For over 60 years, employers have had a federally protected right under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to hold paid, mandatory meetings with employees to discuss various issues related to unions and unionization. These meetings, often referred to by unions as “captive-audience” talks, have historically been used by employers to explain to new hires and other employees the tactics unions use to collect union authorization cards, the legal rights employees have when asked to sign those cards, and the merits of a union-free workplace. . . .

On May 12, 2010, Wisconsin became the second state in the nation (Oregon was the first earlier this year) to pass a law designed to strip employers of their right to hold “captive-audience” talks with their employees. The Wisconsin Fair Employment Act (WFEA) was amended to prohibit employers from discriminating against employees who refuse to attend “employer-sponsored meetings” or “participate in any communication with the employer or with an agent, representative, or designee of the employer” where the “primary purpose” of the meeting or communication was to express the employer’s “opinion” about an employee’s decision to join or support a union. . . .

The judgment declares the WFEA amendments unconstitutional insofar as they prohibit employers from discriminating against employees who refuse to attend a mandatory meeting or participate in any communication with their employer about the decision to join or support a union. (Read more from laborrelationscounsel.com)Wisconsin “Captive-Audience” Meeting Ban Struck Down

The Koch brothers have been elevated to super-villain status by many statists, including the union protesters in Wisconsin. Here is a beautiful satire from reddit:

The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That’s small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren’t enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:

1. decriminalize drugs,
2. legalize gay marriage,
3. repeal the Patriot Act,
4. end the police state,
5. cut defense spending.

Who hates the police? Only the criminals using drugs, amirite? We need the Patriot Act to allow government to go through our emails and tap our phones to catch people who smoke marijuana and put them in prison. Oh, it’s also good for terrorists.

Wikipedia shows Koch Family Foundations supporting causes like:

1. CATO Institute
2. Reason Foundation
3. cancer research ($150 million to M.I.T. – STOP THEM! KEEP CANCER ALIVE!)
4. ballet (because seriously: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Family_Foundations

The Kochs basically give a TON of money (millions of dollars) to the CATO Institute. Scott Walker, $40K? HAH! These CATO people are the REAL problem. They want to end the War on Drugs. Insane, right? We know that the War on Drugs keeps us SAFE from Mexicans and keeps all that violence on their side of the fence. More than 30,000 Mexicans killed as of December! Thank God Mexican lives don’t count as human lives. Our government is doing a good, no, a great job protecting us and seriously, who cares about brown people or should I say non-people? HAHAHA! Public unions are good, government is good, and government protects us from drugs and brown people. The Kochs want to end all that. Look, as far back as 1989 CATO has been trying to decriminalize drugs. Don’t worry, nobody listens to them because they are INSANE.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=981

CATO also rejects the Patriot Act. How can you hate the Patriot Act? Are you not American? They made it easy for you to understand by putting the word “Patriot” in the legislation. That means you should vote YES. Giving up our civil liberties is not a big deal. We need our government. Whether it’s Obama or Bush, we can all agree that the TSA is really good at what they do. God, those patdowns feel SOOOO good.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10599

The Kochs also support Reason Foundation. You don’t know about that? Let me tell you. Basically, REASON Foundation is a bunch of cop haters. Last month, they did a “news” (as if we wanna know!) story on three cops that beat up an unarmed black kid. In the aftermath, the cops were suspended, sat around doing nothing and got paid (like that’s a bad thing!). I don’t know about you, but that puts a smile on my face for four reasons:

1. I hate black people,
2. I love the police,
3. I love it when police beat up black people for no reason,
4. I love that it comes out of taxpayers’ money, because it’s not like it’s really my money.

The Kochs are trying to end this. The Kochs must be stopped.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/24/a-beating-in-pittsburgh

CATO trying to cut defense spending:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-to-cut-military-spending/

Gay marriage. YUCK. That’s just obvious. If the KOCH Brothers have their way, there will be homos getting married left and right. Here’s another scary thought: gays raising children.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6379

Here are some videos from Glenn Greenwald, one of those “gays.” He writes for the liberal Salon.com, but don’t let that fool you. He’s in the Koch Brothers’ pocket. Here are some videos to prove my point:

Here’s Glenn Greenwald talking about drug-decriminalization at REASON:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjuvXdqKM0M&feature=related

Yeah, he’s that Glenn Greenwald that also defends WikiLeaks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M

If there’s one thing I know about billionaires, it’s that they only care about money. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros. They aren’t fooling me. Bill Gates isn’t fooling me with his vaccination campaign in Africa. He’s just trying to make African children live longer so they will buy more copies of Windows. Wow. Not even trying to hide it.

