In a report that was almost 100 pages, the Bureau sharply criticized the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., created in 2011 by Walker and the state legislature, and called for much more oversight.

From the Associated Press:

The audit faulted WEDC for not having sufficient policies to administer its $520 million worth of grant, loan and tax credit programs effectively, including some policies required by law. It awarded $80 million in its first year.

The agency did not consistently follow the law or existing policies when making awards, and had no policies for determining how to handle delinquent loan amounts, the audit said.

It lacked invoices or other contractually required documentation showing authorized costs for seven of 29 grants reviewed, the audit said. Four contracts gave $906,000 total in tax credits for job creation and employee training that had already occurred, the audit said. Twelve of 14 recipients of grant and loan contracts worth at least $100,000 did not submit verified financial statements as required by law, the audit found.

"This audit dates back to 2011 and largely reflects information that WEDC has known for some time," a Walker spokesman said in a statement. "This new agency has taken proactive and positive measures to address its issues, and Governor Walker is confident in the direction of WEDC as an agency that aims to promote job creation and economic growth for Wisconsin."

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The Anonymous action, carried out in support of public sector unions fighting to save collective bargaining rights against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting efforts, was not a hack. Rather, the hacker collective orchestrated a denial-of-service attack, or a DDOS,  encouraging users to repeatedly access the website until it's too overwhelmed to function. The Koch sites were successfully but only temporarily brought down. Rosol is the first and only defendant charged in the attack. Via Pearce:

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However, all of that doesn’t mean the proposal Ryan spearheaded is unimportant, nor does it mean that there are no worthwhile analyses to explain that significance. On the contrary, the proposal is quite important because it endorses an economic war waged by the upper class against everyone else. Two simple studies make this war painfully obvious.

To properly contextualize those studies, first keep in mind three facts: 1) According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, “The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year” and control 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth, 2) the bottom 80 percent of Americans own just 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, and 3) Stiglitz notes that “while the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall.”

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"I think we should see what they did and I think we should, if possible, figure out a way to fix the Supreme Court's objections," Sensenbrenner, who represents Wisconsin, said at CPAC. "The Voting Rights Act has been, I think, the most effective of all of the civil rights laws. It enfranchised all minorities in the south, and that includes both African Americans and Republicans."

He added: "If you look at what happened after Section 5 was amended in 1982, the number of African-American and Republican representatives in Congress and in state legislatures has gone way up."

When asked if Republicans have the political will to act if the VRA is struck down, Sensenbrenner told Salon: "I'm gonna make them fix it."

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Repeal Obamacare and financial reform (Dodd-Frank), voucherize Medicare (after 10 years), cut spending on food stamps and Medicaid by shifting them over to the states. I call those block grants, where you give states a fixed amount regardless of need (so your safety net is no longer countercyclical), but Ryan calls it giving “states flexibility so they can tailor programs like Medicaid and food stamps to their people’s needs” (as long as those needs don’t increase…).

Then there’s “comprehensive tax reform” by “closing loopholes and consolidating tax rates” down to two brackets: 10 percent and 25 percent. Again, no details yet but I’ll be shocked if any actual loopholes get mentioned, much less closed (and since taxes are a bit higher now than last year, he’ll have to offset more lost revenue).

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The White House’s and the Democrat’s continuing failure to reshape that debate has lead directly and logically to Paul Ryan’s budget plan this week, which is a more regressive version of the same plan American voters resoundingly rejected last November.

Sadly, the President is playing into the GOP’s hands with a new round of negotiations over a “grand bargain.”

Despite February’s encouraging job numbers, the major challenge is still jobs, wages, growth, and widening inequality — not deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility.

We’d need numbers like February’s every month for the next four years to get anywhere close to the level of unemployment we had before the Great Recession. But we won’t get there because of the austerity policies the nation has embarked on, and the continuing erosion of the middle class.

Austerity economics — of which Ryan’s upcoming budget is the most extreme version — is a cruel hoax. Cruel because it hurts most those who are already hurting; a hoax because it doesn’t work.

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Of course, this decline is but one facet of the global fall in labor’s influence, the relative union strongholds of continental Europe and Scandinavia included. But the U.S. is still the fulcrum of the global economy, so a weak American labor movement is especially bad news for the working classes of all nations.

Friends of labor greeted the news with despair, seizing on the figures as the latest portent of the movement’s seemingly terminal crisis. Labor’s enemies greeted the news with barely concealed glee, and for the same reason. Most disturbingly, attacks on public sector bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and elsewhere have begun to erode union membership in the public sector, the movement’s last redoubt in the U.S.

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The Koch-backed political assault against unions by both public and private sector has also gained ground in recent years, with state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana voting through measures that weaken unions. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka released a statement in response to the new statistics, lamenting, "Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.”

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But now as Republican governors stake out a new array of conservative goals in the dozens of state legislatures the party controls, Walker has decided to lay low in Wisconsin. Instead of taking what many see as the next steps on a likely to-do list, such as making Wisconsin a right-to-work state or pushing tougher immigration laws, Walker is preaching moderation and calm. He has also backed away from proposals like eliminating the state's same-day voter registration.

"We're not going to do things that are going to bring 80,000 or 100,000 people into the Capitol," Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal shortly before the legislative session began. "It's just not going to happen again."

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Dennis Murawska, 59, said a pet chicken named Cluck Cluck woke his wife Susan Cotey, 52, with loud clucking from its cage in the basement two floors below about 6:15 a.m. Thursday. The couple's two cats also were running around the main floor.

Murawska said he had been half awake but didn't know about the fire because the smoke alarms hadn't gone off. He realized something was wrong when his wife got up.

