Yesterday I reported from the National World War Two Memorial on several members of Congress crashing the barricades set up by the National Park Service that were keeping out several hundred Honor Flight veterans — many of whom were WW2 veterans — from visiting their own memorial. The Park Service claimed that the memorial and the entire National Mall area had to be closed because of the government shutdown.
The same scene was reenacted again today as two Honor Flights from Missouri and Chicago arrived in prearranged visits. These Honor Flights were met by hundreds of ordinary citizens and about a dozen members of Congress, who once again crashed the barricades to let the veterans into the WW2 Memorial.
After about an hour, about 20 protesters arrived on the scene chanting “Boehner, get us back to work” and claiming they were federal employees furloughed because of the shutdown.
In the video below these protesters were marching towards the press gaggle and I was asking them to show their federal IDs to prove they were in fact federal workers. No one wore their federal ID and none would provide it to prove their claim.
Then, remarkably, a guy carrying a sign passed by wearing a McDonald’s employee shirt, which I noted. I then began asking them how much they had been paid to protest, at which point the guy wearing the McDonald’s shirt came back and admitted he had been paid $15.
About a minute later a protest organizer ran up to me telling me that the man in question is a contractor working at the McDonald’s in a Smithsonian Museum — a claim she made no effort to prove. The same story was told to Jake Tapper at CNN who was on the scene and made the same inquiry.
And yet that doesn’t explain why he was paid $15 to attend a protest targeting our nation’s honored military veterans.
UPDATE: Huffington Post reporter Arthur Delaney states that the protest was organized by a group called “Good Jobs Nation,” not SEIU as I previously reported, and that, remarkably, the protesters weren’t even federal employees at all but individuals who WORK in federal buildings affected by the shutdown.
Delaney and his HuffPo colleague Ryan J. Reilly have attacked me on Twitter, speculating on what the McDonald’s employee, Luis Chiliquinga, really thought, and chastising me for my editorial standards in reporting on what I recorded. The video speaks for itself.
UPDATE2: So who is “Good Jobs Nation”? Jonathan Adler points me to this Washington Post article that explains:
The group formed about six months ago as a coalition of like-minded labor groups. Its funding comes largely from unions, including the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Farm Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers, according to organizers.
So they were, in fact, a SEIU rent-a-mob
WAPO adds this:
The group held its first demonstration in May, when service workers at federal buildings walked off the job to protest their wages.
So they voluntarily walk off the job to protest, then complain when Congress gives them extra free time to get some extra scratch from the SEIU and Teamsters to protest.
ConMom has more on “Good Jobs Nation”.
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