As recounted in the NY Times editorial below, Walker tried to follow up his triumphant strut in Iowa's clown parade by making some tweaks to the University of Wisconsin's mission and budget. These poisonous changes did not escape public detection andf massive rebuke.
So the Koch Brothers' puppet-cum-cheesehead-state-scourge of the working man and woman is now walking back his attempt to recast the academically respected Wisconsin university system as a "trade school" while ripping $300 million from its budget. He mutters that the whole thing was sort of a typo. As e-mails from his office revealed, Walker speaks with forked tongue. He is exposed again as one more right-wing lying bastard attacking community-supported (i.e. government-funded) institutions and infrastructure for the sake of plutocratic ends glorified under the rubric of "conservative ideology". Idiotology is all it is for anyone in the 99% who buys this stuff as anything but one more way of keepin' the po' folks down.
Most people do recognize that the right's anti-tax, anti-government ideology is not an ideology at all but merely a strategy -- for government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. They recognize that the collateral damage of responding to inequality by further expanding the economic class gaps is to cripple any ability to maintain, much less upgrade, our physical, social, economic and intellectual infrastructure. Sequestration is the near-perfect mechanism for implementing this strategy, with the qualification that the non-libertarians on the right are desperate to figure out how to exempt the defense budget while continuing to cut poor children out of getting free lunches.
Feckers. Speak out against them at every opportunity. The GOP has become nothing but a drafting error of the Creator.
Howie
Gov. Walker’s ‘Drafting Error’
It was not enough for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin suddenly to
propose a destructive 13 percent cut in state
support for the University of Wisconsin’s widely respected system. His biennial
budget plan, released Tuesday, reached gratuitously into the university’s
hallowed 111-year-old mission statement to delete a bedrock principle: “Basic to
every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”
The budget — patently
tailored for the governor’s conservative campaign for the Republican
presidential nomination — inserted language that the university should be more
narrowly concerned with meeting “the state’s work force needs.”
Brazenly deleted as
well from the mission statement, which is nationally appreciated in education
circles as the Wisconsin Idea, were the far from controversial goals “to educate
people and improve the human condition” and “serve and stimulate society.” It
was as if a trade school agenda were substituted for the idea of a
university.
But Mr. Walker badly miscalculated — in the state at least, and perhaps
even with the national constituency he is furiously courting in campaign trips
and in his fund-raising. The citizens of Wisconsin, clearly more appreciative of
the state university than is their governor, erupted through social media and
news outlets, sending Mr. Walker into retreat a day later. His office attempted
the ridiculous excuse that the pernicious editing of the university’s mission
was simply “a drafting error” in the budget text and that the Wisconsin Idea
would be left intact after all. But a December email showed clear instructions
from the administration to make the deletions.
Mr. Walker came to national prominence four years ago with his attacks on
collective bargaining rights and attempts to curtail the benefits of state
workers. His new budget doubles down on his recent complaints that university
faculty and staff do not work hard enough, insisting that the 26-campus,
180,000-student system could absorb the $300 million state cut he
proposed.
Even fellow Republican legislative leaders quickly shied away from the
governor’s ideologically driven thrust at the university ethos. Even without the
ridiculous changes to the mission statement, the Legislature must firmly resist
Mr. Walker’s regressive budget, because it includes the university cut and a
vaguely detailed plan to transfer university control to a “quasi-governmental”
authority.
The budget also
offers virtually no significant increase in public school funding while
increasing voucher support for private and religious schools at taxpayers’
expense. It includes another shibboleth of the hard-right agenda — a requirement
for drug testing of those seeking a variety of public benefits.
All of that may be
red meat for conservative zealots in the caucus and on the presidential primary
circuit. Yet it is hard to see such a clumsy attack on education going far with
a general electorate concerned about their children’s chances in life. If
nothing else, Mr. Walker is sharpening the debate within the Republican Party
about whether it can win despite its own extremists.
