The American Spectator

Sure, more lanes are nice, but it’s like storage space at home — “junk expands to exceed the storage space available.”
— Scott H. Johnson

A BUNCH OF THUGS
Re: RiShawn Biddle’s Broken Promises:

Late in the 1970s and early 1980 we lived at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. The post was next to the town of Sierra Vista. One fall the local teachers wanted to strike. Their reason was their desire for collective bargaining to be a part of any decision concerning wage increases. The entire idea was to encumber local taxes with the national union’s desire to impose whatever they wanted upon local taxpayers, or in other terms … taxation without representation. What followed was a scene none of us expected to see.

First off, the Commander of the Post allowed his wife to call all officer’s wives and also among enlisted wives to seek university graduates. And we were called upon to go in and substitute and keep the local schools going, not allowing local students, mostly from military families, to have their education shortchanged. As a Texas girl in schools where striking was not allowed (the state of Texas makes teacher’s strikes against the law), I found myself teaching a 5th grade class. And I also found myself crossing strike lines to get to school each day.

The local teachers’ heckles were quite disturbing but by about the end of the first week of the strike everything changed. NEA brought in union thugs, who looked more like they belonged on a dock working forklifts, than like teachers. Then things got really ugly. From simple cat calls the protest became increasingly more complex, with names of substitutes being obtained from schoolchildren, then the teachers would call our homes to harass us (or whomever answered the phone). From there crossing the line each day felt more like being under fire from live ammo. The union thugs used profanities and obscenities, and compelled the local teachers to do the same….and those local teachers also campaigned their own students by planting ideas and messages. Many students were told by their own homeroom teacher to cause havoc and trouble for the substitute, with the implication that we didn’t deserve to teach them.

One day however, one of the students in my classroom came in rather quietly, and he had usually been a real behavior problem. When I asked him what was wrong he replied that his “teacher” out on the strike line told him she knew I was really teaching subject matter, not just holding a seat and she had told him to “mind” me. I was pretty flabbergasted. And before the 3 week strike was over, several of us were asked to stay on and teach for the district.

The teachers and union thugs failed in their efforts of collective bargaining as they were shown that school COULD go on without them and it might even be beneficial to students. But I have never forgotten my experience of seeing what the NEA really was, a bunch of lousy, hot tempered, power grabbing fools. The taxpayers of Sierra Vista might still be rejoicing that collective bargaining did not get imposed on their local taxes.
— Beverly Gunn
East Texas Rancher

WRECKAGE
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s Newsweek: The Canary In The Liberal Coal Mine:

Mr. Lord begins his piece noting the consequences of the failure of Newsweek to the staff and their families. I wonder though, to use his metaphor, about the miners who refuse to run when the canary passes. Most liberals I know are staunch Darwinians, so “refusing to run from the mine” is not terribly surprising and fits their world view. If there is anything to lament about the failure of Newsweek, it is that it’s wreckage could not have been limited to owners and staff.
— Reid Bogie

IVY TO WASHINGTON
Re: Ken Blackwell’s Elena Kagan: Estranged From America:

I regard this as a serious flaw in the theory and practice of government in the United States. Can’t anybody — conservative or liberal — find someone to sit on the Supreme Court whose job resume doesn’t involve going from the Ivy League to Washington to the Ivy League to Washington to the Ivy League and then back to Washington?
— Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida

SMIRKING
Re: Patrick O’Hannigan’s The Governor, the President, and the Race Card:

Nail-on-head observation about Obama’s reflexive smirking. That exposes, I think, an attitude that allows him, as he wears one of his many egotistical hats, Lecturer-in-Chief, to chastise all of America about its incivility while he points fingers, demonizes critics, dismisses public opinion and, generally, depreciates anything outside of his ideological and morally agnostic bounds.
— C. Kenna Amos Jr.