Outrageous! Scandalous! A young spokesman for a major Wisconsin political party compares a politician to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. And he's fired. No, wait. He's not fired. Instead, the spokesman goes on to become governor!

The party was Republican, the year was 1992 and the spokesman was a 24-year-old Scott Walker. Yes, that Scott Walker.

True, the politician whom Walker compared to Dahmer was an inexecrable racist, the one-time GOP candidate and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. But bad as Duke's prejudiced views were, he was not a cannibalistic serial killer.

“We must find a consensus, not conquer those who disagree,” said Senator Bob Jauch.

The Senator knows about disagreement. His Senate district includes an area of the state known as the Penokee Range. A 22 mile iron ore vein runs through this range. Dotted on its surface are lakes, trout streams and the head waters of many rivers. Downstream is the Bad River watershed and the reservation of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa.

The Bad River watershed contains 40% of all the wetlands in the Lake Superior watershed. The lake is the largest fresh water body on the planet. Wisconsin passed into law protection of this water through the Great Lakes Compact.

In a surprising admission yesterday, Tom Tiffany, the nominal author of SB1, allowed that the bill allows for more environmental depredation in the area of the mine.  When pressed on the issue he stated:

“The bill reflects the reality of mining. There are going to be some impacts to the environment above the iron ore body,” said Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst. “If the law is challenged and ends up in court, the judge needs to know it was the Legislature’s intent to allow adverse (environmental) impacts. That way, a judge can’t find fault if the environment is impacted.”

Although this has been obvious from the start, it's surprising to hear Tiffany admit this, particularly after all of the obfuscation from him and the Walker administration that the bill does not lower environmental standards. Read the full article at the Capital Times.

The United States Department of Labor tracks jobs sent over seas through something called the Trade Adjustment Assistance program or TAA.  Because this program involves a lengthy petition process only a fraction of workers that lose their jobs due to outsourcing participate in the program and are therefore counted.  However, it is the only government agency that officially documents jobs that have been sent overseas, so it provides a rough measure of how many jobs a state is losing to outsourcing and how

Republican Senator and former Majority Leader Dale Schultz was a guest on Sly yesterday, where he spoke out against the control that conservative radio station WTMJ has over Wisconsin politics: