It's RadioACTIVITY not Radiation, people!

I hate to have to do this, and it seems almost as pointless as trying to get George W. Bush to stop saying, "nukUler", but almost every major newspaper and TV report keeps talking about "radiation leaks" and detecting "radiation traces" in California, and generally worrying about "radiation". The correct term is radioACTIVITY. Radiation is electrons and neutrons. Light is a form of electromagnetic "radiation", because it *RADIATES* in all directions from a source. Radio waves are another form of radiation. We do not say that "radiation" leaks out of a light bulb or the antenna of a radio. Furthermore, the "radiation" from a light bulb, in the form of light, will not set off a geiger counter, nor do we say that the light is "radioactive".

On the other hand, there are RADIOACTIVE materials. These include plutonium and uranium (some types more than others), for example. These materials, when they decay, DO emit "radiation", the most harmful of which can be *ionizing* radiation. If these material get inside your body then they will continue to emit harmful radiation, because they are are radioactive. People take supplements like potassium iodide (KI) to block the uptake of a radioactive form of iodine into the thyroid.

Other materials may be only slightly radioactive. For example, radioACTIVE steam was released from the reactors in Japan early on, in an attempt to help cool them. This radioACTIVE material quickly dissipated in the air. The mildly radioactive material is still there, but it spreads out so that it is less concentrated and therefore less harmful in smaller doses.

Here is a summary: Radiation does not equal radioactive. Radioactive does equal radiation.

Radiation itself is not necessarily harmful. Many things radiate (and therefore constitute "radiation"), such as light and radio waves. The "radiation" produced by nuclear (no not nucUler) reactors in Japan, like the light from a light bulb in Japan, cannot travel very far without becoming very faint. Airborne radioACTIVE materials, on the other hand, from the Japanese reactor may indeed travel a much greater distance. A few particles can make it all the way across the Pacific Ocean, though, it is very very very (very very ...) improbable that large number of particles will make it all the way to California. It is far far far (far far...) more likely that the radioactive material which may be released will stay in Japan. For example, when the US bombed Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) we didn't worry about the (don't say radiation) radioACTIVE material from the bomb crossing back over the Pacific Ocean and "getting us". Most all of the radioactive material stayed in a close region around the site of the bomb. We used to conduct above ground nuclear tests in the desert southwestern US. In fact, the first such one was at Trinity, New Mexico. We also exploded nuclear devices on or near islands in the Pacific. All of these threw radioACTIVE materials into the air which circulated all over the place. If we have so much time on our hands that we want to worry about utter nonsense, then it would be better to worry about those, because they produced far more radioactive materials. Chernobyl likewise released a great amount of radioactive material, but not much of it made it to the US mainland.

I know it won't stop the constant, almost intentional misuse of these terms for me to point all this out, but it feels good to do it anyway. In fact, as with "nucUler", people will probably decide to make the mistake more than ever before and push for a redefinition of the terms so that they can finally be correct about something.

In japanese "it is difficult" means "no effin way"

Just in case people haven't picked up on this, in Japanese culture and etiquette, they avoid saying that no or declaring that something is impossible. Instead they often use the euphemism "it is difficult". Therefore, when the prime minister says the situation there is "extreme difficult", what he is really saying is that it is effed up beyond belief and that they have no clue how to fix it. Take the two nuclear reactors that are melting down. They keep making these excuses that say things like , "gosh we can't be sure that the core has really melted, because we haven't been able to look inside and see". Well no kidding. But would we really accept this kind of idiotically evasive answer from anyone in our own country if a reactor near us had its cooling equipment explode and emergency efforts looked partially effective at best. There is absolutely no chance that some melting of the rods has not occurred. Cesium monitoring stations are reporting high levels of radioactivity. Let's not try to sugar coat this or hide behind the smokescreen of uncertainty that always exists in any emergency. Minimizing the situation will not change it or prevent the facts from coming to light in the not-at-all distant future anway..

