Forgive me for being a little skeptical when something like this is put up by the Breitbart folks. Some of their stuff is good and some of their stuff is edited to fit their agenda. They could very easily excerpt the letter reformated while linking to a scan of the original email.

And it does matter where this email came from and who redacted it as the first line of the post says, "Media Matters for America (MMfA) sent an email yesterday..." Did Mr. Pollak see it or is he relying on his source? The post also states "the email was explicitly addressed to congressional 'allies.'" Where? This could very likely be an email blast that goes out to anyone who signs up for MMFA updates.

This post is full of inuendo and assumptions. MMFA may be guilty of what the OP alleges, but this isn't proof. If they have what they think is smoking gun evidence of MMFA violating IRS restrictions, report them. 501(c)3s that are violating the rules should be punished. Otherwise this does nothing more than confirm what we already know, MMFA leans left, just like the Sierra Club does and just like the NRA and MRC lean right.

Did you redact this email or did the staff who passed it on to you redact it? The letter redacts who it was sent to and who it was from. Without seeing who it is at least from, how do you (if a senate staffer redacted it) or we (if you redacted it) know who sent this? For all we know, this could be from someone who was given an early heads up on the story. Even if it is from MMFA, I don't think it is enough to take away their 501(c)3 status. They could very well argue that they wanted to make a splash in coverage of their study, not of the underlying issue of the pipeline.

Yeah, MMFA runs left, but this is not the smoking gun it is made out to be.

You are really calling the former Chair of Goldman a socialist?

Maybe he made some bad decisions and came out as a loser, as did his investors, by gambling on European debt, but the market always has winners and losers. I bet every firm on wall street bet one way or the other on it, they just did a better job of hedging their bets with other investments. Yeah, question him on whether the firm lied to investors or whether it broke its fiduciary duty to investors, or whether he does actually know where the money is, but this is a situation of the pain of capitalism, not socialism.

So wait...where in this article does anyone refer Corzine as an Obama Advisor? Wouldn't "Former Democractic Senator Corzine..." be bad enough and accurate?

I was addressing your argument that teachers are paid 35% more than the average full-time salary. If your first post had been apples to apples on salaries, I probably would have kept reading. I was not looking to debate whether teachers are over paid or get better benefits. I have no doubt that government benefits are better than most private sector benefits. I was looking for relevant information to allow people to meaningfully develop their own opinions. The internet is fraught with misleading and downright false information that members of the "left" and "right" eat up and spit out. You can't even get into a debate as to whether teachers are over paid until you have something close to accurate information (Truly accurate numbers on something like this is pretty difficult due to these numbers being based on samples and the wide range of benefits for both public and private sector employees).

With regards to this article; his mother probably should not be getting a pension. Fix that. Require a greater number of years before a worker vests in a plan. If they leave before then, require them to roll out contributions made by them (or on their behalf) within a certain amount of time or they lose that money or get sent a check minus the taxes on those contributions.

The situation in Wisconsin is not about the short term fiscal problems of the state. If that were the Governor's real concern he would have either accepted either the Union's agreement to the benefits cuts or the Republican proposal to cut benefits and freeze collective bargaining rights for 2 years. By refusing to even consider either proposal, the Governor has shown that the benefits cuts are the icing and the busting the Union is the cake. That may be a debate to have, but don't put that in an emergency if it is going to prevent passage. Pull that provision and move on with the emergency and deal with the issue of collective bargaining later with some actual debate.

This seems a lot like 2008 when the Dems came into power in Washington:
1. The majority ignores the minority.
2. The majority tries to jam through legislation quickly without much time to review it.
3. The minority puts up as many procedural hurdles as possible (using a procedural Filibuster to block a vote isn't much different than leaving the state to block a vote. The vote still doesn't happen).
4. Opponents of the bill take the streets, the airwaves, and the inter-tubes to protest, some with inappropriate signs and commentary to degrade the people in the majority and make look like terrible people (There is no reason ever to compare any American leader to Hitler, no matter what party they are. It is not only inappropriate, it is offensive).
5. Supporters of the bill take to the streets, the airwaves, and the inter-tubes in support, some with inappropriate comments meant degrade the protesters and make them look like terrible people.

The Tea Party protesters weren't terrible people and the Union members out there protesting aren't terrible people. They are both exercised their rights to express their views. They weren't jailed or shot, or prevented from getting their views out. Their leaders weren't jailed without cause nor did they disappeared one night.

We get so caught up in out own views and our preconceptions that we can't see anyway to work with those who disagree with us and turn to insults. But despite a few bumps, we've been doing it for 235 years.

Considering you have to have a college education to be a teacher, a more reasonable comparison might to be the salary of college educated workers which, according to BLS, was $53,300 in 2009. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

The average wage for Wisconsin teachers is actually less than the national average for college educated workers.

I would be interested in the sources of those numbers and whether they take into account education level. Is that $39,000 looking at all full-time workers or just full-time college educated workers?

Can someone point me to the violence? Reading the headline I was expecting to see videos of rocks and riot police.

Seriously, any stories with actual violence? Signs are really meaningless for pointing to left or right being violent and hateful because outliers on both sides do it.

Along those lines, had Fox continued to block internet access to Fox content, there is an argument to be made that it was tortious interferance with a contractual relationship. Specifically, Cablevision's contract with its internet customers.

Really what this all boils down to is limited competition in the market place for cable, internet, and phone services (in some cases no competition) and the bundling of three services which are relatively distinct in their type and scope.

The author is correct, Fox paid a lot of money to produce its content. If they wanted to, they could put all fox internet content behind a paywall. If it wanted to, Fox could enter contracts with ISPs (cable companies) to give all the ISP's subscribers access to the paywalled content (maybe, not sure if there are regs blocking this). Fox is completely within its contractual rights to block Cablevision subscribers access to Fox television content. However, internet and phone service are completely different and separate from cable service. ISPs and phone service providers (PSPs) provide nothing more than a portal through which customers access the internet and phone network while cable service providers actually pay for the content their customers view. Fox stepped beyond the service in dispute and apparently quickly realized it and restored access.