Today, in 1916, Irish Nationalists surrendered to British forces, ending the Easter Rebellion. Also today, American media surrendered to British forces and will devote hours of coverage to some probably nice but unextraordinary twenty-somethings.

The latest development in University of Missouri-St. Louis union/labor course fall-out via Labor Notes. Earlier Big Government reports here, here and here.

The attorney for the Missouri AFL-CIO, Ron Gladney, called Giljum’s international union and asked officials there to pressure him to resign from his local and international positions, which they did.

Giljum resigned, despite the fact that he had announced back in January he would be retiring May 1—just days away.

According to Giljum, Gladney argued that the incident might cause Missouri Republicans to take up a right-to-work bill, which they have till [sic] now avoided.

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I recently had the opportunity to ask Michigan’s 1st District Freshman Rep. Dan Benishek a few questions about the state of affairs in Congress in the wake of the battle between Speaker Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and President Obama over what to do with the budget for the remainder of the fiscal year. What follows are his responses, and a brief wrap at the close.

[Lead in to Rep. Benishek]
The debate over the budget for the remainder of this year was very contentious. There’s been a tremendous amount of pressure; from the media, to the President and the Democrats (including a great deal of rancor within the Republican caucus itself), the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1473) to fund the Government through September 30 had the attention of the entire country.

Many people have been very critical of Speaker Boehner and the process that got this deal done as well as what it actually contains. A great deal of attention has been paid to this fight by Tea Party folks and many others. A lot of Americans, both left AND right, believe they were “played” by Leadership on both sides of the aisle – sold a bill of goods filled with what we once called “fuzzy math” – and they are not happy. But the vote is done now, the bill has passed, and we’re moving ahead.

Q: In 2010 Americans sent a lot of new faces to Washington to change the direction of the country. Right now, people are feeling they’ve been sold out. Were they?

Congressman Benishek: People should not feel sold out. They can be frustrated. I am frustrated that the cuts were not bigger, but we have to remember Democrats still control the Senate and White House. I believe the Speaker did the best he could with the resources he had. I was not directly involved in negotiating with President Obama and Senator Reid, but I can tell you that as long as I am given the opportunity to vote for significant reductions in spending, I will be a “Yea” vote every time.

Q: What happened, how are you going to handle negotiations differently going forward, and what do we all need to be paying closer attention to?

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Big Government was forwarded the following statement in an email:

I am Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. While my university prepares its response, I feel compelled to answer the attacks by Andrew Breitbart on my character. I am speaking as an individual and certainly not for UMKC. I am speaking out of my strong lifelong commitment to educating working people to better understand the world they live in. Labor education is a vital part of anyone’s education. All Americans, especially our youth, need to understand the contributions working people have made and make in building our communities and nation. Labor education gives them the skills and vision to make a better world.

My students and I are outraged at Mr. Breitbart’s invasion of our classroom and his attempts to intimidate us and my colleagues at the university. Mr. Breitbart’s chop shop manufactured videos from 30 hours of classroom recordings that were posted for the course, “Labor, Politics, and Society,” on the university’s Blackboard system. Presumably these were delivered to him by a student, in possible violation of the University Standards of Conduct and the Federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. These videos were recorded for the use of students enrolled in this course, and for them only. Breitbart disassembled the material, and reassembled it; arranging them to give the appearance that instructors of the class advocate violence. This is in fact the opposite of the position both instructors took in class. Any examination of labor’s past would be incomplete without discussion of violence, (which for the most part was directed at workers) and analysis of its roots. At no time did my co-instructor, Don Giljum, nor I advocate violence.

There’s no doubt that Breitbart’s attacks are politically motivated, part of a broad agenda to weaken unions and the public sector as well as public education. His fabrications have been exposed numerous times in the mainstream media. Yet he and his echo chamber at Fox News continue to cause great harm to educators and other public servants.

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In the days before ObamaCare, there was a clear delineation between the American medical industry and the government.  The industry would invest – often with the assistance of government policy initiatives — in finding cures and the government would ensure the new drugs were safe.  It was a simple equation that worked and helped make American medicine the envy of the world.