Nuclear Power's Cheating Heart

I know that many people, especially of the completely uninformed right-wing variety, are in love with nuclear power. In their one-size-fits-all world, it should produce 100% of all power. It must really be a b*tch to see absolute and unequivocal proof that their lover has strayed again, in this case, in Japan at the the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Facility, where the cooling system failed, following a massive earthquake. This caused the cooling water to rise above the boiling point and released about 1000 times the normal level of radioactivity.

That was before the cooling system exploded, crumbling the walls of the reactor containment facility and leaking even more radioactive material. These are the same containment facilities that we are constantly assured could take a direct hit from a 747 or withstand the strongest earthquakes. In fact the building did withstand the earthquake, it that turns out not to matter, because it set off a chain of events where the potential for much more serious problems, including a partial meltdown, are possible.

Of course, it is possible that things will be brought back under control. The plan is now to flood the reactor with seawater before temperatures can get high enough for the rods to melt. Perhaps a Japanese Chernobyl will be avoided. Perhaps it will remain only be a Japanese Three Mile Island. However, like the TMI incident, it is questionable whether this multi-billion dollar facility will ever operate again. Three other reactors in Japan also shut down, BTW, though presumably they shut down safely. Hopefully there will not be 4 Japanese Three Mile Island incidents. The quake was devastating enough without additional man-made disasters compounding the situation.

Imagine if a wind or solar generation facility that cost billions of dollars just suddenly and unpredictably became unusable. Imagine if a 20 kilometer radius around it had to be evacuated indefinitely. Imagine if three other billion dollar alternative energy plants also shut down indefinitely.

Nuclear power boosters, after licking their wounds for a while and declaring everyone else to have over-reacted, often sit around nursing their broken hearts. Nuclear power lets them down again and again, but like battered housewives, they dutifully return to it, and in relatively short order. They always talk about the good that they see in it. They talk about the latest, greatest, fancy, high-tech reactors that cannot possibly let them down the way the current ones seem to. They talk about all the times that things didn't go wrong, and how this is just a minor blip.

Of course, if we were getting 100% of our power from this type of nuclear facility then it would be a blip multiplied at least 10 fold. Instead of only having a near disaster every couple decades, we might have only every couple years. And the odds of a near disaster turning into a total disaster also increase.

I believe that the newest, safest forms of nuclear fission should continue to be investigated, but it should only be part of the power mix, not anywhere near 100%. The main reason is cost, and the next major reason is that fact that these facilities are never as safe in practice as they are claimed to be in theory. The latest generation reactors, such as Pebble Bed Moderated Reactors (PBMB) or even Liquid Fluoride Thorium Moderated Reactors (LFTMR) supposedly cannot melt down the same way. PBMRs, are not even cooled with water, and supposedly the encased "pebble" fuel would stop producing heat efficiently without the circulation of a coolant. LFTMRs also avoid the buildup of Xenon, and have no fuel rods at all. Yet these are never the reactors that seem to get built, perhaps because they would be way more expensive than the older, mass-producible generations of reactors we have today.

It is, simple put, 100% false that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear. The same amount of money and time spent drilling super-deep geothermal wells would likewise produce huge amounts of power that was always available, for example. However, the main issue is avoiding one-size-fits-all thinking. Having multiple, diversified power sources makes things more robust, not less. The wind doesn't blow all the time, but it's always blowing somewhere and the sun is pretty predictable too, especially in the desert.

Demand for power itself is variable, so it is acceptable to have variable sources of generation. The problem with nuclear is that it does not vary easily with demand and therefore a lot of power generated at low peak times must be stored. Without certain renewables, like hydro power, nuclear would be even more wasteful than it is already, because there would be no practical way to store this excess production.

The point is that we not put all our eggs in one nuclear basket. All but the most blinded by love should be able to see that now, one would hope.

If Wisconsin dirty trick was legal.....

