One Year...And A Decade's Worth Of Lies

On Thursday, Scott Walker's campaign came out with yet another ad - what is this, the fifth? the sixth? - and the recall papers haven't even been filed yet.

Image by One Wisconsin Now

The ad, in itself, is only notable for two things.  One, about the only bit of truth contained in it is when he says his name is Scott Walker.  Two, at the end, he has a really way of saying "Wisconsin," like he is in pain or something.  Maybe the producers had to do some dubbing work to cover up where Walker really said "Kochland."

Oddly enough, on the very same day, Walker the governor issued a press release with the same talking points.  But there's no collusion between his office and his campaign, right? Oh, wait, how could I almost forget?!  He and his campaign and his staffers from Milwaukee County and the State are under investigation in a John Doe investigation commonly referred to as Walkergate.

For kicks and giggles, and since the two are for all practical purposes, identical, I thought I'd give his press release a fact check.  Outside of the sheer volume of lies that I spotted in the first glance, I doubt that it will be very hard to show all the places Walker has tried to mislead the people.

His first promise, action, comment section claims he balanced the state budget and completely obliterated the deficit.  Well, I had to go no further than last night to find out that Walker lied about this.  In a post I wrote yesterday, I pointed out a PolitiFact article that revealed that not only did Walker not balance the budget, he actually made it even bigger than what his predecessor, Jim Doyle, had left him.

In his next section, he boasts that he created a "business-friendly environment" in Wisconsin.  Again, I was able to disprove that in one quick link.  I've been keeping a running series of posts titled "The Walker Budget is Already Working!" in which I've provided over fifty stories of businesses, large and small, from all corners of the state, who have been forced to shut their doors because while other states, such as Illinois, continue to improve, Walker's ideology has moved us backwards.  Maybe it's just me, but I don't see causing businesses to close could be considered to be friendly.

In the third section, he brings up his promise to create 250,000 jobs and still insists it's achievable, even though his own administration said that they're not going to be able to keep that vow.  In his own defense, Walker offers up that he created "thousands of jobs," and tries to downplay his failure by comparing his first year to three of former Governor Jim Doyle's, who had to contend with the Bush/Cheney recession.  Sadly, the real story is that Walker has chased out 45,000 in the last five months.  In fact, Walker's Fitzwalkerstan has led the entire nation two months running in the numbers of jobs lost, even while the majority of states have been adding jobs.  He's done so badly in this area, I'm surprised he brought this topic up at all.

The fourth section is where Walker claims to have restored raided funds and paid debts.  The fact is to do so, he raided other funds, such as the transportation fund and is setting up to raid the pension fund.  In other words, he's robbing Peter to pay off Paul.

The fifth section, he brags about the creation of the Fraud Squad.  Although it hasn't apparently done anything, since there's been no more reports about it since he said he was going to create it.  And apparently they don't mind all the money being squandered in paying for the salaries and spending habits of Walker's cronies.

Walker's sixth section involves his goal to have every third grader reading at level.  That's going to be a bit difficult for him to pull of since he slashed nearly a billion dollars from the schools, laid of thousands of teachers, increased class sizes and cut programs.  And this was during the "good year" of his biennium budget.  Next year will be much, much worse.

In the seventh section, Walker brags about his creation of the deer czar and taking "politics out of the woods."  It turns out that all he's done is given a sweetheart contract to a guy from Texas who calls himself Dr. Deer and didn't even bother coming to Wisconsin for the deer hunting season.  Instead, DNR director Kathy Stepp went out to the woods where she could kill fawns.

And for his final section, Walker boasts that he froze property taxes.  Ironically, that brings us back to his first section and something I had just debunked yesterday, for the umpteenth time.  Walker did, indeed, raise property taxes, as well as hiking fees at exponential rates.  And not only did Walker raise property taxes, he raised them on the poorest of the poor, causing an anti-stimulus effect on the state's economy.

The sad part is as lengthy as this piece is, it's not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg for all the ills that Walker has brought upon our once glorious state.

But in closing, I must point out that while Walker's held his office for one year, all of the Koch's money and all of the Koch's operatives, they couldn't find one honest positive point about Walker.

That says it all right there, doesn't it?