op ed review 4/5
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Netanyahu BLASTS Obama’s Nuclear
Deal: “Would Not Block Iran’s Path
to Bomb. It Would Pave It”
Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei called for “Death to
America” the day after President Obama appealed to Iran to seize a “historic
opportunity” for a nuclear deal.
The White House dismissed Khamenei’s “Death to America”
rhetoric, telling CNN that it was “intended for a domestic political audience.”
Iran militia chief: Destroying Israel is ‘nonnegotiable’
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declares that
“reading the Quran” reminds him of “quintessential American values.”
John Kerry says nuclear deal with Iran will happen: “If
Allah Wills It”
The Clinton Foundation received money from "a front for
the government of Iran" called the Alavi Foundation. The front gave the
Clintons $30,000 between April 2005 and March 2006, according to tax forms.
Gallup: “Concern About Environment Down – Americans Worry
Least About Global Warming”
Pizzeria Owner Doesn’t Know If They Will Re-Open Following
Backlash Over Gay Weddings Comment…..‘We’re In Hiding':
The greatly anticipated “fix” to the Indiana religious
freedom law has been released by the Indiana legislative committee, and it is
far worse than conservatives feared. According to law professor Mark Rienzi,
the new fix will allow the state to prosecute Christians criminally for denying
gay weddings their professional affirmation.
Indiana Republicans in the state legislature caved to
pressure from the left regarding the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which
simply preserved the right of religious people to act according to their rights
in their businesses, so long as those principles did not conflict with a
“compelling state interest.”
A fundraiser for the owners of an Indiana pizzeria that is
under attack for refusing to cater a same-sex wedding reception has
collected more than $828,000 from online donors.
The next explosion of illegal teen border crossing is in
full swing, but just one-in-six are being sent home, with most of the rest
settled in the United States, according to new government figures.
Illegal immigrant with drug resistant tuberculosis to be
released in US
Supreme Court: when
it comes to a display of patriotism, school safety is more important than free
speech. The Supreme Court declined to
hear the case of a group of California students who were sent home after they
wore American flag-themed shirts on Cinco de Mayo because the school feared the
act would spark racial violence.
The Tax Foundation named April 24 as the day when taxpayers
have finished paying off Big Brother and can get on to actually making money
for themselves. The cost of feeding the leviathan is so high that Americans will
spend more in paying taxes than they do in housing, clothing and food combined.
Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who was recovered in
Afghanistan last spring after five years in captivity, faces charges of
desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, according to his lawyer.
Everything The White House Told You
About Bowe Bergdahl Was Wrong
Sen. Ted Cruz opened the first major campaign of the 2016
presidential season Monday with a kickoff speech courting cultural
conservatives and declaring that he will devote himself to “reigniting the
promise of America.”
Apparently it is again okay to use the pejorative “uppity” against
minorities, if they are conservatives. Ted Cruz is a historic Senator and
presidential candidate, the first Cuban-American to join either club, and for
that reason (and his unapologetic conservatism) the media is out for blood.
"Well, look, there´s nothing like the warm embrace of
the mainstream media," Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox New Tuesday night, after
various liberal media outlets bashed him as a "scary,"
"dangerous," "slimy" no-compromiser with a "hardline
conservative message." For starters.
Reporters have been
warned: Here are the words that you
can’t use to describe Hillary Clinton: “polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere,
ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident...”
Former IRS ethics office lawyer disbarred for ethics
violations. The lawyer, Takisha Brown,
reportedly had bragged that she would never be punished because her boss would
protect her,
__________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Thomas Sowell 3/18
It is fascinating to
see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious -- and to see an even
larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious. A recent story in
a San Francisco newspaper says that some restaurants and grocery stores in
Oakland's Chinatown have closed after the city's minimum wage was raised. Other
small businesses there are not sure they are going to survive, since many
depend on a thin profit margin and a high volume of sales.
At an angry meeting
between local small business owners and city officials, the local organization
that had campaigned for the higher minimum wage was absent. They were probably
some place congratulating themselves on having passed a humane "living
wage" law. The group most affected was also absent -- inexperienced and
unskilled young people, who need a job to get some experience, even more than
they need the money.
It is not a
breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge that minimum wage laws reduce
employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age. It has
been happening around the world, for generation after generation, and in the
most diverse countries. It is not just the young who are affected when minimum wage
rates are set according to the fashionable notions of third parties, with
little or no regard for whether everyone is productive enough to be worth
paying the minimum wage they set.
You can check this
out for yourself. Go to your local public library and pick up a copy of the
distinguished British magazine "The Economist." Whether it is the
current issue or a back issue doesn't matter. Spain, Greece and South Africa
will be easy to locate in the table near the back, which lists data for various
countries. Just look down the unemployment column for countries with
unemployment rates around 25 percent. Spain, Greece and South Africa are always
there, whether or not there is a recession. Why? Because they have very
generous minimum wage laws.
While you are there,
you can look up the unemployment rate for Switzerland, which has no minimum
wage law at all. Over the years, I have never seen the unemployment rate in
Switzerland reach as high as 4 percent. Back in 2003, "The Economist"
magazine reported: "Switzerland's unemployment neared a five-year high of
3.9% in February."
In the United
States, back in what liberals think of as the bad old days before there was a
federal minimum wage law, the annual unemployment rate during Calvin Coolidge's
last four years as president ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8
percent.
