op ed review 1/26
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Record 20% of Households on Food Stamps in
2013
Crack-smoking Toronto Mayor´s Favorability Now Nine Points Above Barack Obama´s
Liberal icon urges Obama impeachment “The most destructive, dangerous president
we've ever had….Apparently he doesn’t give one damn about the separation
of powers…Never before in our history has a president done these things…..This
is the worst state, I think, the country has ever been in.”
The Supreme Court on Friday shielded the Little Sisters of
the Poor and other nonprofit religious groups from complying, for now, with the
Obama administration’s rule that they provide free contraceptives in the health
insurance they offer employees.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) will deliver the
Republican Party’s response to the president’s State of the Union Address next
week.
Obama comes after his enemies: Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, whose
documentary 2016: Obama's America
took a critical look at President Obama and was a surprise hit in 2012, will be
arrested in New York
on Friday for allegedly violating campaign-finance laws.
The militants who gathered on the night of Sept. 11, 2012,
to torch and kill inside the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, were a
who’s who of the modern al Qaeda movement, newly declassified documents show.
President Obama blames racism on his declining popularity.
Aaron Goldstein: “My
dislike of President Obama isn’t a matter of the color of his skin, but rather
because of the content of his character or lack thereof…….Indeed, why should
anyone dislike Obama because of his race when there are so many other good
reasons to dislike him?”
“…growing numbers of people are calling themselves
independents. The Republican Party stands to suffer the most from the movement
away from staunch party loyalty, but Democrats also are affected.”
President Obama will meet with Pope Francis next month, and
hopes the Pontiff will prove useful to his political agenda.. "The
president looks forward to discussing with Pope Francis their shared commitment
to fighting poverty and growing inequality”.
“Maybe President Obama can show the Pope some photos from his luxury vacations,
or his wife´s protracted holiday.”
“Obamas and Bidens spent $295,437 on just one vacation
weekend. And that’s mostly just for
security, not Air Force One or other official costs.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and former vice presidential candidate
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference
(CPAC) in March. Also, former Alaska
Gov. Sarah Palin has been invited to speak and is close to being confirmed.
CPAC is an annual gathering of thousands of conservatives in Washington, D.C.,
aimed at unifying the movement and connecting leaders with grassroots
activists.
Contractor CGI didn’t perform well with the Obamacare
website contract5, so they’re fired. The
latest no-bid Obamacare website contract will go to a company whose former top
analytic researcher developed the voter-tracking computer strategies that led
Obama to victory in 2012.
President Obama’s latest claims about marijuana are
contradicted by research and official positions of his own Office of National
Drug Control Policy, which is part of the White House. And Mr. Obama’s words have anti-drug leaders
worried about negative repercussions among youth. Mr. Obama claimed to The New
Yorker magazine that marijuana is no worse than cigarettes or alcohol and he
promoted state efforts by Colorado and Washington to legalize
marijuana, which remains illegal under federal law.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/21/obamas-white-house-drug-experts-contradict-his-mar/#ixzz2r35PnLB7
Former contressman Patrick Kennedy:
“I think the president needs to speak to his NIH director in charge of
drug abuse….[She] would tell the president that, in fact, today’s modern,
genetically modified marijuana, much higher in THC levels, far surpasses the
marijuana that the president acknowledges smoking when he was a young person.”
Hacking expert David Kennedy says he cracked HealthCare.gov
in 4 minutes
Lawmakers are not ignoring the March for Life, scheduled at
high noon Wednesday on the National Mall, and currently the largest pro-life
demonstration on the planet, according to organizers. “In a rare feat for the
nation’s capital, representatives from both sides of the aisle will come
together,” the organizers say, pointing out that keynote speakers include House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Rep. Dan Lipinski, Illinois
Democrat.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments about forced
unionization among government workers in a case that could greatly curtail
powerful labor groups.
When officials at the Department of Health and Human
Services announced the most recent Obamacare enrollment figures earlier this
week, they focused on one brag point amidst otherwise discouraging
news….According to government tallies, 44.5 million people called or visited
state and federal websites they said, presumably indicating broad interest in the
new benefit. But we also know that only 2.2 million people have signed up for
Obamacare.
“Older people do not decline mentally with age, it just
takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their
brains, scientists believe.”
