Make That Le Gehl: French Manitou BF Buys Madison's Biggest Employer

Today's RealMadison.org feature: Wisconsin-based skidsteer maker Gehl Co. has signed an acquisition deal with Manitou BF of France. Manitou is buying up Gehl stock and hopes to gain full control of the company by October.

Gehl employs almost 400 workers here in Madison, almost twice the workforce of Dakota State University. How will the acquisition affect those jobs? No explicit mention of layoffs yet, but the numbers from Manitou say that once the deal is completed, Manitou will employ about 3,500. Manitou says it currently employs about 2,800, while Gehl employs about 900. Hmmm... might want to start learning French!

More numbers and links at RealMadison.org!

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Update 2008.10.02: Manitou communications officer Damien Cocton replies on the discrepancy in job numbers, seems to say the difference is based on changes already committed since 2007. Read his e-mail for yourself at RealMadison.org.

Illinois and Delaware Subsidize Arizona and Alaska

...and South Dakota!

Michael Kinsley puts "Sarah Palin's Alaskanomics" (not to mention the GOP's insidious reverse snobbery) in perspective:

Back to reality. Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 21/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska's government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it [Michael Kinsley, "Sarah Palin's Alaskanomics," Time.com, 2008.09.09].

The numbers from The Tax Foundation: In the last three decades, Alaska has taken more money from the federal government than it has contributed in all but four years (1982–1985). In this decade, Alaska has seen a return of about $7 in federal spending for every $4 in federal tax paid.

Senator McCain's home state of Arizona has seen similar largesse from Washington: in every year since 1981, Arizona has taken more federal dollars than it has paid (though at a smaller ratio than Alaska, recently about $6 in for every $5 out).

Where do those extra dollars come from? Other states, like Illinois and Delaware. Since 1981, Illinois has never seen better than a 4:5 return on the federal taxes it pays. Obama's home state has always been in the bottom five of states in federal spending received per dollar of tax paid. Delaware ranks right alongside Illinois on that ratio, consistently paying more than it gets back from Washington.

And the local perspective: South Dakota has ranked in the top 10 in the federal spending–tax ratio in all but five years since 1981. In 2005, we got $1.53 back from Washington for every $1 we paid. Thanks, Minnesota (federal spending–tax ratio in 2005: $0.72).

So who has the entitlement mentality here, Republicans or Democrats? The Dems obviously believe in paying their way and then some, while the Republicans think money comes magically from tax cuts and doublespeak.

GOP Doublespeak on Earmarks Continues; Even AP Can't Keep Straight Face

I'm trying to go cold turkey on the Sarah Palin posts (I made it three days without a post focusing on her), but when she makes the desperate mendacity of the Republican Party so obvious, I can't resist.

And neither can the Associated Press in its reporting of yesterday's McCain-Palin campaign stop in Missouri, where the two criticized Obama for requesting nearly one billion dollars in earmarks for Illinois:

"Just the other day our opponent brought up earmarks — and frankly I was surprised that he would even raise the subject at all," Palin said. "I thought he wouldn't want to go there."

Obama hasn't asked for any earmarks this year. Last year, he asked for $311 million worth, about $25 for every Illinois resident. Alaska asked this year for earmarks totaling $198 million, about $295 for every Alaska citizen [Sara Kugler, "McCain, Palin Criticize Obama on Earmarks," AP via Yahoo News, 2008.09.08].

I just mashed up some numbers on earmarks and population by state. In 2005, before all this presidential election brouhaha really got going, the median per capita earmark for the 50 states and District of Columbia was $69.57 (enjoyed by folks in Oklahoma). Alaska ranked second, the only state to bring home* more than one thousand dollars per citizen ($1,062.98). Only D.C. got more per capita, $1,263.67. Illinois ranked 44^th, drawing $36.94 per citizen.

For perspective, South Dakota ranked 15^th, with Thune, Johnson, and Herseth finagling $109.42 for every man, woman, and child in our fair state.

Among the states, seven of the top ten winners of earmarks per capita are among ten least populated states. And overall, states that went for Bush in 2004 were slightly bigger winners of earmarks per capita than Kerry states (Bush states averaged $63.62 per capita; Kerry states, $58.78).

