Obama’s “reverse Midas touch”
Oprompter’s popularity is in the toilet.
So is that of his foot-in-mouth friend Harry Reid.
So is that of his party in Congress, who now stand to lose the House and possibly Senate.
His buds who ran for governor in VA and NJ, as well as the Senate in MA, all lost.
ACORN? Exposed, and cracking up.
The next victim of being an F.O.B. (Friend of Barack)? Unions. Details:
Favorable views of labor unions have plummeted since 2007, amid growing public skepticism about unions’ purpose and power. Currently, 41% say they have a favorable opinion of labor unions while about as many (42%) express an unfavorable opinion. In January 2007, a clear majority (58%) had a favorable view of unions while just 31% had an unfavorable impression.
Bad things happen to people who latch onto President Training Wheels. Amazingly enough, he still draws friends and followers like a cliff draws lemmings…and with a remarkably similar outcome.
Democrat adviser slams Obama, Dems for being unions’ b1tches
Blue-on-blue action gets me hotter than a blind lesbian at a seafood market. Excerpts from The Daily Caller:
Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell on Wednesday blasted the Obama White House for creating “a world in which there is no dissent,” following his banishment from Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff’s campaign for Senate.
…
Caddell said he does not fault Romanoff, a former state House speaker, for cutting ties with him after his remarks from November — in which he called the Service Employee Union International (SEIU) “thugs” and said the goal of the environmental movement is to “deconstruct capitalism” — were made public.
…
Caddell said he is being ostracized for sounding alarms about the problem that public sector unions are posing for the Democratic party. He said he supports industrial unions but that government employee unions such as the SEIU — which is one of the Democratic party’s biggest campaign contributors — violate the raison d’etre of the party, which is to “stand up for ordinary average Americans, not money and special interests.”“I think the public unions are going to take the country and the Democratic party down the tubes,” Caddell said. “They’re in the business of taking care of — of asking taxpayers, asking ordinary people, to pay for people who make twice as much as they make, with benefit packages they will never see, and they’re told, you may not cut those.”
…
“How are you going to tell a person who makes $40,000 that they must pay money to make sure that people keep jobs who make $80,000, roughly, and who have defined pensions that they will never see?” Caddell said. “You cannot ask ordinary Americans who have no jobs, whose pensions have been ransacked, and whose pay has been stagnant, to keep rewarding people who don’t face the same kind of conditions and risk.”
Exit question: Can anyone tells me what this guy said that was factually incorrect? I can’t seem to find it anywhere in the story.
“Jobs” summit…isn’t
Question: Since over 70% of the jobs in this country are provided by small businesses, wouldn’t it make sense to invite the largest representatives of small businesses to a so-called “jobs summit”?
Of course it would make sense. And that’s why the economic illiterate in the Oval Office didn’t bring them to the “summit”. Details:
As noted by the Washington Times‘s Kara Rowland, the list of summit attendees “lacks a diversity of opinion.” Labor unions and liberal economists, who supported Obama’s election and the stimulus bill, are among the honored guests. Not on the list? The largest business organization in the country, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with whom the White House has engaged in a public feud, and the National Federation of Independent Business.
Unions don’t provide jobs…they destroy the companies that provide them (see Government Motors and Chrysler, among others). SEIU, the thug arm of the child sex trafficking abetters at ACORN, is in attendance. What SEIU has to contribute to job creation is anyone’s guess.
As for the handful of private companies that are there, I’m sure it’s just a great big ol’ coinkidink that they were nearly all prominent B.O. donors and supporters.
This isn’t a “jobs summit”, people. It’s an echo chamber.
According to Pelosi’s “logic”, SEIU union thugs are un-American
Think about it: Pe-loco says that protestors of ObamaCare are un-American. Speaker Botox’s defenders say that she meant “drowning out voices” was the un-American part.
OK, let’s run with that for a sec, shall we? If that’s what you believe that San Fran Nan really meant, then you must concede that the union thugs in SEIU who are violently attacking ObamaCare protestors are, by logical extension and by definition, un-American. Details, quoting SEIU’s own announcement:
Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.
I look forward to Pe-loony coming out and loudly condemning SEIU for such blatant “un-American” activity.
By the way, SEIU apparently had their irony-rich announcement brought to their attention, so they’ve redacted their original wording (the “drown out” part) and replaced it with “counter”. Unfortunately for them, Al Gore’s invention has made it possible to capture their original “un-American” call to arms. Boy, for a bunch of tough guys who assault people, they sure are cowardly when it comes to their own words, no?
Obama’s bad week
The week’s a little more than halfway over, and let’s see what our illustrious Genius In Chief has had to endure, shall we? Te recap:
He doesn’t know his own Secretary of Defense’s name. We know, we know…you inherited him from Bush.
