Real Economy Project

Protesters flooded The Homer Building in Washington, D.C., where BGR Group, an enormous and infamously right-wing lobbyist group has its offices.

BGR hosted a $1,000-a-head fundraiser Wednesday for the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Special guests included Wisconsin Republican senators, notably Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald -- the "Fitz" of "FitzWalkerstan," as legislators and protesters in Madison have dubbed Fitzgerald and Governor Scott Walker's now-Republican "state."

Other guests slated to attend: Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, and two senators eligible for recall, Alberta Darling and Glenn Grothmann.

MADISON--New political ads by corporate and CEO-funded groups have been flooding Wisconsin repeating misinformation from the controversial Walker administration about the budget and labor rights.  The total sum spent is not yet known.  Labor rights groups have responded to the crisis with some ads to make sure the people know that Walker and his corporate allies are refusing to negotiate and are determined to destroy labor rights.  Here are some of these ads: 

For some, when the going gets tough, the tough gas up the custom-painted luxury motorcoach.

So it is with the Wisconsin branch of the Koch-backed group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), whose four-day, ten-city bus PR event across Wisconsin to support controversial Governor Scott Walker started in Kenosha March 3 and concluded in Madison on March 7 -- but not at the Capitol, where the bus would have been surrounded by the tens of thousands of people gathered to oppose Walker's union-crushing "budget repair" bill. Instead, AFP ended its tour at the Alliant Energy Center, where protesters against Walker's radical proposals who were outside in the cold easily outnumber the pro-Walker crowd in inside the rented space.

And so it went with AFP's "Stand with Walker" Wisconsin road show. At every stop, the AFP PR gambit was met by some supporters, but it was also greeted often by an equal or a substantially greater numbers of opponents. A little-watched YouTube video of AFP's stop at Serb Hall on March 3, 2011 shows a group of about a dozen Scott Walker supporters, and a sidewalk packed with what appears to be about several hundred demonstrators against the governor's extreme proposals.

Madison – In a dramatic turn of events at the Wisconsin State Capitol today, Governor Scott Walker defied a court order to open the Capitol for normal business operations. State legislator, Representative Marc Pocan, called the move "not only unprecedented, but contempt of court as well."

On Monday at 8:00 a.m., the Wisconsin Capitol building, which was the site of dozens of major protests in the last two weeks including one of over 100,00 on Sunday, was virtually locked down as the Governor moved to limit protester access in advance of his scheduled budget address on Tuesday.