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As a reformed former president of what used to be one of Southern California’s major labor unions representing the employees of a regulated electrical utility I have been watching with great interest the unfolding events affecting the union represented government employees in the state of Wisconsin and that state’s legislative effort to deal with what the news media portrays as Governor Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill. That bit of legislation has now passed, and like it or not all that the Democrats can do about it is bitch, moan and point fingers, to make matters even worse for them and the labor movement, a similar bill was passed by the Ohio state senate.

The provisions of the new Wisconsin law affect all general employees of the state with the exclusion of public safety employees. The areas covered in all future contractual negotiations with the state will be limited to specific topics for the affected bargaining units. Health care and pension benefits will no longer be considered as topics for labor negotiations. Wage discussions will be limited to bargaining over a percentage of total base wages increase that is no greater than the percentage change in the consumer price index. Any discussion of hours will be restricted according to the needs of the state, and the catch-all phrase, “and all other conditions of employment,” that has historically been used by union negotiators to cover everything under the sun, has been deleted. The automatic withholding of union dues from an employee’s paycheck has been prohibited and any general employee who chooses not to pay union dues can remain a member of a collective bargaining unit. Labor organizations representing collective bargaining units containing general employees of the state will be required to recertify annually. Failure to acquire 51% of the vote in an annual recertification election will result in the decertification of the representative at the expiration date of the collective bargaining agreement. The employees formerly represented by that collective bargaining unit will then be unrepresented and will not be represented for one year. No collective bargaining agreement covering general employees of the state will be extended beyond its one year term. Failing to report to work as scheduled for any three unexcused working days during a state of emergency, or participating in a strike, work stoppage, sit-down, stay-in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the of operations or services of state government, including specifically purported mass resignations or sick calls now constitutes just cause for discharge.

From my experience in organized labor I can attest to the fact that the leaders of local unions in the private sector are a canny and normally intelligent bunch. They are very aware of their limitations, and the usually, but not always, exercise a measure of restraint least they “kill the goose that laid the golden egg.” In other words the local unions seek to improve their lot in life, but not to the point where the company their members work for is overly burdened and forced to close down or figure out some way to eliminate its represented employees. Workers without jobs can’t pay union dues, and without a steady stream of union dues to pay the over-inflated salaries of the union officers the whole thing falls apart. Public sector union leaders have never had to consider the well-being of the “goose that laid the golden egg.” For the public sector unions that “goose” is the tax payer who shoulders the burden of their higher wages, great benefit plans and lucrative pension benefits. The private sector service and repair electrician working in Long Beach for $18 per hour and the Certified Electrician working in Van Nuys for $15 per hour and paying the wages, the health care benefits stuffing the pension fund for the generic electrician working for California’s Department of Transportation and pulling in nearly $5000 per month, and the “goose” can scream his head off without anybody paying the least bit of attention. In fact the vast majority of the geese all across this country don’t even think about what all of the tax money that is snatched out of the paycheck is used for and no government body is about to send them an annual audit explaining where their money is being used.

Public sector unions were illegal throughout most of the U.S. until the around 1959 when, ironically enough, the state of Wisconsin became the first in the nation to allow collective bargaining by public employees. Prior to this, public-sector employees commonly earned a bit less than their private-sector equivalents and this was considered acceptable by the public as well as the government workers who, for the most part considered themselves as servants of the public interest. The negative aspect of working for slightly less compensation than their private sector equivalents was marginally offset by the fact that the government employees had reasonable benefit plans at a time when many private sector companies offered few benefits, and employment with the government was always more stable than most of the private sector jobs where companies came and went and everything was in a constant state of change.

Without getting into a lengthy discussion on the history of labor movements in the United States it is still possible to explain the major differences and the inconsistencies of private versus public sector unions. To begin with, the historical basis of collective bargaining revolves around the idea that workers deserve a fair share of the company’s profits. I won’t try to justify that idea in any way because it is pretty impossible to do so depending which side of the fence you are standing on. I will point out that the concept is entirely ludicrous when applied to public service because governments do not generate profits; the revenue of government is derived from the assessment of taxes.

Private sector union members might also be shareholders in the company they work for but their ability to affect the determinations made by the board of directors is pretty limited in most cases and they do not have to power to eliminate their supervisors or other management personnel, however the members of public sector unions are employed to work under the direction of political office holders and their appointees, and as voters they can vote to replace the political leaders that oversee their positions and appoint the supervisors they report to. Furthermore, a large portion of the dues money that is withheld from their paychecks for the union is contributed to the Democratic Party which their labor union supports, for the continuing support of the Democratic Party’s elected representatives. This could be considered acceptable by union members that are also registered Democrats, however for members who are registered with other political parties, this might be considered completely unacceptable. Regardless of what the individual member thinks of the Democratic elected officials they work for, or the Democratic candidates they may work for if elected, the individual union members have little or no voice with respect to their local’s political contributions, and even if they are capable of dropping out of the union and remaining employed, they are still required to pay the union dues, and the process for stopping that money from being used for political parties they do not support is purposely made as difficult as the law will allow.

Private sector unions can leverage companies during labor negotiations with strikes, slowdowns and work stoppages, but the public sector union is limited in their leverage to negotiating within the limited allotment of profit or company revenue budgeted on an annual basis for labor expenses. While it is possible for a local union to demand a larger share of the company’s revenue during negotiations, the union that does this risks the chance of cutting too far into the operating expenses of the company and forcing them into bankruptcy and inevitable layoffs. Classical economic theory holds that wage growth without capital investment is virtually impossible. A machine shop can make a large investment in upgrading and modernizing their machine tools and thereby increase the company’s overall productivity. As a consequence of this increased productivity, the value of each labor hour rises and the company can then increase the wages to attract the workers they need to fully staff the facility without cutting into their operational budget. There is no capital investment in government, and every dollar they take in comes out of the pockets of the tax payers. With public sector unions, the revenue of the “company” is derived from taxes, and the line created by budgetary allotments for labor expenses seems very hazy if not completely arbitrary. The government can, and does, raise taxes on a regular basis to meet the rising costs of operation, therefore, public sector unions are far less shy about demanding significant increases in pay and benefits than their private counterparts. Furthermore, as the number of government employees increases the power of their collective bargaining group becomes greater and greater while the limits to the financial obligations their labor representatives can demand of the government becomes significantly reduced. Given a sufficiently high percentage of voters working in union represented government positions, there is essentially no limit to the demands they can make on their employer, or the financial obligations they can impose on the tax payers as a direct result of those demands. The bottom line, as union negotiators are fond of saying, is that as long as there is no restriction on the size of government and the number of new government positions the politicians create, and that a majority of all government employees are union represented jobs, the power and control that the public sector unions wield over the decisions that government makes is unlimited, and that extends far beyond wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions. That power to control government includes the ability to initiate and pass legislative acts and constitutional amendments as the leaders of those labor organizations see fit without regard for what is best for the American people or what the voters want.

The final difference that I will point out between public and private sector unions is the fact that privately owned companies stretched to the snapping point by their union negotiated obligations can get out from underneath their heavy burden by shedding their obligations in bankruptcy court, however, for a government there are few ways to solve the problems associated with becoming over-burdened by union negotiated obligations, one of those solutions is to dramatically increase the tax base by increasing the population either by encouraging natural population growth through tax cuts extended on the basis of the number of children in a tax payer’s family, or by encouraging huge waves of immigration. In the minds of politicians tax cuts to encourage the growth of American families are viewed as being every bit a noxious as any other tax cut, and their reluctance to give back to the tax payers the money that they feel is justifiably withheld in taxes is made obvious by the fact that every tax cut given to individual tax payers in the last half-century has been so miserly as to be entirely pointless, therefore, the idea of tax cuts to incentivize an increase in population is a non-starter because our elected representatives simply can’t fathom and compelling reason to give back even the smallest portion of what they have already taken. As we have seen in the United States over the course of the last fifty years, the elected representatives of the American voters have chosen the immigration route to solving their problem, unfortunately, this solution is not working because the cost of the public union’s negotiated financial burden on the American taxpayers is growing so fast that no amount of immigration to increase the tax base would ever alleviate it. Secondly, the immigrants that are coming into the U.S. today do not represent a positive growth in the tax base. The majority of the immigrants, and most especially the illegal aliens, that are entering the country today have few, if any marketable job skills, many of them do not speak English, they have no savings to act as a buffer for them and their families while they get training and find employment, the vast majority are functionally illiterate and can’t be trained cost effectively, and more than a few of them have no desire to better their lot in life, acclimate to life in the U.S., or to lead honest and productive lives once they get here. The majority of all legal and illegal immigrants represent a net drain on the American economy for the first ten years they are in this country, and in most cases it is not until the third generation that these immigrants become productive tax-paying members of society. Even if the immigrants coming into the U.S. had the job and language skills, education, and qualifications to immediately secure employment, they can only help solve the problem if there are a sufficient number of vacant jobs in the country to allow each new immigrant a position of employment. Not only are there not enough jobs for the immigrants coming in, but the working American citizens, who now form the tax base that the government depends on to pay these union imposed debts, are being displaced from their jobs by immigrants who are willing to work for far less than American citizens. By working for lower wages, the immigrants pay less in income taxes and the government’s tax revenue is reduced farther and farther with each newly employed immigrant. On top of that, the displaced American tax payer is now dependent on government subsidized unemployment insurance, welfare and/or social security which can only exacerbate the overall problem. In the meantime, the financial burden imposed on the government and the American tax payers by public sector unions continues to grow without restriction. Using immigration in the attempt to solve this problem is illogical, and after many years of attempting to do just that it has become blatantly obvious to everyone, except the labor unions and the politicians, that we could increase immigration to the point that the U.S. was as densely populated as mainland China and it would not begin to dent the constantly growing financial obligation imposed by public sector unions that is currently driving the U.S. economy headlong into ruin.

