McIlheran's Fertile, But Disturbed, Imagination

Last week, Patrick McIlheran, right wing propagandist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, wrote a sententious little column in which he dreams what it would be like to be an actual journalist. His first interview would be with the enigmatic figure of the state government, and how he would deftly point them out to be fraudulent political pawns trying to make his superhero, Scott "the Weasel" Walker look like a fool.

The biggest problem with PaddyMac's column is that he is as short on the facts as he is long on the imagination. After all, who would ever be so gullible as to confuse old Paddy of even being close to a journalist or a truth-teller?

Oops.

So now it is up to me, again, to point out his lies.

Paddy starts out with claiming the State's takeover of the County's Income Maintenance programs was simply because of the County's poor performance in providing these services. In reality, as pointed out by Paddy's own newspaper, it was the poor performance which was putting the State at risk for fines from the feds, not to mention a federal class action lawsuit that could run up into the millions of dollars. I know I sure as heck would try to avoid having to pay a large sum of money due to someone else's incompetence.

But Paddy, despite his claims otherwise, doesn't mind spending your tax money, if it is for something he believes in. Something like make road builders even richer, or promoting one of his party's hacks.

Paddy then goes on about how the mean old State did nothing to help the County in all of these years. Again, he misses the mark. In the letter sent from Karen Timberlake to Scott Walker, you can see she added an entire page of benefits (pdf, page 6, Attachment B) the State has given to the County over the years, including millions of dollars and dozens of full time state employees.

Paddy also quotes Supervisor West as being supportive of Walker and his manager of the Economic Support Division. Well, of course she is. She is the head of the Health and Human Services Committee. The County's failure will also put her into a bad light.

Paddy also really cracked me up with trying to say that the call center has actually expanded. Well, this is true. First, as mentioned above, the State had to supply their own workers to help out. Secondly, the County Board, not Walker, not Hoze, but the County Board expanded it up to two dozen, and now up to 30 workers. But again, Paddy does not read his own company's product, or he would have seen the recent story in which it was found the call center was being staffed with as few as four people. That is not what I would call expansive.

In another point, Paddy states that the call center has never had its staff cut. This is technically true. Unfortunately, what Paddy omits in his fantasy is the fact that Walker and Hoze have refused to fill positions as they became vacant, thereby causing the shortage of workers.

About the only thing that Paddy had dead on correct in his entire column was that most people don't like the idea of the takeover. It's too bad Walker's incompetence put us in the position that the takeover was even conceivable, much less necessary.