From The Chicago Tribune:

Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.

The legislation enabled union officials to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union employees after quickly obtaining teaching certificates and working in a classroom. They just had to do it before the bill was signed into law.

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Editor’s Note: Paul R. Hollrah is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a contributing editor for Family Security Matters and a number of online publications, including mine, BobMcCarty.com.  Today, I published a piece by Paul that deserves widespread attention.  For that reason, I share it below.

In early February 1997, I received a telephone call from a longtime friend in Washington. He was calling to say that we were being recruited for a very important assignment, an assignment related to national security.

He explained that, in 1996, the Clinton administration agreed to give the People’s Republic of China a complete set of magnetic tapes from the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office computers, containing every iota of American technology registered with the patent office in the previous 160 years. With the information from those tapes on their computers, the Chinese would know exactly how to make everything we make. But more importantly, by tracking the long-term development of every conceivable kind of technology and extrapolating the path of development into the future, the Chinese could “leap-frog” our own technological development.

No American president could possibly think it was a good idea to do such a thing – unless, of course, he owed a debt of gratitude to the Chinese and he was more concerned about that than he was about the future prosperity of the American people. The American people would never have known how many factories were being built in remote provinces of China, employing workers who were happy to work for two or three dollars a day. When the proposed technology transfer was inadvertently reported in a Commerce Department newsletter, the offer was withdrawn.

But what was potentially more damaging to the United States was contained in a Memorandum of Understanding with the Japanese government, signed by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown… an agreement to introduce legislation in the U.S, Congress that would destroy the U.S. patent system, as we know it. The vehicles for that treachery, already introduced in Congress, were H.400 and S.507, the House and Senate versions of the Omnibus Patent Reform Act of 1997.

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With Obamacare likely to remain front and center in the political debate going into 2012, the GOP could find itself in a real bind attacking it if a former Pfizer lobbyist who helped push Obamacare, Maria Cino, ends up heading up the RNC after the January elections.

Unfortunately, the establishment-backed candidate to presumably replace current RNC Chair Michael Steele, Maria Cino, opted out of a recent grassroots-focused political event for the candidates. The FreedomWorks and conservative caucus sponsored event was reported on at Big Government on November 2nd. Chris Stirewalt pointed out her absence as well, via FoxNews.

Worse, Stirewalt’s item is primarily focused on how establishment money is driving the race behind the scenes and Cino’s Mary Matalin-hosted fund raiser tonight is only one of Cino’s links to it. Her lobbying for Obamacare on behalf of Pfizer and a $1,000 donation to Mike Castle during Delaware’s contentious GOP primary may prove to be deal breakers for members of the GOP grassroots hoping that the GOP might turn the page on the same old, same old way of doing business in Washington that brought us Obamacare and has left America with staggering debt.

Maria Cino, former RNC deputy chairwoman, Bush administration official and executive director of the GOP’s House campaign arm, didn’t show for the debate. But she was able to tout the support of former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who will host a fundraiser for Cino’s bid at the home of Mary Matalin next week.

But why bother raising big bucks for an election where there are only 168 voters?

“This is a decision that rests with the party chairmen and national committeemen, and they’re not going to be swayed by any campaign,” said one influential Cino backer. “It’s not about the spending, it’s about the fundraising. This is a way to show what Maria brings to the table: fundraising ability and organizational skills. Those happen to be the things that the committee is most in need of right now.”

In fact, Cino was recently noted as one of the old GOP’s resurgent up and comers when it comes to corporate money driving political decisions in Washington.

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Via an op-ed in the New York Times, Congressional Quarterly staff writer, Brian Friel, offers the incoming GOP-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee some suggestions as to what they perhaps should and should not consider investigating next year.

What’s unclear is how Friel determined that two registered lobbyists who lobby the Oversight committee and an unpaid White House adviser should, without full disclosure, be portrayed as 3 of “14 good-government watchdogs — veterans of the oversight process, former public officials, and academics” for purposes of his presumably objective op-ed.

Brian Friel is a staff writer at Congressional Quarterly. The oversight experts consulted were: Joel Aberbach, Steven Aftergood, Ryan Alexander, Danielle Brian, Dan Donovan, Linda L. Fowler, Philip G. Joyce, Donald F. Kettl, David Marin, Conrad Martin, Patricia G. Mcginnis, David Osborne, Andrew Rudalevige, Gerry Sikorski.

David Marin and Gerry Sikorski, are registered lobbyists who actually lobby the Oversight Committee on behalf of their clients. Marin works at the lobbying firm the Podesta Group, which lobbies the Oversight Committee on behalf of General Motors. Sikorski works for the lobbying firm Holland & Knight, which has also lobbied the Oversight Committee. Their clients include the American Arbitration Association and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennessee and Minnesota.

Interestingly enough, neither the bailout of the automotive industry, nor the implementation of ObamaCare made the list of oversight priorities assembled by these “14 good-government watchdogs.” Given that lobbyists are already seen as a big enough problem in Washington, it’s unclear to me as to why they should now perhaps seem to be lobbying from the editorial pages of the New York Times, especially while being portrayed as good government watchdogs, not the lobbyists they appear to be.

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It was kind of hard to stop laughing when I read that Joe Biden is leading a Task Force to study what’s on the mind of middle class Americans. Give me a break.

It would be funny if it were not so sad that those in Washington need a special commission to figure out what America thinks. How can we be represented in the first place if the people we hired to carry our hopes and fears are so clueless?

Here’s my suggestion Mr. Biden—take a trip to any town or city and sit down for an early breakfast in a coffee shop. Stop talking long enough to listen. Try a barber or beauty shop for the same lesson. Have a beer in a tavern. The key here, Mr. Biden—and all you folks from Washington, D.C. who have become so frightened that people are expressing their independent will at the polls—is to stop pontificating long enough to actually hear what we are saying.

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Successfully demonizing Washington insiders on the campaign trail, President Obama needed to find a way to meet with lobbyists without appearing hypocritical. The administration’s advice to lobbyists? De-register.

For an administration that promised to renounce interest groups, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) certainly has the president’s ear and is sure to be a major player in the December jobs summit. In 2008, SEIU donated nearly $28 million to the Obama campaign setting the stage for SEIU President Andy Stern to become the White House’s most frequent visitor in 2009, according to White House visitor logs. Anna Burger, Treasure of the SEIU and Chairwoman of their Change to Win campaign was even appointed to Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board earlier this year and will represent SEIU at the December jobs summit held by the White House.

To the objective observer, it is clear that Andy Stern and Anna Burger are meeting with members of the White House to advance goals of the SEIU, they are lobbying. However, in 2008 both Stern and Burger de-registered as lobbyists providing the Obama administration cover to meet with them while avoiding cries of duplicity. Yet, neither Stern nor Burger changed positions or job responsibilities, they just stopped registering as lobbyists.

So who has to register?

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