Critics blast loophole that forces taxpayers to fund public sector union work

Bob Nicks has firefighting in his blood, but for the last four years, the Texas battalion chief has earned his six-figure salary sitting at a desk doing union work instead of running into burning buildings and saving lives.
As president of Austin Firefighters Association/IAFF Local 975, Nicks is office-bound by order of the chief, even though he believes he could handle union business with one weekly shift and spend the rest of his time on the job doing what he loves. He is paid for what is known as "release time," hours public sector union officials spend doing union business that are paid by their employers - taxpayers.
“Union release time is a plague on local, state and the federal governments’ finances," said Trey Kovacs, who authored a recent study of the issue for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "The practice of allowing public employees to perform union business only benefits the labor union and serves no public purpose.”

"They could save $70,000 a year. It should be about the citizens.”
- Bob Nicks, President, Austin Firefighters Association

Nicks, who calls himself a "different kind of union president," hates getting paid to ride a desk. His rank earns him more than $100,000, he acknowledged, but he spends none of his 40-hour work week in a firehouse.
“I’ve been fighting to be put back to work at our fire department,” he told FoxNews.com. “The chief wouldn’t allow it. How much they have fought against me was crazy.”
Austin Fire Department Assistant Chief Doug Fowler said the system Nicks objects to has been in place for years.
"It was designed that way so that the union president wouldn’t have a chain of command, per se, and could focus and function unbiased in dealing with members’ issues with the department," Fowler said. "Additionally, Chief Nicks is eligible to work overtime on the weekends but has not done so according to our timekeeping system."
Release time costs local, state and federal governments hundreds of millions of dollars. Figures for states, counties and municipalities are not known, but at the federal level, release time costs taxpayers an estimated $122 million annually, according to the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. While no one disputes there is union business to be conducted, and release time is part of collective bargaining agreements, critics say the practice allows for waste and should be funded by union dues, not taxpayers.

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A recent study found that thousands of hours in release time has been doled out at public agencies in Texas, in possible violation of the state constitution's “gift clause,” which bans the grant of public funds to a private entity. (Austin Fire Department)

“It’s an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Greg Mourad, vice president of the National Right to Work Committee. “There’s no reason for it and that is the problem with unionizing the public sector. They [unions] have become the most powerful lobby group in politics."
The CEI study found that Texas cities pay thousands of hours in release time to teachers, cops and firefighters, and raised the possibility that such payments violate the Lone Star State’s constitution, which "prohibits the transfer of public funds to private entities that do not serve a public purpose,” Kovacs said.
After complaints that Phoenix, Ariz., spent nearly $4 million annually on release time, state lawmakers in 2013 introduced a bill that would make ban the practice of allowing taxpayers to pay union officials for work associated with their labor organizations. The bill never made it out of the state Legislature, but a legal battle over the same issue is working its way through state courts, after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled last year that release time was a violation of the state’s gift laws. Unions are appealing.
Pending legislation in Michigan would curb release time and also end a practice known as “pension spiking.” A pair of Michigan Senate bills was proposed in April after Michigan Education Association bargained for the Lansing school district to contribute $50,000 annually to the state pension system on behalf of state union President Steve Cook. The deal allowed him to collect a much larger pension despite not working for the school system.
Mourad, as well as F. Vincent Vernuccio, director of labor policy for Mackinac, said cash-strapped states are starting to look closely at deals that critics say allow public sector unions and their officials to collect taxpayer funds despite not always serving the public.
“It’s extremely troubling to see, when you have examples like union officials say there is not enough money going to public works yet they have teachers collect salaries from districts they don't even work for," Vernuccio said. "This does not help the taxpayer at all.”
Mourad said many of the practices, including release time, are hard to defend once taxpayers understand them.
“I think that is why we are starting to see a push back in general,” he said. “The free hand of the unions being held out has been a recipe for budgetary disaster and state lawmakers are starting to see that and looking for ways to reverse it.”

Baltimore killings soar to a level unseen in 43 years

Well! What did they expect when they undermined  their police??

