“I was, frankly, offended by it,” said Republican strategist Karl Rove. “I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

Already, Democrats have begun co-opting the “It’s Halftime In America” meme, and President Barack Obama’s campaign team has already signaled that “saving” Detroit and the American auto industry will be a central campaign theme in Mr. Obama’s 2012 reelection bid. Indeed, in June 2011, Mr. Obama proudly declared:

Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes American taxpayers for their support during my presidency–and it repaid that money six years ahead of schedule.  And this week, we reached a deal to sell our remaining stake.  That means Chrysler will be 100 percent in private hands.

The Washington Post fact checker, however, disagreed–strongly.

We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.

What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.

At issue was the slippery language Mr. Obama used to calculate Chrysler’s repayment of its taxpayer-funded bailout.  Mr. Obama’s numbers were based off of the $8.5 billion the federal government loaned Chrysler while he was in office and did not include the government’s prior $4 billion loan extended in the last month of President George W. Bush’s presidency, for a total bailout of $12.5 billion paid for by taxpayers.   Therefore, even after the $11.2 billion the Obama Administration says it received from Chrysler, taxpayers are still left holding the bill for $1.3 billion.

Indeed, in a startling statement, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner conceded that, yes, taxpayers would never recoup the $1.3 billion, but that the decision was nonetheless wise:

We did this to save jobs. The biggest impact was in the jobs saved and the wealth preserved. We’ll get everything we can to maximize the gain and minimize the loss. We are going to lose money on the auto industry but our job is to protect the country.

Still, Mr. Geithner hailed the taxpayer boondoggle a tremendous success:

As Treasury exits its investment in Chrysler, it’s clear that President Obama’s decision to stand behind and restructure this company was the right one. Today, America’s automakers are mounting one of the most improbable turnarounds in recent history – creating new jobs and making new investments in communities across our country.

At the time, Mr. Eastwood himself criticized the automobile bailout:

We shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies.   If a CEO can’t figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn’t be the CEO.

As for Mr. Eastwood’s compensation for the ad, Mr. Eastwood claims that “anything they gave me for it went to charity.”  Chrysler has not released figures on the total costs to design, shoot, and air the two-minute spot.  However, 30-second commercials reportedly cost $3.5 million.

Mr. Eastwood also says he is “certainly not affiliated with Mr. Obama.”

However, critics are left to wonder: how could a company who has yet to repay taxpayers the $1.3 billion it loaned them afford such a lavish advertising campaign?  And if, indeed, Chrysler is back on top, then why hasn’t it volunteered to repay Americans the money it still owes them?

After all, as the commercial says, “It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.”

So when can taxpayers expect Chrysler to cut them that $1.3 billion it owes them?  After all, isn’t that the right thing to do?

With a drug cocktail that puts death row inmates to sleep, California’s capital punishment can hardly be said to be cruel — but it is so unusual that death row inmates in the Golden State routinely die of old age or by suicide. When, or more likely if, justice comes, it doesn’t come cheap. By some estimates, it costs $100,000 a year per prisoner to keep California’s 718 inmates alive on death row, thanks in part to the endless, often frivolous appeals brought by inmates and death penalty opponents. If capital punishment is prohibitively expensive, it is because those professionally seeking to abolish it have made it so.

Even death penalty supporters, such as Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye of the California Supreme Court, have given up. “I don’t think it is working,” the newly appointed chief justice told The Times last week. California’s death penalty requires “structural change, and we don’t have the money.” Still, Californians need a “merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs.” But the chief justice ignored why that load continues to mount: death penalty opponents.

Death penalty foes have seized on the cost issue for their latest attempt at killing it off. Led by Natasha Minsker of the ACLU of Northern California, they are gathering signatures to put the so-called SAFE California initiative on the November 2012 ballot. Minsker’s co-written report, “California’s Death Penalty Is Dead,” concedes that it is the appeals process that clogs the courts, noting that “death penalty trials cost up to 20 times more than trials for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole…. Taxpayers are legally required to pay for numerous appeals in death penalty cases, unlike cases involving life without possibility of parole, where the prisoner gets only one taxpayer-funded appeal.”

Read more here.

According to the Digital Texan…

Occupy Austin has been inhabiting City Hall Plaza for two-months and at today’s Austin Public Safety Commission meeting came stunning news: The Austin Police Department has spent $412,000 policing the Occupy Austin protest since it began on October 6 through November 19. That figure is almost certainly higher today. The Commission admitted that the city could be on the hook for over $1 million before too long.

To put the $1 million figure in perspective, you need look no further than the city of Austin’s own budget for 2011-2012 – that’s what the city was hoping to save on police overtime this year. Austin’s fiscal year starts on October 1^st. The city budget made the following assumption…

The Police Department is generating savings by delaying the start of the next cadet academy by six months and reducing its overtime budget by $1.0 million, from $9.3 million to $8.3 million, to be more in-line with actual overtime costs experienced over the last few years. In the past three fiscal years, actual overtime expenditures have averaged $7.5 million.

