90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, September 11, 2017

Trump Is Right. 'Our Tax Code Is a Giant, Self-Inflicted Economic Wound.'

In his second speech in two weeks on the need for tax reform, President Donald Trump again made a strong case, explaining that “our tax code is a giant, self-inflicted economic wound.”

This time speaking in North Dakota, the president reiterated his four key goals for updating the broken U.S. tax system: a simplified tax code, a middle-class tax cut, a more competitive business environment, and the ability for business to bring home trillions of dollars of overseas profits. To this list of goals, I would also add full expensing as a critical reform.

The president’s first goal is “a tax code that is simple, fair, and easy to understand.”

To meet this goal, tax reform must eliminate tax subsidies. The tax code should not be used to pick winners and losers. That means tax reform should eliminate as many individual and corporate deductions, credits, exclusions, and exemptions as possible.

The current collection of privileges in the tax code make it so those who can afford accountants and lawyers to navigate the code are able to benefit, while every other American merely files their taxes and hopes for the best.

Cronyism in the tax code not only slows economic growth, but also increases complexity and makes the tax code unfair.

The president’s second goal is to “cut taxes for middle-class families.”

This one is simple. Tax reform must lower tax rates for individuals, allowing...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

American Muslims celebrating 9/11

Girls With Guns

For months now various media outlets have speculated on whether Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) and her now-indicted IT staffer may have colluded to conceal evidence potentially linked to the infamous 'DNC hacks.' While Schultz and the DNC have maintained that the hacks were orchestrated by Russians from a remote location, others have argued that the stolen documents must have been taken by an insider with direct access to DNC servers. Meanwhile, the mystery surrounding the ongoing controversy has only been amplified by the DNC's rather curious refusal to allow the FBI access to their servers after the supposed 'attacks.'

But, according to a new report from The Daily Caller, even if Awan was originally acting to protect/extort DWS, that may have all changed on April 6, 2017 when he seemingly led U.S. Capitol Police directly to her laptop.

A laptop that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has frantically fought to keep prosecutors from examining may have been planted for police to find by her since-indicted staffer, Imran Awan, along with a letter to the U.S. Attorney.

U.S. Capitol Police found the laptop after midnight April 6, 2017, in a tiny room that formerly served as a phone booth in the Rayburn House Office Building, according to a Capitol Police report reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. Alongside the laptop were a Pakistani ID card, copies of Awan’s driver’s license and congressional ID badge, and letters to the U.S. attorney. Police also found notes in a composition notebook marked “attorney-client privilege.”

The laptop had the username “RepDWS,” even though the Florida Democrat and former Democratic National Committee chairman previously said it was Awan’s computer and that she had never even seen it.

The laptop was found on the second floor of the Rayburn building — a place Awan would have had no reason to go because Wasserman Schultz’s office is in the Longworth building and the other members who employed him had fired him.

Of course, DWS's story on the now-infamous laptop has 'evolved' over the months...originally it was apparently her laptop back when she decided to threaten the U.S. Capitol Police Chief but later, after he stood his ground, DWS backtracked saying she had...

...Though Spears May Spare His Life...

Hávamál (English pronunciation: /ˈ h ɑː v ə m ɑː l / hah-və-mahl; "sayings of the high one") is presented as a single poem in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems from the Viking age. The poem, itself a combination of different poems, is largely gnomic, presenting advice for living, proper conduct and wisdom.

The verses are attributed to Odin, much like the biblical Book of Wisdom is attributed to Solomon. The implicit attribution to Odin facilitated the accretion of various mythological material also dealing with Odin.[1]

The Liberalism That Isn’t

The leaders of American clients Bahrain or Saudi Arabia are pikers compared to Putin. They do stomp out more lives in absolute numbers. But if you’ve never heard of their abuses on CNN, as you incessantly hear of Putin, it’s because they target merely gays and Shiites, obviously lower forms of humanity, whereas Putin exterminates journalists, who are surely the elect of the species. As it happens, one of the most widely-spread memes to illustrate Putin’s genocide of the journalist race—a photograph where unoccupied chairs stand for victims of his anti-press jihad—was quickly shown to be a fraud.

It turns out that many of these journalists were killed before Putin came to power, that is, during the 1990s, when American-supported Boris Yeltsin was president. Some were killed presumably by oligarchs who Putin sought to bring to heel and in some cases later imprisoned. As is customary, the retraction got far less attention than the original lie.

The reason the media emphasize Putin’s attacks on freedom of the press is of course to contrive a parallel to the bully Trump. Trump, after all, says mean things about CNN and questions its objectivity. Forget that Trump has not yet put journalists under surveillance, as Obama did, or spied on tens of thousands of Americans for political purposes. What matters is the promotion of a heroic narrative where America’s security service apparatchiks, crony oligarchs, and their quasi-state media, are engaged in an existential struggle against Trumpist “authoritarianism” on behalf of liberty and democracy.

But the truth is that the American-led “liberal world order” doesn’t do well in measures of liberty of press or of speech, even when compared to, say, 1980’s Communist Eastern Europe. France is well ahead of Russia, and behind only Turkey in censorship requests to Twitter. In Germany, France and Orwellian England, police carry out raids and jail people over Facebook posts questioning immigration and refugee policy. And jail for thoughtcrime can amount to a literal death sentence.

Although no clear studies exist, there’s a good chance that there are more political prisoners now in Germany than there were in the 1970s or 80s in Czechoslovakia and even in harsher “Soviet Yugoslavia,” to use a journalist-geographer’s recent coinage.

Most effective is the tactic, long-favored in western Europe, of inciting Antifa mobs to do the work of repression indirectly. Police need merely to look the other way. The state or university then has its own Red Guard, with plausible...