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JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PROBLEM POLITICS. Harold Meyerson writes about the GOP's penchant for ignoring real problems while concocting fake ones for political purposes. In the latter vein, he recounts a kooky subcommittee hearing in September discussing the dangers of "mixed unions":
On September 28th, Texas Republican Sam Johnson (who regularly introduces legislation to repeal the 16th Amendment, which established the income tax) convened his subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations to examine the threat to civilization posed by the organizing campaign that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was conducting among the employees of Wackenhut, the venerable security guard company. SEIU also happens to be among the most politically active unions, usually on the Democratic side, in the land.Read the whole thing.�In the post 9/11 world,� Johnson intoned, "we cannot risk the potential for a lapse in security that could have disastrous consequences.� The hearing that followed was plainly designed to demonstrate how having security guards in a union that also has janitors and nurses as members (as SEIU does) would pose such a risk. In fact, it demonstrated quite the opposite.
--The Editors