What are Austinites getting for their money? In a pattern that’s been followed all over the country, the ‘Occupy Camp’ in Ausitn has become largely a homeless camp. The Digital Taxan…

…many of the protesters camping at City Hall Plaza have been replaced by homeless people who are attracted to all the free food and handouts. Under normal conditions, police wouldn’t allow a bum or a hobo to take a nap on City Hall Plaza, much less set up camp.

An AP article from mid-November that found the cost of Occupy to a survey of only 18 cities through November 15^th to be over $13,000,000 includes a couple of typical responses from the entitled Occupy movement about the costs.

“We’re here fighting corporate greed and they’re worried about a lawn?” said Clark Davis of Occupy Los Angeles, where the city estimates that protesters’ property damage to a park has been $200,000.

and

“It’s $7 million of taxpayers’ money that’s being spent to stifle our First Amendment rights,” Dutro said. “You know, they’ve consistently overreacted.”

But the police and taxpayer money hasn’t been used to stifle anyone’s First Amendment rights but to promote the safety of both the public and the protesters. For instance, while the protesters march in the streets of cities like San Francisco, the police are actually used to protect the First Amendment rights of protesters where the police block traffic so marchers can pass through intersections safely.

The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, known as CLASS, a pet program of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D- Massachusetts), was to have been sponsored by the federal government but maintained as a voluntary plan to which healthy, younger, working Americans would contribute in the event they became disabled later on in life. Participants would have paid a monthly premium that ranged widely between $235-$3000, depending on income, during their employment years, and then collected a daily cash benefit of at least $50 if they became disabled.

The tragic flaw in the plan is that unless large numbers of healthy people are willing to sign up for the program during their working years, the cost of the program would become prohibitive due to the needs of the disabled who would benefit from the plan. Unlike the purchase of long term care insurance in the private sector, CLASS did not offer lower premiums to healthier participants. Thus, the program attracted those who were already disabled in some way, yet able to work to some extent, and who anticipated the need for long term care in the future. Without healthy subscribers paying into the system, these individuals would not likely be able to afford the steep premiums.

Not surprisingly, if the program had survived, it would have ultimately been “too big to fail” and required a tax bailout. Congressional Republicans intend to repeal CLASS, which, according to the Heritage Foundation was “poorly designed, and actuaries criticized it as being unsustainable well before the passage of Obamacare.”

Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, who had argued for some time that the flaw in the program could be fixed, announced on Friday that the plan could not, in fact, be saved–a situation that was met by significant protest on the part of liberal seniors’ lobby, AARP, and union leaders. Supporters of CLASS wrote a letter to President Obama, urging him to use his “authority,” provided to him under his signature legislation, to “make necessary changes to the design of CLASS to make it work. We fully expect the administration to go forward and use that authority in implementing the law.”

It is almost incredible that the Obama administration entertained the notion that CLASS would actually work. In fact, it is questionable whether the White House ever expected it to survive or if it just threw the program into Obamacare as a bone to its base, never intending to make it viable. In essence, CLASS was really an entitlement within an entitlement, another entire Social Security program built into a government health insurance plan.

Of course, when AARP and the unions wrote the president, asking him to use his “authority” to make CLASS work, we can be assured that what they were urging is for the program to become mandatory rather than voluntary.

All of Obamacare must be repealed, but the fact that its authors now admit CLASS is unsustainable is a major victory for taxpayers and freedom lovers alike.

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.

Speaking of making millions, as mentioned above, the media folks also found some 20 more government union members that could make a combined $56 million in unearned pensions off the taxpayer’s back.

One of these crooks even retired at 50-years-old, then was hired back by the city for one day so that he could bump up his pension returns!

Worse, I was listening to a local Chicago radio program and one of the reporters involved in this story was saying that there may be several hundred more union/government workers that are similarly getting cushy, undeserved riches from the state pension system.

All this at a time when the pensions system is about to crash because it is so deeply in the red.

Now, don’t imagine that these sort of sweetheart deals between politicians and government unions are only happening in Chicago. These deals are endemic throughout government at every level. From your smallest city to the county, state, and federal government, these union thugs are ripping us all off on a daily basis.

Without question, this is the sort of unethical, even criminal, double dealing that you get when government employees are allowed to unionize. These people are cozy with government officials and other elected folks, donate money to their campaigns so that rules can be changed in their favor, then live off the taxpayers for decades. And for the cash in their pockets, politicians bend to union wishes every time. All the while the taxpayers get raped repeatedly.

Government workers should never, ever be allowed to unionize. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that!

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.

(Click here to read the Goldwater Institute’s full report)

“The taxpayers are getting hatcheted at multiple levels,” said Leslie Paige, vice president of policy and communication at Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., nonprofit that tracks federal spending. “The taxpayers may not even know that they are subsidizing the very people that are picking their pockets.”

The union officials who qualify for release time are government employees. But instead of showing up for their regular jobs, they are released from duty to work for the union. Labor executives defend the use of tax money to pay their salaries as a good investment that leads to a more productive government workforce.

John Gage, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in congressional testimony last June that official time has led to better relations between workers and management. That has helped resolve disputes that otherwise could have escalated into costly lawsuits or formal complaints, he said, adding that it also leads to greater efficiency and cost savings for federal agencies.

