Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- Key Senate Democrats are wavering in their support of legislation that would give more power to labor unions, dealing a setback to labor's top priority as businesses warn of the damage the bill would cause. A woman wears a model house on her head during a rally in Washington to support the "Employee Free Choice Act." The battle over the "Employee Free Choice Act" -- expected to be introduced Tuesday -- is seen as a power struggle among labor unions and businesses, as well as a test of whether moderate Democrats and Republicans will push back on Democratic...

Capitol Hill Republicans threw the first legislative punch in the fight over union law on Wednesday, February 25. But Democrats could land a haymaker of their own later with a bill that is much more likely to obtain congressional approval. Members of the House and Senate GOP introduced a bill that would mandate secret-ballot elections to form a union. The measure is meant to counter a bill Democrats could debut any day that would make it easier for employees to organize. Called the Employee Free Choice Act, the Democratic bill would force companies to recognize unions when a majority of...

Sounds nutty, I know, but Ambinder breaks news that The One’s dining with “conservative opinion leaders” in Maryland, evidently at George Will’s house. Among the attendees: Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and … anyone else? Coincidentally, I got an e-mail from a reader shortly after noon noting that Limbaugh had a surprise guest host today who spent the beginning of the show dropping hints that Rush had been called away to urgent business in D.C. and that it might have to do with something he said yesterday about giving Obama advice. I ignored it — but now they’re dropping hints on...

President-elect Barack Obama's transition office said in a report released Tuesday that its staff had no inappropriate communications with the office of Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is at the center of a corruption probe. The five-page report identified incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the only aide who had direct contact with Mr. Blagojevich. Mr. Emanuel "had one or two" telephone conversations with the governor between Nov. 6 and Nov. 8 to discuss his own resignation from the U.S. House as well as potential nominees to fill the Illinois Senate seat being vacated by Mr....

Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has been dropping dimes on his state's disgraced governor and other corrupt local pols for years, a spokesman said Tuesday. Jackson, a longtime congressman and son of the famed civil rights activist, has been pulled into the controversy surrounding Gov. Rod Blagojevich's alleged attempt to auction Barack Obama's now-vacant U.S. Senate seat. A Jackson spokesman, Kenneth Edmonds, said the congressman had spoken to the feds about Blagojevich and others. He wouldn't provide details, but Chicago's WLS-TV reported the congressman told investigators Blagojevich refused to make Jackson's wife director of the state lottery because Jackson would...

Facing 30 years in prison on corruption charges, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is assembling the best defense team money can buy. The question is, whose money? There has been speculation that Blagojevich will use his expansive campaign war chest, $3.6 million at last count, to pay for his defense. Can he really do that? To paraphrase a fellow Chicagoan: Yes he can! Possibly. State law does not prevent the Democratic governor from tapping his campaign committee's funds to pay legal bills, even though he stands accused of illegally soliciting and obtaining some of the funds in exchange for official actions....

Editorial Analysis: Beside figuring out how he’ll weasel out of his recent arrest – and probable conviction – for trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s senate seat to the highest bidder, I wonder if the disgraced governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is contemplating the fates of Lee Harvey Oswald, Alexander Litvinenko, Vince Foster, Jim McDougal and Ron Brown – all of whom were summarily disposed of to keep them from talking. Oswald, we know, was shot by Jack Ruby, a smalltime Dallas nightclub owner with suspected ties to the Mafia. The death effectively cemented the government’s case against the odd...

Barack Obama had begun thinking about his Senate successor even before the presidential election, and dispatched Rahm Emanuel days after the vote to contact aides of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to begin talking up Mr. Obama's preferred candidates, associates of Mr. Emanuel said this weekend. Mr. Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago, had been approached about being Mr. Obama's White House chief of staff the week before the election, though he hadn't yet officially decided to take the post. Nonetheless, the issue of Mr. Obama's Senate replacement was sensitive enough that senior Obama aides wanted to keep the matter within the...

Extorting Children's Hospital is a new political low. Chicagoans and Illinoisans love political scandal the way that Milanese love opera. We trade recollections, like baseball cards, about the secretary of state (Paul Powell) who stashed money in shoeboxes, and the Chicago mayor (Harold Washington) whose birthday was April 15 but never filed his income tax return. Rod Blagojevich stands a chance to be the fourth Illinois governor in recent history, and the second in a row, to wind up in prison. This run suggests that Illinoisans are indifferent to political corruption, and it's hard to argue with such an impressive...

