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Get Ready for Scott Walker… and the Ruthless Politics of Walkerism
The Nation ^ | July 29, 2015 | John Nichols

Posted on 07/29/2015 5:01:31 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife

Scott Kevin Walker, fresh from a free-spending yet folksy campaign in which he carried his lunch in a brown paper bag and promised to create 250,000 jobs, delivered his first inaugural address as governor of Wisconsin on January 3, 2011. “I stand before you not as the governor of one party or another, or the governor of one part of the state or another,” he declared. “Today, I stand before you as the governor for all of the people in the state of Wisconsin.”

Days later, Walker traveled from Madison, the state capital, to Beloit, a working-class town battered by plant closings. But he wasn’t reaching out to laid-off workers or confirming his commitment to a city that hadn’t voted for him. He was meeting with Diane Hendricks, the billionaire who would become his most generous campaign donor. A political compatriot of the Koch brothers, Hendricks had a question for him: “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state, and work on these unions, and become a right-to-work [state]?” This was an explicitly political question about destroying unions, which generally back Democrats, as part of a strategy to turn the swing state of Wisconsin into a Republican bastion. Walker didn’t blink. “Yes…we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget-adjustment bill,” the new governor confided. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-employee unions, because you use divide-and-conquer….”

Although this preacher’s son has developed a reputation for peddling many versions of the truth, Scott Walker never lies to billionaires who write campaign checks. Within weeks, he launched an assault on public-sector unions that provoked mass demonstrations and eventually led more than 900,000 Wisconsinites to petition for his removal. That battle, culminating with his victory in a recall election, helped to propel Walker onto the national stage as a conquering hero for Republicans, who have made him a front-runner for their party’s 2016 presidential nomination. But it also exposed the unblinking hypocrisy of Walker, the most politically savvy and comfortably cynical contender for the presidency since Richard Nixon.

When a video of the meeting with Hendricks surfaced just before the 2012 recall election, Walker knew he was in trouble. His answer was to deny everything, with the aw-shucks smile and knowing wink of a man who understands that in a new media age, it is possible to surf through a few days of bad publicity on a wave of echo-chamber spin and overwhelming campaign expenditures. He wasn’t talking about dividing and conquering Wisconsin for political purposes, Walker said; he was explaining (to a billionaire campaign donor) how to reduce the influence of “a handful of special interests.” As for enacting the anti-labor legislation he had promised Hendricks, Walker declared: “It’s not going to get to my desk. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure it isn’t there.”

Yet after he won the recall and was reelected in 2014, Walker signed a sweeping right-to-work law as an all-but-announced candidate for the 2016 GOP nod. He made no effort to argue that the circumstances had changed or that his views had evolved: His office simply announced that the governor was a longtime supporter of right-to-work measures, while Walker declared that signing the anti-union law sent “a powerful message across the country and across the world.”

Walker has kept his promise to Hendricks: He has divided and conquered. In a little over four years as governor, he has obliterated moderate Republicans and mainstream conservatism in a state where both once flourished. In their place has evolved a win-at-any-cost new politics built around Walker, who has ripped up election laws, governance, and personal relationships so thoroughly that Wisconsin’s largest newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, calls him “the most divisive Wisconsin politician in living memory”—in a state that was represented by Joe McCarthy in the Senate as recently as 1957. Walker has not turned Wisconsin “completely red,” but he has conquered foes in both parties and remade the political infrastructure to the point that he can now boast to compromise-averse Republicans: “If our reforms can work in a blue state like Wisconsin, they can work anywhere in America.” But which reforms? The changes that Walker trumpets on the campaign trail—assaults on public employees, public education, public services, and unions; the rejection of federal mandates; and the remaking of economic-development programs and tax schemes to distribute wealth upward—haven’t worked any better than the failed austerity schemes in Europe. Wisconsin trails far behind neighboring states like Minnesota and the rest of the nation when it comes to job creation and economic vitality. However, the “reforms” that matter most to Walker—those that enhance his personal power and electability—have been successful enough to make him a serious contender for the Republican nomination.

