What's Noteworthy In Latest Walker Jobs-Fail Numbers

[Updated 12:01 p.m.] First off, the takeaway in the story isn't that he cannot meet his signature campaign promise to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs. Sorry for the double-negative, but Walker's failing data and his intentionally-failed response is pure double-negative inspiration.

For the record, he made the now-infamous promise often in the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, and during the 2012 recall campaign, too, with braggadocio, that the number was a floor, not a ceiling, and that once the pesky recall protesters went away, the economy and his leadership fortunes would take off like a rocket.

In fact, he's doubled-down on the double-down, if you can see through the nuance.

But in reality, the promise has been a political and economic dud for years, a classic, perhaps historic Wisconsin unforced error.

A failure guaranteed by hitting the middle and working classes here with ideologically-driven austerity, - - killing Amtrak construction, closing up train assembly, discouraging wind turbine manufacturing, cutting a billion dollars from education and other public programs and even taxing the poor.

Do that and the economy will stall, though Walker was never reticent about responding with excuses - - from the federal fiscal cliff to ObamaCare, to troubles in Syria, to Jim Doyle (not Governor since January, 2011), to certain numbers that he plain didn't like.

And he's tried other 'solutions,' like walking away from the pledge, and scrubbing it from his websites.

And claiming he should get an extra year to make it happen, as if a four-year-term actually comes with a bonus, fifth year.

Basketball ref to Coach Walker: You have six players on the court.  

Coach Walker to ref:  My rules. We get an extra player.

But the numbers don't lie - - he's just over 40% there with less than a year in his term to go - - but lies have been caught as Walker has repeatedly and rightly earned false ratings and other scorn for misrepresentations and bogus claims about the data, and his progress towards meeting the goal.

What's significant in the Journal Sentinel's most recent accounting of Walker's jobs-fail is that the paper asked Walker's people for an interview on the subject and they declined.

It's a pattern: Walker fails, the paper demands accountability and Walker stonewalls.

But Walker's handlers and image-makers will use a taxpayer-paid website put up by his dysfunctional and ethically-challenged business development plaything - - the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, Scott Walker, Chairman of the Board! (it's a corporation, doncha know, so give it conservative style points but not much credit for job-creating) - - to slap Walker's name on news releases about 20 jobs in Eau Claire and 50+ in Antigo.

They'll put him in a WEDC video or in another on yet a different taxpayer-paid website posted by the Wisconsin Department of Tourism and on other state sites - - but a real-time interview with the state's biggest newspaper which twice endorsed his gubernatorial campaigns (and three times for Milwaukee County Executive), where he doesn't control the message?

Nope.

Walker put signs up at the border when he was elected declaring that Wisconsin was open for business.

But is his administration and its business and its leadership really open?

As Walker would say:

No comment.