Union Protests are "Uprisings" Now.

[Jenne]

The bit about Reagan was rather lulzy, especially since Reagan was the only President to have ever been a Union chief, and also supported unions in the Warsaw Pact states (Solidarity, anyone?).  Of course, that hardly makes him a socialist radical, but there is the constant amusement in that modern conservatives do things Reagan historically advised against (torturing terrorists, trying to start nuclear arms races etc) and then claim he was their inspiration.

Yeah, he was kind of an unconventional union rep, though, if that HBO documentary is to be believed.  He was Mr. Corporatist America even back then.  His left-leanings in politics were VERY short-lived.  He literally stopped thinking "the little guy" was important at all once he became rich/famous.  And he was never as famous as he wanted to be until he started politicking.  His union rep job was part of his entree into that spectrum, though he was tantamount to a used car salesman by that time, hawking GE wares on TV every night, year after year.

[Triple Zero]

ooh ooh, did someone say MODAL income?



Explanation: in order to get a nice histogram, I took a shitload of data from www.bls.gov. They got a per county table of income groups (types of jobs), how many people there are in it and how much they earn in that county. That was fine-grained enough for me to allow to massage aggregate data into a different shape, in this case a histogram.

The 2008 modal income is the point at the peak of the histogram:

there's two bars highest, they represent $22k-$24k with 9.82 million jobs and $24k-$26k with 9.85 million jobs.

(I spent over 3 hours last year mining bls.gov to create that graph, so I'm going to milk it for all it's worth )

[Cramulus]

nice graph!
            \

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

ooh ooh, did someone say MODAL income?



Explanation: in order to get a nice histogram, I took a shitload of data from www.bls.gov. They got a per county table of income groups (types of jobs), how many people there are in it and how much they earn in that county. That was fine-grained enough for me to allow to massage aggregate data into a different shape, in this case a histogram.

The 2008 modal income is the point at the peak of the histogram:

there's two bars highest, they represent $22k-$24k with 9.82 million jobs and $24k-$26k with 9.85 million jobs.

(I spent over 3 hours last year mining bls.gov to create that graph, so I'm going to milk it for all it's worth )

Very nice!

[Telarus]

[Chairman Risus]

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/04/wisconsin.budget/index.html?hpt=T2

Gov. Walker warns union of possible layoffs; Dem. assembly member tackled by police entering Capitol building.

[Remington]

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike." -Scott Walker, May 2nd, 2011

[Juana]

I can see him saying that, and getting away with it, too.