He’s fighting with his own party to close Gitmo. For some really weird reason, a lot of people don’t think it’s a good idea to close a terrorist Alcatraz and bring bloodthirsty jihadist camelhumpers to America where they might try to blow up NY synagogues. Go figure. Especially when 1 in 7 freed Gitmo detainees return to terrorism (the administration was trying to keep that factoid on the “down-low”, so as not to undermine his stupid, heavy-on-emotion-but-light-on-fact case for closing Gitmo unduly alarming anyone).
Jobless claims are on the rise at a record pace. Oil prices are up. The CBO says unemployment will keep going up through next year. We’ve quadrupled our deficit from last year. The dollar is teetering on collapse. Yet the MSM tries to sell us on how the economy has turned around?
The Gilded One has been caught in a lie about the “transparency” we were going to see from the Porkulus bill he signed into law.
Thanks to Uhhh-bama’s unholy alliance with unions, union-based companies are going to find it tough to get loans for their businesses.
Oprompter’s vice-president isn’t exactly the shiniest light on the Christmas tree, and it’s proving to be very “distracting”, according to a new book. When he plagiarizes Hillary’s Tuzla moment as something that really happened to him (forgetting that we’ve heard the story before, and from/to someone else), it’s easy to see how Quayle…er, Biden…can be such a “distraction”, no?
Remember Team Obama’s promise that “no one earning under $250k will see their taxes go up a dime”? Well, the Senate is bringing up a federal beer tax to fund Omarxist’s socialized medicine plan. I had no idea that the only people who drank beer were folks who earned a quarter million dollars and higher.
On the positive front for him:
He still has the NYT in his pocket, so much so that they’ve opened their very own NYT Obama merchandise store. But no, no liberal media bias or anything!
Want to boycott UAW-made products?
Here’s the list. I, for one, will not be rewarding an organization that succeeded in destroying American companies and now has the unmitigated gall to ask for a multi-billion dollar subsidized bailout.
Union kills auto bailout bill
Why would the UAW kill a bill that will ultimately keep their members employed? Because…I swear I’m not making this up…Congress wants the union members to actually earn what they’re worth instead of earning $31/hr to do crossword puzzles. According to the union, watching your contract with Detroit ripped to pieces through bankruptcy AND watching all of your members getting pink slips sure beats a pay cut. In socialist la-la-land, $0/hr is better than $20/hr. Here’s your nugget of economic illiteracy for the day:
A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aid struggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute over union wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid before year’s end.
Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit’s beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with U.S. plants of Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011.
Memo to the geniuses (genii?) at the auto union: your employer may not be in existence in 2011! That’s why they’re groveling before Congress for a taxpayer-funded bailout of their bad business decisions…the chief of which is ever agreeing to do business with your union!
NYT cuts loose 550 union workers
The New York Times is shutting down City and Suburban Delivery Systems, a unit that distributed the Times and 200 other publications to newsstands in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. With it, the NYT is shedding 550 full-time union jobs. Instead, company will increase its reliance on non-union contractors (read: cheaper) to distribute the Times to area retailers, much like the national edition of the Times, which is distributed by third-party companies.
The unit was formed in 1992 in a bid to diminish the clout of unions over the newspaper delivery business. The Times bought two newspaper wholesalers to form the unit and negotiated a long-term employment contract with drivers. A good idea at the time, but as NYT GM Scott Heekin-Canedy says now, “the business environment has changed dramatically since 1992 when City & Suburban was formed and wholesale distribution is no longer an economical business for the Times Company.”
I absolutely love the rich, chocolaty irony in this story! The NYT has been a shill for unions since the beginning of time, and they never missed an opportunity to whack businesses and Republicans over the head for seeing the economic burden that unions produce.
Now, with the NYT hemorrhaging readers and advertisers, economic reality has hit the Old Gray Hag right in the mouth. They are now forced to admit the obvious: unions are, by and large, about as useful as a football bat.
Obama: Teachers more important than parents
Once someone was finally able to peel Barry O’s lips off of the teachers union’s collective behinds, he dazzled them with this bit of genius:
That begins with recognizing that the single most important factor in determining a child’s achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.
Memo to Mom and Dad: Mr. Bowers, my senile 7th grade science teacher, apparently played a bigger role in my life than you did. All that feeding, housing, supporting, nurturing, bonding, affection, etc., that went on in our household during my childhood? Well, it just doesn’t hold a candle to the man who filled my life with unmatched richness like mispronouncing “protozoa”, drizzling a puddle of spittle the size of the Caribbean when trying to say “photosynthesis”, and nearly blowing up the room by dropping a chunk of pure sodium into a beaker of water. Who knew?
