If Wisconsin is Egypt in the Midwest, perhaps Ohio is Bahrain.
Associated Press has the story:
Hundreds of union protesters again packed the Statehouse in protest on Tuesday as government officials from around the state lined up in support of a bill that would wipe out Ohio's nearly 30-year-old collective bargaining law and make other union changes.
A crowd of firefighters, police officers and other public employees overflowed the hearing room, packing cat walks and filling the Statehouse Atrium and Rotunda to standing-room-only capacity for much of the afternoon. It was the second week that hearings on the bill drew such crowds.
The Senate bill, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Shannon Jones, would eliminate collective bargaining rights and salary schedules for public employees across the state. GOP Gov. John Kasich has expressed his support for the bill in concept, but he has also signaled he may bring forth his own plan that could go even further — including banning public employee strikes.
One of our Teamster brothers on the Ohio Turnpike started up this
Facebook page to impeach Kasich, a man who doesn't hide his contempt for working people. He actually gave a speech in which he called a police officer "an idiot" for giving him a traffic citation. Sara Winfield, a police widow, responds
in a letter that ought to make you cry (thanks to ProgressOhio):
I am offended because my husband was a deputy sheriff in Marion County. Being called an idiot in public is unfortunately something our family became used to on a regular basis...It wasn't uncommon to hear people's opinions of "pig" or "jerk" in the grocery store while shopping with our children...
Unfortunately it was one of those people that had a hatred for police officers in general and no respect for the law that shot my husband in the back of the head on a dark, lonely road one night. Leaving me alone to raise our two sons and a widow at the age of 27. The man that killed my husband said in his confession that he was drunk and didn't like cops. My husband didn't even arrest him. He could have because he was walking along the road drunk in the middle of the night. Instead my husband, being a nice guy and like he often did, offered him a ride home. In return he got a bullet to the back of the head.
Thanks Gov. Kasich.
