jerkameleon:

(via Infographic: Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably))

You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: sometimes it is the basketball coach.

Ugh. I wish this was a joke.

workingamerica:

75 bills restricting voting rights intro’d in 30 states…in 2013 alone.

kileyrae:

Slate: How Much Did the Gun Lobby Donate to Your Member of Congress?

thepoliticalnotebook:

Want to check out what the gender pay gap is in your state or county? Slate’s got you covered with this great horribly depressing interactive map graphic… I’m looking at you, Wyoming and Utah. The national average is pretty unacceptable, but you’re way far behind even that… 

[Slate]

motherjones:

In light of Mitt Romney’s now-infamous statement about the “47 percent,” it’s worth taking a look at which states actually benefit the most from federal taxes.

Craig Gilbert, in his most recent column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, examines characteristics of Wisconsin’s most right-leaning and left-leaning areas.

The state’s reddest communities are less demographically diverse (they are overwhelmingly white) but more geographically dispersed than the state’s bluest communities. The wards where Walker won 70% or more of the vote cover a huge swath of eastern Wisconsin, from the suburbs and exurbs west of Milwaukee and Racine northward along the Fox Valley and up toward the Door Peninsula. They also cover large patches of north central Wisconsin. (Walker won 53% of the statewide vote).

The Democratic landslide wards are heavily concentrated in and around Milwaukee and Madison. But the state’s bluest areas are demographically diverse. They include African-American neighborhoods in Racine, Beloit and Milwaukee, liberal white enclaves in Dane County, very traditional, blue-collar Democratic pockets in northwestern Wisconsin, and tribal communities across the state.

sarahlee310:

The State Integrity Investigation is an unprecedented, data-driven analysis of transparency and accountability in all 50 state governments. The Center has partnered with Global Integrity and Public Radio International to assign each state a letter grade — based on 300 government integrity indicators. No state received an A, and eight states failed

(via Grading the nation: How accountable is your state? | iWatch News by The Center for Public Integrity)

etsyfindoftheday:

vassislavova has this wisconsinite swooning over their vintage-style milwaukee neighborhoods poster!! it’s available in multiple color combos … and if you’re not from the MKE, check to see if your city is listed, too!

Use this interactive map to predict the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election.

CFED’s tenth annual Assets & Opportunities Scorecard was produced after studying wealth, poverty, and financial security.  States are scored in five categories: financial assets and income, businesses and jobs, housing and homeownership, health care, and education.  The interactive map provides data for each state.  

Corrections spending is absorbing a growing share of states’ budgets leaving less for education, health care, and other priorities. Read more here.

Racial Gap Found in Traffic Stops in Milwaukee:

A black Milwaukee driver is seven times as likely to be stopped by city police as a white resident driver, a Journal Sentinel analysis of nearly 46,000 traffic stops has found.

Similarly, Milwaukee police pulled over Hispanic city motorists nearly five times as often as white drivers, according to the review, which took into account the number of licensed drivers by race.

Police also searched black drivers at twice the rate of whites, but those searches didn’t lead to higher rates of seized weapons, drugs or stolen property.

Mapping the GOP War on Voting

The Laywers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law  has put together an interactive Map of Shame, where you can track GOP block-the-vote initiatives across the country.

A shift that could change the electoral landscape is underway – the tightening of restrictions on who can vote and how Americans can vote.  Going into the 2012 elections, there will be millions of Americans who will find that since 2008, there are new barriers that could prevent them from voting.  Overall, legislators introduced and passed the following measures:

Photo ID laws. The number of states with laws requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification has quadrupled in 2011.

Proof of citizenship laws. The number of states with such a requirement has more than doubled.

Making voter registration harder. At least thirteen states introduced bills to end highly popular Election Day and same-day voter registration, limit voter registration mobilization efforts, and reduce other registration opportunities.

Reducing early and absentee days. Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia succeeded in enacting bills reducing early voting.

Making it harder to restore voting rights. Two states—Florida and Iowa—reversed prior executive actions that made it easier for citizens with past felony convictions to restore their voting rights, affecting hundreds of thousands of voters. In effect, both states now permanently disenfranchise most citizens with past felony convictions.

-The Brennan Center for Justice.

Mapping censorship.

This map is drawn from cases documented by the American Library Association and the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.