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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has had a good run lately. He signed a major tax relief package into law, his controversial budget reforms have put the state back in the black, and his opponent has been torched for telling some high-profile fibs. A new poll from Wisconsin Public Radio suggests that voters are appreciative of the governor’s accomplishments. Walker leads Democrat Mary Burke by 16 points in the survey (56/40), with Walker’s approval rating soaring to just shy of 60 percent — an all-time high in the series. (President Obama’s job approval is underwater at 48/50 in the poll). Walker’s...

"Today is a win for transparency in government and the taxpayers of Wisconsin. The Court of Appeals has agreed with the MacIver Institute that Sen. Erpenbach cannot carve out a special exemption to the open records law for whomever he chooses or try to hide public information when he works for Wisconsin taxpayers," Brett Healy, President of the MacIver Institute said. "Government employees and their unions should not be given a cloak of anonymity to hide their attempts to influence the legislative process. Today's decision requires them to play by the same rules as everyone else." The Court of Appeals...

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday took a shot at the mainstream media and even some conservative outlets for underreporting on the success of Gov. Scott Walker (R) in Wisconsin. Limbaugh cited an Associated Press report run Wednesday on page A14 of the New York Times about the Wisconsin Assembly passing Walker’s $504 million tax-cut plan. As previously reported by TheBlaze, Walker intends to use part of Wisconsin’s projected $977 million surplus to pay for property and income tax cuts.

Good to know. Last week, over 27,000 pages of private e-mails from one of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s convicted ex-staffers were released. As soon as the document dump hit the Web, Democrats began climbing over themselves to prove that the e-mails showed that during his time as Milwaukee county executive in 2010, Walker was part of a grand criminal conspiracy — despite the fact that prosecutors had the e-mails for nearly three years and found Walker had engaged in no criminal wrongdoing. This is a lot like what happened with Sarah Palin a while back. Democrats think that a...

With Christie pretty well neutralized, it’s time to turn to the GOP’s other successful blue-state governor and try to cripple him before 2016 too. Might as well have it on your radar now as you’ll be hearing about it sporadically, even though nothing will come of it. The scandal this time is the fact that, back when Walker was Milwaukee County Executive and running for governor, some of his county staff communicated with his campaign staff during county office hours, while on the taxpayer’s dime. It got to the point where a separate wireless router was installed in the county...

How Scott Walker and the conservatives saved Wisconsin. America, take note The Telegraph Has High Praise for Scott Walker Cortney O'Brien 1/28/2014 A certain Republican governor is getting some high praise across the pond. Dr. Tim Stanley, a historian for the United States and contributor to Britain’s The Daily Telegraph published a piece Monday entitled, “How Scott Walker and the conservatives saved Wisconsin. America, take note,” commending the governor of Wisconsin for employing a conservative agenda “that actually works”: The fact is that Wisconsin's recovery is real but fragile, and Walker has balanced the books without trying to impose on...

The state of our state is strong and improving every day. The economy is dramatically better, and our finances are in great shape. Still, there is more work to be done. Thankfully, the days of double-digit tax increases, billion-dollar deficits and major job loss are gone. We replaced them with massive tax cuts, growing budget surpluses and significant job growth. Wisconsin is going back to work. We have some really great news about the economy and our fiscal situation. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau recently verified that the state will have $911 million more than previously projected. These new revenues...

Gov. Scott Walker used his election-year State of the State address Wednesday to rally support for his plans to use the majority of Wisconsin’s $912 million in unexpected revenue for tax cuts. Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/scott-walker-touts-improvements-in-state-s-finances-in-annual/article_584cc05b-aa56-5178-aac7-053647a3dd75.html#ixzz2rTK3FtGS

RUSH: I need to illustrate a point. Yesterday there was really profound, great news out of the state of Wisconsin. In my mind, earth-shattering news. In my mind, it's the kind of news that should have caused a political earthquake, and probably did. It's just that nobody reacted to it. Here you have one of the bluest of blue states. You have a Republican governor, a conservative Reaganesque governor who was targeted twice for removal. They did everything they could to gin up hate, anger, tried to destroy his reputation, his career, and his life. He hung in there. The...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I need to illustrate a point. Yesterday there was really profound, great news out of the state of Wisconsin. In my mind, earth-shattering news. In my mind, it's the kind of news that should have caused a political earthquake, and probably did. It's just that nobody reacted to it. Here you have one of the bluest of blue states. You have a Republican governor, a conservative Reaganesque governor who was targeted twice for removal. They did everything they could to gin up hate, anger, tried to destroy his reputation, his career, and his life. He hung in...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Does the name Scott Walker mean anything to you? You know him well. Scott Walker is the Republican, conservative governor of the state of Wisconsin. He has survived numerous efforts by the left, by the Regime, and by union buddies to destroy him, to take him out of office, to recall him from office (twice) to ruin his reputation. He has survived it all, and he has survived it not afraid. He has not been compromised in surviving this. He did not become one of them in order to survive. He remained who he was. He remained...

