TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1125.
Archive for 2016
June 7, 2016
THOSE CASES ARE VERY HARD TO WIN, THOUGH NO DOUBT COPS WILL FARE BETTER THAN ORDINARY CITIZENS: Baltimore Cops To Sue Marilyn Mosby For ‘Malicious Prosecution.’
SOCIAL MEDIA’S DARK SIDE: Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America.
The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.
They are to post messages along themes called “American Dream” and “I Love Russia.” The archetypes for the accounts are called Handkerchief, Gay Turtle, The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Left Breast, Black Breast, and Ass, for reasons that are not immediately clear.
According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project’s leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It’s based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.
Not just Russian blogs, I’ve noticed.
OUCH: Math ruins Bernie Sanders’s day.
Math has never been his strong suit.
PRAGER UNIVERSITY’S COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER MIKE ROWE SAYS Don’t Follow Your Passion!
WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1929: James Lileks discusses the Outer Limits with a liquor store clerk and finds himself in the Twilight Zone:
Traders Joe conversations are the best. They’re all friendly and smart and they all play along. Went next door to Infinite Intoxicants, and put the items up on the belt.
“Hello,” chirped the clerk.
“Greetings,” I said.
She smiled. “I saw an old TV show from the ’20s called ‘The Outer Limits’ and someone said that just like you did.”
Sometimes one sentence reveals an endless expanse of — well, I don’t want to say ignorance, because that sounds harsh. How about “scant acquaintance with history.”
The Twenties.
And now we know which TV show FDR interrupted in 1929 when he comforted the nation after the stock market crashed…
Yet another reminder that (a) Lileks’ clerk is in good company when it comes to historical ignorance and (b) Katie Couric, who failed to call Biden out on his gaffe-apalooza in the fall of 2008 has been cooking the books for her fellow Democrats for quite some time.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To End Inequality, Ban The Box — The College Box. “This might seem absurd to some readers, but the fact is that higher education, and especially elite higher education, is probably the single biggest perpetuator of privilege in our society.”
OUT: “A Good Republican Cloth Coat.”
IN: “Hillary Clinton’s New York primary victory speech in April focused on topics including income inequality, job creation and helping people secure their retirement. It was a clear attempt to position herself as an everywoman. But an everywoman she is not — she gave the speech in a $12,495 Giorgio Armani tweed jacket.”
BILL WHITTLE: Free college isn’t free.
(Shhh. Nobody tell the Sanders Babies.)
DON’T QUESTION IT, BIGOTS: Biological male awarded girls high school all-state track honors.
Related: David Solway on “A Melancholy Calculation:” “The West is now busy at work across the entire field of social, cultural and political life promoting its own version of Lysenkoism, a misconceived exercise of supposedly vernalizing reality by transforming fact into fantasy and truth into lie for the purpose of creating the perfect society and the redeemed human being, transferable across the generations. Its assumptions about the world are guided not by common sense or genuine science but by the precepts of ideology and political desire.”
ASHE SCHOW: Hillary Clinton can’t condemn violent protesters without victim-blaming.
Asked about the violent protests at Donald Trump rallies, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gave a clear answer. “Violence is absolutely and totally unacceptable,” he said. He added that if anyone was considering becoming violent, “please do not tell anybody you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, because those are not the supporters that I want.”
Of course, he couldn’t help but also bash Trump, adding that he found the New York business mogul’s positions “reprehensible and disgraceful,” before launching into a lengthy diatribe about Trump’s insults toward women and minorities. Still, Sanders told his audience that defeating Trump would not take egg-throwing and violence, but education and organization.
When Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton tried to condemn the violence, however, she missed the mark by blaming him for the violence against his supporters.
“I condemn all violence in our political arena,” Clinton told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I condemned it when Donald Trump was inciting it and congratulating people who were engaging in it. I condemn it by those who are taking violent protests to physical assault against Donald Trump. This has to end.”
