State & Local Politics

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the middle-aged “Young Gun” leader of the Republican Party, stepped in it this week when he compared the Wisconsin families protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) drastic and politically motivated attack on their employee benefits to the rioters in the streets of Cairo, Egypt. Appearing on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" program, Ryan said “he's [Walker is] getting riots — it's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days."

Paul Ryan should apologize. Immediately.

Perry used to be famous for his flirtation with talk of secession. Maybe we should encourage him to revisit it. — Gail Collins, in The New York Times

How about Wisconsin?

Somewhere between the first cries of the Tea Party in February 2009 and the November election in 2010, the states in the middle of the continent suddenly came to realize what Texas and Alaska have known all along: They are free.

The conservative assault on the freedom of American women continues today in South Dakota, where the State Legislature is expected to vote on a bill that would essentially redefine what constitutes “justifiable homicide” to include the doctor or healthcare provider who performs the legal procedure of abortion if the assailant is related to the woman who receives the abortion.
 
The measure was introduced by state Rep. Phil Jensen, who tried to backtrack from his barbaric proposal yesterday after a story in Mother Jones started to gain national attention. Jensen’s explanation was that the bill has nothing to do with abortion but rather seeks to make self-defense laws “consistent” by saying that not only can a woman use force to protect her unborn child if necessary, so can her relatives if they also use force or kill someone to protect the unborn child. The clarification doesn’t change the fact that the measure still says despite the fact that a woman may decide to have an abortion, a relative of hers — father, mother, son, daughter or husband — can decide to kill the person who performs that procedure and claim it was a “justifiable” murder.

No, not really. When I saw a news post Sunday afternoon on a website called “Ward Room, ” run by the NBC-TV affiliate here, I did a double-take at the headline: “Poll: Moseley Braun in Second Place.”

The reporter, Zach Christman, apparently forgot to ask a key question — who paid for the poll? The answer, when I reached the man behind the poll, Rod McCulloch, was that Carol Moseley Braun paid for it. The one-term U.S. senator from Illinois, as I’ve written previously, is running a bizarre and incompetent campaign.

It is insidious when Rachel Maddow suggests that Rand Paul is a racist. It is insidious when Paul Krugman, The New York Times and the Daily Kos imply that Sarah Palin is a domestic terrorist. But The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s suggestion that Ron Paul is a closet Confederate is just stupid. The only tools left in their toolbox are mnemonic slander, irony and demagoguery; thus the liberals’ call to late-night stand-up comics to run for office. It is prelude to a nervous breakdown.

Ron Paul might have called the brilliant James Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer to talk about Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (or Mick Jagger, for that matter, who is also a fan) and the legendary commodities investor and guru Jim Rogers to talk about the Fed. It would have been entertaining and informative. But Paul is ornery. It is his job.

The former U.S. senator and ambassador to New Zealand is running for mayor of Chicago. She’s running second in a field of six, way behind Rahm Emanuel, who will almost certainly be the next mayor — perhaps as soon as Feb. 22 if he gets 50 percent plus one vote and thus avoids an April 5 runoff.

He could not have designed a better opponent than Carol Moseley Braun, 63, who is living up to her reputation for ineptitude, solidified during her one term as U.S. senator. She buried herself in so many mistakes and scandals that she ended up, in 1998, losing her bid for reelection to a little-known Republican.

Since New Hampshire state Rep. Dan Itse brought his challenge to ObamaCare, citing Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, in February 2009, we have been seeing a new age of Jefferson. Judge Andrew Napolitano now plays primetime “fighting for freedom” five nights a week; Virginia Del. Jim LeMunyon proposes a Repeal Amendment; a 26-state challenge to the federal government moves to the Supreme Court and best practices conferences for governors today feature Thomas Woods’s Nullification. But the turning ahead might best belong to Andrew Jackson. It was the rustic warrior from Tennessee who first fired up the common folk west of the New River and laid their claim to governance. He is much misunderstood and occasionally maligned, but Jackson might well be considered the spirit father of the current red-state uprising.

The New York Times reports today that policymakers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers: “Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional hurdles, because the states are considered sovereign.”



But states are finding their own ways to save money. Last fall, the Nebraska Campaign for Liberty distributed copies of Tom Woods’s book Nullification to 44 of the 49 members of the Legislature. They followed up with discussion with some other senators about the kind of things they’d like to see done and provided some “model legislation” — courtesy of the Tenth Amendment Center.

Not long ago the historian Tony Judt proclaimed that New York had passed as a global city. Possibly because the idea of Reagan/Clinton-era globalism had passed. Culture follows capital, and as Harvard’s Niall Ferguson has said, today it is all about China and America. So better that the American leader today hails not from what Judt considered to be a European city, a “world city” — New York; that is, old New York — but Chicago. New York is a “world city,” Judt wrote, but it is “not the great American city — that will always be Chicago.” L.A. is global, or “world,” as well, which makes Chicago the premier American city.

The news that Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is not running for reelection will set off a chain reaction, bringing multiple candidates from both parties to compete for the open seat.

Because I always want my readers to be ahead of the conventional wisdom, here is my tip of the month. Keep your eye on the Democratic mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, as a rising star in Texas politics. Many Democrats will soon urge him to run for the Senate seat, or to run in the next campaign for governor of Texas.