The stimulus package is over two years old, and the unemployment rate is still above the level that the Obama administration pledged it would not reach. Just as bad, the economy is not showing any signs of getting better, especially in the housing market.

China’s high-speed rail project has just changed from being a model of innovation to a cautionary tale on the limits of central-planning.

This administration has set another landmark: For the first time, America’s bond rating has fallen from standard to negative and the country may lose its Standard & Poor’s AAA rating. This development comes at a time when the White House is busy trying to prove that it is serious about addressing the deficit but pushing an unserious proposal.

Paul Ryan’s budget should dismiss any notion that the new Congress is not serious about reform. Previously, critics might chirp that any proposed cuts were merely for political points, but now the Budget Committee chairman’s proposal tackles out-of-control entitlement spending head-on and calls for reducing wasteful defense spending as well—not a traditional goal of previous Republican establishments.

As Congress considers regulating the regulator—in this case the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—i

Randi Weingarten’s interview in the Wall Street Journal was disappointing but not surprising.  As the leader of the American Teachers’ Federation, the second most powerful teacher’s union in America, Weingarten revealed herself to be a staunch  defender of the status quo.  She doesn’t argue that kids are getting a sufficient education (that is becoming increasingly difficult), but she stood firmly against anything that might reverse the trend.

In a recent address to the National Governors' Association, President Obama said that, in spite of how some Republicans might feel about the stimulus bill, it definitely helped their states. But if the money the government spent has real value, it will have come out of real labor.

For years, public sector unions have hoped that their employers would forget that they were their employers; that they could advance independent of the same demands that workers in the private sector face, such as performance review and a competitive marketplace.  November demonstrated that the voters are no longer standing for this, and governors in these states are following through on the voters’ demands.

But the voters are not the only ones who recognize that the old way of doing things needs reform.  The books say so as well.

Though no one would think it by watching the media’s coverage of Wisconsin, reining in out-of-control spending on public employee unions is a bipartisan issue.  Though only the Republicans have taken reforms far enough in an effort to limit collective bargaining, but it was not a Republican but rather Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo who stated in his inaugural

No real surprises occurred during the Chicago mayor’s race, but the election was a landmark in the sense that the city elected a candidate who was not named Daley. It is hard to see any other way that this election was transformative; conservatives had virtually no chance of electing a mayor in a city which has been ruled by a single party since the Great Depression.