Guest post: View from the Street #Unions vs #TeaParty

---
Boy.. maybe TeaParty people are just WAY too nice by nature..

"The occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol by protesters fighting efforts to strip public workers of union bargaining rights carried on Sunday after police decided not to forcibly remove demonstrators and end a nearly two-week-long sit-in."

That's from an article in today's local newspaper entitled "Police won't boot protesters from Wisconsin Capitol"

and I got to wondering just what would the reaction have been from the main stream media and Washington had a group of TeaParty members, perhaps during the HCR protests, taken over (occupied) a capitol building, for TWO weeks, sporting signs showing obama as Hitler and refused to leave on the order of the police?

Should the TeaParty be watching the unions very closely here? Learn some Marxist techniques that they can effectively employ themselves? Or might the SAME actions taken by TeaParty members be dealt with in an entirely different manner?

I seem to recall TeaParty member being called potentially violent (possibly even domestic terrorists) Nazi racists for doing much less than commandeering a public building..

Thanks to a friend of a friend for this guest post and a view from the street..
---

by Tish Cooper

Well, I went downtown today to stand with other Tea Party members to protest the House Democrats who fled the state, a "Get Your Butt Back to Work" rally, if you will. This is my recitation of events. I took some pictures with my cell phone, which I will post for you, too.

Chad, Katie and I arrived at the Statehouse a few minutes before noon. The protest was to begin at noon, but I could see from a block away there were already several people gathered at the designated meeting place. As we drew closer, I realized that part of the group was made up of union protesters. Katie and Chad proceeded on to the mall to get some lunch, while I stayed there to hold signs with likeminded people. I had three signs that said, "House Democrats are Waging FLEEHAD," "House Democrats = Radical FLEEhadists," and "Awwww.....are the widdle Democrats scared?"

The union protesters held signs that said "The Tea Party is anti-American," "The Tea Party is anti-Worker," "Don't drink the Tea," and various other union signs. Some signs were outrageous, like the one showing Mitch Daniels as Hitler, and some were not even in English. Here are the union signs I was able to snap pictures of:







I don't know if you can see it or not, but in the last picture here, the sign showing RTW with the slash through it has a bumper sticker above it that says "Trabajos con Justicia" or something like that. There were several of those in the union crowd. All the class warfare, corporate hatred, and contempt for conservatives you could ever care to see was on display on that sidewalk today.

Our Side was well behaved as it stood opposite the union thugs, who had megaphones and those loud air horns which they blared to try to keep us from talking to each other and reporters, and to keep us from responding to any of the crap they kept spewing. They made all kinds of noise to bother us, but it never bothered me. I have seven children, for crying out loud, I'm used to it!

At one point, the leader of the Indianapolis Tea Party suggested we spread out along the sidewalk so that passersby could see our signs and our message. We did so, and the union crowd followed us. It was truly a case of monkey see, monkey do! We spread out on the south side of the gathering spot, and the thugs remained to our north. In no time at all, the thugs decided it would be a good idea to march through our crowd. They were completely INCAPABLE of being civil as they did so. Several of them worked awfully hard to start a confrontation. One man hit me with his sign board as he walked by. I don't know if it was on purpose or an accident, but I didn't make a big deal out of it. It was only thin posterboard. One man looked directly at me as he walked by and said, "What a bunch of a$$holes you are!" I just smiled and said, "We love you, too, sir." He kept walking. One man kept approaching people, demanding to know what they did for a living, as if somehow knowing that would give him the opportunity to have a "Gotcha!" moment. He was so pathetically transparent that it was sad. In fact, several of the men in the union crowd did that. Whenever someone would say, "I have my own business," or "I fill-in-the-blank...," they would say, "Oh, good" and move on. WTH?

Some people driving by were supportive of us and others were not. Those who supported us would honk and wave or give us the thumbs up, while leaving the pro-union thugs alone. Not so for those who supported the unions. They went by the union group first, since that group was north of us, and honk, wave, etc., and when they got to us, they would honk and give us a thumbs down or the middle finger. Yes, I am ashamed to admit that my middle finger found its way skyward a time or two while we stood there.

The media was there, too. All the local media were present, and, surprisingly, so was the Washington Post. I gave an interview to the Washington Post reporter, Nick something, who singled me out, he said, because of the sign I was holding which said, "House Democrats = Radical FLEEhadists!" He was very nice, but I won't hold my breath waiting for any kind of positive article on today's events from the WaPo.

