Michelle Malkin: Obama’s Big Labor Ethics Loophole

Everything you need to know about President Obama’s fraudulent ethics pledge can be summed up in four words: SEIU lawyer Craig Becker.

Becker is the left-wing lawyer Obama sneakily installed on the National Labor Relations Board. The U.S. Senate rejected Becker’s nomination on a 52-33 cloture vote in February. Obama responded by flipping the bird and ramming through his recess appointment during the congressional spring break. (The New York Times approvingly dubbed it a “muscular show of his executive authority.” When that authority was exercised by GOP President George W. Bush, of course, the Times editorial board called it a “constitutional gimmick.”)

Despite the White House’s much-heralded policy of binding every executive appointee to strict conflict-of-interest guidelines, a defiant Becker now remains free to rule on cases involving his former Big Labor bosses. And the most ethical administration in U.S. history isn’t doing a thing to stop him.

While serving as an associate general counsel for both the SEIU and AFL-CIO in 2009, Becker generously lent his legal expertise to the White House. He served as an Obama transition team member for labor issues and helped draft several union-backed executive orders.

These new rules essentially blackball non-union contractors targeted by labor organizers and blacklist non-union employees in the private sector from working on taxpayer-funded projects. Another union protectionist measure immediately adopted by Obama requires that when a government service contract runs out — and there’s a new contract to perform the same services at the same location — the new contractor must retain the old workers. Such regulatory favoritism limits freedom in the workplace and raises the cost of doing business. This suits Becker and his White House champions (who reaped $60 million in SEIU campaign donations and support in 2008) just fine.

Becker’s anti-business views date back to his days as a UCLA professor, when he argued that unions should not be subject to the same rules of democracy and fair elections as everyone else. He favors radical rewriting of union organizing rules and elimination of the secret ballot process by administrative fiat.

It’s no surprise that Becker now refuses to hold himself accountable for the ethics pledge he himself signed in April. As the past two years have taught us, Team Obama’s operational slogan is: Rules are for fools. The contractual ethics commitment states: “I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.” Yet, Becker has participated in numerous NLRB cases involving the SEIU and its affiliates — and is parsing the definition of “former employer” by arguing that local SEIU chapters are “separate and distinct legal entities” that don’t fall under the ethics rules.

The National Right to Work Foundation, which has fought both national and local SEIU officials in court on behalf of rank-and-file workers’ rights, eviscerates Becker’s lawyerly blather. SEIU’s own constitution considers local affiliates “constituent subordinate bodies” of the national union, the foundation notes. “Moreover, in 2009 over 85 percent of the SEIU’s receipts came from a per capita tax on the locals’ membership dues and fees. The national union even has the power to assume control over its locals if they do not conform to International policies.”

In any case, Becker has also acknowledged playing a key role in providing “advice and counsel” to the powerful SEIU affiliate in Illinois “relating to proposed executive orders and proposed legislation giving homecare workers a right to organize and engage in collective bargaining under state law.” Championed by Big Labor water-carrier and disgraced former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and current SEIU-endorsed Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, such measures effectively bust into private homes for the Purple Shirts of the SEIU and other union competitors hungry for new dues-paying members.

Now, Becker is in the catbird seat — adjudicating challenges to the power grab rules he helped author.

Little did America know that when candidate Obama promised the SEIU he would “open up the doors of government” to them, he’d give them the keys to our living rooms, too.

Read the original article TownHall

Dunkirk Conservatism

Quin Hillyer

The greatest rescue operation in history began in full 70 years ago today. In nine days beginning May 27, 1940, the British Navy and hundreds upon hundreds of private vessels rescued an astonishing 338,266 men from the harbor and beaches of Dunkirk, France, all while under constant bombardment from German air and land forces that killed 68,111 Brits and captured as many as another 80,000. Instead of Great Britain being left at the mercy of the German death machine, the island nation had saved an army big enough to repel a Nazi invasion.

As Winston Churchill rightly noted: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”

American conservatives right now do not seem to realize that we are in the immediate post-Dunkirk phase of a desired political recovery.

All around the country, I hear conservatives talking giddily about how many seats Republicans will pick up in this fall’s congressional elections, and about how many of those Republicans will be true conservatives.

Newt Gingrich, for instance, is out there playing his usual game of speaking extravagantly about a coming victory. On May 18, he forecast up to a 70-seat gain in Republican House seats. On May 20, on the basis of one special election, he downgraded his prediction to “the 30-to-50-seat range” — which still would be mighty impressive, by historical standards. This sort of volatility is nothing new: This is the same Gingrich who promised a 30-seat Republican House pickup in 1998, only to see an actual loss of five seats instead.

