Tag: Politics

Not jet-assisted, this takeoff

Early jet plane landing on HMS Illustrious in ...
Wild blue yonder ahead . . .

I like these people and what they are aiming at, but even if you don’t, you have to admit they are self-propelled:

Thank you to the hundreds of Tea Party Patriots from Chicago and across the state of Illinois who traveled to Madison on Saturday to defend the taxpayers and parents of Wisconsin. We organized car pools, drove our friends and neighbors and paid our own way to get to the rally. We weren’t bused in by Organizing for America, SEIU, or the Democrat National Committee. This is a critical battle in the fight between freedom and big government and it will be repeated in state after state across the country,

they said in an email to supporters. No OFA or DNC support, take note of that. And I hardly think the RNC is in on it either. The latter is largely looking over its shoulder at these people, or running to keep up, which is how it’s supposed to be.

Wis. Dem no-shows have their reasons

Saul Alinsky
His shadow lurks in Madison

WI Republican state senator to Dem, whom he knows as a colleague:

Hopper [the Republican] says he reminded Taylor [the Dem] that Republicans were out of power not too long ago, when Democrats controlled the state Assembly, Senate and governor’s office. “There were bills I was adamantly opposed to,” Hopper says, “and we didn’t run away.”

How you argue against that point, I dunno. The crux of it:

At the heart of all this, Republicans and Democrats are realizing there might be a gap between them that is bigger than they realized. To Republicans, the budget fight has involved the widespread shirking of responsibilities: teachers walking out on students, legislators running away from their offices, even doctors abandoning medical standards to make excuses for perfectly healthy teacher/protesters. To Democrats, the fight has touched a core issue; anything is justified to preserve union benefits.

Or, as Saul Alinsky said, “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what the hell does?” It’s making social concerns trump personal morality.

Doctor says — so what?

Waiting At The Medical School
Nice day it was in Wauwatosa

These docs teach at U of WI Med Schl? Egad!

Its sad, but what puzzles me [Publius at Big Govt dot
com] most is how in the world three of the four physicians I can identify from these videos and other media reports are faculty members of UWs Family Medicine department, and one is a senior resident in that same department. Its a good training program, committed to providing sorely-needed primary care doctors to the state of Wisconsin. It teaches professionalism, and its faculty are supposed to model integrity. What were they thinking?

Theyve managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients. A doctors sick note is a serious document. It represents an employers desire to verify through a respected, independent, medically qualified third party the fact of an illness and the true need for convalescence. In the videos now circulating online, we witness multiple members of a noted family medicine department trash one of the well-recognized rights and privileges of their profession, with little forethought as to the consequences.

They dumb doctors’ notes down. Who will ever believe them? (It’s like what has happened to leftism-infected [sick?] media, a squandering of credibility.)

On Wisconsin: Wall St. Jnl vs. Chi Trib

Wisconsin State Capitol 5
Wis. capitol buzzing

Wall St. Journal tells percentage of Wisconsin public employees unionists’ compensation that would go for pensions, vs. “little or nothing” at this point:

Gov. [Scott] Walker first introduced his “budget repair” bill a week ago, setting off the firestorm that has swept the Capitol. Besides limiting collective-bargaining rights for most workersexcepting police, firefighters and others involved in public safetyit would require government workers, who currently contribute little or nothing to their pensions, to contribute 5.8% of their pay to pensions, and pay at least 12.6% of health-care premiums, up from an average of 6%.

Chi Trib does not run the 5.8% of pay to pensions, instead:

Walker’s proposal would . . . require all [non-public
safety] state workers to pay half their pension costs and 12.6% of their healthcare coverage, shaving an estimated $330 million off a $3.6-billion deficit.

Half the cost vs. 5.8% of workers’ pay gives us quite a different number to mull over bkfst coffee.

Trib also cites “conservative analysts” as having “long contended that excessively powerful unions representing teachers, welfare workers and other state and local employees have boosted pay and pensions across the country, laying the groundwork for the nation’s fiscal crisis.”

Correct, but Wall St. Jnl slaps this graph on its page 2:

Source: Labor Dept., as noted, providing ample grist for those conservatives’ mill.

Survival by sale

Chicago City Hall Green Roof
City Hall has green roof and structural deficit.

First you sell the car, then the garage, then the house, then the wife (or husband), then the kids. It’s how you stay afloat.

The city’s reliance on one-time revenues, rather than recurring revenue streams like taxes, exploded, with such funding growing to 17.6% of revenues in the city’s main operating fund in fiscal 2011, up from 5.6% just four years earlier.

That’s Chicago’s financing genius, as explained (not as clearly) by the Civic Fed.

This near-suburbanite would like to know what problem is more urgent for the city.

Wispy woman, pls shut up

Photo of Oprah Winfrey at her 50th birthday pa...
Respect her man in the White House - foto by Alan Light

There goes Oprah again, asking that we respect the president, just as she used to do incessantly for Bush.

Oprah called on President Obama’s critics on Friday to show some level of respect.

“I feel that everybody has a learning curve, and I feel that the reason why I was willing to step out for him was because I believed in his integrity and I believed in his heart,” the influential TV host said on MSNBCs Morning Joe in Chicago.

Of the negative mood of the country, Oprah added, I think everybody complaining ought to try it for once.

She said the presidency is a position that holds a sense of authority and governance over us all, and that even if youre not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect.

Away, slight woman! To adapt what Brutus told Cassius, when the two were squabbling in Brutus’ tent in Act III.

Dems have an edge

Democratic Party (United States)
Those guys weasel out of things?

Being a Democrat means never having to resign because of a scandal, says The Other McCain:

Let me explain something: If you want to be a member of Congress and screw around, join the Democratic Party. You can screw around all you want and no problem, if youre a Democrat. But you cant do that and be a Republican member of Congress.

It’s for considering. Thing is, Republicans claim virtue, Dems don’t bother: it wouldn’t sell.

Another, indisputable, point:

UPDATE: Fastest scandal ever! The Internet not only makes it easier for cheaters to cheat, it makes it easier for cheaters to get caught, and the rapidity with which the damning evidence becomes public tends to accelerate the resignation.

Now you see them, now you don’t. It’s also the role of shame, a most useful reaction as regards the common good. Let there be shame! It saves us a lot of trouble.

And expediency, of course. Where would we be without that?

(HT the extremely good “Morning Jolt,” by the top-of-the-line Jim Geraghty, part of the National Review Online stable. Sign up here. You won’t regret it.)