Wait a goldanged minute! I forgot that I was a Born-Again Moderate there for a second. Maybe its time to put on my Moderate Cap and give Sonia Sockmonster a second look. As I travel around the Right Wing Blogger's trail and twist my dial around the AM band from extremist radio show to crackpot incendiary talk host all I hear is people moaning and yelling on behalf of those poor, mistreated firedudes in Connecticut. Unfortunate victims of racism by the Sockmonster, it turns out. Poor old dyslexic Ricci actually studied for this exam while his black colleagues were undoubtedly sitting at home watching the NBA playoffs and downing a few brews, waiting for the quotas to kick in. IS THIS AMERICA? GRRRRRR...

As a resident of the Great Bankrupt State Of Gollyvornia (renamed by The Jerkinator) I'm used to seeing firefighters as victims of injustice. Every time the Powers That Be in the Democrat dominated state legislature are too cowardly to enact some new outrage against the moronic, mouth-breathers who elected this egregious pack of wild-spending hippies and Mexican Marxists to that Love-In in Sacramento in the usual landslide,  these same 'legislators' put whatever bad idea they cant bring themselves to openly support on the ballot as a referendum. A bankrupt state 'investing' $3 billion bucks on embryonic stem-cell research? Won by a landslide! The Jerkinator wanted to sock a giant tax increase to us just this month so they put it up for a special election.

Because the usual gang of idiots were too lazy to vote in a special election the state was saved from this latest outrage by a bunch of Tea Baggers, now so angry at the disastrous onset of Obamunism and the stupidity of their fellow citizens that they flocked to the polls and voted the measures to extinction in a 10% turnout with the zombies at home watching Oprah and exercising their rights conferred by Bowers vs Hardwick. But the Dummycraps tried their best to inflict this new outrage on an overtaxed population. They spent a huge amount of money on ads calling on us to more fully fund the Megastate. Almost all of the hundreds of millions spent came from the coffers of the public employee unions.

And when Public Employee Unions want to put their hands more deeply into your pocket and give you the old Big Government testicular squeeze what do they do? They hire some Hollywood actor and stick him in a fireman's suit, hand him an ax and put him on TV. Please, this Hero Of Combustion implores, dont let them lay me and my heroic, civic-minded pals off. Taxes arent high enough for us to afford for Gollyvornia to ambulance every illegal alien with a sore throat to free medical care, pay worthless political cronies giant consulting fees to conduct useless studies to determine just why all the programs the government inspires are ineffective. We're not taxing enough to be paying billions for useless windmills and solar panels that break after two weeks. We dont shell out enough taxes for every state employee to have a brand new state-provided hybrid car or for those giant towers full of educational bureaucrats AND also to put out any fires that might break out. Taxes are just too darned low and obviously the low-priority firefighters are going to be the first to go in any budget cuts before any of the vital windmills and bureaucrats.

Now we know these arent real firemen we're seeing on TV ads. They're the kind of Firey Adonises who fight giant five thousand degree chemical blazes with their shirts off, the flickering glow playing across their freshly-waxed, magnificently toned pecs in movies like 'Backdraft'. Chick porn firefighters. They use their super-long hoses to quench the flames in your heart. The ones in the ads have eyes like sad basset hounds. PLEASE! DONT TAKE MY JOB, YOU MEANIES! Those poor, underpaid paragons have enough dough to saturate every media market in this hugely expensive state with ads on every channel from morning to night. No broadcast network station is too big or cable outlet too small for you to avoid the soulful big eyes of these firejerks as they plead for you to push the state and yourself a little closer to insolvency on their behalf.

Which brings us, inevitably to Ricci vs Destephano, the case that supposedly defines Sonia Sockmonster as unfit, because of her racist views, to be a member of the Supremes. It turns out that Ricci is a dyslexic who had to get a friend to read the test manuals into a tape recorder so he could study up for the exam. Some delightful Keystone Kop images of him pointing his high-pressure hose in the wrong direction occur to one but I'll resist the temptation to go whole hog, as a moderate must. The blogs and the airwaves are full of loud wails on behalf of Ricci and his white buddies, so severely treated by La Sockmonster in her clumsily-worded, semi-literate, one-paragraph 'decision'. It was a decision so short and lacking in substance that our Esteemed Master Of Hope And Change was able to take some time out from fixing the weather and the health care system in his busy four-hour workday to actually read the entire decision from beginning to end and be suitably impressed before his afternoon round on the golf course. It dripped with empathy and compassion and The Father Of The Nation decided to give the Gift Of Compassion to every American by placing this not-too-bright, angry, left-wing judicial anarchistic legislator on The Court.

Should we be upset on behalf of the dirty deal done to Ricci and the boys? Maybe. Maybe not. After all, even though Ricci doesnt have the sad eyes, waxed torso and elegantly-styled hair of one of our beloved TV firemen he is a member of a left-wing public employee union in a left wing state. The only Republiclowns who ever get elected in Connecticut are oleaginous worms like Lowell Weiker or Chris Shays (who was apparently too 'right wing' to hang on to his seat) who routinely cause nausea and seasickness amongst their Republiclown brethren when they turn up at conventions and are mobbed by the left-wing media hoping for, and usually receiving, embarrassing statements reviling the nominee. Not that a single one of those fire dorks ever voted for even a liberal Republiclown in their wildest dreams.

Thats right. When the Kelo vs. New London decision said it was alright for corrupt city officials to seize people's homes and sell them to crooked developers to raise additional tax and bribe money was the mass demonstration that didnt happen led by an angry contingent from the New Haven Firefighter's Union? When that sniveling, sanctimonious hypocrite liberal Marxist Lieberman ran for reelection or the cravenly corrupt Stalinist Dodd-erer, who played a key role in wrecking our banking system while he was very publicly pocketing huge bribes from sleazy criminals, announced his candidacy did he hear from the center of resistance that was developing in the heart of the staunchly pro-freedom, clean government gang down at the firehouse in New Haven? Not a dickey-bird from these Hope And Change Obama voters.

If the chickens vote for Colonel Sanders should we cry when we find them in the cardboard bucket deep fried and covered with batter? These guys are Democrats and have been all their lives. Affirmative Action has been around a long time and it always was nothing more than a racial quota system that ignored qualifications in favor of group rights. These DEMOCRATS voted for it again and again. So now you studied for the test, passed it and didnt get the job? Too darned bad Fire Dopes! This is the world you chose. You wanted to be in a cushy class of highly-paid employees with total job security and a pension plan that somebody would have to be a millionaire to afford in the private sector. That comes with the affirmative action baggage attached, in case you didnt notice.

So Sockmonster is a good fit for a system that could elect a loser like Obama and sixty senators all devoted to destroying everything that made this country a success. Ricci and the others got exactly what they deserved under a system where laws have been replaced by compassion and empathy. Lets hope they have their hoses ready when Global Warming sets the world on fire.

Every time there's a ballot measure here in Cali limiting the power of government or restricting state spending up for a vote there appear out of nowhere thousands of TV ads featuring actors claiming to be firemen, teachers and nurses expressing their OUTRAGE! that the SPECIAL INTERESTS want to hurt California's firevictims/patients/children by proposing this immoral attack on human decency! It turns out that these helpless victims of inhumanity have enough money to saturate the most expensive media markets in the country for months. A wall can't get painted on HGTV without a tearful nurse interrupting to plead, beg, beseech the voters to stop the ravening Special Interests from throwing terminal cancer patients out onto the streets untreated. An episode of 'Modern Marvels' can't play on the History Channel without a manly but oh-so-upset fireman imploring us to make sure that when the orphanage burns down someone will be there to save the helpless little tykes from being parboiled by the flaming insulation. Teachers invade the local news painting a picture of classrooms more densely packed than a Javanese opium den filled with mouth-breathing illiterates thirsting for knowledge.
Where are these guys getting the hundreds of millions that they use to saturate the airwaves with heart-rending sob-stories pushing every liberal cause imaginable? Huey Long had a tradition, when he was governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, called the 'deduct box'. If you were a state employee you had to pony up a part of your salary to a slush fund that Huey and the boys used for whatever nefarious purposes they decided were in the best interests of the people of Louisiana. The Public Employee Unions have their own version of the Deduct Box. You have to be in a union to work at most State jobs and that means you have to pay dues. Because most of the loyal union members just look on the impost as yet another of the endless bites from their checks and have never been to a union meeting or taken any part in any union activity this money is just a slush fund in the hands of the 'activists' who abandoned their hated careers in the stultifying bureaucracy and wormed their way into the arcane depths of the union's inner circles.
These people are without exception leftists of various degrees of fervor. It cant be said that they haven't looked out for their charges, either. They've made it almost impossible to fire any public employee who has not been convicted of a violent felony. They've gotten pay scales that have completely outstripped anything in the private sector for the same work; not to mention that you can be disciplined or even fired in the private sector for bad performance or malfeasance or your company can cut back or even go out of business. They've gone on the air or hired effective lobbyists to hector the members of the legislature to give ever larger budget increases to the metastasizing offices filled with state employees busily doing God Knows What. They fight every budget cut, or , since budgets never seem to actually get cut, they oppose the cuts in the rate of increase that are occasionally suggested by hopeless reactionaries. They push for higher and higher taxes on 'those who can most afford it'. They always support The Democratic Party. Public employee unions like SEIU and The National Education Assn. are mainstays of the Party, both in contributions and volunteers. They sit at the table and expect to be listened to.
Where they have done their best work is in the realm of pensions. Most state employees can retire in their fifties to a pension that would make anyone in the private sector green with envy. This pension is indexed for inflation and in ten years or so, even in a low inflation environment, will equal the take-home pay that the person earned while they were working. The pensions are paid by CALPERS (CALifornia Public Employee Retirement System) which is the largest single investment entity in the world, controlling hundreds of billions of dollars. So far, so good!
But what happens to CALPERS in a high inflation environment? Much of CALPERS' investments are in bonds, which don't adjust for inflation. Inflation makes investments in the stock market much less profitable. The high-tax anti-business environment coming soon at the hands of the Dems and their union allies will make keeping these pension promises impossible. All paper investments are only a reflection of the health of the general economy and that health is declining rapidly. States like California and New York can only staunch the flood of red ink with massive cuts in state spending. The example of Michigan has shown that further increases in tax rates will lead to lower revenues. The power of the unions prevents any real cuts. The system is headed for a crack-up and the special interests who run it are committed to things staying the same as they have always been. They are the ultimate reactionaries. The unions and the receivers of transfer payments, represented by socialist vulture groups like the AARP, have enough muscle to fight any reform or cut proposed by politicians looking a few years down the road or even staring into the maw of state bankruptcy this year. With a new government which appears to be certain to be completely dominated by Democrats on the federal, state and local levels the hope for any change or reform of anything is zero. It will be full speed ahead to an Argentinian meltdown of the economy and the currency. In a poverty-stricken, sterile society these people who 'had it made' will be broke and betrayed. They will deserve it.