Unions Must Stop Prioritizing Politics Over Jobs

 Issues & Insights

..." A California Grocers Association study recently found the state’s hazard pay ordinances could raise grocery costs for the average family of four by $400 a year while hundreds of workers, most of them UFCW members, will lose their jobs. It’s a pyrrhic victory that may be repeated regardless of the impact on workers because it generates good headlines for the unions."

"At their peak, unions represented more than a third of American workers. Now, after several decades of continuing decline, less than 10% of workers in the private sector are part of organized labor.  And with so much of American manufacturing having moved offshore to escape the less-than-friendly business climate the politicians created, that’s not really news.

"What some people don’t know is how union leadership has continued to cozy up to progressive politicians pushing policies that are antithetical to the interests of the rank and file.

"On his first day in office, President Joe Biden – who campaigned as a moderate — signed an executive order killing the Keystone XL pipeline and, with it, more than 10,000 good-paying union jobs. Among Democrats, that’s par for the course. The vocal progressives dominating the Democratic Party these days are in command of the agenda.

"In another case, the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union has been pushing for at least ten months for “hazard pay” that doesn’t mesh with the interests of its members. UFCW International President Marc Perrone is demanding some of the nation’s largest grocery chains commit to the pay bump because of COIVD.

"Initially, he wanted $2 an hour. Now he wants $4, even $5 an hour in several West Coast cities. For this, he’s finding support from city and county politicians whose campaigns are union-funded.

"Shortages caused by the lockdowns have made it challenging for grocers and their frontline employees. The UFCW’s on them, after they’ve already invested billions to improve safety measures ignores the facts and smacks of ingratitude. Some grocery chains, like Kroger, are already offering $100 bonuses to employees who get a COVID vaccine.

"But what of what the union wants? A letter to the editor recently appearing in the Los Angeles Times said it well: “I fully agree that the grocery store workers are heroes. However, how does requiring them to be paid more solve the problem here? Are we saying to workers that it’s OK if you get sick, so long as you are paid more?' ” . . .

‘That Is A Lie!’: Leo Terrell Blasts Teachers Union President For Saying Reopening Schools Promotes ‘Structural Racism’  "Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell said Thursday that “it’s a lie” for a teachers union president to suggest that reopening schools will promote “structural racism.”  “I know what [the] term [structural racism] means. She doesn’t,” Terrell continued, referring to Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles who said that reopening schools propagates “structural racism.' ” . . .

Mother Says She’s Being Targeted By California’s Largest Teachers Union After She Pushed For School Reopening  "A mother who received an email from California’s largest teachers union asking her to identify her race believes she’s being targeted after she spoke favorably about school reopenings with local media." . . . 

“You are quoted twice in the last eight months,” the email said, in part. “I know that Maryam is a common Iranian name, but I will not make any assumptions without a legitimate method,” the email continued. “Could you tell me how you racially self-identify or point me to a citation on your identity?”

'You can't make this stuff up': Outrage as eBay REMOVES listings for canceled Dr Seuss books 'because they glorify violence' but allows copies of Mein Kampf and Louis Farrakhan's books to be sold

 Daily Mail  "A 2017 tweet from Vice President Kamala Harris has resurfaced mentioning Dr. Seuss by name and quoting him, four years before her own administration would strip his name from Read Across America Day.

"Harris was a senator when she sent out the tweet, dated March 2, 2017, in which she wished the famed children’s book author a happy birthday.

"“Happy birthday, #DrSeuss! ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go,’” the California senator wrote at the time.

"The birthday of Dr. Seuss — whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel and who died at 87 in 1991 — was chosen by the National Educational Association in 1998 as the date for a new holiday focused on promoting children’s literacy." . . .

Carlson: ‘Dr. Seuss Was Not a Racist — Dr. Seuss Was a Preachy Liberal'  

Jimmy Kimmel: Canceling Dr. Seuss Is ‘How Trump Gets Reelected’

HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher has similarly warned liberals cancel culture is “real” and “coming to a neighborhood near you.”  “Liberals need a Stand Your Ground law … for cancel culture.” Maher said, “so that when the woke mob comes after you for some ridiculous offense, you’ll stand your ground, stop apologizing. Because I can’t keep up with who’s on the s—list.”

Psaki's Revelation as to Who Actually Wrote Biden Proclamation Speaks Volumes

Obama’s 2016 proclamation described Seuss as “one of America’s revered wordsmiths” who “used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.” Trump, in his 2018 proclamation, urged Americans to “always remember the still-vibrant words of Dr. Seuss: ‘You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.'” Then-first lady Melania Trump celebrated Read Across America Day in 2017 by reading Dr. Seuss books to hospitalized children. Biden broke with that tradition in his. So, Jen Psaki was asked why Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in the proclamation for the event and her response was troubling on a couple of levels.