Maybe we should learn something from 1998. Or from 1980, where polls six days before Election Day had Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in a dead heat, only to see Reagan win 489 out of 538 electoral votes. Conventional wisdom says that “six months is an eternity in politics.” Actually, six days is an eternity in politics. Six months might as well be “infinity and beyond.”

WHICH LEADS US BACK to Dunkirk. On the same day the evacuation began, the British War Cabinet came close to an ignominious deal with Italy’s Mussolini that would amount to agreeing to permanent Nazi/Fascist domination of the European continent — so close that only Churchill’s dogged willpower stood between the deal and a continued battle for civilization. Yet six days after coming so close to what amounted to surrender, a quarter-million soldiers already had been evacuated, and it was clear that the Brits would indeed live to fight another day. Six days from apparent defeat to survival.

Yes, six days is an eternity.

That’s why the current conservative giddiness is misplaced. Yes, the more conservative candidates won general elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, and conservatives have won primaries in Utah, West Virginia, and Idaho, while conservatives have surged or even forced more liberal candidates out of races in Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and elsewhere. Good. But all that means is that conservatives can now again wage a real fight. It means we have avoided the rout that the Obama-Pelosi-ACORN-SEIU brigades had planned for us. We have been evacuated. But our political D-Day, and V-E Day, and V-J Day, remain a long, long way off, and the outcome is by no means assured.

Some indicators, meanwhile, are not good at all. The Republican National Committee has just about $12 million cash on hand, compared to $40 million at this point in the most recent comparable cycle. All three of the main national party committees are reeling from embarrassments, and poorly led. Thousands of dollars for strip clubs and softball equipment. Chairman’s feet continually in mouth. Blown endorsements and elections in New York-23, Florida Senate, Utah Senate, Kentucky Senate, Pennsylvania-12. Ham-handed interference in primary battles across the nation rather than letting locals choose their own candidates while the committees save their money and prestige and keep their powder dry until it’s time to beat Democrats rather than fellow Republicans.

And, lest anybody forget, conservatives continue to lose legislatively. Health care has been nationalized. Student loans have been nationalized. The financial industry has been turned on its head. Spending continues to go through the roof. The auto industry has been partly nationalized. Half of the 1996 reforms of welfare have been gutted. The Justice Department is run by corrupt, leftist ideologues. The census has been politicized. AmeriCorps has been expanded ten-fold and altered into the first makings of a political army, while its inspector general has been illegally hounded from office — and thus the internal controls against rank politicization have been torn asunder. Civil rights are now protected only for minorities, but not for whites or Asians. In a North Carolina case, civil rights were even adjudged to be nonexistent unless Democrats are virtually guaranteed electoral victory. The Supreme Court now features its most radical member ever, a truly dangerous Latina who is anything but wise — and she seems likely to be joined by another leftist, this one bright and personable enough to have a chance to sway Justice Anthony Kennedy in her direction.

And on and on the disasters have gone. While conservatives pick up popular support and occasional off-year electoral victories, the Left has gobbled up vast amounts of the political continent — and much of that land will be exceedingly difficult to re-take. Anzio, anyone? Guadalcanal? The Somme in World War I? Korea above the 38th parallel? Can anybody doubt that possession of territory, along with the levers of power within it, does anything other than confer huge advantages?

Friends, the fight to retake what already has been lost will be a long, long, hard, hard slog. Giddiness is out of place.

Yes, it is true that confidence, tempered by grim realism, is certainly not out of line, considering the poll numbers, the grassroots enthusiasm, the Tea Parties, and the incompetence and clueless of much of the leftist opposition. But confidence must be backed not just by hard work but also by smart work. Conservatives must not fall prey to mere attitudinal action based on an unfocused anti-establishmentarianism. Some people already in office are not “bums” who merit being thrown out. And some maverick outsiders aren’t really competent or wise. Conservatives must learn to discern which are which.

Sobered by the task ahead, but justifiably confident that victory can indeed be attained, conservatives can indeed learn not just from Churchill’s warning that evacuations are not victories, but also from the determination to earn real victories even against tough odds. At the risk of repeating what has become so familiar as to almost be trite, let us remember what else Churchill said immediately after the deliverance of Dunkirk. Remember his words, but read them and savor them as if they are new:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight… in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our [land], whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

It should hearten us that Barack Obama banished the bust of Churchill from the White House. Obama doesn’t understand. Pray Lord that we conservatives do understand. And never surrender.