National polls as well as surveys from Iowa, the first caucus state, suggest that many sincere conservatives are excited by Walker, who presents himself as more reliably right-wing than establishment favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and more electable than right-wing heartthrobs like Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz. Yet Representative Gwen Moore, a Milwaukee Democrat who beat Walker in a legislative race 25 years ago and eventually served in the state legislature with him, has a warning for wide-eyed Republican stalwarts: “Don’t trust him. He will stab you in the back.” Walker will “move to the left or the right…depending on who is bankrolling him,” she argues. There is plenty of evidence for this on issues as seemingly difficult to straddle as abortion rights, marriage equality, immigration policy, and Donald Trump trolling the 2016 campaign. But there’s more to this governor than the standard political practice of talking out of both sides of one’s mouth—or even following the dictates of one’s donors.

No one should imagine that a President Walker would appoint moderate Supreme Court justices, build bipartisan coalitions, or govern in any way that might offend GOP Super-PAC contributors. There is nothing bold or innovative about Walker, nothing unpredictable or (despite the title of his comically self-serving autobiography) unintimidated. He works methodically, checking every box necessary to secure and engage the party base. Yet across a quarter-century as a legislator, chief executive of Wisconsin’s largest county, and governor, he has shown little interest in expanding that base or “spreading the gospel” beyond true believers, and he relishes every opportunity to recount how angry he makes “the left.”

The way to understand this governor begins with the recognition that, while he has always embraced Republicanism and conservatism, his primary focus is Walkerism—the advancement of Scott Walker. Don’t look for, say, a libertarian streak in this guy, or the old right’s dubiousness about military adventurism. Walker talks a good anti-government game, but he’s been on the government payroll for 22 of his 47 years. Downsizing government isn’t really his thing; rather, he has a penchant for using it to reward friends, punish enemies, and, above all, promote his political career. In this, suggests former White House counsel and Watergate conspirator John Dean, Walker is “a double high authoritarian governor, a conservative without conscience.” That makes the boyishly affable Walker less comparable to the Republican president he claims to revere, Ronald Reagan, and much more comparable to a Republican president he never mentions. In fact, Dean began arguing several years ago, Walker is “more Nixonian than even Richard Nixon himself (the authoritarian leader with whom I was, and am, so very familiar).”

Dean chooses his words in a careful, lawyerly fashion: He says not that Walker is like Nixon, but rather that he is “more Nixonian” than Nixon. The passion for politics may be similarly intense, but Nixon brought a seriousness and precision to the work of governing that Walker has never displayed. The determination to use power for political advantage may be the same, but Walker is far more focused than the 37th president ever was on making structural changes that lock in those advantages—for himself and for a party remade in his image. It’s not that Nixon wouldn’t have gone as far as Walker has gone—and is prepared to go—to do so. Instead, it’s that Walker is living in an era when Supreme Court rulings have cleared the way for ­multibillion-dollar campaigns and unaccountable “dark money” manipulations; an era when the old media have entered a death spiral and the new media have steered partisans into hardened information silos, making it difficult to challenge their fixed opinions; an era when both major parties attack government, even as they govern in the interests of crony capitalism.

Walker embraces the new money with gusto, breaking Wisconsin fundraising records; appearing at the Koch brothers’ summits; jetting to Las Vegas to woo Sheldon Adelson; and cashing almost $500,000 in checks from the late Bob Perry, funder of the “Swift Boat” assault on John Kerry in 2004.

Walker is also a detail-oriented tactician who is always, in all but name, his own campaign manager. Blur the distinctions between Karl Rove and George W. Bush, or James Carville and Bill Clinton, and you get Scott Walker, the strategist as candidate. His 2016 campaign is a role for which Walker has trained since he was posting handmade Reagan signs at age 12. As a College Republican, Walker ran for election as student-council president at Milwaukee’s Marquette University, losing a dirty-tricks-marred campaign that saw the student newspaper declare him “unfit” for the office. But high-school and college campaigns were just early way stations in a career that has seen Walker wage more than two dozen primary and general-election campaigns in 25 years— always with an eye toward the next-highest office.