 

Canceled: Conservative comic strip 'Mallard Fillmore' dropped in 'unprecedented' move

 Washington Times  "The conservative comic strip “Mallard Fillmore” has been plucked.

"Bruce Tinsley, creator of the 27-year-old cartoon, said he was told this week by his syndication company that Gannett newspapers across the country simultaneously dropped the comic over two strips critical of President Biden and transgender participation in women’s sports.

"“It was a big shock,” Mr. Tinsley told The Washington Times. “From what I’m hearing, it was unprecedented. My syndicate had never seen anything like it.”

"He said officials at King Features, which syndicates the cartoon, said that “a decision was made at the [Gannett] corporate level, and they weren’t sure exactly why, except that they were sure it was about those two cartoons.”

"The two comics ran Feb. 19-20. The first depicts Mr. Biden musing: “For too long, segregation sullied women’s sports … They were restricted to women! Thank goodness those dark days are over.”

"In the second cartoon, Mr. Biden says, “I hear what you, the American people, want me to do … kill fossil-fuel jobs … devalue Americans’ labor … and help more transgender athletes beat the *@!# out of biological females.”

"Certainly, “Mallard Fillmore” has been known to ruffle feathers, but Mr. Tinsley said he didn’t think the strips referring to Mr. Biden’s Jan. 20 executive order on gender identity and sexual orientation were over the top." . . .

. . . "Mr. Tinsley said he has gone back to creating four of the seven daily comics per week, and he drew the two Biden cartoons at the center of the controversy.

"Don’t be surprised if “Mallard Fillmore” takes on the cancel culture in future comics.

"“There are so many cartoons about this issue, about all the people getting canned — the Gina Carano thing, and Dr. Seuss,” Mr. Tinsley said. “I know how it feels now.” . . .

Companies must fight back against wokeness

https://www.terrellaftermath.com/

 American Thinker  "Hyatt-Regency is under woke attack for sponsoring CPAC in Orlando, where adoring MAGA thousands expressed their affection for Donald Trump.  Though Hyatt has hunkered down somewhat in the face of leftist screaming, the company doesn't really come across as all that cowed.  Maybe it would buy into the following.

"Remember the nationwide outpouring for Chick-fil-A a few years ago (before it, too, went woke)?  Businesses that openly favor Trump's America need to take advantage of the simmering irritation going on outside the pages of the woke media.  Once the unwoke public understand who's really in their corner and who holds them in contempt, the floodgates will open.  Being ignored is one thing; being sneered at is quite another.  The left doesn't realize that it's been lucky so far that the general public hasn't caught on to what's happening.

"The idea here is, rather than hunker down from wokeness, go on the attack with unwoke themes.  Advertise with such memes as "it's not racist to be white."  "Some of my best friends are white."  "We welcome everybody."  While mouthing these lines, the actors drink the advertised soft drink or luxuriate in the beds of the motel chain or swim in its pool with multiracial guests." . . .

Attack of the Woke Teen Career Killers

"These holy terrors are tormenting newsrooms across New York City — at New York magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times. They are true believers, not original thinkers — race-obsessed, gender-obsessed, anti-white, anti-American, and much, much stupider than reporters used to be. Just tell me what I’m supposed to think and I’ll think it."

  Ann Coulter  "I was a mere 70 pages into Donald McNeil’s brief about his firing from The New York Times when I emailed a dozen of my friends to demand they read it immediately. But they don’t have my perseverance, so here are the highlights.

"Two years after McNeil chaperoned a group of high schoolers on a trip to Peru to learn about rural health care, The Daily Beast published an article detailing the students’ list of denunciations against him, including the career-ending claim that he’d used the “N-word.”

"Days later, it came out that he had used the word in response to a student’s question about a high school girl who’d been suspended from school for using the infamous word. He repeated it in order to ask how she’d said it.

"This paragraph, particularly the parenthetical, is all you need to know about McNeil’s misadventure in Peru:“At some point, a student took issue with my having said the U.S. wasn’t a colonial power, saying something like: ‘Don’t you realize what the CIA has done? Don’t you realize that the United Fruit Company interfered in central America to protect its banana monopoly?’ … (This student herself was white, from Greenwich, CT and went to Andover but mentioned multiple times over the week that she had a Latino boyfriend and he had opened her eyes to a different view of the world …)”

"None of the students on this resume-padding trip were black. There was one Asian, and the rest were white, dripping with white privilege. (Who else goes on a Princeton-bait trip to Peru in high school to learn about “rural health care”?) Twenty of the 22 students were girls. All appear to be complete idiots.

