Jim Douglas: water carrier

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 I heard him hard at work today carrying water for anti-union Wisconsin Governor Scott.

Bright and early on VPR Douglas was offering “useful lessons for Vermonters” regarding Wisconsin on the stations’ commentary feature.  

He said:

The governor of Wisconsin made it quite clear during his campaign where he stood on the state's fiscal challenges.

The implication being that Walker’s policies toward crushing public unions and collective bargaining should also have been clear to voters before election day.

Douglas then praises this implied clarity

Frankly, I like an elected official who does what he says during the campaign. Many don't!

Many don’t!

Certainly it wasn’t so clear to someone that was there. Wisconsin Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, who said in February“Walker never talked about doing away with collective bargaining rights during the campaign.”

John Tures Associate Professor of Political Science at LaGrange College checked Walkers campaign website

I went to Scott Walker’s 2010 campaign website. I searched his “issues” site, which did not contain a single detail about unions. I also tried looking in his press releases and news clips, without any luck. I read dozens of articles about his campaign appearances, but couldn’t find anything about unions. Unions aren’t mentioned on this site until after the bill is introduced last month.

Regardless of how you feel about unions, it’s clear that GOP Governor Walker wasn’t candid with the Wisconsin voters about his plans.

 

Take a look here scottwalker.org candidate Walker’s issue webpage    

15 thoughts on “Jim Douglas: water carrier”

  2. …who opined that Sarah Palin would make a dandy vice president of the United States:

    “For the first time in many years we have someone on the ticket that’s just like us, someone who has dealt with the challenges of raising a family, dealt with so many issues that confront small town America…someone who has provided leadership in rural parts of America.” (more of his painful and grotesquely ill-informed praise of Caribou Barbie can be found here)

    Really, Douglas’ opinion on anything of significance can be dismissed as flawed and opportunistic. He doesn’t appear to ever have put the interests of the people of Vermont ahead of the interests of a) himself, b) his party, and c) the morally corrupt, who prop up the GOP as a vehicle for their deceit and greed.  

  3. Douglas also cites a “survey” in his VPR piece that he says shows that VT state employees earn, on average, 50 percent more than their private-sector counterparts. This is a complete load of cherry-picked bullshit, but, as he loves to do, Douglas presents it as fact.

    I hope VPR will require Douglas to show definitive proof of his 50 percent claim (in a true apples-to-apples comparison). If he can’t prove it (which I’m quite sure he can’t), VPR should remove Douglas’ inaccurate column from its website.  

  5. I retweeted VPR’s tweets this way

    RT @vprnet: #VPR Commentary Douglas: Watching #Wisconsin http://dlvr.it/Jq2v0 – wrong, #walker did not make his plans known b4 election

    RT @vprnet: #VPR Commentary Douglas: Watching #Wisconsin http://dlvr.it/Jq2v0 – why no comments section to respond to half-truths?

  6. JimX, mentioned in his little ditty that state employees and teachers had done a little to help, but would need to do more….   JIM I challenge you… lead by example…  Take on more of your healthcare costs…. you are hitting the citizens up for 80% of your plan cost arent you???  well, how about you make it 50/50????  

    Show us how sacrifice is done JIM, and maybe you would like to kick back some of those retirement benefits???

    Suck it up Jim,  life is hard for retirees, eh???

  7. Here’s what I got:

    Former Governor Douglas responds:

    In the attached report from the State Department of Human Resources, Table 45 on p. 62 lists the average compensation for classified executive branch state employees as $72,694. This includes benefits, but does not include the elected officials, department heads, judges and many state attorneys, so I assume the average of all state employees is even higher.

    This is from the Dept of Labor website…it’s for ’09, while the state employee data are ’10, but I’m sure the #s are close. It shows an average wage of $40,940.

    This is salary only & includes all public employees, so the average private sector worker is below this level. I can’t find any benefit data for the population at large, but state employee benefits are 28.5% of pay. I’d be very surprised if that’s true in the private sector. Some large employers probably are that generous, but most businesses in Vermont are small. If we assume they’re 18.5%, that brings the total average compensation for everyone to $50,233. The state employee average of $72,694 is 44.7% higher than the overall average, so if this were adjusted to reflect private sector jobs only, I think my assertion is fair.

    It’s a little imprecise, but I assume this is the thought process we employed last year.

    I can send anyone interested the “attached report” and the Labor stats he uses as well, but of course the fundamental problem is that he’s still not comparing similar levels of education, and so on.  

    Maybe those numbers don’t exist.  Maybe we need more data.  But if so, we shouldn’t be pretending that reality fits our ideology; this is a prime example of how to lie with statistics.

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