These days, Walker downplays his obsession with campaigning, claiming an interest in “service” rather than politics and assuring the state’s voters that “I had no master plan.” But a veteran Republican who has known Walker for decades and still works with him scoffs at that line, asserting that “Scott had this all worked out by the time he was 20. Politics is all he ever wanted to do.” Indeed, Walker was so determined to get into the fray that he quit college 34 credits short of a degree in 1990. He now claims that he did so because he had landed a “quasi” full-time job as a Red Cross fundraiser—but within weeks of quitting Marquette, Walker was gathering signatures to challenge Gwen Moore for a seat in the state legislature. He knocked on 13,000 doors in Moore’s Milwaukee district, developing targeted literature and advertising and forming partnerships that would remain in place throughout his gubernatorial runs. After losing to Moore, Walker hopped over to a more conservative suburban district and won election in 1993. He was just 25, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called him “an active Republican insider.”

Walker likes to present himself as mission-driven (“I really think there’s a reason why God put all these political thoughts in my head”), yet his approach to public service has always been robotically focused on the next campaign—as opposed to a grand vision. As a new legislator, he joined the right-wing, corporate-dominated American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), becoming a reliable champion of its “model legislation” for prison expansion, privatization, and union-busting. Walker remains so closely aligned with the group—he gave the keynote address at its annual meeting this summer—that the legislative tally in his campaign announcement (“[We] passed lawsuit reform and regulatory reform…. We enacted the Castle Doctrine [a homeowners’ version of ‘stand your ground’] and concealed carry…and we now require a photo ID to vote”) sounds like a list of ALEC’s greatest hits.

Walker’s relationship with ALEC illustrates his approach to governing: He likes to download and follow templates that are vetted by powerful campaign donors and lobbyists. When the conservative media started to question his foreign-policy credentials (especially after he answered a question about terrorist threats by declaring, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world”), Walker scrambled to embrace the fiercely hawkish agenda of former vice president Dick Cheney. He now gets kudos from The Weekly Standard and National Review.

Walker is a master at rewriting his own narrative. Fifteen years younger than Jeb Bush, Walker has always been adept at social media and at tapping the talk-radio and Fox News bases. The governor knows that the old media are dying, that newspapers and broadcast outlets are downsizing their political coverage, and that the reporters and editors who remain are so frightened about enraging their aging audience that they often pull their punches. Walker regularly refuses to answer questions—and gets away with it. When pressed, he simply creates a new story line: For example, when he took a beating during the 2012 campaign for falling dramatically short on his promise to create 250,000 jobs, Walker produced a set of absurdly favorable figures that he declared to be “the final job numbers.” They weren’t, and the fact-checking site PolitiFact rated the stunt as a “pants-on-fire” lie—but not before much of the state’s media had uncritically trumpeted his claim.

Of the almost 150 fact-checks on Walker’s assertions by PolitiFact, nearly half—49 percent—have been rated “false,” “mostly false,” or “pants-on-fire” lies. Even when his pants are on fire, Walker doesn’t blink. He merely opines that he is “the most scrutinized politician in America” and claims absolution. Then he does another round of right-wing talk-radio interviews; floods reporters and the public with favorable e-mails, Facebook posts, and tweets; and airs another salvo of television ads.

When several of Walker’s top aides were convicted of criminal misconduct after an investigation revealed that they’d been engaged in illegal campaigning using a wireless routing system set up just a few feet from Walker’s desk in his days as the Milwaukee County executive (an office he held from 2002 to ’10), the tech-savvy micromanager insisted that he knew nothing about it. “Walker’s amorality is conspicuous,” John Dean says. “It is found in his history of ethics violations and the record of his lying. He’s slick: fast-talking, confident, and dishonest.”

The key word here is “confident.” Walker understands the media and modern campaigning better than most reporters and strategists, and far better than most candidates. With his base ensconced firmly in its right-wing communications silos, and with limitless campaign money to address wavering swing voters, Walker has weathered every political storm in Wisconsin.

Now he’s betting that he can weather them as a presidential candidate. But that won’t be easy: National media outlets have already noted his striking inconsistency on issues like abortion rights and immigration. His opposition, particularly the incendiary Trump and the permanent Bush campaign, will hardly roll over as Wisconsin Republicans have. And, of course, Walker doesn’t dominate the GOP’s national political process the way he has in his home state through most of his gubernatorial tenure. That’s important because, at the heart of his success—at the heart of Walkerism—is the recognition that structure matters more than policy. If you write the rules in your favor, there’s no need for compromise or cooperation; a governor—or a president—can do as he chooses, even if his policies are unappealing and dysfunctional.

When Walker announced his presidential bid, his biggest applause line recalled the mangling of Wisconsin’s historically open and easy voting procedures. Since 2011, he has signed legislation requiring state-sanctioned photo ID for voters, as well as limiting early voting and changing election dates. He has also gutted the power of the elected state treasurer and secretary of state to provide even minimal checks and balances against him. Walker and his allies have gerrymandered the legislature so thoroughly that beating GOP candidates is virtually impossible. In 2012, President Obama won re-election handily in Wisconsin, Democrat Tammy Baldwin was elected to the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the State Assembly garnered 174,000 more votes than Republicans—yet the GOP retained a whopping 60-39 majority in the state chamber.

Walker’s allies have also poured money into election campaigns for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where a conservative majority has steadily upheld the governor’s most controversial moves—including those weakening the political hand of the state’s once-powerful labor unions. Chief Justice Shirley ­Abrahamson, a stickler for judicial independence, refused to dance to Walker’s tune, so his legislative allies crafted a constitutional amendment rewriting the rules for choosing the chief justice; his corporate allies funded a campaign to enact it; and ­Abrahamson was removed from her powerful office in April. Two months later, when the court shut down an inquiry into alleged wrongdoing during the governor’s recall election—and, in so doing, effectively trashed the state’s remaining campaign-finance laws—Justice Abrahamson warned that the decision would usher in an era of “anything goes” politics. That was just fine by Walker, who immediately moved to shut down the state agency that enforced election and ethics rules.

This is the record that Scott Walker will not discuss on the 2016 campaign trail, where he is positioning himself as the party’s most palatable conservative. And, of course, he’s still a long way from becoming the Republican nominee: He has stumbled some and will stumble even more. But Walker is the most disciplined and determined contender for the nomination. His lovingly nurtured donor network guarantees that he will enjoy virtually unlimited funding, and he has more high-stakes political experience than any contender who is not named Bush or Clinton. He is ahead in Iowa, and Rush Limbaugh has advised the faithful that “Scott Walker is the blueprint for the Republican Party if they are serious about beating the left.” Like Limbaugh, Walker sees politics as an unbridled, take-no-prisoners competition for sheer power.

Scott Walker has spent a lifetime preparing for this presidential campaign, and everything about his record says that he will do whatever it takes to win. If he were to secure the nomination and win the presidency—and arrive in Washington with a GOP-controlled Congress—he would no longer be restructuring the politics of a medium-size state to his advantage; he would be restructuring the federal government and the nation’s future. The prospect excites Limbaugh, just as it terrifies the Wisconsinites who have battled Walker the longest and hardest. If this man is elected president, we will be done with elections as we know them. We will enter a new age of winner-take-all politics, where ruthlessly ambitious tacticians assemble billionaire donors, cultivate an echo-chamber media, shove aside idealists, reimagine parties as reflections of themselves, and remake government as a vessel to be filled by the highest bidder. Perhaps we’ve already passed the tipping point, and Scott Walker’s candidacy simply confirms the crisis he exemplifies. Or perhaps it’s the fight against Walkerism that will finally awaken us.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections; US: Wisconsin
KEYWORDS: 2016; 2016election; conservatism; economy; election2016; homosupset; johnnichols; ronaldreagan; scottwalker; thenation; walker; walkerism; wisconsin
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To: John O

I want Walker to dismiss the repugnant Brad Dayspring, who stole the Ms. election for the worthless drone Thad Cochran before I will even consider WAlker.


