Friday opinion, the Badger edition.
Paul Krugman:
Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.
The Fix:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, less than two months into his first term as the state's chief executive, may already be the most well-known governor in the country.
But even as the protests over the Republican's budget cuts rage and Democratic lawmakers continue to be AWOL to avoid voting on them, the GOP's rally effect has been somewhat ... well ... uninspiring.
Rick Fantasia:
Americans may not fully grasp what is at stake here, but we fail to do so at our peril. Unions have made mistakes, but they are the only defense that workers have.
Without viable unions to serve as a counterweight to corporate power, America's working people and their families are at the mercy of the largest and most powerful economic organizations on the planet.
CNN:
Public union battles spread across U.S.
HuffPo:
"Union workers support union workers," said Tom O'Grady, a 60-year-old sheet metal worker from Local 565 in Sun Prairie, a Madison suburb. O'Grady told HuffPost the same thing that many other union workers did: If they don't stick up for public union workers today, they'll lose their own bargaining rights as private union workers tomorrow. "Walker screwed up," O'Grady said. "He put magnets in our shoulders."
Brad DeLong:
The Obama proposal looks to reduce debt 10 years from now, by $400 million. This theoretical House Republican proposal looks to increase the debt 10 years from now, by $150 billion.
And over the past 30 years, Democratic budget proposals have by and large delivered what they promised. Republican proposals, by contrast, have all turned out to produce much bigger deficits than were pledged at the start.
If you are a real deficit hawk, there is simply no contest as to which political party you should support right now.
But there are a lots of people in Washington who are paid in either dollars or favor points to pretend to be deficit hawks when they are no such thing.
Matt Miller:
Sorry, Charles [Krauthammer]. The one thing we know from Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America" -- his claim to fiscal fame -- is that Ryan is fundamentally unserious about the debt. Though few have bothered to look at his plan's details, the CBO analysis Ryan requested shows that the Roadmap does not balance the budget for more than fifty years and incurs, by my small-c conservative estimate, at least $62 trillion in debt between now and then. (I've explained the details elsewhere.) I don't believe that if Charles knew these facts he would have implied that Ryan was "recklessly principled" or "serious."
Sure he would have. Krauthammer's an ideologue, uninterested in reality.
WaPo on yet another Bush era fail:
In hindsight, the deal struck with Gaddafi did little to help ordinary Libyans, said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington research institute.
"We rehabilitated a cruel dictator in the interest of securing American policy gains," Miller said. Though the policy change had its merits, "It was a devil's bargain because we essentially said, 'If you support our policies on war and peace, we'll give you a pass on human rights,' " Miller said.