Free Republic

MADISON (WKOW) - Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin) met with African-American community leaders from Madison Wednesday and spoke with the mother of Tony Robinson, the unarmed 19 year-old man who was shot and killed by a Madison police officer last Friday night. Boys and Girls Club of Dane County CEO Michael Johnson reached out to Gov. Walker on Monday asking for a meeting. He wanted to not only discuss what happened to Tony Robinson, but about helping Wisconsin's African-American population going forward. Meeting for breakfast at the governor's mansion Wednesday morning, both Johnson and one of his top officers said they...

Some are calling it one of the biggest construction projects in the country right now — the $400 million expansion of Google’s data center operations in Council Bluffs, a massive undertaking involving roughly 2,000 construction workers with no deadline announced. “We don’t how long it’s going to be going on, we just know that they’re continuing to build,” said Bob Mundt, president and chief executive of the Council Bluffs Area Chamber of Commerce. Since 2007, Google has invested more than $1.5 billion in its facilities in the Lake Manawa area and now at a 975-acre site opposite the MidAmerican energy...

Scott Walker is killing it with Republicans. The Wisconsin governor is one of his party's rising stars—thanks to his ongoing and largely successful war against his state's labor unions, a fight that culminated Monday with the signing of a controversial "right-to-work" bill. Now (for the moment, anyway), he's a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple weeks ago, he polled a close second to three-time winner Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by a significant margin. It probably won't...

Governor Scott Walker (R., Wis.) wasted no time in mocking President Obama’s performance with respect to the economy after the president picked a fight with him for signing a right-to-work bill into law. “On the heels of vetoing Keystone Pipeline legislation, which would have paved the way to create thousands of quality, middle-class jobs, the President should be looking to states, like Wisconsin, as an example for how to grow our economy,” Walker said in a statement to National Review Online. “Despite a stagnant national economy and a lack of leadership in Washington, since we took office, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate...

In what could be a significant opening for the Republican Party, working-class Americans have largely abandoned President Obama and rejected his economic policies as they continue to suffer from the historically weak economic recovery, a new analysis of IBD/TIPP Poll data finds.

..Tamara Kay, a professor in the sociology department at the University of New Mexico, criticized right-to-work laws as "kindergarten math."Much of the focus on fights over right-to-work laws has been on Rust Belt states like Michigan, Indiana, and now Wisconsin, as its governor and likely presidential candidate Scott Walker signed a right-to-work bill Monday. But there's also a high stakes showdown underway in New Mexico. Late last month, the state's House of Representatives passed a right-to-work bill, setting up a face-off with the Senate, which could raise the profile of Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, positioning her as a Walker-esque rising...

In a sharp jab at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, President Obama on Monday criticized Wisconsin's newly-signed law to prevent workers from being obliged to pay union dues as a "sustained, coordinated assault on unions, led by powerful interests and their allies in government." "I'm deeply disappointed that a new anti-worker law in Wisconsin will WEAKEN, rather than strengthen workers in the new economy," Obama said. "Wisconsin is a state built by labor, with a proud pro-worker past. So even as its governor claims victory over working Americans, I'd encourage him to try and score a victory for working Americans —...

We are halfway there: On Friday, the state assembly of Wisconsin voted to make the state the 25th to pass right-to-work legislation, and Governor Scott Walker is expected to sign the bill with some satisfaction. That’s 25 down, 25 to go. (Our optimism is not so unanchored as to consider the sorry case of the District of Columbia.) Right-to-work laws end the practice of union bosses’ enriching their organizations through a legal variety of extortion under which all workers are required to pay the equivalent of union dues, whether they wish to be represented by a particular union or do...

In America, you have the right to remain silent, the right to rise—and soon the right to work. At least that is if you live in Wisconsin, or one of the other right-to-work states that allow private sector workers to opt out of union membership. Next week, it is expected that Gov. Scott Walker will sign legislation making Wisconsin the 25th state to pass right-to-work legislation. Interestingly, Walker didn't actively push for this legislation, but his signature will nonetheless guarantee one more feather in the cap of a Republican governor who has helped transform his state in recent years. You...

Four of the 24 Republicans who serve in the Iowa Senate are announcing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is their pick for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination. Senator Brad Zaun of Urbandale says he’s watched what Walker has done in Wisconsin. “I thought we needed someone with some executive experience and I’ve spent some time privately with him and asked a lot of questions and am 110 percent behind him,” Zaun says. Zaun was the Republican Party’s nominee for one of Iowa’s congressional seats in 2010 and he was a leading contender in the third congressional district in 2014. Zaun says,...

