Obama To Force Taxpayers to Pay for the Union Label

Steven Melanga writes the following article at realclearlpolitics:

“An advertisement supporting Washington State’s Initiative 1098, which would create a new tax on the state’s upper income earners, starts provocatively with William Gates Sr. taking a dunk in a pool and then declaring that he’s okay with getting soaked by the new tax. So, apparently, is his much richer and more famous son, Microsoft founder Bill Gates Jr., who also supports the initiative.

The sight of rich people pleading to be taxed more has attracted attention to the November ballot initiative. But otherwise, support for the ballot measure, which would slap a tax of from 5 percent to 9 percent on the income of those earning more than $200,000 a year ($400,000 for those filing jointly), is entirely predictable. The chief force behind it is the state’s unions, who’ve contributed some $2 million to the campaign for the initiative, led by the state employees’ union, the teachers’ union and the Service Employees International Union, the largest union in the state with 100,000 workers, many of them working in the heavily-regulated area of health care.

This is the nature of tax hike campaigns these days. When the union movement in America crossed a crucial threshold recently, as membership in public sector unions surpassed private sector union enrollment for the first time, the event signified deeper changes in labor in America. The new labor movement, dominated by government workers, is an increasingly white-collar interest group, culturally progressive and fiscally liberal, and it has become the chief organizer of efforts to raise taxes in America, especially at the state and local level, where these government worker unions wield their greatest influence. Their efforts have helped boost local taxes this year more than any year since 1979.

Find a tax increase campaign and you’re almost certain to find a government union behind it. The California Teachers Association, for instance, is the chief force behind a November ballot initiative in the Golden State which would raise business taxes. The CTA alone has contributed some $6.4 million of its members’ dues money to the campaign, according to filings with the California Secretary of State’s office. Other public unions have anted up another $2.5 million.

In fact, since the budget squeeze hit states and municipalities starting in 2008, such tax and spend campaigns have been typical. Researchers at the Heritage Foundation counted some 25 public union-driven efforts in that time. They include successful efforts by Arizona’s unions to raise the state’s sales tax earlier this year, a ballot initiative in Oklahoma sponsored by the state’s teachers’ unions to raise education spending by $1 billion, a successful $8 million campaign in Oregon by public unions to defeat initiatives seeking to roll back corporate and personal income tax hikes, and a $4 million advertising effort this past spring designed to pressure New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to raise taxes in his state, which failed.

It hasn’t always been this way. At the crucial point in the country’s labor history when public sector employees were first earning the right to organize, the union movement was largely blue-collar, culturally conservative and often pro-economic growth in its efforts. At that time, union leaders led by George Meany, former head of the AFL-CIO, lobbied heavily for one of the most significant tax cuts of the 20th century, the historic 1964 tax package, originally proposed by President Kennedy the previous year with union support.

Meany, ironically, was one of the private labor leaders of that era who looked with suspicion on the growing movement to grant collective bargaining rights to government workers. Critics worried that because government is a monopoly whose management is composed of elected officials, public unions might wind up with a big hand in electing those they must bargain with. Some in Meany’s circle also resented the notion that public employees, already protected by civil service laws, wanted to identify themselves with the long struggles of America’s industrial workers.

But politicians like New York City Mayor Robert Wagner saw even back then that public workers could be valuable political allies. Once a few big city mayors like Wagner began granting collective bargaining rights to public workers, the trend proved irreversible and over time these unions garnered enormous resources which made them among the biggest political players in many states and cities. To understand why, just consider that in California, membership in the teachers’ union grew from about 170,000 at the time when unionization began to about 340,000 today. The CTA is nourished by annual union dues of more than $1,000 per member (do the math), one reason why the union can kick in millions of dollars to support tax-hike initiatives.

In the current election public unions face a backlash from voters who seem to have figured out that the union movement in America is now the chief proponent of higher taxes, and that the increases have often gone to burnish the pay and benefits of government workers. Even union members have figured out that they, too, can become targets of these higher taxes. And not all of them like it.

In 2009 the New York State United Teachers ran a $1.5 million advertising campaign aimed at increasing taxes on families earning $250,000 or more in the Empire State. The ads provoked the ire of some educators. As the head of the Eastchester Teachers Association wrote on the union’s website:

“My wife and I are both employed as science teachers in Westchester County, and earned a gross household income in 2007 of more than $240,000. This year, we may top the $250,000 figure with step increases and extracurricular activities. Thus, NYSUT is suggesting that union teachers who worked hard to get good-paying jobs be taxed at a higher percentage than others.”

Yes, that’s exactly what public unions have been advocating for decades. Even their own members are starting to figure it out, and not all of them like it.”

Ed Schultz, MSNBC Star of Leftese Dialects, Salts Governor Christie’s Girth and Style

 Ed Schultz appears on MSNBC News five nights a week while Americans are busy eating their supper.  He speaks Leftese, Obama language. and speaks in many dialects, usually with more salt  than Obama uses on his tongue….

