Non-union protesting non-union hiring?

Veterans who apply for jobs on Capitol Hill aren’t receiving critical federal job-placement benefits because Congress has largely exempted itself from a law that aids post-military employment for vets, a new congressional report shows.

A groundbreaking report by the Office of Compliance on the state of the congressional workplace is now urging Congress to apply the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act to its own hiring habits.
"For a lot of our members, it's really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else," explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.

So instead, the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he's grateful for the work, even though he's not sure why he's doing it. "I could care less," he says. "I am being paid to march around and sound off."

Not in this house

Veterans who apply for jobs on Capitol Hill aren’t receiving critical federal job-placement benefits because Congress has largely exempted itself from a law that aids post-military employment for vets, a new congressional report shows.

A groundbreaking report by the Office of Compliance on the state of the congressional workplace is now urging Congress to apply the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act to its own hiring habits.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39707.html#ixzz0tfweoPCc

Empty Gestures

In the news this morning, Al Qaeda terrorists set off 2 bombs in Uganda which killed at least 64 people at a viewing of the World Cup. In response, Hillary Clinton condemned the bombing. Take that, Al Qaeda.

Black Hole Blowing Bubbles

A relatively small black hole has been spotted blowing bubbles with diameters of more than 300-1500 light years.

Robert Soria of the University College London and colleagues pored over images and data from the European Southern Observatory and Chandra X-ray Observatory, zeroing in on an unusually large remnant from a supernova explosion. Its host galaxy appears in the Sculptor constellation of Earth's southern sky, around 12.7 million light years away.

They discovered three hot spots in the x-ray emissions, all in a row, and identified the central one as the core of a black hole a few times larger than the sun. The two spots flanking the core are produced by jets colliding with interstellar gas.

A nearby star feeds the black hole, giving it energy to shoot a flood of particles out each side at near the speed of light. These jets are much more powerful than expected for a black hole of this size, blowing bubbles that expand faster than the speed of sound. The finding suggests that more of the energy spent by a black hole goes into accelerating matter - rather than emitting x-rays - than previously supposed.

I don't understand any of this, but love knowing someone does.

The San Francisco earmark

Nancy Pelosi has sneaked a $10 billion government-union bailout, and another $10 billion in domestic spending, into the supplemental military-spending bill.

The war supplemental was only supposed to be $37 billion as it was — that’s $20 billion in grease to pass $37 billion in war spending. Bad form, Nancy. Way to let the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan know exactly where they stand on the political totem pole back home!

Read it all here.

Post Office Logic

The post office says that postal usage has dropped so much lately due to the use of online bill paying, e-mail, and companies like Fed-Ex that they need to raise the price of stamps to increase revenue. This suggests that they have adopted the premise that if they raise the price of something the public will consume more of it rather than less. Amazing.

World Cup

Since the rest of the world seems to be engrossed with the World Cup being carried out in South Africa with horrible horns in the background, Best View has attempted to watch some of the games. The first thing I wonder is how in the world our game ever came to be called "football". The other thing I noticed is how much better the best teams control the ball with both feet and head. If there was more scoring, the game would probably catch on better here in the U.S.

Swimming in China

The Gore Pass

If Al Gore were a Republican he’d have an army of media tailing his every move. But since he’s a hero to the left he gets to avoid even having to respond to allegations he’s an out of control crazed sex poodle. The media probably think that since the woman's allegations of a sex assault by the National Enquirer. They thought the same thing when John Edward's affair was revealed by this magazine.

How True

A reason for the “wealth or income gap”: Smart people keep on doing things that are smart and make them money while stupid people keep on doing things that are stupid and keep them from achieving.

People who get an education, stay off of drugs, apply themselves, and save and wisely invest their earnings do a lot better than people who drop out of school, become substance abusers, and buy fancy cars and houses that they can’t afford, only to lose them.

We don’t have an income gap. We have a stupid gap.

Anonymous

Ouch

Richard Cohen is a pretty liberal columnist at the Washington Post. Here is his latest take on Obama. It seems the left is finally beginning to realize what the rest of us knew from the start. The man is an empty suit. READ IT ALL HERE.

It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges -- of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama's approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself.

For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much

Just wondering

Now and then the news carries stories about a gay pride parade being held somewhere and the objections associated with it. One thing I have often wondered about is the logic behind such demonstrations. Supposedly gays believe their gayness is genetic and since it is inherited it is unavoidable. If this is the case, why should you celebrate and take pride in your gayness any more than you would hair color or height?

