Time For Truth-Telling; GOP, Walker Love Government Power, Perks

Ideological conservatives like Scott Walker and his Legislature lieutenants claim they live by a consistent objection to Big Guvmint and taxpayer spending.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Walker can't get enough of power and public dollars, especially when donors and cronies are involved, or when there is an opportunity to use state power to stick it to opponents:

*  The Walkerites have repeatedly turned over bill-drafting and other legislative processes to GTAC and its massive open-pit mine planned for the pristine Bad River watershed in Northwest Wisconsin.

Documents showed that pro-mining interests have been huge GOP donors. To accommodate them, GOP legislators first walled out the Bad River band, Democrats, environmentalists and anti-mining advocates from the drafting and honest-hearing processes, then moved to wall off 4,000 forested acres near the proposed mine site from all public access. Call it a trend and a metaphor that only a big government hugger could love.

*  Walker's transportation department is delivering another $1.7 billion of taxpayer money so road-builders can wall off the vibrant, walkable Story Hill neighborhood with an elevated, eight-lane Interstate highway expansion. Road-builders were a key Walker campaign piggy-bank.

*  Walker killed the Amtrak passenger train extension to Madison, using government power to cut off the bluest, most-Democratic area in the state from transportation and development options.

*  Walkerite legislators sneaked into the budget a wired half-million grant to an unqualified sportsman's political group. Authentic statewide conservation groups were walled out of the process because partisan favoritism came first.

Making the episode even more scandalous, Walker is handing Scott Suder, the ex-key GOP  legislator involved in the legislative monkey-business, a big-dollar job at the Public Service Commission.

*  Walkerite administrators manipulated state paperwork and employment rules to grease promotions and inflate raises for the two top State Capitol police officials running Walker's unseemly, disingenuous and needlessly violent crackdown on Capitol rotunda singing protesters. Budget-cutting and austerity, as seen in the Suder salary-and-pension bump, is for little people.

*  And then there's massaging the levers of power for some sheer partisan, power-playing fun, essentially treating state agencies and their public information services as if they were video games.

Which is just what the Walkerites did this week when they threw distorted data into their already devious, politically-inspired obstruction of the health-insurance marketplace exchanges in ObamaCare.

The goal was to spread misinformation to people who need it to make important health and personal budgeting decisions.

That was a ploy that vandalized truth and the core obligations of good government - - so spare us the small government, Reaganesque rhetoric and fake facade.