Posts Tagged ‘public employee unions’

Democrats Seek To Stop Wise Governance: Walker’s Wisconsin Labor Reforms Already Saving Taxpayers’ MILLIONS! Off With His Head!!!

January 26, 2012

The last thing God damn America will stomach is a governor or a politician who does the right thing.  That must be stopped.  God damn America has a death wish, and how dare anybody interfere with Democrats’ right to slit America’s collective (make that collectivist) throat.

Wisconsin Govenor Scott Walker’s policy has already proven he was right and the über fascist left that viciously attacked him was über wrong.  Take a look at some of these articles I’ve done to refresh yourself on Wisconsin (fr0m oldest to most recent):

While Unions Have Manufactured Hissy Fit In Wisconsin, Scott Walker Doing EXACTLY What He Promised Voters

As Democrats Play Games With The Democratic Process, It Turns Out Republicans Can Play Games, Too

Wisconsin Cut-and-Run Democrats Are FleeBaggers

14 Wisconsin Democrat Deserters: ‘Jobs? We Don’t Need No Stinking Jobs!’

Vile Unions Threaten To Molest Governor Scott Walker’s Children As Vile Propaganda Media Looks Other Way

Liberals Lie On Public Sector Compensation And The Terrifying Crisis America Faces

Union Liberal Fascists Find Latest Crisis To Exploit In Wisconsin

Wisconsin Marxist Collectivist Bargaining With The Devil Game Over: Decent Americans 1, Liberal Unions 0

Need Proof Democrats Are Un-American? Just Look At Wisconsin And Count The Ways

Liberal Fascists In Wisconsin: Show Me Crap Like THIS Coming From Tea Party Protests

Wisconsin Democrats Show America What Naked Chutzpah Looks Like

Here is the latest on this story:

Christian Schneider
It’s Working in Walker’s Wisconsin
The governor’s controversial labor reforms are already saving taxpayers millions.

One morning last February, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker called his staff into his office. “Guys,” he warned, “it’s going to be a tough week.” Walker had recently sent a letter to state employees proposing steps—ranging from restricting collective bargaining to requiring workers to start contributing to their own pension accounts—to eliminate the state’s $3.6 billion deficit. That day in February was when Walker would announce his plan publicly.

It turned out to be a tough year. The state immediately erupted into a national spectacle, with tens of thousands of citizens, led by Wisconsin’s public-employee unions, seizing control of the capitol for weeks to protest the reforms. By early March, the crowds grew as big as 100,000, police estimated. Protesters set up encampments in the statehouse, openly drinking and engaging in drug use beneath the marble dome. Democratic state senators fled Wisconsin to prevent a vote on Walker’s plan. Eventually, the Senate did manage to pass the reforms, which survived a legal challenge and became law in July.

The unions aren’t done yet: they’re now trying to recall Walker from office. To do so, they will try to convince Wisconsin voters that Walker’s reforms have rendered the state ungovernable. But the evidence, so far, contradicts that claim—and Wisconsinites seem to realize it.

Back in 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to let public employees unionize. The unions spent the next half-century productively, generating lavish benefits for their members. By the time Walker took office in 2011, the overwhelming majority of state and local government workers paid nothing toward the annual contributions to their pension accounts, which equaled roughly 10 percent of their salaries per year. The average employee also used just 6.2 percent of his salary on his health-insurance premium. Among Walker’s reforms, therefore, was requiring employees to start paying 5.8 percent of their salaries, on average, toward their pensions and to double their health-insurance payments to 12.4 percent of their salaries. These two changes, Walker estimated, would save local governments $724 million annually, letting him cut state aid to localities and reduce Wisconsin’s $3.6 billion biennial deficit.

These measures angered unions, but Walker’s other moves were even more controversial. One was to allow government employees to bargain collectively only when negotiating wages; in other areas, collective bargaining would no longer be part of the contract-making process. The unions screamed bloody murder, decrying the loss of what they called their “right” to collective bargaining. “We are prepared to implement the financial concessions proposed to help bring our state’s budget into balance, but we will not be denied our God-given right to join a real union,” said Marty Beil, head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, back in February. “We will not—I repeat we will not—be denied our rights to collectively bargain.”

What had the unions most up in arms, however, was a reform that ended mandatory dues for members. Wisconsin unions were collecting up to $1,100 per member per year in these obligatory payments, which they then spent on getting sympathetic politicians elected. In the last two elections, for instance, the state’s largest teachers’ union spent $3.6 million supporting candidates. Walker’s reform meant that government workers could now opt out of paying these dues—savings that could help offset those workers’ newly increased health and pension payments, the governor said. The unions knew that, given the option, many of their members would indeed choose not to write a check—and that this would strangle union election spending.

The unions’ battle against Walker’s reforms has rested on the argument that the changes would damage public services beyond repair. The truth, however, is that the reforms not only are saving money already; they’re doing so with little disruption to services. In early August, noticing the trend, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Milwaukee would save more in health-care and pension costs than it would lose in state aid, leaving the city $11 million ahead in 2012—despite Mayor Tom Barrett’s prediction in March that Walker’s budget “makes our structural deficit explode.”

The collective-bargaining component of Walker’s plan has yielded especially large financial dividends for school districts. Before the reform, many districts’ annual union contracts required them to buy health insurance from WEA Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the state’s largest teachers’ union. Once the reform limited collective bargaining to wage negotiations, districts could eliminate that requirement from their contracts and start bidding for health care on the open market. When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid, for instance, WEA Trust suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.

Appleton isn’t alone. According to a report by the MacIver Institute, as of September 1, “at least 25 school districts in the Badger State had reported switching health care providers/plans or opening insurance bidding to outside companies.” The institute calculates that these steps will save the districts $211.45 per student. If the state’s other 250 districts currently served by WEA Trust follow suit, the savings statewide could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the outset of the public-union standoff, educators had made dire predictions that Walker’s reforms would force schools to fire teachers. In February, to take one example, Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad predicted that 289 teachers in his district would be laid off. Walker insisted that his reforms were actually a job-retention program: by accepting small concessions in health and pension benefits, he argued, school districts would be able to spare hundreds of teachers’ jobs. The argument proved sound. So far, Nerad’s district has laid off no teachers at all, a pattern that has held in many of the state’s other large school districts. No teachers were laid off in Beloit and LaCrosse; Eau Claire saw a reduction of two teachers, while Racine and Wausau each laid off one. The Wauwatosa School District, which faced a $6.5 million shortfall, anticipated slashing 100 jobs—yet the new pension and health contributions saved them all.

The benefits to school districts aren’t just fiscal, moreover. Thanks to Walker’s collective-bargaining reforms, the Brown Deer school district in suburban Milwaukee can implement a performance-pay system for its best teachers—a step that could improve educational outcomes.

Over the summer, a sign surfaced that the public wasn’t as alarmed by the Walker agenda as the unions would have liked. In August, six Republican state senators who had supported the reforms were forced to defend their seats in recall elections. Democrats, in the minority by a 19–14 margin, needed to pick up three seats to take back the Senate. In the days before the election, Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Mike Tate touted poll numbers showing Democrats leading in three races and in a dead heat in the rest. “Independents are moving towards the Democratic candidates in strong numbers,” he told a group of national reporters. Every race, he claimed, was “eminently winnable.”

The manner in which the public unions ran the campaigns was telling. Because they realized that public-sector collective bargaining wasn’t the wedge issue that they’d expected, not a single union-backed ad mentioned it— even though it was the reason that the unions had mobilized for the recall elections in the first place. Instead, the union ads cried that Scott Walker had “cut $800 million from the state’s schools.” This was true, but the ads neglected to mention that the governor’s increased health-care and pension-contribution requirements made up for those funds, just as Walker had planned. That the unions poured nearly $20 million into the races, by the way, validated another argument of Walker’s: that mandatory dues are a conduit through which taxpayer money gets transferred to public-sector unions, which use it to elect Democrats, who then negotiate favorable contracts with the unions. In this case, the newly strapped Wisconsin unions had to rely heavily on contributions from unions in other states.

