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Bonus links:

• Summary of Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'
• AlinskyDefeater's Blog
• Rules for Radicals at amazon.com
Individual liberty anywhere is a threat to the Progressive-Collectivist Cause everywhere.
While the mainstream press routinely reports that President Obama is riding high and that Republicans are reeling, Gallup tells a rather different story about the popularity of our newly reelected president.(from The Weekly Standard via weaselzippers.us)
Across Gallup’s entire history of presidential job-approval polling — dating back to 1945 — every president but one has had a higher job-approval rating in the January following his reelection than Obama has. No president has had a lower rating than Obama’s.
Gallup shows Obama’s average approval rating so far this January as being just 52 percent. President George W. Bush’s average approval rating in January 2005, immediately following his reelection, was also 52 percent. This can hardly be a source of satisfaction for Obama, who ran against Bush not once but twice — without Bush’s being on the ticket either time.
The former president of California's largest union local was found guilty by a federal jury in Los Angeles on Monday of stealing from the low-wage workers he represented.(full story at latimes.com)
Tyrone Freeman, who led Local 6434 of the Service Employees International Union, was convicted on 14 criminal counts, including embezzlement of union funds, violating tax laws and mail fraud.
As president of SEIU Local 6434 -- the second-largest SEIU chapter in the nation -- Freeman, 43, represented 160,000 low-wage healthcare workers who cared for the elderly and people with disabilities. He also represented 30,000 workers as president of the California United Homecare Workers.
Prosecutors accused Freeman of billing the union for "elaborate personal expenses," including more than $8,000 in costs related to his 2006 wedding in Honolulu, according to court documents.
Freeman ostensibly was marrying Pilar Planells, his executive assistant at the union local. But at the time of the wedding, he was still married to his first wife, according to a trial memorandum filed by the prosecution earlier this month.
Planells pleaded guilty earlier this year to an income tax charge in connection with more than $540,000 she received in consulting payments from the union.
U.S. President Andrew Jackson orders first use of federal soldiers to suppress a labor dispute (1834)
In his State of the Union Address, U.S. President George W. Bush describes "regimes that sponsor terror" as an Axis of Evil, in which he includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea (2002)
President Barack Obama signs his first bill, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009)
President Barack Obama stages a revival meeting of unionists at the University of Tampa (2010)
b: Anton Chekhov (1860), John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874), Gerda Steinhoff (1922); d: Harry Hopkins (1946), H. L. Mencken (1956)