NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Real Cure for Inequality Income gains are now rising faster for low-wage workers.

Posted By on September 21st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-cure-for-inequality-11569020055

The left’s apocalyptic economic predictions for the Trump Presidency haven’t panned out. With jobs plentiful and wages rising at the fastest rate in a decade, liberals are doubling down on alarms about inequality. The inconvenient evidence is that low- and middle-income folks are reaping more economic benefits than during the Obama years.

Democrats flogged last week’s Census report that showed health coverage and Medicaid enrollment declined in 2018. But they ignored the other side of that story: Worker earnings increased by 3.4% while the poverty rate declined 0.5 percentage points to 11.8%, the lowest level since 2001. Benefit rolls are shrinking as low-income workers earn more.

According to the Census Bureau, the number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 2.3 million in 2018, and employment gains were biggest among minority female-led households. The share of workers in female-led households who worked full-time year-round increased by 4.2 percentage points among blacks and 3.6 percentage points among Hispanics.

As a result, real median earnings for female households with no spouse present jumped 7.6% last year. The poverty rate among female households declined 2.7 percentage points for blacks, four percentage points for Hispanics and 7.1 percentage points for their children. Remember this the next time Senator Kamala Harris complains that Mr. Trump’s policies are harming women and minorities.

These findings reinforce Labor Department monthly reports that have shown stronger employment and earnings gains in industries dominated by women such as health care and hospitality. The jobless rate for black women last month fell to a historic low of 4.4% and neared a nadir for Hispanic women at 4.2%.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Soros Takes on Denaturalization By Marion DS Dreyfus

Posted By on September 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/soros_takes_on_denaturalization.html

The left-leaning Open Society, lavishly funded by moneybags darling of the left, octogenarian George Soros, has just published a 194-page ‘report’ on a process I’ll wager not more than 1% of  readers are aware of: denaturalizing  questionable citizens.

Maybe that should read “citizens,” since the government is not, contrary to the notably omission-laden materials by the ACLU and the Society, pursuing legitimately naturalized persons who became so with no shadowy elements attached to their by-now geriatric citizenship sacrament.

During the past three decades, according to a document put out by the ‘always-scrupulous’ ACLU, denaturalizations were pursued an average of 11 times per year. But under the Trump Administration, this jumped in 2017 to 95 cases referred by the Department of Homeland Security. That was bumped up to some 1600 cases by the U.S. Citizenship and  Immigration Services, as of 2018.  Then comes 2019, and in its budget request, the  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicated its intention to review the files of an additional — hold onto your MAGA hats — 700,000, for which they requested funding of an additional $200 million.

In this document, as in the panel discussion attended in mid-September with four key researcher-writers — including the Senior Managing Legal Officer of the Open Society Justice Initiative Laura Bingham — this process of re-examining questionable naturalizations, without proper documents, or with unsettled legal issues of provenance and possible prior criminality,  this effort “throws away standards, due process, fairness, and devaluing the sanctity [sanctity, mind you] of American citizenship.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Child Hostages Obey Their Climate Captors: Julie Kelly

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/19/child-hostages-obey-their-climate-captors/

The emotional, physical, and intellectual damage wrought by the climate change movement now is coming into clear view. It’s an outcome that should enrage every parent.

On Friday, schoolchildren around the world will be prompted to walk out of class as part of the “Global Climate Strike.” These young “climate strikers” will protest alleged inaction on climate change and promote an end to fossil fuel use.

“Our house is on fire—let’s act like it. We demand climate justice for everyone,” the event’s website warns.

It is the latest stunt orchestrated by the international climate cabal and yet another example of how the Left shamelessly exploits and manipulates children to propagandize any cause. (Think of the high school students in Parkland, Florida.) But this time, the climate cabal is using a special-needs teenager from Sweden to indoctrinate more children and adults with climate change dogma.

Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old from Stockholm—which is ironic because the teen exhibits many traits associated with a hostage attempting to please her captors.

In a way, Thunberg is not the face of a climate crisis but an alarming example of how the climate cabal has needlessly terrified two generations of young people. The emotional, physical, and intellectual damage wrought by the climate change movement now is coming into clear view and it’s an outcome that should enrage every parent.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

It Won’t Be Academics Like This Who Reclaim ‘American Excellence’ From Bad Ideas By Tony Daniel

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/20/it-wont-be-academics-like-this-who-reclaim-american-excellence-from-bad-ideas/

The new book by former Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman, ‘The Assault on American Excellence,’ bizarrely avoids placing the blame where it squarely belongs—our morally bankrupt educational systems.

Thirty years ago, nobody was more prepared than I to treat graduate school as a boot camp for scholarship. I was a young man ready to be molded. Instead, I encountered professors who were—there is no other way to put it—a gaggle of petty, bitter, and incestuous fools who seemed to either hate their students or view them as tools to further their own small-minded ends. That, or sleep with us.

