Excerpt for the day - February 26

"That's what "collective bargaining" is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government."


- "The Man" Mark Steyn


read more here

Why Public Employee Unions are a Menace

"Unions have come to rely on the public sector because government employees are easier to organize, and managers less resistent. Who's going to put up a fight over an organizing campaign with a politically active union when taxpayers are paying the bill? If the union wants nicer benefits, it's easy to cave in, tax dollars and budgets be damned. It's good for campaign coffers.

That mentality may have worked during a boom period, but it doesn't work in a bust when unemployment is rampant and the contrasts between haves and have nots are clear. Being a Wall Street banker may have some whiff of sin to the working man, but the loathsome element isn't merely the wealth of the AIG or Goldman Sachs executive, but that it has been compensated with taxpayer subsidies when taxpayers themselves are struggling to make ends meet. It's not so much about haves and have nots. It's about haves and have yours.

Taxpayers are becoming acutely aware of the have-yours as a class -- something like Angelo Codevilla's ruling class -- whose gains in salaries and benefits aren't associated with harder work and important innovations but political access. Public-sector unions rallying in Madison aren't even taking a hit for their political activism, given that their protest is made possible by paid sick days, negotiated for them by their collective bargaining units who, it must be said, donate to the very people with whom they negotiate."

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/02/wisconsin-reveals-class-war-between-haves-and-have-yours#ixzz1Ee5kJLc1"

Excerpt for the day - Feb 21

"When you add collective bargaining to that mix, the unions gain the power to make in private negotiations decisions that should be made in public deliberations—decisions about public priorities and public budgets. And they turn public employees into a formal procedural adversary of the public they serve. This presents some serious problems to our democratic system, problems that traditionally kept even the biggest advocates of unionism from supporting collective bargaining with the government. This is why Franklin Roosevelt said that “collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” It is why George Meany (the first president of the AFL-CIO) said it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”...Walker would not even strip state employees of the power to bargain collectively for wages, only for benefits which are easier to hide from the public. And he would not, of course, strip them of their other great advantages over private-sector workers, which are functions of their rights as citizens who also happen to be employed by the government they elect, and so could not be taken from them.

 

The notion that this involves an assault on some inalienable right to collective bargaining with the public is preposterous. Such collective bargaining is a privilege public workers have obtained by exercising their political muscle, and state officials around the country are right to try to roll it back to the extent they can."

-Yuval Levin @ the Corner

Excerpt for the day - Feb 18

"A common theme of the union demonstrators in Madison today was that Governor Walker is a "dictator." This showed up on sign after sign. It sheds light, I think, on how public union members in particular, and liberals in general, think. What is going on here is that the voters of Wisconsin have elected a Republican Governor and--overwhelmingly--a Republican legislature, precisely so that they can get the state's budget under control.

What the Democrats don't like isn't dictatorship, it is democracy. That is why the Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate fled the stateen masse--they prevented a quorum, so that a vote they were going to lose couldn't take place. Once again, it is democracy they are trying to frustrate, not dictatorship."

- John Hindaraker @ powerlineblog.com

Excerpt for the day - Feb 17

"What are the people around the state supposed to think of them — teachers who have pretty nice jobs and who decided they could go somewhere else for the day instead? What did those teachers teach? I didn't notice any of them trying to speak to the people of the state, trying to win anyone over. In fact, there were chants — simple, repeated words that don't try to explain and persuade — and ugly signs full of name-calling and violence. There were plenty of nice people too and gentle signs, but the nice to ugly ratio was worse than at the Tea Party rallies I've seen, and Democrats aimed such contempt at the Tea Partiers. Why should the Tea Party-type people of the state be impressed by the other side's crowds?"


-Ann Althouse


Althouse has got some pretty good coverage of what's happening in Wisconsin.  I wish that Snyder would have the guts to take on the MEA in a similar manner.  

Excerpt for the day - Feb 16

"The public-sector union tantrums, meant to make lawmakers wobble, have an inadvertent message for the rest of us: Voters can vote all they want. We can elect a cheapskate governor and a Legislature to match. But come the moment, unions will have the last, loudest word.

They'll have it if takes marches. They'll have it if it takes what amounts to an illegal strike, with so many Madison teachers calling in sick Wednesday that the district closed schools. If it takes showing up for a we-know-where-your-family-is protest on Walker's Wauwatosa lawn while he was at work, the unions are sure they can outshout any election result.

This is exactly why Walker is right to limit the unions' power over government spending."

- Patrick McIlheran

Excerpt for the day - Feb 15

"If this guy legitimately blacked out I understand that. I sort of even understand the cops wanting to play this cool after the crowd seemed to decide it had enough information to act.

But part of the reason we are so suspicious of Muslims is that we now know our own government is engaged in an effort to actively lie to us about Muslim-involved violence because they think we can't handle it.

Since we cannot trust the police, FBI, or government (or even the Army's investigators) to tell us the fucking truth, we're not being paranoid: We are reacting appropriately to threats and to a fundamentally dishonest government."

read more at AoSHQ