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The War in Wisconsin
By Ross Kaminsky on 2.18.11 @ 9:23AM

Wisconsin's State Senate Democrats fled the state on Thursday rather than going to work where their presence would have allowed a vote on state budget cuts and controversial rollbacks of public sector union collective bargaining rights in the state that has had them longer than any other. It's not the budget vote precisely that they're avoiding but rather a provision that would essentially strip teachers unions of collective bargaining rights, something no public sector employee should have anyway.

The police were sent, without results, to find even one Democrat to bring back to the Wisconsin State Senate. The leftist Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent spoke to one of the brave Democrats who said they would all stay away until the collective bargaining provision was taken out of the budget.

The War in Wisconsin is, due to its relative simplicity, perhaps the clearest yet demonstration to the American people of three key facts, most of which everyone knows deep down but only a small subset (often called "conservatives" or those evil "libertarians") actually believe:

• Democrats care more about protecting union wealth and power than any other political goal.

• Democrats care only for outcome, not for rules, process, or even democracy itself if the people inconveniently elect Republicans, and

• The media is made up of partisan Democrats in a way that makes them a reliable source of propaganda and an unreliable source of information.

I thought initially that this issue would be a political winner for Republicans -- perhaps even more so outside Wisconsin as we watch the cheesehead spectacle. In fact, if the GOP were smart, they'd make a BIG issue out of teachers taking kids out of school to come protest.

Now I'm nearly sure that it's a winner for Republicans because Barack Obama has jumped into the fray, suggesting that the move against public sector collective bargaining "seems like an assault on unions." First, YES! Say it loud and proud! We should (non-physically) assault public sector unions at every turn for the sake of our nation's economic and political health. Second, and more germane to today, eliminating collective bargaining for public employees is a critical step toward restoring budget sanity to any state.

The left is going all-in to stop this vote, realizing it could be the crack in the dam allowing widespread disallowance of public sector collective bargaining rights, which are one of the key reasons that the past couple of decades has seen the pay of government employees -- who have unbelievable job security and benefits -- go from somewhat under the private sector to far over the private sector. Obama's campaign apparatus is busing in people to protest -- the old rent-a-mob trick aka "astroturf," always done by the left and always charged as a ploy of the right. As Quin Hillyer points out, however, the left "want their targets… to feel fear of the mob."

While many or even most public sector jobs are useful and some are even necessary, public sector unions are neither. They are leeches sucking the blood of the body politic. Actually, that's unfair to leeches because they know to get off before they kill the host, leaving the host to recover for a later blood-letting. Democrat leaders and unions (sorry for the redundancy) believe that they're sucking the blood from a host with unlimited supply, or at least one who can be forced to be such as long as unions spend a big percentage of their dues helping Democrats get elected. They must have been shocked to learn that even a host as accustomed to being bled as Wisconsin cried "no more parasites!" in the last election.

Trying to reattach their teeth to the vital pulse of the state, teachers across the state called in sick Thursday and Friday, with some of them encouraging their students to do the same or to walk out of classes. A high school student interviewed on television yesterday marching in front of the state capitol was asked why he was there and he said "to stop whatever it is they're doing here today." If that's the quality of the public education they're receiving, perhaps there's a silver lining to the teacher sick-out, but causing kids to hate, and I do mean hate, one political party without giving them any real understanding of an issue is not just bad teaching. It's immoral, un-American, and unacceptable.

Similar intentional twisting of words and reality was made by Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, who said that the Democrats had left the State Senate because they were "trying to allow opportunity for democracy to work." In other words, democracy means "We won the election, we wrote the bill," as Nancy Pelosi famously said, only when Democrats are in charge. If Republicans have a ma

As I returned from Illinois to California I took out my little pocket Moleskine sketchbook and decided to pass some time and try to draw what I saw around me. One woman was multi-tasking (trying to write a note, talk to her three kids and complete a Sudoku puzzle), another woman read part of a book and dozed a bit, some watched the in-flight movie and the guy next to me was working his iPod. Having an aisle seat can be fun!