Wednesday, April 16, 2014



Samantha Power: 'Targeting' of Muslims in Central African Republic Is 'Heartbreaking'

More amazing Leftist dishonesty. It is Muslims attacking Christians, not the other way around. Christians must not give Muslims any of their own back, of course. And note that this sympathy for Muslims is unmatched by any sympathy for Christians currently undergoing heavy persecution in the Middle east. I wonder what percentage of Americans would find attacks on Muslims heartbreaking? My guess: 0%

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Sunday called the "targeting" of the Muslim population in the Central African Republic "heartbreaking."

"You both have the devastating, heartbreaking, systematic targeting now of the Muslim population. You also have retaliatory attacks against Christians. That is just so painful to see these people suffer, to see parents who have had their children literally killed before their very eyes," Power told ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos.

The United Nations Security Council last week voted unanimously to send 12,000 peacekeepers to the Christian-majority Central African Republic, where Muslims and Christians are slaughtering each other, and where the government and its institutions have broken down.

The religious conflict follows last year's coup by Muslim rebels, who overthrew the ten-year rule of CAR President Francois Bozize.

According to the BBC, the Muslim rebel leader who replaced Bozize -- a Soviet-educated man named Michel Djotodia -- "was accused of failing to prevent his forces from raping, torturing and killing civilians, particularly among the country's Christian majority."

SOURCE

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Statistical Frauds and the "war on women"

Thomas Sowell

The "war on women" political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.  It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn -- and that this is because of discrimination.

It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same.

Constantly repeating the "77 percent" statistic does not make them the same. It simply takes advantage of many people's ignorance -- something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on many other issues.

What if you compare women and men who are the same on all the relevant characteristics?

First of all, you can seldom do that, because the statistics you would need are not always available for the whole range of occupations and the whole range of differences between women's patterns and men's patterns in the labor market.

Even where relevant statistics are available, careful judgment is required to pick samples of women and men who are truly comparable.

For example, some women are mothers and some men are fathers. But does the fact that they are both parents make them comparable in the labor market? Actually the biggest disparity in incomes is between fathers and mothers. Nor is there anything mysterious about this, when you stop and think about it.

How surprising is it that women with children do not earn as much as women who do not have children? If you don't think children take up a mother's time, you just haven't raised any children.

How surprising is it that men with children earn more than men without children, just the opposite of the situation with women? Is it surprising that a man who has more mouths to feed is more likely to work longer hours? Or take on harder or more dangerous jobs, in order to earn more money?

More than 90 percent of the people who are killed on the job are men. There is no point pretending that there are no differences between what women do and what men do in the workplace, or that these differences don't affect income.

During my research on male-female differences for my book "Economic Facts and Fallacies," I was amazed to learn that young male doctors earned much higher incomes than young female doctors. But it wasn't so amazing after I discovered that young male doctors worked over 500 hours more per year than young female doctors.

Even when women and men work at jobs that have the same title -- whether doctors, lawyers, economists or whatever -- people do not get paid for what their job title is, but for what they actually do.

Women lawyers who are pregnant, or who have young children, may have good reasons to prefer a 9 to 5 job in a government agency to working 60 hours a week in a high-powered law firm. But there is no point comparing male lawyers as a group with female lawyers as a group, if you don't look any deeper than job titles.

Unless, of course, you are not looking for the truth, but for political talking points to excite the gullible.

Even when you compare women and men with the "same" education, as measured by college or university degrees, the women usually specialize in a very different mix of subjects, with very different income-earning potential.

Although comparing women and men who are in fact comparable is not easy to do, when you look at women and men who are similar on multiple factors, the sex differential in pay shrinks drastically and gets close to the vanishing point. In some categories, women earn more than men with the same range of characteristics.

If the 77 percent statistic was for real, employers would be paying 30 percent more than they had to, every time they hired a man to do a job that a woman could do just as well. Would employers be such fools with their own money? If you think employers don't care about paying 30 percent more than they have to, just go ask your boss for a 30 percent raise!

SOURCE

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The Liberals' Latest False Wedge Issue -- the "war on women"

She gave a dramatic eye-roll in reaction to all of the fuss that Democrats and the president attempted to create over equal pay for women last week.  A Democrat herself, she said she has carved out a decent, comfortable life for her family over the years as a waitress at a local restaurant.

"I am in many ways my own boss," she explained. "It is up to me to get the order right, treat people well, and use my personal skills to increase my wages."

And she is "sick and tired of my party treating me like a victim. This is not 1970, and it's insulting."

Then she elbowed the waiter standing beside her, who joked that, despite being younger, he has to work twice as hard to keep up with her earnings.

This woman's frustration with Democrats comes from social and traditional media flooded with tweets, emails and news reports, and from the president himself, all pushing the message that he will protect women from evil Republicans who want to keep her gender from its rightful earning power.

The president, she said, "is trying to create a wedge issue when there isn't one. Why can't he focus on things people are really concerned about, like bringing back lost jobs, a tangible thing that has affected housing, communities, tax bases and schools?"

