Fighting raged overnight [Tuesday night] and in the early hours on Tuesday on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine despite an agreement reached by the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers a day earlier.
And a significant fraction of the rebel troops in the fight are Russian Green Men.
Russia wants Ukraine back in the Russian empire. Full stop.
…to the plaint that Congress’ bill asserting its capacity to approve or disapprove Obama’s coming Executive Agreement with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons program would fatally imperil those negotiations?
Now the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John Kerry, is saying
Yesterday there was a compromise reached in Washington regarding congressional input. We are confident about our ability for the president to negotiate an agreement, and to do so with the ability to make the world safer.
The only change of substance was to withdraw a requirement that President Barack Obama certify every 90 days that Iran was not supporting terrorist organizations anymore.
But the bill no longer imperils negotiations? It never did, of course, that was just Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to anything Republican. The true change, if change it was, was the bill’s passage out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and onto the Senate floor by a unanimous 19-0 vote.
Here’s an example of the 10th Amendment in action:
While the United States and Iran edge closer to a nuclear deal, nearly two dozen US states are imposing their own sanctions against Tehran—a move some say could derail fragile talks between the two countries.
The states, though, say they aren’t budging. In fact, Kansas and Mississippi are even considering adding more sanctions.
And
Several states across the country have put their own measures in place to punish Iran-linked companies operating in certain sectors of its economy, directing public pension funds with billions of dollars in assets to divesting from the firms and sometimes barring them from public contracts[.]
Other states doing this sort of thing include Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Oregon, among others.
Would that the White House had similarly capable judgment.
Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy cred.
At a moment when foreign policy figures to loom larger in this presidential race than in recent election cycles, none of Mrs Clinton’s prospective opponents can match her credentials as a four-year secretary of state. Ordinarily that would be a strong selling point. Yet Mrs Clinton also is tied to Obama-era overseas initiatives that have largely proved unpopular and she’ll be hard-pressed to cite concrete achievements that she made happen on her watch, analysts say.
However, not only is she tied to Obama’s foreign policy failures, she has her own…accomplishments…from her stint sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair. Many of you might remember her 2008 Presidential campaign ad about answering the 3 am call. When she got exactly that call from a consulate that was under attack, Clinton’s attitude, as she said so defiantly in front of a House committee hearing, was “What difference, at this point, does it make!?
Then there are all of those emails she exchanged with her staff and Foreign Service officials—on her personally owned, set up, and maintained email server—of which she turned over to State print copies (only) of carefully selected emails and equally carefully and deliberately erased the rest. Which turnover and erasure she did only last fall after the emails were demanded. She is refusing to turn over her server for forensic analysis.
Then there’s her evident disinterest in the details of foreign affairs, details that might seem unimportant but that in their aggregate contribute to the laughingstock nature of State and of the United States on the world stage. Details like a red button she gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a button ostensibly labelled “Reset” in English and in Russian. What the Russian word actually meant was “overcharge.” This carelessness was typical of Clinton’s time in the Secretary’s chair.
Ronald Bailey at Reason had this iteration of “more.” He brought this item up, even though it’s been described before:
In the absence of the higher minimum wage, employers would generally hire more workers to meet an increased demand for fast food. Boosting the minimum wage means that the revenues that would have otherwise been used to hire new workers is not available. The end result: fewer jobs created and more folks unemployed.
But then he cited some actual research:
…published in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Labor Research, Andrew Hanson of Marquette University and Zack Hawley of Texas Christian University analyzed how low-wage employment would be affected in each state by the imposition of the national $10.10 per hour minimum wage supported by President Obama. The Hanson/Hawley study takes into account how wages relate to the varying cost-of-living levels among the states. First they report the number of workers in a state who earn less than $10.10 per hour. Next they apply the widely agreed upon formula that for every 10% increase in wages there is a corresponding 1 to 2 percent decrease in demand for labor. They then straightforwardly estimate that boosting the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour would result in the loss of between 550,000 and 1.5 million jobs.
And this study, by Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither of the University of California, San Diego and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in December, which used different methodology and reached a similar result.
[J]ob losses were considerably higher in states where unskilled workers had been earning less than the new minimum and employers were now forced to pay more. Overall, the authors estimate that the minimum wage increase “reduced the employment-to-population ratio of working age adults by 0.7 percentage points.” Stated otherwise, not raising the minimum wage would have boosted the 2012 employment-to-population ratio from 58.6 to 59.3, which implies that we actually had 1.4 million fewer jobs than we otherwise would have had.
Thus: on the one hand, raising the minimum wage will cost a million people, more or less, their jobs, and on the other hand, an additional 1.4 million jobs weren’t created in the first place.
Beyond that, there’s this. Raising wages raises prices, as even the Left acknowledges. What gets ignored in this is that those higher prices are paid by those who got the pay raise. Those who got the pay raise, also, are those who work low-skill jobs. Those low-skill jobs exist almost exclusively in commodity industries: food service, extraction, and so on. The goods produced in those commodity industries are the ones most susceptible to production costs like labor, yet those costs are most completely reflected in prices despite price competition. These are the goods with whose higher prices those low-skill workers will be confronted. Wage increase leading to price rise equals no net improvement for the low-skilled. That, though, also represents net harm for everyone else in our economy, who also are faced with those same higher prices.
It’s hard to believe those who claim to be so much smarter than us don’t get this. Which makes me wonder about their motive. Against the backdrop of why minimum wage laws were made national laws in the first place, back in the mid-30s.
Hanson and Hawley’s paper can be read here, and Clemens and Wither’s paper can be read here (paywall alert).