“The Left, labor, Democrats, which planned to embarrass” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Mike Allen of Politico on MSNBC this morning (as quoted by Jim Geraghty), ”instead have made him a national figure with a very bright future,”  adding “It was money poured down the drain by Democrats and the Left in a presidential election year.”

Indeed.

Wonder if we’ll ever see a tally of the total amount of money the various and sundry public employee unions poured into the Badger State, first to lobby the legislature and organize rallies against Walker’s reforms, then to launch petition drives to recall the state Senators targeted for replacement in 2011, to do the same this year to recall Walker, his Lieutenant Governor and another batch of state Senators, then to campaign for their chosen candidate in this month’s primary and now to campaign against the governor himself in the actual recall election upcoming.

Money spent in those endeavors is money they won’t be able to spend to help hold the Wisconsin Senate seat for the Democrats or to help in other political contests this year.

Meanwhile, in attempting to demonize and destroy Mr. Walker, the unions have made that reformer a Republican hero.  As Ann Althouse writes:

The recall has put Walker in the position where he must advertise and promote himself, which might have been awkward before — and it was never his thing. TV viewers are getting barraged with Walker ads — and almost nothing for his cash-strapped opponent, and we’re tolerating it because he was forced into having to defend himself. What a nice opportunity for him!

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE:   “The bigger problem for unions”, writes 2010 CPAC Blogger of the Year, Ed Morrissey, ”is the display of impotence“:

They have poured millions of dollars into Wisconsin, pushed people into rallies and protests, and wasted valuable man-hours organizing for recall elections and a special election for the state Supreme Court, only to come up empty thus far.  Until now, people feared the impact of unions in elections, and in special elections such as these even more, as they are more easily mastered by superior organization.  However, Walker supporters cast more ballots in the recall primaries than the combined votes of the top two Democrats, just as they did in the race that pitted Supreme Court Justice David Prosser against Joanne Kloppenburg, and in almost every recall race thus far.

Is it because they don’t like his policies?  Or perhaps because they want to help Rick Santorum who opposed Right-to-Work legislation when he was in the Senate?

Several unions that back President Obama’s reelection bid are spending big in an effort to damage Mitt Romney in key GOP primary states.

Unions including The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are making ad buys to hit the Republican presidential contenders on issues key to their members, including immigration reform and the bailout of the auto industry.

. . . .

AFSCME, the country’s largest public sector union, spent $500,000 on Internet, television and radio ads to air in Ohio that target Romney before the state’s GOP presidential primary this coming Tuesday, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.

Charles Lane penned a great column on the Gipper’s birthday about a reformist in the traditional of Ronald Reagan.  The former editor of the center-left New Republic observed that “The threat to such progressive goals as majority rule, transparent government, a vibrant public sector and equality comes from public-sector unionism“:

Of course, collective bargaining in the public sector is inherently contrary to majority rule. It transfers basic public-policy decisions — namely, the pay and working conditions that taxpayers will offer those who work for them — out of the public square and behind closed doors. Progressive Wisconsin has a robust “open meetings” law covering a wide range of government gatherings except — you guessed it — collective bargaining with municipal or state employees. So much for transparency.

Even worse, to the extent that unions bankroll the campaigns of the officials with whom they will be negotiating — and they often do — they sit on both sides of the table.

Indeed.  And the left-of-center pundit commends Wisconsin’s Republican governor for taking on such unions.  Read the whole thing!

Whenever Republican governors and legislators push right-to-work laws in their various jurisdictions, unions and their Democratic allies become almost apoplectic.  Despite doing their darnedest, Democrats in the Hoosier State couldn’t prevent the elected legislature from making Indiana

. . . the 23rd state to pass anti-union [sic] “right-to-work” legislation on Wednesday and the first in the nation’s manufacturing heartland, dealing a blow to organized labor by allowing workers to opt out of paying union dues.

Indiana’s Republican governor Mitch Daniels signed the legislation into law immediately after it was given final approval in the state Senate, making Indiana the first state to adopt such a measure since Oklahoma did so a decade ago.

Opponents of the legislation may call it “union-busting,” but all the legislation does is give employees to opt out of union representation:

Republican state Senator Carlin Yoder, the bill’s main sponsor, said it would not prevent anyone from joining a union.

“It is simply allowing those individuals to decide for themselves if they want to pay union dues or not,” Yoder said during the floor debate on Wednesday.

What’s wrong with giving workers the choice?  Maybe the Democrats are concerned about filling their campaign coffers.

Via Powerline

“Why,” Michael Barone asked on Monday, “can’t government build big public works projects any more?” He noted that Rachel Maddow fault “greedy rich Republicans [who wouldn't] pony up enough money.”

