Only in Washington can politicians get away with complaining about a government shutdown, while going on vacation for a whole week.

Senate Democrats took to the air on Sunday to warn the American people about a government shutdown on March 4th.  They argued that the Senate may not agree to the House passed Continuing Resolution (CR), because the bill’s $61 billion in cuts to spending for the remainder of the year are too much.  Yet the problem is not serious enough for these same Senators to come back to the Capitol to debate and negotiate the House passed spending measure this week to avoid a shutdown.

You see — the Senate has a vacation scheduled for this week — can’t miss that. 

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A lot of people focus on the federal level when they think about politics. On the day after the 2010 election, I urged people to continue the fights at the state level. The unions — and especially the public employee unions — know that. Recall that in October of last year, the Wall Street Journal broke a very important story that found that AFSCME, the main non-teacher public employee union in the country, was the largest spender of the 2010 election. Their political director said, “we’re the big dog.”

I urge you to turn your eyes to the state level. The National Institute on Money in State Politics has an excellent site on money in state politics. Who are the #1 spenders in state politics? The public employee unions. #2 the gambling industry. In Wisconsin? The teachers unions are first and third, with the trial lawyers in fourth. Oh, and the Democrats themselves are in second.

And ultimately, that’s why the Democrats in the state legislature are AWOL. They are worried about their money getting cut off. You can see what the unions get for their money. They get state legislators who won’t even allow for a vote to ask public employees contribute to their health care and pension, even at levels below the national or Wisconsin average.

However, one of the Democrats has realized the flaw in their plans. A budget requires 20 votes to pass in the state senate. But simply removing the collecting bargaining rights only requires a simple majority. Let’s hope that the Republicans take the opportunity of Democratic absence to deal with the situation appropriately.

America’s New Mother-in-Law enjoyed some proletariat-free time this week, taking a respite from her pressure-filled life by hitting the slopes in Vail, Colorado. At least, she hit the slopes in between her other, higher-priority activities: chowing down on short ribs, and inspecting “kids’ healthy lunches.” According to restaurant owner and short rib-cooker Kelly Liken :

“[Michelle Obama] was wonderfully gracious and very much interested in what we’re doing in this valley for our kids’ healthy lunch,” Liken said. “She was amazing and — all I can say is she was interested. It was really refreshing to see how interested she really was and how passionate about our kids’ healthy lunches”

Of course, such concern for others’ food choices is nothing new from the not-exactly-svelte Michelle Obama, nor is her regular consumption of foods she regularly seeks to deny the rest of us from consuming. While the Obamas chow down on cheeseburgers by the dozen (see the above links), short ribs, and “bratwurst, kielbasa, cheeseburgers, deep-dish pizza, and buffalo wings…twice-baked potatoes, chips and dip, and ice cream ,” kids in Chicago are walking away hungry from school lunch lines that offer food described by “the vast majority” of students as “nasty .”

“If they’re going to feed us healthy, they need to feed us something good that’s healthy,” said Mijoy Roussell, a sixth-grader at Claremont Academy who was skipping lunch in favor of a packet of candy. “This food is disgusting, which is why I’m not eating lunch.”

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“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” - Lenin

In Wisconsin, and elsewhere, union bosses are fighting to maintain control over more than just their having a say in wages and benefits. With the SEIU ramping up rallies nationwide, the protests in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio are the beginning of a much larger battle that America is facing—whether America’s children will be saddled with generational indebtedness and conditioned to serving the collective, or whether they will live a free life.

Last week, the six-figure salaried head of the Wisconsin teachers’ union (WEAC) was quite clear in stating that the Wisconsin protests have little to do with salaries and benefits. The protests are, however, about union power.

With unions’ ability to collect union dues at risk, as well as the possibility that they may have to get re-certified every year by the people they represent, Republican Scott Walker’s proposals strike at the very foundation of any union’s existence—union dues and union ’security.’  Yet, there is more at stake than even this. The Wisconsin union battle is about the raw union power that unions wield over the local, state and federal governments and, ultimately, the power unions have over children, both through the budgets, as well as school children’s curriculum.

For a long time, unions have known that grooming good, little collectivists begins at a young age. In Wisconsin, however, unions have even gone so far as to enact their progressive brainwashing into Wisconsin state law, as a few of us union watchers tried to draw attention to more than a year ago.

