See Clifford Berryman’s original cartoon here.
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McClatchy: Civilians Were Only Targets Left As Russia Kept Bombing.
GORI, Georgia — On the day that Russia declared an end to its war in Georgia, Jumberi, a taxi driver who gave only his first name, took a long drag on a Marlboro Red cigarette and said that after the first bomb hit, all he saw was body parts.
He motioned to the shattered windshield of his Toyota Corolla and the bloody handprints on the side of the car — left there when the wounded and dying collapsed as they begged him to take them to the hospital.
“I heard the sound of the jets, but I did not see them,” he said. “They were just bombing and bombing the city. Everything was out of control.”
It wasn’t clear what military targets were left for Russian aircraft to hit on Tuesday. Georgian soldiers had fled their positions sometime overnight and all that remained of their presence were abandoned vehicles _two transport trucks crashed in the middle of the road and the charred remains of an armored personnel carrier, its bits blown across the street.
Yet explosions boomed across Gori and the valley around it, and their toll was grimly evident.
Jumberi pointed to his backseat, where blood was pooled on the floorboard — left, he said, by a man who staggered over to his cab before an ambulance took him away.
A few minutes later, three Russian helicopters launched missiles over a ridgeline in the distance. The clouds overhead, dark with rain, flashed with every explosion.
Eteri Tatishvilli marveled at the continuing attack.
“The Georgian troops have withdrawn completely,” she said. “The last time I saw them was last night.”
Miles away, at one of Tbilisi’s main hospitals, doctors struggled to care for the wounded, who arrived in waves throughout the day. Many were elderly. None was a soldier.
“Just now, we admitted eight patients,” said Tamara Saria, a doctor. “The age of all of them was no less than 80.”
“Do you see any military people here?” asked Nikoloz Kvachatze, another doctor. “These are all civilians.”
He was walking past an 80-year-old woman who had shrapnel wounds across the right side of her face. The woman, frail with thin white hair, was gasping and wheezing into an oxygen mask
“They are punishing us,” Kvachatze said of the Russians. “They are punishing us for trying to be independent.”
John McCain in The Wall Street Journal: Today We Are All Georgians.
Holman W. Jenkins: What A “War For Oil” Really Looks Like.
Bill O’Reilly: Vlad the Assailer.
Flashback, 1984: “There is a bear in the woods…”
Glenn Spencer: Union’s Card Check Gimmick.
Today, unions represent a scant 7.5 percent of private-sector workers, with the rest of their members employed in government, their only significant growth market. Demographically, the news is even worse: The largest single group of union members is between the ages of 45 and 54, nearing retirement — while just 6 percent of unionized workers are between 16 and 24.
Sadly, many unions seem to be choosing government power and restrictive legislation as their way out of the wilderness, instead of enhancing their value proposition. The AFL-CIO and its affiliates plan to spend $200 million of their members’ money to elect pro-labor candidates in 2008…
What makes this massive political spending so concerning is the element of coercion that lies behind labor’s political agenda. The centerpiece of that agenda is the Employee Free Choice Act, a masterpiece of Orwellian doublespeak.
The act would effectively strip workers of the protection of secret ballots in union certification elections. Replacing the privacy of the voting booth, workers would be asked to publicly sign cards indicating support for a union, exposing them to harassment and intimidation. Unions could badger workers repeatedly, at work and at home, to sign a card acquiescing to representation and, in most cases, employers would have limited ability to give workers their side of the story.
Could workers still choose to have a secret ballot election? Technically, yes, but in practice, no. Unions have made it clear that they will make the decision for workers, and they will never choose a secret ballot. Otherwise, why pour so much money into pressuring politicians to pass the card check legislation?
And one point unions can’t gloss over is that once they can “convince” enough workers to sign cards, it would be against the law to have a secret ballot election regardless of how many workers wanted one.
Why would unions, who claim to be advocates for workers, want to take the free choice out of forming a union? Well, secret ballot elections require investing time and resources into convincing workers that membership is worth the dues they have to pay. And there’s the risk that, in the privacy of the voting booth, workers may not choose the union.
The net result of this coercive legislation will be a lot more unionization — in retail stores, in restaurants, in banks and in high-tech firms — whether the workers really want it or not. And the impact on the economy, and the well-being of workers could be substantial.
Unions portray card check as a “ticket to the middle class.” In reality, states with the heaviest union presence tend to have slower economic growth, slower job growth, higher unemployment, higher costs of living, significantly heavier tax burdens and less entrepreneurial activity than states with the least union presence.
Taking away workers’ ability to make an informed decision about a union in private isn’t “free choice” — it’s tyranny.
Rocky Mountain News: Obama backs Free Choice Act.
John McCain opposes.
The Wall Street Journal: Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win.
National Right to Work Foundation: Another Card-Check Myth Debunked.
John Hood: Workers, Prepare To Be Carded.
The Wall Street Journal: Bad Law, Worse Timing.
The federal minimum wage rose by 70 cents yesterday [Thursday] to $6.55 per hour, and left-wing advocates are celebrating the increase as a boon for the so-called working poor. Not to be party poopers, but the reality is that most poor people in the U.S. already earn more than the minimum wage, and most workers who do earn the minimum wage aren’t poor.
The wage hike is the second of three annual increases mandated by a 2007 law. Next year the federal wage floor will rise to $7.25. This year’s increase will touch some 1.5 million workers, in a workforce numbering more than 146 million. Census data compiled by the Employment Policies Institute reveal that less than 1% of U.S. workers over 25 is earning the minimum wage. Who are these folks?
Most are not family heads making the minimum wage full-time all year. They are young single adults, teenagers living at home or spouses providing a second income. The average family income of a minimum-wage earner is $44,636, and 42% of these workers live with a parent or other relative. Only 15% of employees making the minimum wage are single earners with dependents. “A minimum wage increase today is a middle-class family entitlement,” says EPI Executive Director Rick Berman, “because that’s who’s working at the minimum wage in second and third jobs.”
Repeated studies have shown that minimum-wage increases are more likely to slow job creation than reduce poverty. A large share of the costs of these mandates are borne by the same low-income families the wage hike is supposed to help. Employers inevitably pass wage increases onto consumers as higher prices for goods and services, which erodes the spending power of all consumers but especially the poor. Employers also respond by hiring fewer unskilled workers, a disproportionate number of whom are teenagers and minorities.
Artificially increasing the cost of labor is always a bad idea because it distorts the free market. But the timing for this latest minimum-wage hike, amid a weak economy, could hardly be worse.
Dr. Walter Williams (2006): Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly.
Kristen Lopez Eastlick: Dude, Where’s My Summer Job?
William F. Buckley Jr. (2006): The Phony World of the Minimum Wage.
Video: Milton Friedman on the minimum wage.
Israel National News: Obama Gives Final Burial to ‘Undivided Jerusalem’ Statement.
(IsraelNN.com) Barack Obama, the Democratic party’s nominee for U.S. President, retracted the statement he made at the AIPAC Convention in June, about the need for Jerusalem to remain Israel’s undivided capital. Obama had already qualified the statement the day after he made it, but in a new CNN interview he effectively retracted it, blaming “poor phrasing” and careless syntax.
Interviewer Fareed Zakaria asked: “One area where you’re outside the international consensus — and certainly, perhaps, some others — is the statement you made in a recent speech supporting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. Now, why not support the Clinton plan, which envisions a divided Jerusalem, the Arab half being the capital of a Palestinian state, the Jewish half being the capital of the Jewish state?”
Obama replied: “You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech. And we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given.
“The point we were simply making was, is that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the ‘67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent.”
…
“I was not trying to predetermine what are essentially final status issues. I think the Clinton formulation provides a starting point for discussions between the parties.
“And it is an example of us making sure that we are careful in terms of our syntax. But the intention was never to move away from that basic, core idea that they — that those parties are going to have to negotiate these issues on their own, with the strong engagement of the United States.
“And if you look at the overall tenor of that speech and what I’ve said historically about this issue, you know, Israel has an interest not just in bunkering down. They’ve got to recognize that their long-term viability as a Jewish state is going to depend on their ability to create peace with their neighbors.”
Jerusalem Post: Obama Backtracks on an Undivided Jerusalem.
Joel Mowbray: What Obama Meant By ‘Undivided’ Jerusalem.
Powerline: Obama on Jerusalem — Dishonest, Ignorant, or Both?
Time Magazine, June, 2001:
In May, convinced the nation was terrified of going California and hungering for a steak-and-eggs energy plan, Bush sold his plan as an aggressive drill-and-dig, anti-regulatory prescription to shoo away the tree-huggers and get the nation — and the economy — humming again.
Two months later, a New York Times/CBS poll released last week found that not only do two-thirds of the nation think Bush and Cheney are too beholden to oil companies, 60 percent think the pair made the whole energy crisis up.
And why not? Energy prices are falling, both in the market and at the pump, and Alan Greenspan, in a post-rate-cut speech Thursday in Chicago, said energy-price inflation was the furthest thing from his mind.
President George W. Bush, July 2, 2008:
…I’ll remind people it took us a while to get into the energy situation we’re in and it’s going to take us a while to get out of it. But one thing is for certain here in the United States, that we can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country — something I’ve been advocating ever since I’ve been the President. I’ve been reminding our people that we can do so in environmentally friendly ways. And yet, the Congress, the Democratically controlled Congress now has refused to budge. It makes no sense for — to watch these gasoline prices rise when we know we can help affect the supply of crude oil, which should affect the supply of gasoline prices.
Via The Astute Bloggers and GatewayPundit.
The New York Times: No Babies?
When [Rocco] Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor [of Laviano, Italy], two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. “I knew what was my first job, to try to save the school,” Falivena told me. “Because a village that does not have a school is a dead village.” He racked his brain and came up with a desperate idea: pay women to have babies…
DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility…”
In Europe, “lowest low” isn’t just a phenomenon of rural areas like Laviano. Cities like Milan and Bologna have recorded some of the lowest birthrates anywhere, in part because the high cost of living forces couples either to move or to have fewer children. After the term was invented, “lowest-low fertility” got the attention of leaders in Brussels and national capitals across the Continent — and by now everyone from Seville to Helsinki seems to be aware of it. In Greece, the problem is so well situated in the national psyche that it is conversationally compacted: people refer simply to “the demographic.” Putting the numbers in a broader world-historical context stirred a debate about Europe’s future. Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European…
To many, “lowest low” is hard evidence of imminent disaster of unprecedented proportions. “The ability to plan the decision to have a child is of course a big success for society, and for women in particular,” Letizia Mencarini, a professor of demography at the University of Turin, told me. “But if you would read the documents of demographers 20 years ago, you would see that nobody foresaw that the fertility rate would go so low. In the 1960s, the overall fertility rate in Italy was around two children per couple. Now it is about 1.3, and for some towns in Italy it is less than 1. This is considered pathological.”
Mark Steyn, The Wall Street Journal (2006): It’s the Demography, Stupid.
If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026. And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate–i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller–is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common…
Nineteen seventy doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life–the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge–isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “Western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)–or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