Now, I don’t know why the KOCH brothers want gay people to have the right to marry. Everybody knows marriage is for a man and a woman. Even Obama believes that. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve amirite? I haven’t figured out the angle, yet. Maybe it’s like this:

1. legalize drugs
2. legalize gay marriage
3. sell drugs, oil and Koch napkins to gays at their weddings
4. ????
5. PROFIT$

I don’t know exactly how it would work, but we can all agree that they’re evil. Think about it. CATO and REASON are the only institutions OPENLY advocating these positions. Who would do such a thing? Have they no shame? Minority opinions MUST BE SILENCED.

Anyway, we must reject everything that the KOCH brothers do in Wisconsin and around the country. We will succeed as long as we stick to the GROUP-&-THINK.

YES WE CAN. You’re either with us or against us.

Democracy Now is leans socialists on most issue. They propose government force as a solution to most problems. However, like many socialists, they are right about the problems, they just propose the wrong solutions.

* U.S. media goes along with the government lie.

Consistent. True. Principled. Beautiful.

Sacramento’s carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit by an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who is scheduled to speak at a local mosque about the Nazi Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer makes the 11th stop on his national “Never Again for Anyone” tour at the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims Islamic Center at 7 p.m. tonight.

Meyer has equated the Holocaust to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, drawing intense fire from Sacramento’s Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League.

“Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is repugnant, anti-Semitic and defiles the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Reuven H. Taff, president of the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, in a civil but emotional exchange of letters with SALAM’s Imam Mohamed Abdul Azeez. [emphasis added] (Read more from sacbee.com)

I would like to point out to Rabbi Reuven that Albert Einstein also cmpared Israel to Nazi Germany. (more)

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps made a case for a government hand in media policy in a speech to the FCBA on Tuesday.

“The commission can act now. It should have acted on the media before now. I am disappointed that it has not,” he said.

The decline of “real journalism” justifies federal involvement, according to Copps. “The news is suffering from a bad case of substance abuse,” he said.

The Democratic commissioner pointed to Fox News’ Bernie Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly as examples of the problem with today’s media landscape, saying the pair has taken his own words out of context.

“What you and I are getting these days is too much opinion based on opinion and too little news based on fact,” Copps said.

The key going forward, according to Copps, is “making sure there is media about, and originating from, the local communities a station serves.” [...]

The commissioner also reiterated his call for a “Public Value Test” as part of the broadcasting license renewal, a process controlled by the FCC.

We have, as a country, tolerated the multiple infringements on “Congress shall pass no law” for far too long. No government official should ever be in the business of enforcing quality of journalism, and when one tries, he–and the agency he represents–should be run out of Washington on a rail. This is appalling on every level, and the fact that there’s a journalistic constituency for it–read this awful commencement speech last year by Columbia Journalism School Dean and New Yorker essayist Nicholas Lemann for a taste–makes me deeply ashamed of my chosen profession. (Read more from reason.com)

Surprise, surprise.

If you spend any time at all reading about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army private who stands accused of providing WikiLeaks with massive amounts of intelligence pulled from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Pentagon and the State Department, the picture that emerges is one of a young man who also felt isolated, one who saw WikiLeaks as a means of ameliorating that feeling. Manning remains in custody — a particularly brutal form of solitary confinement, actually — at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.

Manning still faces charges of his own, but he’s played a larger role in the tensions between U.S. government officials and WikiLeaks, in that he is seen as the key figure in building a larger criminal case against WikiLeaks founder and figurehead Julian Assange. That Manning willingly provided WikiLeaks with classified information does not appear to be in dispute. The issue, rather, is one of “did Manning jump or was he pushed?”

. . . .

This case against Assange — that he had pursued Manning, with the intention of inducing the soldier into proving WikiLeaks with thousands of classified diplomatic cables — relied heavily on the word of Adrian Lamo, a high-profile hacker-turned-”threat analyst,” to whom Manning reached out in May of 2010, revealing that he had taken classified material and leaked it to Assange. Lamo reported this to authorities, and provided the contents of his chat logs with Manning to Wired Magazine. (Read more from huffingtonpost.com)