TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1096.
Archive for 2016
May 9, 2016
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? New York State’s ‘Textalyzer’ Legislation Opens Phones to Warrantless Searches.
KIDS (IN THE HALL) SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS: “This sketch from over 20 years ago anticipates the current mood of political correctness, triggering, and all the other campus cliches pretty well.”
TURKEY MOVES INTO EVER-MORE-OPEN AUTOCRACY: Erdogan In Charge:
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu resigned Thursday after losing a power struggle with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The move may have serious repercussions for the Turkish-EU refugee deal, as well as on Turkey’s internal order. . . .
The Turkish Constitution theoretically holds that the President is a non-partisan, ceremonial figurehead, while the Prime Minister is the head of government, but anyone who has been watching should not have been surprised by this. Erdogan still controls the AKP; he made Davutoglu, and he could unmake him just as easily. Reports indicate that the potential heirs to Davutoglu’s job are all Erdogan cronies. One prominent candidate is Erdogan’s son-in-law.
As the FT points out, Davutoglu had been instrumental in negotiating the Turkey-EU refugee deal, and was seen as in many European capitals as a moderating influence on Erdogan. (As Erdogan grew increasingly powerful, this was starting to take on shades of similar wishful thinking vis-a-vis Medvedev and Putin.) Already, Erdogan has signaled a change of tone. In a “fiery” speech Friday, he made it clear he would not give up any powers he has accrued to please European opinion or keep Davutoglu’s achievements intact.
I miss Kemalism. Before it’s all over, the Turks will too.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Teacher Admits Sex With 15-year-old Boy, Gets No Jail Time. Female privilege.
THIS WOULD CLOBBER SOME OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S BIGGEST DONORS, AND HILLARY’S SON-IN-LAW: Taxing Carried Interest As Ordinary Income Through Executive Action.
Which is why, if Obama doesn’t do it, Trump should. . . .
DAN MITCHELL: Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and Other People’s Money.
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VIDEO GAME DIRECTOR DAVID JAFFE PLAYS THE KKK CARD AS HE RUINS SUPERHERO PROM PICTURE:
As John Nolte wrote at Big Hollywood early last year when the Onion’s otherwise often enjoyable AV Club Website attacked a Michigan restaurateur for symbolically “banning” Hollywood’s Michael Moore and Seth Rogan after the two smeared the late Chris Kyle when Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper proved to be a surprise box office smash:
And how does the AV Club respond to this symbolic but righteous protest? By using no fewer than 7 paragraphs to relentlessly mock the Little Guy and his business.
[Restaurant owner Tommy] Brann has come up with the equally deadly revenge of denying him “decent, better than average, but nothing to rave about” fare delivered through “terrible service” amid “dated and kinda dirty” decor, of the sort that Americans must consume daily to live. Rogen and Moore are hereby condemned to slowly starve to death in the Brann’s parking lot, yearning fruitlessly for Brann’s Classic Onion Straw Loaf, the lights of the sign that illuminates their fatal mistake growing dim in their eyes.
Is anyone else old enough to remember when speaking truth to and defying power was the in-thing?
When the American Left reveals who they are really for and against, it is chilling.
Know your place and shut your mouth, little man.
And now you too, teenage boys with geeky but harmless superhero T-shirts and the prom dates who love them. As Fred Siegel wrote in 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’” And if that means insinuating high school kids are budding Klansmen as part of the PC cleanup, hey, at least you can feel proud knowing you fought the good fight by Speaking Truth to Prom.
THE FOOL ON THE HILL:
Shot: McCartney, in Interview, Compares Global Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers.
—Fox News, June 24, 2010.
—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.
As the Professor likes to say, I’ll believe global cooling/global warming/climate change/climate chaos is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s crisis themselves. And then there’s the issue of how badly the singularly evil legacy of the Holocaust is cheapened by using it as a talking point to smother dissent. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in September of 2003 as the left’s “Bush Equals Hitler” mania was just going into overdrive:
So if you can’t show me the death camps and the horror, find another example. Compare Bush to Bismarck or Franco or Mikey from the Life cereal commercials for all I care — because any of those would make more sense.
By the way, I don’t say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things” that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)
Indeed.
MICHAEL WALSH: Donald Trump is going to troll his way to victory.
Which dovetails well with a recent post of ours: “LAME DUCK WATCH: WAPO COOS OVER ‘SLY’ AND ‘SELF-AWARE’ OBAMA, ‘OUR FIRST COMEDIAN-IN-CHIEF.’” As I wrote late last month, “thanks to his joke writers, as [Washington Post gossip Emily Heil] eventually admits, Obama is the presidential equivalent of Jon Stewart, the nation’s Troll In Chief.”
Choose the form of your destructor.
FRED HIATT: Democrats, don’t celebrate Trump’s nomination. Fear it. “When I hear smart people explaining why Trump cannot win, all I can think is: Aren’t you the ones who told us that he couldn’t top 30 percent, and then 40 percent, and then 50 percent in the Republican primaries? Weren’t you confident that he was finished after he called Mexicans rapists, and insulted prisoners of war, and dished out a menstruation insult? Did you predict his nomination? If not, we don’t want to hear your certainty about his November defeat.”
