Jason asks, "So we're against 'Community Organizing' now, really? The rotary club, the sons of liberty, the minutemen, the neighborhood watch, the grange, the preservation club, and so on, is bad now? Organizing people at the local level is a bad thing now, because the president used to do it?"

Jason, I can certainly understand your confusion. "Community organizing" sounds innocuous or even laudable, but the term is misleading and surely intentionally so. It misled millions of Americans who had never heard the term until Obama introduced it to them.

Stanley Kurtz's articles on this site can clarify the terminology for you. "Community organizing" isn't benign, and it has nothing in common with the Rotary Club, etc. Instead, it is basically rabble-rousing. For want of a better quick source (if you don't believe Stanley Kurtz), here is what Wikipedia says: "Unlike those who promote more-consensual 'community building,' community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless. . . . Organizing groups often seek out issues they know will generate controversy and conflict."

Thor's Goat
On what planet, in what strange universe, besides, of course, a schoolteacher's fevered mind, does a schoolteacher, who risks nothing, works pansy hours, gets tons of vacation, has no accountability, and so on, ad infinitum, imagine himself to be equal to a doctor, or even (although I hate to say it) a stinking lawyer?
If he were Solon himself, he might make a third of a doctor, who works any and all hours, is liable for any little screwup, does truly disgusting things every day, and who literally holds peoples' lives in his hands, with no guidance except his intellect and study.
If I hear one more fat, lazy teacher has expelled some poor kid with a plastic butter knife, because we have a "zero tolerance policy", I think we should just s-can the lot. After all, how much stupider can they make kids than the lot we have today? Perhaps if we allow some time for kids to simply play, with each other, not being supervised by overpaid ninnies, all will eventually turn out well.
I'm willing to try.

To call somebody a nazi is an excellent example of hate speech and the law should be forcefully enforced by the courts. Our past president the wimp Bush failed to do so; the Wisconsin governor should do it now! Where is the ACLU? Not a chance that that branch of the Communist Party US would intervene!
Our first socialist president - Roosevelt - said that strikes by government employees unions are illegal; in my opinion they should be prosecuted under RICO laws as criminal enterprises against the people.

Bmore liberal
So why is she still working for public schools? I've been hearing this dung for my whole life.
The only thing I ever heard Ronald Reagan say that was 100% foolish was when he said you wouldn't get good people to work in government if you didn't pay them more. I do not want government competing with private industry for workers. The government cannot go broke! That is beyond monopoly status. The government can send people with guns to take money from me. This is never to be forgotten.
Let us remember that the only enemy you really have in 21st century America is the government. No Romans, Visigoths or Vikings, nor even crazy Arabs, gravely endanger the general public. You may owe someone money, but only the government can evict you from your home, order your goods sold at auction, and put you in prison, even over a trifle or a misunderstanding.
All the Founders of this great Nation were far more afraid of centralized power than of a common criminal. You may easily vanquish a criminal. The government owns your life. Power does come from the barrel of a gun. I thought we were different. I guess I was mistaken.

@ Jason
I have zero sympathy nor respect for union heads - not all union members - who have destroyed public education in this country. Maybe if I called them Lollipop Lovers that would calm you down?

@ Bmore Liberal
Why am I not surprised? I used to think like you a long time ago. Then I realized the left was ruining almost everything it touched. If your own wife's possible future job switch doesn't open up your eyes, nothing will. The evidence is there, it ain't my fault you can't see it.

UNIONS are Destroying America.

Look at Detroit MI to see what the UNION's AND the DemocRAT party have planned for America.

A ONCE Great American City COMPLETELY DESTROYED
BY the DemocRAT Party and their UNION masters.

WAY to go AFL-CIO, UAW, AFT, and SEIU.

This IS what they WILL do to YOUR town if you LET them.

I don't think public service unions are a good thing, but "collective bargainistas", really? You don't think you're buying into the Fox enemy of the week a little too much? You don't even know what you'll be mad at next week. Don't you want a little more control over your own mind?

@Colonel Travis

That's certainly not the way I see it. I guess when you're hungry, everything looks like a sandwich...

@ Bmore Liberal

You just summed up how the collective bargainistas have screwed millions of children the past several decades.

Lawdawg. Truth be told, there aren't a lot of jobs where I can do a credible breakdown of the public v. private comparison, but teaching happens to be one of them. My wife is a high school English teacher and for years, she has struggled with the decision of whether to teach in a public or private school. It's true that pay and benefits and generally better in public schools, but there are enormous trade-offs. Resources in public schools (books, computers, overhead projectors) generally pale in comparison to those at private schools and every single public school teacher I know (dozens) spend their own money to provide supplies for his/her class; The facilities are generally better at private schools, and the working environment (air conditioning/heat, etc. - my wife works on the top floor of an un-air-conditioned public school building in downtown Baltimore, and in September, she has to bring in two industrial-strength fans - and then shout over them, just to make it at all tolerable); But the biggest difference is the student population. Students in private schools generally have highly motivated and usually upper-middle-class parents, who are partners in their education. I can tell you this is not the case in many public schools, where significantly greater attention must be paid to discipline, attendance, and such.

Sorry to be long-winded, but the long and short of it is that private schools generally offer more to potential teachers than public schools, when all the factors are added in. My wife has worked in rough public high school in Brooklyn and now Baltimore, mostly because she wanted to help at-risk and low-income kids - and she's done incredible work: To hear reports of her students' progress as they go on to college and careers is the most gratifying part of her job. But she will likely move on to work at a private school in the next two or three years. The pay may be lower (at least on average - it really depends on the school), but because of the difference in work environment, I think it will be a welcome change for her.

B'more Lib:
Nice selective data sampling at the Economist. How about a comparison of private skool teachers with public skool teacher?

Those brown shirts at the National Center for Education Statistics (part of US Dept of Ed) compiled salary date to compare the two and, uh oh, it doesn't look good.

External Link 

Oops, that doesn't even include non salary benefits. I wonder if anyone ever took a look at that? You betcha!

External Link 

BTW, my first cousin twice removed was the late George P. Mahoney, are we cousins?

To Lawdawg and others frothing about how over-paid and coddled public workers are, that old lefty rag - The Economist - says you're dead wrong...

External Link 

Bmore Liberal: Thank you for insisting on accuracy and truth regarding this very important issue.

I'm sure we can count on this self-same insistence on truth on port-side blogs and fora. I look forward to seeing you defend Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, and the Tea Parties against similar distortions.

@Michael Chappaquiddick:

When Liberal troll posters stop repeating the lie that this is a fight about collective bargaining, a discussion can begin. (Of course, it already has, like at posts like this one)

The phony lib collective bargaining comment explains something to me. If a fact is stated but does not include all possible other facts on a topic, it is a "lie." I wondered where that came from and now we know.

Walker proposed CB be limited to wages and only within the CPI rate of inflation. Thus the teachers unions retain this "hard fought right".

Leftist, statist and Dems (is that redundant) believe they have found a winning strategy for 2012 by pulling stunts like that in Wisconsin to attract independents ala the Tea Party of 09 and 10. The ace arrow in leftist quivers is "we have to protect the kids, the old, the infirm, the blind, etc." This would work well in yrs past, but won't this time.

Public employees have been cashing in over the decade leading up to 2008. This is especially true b/c a real estate bubble swells values and local gov't coffers are tied to these values. Now that the RE bubble has burst, the non public sector economy has taken a severe step back. So now that we (the poor tax payers) have learned to retrench, cut costs and live on less, we look at the public sector wages and benefits with a more careful eye.

Tell me again how we're the bad guys?

How about we teach and practice democracy?
The Democrats return and vote. Then join with their labor union friends to oust the Republicans in the next election and overturn this law - if they can.
The "if they can" is why they won't.
Power to the people!

I'm curious...who bargins on behalf of the taxpayer?

Bandmom is right.

Bmore Liberal's remarks bespeak the panic that is starting to set in among the socialists. The fact is that more people than not (+10%, according to a nationwide Rasumssen poll out this morning) support the Wisconsin governor.

So, now that they're loosing, the socialists will have you believe that "it never was about pay and benefits!" That trope didn't float up until late last week. Oh, no, of course not. Now it's all about "fundamental human rights!"

Bmore Lib thinks people who support the WI governor are too benighted to understand the subtle, underlying, "root" causes of the socialist angst. Posters Kennedy and Colonel Travis probably represent the norm. Anyone following this story knows very well what the "root cause" of the problem is: The ill-advised decision to vote in government-worker unionization back in the 60s, that decade of endless folly.

I'd like to hear Bmore Lib explain his position to the patron saint of liberalism, Franklin D. Roosevelt. When one of the "brain trusters" asked him about unionizing the WPA and CCC, he flatly refused, saying, "No man has a right to organize against the community."

I never thought I'd say, "FDR, where are you when we need you?"

Good point: “If a fact is stated but does not include all possible other facts on a topic, it is a ‘lie’."

Another omission in the “it’s all about collective bargaining” canard to deflect from their raison d’être of accruing power, union spokesthugs have also resurrected in Madison their perennial straw man of corporate taxes.

Every product sold by a corporation is taxed. Every employee of a corporation is taxed—union, non-union, minimum wage, and CEO—yet, their demagoguery asserts that employees are better served if their employer has less money.

The reason collective bargaining should not be allowed in the public sector is that it puts the employees in a position where they can (essentially) vote for their own bosses. If a private entity gives away the store, they go out of business. Not so with governments; they are monopolies of their services.

collective bargaining is a right?

When Corner posters stop repeating the lie that this is a fight about workers not wanting to have benefits cut, and is ACTUALLY a fight about their right to collective bargaining, that discussing can begin. (Of course, it already has, at posts more fact-based than this one

This comment explains something to me. If a fact is stated but does not include all possible other facts on a topic, it is a "lie." I wondered where that came from and now we know.

A lot of people, after watching the demonstration of civility and ethics of the past week, have decided that public employee unions, illegal in 24 states, must go in Wisconsin and other states that seek solvency. That excludes California, of course, and, probably, Maryland, full as it is of government workers.

Ok, so I guess the title "The Nature of Community Organizing" is just a typo?

The private sector is paying for the public sector pay packages.

Whether the argument is centered around the existence of public unions, collective bargaining, what share of benefits should be paid for by whom, hardly anyone disagrees that the system has effectively bankrupted the states.

And liberals should want these salaries and benefits cut just as much as conservatives, albeit for the wrong reasons (so the money can go to... yoga lessons... high speed rail... free this or that...).

Here's a thought: Anyone who recklessly and/or baselessly infers in public that another person is a Nazi should be charged with inciting hatred (hate speech).

No, Jason, that's not the point. Here's what has our knickers in a twist:

The present occupant of the Oval Office voted "present" on his budget and concocted it based upon rate assumptions that would fail a first year student of finance.

Next, he looses his hounds on a state government duly elected where there is some evidence of adult thinking about a fiscal death spiral.

Finally, a substantial number of teachers -- members of a profession many of us see as "different" because of an oft claimed special cocern for our children -- bug out on their jobs under the guise of illness.

Clear enough now?

All the rest is extraneous to the point.

"Public employees in Wisconsin are paid and pensioned far better than their counterparts in the private sector."

I would like to the source of this, because I have seen the exact opposite:http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/wisconsin_public_servants_already_face_a_compensation_penalty/

"Workers with a bachelor’s degree or more—which constitute nearly 60% of the state and local workforce in Wisconsin—are compensated between $20,000 less (if they just have a bachelor’s degree) to over $82,000 a year less (if they have a professional degree, such as in law or medicine)."

So we're against "Community Organizing" now, really? The rotary club, the sons of liberty, the minutemen, the neighborhood watch, the grange, the preservation club, and so on, is bad now? Organizing people at the local level is a bad thing now, because the president used to do it?

Bmore Liberal:

You quickly label contrary arguments as "lies", ignore all other arguments and insist only on discussion based on your premises.

The real discussion is over. The Democrats lost on November 2nd. The Union was NOT making those concessions then. Now thet are trying to prevent these changes by undemocratic means (a call-in-sick strike, hiding democratic senators in Rockville), etc).

Here is what we fear: When Democrats win, they insist on their way and get it. Scorched earth. When Republicans win, the system is shut down by undemocratic methods.

Now, about YOUR lie: "...a fight about their right to collective bargain." Not true. Walker's plan allows them to bargain over their salaries, but not the medical and pension benefits that are bankrupting the system.

Here's a thought: Anyone who recklessly and/or baselessly infers that another person is a Nazi should be charged with inciting hatred (hate speech).

Nice talking point Bmore Liberal. The Governor is not getting rid of collective bargaining for wages within the CPI. Over that, management gets to weigh in (you know, the taxpayers) with a referendum.

I think the real heartache for the unions is the state will no longer be their dues collector. In NYC, when that stopped, the union had 35% less dues collected. Gee, what a concept, union members might not pay their dues unless they're forcibly taken from their paychecks. Another big issue, glossed over of course, is the recertification of the union every year. Sort of like democracy, but I guess that's inimical to the union - once they get their hooks in, you can't get out.

So Bmore, I think people on this site know EXACTLY what the point of the protests is. And they ARE using fraudulent excuses to get out of teaching. They are so not for the children.