Hoffman’s getting some brushback from local Republicans. George Williams, chairman of the Oswego County Republicans, says Hoffman’s wrong and says the party is “not going to take the blame because he didn’t hold his concession speech.” I was in the district in the run-up to the election, when Hoffman accused Democrats or ACORN of slashing a campaign worker’s tires; when that charge turned out to be baseless, ACORN spokesmen informed me that they had no volunteers in the district. While ACORN’s credibility has been challenged left and right lately, its very public implosion would seem to back that up.

This isn’t the sort of behavior that wins over a skeptical electorate looking at a possible rematch between Hoffman and Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.).

A quick update: Here’s the letter Hoffman is circulating, available at http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/stolenelection.html.

Dear Fellow Conservative,

As evidence surfaces, we find out that reported results from election night were far from accurate. ACORN and the unions did their best to try and sway the results to Obamacare supporter Bill Owens.

I was forced to concede after receiving two pieces of grim news – - down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night – and barely won my stronghold in Oswego County. On Election Night, the information we received was far different from what we received this week!

Rest assured, they will not succeed, and I am therefore revoking my statement of concession.

That is why I am writing you today. Recent developments leave me to wonder who is scheming behind closed doors, twisting arms and stealing elections from the voters of NY-23.

I’m sure you are as dismayed as I am to learn of the mischief that took place in Oswego and neighboring counties. We know this would not be the first time for the ACORN faithful to tamper with democracy.

Now it’s time to actually count every legal ballot and I need your help to ensure the people of NY-23 get the Congressman THEY ELECTED. Please donate now to help me ensure every vote is counted!

A recanvassing in the 11-county district shows Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026. In Oswego County, I was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, but inspectors found I actually won by 1,748 votes

Let’s force them keep this recanvassing active! Let’s give this election a chance to end differently!
Oswego County elections officials blame the mistakes on “chaos“ in their call-in center that included a phone system foul-up, and on inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results. This sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.

The district’s second biggest voter turnout was in Jefferson County, where I had also benefited from a turnaround since election night, gaining another 700 votes. Owens led by 300 votes on the final election night tally, but after recanvassing, I’m now leading by 424 votes.

Jerry Eaton, the Republican elections commissioner for Jefferson County, said inspectors found a problem in four districts where my vote total was mistakenly entered as zero.

The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which the state Board of Elections distributed about 10,200.

The people of NY-23 deserve to have their ballots counted properly, but we can’t let ACORN or the unions keep that from happening. They have more lawyers and more experience tampering with democracy.

State Board of Elections Communications Director John Conklin said the state sent a letter to the House Clerk last week explaining that no winner had been determined in the 23rd District.

Now it’s time to actually count every legal ballot and I need your help to ensure the people of NY-23 get the Congressman THEY ELECTED. Please donate now to help me ensure every vote is counted!

We need to make sure that fair elections are a reality in NY-23, just like our Founding Fathers envisioned So long as we remain the “land of the free,” we MUST ensure every vote is counted.

Help us today so we may be the first of many conservative victories during the Obama Regime.

Yours in Freedom,

Doug Hoffman

Here’s the video that shows the alleged attack — and Gladney (the one in the grey polo shirt) walking around casually after the incident, claiming that an SEIU member attacked him. Meanwhile, as Daily Kos diarist KevinNYC points out in his play-by-play of the event, there’s a big white guy in a white polo shirt yelling — “they attacked him!” The guy on the video looks strikingly like his lawyer, David Brown, who now says he was a witness to the event, so he can’t officially represent Gladney.

When I asked Brown, who was in a car with Gladney on their way to see Brown’s brother, who is going to be Gladney’s official lawyer, Brown said that there’s been lots of misinformation floating around online about this case.

For one, Brown said, contrary to recent reports like this one from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Gladney wasn’t laid off and has health insurance. “He’s just unemployed,” says Brown, and “has insurance through his wife.”

Although Brown initially identified Gladney as “a friend,” when I asked him what line of work Gladney is in, he had to go ask Gladney about that before he could report back to me that about a year ago, Gladney worked for an optical store. Brown said he thinks Gladney’s wife is a social worker, but he’s really not sure.

