Less than two weeks ago political strategist Dick Morris conducted a poll of likely Wisconsin voters that produced some strange results. By a margin of 74-18, those polled want teachers and other government workers to contribute more toward their health insurance premiums, and by an even larger margin (79-16) they want public employees to pay a larger share of their pension costs. Voters also want to end the automatic deduction of union dues from public employees’ paychecks (54-34) and want to require that pay increases that exceed the rate of inflation be submitted to referendum (66-30).

At the same time poll respondents say (by a 54-41 margin) that they don’t want to limit the collective bargaining rights of the public workers’ unions. But by a 58-38 margin, they want issues such as tenure, merit pay, and the right to fire incompetent teachers taken off the bargaining table.

I suppose this could be taken as proof of the Arrow impossibility theorem — that there is no voting system consistent with both individual rationality and democratic principles that will produce consistently rational results. Or, more likely, it just shows that people don’t really understand what “collective” bargaining is.

Whatever Governor Walker’s intentions, his proposed reforms amount to union-busting, just as his critics charge. Collective bargaining becomes a sham when there is nothing to bargain about. And it becomes impossible when a union loses the ability to coerce dues out of the workers it claims to represent. So for Wisconsin voters to say they support collective bargaining, while at the same time expressing strong support for reforms that will kill it, is to reveal a profound misunderstanding. Read more »

A couple of weeks ago I was watching Hardball on MSNBC, and Chris Matthews — you know, the guy who feels a thrill running up his leg when he hears Barack Obama speak — was waxing nostalgic about the warm, fuzzy friendship his boss, the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill had with Ronald Reagan. I almost swallowed my Glide. (I should explain: the only reason I was watching Hardball was to have something to keep my eyes and ears occupied while I was flossing my teeth.)

Matthews, to put it charitably, has a very selective memory. Here is what Tip O’Neill said publicly about Ronald Reagan on one occasion:

The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.

And that’s just one of the milder things that was said about Reagan. Before and during his Presidency, and even after he left office, Reagan was regularly and savagely attacked by liberals and the news media. To hear them talk back in the day, Reagan was not only evil, he was stupid too. Even some Republicans, such as Henry Kissinger and Kevin Phillips, often spoke of him with barely concealed contempt.

In fact, the Left, the news media, and — before he won the Republican Presidential nomination — the GOP establishment too, treated Reagan pretty much the same way they treat Sarah Palin today. Reagan’s spoiled-brat youngest son, Ron, who has been going around promoting a book about his father, sees nothing in common between Palin and the 40th President. But then, how would he know? By his own choice, little Ronnie was estranged from his father during the latter’s White House years — he didn’t even invite his parents to his wedding. Read more »

Let’s perform a little thought experiment. Let’s pretend that, instead of the statement that Sarah Palin released Wednesday morning, she released a completely different one, a statement that made no mention of a “blood libel”, a statement in which she humbly apologized for using over-the-top rhetoric and violent imagery and promised never to do it again — in other words, the groveling statement her liberal critics say she should have made. How do you suppose it would have been received?

I can tell you how it would have been received. MSNBCs smugly self-righteous Keith Olbermann, his voice an octave lower than usual (as it always is whenever he pronounces his judgments on evil right-wingers), would have called it “unconvincing, insincere and manipulative”. Chris Matthews would whine, “too little, too late. She should have made that statement long before last Saturday.” The New York Times‘s Paul Krugman would denounce Palin for using the word “tragedy” instead of “atrocity” — no, wait, he already did that, after she offered her condolences on her Facebook page Saturday.

Let’s be honest. It doesn’t matter what Sarah Palin says or does. She’s going to be viciously attacked for it.

Yes, Palin is polarizing, and her statements are inflammatory. But this is not an indictment of Palin, because the people who get inflamed by her words are the ones who already hate and fear her. They’ll find anything she says to be inflammatory. If her famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the divide you’re on) Facebook map had daisies instead of crosshairs on it, Palin-haters still would have denounced her. They would have claimed she was implying that the Democrats in the targeted Congressional districts should be pushing up daisies. Read more »

I love Fox News anchorwoman Megyn Kelly, and not just because she’s a delectable piece of eye candy. She is one of the most effective interviewers in television news today, and I suspect that her background as a litigator has a lot to do with it.

As a young reporter I once covered a high-profile medical malpractice trial, and after the plaintiff’s expert witness had testified, I was sure the jury was going to find for the plaintiff. Then the defense attorney went to work, not in the manner of Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, where he kept hammering Jack Nicholson over and over again with the same question, “Did you order a Code Red?”, but by gently encouraging the witness to go beyond his earlier testimony, until what had once seemed plausible started sounding absurd. The attorney had obviously studied the witness thoroughly — had read articles he had written, speeches he had given, and testimony he had given in other trials — and knew he could count on an enormous ego to lead the witness to places a man who thought more humbly of himself would never go. And he won his case.

On Sunday Kelly interviewed Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik right after charges were filed against Jared Loughner, the prime suspect in Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Dupnik, as you may know if you read my Sunday post on the subject (or if you’ve been following the news), decided to interject his personal political opinions and tried to tie the shooting to “the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country [which is] is getting to be outrageous”. Read more »

Thanks to CBS News, MSNBC, the Associated Press, Mark Potok, Paul Krugman, Markos Moulitsas and Jane Fonda — yes, that Jane Fonda — we now know who is responsible for the tragic shooting outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, Saturday. It’s Sarah Palin!  With some help from Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. I haven’t heard Bill O’Reilly’s name mentioned yet, but I’m sure we will soon enough.

Keith Olbermann anchored MSNBC’s evening coverage of the shooting, and he spent practically the entire evening trying to tie the shooting to Sarah Palin. You see, early last year Palin posted a map of the United States with little targets identifying the Congressional districts where the seats were held by politically vulnerable Democrats. One of the target districts was that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman who was shot Saturday. (Giffords survived the shooting, but six people, including a Federal judge who was apparently there just to do some grocery shopping, were killed and a dozen others were wounded.)

For good measure, he had Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center on to verify that talk of “death panels” and such inspires unstable people to go out and commit violence. The SPLC, by the way, considers people like Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ron Paul supporters and pro-lifers to be dangerous potential terrorists. In fact, it even considers Judge Andrew Napolitano, the most consistent supporter of civil liberties on television, to be a dangerous enabler of terrorists. Read more »