Weirdos In Wisconsin: Defending the KKK, Odd Sheriffs & Walker's Revenge

How're those charter schools working Gov Walker?

These are truly strange times we are living in.

Depending upon how you voted back on November 8th, yesterday's Electoral College vote confirming Donald Trump's victory was either a cause for celebration, or a depressing reminder of the current state of American democracy.

Bill Clinton was clearly not pleased.

In Wisconsin, where Tea Party puppet Republican Governor Scott Walker's very first state budget back in 2011 included $800 million in cuts to public schools while expanding charter school vouchers for Milwaukee students, an African-American teacher was recently relieved of her teaching duties at the Business and Economics Academy of Milwaukee after she sent a letter to parents of her seventh grade students explaining a class assignment for them to write an essay defending the Ku Klux Klan as a persuasive writing assignment.

Now I don't know that charter school teacher personally or anything, nor am I a teacher, but you can teach persuasive writing to seventh grade students without having them think up ways to defend a white supremacist terrorist organization.

Seriously, between her highly inappropriate classroom assignment and the unhinged right-wing Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke's recent call for people to take up "pitchforks and torches" against the federal government, the White House, the Department of Justice and what he calls "big media", black folk in Wisconsin got some strange-ass ideas.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke

If you thought Sheriff Clarke's bizarre right-wing spiel at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland earlier this summer was out there, take a couple minutes and watch some of his demented rant against the amorphous evil of big media.

Which, in the sheriff's eye, includes the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC - I'm guessing the First Amendment just isn't really his thing.

If you watch that video clip, remember this guy is the Sheriff of the fifth-largest city in the American mid-west.

Either he seals himself in a hermetic chamber and binge watches Fox News while listening to Alex Jones at night, or he's a got a serious man-crush on Arizona's xenophobic soon-to-be ex-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

You heard about Arpaio's Fake News Extravaganza press conference last Thursday when he tried rekindling the long-debunked Birther Theory?

Yup, now that Sheriff Joe's incessant hate-mongering has lost him his Sheriff's badge, he's resorted to proving that President Obama's birth certificate is fake - equal parts pathetic and strange.

But getting back to Wisconsin, in case you were wondering, Gov. Scott Walker's loopy brand of dehumanizing conservatism has only gotten weirder since he was one of the first presidential hopefuls to be bounced from the 2015 Republican Clown Car.

Scott Walker's hit-list includes the gray wolf. Really.

As Sophia Tesfaye reported in an article on Salon.com today, Walker sent a letter to Donald Trump requesting that the federal government loosen regulations to allow his state the autonomy to drug test food stamp recipients, increase premiums on Medicaid and legalize the hunting of the almost-extinct gray wolf.

Did Walker send his Christmas fantasy list for Santa to Trump by mistake?

Has Scott Walker reached the point where hunting the endangered gray wolf into extinction is a "freedom" to be cherished?

Does the gray (or timber) wolf represent some kind of existential threat to Walker's brand of way-off-the-ranch conservatism?

As Defenders of Wildlife's gray wolf fact-sheet notes, these amazing creatures play an important role in keeping the ecosystem in balance that scientists are just starting to fully understand.

Mankind almost killed them all off in the 1930's and they're just now starting to repopulate their species and return to habitats they once thrived in, so maybe Walker wanting to let people kill them all is just some kind of heartless and petty f*** you to animal rights activists?

Or perhaps Walker thinks he can score some cheap points with Trump by requesting the right to hunt one of North America's most endangered species in order to please the fake news-Tweeting Trump-spawn Donald Jr. and Eric - who like to flaunt their manhood by posing next to photos of endangered species they kill.

Regardless of his motivation, Gov. Walker still comes off as a spineless nincompoop from the same state that gave us tax cut fetishist Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump's newly appointed White House Chief of Staff, former RNC Chair Reince Priebus.

Like I said, strange times - and equally strange Republican men.