Walker panders in Iowa on drug tests now abandoned by FL

His Tea Party gubernatorial counterpart in Florida finally abandoned the stupid, illegal, wasteful and punitive effort to force public assistance recipients to take and pass mandatory drug tests, but Tea Party Wisconsin Governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker has included an even wider drug testing mandate (Medicaid recipients along with food stamp eligible adults, too) in his new budget and demagogued on it last weekend in Iowa as right-wing media lapped it up: 

Governor Scott Walker (R., Wis.) received some of the loudest applause of the day while discussing the drug testing and job training requirements for food stamp recipients that he has supported in his state.

There is no limit to the extent Walker will go to appropriate Wisconsin state policy and financing for his personal political agenda, and this has been clear for months.

The drug-testing he's proposing without any cost estimate, his top budget official admitted, is part and parcel of a tough-on-the-poor Southern strategy, as I wrote in September:

Walker unleashing his inner demagogue

In full southern strategy campaign mode, this is your Wrong-Way Governor on the campaign trail, stereotyping people receiving food stamp and other assistance and entertaining a partisan audience with his pledge to force the aid recipients to be drug-tested:

"My belief is we shouldn't be paying for them to sit on the couch, watching TV or playing Xbox," Walker told cheering Republican campaign volunteers last week in West Bend. "We need to get them the skills to get back in the game and get back to work."

The dog whistle, set to divide-and-conquer pitch, is getting louder: we have seen and heard this code from Walker before as he whipped up a partisan crowd in the Milwaukee exurbs towards the close of an election:

People do not want to see Wisconsin "become another Milwaukee," Walker said [at Oconomowoc Lake at the end of the 2012 recall campaign].