ANDREW SULLIVAN IS WRONG AGAIN: HIS MAINSTREAM LIBERALISM HAS BECOME SCARILY ANTI-DEMOCRATIC. Analysis: True. But note this:
Sullivan’s liberalism prevents him from directly endorsing Plato’s prescription for governance by “philosopher kings” as a means of preventing rule by tyrannous demagogues. Instead, he is forced to turn to the contradictory work of praising recent expansions in democracy even as he works to denigrate them. He imagines the “miraculous” election of Barack Obama as an expression of a potentially dangerously radical populism, but one in which America “lucked out” because Obama was “paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School.” He praises the digital revolution that allowed voices like his own to speak truth to the power of corporate media, but laments the lack of elite control over the digital sphere has now created a space in which “the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further.”
These are valid points, but I’m not sure they can reasonably made via the pages of Salon, which in recent years has called for the rather un-democratic nationalization of the news media, plus Amazon, Google, and the film industry, and whose hyperbolic headlines are frequently indistinguishable from its many parodies on Twitter.
FROM MID DOUBLE-DIGITS TO HIGH DOUBLE-DIGITS: Libertarian Party membership applications double after Trump becomes GOP nominee.
And no, that’s not me being snarky: “Between 7 p.m. Tuesday evening and noon on Wednesday, the Libertarian Party received 99 new memberships. For the same time period a day earlier, the LP received only 46 new memberships.” I used to belong to the Libertarian Party, but I concluded that it wasn’t having the hoped-for impact, and in fact rather than dragging the other parties in a more libertarian direction may well have done the opposite.
FASTER, PLEASE: Dozens of Parents Sue DOE Over Illinois Transgender Bathroom Law.
CHANGE: Nearly half of voters in EU countries say they want a referendum on whether to remain in the bloc.
By EU tradition, voters are allowed to vote in as many referenda as might be needed to produce the “correct” outcome. Since in Brussels’ view EU membership is the correct outcome, further referenda would seem unnecessary.
JOHN DICKERSON’S FACE THE NATION INTERVIEW WITH HILLARY A DISGRACE TO CBS NEWS; HERE’S WHY.
Disgrace, or par for the course after a half century of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and more recently, its news president, David Rhodes, who has one degree of separation from Obama, via his now infamous brother.
Not to mention Dickerson himself. Or as we noted last year: New Host of Face the Nation Advised Obama in 2013 to ‘Destroy the GOP.’
Related: Coordination: CBS Debate Moderator Dickerson Meets With Dems Before [November ’15] Debate.
CBS’S LESLIE STAHL HEDGES WHILE DENYING LIBERAL PRO-CLINTON MEDIA BIAS.
Flashback: Cal Thomas Stumps Stahl Who Can’t Name a Conservative at CBS.
Related: David Rhodes, president of CBS, is the brother of failed novelist turned Obama Middle East guru Ben Rhodes, whom, as the New York Times noted last week, “is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going that Rhodes and the president have been formulating together over the past seven years.”
More: “Ben Rhodes’s brother, the day after Benghazi: The government thinks this could be a coordinated attack, not a video protest…Two days later, Sexton reminds us, Ben Rhodes sent out an e-mail ahead of Susan Rice’s Sunday show appearances urging her ‘to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.'”
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Teacher who allegedly raped student landed job at DOE: probe.
WELL, HE’S BETTER AT CAMPAIGNING THAN PRESIDENTING, SO IT MAKES SENSE HE’D WANT TO PLAY TO HIS STRENGTHS: Sidelined Obama Itches For Trump Fight.
HAVE WE REACHED OUR LIMIT? One of Ace’s co-bloggers spots a “cultural marker:”
According to the this article in the L.A. Times, Rachel Dolezal is going to publish a book about race.
Who cares, right? I know. But this particular sentence caused me to raise my left eyebrow and mutter “Fascinating…”:
Dolezal served as the president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP from 2014 to 2015. She resigned after her parents revealed that she was a white woman who was pretending to be black.
Emphasis mine. I think what we have here is a cultural marker. You don’t often see them. To illustrate the boundaries now in place, compare these two sentences:
1. Racheel Dolezal is a white women pretending to be black.
2. Bruce Jenner is a man pretending to be a woman.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Tim Blair asks, “Why does Caitlyn Jenner win awards for courage while Belle Gibson is damned as a fraud?”
(Try this link to get the gist of the story if the above Google link fails to provide access.)
IT’S AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: “So forget Republicans (weak, disgraced descendants of the Party of Lincoln); the Democrats (a criminal organization masquerading as a political party); the Libertarians (dope-smoking pacifist crackpots, mostly) and the various other barnacles on the body politic. The time is right and the time is now for a restoration of American principles, effected by Americans, for Americans. Economic and personal freedom under a Constitutional framework — no matter whose ox is gored — is the real path to Making America Great Again; to continue on the path we’re currently on is not only the road to serfdom but to slavery.”