not necessarily legitimately because both leading democrats and leading republicans say wisconsin is its own microcosm, but the reason it is so relevant is because debt and spending have been major issues there. those are major national issues. and many of the big picture issues we seen play out across the nation are playing out in wisconsin right now, namely money and the influence of super pacs. an independent nonpartisan group estimates dlfr 70 million to $80 million will be spent in the state of wisconsin. that s mind blowing in to a state where air time is so inexpensive. governor walker has outspent his democrat 7 to 1. governor walker today has raised $30.5 million to the democrat barrett s $4 million. that s not even taking into account how much labor unions and super pacs are pouring in. then there s the ore big question that both sides, democrats and republicans are using this as an opportunity to organize the state for november. kate? absolutely. the numbers, th
welcome back to the ed show. breaking news out of wisconsin tonight. first, i want to turn the clock back. it was a year ago in madison the streets were crawling with protesters. they were upset, big time, that governor walker was trying to take their money and bust their unions in the name of solving what was a phony budget crisis. scott walker s budget repair bill was nothing but a surprise attack. he didn t campaign on it, tens of thousands showed up in the capital to try to stop it. walker could get away with it because republicans had majorities in both and senate. the only thing, the only thing that could stop this radical movemen and radical bill from becoming a law was 14 sensenato. in order to pass walker s bill,
to balance the books, something he was against just last year. we need the savings in the budget repair bill because wisconsin faces a 3.6 billion dollar deficit. this deficit did not appear overnight. wisconsin got here through reliance on one time fixes, accounting gimmicks and tax increases. previous governors and legislators from both political parties took money from our tobacco settlement. they relied on one time federal stimulus dollars as if the money would be there forever. but it s already gone. so after governor walker announced that he was raiding the foreclosure settlement funds, he high tailed it out of state and at this hour he is in washington, dc, preparing to spew his hypocrite cal anti-union ideas in a keynote address, where else? at cpac. i m joined by milwaukee, wisconsin mayor tom barrett and also state senator lena taylor, great to have both of you with
independent voters in the middle making the case that as somebody part of the firefighters union has a unique stature in the imagination of the public? well, fire and police were thrown in into the collective bargaining bill in other states, and if you go back to january, we were told our state is broke and we need shared sacrifice, and we have a $3.6 deficit over the next two years. and we saw tax cuts to corporations, and $3.6 billion over the next ten years will be in massive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy in our state. in february, we have a budget repair bill and he takes away collective bargaining rights in unions, and then in june we had 30% cut from tech colleges, and cuts from education, and then voter i dichlt, and a child
of the crew here in madison in the studio were saying, you know, can you believe that? walker s saying he doesn t know about this? that doesn t sound like walker. everyone in the state knows our governor to be a political junkie. he s got his finger on every aspect of the political operation and the governing operation. it s the one thing you can t criticize him on. he s very engaged and what s significant here, ed, is that the woman whose house was raided, cynthia archer was his top political point person when he served as milwaukee county executive and when he moved to the governorship he put her in as a top political appointee in the key agency dealing with his budget and his budget repair bill. she was the point person on security for the capital. her name is all over e-mails talking about how to lockdown the capital and talking about what to do with the protests.