On Friday, Fidel Castro, the former Communist dictator of Cuba, passed away at the age of 90. The Castro regime exiled 1 million Cubans; it killed tens of thousands. Yet, as many public figures penned their thoughts on Castro’s death, they opted to overlook his inhumane, tyrannical actions and highlight the positives.
Here’s a list of the ten most outrageous reactions to Castro’s death.
With less than two months to go before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, President Obama’s legacy took another blow this week — this one from Judge Amos Mazzant, who he appointed to the Eastern District of Texas. On Tuesday, Mazzant blocked the U.S. Department of Labor’s new overtime rule, which was set to go into effect December 1. Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt, in partnership with 20 other state attorneys general and governors, had sued to stop it, and the group was granted a preliminary injunction; now, the rule will not be implemented as litigation continues. Unless the Department of Labor engages in an unusually aggressive effort to expedite the response to Mazzant’s ruling, the litigation is likely to outlast the Obama administration — and, under a Trump administration, one can assume that Department of Labor officials will drop the litigation or roll back the rule.
As I previously reported at National Review Online,
The new rule forces both public- and private-sector employers to pay time-and-a-half overtime to any hourly employees earning less than $47,476 per year, nearly double the old threshold of $23,660. Employees earning less than the threshold but performing “executive, administrative, or professional” duties were previously exempt from the DOL’s overtime requirements, but the new rule mandates that they receive time-and-half pay for extra work, too. In so doing, it directly overrides the exemptions outlined by Congress in the Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition to modifying the threshold and eliminating the white-collar exemption, the Obama administration created an algorithmic method to automatically update the salary threshold every three years based on wage growth and other factors. Laxalt calls this algorithm “ratcheting,” and it is a significant component of his lawsuit.
Laxalt and his coalition sued the Department of Labor on the grounds that the overtime rule overrode congressional authority by omitting white-collar exemptions; it violated the Tenth Amendment by forcing states to pay employees a specific salary, indirectly controlling state budgets; and it violated the Administrative Procedure Act by ratcheting up the salary threshold every three years.
If Judge Mazzant had denied the preliminary injunction, as many as 44 percent of small businesses would have felt the pressures inflicted by the Obama administration’s blatant federal overreach. “Like all of President Obama’s policies that are intended to help workers, they actually hurt workers,” Laxalt tells National Review. Among other disastrous consequences of the increased salary threshold, business owners would have responded by laying off workers and reducing hours, services, and pay.
In the public sector, the overtime rule would have likewise had an adverse effect. For example, state officials would have been forced to find additional funds to comply with the rule, potentially squeezing out other services and programs. “It squarely puts the federal government into our budget process,” Laxalt says, noting that the rule imposes “millions of dollars of unfunded liabilities on the states.”
Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a top contender for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, gave the world a glimpse of the 365-day plan he would enact if he were to be nominated by President-elect Donald Trump. As Trump and Kobach wrapped up their meeting at Trump International Golf Club in New Jersey on Monday, the two posed for photos — and, with papers in his hand, Kobach likely underestimated a camera’s zoom. Only portions of the document titled “Department of Homeland Security Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days” were readable, but enough was visible to make clear that liberal outrage over Trump’s supposedly “dangerous plan” is misdirected. In fact, the plan seems fairly reasonable.
Kobach’s plan to bar entry of potential terrorists would not ban all Muslims from entering the United States, as Trump has suggested in the past.
On Friday, Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey received a major blow to her ongoing legal crusade against ExxonMobil from U.S. district judge Ed Kinkeade, when Kinkeade expressed grave concern that the lawsuit is politically motivated.
Healey and other members of “Green 20” (an attorney-general-led coalition that seeks to limit climate change) subpoenaed ExxonMobil for 40 years’ worth of internal documents related to climate change. By Healey’s account, the climate-change documents will prove that ExxonMobil “knew about the risks of climate change decades ago and fraudulently concealed that knowledge from the public.” But Kinkeade seems unconvinced. Healey, he ruled, must testify in his Dallas court room, more than 1,750 miles away from Boston. This order comes just one week after Kinkeade authored an opinion outlining allegations of bad faith on the part of Healey and Green 20.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi had a bad day yesterday. First, Ohio representative Tim Ryan announced his candidacy for House minority leader, declaring: “Democrats have been reduced to our smallest congressional minority since 1929” under Pelosi’s leadership. Then, Pelosi’s political foes, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), mockingly endorsed her reelection bid.
Pelosi, who was elected to Congress in 1986, was speaker of the House from 2007 to 2011, then became minority leader when Democrats lost the majority in the 2010 tea-party wave. Explaining his decision to challenge Pelosi, Ryan noted that Democrats have secured the majority in just two of the past nine terms. Along with last week’s Republican victories, this “should indicate to all of us that keeping our leadership team completely unchanged will simply lead to more disappointment in future elections,” he said.
In the days immediately following President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning victory on Election Day, he named two of his closest allies to White House posts: Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus as chief of staff and former Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon as chief strategist. On Friday, Trump announced that he offered the attorney-general position to Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, CIA director to Kansas representative Mike Pompeo, and national security adviser to former Defense Intelligence Agency director Michael Flynn. In the coming weeks, Trump and his presidential transition team must appoint the entire presidential cabinet.
Here’s a comprehensive (and somewhat speculative) list of who is being considered for top spots in the Trump administration, drawn primarily from Politico and the New York Times.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats elected New York senator Charles Schumer as minority leader to succeed outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an effort to counter the Republican wave of victories that caught Democrats by surprise on Election Day, Schumer’s leadership team includes senators representing different Democratic factions seen as crucial to the party’s future: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin from the progressive wing, and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin from the white-working class wing — that Donald Trump won over on November 8.
Sanders, the party’s chairman of outreach, and Baldwin, the party’s secretary, will provide progressive voices in leadership posts at a time when the Democratic party recently delivered the most progressive platform in its history.
And Manchin, despite being at odds with many in his party on an array of issues, will serve as the vice chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.
California’s liberals are infamous for railing against the top 1 percent and the income inequality that has supposedly plagued our economic system. Democratic governor Jerry Brown assured his colleagues in this year’s State of the State address that “California has not been passive” on the issue of income inequality. Just last week, voters passed Proposition 55, which extended — for twelve years — Brown’s tax increase on high-income earners, redistributing the wealth to help fund public schools and health insurance. But as California endlessly passes progressive laws that are intended to combat wealth inequality, public employees rake in lucrative salaries. In 2015, 220,000 public employees earned six-figure salaries, costing taxpayers $35 billion. Some of these employees earned salaries north of $400,000.
It’s not only public-sector executives who make these sizable salaries. Open the Books, a non-profit dedicated to disclosing government spending, found that 171 assistant city managers earned an average salary of $201,550 (in other words, some of California’s assistant city managers were in the top 6 percent of income earners nationwide). In the City of Riverside, not one, but two, assistant city managers made over $200,000. What’s more absurd is the income of their bosses: City managers in nine cities, including Escondido, Fremont, Napa, Ontario, and Palm Springs, made over $300,000, two of which (Escondido and Fremont city managers) cleared $400,000.
Other noteworthy high-income earners in the public sector were the “motor coach operators” and the “animal collection curators” who earned over $100,000, the lifeguard supervisors who made $250,000, the Los Angeles harbor-boat-pilots who made $483,000, and the city librarians who made $220,000. And the list goes on.
If four in ten California residents are living in or near poverty, and the progressive ideology is to redistribute the wealth as widely as possible, why are 220,000 public-sector employees earning these substantial government-funded salaries that place them in the top 25 percent of salary-earners nationally.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie has had a bad week.
On Thursday, a top New Jersey legislator called for Christie’s impeachment, and today, vice president-elect Mike Pence replaced him as chair of president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.
New Jersey senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg called on Vincent Prieto, the assembly speaker, to bring an impeachment vote to the floor because of Christie’s alleged involvement in “Bridgegate.” Weinberg claimed that Christie was aware of his office’s politically motivated decision to close lanes leading to the George Washington bridge. The latest six-week Bridgegate trial, which concluded with two of Christie’s two former aides being convicted, unveiled “considerable testimony” implicating Christie, she said.
Some Californians are unhappy about the coming Donald Trump presidency. Their solution? Revitalize a campaign to secede from the Union.
“Yes California,” a political action committee fighting for California’s independence from the union, is campaigning to qualify a secession initiative for the 2018 ballot, which in turn would force a special-election referendum on the question. The group had gained little traction since its founding in 2015, but received an outpouring of support for their movement in the aftermath of Trump’s victory.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar vowed to fund California’s campaign “to become its own nation”; since then, others in the high-tech center have chimed in, including Anand Sharma, founder of the health-tracking system Gyroscope, and Dave Morin, founder of the social-media website Path. “It’s the most patriotic thing I can do,” Pishevar said. Yes, because patriotism means seceding from the country one supposedly loves.