"McNeil went on the exact same trip and gave the same lectures to a different group of high school students the summer before and got rave reviews. But the 2019 batch were in the advanced Spotting Racism class.

"During McNeil’s struggle sessions with his interrogators at the Times, he was accused of an array of crimes against political correctness.  Here’s a sampling:" . . . 

Fighting the Fires of Hate |

The Recurring Symbol  

Ray Bradbury’s introduction to the 1967 edition of Fahrenheit 451 recalls his childhood love of books and libraries: “I ate, drank, and slept books. . . . It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven, it is a sinful practice, and I carried that with me.”

"The symbolism of the 1933 bonfires has entered into the American culture of politics, film, and even television as a powerful metaphor of demagoguery, censorship, and suppression. Americans who depend upon free access to information have to this day often focused on the Nazi book burnings as a historical analogy to past and present-day events. For example, in the 1950s—during a period of widespread book banning in U.S. schools and public libraries—the New York Times editorialized that the suppression of books was a “species of book burning,” conflicting with basic American ideas of free thought. In another example, a U.S. senator, speaking in 1953 against censorship, used the term “book burning” as “symbolic of any effort to remove books from libraries.” “It matters little,” he stated, “whether the removal literally takes the form of burning or consists of storing the books in basements and warehouses.' ”

America's Kristallnacht sets deeper roots and new forms

 

At this rate, nobody will hear a who - American Thinker  . . . "Canceling Dr. Seuss for language considered socially acceptable at the time of publication is akin to suggesting that all history will inevitably be erased because it will eventually fail to meet newer, "better" social acceptance standards.  He is a product of the time he was raised.  He is a product of the time his parents were raised.  He is a product of an immigrant family and all the trappings that each immigrant family brings to America's melting pot.

"If America continues down the road of canceling all voices that make someone feel uncomfortable, children will be denied the chance to learn from the good and bad of history.  It destroys any opportunity for historical reflection.  It eliminates any measure of progress because no record of the past will exist.  At this rate, nobody will hear a Who from Whoville ever again."

Who Had 'Dr. Seuss Is Racist' On Their Cancel Bingo Cards? – PJ Media   . . . "Most forms of entertainment are reflective of the time they were created and there’s a lot of older stuff out there that the woke scolds find problematic because none of them understand context. Disney Plus has been putting warnings on classic movies and cartoons like Dumbo because somebody might have a feeling hurt while watching it. Heck, pretty much everything that was written or filmed before 1965 is probably suspect now. I’m reading a classic sci-fi anthology that’s mostly stuff from the first half of the 20th century and it’s a minefield of words that would be deemed culturally inappropriate now. Does that mean these old stories by luminaries in the genre have no value anymore?" . . .

FACEPALM: Joe Biden Cancels Dr. Seuss – PJ Media  "Last week, when Amazon removed Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment from its digital shelves, many conservatives rightly decried the act as a kind of digital book burning. Yet on Tuesday, six Dr. Seuss books received the same treatment for Theodor Seuss Geisel’s March 2 birthday — a day now celebrated as “Read Across America Day.” Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy, announced it would pull six books from publication due to allegedly racist and insensitive imagery." . . .

Keith Olbermann Hopes Everyone Dies In Texas Now That State Has Reopened –

 

Def-Con News

Keith Olbermann

@KeithOlbermann

·

16h

Why are we wasting vaccinations on Texas if Texas has decided to join the side of the virus?. . .

. . . "It’s Olbermann’s insane position that Texas is colluding with the coronavirus and therefore 29 million Texans should get sick and die. What the f*ck is wrong with this guy. Oh yeah, he’s a liberal. That’s what the f*ck is wrong with him.

"Olbermann will be sorely disappointed that his death wish upon millions of people from a state that doesn’t vote the way he wants to will go unfulfilled because, as was already mentioned, the numbers say the pandemic is over. On top of which, the United States has enough vaccines for every American, so there is no wasting of it.

"Like all liberals, Olbermann thinks wishing death upon political opponents is a reasonable and rational way to debate. If they couldn’t tell people to f*ck off and die, they wouldn’t have anything to add to the argument. Well, they do have the race card as well, but Olbermann figured he had won this won and didn’t need to play it." . . .

Quote Tweet

Gov. Greg Abbott

@GovAbbott

· 21h

NEW: Issuing an executive order to lift the mask mandate and open Texas to 100 percent.

