Today, Yahoo! featured an AP article on the brewing anger over government workers’ benefits, suggesting that the stand-off in the Badger State means additional scrutiny of the power of public employee unions.  In the article, writer Geoff Mulvihill interviewed not just individuals upset at the spiraling costs of offering lavish benefits to the public workforce, but also scholars who have studied labor markets:

“It’s the government sector worker who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.

For instance, most non-uniformed public employees who have worked in New Jersey for 30 years with an ending salary of $85,000 can look forward to retiring at 55 with an annual pension of about $46,000. Working until age 60 and a salary of $90,000 can bring a pension of $57,000. And many of the New Jersey’s public-sector retirees have no or low premiums for their health insurance.

For a private-section worker who retires at 55, relying solely on a 401(k) without an employer match, it would take a $100 contribution to a plan every week for 30 years and getting an annual return over 7 percent to get to the same level of pension benefit as the public worker retiring at that age. Those benefits would run out after 25 years for the 401(k) retiree. . . .

The government entities spent 1.7 times as much on health care per employee-hour worked and nearly twice as much on retirement costs. Public-sector workers — who are more often represented by unions — are far more likely to have defined-benefit pensions with promises to pay for the retirees’ whole lives.

The more people learn not just about the costly benefits which public employees have secured, but also the favors which states have granted their unions (such as requiring local school districts to “buy health insurance from a union company“), the more likely they are to supposed those like the modest one Governor Walker has proposed in Wisconsin.

While I still believe Mito Aviles and his partner Chad Michael Morrisette behaved badly in the way they mocked then-Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, as I follow the race for West Hollywood City Council, I feel increasingly confident I made the right choice in endorsing this young entrepreneur and will be voting for him and Scott Schmidt later this afternoon — once I have decided which candidate will get my third vote in this contest.

Mito was profiled today on West Hollywood Patch and again reminded voters of his concern for transparency at City Halli:

“The public and the residents need to know what exactly is going on in their city,” he says. “If you are an elected official, you are a public servant. That said, there’s a lot of closed-door meetings that happen, there’s a lot of interaction that happens behind closed doors that the residents don’t know about. And they should know, or at least be able to know, about everything and anything going on in City Hall.”

Seems the president and his team could learn from their fellow Democrat.  Mito may be a Democrat, but he has shown an independent streak in articulating his approach to facing the city’s challenges.  And he’ll provided a fresh voice in contrast with the stale rhetoric coming from the entrenched incumbents, one who has been in office since Mito was in pre-school.

If you live in those Los Angeles jurisdictions which are voting today, make sure to vote.  And to my fellow residents of West Hollywood, get out and vote for Mito and Scott Schmidt.

While acknowledging that President “Obama will be difficult to beat” in 2012, Byron York reminds us that a few years back, the conventional wisdom held that another incumbent, riding much higher in the opinion polls than the Democrat is now, would also be tough to knock off:

In early March 1991, all the smart people in politics knew one thing about the upcoming 1992 campaign: President George H.W. Bush was unbeatable. . . .

“Will anybody run against George Bush in 1992?” asked Juan Williams in the Washington Post on March 10, 1991. “There are no candidate footprints in the pristine snows of New Hampshire this winter and the Iowa cornfields are untrampled.”

York believes that “whatever the differences,” between this year and 1991, “the similarity is that for Republicans, victory is possible for a candidate with daring, confidence, and skill.”  Read the whole thing.

Not just that, in 2012, Obama can’t run as a well-spoken blank slate running against Washington and promising change.  He, as I wrote last week, “hasn’t been the change agent he promised to be.  He isn’t the new kind of post partisan politician presented to us in the presidential campaign.”

To win a second different, Barack Obama is going to have to change his narrative from the one who used to great effect in 2008.  And he’s untested running as the insider defending the status quo.

This is rich.  In order to resolve the budget “impasse” that they created by fleeing the state, the fourteen Democrats elected to represent various jurisdictions in the Wisconsin state Senate have invited the Republican governor to meet with them near the border of a neighboring state.  That good man wisely dismissed the letter in which they suggested the meeting:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday dismissed as “ridiculous” a letter from a Democratic state Senate leader who suggested a meeting “near the Wisconsin-Illinois border” to discuss the state’s budget impasse.

Sen. Mark Miller sent the letter to Walker on Monday, offering a border summit as a way to resume stalled negotiations on the state’s budget.