In the end, Republicans held four of the six seats and retained control of the Senate. Democrats nevertheless bragged about defeating two incumbents, but that achievement was more modest than it appeared. One of the Republican incumbents was in a district that Barack Obama had won by 18 points in 2008. The other losing Republican had been plagued by personal problems relating to his 25-year-old mistress. Meanwhile, two of the challenged Republicans, Alberta Darling and Sheila Harsdorf, won more decisively than they had in 2008, suggesting that the reforms might be strengthening some Republican incumbents. (The other two senators who kept their seats, Luther Olsen and Rob Cowles, ran unopposed three years ago, so it’s harder to tell whether their popularity has grown.)

The unions’ cause has been hurt by some widely reported stories of public-sector mischief. The most outrageous was the saga of Warren Eschenbach, an 86-year-old former school crossing guard from Wausau. After he retired, Eschenbach, who lives two doors down from Riverview Elementary, kept helping kids cross the road every morning; it gave him a reason to get up each day, he told a local TV station. But the Wausau teachers’ union didn’t see it that way: it filed a grievance with the city to stop him, since he was no longer a unionized employee.

Such stories of union malfeasance may not be enough to save Walker. If the governor’s opponents succeed in mounting a recall election, it would take place at some point between April and June. A poll conducted in October for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, where I work, found that Walker had a fairly low personal approval rating of 42 percent. Further, the public opposed recalling the governor from office by a troublingly slim 49 percent to 47 percent margin.

But if Walker’s task is to convince the public that the state hasn’t devolved into unfunded anarchy, he may have an easier case to make than you’d think. According to the same poll, 71 percent of Wisconsinites believe that the state’s public schools have either stayed the same or improved over the previous half-year. More than three-quarters of Wisconsinites expect the state’s economy either to get better or to stay the same in the next year, up from 60 percent during the height of the union tumult in March. And while just 23 percent of Wisconsinites think that “things in the country are generally going in the right direction,” 38 percent of them believe that that’s the case in Wisconsin, up from 27 percent in November 2010.

At his inauguration in 1959—and shortly before he created public-sector collective bargaining—Wisconsin’s newly elected Democratic governor, Gaylord Nelson, quoted Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . We must think anew and act anew.” It’s a good thing Scott Walker took his advice. It’s imperative for Wisconsin’s fiscal future that voters take it, too.

Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

If Wisconsin actually votes Scott Walker out of office after he proved that his policies would save the state and create jobs, it will be a poster child for an America that deserves to collapse and fail and die.

Why FDR Would Have Denounced The Modern Democrat Party As Un-American

February 25, 2011

Democrats and the Democrat Party they form have become truly despicable.

I can cite former Democrats such as Dennis Prager who has frequently called himself “a Kennedy liberal.”  He has pointed out, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me.”

I can cite Ronald Reagan himself as such a man:

Reagan began his political career as a liberal Democrat, admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and active supporter of New Deal policies, but in the early 1950s he shifted to the right and, while remaining a Democrat, endorsed the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 as well as Richard Nixon in 1960.[54] His many GE speeches—which he wrote himself—were non-partisan but carried a conservative, pro-business message; he was influenced by Lemuel Boulware, a senior GE executive. Boulware, known for his tough stance against unions and his innovative strategies to win over workers, championed the core tenets of modern American conservatism: free markets, anticommunism, lower taxes, and limited government.[55] Eventually, the ratings for Reagan’s show fell off and GE dropped Reagan in 1962.[56]  That year Reagan formally switched to the Republican Party, stating, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”[57]

One of the things that undoubtedly resulted in these two brilliant political thinkers’ sense of abandonment was the fact that they clearly HAD BEEN abandoned by the Democrat Party as it continued to “evolve” (liberals love that word, worshiping it in place of a God who stays the same) into a degenerate spiral.  And it was that profound abandonment of key Democrat liberal views – the abandonment of classical liberalism into something that can only be described today as a hybrid of Marxism and fascism – that then led these men to question their entire political presuppositions that had resulted in their being Democrats in the first place.

