Tufts Medical Center nurses are ratcheting up their heated contract dispute with the Boston teaching hospital. Nurses planned to follow a flash mob at South Shore Plaza yesterday with picketing from 4 to 6 p.m. today outside the hospital in Chinatown.

Union leaders urged Vice President Joe Biden during a White House meeting last month to go to Wisconsin and rally the faithful in their fight against Gov. Scott Walker's move to curtail collective bargaining rights for most public employees.

Wisconsin State Representative Mark Pocan, the former co-chair of the legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee, says he is starting to feel as if he lives in a “third world junta.” Wisconsin State Senator Bob Jauch, a senior Democrat, says that what he is witnessing feels like “a coup.” Marty Beil, the head of the AFSCME Council 24, the state’s largest public employee union, said Wisconsin had been turned into “a banana republic.”

Once again, Medicaid seems forgotten as another wave of protests and media stories rocks the Capitol. Last night's surprise vote by GOP lawmakers pushing a pared down version of the so-called budget repair bill through a hastily convened conference meeting and a rapid approval by the Senate to what now seems to be almost definite passage as early as this morning impacts not just collective bargaining rights in the state, but the health care and benefits of nearly 1.2 million Wisconsin residents in the public health programs.