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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sorry, Bernie, Minimum-Wage Hike Would Still Hurt Poor Workers Most

By on April 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/20/sorry-bernie-minimum-wage-hike-would-still-hurt-poor-workers-most/

Vermont’s self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is a nonstop cheerleader for a minimum-wage hike. Recently, in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, he once again called for a huge increase in the minimum wage. Sounds generous, until you realize it would in fact hurt most the working poor, those who supposedly would reap the greatest benefits of a boosted minimum wage.

“Whether they are greeting us at Walmart, serving us hamburgers at McDonald’s, providing childcare for our kids or waiting on our table at a diner in rural America, there are too many Americans trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour,” Sanders wrote. “It cannot be done. This injustice must end. Low-income workers need a pay raise and the American people want them to get that raise.”

The idea that there are “too many” people “trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour” isn’t exactly true, at least not for the vast majority of workers.

Among the 76.1 million hourly wage workers, the average earner took home $33.18 an hour in March, or roughly $1,141.39 a week. That’s $59,352 a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own data (for 2021, the latest full year for data) show that just 1.4% of all hourly workers made at or below the current minimum wage.

There’s a reason for this. Businesses pay people what they’re worth to them. If they can’t afford to pay you the going rate, they don’t hire you and you can try elsewhere. But, as the data show, businesses for the most part pay their workers well.

OK, but, as Sanders would have it, why not just have the government force businesses to pay the higher minimum wage for those at the bottom? Such as $17 an hour, his current proposal?

With ever-greater advances in labor-saving technology, machinery and, most notably, artificial intelligence, America will soon see large numbers of formerly employed people become unemployed.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nashville Controversy Reveals Liberals’ Anti-Democracy Double Standard-Jonathan Tobin

By on April 20th, 2023

https://www.newsweek.com/nashville-controversy-reveals-liberals-anti-democracy-double-standard-opinion-1795087

In the last two years, the defense of democracy has been central to the Democratic Party’s attempt to portray itself as the last line of defense against Republicans’ alleged authoritarianism. But as recent events in Nashville showed, Democrats’ alleged fealty to democracy and abhorrence for agitators and mobs seeking to disrupt the legislative branch of government is more a matter of situational ethics than actual principle. As the career of a new Democratic idol, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones, demonstrates, they’re only against anti-democratic rioters when they’re seeking to silence Republicans.

Jones became a national celebrity when, along with two other Democrats—Reps. Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson—he disrupted a March 30 session of the Tennessee legislature to demand that it consider anti-gun rights laws that he supported. Acting in conjunction with a mob of demonstrators that had flooded the state capitol in Nashville, the trio, armed with bullhorns, seized the podium and shut down the assembly, ranting about Republicans being complicit in mass shootings. The demonstrators were kept outside the chamber but harassed both legislators and cops who were present. Eventually, order was restored and days later the legislature voted to expel Jones and Pearson. Johnson escaped the same fate by only a narrow margin.

At that point, the national media and leading Democrats like former president Barack Obama treated the state legislators’ expulsion as the only salient part of the story, ignoring the events of March 30. In that way, they turned Jones into a martyr and used the episode as more proof of the GOP’s supposed authoritarianism.

The hypocrisy and dishonesty of this narrative is staggering.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

VIVEK RAMASWAMY ON CNN YESTERDAY VIDEO

By on April 20th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/04/19/ramaswamy_diversity_is_meaningless_unless_something_else_binds_us_together.html

Ramaswamy: Diversity Is Meaningless Unless Something Greater Binds Us Together

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: VIVEK RAMASWAMY

By on April 19th, 2023

Yesterday I attended a private luncheon and book launching for Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican entrepreneur and businessman, and author of several excellent books on culture, business and politicswho recently announced his candidacy for the White House.

Until yesterday, although I have been seriously impressed by his brilliance and articulate vision for a conservative agenda to restore American values, education, infrastructure, energy independence, and security, I was skeptical about his election chances.

No more. He is an excellent speaker who fields questions deftly with an exciting and infectious vision of our nation’s possibilities and exceptionalism.

I am reminded of an early 2014 meeting when the Tea Party repeated its early endorsement of Donald Trump to a decidedly skeptical reception.

Who knows about 2024? As August debates get closer, Vivek Ramaswamy certainly elevates the language and ideas, and whatever happens he deserves a great future in American politics. rsk

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The lies about hydroxychloroquine were the worst of the COVID era By John Klar

By on April 19th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/the_lies_about_hydroxychloroquine_were_the_worst_of_the_covid_era.html

There has been little accountability for the lies of the COVID pandemic. 