Meanwhile, though Gladney appears to be just fine in the video right after he was supposedly beaten up, he showed up the next day at a tea party event in a wheelchair. At the event, Bill Hennessy, the organizer of the St. Louis tea parties, asked the crowd to donate money to Gladney to help him pay for his injuries, despite the fact that he now says he has insurance. When I asked Brown about this, he said: “Well, who doesn’t need a donation? If people want to give him a donation because he’s injured and unemployed, that’s up to them.” Brown said Gladney has raised about $1,100 in donations so far.

Brown also told me that Gladney is not a conservative activist. He was just selling the 18th-century patriotic resistance flags to try to make some extra money. Brown said Gladney plans to sue both the individuals he says attacked him and the SEIU, since the “attackers” were wearing union T-shirts and “unions have a 100-year history of intimidation.”

On the Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Friday, Gladney said he’s “in some pain” but “I’m okay, I’m still kind of shaken up, just kind of upset about the whole thing.”

Brown said he doesn’t yet have the medical report of his client’s alleged injuries, but that his lawyer brother, Andrew Beeny, will be getting a copy for the lawsuit. Brown said he didn’t know whether his brother would release the report to the public.

It’s a moderate’s world on Capitol Hill right now, and the latest evidence arrived yesterday when the Democratic sponsors of a controversial labor-friendly proposal dropped the bill’s central tenet: A provision allowing unions to organize by getting a simple majority of workers to sign cards in support. Under current law, workers organize unions by secret ballot. The Democrats’ proposal would have given workers the additional option of a public ballot, making it easier to unionize.

The so-called “card check” bill — supported by President Obama — has been labor’s biggest legislative priority this year, prompting a fierce battle with business groups that have spent bill millions to kill the measure. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) have come out squarely in opposition to the bill, making the party’s 60-member majority irrelevant. Yesterday, those moderates won an enormous concession with the removal of the card-check provision. From The New York Times:

In its place, several Senate and labor officials said, the revised bill would require shorter unionization campaigns and faster elections.

While disappointed with the failure of card check, union leaders argued this would still be an important victory because it would give companies less time to press workers to vote against unionizing.

The move might have changed the support dynamics on Capitol Hill, but it hasn’t changed the lobbying dynamics. Indeed, labor groups are still supporting the underlying bill — the Employee Free Choice Act — while many businesses are still opposing it. The Workforce Fairness Institute, a business group formed to fight EFCA, just shot out an email announcing its continued opposition based on language that forces government arbitration when workers and employers can’t agree on a union contract.

“The most damaging aspect of the bill — the binding arbitration provision, will remain intact,” the group rued.

With Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) suffering poor health, there’s no guarantee that even the diluted proposal can win 60 Senate votes.

What does this all mean? Well, it means that GM is headed for bankruptcy. The government will try to push for a speedy reorganization and sale, but the company is a big, complicated beast, and so a standard Chapter 11 process, taking several years, could instead be the result. It’s difficult to sell cars while in bankruptcy (one presumes), so  a protracted process could ultimately lead to liquidation — that is, selling off GM assets down to the last lugnut-affixing robot.

The main problem is that the government is providing the bulk of the bankruptcy financing (some $50 billion), which could give it as much as a 70 percent stake in the new automaker. This is tricky business. For one thing, it means that if the reorganized company doesn’t do well, the taxpayers take a big hit. It also means that the government has a big interest in keeping the reorganized firm afloat, which increases the likelihood of political meddling in the industry and continued cash infusions or subsidies. But the real rub is that GM’s obligations are large while its potentially successful sub-units are small. And those potentially successful sub-units will not be successful if they are saddled with too many of GM’s large obligations. So, for this to really work, the government has to swallow a lot of GM’s baggage and let free a new, trimmed down, unburdened GM. If that new company does well, the equity stake will have value and taxpayers will get back some or most of their investment. If it doesn’t — and in this economy, it will be swimming up a waterfall — then the government will have shelled out tens of billions of dollars just to prop up GM for a matter of months and delay the inevitable reallocation of workers and capital away from an utterly failed enterprise.

High risk, tiny chance of breaking even. What’s not to like?

From the Republican National Committee’s 2008 Platform:

The recent attempt by congressional Democrats to deny workers a secret ballot in union referenda is an assault, not only against a fundamental principle of labor law, but even more against the dignity and honor of the American work force. We oppose “card check” legislation, which deprives workers of their privacy and their right to vote, because it exposes workers to intimidation by union organizers.

