Sunday, April 5, 2015

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,
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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.


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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
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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

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