Unbalanced Approach: Government Workers Work Less and Earn More

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Analysis of government versus private sector pay and work hours suggests bureaucrats get more money for less work.

Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation have recently taken a look at two issues related to public sector pay, compensation and hours worked. What they find is that government workers work about one month less in a given year and earn more than comparably skilled workers in the private sector.

A summary of their findings on compensation were published by the Washington Post last month. Biggs and Richwine were responding to claims that public sector employees earn 35 percent less than their private sector counterparts. However, these comparisons are badly misleading.

“All five outside studies reviewed this year by the Government Accountability Office found that federal pay is equal to or higher than those of comparable private-sector workers. This is consistent with three decades of academic research. According to our analysis of Census Bureau data last year, the typical private-sector worker who shifts to a federal job receives a salary increase, while federal workers who leave for the private sector tend to get a salary cut.”

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New Poll Shows . . . Senator Herman Cain?

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photo credit: gage skidmore

Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss is theoretically very vulnerable to a primary challenger in 2014: it’s just a question of whether any of the folks interested in taking him on can run a strong enough campaign to take advantage of that vulnerability.

Only 38% of Republican primary voters say they want Chambliss to be their nominee next year, compared to 43% who would prefer someone more conservative. But Chambliss stomps most of the people who’ve shown the most interest in taking him on. He leads Congressman Paul Broun by a 57/14 margin in a head to head, has a 50/22 advantage over Congressman Tom Price, and leads former Secretary of State Karen Handel 52/23.

By far and away the Republican who would pose the greatest threat to Chambliss in a primary, if he changed his mind about running, is Herman Cain. Cain would lead Chambliss 50-36 in a hypothetical match up. Cain has a 68/20 favorability rating with GOP primary voters, which compares quite favorably to Chambliss’ 45/36 approval spread. Other long shot candidates we tested against Chambliss were Allen West, who trails 47/26, and Erick Erickson who trails 51/22.

Chambliss is extremely weak with Republicans describing themselves as ‘very conservative.’ 61% of them would like to replace him, compared to only 23% who would like to see him nominated again. He would trail Cain 68/19 with that group of voters.

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School Removed God Reference From First-Grader’s Poem

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photo credit: kevin dooley

An elementary school in North Carolina censored a first-grade student’s Veterans Day poem by removing a line that referenced her grandfather’s belief in God.

The West Marion Elementary School student was supposed to read the poem at a Nov. 8 Veterans Day ceremony to honor her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran.

The deleted line read: “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength.”

An attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which advocates for religious rights and freedoms, criticized the school’s decision.

“America’s public schools should encourage, not restrict, the constitutionally protected freedom of students to express their faith,” said Matt Sharp, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, in a statement. “Students should not be censored when speaking about their faith or honoring those who valiantly served to protect our freedoms. … The censorship of this young student’s poem about her grandfathers is repugnant to the First Amendment rights of all students and sends an impermissible message of hostility towards religion.”

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Federal Appeals Court Likely to Invalidate Obama’s Recess Appointments

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President Barack Obama made headlines months ago when he installed controversial nominees to key government positions, bypassing the U.S. Senate by declaring the Senate in recess so that Senate confirmation was not needed. Today a federal appeals court signaled that it might rule Obama’s move unconstitutional, and remove those officials from power.

The U.S. Constitution says that Congress can by statute allow minor government players—“inferior officers”—to be appointed by the president, by Cabinet officers, or by the courts. But high-level administrative officials—called “principal officers”—must be nominated by the president, then confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

But the Senate isn’t always around; for part of each year, senators are back in their home states. So the Framers of the Constitution included the Recess Appointments Clause, allowing presidents to make temporary appointments during Senate recesses. Such appointments last until the end of the following calendar year, meaning appointments made in January 2012 last through December 2013.

Starting in December 2011, the U.S. Senate officially adjourned for only three days at a time—which the Constitution allows the Senate to do without going into recess—and did so specifically to prevent Obama from using his recess power. Democratic senators did this a few years ago to block George W. Bush from making recess appointments. Although it’s frustrating when the branches block each other, the reality is the Constitution allows it. And besides, this is just the political pushback to presidents using their recess power to get around the Senate in recent years.

But on Jan. 4, 2012, this president did something no president in American history ever attempted. Obama declared that the Senate was actually in recess because there were not enough senators physically present to do regular business, and thus that he had the constitutional power to make appointments unilaterally. He then appointed three members—a controlling majority—of the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), as well as the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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49% of Republicans Believe 2012 Election Was Stolen

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photo credit: charlesfettinger

Yes, we lost. But I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say that ACORN stole the election, do you?

PPP’s first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard…and also declining in numbers.