Yes, I know, liberals always confidently assure us that Nazism and fascism are right wing.  But how, exactly?  If they say militarism, then how was it that the Soviet Union had the largest and most powerful military machine in the world?  If they say racism, then – apart from their own bigotry – how do they escape their own racism?  If you want to talk about anti-Semitism of the Nazis, it turns out that Democrats are actually far more anti-Semitic than Republicans.  And, again, the genocide of the leftwing Soviet Union dwarfs even that of the Nazis.

So, what exactly is it that makes Nazism “right wing”?  Well, maybe the left would say that the Nazis were “Christian” and left wing ideologies are secular.  But that is hardly true, either.  I document in a previous article (“Hitler Wasn’t ‘Right Wing’, Wasn’t ‘Christian’; And Nazism Was Applied Darwinism“) that Nazism and Christianity had virtually nothing to do with one another, and that in fact Hitler was an acknowledged atheist.

I did not know at the writing of that article that in fact Hitler actually wanted to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and that the SS officer placed in charge of the operation understood that Hitler would have murdered him following his capture.  I don’t see how that doesn’t do anything more than strengthen my case that Hitler was hardly a “Catholic.”

When it comes to Nazi ideology and Nazi policies (not the least of which was the sort of abortion and Darwinian eugenics that liberal progressive and modern-day Democrat Icon Margaret Sanger engaged in), Nazism was far more in line with liberal progressivism than anything remotely conservative.  A couple quick statements by Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Hillary Clinton:

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger referred to immigrants and poor folks as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning  … human beings who never should have been born.”

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, “if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon)

In her “Plan for Peace,” Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed “feebleminded.” Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. (Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107)

And I also show in a comment to that article that Nazism was far, FAR more in line with Democrat Party liberalism than it ever could be Republican Party conservatism when it came to big government and big government policies.

Jonah Goldberg points out that Nazism was in fact “far right.”  But only in the sense that the Nazi Party, i.e. the National Socialist German Workers Party, was the far right of the extreme left.

A good article I recently found on the subject of socialism and fascism is available here.  Basically, the latter is simply a particular species of the former.

American conservatism calls for a strong military defense, yes.  But as we shall see, so also did FDR.  And in every other aspect, consistent conservatism calls for limited and small national government.  Which was the diametric opposite of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi project, which controlled every sphere of life the same way the Democrat Party tried to do during the last two years when they had power.

If you think for so much as an instant that Adolf Hitler wanted less centralized power for himself and more control in the hands of the states/districts and the individual people – as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and conservatives constantly talk about – you simply couldn’t be any more ignorant.

That said, just what are the two fundamental issues I claim in my title that FDR would have denounced in the Democrat Party of today?

They are military power and the willingness to use it (i.e., the heart of any foreign policy) and government or public employee unions (i.e., the heart of Democrat’s domestic agenda).

These are no small matters: the former is central to any rational foreign policy and the latter has become central to Democrat domestic policy.

I describe FDR’s fundamental opposition to government unions and the reasons he was opposed to them here.  And I provide FDR’s very own words and his very own reasoning.  Suffice it to say that as pro-union as FDR was, he was profoundly opposed to government/public sector employees having the very sort of collective bargaining rights that Democrats today routinely demand for the public sector unions which constitute the bulk of union power today, and which massively contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat Party machine.  FDR realized that these employees were employees not of some unfair private company, but of the American people.  He also recognized that the government becomes a monopoly unto itself, and that government unions striking 1) exploited that monopoly power in an unfair and un-American way, and 2) was a defacto attack against the American people.

Please read the article above for more.

That leaves the other issue, the foreign policy issue of military power and the willingness to use it to deal with threats to the nation.

A speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could have been given today to expose the American liberal views of Democrats basically since Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to seek re-election after liberals turned on him.  It certainly powerfully applies to the Democrat positions in the war on terror – that Obama once refused to even acknowledge – of today.  Churchill began:

I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject and I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given to them.

As we go to and fro in this peaceful country with its decent, orderly people going about their business under free institutions and with so much tolerance and fair play in their laws and customs, it is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home.

For nearly a thousand years England has not seen the campfires of an invader. The stormy sea and our royal navy have been our sure defense. Not only have we preserved our life and freedom through the centuries, but gradually we have come to be the heart and center of an empire which surrounds the globe.