BALTIMORE –  Baltimore reached a grim milestone on Friday, three months after riots erupted in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody: With 45 homicides in July, the city has seen more bloodshed in a single month than it has in 43 years.
Police reported three deaths — two men shot Thursday and one on Friday. The men died at local hospitals.
With their deaths, this year's homicides reached 189, far outpacing the 119 killings by July's end in 2014. Nonfatal shootings have soared to 366, compared to 200 by the same date last year. July's total was the worst since the city recorded 45 killings in August 1972, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The seemingly Sisyphean task of containing the city's violence prompted Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to fire her police commissioner, Anthony Batts, on July 8.
"Too many continue to die on our streets," Rawlings-Blake said then. "Families are tired of dealing with this pain, and so am I. Recent events have placed an intense focus on our police leadership, distracting many from what needs to be our main focus: the fight against crime."
But the killings have not abated under Interim Commissioner Kevin Davis since then.
Baltimore is not unique in its suffering; crimes are spiking in big cities around the country.
But while the city's police are closing cases— Davis announced arrests in three recent murders several days ago — the violence is outpacing their efforts. Davis said Tuesday the "clearance rate" is at 36.6 percent, far lower than the department's mid-40s average.
Crime experts and residents of Baltimore's most dangerous neighborhoods cite a confluence of factors: mistrust of the police; generalized anger and hopelessness over a lack of opportunities for young black men; and competition among dealers of illegal drugs, bolstered by the looting of prescription pills from pharmacies during the riot.
Federal drug enforcement agents said gangs targeted 32 pharmacies in the city, taking roughly 300,000 doses of opiates, as the riots caused $9 million in property damage in the city.
Perched on a friend's stoop, Sherry Moore, 55, said she knew "mostly all" of the young men killed recently in West Baltimore, including an 18-year-old fatally shot a half-block away. Moore said many more pills are on the street since the riot, making people wilder than usual.
"The ones doing the violence, the shootings, they're eating Percocet like candy and they're not thinking about consequences. They have no discipline, they have no respect — they think this is a game. How many can I put down on the East side? How many can I put down on the West side?"
The tally of 42 homicides in May included Gray, who died in April after his neck was broken in police custody. The July tally likewise includes a previous death — a baby whose death in June was ruled a homicide in July.
Shawn Ellerman, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Baltimore division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said May's homicide spike was probably related to the stolen prescription drugs, a supply that is likely exhausted by now. But the drug trade is inherently violent, and turf wars tend to prompt retaliatory killings.
"You can't attribute every murder to narcotics, but I would think a good number" of them are, he said. "You could say it's retaliation from drug trafficking, it's retaliation from gangs moving in from other territories. But there have been drug markets in Baltimore for years."
Across West Baltimore, residents complain that drug addiction and crime are part of a cycle that begins with despair among children who lack educational and recreational opportunities, and extends when people can't find work.
"We need jobs! We need jobs!" a man riding around on a bicycle shouted to anyone who'd listen after four people were shot, three of them fatally, on a street corner in July.
More community engagement, progressive policing policies and opportunities for young people in poverty could help, community activist Munir Bahar said.
"People are focusing on enforcement, not preventing violence. Police enforce a code, a law. Our job as the community is to prevent the violence, and we've failed," said Bahar, who leads the annual 300 Men March against violence in West Baltimore.
"We need anti-violence organizations, we need mentorship programs, we need a long-term solution. But we also need immediate relief," Bahar added. "When we're in something so deep, we have to stop it before you can analyze what the root is."
Strained relationships between police and the public also play a role, according to Eugene O'Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Arrests plummeted and violence soared after six officers were indicted in Gray's death. Residents accused police of abandoning their posts for fear of facing criminal charges for making arrests, and said emboldened criminals were settling scores with little risk of being caught.
The department denied these claims, and police cars have been evident patrolling West Baltimore's central thoroughfares recently.
But O'Donnell said the perception of lawlessness is just as powerful than the reality.
"We have a national issue where the police feel they are the Public Enemy No. 1," he said, making some officers stand down and criminals become more brazen.
"There's a rhythm to the streets," he added. "And when people get away with gun violence, it has a long-term emboldening effect. And the good people in the neighborhood think, 'Who has the upper hand?'"

