Scott Walker has been a polarizing figure since becoming Wisconsin's governor one year ago. Only months after moving into the Madison governors' mansion, the 44-year-old Republican sought to fix the state’s budget gap by pushing a bill that cut pay and benefits for public sector workers and strictly curtailed their rights to collective bargaining.

Walker's surprising move was controversial – and ultimately successful. National labor activists fought and lost while he became a Fox News regular.

But now, largely as a result of his brazenness, the first-term governor is facing a potential recall election. State Democrats and local union organizers have until Jan. 17 to gather the 540,208 signatures needed to force an early vote sometime this year.

Walker defended his actions and attempted to explain the flood of cash he's received from outside the state since his standoff with organized labor in a three-part profile by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, the final installment of which was published Tuesday.

Out-of-state donors have given the embattled governor $3.2 million as of Dec. 10, the final campaign contributions disclosure deadline in 2011. That sum accounts for an unusually high 42 percent of his total war chest.

“Not a penny of that would be here if it weren’t for the recalls,” Walker said.

Here are six facts about Walker from the series for Wisconsin voters -- and the rest of us -- to consider:

Rick Perry said he would “create another 250,000 jobs by getting the EPA out of the way” of natural gas drilling. But the EPA isn’t currently in the way: The very study on which Perry relies assumes that all of those jobs will result if current regulations are not changed.

In a speech at a steel plant in Pittsburgh on Oct. 14, the Texas governor outlined a sweeping plan to create over a million jobs by increasing American energy production. The plan involves opening up numerous areas currently off-limits to oil and gas exploration, and repealing regulations he said are hampering domestic production of fossil fuels.

The full potential for American energy production can only be realized, he said, “if environmental bureaucrats are told to stand down.”

Calling natural gas a “game-changer” in U.S. energy production, Perry cited regulation of hydraulic fracturing as an example of government overreach. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process of extracting natural gas from underground shale formations. Spurred by technological advancements, the Department of Energy projects shale gas will comprise over 20 percent of the total U.S. gas supply by 2020.

With the Marcellus Shale deposits in the northeast U.S. poised to be the largest producing gas field in the U.S., they have come under intense national focus. Gas companies see huge potential for production and profits and environmentalists worry about damage to drinking water and other environmental impacts. Perry, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, said development of the Marcellus Shale would be a presidential priority for him.

At the latest debate, the Republican presidential candidates repeated several claims they’ve made before. The candidates participated in a roundtable-style discussion at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where they reiterated false and misleading lines about the federal health care law, the debt ceiling debate, job creation and more:

Chris Christie shaded the truth when he took credit for closing New Jersey’s budget gap “without raising taxes.” It’s true he didn’t raise state taxes, but the governor’s first budget extensively revised and reduced a program that once provided residents with local property tax rebate checks. As a result, nearly 1 million homeowners received an average $269 property tax credit in fiscal year 2011, down from an average rebate check of $1,035 the year before.

The New Jersey governor spoke Sept. 27 at the Reagan Library. His theme was “leadership and compromise,” and he cited his experience as a Republican working with a Democratic legislature.

Christie, Sept. 27: "Leadership and compromise is the only way you can balance two budgets with over $13 billion in deficits without raising taxes while protecting core services."

Christie — who after the speech once again rebuffed calls to run for president — did face significant budget problems when he took office in January 2010. He inherited a $2.2 billion shortfall in the fiscal year 2010 budget and declared a fiscal emergency to deal with it. In his first budget for fiscal year 2011, Christie faced a structural deficit of $10.7 billion.

The Perry campaign has been pushing a questionable claim that the Massachusetts health care law, signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, “killed 18,000 jobs.” But that number was churned out by an economic model used by a conservative think tank, and it’s unknown whether the figure is accurate.

At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said: “If Romneycare cost Massachusetts 18,000 jobs, just think what it would do to this country.” Campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan also has referred to the study in criticizing Romney, saying the law “killed 18,000 jobs,” including in statements made prior to last week’s debate in Florida. What’s the truth behind this talking-point-in-the-making? We interviewed several experts to find out.

That 18,000 number isn’t a hard count of laid-off or fired workers, as Perry’s claim may lead some voters to believe. Instead, it’s an estimate from a conservative think tank – The Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University — that ran health care cost variables through its economic model and determined that the state had “created 18,313 fewer jobs in 2010 than it would have had [the state health care law] not been in place.”

We can’t say whether or not Massachusetts businesses really chose to create 18,000 fewer jobs – or any other number – because of the law, but here’s what we can say: