The joke was on the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) this week. On Tuesday, a fake press release claimed SEIU had voted to revoke their endorsement of President Obama. The Washington Post reported the fake release quoted SEIU President Mary Kay Henry as saying, “Our members gave $60.7 million dollars to the Obama campaign in 2008 and fought hard for his election because we were promised change. We’re still waiting.”

The Post also reported, “The email was sent by Mark McCullough, spokesman for the SEIU. But if you looked closely at his email address, it was missing a ‘c,’ and emails to that address bounced back.” While the release was meant as a prank, the payoff that unions expect from their political backing to the Democrats and Obama is no laughing matter.

Also on Tuesday, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) voted to endorse the president’s reelection bid. AFSCME vowed to spend $100 million to help his campaign. That was no joke, and neither are the massive budget deficits which states and localities across the country face due to the unsustainable contracts and pension obligations negotiated by AFCME’s affiliates.

Why the extravagant spending using the forced dues of workers? In his book Democracy Denied, Phil Kerpen details how the Obama Administration gives favors to Big Labor while making an end run around congress.

The unions expected that enormous investment to pay dividends, and Obama did not intend to disappoint them. While the public has mostly focused on the high-profile fights raging in Congress, the key implementer of the union agenda is a relatively obscure federal agency called the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Now stacked with SEIU lawyers who are Obama’s ideological fellow travelers, the  board is poised to grant union bosses vast new powers without so much as a vote in Congress.

Kerpen writes how much the President owes to the unions and SEIU.

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Last month, Phil Kerpen wrote an insightful piece here at BigGovernment.com about “The Stimulus Bill’s Hidden Attack on What We Eat, Drink, and Smoke.” In it, he detailed yet another absurd (and angering) use of so-called “stimulus” funds to help lobby for restrictions and higher taxes on the nanny state’s favorite targets: unhealthy foods, sweetened beverages, tobacco, and other disfavored products that your friendly bureaucrat doesn’t think you ought to enjoy. Digging through the Health and Human Services Department’s stimulus website raises some serious questions about the $650 million in taxpayer money being spent on this program, called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).

Several grant descriptions suggest that this funding may be in violation of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, through which the CPPW program is administered. The CDC’s lobbying restriction guideline states in part that, “no part of CDC appropriated funds, shall be used…to support or defeat legislation pending before the Congress or any State or local legislature.” And yet, that’s exactly what several of the grantees plan to use the money for.

For example, Jefferson County, Alabama plans to spend $7 million on a “tobacco use prevention and cessation initiative [that] will promote changes in policies to reduce smoking opportunities and reduce access to tobacco products.” Pretty straightforward, that. They plan to lobby for more smoking bans and restricting access to legal tobacco products.

New York City, for its part, plans to spend $15.5 million “work[ing] to set policies and create environments that reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and overly salted foods.” One New York legislator is already trying to “create an environment” where restaurants are prohibited by law from using SALT in their food. Yes, salt, the substance without which virtually every food on Earth would be inedible.

Perhaps my favorite, our nation’s capital is spending $4.9 million on a program called “LiveWell DC,” which will “explore limiting tobacco access through zoning/license restrictions, restrict point-of-purchase advertising of tobacco products, support the elimination of price discounts, and provide social support through quitline and other cessation services.” Quite the laundry list there.

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For years we’ve repeatedly heard the falsehood that most Americans want government to regulate the Internet.  We’ve also heard that the Left is supposedly miles ahead of the Right when it comes to online organizing and technological expertise.  Well, late last week, both of those myths have been exposed.

The Federal Communications Commission asked the public to submit comments on its plan to implement so-called net neutrality regulations that would allow government bureaucrats to tinker with the Internet.  The vaunted NetRoots expected to carry the day so much that they simply ignored the facts, claimed victory, and showed themselves to be fools.

It is still hard to understand why we need to regulate something that has been the most successful economic, informational and organizational tool of the past two decades.  But no matter.  On Thursday, the FCC’s comment period closed and the verdict is in. Limited government and free market activists crushed big government fans on the Left.

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The announcement by ACORN that it is creating a panel of inquiry consisting of its corrupt friends is a fairy tale. ACORN did the same thing last year after an internal scandal but when the honest people on ACORN’s internal panel began asking uncomfortable questions, it cast them out.

Since it’s a fairy tale, let me tell the story the fairy tale way:

Once upon a time there was a group called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It was run, and continues to be run today, by very bad people who do very bad things while they pretend to make America a better place.

They get very upset when people point out the bad things they do. They always lie about those things and call those people who speak against them nasty names like “racist” so those people will get scared and run away. Often it works.

They carry out voter registration drives strictly with a view to meeting predetermined quotas. They don’t give a farthing’s cuss if their canvassers register Mickey Mouse or the dead to vote; in fact, they encourage it. As long as the big fat checks keep coming in from billionaire leftist George Soros and Herb and Marion Sandler everything is OK in their eyes.

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