I got an opportunity to watch the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” and it confirmed much of  what I have been saying. Teachers are a national treasure. Teachers’ unions are the new empire of evil. Whoa! That’s harsh. Yes, but not nearly as harsh as flushing thousands of uneducated children into the streets to fend for themselves, when we should be educating them for our future.

The reason I chose the word “evil” is the patent dishonesty the teachers’ unions use to advance their agenda. The steelworkers’ union doesn’t talk about looking out for the steel; they say they are looking out for their members. The United Auto Workers union doesn’t talk about looking out for the cars, they say they are looking out for their members. The Teamsters union doesn’t talk about looking out for the trucks they drive; they say they are looking out for their members. But listen to any pitch from the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers and they are always “fighting for the children.” What utter twaddle. If that is true they should all be horsewhipped for the awful job they are doing. Who are they fighting with? The parents? The taxpayers?  It is a bald faced lie. They are fighting for the teachers and the children be damned.

In New York City, where Mayor Mike Bloomberg has shut down 110 poor performing schools, they are trying a new approach, turning around schools. The experiment would consist of replacing the principal and half the teachers at two schools but keeping the schools and their programs running. Here is the union’s position:

Union leaders might be seen by their rank and file as acquiescing to the replacement of teachers, though those teachers would be entitled to their full salaries and jobs elsewhere in the system. But if those schools were closed, they could be replaced with charter schools, which tend not to be unionized.

That’s the basic union formula, keep incompetent teachers at all costs. They do not want to lose one dollar of union dues and the power that flows from those dues.

In the documentary a bold approach was tried by Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC public schools perhaps the worst school system in the country, where she proposed a merit pay system where teachers could earn as much as $150,000 a year in return for giving up tenure. The union would not even allow it to come up for a vote. Hmmm…merit pay, rewarding teachers for doing a good job, which means actually educating the children, but the union says, NO! We won’t even vote on that. Can we queue the violins and roll one of the union’s commercials about “the children” now, please.

In New York City they finally shut down the “rubber rooms” where teachers accused of misconduct waited, sometimes as long as three years, for an administrative hearing on their case for dismissal. At the time of closing there were 550 teachers in the rubber rooms costing the city $30 million per year. The teachers in the rubber room continued to receive full salary and their benefits grew with the seniority they accumulated while in the rubber rooms. Psst…it’s for the children.

Another expert in the documentary estimated if only the bottom 5%-8% of teachers could be culled from the schools, the progress improvement would soon put the United States back near the top of the world in educational performance. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if after three years on the job a teacher is guaranteed their job for life, that no matter how motivated, they lose their edge. When the going gets tough, instead of doubling their efforts, they can just say, “the hell with it,” I will get paid whether anyone learns or not, and next year I’ll get a raise.

The counter argument, if they were honest enough to make it, is that the unions are fighting to keep teachers’ jobs in a period of high unemployment. But how many uneducated of our youth will be and remain unemployed for much of their life because of failure factories? Why are high tech companies with jobs crying out for more visas for foreign workers? Because our own schools can’t graduate enough people to do these jobs. This is a national disgrace. Imagine if these children, our children, could graduate high school and actually be able to read and write, put together a coherent sentence, and do basic math.

The solution is not the federal government throwing money at the problem. The federal government should get out of the way. It is the teachers’ unions that are the problem. I ask this question to teachers and no one can seem to answer it. Why would a competent and skilled teacher want to link themselves to an incompetent teacher and be sold to a school district as a package? Anyone? Beuller?

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter



Vice President Joe Biden, the man President Barack Obama put in charge of the stimulus spending because, “nobody messes around with Joe,” met with Congressional leaders to talk about the budget for the remainder of this fiscal year. Jingling in his pocket was an additional $6.1 billion in change as all the Democrats had to offer, after the Republicans forced them to agree to $4 billion in cuts to get a two week extension from shutting down the government.

It is not serious, it is even hard to be generous in calling it ridiculous. Why are we in this situation? Because Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid didn’t even bother to put together a budget in their last year in total control of the government. So the Democrats are willing to cut current year expenditures by $10.1 billion while the Republicans put $61 billion in cuts on the table. The Democrats say that is far too drastic. Really? $10.1 billion amounts to 0.28% of federal outlays. Get serious! I have been in many situations in business where the word comes down from the top to find and cut 10% from the budget and do it now. If the federal government was being run like a business that would mean finding $355 billion in cuts and still let the federal government spend 90% of what they originally planned.

The difference is that if the business is up against the wall, they either cut or go out of business. They will cut expenses, sell unneeded assets, or assets that they can get more money for than they can produce themselves. If the government doesn’t cut what will happen? The taxpayers get screwed either way. Either they pay more in taxes or they pay when the economy collapses, but what Obama and Biden think we really need is a faster train to get Joe Biden back and forth to Delaware.

The Democrats say that if we cut the budget it will cost jobs. Even Ben Bernanke in testifying before Congress this week said will slow the economy and cost an estimated 200,000 jobs. Did he use the same model that said if we spend a trillion in stimulus money that the unemployment rate will not rise above 8%? Now, two and a quarter years after the stimulus money was squandered the unemployment rate finally dipped below 9%. It failed. The projections failed, Meanwhile Bernanke keeps printing money and devaluing our currency. It’s time to take a different approach before the government owes more than it is possible to cover the interest on, let alone the principle.

