Obama Off Teleprompter - Bombing Libya

Obama Goes Off Teleprompter - Unions

Obama Now Decides What Is Constitutional

Public Employee Union Thugs Keep Democrats In Power At Taxpayer Expense

When the Wisconsin General Assembly voted to pass Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill, Democratic legislators made themselves indistinguishable from the protestors surrounding the assembly floor.

They wore the same pro-union orange T-shirts. They behaved in the same sophomoric way, breaking out in a noisy, finger-pointing demonstration. They chanted the same ubiquitous word: “Shame!” They might as well have brought guitars onto the floor for a Woody Guthrie sing-along and touted “Walker = Hitler” signs.

The fight in Wisconsin has focused on collective-bargaining rights, but that is not the main event. As Daniel DiSalvo of the City College of New York-CUNY notes in a Weekly Standard article, 24 states either don’t allow collective bargaining for public workers, or permit it for only a segment of workers. Even if Walker prevails, Wisconsin will allow more wide-ranging collective bargaining than these states.

Not to mention the federal government. Obama may lecture Walker about union rights, but he can go straight to Congress with a highly political proposal to freeze the pay of federal workers because they can’t collectively bargain for wages or benefits.

No, the most important measure at stake in Wisconsin is the governor’s proposal for the state to stop deducting union dues from the paychecks of state workers. This practice essentially wields the taxing power of the government on behalf of the institutional interests of the unions. It makes the government an arm of the public-sector unions. It is a priceless favor.

Wisconsin doesn’t collect dues for Elks lodges or the NRA. What makes these organizations different from public-sector unions is that people freely choose to join them and freely choose to pay their dues. They are truly voluntary organizations that don’t rely on the power of the state for their well-being. Walker wants to give members of public-sector unions a measure of this same autonomy.

Perhaps some of these members aren’t liberal Democrats, so they don’t want to pay dues — roughly $1,000 annually in the case of teachers — which will overwhelmingly go to funding and organizing for Democratic candidates. Perhaps some of them, regardless of their politics, want to spend that money on their families or other pressing needs. Walker will allow them to exercise a choice now closed to them. In most of 21st-century America, that surely sounds like common sense; for the unions, it sounds like a dire threat.

When Indiana governor Mitch Daniels ended collective bargaining and the automatic collection of dues in 2005, the number of members paying dues plummeted by roughly 90 percent. In 2007, New York City’s Transit Authority briefly stopped automatically collecting dues for the Transport Workers Union, and dues fell off by more than a third. Without these dues, the ability of public-sector unions to influence elections — what they care about most — drastically diminishes.

This is why Wisconsin Senate Democrats preferred to flee the state rather than stay and vote on a proposal that would curtail their fundraising and organizational base. They can dress up their opposition in the rhetoric of workers’ “rights,” but even if all collective bargaining were stripped from all Wisconsin public workers, they’d still have extensive civil-service protections. For Democrats, the issue is whether they can continue to rely on state government to grease an essential cog in their political machine.

Public-sector unions are a creature of government, and the Democrats are the party of government. The two of them have identical interests and worldviews, and both want to leverage government to swell their campaign coffers. How to characterize this? The word “shame” comes to mind.

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Obama Opposes Free And Fair Elections In Wisconsin

It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s foreign relations or domestic disputes, President Obama is always on the wrong side of history.  Millions took to the street during Iran’s Green Revolution that protested a patently phony election which declared Ahmadinejad the president within an hour of the polls closing.  That mind blowing speed is not bad for a country mired with an authoritarian religion and culture based in the 7th century.  It’s also impossible.  Yet, our president kept silent for 10 days in 2009.

His initial comments were actually supportive of the government. We wouldn’t want to be construed as meddling, would we?  Ultimately, his only admonition to the government was to be nice to the demonstrators. That worked well. Ask all the dead ones.  He never called for new elections or even to request that the opposition to be a part of any negotiations.

