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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Real Wages Are Rising More evidence that faster growth is flowing to workers.

By on September 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/real-wages-are-rising-1536359667

Most headlines from Friday’s August jobs report concerned the 2.9% increase in wages over the last 12 months, the healthiest raise in some time. That figure was probably overstated due to a weak August 2017 falling off the 12-month comparison, but other data are showing that wages after inflation are finally rising as you’d expect in a tight labor market.

The August numbers reinforced the tightening trend. The unemployment rate stayed at 3.9%, and the rate for black Americans fell to a record low 6.3%; a year earlier the rate for blacks was 7.6%. The number of employed Americans fell, but much of that is explained by students returning to school. The same applies to the August dip in the labor participation rate. Overall the August snapshot shows a labor market in excellent shape, with nearly everyone who wants a job able to get one.

Which brings us to the wages debate. The economists who presided over the historically slow wage growth of the Obama years have been arguing that the Trump-era economic growth spurt is no big deal because wages after inflation aren’t rising. Their evidence is the average hourly earning increase, which at 2.7% in July wasn’t much above recent inflation that through July was 2.9%.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The University Is Ripe for Replacement By David Solway ****

By on September 7th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-university-is-ripe-for-replacement/

“Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.” — Stalin, interview with H.G. Wells

Beginning in early K-12 and continuing to the highest levels of university education, Leftist indoctrination is the gravest dilemma that afflicts education in North America, rendering it perhaps the most powerful instrument of anti-Western bias and socialist propaganda of the modern era.

Here my concern is with the abandonment of genuine scholarship, fact-based historical research, familiarity with the “Great Books” and the development of critical thinking habits, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The curriculum now in place is one of intellectual dysphoria promoting the circulation of false or unprovable narratives — Anthropogenic Global Warming, Islam as a religion of peace, the campus rape epidemic, toxic masculinity, the scandal of American history, the glories of “diversity and inclusion,” the benefits of socialism, to cite just a few among a veritable encyclopedia — and furthering the revolutionary project of social and political deconstruction. Education has been transformed into a grooming operation for social justice warriors, radical feminists, anti-white vigilantes and budding socialists.

Moreover, to compound the septic plunge into calamitous absurdity, the self-contradictory adoption as a kind of state religion of postmodern thought and doctrine — briefly, the suspicion of reason, the belief that reality is a conceptual construct, the rejection of fixed or objective truth — has served to turn the university into a parody of its original purpose, the pursuit of genuine knowledge.

Defenders of the status quo need to be taken not with a grain of salt but an entire salt mine. Case in point: Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, a rabid anti-conservative, an apologist for Islam, a believer in rampant immigration, and one of the shoddiest journalists in Canada, fully rejects the charge of university malfeasance. Rather, he claims, the campus is “less radical, more tolerant, more open and more politically moderate than ever before.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Consequences Will be Dire’ if Assad, Russia, Iran Attack Haley Warns By Bridget Johnson

By on September 7th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/consequences-will-be-dire-if-assad-russia-iran-attack-idlib-haley-warns/

“When Russia and the Assad regime say they want to counter terrorism, they actually mean they want to bomb schools, hospitals, and homes.”

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley warned today at a UN Security Council briefing on Syria that an impending regime offensive “will only leave Syria weaker and more broken and create generations of Syrians who will never forget the heinous and senseless brutality of the Assad regime and its allies.”

About three million people live in northwestern Idlib province, one of the last strongholds of opposition forces who have been battling dictator Bashar al-Assad for years. Airstrikes were reported in the province today as the international community is trying to stop a major regime-Russia offensive that could be especially bloody and include more chemical weapons use by Assad.

“Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation. There is lots of evidence that chemical weapons are being prepared,” said Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, America’s newly appointed special representative to Syria.

Jeffrey said the U.S. is “not in a hurry to pull out” of Syria because ISIS, which the non-regime Syrian Democratic Forces have been fighting, is not defeated.

