Scott Walker: Legend In The Making

What Governor Scott Walker is doing in Madison is nothing short of a stroke of genius. By eliminating the collective bargaining agreement, Walker endows all public employees with the right to determine their own success. Collective bargaining agreements shield employees from responsibility and make it impossible for a good teacher, for example, to be rewarded based on merit and instead treats good teachers the same as awful teachers; all are given benefits and pay increases based on the outdated system of seniority. They are paid based on a quantity of years and not on quality of performance.

It should be obvious to anyone who thinks objectively about it that CBAs are a horrible idea. Once the CBA is gone, teachers and other public employees can be evaluated the same way as employees in the private sector. That is, by the value they add to their organization. These employees can also now decide whether or not they want to contribute to their union and be represented, something they had no choice about under the CBA. If a union cannot convince enough people that it provides them with a useful service it will cease to exist and all those employees will be able to be judged on their merits. How great is that! Employees who perform poorly will be thusly rewarded/punished and can even be terminated, creating a position for someone else who is more likely to want to succeed.

There is nothing bad about any of this, of course, except that it will deprive Democrats of the power of unions to push votes for Democrat candidates at elections.

The other thing Scott Walker intends to accomplish is to force public employees to contribute up to 50% toward their retirements. God forbid! This will result in a net decrease in their pay, which is what all the fuss is about. Obama has stuck his skinny head into the matter, saying things like, “These are our friends and neighbors,” blah, blah, blah. He fails to complete his own argument, which is that these are our friends and neighbors and we pay their salary and benefits, and so far they have rarely had to foot the bill for their own lucrative retirement and health care benefits. Imagine if your neighbor went around the neighborhood every week and you had to cut him a check. Then years down the road he’s retired 10 years before you get to on money you gave him. That is exactly how it works only you don’t think that way because the money you pay your neighbor is first filtered though the State and local bureaucratic process.

The protests are a farce. Any teacher who uses a sick day to protest should be fired, but of course they are protected by the union, which has its own trivial survival at stake.

God bless Scott Walker and the Republicans who are showing great and necessary courage in the face of contrived opposition who protect an antiquated and self-destructive system.

The Train Gang

Through the first two years of his term in office, Campaigner-In-Chief Obama has totally failed to spur job growth in this country. Nothing he’s tried has worked, and everything he’s tried has increased the national debt. The unemployment rate, which he promised would not go higher than 8%, in fact went to 10.1%, with real unemployment hovering around 17%.

Obama has no idea what to do. He continues to think that 5 million “green jobs” can still be created by 2013, but everyone know that’s a fantasy. Billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who drafted the obnoxious “Pickens Plan” for green energy, which was his idea to erect thousands of giant wind turbines in the Texas wastes, failed miserably when he discovered the infrastructure did not exist to do anything with such a resource, and no plan to build such infrastructure was being seriously considered. Last June he abruptly scrapped the windmill idea in favor of natural gas pump stations. Do those qualify as “green” jobs? Even now he’s getting little support for his plan that would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars during Bama’s depressed economy. Meanwhile, closer to home, lefties are worried about Governor Scott Walker’s proposal to increase the distance a gigantic wind turbine can be built from private property by a mere 600 feet. The environmental crowd operate as if money were no object. Get a clue! If we could invest a quarter of the money necessary into clean coal and shale oil, of which we have among the world’s largest supplies, we could accomplish many of the spoken objectives of the Left – reduce dependency on foreign oil while creating a cleaner burning fuel, and without the need for a complete do-over on the nation’s power grid!

So he still thinks 5 million green jobs will materialize out of zero demand. He has the same expectation for high speed rail. Unbelievably, the First Goon is going back to that old well, probably because the Vice Moron Joe Biden thinks it’s such a great idea. Obama just proposed a $53 Billion plan to enhance rail along major corridors. Talk about “R is for Reverse”, more like “D is for deaf and dumb.” And whenever a Lefty wants to challenge their many, many critics over higher speed rail the argument that always comes up is that Europe has it. And now China is getting it. Big F---ing Deal! Maybe they wish they were part of the socialist utopias in Europe or the Communist wonderland that is China, but neither of those places have infrastructure requirements that are in any way similar to America.

