UP: Richard Davis. The National Endowment for the Arts awards the 83-year-old UW-Madison music professor the prestigious 2014 Jazz Masters Fellowship, worth a cool $25,000. "I've known about these awards for years because I know most of the people who received them," Davis tells the Wisconsin State Journal. "It's almost like a club." The bassist has played on some landmark albums, including Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch! and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks.
DOWN: Wisconsin. The latest jobs report found that Wisconsin has created a scant 62,000 jobs since Gov. Scott Walker took office in January 2011, well off the pace of his pledge to create 250,000 jobs during the term. The governor nevertheless boasted about his performance in a statement: "Today, over 62,000 Wisconsin moms, dads and grandparents are able to make ends meet." Democrats pounced on the job numbers, but it was hard not hear schadenfreude in their criticism.