This is a very, very serious problem, that requires serious people to stop playing with half measures and games of chicken around shutting down the government as a political ploy. We keep hearing that the American people don’t want to cut programs, but at the same time the American people know how bad the spending is out of control. That leads me to believe they are not being asked the right questions, but rather the questions a clever pollster formulates to get the response he is looking for.

Real cuts, serious cuts are needed to bring the budget into balance and start shrinking the debt not just the deficit. And it needs to be done now.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

To hear the progressives talk about the public sector unions in Wisconsin and other locales you would think collective bargaining was enshrined in the Bill of Rights. We have a right to bargain collectively. The unions are fighting for their rights. The Bill of Rights was won through the fighting of a bloody revolution. The right for all citizens to vote was won through the passage of an amendment to the Constitution. So, naturally, the right of public sector unions was won through a similar groundswell of popular support, right? No. Actually it was started by one man, fighting for his political life, in the shadow of Tammany Hall.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

President was a champion of organized labor. He was a champion as long as the organizing was done in the private sector. When pushing legislation to make it easier for unions to organize and operate, the public sector was specifically excluded. Here is what Roosevelt said:

“… Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the government. All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations … The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for … officials … to bind the employer … The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives …

“Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people … This obligation is paramount … A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent … to prevent or obstruct … Government … Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government … is unthinkable and intolerable.” — FDR

Roosevelt is considered by progressives to be the greatest president in the history of the United States. But against his admonitions of Roosevelt, we have seen the militant tactics of going to the homes of the governor and other Republican elected officials, to the point where the police had to be called to clear the street. We have seen doctors fraudulently write excuse notes so that union members could continue to draw their pay from the public while not serving the public. We have seen the Hitler signs, the comparisons to Mubarak, and the shouting down of news reporters, such that they have to continue interviews inside of news trucks instead of in the public square. Why do the unions say they are fighting for rights, while doing everything possible to make sure the rights of their opponents to speak freely is drowned out?

Public Sector Organizing

So how did the rush to public sector unions happen? It started in 1958, in New York City. The mayor at the time, Robert Wager who happened to be the son of the Senator who authored the Wagner Act, was running for re-election. Things were going badly for him. All five of the borough Democratic leaders were against him. He needed a bold stroke to turn things around and that stroke involved a pen. He signed an executive order allowing public sector workers to organize. That’s it, one man, one pen, one order and it was done. No debate, no deliberation, no vote of the people or their representatives. 

The public sector workers were thrilled, remember the 1950s were the peak of union membership in this country, and they poured out for Wagner in gratitude. Wagner was reelected and the floodgates were opened. In 1962, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, picked up his pen and signed an executive order allowing federal employees to organize.

So two men, not a groundswell of the American public, wrote two executive orders allowing public sector employees to organize. It seems strange then, that when a politician tries to pass a law to rollback not eliminate their bargainig power, as they will still be allowed to bargain for pay, it is painted as an attack on fundamental American rights. In 1959, Wisconsin passed laws rather than an executive order allowing public sector unions, and now after the public voted in a new legislature and governor they are seeking to modify those laws.

Have the collective bargaining gains over the past fifty years gotten out of control? Ask John E. Nelson, a municipal bus driver in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2009, his salary for driving a bus totaled more than $159,000. Another half dozen bus drivers also earned over six figures. Try to tell the struggling private sector workers who are paying this bus driver that taking away the ability to drive his salary and benefits still higher is grossly unfair.

There are two issues that are really at stake here. Sure the unions have said they will agree to the health and retirement contributions that Governor Walker is asking for in return for backing off on the collective bargaining issue. The two reasons are, the unions will use their clout, through the collection of union dues from all members regardless of their political point of view, to defeat the Republicans and put back in power their Democrat friends. Once accomplished, they will use collective bargaining to restore all of their givebacks, and their grateful Democrat allies will be happy to comply. Next step, raise taxes on everyone in the state, that have chosen to remain in the state, to pay for them.

California will be interesting to watch. Jerry Brown, the last time he was governor, gave public sector unions the ability to organize on his first day in office. He now is dealing with a massive budget problem and has to fix it. What goes around, comes around.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

It seemed an unlikely place. But then so was Gettysburg. If you asked anyone at about the time the Tea Party started if Wisconsin would be a major battleground, I don’t think they would have agreed. But in the last few days, a new Republican governor has taken on the public unions and they have fought back with a vengeance. It is a battle they can little afford to lose.

Wisconsin is facing a budget shortfall this year of $137 million for the current fiscal year and $3.6 billion for next year. Like many states around the country, and the federal government too, there is no time for small steps. The governor wants the public sector unions to pay more for their retirement and medical care and he also wants to end collective bargaining on anything but wages, and those to be increased no more than the Consumer Price Index. In return there will be no layoffs.  The battle lines were drawn.

Let’s be Civil

After Tucson, the main stream media and Democrats were all over the airwaves admonishing us (conservatives) to be civil. My Congressman came to my daughter’s high school to give a ten minute lecture on civility and how we have to be nicer to politicians who are trying to do their job. This is the same Congressman who ran for reelection primarily by calling his opponent a liar, and running from his own record. Very civil.

There were the numerous references to Hitler (just what is it with the left’s Hitler fetish anyway?). Posters with the Hitler moustache painted on Governor Walker, a picture of the governor with crosshairs drawn over his face. So much for the outrage after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

Fakin’ It

Many teachers called in “sick” so that they could abandon their students and classrooms to protest in Madison against the governor’s proposals. Since everyone knows that virtually all of these sudden “illnesses” are bogus, some teachers started to worry about covering their tracks. Not to worry though, doctors or doctor impersonators were on the scene to hand out fake sick notes. No mention of any illness or disease is necessary. They were handing them out like candy on Halloween.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjFbMDp5Pg8

The doctors or doctor impersonators should be tracked down and charged with fraud. If they are doctors, they should lose their license. If they are not doctors they should be charged with practicing medicine without a license.