It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has served to form a state; an hour may lay it in dust.

What shall we do? Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.

But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”

Churchill gave that speech back in 1934.  Just imagine how much unparalleled human suffering would never have happened if only the weak and appeasing policies of the leftist bleeding hearts had not triumphed!  The left wrongly claim to stand for peace and compassion and every good thing.  But the exact opposite is true, as they have in fact murdered millions and millions of innocent human beings with their naive and morally stupid policies.  And to whatever extent liberals have good intentions, the road to hell is paved with liberal intentions.

Think back to Obama’s positions as a candidate in which he demonized Bush’s war in Iraq and his surge strategy.  Think of Obama’s incredibly naive and incredibly failed policy of talking to Iran without preconditions.

I could go on all day about Democrats taking on the views that Churchill condemned; that our enemies really aren’t that evil and how we can talk to them and reach some kind of accord short of fighting them.  It is as naive and morally idiotic today as it was in the era of Churchill and – yes – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I did not realize this until I watched a program I viewed on the Military History Channel called “Decisions That Shook the World.”  But FDR rapidly became what we would today call a neo-conservative.

In the late 1930s, FDR began to watch with growing horror as the Nazis began to take over Europe.  In secret letters to Winston Churchill, he offered his moral support to the Allies.  FDR knew that if the people – who did NOT want to become entangled in what they saw as a European war – were to find out about these letters, they would turn against him in outrage.  The American people in the 1930s and early 1940s were crystal clear that they did not want to become involved in another world war in Europe.  As it was, at the very time that the American people were the most worried about FDR secretly getting involved in the war behind their backs, FDR was in fact secretly corresponding with Churchill to do that very thing.  FDR also – again secretly – ordered his military commanders to devise a secret military plan with Great Britain for when FDR was able to involve America in the war against Hitler in Europe.

Now, today, it would be very easy to condemn FDR as duplicitous.  And he WAS incredibly duplicitous.  FDR was a man – we find out in the words of the historians who narrated the “Decisions” program – who had no problem saying and doing things in private that he very much did not want to be known in public.  As an example, FDR, in direct defiance of the United States Supreme Court – directed his Attorney General to wiretap suspected spies.  That was literally an impeachable offense.  FDR was breaking the law to deal with what he saw as a growing threat against America.

Rep. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate for president in the 1940 election – warned the American people, “If you elect FDR, he will get you into a war you don’t want.”  And FDR, deceitfully, in a speech, said, “That charge is contrary to every fact, every purpose of the past eight years.”  It was, as history documents, a complete lie.

Another lie FDR told the people came on the eve of the 1940 election.  FDR told mothers, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”  And it is hard to imagine a more dishonest promise, given that he was at the moment he said those words doing everything he knew how to get America into the war in Europe.

One of the points the historians made clear is that, “If all of Roosevelt’s acts were publicly known, he likely would have been impeached.”  He most certainly would NOT have been re-elected in 1940.

FDR was reelected on the promise that he would not do what in fact he was determined to do.

In 1940, the “anti-war” candidate was the Republican, Wendell Wilkie.  He had the virtue of being honest, but likely on the wrong side of history (we can’t know for sure what would have happened had the United States not become involved in World War II, but it doesn’t look pretty).  Democrat FDR may have had the virtue of being right, but he was certainly profoundly dishonest.

Now, I could write how FDR was quite constant with other modern liberal presidents who say one thing and do the exact opposite (I’m speaking directly about Barack Obama, the examples of which are now already legion).  But that isn’t my project here.  My project is to point out that, when it came to being prepared for war and then fighting that war, FDR was fundamentally in opposition to the modern Democrat Party agenda.

That briefly stated, it was the Republican Party which ultimately came to realize that FDR was correct in his views of the military and the need to vigorously defend American national security.  And it was the Democrats who came to turn on FDR’s realization and abandon his views.

