Elections

Waste of Time and Money

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Mrs. Dan from Madison and I vote absentee every election. We like it for a couple of reasons, the biggest being that we can sit at home and fill out our ballots at our leisure rather than standing in a line (much more important in presidential elections) and we get to hash out a few things politically away from the TV. We typically make it a date over a bottle of wine to research the candidates and talk about the issues on the ballot.

The ballot for our upcoming election in early April has a very strange referendum on it, proposed to the good people of Dane County:

Should the US Constitution be amended to establish that regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting freedom of speech, by stating that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights?

The city of Madison council is famous for preparing and passing declarations denouncing all sorts of crap on the federal level (this activity, I assume has ceased since the zero became president), but I had hoped that the county board wouln’t get involved with this waste of time and ink. Sigh.

What’s next, declarations of war? Impeaching federal officials? Raising the federal tax rate?

Union Rule

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The situation in Madison Wisconsin has been so well covered by Ann Althouse on her blog, that I have not felt it necessary to mention it. Yesterday, the situation began to change. This is what union rule would look like:

The state Senators had passed the limited budget bill that included only the collective bargaining provisions. The Democrats had blocked the fiscal portions of the bill by fleeing the state two weeks ago. Walker has had this option since they left but he and Majority Leader FitzGerald, were negotiating with the Democrats in hopes the standoff could be ended. The negotiations (not reported by the MSM, of course) broke down when it became apparent that the Democrats are nationalizing this controversy. Walker then encouraged the Senate Republicans to go ahead with Plan B. They did and the law was signed by Walker yesterday.

Why has this issue been so inflammatory? There are even leftist academics who are advocating serious violence.

My prediction: 10 years from now public higher education, at least in many states, will have ceased to exist. 20 years from now state governments will realize that they still own the buildings and property on their former state university campuses and start charging us rent to use them. 25 years from now citizens will complain that they can’t afford to send their children to college–any college. But by then the peasant class will be so firmly established that it won’t really matter.

Welcome to the 19th century.

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“An Afghan Comments on Wisconsin Democratic Rule”

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Afghan: So everyone was elected?
 
Me: Yes.
 
Afghan: And so Obama’s party just leave because they don’t like their chances at the vote?
 
Me: Yes.
 
Afghan: That’s not very democratic.
 
Me: No.

Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze.

Michael Barone weighs on the Wisconsin showdown.

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Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

RTWT

This is (apparently, so far) shaping up to be a political defeat for the unions, the Democrats, and Obama.

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48% Back GOP Governor in Wisconsin Spat, 38% Side With Unions.

So far, it looks that way.

If these sorts of numbers hold up, the unions, the Democrats, and Mr. Obama will have managed to turn a local setback into a major defeat by accepting battle on a ground not of their own choosing.

(I wanted poll numbers, and I went to Patrick Ruffini’s Twitter stream, knowing if there were any, he’d have them.)

That poll is a national, not a Wisconsin poll.

What are the Wisconsin-only numbers? Last week Walker was apparently behind.

The question was:

As you may know, Gov. Scott Walker has proposed a plan to limit the pay of government workers and teachers, increase their share of the cost of benefits, and strip some public-employ unions of much of their power. We’d like to know if APPROVE or DISAPPROVE of Gov. Walker’s plan.

43% approved, 53% disapproved. But that was last week, the question is slanted, events have moved on and that is only one poll. (That same poll found that by 55/36 people wanted the Democrat senators to return to the capitol.)

I don’t see any other Wisconsin-only polls. If anyone knows of one please put a link in the comments.

It is too early to say how this will all play out.