The plot thickens:
On Wednesday night, Republicans in Wisconsin's state senate rammed through a retooled version of Governor Scott Walker's controversial "budget repair bill" with the 14 senate Democrats still in hiding in Illinois. The senate bill eliminates collective bargaining rights for most public-sector unions, a provision that has labor leaders and protesters up in arms. But there's another explosive provision in the bill that's received little attention: The bill authorizes state officials to fire any state employee who joins a strike, walk-out, sit-in, or coordinated effort to call in sick.
Don't forget what Scott Walker said when he thought he was talking to his billionaire benefactor from Kansas, David Koch:
I told my cabinet ... about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We'd already kind of built plans up but it was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb. And i stood up and pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan and said this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan ... had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers. And I said, to me that moment was more important than for just labor relations or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism ... in Wisconsin's history, this is our moment, this is our time to change the course of history ... for those who thought I was being melodramatic you now know it was purely putting it in the right context.
Now Walker just needs public employees to go on strike. So he can make history.