They didn’t do so all at once, or right away.  As much as modern liberals tried to attack Ronald Reagan as putting the world on the brink of nuclear war in his Cold War stand against the powerful Soviet Union, one President John F. Kennedy was every bit the cold warrior that Reagan ever was.  And, again, any liberal who doubts this is simply a fundamentally ignorant human being.  That said, it was during the Kennedy presidency that JFK cynically – and by executive fiat rather than any vote by Congress – allowed the government unions that came to own the Democrat Party lock, stock and barrel to collectively bargain as a means to help the Democrat Party.  And the moral collapse of the Democrat Party was incredibly precipitous after that.

At this point in time, anyone who doubts that radical Islam is easily capable of not only destabilizing the world, but plunging it into economic depression and global war is delusional.  The mere prospect of a collapse of the Libyan government alone could spell enormous problems in the likely event of a civil war in that country.  Oil prices could literally more than double, which would simply obliterate any potential global economic recovery.  If Iran is able to obtain the bomb – which is most assuredly will if it hasn’t already – we will see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism and terrorism such that the world has never seen as the Iranian regime rightly sees itself as impervious to any meaningful international action against it.  If that isn’t bad enough, we would also see a nuclear arms race quickly escalate in the craziest region in the history of the planet as Sunni Muslim regimes tried to protect themselves against the Shiite Iranian threat.

For what it’s worth, even as mainstream liberals celebrate and rejoice in the overthrow of one Arab leader after another, it is IRAN which is most benefitting from the chaos.  From the New York Times:

MANAMA, Bahrain — The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

I have been warning and warning about this.  But the world listens to Obama, not me.

But in light of Obama’s policy of appeasement, of asking for meetings of minds with no preconditions, allow me to rephrase Churchill’s words to suit our modern-day situation:

Would the invaders consent to hear Barack Obama’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Hillary Clinton? Would they agree to meet that famous African, Kofi Annan, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it.

Allow me to share with you the consensus view of liberalism today at one of its elite headquarters of Columbia University:

Columbia University is holding a series of public hearings on whether or not to allow ROTC back on campus now that DADT has been repealed. A wounded Iraq veteran who recently enrolled at Columbia took to the microphone and asked fellow students to support ROTC. He was booed, jeered, and called a racist.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

The former soldier responded to the jeers with this awesome statement:

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”

The despicable so-called “Americans” in the audience only laughed and jeered more.

Anthony Maschek was a staff sergeant with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. He was shot 11 times and spent two years recovering at Walter Reed. He’s an American hero and those thugs at Columbia are a disgrace. This is no different than those pieces of crap who spit on veterans coming back from Vietnam. It’s disgusting that in 2011 our veterans should have to be heckled by cowards.

Read more: http://www.thehotjoints.com/2011/02/21/wounded-veteran-booed-and-jeered-at-columbia-university/#ixzz1Evn0A8qL

FDR would have turned his back on this Democrat Party as a bunch of contemptible and despicable traitors to the United States of America.  He would have looked at the government unions that today are the sine qua non – the “that without which” – of the Democrat Party machine.  And he would have been disgusted that the entire Democrat Party rests today upon an inherently un-American foundation.  Then this president who risked so much to keep America and the world safe from tyranny would have looked upon the modern Democrat Party and its repeated denunciation of those who would fight America’s most terrifying enemies even as those enemies grew stronger and stronger while we have grown weaker and weaker, and he would have vomited in contempt for the party that he had such a profound role in shaping.

By the very standards of the figures that you cite as your greatest heroes, I denounce you as the pathetic, vile, un-American fools that you truly are, Democrats.

I would say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but I doubt that you are capable of that virtue in this house-of-card world that you are building now.  And the problem with houses of cards is not merely that they fall; it is also that they tend to burn furiously when a match is struck.

And when the Antichrist warned of by the Scriptures for more than 2,600 years comes (as described in the Books of Daniel and Revelation), it will be Democrats, the quintessential fools, who welcome him with cheers and adoration.

Public Unions To Govmt Budgets Like Kryptonite To Superman

January 25, 2010

Warning: do not read this if you don’t want your eyeballs to shoot out of your skull like bullets.

JANUARY 22, 2010, 11:19 P.M. ET

Public Employee Unions Are Sinking California
Months after closing its last budget gap, the Golden State is $20 billion in the red.

