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Ruth King

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Irony alert: Saudis announce formation of ‘anti-terrorism’ coalition By Rick Moran

By on December 16th, 2015

A nation ruled by an extremist Islamic sect known as the Wahhabis announced that it has formed a grand coalition of mostly Muslim countries to fight terrorism. Saudi Arabia and 33 other nations will coordinate their efforts to end terrorism – they say.

Presumably, the government of Saudi Arabia and the coalition won’t fight any of the Islamist militias the Saudis are currently supporting in Syria. And Pakistan, a member of the coalition, will somehow forget that it is supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The fact is, many members of this coalition are supporting their own pet terrorist outfits to advance their own interests.

Fox News:

The announcement published by the state-run Saudi Press Agency said the alliance will be Saudi-led and is being established because terrorism “should be fought by all means and collaboration should be made to eliminate it.” The statement said Islam forbids “corruption and destruction in the world” and that terrorism constitutes “a serious violation of human dignity and rights, especially the right to life and the right to security.”

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Auditor: EPA broke the law in social media campaign to push water rule By Rick Moran

By on December 16th, 2015

For the fourth time this year, the Environmental Protection Agency has been accused of breaking laws governing its operations.

Last July, the agency was accused of colluding with left wing environmental groups to push its new carbon regulations. In October, a federal appeals court said the EPA broke the law when it illegally approved a pesticide.

In August, the EPA was responsible for a toxic spill at an abandoned mine that polluted rivers in three states.

Now the Government Accountability Office reports that the agency’s social media blitz to approve the new rules governing the protection of just about every acre of water in the country violated strictures against lobbying.

Fox News:

The EPA’s campaign violated restrictions against lobbying and propaganda by federal agencies, the Government Accountability Office said in a 26-page report. The agency blitzed social media in a campaign that urged the public to submit comments on the draft water rule. The effort reached at least 1.8 million people.

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said the GAO finding confirms what he has long suspected: “that EPA will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda.”

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biggest Liar of 2015: The Washington Post and Its Pinocchios By Colin Flaherty

By on December 16th, 2015

Colin Flaherty is the only two-time winner of the Washington Post’s Summer Spy Novel writing contest.

In its annual roundup of this year’s biggest lies and liars, the Washington Post forgot the largest liar of all: The writers and editors of the Washington Post.

We are of course talking about the Post’s recent decision to name the “hands up, don’t shoot’ campaign as one of its “Biggest Pinocchios of 2015.” But the collection of prevarications was curiously incomplete.

The Post reporter had no trouble identifying the biggest liars behind the other lies: Trump, Hillary, Kerry, Warren, whatever: The liars and lies were locked together.

Except for the biggest lie of all; the lie the Post left for last. The lie that took more ink, and went unchallenged by more professional skeptics than all the other lies put together. A lie that, apparently, told itself, because this was the only Pinocchio unmatched with a specific liar.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Hello, Old Friend, Time to Read You Again On the fresh pleasures and insights that can come from revisiting a favorite book. By Christopher B. Nelson

By on December 16th, 2015

As Christmas approaches, many Americans are making their holiday reading lists—and their plans to cozy up over a long vacation with the year’s hot books or their piles of unopened magazines. But it’s important, too, to think about the value of rereading favorite works: Robert Frost’s poems, perhaps, or George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”

We do a lot of rereading at my college. Students are instructed to reread assignments once or twice before going to class, and professors in faculty study groups must reread books from the college’s core list.

Yet some regard rereading as a guilty pleasure. After all, new books come out all the time. “With the shelves thus groaning,” Hephzibah Anderson wrote last year for the BBC, “pulling down a well-thumbed favourite feels like an unconscionable indulgence.”

Surely we shouldn’t give in to this feeling. There may have been a time when so few books had been published that one could read everything. But that was several centuries ago. It doesn’t make much sense to feel guilty for failing to attain an impossible goal.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Evidence Is Piling Up That Higher Minimum Wages Kill Jobs President Obama says there is ‘no solid evidence.’ Yes there is—lots of it. By David Neumark

By on December 16th, 2015

The movement to raise the federal minimum wage has become ever more ambitious. In 2013 proponents deemed $9 an hour acceptable; today the demand is for $15.

Economists point to a crucial question: Will a higher minimum wage reduce the number of jobs for the country’s least skilled workers? President Obama says “there is no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs.” On the contrary, a full and fair reading of the evidence shows the opposite. Raising the minimum wage will cost jobs, particularly those held by the least-skilled.

Economists have written scores of papers on the topic dating back 100 years, and the vast majority of these studies point to job losses for the least-skilled. They are based on fundamental economic reasoning—that when you raise the price of something, in this case labor, less of it will be demanded, or in this case hired.

Among the many studies supporting this conclusion is one completed earlier this year by Texas A&M’s Jonathan Meer and MIT’s Jeremy West, which reaffirmed that “the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years” and that “industries that tend to have a higher concentration of low-wage jobs show more deleterious effects on job growth from higher minimum wages.”

