There’s been an amazing turn of events late this afternoon and this evening in Wisconsin. State Republican leaders have pushed ahead with an effort to put Gov. Walker’s union-busting bill into immediate effect in defiance of a state court order blocking the law from going into effect. Here’s our report.

Our reporter on the Wisconsin story and I are trying to piece together the details of breaking news out of Wisconsin this evening. But the gist is that Wisconsin Republicans have seized on a highly questionable work-around to defy the court order halting implementation of the union-busting budget repair bill and put the law into immediate effect. Whether what they’ve done is legally valid is an open question, which will undoubtedly spawn much more litigation. But since they appear to have taken the step of acting in defiance of the state judicial system itself, it raises the question of whether the legality of the move — in the sense we normally understand it, as in ‘does it count’ — even applies. Here’s a piece out earlier this evening from the Journal Sentinel. We’ll have a fuller report shortly.

In case you think Republicans have a monopoly on brass-knuckle over-the-top campaign ads, take a look at this ad.

White House sidesteps questions about whether Syrian leader should step aside.

Haley Barbour says he’d reinstate DADT to avoid battlefield danger of “amorous mindset[s].”

Benjy Sarlin has been documenting Newt Gingrich’s epic flip-flop on Libya this week, but in this latest post, we’ve dispensed with the exegesis and just gone with Newt’s own words — raw and unplugged — on various aspects of the Libya issue. All you can say is: Wow.

Professor Cronon responds to the latest volley from the Wisconsin Republican Party over its demand for public release of his university emails.

As noted last night, the Wisconsin GOP has resorted to a state FOIA request to try to gain access to the emails of a University of Wisconsin History Professor who wrote a critical blog post about Gov. Walker’s campaign against the state’s public employees unions.

Now the state Republican party is charging that criticisms of their efforts to get the professor’s emails will have a “chilling” effect on open government efforts everywhere.

Gov. Walker’s (R-WI) staff says they never saw the email suggesting they stage a fake assassination of the governor to delegitimize his union opponents.

You can point to any one of a number of specific pieces of baggage that Newt Gingrich carries into a presidential race which could by itself sink his campaign, but his sudden, inexplicable, and utterly contradictory implosion on Libya policy over the last few days reveals as much about the man’s judgment, instability, and character as any of those old Newt stories — and happens to be fresh and concerns an issue of pressing national importance.

As Benjy Sarlin has been reporting, Newt’s flip-flop — and defense thereof — is enough to make your head explode. His current position on Libya amounts to: Obama should never have followed my advice.