Karen Mayhew, guest blogger—a good read

She writes on Facebook:  “I am so excited to see so many stories of walking away that I feel compelled to share my own. Caution long:

Born to into a very split household, Dad was a devout Catholic Republican and Mom a bed wetting liberal Jew. I know you're all thinking, "say what?" Anyway, while politics were rarely discussed as a family, politics were an event. Election night the phone got unplugged and pizza got ordered in. I grew up on ABC News Election Nights with Brinkley and Hugh Downs. I remember my Dad taking me to a Reagan rally at the Portland Airport Holiday Inn. It was a good growing up.

As I got older (high school) some of my Mom's liberal politics crept into my arguments. Hey, I was a teenager. I remember actually defending abortion at one point in of all places in Sunday School. This was the early 90's Portland, Oregon before Portland went full on insane.

1996 was my first election and I voted for Dole. Where did I switch from defending abortion in 1992 to voting for Dole 4 years later? I didn't go to college, I went to work out of high school and nothing moves teenage idealism to conservatism than seeing taxes taken from your paycheck.

But that was only the very beginning.

In 1998 I moved to San Francisco because I could and because I hated boring Portland. San Francisco's liberalism was so repulsive in every sense. Bums, drugs, corruption, anti-Israel, racism cloaked as diversity, if you name it and hated it, SF had it in spades. I lasted 4 years in SF before squirreling back to Portland. SF was terrible in 2002 and I saw the writing on the wall. That writing is what we read about everyday now. Poop maps anyone?

Back in Portland, married, a new homeowner and decidedly conservative, I found myself a plaintiff against my employer and the SEIU when my job was hijacked and this my career threatened. I successfully sued the union OUT of my job and an activist was born.

I became a national face for the Right to Work when Bush was President, testifying to Congress in 2007 against card check, something the democrats sarcastically and deceptively called the employee free choice act (ECFA). My story and many others like mine made certain EFCA never made it to Bush's desk. To this day I will never be able to repay those Constitutional, Federalist Society, attorneys whose brilliant legal minds came to my rescue pro-bono. A legal activist was born.

Then came the nightmare. His name was Obama. Obama kissed the asses of the union I had just defeated. He promised if elected EFCA would be the law of the land. And he won. I was more determined and more conservative every day that he promised he had a pen and a phone. He rammed through Obamacare, lost Congress, won re-election in 2012, and then lost the Senate in 2014. And yet he still terrorized freedom through executive fiat while he stacked the courts. He was wildly unpopular if the losses his party suffered yet he laid the groundwork that his stains would linger a long time. Maybe forever.

In 2013 I escaped for good insane Portland to North Carolina. For the first time in my life I lived where I could be an out, loud and proud conservative. And I was one in real life and on social media. And boy did those Portland, Oregon Facebook friends unfriend me at an impressive clip. A conservative??? Oh noes! Well ... Bye! I attended my first CPAC in 2014, I met fellow activists from all over the nation, I honed my skills in activist boot camps, landed at Heritage Action and in 2015 went to work for Ted Cruz's Presidential campaign. Ahhhh, life was good until it was Trump v Clinton.

I hated both of them and voted for neither. While I celebrated Inauguration Day, it was a celebration for me of Obama being gone. I had massive reservations about Trump until January 31st 2017, the night Trump nominated Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. One of the last events I participated in (before moving to my current location, Wisconsin) was the effort to lobby for Gorsuch. He was such a longshot but judicial activists like myself knew he was the next Scalia. And Trump delivered him.

Last June the SCOTUS (with Gorsuch) delivered the Janus decision that gives public sector union members the right to work. The decision was a Hosanna for a right to work advocate like me. The next day, Kennedy announced his retirement from the court.

On July 9th, Trump nominated a milquetoast Court of Appeals judge named Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was nothing to be excited about. But the increasingly unhinged left had other plans. Especially a crazy lady from Palo Alto and a Senator named Feinstein.

At the time of Kavanaugh's hearings, the left for over a year and a half had thrown everything they had at Trump to no avail. He was winning, America was winning, McConnell was winning. And the left was incredulous. And since they couldn't get Trump they were going to get somebody. Anybody. Judge Brett Kavanaugh was the unlucky victim.

What happened to Kavanaugh turned me into the biggest activist yet. The Democrats went so vile that a once a milquetoast judge was now someone I was willing to put my life on hold for to fly to DC, twice, to lobby Senators to confirm. Again, a judicial activist. A lover of the Constitution and the rule of law could not be stopped.

What happened to Kavanaugh was the Democrats doing in full view what created this walk away campaign, though I know its birth goes back to 2016. The assaults by the media, the invective by candidates (a basket of deplorables) and the like. From Wisconsin, I welcome all of you to the side of righteousness and fairness. To the Constitution, to the right to life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness; I walk with you to #MAGA.”

