Illinois Needs To Have A Scott Walker Moment

State Government: Illinois' new sheriff can be forgiven if he's feeling as underappreciated as the marshal Gary Cooper played in "High Noon." Let's hope his movie ends as happily.

Gov. Bruce Rauner is fighting almost single-handedly against an entrenched, corrupt political class of lawyers, lobbyists, social service providers, media and teachers unions whose rallying cry is to smother reform and maintain business as usual in Springfield......

Years of overspending have many state and city of Chicago bonds selling at junk status. Illinois is now called "the deadbeat state" because it's two to three months behind in paying billions of dollars of bills owed. Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels quips, "Being a neighboring state to Illinois is like living next door to the Simpsons."......

Rauner should take a lesson from Illinois' neighbor to the north. Six years ago, Wisconsin's plight was just as dire, with unemployment running above 9% and red ink topping $1 billion. Republican Gov. Scott Walker stared down the public employee unions and trimmed excessive compensation costs while ending the crisis of runaway pensions and ending automatic tenure for teachers.

Walker later made Wisconsin a right-to-work state. It has subsequently seen a steep drop in unemployment while taxes have been cut and the budget balanced.

Madigan and the unions want to wait out Rauner in hopes that he'll eventually buckle under. But this is a gunfight that the governor and taxpayers can't lose.

A Rauner victory over the political mobocracy that has ruined the Land of Lincoln is vital for good governance in both Illinois and the nation as a whole. It will teach the unions that public employees are the taxpayers' servants, not their masters.

The argument is right but whoever wrote this needs to pick up a newspaper and realize that this IS what Gov. Rauner is trying to do, right now. We’re in the 4th week of a budget standoff where he is refusing to give in to the Democrat-controlled legislature that is refusing all of the reforms that Gov. Walker implemented in Wisc. Rauner has already agreed to forgo some of them for now in favor of getting some of the most critical changes but the Democrats think they can wait him out and public opinion will force him to give in. Of course they are blind to the fact that all that will do is continue the status quo, which is horrible, even though it perpetuates their phoney-baloney jobs and their control of power in the state.

Walker had a Republican legislature to help fight for change and the only thing the Democrats could do is fleebag it to Illinois to delay the vote. Our DemocRATs are already here, and the only exterminator in the house is Bruce Rauner.

Camille Paglia:

"....I think that liberals are dangerously complacent about Scott Walker. They’ve tried to portray him as a madman, an uneducated rube, a tool of the Koch brothers. Right now, Walker seems to be the true GOP frontrunner, but I also feel he lacks gravitas. He’s not ready for his close-up. What is this oddity about so many of the GOP candidates–their excessive boyishness, as if their maturation stalled? But Walker is a very talented and combative politician, with far more substance than liberals are allowing for.

The union issue is huge–because as governor of Wisconsin, Walker went to war with unions and won. Liberals are caught in the past right now in their rosy view of unions, which were heroically established during the progressive era that reformed the abuses of the industrial revolution. But the union battle in Wisconsin had nothing to do with exploited working-class miners or factory workers. In his push to balance the state budget, Walker took action against the middle-class public sector unions, whose negotiations with municipal and state governments outside the arena of private competition have become an enormous drain on local budgets as the economy has worsened. There has been a history of rampant corruption in the public sector unions, coming from their cozy quid pro quo relationships with politicians. Liberals need to wake up about this! All they have to do is read the obituaries of the smaller newspapers in metropolitan New York to see how the early retirement and lavish pensions of the public sector unions have grotesquely drained taxpayer dollars. Obituary after obituary–so-and-so, aged 75, worked for fifteen or twenty years as a policeman or city sanitation worker, retired in his late 40s, and spent the rest of his life on the taxpayer’s dime, pursuing his hobbies of fishing, boating, and golfing. Great work if you can get it!

And then the teachers’ unions! What a colossal tactical error American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (a longtime Clinton friend and donor) made several weeks ago in unilaterally declaring her union’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton right in the middle of the Bernie Sanders surge. Probably for the first time ever, American liberals woke up to the corrupt practices that have become way too common in the political maneuverings of the big unions. The point here is that Scott Walker, in his defeat of the public sector unions, drew the roadmap for struggling municipal and state governments everywhere to balance their budgets, as he did in Wisconsin. Because who ends up suffering the most? It’s the kids. All that money outrageously pouring into inflated pension plans has been gutting public education and community arts programs.

Exactly how have the teachers unions improved the quality of education in our big cities? Look at the dilapidated public schools in Philadelphia or in many other cities run by Democrats. The rigid and antiquated seniority system imposed by the teachers unions has been a disaster–”last hired, first fired.” So many young and vital teachers have been terminated during budget cuts–the entire future of the profession. The unions value seniority over quality, and it’s inner-city children who have paid the price.

In my opinion, Scott Walker still lacks seasoning, presidential temper, and a working knowledge of international affairs. But if Democrats try to use the union issue to take him down, they’re simply empowering him–and we’re going to end up with President Walker....." - Source

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