Your Walker: Tosa Ranger post for the day

First, from Eye on Wisconsin:

Let me tell you a little story about Scott Walker.  Every year he wants to cut or privatize many social programs.  I have someone in my life that benefits greatly from a program at the Behavioral Health Division and every single year Walker wants to cut it.  Now, he would tell you that he is just privatizing it, but it is not that simple.  This program is the Targeted Case Management program for those with mental illness.  It teams the client up with a case manager that usually becomes a mentor and friend.  The case manager helps the client with daily life tasks and provides a stable force which helps the client live more productively in the community.  The clients, who sometimes have real problems trusting people, often rely on their case managers for much in their life.  I can personally attest to the major changes, for the better, for the person that I know as a result of the program.  Now to ask these clients to be cut off from this program and be forced into a new and unknown situation is very callous. 

One of the last few years I was helping the person that I know lobby the County Board to restore the Targeted Case Management program.  This person told me that they had an appointment with Scott Walker.  They asked me if I would come with them, and I agreed.  In that meeting I asked Walker that if the managers for the program could rework their staffing and other issues and came up with a slimmed down version of the program would he keep the program.  Walker told me that he would “look at it.”  The managers of the program did exactly that, and the result was a program budget that would not call for an increase in the tax levy to pay for it.  What did Walker do?  He once again tried to privatize it.  It was at that point that I knew that Walker’s cuts and efforts at privatization where not about the budget, but about ideology and/or something more.

Since that meeting, I have learned that Scott Walker has received thousands of campaign dollars from executives from a company called Phoenix Care Systems.  This company has received several large contracts with Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health Division.  An attempt at making an open records request last September regarding the original bidding process involving this company has yielded nothing almost a year later.  I am still waiting for Behavioral Health Division’s Jim Hill to send me what I have requested.  Phoenix Care Systems has a division called Bell Therapy.  Guess what one of their programs is called at that division?  If you guessed Targeted Case Management, you were correct!

On vacation, I happened to catch the episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa enters the Reading Digest patriotic essay contest, and while in DC catches her congressman taking a bribe from a logging company. She blows the big prize in order to speak out against corruption, and her congressman goes down in a sting. If only it were that easy to catch even this most transparent of corruption in real life. Of course, campaign contributions are not bribes--technically--but you have to wonder why Walker: Tosa Ranger would try to "privatize" a program that is revenue-neutral, helps people who need help, and relies on continuity of care, unless it was specifically to throw business to Phoenix. Maybe there's an innocent explanation, but I doubt we'll get it.

Why do I doubt that we will get such an explanation? Because, as Xoff summarizes for us, Walker: Tosa Ranger can't tell the truth even when he is innocent. It probably was just an oversight that someone somewhere on his team neglected to add a disclaimer from his campaign to a taped phone message, and if Walker: Tosa Ranger had just come clean about it, he would have been okay. Instead, the state elections board looked at the complicated wriggling, shifting, and dodging that Walker: Tosa Ranger and his staff did and slapped him with a $5000 fine. Remember, this is the one that started with Walker's trusted friend and ally--and Walker appointee to the county elections board--Doug Haag who dismissed the notion that there may have been any wrongdoing at all. Xoff picks up the threads:

If Walker had acted the way most candidates do when a complaint is filed with the board, he probably would have gotten a slap on the wrist, too.

Instead, he falsely claimed the issue had already been resolved by the County Election Commission. The board, predictability, found out that wasn't true.

He claimed the disclaimer was left off by the vendor, accidentally, and that the problem was corrected when his campaign learned about it. But his campaign offered no evidence to back up the claim that it asked for a disclaimer, and the vendors didn't back that up either.

When a complaint was filed, Walker asked for two extensions on his reply and then still missed the deadline and filed incomplete responses.

Finally, Walker dissed the board by not coming to the meeting himself and sending someone--John Hiller, his treasurer--who had nothing to do with placing the calls and couldn't really offer any useful information. [. . .] George Dunst, the Elections Board attorney, investigated the case and wrote a memo (.pdf) to the board before the meeting, basically saying in lawyerese that Walker's response did not ring true. I wrote a post about in before the meeting, saying that Dunst clearly didn't believe Walker.

It still might have gone OK for Walker if he--or someone responsible for the violation--had showed up, taken responsibility, explained how it happened, and promised to take steps to make sure there was no repeat. Instead, Walker ducked it and sent Hiller, whose lack of information simply irritated board members.

This man wants to be governor! He acts like a prima donna, obfuscates when he doesn't need to, shuffles people between his campaign and his office staff like lovers on a soap opera, and whines when an independent body nails him for it. (Some people disagree that the State Elections Board is independent, but they are grasping at straws.) Jeebus knows I am no fan of Jim Doyle, but if Walker: Tosa Ranger is what's behind curtain number two, then J-Dizzle it is.