Pelosi says she’s ‘proud’ of Wisconsin Democrats who fled:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she supports the Democratic state senators in Wisconsin who left the state to stop a vote on curbing collective bargaining rights for unionized public employees.

UPDATE: Remember when the Democratic leader had “concerns about some of the language that is being used” by a handful of Tea Party protesters. Wonder if she has similar concerns about the language her ideological allies have been using in Wisconsin.  And now that she’s expressed support for the antics in the Badger State, we can soon expect her colleague Barney Frank to call on her to “differentiate” herself from the hateful signs comparing the Governor Walker to Hitler.

Americans Say Reagan Is the Greatest U.S. President:

Ahead of Presidents Day 2011, Americans are most likely to say Ronald Reagan was the nation’s greatest president — slightly ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton. Reagan, Lincoln, or John F. Kennedy has been at the top of this “greatest president” list each time this question has been asked in eight surveys over the last 12 years

While Democrats, both nationally and in the Badger State, are pulling out all stops to thwart Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s necessary — and fiscally responsible — reforms, they are showing themselves to be the real opponents of democracy and responsible governance.   State Sen. Jon Erpenbach whines from Chicago (a city which, by the way, is not in the state in whose legislature he was elected to serve) that it’s the governor’s “responsibility to bring the state together. The state is not unified. It is totally torn part.”

Yet, it is Erpenach, his fellow partisans and their union allies responsible for tearing the state apart.  They orchestrated the angry rallies.  They walked out of the legislature, expressly in order to prevent legislators from doing their jobs:

“I’m starting to hold [Democratic Minority Leader Mark] Miller responsible for this,” [Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott] Fitzgerald said. “He shut down democracy.”

The protests have attracted teachers, grade school children, college students and other workers over four days. Police report they have been largely peaceful, with only nine people cited for minor acts of civil disobedience as of Thursday night.

The school children did not show up of their of their own accord, but were dragged there by their teachers who walked off their jobs in order to protest the policies of their elected representatives.  The majority leader of the Wisconsin Senate is right, with the apparent blessing of the national party, his Democratic counterpart is shutting down democracy.  Even some liberal pundits agree.  On Time’s Swampland blog, Joe Klein reminds us:

An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that. . . . .

But we’ve had far too many state legislatures, of both parties, that have been cowed by the political power of the unions and enacted contracts that force state and city governments to be run for the benefit of their employees, rather than for their citizens. This situation is most egregious in far too many school districts across the nation. The events in Wisconsin are a rebalancing of power that, after decades of flush times and lax negotiating, had become imbalanced. That is also something that, from time to time, happens in a democracy. (more…)

Seems instead of coming up with solutions for our nation’s dire fiscal situation, Democrats are tearing a page from the last successful Democratic president’s playbook and playing politics instead.  Jonathan Allen reports in the Politico that a “high-ranking aide to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democratic chiefs of staff that a government shutdown is more likely than not“.  This squares nicely with his boss’s recent statement:

Yesterday Pelosi told reporters that if there is a government shutdown, responsibility will fall on Republicans’ shoulders.

“It is a failure. It’s really a failure to say we have taken the leadership of the Congress of the United States and the first thing we’re going to do is shut down the government to the detriment of our people, to our security and to our country’s future,” she told reporters.

A government horizon is only at present on the very distant horizon and already Pelosi is starting to blame Republicans.  While some conservative organizations have called for a government shutdown, most of the talk of such a shutdown comes from Democrats.  Seems that they’ve run out of ideas on how to address our nation’s problems, so they’re resorting to old political tricks.  Or perhaps they know their solutions don’t find favor with the American people, so they need make Republicans looks like big, bad meanies who are even worse than they.

Hey, it worked in 1995-96.

All eyes in the nation have been on Wisconsin the fast few days as public employee unions (and their allies in the Democratic Party) have thrown a temper, trashing the state’s capital and smearing its elected officials, even threatening them with death.

