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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire On Mayor Bill De Blasio’s New York City Workforce? Adam Andrzejewski

By on December 19th, 2018

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/12/18/who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire-on-mayor-bill-de-blasios-new-york-city-workforce/#38472f3b6a99

How to make $1 million? Spend five years or less on the NYC public employee payroll.

There are 1,400 NYC public employees on pace to clear $1 million in total income over the next five years.

The newest members of the New York City millionaire class aren’t television stars, coaches, quarterbacks, tech entrepreneurs, or even Wall Street financiers. The newest millionaires are blue-collar city employees such as mechanics, plumbers, welders, engineers, oilers, prison and fire captains, tractor operators, and more.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com analyzed city payroll data for fiscal year 2017, and found 83,400 employees bringing home $100,000+ incomes. That’s a 10-percent increase from fiscal year 2016.

Search the entire 2017 NYC payroll, click here.

Despite his promise to reform to pay and perquisites, Mayor Bill De Blasio showered the city workforce with billions of dollars in overtime and extra pay. Last year alone, this amounted to $3.2 billion.

Compensation in NYC is more than huge salaries. Last year, 162,000 city workers reaped $2 billion on 34 million hours of overtime. In addition, the city doled out $1.2 billion in extra pay, a category of compensation that includes bonuses, lump sums, allowances, retroactive pay increases, settlement amounts, differentials, and more. Read the mayor’s office’s comment on city overtime, click here.

It’s a citywide problem. We found carpenters nailing down $192,711; plasterers amassing $184,521; and city painters canvasing $168,804. A thermostat repairer can heat his bank account with $213,904.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

WHO IS MICHELLE OBAMA?READ HER THESIS AND SHE’LL TELL YOU BY DAVID GOLDMAN

By on December 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/who-is-michelle-obama-read-her-princeton-thesis-and-shell-tell-you/

Michelle Obama raged against the risk of her “integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure” in her Princeton University thesis. I reviewed this document, remarkable for its rancor as well as for its orthographical dysfunction, during her husband’s first presidential campaign ten years ago. Now that Mrs. Obama has emerged as a prospective candidate for the 2020 presidential election, her radical rant is worth another look.

Below is my 2008 Asia Times essay.

Sing, O Muse, the Wrath of Michelle By Spengler

The wrath of swift-footed Achilles, of which Homer called his muse to sing, nearly lost the Trojan War for the Greeks. The wrath of swift-tongued Michelle Obama well might lose the White House for her husband. We had a peek into her diary last week when the Obama campaign finally made public her undergraduate thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” The contents of this remarkable document sharpen the profile of Obama’s women that I offered last week (“Obama’s women reveal his secret” Asia Times Online, February 26.)

Barack Obama, I argued, evinces a preternatural sangfroid, for he is in America but not of it, a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans. But his wife’s anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt.

Mrs Obama averred that she could not recall the contents of the thesis she composed in 1985, but that cannot be quite true, for it is a poignant cry from the heart. It explains her controversial outburst during the campaign to the effect that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life in 2008, after “feeling so alone” in her “frustration” and “disappointment” at America.

Princeton both humiliated her and corrupted her, Michelle Vaughn Robinson complains in an undergraduate prose that is all the more touching for its clumsiness. By condescending to the young black woman from a Chicago working-class family, the liberal university made Michelle feel like an outsider. Worse, by giving her a ticket to financial success, Princeton caused her to feel that she was selling out to the institutions she most despised.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Human Extinction: Hot Again The New York Times sees some upside and Xi Jinping lauds Mao. By James Freeman

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/human-extinction-hot-again-11545177213

Before condemning any more Donald Trump tweets, take a look at what his critics in Beijing and Manhattan are publishing. The message from both locales is highly disturbing. Still, there’s reason to hope the President can successfully negotiate with China’s communist dictatorship, even if he’ll never win over the editors of the New York Times.

This week the Times runs an op-ed with the headline: “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Strolling along the frontiers of radical environmentalism, author Todd May ponders whether we should all kill ourselves but appears to prefer extinction by attrition:

One might ask here whether… it would… be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying. In contrast, preventing future humans from existing does not introduce such suffering, since those human beings will not exist and therefore not have lives to sacrifice. The two situations, then, are not analogous.

