Michael Franc at the Heritage Foundation busts some liberal myths while demonstrating the folly of raising the minimum wage.

An enduring urban legend about minimum-wage workers is that they are married adults struggling to raise children in Dickensian-style poverty. As Kennedy said in a recent Senate floor speech, ?Minimum-wage workers are forced to make impossible choices between paying the rent and buying groceries, paying the heating bills or buying clothes.? Their families, he said, lack health care and adequate housing. Their ?daily fear? is ?poverty, hunger and homelessness.?

The data, however, tell a very different story. While some minimum-wage workers are primary breadwinners raising young children, the overwhelming majority are either younger workers honing their skills in entry-level positions or part-time, mostly female workers from middle-class homes supplementing their spouse?s income.

• Only 1.9 million American workers (out of a total workforce of 127.4 million) earn the minimum wage. Most (63%) are women. More than half (53%) are between the ages of 16 and 24, and an even larger percentage (58%) work part-time.

• Upward mobility is the happy norm. Two out of three of today?s minimum-wage workers will earn 10% more within a year.
• Many are teenagers who live with their parents in middle-class homes. This explains why the average household income for minimum-wage earners is more than $40,000 a year and why only 19% (about 400,000 nationwide) fall below the poverty line.

The Club for Growth scorecard was compiled by assigning points, based on relative importance, to votes on specific bills. 3 Republican Senators and 7 Representatives, including pork fighting Jeff Flake, scored a perfect 100. My own Congressman, Jeff Miller, had the 12th highest House score of 96. Well done, Mr. Miller. 16 Democrat Representatives and 21 Senators had a score of 0, choosing the anti-growth side of each issue. Not surprisingly, the Senate Republican with the lowest score was Senator Olympia Snowe, followed closely by fellow Maine Senator Susan Collins.

Not that I have any firm evidence that Kennedy was drinking when he wrote this shrieking hit piece on Justices Roberts and Alito, but as a general principle, it’s safe to just assume Teddy has a permanent blood alcohol level of about .20.

Now that the votes are in from their first term, we can see plainly the agenda that Roberts and Alito sought to conceal from the committee. Our new justices consistently voted to erode civil liberties, decrease the rights of minorities and limit environmental protections. At the same time, they voted to expand the power of the president, reduce restrictions on abusive police tactics and approve federal intrusion into issues traditionally governed by state law.

Teddy believes that Alito and Roberts “misled” him on their views, but this is nonsense. They’ve practiced exactly the same conservative philosophy of judicial restraint on the Supreme Court that they have throughout their entire careers. For this to now suprise Teddy suggests he isn’t all there to begin with. No where in his rant does he ever raise a single legal objection to any decision. Rather, he relies on vague generalities and liberal buzzwords to whip up a frenzy in his extremist base. As NRO correctly points out, his real problem is that he doesn’t like their results, though he has neither the understanding nor the inclination to determine whether those results would be legally justified.

But the senator from Massachusetts provides all the evidence one needs that, for some senators anyway, it is not legal thinking that matters at all. It is only results. From start to finish, this column amounts to one long whine that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito don?t share Senator Kennedy?s view that Senator Kennedy?s policy preferences should be enacted by the Supreme Court. What Kennedy doesn?t have is anything resembling a legal argument against a vote cast, or an opinion written or joined, by either of these two justices.

It’s noteworthy that liberalism manages to be exactly backwards when it comes to results versus process. In the case of government programs, liberals refuse to hold government departments accountable and are perfectly happy to get no results whatsoever. There exists no better example than the Department of Education. But they take just the opposite, though equally wrong, view with the Judiciary. Whereas judges must put law (process) ahead of specific outcomes in order to insure the integrity of the system, liberals demand their leftist policies be enacted by judicial fiat, and any who stands in their way is to be declared as “anti” whatever victim group de jour they are wringing their hands over at that particular point in time.

Human Events Online offers the Top 10 Corporate Welfare Queens.

10. United States Postal Service (USPS)

The USPS is a monopoly more interested in job protection than efficiency or innovation. Labor costs consume 80% of USPS revenue, while UPS and FedEx spend only 56% and 42% of their revenue on labor, respectively. Reform would allow competition for mailbox and first-class mail service.

. . .

8. National Education Association (NEA)

The ultimate monopoly is America?s K-12 government schools, and the NEA is the gatekeeper that opposes almost any reform. Sheltered from competition, public schools continue to decline despite dramatic increases in per-student spending. States should give all students a voucher that allows them to attend the school of their choice.

. . .

