Obama take Big Labor in his hand...

...and furiously jacks them off:

President Barack Obama is playing to one of the Democratic Party's most reliable constituencies — organized labor — reversing a number of his predecessor's executive orders that critics regard as anti-union.

Labor leaders were to visit the White House for a second consecutive day Friday, where, a union official said, Obama was to abolish four Bush-era directives that unions opposed and then reintroduce Vice President Joe Biden's task force focused on the middle class.

Both were meant as a way for the new administration to connect with workers at the end of a week that has seen U.S. companies announce thousands more jobs cuts.

"Over the last 100 years the middle class was built on the back of organized labor. Without their weight, heft and their insistence starting in the early 1900s we wouldn't have the middle class we have now, in my view," Biden told CNBC on Thursday. "So I think labor getting a fair share of the pie is part of it."

So Obama's been in office nine days, and two of them have been spent yukking it up with union thugs? Good thing he has his priorities straight; and at least we know who's really in charge of things now....

And Biden is a tool. He's concerned about labor getting a "fair share of the pie"? They already get more - in health benefits, vacation, work hours, retirement, and hourly pay - than most private-sector employees do. And the preceding sentence, that refers to "thousands of job cuts" - how many of them are union, and how many of them are private-sector? And what is Biden and Obama doing for the private sector? Why, taxing them more to pay for union benefits!

But hey - if I may go local, New Jersey is way ahead of the curve on this one. Glance at the New Jersey Supreme Court - if you dare - to see how this stupidity ends up. You see, in New Jersey striking workers are now eligible for unemployment benefits! Via Garden State Patriot:

Unemployment benefits are normally reserved for people who are forced from their jobs, not people who simply walk off their jobs — except in New Jersey, that is, where all common sense was toppled this week in an odd and strained ruling by the state’s Supreme Court, which determined that nurses who went on strike at a South Jersey hospital are entitled to receive jobless pay. As troubling, the decision upheld a backward state law that says strikers can receive unemployment benefits so long as their company remains open.

It is a “pro-labor decision,” said Fred Askin, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark. “It’s a progressive decision.”

Yeah. "Progressively" driving the state - and, under Obama's sticky hand, the nation - into another Great Depression...