We noted then that unions were force-feeding union propaganda to schoolchildren when governor Jim Doyle signed legislation mandating the teaching of progressive labor history to students.

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All of the attempts by the media to make stories out of the budget battles going on in Washington, D.C. will not change the bottom line of how it will end up, no matter how many ways they try to create a story. Namely, the taxpayers will get stuck with more debt and more taxes again.

After all of the political punches are thrown, President Obama will get some of the unnecessary spending and tax increases he wants, the Democrats will get some of the wasteful spending and tax increases they want, the Republicans will get some of the spending cuts they want, and once again the overall deficit will continue to add to the national debt using the taxpayers’ credit card.

That’s not leadership.

Unlike what Obama has proposed, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is actually leading boldly to help get Wisconsin’s budget balanced. Governor Walker has proposed that public sector workers, mostly unionized, pay a portion of their health insurance, and a modest portion of their retirement contributions.

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There is going to be a vigil in support of Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans on Wednesday. If you go to I Stand With Walker you can get the details on it.

Likewise, Democrats and Unions are flooding Wisconsin with hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Democrat Party there.

We need to respond accordingly and give the Wisconsin GOP the funds with which they can fight back.

Be prepared to stand up Wednesday and support Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans in their fight.

The Silvered, Fork-tongued One skates through electoral mayhem with the grace of Johnny Weir, but this time, he falls and fails badly. It will come back to haunt him.

I refer to President Obama siding with the public sector unions across the country while the Governors, both Republican and Democrat, try to balance state budgets and ask the unions to make less-aggressive concessions than private sector employees have been making for years.

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Supporting public sector unions in Wisconsin must be hurting Barack Obama. We know because he is using the New York Times to back away from his earlier statements and the tactics of his own Organizing for America.

In fact, the White House says the involvement of the DNC and OFA “were overblown from the start”, but even the Times can’t help but note

Before Mr. Obama complained late last week of an “assault” on the unions by the Republican governor in Wisconsin, Scott Walker, the Democratic Party had alerted its volunteers in Organizing for America to support the protests there and elsewhere, seeing an opening to show solidarity with the labor movement and rev up the party’s liberal base ahead of the 2012 elections.

By the weekend, national party officials were taking credit for encouraging the protests, especially through the use of Twitter and other online social networks.

The White House now is forced to claim the DNC and OFA went forward without talking to the White House political team. Riiiiggghhhhttttttt . . .

The question, of course, is why? Why the walk back and the distancing?

Let me suggest that this White House understands Barack Obama continues to do poorly in polling with independents. His gut and preference may be to side with the socialist hijackers of the taxpayers we call public sector unions, but he can’t be too bold and upfront. That hurts him with independents.

Nonetheless, we need to remember — it was Barack Obama’s own Organizing for America taking credit for the union antics in Wisconsin that have escalated to the verge of violence.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss German elections and the continued battle between the unions and Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Germany: Angela Merkel’s party loses in Hamburg poll
Obama fans the flames in Wisconsin
Run, Walker, Run

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I’m filling in for Neal Boortz on the radio this morning for his nationally syndicated show. You can listen live from 8:30 a.m. to 1p.m. ET at http://wsbradio.com.

The call in number for the Boortz Show is 1 (877) 310-2100.

I’ll be talking Wisconsin, House GOP selling out, high speed rail, Libya, China, negotiating with the Taliban, and much, much more.

Consider this an open thread.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”~ Ronald Reagan, from his first inaugural speech as governor of California, January 5, 1967

Last November, Republicans were granted an unparalleled political mandate for the specific purpose of taking dead aim at the socialist and regulatory state. Yet, as the dust settles from their much acclaimed budget bill last week, it appears that only dust was pruned from the Federal government monstrosity. This was not the brave defense of freedom which Reagan dramatically predicted would be necessary to combat the truculence of tyrannical government.

Over the past few days, anywhere from 40-100 GOP House members voted to defeat nearly two dozen amendments that would have vitiated useless programs and agencies from a variety of government departments that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The most egregious defection came Friday afternoon, when 92 Republicans helped defeat an amendment sponsored by the RSC that would have cut an additional $22 billion in non-defense discretionary spending. Evidently, $61 billion is all they can extirpate from the $3.7 trillion dollar beast.

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This week’s winning caption came from Ben Howe with 19% of the votes (there were two captions tied for second).

See the rest of the winning captions below.  Thanks for participating.

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