UW program cuts and Faculty layoffs prove Walker Budget Cuts growing problem!!!

The eventual decline of all things Wisconsin is accelerating, but will voters notice how fast in time for the midterm elections. The shortfall in road funding, state parks, water and air policy, and now the University of Wisconsin.

The pathetically easy answer for Scott Walker, requiring no thought process whatsoever, was to simply freeze tuition. Because as we all know, cost-of-living, advanced technology, competitive educator salaries, and maintaining aging infrastructure aren't real considerations...oh wait, until Foxconn burst on the scene.

And no one saw this coming?

UW-Stevens Point Provost: Program Cuts, Faculty Layoffs 'Unavoidable.' $4.5M Structural Deficit Caused By Declining Enrollment After Years Of State Budget Cuts.

Greg Summers, UW-Stevens Point provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs, said years of state budget cuts and tuition freezes have compounded the university's financial problems ... "We've had years of shifting of public funding away from universities and the resulting need to look more at tuition dollars to supplement budgets. Given the tuition freeze that we've been in for five years now, that's put a pinch on possible revenues. In the 1970s the university received about 50 percent of our budget from state sources. Today that number is down to about 13 percent."

According to numbers supplied by the university, the school has been hit with more than $9.6 million in net state budget cuts since the 2011-12 school year. In the 2015-16 school year, state cuts to UW-Stevens Point's general purpose revenue was more than $5.75 million with an additional $570,500 in cuts to segregated program funds. 

It's beyond frustrating to watch Scott Walker and the Republicans scramble to attract college educated Millennial's from out-of-state, after wildly slashing UW funding based on partisan attacks.

And no one saw this coming?

On banning High Velocity Weapons of Mass Murder.

First things first: I recently tweeted this about the 2nd Amendment.

With that in mind, there is no reasonable argument for a right to buy a high velocity weapon, and there's reasonable reason why we can't outlaw their sale.

Understanding why assault-like weapons should be banned came into focus with this editorial by a Florida radiologist who has seen assault weapon wounds that are pretty much impossible to repair. This should change your mind:

As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds,

In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments … victims who arrived at the hospital that day survived.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer,

One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than, and imparting more than three times the energy of, a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.

With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable.

One of my ER colleagues was waiting nervously for his own children outside the school. While the shooting was still in progress, the first responders were gathering up victims whenever they could and carrying them outside the building. Even as a physician trained in trauma situations, though, there was nothing he could do at the scene to help to save the victims who had been shot with an AR-15.

Most of them died on the spot, with no fighting chance at life. Can the answer really be to subject our school children to active shooter drills—to learn to hide under desks, turn off the lights, lock the door and be silent—instead of addressing the root cause of the problem and passing legislation to take AR-15-style weapons out of the hands of civilians?

As a radiologist, I have now seen high velocity AR-15 gunshot wounds firsthand, an experience that most radiologists in our country will never have. I pray that these are the last such wounds I have to see, and that AR-15-style weapons and high-capacity magazines are banned for use by civilians in the United States, once and for all.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) of 1994 included language which prohibited semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, and also large-capacity magazines with the ability to hold more than 10 rounds. The ban was allowed to expire after 10 years on September 13, 2004. The mass murders that followed the ban’s lapse make clear that it must be reinstated.

What is Ryan Thinking...?

I'm accumulating videos documenting the nationwide movement by students to end the mass shootings at schools and anywhere else. I'm going to start with Brian Strassburg's latest cartoon, taking aim at Paul Ryan's total lack of concern.

After Florida's Mass Shooting, High School Students Repulsed by Republican Reaction!!!

Maybe the mass shooting issue will finally focus the nations attention on just how inhumane the Republican Party has become, and how sold out it is to NRA business interests. Hell, what percentage of the economy is dependent on firearms manufacturing anyway?

One irony: Republicans who pushed that mindless "civics test" to graduate, who also didn't know ours schools already have detailed U.S. history courses, may be getting activist teenage blow-back from a very educated electorate. How about that! 

Porn vs Assault Weapons...Porn bigger problem: This is that epiphanic moment if there ever was one...Keep in mind this. Porn Viewing Stat: Florida Number 21, 127 page views per capita:

Less than a week after a shooter killed 17 people at a school in Florida, the state's House of Representatives voted not to discuss a ban on assault weapons after earlier declaring pornography a health risk, angering people on social media.

A high school students response to the "adults" in the Florida legislature?