Last Tuesday, President Obama signed an executive order encouraging federal contractors to pay men and women the same amount of money for the same amount of work.

He claimed that women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by men - a very broad statement and, in many ways, false, according to a Labor Department analysis showing that when you factor in job experience, education and hours worked, the difference in median wages between men and women shrinks to 5 to 7 cents on the dollar.

White House officials had no problem using that same Labor Department analysis to explain away their own 88-cent wage gap between female and male staffers. But they failed to mention it once in all of their press releases, or in Obama's speech

SOURCE

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Leftist Antisemite Incites Murder of Three Jews

by DANIEL PIPES

Max Blumenthal, like others on the far-Left, jumped on the July 2011 Norwegian massacre of 77 dead and 319 injured to impugn the counter-jihadi right. His screed, "Anders Behring Breivik, a perfect product of the Axis of Islamophobia" included this sentence:

The rhetoric of the characters who inspired Breivik, from Pam Geller to Robert Spencer to Daniel Pipes, was so eliminationist in its nature that it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone put words into action.

In other words, we three were to blame for the massacre. A year later, Blumenthal returned to the same theme, this time focusing on just me:

To his shame, Pipes earned eighteen citations in the manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, the self-proclaimed "counter-jihadist" standing trial for the murder of seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers. Drawing heavily on sources like Pipes to justify his actions, Breivik said he carried out the slaughter to punish Europe for succumbing to "Islamicization" and multiculturalism.

Never mind the fundamental inaccuracies of these statements - that (1) Geller, Spencer, or I ever engaged in "eliminationist" rhetoric and (2) ignoring that Breivik cited leftists about as much as rightists and Muslims as often as counter-jihadis - what's important is that Blumenthal exploited Breivik's murderous rampage to score cheap points against fellow American analysts.

In his glee, however, Blumenthal forgot that he too is vulnerable to such charges, that two can play the game of gotcha. Ron Radosh notes at PJ Media that Frazier Glenn Miller, 73, accused of killing three people yesterday at two Jewish venues near Kansas City, wrote the following at runronpaul.com, an antisemitic website:

"Jew journalist Max Blumenthal exposes and explains this attempt by a foreign government Israel, to buy the presidential election for the neo-con, war-mongering republican establishment."

Daniel Greenfield suggests that Miller referred here to "a Blumenthal interview on Putin's propaganda channel RT, which he has since defended, in which he claimed that Netanyahu was targeting Ron Paul and Obama."

Greenfield further finds that "there are 382 results for [Max Blumenthal] on the Neo-Nazi VNN forum that the Kansas City killer patronized." Participatnts at Stormfront, the premier American Neo-Nazi site, often mention Blumenthal approvingly.

Breivik, it is now clear, intentionally sought to discredit counter-jihadis like me; but Miller gives every appearance of being a true believer inspired in part by Blumenthal's ravings.

And so, with due consideration, I wrote the headline of this weblog entry as "Antisemite Max Blumenthal Incited the Murder of Three in Kansas."  Next is for Blumenthal's fellow leftists to denounce him and shun him. But will they?

SOURCE

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Trapped by the State

Over the past half century, federal spending on social programs has risen like a bubbling cauldron. In 1964, it amounted to less than one-quarter of the U.S. budget. Today it accounts for about two-thirds. What effect has the spending trend had on the American psyche? Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs offers a brilliant analogy to help us grasp the transformation.

A salmon trap, also called a pound net, is simple but ingenious, Higgs explains in the Spring 2014 issue of The Independent Review. It’s sort of like a one-way funnel. The deeper a fish swims into the trap, the harder it is to escape. It has long been banned in U.S. waters, but its design lives on, figuratively speaking, in various political schemes that direct people toward dependence on the state.

“As a salmon’s ‘mind’ tells it not to turn back, so the human mind, especially when bewitched by government propaganda and statist ideology, tells a typical person not to turn back,” Higgs writes. “Having lost the capacity for assuming individual responsibility, people are fearful of taking on such responsibilities as their forebears did routinely.”

PDF here

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N.C. Sheriff on Lack of Immigration Enforcement: ‘Every Sheriff Will be a Border Sheriff’

Rockingham County, North Carolina Sheriff Sam Page said the continued lack of enforcement of federal immigration law along the U.S. border with Mexico is bringing the consequences of an unsecured border to law enforcement agencies inside the United States.

“If we fail to secure our borders, basically, every sheriff in America will be a border sheriff because we’ll be fighting the issues that come through those borders,” Page told CNSNews.com at an immigration radio town hall in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

Page said that while the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is in charge of preventing illegal entry at the border, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is tasked with enforcing U.S. immigration law inside the country.

That enforcement, Page said, has been compromised since ICE’s then-director John Morton issued the first of ongoing prosecutorial discretion “guidance” from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that directs agents to concentrate on apprehending illegal aliens that are considered a threat to public safety.

“If their hands are so tied where they can’t do their job, and it’s not getting done, then we have failed because we’re not protecting the American citizens within the interior U.S.,” Page said.

More HERE

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