Saturday, May 13, 2017

Convention site highlights WI GOP's parks, water failings

No better place for Wisconsin Republicans to hold their 2017 state convention than a Dells water park, as the AP reports it.

You couldn't find a more telling metaphor as Wisconsin slides down quality-of-life ratings, from road conditions to job growth, than a long, slippery slope where at the end you're gonna get soaked.

Not to mention that such parks take extra steps to clean their water, while across Wisconsin there has been a surge in river and stream pollution.

And so many wells are tainted with Big Ag and feedlot contamination that Scott Walker felt the political need to rush out a pre-election bottled-water giveaway by the public sector he's crippled to stem rural users' repeat "brown water events" after years of pollution-inducing permit approvals by his so-called environmental 'regulators.' 

Thank you, Wisconsin Republicans, for putting "brown water events" into the news and vocabulary. 

If you're looking for a new Wisconsin slogan, look no further than Flush Brown Water Politicians.

It's also ironic that Republicans would be meeting at a private sector park after slashing the budgets and staffing at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, where public parks under the DNR's intentionally-weakened jurisdiction are raising fees and planning to sell naming rights and other privatized business opportunities to keep the parks afloat.

And are considering a plan by Walker donor and property magnate Herbert Kohler to level much of a wetland-woodland-rare dune and native-artifact-rich nature preserve, and even to allow the development to acquire acreage in the adjoining Kohler Andrae State Park to build a high-end private golf course on the Lake Michigan shoreline south of Sheboygan.

Under Walker's rule and the GOP's one-party takeover of state powers, state waters and parks in Wisconsin ain't what they used to be, so no surprise that the Republican Party would convene in a privately-controlled environment and artificial bubble.

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