California prison psychiatrist and public employee made over $800K in 2010

Can’t say I’m surprised.   But still, wow:

The chief psychiatrist for California’s overcrowded prison system was paid $838,706 in 2010, more than any other state employee that year, payroll figures released today show.

The doctor, whose name wasn’t released, had a salary range of $261,408 to $308,640, according to data released today by California Controller John Chiang. The total compensation was raised by bonuses or payout of unused vacation time, according to the controller’s office.

If you don’t see anything wrong with this, then you’re part of the problem.  Plain and simple.   If the people of  California continue to elect nanny-state supporting, overspending politicians as their representatives to state government, then quite frankly, good riddance.  Let it break off the continent and sink into the Pacific.

Meanwhile, this insanity.

UPDATE.  Linked by Ed Driscoll.  Thanks!

Collective bargaining in public employee unions

The danger is clear to anyone with a brain:

“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

That wasn’t Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul, or Ronald Reagan talking. That was George Meany — the former president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O — in 1955. Government unions are unremarkable today, but the labor movement once thought the idea absurd.

The founders of the labor movement viewed unions as a vehicle to get workers more of the profits they help create. Government workers, however, don’t generate profits. They merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers. F.D.R. considered this “unthinkable and intolerable.”

 

Government collective bargaining means voters do not have the final say on public policy. Instead their elected representatives must negotiate spending and policy decisions with unions. That is not exactly democratic – a fact that unions once recognized.

Common sense, people.  Common sense.

18 GOP Senators from Wisconsin receive death threats

Pure scum:

State Sens. Joe Leibham and Glenn Grothman said they are among as many as 18 Republican senators who received a death threat following their votes to eliminate most collective bargaining powers for public workers.

The threat was sent in an e-mail late Wednesday with the subject, “Death threat!!!! Bomb!!!!” according to a copy of the letter released by Grothman’s office. The e-mail also was addressed to Sen. Pam Galloway, R-Wausau.

Grothman, R-West Bend, said the e-mail is the latest example of “a new height in incivility.” He said in recent weeks he has received obscene phone calls at all hours of the night, been jostled at the Capitol and has been shouted down during interviews.

“This is another example of the anger which is being spewed by the government unions,” Grothman said. “This has been all about intimidating … Republican legislators into bowing to the public unions, and it has only steeled our resolve.”

Grothman said he is hesitant to completely disregard the threat given the volatile atmosphere in Madison. A note shoved under his door Wednesday night said, “The only good Republican is a dead Republican.”

I’m standing up and applauding  Senator Grothman for defending his vote and not being intimidated by these violent, vitriolic union douchebags, and for speaking truth to power about what the unions try to do by intimidation.  For too long public unions have had  their way with state governments by looting taxpayers, and expecting governors to ask “how high?” whenever they say jump.

No more.  It’s time to bring an end to this insanity.

 

Reality Check on Spending

Allahpundit digs through this NY Times/CBS News poll, which shows 60% of respondents disapprove weakening collective bargaining rights for public unions, and comes to the right conclusion on spending:

For whatever reason — misinformation or simple denial — the public isn’t remotely serious yet when it comes to making painful choices on spending. When asked if budget cuts are a good thing in the abstract, they’re plenty supportive, but start identifying specific programs and industries that’ll have to make do with less and those cold feet start turning icy. [...]

I don’t know what it’ll take to build popular support for greater austerity. Maybe nothing. Maybe we’re going to have to elect a bunch of Republicans who are fully prepared to sacrifice their careers by taking tough but necessary votes on the budget.

That sums up the problem pretty well.  Governors around the country are trying to make extremely difficult choices when it comes to their respective state budgets, and the left has acted as expected.  Here in New Jersey, the NJEA and their thugs were out in force last year as Governor Christie tackled the problem directly, the unions responded with vitriol about his weight, his well-being, rallies, etc., and we’re seeing that times ten in Wisconsin.

But as it pertains to Federal budget deficits, if we’ve learned anything over the past three years, it’s that the Democrats, and now President Obama are really not serious about reigning in spending or deficits, much less entitlement reform.  And even with the Tea Party dragging the Republican party to a majority in the House, I’m not sure Republicans are willing to take that big of a political leap either.  It appears that the political process will play out as a game of chicken over the next few months.

“Unions, it seems, attract personalities that approve of violence”

That’s a bit from this IBD piece, which is well worth reading, of which I was thinking when I saw this thread over at Memeorandum.

This is video of Tabitha Hale, conservative activist at Freedom Works, getting assaulted by yet another union thug:

There’s the new civility for ya.  Jim Treacher has had enough:

I know Tabitha. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I’m sick of this crap. We get months of “Teabaggers are violent” — hell, years — when in reality, Tea Partiers have been the recipients of violence. Meanwhile, these union guys are ratcheting up the violent rhetoric and now actually assaulting people in broad daylight.

For the record, I’m in total agreement with Treacher.   Unfortunately there will be no coverage of this story outside of Fox News, and will soon be forgotten I’m sure, so that the media can focus on more important things like how many calories were in Michelle Obama’s ancho-chile braised short ribs dinner or how the Koch Brothers run the country.  And I would be shocked if anyone in the liberal blogosphere is writing about this.

