The Obama administration is again facing criticism from Big Labor, one of the president’s top political supporters, this time for trying to block the American Airlines-US Airways merger.

At least four labor unions have joined in opposition to the Justice Department’s Aug. 13  anti-trust suit that essentially argues the proposed, $11 billion merger could reduce the number of flight choices for customers, allow the two airlines to control pricing, and increase fares and fees.

Unions representing American pilots and flight attendants from both airlines were, as expected, the first to criticize the administration and the suit.

But the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trade Department recently joined the fight, putting some added muscle behind opposition to the administration’s case.

“It’s going further than just a few unions that really don’t represent a lot of people,” Marc Scribner, a transportation policy expert with Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, told FoxNews.com on Monday.

In just the past several months, unions have criticized the president’s signature health care law as a jobs killer, claiming the law’s mandate on employers to provide insurance to full-time workers is forcing them to cut jobs or send people into part-time status. They’ve also ripped the administration for not approving the Keystone XL pipeline and for a proposal to allow small knives in plane cabins, which representatives for pilots and flight attendants helped defeat.

The Allied Pilots Association, which represents 10,000 American Airlines pilots, argues the merger would make the two airlines competitive with industry leaders Delta and United, help bankrupt American Airlines and “significantly expand the choices of travel destinations.”

Further, they question why the federal government is attempting to block this merger after approving similar ones.

“It makes no sense for the Justice Department to conclude now that the airline industry consolidation is somehow undesirable,” argues the pilot’s union, which has the backing from unions representing flight attendants from both airlines.

Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer said in filing the suit: “We determined that the merger — which would create the world’s largest airline and leave just three legacy carriers remaining in the U.S. — would substantially lessen competition for commercial air travel throughout the United States. Importantly, neither airline needs this merger to succeed. We simply cannot approve a merger that would result in U.S. consumers paying higher fares, higher fees and receiving less service.”

The Association of Flight Attendants, which represents US Airway attendants, called the suit a “war on workers.”

Scribner thinks Obama’s course of action on the recent issues is “definitely a risk,” considering Big Labor has long supported Democratic candidates.

The AFL-CIO contributed more than $9 million in 2011-12, and transportation unions gave roughly $11 million, second only to public sector unions over the same period, according to the website OpenSecrets.gov.

“There have been a number of various issues about which unions rightly feel upset,” Scribner added. “The president is doing things that don’t cater to the interests of labor.”

However, Big Labor abandoning Democrats in large numbers is not expected any time soon.

An internal poll by the AFL-CIO on election night 2012 showed Obama got roughly 65 percent of the union vote, compared with 33 percent for Mitt Romney, with larger margins in battleground states.

The federal suit was joined by the District of Columbia and six attorneys general — including Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli and Greg Abbott of Texas, both Republicans, who are both running for governor.

The airlines have filed a motion in court seeking a November trial date.

A Department of Homeland Security manager in charge of buying weapons and ammunition for the government is, on the side, running an inflammatory website that throws around gay slurs and advocates the mass murder of “whites” and the “ethnic cleansing” of “Uncle Tom race traitors,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ayo Kimathi, who calls himself the “Irritated Genie,” told his supervisors that the website was set up to sell concert and lecture videos.

But the report showed the site’s content strayed far beyond concert promotion, warning about a coming race war. His website, “War on the Horizon,” declares, “in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,” the Alabama-based SPLC said in its report.

One of Kimathi’s former supervisors at DHS told SPLC’s Hatewatch that, “Everybody is the office is afraid of him,” and that his co-workers are “afraid he will come in with a gun and someday go postal.”

The supervisor, who was not named, continued, “I am astounded he’s employed by the federal government, let alone Homeland Security.”

Kimathi, who works for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a division of DHS, reportedly got the go-ahead from the government to create and maintain his website.

That’s because as a law enforcement agency employee, he is required to get permission in writing if he engages in outside activities which includes everything from working a second job to volunteering.

The SPLC says Kimathi obtained official permission but did it by misrepresenting the true nature of his site.