There were a couple of exceptions, but even those guys were weird or broken. It says something that the most normal professor I encountered in graduate school was the extremely odd and reclusive aesthetician and novelist William H. Gass.

I used to take long drives up and down the Mississippi and into the Ozarks to remind myself that there was a real, majestic world out there still. Even though I’d begun to suspect that something was rotten in the halls of humanities, back then I still thought the problem was somehow with me. Now that I’ve been through a few other boot camps in life—such as marriage and learning to write a novel—I know differently. My graduate professors were a pack of blithering idiots. What’s worse, they were representative.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Good Riddance, Bill de Blasio By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/good-riddance-bill-de-blasio/

De Blasio ended his presidential campaign today. Maybe now he’ll actually do his day job.

Bill de Blasio ended his presidential campaign today. If you’ve forgotten which candidate he was, he was the tall, abrasive one who didn’t make the third debate and who in the previous one kept trying to take shots at other candidates and interrupt the moderators. He’s also the mayor of New York City.

By the standards of modern American politicians, de Blasio is a really bad one, even when you put the ideological disagreements aside. He’s effectively abandoned his day job during his presidential campaign, spending a mere seven hours — less than one full workday — at City Hall during the month he launched his bid for the White House. He rarely meets with his own city commissioners.

Both as mayor and presidential candidate, de Blasio is always moving on to the next big and exceptionally impractical proposal — Ban steel and glass skyscrapers! Eliminate the gifted and talented programs from public schools! — while other, bigger problems on his constituents’ minds fester.

The city’s public housing is overrun with rats, leaks, mold, and lead paint. The number of homeless students hit a new record. The city’s bus system is the slowest in the nation, and he steers millions to poorly performing school bus companies. (The one area where you probably shouldn’t blame the mayor is the condition of the city’s subways, which are actually run by the state of New York, not the city. Blame governor Andrew Cuomo for your late trains.) His relationship with the city police started bad and got worse.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

Across the Western world tens of thousands of brainwashed kids are bunking off school in what has misleadingly been described as a ‘Climate Strike.’

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/adam_schiff_the_lady_macbeth_of_the_house.html

Adam Schiff, the Lady Macbeth of the House

Patricia McCarthy, AmericanThinker.co,/blog

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”?

—Macbeth

There are numerous people in Congress who should not be there for a variety of reasons: ignorance, incompetence, uncompromising partisanship, lack of patriotism, a dark heart full of hate, and sheer moonbattery.  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is shockingly ignorant of American history, basic economics, and essential science.  Rep. Hank Johnson worried some years ago that the island of Guam might “tip over” because most of the population was on one side of it.  Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, while watching the Mars Rover on Mars, asked where the flag that had been planted on the moon in 1969 was.  It is a long list, and it would be hilarious if such things were not actually spoken by people elected to represent their portion of America’s citizens.  We all know that politicians lie.  They lie about what they are going to do and what they have or have not done.  “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”  Macbeth again.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

#BelieveAllLies By Ruth S. King

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/believealllies.html

So much has been written about truth. In the King James Bible one reads: “ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

George Orwell warned:  ‘The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.’

 Winston Chuchill : The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Friedrich Nietzsche opined: “All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

And my favorite is “In vino veritas” …in Chardonnay there is truth.

Lies are now defined by people as inner or personal truths. Even though they are so often wrong, the left is never in doubt. Outright prevarication is “settled fact” and will brook no skepticism, let alone challenge.

Examples of lies that are now “settled” truth for the “woke” generation.

1.Single payer system will improve healthcare and access to early diagnosis and treatment.

2.President Donald Trump is a racist.

3.The present good economy and energy independence was actually jump started by Barack Obama.

4.The Arab Israel conflict started in 1967 when the Jewish state grabbed ancient Palestinian lands and has exercised a brutal and racist occupation of local Arab citizens.

5.No guns no crime.

6.  The planet is headed for destruction by man made ravages of the environment and failure to implement Green policies. # Believe Greta Thunberg.

7.Socialism is an inherently humanitarian and egalitarian policy and form of government.

8.Native Americans were a benign eco-friendly farmer who abjured violence.

9.The end of colonialism brought independence and freedom to Africa.

10.Women never lie about their near rape and sexual harassment by prominent men.

11.Meritocracy is a back to the plantation strategy of racists.

12.Only Whites have privilege.

13.Antifa and #Black Lives Matter always demonstrate peacefully for good causes.

14.The late David Koch merits no gratitude or respect.

15.The not yet late George Soros merits gratitude and respect.

16.Hate crimes and anti-Semitism are almost always from the conservative right.

17. A liberal education guarantees a good job and enlightenment.

18.All illegal immigrants are seeking asylum from war and terror.

19.There are millions of inhibited transgender people of both sexes in America.

20.Gay people are a persecuted minority.

21.Minorities are underrepresented in entertainment and culture.

