Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Liberal Media In A Frenzy Over Walker’s Pro-Worker Immigration Stance

WASHINGTON - JUNE 20:  Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker listens during the 2011 Governors Summit of U.S. Chamber of Commerce June 20, 2011 in Washington, DC. The summit was to focus on policies that help states to attract businesses and to improve the economy.  (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Monday immigration policy should be American-worker centered, apparently striking a nerve with the liberal media, who called it extreme and used tweets from a disgruntled former employee to criticize the move.
The Washington Post, MSNBC, and Huffington Post said the stance is a dumb move politically, because only a small number of right-wing extremists question the economic value of legal immigration.
“It’s not clear whether he understands that immigration is one way to boosteconomic growth,” Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote condescendingly. “(There is replete evidence that immigration boosts revenue, growth and does not take jobs away from native-born workers.)”
“We have remarked that the temptation in the GOP primary is to play to the loudest voices and the staunchest segment of the party, even though they do not represent a majority of voters in the party, let alone in the general electorate,” Rubin added.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Jumping the (Real Estate) Gun? Clinton Confidante Buys Condo In DC

The view of 3303 Water Street NW condo building from the C & O Canal in Georgetown on April1, 2015. | John Shinkle/POLITICO
Is someone optimistic that Hillary Clinton is going to be spending a lot more time in Washington, D.C., in the years ahead? Donna Shalala, the longtime Clinton family confidante who was announced as the head of the New York-based Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in March, closed that same month on a Georgetown condo in an upscale building with waterfront views. According to real estate records, Shalala purchased for $862,500 the one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit on Water Street NW under a trust account in her name; at just 924 square feet, that’s quite the pricey pied a terre.

Sources say Shalala will likely spend most of her time in New York for her foundation job, which would make the Georgetown property a secondary home—the type of place you’d use frequently if your boss, for instance, was the First Husband and your other boss was the President. Shalala has gotten used to cushy digs. As president of the University of Miami, where she has been since leaving the Clinton administration as secretary of health and human services in 2001, she lived at the school’s massive Coral Gables presidential house until it was sold for $9 million in 2012. Since then she’s been bunking at a new, 9,000-square-foot, two-story home, complete with an elevator, dubbed “Ibis House,” in Pinecrest, an expensive gated community. Shalala is slated to depart University of Miami in early May, at the end of the academic year.

Via: Politico

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Critics: NLRB May Gut ‘Right to Work’ Laws


The federal government’s top labor arbiter may use its regulatory power to force non-union employees in right to work states pay union dues.
Image result for nlrbThe National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) put out a call for legal briefs on Wednesday asking labor law scholars to weigh in on whether unions should have the ability to extract dues payments from non-members. The announcement drew immediate criticism from right to work activists.
“It is unfortunately not surprising that the Obama NLRB is now actively working to undermine the 25 state Right to Work laws. Its ‘call for briefs’ signals this NLRB’s intention to reverse over 60 years of Board precedent to give union bosses an unprecedented tool to eviscerate employees’ Right to Work protections,” Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, said in a release.
“Right to work” laws ban coercive dues systems in which employees must join a union and pay dues as a condition of employment. The laws have passed in 25 states and are spreading in traditional union strongholds: Wisconsin, the birthplace of public sector unions, passed such a law in March, just two years after similar regimes were implemented in Indiana and Michigan.
Unions have fought the law in courts in nearly every state that has adopted the measure, arguing that since labor groups negotiate wages and benefits on behalf of all workers, non-members are “free-riding.” In most cases, those challenges have not prevailed in state or federal courts. Unions in Indiana, for example, filed a flurry of lawsuits intended to block the implementation of the state right to work law. Federal Judge Phillip Simon tossed them out of court in 2013.

What Today’s American Politics Tells Us

There is something very disquieting occurring in American politics today. Most dramatically, the Democratic Party is offering a candidate who is a moral cesspool filled with lies and a history of behavior that would render anyone unthinkable for the highest office in the land. Something is very wrong when Hillary Clinton is, at this point, the only candidate for President the Democrats will be able to vote for and, worse, an estimated 47% of them will vote for her.

What we are witnessing is a Democratic Party that has been debauched by decades of socialism, an economic and political system that has failed everywhere it was implemented.

By contrast, what is being largely overlooked is the wealth of political talent—Rubio, Walker, Paul, et al—-that the Republican Party has to offer as an alternative. Instead of obsessing over the different aspects of its candidates, we should be celebrating the fact that voters will be able to choose someone of real merit for whom to vote.

While the brain-dead media talks about the Republican candidates, seizing on every small element of the policies they are individually offering for consideration, the contrast with Hillary Clinton widens into a gap as large as the Grand Canyon. Her campaign thus far has been an exhibition of media manipulation. She talks of “income inequality” as if it has not existed from the dawn of time and is based on the socialist utopia of everyone being equally poverty-stricken. Who wants to live in a nation where you cannot become wealthy if you’re willing to take the risks and work hard to achieve it?


