Another Voice Agrees With Us: Gov’t Unions Are Un-American

-By Warner Todd Huston

Yeah, I know… it’s like a broken record around here. But, here is another voice coming to our side to agree with us that public employees unions are antithetical to good government, wholly un-democratic, and, therefore, quite un-American. This time it’s the well-regarded Michael Barone echoing our mantra.

Barone is one of the best political reporters in the country and in his own inimitable way has jumped on the anti-union bandwagon (not that he never has in the past, just that this piece is particularly on par).

Before he gets to government unions, one of his points is that unions aren’t even needed in the private sector anymore because all the evils that employers perpetrated in the days of yore have now been regulated away by governments and laws. Because of an active government unions just aren’t needed to protect workers anymore, says Barone. It is a good point, after all.
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Another Voice Agrees With Us: Gov’t Unions Are Un-American”


How Media Chooses Words Adds to Bias

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Politico had a story about Big Labor penned by Jeanne Cummings, the reporter famed for going after Sarah Palin’s Party purchased wardrobe during the 2008 presidential campaign, that was an object lesson in Old Media bias. Her piece headlined “Labor helps kill its own top priority” is a great example of using language to subtly shade the arguments, in this case those of Big Labor, to elicit a positive view of the ideology contained in the issue. Her piece very subtly shades the goals of Big Labor in a positive light easily giving the reader a feeling that Big Labor’s goals are good and noble and is a perfect example of how the media creates emotional appeal for the left’s actions.

Because it is such masterfully crafted example of subtle bias, it deserves to be studied closely.

Cummings Begins her propping up of Big Labor by saying that Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts is “bad news for health care” and will mean that Republicans can “block the Employee Free Choice Act,” and so she immediately casts the possible actions of the GOP in a negative light at the outset. “Bad news for health care”? It is said as if the GOP was against “health care.” It isn’t. And of course “block” is certainly a negative action. In any case, she started by shrouding the GOP in negativity right away.
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How Media Chooses Words Adds to Bias”


Some Letters Beating Me Up Over My Tea Party Articles

-By Warner Todd Huston

Well I’ve now written six — this makes seven — articles criticizing certain failures of the Tea Party movement thus far. They are all meant to be constructive criticisms, though, not dismissive nor derogatory of them. It’s measured introspection I employ in each of these articles. No name calling, no laughing, no hate. There is just no logical way to construe what I’ve written thus far as hate against the Tea Party movement. But this whole Tea Party thing reveals several things to me. First of all it shows that there is still a lot of passion for them and that is a very good thing. I want the Tea Party groups to succeed and I want them to become a force that can teach the GOP a lesson. The other main thing it shows me is that too many people can’t read for comprehension these days.

The sad thing is that these days even the slightest criticism of a thing is seen by too many as outright hostility. Everyone is so hypersensitive that even a mild criticism meant as an exercise in introspection is seen as an over-the-top attack. It doesn’t just happen on the right, either. Look at what happened to all those Hillary Clinton supporters during the run up to the 2008 presidential elections. The constructive criticism that Hillary fans offered the Democrats was pounded down so hard by the left that many Hillary supporters found themselves aligned — and some permanently — with the side they thought they opposed; the Republicans.

Naturally there’s the name callers and nay sayers always floating around out there. I had one guy, for instance, say, “who asked you for your opinion” of the Tea Parties? This same guy then went on to give me HIS opinion of them evoking the obvious rejoinder of just who the hell asked him for his opinion, anyway? Obviously he wasn’t bright enough to “get” that concept!
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Some Letters Beating Me Up Over My Tea Party Articles”


Why Unions Are Dangerous in Education

-By Warner Todd Huston

One would think that a teacher that had 30 some years ago allegedly impregnated a 16-year-old student, a few years later sexually accosted two 12-year-old students, and was accused of molesting yet another student four years after that, would be out on his ear never to teach or be allowed around children again.

But the New York teachers union would beg to differ.

In fact, the union has differed so much that troubled teacher Francisco Olivares has been continually paid his $94,154 a year salary even though he’s been kept from the classroom for the last seven years.

So, who cares what the union says about this guy? Unfortunately, the union’s resistance to getting rid of him is enshrined in state law. The school can’t get rid of this dead weight either.

As a result, because the school can’t fire him and the union won’t let them, Olivares sits day in and day out in what is called a “rubber room” getting paid his full salary. That is getting paid his fall salary courtesy of the taxpayers of New York.
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Why Unions Are Dangerous in Education”


Obama: ‘I am not an ideologue’

-By John Armor

Last week, I wrote about 11 factually false statements in President Obama’s State of the Union address. Normally, one should not repeat the same subject next week. But, did you see the appearance of Obama before the Republicans meeting in Baltimore? I know that a few hundred of you are political junkies like me, and you saw that live.

I’m going to ask you a question. Don’t think. Don’t pause. Answer with the first thing that comes to mind. What occurred to you, when you heard Obama say, “I am not an ideologue.”?

I thought of Richard Nixon, toe to toe with Dan Rather (back when Rather was actually a reporter), Nixon answering, “I am not a crook.” Did you think the same thing? If so, here’s why.

When people have their backs to the wall, they will tell an obvious lie, perhaps just to fool themselves. Is Obama an ideologue? Here’s some of the evidence.

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Obama: ‘I am not an ideologue’”


Why Unions Can’t Work in Education

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle had a great piece pinpointing exactly why unions don’t work, especially for education. Her piece headlined “How Unions Work,” really brings it home why unions can’t agree to merit pay for teachers.

McArdle’s post was prompted by a piece by left-winger Matthew Yglesias whose post is meaningless and I won’t go into too much here. But it did spur some good points by McArdle. Suffice to say that what Yglesias said was that he thought unions could come to like merit pay but that the discussion is messy because people “have ideological opinions about unions in general.” In other words, Yglesias thinks it’s everyone else’s fault, not the union’s fault.

Yglesias is fooling only himself.
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Why Unions Can’t Work in Education”


Wall Street Journal Echoing The Blog

-By Warner Todd Huston

That’s right, it’s time to do the happy dance. Our drum beat of unions being antithetical to good government has, today, been echoed by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial board piece titled “The Public-Union Ascendancy.”

OK, OK, I am not silly enough to imagine that the WSJ is hanging on every word we here at the blog say — though I was told by John Fund a few months ago when we met in Chicago that he has read a lot of my work — but it is still good to see that we aren’t the only ones thinking along these lines.

The Journal has some interesting states to report on the increase in public sector leeches… um, I mean unions… and makes the salient point that it isn’t good.

The money paragraph sounds like something I’ve written a dozen times:
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Wall Street Journal Echoing The Blog”


Union Chief: Senators Are ‘Terrorists’ For Not Voting With Big Labor

-By Warner Todd Huston

Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern said that Senators that vote against his ideas are “terrorists.” That’s right, folks, this union chief is saying that any politician that votes against the politically motivated ideas of Big Labor should be branded a “terrorist.”

This is the sort of gutter rhetoric that union thugs specialize in but regardless Stern should be ashamed of himself for bringing the political debate down into that gutter. Scum. Andy Stern is simply scum for using such idiotic and demagogic rhetoric.
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Union Chief: Senators Are ‘Terrorists’ For Not Voting With Big Labor”


SEIU Hiding Behind Anti-Tea Party Website

-By Warner Todd Huston

Video king Lee Doren has done some great sleuthing to find out who is behind the newest attack on patriotic America by the left. A site called TheTeaPartyIsOver.org has popped up just as the primaries in Illinois get going. Its goal? To destroy the influence that Tea Party groups might have on the political process.

Turns out the biggest contributor to the group that created the site is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of Obama’s biggest supporters and the union that controls a large number of government employees unions.
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SEIU Hiding Behind Anti-Tea Party Website”


Sex, Lies, and the State of Union

-By John Armor

I’m just a semi-retired lawyer, living on a gravel road in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But I am also an avid consumer of news in all forms. This is a test. I read none of today’s analyses of the State of the Union speech. Here are the obvious lies I saw, off the top of my head.