There isn’t one elected official in the United States that isn’t already aware of the fact that the financial burden imposed on government by the public sector unions is unsustainable. No employer, regardless of the company’s profit or accumulated wealth, could ever hope to survive if they routinely allowed their employees to retire at the age of 55 with anywhere from 70% to 100% of the full salary they were making in their final years of employment. There isn’t one private company anywhere on the planet that could afford to operate under a burden such as this, however, thanks to the power of the public sector unions, the majority of government workers enjoy benefit plans that no private sector worker will ever see. Furthermore, in most cases the incredibly lucrative pension plans for represented government employees often include annual inflation adjustments along with 100% government subsidized health care for life. Additionally, while 55 is the average age at which most government employees may retire, there are numerous government jobs that allow the workers to retire with full benefits, at or near their final wage while far younger. The best example of this is the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Boston which allows their bus drivers to retire at the age of 41 with full medical benefits and more than 75% of their annual $70,000 salary. How could an elected representative of the American people, an individual sworn to the service of this nation’s citizens and dedicated to increasing the benefits and prosperity of our society, condone entering into such an unsustainable agreement?

In paragraph seven I made a statement that I will now repeat. Given a sufficiently high percentage of voters working in union represented government positions, there is essentially no limit to the demands they can make on their employer, or the financial obligations they can impose on the tax payers as a direct result of those demands. It is an irrefutable fact that American labor unions pour millions of dollars every year into American politics, and 99.9% of that money goes to the Democratic Party. The majority of the known union money going to the Democrats is given through political action committees (PACs), however, labor unions also donate large sums of money to the Democratic Party by breaking their contributions into smaller amounts and listing them as individual contributions made under the names of the union’s individual members. In many cases, these individual members do not have any idea that they have contributed. This is how Barack Obama got away with saying that all of the money contributed to his 2008 presidential campaign came from individual donors. It would be interesting to check the list of Obama’s campaign donors against the voter registration list to see how many of the contributions came from registered Republicans who didn’t support him, and most likely voted for someone else. In 2008 the labor union PACs contributed $73.1 million to political campaigns with $68.3 million going directly to the Democratic Party. The remaining $3.7 million was split between candidates running independently or in one of the other minor parties and a microscopic portion may have found its way to one or more Republican candidates but I can’t find any record to substantiate this claim. Additionally, in 2008 the labor unions invested $40.7 million in their lobbying efforts for primarily Democratic agenda items. During the 2010 mid-term election cycle the labor unions contributed $67.5 million through their political action committees and another $24.8 million through individual donations. The unions also poured some $46.7 million into lobbying efforts in 2010, and once again, that money was used to further items on the Democratic Party’s political agenda. In 2008 and 2010, the single largest contributor to the total contributions made by labor unions came from the public sector unions representing government employees. Of the top ten contributors to American politics and politicians, five are labor unions representing members working in public sector government positions. There is no possible way to deny the obvious fact that this sort of money buys an incredible amount of influence at every level of American politics and government, however, money is one thing and votes are another. The key to winning elections is to win over or buy the support of large voting blocs within the population.

A voting bloc is a group of voters that are motivated by a specific concern or group of concerns to the point that it determines how each individual in the bloc will vote in an election. The Democratic Party has normally been more concerned with attracting the different voting blocs than they are with the development or integrity of a solid issue platform. When it comes to special interest groups, the Democratic Party is particularly well attuned, and while they may not be even remotely considered the friend of the working man, they are willing to exchange political favors for the support of a fairly cohesive bloc representing more than 14 million voters affiliated with labor unions. Since neither group has acquired the reputation for putting the welfare of the nation before all else, the mutual back slapping agreement between the labor unions and the Democratic Party is a marriage made in Hell.

In 2010 there were 7.6 million public sector union employees and 7.1 million union workers in the private sector for a total of 14.7 million union represented workers in the United States. The combined strength of the union vote in the U.S. is greater than the voting strength of some ethnic groups, it is equal to approximately two-thirds the voting strength of the U.S. population of Hispanics, it represents half the voting strength of all African-Americans and it is greater than the combined voting power of the total populations of Asian, American Indian and Pacific Islanders in the United States. There is little doubt that 14.7 million votes can make or break a political campaign, and any political party that enters the election season with the assurance that most of those 14.7 million votes will be cast in their favor has a distinct advantage over their opposition. Admittedly, voting blocs have been around since the founding of the Republic, and they will still be here long after I and everyone reading this is long dead and buried, but the fact of the matter is that voting blocs are completely contrary to intended purpose of voting in America, and no political party that was honestly dedicated to the preservation of this nation’s constitution, or the freedom and liberty of its citizens, would encourage, support or condone voting blocs let alone foster their growth and multiplicity, or worst of all, intentionally pander to them with promises and unpublished agreements.

In the United States, elections are more than simply showing up at the local voting place on the first Tuesday in November and casting ballots to determine in which of the candidates the majority of citizens will place their trust. Voting is both a right and an obligation. It is the right to participate in the republic, and it is the obligation to be an informed citizen who will take the time to actually vote. The obligation to be informed is founded on the idea that a republic requires well-educated citizens to safeguard liberty, a notion that was expressed repeatedly by the founders of this nation when the expressed the belief that the sole purpose of education in this country was to enable the citizenry with the skills of critical thinking and logic thereby giving to each of them the full potential requisite of an active participant. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” (Ford, “Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” 10:4)

Constitutionally, the major objective of voting is to control the government and its ability to infringe upon the liberty and rights of the people. In this respect, voting is the ultimate check and balance system in the process of government, and it serves “We the People” as the last line of defense to preserve our freedom and liberty. This is why the founders of this nation saw the act of voting as being both a sacred right and a very serious personal obligation, and this is expressly why those same founders viewed the failure to protect and defend the Constitution and the republic by voting for representatives who would not hold the public trust sacred and were not dedicated to the preservation of the Constitution as a despicably treasonous act.

An informed voter assesses the political candidates on the basis of the positions they take on important current issues, leadership qualities, the experience they would bring to office, their past record of service, the candidate’s personal characteristics such as, intelligence, honesty, ability to communicate, common sense, fairness and a host of other factors too numerous to mention. The end result of this process is to determine which of the candidates before us is best suited to safeguard the trust of the voters by fulfilling the obligations of the office that candidate is elected to. Which candidate will to the best of his or her ability, “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?” And finally, which of the candidates has the capacity to effective lead the nation, serve the best interests of the people equally and fairly, promote the prosperity of all, protect the American citizens, overcome all adversity, and ensure the security of the nation? Clearly, the responsibility of being an informed participant in the republic is serious business and it takes a certain measure of self-discipline and determination which, unfortunately, many who today call themselves “Americans” are unwilling to give. For the members of a voting bloc, however, the process of voting is far less onerous, time consuming and mentally challenging. As a loyal member of a voting bloc the act of voting is reduced to transferring the names of the preferred candidates indicated on the paper handed to you by your union leadership or sent to you by the pro-illegal alien advocacy group, straight onto the ballot card. You don’t need to give it any thought at all; in fact you don’t even really need to know how to read. Knowing whether or not the candidates you are voting for are honest, truthful or even qualified is not necessary, and all things considered, when you are voting as a member of a bloc, the less you know about the candidates, the issues, the government, American history or the U.S. Constitution, the easier the whole thing will settle in whatever you have that passes for a conscience. Thinking for your self can be so over-rated.

Simple greed, jealously, stupidity and laziness are the essential components from which voting blocs are created. The candidates selected by them are not judged by their ability to lead the nation, serve the best interests of the people equally and fairly, promote the prosperity of all, protect the American citizens, overcome all adversity, and ensure the security of the nation, they are judged by their ability to make and fulfill promises, their willingness to look the other way when laws are violated, and their ability to stifle the outrage of their own conscience when they become an active participant in some unwritten agreement that will benefit the undeserving at the expense of all. Simply put, the recipients of the voting bloc’s support and money are the candidates that have made the biggest promises. Qualifications and good character do not enter into the equation. In many respects it is more like buying a used car than casting an informed vote, because it is a situation that encourages corruption.

The public and private sector unions gave their full support to the Democrat’s health care bill not because it was good for the people of the United States, and certainly not because it was fair for everyone, but because it contained massive payoffs to the public sector unions, payoffs that will come at the expense of the American tax payers who will be forced to suffer the consequence with no reasonable benefit. The labor unions threw their unwavering support behind the passage of the $800+ billion stimulus bill, not because it was viewed as a solution to this nation’s economic problem, and not because anyone could ever hope to prove that it was the wise or the fair thing to do, but because of the numerous provisions in that stimulus bill that directly resulted in great benefits and increased political power exclusively for the leaders of organized labor, and once again, at the full expense of the American tax payer. The “Employee Free Choice Act,” a rancid piece of legislation currently being sponsored by our Democratic representatives in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives contains nothing at all that will benefit the American worker, but it will provide huge benefits and opportunities for the accumulation of massive wealth to labor unions exclusively, and everything that the labor unions gain by this bill’s passage will be at the expense of the American people. In exchange for the massive financial contributions made by labor unions to the Democratic Party, and the support of the pro-labor voting bloc during upcoming elections the Democratic Party agreed to introduce legislation that contained proposals to eliminate an employee’s right to accept or reject union representation by means of a secret ballot election as it has been done so effectively for more than fifty years, it contains provisions to force businesses into binding arbitration if they fail to quickly agree to the contractual demands of union negotiators, and it imposes severe penalties on companies violating the provisions of the union contracts that were shoved down their throats in binding arbitrations. The Employee Free Choice Act will clear away the legal protections that American workers have against being subjected to the harassment and intimidation of union thugs, and it will eliminate any resistance to union representation by non-union companies whose employees never wanted or needed union representation in the first place. Labor unions will be free to demand unreasonable wage increases and benefits despite a company’s ability to pay, and ultimately, those demands will have to be met because the owners of those companies will have no choice in the matter. The companies that can afford it will close up shop and relocate to other countries, and those that can’t afford to relocate will simply go bankrupt. The ranks of the unemployed will grow by leaps and bounds and the only ones who stand to gain by this insanity are the leaders of the labor unions and the Democratic Party that will be the number one recipient of the huge increase in money flowing into big labor’s already overflowing treasury. The American people will not benefit, and freedom and liberty in the U.S. will be diminished, but the unions and the Democratic Party will flourish, and it will be at the expense of every person in this country.