Low-income
minorities are often hardest hit by the unemployment that follows in the wake
of minimum wage laws. The last year when the black unemployment rate was lower
than the white unemployment rate was 1930, the last year before there was a
federal minimum wage law. The following year, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was
passed, requiring minimum wages in the construction industry. This was in
response to complaints that construction companies with non-union black
construction workers were able to underbid construction companies with
unionized white workers (whose unions would not admit blacks).
Looking back over my
own life, I realize now how lucky I was when I left home in 1948, at the age of
17, to become self-supporting. The unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old
blacks at that time was under 10 percent. Inflation had made the minimum wage
law, passed ten years earlier, irrelevant. But it was only a matter of time
before liberal compassion led to repeated increases in the minimum wage, to
keep up with inflation. The annual unemployment rate for black teenagers has
never been less than 20 percent in the past 50 years, and has ranged as high as
over 50 percent.
You can check these numbers
in a table of official government statistics on page 42 of Professor Walter
Williams' book "Race and Economics." Incidentally, the black-white
gap in unemployment rates for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was virtually
non-existent back in 1948. But the black teenage unemployment rate has been
more than double that for white teenagers for every year since 1971.
This is just one of
many policies that allow liberals to go around feeling good about themselves,
while leaving havoc in their wake.
_______________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“So now President Obama wants to make an agreement that will
ensure that Iran can produce an atom bomb essentially overnight…….all I can
think of is Churchill’s rebuke to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he
returned from his infamous appeasement of Hitler in Munch in 1938. “You were
given the choice between war and dishonor,” Churchill thundered in Parliament.
“You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Certainly President Obama is
choosing dishonor. What kind of war he might unleash, the world watches with
dread.”
-Myron Magnet
“It appears that those who voted for Barack Obama for
president simply because he is black are now urging we vote for Hillary Clinton
simply because she is a woman. At a recent public event, Clinton asked her
Democrat supporters, "I suppose it´s fair to say: don´t you someday want
to see a woman president?" My answer to that ridiculous remark is-´that
would depend on the woman.´ That woman should be as qualified as any male
candidate but if they believe that Hillary is eligible then that means they
plan to vet her as as poorly as they did Barack….”
-Alicia
Colon
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Newly elected Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), wooed voters by
pledging to address man-made global warming with initiatives like cap and
trade. On Feb. 4, Beyer wrote on his website, "In all, extreme weather
events triggered over $110 billion in losses and almost 7,000 fatalities"
in 2014. He reiterated that claim a month later: "More than 7,000 Americans lost their
lives to climate change-fueled events last year." That's pretty startling. And egregiously
wrong. PolitiFact writes, "Of the
7,700 deaths, 850 were caused by earthquakes. The remaining 6,850 deaths were
caused by 'weather-related' events."
________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Shifts in the world’s major religions will see Islam growing
faster than any other faith, with the number of Muslims nearly equaling that of
Christians by 2050.
Federal authorities have arrested two women who were
allegedly planning to detonate a bomb in the New York City area after being
radicalized at least in part by ISIS
A kind of tipping point may have been reached in recent
weeks…..with the loss of Yemen, America has been deprived of one of its main
bulwarks against Islamist forces. “The evacuation of 125 United States Special
Operations advisers from Yemen in the past two days is the latest blow to the
Obama administration’s counterterrorism campaign, which is already struggling
with significant setbacks in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the volatile region,
American officials said Sunday.”
A video sting
operation shows Cornell’s assistant dean for students agreeing to allow an ISIS
training camp for students. “It’s just like bringing in a coach, to do a
training, a sports trainer or something,” the Cornell official said.
_________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Beltway pundits routinely grant Democrats in 2016 an
advantage in the Electoral College. The magic number is 270 electoral votes.
Twenty-four states are almost certain to go Republican: Alabama, Alaska,
Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia,
and Wyoming, with a combined total of 204 electoral votes. Any Republican candidate
who fails to carry any of those states is going to lose the presidential
election anyway. Where will the (additional) 66 electoral votes needed to win the
election come from?
Republicans have a real opportunity to connect with voters
and win big in 2016. But to do so, they´ll have to get over their traditional
love for Big Business. But the fact is
that many big businesses are unpopular with the public, aligned with the
Democrats, and wide open for attack. And after eight years of the Obama
administration´s naked cronyism and support of Wall Street even as the middle
class has suffered, the opportunities are there.
Propaganda: The overreaction by politicians and advocacy
groups to Indiana´s religious freedom law is distressing enough. Worse is the
fact that big companies are now amplifying the disinformation campaign. Apple
CEO Tim Cook wasn´t the only business executive to condemn Indiana´s law, but
he was the most prominent. And, like others, he merely added to the confusion
while exposing his hypocrisy. In his Sunday Washington Post op-ed, Cook
complained that Indiana is part of a "new wave of legislation"
designed to discriminate against gays. New wave? Nineteen states already have
laws substantially like Indiana´s — most of them enacted over a decade ago.
Everything about the so-called deal with Iran, including the
reputations of the men who negotiated it, is a lie. It’s likely to be a deadly
lie for millions of people who will die on account of it. The world should mark
well everyone responsible for it.
For small-town America, new immigrants pose linguistic,
cultural challenges A new generation of immigrants is arriving in Midwest towns
from far-flung places such as Myanmar, Somalia, and Iraq. The communities are
trying to adjust.
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased
at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God."
-Patrick Henry
posted by gary at
7:33 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home