-By Warner Todd Huston
Maybe the gravy train is finally beginning to grind to a halt at long last? Maybe the thievery by unions that is bankrupting governments all across the nation is starting to show signs of abating? If this court ruling in Vallejo, California is any indication, we just might be starting to see some common sense at last endangering the practice of heaping undeserved and unsustainable union benefits on government workers.
On March 13 U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael McManus held that union contracts “negotiated” by city worker’s unions can be voided by Vallejo if the city enters into bankruptcy proceedings. The judge said that city workers do not have the same protections that Congress bestowed upon union workers in private companies and that as public workers they cannot expect their full contracts to be forcibly upheld by courts during bankruptcy.
Ruling: Calif. City Can Void Union Contracts in Bankruptcy”
The whole world was supposed to fall at his feet. He was supposed to spend the next four to eight years (or four to ten as he once said during the late campaign) just making airy pronouncements while everyone danced lemming-like to his tune of hope-n-change. It was supposed to be easy. Heck, The One himself even pronounced that he enjoyed being president. “And it turns out I’m very good at it,” he assured everyone during a luncheon with TV anchors a few weeks ago.
On Saturday afternoon, in the midst of Chicago’s famous St. Patrick’s Day celebration with its tradition of turning of the Chicago River green, a cadre of concerned Republicans met to plan a way to capture the Congressional seat of Chicago’s 5th District, the one being vacated by Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
On March 9, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on one of Barack Obama’s latest nominees. This time it was to assess the suitability of Tony West, Obama’s nominee for the assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Division. Things went “smoothly” according to the
Why are Democrats such liars? I know that sounds harsh, but this penchant for labeling a law, act, or bill with a lie as a title is gallingly Orwellian and it’s getting tiresome. We have the “Employee Free Choice Act” that takes away employee choice, the “Freedom of Choice Act” that takes away the freedom NOT to chose abortion, and now we have the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” that takes away the public’s fair access to scientific research papers without having to first spend a ton of money to access it.
We’ve talked about it several times here on the blog; the hostile takeover of smaller unions. It has been Andy Stern’s main modus operandi (President of the Service Employees International Union or SEIU). The idea is to roll into the territory of a local, smaller union, make back room deals with the employers to get their assistance, and then lead a forced take over of that smaller union eventually to vote it out of existence. Thereby the little unions that might stand in the way of the mega unions are eliminated and the mega unions now controlling everything from the top down get more even more massive.
U.S. colleges are demanding. That’s right they are sternly demanding. You see, they are all upset that the Japanese government is not promoting study abroad for its citizens and they are demanding that the Japanese government get more of its citizens to pony up the cash for a U.S. college degree and if the people won’t do it, why these U.S. colleges demand that the government do it in their stead.
From the early days of his campaign, Obama made with the flourish that, should he be elected, lobbyists would not be welcome in his new tone Washington, his Washington of change and hope. Soon after the election, Obama’s spokesman John Podesta made a great show of announcing that Obama was insisting on the “
Sadly, we are used to the anti-Semitism of Europe. After all, that is where anti-Semitism has historically thrived in a most virulent form and does still today. We are also used to the Jew hatred of the illiterati of Europe’s universities having seen so often the petitions they’ve raised to denounce Israel and give succor to Hamas and Fatah — and any other terrorist group that comes down the pike, for that matter. Of course, this infection of hate, racism and self-destructive terror worship is increasingly appearing at our own universities in the U.S. Nothing is more representative of that than the example of the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel” recently emanating out of several California Universities.