Clearly the disease originated at the Wuhan Virology Lab.  The mRNA vaccines were not nearly as effective as touted (if they worked at all), and possibly unsafe. 

Another glaring dishonesty, exposed by doctors like Meryl Nass, relates to the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID.

Whether or not hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID, government authorities thwarted doctors from honestly attempting to find out, and interfered with doctor-patient relationships to do so.  Agencies conspired to undermine and discredit doctors like Dr. Meryl Nass, discouraging alternative therapies possessing strong safety records while hard-selling experimental and relatively untested mRNA vaccines.

In the case of Dr. Nass, a nationwide pattern of censorship against physicians who supported hydroxychloroquine was reflected when the State of Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine suspended her medical license and referred her for a psychiatric evaluation.  The Board slandered the good doctor by claiming her provision of care constituted “an immediate jeopardy to the health and physical safety of the public” and even suggested she might be using drugs:

The information received by the Board demonstrates that Dr. Nass is or may be unable to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety to her patients by reason of mental illness, alcohol intemperance, excessive use of drugs, narcotics, or as a result of a mental or physical condition interfering with the competent practice of medicine.

Dr. Nass was not doing anything extreme in her patient care: she was targeted because she spoke up forcefully against the mRNA vaccine narrative.  She got in the way of efforts by politicians and pharmaceutical companies to ensure maximum jab compliance. 

The immediate insistence by authorities that Covid skipped species in an open air market flew in the face of common sense—that it may have come from a lab studying that very virus with gain-of-function methodology, using bats carrying that virus, in the city where that virus then broke out.  Similarly, the rush to dismiss hydroxychloroquine as a potentially effective therapy could not have been known without study (much like early dismissals of natural immunity).  Banning its use made no sense.

As a person who had taken hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for many years for Lyme Disease, the slandering of the drug (and doctors who prescribed it) was rather stunning to me.  I knew the risks of the drug were minor.  Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci and others very aggressively opposed trying to save lives with this drug before mRNA vaccines were available, using illogical and extremist justifications.

Dr. Nass stood up boldly and early.  At her website and in her newsletters, she has competently established that:

– studies purporting to discredit HCQ employed excessive doses and were designed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

– the government limited HCQ use by reducing supplies to pharmacies.

– the government used the reduced supplies to suggest doctors who prescribed HCQ for Covid patients were depriving patients from using HCQ for traditional purposes.

– government propaganda fabricated and elevated dangers of the drug, and the FDA and CDC limited its use using false claims.

– trials were unreasonably limited to already-sickened patients.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mayorkas Refuses to Explain Why Child Exploitation Has Exploded Under His Watch; Denies DHS Lost Track of 85,000 Migrant Children By Debra Heine

By on April 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/18/mayorkas-refuses-to-explain-why-child-exploitation-has-exploded-under-his-watch-denies-dhs-lost-track-of-85000-migrant-children/

During a Senate hearing Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas refused to explain why an exponential surge in child smuggling and exploitation has happened under his watch and denied that the Department had lost track of 85,000 of these children.

Since the beginning of Fiscal Year 2021, 345,807 unaccompanied minors  have been allowed to enter the United States through the southwest land border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show.

As American Greatness has previously reported, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) habitually releases migrant children to unvetted “sponsors” who force them to take on grueling jobs, or be sexually exploited. In some cases, dozens of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) have been sent to the same residence of an unvetted sponsor.

Thousands of these minors “have ended up in punishing jobs across the country—working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories—all in violation of child labor laws,” the New York Times reported in February.

In Florida, the State Grand Jury recently released a report accusing the Biden administration of facilitating “forced migration, sale, and abuse of foreign children” through its criminally negligent immigration policies.

“Criminal history, lack of citizen status and even total refusal to submit to a background check does not disqualify sponsors from receiving a UAC,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody pointed out in a statement following the release of the Grand Jury’s findings. “One sponsor was given custody despite having been to Florida prison before for battery on a child,” Moody added.

Monthly calls to Health and Human Services (HHS) to report trafficking, neglect or abuse of minors placed with sponsors have exploded since the spring of 2021.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Has Abandoned the Middle East to China and Russia by Con Coughlin

By on April 19th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19578/biden-middle-east-china

In the absence of any desire on the part of the Biden administration to support the Saudis — for decades one of Washington’s most important allies in the region — China has moved quickly to fill the diplomatic vacuum to launch its own initiative to restore ties with Iran.

[T]he fact that the Chinese can pull off a diplomatic coup involving a country that was formerly a key ally of the US serves as a devastating indictment of the Biden administration’s incompetence.