Mr. Schultz doesn’t like Governor Christie’s style and girth, and that he is conservative, and a governor of a nearly bankrupt Democrat Party-led state, New Jersey.  He has become quite popular.  I admit that I would like him to topple Mr. Obama in 2012.

Mr. Obama may have been born of Kenyan and Kansan parents.  Mr. Christie’s parents were Sicilian and Irish.

click here for a variety of  Ed Schultz dialects including the charge the governor insults all women:

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/27/ed-schultz-chris-christie_n_739929.html

click here for the full video of the teacher who used her Lefty language to challenge the governor, but when given a choice of either being rude  or listen to his answers to her question without her tantrums, she chose to become an adult and listen politely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkuTm-ON904

I admire the teacher for growing up instead of acting Leftish.  She was sent  to harass the Governor.  His reponse to her was remarkably appropriate…..don’t you think?

Exposing Leftwing “Houston Votes” for Voter Fraud

Andrew Breitbard, at Big Government examines reports of massive voter fraud in 2008 in Houston, Texas:

“You may have read that there is strong evidence of voter fraud in Houston. Here’s what you may not have heard: the organization accused of shady behavior is linked to a former head of an Obama campaign office. She is a fan of Che Guevara. She is also the person who invited to a town hall meeting a woman who then posed as a doctor at that meeting during the health care debate.

Here are the details.

Last month, Houston’s Registrar accused a Democratic organization called “Houston Votes” of voter registration fraud. The allegations were recently detailed here, and make compelling reading:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

. . . .

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. . . .

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney.

Guess who was active in recruiting for Houston Votes? That would be one Maria Isabel!”

Comment:  Barack Hussein Obama was an attorney, the chief attorney for ACORN in Chicago and called himself a community organizer.  Organizing votes was a major part of the agenda.

Voter Fraud, 2008 Houston, Texas…..So, What Else Is New?

Voter fraud has been exposed in Houston, Texas.  Ed Barnes of Fox News, writes the following:

 

“When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere. 

“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers.

Like most voter watchdog groups, she said, her group started small. They decided to investigate voting fraud in general, not just at the polling places, and at first they weren’t even sure what to look for — and where to look for it. 

The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them” Engelbrecht said, because those houses were the most likely to have fraudulent registrations attached to them. “Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic . . .

“But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking.”

It was Houston’s poorest and predominantly black district, which has led some to accuse the group of targeting poor black areas. But Engelbrecht rejects that, saying, “It had nothing to do with politics. It was just the numbers.” 

The task was overwhelming. With 1.9 million voters and 886 voting precincts, Houston’s Harris County is the second largest county in the country — and the key to Texas elections.

The group called for help and quickly got 30 donated computers and “tens of thousands of hours” of volunteer work. And then the questions started to arise. 

“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters.”

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. 

The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. 

Caddle told local newspapers that there “had been mistakes made,” and he said he had fired 30 workers for filing defective voter registration applications. He could not be reached for this article.

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney. A spokesman for the DA’s office declined to discuss the case. And a spokesman for Vasquez said that the DA has asked them to refrain from commenting on the case.

The outcome of the efforts grew in importance the day after Vasquez made his announcement. On the morning of Aug. 27, a three-alarm fire destroyed almost all of Harris County’s voting machines, throwing the upcoming Nov. 2 election into turmoil. While the cause wasn’t determined, the $40 million blaze, according to press reports, means election officials will be focused on creating a whole new voting system in six weeks. Just how they do it will determine how vulnerable the process becomes.”

Comment:  The inner city American black culture is essentially a Marxist plantation culture and has been for some time.  There are the bossman politicians all hired by the American Left to keep the flock in political line…serve them regular dinners of hate-and lies  education against  anything  white but not  Democrat Party  to go along with  political payoffs  and financial handouts from politicians “looking out for them”.  

It is a culture crippled by male violence and crime, fatherlessness, family units in disarray, and a community allergic to  education, the good schooling kind.  Many of its residents are taught to hate whitey from the day they are born. 

Other folks, decent in their soul, guided by their church and a devotion to the right from wrong, rise above the “Goddamn America” Jeremiah type  preachers whether in cloth or in jail.  Any criticism from anything white is called racism.  The American left obliges by forcing its laws of Political Correctness, some written, some not, throughout the country, in its schools, churches, movies, television, newspapers, magazines……everywhere, into nearly every household.

Universities establish Black Studies Departments where teaching hate of whites becomes established, popular, and chic…..learnings the modern white left calls “Liberal Arts”.

Cheating on voting day in these areas is nothing new.  As in much of the third world, since it is expected, it becomes a matter of degree. 

Obama’s Hangups With News and Fox: His Suffering for Being A Marxist

David Zurawik at the Baltimore Sun isn’t moved by president Obama’s view of what a free, unbiased press is.   The president seems to prefer MSNBC to Fox News and claims there was a time in American history when the press was free of bias.

Only graduates of Columbia and Princeton could develop such learnings.  Let’s see what the president believes about NEWS.

Mr. Zurawik writes:

“Last year at this time, President Obama and his top White House advisers were about to launch a disastrous campaign against Fox News.

I say disastrous because the acting communications director, Anita Dunn, who sounded the call to arms on Howard Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” show, would resign within weeks. By then, the president and his innermost circle — after going on every major non-Fox news show to attack TV’s highest-rated cable news channel as “not really being a news channel”  — were in full retreat.

I was in the middle of it, a little lonely at first as one of the only mainstream journalists denouncing what the White House was up to. I stressed the need for a free press — a press independent from the reaches and power of any of the branches of government — for democracy to be served.

It got nasty before journalists at other cable channels and networks who understood the principle stepped up and spoke out against an executive branch trying to bully and browbeat a competitor. ABC’s Jake Tapper, then-CNN host Campbell Brown and NBC’s Savannah Guthrie were among the cable and network newscasters who ultimately challenged the White House on what it was trying to do to Fox.

And now comes President Obama in a “Rolling Stone” interview citing the very point I made over and over while under attack from his operatives last fall when he was asked by Jann Wenner about Fox News in an interview for a midterm-themed cover story in “Rolling Stone.” And after he cites the Constitutional principle, he then goes back on the attack saying Fox News is “destructive” to the country.

Here we go again — sort of. The president seems to have learned from the mistakes of last fall’s campaign against Fox. But instead of using his newly gained wisdom to respect the role of a free press, he’s using it to try to be more effective in his attack on Fox News. He’s trying to plug the gaping hole in last year’s rationale to better disguise his partisan intent.

UPDATE: 8 p.m. Check out this report of White House spokesperson praising MSNBC and Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow if you don’t think the White House is on the attack against Fox again just as it was last fall — while shutting its eyes to MSNBC committing the same sins of bias of which it accuses Fox News. This sure looks like playing to the base to me. The White House spokesman says the president believes Olbermann provides an “invaluable service” to the country. He helps keep government “honest.” And this, while the president is saying Fox News is “destructive” to the country.

According to TVNewser’s account of the Rolling Stone interview, here’s Obama’s answer after Wenner asks him is he thinks Fox News is “is a good institution for America and for democracy.”

(Talk about loaded, tee-’em-up, partisan, softball questions. If the publisher of “Rolling Stone” was so concerned about what institutions were good for democracy, he should have stepped up last fall when the executive branch of government was trying to crush one of the most popular news outlets in America. Anyway, here’s Obama, and please note the laughter at the question about Fox and democracy indicated in the transcript of the exchange.)

Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition – it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

I love it that Obama finally masters the first week’s topic for Government and the Press 101, the part about the need for independent press, and now he’s lecturing us on the History of the Press 499 like he knows what he is talking about.

That’s fine, that’s Obama, isn’t it?

And I guess, it is even okay if Obama wants to say he believes Fox News has a point of view and that  it’s “ultimately destructive” for America. That is a pretty serious charge for the president of the United States to make against a media outlet. I wonder if Obama realizes that he carries the history and the weight of the presidency behind him when he say such things — words that seem more suited to the slash-and-burn rhetoric of a politician on the campaign trail than the president of the United States.

But, after all, Fox News is winning with the viewer-voters of America, and Obama has been losing support for his party left and right. And nothing rallies the left, which is pretty disillusioned with Obama these days, like an attack on Fox — especially on a week of more great ratings news and the release of a study that finds Fox a winner when voters are asked what news outlets are having a positive impact on American politics.

But you don’t deny Fox News or any other news organization access to pool interviews with administration officials as was done last year or have your top aides go on Sunday morning public affairs shows and tell other journalists they should cut Fox News from the journalistic herd.

I have written this before, but it bears repeating: Outside of Richard Nixon, I have never seen  a president with the profound contempt for the press that Obama has.

Say what you will about Fox News and the all the candidates on its payroll, and its parent company donating $1 million to the GOP, all journalists owe Roger Ailes & Co. a debt of gratitude for standing up to the White House last year and teaching this president a lesson about the press and government — a lesson that you think he would have learned long ago being a professor of law.”

Comment:  It is amazing how many professional liars in politics have law degrees.  How unfortunate that a MRI exam doesn’t yet exist which might be able to calculate at what stage of brain disintegration did  this  disease (lying)  so rank among  degreed attorneys begin.

Yet, we know in advance, the results…….at ages 19,20, and 21 through about age 26…..We also already know the locations where the disease has caused the most deterioration of honest thinking…..at the universities….Wisconsin at Madison, California at Berkeley, Harvard at any location, Yale, Columbia, and the list becomes nearly endless. 

This is a station an American youth must endure…..to become brainless from drink, sex  and drugs and professor Obama teachings…..to endure the meaningless of life they’re being taught.

This MRI, if discovered, might be programmed to recommend the number of days, months and years needed for recovery, when these children, programmed to hate, will enter an adult stage to conduct a productive life when thinking might return.