Not long after that, I moved back from the curb and took position on the wall around the Statehouse grounds. A man came along in a truck and made a show of supporting the union folks while at the stop light. He laid on his horn, had his hand out the window giving thumbs up, and pumped his fist (in solidarity, no doubt). When the light turned green, he took off slowly and then quickly accelerated, heading straight toward our group standing along the curb. He purposely ran through the curbside mud puddles in front of where the Tea Party people were standing. He splashed dirty water on several of them before he had to swerve to miss a stopped car in front of him. There was no doubt that he did this on purpose. There was also no doubt that the union thugs appreciated his efforts as they cheered and laughed.

Soon after, a truck was at the stoplight, waiting to turn out onto the street we lined. The light turned green and he entered the intersection. All of a sudden, he stopped, slammed his truck into park, and jumped out, yelling at a man standing on the corner. He was yelling, "You wanna do that to my face, punk?! HUH? COME ON!!" He was an older, tolerant, leftist union thug decked out in union patches, hat and coat. He was angry at someone who had made the "L" sign on his forehead with his thumb and index finger. The cops and a few of our guys ran over to intervene, so nothing much came of it. Channel 8 (www.wishtv.com) was there and has a story about it on their website.

In all the excitement, I had made my way back to the curb again to hold my sign, and that's where I stayed for a while. After a while, I was the only one standing at the curb at the northernmost edge of our group. There were others behind me standing on the short brick wall that surrounds the Statehouse, and others further to the south. I was talking to the people behind me when I heard a vehicle accelerating. I turned around in time to see the truck that had splashed everyone earlier heading straight toward the mud puddle in front of me. I said, "He's gonna splash" and jumped back, but he was going so fast that the water sprayed the entire sidewalk and me. It got me a little wet, but splashed my sign pretty good and all the ink started running. I took a pic of it after I got home.



Of course, the union thugs whooped and hollered, because that sort of thing is how they roll. I just laughed at the guy's childishness, which most likely disappointed the watching thugs. There happened to be a policeman parked just to the north of the intersection who saw what happened. He immediately began following the guy in the truck. I don't know if he actually stopped him or not. Five to ten minutes later, I thought I saw his truck turning on the street again. I said, "Uh oh, here he comes again," and I stood my ground. At that point, it was my personal mission to STAY on that curb, no matter what kind of abuse the thugs tried to dish out. I was NOT going to let a creep like that run me off. Let him do his worst to a little old lady like me while everyone around watched. To my surprise, another lady from our group came and stood right beside me with her sign. She said something like, "He's not gonna run me off either." LOL I could have cried, I was so proud of her! Turned out that it was not the same truck or guy. Splasher never reappeared.

On one of the several marches the union thugs took through our group, one of our members asked a mouthy union lady who was walking by if she was paid to be there. She angrily asked if we were paid, to which we replied that we were not. She cackled and said, "Honey chil', I be makin' 25 dollar an hour to do NUTHIN'!" She was PROUD OF THAT, you guys!! She said, "You all CHOSE to be out here for nuthin', not me, and I ain't givin' up my 25 dollar an hour for NUTHIN'!" I thought, the whole reason we're out here fighting this fight is because of people like her. It was truly disusting.

Towards the end of our protest, the union thugs and Tea Party folks were face to face in front of the eastside Statehouse entrance. They were yelling, "UNION! UNION!" in our faces, and we were shouting "FREEDOM! FREEDOM!" Things pretty much wound slowly down after that. One lady in our group was telling several union supporters that IPS teachers make $70,000 a year when you include their benefits package with their pay, for working 9 months of the year. They responded with the same old line that the union will make things better if Republicans would stay out of the way. I said, "Oh yeah, the unions have done such a GREAT job already, haven't they?" One lady, the one making "25 dollar an hour" said that everything was so messed up because George W. Bush had made a mess of everything over 8 years and it was going to take a long time to set it right. *eyeroll* I pointed out that we were all where we were today because NO ONE - neither Republican or Democrat - had had the guts to make the hard calls that needed to be made for decades. Of course, the union lackeys disagreed and said that Republicans wanted to implement policies that would push talented teachers out of our schools. I said, "Unions don't care about talent, otherwise they wouldn't use the sum of teachers' social security numbers as a guideline for tenure. They would at least consider PERFORMANCE!" This irritated them for some reason and they began shouting "Don't drink the Tea!" as they made their way back to their group.

That's when I gathered Chad and Katie and we all left. We had to walk through the union thugs to get to our car and, coincidentally, I was hit in the head with a posterboard sign again, but I just kept walking. I'm pretty sure it was the same sign which 'accidentally' hit me earlier, carried by the same man. What are the chances of that happening? Pretty high if your in the midst of those tolerant union thugs.

Here are the rest of the pics I took today. Sorry for being so long-winded, but I wanted to make sure not to miss anything! Love to you all. ~ Tish