Lie 1: “one in ten… cannot find work.” Government statistics show that unemployment is almost double that; 17% are out of work. But the “official” rate ignores the 7% who have given up looking for a job.

Lie 2: “to get a government that matches [Americans] dignity.” Is he totally unaware of the members of his Administration, or of his supporters in Congress, who are currently under investigation as tax cheats, perjurers, or other felonies? Or, does President Obama assume that they will all beat the rap?

Lie 3: “we made the [financial recovery] program more transparent and accountable.” Is he unaware that Congress is currently trying to find out where the now-$850 billion bailout money went? Who got it, and why, and how?
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Sex, Lies, and the State of Union”


Public Employees Unions Are Sinking California, Part 2

-By Warner Todd Huston

(Editor’s note: Some of this I posted earlier this month, but this is an expanded version that was just posted by BigJournalism.com, so I thought I’d go ahead and post it here, too.)

Steven Greenhut has an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about how the evils of public employees unions are destroying California’s budget and economy.

Greenhut begins by noting that with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, California is losing its “productive citizens” to other states but is still saddled with an economy killing surfeit of public employees unions that, “drive costs up and fight to block spending cuts.”

Greenhut goes on to report that the unfunded pensions that California is stuck with has increased by 2,000% in the last decade because of the overweening power of the unions.

Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.” There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

That is an absurd reality!
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Public Employees Unions Are Sinking California, Part 2″


Chgo Trib: Who Will Smack Down the Unions?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Dennis Byrne, a columnist with the Chicago Tribune, has a great piece asking the seminal question: what politician will take on the public employees unions?

This is, of course, the question we’ve been asking here for years! Who will stop these union thugs that have bought for themselves a bevy of compliant politicians at the state and federal level who will do their bidding against the best interests of the voters? What politician will step up and cut these thug’s illicit power down for the good of the people?

Seeing as how he is an Illinois columnist, Byrne centers his discussion on the $80 billion shortfall that Illinois’ public pensions are saddled with, but he can just as easily be talking about California, Oregon, Wisconsin, New York or any other state in the Union.

To quantify the $80 billion, Byrne tries to put it in context:
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Chgo Trib: Who Will Smack Down the Unions?”


Union Membership Down Another 10%

-By Warner Todd Huston

With some ups and downs, unions have been steadily losing members for quite a while and 2009 is no exception. According to the Labor Dept., private-sector unions lost 834,000 members last year.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported private-sector unions lost 834,000 members, bringing membership down to 7.2% of the private-sector work force, from 7.6% the year before. The broader drop in U.S. employment and a small gain by public-sector unions helped keep the total share of union membership flat at 12.3% in 2009. In the early 1980s, unions represented 20% of workers.

The Wall Street Journal also notes that it isn’t likely that the union jobs lost will come back as union jobs if they ever come back at all.

But the Journal doesn’t stress the most important union fact nearly enough. Unions that serve government workers in still on the rise and form the largest section of union workers.
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Union Membership Down Another 10%”


Public Employees Unions Are Sinking California

-By Warner Todd Huston

Steven Greenhut has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal about how the evils of public employees unions are destroying California.

Greenhut begins by noting that with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country California is losing its “productive citizens” to other states but is still saddled with an economy killing surfeit of public unions employees that “drive costs up and fight to block spending cuts.”

Greenhut goes on to report that the unfunded pensions that California is stuck with has increased by 2,000% in the last decade because of the overweening power of the unions.
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Public Employees Unions Are Sinking California”


Environmentalism Not About the Earth But About Control, Part 1

-By Frederick Meekins

For decades, American motorists have been subjected to propaganda insisting that they either need to drive less or give up safe, comfortable automobiles in favor of what amount to motorized coffins in order to preserve natural resources and environmental quality. Now that this policy goal is pretty much on the road to being implemented, the elites running our lives are not content to sit back in the glow of their accomplishment but are rather laying the groundwork for the next phase in their grand dream of limiting the free movement of the American people.

One would think the increasing popularity of electric and hybrid automobiles would please transportation planners and social engineers. However, as most realize somewhere along life’s journey, getting what you want is not always what you expected.

For while hybrid cars might cut back on emissions and fuel consumption, they also take a bite out of gas tax revenues. But instead of tightening their belts and learning to make due with less as they counsel you when you complain about rising fuel costs, government planners are now conniving to pass the hardship on to you by altering the way transportation taxes are assessed.
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Environmentalism Not About the Earth But About Control, Part 1″


Book Review: What Are These Tea Parties About, Anyway?

-By Warner Todd Huston

A new book about the Tea Party movement — and a movement it really is — will soon be hitting the shelves. “A New American Tea Party” penned by John M. O’Hara, one of the many folks that helped bring us some of those protests in early 2009, is a book that hopes that the reader will come away understanding and appreciating the Tea Party movement as a truly grassroots happening, a spontaneous outpouring of interest backed by true red, white and blue American ideals.

Author O’Hara, himself an early Tea Party organizer in Washington D.C. and the Chicago area, answers several questions with the book: what sparked the Tea Parties; is the name “Tea Party” itself a proper sobriquet; what do they mean; what does the future hold; and how do you make more?

The first thing one might notice is that O’Hara writes in a crisp, conversational style with short subchapters. This makes it ideal for reading bits at a time. This is not a dense treatment and I think his style makes the book very accessible to people of all ages — without talking down to the young or dumbing it down for the more advanced reader.
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Book Review: What Are These Tea Parties About, Anyway?”


Interview With Randy Hultgren Candidate for 14th Congressional District

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last week I spoke to candidate for Congress Randy Hultgren (R, DuPage County) who would like to win your GOP nomination for the 14th Congressional District. The 14th District encompasses the cities of Elgin in the east, westward toward DeKalb, Dixon and Sterling and as far south west as Coal Valley. The shape of the district is like that of a gas pump handle with the nozzle headed westward.

Attorney and business owner Randy Hultgren is currently the 48th District State Senator elected to that position in 2007. In 1999 he was elected to the State House and served there until elected to the Senate. Hultgren has been involved in state politics for 20 some years.

On his website, Hultgren says he’s running for Congress because he believes “we need real conservatism in Washington,” and that he’s proud to call himself a “real Conservative.” (Website: http://hultgrenforcongress.com/)

I began my time with Senator Hultgren noting that the filed of candidates for the 14th District was once pretty large but that in the last month it has been winnowed down to two candidates: himself and Ethan Hastert, son of former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. It is well known that the national party and folks like Newt Gingrich have announced their support of Hastert and I wondered what Mr. Hultgren’s reaction was to this fact.
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Interview With Randy Hultgren Candidate for 14th Congressional District”


…Yet Not ALL Unions Willing to Bend Over for Obamacare Tax Hike

-By Warner Todd Huston

Yesterday I posted a story about how the two big public employees unions were looking the other way on Obamacare and helping Obama to pass his socialist take over of our healthcare system even though the plan would hike taxes on their very own members and would devastate their helathcare plans. Well, not all unions are willing to hurt their own membership merely for political reasons.

Of course, in the past we’ve posted stories (here, and here) pointing out that there are the several unions that are not bending over backwards just to hand Obama a political victory and today The New York Post reported on several New York unions that are just as unhappy as those that we’ve previously mentioned.
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…Yet Not ALL Unions Willing to Bend Over for Obamacare Tax Hike”


DOJ Rejects Broadband Market Failure Thesis

-By Scott Cleland

In a filing to the FCC on the National Broadband Plan, the DOJ Antitrust Division, the U.S Government’s leading expert in assessing the state of competition in communications markets, implicitly rejected net neutrality proponents’ core thesis of broadband market failure.

This DOJ filing, which represents the most recent U.S. Government expert assessment of broadband competition, could make it extremely difficult for the FCC to legitimately conclude in the coming months the factual opposite — broadband market failure.

Without a sound factual finding of broadband market failure, it also could be extremely difficult for the FCC to legally justify preemptively mandating common-carrier-like regulations on un-regulated broadband information service providers in the FCC’s pending open Internet proceeding.

Let’s review the DOJ’s core broadband competitive conclusions, which are relevant to the alleged broadband market failure thesis and the FCC’s open Internet proceeding.
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DOJ Rejects Broadband Market Failure Thesis”


Unions to Rake in $19 Billion Per Year From Obamacare

-By Warner Todd Huston

Over at BigGovernment.com, Don Loos posited an excellent reason about why the big public employees unions are falling all over themselves to help Obama force Obamacare down America’s throats even though their members would lose their lavish healthcare plans as a result. The reason? $19 billion in likely dues money that these unions will get when helathcare is taken over by the federal government is the reason.

It is true that everyone in the country will be hurt by the current Obamacare policies, it is true that everyone will experience less healthcare coverage at higher costs, it is true that government will ration healthcare and the elderly and very young will find less access to healthcare, it is true that government will destroy the best healthcare in the world. But the bosses of Service Employee International Union (SEIU) and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Union (AFSCME), Andy Stern and Gerald McEntee, feel that the trade offs will be worth the loss.

… and to be sure neither Stern nor McEntee will lose their own Cadillac healthcare plans regardless.
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Unions to Rake in $19 Billion Per Year From Obamacare”


John Stossel Gives me a Shout Out

-By Warner Todd Huston

Usually I don’t give notice for every single time some news agency cites my work. If I did I’d be spending too much time doing it (no, that wasn’t too self congratulatory at all! Ha, ha). But here is one that I am sort of proud of.

On his new Fox Business blog, long-time TV libertarian John Stossel cited my piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s union woes today. In a post titled “Unions’ Next Victim: California” Stossel cited my Publius Forum piece published on Jan.5.

I have a ton of respect for Mr. Stossel even as I don’t agree with some of his more libertarian ideas (such as those on drug control and prostitution) but he is right on in so much. So, that being said (and why must they always say it, right John?) I was pleased to see Mr. Stossel citing my piece.

Also, I want to wish good luck to Stossel on his new job with Fox Business channel.


Two Americas: One Struggling, One Happy, Unionized, and in Government

-By Warner Todd Huston

I know I’ve said it before, but unionism is antithetical to good government. It is impossible to have both unions and effective government in a democratic republic such as ours. Unions destroy good government, waste money at all levels and they move strictly against the best interests of the voters in all cases. Once again my axiom is shown as a truism with a report by Michael Barone with his Dec. 30 Examiner piece.

Barone details the findings of a recent Rasmussen poll that reveals that Americans that aren’t in government unions and government jobs feel that the economy and the job outlook is getting worse while those in government jobs and unions think everything is going swimmingly.

That isn’t because the government jobs are materially better, but that the government jobs are raiding the public treasury and returning nothing of worth to the country through undue influence on politicians. You might ask why government workers feel things are so good if their jobs provide nothing of worth to the country? Good question. The problem is, even as government jobs are useless to the health, wealth, and welfare of the country, even while government jobs tear us all down and make us weaker in every category, they do provide something of relative worth to politicians: campaign cash.
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Two Americas: One Struggling, One Happy, Unionized, and in Government”


Union Blocks Red Cross Blood Donation

-By Warner Todd Huston

In their greedy desire to steal even more money from employers one union has even gone so far as to block Red Cross blood donations from getting to a hospital as well as picketing blood drives from private companies. In other words, these union thugs have put money and their quest for power above the health, welfare, and medical needs of real people.

As BigGovernment.com reported a few days ago, union workers for Red Cross have been picketing locations in an attempt to disrupt Red Cross Blood Services operations. In one case, the Red Cross was blocked from delivering blood that was supposed to go to save the life of a two-year-old child.

The unions were so disrupting delivery of life saving blood that the Red Cross had to resort to the courts to stop the union thugs from stopping them.

