Union Busters Hit a Speedbump

The Grand Old Party's union-buster express hit a bit of a speedbump when a new USA Today/Gallup poll revealed 61% of Americans opposed the Republican's pet agenda to slash collective bargaining rights for state workers.

Despite Americans' increasing revulsion, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker plowed ahead with the union-busting gambit, spearheaded by a new multi-million dollar ad blitz funded by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity front. The radio and television blitzkrieg will start tomorrow, adding to the right-wing clamor already coming from the corporate news networks.

In the face of the unified media disinformation campaign, what's most astonishing is that as many as 61% of those polled were well-informed enough to make a cogent decision on the question. This is noteworthy, considering how the traditional media had incessantly attempted to frame the issue as greedy union workers bankrupting a state by refusing to make concessions on overly generous wages and benefits they didn't deserve.  Somehow, word got out that the employes were more than willing to negotiate on wages and pensions, but the GOP wanted to proscribe their right to negotiate at all.

And this is on top of similar poll results from Ohio where a whopping 88% told the Columbus Dispatch they backed collective bargaining rights for state workers there.

Perhaps the message leaked out through Facebook and Twitter.

It may have been fear of information leaking through the worldwide web that prompted Walker and his masters to take an action that garnered the Tea Party darling the new moniker "Hosni" Walker. For a considerable period today, the protestors' website defendwisconsin.org had been blocked from the state capitol's wifi.

Under a wave of outcry, the Teapublican powerbrokers restored access to the site late in the day.

As protests spread to Indiana and Ohio, perhaps poll results such as those in USA Today and the Columbus Dispatch can help encourage Democratic leaders to decide they are in fact stalwart champions of the American working people. Many of them have remained quietly shuffling along the sidelines, timidly sniffing the wind for some sign that might indicate to them what they think.

Meanwhile, Hosni Walker remains defiant in his palace, waiting for the Koch brothers to send more thugs to reinforce the counter-demonstrations and to begin the media blitz on local versions of Egyptian State Television.