But fast forward to today in Wisconsin.  We have a democratically elected Governor Scott Walker and a state legislature with a state that’s going broke because of the burden of union payrolls and pensions.  Here is a Republican governor and a Republican legislature that wants to do the right thing, reign in out-of-control spending and balance the budget.  Hmm, isn’t this something the American people think Obama should be doing in Washington?   Remember, the last election in 2010?  Republican swept the House.  So what does Obama do?  He has the nerve to open his yap to object to the Wisconsin governor and release the dogs to attack and bring havoc to his state. This is Ahmadinejad and his goons redux here in America. Obama is inciting a riot. Outrageous.

It’s outrageous on several fronts:


1) State’s Rights. Not only is Obama interfering in state politics (suing Arizona wasn’t enough). Obama doesn’t understand state’s rights.  He needs to read the Constitution; it’s in there.  Everything else Obama supports:  Obamacare, GM bailout, etc.  is not.    He then sends in his storm troopers, literally.   His Organizing with America, his political arm, has been coordinating the chaos and mayhem in Wisconsin in concert with union thugs.

2)  The Organizer In Chief can’t get his own house in order. Obama’s position of opposing the  reigning in of union largesse is now clearly shown for the world to see.  It stands in sharp contrast to Obama’s own federal budget plan.  There he is expanding the size of his deficit with his proposed federal budget, while simultaneously giving lip service to “deficit reduction” and being “business friendly”. Why he’s even met with top business execs this past week in Silicon Valley.   Helloooo, just how stupid does he think the American people are?  Plenty stupid, apparently.   But America is not buying what Obama is serving.   A Rasmussen poll released today shows just 23% of Americans strongly approving and 41% Strongly disapproving of the president.  Memo to Michelle, it’s not too early to ask your army of valets to start packing.

Incredible as that might be,  it doesn’t end there.

3)  A New Level of Radicalism. How radical is Obama’s position?  Obama finds himself very alone in his rabid support for his union thugs.  He’s now given up on playing that “centrist card”.    That didn’t last long.  His mentor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal and a Supreme Court packed with statists and lefties steered America more leftwards than any other president in American history, could not even support public civil service unions.

“Meticulous attention,” President Roosevelt declared in 1937, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

Why did Roosevelt say that?   Because as later expressed;

“[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Here’s how the Socialists are working the Wisconsin civil unrest- they love it.

The taxpayers are paying for the teachers to demonstrate. They’re unlawfully using their sick days.  This underscores the very reasons why Governor Walker is right in demanding reforms of the outrageous labor laws.  And as of today, the governor is not blinking and standing his ground. In most states, like Wisconsin and California, the labor unions write their own ticket and a kowtowing legislature rubber stamps it.  How else can we daily read about all the outrageous:  pensions, overtime, padding, lifetime employment, health benefits and salaries that make a normal working stiff wince?  The outrageous gravy train of benefits have already toppled a dozen cities and now threatens to topple scores more cites, counties and states.

4) Who is Getting Screwed? The Students, Parents, and the hapless Taxpayers.

Obama opposes the workings of a democratically elected Wisconsin governor and legislature.  The people voted in fair and open elections, this is what Obama doesn’t like.  He apparently likes rigged elections like those in Iran, where he supported the government- over the democracy movement during the Green Revolution there. 

Maybe, Wisconsin should borrow a page from Iran and develop its own nuclear bomb, that’ll quickly quiet up Obama, the nation’s first and hopefully last Community-Organizer-in-Chief.
Obama’s Alinsky-ite rantings are all to the detriment of students who have no classes, parents who must lose work to care for their stay at home students and for the hapless taxpayers of Wisconsin who are underwriting the demonstrations. 

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Socialist, Nazi, Progressive - Pick Your Left-Wing Poison

Socialism - the abolishment of private property - sometimes advances at the point of a gun. At other times, it advances by co-opting the language of freedom.

