Mike Rosen is at it again.

I broke a promise and read Mike Rosen's column today. Today's topic was an attack on all of those evil liberals out there protesting in Wisconsin. Is anyone surprised that Rosen has taken a stand against teachers? I'm mad at myself because the main reason I have stopped reading his stuff is that it is so predictable. He uses the word "liberal" as a perjorative with such frequency that it actually begins to sound like a bad thing. Then he peppers his argument with half truths and loaded language because he knows he has an audience that eats propaganda and political naysaying like mother's milk.

His article is titled "Push has come to shove" to suggest that all the largesse our country has irresponsibly showered on public employees has finally reached critical mass and the world as we know it is on a fast track to Hell. Using illegal immigrants as the source of all ills has lost some of its clout, so I guess right-wingers like Rosen and Governor Walker in Wisconsin have shifted their focus to public employees. Conventional wisdom says that government is too big; the obvious solution is to weed out those people employed by government. You know, the ones who sit back doing nothing while collecting exorbitant salaries and obscene retirement packages.

At least that is what Rosen would have us believe. He admits that "once upon a time" a person entering public service (Rosen, apparently incapable of straight reporting, derisively put the term PUBLIC SERVICE in quotation marks) expected to trade lower pay for job security and benefits. But that is not the case any more, Rosen argues, stating that "government employees are better paid than the private sector average. . ." He even goes on to say that these ever increasing compensation packages are the result of the "incestuous" relationship unions have with the "politicians they fund and elect."

It would be a great argument if it were true. But it is patently false. When you compare public sector employees with ALL private sector employees, taking into account both salary and benefits, as The Wall Street Journal recently did, you will discover that the public sector does indeed receive more compensation on average. But hold on a minute. Public sector employees as a group have more education than the average private sector employee, so it stands to reason that they would make more money. When you compare public sector workers with those private sector types who have equivalent education and experience, as The Wall Street Journal also did (but which Rosen failed to point out), the private sector wins the compensation comparison handily.

How do people like Rosen get away with these blatant errors of omission?

He expands his argument to say that since states are not allowed to run budget deficits like the EVIL federal government under Obama, they are facing a shortfall crisis--fueled by public labor unions' increasingly unfair demands--that is becoming so huge that tax increases will not close it. I guess he said that as a sop to his conservative friends who see anything resembling a tax increase as anathema, but again his statement, while having the ring of truth (conservative pundits are good at that), is not true. If state income taxes were raised in California, the most beleaguered state deficit-wise, by just one percentage point, California's deficit would disappear. Again, Rosen conveniently ignores this fact because presumably, since it comes from the Congressional Budget Office, it can't be trusted.

Isn't it interesting that republicans scoff at the CBO's findings when they don't support republican positions, but never fail to cite the CBO when it projects economic doom for anything Obama proposes? For example, toward the end of his column he mentions that Obama's forecasts for economic growth are unrealistically optimistic. For support, he cites the CBO's estimate of 2.2 percent, a slightly more pessimistic forecast than Obama's. That is why I sometimes envy conservatives. They can believe anything they want and still sleep at night.

He says some more outrageous things. He points out the "theatrical" nature of the protests and directs our attention to protest signs and placards with swastikas and comparisons of Walker to Mubarak. He thinks it ironic that it is okay for liberals (there is that "L" word again) to use hateful slogans and signs, but those same liberals jump on any incivility among Tea Partiers. I don't disagree, but I find it even more ironic that Rosen calls the hateful tea party slogans and the rifle sight graphics examples of "incivility." It seems me that they are at least as "theatrical" as the Wisconsin protestors.

He makes two more patently dishonest points. The "angry throngs in Wisconsin are self-righteously delusional, paying no heed to their state's fiscal reality." Has he been reading the papers? The unions have agreed to all the components of the financial package. Their salaries will remain frozen. They will pay more for their benefits. The only thing they are not agreeing with is the systematic attack on collective bargaining, as if collective bargaining is the reason Wisconsin's budget is in dire straits.

What is happening in Wisconsin is clearly an attempt to scapegoat public employees and break unions. If it was only about money it would have been resolved weeks ago.

Rosen ends with two statements. In his second to last paragraph he maintains that we are all going to see a decline in our standard of living in the future. "We'll still enjoy one of the best lifestyles on the planet, but we'll have to get along on a little less. And that includes those who work for the government." He fails to add that it doesn't include those of us who are clever enough to be in the top one percent. Those folks, as long as they have apologists like Mike Rosen, will just keep raking in the money.

Finally, he says that we will be in for some tough times if the "virus" in Wisconsin spreads and unions in other states "go to war with taxpayers. But they'll ultimately lose that battle. They're greatly outnumbered by those in the private sector on whose taxes they feed."

He makes public sector employees sound like ravening wolves feeding on the unwary private sector tax payers and then blatantly lies when he suggests that the majority of the country are against the unions. Not true. A recent Pew survey showed that over sixty percent of the country favor unions and decry the blatant political power play that Governor Walker and his republican cohorts are trying to push.

I wonder, does The Denver Post employ fact checkers?