‘Civility’

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Ann Althouse: “After all those efforts to paint Tea Partiers as using violent images and rhetoric, these pictures from Madison have got to hurt.” It’s also going to hurt that Democrats are issuing “demands” like … uh, hostage-takers. But as Ace of Spades says, there are times when liberals find a “Climate of Hate” useful.

Here’s an Associated Press video report:

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard points out the irony of the union-orchestrated protests:

According to the state of Wisconsin, the average teacher salary in Wisconsin is $49,093 annually. (With benefits, the average total compensation is $77,857.) With 190 school days per year, Wisconsin public education employees make about $258 per day. So in an effort to avoid contributing to their own pensions and funding 6 percent more of their own health care premiums, teachers have taken unpaid leave to protest and have given up nearly $500 – so far. . . . . What’s more, Wisconsin teachers pay as much as $1100 each year in compulsory union dues. If the legislation passes, they will no longer be required to pay those dues – returning that money to their own pockets.

Maybe the teachers need a refresher course in math. And if Democrats and their union-goon allies think they’re going to win the P.R. battle in Wisconsin, perhaps they ought to heed Neil at Eternity Matters:

Unemployment is stuck at 10% — which means non-union unemployment is much higher — and they think this will improve their reputations?
Poorly performing teachers close at least 15 school districts to go fight for their entitlements? Yeah, that’ll garner a lot of sympathy.
Obama’s campaign arm is in the middle of this? Shocking.

The unemployed, the under-employed and regular folks trying to pay their bills aren’t likely to have a lot of love for people who (a) have jobs, (b) work at taxapayer expense, (c) get paid more money than the average taxpayer, and (d) go on strike because they don’t want to pay a dime toward their own generous benefits.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s obnoxious Ed Schultz broadcast live from the mob scene in Madison last night. Michelle Malkin has compiled important economic facts about the Wisconsin strike. As I explain over at The American Spectator:

It is obvious that if voters and taxpayers pay attention to the facts, Walker wins and the srikers lose . . .
Gov. Walker is being compared to Calvin Coolidge, and that’s an enormous compliment. President Obama and Democrats have placed themselves squarely on the wrong side of the issue.

“On, Wisconsin!”

LIVE AT FIVE – 2.18.11

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TOP NEWS
Bahrain Moves Quickly To Crush Protests

Armored units move to suppress Bahraini protests

Security forces level protesters’ camp early Thursday morning

Democrats Flee Wisconsin To Stall Union Reform Bill
Meanwhile, Union spokesmen piously wrap themselves in the Egyptian flag, assert global importance of their “struggle”



Libyan “Day Of Anger” Protests Reportedly Leave 19 Dead
Government allegedly warned that live ammo would be used on protesters



POLITICS
Budget Dispute Stokes Fears Of Government Shutdown

The Speaker throws down the gauntlet

Boehner says no continuing resolution will be passed without cuts

Mayor Bloomberg’s Budget Fix Depends On Help From Albany




Latinos Lead The Way As Texas Gets Even Bigger

Senate Passes FAA Bill, Resolves Reagan National Airport Fight

JFK Bomb Plot Mastermind Gets Life In Prison



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Daley Blasts Airlines For Stalling On O’Hare Expansion
Consumer Prices Jump In January
Motorola Atrix 4G Phone Transforms Into Laptop
Here Comes The Sun: Solar Flares Make Way To Earth



SPORTS
Cabrera’s Arrest A Concern For Tigers

Miguel Cabrera: Busted

Back on the bottle again?

NFL Owners, Players Agree To Mediation

Iowa High School Wrestler Refuses To Wrestle Girl

Alabama-Auburn Rivalry No Longer A Good Thing For College Football?

Don Mattingly Takes Charge Of Troubled Dodgers

Danica Patrick Taking It Slow In Second NASCAR Season

Leafs GM Denies Kaberle-To-Bruins Deal In Place




Notre Dame Men’s Hoops: Veterans Keep Foot On The Gas

Big East Swim Championships: Relays Spark Louisville



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Bieber Backlash In Effect?

Justin Bieber: Catching flak for being truthful

Teen dream not so PC in interview

Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like “Sex In The City 3”, But Not Now

J-Woww To Strip For Playboy

Lindsay To Charlie: Thanks For The Support!

It’s a Boy For Rod Stewart

Mila Kunis Melts For Role Of Big Bad Witch In Sam Raimi’s Oz

Celine Dion Proudly Shows Off Her 4-Month-Old Twins



Serene Branson Had Complex Migraine, Not Stroke, Says Doc

Gwyneth Paltrow Mediates Truce Between Kings Of Leon, Ryan Murphy

“Firefly” Returning To Cable; Fillion Says He’d Play Mal Again



FOREIGNERS
Belgians Strip To Protest Continuing Lack Of Government
Egypt Jails Former Ministers In Corruption Probe
17 Killed In Tanzania Arms Depot Blast
Was Davis Running Drone Programme In Pakistan?



BLOGS & STUFF
Gateway Pundit: Tea Party Protesters Chase Truant Wisconsin Democrats Out Of Hiding Place
Mary Katherine Ham: AWOL Wisconsin Democrat Calls CNN With List Of Demands
Conservatives4Palin: Ben Smith’s Moronic Meltdown
Allahpundit: Palin Doesn’t Question Obama’s Citizenship Or Religion
Shannon Love: Are There Any Adults At The New York Times?
Jawa Report: Jihadi Attorney Takes Aim At Jawas, Who Go To Court For Protective Order
Yid With Lid: Did Sheila Jackson-Lee Have a Lobotomy, Or Is She Naturally This Stupid?
Blackfive: The Difference Between Pacifism And Non-violence


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Democrats, Republicans Battle in Oversight Committee Hearing

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The hearing was about a new report from the GAO exposing waste in government:

[Committe Chairman Rep. Darrell] Issa’s panel was discussing the GAO’s biennial report, released this week, on areas with high risk for waste. In its study, Congress’ investigative agency placed the Interior Department’s oversight of oil-and-gas resources on to the list . . .
The study found that Interior’s management of oil-and-gas issues faced challenges in collecting revenue, hiring and training sufficient staff, and in its efforts to reorganize. The department announced last year that it was breaking down what was once known as the Minerals Management Service.

Democrats will fight against any cut to any government program anywhere — except the Pentagon:

[A] House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Thursday to examine ways to trim the budget deficit devolved into a public-vs.-private battle, with Republicans looking to cut bloated federal programs and Democrats blaming not-always-accountable federal contractors.
In a nearly four-hour hearing, committee Republicans and fiscally conservative witnesses listed a host of government programs and offices that should be cut, eliminated, privatized, or more highly scrutinized.
Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., cited the pay and benefits of federal employees while others cited waste in the Recovery Act or billions lost in improper payments through Medicare and Medicaid.
“The president’s [fiscal 2012] budget adds approximately 15,000 employees to the federal payroll at a time when private sector unemployment has remained above 9 percent for the longest duration since the Great Depression,” Issa said.
But Democrats, led by ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., repeatedly directed the conversation back to federal contractors. Cummings cited the Government Accountability Office’s 2011 High-Risk List, released on Wednesday, which included six programs directly related to federal contracting.
“When you examine all of these together, they have a massive impact, accounting for hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year,” Cummings said. . . .
Thomas Schatz, president of the advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste, called on Congress to defund the Export-Import Bank, which is charged with aiding foreign exchange; the Essential Air Service, which provides subsidies to continue airline service in less populated regions; and the Agriculture Department’s Market Access Program, which helps farmers and growers promote U.S. products overseas.
Schatz also recommended repealing the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires contractors to pay the prevailing wage on federal construction projects costing more than $2,000. “The mandate raises the cost of government projects by 15 percent and costs taxpayers more than $1 billion annually, not including $100 million in administrative costs,” he said.
Others offered even bolder proposals. Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, argued the private sector rather than the government is best-suited to run Amtrak, the U.S. Postal Service and the air traffic control system.

Democrats Believe Secret to Winning Back Congress Is … Pro-Abortion Voters?

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Dave Weigel at Slate has the lowdown on their strategy:

The man in charge of taking back the House for Democrats is talking about rape. When the Republicans took Congress, says Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat, they didn’t focus on creating jobs. “They focused on redefining rape.”
He’s referring to the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, the first of several bills Republicans introduced to chip away at the unpopular bits of “Obamacare” . . .
“We need to bring out 9 million independent voters,” Israel explains. “If you do a geographic analysis of them, they live in about 37 fairly suburban, moderate districts across the country. Those 9 million independent voters, in those 37 [districts], elected Republicans because Republicans said that they would, on Day One, focus on revitalizing jobs. And what did they do on Day One? They redefined rape. That is not what those independent voters expected from the new Republican majority.”

And guess which target is at the top of the DCCC’s list?

The new members include lots of people who took over suburban districts that had been trending more liberal. The Republicans who won, in most cases, didn’t run on abortion. They got pro-life support—the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List endorsed 14 Republican congressional candidates who took over Democratic seats. But Democrats remain convinced that the new class was never smoked out.
Take Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., one of the Democrats’ favorite examples. She started in politics as a spokeswoman for Operation Rescue in the 1980s. She didn’t hide this fact, but when she began running, she said she’d “be really careful not to make this a referendum on abortion.” Her opponent, incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei, tried to make abortion an issue. He lost. And when Buerkle got to Congress she immediately became a prominent pro-life advocate.

Regular readers here know all about Ann Marie Buerkle. Barely two weeks before Election Day, a poll showed her trailing by 12 points, but she won by 567 votes and was the last Republican to clinch victory in the historic mid-term election.

Buerkle is a member of the important House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and, as one of her constituents said in a letter to the editor, she is fighting against regulations that business leaders “believe are hindering job creation.”

No GOP freshman is more vulnerable. None will be attacked harder in the 2012 campaign. In fact, Democrats are already running attack ads against her. And the only way she can fight back is if the people who helped get her elected will give now to help fund Ann Marie Buerkle’s re-election campaign. Every $25 or $50 helps.

Cheesehead Revolution?

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They elected Ron Johnson to the Senate, elected Scott Walker governor, and elected Reince Priebus as RNC chairman. Now the Wisconsin Republicans have chased Democrats out of the state senate:

Law enforcement officers are searching for Democratic senators boycotting a Senate vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair plan Thursday in an attempt to bring the lawmakers back to the Capitol to allow Republicans to act on the bill.
Stymied by the missing Democrats, Republicans adjourned the Senate Thursday shortly before 5 p.m. and said they would come back Friday morning to try to take up a bill that would cut public employee benefits and most union bargaining rights.
One Democratic senator said that he believed most of the members of his caucus have gone to another state to prevent enough lawmakers from being present in the Senate to take a final vote on the controversial measure. A Democratic source familiar with the senators’ whereabouts said they were at the Clock Tower Resort & Conference Center in Rockford, Ill., but might be leaving soon.
Walker Thursday afternoon called for Democrats to call off their “stunt” and “show up and do the job they’re paid to do.”
“It’s either a matter of making reductions and making modest requests of our government employees or making massive layoffs at a time when we don’t need anyone else laid off,” Walker said.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Jim Hoft reports at Gateway Pundit:

The Rockford Tea Party just chased the Wisconsin democrats out of the Best Western. They just boarded their bus and are leaving the Best Western!

UPDATE II: I’m sure Wisconsin voters will be glad to learn that Team Obama has helped organize the union goons in their state:

The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America arm — the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign — is playing an active role in organizing protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to strip most public employees of collective bargaining rights. . . .
OfA Wisconsin’s field efforts include filling buses and building turnout for the rallies this week in Madison, organizing 15 rapid response phone banks urging supporters to call their state legislators, and working on planning and producing rallies, a Democratic Party official in Washington said.

UPDATE III: Important background from Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh:

The teachers union in a state whose public schools get solid C-minus grades in state-by-state rankings have decided to take a break from failing to teach children and bring busloads of Ms. Krabappels up to Madison as well. At least 15 school districts around the state reportedly cancelled classes today as teachers declined to show up.
Wisconsin’s budget standoff is drawing national attention, and like so many states where demands for increasing public largesse and special privileges for government employees are getting louder, the Badger State is out of money. Before taking office, Walker, a Republican, was told by his Democratic predecessor Jim Doyle that without spending cuts beyond what Walker has proposed, the deficit could go from $2.2 billion to $3.3 billion.

UPDATE IV: Jimmie Bise Jr.:

This is The Week that Should
End Public Sector Unions

Bahrain Burning, Silver Soaring

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Trouble in the Sunni kingdom in the Persian Gulf that is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet:

MANAMA, Bahrain — Troops and tanks locked down the capital of this tiny Gulf kingdom after riot police swinging clubs and firing tear gas smashed into demonstrators, many of them sleeping, in a pre-dawn assault Thursday that uprooted their protest camp demanding political change. . . .
Foreign Minister Khalid Al Khalifa justified the crackdown as necessary because the demonstrators were “polarizing the country and” pushing it to the “brink of the sectarian abyss.”
Speaking to reporters after meeting with his Gulf counterparts, he also said the violence was “regrettable.”

Here’s a video report from Euro News:

Raw footage from Russia Today:

Instability in the Middle East is bad for business: 

Qatar benchmark stock index fell to the lowest this year and Bahrain’s 2020 dollar bond dropped to a record on concern unrest in the Persian Gulf may spread after protests escalated in Bahrain. . . .
Markets in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman are closed today for an Islamic holiday, while Saudi Arabia’s is shut for the weekend.
Investors are “de-risking due to the events in Bahrain mainly,” said Mahdi Mattar, head of research at Abu Dhabi-based CAPM Investment PJSC, an investment banking company. “Both local and the few international investors might want to reduce their exposure” amid the unrest and as most markets are shut.

Instability always creates a market demand for security. Gold hit a five-week high today, but the real hot action is in silver:

Silver hit a session high of $31.38 an ounce and was up 2.4 percent at $31.37 an ounce in afternoon trading.
The gold-silver ratio — the number of silver ounces needed to buy an ounce of gold — fell to a low of 44, a key area near its lowest level in five years, as silver has outperformed gold. Year to date, silver was nearly 2 percent higher, swinging to positive territory with Thursday’s rally, while gold was still 3 percent lower.
The prospect of rising inflation, not only in areas currently affected by the phenomenon such as China and India, but also in the United States and Europe, has become an oft-cited reason to hold gold in recent weeks.
“The mood of the market is that an inflation story, a war story, an Egypt story, a Bahrain story will all be bullish for gold, because the market is looking for those at the moment,” said ANZ Bank analyst Peter Hillyard.

In 1986, you could buy silver for $6 an ounce. It’s now trading at five times that price.

VIDEO: Fun With Fireworks

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Watch this low-breaking shell set off car alarms:

Being a serious fireworks buff, let me explain what appears to have happened here: The shell was either fired from the wrong size mortar or else the lift charge was just weak, resulting in the “break” being at least 50 feet too low for safety.

Judging from the size of the break, I’d say that was at least a 3-inch shell, which is much larger than the largest consumer mortar shells (1.75-inch) sold in the U.S. There are consumer 3-inch shells, but they’re sold either in pre-loaded #500 tubes or in the so-called NOB (“nine on a board”) 500-gram finale racks, to avoid the risk of injury from idiots trying to re-load a “hot” tube.

The risk of injury from consumer fireworks, when used according to proper safety instructions, is really quite small, as I explained in a 2006 Reason magazine article, “Light Fuse, Get Away.” And as it’s now less than five months until the Fourth of July, its probably time for me to start planning my next big purchase for the annual Alabama show.

That’s the 2009 show. In 2008, I wrote an American Spectator article about my preparations for the show at Camp FUBAR on Lake Weiss.

Hit the tip jar — this year’s show is gonna be awesome.

Nirs Rosen, Moonbat

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“Certainly, if the goal of the war is to reduce the threat from this group called al-Qaeda — which may not even exist anymore — then nobody has explained why increasing American occupation in Afghanistan, where you don’t even have al-Qaeda, is going to help weaken al-Qaeda . . . A couple hundred guys who got lucky and crashed a few towers with planes — not really a big threat. . . . September 11 wasn’t really a big deal.”
— Nirs Rosen, January 2010

This is the guy whose Tweets about “war monger” Lara Logan cost him his fellowship at New York University, but the question I have is, “Whose idea was it to award him a fellowship in the first place?”

What the hell is going on at NYU? This guy is a disgusting wad of hate, as Jeffrey Goldberg explains:

Nir Rosen, the journalist who infamously mocked Lara Logan . . . has been saying hugely outrageous things for years. . . . He is sympathetic to the Taliban; he thinks al Qaeda poses no threat to America; he wishes Americans would “get over” 9/11; and he thinks Israel is an “abomination” that should be destroyed.

Goldberg’s readers called attention to an article Rosen wrote in 2002, at age 25, calling Israel a land of “bloody nationalism, paranoid identity and violent religion” and actively wishes for the “punitive bombing of Tel Aviv.”

Given that sort of sentiment, how would you expect Rosen to explain his comments about Lara Logan?

A part of me was bothered by how celebrities, especially white ones, get so much attention, and before I realized it was a sexual assault I was sort of anticipating a return to the old theme about unleashed brown natives attacking a white woman.

In other words, Rosen was expressing his contempt for white “celebrities” and his concern about stereotyping of “brown natives.” Never mind that “brown natives attacking a white woman” was, in fact, what happened in Cairo — Rosen cares more for the propaganda value of the news than he cares for the unfortunate facts.

Rosen’s quote dismissing the threat from al-Qaeda and saying 9/11 “wasn’t really a big deal” comes from this Jan. 15, 2010, Russia Today interview via Fire Andrea Mitchell: