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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (77508)	2/15/2010 7:29:06 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Union leaders on the warpath By: Michael Barone Senior Political Analyst 02/11/10 2:31 PM EST Labor unions contributed something like $400 million to Democratic campaigns, and all they got was a lousy T-shirt. Or at least that’s the way they’re feeling these days. The card check bill which would have effectively abolished the secret ballot in unionization elections is going nowhere and, in retrospect, never was going to pass, and certainly did not in the 213 days from the swearing in of Al Franken to the swearing in of Scott Brown when Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate. Their choice for NLRB Chairman, Craig Becker, who has written that the NLRB can abolish the secret ballot without an act of Congress, got only 52 of the needed 60 votes in the Senate, where two Democrats voted against him. Public employee unions did benefit from the one-third of stimulus funds, nearly $300 billion, funneled to the state and local governments which employ their members; but the union leaders don’t seem to be counting that, at least in public. Now, according to Politico, union leaders are threatening to withhold support for Democrats in the 2010 elections. This threat may be a case of making a virtue of necessity: are union members going to be happy with leaders who spend $200 million of their money on elections which don’t seem to be producing much for them? In Wednesday’s Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson echoes union leaders’ complaints and points out that the unions have been stiffed by Democrats before—in 1965, Lyndon Johnson failed to press a heavily Congress to pass their bill outlawiong state right-to-work laws, and in 1979, when a heavily Democratic Congress failed to press a bill making it easier to unionize employers (leading the fight then was a freshman senator named Richard Lugar). Meyerson is a longtime principled advocate of unionization and he seems to write in sorrow as much as anger. He argues that you can’t have a prosperous and egalitarian society without mass unionization. I took a different view in my Examiner column last Sunday. Meyerson ignores many of the points I made, but his column is worth reading as the lament of a true believer. Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (77508)	2/15/2010 11:22:48 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

No Compromise on Enemy Combatants By: Andrew C. McCarthy National Review Online Imagine the Yanks are beating the Mets 12-0 in the eighth inning (I know -- not hard to imagine). Now, imagine if the Mets approach the Yanks and say, “How ’bout we give you a new Gatorade barrel, and we call this thing a draw?” Joe Girardi would laugh them out of the dugout and say, “Hey, you want to forfeit, go ahead and forfeit. Otherwise, get back out on the field and finish getting your brains beat in.” This is how we ought to think about rumors swirling around that the Obama administration is looking for a deal on enemy combatants and that some GOP types are listening. The compromise would be: KSM gets a military commission, but Republicans agree to close Gitmo and bring the combatants to stateside federal prisons. This would be a terrible sell-out of our national security. It would also be unnecessary. The American people strongly support military commissions for enemy combatants -- not for all terrorism cases, but for all unlawful alien enemy operatives who have no right to be tried in our civilian courts and for whom Congress has authorized military commissions. The American people also support holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, a secure, off-shore military facility. U.S. taxpayers have already plunked down over $200 million to turn Gitmo into a state-of-the-art, Geneva Convention-compliant facility that even Obama administration officials concede is first-rate. There is no reason on earth to create a security problem inside our country when we have gone to Herculean lengths to create a perfect location outside our country. The Left’s counter to this is the claim that Gitmo fuels terrorist recruitment. That is absurd, and, as I’ve said before, confuses a pretext with a cause. People in the Islamic world could not care less whether we are detaining Muslim terrorists based on civilian protocols or under the laws of war: They don’t know the difference. The Blind Sheikh’s disciples mass-murdered people in an attempt to extort his release despite the fact that he is in a nice civilian jail after having had his nice civilian trial. What offends many in the umma is that we are holding Muslim terrorists, period. They don’t care where. The only people actually offended by Gitmo are leftists who regard it as a symbol of Bush-style counterterrorism. Those people are projecting their own obsessions onto our enemies. As is too often the case, Republican moderates are itching to placate these ideologues in order to show how they rise above the fray, reach across the aisle, and transcend all this partisan bickering. That is nuts. This is not TARP or a phony stimulus bill. Lives are at stake if we get this wrong. Any compromise here benefits al-Qaeda and harms Americans. Moreover, it would only convince the Left, which does not really take national security to heart, that it should cling to its positions, however unpopular, because there will always be some GOP appeasers who convince themselves that being bipartisan is a virtue that outweighs doing the right thing by the country. We are winning on enemy combatants. We are winning on the fact that they should be treated like war prisoners and tried, if at all, by military commission. We are winning on the fact that they should not be Mirandized but should be detained without trial and interrogated as war prisoners. We are winning on the fact that Gitmo is a fine facility and a far better place to detain and try terrorists than any detention center in the United States. We are winning on these issues not because we are more politically savvy , but because our policies on these matters are the right ones. There is no reason to compromise on this issue. We should tell the president we are delighted he has had the good sense to keep Gitmo open and to refer at least some of the combatants to military commissions. Now it is time for him to announce that the decision to close Gitmo was a mistake, and that it will remain open for the foreseeable future. Now is the time for him to announce that all of the enemy combatants who are tried will be tried by military commissions, as authorized by Congress. If he won’t agree, then fine: Congress should deny the funds to transfer prisoners out of Gitmo, divest the district courts of jurisdiction to try enemy combatants, and dare the president to empty Gitmo by releasing trained jihadists to other countries where they can plot against the United States. He won’t dare. We don’t need to be graceless. There is plenty we can do to make this easier for the president. We can emphasize that he ordered his administration to undertake a thorough study of Gitmo to ensure that it is a top-flight detention camp. We can point out that a good-faith assumption Obama made about closing Gitmo -- namely, that he would get a lot of cooperation from our allies -- turned out not to be true. We can demonstrate that terrorists who’ve been released -- not just by this administration but by the Bush administration -- have gone back to the jihad at an alarming rate. Further, we can note that certain curative measures the Obama administration was banking on, such as the Saudi re-education program, have not worked. Any president would have to adjust to such developments. We can laud the president for acting responsibly in reconsidering his initial decisions about Gitmo after he ordered more troops to Afghanistan, appreciating that any commander-in-chief would want to minimize the flow of trained jihadists joining the battle against our forces. We can note that rather than scrap the military commissions, he made some tweaks to try to improve them. (True, the changes were all either cosmetic or counterproductive, but there’s no reason to dwell on that.) In sum, I’m not suggesting that we humiliate the administration. Obama is going to be president for another three years, and we have to make it as easy as we can for him to do the right things -- which will often go against his instincts. But we don’t have to compromise on the things that actually must be done. No civilian trials for war criminals. No closing Gitmo, and no permitting alien jihadists to enter our country so the courts can order them released. Consider these not negotiable. If the administration won’t accept those terms, then tell the president to keep his Gatorade barrel, get back out on the field, and prepare for his side to get its clock cleaned. — National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad(Encounter Books, 2008). article.nationalreview.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (77508)	2/15/2010 11:40:24 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Excuses, Excuses Michael Ramirez; Investor's Business Daily powerlineblog.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (77508)	2/16/2010 11:57:12 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

** Apparently the MSM isn't enough of a LWE mouthpiece for Prez Obeyme ** Obama Seeks New Social Media Mouthpiece By Joshua Rhett Miller FOXNews.com Help wanted. Must tweet. If you're "passionate about engaging millions" in advancing President Obama's agenda, the commander in chief has a job for you. The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America -- the successor organization to Obama for America -- are seeking a "social networks manager" to oversee Obama's accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. The ideal new hire, according to the official job description, will possess "strong, sharp and personable" writing skills, as well as the ability to craft messages that "move people to act" and managing multiple "complex" projects. Be prepared to lose some sleep: "Ready to work hard; this isn't a 9-5 sort of job," reads another job qualification. Candidates must also be willing to relocate to Washington, and preference will be given to those with experience in electoral campaigns and advocacy or nonprofit organizations. The president's next social network mouthpiece will have his -- or her -- hands full with Obama's 7.5 million-plus Facebook fans, 3.3 million Twitter followers and nearly 2 million MySpace friends. The White House, in contrast, has less than 500,000 Facebook fans. Recent posts to Obama's Facebook page have included well-wishes to Team USA in Vancouver and calls to "support candidates who fight" for health care reform. "An alarming new study shows that U.S. health care spending rose to an estimated $2.5 trillion in 2009 and is projected to nearly double by 2019," a Feb. 10 posting reads. "We can't kick this problem down the road for another decade -- or even another year." The starting salary for the position is unclear, as is the number of applications that have been received since the opening was posted late last week. Several messages to the DNC seeking comment Tuesday were not returned. Mia Cambronero, who currently holds the position, will step down by the end of the month from her "infamous job as 'Barack Obama's twitterer,'" according to an e-mail posted to a listserv. "We're looking for someone to start immediately," the posting read. Attempts to reach Cambronero, whose personal Facebook profile can be found here, were unsuccessful Tuesday. She formerly served as a fellow for the New Organizing Institute, a "progressive advocacy and campaign training program" that was established by the liberal political advocacy group MoveOn.org in November 2005. Cambronero graduated from Georgetown University in 2008, according to her profile. Judging from Cambronero's past, her successor would do well to write lefthanded. foxnews.com