Labor Unions

Vacuum at the Top

Featured image As Scott noted previously, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for three days before Joe Biden knew anything about it. Austin claimed he “could have done a better job ensuring that the public was informed.” Such an understatement raises more than a few questions. We now know he was being treated for prostate cancer, but neither President Biden nor his staff knew this until today—weeks after Secretary Austin went »

It Has To Be Su

Featured image Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for Labor Secretary, can avoid Senate confirmation and keep running the Labor Department. This is due to a September 21 ruling by Edda Emmanuelli Perez, general counsel of the General Accountability Office (GAO). “As the Deputy Secretary of Labor, Ms. Su may serve as Acting Secretary under section 552 until a successor is appointed,” Emmanuelli Perez ruled. “The Vacancies Act’s time limitations do not apply »

The Price Point of Virtue-Signaling

Featured image I am intermittently a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and attend its large annual meeting when it is convenient or otherwise useful, such as when held in San Francisco or Washington DC, as it often is. Some years back the APSA moved its long-scheduled annual meeting from San Francisco to Seattle because there was a pending strike of hotel workers in San Francisco, and for the oh-so-sensitive »

The Democratic Party Is Run by Graduate Students

Featured image This news item caught my eye: Secretary Cardona cancels UW commencement speech amid researchers strike Hours before he was scheduled to give the commencement speech to the University of Washington’s graduating class of students, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona canceled his appearance, citing a strike by graduate and postdoctoral researchers. “Secretary Cardona will not cross the picket line to give the commencement address,” a spokesperson for Cardona said in »

The world according to Biden: Transcript

Featured image I was looking for transcript in all the wrong places, i.e., for the official White House transcript of President Biden’s fabulations at the 29th quadrennial convention of the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia yesterday morning. The White House posted it under Statements and Releases here. I commented on it here based on the PBS video (below). Today’s New York Post devotes a good editorial to Biden’s speech under the heading “The Post »

The world according to Biden

Featured image President Biden spoke today at the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention in Philadelphia. I have posted a video of the whole thing at the bottom. Biden is in his element and the torrent of lies is tough to take. The White House has not posted a transcript. As usual, Biden builds himself up by comparison with “the last guy.” In the world according to Biden, life under Donald Trump was a nightmare »

Reconcile this

Featured image It looks like the Democrats can only pass a reconciliation bill if they are willing to get behind a trimmed-down package. The $3.5 trillion version doesn’t command the support of 50 Senators. A $2 trillion package might. But to get from $3.5 trillion to around $2 trillion, the Democrats must agree on what to cut. That seems like a tall order because the current package contains big gifts for everyone »

My dad and Hubert Humphrey

Featured image Scott’s Father’s Day tribute to his dad includes a picture of his father and Hubert Humphrey. Scott noted that the picture was taken not long after Humphrey had led the charge to retake the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from the Communists between 1946 and 1948. Around the same time as that picture was taken, my father, a socialist, was a leader in the movement to wrest control of certain union locals in »

Does Marty Walsh have Alex Acosta’s problem?

Featured image Marty Walsh is Joe Biden’s Secretary of Labor. Alex Acosta was Donald Trump’s for a few years. Acosta lost his job after reports showed that he gave a sweetheart deal to Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophile. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal suggests that Walsh might have a somewhat similar problem. The alleged pedophile in question is the former chief of the Boston police union, Patrick Rose. He was »

The Great Implosion

Featured image A couple days ago I referenced Tom Wolfe’s classic essay “The Great Relearning,” and it may be that we have to go through the Great Implosion in order to relearn things like common sense. As you have heard, California is going through a series of rolling blackouts of the kind not seen since the botched electricity “restructuring” almost 20 years ago ultimately ended up costing Governor Gray Davis his job. »

In Hoffa’s Shadow

Featured image If you are looking for a new book with which you can hunker down while you isolate yourself at home, I recommend Jack Goldsmith’s In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, A Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth. Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant »

AFL-CIO hopes Alex Acosta hangs on at Labor Department

Featured image Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta is under fire from nearly all sides over the sweetheart deal he gave to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein when Acosta was a U.S. Attorney in Florida. The fire is all the more intense because a Florida federal judge has now ruled that, in the process of giving Epstein his deal, Acosta violated federal victims’ rights law. Editorialists of all political stripes have called on Acosta to »

Trump renominates the Chai Feldblum of the NLRB

Featured image I’ve written often about President Trump’s strange decision (or the decision of his advisers) to renominate Chai Feldblum as an EEOC Commissioner. Feldblum was the architect of President Obama’s aggressive LGBT agenda. Thus, her renomination seemed like a betrayal of Trump’s social conservative supporters. Some (perhaps many) of them construed it that way. As a result, Feldblum has not been confirmed. Neither have the two Republican nominees on the same »

Civil War on the Left, Part 27

Featured image I’ve been expecting this to happen for a long time. From the New York Times: Rift Between Labor and Environmentalists Threatens Democratic Turnout Plan By Jonathan Martin WASHINGTON — Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election. The rift »

Annals of Liberal Hypocrisy

Featured image As we and others have endlessly reminded, if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any standards at all. Witness Hillary’s prostration on Tuesday (“Equal Pay Day“) about how since rent, groceries, etc., all cost the same for men and women, women should be paid as much as men. Hey Hillary—how about starting at home, with the pay gap for executives at the Clinton Foundation: Pay Gap Alert: Clinton »

Obama’s impending regulatory assault

Featured image President Obama promised that 2014 would be the year of the presidential “phone and pen.” Atypically, Obama delivered to some extent on that promise. For Obama, 2015 will be the year in which he eschews the phone and resorts even more to the pen. His controversial executive orders on amnesty and Cuba are just the tip of that iceberg. For years, leftist dominated federal agencies have been clamoring for an »

Civil War on the Left, Part 4

Featured image The Hill newspaper notes yesterday that “The Keystone pipeline has long been a source of friction between Democrats and labor unions.”  Well one union this week sent a letter to Democrats who publicly oppose Keystone threatening retribution: A top building trades union is launching a midterm-election assault on House Democrats who oppose construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. A letter distributed Friday by the Laborers’ International Union of North »