Stella awed to find her teacher on You add what offends you this time.
the same plane from Pittsburgh to
Miami.
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Rumor regarding Condi Rice as VP on Trump ticket would be a clever idea. Black, female and experienced. Condi would be vulnerable to being associated with GW and she went along with many of the matters others claim were mistakes. She is an accomplished pianist, far better than Harry Truman.
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Defiant N Korea. (See 1 below.)
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Meanwhile, as I have been writing, Obama and his many blunders has pushed the Israelis closer to their neighbors. (See 2 below.)
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As money continues to flow from anti-Semitic sources, there are always unsuspecting radical ignoramuses among the Jewish college community available and ready to join in and spew their hatred of Israel. The college campus is generally where this type of venom begins but, after a sustained period of repetition, it eventually spreads and spills over into the streets .
This is where we are today and the Obama Administration takes comfort in the fact that this growing anti-Israel sentiment aligns with their own efforts to blame Israel. Why? Because Obama's America is failing, and, as is his style, he needs a convenient political scapegoat. Lamentably Israel has become Obama's stuckee on which he seeks to place his false narrative tail.
Because he is Jewish, Bernie adds credibility to the growing contemptuous attitude toward Israel among the Far Left radicals who are now in command of the Democrat Party. They too need a convenient source to blame for all the world's ills. and the plight of the 'conquered' Palestinians is most suitable.
The fact that Palestinians kill claiming justified retribution and are where they are because of corrupt leadership and poor choices is conveniently ignored. Every time Israel offered to meet them more than half way they seek more and then reject what is offered because it keeps the money rolling in from the patsy's in the West.
The stupidity of this drama would be understood if it were made into a movie or TV Drama but it is far easier to manipulate propaganda because the world eventually tires of supporting the strong and eventually embraces the weak and in the process facts are twisted to suit the new orchestrated theme.
I have seen this play many times in my life and the flame is generally lit by the match of a demagogue, a silver tongued orator. I leave the 'who' to your imagination. (See 3 below.)
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I recently was told California's Governor was smart to raise the minimum wage because California was having to pay too much in welfare benefits and by raising the minimum wage it off loaded the problem on the backs of business.
Perhaps my learned friend is correct in his assessment but I am not persuaded.
Something tells me what you gain on one end, if you even do, you lose on the other as taxes drop and businesses either go under or flee the state and eventually more people lose their job to technology.
I read where driver less trucks are coming.
You decide. (See 4 below.)
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The best evidence I have to demonstrate that Capitalism is being crushed by Government is the length of my proxy statements.
They used to run a few pages and now they are so full of inane information, required by The SEC, I neither read them nor can understand them if I did.
What they also have become is a paper shill for corporate managers and their friendly directors who earn millions which they claim is justified because of the legal risks they assume. Why? Because we have too many plaintiff lawyers looking to scam stockholders with frivolous derivative action law suits.
Entire sections now must be devoted to justifying why a particular director was chosen and other sections reveal enormous fees now extracted by accountants for extended audits demanded by The SEC. and the list of self serving and crippling regulations simply grows exponentially.
We have taken economic functions, complicated them and increased the likelihood of violations and law suits. Thank you Uncle Sam!
What the Trump phenomenon is about is the recognition by the poor working slobs they need to recapture their destiny and retake government from the do good politicians who place themselves above the laws they pass for others and who get rich serving us.
Is it too late? Is Trump the best vehicle to ride into battle? I believe the answer is probably yes to the first and we will not know to the second.
I do believe the alternatives are equally threatening if not decidedly worse.
But the same negative attitude exists towards America, Capitalism etc. among most elitists, liberals and progressives. Therefore, I am re-posting Dennis Prager's explanation because I believe it is one of the very best I have read.
However, I believe Prager left out a very important word - relativism. Why? because once everything is relative the need for standards also disappears.
Relativism allows for a wide range of excuses and explanations and permits leveling the playing field and is non discriminatory in nature. It fits neatly with the concept of affirmative action which is a method of giving an edge because of prior discrimination and allows one to be elevated without the need to earn. Allowing everyone to achieve cheapens the meaning of making an effort.
Of course AA is reverse discrimination but achieving the desired goal is more important than the method used. The negative side of history must be rectified. Again, I am reminded of the Colonel in The Tea House and The August Moon who said of the natives he '...was going to teach them democracy even if it meant having to kill everyone of them.'
Allowing people to succeed without trying makes one feel good and feeling good is an important goal. After all self worth is virtuous and we should all aspire to loving ourselves even if it is a bit narcissistic.
But since Westerners are hated and reviled by so many who have been persecuted how can Westerners possibly feel good about themselves so those who resist must be evil.
Lay guilt on me brother for things I did not do because past sins must be assuaged and time sequences are irrelevant and meaningless. It's the new gotcha game and whatever Lola wants Lola not only gets but she is entitled to have. Just ask the virtuous do gooders. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)
South Korean leader says North ready to stage 5th nuclear test
By Kim Gamel
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea President Park Geun-hye said Tuesday that North Korea is ready to stage a fifth nuclear test at any time, but she warned Pyongyang will face tougher sanctions if it goes through with the test.
North Korea “completed its preparations for a fifth nuclear test and it is in a situation, in which it can carry out” the test whenever it wants to, Park was quoted as saying during a meeting with chief editors of South Korean newspapers and broadcasters at the presidential office in Seoul. She didn’t elaborate on the claim.
Her statement came as a South Korean news agency reported that the North is believed to have put a new, powerful midrange missile on standby for an impending launch. Yonhap cited an unidentified official in Seoul for the report. South Korea’s Ministry of Defense said it had no intelligence about such plans.
It would be the second effort in less than two weeks to fire a purported Musudan missile, which has the range to reach far-off U.S. military installments in Asia. U.S. officials said another launch on April 15 failed, although they didn’t confirm the type of missile.
Tensions spiked even further this weekend after North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile. South Korean military officials said the missile only flew about 20 miles on Saturday, well short of the roughly 190 miles needed to be a success. But analysts said the North appears to be making significant progress in its weapons programs.
The flurry of tests and threats comes as North Korea gears up for a ruling Workers’ Party congress, which is expected to be held as early as next week. Kim Jong Un is believed to be hoping to use the first such congress in 36 years to consolidate his hold on power.
He is also sending a clear message to the international community that he won’t be intimidated by harsh U.N. sanctions that were imposed after the North staged its fourth nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch earlier this year.
Park insisted the sanctions are starting to have an effect, and she promised to plug any possible loopholes in them.
“If North Korea continues to stage a provocation in disregard of warnings of the international community, it will hasten its collapse,” Park said, according to Yonhap.
She also pointed to the importance of Chinese enforcement of the measures. Beijing, which is a traditional ally and trading partner of North Korea, was key to passage of the sanctions and has shown increasing impatience with Kim Jong Un’s defiance.
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By Michael J. Totten
Israel and the Sunni Arab states inched closer together diplomatically and geopolitically last week when Egypt transferred control of Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia.
It’s not initially obvious why the control of two uninhabited islands moving from one Arab country to another would even affect Israel let alone suggest that Israel’s relations with its neighbors might be improving. The answer lies in the past. These islands have been flashpoints a number of times during the Arab-Israeli conflict, but they won’t be anymore.
They have no value in and of themselves—no resources, no people, no nothing—but look at a map. The two islands bottleneck the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. Any ships that want to reach Israel or Jordan from the south have to pass through there, and the passage is only a few miles across. A fit person could swim from one side to the other without too much trouble.
In 1950, during the early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Saudis asked the more-powerful Egyptians to take control of these islands because they feared the Israelis might seize them. Just as the Saudis feared, six years later the Israelis took Tiran Island during the Suez Crisis in 1956, and again in 1967 when Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the straits and precipitated the Six Day War. The Saudis wouldn’t have been able to hold the Israelis back, but as it turned out, neither could the Egyptians.
