STATE OF SELF-PARODY: History’s ‘Most Transparent Administration’ Appoints a ‘Transparency Coordinator,’ as spotted by Claudia Rosett.
No matter who wins next November, the tell-all memoirs to begin emerging after the disastrous current administration leaves the White House are guaranteed to be jaw-dropping.
ROLL CALL: Capitol Hill Grappling With D.C. Crime Spike.
When Capitol Hill’s police advisory council usually convenes to discuss crime and policing issues, a handful of residents show up. On Sept. 1, it was standing room only.
Capitol Hill residents and others living in the Metropolitan Police Department’s 1st District gathered at the police station in Southwest D.C. to voice concerns about the recent spike in violent crime rocking the nation’s capital. In the front row sat 13 year-old Taije Chambliss, who walked into the station with help from a walker. Chambliss was recovering from being shot in a drive-by shooting on Aug. 30, just a few blocks from the police station.
“It’s getting old,” one clearly frustrated resident told 1st District Commander Jeff Brown. “It’s getting increasingly more dangerous.”
Maybe if DC followed the law on carry permits, things would be safer. But how likely is that?
GREAT MOMENTS IN HARD-HITTING JOURNALISM: ABC’s David Muir Ends Hillary Interview with Softballs on Running Again, ‘Your Mother’s Voice in Your Ear:’
In her third interview in the past week, Hillary Clinton sat down Tuesday with ABC’s World News Tonight anchor David Muir and while Muir pressed her on the e-mail scandal, Muir concluded part one of the discussion with gooey questions about if she ponders why she’s running for president “in your most private of moments” and whether she hears “your mother’s voice in your ear.”
Particularly given his employment at ABC, the House of Stephanopoulos, I was going to make the usual remarks about Muir being a Democrat operative with a byline. But given all of the articles over the years concerning Hillary’s robotic nature and rumors of her military-grade titanium exoskeleton, perhaps Muir was bravely performing an on-the-air Voight-Kampff test on Hillary by asking about her thoughts on her mother. He’s very lucky; here’s how those sorts of interviews can also end-up when they don’t go as well:
RELATED: “From 1995. Hillary’s quest for a ‘softer image’ has been going on for at least 20 years now.” And it was just four years later that Beltway journalists were similarly grousing about Al Gore’s robotic tone as well.
THE HILL: Bush tax plan takes swipe at Wall Street.
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush proposes scrapping a tax break prized by Wall Street, as part of a new plan that would sharply lower tax rates for both individuals and businesses.
Bush, the former Florida governor, calls for dropping the corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, a more aggressive approach than even congressional Republicans have outlined in recent years.
Under the framework Bush outlined in The Wall Street Journal, the top individual rate would drop to 28 percent, where it stood after the last successful overhaul of the tax code nearly three decades ago.
Bush’s plan received quick praise Tuesday from the GOP’s business wing, which has long lobbied to cut the corporate tax rate.
But in proposing to roll back the so-called carried interest incentive, Bush is also seeking to tap into the populist sentiments that have helped propel businessman Donald Trump to the top of the GOP polls.
“The tax code is a labyrinth littered with thousands of special-interest giveaways, subsidies and other breaks written to favor Washington insiders,” Bush wrote in his Journal op-ed, adding: “The code is rigged with multiple carve-outs for favored industries.”
The carried interest tax break essentially allows private equity and hedge fund partners to count profits from managing money as capital gains, which is currently taxed at about half the top rate for ordinary income. Democrats have long pushed to tax carried interest at the individual rate, which currently tops out at 39.6 percent.
Trump has also made it clear that he thinks hedge fund managers pay far too little in taxes.
Honestly, there’s no reason for the GOP not to go after tax breaks for the very, very rich — who overwhelmingly support Democrats anyway. And I have a few revenue enhancement proposals of my own.
