Scott Robbins's blog

The AFL-CIO has not been bashful about its support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. And the union giant recently posted an article by Tula Connell hyping a booklet entitled “Economics 101 for the 99%.” The booklet was produced for the Occupiers by a socialist group called the Center for Popular Economics.

Connell wrote that the booklet will clarify “such concepts as the role of the Federal Reserve and the so-called austerity war.” The booklet is intended to “to help the ‘99%’ make a coherent argument for why we need to change our economic course.”

Elephants are one of nature’s most popular creatures. And one of its most protected. The ivory trade has been outlawed for many decades. Yet, a recent CNN guest column claimed that renewed poaching to feed an illegal Asian ivory market (along with more run-of-the-mill lefty environmental threats) is “a tragedy beyond reckoning.”

The hyperbolic June 15 article that said saving the elephant is “an urgent moral imperative” (those, to the author, are the words of Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel).  The piece, by photographer and filmmaker Cyril Christo, explained the killing of the elephant is one of the pressing world issues.

In a rural area where “The economy sucks when it’s good,” natural gas drilling could have gone a long way. Could have, until environmental extremists and regulators got in the way.

That’s what happened in Wayne County, Pa., just a few years ago when “corporations offered struggling farmers lucrative leases for mineral rights” but a documentary filmmaker and government prevented the drilling, according to a June 7, 2012 story from Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.

American liberals continue to be clueless (willfully or otherwise) as to the nature and purpose of the Catholic Church and its relationship to its members. The latest proof comes in the case of theVatican’s condemnation of left-wing nun Margaret Farley’s book, “Just Love, A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” which advocates gay sex and marriage, divorce, and female masturbation. These practices are contrary to Catholic theology as practiced since the beginning of Catholicism. 

But the Church’s reaction to the book is, to liberals, another example of the Vatican stifling women. Here’s how one Sarah O’Leary described it in the Huffington Post: “Sister Margaret A. Farley, a scholarly woman of faith who taught Christian Ethics at Yale University and served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, is being brought to the woodshed by Rome for penning "Just Love.” How dare she use her God given gifts of cognition to share her educated point of view with the world!” 

As an ever-shrinking number of newspaper readers can attest, most major U.S. papers skew liberal. But its not every day the head of a union representing journalists lays out a list of goals that might have been written by MoveOn.org, and displays a contempt for democracy more at home on the editorial pages of state-run organs in third-world dictatorships.

But there was Larry Cohen, AFL-CIO Organizing Committee chair and President of Communication Workers of America (CWA), of which the Newspaper Guild is part, calling on progressives to “unite in a years-long campaign to restore and reclaim both workers rights and U.S. democracy.” According to report on the Guild’s website, Cohen was addressing the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., when he declared that reclaiming democracy would mean overcoming, well, democracy. “The limits of democracy alone have blocked us,” Cohen said.

If you doubted where many journalists stand on gay marriage, don’t. The Newspaper Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), joined with other unions, such as the AFL-CIO, in expressing its support for Obama on homosexual marriage. President Larry Cohen of the CWA stated: 

 "The Communications Workers of America stands with the President and those who support equality and human rights.”