Unions, Employers Square Off Over ObamaCare Costs in Collective Bargaining

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Photo Credit: FOXNEWS.COMDisputes between unions and employers over paying for new costs associated with the Affordable Care Act are roiling labor talks nationwide.

Unions and employers are tussling over who will pick up the tab for new mandates, such as coverage for dependent children to age 26, as well as future costs, such as a tax on premium health plans starting in 2018. The question is poised to become a significant point of tension as tens of thousands of labor contracts covering millions of workers expire in the next several years, with ACA-related cost increases ranging from 5 percent to 12.5 percent in current talks.

In Philadelphia, disagreement over how much workers should contribute to such health-plan cost increases has stalled talks between the region’s transit system and its main union representing 5,000 workers as they try to renegotiate a contract that expired in March.

Roughly 2,000 housekeepers, waiters and others at nine of 10 downtown Las Vegas casinos voted this month to go on strike June 1 if they don’t reach agreements on a series of issues, the thorniest of which involve new ACA-related cost increases, according to the Unite Here union.

Flight attendants at Alaska Airlines voted down a tentative contract agreement with management in February, in part because it didn’t provide enough protection against a possible surge in ACA-related costs, union members said. They are still without a new contract.

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Pay-To-Pee Teacher Faces No Discipline; Mad Mom Vows To Homeschool

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Photo Credit: YouTube screenshots / heivokasLast week, two Vancouver, Wash. third graders said they wet their pants after their teacher would not let them use the bathroom. The students, both girls, said the reason for the denial was that they hadn’t accumulated enough pretend classroom money to pay for privilege.

The unidentified teacher will not be punished in any way as a result of one investigation of the incidents, a teachers union representative told The Columbian.

A separate investigation of the same incident based on livid mother Jasmine Al-Ayadhi’s complaint remains pending.

The alleged incidents occurred May 15 at Mill Plain Elementary School.

The pretend money is designed to teach students about the value of money. Students earn the fictional funds by doing their homework, for example, or by being nice to others. They can spend it to buy pizza or pointless crap like a squirt gun. Students say they must also use the fake cash to pay for bathroom breaks.

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Final Word on U.S. Law Isn’t: Supreme Court Keeps Editing

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Photo Credit: ALEX WONG / GETTY The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.

The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. The widening public access to online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.

Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other justices, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case.

The larger point, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford, is that Supreme Court decisions are parsed by judges and scholars with exceptional care. “In Supreme Court opinions, every word matters,” he said. “When they’re changing the wording of opinions, they’re basically rewriting the law.”

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Black Pro-Lifer NAACP Silenced After Blasting Its Pro-Abortion Stance Appeals Decision

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Photo Credit: Life News A leading black pro-life advocate has appealed a judge’s decision effectively silencing him and prohibiting him from criticizing the NAACP after the civil rights group sued him for calling it the “National Association for the Abortion of Colored People.”

In February, the NAACP threatened to sue LifeNews.com and Ryan Bomberger, a LifeNews blogger , for a column that took the civil rights organization to task over its abortion position. The NAACP is upset about a column Bomberger wrote at LifeNews titled, “NAACP: National Association for the Abortion of Colored People,” which notes the organization’s 44th Annual Image Awards.

Following the piece, the NAACP sent Bomberger, the director of the Radiance Foundation, and LifeNews a threatening letter claiming infringement on its name and logo for including it in the opinion column. The letter accused Bomberger and his group, the Radiance Foundation, of “trademark infringement” over an ad campaign that exposes the NAACP’s pro-abortion position.

Stating that while “you are certainly entitled to express your viewpoint, you cannot do so in connection with a name that infringes on the NAACP’s rights,” the letter demands a response within a self-imposed time period.

In response to the letter, Bomberger asked a federal court to declare that the First Amendment protects his and the Radiance Foundation’s exercise of free speech and that his speech does not infringe on any of the NAACP’s trademarks or other rights. The lawsuit does not seek any damages.

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Swiss Group to Allow Assisted Dying for Elderly Who Are Not Terminally Ill

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Photo Credit: Christian Hartmann / ReutersA Swiss organisation that helps people take their own lives has voted to extend its services to elderly people who are not terminally ill.

Exit added “suicide due to old age” to their statutes at an annual general meeting held over the weekend, allowing people suffering from psychological or physical problems associated with old age the choice to end their life.

Assisted dying is legal in Switzerland and technically even a healthy young person could use such services. However, organisations involved in this work set their own internal requirements, which differ from group to group.

The move has been criticised by the Swiss Medical Association amid fears it will encourage suicide among the elderly. “We do not support the change of statutes by Exit. It gives us cause for concern because it cannot be ruled out that elderly healthy people could come under pressure of taking their own life,” said the association’s president, Dr Jürg Schlup.

But Exit said that most people who would choose this option were already members of the organisation and had been looking into assisted dying for years.

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Following Pope Visit to Security Fence, Netanyahu Highlights Pre-Wall Terror Deaths (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube ScreenshotA day after Pope Francis was pictured praying at Israel’s security barrier on Sunday beneath a slogan that compared Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu explained to him in no uncertain terms why the wall was erected in the first place.

At a Jerusalem memorial for terror victims, Netanyahu told the pope, “When my son was ten years old, his best friend was a girl, a beautiful Ethiopian girl, who sat next to him in class. One day she didn’t come. She was blown up in a bus not far from here because there was no fence, no wall.”

After the pope responded with prayers for peace and a harsh condemnation of terrorism, Netanyahu elaborated further.

“I’m grateful for your words today. Israel wants peace. Here we have a hospital, Hadassah Hospital. Palestinians come to this hospital. With the wall, they come. We cannot go to their hospitals, they come to our hospitals,” he said. “We don’t teach our children to plant bombs. We teach them peace. But we have to build a wall against those who teach the other side. But it cannot prevent the incitement to hate and terror and the destruction of Israel that permeates so much of the society on the other side of the fence. If that changes, then the walls could come down and we will have peace.”

The pope’s unscheduled visit to the security barrier on Sunday drew harsh criticism, especially as a result of the imagery that emerged from the trip showing the pope in the same frame as graffiti that read, “Bethlehem look like Warsaw Ghetto.”

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Christian Leaders: God Is Not Finished with America…Third Great Awakening Is Need of Hour (+video)

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Photo Credit: WND Some religious leaders say America is facing a spiritually dark time.

“At the root of America’s problem, we really have a spiritual cancer that’s been eating away at our nation,” Bishop Harry Jackson, senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, told CBN News.

Retired Gen. Jerry Boykin used to fight America’s physical enemies overseas. He’s now working with the Family Research Council fighting spiritual foes.

Boykin said without a Third Great Awakening, forces like those that took down mighty empires of the past will also bring down the United States.

“We’re going to wind up exactly like these other great empires, which only lasted on an average about 200 years,” he said. “We’re going to completely self-destruct. And you see the beginnings of that now.”

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Video: Was Godzilla ‘Caused by Global Warming?’

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Liberals blame global warming for pretty much anything that happens weather-wise, so why not Godzilla too?

Jimmy Kimmel sent a video crew onto Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles to ask passers-by about whether the movie creature Godzilla is real, surprisingly pressing one guy: “Do you believe these creatures are caused by global warming?”

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Poll: Only Mike Huckabee is More Conservative than Ted Cruz

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He’s been a senator for only 16 months, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has created such a sensation among conservatives, Tea Party members and strict Constitutionalists that he is now poised to be among the top of 2016 GOP presidential candidates, according to a new poll.

The engaging senator “could have an edge in the primaries as he is seen as one of the most conservative GOP politicians around,” said the Economist/YouGov.com poll. He is also viewed as honest and outspoken.

And in a sign of his growing popularity among conservatives, 36 percent of Republicans want him to run for president. And 42 percent of Tea Party members want Cruz in the race. But when all Americans are considered, just 19 percent said he should run, while 38 percent don’t.

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No Joke: Obama Actually Believes The Media is Stacked Against Him!

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Photo Credit: IJ ReviewAt a fundraiser on Thursday night, President Obama went on at length about the unfairness of the media, which he actually believes is too lenient on conservatives, and too hard on him.

From the White House transcript:

“You’ll hear if you watch the nightly news or you read the newspapers that, well, there’s gridlock, Congress is broken, approval ratings for Congress are terrible. And there’s a tendency to say, a plague on both your houses. But the truth of the matter is that the problem in Congress is very specific. We have a group of folks in the Republican Party who have taken over who are so ideologically rigid, who are so committed to an economic theory that says if folks at the top do very well then everybody else is somehow going to do well; who deny the science of climate change…

…So when you hear a false equivalence that somehow, well, Congress is just broken, it’s not true. What’s broken right now is a Republican Party that repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people.”

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