We know Scott Walker is an extremist

Good for The New York Times editorially telling the country that Scott Walker is an extremist.

 [His budget] 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.

As this blog has noted and documented more than a dozen times, for years, including:

October 8, 2014: Scott Walker is an extremist

Some additional examples:

November 2, 2010: Walker to women: back to the dark ages

On reproductive rights, Walker is an extremist.The facts are here.

February 10, 2011:  Walker will turn Wisconsin into an anti-union joke

Scott Walker will get plenty of attention nationally for his extremist plan to strip away most traditional public employees' union rights, and while his angry base may like the cost savings he's promising, the black eye it will earn Wisconsin may prove costly, too.

March 7, 2013:  There Will Not Be A Moderate Scott Walker

There was news this week that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer had joined fellow fringe Republican Gov. Rick Scott signing on to the expanded federal Medicaid funding provided by the Obama administration.

Leaving fewer right-wing GOP governors like Scott Walker who refused the funding and put ideology ahead of sane health-care funding for lower-income and out-of-work residents in their states.

So let's be clear about the message he was sending: there is not, and will never be, a moderate Scott Walker.

That is not who he is.

That is not why he ran for Governor.

That is not how he won re-election in the 2012 recall and intends to govern.

He was put into office and embedded there by far-right advocacy groups and corporate donors to turn Wisconsin into an anti-labor, anti-transit, anti-environmental, anti-public education laboratory for reactionary, private-interest -friendly and regressively-funded governance.

Period. 

Whomever and whatever is in the way of that agenda gets rolled: women served by Planned Parenthood, Amtrak patrons, public employees, Native American culture, municipal transit systems, voting rights, urban school districts, Medicaid-eligible, working poor, publicly-owned wetlands, and air quality near sand mines, publicly-owned power plants and expanding, road-builder enabled freeways.

And just about anything in Milwaukee or associated with the Mayor who twice had the temerity to run against him. 

Walker is in office to serve the wealthy, expand their class advantages and spend their campaign donations on his personal and party ambition.

He is there to implement Grover Norquist's blueprint to drown a dismembered government and reward the private sector and its managers with the consequences of intentionally shrunken, weakened, enervated government:

Lower taxes, greater power and more privilege, like iron mining company officials being invited in behind closed doors to write a mining bill that will let the company fill public Wisconsin wetlands and create acid mine drainage and air pollution in the watershed that has supported the Ojibwe rice-culture downstream, and connects to Lake Superior, for centuries.

Nowhere in that extremist, insider-managed, dollar-driven reactionary agenda is there room for, or any interest in anything approaching moderation.

Any campaign, candidate, consultant or commentator who tries to spin you otherwise is flat-out lying, and is after something that belongs to you.