Read the original article American Spectator

BECK-Crime Inc.: What ‘Greening of America’ Means

BECK-

It’s a safe bet that most Americans’ first exposure to the concept of carbon trading or cap-and-trade legislation came during the most recent presidential campaign when both candidates advocated the need to make protecting the environment a government mandate instead of the moral obligation it’s always been. In the past few months President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that a comprehensive energy/environmental law, including cap-and-trade, is an absolute priority of his administration.

Cap-and-Trade

Simply put, the idea behind the cap-and-trade plan is this: The federal government would set limits or cap the amount of pollutant a business could create. If the business chose to emit levels exceeding the cap they would have to find a business not using its full allotment and purchase the surplus from them. Needless-to-say, for the concept to work there would need to be a highly centralized infrastructure to facilitate the transactions, matching buyers to sellers.

The CCX: A Dream Come True?

For people like Richard Sandor and former Vice-President Al Gore the focus on “green politics” represented the culmination of years of planning and a giant step towards a massive payday.

With a big helping hand from then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, Sandor’s brainchild, The Chicago Climate Exchange, opened for business in 2003 billing itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases…” In other words, the facilitator for a scheme not quite hatched. Sandor, a long-time economist turned environmentalist shared his vision during a 1990 interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying, “Air and water are no longer the free goods that economics once assumed. They must be redefined as property rights so that they can be efficiently allocated.” The statement didn’t get a lot of attention back then but today seems prophetic. Sandor claims his idea of efficient allocation, also known as carbon trading, will develop into a $10 trillion industry.

Assembling the Team

During 2000 and 2001, the Joyce Foundation, a progressive trust with assets near $1 billion, known for funding groups like Center for American Progress and Tides Foundation, provided grants to CCX totaling $1.1 million. State Senator Obama served on the foundation’s board of directors during that time and was instrumental in awarding the grants.

Shortly after the first grant was approved, the president of The Joyce Foundation, Paula DiPerna, left to join the executive team of CCX. Other notables with familiar names soon followed.

• Former Vice-President Al Gore became part-owner of CCX when his company, Generation Investment Management, made a sizeable investment. Gore brought with him his senior partner at GIM, David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, along with a company chalk full of former Goldman Sachs’ executives

• Goldman Sachs itself soon joined the team buying a ten percent interest in CCX

• Maurice Strong, once linked to Tongsun Park, the central figure in the United Nation’s oil-for-food scandal in 2005 and one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol, joined the CCX board of directors

• Carlton Bartels was one of the first, and perhaps most important, additions to the CCX roster. As CEO of a company called CO2e, Bartels developed and delivered the actual guts of the exchange — a system for facilitating and managing the actual carbon trades

Strange Bedfellows

Just three weeks after filing for a patent for his carbon trade system, Bartels was killed during the attacks of 9/11. Bartels’ death opened the door for a new partner to join CCX, easily the oddest fit of them all: Fannie Mae. In a move still unexplained, the quasi-governmental mortgage agency, led by CEO Franklin Raines, purchased the rights to the system from Bartel’s widow. A patent on the invention was granted to Raines and Fannie Mae on November 7, 2006, ironically, the day after the Democrats regained control of Congress. According to Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, the patent covers both the “cap” and “trade” parts of Obama’s top domestic energy initiative and gives Fannie Mae proprietary control over the automated trading system used by Sandor’s CCX.

When asked about the patent recently Fannie Mae communications director Amy Bonitatibus told the Washington Examiner, “Fannie Mae earns no money on this patent. We can’t conjecture as to the cap-and-trade legislation.” A source close to Fannie Mae, however, says a plan is in place to funnel future earnings from the patent to a non-profit housing organization called Enterprise Community Partners. Ironically, Raines, who left Fannie Mae in 2004 amidst allegations that he inflated earnings reports in order to collect higher bonuses ($52 million in bonuses over 5-years; $90 million in total compensation), serves on the board of trustees at Enterprise. In a continuation of theme, Goldman Sachs also has a representative on the board in the person of Alicia Glen.

