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Charles Krauthammer likes the developments in Wisconsin.
The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics have yielded singular clarity.
At the federal level, President Obama’s budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions crying, “Hell, no.”
A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades. …
David Harsanyi comments on an over the top analogy from the far-left.
According to Nobel laureate and raconteur Paul Krugman, Gov. Scott Walker and “his backers” are attempting to “make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a Third World-style oligarchy.”
Now, it’s common knowledge that throwing around loaded words like “socialism” is both uncivil and obtuse, so it’s comforting to know we can still refer to people as “Third World-style oligarchs.” And boy, that kind of Banana Republic doesn’t seem very appealing.
Democracy, naturally, can only be saved by public sector unions, which attain their political power and taxpayer-funded benefits by “negotiating” with politicians elected with the help of unions who use, well, taxpayer dollars. And you know, that doesn’t sound like an oligarchy at all.
While Walker, who won office using obnoxious Third World oligarchic tactics like “getting more votes than the other candidate,” is a cancer in the heart of democracy, union- funded Democrats evading their constitutional obligation to cast votes are only protecting the integrity of representative government by completely avoiding democracy.
John Fund profiles Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s newest progressive.
… It is deeply symbolic that this epic battle over the direction of government is taking place in the Badger State. Wisconsin was the birthplace of the modern progressive state in the early 20th century under Gov. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, who championed progressive taxation and the nation’s first worker’s-compensation system. In 1959, Gov. Gaylord Nelson made Wisconsin the first state to grant public employees collective-bargaining rights.
But in more recent years Wisconsin has also been an incubator of the conservative counterargument to the welfare state. In the 1990s, Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson helped push through welfare reform and school-choice programs that have been emulated across the country. By modernizing the relationship between state employees and the government, Mr. Walker, like Mr. Thompson before him, hopes to contain the excesses of the past—to enable the modern welfare state to live within its means.
Mr. Walker says that the employee rights that people care about are protected by civil-service rules, not collective bargaining. “We have the strongest protections in the country on grievance procedures, merit hiring, and just cause for disciplining and terminating employees,” he says. “None of that changes under my plan.” Mr. Walker notes that the single largest group affected by his proposal are the 30,000 workers at the University of Wisconsin who were only granted collective-bargaining rights in 2009. “If they only got them two years ago, how can you say they’re set in stone?” …
Victor Davis Hanson liked Krauthammer’s comparison of the president and France’s Louis XV.
President Obama established a bipartisan debt-reduction commission — and then ignored its findings, which called for unpopular reductions in entitlements and across-the-board spending cuts. His first two budgets led to the largest deficits in U.S. history. The ensuing $3 trillion in red ink gave rise to the Tea Party movement and led to the largest midterm defeat of the Democratic party in the House of Representatives since 1938.
No matter. The president has proposed a new budget with an even larger $1.6 trillion deficit. That record federal borrowing prompted columnist Charles Krauthammer to describe it as a Louis XV indulgence, an allusion to the wild royal spending that brought about the French Revolution. Even Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas, who once gushed that Obama stood “above the world” as some “sort of God,” called the president’s new budget a “profile in cowardice.” …
Deroy Murdock wonders when we can start drilling for oil again.
… Petroleum futures Thursday reached $103.41 per barrel before falling back below $100, their highest price since September 2008. Unleaded gasoline averages $3.24 per gallon – up 55 cents, year-on-year. Summer road trips may push prices higher.
Amid all of this, the Obama administration treats America’s domestic petroleum supply like the Smithsonian’s Hope Diamond: Something to be observed and admired, but not touched.
Like it or not, America relies heavily on oil today, for jobs, commerce, and our very existence. Alas, oil comes mainly from an area that is as stable as a prison riot. “Precarious” barely describes America’s predicament. And yet, a huge part of the solution – domestic oil and gas – lies just beneath our feet, if only President Barack Obama would let us open the basement door and light this dormant furnace.
May we drill now, please?
John Stossel tells us how to bet on the Oscars.
Sunday night is Oscar night! Think you know who’s going to win? Want to make a bet?
The Hollywood Stock Exchange allows people to bet on which movies, actors, directors, etc. will take home Academy Awards. You can also bet on how much money a movie might make. It’s called a prediction market … except unlike other prediction markets, bettors can’t use real money.
What fun is that? It’s not only less fun, it’s also makes the prediction market less accurate. People are more careful when they have real money on the line, and the chance of losing money weeds out the frivolous guessers. Prediction markets are valuable for predicting all kinds of things because the prospect of making money attracts people with knowledge, judgment and a good sense of the future. More information is better than less. The people most confident in their information bet the most. That’s why speculation is a sound market institution.
The promoters of the Hollywood Stock Exchange would have preferred the use of real money but — surprise! — government forbids it. The Frank-Dodd financial regulation law killed the real market at the behest of some in the movie industry. …
WSJ editors tell us the foolishness of ethanol subsidies are so obvious Bill Clinton sees the light.
America’s political addiction to ethanol has consequences, from raising the price of food to lining the pockets of companies like Archer Daniels Midland. So we’re delighted to see another prominent booster—Bill Clinton—see the fright.
“We have to become energy independent” but “we don’t want to do it at the expense of food riots,” the former President told an agriculture conference Thursday. He urged farmers to consider the needs of developing countries—the implication being that the diversion of corn to ethanol production limits food supplies and artificially raises prices. …
Scientists in North Carolina have demonstrated turtles navigate by differences in the earth’s magnetic field.
For centuries, determining longitude was an extremely difficult task for sailors, so difficult that it’s been thought improbable — if not impossible — for animals to do it.
But migratory sea turtles have now proved capable of sensing longitude, using almost imperceptible gradients in Earth’s magnetic field.
“We have known for about six years now that the magnetic map of turtles, at a minimum, allows turtles to … detect latitude magnetically,” said biologist Ken Lohmann of the University of North Carolina, who describes the turtle’s power Feb. 24 in Current Biology. “Up until now, that was where the story ended.”
Lohmann specializes in animal navigation, and work from his laboratory and others have exhaustively demonstrated how sea turtles — along with many birds, fish and crustaceans — use gradients in Earth’s magnetic field to steer. …
Politico catches Nancy Pelosi with more delusions of grandeur.
The Democratic National Committee wanted to honor Nancy Pelosi Thursday — but its praise wasn’t good enough for the House minority leader.
When the DNC’s Resolutions Committee brought up a resolution commemorating Pelosi’s years as speaker of the House, Pelosi’s daughter sought to alter the proposal at her mother’s behest, adding some of the accomplishments that the elder Pelosi felt the committee had overlooked.