A couple of relevant tweets illustrate the differences between the union organized protestors and the Tea Party. From a union supporter, “Tea Partiers protest on the weekends – which were won for them by unions.” The claim about weekends being won by unions is dubious, but even the union supporters acknowledge that the Tea Partiers don’t steal their pay from their employers by calling in sick, they wait until they are on their own time. I can’t say if the union supporter is mocking the Tea Partiers for being ethical or not. From a Tea Party supporter, “Gov. Walker, sorry we’re late, we work full time.”

Organizing for America

According to our federal form of government the states and the federal government are both sovereign entities, meaning one is not subordinate to the other. Instead of focusing on getting the federal budget in order, President Obama is taking time to weigh in on Wisconsin. Not only that, but there is an organization called Organizing for America that is actively involved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkc-diFmcb8 

This political arm is encouraging teachers to violate their contract. So let’s take a step back. The unions are outraged that the governor wants to curtail their collective bargaining rights. The unions negotiate a contract with the government and then violate it with impunity when it suits their ends. The unions want to hold the state accountable but they don’t want to be accountable.

Dereliction of Duty

To help their union supporters, all of the Democrat Wisconsin State Senators fled the state to prevent their being a quorum to vote on the measure curtailing union power. These senators took an oath to do their job and they are hiding out in Illinois. The far left web site Daily Kos is actively raising money to help these senators violate their oath. This is an excerpt from an e-mail sent to their supporters: 

Even though you don’t live in Wisconsin, there’s a way you can help. The 14 Democratic state Senators who kept the fight alive are on Act Blue, and we’ve put their party committee on our Orange to Blue 2012 page.

Please, contribute $14 to the Wisconsin State Senate Democratic committee, $1 for each of the heroic Senators.

Republicans hold a 19-14 edge in the Wisconsin state Senate, but 20 Senators are needed for a quorum. So, in response to a Republican attempt to pass a bill making public sector unions virtually illegal, all 14 Democrats simply left the state. If even one of these Democrats had remained in Wisconsin, then s/he would have been rounded up by the police, forcibly brought to the state Capitol, and the bill would have passed. At great personal and electoral risk, these 14 Democrats are protecting workers’ rights and making resistance to the Tea Party the top news story in the country.

When the Democrats held the House, Senate and White House and rammed through ObamaCare despite polling showing the American people were opposed, did the Republican members of Congress flee to Canada? No. They fought at the ballot box to elect Scott Brown in Massachusetts. They fought in the Senate using Senate rules like the filibuster. They lost the battle and ObamaCare passed, but they stayed and did their duty representing their constitutents.

They fought at the ballot box again winning big in November 2010. Among those wins was both houses of the state government in Wisconsin and the governor. Now, with the tables turned, the left shows their true colors. Instead of fighting within the system, they lie, violate contracts, cheat with fraudulent sick notes, they abandon their responsibilities to hide out in another state, while still claiming to hold their office. This is the left’s vision of America, and all the while holding signs equating the legitimate government to Hitler, Mubarak, Cairo, Bahrain, etc. It pretty much speaks for itself.

If the senators do not go back to the state house to do their jobs, then the only alternative to balance the budget may be to fire about 5,000 state workers.

Public Sector Unions

The issue with public sector unions is collusion. Unions collect dues from their members. Their members, like the general public come from all parts of the political spectrum: Democrats, Republicans, Independents and even people not registered to vote or who don’t vote. Parts of those union dues are steered toward political activism which in short means electing as many Democrats as possible. The amount of money raised and spent is staggering. The Democrats that get elected are then in a position to negotiate contracts with those same unions and reward them for their support. As long as those Democrats are out of office before the bill comes due, they are happy to oblige.

What is happening in Wisconsin is ending that collusion. An alternative would be that public sector unions are not allowed to collect any dues for political purposes or participate in any political activity. In the private sector, unions don’t appoint the management that they eventually negotiate with for their contracts, why should it be different in the public sector? In the private sector if a company negotiates a lousy contract with the unions and it bankrupts them, they go out of business. In the public sector, if the government, generously helped into office by the unions, negotiates a lousy contract with the unions, the government doesn’t suffer, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

In Wisconsin those taxpayers said, “enough,” and turned out the Democrats and elected the Republicans to fix the problem. The Republicans are trying to do what they were elected to do.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

The corrupt main stream media, the unions, and President Barack Obama are fighting their Waterloo. The voters have had enough of bloated out of control government. The private sector struggles with unemployment and a stagnant economy, while the public sector grows and out earns them while they have to pay for it. The union thugs take to the streets, shut down schools, take students out of the classroom to protest with their union teachers, while Democrat lawmakers flee the state instead of doing their job. Is this Greece? No, it is Madison, Wisconsin.

Let’s start with the mainstream media. A tragedy occurs in Tucson, Arizona and somehow it is harsh rhetoric on the part of the right that caused it. That was a lie. They knew it. They didn’t care. Many of those stations have a broadcast license from the government and the don’t blanche at lying with impunity. A left wing rally protests outside of a private conservative meeting and out of a crowd of about a thousand, twenty-five are arrested. In Madison, Wisconsin, more arrests are made. Signs portraying the governor as Hitler, a sign with a cross hairs on the governors face, protesters gathering at the private home of the governor and legislators and where is the outrage on the main stream media? You can hear a pin drop.