Off to See the Wizard

In December 2009 The Joyce Foundation awarded Raines and Enterprise a $200,000 grant to launch Emerald Cities Collaborative. According to its website, “The Emerald Cities Collaborative (ECC) is a start-up, national coalition of diverse groups that includes unions, labor groups, community organizations, social justice advocates, development intermediaries, research and technical assistance providers, socially responsible businesses, and elected officials.”

Emerald Cities’ goal is “the greening of our nation’s central cities and the creation of a “new vital economic sector.” The collaborative is headed up by Joel Rogers, widely recognized as the “man behind the curtain” of today’s progressive political movement. Rogers founded the powerful Apollo Alliance, the group recognized as having shaped much of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill. Former White House green jobs “czar,” Van Jones, described Rogers influence this way: “The best thinking that he represents… is now represented in the White House.”

Also represented on the Emerald Cities board of directors, Gerald Hudson, executive director of SEIU (also on the Apollo Alliance advisory board); Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All (created by Van Jones), and Doris Koo, CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, along with a collection of other union and community activist regulars.

The Bottom Line

The “environmental movement,” once the bastion of peace loving hippies and Earth mothers, is potentially the booming business of the 21st century. Billions of dollars currently change hands each year in the name of the environment and, by all accounts, the surface is only scratched.

To date the missing piece of the puzzle has been a government mandate, something cap-and-trade legislation will remedy. Those already in the game stand to reap a fortune on the backs of average Americans who will see their energy bills “necessarily skyrocket,” as President Obama explained, as businesses pass along the new cost of doing what they do in a “green America.”

It’s interesting to note that without the specter of a government mandate, the Chicago Climate Exchange would hold no value. Likewise Fannie Mae’s patented trading system and Emerald Cities’ prospects for “a new vital economic sector” would be nothing more than fool’s gold.

Equally troubling is the blatant acknowledgement by those involved in this high stakes green rush that power and profit are the only real benefits to be had. The words of Joel Rogers: “I hope you all realized that you could eliminate every power plant in America today and you can stop every car in America. Take out the entire power generation sector and you still would not be anywhere near 80 percent below 1990 levels. You would be closer to around 60 percent… it would be around 68 percent and this is with bringing the economy to a complete halt… basically.”

Crime Inc. – what do they know and when did they know it… and how much will it cost the American people?

Read the original article Glenn Beck.

Watch Glenn Beck every weekday at 5p and 2a ET on the Fox News Channel

Official: SEIU President Stern to Resign

The leader of one of the country’s biggest labor unions and a top ally of President Obama is stepping down. 

Andy Stern, whose 2.2-million member Service Employees International Union spent about $60 million to help Obama win the presidency, is planning to resign as union president, according to a senior union official. 

The news comes weeks after health care reform, one of Stern’s longtime goals, cleared Congress and was signed into law by Obama. Stern, 59, has been a formidable force in Washington since well before the election — aside from the money spent to boost Obama’s candidacy, the SEIU also spent millions more on House and Senate races. 

Stern visited the White House more than 20 times in the first six months of Obama’s presidency alone. Obama also had named Stern as a member of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in February. 

Confirmation of his resignation came from Diane Sosne, a member of the union’s board and president of an SEIU local based in Seattle. 

SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette said only that Stern plans to address “speculation” that he would leave his post later this week, at the close of the union’s executive committee meeting. 

News of his pending resignation surprised many SEIU officials reached late Monday, who had not yet officially been informed of the move. Stern’s current term is scheduled to end in 2012. 

Since 1996, when he became president of the SEIU, Stern has led the union to grow faster than any other, adding over 800,000 workers in the last decade. 

He famously led his union and several others to break away from the AFL-CIO — the nation’s largest labor federation — to form the rival Change to Win federation. He complained that the older federation focused too much on political campaigns and not enough on recruiting new members. 

Stern has swelled his union’s ranks with aggressive, hard-driving tactics, but his topdown management style has rankled many who complain that Stern has ignored the interests of members. 

Thousands of members of an SEIU local in California broke away last year and Stern spent millions in a bitter and ultimately unsuccessful legal fight to stop it. 

Though he saw through the passage of health care reform, he failed to win legislation making it easier to organize unions. 

Stern’s plans to resign were first reported by Politico.com. 

Read the original article on FOXNews

Palin Says “Reload” and the Liberals Have a Cow

Doug Giles

For all the Ann Curry literalists out there, I do not “literally” mean that liberals had an actual cow after Palin told her conservative compadres to “reload” following their health care loss last week. It was a figure of speech. “Having a cow,” folks, simply means the Left overreacted to Sarah’s slang.

