Who Does Paddy Mac Work For?

After years of trashing the government and the money wasted on bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., Patrick McIlheran became the second most hypocritical person* in the world when he left the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to go work for Senator Ron "Sunspot" Johnson. As the paper reported at the time:

Patrick McIlheran, a columnist for the Journal Sentinel's op-ed page since 2004, is leaving the newspaper this week to take a job with Republican Sen. Ron Johnson's staff.

McIlheran, who will work out of Johnson's Washington, D.C., office, will research issues and write about them for the senator. McIlheran also will work for the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia, of which Johnson is the ranking member.

A little later, it was found that Paddy Mac was making around $93,000 a year, although it appears he does little more than tweet Republican talking points.

But now it gets really interesting.

Michael Horne, working at Milwaukee Magazine, has also been covering this story, and had the same facts. Despite this, RoJo's press secretary contacted the magazine, wanting a correction, claiming that P-Mac didn't work for the Senator at all and just for the subcommittee. Horne also reports that since Paddy has started suckling at the government teat, as he would quaintly put it, he's changed is Linked In and Facebook profiles to reflect the same.

Case closed, right?

Wrong.

Horne has this to add to his report:

Finally, our original reporting included a call to the subcommittee office asking for McIlheran. The operator said McIlheran did not work at the subcommittee’s office, and forwarded the call to the office of the senator.

Perhaps it's time for an open records request just to see exactly which teats Paddy Mac has been suckling on and how he got there.

If he's only been with the subcommittee, someone needs to explain RoJo's involvement in all of this. Did RoJo manipulate the system to get a job for someone who was lobbying hard for him?

And if Paddy Mac's getting money from both RoJo and the subcommittee, why is RoJo's office lying?

*The most hypocritical still belongs easily to Scott Walker, who holds that title by such a wide margin, he'll never lose it.

Patrick McIlheran: A Waste Of Tax Payers Dollars

Six months ago, Patrick McIlheran, champion of the tax payers and fighter of government waste, showed his true nature by leaving the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and going to suck at the government teat.  That is, of course, something he has spent years criticizing people for doing.

Bill Christofferson has looked into this, and even though we still don't know exactly what he is supposed to be doing, we do know he's getting paid extremely well for it, whatever it is:

What we do know is that McIlheran has landed in a pretty cushy job at taxpayer expense.

Legistorm, which tracks Congressional salaries, reports that McIlheran was paid $27,213.84 between the time he bellied up to the public trough on June 20 and Sept. 30. That works out to an annual salary of $93,300.

And, of course, there's a government health care plan (horrors!) and lots of other benefits, including both Social Security and a pension. The Congressional Budget Office says benefits add 26% to 50% on top of salaries, depending on age, salary, length of service, and retirement plan. So that's at least another $25,000 from the taxpayers, and probably quite a bit more. But at least he doesn't have to join a union. That must be a relief for a generally anti-government, anti-union, anti-worker, bootstraps kind of guy.

Whooey! $93,000 salary is a lot of money, especially for a guy who doesn't work full time and for a job no one knows what he supposed to be doing.

Well, there is one thing we do know he does do. He sure tweets up a storm about things that have nothing to do with his supposed job.  The funny thing is he never seems to be doing it during the evening, when his off of work.

I'm sure that Citizens for Responsible Government, Badger Blogger and the rest of the usual "watchdogs" will be on this apparent waste of tax payer money in no time.  Then again, maybe not. That would require integrity.

Milwaukee's Collective IQ Is About To Experience A Significant Jump

Just like we did when Jessica McBride was given the boot or when Paddy-Mac performed the ultimate hypocrisy, Milwaukee is about to be blessed with a significant spike to our collective intelligence.

Drama Queen James T. Harris is leaving the great and about to become greater state of Wisconsin to spew his hatred, bigotry and sexism across the deserts of Arizona.  Gilas will no longer be the only monsters slithering across the sands there.

The funniest part of it is that his mentor, Charlie Sykes, couldn't even let a small time conservative blogger her moment of glory by being the one to break the news, but had to hog it for his own vain self.

The only real question is whether the Petty Child is leaving because he found a better deal for his soul or because he's leaving like a rat jumps from a sinking ship.

