Quotulatiousness

April 4, 2011

“Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

I love the smell of censorship in the morning. It smells like politics:

[Senator Lindsey Graham said] “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, we had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. So, burning a Koran is a terrible thing but it doesn’t justify killing someone. Burning a Bible would be a terrible thing but it doesn’t justify murder. Having said that, anytime we can push back here in America against actions like this that put our troops at risk we should do it, and I look forward to working with Senators Kerry, and Reid, and others to condemn this, condemn violence all over the world based on the name of religion. But General Petreaus understand better than anybody else in America what happens when something like this is done in our country and he was right to condemn it and I think Congress would be right to reinforce what General Petreasus said.”

[. . .]

Here’s your answer Senator. No, you don’t need to hold hearings and you don’t need to be looking into ways to limit the free speech rights of American citizens because of the insane reaction of people thousands of miles away who were obviously ginned up by demagogues. War or not, Terry Jones had every right to do what he did.

Jim Geraghty perhaps put it most appropriately:

This pastor, Terry Jones, has a jones for media attention that makes the Kardashians look like J.D. Salinger. He knows that there’s a good chance that tossing the Koran on a pile of charcoal briquettes will make the easily-enraged in far-off lands lash out in that time-tested tradition, killing aid workers, and he doesn’t give a damn. He knows there’s a chance that the Muslim tantrums might put our men and women in uniform at greater risk. He still doesn’t give a damn. He has never given a damn. What, he’s gonna go weak-kneed at the thought of a unanimous Senate resolution?

March 31, 2011

Calculating “Tax Freedom Day” for each state

Filed under: Cancon, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

The least-taxed five states have already celebrated their Tax Freedom Days: Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and South Dakota. Other states may wait as long as May 2:

Americans will spend an average of 28% of their income to pay federal, state and local taxes this year, the Tax Foundation said Wednesday.

That means you will need to work 102 days — more than three months — just to earn enough to pay your tax bill. So on April 12 you will be free of your 2011 tax burden.

This year’s “Tax Freedom Day,” as the Tax Foundation calls it, comes three days later than last year. Rising incomes — resulting in more income tax owed — are largely to blame for its late arrival, the organization said.

For Canadians, you can calculate your own personal Tax Freedom Day using the Fraser Institute’s customized web tool. If I lived in Alberta, for example, my Tax Freedom day would be May 13, but as I live in Ontario it’s actually May 27.

March 25, 2011

CNN: US government finance requires both spending cuts and tax increases

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Jeanne Sahadi at CNN Money insists that the government can’t control the ballooning debt situation by spending cuts alone:

If lawmakers wanted to permanently freeze the debt held by the public at the today’s level — 62% of GDP — they would need to immediately cut spending by 35% or about $1.2 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. And those cuts would need to be permanent from hereon out.

How hard would that be?

Consider that in 2010, all of discretionary spending — including defense — totaled $1.35 trillion. In other words, to do deficit reduction all on the spending side means “you have to cut into the real meat,” said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Consider, too, how much fun lawmakers are having right now trying to negotiate spending cuts for this year alone. Their working range: Between $10 billion and $61 billion.

And here’s the kicker: Even permanently cutting $1.2 trillion today wouldn’t be the end of the story. Deficit hawks note that public debt at 60% is still well above the country’s historical average — which is below 40%. So more cutting would need to occur in subsequent decades.

The joker in the pack is that interest rates at the moment are incredibly low by historical standards. This is an aberration, not the “new normal”, and won’t last. If the government fails to take serious steps to reduce the debt now, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they’ll be able to avoid a default. It’s like running up a huge debt on a credit card with a low introductory interest rate: once the low interest period is over, the debt becomes payable at the higher interest rate. Pretending that tomorrow will never come is never a good planning strategy.

March 24, 2011

Even if the government falls, we’ll still be paying through the nose

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:12

A round-up of what happens if the government falls includes this nugget of information for anyone who hoped the spending would at least slow down while the politicians are off on the campaign trail:

To fund the daily operations of government without a budget, the Governor-General will typically issue special warrants that allow government departments to take funds from the federal bank account (officially known as the Consolidated Revenue Fund) without having to get Parliament’s approval. The money must be “urgently required for the public good” according to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice manual, and the Treasury has to show that no existing funds have been set aside for the payments. The special warrants run from the date that parliament dissolves until 60 days after an election and the government has to give the next Parliament a list of everything they have spent within 15 days of the new government taking office. The money still needs to be retroactively approved by the new Parliament and included in their upcoming budget.

“Ultimately Parliament has to come back an approve the budget but there are these ways of getting interim finance when parliament has not passed a budget,” said Ned Franks, an expert in parliamentary procedure and professor emeritus at Queen’s University.

Thanks to some abuse of the system while Brian Mulroney was prime minister, the system was amended in 1998 to limit the use of special warrants to only those times when Parliament has dissolved.

March 23, 2011

Harper government teeters on the edge

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

Tasha Kheiriddin thinks this has been a deliberate trap laid by the Tories and that the opposition have tumbled right into it:

The Foyer of the House of Commons turned into a beehive on speed. Within the next hour came reports that the NDP and Liberals were moving staff into their war room. Mr. Layton, gaunt but with a glint of steel in his eyes, strode stiffly by the CBC booth, leaning on his cane, turned to a group of journalists and smiled: “Looks like an election”. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff tweeted the first slogan of the coming campaign “An out-of-touch budget from an out-of control government.”

But Mr. Ignatieff is dead wrong — on both counts. This is very much an in-control government, which played its cards brilliantly in the face of not one, but two confidence motions this week. By falling on the budget instead of the contempt of Parliament motion, the Tories escape the stigma of being the only government to ever have been found in contempt by the House. This gives the Opposition less mud to throw their way, which is helpful in light of the brewing Carson scandal, and puts the focus back on the economy, the Tories’ campaign issue of choice.

It is also a very in-touch budget — in all the ways that benefit the Conservatives. The Tories have reached out and touched most of their key voter groups: homeowners, families, seniors, the military, and rural Canadians. They ignored less promising sectors of the electorates, including Quebec, though it is likely they are saving a Quebec HST announcement for the campaign. Had they included it in the budget itself, the Bloc would have been force to support it, which would have meant no election — yet another sign that the Tories were more interested in going to the polls than getting a deal.

Lots of pundits have (correctly) called the budget a “boutique”: small but attractive lures for many of the key constituencies, so that the Tories will have lots of opportunities on the campaign trail to characterize the Liberals as “taking away” promised benefits. It may never have been intended to be implemented: it works far too well as a campaign paper.

To the despair of small-c conservatives, the budget does not address the things that matter to that market. As Kelly McParland points out, it’s really a Liberal budget in a blue wrapper:

[The Toronto Star] is a big [Liberal party] supporter. It would like nothing more than to help orchestrate a return of Liberal hegemony to Ottawa. Yet it’s having trouble finding bad things to say about the budget over which the Liberal leader is determined to force an election.

Here are Wednesday’s headlines from The Star:
Page 1: “2011 Federal Budget Highlights: A Sprinkling of Cash for Almost Everyone”
Page 6: “Budget Promises $300 Tax Credit for Family Caregiver”
Page 8: “Tories Blueprint Looks a Shade of Liberal Red”
Page 9: “Low-income Elderly to Get Supplement Boost”
Page 9: “Tories Revive Retrofit Funding”
Page 9: “Job Creation Still Key Priority in Federal Budget”

Yes, the Star managed to editorialize against the budget, arguing it “fails [the] nation’s needs,” but Finance Minister Jim Flaherty could happily stand at the Toronto GO station handing this newspaper to commuters and seeking their support.

US government financial plight: more reasons to worry

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

The ever cheerful Monty brings us another helping of financial DOOM:

Our whole “plan” (to the extent that our government even has a plan for getting us out of this mess) is founded on the belief that our borrowing costs will remain low — that the interest-rate environment will remain at or near zero indefinitely. Well, it won’t, and I don’t think enough people are thinking about what a huge dent interest-payments on the debt is going to put into our budget. Our entire federal budget will be eaten up with four things: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and debt-service payments. That means any additional spending (like, oh, say, the military) will have to come from borrowed money…which will have to be borrowed at higher rates, which in turn causes debt-service costs to rise yet again. This is the vicious debt-spiral many European countries now find themselves in.

What has basically happened during the past forty or fifty years is that we’ve spent most of our actual capital — mainly on our vast welfare state and government apparatus, but also on our huge military. We are like a couple who lives paycheck-to-paycheck: any money that comes in goes right back out. Nothing gets tucked away. An unexpected expense — a busted water-heater, broken-down car, or an unexpected illness or injury — all of a sudden puts you in a hell of a financial hurt. So you borrow. You can’t really afford even the payment much less the whole loan, but what can you do? You may even cast caution to the winds and buy that jet-ski you’ve had your eye on (on credit, of course). Why not? You’re already screwed; being screwed a little bit more hardly matters at this point, right? Then something else breaks and you have to borrow again (if you can), and the monthly bills start to pinch you where you live — it’s either service your debt or pay the rent, because you can’t do both. At that point, the spinning plates will come crashing down — you will either default on your debt to avoid starving your family into oblivion, or you will force your family to live like animals in a cave so you can pay off the debt you ran up.

So the frustrated call goes up: “Okay, we’re boned! I get it! But what can we do about it?” Answer: I don’t know. Maybe nothing, at this point.

[. . .]

I’ve often said that circumstances will impose a solution on us if we don’t find one ourselves — we simply cannot continue as we are. And the reckoning is not comfortably far off in the future; it’s unfolding right now, before our very eyes.

Middlesbrough hopes for low tax designation

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:42

My old home town has been struggling pretty much my entire life, as its original prosperity was built on industries which have been declining for decades. The Guardian says there’s a chance that Middlesbrough will be one of the new designated “low-tax enterprise zones”:

George Osborne does not know it, but Wednesday’s “budget for growth” could change much more than the lives of ponies now grazing quietly on a grassed-over industrial site in the heart of Middlesbrough. It seems all but certain that the chancellor will designate the Tees valley one of 10 new low-tax enterprise zones. If so, one of the local options will be to set up a precision-engineering cluster on the old ironmasters site — relic of the days when “Made in Middlesbrough” was stamped on countless bridges, including Sydney harbour’s.

In September 1987, Margaret Thatcher famously took her “walk in the wilderness” across a similar derelict site five miles upstream in Stockton, where as local MP in the 30s Harold Macmillan once preached the economic “middle way” she rejected. Stockton’s enterprise zone eventually became a business park, supporting 4,500 jobs at its peak. But this is a region that has long struggled to diversify its coal-and-ships, chemicals-and-steel economy, its hard-won gains always at risk — from global conditions as well as government policy and the region’s own mistakes.

[. . .]

So an enterprise zone will generate good headlines in the Middlesbrough Gazette and Northern Echo. But in deciding exactly how to proceed, disrupting ponies will be the least of it. The five unitary authorities that make up the sub-region of Tees Valley – Hartlepool, Redcar, Stockton, Darlington and Middlesbrough – must agree which of their local plans will make most long-term impact for all of them in terms of inward investment, skills upgrades and job creation along the supply chain. Spread the opportunity too thinly and it may be wasted. It has happened here before.

As Teesside University’s professor Tony Chapman puts it, the north-east has endured so many changes in Whitehall’s regional policies that someone could make a career in “the archaeology of regeneration”. Likewise, countless local government reorganisations have seen Anglo-Saxon “Mydilsburgh” change from a hamlet to an industrialised borough, become part of unloved Cleveland (1974-96), return as a borough, and now boast an elected mayor in ex-superintendent Ray “Robocop” Mallon.

Everyone agrees Middlesbrough has had its problems, some worse than its neighbours. Steel and chemicals have shrunk, as has the population of the town (bidding to become a Jubilee city) by 20,000 since the 60s to 140,000. “We have 200 teenage pregnancies a year,” says Mallon, who thinks a hardcore of families let the town down. But 16 wards out of 23 have high indices of deprivation, which cuts seem likely to intensify.

March 22, 2011

Starting election watch now

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:55

With the opposition parties unified in their denunciations of the federal budget tabled today by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, we’re now looking at the strong possibility of a May general election:

The minority Conservative government tabled a 2011 budget Tuesday that was quickly rejected by its political opponents for falling short in helping the middle class, setting the stage for an election campaign that could begin any day.

The leaders of the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois and NDP said they could not support the budget as presently written — even though Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tried to appease the left-wing party through a series of modest, symbolic initiatives.

“We’re forced to reject the budget and we are also forced to reject a government that shows so little respect for parliamentary democracy and our democratic institutions,” said Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Leader.

Gilles Duceppe, Bloc Quebecois Leader, said his party “can’t support what has been offered here.”

And Jack Layton, head of the NDP and viewed as the person most likely to lend the government support, said the budget fell short of NDP expectations.

I have to admit that I’m surprised that the NDP and the Liberals appear to be ready to force an election at this moment: neither party has had much of a “bounce” in recent polls from government scandals (both real and imaginary). Perhaps they’ve got something held in reserve to release during the campaign that they think will cause voters to turn away from the Tories.

QotD: The modern welfare state

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

In past ages, the desire of kings and emperors to control the lives of their people was no less than it is now, but they simply lacked the means to substantially affect the average serf or peasant’s daily life. A tax collector or company of soldiers might come by occasionally, but it was the church and not the state that formed the polestar around which most lives revolved. But beginning in the late 19th century, technology allowed the governments of the industrialized nations to reach down into each city, town, and hamlet, and “adjust” things directly. In totalitarian regimes the impulse was malign, but in western nations the intentions were mainly good: to provide subsistence and aid for those in need of it.

But one thing has become clear in the western nations since the welfare-state started in earnest after World War II: it spreads like kudzu, it encompasses and infantilizes ever-larger percentages of the population, and it beggars even the richest and most powerful countries. Leave aside questions of morality and efficacy for the moment — it is dreadfully clear that the main problem with the welfare-state is that we can’t afford it. No one can, no matter how rich or powerful.

This is the paradox of the welfare state: it will surely ruin us if left to run unchecked, yet so many people now depend upon it that we can’t stop.

[. . .]

We have so successfully turned Americans into wards of the state that any significant change will (I fear) have to be imposed by fiat or by circumstance, because I don’t think it will ever take place at the political level. There is simply no way to get from here to there without making the kinds of wrenching changes that no democratic/republican form of government is good at. (If you doubt me, look at the protests in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. Even when the writing is on the wall, the population does their best to ignore it.)

Monty, “She Walks in DOOM! Like the Night…”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2011-03-22

Why nobody takes conservative promises too seriously

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Today is budget day, when federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will be introducing the Conservative budget for 2011. Unless something has suddenly changed in the government’s philosophy, don’t expect anything daring:

First and foremost, the budget should contain a plan for reducing federal spending in real terms over the next four or five years. Mr. Flaherty’s 2010 budget outlined how the federal government intended to restore balance to the federal books by 2015 by holding the line on spending increases to just over 1% a year while praying for a return to robust annual revenue increases. In fact, merely planning to hold the line on spending is never going to be enough. For one thing, the Conservatives have never proven themselves capable of pulling it off. Despite coming to power in 2006 on a message of fiscal restraint, the Tories raised federal program spending by an average of 6% in each of their first three budgets before the worldwide finance crisis of 2008. Since then, they have added $100-billion to the national debt, in large part thanks to stimulus spending of dubious worth.

According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, as of last Friday, Canada’s debt stood at nearly $563-billion. This means the debt repayments made over the 11 years before the recession began have been wiped out, and that the federal treasury is back to where it was before the Liberals’ then-finance minister Paul Martin brought down his austerity budget in 1995.

Since the Tories took power five years ago, program spending has expanded by nearly 40% and the federal civil service has grown by nearly 20%. We’re sorry, but we just don’t trust a government with a track record like the Tories’ to be able to regain budget balance simply by holding the line on new spending.

They can promise all sorts of things, but what they seem best at doing is pretending not to be “conservative” at all.

The government may fall, as the opposition are calling for even higher spending on “universities, home care, daycare, unemployment, seniors and Quebec”. This may work to the Conservatives’ advantage as they’re (temporarily) riding high in the opinion polls, so they might be able to win a majority if an election is forced on them over this budget. Of course, the opposition can read the polls too, so they may not be as eager to throw Stephen Harper an opportunity to win an easy victory.

Update: Well, the budget was tabled in the House, the opposition parties all rejected it “as it stands”, and the prime minister has stated they will not accept any amendments. For Thursday’s performance in the Ottawa Little Theatre, the budget will get first reading, which means the first opportunity for the government to be defeated . . . which means a May general election.

March 20, 2011

A different way to visualize the proposed US budget cuts

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Jon sent me an interesting link on a different way to visualize the relative size of the proposed budget cuts:

That struck me as a pretty good analogy. I wondered: if you do the math, what part of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal would a $6 billion budget cut represent?

The arithmetic is pretty simple, due to the extensive nutrition information that McDonalds makes available online. A Big Mac Extra Value Meal has three components: a Big Mac, a large order of french fries, and a medium soda. The McDonalds site tells us that a Big Mac has 540 calories, a large fries has 570 and a medium Coke has 210, for a total of 1,320 calories.

Meanwhile, the federal budget is currently around $3.8 trillion, which means that a $6 billion cut represents one 633rd of the total. What would be an equivalent cut in a Big Mac Extra Value Meal?

One variable is not readily available online; that is, how many french fries are there in a large order? To answer that question, I went to a nearby McDonalds at lunch time, paid for a large order of fries, and counted them. There were 87. (I counted fries regardless of size, but did not count the hard bits in the bottom of the container.)

This allows us to complete the calculation. If there are 570 calories in a large order of fries, and 87 fries per order, each french fry, on the average, contains 6.5 calories. One 633rd of the total calorie content of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal is 1,320/633, or 2.1 calories. That equals almost exactly one-third of an average sized french fry.

March 19, 2011

Trying to sort out truth from speculation at Fukushima

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

The only thing that is certain about the Fukushima situation right now is that both the operating company (Tokyo Electric Power Co. aka TEPCO) and the Japanese government have been ridiculously slow to provide information. They may or may not be actively concealing what they know, but they’re taking far too long to share what they do know with the rest of the world.

Inline update: New Scientist has a timeline of Japanese nuclear cover-ups and accidents. [end update]

wormme is a radiological control technician, so he’s very well informed about the overall picture — in a way non-specialists are not — and he’s had an epiphany about Fukushima:

See the light bulb above my head? Lesson Learned!

My first post on Fukushima is still the most widely read. Alas. I’m a radiological control technician who wasn’t paranoid about a radiological situation. Never good. Never acceptable. So I’ve been “hotwashing” myself ever since.

Where did I go wrong? What was the first cause, the primary mistake? I had to know in order to answer the most important question of all:

How do I never make that mistake again?

I turned a nifty phrase in “incalculable danger”, got generous links . . . then steam began venting and cores melting and hydrogen exploding and fuel pools leaking and spent fuel smoldering, all at once, with my brain sprinting like a hamster on a wheel and making about as much progress.

How did Fukushima have several quiet days after the event and only then have the Hellmouth open?

No lesson learned.

Then a couple of days ago we learned the site went six days without electricity. That monstrous tsunami took out the electrical backups, the backup-backups, and the backup-backup-backups in one fell swoop.