Things have settled down in the meantime. The Egyptians and Saudis aren’t worried about Israel anymore. There’s no point. The Israelis are spectacularly uninterested in another war with Egypt, and they’ve never fought a war with the Saudis. Cairo and Riyadh—like most Arab capitals—are far more worried about Iran, especially now that Washington is letting Tehran come in from the cold as part of the nuclear “deal.”
So Egypt returned control of Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia.
Egypt’s dictator General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has turned out to be a staunch champion of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, not because he loves the Israelis—surely he doesn’t—but because, like all Egyptian Army officers, he’s painfully aware that another war with Israel would be just as stupid and pointless as the previous wars with Israel and that Egypt would get its ass kicked all over again for nothing. And he’s realistic enough to know that the Israelis won’t wake up some random morning and decide to bomb Cairo just for the hell of it.
The transfer of the islands back to the Saudis “relates to us and it does not bother us,” Israeli Knesset member Tzachi Hanegb said. “The Saudis, who are committed to freedom of shipping under international law, will not harm the essence of the agreement between Egypt and us in this regard, and freedom of shipping in Aqaba and Eilat will remain as is.”
The Saudis are congenitally incapable of saying anything friendly about Israel in public—behind closed doors, the Saudis get along with Israel fine—but Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir nevertheless said, “There is an agreement and commitments that Egypt accepted related to these islands, and the kingdom is committed to these.”
He’s referring to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1979, which guarantees passage of Israeli ships through the Straits of Tiran.
By publicly agreeing to respect Israel’s right to this particular international waterway, the Saudis are implicitly agreeing to at least part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty despite the fact that no formal peace treaty exists yet between Jerusalem and Riyadh.
How far those two little islands have come. They started out as pieces on the board in the region-wide Arab-Israeli conflict, and now they symbolize a long overdue thaw.
Israelis and Arabs may never like each other, but they don’t have to. Look at the Greeks and the Turks. They’ve hated each other’s guts for hundreds of years, they ethnically cleansed each other in 1923 and again on the island of Cyprus in the 1970s, but the Soviet Union was a lightning rod during the Cold War, and they set aside their longstanding hostility and agreed to work with each other within the framework of NATO.
Israel was similarly a kind of lightning rod in the Middle East that unified the Arabs, but today Iran is the lightning rod. The real threat from Iran is uniting most of the Arab states, and it’s triggering a serious rethink about the non-threat from the Jewish state.
It’s the Iranian government’s greatest diplomatic and propaganda failure. When the revolutionary regime seized power from the Shah in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini attempted to rally the Arab world behind him by singling out the so-called Zionist Entity as a threat to all Muslims. He had his work cut out for him. Hatred of Jews was never as strong a force in Persian culture as it historically has been in Arab culture. For Persians, Arabs—not Jews—were and are the ancient implacable foe. Iran had excellent relations with Israel until 1979 and would still enjoy excellent relations with Israel today if the Khomeinists had not taken over.
The most intractable fault lines in the Middle East are between Sunnis and Shias and between Arabs and Persians, and Iran has both a Persian and a Shia majority. Iran’s rulers can’t easily become the hegemons of an entire region that hates them. Their best bet, perhaps their only bet, was to unite all Muslims—Sunni, Shia, Arab and Persian—against the Jews.
So Khomeini abandoned Iran’s alliance with Israel and threw its support behind terrorist armies like Hamas and Hezbollah.
In The Persian Night, Amir Taheri sums up Khomeini’s pitch to the Arabs this way: “Forget that Iran is Shia, and remember that today it is the only power capable of realizing your most cherished dream, the destruction of Israel. The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood promised you it would throw the Jews into the sea in 1948, but failed. Pan-Arab nationalists, led by Nasser, ushered you into one of your biggest defeats in history, enabling Israel to capture Jerusalem. The Baathists under Saddam Hussein promised to ’burn Israel,’ but ended up bringing the American infidels to Baghdad. Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian ’patriots’ promised to crush the Jewish state, but turned into collaborators on its payroll. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda never gave two hoots about Palestine, focusing only on spectacular operations in the West to win publicity for themselves. Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Hamas did all they could to destroy Israel but lacked the power, like flies attacking an elephant. The only force now willing and able to help realize your dream of a burned Israel and drowning the Jews is the Islamic Republic as created by Khomeini.”