That pundit well-versed in American (and English) history referenced Glenn Reynolds’s post where that prolific blogger faulted a government which “focuses on process instead of product”, contending that such focus prevents the government from “doing big things“:

To pick an example from my neck of the woods, the TVA had its first dam filled within 18 months of the TVA Act’s passage. That could never happen today. Now arguably TVA built too many dams, but at least taxpayers who wondered where their money was going could see dams springing up all over. Now it goes into the pockets of lawyers and consultants and Environmental Impact Statement reviewers. Not surprisingly, that’s less impressive.

Today, as Steven Hayward noted in a post linked by both Reynolds and Barone, no one in our various government agencies seems to be able to “decide what to do. . . without endless ‘process’ and ‘public input.’”

In California (and in other states like Ohio) there’s another problem.  Many who love this state, as I do, stand in awe at the great public works projects which have turned barren landscapes into (once-)bustling metropolises and fertile farmlands and built roads across tortuous mountain passes and along rugged coastlines.  They did all this well before Jerry Brown first became governor in 1975.

A sexagenarian friend of a liberal friend echoed this when he reminded me in a Facebook thread that he is “old enough to remember when CA had unparalleled infrastructure, education and public services.”  He was attempting to defend granting collective bargaining privileges to public employees.  In the thread, he has also been lamenting the decline of the Golden State.  It no longer has the services it once had.  Its engineers no longer accomplish the feats they once did.

In reminding me of California’s glorious past, he made my point.  You see, the then-Golden State enjoyed such high-performing public schools and amazing engineering accomplishments — not to mention top-notch public services — before the once- and current governor, in 1977, signed the Dills Act which “formalized collective bargaining for State employees.”

In other words, state employees accomplished all those things without collective bargaining privileges.   (more…)

Those who would like to see the (once-)Golden State glitter once more should hope that we have a Scott Walker waiting in the wings.  We need someone to bring real change to the state which once defined innovation and opportunity. Since that Republican’s much-maligned reforms passed the Wisconsin Legislature, the Badger State has been able to close its budget gap, see new jobs created watch school districts across the state renegotiate teacher contracts, saving taxpayers’ hundreds of thousands of dollars.

All this achieved because Walker stood up to the public employee unions who had, before the current legislative session, wielded considerable power in the state capital, preventing real cost-saving reform.  They tried to wield that muscle in the recent recall elections, pumping millions into Democratic coffers and even walking precincts on behalf of Democratic candidates.  All to little avail.

The unions, however, have been far more successful in California than they were this year in Wisconsin.  Here, every Democrat has a built-in advantage over his Republican and not just because of the state’s demographics.  Our public employee unions funded directly by the taxpayer, with employees’ dues siphoned off from their paychecks, provide the Get Out The Vote (GOTV) infrastructure for Democratic nominees as they support their favored political party with television ads and campaign contributions.

In return, the unions exercise considerable influence over elected Democrats, preventing them from enacting real reforms.  As Joel Kotkin put it in his (must-read) piece on the decline of Los Angeles:

It’s a familiar story: because Democrats are almost assured of victory in L.A.’s general elections, candidates must win only the low-turnout, union-dominated party primaries. John Pérez, a longtime union political operative and now speaker of the California State Assembly, won the Democratic nomination in 2008 with fewer than 5,000 votes and then easily crushed the GOP candidate. Pérez’s predecessor as speaker was Fabian Núñez-another L.A. labor official. No wonder the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters calls the labor movement “the closest thing to an omnipotent political machine anywhere in the state.” (more…)

Well, the Democrats may have picked up two state Senate senates in the Wisconsin recall vote yesterday, but, they, as Allahpundit reports, “outspent Republicans two to one”, thus they “lost two to one on tonight’s seats — with two of their own still to defend next week.”

Do wonder how much of that money will no longer be forthcoming as it came directly from the Badger State’s coffers, skimmed off from the salaries of public employees and sen straight to their unions, active supporters of the state Democratic Party.  They may just not have the money to spend they once did.  Thanks to Governor Walker’s reforms, the state won’t be sending that money directly to those allies of his partisan rivals; they’ll have to collect it on their own.

Allahpundit offers what he calls a “nice data point from Nate Silver which he claims “can be read as more of a rebuke to the left as [well as] to the right”:

In total, GOP leads 52-48 among all votes counted so far tonight in Wisconsin. Walker won those districts 56-43, Obama won them 53-46.

