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For Immediate Release
March, 11 2011, 11:31am EDT
Contact:
Robert Doeckel
Phone: 608-217-0194
Over Two Weeks Later, Walker Has Not Released Administration-Koch Lobbyist Communication Emails
One Wisconsin Now Considering ‘Any, All Legal Remedies’
WASHINGTON
Over two weeks after One Wisconsin Now filed an open records request for all email and written communications between Koch Industries' lead Wisconsin lobbyist and the office of Gov. Scott Walker and the Department of Administration, the Walker administration has yet to fulfill the request. One Wisconsin Now said it is considering legal action and notes the unusual speed at which Gov. Walker's office released staff email communications this week it claimed were proof of the administration's willingness to negotiate with Senate Democrats in the budget repair bill dispute.
"Gov. Scott Walker needs to learn there isn't one set of open records laws for emails you want to release and another set of open records laws for emails you don't want to release," said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now Executive Director. "Suing Gov. Walker to obtain these records is not what we want to do, but we are more than willing to take him to court if he refuses to promptly fulfill our reasonable and legal request."
One Wisconsin Now would be the third organization in the last week to sue the Governor's office over its open records request obstructionism. Both the Associated Press and the Madison-based Isthmus filed suit over the Walker administration's failure to fulfill an open records request asking for emails the Governor claimed he had received in support of his plan to use the government to take away the rights of working families by ending collective bargaining rights of public employees. Walker attempted to charge the media outlets $31,000 for the request.
Over a week ago, Walker's office acknowledged it had received One Wisconsin Now's open records request, which was sent electronically February 24. In the request One Wisconsin Now asked for written and email communications between Jeffrey Schoepke, Koch Industries' lead Wisconsin-based lobbyist, and the Governor's office and the office of the Secretary of the Department of Administration.
Koch Industries' billionaire owners Charles and David Koch are the driving financial force behind Americans for Prosperity, the organization running hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in television ads to support Gov. Walker's effort to use the government to take away the right of 175,000 Wisconsin workers. Gov. Walker has also included in his scheme a plan to allow private companies, like Koch Industries, to purchase the state's public power plants in a possible no-bid scheme.
KochPAC gave Gov. Walker's gubernatorial campaign $43,000 and David Koch personally donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which spent $5 million to elect Gov. Walker. [Center on Media and Democracy, 2/18/11; Republican Governors Association Press Release]
Americans for Prosperity, which spent $70 million in 2009 and 2010 to advance Koch's anti-working family agenda was founded through the donations of the brothers' Koch Foundation.
LATEST NEWS
More Signs of Distress in Trump Economy as Inflation, Jobless Claims Rise
"The middle-class squeeze from tariffs is here," observed one economist.
Sep 11, 2025
New economic data released on Thursday revealed fresh signs of stress for the US economy and working families.
A new Consumer Price Index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that overall inflation rose by 2.9% year-over-year in August, while core inflation—a measure that excludes commodities such as food and energy—rose 3.1%, the highest reading recorded since this past January.
Both of these numbers were in line with economists' consensus estimates, although they still showed inflation trending in the wrong direction during a time when the US labor market is also showing signs of weakness.
Looking deeper into the report reveals that the cost of groceries continues to be a major pain point for US consumers, as food prices jumped by 0.6% on the month and 2.7% year-over-year.
The report comes days after US President Donald Trump said in a radio interview, "We have no inflation. Prices are down on just about everything."
New York Times economics reporter Ben Casselman said that the spike in food prices was notable because it came after a long period in which food inflation had been coming down.
"Grocery prices are once again rising relatively rapidly," he observed in a social media post. "Food inflation had eased significantly, and had been running well below overall prices, but that's no longer true."
Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, singled out some particularly important household staples in the report that she argued were very likely being impacted by President Donald Trump's tariffs.
Among other things, Long said that coffee was now 21% more expensive than it was a year ago, while living room and dining room furniture saw a 10% year-over-year increase, and the price of toilet paper rose by an annualized 5%.
"The middle-class squeeze from tariffs is here," she said. "Inflation hit 2.9% in August, the highest since January and up from 2.3% in April. It's troubling that so many basic necessities are rising in price again: Food, gas, clothing, and shelter all had big cost jumps in August. And this is only the beginning."
Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former member of President Joe Biden's National Economic Council, said that the new report shows "inflation is broadening" given that the "percent of items that had at least a 3% annualized price increase over the last month" increased to nearly 60%, which is the highest percentage seen in years.
The inflation report was not the only troubling economic indicator, however.