“He told management that it was an entertainment website selling videos of concerts and lectures,” the report said. “He called it simply WOH, never saying that WOH stood for War on the Horizon.”

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a written statement that the agency “does not condone any type of hateful rhetoric or advocacy of violence of any kind against anyone.”

It is not known what disciplinary actions, if any, will be taken against Kimathi.

“Every ICE employee is held to the highest standard of professional and ethical conduct. Accusations of misconduct are investigated thoroughly and if substantiated, appropriate actions in taken,” she said.

Kimathi’s site even includes President Obama, who is technically his boss, on its own enemies list.

According to the WOH website, the organization was “created for the purpose of preparing black people worldwide for an unavoidable, inevitable clash with the white race. Whites around the world are absolutely determined to exterminate Afrikan people in all corners of the earth.”

The mission statement also claims to prepare blacks intellectually, spiritually, psychologically and physically for “a global clash that will mean the end of white rule on this planet or the end of the black race as we know it.”

One of the teens charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane in Duncan, Okla., previously posted anti-white statements on his Twitter feed.

James Edwards, 15, Chancey Luna, 16, and Michael Jones, 17, have all been charged as adults in Lane’s death. Lane, a 22 year-old student from Melbourne, was out for a jog last Friday evening when the three teens began following him in a car and shot him “just for the fun of it,” according to Duncan officials.

Edwards and Luna are charged with first-degree murder while Jones is accused of using a vehicle in the discharge of a weapon and as an accessory to first-degree murder after the fact. Edwards and Luna are held without bond; Jones’ bond has been set at $1 million.

The economy has seen an “unprecedented” number of long-term unemployed under the Obama administration, according to a liberal think tank, and economists say plans pursued by Democrats in Washington are unlikely to curb the problem.

Nearly 5 million workers are classified as long-term unemployed, while 900,000 more have stopped looking for work altogether, according to a new series of reports issued by the Urban Institute.

Three percent of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months, an improvement of only one percentage point since unemployment spiked in October 2009, according to the study.

“That long-term unemployment would rise during a recession is not at all surprising, but the extent of the increase and its persistently high level since the start of the recovery are both troubling and unprecedented,” the report states. “The U.S. economy is now well into its fourth year of recovery, the unemployment rate is below 8 percent, yet the long-term share of unemployment is still near 40 percent.”

The center-left think tank said that those startling figures are unlikely to change unless the United States can achieve dramatic job growth, rather than the middling 2 percent overall economic growth figures the Obama administration has averaged.

While the think tank stresses that many of the causes of long-term unemployment are outside of the control of the government, it outlined a number of policies that could help alleviate long-term unemployment, including reforming unemployment insurance to subsidize wage decreases and hour reductions and increasing workforce training subsidies at the local level, rather than a “one-size-fits-all federal approach.”

Michael R. Strain, a labor economist with the American Enterprise Institute, said the Obama administration has failed to lead in the effort to solve the crisis of long-term unemployment.

“There are plenty of solutions that could be supported by Republicans and Democrats, but we’ve failed to find someone to champion them—most of the blame lies with President Obama because he sets the agenda in Washington,” Strain said.

He agreed with the Urban Institute that unemployment benefits could be better utilized by using them to subsidize workers who take lower-paying jobs following layoffs. Getting back in the job market quickly, even at a lower salary, can prevent workers from suffering long-term damage to their earning potential as well as ensure that they do not fall further behind in the skills gap.

However, the debate over America’s record-high spending on unemployment has focused on how long workers receive benefits, rather than how to spend that money effectively.

Many of the long-term unemployed come from the manufacturing and construction industries. Minorities and those with less education are the most likely to be out of work for long periods of time, according to the Urban Institute.

Job seekers are also stuck in regions that have failed to produce new jobs. Strain said that these workers could be assisted using unemployment benefits to help them relocate to areas that have wider access to jobs, rather than repeating a cycle of poverty in cities like Detroit.

