Everything we ever needed to know about collective unions we learned in Kindergarten. Why run around gathering up all the Easter Eggs – if they are just going to be reassembled in a big pile at the end of the hunt and equal amounts given to each ?

PENNSYLVANIA – Few workers would turn down a raise. Union members, however, can have raises turned down on their behalf.

Employees of a Pennsylvania grocery store learned this the hard way.

Managers at the Giant Eagle grocery in Edinboro, Pa., wanted to reward hard work. So they boosted the wages of two dozen high-performing employees above their union rates. But United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23 was not pleased. The union argued the pay increases violated their contract, took Giant Eagle to court and forced it to rescind the raises.

Why did Local 23 oppose higher pay for its members? Because it upended their seniority system, allowing junior employees to make more those with more seniority. Local 23 wanted uniform pay scales—even if that meant cutting some of their members’ wages. (more…)

(Via Wall Street Journal)  The news website Tout Haiti reported last month that two prominent lawyers have petitioned Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, demanding an audit of Bill Clinton’s management of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC).

There are powerful interests that won’t want to see the petition succeed and it may go nowhere. But the sentiment it expresses is spreading fast. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, Mr. Clinton has gone from hero to goat.

Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the IHRC, are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects. (more…)

MILWAUKEE, WI — The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that it is not a violation of constitutional rights if police break down a citizen’s door, search the home, and confiscate firearms, so long that they believe it is in the citizen’s best interest.

A Doctor’s Concern – The lawsuit stems back to an incident that occurred on May 22, 2011.  A psychiatrist, Dr. Michelle Bentle, phoned police to report that a patient had expressed a suicidal thought during an outpatient appointment; the woman had received some bad news and privately expressed grief during a difficult appointment.

At approximately noon, Milwaukee Police were dispatched to search for Krysta Sutterfield, age 42 at the time, in order to forcibly detain her and commit her for a mandatory medical evaluation.  In Wisconsin, the mere suggestion of suicide is grounds for forcible police detention.

Police had a description of Ms. Sutterfield’s vehicle but could not immediately locate her; police checked her garage and it was empty.  Hours passed.  At 2:45 p.m., Dr. Bentle notified police that her patient “had called her some minutes earlier stating that she was not in need of assistance and that the doctor should ‘call off’ the police search for her,” according to court documents. (more…)

How dare you not comply !   “Your ?…. You want YOUR ?”

WASHINGTON DC – Sounding a new aggressive tone, first lady Michelle Obama vowed in a private conference call on Monday to fight industry efforts at rolling back healthy school-lunch standards, an issue that could come up for a vote on Capitol Hill later this week.

The remarks to health activists were made in an off-the-record conference call at the beginning of a week of intense lobbying around proposed changes in the national school-lunch program, which sets standards for fat, sugar and sodium levels in food.

“I was thrilled that the first lady pulled advocates together this morning and sounded such a strong rallying cry to fight back against efforts to weaken the school food standards,” said Margo Wootan, who lobbies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere on behalf of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. (more…)

Full Story HERE

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WASHINGTON DC – Police have released surveillance video that shows persons of interest in a ‘flash mob’ robbery that happened at a store in northeast D.C.

Officers say the robbery occurred on Monday, April 14, around 9:30 a.m.

On the video, about 20 people can be seen entering a convenience store on the 4400 block of Benning Rd. – one right after another.   The video shows several unidentified subjects dashing out the store with what appear to be goods in their hands.  (LINK)

“This is an attempt by the federal government to keep people from buying guns and a way for them to combat the Second Amendment rights we have. It’s a covert way for them to control our right to manufacture guns and individuals to buy guns.”

(Via Washington Times)  Gun retailers say the Obama administration is trying to put them out of business with regulations and investigations that bypass Congress and choke off their lines of credit, freeze their assets and prohibit online sales.

Since 2011, regulators have increased scrutiny on banks’ customers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2011 urged banks to better manage the risks of their merchant customers who employ payment processors, such as PayPal, for credit card transactions. The FDIC listed gun retailers as “high risk” along with porn stores and drug paraphernalia shops.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has launched Operation Choke Point, a credit card fraud probe focusing on banks and payment processors. The threat of enforcement has prompted some banks to cut ties with online gun retailers, even if those companies have valid licenses and good credit histories. (more…)

…And, despite the splodey head response from the school, he raised it according to all flag decorum.   WOLVERINES !! 

COLORADO – Greg Stoneburner, a senior who just graduated from Central High School in Grand Junction, Colo., said he was told in no uncertain terms that he was no longer welcome at the school after raising a Gadsden flag on the school’s flagpole. Moreover, he told Examiner.com in an exclusive interview Friday, the principal withheld his flag and his diploma until after his graduation walk.

The incident, he said on Facebook, took place on May 9. That’s when he replaced the school’s flag with the yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” banner often associated with the Tea Party as a senior prank. He also posted a paper to the pole that told the history of the flag.

The prank didn’t sit too well with Jodie Diers, the principal of Central High School, who was livid over the prank. Other students, Stoneburner told Examiner, claimed she was angrily yelling to have the flag pulled down when she first saw it. According to Stoneburner, she pulled him out of a scholarship breakfast and told him and his parents the flag was a “slap in the face” to the school. She then said he was “not welcome” at Central High. (more…)

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – Calif.) thinks the House select committee on Benghazi is “ridiculous.”

“I think it’s a hunting mission for a lynch mob,” she told CNN’s Candy Crowley on State of the Union Sunday.

Good summary of Michelle Obama’s speech ideology to the graduating class of Topeka Kansas from Truth Revolt:   

For Michelle Obama, the world is black and white. But not about good and evil, right and wrong. Her black and white is all about skin color.

She talks about it often, incessantly, even, injecting race and racism into speeches and events in which they have no business. And she did so again on Friday, when she traveled to Topeka, Kansas, to deliver a speech to graduating high school seniors.

First, a background note: Her speech was moved up a day after parents complained that her visit to a school district — just blocks from the historic schoolhouse central to the Brown v. Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation — would focus on race, not their children’s accomplishments.

And that, in fact, is exactly what the first lady did.  (more…)