Interestingly, Marks also said that Sen. Arlene Specter’s vote was being counted upon to get the requisite 60 votes.  “He’s part of our formula for 60 votes. We believe he’s going to come through,” Marks said of the Pennsylvania legislator.

When the president met privately with the health industry leaders that day, Stern and a second Service Employees International Union official were the only labor representatives in the room. 

In a fractious labor movement fraught with rivalries and mutual suspicion, Stern’s close association with Obama has given him cachet that may prove important in the fierce competition to lure new members.

But Stern’s access to the White House has also provoked jealousies. His opponents paint him as a polarizing figure that Obama elevates at his own peril.

The Obama-Stern relationship has emerged as one of the most curious within the young administration.

Stern can boast that union officials are scattered throughout the Obama administration. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is a former executive at an SEIU local based in New York. No other union has placed anyone at such a high level in the White House.

Anna Burger, SEIU secretary-treasurer, was appointed to Obama’s economic recovery board. And union associate counsel John Sullivan was named to the six-member Federal Election Commission. 

Moreover, Stern has enjoyed considerable entree to the new administration — starting on Inauguration Day, when he joined Obama and the new president’s family on the reviewing stand outside the White House to watch the inaugural parade.

1. Virginia

2. Utah

3. North Carolina

4. Wyoming

5. South Carolina

6. South Dakota

7. Kansas

8. Georgia

9. Florida

10. Nebraska

Readers please note that all 10 states have a critical component in common — they all protect workers with Right to Work laws.

Spending a trillion dollars as a down payment for a government takeover of health care is a dream of many Democrats. The current plan in Congress would create a government insurance plan that would drive out the private ones.

The problem, though, is the cost. Even moderate Democrats are having second thoughts about that, as well as all the quality problems associated with socialized medicine. Even so, health care nationalization’s biggest boosters are cooking up bad new plans.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., both would like to slap a tax on private health plans to pay for a new government one.

But they’ve carved out one very big exception: unions and their gold-plated benefit packages. This effectively gives Big Labor an advantage in the market and forces nonunion workers to subsidize unions for their share of this bad idea.

The logic behind this tax giveaway is that union health plans, which are lavish, would be subject to higher taxes than those of workers with regular private sector health care plans.

According to news reports, if unions get a special tax break for themselves on health care taxes, they’ll gladly muscle “their” Congress members into supporting a “public option” health care bill.

In short, it’s little more than a political payoff to unions for spending $400 million in campaign cash to elect Democrats to Congress and the White House last year. As if the outrageous favors they’ve received from the auto bailouts aren’t enough.

But unions don’t just get a tax break. They also get a great recruiting tool. After all, nationalizing health care in itself undermines any reason to belong to a union, since unions exist to squeeze more out of companies. If a company is no longer involved in health care and thus can no longer be squeezed, why belong to a union? The answer: special tax privileges.

This will artificially beef up union membership. Who wouldn’t want tax-free health care over subsidizing someone else’s as the current congressional bills dictate?

With the Employee Free Choice Act to coerce workers into unions now dead in the water, this could be a backdoor means of doing the same thing — while bringing in more campaign cash to Democrats.

This may be great for the Democrats and their union backers, but it’s bad for the rest of us. By creating a two-tier system of pricing for health care, and with it privileges for party elites, it’s fundamentally unfair to the public as a whole. The people who will get the short end of the stick on this — the rationing, the shortages, the wait lists — will be the very ones forced into paying for other people’s health care. Unions will get a free ride.

Remember that whenever health care is “free” or subsidized to consumers, it distorts the market and creates disincentives to cut costs. So under the Kennedy-Baucus plan, union health care costs will soar without restraint. And ordinary Americans will pay.

This will turn unions, whose members comprise only 6% of U.S. workers, into a privileged caste, for no other reason than their political muscle with Democrats.

There’s a word for this: Peronism. That was the populist political patronage system that took Argentina from one of the richest countries in the world in the early 20th century to the economically troubled nation it is today. It’s a bad model for the U.S. to follow.

Spending big, carving out tax niches for no other reason than campaign contributions, and creating two-tiered pricing systems, is little more than a kind of corruption. It will lay us low, too.

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

Homecare workers report scores of incidents of voter intimidation, illegal threats and ballot manipulation by SEIU staff as they pushed for an election to swap unions.  

The SEIU would not give up those member dues money without a fight.  

Indy Media reports that ”the SEIU “spent an estimated $10 million on attack mailings, robo-calls, TV and radio ads, and 1,000 paid staff flown in from across the country,” to keep workers from leaving.  

Workers were subjected to intimidation and even “physically threatening behavior by SEIU staff.”  Remember, California does not protect workers with the RIght to Work and they have no choice and little voice in the process.  

It’s worth the read, but keep in mind, these tactics were employed with the use of a secret ballot election.  Just think of the intimidation and threats available in the big labor organizers arsenal if the Card Check bill was law.