For one, we have cars and roads. Almost nobody in China drives – most of it is still a third world country. And it’s existing train system is horrid by all accounts. Once you get out of the major cities in China you might as well be on the Moon. The tourism shows work hard to meet Western expectations, but the people of China live very differently. We are not the same. We are not even similar. Our societies almost could not be more different, so any comparison of transportation systems is absurd. Likewise, Europe is in a very different boat. The places where people live there are so old that cars are impractical. People walk. They walk the short distances to neighborhood shops and places of work or take the train to the next city and then walk from there. While this may solve our obesity problem, the amount of public transportation needed to cover the relatively vast expanses of North America and operate the way other countries do it, is obviously prohibitively expense. The only way it could work, and Republicans have been quick to say it, is by private enterprise. The big problem there is that no private company is interested in operating at a loss in perpetuity, ala Amtrak.

So when Obama says jobs he can only mean more government jobs. Are there any doubters left that this guy is a Communist?

More Weak-Kneed Foreign Policy From Bama

It's hard to look at the situation in Egypt right now and not see the stunning failure of the Obama International Apology Tour. Wasn't that supposed to make the rest of the world not hate us? And yet Egyptians - mostly young, radicalized Muslim men - are gathering by the tens of thousands in the streets of Cairo shouting down their own dictator while at the same time decrying the United States. Even American "journalists" working for CNN and other outlets are being mugged in the streets; evidence that Egyptians are not at all in tune with the "Free Press" in this country, which would otherwise have been sympathetic to the cause of the revolutionaries.

So that's what Bama gets for telling the people who hate us how awful we are - a few bloodied talking heads and a likely return of Egypt to a decidedly less West-friendly nation. Egypt in the last 50 years has teetered on the brink of fundamentalism more severely than most people realize, with only the strong leadership of military-backed despots to keep the Arabs in line. An argument could be made that Sadat was the last rational leader Egypt had, and Islamic fundamentalists assassinated him. At best Sadat was to Israel what Nixon was to China, and at worst he was a similarly corrupt leader who created a quasi-capitalist economy to enrich himself.

It is a sad state of affairs that led the U.S. to support Mubarak for the last three decades. Mubarak was like a dam, holding back the growing sea of fundamentalism and siphoning billions of dollars from the economy for his own gain at the people's expense. He is in the worst category of dictators - no better than Saddam except that he has been more than willing to rule while on the U.S. payroll. He has played it both ways and gotten away with it, for the most part, his $100 Billion in personal wealth stashed among the banks of Europe. I don't blame Egyptians for finally getting fed up with this guy and at the same time cursing the U.S for our meddling.

But we already know how this is going to turn out. For some reason Obama actually seems unwilling to intervene in any meaningful fashion. Once again he is putting more faith in people that openly hate us than he does American citizens. Israel has the most to lose. If fundamentalists seize power from the chaos of the collapse of the Mubarak regime then if we'll end up with another Iran or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

And it will happen on Obama's watch, not because of what he did but because of what he will not do. Don't think influence cannot still be bought - that is exactly what is already at work, and if the United States is not in that game we lose by default. Mubarak is corrupt and is hurting his country, but what will replace is not likely to be much better. Egypt is a resource-poor country relative to its population, much like Afghanistan. In such a place, with the world as globally invested as it is, money equals power. The question is how much are we willing to spend to have things break our way?

As a fiscal conservative, I same F--- 'em. Let's pull out of the whole region for a decade and see what happens. It's time to ask our allies, "What have you done for me lately?" and pull foreign aid accordingly. Will the region destabilize? Absolutely. But they are more than likely to to form pocket regimes and kill their own for a while. It's been happening in the rest of Africa for a century. It's Egypt's time now. I hope when it all plays out these revolutionaries realize they reaped what they sowed, but they'll probably just blame us.

My point is that Obama has the ability to change the outcome for the better. For everyone. Only he's not that kind of leader. He's not Reagan, not even in the same universe. But Reagan is exactly what we need right now.

2012 can't come fast enough.