Judge Barbara Kluka
Posted on 02/27/2015 11:41:59 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Milwaukee County officials say they don't plan another mass release of emails collected in the John Doe investigation into Gov. Scott Walker's aides and associates when he was county executive.
County attorney Paul Bargren says in a letter Wednesday to The Associated Press that more than 29 gigabytes of documents were released as ordered by a judge between August and December. The AP and other news organizations reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents during that time.....
(Excerpt) Read more at wxow.com ...
Bump...
Judge Barbara Kluka
His record on providing in-state tuition to illegal immigrants is also likely to come under scrutiny. In 2001, Walker, at the time a state assemblyman, voted for a budget bill that included a provision to grant in-state tuition costs at state colleges to undocumented immigrants who graduated from Wisconsin high schools, under specific residency circumstances. However, Walker had earlier voted to remove that provision from the budget; it was reintroduced during a conference of the state senate and assembly.
The provision was ultimately vetoed by Republican Gov. Scott McCallum. Walker himself repealed Wisconsin’s in-state tuition policy, approved in 2009, when he became governor in 2011.
Walker’s history of dealing with immigration issues has already drawn some attention. Last week, a National Review Online report pointed to his 2002 signing of a Milwaukee County resolution supporting “comprehensive immigration reform that will provide greater opportunity for undocumented working immigrants to obtain legal residency,” though Walker’s staff told the site this resolution was “stripped of references to amnesty before passage.”
Wisconsin’s economy and job numbers:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-closer-look-at-scott-walkers-record-on-jobs-1430688558
Walker requested that the WEDC remove all elected members.
Pre-dating Walker (under Doyle) this agency was having problems.
Then here, spun from another anti Walker paper - naturally they quote a lot of dems who are not happy about their clout being removed.
Open Records kerfuffle
[Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Walker have said they were part of the discussions over the changes but have not specified who pushed for which parts of the plan.
Thousands of pages of emails and other documents released under the open records law in recent weeks shed some light on the origins of the proposal. The batch of records revealing the contact with Rabe came from Vos’ office.
Previously released records showed Vos made the request to the Legislative Reference Bureau to rewrite the law on legislative privilege.....
Gallagher, the attorney for the Legislative Reference Bureau, performed an extensive review of legislative privilege in September 2014 — two months before the fall elections and four months before the legislative session started. In emails to a Vos aide, he said he did the work for continuing legal education credit.
“This office had nothing to do with the study that the LRB did,” Vos spokeswoman Kit Beyer said Wednesday.
MADISON — Assembly Speaker Robin Vos was the state lawmaker who drafted a proposal that would have gutted Wisconsin’s open records law and protected legislators from having to release documents currently available, according to documents released to The Associated Press on Thursday....
....”At the time of the email you reference, the concepts being discussed by Assembly Leadership were simple: Returning legislative powers ceded to the Executive Branch, and the idea that the Legislature should be able to set its own common sense policies on open records and retention of drafting files,” Beyer wrote. “The intention was to study the practices around the country and update our policies to catch up with advances in technology and to protect constituents.”
Walker spokeswoman Laurel Patrick has previously said that legislative leaders told the governor’s office they wanted to make changes in the open records law and Walker’s staff provided input. She said Walker intended to “encourage a deliberative process” to develop policy and legislation.
Patrick did not immediately return an email seeking comment on Thursday.
The Center for Media and Democracy is suing Walker’s office for drafting files surrounding his budget proposal to eliminate the Wisconsin Idea — the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement. Walker argues that the files are part of the deliberative process and should be kept private, an exemption not currently allowed under state law.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Idea
“The Wisconsin Idea is the policy developed in the American state of Wisconsin that fosters public universities’ contributions to the state: “to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing information and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities”. A second facet of the philosophy is the effort “to ensure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefiting the greatest number of people”. During the Progressive Era, proponents of the Wisconsin Idea saw the state as “the laboratory for democracy”, resulting in legislation that served as a model for other states and the federal government. - politics, education, media.
Figures don’t lie but liars can figure.
Re: Wisconsin economy and job growth being compared to surrounding states (prefer to use Democrat talking points).
Some facts that they don’t want to take into account:
Gov Walker continues to roll back state dept budgets (which has shrunk those jobs) ie DLM, Sec of State, etc; he’s cut Univ Wis budget/taken tenure out of the state constitution (which has shrunk those jobs).
Unemployment went from 8% to 4% - number of new employed lower because already higher than other states.
Bush likes to compare FL employment when he was governor - 1999 to 2007 BEFORE the bust.
The EPA, energy sector, Obamacare and other federal dictates and regulatory oversight has depressed the economy and slowed hiring.
Wisconsin’s pension plan is fully funded.
Wisconsin continues to lower property taxes.
Walker’s policies are good examples of how he intends to roll back government on the federal level and return many of these decisions to the local and state level.
Super PACs
Super PACs, officially known as “independent-expenditure only committees,” may not make contributions to candidate campaigns or parties, but may engage in unlimited political spending independently of the campaigns. Unlike traditional PACs, they can raise funds from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups without any legal limit on donation size.
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“WAUKESHA, Wisconsin — GOP presidential candidate Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker threw anti-conservative Brad Dayspring, who’s working for his Super PAC Unintimidated PAC, under the bus on Sean Hannity’s television program on Monday evening in an hour-long interview after announcing his White House run.
