POWERLINE ARGUES OCASIO-CORTEZ HAS SAID SOMETHING SENSIBLE: Well, sort of sensible. She’s against cauliflower in a community garden. But…
…Not for the good reason that it tastes bad, but because it represents a “colonial approach” in the context of urban community gardens. Crops like plantains and yucca are much less colonialist.
John Hinderaker has a great little chuckle at AOC’s expense.
CREEPY PORN LAWYER UPDATE: Avenatti Stole Stormy Daniels’s Book Advance, According to Indictment.
Related: “He once threatened The Daily Caller with a defamation suit, messaging the reporter that ‘this is the last warning.’ His girlfriend through much of his year in the spotlight, Mareli Miniutti, recalled that he rarely put his phone down and would scroll through all of his Twitter mentions. ‘He would say, ‘Oh my god, this asshole said this and you know what I did? I fucking blocked that motherfucker.’ Behind the scenes, his behavior was even more volatile. ‘He had a terrible temper,’ one prime-time anchor told me. ‘He never lost it with me, or really with any of the talent, as far as I know, because it was mostly for the bookers or the people who were behind the scenes. But he would tell people, ‘I’m going to fucking bury you. Why the fuck would you do that?’ if he didn’t like something.’ A number of reporters recalled that he would physically invade their space. ‘His nose gets millimeters from your face and it’s clear he knows no boundaries,’ one broadcast reporter and producer told me.”
As Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner tweets, “Turns out a lot of our media knew what kind of guy Avenatti was before they told the rest of us. They put up with it, because they liked what he was selling.”
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Chicago High School Falls for ‘OK Sign’ Hoax, Spends $53K Reprinting Yearbook.
JOSH KRAUSHAAR: Kamala Harris Is Undermining Her Campaign.
If there was a primary for the most self-destructive presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California would be the front-runner of the 2020 field. Instead of leveraging her profile as a pragmatic prosecutor who has distinguished herself in the Senate as a tough litigator of top Trump officials, she’s run a campaign that has embraced seemingly every half-baked idea from the party’s left wing.
Supporting Medicare-for-all legislation that would all but eliminate private health insurance? Check. Decriminalize sex work? On it. Reparations for the descendants of slaves? Let’s study it. Criticize Rep. Ilhan Omar for invoking anti-Semitic tropes that even the Democratic party leadership condemned? Hard pass. Voting rights for the Boston bomber? Let’s talk about it, at least before backtracking the next day.
Her latest policy proposal would penalize businesses that fail to demonstrate gender pay equity, but without contextualizing salary data for merit and experience. “Companies would also be required to report the share of women who are among the company’s top earners, the total pay and total compensation gap that exists between men and women, regardless of job titles, experience and performance,” according to the Associated Press.
The plan combines the heavy hand of government with a mission that’s near-impossible to implement effectively.
The point isn’t to fix a problem, the point is to create more opportunities for corruption and graft. At that, Harris’s idea would prove a huge success I’m sure.
Getting elected though, as Will Collier noted, is “Harris’s Achilles Heel: she’s spent her political life in the Bay Area, where there’s no penalty for going another step further to the Left of your opponents. It’s her go-to tactic, and she has no idea how to modulate it, or what to do outside that bubble.”
NJ MAN ARRESTED ON TERROR CHARGES, ALLEGEDLY WANTED TO BOMB TRUMP TOWER: “In another Instagram post court records quoted Xie as saying ‘I want to shoot the pro-Israel demonstrators…you can get a gun and shoot your way through or use a vehicle and ram people… all you need is a gun or a vehicle to go on a rampage…’ Xie’s social media accounts were loaded with terror propaganda, the FBI said, and declarations of support for Bashar al Assad, Saddam Hussein and North Korea.”
DENIAL IS IN NO.10 DOWNING STREET: The last poll from YouGov before the European elections tomorrow puts Theresa May’s Conservatives on just 7 percent support, compared to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party at 37 percent.
Senior Ministers have asked to see the Prime Minister, which is normally a sign of impending defenestration. In response, Mrs. May shut the doors to her Downing Street bunker. Now Andrea Leadsom, probably the leading Leaver left in the Cabinet, has resigned.
Owing to the lack of free speech in the UK, political news reporting is banned over there tomorrow. It would be just like May to resign when a) it can’t be covered properly and b) it comes of no help to the party she’s supposed to be leading.
