Union Thugs Turn Wisconsin into Greece as the Freeloaders Protest

Folks, I don't think the people in Wisconsin, the unions, the teachers, and some of the protesters, I don't think they got the memo on civility. Have you seen what's going on? I mean this is Greece! It's Greece. All of these people who live off the largesse of taxpayers are just marching in the streets, calling in sick. Schools have been closed in parts of Wisconsin today for fog. There isn't any. Well, there's certainly not enough in these areas where it's been canceled. We have some photos I want to show you from the protests in Wisconsin. Let me turn the Dittocam off while I zoom in here and get this. I don't want you to see the zoom-in happen.

All right, now this first one is self-explanatory for those of you watching on the Dittocam. "Hosni + Hitler = Dictator Scott Walker." Scott Walker, the dictator governor of Wisconsin. Okay, that's one of them. Here's another one. "Down with dictators, one to go." That's a picture of Hosni Mubarak on top there. Let me zoom in even tighter on this one if we can. Down with dictators, one down and one to go. Mubarak in the upper right, Scott Walker, the mayor of Wisconsin in the lower left. I don't know if Biden has weighed in on whether he's a dictator or not.

Now, this next picture for those of you watching on the Dittocam, this is people carrying the sign, "Hosni + Hitler = Dictator Scott Walker." I got a picture here, these are the union thugs, as you can see right there. These are the union thugs that are carrying the picture. This is just a sample of three pictures that we have seen out there of the protesters. We know people are being bussed in, by the way. It's not just people from Wisconsin. It's like during the Hawkeye Cauci in early 2008, Obama had a bunch of people bussed in from outside Iowa to go to the Hawkeye Cauci, and we have some sound bites on this. Obama last night in Milwaukee, correspondent Charles Benson interviewed Obama. He said, "Thousands are marching on Madison as we speak. Unions and state employees are angry at Governor Walker. Walker's talking about potentially bringing out the National Guard. They're worried that they're gonna lose their right to bargain, forced to pay more for their benefits."

OBAMA: I haven't followed exactly what's happening with the Wisconsin budget. I've got some budget problems here in Washington.

OBAMA: I would say as a general proposition that everybody's gotta make some adjustments to new fiscal realities. I think those kinds of adjustments are the right thing to do.

RUSH: "I haven't followed exactly what's happening with the Wisconsin budget." BS. His buddies at the SEIU and the teachers unions are right in on it. But there's an interesting story. It's all about how the Democrats, a lot of them now understand here that what's going on with the unions cannot be sustained, even Democrats do, some teachers unions particularly because there's no performance here. Everybody knows the schools are not performing. The students are not performing. It was kind of an interesting story, frankly. I'll see if I can find it somewhere in the stack. Obama sounds somewhat sympathetic to Governor Walker. "I would say as a general proposition that everybody's gotta make some adjustments to new fiscal realities." He could be talking to the teachers, union guys. But realizing what he had done, Obama then continued with this. OBAMA: Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin where you're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally seems like more of an assault on unions. Public employees, they're our neighbors. They're our friends. These are folks who are teachers and they're firefighters and they're social workers and they're police officers. You know, they make a lot of sacrifices and make a big contribution, and I think it's important not to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.

RUSH: Who's vilifying 'em? We just don't have the money to pay them. Nobody's vilifying them. It's just the money isn't there to pay them. Now, Walker is threatening to call out the National Guard to do the jobs of the people who are calling in sick. The media makes it sound like he's calling out the guard to crack down on the protesters. Mr. Vilify himself, what does he call it, tea baggers? Big Oil. Big Bank. This guy vilifies everybody he considers to be one of his enemies. But it's important not to vilify these people, his friends, they're our neighbors and we don't have the money. The money simply isn't there. Scott Walker ran on this premise and he is implementing this premise, and despite the protests, you don't see the average citizens in Wisconsin joining them and saying throw the guy out. Lena Taylor is a state senator, Democrat in Wisconsin. She spoke to a reporter in Madison yesterday, said this.

TAYLOR: The history of Hitler in 1933, he abolished unions, and that's what our governor is doing today.

RUSH: Okay, so here comes the official comparison to Adolf Hitler. Apparently Lena Taylor did not get the memo on civility. The history of Hitler in 1933, he abolished unions, and that's what our governor is doing today. We'll skip number six and we'll skip number seven. Let's go back to Paul Ryan here. This is this morning on Morning Joe on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski, the cohost, said, "Governor Scott Walker, what he's asking of state workers there, what do you make of the stand he's taking and have you been in contact with him at all?"

RYAN: It's not asking a lot. It's still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do, so he's basically saying, "I want you public workers to pay half of what our private sector counterparts are," and he's getting riots. It's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days. People should be able to express their way but we've gotta get this deficit and debt under control in Madison.

RUSH: Right. And Walker is listening to the people, the people who elected him. He's doing what the people of Wisconsin want. He can't print money like Obama can. This is the thing these union people don't seem to understand. This guy is a Republican in Wisconsin, in Madison, he got elected on this agenda. He's doing what the people want. The opposite of what Mubarak did. They try to compare him to Hosni Mubarak. By the way, V. I. Lenin, Vladimir Lenin did away with unions, too. Well known communist did away with unions when he was ascending to power. The teachers got together, too, government union rally in opposition to Scott Walker. Here's a little bit of an exchange between an unidentified reporter and several unidentified students from Madison East High School.

STUDENT: Trying to stop whatever this dude is doing. (laughing) RUSH: They don't even know! The Wisconsin teachers bringing the kids to the union protests and the kids are clueless! They don't even know what they're doing there. (imitating student) "I guess stop whatever the dude's doing." They can't even teach 'em how to protest properly, can't even inform them what they're going to protest when they take 'em. Last night on television, we had Russ Feingold, and he was asked the following question. This is all about Wisconsin. "The governor's line here is that this is about balancing the budget. What explains the distance between what he wants to do and what he's actually proposing?"

FEINGOLD: Well, the argument this is really about the budget process is phonier than a three-dollar bill. What he did last week was say basically on Thursday or Friday, "I want to take away all these rights of collective bargaining from people, and I want it done within the next five or six days." This is just a direct attack driven by corporate interests and the state in this country that they have been fantasizing about forever, which is to bust the unions, and that's what the agenda is. It is really not about the state budget. That's just simply phony.

RUSH: Russ Feingold, who wasn't reelected, was he? He wasn't reelected by the people of Wisconsin to return to Washington as their senator. They elected a corporate guy. The Wisconsin people elected a corporate guy. May be trying to bust the union; I don't know. But it is about the budget. It is most definitely about the budget. I wonder if the parents of these students gave permission for their children to attend these protests. These are ugly. You see some video, the protests are pretty ugly. I wonder if most parents want their children exposed to this. One more here from Feingold. Question: "Republican politics have become very homogenous on this issue in the way they weren't a generation ago. They're all very anti-employee, very pro-business, very, very anti-union. Are Democrats taking the other side of that fight?"

FEINGOLD: In our state we are. The Democratic Party here and the unions, both public and private, are unified. They're trying to somehow divide and conquer not only between private and public employees, they're trying to divide people within public employees. We're not gonna let Governor Walker acting as a shill, basically, for these corporations to destroy the rights of working people.

RUSH: So it's the same old traditional argument, the rights of working people are being trampled on. It's working people that are losing their jobs, real working, nonunionized people who are losing their jobs. Their unemployment benefits and tax dollars are being paid, being used to provide never ending pensions, health care benefits and so forth and so on. It is socialism on the march, it can't be sustained. We've reached the point it simply can't be sustained. This is the breaking point. And just like in Greece, you tell the freeloaders the free ride is over and they just raise hell, they just can't handle it. "What do you mean freeloaders and a free ride?" Look, when somebody else is paying for most of what you get in life, you're a freeloader. There's no other way to describe it. It may sound a little harsh, but that's why passions here are what they are. The people paying for this are losing their jobs. The people paying for all this don't make nearly the money the people they're paying make. It cannot be sustained. Anybody responsible for running a state has got to step in and reverse the trend. It's that simple.

RUSH: It's kinda comical to watch here the media and the protesters really trying to make it sound like Governor Walker is gonna sick the National Guard on the protesters and beat the protesters upside the head. But that's not why the National Guard is there. The media and the protesters are engaged in a lie even too big for the so-called fact check site, PoliFact, to swallow. The claim was rated a "pants on fire untruth" by this bunch, which clarified that the governor referenced calling up the National Guard if workers didn't show up to work, not to quash the protesters and beat 'em upside the head. The point, ladies and gentlemen, is, they're there to do work necessary if people do not do their jobs. It's to keep the state operating.