For those of you on the left, the prior paragraph was sarcasm.
Look, I was blessed enough to have had a number of outstanding, caring, and competent teachers in my life who I readily recognize as having had a profound and positive impact on my development. But with all due respect to all of them, not a single one of them were more important than my parents! Important, yes…but by no means more important!
MI Dems using paid state workers to stop recall efforts
Red State chronicles the travails of Michigan, a Dem-controlled state with an economy in shambles so badly that…uh…Dems want to tax their way to prosperity. Friggin’ brilliant.
Anywho, the Dem governor and the Dem House Speaker are targets of a citizen-initiated recall effort. Apparently, residents of MI aren’t happy that their government wants to confiscate more of their tax dollars in an economy that the Dems destroyed in order to further destroy said economy. Go figure.
In order to stop such democracy dead in its tracks, the Dem Speaker of the House has enlisted the services of state employees to stop the recall effort. What a shameless piece of crap this guy is! Excerpt from Red State:
… So, as these citizen activists who are sick of being bled to death by the uncaring masters in the state capitol of Lansing fanned out into Redford Township to ask the folks to sign their recall petition, they were met with harassment from state workers and union members imported for the purpose. The recall effort is all perfectly legal and serves as a fine example of the people acting in the democratic way to try and change the bad habits of their representatives in government, but the unions and the Democrats headed by Speaker Dillon are wholly against this expression of freedom and liberty.
…
Dillon has begun an illegal practice sending state workers and related supporters in unions all across the country to gang up on these citizen petition carriers and try to block people from being able to get to the petitions to sign them. These “petition blockers” often outnumber the petition carriers four, sometimes seven to one.
…
These petition blockers scream at citizen petition signers, calling them names, and hover menacingly over them making them feel threatened and uncomfortable. They also are assigned to follow the petition carriers to their homes and harass them there.Remember, these petition blockers are paid state workers. One wonders why the people of Michigan are paying their taxes to have state workers loll about these citizen petition carriers on the state’s payroll? Don’t these state workers have jobs they are supposed to be doing for the state? After all, state workers are not paid to act as thugs for the Speaker of the House… or any other politician for that matter.
Speaker Dillon’s office was queried by a Michigan TV station why state workers were acting as political operatives on the job. Greg Bird, Speaker Dillon’s Press Secretary told WDIV that any state worker that was acting as petition blockers “was using vacation time.” But when the TV station asked for records to prove the claim, the Speaker’s office never supplied the proof.
And when the TV reporters asked why it was fair to have four to seven state workers deployed to harass a single citizen petition carrier, Dillon’s Press Secretary said that “they were exercising their Constitutional right to inform the voters.”
Even more ridiculously, Dillon’s shill complained that the thuggish state workers were themselves “feeling harassed” because the citizen activists trying to push the recall petition efforts had hired people to photograph them as they tried to harass the petition signers. This is like the bully complaining that his hand is bruised because the nerd he was beating up kept slamming his face into the bully’s knuckles! …
Michigan, as long as you want to keep Democrats in power in your state, you will continue to reap the sorrow of a tax-oppressive, crime-ridden, and economically anemic state. Congrats.
Unions staying behind the times
From Say Anything blog:
There are some very clever automated pothole machines on the market. I have seen them operate. They come on top of the hole, a tooth goes in and clears out the hole and high powered air blows the debris and water out, the hole is sprayed with molten tar which drys the hole and hot asphalt is measured into the hole, rolled and vibrated down until it is as smooth as the surrounding pavement.
It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s effective and it works. The machines aren’t terribly expensive comparatively. And we always have potholes.
BUT we don’t do it that way. We do it like was done 70 years ago. A crew drives to the pothole chips out the junk, sweeps it out, blows air in it, a little tar and a couple shovels of hot asphalt. Then, a guy with a hand tamper comes along behind and tamps. That’s it. Bad and expensive fix.
Why? Unions and political patronage jobs. In Chicago and Cook County pothole repair crew members are paid 28 per hour plus overtime. I know men with PhD’s who do this. It’s good money. And the work isn’t hard.
These PhDs could be inventing better automated pothole repair machines but they don’t because they are on the payoff. It’s better money to just suck on the political machine teat.
This is what is wrong with unions, political machines and politicians.
It costs money to elect democrats.
Hey, those union dues don’t pay for themselves, you know.