“Let’s allow firms to pay workers whatever they can, supplement those earning with subsidies; let’s open those workers up to new skills and new lines of work and new locations to cope with manufacturing’s decline,” Strain said.

Democrats have focused on playing politics with hot-button political issues such as the minimum wage and top tier tax rates “to paint Republicans as the party of the elite and wealthy.”

The minimum wage is an area where Democrats are pursuing good politics using bad policy, according to Strain. It raises the cost of hiring young and inexperienced workers—those hit hardest by the recession.

“Raising the minimum wage is a debate to have during boom times when there’s money to spread around,” Strain said. “Raising the minimum wage now is a bad idea; the government should be reducing the rigidity of the labor market rather than making it harder and more expensive to hire workers.”

He sees politics at play.

“Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have been explicit in saying that the minimum wage is being used as a midterm election issue and President Obama is helping them achieve that,” Strain said.

By Bill McMorris

WASHINGTON – Bill Clinton’s foundation has spent more than $50 million on travel expenses since 2003, an analysis of the non-profit’s tax forms reveal.

The web of foundations run by the former president spent an eye-opening $12.1 million on travel in 2011 alone, according to an internal audit conducted by foundation accountants. That’s enough to by 12,000 air tickets costing $1,000 each, or 33 air tickets each day of the year.

That overall figure includes travel costs for the William J. Clinton Foundation (to which Hillary and Chelsea are now attached) of $4.2 million on travel in 2011, the most recent year where figures are available.

The Clinton Global Health Initiative spent another $730,000 on travel, while the Clinton Health Action Initiative (CHAI) spent $7.2 million on travel.

CHAI also spent $2.9 million on meetings and training, according to the report, conducted by the Little Rock, Ark. Accounting firm BDK CPA’s and Advisors. All three entities have global reach, while CHAI has the most staff.

It’s impossible to discern from tax filings how the total travel costs were reached, although the former president is known to rack up his personal miles on private jets.

Wealthy businessman John Catsimatitis has lent aircraft to Clinton and to the foundation multiple times for travel, including Clinton’s recent trip to Africa along with daughter, Chelsea.

Clinton sometimes uses Catsimatitis’ Boeing 727, opting on other flights to use a smaller Gulfstream jet.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily their go-to plane, because the 727 is a pretty big plane. It all depends where they’re going and what they’re doing,” said a Catsimatitis spokesman.

Sometimes Clinton uses the plane at a discount rate for the foundation, and sometimes Catsimatitis donates the flight time to the charitable foundation, which has a variety of programs to improve global health and improve conditions in Haiti and other far-flung locales.

According to previously undisclosed data provided by the Clinton Foundation, presidential trips accounted for 13 percent of the 2010 travel budget and 10 percent of the 2011 travel budget.

That puts Bill Clinton’s single-year travel tab for 2011 at more than $1 million. A foundation official wouldn’t say how many presidential trips occurred in that time frame.

The remaining travel paid for an array of foundation travel, with nearly 60 percent soaked up by the health access initiative, and about 5 percent going to the Clinton global health initiative, including flying students to attend Clinton Global Initiative University.

A Climate Change Initiative took up 12 percent of travel in 2010 and 11 percent in 2011, although the program accounts for a much smaller fraction of foundation revenues. A foundation official said that’s because the program employs many overseas staff and domestic staff doing transcontinental travel.

Clinton made reference to foundation overhead in an “open letter” posted on his foundation’s web site – mentioning an outside review that called for “stronger management staff” and blaming his own efforts to keep costs down.

“The review told us that my passion to keep overhead costs down – at about a low

8 percent for most of the last decade, rising only to above 11 percent in 2012 as we invested to support our growth – had gone on too long and that the Foundation needed better coordination without dampening the entrepreneurial spirit that infuses all our initiatives,” he wrote.

The sky-high travel costs come after a report revealed some of the foundation’s high-flying ways, including letting actress Natalie Portman fly first class with her pooch to a foundation event.

By GEOFF EARLE / New York Post