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Walter Williams:
Politics and the Minimum Wage 1/8
There's little debate among academic economists about the
effect of minimum wages. University of
California, Irvine economist David Neumark has examined
more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage. He reports that 85
percent of the studies "find a negative employment effect on low-skilled
workers." A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90
percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises
unemployment among young and unskilled workers. A 1990 survey reported in the
American Economic Review (1992) found that 80 percent of economists agreed with
the statement that increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment among the
youth and low-skilled. If you're searching for a consensus in a field of study,
most of the time you can examine the field's introductory and intermediate
college textbooks. Economics textbooks that mention the minimum wage say that
it increases unemployment for the least skilled worker. The only significant
debate about the minimum wage is the magnitude of its effect. Some studies
argue that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage will cause a 1 percent
increase in unemployment, whereas others predict a higher increase.
How about the politics of the minimum wage? In the political
arena, one dumps on people who can't dump back on him. Minimum wages have their
greatest unemployment impact on the least skilled worker. After all, who's
going to pay a worker an hourly wage of $10 if that worker is so unfortunate as
to have skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value per hour? Who
are these workers? For the most part, they are low-skilled teens or young
adults, most of whom are poorly educated blacks and Latinos. The unemployment
statistics in our urban areas confirm this prediction, with teen unemployment
rates as high as 50 percent.
The politics of the minimum wage are simple. No congressman
or president owes his office to the poorly educated black and Latino youth
vote. Moreover, the victims of the minimum wage do not know why they suffer
high unemployment, and neither do most of their "benefactors."
Minimum wage beneficiaries are highly organized, and they do have the necessary
political clout to get Congress to price their low-skilled competition out of
the market so they can demand higher wages. Concerned about the devastating
unemployment effects of the minimum wage, Republican politicians have long
resisted increases in the minimum wage, but that makes no political sense. The
reason is the beneficiaries of preventing increases in the minimum wage don't
vote Republican no matter what; where's the political quid pro quo?
Higher-skilled and union workers are not the only
beneficiaries of higher minimum wages. Among other beneficiaries are
manufacturers who produce substitutes for workers. A recent example of this is
Wawa's experiment with customers using touch screens as substitutes for counter
clerks. A customer at the convenience store selects his order from a touch
screen. He takes a printed slip to the cashier to pay for it while it's being
filled. I imagine that soon the customer's interaction with the cashier will be
eliminated with a swipe of a credit card. Raising the minimum wage and other
employment costs speeds up the automation process. I'm old enough to remember
attendants at gasoline stations and theater ushers, who are virtually absent
today. It's not because today's Americans like to smell gasoline fumes and
stumble down the aisles in the dark to find their seat. The minimum wage law
has eliminated such jobs.
Finally, there's a nastier side to support for minimum wage
laws, documented in my book "Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on
Discrimination?" During South
Africa's apartheid era, racist labor unions
were the country's major supporters of minimum wage laws for blacks. Their
stated intention was to protect white workers from having to compete with
lower-wage black workers. Our nation's first minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon
Act of 1931, had racist motivation. Among the widespread racist sentiment was
that of American Federation of Labor President William Green, who complained,
"Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates."
Phyllis Schlafly has a different take on this: “Minimum Wage and Welfare: the Tradeoff” “…raising the minimum wage may actually be
worth considering if it has the side benefit of cutting the gigantic total of
our hidden welfare programs.”
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Sex and drugs have replaced building for the future;
abortion and the welfare state have replaced consequences. In the end, this
philosophy will lead to the dominance of the state. … [H]ow can we solve all of
this? Not through the law – the law follows culture. The only way to restore an
American future is to restore the social and religious institutions that
fostered genuine American values. This means fighting back against the tyranny
of those who conveniently proclaim to ‘live and let live’ while simultaneously
demanding that Americans with traditional values shut the hell up.”
-Ben Shapiro
“A recent survey of employers asked if they would fire
workers if the minimum wage were raised. Two-thirds of the employers said that
they would not. That was good enough for a minimum wage advocate.
Unfortunately, the consequences of minimum wage laws cannot be predicted on the
basis of employers' statements of their intentions. Nor can the consequences of
a minimum wage law be determined, even after the fact, by polling employers on
what they did. The problem with polls, in dealing with an empirical question
like this, is that you can only poll survivors.”
-Thomas Sowell
“During the first cold-weather Super Bowl, Fox Sports will
use an infrared camera that will show how players' body temperatures change
throughout the game. And MSNBC will have a simulcast, blaming the changes on
global warming.”
-Fred Thompson
________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
“10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That
Didn't Help” by Benjamin Wiker. You've heard of the "Great
Books"? These are their evil
opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto
to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these
"influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian
oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these
authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive--in fact, they might
influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote
is Professor Benjamin Wiker.