McCain booed in Michigan as the amnesty shill that he is
I don’t know if this will hurt him, since polls show a near-tie in Michigan between Johnny Mac and Mitt Romney. But I love the treatment he got nonetheless. From MSNBC:
Sen. John McCain threatened Tuesday to cut short a speech to union leaders who booed his immigration views and later challenged his statements on organized labor and the Iraq war.
“If you like, I will leave,” McCain told the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department, pivoting briefly from the lectern. He returned to the microphone after the crowd quieted.
…
But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.
McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.
Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain’s job offer.
“I’ll take it!” one man shouted.
McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. “You can’t do it, my friends.”
Some in the crowd said they didn’t appreciate McCain questioning their work ethic. (Ya think? Now THAT is an effective way to court votes: “Support my criminal alien amnesty plan, because you’re too damned lazy to pick the lettuce yourself for a six-figure salary! Brilliant, Johnny Mac. – Ed.)
Impressed by McCain’s moxie
“I was impressed with his comedy routine and ability to tap dance without music. But I was impressed with nothing else about him,” said John Wasniewski of Milwaukee. “He’s supposed to be Mr. Straight Talk?”
Reap what you sow, Senator Lettuce.
“House bill would shield workers in bankruptcies”
From al-Reuters:
Workers’ and retirees’ wages and pension benefits would be protected in corporate bankruptcies under a bill to be introduced on Tuesday by Democratic U.S. lawmakers with support from labor unions.
House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement he will offer the bill to “make it more difficult for the companies to use bankruptcy as a way to gut workers’ wages and benefits.”
Conyers said he will be joined at a news conference on the bill on Tuesday by Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO labor coalition, and labor leaders for airline pilots, steelworkers, auto workers, flight attendants and machinists.
“Workers have been bearing more than their share of the pain when their companies file for bankruptcy,” Trumka said.
“This legislation restores balance to the bankruptcy process, moving workers up in the line of who gets what they’re owed, ensuring outrageous CEO packages don’t trump things like pensions and living wages, and slamming shut corporations’ back door route to gutting workers’ rights,” he said.
An aide to Conyers said the bill would seek to amend the U.S. bankruptcy law and declined to provide further details ahead of the news conference.
“Workers have been bearing more than their share of the pain when their companies file for bankruptcy”?? Are you freakin’ kidding me? More often than not, union workers are largely responsible for their companies filing for bankruptcy!
They strongarm companies into paying inflated wages, inflated pensions for people who no longer contribute to the company, and inflated health care costs. All of these things cause the company to raise the price of its goods and services, and when non-union companies don’t have the overhead that union companies have, non-union companies can offer a superior product or service at a cost lower than that of the union companies. As a result of being unable to compete, many union companies file for bankruptcy.
So after the union thugs bankrupt their employers, they have the temerity to demand that they still get to keep that which contributed to their employer’s financial demise? Un-freakin’-believable!
Thankfully some in teachers’ unions get it!
From Michelle Malkin:
After years and decades of coerced dues-paying, this is a promising sign:
Washington’s teachers, Democrat and Republican alike, increasingly agree that they should not be forced to pay for the Washington Education Association’s politics. In a poll commissioned by EFF, teachers were asked if they agreed or disagreed that, “Teachers should not be forced to pay for someone else’s politics, including the WEA’s.”
73% agreed compared to 62% who agreed in a poll ten years ago when the same question was asked. Support for the statement increased sharply among both Republicans and Democrats.
1997 2007
Republicans 81% 92%
Independents 67% 66%
Democrats 52% 66%
Now think about WEA’s decade-long campaign to convince teachers that, when it comes to politics, it knows best. WEA’s message has not resonated with teachers, even those who side with it ideologically. Maybe for teachers, the First Amendment cannot be “untaught.”And it’s no wonder more educators are revolting against their non-education associations, which focus on everything BUT real education. As I’ve said before, the teachers union bosses are the looters libs ignore.
There may be hope for Washington state yet.
No one cares who teachers vote for, but to confiscate the money from teachers in order to fund political agendas (and as this poll shows, regardless of whether the teachers agree with the politics or not) is indefensible.
Income gap…between union bosses and dues-paying members
We always hear the left whine about the “income gap” in this country between the poor and the non-poor. I’m guessing they think that it’s the federal government’s job to dictate what people should be paid, so as to close this “gap”. Didn’t they try that in the Soviet Union? But I digress.
I wonder, though: will Democrat leaders find ways to address the income gap between union bosses and the dues-paying laymen who work for them? From Motown:
In the past five years, pink slips have descended upon tens of thousands of union workers in Michigan, while others have seen their health care and pension benefits gutted and wages frozen or cut.
But in many cases, labor’s pain stops at the union hall door.