The unions got together with the Democrats to kick the protests into high gear.

Organizing for America, which is run in conjunction with the Democratic National Committee, was helping mobilize protesters on Thursday through its blog and Twitter updates that included a “call to action” to phone state senators.

This is the crux of the problem. Public sector unions are in a symbiotic relationship with the Democratic party. They take union dues from Democratics, Republicans, Independents and even unregistered voters and use part of that money to elect Democrats. Those elected officials will then negotiate public sector contracts with the unions giving away the store. The officials only have to make sure that they are no longer in office when the bill comes due. By then they will be retired in Florida with their own fat pension and living in a state with no income tax.

President Obama, who can’t get his own budgetary house in order, weighs in on another non-federal matter. In the past he has injected himself in a local police matter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s time the president started focusing on being the president and instead of worrying how Wisconsin is dealing with their budget mess, to clean up his own.

The same teachers who tell us time and again in their paid advertisements that it is all about the children, wasted no time abandoning those children, forcing some schools to close, by lying to their school districts by calling in sick, so they could go to the state capital and protest. Some of them went even further and brought their students with them to use as pawns for their own greed. This clip shows some of these students and they have no idea why they are there and what they are protesting for. It is just a day out of the classroom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cufj2d8Co5A

The unions offer no solutions for closing a $3 billion budget gap other than the same tired bromide to go find that rich guy somewhere who isn’t being taxed enough, and make him pay for their union’s greed. Everyone else can struggle, everyone else can pay for the public employees, but don’t touch what the public sector unions have extracted from their political beneficiaries.

Meanwhile the Democratic members of the Wisconsin state senate are in hiding in Illinois. Profiles in courage this is not. But like Waterloo this is a battle. Reinforcements are on the way. There is a rally in support of the governor on Saturday. Go to Freedom Connect for details. Andrew Breitbart has also said he will attend. It’s always fun when Andrew goes to a left wing protests and asks the protestors what they are doing and getting blank stares as their frantically look around for some organizer to tell them what to say.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

K-12 education is in trouble. A recent report on schools in New York City said that of the 60% or so of students who actually graduate, about half need remedial classes before they can perform at the college level. We have a Department of Education that has spent over $1 trillion since it was created by President Jimmy Carter and school performance has declined.

A conference was held in Denver bringing together the Department of Education, school administrators and teachers’ unions to discuss school policy and what to do to improve education. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the assembled, “Collectively, you have the power to stop our nation’s educational demise.” Collectively; that word keeps popping up in the speeches of President Obama and his administration. The reality is that this nation wasn’t built by the collective. It was built by individual initiative and drive, where one great idea was built upon another, not by group think, but by free thinking.

The Obama administration hailed the summit as a fresh start to kick off education overhaul efforts looming in Washington, especially delicate negotiations over how teachers should be paid and evaluated. Participating school districts agreed to send a teacher, an administrator and a school board member to hear presentations from a dozen school districts that have accomplished school overhauls agreed to by all three groups. – Kristen Wyatt, Associated Press

Does anyone see any mention about students or learning in that quote? It focuses on teachers. How to pay them and how to evaluate them; it is about the unions, not the students. The delicate negations about pay (unions favor) and evaluation (unions oppose) has nothing to do with our children learning. The unions can run all the TV and radio ads they want about “the children” but when you hear the tag line about who paid for the ad, it is not about the children.

In other parts of the country, Republican governors are going on the offensive to really fight for the students. They are challenging the principle of teacher tenure and in some cases even the right to collective bargaining for the teachers. This will be a very intense fight, but the governors are up to the challenge.

“It’s practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now,” said Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, lamenting that his state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.

The teachers’ unions are firing back:

“Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Instead they are saying, ‘Let’s make it easy to fire teachers.’ That’s the wrong goal.”

Let me take a shot at that question. Teachers’ unions, for years, have been arguing for smaller class sizes. To create smaller classes you have to break up larger classes. In doing so, you need to hire more teachers (read: dues paying union members). In hiring more teachers you have to go deeper into the labor pool to find them. Net result, the overall quality of the teachers goes down. The second point, is that Mr. Van Roekel never speaks to a teacher’s performance after he gets into the classroom. If that teacher was competent going in, but because of tenure becomes a slacker, there is almost no getting him out.

The argument that the unions often put forth and even their members repeat it is that, in tough times what is going to prevent an administration from firing a teacher that is at the top of the pay scale? If the only thing that is eliminated is tenure, that is a valid argument. What must be done is abolishing teachers’ unions. Because if a highly qualified teacher is not allowed to perform at their full potential because of union rules, they can be priced out of the market. For example, Jaime Escalante, the math teacher portrayed in the movie Stand and Deliver was talented enough that he wanted to teach math to as many as fifty students in a class. The union fought him because they had work rules limiting class size to thirty-five. If a Jaime Escalante can teach as many students as three tenured but ineffective teachers, why would a district fire him over salary? Keep him, pay him 50% more and fire the three incompetent teachers and everyone comes out ahead. Teachers would want to work there because it is challenging, not drudgery. Parents would want to live in that district because their kids get a great education (increasing the value of their homes as well). And the district could save money by hiring fewer teachers but paying them more.