It seems that the unions had good reason to fear Scott Walker. In news that is unlikely to receive wide play in the legacy media, it appears that a number of Wisconsin unions failed to achieve recertification as a result of year-end member votes. The recertification votes were a consequence of Act 10, the epoch-making collective-bargain reforms pushed through by Walker in the face of mass demonstrations, vandalism, death threats, and all but open rebellion by unions in 2011. One of act's provisions was that public-sector unions must be annually recertified by a positive vote of at least half their...

Liberals think they hold the moral high ground.Here’s their moral high ground: Death threats against the Wisconsin Governor, wife and children from Democrats.Liberals would have us believe that only pro-lifers and tea-partyers engage in this kind of thuggery.I want everyone to know what Wisconsin Democrats are really like.  This an act of civic duty.  This is a public service announcement.They don’t get a pass on this.  This is too disgusting.  In their blind self-righteousness they threatened his children.The Democrat Party in Wisconsin and big labor leadership need to denounce these tactics formally, openly, publicly.From The Blaze: READ THE CHILLING NOTE...

MADISON — Federal employees in Wisconsin apparently cannot have their cake and eat it, too. What could be more than 2,000 furloughed workers who received back pay related to the 16-day partial government shutdown will have to reimburse any unemployment benefits that were applied for or collected during that time, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development spokesman John Dipko said. That total could be in excess of $245,000. According to Dipko, nearly 2,070 federal employees in the Badger State filed claims for unemployment between Sept. 30 and Oct. 12. The number of claims made last week were not available at the...

The Kenosha, Wis.School District teachers' union was decertified September 12. Depending which people you believe, it was either decertified by a vote of the teachers or it was decertified because the union did not follow procedures and request a recertification vote as required by Wisconsin's labor reform law, popularly known as Act 10.

MADISON – After more than an hour of political ping pong Tuesday, with the taxpayer playing the familiar role of ball, most Senate Democrats agreed with Republicans that a $100 million property tax cut was too good a deal to pass up. Or, perhaps, political suicide to turn it down. Last week, Democrats gave Gov. Scott Walker and legislative Republicans an earful after Walker called a special session to pass a $100 million property tax cut last week. Mike Tate, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, called the tax cut a “gimmick.” Sen. President Mike Ellis, R-Neenah, excoriated senate...

MADISON – Better than expected. That’s been the story of state revenue and surplus in Wisconsin over the past year and a half. An improving economy has pushed the state’s surplus up to $759.2 million, according to the Wisconsin Department of Administration State Controller’s Office’s Annual Fiscal Report released Monday. That’s up nearly $90 million from the last budget estimate earlier this year, and an increase of $274.5 million higher than the $484.7 million projected in the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s 2013 re-estimates in January. Word of the better-than expected balance, which doesn’t take into account the hundreds of millions of...

Two battles were joined this week, one on Capital Hill and another at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (the symbolic core of which is known as Bascom Hill). In both cases, free men who refused to be cowed struck back at overreaching tyrants. (a) The Battle of Capitol Hill As the Republicans and Democrats squared off on spending, World War II and Korean War vets were making their way to Washington, D.C. on Honor Flights, a charitable program to bring these folks to see the memorials to service members who fought... ~snip~ On hearing that the Obama administration intended to block...

MADISON — Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madison public schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist’s couch. Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School District in July posted some of her students’ drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts’ ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air. “One student said something to the effect of ‘Scott Walker wants to close all the public schools’… So the rest of the class started drawing their own cartoons and they turned very political....

MADISON — Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madison public schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist’s couch. Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School District in July posted some of her students’ drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts’ ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air. “One student said something to the effect of ‘Scott Walker wants to close all the public schools’… So the rest of the class started drawing their own cartoons and they turned very political....