MORE know-nothing Idiotology: Scott Walker boards GOP's anti-intellectual train

Okay, Scott Walker apparently felt upstaged by competing 2016 GOP hopefuls when he was caught in flat-footed silence as Paul and Christie pontificated in favor of spreading measles as a form of liberty for which the Founding Fathers (and of course Jesus) staked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

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’

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD  FEB. 6, 2015

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.