By John Schwada / Fox News LA

California’s Pension Battle Gets Ugly: MyFoxLA.com

To read the accompanying news story, click here.

Everywhere you turn these days, your public sector unions are hard at work, protesting cutbacks to public sector unions. Andrew Klavan of City Journal exposes the charming charm of your unionized civil servants:

Will this Alabama town’s bankrupt pension fund have nationwide consequences? The state’s governor, Bob Riley, comments on Fox News:

Tuesday’s ongoing downpour in Southern California caused all kinds of outages here at PensionTsunami’s international headquarters — phone lines, DSL lines and even the cable TV we rely on to keep us informed and entertained while working. So if you don’t see a new headline summary appear on the site by around 2:00 pm Pacific Time, it means that we’ve been swamped by nature and we’ll catch up on Thursday.

We decided to take advantage of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend to take a break from the never-ending Pension Tsunami. We’ll be back covering the latest depressing news on Monday.

Back in June, an anonymous video producer sent us the link to a humorous production that created quite a stir — mostly generated by an Orange County union official who claimed to be terribly offended by it.

Well, we just received another link, and here’s the video:

It will be interesting to see which union official claims to be offended this time, and why.

Be sure to visit the CalPERS $100,000 Pension Club searchable database to see why this issue is such a big problem.

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Following last week’s conference in DC, your editor is attempting to squeeze in a vacation with family in Massachusetts this week. But since the news never stops — and the volume of pension-related news is, in fact, escalating (along with the pension crisis) — I’ll do my best to keep you informed of key events.

– Jack Dean

Because I will be traveling today to participate in a pension conference in Washington, DC sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, there will be a minimal number of headlines posted today and tomorrow.

– Jack Dean

By Jack Dean

Pension reform candidate Shawn Nelson took an early commanding lead in the absentee ballot count Tuesday night and never looked back, winning the special election for Supervisor in Orange County’s Fourth District with 30% of the vote. His nearest challenger, the public employee union-backed candidate Harry Sidhu, captured 18%. The remainder of the vote was divided up among four other candidates.

Because Nelson didn’t win more than 50% of the vote, Nelson and Sidhu will meet again on the November ballot to decide who will fill the seat for the next four years.

The night’s big losers were the county’s public employee unions — the Orange County Employees Association (OCEA) and the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs (AOCDS) — who together reportedly spent $1.3 million on mailers and TV ads promoting Sidhu, and on mailers attacking Nelson. Based on Sidhu’s 7,658 vote total, this amounts to about $170 per vote.

You can get more details on the election results on the website that is starting to be called the “Voice of OCEA” by clicking here, and you can get background on why the unions spent so much trying to defeat Nelson by clicking here.

Jack Dean is president of the Fullerton Association of Concerned Taxpayers and publisher of PensionTsunami.com.