Kudos to Mr. May for discovering that the death of 7.7 billion people might involve some measure of suffering. Such keen insights may ultimately leave readers more amused than shocked, especially when they get to the bottom of the story and learn that he is no less than a “philosophical adviser” to a television program starring Ted Danson. It remains unclear from the Times op-ed whether the author is in charge of all philosophical advice for the NBC comedy “The Good Place” or merely one of a number of people ready to offer such assistance on set. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Left Lends Cover to Anti-Semitism By Ben Shapiro

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/alice-walker-anti-semitism-the-left-lends-cover/

Ignoring anti-Semitic actions or comments depending on the perpetrator’s ethnicity or background allows hatred of Jews to spread.

This week, The New York Times Review of Books printed an interview with Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple. The interviewer asked Walker to list the books on her nightstand. Most were unobjectionable. One was not: a book titled And the Truth Shall Set You Free, by David Icke. Walker described the book thusly: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”

As Yair Rosenberg of Tablet noted, this is a bit of problem. As it turns out, Icke is a rabid anti-Semite, and And the Truth Shall Set You Free is a tome of vitriolic Jew-hating garbage. Rosenberg explains that in the book, “The word ‘Jewish’ appears 241 times, and the name ‘Rothschild’ is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments.” The book itself suggests that the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax tract written in the late 1800s, was indeed genuine.

The Times itself has received the lion’s share of the blame for Walker’s reference. But the more interesting question is why Walker herself has been able to escape censure. As Rosenberg points out, Walker has repeatedly praised Icke’s work, has written openly anti-Semitic poetry (“Simply follow the trail of ‘The / Talmud’ as its poison belatedly winds its way / Into our collective consciousness”), and has personally refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated into Hebrew. Yet she is still a well-respected member of the leftist intelligentsia.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Liberal Arts Weren’t Murdered — They Committed Suicide By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/liberal-arts-education-politicized-humanities/

The University’s Scylla and Charybdis

The great culture wars on the campuses of the 1980s were largely lost by traditionalists. And the question then became not if but when the liberal arts would die off as a result. What is strange nearly 40 years later is that the apparent outrage over what was clearly foreordained is now becoming fact. What did academia expect, given its years of academic specialization and politicized indoctrination?

Recently the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point announced plans to drop liberal-arts majors in geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art — and history. The Atlantic ran a well-meaning essay by Adam Harris on the controversial move, “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century” — again, a topic much in the news recently. The article’s chief thrust is that insidious efforts to promote STEM vocationalism — the need to prepare young people for careers requiring extensive math and science skill sets — has driven out the need for more in-depth focus on the liberal arts, in a climate in which crass Republican state legislators, in allegedly vindictive and short-sighted fashion, demanded catastrophic cuts in state public higher-education budgets.

The Stevens Point campus highlighted a popular perception that emphases in literature, history, or languages lead nowhere for cash-strapped graduates but to more debt and fewer jobs. Yet what the article on official university policy misses is why students do not concentrate in the liberal arts in the fashion of the past.

After all, only that fact of declining enrollments allows the university to institutionalize the unspoken reality of eroding student interest. In other words, the university is simply burying liberal-arts majors that were already killed off not by bottom-line-minded state legislators but by the choices of either students or faculty or by university policies, or by combinations of all three.

If higher education’s increasing fixation on job training is the whirlpool that swallows history majors, the monster across the narrow straits of liberal-arts education is a many-headed politicized orthodoxy, a Scylla that consumes the flesh of the liberal arts and leave the bones as dreary reminders of boilerplate race, class, gender, and culture agendas.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Twilight of Human-Rights Diplomacy The sunny idealism of 2011 couldn’t survive the cold realities of geopolitics. By Walter Russell Mead

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-twilight-of-human-rights-diplomacy-11545090825

Pesident Trump’s abandonment of democracy promotion and human rights is among the most striking of his departures from the post-Cold War American foreign-policy consensus. To the despair and fury of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike, Mr. Trump often appears determined to conduct American diplomacy as if human rights abroad were not a concern.

But the human-rights recession in U.S. foreign policy was already under way when the president took office. It isn’t hard to see why: Efforts to base America’s foreign policy on human rights and democracy hadn’t been yielding their desired results for some time.

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Rep. Martha McSally appointed by Arizona governor to Senate seat held by John McCain By Alex Pappas

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rep-martha-mcsally-appointed-to-open-arizona-senate-seat

Republican Rep. Martha McSally, just weeks after losing one of the midterms’ tightest and most contentious Senate races, was appointed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday to fill the state’s other U.S. Senate seat.

