Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Walker's announcement sinks in, unsettling and nerve racking.

Boring.

Scott Walker's presidential announcement contained the same tired rhetoric he's been pushing for the last year. But not surprising, many of his most rabid supporters were unfamiliar with his speech, obviously distracted by the crap spewed by talk radio and Fox News. Just as bad, some didn't care what he's done in to the state or how Walker's agenda will effect their lives, they just liked the idea he was very religious. That's all it takes I guess to like Walker, and those religious voucher schools. Damn the results.

And while most of the press gushes and doesn't register surprise over the state's mismanaged economy, a few source did cut right to the chase.

I thought this Guardian list of Scott Walker extremism hit the mark:
What might Scott Walker's America look like? Just see what he did to Wisconsin. “We transformed the state,” Walker boasted at a Wisconsin Republican convention in May. Below is a list of 15 things he meant by that.

1. Pinch the public sector (Act 10): Protesters occupied the capitol. “The capitol grew so packed with human bodies, the staff who worked there physically could not move around the building,” Walker wrote in Unintimidated, a 2013 memoir. “The smell, as soon as you walked into the building, was overpowering.

2. Cut taxes for the wealthy while eliminating tax relief for low-income families: Walker’s budget eliminated tax credits that served an estimated 140,000 lower-income people.

3. More prisons, more prisoners, more prison spending: Walker has granted zero inmate pardons and snubbed initiatives backed by fellow budget hawks to reduce incarceration rates, which are now nine times greater in Wisconsin than they were in the early 1970s. 

4. Cut education spending.

5. Limit Medicaid expansion, at a price of hundreds of millions

6. Guns: concealed carry, castle doctrine and no waiting period

7. A strict voter ID law in a state where turnout is everything.

8. Mandatory ultrasounds with physician narration, abortion ban after 20 weeks.

9. Historic mining concessions threatening environmental disaster.

10. Roll back living wage, minimum wage, prevailing wage, equal pay: Walker campaigned against raising the minimum wage, which in Wisconsin is the federally mandated $7.25. “It is a job-killing agenda,” he said. “It’s done for political expediency. It’s a cheap headline.”

11. Cut funding for community policing: Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn “I don’t know of a governor anywhere in the country who succeeded in turning his state’s economy around by actively facilitating the decline of his biggest city,” Flynn said. “This isn’t like: ‘Bad things are happening in Milwaukee and I can’t stop it.’ This is: ‘Can I put another stick in the eye of Milwaukee on another issue’”  … as punishment for Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett having run against him in the recall election. “Perhaps, you know, the leadership of this city should go to Madison and kiss a ring and bend our knees and say: ‘Yes, overlords, please don’t hurt us anymore. We’re so sorry.’ I mean, enough.”

12. ‘Right to work’

13. Ending paid sick leave, attacking guaranteed one-day weekends: In 2008, 69% of Milwaukee voters in a referendum approved a law requiring employers to offer paid sick leave to any worker … Three years later, Walker overruled the measure with legislation that banned municipalities from imposing sick leave mandates on private employers. Wisconsin law currently mandates at least 24 consecutive hours of rest in every seven consecutive days. A measure creates an exemption that would allow employees to “voluntarily choose” not to take their one-day weekend.

14. Drug screenings for recipients of public aid

15. ‘I can do the same across the world:’ “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.” 

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