No Runny Eggs

There’s three of them:

• First things first, Dave Westlake, American Majority and Americans for Prosperity will be having a rally on the east side of the Capitol at noon. They put together an all-star lineup, from Vicki McKenna to Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, from Herman Cain to Andrew Breitbart, from AFP head Tim Philips to American Majority head Ned Ryun. I strongly suggest getting there early, bring your video cameras, and be nice. While some of the organizers of the lefty rallies have publicly told their supporters to not engage us, I don’t exactly trust their words (I’ll get to that in a bit).
• Item #2 – Recalls have been announced against absent state Senators Jim Holperin and Bob Jauch. Those of you down in the Kenosha area and in northeast Wisconsin, expect to see recall petitions circulated shortly.

  The short version of how partisan office recalls work in Wisconsin for those of you who either don’t remember or aren’t from Wisconsin:

  • An officeholder who has held office for at least a year since the last election is eligible for recall. On the state partisan level, that means only the state Senators in even districts, who were last elected in 2008, are eligible to be recalled at this point.
  • Organizers have 60 days from the time they register with the appropriate election officials (in this case, the Government Accountability Board), to circulate petitions in the district and get signatures equalling 1/4th the number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election (specifically, the 2010 election).
  • If a sufficient number of signatures are gathered, the Tuesday during the 6th week after the petitions are turned in, either a partisan primary (if more than one Democrat or more than one Republican files to run) or a recall general election (if a primary is not necessary) is held. The recalled candidate is automatically on the ballot unless he (or she) declines to run within 10 days after the petitions are turned in. If there is a primary, the recall general election is held 4 weeks after the primary.
  • If the recalled official survives, he (or she) is immune from recall for the remainder of the term. If not, the winner assumes the office upon certification of the results.
• Item #3 – WisPolitics reported the reason the Assembly adjourned rather abruptly after attempting to take up the budget repair bill (in special sessions, identical bills are filed in both houses of the Legislature) was because enough credible threats to the security of the Assemblymen and their staff came into the Capitol Police to cause them to tell the Assembly leadership that their safety could no longer be assured. Quoting Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, in an RPW press release:
  

  To willfully prevent elected officials from performing their official duties in order to circumvent the legislative process flies in the face of democracy and is an insult to the citizens of this state.

  Governor Walker was elected to fix a broken system. Walker and Republicans campaigned and won on that platform, and the will of the people will not be suppressed by intimidation. State government is broken and the time for reform is now.

Tomorrow’s going to be interesting. I just hope it’s not in the Chinese way, as I’ll be in Madison.

Revisions/extensions (9:36 pm 2/18/2011) – I have to thank the folks at Power Line for linking here on the recommendation of Patrick McIlheran. Things have been moving fast, so most of my updates have been on my Twitter account rather than on the blog itself. With the rally tomorrow, I expect more of the same high Tweet count/low post count tomorrow.

I probably should have put this in with today’s Scramble, but I think I closed the books on that just before the expanded version went live at her blog. In any case, Michelle Malkin nails the essence of the argument once again:

The lowdown: State government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits. Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new GOP Gov. Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more. He has proposed raising the public employee share of health insurance premiums from less than 5 percent to 12.4 percent. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions. To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of Byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor’s collective bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.

As the free-market MacIver Institute in Wisconsin points out, the benefits concessions Walker is asking public union workers to make would still maintain their health insurance contribution rates at the second-lowest among Midwest states for family coverage. Moreover, a new analysis by benefits think tank HCTrends shows that the new rate “would also be less than the employee contributions required at 85 percent of large Milwaukee_area employers.”

In addition to my open to today’s Scramble, where I outlined some very-recent history of The Union/Democrat Axis trying to grab the last of the loot and power on their way out the door, I’ll bring in the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association’s attempt to force the Milwaukee Public Schools to restore erectile dysfunction benefits. That’s right, back in 2002, MPS offered coverage for Viagra and that class of drug. By 2005, after a massive abuse of the privlege, MPS pulled it back, and the MTEA has been battling since to restore the benefit. By the summer of 2010, after arbitrators, administrative law judges and ultimately the state Labor and Industry Review Commission ruled in MPS’s favor, the MTEA filed suit rather than fight more vigorously for the teachers that had been laid off that summer.

Oh, did I mention that the MTEA shut down MPS today to set up a 4-day weekend?