Top Clinton aide reportedly received overpayments at State Department

One of Hillary Clinton’s top aides was reportedly overpaid by nearly $10,000 because of violations of rules that govern vacation and sick time during her time as an official in the State Department, according to investigators.
The Washington Post reports the finding emerged on Friday after Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley sent letters to Secretary of State John Kerry, among others, about an investigation into possible “criminal” conduct by Huma Abedin over her pay.
The letters also sought the status of an investigation into whether Abedin violated conflict-of-interest laws related to her work for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and another private firm founded by a Clinton ally, according to The Post.
The finding that Abedin, who now serves as vice chairwoman of her presidential campaign, had improperly collected taxpayer money could damage Clinton’s candidacy, a GOP lawmakers insist that government rules were bent to benefit Clinton and her aides and at the same time could bolster Democratic claims that Republicans are using their oversight role to purposely damage Clinton politically.
The Post reports that Grassley indicated in the letters he was describing an inquiry by the State Department’s Inspector General. Grassley wrote, in letters to Abedin, Kerry and the Inspector General, that staff of the inspector general had found “at least a reasonable suspicion of a violation” of law concerning the “theft of public money through time and attendance fraud” and possible conflicts to Abedin’s “overlapping employment,” according to the newspaper.
Grassley also noted the possibility that efforts to investigate the allegations were nixed because Abedin’s exchanges were sent through Clinton’s private email server.

More on this...

• Controversy over two-month gap with Clinton emails

The Post reports, citing the letter describing the investigation, Abedin’s time sheets said she never took a vacation or sick leave during her four years at the State Department, which started in January 2009 and last until February 2013. The senator did write the investigation found evidence that Abedin did take some time off, including a 10-day trip to Italy.
Attorneys for Abedin told the newspaper she learned in May that the State Department’s inspector general concluded she improperly collected $9,857 for the time she was on vacation or leave. Abedin responded to the allegations with a 12-page letter contesting the findings and a request for administrative review of the investigation’s conclusions.
In the letters, Grassley also contends Clinton’s private email server interfered with the investigation.
“The OIG had reason to believe that email evidence relevant to that inquiry was contained in emails Ms. Abedin sent and received from her account on Secretary Clinton’s non-government server, making them unavailable to the OIG through its normal statutory right of access records,” he wrote.
Grassley has been questioning Abedin’s “special government employee” status, which allowed her to take a job at the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm led by former aide for Bill Clinton, Douglas Band. Abedin worked there for her final six months at the State Department.
Grassley’s letter to Kerry alleges that Abedin had exchanged at least 7,300 emails that “involved” Band, but didn’t expand on how many of those were between Abedin and Band.

Football Cartoon

Trump is top Republican for president

HAMDEN — Donald Trump is the clear leader for the republican nomination in the race for president, but he still trails the Democratic contenders by wide margins, according to a new poll released Thursday morning by Quinnipiac University.
At 20 percent, Trump has a seven point lead over Scott Walker.
Hillary Clinton is the top Democrat with 55 percent, and Bernie Sanders has 13 percent.
In a general election match up of Clinton versus Trump, Clinton would win 48 — 36, the poll says.
If the election were held today, the poll says, Republican voters would choose:

• Donald Trump 20%
• Scott Walker 13%
• Jeb Bush 10%
• Ben Carson 6%
• Rand Paul 6%
• Marco Rubio 6%
• Mike Huckabee 6%
• John Kasich 5%
• Ted Cruz 5%
• Chris Christie 3%
• Bobby Jindal 2%
• Rick Perry 2%
• Carly Fiorina 1%
• Lindsey Graham 1%
• George Pitaki 1%
• Rick Santorum 1%
• 13 percent said they didn’t know or they wouldn’t vote.

If the election were held today, the poll says, Democratic voters would choose:

• Hillary Clinton 55%
• Bernie Sanders 17%
• Joe Biden 13%
• Martin O’Malley 1%
• Jim Webb 1%
• 13 percent said they didn’t know or they wouldn’t vote.

It should be noted that Vice President Biden has not declared interest in running for president.

Information in classified Clinton emails came from multiple intelligence agencies, source says

Classified emails stored on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server contained information from multiple intelligence agencies in addition to data connected to the 2012 Benghazi attack, a source familiar with the investigation told Fox News.
The information came from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National-Geospatial Agency, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, the source said.     
A random sampling of emails by the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General has identified five emails containing classified information. One of the classified emails was released in full by the State Department on its “reading room” public website for Clinton’s emails.
The official responsible for overseeing the government’s security classification system, John Fitzpatrick, told McClatchy Newspapers that while reviewing four years of Clinton’s emails, intelligence agencies grew concerned that State Department officials were not guarding classified information in screening documents for public release.
A congressional source told Fox News that in early July, Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, met with about a dozen staffers on Capitol Hill from the intelligence, homeland security and foreign affairs committees.
In the meeting, Kennedy made the argument that he had checked with CIA and the publicly released email had no classified information, but that the agency was not the originating agency for the intelligence and would have no say over the classification issue, the source said.  
Staffers however questioned why the meeting was held in a classified setting, the source told Fox News, adding that Kennedy carried the email with him in a locked black bag, reserved for classified information.
A CIA spokesperson had no public comment on Thursday to Fox News, while the ODNI referred calls to the inspector general of the intelligence community.

White ex-DC official sues city, claims he was called 'cracker' and fired over race

WASHINGTON –  A former District of Columbia official brought in to help straighten out mismanagement at the Department of Public Works is suing the city, claiming he was harassed, intimidated and then fired for being white. 
The former city worker says he was repeatedly called “cracker” and “white boy” by black members of the department while in the presence of other managers. On his last day on the job as a deputy fleet administrator, Christopher Lyons said he found a sign on his door that said, “Get Out White Boy!”
Lyons is suing the city for wrongful termination, claiming he was the victim of racial discrimination. He also believes he was targeted because he uncovered financial flaws and reported cover-ups. He’s suing his former employers for back pay and then some.
“I am surprised [the racial discrimination] happened at this level of government,” his lawyer Morris Fischer told FoxNews.com. “We’re all Americans. We all have to treat each other the same, and we have to put aside whatever differences we have.”
Lyons was hired on Jan. 17, 2012 as the first -- and at that time, only -- white supervisor for DPW’s Fleet Management Administration. The agency supports municipal operations by finding, fueling and maintaining thousands of D.C. government vehicles.
At a mechanics and managers meeting in March 2012, Lyons claims he was subjected to relentless name-calling. He was referred to regularly as “white boy,” “cracker” and “big white guy” at meetings, he says.
Lyons also said his truck, which he parked in the secure DPW lot, was spat on and damaged by his black colleagues. He claims they took turns throwing paint and trash. When he brought up the incident, he claims the same group of people filed false complaints against Lyons with their union. Those claims, according to court documents, were found “without merit.”
The taunts continued, and Lyons told Bill Howland, the longtime head of the Department of Public Works. But instead of responding to the concerns, court records claim Howland told several of the same workers accused of harassing Lyons that he would fire Lyons. And then he followed through.
On the day he was terminated, Lyons said he walked to his office door and saw a number of derogatory signs written by supervisors and mechanics, including one that said, “Get Out White Boy!”

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Former D.C. official Christopher Lyons says he found this note on his office door.

