RedState.com tries to incite anger, forgets common sense

Writers over at RedState.com, a popular conservative blog, are trying to derail the movement taking place in Madison this past week by making unions seem like bullies.

In one specific blog post, writer Ben Howe claims that WEAC published the home addresses of state legislators in order to have supporters go to their homes and harass them. The PDF file on WEAC's page is in spreadsheet form and lists the work phone numbers of state legislators, their email address, and yes their home addresses as well.

However, this isn't information that isn't already attainable. Go to the Wisconsin State Senate's home page and you'll find that the information is already there. What RedState.com is essentially saying is that WEAC is a terrible organization...for providing people with already attainable knowledge.

What's more, the WEAC page that RedState cites never once encourages anyone to go to legislators' homes. The link that WEAC provides doesn't even mention that their home addresses are included within -- it simply states that the link contains "Phone numbers, email addresses of state senators." How RedState thinks that WEAC is trying to incite violence through this information -- again, which is attainable to anyone with a 56K internet connection or greater -- is beyond me.

Then there's this little ditty by Moe Lane, who claims that unions are starting to cave because they offered Walker a compromise of agreeing to wage cuts in order to preserve their bargaining rights. Writes Lane:

What this means, of course, is that the unions are sliding towards the edge of the cliff on this one, and they know it. The counter-protests must be quietly putting Wisconsin Democrats in a panic: they can tell their own minions that it’s not a reflection of grassroots outrage (unlike their own artificial outrage), but they themselves know better.

Clearly, Moe Lane doesn't know a thing about what's going on in Madison. 70,000 protesters -- a vast majority of them pro-union (by my count, about 90 percent of them) -- doesn't mean the Democrats are "in a panic." This protest was never about the money, though the deal given to public employees is a terrible one. This is about workers' rights, negotiation rights, that were stripped in one week's time, after 50 years of respectful negotiations between Democratic AND Republican administrations.

What we've got to remember within this whole protest is that it's collective bargaining rights, not the changes in benefits, that matters most. I saw one sign that stated that very fact -- "I'd rather get laid off than lose my rights" it said. Not everyone would agree to those sentiments, but Gov. Walker is ignoring other options available to him, as well as the fact that he created this fiscal mess in the first place.

Ignore right-wing talking points about this protest, especially from those outside of the state. We all know what's going on here -- Scott Walker is driving our state into dire times.