Flap’s Links and Comments for March 27th on 17:45

These are my links for March 27th from 17:45 to 19:17:

• Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in Trouble? – Like Ann Coulter, Higgins worries that Walker isn’t doing enough to get his message across. … What would that require?

  1) Pointing out the growing disparity between cushy union contracts and the working situation of average American taxpayers. Horror stories are useful here;

   2) Noting that eliminating government workers’ ”collective bargaining rights” doesn’t mean taking away employee’s free speech rights, or the right to have an organization that advocates for them. It means taking away specific, monopoly-like special privileges granted to unions during the New Deal and Great Society years (including the right to be the sole and exclusive bargaining agent for workers, a requirement that employers bargain “in good faith”–whatever that means–and for many government workers the automatic deduction of dues from paychecks).

  3) Pointing out that government unions aren’t like private unions, in that there aren’t any profits in the government to redistribute, union work rules tend to reinforce government’s inherent tendencies toward inefficiency, governments don’t have to stay competitive, the threat of a legal or illegal strike is close to blackmail, and unlike in private industry workers get to try to choose and then buy off the bosses who negotiate with them by donating money and manpower to campaigns.

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  I don't think so.

  When the television ads start – when the elections count – voters will understand these points and if they vote Walker et. al. out of office, they do so at their own peril.

• The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics – The left’s obsession with the Koch brothers – David Koch’s secretary told him the news. This was in February, during the rowdy standoff between Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and demonstrators backing 14 Democratic legislators who’d fled to Illinois rather than vote on a bill weakening public employee unions. Koch’s secretary said that an editor for a left-wing website, the Buffalo Beast, had telephoned the governor posing as David Koch and recorded the conversation. And Walker had fallen for it! He’d had a 20-minute conversation with this bozo, not once questioning the caller’s identity. But then how could Walker have known? Sure, David Koch was a billionaire whose company had donated to his campaign. But Koch (pronounced “Coke”) had never talked to Walker in his life.

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