From the comments: No pension, no Social Security

Allen, a former colleague, responds to my post about teachers getting large pensions because they don't get Social Security.

So here is a story that happened to my mother.

She started working for the school district at 55 to teach learning disabled children, a physically demanding job with kids who are often very strong but not necessarily in control of their own bodies.

The school district had it's own Teacher's Union, which had it's own pension system and didn't contribute into Social Security.

In all of her previous jobs, she had given a portion of her income to Social Security.

She worked for a few years, and then had a medical emergency which prohibited her from ever working again.

Because she hadn't been in the Teacher's Union long enough, no long term retirement benefits. Because she'd spent several years working for the Teacher's Union and not contributing to Social Security, she isn't allowed to collect Social Security either.

Long and short of it, she's now disabled and unable to work, and no retirement benefits from Social Security or the Teacher's Union.

And here I thought the ACLU hated Christians

Via Andrew Sullivan, an interesting bit of news:

The ACLU of Virginia has come to the defense of a group of Christian athletes in Floyd County.

In an e-mail sent Friday afternoon, the civil liberties group said it had e-mailed the principal of Floyd Co. High School (FHS), and urged him to allow students to post their personal views, including copies of the Ten Commandments, on the lockers.

The e-mail comes one day after WSLS first reported that members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at FHS claims school leaders took down the copies of the Ten Commandments on their lockers.

The e-mail from ACLU of Virginia legal director Rebecca K. Glenberg drew a distinction between "school imposed religious expression," and "the personal religion expressions of students." The ACLU distinguishes the situation at FHS, from the Ten Commandments controversy in the Giles County Schools system.

The ACLU, in other words, is for the right of individuals to express their faith—but not of government to impose those expressions on them. Sounds perfect to me. Too bad the ACLU will get almost zero credit for this among religious conservatives.

U.S. silent as Iraq quashes protests, kills dissidents

Say, I wonder if Bill Kristol and National Review will pipe up about the Obama Administration's failure to side with freedom ... in Iraq:

But in one of the least-noticed stories of the week, the U.S.-backed government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq has resorted to imprisoning 300 journalists, intellectuals, and lawyers in order to stop ongoing protests, according to a well-reported Washington Post dispatch from Baghdad.

The Post story reports that about 30 people have been killed -- at least some of them gunned down by government forces seeking to disperse protests. And the imprisoned dissidents are not being treated humanely, according to one journalist who was detained.

Somehow I doubt we'll see those guys publicly call Obama weak for staying silent on the issue. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Fan mail: Why the big public pensions? No Social Security.

It's not all insulting mail I get. Ed Spondike wrote this morning—probably a longer piece than I should reproduce here. A relevant excerpt:

A private sector worker has three sources of retirement income. He has Social Security, his own savings plan, and probably a company pension. Teachers do not get any Social Security benefits, so they rely heavily on a good pension plan. So, if you do away with the union's right to collectively bargain benefits, some teachers may be without retirement benefits that private-sector workers have.

Spondike raises a great point. Here's some relevant info from the New York Times:

More than six million public employees work outside the Social Security system, including roughly 1.7 million teachers in California, Illinois and Texas, and nearly two million employees of all types in Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada and Ohio, as well as Louisiana and Maine. For years, these and other states have insisted they could provide richer pensions at a lower cost, both to workers and taxpayers, because of investments.

Some of those states’ pension plans now have shortfalls so large that they need outsize contributions. Virtually all state pension funds have had big losses in the last two years, but the go-it-alone states appear especially vulnerable.

So: States promised big pensions to state workers who stayed off Social Security because it was cheaper. But the states failed to put enough money away to cover their promises. And now the states want to reneg on those promises because of "shared sacrifice." That means the states get teacher's services for lower cost than what those states valued those services at, both on the front end and the back end. And yet it's the union members—not state officials—who are being maligned.

The unions aren't the real plutocrats

Jonathan Chait points out a flaw in Kevin D. Williamson's screed against union power:

Obviously, unions exert a large influence in absolute terms. But relative to business, labor is indeed a tiny force. In the last election cycle, business groups out-spent labor on both lobbying and electioneering by more than a 3-to-1 ratio.

Fan mail: The problem with public unions

John Polena writes in:

Like most left wingers you probably have trouble breathing with all that sand in you nose from having your head stuck in it too long.

Your cutesy support for public sector unions ignores health care and pension plans which are outrageous. --------With all this passion you have for these poor pain afflicted unappreciated public workers, why don't you send in a couple extra thousand at tax time?? JCP

P.S.: You should contact your liberal buddy Richard Cohen, who incredibly has seen the light relative to this issue.

NRO almost gets it on Libya

For a second there, the folks at National Review were in danger of making sense:

The rebels are on the ascendancy. Absent some drastic change in the tide of events, it looks as if they will prevail. Why would we taint what would be the indigenous glory of their ouster of Qaddafi with an almost entirely symbolic Western military action? The reason that the revolts of 2011 have had a dramatic catalyzing effect across the region, when the invasion of Iraq didn’t, is that they are the handiwork of Middle Eastern populations themselves, and thus a much more appealing model of change...

Right! It's not about us, and Libyan rebels don't seem to need our help changing their own government. It's good to see NRO isn't trying to use the crisis there as a way to score cheap political—

Indeed, it is a sign of how home-grown these rebellions have been that President Obama’s mealy-mouthed passivity hasn’t stopped them from rolling on.

(Sigh.) Oh. Right. It's not about us, except to the extent that we can use it as a cudgel against President Obama for not making it about us.