It was a clever plan, but it failed, and its failure is a little more obvious with each passing year. Israel could have been the lighting rod that brought Arabs and Persians, and Sunnis and Shias, together. Instead, the Semitic tribes are slowly inching together. Not warmly—that’s for damn sure—but the Greeks and Turks, along with the Americans and the Saudis, showed the world a long time ago that cold alliances can work almost as effectively.
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3)The facts are hard to swallow, but they are the truth.
I am sorry to tell you that the terror attacks we suffer today and yesterday, a week ago, a month, a year and a decade and century ago, are all part of the same war, the same struggle, the same Jihad waged against us by our neighbors for over a century. Sometimes it is a full scale war with tanks, noise, flames, planes and ships and sometimes it is a war on a slow burner known as “terror” with explosions, stabbings and shots. Each of these is Jihad in Arabic, each is aimed at Jews just for being Jewish.
I regret to remind you of the fact that this war began way before the establishment of the Jewish state declared in 1948. The riots and massacres of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 et al, were not due to a Jewish state or what our enemies call the “occupation” of 1948, and certainly not because of the 1967 “occupation”. The bloody and cruel massacre of the Jews of Hevron in 1929 was carried out against Jews who were not part of the Zionist movement, quite the contrary. The Palestine Liberation Movement (Fatah) was founded, may I remind you, in 1959 and The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, years before the 1967 “occupation” that was a result of Israel winning the Six Day War.I hate to point out to you that the shouts we heard, mainly in the 1948 War of Independence, were “Itbach al Yahud” – “Butcher the Jews” – and not the “Israelis” or the “Zionists,” because their problem is with the Jews who refuse to be dependent on the mercy of Islam, refuse to live as dhimmi, protected ones, the way Islam mandates for Jews and Christians.
In the Arab world, children still sing (in Arabic): “Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs.” The dog, in Islamic tradition, is an unclean animal. Sharia law stipulates that if a Muslim is praying and a dog, pig, woman, Jew or Christian walks in front of him, his prayers are worthless and he must begin the entire ritual once again.
It is not pleasant to tell you this, but Israel’s enemies’ most popular chant is (in Arabic) – “Kyber, Khyber O Jews, Mohammed’s army will yet return.” Khyber is an oasis in the Arabian Peninsula that was populated by Jews until Mohammed slaughtered them in 626 C.E. The chant commemorates that event and threatens a repeat performance. The Jews, according to the Koran (Sura 5, verse 82) are the most hostile enemies of the Moslems. Verse 60 states that Allah’s curse and fury upon them turned them into monkeys and pigs. Since when do monkeys and pigs have the right to a state? Since when are they entitled to sovereignty?
Despite what you think, peace with Egypt was achieved only after Sadat realized that despite Arab efforts to destroy Israel in the 1948 War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the 1967 Six Day War, 1970 War of Attrition, and even the 1973 Yom Kippur War that took Israel by surprise, the Jewish state managed to push back all the Arab armies and bring the war to their territory. That is why Sadat understood that Israel is not conquerable and that there is no choice other than making peace, even if this peace is temporary and based on the precedent of the 628 C.E. Hudabiya Peace in which Mohammed gave a 10 year hiatus to the infidels of Mecca, but broke it at the end of two years when they fell asleep on the watch.
Yassir Arafat did not sign the Oslo Accords because he believed in peace, but because, calling it the “Hudabiya peace,” he saw the agreements as a Trojan horse that would hoodwink the Jews. The only objective of the Oslo Accords was to create a Palestinian entity with an army and weapons that would be used to destroy Israel when the time was ripe. He repeated this constantly, but our decision makers explained that he is only saying it for domestic consumption, and when suicide bombers set themselves off in our streets, the victims were called “victims of peace.” Since when does peace require victims? And when will the rifles we allowed them to obtain be turned on us?It saddens me to tell you that all of Israel’s efforts to please the Hamas Gazans failed, and Hamas went on from being a terrorist organization to becoming a terrorist state. Deathly rockets, attack tunnels, suicide bombers – all are considered legitimate in the eyes of Gaza’s Jihadist government, so to hell with the lives of the men, women and children living there, and to hell with their welfare, health and assets. The Gazans are pawns in the hands of Hamas, the Jihad and the Salafists, all of whom appointed themselves the liaison between the residents of Gaza and Paradise, having already given them a taste of hell on earth.You were wrong again – basing your policy on pipe dreams, delusions and hopes instead of on facts and figures.
