The lies began a few days ago with unsubstantiated allegations in Rupert Murdock's New York Post:
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
(snip)
City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens)... was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
(snip)
The snitches "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation," Halloran said.... They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."
Got that? A Republican City Councilmember blames it all on unions, and the allegations are suddenly opinionworthy in Bloomberg News.
In a front-page opinion piece today at Bloomberg News, Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and adviser to John McCain in 2008, uses these unproven allegations at their unchallenged worst:
Europeans have grown accustomed to seeing government workers shut down their countries when provoked. At this time of huge deficits from Washington to the smallest towns, government workers in the U.S. also face significant cutbacks.
Americans may have had their first taste of what that will mean.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Governor David Paterson are both calling for an investigation of allegations that city workers intentionally dragged out the cleanup of the Dec. 26 blizzard as a way to protest cuts in the city budget. The New York Post, citing City Councilman Dan Halloran, reported that some snow-plow drivers skipped streets on their routes or kept their plows too high to clear streets.
That's the right-wing noise machine: One outlet makes a vile accusation, then a second cites the first, revising and extending the incredible allegations even further!
If city workers did undermine the slow-clearing effort to protest budget cuts, they may have contributed to the death of a baby girl in Brooklyn, who waited with her 22-year-old mother nine hours for emergency crews to fight their way through the snow-covered streets. A Queens woman watched her elderly mother die as she waited three hours for an ambulance to arrive.
Americans better get used to this treatment.
Got that, America? Get used to unions killing babies and grandmas!
UNIONS: THE NEW DEATH PANELS!