather than continue to be appeasers and enablers of fascism for a change. Something similar goes for the House of course. But, as FDR said, the public has to make politicians act, to make their jobs untenable in reality.

In the proud pantheon of racist voter profiling, the North Dakota chicanery has to be near the top but I still think Wisconsin's Neo-Nazi Governor Walker and his far right minions in the Wisconsin legislature beat that when they required citizens in their state to get their voter ID at motor vehicle agency offices and then went on a jihad of closing such offices in locations that are heavily populated by democratic voters, especially African-Americans in both urban and rural areas. Gov. Walker slyly pointed out that In some heavily Democratic areas, motor vehicle offices weren't fully closed but opened for obtaining voter registration IDs on every 5th Wednesday of the month. That almost sounds semi-reasonable until you look at that calendar and see that the typical year has only 3 months with a 5th Wednesday. And, of course, the open hours are limited. Personally, I envision myself driving to one of those rarely opened MVA's, removing the tied and gagged governor from the trunk of my car, jimmying open the door and dumping him inside on one of the best winter Thursdays Wisconsin has to offer. Of course, I will make sure the heat is off. But, I will tell him to rest assured that someone will find him when the 5th Wednesday of the month comes around.

In Confederate Georgia, white supremacists are protecting their Jim Crow heritage not only by saving their birdshit-encrusted statues but by doing the usual purging of the voter rolls of what today's republicans call "undesirable" citizens, over 53,000 to date, mostly African-Americans. That is after already removing 670,000 Georgia citizens off of the voting rolls in 2017 alone. What makes republicans even more sadistically gleeful is that the guy they have doing all of this purging is also their candidate for governor of the state. Stalin would be so proud!

There's also the legendary goings on in Prairie View Texas but, hey, what do you expect from Texas? This one is too complicated and too long-winded to detail in this post but you can just check this link I'm providing.

Saving the worst for last though, is Dodge City, Kansas. Yes, something is always the matter with Kansas. Hell, just the name Kansas is now synonymous with governmental evil, but, in Dodge City, a majority Latino and African-American city, Ford Country Clerk Debbie Cox, knowing that most of the locals don't drive, decided to just move the traditional polling location not only completely out of town but to a location that sits about a mile from the nearest bus stop; hence the inspiration for the cartoon I'm using as tonight's meme. Like Georgia, it's the Secretary of State (her boss) who is running for Governor in a tight election.

Nationwide, Republicans have managed to close over 15,000 voting locations that used to serve minority voters since the Obama years. The only feasible antidote is to remove republicans from their jobs. Now if we can just get through the election without Trump's allies, foreign and domestic, hacking the voting machines or bringing the power grid down and make some headway in that task.

Independent Voters Are Ready To Step Up And Save The Country From Trump

Overwhelmingly, voters who identify as Democrats vote for Democratic Party candidates-- even for candidates for the Republican wing of the Party (Blue Dogs and New Dems)-- and the rapidly shrinking number of voters who identify as Republicans vote for Republicans-- whether mainstream conservatives or neo-fascists and, presumably, Trumpists. So... more than ever, it is independents who will determine who wins the midterms. And guess who the independents can't stand? Yes, Trump... and Trump enablers.

Take Wisconsin. Paul Ryan has bowed out of contention with as much grace as he could muster before being taken down by a union iron worker, saving, he hopes, his future political career. Focus groups showed he had irretrievably lost the respect of WI-01 independent voters. But the Randy Bryce congressional race isn't the only one with national import in the state. Remember Governor Walker? Monday morning, Politico reported that his goose is cooked... by the same independent voters who plan to vote for Randy Bryce and Tammy Baldwin. "There’s every reason to believe this is the beginning of the end for Scott Walker. His presidential bid crashed and burned. He’s running for a third term as governor in what figures to be a hostile midterm for the Republican Party. Polling shows that the independent voters who were so critical to Walker’s wins in the 2012 recall and 2014 reelection are breaking away from him... His opponent, Schools Superintendent Tony Evers, has a slight lead in recent polls and there’s evidence that critical suburban voters are shifting leftward."

“I don’t think this is about Democratic enthusiasm in Madison and Milwaukee, it’s about Democratic enthusiasm and a backlash to Trump and Walker everywhere in Wisconsin,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic strategist and former Milwaukee County party chair.

Chheda points to “a massive shift to the left” in what was once solid Walker territory-- including special elections in Green Bay’s Brown County and in the Twin Cities suburbs in St. Croix County.

Democrats also cite three public polls in recent weeks-- NBC/Marist, Marquette and Suffolk/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel-- show independent voters are breaking from Walker, a daunting signal given that the state is almost evenly split politically, making them an essential part of the governor’s path to victory.

“What all of those polls said is that independents are going for Evers over Walker by 10 points. Walker has generally won independents when he’s gotten to victory,” Chheda said.

While Walker is expected to again win the vote-rich, GOP suburban counties outside of Milwaukee-- he dominates in the so-called “WOW” counties where turnout is high-- Chheda said if Democrats can nibble at the margins, it would make it much more difficult for Walker to win statewide.

The Trump factor could play a role in those suburbs. Even Republicans admit Trump’s unfiltered rants on social media and a slew of scandals hitting his inner circle could prompt GOP voters to stay home in November, including those heartened by Trump’s policies on immigration and taxes.

Sunday night Jonathan Swan lit up the internet with a simple statement at Axios that "it's rare to see so much evidence of a trend accumulate so many months out, only for all the signals to be proven wrong... 'Every metric leads you to one conclusion: The likelihood of significant Republican losses in the House and state/local level is increasing by the week,' said the Republican operative who did this statistical comparison to 2010. 'The depth of losses could be much greater than anticipated and the Senate majority might be in greater peril than anticipated.'"

This is all about independent voters. Julie Pace, reporting for AP, noted that "Republicans have spent the primary season anxiously watching suburban voters, particularly women, peel away because of their disdain for Trump. The shift seems likely to cost the party in several key congressional races. Still, party leaders are optimistic that Republicans can keep control of the Senate, which could help insulate Trump from a raft of Democratic investigations."

History is not on Trump’s side. The president’s party typically suffers big losses in the first midterm election after taking office. And despite a strong economy, Republicans must also contend with the president’s sagging approval rating and the constant swirl of controversy hanging over the White House, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into Russian election interference and possible obstruction of justice by Trump.

Despite those headwinds, Trump is betting on himself this fall. He’s thrust himself into the center of the campaign and believes he can ramp up turnout among his ardent supporters and offset a wave of Democratic enthusiasm. Aides say he’ll spend much of the fall holding rallies in swing states.

“The great unknown is whether the president can mobilize his base to meet the enthusiasm gap that is clearly presented at this point,” said Josh Holmes, a longtime adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Because the middle won’t be there for Republicans.”

Indeed, Trump’s turbulent summer appears to have put many moderates and independents out of reach for Republican candidates, according to GOP officials. One internal GOP poll obtained by The Associated Press showed Trump’s approval rating among independents in congressional battleground districts dropped 10 points between June and August.

“The great unknown is whether the president can mobilize his base to meet the enthusiasm gap that is clearly presented at this point. Because the middle won’t be there for Republicans.”

A GOP official who oversaw the survey attributed the drop to negative views of Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the White House’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The official was not authorized to discuss the internal polling publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Those declines put several incumbent GOP lawmakers at risk, including Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, who represents a district in the Washington suburbs, and Rep. Erik Paulsen, whose suburban Minneapolis district has been in Republican hands since 1961.

Coincidentally, the NY Times took an in-depth look at how the Paulsen race in Minnesota is shaping up. Short answer: very, very badly for the GOP.

