Pinboard Links

Flap’s Links and Comments for February 28th from 15:42 to 16:54

These are my links for February 28th from 15:42 to 16:54:

  • Obama flies workout trainer out to D.C. often, increases carbon footprint – Washington may be the nation’s capital — and one of America’s fittest cities — but its trainers apparently don’t cut it for President Barack Obama, who frequently flies his personal fitness instructor from Chicago to D.C., reports the New York Times.

    Cited as the mastermind behind first lady Michelle Obama’s “famously toned arms,” trainer Cornell McClellan has managed the Obamas’ workout routines for more than a decade. The owner of Naturally Fit, a Chicago-based personal training and wellness center, McClellan spends part of his week in D.C. at the president’s request.

    “It was an easy sell for me, because I thought of it as kind of a duty, to serve the president,” McClellan said.

    McClellan usually works with the Obamas in early morning sessions at the White House gym. The first lady and president both attempt to work out for at least an hour each day, and Mr. McClellan says he typically sees them two to four times a week, depending on their other duties.

    ++++++

    Obama may be just a little hypocritical here?

    You betcha.

  • Is the U.S. Immigration Debate Going in the Right Direction? – New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican who became the state’s first Latina governor after the November elections, rescinded an executive order by former Gov. Bill Richardson that prohibited law enforcement officials from asking people about their immigration status for the sole purpose of determining if the individual had violated immigration laws. Opponents have likened the bill to Arizona’s SB1070 and claim the order will lead to racial profiling. Will other states follow suit and enact similar legislation? Is comprehensive immigration reform likely to be addressed this year and, if so, what would that consist of?

    +++++++

    Read it all

    There will be NO comprehensive immigration reform unless Obama is re-elected and the Democrats win 60 plus members of the U.S. Senate.

    This means there will be none in the foreseeable future.

  • Mark Steyn: STATES OF THE UNIONS – You don’t have to go to Athens to find “public servants” happy to take it out on the public. In Madison, politicized doctors provide fake sick notes for politicized teachers to skip class. In New York’s Christmas snowstorm, Sanitation Department plough drivers are unable to clear the streets, with fatal consequences for some residents. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Dept head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged. Three hundred Sanitation Department workers have salaries of over $100,000 per year. In retirement, you get a pension of 66 grand per annum plus excellent health benefits, all inflation proofed.

    That’s what “collective bargaining” is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

    Big Unions fund Big Government. The union slices off two per cent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic Party, which uses it to grow government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of two-per-cent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic Party, which thereby grows government… Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

    In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus”, offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.” The Greek and Wisconsin bullies are Keynesians to a man: The mob is demanding the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

    If the new class war is between “public servants” and the rest of us, some countries no longer have enough of “the rest of us” even to put up a fight. That’s why you can’t wait to fight in the last ditch. The longer you wait to stand up against the “public service” unions, the less your chance of winning.

    ++++++++

    Read it all

    There is a class war between public servants and the rest of the taxpaying public.

    Mark Steyn illuminates the conflict in this piece.

  • Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels Is Tough On Budgets : NPR’s Interview – n 2005 on his first day in office, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed an order ending collective bargaining with public employee unions. He said it freed him to turn over some state jobs to private contractors.

    Daniels was able to put his state’s finances in order just as other states headed for trouble. Now, that’s a big part of his reputation, and some Republicans are promoting him as a possible presidential candidate.

    Yet as he looks back on that budget-cutting moment with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Daniels says that he also added government jobs in the child welfare system.

    Mitch Daniels is a former budget director to President Bush. He won re-election as governor at the same time Indiana was carried by President Obama. Currently, he’s pushing contentious conservative plans. Just last week, Democrats walked out of the Indiana state Legislature protesting a range of Daniels’ plans, including government vouchers for private schools.

    Read the full transcript of Steve Inskeep’s interview with Gov. Mitch Daniels below.

    +++++++

    Read it all