The Week In Walker

By Jeff Simpson

With so much bad and crazy happening on a breakneck pace everyday, it is hard to keep up with it all.   Let's try and catch up with some of Scott Walker's recent hits.

1.  Get ready, coming smack dab in the middle of the state, will be lots of layoffs and changes at UW - Stevens Point!

 Kristen Hendrickson, the university’s chief financial officer, laid out three scenarios for UWSP's structural deficit that largely depend on enrollment numbers for this year.
If the university enrolls 8,000 students, the total deficit may sit at about $2.4 million.
If 7,500 students enroll, the total deficit may grow to $5.4 million.
If enrollment falls to 7,000, the total deficit may grow to $8 million.
The university’s academic division might need to make cuts ranging from $4 million to $6 million, eliminating as many as 60 to 70 full-time jobs, if enrollment falls to 7,000 students, Summers wrote in the Aug. 27 letter.

 2.  Small Government Scott Walker is taking people's homes.

Unless you know the right people, then Foxconn is the jackpot!

3.  While Walker's signature promise was to create 250,000 jobs (as his floor) and after 8 years still has not come close to that number.  In fact, Scott Walker has cost Wisconsin some 80,000 jobs.

The average from both models points to a Walker administration which cost Wisconsin 80,000 jobs. This loss was masked by national job growth. If Wisconsin had followed the same pattern relative to its neighbors as under previous administrations, jobs would have grown by an additional 33 percent — quite a difference. To put the shortfall in perspective, the 80,000-job loss is six times the 13,000 jobs promised from the Foxconn development in Racine.
It is hard to identify possible causes for Wisconsin’s jobs lag other than the administration’s policies. It is not as if the state is dependent on a single industry. Rather, the underlying cause seems to be the triumph of ideology over evidence as to what grows an economy. 

4.  Have to admire Badger Meters business sense, and be amazed at how cheaply Scott Walker can be bought.

Top executives of a company that was awarded $250,000 in state welfare have contributed nearly $26,000 to Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s campaigns.
Badger Meter, which makes flow measurement tools for water utilities and commercial and industrial businesses, plans to expand its Mount Pleasant operations in Racine County and create up to 40 jobs in the next three years. Walker’s economic development agency, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., said Thursday it will provide up to $250,000 in tax credits to train the new employees.
Overall, Badger Meter employees contributed $36,850 to legislative and statewide candidates between January 2010 and December 2017. All but $300 went to Republican candidates.
The top recipients of the contributions were Walker, $25,900, followed by Republican Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, $6,000, and GOP Rep. Dale Kooyenga, of Brookfield, $2,000.
The company’s top contributor to legislative and statewide candidates between January 2010 and December 2017 was its chief executive officer, Richard Meeusen, of Pewaukee, and his wife, Maribeth, $34,750. That’s 94 percent of the contributions from all employees of Badger Meter. Walker received $24,500 of those contributions from the Meeusens.

5.  Another way to get your hands on some easy Wi Taxpayer funds in Scott Walker's WI?  Abuse teenagers at Lincoln Hills. 

– For the second and third times, Gov. Scott Walker’s administration has given cash settlements to guards who it determined had used excessive force on juvenile inmates, state records show.
The payoffs — including one totaling $9,000 — were reached as the FBI continues a criminal investigation of Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year reported officials at the prison complex trained staff improperly, failed to preserve video evidence, didn't document serious incidents and often shirked their duty to report matters to parents, police and social service agencies.

 6.  In Election Season, Scott Walker will say absolutely anything to get elected.   Here is a clip in 2010 telling us how he would never cut education funding.

7.  Scott Walker is out with his 21st political ad already.  I guess he can not find one that people will believe.  However this one is very typical of Scott Walker.  He starts out complaining about attack ads, then starts attacking.

Tone deaf? Desperate? Dishonest?   We report, you decide. 

It stays with the theme he has been working for months.  That Scott Walker, the king of outside money, fears outside money.   
I guess that the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson and loony Uihlein are all above board WI residents, or maybe he just a hypocrite. 

Finally, as Bruce Murphy points out in his great piece at Urban Milwaukee, everything Walker does is for sale. 

Two of his biggest supporters have been the Koch Brothers, who have donated $4.8 million to Walker’s campaigns, and the state’s biggest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturer’s and Commerce, which has given $9.5 million to his campaigns.
Walker’s signature law, Act 10, which decimated public employee unions, was backed the Koch Brothers and WMC. The two groups also supported the Right to Work law, which makes it difficult to organize private unions and which Walker had promised unions supporting him in 2014 that he would never support. But he signed it into law in 2015. 

Readers of this humble blog know, that everything Scott Walker sells, he sells cheap!