Janesville Gazette Editorial Excerpt:
...unions protesting at the Capitol missed a great opportunity to send a loud and clear message to elected officials. Unions could have rallied members to support one of the four judicial candidates.
Their message to every elected official would have been to pay attention to us or the next time we'll target your seat.
Unions are trying to send a loud and clear message in the Capitol right now. Are you listening?
This would have been bad advice if it were coming from a pro-union newspaper. Judicial primary and general elections deserve to be carried out with as little WMC-like strongarm tactics as possible. They belong to the people to choose and the people to turnout.
But we'll see what will happen as the general election closes in. You can bet the WMC will fire up their thug brigades and deceptive ads. The working taxpayers of Wisconsin will have to respond one way or another, or expect to suffer the consequences of continued judicial decline ushered in by the recently elected Michael Gableman and Annette Ziegler.
The Gazette went as far as to saddle the unions with the blame for the state's low primary election turnout.
Note: This Gazette editorial is not available online.
2 comments:
I understand, but don't always agree with your targeting of the Gazette, but you've blamed the Gazette for something someone else said.
The editorial read "As Vietnam veteran Thomas J. Stehura, a former Janesville city councilman, pointed out in a letter in Sunday’s Gazette, unions protesting at the Capitol missed a great opportunity to send a loud and clear message to elected officials. Unions could have rallied members to support one of the four judicial candidates. In the process, they likely would have left some surprised polling places without enough ballots and created a big news story. Their message to every elected official would have been to pay attention to us or the next time we’ll target your seat."
Your parsed the quote (I'd expect more from you, Louis.), taking away the attribution - and the credit - away from the man who wrote the letter. Then, you blame the Gazette.
The Gazette agreed with the letter's advice and didn't blame anyone. The paper just said it was a missed opportunity.
I deleted the beginning because I consider him a private citizen and prefer, unless they are in the news regularly, to keep their names away from the search engines to my blog. And, I don't print entire articles out of respect for copyright.
But the Gazette agreed with the former council member's perspective completely and unequivocally!That's number one. Number two is the headline, "To the low election turnout" to what was mostly content about the unions! - and gave a thumbs down to it mostly based on the premise that if the unions activism was redirected to the polls,instead of in Madison, members would have rallied a larger turnout and would have surprised some of the bored poll workers. The structure of the editorial placed what they believe were the misdirected unions as the cause (or blame) for the lower turnout. They missed an opportunity.
I can't even begin to imagine what the Gazette and other Wisconsin anti-union newspapers would have wrote about the unions had they done what they suggest. "Strong arm thugs steal another judicial primary" would have been the first headline.
Post a Comment