IF THE RIGHT-WING ASSAULT ON UNIONS IS A WAR, THIS WAS A BABIES-THROWN-FROM-INCUBATORS STORY

Remember when a Christmas-week blizzard hit New York City, and the right-wing media focused its attention not on Bloomberg administration snow-removal missteps but on evil union saboteurs? Remember the headlines emanating from Fox News? "Union Snow Saboteurs Caught on Tape: Criminal Investigation Launched"? "Dems' Dependence on Government Workers Poses Peril"? And my favorite: "Fox News Warns That NY Snow-Cleaning Union Protest Could Be Coming To Your Town Next"?

The saga of why parts of New York remained inescapably covered in snow days after this weekend's blizzard got a strange twist this morning when The New York Post reported City Councilman Dan Halloran's claims that sanitation workers had admitted to him that the slow clean up was part of an intentional protest by the unions over budget cuts. On Your World today, Brian Sullivan (in for Neil Cavuto) brought on Halloran to discuss his story as well as the Wall Street Journal'’s Steve Moore who warned that these kind of union pseudo-strikes could pop up all over the country in the coming year....

This wasn't just the Murdoch media launching a typical attack on a target of opportunity -- this was part of the propaganda build-up for the war on unions that was coming in a matter of weeks, as soon as GOP governors and GOP-dominated legislatures got down to work in Wisconsin and other states. This was the equivalent of the notorious, since-debunked story about Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, which formed part of the propaganda that sold the first Gulf War.

Because, you see, the union slowdown never actually happened:

City Report Finds No Work Slowdown in Blizzard Cleanup

Late last December, a councilman from Queens inflamed the frustrations of many New Yorkers upset with the pace of snow removal after a blizzard when he claimed to have evidence that city sanitation workers had intentionally slowed the cleanup.

The councilman, Daniel J. Halloran, became something of a national news celebrity for a more than week. Commentators said his evidence showed how public employee unions were harming America.

But on Friday, a report by the city's Department of Investigation said that investigators, after interviewing more than 150 witnesses and reviewing video from surveillance cameras and from angry residents, had found no evidence of an organized slowdown. In fact, the report found, Mr. Halloran had no evidence for his accusation, and his account of conversations with two workers differed sharply from what the workers told investigators....

There were individual shirkers, and disciplinary actions are being taken -- but nothing was organized. And there were management and maintenance problems:

About 44 percent of the snow chains on trucks broke during the cleanup.

And a few workers were photographed buying beer or coffee when they were supposed to be cleaning the streets. The investigators said those workers were doing so only while stuck with broken-down equipment, and not as part of a labor slowdown, but the workers caught drinking now face disciplinary charges.

The city also made choices that might have slowed the cleanup. A decision to stop salting roads as the snowfall warnings increased was controversial within the Sanitation Department. And because the city elected not to declare a snow emergency, many drivers became stuck in roadways, and their cars impeded the cleanup.

I don't recall a panic about incompetent management by wealthy budget-cutting politicians who oppose further taxes on their fellow rich people ... coming to your town next! You think there's a chance of that?