As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” By asking the teachers’ unions to solve the problem they helped create is foolhardy. If you don’t like the cars built by the United Auto Workers, you can but a car built by a non-union car company. If you don’t like what the unions are doing to your child’s education, what do you do, get another child? It’s time to stand up for our children. We owe them a future. We don’t owe the teachers’ union members a living. And if those teachers are truly professionals, they don’t need a union either.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

You have probably seen a lot of comparisons in the main stream media trying to compare President Barack Obama to President Ronald Reagan. Try to make this comparison to a conservative and they will look at you rather oddly. Tell it to a progressive and they lap it up, because they know that President Reagan was a leader and by comparing the two men, perhaps some of that leadership will rub off on the incumbent.

Leadership springs from some deep personal convictions. It is perhaps why, leadership is not common in politics. In politics, to be relevant you have to get elected and reelected. It is hard to take a stand on principles and get people to elect you time and again. It is easier, to get along, hand out some goodies, bribe the public with the public’s money and slide back into office. If they are adroit enough perhaps the individual can do some real good in the interval between elections. But over time, they tend to get sloppy and stay in the reelection mode and forget what public service means.

One of the challenges of the Republican party today as the field assembles on the starting line for the 2012 presidential sweepstakes is the lack of a leader in the declared field. Ronald Reagan was a leader. Chris Christie is a leader. Herman Cain is a leader. Alan West is a leader. But many whose names are mentioned are more politicians than leaders, with resumes filled with compromises to get along with the opposition. Some of those who are leaders, including a number of the above, are too new to their current jobs to start looking for the next one.

But what about President Obama? Even on his signature socialist programs like health care, cap and trade, increasing taxes on the wealthy, he didn’t lead. Sure, he drove them hard to get them through, but the finished products were awful, and it was ugly right down to the final passage of the health care program because he abdicated the writing of the legislation to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

On foreign policy, he has been outmaneuvered by almost everyone. When the people rose up against the mullahs in Iran, he didn’t say a thing in support of them, preferring to coddle the dictators in charge believing they would return measure for measure. They didn’t. In Egypt he was for Mubarak, then against Mubarak, than for him, against him, such that no matter who came out on top they would have reason not to trust us as a friend or ally. In Honduras, their president tried to become a dictator along the lines of Hugo Chavez and the government would have no part of it. Did this administration side with democracy? No, they sided with Chavez, Castro and their puppets.

We are now in the midst of a budget crisis and President Obama talks but he does not lead. He says nothing about entitlements, the most toxic part of the budget, because he didn’t want to go first. Isn’t that the definition of lead? The leader goes first and the rest follow. He appointed a budget commission, spending more tax dollars in the process, as a way to slide past the November elections appearing to be doing something. When the commission finished its work, the president ignored it. When a reporter asked him about it, he complained that the media is impatient and that the commission’s work is not dead, just not now. Well when, then? President Obama is in the third year of his term. He is proposing a budget for the next fiscal year that will end a month before the next election. Is he assuming he will be returned to office to implement the commission’s work? Judge for yourself in the following video. Is this the nature of a man firmly in charge of the reins of government? Or does it bring to mind a certain man from Plains, Georgia?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Il_aoTYORM

Feel inspired? Do you feel like this man has a firm grasp of the problem and a concrete plan to resolve it? Neither do I.  In 2012, we can do better.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

It didn’t take long for President Barack Obama to get set back on his heels and hastily call a press conference to talk about his budget. Throughout his term we have seen his inexperience show as he jerks back and forth from position to position, unless it involves pushing his progressive agenda, where he is laser focused.

However, in listening to the president it makes you wonder if we occupy the same time-space continuum that he does. His budget plan projects that in 2015, the deficit will be down to $607 billion, a level that he alone among all presidents has reached or exceeded, and he says of that projection, “will not be running up the credit card anymore.” Say what? He is planning to overspend revenues by $607 billion and that is not running up the credit card anymore. Has there been another language overhaul that I missed like the one that changed spending to investing?

His plan also will add $7.2 trillion to the debt. It took every president from George Washington until Nancy Pelosi took over the purse strings half way through George W. Bush’s second term to borrow $8 trillion. From Nancy Pelosi becoming Speaker of the House until now, another $5 trillion was added and President Obama wants to add another $7.2 trillion to that! One president, Barack Obama, has set a course to borrow more money during his term in office that all other presidents combined and he calls that “not running up the credit card.” Is he delusional? If Joe Biden weren’t the Vice President I might start pushing to invoke the twenty-fifth amendment.

Everything has to be on the table. Entitlements have to be re-designed and re-designed out of existence so that these previously private responsibilities, no where authorized in the Constitution, are once again the private responsibilities of all Americans and not the incompetent nanny state that knows no limit to fraud and mismanagement of such programs.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

President Barack Obama released his budget blueprint on the same day the White House says it expects the budget deficit for the current fiscal year ending in October to hit $1.65 trillion. His budget calls for spending cuts of $1 trillion spread out over ten years. 

To put it another way, the cuts that the president is proposing will be less than the deficit in the first year alone, projected at $1.1 trillion. So the debt leviathan will continue to grow and with it, the interest payments required to satisfy it. While the nation is staggering under this massive and growing debt, this president still wants to spend $53 billion building high speed railroads. Such a program may create jobs to build such railroads and create jobs to man the trains, stations, and track, but they are make-work jobs that will be a burden on future budgets and future generations because anyone with a room temperature IQ knows that these trains will operate at a deficit, just like Amtrak does.

