Michelle Malkin spots “SEIU tantrums in San Francisco”:

Police arrested 18 SEIU Purple Shirts yesterday in San Francisco after their protest of city layoffs and budget cuts caused a traffic jam and massive headaches for other residents trying to commute to and from, you know, work:

Police arrested 18 members of the Service Employees International Union on Monday night after they blocked rush hour traffic on Market Street about a block from Civic Center Plaza to protest job cuts in the face of San Francisco’s budget deficit.

Protesters, trying to prevent 500 city workers from being laid off, reassigned or given smaller paychecks, had notified police ahead of time of their plans. Nobody was injured in the demonstration, police said. The demonstrators were cited and released with an order to appear later in court.

The SEIU also bragged about another disruptive caper in San Francisco on its blog last week:

“What does it take to get the mayor’s attention in this town?” was the question on their purple lips Thursday night (it was cold) after several dozen SEIU 1021 members and staff occupied Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, while hundreds more cheered them on inside and outside City Hall. It was a two-pronged tactic of escalating the San Francisco campaign through civil disobedience on top of public rallies…

…How the caper went down: Like a scheme from Ocean’s 11, SEIU 1021 had a 14-foot puppet and a crowd of hundreds to draw public attention–while inside the halls of power, a joint member-staff task force prepared to occupy the mayor’s office at any cost.

After changing into purple nursing scrubs in a conference room near the supervisors’ second floor offices, members seized advantage of an opened door to charge through the hallway past Newsom’s budget director’s office and into the wood-paneled lobby of Da Mayor’s office itself. That’s where they stayed for more than two hours, chanting and discussing and demanding to see the mayor, who never showed. Outside, hundreds of SEIU 1021 members and supporters rallied outside, holding signs reading “I Am a Woman” and dancing to Bob Marley’s anthemic “Get Up, Stand Up!”

After negotiating their release from the mayor’s office (they were locked in), members were greeted with wild cheers by most of the outside supporters.

What the SEIU won’t brag about is its own increasing isolation from other workers as a result of its militancy.

Oh, that militancy:

• Video: ‘Bury Them’: Fresno Homecare Workers Describe SEIU Threats
• The SEIU versus a 17-year old Boy Scout
• The August beating of Kenneth Gladney
• Obama’s August conference call with SEIU

How interconnected is SEIU and President Obama? Last month, a clip  from January 2008 began circulating of Obama as a newly-minted presidential candidate, as transcribed by Chelsea Schilling of World Net Daily:

During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it “build more and more power” – and he promised to “paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:

[Watch video here -- Ed]

“They’ll all say, ‘We love SEIU,’” he said. “But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?”

Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

“I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything,” he said. [More on that from Sammy Benoit at Pajamas -- Ed] “When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That’s how we built political power on the south side of Chicago.”

He continued, “And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

And more and more of the nation has the purple bruises to show from it.

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VIDEONETDAILY
Obama: ‘We’re going to paint nation purple with SEIU’
Explains how he ‘built political power on south side of Chicago’

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Posted: October 13, 2009
9:41 pm Eastern

By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it “build more and more power” – and he promised to “paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:

“They’ll all say, ‘We love SEIU,’” he said. “But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?”

Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

“I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything,” he said. “When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That’s how we built political power on the south side of Chicago.”

He continued, “And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”