CHICAGO (AP) - A federal judge in Chicago has ordered Governor Rod Blagojevich released on his own recognizance after the Democrat was hit with federal corruption charges. The governor was arrested at his home Tuesday on charges he conspired to sell or trade President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. U.S. District Judge Nan Nolan said "Good afternoon, governor" in greeting Blagojevich at the afternoon bond hearing. The governor was wearing sweat pants, gym shoes and an athletic shirt. He was released on a signature bond that specifies that he'll forfeit $4,500 bond if he doesn't appear...

I doubt too many people around Barack Obama would have any criticisms for US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald or offer any defenses of Illinois politics now. In 2005, however, Obama’s chief political adviser did both in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. While Fitzgerald probed the endemic corruption in the Land of Lincoln, David Axelrod scolded him for criminalizing the normal trading of interests in Chicago-style politics: Patrick Fitzgerald’s charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have drawn a chorus of shock and outrage. But Barack Obama’s message man David Axelrod once staked out a much more nuanced position on Fitzgerald’s anti-corruption...

<p>A source said today that Gov. Rod Blagojevich was taken into federal custody at his North Side home this morning. The U.S. attorney's office would not confirm the information, and a spokesman for the governor did not immediately return a phone call for comment.</p>

Organized labor helped elect Barack Obama and now eagerly awaits his promised support for its top priority—a bill that would make it easier to set up union locals. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow unions to create local bargaining units without winning the vote of a majority of workers in a secret ballot. The local unit would be certified if a majority of workers endorsed it by signing an authorization card handed out by union organizers. Fair enough? Not really. The so-called card-check bill would not protect workers and it would not be "free choice." It would strip away...

President-elect Barack Obama's 3 million campaign volunteers got re-enlistment notices this week. Campaign manager David Plouffe, in a mass e-mail sent Wednesday to former workers, asked how much time they can spare for four missions integral to Obama's effort to transform his victory into a broader political movement. The volunteers' options are, Plouffe wrote: -Campaign for progressive state and local candidates -Undertake grassroots local efforts to advance Obama's agenda -Train others in Obama's organizing techniques -Focus on local political issues. "Obama's building a political machine," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington research group.

Regarding Dr. John David's commentary, "Make it Easier to Unionize Workplace": Labor unions certainly have their place in a contemporary American economy, but not at the expense of employee free choice and economic security. Indeed, the Employee Free Choice Act would severely erode the freedom enjoyed by employees for nearly 75 years to make a private, fully-informed decision about whether or not they want a union to represent them. Too often, the losing party in a union election - the company or the union - blames its loss on the opposing party's "coercive and underhanded" tactics. In reality though, the...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. labor unions, having helped Barack Obama win the presidency, entertain high hopes he will enact their agenda to bolster their negotiating power with employers and increase their numbers after decades of decline. Unions have "an unprecedented amount of leverage" after turning out white middle-class voters for Obama in battleground industrial states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that he won in Tuesday's election but had lost in the Democratic nominating primaries, said University of Illinois-Chicago labor expert Robert Bruno. "American workers won this election," said Anna Burger, chairman of the labor coalition "Change to Win" at a news...

"... the community organizer ... must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.'     -- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals "THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT --- An analysis of the Alinsky Model."  -- Hillary Clinton, BA Honors Thesis, Wellesley College, 1969. "(Barack) Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing...."  -- The Nation  A psychopath is a person without conscience; someone who constantly breaks the moral rules of the community. Saul Alinsky was a "community organizer" who found a career that...

96-Year-Old Gangster Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy Charges Wednesday, February 28, 2007 FORT LAUDERDALE — A 96-year-old gangster who oversaw robberies, money laundering, bank fraud and other crimes for one of the United States' largest Mafia families pleaded guilty Wednesday, but because of his age will likely be sentenced to house arrest. Albert "The Old Man" Facchiano pleaded guilty to a Florida charge of racketeering conspiracy and a New York charge of conspiracy to tamper with a witness. From 1994 to 2006, Facchiano supervised associates of the Genovese crime family who committed robberies, money laundering, bank fraud and possessed stolen property,...

Now that the United States Senate's plan to grant amnesty to over 12 million illegal immigrants has reached a deadlock, it would be interesting to look back at how such proposed law-making would have affected other characters in American history. Al Capone legally immigrated to the United States in the early 1900's, eventually creating one of the most notorious crime syndicates our nation has ever known. Capone, who came to America from Italy, amassed a great fortune through his participation in bootlegging, prostitution and gambling during the Roaring 20's. Capone thrived in Chicago where a corrupt city government and police...

<p>The United States, rightly unsparing in its efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, whose al Qaeda operatives killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, is in no position to criticize Israel for assassinating Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas. Yassin is lionized in certain quarters of the media as a Muslim spiritual leader, but his enduring legacy is the skill he exercised to motivate Muslims to kill Jews by killing themselves.</p>