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we’ve seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%.

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New Lawsuit Claims Boy Scouts Failed to Stop Pedophile in Midwest

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CHICAGO – A former Boy Scout who says he was sexually assaulted when he was 10 by his now-imprisoned former troop leader sued the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday, citing recently released files the group secretly maintained on suspected molesters in its ranks.

The lawsuit claims that the Boy Scouts allowed Thomas Hacker, a Scout leader barred from the group after a 1970s felony sex abuse conviction in Indiana, to rejoin as a volunteer in Illinois in the 1980s, and he went on to molest more boys, including the plaintiff.

Hacker was arrested in 1988 and convicted in 1989 of the aggravated sexual assault of an 11-year-old member of his troop in the southwest suburbs of Chicago.

Now 75, Hacker is serving two concurrent 50-year prison terms as a result of his conviction. His defense attorney in the 1989 case called him “a classic pedophile – and sick beyond that,” according to a Chicago Tribune story at the time.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by a man identified only as John Doe claimed that Hacker sexually assaulted him when he was 10 years old — after Hacker re-joined the Scouts in Illinois.

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Women’s Group: Obama’s Cabinet ‘Clearly’ Needs To Be 50-percent Female

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As President Barack Obama finalizes his second-term cabinet picks, the nation’s leading feminist group is pushing for more female appointments.

Currently, the president, who garnered 55 percent of the women’s vote on Election Day, has eight females in his 23-member cabinet. According the National Organization for Women, that number isn’t nearly high enough.

NOW president Terry O’Neill, in an interview with The Daily Caller, explained that she would like to see complete gender parity in Obama’s second-term cabinet.

“I think that if half of the cabinet were women and half of the Supreme Court and half of Congress were women, we would see a lot more policies for expanding education and health care and social services that allow communities to thrive,” O’Neill explained. “We’d see a lot less spending on military weapons systems, and we would also see a lot less of the most powerful, moneyed people not paying their fair share.”

While O’Neill said Obama’s inner circle needs more gender diversity, she praised the president for nominating women and minorities to other posts, joking that Obama doesn’t “need binders” to pick top females.

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Famous Fox News Faces ‘Get Dumped Off Air’

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If you’re used to watching Fox News, you may notice a lot less face time by political analysts Karl Rove and Dick Morris.

New York Magazine is reporting the top-rated cable-news network is doing some “post-election soul searching,” and Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, is changing the characters who appear as talking heads on the air.

“According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff,” reports Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine. “He wants the faces associated with the election off the air – for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris – a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign – Ailes’s orders mean new rules.”

Among the reported new rules is a mandate from Fox News programming chief Bill Shine that producers receive permission before booking Rove or Morris for an appearance.

Both pundits were on the air in the immediate aftermath of last month’s election, “but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly,” wrote Sherman.

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Group-Home Staff Took Illiterate, Developmentally Disabled Resident to Vote

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Cecil Pearson is “shocked” his daughter voted for Barack Obama in November, but not for a typical reason: Darlene, Pearson’s daughter, is intellectually disabled and functionally illiterate, and lives with five other women in a group home operated by Easter Seals.

“We are here to support the individual’s rights and we help them exercise their rights as adults,” Jeff Smith, Easter Seals chief communication officer, told The Daily Caller.

“We we were providing the support for those individuals based on their community involvement and desires, and in this case their desire was to vote.”

In the state of North Carolina, Darlene can vote, marry and enter into contracts, despite a court ruling in 1995 declaring her incompetent.

“Its not my role to refute law or otherwise,” Smith told TheDC, “They are individuals and they have the same rights. … They were fully in their right to vote.”

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Purged Reps Speak Out: ‘Petty’ ‘Vindictive’ Establishment Punishing Members for Voting Conservative

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A day after learning he was yanked from from the Agriculture Committee, Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp lit into GOP leaders Tuesday, charging that conservative Republicans are punished for not toeing Speaker John Boehner’s line.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Huelskamp said at a Heritage Foundation event. “We were not notified about what might occur but it confirms in my mind the deepest suspicions that most Americans have about Washington D.C: it’s petty, it’s vindictive, and if you have conservative principles you will be punished.”

Huelskamp spoke at the briefing with Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who was booted from the Budget Committee as part of a series of committee moves by Republican leaders that drew criticism from the right. Amash said he still hadn’t been contacted by leadership about what happened, and neither man has been told which committees they’ll be appointed to in the next Congress.

Huelskamp said that when the Republican freshman class of 2010 came in, they were told they had to fundraise for the party and notify leadership how they would vote but could otherwise “vote their conscience and their district.”

His removal, the congressman said, was “not about principle, it was about obedience.”

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