If Paul Ryan is the dude that completely misinterprets Rage Against the Machine, we can probably surmise that Rahm Emanuel secretly yearns for post-grunge butt-rock…

If you haven’t heard, 26,000 teachers and staff have gone on strike in Chicago, the first CTU strike in 25 years. While certain idiots seem to think a few days out of school will forever render children feral little beasts, the teachers are fighting lay-offs, school closings, increases in hours, and the measuring of student (and teacher) success by standardized test scores. Oh yeah, and they want fucking air conditioning.

My beloved socialist rag, Jacobin magazine, sets the record straight:

“[Rahm Emanuel] brazenly canceled a contractually-obligated four percent cost of living raise for teachers last year; he pushed hard for a 20 percent longer school day while offering a two percent pay increase (a fight he eventually lost); he has unabashedly denigrated teachers, accusing them of not caring about the well-being of their students. Despite campaigning on promises of reform, he has gone full-steam ahead on the city’s Tax Increment Financing (TIF) system, which diverts huge amounts of tax dollars from public institutions like schools and libraries and funnels them to wealthy corporations.”

With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?

Even Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education under that Marxist union thug, Comrade George Bush the First, has written extensively on how these sorts of “reforms” hurt children (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education), only to be ignored by Democrats, and attacked by Republicans.

If you’d like to donate to the strike fund, go to here.

And if you’d like to harass Nightline Host Terry Moran, for being a sanctimonious talking head devoid of journalistic integrity, I suggest you tweet my favorite YouTube video at him!
 

 
Mafia -style politics in Madison? This is the text of the email that went out yesterday to Wisconsin Republicans from their Majority Leader, Scott Fitzgerald. Stunning, isn’t it? It’s as if these people have no clue what is about to hit them.

From: Sen.Fitzgerald
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 3:52 PM
To: *Legislative Senate Republicans
Subject: Senate Democrat voting privileges in standing committees

Dear Members,

With the return of the Senate Democrats this weekend, questions have arisen regarding Democrat members’ participation in Senate standing committee public hearings and executive sessions.

Please note that all 14 Democrat senators are still in contempt of the Senate. Therefore, when taking roll call votes on amendments and bills during executive sessions, Senate Democrats’ votes will not be reflected in the Records of Committee Proceedings or the Senate Journal. They are free to attend hearings, listen to testimony, debate legislation, introduce amendments, and cast votes to signal their support/opposition, but those votes will not count, and will not be recorded.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact my office.

Thank you,

Scott Fitzgerald
Senate Majority Leader
13th Senate District

Below, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald discusses his version of democracy(!!), but look what happened when the Wisconsin 14 actually did return. Fitzgerald thinks he can have it both ways. He’s wrong. What an appalling hypocritical scumbag this man is. I will look forward to his recall and hope it’s chock full of juicy Republican schadenfreude, because Republican schadenfreude is the best kind of schadenfreude there is. (And how fucking dumb—and politically tone-deaf—would you have to be to make a statement like this with THAT racket in the background? Fitzgerald only appears slightly less stupid than Sarah Palin did when she pardoned the turkey... and that’s nothin’ to be proud of, pal.)
 

 
Via The Raw Story:

Police estimated that more than 100,000 people flooded the streets around the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison Saturday, making the turnout larger than any of the fledgling Tea Party’s rallies. The largest turnout for a Tea Party rally is the estimated crowd of 60,000 to 70,000 people who marked in Washington, D.C. during the group’s September 12, 2009 demonstration.

The 2009 Tea Party rally’s crowd size is also notable for the controversy that surrounded it. ABC News published a piece claiming conservative activists had told them that 1 million to 1.5 million people turned out at the rally, when the corrected number was only a fraction of that size.

Below, an amazing time lapse document of events in Madison. Comprised of 2940 photos of protesters on the square.
 

“A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it.

The CEO takes 11 cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’ “

 
Apparently a lot of people have been updating their Facebook status with this joke today. Maybe you’d like to also?

 
Kathie Free, a retired Milwaukee public school social worker told Huffington Post:

“He owes it to us. Obama was not put into office just by the big money. He was put into office by millions of poor and middle-class people who walk the neighborhoods, talking to neighbors, getting the votes, and that’s how Obama got in, and he has to start remember how he got in. He’d better start working for the middle class and poor people.”

Well put, Kathie! Damn right he should be there.

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