Border summit?  Huh?  Are they attempting to resolve tense relations between the Badger State and the Land of Lincoln?  Will they need intermediaries from a neutral state?

Shouldn’t they return to Wisconsin if they wish to resolve Wisconsin‘s budget impasse?  Maybe the governor might meet with them if they returned to the state they were elected to serve.

In what Moe Lane calls, “one of the better official political letters“, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald reminds his Minority counterpart how representative democracies work:

As you know, your opportunity to compromise and amend the bill was on the floor of the state Senate. As you know, you forfeited that right and opportunity when you decided to flee the state instead of doing your job.

Just love the way the Republican who has remained in his jurisdiction doing his job addresses the letter to the flighty Democrat:  ”Sen. Mark Miller/Parts Unknown, IL.”

Returning from a long weekend out of town, I opened my mail box stuffed with card stock and glossy flyers for and against the various candidates running for West Hollywood City Council.  One flyer attempted to “smear” appointed incumbent Lindsey Horvath, who have lived in the city for fewer than twenty-four months, as a Republican.  Interesting given that the young woman was appointed by two long-serving Democrats on the council, one first elected when the appointed incumbent was still in diapers.

So heated has this race become that even the New York Times has covered it:

But an uncommonly bitter election has exposed a growing divide over what West Hollywood should represent, with prosperity and urban development pitted against the city’s history as a countercultural haven.

The six challengers in Tuesday’s City Council election — all of them gay men — are seeking to oust three incumbents by running on platforms invoking concerns about development and gentrification pushing out younger gay residents and the edgier elements that have long distinguished West Hollywood.

“I believe we’re at risk of being in a situation where West Hollywood is no different than Beverly Hills or Calabasas,” said Scott Schmidt, one of the challengers. “West Hollywood has a special place in the heart of the gay and lesbian community, and people want to make sure we retain what makes us special.”

Interesting that Scott, a registered Republican, whom yours truly has endorsed, is focusing on the city’s gay identity.  He made a similar point in an interview for West Hollywood Patch:

“We are at a cultural crossroads as we struggle with what the West Hollywood dream is,” he said. He fears that Sunset Strip and Boystown are no longer the entertainment destinations they once were, that dissenting voices that were once honored are being ignored, that affordable housing is becoming unobtainable. “The next City Council will define whether we continue to preserve our legacy as a unique and special place for everyone.”

That said, Scott has not focused just on the city’s gay identity, he has also focused on a key Republican issue, out-of-control spending at City Hall: (more…)

His 2012 budget suggests as much:

Likely voters overwhelmingly believe deficit reduction is crucial to America’s future, but generally oppose raising revenue through tax reform to cut those deficits, a new poll conducted for The Hill found.

A full 95 percent of likely voters believe that lowering the debt is either very or somewhat important, the poll found, with only 2 percent finding the issue not at all or not very important.

Not surprisingly, respondents had a more nuanced take on tax reform, with likely voters saying they prefer spending cuts to tax increases to shoulder the brunt of lowering the country’s debt.

Emphasis added.  (Via Instapundit & Memeorandum.)

“Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

–Barack Obama, October 15, 2008

Obama Posts LARGEST MONTHLY DEFICIT EVER… Larger Than Bush 2007 Deficit For Entire Year

–Jim Hoft, March 7, 2011

UPDATE:  An Instapundit reader offers a correction to Jim’s headline above:

Reader Jacob Allen writes: “The 2007 total fiscal year deficit number being bandied about is inaccurate. Thanks Drudge! As your link shows, that was the CBO estimate for 2007. The actual, hard number ended up being $244.2 billion. So February 2011’s #s would fall just short of 2007’s total (and, 2006 and 2008 which were $248.2 billion and $239 billion (estimated) respectively).” Well, that’s so much better, then.

Perhaps the biggest blunder, public employee unions and the Democratic National Committee made in organizing a practically permanent rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison was in gaining a media focus on the protests.  Now, while they (and Charlie Sheen) may buy into the mantra that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, perhaps the unions, like Charlie, should reconsider.

These protests have put the spotlight on the sweetheart deals Democratic legislators secure for the public employees.  Recall that in the 2010 California elections, where the public employee unions poured tens of millions of dollars into Democratic campaigns, even running the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts, media in the state focused more on the millions the Republican gubernatorial nominee spent on her effort to win the governor’s chair.  And all but ignored the unions.

Now, as blogging law professor William A. Jacobson reminds us, even the New York Times is noticing the intransigence of public employee unions as states face massive budget shortfalls:

The Board of Editors of The New York Times is demanding significant cut backs in public sector union contracts, but refuses to recognize the cause of the problem, which is the entire structure of public employee unions

Jacobson is right.  Read the whole thing.

That said, while the Times‘ editors may diagnose the problem incorrectly, at least they recognize that there is a problem.  This added media focus may make Americans more aware just how big a factor the unions have been in various states’ spending sprees.  This focus could help strengthen the position of Republican governors and legislators seeking to restrain the unions in order to protect taxpayers.

UPDATE:  Michael Barone addressed this very matter in his must-read column on Saturday:

Voters are beginning to realize, thanks to governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, that public sector unions have negotiated unsustainable levels of pensions and benefits — and that public sector unions are a mechanism for involuntary transfers of money from taxpayers to the Democratic Party.

It’s Barone.  Read the whole thing.

Former French President Chirac to stand trial.  This is why this news brings such cheer to so many:

The former president, a bugaboo for George W. Bush during his rush to war in Iraq, on Monday becomes France’s first former head of state to go on trial since its Nazi-era leader was exiled.

Together with his sidekick, former German Chanceller Gerhard Schröder, Chirac raised such a ruckus opposing Bush’s efforts to enforce multiple United Nations’ resolutions in the early 2000s as Iraq repeatedly flouted them.   The American and European media used this opposition to peddle the (false) narrative that W had developed a go-it-alone foreign policy, acting without consulting our allies.  It was Chirac’s petulance that caused a rift among Western nations.

Yet, Chirac defied the United States not on the merits of the arguments, but for the sake of defiance.  And to try to preserve France’s stature on the world stage.

Now, to be sure, the trial does not address Chirac’s self-important posturing while President of France.  But, it is sweet to see such a man in legal jeopardy.  I believe the term is schadenfreude.

. . . who ties the Senate’s only Socialist for the title of most liberal Senator, a title he has held for two years running?  In a swing state like Ohio that has gone with the winner in every presidential election since 1964, a state which prides itself on avoiding extremes?

Methinks that if this information becomes public knowledge in the Buckeye State, Sherrod Brown will soon be returning to the private sector.

Doug Powers asks us to imagine “the outrageous outrage if Republicans were fighting for public funding for a radio network supported in part by Roger Ailes.”

Democrats, however, are digging in their heels and ma’am, those are some pretty high heels to protect funding for a radio network whose political bent is to the left and whose executives take home salaries well into six figures.  Now two Senate Republicans have introduced legislation to cut off the gravy train, a bill which should be a no-brainer to any legislator concerned about our burgeoning budget deficit:

Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced a bill Friday to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which doles out federal funds to radio and television stations.

DeMint said it “should be an easy decision” to halt taxpayer money for public broadcasting while the nation is “on the edge of bankruptcy.”

He pointed out that the bipartisan debt commission convened by President Obama suggested ending the subsidies.

The pair focused on NPR and PBS, two major recipients of public media dollars — particularly on the salaries of media execs at both outlets, including the nearly $1 million a “Sesame Street” president takes home each year.

No, Ma’am, Republicans don’t have a vendetta against Elmo.  To even make such a comment betrays an ignorance of our nation’s precarious fiscal situation and Republican support for free market ideals.  Or it just shows an individual so blinded by her partisan instincts that she could only see animus in Republican actions. (more…)

Look, I’m not the first to say it, so I’ll just put this observation out there for your consideration and commentary.  People in LA want to be noticed; they want to be the center of attention.  And many don’t care how they get your attention just as long as they have it.

Charlie Sheen has ours now.  He’s all over the tabloids, in print, pixel and video.  When I got to the gym, I hear people talking to him.  When I go out to eat, even in restaurants outside LA, I hear people talking about him.  Certainly, he seems like he’s off his rocker.  But, is he?  Right now, everyone is paying attention to him.  He’s being noticed.  He has become the number one celebrity this week.

(A google search for “Charlie Sheen” (in quotation marks) results in over 500 million hits.)

To Hollywood celebrities, it used to matter what people thought of them.  Now it only seems to matter that people think about then.  And people are sure thinking about Charlie.

