This just seems so unsporting. After all, these high-school students didn’t make threatening calls to the unions that were singing their silly “Solidarity Song” in the capitol rotunda in Madison, to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:
When about 300 Sheboygan Lutheran High School students and supporters piled into the rotunda of the State Capitol in Madison last Thursday after the boys basketball team clinched a trip to the finals for the Division 5 WIAA state championship, they had some time to spare.
Sharing the rotunda with a small group of pro-union demonstrators singing songs, the Lutheran High group broke into spontaneous cheers “Stand with Walker!” interspersed with cries of “LHS! LHS!” and the Common Doxology.
The resulting furor since the event has surprised school officials and state Sen. Joe Leibham, a Lutheran High alumnus who invited the group to the Capitol for a photo with the team and a celebratory reception.
“Friday morning, we had a couple of nasty phone calls all of a sudden,” said Jim Pingel, Lutheran’s executive director. “People identified themselves as union leaders, protesters. They were passive-aggressive, menacing.”
Liberal activists called the school to complain, and conservative talk radio hosts have spent days discussing the students’ actions. Charlie Sykes of WTMJ-AM in Milwaukee wrote in an online blog post that the students “decided to fight back against the anti-Walker sentiment they were witnessing during an impromptu visit.”
Seriously? Having a handful of high-school students counterprotest — even just in jest, which is what this seems to be — causes the union activists so much grief that they have to make nasty calls to the school? That doesn’t sound like a confident movement; it sounds like a bunch of crybabies that can dish out the protests but need to threaten people to keep them from speaking their own minds.
Small wonder that Governor Scott Walker says that the recall effort is the unions’ Waterloo:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says his upcoming recall election is a “Waterloo” moment for national unions that will “invest everything possible to try and take me out to send a message.”
Walker told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on Monday night in Milwaukee he believes the vast majority of money that will pour into the June recall will come from out of state. And the unions, the Republican governor said, will be leading the charge against him in the new few months.
“The national unions, for them, this is all about the money,” Walker said. “It’s not just about the budget or collective bargaining. We gave nearly every, well, we gave every public employee in the state the freedom to choose whether or not they want to be in a union or not and I think that’s really why this is a Waterloo for them.”
Walker said his recall election is about more than just the future of Wisconsin for the national unions — it’s a message to any other elected official who would try to tackle collective bargaining and other controversial reforms.
“They’re going to invest everything possible to try and take me out to send a message not only to other Republican governors, but I think to a number of discerning Democrat governors and mayors who look at this and say, you know what? Maybe we can rein in our cost here and be able to balance our budget in a way that’s responsible if we do some of the same things that they’ve done in Wisconsin,” Walker said.
No kidding. But even at Waterloo, Napoleon’s soldiers probably whined less about the result.
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