By STEVEN GREENHUT

An old friend of mine has a saying, “Even the worm learns.” Prod one several hundred times, he says, and it will learn to avoid the prodder. As California enters its annual budget drama, I can’t help but wonder if the wisdom of the elected politicians here in the state capital equals that of the earthworm.

The state is in a precarious position, with a 12.3% unemployment rate (more than two points higher than the national average) and a budget $20 billion in the red (only months after the last budget fix closed a large deficit). Productive Californians are leaving for states with less-punishing regulatory and tax regimes. Yet so far there isn’t a broad consensus to do much about those who have prodded the state into its current position: public employee unions that drive costs up and fight to block spending cuts.

Earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a budget that calls for a $6.9 billion handout from Washington (unlikely to be forthcoming) and vows to protect current education funding, 40% of the state’s budget. He does want to eliminate the Calworks welfare-to-work program and enact a 5% pay cut for state employees. These are reasonable ideas, but also politically unlikely.

CCgreenhut

Associated Press – Los Angeles County employees rally for a new contract.


As the Sacramento Bee’s veteran columnist Dan Walters recently put it, the governor’s budget is “disconnected from economic and political reality.” Mr. Walters suspects what will happen next: “Most likely, [the governor] and lawmakers will, to use his own phrase, ‘kick the can down the road’ with some more accounting tricks and other gimmicks, and dump the mess on whoever is ill-fated to become governor a year hence.”

Mr. Walters’ Jan. 10 column was fittingly titled, “Schwarzenegger Reverts to Fantasy with Budget Proposal.” Shortly before releasing his budget, the governor and Democratic state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg held a self-congratulatory news conference. Mr. Steinberg used the spotlight to bemoan what he deemed to be unfair attacks on California. Mr. Schwarzenegger told a hokey story about his pet pig and pony working together to break into the dog’s food. It was an example, he said, of how “last year, we here in this room did some great things working together.”

Meanwhile, activists are fast at work. For example, the Bay Area Council, a moderate business organization, is pushing for a constitutional convention to reshape California’s textbook-sized constitution. The council’s aim is to ditch a constitutional provision that requires a two-thirds vote in the legislature to pass budgets. Other reforms being proposed include a plan to institute a part-time legislature and another plan to require legislators to pass drug tests. None of these ideas will ratchet down state spending.

To do that California needs to take on its public employee 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.

Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year’s pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state’s pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven’t been).

A 2008 state commission pegged California’s unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades. That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock-market and real-estate values, certainly will soar.

One idea gaining traction is to create a two-tier pension system to offer lesser benefits to new employees. That’s a good start, but it would still leave tens of thousands of state employees in line to receive lucrative benefits that the state must find future revenues to pay for. Another is to enact paycheck protections that require union officials to get permission from their members before spending union dues on politics (something that would undercut union power).

My hope is that these and other reforms find support in unlikely places. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a well-known liberal voice, recently wrote this in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians—pushed by our friends in labor—gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages. . . . [A]t some point, someone is going to have to get honest about the fact.”

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, another prominent liberal Democrat, told a legislative hearing in October that public employee pensions would “bankrupt” the state. And the chief actuary for the California Public Employees Retirement System has called the current pension situation “unsustainable.”

As the state careens toward insolvency, these remarks are the first sign that some people are learning the lesson of the earthworm.

Mr. Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s journalism center and author of the new book “Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation” (The Forum Press).

I’m left aghast at the thought that unions across the country are literally spending hundreds of billions of dollars for political campaigns while passing off their health care and retirement costs to taxpayers.

Pension costs increased 2,000% while revenues increased only 24% – and the unions that inflicted this hell on us continue to run massive political campaigns to collect more and more and more while we drown trying to sustain a dying system.

Again and again, Obama has demonstrated that he is a bought-and-paid-for slave to the union agendaIn Obama’s own words:

“Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate.  Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.”

“We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

In his latest act of betrayal of the vast majority of the American people who are NOT unionized, Obama handed out $59 billion to the unions in yet another subsidized sweetheart deal.

I want you to understand in no uncertain terms: America is very nearly doomed.  When it dies, it will be due to Democrats and their hellish, selfish policies.