A similar resulted happened right here in Madison:



Trump White House Considered Florida Shooting a Reprieve from Critics: Here's Chris Hayes with the ugly details and other repugnant Republican reactions:



Make Paul Ryan Go Away...Please: After plunging the nation into deeper debt with his dream tax cuts, he's not going to bother with trying to end mass school shootings with common sense, bi partisan gun control that polls see big support for:

Last October, Politico/Morning Consult found that 64 percent of Americans and 55 percent of gun owners believe gun laws should be stricter. Furthermore, 84 percent support universal background checks, 76 percent support a mandatory 3-day waiting period, and 72 percent support a ban on assault weapons.

House Speaker Paul Ryan called the shooting “horrific,” but said Congress shouldn’t do anything until it has “all the facts and data.” There’s just one problem with that: The GOP, at the behest of the National Rifle Association (NRA), is blocking scientists from producing the “facts and data” on gun violence.

Thanks to the Dickey Amendment — a 23-word rider attached to a spending bill in 1996 and enacted in 1997 — research on gun violence has been frozen for two decades. As a result, gun violence was the least-researched cause of death in the U.S. over the past decade, and the answers to even the most basic questions about gun violence prevention remain elusive.

Fox News' Shep Smith railed against the idiocy of the amendment.

“Forget your political arguments. Why can’t we come together as a society and say ‘No, we’re going to study this, we’re going to research this, we’re going to bring our best and brightest together and put them in a room and give them whatever they need to figure out why are our children killing each other more in the United States than anywhere else in the world?' We change the course of human events around the world. We put a man on the moon 50 years ago and we can’t figure out why only our children are running around in their schools killing each other. It doesn’t happen everywhere else. It happens here. Why can’t they put the best and the brightest together to research it, to figure it out, and help us stop it? We’re failing our children."

MSNBC's Nichole Wallace and Steve Schmidt called it like it is; a big GOP problem:

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace has had enough of Republicans feigning concern about gun violence and doing nothing ... students and parents are holding Republican politicians accountable for inaction ... Republicans are not just refusing to help, they are responsible for the bloodshed. And as a “non-practicing” Republican, Wallace said, she shares the “culpability of a party being held hostage by the NRA.”

“The NRA is a gun lobby out of step with the vast majority of its members that support more common-sense gun measures. Most gun owners are for things like gun locks and gun safes. Most gun owners are for background checks. Democrats who are for gun control are fine with doing more for the mentally ill, but Republicans who are for doing more for the mentally ill never, ever, ever, ever want to have gun control. When is the Republican Party going wake up and realize it has blood on its hands?”

Manufacturers answer to Walker's Job Training, Drug Testing, Minimum Hours Labor Scam? Automation Push!

There’s nothing wrong with automation. It’s inevitable. Which is why so many economists are kicking around the idea of a “basic income” for the possible under and unemployed labor force of the future. No one is sure what the tech and information economy will bring, or how many good paying jobs will be created, so a backup program like a “basic income” is getting some attention now. 

Which makes Scott Walker's plan; drug testing/minimum hourly requirement/job training such a blatantly cruel scam and business knows it.

Check out what's really going on behind the scenes and just how seriously business is taking Walker's "reforms:" 

A concerted effort to boost manufacturing productivity in Wisconsin is gaining momentum … The Transformational Productivity Initiative (TPI) consists of a diagnostic assessment and strategy implementation … to boost their productivity, in large part, because of ongoing labor pool issues.

Job Training, or Dropping People from Food Stamps and Health Care? It’s a way to dump Wisconsinites from safety net programs, saving money that Republicans can hand out to keep companies in our state, real "free market-like."

While we know the malarkey over the “skills gap” was a business con to import cheap foreign labor, it’s now morphing into an corporate image saving conversions to automation. Nice to know Walker’s effort to job train isn’t being taken seriously by big business in Wisconsin. So how do manufacturers see us, family supporting real human beings?

Kelly Armstrong, director of sector strategy development for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (said) “TPI is a long-term solution, and being more productive and efficient is part of the solution to the talent gap, the body gap and the skills gap,”

Randy Bertram, director of sustainability and operational excellence at the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership, said “There are workforce issues that aren’t going to change any time soon and this will at least partially offset a decline in workforce participation. Companies are making fairly significant investments in automation technology.” Productivity depends in part on the efficiency of workers, but a larger influence is technological advancement.

With Industry 4.0, also called the fourth industrial revolution, companies are utilizing sensors and “smart” machinery to make their manufacturing processes ever more efficient ... TPI is working with Wisconsin manufacturers to implement the groundbreaking productivity-boosting practices. 

Productivity Flat in Walker's Wisconsin, who knew: And the truth continues to dribble out:

“Productivity equals prosperity,” said Lee Swindall, vice president of sector strategy development with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). “But we’ve been literally flat in manufacturing productivity since 2004. I was flummoxed. We have a major productivity problem.”

Despite wage growth being almost nonexistent in Wisconsin, we're being told...

What’s more, the combination of rising real wages and declining productivity is a recipe for inflation.