Special delivery for Shelly

The flailing Walker has previewed a policy agenda that includes eliminating unions for federal employees, making all workplaces “right-to-work” unless states opt out, and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board.

“This will not be easy,” Walker told the Associated Press. “Many — including the union bosses and the politicians they puppet — have long benefited from Washington rules that put the needs of special interests before needs of middle-class families.”

The time and place of Walker’s announcement ought to prove to America once and for all that he’s dumb as a box of rocks. Walker is rolling out his anti-union agenda in Las Vegas, one of the most heavily unionized cities in America. Ninety percent of the jobs in Vegas hotels are union jobs, and almost half of all non-supervisor positions in the hotel, restaurant and gaming industries are unionized, compared to 19 percent of such jobs nationwide.

Meanwhile, in the last few days analysts have drilled to the core of Donald Trump’s base to identify his most fervent supporters: working class white men. That once-loyal Democratic voting bloc has been steadily trending Republican since the days of Richard Nixon. Now they see their savior in a bloviating billionaire who brags about how he’s going to improve their lives but never quite says how.

So does Walker think he’s got a plan to win these men back from Trump? I’m pretty sure they aren’t sitting around the tavern grousing, “That damn NLRB! That’s the reason I haven’t gotten a raise in 15 years!”

Let's start at the very beginning. Adelson remembers meeting Gingrich in Washington in 1995, when Gingrich was House Speaker and Adelson was lobbying to get the U.S. embassy in Israel moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Other reports have them being introduced in 1996 by a far-right anti-union operative in Nevada who worked for Adelson. Details of the subsequent courtship are murky, although the huge favor Gingrich did for Adelson in 1996 by turning off a federal investigation of the gambling industry probably did a lot to cement their friendship.

Two years later, Nevada conservatives sponsored a "Paycheck Protection" ballot initiative – the right-wing term for measures weakening unions by banning them from automatically deducting dues from members' pay. Adelson was gung-ho for it – and "would spend any amount of money," D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of Las Vegas's Culinary Workers Union Local 226, told me; however, the Nevada Republican Party was split over whether to take on the powerful Vegas unions. That was when Gingrich did the anti-labor side a solid, recording a videotaped message in support of the measure at a Nevada GOP dinner at the height of the intra-party civil war. And, in another detail the Times missed, Gingrich also promised to block an IRS proposal to tax meals that casinos provide employees. (An amendment to that effect, costing the U.S. Treasury $316 million, indeed ended up in an IRS reform law.) Soon after, Gingrich enjoyed a fundraiser at the Vegas convention center owned by Adleson. Ah, young love.

In 1999, Adelson closed one casino, the Sands, and completed work on a new one, the Venetian, stiffing so many contractors that there were at one time 366 liens against the property. Taylor, of the Culinary Workers, said he and his colleagues presumed that "like every other casino that had done that, workers in the [closed] hotel would be given priority when the [new] hotel was built." Instead, Adelson refused even to talk. All this, in a union town like Vegas, was unprecedented. "Even when you're having battles, you continue to have talks. Shit, we're talking to the North Koreans right now!" he told me. "The Israelis talk to the Arabs. Talking doesn't necessarily solve anything, but at least you understand the other guy's position." Adelson, not much interested in understanding the other guy’s position, proceeded to launch a campaign against the Culinary Workers that Taylor calls "beyond aggressive."

Right before the grand opening of the Venetian, in 1999, the Culinary Workers staged a demonstration on the public sidewalk out front. Adelson told the cops to start making arrests; the cops refused. Glen Arnodo, an official at the union at the time, relates what happened next: "I was standing on the sidewalk and they had two security guards say I was on private property, and if I didn't move they'd have to put me under 'citizen's arrest.' I ignored them." The guards once again told the police to arrest Arnodo and again, he says, they refused. The Civil Rights hero Rep. John Lewis, in town to support the rally, said the whole thing reminded him of living in the South during Jim Crow.

Marvels Arnodo, "Here you have a sidewalk that 12 billion people walk down, [and] the only people who can't use it are the union!" The Culinary Workers argued before the National Labor Relations Board that Adelson's attempts to keep them from demonstrating violated federal labor law. Adelson's lawyers countered that their client’s First Amendment rights were being violated – because his threats of arrests were an instance of "petitioning the government." The union won the right to protest; Adelson refused to comply with the settlement, copies of which the union passed out on that very same sidewalk. That was "fraudulent use of the seal of a government agency," the Venetian argued, further claiming that union workers had "impersonated" NLRB officials, and that the volunteer labor activists had been coerced. The great civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz got involved – on Adelson's side. "The Venetian has no property rights to the sidewalk," a federal appeals judge told them in 2007. Unmoved, Adelson tried, without success, to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, Adelson told the Wall Street Journal, radical Islam and the right to more easily join a union were the two most "fundamental threats to society."

Did I mention Adelson is nuts? But don't take my word for it – it was George W. Bush who called him "some crazy Jewish billionaire."