A GOOD SUMMARY FROM MURDOCH

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch said he has no regrets about supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq and asserted that the American death toll in the conflict was insignificant from a historical perspective. Speaking to reporters at a conference in Tokyo, the News Corp. chief said: "The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute. "Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis from killing each other."

More than 2,830 American troops have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and thousands of others have been wounded. "I believe it was right to go there," Murdoch insisted in remarks reported by the Times of India. "I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes. But that's easy to say after the event. "It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too."

Source

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MINIMUM WAGE NONSENSE REVIVES

How to create unemployment in one easy lesson

A hike in the national minimum wage seems all but certain to become one of the first fruits of the Democrats' victories this week. Nancy Pelosi, the presumptive Speaker of the House, has pledged to raise the minimum by over $2, to $7.25 from $5.15. And President Bush has already signaled he'd go along. At the state level, six states not only approved minimum wage hikes in referendums this week but indexed the minimum to inflation going forward. We hope Mr. Bush fights off any attempt at federal indexation and insists on a provision to protect small business.

Raising the minimum wage has been a hardy perennial of the left for decades now. What is striking is the degree to which is has come to be seen as an economic free lunch. Even some reputedly unbiased economists have started to tout the view that raising the minimum wage has no discernible effect on job creation.

But if this were true, they'd be calling for a $10, $20 or even $50-an-hour minimum wage. They're not, and neither is Nancy Pelosi. That's because the law of demand is one of the most dependable precepts of economics. It says that when the price of something goes up, demand for it goes down. An employee's wages are the price the employer pays for his services, so raising their wages means forcing employers to pay more for workers. The price goes up and there is downward pressure on demand for workers. Other things being equal, jobs are lost

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California: Republican voters didn't show up at the polls

Disillusionment with the GOP shows

California's Republican voters stayed home in droves on election day, as preliminary figures show voter turnout falling well below the state average in some of the most reliably GOP parts of the state. Although the final totals won't be known for weeks, election day turnout in Fresno, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and SanDiego counties, which all have Republican pluralities, ran as much as 10 percentage points below the state's 44 percent average turnout. "The turnout in Republican counties was low compared to the turnout in counties where Democrats hold the edge,'' said Patrick Dorinson, a spokesman for the state Republican Party. "The conservative Republican base didn't show up.''

Without that anticipated flood of votes from places such as Orange County and the Inland Empire, Tuesday was a long night for most of the statewide Republican candidates not named Arnold Schwarzenegger. "It came as a surprise,'' admitted Stan Devereaux, a spokesman for Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock, who lost the lieutenant governor's race to Democratic Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi. "We kept looking at the returns through the night and thought we had a chance, but when the returns (from Republican counties) came in, we didn't get the turnout we expected.''

Of course, there were exceptions. Schwarzenegger easily won re-election over Democratic state Treasurer Phil Angelides, and Republican businessman Steve Poizner, who put more than $9 million of his own money into the campaign for insurance commissioner, rolled over Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante. According to exit polls, Schwarzenegger attracted 93 percent of the Republican votes, 59 percent of independent voters, and a strong 22 percent of Democratic votes. "Angelides' collapse was a huge contributing factor to Schwarzenegger's victory,'' said Kevin Spillane, a GOP consultant. The governor "not only got near-unanimous support from Republicans, but drew a huge crossover vote from independents and Democrats.''

But Schwarzenegger did little campaigning for the other candidates on the GOP ticket, which meant those Republicans had to depend on their traditional strategy of running up big enough margins in the conservative parts of the state to overcome the flood of Democratic votes in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area. But with the 34 percent turnout in Riverside County and only 37 percent in Orange County, those Republican candidates couldn't find enough votes. "Our people just chose to stay home,'' said Beth Miller, a spokeswoman for Republican Bruce McPherson, who lost his job as secretary of state to Democratic state Sen. Debra Bowen of Marina Del Rey (Los Angeles County), 48 percent to 44 percent. "Republican turnout definitely had an effect on our race.''

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For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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