Switching from Wisconsin Education Association's health insurance product saves nearly $700,000; Obama's illegal uncle has magically reappeared and gets DUI; Obama's uncle has had dummy SSN for 20 years; WST asks for suspension of EPA rules; Obama's labor specialist pick for economic adviser; Government protection for the ugly?; Economic downturn, smaller tax revenues, causes more spending on "income security"; Former justice officials call for investigation of hiring only liberals in Civil Rights Division; WikiLeaks outs names of those who spoke confidentially to American diplomats; Climate changes causes mental illnesses?; Justice Dept. refuses to release memos; Cover-up of fact that flash mob violence being done by blacks against whites

The Washington Examiner reports: The Hartland-Lakeside School District, about 30 miles west of Milwaukee in tiny Hartland, Wis., had a problem in its collective bargaining contract with the local teachers union.
The contract required the school district to purchase health insurance from a company called WEA Trust. The creation of Wisconsin's largest teachers union -- "WEA" stands for Wisconsin Education Association -- WEA Trust made money when union officials used collective bargaining agreements to steer profitable business its way.

Changing to a different insurance company would save Hartland-Lakeside hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be spent on key educational priorities -- especially important since the cash-strapped state government was cutting back on education funding. But teachers union officials wouldn't allow it; the WEA Trust requirement was in the contract, and union leaders refused to let Hartland-Lakeside off the hook.

That's where Wisconsin's new budget law came in. The law, bitterly opposed by organized labor in the state and across the nation, limits the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. And it just happens that the Hartland-Lakeside teachers' collective bargaining agreement expired on June 30. So now, freed from the expensive WEA Trust deal, the school district has changed insurers.
"It's going to save us about $690,000 in 2011-2012," says Schilling. Insurance costs that had been about $2.5 million a year will now be around $1.8 million. What union leaders said would be a catastrophe will in fact be a boon to teachers and students.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/07/wisconsin-schools-buck-union-cut-health-costs#ixzz1WQ8eynbv

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Barack Obama's long-lost "Uncle Omar" has been arrested for alleged drink-driving outside Boston and detained as an illegal immigrant, The AustralianTimes can reveal. The arrest ends a mystery over the fate of a relative that the US President wrote in his memoir had moved to America from Kenya in the 1960s, although the circumstances of his discovery may now prove to be an embarrassment for the White House.

The Times has established from his birthdate that Mr Obama is the Uncle Omar mentioned in President Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father. In the 1995 book, President Obama writes of "the uncle who had left for America 25 years ago and had never come back".
In 2008, The Times mounted a search for Uncle Omar. Instead of finding him, we discovered his sister, President Obama's Auntie Zeituni, who was living as an illegal immigrant on a Boston housing estate. Uncle Omar and Auntie Zeituni are the children of President Obama's grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, by his third wife Sarah, the woman President Obama calls "Granny", because she raised his father, Barack Sr, who was Hussein Obama's son by Hussein's second wife, Akumu.  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/barack-obamas-uncle-has-been-arrested-and-held-as-illegal-immigrant/story-e6frg6so-1226124269032
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The Washington Times reports:  Mr. Carr contacted the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles and asked spokesman at the state motor vehicle how someone Onyago Obama's circumstances could get a driver's license. He later told his audience what he discovered: (emphasis is the Times writer's)

"According to the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles he has a valid driver's license and you can't get a valid driver's license, supposedly, unless you have a social security number. And I asked them (RMV), 'Well how did he get a license if he never had a social security number? But they said that they couldn't tell me because he had the license for at least 20 years, so he had gotten it back in their pre-computer days."  

In President Obama's 1995 memoir "Dreams from My Father" he writes that he learned in 1988 through family members in Kenya that his Uncle Omar came to the United States 25 years prior. A number of commentators are mentioning that President Obama's uncle may have benefited from a policy from the days that go back to former Massachusetts Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis, whereby illegal immigrants were assigned identification numbers that looked similar to social security numbers. A 1989 Associated Press article with the headline "Mass. Aliens Given Fake Social Security Numbers" describe how these numbers were released: (bolding is mine)
Massachusetts welfare workers assigned hundreds of dummy Social Security numbers to illegal immigrants to enable them to receive millions of dollars in state benefits.
Onyango Obama is currently being held by ICE authorities. Interestingly his immigration case will be handled by the same Cleveland attorney who successfully represented President Obama's Aunt Zeituni when she was about to be deported back to Kenya. http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2011/aug/30/picket-questions-arise-over-onyango-obamas-drivers/ 
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The Wall St. Journal opines: Since everyone has a suggestion or three about what President Obama can do to get the economy cooking again, here's one of ours: Immediately suspend the Environmental Protection Agency's bid to reorganize the U.S. electricity industry, and impose a moratorium on EPA rules at least until hiring and investment rebound for an extended period.
The EPA is currently pushing an unprecedented rewrite of air-pollution rules in an attempt to shut down a large portion of the coal-fired power fleet. Though these regulations are among the most expensive in the agency's history, none were demanded by the late Pelosi Congress. They're all the result of purely bureaucratic discretion under the Clean Air Act, last revised in 1990.
As it happens, those 1990 amendments contain an overlooked proviso that would let Mr. Obama overrule EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's agenda. With an executive order, he could exempt all power plants "from compliance with any standard or limitation" for two years, or even longer using rolling two-year periods. All he has to declare is "that the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903327904576524423674218998.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
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Fox News reports: As President Obama prepares his jobs plan speech, he's also filling out his economics team, preparing to nominate Princeton University's Alan Krueger to be chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. 

"I am pleased to nominate Alan Krueger to lead the Council of Economic Advisers," Obama said in a written statement Monday. "As one of this country's leading economists, Alan has been a key voice on a vast array of economic issues for more than two decades. Alan understands the difficult challenges our country faces, and I have confidence that he will help us meet those challenges as one of the leaders on my economic team."

Krueger, 50, a labor specialist who served in Obama's Treasury Department in the first two years of the administration, returns to Washington to succeed Austan Goolsbee, who is now back at the University of Chicago.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/29/obama-to-nominate-princeton-professor-as-head-economic-advisers-team/#ixzz1WQSvMj00

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American Thinker writes: It's not often I read an op-ed in the New York Times and confuse it with an article from The Onion.  But, I did just that Sunday with Daniel Hamermesh's piece calling for government protections for "The Ugly." 
At first, I thought it was written tongue-in-cheek, but, no, the University of Texas economics professor is completely serious.  He says ugly people earn between 10 and 15 percent less a year than their attractive counterparts, and thus, deserve protection.   Where does it end?  What sort of personal differences justify government intervention? http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201/08/should_the_ugly_be_a_protected_class.html#comments-container
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The Washington Examiner writes: There's no doubt federal spending has exploded in recent years. In fiscal 2007, the last year before things went haywire, the government took in $2.568 trillion in revenues and spent $2.728 trillion, for a deficit of $160 billion. In 2011, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the government will take in $2.230 trillion and spend $3.629 trillion, for a deficit of $1.399 trillion.
The deficits are largely the result not of entitlements but of an explosion in spending related to the economic downturn and the rise of Democrats to power in Washington. While entitlements must be controlled in the long run, Washington's current spending problem lies elsewhere.
A lot of the higher spending has stemmed directly from the downturn. There is, for example, spending on what is called "income security" -- that is, for unemployment compensation, food stamps and related programs. In 2007, the government spent $365 billion on income security. In 2011, it's estimated to spend $622 billion. That's an increase of $257 billion. http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-spending-not-entitlements-created-deficits
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Expose Obama reports: Former Department of Justice officials are calling for an investigation into current hiring practices,which they say have become politicized under Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration.
Pajamas Media conducted an analysis of the resumes of hired individuals in five Civil Rights Division sections. The conservative media outfit was only able to obtain the documents after filing a federal lawsuit in response to DOJ’s 10-month delay in responding to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Based on their investigation,the researchers found that every single new hire — 70 in all — boasted far-Left résumés. They found no conservative or apolitical new hires in the Voting Section (16 hires),the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (5 hires),the Special Litigation Section (23 hires),the Education Section (11 hires),or the Employment Section (15 hires).
“The Department’s political leadership clearly recognized that the resumes of these new attorneys would expose the hypocrisy of the Obama administration’s polemical attacks on the Bush administration for supposedly engaging in ‘politicized hiring’ — and that everyone would see just how militantly partisan the Obama Civil Rights Division truly is,” wrote former Justice official and Pajamas Media investigator Hans von Spakovsky,explaining why the Department stonewalled FOIA requests for nearly a year.  http://www.exposeobama.com/2011/08/29/fmr-officials-say-investigate-political-hiring-at-doj/
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The NYT writes: In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November.
A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.”
State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/us/30wikileaks.html?_r=1
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The Sydney Morning Herald reports: RATES of mental illnesses including depression and post-traumatic stress will increase as a result of climate change, a report to be released today says.
The paper, prepared for the Climate Institute, says loss of social cohesion in the wake of severe weather events related to climate change could be linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse.
As many as one in five people reported ''emotional injury, stress and despair'' in the wake of these events.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/mental-illness-rise-linked-to-climate-20110828-1jger.html#ixzz1WVjh6yh1