It’s called hyperbole, Slingblade … y’know, an extravagant statement or an exaggeration not intended to be taken literally. Did you morons not get that memo in junior high? Maybe you were out that day smoking the devil’s lettuce and watching the Young and the Restless.

My cow comment is clearly figurative because we all know Libs can’t have cows; it takes a cow to have a cow, duh. Which I guess means that Rosie O’Donnell could have a cow, Joy Behar could lay a mess of tsetse fly eggs, and Janeane Garofalo could spawn a ring-tailed lemur. Wouldn’t that be the bomb?

Oops, sorry. I forgot. I said bomb. Shame on me because I forgot that I can’t use any warfare terminology anymore in my prose since the thought police on the Left have put a moratorium on militaristic analogies (as such language will lead, according to “them,” to Tea Party terrorists).

It’s weird that Curry and her scrub bull buddies on the Left would make such a fuss over Palin’s clear and common use of a war term to rally the troops. Crap … there I go again with the martial verbiage. Forgive me Ann, for I have sinned.

Y’know, Miss Sarah, you would have saved all of us wordsmiths out here a lot of trouble if you would have just told your republican fellows to get back up on their horses after their loss. But then again I doubt the noun Nazis would have allowed the horse metaphor, seeing that according to these numb nuts riding horses represents animal cruelty.

This means, of course, that PETA would trot out Pam Anderson to do a commercial, wearing short shorts, petting a white horse on a lonely beach while chiding us as she runs her fingers through her lightly tossed blonde locks. Which would be, I must admit, much more enjoyable than being castigated by Ann Curry and her disapproving, furrowed brow at 7:14 am. What a way to start the day.

All of you of PC gods of gobbledygook have got to chill out on strangling our vocabulary to death with your egregious leaps to conclusions, or we are not going to be able to communicate any longer except through eye movements, hand signals and guttural grunts—which, I’m sure, I would still be ceaselessly censored given my current regular use of the finger, my habitual rolling of the eyes, and the incessant groaning I emit when I see Pelosi doing that crazy laughter under her breath while she’s stripping away our cherished liberties.

You’d think that Ann’s angst over Palin’s military analogy would cause her to get really pissy over Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, and the Assassinate Bush rabble’s literal, outlandish and ofttimes violent anti-American diatribes, but for some reason their rank rhetoric doesn’t ruffle the Left’s feathers.

Heck, you’d also think that given their intolerance for Sarah’s imagery they would even condemn Obama, who told his zombies to “sharpen their elbows and get in people’s faces,” which his main backers SEIU did by calling a black conservative a nigger and then commencing to beat him up (which, by the way, we have on film), but alas, there was nary a word. Yep, that inexcusable incident by SEIU didn’t even generate a peep from the Left’s peeps. But God forbid if Sarah Palin utilizes a military analogy in exhorting her base to get back into the fray. Oops, I said fray.

Read the original article on TownHall

Backdoor card check: GOP slams pro-union contracting policy

Gautham Nagesh – The Daily Caller

Republicans are up in arms over a pro-union contracting policy currently under consideration by the White House, arguing the measures will significantly increase the cost of government contracts and are part of the Obama administration’s efforts to implement policies that favor organized labor while circumventing Congress.

The Daily Caller reported last week that senior administration officials are considering a series of proposals known as “High Road Contracting Policy” that would give preference to companies bidding on federal contracts that pay hourly workers a “living wage” (typically a mandated, above-market wage) and provide additional benefits above and beyond existing labor laws.

Critics say the proposals would heavily favor unionized companies and significantly increase the cost and amount of time needed to award contracts. Estimates have the potential cost increase at 20 percent, adding about $100 billion a year to the federal budget.

“Making contracting decisions based on political or ideological litmus tests will waste taxpayer dollars and limit economic growth at a time when we can least afford to do so. The administration’s new rules amount to a backdoor attempt at card check. The last thing our small businesses need is to be saddled with new rules that effectively say ‘unionize or die,’” said John Hart, communications director for Senator Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican. Coburn and four other Senate Republicans sent a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag last week asking for a briefing on the proposals; they have yet to receive a response.

The proposals are among the measures the administration is considering in order to give a boost to unions following a series of setbacks. Many liberals have conceded the Employee Free Choice Act, also known as card check, is dead for the time being and organized labor was dealt another blow yesterday when the Senate blocked the nomination of labor lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board.

