Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress recounts the story behind the protests in Wisconsin: How Democrats, after losing the November election, called a special lame-duck session in an abortive effort to lock in sweetheart deals for government employee unions. When that didn’t work, Democrats have since tried to prevent Republicans from acting to balance the budget at the expense of government employee unions.
We can therefore only conclude that the Wisconsin voters who elected Walker share and endorse his anti-union views, and that his “busting” of the state employees unions is the legitimate consequence of last November’s election.
The union protests in Madison — and the flight of Democratic lawmakers — are an effort to overturn the election, to maintain the power of state employees unions in contravention of the expressed will of the majority of Wisconsin voters.
Hopes of a domestically boring time period while I’m over by the Hindu Kush have proven futile. One would not have picked Wisconsin as the epicenter of the meltdown, but there it is. The teachers jumped the shark, and the Democrats jumped the border. Chicago Boyz point out that, in addition to quirky quorum rules, the Wisconsin constitution may have some ugly repercussions in store for the Senators Who Were Not There. The comments at the ‘Boyz are not optimistic that the cheeseheads are packin’ the gear to do something like that.
This compels me to point out the opportunity to drag Troglopundit from his bog and turn his serial bloviations into something productive for society. Sure, there may be the occasional misstep, a bill declaring a Danica Patrick Appreciation Day, for example, but I submit that this is a manageable risk for the great state of Wisconsin.
TROG FOR WISCONSON SENATE!
In all seriousness, one hopes that conservatives remember to be both steadfast in opposing the Left’s attempts to debase the meaning of the 2010 elections, as well as forgiving of these benighted fools who seem to think that it’s OK to like about being sick to protest, and have doctors pile lies upon lies to justify their falsehoods.
The sun is setting on the Progressive Era (or however the Left would label the last century of the E PLURIBUS collapsing into the UNUM). The Left is reacting with all the grace of an alcoholic denied the bottle. But financial sobriety is coming, oh yes. And, as the redeemable Lefties you know get past their delirious tremors, don’t forget that even Ronald Reagan was once a Lefty.
God bless the United States of America.
She found a woman holding a sign that said, “Please don’t teabag our children.” (Question: Did that woman have any children of her own? Or was the phrase “our children” employed in the progressive, collectivist sense?)
Three days before the Nov. 2 election, U.S. Rep. David Wu’s most loyal and senior staffers were so alarmed by his erratic behavior that they demanded he enter a hospital for psychiatric treatment.
Their concern had been spiking for weeks in tandem with the Oregon Democrat’s increasingly unpredictable performance on the campaign trail and in private. He was loud and sometimes angry, some of them told The Oregonian. He said kooky things to staff and — more worrisome with a tough election fast approaching — around potential voters and donors. . . .
Several staff members confronted Wu for the final time on Oct. 30. Wu’s psychiatrist was brought into that meeting . . . The meeting was held after four consecutive days of troubling behavior that led the staff to agree that Wu needed a higher level of medical care . . .
“This is way beyond acceptable levels and the charade needs to end NOW,” wrote Lisa Grove, a senior and long-serving campaign pollster, in an e-mail to colleagues that day. “No enabling by any potential enablers, he needs help and you need to be protected. Nothing else matters right now. Nothing else.” . . .
Faced with a stalemate, the campaign essentially shut down at the very time when most other candidates were at their most frenzied. No public announcement was made, but campaign staff withdrew and Wu did not hold another formal campaign event until he emerged on Tuesday night after winning a seventh term.
Last month, The Oregonian reported that at least a half-dozen members of Wu’s staff had resigned after he won re-election in November. That group included his longtime chief of staff and his spokeswoman. In addition, he lost his campaign pollster and his fundraiser. . . .
For some staffers, the beginning of the end was Wednesday, Oct. 27, when Wu delivered a belligerent and rambling 19-minute monologue to Washington County Democrats that some in the audience said was inappropriate for the friendly crowd. His behavior left staff members aghast. . . .
In the early morning of Saturday, several odd messages written from Wu’s private House of Representatives e-mail address were sent to some staffers, all female, with still others copied on them. . . .
At that point, staff knew something was terribly wrong with their candidate. That Saturday, Oct. 30, they checked for available hospital beds and consulted with his psychiatrist. Veteran pollster Grove sent staffers the e-mail that signaled the end. She declined to comment for this story but earlier told The Oregonian that she would never work for Wu again.
There was no doubt Wu was having a rough 2010. He had separated from his wife, and he faced a credible opponent — Republican Rob Cornilles — in a difficult year for all Democrats. He told people he had stopped drinking in July.
But staffers and others who encountered Wu say his behavior that fall was not an ordinary response to stress. As the campaign wore on, they said, Wu became unpredictable and sometimes loopy, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and often not making sense. Nor would he own up to their concerns. . . .
