AFTERNOON EDITION

Wild and woolly in Wisconsin

It's been a wild and woolly morning in Madison. After last night’s stunning, quicky vote to strip public union collective bargaining rights, it's fair to say that “all hell has broken loose,” as my dad used to say. In its noon post, a team of Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters was saying: “Demonstrators were carried out of the Assembly by police Thursday as Gov. Scott Walker's administration again closed and then reopened the building to the public. About 11:30 a.m., the statehouse was opened after police cleared the Assembly so the body could vote on Walker's bill on union bargaining. After protesters said they were willing to risk arrest to block a vote, police began escorting or dragging some of them out. ... As of 10 a.m., many reporters inside the Capitol were denied access to Assembly parlor where Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) was to hold a news conference. Reporters outside the Capitol were not being allowed into the building. With Democrats still in Illinois, the state Senate abruptly voted Wednesday night to eliminate collective bargaining provisions for most public workers that have stood for decades, sending a flood of angry protesters into the Capitol. The Assembly has already passed a nearly identical version of the wide-ranging bill, which Walker introduced last month to address a budget shortfall.”

The Journal-Sentinel, which endorsed Gov. Scott Walker last fall, editorializes this morning: “[T]he Republicans went too far in their zeal to bust the unions and too far in their stubborn tactics to accomplish that mission. They are forcing these changes on an unwilling state at great cost — and they still haven't filled the budget hole the original measure was designed to fill ... Republicans, in the end, did what they had said they would not do: They cast aside provisions in the ‘budget-repair’ bill that actually dealt with the budget and took an up-or-down vote on ending most collective bargaining. ... Walker never campaigned on disenfranchising public-employee unions. If he had, he would not have been elected. He got a spare 52% of the vote — hardly a mandate for what he is trying to do.”

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post looks at whether Democrats will really reverse all this if they return to power. After introducing an argument that nationally Democrats aren’t all that excited about restoring collective bargaining to public employees, he says: “[T]he incentives of public employees and the incentives of even Democratic officeholders are not always, or even often, aligned. In these negotiations, Democrats and their appointees are management, and they want to spend as little as possible in order to keep tax rates and deficits low, while the workers want to bargain for a better deal. As I’ve been arguing for some time, that’s quite similar to what happens in the private sector, and though I admit that the role unions play in funding campaigns changes the dynamic a bit, it a) changes it less than many people think and b) is a good argument for campaign-finance reform, not for taking collective-bargaining rights away from public workers but still allowing corporations to benefit from that exact same dynamic."

Meanwhile, fresh polling on all of Wisconsin’s recall initiatives doesn’t bode well for at least two GOP senators. Greg Sargent of The Washington Post’s “Plum Line” blog writes: “I've got an advance look at some new polling by Survey USA that finds solid majorities in two GOP senate districts support the recall of their senators. The poll was paid for by MoveOn, which obviously has an ax to grind in this fight, but Survey USA is a respected non-partisan pollster that's routinely cited by major news organizations. Here are the numbers, sent over by a MoveOn official, in the districts of GOP senators Dan Kapanke and Randy Hopper. When asked if they would vote for Hopper or someone else if a recall election were held right now, 54 percent said they'd vote for someone else, versus only 43 percent they'd vote for Hopper. In Kapanke's district, the numbers were even worse: 57 percent said they'd vote for someone else, versus only 41 percent who said they'd vote for Kapanke.” Sargent notes that this poll was taken before last night’s vote.

Here in Minnesota, Brian Bakst of the AP reports on our GOP majority’s first outline of its all-cuts budget: “Majority Republicans largely leave spending for K-12 education intact, although they would continue a $1.3 billion state payment delay that gets checks to schools slower than normal. Social service programs that serve the poor, elderly and disabled would have to get by with about $1.6 billion less than they were anticipating. Health and human service programs are among the fastest growing in state government. Money for higher education, aid programs for local governments and state agency operations would fall by hundreds of millions of dollars each compared with projected spending.”  

If it's OK for John Boehner, it's OK for Keith Ellison. Minnesota’s 5th District congressman broke down in tears today talking at New York GOP Rep. Peter King’s controversial hearing on homegrown Muslim radicals. Writes Jeremy Herb of the Strib: “Telling the story of a Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Muslim first responder who was killed on Sept. 11, Ellison choked up and his voice broke as he said that Hamdani was smeared by some people after Sept. 11 because of his faith. ‘His life should not be identified as just a member of an ethnic group or just a member of a religion,’ Ellison said, ‘but as an American who gave everything for his fellow Americans.' As he concluded his testimony, Ellison knocked his glasses to wipe away tears, and briefly covered his face with the papers from which he had been reading.”

The seemingly indefatigable Sally Jo Sorensen of the Bluestem Prairie blog has several favorite targets. Few compare with Sibley County’s freshmen Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen. In a piece that’s up on the Minnesota Independent, Sorensen tears into him: “While Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen's bill to halt implementation of the federal Affordable Care Act in Minnesota grabbed the attention of the capitol press corps, the freshman legislator’s homage to natural law wasn’t the only striking statement he made in committee Wednesday. In a separate hearing, the conservative Republican from Sibley County condemned sexologist Alfred Kinsey as a ‘filthy, perverted unscientific liar’ whose research needs to be ‘destroyed.’ ” She then quotes from Gruenhagen’s committee remarks: “I would just add: there is nothing more destructive — or, one of the most destructive things to a society in term of our women and children and even having economic consequences — is when the male sex drive is released in an uncontrolled and undisciplined way. There — you can’t print up enough money to take care of the consequences of that. So I beseech you as a man to expose the lies that have been permeated through our schools and our culture and of course we know Hollywood is brainwashed disciples of Dr. Albert Kinsey. I use the word “doctor” reluctantly. He’s a filthy, perverted, unscientific liar and his research needs to be exposed. Other than that, I don’t have a lot of opinion on the subject.’ ” How do you say O ... M ... G?  

Tim Pawlenty is promising to obey the Republican 11th commandment. Politico’s Maggie Haberman writes: “Pawlenty said the GOP field needs to avoid ‘[whaling] on each other’ and that he doesn't plan to attack his Republican rivals in the leadup to the 2012 primaries. ‘I’m going to be mixing it up with President Obama. The folks who are running, or may run, if I run, are going to be my friends. We’re all going to have to be a team in the end,’ Pawlenty told Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody. ‘So, I think it’s important to, as best as possible, observe Ronald Reagan’s 'Eleventh Commandment,' which is 'don’t speak ill of another Republican.' There’s going to be some differences between us, but the people and the press can sort that out. There’s no need to be [whaling] on each other.’ ” Or in other words, there’ll be no “poohing” on other Republican’s front yards.

The National Journal spits out it’s “Political Insiders poll” showing Pawlenty’s stock rising within the party, almost as fast as Sarah Palin’s is dropping. Writes James Barnes: “Pawlenty was rated equally well [as Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels] by GOP Insiders who have been impressed by his disciplined courtship of the party faithful in the early caucus and primary states. Pawlenty is also viewed as a candidate who is acceptable to a broad range of Republicans and has relatively little political baggage. ‘[He] continues to methodically define himself as the mainstream conservative Republican who can appeal to traditional and new Republican activists’, said one GOP Insider. ‘Daniels may not run because of family, Barbour has proven surprisingly tone deaf, Gingrich has failed to turn around the marital issue, Palin excites her core group and is unacceptable to everyone else, Romney-care has become the mark of death for Romney,’ noted another GOP Insider. It looks more and more as though everyone has a fatal weakness, other than Pawlenty.' " So “no fatal weakness” is now a solid base for a candidacy?