This appears to be about core Republican principles. Well, sort of … except that it really isn’t. In its own elections, the RNC actually prohibits the use of secret ballots.

Here’s the relevant RNC Rule [RNC Rules, Rule No. 7(d), pg. 7]:

No votes (except elections to office when properly ordered pursuant to the provisions of Robert’s Rules of Order) shall be taken by secret ballot in any open meeting of the Republican National Committee or of any committee thereof.

Apparently, the Republicans are now more concerned about the dignity and honor and right to privacy of union workers than they are about the rights of their own members.

Is this the party’s way of following RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s directive to “think outside the box?”

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By the way, isn’t Michael Steele hilarious? Please follow our Twitter feed here.

The bill, which would allow employees to form a union if they can gather signatures from a majority of workers, rather than being required also to hold a formal election weeks after collecting the signed cards, is virulently opposed by business groups, who fear they’ll lose the ability to sway workers against the union option. (The law would also increase penalties against employers who mistreat workers for trying to unionize.)

According to OpenSecrets, “Business [Political Action Committees] not only gave nearly five times more in campaign contributions than labor PACs did in the last election cycle ($365.1 million versus $77.9 million, including contributions to leadership PACs) they are backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $144.4 million on lobbying efforts in the 2007-2008 election cycle, or more than $400,000 for every day Congress was in session. By contrast, the entire labor sector spent less than $84 million on lobbying efforts during those two years.”

All that lobbying by big business has certainly won the support of some Republicans, who have conveniently misrepresented the bill as “taking away the secret ballot” from employees — as opposed to offering them another, far simpler option for how to form a union.

For example, at a fundraising stop Monday in his home state, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said that “jobs are being exported. We have problems with pensions and health care. To take away the secret ballot is big stuff. I’m listening to all of the viewpoints very carefully. I have a hunch we’ll vote this spring.”

And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called it “a threat to one of the fundamentals of democracy.”

Meanwhile, some Democrats who’ve supported the bill in the past aren’t signing onto it now. Even key Senate Democrats are wavering in their support, The Wall Street Journal reports.

That’s likely because it’s so easy to distort what the bill says, and why. As Rachel Maddow explained on her MSNBC show the other night, in the most coherent and straightforward discussion I’ve heard yet of this bill, the purpose of the Employee Free Choice Act is to allow employees to form a union without having to endure weeks of intimidation by their bosses. The “card check” option, as it’s called, means employees can just sign a card to vote for the union, if they want to do that. (As Maddow explains, contrary to the Republicans’ claims, the law explicitly allows them to have a secret ballot, too, if they want one.)

Employees might want to go with the card check because traditionally, after the cards are signed, an employer gets several weeks in which it can campaign against the union, often by intimidating employees who might want to sign up. As a former labor lawyer and a former employee at a company where some of us signed cards to form a union, I can attest that the boss immediately starts sending letters and emails to employees listing all the terrifying things that are likely to happen when they join — including that they could all be fired. Since employees are a captive audience to the boss, they get to hear lots and lots of this reasoning.  And eventually, many are too scared to vote for the union, despite that sacred secret ballot.

The Employee Free Choice Act tries to swing the pendulum back a bit, so employees can make a choice without intimidation. Card check has long been an option under the National Labor Relations Act, but the law gave employers the right to veto it, and increasingly, that’s just what they’ve done.

For a more thorough explanation, including how the labor law actually applies to a unionizing battle at a Rite Aid in Lancaster, Calif., check out this story on Truthout from David Bacon.

“Although its collapse has dominated recent media coverage, the financial sector is not the only segment of the U.S. economy running into serious trouble. The institutions that govern the labor market have also failed, producing the unusual and unhealthy situation in which hourly compensation for American workers has stagnated even as their productivity soared.

EFCA, which would allow workers to unionize without a secret ballot,  “is not a panacea,” the signatories say, “but it would restore some balance to our labor markets.”

Among the supporters are several economists better known for their neoclassical “free trade” convictions than defending unions — including Laura Tyson, a former adviser to President Clinton who sits on the boards of Morgan Stanley and ATT, and Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University professor and former adviser to the World Trade Organization.