"The chicken gets quite vocal when she gets excited," he said.

Cluck Cluck came from a nearby farm in Alma Center, about 135 miles east of Minneapolis, Murawska said. When the chicken began wandering over to his house, his neighbor said he could kill it because it wasn't producing any eggs. But Murawska felt sorry for Cluck Cluck because she had a mutated foot and decided to keep her. He fed the bird and built a coop, and then his wife let Cluck Cluck into the basement on cold nights.

"I spent way more money than I ever should've," Murawska said by telephone. "I guess it paid off."

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It was a sneak move -- GOP lawmakers only announced Thursday morning that they intended to enact the so-called right-to-work bill (aptly described by its opponents as the "no-rights-at-work" bill). Right-to-work laws ban requirements to pay dues or fees to a union as a condition of employment --  studies have consistently shown that states with right-to-work laws have lower wages for union and non-union workers.

As a study by Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute found:

[O]ur findings -- that "right-to-work" laws are associated with significantly lower wages and reduced chances of receiving employer-sponsored health insurance and pensions -- are based on the most rigorous statistical analysis currently possible. These findings should discourage right-to-work policy initiatives. The fact is, while RTW legislation misleadingly sounds like a positive change in this weak economy, in reality the opportunity it gives workers is only that to work for lower wages and fewer benefits.

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That was all supposed to end with this election -- but did it?

This absurd period of legislative history that became dubbed the “war on women” (though it affected people of all genders) culminated in the notorious spate of comments from Tea Party-approved candidates about rape -- legitimate, god-willed or otherwise -- and resulted in the biggest anti-misogynist backlash at the ballot box we’ve seen in a long time.

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The nine lawmakers were responding to a survey from the conservative advocacy group the Campaign For Liberty, and responded "yes" to the question: "Will you support legislation to nullify ObamaCare and authorize state and local law enforcement to arrest federal officials attempting to implement the unconstitutional health care scheme known as ObamaCare?"

Gov. Scott Walker has until Friday to decide whether he'll create a health care exchange in the state as mandated by the law, or let the administration handle it.

Rep. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he still believes the law is not constitutional, despite a Supreme Court ruling to the contrary. "Just because Obama was re-elected does not mean he's above the constitution," Kapenga said.

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"Hopefully I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal budget because they're simply the facts," he told the Chippewa Herald. "Hopefully she'll agree with what the facts are and work toward common sense solutions."

He also offered this explanation for Obama's win: "If you aren't properly informed, if you don't understand the problems facing this nation, you are that much more prone to falling prey to demagoguing solutions. And the problem with demagoguing solutions is they don't work," Johnson said. "I am concerned about people who don't fully understand the very ugly math we are facing in this country."

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Dylan made the prediction Monday night midway through the song "Blowin' in the Wind" during a concert in the battleground state of Wisconsin.

Dylan spoke to the Madison audience as he was wrapping up his concert that came just hours after Obama appeared at a morning rally in the same city with rocker Bruce Springsteen.

Dylan made his comments during his encore when he said, "We tried to play good tonight since the president was here today."

He went on to say he thinks Obama will prevail Tuesday.

Dylan says, "Don't believe the media. I think it's going to be a landslide."

After his comments, Dylan completed the song to the roar of the crowd.

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It's been striking that Baldwin's sexual orientation has been a non-issue on the campaign trail, but LGBT groups like the Human Rights Campaign, Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and the new Lesbian Super PAC have provided what might prove a decisive boost, including millions of dollars in bundled campaign contributions from a roaring activist base.

The cash infusion allowed Baldwin, a seven-term congresswoman from the liberal college town of Madison, to overwhelm Thompson on the television airwaves for a critical period this August, framing the debate on her own terms – she’s a populist fighter while Thompson, a once-beloved governor, “is not for us anymore” -- as the Republican struggled to refill his own coffers after the rigors of a brutal Tea Party primary.

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Ryan is still running for the seat he's held for seven terms, but the national race has consumed him. Aside from a stream of generic television ads, Ryan hasn't campaigned for his seat since Romney tapped him.

Zerban has accused Ryan of abandoning his district. Last week the Kenosha Democrat launched a "Focus on the First" mini-campaign of volunteer work to play up that he cares about the locals. But Ryan's absence doesn't appear to have hurt him. Even Democrats aren't optimistic about Zerban's chances of winning.

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Stephen Einhorn, the head of a small Milwaukee-based mergers-and-acquisitions consulting firm, admitted that he was behind the anonymous billboards, which some liberals suggested would intimidate Obama-leaning voters. Clear Channel Outdoor Advertising pulled the billboards after an investigation by NBC's The Grio and One Wisconsin Now, an activist group in the area.

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the billboards initially appeared in 2010, but reappeared this election cycle as well:

"The Milwaukee billboards in 2010 replaced the gavel with images of a black man and woman, and a larger picture of a white woman, behind bars, with the words 'We Voted Illegally' emerging from a cartoon bubble, underneath the large headline: 'VOTER FRAUD is a FELONY!' Voting rights advocates protested the boards, to no avail."

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That left only one weekend for Wisconsin Democrats to get out their voters on a Saturday and Sunday, when people are more likely to have time off from work. At a "Souls to the Polls" rally in Milwaukee on Sunday, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock shook up some Democrats by declaring, “If the election was held today, President Barack Obama would lose the state of Wisconsin because where his base is, we have not turned out the vote early. The suburbs and rural parts of Wisconsin – the Republican base – are voting. President Obama’s base has yet to go vote. We've got to get our people to go vote."

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