Pawlenty demonizes public employee unions in Wall St. Journal op-ed

What is with the wing-nuts and naming their books with the words patriot and courage and other empty words they do not practice.

What is so courageous about him? Pushing a deficit to Dayton? That took balls.

If you compare the average salary and benefits of a politician, it is way higher than the average worker. Clearly, politicians are evil and harmful to regular folk. Tim Pawlenty is a professional politician. Tim Pawlenty is evil and harmful to regular folk.

Pawlenty has lived off the public teat for more than a decade. So has his wife, government-paid judge.

Pawlenty, when you cash your check, you know who the payer is?

“State of Minnesota”. Now Tim wants to be elected so he can keep sucking.

More like a wide stance!!! That is how Pawlenty feels about his police, fire and teachers. Ooop, and his infrastructure crews. We all know what happened there. All of them make considerably less an hour than we pay people to work on our cars than we do to teach our children, keep our streets safe, and save our lives. These folks have to work 8 hours to pay for one hour of legal representation for lawyers like his highness. Pawlenty CLEARLY sees us all as Walmart greeters in his theonomic 3rd world America.

And I’m sure Tim has no problems with the outrageous salaries of just about any CEO of an American company. That’s just the free market at its best for TP.

Unions give workers a voice in how they are treated as workers. Unions are a very democratic institution. I know conservatives want to treat workers as property but what is unclear is why workers (such as Delta workers) are so dumb that they go along with being treated like property.

The correct title for the book is “Courage to Stand Exactly Where the Taxpayers’ League and Fox News Tell Me To.”

Courage to Stand By As Minnesota’s Quality of Life Plummets

Randy

I have to agree with you. Lately it seems like any statement out of Tim’s mouth is totally predictable and that includes his political position on issue x, y or z. It almost seems like someone is feeding him a prewritten script to follow and follow it he does.

Uh, yeah. His campaign manager is neo-con tool for PNAC, Project for the New American Century (google that) warlords and nation-builders for The Heritage Foundation who gave us the Iraq war-crime, and he is taking marching orders from the Grand Poobah of Holly-rollers Pat Robertson head kook of the Dominionists who want to claim dominion over the 7 mountains of power. Google that too.

Time is desperate to break out of the low single digits in every major 2012 poll and he won’t be able to keep blaming “name recognition” for his low numbers (because as Nate Silver pointed out, poor name recognition after quietly campaigning for this long really means that you’re not memorable or impressing voters). So he’ll become louder and louder and more and more extreme until GOP primary voters notice him.

That wage statistic is an outright lie. A Minnesota university professor cannot be expected to earn the same wage as a wal-mart worker. In california, a study that came out recently and which was quoted in the SF Chronicle said that California public employees earn slightly less than their private counterparts, and massively less if their pension is taken away.

Many public employees across the nation also don’t get social security, because their employers have decided to save money on a cheaper pension plan (CA pays 1% less per employee due to this arrangement in comparison with the SS tax).

Unfortunately, a lot of people really are very uneducated about the job market, who earns what, etc, and most private companies keep their wages, er, private. So it’s likely a lot of people will believe this and vote accordingly, gutting our middle classes further.

He tried an honest title first, but “The Gall to Lie” didn’t poll well.

He’s right. Check your budgets; local, county and statewide over the last 20 years and look what we’re doling out for pay and benefits. It’s a cash cow and I don’t want to pay for it. I have many neighbors who work for the gov’t – either as teachers, behavior specialists, technology analysts… you name it. I know what they make and I hear what they do… It takes every ounce of strength from laughing when they tell me about what they do (especially after they go on about how crucial their job is). I work as a teacher (privately) and am an engineer by trade – I typically don’t talk about things I do for work with them because they’d be lost at hello. Why should I teach my kids to work hard at school when they can be a drop-out and enroll in the gov’t jobs program and make more than most anyone else? Pathetic.