Wisconsin is the far-right's bad idea lab

If there's a bad political idea floating around out there or a hard-right group trying openly or quietly to make it happen, the odds are there's a Wisconsin personality, policy or partisan funder behind it.

*  Make sure you read this Dan Bice scoop in The Journal Sentinel:

Hacked records show Bradley Foundation taking its conservative Wisconsin model national

*  Pair it with this under-covered 2014 story broken by Salon:com that actually dates to 2007:

“Wisconsin is the model”: Grover Norquist’s Tea Party scheme to crush his union enemies

So there are your big strategies and players, and here are some of the ugly results:

*  Special interests and big trade associations have captured the State Supreme Court and turned it into a conflicted, ethically-deficient laughingstock:

You may remember that the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted a recusal rule - - actually, more of a blank permission slip - -  that allows its members to sit on cases even if they had received campaign contributions from a party before them. 

That earned our troubled Court
widespread criticism and brought about a petition to the Court from dozens of retired judges who urged that the rule be rewritten. 

The petition was rejected by the very justices whose campaign committees have taken millions from the same special-interests that wrote the easy-pass 'ethics' code.

*  This blog post:

National report says Wisconsin models Trump's war on the environment

*  And this one, from February:

Want an idea for what's coming to your rivers, streams, groundwater and clean air when Donald's Trump's anti-environmental EPA administrator Scott Pruitt turns the agency into a subsidiary of the oil and gas interests he let run the State of Oklahoma, records show?

Look to Wisconsin, the new state-level laboratory of corporate, special-interest control.

*  And this CBS report, also from February: 

Scott Walker’s Wisconsin: A labor model for Trump?

Regrettably, stay tuned.

She progressive and blue state of Fightin' Bob, Gaylord Nelson and others is no longer.