ROGER SIMON: Make the Reagan Library Debate an Audition for Commander-in-Chief:
What matters is what the candidates would do about the global crisis, how they would address it. To find that out, the panelists (including Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Hugh) should take a different approach on September 16. Treat the event more like an audition than a debate. That is unlikely to happen, of course. But debates with eleven people are silly in the first place. They’re not real debates. But auditions with larger numbers can occur. You can drill down with each person to the extent necessary to see if they are the best one for the part, in this case commander-in-chief. That is how auditions work.
Read the whole thing.
THOMAS SOWELL: The Past and Future of the Refugee Crisis.
Barack Obama’s decision to pull American troops out of Iraq, with happy talk about how he was ending a war, turned out to be a bitter mockery when the policy in fact opened the doors to new wars with unspeakable horrors in the present and incalculable consequences for the future.
The glib rhetoric that accompanied the pullout of American troops from Iraq was displayed once again when the rise of ISIS was dismissed as just a junior varsity team trying to look like a serious threat. But now that ISIS controls a big chunk of Iraq and a big chunk of Syria, it is the Obama foreign policy that looks like the work of a junior varsity team.
Undermining stable governments in Egypt and Libya that posed no threat to Western interests in the Middle East was another rhetoric-laden catastrophe of the Obama administration. No wonder President Obama does not want to get involved in the refugee crisis that his own policies did so much to create. Talking about renaming Mount McKinley seems far safer politically.
Indeed. Related: “We’ll see who cracks first, the guests or the hosts, but sooner or later, somebody’s getting loaded into cattlecars, because that’s how things go in Europe.”
THIS WOULD BE INTERESTING: Alien Nuclear Wars Might Be Visible From Earth.
USEFUL: Gravity Basics for Sci-fi Authors. Actually there’s a whole lot of useful stuff at his site.
BOOING IS NOT ACCEPTABLE: College Promises To Punish Students Who Heckled Mandatory Play.
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE ELITES PART TWO: Counter-Narratives From a Crisis.
Brendan O’Neill tackles the preening—and worse than preening— of those in the European elite now so keen to show that they #WelcomeTheRefugees.
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE ELITES, PART ONE: Why does Germany want so many refugees?
Germany faces a severe labor shortage, both short-term and long-term. A study by the Robert Bosch foundation suggested that Germany’s workforce could shrink by about 6 million by 2030.
I think what they get might not be what they want…
I DON’T ENVY THE CLEANING CREW: Inside the world’s most secretive, sex-filled nightclub.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH: Liberalism Doesn’t Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt.
CHOOSING POORLY: Cuomo’s commitment to lousy teachers is failing our kids.
DO-GOODERS CAN BE DANGEROUS: How homeless ‘advocates’ caused NYC’s new homeless crisis.
TURNS OUT GIRLS AREN’T ANGELS: America’s girls have a violence problem.
ANOTHER FISH OIL FAIL: Supplements Don’t Fight Cognitive Decline, N.I.H. Study Says.
WHY MEN PREFER YOUNGER WOMEN: Grandmothers.
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PRAGER UNIVERSITY: Robert George: Why We’re Losing Liberty.
NASSIM TALEB: An Uberized Education.
An Uberized education is when –as in antiquity — one goes to a specific teacher to get lectures, bypassing the university. The students and the teachers are thus matched. If a piece of paper is necessary, it would be given by *that* teacher, or a group of teachers. It is not too different from the decentralized apprentice model.
This already works well for executive “education”. I give short workshops in my specialty of applied probability (I have given a few with PW, YBY and RD, though only lasting 1-2 days), limited to professionals. An Uberization would consist in making longer workshops, say of 2-3 week duration, after which the attendees would be getting a piece of paper of sorts.
From my experience, both students and lecturers are more sincere when they bypass institutions. And, as with other Uberizations, it would be much, much efficient economically.
A full education would be a collection of such micro-diplomas, which can be done on top of a conventional one.
Or, in time, instead of. All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
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