Flap’s Links for February 24th from 14:06 to 14:17
These are my links for February 24th from 14:06 to 14:17:
- Follow the Money – Who Benefits from the Public Employee Unions? – Everyone has priorities. During the past week, Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi has launched on the Libyan people.
But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican governor Scott Walker and the state’s public-employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”
Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the biggest public-employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.
“Follow the money,” Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public-employee unions — who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public-employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic party.
So, just as the president complained in his 2010 State of the Union address about a Supreme Court decision that he feared would increase the flow of money to Republicans, he also found time to complain about a proposed state law that could reduce the flow of money to Democrats.
And, according to the Washington Post, he had time enough to get the Democratic National Committee to organize protests against the proposed Wisconsin law — protests that showed contempt for the law, with teachers abandoning classrooms, doctors writing phony medical excuses, Democratic legislators fleeing the state and holing up in a motel. The lawmakers played hooky without losing any salary, which is protected by the state constitution.
It’s true that Walker’s proposals would strike hard at the power of the public-employee unions. They would no longer have the right to bargain for fringe benefits, which are threatening to bankrupt the state government, and they would no longer be able to count on government withholding dues money and passing it along to them.
But what are the contributions that public-employee unions make to our states and our citizens? Their incentives are to increase the cost of government and reduce toward zero the accountability of public employees — both contrary to the interests of taxpaying citizens.
++++++
Read it all
- Obama’s Gay-Marriage Striptease – The Obama administration’s announcement today that it regards the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional and will not defend it in court is the latest act in a striptease. President Obama favors same-sex marriage — favors its judicial imposition — and is casting off the disguises that have hidden that position one by one.
The portion of the Defense of Marriage Act on which the administration just opined defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman for the purposes of federal law. So if a state court declares that in Massachusetts men can marry each other, its edict does not require the federal government to provide spousal benefits under Social Security to such couples. Obama, while claiming to oppose same-sex marriage, has also favored repeal of this act.
++++++
Read it all
- President 2012: Mike Huckabee defends Obama on Jeremiah Wright – In an interview with Christianity Today, Mike Huckabee denounces the line of attack that Republicans opened up against Obama in 2008 concerning his controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright. Huckabee, on Obama:
He's been very expressive in his statements, even at the Saddleback Forum when he ran in 2008. He spelled out very clearly what his view was, and frankly, it's inappropriate , wrong-headed, and not helpful to the overall discussion when people try to say he doesn't have a birth certificate or he's a Muslim. To me that demeans the entire real discussion—what is he proposing and whether it's good for the country—that ought to be the centerpiece for our entire conversation, not what did he hear when he sat in church. If people went back and heard every sermon I heard when I was a little kid and some of the more fundamentalist pastors were yelling from the pulpit at me, if they took every one of those sermons and lifted out of them certain phrases and things, it could be scandalous, but only out of the context of the bigger picture. That's why I thought that a lot of the focus on Jeremiah Wright was misplaced.
++++++
Still think Huckabee is running for President in 2012?
Mike will have a hard time winning the GOP nomination and he will not readily give up his fat paycheck at Fox News.
- Watchdog calls for criminal probe of Governor Walker over prank Koch call – A Washington-based campaign finance watchdog group is calling on Wisconsin prosecutors to launch an investigation of Governor Scott Walker, alleging potentially illegal fundraising activity in an exchange with the prankster who posed as billionaire David Koch, the group says.
The Public Campaign Action Fund provided me with a letter it has sent to the Dane County District Attorney, who has jurisdiction over state government matters, asking him to probe whether Walker engaged in an effort to solicit "illegal coordinated political spending," as well as whether he illegally did so from state property, i.e., his office.
+++++++
Greg Sargent is a lackey for the Far Left and what else do you expect from the Fleebag LEFT.
This is as stupid as it is moronic.