Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Walker the Fraudulent

You knew it was only a matter of time.

When Scott Walker was campaigning on how he was going to create 250,000 jobs, even though he didn't (and still doesn't) have a plan on how to do this, the only thing getting jobbed was the voters that fell for that crap.

Because of that, you knew it was only a matter of time before he started to skirting the truth and taking credit for windfalls or for someone else's hard work.

Sure enough, as Dan Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, Walker did that very thing:
Consider it one more hurdle cleared by the first-term Republican governor in his quest to fulfill his campaign promise of creating 250,000 jobs in four years.

But wait a second.

Didn't Doyle announce the creation of 125 new jobs at the same business late last year?< Indeed he did. In a Dec. 16 news release, the Department of Commerce announced the Doyle administration was awarding Curt Manufacturing $400,000 in tax credits and $11 million in tax-free bonds under a program created by the federal government's 2009 stimulus package. In addition, state commerce officials said Altoona was receiving a $256,545 grant to upgrade a city road next to the company.

Doyle said the project would create 125 jobs and result in $12.8 million investment to the community.
To top off Walker's thievery, it should be noted that the funding Governor Doyle used was from President Obama's stimulus packet. You know, the same stimulus that Walker and other right wingnuts told us could not and would not create a single job.

But this was not Walker's only misrepresentation. After starting to catch flak for falsely taking credit for these jobs that Doyle and the stimulus plan had created, Walker tried to change the subject by saying he was only there at the insistence of the business owner. Guess what? Yup. That wasn't true either:
Besides, Jadin said, it's the company's call as to when something is announced publicly.

"Generally, the press releases or press conferences are tied around when the company wants to do something," Jadin said. "Obviously, they want to do it with a governor present. That's probably what occurred here."

Or not.

Company President Curt Tambornino said last week's news conference was initiated by the current governor.

"Walker's office had called and said they wanted to do this final presentation with a press release in front of the media," Tambornino said Friday.

The manufacturing boss said he submitted his applications for state help last summer.
For those of who had to contend with Walker for those eight long years that he was county executive, this is nothing new at all. Walker was continuously misrepresenting himself, claiming to be responsible for anything good, whether he was even aware of it ahead of time or not.

One of the most glaring examples of this was in 2008. They had just finished closing the books for 2007 and found that Milwaukee County had a $7 million surplus.  Walker, as one would suspect, tried to take credit for this.  However, in reality, he took himself out of that game, when he had vetoed that entire budget and washed his hands of it:
Darn right, said three county supervisors, Richard Nyklewicz Jr., Roger Quindel and John Weishan Jr. All pointed out that Walker vetoed the entire 2007 county budget, which was overridden by the County Board. That should deny him any bragging rights for the surplus, the supervisors said separately.

Furthermore, it was a board-led move to recraft the county's health insurance that provided such a windfall in savings that it offset other departmental deficits for '07, said Nyklewicz, the County Board's finance commitee[sic] chairman.
Rick Unger, writing at Forbes , claims that Walker taking credit for the jobs that Doyle had created was using stimulus, nothing short of plagiarism. That's one way to describe it alright.

But for those of us that have been going through this for years, we know it's just another  example of Walker committing plain old fraud.

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