Posts Tagged ‘public employees’

Can Someone Explain Why The Government Should Be The Unions’ Bag Man And Forcibly-Collect Union Dues???

March 26, 2011

This is really quite amazing; not that the Republicans are ending the practice in Florida, but rather that it was ever done anywhere in the first place:

House approves bill banning automatic deduction for union dues
By Kathleen Haughney, Tallahassee Bureau
2:00 p.m. EDT, March 25, 2011

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida House delivered a major blow to public employee unions Friday, approving a bill that would ban automatic dues deduction from a government paycheck and require members to sign off on the use of their dues for political purposes.

Democrats and Republicans fought over the legislation for just under two hours. Democrats and labor unions have accused conservatives of “union-busting” and said the bill was more about political payback than public policy. Unions have typically been big backers of Democratic candidates.

Rep. Chris Dorworth, R-Lake Mary, the House sponsor of the legislation, said this was simply the state’s movement to get out of the dues deduction business and let the unions take care of it.

“It’s a bill that empowers membership of labor unions,” Dorworth said.

The measure, HB 1021, passed by a 73-40 vote, with three Republican lawmakers siding with the Democrats.

Florida is a “right to work” state, which means a worker is not forced to join a union. But many public employees do so, and state employers typically withhold union dues from workers’ paychecks. A portion of those dues is set aside by their unions for education, community action — and political contributions.

Democrats argued that Republicans are simply trying to take out their political opponents.

“It’s about silencing the opposition. That’s not democratic,” said Rep. Richard Steinberg, D-Miami Beach.

During the last general election cycle, the statewide teachers’ union gave more than $3.4 million in campaign contributions, mostly to Democrats. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees doled out nearly $1.4 million, much of it directly to the state Democratic Party.  And the AFL-CIO and other labor groups gave hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

For the past few weeks, labor groups have been actively campaigning against the bill and testifying against it in legislative committee meetings, but the Republican majority was largely united in pushing the bill through the House.

“This bill aims to do nothing more than silencing dissent,” said Florida Education Association President Andy Ford. “The lawmakers who voted for this bill have signaled their desire to use the power of government to single out and attack the hardworking men and women who serve Florida in public employment.”

The Senate version of the bill, sponsored by Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, has one more committee stop before it makes it to the floor.

Republicans have denied Democrats’ accusations that the bill is a political attack, saying the legislation was designed to get government out of the political process since it would no longer be collecting dues for organizations that sometimes do political work. And people who decide they don’t want their dues used for political purposes can say no, Republican lawmakers argued.

“If you want your money –your money– you get to keep it,” said Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, R-Miami.

What am I supposed to say, unions?  “Sorry.  Don’t got it right now.”  Or maybe, “The check’s in the mail.”

I absolutely love the way liberals turn reality on its head and then spit on it after urinating on it and defecating on it.  By voting to give workers a chance to decide for themselves whether or not to fund the unions – instead of this bizarre practice where the government forcibly seizes their money and gives it to people who are ostensibly bargaining against the government that pays the bills – Republicans are “silencing dissent” and “undemocratic.”

It is “undemocratic” to believe that a worker shouldn’t be forced by the government to give his or her wages to a union that fundamentally opposes that workers core interests and beliefs.

On a liberal-fascist view, “democracy” means refusing to allow the people to vote.  “Democracy” means the government seizing the people’s money and giving it to ideological organizations.

Apparently, given that it is “silencing dissent” to end this practice, Republicans should pass another bill requiring the government to deduct from union workers’ paychecks moneys payable to the Grand Old Party.

We’ve reached the point where arguing about democracy with a “Democrat” is rather like arguing nuclear physics with a cockroach.

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

February 28, 2011

“I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon,” said totally-in-da-pocket-of-da-unions Barry Hussein.

Okay, so it’s bad to denigrate or vilify public employees.

Except the governor of the state, who is a public employee whom the public UNION employees have damned as Adolf Hitler and as a Nazi.  Barry could care less about vilifying the governor as Hitler.  Because if he had one more particle of hypocrite inside of him it would explode right out of his thin skin.

Barry Hussein’s on the side of chief AFL-CIO thug Richard Trumka, you see.  And since Scott Walker is a public employee who ISN’T in the union’s pocket, it’s FINE to tee off on him in the most hateful way imaginable:

Union Chief Doesn’t Condemn Comparisons of Wisconsin’s Walker to Hitler
Published February 27, 2011
| FoxNews.com

Fox News Channel

The head of one of the nation’s most powerful labor unions did not condemn the violent rhetoric in placards and signs held by union supporters demonstrating in Wisconsin despite two direct attempts Sunday to get him on the record declaring them inappropriate.

