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With little more than a month to go until Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker faces his recall vote, unions and their supporters are pulling out all the stops to replace him with one of their own.

Writing for the pro-union newsletter The Progressive, its political editor Ruth Conniff decried every major piece of “Act 10”—the highly contested Budget Repair Bill that Walker finally got passed by the Wisconsin legislature last March—saying that “If you want a preview of the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan plan for America, take a look at Wisconsin:

• Huge tax breaks for corporations….
• Deep cuts to health care, education, unemployment insurance….
• Rolling back…protections and…regulations….
• Waging war on labor unions, taking away public employee’s collective bargaining rights….

So where does this blueprint leave us?

Wisconsin is now dead last in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for job loss.

Between January 2011 and January 2012, while 44 states and the nation as a whole were adding jobs, Wisconsin was one of only six states to lose jobs—and Wisconsin’s job loss was the worst among that handful of losers.

In its latest jobs report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Wisconsin shed 23,900 jobs between March 2011 and March 2012. Wisconsin was the only state with a statistically significant percentage change in employment to report a net loss, the report stated.

The obvious point she was hoping to prove was that it was because of Act 10 that all these jobs were being lost, while hoping that few would actually take the time to look closely at what the BLS actually said.

First, Conniff is violating a rule of logic—“post hoc, ergo propter hoc”—which means, “After this, then because of this.” In other words, Conniff assumed that