Musings and Rants

1)The Obama administration is so inept. It is becoming clear now that when they decided to halt all further drilling in the gulf they did not foresee the unemployment of thousands of oil workers and others who support their efforts. Now that it has become obvious to them, they are saying BP must pay the salaries for all the people who are losing their paychecks. So, now BP is going to make a stand against this insanity and all this is going to wind up in the courts and nobody will win but the lawyers.
2)In their continuing attack on private enterprise, Obama now says that BP should forgo paying dividends and give all the money to the gulf effort. There is absolutely no evidence that anyone in the Obama administration knows anything about how to run a business or anything else, but BP has many billions to devote to the obligations their negligence created and the payment of dividends is not a great percentage of their assets, but dividend revenue from BP is a large percentage of the British retirement system's income.The firm's dividend payments, which amount to more than £7 billion a year, account for £1 in every £6 paid out in dividends to British pension pots.
3)Islamic fundamentalists believe that homosexuals should either cure themselves or die. Given this, it is amusing to read that a delegation of gay residents of Tel Aviv has been banned from joining a gay pride march in Madrid because authorities in the Israeli city have not condemned the recent attack on the Gaza flotilla.
So, the gays in Spain are supporting those who kill any gay who permits sexual preferences (Palestinians) to become known. Strange mixing of ideas.
4)The proposed Arizona law which addresses the illegal immigrant problem in that state may be working prior to its actual effective date. Arizona's tough new immigration enforcement law is fueling an exodus of Hispanics from the state seven weeks before it goes into effect, according to officials and residents in the state.

Though no one has precise figures, reports from school officials, businesses and individuals indicate worried Hispanics — both legal and illegal — are leaving the state in anticipation of the law, which will go into effect July 29.

Schools in Hispanic areas report unusual drops in enrollment. The Balsz Elementary School District is 75% Hispanic, and within a month of the law's passage, the parents of 70 students pulled them out of school, said District Superintendent Jeffrey Smith. The district lost seven students over the same one-month period last year, and parents tell Smith the Arizona law is the reason for leaving.
5)Here in Georgia and across the country as I read the news, schools are facing severe money problems and there are teacher furloughs, increasing class sizes and other measures to save money. Rather than raise taxes what if schools spent available funds on educational efforts rather than non-academic matters. Football and other sports are nice, but not essential. Ditto for food service two meals a day. If you want a choir, pay for it. Bus service could be an option which parents pay for. Maybe some of the assistant and associate administrators could go back to teaching instead of pushing paper. The most effective move to save money is to simply dismiss any student who causes problems for the year and tell them to come back when they want to learn and study without causing problems. This would improve the learning environment and fewer teachers could teach larger classes more easily. Let the police deal with the problems on the streets rather than the teachers in the schools.

Gore causing global warming!!!!

News that Gore and Tipper are on the outs is going to just cause the globe to get hotter. How could that be? Well, just read the following: A teaser follows.

As if the burden of divorce weren't bad enough, people with failed marriages can be blamed for global warming, according to a study by Michigan State University.

Divorced couples use up more space in their respective homes, which amounts to to 38 million more rooms worldwide to light, heat and cool, noted the report.

And people who divorced used 73 billion kilowatt-hours more of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water than they would otherwise in 2005.

Dissolving a marriage also means doubling possessions, from the lowly can opener to the SUV. The report, however, did not estimate how many more natural resources the children of shared-custody parents consume by getting birthday and holiday gifts twice.

You can read more of this nonsense at the link given above.

How stupid are you?

If you believe that Bill Clinton called Joe Sestak,"a longtime friend", spoke for 60 seconds, offered him a position he was not able to accept (on an intelligence board) as a Congressman to get out of the race against Specter, and this was the sum and substance of the 10 week stone wall of the subject by the White House, you are truly beyond stupid. In the first place, Bill Clinton can't talk to anyone about anything for only one minute.
If the matter was all that innocuous, the White House lawyer would not have to issue a 3 page memo detailing why the matter was not illegal. Of course, the White House says they were just doing what every President going back to George Washington did---even though the federal statute which clearly prohibits interference with federal elections was not extant when George was President.

Memorial Day

President Obama will not be at Arlington National Cemetery honoring our military casualties today. He will not be there because he is in Chicago on vacation.

This will do it

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship, kills 40 some odd sailors and the U.S. insists a powerful response is called for so Hillary Clinton says she is going to take the matter to the U.N.

The Pentagon Brownie Recipe

Sure enough, the military has a recipe for making brownies. That may not be surprising, but the fact that it is 26 pages long might be.

Here is the link.

$234 Million and no jobs

Detroiter Mark Brisker had high hopes of securing a future as a green-collar worker. Michigan officials had touted green energy as a fast-growing employment sector and part of a fix for the state’s economic woes. An influx of federal funding and the creation of training programs in green trades, such as weatherizing homes, were intended to quickly grow the industry.

But five months after completing weatherization training offered by Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Brisker remains out of work. And jobs in this specialization, which focuses on improving the energy efficiency of homes and buildings, have been slow to materialize.

“As of yet, very few — if any of the students — have found work,” said Brisker, 51, a former chemical plant worker. “Yet the schools are still cranking out graduates.”

Although the federal stimulus package earmarked $234 million to weatherize 3,000 low-income Michigan homes — about 10 times more than average — and create jobs, the money has been slow to trickle to contractors and other employers.

National Observer

The no health insurance option

AT&T spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option instead.

Other large companies face similar situations. The question is, therefore, will these companies be sorely tempted to just pay the fine and let the workers look for health insurance elsewhere? It could be a great financial boon to any company with more than 50 employees.