Last week the UAW approved an increase in dues for the first time since 1967. The average worker will spend over 2 hours a month working to pay his dues. UAW leadership is misreading the tea leaves. The increase is on the heels of a decline in membership to less than 400,000 from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979. Half of the UAW’s membership is in Michigan—a right-to-work state. This will not end well for union leadership and its bully pulpit. This is not the time for increases in dues. “Now, $10 may not sound like much if you are making more than $100,000 a year,” said Charlie Tipton of UAW Local 912 in Lexington, Ky. “To me, it’s two gallons of milk a week … or a few loaves of bread.”

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NSA can track you even if your phone is OFF! Sound like science fiction? Sorry, and the news gets a lot worse as you will read here.

Just because you turned off your phone doesn’t mean the NSA isn’t using it to spy on you.

Edward Snowden’s latest revelation about the NSA’s snooping inspired an extra dose of shock and disbelief when he said the agency’s hackers can use a mobile phone as a bug even after it’s been turned off. The whistleblower made that eye-opening claim when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, holding his iPhone aloft during last Wednesday’s interview, asked, “What can the NSA do with this device if they want to get into my life? Can anyone turn it on remotely if it’s off? Can they turn on apps?

“They can absolutely turn them on with the power turned off to the device,” Snowden replied.

Snowden didn’t offer any details on this seemingly magical feat. But a group of particularly cunning iPhone hackers say it’s possible. They also say you can totally and completely turn off your iPhone so no one—not even the NSA—can use it to spy on you.

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Remember the Building 18 scandal? No? Well refresh your memory here. We’re talking 2007, and the target is Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. I remember the mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, Walter Reed horror story like it was yesterday, and I am not even a U.S. senator like John McCain or Bernie Sanders, the crack duo who introduced the new veterans health package Tuesday. That’s Tuesday 2014, keep in mind.

I remember the Walter Reed national disgrace in part because of all the publicity Don Imus gave the disgraceful conditions at Reed. And who was a frequent Imus radio guest back in the old days? Well, John McCain. Imus has a legendary kids ranch in Arizona where McCain is, of course, senator. So the two had plenty to gab about on air. Suffice to say, the black mold foulness and overall wretched conditions at Walter Reed were well known to Senator McCain. I do not want to be unfair or unpleasant about a national war hero and a man who ran a strategy packed campaign for president of the United States not long ago but…

OK, so better late than ever, right? Not really. As you may have read, the current national disgrace centers on another VA facility, which happens to be based, darn it, in Arizona, John McCain’s home state. This time we’re talking about a little bit more than belly-up cockroaches and mouse droppings. It is alleged that as many as 40 veterans may have died while waiting for an appointment at the Phoenix hospital.

Seven long years have passed since the nationwide Walter Reed VA scandal before the U.S. Senate wakes up. And who rings the wakeup bell? Why, John McCain. Our American Federal Republic form of government is broken. It is that simple. Europe is in the same fix but multi-party systems in countries like France and England have given voters a way to speak out, and speak out they have as witnessed in the recent European parliament elections. It is long past time we Americans had a similar option.

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In France, Front National (FN), the anti-immigration “France for the French” party, just defeated France’s two big parties in the European Parliament elections. Many of the people I talked with in France recently are fed up, and there is a powerful ground swell against Muslim, Third World, and Eastern European immigration. In fact, FN wants to send a lot of this unproductive crowd packing.

Here in America, it is up to the Tea Party to fight the immigration battle because, as Pat Buchanan writes, the John Boehner, Eric Cantor-led Republicans appear to be folding up their tent and joining hands with Obama and Holder in allowing a continued course of illegal immigration, along with a potential pathway to citizenship for illegals.

The French have learned the hard way and it is time Americans wake up. Any country that allows itself to be swamped by Illegal immigration soon loses its cultural and national roots. Can there be anything worse for our Federal Republic? Voters need to rise up in protest now while there is time left.