Now the administration is facing increasing pressure to go around Congress and implement pro-labor policies via executive order. The Service Employees International Union, one of the groups lobbying the White House to adopt the new labor policies, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“There’s a tremendous amount of fervor in this area related to the Obama administration taking some action to boost organized labor and I think one of the things this illustrates is that their are numerous avenues that could potentially be explored,” said Michael Fox, a labor and employment lawyer with Ogletree Deakins in Austin, Texas. Fox added that Obama could also consider a recess appointment for Becker, “if the administration has decided to burn their bridges and go all out.”

But sources told The Daily Caller that Vice President Biden’s office has already floated the idea of implementing the new labor policies by executive order and was rebuffed by OMB’s general counsel, who claimed such drastic changes to contracting laws would require legislative action. When asked for comment on the talks, an OMB official provided the following: “We are aware of the proposals and are currently in the process of reviewing them.”

David Madland, director at the Center for American Progress testified in front of the House Armed Services Committee in August on labor standards in federal contracting and said his organization supports the changes and has discussed them with the administration and lawmakers. He disagreed that the changes would increase costs, pointing to studies at the state and local levels showing similar policies have increased competition for contracts.

“If we’re talking basically a wash on the overall direct bid costs and then you factor in the savings from reduced spending on Medicaid and food stamps, it’s increasingly likely [this policy] wouldn’t cost the government anything,” Madland said. “It would be great if Congress took action, and great if the administration took action. Everything does not necessarily need legislative action.”

One of the most contentious proposals is to centralize the evaluation and scoring of companies’ labor records, likely in the Department of Labor. Republicans are concerned that the process could undermine the autonomy of contracting officers, who are currently supposed to award contracts based solely on cost to the taxpayer, technical merit and a company’s past performance.

Madland said adding one additional criteria should not excessively complicate the bidding process, pointing out that the Labor Department already evaluates contractors based on their labor policies.

A Senate staff member who asked not to be identified argued otherwise, saying the new labor evaluations would become a de facto screening process that favors unionized companies.

“You will see protests right and left,” the staff member said. “This will grind federal contracting to a halt.”

Read the original article Daily Caller

Seven Lowlights From Obama’s First Disastrous Year in Office

John Hawkins
Barack Obama’s first year in office was one long string of gaffes, foreign policy blunders, and domestic disasters strung together in a long, terrible line. Although it’s not possible to adequately catalogue every blunder in Obama’s first year in something shorter than a book, here are some of the many, many blaring lowlights that really stood out:

1) The stimulus that didn’t: The Democrats shoved through a stimulus bill that cost more than the Vietnam and Iraq wars combined. Why? Over and over again, they said “jobs, jobs, jobs.” In fact, the Obama Administration said that if the bill passed, they expected it to keep unemployment below 8%. Instead, unemployment hit a 26-year high of 10.2% in November.

2) Pyrrhic “victory” on health care: In one of the most nauseating displays of government “sausage making” in American history, the Democrats have used open bribery to push a wildly unpopular health care bill through both the House and the Senate. The Democrats are willing to trade tax increases, increased premiums, Medicare cuts, government-financed abortions, taxpayer-funded care for illegals, death panels, rationing, and reduced quality of care for a bill they believe will help move America towards socialism. However, this is turning into the Hindenburg of political bills and could very possibly cost the Democrats the House, the Senate, and the White House over the next couple of election cycles unless Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts and helps kill the bill deader than Lenin in the next few weeks.

3) Thanks for the help on the campaign. Enjoy your new company! In what may be the “crookedest” government deal since the Teapot Dome Scandal in the early twenties, Barack Obama broke legally binding contracts and spent more than 50 billion dollars in taxpayer funds to save union jobs at GM and Chrysler. When it was all said and done, the SEIU, which provides political shock troops for Democrats all across the country, ended up with more than 50% of Chrysler and almost 40% of General Motors. Jack Abramoff, Bernie Madoff, and Charles Ponzi together couldn’t have bilked as many Americans out of their money in a hundred years as Barack Obama did with this scam.

4) Obama lets you know what he really thinks about race: Barack Obama has been well served by letting his supporters play the race card for him while he keeps his hands clean. That way, he looks like a good guy, even while his friends and allies scream “racism” at everyone who gets in his way. However, the mask slipped on the Henry Louis Gates case and Americans got to see what Obama really thinks about race.

