Topic category:  Government/Politics

"In vino veritas" is a Latin phrase meaning “in wine [there is the] truth".

Apparently there is truth in a retirement address of a teacher union lawyer too.

A dying declaration is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule.

That's because it is presumed to be truthful.

Former National Education Association general counsel Bob Chanin spoke truth in his retirement address at the NEA's national convention.

Give that man an award for candor.

The NEA bosses must regret not having gotten Chanin to sign a confidentiality agreement to keep him quiet.

Chanin candidly explained his union's effectiveness in stark terms that undermine the illusion the union has worked hard to create about putting children first.

Chanin: “It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues….”

See the video at http://seeingredaz.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/nea-general-counsel-exposes-union%E2%80%99s-true-agenda/.

That video dispels the smoke blown by the Far Left during "the battle of Wisconsin."

What was at stake in Wisconsin were the need of state and local government and taxpayers for fiscal responsibility and the power of that state's union bosses.

Advocates of fiscal responsibility won.

The power of union bosses has been greatly reduced.

ACORN founder and chief organizer from 1970 to 1938 Wade Rathke seemed very down in a post titled "Are We Hearing the Death Knell for Unions?" (http://chieforganizer.org/2011/02/25/are-we-hearing-the-death-knell-for-unions/).

Rathke:

"...worse in all of these comments whether high or low, Twitter or Times, is that even when expressing hope they still reflect the old post-Katrina refrigerator slogan: Hope is Not a Plan. There still seems to be no coherent strategy or plan that pulls labor together in a more fundamental direction to rebuild and reassert. In some ways it is too easy to see Wisconsin as a last gasp of the old school. I heard recently that the Madison AFL-CIO was debating calling a general strike. If called, who would come? If we came, what would we really stop? I want to see this and count the feet on those streets!

"In the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago a breathless story about a possible $100,000,000 organizing campaign being launched by SEIU in more than a dozen cities around the country was attributed to an anonymous SEIU board member and other sources. Whatever the merits and truth of those reports, SEIU and every other union need to pull all of their last dollars together and figure out how to survive and turn the tide and do it now, make it real, and make it very, very different, because the bell has rung on the old school and the old ideas, as Stern acknowledges, and we are running out of time and money with the tide coming in hard against us."

Hopefully the Far Left IS "running out money with the tide coming in hard against" it, but the Far Left put its candidate in the White House and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan on the Supreme Court, it passed and quietly funded Obamacare, and it has been raising the national debt at breakneck speed. Don't expect it to slink away quietly and insist upon election integrity.

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.