In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Obama paid homage to the free market and families while driving home his central point that government knows best.
He began and ended with stories of individuals doing great things. He even said families are important and called for a five-year freeze on domestic spending. In between, he promoted more spending under the guise of “investment,” boasted of government takeovers of health care and student loans, blamed George W. Bush for the economic mess (“a legacy of deficit spending that began almost a decade ago”), took nasty shots at the oil and health insurance industries, and engaged in class warfare:
“Before we take money away from our schools or scholarships away from our students, we should ask millionaires to give up their tax break. It’s not a matter of punishing their success. It’s about promoting America’s success.”

Mr. Obama also said he would begin to consider protecting the border, something he is under oath to do now but is not doing. There was a sprinkling of pseudo-Reaganesque rhetoric, such as: “America’s moral example must always shine for all who yearn for freedom and justice and dignity.”

But Reagan had a reliable moral compass. Mr. Obama is making it up as he goes along, slappinga moral sticker on anything that advances his left-wing agenda, however immoral it may be. This would include the lame-duck Congress‘ imposition of lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender military law, which will homosexualize the armed forces and require “training” of hundreds of thousands of servicemen that will violate their faiths and consciences.

Tough cheese, Mr. Obama says. “It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation.” This is socialist talk for “Resistance is futile. America’s plunge into depravity and moral confusion cannot be reversed. We won’t let it.” As with his economic policies, this will take plenty of coercion, which is the progressive coin of the realm.

A free society with free people and free markets runs on incentives. Socialism always depends on coercion. That’s because it is anti-God to the core and sheds the restraints of religious teaching. Socialism seizes and perverts the biblical notion of charity, turning it into an excuse to empower the state. Because it can advance only at the expense of existing institutions and because it so violates human nature and natural human relations rooted in the family, socialism is at war with normalcy itself. Hence the Obama administration’s warm embrace of abortion, homosexuality and confiscatory taxation, all enemies of the family.

Men do not naturally place the needs of strangers ahead of the needs of their own families. In fact, the Bible warns that it’s a sin not to provide for one’s own. Charity happens after that primary duty, and it is best realized on a personal level, where the giver’s sacrifice is voluntary and the giver is aware of the impact of his charity.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species.” Ironically, although it would appear to militate against natural equality among men, Darwin‘s theory of evolution hastened the rise of socialism because it undermined man’s belief in the Bible as God’s inspired word. Darwin‘s reliance on “natural selection” helped usher in materialism, the belief that only the physical elements as perceived by man’s five senses are real - or matter. This fit the new doctrine of Marxism, in which man’s soul was subordinated to strictly material, economic concerns. It also fits today’s “progressive” agenda.
Marx himself told his colleague Friedrich Engels, “Darwin‘s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”

Both the Nazi-fascist version of socialism and the Communist Party version emphasized the primacy of the state over the individual, the family and the church; ultimate control of property; the crushing of dissent; and control of the press. They were two sides of the same coin, even though they bitterly hated each other, with national socialism vying with international socialism (communism) for domination.

A common myth perpetuated in academia and the media is that a straight-line axis would put the Nazis on the far right and the communists on the far left, with America somewhere in between. But the communists and Nazis are both, in fact, on the far left of the axis. On the far right would be anarchists, who believe in no government. America, with its limited government and guarantees of individual liberty, would be somewhere in between.

Socialism, while masquerading as a sort of compassionate megacharity, is really a confiscatory system that ultimately requires force. Peter is robbed to pay Paul. This ensures the support of a growing number of Pauls, who develop an entitlement attitude and dependence mentality. It also ensures that the Peters are disconnected from the supposed charity done in their name with their taxed income. This breeds indifference to genuine suffering because it is assumed that the government will take care of everyone’s needs.

In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama talked a good game about America’s free-market economy, but he couldn’t resist giving government the lion’s share of credit:
“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.”

It got a laugh, but it’s a reminder that for Mr. Obama and other progressives (i.e., socialists) government spending - not freedom - is the engine of progress.

Robert Knight is senior writer for Coral Ridge Ministries, a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and co-author of “Ten Truths About Socialism” (Coralridge.org, 2010).

As printed in The Washington Post