Unions a-Hatin’ on Unions

-By Warner Todd Huston

Ben Smith of Politico reports on some interesting union-on-union hatin’ this week.

HERE responds: ‘Tactics of anti-union bosses’

A official in the the HERE wing of the feuding UNITE HERE union responded just now to mailings from the union’s other wing casting its leaders as examples of labor corruption.

“This is an example of Bruce Raynor’s take-no-prisoners tactics,” the official, Pilar Weiss, told me, referring to UNITE HERE’s president. “They are no different from the the mail from the most anti-union employers.”

Weiss dismissed a UNITE leader’s charge that HERE has a history of corruption — such questions were “way in our past,” she said, and raised questions about spending at UNITE and the Amalgamated Bank, which it controls.

“It’s disappointing that people who call themselves labor leaders would resort to the tactics of anti-union bosses,” she said.

One footnote on the wider ramifications of the battle: Weiss said a prominent labor operative, Steve Rosenthal, had been running the campaign, and Rosenthal confirmed in an email that he’s an advisor to Raynor. Rosenthal is also a close advisor to SEIU President Andy Stern, who backs Raynor’s call for splitting the union.

The last bit, the “footnote,” is of special interest. Here we see again the heavy handed, take no prisoners version of SEIU President Andy Stern’s brand of unionization.

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Unions a-Hatin’ on Unions”


What Will Obama’s Budget Cost You? $25,573.48… EACH!

-By Warner Todd Huston

Obama is about to unleash a $3.552 TRILLION budget on this poor nation. So, if we each of us were expected to fork over our share of that tab, what would it cost us? Well, according to Toby Harnden, blogger for the Daily Telegraph, it would amount to $25,573.48 each.

I don’t know about you but, I just don’t have it.

So how much will President Barack Obama’s budget cost us? The projected 2010 budget of $3.552 trillion can be found on page 114 of the “New Era of Responsibility” budget here.

The US Census bureau estimates that the current US population is 304,059,724. Dividing the $3.552 trillion by that gives us close to the $11,833 that Drudge came up with. ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that there wil be $989 billion in new taxes over the next decade.

I’m an American taxpayer and the starkest figure is what this could cost me. The latest figure I could find for the number of US taxpayers is 138,893,908 returns in 2007 here. By my reckoning, that’s $25, 573.48 each.

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What Will Obama’s Budget Cost You? $25,573.48… EACH!”


These Are the People Supporting EFCA

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the union friendly law currently sitting idle in Congress awaiting a Big Labor financed president to get around to addressing it, has some very interesting supporters. We’ve been told, of course, that we shouldn’t worry about Barack Obama and his followers, that they are just as American as anyone else. That claim of red-blooded Americanness is a bit hard to reconcile, however, where it concerns the EFCA.

While taking a small uptick in numbers the last few years, union membership has been down compared to the heyday of union labor in the US. Unions backed Obama with many millions of dollars during the campaign and have been keenly interested in enacting the EFCA, a bill that will help grow union membership in the country. They expect pay back for supporting Obama and he’s pledged to give it to them.

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These Are the People Supporting EFCA”


The Limitations of Econometric Computer Models

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Computer models were the tools employed to inflate the subprime mortgage balloon that precipitated collapse of our financial markets. And the same sorts of inherently faulty computer models are generating proclamations that President Obama’s near-trillion-dollar stimulus and mortgage protection programs will create millions of new jobs and restore the economy to prosperity.

The old saw is “garbage in; garbage out.” When the computer model is too complex and attempts to cover too wide a scope, its output is worse than useless; disaster is just around the corner.
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The Limitations of Econometric Computer Models”


Hollywood Extols National Healthcare While Closing Its OWN Actors Hospital and Long-Term Care Facilities

-By Warner Todd Huston

The self-aggrandizing denizens of Hollywood constantly scold Americans over a lack of national healthcare. It is the biggest failure of American society ever that there is no cradle to the grave program for free health care, they constantly tell us. And now, in keeping with these nearly universal Hollywood “principles,” to prove how Hollywood is far more moral than we lowly citizens of flyover country, and to show that they are better than the great unwashed in the backwaters of America… Hollywood is closing its nearly 90-year-old Motion Picture Fund hospital and accompanying long-term living facilities for aging actors.

Yep, dumping it. Walking away from the facilities for free healthcare for actors. Fuggedaboutit.