21 posted on 07/29/2015 5:56:06 AM PDT by alstewartfan (If I should live to be seven I might forget Stephanie. Al Stewart)
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To: hoosiermama

I didn’t need a lefty to tell me Walker is a nothing burger. :-)


22 posted on 07/29/2015 6:12:56 AM PDT by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose o f a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped.)
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To: Reeses; All

Mother Jones:

“Scott Walker is the worst candidate for the environment”

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/scott-walker-environment-climate-change-2016

Scott Walker is killing it with Republicans. The Wisconsin governor is one of his party’s rising stars—thanks to his ongoing and largely successful war against his state’s labor unions, a fight that culminated Monday with the signing of a controversial “right-to-work” bill.

Now (for the moment, anyway), he’s a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple weeks ago, he polled a close second to three-time winner Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by a significant margin.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that none of the prospective GOP presidential candidates are exactly champions of the environment. Probably the least bad is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who at least acknowledges that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Walker just might be the worst. He hasn’t said much about the science of global warming. (In the video above, you can watch him tell a little kid that his solution to the problem will center on keeping campsites clean, or something.) But his track record of actively undermining pro-environment programs and policies while supporting the fossil fuel industry is arguably lengthier and more substantive than that of his likely rivals.

“He really has gone after every single piece of environmental protection: Land, air, water—he’s left no stone unturned,” said Kerry Schumann, executive director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters. “It’s hard to imagine anyone has done worse.”

Here’s a rundown of Walker’s inglorious history of anti-environmentalism.

Attacking Obama’s climate agenda: Walker is a key figure in the GOP’s battle against President Barack Obama’s flagship climate policy—the proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the nation’s electricity sector 30 percent by 2030. The rules will likely require states to retrofit or shutter some of their coal-fired power plants. That could be a big deal in Wisconsin, which gets 62 percent of its power from coal.

Walker “has gone after every single piece of environmental protection,” says Kerry Schumann of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters. “It’s hard to imagine anyone has done worse.”

In a letter to the EPA in December, Walker said the plan would be “a blow to Wisconsin residents and business owners.” He cited an analysis from his state’s Public Service Commission that predicted household electric bills would skyrocket. They won’t, necessarily, since the state has a lot of options—including boosting renewables and energy efficiency—that it could use to meet its EPA carbon target without jeopardizing the power grid. But rather than preparing for the new rules, Walker seems bent on stonewalling them. In January he announced that his new attorney general was already preparing a lawsuit against the EPA, a move that was lauded by the Wisconsin director of the Koch Brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity. Walker has also signed a pledge, devised by Americans for Prosperity, that he will oppose any legislation relating to climate change—presumably a cap-and-trade plan or a carbon tax—that would result in a “net increase in government revenue.”

Indeed, Walker has close ties to Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who made a fortune in fossil fuels and who for years poured money into groups that cast doubt on the science of climate change. They own paper factories and a network of gasoline supply terminals in Wisconsin, and they have an interest in the state’s trove of “frac sand” (more on that below). Koch Industries gave $43,000 to Walker’s 2010 election campaign, and just after he took office, the Kochs doubled their lobbying force in Madison. In 2011 and 2012, David Koch and Americans for Prosperity spent $11 million backing Walker’s agenda and his successful effort to avoid being recalled.

Turning off clean energy: As much as he apparently supports fossil fuel development, Walker has taken steps to put the brakes on clean energy. Last month, he released a budget proposal that would drain $8.1 million from a leading renewable energy research center in the state. That same budget, however, would pump $250,000 into a study on the potential health impacts of wind turbines. (Wind energy opponents have long suggested that inaudible sound waves from turbines can cause insomnia, anxiety, and other disorders, although independent research has repeatedly found these claims are more connected to NIMBYism than legitimate medical concerns.) Walker’s budget would also cut $4 million in state subsidies for municipal recycling programs. That, at least, is an improvement over his first budget as governor, which proposed to eliminate recycling subsidies altogether.

