Scotty's unhappy!!

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has set his sights on ending the availability of cervical and breast cancer screening —along with multiple sclerosis detection— for Wisconsin women who have insufficient health insurance to pay for these critical procedures.

It’s not about money or budgets or unions or any of the usual ideologically driven nonsense we’ve come to expect from Scott Walker. This time, it’s just all about politics.

The screening service, which goes by the name of the Wisconsin Well Woman Program and is administered by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, contracts with various screening providers throughout the state on a county-by-county basis. Among those who provide these critical services to women between the ages of 45 and 64 is Planned Parenthood.

I love this comment.
"The decision of one individual who chooses to sign a recall petition should not carry more weight than the decision of another who chooses not to sign," said Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party and a plaintiff in the case.

What the hell does that mean?! Isn't the whole idea of signature thresholds on any petition that for every person that signs there's X more that agree and didn't sign/didn't have an opportunity to sign/would support a measure on the ballot? That the number of signatures required constitutes a representative/ meaningful sample of the total? Is Thompson that dumb or is he assuming other people are that dumb? They are running scared. The very reason Kasich wanted to make a deal on SB5 before election day was the number of signatures gathered showed he was going to take an ass-whipping on election day. That stunning defeat overshadows every thing that's happened under his governorship that he could tout as a success.

As I have pointed out before, PP does so much more than abortions which are only 3% of their budget.

At the hospital I worked at, most of our Medi-Cal babies went to PP for their well-baby checkups and in Santa Cruz PP is the primary care practitioner for some elderly and disabled people.

Question to the lawyers. Gov. Walker is suing in state court but the suit says it violates his 14 admendment rights. Wouldn't that be something for the federal courts to decide?

It's not a moment too late, either. That scumbag, as if completely unaware that he's already crossed the line, is trying to kill women from breast and cervical cancer by cutting off funding for screening. In what universe do the policies of these insane scum make sense?

Scott Walker Kills Women's Cancer Screening Program For Political Gain

These clinics also prevent nearly a million unintended pregnancies every year, thus reducing the need for abortion. And family planning also saves the government money — about $3.74 for every dollar invested.

In an interview last Friday with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Gov. Scott Walker (R) gave perhaps his most blunt show of contrition yet for the mega-gaffe that could haunt him in the coming recall: His 20-minute phone call in February, at the height of the protests against his anti-public employee union legislation, with a blogger posing as conservative financier David Koch.

The interviewer said that a friend of Walker’s has said that the “Koch” call was the only time he saw Walker rattled, to have done something so “stupid.”

One doesn't need to be a math wiz to get this. The issue isn't money. The issue is social darwinism.

Planned Parenthood:

Number of Victims

There were a total of 1,823 people on record who were sterilized (Paul, p. 546). Of those whom were sterilized, 79% were women and 99.5% were deemed mentally deficient. Wisconsin was 11th in the nation for the total number of sterilizations performed.
...
Passage of Law(s)

On July 30, 1913 (Dowbiggin, p. 126), Governor Francis McGovern [R] of Wisconsin enacted Chapter 693 (Lombardo, p. 47), a statute empowering the state to sterilize inmates of both mental and penal institutions (Painter) and to require the presentation of a medical certificate when applying for a marriage license (Laughlin, p. 345; “Health-Marriage and Sterilization Acts”). Wisconsin was the 12th state to pass a sterilization law in the United States. In 1955 the legislature eliminated epileptics from the law (Paul, p. 547). Involuntary sterilization remained legal until July 1978, when Chapter 428 of the Laws of 1977 outlawed the procedure (Goc, p. 41). Today, voluntary sterilization in Wisconsin is legal and does not require spousal consent. Doctors often refuse to sterilize persons below a certain age or with few children and there is strict opposition to the procedure in some hospitals (Lucey, p. 46).
...
Groups Targeted and Victimized

Although the law specifically listed several groups for sterilizations (Painter), those who were targeted in practice were primarily “feebleminded” because they were actually at risk of procreating. However, severely disabled persons were more likely to be institutionalized with long term care for their entire lives and therefore were less considered for sterilizations, particularly because they were less likely to reproduce. Thus, a target was placed on those with lower levels of disability. Furthermore, sexually promiscuous people would be most likely to reproduce and therefore would be targeted the most (Paul, p. 548). Because of the nature in which society and legislators viewed promiscuity, women were more likely to be labeled as such than men and the impoverished lower class was more likely to be targeted than the middle and upper classes (Paul, p. 546).

Poll: Barrett Leads Potential Democratic Primary In Walker Recall

With Wisconsin Democrats set to turn in a mountain of petitions to trigger a recall against Gov. Scott Walker, a new survey from Public Policy Polling (D) shows that Walker’s Democratic opponent in the 2010 election, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, would start out as the favorite in the Democratic primary if he were to seek a rematch.

In a two way-race, Barrett leads former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk by 46%-27%, and he would also lead former Congressman David Obey by 42%-30%. Obey leads Falk by 43%-28%. In a more wide-open race, Barrett has 26%, Falk 22%, Obey 21%, and state Sen. Tim Cullen (who has already said he will run, but is less known) has 11%.

Recalls in Wisconsin do not feature any direct up-or-down vote on the incumbent, but instead effectively take the form of a special election with the incumbent and a challenger fighting it out to serve the rest of the term. In the 2010 Republican wave, Walker defeated Barrett by a 52%-47% margin.

The survey of likely Democratic primary voters was conducted on Monday, January 16, and has a ±4.3% margin of error.

Interestingly, among likely voters in a Democratic primary, only 59% were self-identified Democrats — 30% were independents, and 11% Republicans.

That is 46% of the number of people who voted in the 2010 election. However, that is the same percentage of votes that Tom Barrett got, so it's hard to say how he would do. The question is, of those million plus petitioners, how many of them didn't vote for Barrett in 2010 and are likely to vote for him this time?

I think the issue is more how many people just sort of shuffled off to vote for Walker who won't make the effort to show up at a special recall election. I think it's a pretty good bet that the population of people who actually signed a recall petition are very likely to show up and vote against Walker. The question is really how many Walker supporters are still pumped enough to show up to reaffirm the guy.

I understand they're turning in the petitions for recall vote today. A million signatures. Really. A million.

Paging Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman. I say pay attention son, this is for your own good.


Apologies to The Rooster. Sorry, I couldn't resist

Organizers behind the recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker collected 1 million signatures to be submitted to the state’s Government Accountability Board on Tuesday, dwarfing the required number of names and virtually ensuring that a recall election will take place later this year.

A total of 540,208 valid signatures, or 25 percent of all of the votes cast in the election that put Walker in office last January, were needed to force a recall election, but organizers had aimed for hundreds of thousands more than the minimum requirement to ensure they met the threshold even if some signatures are disqualified.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party was quick to dub the recall effort — which also targeted Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and a handful of Republican state legislators — the “biggest” in American history and boasted that organizers had gathered a whopping 460,000 extra signatures for the recall of Walker, who infuriated many in his state last year by pushing through a law that ended most collective bargaining rights for many public workers.

snip.....

Tate dismissed the criticism to POLITICO, saying the fact that Democrats have “more than one candidate” in mind is actually indicative of Walker’s weakness.

“There are a couple of good Democrats that I know are taking a look at this race, and this is indicative of how weak Scott Walker is that we may have more than one strong candidate,” he said. “This is tremendously significant — it’s something that’s never happened before in Wisconsin history. It is a very high bar to hold a recall election.”