Sean Penn has advocated for national healthcare in the U.S. basing his interests upon his close personal friendship with the dictatorial, socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The twin activists of Susan Sarandon and hubby Tim Robbins have claimed that healthcare is one of the most important issues facing the country today. Many of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been heard to lament about how healthcare is something that only the caring, you know, care about, and stuff.

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Hollywood Extols National Healthcare While Closing Its OWN Actors Hospital and Long-Term Care Facilities”


The Long and Short of It

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Asked about long-term inflationary effects of government deficit spending that he recommended to combat the Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes’s flippant dismissal was, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Keynes’s irresponsible mode of thinking has become Congress’s accepted way of dealing with any problem having more than a six-months horizon. Exhibit A is the refusal of Democrat/Socialists to face up to the looming unfunded liabilities of the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid funds. Exhibit B is the near-trillion dollar stimulus bill, to be funded largely by the Fed’s bookkeeping entries creating fictitious, fiat money out of thin air.
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The Long and Short of It”


Paper At Last Finds Unions Hurt Business, When it’s THEIR Business

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is often called the “Red Star” Tribune by residents of Minneapolis for its long-time, virulently left-wing outlook. Many has been the time when the editorial board of the Star Trib has carried water for political candidates shilling for big labor.

The STrib endorsed Obama for president for his supposed fiscal responsibility as well as his focus on the working classes. It is well known that big labor was solidly behind Obama and have been getting payoffs every week since the January inaugural.

But that was then. Now-a-days the STrib is not so keen on unions. In fact, it is so put off by unions that it is going to court to have its contract with its printers union annulled and asks for new terms to be imposed by the courts to save the paper from going bankrupt. Apparently, unions are fine for politicians as far as the STrib is concerned, but when it is faced with real life union demands, well, the courts are asked to save them from union excess.

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Paper At Last Finds Unions Hurt Business, When it’s THEIR Business”


George of Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Doesn’t Get EFCA… or Does He?

-By Warner Todd Huston

In a recent issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a story on the delicate political spot occupied by Senator Arlen Specter was discussed showing that he has worked himself into a can’t win for loosing situation. He’s made both sides mad with his erratic stance on both sides of the political fence.

But one quote by Bill George the head of the Penn. AFL-CIO was telling about how unions view the Employee Free Choice Act. At least in George’s case, he proves to either have no clue what’s in the EFCA, or he knows all too well and is willing to obfuscate just to get it passed.

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George of Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Doesn’t Get EFCA… or Does He?”


How Barack Obama Wants to Make Black Children Poorer

-By Warner Todd Huston

In 1996 Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the welfare reforms that for the first time in 20 years caused poverty statistics for black children to fall to unprecedented lows during the modern welfare era.

In 1996, Barack Obama was against these reforms.

In 2009, with his giant welfare bill he calls a “stimulus plan,” Barack Obama has eliminated these reforms.

Watch this video to see how Obama wants to return to the days of higher poverty rates for black children.

Proof once again that Democrats want to enlarge welfare rolls, destroy the lives of citizens, make everyone poorer, and create a permanent underclass that they can count on for votes.


Chigo Trib: GOP Doesn’t Want to Help, ‘No Interest in Family, Work or Neighborhood’

-By Warner Todd Huston

For the Chicago Tribune, Romney supporter turned Obama man Douglas Kmiec indulged in quite a litany of name-calling, finger pointing and demagoguery against the GOP that would have been amazing from the same man only one year ago. Hopefully questioning “The Death of the GOP,” Kmiec has shown that he no longer cares much how he is viewed, going full Democrat Partisan at this point.

In his Tribune article, Kmiec outrageously says that Republicans don’t care about “helping” the country, that they denigrate the “values, hopes and planning of others,” and have “no interest in family, work or neighborhood.” After heaping such calumny onto the GOP, he then does further damage to poor Mitt Romney by happily reminding us that Romney is a “flip flopper” that should join the Obama administration. Some friend he is!

Douglas Kmiec used to have a certain reputation as a serious man of the law and a man of religious conviction. Apparently that reputation is no longer important to him if this display of name-calling is any indication.

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Chigo Trib: GOP Doesn’t Want to Help, ‘No Interest in Family, Work or Neighborhood’”


This is Why Government is Legalized Theft

-By Warner Todd Huston


Imagine you are the head of a company that loses a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Then imagine the public outcry if you announced that you were going to raise your prices to pay off the lawsuit. Would the public get incensed? Would you lose business? Likely both. It’s even somewhat likely in this litigious climate in which we live that the decision to raise prices to payoff the lawsuit would spawn yet another lawsuit against you. Ah, but we are talking business, aren’t we?