The Nobel Prize-winning economists checking in for labor are Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow, emeritus professors at Stanford and MIT respectively. Their support for unionization reflects an emerging viewpoint among many economists that a successful global free trade regime depends on the growth of strong social safety nets.

South Carolina State Rep. Eric Bedingfield (R) won a second term in November, on the same day Barack Obama won the presidential race and Democrats took the largest congressional majorities in a generation. Within weeks, Bedingfield came up with a way to challenge the Democratic agenda right out of Charleston. He drafted a bill that, if passed by two-thirds of the state House and Senate, would place a measure on the 2010 ballot to invalidate any attempt by labor organizers to make unionizing possible without a secret ballot vote.

“Other members have introduced this bill in the past,” Bedingfield said on Thursday. “It hasn’t gotten the two-thirds vote. What’s changed is that there’s never been a concerted effort like this.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Bedingfield is a member of the Save Our Secret Ballot coalition, an alliance of businesses, conservative think tanks, and local politicians united in the goal of passing state ballot initiatives that prohibit any kind of elections held without secret ballots-and thereby, the thinking goes, nullifying the Employee Free Choice Act before Democrats in Congress can pass it. As it was written by the last Congress in 2007, EFCA would allow unions to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board if a majority of workers sign cards designating the union as their bargaining representative. Union elections would not be banned, but they would no longer be required. Union activists and anti-labor groups alike believe that the new rules would make it easier to organize.

Members of the coalition believe they’ve found the best strategy for stopping the proposed law in its tracks. They are running up against another, better-funded group of anti-EFCA campaigners who consider a state-by-state campaign a waste of time. Still other opponents of EFCA think that the battle was already lost in the 2008 elections, when the Democrats won their increased majorities. While all of the bill’s opponents are bolstered by polling that show 70 percent or more of Americans opposing EFCA if they see it as “eliminating the secret ballot,” the disagreement over strategy is hurting them in the most critical labor battle in decades. While opposition to EFCA will be well-funded, this division, and the size of the Democrats’ majorities in Congress, are making life difficult for the anti-labor side of the debate.

“This is basically about a 40-year struggle to bring the social democratic model to America,” said Linda Chavez, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and President George W. Bush’s first nominee for Secretary of Labor, on Thursday. “Unfortunately, I think it’s going to succeed. Having 58 or 59 Senate seats, instead of 55 seats-that makes a big difference.”

Many Washington-based activists are more hopeful than Chavez. There is little doubt that EFCA will pass the House of Representatives – in 2007, the bill picked up 15 Republican voters there. There are rumors that Blue Dog Democrats might ask for the Senate to act before the House does on EFCA, which would be fine for most activists, as that’s where they’ve focused their attentions. One insider at an anti-EFCA campaign identified four Democratic senators who could be cajoled to oppose the bill-Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mark Warner of Virginia, and newly-appointed Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.

In targeting these senators, the Washington-based anti-EFCA coalition is continuing a strategy that began during the 2008 election. In July, Peter Stone of National Journal reported that more than $100 million would be spent between multiple political action committees (and the Chamber of Commerce) to defeat Democratic Senate candidates who supported EFCA. The Employee Freedom Action Committee, a political outgrowth of Rick Berman’s Center for Union Facts, spent millions of dollars to fund ads and staffers who hounded candidates such as Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) about EFCA.

Almost all of the Democrats targeted in these campaigns won their elections. The economic crisis played a decisive role, not merely by driving Republicans down in the polls, but by erasing assets of the people who had been funding anti-EFCA campaigns. Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who had given $30 million to the Freedom’s Watch PAC and had called EFCA a “fundamental threat” to society, lost an eventual $24 billion of his net worth in the crash.

The sinking fortunes of funders like Adelson caused anti-EFCA campaigners to scale back at a critical time. Now, some worry about the effort to run ballot initiative campaigns in states for the lack of funds. “The business community has a very big appetite for the campaign against EFCA,” said one campaign insider. “It’s also very hungry, and the cupboard is bare. They have no money. Everyone is trying to raise money.”

“The very existence of efforts in the states is healthy,” said Ernie Istook, the chairman of the coalition’s advisory board, on Wednesday. Istook, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that he’d received positive feedback from his friends in Congress because the ballot initiatives, by attracting local media, “are helping to educate the public and open up new fronts. Our goal is not simply to win a one-time fight in Congress, because bills can be re-filed in the next session. Our goal is to enact provisions that kill the idea.”

