Smash Unions? It Never Even Occurred to Me

The House of Representatives has just voted emergency funds for building a fence around the state of Ohio, where the legislature is considering a bill that would, among other things, effectively end collective bargaining for state workers.

According to Speaker of the House John Boehner, "The purpose of the fence is not, as some skeptics have suggested, to keep Democratic legislators inside the state. This is absolutely not about making sure there's a quorum so that the Republican majority can pass a bill that would obliterate the collective bargaining rights of public employees. The real purpose of the fence is to keep job-killing immigrants -- those from from New York and similar places -- out of Ohio."

Fox News commentator Glenn Beck was supportive of the move: "If Ohio's border goes unprotected, the state is going to have to live with civil unions. And it will have to let those unions be demonstrative in public. And we all know what that leads to: collective bars."

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose proposal to cut Wisconsin's spending would have what he characterizes as the incidental effect of stripping state workers of their bargaining rights, had this to say: "Although my only goal is to put Wisconsin back on its fiscal feet, I can't help but note that if we'd had a fence around the state three weeks ago, you wouldn't see state employees out in front of my office today marching around and carrying signs. That's because their new contract would have specified that they could march around only in fields where the corn was as high as an elephant's eye and carry signs that said 'Kick Me.'"

He added, "These people need to understand that we're broke; that the days of Spam and baked beans are over; that we're going to be eating omelettes for a very long time. And that they're the eggs."