ELSEWHERE

It's all coming out now about the Communist Italian journalist who was released by the terrorists and then shot up by U.S. forces. The car WAS speeding and Italy DID pay a huge ransom, thus encouraging more kidnapping.

Australia deports its illegals: "Seventy-four illegal migrant workers have been deported on a charter flight after a series of raids in regional Victoria. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said the 57 Malaysians and 17 Thais had been found over the past three weeks, most of them working on farms in the Goulburn Valley. The 48 men and 26 women were flown out on a charter flight to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok yesterday. Senator Vanstone defended the use of a charter flight as the most cost-effective option given the size of the group. "The success of operations such as this, completed yesterday, should send a strong message that the government does not tolerate people living and working illegally in this country," she said."

The usual Leftist attack on jobs: "Asking Democrats if they favor an increase in the minimum wage is like asking Martha Stewart if she'd mind sharing some decorating ideas. There are few things they'd rather do, and Sen. Ted Kennedy thinks it is high time. The Massachusetts Democrat is offering a measure that would boost the wage floor from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. .... Although you can force employers to pay their workers more, you can't force them to employ people. If you raise the tax on cigarettes by $2.10 a pack, people will smoke fewer cigarettes. The minimum wage functions as a tax on hiring low-wage workers, which means companies will look for ways to do without them. Economists have always taken this effect as an unfortunate reality. But a few years ago, ardent proponents of wishful thinking hailed a study that seemed to confirm their hopes. Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger looked at what happened in New Jersey when it raised its minimum wage and neighboring Pennsylvania didn't. Far from losing jobs, they reported, New Jersey enjoyed a boom in hiring compared to its neighbor.... As it happens, the study fared poorly under scrutiny. Economists David Neumark of Michigan State University and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board got more comprehensive data and found that actually, New Jersey didn't gain jobs compared to Pennsylvania--it lost them".

Bush gets it right again: "The economy is on a tear. You might not know this from coverage in the mainstream media, which may have a built-in bias against George W. Bush. Sure, some big outlets like the New York Times have come around at least somewhat on the president's freedom-and-democracy revolution in the Middle East. But they're not about to concede on the economic power of lower marginal tax-rate incentives. Too bad, because the evidence is overwhelming that the supply-side tax cuts enacted in the spring of 2003 have triggered an economic boom. Yes, I will call it the Bush boom..... Since May 2003 - which not coincidentally was the debut period for Bush's tax cuts on personal income, dividends, and capital gains - the economy has generated 3 million new jobs. Using the Labor Department's household survey, 2.6 million more people have been employed since the tax cuts. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.4 percent from 6.3 percent. Weekly unemployment claims have fallen to 300,700 - the lowest since late 2000". See also PoliPundit.

Moscow Moved Weapons to Syria and Lebanon : "According to a former top Bush administration official, Russian special forces teams moved weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq to Syria. "I am absolutely sure that Russian Spetsnatz units moved WMD out of Iraq before the war," stated John Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary for international technology security. According to Shaw, Russian units hid Saddam's arsenal inside Syria and in Lebanon's Bekka valley. "While in Iraq I uncovered detailed information that Spetsnatz units shredded records and moved all WMD and specified advanced munitions out of Iraq to Syria and Lebanon," stated Shaw during an exclusive interview. "I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives"."

There is a good debunking here of the many nutty conspiracy theories about 9/11.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes that Marx saw people as "debris". My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at predestination and the 39 Articles of the Church of England.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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