Now imagine that you are a city government and a court finds out that you’ve ripped off hundreds of thousands of your city water customers by wildly overcharging them for installing new fire hydrants. Imagine that you’ve been ordered by the courts to rebate $22 million to those city water customers. And then imagine that you announce that the rebates will be paid for by taxing the city water at an even higher rate than before.

In other words, you, the city, will be expecting the water customers to pay for their own rebates by charging them higher rates to fund that same rebate. Yes, the same “customers” that have no competition for water and no choice but to pay through the nose will be paying themselves their own rebate.

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This is Why Government is Legalized Theft”


The New Yorker: Obama Like Gandhi

-By Warner Todd Huston

We’ve seen the Obamacized media call President Obama Lincoln, we’ve heard him called FDR and Kennedy, we’ve been informed that he gives newsers a thrill up their leg. The media has even ridiculously called Barack Obama a “light worker.” He is The One, their Obammessiah. Well, we can now add another undue adulation to the media’s obsession of finding great figures to compare Obama to: Mahatma Gandhi. At least according to the New Yorker’s Hendrick Hertzberg he is, anyway.

In a piece from February 23, headlined “Partisanship, by the bye,” Hertzberg likened Obama’s work on the so-called stimulus bill to a “Gandhian” effort because it is going so swimmingly for The One.

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The New Yorker: Obama Like Gandhi”


Chuck Schumer: Liar, Propagandist, Anti-American, Killer of Free Speech

-By Warner Todd Huston

Usually I don’t go for the hard-edged treatment of politicians as my headline here does. I don’t often call individuals “liars” and the like, though I’ve been known to do so on occasion. Generally, I prefer to assume that those that oppose my views are truthfully advocating for deep held beliefs and not using lies and obfuscation to get there — some exceptions to that, of course. I am not really the biggest fan of the wild-eyed, Olbermannesque sort of bombast and name-calling.

But, after what Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said of his desire to push the ill-conceived “Fairness Doctrine” down our throats, I just can’t see any other explanation of his motives. Every single word he said on this issue was convoluted, unAmerican, illogical and meant solely as a cynical means to his ends of quashing free political speech so that his party could consolidate it’s domination of American politics.

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Chuck Schumer: Liar, Propagandist, Anti-American, Killer of Free Speech”


Obama to Hold ‘Fiscal Responsibility Summit’… So Who’s Gonna Teach HIM?

-By Warner Todd Huston

In January, then president-elect Obama announced that sometime in February he intended to hold what he was calling a “fiscal responsibility summit” as he would be planning his proposal for the 2010 budget. Apparently it will be held on February 23, most likely at the White House.

But first we have the stimulus bill that Obama most likely plans to sign on February 17. That in mind, I ask the question: what does Barack Obama know of “fiscal responsibility”?

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Obama to Hold ‘Fiscal Responsibility Summit’… So Who’s Gonna Teach HIM?”


Stimulus: Congress rejected mandated open access/net neutrality; affirmed reasonable network management

-By Scott Cleland

In promoting the important goals of extending broadband to all Americans and stimulating the economy, Congress has rejected attempts by net neutrality regulation proponents to broadly impose open access or net neutrality requirements on the marketplace at large via the economic stimulus bill. The Congress obviously understood that would not be an economic stimulus, but a wrong-headed, counter-productive depressant to necessary private broadband investment (see the stimulus bill).

Importantly, Congress implicitly affirmed the necessity for “reasonable network management” and also implicitly rejected the core end-to-end network principle of the net neutrality movement — where they define/accuse any smart network management/innovation as anti-competitive discrimination or infringement of free speech.
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Stimulus: Congress rejected mandated open access/net neutrality; affirmed reasonable network management”


Don’t Blame President Obama

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The simple truth is that no president can pull an economy out of recession or guarantee continuous prosperity.

Our nation has become hypnotized by the PR hype surrounding all presidents. The proposed stimulus plan almost certainly will do little to boost employment, but it will give a huge boost to inflation. In our economic ignorance, we desperately want to believe that presidents can take steps to manage the economy back to low unemployment and prosperity. We therefore demand action, even if such action always leads to inflation that makes economic problems worse.

