In the Really Good News file for today:

The House just approved Rep. Mike Pence’s amendment to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, checking off a hot-button social issue even as it set up a bigger showdown over defunding the health care law.

The vote was 240-185 with 11 Democrats voting for the amendment, and seven Republicans voting against. One member voted present. A group of Republicans on the floor applauded when the vote hit 218.

And…

The House voted to defund President Obama’s health care overhaul on Friday during a sustained burst of floor activity on a temporary spending bill.

The House passed the health care measure, 239-187, as an amendment to a bill that would keep the government lights on through the end of the fiscal year but also impose deep cuts on domestic programs…

So, some clear advances to counterbalance the failure Friday to add an additional $22 billion in cuts to this year’s budget. We can’t get too upset if the House GOP flubs it from time to time – though, of course, we must keep extreme pressure up on them to do the right thing. Better if we can leap ahead ten steps at a time, but if we make two steps forward and one step back then we’re still one step ahead.

Since this Greek comedy-tragedy has been playing out in my old stomping grounds of Madison, Wisconsin and throughout The Dairy State, I’ve corresponded with a lot of friends and acquaintances–some who have been backing the Republican-led legislature and Governor Scott Walker; and others, most of them fellow union members, who believe that Wisconsin’s actions will portend a dead-end to collective bargaining; some going so far as to defend runaway democrat Wisconsin state senators, stating they are merely buying time until ‘cooler heads’ can prevail.

Yes, I’m a member of a union–but I can also see the fact that the taxpayers cannot sustain carte blanche bankrolling of never-ending union-based benefits. Even when Ronald Reagan broke the Air Traffic control union back in the early 1980s, it wasn’t the end of collective bargaining. Far from it.

There does comes a time, however, when the rights of public sector workers needs to be balanced against the rights and the well being of those whom they serve. This, in my opinion, is a long-awaited correction in a bubble of unsustainable growth in spending.

BTW–correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the majority of Wisconsinites vote for the Republicans to balance the state budget and to end runaway spending?

And yes, the democrat Senators ARE being derelict in their duty. Of course they don’t want legislation that will halt the union gravy train–the union is for all practical purposes a political arm of the democrat party that contributes hefty financial resources to its workings, not to mention nearly limitless footsoldier hours to help in their favored party’s re-election efforts.

Again–I’m a union member. I know that in the long term this will likely have significant repercussions in my now-home state of Minnesota, but the fact of the matter is that we are spending our great-grandchildren’s inheritances for present-day opulence, and it just has to stop, somewhere.

One of the long-loved mantras on the left during progressive rallies has been the time-honored favorite song by John Lennon called, “Give Peace a Chance.”

To my union brethren, the time is now indeed nigh to pay heed to another one of Lennon’s words of wisdom, “Let it be.”

This admission demonstrates that the President knows he’s just full of it – and he doesn’t care. Why doesn’t he care? Because he fully expects that he’ll be able to put the GOP on the spot in the upcoming budget battle…and today’s cave in by the House GOP over a mere $22 billion in additional cuts to this year’s budget indicates Obama may be on to something.

We did a lot of good in 2010, but we’ve still got a long way to go. The plain fact of the matter is that you could cut $500 billion from this year’s budget and not touch a single benefit check, nor cut a penny off of defense spending. Obama and his Democrats so bloated government spending over the past two years that massive cuts will be necessary just to get back to the profligate years of 2007 and 2008. But as long as we have RINOs, we’ll have this trouble – the rank, nauseating fear on the part of some GOPers that if they cut, they’ll be punished at the polls for it.

It is time for the TEA Part to reappear in DC – time to get our House GOP back up to scratch and let them know that they’d better fear us a lot more than they fear a hostile leading article in the Washington Post.

UPDATE: Over at NRO’s The Corner a bit of an explanation for the failure on additional cuts. Supposedly, we’re better off going for specific cuts rather than across-the-board (as the defeated amendment proposed). Me? I’m not sold on that argument, at all – to me it is irrelevant what actually gets cuts in non-defense discretionary spending as all of it is massively over-funded. But we’ll hold fire and see what happens in the GOP budget to be released in the spring…

From PT Tatler:

…Yesterday House Speaker John Boehner made it clear he would not accept another temporary fix in the federal budget that did not include major cuts. According to Politico, his comments “triggered an immediate and fierce response from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who ramped up a cross-chamber fight Democrats have been waging against House Republicans for weeks over whether the GOP spending-cut demands could culminate in a shutdown on March 4, the date the government runs out of money. ‘”

As House leaders have repeatedly noted, only Democrats have been talking about shutting down the government, not Republicans. But it appears Democrats are in the mood for a show down that they hope will change the political calculus in their favor…

Remember that Obama’s Organizing for America group is behind the Wisconsin antics – it seems that our liberals are spoiling for a fight. The thinking seems to be that what rescued a Democrat President in 1995 was a fight over spending; that at the end of the day, the people don’t really want substantive cuts and will thus rally to the Democrats if government is shut down. Wisconsin is just a test of this – as this unfolds, Democrats will check polling and figure out if its working and if it needs to be tweaked. But the plan does seem to be to force a show down.