On several occasions over the past two weeks of demonstrations in the Wisconsin capital of Madison news media have zeroed in on signs that liken Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and recently ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was twice asked whether he found the tone at the nearly two-week long demonstrations “wrong” or “inappropriate.”

Trumka did not answer […]

Apparently it is PERFECTLY okay to denigrate public employees.  At least by Barry Hussein’s twisted standards.  That’s the way scumbags like Trumka and Obama roll.

That’s one lie from Barry Hussein.  Another one is that he gives a damn about jobs.  Because his rigid union ideology is about to cost at least a thousand of them tomorrow:

Governor gives Wisconsin Democrats an ultimatum
By David Bailey

MADISON, Wisc. | Mon Feb 28, 2011 5:41pm EST

MADISON, Wisc. (Reuters) – Republican Gov. Scott Walker on Monday gave absent Democratic lawmakers an ultimatum to return to Wisconsin within 24 hours and vote on a proposal to reduce the power of public sector unions or the state would miss out on a debt restructuring.

Walker stepped up the pressure on 14 Senate Democrats who fled the state to avoid a vote on the bill as he prepared to unveil on Tuesday a two-year state budget that he said cuts $1 billion from funding to local governments and schools.

What began as one small state trying to rewrite the rules of labor relations has blown up into what could be the biggest confrontation with American labor unions since then President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981.

For the second time since the controversy erupted, President Barack Obama weighed into the debate on Monday criticizing the Wisconsin plan without mentioning it by name.

“I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon,” Obama told the nation’s governors gathered in Washington.

Wisconsin’s Walker immediately issued a response, saying: “I’m sure that President Obama simply misunderstands the issues in Wisconsin.”

Pro-union demonstrators continued to occupy the State Capitol building on Monday after some of them refused to leave on Sunday night. Capitol police, who had allowed the protesters to stay in the building for more than a week, on Monday prevented more from entering even though it was a week day.

So far the police have been tolerant of the protesters and no arrests have been made.

Walker’s budget proposal brought out the biggest protest crowd since the Vietnam War in Madison over the weekend.

A new poll released on Monday suggested that if the 2010 election could be replayed the Wisconsin governor might lose. The Public Policy Polling survey found that if the election were repeated the result would flip with Walker’s Democratic opponent Tom Barrett getting 52 percent and Walker 45 percent. Walker won with 52 percent in November. The shift came mainly from union households.

The Wisconsin proposal would require public sector employees to pay more for pensions and health care, strip some of their unions of bargaining rights except for wages up to the rate of inflation and require yearly recertification votes.

The proposal was approved by the state Assembly last week but is stalled in the Senate because the 14 Democrats have fled the state to avoid a vote.

The proposal includes a restructuring of the state’s debt that Walker said would save $165 million. Walker said this restructuring deal was in doubt if the Democrats did not return.

“Failure to return to work and cast their votes will lead to more painful and aggressive spending cuts in the very near future,” Walker’s said in a statement.

Under Walker’s proposal, Wisconsin’s general obligation bonds would be restructured and that would push debt service payments due by March 15 into future years.

Democrats differed from Walker’s estimate, quoting on Monday a report from state fiscal analyst Al Runde saying that the restructuring Walker wants would add more than $42 million of interest payments over the long term.

In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Walker said he hoped to delay sending layoff notices to state workers if the legislature makes progress on fixing the budget deficit, according to website wispolitics.com.

But to postpone the layoffs, Walker said it will be necessary that his budget repair bill, including the move to end collective bargaining, go into effect by April 1.

There has been speculation that Walker would send out layoff notices to more than 1,000 state workers if no progress was made soon on the budget.

(Additional reporting by Stefanie Carano in Madison and Wendell Marsh in Washington; Editing by Greg McCune)

For what it’s worth, “Public Policy Polling” is rather like asking what Media Matters thinks about something.  It is very left leaning with Democrat connections.  Try most accurate Rasmussen and you get a dramatically different result.

I mean, everyone I talked to says Walker is right-on.  And the fact that I only talked to Republicans really doesn’t have anything to do with anything.

The most important thing for the moment is tomorrow’s deadline for Democrats to return.  We can take the first two and last two sentences of the Reuters article to cut to the chase:

MADISON, Wisc. (Reuters) – Republican Gov. Scott Walker on Monday gave absent Democratic lawmakers an ultimatum to return to Wisconsin within 24 hours and vote on a proposal to reduce the power of public sector unions or the state would miss out on a debt restructuring.

