Okay, it's official. Wisconsin is now a political Wonderland, where illogic and craziness reign supreme.

The lead, page-one story in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel provides the evidence, in an oversized headline: AFSCME District Council 48 allegedly negotiated a contract in secret with Milwaukee County! Shocking! Say County Executive Chris Abele and other conservatives, that's just plain illegal! Because, Scott Walker's union-busting Act 10 caused the union local to become "decertified."

“Black River Falls is grappling with high phosphorus in the water,” the woman told me at the Town Hall Meeting. “The phosphorus is coming from farms up river. Why cut funding to conservation staff that help farmers keep manure out of the river?”

Buried in the 2013-15 state budget is removal of almost $5 million or over a quarter of cost-share funding to create structures to reduce run-off and preserve topsoil. The budget proposal also cuts nearly $2 million for local county conservation staff who assist farmers in creating and monitoring these structures.

That supposedly awful, incompetent, nit-picky Milwaukee County Board, so infested with (gasp!) duly elected Democrats and minorities that Republicans in the legislature are now busy dismantling it? Well, the board's policies, hard work and votes mightily figured in a new report: Milwaukee County has a nearly $25 million surplus from 2012 operations and the five-year budget outlook is encouraging. That's according to county Budget Director Craig Kammholz.

Reprinted with permission from Huck/Konapacki Cartoons .

Actually, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s agenda is an unqualified success. Everything Walker has done over the last two years was designed to keep wages low and ensure employers a weak and desperate labor force. It’s simple supply and demand, high unemployment ensures low wages.

The March 2013 BLS statistics rate Wisconsin 44^th in the nation in job creation. Wages fell by 4.1% and unemployment rose to 8.4%. Critics blame Scott Walker’s austerity policies. Walker blames the “uncertainty” of peaceful protests and recall elections.

The reality is that Walker’s agenda is an unqualified success. Everything Walker has done over the last two years was designed to keep wages low and ensure employers a weak and desperate labor force.

What do the two most iconic economists of the 20th century have in common?  Both John Keynes and Milton Friedman would tell you if they were alive today that when you are in the midst of a severe recession, the government has got to spend money to get the economy back on track. 

Unfortunately, Governor Scott Walker never took Economics 101 and instead of increasing spending, he made deep budget cuts.  In fact, his cuts to education were the deepest in state history.  This sent a state that was on the verge of climbing out of the deep hole known as the Great Recession back into the hole, AKA a double-dip recession.

What Walker should have done is borrow money to fill the budget holes.  Instead, he took any question of borrowing off the table and instead decided to demonize teachers and other public servants as "the haves" that were living the high-life while everyone else suffered. This was equivalent of dozens of Janesville GM plants closing across the state, suddenly yanking millions out of local economies and contracting the Wisconsin economy.

Now, with Wisconsin 44th in job growth and a re-election just around the corner, Walker is desperate to get the economy going, so he is doing in 2013 what he should have done in 2011:  Borrowing money to spur the economy.  He has all kinds of explanations about how this is free money, how its different because its for capital projects, ect, but at the end of the day, he is following basic economics principals that the failed to follow in 2011.

One of the key arguments in the continuing legal battles to overturn Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union law is that citizens of this state and country have the right to associate freely. By arbitrarily "decertifying" public employee unions that refuse to jump through Walker's expensive, time-consuming legal hoops in order to gain virtually nothing, Wisconsin Republicans want to pretend that those unions and the employees they continue to represent are somehow now "illegals," just like many of those lawmakers regard undocumented immigrants brought in by businesses to work on the cheap.

You can always tell if an organization or think tank is trying to pick your pocket if it has “free market” in it's title or as one of it's goals. Organizations like the Club for Growth, The Heritage Foundation, Wisconsin's own McIver Institute:The Free Market Voice of Wisconsin, and of course the ghost writer of all of Wisconsin's Republican Legislation, The American legislative Exchange Council. Their policies are benefiting an ever shrinking minority of people who control an ever growing majority of America's wealth.

“Why don’t these numbers add up?” the school board member asked me. He was looking at the summary tables on dollars for schools in the new state budget. “Because numbers are missing,” I told him, realizing there are a lot of missing numbers.

The Legislature is given a 519 page “summary” of the budget to consider but nowhere can you find numbers to compare this year’s budget requests for particular programs to dollars actually spent under the previous budget.

There are no numbers clearly showing the increases or decreases in each individual program. There are no numbers showing what was accomplished by the spending.