Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) is facing a recall election after he pushed through legislation last year that limited public workers’ bargaining rights. And now a special Wisconsin state law that allows recall targets to raise unlimited amounts of money in the early days of the campaign has helped Walker raise an unprecedented amount of money.

The Associated Press reports:

Walker set the record for a state office with $12.1 million raised last year. Campaign finance records filed Monday show he has already easily surpassed that this year, raising $13.1 million between Jan. 18 and last week. He spent nearly $11 million and had almost $4.9 million in the bank.

Walker is beloved by rich conservatives — as the AP writes his “fan list reads like a who’s who of some of the richest people in America” including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Richard DeVos, owner of the Orlando Magic NBA team, and the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

If wealthy big donors have sided with Walker, unions have been mustering efforts to get Walker. The Walker vote has been “billed as a critical test of labor muscle versus corporate money,” write Jim Rutenberg and Steven Greenhouse at the New York Times. “But it is only a warm-up for a confrontation that will play out during the presidential election…:”

The same national groups flooding the streets and the airwaves in Wisconsin — the Koch-supported group Americans for Prosperity on the right, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., ...

No one likes a smart aleck — or a stupid one, for that matter.

A really stupid one is called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which masquerades as an "educational" group that simply assists state officials with policy research. In fact, it's a corporate-financed, far-right front group that writes and aggressively pushes anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environmental, anti-immigrant, and other extremist "anti-people" legislative proposals.

ALEC's operatives take these cookie-cutter bills from state capitol to state capitol, getting Republican governors and key legislators to introduce them. Then the organization helps organize astroturf campaigns to ram such ugliness into law.

Gov. Scott Walker's repressive agenda in Wisconsin is an ALEC product. So is Arizona's war on Latinos, as is Florida's murderous "stand your ground" shoot-em-up law. However, all this success led ALEC to get stupid. Its leaders got to thinking they were bulletproof, that they could shove this stuff down people's throats all across the country — and the people would just accept it.

That was wrong. In fact, it was stupidly arrogant. Not only have people rebelled, they've also organized and mobilized. Groups like the Center for Media and Democracy, Color of Change, Common Cause, Occupy Wall Street, and People For the American Way have rallied grassroots people to hit ALEC where it really hurts: its pocketbook. Suddenly key corporate sponsors of this extremist organization were hearing from outraged citizens (and customers) — and now company after company is withdrawing its sponsorship.

Among those recently declaring that ALEC just "doesn't fit our business needs" are Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Mars, McDonalds, PepsiCo, and Wendy's.

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)

The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.

Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.

Hispanics are also reacting to ...

On the 44th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we look at his history of activism in Wisconsin, a state that has been central to the history of labor organizing, and beyond. Near the end of his life, King was helping to organize members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which was founded in Wisconsin in 1932. King argued that labor rights were human rights and civil rights, a message that resonated in Wisconsin during last year’s protests against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers, as well as slash their pay and benefits. "This is not just a battle about economics. It’s not just a battle about wages, benefits and pensions,” says John Nichols, political correspondent for The Nation. "It’s also a battle about that right to organize, that right of individuals who, in and of themselves, may not have immense power but, when they come together, have the potential to challenge the most powerful political and economic figures in the country. Dr. King preached that as a gospel."

Transcript:

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) could be out of a job soon as the Government Accountability Board ordered a recall election this week after more than 900,000 Wisconsinites submitted signatures to hold a recall election this summer. With the election just two months away, outside spending groups are already scrambling to pour money into ads both for and against Walker. However, because of a quirk in Wisconsin campaign law, these groups can spend unlimited funds without disclosing where their money is coming from.

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With Wisconsin recall elections looming against four Republican state Senators -- as well as Governor Scott Walker and Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch -- the state's politics was thrown for another loop Friday when a targeted senator up and quit.

State Senator Pam Galloway, a Tea Party favorite and one of Walker's steadiest backers in the legislature, announced her immediate resignation from the legislature and her decision not to contest the recall election.