While showing extraordinary focus and determination in ramming his healthcare and other socialist programs down the throat of Americans that do not want them, his knees buckle when it comes to showing leadership on cutting the vast and growing entitlement programs.

 ”It is a patronizing plan that says to the American people that their concerns are not his concerns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said.

Also, noticeably absent from the president’s budget was most of the recommendations of the bipartisan budget panel he created via an executive order. There’s nothing like spending tax dollars on a show panel to buff up your fiscal “cred” before an election and then ignoring the results afterwards to build on your reputation for cynicism.

 Erskine Bowles, the Democratic chairman of the fiscal commission, said the White House budget request goes “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.” – Washington Post

So there you have it folks, even Democrats are saying the president’s budget doesn’t go far enough. It will be up to the newly elected Republicans and the Tea Party who will hold those Republican’s feet to the fire, to get that job done.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

I received an e-mail from my congressman touting his efforts to fight outsourcing. In a global economy, it escapes my why this is a good thing and why we need more businessmen in Congress and fewer professional politicians and academics. So I penned the following response.

February 7, 2011

Congressman Tim Bishop

306 Cannon H.O.B.

Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Congressman Bishop,

I recently received your e-mail update regarding your ongoing battle against outsourcing. I must confess that I am confused as much by your efforts here as I was during your successful reelection campaign. You say, “That is why I am fighting so hard to reduce job-killing outsourcing.” I find that to be an oxymoronic statement. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, outsourcing is defined as, “The procuring of services or products, such as the parts used in manufacturing a motor vehicle, from an outside supplier or manufacturer in order to cut costs,” which implies that it would create jobs.

Do you, Congressman, make all of your own clothes or do you outsource that to others? Do you grow all of your own food, or do you outsource that to others? And if you do outsource these and many other things, for if you don’t how would you have time to be a Congressman, what steps do you take to make sure none of your clothes are made overseas or that none of your lettuce is picked by illegal immigrants?

Is it your goal to make America a nation of lettuce pickers, or seamstresses? Is it your goal to make our clothes cost twice as much as they do today so that working families have to spend more of their take home pay on clothes because you insist that clothes only be made in American factories that would have the double edged effect of raising the cost of the clothes and not paying very high wages. Or should we focus on jobs for engineers to design computer controlled looms that we can sell to these counties?

In a study by Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth University, he found that when companies increased overseas employment by 2.8 million jobs, these same companies increase domestic employment by 5.5 million jobs. In other words, for every job outsourced overseas, two jobs were created here and those jobs were higher skilled with higher pay. So if your claimed objective is to create jobs in the U.S. why are you opposed to one of the most effective ways to do that?

Okay, let’s assume that you don’t believe any of the foregoing and that any company that creates jobs overseas is evil and anyone who supports it is dead wrong. Then perhaps you can explain how you supported the bail outs of GM and Chrysler? After getting taxpayer money, both companies increased their outsourcing. Chrysler built a $570 million engine plant in Mexico, and GM increased its share of cars it builds overseas by 35%. If it is bad for private companies to be global enterprises, and therefore unfit to receive any government contracts, why is it alright to take taxpayer money and give it to companies so that they can create jobs overseas? Isn’t that hypocritical?

Let’s say further, that you are successful in your campaign to end outsourcing. What do you think will be the reaction of Toyota, Honda, BMW, Volkswagen, and other companies who employ tens of thousands of workers here in America because outsourcing was a good idea? Do you tell all of these workers that their jobs should really go back home to workers in the headquarters country?

So where do you really stand on outsourcing in a global economy? Is it bad for private enterprises to outsource, but it is okay for the government to take taxpayer money, take over a private company and then outsource jobs? I would appreciate it if you could clear that up.

Sincerely yours,

 William R. O’Connell

Thankfully, his efforts were defeated in the House.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

As indicated in a previous post, President Obama’s reelection effort depended on him walking a tightrope that required him to stem the hemorrhage of independent supporters while keeping the livid left on his side. His State of the Union address showed him confidently stepping out on the high wire, with lofty language extolling the virtues of America. But by the end of the speech it looked like the aerialist was leaning to one side, sticking his leg out on the other as a counterbalance while starting to pinwheel his arms backwards to avert a fall.

What Will Republicans Do?

The question is will Republicans sacrifice themselves, diving beneath the plunging president to break his fall? Or will they stand aside, avert their eyes to the catastrophe and then carry on to clean up the mess? To achieve the former, they need only to overreach and get in a toe to toe battle with the president and do something reminiscent of the 1990s and shut down the government. Bill Clinton turned that event to his advantage and cruised to reelection. To do the latter, Republicans should methodically pass legislation that will cut appropriate parts of the government, reform taxes, repeal ObamaCare, revamp legislation and let the Democrats in the Senate and President Obama go on record, item by item, as being against it. Limit the collateral damage of a government shutdown that the left can portray as cruel and hang every objection to responsible government around their neck to display again and again in 2012.

Real Education

Much was said about education, but the real education is not about schools. It is about an education strategy to inform the American people. With the Tea Party and the new media it is vital to explain conservative positions to the American people, ideas that often don’t fit into thirty second sound bites. If the task of educating the American people on conservative principles begins in the fall of 2012, we have lost the argument. The real education begins now. Professor Paul Ryan made the opening argument to the president in the Republican response. We need to obliterate the stock argument of the left that being against the Department of Education is not to be against education. That fixing Social Security is not cutting or ending retirement benefits but making them the personal property of the individual, not a stipend of the federal government that is completely within the government’s control and not our own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA4H88lk0Yk

We are not going to gain long term prosperity by wagering on white elephants like high speed rail, having the government decide that solar shingles is an industry that should succeed. Let the market decide, which really means let us decide as we vote hundreds of times each day on what products meet our needs, rather than voting once every two years, only to be shooed away by the statists, who think they are the smartest people in the world. We need a federal government to only do those things that are not effective for us to do ourselves, such as national defense, and not tell us what to buy and sell (health insurance, electric cars), what to make in our factories (light bulbs), or what to eat.

Just as the Republicans are requiring that all legislation must indicate where in the Constitution the bill is justified, we must explain to the American people what each bill does and why it should be enacted. If we follow these steps, we can continue on the road to recovery and this president can either get on board, or start writing the memoirs of his single term.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

On the surface, President Obama’s State of the Union address was like many others, long on platitudes, short on substance. I had the opportunity to witness it at the studio of WNYC in New York. We were a handful of Tea Party members is a sea of progressives.

Education

The president talked of many things that were, constitutionally, not his nor the federal government’s responsibility. He spoke of having to strengthen education. Before my progressive friends leap out of their chairs let me point out that being against the federal government’s involvement in education, is not to be opposed to education. We have had a Department of Education since the Carter administration, spent over one trillion dollars, and our educational performance has declined. The stock progressive answer to such failures is that the program either wasn’t big enough, or that we should imagine how bad things would be without the effort, neither of which is provable.

We should eliminate the Department of Education. During the speech, folks in the studio tweeted their thoughts and they were projected on a large screen. One of my favorites was, “Mixed msg for teachers: will recruit you & celebrate you as nation-builders while making it easier to fire you.” Who would want to fire a competent teacher? Anyone? At the same time, who would not want to fire an incompetent teacher? How does retaining an incompetent teacher improve our education? We should eliminate teachers’ unions. I know of no professional that does not stand on his own merits and make the case for their value to the organization and their compensation. Teachers tell us repeatedly that they are professionals, but they need the protection of an unskilled laborer pushing boxes in a warehouse, or they won’t be treated fairly. I’m all for paying good teachers as much as the market will bear. I am against paying teachers because they carry a union card and will disrupt the education of our children if they are not bought off.

High Speed Rail

The president wants 80% of Americans to have access to high speed rail. Why? Why, even if we could, would we pay for this? Think about it. A car can travel in any direction you point it. A plane can travel in any direction you point it. A train can only go where some very expensive tracks are laid and if conditions change you can’t re-route it without tremendous expense. Yes, high speed trains are much faster than cars, but when you add in the time to get from your home to the train and from the termination point to your ultimate destination, the speed advantage falters. Add to that the inflexibility of adhering to a train schedule, and the advantage is lost to all but the most densely populated areas of the country, like the Northeast corridor. This will be the white elephant of white elephants.

ObamaCare

Obama cracked his Cheshire Cat grin and joked about some folks not being satisfied with ObamaCare. He said he was open to suggestions on how to improve it. Why wasn’t he open to ideas when it was crafted? Congress passes this two thousand page abomination and now he invites us to tinker with it. A tweak here, a twist there, and it will be terrific. Throw it out wholesale, and implement some simple market based solutions: Tort reform, buying policies across state lines, eliminate third party payer, high deductable plans with Health Savings Accounts, employees owning policies rather than companies. Let’s find common ground on how to deal with pre-existing conditions and the issue of dropping coverage for people who get sick. That will not take two thousand pages to do so.

Spending Cuts

After a spending binge under both Bush and Obama, capping spending is negligence. As Senator Jim DeMint said, “When a car speeds toward a cliff, you hit the brake, not cruise control.” We have about four hundred thousand federal employees that make over $100,000 per year. We need to cut, cut, cut.

Taxes

Watching the speech in the bastion of liberalism, it still baffles me how they view taxes. This was not a crowd of homeless people. When Obama talked about taxing the wealthiest, the room exploded in cheers and applause. Consider two things. One, New York is heavily dependent on those very wealthy people who work on Wall Street to pick up most of the tax burden, and they do. They are also very mobile and do not have to choose to remain in New York, if New York becomes hostile, taxwise. Two, compared to the rest of the country, we are rich. Which means we pay a greater share of the federal burden of taxes and yet our heavily Democratic Congressional delegation keeps voting for a bigger and bigger federal government and we get the bill but a small portion of the benefit. The light bulb recently illuminated over the head of Congressman Steve Israel, when he wondered why we don’t get back as much money from the federal government as we send to it. As comedian Ron White likes to say, “You can’t fix stupid.”

Cato Takes it Apart

The Cato Institute produced this excellent video taking apart the State of the Union, piece by piece. It’s worth a watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuU1K80ZJDo

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

The public sector unions have succeeded. They have been so successful they are on the verge of bankrupting the country. Like the private sector unions, who at one time were a key advocate for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, they don’t know when to declare victory and go home.

However, in the private sector market forces are actively in play. As low skilled jobs move offshore and are replaced by higher skilled jobs, the individual knowledge worker brings a stronger value proposition to the table than the previous generation. Employers have learned to both see and reward that value and the worker has taken responsibility for their own compensation. As such, the need and, to the worker, the benefit of unions has dwindled as has union membership to about 7% of private workers.

But the public sector’s story was very different. True there were some cases where public sector employees were not paid very well, but the real reason for organizing public sector workers was political. It was a devil’s bargain from the outset. The politicians would help the unions organize and the unions would become the political machine of the pols.

In New York City, mayor Robert Wagner allowed public sector workers to organize in 1958. This was opposed by the leaders of the five boroughs in New York, so Wagner turned to his newly organized workers to help win reelection in 1961. President John Kennedy, who won by a razor thin margin in 1960, followed Wagner closely and with the stroke of a pen he signed Executive Order 10988 that allowed federal government employees to organize. There was no groundswell of support for doing this, no long hard fought campaign promise that had to be kept. Simply two executives, Wagner and Kennedy, who just decided to do it. Consider this views of the concept a generation earlier.

“a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

an infringement on democratic freedoms that threatened the ability of government to represent the broad needs of the citizenry. – New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia

 Where We are Today

 Today, we have public sector employees making more money than the average private sector worker. There are over 170,000 federal employees that make over $150,000 per year. Twenty percent of all federal employees, nearly 400,000 make over $100,000 per year. We have a number of states that are destitute owing to unfunded public sector union pensions. Not only do they make good pay, they will be very well cared for after they retire. All paid by you and me. Meanwhile you have to provide for your own retirement, work at a company that has to be profitable to be able to continue to employ you. But you have virtually no control over how much these public union employees are paid, but every raise comes out of your pocket.

So as someone struggles to make ends meet on $50,000 per year, he faces increased taxes so that some government employee can get a raise on top of their $100,000. That public sector employee will then work furiously to make sure Democrats are reelected so they can get another sweetheart contract.

It’s time for Congress to undo Executive Order 10998 and tell the highly paid government workers, “You are on your own.”  In other words, each and every one of you will have to prove your own value to your employer to get a raise or keep your job and the unions will have to do without millions of dollars of coerced union dues to help Democrats get reelected.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

The bedrock principle of the First Amendment is to protect political speech from government censorship. That is what the Founders intended as a way for the citizens to disagree with their government without fear of reprisal.

Over the years we have seen some bizarre applications of the free speech doctrine to include such things as flag burning, and evolving into freedom of expression, whatever that really means. What the progressives want is that they and their main stream media chorus are alone in conveying their message. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law banned using corporate or union money for “electioneering communications,” which meant broadcast advertising that identified a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary, or 60 days of a general election. In other words, it is the “Incumbent Protection Act.” As incumbents have the name recognition and the communication platform of their office, they begin a campaign with a considerable advantage. The particular timeframes in the act are when most people start paying attention, so if you can choke that off, the victory circle is that much closer.

In Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, at issue was a documentary film that was critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was running for president at the time. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Citizens United brought the scorn of President Obama upon the Court in his State of the Union address last year.

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens blasted the Court’s 5-4 decision saying that the ruling was not grounded in the writings of the Founding Fathers.  His argument being that certain groups could have their speech curtailed and only individuals had their speech protected.  Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate concurring opinion to address Stevens’ argument.  In part:

“I write separately to address JUSTICE STEVENS’ discussion of “Original Understandings”… This section of [Stevens'] dissent purports to show that today’s decision is not supported by the original understanding of the First Amendment. The dissent attempts this demonstration, however, in splendid isolation from the text of the First Amendment. It never shows why “the freedom of speech” that was the right of Englishmen did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form. To be sure, in 1791 (as now) corporations could pursue only the objectives set forth in their charters; but the dissent provides no evidence that their speech in the pursuit of those objectives could be censored….

The [First] Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals–and the dissent offers no evidence about the original meaning of the text to support any such exclusion. We are therefore simply left with the question whether the speech at issue in this case is “speech” covered by the First Amendment. No one says otherwise.” – Antonin Scalia, concurring opinion in “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

This is an historic moment to be celebrated as another victory in the war to roll back government before it rolls over us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn739hxpGNI

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter

With all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over those obstructionist Republicans and how they stopped the Obama agenda, particularly during the Lame Duck session, the Democrats were going to change the rules so that never happens again.

So getting 60 votes to move legislation forward was too much, well then how about having one vote stop legislation? Huh? The new Republican controlled House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly yesterday, to repeal ObamaCare in full.  Every Republican voted for it as well as three Democrats. According to Nancy Pelosi’s worldview, that counts as bipartisan. Personally, I look for a much bigger number from the other side before I would call it bipartisan, but that’s not important. So the bill now moves to the Senate where the Senate can vote for it, right? Not so fast.

Harry Reid, of the low approval ratings, has declared that the bill will never come up for a vote in the Senate. As majority leader he has a great deal of discretion in how the Senate calendar is run. But to have one man out of one hundred senators say, no, we’re not voting on that, is hypocrisy at its highest. What is his concern, after all, his party still controls the Senate albeit with a smaller margin than before the 2010 election. Actually he has twenty-three reasons.

That is the number of Democrat or Independent senators, who caucus with the Democrats, who are up for election in 2012, with only ten Republican senators facing the same fate. Harry wants to help them by not having a pro-ObamaCare vote on their record. The Senate could vote it down along party lines alone, or if failing to do that, President Obama will certainly veto any such bill, but the record of voting for, what most of the American people are against, will not augur well for 2012.

However, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is having none of it. He said it plainly, “There will be a vote on this in the Senate.” Having seen McConnell’s masterful work holding on until the 2010 cavalry arrived to shrink the Democrats advantage, I wouldn’t wager against him.

Originally posted at Liberty’s Lifeline.

Bill O’Connell lives in New York and is the author of Liberty’s Lifeline blog.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter