It’s 47-47 in Wisconsin! The Daily Beast called Mary Burke the “woman who could beat Scott Walker.” We could FINALLY wipe that smirk off Walker’s face. Your donation to DEFEAT Tea Party Republicans will be DOUBLED up to $56,000 in the next 48 hours.

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It’s our turn to turn them out. If we do, Mary wins and Walker’s toast! And that’s true in other key battlegrounds as well.

So every day until the election, we’ve got to raise $56,000 to win. When you donate in the next 48 hours, a donor will DOUBLE your gift up to $56,000.

According to a report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner Mary Burke called herself a “fiscal conservative” during a meeting on Tuesday with Milwaukee business leaders.

While I understand that calling herself a “fiscal conservative” will win her some votes among moderates and independents, it’s certainly not going to win her many fans among her base, and I’m disappointed that the candidate most likely to end up as the Democratic standard-bearer against Gov. Scott Walker is proud to call herself a “fiscal conservative,” because when I think of fiscal conservatives I don’t think of Democrats who’ll stand up for the middle class – I think of Democrats like Chris Abele, who’s proven he’s certainly no champion of the largely middle class public employees who work for Milwaukee County.

What’s more, when I think of “fiscal conservatives,” I think of Scott Walker and Glenn Grothmann, and if that’s the kind of company Mary Burke wants to be associated with as fellow fiscal conservatives, then I think I’ve officially entered the Twilight Zone.

BURKE: "In terms of the fiscal picture, there is no doubt that the first budget that introduced and that he implemented significantly improved the financial situation of the state, because the state was coming out of this downturn, in 2008 and 2010, revenues were going down, there were, you know, the structural deficit grew, and basically he got rid of the structural deficit."

WASHINGTON — Most of the people choosing health plans under the Affordable Care Act — about 80 percent — are paying their initial premiums as required for coverage to take effect, several large insurers said Tuesday on the eve of a House hearing about the law.

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Paul Wingle, the executive director of exchange operations and strategy at Aetna, said: “As of the third week of April, Aetna had over 600,000 members who had enrolled and roughly 500,000 members who had paid. For those who had reached their payment due date, the payment rate, though dynamic, has been in the low- to mid-80 percent range.” Aetna said it was selling insurance to individuals and families in the exchanges of 17 states.

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J. Darren Rodgers, the chief marketing officer of the Health Care Service Corporation, which offers Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, said his company had received 600,000 applications through the exchanges in Texas and the four states it serves. On average, according to data provided by Mr. Rodgers, about 15 percent of customers missed their initial payment deadlines from January through April.

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Republicans on the committee said last week that only about two-thirds of people signing up for private health insurance in the federal exchange had paid their premiums as of April 15. Administration officials and congressional Democrats called that statistic grossly misleading. Given the surge in enrollment near the end of March, they said, it is understandable that some policyholders would not have paid by April 15.

There are a few things you should know about the Virgin Islands Republican Party: It has no full-time staff, has not had regular meetings for nearly two years, and only about 4 percent of the $200,000 it has raised since last fall has gone to party coffers. Through the end of March, it moved exactly $7,927 to the party. Most of the contributions, solicited by mail sent to people across the county, end up in a bank in Fairfax, Va., and are used to solicit yet more donations.

The Virgin Islands committee has made two donations — to Republican candidates running for the Senate in South Carolina (Tim Scott) and Oklahoma (T. W. Shannon). Its third donation was to a Georgia state superintendent candidate. The Virgin Islands committee spends the overwhelming bulk of its money not for basic political activities like voter registration or party messages, but to raise more money. A few other conservative political committees employ this technique, and the biggest beneficiaries are a number of fund-raising companies in Northern Virginia.

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The VIGOP committee is different from other state party committees in several respects. First, it appears to raise no significant money from the territory, whereas most state parties depend on in-state support from individual donors. Second, it has no local bank account listed on its registration form, and the same person — Mr. MacKenzie — is listed as both the custodian of the committee’s records and its treasurer. Third, no Virgin Islander is listed on the committee’s forms.

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The fund-raising approach of the Virgin Islands committee is unusual for party organizations, but it’s not unusual for Mr. MacKenzie. In addition to the party committee, Mr. MacKenzie is the treasurer of nine other active political action committees that have raised a combined $10.1 million from individuals since the beginning of last year. The committees include the Conservative StrikeForce, Freedom’s Defense Fund and the Black Republican PAC. Almost all of them employ similar techniques: using direct mail to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, most of which is spent on more fund-raising activities, although in the past some of the committees ran television advertisements.

According to a report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner Mary Burke called herself a “fiscal conservative” during a meeting on Tuesday with Milwaukee business leaders.

While I understand that calling herself a “fiscal conservative” will win her some votes among moderates and independents, it’s certainly not going to win her many fans among her base, and I’m disappointed that the candidate most likely to end up as the Democratic standard-bearer against Gov. Scott Walker is proud to call herself a “fiscal conservative,” because when I think of fiscal conservatives I don’t think of Democrats who’ll stand up for the middle class – I think of Democrats like Chris Abele, who’s proven he’s certainly no champion of the largely middle class public employees who work for Milwaukee County.

What’s more, when I think of “fiscal conservatives,” I think of Scott Walker and Glenn Grothmann, and if that’s the kind of company Mary Burke wants to be associated with as fellow fiscal conservatives, then I think I’ve officially entered the Twilight Zone.

BURKE: "In terms of the fiscal picture, there is no doubt that the first budget that introduced and that he implemented significantly improved the financial situation of the state, because the state was coming out of this downturn, in 2008 and 2010, revenues were going down, there were, you know, the structural deficit grew, and basically he got rid of the structural deficit."