88% of Democrats are planning to vote for Dean Phillips, an exceptionally bad candidate from the Republican wing of the party, a rich, out-of-touch New Dem who will make an absolutely horrible member of Congress. 92% of Republicans plan to vote for Paulsen, who has already proven himself a horrible member of Congress and a repulsive Trump toadie and rubber-stamp. So why is Phillips so decisively ahead? There are more independents in the district than Republicans and they've swung to Phillips-- 53-40%. That's it. BOOM! And that tells us more than just about one district in the suburbs that wrap around Minneapolis from the west, north and south. Independent voters are not a factor in much of the Old Confederacy. But in the rest of the country... their disdain for Trump is going to be very bad news for the Republican Party 2 months from today.

Are Republicans Purposely Leaving The Back Door Open For Russian Hackers?

Yesterday the Senate votes 50-47 to reject Patrick Leahy's amendment to send states an additional $250 million for election security. 50 voted YES and 47 voted NO, but 60 votes were needed to get by the Russian-GOP filibuster. 3 Republicans who might have voted for more election protection-- John McCain (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Richard Burr (R-NC) weren't there. Every Democrat and both independents + Bob Corker (R-TN) voted to break the filibuster.

I just want to point out that the Republicans who whine about Trump and sometimes about the Russian interference with our elections all voted to not allow a vote on this, including (an even dozen):

• Susan Collins (ME)
• Tom Cotton (AR)
• Ted Cruz (TX)
• Cory Gardner (CO)
• Lindsey Graham (SC)
• Chuck Grassley (IA)
• Ron Johnson (WI)
• James Lankford (OK)
• Mike Lee (UT)
• Lisa Murkowski (AK)
• Marco Rubio (FL)
• Ben Sasse (NE)

[Those 12 senators should be tried for treason.] Lankford this morning: "While the President has been inconsistent in his tweets, and some of the messaging that he’s put on it, he’s the only one in the government that hasn’t been paying attention to this." What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with this political party?

A couple of days ago I had dinner with an old friend, Chris Larson, the Wisconsin state senator who led the Democrats out of the state when Scott Walker was trying to pass anti-union legislation a few years ago. He reminded me that although the state legislature passed a bipartisan appropriations bill for election protection, Scott Walker has sat on it and refused to spend a dime of it. Wisconsin... one of the states that was infiltrated by Russian hackers.

State positions to secure Wisconsin elections from cyber threats remain vacant months after being created, and state elections commissioners say Gov. Scott Walker’s administration is the holdup to filling them.

...National security officials have warned that malicious cyber actors, including those tied to the Russian government, this year may reprise or intensify their attacks on U.S. election systems.

The bipartisan state Elections Commission voted in April to create and fill six new staff positions, in addition to its existing 25.75 positions, in the lead-up to the 2018 elections. All six deal with election security and three intensively: Two are in elections IT and one provides security training to local election workers.

In May the commission gave information about the positions to Walker’s Department of Administration and tasked it with filling them. The department handles human-resources functions, including hiring, for agencies across state government.

So far that hasn’t happened. Democratic elections commissioner Mark Thomsen said there’s urgency to fill the positions; he hoped that would be done by the Aug. 14 primary election and well before the Nov. 6 general election.

Commission chairman Dean Knudson, a former Republican state lawmaker, also said the ball is in the Administration Department’s court.

“We want (the new positions) filled as soon as possible,” Knudson said. “When you’re creating a new position, it never happens as fast as you’d like.”

...“We’ve seen the recent Mueller indictment and the Russians’ ability to deconstruct our infrastructure,” Thomsen said. “Certainly as a commissioner, I’m concerned with what is happening.”

Democratic Assembly Leader Gordon Hintz, in an interview Thursday, questioned why the Walker administration hasn’t taken election security more seriously.

“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t expect more (hacking) attempts,” said Hintz, D-Oshkosh. “Why is this such a low priority?”

Walker last year vetoed a plan approved by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, as part of the state budget, to fill five elections staff positions. Walker said then that the commission “has been operating effectively with fewer staff.”

The elections commission moved ahead anyway earlier this year after landing a $7 million federal grant to pay for the new staff positions.