22.Women are even better than men in just about everything including combat and sports.

23.Jihad is misinterpreted by Islamophobia. It is a spiritual struggle within oneself. Seriously!

24.Capital punishment is evil but late term abortion is a right.

25. Gender pronouns are offensive and biased.

26. In fact there are more than ninety genders.

27. In the New York Times, even the ifs, ands, buts, commas and semicolons are true. 

And here is the unvarnished truth. All the above are lies but they are believed with a religious fervor usually reserved for Commandments and prayer. As Orwell warned:

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Merkel’s Germany: an antisemitic terrorist state By Dogan Akman

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.israpundit.org/merkels-germany-an-antisemitic-terrorist-state/

It is time to call a spade a spade.

Some or a good number of the readers may or will find the heading to be an outrageous and gratuitous one.

Yet, facts speak for themselves.

It is my intention to demonstrate that the heading is indeed a timely one that must be addressed and that Merkel is indeed a homicidal anti-Semite while Germany is a terrorist state.

A general principle of the Canadian criminal law

A person can be criminally responsible as a member of a party acting together in the commission of an offence. In terms of guilt, there is no difference between an aider, abettor or principle to an offence. They are all equally culpable. More specifically, section 21 of the Criminal Code of Canada provides:

Parties to offence

s.21 (1) Every one is a party to an offence who

(a) actually commits it;

(b) does or omits to do anything for the purpose of aiding any person to commit it; or

(c) abets any person in committing it.

(2) Where two or more persons form an intention in common to carry out an unlawful purpose and to assist each other therein and any one of them, in carrying out the common purpose, commits an offence, each of them who knew or ought to have known that the commission of the offence would be a probable consequence of carrying out the common purpose is a party to that offence.

I am sure that this principle and similar provisions are operative in most, if not all, of the western countries, including Germany.

Antisemitism

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Do Palestinian Leaders Want a Better Life for Their People? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14901/palestinians-lebanon-better-life

“We talked about the general situation of Palestinian refugees who have been living in Lebanon for the past 72 years. We told them that Palestinians in Lebanon are banned from working in 70 professions and have no right to own property. We gave them a list of 2,300 Palestinian refugees from Syria who want to go to Canada.” — Mu’awya Abu Hamideh, a representative of the Palestinian refugees who fled from Syria to Lebanon after 2011, akhbarten.com, September 9, 2019

Human Rights Watch says that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live in “appalling social and economic conditions” and are barred from employment in at least 25 professions, “including law, medicine, and engineering.”

“The Palestinian factions and others who benefit from our stay in Lebanon are denouncing us as traitors and of serving foreign agendas… but if anyone has another solution, he should bring it to the table. We are sure, however, that these voices are designed to prevent us from living in dignity.” — Mu’awya Abu Hamideh.

Instead of encouraging and assisting their people to move on with their lives and seek a better future for their children, Hamas and other Palestinian groups continue to lie to the refugees by promising them that one day they will go back to their villages and towns in Israel.

Are the Lebanese seeking to get rid of the Palestinians living in Lebanon? Many Palestinians seem to think that the Arab country they have been living in for decades has plans to throw them out.

Palestinian factions, meanwhile, are working in precisely the opposite direction, trying to stop the Palestinians from leaving their refugee camps. The factions want the refugees to continue living in misery and poverty so that they can continue to use them as pawns in the conflict with Israel.

They are hoping that the continued presence of refugee camps will keep the issue of the refugees at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In recent weeks, many Palestinians have been flocking the embassies of several Western countries in Lebanon asking to be granted asylum for humanitarian reasons.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOP Rep’s Bill Would Redirect Palestinian Aid To Israel, If State Department Can’t Certify Money Not Going To Terrorists James Ledbetter

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://starpolitical.com/gop-reps-bill-would-redirect-palestinian-aid-to-israel-if-state

Republican North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd is announcing a bill Thursday that would require the U.S. State Department to redirect Palestinian aid money to Israel if the agency is unable to certify that none of the funds is being used to pay the families of Palestinian terrorists.

Under Budd’s bill, the Iron Dome Reinforcement Act, all of the aid money given to Palestinians would be redirected toward Israel’s Iron Dome defense program, if the State Department is unable to certify that the Palestinian Authority (PA) isn’t funneling any of the money to the families of dead terrorists. [

Seven percent of the PA’s budget went to terrorists’ families, found a 2016 analysis Washington, D.C.-based think tank Middle East Media Research Institute submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

President Donald Trump significantly slashed the amount of aid given to the Palestinians, but the U.S. still gave roughly $65 million to the PA in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The State Department is already required to certify that none of the funds given to the PA are used to support terrorism, as a result of the Taylor Force Act, which Trump signed into law in 2018.

Budd’s bill adds the additional stipulation that Palestinian aid money would be redirected to Israel’s Iron Dome program, in the event the State Department is unable to certify how the funds are being used.