Indiana Democrats fled the state for five weeks to protest, among other things, a bill that would revamp education in the state, a top priority of Mitch Daniels. Having won some concessions, they returned. And as part of the deal, yesterday Indiana passed the education bill, which still includes a very wide-reaching school voucher program.

The heavy-handed tactics of Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has awakened the US labor movement, and a wider class consciousness, as much as any event in the past 30 years. Two new polls out in the past 24 hours not only confirm this, they reveal a coalition remarkably similar to the coalition occupying the Capitol in Madison for the last two weeks.

To the Village, Mitch Daniels (R-IN) is a Very Serious “Grown-Up” Republican — but he sure sounded like a WATB on NPR this morning.

There are differences between the proposed Wisconsin and Indiana measures: the Indiana ones are actually quite a bit worse. Governor Mitch Daniels de-certified the state’s public employee unions on his first day in office back in 2007. It got little response at the time. This new bill would essentially make Indiana into an anti-union “right to work” state. It would prohibit employers from requiring an employee to join a union or to collect union dues to work at their establishment. It would also give private-sector union members the right to drop out of their unions and stop paying dues. Basically it would turn the work environment in Indiana like much of the deep South.

Wisconsin remains the main battleground for the broader assault on worker’s rights. But elsewhere in the Big Ten states and across the country, these battles have moved forward. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich is pushing pretty much the exact same bill as Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Known as SB 5, the bill would strip collective bargaining rights from Ohio public employees. SB 5 is a piece of legislation, so Kasich isn’t trying to implement this under the cover of a budget bill. However, he has said that if he doesn’t get what he wants out of SB 5, he will put those items into the next budget bill. Alternatively, this could go to the ballot. So SB 5 won’t be the last showdown. The Governor, aping Scott Walker, claims this is a fiscal issue, but nobody can explain how much money SB 5 would sav

Over the past 12 days the Gallup daily tracking poll found Obama’s job approval numbers have been net positive every day.

This has become the bipartisan baseline in Congress. Mark Pryor is just another example, out there talking about putting Social Security and Medicare “on the table” for cuts to “bring our spending into balance.” That neither program has anything to do with the federal budget deficit is besides the point.

Social Security is under threat because Democrats have taken up the cause, under the rubric of “responsibility” and “getting our fiscal house in order.” It’s about the least propitious time to do that, but nevertheless.