Having previously castigated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader, over his alleged involvement in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, as well as the Saudis’ involvement in Yemen’s disastrous civil war, Biden demanded that the Saudis increase oil production to ease the global shortage caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At the same time Biden made it clear that his main policy goal in the region was to resurrect the flawed nuclear deal with Iran, a move the Saudis responded to with utter dismay.

Unsurprisingly, Biden left Riyadh empty-handed, prompting the Saudis finally to cut their losses with the White House, and look for alliances elsewhere.

This is indeed a sorry state of affairs for two countries that once prided themselves on their close ties with Washington but now, thanks to the Biden’s administration’s ineptitude, now find themselves seeking alliances with America’s enemies.

The Biden administration may have lost interest in the Middle East, but it is not a sentiment that is shared by rival powers such as China and Russia.

While U.S. President Joe Biden has shown nothing but contempt for long-standing allies in the region, both China and Moscow have been quick to exploit Washington’s wilful neglect to their own advantage.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Greenfield Video: Media Bias Against Israel If there is bias in the U.S. media against the Jewish State, how does this manifest itself?

By on April 19th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/greenfield-video-media-bias-against-israel/

Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield recently went on the Never Again is Now Podcast to discuss Media Bias Against Israel, dealing with the question: If there is bias in the U.S. media against the Jewish State, how does this manifest itself?

Don’t miss it!

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OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Has the NATO Turning Point Stopped Turning? “No nation can be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests.” by Bruce Thornton

By on April 19th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/has-the-nato-turning-point-stopped-turning/

Remember last year when the NATO nations had a road-to-Damascus moment? It seemed that Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine had awakened the West from its “new world order” dogmatic slumbers, with scenes of death and devastation from a past we thought we had exorcised with the end of the Cold War.

In response to Russia’s attack, last year the air was filled with pledges of military support for Ukraine and blustering denunciations of Putin. Skimpy defense budgets and “postmodern” foreign policy idealism were over. Columnist Michael Barone announced “a vast and historic transformation in Europe . . . that will continue reverberating, no matter what happens in Ukraine.” And according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “February 24 marks a turning point in the history of our continent.”

Lately the “turning point” seems to have stopped turning, as the conflict in Ukraine heads for a long, bloody slog, with no resolution in sight. What many thought would be a triumphal confirmation of the “rules-based international order” has instead seen the return of the repressed foreign policy realism dominated by national self-interest.

French president Emmanuel Macron, for example, besieged by riots and protests over a proposal to raise the retirement age, recently visited China’s autocrat Xi Jinping, in a failed attempt to distance Xi from Putin, though he successfully secured a contract worth billions of Euros. He also called for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. regarding China’s threats to Taiwan, and to avoid the “great risk” that Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours” and ends up “taking our cue from the U.S. agenda.”

The diplomatic confusion and bluster about Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy” raised questions about NATO “unity.” It seems calm with China is more important than upholding the “rules-based international order.” In that case, as Senator Marco Rubio said, if Europe doesn’t “‘pick sides’ between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, then maybe we shouldn’t be picking sides either [on Ukraine].”

A more significant blow to the renewed martial vigor of NATO was the Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by a recently arrested intelligence operative serving with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. If the intelligence is accurate, our public confidence that Ukraine can stop Russia and recover some of its occupied territory is shaky. That “explains the urgency with which Kyiv has been lobbying the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to speed up deliveries of Western-made air-defense systems and to provide Ukraine with Western-made jet fighters, such as F-16s,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

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IMMIGRATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Half of Illegal Immigrants in NYC Are Not Vaccinated for Polio, Health Commissioner Warns Madeline Leesman

By on April 19th, 2023

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/04/18/immigrants-polio-vaxx-n2622053

Half of illegal immigrants pouring into New York City are not vaccinated against poliovirus, the city’s health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, said.

This month, Vasan sent an eight-page letter to doctors outlining the health risk migrants living in the city pose to residents. In the letter, Vasan pointed out that the migrants come from countries with high rates of infectious tuberculosis, chickenpox and other illnesses (via the New York Post): 

“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City (NYC) in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. As more people arrive and many make NYC their home, the scale and scope of need continues to grow,” Vasan said in an eight-page letter, dated April 11, sent to physicians and other health care providers. A copy was obtained by The Post.  

“I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum … The scope of this letter represents the scale of the need. It is incumbent upon us as a welcoming city to comprehensively evaluate and meet these needs.”

[…]

“Vaccination rates for certain diseases are low in some of the most common countries of origin, with rates hovering around 50% for polio as an example,” the commissioner said.

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