Walker stepped up the pressure on 14 Senate Democrats who fled the state to avoid a vote on the bill as he prepared to unveil on Tuesday a two-year state budget that he said cuts $1 billion from funding to local governments and schools. […]

But to postpone the layoffs, Walker said it will be necessary that his budget repair bill, including the move to end collective bargaining, go into effect by April 1.

There has been speculation that Walker would send out layoff notices to more than 1,000 state workers if no progress was made soon on the budget.

The fact of the matter is that Walker may have to end up laying off 6,000 workers, not just 1,000:

Wisconsin is broke. The current budget is already $137 million in the red. The 2011–2013 biennial budget faces a $3.6 billion hole. So Governor Walker has called the legislature into special session and presented them with an emergency budget. His plan closes the deficit without raising taxes.

Government employees in Wisconsin get amazing benefits. They get a generous defined-benefit pension with minimal contributions on their part. They also only pay 6 percent of the cost of their health-care premiums. Few taxpayers enjoy anything this generous.

Government employees get these benefits because of the special privileges government unions enjoy. Government workers in many states — including Wisconsin — must pay union dues or lose their jobs. The state subsidizes their fundraising by using its payroll system to collect these forced dues.

This gives the union movement billions of dollars, which it uses to elect favored candidates. The American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent more than any other outside group in the last election. Government unions have used this political clout to hijack state government to serve their interests.

Governor Walker could have raised taxes or fired 6,000 state employees. Instead, like Governor Christie, he decided to actually fix the problems that brought Wisconsin to this point. His budget limits government collective bargaining to just wages, taking benefits and work rules off the bargaining table. He would also require voters to approve any raises above inflation. Walker would prevent government unions from forcing taxpayers to cough up for their gold-plated benefits.

Democrats don’t give a damn about creating jobs.  They only care about UNION jobs. 

And it looks like tomorrow they’ll prove it.

New York Snow Cleanup: Unions Once Again Prove They Are Un-American

December 30, 2010

This is just another shocking addendum to my previous article, “Labor Unions: A Century Of Genuine Evil.”

In New York City, people are dead and unknown tens of thousands suffered because union workers were in a snit over reductions in the workforce.

Sanitation Department’s slow snow cleanup was a budget protest
By SALLY GOLDENBERG, LARRY CELONA and JOSH MARGOLIN
Posted: 2:34 AM, December 30, 2010

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in combating a fierce, fast-moving blizzard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

[Snip]

Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”

But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.

And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.

One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.

“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

The article fails to mention that at least two people are DEAD because of this disgrace.  They were murdered by union greed.  It also fails to mention that in addition to the workers who showed up deliberately sabotaging the cleanup effort, more than 10% of the union employees simply called in sick.

As I point out, it is anything but the first time labor unions have demonstrated that they were despicable, un-American, or murderers.  It isn’t even the first time that top union leaders TODAY have participated in the murder of American citizens.

Now, when I point out the fact that labor unions are fundamentally un-American, I’m not making anything up.

From my aforementioned article about labor unions being genuinely evil:

Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe.  It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement.  The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.

From a 1935 German magazine:

A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, CommunismAdolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”

“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”

While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.

So far, I can’t say I’d be proud to be a member of a labor union.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently appeared before an audience of fellow socialist travelers and said:

“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.

I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:

“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?

Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.

As in Adolf Trumka.

Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:

“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore.  It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

Whose slogan was that “workers of the world unite” thing, Andy Stern?

The political slogan Workers of the world, unite!, is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation (“Workers of all lands, unite”) is also inscribed on Marx’s tombstone.

Ah, yes, the vile, vindictive, vicious and vehemently anti-American Marxists.  And labor unions, which are nothing more than the Communist Party in America today.

Labor unions were spawned by evil and continue to have a history of evil.

But don’t ask me about the particular evil of public unions; ask a former hero of the Democrat Party (which proves that Democrats are far more despicable today than they even were before), Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

February 10, 2010
Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions
Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Not just “Federal employees.”  “All government employees.”  Public-sector unions in general.

Labor unions are un-American in every way, as are the Democrat-passed laws that make it impossible for private businesses to resist their impossible demands that are now breaking the back of our economy and our society; and public labor unions are even more so.

