Thursday, December 17, 2009

Why Can't You Just Say, "He's Wrong"?

Today the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorialized that the full Milwaukee County Board should override a Scott Walker veto today. The veto was meant to stop a study that would look at the actual costs of treating all Milwaukee County employees equally. Specificly, that LGBT families would have access to the same benefits as their heterosexual co-workers. So the study that Walker doesn’t want is about how much extending those benefits will/or won’t cost.

The good part about the editorial is that the MJS says that the Walker veto should be overridden. The part that makes me crazy is how they have to qualify any and every criticisim of Walker with “he has a point” kind of language. NO! HE DOESN’T HAVE A POINT! HE IS WRONG! Why can’t the MJS just say so?

I know that the MJS has invested a lot of their own “capital” into Scott Walker but this kind of thing is getting so absurd. I really think that Scott Walker could propose using the Park East land to build a massive puppy mill and the MJS would somehow manage to find a “good point” in it.

The last time that I can remember the MJS Editorial Board saying that Walker was flat out wrong about something was when his administration closed the pools early in the middle of a heat wave and then scapegoated his managers when he saw the public outrage. Other than that 2003 incident, I simply can’t remember the MJS simply saying “He’s wrong” about anything.

The measure is only asking for a study of the benefits in question. We want to the know the real costs and Walker wants to keep us in the dark. The likely outcome of a study will be that they will not cost that much more. Then Walker and friends will have to admit that the real reason for fighting this is rank discrimination and pandering to an extreme base. That is why he vetoed the study and that is flat out (come on, you can say it) W-R-O-N-G!

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