Don't Go Into The Light

after this illuminating op/ed by Joel Mowbray in the Washington Times. He's apparently received one of the union group's communications detailing plans for the Ft. Lauderdale protest:

Inside a South Florida Wal-Mart last Thursday, union-sponsored protesters handed out empty, gift-wrapped boxes to children and made them cry, according to multiple witnesses -- and it appears that the arrests of two of the protesters may have been part of a grand strategy designed by Big Labor-backed WakeUpWalMart.com.

Yet despite internal WakeUpWalMart.com communication -- obtained exclusively by this columnist -- indicating that the union-funded front instructed its protesters to test police patience, the organization is now playing the race card since the two protesters arrested (out of 15 total) are both black.

You'll recall that I mentioned the race accusations in a previous post. But Mr. Mowbray add a new element - instructions from above to push the envelope of police patience, in front of the cameras, for the purpose of provoking an incident:

In an internal WakeUpWalMart.com PowerPoint presentation that lays out a 10-part timeline for attacking the retailer from late October through the end of the year, the ninth step -- which is supposed to take place between Dec. 14 and Dec. 19 -- calls for activists to place "Santa Claus in front of WMT stores with children asking for health care and signs." Beneath that, though, it reads: "they can't arrest Santa -- and if they do, make sure the press is there."

Mr. Mowbray poses the theory that the protesters mistakenly went too far, and this seems to be a good read of the situation. But it appears that the rest was planned. Getting arrested is a favorite and time-honored protest ploy.

Here's the way it appears to have happened:

The four protesters entered the store and started distributing their union pamphlets and their vocal views to the employees and the customers (in other words, disrupting business), all planned and executed knowing that it was illegal to do so, in hopes of getting the police called out. This also included passing out the "presents", or rather, empty boxes, to employees (planned) and the customers (likely unplanned, probably straying from the script due to the excitement of the moment). When the police arrived they would incite the police into an embarrasing photo-op in true protest tradition.

Their plan went south when the manager refused to take the bait, instead hustling them out of the store with only his staff to assist instead of the headline generating police that they craved.

Perhaps they felt the push to the manager, in their desperation to salvage something from the day, was the only way to get the police called to the store. Regardless, it backfired. The cops interviewed a few bystanders and simply arrested the two protesters - not because they were black, but because they were the ones who did the pushing. And all the posturing by wakeupwalmart's Paul Blank is an obligatory attempt at butt-covering, and making lemonade from an event that obviously went sour.

After getting caught in this lie, wakeupwalmart should issue an apology to the store employees, the public, and the police for the false assertions in their statements.

One would hope that the press would view further statements from the union with a jaundiced eye in the future.