Yesterday, I wrote about how President Obama’s Department of Labor issued guidelines for dealing with the job losses from sequestration. The guidelines told employers not to provide workers with 60 days minimum notice of pending layoffs, as required by federal law. We don’t know what prompted the DOL’s unusual directive, but Obama most likely wants to avoid a scenario in which mass layoff notices are sent out just days before the presidential election.
It’s interesting that the Obama administration is suddenly so blase when it comes to enforcing employee protection laws, particularly because he was a champion of the 60-day minimum notice law — also known as the WARN Act — back in 2007.
“For too long, employers have failed to notify workers that they’re about to lose their jobs due to mass layoffs or plant closings even though notice is required by the WARN Act,” then-Sen. Obama said in a July 17, 2007 press release. “The least employers can do when they’re anticipating layoffs is to let workers know they’re going to be out of a job and a paycheck with enough time to plan for their future.”
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama also railed against loopholes that allowed employers to avoid complying with the law — which is basically what his DOL seems to be advising now.
“Now, I believe we must act at the federal level to close the loophole that allows employers to disregard the WARN Act without penalty,” he said in statement to the Toledo Blade.
As senator, Obama even cosponsored the 2007 FOREWARN Act, which would have extended the minimum notice to 90 days and increased both the penalties for violating the law and the government’s ability to enforce it.
Oddly enough, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown reintroduced the FOREWARN Act less than two months ago. Will Obama — who advocated for it during his last presidential campaign — express his support for it again? And will he tell his DOL to stop encouraging employers to dodge the WARN Act, which he insisted was so important when he was serving in the Senate?
Nobody wants employers and workers to worry about layoffs that may never happen. But the way to ensure that warning notices don’t go out unnecessarily is by dealing with sequestration before November and before the 60-day minimum window — not by telling employers to ignore the WARN Act and assume sequestration will be taken care of after the election.
Alana, Alana, Alana, you silly person, you. Surely you haven't forgotten that such rules apply only to other people, especially if they're eeeeevil Republican capitalists, and not to the ObaMessiah and his acolytes? And most especially, when complying with said rules would interfere with the Great One's electoral chances?
Actually, I think that little Alana is giving B. Hussain and Co a great deal of heartburn. n nShe is right, absolutely right, and now has managed to find that Obama actually supported the law when it passed – and who knows what she will find tomorrow…. I think we all need to give her credit for this — and for having the guts to take on the POTUS, which is exactly what she is doing here — something few people twice her age would have the courage to even consider doing. n nAnd we need to support her on this — while I have no doubt she would take on the POTUS all by herself — and at the very least hold her own — we need to support her on this because if Obama gets away with something this brazen, then what is to prevent him from just throwing out the election returns outright and declaring himself the victor? n nI dread to think of either that or the consequences — but if he gets away with this (not sending WARN notices) then where will the line in the sand be??? Alana Goodman needs to be not the only person inquiring as to why Obama considers himself exempt from the WARN law he himself helped pass….. n nGo, Alana, Go! n n
Obama's speech on WARN would make a great ad as it gets out the message that the Dems want to kick past elaction day.
I'd like to know what "rule" allows BHO to issue "guidelines" that are obviously against the Warn Act?! Where is the Republican outrage? Where are the lawsuits? It seems to me the more BHO gets away with changing the rules,laws, etc, the bolder he gets. We no longer have a republic; we have a banana kingdom.
This was Michelle Bachmann's point on the security breaches and things like giving NSA briefings to members of the Muslim Brotherhood and such. Things truly are out of control and we do need to call him on them.
I sometimes think that the President wants to outrage Republicans to the point of nervous exhaustion, at which point he imagines they will, I don't know, hibernate or something. I no longer have the capacity to feel outrage, I mean real, honest-to-goodness anger. Every week, no, every day, it seems, there is something else to marvel at, something more brazen, more dishonest, more cynically calculated to appeal to NO OTHER END than to his re-election. The insults to law and common sense come monotonously like tracer bullets, one after the other after the other, going all the way back, I believe, to the Spring of 2008 when he discarded what had theretofore, on his own testimony, been a point of deep and profound principle: public financing of elections. He dumped that sacred talking point (which is all it was) like a blown-out Kleenex. Since then he has ransacked his conscience and discarded everything — and I do mean EVERY LAST SOLITARY THING — he ever avowed, leaving only the spectacle of raw and naked ambition for the rest of us to contemplate in horror and disbelief. n nI am not speaking here of humdrum examples of routine political opportunism that should surprise no one. I don't mean the petty prevarications and half-truths that one might find in any political campaign. I mean statements along the lines of "My administration has grown the Federal government the least since Eisenhower." I mean flat-out falsehood, lies on such an industrial-strength scale that it is impossible that Obama and the chatterati who repeat them (on cue) CANNOT NOT KNOW that they're lying. No one could be that stupid. Or how about "Exempting 1.6 million distinct illegal aliens from deportation proceedings, tout ensemble, is a matter of prosecutorial DISCRETION"??? As if "discretion" meant "without regard to differences," its exact opposite. Or what about, with respect to bribing seniors concerned about the coming Affordable Care Act demolition of Medicare Advantage, what, I say, about asserting with a straight face that "$8.2-billion may be spent on A DEMONSTRATION PROJECT"? Eight-point-two billion dollars??? For such a sum, gentlemen, you'd better be able to demonstrate that there is life after death. n nI am running out of energy and time, so I invite others to supply their own "favorite" Obama fib. Remember, it can't be something as ho-hum as, for example, claiming that Mitt Romney cares only for rich people. That sort of casual smear is hardly worth mentioning. No, it has to be a real whopper. It must be so egregiously misaligned with reality that whoever says it CANNOT NOT KNOW it is moonbat-crazy false. Help me out here. n nLying so blatantly and on so colossal a scale, with such utter lack of shame, has convinced me that the Obama Administration in general and the Obama campaign in particular have adopted LYING AS A DELIBERATE TACTIC. Perhaps even as a comprehensive strategy for 2012, along the lines of a well-known ad campaign: "Just Say It!" Whatever it is, no matter how false it is or how obviously, plainly, and enormously it diverges from the facts of life on planet earth, "Say It!" Then say it again. If it confuses some people some of the time, then it has served its purpose. Also "Don't stop saying it until a whole lot of people object." In that case "Don't retract it unless a whole lot more people object to not retracting it." Thereafter "Pretend you never said it. Pretend that no one ever said it." Act "as if it never happened and it will never have happened." Repeat with new and, where possible, more blatant lie until November 6th. n nThat is the way things work in a largely illiterate culture like America c. 2012, a celebrity-obsessed culture having the concentrative powers and interests of a nation of coke whores, where it is fully expected and even, dare we admit it, desired that one meretricious gew-gaw can reliably be expected to supplant another the way, say, that Miley replaced Britney who shoved aside Mariah, and so on, going all the way back to the legendary Madonna disembarking from the Ark. And who cares a fig for any of them anymore? The Obama approach to truth — "Oh! Oh! Look over here, girls and boys!" — was made for such an electorate. n nNo political campaign in history has lurched from falsehood to falsehood, lie to lie, calumny to calumny, as has the Obama campaign. None is even close. John Kerry's so-called "swift-boating" was honesty incarnate by comparison, because those 100 or so sailors who served with him actually felt this way about Kerry: they didn't like him when they served with him, liked him even less for what he did afterwards, and were eager to share their opinions. They were not lying as per plan. The Obama campaign is another, sort of slouching beast altogether. What Saul Alinsky could only dream of is in our midst.
You are right. Part of the strategy is to exhaust the opposition. That is why defense is not enough. Every American who loves his country has to fight back and attack Obama over and over and over. The attacks must be much much tougher than in the past. They need to question his credibility, his intentions and his monstrous, unamerican policies. But it may be too late.
The tragedy is that the Democrats feel immune to the force of law because they can absolutely rely on the media to conceal their usurpations of authority while at the same time depend on the demonizing of any Republican who utters even one misspoken word. r nr nThe 4th estate has become the lap dog of the political and pseudo-intellectual elites who are determined to radically restructure America into a bastard clone of Banana Republic and Marxist utopia. These are harsh words, I admit, but viewing all of the data as a whole unargueably true. The solution is to be found at the ballot box in November but I wonder how many Americans are taking the time to look at the issues or to understand the unprecedented violations of law that this administration has pursued. If we lose or Republic it will be because we gave it away from slothfullness.