Why unions can bite me ...

Typical blood-sucking thugs.

A retired U.S. Marine who runs a Massachusetts high school's ROTC program says he faces termination if he doesn't pay a $500 union fee by next week, a levy he refuses to pay because he already receives medical and dental benefits from the military.

Maj. Stephen Godin, senior naval science instructor at the Naval Junior ROTC Unit at North High School in Worcester, Mass., told FoxNews.com he has been teaching for the Educational Association for Worcester for 15 years -- including 14 at North High School -- without having to join the union or pay an "agency fee" toward the cost of collective bargaining.

"I just want to save my job here," the 58-year-old father of two said. "I've been doing this for 15 years. Nobody has ever told me to join the union or be terminated."
...
An official with the Massachusetts Teachers Association said state law requires public employees -- including teachers at public schools -- to join unions as a condition of employment or to pay an agency fee.

But Godin says he should be exempt from the law since he receives military benefits, including medical and dental insurance.

"So that's nothing to do with Worcester there," he said. "Neither the union nor the Worcester Public Schools have allowed me to make that argument. It's just the union that wants my money."

Godin, who retired from the Marines in 1994 after logging more than 2,000-plus hours flying F-4 Phantoms and five overseas deployments, said he has not hired an attorney.

"That would cost me money, too," he said.

No better than the mafia ... and they act like it too. Another reason Sal lives in a right-to-work state. Maggie?

Hat tip MTH.

Detective, the more important question is....

How do you afford a Hummer on a police salary?

Heck - I know a Navy CDR can't on his.



BTW, the girl with the drum and the santa hat ... LGB, call your office.

Nation of laws vs. Nation of people

We are mostly familiar with the concept that a nation of free people results from a society run by laws, not run by people. A basic Common Law idea.

We often think of it in the larger sense - as in macro-national problems. We also need to see it at the micro-local issue, even down to your city government to the local school's PTA.

The rule of law keeps a society on an even keel. Though imperfect as all human things are - it smoothes out the edges and promotes civil, non-violent problem resolution. Slow and clunky at times - and blessedly inefficient, it is still the one things that keeps a civil society, well, civil.

Without fair, just, equal, enforced, and followed laws - things will always devolve to the use and abuse of power where those in a position of authority will exert their will regardless of fairness, justice, equality, or balance. There will not be a civilized discussion of issues - things will elevate until the thugs get their way through the surrender of their opponent - or escalated further towards the application of the police and/or mob power the thugs control.

They will do all they can to maintain their power, promote their positions - but nothing is more important to them than to keep their ego intact from those who might challenge its sense of self-importance derived from the possession of power; power great or small.

The smart are good at hiding the subversion of established law - be it the Constitution or the by-laws of the PTA. When the clever act, it is hard to see the Thugocracy in action.

However, when you have small-minded people, who wield their little power in a ham-fisted and clumsy manner, the tendency and methods of a Thugocracy are clear to see.

Another characteristic of a Thugocracy is that they will do anything to destroy someone who shows them for what they are. Anyone who stands up to them. They will do all they can to pressure you to back off. They will try to destroy you personally, professionally, and emotionally. They will come after your job, your wife, your children - trying to find your breaking point. It does not matter if you are right - you are "They." "They" must be destroyed because they disrupt "my" power.

If you want to see the Thugocracy in micro - go over to fellow milblogger CJ's place to see what I am taking about.

The broader Thugocracy ...

This is sad - but it is what I see more and more of; and it will get worse as we go towards 2010 and 2012. The Left has decided that to win, it must win ugly. This is the third-order effect of that choice.

We will all soon, if we don't already, have stories like Penn's.

From Crackle: Getting Yelled At by One of My Heroes

The American mind is closing from the Left. Don't take it in silence. Speech and more speech. Opinion and more opinion. Talk and more talk.

I feel sorry for Penn; mostly because he is right.

Hat tip HotAir.

Do you have the courage of your convictions?

The thugocracy is smart and is folding in full disclosure with open access to create something that is, in a word, chilling.

Prop8 maps.

Park your car in the garage.

Virtual thugocracy

Via Glenn, Politico gives us a glimpse of the nature of discourse in the next 4 to 8 years.

President-elect Barack Obama’s Transition today launched “Open for Questions,” a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another’s questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.

It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama’s supporters appear to be using — and abusing — a tool allowing them to “flag” questions as “inappropriate” to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama’s website. . . . So far, Obama’s team does not seem to have stepped in to allow uncomfortable questions to rise to the top, and instead is allowing his supporters to sanitize the site.

Two follow-on quotes that I think catch it all; first from Gawker.

“The same Obamatards who voted up total blowjob questions on the Digg-like question section of Change.gov have, all too predictably, almost completely obliterated any question mentioning ROD BLAGOJEVICH. In fact, if you mention ROD BLAGOJEVICH in your question, at all, even totally politely in a relevant way, your question will not only be voted down but ‘removed’ (says the site) as ‘inappropriate,’ visible only through a specific search for ROD BLAGOJEVICH.” Hmm, group censorship of uncomfortable subjects. Nothing creepy about that on a political site. Hope and change!

...and one of Glenn's readers.

Notice the problem with Obama’s websites?

Neither he nor his staff is censoring the comments…. but they’ve set the site up to allow others to do so.

Neither he nor his staff asked for any illegal foreign contributions, or for contributions from obviously false donors….. they just disabled the standard controls and credit card checks to allow it to happen.

They didn’t have any ties to whacky characters with extreme ideas…. but the campaign website allowed anyone to set up a “blog” and put out the propaganda.

