The pro-abortion EMILY's list does NOT have a lock on the female vote
Marsha Blackburn, a Republican congresswoman from Tennessee, throws cold water on EMILY's shrieks of horror. "Women voters are fired up for this year's election and will most definitely not be staying home on Nov. 2, and there are at least 146 good reasons for this. A record number of Republican women have sought federal office this year -- 129 GOP women in House races and 17 in Senate races. In 1994, another record-breaking year, 91 Republican women ran in the House and 13 in the Senate. How can EMILY's List say that the party is running women out when more and more women are running? This is the year of the strong conservative woman, but because those women are overwhelmingly pro-life, EMILY's List clearly doesn't see them as good enough."
Blackburn's colleague, Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, adds: "The type of women we are running -- political outsiders who are moms, small-business women, women who up until recently never thought of running for office but were inspired to run because of the dangerous course President Obama and Speaker Pelosi are taking America -- are threatening to the liberal special-interest groups who believe that to be a woman you must be a liberal and that conservative women candidates ... must not only be defeated, but also branded as somehow anti-woman. This is absurd."
Billie Tucker, a tea-party organizer from Florida, has no patience with Schriock's attempt to hold onto governing power: "It's not the number of women in Congress Ms. Schriock is really worried about. It's the number of women with Nancy Pelosi's behaviors that she wants to keep there." Stacy Mott, president of Smart Girl Politics, adds: "The next Congress is going to get this country back on track because brave women have had enough of Speaker Pelosi and President Obama's pandering, condescension and broken promises."
All of these women are people that EMILY's List exists to drown out. But they're being heard loud and clear. As Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, the closest thing the pro-life movement has to an organized response to EMILY, says: "EMILY's List has only dominated women's politics for so long because it discourages female voter turnout of what they consider the 'wrong kind of woman.' That dominance is clearly on the wane."
This election season points to a reality that hurts EMILY's List at its core. There is "enormous consensus" on the issue of abortion, Knights of Columbus head Carl Anderson argues in his upcoming book, "Beyond a House Divided: The Moral Consensus Ignored by Washington, Wall Street, and the Media." Marist polling done for the Knights found that eight out of 10 Americans "favor restrictions that would limit abortion to the first three months of pregnancy at most." Additionally, he notes that "53 percent of Americans would limit abortion to cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of a mother -- or would not allow it at all. Among women, the number is even higher -- 55 percent."
In this election, EMILY's List is playing to less than a quarter of Americans, according to the Knights' polling (which is consistent with CNN and other polling): the minority that wants abortion available throughout a woman's pregnancy. Republicans, for the most part -- even consistently pro-life ones -- seem to be playing to the real consensus as described by Anderson, while being true to their principles. If we can all agree on some restrictions, how about we start with prohibiting all federal funding of abortion? That's a far cry from overturning Roe v. Wade, but it's a start. And, by the way -- contrary to the scare tactics of EMILY's List -- a House Speaker Boehner wouldn't have the power to overturn Roe v. Wade even if he wanted to.
People are fed up with alarmist fear-mongering, because they are genuinely concerned about the future of their country. They know who they are, and they know that fear doesn't build a nation. They know how to keep those who are supposed to represent them accountable. EMILY's List doesn't speak for me; it speaks for fewer Americans every day. I understand why EMILY's List and the people who support it are spooked, but this year, voters will not be tricked.
More HERE
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Epic "Feminist" Hypocrisy (again)
By Carol Platt Liebau
The day after he (or a member of his staff) is caught on tape calling Meg Whitman a whore, Jerry Brown has announced the endorsement of the National Organization of Women (NOW).
You know, it's fashionable in feminist circles to sit around bemoaning the fact that few young women want to identify themselves as feminists.
Wanna know why? This kind of hypocrisy is the reason why. It's OK with NOW, supposedly an organization devoted to the equal and respectful treatment of women for Jerry Brown to call his opponent -- an accomplished woman, and more importantly, any woman -- a "whore." It's OK with NOW for Bill Clinton to engage in sexual harassment of an intern in The White House, and possibly worse in his pre-presidential days. It's OK with NOW to allow Sarah Palin to be denigrated in the cheapest, lowest and most sexist ways.
NOW has nothing to do with women's rights, or the proper treatment of women. They are simply shills for abortion and big government. They ought to admit it and take the word "Women" out of their name, because they no more stand for "women" in general than President Obama stands for small government and low taxes.
Women -- and men -- are on to NOW's racket. That's why their endorsement means nothing. They're just political hacks. What young woman in her right mind would want to be associated with such cheap political opportunism?
SOURCE
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What public-sector unions have wrought
by Jeff Jacoby
ORGANIZED LABOR in the United States achieved a milestone in 2009 that once would have been unthinkable: for the first time, union members working in government jobs outnumbered those working in the private sector.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the number of unionized private employees fell last year to 7.4 million. That represented just 7.2 percent of the private-sector labor force, the lowest proportion in over a century. By contrast, union membership in the public sector topped 7.9 million, or 37.4 percent of all federal, state, and local government jobs. The share of government workers belonging to labor unions, in other words, is more than five times the unionized share of the private sector. Union membership in private industry peaked at 35.7 percent in 1953 and has dwindled ever since. In the public sector, unions surpassed that level years ago and show no sign of weakening.
The number of government employees at all levels surged from about 8.2 million in 1959 to 22.5 million in 2009. Historically, government work paid less than comparable employment in the private economy, but greater job security and good pensions compensated for the lower wages. No longer: now government workers tend to fare better than private-sector workers across the board—not only in job security and pensions but in wages and other benefits as well.
Supporters of government pension benefit increases routinely argue that public employees are underpaid compared to private-sector counterparts, so retirement benefits must be sweetened to compensate. However, recent surveys used by the City's [NYC] Department of Human Resources to benchmark compensation disclose that in nearly all job classifications the City pays more in wages and salaries than the other governmental agencies and more than most private-sector employers.
Nationwide, according to BLS data for 2009, state and local government employees were paid an average wage of $26.01 per hour, which was 34 percent higher than the average private-sector wage of $19.39 per hour. Even more lopsided was the public-sector advantage in fringe benefits, such as health and life insurance, paid vacations and sick leave, and—above all—retirement income.
With compensation so generous, it is not surprising that government employees are only one-third as likely to leave their jobs as workers in the private sector. The logical inference is drawn by Chris Edwards, a scholar at the Cato Institute: "[S]tate and local pay is higher than needed to attract qualified workers."
Yet when it comes to outearning Americans who labor in the private sector, state and local government employees are left in the dust by their counterparts at the federal level.
In 2008, the 1.9 million civilians employed by Uncle Sam were paid, on average, an annual salary of $79,197, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. The average private employee earned just $49,935. The difference between them came to more than $29,000 -- a disparity that has more than doubled since 2000. Add benefits to the mix and the federal advantage is even more striking.
In its budget narrative for 2011, the Obama administration acknowledges the premium in federal compensation but attributes it to the specialized skills and greater education of federal workers:
The federal government hires lawyers to tackle corruption, security professionals to monitor our borders, doctors to care for our injured veterans, and world-class scientists to combat deadly diseases such as cancer. Because of these vital needs, the Federal Government hires a relatively highly educated workforce, resulting in higher average pay. In 2009, full-time, year-round federal civilian employees earned on average 21 percent more than workers in the private sector.
In a similar vein, when Scott Brown, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, called in February for a federal hiring and salary freeze "because... federal employees are making twice as much as their private counterparts," he was promptly taken to task by the 150,000-member National Treasury Employees Union. "Comparing salaries of federal employees and private sector employees is not an apples-to--apples comparison," the union's president admonished Brown in a letter. "The only appropriate way to make a fair pay comparison is to compare similar jobs with one another."
A few weeks later, USA Today published just such a comparison. Analyzing the salaries (not including benefits) paid in the 216 occupations with direct equivalents in both the federal and private-sector labor markets, it found a government premium in more than eight out of 10 categories. Registered nurses in the government's employ, for example, were paid an average of $74,460 a year, while those in the private sector earned an average of $63,780. Among librarians, the federal pay advantage was $12,826; among graphic designers, $24,255; among pest-control workers, $14,995. Overall, the paper concluded, "the typical federal worker is paid 20 percent more than a private-sector worker in the same occupation."
Even when taxpayers fall on hard times, the good life goes on for public employees. During the first year and a half of the current "Great Recession," the number of federal workers with salaries of $100,000 and up increased 46 percent. At the Defense Department, the number of civilian employees making $150,000 or more quintupled from 1,868 to 10,100; at Justice, the increase was nearly sevenfold.
The devastation wrought by the worst recession in two generations has not been evenly distributed. Between January 2008 and June 2010, the American private sector lost roughly 8 million jobs. Over the same period, the public sector workforce grew by 590,000.
IT IS NOT by happenstance that the growth in public-sector union jobs—from a trivial share of overall union membership 50 years ago to a majority today—has coincided with so vast an expansion of government and of its employees' pay and perquisites. As FDR had foreseen, there are crucial differences between collective bargaining in the public and private sectors. Labor unions negotiating on behalf of government employees enjoy at least four potent advantages, which they long ago learned to exploit.....
In many states, strikes by public employees are prohibited, and disputes that cannot be settled through collective bargaining are resolved through mandatory binding arbitration instead. Far from promoting compromise, however, binding arbitration undermines it. Unions have every incentive to bargain to impasse and then insist on arbitration, since they know that an arbitrator will almost never award public employees less than the government's final offer. That makes binding arbitration a can't-lose proposition for the unions and a certain loser for the taxpayers.
As a state senator in 1969, Coleman Young authored Michigan's mandatory-arbitration law. As mayor of Detroit years later, he came to deeply regret it. "We know that compulsory arbitration has been a failure," Young told National Journal in 1981. "Slowly, inexorably, compulsory arbitration destroys sensible fiscal management" and has "caused more damage to the public service in Detroit than the strikes [it was] designed to prevent."
It didn't take unions long to figure out that their members' votes, and the political donations funded in part with their members' dues, would yield tremendous leverage at the bargaining table. Consequently, for many public-sector unions, politics became a core function.
Time magazine, reporting in 1973 that the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees was "teach[ing] local unionists how to organize political rallies, telethons, and letter-writing campaigns," quoted AFSCME's president, Jerry Wurf: "We're political as hell." That attitude is reflected on the AFSCME website, which boasts that candidates "all across the country, at every level of government" have learned to "pay attention to AFSCME's political muscle." The union is blunt about its reliance on politics to achieve its collective-bargaining aims. "We elect our bosses, so we've got to elect politicians who support us and hold those politicians accountable," AFSCME says. "Our jobs, wages, and working conditions are directly linked to politics."
For an even blunter expression of political hardball as played by the public-sector unions, turn to YouTube and watch the video labeled "SEIU Threat." At a budget hearing in the California legislature in 2009, an official of the Service Employees International Union, the nation's fastest-growing union, was recorded telling lawmakers to give the union what it wanted—or else. "We helped get you into office, and we got a good memory," she says evenly. "Come November, if you don't back our program, we'll get you out of office."
SEIU's memory—not to mention its clout and deep pockets—was clearly appreciated by the Obama administration. SEIU spent $67 million to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats in 2008. In the first nine months following Obama's inauguration, union president Andrew Stern visited the White House 22 times—more than any other visitor. Several top SEIU officials were appointed to posts in the new administration, including Patrick Gaspard, who became the White House political director, and Craig Becker, who was named to the National Labor Relations Board. "SEIU is on the field, it's in the White House, it's in the administration," gloated Stern—with reason—in a video to his members.
The unions' power to "elect our bosses" has thus turned public-sector collective bargaining into a rigged game -- rigged in favor of a privileged government elite and against the private taxpayers who pay its bills.
PUBLIC-SECTOR UNIONS will fight tooth and nail against any effort to rein in their outsize benefits, and with their immense political clout, they will not be easily defeated. But neither will it be easy to ignore the widening gulf between the public-union aristocracy—with its recession-proof jobs, automatic raises, early retirement, and spectacular pensions—and the scores of millions of Americans working in the private sector, whose standard of living is being eroded by high taxes, profligate government, and a shaky economy. In states where public-sector unions are dominant, such as California and New York, politicians will increasingly find themselves pressed to choose between the unions and a restive, indignant public.
Much more HERE
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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