At NH debate, Walker in talking point overdrive

[Updated] This is what happened when the tapes upstairs in Walker's head get garbled and Wisconsin's polluter-in-chief - - including air and water, despite what he tells the NH forum audience  - - turns bon mots into word salad.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker discounted President Barack Obama's plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants, saying at a forum with other GOP candidates for president that it would blow a hole in the economy.  

"It would be like a buzzsaw to the nation's economy," he said at the Voters First Presidential Forum in Manchester, N.H. "States like mine and many of the other governors here would be devastated by that.  

"I'm an Eagle Scout. We were taught long ago that your campsite should be cleaner when you leave than when you find it, so I want to balance the sustainable environment with a sustainable economy. But the two have to go hand in hand. I want clean air, clean land, clean water, but I want an economy that my children and grandchildren some day can grow in as well, so the two have to go hand in hand."

For the record, Walker has been a disaster for the Wisconsin environment.

Show me where he has left the environment better than how he found it?

Does slashing the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources budget and laying off scientists so his "chamber of commerce" senior management appointees can continue their laissez-faire 'regulation' of renegade human septic waste spreaders, cow manure overflow runoffs, frac sand spills and wetland fillings sound like dedication to a "sustainable environment?"

Show us the proof.

What a crock.

Read all about Walker's real impact on the environment, and more, in a summary documentation of Walker's history, here:

*  Documents released by a Federal Court of Appeals in Chicago showed that Walker helped coordinate the donation of $700,000 from an iron mining company to a third-party, so-called independent group which he wanted to coordinate sympathetic messaging for his successful 2012 recall campaign and re-election. 

The iron mining company helped write a new iron mining law for Wisconsin that eased its ability to dig a massive open-pit iron mine in a water-rich range of hills in NW Wisconsin close to Lake Superior and very close to a Native American reservation where wild rice is grown on estuaries.

Walker had campaigned for the new mining bill and signed it into law. The mining plan has been suspended because the site contains even more water and wetlands than the company says it initially knew about, though a drop in iron ore prices, opposition from the nearby Ojibwa reservation, environmental and conservation-minded organizations were obstacles the mining plan could not overcome.

* One of Walker's very first actions as Governor spoke volumes about his approach to environmental protection. He got the Legislature to approve a special bill to suspend before completion an ongoing environmental review by the Department of Natural Resources so that one of his 2010 campaign donors - - a car dealer and developer - - could build a retail project for Bass Pro Shops, a destination fishing and outdoors retailer on a site that included a wetland close to Lambeau Field in Green Bay. 

Bass Pro Shops pulled out of the project when it became controversial, but once the wetland filling permission was granted by the Legislature and signed into law by Walker, Cabela's, another large outdoors merchandiser, built on the site.

* In the years that followed his inauguration, Walker installed what he called "a chamber-of-commerce mentality" atop the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, traditionally a science-based regulatory agency driven by citizen participation. Basically, Walker remade the DNR into something of a reconfigured Department of Commerce, of sorts, with a new business service division and pro-corporate attitude.

Through new laws, budgets and industry-friendly appointments, Walker cut the DNR staff, reduced citizen participation and policy oversight, and enabled relaxed agency pollution and reduced investigation and enforcement. The DNR is now selling 10,000 acres of public land and, with all state funds except for campaign and permit fees removed from parks operations in Walker's budget, the DNR may sell naming rights for the parks to corporate interests.

A summary posting, here.