The angry pro-union mob in Wisconsin
Isn’t it interesting how much hype was made about angry (and racist) Tea Partiers, and yet no evidence was ever found?
And isn’t it interesting that, although there’s plenty of evidence of really viciously angry pro-union protesters in Wisconsin, it’s really only being reported in the right-wing media?
[NOTE: Ann Althouse and her husband Meade are doing yeomans’ work in covering the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, where they live.]
“Right wing media” sounds extreme to me. I prefer right side media. There’s plenty of us on the right, but most of us are firmly inside the plane, not out on the wing.
Other than that, your point is well taken. Imagined violence that never happens is fascinating to the MSM. Real violence right in front of their face somehow holds no interest. (Well, we actually know how and why it doesn’t.)
Let’s face it – the difference between a union and a criminal organization generally isn’t worth arguing about.
(Right thread this time!)
Sadly it’s not that surprising to those of us paying attention to these things and was very predictable. It’s so unsurprising to me that it doesn’t quite reach the status of interesting anymore. It’s more of a glance up notice it and move on sort of thing. Anyone makeing claims as to the “balance and integrity” of the MSM is likely so uninformed as to not be worth debating.
shrug..
kcom makes an interesting point. I’m NO right winger. I pay attention to the right only insomuch as their economic views overlap my libertarian leanings. I have no interest in the right wing utopia as it is imagined by the Newt Gingriches of the world but I like the way they balance the checkbook. Oh how I pine for the days when we were doing so well that we could afford to sit around and argue about drug legalization and Gay marriage rights. sigh…
In many US novels and films an “union boss” is portrayed as a mobster or, at least, mobster affiliate. The main job of this personage was to extort money from business people under treat of unionizing or organizing a strike. So it is strange for me to find certain level of public sympathy to such organisations. Being essentially fronts for mafia syndicates, in capacity of public unions are now fronts for political mafia.
A “racist” Tea Party organization in Arizona held a convention this past weekend. Part of the festivites included conducting a presidential straw poll among the Tea Partyers present. Guess who won? Black conservative Herman Cain, that’s who.
No explanation has been put forth by the know-it- alls who have been routinely alleging Tea Party racism for two years why the “racist” Tea Party voted for a black guy to win the presidential poll.
Whats so interesting about a state controlled press?
That the people think its not?
The jokes about Pravda weren’t jokes…
“not left” is not equal to “right”
Scott:
The left would have two answers for that (not to be used simultaneously):
(1) Herman Cain has lost the right to call himself black.
(2) They voted for him just to hide their real, inner racism and throw us off the track.
neo-neocon:
I think the whole “Tea Partyers are racists” schtick was a tactical ploy (likely initially dreamed up by members of the notorious “Journolist” conspiracy), to try to discourage the 97% of blacks who voted for Obama from participating in Tea Party rallies, thus holding together a big part of the Democratic coalition for the 2010 mid-terms and Obama’s 2012 re-election race.
Scott: It was a tactical ploy that probably had that and many other purposes.
scott,
The ploy ONLY works in a society whose majority is NOT racist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
if they were racist the response would not be anger or desire to take some form of corrective action, it would be “so what?”
imagine telling a nazi he is a jew hater…
or a black national socialist (black nazi), that they are a white hater…
all they will do is say, damn right, and then launch into the justifications..
ergo Holder under social justice doesnt want to prosecute blacks until whites now suffer.
but in truth.. if we DID apply that, i guess that women would have to fight in the millitary till there are a few million dead women.
hears said that fascism will arrive in the US as a way to prevent communism…
yup
thats what happened in germany..
and there is no other alternative here either.
if you dont know the old story
how do you know your living in a remake?
The WI cops are unionized, but exempt from Walker’s anti-public union efforts. So which side do the cops choose when called upon to enforce public order at the capitol in Madison? The union mob? Or the public at large, aka taxpayer & employer?
One of Althouse’s videos underscores this point, with cops telling her not to video them, despite her lawyerly and civil civilian reply that she is in a public place, videoing a public occurence, and has every right to video the cops. Answer: Cop puts hand over the lens.
Thus do we creep ever so gradually toward violence.
I think the “creep” is turning into a trot.
A) The Anchoress / Elizabeth Scalia
The Bullying Mob; Everything Tea Partiers Were Not
http://www.patheos.com/community/theanchoress/2011/03/02/bullying-wi-mob-what-the-tea-parties-were-not/
S) SLATE
Protests and Violence
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/02/28/protests-and-violence.aspx
N) New American
Sayani
A History of Union Murder and Sabotage
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/history/american/6487-labor-unions-a-history-of-murder-and-sabotage
so here we have A, S, and N
A) claims bullying, and presents a video showing it. at the end is a link to more comments by more competent writers.
S) Is claiming that the non left (known as the right) press is making up the thuggery. no video. passes the thuggery off as 1 person in 50k. even tries to make it seem that they wouldn’t be violent if tea party members were not there. some mish mosh, but the feel is that its just that right wing fake stuff, and its so boring to pay attention to the violence, better to move on…
N) takes the tack that the unions and their members have waken a large part of the electorate who now are getting used to running to find out more. (more on this in a minute). and so the article starts dishing the dirt and links the past up to today in a context.
Watch charlie chaplin silent movies…
the Flag scene is one of such labor strikes and plainly who was behind them then as now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqFU8O53tr4
the problem the left has is that once a person starts looking and noticing like the movie The Truman Show… (notice the name they picked?), or the Matrix, they do not go back to sleep easy.
once they find one thing by looking, they then go to find another thing by looking. their game is all surface for the most part, and so when you start looking, you suddenly start to notice that the nice chocolates you have been eating, are not chocolates at all.
see: the narnia scene and the ice queens sweets…
the more someone like brad argues with me, the more people see there is a history they can look up. people dont exist in a vacuum and so, that eventually leads to others looking things up
which is why old books were made illegal by other means (lead), and all the super hype for things like the kindle the past gets erased faster and more selectively given storage and lack of ownership
“”the problem the left has is that once a person starts looking and noticing like the movie The Truman Show…””
Artfldgr
I believe Michael Crichton had a name for this that i can’t seem to recall. About when we notice how inept media handles subjects that we personally may know a lot about. Then you can reasonably extrapolate most of the rest they put out is junk too.
I saw that movie years ago and thought the flag scene was hilarious. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what color the flag was, either.
Neo, in the interests of accuracy, shouldn’t the title of this post be “The angry union mob in Wisconsin?”
Only useful idiots believe the MSM is right wing. People who believe such nonsense have a pathological defect. All (except a few) who post comments here know that 95% of the impulse to resort to repression, violence, genocide, racism, demagoguery, and so forth comes from the left. All one has to do is look back at the 20th century.
Steve D,
I’m more of a libertarian than a conservative where certain social issues are concerned; but my problem with the libertarian party is two fold: open borders make no sense to me (its intuitively insane and suicidal) and sometimes what occurs off shore can definitely come home to roost and I prefer to be proactive.
Cops & fire persons (bow to PC) are not special people. They are just like everyone else. A rare few are excellent, a few are above average, most are average, a few are below average, and a rare few are abominable. I don’t understand why Walker left them out of the equation. Cops and fire persons engage in less hazardous professions than farmers and fisher persons (bow down to PC once more).
20 years as a cop or a fire person and you can retire at 40 with a full blow pension is not in the taxpayers’ best interest.
Parker:
Open borders make sense from a libertarian perspective if and only if we do away with the welfare state. Then immigrants would come here in search of opportunity and a chance to make the most of themselves. The best would stay, thrive, and contribute to our society, while the worst would give up and go back home.
Open borders with a welfare state is a prescription for disaster.
MSM does not report this because MSM’s # 2 Rule is this: Help the Democrats, hurt the Republicans.
They tell people what they want people to know, and don’t tell people what they don’t want them to know, so people will (continue to) vote for Democrats.
Do I really think it’s that simple? Yes.
“So it is strange for me to find certain level of public sympathy to such organisations. Being essentially fronts for mafia syndicates, in capacity of public unions are now fronts for political mafia.”
That’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand a few years ago.
Growing up, I knew the reputation of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters and other industrial unions. They were big, burly men who didn’t always handle things through legal channels. The frequently had mob ties. I naively assumed that public employee unions were different. Dweeby bureaucrats had to be different.
But now that I’ve learned about the SEIU and observed over the last two years that even public employee unions have big, burly guys who aren’t averse to going around beating up black Tea Partiers and female FreedomWorks employees, I understand that they aren’t that different. And with the public unions having a hammerlock on much of the political process, and seeing how the public is cut out of the bargaining such that the taxpayer isn’t even represented at the bargaining table (Unions: give us more taxpayer money; Dems: sure, just make sure we get our cut; Taxpayers: What about us?) I realize in some ways public employee unions are actually worse. And they’re certainly as corrupt in their own way as the Teamsters. I guess they’re not all dweeby bureaucrats after all. To the extent that the public thinks they are, like I used to, that’s a problem.
rickl,
I agree with your caveat, except I wish to note that in the past (until the mid-20th century) most immigrants came here legally. Now, far too many come illegally. Condoning illegal immigration, our current policy, is suicide.
One grammar point: I’m thinking “yeomans’ work” should be yeoman’s work. Or, perhaps, since there are two of them, yeomen’s work. Or would that be yeomens’ work? Probably not.
kcom:
Do a little heavier lifting. Post something substantive.
We’re not in the 6th grade here. And you ain’t grading our grammar!
Now, if you were trying to literally say “the work of two yeomen”, it would be “yeomen’s work”. (Just use apostrophe-s after the plural form not ending in s.) But since it’s being used as an idiom, I think Neo’s use of “yeoman’s work” was correct.
“Yeoman’s work” probably refers to the kind of hard, honest work done that a yeoman (in this case, a farmer) would do. So it’s possible for two people to be doing “yeoman’s work”, because they’re both doing a specific type of work described by
“yeoman’s”.
http://notesfrombabel.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/a-plague-on-words-yeomans-work/
The phrase is ambiguous, but the the grammar should be the same as long as it’s used as an idiom.
“”20 years as a cop or a fire person and you can retire at 40 with a full blow pension is not in the taxpayers’ best interest.””
Parker
All i can say is Firemen must have some hellacious lobbyist in govt. I think we had perceptions of that job more in line with reality back when we had them just above butcher and milk man but well below a draftsman or accountant. Now it’s not unusual to run into a big city fireman with three cars, two boats and a half million dollar house on a lake. Wtf?
I live near a fire house. It’s quite busy. In and out all day and all night. Fire trucks and ambulances heading to wrecks and fires. I will say I am glad they are there.
The shift they work in many places is 24 on and 24 off. It is a known fact a good percentage of them are also small business owners of the maintenance and repair, home improvement type or similar businesses. If they are good at it, and become successful, good for them. For them, it’s the best of union membership and unfettered capitalism all rolled in to one. Let’s face it, you gotta love America.
The reason police and firefighters get pensions at a relatively young age is not because we’re special, it’s that firefighting and policing are young man’s jobs. Once I hit my early forties I could no longer run as I could when I was twenty-five. So I could no longer chase a crook through the backyards and over fences.
Parker may feel comfortable having a sixty-two year old firefighter try to carry him out of a burning house, most folks do not.
The very nature of those two jobs means that there are only a very few tasks in policing and firefighting open to the older worker. When the kids were little I wanted off the rotating shifts so I chose to become my departments expert on DUIs. This allowed me to work a steady nine PM to five AM shift when the drunks were out and left me time to book them and do the paperwork. Great job, most of the time. One would think I could do that job right up until my sixties, except for the two-three times a week I had to back up another deputy on a potentially violent call.
So, after twenty years I could retire on fifty percent of my highest pay rate, if I had lasted thirty it would have been 75%. I don’t know what those big city Yankee officers get. I do know that no one would hire on to a police or sheriff’s dept, or fire dept, either, knowing that in his mid forties he’d be thrown out without a penny.
Oh, and firefighters have lake houses and suchlike because of the twenty-four hour shifts they work, leaving fime for second jobs. Most firefighters have some kind of construction business on the side.
Lastly, Althouse, having voted for Obama is hardly a right winger.
“”it’s that firefighting and policing are young man’s jobs.””
Peter
Which pretty much describes 95% of blue collar jobs that don’t feel entitled to or require taxpayer funding for pensions and benefits. So either you do consider your vocation special or just live in a cocoon protected from the big real world out here.
And noting firemen do construction on the side has all the irony of a high school janitor moonlighting as a physicians assistant. But that’s just me and my unreasonable real world experience i suppose.
whoops, kcom, misread your correction and started making unnecessary corrections myself. Tom should be disappointed in us both :p
If anyone deserves these kind of pensions, it’s the police and firefighters, teachers not so much. And if it was simply about their pay and pensions (the police and firefighters) we could come to some kind of an agreement with them. But this mob in Madison is way beyond that. Whether Trumka is willing to use real violence, who knows. But if he does, and someone gets hurt, not even the MSM can ignore or spin that away.
Oh the sweet irony.
http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2011/03/figures-wi-state-worker-retirement-system-owns-5-5-million-in-koch-industries-bonds/#comment-276807
Another minor factoid we will never see reported by the MFM (Mainstream F*cking Media ~ Hat Tip Ace).
@Parker
When I say I have “libertarian leanings” I mean it just that way. My personal view is that there is no concrete platform on foreign policy/war/border security where libertarians are concerned. I guess I’m in the small L branch of the party. Maximize personal freedom and responsibility while recognizing that the world is still divided into sometimes dangerous tribes. I call it reality base libertarianism.
But if he does, and someone gets hurt, not even the MSM can ignore or spin that away. How much are you willing to bet on that?
Peter try being a steamfitter. a lot more physically taxing than being a cop or fireman.
ELC-
Sadly that’s not a bet that I could take. Up till now its been the outlets like MSNBC that has ignored, spun or simply made up stories to fit the leftist agenda. The MSM up till now has simply voted present with the left on most of these issues. If the crowds break into real violence, and there are enough asshats hanging around for that to happen, and they side with union thugs, then they lose whatever credibility they have left. You and I don’t believe them, but I would think they still have a large audience in the independents. They may be suckers for revolution, but not at the cost of losing their ivory tower.
SteveH:
Uh, am I missing something obvious here?
Are policemen and firemen “special”, entitled to tax-funded special treatment that other blue-collar workers don’t get? Damn straight they are. They are expected, and required, to risk their lives in the course of their day-to-day work — or, at minimum, to be prepared to risk their lives to save others at any moment.
Is pipe-fitting more strenuous than firefighting? I wouldn’t know, but I’ll happily stipulate the point. And I’ve no doubt that pipe-fitting can be dangerous at times. But to firemen and policemen, risk of life is part of the job description.
(That’s why I don’t classify other emergency services in the same category. Ambulance drivers and emergency-room workers are vital, and extremely praiseworthy… and I wouldn’t doubt that they work extremely hard. But they don’t have to risk their own lives every day.)
So. Pensions for firefighters and police? Absolutely.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
“”Uh, am I missing something obvious here?””
Daniel in Brookline
With all due respect i’d say you are Daniel. The one thousand people that generally clamor for one open fireman position should be your first clue. And the ones with this “special” hero gene that make it through surely got it from their dad, uncles, brothers and cousins who obviously have it because they mysteriously work at the same firehouses too.
Pipefitters don’t get shot at, cops and firefighters do. My hometown has lost three policeman in little more than a month. Years ago we had riots here and the firefighters were shot at. There is simply no comparison. Those men left behind families.
Let me say, I agree that police and fire are young people’s jobs and unless said people went to school for another vocation during those 20 – 30 years we need to have a pension.
That said:
They should contribute more to their pension while they are employed. Period.
You put away for the rainy day as a police officer, fireman, and …. a model. 🙂
A model unless she went to school for 20 years does not have another vocation usually either.
Papa Dan, by that standard cab drivers need to be on your list.
You have to believe in perspective.
I served in the military and my brother has been a paramedic and is in police now.
I fully understand that we all are putting our lives in danger.
It is a choice.
We chose that.
Let’s figure out how to move forward to make that 20-30 year career give a meaningful pension without breaking city and state’s backs budget wise.
There is no reason why we can’t contribute more to our own pensions.
Everyone has an HDTV – including my brother and my girlfriends brothers (who are in corrections) except me. I have a 27″ tube.
You telling me we can’t make better choices? We need to make better choices.
For our kids and grandkids.
baklava-
Cab drivers have never stood in harms way for me, in fact they have put me in harms way more than once.
Thank you for you and your families service to our country. I believe you deserve every benefit you have earned.
“There is no reason why we can’t contribute more to our own pensions.”
Agreed
“You telling me we can’t make better choices? We need to make better choices.”
Agreed- teachers and endless legions of government paper pushers do not deserve the kind of pensions that police and firefighters do.
And I don’t have HDTV either. I still watch TV on a 32″ Sony that is 20 years old that can’t decide when it wants to turn on or off. It spared me from watching this years Superbowl halftime show.
Cops, occasionally do put their life on the line, the same goes for firefighters, no disagreement there. Yet farmers & fishermen have higher per capita job related injuries and fatalities. The grunts & jar heads now on the line in Afghanistan have even higher rates of injury & mortality. Take a look at what you get after 20 years in the military and compare it to what you get after 20 years as a cop or firefighter.
And, many in the construction trades face dangerous work conditions and they don’t receive anywhere near what cops & firefighters receive in benefits. I’m not belittling cops or firefighters, I’m just comparing them to others who work in dangerous professions and comparing the rewards they get to the rewards others receive.
“whoops, kcom, misread your correction and started making unnecessary corrections myself. Tom should be disappointed in us both :p”
Thanks, ninjafetus. I appreciate your support and your light-hearted comment made me laugh. The world is big enough for all of us, even Tom.
“No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.”
(Abraham Lincoln; Address at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859; Collected Works, Volume III, p. 479)
Just a thought. 🙂