If it was possible for Republicans to pass a bill with no democrats present .... then that proves that people criticizing democrats for obstruction don't know what they're talking about. After all, right wingers, who wanted democrats to return so that they could be steam rollered kept screaming about how the legislators weren't doing their jobs, but now these same republicans say that it wasn't even necessary for democrats to be there in the first place to pass legislation. If it was legal for Republicans to act as they did, which is highly doubtful, given strict open-meeting laws in Wisconsin, then clearly these Republicans were incompetent at their own job, because they didn't act for three weeks when they had the power to do so.

They need to get their story straight. Besides, these missing democrats are doing a better job of representing the interests of their constituents than they would if they were just going to be automatically voted down anyway. The republicans who want the democrats to return are not the constituents of these representatives anyway.

It is also worth noting that Walker has tried to manufacture this kind of phony crisis before, when he tried to bust courthouse unions in Milwaukee in favor of a fat-cat crony deal with Wackenhut. He failed to follow the law then as well, however, and now Milwaukee has to pay back pay to all their courthouse security, as well as pay for the private contract.

This phony $137 million budget "crisis" is as transparently fraudulent as they get. Even in New Mexico we have a budget shortfall of larger than that and our total operating budget is far less. Every year legislators deal with gaps bigger than this and routinely plug them without abolisihing the rights of public employee unions.

On top of that, Walker offered about as much in tax breaks to businesses as the total amount of the alleged "shortfall". If there was really a budget crisis then all he would have to do to plug it would be to rescind the tax breaks, rather than demand that public workers take what amounts to an 8% pay cut.

Against senority? Tell the rest of the world.

When it comes to teachers and other public employees, it seems that today's crop of "reformers" wants to take away every right in sight including the job security which comes with senority. Strangely, they don't seem to think that giving deference to senority is a problem in just about any other profession. In fact, I suspect that most people, in most jobs, would be appalled if they saw companies discarding 20 and 30-year veterans like yesterday's garbage and replacing them with people who have five minutes of job experience. It is not just teachers and public employees who have systems based upon senority. It is embedded in the entire fabric of the labor market throughout this nation and, in fact, throughout most of the world. Abolishing these practices amounts to a voiding of the social contract that society has with those who work to build it and keep it going.

I guess unions do work after all

Soon-to-be-recalled Republican Governor Scotty Walker is waging a Moammar Gadafi style civil war against the labor rights of the citizens of his own state who have the misfortune of being public employees under his "leadership". It is clear to us all now that his attack on unions has absolutely nothing to do with balancing budgets and everything to do with attempting to destroy union rights. It's not about balancing budgets, but about payback to political cronies who coincidentally are getting just as much in tax cuts as he proposes "saving" by imposing what amounts to a tax on public workers in the state.

This is interesting, because it requires Republicans to admit that unions are actually effective at securing higher wages for their employees. Contrary to a half century of right-wing propaganda against unions, Walker is admitting that union workers make more money and have more benefits, compared to their non-union counterparts, and he wants to put a stop to that right away, by God. It's unfair for them to make more than the rest of us....except it's fair for rich people to make more...especially the Koch brothers who underwrote his campaign. Taxing the rich is unfair, by Republican logic, but taxing a group of working class public employees by charging them higher fees for medicine and retirement is A-OK.

What's so wrong with working people bargaining for more money, anyway? Isn't this the American way? Republicans have even fought against minimum wage, refused to raise it for a decade, and have created sub-minimum wage "training wages" which are used as loopholes to short change workers even today.

Talk about a race to the bottom. If you get rid of a system that has and proven to help people earn higher wages, as even Republicans now admit, replace it with their proposed systems which pay less than current minimum wage, how is this supposed to help the "average Joe" that McCain/Palin so epically failed court in their disastrous presidential campaign?

I know, I know, by the magic of voodoo it with mysteriously "trickle down", but "how's that been working out for ya", to paraphrase Sarah, over the last 30 years that Republicans have been hocking it as the patented cure-all elixer for our economy? Wages are flat for the average worker while the rich are richer than before. Mighty geysers of tax dollars have blasted (not trickled) upward and into the bank accounts of the rich, but the middle class worker has less net worth than before under the leadership of primarily Republican presidents and a Republican congress.

Trickle-down economics has itself been an epic failure, so much so that now, as I alluded to earlier, Republicans are playing "divide and conquer" games with American citizens, pitting union workers against non-union ones, much like Moammar Gadafi is known to pit one tribe of Libyans against another in a desperate bid to hold on to privilege and power. However, history has shown us that you can't build up the rights and pay of non-union workers by tearing down the rights of union employees. If employers will not make concessions to an organized group of professional negotiators, what makes people think that they will offer anything better to unorganized amateurs and individuals?

Walker has inadvertently spilled the beans here, about the Republican double standard on labor. He wants to abolish unions so that he can pay people less, but this means that unions do succeed in getting people paid more. This means that those who haven't been brainwashed by decades of anti-union misinformation, should be wanting to go out and join one, rather than demanding that the ones that exist be abolished.

It is also noteworthy that Walker's egotistical comparisons of himself to Ronald Reagan when dealing with striking air-traffic controllers is completely off the mark. There were no strikes in Wisconsin. Reagan was dealing with people who were on strike even though public workers are forbidden from striking. I have already addressed the silliness of calling a one day "sick out" a strike as well. A real strike is not a minority of workers calling in sick for one day. A real strike is occupying the factory floor and bringing work 100% to a stop for weeks or months. Nothing like that was happening in Wisconsin.

Air-traffic controllers acted first and force Reagan to respond after-the-fact, but Walker threw the first punch in this brawl trying to cut wages and benefits that had already been negotiated under contract. He doesn't like the contract so he wants to change the law to say that he doesn't have to follow it. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could all just change any law that we didn't feel like following. That's how Gadafi operates. Then Walker threatens to layoff thousands of workers unless his demands are met. No negotiation. Hummm, this sounds more and more like Libyan dictatorship everyday.

So maybe when Walker is removed as Governor, by a popular uprising at the polls, then he can move to Libya, where there are no pesky union labor laws. He would probably get along fine with people like Gadafi, if he is still in power.

Oh and lest you protest too much about how Walker never threatened violence like Gadafi, Walker actually was already on record before he started this fight as threatening to call up the national guard to deal with union protesters. So far he hasn't had the courage to attempt to follow through with that, perhaps because he has already generated enough negative publicity for himself.

It must also be said, on the subject of protesting too much, that right-wingers have been apoplectic about a few people on the left who started twittering about wishing Walker would die. Of course, they know quite well, if for no other reason than because many of those complaining have participated in it themselves, that not a single day goes by without fringe right-wingers wishing death upon Obama and in many cases calling for more direct assassination of him and other Democrats such as Reid and Pelosi. Therefore, when a few people on the left talk about something far less direct, though still distasteful, their hypocrisy on the subject gives them no room to manuever.

Denial is not a river in Wisconson

Most of the rest of the world, expect for a few far-right wingers like Glenn Beck, are happy for the people of Egypt, Tunisia, and perhaps soon elsewhere, who are getting their first opportunity to have a democratic government in decades. Of course, the right-wing frets that there may be more "terrorism" there, now that the firm hands of the dictators have been loosed from the throats of their people. However, much the same was said about the American Revolution when we overthrew our king. British solidiers thought of American colonists as no better than "terrorists" or "enemy combatants" and many of the regimes in Europe predicted that our liberated nation would quickly plunge into anarchy. People who know anything about history should, at long last, be able to see that the alleged anarchy is often overblown, although revolutions will have their ugly moments. This is one reason why I would caution the far-right to be careful what they wish for, given that, more often than not, they are the ones using inflammatory rhetoric about needing an armed uprising every time they don't get their way on some minor point.

Speaking of uprisings, let's hear it for Cheesehead power. I'm not just taking about the Greenbay Packers finally taking back the Lombardi trophy. They also made a good show in the capital of what it looks like when unionized Cheeseheads get cheesed off.

Of course, much was made of the match up of Steeler versus Packer, with both teams being representative of blue collar, working class people. However, if one wants to get down to it, working in a "packing" plant is way more blue collar than steel work. It certainly pays a lot less, even with unionization. Anyway, our steel industry, or what is left of it, is only a dim shadow of what it was before free traders freely traded much of it away to other nations in exchange for cheap, shiny trinkets.

Anyway, back to sports for a second, I have long been a fan of Greenbay for another reason, which is that it is the only fan owned team, while the others are often owned by a wealthy individual. Every time Greenbay would win a game this season, I would tell my friends that I hoped they finally made it to the Superbowl, because I think it would make a powerful statement, reminding the nation that you do not need economic royalty to have sports teams. The city of Greenbay decided that they wanted a team that one wealthy owner could not move around willy-nilly, so they sold shares to help finance the Packers. We could do the same thing with other teams, but many people have already drunk the Koolaid of conventional thinking that tells us that we need some rich guy, modeled after the pharaohs or dictators of Egypt in order to world-class professional organizations, like football teams.

The topic of dictators gets us back to the current situation in Wisconsin. In a place where unions started, Republicans have finally seized back control of the governorship and state senate, and are determined to decimate public employee unions. You can hate on unions all you want, but when you see a group of political hitmen doing everything they can to strip rights and benefits from public employees, what will stop them from doing the same to other groups next.

As a teacher in another state, I can attest to the fact that EVERY single year, without exception, we are always told that there is ANOTHER crisis and that we will have to expect massive layoffs, paycuts, benefit cuts, etc. In the end, we always discover that there never was a crisis to begin with. It is just the standard method that the state uses to do business with is. The state always seems to want to balance the budget from the bank accounts of teachers.

Right now the governor in Wisconsin claims that there is a fiscal emergency. This is the same governor who turned down over $1 billion dollars in Federal Stimulus money to build rail systems in his state. In the middle of a recession, when they have a budget shortfall in the state approaching $3.5 billion, this guy is turning down a billion dollars of assistance from the federal government, and then telling people there is an emergency.

I can tell you this. The so-called fiscal emergency, which I predict is another manufactured disaster, was not created by teachers, who tend to earn very modest wages. On the federal level we have seem republicans cut trillions of dollar of taxes over the last decade, with the promise that it would "stimulate the economy". Instead we have the worst recession in living memory and now the states are hurting, because (1) the Federal government has much less money to give them and (2) certain republican politicians are turning down the money that is available, when it is being given to them.

They always want us, out of the goodness of our hearts, to voluntarily cut our own throats, and if we have the temerity to ask them to show us the evidence of this latest emergency, they tell us about how our lavish union contracts have bankrupted them. However, when we look at our wages compared to other people with graduate degrees, we already see ourselves paid 20-30% less than comparably skilled workers in other areas. Our pensions are far from lavish. They talk about teachers making 70k or 80k. I know of nobody in New Mexico who makes even close to that. Our top tier in in the low to mid 50k range, after going through a decade of hoops and national board certifications. Teachers here, even under union contract start at $30,0001 per year and cannot earn more than that for three years. That is the lavish salary of the state. My medical contributions run 13% of my gross salary. My state retirement takes another 10% and is an involuntary contribution.

When I finally retire, politicians will call my pension an "entitlement" and sneer at it like I'm collecting welfare. I paid into it every year, and this doesn't count social security, workman's comp, etc which are also taken out before I even get my check. I should be "entitled" to collect something, down the line, for putting money into all those programs.

As I started to suggest in the title of the article, denial is not a river that runs through Wisconsin, but many anti-union republicans there are in a state of severe denial. They believe that the same group of people who systematically strip away pay and benefits from teachers can be trusted not to do that to police and firefighters, and the average working man. They scream about "no new taxes", but this is a tax on the people they are attacking. They are effectively forcing these people to pay thousands more to the state. It is a very unfair and selective form of taxation on working class people, so that wealthy, non-working people don't have to pay higher taxes.

To the working people of Wisconsin, many of whom were brainwashed enough to think that public employee unions are the source of all their problems. You will not see a penny more in your pocket by attacking teachers. In fact, you will see less money than before, because the people who attack teachers today, will attack you tomorrow. They won't call it a "tax", they will charge higher "fees" and cut back the services that you use. This will effectively be the same as a tax hike, because you will have to pay more for your driver's license.

Here is another dirty little secret about public employee's unions too, for all you union haters. Teachers unions are not even real unions. They are forbidden by law to strike, since they are regarded as "essential" service providers, in many cases. This is like a tiger that has been declawed and had all its teeth pulled. You might say, "look at that scary tiger", but the fact is that it's not a real tiger anymore when it has no claws or teeth to do what tigers do. It's a cuddly pet. So people who tell you about those scary public employee unions are either ignorant of the facts, or want you to be ignorant of the facts. Don't believe the hype.

Alarmists might also point to the fact that public employees can do a "sick-out", but we all know that these are just symbolic and can only last a day or two at best. Only a minority of teachers even called in sick in a few districts for a day in Wisconsin. Real strikes last longer than a single day.

In some ways, it is funny that we have such a love/hate relationship with education. Many people love to hate it and are forever complaining about how kids don't learn enough, while simultaneously cutting funding for education and cutting pay to teachers. I'm sure that test scores are just going to shoot through the roof if you start pay teachers less and cutting their benefits. Why, the best and brightest will just be lined up around the block to go through the elaborate state licensing process, just so that they can make substantially less than they could in the private sector.

Propaganda pieces like _Waiting For Superman_ (WFS) make the unions out to be the source of all evil in education because they limit "flexibility", meaning the ability of principals to fire teachers without any kind of due process, and the "flexibility" of the state to constantly lower pay, while raising requirements. I can tell you that the mythical "tenure" given to school teachers is not the same as real tenure, and it certainly is not granted after two years with only trivial requirements, as the film alleges.

The mantra of the anti-union people is that unions protect bad employees. However, myths aside, most teachers have none of the imagined protections. Waiting for Superman claims that only about 1 in 2500 teachers ever lose their licenses, but the fact is that around half of all teachers do not even renew their licenses after they expire (which is in three years in NM). Besides, you don't have to lose your license to be fired as a teacher. They don't even have to say, "you're fired". You just don't get a contract for the next year. It is standard practice in many places to not rehire any first year teachers, for example, and that is even when these teachers are under union contract.

Far from being a cushy arrangement, most union contracts for teachers are extremely stingy about pay raises, which often only come after several years on the job, and don't even give good education benefits for teachers to upgrade their skills. Typically, even in union contracts, it entirely stacked against the newcomers, and this would not change if there were no contracts at all. It would make things even more precarious. The first time a single parent complains about anything, many principals would rather get rid of the teacher than have to deal with unpleasantness. So students end up with three or four different teachers in a single year, including long-term subs who are not under union contract and are paid even less. That is under the current system. I know because I was brought it, in exactly this situation, when several previous teachers had been fired, and the alleged infractions were not even that serious. So the myth that it cannot happen and that schools are stuck with low performing "lemons" or "turkeys" according to WFS can officially be considered busted just based upon personal observation.

I know that people want official studies to "prove" this or that, but you find that, especially in education, the "studies" tend to "prove" whatever the people putting the study together want to prove. They decide what particular agenda they want to prove and then proceed to collect data to "support it". Every year there is some new "scientifically proven" new gimmick system that "can't fail" that promptly fails and we move on to the next one.

For example, a recent justification for denying graduate tuition benefits to teachers is an alleged study that claims that teachers with graduate degrees are not necessarily any more effective than ones with bachelor's degrees. Well I'm sure you can prove that people with PhDs don't necessarily do a better job teaching either, and there are grad students who do a better job at teaching university classes. If universities operated like public schools this would require us to immediately fire everyone with a PhD and replace them all with grad students. But as we just saw, they don't necessarily do a better job either, so many we should replace them with undergraduates, and so on, ad infinitum.

In the end, it may be true that a person with an MBA is not necessarily a better manager than someone without one. It's doubtful that a manager at Burger King is going to sell way more burgers with an MBA under his belt, but I'm sure people can do all kinds of "studies" and prove whatever they want about it.

Generally, however, we have a social contract that says that we value people getting higher levels of education, even if we can't prove that this will instantly make things measurably better in ten different ways. When we stop valuing the process of continually improving levels of education then we start to stagnate and decline as a civilization. We might think that everything you need to know is in a book somewhere, but there are a lot of things that people know about how to do things that must still be passed on to other people and is not something that gets written down. When we stop telling people to go out and get this education because we cannot prove that it instantly makes them more productive, then we will start to lose all this procedural knowledge.

This takes up back to unions. Before there were unions there were skilled craft guilds, and almost every profession had them. Learning to teach is more than one can get from a book. It takes an organization of professions, or a community of practiced individuals with common experiences and common purposes. When we start breaking this apart and saying that every teacher should be out of himself or herself, we will likewise lose a great deal of knowledge and commitment that teachers hold as a group.

It used to be that the word "conservative" meant someone who was cautious and valued time-tested approaches to things. Now we have radicals, calling themselves "conservatives", who want to gut a century of labor practices with a result that is, at best, extremely uncertain. Everyone hopes that the changes he or she puts through will turn out for the best, but the history of education suggests that the vast majority of quick fixes, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), never accomplish even a fraction of their much-lauded ambitions. More than a decade after NCLB, there are more children being left behind than ever, and the same right-wingers who told us that NCLB would fix all these problems are now putting their faith in union busting. Perhaps this time, at long last, we can tell them that "No, this won't work any better than all the other quick fixes you have proposed".

Just like their trillions of dollars of tax cuts did not stimulate the economy, and instead produced the worst recession since 1929, their union busting efforts will neither improve the economy, nor fix education. Cutting spending in the middle of a recession, many have pointed out, is like deciding to start saving water when your house is burning down. Actually FDR used the metaphor of people wanting to save water only when their neighbor's house is on fire. This ambition to start saving money seems to have been forgotten when Bush was president and Republicans were in charge of congress most of the time. It only seems to have been discovered when Obama is now in office and they believe that continuing to wreck the economy can help them in the next presidential election.

We are back to the issue spoken about at the beginning of inventing crises so that certain political opportunists can ram through their agendas with less opposition. People are tired of government by crisis. We are tired of people who constantly provoke fights that weren't there before they stirred the pot and tried to turn the working class against itself in Wisconsin and elsewhere. People who continually provoke fights are likely to get more than bargained for eventually. In many other countries there are national strikes to show solidarity. Wisconsin is, after all, not the only state considering similar maneuvers. What if educators called their own "day of outrage" in this country? What if we all went to our state capitals. I've heard of accidents where boxes of roofing nails got accidentally knocked off the back of trucks and get scattered across all the streets in these capitals. I've also heard of strange accidents where people get very confused and end up squirting glue into the locks of the doors of important buildings, tragically making it impossible to open them without calling locksmiths. A pair of old shoes with bailing wire for laces sometimes might get accidentally tossed into the air like a bolo and end up wrapped around power lines, which could inadvertantly cause them to short out. I don't know how that could happen or why or who want to do such a thing, but if it did occur, God forbid, I suppose it could give people a little more time to reflect on things, and contemplate if this is a confrontation that needs to take place.