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Want robots at McDonald's? Hike minimum wage: Zell Matthew J. Belvedere | @Matt_Belvedere Wednesday, 3 Sep 2014 Video Federal and state efforts to increase the minimum wage are misguided and pose serious risks to the economy and the job market, billionaire Sam Zell told CNBC on Wednesday. "The tinkering with the minimum wage is a very dangerous game," the chairman of Equity Group Investments said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "You start talking about a $13 or a $15 minimum wage, and you're going to have robots that are operating McDonald's."

Recently we have been pouring over “Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America,” a collection of numerous speeches written by Reagan primarily in the years leading up to his 1980 run for the presidency. One such speech on treaties — and how frequently throughout history they have been broken — is ringing particularly timely, not just in light of the ongoing Iranian nuclear negotiations or Russia’s eastward march, but in context of two recent stories out of Hong Kong, where as the New York Times writes, “Pro-democracy advocates…are girding for...

“When women go wrong men go right after them.” – Mae West “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago. During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!” What a giggle we girls...

Sixty-one years ago last month, the third-ever McDonald's opened in Downey, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles and home to Apollo, the third-ever NASA manned spaceflight program. McDonald's went to 119 countries from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Apollo went to the moon. A man who witnessed much of this history is Ron Piazza, who owns the landmark McDonald's in Downey —the world's oldest-operating McDonald's— along with nine other golden-arched franchises in the area. Piazza is something of a throwback. Plainspoken and serious, he is the type of business owner whose name and phone number are printed at the...

Dozens of fast food workers have been arrested at protests around the country where they are demanding higher pay at popular restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King and Domino's. Fast food workers in New York City, Chicago, Detroit and possibly more cities were arrested for blocking traffic in front of restaurants early Thursday morning, while thousands more continued protesting peacefully, according to news reports. Backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), fast food workers in 150 cities are walking off the job and picking up picket signs to demand that they be paid no less than $15 per hour....

The home-cooked meal has long been romanticized, from ’50s-era sitcoms to the work of star food writer Michael Pollan, who once wrote, “far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention.” In recent years, the home-cooked meal has increasingly been offered up as the solution to our country's burgeoning nutrition-related health problems of heart disease and diabetes. But while home-cooked meals are typically healthier than restaurant food, sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton from North Carolina State University argue that the stress that...

Tolka Rover/Flickr Four of San Francisco's nine golf courses surround Lake Merced. President Obama has gotten a bit of flak for spending a lot of time on the golf course this summer. But here in San Francisco, it’s the golf courses themselves that are causing controversy. Earlier this month, Priceonomics’s Alex Mayyasi wondered, “Why Does San Francisco Have So Many Golf Courses?” while noting that the 47-square-mile city actually has nine golf courses, plus a tenth outside the city limits that’s under its jurisdiction. In light of the housing emergency, Mayyasi framed the question as one of space allocation, because...

Not too long ago I posted a video produced in the mid-nineties concerning a U.S. Army soldier, SPC Michael New, who refused to wear the UN insignia and uniform, or accept orders from a foreign commander under the auspices of the United Nations. New’s reasoning was simple: he pledged an oath to defend the United States and the U.S. Constitution, not the United Nations and its Charter. The Michael New case received very little press coverage at the time. New was threatened with court-martial, but he decided to fight the charges. Unfortunately, Michael New lost the case and eventually received...

By REBECCA KAPLAN CBS NEWS September 1, 2014 At Labor Day Event, Obama Pushes GOP To Raise Minimum Wage In the spirit of Labor Day, Obama promotes boosting minimum wage President Obama used a Labor Day event to tout economic gains and chide Republicans for not joining him in promoting policies he says will help working Americans, his latest push on a campaign-year issues that Democrats hope will boost their support at the polls this fall. Mr. Obama traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin Monday to speak at Laborfest, an event he visited in 2008 during his first presidential campaign. Despite a...

McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants are expected to be targeted with acts of civil disobedience that could lead to arrests Thursday as labor organizers escalate their campaign to unionize the industry’s workers. Kendall Fells, an organizing director for Fast Food Forward, said in an interview that workers in a couple of dozen cities were trained to peacefully engage in civil disobedience ahead of this week’s planned protests. Fells declined to say what exactly is in store for the protests in around 150 U.S. cities. But workers involved in the movement recently cited sit-ins as an example of strategies they...

...Diana Nyad - the first to swim across the Florida Straits without a shark cage - was presented with Cuba’s Order of Sporting Merit on Saturday, the first American athlete to receive the award. Nyad, after four failed attempts, successfully swam from Cuba to Key West Florida in September 2013 without a shark cage, in a 53-hour feat. Speaking in Spanish, the 65-year-old said the Cuban award was “the most precious honour of my whole life.”

Progressives: Spoiled brats who have no point of reference or baseline to compare to and appreciate their windfall of prosperity My 1977 English teacher who said I would never amount to anything because my English was not British enough, taught me how to type on an old Remington typewriter with each letter attached to a striking metal arm. These armed letters often tangled if I typed too fast. When the school was allowed a few IBM SELECTRIC typewriters, I felt like we had arrived. I could type really fast, 85 words per minute. One of the big shots in the...

When a comedian‘s “brilliant” witticism bombs he'll often complain to the "dumb" audience that: "The irony is lost on you people!" In this spirit of “lost irony” I give you (pro) Michael-Brown demonstrators wearing Che Guevara T-Shirts at the recent Ferguson demonstrations. Why “lost irony” some readers might ask? “Don’t Shoot!” was the Ferguson demonstrator slogan/chant right? Well, upon his very first (and very brief) experience with something properly describable as combat, the world’s most celebrated “guerrilla fighter” actually snuck away from the firefight, crawled towards the Bolivian soldiers doing the firing—then as soon as he spotted two of them...

BEIJING -- The top leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) decided on Friday to cut salaries for executives of state-own enterprises (SOEs). During a meeting presided over by Chinese President and CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee approved plans to reform the system that determines centrally administered SOE executives' salaries and the size of their expense accounts and other privileges. In a statement released after the meeting, the Political Bureau said excessive salaries will be cut to reasonable levels. It urged SOEs to improve their corporate ethics, saying that income gaps...

In August 1939 -- 75 years ago this week -- Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In the wake of the Russo-German alliance, newspaper wits coined the term "ComunNazi." Communist-Nazi. Yes, "red" and "brown" entwined as the dictatorships they are. The two dictators' legions of liars hailed the deal as a peace treaty. Peace? Eastern Europeans in the dictators' gun sights scorned the falsehood. "Peace in our time, " Neville Chamberlain had proclaimed after the wretched Munich deal of 1938, which gave Hitler permission to annex slices of Czechoslovakia. Of course, when given a slice, Hitler annexed...

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel sounded the tocsin last week about ISIS, saying "they are beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of ... military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. This is beyond anything we've seen."He also described them as “an imminent threat to every interest that we have.”The threat, however, is not unprecedented. Western Civilization has faced this before. Its failure to quickly kill it led to the suffering and death of tens of millions, although freedom ultimately prevailed.ISIS today looks like the 1919 version of the Bolsheviks. Will ISIS elevate itself, as the Communists did,...

The Russians -well known for their great sense of humor (especially when you're making fun of them)- have loudly complained to the Bulgarian government for not-the-first-time re. the ongoing vandalism offensive against (offensive) USSR-era monuments glorifying the Soviet Red Army, the Bulgarian Red Army, and/or socialism in general that still dot the bleak post- communist landscape of the EU's poorest country. One gets the feeling they might have done a bit better by now economically if not for the damage wrought by 40 years of communist stagnation- they seem to think that too, as evidenced by the Bulgarians' disgust...

The PJ Tatler Eric Holder’s Soros-Sponsored Police Sensitivity ‘Training’ Your money went to the radical Institute on Race and Justice. J. Christian Adams August 21, 2014 The vice president’s Boeing 757 delivered Eric Holder to St. Louis yesterday. In Ferguson, Holder announced that he was “a black man” and therefore had the power to heal Ferguson in ways that no other law enforcement official could. Yet his comments were sure to throw gasoline on fire burning hot with racial division. That shouldn’t shock anyone. It’s the community organizing model of running the Justice Department. What is shocking is who is...

Fingerprint scanning to be used to fight food shortages made worse by hoarding and smuggling to neighboring countries. Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, plans to introduce a compulsory "biometric card" designed to limit individuals' food purchases using a fingerprint scanner. The move, announced on Wednesday, is part of the government's latest effort to fight the oil-rich nation's chronic food shortages, which it claims result from hoarding by speculators, who resell goods at a profit, and from smuggling into neighbouring countries. This will be the second time the government has introduced a fingerprint-based system to track and limit food purchases. Earlier this...

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned. Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon