ICE Agents Union to AFL-CIO President Trumka: ‘You Don’t Speak for Us’

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The ICE Agents union responded forcefully to AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka’s assertion Tuesday that “unions did have at one point some differences” but “the entire labor movement is entirely behind” the president’s immigration reform agenda now.

“No President Trumka, there are still differences within the AFL-CIO, and you don’t speak for us,” the ICE union dispatched in a press release this week.

According to the union, an AFL-CIO affiliate — currently suing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, ICE Director John Morton, and U.S. Customs and Immigration Services Director Mayorkas over the administration’s changes to immigration policy, which they say prevents them from enforcing the law — the ICE Agents union has been barred from AFL-CIO discussions regarding the union’s stance on immigration policy.

They note the administration and lawmakers have also left them out of the policy debate.

Chris Crane, National ICE Council president, which reportedly represents about 7,000 ICE agents, officers and employees called the exclusion of de facto immigration experts under the AFL-CIO’s organizational umbrella “shocking.”

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Obama Recovery: January Unemployment Rises to 7.9%

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Photo Credit: Susan Trigg The new year started off with an old story: Employment grew again in January but not at a pace able to lower the jobless rate.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 157,000 for the first month of 2013 while the unemployment rate edged higher to 7.9 percent, news unlikely to alter the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy or instill confidence that the recovery is gaining steam.

Economists were looking for 160,000 net new jobs created with the unemployment rate holding steady at 7.8 percent.

The ho-hum jobs numbers for January were accompanied by substantial revisions higher for previous months, according to the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . . .

A report earlier this week indicated that third-quarter growth actually contracted 0.1 percent, but Friday’s jobs numbers contradicted the gross domestic product read.

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Convicted Murderer Mistakenly Freed Recaptured in Illinois

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Photo Credit: Cook County Sheriff’s OfficeCHICAGO – A convicted murderer from Indiana who was mistakenly released after a Chicago court appearance was back in custody Saturday after authorities tracked him down at a house in southern Illinois about 60 miles away.

Steven L. Robbins, 44, was rearrested late Friday night without incident in Kankakee, the Cook County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release. Although the details of his capture weren’t immediately released, officials said they used various leads and interviews with friends and family members at police headquarters to locate him.

The reason Robbins was able to escape in the first place, Illinois officials acknowledged, was because they lost paperwork directing them to return him to Indiana.

Robbins was serving a 60-year sentence for murder in Indiana and was escorted by Cook County sheriff’s deputies to Chicago this week for a court appearance in a separate case involving drug and armed violence charges — a case that had actually been dismissed in 2007.

After appearing before two Cook County Circuit Court judges, Robbins was taken to a jail on Chicago’s South Side. He was released hours later, instead of being sent back to Indiana to continue his murder sentence. The public was not alerted that he was on the loose for about 24 hours.

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Harvard Scandal: Students Punished for Cheating in . . . ‘Introduction to Congress’

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Photo Credit: Patricia DruryHarvard University said Friday it has issued academic sanctions against dozens of students, bringing to a close a cheating scandal that involved the final exam in a class on Congress and drawing criticism from a high-profile alumnus.

he Ivy League school implicated as many as 125 students in the scandal when officials first addressed the issue last year.

The inquiry started after a teaching assistant in a spring semester undergraduate-level government class detected problems in the take-home test, including that students may have shared answers.

In a campus-wide email Friday, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith said the school’s academic integrity board had resolved all the cases related to the cheating probe.

He said “somewhat more than half” of the cases involved students who had to withdraw from the college for a period of time.

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Public Employee Unions Spending More on Lobbying as Membership Booms

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Unlike their private sector counterparts who have seen steady membership declines for several decades, federal career civil service employee unions are expanding their numbers even as they devote more dues money to lobbying Congress and the White House, often on issues only tangentially related to goverment workplace conditions, according to OpenSecrets.org’s Janie Boschma.

Approximately half of the federal government’s 2.1 million career employees are union members, and the largest of those unions is the American Federation of Government Employees, an AFL-CIO affiliate that saw a 43 percent increase in members to 282,535 last year, Boschma said. The increase came about “partly because AFGE began representing Transportation Security Administration employees last year.” she said.

The union “also increased its lobbying budget to $1.49 million last year, an increase of $190,000 over 2011, the biggest jump for federal unions in 2012. According to its fourth-quarter report, AFGE mostly lobbied budget and appropriations issues to secure funding for Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for example.”

AFGE is the largest of the federal employee unions but it is not the biggest spending public employee union lobbyist. That distinction belongs to the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, also an AFL-CIO affiliate, which Boschma said spent $2.68 million on lobbying in 2012.

“According to its fourth-quarter report, AFSCME lobbied on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as job creation bills, Hurricane Sandy relief and the fiscal cliff negotiations,” she said.

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Despite Criticism, MSNBC’s Silence Regarding Doctored ‘Heckling’ Video Deafening

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A video doctored by MSNBC featuring the grieving father of one of the children who died in the Sandy Hook tragedy from has set the Internet aflame this week. The video, which first aired on the Monday, January 28 broadcast of the liberal network’s “Martin Bashir”show is only the latest video controversy to include NBC and its crazy liberal stepchild MSNBC.

We’re now three days — and counting — into the scandal and MSNBC still hasn’t come clean and admitted what it did.

The video showed Newtown, Conn. father Neil Heslin’s testimony about guns speaking at a legislative hearing. Bashir then claimed Heslin was heckled by a gun supporter at the hearing. “A father’s grief, interrupted by the cries of a heckler,” Bashir declared.

Bashir’s declaration was at best wrong and at worst outright misrepresentation by the network. The video cut out the part of Heslin’s testimony where he posed a question to the crowd. Hearing no response, Heslin then appeared to act like no one was able to challenge his argument, which is why some present did so.

This latest controversy has made MSNBC the target of criticism from AP, The Washington Post and even some commentators like David Frum. After Tweeting about the alleged heckling incident, CNN’s Anderson Cooper then deleted his Tweet and clarified the situation, much to his credit.

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It’s On: Rand Paul Plans Round 2 Against TSA

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Sen. Rand Paul is not giving up his fight to get the government off the front lines of airport security.

The Kentucky Republican said in an interview that he plans to refile legislation that would drastically scale back the Transportation Security Administration’s reach by privatizing security screening operations at airports and creating a series of passenger protections.

“I think we are going to,” Paul said when asked if he would take another crack at the oft-criticized agency. “We have two different bills, one to privatize the TSA and then we have another one which is a passenger bill of rights.”

As a policy, the TSA does not comment on proposed legislation. It declined to comment on Paul’s plans.

For Paul, TSA reform is personal. He drew viral media attention for resisting a TSA pat-down in 2012, which caused him to miss a speech at the March for Life rally. Following that incident, Paul introduced TSA privatization and flier bill of rights legislation last summer.

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IRS: $20,000 Minimum Health Care Decree

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Photo Credit: Andrew Aliferis In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.

The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.

“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.

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Schumer: Legalizing Illegal Immigrants Won’t Be Stopped by Border Security Needs (+video)

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Photo Credit: EVAN BAYHNew York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said securing the nation’s borders should not be used as “a barrier” to giving illegal immigrants living in the U.S. a pathway to citizenship.

“We want the border to be secure. It’s more secure than it was several years ago, but it has a ways to go. And different sectors need different types of security. It’s a lot different having security in the Tucson sector than off the stretch in Texas, which is bounded by the Rio Grande,” Schumer said on Thursday.

“But we’re not using border security as an excuse or block to the path of citizenship. We just want to make sure — and this is very important both substantively and politically — that there is a secure border, and we’re going to work for that. But it’s not — and Dick [Durbin] and I and Bob [Menendez], as well as our three Republican friends, want to make sure the border’s secure but not to use it as a barrier to prevent the 11 million from eventually gaining a path to citizenship.”

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who joined a bipartisan group to announce an immigration reform blueprint earlier this week, argues that increased border security should come before a pathway to citizenship.

“The only way that I know to incentivize the enforcement part is to say that the green card stuff doesn’t even begin to happen until the enforcement happens first,” said Rubio.

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Union Leaders Making an Effort to Dodge ObamaCare

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Photo Credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty ImagesImagine the following scene: A handful of union bosses crowd around an old card table, punching numbers into their calculators. They’ve been up all night. Someone puts on another pot of coffee and a few of the older bosses are starting to fall asleep. Those who are still alert and active scratch their heads and re-enter their calculations.

“Oh, my gosh!” one of them shouts, concluding the all-night exercise. “‘Obamacare’ is going to cost us!”

Yes, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, union leaders (i.e. the same people who campaigned tirelessly in favor of universal healthcare) are trying to figure out a way to avoid paying for the costs associated with “Obamacare.”

From the WSJ: “Labor unions enthusiastically backed the Obama administration’s health-care overhaul when it was up for debate. Now that the law is rolling out, some are turning sour.

Union leaders say many of the law’s requirements will drive up the costs for their health-care plans and make unionized workers less competitive. Among other things, the law eliminates the caps on medical benefits and prescription drugs used as cost-containment measures in many health-care plans. It also allows children to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.”

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