08hayabusa: Union civility: Fox-bashing edition

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Union civility: Fox-bashing edition

By Michelle Malkin • February 27, 2011 10:25 PM

It’s not about the “children.”

It’s not about “fairness.”

It’s about agitation and community organizing and ginning up hatred against political enemies.

For the union radicals in Wisconsin, as I reported in my column on Friday, those enemies include the Koch brothers, the Tea Party movement, minority conservatives, female Republicans, independent citizen journalists…and Fox News.

As I told you on Feb. 19, Fox News-bashing has been all the rage in Madison:

Now, the hatred has turned physical. Fox News reporter Mike Tobin — a fearless international correspondent who has covered wars in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories — was assaulted in Madison today as hysterical union goons screamed over his live shots to drown out his news segments.

Via Mediaite:

Tobin said he has received much heckling, and that a teacher even told him she hates him because it made her feel good. The “utter lack of civility and harassment of reporters,” as anchor Gregg Jarrett described it, is truly breathtaking and seems like a weird strategy to try and win support for one’s cause.

And yes, they threatened to break his neck.

“Get a little bloody.” It’s the Union way.
***
AFL-CIO thug-in-chief Richard Trumka has nothing to say about the ugliness on the ground:

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was twice asked whether he found the tone at the nearly two-week long demonstrations “wrong” or “inappropriate.”

Trumka did not answer, instead saying, “We should be sitting down trying to create jobs. … In Wisconsin, a vast majority of the people think this governor has overreached. His popularity has gone down. They’re saying to him, sit down and negotiate; don’t do what you’ve been doing. So he’s losing.”

And, of course, the lamestream media had nothing to say about Trumka’s own violent legacy. I repeat, because no one else will:

Trumka and Obama will cast Big Labor as an unassailable force for good in American history. But when it comes to terrorizing workers, Trumka knows whereof he speaks.

Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?

A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s**t out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation (pdf), the leading anti-forced unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities … organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”

Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor boss brethren at the Teamsters Union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles and fists.

And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups — publicized in the revolutionary Marxist People’s World — to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.”