...National security officials recently have sounded the alarm about a possible reprise of the 2016 election attacks. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats earlier this week warned that Russia is likely to attempt it again. Coats, a former Republican U.S. senator, likened the situation to indicators observed by the U.S. intelligence community prior to the 9/11 terror attacks.

“I’m here to say the warning lights are blinking red again. Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack,” Coats said.

All of the most recent gubernatorial polls show Walker losing. Last week Emerson released a poll showing Evers way up in the primary-- by 20 points-- and then going on to beat Walker:

Maybe-- or a lot more than maybe-- Governor Walker hopes that if he doesn't do anything to stop the Russians from tampering with the election, they will fix it for him so he "wins" again, despite his tremendous and growing unpopularity in the state. What do you think?

Walker is just an ugly example. We all know who the real culprit is that enables this kind of thing. This morning, the Washington Post reported that "Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts... Russian efforts to manipulate U.S. voters through misleading social media postings are likely to have grown more sophisticated and harder to detect, and there is not a sufficiently strong government strategy to combat information warfare against the United States." The Post completely and naively played down the ability of the Kremlin to target voting systems claiming they "are more secure against hackers, thanks to action at the federal and state levels-- and that the Russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016." Utter bullshit.

Even Without Paul Ryan To Kick Around, Randy Bryce Is Poised To Turn A Red Seat Blue

Unless you can make a clear case for outright villainy-- a really clear case-- Democratic primary voters do not like Democratic primary opponents attacking each other. They hate it. Republican primary voters love to see their primary candidates attacking each other, but Democrats want the attacks saved for general elections, not primaries. Sunday, Randy Bryce shared a stage in Lake Geneva with the very negative and desperate vanity candidate running against him. For her sake, I hope she learned that lesson-- and the one about being careful about what you wish for. Her barrage of negative slurs against Bryce, the clear front-runner, angered the audience and won her no votes. Bryce owned the room and refused to even acknowledge her weak, mean-spirited attacks. He concentrated on the positive messages of his campaign and on going after Bryan Steil, the Paul Ryan clone, Ryan is trying to deliver the GOP nomination to. He opened his remarks by saying on his first day in Congress he would either sponsor or co-sponsor a Medicare-for-All bill. That's what people want to hear and they reacted with loud, sustained cheers.

Saturday, Bernie is back in southeast Wisconsin, this time in Janesville (Ryan's hometown) for a rally with Randy at the legendary UAW 95 headquarters at 5PM. That'll be Bernie's second rally with Randy in Wisconsin this year. This morning, the 10,000 member South Central Building Trades union, which has always endorsed Ryan in the past, unanimously endorsed Bryce. How's that for momentum?

Monday, a few hours after the debate, Dan Kaufman ran a so-so piece about Wisconsin in the New Yorker, The Fall Of Wisconsin And The Rise Of Randy Bryce. Like so many observers have, Kaufman credits the meteoric rise of Bryce to the introductory video launched a year ago. It went viral and Bryce attracted both celebrity supporters and ordinary folks who would stop him on the street to talk and share their own stories about their families with him.

Kaufman had met Bryce while Bryce was working on the Scott Walker recall effort and Kaufman was covering it for the magazine. They stayed in touch.

CNN was hosting a town hall with Paul Ryan in Racine, a small city on Lake Michigan twenty-five miles south of Milwaukee, in the southeastern corner of the state. It was Ryan’s first town hall in nearly two years-- which some took as a sign that Bryce’s early success was making the House Speaker nervous. As I drove through town to the venue, I saw nearly as many vacant storefronts as open businesses. The industrial jobs that had sustained the local community for generations were mostly gone. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the passage of nafta and China’s admittance to the World Trade Organization have cost Wisconsin nearly seventy thousand manufacturing jobs, most in its industrial southeastern corridor. In the Walker era-- a period during which Republicans have maintained nearly uninterrupted control of the state’s governor’s office, legislature, Supreme Court, and most of its seats in Congress-- Wisconsin has also experienced a large decline of the middle class. Its child-poverty rate has increased dramatically, while funding for K-12 education and the state’s public university system has been sharply reduced. And union membership in the state, which had been fourteen per cent when Walker took office, has fallen by almost half-- a change that can be traced directly to the anti-union laws that Walker has championed.

A few hours before the town hall was scheduled to begin, dozens of protesters gathered nearby, on a patch of grass blocked off by barricades-- the sanctioned protest area. Many held sheets of paper with their Zip Codes written in black marker, proof of their residency in Ryan’s district and of their exclusion from a forum with their representative. Bryce showed up at around 5:30 p.m., trailed by campaign staff, intending to join the protesters. He was greeted like a rock star. The crowd was mostly older white union workers and Latino immigrants—the kind of voters Bryce was counting on to help him flip the district. Ryan had first won election to Congress in 1998, and the Democrats who had challenged him in 2014 and 2016 each failed to attract more than forty per cent of the vote.

Yet in the lead-up to the CNN town hall, Ryan’s poll numbers were falling. His campaign staff had begun arguing that Bryce was nothing more than a “liberal agitator,” but Bryce’s campaign had reminded people that Wisconsin’s First District wasn’t really that conservative a place-- it went for Barack Obama in 2008, and only narrowly for Mitt Romney in 2012, when Ryan served as the Republican Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee. And Ryan’s awkward relationship with Donald Trump-- occasionally issuing a mild rebuke of Trump’s latest sexist or racist outrage while supporting and serving as a prominent ambassador for the President’s agenda-- wasn’t playing particularly well back home.

Outside the town hall, Bryce did a local-TV interview, took selfies with a few young supporters, and talked to a reporter from Rolling Stone. Eventually, Bryce and his campaign crew headed for downtown Milwaukee, to watch the event from a bar. “You’re like a real-life superhero, Randy,” a woman sitting next to him said. Bryce smiled politely, then turned back to his phone, which he was using to tweet responses to Ryan’s performance. Bryce’s background would make him something of a novelty in Congress, which has long been occupied by the professional class. Of the four hundred and twenty-eight current members of the House of Representatives, three hundred and forty-seven have backgrounds in law or business. Only three are tradespeople. For many of Bryce’s supporters, though, his greatest appeal is that he is an ordinary worker, like them. “We don’t need a lot of people with classroom knowledge,” a retired Kenosha plumber named Tom Nielsen told me. “We need people who have experience in the field and know people who have suffered, been discriminated against, and got thrown under the rug and mistreated. These people deserve better.”

Bryce grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the southwestern edge of Milwaukee. His stepfather, Richard, was a beat cop, and his mother, Nancy, was a doctor’s secretary whose grandparents were immigrants from Poland. Bryce’s only memory of his birth father, a Mexican immigrant, is a box of crayons marked with “Enriquez”-- his father’s last name. Richard adopted Bryce and helped raise him. A proud patrolman, Richard could be forgiving, like the time he pulled over a group of Bryce’s teen-age friends for speeding and let them go without a ticket. But he could also be severe. When Bryce was eleven, Richard took him into his precinct house, put him in a cell, and closed the door. “It was a warning to follow the right path,” Bryce said.

... [Byrce] began to worry about Walker, who was then the Milwaukee county executive. Already a declared enemy of the county’s public-employees union, Walker was winning praise from national conservative organizations for his anti-union positions. In 2010, when Walker ran for governor, Bryce became one of the most active participants of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, an umbrella group of the Milwaukee-area A.F.L.-C.I.O. locals. The Act 10 fight that followed Walker’s inauguration in January, 2011, made international headlines-- it came in the wake of the Arab Spring protests on the other side of the world, and was seen as a forerunner of the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged the following September. During the protests, tens of thousands of people descended on Madison every day, including Bryce, who began taking off work to go to the capitol, driving two hours each way, morning and night. This commitment soon cost him his job working on an addition to a Nestlé plant in Racine. It also contributed to the strain on his marriage, which eventually ended in divorce.

Walker, for his part, had relished the conflict that Act 10 created. And, after he survived the recall effort, and watched the movement that had risen up to oppose him mostly dissipate, he became a politician whom conservatives talked about as a potential future President. In 2015, during a question-and-answer session at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker was asked what he would do to confront Islamist terrorists such as isis. “If I can take on a hundred thousand protesters, I can do the same across the world,” he said.

While other Act 10 participants went back to their day-to-day lives, Bryce kept protesting: he participated in rallies for immigrants’ rights, Black Lives Matter, a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, and a unionization effort at Palermo’s Pizza, one of the largest frozen-pizza makers in the country. Around the same time as the union drive, Palermo’s terminated eighty-four workers who could not produce documents confirming their residency status. The company claimed that the firings were unrelated to the union campaign, but the workers didn’t see them that way. About a hundred went on strike, and Bryce joined them. He was the only member of the building trades to walk the picket line. “Whatever’s been going on, I’ve usually been involved with,” he told me once. “Just showing up and holding a sign and talking to people. It’s a way of saying, ‘I’m an ironworker, and I am with your cause.’ It’s something that keeps me going.”

...During the past seven years, Wisconsin’s Republicans, enabled by a combination of dark money, gerrymandering, and a weak Democratic opposition, have enjoyed unfettered control of the state. Tax cuts, deregulation, and other corporate-friendly policies have been at the top of the state government’s agenda, most recently exemplified by the four-and-a-half billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies that Walker and his allies want to give to Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer, in exchange for building an LCD-screen factory near Racine. Last month, Trump, Ryan, and Walker spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony of Foxconn’s plant. Bringing Foxconn to Wisconsin “is the most vivid picture of what a strong and healthy economy looks like,” Ryan said. Afterward, Trump held a fund-raiser for Bryan Steil.

Dale Schultz, a moderate former Republican state senator, once described to me a Republican caucus meeting he attended a few years back with a prominent conservative lobbyist, which in his view illuminated his party’s current approach. “All we need is fifty per cent of the vote plus one,” the lobbyist told Schultz and his colleagues. “If we get any more than that one vote, then we didn’t push the state far enough in the direction we want to push it, because we had votes to spare. And if we lose an election we’ll win it back, and then we’ll start up where we left off.”

Conservative activists see a model to emulate in Wisconsin. “Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 did not lay the groundwork for Republican political dominance,” the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote after Trump’s victory. “But the March 2011 signing of Act 10, a dramatic reform of public-sector labor laws, by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker certainly did.” Since Walker signed Act 10, Republicans in many other states have passed measures restricting collective bargaining. An extreme version of Act 10 was passed in Iowa in early 2017, after Republicans seized the governorship and both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1998. The bill, supported by Americans for Prosperity-Iowa-- a non-profit group funded by the Koch brothers-- eviscerated collective-bargaining rights for Iowa’s hundred and eighty thousand public workers, and it went further than Act 10 by placing some restrictions on even police and fire-department unions.

The number of right-to-work states, meanwhile, now stands at twenty-eight-- Missouri, West Virginia, and Kentucky have joined the ranks since Trump’s election. A 2018 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that right-to-work laws correlate with lower vote shares for Democrats up and down ballots, from Presidential candidates to state legislative races. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Janus v. afscme nationalized right-to-work for public employees-- a coast-to-coast threat to union funding and Democratic Party power.

Walker knew that by crushing labor in Wisconsin he could atomize his opposition. Whether the state’s labor movement can ever reacquire its past political power is unclear, but, after seven years of Republican control of the state government, Wisconsin’s beleaguered Democrats have begun winning small victories. Just a few months before Ryan announced his retirement, in a special election for an open state senate seat, a Democrat named Patty Schachtner trounced her Republican opponent in a rural western district that Trump had carried by eighteen points in 2016. “Everything we have done is at risk if we don’t win in November,” Governor Walker warned in a fund-raising e-mail after Schachtner’s victory. Since then, liberals have won an open seat on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court and another state senate race.

Bryce has drawn inspiration and hope from those victories, as he has in the success of underdog progressive candidates across the country this year, and in the recent wave of teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma. “We are going to have to go back to things like that to get what we need,” Bryce told me. “Without people doing the work, nothing is going to happen.”

Bryce is a private kind of guy, taciturn and brooding. Sometimes I get the feeling he hates politics and is revolted by politicians. I know he hates the negativity and slime and I worry if he'll stay in this for long enough to achieve his lofty, heart-felt goals. Sometimes I think he'd rather be "working the iron" than dealing with campaign bullshit and the ugly attacks a panic-stricken NRCC is planting about him, often through useful idiots. Yes, exactly, he's just like the rest of us, a flawed human trying to do his best in a new environment that must be scaring the crap out of him. He's not politically ambitious. He's ambitious to make the country a better place.

No, The Founding Fathers Weren't "Ordinary Men," Not In The Way Scott Walker Means It

Trump's knowledge of American history is as thorough as his knowledge of everything other than grifting. That's why so many morons love him so much; they see themselves in him. I guess there's nothing we can do about that. Even when Max Boot speculated in his Post column yesterday that "If Trump announced he were going to spit-roast immigrant kids and eat them on national TV (apologies to Jonathan Swift), most Republicans probably would approve of that too," he was right on target. Anyone-- including Boot-- who thinks there is anything Robert Mueller could find that will that will shatter his hold on the affections of his moron followers is just whistling Dixie. "Imagine," wrote Boot, "what would happen if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III finds clear evidence of criminality or if Trump’s trade wars tank the economy... if it does, it might-- just might-- shake the 88 percent GOP support that Trump currently enjoys. That, in turn, could open the way for a credible primary challenge... To use one of Boot's own metaphor sources, Wrong 'Em Boyo.



Remember when the idiot talked about what a great future he saw for Frederick Douglass? That's his knowledge of history. I don't want to say that the whole party don't know much about history... but... scholar's they don't tend to be these days. Another genius, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, getting his voters ready for some unconstitutional activities, has been a big proponent of spreading the idea that the founding fathers were "ordinary people."

Well, is some ways Scott Walker was correct. Here's half a dozen:

• each one had a nose from which he breathed
• each one ate food through a mouth
• each one got tired and slept
• each one had feet to walk with
• each one was born of a mother
• each one was, in Walker's own words, a patriot who risked his life for the freedoms we hold dear today

There are reasons their collective endeavor-- the founding of our country including the war for independence and then the Constitution-- has held up, had something to do with just how extraordinary these men were. PolitiFact Wisconsin though, decided that instead of contradicting Walker, they would give him and other Republicans a little history lesson about who the Founding Fathers' fathers were.

After consulting several scholars and other sources, we found that-- with some exceptions-- central figures in the nation’s founding generally came from privileged backgrounds, attended college at a time when very few people did and, by 1776, were prominent and wealthy.

"They weren't ordinary," said Brown University emeritus history professor Gordon Wood, author of Creation of the American Republic, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different and other books. "They were the elite of the day, involved in highest levels of the society."

Paul Finkelman, a scholar-in-residence at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, was among the historians who agreed with that assessment. But noting that Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended when he was 10, Finkelman added, "the notion that some of the founding fathers were self-made is true."

While there is no set group of founding fathers, lists of the major ones usually include the following six, as listed by the National Archives’ Founders Online.

Here’s a look at their early years, as well as where they were by 1776:

John Adams

Adams was born into a "comfortable, but not wealthy, Massachusetts farming family," according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in political history. His father earned a living as a farmer and shoemaker. His early education was strong enough that he entered Harvard College at the age of 15.

Adams became the lawyer with the largest number of clients in highly competitive Boston, said University of West Georgia history professor emeritus John Ferling, the author of 11 books on the American Revolution and its leaders.

In the Continental Congress-- the body of delegates who represented the people of the colony-states that later became the United States of America-- he was the leader of the faction pushing for independence in 1776. He later became vice president and then the nation’s second president.

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin was the son of a man who made soap and candles, which Encyclopedia Britannica terms "one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts" at the time. Franklin learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended at age 10. At 12, he was apprenticed to one of his brothers as a printer and "taught himself to write effectively." He founded a weekly newspaper at age 16.

Franklin, Finkelman told us, "is the classic self-made American." He eventually became wealthy enough that, at age 42, he became "perhaps the first American we know of to retire," Finkelman said. He was a significant property owner, owned a successful publishing business and was an internationally known scientist. Franklin was a slave owner when he helped draft the Declaration of Independence, but became one of the early abolitionists when, at 81, he was at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Finkelman said.

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was born in the British West Indies, the illegitimate son of a "poor itinerant Scottish merchant of aristocratic descent and an English-French Huguenot mother who was a planter's daughter," according to the National Archives. He received a "basic education" and became an apprentice clerk in a mercantile establishment. The proprietor and others recognized Hamilton’s "ambition and superior intelligence" and raised money to further his education, which included time at what became Columbia University in New York.

Finkelman said that after Hamilton joined the Army, he quickly became George Washington’s aide-de-camp with rank of lieutenant colonel. Hamilton wrote pamphlets and newspaper essays favoring independence in 1774 and 1775. In 1789, he became the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. In 1804, he was mortally wounded in a duel with a political rival, Aaron Burr.

James Madison

Madison’s father inherited and married into substantial wealth, according to the Miller Center. Madison was a "sickly child" who also suffered from psychosomatic, or stress-induced, seizures, similar to epileptic fits, "that plagued him on and off throughout his youth." But by the time he entered what became Princeton University, Madison had mastered Greek and Latin under the direction of private tutors.

Ferling noted that Madison was a leading figure in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, served as the leader in the First House of Representatives and drafted the Bill of Rights. According to Finkelman, Madison owned at least 100 slaves, inherited wealth and land from his father, and married into wealthy family. He was president from 1809 to 1817.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was born on a slave plantation in central Virginia, according to Monticello.org. His father was a planter and surveyor, and his mother was the daughter of a well-known Virginia family. When Jefferson was 14, his father died and he inherited about 3,000 acres of land and about 30 slaves. Jefferson went to the College of William and Mary, then studied and practiced law.

Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. According to Finkelman, he owned two major plantations and 150 to 200 slaves which, by modern standards, means he was a billionaire. Jefferson followed Washington and Adams as the third president.

George Washington

Washington was a member of Virginia’s gentry, born on his father’s plantation, according to MountVernon.org. Augustine Washington was a leading planter in the area and also served as a justice of the county court.

After Augustine died, when George was 11, "the income from what remained was just sufficient to maintain Mary Washington and her children" and George "undoubtedly helped his mother manage" the plantation where they lived. His formal education ended at age 15, before that of many gentlemen’s sons.

Washington trained as a surveyor before entering the military. Virginia’s governor appointed Washington, at age 22, to command the colony’s army in the French and Indian War, Ferling said. Washington went on to become a wealthy farmer and businessman before being appointed commander of the Continental army in 1775. Finkelman said by this time, Washington owned thousands of acres of land and hundreds of slaves. He served two terms as president.

PolitiFact added that the Founding Fathers "were all far from ordinary in terms of income, wealth, education, and social standing." But, to be fair, I don't think that's what Walker meant. Walker is an ordinary man, a profoundly flawed one. My guess is that he was trying to get across to Wisconsin voters that the Founding Fathers were also flawed-- ordinary like him in that way-- and could make mistakes that had to be corrected. And it is true that there are grievous historical errors in the Constitution, for example, errors that had to be corrected, something foreseen by the Founding Fathers, who included an amendment process, which gave us the Bill of Right, eventually abolished slavery, gave women legal equality, pohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race and then based on gender.

Constitutional Amendments generally gave more rights to people. Conservatives, Republicans, people like Scott Walker and Señor Trumpanzee aren't looking to expand rights; they look to narrow them and take them away.