Collective Bargaining, Keystone, and Global Warming

LABOR UNION POLITICS – IVAN OSORIO

Openmarket.org:Is the Obama Administration Trying to Expand Federal Collective Bargaining?

An Obama-created board within the federal Office of Personnel Management’s recently approved “an outline of a report due to President Obama in May on personnel issues for which collective bargaining is currently optional,” reports Government Executive. The board in question is the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations, which was created under a December 2009 Obama Executive Order that stipulates: Management should discuss workplace challenges and problems with labor and endeavor to develop solutions jointly, rather than advise union representatives of predetermined solutions to problems and then engage in bargaining over the impact and implementation of the predetermined solutions. In other words, managers shouldn’t tell unionized employees what they need to do to fulfill their duties if the unionized employees don’t feel like doing it.

ENERGY & OIL – MYRON EBELL

Globalwarming.org: House Passes Energy Bill That Includes ANWR and Keystone Pipeline

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday evening, 16th February, for a package of four energy bills that if enacted will greatly expand U. S. oil and natural gas production on federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf plus permit the Keystone XL pipeline. The omnibus energy bill, H. R. 3408, passed by a vote of 237 to 187. Twenty-one Democrats voted yes, and twenty-one Republicans voted no. The most significant provision would require the Department of the Interior to open a small portion of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska’s North Slope to oil and gas exploration.

GLOBAL WARMING – MATT PATTERSON

Forbes.com: Global warming — the great delusion

[G]lobal warming is the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history. The fever that these legions of warmists warn of does not grip the globe, but rather their own brains and blinkered imaginations. And like every mass delusion, there is danger – danger that Man will be convinced by these climate cultists to turn his back on the very political, economic, and scientific institutions that made him so powerful, so wealthy, so healthy. Will the fever break before this happens? > Read the full commentary on Forbes.com > Interview Matt Patterson > Read more by Matt Patterson, CEI’s Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow > Find out about the Warren Brookes journalism fellowship