<Crying "Raise our taxes!" and "Show some guts!", thousands of people rallied at the Illinois state Capitol on Wednesday to protest lawmakers' inaction on a tax hike.>
This must have been a grassroots collection of ordinary citizens from all walks of life, because news consumers were not treated to weeks of reporting and analysis of the participants' racial composition, income-level, education or political party affiliation. We were not introduced to any slang terms for perverted sexual acts, applied to the protestors by network news broadcasters, nor were we regaled with ominous hints about the propensity of such dissenters to commit acts of anti-government violence, accompanied by stock footage of carnage from The Unabomber's handiwork.
News reports of the rally did give passing mention to the presumably innocuous fact that the crowd included "public employees, labor union members and school teachers," so permit me to translate: this astroturf rent-a-mob consisted of a bunch of parasites, angered that the Democrats in Springfield have thus far failed to hike the rate at which they rob the productive private sector through taxation, in order to adequately suckle the unproductive sector, as represented by public employees, labor unions and school teachers.
Now, not being a Stalinist thug myself, and therefore unqualified for employment in the "mainstream" media or the Obama administration, I am perfectly content for this brood of blood-sucking parasites to skip work in order to clamour outside the State Capitol for policies that they support. I merely note, for the record, the double-standard of media scrutiny compared with the Tea Parties.