Michael Bloomberg is trying to pull off a pretty neat trick. The billionaire mayor of New York City can blame his own police department for the growth of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which surged after incidents of police brutality and illegal arrests and will only continue to grow as his police continue to use nightsticks and pepper spray. But now, he’s claiming that the protests are costing municipal workers their jobs.

I’m a bit stunned by Ben Bernanke’s morning in America speech, so let me try to recover by looking at Wisconsin. Yesterday was the first day that elevated contributions to pensions and health care came out of the paychecks of public employees, as part of the anti-union bill. So protesters returned to the Capitol in Madison by the hundreds, chanting and demonstrating against the policy. After closing time, the Capitol Police struck back.

I’m trying really hard to keep away from the 4,827 Rick Perry articles in the last day in the traditional media and lefty blogosphere. Rick Perry is the new shark attack story.

However, if we must look at the jobs record in Texas, we must. Kevin Drum has a decent enough rundown. I did my own version of this (I’ve been keeping myself to one Perry story a day). The story is familiar – an oil boom and population migration can explain much of the job gains in Texas, and even then, their unemployment rate is a high 8.2%, and a lot of the jobs created are low-wage.

So this means that the Democrats picked up a total of two seats in the recalls, and Republicans will have a 17-16 majority in the State Senate when they return to session. Dale Schultz, the moderate Republican who voted against the anti-union bill that stripped collective bargaining rights, will have a lot of say over what else of Scott Walker’s right-wing agenda gets passed. And the state waits for January 2012, when Walker and the rest of the legislature becomes eligible for recall.

In Chris Cillizza’s smug dismissal of liberal frustration, with the curt statement “liberals and progressives have nowhere else to go,” he overlooks the fact that liberals have plenty of places to go. More than ever, in fact. From a movement-building perspective, there are more opportunities than normal in an off year to really make a difference on progressive policy.

We’re in a four-week sprint to recall elections in Wisconsin, and it’s not entirely clear how it’ll all turnout, though Democrats seem to have at least a plausible chance of getting back the state Senate. The success or failure of the recalls will determine whether the Democratic-labor-progressive alliance decides to go after the big target – Scott Walker, with a recall in 2012. New poll numbers out today show that Walker would be vulnerable to the challenge.

David Prosser, just re-elected to another 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a tight election, allegedly “grabbed fellow Justice Ann Bradley Walsh by the neck” prior to the release of the hasty ruling on the anti-union bill, which the court eventually upheld.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, just hours before a deadline imposed by state legislative Republicans, just reinstated the anti-union law which a district court judge had blocked because it violated state open meetings requirements. They made the novel interpretation that those requirements don’t apply to the legislature.

With some serious doubt as to whether they will hang on to their Majority in the Wisconsin State Senate, Republicans and Gov. Scott Walker are pushing their union stripping measure again in and “Extraordinary Session”.

Yesterday we looked at the potential responses from Democrats in Wisconsin to the dirty trick from Republicans, who plan to run “spoiler” candidates in the recall elections to force primaries and move the general recall elections out to August. Democrats had a couple options, ranging from taking the high road to retaliating with spoiler candidates of their own. The final decision reflected mostly a high road approach.