McSally will serve for at least the next two years in the seat that was held by longtime Arizona Sen. John McCain until his death in August.

“With her experience and long record of service, Martha is uniquely qualified to step up and fight for Arizona’s interests in the U.S. Senate,” Ducey said in a statement.

Ducey had appointed former Sen. Jon Kyl to the seat in September, but Kyl, after serving for several months, announced plans to resign at the end of the year. According to Ducey’s office, Kyl’s resignation will be effective Dec. 31.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Poll: Hamas leader would win Palestinian elections

By on December 18th, 2018

https://worldisraelnews.com/poll-hamas-leader-would-win-palestinian-elections/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1545158090&pushcrew_powered=1

If the Palestinians held elections, the leader of the Hamas terror group would defeat current PA President Mahmoud Abbas, according to a new poll.

By Associated Press and World Israel News Staff

A public opinion poll shows that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would lose to the leader of the Islamic terror group Hamas if elections were held today.

The Palestinians last held elections 13 years ago, with Abbas extending his original four-year term indefinitely.

The survey, conducted by pollster Khalil Shikaki and released Tuesday, shows that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would win with 49 percent to Abbas’ 42 percent.

Shikaki links the results to Hamas’ increasingly confrontational posture with Israel.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Michael Flynn Is Owed an Apology One year after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, there is still no evidence that he is a traitor. By Eli Lake

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-18/michael-flynn-sentencing-washington-owes-him-an-apology

Remember when Michael Flynn was a traitor? It was early 2017. Democrats were still stinging from their defeat at the hands of Donald Trump. Every day, it seemed, brought news of another contact between Trumpworld and Russia.

Flynn, a retired three-star general, was forced to resign after serving less than a month as Trump’s national security adviser. He was said to have colluded with Russians during the presidential transition. For this he was defamed as a Russian agent and mocked as a bumbling Benedict Arnold. Former officials of Barack Obama’s administration hinted that Flynn had been compromised.

As it turns out, none of this was true. On Tuesday Flynn will receive a sentence for the one count to which he has pleaded guilty, lying to the FBI. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has recommended no jail time. Flynn will have a chance to get on with his life.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Electronic Barriers While the nation squabbles over a border wall, technology could help cut off the supply of jobs to illegal immigrants. Heather Mac Donald

By on December 18th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/e-verify-illegal-immigration

Donald Trump was elected president because a large segment of the American public was fed up with the government’s failure to stop mass illegal immigration. Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. drew an ecstatic response from his supporters, long scorned for their belief that the decision regarding who enters the country belongs to Americans, not to foreign nationals living outside the country. But the wall has not been built, and the fight over its funding has sucked political capital from the pursuit of other, and arguably better, means to deter illegal immigrants.

The most important of those measures is to prevent unauthorized aliens from getting work, since the jobs magnet is the primary lure for illegal immigration. Commentators and analysts across the political spectrum have acknowledged that preventing illegal employment is key to deterring illegal immigration. The New York Times editorialized in 1982 that “there can be no effective enforcement of the borders” without mandatory verification of a worker’s papers. A technology has existed for decades to do just that. E-Verify, run by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, allows employers to check—instantaneously and for free—whether the work documents presented by a potential employee correspond to an existing Social Security number or whether they are forged. Universal implementation of E-Verify has been blocked, however, by employers who prefer to hire illegal aliens over American workers.

Trump invoked E-Verify during the 2016 campaign but has since stopped publicly promoting it. Yet E-Verify is more popular with the public than the wall; at least two-thirds of poll respondents support mandatory verification of a worker’s lawful status. States that require it (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah) have changed worker behavior. Illegal aliens dropped off the payrolls in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, prompting employers to hire legal workers, according to a 2013 study conducted by Bloomberg Government. A 2017 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that Arizona’s E-Verify law induced return migration from Arizona to Mexico and decreased illegal immigration into Arizona from Mexico. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the population of less educated young Mexican and Central American immigrants dropped in states with mandatory E-Verify, in part because they moved to states without the mandate and in part because they returned to their home countries. Wages for low-skilled American and legal-immigrant workers in mandatory E-Verify states rose between 7 percent and 9 percent, while wages for illegal Mexican males dropped nearly 8 percent.

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