Our tactic should be to patiently but firmly keep repeating the obvious – we’re bankrupt. We can’t spend as much as some people would like. Everything has to be cut in at least some manner. Failure to do so is a betrayal of the United States. This is not, by the way, a sure-fire way to victory – maybe, in the end, the people will abandon us. Maybe so many have become hooked on Big Government that there is no ability to reduce spending. If that is the case, then so be it – once the complete collapse comes, they will turn back to us…but, meanwhile, there is no upside for us in compromise.

With that said, I do believe that firmness will lead to victory; things have changed mightily in the United States since 1995. First off, we’re vastly more in debt than we were back then. The economy is worse. America has suffered intense relative decline in the world. The New Media has arisen to provide alternative sources of information, thus breaking the 1995 near-monopoly on information the MSM had (really, back then, it was Rush, a few other talkers and a few small, conservative magazines; that was all we had to counter balance the networks, CNN, almost all the major dailies and scores of other outlets). The left will not be able to write a script and keep to it – already, because there is a New Media, the reality of those union stooges in Wisconsin is being shown to the people…and people aren’t liking the sight of taxpayer-funded union workers calling out sick to create a workday ruckus…nor the sight of Democrat Senators fleeing the State to avoid a fair, up or down vote.

So, let’s have this knock down, drag out; I’m ready for it. It’ll be fun, educational and, in the end, victorious for conservatism.

Sure, its DOA in conference, but its a nice touch, none the less – from The Hill:

The House GOP approved an amendment to a government-spending bill that would block funding for the Obama administration’s so-called policy “czars,” appointed advisers to the president that have been much-criticized by Republicans…

This is the kind of thing we must do – continually press Obama and his Democrats on their profligate spending and unconstitutional ways. Not with a mind towards getting them to agree, but with contrasting the differences between the party. We can only get a little done while Obama wields the veto pen and Reid has a hammerlock on the Senate…but if we use this as an opportunity to educate the public about who stands for what, we’ll reap the benefits in 2012. Force the Democrats, day after day, to defend their policies…let the people know who in politics is for America, and who is for corruption, waste and fraud.

The people are on our side – things like what happened in Wisconsin yesterday will just more clearly define that Democrats are the party of bloat and waste…as long as he keep highlighting this we’re on the right track. Victory beckons, if we just show the courage to take them on, every where and every day.

From Al Arabiya:

For the first time since he was banned from leading weekly friday prayers in Egypt 30 years ago, prominent Muslim scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi will lead thousands in the weekly prayers from Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday…

I wonder if they’ll pause to offer a prayer for Lara Logan?

Anyways, this is the Moslem Brotherhood writ large in Egypt…bad news for Egypt, bad news for the world.

From the PJ Tatler:

Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up to those still hoping the Democratic Party of 2011 is the Democratic Party of 1986. Speaker Boehner’s home was targeted by a protest mob. Maybe this protest will drive home that the rules seem to have changed. Unleashing intimidating mobs to affect policy is nothing new to some. Ask officials with Waste Management Corporation who saw their 1988 meetings with local banks in Chicago illegally raided by howling mobs. Stanley Kurtz has documented these tactics throughout Chicago in the late 1980s and 1990s in his book Radical in Chief. That gangs of activists are now showing up en masse, whether at people’s homes, or at state capitals, shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention, and certainly won’t surprise Kurtz who devotes an entire book to these new rules of politics. The only question is whether Republicans still think the old rules apply.

Its the Chicago Way, my friends – or, to put it more accurately, the Gangster Way. This is what the left is all about – they know they can’t win with ideas, so they are hoping to win by intimidation. “We know where you live”; that is the purpose of showing up at the Speaker’s house…they are trying to make him worry about his family and, by extension, frighten away people from backing him.

The taxpayer-funded union stooges who showed up in Wisconsin are just par for the course…as is the extreme nastiness of their signs and slogans. While we’re far away from any such thing, it must be noted that the sort of tactics being used by Obama’s Democrats are the tactics of those who want a civil war. Rank and file liberal foot soldiers might not realize it – and probably don’t, as not 1 in 100 of them has any real familiarity with history; if they did, they wouldn’t be liberals – but their leaders are playing a dangerous game. When you go to extremes, you tend to generate extremes.

And before any liberals out there try to pass off any revisionist history, this nastiness in our modern politics was created by Democrats. Specifically, it was the late Senator Ted Kennedy who turned American liberalism towards the nasty, hate-filled tactics of the extreme left wing back in 1986. When Kennedy accused Robert Bork of wanting to bring Gestapo-tactics and back alley abortions to America we, as a nation, entered the realm of gutter politics…and liberal Democrats have, year by year since then, ensured we’d go further and further in to that sewer. What was once the province of unreformed Stalinists is now the run-of-the-mill tactics of the Democrat party.

