#Occupy goons riot in Oakland. (NY Post)

Obama’s #Occupy army threatened to disrupt and physically assault conservative speakers at the CPAC convention this week in Washington DC. Andrew Breitbart and Newt Gingrich are two conservatives who they will be targeting at the event.

Lachlan Markay at The Foundry reported:

The “Occupy DC” protest group is planning to disrupt the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference using a range of potentially illegal tactics that could even include violence against participants, Scribe has learned.

The planned disruptions at CPAC come only days after U.S. Park Police raided Occupiers’ tent cities at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., confiscating a number of tents, and prohibiting Occupiers from camping out there any longer.

During a Thursday meeting at McPherson Square, until Saturday the epicenter of the protests, Occupiers brainstormed tactics for shutting down or disrupting the conference, according to a source who was present at the meeting.

The protesters suggested pulling fire alarms in the hotel where the conference will take place, screaming “fire” during conference activities, “glitter-bombing” participants, cutting electrical power, and barricading entrances to the hotel, according to the source, who requested anonymity.

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After spurning Trump debate, Romney takes his endorsement

Nevada, or, as I like to call it, “Snowfall,” may be poorly named after the blizzard of ads we’ve been seeing elsewhere in Florida, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa; but beneath the calmness and lack of exposure is a well-oiled strategic machine that is methodically getting out the vote.

If the latest poll is to be believed, Mitt Romney might just strike political gold in the “Silver State.” Romney is the favorite of 50% of likely GOP caucus-goers, according to the Democratic-leaning polling firm Public Policy Polling. He’s leading his next closest rival, Newt Gingrich, by 25 points. Ron Paul is third at 15 percent, and Rick Santorum is fourth at 8 percent.

Nevada has been particularly hard hit by the economic downturn, with a high number of home foreclosures and an unemployment rate that recently soared to an all-time high of 14.9%. In other words, Nevada’s looking for a turnaround; Nevada Republicans think that the guy who turned around the Olympics next door might be able to help.

For the Mitt supporters out there, Romney is doing especially well in the state that went for Barack Obama in 2008, with 55% of the vote. I quote the PPP poll:

Romney hits the 70% favorability mark in Nevada, something we’ve seen for him in very few states. Just 25% see him unfavorably. That’s partially due to an 89/8 standing with Mormons, but he’s at a still very strong 64/30 with non-Mormons as well. One thing that’s contributing to Romney’s strength in Nevada is a strong advantage on the electability question. 56% think he would be the strongest candidate against Barack Obama this fall with no one else topping 21%.

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Here’s another example that shows just how ‘accepting’ liberals are of people from all walks of life.

High School teacher Al Levie refused to accept an MLK award from Rep. Paul Ryan because, well, Paul Ryan is a conservative no matter how Levie tries to frame it. Levie stated that “Paul Ryan has no business being at an MLK event.” That’s a pretty bigoted action.

Levie’s speech can be found here.

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The U.S. Coast Guard will escort the first ship coming to the EGT grain terminal at the Port of Longview this month, and the Occupy movement and local labor groups say they are planning to greet the vessel with a massive protest.

EGT officials say they have not scheduled a date for the ship’s arrival. The freighter is expected to haul thousands of tons of grain to Asia, but opposition groups are already marshaling their forces to support the lengthy protest by union dock workers at the grain terminal.

“We just want to swell the population of the city to show there are people behind us,” said Jeff Washburn, president of the Cowlitz Wahkiakum Central Labor Council, which passed a resolution calling for a protest this week.

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The most successful Obama campaign meme–repeated ad infinitum by the mainstream media–is the idea that the country is saddled with a “do-nothing Congress.”

The implication–brilliantly conveyed, though completely untrue–is that we have a “do-nothing Republican Congress,” though in fact the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has been extremely active.

It would be more accurate to say that we have a “do-nothing Senate“–by design, since it’s clear that the Demcorats’ leaders in the Senate believe that legislative gridlock works to their political advantage. It’s been nearly 1000 days since the Demcorat-controlled Senate even passed a budget–a violation of the Congressional Budget Act.

With tomorrow’s official unemployment number looming, and with today’s ADP employment report for December 2011 suggesting some improvement could be on the way, it’s worth asking what happened to Obama’s “Jobs Bill”–without which, he warned, “there will be fewer jobs.” Voters wanted Washington “to do something big and something bold,” Obama said–even if it was a stimulus packed with boondoggles and bailouts, much like the “Porkulus” that launched the Tea Party.

Lo and behold–there is a little bit of life in the job market; manufacturing is improving moderately; and consumer confidence, while still shaky, is up significantly from where it was when Obama was demanding his jobs bill.

And no jobs bill was enacted. (more…)

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – Indiana’s Republican House leader on Tuesday promised swift movement on a push to make his state the first in more than a decade to ban labor contracts that require employees to pay union fees.

Speaker Brian Bosma of Indianapolis told the Associated Press he is confident he can push the “right-to-work” bill through his chamber during the 2012 session that begins Wednesday and is spending a lot “personal capital” to do so.

“We assume nothing,” Bosma said. “I don’t assume we have all the Republicans votes, in fact I know I don’t and I don’t presume we don’t have some Democrat votes either.”

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From Carolina Journal:

RALEIGH — Since as early as January 2011, and perhaps before then, Gov. Bev Perdue’s press office has received access to confidential employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics hours if not days before its scheduled release, quite likely in violation of federal law. The governor’s staff used its early access to massage the monthly employment press release that reported jobs data to the public.

Documents and correspondence obtained by Carolina Journal show that the Division of Employment Security, formerly known as the Employment Security Commission, sent a draft of the press release each month to Perdue’s press office. The governor’s spokesmen typically rewrote the text and added a positive spin, even if the data did not support Perdue’s talking points.

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Recent polls indicate Americans are fed up with Big Labor’s schoolyard bully tactics and utilization of taxpayer money to support political candidates and liberal agendas. Additionally, Americans are tired of government deficits driven by public sector pay, overblown benefits, and restrictive work rules. Americans, including union rank and file members, are tired of Big Labor’s attempt to deprive them of basic freedoms. They voiced their displeasure in last November’s election (see Union Members Not Happy with Their Leader’s Political Spending and Union Members Overwhelmingly Oppose Union Boss Political Spending on 2010 Midterm Elections). In states like Indiana, elected officials have heard the people’s mandate and are proposing “Right to Work” legislation (“RTW”) that will provide each and every American the right to personally decide if they wish to be represented by a union, without fearing the threat of reprisal. What could be more American than the freedom of choice?

Politicians and Big Labor bosses in Indiana, Michigan and New Hampshire are already drawing the battle lines for debate and potential passage of Right to Work (“RTW”) laws during their respective 2012 legislative assemblies. Determining which state will be next and become the 23^rd Right to Work state is a matter of speculation.

Unfortunately, we can be certain that the rhetoric, propaganda, misinformation and theatrics from liberal politicians and Big Labor bosses will be divisive. As chronicled in my book The Devil at My Doorstep, I have first-hand experience with Big Labor’s tactics and their use of corporate campaigns.

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The SEIU’s Insidious Tentacles continue to infiltrate government and politics at the expense of its own rank and file without attracting national media attention. Interestingly enough the mainstream media will not peek beneath the covers and investigate reports by employees and employers, such as those detailed in The Devil at My Doorstep, who have been abused by the SEIU’s ruthless tactics and/or the reports of corrupt political connections , government infiltration and pay-to-play ties to the current administration. Several interesting stories have surfaced during the past month, yet not one has received the national attention it deserves through investigative journalism by the national mainstream media.

Among the events:

1. )  On November 10, 2011 a Washington Examiner article reported on SEIU activities in Michigan, a state desperately attempting to pass a RTW bill to stop big labor from usurping employee rights and money, involving the SEIU’s infiltration of state government and how the SEIU Siphons ‘Dues’ from Mich. Medicaid Payments.

2. )  On November 16, Michelle Malkin revealed that  former SEIU President Andy Stern utilized his membership on the board for a California pharmaceutical company to facilitate a half billion dollar drug deal for the company.  See the article: Obama’s Half-Million-Dollar Crony Drug Deal; Related non-shocker: SEIU endorses Obama.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The National Labor Relations Board on Friday dropped its high-profile challenge of Boeing’s decision to open a nonunion aircraft manufacturing plant in South Carolina.

The board acted after the Machinists union approved a four-year contract extension with Boeing this week and agreed to withdraw its charge that the company violated federal labor laws.

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Greece is about to default on its public debt or ruin the European Union, or both. The Greeks are destroying themselves today much as they did during the Peloponnesian War. This looks like the inevitable result of the welfare statism and entitlement mentality that is destroying the entire Western world. We see similar forces of anarchy at work in the “Occupy” movements in American cities.

An important factor in these movements is the fundamentally anarcho-syndicalist tenor of the union movement, which demands an ever greater share of national income. Public-sector unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have been prominent in the “occupy” movement. Wisconsin AFSCME proudly sent pizzas “in solidarity” with the Wall Street occupiers.

Rutgers University labor economist Leo Troy calls public-sector unionism “the new socialism.” The old socialism was based on state ownership of the means of production. The new socialism involves the transfer of an ever greater share of the economy to the public sector. Government at all levels took about 5% of GDP a century ago and 13% on the eve of the Great Depression. The New Deal increased the proportion to one-third by 1960. We are in the forty percent range now, and the full nationalization of health care will put us over half.

Unions have been a primary force in the expansion of state power. Even the reputedly “conservative” American Federation of Labor called for “the abolition of the wage system.” A.F.L. President Samuel Gompers put organized labor’s goal as simply “more” — exactly what Johnny Rocco, the Al Capone-like figure portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in the 1939 film “Key Largo,” explained as his ultimate end. The New Deal’s expansion of state power was based principally on private-sector unionism that began with the “occupy Flint” sit-down strikes of 1936.

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Despite some modest improvements in the jobs picture with the release of Friday’s Labor Department report, I would guard against any irrational overexuberance that problems with employment or the economy are being solved.

A smaller-than-expected 80,000 gain in nonfarm payrolls was bolstered by upward revisions in the prior two months, amounting to 102,000 additional jobs. So over the past three months the establishment survey has averaged 114,000. It’s really nothing to write home about.

A 2 percent economy is simply way too slow to generate the kind of 300,000 per month job gains the country needs. Economic growth at 5 percent would be more like it.

And this should be a warning to members of Congress who are flirting with higher tax rates as part of the supercommittee deficit deliberations. There’s loose talk about raising the top Bush tax rates and adding to that a surcharge on millionaire tax rates. That would be a big negative for future growth.

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Last month, the Chicago Tribune broke the story of a union leader who was re-hired for one day at the City of Chicago and then retired with a $158,000 city pension. Yesterday, the Tribune broke the story of the union leader accruing three pensions off of the same work credit: a city pension, a local union pension and a national union pension.  Combined, his annual pension income exceeds $400,000-  with anticipated lifetime benefit of $9 million.

There is debate as to whether these rotten scams could even be legal in Illinois!  But, we’ve discovered that sweetheart union leader access into our Illinois state pension system is an even larger scam.

On September 29^th, we broke this story nationally on the third largest conservative talk radio program: 34 union leaders who are not government employees are draining nearly $340 thousand per month from the state teachers’ pension system.

Last Sunday, the Illinois Statehouse News was the first Illinois newspaper to investigate.  No other newspaper has covered the statewide angle.

Former employees of the National Education Association (NEA), Illinois Education Association (IEA), Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), and Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB), drawing pensions have collected more than $47 million from the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS), to date.

It’s an on-going $47 million pension scam.  Union leaders who are not government employees are draining millions in teacher retirement pensions.

How did we unearth this pension abuse?

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From the Associated Press:

Congress approved free trade agreements Wednesday with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, ending a four-year drought in the forming of new trade partnerships and giving the White House and Capitol Hill the opportunity to show they can work together to stimulate the economy and put people back to work.

In rapid succession, the House and Senate voted on the three trade pacts, which the administration says could boost exports by $13 billion and support tens of thousands of American jobs. None of the votes were close, despite opposition from labor groups and other critics of free trade agreements who say they result in job losses and ignore labor rights problems in the partner countries.

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From The Chicago Tribune:

At least eight Chicago labor leaders who are eligible for inflated city pensions also stand to receive union pensions covering the same work period, thanks to a charitable interpretation of state law by officials representing two city pension funds, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

By double and even triple dipping on pensions, these union officials stand to reap millions more in retirement while thousands of rank-and-file union members face hard times and city pension funds stagger toward insolvency.