You can download my spreadsheet and play with the numbers yourself. In the meantime, I will continue to view the Republican rhetoric with a strange combination of mirth and disgust as McCain and Palin repeatedly trot out the most blatantly deceptive sound bites I've ever heard. As Obama said this weekend, the GOP must think we're stupid.

p.s.: Sioux Falls Regional Airport has just won a $500K federal grant to help in its effort to convince American Airlines to give Sioux Falls a connection to Dallas. Any local GOP ready to argue that's a reason to throw Johnson, Herseth, and Thune out of office?

*I keep wanting to say earn, but that's clearly not the right verb for earmarks.

Income Inequality Means Republicans Lose Elections

David Frum is quickly becoming my favorite conservative. In the past several days, Frum has expressed sensible caution and concern over McCain's VP choice and issued a reality check for the GOP on immigration.

Add this intelligent and extended commentary from Frum on how income inequality is leading to "The Vanishing Republican Voter." Frum points to a trend of upper-income voters joining lower-income voters increasingly throwing their support behind Democrats. The middle class whom the GOP purports to champion is becoming a smaller target, with middle-class incomes stagnating due in large part to health care costs (if health insurance costs had only increased 50% rather than doubling during the Bush Administration, says Frum, "middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation").

"Conservatives need to stop denying reality," says Frum: middle-class Americans need health care reform, not more cuts in federal income taxes (the burden of which, says Frum, a majority of Americans already consider "reasonable").

Frum also notes that the GOP is losing ground in the best-educated states:

Leaving aside the District of Columbia, 7 of America’s 10 best-educated states are strongly “blue” in national politics, and the others (Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia) have been trending blue. Of the 10 least-educated, only one (Nevada) is not reliably Republican. And so we arrive at a weird situation in which the party that identifies itself with markets, with business and with technology cannot win the votes of those who have prospered most from markets, from business and from technology.

Republicans have been badly hurt in upper America by the collapse of their onetime reputation for integrity and competence. Upper Americans live in a world in which things work. The packages arrive overnight. The car doors clink seamlessly shut. The prevailing Republican view — “of course government always fails, what do you expect it to do?” — is not what this slice of America expects to hear from the people asking to be entrusted with the government [David Frum, "The Vanishing Republican Voter," New York Times, 2008.09.05].

Remember, this is conservative Frum talking. The old "Guv'mint can't do nothin' right!" grunt doesn't seem to fly with this generation of educated professionals. Obama's "Yes We Can!" taps into this mindset: even if government is failing certain areas, educated voters believe we can fix it and make it work in our interest again.

The McCain campaign is apparently counting on uneducated voters to buy into the politics of image and personality and not trouble themselves with what those darned elitist eggheads say about silly things like economic policy. Maybe the McCain campaign should pay a little more attention to conservative eggheads like Frum, who see their successful, educated neighbors voting ever more for the other party.

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Update 11:04 CDT: More on middle class policy—AP offers this breakdown of who gets what under the Obama and McCain tax cut plans:

Income Bracket	Fed. taxes under Obama	Fed. taxes under McCain
Wealthiest 1% (making $600K+/yr)	+$93,709	–$48,860
Middle 20% (making $37,600–$66,400/yr)	–$1,118	–$325
Bottom 20% (making $19K or less/yr)	–$567	–$21

Rapid City Schools Promote Blogging

In a state where the K-12 server blocks some of the finest local citizen journalism, the Rapid City School District is demonstrating an anomalous grasp of the interactive, participatory power of the Internet. The Rapid City Journal reports that the school district is using its new website to encourage teachers to blog:

“Our goal is that everyone becomes a publisher.... This will reflect that new energy in education – the way people communicate" [emphasis mine; RCAS IT director Rick Bates, quoted by Kayla Gahagan, "New Web Site Lets Teachers Blog," Rapid City Journal, 2008.09.04].

Will students also be allowed to blog? Gahagan's report is a little unclear on this point: "Teachers and staff will be given the discretion to post and monitor student posts," she writes, leaving me uncertain whether students have direct publishing access with staff able to censor after the fact or whether all student text goes to staff for approval pre-publication.

