Dang, can't remember if it's the Year of the Turtle

While the Wisconsin teachers continue their collective tantrum, a bunch of Iowa "educators" is heading for a nice vacation  conference in China. The news report glaringly neglects  to say who's paying, but it's a safe enough bet that they're not dipping into their own pedagogical pockets.

Local radio permits one of the teachers to explain the purpose:

“Everybody participates in a group and comes up with different projects to do, trying to flatten our world so that we can show the kids that we’re all just people,” (says Lisa Schaa, of Stratford Elementary School).


This tends to explain the Huckabee win in our most recent presidential caucuses.

Because of the depressing ice storm, that's why.

Quick take on language

The word "liberal" seems to have to become anathema to liberals. I have seen it less and less for a couple of years or so, and it appears hardly at all in the Wisconsin reporting.

It's been replaced by "progressive" --  the statist left rebranding itself,  screwing around with the language -- to hide motives in order maintain progress toward national bankruptcy.

On Wisconsin!

The Wisconsin riots are being characterized by AP this morning as "unmatched in their sustained, impassioned energy...".

They're probably not "unmatched," but we can let that slide as a workaday media solecism as reporter and editor grasp for the blaring headline. It's bad journalism but routine these days.

It is the approving tone of "sustained passion"  in a public policy debate that  worries thinking folks. Reducing the Wisconsin budget problem is a matter of arithmetic, not heavy breathing drama.

Public employees earn adequate-to-handsome salaries and enjoy luxurious benefit packages which poor saps in the private sector never had or have lost in the age of globalization. Some one pays for their, wages, insurance, and guaranteed pensions. That some one is the unfortunate family head who is trying  to feed kids and stave off the bill collector on a precarious 12-buck-an hour job which can be lost in a heartbeat.

The Wisconsin public titters are having a marvelous time at the trough, and it is the fear of losing it which is turning them into a mob of petulant children. They react precisely as six-year-old Bratty Suzie does when asked to share her Snickers with Little Brother.

---

That said, the demonstrating teachers et al.  look almost statesmanlike compared to their 14 Wisconsin Senate protectors who react to administrative challenge by going to the mattresses in Chicago.