It pains me to tell all the soul-weary peace seekers in Israel and the world, that the concrete and iron that you forced us to give the Jihadists in Gaza in order to rebuild their destroyed homes, were used to build tunnels of death both to Gazans and Israelis. Instead of building hospitals, schools and infrastructure, the Jihadists built an infrastructure of death, suffering and disaster.
You were wrong again – basing your policy on pipe dreams, delusions and hopes instead of on facts and figures. Analysts, including me, are not entirely blameless: they said in wondrous harmony that when Hamas has to bear the responsibility for food, electricity and welfare in Gaza, its leaders will become more moderate, realistic and pragmatic.
We were wrong: Hamas, despite leaving the opposition in order to rule, has not ceased its Jihad against Israel and has not removed Israel from the top of its list of priorities, nor has it changed in the slightest its wholly negative view of the “Zionist entity.”
I hate to ruin the “two states for two peoples” party, but I must, because what is happening in Gaza today is exactly what will happen to the second Palestinian state you are trying to establish in Judea and Samaria. Hamas will be the winner of elections for the legislature, as they were in Gaza in January 2006, and will win the presidential elections as well. If they don’t they will take over all of Judea and Samaria in a violent putsch, just as they did in Gaza in 2007. And when that happens, what will you say? “Ooops.we didn’t know.we couldn’t imagine.?” So now you know and do not have to extrapolate. This should be your working hypothesis. If Gaza’s Hamas is digging tunnels of death in the sand today, it will be digging through rocks to build them from Judea and Samaria – and let’s see you find them and blow them up when that happens.
And to anyone with a short memory, let me refresh it: In July 2014, Hamas managed to shut Ben Gurion Airport for a day by launching rockets from Gaza. If and when they gain control of Judea and Samaria, they will be able to shut Ben Gurion down with a slingshot, and will be able to overlook all the runways from the Beit Arye heights. Anyone who does not believe me should get into his car and drive to the top of the hills to the east of Ben Gurion Airport, located in “conquered, occupied territory” (conquered from whom, precisely?).
Due to Israel’s wind conditions, most of the planes that land in Ben Gurion approach from the east, cruising right over those very same hills. Will Hamastan allow planes headed for Israel to circle and approach landing from above its territory? Just what price will Israel have to pay after an RPG or machine gun shoots down one El Al plane, G-d forbid? Will we offer them Jerusalem so as to calm them down?
And if we are already talking about Jerusalem, what will you do when the State of Hamas presents you with an ultimatum: Jerusalem or war? The Temple Mount or we shut down Ben Gurion Airport? And when the world supports their demand for Jerusalem, letting Israel pay the price of calming down radical Islam, what will you say? And when the snipers go back to shooting at passersby on Jerusalem streets from the walls of the Old City as their Jordanian brothers did until 1967, where will you hide? Behind concrete walls? A security fence? Or will you simply move Israel’s capital city to Tel Aviv?
I am sorry to disappoint you but the worst thing that ever happened to Israel’s hopes for peace was the rise of the peace movements, those calling for Israel to establish a terror state in Judea and Samaria and give up East Jerusalem for it. In the Middle East, he who expresses a desire for peace, talks about his yearning for peace and offers his land and country as bribery in exchange for a paper which has the word “peace” on it, is looked upon as someone who lost a war and is begging for his life.
Anyone who does not accept these facts, who is not ready for “blood, sweat and tears,” he who impatiently demands “Peace Now” does not belong in the Middle East. Here, we have room only for the brave, the strong, the steadfast and those who believe in the justice of their cause. Anyone who lacks those traits can find a suitable home somewhere else, where life is peaceful, quiet, prosperous and blooming. May we suggest Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Boston or San Bernardino..The peace movements turned Israel’s image into that of a weak and soft defeatist country, the exact opposite of the kind of country that achieves peace in the Middle East. In the violent and radical region where Israel is trying to survive, anyone considered weak gets kicked, you know exactly where, and is sent to hell in the best case, or butchered and beheaded as a matter of course.In the Middle East, peace means that your enemies leave you alone because you are too strong, threatening and dangerous to start up with. In the Middle East only the unvanquished obtain peace.
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4)Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity
California is the latest state to dive headfirst into the shallow waters of raising the minimum wage. Predictably they are about to suffer, not a broken neck, but instead further injury to their already lackluster economy. Governor Jerry Brown recently announced a deal to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022.
This follows the efforts of other cities to raise their minimum wage last year, specifically Seattle and San Francisco. How did that work out? For large businesses that could pass on the wage increase to customers, no big deal. For smaller businesses such as bookstores or restaurants, not so well. Small businesses in competitive markets are unable to raise prices enough to cover their higher labor expense and instead reduce workers’ hours or simply reduce workers.
Los Angeles-based American Apparel, employing 4,000 workers, responding to the wage increase, “Said it might outsource the making of some garments to another manufacturer in the U.S., and wipe out about 500 local jobs.”
Another LA clothing manufacturer, Joompy, selling its goods to large retailers such as Forever 21, faces a similar predicament. An item formerly costing $5 to produce now costs $6.50, and the big retailers are buying elsewhere to keep their own costs down. As a result, “Joompy may have to start importing goods instead of producing them locally.”
Liberal bastion of higher learning, tolerance, and diversity, the University of California, Berkeley fired 500 employees a week after Governor Jerry Brown signed the new minimum wage bill into law. Coincidence or economics?
Should this be any surprise? Not to anyone with a basic knowledge of economics. One of the first things taught in Economics 101 is the demand curve. Raise the price of something and demand for that something goes down. And vice versa. Put your house on the market for a higher price than it’s worth and see if any buyers are interested. Conversely, set the asking price for less than it’s worth and you will have a bidding war.
Labor is no different. A wage is the price of labor. Raise the wage and fewer employers will want to pay that wage, instead employing fewer workers or giving them less hours. Great for the worker receiving the new higher wage and maintaining their hours. Not so good for the employee laid off or now working part time. Or those replaced with self-serve kiosks, another option to reduce labor costs.
It’s election season and raising the minimum wage is a campaign issue for candidates. Socialist Bernie Sanders wants “a national $15 per hour minimum wage.” Socialist wannabe Hillary Clinton also wants a $15 federal minimum wage, but with stipulations, phasing it in gradually and perhaps not at all in low cost of living areas.
Their hypocrisy is rich. Bernie pays his interns only $12 per hour. Hillary is worse, paying nothing to interns for her campaign or the Clinton Foundation.
Why only $15 per hour as the minimum wage? Why not $20 or $25 per hour? Is $15 really a “living wage”? This translates to roughly $30,000 per year, not even above the 138% Federal Poverty Level which would qualify a family of four for Medicaid. Has anyone asked proponents of a higher minimum wage why only $15 and not $50 an hour?
Who actually earns the minimum wage? Is it the breadwinner for the above family of four? Or a middle-class teenager working his first job while living at home? The Pew Research Center answered the question. Half of minimum wagers are age 16 to 24 and a quarter are age 16-19. Two-thirds are part-time workers. 55% work in leisure and hospitality and 14% work in retail, where tips and commissions supplement wages.
The minimum wagers are typically not the family breadwinner. Those under age 25 live in households with an average family income of $65,900. For those over age 25, the majority live above the poverty line, most work part time, and only 5% are married. Rather than being breadwinners, the typical minimum wage earner is a suburban teenager, not a single parent.
The minimum wage is popular among limousine liberals who fancy themselves as champions of the poor and downtrodden. Unfortunately raising the minimum wage has little effect on poverty or standard of living. Instead it often has the opposite effect of reducing employment and job opportunities, particularly among entry-level workers in low-skilled jobs. In other words, among those who need it the most.
Interestingly the New York Times had this issue right. “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00” they say. “The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable -- and fundamentally flawed.” The only problem was they wrote this in 1987. But hey, even a broken clock is right once a day.
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5)
Why the Left Loathes Western Civilization
By Dennis Prager
This month, Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have their college require a course on Western civilization, as it did until the 1980s.
Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist at the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means "upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations."
The vote — and the column — encapsulated the left's view: In Europe, Latin America and America, it loathes Western civilization.
Wherever there is conflict between the West — identified as white, capitalist or of European roots — and the non-West, the left portrays the West as the villain.
I am referring to the left, not to liberals. The latter generally venerates Western civilization. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, frequently spoke of defending "Christian civilization." Today, the left would likely revile any Westerner who used such language as xenophobic, racist, and fascist.
The left similarly describes any suggestion that anything Western is superior to anything non-Western. Likewise, it dismisses virtually all Western achievements, but regards criticism of anything non-Western as racist, chauvinistic, imperialist, colonialist, xenophobic, etc.
That is why the left is so protective of Islam. America's left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, and does not seem to allow the government to use, the words "Islamic terrorism." And, criticism of Islam is labeled "Islamophobic," thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is not that the left is sympathetic to Islam, for it has contempt for all religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy (the West) must be protected.
That is why the left loathes Israel. If the left actually cared about human rights, women's rights, gay rights, or freedom of speech, religion and press, it would be wildly pro-Israel. But Israel, in the left's view, is white, European and colonialist, or in other words, Western. And the Palestinians are non-Western.
So, the Big Question is, why? Why is the left hostile toward Western civilization?
After decades of considering this question, I have concluded the answer is this: standards.
The left hates standards — moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and it has excelled in all three.
Why does the left hate standards? It hates standards because when there are standards, there is judgment. And leftists don't want to be judged.
Thus, Michelangelo is no better than any contemporary artist, and Rembrandt is no greater than any non-Western artist. So, too, street graffiti — which is essentially the defacing of public and private property, and thus serves to undermine civilization — is "art."
Melody-free, harmony-free, atonal sounds are just as good as Beethoven's music. And Western classical music is no better than the music of any non-Western civilization. Guatemalan poets are every bit as worthy of study as Shakespeare.When the Nobel Prize-winning American novelist Saul Bellow asked an interviewer, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" all hell broke loose on the cultural left. Bellow had implied that the greatest writers of fiction were Western.
Why such antagonism? Because if some art is really better than other art, your art may be judged inferior. The narcissism of left-wing thought does not allow for anyone to be better than you artistically or in any other way. Therefore, all art and artists must be equal.
In the moral realm, the same rejection of standards exists. Thus, the left loathed President Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," because that would mean America was morally superior to the Soviet Union. And such a judgment was unacceptable. The whole left-wing moral vocabulary is a rejection of Western moral standards: "tolerance," "inclusion," "anti-discrimination" (by definition, standards discriminate), "non-judgmental," and even "income inequality," which deems some peoples' work more valuable than others.
Every civilization had slavery. But only thanks to Judeo-Christian civilization was slavery abolished there, and eventually elsewhere. Nevertheless, to speak about any moral superiority of Western or Judeo-Christian civilization is completely unacceptable, thanks to the left's stranglehold on education and most media.
In this regard, the protection of Islam by the left is so thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths such as that the status of women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic world. The veil women wear, for example, is dehumanizing. Yet, in a speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a rabbi who, at the time, was the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that a woman's voluntary choice to wear a head scarf "deserves our respect."
And finally, we come to the left's loathing of the religions of Western civilization — the Judeo-Christian religions, which have clear standards of right and wrong.
Bible-based religions affirm a morally judging God. For the left, that is anathema. For the left, the only judging allowed is leftists' judging of others. No one judges the left — neither man nor God.
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