NB:  Moments after posting this, I decided to modify (albeit slightly) the title.

Charles Krauthammer detects a curious contradiction in world opinion:

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Qaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the U.S. has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance, and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Saddam’s evil was an order of magnitude beyond Qaddafi’s. Qaddafi is a capricious killer; Saddam was systematic. Qaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture, and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a Republic of Fear.

Moreover, that systemized brutality made Saddam immovable in a way that Qaddafi is not. Barely armed Libyans have already seized half the country on their own. Yet in Iraq, there was no chance of putting an end to the regime without the terrible swift sword (it took all of three weeks) of the United States.No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda, it’s not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole.

And as if George W. Bush has as well.  Seems some people were so blinded by their animosity against George W. Bush that they refused to see the merits of their arguments.

Oh, it’s Krauthammer, read the whole thing.

RELATED:  Jim Geraghty quips, “But of course, in certain eyes, every idea that comes from a prominent Republican is, ispo facto, stupid.”

On his Facebook page, a reader poses the questions which, by answering, we come to understand modern liberalism:

Why are the billionaire Koch brothers evil and the billionaire Soros is not?

RELATED:  Understanding left’s all-out assault on Koch Brothers through prism of liberal prejudice

Broadly speaking, there are two types of reactions we get when we come out as conservative to our gay peers, particularly to those who have never previously met a “homocon.”  To be sure, there is also a third type of reaction we get, but that from those who more regularly interact with gay conservatives and who are truly familiar with the ideas undergirding modern American conservatism.  And while it may seems sometimes that most who meet us respond with bile and vitriol, we only report those stories more often because they provide greater entertainment and reveal much about a growing strain of intolerance inherent in the new American left.

We also tend to remember such dramatic confrontations more readily than we more polite and genuinely curious expressions of incredulity.  And that type of incredulity seems to be the more common reaction, gay men and lesbians who seem legitimately astounded that someone so intelligent, sensitive and interesting could support ideas or back the political party whose guiding principle, they have been taught to believe, is preserving straight white male privilege.  Unlike the “third type” mentioned above, they have little real experience with real conservatives and almost no understanding of Republican ideals.   They don’t know the history of the conservative movement and remain unfamiliar with the everyday concerns of rank-and-file Republicans.

All they know is what gets filtered through the mainstream media, what they learn in conversations with their friends and, increasingly, what they find presented in various social media.  They have rarely met actual conservative individuals and  have had almost no exposure to our web-sites, magazines, editorial pages nor have they read books which articulate our ideals. (more…)

I have known Scott Schmidt now for nearly six years.  He launched his BoifromTroy blog shortly before Bruce launched this one.  And while Bruce and I tend to see ourselves as conservatives who happen to be gay, Scott has been more active in gay causes than have either of us.  Indeed, he spearheaded Republicans Against 8 in 2008.  Had the “No on 8″ leadership designed a campaign along the lines of the one Soctt waged on a shoestring budget, the results that fall might have been quite different.

Indeed, Scott’s energetic opposition to Prop 8 earned him the endorsement of Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black who said that the former blogger “did more to fight Prop 8 than [incumbent City Councilors] John Heilman, Abbe Land or Lindsey Horvath combined.”  Scott worked with Black on a video project for his “Republicans against 8,” web-site. The site later won a “Pollie Award from the American Association of Political Consultants for the best use of a web video in a state ballot measure campaign.”

But, Scott is not just basing his campaign on his opposition to that ballot measure.  He’s also basing it on his years as a civic activist and businessman in West Hollywood.  He is now serving in his second term on the West Hollywood Transportation Commission, having been elected chairman after just two years on the commission.  On that commission, he led “the effort to improve signage at Taxi Zones,” making it easier for motorists to avoid parking illegally.  As a result, fewer parking tickets were issued.

Indeed, Scott has wants to steer the city away from its reliance on parking tickets as a means of revenue enhancement, a welcome priority for those concerned by the city’s overzealous enforcement of its byzantine parking regulations, often issuing tickets to motorists who have parked their cars in spots where no visible sign indicated they were subject to penalty — or where the signs gave conflicting information.

Unlike some of the more “progressive” challengers, Scott doesn’t believe “believe development is a four-letter word.”  He contends that the city can live up to its “moniker as the ‘creative city,’” while continuing “to renew and reinvent ourselves–and part of that process means building new buildings.”

Scott has drawn attention to the spendthrift ways at City Hall, noting, in a forum last week at the West Hollywood Heights Neighborhood Association that “that the lowest paid employee in City Hall makes $56,000 a year, higher than the $40,000 average among all West Hollywood residents“:

[He also] pointed out that the city uses two inflation rates—one for determining how much a landlord can raise rents in rent-controlled apartments and a second, higher one for determining cost of living raises for City Hall employees. He believes there should be only one rate.

I agree.  That commitment to one rate is part of his plan to hold the line on city hall salaries and pension benefits.  This dedication to cutting costs is one of the many reasons I am endorsing this Scott Schmidt for West Hollywood City Council. (more…)

Last fall, I can’t recall a single call I received for the fall gubernatorial campaign, only recall being phonebanked for one race.  These past few weeks, hardly a day has gone by that I haven’t received a phone call on behalf of the various candidates running for West Hollywood City Council.

I have been polled at least two times for the City Council race and twice for the campaign on Measure A, with each of the polls on said measure taking more than five minutes.  They offered me various hypotheticals, such as if you learned that this measure would raise 47 quadrillion dollars for the city, would you support it.  I kept responding, this is all well and good, but I plan to read the measure and if I find it places unnecessary limits our freedom or taxes individuals or employers too much, I’ll probably vote against it.

I began to wonder how accurate polls which ask such questions could be.  I was eager to end the call and knew I wouldn’t make my mind up on the measure until I had read it.  Given that most people have busy lives, they too are eager to end the calls.  Not just that, their minds may become distracted as the polling drags on. (more…)

In the course of researching my dissertation, as I sought to show that Achilles’s rage represented an archetypal aspect of male behavior, I read many scientific studies on sexual difference as well as books considering those studies in the context of current cultural debates.   In their book Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women, geneticist Anne Moir and journalist David Jessel articulate the essence of this tension between sound science and politically-correct attitudes:

Recent decades have witnessed two contradictory processes; the development of scientific research into the differences between the sexes, and the political denial that such differences exist.

They write that if the reality of these differences make women angry,

. . . it is not because science has set at naught their hard won struggle towards equality; their wrath should rather be directed at those who have sought to misdirect and deny them of their very essence.  Many women in the last thirty or forty years have been brought up to believe that they are, or should be, ‘as good as the next man’, and in the process they have endured acute and unnecessary pain, frustration and disappointment.

Those passages came to mind earlier today when I was reading Christina Hoff Sommers’s, The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.  That feminist scholar offered an argument similar to that put forward by Moir and Jessel:

I would argue that turning a blind eye to real differences and dogmatically insisting that masculinity and femininity are “created by culture” pose even more serious dangers of their own.

Science has shown that differences between men and women derive not from social construction, but our very biology.   (more…)

One of the main reasons I disagree with my co-blogger — not to mention an apparently emerging media consensus– about the president’s prospects for 2012 is that a year hence he can no longer duplicate the formula which served him so well just shy of three years ago.

A charismatic man with a powerful presence, a winning smile and a mellifluous baritone, he could fire a crowd up with his voice, taking a nothing speech and making it seem profound, save to those who read the words after.  Hope and change worked in 2008 because people wanted change.  And Americans believed that this newcomer could effect the kinds of changes they wanted.

Unlike the then-incumbent president, he spoke well.  He hadn’t been in Washington very long and didn’t seem part of the establishment that, they believed, needed altering.  But, instead of diverting the Potomac to clean out the Augean Stables which lines its banks, he brought in more straw to feed the horses who had made the place such a mess.

The “net spending cut” he promised “throughout” campaign has become instead an exponential spending increasey.  Even his allies and ideological confrères have excoriated him for his recent budget proposal, with one calling it a a ‘Profile in Cowardice.’ Unlike his two most recent predecessors, he hasn’t even made an effort to reform entitlements which account for bulk of the outpouring of red ink from Washington.

He simply hasn’t been the change agent he promised to be.  He isn’t the new kind of post partisan politician presented to us in the presidential campaign.  Indeed, as Jennifer Rubin reminds us, his tone this week at bi-partisan gathering of governors was “sharper and more overtly political.”

Commenting on a piece on how the president resembles 1980s General Motors CEO Roger Smith, Michael Barone suggests the president has deployed that rhetoric to defend the current order: (more…)