COMPLAIN ABOUT PUBLIC PENSIONS AND BENEFITS, WATCH YOUR BUSINESS BURN DOWN:

According to the blog that broke the story, Watch Sonoma County, “North Bay firefighters launched a boycott of a Napa Valley winery this weekend after its owner criticized their wages and benefits in a letter published in the St. Helena Star.” But more than a boycott was launched, as the winery owner has received veiled threats online from some public safety employees, potentially refusing to fight a fire at his home or winery, or save him from choking in a restaurant.

Let’s hope this story isn’t true, but it is, alas, believable.

A BUNCH OF new releases on Blu-Ray. With some, like Avatar, at half-price. Think I’d prefer Tombstone, though.

HOW LONG WOULD YOU SURVIVE after SHTF? The correct answer, of course, is “it depends.” I’m all for disaster prep, etc., but luck also plays a big role. People answering that poll, after all, have no idea how long they’ll live if it doesn’t hit the fan.

DAVE KOPEL: “With President Clinton wagging his finger at the Tea Party movement and claiming that the movement is inciting violence, it is worthwhile to remember the role of the Clinton administration in perpetrating and covering up numerous violent and other crimes at Waco.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I have a question. Disregarding competence and politics, how does a young Bill Ayers substantially differ from a young Tim McVeigh?”

Well, competence seems to be the biggest difference.

BIG JOURNALISM: From ‘The Front Page’ To a Flock Of Sheep: Reporters, Then and Now.

MICKEY KAUS: “I apologize to former Vice-President Walter Mondale for this comparison. Even Mondale was never as much of a Big Labor toady as today’s California Democratic hacks. … He did lose decisively to union-skeptical Hart in the state, though. … Today, it’s as if Gary Hart had never lived, with the party owned lock, stock and barrel by the interest groups he criticized. …”

ICELAND FALLOUT: Contracts Prof Finds Herself in Real-Life Contracts Hypo.

PJTV: The Best of the Worst: Tea Party Infiltrator Signs Revealed.

OKLAHOMA SENATOR: Bill Clinton’s Comments On Oklahoma City Bombing “Unconscionable.”

PJTV: Matt Kibbe: Why The Tea Party Is Stronger Than Ever.

L.A. TIMES: Obama’s fifth-quarter Gallup approval slips, among worst 3 of modern presidents.

FEELING ENTITLED:

They’re the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.

But the target of this tirade is New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie — and the perpetrators are the state’s teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.

In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

Charming.

UPDATE: Reader Neil Sorens writes:

With public sector employment, it is easy to blame the governor/mayor/legislature/etc. for budget cuts that affect your pay or employment, or to blame voters for opposing policies that directly benefit you. Someone who opposes that tax increase that would allow you to keep your job is automatically a heartless bastard (and, most certainly, completely wrong about the issue).

With private sector employment, we can’t always put a human face on the root cause of detrimental effects on our livelihood. We may blame the company leadership, the President/governor, taxes, outsourcing, or just the fickleness of “the economy.”

That’s not to say I support the cause of the public sector employees. Rather, I think that these quirks of human nature are what makes it dangerous to allow the public sector to grow so large.

For example, the problem here in California is that the public sector unions have grown so large and are so politically active that they are unstoppable through normal democratic means. Some people may have the sense to vote for fewer teachers, or less money for public safety, but fiscal sanity can be a difficult cause to rally behind, especially when your opponent is equipped with money, votes, a single-minded purpose, and an emotionally appealing message. We simply have to wait for them to consume everything and then turn on each other, we have to move elsewhere…both of which are happening now.

Yes, California is in trouble, but there still seems to be hope for New Jersey.

THAT’LL HELP: Obama: Washington Needs To Be More Like California. Matt Welch comments:

While I appreciate any shout-out to my home state, what California’s Democratic elite are “about” is enabling their union backers to drive a once-thriving economy into a bottomless pit of unemployment, perennially busted budgets, and unfunded pension contributions that transcend most human comprehension. This is not a spirit Washington should try to “recapture,” unless the goal is 12.6 percent unemployment (with a bullet!), a credit rating hurtling toward junk-bond status, and a perpetual round of bailouts from a faraway government entity.

And here’s the kicker–Obama in his speech said that “one of the main reasons our economy faltered was because some on Wall Street made irresponsible bets, with no accountability.” The exact same language could be used, with 100 percent accuracy, to describe public officials all over California–including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who just today is unveiling his latest too-little, too-late package of reforms. All of these labor-backed bureaucrats bet irresponsibly that they could more than double pension promises to state employees over the past decade, because the “accountability” moment was deferred to when those payments came due. Well, they’re only beginning to come due now, and it’s a damnable mess.

Indeed. And that doesn’t even count the CalPERS scandals.

Plus, from Tim Cavanaugh: Why California Will Get Even Sicker.

SEDITION? ‘We’re Going to Make it Uncomfortable for the Democratic Party’.

Related: Joe Klein’s Seditious Hyperbole.

And Mark Steyn on Ayman Al-Awlaki:

The voiceover is by US citizen (and spiritual mentor, most recently, to Major Hasan) Ayman al-Awlaki. He is explaining the rationale for killing identified individuals, including the creators of “South Park”.

Mr al-Awlaki says things like, “Harming Allah and his messenger is a reason to encourage Muslims to kill whoever does that.”

Maybe he’d get a worse press if he were to stop pussyfooting around and explicitly incite violence by saying something openly hateful like “I’m becoming very concerned about federal spending.”

Then he’d be a drone-target for sure!

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Techno-GOP.

AMAZON FIGHTS FOR privacy of customer records.

PJTV: Alison Acosta Fraser: We’re Not A Nation of ATMs.

SELECTING AND TRAINING legal entrepreneurs. This is something I talked about at Hofstra last year, and I’m going to be writing more on it this summer.

AN “UNAUTHORIZED” LOOK AT the next iPhone. But the question for me is, was it really lost, or is this a clever PR ploy?

A POLITICAL BEATING IN NEW ORLEANS: Real Violence, Real Evidence, No Media. Sorry about that broken jaw. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

DAN RIEHL: Is Barbara Boxer Inciting Violence Against Tea Party Protesters?

THE JOYS OF champagne and crab. Beats those fattening school lunches!

ARE SCHOOL LUNCHES A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT? “The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.” So the one meal where teenagers are fed directly by the government is a major source of obesity, but we keep being told that the solution to widespread obesity is . . . more government? Uh huh.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: A virtual thief used iTunes to sell my stolen short story.

COOKING THE BOOKS? White House Caught Altering Stimulus Baseline Projection by 7 Million Jobs. “That’s right, in order to make it look like their stimulus has ‘created or saved’ 2.8 million jobs, the Obama Administration first had to whack 7 million jobs from their previous estimates.”