Not a great night for the Republicans nor for the Democrats.  But, Republicans still control the Senate in Wisconsin and the labor unions spent a tens of millions to pick up two Senates, one just barely.

Quoting a “Twitter friend” who quipped “Democrats in #Wisconsin spent about $263 per vote to not get a majority in the state senate”, Michelle Malkin suggests that “rank-and-file union members” consider recalling their “own profligate Big Labor bosses.”

The public employee unions are the real losers in Wisconsin.  Let’s hope they suffer similar fates in other states, including (and especially) the (once-)Golden one.

UPDATE:   Not sure I’ll have time to get back to this today.  I had penned this post just before heading to bed last night and as I take a break and scan the blogs, seems it’s a much bigger defeat for the unions than I had originally thought.  Jennifer Rubin has a good post with some helpful links, including an observation that the GOP was caught “flat-footed,” thus was clearly out-organized by the unions. (more…)

In the past three days, two conservative blogs have posted on issues which get at the heart of the anemic private sector job creation in the Obama administration — and demonstrate why if the Democrats continue to set economic and regulatory policy, we won’t see the level of job growth promised when the president sold us his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AKA the “so-called stimulus”).

The first piece relates directly to that legislation.  Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker quotes from a study of the near-trillion dollar bill by economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor.   Reporting “their findings in a paper titled ‘The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled‘, they found that the “stimulus”

. . . created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.

By sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the states, the Democratic legislation helped bail out many spendthrift jurisdictions, delaying their day of reckoning.  No wonder so many states have been struggling this year to find ways to cut spending.  Thanks to the 111th Congress, they, in the early Obama years, had federal resources to balance their budgets — and no incentive to economize.

So, the “stimulus” didn’t stimulate the private sector because so much of it went to state and local governments.

Today, at the Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll details how the National Labor Relations Board is trying to game the system in favor of unions, thus making it more difficult for private companies to expand and innovate:

Unions are a major drag on a firms competitiveness. Studies show that unionized firms spend 15% less on research and development than non-unionized firms and 6% less on capital investments. If a firm is in a competitive industry, this can mean death. If a firm is in an international industry, which pretty much all of them are today, it means less (sic) jobs here in the United States.

Read the whole thing!

From friends and acquaintances here in the Golden State, I have accumulated anecdotal evidence that public employee unions, particularly the California Teachers Association send multiple e-mails* to their members, often to their government computers, while contacting them regularly telling them how to vote in various elections.  In contested partisan races, they almost always “encourage” their members to vote for the Democrat.

Now, Mike Ames and Mike Elk of The Nation magazine are in a lather because, gasp!, Koch Industries has done something similar:

On the eve of the November midterm elections, Koch Industries sent an urgent letter to most of its 50,000 employees advising them on whom to vote for and warning them about the dire consequences to their families, their jobs and their country should they choose to vote otherwise.

The Nation obtained the Koch Industries election packet for Washington State—which included a cover letter from its president and COO, David Robertson; a list of Koch-endorsed state and federal candidates; and an issue of the company newsletter,Discovery, full of alarmist right-wing propaganda.

This, the left-wing magazine’s editors dub, “Thought Control.” Ben Smith believes the expression, “thought control . . . seems rather strong“:

The mailings don’t ask for feedback from employees or suggest their jobs are dependent on whom they vote for, much less what they think; it seems to give the workers very little credit to imagine that they’ll have their thoughts controlled by this document, as opposed to by the campaign literature they get from candidates or, for some, from their unions.

It would be interesting to compare the language Koch Industries used in its letter to the languages union officials use in theirs.   And to compare their vote-getting tactics as well.  I’m sure Ames and Elk are already on top of this, working feverishly on just such an article.

(H/t Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner.)

* (more…)

Via Legal Insurrection:

The results have just been posted in the Milwaukee County canvass, and nothing much changed from yesterday. AP reports Prosser picked up 11 more votes and is the winner.

I repeat, JoAnne Kloppenburg lost.  David Prosser won.

The vote margin stands at 7316, a virtually insurmountable lead for a recount.  All the hanging chads in the world will not put Kloppenburg on the Supreme Court.

Awwwwww…. and all that money wasted by the public employee unions, too.  Oh wait — that’s taxpayer money they waste on their liberal political agenda.  *facepalm*

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

If you need any further evidence of how fully politicized public employee unions have become in Califronia, look no further than this story about which Phineas, blogging at Sister Toldjah’s, site reminds us, “At its recent convention, the CFT passed a resolution of support for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop-killer:”

Between negotiating for more benefits and teaching their students, the California Federation of Teachers has adopted a resolution of support for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.At the CFT’s 2011 Convention in late March, the delegates passed 30 resolutions, from solidifying support for anti-bullying legislation to supporting transitional kindergarten. Among the resolutions largely pertaining to education and collective bargaining rights was Resolution 19 – to “Reaffirm support for death row journalist.”