“Let me ask you about a hire of yours that has angered conservatives, it’s come up a lot in the news—Brent Bozell talks about Brad Dayspring as someone who besmirches the reputations of conservatives, that he’s paid to do the ugly work—do you pay attention to any of that, those criticisms?” Hannity asked Walker.
“Well, he doesn’t work for me, he works for the Super PACs out there and by ‘he doesn’t work for me’ I can’t tell any Super PACs anything,” Walker replied amid crosstalk.
Great bunch of links and information
Good links and info.
Wisconsin health care leaders say taking federal money for Medicaid expansion not dead yet
August 4, 2015
AP - MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin health care leaders say taking federal money to pay for expanding Medicaid coverage in the state is not dead yet, even though Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans who control the Legislature have repeatedly refused to accept the funding......”
http://www.startribune.com/state-health-care-leaders-say-medicaid-expansion-not-dead/320641032/
Good LINKS and information about Wisconsin and Scott Walker's tenure as governor.
Scott Walker Shows How Pro-Life Presidential Candidates Can Avoid the Media’s Abortion Trap
Politico Quotes Scott Walker Wildly Out Of Context To Invent Abortion Attack
“......In Wisconsin, Milwaukee became a sanctuary city in 2012, according to ICE. That was in Mr. Walker’s second year as governor — just after he survived a recall election.
Mr. Walker’s campaign said Wisconsin did try to cooperate on deportations and that the governor signed an agreement in 2011 to join Secure Communities, the Obama administration’s program to cull prisons and jails looking for illegal immigrants to deport.
Secure Communities, which the administration was trying to implement nationwide, helped Mr. Obama set deportation records in 2012. But immigrant rights groups put immense political pressure on the president, and he canceled the program in November. Mr. Obama now is trying to replace Secure Communities with a program that would deport far fewer illegal immigrants.”...
"Republican Party 2016 primary frontrunner Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told Breitbart News exclusively that if the invasion of illegal aliens that’s currently swarming across America’s southern border were coming in via America’s sea ports, the government would be sending in the Navy to stop it. Instead, the federal government—despite not having to at all—chooses, he says, to leave the U.S. border with Mexico wide open.
Walker said in an interview over Memorial Day Weekend:
Earlier this year I went out with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his invitation—I was thrilled to go with him not just up in a helicopter for the day, but we went down to the border and didn’t just see it from the air. To meet with Texas Public Safety, to meet with local officials, as well as with many of the fine people who are in U.S. Border Patrol down there—and to just to see the massive challenges, more so in meetings than they even showed me up in the air—they clearly, clearly showed to me in video and any number of reports that this is a matter of safety. This is a matter of national security. This is truly a matter national sovereignty, in that if we were having people penetrate our water-based ports throughout the Gulf [of Mexico] or either coast, we’d be taking swift action initially with the Coast Guard and eventually probably with the Navy. Yet, we have international criminal organizations seeking to penetrate our land-based borders to the south—the push for drugs, for firearms and increasingly for people from a trafficking standpoint—it’s just horrific we’re not taking more action to truly secure that border.
Walker discussed with Breitbart News how on his trip to the border, officials showed to him that the list of country of origin of illegal aliens shows people from nations with terrorism ties trying to get into the U.S. Walker said:
We were there with Public Safety and one of the things they pointed out was they shared with us the list from just the beginning of the year here in 2015 of all the countries of origin. Many are not from Mexico or Central America or even South America. There are many from other places around the world including many places in the world where obviously there’s some concerns about terrorist-related activity and some of that. That’s what I pointed out: You look at what people are coming across the border, there are any number of reasons out there. People say ‘oh we can’t secure the border.’ I disagree. I was just in Israel where they have something like 500 miles of fencing up and when they did that it dramatically lowered the number of terrorist-related attacks and they saw like a 90 percent reduction [in illegal immigration]. They’re a much, much, much smaller country than we are and we’re talking about a southern border that’s larger than that—but really only about four times larger than their entire country. It just shows me though that with investments in infrastructure, personnel and technology, there’s no reason why we can’t secure that border. When I suggested this before, one of the more cynical reporters from another national outlet suggested to me ‘well, governor, the number of crossings is down, what level do you find acceptable?’ I said back to this reporter, ‘well, you stand in line at TSA at the airport, to see that your bags are scanned to make sure there’s no explosives on the airplane, what level of success do you find to be successful?’
Walker also talked about his strong pro-American worker position on immigration—and how he plans to put Americans ahead of special interests and foreigners, if and when he’s elected president, when it comes to immigration. He said:
I just think it’s an important policy overall. I get why the political class is rumbling around out there but I’m just saying give priority to American working families and their wages and that we want to strengthen the American economy. Who can be against that? I’ve yet to find somebody who when talking about those terms that that’s not a logical thing and yet I’m surprised how many others are reluctant to share the same sentiment out there. For me, not only those like myself who were born here but even the people over the years who have come here legally, again my stance is our priority should be for those who are working families whether they were born here like me or have come here through the legal process—if you’re in America and here working the right way. It’s the number one priority when we talk about legal immigration. I think it’s a smart approach moving forward and I think it’s rational to look at in other ways and I think it’s one where Republicans have ignored talking about the impact on American workers and strengthening working families.
[HUGE snip]
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