Now, you'll notice in these Feingold sound bites that we played, he didn't say a single word about the children or the taxpayers. We have schools for what purpose? What's the purpose, really? To educate children, right? No other reason. That's why we have schools. We don't have schools to exist for the unions. The taxpayers are the boss. The taxpayers decide how their employees are to be organized and paid. The schools do not exist for the union to have jobs, just like corporations don't exist for members of a community to have health care benefits. That's not the purpose. It's the same thing with schools. They are in existence to teach kids, not to provide unions jobs. So when people speak out and vote, the likes of Russ Feingold talk about "the little people."

Well, it's the little people paying the price. The kids and the taxpayers, they're the ones paying for all of this failure. They're the ones who are unemployed. They're the ones, when they are working, paying people salaries larger than they make. The liberals are defending their power base. That's why they speak as they do and act as they do, the power base being the unions. Feingold wants the taxpayers to continue to support his campaign supporters at the NEA. That's what he's worried about. Why should everyone else give up some of what they have but not those who work for the government at whatever level? They kept tell us all through Iraq war and all through this recession, "We need to sacrifice. The American people need to sacrifice. Damn right!" Okay, why are public employees exempted from all of this sacrifice? It's times like this, folks, when the disconnect between liberals and the people become very, very clear.

RUSH: Folks, one of the things that you're not hearing about what's going on in Wisconsin is that Governor Walker is trying to make a deal. If the unions will accept the concessions (which, in the big scheme of things, are pretty minor) he's promising not to lay any of them off. He ought to be look at it as a hero. We've got an economic recession, we've got unemployment rising, and be he's offering them a deal where they won't be laid off. The AP has a 24 paragraph story and in paragraph 23 we find this: "In exchange for bearing more costs and losing bargaining leverage, public employees were promised no furloughs and no layoffs." He's trying to save their jobs. He ought to be treated like a hero instead of a dictator.

But this is a microcosm, folks, of what's going on all over this country in communities large and small. It is times like this where the disconnect between the liberals and the people who make this country work becomes very clear. Senator Feingold, the issue in Wisconsin is very simple. It's about what people can afford, not what the unions want. It is about what the kids need as students. It's not what the unions want. What's going on here, folks, is a realignment back to constitutional, representative government where the people have a say in their future. The people are sick and tired of playing second fiddle.

They're sick and tired of paying the salaries and benefits of people who end up undermining their own values and ideals, oftentimes undermining those of their kids as students. This cabal of politicians and public sector unions and bureaucrats is being challenged. For once, we got some people with some guts! Who are not acting like a bunch of little sissies running around afraid to offend people by standing up for what they believe. This is not just going on in New Jersey and Wisconsin, either. This is happening in many towns and states, and it has been going on for quite a while. This is getting news in Wisconsin because it's a large state.

There's a very long New York Times story on Wisconsin today -- and remember, now, we're operating under a presidential directive: We need to have more civility in our society. By the way, has anybody claimed that talk radio is responsible for what's going on in Wisconsin? Nope. Not yet, but let's wait and see what happens there before they do. But the New York Times has a very long story, and this is the last paragraph. The last paragraph of a long story in the New York Times: "Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican leader in the Wisconsin state Senate, slipped out of the capitol Wednesday morning with his sunglasses on and his head down. Protesters had gone to his home earlier in the week, forcing his family -- including his wife, a school guidance counselor -- to go elsewhere for a bit."

So the Republican leader in the Senate was forced from his home by this mob. I don't know if they've called him a Nazi yet. They may not know that he's gotten people out at his home, but they're out there protesting at his home in this new era of civility. So you clearly now see that all that after the so-called memorial for the people who died in Arizona was just a crock, all this civility stuff. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is fighting for every American now. By the way, are we not being told it is Obama trying to be like Reagan? Well, if Obama wants to be like Reagan, why doesn't he call up Walker and encourage them to fire all these union thugs like Reagan fired the air traffic controllers at the FAA?

From The Politico today: "The Politics of Education Upended." It's a story by Jennifer Epstein. Even Democrats sound a little like Republicans when it comes to the teachers unions. The gig is up, obviously, and teachers know it. You want to hear a little bit of this? "In Wisconsin, about 1,000 teachers called in sick Wednesday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip their union bargaining rights. In Washington, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recounted his battle with his state’s teachers unions Wednesday, calling their leaders 'greedy' and 'selfish.' And in Nevada, Indiana and Florida, Republican governors are targeting teachers contracts and work rules to fix a system they say is broken.

"'The status quo has put us at the bottom of the heap,' Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval told Politico. The events point to a convergence that is remaking the politics of education. Teachers unions, historically one of the most powerful interest groups in American politics, are being besieged like never before -- under attack from conservative GOP governors with a zeal for budget-cutting even while taking fire from some Democrats, including President Barack Obama, who has suggested he agrees that unions can be an impediment to better schools." (snorts) I wonder if the Politico gang will be invited back to the White House after that paragraph.

"Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan sounded surprisingly like the Republican governors when he told teachers unions and administrators at a conference Tuesday in Denver, 'Clearly, the status quo isn't working for children.' The backlash threatens to undercut one of the Democratic Party's most stalwart backers -- and upset a mutually beneficial relationship where the unions provided financial support and foot soldiers for Democratic campaigns, in return for political cover to protect their prerogatives in the U.S. Congress and state capitols across the nation. The National Education Association, the largest teachers union, spent $40 million on the 2010 elections alone, making the union one of the largest outside funders of Democratic campaigns.

"But things are changing. On both sides of the aisle, politicians are unhappy with how teachers are compensated, hired and fired, and are eager to introduce reforms. ... Obama and Duncan have made clear that their vision for the country's teachers includes getting tougher on them. 'It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,' the president said shortly after taking office." I don’t know if he even remembers that. "'The state's unions 'think I'm attacking them,' [Chris] Christie said. ... 'I'm attacking the leadership of the unions because they're greedy, they're selfish. It's time to honestly say that we can separate the teachers from the union,'" which has long been a point on this program.

By the way, Scott Walker's home and his car have been attacked as well in this new era of civility ushered in by Obama after the shooting spree in Arizona. So as I say, the disconnect between liberals and the people who make this country work is becoming stark. This disconnect is patently obviously now. It's very, very clear. In Wisconsin it's about what people can afford, and it's about what kids need. It's not about what unions want. The money isn't there. They simply don't have the money. Of course that doesn't matter. That's not a concern of the union leadership.

Going to a trusted source ~ the Drudgereport.com I found fog reports for most of Wisconsin today.

For example

Report for:

"Shawano

Special Weather Statement

Mobile & Email Alerts Statement as of 5:57 PM CST on February 17, 2011

... Visibilities will improve across northeast Wisconsin this evening...

A frontal boundary moving across Wisconsin this evening will provide enough mixing and dry air to improve visibilities across northeast Wisconsin. Areas of dense fog will slowly dissipate with mainly cloudy skies expected by 9 PM.

If you have travel plans across central or northern Wisconsin be alert to changing visibilities in fog early this evening. Slow down to a safe speed and use only your low beam headlights.

Mg"

So, who made Rush into a Weatherman?

Meanwhile back in the White House, Dumplin Ears the marxist is enjoying the chaos. I really believe this is just what he wants, chaos to destroy our country and the useful idiots are playing their role very well. After all, Organizing for America and BarackObama.com is fully supportive of this union thuggery.

The rats and union thugs are testing Gov Walker to give in a little.

He won’t. He has the votes.

Look at how all the Democrat legislature members scurried to their rat holes out of state.

Don’t know if you heard Gov. Walker’s press conference about two hours ago but he hasn’t waivered a millimeter from his original stance. He acknowledged the protesters’ right to be heard but also insisted that the taxpayers’ voice be heard as well. He called out a reporter who asked a slanted question by saying “nice editorial.” He also called the unions’ sudden willingness to negotiate as “disingenuous” because of how they tried to ram through last-minute deals at the end of December.

He pulled no punches and stuck to his guns.

While it is true that there are SOME overpaid people in education and it is true that there are SOME lazy people in education, it is also true that there are overpaid and lazy people in every profession. Your profession included. I would like to see someone attack your livelihood, take away benefits you have been promised, and see how you respond. The bottom line is that freerepublic is a gathering place for complainers and whiners who love to beat up on public education. They are just negative voices who have nothing constructive to add to the discourse. I might also add that they are extremely ignorant, arrogant, and childish in their comments. While I disapprove of unions and the behavior in Wisconsin, it sickens me to see the response of the pack of jackals here at freerepublic who rejoice to see others lose the standard of living many of them have worked hard to earn. The next time you don't like the way things are going at your job and you try to change it or speak our against it, maybe you should just be fired. Or does that type of treament only suit all the so called evil forces conspiring against you in your little paranoid conservative world? I bet some of you are the loudest complainers at work and your bosses would love to get rid of you but you're probably dug in like a big fat tick- just like the teachers you malign.

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