FDR’s argument was that public-sector labor unions would entail government workers literally organizing AGAINST AMERICA and AGAINST AMERICANS.

And in that one thing, FDR was entirely right.

Meanwhile, such flagrantly un-American organizations own the Democrat Party, and own President Barack Obama.

SEIU boss Any Stern, “Mister Marxist” himself, was the number one visitor at the White House.  And Mister Marxist bragged that “we spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million, to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”  You know, when he wasn’t saying stuff like, “We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

And, of course, letting American citizens suffer and even die while unions refused to do the jobs they were hired to do was most certainly “the persuasion of power.”

And the very same public sector unions that FDR condemned as profoundly anti-American blatantly OWN Barack Obama, who once famously said:

“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.”

For the record, SEIU is the very sort of public labor union FDR never wanted to see.  It was a giant step downward into the death-spiral of the American eagle-as-Dodo-bird.

Obama swore that he was a loyal minion of the union agenda.  He also swore he was a loyal minion of the despicable anti-American treason organization aka ACORN.

And just what is that agenda that Obama shares with unions?  How about – in addition to “the persuasion of power” – passing on $3 TRILLION in unfunded pension liabilities onto the American people???

If you’re for public union workers literally allowing you to freeze to death as a means of forcing local governments to continue to impose the union agenda – which includes destroying American families to pad their pensions – then by all means, just keep voting for Obama and the Democrat Party.

But I hope you don’t mind if people who know the truth call you out for what you are: as un-American as Marxist pie (which taste just like a shit sandwich, for what it’s worth).

A Fact Media Is Hiding: All EIGHT Slimbeball Bell, Calif. Officials Are DEMOCRATS

October 7, 2010

Particularly if you live in California, you have seen repeated coverage of the incredibly despicable corruption and violation of the public trust demonstrated by politicians in Bell, California.

First, the story from Newsbusters:

Eight Dems Arrested in Bell, CA ‘Corruption on Steroids’ – Not a Single Mention of Party Affiliation From Media
By Lachlan Markay (Bio | Archive)
Tue, 09/21/2010 – 15:19 ET

Today, eight city council members were arrested in Bell, California for what Los Angeles County District Attorney labeled “corruption on steroids.” Thus far, every major news outlet that has reported on the story has omitted the fact that all eight individuals arrested are Democrats.

These glaring omissions come only weeks after NewsBusters reported that of the 351 stories on the then-brewing controversy, 350 had omitted party affiliations, and one had mentioned they were Democrats only in apologizing for not doing so sooner.

ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.

One commenter at CNN’s online story got it spot on: “I notice there is no mention of the party affiliation of the accused. I can find no mention of it in any story on the internet. This must mean they were all Democrats.”

Give the man a cigar.

Together, the eight city officials “misappropriated” $5.5 million in municipal funds. Robert Rizzo, the chief culprit, was arrested on 53 counts of various brands of corruption.

Before the scandal came to light, Rizzo had been making roughly $1.5 million per year, even though the per capita income in Bell is roughly half the national average.

Pedro Carillo, Bell’s interim city manager, released a statement on the arrests today:

Given the sheer volume of charges levied against former Bell Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo and former Assistant CAO Angela Spaccia by the district attorney, it is clear that Rizzo and Spaccia were at the root of the cancer that has afflicted the City of Bell. Also, it is a sad day for Bell that four current and two former members of the council also have been arrested. I am prepared to double down our efforts to continue to restore order, establish good government reforms, and to ensure that Bell is providing needed services to its residents.

Despite arrests in one of the most massive cases of municipal corruption in recent memory, no media outlet could bring itself to mention the officials’ party affiliations, a fact that has been widely reported since the scandal entered the national spotlight.

There was basically ONE acknowledgment that the corrupt politicians who filched MILLIONS of dollars for themselves in the form of insanely lucrative salaries and pensions – all at the courtesy of taxpayers, of course – were all in fact DEMOCRATS.  That came from The Orange County Register.  And even then, that admission only resulted from the fact that knowledgeable readers complained about the omission:

In the wake of the Bell salary scandal, our readers noticed one part of the story has been left out by virtually all media sources, including our related editorials and columns: the political party affiliations of the five city council members who not only failed to protect city coffers, but participated in what amounts to shameless, if apparently legal, self-dealing.

All five council members are members of the Democratic Party.

Jack Abramoff wasn’t even a Republican official, but by the time the mainstream media got through with the story, there was naught an American who didn’t know that Republicans were evil as a result of their reporting of the 2005-2006 story.  And the fact that a number of prominent Democrats were involved, too, somehow got little mention, of course.