The move had dramatic repercussions:

1. Republicans have lost the complete control of state government that allowed the governor to advance an austerity agenda that was defined by attacks on unions and deep cuts in public education and public services funding -- along with the harshest Voter ID law in the nation, a rigidly partisan redistricting of legislative districts and what critics complain has been a battering of the state's open-government tradition.

2. State Senate Majority Leader Jeff Fitzgerald, a Walker ally who is targeted for recall, has lost his position as the dominant player in the legislature.  He now must enter into a power-sharing agreement with Minority Leader Mark Miller, a progressive Democrats who led a historic walkout by his caucus during last year's struggle over Walker's labor law changes.  Committee assignments will be redone to reflect what is now a 16-16 split in the Senate.

3. Governor Walker, who has ...

For the last year, the American Legislative Exchange Council and its members have directed Republican-controlled legislatures across the country to enact what critics have rightly decried as voter-suppression laws.

The most aggressive of these have been voter ID laws that place dramatic new burdens on the elderly, students, low-income and minority citizens who want to participate in the democratic process.

Since the 2010 election results gave Republicans full control of statehouses across the country, dozens of states have considered proposals for variations on the model voter ID proposals advanced by ALEC, a corporate-funded group that brings together business interests and conservative legislators to advance agendas that make it easier for corporations to influence elections, and harder for citizens to participate in them.

Eight states, including Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin either made existing voter ID laws dramatically stricter or enacted new laws that were condemned by groups such as ...

A Dane County judge has granted a temporary injunction against Wisconsin’s new voter identification law, which he called “the single most restrictive voter eligibility law” in the country.

Circuit Judge David Flanagan’s ruling Tuesday means the voter ID requirement would not apply for the April 3 presidential primary and local general election.

A spokesman for Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said the state likely would appeal, and other state election officials pointed out that other aspects of the law will remain in effect, such as having to sign a poll list.

The NAACP’s Milwaukee branch and immigration and worker rights group Voces de la Frontera had sued over the law last year. A trial on whether to grant a permanent injunction is scheduled for April 16.

In granting the injunction, Flanagan found that the plaintiffs likely would succeed at trial and would suffer irreparable harm without the court’s inter vention.

“It’s a solid victory for voting rights and all voters in the state of Wisconsin,” said Richard Saks, attorney for the NAACP, at a news conference Tuesday at St. Mark’s AME Church, 1616 W. Atkinson Ave.

“It’s a win for the hundreds of thousands who have difficulty or find it impossible to get voter ID under Act. 23.”

Rep. Jeff Stone (R-Greendale), a co-sponsor of the voter ID law, said: “Obviously, I’m disappointed. It’s a good piece of legislation. It’s a good law. I’m looking forward to having the decision appealed, and I believe at end of the day we will have a photo ID law in effect in Wisconsin.”

With the primary looming, he wondered whether confusion would ...

One of the newly named co-chairs of President Obama's re-election campaign is openly criticizing the President's decision to accept super PAC funds, his record on civil liberties and his handling of the war in Afghanistan. Former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has described Obama's decision on super PACs as "dancing the with the devil." At the time Feingold was named a campaign election co-chair on Wednesday, the lead headline on his organization's website read: "The President Is Wrong." "I think it's a big mistake to go down the road of unlimited, undisclosed corporate contributions," Feingold says. "That's not who Barack Obama is, that's not who the Democratic Party should be, and I think it doesn't help him get re-elected. I think it delivers the Democrats as well as the Republicans to corporate power and corporate domination." Feingold served in the U.S. Senate for 18 years. During that time, he wrote the landmark campaign finance law McCain-Feingold. He also opposed the war in Iraq and was the only senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act. After he lost his re-election bid in 2010, he is founded the organization Progressives United. His new book is called, "While America Sleeps: A Wake-Up Call for the Post-9/11 Era." 

We're being told by today's High Priests of Conventional Wisdom that everyone and everything in our economic cosmos necessarily revolves around one dazzling star: the corporation.

