Mob of Angry Protesters Corners Wisconsin GOP Senator

Original Post: The Blaze

Wisconsin state Republican Sen. Glenn Grothman found himself in a frightening situation at the Wisconsin State Capitol after being tailed and cornered by a large group of angry protesters who screamed and hurled curses at him as he tried to enter the building. Fortunately, a Democratic state assemblyman — Rep. Brett Hulsey — stepped in to help.

I'd like to thank Brett Hulsey. There are very few Democrats representing their constituents and it's good to see that there are those across the isle who still care about law and Democracy.

Matthews Ignores Democrat's 'You're F***ing Dead!' Threat of Republican Woman, But Slams Boehner for Talking Like Glenn Beck

Original Post: MRC

By: Geoffrey Dickens
Tuesday, March 01, 2011 7:37 PM EST

Chris Matthews has yet to condemn Democratic Wisconsin State Representative Gordon Hintz for yelling "You're f–ing dead!" at Republican State Representative Michelle Litjens during a legislative session on Friday, but the Hardball host did find the time, on Tuesday's show, to slam Speaker of the House John Boehner for engaging in "Glenn Beck talk" about guns.

Matthews, initially teasing a guest for using the word "lethal" in a discussion about recent poll numbers on the Wisconsin budget battle, chided: "In the media world, I think we all agreed...after the horror in Arizona that we weren't gonna...use ballistic terms." The MSNBC host then segued into a clip of Boehner making a gun reference, after which he railed: "What is this Glenn Beck talk?...That's how Glenn talks. 'I'm gonna put a gun to your head' and all this!" This led Huffington Post's Howard Fineman to tag in: "Well when John Boehner back slides, he really back slides."

However, according to Newbusters' own Noel Sheppard, Matthews, Fineman and most mainstream media outlets, other than Fox News, have been largely silent about the Hintz threat.

To review, a Democrat man cursing at a Republican woman "You're f--ing dead" isn't worth mentioning in Matthews' mind, but if you dare make a political metaphor referring to weapons (something Matthews himself has done) that's objectionable.

(MP3 audio)

The following is the relevant exchange that was aired on the March 1 Hardball:

JOSH MARSHALL, TALKING POINTS MEMO: They see that the Republicans, Walker, et cetera, sees that, that collective bargaining argument which is really what's being discussed right now is a loser for them and when you have these poll numbers that are 60/30, you know those are lethal for anybody in politics.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Lethal? Did you say lethal? Because let me tell you who is using the word lethal. You know how we all agreed, in the media world, I think we all agreed a couple of weeks ago after the horror in Arizona that we weren't gonna talk about, you know, "shoot 'em up." We weren't gonna use terms, ballistic terms in the way we talk. We're gonna, we're not gonna say, "Mow down our opponents" or all that. We're gonna stop talking about guns in regular political discourse. Somebody didn't get the message!

MARSHALL: I don't think, I don't think that's in, I don't think that's in, I don't think that's in the same category. I think those, I think those kinds of numbers can be politically lethal.

MATTHEWS: Well no you're missing. Here's Boehner! I'm just teasing. I used you to tease into Boehner. I'm sorry.

HOWARD FINEMAN, HUFFINGTON POST: You got in the way, you got in the way of one of his set-up jobs.

MATTHEWS: You were part of my set-up sir. Let's take look. Here is John Boehner who didn't get the – you of course have always gotten the message – here is John Boehner on unions. And let's look at his metaphor. Let's listen.

(Begin clip)

REP. JOHN BOEHNER: In some of these states you've got collective bargaining laws that are so weighted in favor of the public employees that there is almost no bargaining. You know we've given them a machine gun and put it at the, at the heads of the, of the local officials and they really have been, had their hands tied.

(End clip)

MATTHEWS: What is this Glenn Beck talk? Guns at the heads of - that's how Glenn talks. "I'm gonna put a gun to your head" and all this!

FINEMAN: Well when John Boehner back slides, he really back slides.

KOL strange leaflet

Original Post: zerokelvin

Strange Leaflet:
The strange leaflet is given to you by the Council Of Loathing when you reach level 9. The leafet is a text based adventure controlled by various commands like: "i, use, read, open, take, cut, light, climb, look at, kill, exit, etc.". To begin the quest, use the leaflet and type the following instructions in order:

open door, east, take sword, west, north, cut hedge, pick up stick, west, light stick, east, north,
kill serpent, open chest, look behind chest, look in hole

You should now possess a Frobozz Real-Estate Company Instant House (TM) (campground item, the best dwelling) and a grue egg (a familiar). You can continue the quest with these commands:

south, south, east, examine fireplace, examine tinder, examine parchment

This will allow you to later memorize a spell which you will be able to use in normal combat.

light fireplace, take boots, put on boots

At this point type: "

examine fireplace

". There will be one of five objects here. If you see a trophy, take it using "

take trophy

". This allow you to get the Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy. The other four objects have secret words tied to each of them that provide a large stat bonus. The commands are detailed at the end of this section.

west, south, south, south

You should now be in dense forest. Simply move in any direction about 5 times and you will leave the maze. Note that once inside the maze, you will not be able to return to the previous parts of this adventure.

climb tree, take egg, look at petunias, throw egg at roadrunner, down, look in leaves, up, throw ruby at petunias

If you have the parchment from inside the house, you can now type: "

gnusto cleesh

" to memorize the cleesh spell from the scroll you just found. This will allow you to cast this spell in combat for 10 MP. The spell turns creatures into a newt, a frog, or a salamander. The transformed creatures drop a eye of newt, a squashed frog or a salamander spleen, respectively. If you want this spell, you must memorize it before using it on the giant or the cleesh scroll will be lost.

up, cleesh giant, take ring

This will give you the giant pinky ring and end the quest.
There is a secret code that will give you a stat bonus. The code is one of:

xyzzy, plugh, plover, yoho.


Note that you can only try these codes once, so you must get it right the first try. The codes are tied to the items found after examining the fireplace.
plover is tied to finding the bird, plugh the brick wellhouse, yoho the ship and xyzzy the white house.

NEA teaching children at the expense of collective barganing a cost to high to pay

Alan Colmes thinks there's no such thing as radical Islam

I really, really want to be a liberal now. It must be so easy going through life and any time something bad happens, you just deny it's existence. That would be so unburdening! Islamic extremists don't exist! Wisconsin deficit, didn't happen! War in Afghanistan, wut war (wut intentionally misspelled for artistic reasons)?

The problem with this outlook is that you still need people grounded in reality because even if you deny these problems they do in fact exist. But still, it must be so nice.

Unions vs. the Right to Work

Original Post: WSJ

By ROBERT BARRO

How ironic that Wisconsin has become ground zero for the battle between taxpayers and public- employee labor unions. Wisconsin was the first state to allow collective bargaining for government workers (in 1959), following a tradition where it was the first to introduce a personal income tax (in 1911, before the introduction of the current form of individual income tax in 1913 by the federal government).

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Remarkably, labor unions are not only immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a "union shop," which requires nonunion employees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues. Somehow, despite many attempts, organized labor has lacked the political power to repeal the key portion of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act that allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which now prohibit the union shop in 22 states. From the standpoint of civil liberties, the individual right to work—without being forced to join a union or pay dues—has a much better claim than collective bargaining. (Not to mention that "right to work" has a much more pleasant, liberal sound than "collective bargaining.") The push for right-to-work laws, which haven't been enacted anywhere but Oklahoma over the last 20 years, seems about to take off.

The current pushback against labor-union power stems from the collision between overly generous benefits for public employees— notably for pensions and health care—and the fiscal crises of state and local governments. Teachers and other public-employee unions went too far in convincing weak or complicit state and local governments to agree to obligations, particularly defined-benefit pension plans, that created excessive burdens on taxpayers.

In recognition of this fiscal reality, even the unions and their Democratic allies in Wisconsin have agreed to Gov. Scott Walker's proposed cutbacks of benefits, as long as he drops the restrictions on collective bargaining. The problem is that this "compromise" leaves intact the structure of strong public-employee unions that helped to create the unsustainable fiscal situation; after all, the next governor may have less fiscal discipline. A long-run solution requires a change in structure, for example, by restricting collective bargaining for public employees and, to go further, by introducing a right-to-work law.

There is evidence that right-to-work laws—or, more broadly, the pro-business policies offered by right-to-work states—matter for economic growth. In research published in 2000, economist Thomas Holmes of the University of Minnesota compared counties close to the border between states with and without right-to-work laws (thereby holding constant an array of factors related to geography and climate). He found that the cumulative growth of employment in manufacturing (the traditional area of union strength prior to the rise of public-employee unions) in the right-to-work states was 26 percentage points greater than that in the non-right-to-work states.

Beyond Wisconsin, a key issue is which states are likely to be the next political battlegrounds on labor issues. In fact, one can interpret the extreme reactions by union demonstrators and absent Democratic legislators in Wisconsin not so much as attempts to influence that state—which may be a lost cause—but rather to deter politicians in other states from taking similar actions. This strategy may be working in Michigan, where Gov. Rick Snyder recently asserted that he would not "pick fights" with labor unions.

In general, the most likely arenas are states in which the governor and both houses of the state legislature are Republican (often because of the 2010 elections), and in which substantial rights for collective bargaining by public employees currently exist. This group includes Indiana, which has recently been as active as Wisconsin on labor issues; ironically, Indiana enacted a right-to-work law in 1957 but repealed it in 1965. Otherwise, my tentative list includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine, Florida, Tennessee, Nebraska (with a nominally nonpartisan legislature), Kansas, Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The national fiscal crisis and recession that began in 2008 had many ill effects, including the ongoing crises of pension and health-care obligations in many states. But at least one positive consequence is that the required return to fiscal discipline has caused reexamination of the growth in economic and political power of public-employee unions. Hopefully, embattled politicians like Gov. Walker in Wisconsin will maintain their resolve and achieve a more sensible long-term structure for the taxpayers in their states.

Communists, socialists rallying support behind Madison protests

Original Post: Yahoo

John Rossomando - The Daily Caller John Rossomando - The Daily Caller – Fri Feb 25, 1:27 pm ET

Communist and socialist groups — including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Communist Party USA, Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Democratic Socialists of America — are voicing their support for the public-sector unions protesting Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plans to curtail their collective bargaining abilities.

The communist and socialist groups have parroted many of the union talking points being used by the unions on their websites and in their publications, such as those accusing the governor of trying to break their unions. They have also compared Walker to former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

“Egypt, whose revolution has been a constant source of inspiration here, reflected in signs and chants — and Walker’s new nickname, Gov. Mubarak,” an article reads from the International Socialist Organization’s webzine.

The webzine also describes the unions’ protest of Walker’s plans to force a vote on curtailing public-sector unions as “class war in Wisconsin” and as an affront to “the standard of living of working people.”

The formerly Soviet-backed Communist Party USA (CPUSA) echoed similar talking points.

“Using the deficit as a scare tactic, the right-wing corporate Republicans are on a fast track to defeat every initiative of the Obama administration, to destroy unions and public services at the federal, state and municipal level, and at the same time protect tax breaks for the richest few,” Joelle Fishman, chair of the CPUSA’s Political Action Commission, wrote in an article posted on her party’s website.

Fishman went on to call on a “broad alliance of forces for social change (labor, racially oppressed, women, youth)” to reframe the debate for the 2012 elections.

The website of the Socialist Workers Party’s newspaper, The Militant, bears a photo of a sign proclaiming “Walker is an enemy of the people.”

Over in the Workers World Party’s newspaper Workers World, the presence of the student participants in the demonstrations is described as “as one of the most urgent tasks for young people at the moment.”

This says a lot more about the unions’ political orientation than it does about these fringe groups that have thrown their support behind the union protesters, according to noted author and former communist-turned-conservative activist Ron Radosh.

Radosh doesn’t believe the communist and socialist groups have been orchestrating the protests, but their willingness to speak the same language as the unions shows how far to the left the public-sector unions have moved.

“Their positions are the same as the unions, and that’s not surprising,” Radosh said. “But if you try to prove or show the level of cooperation there, it is very difficult to show that.”

At the same time, Radosh says both the communists and the unions have resorted to trotting out the same talking points communists and other radicals used in the 1930s.

But he cautions against labeling the unions as socialist or communist because they largely do not advocate overthrowing the current system.