How many on here do you think actually read your link?


Most just believe what they are told and ignore any facts that go against what they want to believe.

The mid-term elections showed a peak for the Tea Party and complacency for the Democrats.

Now that some Tea Party candidates are actually in office, the consequences and ineffectiveness of their policies, and the Koch brothers backing is becoming evident. People will leave them by droves before 2012.
Their mere presence in office will be their end. Of course they will still be Republican, as is their true color.

They aren't drafted!

It's a place of employment.
Aren't you allowed to chose where you wish to work?

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The best thing he could do for America is win the Republican nomination for President in 2012!

Paul's proposed a number of court-stripping measures, shutting the courthouse door to discrimination suits based on sexual discrimination;

he's tried to prohibit the government from mandating a minimum wage;

he's tried to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, which guarantees that workers on federal projects be paid a prevailing wage, and the Copeland Act, which bars kick-backs on federal projects;

he has proposed freezing Social Security benefit levels and making the program fully optional, which would effectively destroy it;

he has opposed measures that promote more voter participation;

he would repeal key parts of American anti-trust law, gutting it;

he's tried to deauthorize most federal agencies' regulatory powers;

he's tried to eliminate all affirmative action programs;

he's proposed altering the 14th Amendment to prohibit the children of immigrants from gaining citizenship;

he's proposed eliminating or gutting a variety of environmental legislation;

he's tried to kill the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and submitted legislation that would pull the United States out of the United Nations 12 different times;

he has tried to eradicate the Department of Education, offered legislation to end federal involvement in educating kids;

and he has proposed, at various times, the abolition of most taxes on wealth as well as income and the establishment of a flat tax.

All of this is legislation that he not only supported, but proposed or co-sponsored.



Very Extreme!

Observation of the truth is powerful.

Don't help corporations take control of your government from you.

Apr 9th, 2009

Yesterday, Think Progress reported on Republican lawmakers planning to speak at anti-Obama “tea party” protests taking place nationwide on April 15. Last night, Eric Odom of the DontGo website — one of the organizers of the protests — wrote a blog post stressing that these protests are displays of “regular American[s] in protest of government spending and extreme taxation,” rather than something affiliated with a political party or special interest agenda.

Today on Fox News — which has actively been promoting the protests — Glenn Beck pushed the tea party talking points, similarly claiming that the protests aren’t “coordinated” and are fully organized by “regular” people. Watch it:



Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests:

– Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters, contacting conservative activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHDFWViHL7o

– Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida.

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/bstein80/how-to-organize-your-own-%E2%80%9Ctea-party%E2%80%9D-protest

http://americansforprosperity.org/032509-kansas-city-tax-day-tea-party

– Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media.

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/bstein80/how-to-organize-your-own-%E2%80%9Ctea-party%E2%80%9D-protest

– Freedom Works has several domain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests.

(you'll have to follow the link to see these. They are too numerous to list)
Chances are, if you're a Tea Party supporter, you've already visited one of these sites.


– Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.

(you'll have to follow the link to see these. They are too numerous to list)
Chances are, if you're a Tea Party supporter, you've already visited one of these sites.





This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey, the former Republican Majority Leader who now leads Freedom Works and is a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.

Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/lobbyists-planning-teaparties/

I've watched him plenty.
My observations of his speeches are in line with 98% of American voters. He has never received more than 2 % of any vote.
Why?
His views are way too radical.
His philosophies and ties fit with the Koch brothers, and his migration to the Republican Party coincides with the founding of the Tea Party, and their (the Koch Brothers) migration to the Republican Party.

LMAO
It has never been cool to be Libertarian.

How do the earnings of government workers who are union members compare to the earnings of private-sector workers?

In 2010, median earnings of government workers who were union members were 25 percent higher than earnings of private workers.

However, two economists at the University of Wisconsin, Keith Bender and John Heywood point out that “government workers have jobs that demand more education, which is not accounted for by raw averages.”

Bender and Heywood did a study last year for the Center for State & Local Government Excellence, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, in which they concluded that “although a comparison of unadjusted average earnings will show that wages are higher among jobs in state and local government, this result is largely due to the fact that the workers in those sectors have more education.”

They said, “Holding education and other characteristics the same, typical state and local workers earn an average of 11 percent less and 12 percent less, respectively, than comparable private-sector workers.”

They also concluded that “the compensation of state and local workers is not excessive” and that “this remains true when including benefits.”

“People who go into the public sector — especially at the highest occupations that require a lot of education — are trading off stability for higher salaries,” said Kim Rueben, a public finance economist at the Urban Institute. That is, such highly educated workers could likely make more money in the private sector but wouldn’t enjoy as much job security.

“For lower educated workers, they actually do get a premium for being in the public sector, even on the wage side,” said Rueben.

How do the earnings of unionized government workers compare to the earnings of government workers who aren’t union members?
It depends on the level of government.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, for federal employees last year, the median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers who were union members were $977. But the median weekly earnings of full-time federal workers who weren’t union members were $1,040.

But for state workers, union members had median weekly earnings nearly 17 percent higher than non-union members, $922 compared to $769.

And for local government employees, the union differential was greater, 23 percent higher wages for union members than for non-union members.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41672854/ns/politics-more_politics/

If you need to know the basics of what's going on in Wisconsin, read on. If you're already up to speed, you can follow the action on Twitter or jump straight to today's updates from our reporter on the ground in Madison.

—With additional reporting by Nick Baumann and Siddhartha Mahanta

The basics:

For days, demonstrators have been pouring into the streets of Madison, Wisconsin—and the halls of the state's Capitol building—to protest rookie Republican Governor Scott Walker's anti-union proposals. Big national unions, both major political parties, the Tea Party, and Andrew Breitbart are already involved. Democratic state senators have fled the state to prevent the legislature from voting on Walker's proposals. And the protests could soon spread to other states, including Ohio.

Is this like Egypt?

No.

What's actually being proposed?

Walker says his legislation, which would strip most state employees of any meaningful collective bargaining rights, is necessary to close the state's $137 million budget gap. There are a number of problems with that argument, though. The unions are not to blame for the deficit, and stripping unionized workers of their collective bargaining rights won't in and of itself save any money. Walker says he needs to strip the unions of their rights to close the gap. But public safety officers' unions, which have members who are more likely to support Republicans and who also tend to have the highest salaries and benefits, are exempted from the new rules. Meanwhile, a series of tax breaks and other goodies that Walker and the Republican legislature passed just after his inauguration dramatically increased the deficit that Walker now says he's trying to close. And Wisconsin has closed a much larger budget gap in the past without scrapping worker organizing rights.

What's really going on, as Kevin Drum has explained, is pure partisan warfare: Walker is trying to de-fund the unions that form the backbone of the Democratic party. The unions and the Democrats are, of course, fighting back. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein drops some knowledge [emphasis added]:

The best way to understand Walker's proposal is as a multi-part attack on the state's labor unions. In part one, their ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced. In part two, their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut. And in part three, workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year. Put it all together and it looks like this: Wisconsin's unions can't deliver value to their members, they're deprived of the resources to change the rules so they can start delivering value to their members again, and because of that, their members eventually give in to employer pressure and shut the union down in one of the annual certification elections.

You may think Walker's proposal is a good idea or a bad idea. But that's what it does. And it's telling that he's exempting the unions that supported him and is trying to obscure his plan's specifics behind misleading language about what unions can still bargain for and misleading rhetoric about the state's budget.

Walker's proposals do have important fiscal elements: they roughly double health care premiums for many state employees. But the heart of the proposals, and the controversy, are the provisions that will effectively destroy public-sector unions in the Badger State. As Matt Yglesias notes, this won't destroy the Democratic party. But it will force the party to seek funding from sources other than unions, and that usually means the same rich businessmen who are the main financial backers for the Republican party. Speaking of which....

Who is Scott Walker?

Walker was elected governor in the GOP landslide of 2010, when Republicans also gained control of the Wisconsin state senate and house of representatives. His political career has been bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, the very rich, very conservative, and very anti-union oil-and-gas magnates. Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Reason Foundation have long taken a very antagonistic view toward public-sector unions. They've used their vast fortunes to fight key Obama initiatives on health care and the environment, while writing fat checks to Republican candidates across the country. Walker's take for the 2010 election: $43,000 from the Koch Industries PAC, his second highest intake from any one donor. But that's not all!:

The Koch's PAC also helped Walker via a familiar and much-used political maneuver designed to allow donors to skirt campaign finance limits. The PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker. The RGA also spent a whopping $3.4 million on TV ads and mailers attacking Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker ended up beating Barrett by 5 points. The Koch money, no doubt, helped greatly.

What are the Democrats and the unions doing to respond?

Well, they're protesting, obviously—filling the halls of the Capitol and the streets of Madison with bodies and signs. They're calling their representatives and talking about recalling Walker (who cannot be recalled until next January) or any of eight GOP state senators who are eligible for recall right now. Meanwhile, all of the Democratic state senators have left the state in an attempt to deny Republicans the quorum they need to vote on Walker's proposals, but if just one of them returns (or is hauled back by state troopers), the GOP will have the quorum they need. (Interestingly, the head of the state patrol in the father of the Republican heads of the state senate and house of representatives, who are brothers.) Finally, Wisconsin public school teachers have been calling in sick, forcing schools to close while teachers in over a dozen other school districts picket the capitol, plan vigils, and set up phone banks to try to block Walker's effort.
How could this spread?

Other Republican-governed states are trying to mimic Walker's assault on public employee unions. The GOP won a resounding series of state-level victories in high-union-density states in November. Now they can use their newly-won power to crack down on one of the Democrats' biggest sources of funds, volunteers, and political power. Plans are already under consideration in places like Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.

Speaking of Ohio:

As Suzy Khimm outlined on Friday, an estimated 3,800-5,000 protestors came out in full fury in Columbus, Ohio, to vent their anger over a similar anti-union bill that would limit workers' rights to bargain for health insurance, end automatic pay increases, and infringe upon teachers' rights to pick their classes and schools. As in Wisconsin, both the Ohio state house and governor's mansion flipped from blue to red last year. "This has little to do with balancing this year's budget," former Governor Ted Strickland told the AP. "I think it's a power grab. It's an attempt to diminish the rights of working people. I think it's an assault of the middle class of this state and it's so unfair and out of balance."

How are conservatives working to support Walker?:

It was only a matter of time till the Tea Party got in on the action. Stephanie Mencimer reports that activists are bussing into Madison, and are "promising a massive counter-demonstration." The push is being led by American Majority, a conservative activist group that trains impressionable young foot soldiers to become state-level candidates (check out their ""I Stand With Scott Walker Rally" Facebook page). Founded by Republican operatives, the well-funded group (which, according to tax fillings, had a budget of nearly $2 million in 2009) gets much of its money from a group with ties to those adorable Koch brothers. Conservative media baron Andrew Breitbart will be leading the rally, and will be joined by presidential candidate Herman Cain and maybe—if we're lucky—Joe "The Plumber" Wurtzelbacher. Expect fireworks.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained

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He's the first attempt by the Koch brothers to dismantle the government so corporations could take the power away from the people.

All he ever does is ask questions, and never allows anyone to answer.

Watch one of his senseless ramblings on the senate floor sometime.
He's a puppet.

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The woman in charge of the SECIU, the one protesting in Wis., makes $148k.
That is not like most corporate ececutives.

Sorros was the top donator to charities of the top 50 richest Americans.
At least he is giving back.

Denial is futile.
If you support the Tea Party,
You are a participant in the death of the American Dream.

This proves that the bill is not designed to save Wisconsin money but more to destroy the Unions so corporations can gain more control over our government.

When will Tea Party supporters quit being patsies?

As the nation focuses on the efforts of Governor Scott Walker to take away collective bargaining rights from public employees in Wisconsin, new information is coming to light that reveals what is truly going on here.

Mother Jones is reporting that much of the funding behind the Walker for Governor campaign came from none other than uber-conservatives, the infamous Koch Brothers.

What’s more, the plan to kill the unions is right out of the Koch Brothers play book.

Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Reason Foundation have long taken a very antagonistic view toward public-sector unions. Several of these groups have urged the eradication of these unions. The Kochs also invited Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, an anti-union outfit, to a June 2010 confab in Aspen, Colorado;

Via Mother Jones

If you are reluctant to believe that this is a coordinated attack, consider this-

This afternoon, Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Workers Union, sent a message to the Governor’s office agreeing to the cuts to pension & welfare benefits sought by Walker in his bill. The governor’s response was “nothing doing.” He wants the whole kit and kaboodle – the end of the collective bargaining rights of the public unions.

As noted in my earlier post, this is, indeed, the first shot in the final battle to end unionism in America.

UPDATE: The Americans for Prosperity group, a Tea Party group that is a Koch Brothers front, has put up a website and petition called www.standwithwalker.com. The website attacks all collective bargaining – not just for public employees’ unions. Americans for Prosperity is also organizing a rally tomorrow in Wisconsin to support Gov. Walker.

Why are the Koch Brothers so interested in Wisconsin? They are a major business player in the state.

This from Think Progress:

Koch owns a coal company subsidiary with facilities in Green Bay, Manitowoc, Ashland and Sheboygan; six timber plants throughout the state; and a large network of pipelines in Wisconsin. While Koch controls much of the infrastructure in the state, they have laid off workers to boost profits. At a time when Koch Industries owners David and Charles Koch awarded themselves an extra $11 billion of income from the company, Koch slashed jobs at their Green Bay plant:

Officials at Georgia-Pacific said the company is laying off 158 workers at its Day Street plant because out-of-date equipment at the facility is being replaced with newer, more-efficient equipment. The company said much of the new, papermaking equipment will be automated. [...] Malach tells FOX 11 that the layoffs are not because of a drop in demand. In fact, Malach said demand is high for the bath tissue and napkins manufactured at the plant.

You really have to wonder how long it will take for Tea Party devotees to realize just how badly they are being used.

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/02/18/koch-brothers-behind-wisconsin-effort-to-kill-public-unions/

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