MSNBC’s Ed Schultz–reporting from Ohio–lead a panel that advanced the falsehood that new legislation (SB 5) prevents firefighters and police from bargaining collectively on personal safety equipment:

In fact, SB 5 explicitly provides–as existing law does not–for collective bargaining on personal safety equipment. Here are the two most relevant excerpts:

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After the panel, a reporter explained to Schultz that SB 5 allows for firefighters and police to bargaining collectively on personal safety equipment, to which Schultz replied, “I don’t think it does.”

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(Read Project Mayhem, Part I here)

When he’s not busy encouraging Massachusetts voters to commit voter fraud to “keep these bastards out,” or condemning “tea party rhetoric” for not “rising to the president’s challenge on tone” while calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut,” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz indulges his hobby of swooping into states like Wisconsin and Ohio, becoming an overnight expert on legislation he is only familiar with from having skimmed through SEIU-furnished Cliffs Notes, calling the legislation “racist” while cheerleading union rallies with applause-cuing platitudes, waving his arms in solidarity and then peacing out.

Schultz made a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio in which he had Congressman Tim Ryan (whom I had interviewed hours prior about Senate Bill 5’s alleged confiscation of safety equipment) and Senator Sherrod Brown on the show against a backdrop of union firefighters to whom, during commercial breaks, Schultz yelled that SB 5 “makes me believe Jimmy Hoffa even more that they are sons of bitches!” Throughout the broadcast Schultz and his guests parroted the manufactured mantra that the bill takes away safety equipment, perhaps almost enough times to make it true.

Admittedly breaking the SEIU’s first rule of Project Mayhem, I subsequently interviewed Schultz on camera and asked him to respond to the fact that the bill gives bargaining rights on safety equipment — which the Democrats’ earlier bill didn’t, citing the exact section number — to which he offered a Pulitzer Prize-warranting response: “That’s not what the firefighters are telling me.”

Well Ed, that may not be what the firefighters are telling you the bill says, but it is what the bill is telling me the bill says. When I later asked the author of SB 5, State Senator Shannon Jones, to respond to Schultz’s talking points, she clarified the provision in depth, noting to Schultz that “reading is fundamental.”

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Steven Greenhut has an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about how public employees unions are destroying California’s budget and economy.

Greenhut begins by noting that with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, California is losing its “productive citizens” to other states but is still saddled with an economy killing surfeit of public employees unions that “drive costs up and fight to block spending cuts.”

Greenhut goes on to report that the unfunded pensions that California is stuck with has increased by 2,000% in the last decade because of the overweening power of the unions.

Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.” There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

That is absurd!

Greenhut goes on to offer some hope that some Californians are beginning to learn how bad the unions really are, but I am not so sanguine. And even if California is just starting to “get it,” the problem isn’t just in California but in every state in the union, as the following chart shows: (more…)