Been reading about the mess in WI,

and in the mid-East and north Africa, and thinking about the reactions of some people here.

Specifically, despite a lot of the groups and people involved(Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example) we've got a bunch of people yelling "Democracy! It's about Democracy!! Democracy good!!!" ; how the hell do you see a bunch of islamist clowns talking about imposing sharia and calling for war to wipe out the Jews and keep saying that as if there's no problem?

Some of this is pretty much pushing for base-form democracy, mob rule; and mob rule pushing for a theocracy, at that. But you've got a bunch of people, primarily progressives and socialists, who either see no problem with mob rule(they plan to control the mob, of course) or are too damn stupid to see the problems. Long as they keep yelling "Democracy!" they think it's all good.

Went 'round with someone the other day on the mess in WI; according to her it's purely the downtrodden workers fighting for their rights against the evil right-wingers who want another bit of value on their stock accounts. Think about this: the state is broke, the people elected are acting to do exactly what they said they would, get the costs under control and stop the unions from controlling the process, and somehow this is seen as Evil Right-Wing Fascists robbing the poor workers, etc.(yeah, she is a socialist) She even sees a connection to those epitome-of-evil Koch brothers. She also defended the crooked doctors handing out fake sick excuses for teachers to skip work because "I'd be stressed too if I knew I might be fired for no reason!" Let's see, skipping work on falsified grounds, abusing sick leave... that's grounds to be fired in just about any company, and I think most states have similar rules on that, but that would be getting fired 'for no reason'. Yeah. Right. (she also basically said that one piece of information I brought up didn't count for squat because I found it on a blog while she quoted something from a local paper; I just said "Information is where you find it." This is also the one who claimed a Media Matters list of calling Glenn Beck names and disagreeing with him proved he 'lied' about a bunch of things)

And let's completely ignore that the Governor pointed out that if these concessions aren't made there'll be thousands of state and local public employees laid off; that doesn't count or something.

Back when, I worked for a state agency. In Oklahoma the union is called the OK State Employees Association, and I became really sick of them. If they'd been honest they'd have registered as a lobbying arm of the Democrat Party, which actions rather ticked me off; add to that their apparent complete disregard of the financial condition of the state when demanding more. More money, more benefits more whatever. And if the point was made too loudly that "THERE IS NO MONEY FOR THIS, YOU MORONS!" their answer was "Then raise taxes so you can give 'us' a raise!" I'd be sitting there thinking "Hey, if you raise taxes to give us a raise we'll be paying those increased taxes too, dammit!"

Their answer to that seemed to be "We'll only raise taxes on the rich!", etc. Yeah. That NEVER soaks down to everyone else, does it? Right now look at how that's worked in Californicated and the PROM; raise taxes on the wealthy and at least some of them move, and then you lose ALL the taxes you were getting from them. Isn't that a wonderful idea?(it is for the lower-tax states those people move to, of course) We're seeing the same attitude in WI; there's no money, but Progressivism Forbid that be acknowledged if it means the unions lose some power. I think one of the things that demonstrates this is about power is the outrage the unions have for two things in particular:
ALL union members would have to vote annually about keeping the union, and
The state would no longer collect dues for the unions, they'd have to get them directly from members.
The unions are apparently terrified of both ideas, which tells me the unions don't trust the bulk of their members to want to stay in and don't trust that they'll be happy to pay dues; they want the power of the state to take the dues for them, and don't want to have to deal with a vote of all members. Says bad things about the union, doesn't it?


I'll add to the personal history that there were a couple of people in my area who were OPEA members; the one time we had a problem that they went to the union with, the response was "Oh, we don't get involved in things like that! And please remember to renew for next year."