Efforts to organize constituent groups to contact and lobby their elected officials have grown more sophisticated in recent years. Many of us like the ease of the online petition that automatically directs messages to our representatives based on our input location data — though I frequently prefer to tailor the pre-fab messages with my own words.
I can’t be the only one who has subjected myself to an onslaught of email messages urging me to call my Congressman or state senator over the latest hideously outrageous or earth-saving piece of legislation. A result of the sheer volume of these messages, combined with limited resources and competing priorities, my eyes long since have glazed over most of them. Have I become too cynical? Perhaps.
Why was [Maryland Sen. David Brinkley] getting so many calls? The Maryland State Education Association hired a company to call teachers from throughout the state, and then connect them with their senators.
Unfortunately, there was just one small problem with the approach:
Brinkley, who said he planned to vote against all three tax proposals, said teachers seemed caught off guard and ill-prepared to speak to their senators.
Can you imagine any other advocacy group trying so desperately to hold its constituents’ hands like helping a toddler cross the street (do I know a thing or to about that)? Especially a group on the Right? Well, if someone were to follow the MSEA’s strategy, they at least might want to find a better way to prepare members or supporters for that all-important call with their elected representative.
March is a bad month for Colorado Senate Majority Leader John Morse. Last year about this time he went a little ballistic at Amazon.com on a YouTube video he created — trying to blame the company for deciding to terminate its Colorado Affiliates program rather than pay the Democrats’ new tax.
Last year’s episode looks like a warm-up act for this year’s arrogant display, with John Morse threatening the private homes of citizens who filed an ethics complaint against him. You see, March so far has been filled with Colorado Peak Politics (if you’re not reading this blog regularly, you should be! … and no, I don’t know who is behind it) reporting on a brewing scandal: Democrat legislative leader Morse claiming $40,000 in public reimbursements for things like golf outings, political fundraisers, and out-of-state travel. (more…)
Mothers Against Debt (MAD) has launched a powerful video update about the crushing load of national debt we already face and the danger behind plans to raise the debt ceiling:
Don’t crush the baby! As a dad of two (and soon to be three) young girls, the message hits home with me. Fiscal responsibility and spending discipline, already fixtures in our own household budget, are the watchwords of the day for the federal government Leviathan.
Delaying today’s decisions only magnifies tomorrow’s pain. Let’s start imposing the bitter medicine. Our children will thank us later.
It looks very much like Colorado is only one year behind in achieving a labor movement milestone measured at the national level. A little over a year ago I reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) finding that government employees represented a numerical majority of the unionized workforce in the United States. (You can listen to a 2010 iVoices podcast on this finding that I recorded with the Alliance for Worker Freedom.)
This milestone is the culmination of a decades-long trend in which private sector unions have diminished while Big Labor has targeted government agencies as fruitful sources of revenue. As of 2010, we have the first strong indications that the same observation can be made of Colorado — namely, that more of the state’s union members work for government than for a private employer.
In light of the legislative action taking place in Ohio and Wisconsin, I have written on some of the critical differences related to union collective bargaining between the private sector and the public sector. An even better explanation of the inherent defects in government collective bargaining appears in a recent op-ed by David Denholm published in the Washington Examiner. (more…)
It’s easy to overlook, especially if you’re not a student of U.S. history. But once upon a time, before the ratification of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, presidents were inaugurated on March 4. Which makes today the sesquicentennial (that’s the 150th anniversary, for Buckeye fans) of Abraham Lincoln swearing the oath of presidential office in a moment of profound national crisis and delivering his First Inaugural Address:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Union, eh? No, not that kind of union. Someone must have Labor on the brain. Ripped out of context, though, the powerful conclusion to Lincoln’s inaugural could almost speak to the current heightened domestic political strife with its bulls-eye on Madison, Wisconsin. Not that we have nearly approached the level of crisis in 1861. Nor do we wish for such an outcome.