Olbermann deletes and apologizes for 'racist' tweet comparing 'whiny' Trump to a slave

NY Times reveals the devastation after Smith College capitulated to a false claim of racism

 NY Times reveals the devastation after Smith College capitulated to a false claim of racism (legalinsurrection.com)

“Faculty members pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity.”

"For several months we have been covering the story of Jodi Shaw, a now-resigned Smith College staff member who blew the whistle on racist “anti-racist” training which singled out and demonized “whites”.

"When Shaw first told her story publicly, she emphasized an incident of a false allegation of racism lodged against Smith College staff members. We wrote about that in our very first post about Shaw, Smith College whistleblower hits campus Critical Race Theory indoctrination: “Stop reducing my personhood to a racial category”:

Shaw alludes to the fact that she or her colleagues have been mistreated by students, and Smith College has either encouraged or permitted this behavior, stating, “And, I think we all know what I’m talking about.”

Shaw appears to be referring to a 2018 incident, where a black student accused a custodial staff member of racism for calling Campus Police. The staff member eventually was exonerated, as Inside Higher Ed reported:

Smith College released a report Monday detailing an independent investigation into a July call to campus police and rejecting the idea that the caller was motivated by clear racial bias. During the call, a Smith College custodial employee reported a black student who was eating lunch and relaxing in the Tyler House residence hall living room. The student “seems to be out of place,” the caller told the dispatcher.

"Repeatedly in later interviews and videos, Smith emphasized the importance of that 2018 incident in what followed in her own story.

"The incident involved a student backed by the ACLU legal and public relations behemoth, which published her story, A Smith College Employee Called the Police on Me for Eating Lunch While Black." . . .

Stop the Balkanization of America

My Turn, Chris Boardman: We are being Balkanized

 Stop the Balkanization of America - American Thinker

• The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) had a web page that depicted "whiteness" as including values such as the nuclear family and the Protestant work ethic, as if non-White people lacked similar values before they encountered Caucasians.  Japanese workers have a reputation for putting in far more hours than Caucasians, Protestant or otherwise, and the same goes for Asian-American immigrants.  Black-majority nations in Africa also have a strong work ethic.

. . . "Balkanization has already resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire.  Balkanization is the reason for proposals for Scottish, Bavarian, and Catalan secession.  This makes those who want to similarly Balkanize the United States useful idiots for foreign and domestic enemies of the United States.  We need to marginalize them as such."

DC Whisper

When A Great Democracy Politicized The Military -

 

When A Great Democracy Politicized The Military - American Thinker   . . . "More than a decade of politicization of the military resulted in a French army that went to war in August 1914 with appallingly poor leadership and training. The great social experiment of the Left Bloc was a bloodbath. In the first month of the war, the French army lost 250,000 casualties—20% of the field army. Faced with an existential crisis, the French government announced a truce between the left and the conservatives. For the duration of the war, with France’s survival at stake, meritocracy would be the only standard in the French army.

"By 6 September 1914, General Joffre, French Commander-in-Chief, had relieved two army commanders, ten corps commanders, and thirty-three division commanders (half of the French Army divisional commanders) for incompetence. Some officers slated for retirement in 1914 and denied promotion for political and religious views, became full generals and army commanders within a year. France barely survived in 1914 thanks to the British Expeditionary Force and Russia’s invasion of East Prussia.

"We see an interesting historical parallel today, with a leftist government under Biden behaving much like the French Premier Combes in trying to impose a radical leftist orthodoxy and crush the conservative half of the nation. In Defense Secretary Austin we see a man obsessed with the internal politics of the army, just like French General André, intent on purging the armed forces of “extremists” rather than focusing on foreign threats.

"In France, the attempt to replace meritocracy with political loyalty resulted in military disaster. The moral of the story is simple. You can have armed forces that are completely loyal to the political leadership and rigidly follows its political ideology. Or you can have a military based on meritocracy and competence. You cannot have both."

Haunting Photos of WWI Soldiers at the Battle of the Somme | HISTORY

Neera Tanden withdraws as Biden’s budget chief pick

 Neera Tanden withdraws as Biden’s budget chief pick (msn.com)

"Tanden faced opposition from at least one Democratic senator and was struggling to win any Republican support, leaving her nomination to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget with no clear path toward confirmation.

“ 'Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” Tanden said in a letter requesting her withdrawal. Biden’s statement indicated that he expects Tanden to serve in another role in his administration.

"The withdrawal marks the first Cabinet defeat for Biden, whose other nominees have so far all cleared 50 votes in the Senate. But it is a potentially costly one. The White House is expected to introduce a budget in a matter of weeks or months and will now have to do so — at least for the foreseeable future — without a budget chief.