No, Patrick, Competence Matters

Patrick McIlheran has his Sunday opinion piece up and this one is a real laugher. Patrick is actually trying to portray Scott Walker as the responsible candidate in the race for governor.

To prove his point, he decries the state's failure to keep petty criminals locked up for excessive lengths of time or to be able to turn around Milwaukee County's Income Maintenance program in one day:

The state doesn't pick up garbage anyhow, but surely the mayor meant it as a sign of some task that no one questions. The state has some of those - keeping prisoners locked up, for instance, or passing out food stamps. Gov. Jim Doyle decided the state couldn't afford the former and started releasing inmates early. His administration so badly botched the food stamps that federal authorities stepped in.

However, before Walker dumped the House of Correction on the Sheriff's Office, one of myriad of problems occurring there were prison escapes. I guess it's better if you make it look like you're not releasing them intentionally, but through negligence.

Paddy also forgets to mention that the reason the state took over the food stamp program was because Walker had mismanaged it so poorly that it was either the state take over and fix it (which they did do) or let the taxpayers in the state and Milwaukee County be hit with a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit.

Not exactly a stellar example of Walker's responsibility, is it?

But the best of the worst is when PaddyMac tries to make Walker's use of a private cleaning company better for the courthouse and the tax payers, and that budgets should be cut.

Apparently, in Paddy's world, instead of some county worker making $10 an hour is much better to give the CEO of a cleaning company a big old contract. Never mind that said CEO is a campaign contributor.

And about those budget cuts. They only produced situations like the horrible events that have been occurring at the mental health complex or the county's infrastructure to fall down. I wonder if Paddy would also call these things a "trade off."