During the toughest economic times for organized labor in decades, union leaders are more likely to keep their jobs and get raises than the members they serve. A Detroit News analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data revealed a growing pay divide between labor bosses and the rank and file who pay their salaries with their dues.
Michigan’s biggest unions represented 60,000 fewer workers in 2006 compared with 2002. While membership plummeted 14 percent, jobs at union halls remained safe, dropping less than 1 percent.
Workers who kept their jobs saw the disparity between their paychecks and those of their union bosses grow. The pay gap between the state’s 50 top-paid labor leaders and union workers has grown by $18,000 since 2002 — an economic chasm expanding by almost $10 a day. Records supplied to the Labor Department by the unions themselves show that the state’s 50 top-paid union officials now earn an average of $186,000. More than 1,000 labor officers and staffers in Michigan made more than $100,000 in 2006, more than twice as much as the average union worker.
…
In 2006, the highest-paid union official in Michigan was Grosse Pointe Park’s Walter “Ralph” Mabry, the former executive secretary-treasurer of the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters. He was paid more than $410,000 last year — up $26,000 from the year before. That’s a 6.7 percent pay hike at a time when his union lost 5 percent of its members, records show.
“That’s silly,” said Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, about Mabry’s pay. “Those are the kind of things that make them (union officials) look bad.” …
Unions, in many ways, are like our federal government: they frequently ignore economic reality, give the impression that they’re run by functional economic illiterates, and give themselves pay raises when times are tough for eveyone they allegedly “represent.” Whenever I see a union direct its members to strike, either during or right before their employer goes bankrupt, that kind of ignorance tells me all I need to know about the stupidity of unions.
By the way, whenever you see a liberal politician fighting for an increase in the minimum wage, don’t be stupid: they’re not doing it for the “little guy” or for “working families”, OK? They’re pandering to unions.
See, union contracts guarantee a minimum wage for their employees that is indexed with the federal minimum wage. For example, ABC Union has a contract with the ABC Company that says the employees of ABC Company cannot be paid less than 3x the federal minimum wage. When the federal minimum wage increases, so does the pay for union employees…and thus, the dues coming into ABC Union increases! Unions are always the ones who are front and center in screaming for an increase in the minimum wage, despite the fact that none of a union’s members make anywhere near the minimum wage. Remember that next time you hear calls for a minimum wage increase.
Moonbat bloggers want to unionize
Here’s a story about how bloggers (primarily the tinfoil hat brigade) want to unionize.
Here’s an intemperate point to ponder: how does one bargain with employers, collectively or individually, when one does not actually have employers? Do I bargain with WordPress, who hosts my blog? Do I bargain with the Libertarian Party? As Bizzy notes, “‘Reality-based community’ bloggers wanting to unionize are also going to have to work on the reality economists call ‘barriers to entry’.”
I can somewhat understand the part about grouping together to negotiate more favorably for health insurance. But considering the overwhelming number of bloggers are not professional full-time bloggers, most of us have insurance through our real jobs. Then again, we are talking about leftist bloggers who hatched this idea, so they’re probably much less likely to have real jobs (to say nothing about real jobs that offer health plans) than their counterparts on the right.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s this: if moonbat bloggers like the Kos kooks unionize, maybe they’ll go on strike, too! 
Dems finally ready to cut government office
No, not defense spending. From Opinion Journal:
The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law.In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration’s budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.
…
OLMS, the Labor office that watches over union disclosure forms, says that last year 93% of unions met its reporting requirements. But the other 7% deserve scrutiny. Union members deserve to know how their dues are spent. They might want to know that in 2005, the National Education Association gave more than $65 million to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and dozens of other liberal advocacy groups that have nothing to do with the interests of teachers. In 2006, 49 individuals employed at the national AFL-CIO headquarters were paid more than $130,000. “Union members are also discovering the extent to which their dues money is funding lavish trips for union officials to luxury resorts and other expensive perks unrelated to collective bargaining,” says Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
…
Investigations conducted by OLMS also have led to an impressive list of successful prosecutions of union officials. Just last week Willie Haynes, a member of the Saginaw, Mich., City Council who also served as a United Auto Workers financial secretary, pleaded guilty to falsifying his union local’s reports. In May, Chuck Crawley, a former Teamster’s local president in Houston, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for stuffing a ballot box so he could be elected president of his union local and embezzling dues money.
…Union officials have publicly stated that they believe many of OLMS’s requirements are burdensome and unnecessary. Since unions helped elect the current Congress, they are now seeking action on their agenda, which ranges from holding fewer secret ballot elections to cutting back on the oversight that is at the heart of the 1959 union “bill of rights” that JFK championed.
Once again, the Dems have their dirty little hands in the “culture of corruption” cookie jar.