Haley said today that the “Assad regime and its enablers, Russia and Iran, have a playbook for this war.”

“First, they surround a civilian area. Next, they make the preposterous claim that everyone in the area is a terrorist, so every man, woman, and child becomes a target. Then comes the ‘starve and surrender’ campaign, where they keep attacking until the people no longer have food, clean water, or shelter. It’s a playbook of death. The Assad regime has spent the last seven years refining it with Russia and Iran’s help,” she said.

“The atrocities committed by Assad will be a permanent stain on history and a black mark for this council – which was blocked over and over by Russia from taking action to help,” she added. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Keith Windschuttle: Captain Cook and the Great Game

By on September 7th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/captain-cook-great-game/

Margaret Cameron-Ash’s ‘Lying for the Admiralty’ demonstrates how Cook discovered Bass Strait and drew deliberately misleading maps, presenting Van Diemen’s Land as a peninsula and disguising his discovery of Sydney Harbour. His goal and that of the Admiralty was to mislead the French.

The book’s title is Lying for the Admiralty (Rosenberg, Sydney, 2018) and instead of a subtitle to spell out its subject matter, its cover has a portrait of Captain James Cook and a map of New Holland with its east coast uncharted, as it was before the great navigator’s first expedition. For a brief moment I thought this might be another assault on Cook, adding to the indignities his reputation suffered from the graffiti attack on his statue in Sydney last September. The accusation of lying sounded like the now well-entrenched leftist campaign to discredit him on the 250th anniversary of his epic voyages of discovery, which began when he left Plymouth Dock on August 26, 1768.

Author Margaret Cameron-Ash quickly dispels any such thoughts. Her introduction confirms that Cook was not only a great man but a loyal English patriot who was not above preparing charts, log books and journals which, with the approval of the British Admiralty, provided misinformation to deceive the navigators of foreign powers. Cook was a player in what Rudyard Kipling later called the “Great Game” of spying and deception in the geopolitical rivalry among the European powers for maritime supremacy. Cook’s discovery of the Australian continent’s east coast, and the information he kept secret about it, were critical manoeuvres in this rivalry.

This is both a compelling new take on the political climate behind the founding of Australia and an exciting, page-turning work. It is easily the best book I have read all year, and one of the best in many a year. It is located within the same revisionist version of Australia’s origins that Alan Frost has been pioneering since the 1990s in his books Botany Bay Mirages, The Global Reach of Empire and his recent popular summaries Botany Bay and The First Fleet.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Singer: Jordan’s Re-entry into West Bank Looms Large as Trump Dumps PLO

By on September 7th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/09/david-singer-jordans-re-entry-into-west.html
Two major developments this past week could see a large part of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) being reunified with Jordan – as existed between 1950 and 1967 – or becoming a Jordanian enclave – under President Trumps’ yet-to-be- announced “ultimate deal” intended to resolve the100 years-old Arab-Jewish conflict.

Those developments were:

Trump immediately stopped all further American financial aid to UNRWA:

The PLO refusedto have anything to do with Trump’s slowly-gestating peace proposals after Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017.

This PLO anti-Trump stance has continued unabated despite US Ambassador to the United Nations – Nikki Haley – publicly warning the PLO last January when asked about future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Arab refugees:

“The President has basically said he doesn’t want to give any additional funding, or stop funding, until the Palestinians agree to come back to the negotiation table. We still very much want to have a peace process. Nothing changes with that. The Palestinians now have to show they want to. As of now, they’re not coming to the table, but they ask for aid. We’re not giving the aid. We’re going to make sure that they come to the table.”

This week Trump gave up waiting – ending all future donations to UNRWA including $300 million pledged for this year.

More than 2 million UNRWA registered Palestinian Arab refugees live in Jordan – most of whom have full citizenship. Nearly 370,000 – or 18 per cent – live in 10 refugee camps.

The West Bank has nearly 775,000 UNRWA registered Palestinian Arab refugees – a quarter of who live in 19 camps.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MARK STEYN: ON JOHN McCAIN

By on September 7th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8781/odd-couples-of-the-obituaries-page

~John McCain exasperated conservatives, but he had his moments. I recounted one such during the 2008 campaign, when Hillary called for public funding for the Woodstock museum:

If you’re under 70 and have no idea what “Woodstock” is or why it would require its own museum, ask your grandpa. But McCain began by saying he was sure Mrs. Clinton was right and that it was a major “cultural and pharmaceutical event.”

Which is a cute line. And McCain wasn’t done yet: “I wasn’t there,” he said of the 1969 music festival. “I was tied up at the time.”

And the crowd roared its approval. It’s not just a joke, though it’s a pretty good one. It’s not merely a way of reminding folks you’ve stood up to torture and you can shrug it off with almost 007-cool insouciance. But it also tells Republican voters that, when Sen. Clinton offers up some cobwebbed boomer piety, you know a piñata when you see one, and you’re gonna clobber it.

And that’s the music a lot of Republican voters want to hear. For a certain percentage of voters, McCain is tonally a conservative, and that trumps the fact that a lot of his policies are profoundly unconservative. He won New Hampshire because if you stuck him in plaid he’d be a passable Beltway impersonation of the crusty, cranky, ornery Granite Stater. The facts are secondary that, on campaign finance, illegal immigration, Big Pharma and global warming, the notorious “maverick’s” mavericity (maverickiness? maverectomy?) always boils down to something indistinguishable from the Democrat position.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Elizabeth Warren Calls for Trump Coup Daniel Greenfield

By on September 7th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271272/elizabeth-warren-calls-trump-coup-daniel-greenfield

“Great Spirit Bless the Deep State, it is your humble daughter, Elizabeth of Harvard and the Pow Wow Chow Cookbook who speaks.”

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, seizing on an explosive op-ed from an anonymous administration official, said Thursday that it’s time to use constitutional powers to remove President Donald Trump office if top officials don’t think he can do the job.

“If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren told CNN. “The Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the President can’t do his job. It does not provide that senior officials go around the President — take documents off his desk, write anonymous op-eds … Everyone of these officials have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It’s time for them to do their job.”

That’s actually the opposite of how the Constitution works. It does not provide a mechanism for removing a president if some officials don’t like him. That’s not what the 25th Amendment is for. It provides a clear process for when a president is incapacitated, say after a shooting, and was an artifact of the JFK assassination.

What Warren is proposing is a coup.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Blumenthal, Whitehouse, Harris, and Booker, the four horsemen of the Democrat apocalypse By Patricia McCarthy

By on September 7th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/blumenthal_whitehouse_harris_and_booker_the_four_horsemen_of_the_democrat_apocalypse.html

The Senate Kavanaugh hearings have been instructive, to say the least. The four names above were the most tellingly obnoxious Democrats at the event, the worst offenders. To name the others would be redundant.

The Democratic Party’s left – what amounts to a far left these days – cares about nothing beyond ending the Trump presidency, by any means necessary. These people have sold their souls to accomplish this feat. That was on display for all to see these past few days. They set out to destroy Judge Brett Kavanaugh with all sorts of accusations, innuendo, and insults, but they didn’t lay a hand on him, not one of them, no matter how malicious their interrogation.

Not one of these Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee showed the judge an iota of respect. They did expose for all to see their contempt for the president and all things conservative. They apply very different rules to those nominated to the SCOTUS by Republicans from what they apply to those nominated by Democrats. Non-answers by Democrat-nominated candidates are heralded for their evasion of how-would-you-rule questions. This is not allowed for those nominated by Republican presidents. Supreme Court justice nominees such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, etc. were celebrated for their refusal to answer certain questions. Kavanaugh, more judicious and more experienced than Ginsburg or Kagan ever were, has been eviscerated by these same Democrats and the press for his handling of the questions asked.

The left is behaving as if its members’ very lives depend on defeating Kavanaugh’s nomination to the court. Republicans have never resisted a Democrat-nominated justice so vehemently. Most of them have been confirmed almost unanimously. Yet Democrats do not grant a sitting Republican his choice. Why?

It’s because they count on the SCOTUS to advance the far-left agenda they cannot get done legislatively. They view the Court as their ace in the hole, their way to achieve their ends. It has worked through the years. When they are foiled, they become very, very angry. Think Citizens United.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A New Standard for Stupid By Rich Lowry

By on September 7th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/zina-bash-hand-signal-lef-wing-theory-stupid/

How does the Zina Bash hand-signal theory make any sense at all?

It’s not easy to set a new standard for stupid in 2018, but a few left-wingers on Twitter managed it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.

They claimed to have seen one of Judge Kavanaugh’s former law clerks, Zina Bash, making a white-power symbol while sitting behind him at the opening session of the hearings.

Less discerning viewers wouldn’t have noticed the alleged signal at all, or if they had, would have easily mistaken it for Bash’s hand at rest in something like a gesture of OK.

It was declared “a national outrage” by a #resistance tweeter who has 200,000 followers, and the activist and author Amy Siskind said the supposed gesture alone should disqualify Kavanaugh (she deleted the tweet but still suspected that Bash’s hand represented something nefarious).

It’s not clear how the hand-signal theory was supposed to make sense. Why, if Judge Kavanaugh is a stealth white-power candidate, would someone on his side go out of her way to advertise that fact on national TV?

On the other hand, if Judge Kavanaugh is a brazen white-power candidate, why does a supporter have to rely on such a subtle gesture to signal his true colors?

Who was the audience for the gesture? A racist underground initiated in a series of secret symbols and handshakes that would be activated to lend its full support for Kavanaugh?

Who knows, and who cares? For an element of the Left, the Trump era has been an open invitation to lose their minds, one they have gladly accepted for fun and profit, since there are few things said about the president that can be too extreme or irrational to find an audience.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Character Assassination of Brett Kavanaugh By David French

By on September 7th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-character-assassination-by-democrats/

There are honorable ways to oppose a nominee with whom you disagree. Kavanaugh’s Democratic critics have chosen to go the dishonorable route, instead.

There is certainly an honorable way to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. It’s simple. A progressive senator can simply declare that he or she does not agree with Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy, explain why, and vote against him. There is no constitutional rule that declares a senator must vote for every qualified Supreme Court nominee.

There’s also an honorable way to investigate Kavanaugh’s fitness for the bench, regardless of his judicial philosophy. A judge at any level — much less the Supreme Court — should exhibit a basic and enduring commitment to honesty and integrity. So, yes, scrutinize his record. Diligently investigate his background. If a serious character issue emerges, expose it.

But it’s low and dishonorable to skip the principled opposition and simply smear a good man, engaging in cheap character assassination as Judge Kavanaugh’s Democratic opponents have this week.

For those keeping score at home, millions of Americans have now been exposed to false and ridiculous claims that Kavanaugh is a slippery perjurer who surrounds himself with racists and a cold, dark soul who deliberately snubbed a murdered child’s father.

The latter two claims date back to the first day of his hearing, when the online Left erupted with claims that former Kavanaugh clerk Zina Bash had flashed a white-power symbol during the hearing. It turns out that Bash is a Mexican-American immigrant with a Jewish father, a descendant of Holocaust survivors. So, no, she’s not a white nationalist.

The same day, activists claimed that Kavanaugh actively refused to shake Fred Guttenberg’s hand. Guttenberg is the father of a student murdered in February’s Parkland, Fla. school shooting, and he approached Kavanaugh in the scrum following a break in the hearing. Just as Guttenberg, a complete stranger to Kavanaugh, stuck out his hand, security arrived and ushered Kavanaugh away. This was then cravenly spun into an outrage by the progressive Internet.

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