Is there a blogging equivalent of a double take, because I’m doing that right now.

Maine labor boss Jack McKay is a tricky guy. He has been trying to conflate union leadership elections, with union organization elections in an effort to suggest that unions like secret ballots. But if you know anything about unions, you know there is a huge difference.

To that point, yesterday he held a press conference to release a report titled “Truth and Falsehoods,” in which he said that “Union members in eastern Maine vote by private ballot all the time. Just like the sun rises in the east, this is not some big surprise.”

To prove it, he produced a survey of union leaders that showed that 221 union officials were elected by secret ballot. All of this, he said, shows that our advertisements in Maine are wrong.

But of course, our ads have nothing to do with union leadership elections. It is great that they elect their leaders by secret ballot, but that has nothing to do with our ads. What’s not great, is that McKay, Tom Allen, and the Maine Democratic Party are lying about the true intentions of the deceptively-named Employee Free Choice Act, which would effectively eliminate secret ballot elections during union organizing campaigns.

Sadly, Bangor Daily News reporter Dawn Gagnon seems to have bought this hook-line-and-sinker. If she’d bothered to so much as call us, I’d have explained McKay’s ruse.