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August 2018

Overthrow the Church of Leftist Guilt By Karl Notturno

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/17/overthrow-the-church

For the past couple of decades, Leftists have used guilt masterfully to convince Americans to vote against the interests of their country. They set forward some lofty and idealistic vision of what justice in America should be, typically using language generic enough to be palatable to both sides. Then they focus on all of the ways we have fallen short of this goal, ignoring the fact that we have gotten much closer than almost any other country or culture in history. And then they offer an opportunity for penance and salvation—keep voting for them and you will continue to be absolved of your sins.

But Democrats still need the vague feel-good vision of America to appeal to voters’ patriotism—it’s hard to run a country that you hate. And so they use aspirational language effectively to campaign while hiding their overwhelming disgust with the nation. They have never been proud of America. They are only proud of what America could be if everyone capitulated to their demands.

Mainstream liberals do not advertise this fact loudly, but they don’t hide it, either. John Kerry chose the slogan Let America be America Again for his presidential campaign—a phrase from a Langston Hughes poem that describes an idealized America, laments that it’s never fulfilled these lofty goals, and finally admits that “America never was America” to him. Michelle Obama famously remarked, during her husband’s first presidential campaign, that it was the first time that she was proud of her country. And, of course, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—a possible contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—said this week, “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.”

Beware Jeremy Corbyn and His American Apostles By Christopher Gage

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/18/beware-jeremy-corbyn

Donating £3 to the campaign of Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Party leader was, at the time, the best money I had ever spent.

Fresh from their second election loss in a row, Labour’s mild ineptitude was about to translate into hilarious farce. One which I, and many other conservatives, were all too keen to cement into a laughing stock sure to punctuate the decades ahead with regular dizzying mirth.

For the princely sum of £3 (less than the price of a pint) one could ensure the new Labour leader would be Corbyn, a bedraggled know-nothing backbencher whose terrific dullness would condemn his party to decades of nothing.

Back then, in 2015, Corbyn managed to squeeze onto the leadership ballot via charitable Labour MPs naively hoping to “widen the debate.” It went terribly wrong.

Getting wind of Corbyn’s glittering Marxist résumé, left-wing activists deserted the likes of Great Britain’s Communist party to stump up that tiny sum for a say in the future of the only other party with a chance of meaningful power.

Corbyn won in a near 60 percent landslide. (And increased that figure in a re-do). His supporters were muted only by raucous #ToriesForCorbyn then giddily convinced Labour was castrated.

The victor, after all, was everything that made Labour unelectable for what their party’s sensible and shrinking sect billed the “wilderness years”—18 years of irrelevance as Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher raged on.

Gender Confusion: A Tool of the Left By Peter Skurkiss See Video

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/gender_confusion_a_tool_of_the_left.html

The Democratic Party has gone off the deep end in many more ways than just pushing socialism. One sign is the fanatical embrace of identity politics, which has become the hallmark of the Party of Obama (POO). Look at Vermont. There, the Democrats’ primary race for governor was won by Christine Hallquist.

What is unusual is that Hallquist calls himself a “transgender woman.” To put it more accurately and without any politically correct gloss, Hallquist is a male pretending to be a woman. His pretending isn’t all that convincing, as evidenced by this YouTube clip from Time magazine.

It’s worth a minute’s time to see Hallquist to connect a face and a voice to the name and see what the Democrats are pushing.

Yes, Hallquist is a man in spite of any superficial changes he has made to his appearance. The chromosomes of the cells in his body haven’t changed, and he can’t erase the fact that he fathered three children when he was known as David Hallquist. Now, it is one thing for an individual to assert himself to be a woman and to act the part. There are always oddities. However, it is something entirely different for a major political party to put forward such a confused person for a high-level position as governor of a state.

Blue State ‘Charity’ Rubbing SALT into the wounds of school-choice scholarships.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-state-charity-1534546826

Any day now the IRS will release new rules that address efforts by states including Connecticut, Oregon, New York and New Jersey to evade last year’s tax reform by masking tax payments as charitable contributions. The danger is that nonprofit scholarship organizations that are funded in part by tax credits could end up as collateral damage.

The issue arises because certain states—mostly left-leaning—have been looking for gimmicks to claw back the state and local deductions that were capped at $10,000 in the new tax reform. State politicians understand that because taxpayers can no longer fully deduct their high state taxes on federal forms, they are going to pay a higher price for their states’ big-spending ways.

Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo have concocted a scheme to get around this. Essentially they’ve set up fake charities, which would collect in charitable contributions money that taxpayers formerly deducted from their federal taxes—which the states would then use to pay for state programs. Because the tax reform didn’t cap charitable deductions, taxpayers would effectively be taking a charitable deduction as a substitute for their formerly unlimited state and local tax deductions.

The IRS is rightly skeptical and in May issued Notice 2018-54 indicating it would adopt new regulations for such proposals. The danger now is that these new rules will not distinguish between “charities” that are really government fronts to collect taxes and Scholarship Granting Organizations that are not government entities, that do not funnel money back to the state, and that were set up by the states to expand opportunities for students.

Kofi Annan, Former United Nations Secretary-General, Dies at 80 He died after a short, unspecified illness R.I.P.

NO COMMENT….RSK HE DID LOOK GREAT IN A TUXEDO

The Press Abets a Coverup There is much to know about America’s own spies in 2016, but it would be impolitic to ask. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-abets-a-coverup-1534544446?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

The two biggest shoes are yet to drop in the 2016 investigations. We still don’t know the origins and back story of the intercepted Russian intelligence document that was pivotal in James Comey’s unprecedented, ill-advised and possibly decisive (according to numerous Democratic and independent election analysts) interventions in the presidential race.

Depending on what report you credit, the information was false, it was planted by the Russians, or it accurately indicated an illegal conspiracy to obstruct justice by the Clinton campaign and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch. If it was a Russian fabrication, then Mr. Comey was spoofed by the Kremlin into his improper intervention in the race. If the parties to the incepted exchange were simply misinformed, it’s hard to understand Mr. Comey’s reason for intervening.

Presumably some of the questions are answered in a still-secret annex to the inspector general’s report that criticized Mr. Comey’s performance, but even that won’t tell us everything we need to know. What did fellow intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, tell the FBI about this intercept? What did they advise Mr. Comey to do?