The leaders of the collective always make sure they’re taken care of first and then give what’s left over to the members. Even more repugnant, the bosses who unethically carve out the best for themselves simultaneously stoke the fires of suspicion and fear about management to keep the rank and file blindly loyal to them. They beat the drum that the bosses are protecting them from the evil vampire-like corporations. It’s been a lie the unions have told for years. But now, it’s beginning to unravel.  From The Daily Caller:

Union officers’ pension plans are significantly better funded than the plans they negotiate for their rank-and-file counterparts, raising questions about whether union members have been manipulated by those they trust to bargain for them.

The average union staff plan is funded at over 95 percent, while the average funding percentage of a rank-and-file member’s pension plan is 79 percent, according to a September study by the Hudson Institute. None of the staff pensions are on the Department of Labor’s list of critically underfunded pension plans, while more than half of rank-and-file pension plans are endangered. (A pension is considered “endangered” by the government when it contains less than 80 percent of the assets needed to cover its liabilities.)

Some are questioning why pension plans negotiated by union leaders on behalf of union members are performing so poorly while the leaders’ pension funds remain healthy.

“Unions are pay and benefits experts — they know this stuff six ways to Sunday, it’s their raison d’etre,” said Brett McMahon, the Vice President of Miller and Long Construction and a member of the national trade association Associated Builders and Contractors.” It’s not as if they can claim some kind of ignorance about this, that by chance or happenstance these are funded better than those. They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“You’re not supposed to pay yourself first, but they do, and they pay themselves quite well, and then they appear to bargain for their membership,” said McMahon.  “If they were really dedicated to what they were doing, which I think at [one] point they were, decades ago, it wouldn’t look like this.”

Of course they know what they’re doing. They’ve cowed their members into feeling indebted to the union for their salaries and benefits by convincing them that if it weren’t for the bosses, corporate management would have treated them like slave labor all these years.  The bosses are happily sitting in the catbird seat and will sail into the sunset with generously funded pensions while the US taxpayers are stuck paying the union members’ under-funded pensions to the tune of $8 – $10 billion, as the unions continue to recruit members using pensions as a selling point. I suspect we’ll see the bosses somehow convince their members that the *evil* corporations are to blame for the funding discrepancy. Maybe they’ll blame Republicans. Better yet, Bush.

Will the union bosses be criminally prosecuted for, at the very least, negligence, as they should be? Of course not. They’ll be protected by the Democrats who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions – all union dues from the same pension abused rank and file – from these same bosses.

Ah, I love the smell of Democrat Party/union corruption in the morning. It smells like quid pro quo.

Now, let my reiterate just as John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and countless others have already have: it is unacceptable to cause or even threaten physical harm to members of Congress or their families.

With that said, I am compelled to ask: what in the world did the Democrats expect when they thumbed their noses at the American people?  A candy-gram?

The American people time and time again made it crystal clear that they absolutely, positively did not want ObamaCare.  Americans from all over the country crowded into town hall meetings with their elected officials for the express purpose of letting them know what they thought.  They pleaded, yelled, chanted, sent emails, called their offices, and everything else they could think of outside of sending up a skywriter over the Capitol building.  There is no way the Democrats can say with any shred of honesty whatsoever that the American people wanted the Democrats to vote for ObamaCare, something Nancy Pelosi said was actually the case.

Yes, virtually all Americans want health care reform, but they want reforms that are targeted and will fill gaps in coverage so people who want health insurance can get it even if they have pre-existing conditions. They also want reforms that will increase competition between insurance companies and lower premium costs. The last thing they wanted was to have the entire system turned upside down.

Not only did Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama ignore what the American people wanted, but after a long, drawn out series of outright bribing, arm-twisting, and infamously threatening to file ethics complaints against one Michigan congressman, the bill finally passed, which was when Obama, Pelosi, Hoyer, and all the others rubbed it in the American people’s faces by cheering wildly.

So, what kind of threats have the Democrats been receiving that has them so scared? I’m sure there have been a couple of nutcases who have issued threats of physical violence or said they hoped someone else would, and those are, of course, unacceptable as I said above. Democrat Bart Stupak received a very rude phone message by a woman who called him a piece of sh*t and another by a man who called cursed at him. After the media originally reported that Tea Partiers placed a coffin on Missouri Congressman Russ Carnahan’s lawn, we learned that it was nothing but a prop that Tea Partiers used during a prayer vigil for the congressman. Nonetheless, Democrats trumped up the stories for political purposes, which were immediately reported by a sycophantic media.

Take for example, this video of Congressman James Clyburn who was on MSNBC:

Clyburn and MSNBC  thought those signs of Obama were terrorism?  Those images were nothing but signs that call Obama a socialist and images of his face with a Hitler mustache. I’m not sure why he thought the Republicans should have been outraged. Signs like those were common fixtures at left wing protests when President Bush was in the White House, but we didn’t hear any complaints from Clyburn  or any of the other Democrats. Nor did any of them have much to say when when Bush was portrayed not just as Hitler but also as the devil and as a vampire complete with fangs and dripping blood.

As offensive as the Bushitler and vampire signs were, they were child’s play compared to the ones that called for Bush’s assassination. The blogger Zombie documented these threats in a lengthy post last year.  If Russ Carnahan was spooked by a prop coffin, how would he have reacted if he were were the subject of this display created and exhibited by leftists - at an Obama rally no less – that showed President Bush’s likeness being beheaded in a guillotine:

Let’s not forget the movie The Death of a President, produced by a leftist filmmaker about the assassination of President Bush. The movie was a veritable instructional film about how to plan and execute his assassination. And Steny Hoyer got his nose out of joint and accused Sarah Palin of inciting violence for writing on her Facebook page, “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’”

So, here’s my question to Congressmen Clyburn, Hoyer, Stupak, Van Hollen, Governor Tim Kaine and others: Why weren’t you wringing your hands and calling for a more civil debate when the members of your political base were holding signs calling for the assassination of President Bush?

Let’s be completely honest here.  If conservatives constructed a display like the one above or made a film like The Death of a President but used Obama as the subject, the Democrats and the media would overflow with so much shock and outrage they would all spontaneously combust.

After seeing how you were silent for years about the blind hatred and publicly pronounced death threats that leftists – your voters – routinely hurled at President Bush, I am having just a little bit of difficulty mustering up a lot of sympathy for the nasty phone messages the Democrats have received as a result of their disgraceful treatment of the American people.

Does that mean I condone the threats the Democrats have received? Of course not. But don’t expect me to get all exercised about it.

Update: Patterico informs us that a liberal has sent Sarah Palin multiple death threats on Twitter:

In recent days, Brown has been saying that he is concerned about the violence that he believes Sarah Palin is fostering.

So, he is threatening to kill Sarah Palin and her family.

I had hoped to post about 20 screenshots from this guy’s Twitter account, but with the technical work being done on the site I find myself suddenly unable to upload images. So I will just quote you the messages. He posted most of them tonight, and they include messages like this:

@sEaTtLe_MeTrO Death 2 Palin family them retarded hillbillies take teabaggers w/ you hateful bitch

and this:

We cant expect gov to intervene we must shoot Gen. Palin on site be 4 her troops strike again!

and this:

@interactionswst one word racism choose sides plain and simply that bitch Palin launch an attack, she need 2 b shot on site!

and this:

@Palin360 you need 2 b assassinated soon we ll settle 4 one of the family if not u!

Twitter’s rules specifically state that no violence or threats will be tolerated and anyone violating the rules can have their accounts terminated:

*Violence and Threats: You may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.

Hat tip: Power Line

Update II: Lorie Byrd, one of my colleagues at Wizbang, has a great post that offers a lot of insight, many updates and links.

The U.S. Senate proposal to impose taxes for the first time on “gold-plated” health plans may bypass generous employee benefits negotiated by unions.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, the chief congressional advocate of taxing some employer-provided benefits to help pay for an overhaul of the U.S. health system, says any change should exempt perks secured in existing collective- bargaining agreements, which can be in place for as long as five years.

The exception, which could make the proposal more politically palatable to Democrats from heavily unionized states such as Michigan, is adding controversy to an already contentious debate. It would shield the 12.4 percent of American workers who belong to unions from being taxed while exposing some other middle-income workers to the levy.

I’m no constitutional lawyer like our dear President Obama, but I see “violation of the equal protection clause” written all over this. However, considering how this administration has trampled over other constitutional laws such as those that regulate contracts and bankruptcy, I’m sure Obama will not have any problem violating this clause as well.