From the Associated Press:

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore urged Wisconsin residents Saturday to fight Republican-backed efforts to strip most public workers of their collective bargaining rights, telling thousands of protesters that “Madison is only the beginning.”

The crowd roared in approval as Moore implored demonstrators to keep up their struggle against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation, comparing their fight to Egypt’s revolt. He also thanked the 14 state Democratic senators who fled Wisconsin to block a vote on the bill, saying they’ll go down in history books.

“We’re going to do this together. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up,” Moore told the protesters, who have held steady at the Capitol for nearly three weeks. Police have said a crowd of about 70,000 showed up on Feb. 19, and an even larger crowd rallied Feb. 26.

Moore said the wealthy have overreached, first taking the working class’ money and then taking their souls by shutting them up at the bargaining table. The crowd yelled “thank you” before Moore began to speak, and he responded: “All of America thanks you, Wisconsin.”

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On Saturday, standing on the state capitol steps in Madison, Wisconsin I saw history. I saw the first public, physical manifestation of the great struggle between the tea party movement and the public sector unions. At stake: the future freedom and prosperity of this country.

On one side of the debate, you have freedom loving Americans who are the taxpayers, the ones who fund our government and are the heart and soul of this great nation. On the other, those who would seek to ride on the backs of the taxpayers as they take this country down a path of statism.

This is the great fight right now: freedom vs. statism, and the ones of the front lines for freedom are the tea partiers. They have been, and are continuing to, answer the bell time and time again in this crucial time in American history. They’ve been mocked and reviled, questioned, but they are America’s best hope to turn this magnificent nation back to a path of freedom and prosperity and away from destructive statism.

What I saw in Madison on Saturday was amazing. Thursday morning, the American Majority staff in Wisconsin and some local tea party leaders, Meg Ellefson and Tim Dake, along with Dave Westlake, decided there should be a rally in support of Scott Walker and his Budget Repair Bill. In roughly 48 hours, it went from idea to reality, from a few people talking to 10,000 rallying on the steps of the capitol.

Within hours of announcing there would be a rally, I got a call that Andrew Breitbart was in.

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BigGovernment.com has learned that the University of Wisconsin medical school is investigating reports that its
physicians handed out fake medical excuses to union teachers who were planning to call out sick this week.

On Saturday, Andrew Breitbart approached doctors signing teachers up en masse and was told he has ‘[Gov. Scott] Walker Pneumonia.’ Upon putting down his real name, and stating he wasn’t sick and that did “didn’t want to get in trouble,” with cameras filing the scene, one of the alleged doctors became suspicious and demanded that the cameras be shut off.

BigGovernment.com blogger Christian Hartsock and prominent Madison-based blogger and U of W law professor, Ann Althouse chronicled the mass fake doctors note sign-ups, as well.

On Sunday, the Teachers Union backed down and told its members attend class on Tuesday. (more…)

The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy; they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature. In fact, Democratic legislators themselves are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget cuts.

That’s not democracy.

The teachers’ union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.

The teachers’ union on strike? Wisconsin parents should go on strike against the teachers’ union. A friend e-mailed me to say that the graduation rate in Milwaukee public schools is 46 percent. The graduation rate for African-Americans in Milwaukee public schools is 34 percent. Shouldn’t somebody be protesting that?

Governor Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That’s an outrage.

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When we first heard this union protester saying he would rather vote for Castro over a GOP member, we thought he meant ‘vote’ ironically, since, um, the Cuban people don’t exactly get to ‘vote’ for Castro. But then we remembered, this is Wisconsin–they don’t really do irony. Plus, he doesn’t exactly look like a 20-something hipster. So, we’re left having to take him at his word. Why does the left have such an affinity for authoritarian tyrants?

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What is occurring in Madison, Wisconsin has become a microcosm of what is happening across America: conservative care givers are being blocked by progressive liberal statists. In Wisconsin, the elected Governor and conservative legislature are trying to institute rational, humane treatment to a sick patient, the state of Wisconsin’s failed economy. Unfortunately, progressive liberal statists and unions, as self-appointed “family members” of the patient, have decided to withhold treatment by NOT allowing the caregivers in the room and by trying to hide the patient in another state.

Photo: Ann Althouse

The progressive liberal statists and unions have taken the situation to a fraudulent and possibly criminal level, with the help of The Democratic National Committee, Organizing For America and their mouthpiece the “Organizer in Chief:” Barack Obama. They have recruited “physicians” in their white coats to hand out FRAUDULENT work notes to the “victims” of the needed treatment. These “physicians” in white coats were eerily similar in appearance to the “physicians” in white coats who slithered into the Rose Garden during the debate on Obama Care. In their actions, these “physicians” have violated and compromised The Hippocratic Oath, medical ethics and committed medical fraud.

The video of Andrew Breitbart shows him being “diagnosed” with “Walker Pneumonia” and being given a “medical release” from work. This is all the evidence needed to bring those “physicians” up on charges of FRAUD before the State of Wisconsin Medical Review Board, The State of Wisconsin Medical Society and The Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office. What these “physicians” have done is incomprehensible to those of us that uphold the Oath 24-7 year in and year out.

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Governor Scott Walker is making the tough choices needed to avoid financial ruin in Wisconsin. Like most states, Wisconsin is facing a budget deficit caused in part by excessive pay and benefits for public employees. Governor Walker is tackling this problem head on, rightly proposing to bring public employees’ compensation in line with the private sector.

In response, President Obama, national Democrats and their union allies have gone on the attack, helping organize protests that have flooded the Wisconsin capitol and shutdown public schools in Milwaukee and Madison. They’re even lending moral support to the state Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to avoid a vote.

The nation’s governors don’t need a lecture from a President who has never balanced a budget. On both the federal and state level, we need leaders who will make the tough decisions and stand up to the public employees unions.

As a conservative governor in a liberal state, I regularly battled with the public employees union and am familiar with the sort of tactics we’re seeing in Madison. When I proposed reforms to public employees’ benefits, we had protests and one of the longest transit strikes in American history. But we won in Minnesota because average taxpayers supported the reforms – and I’m confident that Governor Walker will win in Wisconsin.

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MediaTrackers is on the scene for today’s protests in Madison. They captured this doctor on video signing ’sick’ forms for union members skipping work. As you know, hundreds of schools across the state have been forced closed because teachers have called in ’sick.’ Yet another good lesson to be teaching the next generation. Stay tuned for more video and reports from Madison.