“This is not a political rally, it’s a parade, for God’s sake,” [Wausau Mayor Jim]\u00a0Tipple said, noting that taxpayer money is used by the city to pay for staging the event. Tipple’s office is nonpartisan, and he claims no affiliation with either political party.<\/p>\n
He said the annual cost of the parade, including insurance, setting up and taking down a stage, and police personnel, runs anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 each year.<\/p>\n
The Republican-backed collective bargaining limits made Wisconsin the center of a battle over union power this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m not sure if the various public employee unions responded “What? \u00a0We spend taxpayer money on our own interests all the time!”, but I’m sure it came up…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, we reported that labor leaders in Wausau, Wisconsin had disinvited Republican politicians from participating in the Labor Day parade, because they’d sided with Scott Walker (and that a Minnesota politician had more or less joined in). Today, Wausau’s mayor says if they wanna play, they gotta pay:. “This is not a political rally, it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22059"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22061,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22059\/revisions\/22061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}