By Dustin Beilke

I've written often in this space about how I envy the organizing cultures in other parts of the world, where official transgressions against workers and other organized groups are not taken lying down. Add another foreign country to the list: Illinois.

In this case, it is the rationality and personal responsibility of the state's elected officials I envy. Illinois has a big deficit, like Wisconsin does, and it has made all the cuts to public services that can be made without rendering them insolvent (for the most part) like Wisconsin has. So the legislature and the governor in Illinois are going to do the only rational, honest, adult thing that there is to do: raise taxes.

I suppose we shouldn't heap praise on people just for doing the only thing that makes any sense, but still, such things are rare when it comes to elected officials and taxes. I have been voting in Wisconsin since 1986, and I can't recall a time when any candidate or elected official has said any tax increase is a good idea, let alone passed one. It has been 24 years of uninterrupted ratcheting down.

What we get instead are enthusiastic proposals to hold ever swifter races to the bottom.

Public employees always get trampled in these races, and in the past few months the men and women who produce the news have decided to go out of their way to tell them they deserve it. It is nice then to find an exception to this rule. The Capital Times has an editorial reminding us, just a few days before we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, that King was in Memphis on the day he was shot because he was standing with and standing up for public employees.

And yes, I'm praising the Capital Times just for making sense.