Master image of Walker: Andy Manis/AP

Budgets aren’t the only avenue for these attacks: In 2011 Walker introduced legislation backed by the Wisconsin Realtors Association to restrict where wind turbines could built. (That bill was ultimately killed by the Legislature.) And the state’s Public Service Commission—which oversees the electric grid and is comprised mainly of Walker appointees—recently launched a campaign to redesign power companies’ rates in a way that solar companies say is meant to kneecap their competitive edge. The commission wants to impose a high fixed charge on monthly bills that homeowners would have to pay even if they purchase their own solar panels.

There is, however, one alternative energy source that Walker suddenly seems willing to support. Pandering to corn farmers in Iowa over the weekend, he flip-flopped his stance on biofuels—as governor he was opposed to a federal ethanol mandate, but now, as a likely candidate, he’s in favor of it. Backing ethanol may help Walker win support from Iowa caucus-goers, but the climate benefits of biofuels are very much in doubt.

Open to open-pit mining: In 2010, a mining company called Gogebic Taconite LLC began to push hard to establish a large open-pit iron ore mine in the state. Environmentalists vehemently opposed the project, warning that it could damage fragile wetlands and contaminate local air and water with toxic chemicals. But Walker supported it. (In 2012, the company gave $700,000 to the pro-Walker Wisconsin Club for Growth.) In 2013, Walker succeeded in pushing through a bill to relax environmental standards for iron mines that paved the way for the project to be approved once it was reviewed by federal regulators.

Walker’s pick to head the state’s environment agency was “like putting Lindsay Lohan in charge of a rehab center,” one lawmaker said.

Walker also reportedly cultivated an industry-friendly atmosphere at the state’s Department of Natural Resources, the agency charged with enforcing environmental standards. One Democratic state representative said Walker’s pick to head the DNR, a former Republican state senator who was a vocal critic of environmental regulations, was “like putting Lindsay Lohan in charge of a rehab center.” One of the Walker DNR’s first moves was to delay phosphorus pollution standards that were opposed by a Koch-owned paper factory.

In the case of the iron mine, it was all for naught: Last month the mining company announced it was putting the project on indefinite hold, blaming “cost-prohibitive” federal regulations.

A blind eye to fracking sand: Wisconsin doesn’t have much in the way of shale gas, but it still plays a vital role in the fracking boom. The state is home to a major supply of “frac sand,” a superhard, chemically inert type of silica that props open cracks in underground rock formations during the fracking process. Since 2010, the number of sand mines in Wisconsin has grown more than tenfold, despite widespread complaints that the operations are turning idyllic rural communities into industrial wastelands and that the type of dust produced by the mines is linked to a wide range of serious respiratory health hazards. Walker has been a vocal proponent of the industry, touting it as a source of jobs and investment in an otherwise lackluster economy.

Here again, Walker’s weakened DNR is an issue. In 2013, the state’s independent, nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated that at least 10 full-time DNR employees would be necessary to ensure proper oversight of the frac sand industry. But the report noted that the agency had chosen to hire just two.

“It’s really going, to a large extent, unregulated,” said Tom Thoresen, a veteran DNR conservation officer who retired before Walker became governor but still has friends in the agency. (Thoresen currently sits on the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters board.)

Indeed, citations for various environmental infractions from the DNR fell 28 percent under Walker compared to the previous administration, according to the Journal-Sentinel.

“The messaging,” added Thoresen, “is to be business-friendly, don’t enforce.”


23 posted on 07/29/2015 6:17:02 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: hoosiermama

“Hit”. Walker is not to be trusted.


24 posted on 07/29/2015 6:17:31 AM PDT by conservativejoy (We Can Elect Ted Cruz! Pray Hard, Work Hard, Trust God!)
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To: Georgia Girl 2
I didn’t need a lefty to tell me Walker is a nothing burger. :-)

Profound addition to the discussion :-)

25 posted on 07/29/2015 6:19:24 AM PDT by johniegrad
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Would that it were all so.


26 posted on 07/29/2015 6:19:36 AM PDT by Mr. Lucky
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To: TomGuy

These socialists really get animated when you go after their entrenched academic power base:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/politics/unions-subdued-scott-walker-turns-to-tenure-at-wisconsin-colleges.html?_r=0

“CHICAGO — Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who began building a national profile four years ago by sharply cutting collective bargaining rights for most government workers, has turned his sights to a different element of the public sector: state universities.

