Harsanyi: An Assault on Taxpayers

Townhall - by David Harsanyi - When Dan Nerad, the superintendent of schools in Madison, Wis., was informed that 40 percent of the teachers union was calling in sick this week (evidently, something's going around), he shut down the entire operation. "At this ratio," he explained, "we have serious concerns about our ability to maintain safe and secure school environments." Where can one find a safe environment for children? As political props for union activists, of course, holding prefabricated signs demanding the state go broke funding increasingly inferior yet increasingly costly education. OK, by education I mean pensions. But isn't it nice to see kids thinking for themselves? Now, as easy as it is to blame unions, it's not enough.

We have a bigger problem, and that's monopoly. Every year government grows, each time a state assigns itself new duties, the monopoly expands. Education is just the worst example. Whatever you may think of the politics of private-sector unions -- now less than 7 percent of the work force -- they function in a competitive environment. Public sectors, on the other hand, have artificial leverage that no other workers in the nation enjoy. In Wisconsin -- where union sign wavers have yet to get the memo that Nazi imagery is no way to embrace the new era of civility -- lawmakers are attempting to reform bargaining rights of about 170,000 public-sector workers in unions. More precisely, they want to restrict union members to bargaining for wages rather than take taxpayers hostage with unsustainable pensions and benefit demands every few years. Read full column here: News New Mexico

Harsanyi: An Assault on Taxpayers

Lara Logan and the Media Rules

Caroline Glick

CarolineGlick.com - Among the least analyzed aspects of the Egyptian revolution has been the significance of the widespread violence against the foreign media covering the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The Western media have been unanimous in their sympathetic coverage of the demonstrators in Egypt. Why would the demonstrators want to brutalize them? And why have Western media outlets been so reticent in discussing the significance of their own reporters’ brutalization at the hands of the Egyptian demonstrators? To date the most egregious attack on a foreign journalist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square took place last Friday, when CBS’s senior foreign correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten by a mob of Egyptian men. Her own network, CBS, took several days to even report the story, and when it did, it left out important information. The fact that Logan was brutalized for 20 to 30 minutes and that her attackers screamed out “Jew, Jew, Jew” as they ravaged her was absent from the CBS report and from most other follow-on reports in the US media. Read full column here: News New Mexico

Lara Logan and the Media Rules

House Budget Blueprint Unveiled

Lucky Varela

SANTA FE, NM (KRQE) - The projected $5.4 billion budget, containing no new taxes and deep cuts to almost all programs and agencies, passed the House Appropriations and Finance Committee on Friday morning on a 10-7 vote along party lines. "We had limited resources," said Committee Deputy Chairman Luciano "Lucky" Varela, D-Santa Fe. Members tried to soften the blow to K-12 public education, Medicaid and the Children, Youth and Families Department, while maintaining the state's reserves at 5 percent. The state plans to replace the hundreds of millions of lost federal dollars for those programs. Read full story here: News New Mexico

House Budget Blueprint Unveiled