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From the Associated Press:

Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and other grievances were maintaining a presence in Manhattan’s Financial District even after more than 700 of them were arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge in a tense confrontation with police.

The group Occupy Wall Street has been camped out in a plaza in Manhattan’s Financial District for nearly two weeks staging various marches, and had orchestrated an impromptu trek to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. They walked in thick rows on the sidewalk up to the bridge, where some demonstrators spilled onto the roadway after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway, police said.

The march shut down a lane of traffic for several hours on Saturday. The majority of those arrested were given citations for disorderly conduct and were released, police said.

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Now this is the sort of corruption we are used to seeing in Illinois, eh? This week the Chicago Tribune and WGN TV have found up to 23 retired union operatives that are collecting millions in taxpayer dollars because they had pals in government tweak the state’s pensions laws to favor them.

These former government workers that were government union members got pliant politicians to alter the pensions laws to say that their pension remuneration would be calculated not on the lower pay they received when they retired from government, but from the much higher salary they received when they worked as union operatives. These folks worked as union bosses at the same time as working on the clock for government.

The “luck” of former union boss and Dept. of Streets and Sanitation worker Thomas Villanova is a typical example. Villanova last worked full-time for the city in 1989 and made $40,000-a-year. But he was also a union big wig making $198,000 annually upon his retirement in 2008 at age 56. His city pension, it appears, was calculated on the union salary of $198,000 instead of his real salary of $40,000 — itself obviously a no-show job in the first place.

Villanova stands to make millions off the taxpayers.

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Taxpayers across the nation are spending millions of dollars to pay the salaries and benefits of government employees to work exclusively for labor unions, an investigation by the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute has found.

The practice is called “official time” in federal law, or “release” time in local labor agreements reviewed by the Institute. At the federal level, it cost taxpayers more than $129 million in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Similar provisions have become standard in labor agreements between unions and governments at the state and local level. Finding the total cost would require analyzing every government union contract in every state, county, city and school district in the country, a monumental task that those who have studied the issue say has not been done.

But one example exposed by the Goldwater Institute’s investigation shows the City of Phoenix spent about $3.7 million to pay its employees to do union work last fiscal year, which ended in June. Phoenix has agreements with seven unions that represent city employees, allowing them a total of more than 73,000 city-paid hours annually to do union work.

Other cities in the area have similar provisions in their contracts with labor organizations that represent municipal employees.

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From the Chicago Tribune:

All it took to give nearly two dozen labor leaders from Chicago a windfall worth millions was a few tweaks to a handful of sentences in the state’s lengthy pension code.

The changes became law with no public debate among state legislators and, more importantly, no cost analysis.

Twenty years later, 23 retired union officials from Chicago stand to collect about $56 million from two ailing city pension funds thanks to the changes, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation found.

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President Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is on a job-killing rampage. It’s claiming unprecedented powers far beyond what federal law allows. Taken with Obama’s other agencies, these executive actions paint a picture of what has become an imperial presidency.

A federal appeal is certain once NLRB’s shocking attack on Boeing Co. goes through the administrative process. In a free-market society, government bureaucrats cannot dictate to a private company where they can and cannot open factories or create jobs. Boeing—whose general counsel was formerly one of the most brilliant federal judges in America, Michael Luttig—should win this court battle.

NLRB’s power grab is not limited to Boeing. It’s also claiming jurisdiction over St. Xavier University, saying that the school doesn’t qualify for the religious exemption to NLRB’s authority because St. Xavier is not Catholic enough. NLRB cites to a 1979 Supreme Court case as giving it this authority, when that case instead makes clear that this government agency would be running afoul of the First Amendment by presuming to rate the religiosity of bone fide church organizations.

Just recently NLRB came down with three other far-left decisions. One was repealing an earlier NLRB ruling, stripping workers of the right to promptly contest the results of a vote to form a union. Another was ruling that employers everywhere must post signs on forming a union, giving the appearance that unionizing was encouraged both by the government and even the employer.

The third and most damaging ruling was to rule that even where unions do not exist, employees can form micro-unions in part of a company. This would make a mess of labor laws by creating countless possible entities with which business owners and management must constantly negotiate, seriously complicating efforts to have company policies that are stable, predictable, and profitable.

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