This has been going on for so long, and it’s so sickening.

On October 14, 2008 – two years ago this month – I wrote an article about another galling example of media bias and hypocrisy.  I reminisced about Mark Foley – whom the Democrats and the mainstream media turned into the poster boy of everything that was wrong with the Republican Party just in time to poison the 2006 elections against Republicans.

Now, the media could have made a similar example out of Democrat Tim Mahoney, who replaced Mark Foley in the very same West Palm Beach, Florida district.  In terms of breaking the law and being a slimeball, Mahoney did far worse than anything Foley did – and just in time to be the poster boy for Democrat malfeasance in advance of the 2008 elections.  But the same media that turned Mark Foley into a household name were nowhere to be found.

And, as I predicted, two years later and nobody knows who Tim Mahoney was anymore.

Tim Mahoney spent $121,000 of taxpayer money to keep an aide with whom he was sexually involved with from talking after she threatened to sue him.  He threatened his tax-dollar-funded mistress and said to her, “You work at my pleasure.  Do you understand what that means?”

Mahoney self-righteously claimed he would be better than Mark Foley.  He was actually the guy the Democrats tasked to lead the way in the Democrats’ ethics reform package.  And yet the mainstream media couldn’t seem to find a hitch to hang a story about the guy.

Journalists couldn’t bring themselves to harm Democrats.  Because they are partisan and biased.  And they don’t report the facts, they slant them.

There’s always a ton of stories to show how pathologically dishonest, biased and corrupt the mainstream media is.  Recently, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was fired by the network after a bizarre rant in which he demonstrated he was profoundly racist and anti-Semitic.

No wonder Obama is so favorable toward CNN; they have the same attitude toward “them Jews” that his reverend and spiritual adviser for 23 years had.  Just saying.

That Rick Sanchez racist tirade reminded me of a story I wrote about how that very same CNN anchor falsely attributed racist statements to Rush Limbaugh in a shocking act of media scapegoating:

CNN joined MSNBC in “quoting” Rush Limbaugh to effect that he is a racist.  And as a result of these “bigoted remarks,” Rush Limbaugh was thrown out of an ownership package to purchase the St. Louis Rams.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did the following:

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez read a disputed racist quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh about antebellum slavery on Monday’s Newsroom: “Limbaugh’s perceived racist diatribes are too many to name. Here’s a sample- he once declared that ‘slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.’”

And that certainly wasn’t all that Rick Sanchez said.  Go to the link for more, and for the embedded video of the “reporting.”

You want to talk about the racist calling the kettle “racist”?

Rush Limbaugh never said any of the things that Rick Sanchez claimed.  It was a terrible, biased, ideological, serial slandering by someone who professed himself to be an “objective journalist.”

I want you to understand.  Clearly, Rick Sanchez didn’t go after Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh is racist.  It’s RICK who is racist, not RUSH.  No, Rick Sanchez targeted Rush Limbaugh because, like most of his fellow “journalists,” Rick Sanchez is a partisan, biased, ideologue propagandist.

If the media were to report the facts fairly, accurately and honestly, the Republicans would have dominated the political landscape since FDR nearly destroyed America with the same policies that Obama is using to destroy the country today.

Prior to Obama’s being elected president, the “story” was all about how Republicans had exploded the economy.  So it should come as no surprise that 57.4% of Obama voters were unaware of the fact that DEMOCRATS had been in control of Congress for the preceding two years.  It didn’t make any sense how the Republicans could be entirely to blame for the economy collapsing if it was actually DEMOCRATS who controlled both the House of Representatives and the US Senate.  So we had one of those cases in which “if the facts got in the way of the reporting, so much the worse for the facts.”

In 2006, and again in 2008, Democrats – with the help of the mainstream media – made Republican corruption a primary issue.

Now we’ve got more corrupt Democrats than you can shake a stick at (e.g., Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, John Kerry, all the many Obama officials who failed to pay their taxes – particularly the Treasury Secretary and top tax enforcer Timothy Geithner – and basically the entire Democrat establishment).  Not to mention the eight incredibly sleezy Democrat officials from Bell, California, who are robbing poor citizens who earn only half the national average blind.

And those eight Bell, California Democrats are basically using the same “pension enhancement” techniques that their fellow liberal public officials in the public employee unions have relied upon to rack up some $3.35 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities.

Which is to say that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of corruption, even as they were out literally bankrupting America with their own corruption.

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.

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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.