(For those not familiar with the "___ ALL the things!" joke, I direct your attention here.)
Scott Walker, Wisconsin's asshole-in-chief, best known for his lying scumbag tactics* during the union-busting fight a couple months ago, is back hard at work on his job of undercutting the government's ability to provide services. This time, it's through an expansion of the proven-to-be-a-failure school vouchers program in the state, while simultaneously cutting funding for public schools. No, seriously. Studies and testing have shown that the students in the voucher program actually did *worse* than their counterparts in public school. And yet Walker wants to cut funding to the better-performing program and pump public funds into the worse-performing program.
But it gets better! Not only does he want to cut funding and expand the failed voucher program, he wants to exempt voucher students from the testing and studies that revealed the program's failure!
Dear Republicans: You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts. The proper response to a study showing that your pet project isn't working like you insisted it would, is not to say "Well FINE then, we just WON'T STUDY IT ANYMORE, OKAY? (But let's give more money to it anyway.)"
*Sealing protesters inside the Capitol building, calling in the police, sheriff dept, and even the National fucking Guard to try to intimidate protesters, insisting the union-busting bill (I typed that "union-busting bull" the first time. Ahem, paging Freud.) was absolutely! necessary! for the budget! during this time of fiscal! crisis! and then, when it became clear that wasn't going to fly, blatantly violating procedural rules and forcing through a vote on the union-busting as a separate bill in less than 5 minutes in a secret meeting, among other abuses of power.
4 comments:
Sounds like good old-fashioned douchebaggery, courtesy of our amazing system of failure..I mean...government. What?
Yeah, it's pretty breathtaking. They weren't kidding about drowning government in the bathtub...
I think fifty or sixty years from now, though I'll likely be gone by then (I'll be 95 in 2061) , they're going to look back at this period in US history, from 9/11 until the blessed day that the US...finds itself again, finds the hope and incredible novelty of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free", finds what used to make people envy and admire the US, everything that Bush and his followers have pissed on...will look back on these days as a huge time, like the Weimar Republic days in Germany. I know the Nazi rise has been a badly overused metaphor, but as a student of history, I'm finding it hard to look away from those historical events, and similarly from the end of Empire for both Rome and Britain. Hard not to wonder how it felt to live through the older ones, and whether it might feel rather like we do right now, as progressives.
I'll tell you this for nothing: I'm making sure I keep my UK passport up-to-date. If the US goes the way it looks like it might, living just the other side of a 4000-mile undefended border seems like a poor choice for a queer loony lefty like me.
Yes. Fifty years, well...I only *hope* we've regained our collective capacity for reason by then. The women of my line live long; I may actually be around to see it in fifty years, who knows. But I can only imagine what this period of time will look like to the history books. "Remember that one time, when the US nearly ended up looking like something out of a bad secret-society-evil-plot-to-overthrow-the-world movie?" And lately I have thought more than once, "So this is what it feels like to be a citizen of a falling empire..." Because that's really what it seems, more and more, to be.
And I don't blame you. I'm starting to think, if I need to run, Canada may not be far enough. :-/
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