Politifact just came out with a horribly wrong rating for the Save WI Deerhunting campaign that our kossack, wmspringer, has been running for the past week. Here are a number of facts that THEY got wrong in their reporting.

 

NUMBER ONE

They claim that we have a Facebook fan page but we do not. That is not the case. If Politifact had bothered to read our FAQ, they would've seen that we DO NOT have a Facebook fan page, and that we are NOT associated with that Facebook fan page.

The SAVE WI Deerhunting campaign is run by wmspringer and his wife, who both have hearing impairments, and they live in Wisconsin. I am based in Texas, and 2laneIA is based in Iowa. We both have been helping out wmspringer and his wife in this campaign. I have experienced just how disastrous Texas's private ranches can be for affordable hunting. It just doesn't exist anymore for hunters, and is now restricted to those who can afford to hunt. It puts food out of reach for hunters to provide to their families in Texas. That's why we started the SAVE WI Deerhunting campaign, to prevent the Texas debacle from happening to public lands in Wisconsin.

NUMBER TWO

Politifact claims that privatization of public lands will not happen, and that the Texas Monthly article quoting Dr. James Kroll is ten years old, making it irrelevant. This is what James Kroll, the Deer Czar, said in Texas Monthly:

"Game management," says James Kroll, driving to his high-fenced, two-hundred-acre spread near Nacogdoches, "is the last bastion of communism.""People who call for more public lands are ‘cocktail conservationists,’" he says, who are really pining for socialism. He calls national parks "wildlife ghettos" and flatly accuses the government of "gross mismanagement."

Politifact also ignores the record that Scott Walker's own appointees have set when it comes to privatizing public lands:

1) DNR Land Could Be Sold To Raise Cash

2) DNR Appointee Sought To Privatize Trout Streams

[Gunderson] once pushed for legislation that would have privatized thousands of miles of Wisconsin's waterways, including portions of every trout stream in the state. The 2004 legislation, authored by Gunderson while he was representing the 83rd District (Waukesha) in the State Assembly, redefined "navigable waters" in a way that would have denied public access to between one third and one half of Wisconsin's public waterways.

3) Walker DNR Appointees Look Other Way On Pollution of Wetlands

As DNR executive assistant, Gunderson became a central figure in the recently publicized "Sewergate" scandal when he worked behind the scenes to help Herr Environmental, Inc. evade serious penalties from charges of illegally dumping human urine and feces on fields near residential areas in Jefferson County in 2009.

And there's more about what a joke Dr. Kroll is with his taxpayer-subsidized salary of $125,000 in producing a preliminary report like this:

The report, posted today on the DNR website, spans 186 pages, but only 21 of those pages are “new content.” Much of the report is rehashed data that was collected during the state’s Deer 2000 study, and the rest of it is Kroll’s resumé and vitae.

...

Further, it appears that much of this review is purely subjective and based off on an unscientific survey of 486 people who visited Kroll’s personal website. You would expect more for $125,000.

And this is directly from the Save WI Deerhunting website:

The list of assaults from the Walker administration on the waters and woods of Wisconsin is long already, and likely to get much longer if he remains in power. If you like to get out the deer rifle, put on an orange vest over your Carhart jacket and head to the woods, then you should be worried about what Walker will do to the places you love to go. If you love the sound of rushing water and the sight of a brown trout or a walleye breaking the water's surface on the end of your line, you should think about what Walker and his cronies were willing to do to the Mad River and its tributaries.

What is needed is not Deer Czars and crony capitalism in Madison. The Deer Czar does not have a magic answer to making sure that everyone who hunts gets a deer. What is needed is habitat management, which is something that DNR knows how to do, even as under-resourced as it has been in recent years. If there are so many deer that they are eating the forest understory away, that might be good hunting in a given year, but it is unsustainable. Wisconsin fishing is some of the best there is, but it requires attention to stream banks and water quality.

Then again, we shouldn't expect much out of Politifact. Especially when they can't click on the FAQ section of our website to see that we are not based in Berkeley, California, and that we do not have a Facebook fan page. Here's our rating that we're giving to Politifact on their shoddy reporting: