Wrestlin' in Wisconsin

You can form them you just could not do anything with them once form so unions become pointless and that is indeed taking away workers rights to have unions in more then name.

Let not be that dishonest as it does your side no good at all.

I think the rules are different for state workers...I saw a site that asserts that 5 states outlaw union representation, 11 allow at the choice of the workers, and the rest mandate that the workers will be unionized. I would be very interested to know if this is factually correct.
http://www.nctq.org/tr3/scope/

If the citizens of Wisconsin, or the GOP, have turned against the Gov he is not a good enough politician to know

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030405713.html?hpid=topnews

I certainly have my doubts about the claims of his incompetence...has he has been around the block more than a few times in his career..

Lord do you have any shame Hawkeye as you do know that the idiot got prank and I had even given you the youtube sound of him acting like a very damn asshole/fool.

The word incompetence does not cover this fool.

What that tells me is that he does not know very well the guy who it was claimed to be calling , which argues 180 degrees against what the left claims this event means......It is all about the spin baby, and since the news media leans Left the reports and assumptions skew Left. I am a Leftist myself, but unlike you boys I believe truth trumps political spin.

I believe the 70,000 protesters that had shown up day after day, a dem party with the guts not to roll over but to have it senators leave the state and therefore shutting down the government, a party that already have a recall of more then enough of the GOP senators to change the power balance completely in less then 60 days and voter surveys by both the left and the right showing that the GOP control of Wisconsin days is number.

That was one day, and how many of them were bussed in? I heard that many were from Illinois and Minn, but I never heard a number.

I should add that professional agitator Michael Moore showed up today in Madison but the protest crowd numbers were massively down from the last two Saturdays anyways....this thing seems out of gas....

You are very fast to buy into the fox network nonsense it would seem.

In fact in this whole thread you had sound like you are working for the fox network or the Koch brothers.

I love the scene of unions protectors misbehaving that was air on the Fox Network with the only problem being the palm trees in the background.

Oh yes it was an honest error according to FOX with some CA Video just accidentally being label and shown as Wisconsin protesters.

No, I was born in 1962 so I am old enough to remember back when labor was Big Labor when sympathy strikes and not crossing the picket line was normal and expected behavior. When I hear that workers from neighboring states are in Madison to join the protest not only am I not surprised but if I had not heard this was the case I would be asking where the **** is the back-up??

My only question is what number of the 70K were out of staters and thus not relevant? Nobody seems to have tried to find out, which does not exactly surprise me given the decrepit state of American Journalism but it disappoints none the less.

You first claim that they were bussed in, but you have no evidence of it. Makes a lot of sense.

There were many first hand interviews with people on the scene who volunteered that they were from out of state, from their angle the fact that they had come so far to support their Wisconsin brothers was a feather in their cap, they were not shy about admitting it.

Look, I am on your side here, but I find your brain dead regurgitation of the DEM talking points.... divorced from reality as they are .... disquieting. Considering that this is the same bullshit that we got on Firefly for in the Rape thread I had hoped for better from you...

I want the Unions to win this fight, but it is very far from a sure thing that they will. This is a power fight, and from what I can see the GOP is in a better position to win this fight than the DEMS are.

Nothing is a sure thing but the situation is looking damn good for the Democrats.

HuffPost Reporting

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96Local Poll: Wisconsin Wants Compromise

First Posted: 03/ 6/11 12:13 AM Updated: 03/ 6/11 12:13 AM

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Submit this storydigg reddit stumble The recent vow by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) that he "can't compromise" with Democratic legislators on union rights runs sharply counter to preferences of Wisconsinites, according to a new survey of the state sponsored by a conservative think tank.

The poll, conducted last week and sponsored by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), finds nearly two-thirds of the state's adults (65 percent) prefer that Walker "negotiate with Democrats and public employee's unions in order to find a compromise solution" to the "current conflict over public employee benefits and collective bargaining rights." A third (33 percent) prefer the alternative, that Walker "stand strong for the plan he has proposed no matter how long the protests go on."

WPRI bills itself as "Wisconsin's Free Market Think Tank" and their web site features articles critical of the union protests and supportive of Walker's agenda. But Kenneth Goldstein, the University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor who directed the survey, tells The Huffington Post that he "had control over every aspect of the survey methodology" and applied the "best practices" of the field. The survey used live interviewers and reached respondents over both their landline and mobile telephones, and WPRI has released full results and cross-tabulations for every question asked (here and here).

The results of the WPRI survey on common measures are also in line with other recent public polls of the state. Like other surveys, for example, WPRI found that Walker has a net negative job rating, with 43 percent expressing approval and 53 disapproval. That result falls within the margin of sampling error four other surveys conducted in recent weeks, including an automated survey by the Democratic-affiliated firm Public Policy Poling and two surveys sponsored by the AFL-CIO.



Also, like the AFL-CIO surveys released a week ago, the WPRI study found more positive views of Walker's opponents in the ongoing controversy, the legislative Democrats (50 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable) and the public employee unions (59 percent favorable, 34 percent unfavorable).



The survey included a question testing reactions to the following description of Walker's plan:

As you may know, Governor Scott Walker recently announced a plan that would require public employees to contribute to their own pensions and pay greater amounts for their health insurance, which would, in effect, be a pay reduction. The plan would permit most public employees to negotiate only their wages, and future wage increases above the rate of inflation would have to be approved by a voter referendum. Contracts would be limited to one year. In addition, Walker's plan also changes rules to require public employee unions to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union, stops state or local government from collecting union dues, and allows individual members to decide if they wish to pay union dues. Unions for law enforcement and firefighters would be exempt from the changes.
More Wisconsin adults disapprove (51 percent) than approve (46 percent) of the plan as described, and strong strong opposition (42 percent) is 10 points greater than strong support (32 percent).

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Tabulations of these results by party identification show stron

So Bill, we have one poll that is 51-46 against Walker with a 4% error factor and you want to claim that the sky is falling on Walker?? We also have this

http://www.wpri.org/polls/March2011/poll0311.html


http://www.wpri.org/polls/March2011/ToplinesWPRIFebMar%202011.pdf


I may not be a PHD, but from where I sit it looks like the two sides are running neck and neck. 51-46 against the Walker plan and 51-47 against the Dems running away.


Facts are a bitch, aren't they Bill......

I have found a flaw in the poll that Bill provided as well...in it 14% of the respondents are union members, but only 14.2% of the employed in Wisconsin are union members http://www.bls.gov/ro5/unionwi.pdf
...if we factor in the 7% unemployed and some large but unknown to me number who have given up looking for work or have no interests in working (stay at home parents for instance) who are of course not union members then this number of union members polled should have been much lower if the sample was truely representative of the adult citizens . Some math wiz could figure it out, but I guess about 10%-11%. Goldstein has a rep for being non partisan, but he certainly blew it here. It is biased towards unions and the DEMS.

EDIT: if 20% of the adults are not working which seems reasonable then 11.2% of the respondents should have been union members and not the 14% who were sampled.

.86(.80) + .20= .888
86% (80% employed) + 20% dont work either by choice or not= 88.8% adults not union members
Once you factor in this 3% sample mistake plus the polls 4% error rate then the poll results dont show the Dems winning this fight at all.

Another thing I wonder is where the **** does Obama get off blasting Walker and the WI GOP? This is a state matter, not a federal concern at at. Unlike with the Arizona illegal immigrant law where Obama can make a flimsy argument that it is with-in his lane to comment here it is clearly none of his business at all. Obama's behavior is consistent with that of the leader of an overly large and overly intrusive federal government which is in dire need of pruning with a hatchet.

Your statement demonstrates that you have no idea how the Constitution works.

Believe it or not, the President has First Amendment rights, too.