Since the election of President Obama and the enactment of his government takeover of our health care system, the emphasis is no longer on finding cures but limiting cost.  In fact, limiting cost is taking precedent over protecting the safety of patients.

The foundation of this effort was laid in the president’s ill-fated stimulus plan.  A provision in the bill set aside over $1 billion for “comparative effectiveness” research – certainly a “shovel ready project” if we every saw one – but that is a debate for a different day.  Betsy McCaughey of the Hudson Institute warned that the provisions “treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry.” Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., (R-LA) a heart surgeon, warned that it would lead to “denying seniors and the disabled lifesaving care.”  Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) unsuccessfully proposed amendments to bar the federal government from using the research to eliminate treatments for the elderly or deny care based on age.  How right they were.

The National Institute of Health will release their first high profile multi-million study next week to determine whether the drug Avastin (the same drug the Food and Drug Administration is trying to deny to breast cancer patients) can be injected into the eye to combat wet age related macular degeneration instead of the FDA approved drug Lucentis.  Avastin was never approved for this purpose but the cost of Avastin is cheaper than the cost of Lucentis.

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Having settled the controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate, let us now turn to an even more important issue: his birth horoscope. Knowing the exact date, time and latitude of his birth allows us to chart the positions of the stars and planets at that exact moment, the better to understand his destiny according to the ancient methods (which were sophisticated nonsense long before today’s pop astrology was crude nonsense).

Birth Horoscope for President Barack H. Obama, constructed at alabe.com

One of the pleasures of my undergraduate education was a freshman seminar on the history of astrology. Like other occult sciences, such as alchemy, astrology developed tools and knowledge that were the foundation of today’s empirical sciences, even if its ideas were ultimately discredited. In politics, astrologers were the pundits of their time–though their methods were quite different from what we find on horoscope pages today.

According to today’s pop astrology, for example, President Obama is a Leo because he was born on August 4. The ancients, however, would have considered him an Aquarius, because the point on the horizon at the moment of Obama’s birth–the ascendant–is in the 18th degree of Aquarius (each sign being divided into 30 degrees). Our first sixties-born president really was a child of the Age of Aquarius–astrologically, anyway.

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We continue to hear the rhetoric from teachers unions and others in the education establishment that we need to “invest” more in America’s public schools.

Want smarter, better-prepared kids, the teacher unions ask? Give us more money! (And get the “rich” to pay for it.)

That’s been the nation’s approach to public education for, oh, the last 50 years.

But after decades of increased education spending, it’s time to ask the obvious question: What kind of return are American taxpayers getting for all this “investment”?

The answer: not much.

According to a  new survey by Rasmussen Reports, a whopping 72% of taxpayers say they “are not getting a good return on what they spend on public education, and just one-in-three voters think spending more will make a difference.”

Americans are correctly discerning that simply spending more money will not improve educational outcomes.

Sure, throwing more dollars at education helps shore up the teacher unions’ Cadillac health insurance and pension plans. The money also helps cover automatic step raises for teachers. The problem is, none of those things help children read better or compute a calculus equation. Not one iota.

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Scranton, PA provides another example that Big Government Unions are more concerned about union power and control than citizens and crime in the street.

This attempt to intimidate a police chief by union bosses is shameless and the city council apparently unanimously agrees:

City Council unanimously passed a motion in support of Police Chief Dan Duffy on Tuesday, asking the police union to withdraw their unfair labor complaint against the city that involves the chief.

Filed on April 14, the grievance takes issue with Duffy’s off-duty arrest of a man in possession of marijuana on March 20. The chief, who is not part of the collective bargaining unit, should not be allowed to perform bargaining unit work, FOP President Bob Martin explained to council last week, but Duffy would be “legally and morally obligated” to stop a crime if he came upon one in progress.

Martin clarified that the March 20 case was an example of the chief leaving his home to conduct police work, but noted that the chief also “happens to be a part of the collateral damage” in their attempt to convince city administration “to sit down and negotiate” the terms of their contracts.

