Wisconsin Voters Should Have Gotten It Right the First Time

as someone who was purely a spectator to the wisconsin recalls.what i took away from the proceedings was that there were enough disgruntled voters to bring about the recalls.the democrats gave it their best shot and came up short.

the real winner yesterday was democracy.theres not to many other places in the world where this process could have even taken place.

bruce b of NV 1:57AM August 11, 2011

A person in the media is a Democrat!! She voted for Obama and think Republicans are out to kick grandma to the curb... I just can't believe it.

Let me explain something to you since every freaking Democrat can't figure it out. The US of A is on life support. We are broke, period. Social Security and Medicare carry a 0, as in ZERO, cash balance which is why we cannot cut the annual deficit. You see, Clinton's wonderful "surpluses" came directly from the surpluses in Medicare and Social Security, plus the tech boom stock market capital gains tax helped. The SS and Medicare surpluses were replaced by IOU's which the US now has to issue debt in order to pay for those programs.

Worse yet is our money is worthless. Bernanke printed us to death and the rate of government spending has killed the dollar, mark my words on that as we are going to see pain like you cannot believe. Freddie and Fannie, Democrat programs and mismanaged pet projects, needs $5B more in capital, go figure, but it gets better as they will eventually need half a trillion or a trillion. We are done because of idiotic Democrats AND Republicans, but the Democrats are the ones who are just plain dumb about this stuff and the fact that they caused most of it.

So, I am not surprised that you are an unapologetic liberal who believes Republicans want to kill grandma. I am also not surprised that you are dumb as well. What I am surprised about is that this piece is in a periodical called US "News You prove the media is liberal biased with every article you write.

scott of NY 6:45PM August 10, 2011

You think Ms. Marshall reads these? I was just re-reading the piece before closing the window (I am still in shock that stuff like this gets published), when I realized what she said in the last paragraph: "Did they [working class independents and Democrats] really believe a Republican would care more about education, pensions, and government workers' jobs?" Think about that for a minute. And leave education out for this discussion (although I think Republicans care a lot more about education than Democrats as a rule). Why would any voter aside from government workers and their families (and I am a government worker, by the way) care about "pensions[] and government workers' jobs?" I mean, I know why Democratic pols care - the public unions finance them and/or have voter drives for them. But why would any real person care? Is there an argument for it? As a voter you want basic minimum service from your government employees and want them to be paid whatever the market rate is so that the government isn't full of losers and morons. But anything above that is just a gift from the taxpayers to workers. And the workers aren't even grateful for the gift. Obviously, there can be disagreements about what is necessary to entice skilled (or unskilled depending on the position) workers from the private sector, but that has to be the baseline. If you cut pay and still have good resumes flooding in for each position, you know you haven't reached the market rate yet (and perhaps long-term contracts are necessary that will seem below average in flush times and overly generous during a recession to maintain continuity because government can never pay the extremely high wages of private sector law firms, for instance). But this is all nitty-gritty stuff that should be left to government managers to keep within their budgets or argue for larger budgets - why would voters care except when the tax burden gets too high and government services need to be cut? But Ms. Marshall just assumes that independents and registered Democrat voters will care. Huh?

David of CA 5:01PM August 10, 2011

Ms. Marshall, the bill that Gov. Brown signed did NOT remove all collective bargaining rights from public sector employee unions. They still have the right to bargain wages and conditions. What they lost was the ability to bargain for pension and other benefits.

You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.

Ralph Gizzip of OH 3:17PM August 10, 2011