“Wisconsin's budget codifies unions ability to organize” by ATR’s Christopher Prandoni in The Washington Examiner.  “Scott Walker’s budget plan does not touch public employees’ right to organize…This is an important distinction, and one that union advocates have gone to great lengths to conflate…As it stands today, anyone who wants to teach in a unionized Wisconsin public school is required to join the union as a condition of employment. While this teacher, technically, can leave the union, they are still forced to financially support the union in the form of monthly dues and are still covered under the union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement …Equally important, public sector employees are not allowed to negotiate the terms of their contract with their employers—an amazing concept when you think about it. The only party that benefits from this exchange is the labor union.”

Grover Norquist writes on prison reform in The Orange County Register.  “The size and cost of America's prisons has quadrupled in the past three decades. In states like California, the annual cost of incarceration is around $50,000 per inmate. When looking for reasons why California is going bankrupt, just multiply that figure by the 170,000 inmates that live in the state…The costs of incarceration is worthwhile to the extent that it is the most cost-effective means of protecting the public; however, research indicates we have reached the point of diminishing returns… We fight against big government, excess spending, unaccountability, and bureaucracy in nearly every other segment of spending.”

In the Hawaii Reporter Grover Norquist highlights Obama’s stimulus broken promises.  “Promise: Absent an infusion of ‘stimulus’ cash, unemployment would skyrocket to 8 percent…Promise:Using the creative, but totally unverifiable metric of jobs “saved or created” the President claimed the ‘stimulus’ plan would ‘save or create’ 3.5 million jobs…Promise: ‘…every American will be able to go online and see where and how we’re spending every dime.’… Promise: The federal infusion of cash would shore up state budgets that had fallen victim to a struggling economy.”

From Newsmax.com “The Next Chris Christie: Wisconsin's Scott Walker” by Grover Norquist.  “As part of Gov. Scott Walker’s current budget repair bill to close a $137 million deficit in the current fiscal year’s budget and a projected $3.6 billion deficit in the next two-year budget, he has proposed: The state would no longer collect union dues…Union members would also have to vote every year to keep their union…This isn’t about collective bargaining, or anything else, it’s about balancing a budget and preventing layoffs.”