Bad news for teachers unions
That means good news for parents of school-aged children. The Supreme Court recognizes the right to homeschool your child. From the Washington Times:
It is no secret that home-schooling is growing and gaining credibility as a viable educational alternative.More and more colleges are actively recruiting home-schooled students, each year there are an estimated 50,000-plus home-school high school graduates who find work or go to college and thousands of new curriculum products have become available over the past five years. Meanwhile, the number of home-schoolers continues to grow by 7 percent to 15 percent each year, more states are reforming their laws to remove the burdens from parents who want to home educate, and home-schoolers continue to excel in national competitions as well as on standardized tests. In short, home-schooling is a major success story.
Now, for the first time, home-schooling has been recognized in an opinion by a U.S. Supreme Court justice as a viable educational alternative. Morse v. Frederick, which recently made national headlines, involves free speech and whether a public school can regulate what a student says. The 5-4 decision said that the school principal, Deborah Morse, did not violate the free speech rights of Joseph Frederick when she took down his pro-marijuana banner, which said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” The student had violated school policy and was advocating illegal drug use.
While the Home School Legal Defense Association agrees with the ruling in this specific case, it is a reminder to all families that when your child enters the public school, you have virtually ceded your parental rights to the public school.
The clearest explanation of this view was expressed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Fields v. Palmdale, when it said, “While parents may have a fundamental right to decide whether to send their child to a public school, they do not have a fundamental right generally to direct how a public school teaches their child.”
This is the reason many parents have chosen to home-school, especially those parents who have a religious worldview, because they know their children will be taught secular values by the public system.
In Morse v. Frederick, however, Justice Clarence Thomas said, “If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move.”
This is the first time the Supreme Court specifically has recognized home-schooling as a viable educational alternative. HSLDA has worked for 24 years to advance a parent’s right to home-school and to promote home-schooling to the general public.
After 24 years, it is gratifying to read the words of a Supreme Court justice who rightfully placed home-schooling on a level playing field with public and private schools. This kind of recognition is tremendously significant to the home-school community.
It’s another step on the long road to raise home-schooling to the point where, when the terms public, private or home-school are used in the same sentence, they all will be seen as mainstream educational alternatives.
Home-schooling is a modern education success story and HSLDA urges all parents to carefully consider their educational options. Home-schooling should be front and center because it is a viable alternative that has helped hundreds of thousands of children become mature, productive citizens.
If you don’t like how your local government school is educating Little Johnny, you can either move to a different school district, enroll him in a private school, or home school. That’s it. Efforts have existed for years by the NEA (leftist teachers union) to eliminate homeschooling, since homeschooling makes their job of indoctrinating and dumbing down your kid considerably tougher.
No, I am not bashing all or even most public school teachers. I am blessed to know far more decent, competent, and dedicated teachers than those who are not. I also recognize that some parents are about as sharp as a velvet bag full of styrofoam peanuts and probably aren’t serving their children well by educating them directly. However, I reflexively defer to parents in determining the best interests of their kids until it can be demonstrated that the contrary is occurring.
Maybe homeschooling is for your kids. Maybe it’s not. The good news is that it’s your choice.
Teachers’ free speech trumps union politics
Once in a while, the Supreme Court gets one right. From WND:
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that could impact millions of public-sector employees nationwide, concluded today the First Amendment right of teachers trumps the speech privileges of organized labor.The decision, in the consolidated Washington vs. Washington Education Association and Davenport vs. WEA cases, found organized labor, such as teachers associations, have no “constitutional right” to use money collected as “agency fees” from nonmembers for political purposes.
“We are elated that the U.S. Supreme Court has honored the First Amendment rights of teachers by overturning the state Supreme Court’s decision,” said Bob Williams, president of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which has worked on the case for a decade. “The court understood that the constitutional rights of teachers should be protected and are not superseded by the union’s statutory rights.
“This ruling will help protect non-member teachers from having their agency fees used on union politics against their will,” he said.
Booker Stallworth, communications director for the foundation, told WND the case originated with a list of teachers who had a variety of complaints about the Washington Education Association’s dedication of its financial resources to help causes to which the teachers objected, including homosexual marriage and abortion issues.
Some of the teachers appreciate collective bargaining but don’t like union politics,” he told WND. “Some of the teachers are pro-life, some are against homosexual marriage. For a number of reasons they preferred to not have the union speak for them politically and have their own dollars used against them.”
Diane Lenning, an English and history teacher, said, “My major objections to the NEA are that there is an operative glass ceiling for moderate and conservative Republicans, independents and Christians.”
Added Cindy Omlin, a speech pathologist. “There were many political causes that they were funneling my union dues toward that I found to be very offensive.”