So far, so good. But Clinton couldn’t stop there. She added: “He created an environment in which it seemed to be acceptable for someone running for president to be inciting violence, to be encouraging his supporters. Now, we’re seeing people who are against him responding in kind,” she added.
As if Trump had some mysterious power over the free will of all anti-Trump protestors. They can’t help themselves.
If so, then maybe we need a wall to keep them away from civilized folk.
SO ZEPHYR TEACHOUT IS RUNNING FOR CONGRESS and one of her planks is opposing the “carried interest” loophole. Since that mostly benefits fatcat Democrat donors, I think lots of GOP folks should get behind it.
UH-HUH: State Dept. would need 75 years to compile Clinton emails.
But in a pinch, they could probably get them out by November 9 or 10.
DON’T CRY FOR ME, TEXARKANA! NPR Reporter: Women Weep Over History-Making Hillary Clinton.
Even the throne-sniffing Democrats with bylines at NPR must admit, when no one is looking, that the political candidate as deity shtick doesn’t sell nearly as well with Hillary as it did with an unknown Obama in 2008.
THE REVOLUTION ALWAYS EATS ITS OWN: ISIS kills dozens of its own in hunt for spies.
Well, good.
IDENTITY POLITICS FOR ME, NOT FOR THEE: “Trump says Mexican heritage could cause judge bias? Evil. Hillary suggests all Germans are Nazis? Cool.”
YEAH, BUT HIS POLITICS WERE OKAY SO IT DIDN’T MATTER: Muhammad Ali embodied everything lefties hate about ‘lad culture.’
Related: Piers Morgan (!?!): Muhammad Ali was racist, Trump is not.
HOPE: The Kids Love Sanders Even More Than They Loved Obama.
According to the Tufts analysis, in 2008 Obama defeated Clinton among under-30 voters by a 60-35 margin. So far Sanders is beating Clinton by a 71-28 margin. Obama racked up 2.2 million youth votes in the 25 states included in the study. Sanders has won an estimated 2.4 million in those states, with California, New Jersey, and a scattering of smaller states still to vote. Based on recent polling in California (the Field Poll has Sanders leading Clinton 75-10 among under-30s), it doesn’t look like Sanders’s domination in this demographic is going to change before the final bell.
Millions of young voters going doe-eyed for an aging socialist is in the longterm far more worrisome than anything Donald Trump ever did or said.
SURE IT IS. AND IT’S ALSO SEXIST FOR THE GOP TO RUN ANYONE AGAINST HER. Sanders: Not sexist to stay in race against Clinton.
Bernie Sanders pushed back at a Monday press conference, after a journalist asked whether his continuing campaign against Hillary Clinton is sexist, given Clinton’s likely lock on delegates.
The journalist interrupted Sanders as he tried to call on another reporter, repeatedly asking the Vermont senator how he’d address women who say he is acting sexist for standing in the way of Clinton becoming the first female presidential nominee in American history.
“Is that a serious question? Your question implies that any woman who is running for president is by definition the best candidate,” he said during a press conference in California the day before the state’s primary.
Well, that’s basically Hillary’s platform, right?
Related: “In case you goldfish forgot, the GOP nominee is always Literally Hitler.”
THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Mocking Putin Got Me Sent to Twitter Gulag.
I run the @DarthPutinKGB “parody” account.
…
Someone, somewhere, was not amused. Last Tuesday the account was suspended as, despite a bio that said “146% of Russians didn’t elect me. You don’t visit Russia, I visit you. I serve tea to those who call this parody. Tweets made while topless signed “vvp” it was decided it could be confused with the real person and thus violated Twitter’s terms of service.So what lead Twitter to shut down this obvious parody account? Well, Darth wasn’t the first to be sent to Twitter’s gulag for re-education.
“Darth’s” exposé is even more revealing about Jack Dorsey’s Twitter than it is about Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
Read the whole thing.
AMERICA’S CHILDLESS CITIES: They’re hip, they’re entertaining—but where are the families?
The American left are unknowingly taking Nietzsche’s concept of the “Last Man” far too literally, in more ways than one.