Bookworm Room

Tweet A deeply disappointed New York Times reports that the Democrats are not able to rely upon the union stalwarts in the upcoming election: Labor leaders, alarmed at a possible Republican takeover of one or both Houses of Congress, promise to devote a record amount of money and manpower to helping Democrats stave off disaster. [...]

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Tweet I am crazy abut this politician: We have some spectacular young guns in the conservative party.  The problem is timing.  I don’t know if any will be ready by 2012, and it may be too late by 2016.

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Tweet I’m generally not a union fan, because I believe that unions have become inherently corrupt organizations that stifle business growth in America, something that harms the very people they’re supposed to represent.  At the government level, government unions have completely gained the upper hand, so much so that the government merely signs the checks, [...]

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Tweet I’m all for reducing pollution, but we don’t need a trumped-up excuse like “climate change” in order to achieve a cleaner environment. Minimizing pollution is a legitimate goal which stands on its own merits; concocting hysterical disaster scenarios (such as those shown in An Inconvenient Truth) only serves to undermine any credibility the environmental [...]

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Tweet Actually, there are only three reasons here why public sector employment is killing the economy.  I’m sure that, all of us working together, could think of many more reasons:

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Tweet Here’s a list of the biggest spenders in California politics for the past decade: These 15 groups spent more than a combined $1 billion over the past 10 years to influence public policy: – California Teachers Association: $211.8 million – California State Council of Service Employees: $107.4 million – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of [...]

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Tweet There are some things that seem immutable, right until a collapse that, in 20/20 hindsight, seemed inevitable.  Just think of the Iranian Revolution, the Fall of the Berlin wall and . . . the SEIU? For some time, the Service Employees International Union has appeared to be a permanent fixture on the political and [...]

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Tweet Here’s a beautiful matched set: The first part of the set is Daniel Henninger’s truly brilliant article about the way in which President Kennedy’s 1962 executive order allowing federal workers to unionize “transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.”  Henninger thinks this dependency broke down yesterday in Massachusetts. The second part of the [...]

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Tweet This is a portmanteau post, filled with interesting things I read today, some of which come in neatly matched sets. Opening today’s San Francisco Moronicle, the first thing I saw was that an illegal teen’s arrest is causing a stir in San Francisco’s halls of power.  You see, San Francisco is a sanctuary city, [...]

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Tweet One of my main bases for hostility to teacher’s unions is that increasingly have nothing to do with their original goal, which was ensuring a living wage and decent working conditions for teachers.  (Not that they were always that effective at serving their original union mandate.  My father was a teacher and he did [...]

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Tweet I frequently read that the White House is dancing the to the various unions’ tunes because, as the saying goes, you “dance with them what brung you.”  In other words, it was union money that helped (in a large way) to pay for Obama’s victory, and now the White House is returning the favor.  [...]

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Tweet This morning Mr. Bookworm offered me something:  “Hey!  You want to blog about something Obama’s doing that I don’t like?” I was curious.  “What?” “This Employee Free Choice Act.  What’s up with that?” “That’s been around for a while,” I said.  “It’s one of the platforms on which Obama ran.” He asked, “What do [...]

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Tweet I’m ambivalent about unions.  When they first arose as a real market force at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, I believe they were a necessary counterbalance to industries that (a) had unlimited power in the employment market place and (b) that abused that power something awful. I started [...]

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Tweet I think unions were an absolute necessity in the early days of the industrial revolution.  Workers were so spectacularly abused in those days, in part because they had limited mobility when it came to looking for greener employment pastures, that only by united action were they able to change the employer/employee dynamic away from [...]

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Tweet The internet is an amazing thing.  Within one day, that hilarious National Guard photo rebuking Kerry was everywhere.  It deservedly got all that attention, but how about a little attention for some other things too?  American Thinker points to a story from Investor’s Business Daily explaining that Nancy Pelosi, who may be the next [...]

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Tweet VULGARITY ALERT. DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ SOMETHING SLIGHTLY VULGAR. My sister sent me this joke in an email. As she said, “it pretty much says it all.” A dedicated Teamsters’ union worker was attending a convention in Las Vegas and decided to check out the local brothels. [...]

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