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On this day - The People's Commissars give authority to Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin (1917), Beer Hall Putsch: Hitler's Nazis fail to overthrow the German government (1923), FDR unveils the Civil Works Administration for the unemployed (1933), the right ear of John Paul Getty III is delivered to a newspaper together with a ransom note for $2.9 million (1973); b: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901), Dorothy Day (1897), Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. (1927); d: Vyacheslav Molotov (1986)
A state worker is recovering after a bloody brawl at a union hall. He says members of the local SEIU 1000 beat him up and sent him to the hospital all because he wanted to expose alleged corruption within the union.
Ken Hamidi is a state worker at the California Franchise Tax Board. Last night he walked into a union hall in Sacramento for an SEIU local 1000 meeting.
"We had every right to be here, very simple; it wasn't anything private or anything exclusive," said Hamidi. But Hamidi says the union members did not want him there. "Three, four people jumped at me, wrestled with me, then did all that," said Hamidi. "I was covered in blood and then over to the emergency room."
Photos of Hamidi in the hospital show him bloodied from the brawl. So why did this happen? Besides being a state worker, Hamidi says he's an unpaid reporter for a cable access show and a vocal critic of the SEIU. He calls the state workers' union corrupt. (cbs13.com)
Remember U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski? Seniors have long memories, especially when Congress trifles with us over health care. (Clue: Rosty served 15 months in prison for mail fraud and was pardoned by President Clinton.)
Here's a video of 'the original town-hall protest' in 1989. The year before, seniors had been forced by Congress to pay for 'catastrophic' insurance that they didn't actually want. Then-House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski repealed the ugly sausage before serving his term in jail.
Sometimes it seems that no story is too big for the U.S. lame-stream media to spin wrong in order to protect President Barack Obama. In this case, a major event of domestic terrorism -- the worst since 9/11 -- is pawned off as ... something else.
It falls to the foreign press to get it right.
Texas army killer linked to September 11 terrorists (telegraph.co.uk)
Major Nidal Malik Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a "spiritual adviser" to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001.
Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. His mother's funeral was held there in May that year.
The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.
"I can't think of a single situation where workers were permanently replaced on the public sector," said Gordon Pavy, national collective-bargaining director for the AFL-CIO in Washington.
There is a notable exception, and it made labor history. In 1981, when members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization walked out, President Ronald Reagan replaced nearly all of them, breaking the union.
"I think a public employer would be hard-pressed to do that," Pavy said. "We like to think of our government agencies and quasi-government agencies as being more fair-minded than private employers who are out for a profit."
That gives public-sector unions an unfair advantage, said Chris Edwards, an economist for the conservative Cato Institute in Washington. "There is no downside for public-sector unions to push too far because they always have their jobs," he said. "With private-sector unionism, there is a tug and pull between employer and employee," Edwards said. "There is an economic struggle. Public-sector unions have government officials in a tight spot. It's not their money they are playing with."
In 2008, 12 percent of all employees were members of unions. In the private sector, the percentage was 8, but in the public sector, more than a third of employees, 37 percent, were in unions. (philly.com)
Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked,
“Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”
What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?
More proof has emerged of White House political director Patrick Gaspard's ties to the radical advocacy group ACORN. Gaspard, a longtime operative for ACORN and one of its partisan arms, New York's Working Families Party, currently holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush's White House.
Internal ACORN documents show that Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 over the past two years. Specifically, while Gaspard worked as an executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York he gave ACORN $15,000 in 2007 and $25,000 in 2008.
That's an awfully large tithe for someone who made $111,894 in 2007 and who has a wife and two children. The $111,894 figure comes from SEIU 1199's most recent publicly available tax return. (If salary and deferred benefits are combined the total is $151,869.)
Inside D.C. sources say that Pelosi has promised lobbying jobs to House Dems who are defeated in 2010 -- but only if they vote for the bill. Or they can go home, losers, with nothing.
Much has been said about the our 150-year agitation for government-run health care. Now big labor unions like Andy Stern's SEIU stand to gain a huge influx of union dues from the 10,000+ government jobs to be created under ObamaCare. That's why they are working so hard to pull Nancy Pelosi's bill over the finish line.
The U.S. jobless rate unexpectedly jumped to a 26-1/2-year high of 10.2 percent last month, adding to pressure on the Obama administration to do more to tackle unemployment even as signs of recovery mount. The Labor Department said on Friday that employers cut 190,000 jobs in October, more than the 175,000 markets had expected but fewer than the 219,000 lost in September. (via AP)
Tax-funded, union-backed front-group taken off-mission
State investigators raided ACORN offices on Friday, taking away computer hard drives and documents as part of a probe into alleged embezzlement and tax fraud when the organization's national headquarters was based in New Orleans.
"This is an investigation of everything — ACORN, the national organization, the local organization and all of its affiliated entities, specifically as it relates to any potential violations of Louisiana law," Assistant Attorney General David Caldwell said.
ACORN staff on the scene declined to comment, but an attorney for the group said in a statement the raid was prompted by allegations that former ACORN employees had removed or altered electronic documents and may do so in the future.
Attorney Pamela Marple said ACORN was cooperating and called the raid exhaustive, saying investigators wanted "virtually every document in the possession of ACORN and any related entity."
On Thursday, Oct. 29, the United States House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution funding the Federal Government through December 18th. The continuing resolution was passed as part of the behemoth Interior-Environment Appropriations conference report.
A continuing resolution is a stop-gap provision which allows the government to continue its operations until Congress can determine the next year’s appropriations. The actions taken today merely extended the expiration date of the resolution which went into effect on October 1st. By extending the existing continuing resolution Congress has continued to deprive ACORN and its affiliates of federal funds until December 18th.
Rules for Power Tactics:
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Because Alinsky was sensitive to criticism that he wasn't ethical, he also included a set of rules for the ethics of power tactics. You can see from these why his ethics were so frequently questioned.
Rules to test whether power tactics are ethical:
1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."
The ACORN 7: U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Roland Burris (D-IL), Robert Casey (D-PA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Purple People Beaters can't get enoughKen Hamidi is a state worker at the California Franchise Tax Board. Last night he walked into a union hall in Sacramento for an SEIU local 1000 meeting.
