The Capitol building in Madison Wisconsin looked somewhat like the streets of Cairo in past weeks today when State lawmakers proposed legislation as part of an effort to close a $3.6 billion budget gap that would require union concessions worth $30 million by July and $300 million over the next two years.

There appears to be a growing trend across the nation in order to close budget gaps of States, to clamp down on the strangle hold of union sweetheart deals of the past and request them to make some realistic concessions.

The trend is taking place in Ohio, New Jersey, New York and of course reared its sound and fiscal conservative head today in Wisconsin.

The bill in Wisconsin also bans collective bargaining rights for teachers, requires educators to contribute 5.8 percent to their pensions and 12.6 percent to their health care.  Currently educatiors pay 0.2 percent for their pensions and 4 to 6 percent of their health care costs, according to Fox News.

This move was initiated by newly elected Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican.

The legislature is controlled by Senate Republicans by a 19-14 majority, but they could not vote on the bill today unless at least one Democrat was present.

The Democrats could not be found.  Speculation was they were holed up in the Best Western Clock Tower Resort in Rockford, Ill.

Gov. Walker called on the 14 Senate Democrats who fled the state instead of voting on the controversial anti-union bill, to return and do their jobs.

Governors across this nation are beginning to play hardball in order to balance their budgets, unlike what is taking place in the White House.

This State issue was apparently important enough that President Obama, who has given unions more access to the White House in his first two years in office, then any other lobbying group, to comment on the Wisconsin controversy.

Unions were the base that put Obama in office.

Today, Obama didn’t waste any time to weigh in: saying that making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain “seems like more of an assault on unions.”

“I think it is very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends,” he said.  “These are folks who are teachers and they’re firefighters and they’re social workers and they’re police officers.”  These comments brought tears to my eyes.

Obama said it is important “not to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees,” Obama said.

It was an ugly scene today when Walker was compared by the protesting mob to, Hitler and Mussolini.

It is a sad state of the nation when the President has to weigh in on a State issue, when a Governor is trying to do his job by balancing a budget, something Obama refuses to do with a budget that puts the nation in further debt , and when 14 Democrats of the Wisconsin legislature flee the State, failing to do their job for which they took an oath to uphold.

I predict that there is more to come, fiscal conservatism will win out over union sweetheart deals of the past.