Howland, who abruptly resigned from his position in June, also allegedly refused to discipline the employees Lyon accused of harassing him because Howland “liked them,” according to court records.
Howland was at his post for 11 years – a lifetime in D.C. terms – and managed to survive four mayoral changes despite a long list of controversial proposals including the 2014 rollout of Supercans, which was initially pitched as a $9 million recycling campaign paid for by earmarked money from the city’s retiree health fund.
Von Trimble, Lyons’ immediate supervisor who is black, also was terminated. Asked about this, Lyons' attorney argued that he and Lyons were close, and the other employees didn't like that. “We contend that Howland was aware of that,” he said.
Fischer and Lyons claim another factor in the termination was Lyons' reporting of mismanagement, including a case involving 100 missing vehicles. The District last week convinced the D.C. Superior Court to dismiss the whistleblower count due to a statute of limitations issue. But Fischer argued that in doing so, the D.C. government "pretty much conceded" there are issues to resolve on the racial discrimination claims.
Officials with the D.C. attorney general and Department of Public Works offices told FoxNews.com they could not comment on pending litigation. However, spokeswoman Linda Grant says, "Department of Public Works is committed to equal employment opportunity and ensuring all employees are treated fairly."
Lyons says that, when asked why he was terminated in August 2012, Howland told him his termination was “not performance related.”
He was only provided with a reason for his dismissal after he filed a complaint with the D.C. Office of Human Rights. On Jan. 11, 2013, Lyons received a statement that he was let go because his performance level “fell far short of their targets.”

US long suspected Pakistan of sheltering late Taliban leader Mullah Omar, report says

U.S. intelligence officials suspected Pakistan of sheltering Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, one of the world's most wanted men, for years before his death, according to a published report.
On Wednesday, Afghan officials announced that they believed Omar had died in a Pakistan hospital sometime in 2013. On Thursday, the Taliban issued a statement confirming the death of the man known as "The Commander of the Faithful", but did not specify when or how he had died. The Taliban statement also specifically claimed that Mullah Omar never left Afghanistan, "even to go to Pakistan or to any other country."
However, the Washington Post, citing diplomatic and intelligence documents, reported that the CIA had a lead on the reclusive Omar's whereabouts several times in 2010 and 2011, always placing him in Pakistan. The suspicions are another example of the complex relationship between the U.S. and one of its key allies in the global war on terror.
One such document cited by the Post quotes then-Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as telling Pakistani officials during a White House strategy review in 2010 "while Pakistan has done a lot to deny safe havens to terrorists ... senior leadership of the Quetta Shura [Council] including Mullah Omar resides between Karachi and Quetta."
Early the next year, the Post reports, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta informed Pakistan's then-President Asif Zardari that the CIA had learned that Omar was being treated at a hospital in the bustling port of Karachi. Zardari's reaction to Panetta's disclosure is not recorded in the Post report. However, the reported presence of Omar in a major city in Pakistan did nothing to assuage suspicions that he was there with at least tacit official approval.
A spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington who was contacted by the Post cited the Taliban statement in dismissing claims that Omar had ever been in Pakistan or that the Islamabad government had knowledge of his presence. However, a former Pakistani official tells the Post that some sections of the government may have wished to keep Mullah Omar's death a secret to preserve Islamabad's ability to influence peace talks between a united Taliban and Kabul. The official also said that Pakistan's powerful ISI intelligence agency told Pakistani leaders that Omar was alive as recently as March of this year.
Despite suspicions about his whereabouts, the search for Mullah Omar always took a backseat to the hunt for Usama bin Laden, who was killed by a team of Navy SEALs in May 2011. U.S. officials tell the Post that to the best of their knowledge, there was never any CIA plan to capture of kill the Taliban leader.
"We were overwhelmingly focused on Al Qaeda, and there were many fewer instances where we had what we thought was halfway-reliable information on the whereabouts of senior members of the Taliban," said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan, told the Post. Grenier also said that the ISI intelligence agency proved less adept at tracking down members of the Taliban than apprehending members of Al Qaeda.
The ISI had long been accused by Afghanistan of protecting Mullah Omar, with former President Hamid Karzai making precisely that claim in a 2006 interview with the Associated Press. The ISI does have long links with Islamic militants in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, since at least the 1980s, when it funneled weapons and money to insurgents battling Soviet forces.