In each case, Obama and his staff were careful to leave no directly illegal / unethical fingerprints of their own….. but they sure made it easy for “supporters unknown” to do so through their IT systems.

Deniability — it’s built right in.

Yep - they are a funky bunch.

Of Jews and Mormons ...

In cultures there are some early warning signs of political thuggery. When there is a group of people who are so sure of their own beliefs that they will not work through a normal, free political process - they will often turn to violence. That violence, like that of a narcissistic child, derives from and intellectual inability to accept that perhaps their chosen idea is not acceptable to the majority.

When that happens and there is a group that holds the majority in contempt - they will lash out. They won't lash out of the majority though, no that would be too hard. They will instead focus on a sub-set of the majority and attempt to bully, suppress, or destroy that segment to remove it from the equation - and therefor get close to winning thorough either changing the playing field, or intimidating the remainder of the majority.

That is one thing - another is when to distract from real problems with their goals, they find a minority to place all the blame on their failure. Externalizing their problem even though the problem is internal.

With the victory of Prop 8, we see a little of both. In California, when it was found out that majorities of the Hispanic and Black communities supported traditional marriage - the radical homosexual advocates attacked them. After a few days, they realized that Hispanics and Blacks are not only a large part of the CA political Left coalition, they are also a protected class.

Like all thugs however, they looked around for an easier target for their blame and anger. Falling on traditions thousands of years old, they went for a religious minority. Historically, the Jews have been the target. This time it is the Mormons.

The FBI says a letter containing a suspicious white powder sent to a Mormon temple in the Westwood area of Los Angeles was not hazardous.

The temple was evacuated Thursday while a hazardous materials crew tested the substance and determined it was non-toxic.

A temple in downtown Salt Lake City received a similar envelope containing a white powder that spilled onto a clerk’s hand. The room was decontaminated and the envelope taken by the FBI for testing. A spokesman for the Salt Lake City Fire Department says the clerk showed no signs of illness, but the scare shut down a building at Temple Square for more than an hour.

Both macro like above, and micro.

In Sacramento, a high-profile theater director resigned from his job of 25 years after a boycott threat over his $1,000 donation in support of the measure. In Los Angeles, a Mexican restaurant owner, a Mormon who donated $100, was reduced to tears and left town after hundreds of protesters confronted her at work, by phone and on the Internet.

"You express your beliefs and you have to be punished for it?" said Arnoldo Archila, an employee at the El Coyote restaurant. "This is not right, not in this country. This is not Iraq."

Where is President Elect Obama? What about this hate? Who will stand with the Mormons? I will. All good people, Spartacus like should proclaim,

I am a Mormon.

OK, maybe too much to ask for the beer drinkers out there - but you get the idea.

Such thuggery should not go unopposed. Saddleback Church Members should spend next Sunday at the Mormon Temple in LA - as should a delegation from the Catholic Church.

Sad thing - this hurts gay men and women everywhere. As most of you know, I have no problem with openly gay people serving in the military - but it is the radical fringe that is preventing many from being fully comfortable with the concept. Full frontal political thuggery will not help your cause - and gives your benign supporters pause.

Attn N.C. military parents

This is part of the Obama Thugocracy - this time aimed at your children in school.

North Carolina residents, this is in your backyard - what are you going to do about it?

This kid's father is deployed to Iraq and her teacher holds her up to ridicule to tears.

Who are you holding accountable?

Watch it all here (ignore the Swedish/Finnish )


More from Michelle, Allah, Lex, and Belch. That woman is lucky one Anne's kids didn't have the bad luck to be in her class.

Cross-posted at MilBlogs.

BTW, the "teacher" is Diantha Harris - AKA a child abusing thug.

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UPDATE: ... and TundraTabloid too!

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UPDATE II - Electric Boogaloo: Superintendent of the Cumberland County Schools, William C. Harrison, responds:



Good for him to stand up like that - "appropriate action."

The Obama Thugocracy in full bloom

Last week Michael Barone wrote something that described what my instincts told me was coming should Sen. Obama (D-IL) win. He described it as such;

Once upon a time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the staunchest defenders of free speech. Union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s made the case that they should have access to employees to speak freely to them, and union leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther were ardent defenders of the First Amendment.

Today's liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don't like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

We see a similar attitude in what has happened to "Joe the Plumber." CAPT Ed over at HotAir reviews;

Now, we have people crawling over his tax records, his voter registration, his professional licensing, and whatever else they can find in the public record. Someone has linked him to the long-deceased Charles Keating, suggesting that somehow Obama managed to pick a McCain plant out of a ropeline full of people by accident. How much longer before a certain blogger at The Atlantic demands a paternity test to see if Joe the Plumber fathered Sarah Palin’s baby — or Bristol’s, for that matter?

There is a stench of desperation surrounding this, as if they sense defeat coming from a moment of honesty from Obama about his real intentions to institute a regime of redistribution. They want to discredit the man who only asked the question as if he’s some political operative who magically forced Obama to sound … well, a little like a Marxist. Why? They want to distract people from Obama’s answer by sliming the man Obama picked at random to ask a question.

And so it goes. I like his new rules.

So what have we learned from this episode?

1. Thou shalt not offend The One by asking him a question. Of any kind.
2. Anyone who questions The One will have to undergo a public pillorying of a kind unseen since the Red Scare, or perhaps the Inquisition.
3. The Tanning-Bed Media will happily participate in any inquisition, as long as it keeps them from investigating irrelevant issues like Obama’s ties to the Chicago Machine, William Ayers, ACORN, or his record on protecting infanticide.

Ahhh yes. Change you have to believe in.