Walker Puts Wisconsin In The Pink

In Wisconsin, deer hunting is a strong tradition that reaches almost religious levels for some people. Every fall, the woods in Wisconsin would fill with men and women dressed in blaze orange as they hope to bag the big one. It's the only time that Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, is filled with orange instead of green and gold.

But in recent years, the number of hunters - and the number of deer harvested - has been dropping. It could be because Scott Walker and the Republicans have jacked up the cost of hunting licenses. It could be because Walker's hand off approach to the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease isn't working. It could be because of the fact of dropping number of people, it's becoming even more dangerous to be out there.

Ah, but Walker and his buddies have just the solution to cure all our woes!

Walker privately and secretly signed a bill into law which would allow people the option of wearing hot pink instead of blaze orange. When these geniuses first came up with the idea, they tried to sell it as the way to get more women involved in hunting and boost the economy.

No, really:

The bill's authors, Reps. Nick Milroy, D-South Range, and Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, maintain that the measure will encourage more women to take up hunting, give hunters more clothing options and give apparel manufacturers a boost.

Yeah, because I lost count of all the women that have told me that they would love to go out in the woods, maybe get shot or catch a horrible disease, but they just didn't want to get caught in that tacky orange.

I guess it's easier for Walker and company to deal with these kinds of distractions rather than get to work on fixing the economy they've trashed, repairing the damage they've allowed to our environment or, y'know, getting around to creating those 250,000 jobs Walker promised us all those years ago.

Walkergate: Doe, A Deer, A Phony Deer Hunter

In 2010, to hear Scott Walker tell it, he was suddenly a lifelong avid deer hunter and outdoors man.

Shortly after getting elected, the charade stopped when he hired Cathy Stepp to be the head of the DNR, in order to make it more business friendly.  Thus far, Stepp's claim to fame is to open the door for pit mines and pollution and to put hit jobs out on  Bambi and Giggles the fawn.

Walker's disregard for deer hunting continued when he hired his deer czar. Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire, explained it pretty clearly (emphasis his):

Walker's already better than halfway to selling off all of Wisconsin's public lands to private pillage, but Dr. James Kroll, the guy Walker has put in charge of deer hunting, takes things to a whole 'nother level. (First hint that Wisconsinites are being sold out? Handing their deer hunting authority over to a guy from Texas.) Back in 2002, Joe Nick Patoski of Texas Monthly wrote a long piece about the battle over deer hunting regulations in that state, and Kroll obliged by doing a half-gainer off the deep end. You see, Kroll doesn't believe in public lands. Her believes that the rights of plutocracy extend even to the wild spaces, and is a big fan of the kind of ranches that Dick Cheney goes to so he can mistake his friend for a dove and shoot him in the face....

...Kroll, who has been the foremost proponent of deer ranching in Texas for more than thirty years, doesn't mind the controversy and certainly doesn't fade in the heat. People who call for more public lands are "cocktail conservationists," he says, who are really pining for socialism. He calls national parks "wildlife ghettos" and flatly accuses the government of gross mismanagement. He argues that his relatively tiny acreage, marked by eight-foot fences and posted signs warning off would-be poachers, is a better model for keeping what's natural natural while making money off the land...

As the gentle reader could have predicted, with all of Walker's mucking about - not to making hunting less affordable in the state's sinking economy - deer hunting numbers have been dropping like a stone.

Abe Sauer wrote a piece at The Awl which really catches Walker's whole problem with trying to present himself as a deer hunter:

But an entirely different strategy is to frame the cheeseheaded governor as a man of the outdoors, a true hunter—just like Sarah Palin.

On Monday, Walker tweeted a selfie. Wrapped in hunter orange, the governor complained that the deer must hate the cold as much as he does. Walker tweeted the selfie about the frigid, deer-less cold from his personal account as well. Even more boldly, Walker is selling himself as a seasoned hunter without even setting foot in a field or zipping up a shred of Boehner orange. Early in November, Walker traveled to Virginia to campaign on behalf of part-time Cialis model and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli. It was a doomed venture but Walker’s team did manage to sucker Politico to state as fact that Walker had cancelled his planned bow-hunt to campaign for Virginia’s Touch Of Grey® spokesman.

Unless it has disappeared, Walker has never tweeted from a hunt before. (A request to his office for a clarified accounting of Governor Walker’s hunting experience was not answered.) And as far as the Internet record is concerned, it seems there is a reason for that.

In the end, “experienced deer hunter” Scott Walker’s 2013 deer hunt appeared to last about as long as it takes to climb into a deer stand and tweet the view, tweet a selfie two hours later and then have spokesman Tom Evenson issue a statement to the Associated Press that Governor Walker had completed his 2013 hunt “without getting a deer.“2 Total 2013 hunting time, including bow season: about four hours. But then, maybe Walker is hoping he’ll get more than the nine-day season after his administration’s recent proposal to open an eight-month season that would add “about two-thirds of the acreage in the Wisconsin state park and trail system” for “hunting and trapping.”

In the recent release of the latest batch of the Walkergate emails, Walker's then secretary and scheduler, Dorothy Moore confirms that Walker wasn't much of a hunter then.

In the email in question, Moore is responding to Darlene Wink who was asking a favor for a friend of hers and Walker's, Chris Kujawa, to have Walker appear at a benefit for Thomas More High School, a private school in Milwaukee:

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't show us anything new.  It only confirms what we knew all along - Walker is a phony and will do and say whatever he thinks the people want to hear, even if he knows it to be a flat out lie.  Sadly, this characteristic of Walker's is not limited to deer hunting but extends to everything under the sun, including taxes, job creation and education.

Deer Hunting: Commoners Need Not Apply

Over the weekend, I got away for a couple of days and went up north.

While driving around Central Wisconsin, I noted that there were a lot of properties and homes for sale.  And by a lot, I mean that I hadn't seen that many since the housing bubble burst.

Many of the for sale signs promoted their positives, with the most common being "waterfront property."  Normally that's a big seller in Wisconsin, where people, at least those that don't blindly support Scott Walker, appreciate the chance to go fishing and swimming in our clear lakes or go canoeing and intertubing down our rivers.

By far, the saddest signs were the ones that boasted of being "banked-owned."

But there was one signed that spoke volumes:

I know those woods and it is a beautiful area. While it is privately owned, a lot of people do go in there to hunt and go fishing (that part of the river isn't all that far from a DNR fish hatchery and they supposedly keep the river well stocked.  It would be a perfect spot for a cabin, in my humble opinion.  

But sometime in the last month or so, since I was up that way last, they have decided to put the land up for sale.  And not for a cabin or for camping, but as hunting land.

And at $4000 an acre, that's a hefty bit of change.  Not many people can lay out $160,000 just to have a place to hunt.  And if you get a group of people to lay out that kind of cash, they'd either have to be pretty well off or there will be so many people in that area that the deer will be sure to stay clear of that spot.

The only way that this would make sense is if the buyer was planning on recouping his money by charging people, like we were warned about before the recall and like Walker's deer czar was promoting.

It is also worth noting that it only came up for sale after the recall election and after the deer czar's recommendations came out.

I wonder how the Walker supporters will feel when they can't afford to go hunting anymore.

Hunt, Fish, Pay Through The Nose

If Scott Walker somehow manages to buy, steal or borrow the recall election, I can't wait to see the exploding heads of all the hunters and fishers who supported him when they come to realize he's gonna screw them over when deer hunting and fishing become privatized.

Here's the story on the privatization of deer hunting:



And for the privatization for fishing, you can find that report here.

And don't forget that Scott Gunderson, the one that's all gung-ho already to privatize these sports, is so much a faithful Walker lackey that he'll even try to sweep the effluence down the well, and he is in the position where he could make it happen.

Oh, Deer! Walker's Assault On Another Wisconsin Tradition

I'd be the first to admit that I am not a big fan of deer hunting.  While it might be a necessity, in my humble opinion, it's at best a necessary evil.  Because of that, I try to avoid going up north during deer hunting season.  Unfortunately, that was not something I could avoid this year.

So when I came home, it was no surprise that the local paper had their annual article romanticizing deer hunting.

What I did find noteworthy was that, in an amazing bit of timing, I also found this press release in my inbox:

As 600,000 Wisconsin deer hunters head to the field for opening day, Representatives Brett Hulsey (D-Madison), Fred Clark (D-Baraboo), Terese Berceau (D-Madison), Kelda Helen Roys (D-Madison) and Louis Molepske Jr. (D-Stevens Point) called on Governor Walker in a letter today to cancel the contract of James Kroll as the state’s “deer czar”. They pointed to his lack of qualifications, including no Wisconsin experience and no background in scientific management.

“While we should always be open to fresh perspectives, no outside expert has the ability to come in and remake Wisconsin’s deer management program based on a few weeks in the field,” said Clark. “If we are serious about evaluating our deer management practices, we need to bring together in-state talent and resources that will allow us to make the best long-term decision.”

“He’s come from Texas where he worked on private farms, and doesn’t seem to know how
important our deer herd is in Wisconsin,” said Hulsey, a member of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and a lifelong hunter. “This is just another example of the governor hiring an unqualified crony who will further politicize our state government.”

Even prior to issuing his initial evaluation, Kroll has been openly critical of the DNR’s herd management practices, which were described by leading experts in 2006 as “the most comprehensive and transparent deer management program for comparable states that harvest white-tailed deer.”

Given that there is no deer management crisis, Mr. Kroll’s position is a waste of $125,000 in taxpayers’ money and needlessly politicizes wildlife management decisions made by DNR scientists and biologists, the representatives said.

“In these tough times, we need the governor to focus on jobs in our state, not on hiring someone to do the governor’s political bidding in yet another state department. This hire might hurt our deer hunting tradition and even our long term tourism outlook,” said Hulsey.

The representatives also wished good luck and to hunters across the state this weekend and throughout the season.

No one should be surprised that Scott Walker would try to foul up yet another Wisconsin tradition, like he has done with collective bargaining and clean government.

Just like his deer czar, Walker is not from Wisconsin. He does not understand, much less care, about the values that we hold dear and will do anything to preserve. The only thing Walker cares about it pandering to those who bought his office for him and are paying tens of millions of dollars to keep their puppet in the governor's chair.

Maybe that's why I saw more than a few orange clad people signing petitions this weekend. There's not many demographics that Walker has been able to completely alienate already.