In the 2009 fiscal year, unions representing federal workers used almost 3 million hours of official time, the equivalent of more than 1,400 full-time employees, at a cost of $129.1 million.

Paying government employees to do union work has become a standard provision in state and local labor contracts, said Patrick Semmens, director of legal information at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which opposes the practice.

TAXPAYER ELECTIONEERING

Costs to taxpayers from release time go far beyond the dollars spent on salary and benefits for government workers who do not do their government jobs, said Paige. There is no pressure on the union to settle grievances or agree to concessions when their salaries are not coming out of union dues, she said. Money the unions would otherwise have to spend paying top officers also is freed up for other activities, including electioneering, when taxpayers are footing the bill for salaries and benefits, she added.

A bill to limit union release time at the federal level was introduced this year in the House of Representatives, but has gone nowhere.

Labor unions spent about $96.7 million on federal campaigns alone in the two-year cycle leading up to the 2010 election, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Three of the top four labor contributors are public employee unions – the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The top contributor to federal campaigns among labor groups was the Service Employees International Union, which represents workers in both government and private-sector jobs.

James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, said release time can end up shortchanging union members, as well as taxpayers. Even in the private sector, management is sometimes willing to pay top union officials if it brings concessions in pay and benefits that will apply to all workers, said Sherk, who advocated eliminating official time at the federal level during congressional testimony earlier this year.

“A lot of managers will say ‘it’s cheaper for me to put a few of them on the payroll than it is to pay the higher wages’” for everyone, Sherk said.

But at least in the private sector, there is pressure on management to control costs or face being wiped out by their competitors. That pressure does not exist in government, where there is no competition and no bottom line to protect, Sherk said.

About 12 percent of the nation’s workforce is comprised of union members, according to 2010 data compiled at Unionstats.com. About 52 percent of them work for some level of government, from federal agencies down to local school districts.

Among government employees, union membership is about 36 percent nationally, according to Unionstats.com. In the private sector, it’s about 7 percent.

Following the governor’s threats of thousands of layoffs, the concession package, as anticipated, was overwhelmingly approved on the second vote on Thursday by 14 of the 15 unions. Ironically, the union representing corrections officers, AFSCME, which had rejected the package originally, approved it wholeheartedly this time, despite the fact that corrections workers have solicited membership in the National Correctional Employees Union (NCEU), charging that they were misrepresented by the vote to change the bylaws.

Upon ratification of the contract, the governor released the following statement:

“We have achieved something the skeptics said was unachievable: we’ve made the relationship between the state and its workforce sustainable. And, unlike in most other states, we did it without going to war with public employees. We’ve shown what’s possible when management and labor work together in a respectful fashion. Sure, this agreement took a few extra months to achieve – but so what? Those extra months are a small price to pay for the billions of dollars that extra time will save taxpayers, the critical services that time will preserve, and the peace of mind that comes from understanding the state now has a sustainable relationship with its employee base…”

The agreement calls for a two-year wage freeze and some changes to pension benefits and healthcare, such as required annual visits to a physician. In exchange, the unions obtained no layoffs for four-years and a pledge they would not be required to take unpaid furlough days. According to Mr. Malloy, the changes will save the state an estimated $1.6 billion over the next two years and $21.5 billion over the next two decades. As of July 1st, the governor’s budget plan called for “shared sacrifice” from taxpayers, who have consequently experienced the largest tax increase in the history of the state, including a hike in the income tax, retroactive to January 1st.

While Governor Malloy is self-congratulatory on the approval of the concessions, SEBAC officials downplayed the need to change the bylaws in order to obtain rank and file approval. Instead, they blamed the first rejection vote on “lack of clarification” of the anticipated changes to healthcare, and to a case of email sabotage by the conservative think-tank, Yankee Institute for Public Policy.

Many state workers who initially voted against the concession package said they were fearful that the plan would force them into the state’s anticipated Sustinet universal healthcare plan, Connecticut’s version of Obamacare. Not surprisingly the unions were extremely supportive of Sustinet for everyone else, while they maintained that their members should continue with “Cadillac” healthcare plans paid for by Connecticut taxpayers. Union officials “educated” their members about the true nature of the healthcare changes, at meetings that state employees were paid to attend, at the direction of the governor’s administration.

In what appears to have been an effort to save face while taking a jab at conservatives, SEBAC also charged the Yankee Institute with hacking into the state employees’ email database for the purpose of spreading misinformation about the concession package. Yankee Institute welcomed a review to prove the charge was false, and won its battle last month when state Attorney General George Jepsen cleared the think tank of any illegal involvement in the unions’ failed effort to ratify their contract concessions.

Connecticut Democrats appear to be following in-step with their liberal counterparts in Washington D.C. Remember how House and Senate Democrats wanted to “deem” a bill passed, just to get it passed? Remember Nancy Pelosi, on passing Obamacare: “We’ll go through the gate; if the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence; if the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in; if that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in…”

Connecticut Democrats and their union buddies: If we don’t pass it the first time, we’ll change the rules so we can pass it the next time…then blame conservatives for not passing it the first time.