You really won't believe this.  It's so dumb and so stupid that it can't possibly be factual.  No one would ever support such an obvious and blatant joke of a scam.

Look, don't play the video below if you don't want to be disgusted.  Just go somewhere else if you think the grant process is legitimate.  Turn away if you believe unions are working for their membership.  Run if you have faith in your politicians of either political party.

Every time I begin to believe this country might wake up and restore values, James O'Keefe exposes just how corrupt and despicable things really are now.

Ugh!  Yecch!

Bill Cochrane

Tuesday, June 5, 2012, will be remembered as the beginning of the long decline of the public-sector union.  It will follow, and parallel, the shrinking of private-sector unions, now down to less than 7 percent of American workers.  The abject failure of the unions to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — the first such failure in U.S. history — marks the Icarus moment of government-union power.  Wax wings melted, there’s nowhere to go but down.

The ultimate significance of Walker’s union reforms has been largely misunderstood.  At first, the issue was curtailing outrageous union benefits, far beyond those of the ordinary Wisconsin taxpayer. That became a nonissue when the unions quickly realized that trying to defend the indefensible would render them toxic for the real fight to come.

But as the recall campaign progressed, the Democrats stopped talking about bargaining rights.  It was a losing issue.  Walker was able to make the case that years of corrupt union-politician back-scratching had been bankrupting the state.

The real threat behind all this, however, was that the new law ended automatic government collection of union dues.  That was the unexpressed and politically inexpressible issue.  That was the reason the unions finally decided to gamble on a high-risk recall.

Without the thumb of the state tilting the scale by coerced collection, union membership became truly voluntary.  Result?  Newly freed members rushed for the exits.  In less than one year, -AFSCME, the second-largest public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than 50 percent of its membership.

It was predictable.  In Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) instituted by executive order a similar reform seven years ago, government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their dues-paying membership.

So they fought and they lost.  Repeatedly. Tuesday was their third and last shot at reversing Walker’s reforms … their Waterloo. Walker defeated their gubernatorial candidate by a wider margin than he had — pre-reform — two years ago.

The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point.  They set out to make an example of Walker.  He succeeded in making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism.  An institution founded to protect its members grew in size, wealth, power and arrogance, thanks to decades of symbiotic deals with bought politicians, to the point where it grossly overreached.  A half-century later these unions were exercising essential control of everything from wages to work rules in the running of government — something that, in a system of republican governance, is properly the sovereign province of the citizenry.

Why did the unions lose?  Because Norma Rae nostalgia is not enough, and it hardly applied to government workers living better than the average taxpayer who supports them.

Most important, however, because in the end reality prevails.  As economist Herb Stein once put it:  Something that can’t go on, won’t.  These public-sector unions, acting, as FDR had feared, with an inherent conflict of interest regarding their own duties, were devouring the institution they were supposed to serve, rendering state government as economically unsustainable as the collapsing entitlement states of southern Europe.

It couldn’t go on.  Now it won’t.  All that was missing was a political leader willing to risk his career to make it stop.  Because, time being infinite, even the inevitable doesn’t happen on its own.


Charles Krauthammer

After the 2010 election, I was scared that the tea party movement and the conservative resurgence had "jumped the shark", peaking too soon to attain its goal of sending Barack Obama and his policies back to Chicago.  The Wisconsin vote this past week put that fear to an end.

The midterm elections had recaptured the U.S. House of Representatives for the Republicans.  It upset in both congressional houses what had been a filibuster-proof majority, theoretically allowing a unified Democratic Party to pass any legislation it desired.  That election also brought forth the first truly Republican North Carolina legislature in more than a century.  Before Wisconsin, many Republicans, including me, were concerned that the post-Obama conservative tide had ebbed.

The Badger State became a test for modern tea party conservatism.  Scott Walker was a bold governor who dared to challenge the most stalwart supporter of the Democratic Party, organized government labor.  He did this in an effort to govern under the Republican principle that budgets needed to be balanced without excessive new taxes.  And the best way to do that was to curb the power of government unions.

He did all this in a state that had not sent a Republican electoral vote to Washington since Ronald Regan.  Such conduct was so dangerous to the left-wing power machine that it decided to make Walker an example to the nation that conservatives ought not bring their philosophy into the House of Labor.  They then decided to gather enough signatures to demand the governor's recall, along with certain legislators on whom the governor depended for support.

The result was supposed to be a stern lesson for any politician who treaded upon the sacred ground of organized government labor.  It didn't turn out that way.

The conservatives accepted labor's challenge.  It was almost like a second Battle of Gettysburg.  Conservative forces found themselves in a place unfamiliar with their cause and on ground they might not have chosen.  But the enemy presented itself there.  This time, the tea party, galloping across open ground, led a charge that could not be repelled. They made it past labor's stone wall and are now headed for Washington with the defenses of the left wing in tatters.

Some might say that the conservatives outspent the left. Perhaps that is true.  But this was clearly a battleground chosen by labor and the left.  They cannot now complain that their army was not ready for the conflict.

Moreover, each side spent enough money to educate all voters about the issues before them.  When the airwaves are saturated with mutually destructive propaganda, voters tend to tune out the noise, voting their convictions.  And those convictions were sympathetic to the 2010 conservative movement.

Now, President Obama was heavily criticized for not standing with his labor allies and campaigning in Wisconsin.  He was similarly criticized for not joining in the effort to defeat the North Carolina marriage amendment, instead opting to oppose it the day after it was passed.  Perhaps the Obama pollsters knew that the conservative resurgence that turned around Congress in 2010 is not only alive, but is continuing to expand its influence over the electorate.

Interestingly, the lesson of Wisconsin is important, too, for Republicans.  Mitt Romney, the nominee apparent, is not a tea party candidate by any measure.  His advisers often seem uncomfortable with some conservative ideas.  Yet Wisconsin proved that shaking the "Etch A Sketch" to erase Romney's conservative primary positions may not be either necessary or advisable.

Wisconsin proved that dissatisfaction with the liberal agenda runs deeper than Obama's economic failures.  Independent and swing voters have embraced conservative principles of governance like limited taxes and placing curbs on the pension and salary excesses of government labor.

Wisconsin was a state colored blue for many years past. Today it is state where the only things that remain solidly "blue" are the color of its crumbled cheese and its crumbling government unions.

The lesson of the Battle for Wisconsin is that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the 2010 conservative resurgence were greatly exaggerated.   Reports on the influence of conservatives in the 2012 electorate have been substantially underestimated.  It is lesson for both parties found in local tea party song:  "We Ain't Goin' Away!"

Robert M. Levy is chairman of the Moore County Republican Party.