Paddy Mac forever?

Patrick McIlheran has been gone from the Journal Sentinel editorial page for a full month now, since leaving for greener pastures and the public trough. Praise the Lord.

He lives on, however, in the paper's website, where his last column, "The Right's Ideas Are Winning," continues to be displayed prominently with the other actual working journalists on the site.

I've sent a polite email to the assistant managing editor of the online edition. We'll see if that wipes the smirk off of McIlheran's face.

UPDATE: It took only 38 minutes to get a reply:

Good point. We'll remove him from the various spots he's featured. Thanks.

McIlheran Reaches Hypocrisy Zenith

Patrick McIlheran, the rabid small government advocate, has taken himself a government job:

Patrick McIlheran, a columnist for the Journal Sentinel's op-ed page since 2004, is leaving the newspaper this week to take a job with Republican Sen. Ron Johnson's staff.

McIlheran, who will work out of Johnson's Washington, D.C., office, will research issues and write about them for the senator. McIlheran also will work for the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia, of which Johnson is the ranking member.

It also proves the old adage of rats leaving a sinking ship.

I reckon that the first bit of research that old Paddy will need to do is show that sunspots are really the cause of all the world's ills.

But this leads to an interesting question: Who will the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel hire to become their new propagandist?

The most logical answer would be Rick Esenberg, who already is a frequent columnist for the paper, and their  go to guy for legal spin.

But like I said, that would be logical, so it's not going to happen.

So who do you think it will be? One of the Badger Blogger Boyzzz? Daddio? Maybe Peter DiGaudio?

Give your guesses in the comments.

Even Twitter Knows About Pat-troll McIlheran

From the esteemed and impeccable Emily Mills (note: the feed reads from bottom up, so the lower entry came first):

click on picture to embiggen

*Sniff, Sniff*. Do You Smell Smoke?

The other day, we pointed the gentle reader to Illy-T's* play by play as Patrick McIlheran gets victimized in a flame war with the second in command of the news room, George Stanley.  The flaming of McIlheran was about a German study claiming that BPA was safe.

Looks like the ensuing lull was not a cease fire, but merely Stanley loading up the big flamethrower:

Four authors of a new report concluding that bisphenol A is safe have ties to companies and groups that benefit from the controversial chemical.

The report was written by the Advisory Committee to the German Society for Toxicology, the country's national association of toxicologists.

Poor Paddy won't be able to sit for a week the way his ass is getting burned.

*Illy-T's coverage was so masterful, even the real media noticed it.

McIlheran's Pants Are On Fire

No, not in the PolitiFact sense of the term. That's left for Charlie Sykes.

McIlhernan's burning sensation is the one that comes from having a senior editor of your newspaper publicly slap you down.

The source of this and some other fun observations would be the Illusory One.

McIlheran: In Defense Of Witch Hunts

Professor William Cronon is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.  He is also a blogger who wrote an eye-opening piece on how the Koch Brothers and their ilk are funding and controlling this recent assault that we have seen in recent weeks, not only on the working people of Wisconsin, but all across the country.

Within days, the Wisconsin GOP came down like a gang of locust, making a very specific open records request.  It was obvious by their choice of words to search for that their only concern was to throw a wide fishing net in their expedition in hope of finding some stray tidbit that they could conflate and use in an effort to discredit his good name.

Patrick McIlheran, resident GOP spokesman at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (motto: Have you unsubscribed yet?) tries a pathetic attempt to justify the GOP's witch hunt (emphasis mine):

Schneider points out something else: The left has freaked, loudly enough to shake some conservatives, because the Wisconsin Republican Party ran a freedom of information request on Cronon's UW e-mail account. Was the professor using the equipment provided by taxpayers to play politics? Inquiring minds are curious, but the left behaves as if to request the records was itself some kind of suppression of the professor's free thought.

The question for McIlheran is this: On what grounds do you suspect that Professor Cronon was using the government's computer to write his blog?

Having some experience myself with what Cronon is currently going through, I have to wonder.

Is it based on some baseless and artificially created "proof" as the right is wont to rely on, since the truth and reality rarely supports their positions?

Or is it because they so often don't do the ethical thing that they naturally presume no one else does either?

Or is Charlie Sykes their director of research?

As McIlerhan would say: Inquiring minds are curious...

McIlheran: Your Illness Is A Sin

Father Patrick McIlheran again climbs up on his podium to preach to the great unwashed masses.

The main premise of his sermon is that there has been a spike of HIV cases among black homosexual men because they are sinners.  In other words, he is saying that those people who contract HIV are only getting what they deserve.

How absolutely Pat Robertsonian of him.  If Westboro was a Catholic Church instead of a Baptist one, McIlheran would probably be applying for membership.

But to further his egregiousness, McIlheran just doesn't know when to stop and includes this:

... Most churches decry drunkenness, and isn’t that awfully mean? (Don’t even get me started on how many churches cruelly try suppressing any expression of drunkenness by offering AA chapters meeting space down in the basement hall!)
No, in fact, it isn’t mean to say drunkenness is wrong, or lying or gluttony or any of the rest. It is kind if you believe, as churches do, that sin does real and lasting damage to the sinner.

Considering that Alcohol Abuse (and Drug Abuse, for that matter) are considered to be mental illnesses, isn't it being particularly inappropriate to be condemning it?

It makes you wonder what McIlheran does during his free time.  I'd hate to think he takes field trips to the local hospital and patrol the cancer ward telling people that they are sinners.

Did Talk Radio and Fox News Play A Role In Arizona Nightmare?

A gunman, Jared Loughner, approached, and at point blank range, shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head. Giffords, survived the immediate wounding, but is still in critical condition after having had surgery.

Unfortunately, the gunman proceed to shoot eighteen other people, killing six. Among the dead was U.S. District Judge John Roll and a nine year old girl.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik held a press conference and had this to say:

Mr. Dupnik called the shooting a "very sad day for Tucson" and a "horrendous, horrendous, senseless, unbelievable crime." And then he blamed the crime on the rhetoric -- presumably political rhetoric -- in the country.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," he said. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Mr. Dupnik said it is time for the country to "do a little soul searching."

He added: "The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business ... This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in."

I'm sure that Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling, Patrick McIlheran and their supporters will deny this up and down until they are blue in the face (blue faces and red necks don't go as well together as you might expect).

But since Sykes has already been sued for libeling a Hispanic man and Belling has been suspended for using the term "wetback," they cannot deny that they love too stir up their audiences primal fear and hatred.

It's rather telling that right loves to act very much the tough guy, with their rantings about gods, gays and guns, but when it comes to owning up to the consequences of their behaviors, they mewl a different tune. So much for their argument for personal responsibility.

McIlheran Deals From The Bottom

Patrick McIlheran has a snide little post up, in which he cites the psuedo-news organization McIver Institute* who found that former Governor Doyle had slotted a handful of people into state jobs before leaving.

Even though every politician leaving office at any level has done this, apparently now it is a bad thing.

I guess that is because Scott Walker needed those spots for his cronies. So far, we know he's only found a spot for his former Director of Administrative (Lying) Services, Cindy Archer, as reported by his own newspaper.**

But that isn't even the most egregious part of his post.

McIlheran then has to go on lying about Russ Feingold, labeling him as being for infanticide. Gutter press, indeed.***

*Just how does that propagandist group keep their 501(c)(3) status?

** A quasi-news organization

***Factoid: McIlheran only buys Bibles with that pesky commandment about not bearing false witness redacted.

McIlheran Hedges To Make A Sale

Patrick McIlheran is trying to convince his readers that Scott Walker's power grab isn't really a power grab, but is something totally benign. But one word in his verbose oversell of the power grab is what poker players and human lie detectors call "the tell."

The governor's power to veto is a big one. Wisconsin’s governor can rewrite budgets with the partial-veto power, and that power used to be even stronger. Conservatives liked it when Tommy Thompson did this and didn’t when Jim Doyle did, and perhaps it’s better if no governor could so edit law, but the point here is that Walker’s not seeking the power to rewrite laws or even regulations. We haven’t seen a bill, just the idea, but Walker appears to ask only for the ability to veto new regulations -- not edit new ones, not veto old ones. The result is one more opportunity to deny power to the state overall, a reasonably safe bet.

The use of the word "appears" would indicate that either McIlheran isn't sure of his facts (which is highly likely) or he knows that he is lying and is carefully choosing his words so he can't get called out for telling a flat-out lie (which is even more likely).

Either way, Walker shouldn't be given this kind of carte blanche. And before any conservatives would try to argue otherwise, think about this: How would you feel if Jim Doyle had that same kind of power?

McIlheran's Unhealthy Approach To Health Care

Once again, McIlheran kvetches about health care reform, this time spurned on by the thought of allowing patients make informed choices as opposed to having Big Insurance make those choices for them.

First he mews about the supposed death panels that only he and Sarah Palin still believe in. Never mind that the private insurance companies provide enough death panels in their own right. Also don't mind that while governmental death panels do exist, they are only found in Republican-controlled states.

At the end of his post, we find what is his real driving factor:

The problem lies in the guarantee -- in thinking in terms of rights and of universality and equity. This doesn’t mean we must embrace some every-geezer-for-himself savagery; it suggests that some more rational approach that centers on the autonomy of the patient -- such as, for instance, the concepts behind Rep. Paul Ryan’s “roadmap” -- be central.

None of this precludes social generosity outside the realm of politics -- indeed, it calls for exactly the kind of charitable spirit implicit in every hospital name that includes the word “memorial.” Not that the government doesn’t have a role, but when we talk about health care chiefly in terms of rights asserted and claims made on strangers via the political process -- as Obamacare does -- then inevitably those strangers will balk at the cost, and they will do so through the mechanisms of the administrative state.

Keep in mind that Ryan's "road map" consists of basically taking Grandma out to the middle of nowhere and pushing her out the door, allowing her the "autonomy" of fending for herself: Life preserving medicine or life preserving food?

His solutions, let the hospitals give free treatment. They'll only turn around and stick it to the rest of us at a higher rate than a centralized system would cost, but it would allow the CEO's, board members and stake holders to profit nicely on our daily struggles for survival.

Gosh, what a humanitarian old Paddy is.

Speaking of Entertainment Value

Patrick McIlheran put up a rather weak, even for his standards, post about the upcoming county executive race. He has a grand old time yukking it up about Ieshuh Griffin, former state legislature candidate who ran with the slogan of "Not the whiteman's bitch."

I thought the most comical part was when he offered the half-hearted endorsement of Jeff "Walker Lite" Stone, with the only positive he could come up with was calling him "polite."

But the commenters stole the post with their thread and this one-liner:

I hate to add this in but the Cudahy comb-over comment is hilarious. I've been wondering about that loaf of hair for a long time. Pat- your not fooling anyone.

He Might Not Know Art...

Patrick McIlheran uses his best bud's witticism to take some pot shots at The Calling, inferring that it should be dropped into Lake Michigan.

Illy-T points out the hypocrisy of Paddy and friends:

So do you think you'll catch Patrick McIlheran or Charlie Sykes or Mark Belling publicly lampooning the aesthetic predilections of their own conservative Republican fellow travelers and popular benefactors?

Me neither.

But this is the journalism that wins awards.

Paddy might not know art, but he knows what he likes.

I Can't Wait To See Sykes Explain This One

So, Chuckles Sykes, like his paper counterpart, keeps trying to hammer into people's heads that Scott Walker is doing them some kind of favor by making them pay hundreds of millions of dollars in order to chase thousands of much needed jobs out of the state, likes to play adolescent games by referring to high speed rail as the "half-fast" train. Get it? If you say it quickly, half-fast sounds like half-assed.

Oh, isn't Sykes the droll one?

But I wonder how Sykes, or Patrick McIlheran, will say a half-fast train is worse than a dead-stop car:

Travel times on the busy section of freeway will more than double during a repaving project scheduled to last about three months, from early April to the end of June.

Motorists commuting between the Marquette Interchange and Wisconsin Highway 16 can expect to add an hour per day to their drive time.

McIlheran Jumps The Tracks For Walker

In Sunday's issue of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Patrick McIlheran claims that Scott Walker did our neighbors to the west a grand favor by cutting off high speed rail. McIlheran's effort is to discredit the majority of Wisconites who are might steamed about Walker turning away all those jobs and making state tax payers cough up hundreds of millions of dollars, all for some malignant ideology.

One of the arguments that pro-train advocates have argued is that by killing the train, Walker has also put Minnesota into great fiscal danger.

In his effort to undermine that argument, ol' Paddy finds one of the few politicians from that state that was in agreement with Walker. Of course, McIlheran also cites Michele Bachmann, and we all know what that is worth.

Patrick even manages to get in touch with the Minnesotan version of WPRI (Wankers Promoting Republican Ideology) who claims that no one in the great state really cares about some dumb old train anyway.

Pretty convincing stuff that Patrick writes. Pretty convincing, indeed, unless one has access to Teh Google Machine which blows up Patrick's craven lies in about .047 seconds.

You see, despite Patrick's claims that the politicians in Minnesota are about to erect a 100 foot tall statue of Walker along the Mississippi River, the fact is that they are much less than pleased with Walker's silliness:

Earlier, Minnesota's Gov.-elect Mark Dayton reacted to the news, lamenting the loss and worried about its impact on Minnesota's plan to be part of a high-speed rail route from Chicago to the Twin Cities.

Today, Jerry Miller, chair of the Minnesota High-Speed Rail Commission called Wisconsin's loss of funding "a setback" but said the commission will continue to work to get the rail line established.

And regarding the common folk that are being affected by Walker's acquiescence to the road builders, well it's seems like there is still an interest by John and Jane Q. Public after all.

So why is Patrick telling lies for Scott Walker? After all, Walker has already won the election, so why continue with this farce?

Well, the main reason is that Walker is not too popular with the people. And that poll was taken before it was learned that Walker was to chase away thousands of jobs or adding insult to injury by making the tax payers foot the bill for the chance not to have a job. I would imagine that his popularity is considerably less now that people have had tome to absorb what the implications of Walker's folly really is. (Also not included in this is his Walker's push to make Wisconsin a right-to-work-for-less state.)

Another reason is that as of November 3, Walker started laying the groundwork for his eventual run for POTUS. It just wouldn't do to start off his presidential campaign by making obvious and egregious blunder after obvious and egregious blunder, so he needs the fallible services of Charlie Sykes and Patrick to keep the lie going that he is not a completely incompetent fool.

McIlheran Gets Schooled

A couple of weeks ago, Patrick McIlheran crowed about a school district that chose another health care provider besides WEA. In McIlheran's world, anything to do with teachers is obviously evil, and thus should be condemned as such.

Too bad for Paddy that reality, as usual, is not on his side on this issue. Thus comes the schooling:

I am writing in response to columnist Patrick McIlheran's angry attack on my company, the WEA Trust.

He wrote in a Dec. 2 column on Perspectives that my company just lost the Milton School District as a health insurance customer because we were outbid. That is true. We competed in a fair bid process, and in this instance, the school district chose another carrier.

But McIlheran went on to make a series of unfounded and unwarranted statements that we must refute. He concluded that because we lost the business, my company, therefore, "sucks away scarce school money" from all of our state's schools where we do business. It's a choice between "more taxes or more ignorance," he says.

That's outrageous.

If P-Mac holds true to his nature, any day now he will be putting up a blog ridiculing the corrective post.

The funny thing, though, is that I never would have thought McIlheran was so much against the free market system.

H/T Illusory Tenant

McIlheran: Fighting Racism Is Pointless

Once again the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wastes paper and expensive ink by giving some of its precious space to Patrick McIlheran, who now has a beef with a new law requiring police to keep track of who they stop. He feels it's pointless because all cops know that it is wrong to stop someone just on the basis of the color of their skin:

There could be some value, Jungbluth says, if the exercise reassures the worried that police aren't stopping people on account of race. Lawmen already get that, however. They're trained that racial profiling will end their careers.

He's correct if he's talking about the good cops. Unfortunately, while most law enforcement officers are good people, not all cops are good cops, and there is still a lot of evidence of institutional racism.

Or perhaps Paddy thinks that is what makes them good cops...