Jason Horowitz, one of the New York Times more colorful reporters, gave Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker a gleeful finger upon his departure from the Republican presidential race, suggesting Walker has advanced his career on racist appeals in "Dismal Finish Is a Fitting Result, Old Foes Say." Horowitz wrote on Tuesday: "Old political adversaries of Mr. Walker greeted his dour denouement as a fitting result for a politician who they say began and furthered his career here with a divisive style, a penchant for turning out conservative supporters rather than working with opponents, and tacit racial appeals in one of the nation’s most segregated cities. But the irony is that Mr. Walker was eclipsed by candidates who have ignited the Republican base with more overtly nativist and, their critics argue, racist appeals." Those "racist appeals"? Actually tough-on-crime proposals targeted at victims of crime in Milwaukee.
Wisconsin
The Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature may soon weaken protections for tenured professors in the state’s university system. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall believes that Gov. Scott Walker’s enthusiastic support for tenure reform is “driven in part by right-wing ideology and in part by the palpable animus Walker himself holds to people who managed to get an education.”
Marshall asserted that Walker sees tenure reform as an attack on the philosophical strain of liberalism that undergirds “empirical thinking and new ideas,” especially in the scientific realm, and opined that as regards the system’s flagship university in Madison, the effect of the reforms would be “pretty much like just lighting [the campus] on fire.”
The New York Times magazine launched another emotional attack on Wisconsin's Republican (and presidential hopeful) Gov. Scott Walker, whom the paper cannot forgive for successfully taming his state's public unions and then surviving an expensive, union-funded recall election. Contributor Dan Kaufman's romanticized, pro-union 5,700-word cover story was advertised as "Labor's Last Stand -- Scott Walker and the dismantling of American unions." A pull quote from a union official captures the tone: "Wisconsin has become a kind of laboratory for oligarchs to implement their political and economic agenda."
It’s become quite common to note that leftists see no intellectual clash between ardent activism against “animal cruelty” and passionate “pro-choice” activism advocating “fetus cruelty.” See Shirley Manson, the lead singer of the rock band Garbage.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that St. Patrick’s Catholic Parish in the small Wisconsin town of Stephensville (near Appleton and Green Bay) has ended its long tradition of pig wrestling after “more than 81,000 people signed an online petition expressing concerns for the animals' well-being.” Manson called this "abusive," but dearly loves the right to abortion.
On Friday morning at Jezebel, a Gawker-affiliated web site, Natasha Vargas-Cooper thought she had Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by the — well, you know.
In a post tellingly tagged "Conservative Werewolves," Vargas-Cooper was absolutely sure — so certain that she apparently felt no need to check any further — that Walker's proposed budget would allow its colleges to "to stop reporting sexual assaults." Vicious vitriol ensued (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a reformist conservative and Republican presidential hopeful for 2016, has become a media target, from making a stink of Walker evading an evolution question to obsessing over his college years. Next up: Ripping Walker's proposed cuts to the state university system's operating budget. New York Times reporter Julie Bosman took advantage of Tuesday's front page to portray Walker's university cuts as tarnishing the very ideal of the university in "2016 Ambitions Seen in Bid for Wisconsin Cuts."
"Voting Under Attack" blares the teaser headline for a new Zachary Roth piece at MSNBC.com looking at efforts in five states to pass new voter ID laws.
With Scott Walker entertaining a run for president in 2016, you can expect MSNBC to amp up their criticism of the Wisconsin governor. Enter msnbc.com running a piece by David Taintor today hitting Walker for proposing a "huge cut" in taxpayer financing of the University of Wisconsin system.
On Monday’s CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker opined during a roundtable discussion that Tuesday’s governor’s elections in Florida and Wisconsin featuring incumbent Republican Governors Rick Scott and Scott Walker (respectively) will be “a referendum on” the “policies” that the two have implemented in their states based on “the Republican playbook.” After mentioning that Scott is facing Democrat Charlie Crist (failing to mention Crist was both a former Governor and Republican) while Walker’s Democratic challenger is Mary Burke, Whitaker suggested that: “Now, both Scott and Walker have followed the Republican playbook on taxes, on abortion, on same-sex marriage, and tomorrow's kind of shaping up to be a referendum on those policies.”
M.D. Kittle at Watchdog.org's Wisconsin Reporter scooped everyone covering the Badger State Governor's race on Tuesday when he reported that Democratic candidate Mary Burke's resumé is not what her campaign's web site says it is.
Burke's campaign bio claims that she "played a central role in Trek’s expansion as the Director of European Operations." Kittle found "multiple former Trek executives" who told him that, in Kittle's words, she "was fired by her own family following steep overseas financial losses and plummeting morale among Burke’s European sales staff." The real question to me is why it took until a week before Election Day to learn this.
With the midterm elections one week away from Tuesday, the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley profiled the race in Wisconsin for governor as incumbent Governor and Republican Scott Walker faces off against Democratic candidate Mary Burke.
While it’s certainly worth covering governor’s races across the country, CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds chose to use the occasion to go after Walker and his policies by asking Burke if a victory over Walker would “send a message to the rest of the country about the kind of policies and politics that he practices.”
On Friday morning, ABC’s Good Morning America aired a news brief that described state voter identification laws struck down in Texas and Wisconsin as “restrictive” and passed on the opinion of the judge who put Texas’s law on hold as being “a poll tax designed to keep minorities from voting.”
During the 7:00 a.m. hour, newsreader Amy Robach offered the following news brief: "Back in this country, restrictive new voter ID laws are on hold in Wisconsin and Texas this morning, just weeks before Election Day. A federal judge overturned it the Texas Law, comparing it to a poll tax designed to keep minorities from voting and overnight, the Supreme Court delayed implementation of Wisconsin’s voter I.D. law."