Unemployment in the U.S. has dropped to a seven-year low of 5.5 percent—a level normally considered the mark of a healthy job market. Yet that number isn’t as encouraging as it might sound. While U.S. employers added a solid 295,000 jobs in February, and the jobless rate fell from 5.7 percent, it went down mostly because many people gave up looking for work and were no longer officially counted as unemployed, the government reported Friday. What’s more, wage gains remained sluggish. Those trends suggest that the job market, while improving rapidly, isn’t quite as healthy as it looks. That complicates...

Leftists love to constantly spout off about the “war on women” by conservatives and Republicans. Because, you know, we hate women if we believe they shouldn’t murder their unborn children or something. They also claim women are discriminated against in the workplace by making less money than men, again spewing nonsense and incomplete facts in order to persuade women to vote Democrat. The only problem is, if you look at the statistics involving women in the workforce, you start to see it’s really the loony left that has a war on women. From CNS News: A record 56,023,000 women, age...

On the final day of legislative debate over a proposed Right to Work law in Wisconsin, union protesters proved once again they are unable to replicate the massive crowds generated during Wisconsin’s historic 2011 Act 10 debate. While unions attempted to hold an outside rally during the midday, which mustered about 300 people, the hour long outside rally completely failed to move inside the statehouse and support Wisconsin Assembly Democrats as they debated against the bill. While Assembly Democrats were able to draw debate out to 24 hours by using poetry, claims of racism, and references to Moses delivering the...

On a recent Monday at Washington’s Willard InterContinental Hotel, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was schooled on the world by some of the GOP’s leading foreign-policy lights. In a two-hour tutorial, seated around a table in the Taft Room sipping sodas and coffee, they used detailed regional maps to lead the likely presidential candidate on a tour of the globe’s hot spots: Israel and the Middle East, Latin America, Russia and Ukraine.​ The reason for Walker’s crash course was urgent: He has not impressed many leading Republicans with his grasp of foreign affairs. He drew mockery from members of both parties...

After debating all night, the Wisconsin Assembly passed a right-to-work bill Friday which is designed to end mandatory union membership in the state. The policy, which has passed in 24 states, outlaws forced union dues as a condition of employment. After a state version of the policy passed the Wisconsin Senate last week it was sent to the Assembly where representatives heard testimony from labor experts, union leaders and the public before voting 62-35 in favor of the legislation. Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Committee, praised the Assembly for moving the legislation to Gov. Scott...

(CNSNews.com) - The labor force participation rate hovered between 62.9 percent and 62.7 percent in the eleven months between April 2014 and this February, and has been 62.9 percent or lower in 13 of the 17 months since October 2013. Prior to that, the last time the rate was below 63 percent was 37 years ago, in March 1978 when it was 62.8 percent. The labor force participation rate declined to 62.8 percent in February, while another 92,898,000 Americans were not in the labor force, according to data released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday. The participation...

To listen to President Obama, the U.S. economy is firing on all cylinders. Yet it is hardly creating jobs at a breakneck pace, and too many able-bodied men have grown lazy and show no interest in working. Friday, economists expect the Labor Department to report 230,000 jobs were added in February—down from 336,000 averaged the prior three months. Economists at Wells Fargo expect the pace for the entire year to be only 224,000. The culprits remain slow growth, and Obama’s attempts to remedy income inequality with government programs that fail to lift millions of Americans to dignified work. Since the...

The U.S. economy added 295,000 jobs in the February, according to the Labor Department's monthly survey and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.5 percent. The latest strong data beat expectations and follows on the heels of a robust jump for the previous month — a sign that the economy is finally picking up steam. Expectations among economists had been for the economy to add another 240,000 jobs from last month and for the unemployment rate to notch back down to 5.6 percent, where it stood for December. The slight increase in the rate last month was attributed to strong growth...

About 9,300 oil and gas workers lost their jobs in February, as low crude prices spurred energy companies to lay down rigs and lay off employees. The 1 percent decline in oil and gas payrolls adds to the 1,900 jobs that were already shed in January and may just be the beginning of things to come. Producers have been able to blunt some of the pain from the plummet in crude prices — down from a high of $107.26 last June — by stashing oil in storage tanks around the country. But available storage space is filling up, and analysts...

MADISON, Wisconsin—Scott Walker loves the haters. In recent years as Wisconsin has moved further to the right, the mild-mannered preacher’s son has become in the eyes of his opponents an icon of all that is evil—and he seems to relish it. On the stump, the governor is fond of talking up the fact that he’s “the No. 1 target in America of the labor unions and many others on the left,” and the hecklers that seem willing to follow him to the ends of the Earth give him a chance to flex his conservative muscles. They feed the perception that...