The BLS also revealed that jobless claims in the US jumped to 263,000 last week, which was significantly higher than the 235,000 claims expected by economists. Joe Weisenthal, the co-host of the Bloomberg "Odd Lots" podcast, noted that this was the highest total for weekly jobless claims in nearly four years.
Long also flagged the worrying jobless claims number and predicted that it was just the start of a further downturn in the US economy.
"'Cost cutting' is back among CEOs and that is corporate speak for more layoffs," she said. "It's going to be a rough few months ahead as the tariffs impacts work their way through the economy. Americans will experience higher prices and (likely) more layoffs."
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Inflaming Tensions, Trump Threatens Political Left With Retribution Over Killing of Charlie Kirk
With the suspect still at large and the motive unknown, the president "seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division."
Sep 11, 2025
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the "radical left" as "directly responsible" for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was "directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now."
The president didn't specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants' rights. But Trump said his administration would "find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it."
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups "contributed" to Kirk's killing.
"Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives," he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
"It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization," Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. "We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat."
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how "Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left."
The president, writes Cook, "seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk's assassin or their politics."
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman's killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
"Democrats own what happened today," she told reporters. "Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck."
Mace added that it was "ridiculous" to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers "own" Hortman's assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are "not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit" of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
"There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years," wrote Hasan. "In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL's Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by... right-wingers."
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also "reviled" Kirk.
"I'm not speculating about the shooter," said Downen. "I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It's how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
"Oh, please," she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. "Why don't you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word."
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk's assassination, journalist David Sirota said that "what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink."
Instead, Sirota warned, "we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family."
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
"It's a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan," said Sirota. "Your life has value and your political opponents' lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries' ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that's the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win."
The "nihilism" and "greed" of too many, he added, "are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable."
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House Passes NDAA to Push Military Spending Approved This Year Beyond $1 Trillion
Highlighting how the Pentagon is "replete with waste and fraud," one critic called it "a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money."
Sep 10, 2025
Nearly all Republicans and 17 Democrats in the US House of Representatives voted Wednesday evening for a military bill that would push the figure for defense spending approved this year beyond $1 trillion.
The final vote for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026 was 231-196, with just four Republicans opposing the bill, which will still need to be reconciled with the Senate's version.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, highlighted after the vote that the House's NDAA authorizes about $883 billion for defense spending—including over $848 billion for the Pentagon, which has never passed an audit—on top of the $150 billion in the GOP budget reconciliation package that President Donald Trump signed in July.
"Throwing a trillion dollars at the Pentagon—an agency replete with waste and fraud—at the same time the Republican Congress and the Trump regime are slashing spending on healthcare, education, housing, food assistance, and foreign aid is a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money," Weissman said, referring to other provisions in the earlier package.
"On top of the age-old dangerous and wasteful spending, the bill pours billions into new boondoggles like Trump's 'Golden Dome' space interceptor vanity project and supercharges the dangerous development of killer robots for the battlefield," he noted. "Making it still worse is the administration's in-your-face, authoritarian misuse of Pentagon dollars—from the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Washington, DC, to the illegal and murderous attack on a Venezuelan boat."
Weissman added that "the bill includes some modest, positive requirements to report waste, fraud, and price gouging to Congress and establishes financial penalties if the Pentagon fails its audit. But these small measures do not begin to offset the damage done by the dangerous and wasteful overall package."
House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who voted against the NDAA's final passage, told Politico that "we didn't get any of the amendments and the debates that we wanted; not a single solitary one."
"Meanwhile, all manner of different issues that are pure culture war partisan issues were allowed in," he continued. "I fear that many of those are going to pass."
In a statement after the vote, the Congressional Equality Caucus condemned "six Republican-sponsored anti-LGBTQI+ amendments," including bans on medically necessary healthcare for transgender service members and dependents.
"The National Defense Authorization Act has traditionally received strong bipartisan support, yet for the second Congress in a row House Republicans have tainted a bill aimed at improving the lives of servicemembers with poison-pill riders that threaten our troops' rights, their families' stability, and our efforts to retain top talent," said the caucus chair, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Cailf.).
"Republicans' sacrifice of a strong bipartisan vote for a politicized NDAA to appease the Trump administration and a small slice of their base cannot undo the sacrifice of the transgender service members, cadets, or military dependents that will be hurt by this bill," he added. "Congress should be fighting for those who fight for us—but it's clear the GOP has other priorities. I will keep fighting to prevent the harmful provisions in this bill from becoming law."
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