It’s Monday, November 19th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, perhaps inspired by the Dark Side’s electoral triumph, the WSJ describes how….

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

Even when reform passes, teachers unions engage in massive resistance.

Education reformers had good news at the ballot box this month as voters in Washington and Georgia approved measures to create new charter schools. But as the reform movement gathers momentum, teachers unions are giving no quarter in their massive resistance against states trying to shake up failing public education.

In Georgia, 59% of voters approved a constitutional amendment that creates a new statewide commission to approve charter schools turned down by union-allied school boards. Instead of absorbing the message, charter opponents are planning to sue. The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus said last week it will join a lawsuit against Governor Nathan Deal to block the change. (Curious….particularly since Black school children suffer most from America’s failing public schools!) According to Caucus Chairman Emanuel Jones, because the ballot measure’s text didn’t discuss the details of how the schools were selected, “people didn’t know what they were voting for.”

This is the legal equivalent of sending back a hamburger because you didn’t know it came with meat. Georgia voters rallied around the charters because they want something better for their children than the dismal status quo. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that as of April only 67.4% of the state’s freshmen graduated from high school in four years. Last year a state investigation of Georgia schools found that dozens of public educators were falsifying test results to disguise student results.

A different battle is unfolding in Chicago, where the city’s teachers union is getting ready for its second showdown with Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In September, teachers went on strike and won a pay raise and limits on test scores in teacher evaluations. Now the union is fighting the city’s plan to close underused schools in an effort to consolidate resources.

Chicago Public Schools have some 600,000 seats but only 400,000 kids, while the district faces a $1 billion deficit next year and over $300 million of pension payments. Yet at a protest rally last week, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey declared that the union was “serving notice to elected officials, if you close our schools, there will be no peace in the city.” Remind you of Selma, circa 1965?

The tension is especially acute for black parents whose children are trapped in the worst public schools. In other states, black organizations that march in lockstep with Democrats and their union allies have also been slow to catch up, but the message is getting louder. In Harlem last year, thousands of parents protested the NAACP’s role in a lawsuit to block school closings and the expansion of charter schools.

No reform effort is too small for the teachers union to squash. In this month’s election, the National Education Association descended from Washington to distant Idaho, spending millions to defeat a measure that limited collective bargaining for teachers and pegged a portion of teachers’ salaries to classroom performance. In Alabama, Republican Governor Robert Bentley says he’s giving up on his campaign to bring charter schools to the state after massive resistance from the Alabama Education Association.

Unions fight as hard as they do because they have one priority—preserving their jobs and increasing their pay and benefits. Students are merely their means to that end. Reforming public education is the civil rights issue of our era, and each year that passes without reform sacrifices thousands more children to union politics.

Now that the election is over, is it too much to ask that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan drop their union coddling and speak truth to union power? Alas, it probably is.

We can only assume was a rhetorical question, as both Arne Duncan and his Dear Misleader are both products of the same corrupt Chicago system.  So in a second term, they’re suddenly going to take the interests of the students?!?

Next we move to International News of Note, courtesy today of Carl Polizzi, and Gordon Change, writing at NRO, sounding General Quarters over signs of a….

Red Flag Over the Atlantic

China is angling to take over a U.S. airbase in the Azores.

On June 27, a plane carrying Wen Jiabao made a “technical” stop on the island of Terceira, in the Azores. Following an official greeting by Alamo Meneses, the regional secretary of environment of the sea, the Chinese premier spent four hours touring the remote Portuguese outpost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wen’s Terceira walkabout, which followed a four-nation visit to South America, largely escaped notice at the time, but alarm bells should have immediately gone off in Washington and in European capitals. For one thing, Wen’s last official stop on the trip was Santiago, the capital of Chile. Flights from Chile to China normally cross the Pacific, not the Atlantic, so there was no reason for his plane to be near the Azores. Moreover, those who visit the Azores generally favor other islands in the out-of-the-way chain.

Terceira, however, has one big attraction for Beijing: Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility where Premier Wen’s 747 landed in June is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart. If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure. From the 10,865-foot runway on the northeast edge of the island, Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

And China could target the American homeland. Lajes is less than 2,300 miles from New York, shorter than the distance between Pearl Harbor and Los Angeles.

Lajes is certainly the reason Wen went out of his way to win friends in Terceira. For years his country has been trying to make inroads into the Azores and waiting for opportunities to pounce. There is nothing the Chinese can do if the U.S. stays, but Pentagon budget cutters, according to some observers, are planning to make Lajes a “ghost base.”

At one time, the facility was critically important. During World War II, the airfield was instrumental in hunting U-boats, and in the Cold War the base helped the West track the Soviets. Lajes was a busy transit point in the Gulf War. It was one of the spots where the Space Shuttle could have landed in an emergency.

Now Lajes is home to the USAF’s 65th Air Base Wing, which supports American and NATO aircraft transiting the Atlantic, and it hosts various other American military units. Its role, nonetheless, is greatly diminished. Peace in the North Atlantic and advances in air-to-air refueling have decreased the importance of the strategic runway, which is now rarely used by the U.S.

So from a purely military point of view, the decision to cease operations at Lajes makes sense. The effective closure of the field, however, would send Terceira into a tailspin. While agriculture forms the basis of the island’s economy, the base directly accounts for about one in 20 jobs there. Unemployment is already high, about 10 percent. If Terceira is to have any future, the Portuguese government will have to find a new major tenant for Air Base No. 4.

In recent years, Beijing has identified Portugal as its entry point into Europe, and Chinese officials now know their way to Lisbon. It is in this context that the Portuguese are already thinking about the planned closure of Lajes Field. They don’t want to invite the Chinese in, but they have quietly indicated they will have no choice if the U.S. Air Force decides to leave the base.

“We have a close relationship with Portugal,” the Defense Department told NRO when asked about the planned closure of Lajes and Beijing’s apparent interest in taking it over. “They are an important NATO ally and bilateral partner, and we continue to discuss our strong defense cooperation, in Portugal and around the world.”

We will, as a longtime ally, need to work closely with Lisbon over an especially thorny issue, but in the interim, there are things that can be done. For instance, it’s not entirely clear why the U.S. Africa Command should be based at Kelley Barracks, outside Stuttgart. A transfer of the approximately 1,500 staff there to Lajes, which is much closer to Africa, would solve the problem overnight, and the move might actually improve Africom’s effectiveness.

There are undoubtedly other stopgap solutions that the Pentagon could implement. None of them will be perfect, but all of them would be better than having Beijing’s red flag flying over the Atlantic — and permitting Chinese aircraft to patrol the waters connecting America to Europe.

Were this any other time in American history….and anyone else occupying the Oval Office….the status of Air Base No. 4 would be of little, if any, concern.  But this is now; and we’re stuck….

….with Stupid, aka the Great Appeaser.

And since we’re on the subject of the perspicacity of Progressive politics, we turn to today’s installment of “Be Careful What You Wish For”:

Iconic Maker Of Twinkies Closing Its Doors

Hostess, the maker of iconic treats like Twinkies, is shuttering its plants and liquidating its 82-year-old business. A victim of changing consumer tastes, high commodity costs and strained labor relations, Hostess ultimately was brought to its knees by a national strike orchestrated by its second-largest union.

Or, as the WSJ terms it:

The Twinkie, a Suicide

Unions kill an American classic, and 18,500 of their own jobs.

Perhaps it says something about America—though we’re not sure what—that iconic junk foods like Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Ho Hos snack cakes and Wonder bread have endured since the 1930s despite changing consumer health and eating habits. It does say something about institutions that can’t—or refuse to—adapt to new economic times that the company behind those products has chosen to go out of business overnight.

Hostess’s owners have decided to liquidate rather than ride out a nationwide strike by one of the largest of its dozen unions, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. The Texas-based company owned by the private-equity shop Ripplewood Holdings and other hedge funds essentially gave up. On Friday it shut down its 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers and prepared to fire nearly 18,500 employees en masse and auction off its brand and recipe portfolio.

Hostess posted sales of $2.5 billion in 2011 but lost $341 million and lacked the cash flow to hold out through the bakers union work stoppage that had only lost a few days of production so far. One reason is a labor-rule burden that by comparison makes Detroit look like Hong Kong.

The snack giant endured $52 million in workers’ comp claims in 2011, according to its bankruptcy filing this January. Hostess’s 372 collective-bargaining agreements required the company to maintain 80 different health and benefit plans, 40 pension plans and mandated a $31 million increase in wages and health care and other benefits for 2012.

Union work rules usually required cake and bread products to be delivered to a single retail location using two separate trucks. Drivers weren’t allowed to load their own vehicles, and the workers who loaded bread weren’t allowed to load cake. On most delivery routes, another “pull up” employee moved products from back rooms to shelves.

This year management negotiated concessions from some of the unions, including the Teamsters, but the bakers rejected a last and best offer in September. Then the courts gave Hostess unilateral authority to modify collective-bargaining contracts, prompting the strike. So now it will liquidate, instead of attempting to emerge from Chapter 11 intact.

The 18,500 layoffs are equal to about 11% of the net new jobs the entire U.S. economy created in October. The unions are blaming private equity, or Bain Capital, or capitalism, but the election is over. And so is Hostess.

Of course they are; except that it wasn’t Bain, it was Ripplewood.  And rather than Mitt Romney, it was Dick Gephardt and Tim Collins, both prominent Progressives, whose Teamster connections allowed them to become involved with Hostess during its first bankruptcy.

Regardless of whether Tigers truly eat their young, the Hostess liquidation leaves no doubt Dimocrats do.  And though we wish no one ill, we’re hard pressed to feel any sympathy for these boneheaded bakers.  Wake and smell the dough, boys!  Your union bosses are still living high on the hog; you just got slaughtered.

And in the Environmental Moment, a headline from FOX News which we found rather self-explanatory:

Why People Opt Against Going Green

“Organic cotton”?  Seriously, does anyone….ANYONE….have the slightest clue as to what on earth organic cotton is, let alone why we’d want to buy it?!?

We’ll tell you why people opt against going green; because they know it for EXACTLY WHAT IT IS: an absolute….

….and total….

In a related item, courtesy of the Daily Caller and NewMediaJournal.us, the latest on a story we covered a week or more ago concerning….

Obama Officials Using Secret Emails to Avoid Oversight

Fuggedabout this global warming bullsh*t; what’s this I’m hearin’ ’bout no more TWINKIES?!?

The House science committee is demanding the White House explain why top administration officials are using secret e-mail accounts and other techniques to conceal their taxpayer-paid activities from public oversight. The evidence of officials’ efforts to evade transparency laws includes EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of the fake name “Richard Windsor”, and hidden e-mail accounts, according to a Nov. 16 letter sent by the committee to several White House officials, including Jackson.

The committee’s letters justified their startling statements with evidence published in The Daily Caller. The Caller’s report was based on an investigation by Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book “The Liberal War on on Transparency.” “The use of these [hidden] accounts could seriously impair records collection, preservation, and access, therefore compromising transparency and oversight,” said the letter, signed by committee chairman Rep. Ralph Hall.

The letter also asked Jackson’s office to provide all records related to “‘Richard Windsor’ or other aliases used by the EPA Administrator or senior management…. [plus] records relating to the establishment or use of dual, secondary, or non-public email accounts.” Similar letters were sent to the White House counsel’s office, the EPA’s inspector general, the inspector generals at the Departments of Commerce and Energy, and to John Holdren, the controversial director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The letter was not signed by the committee’s Democratic members.

Will wonders never cease.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with Another Sign The Apocalypse Is Upon Us, brought to you today by The Land of Fruits & Nuts:

San Francisco eyes public nudity ban 

We beg to differ; such perversion not only constitutes an accurate depiction of what San Francisco’s about, it pretty well sums up the entire Liberal agenda!

Magoo