Free Republic

There can be no debate about the nation’s anemic economic recovery and its effect on the working poor. While the stock market is soaring again, jobs and wages continue to lag. Democratic leaders and the governor have rightly agreed to raise California’s minimum wage significantly – to $10 over two years. It would increase to $9 on July 1, 2014, and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016. In an economy with a record-high income gap (the top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the nation’s total income last year), such an adjustment is justified and long overdue....

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

Who needs Congress to help govern America? Not the Obama administration, it seems. At the UN Climate Control conference in Copenhagen yesterday, Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson said that she wants to work with Congress to contain carbon emissions that her agency claims are "dangerous." "This is not an either/or moment. This is a both/and moment," Jackson said. Consider that the velvet glove covering the administration's extremist fist -- which had itself been revealed a day earlier in Washington. An Obama staffer -- speaking anonymously, of course -- told Fox News: "If [Congress doesn't] pass [emissions-control] legislation . ....

As scary as the idea may sound, the Israelis may not be bluffing. Their defense experts display no doubt whatsoever that Israel's Air Force can cripple Iran's nuclear program if necessary. The trick, they say, is to go after the system's weak spots. "You need to identify the bottlenecks," says a senior Israeli military source, asking not to be named for security reasons. "There are not very many. If you take them out, then you really undermine the project." Shlomo Brom, a former Israeli armed forces chief of strategic planning, says the destruction of two or three key facilities would...