Man MKE's blog

Air campaignFresh from making nice with Democrats, "rock star" Scott Walker was hamming it up for Beltway national media in D.C. yesterday and today, advising Mitt Romney on how to be a better GOP presidential candidate and telling a largely partisan crowd at the US Chamber of Commerce that public employee benefits like health care and pensions are a "virus."

Bloggers on the left have noted many similarities between Scott Walker and Nixon, and between Walker and Reagan. But another way to compare him is to George W. Bush. And in that comparison, a Bush quote sums up how we should deal with Walker now that he's pretending to be a Democrat.

The editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel need to check in with an optometrist, because their ideological myopia is getting quite out of hand. Case in point: Today's editorial once again flogging the state constitution's recall provision. It's warmed over yacking from the J-S editorialists, except for this installment's focus on recall campaign spending. In the editorial's very first sentence, the Journal Sentinel makes a horribly wrong correlation, then compounds its foolishness:

Republican dirty tricksters once again apparently are trying to suppress the vote of Democrats in today's recall elections.

Just as predictably, perhaps, the state's largest newspaper has reported nothing about the latest lie from these tricksters. Instead, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reserved page one space today to report how some voters are upset over a legal but (gasp!) unusual mailing from a pro-Democratic Party group. Well, hey, "unusual" is always newsworthy. Except when it isn't.

Over at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Politifact, Scott Walker's many lies and distortions are often chronicled and properly rated along the feature's untrue scale. Nevertheless, the newspaper apparently can't help but to try to bend over backwards to make their double-endorsee for governor look as good as possible.

You want some of this?We've spent much time in past blogs documenting how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Politifact feature often can't see the forest for the trees, nitpicking statements by Democrats in what seems a failing effort to balance the typically more outrageous yet often obtuse truth-stretching of Republicans. Today in another such installment, the progressive activist group We Are Wisconsin gets a "false" for saying that Gov. Scott Walker "took away $1.6 billion from schools and handed it off as over $2 billion in tax breaks to the rich."

We're not going to get far into Politifact's parsing of this statement, which can be dissected several ways (mostly, Politifact seems preoccupied with noting that the tax breaks add up over a decade, whereas the school aid cuts are by some measures smaller than $1.6 billion and, theoretically at least, are a one-time, two-year amount -- as if Walker wouldn't do it over and over, given the chance in future budgets).

A bigger problem is the way the Politifact views public spending and budgets, which mostly follows the Walker campaign spin.

Stick it to themScott Walker and his minions have since day one been spreading the nonsense that state employee grievance procedures have not been hurt by his union-busting law. He claims the civil service system has built-in workplace protections and there's no need for grievance procedures to be spelled out in collective bargaining with represented employees.

Phil Scarr over at Blogging Blue came up with this excellent chart showing the difference between the normal manner in which job growth is measured in Wisconsin and nationwide and the method now (but not always) preferred by Gov. Scott Walker and his administration. A third line shows the overall national job creation trend. The simple takeaway: Even granting greater accuracy to Walker's use of quarterly statistics, this state still badly lags behind the rest of the nation in job growth, even though a jobs recovery was already putting Wisconsin ahead of the curve as he came into office.