90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1960

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.

Visage à trois #705

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #873

IRS TARGETED POOREST TAXPAYERS WHILE MILLIONAIRES WENT MOSTLY UNSCATHED IN 2022: REPORT

A study of 2022 IRS tax audit data found that a taxpayer in the lowest income bracket is five times more likely to face an audit that would a member of the highest income bracket.

"The IRS correspondence audit process is structured to expend the least amount of resources to conduct the largest number of examinations – resulting in the lowest level of customer service to taxpayers having the greatest need for assistance," National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins said of the report during an annual report to Congress.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University examines internal IRS management reports each month, and the group noticed different trends by reviewing 2022 data. Most notably, the group looked at audits, particularly considering the agency relying more heavily on automatically produced letters sent to taxpayers.

The data showed that the IRS conducted 85% of its audits through these letters, which request additional information and documentation related to specific items of interest. Overall audits dropped from 659,003 in FY 2021 to 626,204 in FY 2022 out of 164 million income tax returns filed last year.

The rate of income tax audits for those in the lowest income bracket hit 12.7 per 1,000, compared to 2.3 per 1,000 among theose in the highest – a nearly five-fold increase. The odds of a millionaire facing an audit were around 1.1%.

The exterior of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building in Washington D.C. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

This roughly matched similar numbers – 13 per 1,000, and 2.6 per 1,000, respectively – during FY 2021, but that rate nearly doubled from FY 2020, when the lowest income bracket saw...

To be state licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must personally advocate critical race theory and transgender ideology.

Minnesota’s teaching licensure board will soon require all teachers to be card-carrying Marxists. The card will literally say “licensed teacher,” but recently approved revisions redefine state licensure in expressly Marxist terms: Academic knowledge is out, and power struggle among the classes is in. To be licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must not merely teach about, but personally advocate, the core tenets of critical race theory and transgender ideology.

The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.

A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).

The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.

Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.

The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.

The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from...

Visage à trois #706

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #872

Google Is Complicit In Hiding Critical Health Information For People To Make Crucial Personal Health Decisions...

The Biden Administration’s Border ‘Parole’ Plan Takes Illegal Immigration To A Whole New Level

The Biden administration doesn’t need a parole policy. It needs a border enforcement policy.

President Biden has finally found a solution to address the surge in illegal crossings at the southern border: tell the tens of thousands of aliens unlawfully entering the United States from Mexico that they can come to America “legally” if they instead fly to a port-of-entry in the interior of the country.

Seriously, for all the Biden administration’s spin, that’s his plan — and it is illegal.

Of course, when Biden announced his administration’s newest policy on Thursday in advance of his midterm inaugural trip to the southern border on Sunday, the press release heralded the plan as a “new border enforcement action.” But as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy exposed in his weekend column, it’s a scam.

The scam, though, is layers thick, both legally and politically. And to reach the core truth — that Biden refuses to faithfully execute his duties as the president of the United States by defending our sovereign border — one must first unpeel the specifics of the newest plan buried in the Department of Homeland Security’s official notice of the changes, while also analyzing the relevant immigration law.
The Plan

Today’s edition of the Federal Register, which serves as “the Daily Journal of the United States Government,” contains the details of DHS’s supposed “new border enforcement action,” in four separate “notices,” titled respectively: “Implementation of a Parole Process for Cubans,” “Implementation of a Parole Process for Haitians,” “Implementation of a Parole Process for Nicaraguans,” and “Implementation of Changes to the Parole Process for Venezuelans.”

Each notice summarizes the Biden administration’s supposed “solution” to the flooding of the southern border, which in short consists of allowing, on a monthly basis, a total of 30,000 aliens to enter the United States “legally” if they are Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan nationals. To qualify, aliens must have a “U.S.-based supporter,” which could be “non-governmental entities or community-based organizations,” and must “provide for their own commercial travel to an air [port-of-entry] and final U.S. destination.” National security and public safety vetting are also required, as well as any additional public health requirements, such as vaccinations.

But how is it that illegal-alien border crossers can become lawful noncitizens by just jumping through a few hoops and flying to the interior of the country, rather than sneaking over the southern border?

They can’t. And in crafting its latest immigration plan, the Biden administration is again acting lawlessly.

Biden’s Lawlessness

The Biden administration maintains it has the authority to allow aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States legally under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA. That section provides the secretary of homeland security the authority to “parole” noncitizens “into the United States temporarily under such reasonable conditions as [the secretary] may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or...