“Therefore, be it resolved, that the California Federation of Teachers reaffirm its support and demand that the courts consider the evidence of innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” the Committee Report reads.

Defense of this convicted cop killer has become a cause célèbre on the left.

One wonders why union officials felt it incumbent upon themselves to take up his cause, one entirely unrelated to their profession.

Ann Althouse links a post whose author David Blaska claims to have found the “smoking gun” that the teacher sick-out which closed “Madison schools for five days in February” was “an illegal, union-coordinated, illegal strike”:

Now there is proof that the sickout was a premeditated, union-authorized job action  — a phone tree of teachers calling other teachers to close down the schools. This kind of activity is prohibited by the union’s own contract and illegal in WI Statute Chapter 111.84(2)(e):

It is unfair practice for an employee individually or in concert with others: To engage in, induce or encourage any employees to engage in a strike, or a concerted refusal to work or perform their usual duties as employees.

Read the whole thing which includes an e-mail about the call and audio of the call in question.  I’m no expert in Wisconsin law, but Althouse teaches law at the University of Wisconsin — and saw fit to link the post.

You can bet this would get a lot more attention if an interest group allied with the GOP had tried to coordinate similar activity.

A few days before last fall’s election, I knew that despite her high unfavorable ratings, California’s junior Senator Barbara “Ma’am” Boxer was likely to win re-election. While doing cardio at the gym, I looked up to see the career politician rallying union employees at a very professional phone bank.

Each paid staffer sported telephone headsets, while working at a computer in separate cubicles.  By contrast, I had just come from spending the afternoon phone banking with other volunteers for the Republican tickets. We used cheap cell phones, lacked headsets, had no computer monitors and worked off printouts.

Thanks to the unions (many with funding directly from the state’s coffers), California Democrats had a more professional Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort than did Republicans. And in a state where that party has a decided registration edge, such efforts tend to reap rewards come Election Day.

Given unions’ determination to oust Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice David Prosser–and the resources they were pouring into their effort–I was all but certain they would succeed. Those defending the relatively conservative justice were not nearly as fired up as were his opponents. They weren’t pouring the resources into his defense. And they didn’t have, as the unions did, a organization already in place. As Ed Morrissey put it:

Given the usual lack of turnout for April elections in off years, the organizing power of the unions should have been overwhelming, and Prosser should have been toast even in less-progressive areas of the state.  Instead, Wisconsin voters thundered to the polls to support Prosser, and Kloppenburg turned out to do poorly outside of Dane and Milwaukee counties — and even in Milwaukee, Kloppenburg led by just a 57/43 margin.

What should have been a slam-dunk if Walker’s proposal was really as extreme and disaffecting as unions claim turned out to be an even split.  Given their power and the investment of time and money by the unions, this is an eye-opening stumble.

The latest returns show Prosser with a 40-vote lead.  For “all that it invested in this contest,” F. Vincent Vernuccio writes, “big labor was unable to secure a decisive win.” (more…)

Some Democrats as well as their ideological allies in the media and the leaders of their various auxiliary organizations seem to see victory in their defeat in Wisconsin this past week.  ”AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka,” for example “dubbed Gov. Scott Walker Thursday ‘the Mobilizer of the Year’  for the labor movement, saying Walker’s move to take away collective bargaining rights for public employees will boomerang on Republicans.”  James Taranto summarizes E.J.Dionne’s recent column as saying that “Republicans won a legislative victory but overreached, just as Democrats did a year ago [with Obamacare], and they are going to pay a political price, just as the donks did in November.”

Now, to be sure, the recent poll numbers among Wisconsinites for Walker’s modest reforms don’t look much better than do those for Obama’s major health care overhaul.  Yet, here’s one distinction to bear in mind.  The intense debate over Walker’s plan took place over three weeks, a relatively compressed time frame for a debate of this magnitude.  By contrast the debate over Obamacare unfolded over three seasons (Summer 2009, Autumn 2009, Winter 2009-10), with the House passing the bill just after last year’s Spring Equinox.

The shorter time frame for the Wisconsin debate has not given people much time to consider all the issues involved in this reform/budget package.  Consider, for example, polling on Obamacare.  While Democrats had been talking about reform since the transition, the debate didn’t start heating up until the spring of 2009, becoming really intense that summer.  At the beginning of that sultry season, a slight plurality favored the Democrats’ reforms.  While people supported health care reform in the abstract, once they learned the details of the plan crafted in Washington, D.C., they became increasingly skeptical and indeed outright opposed.

