Republican Fiscal Clowns Propose Politically Filtered Audits.

So, Republican voters would rather not know if their hard earned money is being spent wisely by their party leaders? I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised after seeing how easy it was for Walker to just keep borrowing money for transportation with no constituent outrage.  

Tweedledee and Tweedledumb!!!

I also wondered why I didn’t hear a peep out of “stand with Walker” trolls when Scottie wanted to change WEDC again, but this time with no financial oversight whatsoever.  

When that happened, Walker and his band of legislative pirates took their cue, and thought, “what the heck let’s get rid of the Legislative Audit Bureau.” After-all, they catch bad management after the fact, when it’s too late, embarrassing for them, at when no one cares anymore. Check out the pretzel logic:

Wisconsin Republicans propose abolishing the Legislative Audit Bureau: The Legislative Audit Bureau has been the source of some bad news lately for Republicans and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation they created in 2011. Now, two GOP lawmakers have a solution: eliminate the bureau.

State Reps. David Craig and Adam Jarchow, are looking for co-sponsors for their proposal to abolish the audit bureau and replace it with independent inspectors general who would be placed in state agencies … an email the two representatives sent to fellow lawmakers; "Unfortunately, the statutory process under which the LAB operates focuses more on retrospective examination rather than proactive fiscal action and bad practice deterrence. In many instances, by the time an audit has occurred the political will (or new legislative composition) necessary to change a state program has diminished." In recent years, the audit bureau has uncovered numerous problems with the state's flagship job creation agency, which is chaired by Gov. Scott Walker. 

So why not give politicians complete control over the messaging, the audits…or concealment of the data? I'll bet there won't be a peep from the conservative peanut gallery we know as low information voters:

"Why would legislators want to do away with the Legislative Audit Bureau?" said state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, the Democratic caucus vice chair. "Could it be they don't want to know what's happening?" Vinehout said the bill would put audits under the direction of the leaders in the GOP-controlled Legislature, as opposed to the current system of having the LAB overseen by a bipartisan legislative committee. "The breadth of their ignorance of the LAB is staggering," Vinehout said. "It shows a complete unfamiliarity with the skills of the auditors, the efficiencies in government that the LAB helped create, with the fraud, waste and abuse that the auditors have discovered, and further prevented through their oversight."

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha called the proposal one of the worst ideas in a legislative session fraught with bad ideas. “Changing the nonpartisan, award-winning Legislative Audit Bureau into partisan appointees continues the Republican efforts to reduce oversight of state government," he said.

This letter to the editor says it all:

I cannot but express my utter embarrassment to be a registered Republican. Already a rarity in Madison and Dane County, I would hope Republicans would value my vote enough to be mindful that I vote based on rationality and that eliminating a government post in retribution for its doing a good job is one of the most counter-intuitive proposals I have read in years. Politics play a role but when a quality organization such as the LAB is subject to petty attempts at retribution for pointing out the obvious failures of one of the governor’s pet projects, the politics have gone too far.

Esquire columnist Charles Pierce wrote this wonderfully insightful piece: 

First, they went after the state's Government Accountability Board, the eight-year old watchdog agency that, among other things, allowed the citizens to attempt to recall Walker and some of his more conspicuous lapdogs. And now, because it is doing what it is chartered to do, and is investigating whether or not Walker's campaigns illegally coordinated with "outside" groups in his past few campaigns, the pet legislature is proposing to "restructure" it. Keep that phrase in mind.

Then, in the wake of Walker's having been fired from his own economic development corporation, the pack of poodles descended on something called the Legislative Audit Bureau, which was central to demonstrating what a waste of cheap cronyism said agency was. This is especially egregious in this case because Scott Walker never has held a political office that he has not so deformed by his political ambitions that people actually went to jail over it. This is a singularly corrupt man, even by the standards of the our new era of decriminalized influence peddling. He never has run a campaign in his life that wasn't shot through with penny-ante grifting. There is no reason to believe this one is any different.