4 June 2004

 

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Spectator

 

Firefighters' Foley, Giambra's Halliburton, Chalabi's snitch, and GWB's WWII

 

The binds that tie

The Spectator is stupefied at the shrewd bargaining of Buffalo firefighters president Joe Foley. He started bargaining with a full complement of firefighters and the city had a balanced budget. He walked out of the session, losing 70-odd members of his union and having three fire houses close within a month. Now that's leadership! Foley will probably go back to his membership now and ask for a raise for his "tough negotiating." The Spectator wonders if the men and and women who lose their jobs because of Foley will get to vote. It shouldn't be much of a stretch to understand why Foley doesn't know a bargaining table from a table of contents. With binding arbitration in force in New York State, union "leaders" like Foley don't have to bargain. They declare an impasse at the drop of a hat and allow unelected, anonymous arbitrators to give them what they want. And why not? The unions always get what they want so why bother actually negotiating? Let the arbitrators do it. And therein lies the big joke about the financial control board membership. A couple of them had positions of power in the state legislature: John Faso as a member of the Assembly and Rich Tobe as chief advisor to Bill Hoyt. Neither of them ever did a thing to lift the onerous burden of binding arbitration off the backs of the state's cities. For that matter, neither did Tony Masiello when he was a state senator. Now Faso and Tobe sit on high, in judgment of the Masiello administration crippled by out-dated state rules and regulations. It just keeps on keeping on.

Joel Giambra's Halliburton

The Spectator has heard that not only did Joel Giambra do a Halliburton for his buddy Jimmy Spano when it came to office furniture, he actually called other people of "influence" in the community to throw Spano like bones. Rumor has it one big hospital provider was contacted. Perhaps Joel needs another putting surface in his office cuz he's got way too much time on his hands.

Why is Chalabi's drunk informer more criminal than Robert Novak's deliberate snitch?

Is the Spectator the only one who finds it curious that the FBI would be administering lie detector exams to Pentagon employees to see who blabbed to Chalabi that the US was on to him when the same rigor wasn't in evidence in the investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame? Which reminds me, if it is a federal crime to reveal the name of a CIA agent, why isn't Robert Novak in jail? What possible public right to know would provide legal protection to a hack like Novak? Assuming that someone in the White House gets fingered for the leak, that person would have only told seven or eight reporters and that constitutes a crime. Novak told the entire world and that's "freedom of the press?" Perhaps Lee Coppola or Margaret Sullivan would like to take a crack at answers to these question.

What GW doesn't understand about WWII

You can always tell a moron when they are utterly unable to keep their own feet out of their mouths. You know, like Paul Tagliabue saying that Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan "is what the NFL is all about." Now we have George W. Bush in his Air Force Academy commencement address tickling his tonsils with his toes while comparing the world he created to WWII. He couldn't just pat the vets on the back and tell them how damned proud of them we are. He had to continue to make his flawed and fallacious case for war when he should have been talking about what real soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines did in the Big One. What GW doesn't understand is the universal sacrifice involved in WWII was the glue that bound a world at war. Women went to work in defense plants. Kids saved tin foil and tin cans. Everyone went without food staples like butter. We were a nation and a world citizen because we were united in our shared sacrifice to save the world from totalitarianism. Bush the Lesser has a different approach to war, but the same approach he had to the war of his own generation: "let someone else do it." Let someone else fight and bleed and die. Let someone else sacrifice. As for the president and his ilk, it's Fat City with tax cuts, off shore tax shelters, cheap labor outsourcing, and billion dollar no-bid contracts. Tell that to the Marines, Georgie.



 

 

 

 

 

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