The stakes in the state couldn’t be higher. “As Wisconsin goes,” Michelle Malkin writes, “so go the rest of the nation’s bankrupt and near-bankrupt states.”   What we’re seeing in the Badger State, we need to be seeing in the (once-)Golden State.  And when it happens here, what we’ll see in Sacramento will make the goings-on in Madison seems like a a rather sedate affair.

But, confronting the public employee unions is a necessary first step to fixing the underlying structural problems behind each state’s impending insolvency.  What the editors of the Wall Street Journal observe about Wisconsin is also to be found here in California, but to a much greater extent:

Unions are treating these reforms as Armageddon because they’ve owned the Wisconsin legislature for years and the changes would reduce their dominance. Under Governor Walker’s proposal, the government also would no longer collect union dues from paychecks and then send that money to the unions. Instead, unions would be responsible for their own collection regimes. The bill would also require unions to be recertified annually by a majority of all members. Imagine that: More accountability inside unions.

The larger reality is that collective bargaining for government workers is not a God-given or constitutional right. It is the result of the growing union dominance inside the Democratic Party during the middle of the last century. John Kennedy only granted it to federal workers in 1962 and Jerry Brown to California workers in 1978. Other states, including Indiana and Missouri, have taken away collective bargaining rights for public employees in recent years, and some 24 states have either limited it or banned it outright.

And for good reason. Public unions have a monopoly position that gives them undue bargaining power. Their campaign cash—collected via mandatory dues—also helps to elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions. The unions sit, in effect, on both sides of the bargaining table. This is why such famous political friends of the working man as Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia opposed collective bargaining for government workers, even as they championed private unions. (more…)

If there is one moment which shows how unfit Barack Obama is to serve in the times he does, it was when he proposed $53 billion for high-speed rail.  Anyone proposing such spending when crafting an annual budget with a deficit higher (in constant FY 2000 dollars) than the entire national budget in 1990 simply can’t be serious about confronting our fiscal mess, particularly given polls showing an increasing concern with the federal government’s spending binge (and the concomitant explosion of debt) and the results of last November’s elections.

The president’s budget budget, as Karl Rove wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, “is not a serious governing document. It’s a political one, designed to boost his re-election chances.”  And new kinds of politicians seeking to change the way Washington operates are supposed to put governing ahead of politics.  Or so I thought.

High-speed rail may be a fine (and dandy idea), but, well, as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie understood, in nixing a similar idea which could also facilitate travel, you shouldn’t build something you can’t afford.  And we don’t have the money to pay for the numerous programs the federal government has long supported.

House Speaker John Boehner recently got into some hot water for calling it like it is:

Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs. . . . And if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We’re broke. It’s time for us to get serious about how we’re spending the nation’s money.

If you’re going to get serious about addressing the nation’s fiscal problems, you’re going to need to make tough choices.  And not proposing new spending initiatives when the federal deficit is larger than the economies of most nations.

UPDATE:  Calling the president’s enthusiasm for high-speed rail “serious case of  policy delusion“, Joel Kotkins says his advocacy of more federal spending on this initiative shows just how out of touch he is with our nation’s fiscal reality and the national mood: (more…)

Even though our reader and occasional blogger Sonicfrog doesn’t like former U.S Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa), considering him “an example of an anti-gay Republican“, he wonders at the lengths some of our fellow gays go to smear the man whose political career ended over four years ago.  (If Santorum runs for president, his polling may break into the single digits.)

Put the shoe on the other foot. Would you be cheering if someone associated your name with something you considered vile and extremely improper? I don’t think so. The guy is lame on his own.

When he took one of his “very liberal Facebook friends” to task for “gleefully” posting a link to the story documenting the smear, said liberal responded:

bull***t. santorum deserves much worse than this. a disgusting smug self-righteous religious blowhard like him should never be allowed to achieve any significance in our government and anything done to ‘smear’ his name is acceptable.

Anything done to ‘smear’ his name is acceptable?  And this fellow allies himself politically with the folks decrying the harsher tone of our discourse.

“And you wonder,” Sonic concludes, “why I don’t associate myself with the liberal pro-gay anti-Republican establishment that I’m supposed to belong to simply because I’m gay.”

Methinks some of our readers might share his sentiments.  Read the whole thing.