Monday, August 3, 2015

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.

9 comments:

Jake formerly of the LP said...

Sarah Palin finds that comment incoherent and foolish.

As you mentioned, Scotty forgot the script the Kochs gave him this weekend and got it mixed up with the "Eagle Scout" talking point.

Sue said...

That Eagle Scout thing is getting tiresome. I do hope he continues to mention it at every opportunity. Please bring it up during the debate, preferably in the same sentence as a Kohl's reference.

Anonymous said...

This sounds just like the garbage he said last year just before the election, about a woman's right to choose being her own (which of course he has subsequently rescinded). Same garbage here - he's trying to claim he cares about the environment. Lying slimewad.

Anonymous said...

"We were taught long ago that your campsite should be cleaner when you leave than when you find it,"

The same comment that Wlalker made a month or two ago,, when a youngster asked him about climate change.

The fool cannot get away from his lame talking points to a kid.

Anonymous said...

So the media is catapulting the Eagle Scout lie again? And YES, I blame the media for letting a 40 us year old man that has lived on the public teat virtual his whole adult life get away with using a boyhood club as "proof" of his integrity.

Just ridiculous if it wasn't so creepy and sick. It is a "tell". Just like when Paul Ryan was falsely being heralded as a "policy wonk" and "numbers guy", the media is continuing to groom Walker for something big -- a stolen election in 2016.

Anonymous said...

You know, maybe that guy in Philly was right -- it increasingly sounds like Scott Walker does live in his butt.

my5cents said...

All Walker is pushing for is more tax breaks for corporations, as if they pay their fair share now. See another comment under "Scott Walker, the air pollution Governor" for my analysis on how he wants to balance environmental issues and the economy. All Republicans are pushing this latest idea to get more tax breaks for corporations and the rich. Seems to me that if the economy was booming, the environmental issues would get taken care of easily. In the future all of our kids and grandchildren would be better off, not just his. But, the only thing on Walker's mind is "what I can do to give more to corporations and the rich." That thought is intertwined into everything he says and does. Whatever happened to a "free economy" where corporations succeeded or failed on their own merits? Just a couple of years ago that's all they could talk about, a "free economy." Now all they want to do is funnel our tax dollars to that "free economy."

Anonymous said...

We're surrounded by men and women who have served and sacrificed in so many ways who carry themselves with dignity, humility, and grace. And then we have Scott Walker, who at every opportunity crassly boasts of being an "Eagle Scout" as a child 30 years ago. In some ways he still is a child, apparently.

MadCityVoter said...

You need to drop the other shoe -- all of this loosening of environmental regulations hasn't done a darn thing to make our economy better or more sustainable. Walker's not leaving the campsite better than the way he found it, he's making transparent excuses for his corporate friends who are trashing the place for their own benefit and amusement. He's telling the cub scouts that they don't see what's happening right before their eyes. Kind of like the way gay scouts and scout leaders were treated in Walker's scouting days, I'm thinking -- see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil; don't ask, don't tell, and if something bad happens just pretend it didn't. Those kind of rules weren't healthy for anybody. Letting the bullies loose to do what they want to Wisconsin while our "leaders" cower and lie and cover up for them won't come to a good end either.