A LEGAL FUNDRAISER FOR A CANADIAN BLOGGER ENDORSED BY MARK STEYN. I donated.

Background here.

BT AND KIRSTY HAWKSHAW: Dreaming.

And here’s the Tiesto remix. Personally, I prefer the original.

BYRAN PRESTON: Assault in Lansing: Leftist Blogs Go Into ‘False Flag’ Mode, Mainstream Media Goes Silent. “It’s not tough to figure out how the mainstream media can turn a hot story into a non-story through monolithic silence. Journolist proved beyond any doubt that many mainstream media figures collude with figures in the radical left-wing blogosphere to protect Democrats and their allies. . . . This alternative version the left offered didn’t have to be true. It didn’t even have to appear to be true. There did not have to be a single grain of a fact anywhere near it. It just had to be floated out there and give so-called mainstream journalists enough of an excuse to decide not to cover the real story. Mainstream media journalists know all about editing, for instance, since they go out of their way to edit out the conservative world view in just about every story they write or produce. Many journalists know about false flag operations, because they are living false flag operations.”

SO PEOPLE HAVE BEEN COMMENTING ON THE PURE MICHIGAN FACEBOOK PAGE and expressing their anger at Steve Crowder’s being assaulted by union thugs. But Reader Aaron Chmielewski points out that, hey, the good guys won. And he suggests that anger and boycotts of Michigan miss that important point:

Michigan did the right thing and passed the law. Right now Michigan needs the support of sportsmen as well as businesses to make sure that RTW is successful. The site is for sharing tourist information, pictures, and positive stories.

Union members will do everything possible to make RTW seem a disaster, don’t help them out. The quasi-cover-up and failure to arrest Crowder’s attackers is atrocious. Posting “I won’t visit Michigan” is not helpful and shows little more class than the protestors.

Arresting those responsible is important and people should be expressing this. But how is also important. Posters need to show more support and more class. If someone feels compelled to comment, they should be promising to visit when the men arrested and what they are looking forward to when this happens instead of promising not visit like opponents of RTW are also doing.

He’s right. You might want to drop by and thank them for passing the law.

KATIE PAVLICH: Jimmy Hoffa’s Personal and Hypocritical Class War.

IT’S 12:12:12 ON 12/12/12.

EULOGY FOR OCCUPY: “It was the tiny, brutal, and bitter politics of failed people.”

Yet there are lessons to be learned.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Union thugs use punches, not persuasion, in Michigan.

Union bosses hate right-to-work laws the same way they hate every policy that tends to empower workers — including their own members — to make informed decisions about how they are represented in the workplace. This is why they pushed so hard to eliminate secret ballot votes in unionization elections. It is why they have pushed to shorten the time frame for those elections to the vanishing point, and to prevent employers from discussing the possible drawbacks of unionization with their employees. That is why they pushed to change the 70-year-old rules for airline and railroad union elections, so that a minority of workers can now force the majority into a union.

Right-to-work laws do not ban unions. They merely ensure that workers can no longer be coerced to pay them. They also create workplace conditions under which even union members are no longer a captive audience, forced to bow to whatever decisions the union leadership makes.

And that’s what the union leaders fear most.

With reason.

UPDATE: But of course: Gawker Tries To Defend Man Who Punched Steven Crowder.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thoughts from Patterico on the tactics involved.

Related: The Terror of the Anti-Liberty Movement.

CALIFORNIA’S PAMPERED PUBLIC EMPLOYEES: “How bad is California’s public employee compensation problem? If nurses collecting $1 million in overtime pay and highway patrol officers making $500,000 are any indication, ‘bad’ doesn’t cover the half of it. . . . Public sector unions in states like California have squeezed every fringe benefit out of the state government you can imagine, from ‘arduous-duty’ pay, to bonuses for ‘the complex workload and level and knowledge required to receive and respond to consumer calls.’ These are not the demands of people who have the state’s well-being in mind.”

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: “Better Off On Benefits.”

NEW MARIJUANA LAWS CAUSE CONFUSION: “Laws legalizing the recreational use of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state have exposed a wide disconnect between Congress, the administration and voters on an increasingly controversial issue. The newly enacted laws put President Obama in a tricky spot, as evidenced by the Justice Department’s (DOJ) monthlong silence on the matter, despite pleas from lawmakers and the states’ governors for a concrete position.”

MASS INCARCERATION: John Tierney: For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars.

BARBARIANS: In northern Mali, Islamists’ attacks against civilians grow more brutal.

On a sweltering afternoon, Islamist police officers dragged Fatima Al Hassan out of her house in the fabled city of Timbuktu. They beat her up, shoved her into a white pickup truck and drove her to their headquarters. She was locked up in a jail as she awaited her sentence: 100 lashes with an electrical cord.

“Why are you doing this?” she recalled asking.

Hassan was being punished for giving water to a male visitor. . . . “The people are losing all hope,” said Sadou Diallo, a former mayor of the northern city of Gao. “For the past eight months, they have lived without any government, without any actions taken against the Islamists. Now the Islamists feel they can do anything to the people.”

Hunt them down and kill them. Make examples.

EX-DIPLOMAT: I Was Beaten By Muslim Brotherhood.

WHAT THE LEFT BLOGOSPHERE IS DOING ABOUT THE ASSAULT ON STEPHEN CROWDER: “They’re engaged in a systematic effort to create confusion and discourage mainstream journalists from reporting on the incident.” And they don’t have to be very good at it to achieve their goal, since mainstream journalists are looking for an excuse to ignore it. They never cover violence by lefties when they can avoid it, though they’re happy to report made-up claims of violence involving the right.

KEITH HENNESSEY: A Third Option Changes The Negotiation. “This doesn’t mean Republicans want to go with option C, or that they like option C. It instead means their negotiator now has the ability to walk away from a really terrible deal with the President, and that he can therefore demand a bit more from the President in exchange for cooperation on a deal. Option C is useful to Republicans even if their strong preference, for non-policy reasons, is to negotiate a deal with the President. I think option C is S. 3412, a bill passed by the Senate in July.”

IRS GRANTS TAX-EXEMPT STATUS to Ohio Tea Party group.

THEY PASSED IT, AND NOW THEY’RE FINDING OUT WHAT’S IN IT: Democrats urge delay for ‘job-killing’ Obamacare tax.

JAMES TARANTO: ‘There Will Be Blood:’ Big Labor shows its ugly face in Lansing.

This is the third major state-level victory against Big Labor in the past two years, after Wisconsin’s triumph over greedy government unions and Indiana’s lower-profile right-to-work effort. “People always say this is a really tough battle, you can’t win,” Mark Mix of National Right to Work tells the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. “Then one morning we woke up and guess what? We found out it wasn’t nearly as strong as we thought.” The violent rhetoric looks like a sign of weakness, not strength.

Yep.

JEREMY LOTT: How They’ve Ruined Air Travel.

REVISING THE SCRIPT: Campaigning At A Diesel Engine Factory, Obama Made No Mention of “Green Energy” or “Green Jobs.” “Perhaps the administration is tired of endorsing projects the wind up in bankruptcy. . . . The green jobs boom, it appears, is not panning out as well as the President hoped.”

PRO-CHOICE: Ed Morrissey: You Have The Right To Not Pay Union Dues. “Labor groups should have to convince members that their goods and services are worth the price demanded — and not just take the money and run.”

HAPPY 12/12/12! We won’t see this sort of date again in this century.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): ‘Underemployed’: The TV Show That Nails How the Recession Changed Sex.