Karen gave me permission to repost this from the Walkaway Facebook page.  Wow.  She’s on fire.

Unions and right to work

Public-sector workers had a union membership rate (34.4 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.4 percent). So our taxes pay the salaries of govenment workers and then they lobby against us. Never waste a crisis, so government union membership grew during the recession. Among occupational groups, the highest unionization rates in 2016 were in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent). I think this suggests that women, who dominate those fields, seem to want protection despite all the bravado and complaints about a patriarchy, and see the government as a father/spousal figure. (Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016.)

https://www.law360.com/articles/899211/challenges-continue-for-organized-labor-in-2017

"The union agenda has also shifted since the 1940s. What was once a collective bargaining focus has morphed into a political operation using those millions in member dues to support other liberal organizations and campaigns. From 2012 to 2015, union bosses have given away over a half-billion dollars to groups many of their members would never support."
 
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/6/union-support-for-donald-trump-gives-big-labor-cha/

A comment from a FB friend:  "And, in Ohio, they have what they call a "fair share fee" for those who don't wish to join the union, but pay their share of the union representing them. The difference is supposed to be what goes to political activity. What is a fair share? 100%, of course. Nothing fair or accurate about that at all. Having served as union rep and on state executive board, I can tell you much of what is done is clearly partisan political activity, including much of what goes on in their conventions."

Some issues just go together

Some values and political ideas just seem to go together like mac and cheese or ham and eggs. For instance, those who believe in ending the life of babies in the womb for any reason and the lives of elderly in end stage disease or the disabled who can't protest also believe in things that don't seem related at all, but they are so predictable, there must be a connection.

1) protesting the death penalty for vicious criminals,
2) open borders and sanctuary cities,
3) increasing regulatory burdens on small businesses,
4) increasing taxes on the successful to spread the wealth to the less successful,
5) creating education systems that cater to the lowest common denominator and give more power to the federal government,
6) taking private property for either government use or promised good for society to be given to crony capitalists,
7) violating religious rights guaranteed in the first amendment,
8) recreating the military through social engineering,
9) letting gender confused boys share bathrooms and showers with girls while screaming "rape culture",
10) destroying centuries-old historical standards for marriage
11) legalizing marijuana
12) putting people in boxes and calling it diversity and multiculturalism with severe punishment for violation
13) destroying a private health insurance system and making it illegal and punishable by jail and fine to not have government insurance
14) requiring an ID for just about everything except voting
15) creating huge "non-profit" foundations by politicians and former government career officers which rake in millions while decrying wealth that is profit from an actual business which creates jobs
16) choosing winners and losers in business by government, especially new technology to support climate myths
17) requiring workers to belong to unions in order to work
18) pushing progressive income tax rather than a fair or flat tax
19) advocating free college for all, even though the education bubble has been created by the government, a bigger bubble than the 2007-08 housing bubble
20) Downsizing to a smaller, weaker military.

Conservative vs. liberal ideas

Pro-choice vs. pro-life

Abortion and climate change

Unions lie about right to work states

Private sector wages are not reduced in right-to-work states as union advocates have argued, according to a new report released Tuesday by The Heritage Foundation.

Every state with compelled union membership and Virginia, a right-to-work state, has living costs above the national average, which is how EPI arrived to its finding that right-to-work states have lower wages.

Though more than three-quarters of Americans believe union membership should be voluntary, 25 states still have compulsory unionization.

Are you allowed to work, or do you have to join a union?

Non-union teacher must pay union dues anyway

Darren over at Right on the Left Coast (that's California in case you didn't know) is not a member of a teacher's union, but to keep his teaching job he has to pay $1,000 as his "fair share" for the representation he doesn't want. Then he has to apply for a rebate to get back that portion of his non-dues that they spend on non-collective bargaining--i.e., political lobbying. 55% of his rebate comes from NEA--it spends over half of its dues influencing/supporting left wing politicians and 28.6% comes from CTA, and the rest from his local. What a screwed up system. Link. Many states have this "fair share" provision. I think Ohio is one of them, but don't know for sure.

Churches provide many benefits to the community; maybe non-members should be assessed for their non-participation and non-worship.

At the Freedom @ Work blog they suggest that Obama's job summit should have included more Right to Work laws:

"For many years, U.S. Labor Department data have shown that states with Right to Work laws on the books have far faster private-sector job growth than states that do not protect employees from federal policies authorizing the termination of workers for refusal to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union.

Between 1995 and 2005, private-sector jobs in Right to Work states increased by a net 20.2%. That’s a 79% greater increase than the relatively small increase in private-sector jobs experienced by non-Right to Work states over this period. Link.

But that would make too much sense. If he were interested in creating jobs instead of killing them, why did he invite the unions?