He made few campaign appearances and near the end of the campaign was even placed under what one campaign official characterized as “house arrest.” . . .
Wu had shown signs of erratic behavior before. In 2007, he accused the Bush White House of acting like fake Klingons. In 2003, he appeared to go catatonic before a crucial vote on Medicare.
Sources reported that over the years Wu would have normal periods, followed by times when he seemed disturbed. Each episode seemed more erratic, they said. But just before the election, they said, was the worst they had seen.
As Election Day approached, the prevailing mood, according to one person, “was that the only thing worse than losing the campaign would be winning it.”
Those are merely highlights — or rather, lowlights — or a much longer article. All in all, it sounds like Wu was exhibiting bipolar tendencies, probably aggravated by the stress of separating from his wife.
In other words, a midlife crisis.
What’s interesting is that his loyal Democratic staff kept all this quiet, so the crazy Congressman could get re-elected.
UPDATE: Blogs are way ahead of the regular news outfits on this story. Michelle Malkin:
Free-market champion and conservative businessman Herman Cain declares Madison “Ground Zero” in the battle against Big Labor.
That’s the first quote I’ve seen from Cain’s speech, and he spoke more than two hours ago. You would think that when a presidential candidate gave a speech at a major event like this, reporters on the scene would rush to be the first to report it. But you would be wrong. Anyway, Malkin is using reports via Twitter to cover the rally and posts this Twitpic of the scene:
Gov. Scott Walker on Saturday rejected an overture from a Democratic state senator that public employee unions had agreed to make financial sacrifices contained in the budget-repair bill in return for the right to bargain collectively.
The protests by the Teacher unions (and the professional protesters called up by OFA and President Obama) in Madison, Wisconsin are almost a bad re-play of the Anti-war protests of the Bush years (both Bushes). Thus, deja vu.
Walker has called on 14 Democratic state senators, who fled the state rather than allow a quorum permitting a vote on the bill, to return to Madison.
Bill opponents say they won’t allow a vote unless Walker negotiates on the plan to eliminate collective bargaining rights for everything but wages. The legislation also would require most employees to pay more for their pensions and health insurance benefits.
“I have been informed that all state and local public employees — including teachers — have agreed to the financial aspects of Gov. Walker’s request,” said Sen. Jon Erpenbach, a Democrat. . . .
Walker, who says the state is “broke,” is asking legislators to pass his Budget Repair Bill to combat a $137 million shortfall through June 30. An upcoming two-year budget for 2011-13 must address a pending $3.6 billion deficit, he said. The governor’s press secretary, Cullen Werwie, released a statement Saturday calling on Erpenbach, Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller and other Democrats to return from Illinois. “These are many of the same senators who, two years ago, rammed through a billion dollar tax hike in 24 hours with no public input,” the statement said. “The quickest way to resolve the current situation is for the Democratic senators to stop shirking their responsibilities and debate the bill in Madison.” Opponents say the proposed legislation is an attack on workers’ rights.
“Worker’s rights,” my ass! You’ve got no “right” to be employed by the state, nor any “right” to hold taxpayers hostage and demand that they give you more money or more benefits.
The women I know who have given birth, whether pro-life or pro-choice, do not romanticize it. They speak, of course, of the miracle that it is. But they also speak, often rather too frankly, of how difficult and often disgusting the process is. If a substantial number of pro-lifers are women who have given birth–and they are–then we pro-choicers can’t simply tell ourselves that it’s because they haven’t really thought about what birth entails.
So this is what is at the bottom of the pro-choice argument — they are “disgusted” by pregnancy and birth? I thought it was supposed to be the crazy fundamentalists that hated the human body and feared sex. How sick do you have to be to be revolted by the process that brings new life, that brought your life, into being?
What accounts for these differences in attitude? Anti-natalist sentiments are a natural byproduct of the Contraceptive Culture, which propagates the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal, and where pregnancy is considered a rare medical anomaly.
This way of thinking — nowadays so common that we don’t even recognize it as an ideological phenomenon — is an inversion of nature.
From a strictly biological point of view, procreation is the only purpose of sex. People who like to condemn conservatives as being “anti-science” because we don’t go along with the global-warming crusade ought to be asked to explain why they are so hostile to the scientific purpose of sex, i.e., making babies.
Ah, but for the past half-century, Big Science has been in the business of preventing childbirth, you see. So the anti-baby industry has diligently promoted all the arguments and attitudes necessary to the marketing of contraceptive products and services. And this marketing campaign — for that’s what it was — has succeeded so phenomenally that the Contraceptive Culture is now nearly ubiquitous, and people don’t even stop to ask themselves: “Why do we think this way?” Continue reading ‘Disgusting’ Childbirth? →