This heavenly institution, the HPCW explain, has such financial and political mass that it is the optimal force for organizing and directing our society's economic affairs, including the terms of employment and production. While other forces are in play (workers, consumers, the environment, communities and so forth), they are subordinate to the superior gravitational pull of the corporate order. Profits, executive equanimity and a healthy Wall Street pulse rate are naturally the economy's foremost concerns.

How nice. For the wealthy few. Not nice for the rest of us, though. We're presently seeing the effect of this enthronement of self-serving corporate elites. Millions of Americans are out of work, underemployed and tumbling from the middle class down toward poverty. Yet excessively paid and pampered CEOs (recently rebranded as "job creators" by fawning GOP politicians) are idly sitting on some $2 trillion in cash, refusing to put that enormous pile of money to work on job creation.

The Powers That Be keep us tethered to this unjust system of plutocratic rule only by constantly ballyhooing it as a divine perpetual wealth machine that ...

One year ago this week, blogger Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast pranked Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by posing as billionaire David Koch on a phone call. As the crowds at the Capitol protesting Walker's bill to end collective bargaining were increasing in size and volume, the fake Koch inquired how Walker’s efforts to "crush that union" were going. Walker's fawning response helped rocket the Wisconsin protests into the national media limelight.

Now the real David Koch reveals that crushing unions is indeed at the top of his agenda. In an interview with the Palm Beach Post, Koch talks about Walker, unions and the historical importance of the Wisconsin recall fight.

"We have spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We are going to spend more."

Koch didn’t know that when he sat down with Palm Beach Post reporter Stacey Singer that he ...

Billionaire campaign donor David Koch, heir to a fortune and a political legacy created by one of the driving forces behind the John Birch Society, makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

“What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He’s an impressive guy and he’s very courageous,” Koch explained in a recent conversation reported by the Palm Beach Post. “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”

That’s no surprise. What is surprising is that Koch is now appears to be bragging about how he and his brother Charles are using their vast fortune to fund an independent campaign aimed at “helping” Walker. Even in an era when billionaires such as the Kochs are emerging as key financiers of Super PACS and other campaigning vehicles Koch’s admission will raise ...

After she organized Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson, around the time she joined Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm in forming the National Women’s Political Caucus, Midge Miller got herself elected to the Wisconsin Assembly.

In that latter role, she taught Wisconsin progressives that they ought never be cogs in a political machine. Midge Miller,  arguably the most activist member of the state Assembly during the years of her service from 1971 to 1985, never hesitated to call out Republican or Democratic governors. She never deferred to legislative leaders if she thought they were wrong. She believed in the great progressive tradition of the state that governing involved moral choices and that, while there was always a place for negotiation, and sometimes a place for compromise, there was never an excuse for going along to get along.

The point of progressive public service, argued Midge Miller, was not to be a cog in the machine run by corporate and political elites. It was to make the machine work for the people.

So when Midge Miller’s stepson, Wisconsin ...

Today marks the first anniversary of the Wisconsin uprising that erupted after Republican Gov. Scott Walker announced plans to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers, as well as slash their pay and benefits. Now, one year later, Walker is in the midst of a recall effort and faces an investigation for campaign corruption. "People have begun to recognize that they shouldn’t just wait for elections," says John Nichols, who covered the protests for The Nation magazine. "They should go to the street and challenge political power at the point where that power is taking away their rights or threatening them in some fundamental way." Nichols is the author of the new book, "Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street."

Transcript:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today marks the first anniversary of the Wisconsin uprising that erupted after Republican Governor Scott Walker announced his plans to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers, as well as slash their pay and benefits. Now, one year later, Walker is in the midst of a recall and faces an investigation for campaign corruption. It was February 14th last year when Walker first unveiled the curbs on state workers after refusing to negotiate a new ...

In February, 2011, Scott Walker was just another Republican governor. A favorite of Newt Gingrich, billionaire Tea Partisans Charles and David Koch and wealthy advocates for privatization of education, the Wisconsinite had his national fans on the conservative circuit. But he was not a player, and no one (except perhaps Walker) thought he was headed for the national spotlight. Among the Republican governors ushered into power by the Republican wave of 2010, he was ranked with the “assistant Walmart manager” group of drab mandarins, along with Iowa’s Terry Branstad, South Dakota’s Dennis Daugaard and Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin. He didn’t have the national stature of Ohio’s John Kasich or Kansan Sam Brownback, nor the wild-eyed “say anything” appeal of Arizona’s Jan Brewer or Maine’s Paul LePage.

Yet, when the nation’s most prominent right-wing operatives and reactionary Republicans gathered for the Friday night keynote speech that is always the centerpiece of a Conservative Political Action Conference, it was not a Republican presidential candidates, nor a Congressional leader who was standing at the podium. It ...

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Governor John Kasich’s anti-labor agenda by a sixty-one to thirty-nine margin in a statewide referendum, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker jetted to Arizona to launch the next front in the national campaign to attack union rights.

After meeting with former Vice President Dan Quayle, Walker was whisked over to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, where he briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they could attack “the big-government union bosses.”

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising with unions was “bogus.”

Comparing governors who have been attacking the collective-bargaining rights of public employees with the founders of the American experiment—“just like that group that gathered in Philadelphia”—Walker told his listeners: “We need to have leaders not just in Wisconsin but here in Arizona…”

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America is almost four weeks into the voting stage of the Republican presidential race. The candidates are debating. The media is covering the competition 24/7, and in such minute detail that Rick Perry’s quitting of the contest was treated as news. And Republicans in three states have caucused and voted in numbers that party leaders, pundits and the talk-radio amen corner tell us are significant.

Yet at the same time, those same party leaders, pundits and radio talkers continue to dismiss the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as a false construct with little real hope of prevailing.

Fair enough, let’s compare.

Since January 3, Republican caucuses have been held in Iowa (with an electorate of 2,231,589), and Republican primaries have been held in New Hampshire (electorate of 998,799) and South Carolina (electorate of 3,385,224).

That adds up to a total electorate of 6,615,612 in the trio of first- (and second- and ...

Many organizations, most notably among them Wikipedia, are going dark or gray for today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. When they come back, a lot more Americans will likely be aware of the now substantially altered legislation. And my hope, however unlikely, is that after this day of action, we can reset the conversation, especially now that DNS blocking and rerouting appear to be out of play.

It might help for both sides to acknowledge the legitimate fears held by powerful interests on both sides of the SOPA debate. Changing the way the internet is governed, especially after a year when free access to it played a major role in critically important liberation movements, is a hugely momentous thing to propose, even if you feel that your industry is at stake. It may be difficult to quantify the economic impact of piracy, but that doesn’t mean that there is none, or that it’s illegitimate for the people who work in an industry to feel insecurity about its transformation and their prospects for stable employment in it. Tech companies could do more to sell themselves to legacy content providers as beneficial partners. And legacy media companies could spend more time talking to consumers about customer service and cross-platform accessibility than scolding them.

Content and technology companies are not inextricably enemies, and there’s likely to be less and less daylight between them in the future. Netflix is making investments in shows like mob drama Lillyhammer and a remake of the classic British series House of Cards. On a smaller scale, Hulu is doing the same with its unscripted series from Morgan Spurlock and Richard Linklater and its first scripted ...

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named “right-to-work” laws.

These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.

In short order, all the states that had seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles have been far more bitter and violent in the South than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the ...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is scared, so scared that he is calling in a posse of Texas billionaires to try and save his political skin.

Facing the threat of a recall election, Walker poured money into a television advertising campaign to convince Wisconsinites that his attacks on collective bargaining rights, his budget cuts for education and local services, and his pay-to-play approach to politics are good things.

Wisconsinites weren’t buying what Walker was selling. On Tuesday, the recall campaign mounted by United Wisconsin will submit not just the 540,000 signatures needed to recall Governor Walker but hundreds of thousands more.

This fight is going to happen. Walker knows he faces an accountability moment that threatens to end his long political career.

But he is not giving up easily. The governor is arming himself with all the money he can get his hands on. Big money. Texas money.

When Walker’s campaign announced a month ago that it had ...

Tim Russell, a top aide of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, was arrested for stealing money from a military charity fund for families of Wisconsin soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. John Nichols joined MSNBC’s The Ed Show to explain this investigation’s impact on Walker, who is facing a possible recall election. “Even if he’s not personally tied to the wrongdoing,” says Nichols, “he seems to have very bad judgment in the people he hires and trusts.”

Who would have thought that some young people camped out in lower Manhattan with cardboard signs, a few sharpies, some donated pizza, and a bunch of smart phones could change so much?

The viral spread of the Occupy Movement took everyone by surprise. Last summer, politicians and the media were fixated on the debt ceiling, and everyone seemed to forget that we were in the midst of an economic meltdown—everyone except the 99 percent who were experiencing it.

Today, people ranging from Ben Bernake, chair of the 
Federal Reserve, to filmmaker Michael Moore are expressing sympathy for the Occupy Movement and concern for those losing homes, retirement savings, access to health care, and hope of ever finding a job.

This uprising is the biggest reason for hope in 2012. The following are 12 ways the Occupy Movement and other major trends of 2011 offer a ...

’Tis the season for lists. And so it should come as no surprise that the Politico, the Washington-insider journal that covers every aspect of national politics, has offered up a Boxing Day analysis of “2012’s Top Unanswered Questions.”

What is surprising, and significant, is that the first item on the Politico list does not involve a Congressional or presidential race.

Rather, it focuses on a fight in the states, where the direction of the nation is being determined by pitched battles between right-wing Republican governors and defenders of public education and public services.

Politico’s top unanswered question for 2012 was: “Can Democrats claim a scalp in Wisconsin?”

Putting aside the clichéd and offensive “get a scalp” language, the analysis turns attention to what will indeed be one of the great political battles of the coming year.

“Few are more reviled in Democratic circles than Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who this year forced through a controversial law that significantly curtailed the power of organized labor. Democrats have responded with an aggressive push to put Walker on the ballot in a recall—a battle [t]hat would excite the party’s liberal base and lure an army of deep-pocketed outside groups from both sides of the aisle. Walker, for his part, has already spent about $4 million on TV ads in an effort to polish his image,” writes the online publication. “Walker’s ouster would mark another dramatic victory for labor in its fight against a crop of newly elected Republican governors who have sought to slash collective-bargaining rights. In November, Ohio voters approved a repeal of SB-5, an anti-labor bill championed by Governor John Kasich.”

True enough on ...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) took an important step in combating the epidemic of Republican vote suppression efforts on Friday. DOJ blocked a South Carolina law requiring voters to present photo identification, because the law would disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters. South Carolina is one of the states that under the Voting Rights Act (VRA), due to a history of discriminatory practices, must obtain pre-clearance from DOJ for new voting requirements. The DOJ must certify that such laws are not discriminatory in their impact, not just in their intent. 

According to South Carolina, 240,000 registered voters lack the requisite identification. That alone should be a cause for concern. But the legal problem for South Carolina arises from the fact that those without photo identification are more likely to be African-American than white. (They also tend to be younger, poorer and thus more Democratic-leaning.)

Voting rights experts say DOJ did the right thing. Unfortunately, in states that aren’t subject to pre-clearance, DOJ doesn’t have the same power to protect voting rights. “The Department of Justice came to the only conclusion it could have – that South Carolina’s ID law, like others passed around the country, may disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters and is racially discriminatory in its impact,” says Tova Andrea Wang, an election reform expert at Demos, “The decision is legally correct,” says Daniel Tokaji, an election law professor at Ohio State University. “If the effect is to make it more difficult for minorities to vote than was the case before, then the law presumptively violates the VRA. Given that blacks are more likely to lack the required ID, it was hard for South Carolina seriously to argue that the law complies with the VRA.”

Wisconsin and Indiana, which ...