I am what you get when you don't vote.

 

Thank you, non-voters for electing me.

 

After Tuesday, I am somewhat at a loss for words. 

 

Scott Walker is still my governor, and my beloved Wisconsin has sent possibly the dumbest man on the planet, Glenn Grothman, to Congress. 

 

The Republican Party has the Senate and the House, the only thing stopping the crazy from them is President Obama's veto pen. 

As a state, Wisconsin is looking at even more of the right-wing agenda to be shoved down our throats, all because people could not get out and fucking vote.

Milwaukee County has a population of 956,000 people, yet only 367,227 people voted. I could go on county by county and list the apathetic turnout, but it would do no good.

The people that need to be shamed for not voting are not at Daily Kos reading this diary.

Some of you out there will say that the people of Wisconsin got just what they deserved,  reveling in rubbing salt into the fresh wounds of Wisconsin progressives who've been fighting Scott Walker and his Koch brothers' agenda for the past four years.

But you will be wrong.

No person deserves what Wisconsin is going through, and it is going to get a lot worse, especially for women.

The day before the election, almost unnoticed, a story by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism ran in the Capital Times about the Walker administration auditing the Medicaid billing of family planning clinics:

Two family planning clinics serving low-income women say their operations will be at serious financial risk if state auditors stand firm on claims that they overbilled Medicaid by $3.5 million, largely for birth control drugs and devices.

According to Beth Hartung, president of the Wisconsin Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association:

My hunch is that if any one of us were audited it would come out the same way. 

We’re all operating the same way. It would mean, quite frankly, that we would all close.

The auditors are challenging a reimbursement price for oral contraception that providers say the state itself set. 

 

In other words, the state is changing the rules in the middle of the game without telling anyone. It's not like the state would recover a lot of money in any of these cases either—the federal government pays 90 percent of the claims, the state only 10 percent.

 

This is not about saving the state any money; it's about shutting down family planning clinics. But, hey, we are getting what we deserved, aren’t we? That will teach poor women working multiple minimum wages jobs a lesson.

We will not see the minimum wage raised in Wisconsin over the next four years, nor will we see collective bargaining for public servants make a comeback. We will likely see tort reform, and right-to-work laws signed into law, lowering wages and costing more jobs. But we deserved that too, didn’t we? Taxes will be cut for the rich, leaving more of the burden on the dwindling middle class. Education funding, welfare, food stamps, and healthcare funding will be cut, hurting our children and our most vulnerable members of society.

But we deserved it.

We will likely see high-speed rail bypass Wisconsin and go through Iowa and Illinois, losing thousands of jobs that should have been in Wisconsin. We will have to pay higher costs for health care, and it's likely we will see lower wages and higher unemployment than bordering states. But we deserved that.

The thing is, no one deserves this.

We all should be treated with dignity and respect.

A governor, whether he or she is a Republican or a Democrat, represents all of the people of the state, not just those who voted him or her into office.

Scott Walker has already proven that he only listens to his big money donors.

Remember, the people of Wisconsin deserved this.

And be forewarned: Scott Walker is going to run for president in 2016.

Do you think the United States as a whole deserves what he has done to my beloved state?

Please.

Do I and the rest of the 1,121,490 Wisconsinites who voted against Walker a favor—don't tell us we deserved this.

We did everything we could to stop this man.

Originally posted to Daily Kos on Sun. Nov 09, 2014