As the former president of a major Southern California local union I have sat on the union side of the negotiating table debating wage and benefit agreements for the private sector employees of four multi-national corporations, and I can attest to the fact that in every case talking to the stone-faced corporate negotiators sitting across from me was like trying to carry on a conversation with a parrot. It seems like all really big corporations get their labor negotiators from some top-secret genetics research lab where they breed them under strictly controlled conditions devoid of humor, sympathy, compassion and other human weaknesses. Preparations for private sector union negotiations normally begin months before the first meeting with the company takes place. The union negotiating committee conducts a multitude of brain-storming sessions trying to develop the best strategy possible and to identify any potential opening that will increase their leverage at the bargaining table. From beginning to end it is a major struggle for the private sector union to simply keep what they have during contract negotiations, and any improvement they can squeeze out of the company is always viewed as a major achievement. The private sector union negotiator is not sitting across the table from a company representative that he voted into office and can as easily vote out of office. The private sector union negotiator is not sitting across from someone he has contributed thousands of dollars to during the last election, and certainly not someone that he can threaten with cutting off those contributions or giving them to someone else. The private sector union negotiator is not sitting across the table from someone who is in office because the union supplied him with free union volunteers at election time to staff his phone banks, flood the city with campaign signs and pass out glossy leaflets in from of grocery stores outlining his sterling qualities. Public sector contract negotiations are entirely different because the representatives of the public sector union are sitting on both sides of the table. On the one side there are the actual union leaders representing the government employees, and on the other side sit the political hacks that depend on the union’s campaign contributions for the money they need to run for office as well as the union endorsement that will ensure them the support of the union voters thereby guaranteeing their continued employment. For a private sector union negotiator this sort of an arrangement could only happen in a really great dream, and this is the exact reason why when the total compensation for federal and state workers is nearly 50% higher than for private sector employees the public sector unions can demand higher wages and better benefits and the union lackeys, who are supposed to be representing the interests of the people, acquiesce to anything the union asks for. Furthermore, the union lackeys who are supposed to be representing the interests of the people that elected them to office instead of the unions that are paying them are, 101 times out of a 100, Democrats. How can I be so sure that these corrupt, bought and paid for politicians are Democrats? The answer to that is as easy as following the trail of money from the worker’s pay check, to the union treasury and then out the back door and into the back pocket of the sympathetic politician. In the 2010 election cycle 99.5% of the political contributions made by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees went to the Democratic Party, 96% of the political contributions made by the National Education Association (representing public school teachers) went to the Democratic Party, and 99.7% of the political contributions made by the American Federation of Teachers (representing workers in education, health care, and public service) went to the Democratic Party. These contributions were not made by the labor leaders of AFSCME, NEA, and the AFT on the basis of who had the best qualifications to do the job, who was the most honest and forthright individual running at the time, or who appeared to be the most dedicated to serving the public in a fair and balanced manner. These contributions were made to the Democratic politicians who promised to raise the wages of the public sector union members, give them greater benefits, and hire more government workers into union represented positions despite the fact that statistic show that public sector workers are already making 50% more than their private sector counterparts, that the overly generous pension plans of these public sector workers is underfunded by more than $1 trillion across the entire county, or that private sector employment is skyrocketing at an unprecedented rate while the private sector companies have shed more than 7,000,000 jobs since the recession began.

The massive power of public sector unions has enabled them with the ability to dictate increases in taxes regardless of whether or not those tax increases are supported or rejected by the American voters. Essentially the public sector unions have usurped the voters control on the rate of taxation in the political spectrum of this nation, and they have set themselves up as the primary beneficiaries of an American tax system that provides them with wage increases and outstanding benefit plans while the unrepresented American citizen receives the meager crumbs left on the table after the feast is abandoned. The Democratic politicians that first engineered this scam are long dead and the current drop can no longer keep the facts hidden from view. For years they have tried to keep it under wraps by offering the public sector parasites moderate wage increases and outstanding pension promises in the hope that by deferring the costs to some future date, they would be long gone to some other political position before the bill came due. The future has finally arrived and all across the nation the states are standing on the edge of insolvency, most of them so deep in debt that they will never recover, the federal government is printing money by the truckload with nothing to back it up and borrowing trillions of dollars from foreign investors to pay for the over-bloated wages and pensions of public sector union employees while cutting back on health to the elderly, closing our national parks and letting our highways fall into ruin.

Public sector unions are killing the American economy and they are intentionally distorting our system of government to their advantage and our great and lasting detriment. And yet when the governor of the state of Wisconsin sees what amounts to $10.9 billion in unfunded pension liabilities for the public sector union employees, and a projected $3.6 billion deficit for the state in the next few years, and tries to take the necessary steps to halt the hemorrhaging before the patient bleeds completely out and dies, the American news media, the self-appointed “Guardians of American Freedom” attack his efforts with headlines reading, “Wisconsin Governor Attacks Collective Bargaining Rights of Union Workers,” millions of loyal union members across America express disdain for the union busting governor and the legions of liberally inclined sheep wax sympathetically for the civil rights of the poor oppressed Wisconsin union members suffering at the hands of another evil right-wing fascist. The issue in Wisconsin is not the bargaining rights of the over-stuffed government hogs feeding mindlessly away at the tax payer’s expense, the issue in Wisconsin is survival.

I did not intend for this posting to reach such a gargantuan proportion and I will admit that when I was back at the mid-way point I edited out ten paragraphs regarding the history of the labor movement’s affiliation with the Democratic Party in the attempt to post something a bit more concise than what I ended up with. My failure is obvious. I will leave this dissertation with a few parting thoughts before I get fired up and take off on another tangent.

The freedom, liberty and prosperity we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America is the result of the hard work, dedication and sacrifices made by the millions of Americans who came before us. People who were willing to think and act for the advancement of something that was far more important and vital than their own personal needs and desires, and people who had the discipline to see beyond their own self-interest a future that was far grander than anything they could accomplish alone. The efficiency of our form of government is predicated on the ability of individuals to see beyond their own desires and to act for the betterment of all. Our assumption that all men of good character will naturally be inclined in this direction has made us the easy prey of the slick talking self-centered manipulators who would steal our power and our nation out from beneath us and hock it for whatever they could get. If we remain as complacent and self-absorbed as we have been in the recent past then we will soon find ourselves becoming subject to same foreign powers that our current elected representatives now turn to for larger and larger loans, and our freedom and liberty will be lost forever. We will be bound by the chains of slavery for debts incurred by those who thought only of themselves and what they wanted while we were left floundering out of control. Before our nation falls and our freedom becomes a historical footnote in the pages of history we, the American people, must stop the destructive distortion of our system of government by the labor union’s looters and the corrupt politicians who have conspired with them to destroy our nation, our future and the future of all who come after us.

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A few months back, the Los Angeles Times ran an investigative piece about the large number of California teachers that were being paid their full wages for not entering a classroom or doing any sort of teaching because they couldn’t be trusted to do the job they were hired to do, but couldn’t be fired because of the extremely convoluted disciplinary procedure negotiated by the labor union representing them. Some of these teachers had repeatedly made inappropriate advances towards students and other staff members and the evidence of their guilt was substantial, and yet the school administrators could do little in light of a negotiated labor agreement demanding full pay for the obviously guilty party while the malefactor proceeded through a seemingly unending system of appeals, procedural hearings and intentional delays. In one case, a high school teacher that had repeatedly made sexually inappropriate remarks to female students and staff members had pulled in seven years worth of full pay and benefits as he manipulated the union negotiated system intentionally designed to frustrate the administrative disciplinary actions required to protect students from the inappropriate actions of sexual predators. After the tax payers of the state of California had paid this creepy character full pay for seven years of doing nothing, the frustrated school administrators finally took the case to court and managed to convince a judge to override the negotiated labor agreement and allow the termination of his non-productive employment.

According to the investigative article and a few follow-up pieces published, the example described above is not a rare or isolated case. There are nearly two hundred union represented teachers in the state of California who cannot be trusted with students because they have made inappropriate sexual advances towards students, have demonstrated a total lack of professional competence, or they have repeatedly refused to comply with well established guidelines intentionally designed to ensure that California’s students are given the equal opportunity to receive a decent education without being subjected to the inappropriate behavior of classroom tyrants, sexual predators, incompetent fools and the immature outbursts of emotionally unstable adults hired by the state to provide children with basic educational skills. In every case, the union negotiated agreement provides these individuals with an inexhaustible system of lengthy appeals along with full pay and benefits for doing no productive work for the duration of a process that can go on for many years.

More recently, the Los Angeles Times ran yet another investigative article regarding the failure of the California’s Board of Registered Nursing (CBRN) to effectively manage California’s 350,000 registered nurses, especially in individual cases where complaints of egregious misconduct have been filed. The paper’s investigation covered more than 2000 cases filed between 2002 and 2008, in which complaints against registered nurses, resulting from drug abuse, callous negligence, total incompetence, and in some cases violence against patients, were slowly processed by the CBRN while the nurse remained free to practice without restrictions and could even change jobs without their prospective new employer being notified of the disciplinary investigation because the individuals record remained clean until the CBRN reached their final decision on the matter.

According to the statistics maintained by the California Board of Registered Nursing, regardless of the egregious nature of the complaint or the overwhelming amount of documented and substantiated evidence against the nurse in question, the CBRN took an average of three years to complete their investigation and take disciplinary action, and in many cases, that disciplinary action was extremely weak and did not restrict the nurse from practicing in the state. In some cases, nurses that had been disciplined and restricted from practicing by similar licensing boards in other states, were allowed to practice in California where their prior record of abuse was entirely ignored even when it was pointed out to them in subsequent disciplinary investigations. In hundreds of cases the decision of the CBRN resulted in little more than unsupervised probation and in one example, an alcoholic nurse missed 38 scheduled drug screens, tested positive for alcohol five times and was actually fired from one nursing position before the CBRN finally revoked his probation three years later.