And I thought, ”well, that explains most everything”.

But still, no lesson learned.

It’s only now, right now, the realization: I wrote the post assuming that they had electrical power.

Not even an assumption, really. It wasn’t even a consideration. Of course they had power. They couldn’t possibly not have power.

But they did not have power.

Lesson Learned: the Japanese are different from Americans.

He also has interesting and highly informative posts (earlier than the one quoted above, so perhaps to be read with that in mind) on radiation poisoning, stuff that can cause a meltdown, some crappy radiological terminology, characteristics of radiation(s) and shielding(s), why the spent fuel is a bigger problem than the reactors, nuclear triage, time, distance, and shielding, spent fuel pools, first notes on the “Event Summary” file, and how NOT to wear a respirator.

Andrew Sullivan: It’s time to rein in the Imperial Presidency

Filed under: Africa, Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:32

I stopped reading Andrew Sullivan a long time ago, when he seemed to lose his mind over Sarah Palin and her family. If this is typical of his writing these days, perhaps he’s recovered from his temporary obsession:

The president’s speech was disturbingly empty. There are, it appears, only two reasons the US is going to war, without any Congressional vote, or any real public debate. The first is that the US cannot stand idly by while atrocities take place. Yet we have done nothing in Burma or the Congo and are actively supporting governments in Yemen and Bahrain that are doing almost exactly — if less noisily — what Qaddafi is doing. Obama made no attempt to reconcile these inconsistencies because, one suspects, there is no rational reconciliation to be made.

Secondly, the president argued that the ghastly violence in Libya is destabilizing the region, and threatening world peace. Really? More than Qaddafi’s meddling throughout Africa for years? More than the brutal repression in Iran? And even if it is destabilizing, Libya is not, according to the Obama administration itself, a “vital national interest”. So why should the US go to war over this?

So what is to be done? Sullivan has an answer:

The proper response to this presidential power-grab is a Congressional vote — as soon as possible.

That will reveal the factions that support this kind of return to the role of global policeman, and force the GOP to go on the record. I also look forward to the statements of the various Republican candidates in support of this president.

But it seems clear enough: exactly the same alliance that gave us Iraq is giving us Libya: the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into. I do not doubt their good intentions and motives. No human being can easily watch a massacre and stand by. Yet we did so with Iran; and we are doing so in Yemen and Bahrain as we speak, and have done so for decades because we rightly make judgments based on more than feeling.

March 17, 2011

Rick Mercer on “the Harper Government”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:02

Police and fire unions threaten to “boycott” businesses that support Wisconsin governor

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

You’ve got a nice office here, guv. Shame if anything were to happen to it, y’know?

Here is another reason public unions should not be allowed to collectively bargain with politicians running a local or state government. Union leadership — including those from law enforcement and firefighters — have sent letters out to local businesses demanding they publicly oppose the efforts of Wisconsin’s legislature and governor or face the consequences.

Not only are they suggesting they publicly oppose the fiscal-sanity measures in Wisconsin, they are flat out telling them they will publicly boycott businesses who do not proactively do so. From James Taranto’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

In the letter to Wisconsin businessmen, however, we see why so-called collective bargaining is particularly corrupting to the police. Although the letter explicitly threatens only an economic boycott, when it is written on behalf of the police — of those on whom all citizens depend to protect their safety — it invariably raises the prospect of another kind of boycott. Can a businessman who declines this heavy-handed “request” be confident that the police will do their job if he is the victim of a crime — particularly if the crime itself is in retaliation for his refusal to support “the dedicated public employees who serve our communities”?

LauraW clarifies the message here:

We’re the Police and Firefighters Unions.

If you don’t accede to our demand, we’ll put you on The Naughty List. And, um….boycott you. That’s our threat. We’ll boycott you. That’s all.

Right.

…did we forget to mention that we are cops and firefighters?
Just checking. Making sure you caught that.

H/T to Jon for the link.

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