90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, November 26, 2017

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #87

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.

The Stench from the Bench: A Rant

Girls With Guns

In order to drain the swamp, President Trump must first destroy the Green Blob.

This is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from a series of data leaks and Freedom of Information (FOI) revelations exposing the relationship between left wing campaigners and the great climate change scam.

Global warming, it becomes clear, is primarily a left-wing political issue, not a scientific one. Green is the new red.

These leaks show how rich liberal backers—left-wing institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, eco hedge-fund billionaires like Tom Steyer, and the various socialistic Geek Emperors of Silicon Valley—are funneling millions of dollars into sock-puppet environmental organizations both to undermine Trump’s economic agenda and to finance his political opponents both in the Democratic Party and the GOP.

U.S. Climate Alliance

This poses as “a bi-partisan coalition of states is committed to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.” Or so the website says. But anyone can set up a website.

The truth, as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has discovered through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-requested email correspondence, is that U.S. Climate Alliance is just a front. Its real purpose is to enable the richly funded green lobby to buy up Democrat governors—and one, token, squishy Republican governor: Gov. Charlie Baker (MA)—by effectively bribing them with free office, research and staffing facilities which they can run off books.

There is nothing actually illegal in any of this. But to appreciate how ethically dubious it is, just consider how the liberal media would respond if the roles were reversed and it were conservative politicians being provided with all these off-books services by, say, the fossil fuel industry.

Chris Horner, who initiated the FOIA for the CEI, put it like this in the Washington Times:

Mr. Horner asked how the media would react if, for example, the Koch brothers provide staffing on behalf of a Republican governor.

“This would unleash a tsunami of Pulitzers and hysteria if the political parties or priorities were changed,” said Mr. Horner. “Here is a real test for ‘good government’ activists—is this all right if the ‘right’ politicians and donors pushing the approved agenda outsource government?”

What the emails show is the intimate relationship between the liberal donors, green sock puppet organizations and Democrat politics.

Climate activist groups, most notably Climate Nexus—a sponsored project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors—act as the press arm for these governors’ offices at no charge. They also operate as a “shadow staff”to support climate change communications efforts, and supplied research later promoted by these state governors as their own. This includes at least one for-profit contractor, raising the question who its actual paying client is.

The three main Democrat governors fronting the U.S. Climate Alliance are Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Jerry Brown and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

But the people actually running it are green lobbyists and activists, doing the bidding of their wealthy anonymous donors in liberal strongholds like Silicon Valley, as well as the usual liberal suspects such as the Rockefeller and Hewlett Foundations. One prominent figure is...

George Soros has come under fire for hiding $18 billion dollars from the IRS in what experts are calling “the biggest tax dodge in US history.”

Soros transferred $18 billion of his fortune to a private charity he controls in order to shelter it from the Internal Revenue Service.

Wsj.com reports: This may be the single biggest tax dodge in U.S. history, yet no one on the right or left seems to have raised an eyebrow.

True tax reform is predicated on the principle that all income should be taxed at a low rate once, and only once. But much of the wealth that Mr. Soros spent years moving into his Open Society Foundations will never be taxed. A gift of billions of dollars of appreciated stock escapes any capital gains tax, and the estate tax as well. So Mr. Soros can donate appreciated stock that Open Society Foundations can liquidate without the government ever taking a cut.

There’s more. When a person donates untaxed, appreciated assets to a private foundation, he may also deduct up to 20% of its market value on his personal return, carrying forward this deduction for five years. This double write-off may be the sweetest deal in the tax code.

The donors also can retain control of the money within the private foundation for years or even decades before it is disbursed. Since the foundation can employ family members at six-figure salaries for life to “administer” it, the umbilical cord to the donor never has to be cut.

Congress should stop ignoring this tax-avoidance scheme. The super rich have already poured hundreds of billions into private foundations, but the figure could soon be in the trillions. Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to give away 99% of his Facebook shares, currently estimated to be worth somewhere around $70 billion, and much of it will go to a foundation his family controls. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have each put roughly $30 billion tax-free into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This has left the foundation so flush that it spent $500 million on a 12-acre, 900,000-square-foot office complex in Seattle for...

Mom whose son is in China jail speaks out about President Trump in way that puts LaVar Ball to shame

When it comes to the parents of athletes who have found trouble abroad, consider Antoinette Brown to be the anti-LaVar Ball.

She has been on a 14-month long quest to have her son Wendell Brown released from a Chinese jail after an altercation at a bar. Brown says her son was attacked by a beer bottle, and the incident got him in trouble with the authorities.

Brown appeared on Fox & Friends to tell her story of trying to get her son out of Chinese jail.

“President Trump intervened when three UCLA basketball players were arrested for shoplifting,” Pete Hegseth began. “He helped them return home safely. The father of one of those players downplayed the president’s help.”

“It wasn’t like he was in the U.S. And said ‘okay, there are three kids in China. I need to go over there and get them,” Ball said in the clip. “Then, I would say ‘thank you’ if he would have put them on his plane and took him home. Then I would have said thank you, Mr. Trump, for taking my boy out of...