Are you dazed and confused by Barack Obama, the nominal
Democrat, whose conduct as president since 2009 has seen him sink from nearly
70 percent to 40 percent or less in the national polling, from which he has
seemed to learn nothing, but still marches on? Fear not, the doctor is in: Fred
Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose latest book, “The Revolt Against The
Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class”, explains all you
wanted to know about Obama, and much else.
_______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
What a lost prison manuscript reveals about the real Nelson Mandela. An example:
“Unquestionably, my sympathies lay with Cuba [during
the 1962 missile crisis]. The ability of a small state to defend its
independence demonstrates in no uncertain terms the superiority of socialism
over capitalism.”
________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Are we facing a dangerous period of global cooling? That´s
not a question that many have been asking. But reports that there has been a
sharp reduction in sunspot activity raises that possibility. It has happened
before….. The result of the “Maunder Minimum” of sunspots was a so-called
Little Ice Age,
One of the latest badges of greenie virtue is the mini-car.
Supposedly, if you drive one of these little contraptions, you demonstrate your
concern for Mother Gaia and help diminish the risk that catastrophic global
warming will engulf low lying coastal areas and fry the rest of us in
temperatures that will be a couple of degrees higher in the next hundred years.
In this worldview, people who drive around in SUVs are carelessly risking the
very future of humanity……what about the risk of serious injury when one of
these tiny vehicles encounters an obstacle?
_______________________________________________________________________
REPUBLICAN CIVIL WAR
As the battle between the grassroots and the establishment
sides of the Republican Party rages on, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is taking a
very public stance on the side of the establishment. “I Embrace Being a
Chamber of Commerce Republican”
As House Republican leaders prepare an immigration proposal
that could go much further towards amnesty than their prior public stances,
conservative lawmakers are quietly plotting to push back.
“In the latest indication of a growing libertarian wing of
the GOP, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution Friday calling
for an investigation into the “gross infringement” of Americans’ rights by
National Security Agency programs that were revealed by Edward Snowden.”
Libertarian wing of GOP gains
strength in Congress
________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Think it´s hard to enroll in ObamaCare? Try getting out of
it. Missouri
resident Lesli Hill learned the hard way that terminating an Affordable Care
Act plan can be far more difficult than navigating the website to buy one. She
spent six weeks being bounced from operator to operator, calling the help line,
using the online chat, blasting out emails to anyone who would listen, before
ultimately driving to Kansas City last week to enlist her insurance company´s
help. Only then was she able to break through the bureaucratic logjam, and
cancel her policy.
“This isn’t your grandparents’ rally” Every January for the past 40 years, a large
group of anti-abortion advocates has gathered on the National Mall and then
marched to the Supreme Court to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Organizers say their participants in the past few years have numbered from
200,000 to 400,000, a large part of whom are young people, and yet they remain
perplexed why one of the largest demonstrations in Washington, D.C., gets
little of the attention they feel it is due.
This week ABC and NBC allocated a total of 46 seconds
covering the event; CBS failed to even mention it. The big three did, however,
spend 4 minutes and 41 seconds covering the National Zoo's baby panda
Quite a few gathered in Olympia as well.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has effectively declared that
anyone who holds a pro-life position should leave the state.
To the delight of dorm rooms everywhere, President Obama has
all but endorsed marijuana legalization. "I don't think it is more
dangerous than alcohol." He called
the Colorado and Washington legalization experiments
"important for society," while offering no comment on the federal
Controlled Substances Act that he has an obligation to enforce equally across
the country.
It may be awhile before national corporations blatantly
target the stoner market with mainstream advertising campaigns, but many
companies have found a way to infiltrate the late-night psyche of the cannabis
cult insurgence by producing commercials with subliminal messages aimed at
turning the marijuana munchies into big business.
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
“Another scary debt chart.”
________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"[T]he best way
of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or
driving them out of it. Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a
change in their manners. ... [T]he more public provisions were made for the
poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And,
on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves,
and became richer. More will be done for their happiness by inuring them to
provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among
them."
-Benjamin Franklin (1766)
"If a republican
government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because
the citizens neglect the Divine commands, and elect bad men to make and
administer the laws."
-Noah Webster
__________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: According to a
new study, smog is drifting across the Pacific Ocean from China and
polluting our West Coast. Can't we make anything in this country anymore?..... President
Obama is getting serious about this NSA spying scandal. He told the nation that
the NSA will not be used "for the purpose of suppressing or burdening criticism
or dissent." You see, that's what the IRS is for. That’s their job.
Fallon: Yesterday the Denver Broncos and the Seattle
Seahawks advanced to the big game, which means this year’s Super Bowl will have
teams from the two states where recreational marijuana is legal. Or as pizza
delivery men put it, "Pray for us."
posted by gary at
7:44 AM
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