Some anti-EFCA campaigners in Washington disagree with this, and point out that the states where ballot initiatives have been launched do not contain swing senators who could cast the deciding votes in a 2009 or 2010 EFCA fight. Rep. Bedingfield’s South Carolina has two Republican senators, whose opposition has never been in question.

While Bedingfield says that his effort can be “a tool to tell businesses to come to South Carolina,” it doesn’t calm Washington’s anti-EFCA campaigners. The proposed language in South Carolina and the 10 other states read, in part, “Where state or federal law requires elections for public office or public votes on initiatives or referenda, or designations or authorizations of employee representation, the right of individuals to vote by secret ballot shall be guaranteed.” Some campaigners argue that a pre-emptive law like this won’t work; if it could, it would have been tried already.

Clint Bolick, a fellow at Arizona’s free-market Goldwater Institute and the principal legal adviser for the coalition, disagrees. “I didn’t hear anyone talking about this idea until very recently,” Bolick said. “It’s happening now because the threat is more significant. Even if the folks in D.C. are successful at derailing EFCA this time, we’re likely to have an even more Democratic senate in two years. It’s essential that we create some thunder at the grass roots.”

“We’ve got many of the same donors as [the Washington campaigners],” Bolick continued. “I don’t perceive any shorting of funding.”

In a legal memo that Bolick wrote for the coalition, he acknowledges that if anti-EFCA ballot measures pass after the president signs the bill, it will be difficult to defend the new lines in state constitutions. “Federal preemption law will present a significant challenge to state constitutional protections of the right to secret ballot,” Bolick wrote, “but ultimately, the interests served by such provisions should prevail.” That is exactly why some Washington activists oppose the state-focused campaign, and why labor attorneys contacted by TWI are not overly worried about it.

That won’t dissuade Bolick and the other members of the coalition from focusing their attention in states, ignoring the Senate, and trying to build a populist movement against EFCA. “You don’t get rid of your relief pitcher because you’ve lost your starter.”

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Rep. Hilda Solis to head the Dept. of Labor, according to reports. The California Democrat has a long record supporting workers in general and unions in particular. Before she arrived in Washington, for example, she led the successful charge to raise California’s minimum wage, according to The Associated Press.

More recently, she’s been a vocal advocate for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to form unions more easily. The controversial bill is widely expected to surface early next year when Democrats will command the White House and stronger congressional majorities.

The Service Employees International Union issued a statement an hour ago calling the choice “great news for America’s workers.”

Solis comes from a union family and has never forgotten her roots in her public service career. Her appointment is a win for the prospects of the Employee Free Choice Act and the economic future for the people of this country who get up and go to work every day.

Environmentalists are praising the pick as well, pointing out that Solis has been on the front-lines of the push to create green jobs. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, issued a statement today saying the group “can think of no better person to help President-Elect Obama implement his plans for an economic recovery fueled by the creation of millions of new green jobs.”

Solis, who sits on both the House energy committee and the special global warming panel, has a lifetime environmental voting record of 97 percent, according to the League of Conservation Voters.

In the wake of criticism aimed at Obama for his recent pick to have Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) run the Dept. of Transportation, this should calm the storm a bit.

The thinking is that if the union isn’t willing to cede some of these benefits as part of a larger bailout strategy, then Republicans will be unlikely to support it.

But Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, voiced concerns yesterday about a plan that would cut workers’ incomes.

“The union to its credit did just renegotiate the contract and new workers are going to take less,” Frank told CNN. “But frankly, I think there’s already been too much income inequality in this country to give them a tool to start undercutting what people already have.”

United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger has wondered why critics of a Detroit bailout didn’t ask similar concessions from workers of bailed-out Wall Street firms, according to reports.

“Let’s go to AIG, Bear Stearns, active and retired workers: Did anybody go in and ask them to give back wages and benefit levels?” Gettelfinger said on WDIV-TV in Detroit. “What about the bond traders? Did anybody ask them? What about the cleaners in the building? Why would the UAW be any different?”

Democrats hope to take up legislation next month to help Detroit survive the downturn. If one side doesn’t give on the workers’ pay issue, however, it won’t likely move very far.