4. Asbestos lawyers

While trial lawyers of all stripes abuse the legal and political system for personal gain, the asbestos litigation attorneys are a special breed. Runaway asbestos lawsuits have already bankrupted more than 70 American manufacturers, destroying 60,000 jobs and costing billions. Yet most of the litigants aren?t sick. Congress should pass medical criteria legislation to stop asbestos pillaging.

Hat tip: Club for Growth Blog

FOX News

Israel’s U.N. ambassador has ruled out major U.N. involvement in any potential international force in Lebanon, saying more professional and better-trained troops were needed for such a volatile situation.

Dan Gillerman also said Israel would not allow the United Nations to join in an investigation of an Israeli airstrike that demolished a post belonging to the current U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. Four U.N. observers were killed in the Tuesday strike.

Given what the UN does when it’s involved in an area, Israel made the right decision.

Normally I wouldn’t concern myself with the success of any particular corporation. Unfortunately, this news will have some annoying effects. Another round of useless hearings and investigations will commence on Capital Hill. Opportunist Democrats and Republicans alike will take to the cameras and demand “windfall profit” taxes. Meanwhile, sound economics and the American system of free markets will take yet another hit, as reason once again gives way to populist hysteria.

Congressman Jeff Flake has been on a crusade to eliminate earmarks. Thanks to his efforts, all members of Congress have their votes on record and we now know exactly where they stand on this critical issue. The Club for Growth Blog has compiled a score, using the votes from Congressman Flake’s 19 amendments, for all 435 members of Congress. Unfortunately, only 55 Republicans voted for over half of the amendments, with only 21 scoring a perfect 19 for 19, while an astonishing 112 failed to vote for eliminating a single piece of pork.

My own Congressman, Jeff Miller of Florida, had an admirable record of 15 for 19. He’s been a strong Conservative over the years, from spending to immigration, so I am not surprised to find him on the right side of this issue. While his score has room for improvement, overall his record is good. Certainly if all Republicans were similarly principled we wouldn’t be in the financial fix that we are now.

In comparison, a paltry two Democrats voted 19 for 19 while 168 Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to vote against a single piece of pork.

An Ohio suburb’s attempt to seize private homes using eminent domain so they can build offices and shops was shot down by Ohio’s high court.

Ohio’s highest court said a Cincinnati suburb may not take over private property to make way for a $125 million development of offices, shops and restaurants.

The case is the first challenge of property rights laws to reach a state high court since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local governments can seize homes for use in private development.

The Ohio case involved the city of Norwood, which used its eminent domain authority to overrule holdouts against private development. The project is meant to revitalize the neighborhood, but the state court says economic development alone doesn’t justify taking homes.

The American Spectator believes the solution to government’s fiscal irresponsibility is to create an Office of Taxpayer Advocacy.

Congress itself should create an Office of Taxpayer Advocacy charged with the specific mission of representing the taxpayer interest in opposing unwise or unnecessary spending. This agency could employ thousands of researchers to investigate ineffective and unnecessary programs and highlight the damage done by the spending of tax dollars. It could establish a hotline for taxpayers to call about instances of waste and abuse. It could employ writers and public relations specialists to publicize the costs of spending proposals, to ensure that Congress, the media, and the public heard anti-spending arguments.

If administrators and lobbyists believe their programs are as valuable as they say, they should welcome scrutiny and feel confident that they will be able to refute their critics. The media should be happy to have voices on both sides of spending questions. Congress itself should embrace the idea. Most lawmakers know they are being bombarded by the self-interested sales pitches of spending advocates. They know they need to hear anti-spending arguments in order to make responsible decisions.

A novel and worthwhile idea, I can’t help but suspect that Congress would not be so quick to embrace such an organization.

Hillary Clinton, who has attempted during her time in the Senate to recast herself as a “centrist”, is poised to launch her Presidential campaign the old fashioned way, as a free spending liberal.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the presumed front-runner for her party’s presidential nomination, this week unveiled her “centrist” American Dream Initiative that is a veritable vote-buying nightmare for taxpayers.

It includes HillaryCare II, only this time just for kids (a camel’s nose in the tent if there ever was one; see Connecticut’s HUSKY program). She also wants to ax 100,000 federal contractors in favor of more costly dues-paying government employees, create government-funded “baby bonds” of $500 each for children born in this country and so forth. Buy it now for only $500 billion over 10 years. Her funding sources weren’t disclosed, but she swung at the usual election-year punching bags: tax loopholes and cheats.

The centerpiece, however, was $150 billion in block grants to cap college tuition costs. For states to qualify, public universities would have to limit tuition increases to the inflation rate. And there’s where the political pocket-picking begins.