Similarly, while people favor the rights of public employees to organize in the abstract, the more they learn the details of Walker’s reforms curtailing their privileges, the more citizens will realize how these reforms protect Wisconsin taxpayers from unions who have gained an inordinate amount of power in recent years.  As the reforms limit the unions’ privileges, they giving local governments (including school districts) greater flexibility in providing benefits to their employees. (more…)

Democratic attacks on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker notwithstanding, it appears that good man was indeed willing to compromise with Senate Democrats who fled the state.  It’s only that the state’s minority party proved intransigent:

It appears the Democrats had not accepted the concessions outlined by Walker in an email to some Dem senators (an email his office released). These were discussed below. They allowed collective bargaining over a broader range of issues, but kept the provision ending mandatory union dues checkoff, which is arguably the change unions fear the most. I doubt there was ever a route to a mutually acceptable compromise unless the dues-checkoff provision could itself have somehow been compromise

Read the whole thing (via Instapundit).  Moe Lane explains why unions fear ending that mandatory checkoff:

Simply put, what automatic checkoff does is make it trivially easy for unions to collect dues: the employer (in this case, the state government) simply deducts the money from an union member’s pay and sends it along. No fuss, no muss, no debate… it’s just one more thing that the government takes from your paycheck. This turns the collection of union dues into a guaranteed revenue stream (instead of the colossal pain in the neck that such things usually are); most people don’t even notice, frankly. And it’s from union dues that unions get the money that they use for political advocacy*.

Read that whole thing too.  In short, the bill is indeed about a “power grab” as some have described it; the unions and the Democrats have long since grabbed it.  Not, once the Walker reforms pass, Wisconsin Republicans will have taken the power away from a Democratic interest group — and restored it to individual public employees.

*”Which is, by the way, mostly being used on the behalf of Democrats, at a ratio far out of sync with how their members vote.” [Footnote in original]

**and California law (as well as that in other states).

. . . can we claim a right to his?

I mean, this guy who acts as if he is today, something he never was, a member of the working class, shocks the audience on Rachel Maddow’s show “by telling the rich and bankers that ‘we have a right to your money!’”  And well, with the success of his movies, the guy can really count himself among the rich.

Noting that Michael Moore had declared in the same clip that “This is War”, Glenn Reynolds quips,

I guess the “new civility bullshit” is officially over. Bear that in mind as you contemplate a response. I don’t think these people realize that they are setting precedents that they may come to regret. They are as feckless in this behavior as they are in their fiscal approach. The consequences are likely to be insalubrious.

As I was reading about the Wisconsin Senate’s vote to curtail the privileges the state had granted pubilc employee unions, I was watching Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted which provided footage of various MSM reporters concerned about allegedly violent rhetoric at McCain-Palin rallies and asking Republicans to denounce it.  Interesting how concerned they were about violent rhetoric when they had no actual evidence of such rhetoric.

I wonder how many reporters will call on Wisconsin Democrats — or any Democrats for that matter — to distance themselves from Mr. Moore’s incitement to violence.

UPDATE:  Yes, the media who seem obsessed with imaginary conservative violence seem oblivious to actual liberal antics as per Bryan Preston’s observation: (more…)

You can learn a lot about the silliness of certain liberals just by going to the gym. I say that because that’s where I get my daily dose of CNN which seems to be constantly playing on the television monitors in the cardio area.

First, some background.  When Wisconsin Senate Democrats didn’t like some provisions in the budget bill that the state’s elected governor presented, they fled the state in order to prevent the elected state Senate from voting on the bill.  Democrats were unhappy that the party elected to majority status in the legislative chamber had the votes to pass the bill.  While Republicans had the votes, they lacked a quorum of “20 senators to be present for bills that authorize spending money.”

Had Democrats remained in the state, they could have debated the bill, raised objections, offered amendments.  Instead, they preferred life on the lam.  So, after three weeks, Republicans, as John Hinderaker put it finally lost patience.  A committee ”stripped some financial elements from the bill, which they said allowed them to pass it with the presence of a simple majority.”  The remaining provisions curtail the privileges the state had long granted to public employee unions.

As Governor Walker reminded his fellow citizens in a statement, “The Senate Democrats have had three weeks to debate this bill and were offered repeated opportunities to come home, which they refused”.   And now with “exquisite irony,” Allahpundit quips, supporters of the truant Senators “are screeching, ‘This is not democracy!’” (more…)

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.

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.”

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.