After admitting that he didn’t know all the facts, Obama accused the police of “stupidly” arresting his friend and then went on lecture everyone about the racism that surely had to be involved. It was Obama’s most revealing moment on race since he tossed his own grandmother under the bus even as he supported Jeremiah Wright.

5) Book ‘em, Danno! The decision to put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on trial in New York is simply bizarre. No one in the Obama Administration has been able to give a coherent explanation for why KSM is being tried in New York while other terrorists are facing military tribunals. Why increase the chances of a terrorist attack in New York, give KSM the chance to spew propaganda in the court room, risk the release of sensitive intelligence data, and give a slick lawyer a chance to let Khalid Shaikh Mohammed off via a loophole? This is all doubly true since both Barack Obama and Eric Holder have assured Americans that KSM won’t be released, no matter what happens. That should help America’s image abroad — making a big show of putting a terrorist through our criminal justice system and then in essence telling the world it’s a sham trial that’s about as meaningful as the courtroom proceedings in North Korea or Cuba.

6) This is the most important fight ever! Here’s when we give up: Since Obama got into office, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has markedly deteriorated. General Stanley McChrystal gave Obama a plan to help turn things around, and after months of golfing, Obama got around to partially approving it — along with a timeline, explaining when we were leaving. Just after telling Americans how vital Afghanistan was, not just to America’s security but to the world, Obama then told the audience when we’d be starting to pull out, whether we won or not. After it became clear that the timeline had the potential to dramatically undercut support for the war, the administration backpedaled like they were training for the Tour De France, leaving everyone confused about where we really stand.

7) Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Al-Qaeda nipping at your nose: Isn’t it great to know that after all the obtrusive, annoying, and time consuming searches we have to endure at the airports, terrorists can still get on airplanes with explosives? Moreover, despite the fact that our government was given every warning that the Christmas Day Pantsbomber was a threat, not only did they manage to fail to connect the dots, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano declared that “the system worked” because passengers managed to thwart the terrorist attack. As if that wasn’t insulting enough, aggravating, completely ineffective new rules were implemented because of the attack, and after the Nigerian pants bomber was foolishly put into the civilian court system, he immediately stopped talking. Where’s Jack Bauer — or for that matter, Dick Cheney — when we need some adults to help protect our country?

Read the original article on TownHall

More Details on Obama’s Big Bribe to Big Labor

By Philip Klein

Brian Beutler has new details on the deal aimed at bribing big labor into supporting the health care bill at the expense of all other workers.

He writes:

The Obama administration and organized labor have reached a tentative agreement on the so-called Cadillac tax on high end health insurance plans, signaling that Democrats may soon be able to resolve their differences over how to finance health care reform.

Unions had opposed the measure, which, as originally designed, would have imposed a 40 percent excise tax on insurance policies that cost more than $23,000 for families, and $8,500 for individuals, indexed just above inflation.

Under the terms of the proposed deal, the threshold for families would be raised to $24,000, and would exempt certain benefits like vision and dental, according to a Democratic source.

Collectively bargained plans would be exempted until 2017, to provide workers with a real opportunity to renegotiate their benefits packages, which were designed under current law and exempted from taxation.

Of course, everybody else with “Cadillac” plans also negotiated them during a period when they weren’t taxed, but they won’t have until 2017 to renegotiate. They’ll be subject to the new tax.

Back when he was taken seriously as a politician, John Edwards used to talk about there being two Americas. Well it turns out, that’s a good description of life under President Obama. If you’re part of one America, you have to pay a tax if you receive generous health benefits. But if you’re part of the other America that has contributed handily to Democratic campaigns and has access to the White House, you can receive those same benefits without paying a tax.

UPDATE: Back when this idea was being floated last June, liberal health care blogger Ezra Klein agreed that it was unfair. Here’s what he wrote on his Washington Post blog:

I see the short-term appeal of the proposal. It retains most of the revenue and neutralizes an important source of opposition. But it’s pretty crass. The benefits won by workers in collective bargaining agreements are no more sacrosanct than the benefits negotiated by an individual worker when he settled on the terms of his job. And it’s not hard to see the dangers of the (accurate!) attack that “Democrats want to tax your health benefits — unless you join a labor union that donates mainly to Democrats.” The last thing you want when levying a new tax is to make it look like an unfair new tax, or a new tax that mainly benefits your favored special interests. Like everyone else, union members — particularly those in the aging industries that offer the best benefits — have much to gain from health-care reform. It’s not crazy to ask them to help pay for it.

