A big headline across the top of the Metro front page, and a huge pull-out quote on this piece of phony baloney suggesting that a proposal to require prevailing wages be paid on public construction projects would prevent volunteers from working on them. Here's the big pullout:

"No civic projects will ever get done since you would have to pay volunteers for a municipal project that costs more than $2,000," Port Washington City Administrator Mark Grams wrote in a recent memo to aldermen. "That's INSANE!"

Actually, what's INSANE is the newspaper's treatment of this story. No one in his/her right mind would suggest that volunteers need to be paid the prevailing union wage in order to help with a playground project or some similar community program. That would, indeed, be INSANE. That's why the guy who sold this story to the newspaper said:

"However unreasonable it may sound, that may be the outcome," said Dan Thompson, executive director of the Wisconsin League of Municipalities.

It sounds very, very unreasonable and there is no way that will be the outcome, as Thompson well knows. Lee Sensenbrenner, Gov. Doyle's spokesman, hit it on the head, but apparently not hard enough, when he called it a red herring. He said:

"The intent here is not to stop volunteers from participating in projects. The intent is to protect workers and make sure they are paid the going rate."

Well, duh! Of course, the newspaper didn't see fit to highlight that quote, and it isn't until the verty end of the article that Thompson's more reasonable quote appears:

Thompson said that once it becomes apparent what effect Doyle's proposal might have, "I would not be surprised to see the Wisconsin Legislature be amenable to write in language" exempting volunteers from being paid prevailing wages. "I can't imagine the governor or legislators wanting to prevent donated projects from being built," he said.

Exactly. No one wants that, and if the current bill somehow accidentally would do that, it will be simple to amend it and fix the problem. But that wouldn't have been much of a story. And it would not have helped the effort by Thompson and others (perhaps including the newspaper) to derail the legislation.

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What you didn't read in the Journal Sentinel was this AP story about the paper's fair-haired boy, Scott Walker:

In a strongly worded November fundraising letter, obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, Walker said Doyle and President Barack Obama "rolled out the red carpet for a cabal of militant activist thugs" who registered voters last year. Walker accused Doyle of negligence, resulting in an election system "more akin to Hugo Chavez's rigged polls in Venezuela than the proud Wisconsin tradition."

Reminiscent of Scott McCallum, another desperate Republican candidate for governor, basically calling Doyle a crook. Didn't work then, won't work now. If Walker's at that stage two years before the election, 2010 should be a lot of fun -- if he lasts that long.

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Speaking of Walker, the discussion about moving Wisconsin's spring elections to November and eliminating the non-partisan local races should give him pause. The NY Times recent poll found the Republican Party's favorable unfavorable ratings at 31-58, almost 2 to 1 on the negative side. How'd you like to be running for Milwaukee County exec as a Republican in a November election?