The broader research confirms this. An extensive survey of decades of minimum-wage research, published by William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board and me in a 2008 book titled “Minimum Wages,” generally found a 1% or 2% reduction for teenage or very low-skill employment for each 10% minimum-wage increase.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The IRS Targets Political Donors A new rule encourages nonprofits to turn over Social Security numbers.

By on December 16th, 2015

The IRS regulatory assault on political nonprofits continues, albeit out of the media glare. In September the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department proposed a rule to give 501(c)(3) charities the “option” of filing detailed reports on every donor who contributes more than $250. These reports would include names, addresses and Social Security numbers. Oh, oh.

While the IRS says the rule is “voluntary,” in government that’s often a prelude to compulsory. The legitimate fear in the nonprofit world, on the right and left, is that this is a first step toward making such donor lists mandatory, and then applying the requirement to every nonprofit—including the conservative social-welfare organizations that the IRS helped to shut down in the 2012 presidential election.

Under current law, nonprofits must report only donors who give more than $5,000 a year, and then only names and addresses. Donors who give less than $5,000 to (c)(3) charities, and who want to claim a tax deduction, must obtain a “receipt” from the charity—to furnish to the IRS if they are audited or examined. This process has been in place for years, and even Treasury and the IRS acknowledge in their new rule that it “works effectively, with the minimal burden on donors and donees.”

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North Korea Gives Christian Pastor Life in Prison Lim Hyeon-soo had been in detention since February, was charged with ‘state subversive plots and activities’ By Jonathan Cheng….See note please

By on December 16th, 2015

Little Kim goes unchallenged in human rights abuses…after the dismal policies of Clinton and Dubya Bush which supposedly “reset” relations with the thugs of North Korea…..rsk
SEOUL—North Korea’s Supreme Court sentenced Korean-Canadian pastor Lim Hyeon-soo, who had been in detention since February, to life in prison with hard labor.

Mr. Lim, the pastor of Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Mississauga, Ontario, is the latest in a string of Christian missionaries who have been detained and sentenced to hard labor in North Korea, which worships its founder, Kim Il Sung, as a deity and views the spread of organized religion as a threat to the ruling family’s grip on power.

Mr. Lim was accused of committing “state subversive plots and activities,” according to North Korea’s official mouthpiece, the Korea Central News Agency.

The agency said Mr. Lim had “committed anti-DPRK religious activities” and acted with U.S. and South Korean authorities “to lure and abduct DPRK citizens,” using the acronym for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

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U.N. Experts Say Iran Missile Firing Violated Sanctions Report says Iran is focusing on improving accuracy By Farnaz Fassihi and Laurence Norman

By on December 16th, 2015

Iran violated a United Nations Security Council resolution by testing a new ballistic missile in October, a panel of experts found in a confidential report, increasing pressure on the Obama administration as it moves to implement a separate international nuclear deal with Tehran.

U.S. officials asked the Security Council on Tuesday to address the Oct. 10 test and a second launch on Nov. 21 of a ballistic missile capable of delivering atomic weapons. The council, however, adjourned without taking action.

The developments are part of a complicated welter of sanctions on Iran from the U.N. and individual countries over its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. The U.S. and five world powers struck a deal with Iran to lift economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, which Iran has always maintained is peaceful.

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Tashfeen Malik’s Jihadist Social-Media Posts Were Deliberately Ignored by the Feds By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on December 16th, 2015

San Bernardino mass-murderer Tashfeen Malik wrote social-media posts that endorsed jihad and expressed disdain for America. Yet, that did not cause U.S. immigration agents to question her admission into our country, much less deny it. In fact, our government consciously avoided learning about Malik’s Islamist rants.

Commentators stunned by this dereliction are attributing it to “secret” guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security. In truth, there is nothing secret about it. The instruction to refrain from scrutinizing social-media commentary, a precious source of intelligence, is a straightforward application of what passes for the official Obama administration “anti”-terrorism strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism.”

Malik, a native Pakistani, who immigrated to the United States in July after living for a time in Saudi Arabia, joined her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, in slaying 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., earlier this month. The jihad’s Bonnie and Clyde were finally killed in a gun battle with police.

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German Chancellor to Obama: Don’t ask for more help fighting ISIS : Jim Kouri

By on December 16th, 2015

On Monday, President Barack Obama opened a rare meeting of his National Security Council at the Pentagon, in an effort to put “lipstick on the pig” which is his strategy for fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) abroad and its sympathizers at home. During his press briefing he gave few details about his meeting at the Pentagon, and didn’t even mention that Germany’s leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, on Sunday turned down a request from the United States to provide even more military involvement in the fight against ISIS.

“I believe Germany is fulfilling its part and we don’t need to talk about new issues related to this question at the moment,” Merkel told the German news media about her response to Obama’s request on Saturday.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter sent a letter to Chancellor Merkel asking for an additional military commitment from Germany, just one week after parliament approved a plan to join the anti-terrorism campaign in Syria.

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