Chalk the misperception up to President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR). He was the first president to operate on the hubristic presumption that a president could plan and successfully manage the entire economy to prosperity by imposing the liberal-progressive ideology of social justice. Even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of President Roosevelt’s most sycophantic eulogizers, was compelled to tie the New Deal to what he termed the imperial presidency.
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Don’t Blame President Obama”


Boehner: Thanks to Dems, We Don’t Have Time to Let America Know What’s in This Stimulus Bill

Representative John Boehner (R-OH), Minority leader of the House has been very good on Obama’s Generational Debt Bill — obscenely known as the “stimulus bill.” Here he is scolding Democrats for not giving Congress time to even read this 1,100 page bill. Boehner contends that “not one member has read.”

Boehner deserves a pat on the back for his strong stance against this bill.

Now You’re a Racist if you Don’t Support Unions?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Union shill Ron Gettelfinger wants you to know that if you don’t support unions you are a racist. That’s right. If you don’t want the undemocratic card check bill to pass Congress you are exactly like the negro hanging, civil rights denying, Jim Crow enforcers of the 1950s.

In one of the most disgusting examples of moral equivalence I’ve seen for a long time — at least one not appearing on such low-born sites such as the DailyKos or Huffington Post — Gettelfinger committed the anti-intellectual outrage of positing that hanging black men in the 1950’s is “just like” voting against a bill that would take away the right of prospective union members to be allowed to vote their conscience in secret as all votes in a democracy are traditionally cast.

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The Value Of Propaganda

-By Dan Scott

President Obama went on the road this week to sell his supposed economic rescue bill and naturally talked up the need for the bill. What was fascinating were the Orwellian like claims he used and the stark terms of catastrophe if we don’t do as he demands. He made demonstrably false claims like there is no pork in this bill and he did so with a straight face. It seems pork is not pork if Obama says it’s not. His entire case rested on the premise, “we must do something, doing nothing is not an option.” The premise is also false since the CBO scored the bill as totally ineffective in the long run and in fact harmful to the economy as it would reduce, not increase economic output over the years of it’s implementation. President Obama would have you believe there aren’t any alternatives to the one that is on the table, a demonstrable falsehood. The GOP alternative is half the price with twice the results and even Obama’s own economic advisor admits to it.

Setting aside the reasons for President Obama’s false statements, whether that be of sheer incompetence and ignorance of economics or his willingness to say anything to sell something to which he stakes his name (ego) or if he has a hidden agenda of malice, it is the tactics in which he and his associates uses that should be at issue. Making demonstrably false claims by public officials is a violation of the public trust no matter how well intentioned (political direction) and rationalized (fear) they may be. The MSM is also complicit in supporting this never-ending stream of misstatements. Lying, misrepresenting or deceiving is not an act of Transparency.
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Unions are Inherently UnAmerican — Teachers Union Rips Off Members

-By Warner Todd Huston

Imagine a fast food place that makes you buy a cheeseburger when you want a chicken sandwich. Oh, they don’t mind if you buy the chicken sandwich, too, mind you, but you are forced to purchase a cheeseburger every time you walk through the doors whether you want it or not. Seems a bit like a rip off, not to mention unAmerican, to force you to buy something you don’t want, doesn’t it? Well, this is unionism. Only unions prevent you from even having a job in your chosen profession in the first place to have the cash to buy your chicken sandwich unless you follow their rules. That’s forced labor for other’s benefit.

We used to call that a form of enslavement… now it’s called union membership.

Case in point, teachers unions and teacher’s support for California’s Proposition 8 — the sanctity of marriage law now embroiling California in such turmoil.

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Newsweek: Celebrating America as a New, Socialist France

-By Warner Todd Huston

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas are tired of all this talk of socialism. We need to stop talking about yesterday’s news, they say, and embrace the great new fact that America is already a socialist country. They chortle that
America is just like France
. Meacham and Thomas chide Sean Hannity for using socialism as a dirty word because it “seems strangely beside the point.” The pair is enthusiastic about our new American socialist society!

We are a European country and we like it, claim the Newsweek duo. Unfortunately, they seem to misunderstand so very much about what they speak.

One of the worst tactics that the morally bankrupt use to justify an argument is that of moral equivalence. This Newsweek article employs this strategy at nearly every turn. For instance, the piece chides Republicans for the excess of the Bush years as some sort of balm on our turn to socialism.

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Obama Nothing But A Poser

-By Frederick Meekins

According to a Washington Times story titled “Obama Now In Combat Mode”, the President is headed to a posh Williamsburg resort where he and the politburo will wallow in luxury ringing their hands about the deteriorating economy.

It is estimated that the trip will cost at least $80,000 with this tabulation arrived at by factoring in the $70,000 it will cost Democratic leaders to charter an Amtrak train to the event and the $11,000 for food and the $7,000 spent on entertainment at this leftist orgy back in 2003.

If these frauds were really interested in addressing the nation’s problems, they’d drive there themselves, pack their own snacks, and go outlet shopping on their own dime like the rest of us when on break.
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Pelosi: Screw Barack’s ‘Bi-Partisanship’ AND The GOP

-By Warner Todd Huston

Once again Nancy Pelois has told Barack Obama that he can take his desire for a post-partisan Washington and shove it. Pelosi has left little doubt that she doesn’t give a flying fig about the bi-partisan method of governing to which Obama continually pays lip-service.

So, will President Obama take these slaps from Pelosi lying down or will he stand up for what he keeps claiming he is truly interested in? Will this president allow the Speaker of the House to drive his agenda without his input?

Thus far, it seems that he will. It is starting to become glaringly obvious that Barack Obama isn’t taking any part in the actual process. He just gives good press conference and then retreats back into the White House to leave the real work to others. And those “others” (like Democrats Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid) are not interested in their president’s sparkling ideals. Not only do Reid and Pelosi have no interest in heeding Obama’s lofty call to work across the aisle with the GOP but they want to crush the GOP without mercy. It’s partisan business as usual as far as the Democrats in Congress are concerned.

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A Simple, Inescapable Fact

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Corruption can be reduced only by reducing the size of the Federal government.

Much is being written about unsavory political influence exercised by the army of Washington lobbyists, who act as conduits for large amounts of influence money from special interest groups. Those special interest groups range from business and environmental groups, to abortion advocates, and labor unions.

Tom Daschle’s exit from nomination as the commissar of a national socialized healthcare system is among the headliners. Another is Leon Panetta, bound for the CIA, coming off large lecture earnings from groups doing millions of dollars worth of business with the CIA. Already fading into the background is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s husband’s big-bucks connections with some of the less reputable characters on the international scene, people against whom Secretary Clinton must represent the interests of the United States.
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Obama Order Allows Unions to Drive Up Cost of Gov’t Contracts

-By Warner Todd Huston

The newest in his series Executive Orders that are little else but sops to unions was uncorked in Washington on Friday, February 6. This one ordered the use of union labor for large-scale federal construction projects, eliminating 84 percent of the American contractors that are not unionized.

Not only would this bill force unions on government projects, but the resulting rise in the costs of those projects would be incredible. This executive order — a re-establishment of a Clinton era order — will force federal projects to accept labor agreements and the resulting higher wages, benefits and collective-bargaining that comes with that.

Naturally, the unions love this order. But the exorbitant costs that will be forced upon federal projects will be a bitter pill to taxpayers.

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Boxer Urges Quick Handover of U.S. Power to UN

-By Warner Todd Huston

Senator Barbara Boxer (D, CA) wants to speed the process of handing power over U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations as soon as possible by urging the State Department to come out in support of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The UNCRC imposes on all treaty signatories power over laws concerning children and, by extension, families. The largest portion of laws concerning children and families in the U.S. are state statutes so this treaty would, in actual fact, eliminate all family laws in the various states and hand the power over this area of law to the U.N. as per the Supremacy Clause to the U.S. Constitution (Article V1) that states that treaties preempt state laws.

Boxer is eager to destroy the entire lot of family laws throughout the country supposedly to protect “the most vulnerable people of society.”

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Unions’ Incestuous Relationship to Government Means BAD Government

-By Warner Todd Huston

Lisa Jones of the web news site The Examiner has a great piece that exemplifies what I have been saying for a long time: unions are antithetical to good government.

Jones details a story of the incestuous relationship between anti-democratic union thugs and the city government in Denver, Colorado. Her sad tale of inside dealing and graft concerns the story of a law firm that promulgates the interests of Big Labor and members of Denver government that tends to make a mockery of the people’s interests by using subterfuge and lies to further the goals of Big Labor over that of the people.

One part of her story is quite egregious. It reveals a Councilman that got away with violating the law while running for the city council because of his support from insiders connected with the law firm Isaacson Rosenbaum. Apparently while running for a council seat in the 3rd District, Paul Lopez was in violation of residency requirements.

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