The whole fight seems to be over pay raises and the Red Cross says that they’ve already cut the salaries of non-union employees and its time the unions shared the sacrifice. In this bad economy everyone is suffering but unions refuse to bend to reality and would rather see a two-year-old child die for lack of life saving blood than to give an inch like everyone else has to.

This is the logical, and disgusting, end result of unionism.
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Union Blocks Red Cross Blood Donation”


Ten Ways to Stop Illinois Corruption

-By Warner Todd Huston

Jerry Agar is a Chicago area radio host and a member of the Illinois Policy Institute, a free-market centric policy center. Agar also has a column on the IPI website often centered around a list of one type of another. Today’s piece is titled, “10 Ways to Stop Political Corruption in Illinois.”

He begins:

Since 1970, more than 1500 individuals have been convicted, and the cost to Illinois taxpayers is estimated at $500 million a year. If we had that money back, instead of just watching an endless perp-walk, we would be in much better shape on several levels.

Agar goes on to list his ten points, but most of them seem to have an aspect of government transparency to them — such as number ten, “Appoint the Sunshine Commission”

Now, I have to say that I agree with an effort at state transparency. DuPage County has done a fantastic job putting all its business transactions, funding, and accounts online for everyone to see. This sort of thing can lead to two things. One, that govt officials might feel less likely to waste and steal tax money if their accounts are so easily discovered by the voters, and two… well, two is that the voters can see what their government is doing.

Still, transparency is not the only thing we can and should do to clean up government. We, the voters, need to be far more careful of who we vote into office in the first place. Being an informed voter is even more important than transparency.
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Ten Ways to Stop Illinois Corruption”


Cops Insist on Getting Paid for Dressing Themselves

-By Warner Todd Huston

Here is another reason why unions need to be destroyed…

Do you think your boss should pay you for getting dressed in the morning or for taking off your day’s clothes to climb into your snuggly Pjs each night? No reasonable, sane person would. But unions are neither reasonable, sane, nor apparently interested in what’s good and right. At least the moron unionists in Oakland, California are illicit like that because the thugs of the police union have found some halfwit judge to agree with them that the city… that would mean the taxpayers… should pay them for zipping up their fly each morning and taking off their clothes at the end of each day.

In the height of arrogance, idiocy, and theft of taxes, these Cop thugs have been suing the city to get paid for “donning and doffing,” or in more sensible English, for putting on and taking off their uniforms each day. It’s bad enough these creeps had the gonads to make this idiotic attempt to steal the taxpayer’s money in the first place, but the feckless “legal” system in California has allowed it to go on AND have absurdly given these greedy public servants a victory over it all.
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Cops Insist on Getting Paid for Dressing Themselves”


Unions Again In DC Arguing Against ‘Cadillac Plan’ Tax

By Warner Todd Huston

The Associated Press reports the words of Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association, who went to Washington D.C. to protest the so-called Cadillac healthcare plan tax currently in the Senate’s healthcare bill. “We should tax the millionaires, not teachers and bus drivers,” she told reporters.

This has been the constant refrain from Big Unions since Senator Max Baucus (D, Montana) included the taxing plan into his Senate version of Obamacare earlier this year. This 40 percent tax plan would kick in for any employee whose healthcare plan reaches $8,500 per year for individuals or $23,000 for families.

Of course, there is a fatal flaw in the Democrat’s assumptions of what this tax will do. As the AP reports, “The tax would raise some $150 billion over 10 years to help pay for the Democrats’ nearly $1 trillion health care bill.”
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Unions Again In DC Arguing Against ‘Cadillac Plan’ Tax”


An IPI Christmas: Feeding The Hungry, Bringing Opportunity to Developing Nations

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last night I was invited to attend a Christmas get together sponsored by the Illinois Policy Institute. This year’s theme was feeding the hungry in Africa and bringing economic freedom to developing nations. We heard some interesting presentations from Paul Wormley of the One Acre Fund as well as Tim Probasco of Opportunity International, both involved with helping subsistence farmers in Africa and India to become self-sufficient and to work toward creating financial success by selling their products at market. Both organizations take different approaches toward the same market oriented goals and both are efforts worthy of support. Best of all both organizations base their assistance on free market principles as opposed to mere charity work.

But, before the serious discussions of hunger in Africa and India and economic assistance to the impoverished began, we were serenaded by a charming group of kids from a local Chicago school operated by the KIPP: Ascend charter school program.


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An IPI Christmas: Feeding The Hungry, Bringing Opportunity to Developing Nations”


SEIU’s Calif. Vote Fraud

-By Warner Todd Huston

Over the last few months we’ve talked about several instances of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) committing vote fraud in elections for in-home helathcare workers to chose a union. We have also reported on the shaky UHW election in Dec. of 2008. (Here, here, and here) Even with those instances extant we have more SEIU vote fraud to report.

The SEIU is still perpetrating fraudulent elections, intimidating union voters, and trying to strong-arm members into accepting SEIU dominance despite what they may want. Recently the Wall Street Journal had another story detailing the SEIU’s un-democratic actions.

Among other things, the Journal is reporting that SEIU officials working with its sister union, California’s UHW, have been threatening deportation to Hispanic union members that were considering a vote for a new union going by the name National Union of Health Workers (NUHW).
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SEIU’s Calif. Vote Fraud”


A Tale of Two Presidents: How Media Treated Bush’s Unemployment #’s Compared to Obama’s

-By Warner Todd Huston

It never ceases to amaze me how differently the Old Media treats Republican presidents compared to how they treat Democrat Presidents during times of unemployment reporting. Today, in the vaunted era of Obama, the unemployment numbers for November 2009 have come out and it shows some of the highest unemployment numbers since the Great Depression. Despite that the Old Media seems to be playing this as a sign of optimism. Such optimism was decidedly not in the cards when that same Old Media was reporting rates during Bush’s years, however.

Let’s take two reports from The New York Times for example. One from September 7, 2002 in Bush’s first term and one from December 4, 2009, early in the Obama presidency.

In 2002, The New York Times reported Bush’s 5.7 percent unemployment rate, noting that it was a drop from 5.9 percent, with the following headline: Unemployment Fell in August, But Drop Is Called Insignificant.

For the Times, David Leonhardt started off on a sour note whilst reporting this drop in unemployment.
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A Tale of Two Presidents: How Media Treated Bush’s Unemployment #’s Compared to Obama’s”


Obama Job Summit: Another Manufacturer Opts Out of U.S.A.

-By Warner Todd Huston

With President Obama carrying on his “jobs summit” this week blaming business for “not hiring enough workers,” it is interesting to see the reaction of at least one major U.S. business to the Obama administration’s actions during this economic downturn.

On November 11, David N. Farr, Chairman, CEO and President of Emerson Electric Co., announced at the Baird 2009 Industrial Conference in Chicago that President Obama has succeeded in chasing his multi-billion dollar industry right out of the U.S.A. Why? Onerous regulation, high taxes, and the over $1 trillion Obama debt should be reason enough for any business to consider shutting down U.S. facilities and seeking greener pastures overseas says Farr.

The federal government is “doing everything in [its] manpower [and] capability to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” says David Farr, chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric Co., in a presentation at the Baird 2009 Industrial Conference in Chicago Ill., on Nov. 11. In comments reported by Bloomberg, Farr added that companies will continue adding jobs in China and India because they are “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something. I am not going to hire anybody in the United States. I’m moving. They are doing everything possible to destroy jobs.”

During his slide show on the state of Emerson’s business, Farr noted that the “unprecedented job loss experienced in this recession will result in a much slower U.S. recovery” and the federal government is making matters worse. The slide reports that the job loss this time is by many magnitudes worse than previous recessions. Noted are job losses from several recessions: 1980 with 1 million jobs lost; 1982 with 2.8 million; 1990 with 1.5 million; 2001 with 2.7 million. Finally Farr notes that we’ve seen a whopping 7.3 million lost thus far (and climbing) in this 2008-2009-2010 recession.
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Obama Job Summit: Another Manufacturer Opts Out of U.S.A.”