According to a May report of the Center for Immigration Studies, of the 36,000 criminal aliens who, while awaiting deportation, were set free by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 193 had been convicted of homicide, 426 of sexual assault, 303 of kidnaping, 1,075 of aggravated assault, 1,160 for stolen vehicles, 9,187 for possession or use of dangerous drugs, and 16,070 for driving drunk or drugged.

Those 36,000 criminal aliens are roughly equivalent to three-and-a-half divisions of felons and social misfits released into our midst.

And this does not include the 68,000 illegal aliens against whom ICE declined to press criminal charges last year, but turned loose.

How goes the Third World invasion of the United States?

According to the AP, the U.S. Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector made 148,017 arrests from Oct. 1 to May 17, while 62,876 were caught in the Tucson sector, the second-busiest crossing point.

That is almost 211,000 illegal aliens caught in just over half a year in just two sectors of the border. And that figure only tells us how many were caught, not how many got in, or how many of those caught were released and now reside among us.

Among those caught crossing into Texas these last seven months were 47,000 unaccompanied children. Border Patrol estimates that by Sept. 30, apprehensions of children and teenagers in this fiscal year could reach 90,000.

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Thomas Sowell in NRO points out that perhaps it was more important what Mr. Obama got out of the Berghdahl deal than what the U.S. got out of it. For example, getting the VA scandal off the front page certainly made Obama a clear winner.

Voters elected Barack Obama not based on serious reflection of who the man was, but instead based on “racial symbolism, glib rhetoric, and wishful thinking.” And under Obama, fundamental institutions within our country have been perhaps irretrievably undermined. As Mr. Sowell laments, the U.S. may be the first nation to be “threatened by self-indulgent silliness” at the voting booth.

People are arguing about what the United States got out of the deal that swapped five top-level terrorist leaders for one American soldier who was, at best, absent from his post in a war zone. Soldiers who served in the same unit with him call him a deserter. The key to this deal, however, is less likely to be what the United States got out of the deal than it is about what Barack Obama got out of the deal. If nothing else, it instantly got the veterans’ hospitals scandals off the front pages of newspapers and pushed these scandals aside on television news programs.

It was a clear winner for Barack Obama. And that may be all that matters to Barack Obama.

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Russia, in a snit, is attempting to move away from the U.S. Dollar in favor of Asian financial centers and currencies. The move is a complete non-event for the West. Russia has adopted an adventuresome position versus its Eastern European neighbors, which will generate a prompt financial retaliatory response by the West if Russia continues on this course. If Vladimir Putin would like to see backward Russia become isolated from Western financial markets and become even more backward, he is well on his way. Al Jazeera America reports here:

In the aftermath of the showdown over Ukraine, however, Russia has sought to wean itself off the dollar. Many Russian economists fear that another brash foreign policy venture — like the occupation of the Crimean peninsula — could have disastrous consequences for Russian markets.

In May, Visa and Mastercard nearly closed up shop in Russia after Moscow created a competitor national payment system, a move that was in line with Russia’s brazen dismissal of its need for economic ties with the U.S. But on Monday, Russia’s Central Bank offered Visa and Mastercard a better deal to keep operating in the country, and it now seems unlikely they will exit.

In the absence of a viable alternative, replacing the dollar has proved difficult. Most economists say Russia cannot possibly pursue the wholesale de-dollarization of its economy, which would be risky and costly.

“People use the U.S. dollar for a variety of reasons; most important is that no matter where you are in the world it’s relatively easy to get your hands on it,” said Mark Williams, chief Asian economist for London-based Capital Economics. “So the costs in using the U.S. dollar to settle trade and investment are lower than other currencies.”

Of course, even if Russia was able to avoid trading directly in dollars, it cannot fully isolate itself from the U.S. currency.

“What’s important is not just the currency in which trade is conducted but also the currency composition of Russia’s savings,” said Rachel Ziemba, director of emerging markets at Roubini Economics in London. “Dollars and euros make up the bulk of the Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves, and Russian corporations borrow more in dollars. So this move to the renminbi would only modestly diversify savings.”

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You may be disappointed with the title of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices.” A better one, that I can’t get out of my head, would be a picture of her on the cover and the quote, “What Difference, At This Point, Does It Really Make?” The about sums her up. It’s the attitude that she has displayed throughout her tenure in Washington, D.C. especially her vote to go into Iraq. My friend Gene Healy, in an article appearing in The DC Examiner and at Cato writes:

Judging by the early reviews, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, “Hard Choices,” is a cautious, poll-tested tome, drafted with an eye toward 2016.

But she says at least one interesting thing in the book.

On her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq War, Secretary Clinton writes: “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. … But I still got it wrong.”

What a strange formulation! Was then-Senator Clinton dissociated from her own mental state in the post-9/11 fog of war? “I thought I had acted in good faith,” but … I later found out my motives were base and mercenary?

Well, as the lady herself noted some 20 years ago, it’s not easy to figure out “who we are as human beings in this post-modern age.”

“What difference, at this point, does it make?” you might ask. Actually, Clinton’s role in the worst foreign policy disaster in 30 years is highly relevant to her fitness for higher office.

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Tea party rebels easily succeeded in ridding the House of Eric Cantor for the coming term. Cantor was squashed in the Virginia primary by little-known tea party-backed college professor David Brat. Let’s hope the tea party can be equally successful this fall in grabbing the House leadership role from corporate crony lackey John Boehner. The immigration “give in” Boehner and Cantor have been plugging is a non-starter for tea party rebels and a loser for America. Illegals must not be given any track toward citizenship. Gerald Seib reports in The Wall Street Journal:

The reverberations will spread far beyond Mr. Cantor’s home district in Virginia. The loss is a blow to House Speaker John Boehner, who has struggled since taking command of the House to control the tea-party contingent within his own caucus. Tea-party aligned lawmakers in the House, who have unhappily accepted a series of legislative compromises in recent months, now are likely to feel reinvigorated.

The loss by Mr. Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, also deals a heavy blow—almost certainly a fatal one for this year—to Mr. Boehner’s hope to revive immigration reform legislation.

The speaker and other leading Republicans have been pushing since the 2012 election for their party to swing behind an immigration overhaul, in the belief that such an effort would improve the party’s standing among the growing population of Hispanic voters.

But in his campaign, Mr. Brat accused Mr. Cantor of supporting an immigration reform plan that would amount to “amnesty” for illegal immigrants by offering a path to legalization for some. The success of those attacks figures to make rank-and-file Republicans in the House even more skittish about heeding Mr. Boehner’s call to back immigration-reform legislation this summer.

And party leaders will worry anew about the political implications of a failure to move on immigration.

The upset also creates new questions about who will lead Republicans in Congress, now and in the future. Mr. Cantor was considered the most logical successor to Mr. Boehner if the speaker chose to step down in the next few years. Now that idea not only is off the boards, but it is more likely that the tea-party caucus will feel emboldened to offer its own alternative leader.

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Despite a huge financial advantage, Eric Cantor lost to David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, in the Republican primary for Virginia’s seventh congressional district. Yes, Mr. Brat’s focus was on immigration, but he also hammered away at Eric Cantor on Mr. Cantor’s support of increasing centralization in education (Common Core), crony capitalism, and our exploding national debt. Read here in NRO John Fund’s analysis of why Mr. Cantor lost.

Eric Cantor’s loss is historic. No sitting House majority leader has lost an election since the office was created in 1899. While Cantor’s loss was a stunning surprise, the warning signals were around for a while:

1. Cantor managed to muddle his message on immigration. His direct-mail pieces claimed he was foursquare against amnesty. But the newspapers covering Washington, D.C., quoted him as saying he was seeking a compromise with President Obama on immigration. Voters resolved the seeming contradiction by deciding to vote out their establishment congressman. Cantor’s loss destroys any chance of a comprehensive immigration bill passing the House this year.

2. The majority leader outspent his opponent, David Brat, by $2.5 million to $40,000. Much of that money went to negative ads against Brat that turned off voters and were so vitriolic as not to be credible.

3. Cantor was also hurt by a subterranean campaign by Democrats to convince their supporters to vote in the Republican primary against Cantor. Apparently, some of them did.

4. Many constituents of Eric Cantor felt he had ignored them for years, rarely returning home and often ignoring them on key issues ranging from expanding Medicare prescription-drug benefits to TARP bank bailouts. The frustration boiled over at a May party meeting in his district, where Cantor was booed and his ally was ousted from his post as local party chair by a tea-party insurgent. “He did one thing in Washington and then tried to confuse us as to what he did when he came back to his district,” one Republican primary voter told me.

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Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner explains that the twin headliners of the disgraceful Veterans Affairs scandal and the Taliban prisoner swap for Sgt. Bergdahl were actually a welcome relief to congressional democrats. Thanks to Obamacare, most of the major health-care insurers are calling for double-digit rate increases next year. And because there have been so many changes, postponements and waivers to the law, the CBO can no longer accurately estimate the cost of O’Care on the deficit.  As Mr. Tanner warns, “And the news just keeps getting worse.”

There was also bad news from the Congressional Budget Office, which announced that, in part because there had been so many changes, postponements, and waivers to the law, they could no longer provide an accurate estimate of its cost or impact on the deficit.

Of course, maybe that is honest Washington budgeting for a change. We have a great big program that’s going to spend a lot of money, but we really don’t have any idea how much. Happy days are here again.

Perhaps the worst news is coming from states where next year’s insurance premiums have already been announced. This will undoubtedly come as a big shock to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, but the premiums are going up. A handful of small and niche insurers are requesting smaller increases, and a few have lowered rates, news eagerly seized upon by Obamacare supporters. But, in reality, most of the major insurers are calling for double-digit increases next year.

In Maryland, for example, CareFirst, the state’s dominant insurer, is proposing premium hikes of 23 to 30 percent for consumers buying individual plans next year. In Vermont, MVP Health Care has requested an average rate increase of 15.4 percent, while the only other insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, requested average hikes of 9.8 percent. The Ohio Department of Insurance reports that average premiums will increase by 13 percent for individual plans and 11 percent for small-business plans next year. In Virginia, insurers are seeking rate increases ranging from 3.3 percent to 14.9 percent in the individual market, while in Arizona, Cigna asked for average premium hikes of 14.4 percent and Humana requested a 25.5 percent increase. Some insurers in Washington State are seeking hikes as high as 26 percent.

Apparently we will have to wait a little longer for that $2,500 premium reduction that the president once promised.

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A University of California at Berkeley professor has found a way to potentially boost the efficiency of solar cells and make solar competitive with fossil fuels. Here MIT Technology Review breaks the details.

The world’s most efficient solar cells are twice as efficient as the ones people put on their roofs, but hardly anyone uses them because the semiconductor materials they’re made of are so expensive. That could be about to change.

Ali Javey, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, has found a far cheaper way to manufacture these better-performing semiconductors. This advance could lower the cost of high-efficiency solar cells, potentially making them as cheap as conventional ones. Javey says the new process could be a “game changer” for solar cells.

Improving the efficiency of affordable solar cells will be essential for making solar power competitive with fossil fuels. Fewer cells would be needed, reducing costs for materials and installation, a large share of the total cost of solar power. Early tests suggest solar cells made from the materials would have an efficiency of about 25 percent, which is far better than conventional silicon solar cells, which are less than 18 percent efficient. And a preliminary analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory suggests Javey’s cells could be made as cheaply as conventional ones.

The most efficient solar cells available today are made from materials called III-V semiconductors, a group that includes gallium arsenide and indium phosphide. Making solar cells from these materials normally means starting with expensive crystals of the semiconductor material, then exposing the crystals to vapors that produce the thin films need for a solar cell.

Javey’s process instead grows thin films for solar cells on top of a cheap material—glass or a sheet of metal. The vapors used in the process are cheaper than those normally used, and they’re used far more efficiently, reducing waste.

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