The Loretta Lynch Race Game


Saturday’s Washington Post front page carries on its recent tradition of fanning racialist flames without substantial regard to fact or context. 

Image result for loretta lynch obamaThe header reads: “Race creeps into debate over stalled nomination for attorney general” and the first graph notes that “African American and other civil rights leaders” are infuriated that Loretta Lynch’s confirmation as attorney general has been held up because of -- you guessed it -- racism. Responding to the president’s dog whistle, National Action network and multimillionaire tax scofflaw Al Sharpton says he’s going on a three-day hunger strike to force consideration of her nomination. Be our guest, Al. (Although after the stomach stapling, there’s not much more to be lost.)

Again the formerly respectable civil rights movement is shilling for the Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, and the Post fails to present the issue fairly. Once again the “civil rights groups” prove themselves as blindly partisan as the no nukes crowd who protest the building of nuclear power plants here and say nothing of the Iranian nuclear arms buildup and the human shields who never tie themselves to the doors of Israeli nurseries. How easily they all ceded any moral authority.

The record shows that the holdup is not racist and not unprecedented. The charge, moreover, is pure projection -- the left attributing to its opponents its own bad behavior.

Via: American Thinker


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Who actually pays their “fair share” of taxes?


In recent years, claims that “the rich” don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes have been repeated countless times. But that excuse to tax them more to line others’ pockets is blown away whenever the highly disproportionate income tax burdens borne by higher earners are reported. As the Wall Street Journal titled a recent article,“Top 20% of Earners Pay 84% of Income Tax.” In fact, the top 1 percent of American earners earn about one-sixth of total income, but pay nearly as much in income taxes as everyone else combined.
Image result for Taxes Fair ShareRather than abandon the electorally valuable false premise that such disproportionate burdens are justified, however, the political Left rallies to its cause. They try to rescue it by asserting that other taxes are regressive, so that taxes aren’t “really” so clearly unjustifiable as income tax burdens reveal. The featured players in that drama are state and local sales and excise taxes and Social Security taxes. Unfortunately, those taxes are also misrepresented to defend “fair share” misrepresentations.
Columnist Michael Hiltzik illustrated the state and local gambit in a tax-day column echoing charges that their sales and excise taxes “disproportionately hammer lower-income taxpayers,” with that alleged regressivity offsetting income tax unfairness.
That claim arises because those with lower current measured incomes spend a larger proportion of them on those taxes. However, as Edgar Browning has noted, “relative to lifetime income, there is very little difference in the percentage of income consumed among income classes.” As a result, apparent regressivity using current incomes is shown instead as “roughly proportional” to income in the more-appropriate lifetime context. Low current-income families also consume a multiple of their income, largely financed with government transfer payments excluded from income measures. That further exaggerates the share of their incomes going to such taxes.

NY Post: How Menendez ‘Conspired’ To Import Rich Donor’s Babes

They are the models who could bring down a senator.

Sen. Robert Menendez mobilized his staff to secure a visa for a Brazilian actress who posed nude on the cover of Sexy magazine; he stepped up for a sultry Ukrainian student who wanted a plastic-surgery consult; and he directd a staff member to “call Ambassador asap” in order to reverse a visa denial to a 22-year-old Dominican model.
The young women were all paramours of Dr. Salomon Melgen, 60, a married eye doctor and one of Menendez’s biggest donors, prosecutors charge.

The New Jersey Democrat’s efforts on behalf of Melgen’s lovers came to light in a 68-page indictment against the two men unsealed this month.

Menendez is accused of using his power and influence to benefit Melgen in exchange for almost $1 million in gifts and campaign contributions.

If convicted, Menendez faces up to 15 years in prison on each of eight bribery counts alone. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

The senator is also accused of trying to influence a State Department official on Melgen’s behalf in a dispute involving one of the doctor’s business interests in the Dominican Republic.

Prosecutors also say Menendez and his staff tried to help Melgen in a Medicare billing conflict.

Melgen was charged with Medicaid fraud last week in a separate 76-count indictment.

Schieffer to O’Malley: Why Are You Only One ‘Even Thinking of Challenging’ Hillary?



Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer sounded more interested Sunday morning in why Martin O’Malley was the only Democratic candidate seriously considering challenging putative frontrunner Hillary Clinton than in his candidacy itself.
“Here is a party that won last two presidential elections, yet there seems to be this one candidate,” Schieffer said. “Shouldn’t there be more people out there? Why is there nobody but you — I don’t mean this in deprecating way towards you — but you seem to be the lone guy who’s even thinking about challenging her.”
“I’m not sure why that is,” O’Malley said. “But I think it would be an extreme poverty indeed if there weren’t more than one person willing to compete for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.”
Clinton who finally officially announced her candidacy last week, has significantly outpolled the remainder of the Democratic field. O’Malley polls in the single digits against her.

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