As Mr. Walker takes steps toward announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, he and leaders in Wisconsin’s Republican-held Legislature have called for changes that would give a board largely picked by the governor far more control over tenure and curriculum in the University of Wisconsin System.

Critics said the proposal, which is championed by Republicans in the Legislature, would burnish Mr. Walker’s conservative credentials as he is scrutinized by likely primary voters.

As a new and unknown governor in 2011, Mr. Walker quickly drew national attention by announcing legislation to limit collective bargaining rights for most public-sector unions and require workers to pay more for their health care and pensions.

He followed that battle — which included surviving a recall effort — by signing other measures that attracted notice from conservatives nationally: new limits on early voting, the expansion of school vouchers and, this year, legislation barring unions from requiring employees in private workplaces to pay the equivalent of union dues.

Republicans say the new proposal will give university leaders more autonomy and encourage savings and efficiency at a moment when the state is aiming to cut spending to balance its budget. But the plan has caused professors to express alarm............”


27 posted on 07/29/2015 6:20:01 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Hmmmmm? Sounds positive to me !


28 posted on 07/29/2015 6:20:38 AM PDT by hoosiermama (Obam5a: "Born in Kenya" Lying now or then or now?)
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To: hoosiermama

He knows where to hit them and make it hurt.


29 posted on 07/29/2015 6:21:28 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Reeses
if he inspires the left to go bonkers in public again, and they will.

FWIW, the professional Gibsmedats and Dindu Nuffins in Cleveland are already promising to go bonkers in public during the Republican National Convention next year.

30 posted on 07/29/2015 6:23:37 AM PDT by NorthMountain ("The time has come", the Walrus said, "to talk of many things")
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

This Nichols guy sounds like a real scumbag.


31 posted on 07/29/2015 6:24:04 AM PDT by KC_Conspirator
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To: alstewartfan

Dayspring works for a PAC that is backing Walker. Walker cannot exert influence on his employment with the PAC.


32 posted on 07/29/2015 6:24:25 AM PDT by sitetest (If Roe is not overturned, no unborn child will ever be protected in law.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Another hit piece.


33 posted on 07/29/2015 6:27:25 AM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: <1/1,000,000th%

Another look at who they fear because he just keeps rolling over them.


34 posted on 07/29/2015 6:29:12 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Senator_Blutarski

Exactly. If anyone was not preparing for an eventual White House run, it was Scott Walker. As someone who dropped out of college to work, he’s more of a grinder who’s earned his way their through hard and smart work. People who spend a lifetime running for the presidency do the ivy league, butt kissing, inside glad handing in elite circles. I don’t see that in Walker in any stretch. He’s more of the Giuliani type who simply is a smart administrator who has risen to the top by achievement.


35 posted on 07/29/2015 6:32:20 AM PDT by ilgipper
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To: huldah1776
" If Walker could “divide and conquer” the cancerous tumor of the federal employee union, especially at the VA, I would vote for him."

Amen, sister.
36 posted on 07/29/2015 6:32:55 AM PDT by StAntKnee (Add your own danged sarc tag)
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To: Patton@Bastogne

Not a Walker fan, eh?


37 posted on 07/29/2015 6:40:31 AM PDT by GSWarrior (Click HERE to skip this tag line.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

I’m OK with a 70% cut in the annual operating budget. I kinda doubt that Walker can cut 7%. But if he does, I’ll be very pleased.


38 posted on 07/29/2015 6:41:21 AM PDT by St_Thomas_Aquinas ( Isaiah 22:22, Matthew 16:19, Revelation 3:7)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

In the coming year, EVERY leader of the Right can expect to be featured in countless political hit pieces written by every variety of sub-literate Leftist political hack.


39 posted on 07/29/2015 6:44:33 AM PDT by Jack Hammer
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
st. If this man is elected president, we will be done with elections as we know them.

LMAO, friggin drama queen.

40 posted on 07/29/2015 6:53:42 AM PDT by Impy (They pull a knife, you pull a gun. That's the CHICAGO WAY, and that's how you beat the rats!)
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