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OKAY, BUT TRY TO GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT: Tammy Duckworth, Corey Booker and Tom Carper have formed a Senate Environmental Justice Caucus aimed at eliminating racism in environmental protection. That’s fine. But note that when the Commission on Civil Rights tried to prove that coal ash dumps were disproportionately being located near African-American neighborhoods it ended up finding the opposite: The dumps were disproportionately placed near white neighborhoods.
BYRON YORK: Republicans seek release of secret Papadopoulos transcripts.
The reason Papadopoulos’ experience is so important is because the FBI has cited it as the reason the bureau officially began the Trump-Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016. The FBI said that Australian diplomats, who talked with Papadopoulos in London, told U.S. government officials that Papadopoulos said Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. After that, the FBI reportedly sent “Azra Turk” to London and also used other resources to find out what was going on with Papadopoulos. They created a record of their work, according to Gowdy.
“If the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired,” Gowdy said. “And if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there’s going to be a transcript of that.”
Gowdy cast his statement as a hypothetical, but it did not veil much of anything. “Some of us have been fortunate to know whether or not those transcripts exist, but they haven’t been made public,” he said.
Gowdy strongly suggested at least one of the transcripts has information that would be exculpatory for Papadopoulos.
“Very little in this Russia probe, I’m afraid, is going to persuade people who hate Trump or who love Trump,” he said. “But there is some information in these transcripts that I think has the potential to be a game-changer, if it’s ever made public.”
“You say there’s exculpatory evidence,” replied Bartiromo, “and when people see that, they’re going to say, wait, why wasn’t this presented to the court earlier?”
As a guess, precisely because it was exculpatory.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Homemade Natural Sunscreen is Dangerous and a Bad Idea.
HOUSE: Republican wins special House election in Pennsylvania.
Keller’s victory means that the north-central Pennsylvania district will remain in Republican hands after former Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) stepped down in January, less than one month into his fifth term in office.
The 12th District still tilts heavily in the GOP’s favor, unlike several districts in Pennsylvania that became more competitive for Democrats after the state Supreme Court ordered the state’s congressional lines to be redrawn.
President Trump would have carried the district by 36 points in 2016 had the state’s current congressional boundaries been in place that year, and Keller outspent Friedenberg by more than $140,000, according to federal filings.
A win is always nice, but I wouldn’t read too much into this one.
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ALL I’VE GOT’S THIS SUNNY AFTERNOON: In Wake Of Federal Tax Reform, Blue States Scramble To Hide High Taxes. “Democrats insist richer people need to pay more taxes. When that becomes slightly more true because of a Republican initiative, they hide income.”
Any analysis of the federal income-taxing power must begin with the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which is brief but sweeping: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” While Article I always gave Congress the power to impose direct taxes, the Sixteenth Amendment removed the constitutional restrictions on that power that made its exercise practically impossible.
That power, with the pre-1916 restrictions removed, is as broad as it gets. If you have income, the federal government can tax it. From the beginning, courts have recognized the sweeping nature of the Sixteenth Amendment and, in 1955, clarified further just how broad the amendment is in the landmark case of Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co. In that case, the upheld the Internal Revenue Code’s definition of income as being truly “all-inclusive.”
To admit this does not require an endorsement of high taxes, or indeed of any taxes at all. To say that the government can tax all income does not mean you think they should tax all income. It is only to admit a fact that, until recently, Democrats were especially fond of acknowledging: the government has the power to tax your income.
Well, they’re hypocrites.
AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: U.S. Commander Confirms: Al Qaeda Operating ‘Across’ Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda is operating “across the country” and not confined to one region, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan confirmed.
General Austin Miller, the commander of Resolute Support Mission and US Forces – Afghanistan, confirmed several analyses by FDD’s Long War Journal, which has noted for years that al Qaeda’s footprint spans all regions of Afghanistan.
“We have seen al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Yes, in different parts of Afghanistan,” Miller said, according to TOLONews. “In different parts of Afghanistan, we can find them, so it’s not one particular region, it’s across the country.”
Later this year, someone born after 9/11/2001 will be old enough to serve in Afghanistan.
THE BUREAUCRACY SEEMS TO BE DOING THIS A LOT: A Government Coup by NASA’s Bureaucracy.
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