Editorial

"But this is bigger than party politics. This is horrifying. And this is not Wisconsin. Scott Walker is making a great state into something small and vile. The governor has been exposed. He has shamed himself, and he has shamed Wisconsin — a state that some of us remember, and love."

h/t Media Matters

At least 1/12/11 will be easy to remember. On that day, with the state of Illinois mired at 48th place nationwide in job creation, Democratic leaders dragged through the lame-duck Legislature—with a post-midnight vote in the Senate—a tax plan sure to make many employers do their hiring somewhere else.

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Remember that Illinois needs 600,000 more people working to restore employment to the level it was a decade ago. Then burn 1/12/11 into your brain — along with the phrase "Goodbye, jobs."

So much for 1968.

So much for baton-swinging cops and tear gas and mass arrests.

So much for police riots.

If the whole world was watching this time, good.

What we saw in Chicago over the weekend and on Monday was police training that paid off. We saw crowd-control tactics that worked. We saw patience.

We saw police work at its best.

A small number, perhaps 200, of the several thousand NATO protesters who hit the streets were begging for a fight, looking to provoke the police into swinging those nightsticks.

Why? Who cares.

But about all they got was a rugby scrum.

Six months after voters sent Republicans in large numbers to Congress and many statehouses, it is possible to see the full landscape of destruction that their policies would cause — much of which has already begun. If it was not clear before, it is obvious now that the party is fully engaged in a project to dismantle the foundations of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to liberate business and the rich from the inconveniences of oversight and taxes.