The Morning Blog, Wisconsin Edition

Hey there, Wisconsin: Egypt totally has your back (Courtesy of the brilliant Girlfriend). The comparison of course is a little silly. Madison is a long cry from Cairo by any reasonable standard. Still, it's nice to know that someone in Egypt cares.

There's a nice run-down of commentary on the Wisconsin budget cuts here. A couple of takewaways that leaped out at me:

From Michael Tomasky at the Guardian:

Making public-sector employees pay a larger share of their healthcare premiums is one thing. Doing what Walker is trying to do is appalling. He’s just making scapegoats of hard-working people who contribute no less to the economy simply because they’re employed in the public sector.

Ann Althouse (a public employee in Wisconsin) details what she'll be looking at in terms of increased costs:

The cut we — I’m one of them — are being asked to take is severe. (I’m looking at a loss of more than $10,000 a year, myself.) But it’s hard to complain and appear sympathetic, because we’re only being asked to go from paying 0.2 percent of our salary into our pension fund to 5.8 percent, which probably looks astoundingly low to outsiders. We’re being asked to pay more for our health insurance, but the coverage is extremely good, and the annual hit will be about $2,500 …

The Nation cries "Shenanigans!":

The Fiscal Bureau of Wisconsin just said in January that it will end this year with a $123 million surplus. So the fact of the matter is that this is not being done because of a lack of money. This is being done because political forces, conservative political forces, would like to disempower public employee unions and remove that voice for a strong public sector.

The Washington Posts Christopher Lane cries "Shenanigans!" right back:

No, what the public sector unions really can’t abide is the legislation’s requirement that public employees vote every year on union representation, coupled with an end to the automatic dues check-off on state paychecks. For the first time in decades, these organizations would actually have to prove on a regular basis that they’re voluntary; and they would have to collect their own political war chests, instead of relying on the government to extract the cash for them.

Some quick thoughts on my part: I agree that it's inappropriate to scapegoat the public service unions. It's quite obvious that states have enormous problems with unfunded pension obligations and these need to be resolved. That said, I can't imagine that these are the central problem causing the budget crises. At the same time, I don't have a problem with unions being compelled to prove that they are in fact voluntary. I have no problem with collective bargaining per se, I just feel that people should have the right to opt out of the collective. So ultimately...I'm not really sure where I stand on this. Inasmuch as the bill in some ways supports greater autonomy for state workers, I'm for it. Inasmuch as the bill seems to largely be a combination of political theater as well as payback, I'm opposed.

Meanwhile, our wise and benevolent leaders in Washington keep it classy.

Considering the general political silliness going on oh....just about everywhere, I have to think that these people made a good choice. Politics really is going to the dogs.

Oh fun! Hide and go seek!

This is a neat story: Rise of a Chess Grandmaster (to be). It's a little bittersweet when you consider that if she had the same ability with sports rather than chess (and let's face it, was a boy), many of her family's money problems would disappear.

Here are some movies coming your way. Seriously...One really is a full length feature about an evil tire.

Cancer in a command economy. I would note that a command economy can' even make something as ridiculously addictive as cigarettes profitable for the producers.

England needs to work harder on its superheroes. Sure, this guy is quite brave. But he's got nothing on Phoenix Jones.

I don't even know if pirates are newsworthy anymore.