UPDATE II: Via Twitter, Ezra Klein replies that, “I don’t love this solution, but I wasn’t talking about it in June. That was about exempting union agreements, not time…i.e. leaving union benefits out altogether is a lot worse than giving them a few years to renegotiate.” 

While exempting union benefits altogether may indeed be worse, the time element doesn’t change the basic unfairness. The bottom line is that unions will get special treatment, for no other reason than their ties to the Democratic Party. If, say, the tax were designed to only affect those making more than $200,000 per year, at least there would be some argument that liberals could make based on progressive taxation and protecting the middle class. But this isn’t based on income, nor does it have a policy rationale. It’s pure special interest politics.

To his credit, while I was updating this post, Ezra added on Twitter that, “I agree that this is pure special interest politics. I’ve not been on the union’s side on this fight!” 

Read the original article on The American Spectator

Promises? What Promises?

Jennifer Rubin

Union bosses are having a get-together with the president today to discuss his broken promise not to tax those families who make less than $250,000. They will meet behind closed doors, violating the promise to C-SPAN that we’d watch them all sit around a big table to work out the details. But for tough guys, these Big Labor fellas seem awfully wimpy, as this report explains:

Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), told The Hill on Friday that the final bill would likely include some form of the excise tax.“When you have a president who says he wants to incorporate it and a Senate that says it wants to incorporate it and some in the House who say they want to incorporate it, it’s hard to look that in the face and say we can just win this outright,” Stern said.

I wonder how their members feel about that. Millions and millions of dollars were taken from union members’ pockets to be spent in direct contributions and soft-money expenditures to elect Democrats to Congress and Obama to the White House. And what they get for that is nothing — worse than nothing. Union members already have health care. What they’re now going to get are tax increases. Or perhaps they’ll instead see those generous health-care benefits slashed to avoid the excise tax (so much for “guaranteeing” to keep the health plan you have). Meanwhile, unemployment is in double digits and employers aren’t anxious to hire anyone — union or nonunion. What exactly have union members gotten from Washington and from their own leaders?

And if union leaders succeed in trimming the tax, if not eliminating it, what then? Well, other Americans are going to get smacked because the money has to come from somewhere:

The Senate bill would raise about $150 billion from 2013 to 2019 by taxing employer-provided health plans costing more than $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for families. Labor officials, citing an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, claim this would hit nearly 31 million households by 2019. But limiting the excise tax would require Senate and House negotiators to find alternative sources of revenue to fund healthcare reform.

Who’s the likely victim? Well, it seems that “labor leaders may push for a bigger increase in the Medicare Hospital Insurance tax.” Because we haven’t stuck it to health-care providers or endangered the fiscal viability of Medicare enough, I suppose.

Well, Democrats are bound and determined to push something through. Now the only question, it seems, is determining which groups will hate the bill more: union members, seniors, young people (forced to buy insurance), the Left, the Right, good-government types, independents, or tax-hike opponents. So many groups, so many grievances.

Read the original article on Commentary Magazine

Will Corzine Allies Steal the Election in New Jersey? ACORN, Dirty Tricks and Absentee Ballot Fraud

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine is locked in the political fight of his life. With just hours left before voting, polls show a neck-and-neck race between Corzine and GOP candidate Chris Christie, with Independent candidate Chris Daggett pulling significant support. Obama and VP Biden are making last ditch pitches for the embattled governor. But evidence is building that Corzine’s campaign may see its only salvation is in rigging the election.

The first sign is a straight-up dirty trick. Daggett’s run for office is certainly convenient for Corzine, as he will help split any anti-Corzine vote. And, as a Corzine political appointee, one wonders if his candidacy wasn’t a set up to begin with. Now, in the final days of the campaign, it appears state democrats are paying for robo calls supporting Independent Chris Daggett. First reported here, the robo calls attack Christie (but not Corzine) and promote Daggett. At the end of the call, it is mentioned that the calls are paid for by a “project of the NJSDC.” No idea what that acronym stands for, but New Jersey State Democratic Committee, isn’t too big of a stretch. More interesting is the fact that the return number on the calls is the same number that was used to promote Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s election in closing days of the 2006 race.

More telling that the fix is in, however, is the sudden appearance of ACORN on the scene. Not by name, mind you, as their reputation is so tarnished that even New Jersey Democrats don’t want to be associated with them. No, in New Jersey ACORN sought cover behind its big brother, SEIU, specifically SEIU Local 32BJ.

(more…)