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Fox News reports: The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos the George W. Bush administration used to justify his warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president's time in office.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/29/obama-administration-blocks-release-bush-administration-surveillance-policy/#ixzz1WVkDOt7M

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American Thinker reports: Recent flash mob violence has alerted Americans to a troubling wave of sadistic racial mayhem.  A notable outbreak occurred in Denver in 2009, setting a pattern of delay, denial, and silence.  Now that same scourge has returned to Denver, among many other places.  

The first-hand accounts and surveillance videos of the 2009 attacks are shocking. These weren't sucker punches or fair fights -- the attackers swing madly and rapidly with a viciousness that can only come from blind cruelty.  The victims, who can be seen in interviews, were kind-looking, ordinary people.  The victims were mostly either gay or straight couples. They didn't provoke the attacks in any conceivable way.  The attackers sometimes fractured skulls, or broke eye sockets, and left one victim in a coma.  There were a total of 26 attacks from July 17 to Nov. 17.  The story first came to light in 2009 when a source inside the Denver police department said that the department was "keeping the public in the dark" about the attacks.  
Late last month, Denver saw a possible return to violence, as couples leaving restaurants were being attacked by a group of black men with baseball bats. The Denver Police have renewed warnings of those attacks.
The brutality  in Denver is disturbingly similar to violence occurring elsewhere, nationwide.  In the last few months alone, a young white lady named Shaina Perry was taunted and beaten in Milwaukee.  A young white man named Carter Strange had his skull fractured by a mob in South Carolina.  Dawid Strucinski was beaten into a coma by a mob in Bayonne.  Anna Taylor, Emily Guendelsberger, and Thomas Fitzgerald were beaten and kicked to the ground in separate Philadelphia flash mobs.  Every weekend in July, mobs have attacked in Greensboro, NC.  In a mostly-white suburb of Cleveland, witnesses reported large groups of "teens" walking through the streets, "shouting profanities and racial epithets," and one man was viciously beaten while leaving a restaurant with his wife and friends.  In all of those cases, the victims were white and the attackers were black.
It cannot be emphasized enough that these attacks often occur in suburban areas where the black groups have to leave their own neighborhoods and purposefully travel to areas that are predominantly non-black, to attack non-black victims.   But the social problem we're looking at is large groups, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, sometimes armed, engaging in racially-focused violent crimes. 
The Washington Post, New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, have all openly stated that they will refuse  to report on the racial facts of these violent crimes. The Los Angeles Times explains that they don't want to "unfairly stigmatize racial groups." They prefer the soft bigotry of low expectations instead. 
Indeed, the welfare state itself is in large part based on the assumption that whites need to give more to achieve racial equality, as reflected in President Obama's lament that the civil rights movement didn't focus on economic redistribution.
We all pay the price, as racial guilt is used to extort tax money for the welfare state, which fosters the mobs. The PC status quo will not acknowledge the fact that the worst form of racism today is black mob violence.  http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/the_racial_violence_that_dare_not_speak_its_name.html