“I wanted to be congruent with my beliefs,” said Karen Petty, another instructor. “My dues were going to causes that personally I would go against.”
The case focused on a Washington initiative, approved by voters, that required labor organizations to get permission from nonmember workers before using mandatory dues for political purposes.
In many cases, workers are not required to be union members but must pay a fee equivalent to union dues because they are the beneficiaries of collective bargaining.
Unions, however, are increasingly active politically, and many times support causes such as homosexual marriage and the abortion industry under the guise of “rights” — issues Christians and others would choose not to back.
WEA had admitted to multiple violations of the Washington law during an investigation then was fined more than $590,000 for its actions. However, on appeal, the Washington state Supreme Court concluded the “free speech rights” of the union superseded the First Amendment rights of the individuals.
“The agency-fee cases did not balance constitutional rights in such a manner, because unions have no constitutional entitlement to nonmember-employees’ fees,” the U.S. Supreme Court countered. “For First Amendment purposes, it is immaterial that [state law] restricts a union’s use of funds only after they are within the union’s possession. The fees are in the union’s possession only because Washington and its union-contracting government agencies have compelled their employees to pay those fees.”
“As applied, … [Washington state law] is not fairly described as a restriction on how the union can spend ‘its’ money; it is a condition placed upon the union’s extraordinary state entitlement to acquire and spend other people’s money,” the Supreme Court said.
“The next step is to make sure the law is strongly enforced … to ensure the WEA and other unions are in compliance,” Williams said. “The WEA has been busily attempting to undermine the law while it was under Supreme Court review.” …
This is good news for teachers everywhere who object to their unions spending their dues on grotesque liberal policies and agendas.
Bush to veto a bill?
Wow…twice in six years. Must be a record. Oh, well, at least it would actually be a good thing this time. From the Boston Herald:
President Bush would veto legislation championed by Democrats and labor groups that would make it easier to organize unions by eliminating employer rights to demand secret-ballot elections, the White House said Wednesday.The House is to vote on the legislation Thursday and, with help from pro-labor Republicans from the Northeast, it is almost certain to pass. But the margin of support is expected to fall well short of the two-thirds needed to overturn a presidential veto.
The Employee Free Choice Act, also known as the card check bill, is the top legislative goal of labor groups eager to reassert themselves with the emergence of the Democratic majority.
The current system is broken because employers can coerce and intimidate workers into rejecting unionization, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a phone interview this week. The House bill, he said, is ”the most important improvement in labor law in many decades.”
But the White House, in a statement, said the measure ”would strip workers of the fundamental democratic right to a supervised private ballot election.” Substituting a card check mechanism under which unions would get bargaining rights as soon as a majority of workers at a plant sign approval cards, ”would turn back the clock 60 years and return us to a failed system.”
Under the bill a company would no longer have the right to demand a secret-ballot election, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, before a union can be certified.
The legislation also imposes tougher penalties on companies that violate the rights of workers trying to organize and sets up a binding arbitration process to prevent companies from thwarting a new union by bargaining in bad faith on an initial contract.
Big Labor says that secret ballots allow employers to intimidate employees. However, there’s an intimidation that’s being missed, albeit intentionally, by the left: the intimidation of employees by pro-union employees. Here’s how it would unfold:
Let’s say you work for Company X. Company X doesn’t have an employee’s union, however a group of employees there decide they want to form one.
Today: They go around hounding and browbeating their co-workers into signing the petition to organize a union. Very few employees will want to piss off their supervisors and colleagues (“Come on, Jim, sign the damned thing! Why would you want us to suffer? Wait ’til Bert finds out what you did!”). So even if they don’t want a union, they’ll sign the petition, knowing they can always vote “Nay” secretly. The signatures on the petition aren’t from people who want to form a union, but are signatures of people who are agreeing to VOTE on the matter.
If enough signatures on the petition are gathered, the employees of Company X get to hold an election as to whether to form a union. The ballots (which are secret ballots, i.e. no names attached) are tallied, and the most “Yea” or “Nay” votes will determine if a union will be formed at Company X.
Big Labor’s plan: They go around hounding and browbeating their co-workers into signing the petition to organize a union. Very few employees will want to piss off their supervisors and colleagues (“Come on, Jim, sign the damned thing! Why would you want us to suffer? Wait ’til Bert finds out what you did!”). So even if they don’t want a union, they’ll sign the petition. However, now the signatures on the petition are enough to form a union, with no election necessary. No secrecy or protection of employees’ rights.
