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Karl Rove tells us why the president is involved in Wisconsin.
… Why is the president trying to bully the Wisconsin governor? After all, Arizona, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia are among the states to explicitly prohibit collective bargaining for public employees, which is far beyond what Mr. Walker is seeking. The answer is found in four digits: 2012.
Unlike those states, Wisconsin is a 2012 battleground. Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told a reporter from this newspaper last week that a union defeat in Wisconsin “can put [Mr. Obama] in some danger” of losing the next election. Labor spent $400 million to elect Mr. Obama in 2008: Mr. McEntee was sending a not-so-subtle message that unions would be unable to spend so generously on his behalf in 2012 if they continue hemorrhaging members and dues money. ..
Roger Simon says liberals have become reactionaries.
Jonah Goldberg has famously linked liberals with fascism, but in these times I think they are more like reactionaries, desperately clinging to past views when they are no longer functional or even relevant, if they ever were.
I admit I have been using the term “reactionary” for a while when referring to contemporary liberals. This has been quite intentional, something of a deliberate hoisting by their own petard. In my old days on the left, we would brand everyone we didn’t like as a reactionary, mired in the then supposedly-evil capitalist system. And I would like to use the events in Wisconsin to explain why I do it to them now. (Yes, it is partly to get their goat, but it is also to make a point.)
Let’s review what happened: In November, Wisconsin voters delivered a serious and obvious message. Their state (and our country) was going broke. It could no longer afford the massive entitlement programs that had been enacted and in place for some time. Demographics had made them untenable. Something had to be done to avoid bankruptcy and a calamitous economic situation, both for the state and the country. And it had to be done soon. (This was indeed a worldwide phenomenon, as most of us know.) ….
Noemie Emery says there is a war between chief executives of the states and the country.
Picture a hand on the wheel of the great ship of state, pushing it hard in a certain direction, say, to the left. It belongs to the president. Picture 29 smaller ones on the other side of the wheel, trying as hard as they can to wrench it back in the other direction. They belong to Govs. Chris Christie, R-N.J., Mitch Daniels, R-Ind., Scott Walker, R-Wis., and 26 other Republican governors, 12 of them elected in the 2009 and 2010 cycles.
Two years and four months ago, President Obama was elected to enact his agenda; and four months ago, the Republicans were put in to dismantle it.
In the interim, the public had a big change of mind, which created the impasse. Each side has a mandate, and is hell-bent upon it, creating a situation unique in our history.
For the first time since the Civil War ended, the federal government and a large number of the states and their governors are at open and few-holds-barred war. …
Josh Kraushaar in The National Journal says the president is playing a prevent defense.
President Obama has chosen to play the political equivalent of the prevent defense as his reelection campaign approaches by deferring tough decisions on entitlements.
His budget made no attempt to change the Medicare and Social Security programs, and barely made a dent in spending cuts.
His agreement to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts in last year’s lame-duck session has been followed by an embrace of the protesters in Wisconsin, both of which are off key in an economic situation that demands sacrifice from all.
Obama said in his State of the Union address that he wants to “win the future,” but his policies remain stuck in a 20th-century mindset defending a strained government entitlement system and public-sector unions.
His own message was clear: Wait for Republicans to take the initiative, at their own political peril. And that they did. The contrast between the White House and GOP messages couldn’t have been more at odds with each other last week—one that is poised to set the tone for the 2012 presidential election.
A trio of Republican governors has set the stage.
John Podhoretz thinks the 2012 GOP candidate will come from the action in the states.
For months now, Republicans have turned to each other and said, “Who’s the candidate?”
President Obama is vulnerable in 2012, clearly, but you can’t beat something with nothing, and right now, the GOP field looks pretty much like . . . nothing.
Who’ll have the stature to compete? Thanks to those Democratic lawmakers fleeing Wisconsin and Indiana to frustrate the democratic process they swore an oath to uphold, we may have an answer.
They, and the demonstrators screaming about the governors seeking cuts in the absurdly generous benefits granted to public-sector workers, have created a national stage on which a new and dynamic candidate can emerge.
The governors (and perhaps the House members) who are taking on these battles are fighting the fight of the GOP future, and one of them now seems certain to take the mantle of 2012. …
Steve Malanga exposes many of the lobbying efforts of government unions.
Government workers have taken to the streets in Madison, Wis., to battle a series of reforms proposed by Gov. Scott Walker that include allowing workers to opt out of paying dues to unions. Everywhere that this “opt out” idea has been proposed, unions have battled it vigorously because the money they collect from dues is at the heart of their power.
Unions use that money not only to run their daily operations but to wage political campaigns in state capitals and city halls. Indeed, public-sector unions especially have become the nation’s most aggressive advocates for higher taxes and spending. They sponsor tax-raising ballot initiatives and pay for advertising and lobbying campaigns to pressure politicians into voting for them. And they mount multimillion dollar campaigns to defeat efforts by governors and taxpayer groups to roll back taxes. …
Richard Cohen thinks enough is enough with government pensions.
In New York City, the No. 2 guy in the fire department retired on a pension worth $242,000 a year. In New York State, a single official holding two jobs and one pension took in $641,000. A lieutenant with the Port Authority police retired with an annual pension of $196,767, and 738 of the city’s teachers, principals and such have pensions worth more than $100,000 a year. Their former employer, it goes almost without saying, is steamed. Their former employer is me.
These examples of pension obesity were culled from the local newspapers, which never fail to shock with revelations of how good life is for those who once worked for the city, the state or any one of several public agencies. In some cases, retirement came a mere 20 or so years after first reporting to HR and, if you were lucky enough to fake a disability – oh, my aching back! – the sky is virtually the limit. Fully one-third of all New York City cops who retired during a recent 17-month period did so on disability. They have dangerous jobs, we all know – but not nearly as dangerous as Long Island Rail Road workers. Almost all of them retired on disability. All aboard!
I pause now to assert my bona fides. I got my first union card while still in college and remained a member of the Newspaper Guild throughout my career, paying dues even when I no longer had to. I can whistle union ditties, and I swell with pride at the ancient picture of my grandfather, posed with his good friend, the union organizer. I know, too, what happens when unions are weak or nonexistent. Capitalism is cruel. Do not look for charity.
But, really, enough is enough. …
Streetwise Professor says Krugman’s defense of public sector unions proves their danger.
… Krugman sets out a Galbraithian vision in which the influence of countervailing powers, organized labor and organized capital, are offsetting, and an activist government wisely directs the polity and the economy. As if. In practice, what occurs instead is corporatism of a sort described by Mancur Olson, in which concentrated and organized interests exploit the power of the state to extract rents from diffuse consumers, investors, entrepreneurs and taxpayers.
Thus, Krugman’s unwitting endorsement of the public choice perspective torpedoes his own defense of public sector unions. Because they are just organized groups that exploit the power of the state for their own benefit and impose costs on those lacking such privileged influence. Once it is admitted that that’s the way the game is played–and Krugman jumps into that puddle with both feet–the immediate conclusion is that it is imperative to constrain the power of such bodies, and the power of the state that they exploit for their gain and to our detriment.
Nile Gardiner agrees, saying that liberals are stuck in a twilight zone.
Remember those episodes of the brilliant but now dated 1960s sci-fi series The Twilight Zone where the lead character invariably gets stuck in a parallel universe, but is blissfully unaware until the final denouement? Well 2011 America looks much the same as far as the country’s liberal elites are concerned, trapped in a make-believe world where the towering national debt doesn’t really matter, where militant trade unions holding an entire state hostage is somehow normal and “democratic”, and where the real problem is not the spectre of Big Government but those cost-cutting conservatives committed to bringing it down to size.
Two op-eds published in the bastions of the liberal establishment this President’s Day weekend encapsulate the Twilight Zone mentality which dominates America’s left in the second decade of the 21st Century. The first is by Paul Krugman, who holds forth in The New York Times with what can only be described as a ludicrous rant against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who, heaven forbid, is actually trying to reduce spending by cutting the entitlements of the bloated public sector. According to Krugman, Walker is hell-bent on turning America into a “third world oligarchy” under the pretense of fiscal retrenchment: …