RUTHFULLY YOURS

A crescendo is building for raising the federal minimum wage by 107%, from $7.25 an hour to $15.00. To be against it, according to those who support such a move, is to favor inequality and unfairness – it is to show one’s Simon Legree side. The $7.25 wage has been in place for six years; so it is understandable why this tidal wave has been developing. But its implementation will have negative consequences that are surely unintentional. Some perspective is needed.

The income gap has widened during the six years since the recession ended in mid 2009. That fact has little to do with the minimum wage and a lot to do with government policies regarding taxes, regulation and interest rates. A front-page article in Saturday’s New York Times detailed the gloomy news. While employers have added 200,000 jobs a month and the official jobless rate is at a post-recession low of 5.3%, the labor participation rate (62.6%) is at the lowest level since the Carter years. Six years into economic recovery there are fifteen million Americans on Social Security disability insurance, more than when the recession ended. Forty percent more people are on food stamps than six years ago. Work requirements, which were part of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, were waived in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And for the first time in the nation’s history, or at least during a time of economic recovery, more small businesses are closing than opening. And now government wants to fuel this fire by mandating a doubling of the minimum wage?

The US campaign season is yet in its early days, with the imminent need for voters to make their final, rational decisions still a far-off notion. In such an environment the ability to generate headlines can serve as substitute for policy, which is why the brash billionaire is flying high — for now.
We Americans like to think that each presidential election is one for the history books — that some vital aspect of any and every contest will be studied by political scientists for years to come. With Bush vs. Gore in 2000, for example, it was said that the disparity between the popular and the Electoral College votes would dominate discussion and analysis for years to come. This had actually occurred twice before — in the Hayes vs. Tilden race of 1876 and 1888’s Harrison vs. Cleveland. Heard much of them lately or, for that matter, the interminable Florida recounts that eventually put Dubyah in the White House? Probably not.
In 2008 the watershed was, of course, America’s first black president. Once we stop fetishising race, expect history to treat Obama like a Gerald Ford: exceptionally unexceptional. Alternately, he might come to be seen as a more disagreeable Jimmy Carter, forever caught unawares by the consequences of his incompetence, innocence and, as the Iran deal demonstrates, his impotence.

The modern-day progressive’s abiding hatred of the United States of America and the eternal principles for which it stands is what animates the Left’s efforts to cripple and destroy this one-of-a-kind nation.

It is fair to say that support for America’s enemies abroad and criminals at home are the twin pillars of progressivism today. Since in the real world left-wing social engineering schemes inflict great damage on the human beings selected for experimentation, progressives’ most effective tactic is the smear, which they deploy day in, day out, when they run out of arguments, or increasingly nowadays, as their opening argument.

Two recent events illustrate the dual tracks on which progressivism operates in its never-ending campaign to bring down America.

The first major news event is the bizarre, outrageously generous settlement that the public learned last week will be paid out to the late Eric Garner’s family.

New York City’s ultra-progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio (D), is behind the settlement that comes on the anniversary of career criminal Eric Garner’s unfortunate death in Staten Island. He died because he unlawfully resisted arrest by the NYPD and his body, weakened by years of disease, could not handle the stress.

‘Progressive” is a funny word, one that often means the opposite of what it appears to mean. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a wanton and shameless trafficker in Nineties nostalgia, but the odd fact is that she intends to be sworn in as president in 2017 with the Democratic platform from 1948: weaponizing the tax code for use against disfavored businesses while offering rich new subsidies for compliant corporations, raising the minimum wage, aggrandizing the micromanagerial powers of the Department of Labor, expanding our already insolvent entitlements, adding mightily to our zero-return “investments” in government-school bureaucracies and dodgy energy programs, etc.

At least the Democrats of 1948 were also campaigning to repeal Taft-Hartley.

Mrs. Clinton’s accomplishments are restricted almost entirely to a series of prestigious job titles. We’d say that she’s padding her résumé, but at this point in her over-ripe career Mrs. Clinton is only padding her obituary, which is a morbid thing to do. She was an undistinguished senator holding office in a freshly adopted Democratic bastion as a craven tribute to her husband, and then she was a feckless and destructive secretary of state whose wake of incompetence spread, and spreads still, from Moscow to Tripoli. Now she seeks to attain the presidency on a series of intellectually dishonest and lightly considered economic nostrums.

Trump is an oaf, a distraction and a joke who has latched on to a vein of American discontent with illegal immigration…And he once favored amnesty for illegal aliens..Even Bernard Sanders is more suited to enter the most serious election of our time……..rsk

Las Vegas — It’s the height of political fashion to bash Donald Trump, and I’ve done my share. It’s harder to understand his appeal, but it’s absolutely necessary if we are to come to terms with the political times we live in.

Anyone who watched Trump’s speech to 2,000 attendees of FreedomFest in Las Vegas on Saturday could easily lampoon his bizarre, meandering, and egomaniacal delivery. But by the time he left the stage, a big chunk of the audience approved of him, and many expressed a willingness to vote for him.

“Trump was upbeat, and, unlike other candidates, he’s a man of action,” Barbara Carter, of Las Vegas, told me after the speech. She is considering voting for Trump. A former resident of Wasilla, Alaska, she was a fan of Sarah Palin’s when Palin was mayor there. She says that both Palin and Trump cut through the politically correct rhetoric of our day and speak plain truths. When I pointed out that Trump never presents any evidence for his charges that the Mexican government deliberately sends rapists and killers to the U.S., she agreed that both Palin and Trump “may have been pushed onto the national stage before they were ready.”

STANLEY KURTZ: What is the purpose of an election campaign? Supposedly, elections allow voters to decide who and how they want to run the country. The candidates explain their positions, debate the merits of the issues and then the voters choose.

You might remember a little thing called the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Well, nothing like that is happening these days. Let’s review. In 2008, Americans elected a president who advertised himself as a post-partisan unifier, a fellow who was famous for saying that there weren’t red states or blue states, only the United States. And a lot of Americans, even some Republicans, believed him. Yet, the man they elected turned out to be the most partisan, the most intentionally polarizing and the most leftist president in the history of the United States.

The people in this audience, I would wager, weren’t fooled by any of this, but, on the whole, the people of the United States were fooled. And the question now is are we, as a people, about to be fooled again?

“Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.”

Al Bernstein

American sportscaster

June is the month – at least in the Northern Hemisphere – of the summer solstice, the day when the sun reaches its highest point. Subsequently, the sun retreats south. Days shorten, until six months later we experience the longest night of the year, the winter solstice. The calendar is a reminder of the ever-changing world in which we live.

For Greece, of course, the sky turned darker as the month wore on, culminating in a decision to close banks for a week. For years, it has seemed that, ultimately, the only answer is for Greece to abandon the Euro and then enter detoxification. (As of early this morning, it appears that Greece has, with conditions, accepted the terms of its creditors.) Nevertheless, Greece is addicted to spending what they do not have.

Hillary Clinton is a woman without conviction, a woman who doesn’t know. She was first lady of a southern state, she sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart from 1986 to 1992 – but is there any record of her voicing opposition to Wal-Mart’s labor practices, of her opposing the sale of the Confederate battle flag? Until recently, has there been any moment in the decades following her appointment to that board, in the many years in which she has been egregiously prominent in public life, when she led on, was prominently identified with, the issue of the flag or racial matters in general?

They say Obama’s audacious. What’s truly remarkable, though, is his potential successor’s blatant contempt for the politics of principle and conviction – her unique ability to adopt, quickly and seamlessly, the most expedient position at any moment, to flaunt her temporary stance with the righteousness and self-regard of a longtime committed activist.

Hillary Clinton’s reticence is drowning out her message, which is that she is the cure for the many ailments that afflict America during a second Democratic presidential term. Senator Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) has called her “the most opaque person you’ll ever meet in your life,” but when opacity yields to the necessity of answering questions, here are a few:

Your first leadership adventure was when your husband entrusted you with health-care reform. Using a process as complex as it was secretive, you produced a proposal so implausible that a Democratic-controlled Congress would not even vote on it. Your legislation was one reason that in 1994 Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in 40 years. What did you learn from this futility and repudiation?

Three times in your memoir Hard Choices you say that as secretary of state you visited 112 countries. Do you think “peripatetic” is a synonym for “effective”? You tell readers that at a 2009 meeting with Chinese officials you said, “We need to build a resilient relationship that allows both of us to thrive and meet our global responsibilities without unhealthy competition, rivalry, or conflict.” Does it trouble your environmental conscience that trees died to produce the paper on which you recycled that thought?

Two years into his reign, Pope Francis has emerged as an extreme socialist obsessed with the usual phony leftist problems such as manmade global warming, American institutional racism, and income inequality.Muslims are indiscriminately slaughtering Christians around the world while Christianity itself seems on the verge of being eclipsed globally by Islam, but these things barely register with this pope.

This pseudo-intellectual pope keeps on spouting the same misanthropic Marxist platitudes as he hitches his papacy to global warming, the new international totalitarian cause. Sounding like Mao Zedong, Francis said a “bold cultural revolution” was needed to save the planet.