If you think that employers can coerce their employees, but co-workers cannot coerce each other, you’re officially an idiot. Need proof? Think about labor strikes, and what happens when union employees cross the picket to actually do their jobs. Their striking union thug co-workers make their lives a living hell! If bullying groupthink plagues the workers (or, in the case of striking, “not-currently-workers”) during strikes, do you honestly believe that said groupthink won’t occur anywhere else in the workplace, such as organizing a union in the first place?
-
Archives
- May 2012 (15)
- April 2012 (20)
- March 2012 (11)
- February 2012 (17)
- January 2012 (19)
- December 2011 (25)
- November 2011 (41)
- October 2011 (38)
- September 2011 (32)
- August 2011 (39)
- July 2011 (28)
- June 2011 (43)
-
Categories
- "art"
- "hate crimes"
- 9/11 Commission
- abortion
- ACLU
- ACORN
- affirmative action
- Afghanistan
- Ahmanutjob
- Air America
- al franken
- Al Sharpton
- ambulance chasers
- Andrew Sullivan
- animal rights wackos
- Ann Coulter
- Anthony Weiner
- anti-Semitism
- Arizona shooting
- Arlen Specter
- atheists
- Australia
- autism
- Barney Frank
- Beeb
- Biden
- big government
- bigotry
- Bill Clinton
- Bill Richardson
- bizarre
- Blagojevich
- Blog Talk Radio
- Bloomberg
- Bobby Jindal
- CAIR
- California
- Canada
- Canucks
- capital punishment
- capitalism
- Caroline Kennedy
- Carter
- Castro
- Catholics
- Charlie Crist
- Cheney
- Chicago
- China
- Chris Christie
- Christianity
- Chuck Schumer
- CLOWNS
- CNN
- conservatism
- Constitution
- corruption
- Cuba
- D.C.
- Dan Rather
- Darfur
- Debbie Wasserman Schultz
- defeatism
- Detroit
- dhimmitude
- Dodd
- drugs
- Duke lacrosse
- economic ignorance
- Egypt
- eminent domain
- energy
- environuts
- Episcopalians
- Eric Cantor
- Euros
- Fair Tax
- Fairness Doctrine
- Farrakhan
- fauxtography
- feminism
- Florida
- Fort Dix Six
- Fox News
- France
- freaky deaky
- Fred Thompson
- Ft. Hood
- gay
- Germany
- global warming
- Godwin's Law
- Gore
- Grayson
- gun rights
- Halliburton
- headlines
- health care
- Herman Cain
- Hillary
- Holder
- Hollyweirdos
- homeless
- Howard Dean
- Huckabee
- Hugo Chavez
- humor
- hurricanes
- hypocrisy
- illegal immigration
- Imus
- intelligence
- Iran
- Iraq
- irony
- Israel
- Janet Napolitano
- Japan
- Jena
- Jesse Jackson
- John Boehner
- John Edwards
- Jose Padilla
- judiciary
- karma
- Kennedrunk
- Kerry
- Larry Craig
- Leahy
- Libby
- libertarian
- Libya
- Lieberman
- Lindsey Graham
- Lott
- Louisiana
- Marco Rubio
- Mark Sanford
- Massachusetts
- McCain
- McClellan
- media bias
- Mel Martinez
- Memphis
- Mexico
- Michael Moore
- Michael Steele
- Michelle Bachmann
- military
- minimum wage
- Minnesota
- moonbats
- MSNBC
- Mugabe
- Murtha
- NAACP
- New Jersey
- New York
- news bytes
- Newt Gingrich
- Night and Day
- Ninth Circus Court
- non-political
- North Korea
- Obama
- Occupy Wall Street
- oil
- Olbermann
- Operation Fast and Furious
- Osama bin Laden
- Palin
- Pelosi
- photoshop
- Plamegate
- political correctness
- polls
- Pope
- pork
- privacy
- property rights
- public education
- public service announcement
- Putin
- quote of the day
- Reid
- religion of peace
- Rick Perry
- Rick Santorum
- Rick Scott
- Robert Byrd
- Roman Polanski
- Romney
- Ron Paul
- Rudy
- Rush
- Russia
- San Francisco
- satire
- Seattle
- separated at birth
- shameful
- Shehag
- smoking
- Social Security
- socialism
- Solyndra
- Soros
- Spitzer
- Supreme Court
- swine flu
- taxes
- Tea Party
- Texas
- The Memphis Posse
- Tim Geithner
- Tim Pawlenty
- tolerance
- TOTUS
- treason
- Uncategorized
- unions
- United Nations
- vandalism
- Vermont
- vote fraud
- Wal-Mart
- Wall Street
- Ward Churchill
- Warren Buffett
- Webb
- wingnuts
- Wisconsin
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