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Looking to the 2012 elections, top operatives with organized labor say they are going to concentrate their efforts at the state level and will withhold their support for federal candidates. In the 2008 election cycle, unions spent almost $80 million on independent broadcast advertising, mail, and advocacy to either elect or defeat candidates for federal office, according to OpenSecrets.org. Federal records also show that labor union political action committees (PACs) contributed over $66 million to federal candidates in 2008, with 92 percent of this total going to Democrats.

But, this investment did not secure enough votes to pass the “card check” legislation and other policy measures weighted against the business community. So, a change in strategy is in order. Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Firefighters, told FOX News, his organization is eyeing the political terrain at the local level. But there is no reason for states, especially Right to Work states, to play defense.

Instead, they should follow the example set by Danny Martiny, a Republican state senator in Louisiana, who has introduced a bill to safeguard competitive bidding practices in the construction industry. In a pre-emptive move aimed against contracts negotiated between employers and unions before workers are hired, Martiny has introduced Senate Bill 76. This legislation prevents state government officials from mandating Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) on publicly funded construction projects.

PLAs call for construction contractors, including those non-unionized, to require their employees to be represented by a union on government-funded construction projects. In practice, they lock out non-union construction shops from the bidding process, officials with the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), a private industry group, have argued.

Although the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 generally prohibits pre-hire agreements, an exception in the law was created for the construction industry.

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New from Econ Stories (an Emergent Order joint) the music video Paul Krugman refused to pole dance in….

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech discuss the world’s challenges providing food for booming populations in China, India and elsewhere.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Ben: The New Geopolitics of Food
Welcome to the 21st-century food wars
South Korea to Set Up Grain-Trading Company in Chicago in 2011
What is causing food prices to soar and what can be done about it?
Coffee and Markets: The Real Costs of Inflation

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On Tuesday, President Obama urged Congress to raise taxes on energy firms by ditching the ability of oil companies to take advantage of certain tax provisions– a move he no doubt expected to be greeted with enthusiasm by members of his party and the liberal base, but which earned him a slap from Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.).

Via the Tulsa World:

Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Boren said Obama just needs to be quiet.

“Americans are tired of empty rhetoric on both sides and want a real plan,” Boren said. “If the president doesn’t want to stand up and be a leader, then his silence would be appreciated from people who are trying to find solutions.”

Boren described Obama as completely uninformed about the oil and gas industry.

“The industry is not made up of just major companies,” he said. “It is made up of small independent firms like those in Oklahoma that produce a vast majority of our domestic production.”

For every CEO of a major company, Boren said, there are thousands of blue-collar jobs that are affected by the Obama administration’s energy policy.

“It is a policy that is very inadequate and has left so many on the Gulf Coast unemployed.” Boren said.

From Associated Press:

The economy slowed sharply in the first three months of the year as high gas prices cut into consumer spending, bad weather delayed construction projects and the federal government slashed defense spending by the most in six years.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that the economy grew at a 1.8 percent annual rate in the January-March quarter. That was weaker than the 3.1 percent growth rate for the October-December quarter. And it was the worst showing since last spring when the European debt crisis slowed growth to a 1.7 percent pace.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other economists say the slowdown last quarter is a temporary setback. They generally agree that gas prices will stabilize and the economy will grow at a 3 percent pace in each of the next three quarters.

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Under my plan energy prices would necessarily skyrocket!

The Left has stealthily worked for decades to forever change this country, with the Agitator-in-Chief’s policies threatening to push us all off the economic cliff before 2012. Yet the Left has an almost hysterical fear of the Tea Party, because it represents the one great unknown that the best laid plans of the Left– even with billions of Soros money – cannot foretell: the resourcefulness and spirit of Americans.

And that great, innovative American spirit has done it again. Without billions, millions, thousands, hundreds or even tens of dollars; without strategy sessions, focus groups, coordination with media “Journolists” or anything else, patriotic Americans have launched another devastating offensive in what has come to be called the “Sticky Note Campaign.”

Sticky notes and flyers are being attached to gas pumps, at grocery stores and retail outlets all over the country, reminding people who we can thank for all this “change.”

There is a Facebook site and a few other postings. On the strength of these things alone, this idea has gone viral. The flyer above first appeared at Disrupt the Narrative where you can download and print the PDF. A clever modification appeared here.