The nine-member Board is composed of four members of the public and five registered nurses. The five registered nurses include two direct-patient care nurses, an advanced practice nurse, a nurse administrator, and a nurse educator. Seven of the members are appointed by the Governor and two of the public members are appointed by the Legislature. Each member serves a four-year term and can be re-appointed, although the member cannot serve more than two consecutive terms. The nine appointees making up the California Board of Registered Nursing are political appointees including the five registered nurses. The appointments made are the result of political decisions. Exemplary service as a nurse, a nursing administrator or an educator of nurses is not a requirement for the five registered nurses serving on the board, and as far as the four members of the public are concerned, its impossible to say how they would qualify for a position such as this, however, I would venture to speculate that since all nine members of this board are political appointees the primary qualification for all of them is that they are somehow “connected” to the political party of the politician who appointed them, or they are “connected” to an organization that has funneled great gobs of cash contributions to California’s Democratic Party or to a particularly grateful politician. Furthermore, I would venture to guess that some, if not the majority of registered nurses appointed to the California Board of Registered Nursing are union members and former union officials from the labor organizations that represent the nurses.

Looking at some of the numerous cases of incompetence, it boggles the imagination as to why the CBRN takes so long to act. A nurse at the now defunct Martin Luther King Jr. / Drew Medical Center was suspended for a brief period of time after giving an anti-cancer drug to a meningitis patient, and she was ultimately fired in 2005 for failing to check a critically ill patient’s heart-rate monitor. As it turned out, the nurse faked the recorded vital signs on the patients chart because she didn’t feel like actually going through the hassle of checking the patient’s vital signs. She continued recording her phony entries on the patient’s chart even after the poor guy had died. The hospital fired her and a complaint was filed with the CBRN but they didn’t file a formal accusation against this nurse until September 2007, and they have yet to render a decision on this matter. In the meantime, this nurse’s record remains clean and it is entirely possible that she has found employment as a registered nurse in the state pending the final decision. Ultimately, Martin Luther King Jr. / Drew Medical Center was closed as a result of numerous incidents involving incompetent, negligent and sometimes down-right malicious nurses, and the case that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when an emergency room nurse at the hospital ignored the agonizing screams of a 43 year old woman who writhed on the floor for a full 45 minutes before dying of a perforated bowel. The nurse responsible for this woman’s death was ultimately terminated and she immediately, but unsuccessfully, sued the county for defamation and wrongful termination. Up to this point in time she has never been contacted by the CBRN, her record remains clean and she is free to work as a registered nurse at any hospital willing to hire her.

Excellent teachers, like highly skilled and compassionate nurses are a blessing to every life they touch. There are talented educators with the wisdom, patience and talent to identify and inspire the budding capacity of future writers, engineers, doctors, artists, scientists and mathematicians in the midst of irrepressible pranksters, juvenile delinquents and slackers populating America’s classrooms. In most cases the highly successful adults, the greatest contributors to modern society, the leading innovators in every field of human endeavor can look back over their early years and quickly identify the one person who, magically saw through the youthful impulsiveness and identified a talent worth the effort of inspiration. Educators like this do not regard teaching as an occupation; they view what they do as a calling. They derive the sort of deep satisfaction from their work that can only be found by those who do what they love to do most. The wages, the benefits, the occupational security and the opportunities for advancement did not influence their decision to become teachers. They were drawn to their chosen field because that is where they are most talented and the expression of that talent is where they find their deepest satisfaction in life.

The most highly skilled and compassionate nurses, like excellent and dedicated teachers, stand out amidst the seemingly chaotic activities endured by hospital patients across this nation like sainted angels of mercy. Their dedicated vigilance and the depth of their compassion for the sick, the suffering and the dying patients they serve is an expression of their love and concern for others. Their demonstrated excellence is not the result of the wages and benefits they receive for their work but stems from their innermost personal desire and dedication to provide care and support for those in need. The satisfaction they derive from the high quality care they provide for their patients is the primary motivating factor behind their choice of careers. The talent, the concern, the patience, the love and compassion they feel for others is the compelling force that calls them to a field of endeavor where those characteristics are most useful and appreciated.

The influence of labor unions on teachers and nurses has significantly degraded this nation’s educational and health care systems. Labor organizations hold that all workers are equal according to classification and the only differentiating factor allowable is the amount of time that each worker has spent on the job. Talent and skill are of no particular consequence in the perspective of union leadership because all union members are considered equal according to their occupational classification. The laziest and least talented, but more senior member of a union is given preferential consideration over the most highly skilled, compassionate and truly dedicated but junior employee. Natural talent, the desire to develop excellence in one’s chosen field and performance above and beyond the minimum requirements of the employer are regarded as being questionably suspicious, and even detrimental to the working environment of a union represented workforce and well-talented, dedicated “over-achievers” often find themselves being subject to harassment by their union peers, and in some cases subjected to disciplinary action by their union leaders for their effort to provide more than the negotiated minimum requirements of their position.

While I can only speak from my own personal experience as a long term private sector union member as well as my experience as a financial officer, executive board member and president of what used to be one of California’s largest local unions, I know that there is little difference between the way private and public sector unions operate and how their officers think. The national and international organizations that the local unions are affiliated with provide the same level of service, advice and political propaganda regardless of whether the members of any given local are working in the private or the public sector. As far as the national and international labor union leadership is concerned, the only thing that really matters is the monthly per capita checks rolling into their treasury and the amount of political power they can purchase with that money. The inherent philosophy of all labor organizations holds that the sole motivating factor for all workers is money and benefits. This is the universally accepted fact of life by which all labor organizations operate without regard for the occupation of those they represent. It is a common belief held by the labor representatives of unionized janitors, truck drivers, laborers, carpenters, electricians, teachers, nurses, social service workers, and any other union represented occupation you can think of. The commonly held belief of all labor organizations is that people work for money and benefits alone and any satisfaction they might derive from doing a job well is inconsequential, probably delusional, and certainly is not appreciated by the company the worker is employed by. The relationship between a labor union and the company whose employees they represent is an adversarial relationship. In order to maintain the appearance of providing beneficial representation to their members, union leaders must constantly struggle to increase the compensation of its members and minimize the company’s efforts to weed out and discipline union members who fail to perform effectively or meet the minimum requirements of their job classification. The successful defense of non-performers slowly erodes the overall productivity of the represented workforce and each successful defense gradually establishes new precedents that subsequently undermine the employer’s ability to establish minimum requirements expected for any given job classification. Historically, most labor organizations discourage the company’s efforts to recognize exemplary performance of union represented employees. Meritorious service awards undermine the union’s philosophy that all workers are equal and every effort is made to restrict such awards because they are viewed as an attempt to undermine the solidarity of the union membership.

In a union represented workplace there is little motivation to excel and there is little encouragement for an individual who feels called to perform above and beyond the minimum requirements of any given job. The only satisfaction considered acceptable is derived from the union negotiated compensation received on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and anyone who bucks the system by striving for excellence, overachieving, or striving to perform at a higher level than what is required is viewed with disdain by their peers. The decline of this nation’s educational system, like the decline of American health care began with the first negotiated union contract in those institutions and has continued to the current sorry state of both. Few individuals become teachers or nurses today because they feel compelled to satisfy their inner drive to selflessly serve others. With few exceptions the primary motivating factor for choosing to become a teacher or a nurse is the money and lucrative benefit packages made possible by union negotiated contracts. The rare exceptions find little satisfaction in a union environment and normally move on to non-represented private facilities where they can find fulfillment without the interference and restrictions commonly associated with union representation. This fact is most evident particularly in field of education where small private schools consistently provide a higher level of education and maintain a significantly better record of academic achievement among their students than any of the larger, much better funded, public schools that are staffed entirely by union represented teachers. Most of California’s state budget is funneled into the state’s union dominated educational system, and that system has proved itself to be a total disaster. The drop-out rate among California’s public high school students is outrageously high and many of the graduating students lack the basic reading and math skills that were expected of third grade students fifty years ago. Private and parochial schools in California are typically staffed with non-represented teachers, Their efforts are not subsidized by the state government and their resources are severely limited in comparison, but their overall drop-out rate is minute in comparison and the academic achievement of their students far exceeds anything accomplished by their union dominated counterparts.

The field of nursing is no different. Hospitals that have managed to fend off the organizing efforts of labor unions consistently demonstrate better records and higher quality care than their unionized counterparts. Nurses working in an at-will environment meet or exceed the demands of their job with far more consistency than represented nurses working under the protection of a labor organization that will bail them out when their demonstrated incompetence or laziness becomes a problem for management and the patients they were hired to serve. In a non-represented workplace a nurse can perform work above and beyond the expected norm and achieve the acknowledgement and appreciation of management for meritorious service. This directly translates into a better level of care provided to the patients, and the reputation of the hospital is enhanced in the community they serve.

It is easy to understand why the owner of a company or the board of directors for any corporation would resist the attempts of union organizers bent on forcing them into a position of collective bargaining. Union jobs typically pay higher than non-union jobs and the benefits are normally better than those of their non-union counterparts, however, labor/management relations are always adversarial. On the average, the “at-will” employees of non-union shops are far more productive than union represented employees. “At-will” employees hire on to a company with the agreement to perform the work demanded by their employer and to do so with an expected level of proficiency, and if the employee fails to live up to the expectations of management he or she can easily be terminated, while union represented employees can perform below the expected level of proficiency and turn to the union for protection against management’s attempts to bring disciplinary action against them. Discipline in Union represented workplaces can become a very convoluted, long and drawn out process; terminations of employment are often subject to arbitration, and in many cases reversed by arbiters with a favorable bent towards collective bargaining groups. Attempted disciplinary actions can become quite costly for management and most companies facing this sort of problem on a regular basis are forced into the position of having to retain a legal staff to deal with such matters. Union organizers are perceived as a major threat to any company’s profit margin because the cost of dealing with a represented workforce can be very expensive. Unions have a place in the American workplace, especially in company’s that hire large numbers of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, skilled tradesmen and high level journeymen workers who are very knowledgeable in their field of expertise but otherwise somewhat limited in their level of academic achievement and have no or little experience with employment law and even less knowledge of their rights as employees. Public school teachers, college professors and other educational workers, health care workers such as registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, therapists, and public service workers commonly have the benefit of a higher level of academic achievement and the educational capacity to understand some measure of labor law and their rights as employees. The positions they are hired to fill are positions of trust involving children and individuals with medical problems in need of assistance. In the public sector the union represented employee’s wages and benefits are paid by the tax payers who have little or no say in the negotiation of these union members’s working agreements and negotiated benefits despite the fact that their wages and pension benefits pose a burden to the taxpayers. As a political force, the power of federal and state government workers is second to none, and when you consider the fact that the unionized government employees and the private sector union members have the same agenda, support the same politicians and lobby for and against the same legislation in complete harmony, you can begin to understand the significant hold these special interest groups have on our nation and how they have managed to get legislation passed that greatly benefits them but has a disastrously adverse impact on the citizens of the United States and on this nation as a whole.

Organized labor is pouring billions of dollars every year into state and federal elections and into lobbying efforts across the nation. More than 95% of that money is going straight into the coffers of the Democratic Party, Democratic politicians and into the treasuries of Democrat controlled organizations advocating the liberal agenda. No corporation or group of corporations can match the vast amount of money poured into government by the labor unions. The demands the labor unions place on the state and federal elected representatives of the people take precedence over the will of the American people and the irreversible collapse of the American economy will be the inevitable result of our elected officials refusal to stand firm against the widespread corruption at all levels of American government resulting from organized labor’s heavy handed influence.

Kaiser Steel, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Martin Luther King Jr. / Drew Medical Center, and many other formerly great companies, corporations and American businesses have been victimized virtually out of existence by the labor unions representing their employees. Millions of people have been put out of work; the lives of millions of American families have been irreparably damaged forever as a result of union greed. The union controlled Democratic Party now dominating the American government is trying to convince the American people that the best way to solve our current economic crisis is by spending more tax dollars, growing the size of government and making it easier for labor unions to force American workers into labor unions against their will by passing the Employee Free Choice Act and eliminating the worker’s right to cast a ballot in privacy when faced with union representation.

Admittedly, apathy may be the primary characteristic of most Americans when it comes to politics and government and nothing I say here is likely to change that fact, but union member or not, when the economic situation in this nation gets to the point where your over-inflated union paycheck won’t even buy you a loaf of bread and the starving people in this nation’s large metropolitan areas begin to riot and it is clearly too late to do anything to reverse the current insanity, you might want to take a second to remember the words written here.

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“The compromise package of $789 billion will create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years.”
SOURCE: Statement contained in the February 17th, 2009, White House press briefing

“Payroll employment declined by 598,000 in January, bringing the total job loss since the recession began in December 2007 to 3.6 million. This is the largest 13-month job loss since the payroll employment series began in 1939.”
SOURCE: The Press Office Statement on January Employment Numbers from Christina D. Romer, Chair, President’s Council of Economic Advisers

“Today we learned that our economy lost another 651,000 jobs in February, bringing the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent. 4.4 million Americans have now lost their jobs since this recession began.”
SOURCE: The Press Office Statement by the Secretary Of Labor Regarding the Monthly Employment Situation Report, by Secretary Hilda L. Solis

The source of the information given below comes from the monthly report on economic indicators for April, 2009. This report was prepared for the 111th U.S. Congress by the Joint Economic Committee by the Council of Economic Advisers. For the sake of comparison I have thrown in the last two months of the Bush Administration and it should be noted that the report shows that when Bush first entered office the unemployment rate was at 4.7 and grew to an overall increase of 2.5 in a slow and gradual increase spread out across his two terms of office to a high of 7.2 indicated for December 2008 as shown below. Since Obama first entered office in January, 2009 the unemployment rate has shot up from 7.6 to 8.9 indicating a 1.3 overall increase in a brief period of les than four months. If the unemployment rate continues to accelerate at a rate of 1.3% every quarter over the maximum two terms of office than Obama can serve, we can expect that, by the time he leaves office, the unemployment rate in the United States will be somewhere around 46.1% and nearly half the population of the country will be without jobs.

Bush Administration
In November 2008, there were 10,476,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 6.8 In December 2008, there were 11,108,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 7.2

Obama Administration
In January 2009, there were 11,616,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 7.6
In February 2009, there were 12,467,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 8.2
In March 2009, there were 13,161,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 8.5
In April 2009, there were 13,724,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 8.9

The reports from the Joint Economic Committee by the Council of Economic Advisers for June have not been released but the current unemployment rate has been approximated at 10.5%. The simple fact is that nobody cares who is at fault for any of this, the American president does not create jobs, they are created by business and a healthy business climate creates more jobs than political rhetoric. When the government attacks large corporations and big businesses they are attacking the American people who depend on large corporations and big businesses for employment and income. When the government does not enforce border security they allow illegal aliens to come here and take jobs needed by the American people. Immigration enforcement is not discrimination, its law enforcement and enforcing the laws that protect American citizens is a benefit to all of us as well as to the nation.

In case there is someone out there who isn’t aware of it, George Bush is no longer the President of the U.S., the responsibility for the state of this nation’s affairs now rests with Barack Obama, so he should quit blaming Bush and get his act together, or shut up and get out of the way so somebody else can fix the problems correctly.

“We have to make sure that there’s a verification system to find out whether somebody is legally able to work here or not. But we have to make sure that that verification system does not discriminate just because you’ve got a Hispanic last name”
Barack Obama at Costa Mesa Town Hall meeting – Costa Mesa, California
March 18, 2009

Barack Obama has consistently harped about job creation during his numerous speeches, but while he is talking the number of America’s legal residents getting laid off increases dramatically and the number of illegal aliens employed by American companies continues to climb. Obama has repeatedly stated that securing the nation’s borders is an important priority and he has repeatedly promised to increase the use of the E-Verify program to identify and punish employers hiring illegal aliens. If he actually did as he has repeatedly promised the companies now hiring illegal aliens would decrease and the number of jobs available to the legal residents of this country would increase. The unemployed legal residents of this nation are becoming desperate. They cannot pay their bills or feed their families and increasing numbers are being forced out of their homes by foreclosure. American citizens with advanced academic degrees, individuals qualified for positions with law firms, and graduates with a Master’s degree and PhD’s are jumping at the opportunity to fill low-paying positions as secretaries, analysts, retail sales and low-skilled laborers. Unfortunately the opportunity for them to fill even the low end jobs are limited because Obama has put off the full implementation of the E-Verify program four times already and there is no telling if it will ever be fully implemented. Furthermore, with the U.S. Congress becoming more and more vocal about immigration reform and amnesty, the full implementation of the E-Verify program might end up getting dumped altogether as congress legitimizes the approximate 20 million illegal aliens now in this country and reforms out current immigration laws to allow for then next 20 million behind them.

Currently the E-Verify program is the only tool available. It may not be perfect but it does work very well and the ridiculously small numbers of errors made are avoidable and represent a small problem that is well worth the cost of making the jobs now taken by this nation’s 20 million illegal aliens, available to American citizens now facing financial disaster. The program should be immediately implemented nationwide and made mandatory for every company regardless of size. Data errors are not systematic efforts to discriminate, they are data errors, plain and simple, the computers don’t know what color a person might be, it only knows that the data doesn’t jive and it reports the facts based on the information fed into it. Further delay is unacceptable and as Obama has been known to say in the past, “We can’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.” The E-Verify program works – implement it and fix the little problems later.

The United States government was designed as a form of government whose authority comes from the American people it serves, however, instead of serving the best interests of the American people our Washington DC politicians are serving their own agenda and the beneficiary of what little they do is the highest bidder among the special interest groups filling their campaign treasuries.

Every fractional graduation of the broadcast spectrum, whether it be radio, television, satellite, cable or microwave is controlled by one or agencies of the United States Government. Beyond the Internet, every aspect of public communication is subject to government regulation, permitting requirements and the ever increasing pressure of censors who are all to willing to overlook pornography but are highly sensitive to anything that might be even remotely considered as being politically incorrect as defined by the cognoscenti of modern liberal orthodoxy. The American people are informed only to the degree and nature deemed appropriate while sweeping changes, legislative actions, foreign policy modifications and trade deals are proposed, debated, rejected, passed, implemented and modified in countless ways behind the secrecy of closed doors and we the people, the very people from whom our government derives its authority to act, are told nothing and remain largely ignorant. The primary pursuit of government officials in the United States today is to keep the American people entertained and distracted by a never-ending supply of extravagant “vitally important” issues while our formerly inalienable rights and freedoms are systematically stripped away, the free market democracy is dismantled and the entire system of government it transformed into a socialist tyranny capable of controlling every aspect of modern life. It is evidently the determination of the controlling power that the best way to achieve that ultimate goal is to make life in America so difficult that the American people willingly welcome any proposal that offers the slightest degree of hope for beneficial change. Informed people will resist changes to ease government inflicted hardships and would fight to change the government officials responsible for their suffering. Uniformed people will tend to see their suffering as the result of circumstances beyond their control and beyond the control of their government. They will be more inclined to accept any hope offered even if that hope is false and the change brings on greater adversity.

Immigration reform and amnesty are being sold by the current crop of politicians as an economic and moral necessity, the only viable solution to a pressing problem of great importance to the American people. The actual problem is the creation of a U.S. government whose refusal to enforce the immigration laws that were enacted to protect our nation from being inundated with illiterate, criminally inclined, free-loaders with few redeeming values has allowed more than 20 million illegal invaders the ability to come here, take our jobs, purchase the homes we are being forced out of and victimize the American people who are easy prey to foreign predators. The government’s proposed solution is to legalize the presence of these invaders and make it easier for others like them to enter the country and we are being told by most politicians and every newspaper and television new show that it is the right and moral thing to do, and as American, it is our obligation. The fact that it will increase every legal resident’s tax burden, sharply increase the crime rate and further erode the American way of life is not a subject that we will hear much, if anything, about. Those facts are entirely evident and yet that information is not being relayed to the American people because it might muddy the water and make the government’s goal harder to attain.

The union officials, the Parent Teacher Associations and all the other special interest groups out there are fighting for political power in Washington DC, they are not fighting for you. In the short term you might gain some small benefit but in the long term you lose everything because you’re not thinking about the long term consequences of the short term solutions they offer. When you lose your job, your kids are going hungry and the U.S. Marshalls are nailing an eviction notice to your front door, the union won’t be there to help you and the PTA won’t be rushing to your side. The government will do nothing for you when your foreclosed home is sold off to some illegal alien for less than half what you paid for it and you will be lucky to have a shopping cart to push your stuff around in if you have anything left at all. Believe it or not, that is all part of the grand plan that you voted for when you bought into “Change” without asking for details.

Wake up America! Pull your head out of your ass and look around you. Instead of sitting on that sway-backed couch staring at the simple-minded garbage the television broadcast networks are using to deaden your brains get up and go outside, drive to the drugstore, the market, count the people who pay for their food with the government subsidized allowance cards that you don’t qualify for, and all else, look at what is going on around you. Go sit in an emergency room some Friday night and see who comes through the door to get stiched up without any insurance. Go drive through the slums and see for yourself who lives there. You should be interested enough to find out since you are paying for most of them to be here. Quit accepting lies and start demanding the truth in every minute detail. Go outside and take a hard look at what the most powerful nation the planet has ever known has become, and consider what it could be if you quit paying attention to the nightly propaganda broadcasts of government sponsored lies and actually started thinking about the consequences of the repeatedly voting for the same bunch of self-serving jackasses you’ve already voted for in the past. Instead of letting other people tell you what to think based on their agenda and the political needs of whoever they represent, try thinking about the implications for you, your family, your future, the future of your children and your nation. Instead of voting for everyone listed on the union leaflet or the PTA circular, vote against them, because they are the candidates that have got us to where we are, and they are the future politicians who will deliver us to the Hell that the future holds in store for you and your kids. Think for yourself, it’s not all that painful, throw a brick through the television screen and chuck it in the trash where it belongs; you might save yourself a ton of grief in the process.

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In the effort to maintain some semblance of awareness regarding current events, the diverse political perspectives of numerous political parties operating within the U.S., and to closely follow the American news media’s increasing attempts to influence the public perception of political events and personalities, I subscribe to countless newsletters and regularly check the updated contents of an entire legion of web sites maintained by news agencies, political parties, special interest groups and a few hundred syndicated RSS feeds coming out of news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers. One of the many email newsletters I receive, on a near daily basis comes from GOPUSA, and one of the items I recently received as a result of their numerous emails was an advertisement paid for by a group called the “Pray in Jesus Name Project.” That advertisement, which is the topic of this posting, contains the allegation that the Obama administration seized and burned the privately owned Bibles of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

To the best of my ability I have scoured the net investigating this allegation and I have not found anything to substantiate most of the claims made. The Bibles were printed by an American evangelical group, they were shipped to an American soldier serving in Afghanistan with the intention that he or his fellow soldiers pass them on to the local residents. An American military Chaplin explained to these soldiers that the U.S. Central Command’s General Order Number 1 prohibits proselytizing the Afghan people for conversion to Christianity. The obvious justification for this prohibition is to avoid outraging the religious sensibilities of the local inhabitants well known for their hysterical tendencies in response to real or imagined insults of a religious nature. Furthermore, the laws of Afghanistan are such that a Muslim’s conversion to Christianity is a crime punishable by death. Considering the facts, the U.S. Military, caught up in a war effort that is entirely controlled by politically correct Washington liberals that have denied all along that the root problem of Middle Eastern terrorists is the religion of Islam, the U.S. Military commanders obviously made the wisest decision possible and confiscated the translated Bibles from the soldiers before they could be handed out.

The one pertinent fact not disclosed by the individual who wrote the “Pray in Jesus Name Project” advertisement about this incident is that the entire thing was over and done with prior to the end of George W. Bush’s final day in office as U.S. President. It logically follows that Barack Obama had nothing to do with the matter when it happened. Furthermore, as much as I enjoy poking holes in Barack Obama’s numerous lies, conscious omissions of the truth and his blatant incompetence as the leader of the greatest nation on Earth, in this particular instance, I can find no evidence of his involvement. If there is evidence of Obama’s involvement in this incident I can’t find it and if anyone out there knows of anything that can be independently substantiated to prove otherwise, please contact me and I will update this posting accordingly, but until that point in time, I have concluded the story is baloney.

With that conclusion being stated, I must add that it is my firm conviction that Obama is a fake, a scoundrel of the worse sort and ultimately that he is the enemy of the American people, our freedom and our liberty, however, if I and other individuals, similarly convinced of the nefarious agenda of Barack Hussein Obama, do not maintain the highest standard of credibility possible, then we become just as bad as he is, and by the dishonest acts and words of his opponents Barack Obama and the liberal’s socialist agenda is enhanced. The last thing we should be doing is furthering the goals of the liberal socialists by destroying our own credibility.

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The National Research Council has estimated that immigrant households create a net fiscal burden on all levels of government of $20.2 billion annually and that the average immigrant to this country will continue to be a drain on the American economy for the first 22 years after his or her arrival. Furthermore, the earning level of an immigrant’s children will remain so low that they will not be able to pay back the burden imposed by their parent’s first 22 years of government subsidized existence in this country for another eighteen years. Simply put, each immigrant represents 40 years of tax burden for every working citizen in the United States.

Immigrants (legal and illegal) have repeatedly and substantially proven to be a major financial drain on our Medicare system, government subsidized food assistance programs, state and federal prison/court systems, and the American educational systems at every conceivable level. Furthermore, the astronomical amount of state and federal money futilely poured into half-hearted and entirely incompetent immigration enforcement programs was not included in the National Research Council’s estimate of the financial impact of immigrants and if it were thrown into the equation it would easily double the amount of the overall burden now being shouldered by the American tax payers.

In my honest opinion the National Research Council has purposely under estimated the true cost of immigration on American tax payers to avoid the outrage that would ensue if the actual financial impact of their presence were known. Financial data collected from a variety of different government web sites indicate a much larger impact than the National Research Council is willing to admit. While it is a fairly easy matter of adding up the numbers given, in some cases the financial impact is a lot tougher to calculate when no direct expenditures are tracked. For example, how does one go about calculating the financial impact of the more than one million sex crimes committed every year in the United States by illegal aliens, or how does anyone affix a value to the more than 5000 American citizens slaughtered every year in this country, for the most part by illegal aliens driving uninsured cars while drunk out of their minds?

$11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.

$2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

$2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

$12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally.

$17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens.

$3 Million Dollars a day is spent to incarcerate the illegal aliens that make up more than 30% of this nation’s federal prison inmates.

$90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for welfare social services by the American taxpayers.

$200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.

Immigration, and particularly illegal immigration has been having a profoundly adverse financial impact on this nation’s economy for decades and now that the United States of America is gazing into the blood-shot eyes of economic collapse and something has finally got to be done about our sorry state of affairs, the pathetically sorry excuse for a human being that was slapped into the oval office by a majority of America’s most ignorant voters has reached the determination that one of the best ways to save this nation’s tax dollars for their future use by the incoming hordes of illegal aliens is to stop the U.S. government’s financial support for the treatment of American soldiers wounded and disabled while faithfully and patriotically serving their nation’s best interests.

Regardless of whether military service is voluntary or involuntary, the men and women who answer their America’s call to service may be making a selfless personal sacrifice motivated by patriotism, or they may be trying to kick start their lives by learning a useful trade or by earning the miniscule educational benefits that four years of honorable service gets them, but reckless personal abandon, or the desire to spend the remainder of their lives strapped immobile to a hospital gurney does not motivate young people to join the military. Soldiers do not chose to go to war, they play no part in the decision to wage war and if the truth be told, few American soldiers, if given the opportunity would vote for a war when one did not exist. Politicians in Washington D.C. make the decision to wage war, they are the ones who direct our troops into battle around the world, and they are the ones who later tie their hands behind their backs with rules of engagement that our enemies are not compelled to observe as they slaughter our forces and then dash back into their protected mosques or hide behind the crowds of their women and children.

The United States government has a moral obligation to pay for service-connected injuries for the men and women who risked their lives serving this nation and it is irrefutably unconscionable for any two-bit hack politician or phony American president to suggest anything less. Barack Obama’s proposal to have treatment for service-connected injuries charged to the veterans’ private insurance plans is an insult to every man and women that has ever served in this nation’s military. It is an insult to the spouses, the children and the parents of all current and former military members that have been forced to endure the sub-standard wages, the personal sacrifices demanded and the emotional cost of facing potentially traumatic loss in times of combat. The average illegal alien in the United States is receiving more free money from the federal government’s social welfare programs than the average buck private receives in compensation for putting his life in jeopardy on behalf of his nation.

Barack Obama’s proposal is a loud and clear message to all American citizens, both military and non-military, that the United States of America feels no compelling reason to honor any moral obligation it incurs when the funding required to pay that obligation can be used to pay for social welfare programs and other forms of bribery aimed at winning over the support of future Democrats. Barack Hussein Obama is determined that the complete destruction of the United States of America will be his lasting legacy, and in his first four or five months as President, he has made a lot of progress towards that goal.

It will take the American people decades to repair the damage that Obama has done in the last four months alone. How far will the American people let him go before they reach the decision that this make-believe president needs to be flung out of office? If we need to cut costs in this country we should start with the people who are here illegally. By the time we are done cutting there we will find that there is no need to cut anything else except maybe the pay of the traitors sponging off of us all in the U.S. Congress.

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The amount of money borrowed by the United States General Fund amounted to $ 11,297,198,717,200 at approximately 7:30 am (PST) this morning and has grown at a average rate of more than a million dollars every ten seconds. In the time it took to write and review that single sentence, the amount of money borrowed by the United States General Fund increased by $34,984,604.

While some of this U.S. debt is purchased by the nation of Japan to cover its trade surplus, the majority of the money is borrowed from the People’s Republic of China who essentially now holds the title on most of the United States of America.

While Barack Obama is patting himself on the back for cutting $17 billion in wasteful spending and redundant government programs from next year’s budget. The U.S. government’s budget deficit is five times larger than the paltry amount he cut, and with the more than $7 trillion dollars of government spending scheduled since he took office a little more than 100 days ago, even the astronomical amount of the total current budget deficit seems miniscule by comparison.

The United States government, under the direction of the Obama administration, is currently borrowing $46 cents for every $1 dollar spent. Ultimately, as every credit card holder in America can attest, there comes a point in time when the bill comes due and the debt must be repaid. The bill for all of this spending will not be addressed to Barack Obama at the White House, nor will it be addressed to the U.S. Congress in Washington DC. The bill for all of this insane spending is going to be addressed to you and me and every other American citizen, including those who won’t even be born for another thirty to fifty years. Even if the spending by our government stopped entirely at this very moment, the American people would still be paying the cost of the current debt load for the next three or four decades. For an American child born today, this means that his or her great, great, great grandchildren will be on the hook for our nation’s irresponsible spending.

Laughably, Barack Obama has announced his intention of raising taxes on America’s wealthy to pay for a good portion of his spending, but the fact of the matter is that his henchmen could mug every high income earner and wealthy fat-cat in the entire county, leaving them all penniless, stripped naked and bleeding in the streets, and the total accumulated amount gathered from these heists wouldn’t make the slightest dent in the overall growing debt. Significant tax increases for wealthy Americans will have serious repercussions for everyone in this nation and the major impact will not be on the wealthy, but on the poor. The wealthy Americans are the business owners and investors who employ everyone else. When those business owners and investors are forced into insolvency by the planned higher taxes, their businesses and their enterprises become less competitive and less profitable, which translates directly into fewer companies doing business in the U.S. and less people employed. Those who remain employed will be making far less money than they are today. As the common workplace saying goes, “Shit rolls downhill,” and when the government goes after the profits of the business owners, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out who is standing downhill.

Currently, the largest item on the federal budget, the item for which the majority of our tax dollars are now allocated, is social spending under the Departments of Health and Human Services, HUD, and the Department of Agriculture who provides oversight for the food stamp program. The spending on these social service programs is the bread and butter of the Democratic National Party because the number of people who are dependent on social welfare programs in America will soon be larger than the number of people who are not. The people who are not dependent on the government’s social welfare programs are paying the house payments, the rent, the educational costs and the food bills for those enrolled in one or more of these free government hand out programs. Furthermore, the people enrolled in all of those social welfare programs are well aware of who established and maintains the flow of money they are so dependent on, and this social dependents are nearly unanimous in their undying appreciation and support of the Democratic National Party and it’s representative candidates.

As the Obama government grows in size at the expense of this nation’s wealthy investors and successful business owners, support for the Democratic agenda will increase in direct proportion to the increases in unemployment and the dependency on social welfare programs. The Democrats may believe that this road ends at a point where they are firmly entrenched in the seat of U.S. control forever, but the fact of the matter is that the end of this road is where the United States of America, like a shiny new toy, is firmly tucked into the back pocket of the People’s Republic of China.

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Barack Hussein Obama, in his never-ending quest to make former President Bush appear like the biggest monster since Dr. Mengele, released a collection of secret Justice Department documents providing guidance to the CIA on how far it could go to extract information from terrorism suspects. These documents are currently being portrayed by the liberal media as the most detailed account to date of the shockingly horrible “tortures” employed by the CIA against Al Qaeda terrorists in secret prisons around the world. The entire list of these ten despicable torture techniques follows below, and after carefully reading both the documents released as well as the news accounts describing those documents, the only response I can muster is “So what.” I am not particularly upset by any of the techniques described and can truthfully say that if anything about this upsets me then it is the fact that, despite all the liberal caterwauling, the CIA was given the opportunity to squeeze those terrorist scumbags for all they were worth and these are the worst “torture” techniques they could come up with. Other than the mild form of water boarding practiced, there is nothing in the list below that was not routinely practiced on American military recruits back when drill instructors were still allowed to shape worthless hunks of human flesh into American soldiers capable of surviving the combat situations they might encounter around the globe. I would swear that the last four items on the list were taken directly from my own mother’s creative techniques for responsible parenting, and while she was not strong enough to “wall” any of her three sons, my dad had that technique down to a fine art even if he did neglect the part about selecting flexible walls. He used my oldest brother to begin the expansion our dining room one afternoon and that old lathe and plaster wall didn’t flex a bit when my brother’s 250 pound body failed to bounce and the plaster came tumbling down. Oddly enough, I don’t remember thinking that torture techniques were being used right in front of me at the time, but then again, my views on torture tend to be somewhat more extreme than mere physical discomfort.

Water Boarding – Everybody knows what water boarding is by now but the practice as it was used in these instances was fairly mild (I could say it was sort of a “watered down” version), this was limited to twenty minute sessions.

Stress Positions – Forcing the individual to sit on the floor with legs straight out and arms extended in front with palms up for extended periods

Walling – The individual is physically bounced off a flexible wall made of plywood, neck protection is provided

Sleep Deprivation – Keeping the individual awake for prolonged periods via noise, lights and so on.

Cramped Confinement – Confinement in a dark box that is just large enough to allow the individual to sit down.

Insects – See above and add a bug such as a caterpillar or cockroach

Wall Standing – Forcing the individual to stand facing a wall, similar to being put in a corner

Facial Slap – The standard smack upside the head with an open hand

Attention Grasp – Grasping the individual’s shoulders with both hands in a quick manner so as to get their attention

Facial Hold – Grasping the individuals head with both hands to fix their focus on the interrogator

Barack Hussein Obama may think that by exposing these practices he has ended a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” but in my opinion the man is either entirely naive or expertly divisive and I tend to lean toward the latter a lot more than the former. It is becoming more and more apparent as time goes on that Barack Hussein Obama is a clueless jackass and his only hope for re-election in 2012 hinges on his ability to continuously smear every possible or potential opponent between now and then.

If he really wanted to witness water boarding as a form of torture he should have asked the Mexican president to have the federal cops in Tijuana demonstrate their water boarding technique. They us a bottle of carbonated soda thoroughly shaken and inserted directly into the nostril as a method for expand the mind of their interrogation subjects, and when they are in a real hurry, they do it while the poor soul has a pair of jumper cables hooked to his balls and a maniac cranks wildly on the generator. The federal cops in Tijuana know that if a little bit is good then a lot must be better so they aren’t too concerned with “sessions” and are happy to keep this sort of party going on for hours and hours and hours.

Going by the list that was disclosed, it is safe to say that the CIA did not practice torture on terrorists. They may have made them feel extremely uncomfortable but they didn’t actually torture them. Torture is having wooden wedges hammered up under your fingernails or toenails until they pop off. Torture is having the skin flayed off of your body before being rolled in salt. Torture is having your foot cooked to a black crisp by some nut holding a propane torch to it, or having your head slowly smashed in a large vise. Being forced to stand in corner facing a wall for a few hours is not torture and neither is getting smacked upside the head by a open hand. You might not like it happening to you but it is far from being torture, and any claim that such actions are torture is well beyond the normally acceptable level of stupidity.

Personally I think that listening to Obama lie on public television is torture but it is slightly less torturous than having to listen to Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid and I would gladly allow myself to be subjected to CIA water boarding rather than sitting though a couple of hours of Barbara Boxer. What the CIA did to terrorists while they were interrogating them is not shocking, surprising or shameful to anyone other than a self-serving liberal twit with a serious axe to grind and I hope they get over it soon because I am sick of listening to their whining.

Honestly, if Obama wants transperency why doesn’t he start by releasing a copy of his Kenyan birth certificate?

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The Border Patrol agents working out of multiple stations in Arizona’s Tucson Sector are reporting a significant increase in the apprehension of illegal aliens with criminal records and more alarmingly, most of the illegal aliens they’ve apprehended with prior U.S. criminal records are sex offenders, including a Mexican national with a warrant outstanding in California for willful cruelty of a child and sexual intercourse with a minor and a Honduran national taken into custody on Sunday who was previously convicted of being a sex offender in Georgia. There was also an illegal alien captured last Saturday who had been convicted in California for kidnapping and sexual assault and another illegal caught the same day was found to have prior convictions for rape and assault in Nebraska and Washington. Earlier in the week six illegal aliens crossing the border were picked up in Cochise County and all were found to have prior arrest records for sexual offenses including one Mexican national who had been previously charged in the state of Florida with sexual assault of a minor. A spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector was quoted as saying that many of the illegal aliens now trying to enter the United States are connected to Mexican gangs and are not the sort of people normally crossing the border in search of U.S. employment. The Border Patrol agent stated that, “There’s a whole new element coming across the border.”

The Washington Times reported that the two largest and most violent drug cartels in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and “Los Zetas”, the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel, are negotiating a merger to combine their force of nearly 100,000 heavily-equipped ground troops. This drug cartel merger would give the Mexican drug gangs an armed force that is nearly as large as the entire Mexican Army and much better equipped. It is common knowledge that the Sinaloa Cartel has successfully infiltrated all levels of Mexico’s federal government, and U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has released several US intelligence reports stating that the drug cartel situation in Mexico currently presents a worse threat to American national security than Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Meanwhile, Mexican President Calderon admitted that his government is essentially powerless against the drug cartels and that without a U.S. rescue operation to save them, the nation of Mexico will soon be a full fledged narco-state entirely taken over by the drug gangs. Unfortunately, at the same time, Calderon blames the U.S. for the situation in Mexico and was quoted as saying that the primary cause of Mexico’s problem was the result of having “the world’s biggest consumer of illegal drugs” as the country neighbor. Furthermore, Calderon demanded that the U.S. make the border safe and open for trade and workers but closed to illegal drugs, weapons, and money trafficking. This is just a bit unrealistic and I seriously doubt that even the masterful leadership of Barack the Omnipotent can figure out a way to have it both ways at once.

American law enforcement agencies have long reported that Mexico’s drug cartel thugs easily hide in plain sight once they enter the countless U.S. migrant communities overflowing with illegal aliens. Many of them are already here in the U.S., and while their presence is well known to the illegal aliens living in these communities, they are not reported to American law enforcement personnel and they do as they please with complete impunity because the illegal aliens will not do anything about it. As long as they avoid the attention of the American police these criminals are free to prey on the illegal aliens around them and large concentrations of drug cartel gang members have been reported in Houston, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia, throughout the state of Arizona and all over Southern California. Jack Killorin, the head of Atlanta Office of National Drug Control Policy’s Task Force, stated that “The same folks who are rolling heads in the streets of Ciudad Juarez are operating in Atlanta.”

There is little doubt that what Mexican President Calderon says is true. The Mexican drug cartels buy their highly sophisticated equipment and their superior armament in the United States. The billions of dollars they pull in every year in drug sales, the funds that subsidize their war against the Mexican government, comes primarily from the sale of illegal drugs to American citizens inside the United States. There is no doubt that American money finances the Mexican drug cartel’s war. There is also little doubt that, as long as the border between Mexico and the U.S. remains in it’s present porous state, the drug money, the sophisticated equipment and the superior armament will continue to flow from the United States into Mexico where it can be used by the drug gangs to wage war against the Mexican government and the increasingly serious threat to U.S. national security will continue to grow unabated.

What Mexican President Calderon doesn’t seem to realize is that the Democratic Party currently controlling all branches of the American government are more concerned with maintaining their own control than they are with the desperate needs of the besieged Mexican government. Maintaining control is the number one priority of the current U.S. administration and everything else takes a back seat to it, including national security and the welfare or safety of American citizens. The hordes of Mexican Nationals flocking over our southern border, including the cartel gangsters, the pedophiles, the sex offenders and the Middle Eastern terrorists are viewed by America’s Democratic masters as future Democratic votes and they are not going to do anything that will jeopardize their source of support for future elections. The Mexican government is expendable, and for that matter, the American people are expendable to a Democratic Party that is willing to do whatever it takes to remain in full control of the U.S. government. The drug cartel thugs and the human smugglers bringing illegal aliens into the U.S. are one in the same. As long as there is money to be made and U.S. politicians willing to look the other way for the sake of political expediency and their own self-serving needs, the problem, both Mexico’s and the united States, will continue to grow.

If you believe that the viewpoint stated above is extreme then you should consider the fact that while the Mexican president is pleading for American intervention, even as unrealistic as his demands might be, on Wednesday of this week, Barack Obama renewed his campaign promise to scuttle American immigration laws and encourage further illegal immigration by providing amnesty to the more than 20 million illegal aliens currently in the United States. At the same time his good friend and mentor, the irrepressible San Francisco based douche bag and current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, publically stated that U.S. immigration enforcement efforts were “Un-American,” and that the illegal parasitic invaders who have contributed a large part to this nation’s current economic problem, “are a special people,” and “very patriotic.” The simple fact of the matter is that as long as the United States of American is under the control of simpering political hacks like Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Harry Reid and all the rest of of the self-serving, arrogant, liberal elitists, there will be no effort to control the flow of the illegal invaders, the drugs, the drug cartel thugs, the guns and ammunition or the money that washes back and forth across our border unhindered, and Felipe Calderon may as well give up the fight while he is still alive to do so because, while the politicians in Washington. D.C. might be happy to throw a few bucks his way; they aren’t going to do anything about enforcing the security of the border as long as they see all of those illegal aliens as the source of their future support.

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Like pilgrims flocking into Mecca for the annual Hajj pilgrimage, hordes of California’s guilty white liberals (GWL) aimed their Beamers, their Mercedes and their Cadillac SUVs, and even a few Toyota Prius hybrids at Costa Mesa Wednesday afternoon where they could bask in the blinding radiance of America’ pop-star in chief, Barack the Omnipotent. Gag me with a stick.

While many have linguistically gushed all over themselves at the seemingly miraculous visitation of the blessed one, I haven’t heard anyone ask the question that really begs asking. Costa Mesa is 3000 miles from the focal point of the economic meltdown and even if the state of California is headed to economic Hell in a hand basket of it’s own design, it is far removed from the Washington D.C. boardrooms where tap-dancing lobbyists negotiate with congressional legislators over who get the bigger chunk of pie. Other than a massive boatload of state spending, unrealistic social welfare programs, increasing home foreclosures and the most unfriendly environment in the nation for business owners, there isn’t anything especially important going on in the soon to be bankrupt “Golden” state of California. In short – California is not part of the solution, if anything, the Great Seal of California could be used as a symbol for the entire problem.

Essentially, Barack the Wonderful burned up all of that jet fuel to stand before a massive crowd of adoring worshipers, bask in his own sense of glorious accomplishment, distract attention from the bottom line of the bailout invoice as it rapidly approaches the $10 trillion dollar mark, and drop a few more meaningless comments and empty promises on the American public while his liberal elitist cronies back home finish looting everything of value. Considering the fact that, not so long ago this was irrefutably the richest nation on Earth and it may take awhile to pick it clean, Obama needs to keep his eye on 2012 in the off chance that the Democrats need another four years to complete the job. After all, his genius is campaigning, and that is all the man is really good at. When he steps out from behind the smoke and mirrors resembling his administration the true nature of his government transparency becomes evident and the man disappears like a puff of smoke in a high wind.

Addressing the issue of the $165 million in bonuses snatched up by AIG executives, Obama said, “I know Washington is all in a tizzy and everybody is pointing fingers at each other and saying it’s their fault, the Democrats’ fault, the Republicans’ fault. Listen, I’ll take responsibility. I’m the president.” He smiled at the crowd, and instead of high stepping him to the nearest tree where the rope waited to punish this incompetence, they melted in forgiveness and brushed the whole matter aside as just being a minor snafu on the yellow brick lined road to the big picture in the distance. When you’re talking about a $10 trillion dollar haul, $165 million could be the chump change forgotten between the cushions of the old sofa sent to Goodwill. $165 million dollars is only a lot of money when you compare it to your annual income or the balance in your checking account, but you could drop it onto a $10 trillion dollar pile and not even notice the difference. Obama can afford to dismiss it as insignificant; he can easily take responsibility for it and smile. The goofy liberals can easily smile and forgive him because they haven’t yet been hit with their share of the bill. For a group that is so emotionally overwrought by the mere thought of what this year’s accumulation of greenhouse gases will have on the environment 100 years down the road this may seem fairly inconsistent, but then again, logic has never been the liberal’s primary talent.

On the second day of his California visit he spent some time touring what Southern California Edison calls their electric-vehicle test facility in Pomona. Southern California Edison maintains a fleet of Toyota RAV4s and 20 Ford Escape Hybrid sport utility vehicles that have been converted to electricity. SCE has been dabbling in electric cars for about ten or fifteen years but their efforts have been less than stupendous. After conversion to battery power, the Ford Escape SUVs in their fleet only manage a twenty mile range from their highly toxic and potentially explosive lithium ion battery packs.

During his campaign, Obama promised to put 1 million plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles on US roads by 2015 and today he was impressed by the show put on for him by SCE and announced that the Department of Energy would be launching a $2 billion competitive grant program under the Recovery Act that will spark manufacturers to produce the batteries and parts for electric cars while putting thousands of Americans back to work. If he had of checked his fact beforehand he might have been a little more reserved with his comments. Currently there is only one American battery manufacturer producing lithium-ion batteries and those batteries are made in Asian facilities that are subsidized by Asian governments. The environmental regulations in the United States make it very unlikely that a permit to mass produce lithium-ion batteries here would ever be issued and I seriously doubt that Obama will turn his back on the tree huggers in his own party to get it done. When you get right down to it, $2 billion dollars wouldn’t pay the permitting, licensing and construction costs of one factory. As I said, logic has never been the liberal’s primary talent.

As far as this Californian is concerned, the less time Obama spends fixing this state’s problems the better off we will be. We have enough goofy liberals of our own without him adding to the mix.

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A recent survey by the Pew Research Center indicates that Barack Obama is losing credibility at break neck speed as he fumbles around trying to solve the nation’s economic problems while the stock market plummets toward a black hole, the unemployment rate moves closer to depression era levels and he jettisons campaign promises with faster than a celebrity starlet changes boy friends.

Obama’s job approval rating has dove from 64% in February to 59% this month as more and more American citizens are reaching the obvious conclusion that he simply doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to government administration, politics or anything else. The only area in which Obama seems to be growing is in his disapproval rating, and that has increased nearly twice as much as his approval rating.

This unsurprising decline in Obama’s approval rating is the inevitable result of sending an empty-headed celebrity to do the job of a master-administrator. The American voters disregarded Obama’s lack of experience, background, credibility, integrity and sense of patriotism and they put him in office because he was young, he appeared to be black, and he could talk like the voters thought a president should talk. As it turns out, Obama shot his entire wad during the campaign. We saw everything he had before November, and now that he’s in office, he’s got nothing left to show but the bad ideas of his friends in the Democratic Party.

If the American people wanted Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi as president they could have supported them, endorsed their campaigns and voted for them. That didn’t happen because nobody wanted them or their ideas. Unfortunately, their ideas are all we now have because Obama’s got nothing to offer on his own and he’s depending on them. We couldn’t be in deeper water with an aqualung.

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