In brief: Clinton leads rally against Walker

Milwaukee – Former President Bill Clinton urged Wisconsin Democrats to vote against Gov. Scott Walker in Tuesday’s recall election, saying the Republican has governed without compromise or honest negotiation.

Clinton rallied hundreds of voters Friday in Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold and home of Walker’s challenger, Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett.

Clinton told the crowd at a downtown riverfront park that the states recovering from the economic downturn are those in which members of both parties are working together.

“They are involved in creative cooperation, not constant conflict,” he said, later adding, “Cooperation works. Constant conflict is a dead-bang loser.”

Clinton’s comments were a clear dig at Walker after the state divided last year over the governor’s push to effectively end collective bargaining for most public workers.

Summer heat record is Oklahoma’s

Tulsa, Okla. – Oklahoma and Texas have argued for years about which has the best college football team, whose oil fields produce better crude, even where the state border should run. But in a hot, sticky dispute that no one wants to win, Oklahoma just reclaimed its crown.

After recalculating data from last year, the nation’s climatologists are declaring that Oklahoma suffered through the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S. last year – not Texas as initially announced last fall.

In the new tally by the National Climatic Data Center, Oklahoma’s average temperature last summer was 86.9 degrees, while Texas finished with 86.7 degrees. The previous record for the hottest summer was 85.2 degrees set in 1934 – in Oklahoma.

“I’m from Oklahoma, and when you talk about the summer of 1934, there are a lot of connotations that go with that,” said Deke Arndt, chief of the NCDC’s climate monitoring branch in Asheville, N.C.

Yet the summer of 2011, “was warmer than all those summers that they experienced during the Dust Bowl,” Arndt said.