RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/18/white-house-employers-can-prevent-job-losses-after-minimum-wage-hike-by-accepting-lower-profit-margins/?print=1

The White House lauded a Congressional Budget Office report on the proposed minimum wage hike to $10.10 per hour while brushing off one key finding: that such a bill could cost half a million jobs, and maybe more.

“The new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report finds that 16.5 million workers would get a raise from increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and this would help millions of hard-working families, reduce poverty, and increase the overall wages going to lower-income households,” Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Betsey Stevenson, Council of Economic Advisers member, wrote in a White House blog post this afternoon.

“On employment, CBO’s central estimate is that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would lead to a 0.3 percent decrease in employment and CBO acknowledges that the employment impact could be essentially zero,” they continued. “But even these estimates do not reflect the overall consensus view of economists which is that raising the minimum wage has little or no negative effect on employment. For example, seven Nobel Prize winners and more than 600 other economists recently stated that: ‘In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.’”

The CBO report says that “once fully implemented in the second half of 2016, the $10.10 option would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent, CBO projects.”

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/18/ayatollah-dismisses-nuke-deal-white-house-official-says-they-have-sober-frame-of-mind/

A senior administration official admitted that the Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments about a nuclear deal being doomed and duplicitous should slightly lower expectations going into the next round of talks in Vienna.

The P5+1 is meeting to take the six-month interim agreement and forge it into a long-term agreement, but the Supreme Leader’s statements sought to dampen any real or feigned optimism from the White House.

Some assume nuclear talks wud solve problems,but as I said b4 I’m not positive abt negotation,it won’t get anywhere but I’m not against it.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

The nuclear issue is an excuse, if the nuclear [issue] is solved, they’ll look for a new issue.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

What the Foreign Ministry has started will be continued, Iran will not violate its commitments but I am saying now it will not get anywhere.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

Iranian nation wanted to reassure the hardworking officials that the Iranian nation is standing up, do not feel weak when facing the enemy.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371412/shrinking-imperialist-president-jonah-goldberg

Of all the time-honored failings for which we criticize sitting presidents — by “we” I mean pundits, academics, and other members of the chattering phylum — two charges stand out: imperialism and shrinkage. Usually it’s one or the other.

When the president is unpopular or when he’s lost control of his agenda or when he just seems inadequate to the demands of the job, the headline “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” proliferates like kudzu. When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, The Economist proclaimed “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” of George W. Bush on its cover. Barack Obama has been diagnosed with presidential shrinkage many times, including in Politico, the New York Times, and my own National Review.

The flip side of the shrinking presidency is the imperial presidency, something we’ve been fretting about, by name, since at least Franklin Roosevelt and in principle since the Founding.

Politically, what is remarkable is that Obama seems to be doing both at the same time. His “Year of Action” — intended to dispel that lame-duck scent — is simultaneously Caesar-like and pathetic. (Maybe the presidential seal should depict that dude from the Little Caesars pizza commercials?) Last week, he announced that he would unilaterally raise the minimum wage for federal contractors seeking new work. Only 1 percent of the workforce makes the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and vanishingly few of them work for the federal government. This probably explains why the White House wouldn’t give an actual number when asked how many people his bold action would benefit.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/ukraine-in-flames/print/Putin’s stooges ruthlessly crack down on Ukrainians’ cry for freedom and independence.

Parts of the Ukrainian capital were on fire last night as protesters battled security forces of that nation’s repressive government — months after it announced Ukraine would align itself with Russia instead of the European Union.

After a late-night pow-wow with opposition figures Vitaly Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych blamed the violent episodes on opposition leaders, but added that it was still “not too late to stop the conflict.”

Activists took over City Hall in Kiev yesterday and anti-riot police moved into Independence Square. BBC reports that at least 18 people were killed Tuesday, including seven police officers, in the worst outbreak of violence in weeks.

Many Ukrainians came to the main protest camp, the Maidan, to support activists who have reportedly been trained to defend barricades from riot police. Supporters had to walk because authorities completely shut down Kiev’s metro, claiming that there is a danger of “terror acts.” It was the first time the metro was shuttered since Ukraine declared independence in 1991.