This act of thuggery comes a day after a Tea Party Democrat congressman said this to a crowd of union supporters:

“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going  [...]

“Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.”

So you have a pro-union, liberal Democrat from Massachussets egging on a crowd of frothing union hate-mongers, and less than twenty-four hours later, a union protester with a deranged look in his eye, decides to take the congressman’s words to heart, and assaults someone for standing up for themselves.  That’s not to say that this goon actually heard Congressman Capuano’s statement, but union thuggery appears to be more the rule, and not the exception.

But this is a world of biased inference.  A place where cable news apologizes for a guest using the word “crosshair”, because Sarah Palin put some on a map once, and a Congresswoman was shot months later by an anarchist, so it is of course, Sarah Palin’s fault.

To wit, mission accomplished Congressman Capuano.  Who knows what you’ve started.

UPDATE. Bravo! Ace nails it with a excellent post on the left’s reaction to the Tabitha Hale story, specifically Oliver Willis’ assertion that the attack was a stunt:

“Manufactured” is a slippery term indeed because it embraces a very fat range of meanings. It can be a literal term — something can be literally manufactured, created in whole. It can be more figurative — we say something is “manufactured” if it’s incited by craftiness. In baseball, they speak of “manufacturing” runs, by which they mean relying on less-spectacular methods of run production such as the combination of a walk, a steal, and a sacrifice fly.

Or “manufactured” may refer to the outrage over an incident, which is postulated to be false, and not the actual incident itself.

So a fat, dull, talentless hack like Oliver Willis can offer a general denial of an incident without really specifying in what particular way he denies it. He claims it’s “manufactured.” What does this mean? We don’t know, and in all likelihood, neither does he. Being obese of mind as well as body, he is lazy and hasn’t bothered to figure it out.

But he knows that his job relies upon him vomiting a steady stream of propaganda (as well as half-digested Filet O’Fishes), and so he obliges with a meaningless statement that pleases the leftist lunatics he preaches too and dissatisfies anyone with a working intellect.

[Via: Robert S. McCain]

Marching to the wrong tune

This piece by Joe Klein is garnering plenty of attention in the blogosphere, primarily because it ticks off all of the right people. 

The bottom line:

Revolutions everywhere–in the middle east, in the middle west. But there is a difference: in the middle east, the protesters are marching for democracy; in the middle west, they’re protesting against it.

I mean, Isn’t it, well, a bit ironic that the protesters in Madison, blocking the state senate chamber, are chanting “Freedom, Democracy, Union” while trying to prevent a vote? Isn’t it ironic that the Democratic Senators have fled the democratic process? Isn’t it interesting that some of those who–rightly–protest the assorted Republican efforts to stymie majority rule in the U.S. Senate are celebrating the Democratic efforts to stymie the same in  the Wisconsin Senate?

An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that. There are no guarantees that labor contracts, including contracts governing the most basic rights of unions, can’t be renegotiated, or terminated for that matter. We hold elections to decide those basic parameters.

Robert S. McCain:

…[T]he anti-Obama, anti-Democrat tide is still running high. This tide is still quite strong enough to overwhelm the government-employees unions in Wisconsin and by 2012 may yet be strong enough to wash Obama himself out of office.

[...]

Organized labor is leading liberalism on a lemming stampede toward a cliff, and it’s probably too late for Klein or anyone else to stop them.

If you read any of the liberal blogs or watch cable news, you would think that there is a mass populist revolt going on in the Midwest.  This is not the case.  Public employee unions are protesting and, as numerous as they are, do not represent the majority of Wisconsin’s citizens. 

This is not an “uprising”, it’s not a “revolt”.  It won’t be considered a revolt until you see everyday Americans, for lack of food, for lack of representation, for whatever, take to the streets and demand that their voices be heard.  But then again, we’ve already seen true uprisings recently, and those only come around once a generation.

These lawbreaking teachers and union thugs are protesting because their way of life–the fleecing of taxpayers, the bankrupting of state governments, the hubris, the sense of privilege, all of it–is hopefully about to come tumbling down. 

The fact that Richard Trumka rolled into Wisconsin today, that President Obama is directing OFA to astroturf the protests, that the SEIU is busing in thousands of malcontents, speaks volumes about how serious they consider the threat.  As well they should.

UPDATE.    Part of today’s reach-around at Stacy McCain’s place.  Thanks!

Stimulus

I’m reminded by Jim Geraghty that yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the stimulus package–the $800 billion Keynesian boondoggle merely added to the deficit with no substantial gain.  The NRSC has put together a commemorative video that should remind us all of the outright waste of taxpayer money:

It’s ironic really.  A big portion of the stimulus went to plug the holes of states budgets, so that they could paper over their individual deficits.  Despite warnings from conservative circles, those measures only acted as a band-aid, kicking the can to…2011.   Now we have union protests in Wisconsin led by law-breaking teachers and their union, Democrat politicians literally running for their political lives out of state to avoid the reckoning.    Now those protests are spreading to Ohio and possibly Indiana.

And let’s not forget what Chris Christie has been doing here in the Garden State in addressing the public union parasites straight on for the past year or so.

Yeah.  Happy Anniversary, Stimulus.