Either way, I hope this experiment takes off and opens the doors for all members of the school community, staff and students, to make the school Web their own. The power of the Web is not simply the vast amount of information it can bring to us. The Internet is not just TV, where we sit glassy-eyed and flip channels. The real power—the power we need to teach our kids to use—is the power to publish, to participate.

"The Web can be a dangerous place," says Bates. Well, you can cut your finger off with a saw, too, but we don't send kids to shop class to learn how to buy shelves at Home Depot. The good teacher demonstrates how to use the tools, then puts them in the students' hands and says, "Start building."

The same goes for blogging and all the tools of the Web. Rapid City teachers, start blogging. Show the kids what you're doing and how you do it, then hand the keyboards to the kids and say, "It's your Web: make it what you want it to be."

Canadian Conservatives Fear Obama Bounce, Call Early Election

Afraid the slowing economy and Obama's message of change south of the border, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper dissolved Parliament this weekend and called an election for October 14. A national election in five weeks?!? Now that's the way to run a country!

The call for an election finds Harper's Conservative Party holding up a mirror to our own dark politics:

The Tories [that's what they call Conservatives up north] expect to make this campaign about leadership, hoping to bank on Harper's popularity.

Harper is "a minivan-driving hockey dad from the suburbs" and "the most middle class prime minister this country has ever had," the aide said.

In contrast, [Liberal Party leader Stéphane] Dion is "an elitist professor whose leadership is marked by indecision and dogmatic adherence to ideological theories" such as his Green Shift carbon tax plan [Mia Rabson, "Tories Focus on Bashing Dion," Winnipeg Free Press, 2008.09.06].

A conservative politican facing economic troubles and promising a campaign focusing on personal image. Imagine that.

Treasury Opts for Experience to Oversee Fannie/Freddie Salvage Operation

The Treasury Department is ousting the disgraced CEOs of failing mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Whom has the federal government chosen to see these companies through their bailouts?

• Now heading Fannie: Herbert M. Allison, Jr., 63, chairman/president/CEO of TIAA-CREF since 2002, former president of Merrill Lynch and Alliance for Lifelong Learning, graduate of Yale and Stanford.
• Now heading Freddie: David M. Moffett, 55, Carlyle Group senior advisor; U.S. Bancorp CFO from 1993 to 2007; graduate of University of Oklahoma, Southern Methodist University, and Rutgers.

Not tapped to head either of these institutions of vital national interest: Debbie Ginther, Branch Manager, Wasilla Financial Center, Wasilla, Alaska; employee of Northrim Bank since 2003.

Get out the Vote: Dems Have Registration Edge

I mentioned Thursday that the GOP's mockery of community organizers could come back to bite them. Maybe it already has. AP leads a story about voter registration with an account of the efforts of Linda Graham, who has taken three months unpaid leave from her job at a blood bank to help register voters in working-class neighborhoods in Pittsburgh:

Since the last federal election in 2006, volunteers like Graham combined with the enthusiasm generated by the Obama-Clinton struggle to add more than 2 million Democrats to voter rolls in the 28 states that register voters according to party affiliation. The Republicans have lost nearly 344,000 thousand voters in the same states [Julie Pace & Stephen Ohlemacher, "Democrats Post Big Gains in Voter Registration," AP via Yahoo News, 2008.09.07].

A shift of 2.3 million in party ranks in 28 states. Pure speculation: if the other 22 states have experienced a similar shift, that could mean something like a nationwide shift of 4 million.

George Bush's margin of victory over John Kerry in the 2004 popular vote: 3 million.

These numbers don't make an Obama-Biden landslide a foregone conclusion. But you can bet Obama's people are looking very closely at those numbers, breaking them down state by state and precinct by precinct, the same way they did the numbers during the primaries and caucuses, and organizing folks at the community level to get out the vote and flip the Bush-Kerry numbers from 2004.

P.S.: Remember the Boston Tea Party—good colonial patriots, standing up to British oppression? Community organizers.

Shelterfest! Saturday! Madison!

Oh yeah, did I mention...


Ten hours, five bands, $5, money goes to Habitat for Humanity—that's Shelterfest!

Pile your friends in the car and come to Madison (Hope Studios, 211 SE 4th St.), noon to ten p.m., tomorrow today!!!

Republican National Convention: All Doublespeak

You don't have to read Orwell to understand what the Republican National Convention was selling this week, but it helps. Doublespeak, wall to wall. Todd Epp mentioned it yesterday. Joe Biden certainly caught it (thanks, Scott!). Bob Herbert sums it up nicely today:

If there was one pre-eminent characteristic of the Republican convention this week, it was the quality of deception. Words completely lost their meaning. Reality was turned upside down.

From the faux populist gibberish mouthed by speaker after speaker, you would never have known that the Republicans have been in power over the past several years and used that titanic power to lead the country to its present sorry state [Bob Herbert, "Running from Reality," New York Times, 2008.09.06].

From Leslee Unruh to John McCain, the fundagelical-conservative GOP hucksters just can't win on facts and policy:

• Abstinence-only education doesn't stop teen pregnancy.
  
• Outlawing abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates.
  
• Democratic presidents produce better economic results than Republican presidents.
  
• Deregulation brings us the home mortgage mess that taxpayers will soon have to pay for.
  

Facts don't treat the GOP well. So they have to turn the campaign into an exercise in personality and bogus rhetoric. Go figure.

McCain Loses Sight of the Real War in Afghanistan

It's just natural that forgetfulness comes with age. But Rachel Kleinfeld, executive director of the Truman National Security Project, blogs at the New York Times that John McCain's forgetfulness about our most important war (in combination with his bad temper) might not be the best characteristics to put in the White House:

Curiously, for all his fighting words, there was one fight that Senator McCain forgot to mention Thursday. And that was Afghanistan. The country did not appear once in his speech. Nor did it appear in Sarah Palin’s speech on Wednesday, or in Joseph Lieberman’s the night before.

What are we to make of a fighting man who has forgotten a war? Who has forgotten, in fact, our principle war: the one against Al Qaeda, the terrorist force that attacked our country? In a 45-minute speech, John McCain did not mention Afghanistan because it is there that his choice to fight in Iraq had its most serious negative consequences. It’s in Afghanistan that the cost of pulling troops to fight in Iraq meant that we still have not found Osama bin Laden, or the rest of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. It is in Afghanistan that veterans have been forced to patch metal on a pick-up truck to create some protection for themselves as they drive through mined canyons. It’s there that veterans have buried fellows who died to gain ground — and given up that ground days later, for lack of troops to hold it. Despite his own, moving service in war, it is in Afghanistan that Senator McCain has broken his trust with today’s armed services [Rachel Kleinfeld, "The Wrong Fight," New York Times: Campaign Stops, 2008.09.05].

For the record: In his RNC acceptance speech, McCain mentioned neither Afghanistan nor Osama bin Laden. He mentioned al Qaeda by name once. In his DNC acceptance speech, Obama mentioned Afghanistan three times, bin Laden twice, and al Qaeda once.

As Kleinfeld says, being a fighter is great. It certainly appeals to the inattentive voter who responds to simple macho B.S. But the good fighter knows how to pick the right fight.
kk

What Goes Up... McCain KJAM Bounce Disappears

As a blogger, I speak with immense authority on this single issue: don't trust everything you read on the Internet!

I thus offer this not as hard proof, but simply as something that brightens my day, like looking out the window over breakfast, seeing the sunshine over the lake, and thinking, "Gee, maybe today will be a great day!"

Yesterday I noted that John McCain was leading Barack Obama on a KJAM poll 2 to 1. This morning, Obama has surged to put the KJAM listening audience back in play:
The Madville Times can't claim credit (and no, I didn't sit on the KJAM website and click Obama all day), but I'd love to see KJAM's referring URL stats...

And did I say "in play"? Funny, so did Robbinsdale Radical, who cites Electoral-Vote.com, who cites a July 9 Rasmussen poll that found McCain leading Obama by a mere 4 percentage points.

But polls schmolls: I've heard a few people say that voting for Obama in South Dakota won't matter, since the GOP vote will swamp him anyway. Maybe. Maybe not. But we won't know until we play the game down to the final buzzer. Let's go! Let's vote!