We can still head this off – we can still restore civility to American political life. But we can only do so by utterly crushing the Democrat party. We have to stand firm and keep hammering them until we defeat them so badly that they will wake up and crawl back out of the gutter. A better day will come for America – and it will come faster the more badly we beat these liberals.

I just can’t believe it. No, scratch that. I can believe it. I can believe that a bunch of liberal Democrats would call out sick and then on the taxpayer’s dime – because if they are “sick” teachers, then the taxpayer is providing the sick pay – show up at the Capitol to say, “gimme, gimme, gimme”. The signs should say, “I want mine! Screw you!”. “I became a government employee so I can lord it over the taxpayer”. “How dare you say I should carry my own weight”.

And then there’s the Democrat State senators – demanding democracy while running away from both the voters of November and their own responsibility to vote on measures in the Senate. Never in my life have I seen such lack of civic virtue; such a complete negation of both democracy and basic decency.

We should also not ignore the extreme nastiness of these people – they are putting cross hairs not on a map, but on the face of Wisconsin’s governor. The are comparing the governor – freely elected just this last November by the people of Wisconsin – to Hosni Mubarak. A dictator of 30 years standing who was a greedy brute. What “new tone”? And, seriously, are these the sort of people you want a truce with on any issue?

Contemptible. The Governor should just up and fire every last government employee who cut out in order to demonstrate today. That should go a long way towards balancing the budget and teaching these cretins a lesson.

UPDATE: From NRO’s The Corner:

In an interview with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren tonight, Gov. Scott Walker emphasized that the thousands of protesters had not cowed Republican state legislators.

“If anything, I think it’s made the Republicans in the assembly and the senate stronger,” said Walker. “They’re not going to be bullied. They’re not going to be intimidated.”

“Democracy doesn’t come by hiding out in another state, avoiding any real debate,” he said, adding that if the Democrat senators came back, they could “take as much time as they want to debate [and] offer as many amendments as they want.”…

UPDATE II: The Democrat’s 2012 campaign song is ready:

Ten financial charts which show just how bad things are for us economically…and which illustrate my view that fake money and debt is at the heart of our problem.

If Napolitano and Kaine are the Democrats’ best hope of holding the Senate in 2012, then I feel pretty darn good.

Best for the GOP: lose in 2012 so that our stellar up-and-comers can clean up in 2016? My view: heck no. OMG – Obama Must Go!

A tale of two governors – a liberal Democrat who can’t get past his special interests and a conservative Republican who is leading his State to prosperity.

Our foreign policy just gets stupider by the day:

The U.S. informed Arab governments Tuesday that it will support a U.N. Security Council statement reaffirming that the 15-nation body “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” a move aimed at avoiding the prospect of having to veto a stronger Palestinian resolution calling the settlements illegal…

Allegedly we’re doing this so we won’t have to veto a different resolution which would call the settlements illegal. The proper policy is to advise the Arab world that if they want Israel to stop making or expanding settlements, they’d better hurry up and make peace and create internationally recognized borders…right now, you see, there is no border so you can’t say this area is Israel and that area isn’t…such defined territories are only possible between people who have made peace.

Yes, I realize that what the Moslems want, for the moment, is all of the 1967 West Bank (which means, by the way, not just an end to new settlements, but the destruction of whole towns where tens of thousands of Israelis live, some of them for decades, now). I realize that the ultimate goal for the Moslems is the destruction of the State of Israel. But what they tell us they want is peace – what we should tell them is, Ok; make peace. Get what you can – once you have a treaty, you’ll find the United States rigid in defense of your new borders…but don’t come whining to us when you still haven’t made peace.

You see, US policy has gotten it wrong from the start – we’ve continually acted as if the Moslems actually have a case; that they have a legitimate claim on Israel…that somehow those who launched repeated wars of aggression are owed something by the victors. A rational policy is to say, “hey, you lost; make the best deal you can and thank your lucky stars if the Israelis leave you even a square foot of the conquered land”. Or, start fighting again and see where that gets you – but don’t expect the United States to pressure our best ally in order to please those who despise us.

Such a policy has, I think, never even occurred to American leaders. We’ve always tried to walk between Israel and the Moslems…as if you can walk down the middle of a battlefield and not take hostile fire. Time to pick sides, for once and for all – and the side we should pick is the side of a fellow democracy which has, quite incredibly, managed to thrive in spite of repeated attempts to destroy her.

And, know what?, my bet is that if we went for reality rather than either “real” policy or a nauseating, politically correct view of things, our enemies over there would learn to respect us more and we’d be able to work out rational relationships with all parties. Not saying that a glory day of peace would arrive and all would be well, but at least we’d have a policy which is respected by friend and foe, and frees us from hypocrisy.