The explosion of anger comes a month after four anti-government protesters were killed in central Kiev.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/9-out-of-10-saudi-men-say-eyeshadow-on-women-causes-sexual-assaults/

Why are Saudi men attacking women? According to 9 out out of 10 Saudi men, it’s all about the eyeshadow. It has to be the eyeshadow since there’s not much else you can see of a traditional Saudi woman’s face.

In entirely unrelated news…

“The flash memory of mobile phones taken from teenagers showed 69.7% of 1,470 files saved in them were pornographic and 8.6% were related to violence,” said report author Professor Abdullah al-Rasheed.

Whew. I would have thought it would be the other way around.

Saudi Arabia was the only country to generate more searches than Pornistan for an animal, coming in at position 1 for ‘fox sex’. They also finished second or third for a good number of the abovementioned animal terms.

Probably the foxes were wearing too much makeup.

Far be it from me to criticize Islamic culture, but maybe this situation can be resolved by building a giant fence around Saudi Arabia and not letting any Saudi men leave. The Saudi women and the foxes will however be provided with sanctuary in a saner place. Like maybe Somalia.

A survey conducted by the King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue in Saudi Arabia shows that Saudi men blame women for the rising rate of molestation in the Gulf. The poll surveyed 992 men and women.

Ironically, in a country where women are required to wear full-face and body coverings in public, over 86% of men said that excessive makeup was the main cause of the increase in public molestation of women.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-islamic-grinch-who-stole-the-olympics-on-the-glazov-gang/This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Tommi Trudeau, the Producer of Groovy Foods, and Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

The Gang gathered to discuss A Day in the Life of Trying to Sign Up for ObamaCare. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on Tommi Trudeau’s harrowing odyssey in the eerie world of the “Affordable Care Act.“ The segment also involved an analysis of The Lawless Presidency.

In Part I, the Gang discussed The Islamic Grinch Who Stole the Olympics, gauging why the Olympics strike at the heart of Islamic ideology — and why jihadists yearn to annihilate them. The segment also dealt with Jihad Migrating to Red States With Obama’s Blessings, analyzing why the president is easing immigration requirements for those linked to terror.

Watch both parts of the two-part episode below:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/the-folly-of-open-borders/print/

Ceuta is one of two small Spanish enclaves in North Africa, the second being Melilla. They provide the only possible entry to European territory without leaving Africa. Ceuta is separated from the Iberian Peninsula by the Strait of Gibraltar, and lies at the strategically important boundary between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. 1300 years ago, Muslims used it as a staging ground for their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and their aggressive inroads into Europe. The tide took centuries to turn, but in 1415 the Portuguese conquered Ceuta. This event marked the beginning of half a millennium of European dynamism and global expansion.

It is ironic that Ceuta is now once again at the front lines. This time we are witnessing the retreat and decline of Europe, and the demographic expansion of Africa and the Islamic world. As one member of Spain’s maritime rescue services commented in late 2013: “It has been a very busy summer, because we’re now also rescuing Africans who not only cross in a toy boat but haven’t even spent money on buying proper oars.”

Apart from scaling the fences at Ceuta and Melilla, other common routes into Europe are by boat, sometimes via Spain’s Canary Islands off the Atlantic coast of North Africa, but more frequently to Mediterranean islands such as Italy’s Lampedusa. Some also enter Europe from the east, via the Greek islands. Greece has a huge problem with illegal immigrants, many of them Muslims coming from as far east as Afghanistan.

The tiny island of Malta, which is a member of the EU, has already received tens of thousands of illegal immigrants coming in by boat. Many of the arrivals hail from the poorest and most war-torn parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Their arrival constitutes a heavy burden for such a small nation.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303491404579390523100612640?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecond

A billionaire environmentalist threatens to target a Senate Democrat with negative ads.

GLOBAL-WARMING ACTIVISM HEATS UP
Tom Steyer made a fortune as a hedge fund manager at Farallon Capital, in part from investments related to fossil fuels. But now that he’s sitting atop a pile estimated at $1.5 billion, he’s been aggressively seeking to prevent others from making a living from such energy sources. Mr. Steyer has funded a media campaign against approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and leads a political organization called NextGen Climate Action.
And although Mr. Steyer is now among the most visible environmental activists in the country, he still maintains a significant footprint upon the landscape. The New York Times reports on a recent meeting at his 1,800-acre California ranch, at which the former hedgie urged other enviro-donors to join with him to assemble $100 million to spend on the 2014 elections.
Interestingly, the group is considering political attacks on not just Republicans, but even Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat facing a tough re-election campaign. It’s true that she has posed as a friend of the oil and gas industry in her state. But we wonder how aggressively Mr. Steyer and his pals will attack Ms. Landrieu with control of the Senate hanging in the balance.

Mr. Steyer also aspires to have an impact beyond this fall’s elections, and specifically to broaden support for his cause. The Times notes: “In their advertising and research, Mr. Steyer and his aides have sought to craft appeals that would reach beyond affluent white liberals on the coasts.” Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, whatever happens in this fall’s elections, President Obama has embarked on a new plan to administratively slow U.S. development of shale gas while simultaneously creating new subsidies for green energy. Yale Law professor Donald Elliott explains.
And speaking of President Obama, in California he introduced global warming as an explanation for government policies that are routing water away from farmers and toward a fish called the delta smelt.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2014/02/17/past-present-and-future.html

By one of those odd coincidences, I had just finished watching Clint Eastwood’s movie on the rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover when I came across the following commentary, written by J. R. Nyquist in his blog titled, The Time Traveler’s Lesson. It is of an imaginary interrogation by Hoover himself of a man taken into custody by the FBI in 1964 claiming to be from the future and describing America in 2014.

Hoover, back in 1964, upon hearing the time traveler’s description explodes in outrage, finding the account the most egregious nonsense he has ever heard. No doubt, Hoover concludes, this man’s description of life in the United States 50 years hence is an unmitigated hoax or the man is certifiable insane. But what is it that the time traveler describes?

“America in the future will be led by a black man with an Arabic name mentored as a youth by a suspected Communist subversive named Frank Marshall Davis.

“The time traveler explains that the leading social question of 2014 is gay marriage. Hoover angrily asks if the NASA thinks this is funny; to play such a practical joke on the FBI?

“Neither does Hoover credit the time traveler’s absurd claim that the national debt is more than $17 trillion in 2014, or that Venezuela and Nicaragua have been quietly taken over by Fidel Castro’s friends, that Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa and the Congo are in the hands of African Communists, that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons. None of this is believable. None of it makes any sense to someone living in 1964 during the Cold War.

http://www.steynonline.com/6101/hath-not-a-jew-eyes

When my troubles with the Canadian Islamic Congress and the “human rights” commissions began up north, I quickly learned something my comrade Ezra Levant was already well up to speed on – that Canada’s “official Jews” (as he calls them) were among the most useless people on the planet. Under Bernie Farber, for example, the Canadian Jewish Congress was obsessive about the last three neo-Nazi losers living in their mum’s basement and contributing unread blog posts to obscure “white supremacist” websites. But it had nothing to say about the broad-daylight mass Jew-hatred and, indeed, brazen incitement to murder of large groups of people parading through downtown Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Farber & Co were cardboard warriors, capable only of fighting the battles others had already won long ago.

And so it goes for America’s “official Jews”:

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman believes that anti-Semitism is at its height since the Holocaust, and threatens the lives of Jews all around the world.

He got that right. He got everything else wrong:

“Europe is where the Jewish people have paid the highest price for anti-Semitism, and it’s sort of an old-new phenomenon,” he said, defining it as “nationalists, anti-government people, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis of anti-immigration and anti-government coming together with a glue and cement of anti-Semitism. I think it’s a serious threat to Jewish life.”

Is it really possible in 2014 even for the capo di tutti capi of official Jews to be so blind? Foxman is either the most wicked dissembler or, to be more charitable, he reflects merely the blinkered parochialism of America’s liberal Jewish elites. Unlike the head of the ADL, I have no special interest in or responsibility for the welfare of the Jewish people, but I have been to Toulouse, Antwerp, Malmö and the old Jewish East End of London, and I know what I have seen there.