Undaunted by the constitutionally-questionable appointment of three members to Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board, union attorney and current NLRB chairman Mark Pearce declared in an Associated Press interview that he and his union comrades are continuing their assault on the 93% of private-sector employees who are union-free.

In fact, if Obama’s union appointees have their way, all employees who are targeted for unionization will have their employers forced to turn over their home telephone number and e-mail addresses to unions.

Ever since the 1960s, when unions have targeted companies for unionization through a NLRB-supervised election, employers have been required to turn over the list of employee names and their home addresses. The NLRB, in turn, promptly gives the list of employee names and home addresses to the involved union(s).

This list, called an Excelsior List, gives union organizers the ability to conduct intrusive home visits prior to the NLRB election. As is often said, just as when any other salesperson doing door-to-door sales knocks at the door, targeted employees can invite the union organizers into their homes, or they can sic the chihuahua on them.

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Following Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s reforming his state’s collective bargaining laws and breaking the stranglehold unions held on taxpayers (saving them $476 million so far), union bosses across the country laid siege on the  dairy state’s capitol and declared war on Walker and his fellow Republicans.

In 2011, union bosses and other outside groups spent tens of millions of dollars in a failed attempt to recall six Republican state senators and are spending millions more now trying to recall Scott Walker.

The millions union bosses are now spending—paid for by union members throughout the country—has Democrats getting nervous that the money spent might strain union coffers too much prior to the November elections.

According to the Hill:

Unions have made ousting Walker a top priority and are poised to spend heavily in Wisconsin. But Democratic strategists and some senior political experts within the labor movement believe the initiative should have been launched before the November presidential election.

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Listening to Barack Obama’s State of the Union Speech last night was like listening to just about every one of his SOTU speeches…

Actually, with the exception of Obama’s promise to sign a law making Congressional insider trading illegal [Martha Stewart may have some resort recommendations for Nancy Pelosi], listening to Obama’s SOTU speech really was listening to his other speeches, as this RNC video points out.

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Consider this an open thread.

Most people know the name George Soros, the mastermind behind…well, a lot of stuff.

Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

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The fallout over Barack Obama’s decision to kill 20,000 (mostly) union jobs on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project continues as the Laborers International Union of North America left the BlueGreen Alliance Friday afternoon.

Founded in 2006, the BlueGreen Alliance is a political pairing of left-wing unions and environmental groups whose mission (so to speak) is to ensure that America’s conversion to a green economy results in union jobs as jobs in industries like coal are destroyed.

Included among its stated goals are passage of cap and trade legislation, as well as the Employee Free Choice Act (aka card-check unionization).

According to the Laborers’ union press release announcing the union’s departure from the BlueGreen Alliance on Friday afternoon, at least Laborers’ president Terry O’Sullivan seems to be understanding the Devil’s pact union bosses have made by sacrificing their members’ jobs in exchange for an economically-unrealistic “green” economy:

“AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently said there was a divide in the labor movement over this project,” LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan said. “That is an understatement. That divide is as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon. We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women.” [Emphasis added.]

Specifically, O’Sullivan was referencing the CWA, SEIU, UAW, Transport Workers Union, United Steelworkers Union and Amalgamated Transit Union who had sold their souls (and union jobs) to the environmentalists and praised Obama’s decision to side with the green activists by killing the pipeline, as well as destroying the hopes of unemployed union members.

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After months of playing political ping-pong with 20,000 potential (mostly union) jobs, the Obama administration decided on Wednesday to kill the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried crude oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

According to a State Department release [emphasis added]:

Today, the Department of State recommended to President Obama that the presidential permit for the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline be denied and, that at this time, the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline be determined not to serve the national interest. The President concurred with the Department’s recommendation, which was predicated on the fact that the Department does not have sufficient time to obtain the information necessary to assess whether the project, in its current state, is in the national interest.

Since 2008, the Department has been conducting a transparent, thorough, and rigorous review of TransCanada’s permit application for the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project…

For more than three years, the State Department has conducted its “transparent, thorough, and rigorous review.” However, apparently, the Obama Administration believes that three years wasn’t enough to be transparent, thorough, or rigorous enough.

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Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s penchant for hypocritical hyperbole is once again manifesting itself. Her latest example is regarding the #Occupy movement.

Just a few short months ago, before the #Occupy movement exposed itself as a bunch of entitlement-driven neo-Communist criminals, Pelosi (and other Democrats) wholly embraced the squatters’ rag-tag movement.

This was Pelosi then:

Despite the fact that unions are now funding, coordinating, aiding and abetting the #Occupy movement–the same unions that fund, coordinate, aid and abet the Democratic Party apparatchik–Pelosi now claims that she and her fellow Democrats are not “connected” to the neo-Com movement.

This is Pelosi now:

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Nearly a year ago, the Democratic National Committee opened a wound with union bosses, the Democratic party’s biggest financial backers, by choosing Charlotte, NC as the host-city for its 2012 convention. While the circumstances that led to the decision to choose one of the least unionized states in the nation may have been a union turf war, the DNC convention planners have tried to make up for it by discriminating against union-free vendors.

Nevertheless, the AFL-CIO’s Building & Construction Trades Division has chosen to boycott the convention entirely and, now, DNC convention planners may just have added more salt to union bosses’ wound by choosing the venue for Obama to make his acceptance speech at Charlotte’s Bank of America stadium—a stadium built by non-union labor.

[via the Daily Caller]

Bank of America Stadium, the Charlotte, N.C. sports area that has been proposed as the site where President Obama will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for a second term in the White House, was built entirely with nonunion labor

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Meet Jessica Shearer, Executive Director of the Healthcare Education Project at 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

In the 14-minute video below, Ms. Shearer, sitting in a panel discussion (with an unknown Tea Party activist beside her), discusses a variety of topics, such as:

• The current excitement over the OccupyWallSt movement and what it means to the union movement
• The inability of unions to motivate their own members
• The half-empty buses to last year’s One Nation rally
• The election Barack Obama and the subsequent disappointment on his (and the SEIU’s) “caving” on health care reform
• The failure of Barack Obama’s Organizing for America to realize its potential
• …and much more

View the video in its entirety. It is an insightful look into the mind of a SEIU activist and insider…a collectivist.

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[Full disclosure: Until the Holidays, it has been years since having sworn never to step into a church again. However, as Life's Rich Pageant has a way of throwing curves, over the Holidays, I found myself doing the unthinkable and stepped into church for the first time in a long, long time.  Having family members who have attended this church for years, I had only heard about it. However, seeing is believing (so to speak). Once inside The Life Christian Church (more on the church in a moment), I found a warm, welcoming and enjoyable environment and were it not for that visit (and one or two since), you would not have the chance to know about this book.] 

Over the next several paragraphs, I’d like to share a little about TEN: How Would You Rate Your Life?, it’s author, Pastor Terry Smith, his church, and, as importantly, its missions.

The Book — First and foremost, Pastor Terry’s recently-published book is not a “self-help” book, it is more a self-fulfillment book.  TEN: How Would You Rate Your Life? is a book about Life for oneself, as well as for others.

Yes, it is Christ-centered. However, even the more secular among us will appreciate it.

“I couldn’t agree less with the idea that most of our problems result from wanting too much. I think we should want more. Not more stuff, but more life,” says Pastor Smith. “I believe a more fulfilling life—a life in all its fullness—is the future that we are created to have. I also believe we have the ability to tap into this potential and create that more and better life for ourselves and others.”

What is unique about Smith’s book is that it is also a book about leadership that speaks equally to the heart of the day laborer, the pro-football player (see below) as well as the highest executive.

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