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Happy Earth Day! Today is a day we can all band together and share our love for this beautiful planet—or at least drown our sorrows about climate change with nerdy themed cocktails. Later today, President Barack Obama will mark the occasion with a climate-focused speech in the Florida Everglades. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, had a different idea: Fire a big chunk of the state's environmental staff. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Fifty-seven employees of the state Department of Natural Resources began receiving formal notices this week that they might face layoff as part of...

That didn’t take long. Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) is now the first 2016 GOP presidential potential walking the anti-immigration plank, hoping — against history — that this time it will lead to the White House and not just to a watery political death. Since Republican nominee Mitt Romney crashed in 2012 on the shoals of his "self-deportation" strategy of harassing immigrants until they left the country, many Republican leaders and operatives have concluded that Romney's immigration policies were sure losers in a national election. How else to explain Romney's showing among American Latino voters — the worst since President Ford?...

These are fighting words for the Left. The Left has been given a free pass by the mainstream press over the last decade with regard to their immigration agenda’s effect on the ordinary American worker. Huge legal immigration combined with gargantuan illegal immigration has put downward pressure on blue-collar wages and reduced the opportunities for Americans to find good jobs. This is an obvious consequence of millions of legal and illegal immigrants coming into America to compete with regular Americans looking for work. Yesterday, Scott Walker told the mainstream press and the Left that their emperor has no clothes. A...

..."The next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that's based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages," Walker said. "Because the more I've talked to folks—I've talked to Sen. Sessions and others out there, but it is a fundamentally lost issue by many in elected positions today—is what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages, and we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward."Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, responded, “It...

According to a number of well respected journalists, the Koch Brothers are putting their heft and muscle behind Scott Walker for president. Or maybe not. It depends on who you ask. First, let’s acknowledge once again that the Great Whitebread Hope from Wisconsin seems to have everyone in the political establishment mesmerized by his alleged strategic and tactical brilliance. Sure, he makes epic gaffes over and over again, but that cannot take anything away from the fact that he barely won a recall election and two swing-state elections in years in which Republicans ran the table. Why this is considered...

Conservative columnist and multiple-time number one New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter told Breitbart News that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s boldly stated position on immigration when it comes to protecting Americans from illegal and legal immigration is “fantastic” and “amazing.” “YES! Fantastic, amazing, just what I’ve been waiting for! Romney, of course, said exactly this and also endorsed E-Verify and a fence on the border,” Coulter said when asked to react to Walker’s statements—and all the political establishment from both sides of the aisle and the media attacking him—on Tuesday. “I’m bitter and cynical, but I don’t know how...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s newfound skepticism of legal immigration levels is a potential turning point in the still nascent presidential race, potentially dragging the Republican Party further to the right than Mitt Romney’s hardline immigration platform in 2012. “In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying – the next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages,” Walker said Monday in an interview with Glenn Beck. “It is a fundamentally lost issue by many...

Employers in 31 U.S. states cut jobs last month as weak economic growth weighed on hiring and a slowdown in oil and gas drilling caused big job losses in some states. The Labor Department said Tuesday that unemployment rates rose or were unchanged in 27 states and fell in 23 states. Eighteen states gained jobs, while employment was unchanged in Idaho.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate, is marching forward with his bold new pro-American worker immigration policy. He’s not afraid to push for a legal immigration system that doesn’t box out American workers with a massive influx of inexpensive foreign labor. After first rolling out his new ideas on Glenn Beck’s radio program on Monday, Walker appeared on Fox News’ Megyn Kelly’s show to further elaborate on how he hopes to protect Americans economically from special interests pushing for a massive influx in cheap foreign labor from around the world.... [HUGE SNIP] In addition to the...

As I noted a week or so ago, Scott Walker has begun to talk about immigration in terms of American wages, the only candidate in the GOP field to do so. He reinforced the message on the Glenn Beck show the other day (note the Jeff Sessions name-check): In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying — the next president and the next congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages, because the more I’ve talked to folks,...

The Post reports that Walker now says, “In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying … the next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages.” He went on to cite favorably Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on the subject. The notion that legal immigration hurts the economy and native workers has been rebutted repeatedly and is widely disparaged by a host of pro-growth conservatives and scholars.....AshLee Strong, spokeswoman for Walker’s Our American Revival PAC, tells...

Schlumberger, the world's largest oilfield service provider, said it plans to cut its global workforce by another 11,000 jobs over coming months. Schlumberger has slashed its worldwide workforce by 15 percent total. The company, which has headquarters in Houston, Paris and Hague, announced its plans last week, part of sweeping layoffs across the oilfield service industry as drilling rig counts in North American plummet amid low oil prices. Competitors Halliburton and Baker Hughes have also announced layoffs. Schlumberger, which employed 126,000 worldwide at the height of oil prices last summer, did not provide specifics as to where layoffs would occur...

Commentary By Portrait of Patrick Tyrrell Patrick Tyrrell There was good news this month: private-sector job openings rose slightly in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Openings rose to 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and the job openings—the highest rate since January 2001. Other data for the month showed the unemployment rate for workers age 25-54 (often called prime age workers) ticked downward to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.

"....This development, perhaps one of if not the biggest of the 2016 presidential campaign so far, comes as Walker has taken a commanding lead in polls in all three of the first GOP primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The reason why this development is so significant is that the two establishment-backed candidates, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, both have an in-depth understanding of the immigration issue and come down on the side that supports special interests’ desire for a massive increase in legal immigration that hurts American workers. Meanwhile, Sens. Ted Cruz...

Megyn Kelly interviewed governor Scott Walker on her show last night and covered a wide variety of topics. The first subject was Hillary Clinton, who Walker suggested is out of touch with the American people. Other topics included Walker’s strategy for winning independent voters in Wisconsin, the GOP’s prospects for 2016 and immigration. Here’s the video:

Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the number of job openings in the private sector has steadily climbed — just as one would expect to happen as the economy recovered. But over those same years, the share of 25- to 54-year-olds who are active in the labor market has steadily fallen...

For the first time in 110 months, the number of manufacturing jobs could exceed the number of government jobs in this state, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of February 2015, the latest period for which data is available, there were 593,300 government jobs in Michigan and 593,100 manufacturing jobs. Employment in Michigan took a beating during the 2000s, said Michael LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in an email. “Manufacturing was just one industry that was hit hard,” LaFaive said. “Finally after eight long years,...

In results that were stunning for several reasons, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the runaway winner in a "straw poll" of Republican presidential favorites at Pennsylvania’s largest-ever gathering of conservatives, the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, on Friday and Saturday.With the "straw ballots" counted and released on Saturday, Walker was an easy winner with 91 votes, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 58 votes. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was third with 56 votes.Since the first PLC back in 1989, the group has become the most-attended and most-watched conclave of conservatives in the Keystone State. Fueled by the recent campaigns of...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate, pledged to protect American workers from the economic effects, not only of illegal immigration but also of a massive increase in legal immigration. During an interview with Glenn Beck, Walker became the first declared or potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate to stake out a position on immigration fully in line with that of Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). He also noted that he has been working with Chairman Sessions on the issue to learn more about it. Walker is now...

Glenn Beck on Monday interviewed Wisc. Gov. Scott Walker (R), who is widely expected to be running for president in 2016. Though Beck had reservations before the interview, when it concluded, Beck said he “loved” the man. “I loved him,” Beck said. “I was really impressed with him, really liked him. [I] thought he had great answers for everything. We didn’t push him to the wall on things, but it’s our first meeting and I thought he had really reasonable answers.” Beck said he would like to speak with Walker more about immigration and the Middle East, but he was...