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Can you believe it?  President Obama released the long form birth certificate this morning, and it isn’t over. There still people who don’t believe the released birth certificate is real.  Apparently if you have Adobe Acrobat and look at the PDF of the long form certificate and right click, with your left foot off the ground, while chewing on a Ritz Cracker and whistling the theme song from the old Barney Miller TV show, the birth certificate will reveal that the real Paul McCartney was killed in a car accent in 1968 and for the past 43 years we have been rocking to Wayne Newton’s unknown brother Fig.

Of course, Donald Trump took all the credit, “I am really honored and I am really proud, that I was able to do something that nobody else could do,” Of course he forgot to mention the fact that two days before he told Anderson Cooper that a believable source who he could not name told him that the birth certificate was missing. I guess it got “un-missing” Mr. Trump.

And like the person who wins the lottery but complains that his take was only a few hundred million Trump isn’t done. In his next breath, Trump declared that Obama needs to release his Occidental College school records, to dispel rumors that he was a bad student who did not deserve a transfer to Columbia University,or his acceptance to  Harvard Law School.

“How do you get into Harvard if you are not a good student?” Trump said. “I don’t know why he doesn’t release his records.”

Oh Puleeze.  Who Gives a flying Frisbee!

This nonsense is a losing issue that will do nothing but alienate the moderate voters who are needed to beat Obama in the 2012 election.  That is the objective–Nobama!

But I want everyone to know that I can compromise, I am willing to join the side of the tin-foil hat crowd, but only after we are done bashing the president on the following real issues (in no particular order) which have a much more urgent priority:

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While the American online poker community is still reeling from the federal government’s recent crackdown on online gambling websites, it’s worth considering the significance of the date of the seizure and indictment: April 15.

The indictment was handed down by a grand jury and sealed on March 10, 2011, but the Department of Justice (DOJ) waited more than a month before taking action against the online poker companies and the banks involved. While the concurrence with Tax Day was likely a coincidence, it nevertheless reveals the government’s true priorities at the heart of its prosecution of online gambling: money and control.

Keeping foreign operators out of the U.S. market will enable the government to keep more American money in the U.S. subject to tax, as well as prosecute any remaining operators based within the United States.

In December, news broke that the District of Columbia was considering legalizing online gambling. The law was enacted on April 13, 2011, two days prior to the unsealing of the indictment.

D.C’s legalization of online gaming came on the heels of several deals struck between land-based American casino operators and established foreign online poker rooms to work together should online gaming become legal in the United States. For example, U.S. casino operator Wynn and Isle of Man-based PokerStars (now one of the companies under indictment) announced a partnership from which Wynn has since pulled out.

Ironically, the indictment hasn’t hurt online gambling sites, which saw their share prices rise.

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Today, in 1758, James Monroe, 5th President of the United States, was born.

Andrew Breitbart was in Washington last week to promote his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!” He visited The Heritage Foundation to talk about the Democrat-Media Complex, his conversion to conservatism, how the Clarence Thomas hearings changed his life, and his future plans. Here’s the full video of his speech (approximately 30 minutes).

Fed head Ben Bernanke, at his first-ever news conference on Wednesday, slammed the door shut on any new QE3 pump-priming. The $600 billion QE2 program to purchase bonds will end on target at the end of June, and that will be that. Mr. Bernanke also suggested that the Fed’s “extended period” for the near-zero federal funds target rate could end in a couple of meetings. Perhaps these announcements suggest a bit-less-easy monetary policy. Perhaps.

But Mr. Bernanke had no defense of the sinking dollar, or the inflation it brings, or the drop in middle-class living standards it causes. So it’s little surprise that gold prices surged $24 to $1,526 during the Fed chairman’s press conference. Silver jumped sharply as well. The markets clearly don’t see any King Dollar shift by the Fed.

Mr. Bernanke just doesn’t get that inflation-sensitive market-price indicators — like rising gold, oil, and commodity indexes, and the falling dollar exchange rate — are trying to signal higher future inflation. Instead of listening to markets, he is determined to fight them. This is a losing battle. Instead of a market-price rule (anchored by gold) we have some sort of Bernanke fine-tuning rule. It’s not working.

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