Once upon a time, a new Republican governor arrived in Madison, Wisconsin. The state was in debt, and their cash on hand was poor. The answer? For Robert La Follette in 1900, it was simple: raise taxes.

Fast forward about 100 years, and you get a very different answer from a very different Republican governor.

La Follette’s policies solved the budget crisis of his day and vastly improved the state and the lives of its citizen. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Walker to learn that lesson and follow his example.

Being from California, I’m pretty clear what the implications of a Prop 13-style supermajority requirement for taxes will do. It will basically destroy government as they know it in Wisconsin, ratcheting down the ability for the state to collect the revenue needed to provide a basic level of services. If you liked the efficient, responsive government we’ve seen over the last three decades in California, you’re going to love it in Wisconsin.

So almost all the people we’d like to keep Davis’ identity secret from–the Pakistani government and the Pakistani people–already either knew or have been operating based on the assumption that he is a spy. The one exception, of course, is the Taliban or other extremists, who would no doubt like to know whom Davis was speaking to in their ranks. But to the extent they haven’t already guessed those details, the Pakistani government now must be trusted to keep them secret, if they will. There’s no more or less that the Taliban and Al Qaeda will learn about Davis based solely on US reporting confirming he is a spy.

In other words, had they revealed his CIA affiliation, American newspapers would not have revealed anything to the key people we’re supposed to be protecting Davis’ identity from; those people already knew or assumed it.

This morning on a local news channel, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker reiterated a threat to send out layoff notices for public employees “as soon as early next week” if Democrats didn’t return to Madison to pass his budget repair bill. There’s a deadline built into the bill; if a debt refinancing scheme that saves anywhere from $100-$165 million dollars isn’t put into motion by Friday, it can’t be done, leaving the state to search for additional cost-cutting measures to fill the short-term budget gap. Basically, Walker is weaponizing that deadline with the layoff threat. The layoff notices are required under the current contract, and don’t necessarily mean that the layoffs would take place immediately.

State Senator Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee), one of the 14 hiding out in Illinois, shrugged off the threat. “He’s throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall,” Larson said. “He knows on the wrong side of history. He should start listening to the people outside in the streets.”

With Rhode Island about to deal with legislation to legalize gay marriage, PPP decided to poll the question. The poll found 50 percent of registered voters favor allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry, while only 41 percent oppose.

We know what Republicans want out of a continuing resolution – deep cuts and policy changes that would block just about the entire Obama agenda of the first two years. Now we know precisely what Democrats want, at least in the short term. Harry Reid will introduce a “clean” continuing resolution next week that will freeze government funding at 2010 levels for 30 days. There’s this conceit in calling reductions from Obama’s 2011 budget request “cuts,” but that budget never got adopted. So while Reid calls this $41 billion in cuts, it’s really just a freeze at the current levels.

Gawker has liberated Iraq some of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumfeld’s papers on Iraq and Afghanistan — and apparently Rummy was coaching some of the leadership team on the “plan” that wasn’t.

There are differences between the proposed Wisconsin and Indiana measures: the Indiana ones are actually quite a bit worse. Governor Mitch Daniels de-certified the state’s public employee unions on his first day in office back in 2007. It got little response at the time. This new bill would essentially make Indiana into an anti-union “right to work” state. It would prohibit employers from requiring an employee to join a union or to collect union dues to work at their establishment. It would also give private-sector union members the right to drop out of their unions and stop paying dues. Basically it would turn the work environment in Indiana like much of the deep South.

McBobo’s entire column today about Scott Walker’s union-busting is packed full of wrongness — but he does get something right about Scott Walker’s and the Wisconsin GOP’s “ideological overreach.”

Claiming he hasn’t even started to order the use of bullets yet, reading a list of acts from his “Green Book” that will result in a death sentence, and telling parents to get their children “away from these gangs,” Muammar Gaddafi, still Libya’s nominal leader, has spoken on Libyan State TV. Defiant – and irrational – he blames America and the UK for the current uprising and asks if Libyans want to be “like Somalia.” Saying that this is a war against the US – “do you want to be occupied like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan … do you want to be like Fallujah?” — he added a very chilling comment: “The unity of China was more important than Tianamen Square.”