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Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Walker on "corrupt" union dues and angelic corporate cash; on reluctantly signing bills not on his radar.

Bill Lueders, from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, included some interesting comments from Scott Walker's book. For those of us who will never read a word of Walker's dismally selling book, it's nice to get a look at some of these bizarre tidbits.

On breaking up the unions and exempting conservative employees from paying dues under Act 10: 
WSJ: “What I fought about with public employee unions is they didn't have that freedom. You have money that was forcibly taken from people without them having any say about that. That’s where I thought the corruption was.”
That's considered corruption? In Walker's mind, getting all the benefits of union representation without paying for it is fair? Another easy excuse to freeload.  

Lueders wonders if union money is so corrupting in elections, why private corporate cash wouldn't have the same effect.
Union leaders, charged Walker, “would rather have seen us take the money from the poor ... just so long as we did not close the automatic spigot of cash that was filling their union coffers.”

Yet on the cusp of what may be a hugely expensive 2014 governor’s race ... the will to please big-money donors led to two of Walker’s greatest missteps — his comments to businesswoman Diane Hendricks about his plan to “divide and conquer” public employee unions, and his embarrassing remarks to a prankster pretending to be billionaire industrialist David Koch. But he didn’t want to go there.
But this comment still really pisses me off, for it's lack of coverage and and for its outright BS:
“It was people here and across the country who looked at the protests, who looked at the recall, who thought it was an abuse of power, who went out of their way to say, ‘You know what? I’m going to send $25 or $30 or $40 to help someone out.’ ” He added that these out-of-state donors “don’t have any skin in the game. There wasn't anything they wanted or desired out here.”
They didn't want the repeal of environmental laws, tax cuts for big business and school vouchers? Really? That's why billionaires continue to fund out-state politicians I guess.

Walker's Next Book: The Incidental Governor: Can Walker really get away with pretending he didn't have anything to do with the many grotesque bills he signed into law, by claiming they weren't on his radar or they weren't his fault?  
Walker was noncommittal about a bill that passed the state Assembly and awaits action in the Senate that would, as amended, double the maximum individual contribution to candidates for state office, including governor.

“I haven’t advocated for it,” he said.

He made the same point about a bill to eliminate the requirement that candidates disclose their major donors’ principal place of employment.
He also made the same point about giving the go ahead to encourage more racist mascots, by making it impossible to get rid of them. "Governmental free speech" he said, proving he's like all the other clueless constitutional conservative tea party dummies.

Lueders made one final point: Walker wants to cement in place convenient lies that make his campaign ads so ridiculous: 
Finally, while Walker said his book has gone into a third printing, apparently nothing has been done to correct admitted mistakes, noted in this column.

In one case, the spending on recall races by Senate Republicans and their supporters is vastly understated. In another, the book says “Democrats and their union allies” spent a huge sum against a GOP state senator, when in fact the figure cited represented spending by both sides, led by the senator and her supporters.

An error left uncorrected after it is pointed out is no longer an error.

3 comments:

  1. Walker is lying about union dues being forcibly taken from state workers. Belonging to the union and paying dues was always optional when I worked for the state in the 80's and 90's and I don't believe it has changed since then. Workers who chose not to join or pay dues were still entitled to full representation in grievances or disciplinary proceedings.

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  2. I'm not sure. Hope someone else can clear this up.

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  3. It actually is against the Wisconsin Constitution to force an entity to provide a service for free, as it is in other states. So if these Bootlickers do not want to pay dues, it is also unconstitutional for the state to say that they still need to be represented by the union.

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