RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-reconciliation-entitlements-global-competitiveness-corporate-tax-hike-income-death-11630619861?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Joe Biden this week completed the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, in a humiliating military surrender to the Taliban. The president is more interested in working on a second capitulation—a wholesale economic surrender to China and other rivals.

Members of the House Ways and Means Committee were notified that markup will begin as early as next Thursday on Democratic plans for the largest tax increase in at least 50 years. House leaders have yet to provide any text for the committee work, since they continue to negotiate the details. But the White House and Democratic lawmakers have made clear the broad contours, which are best read as an exercise in U.S. self-sabotage—a gift to foreign companies and foreign workers everywhere.

Washington excels at spin, but few lines may prove more economically destructive than the continued Democratic claim that the 2017 tax law was about cuts for the “rich.” Even critics at the time acknowledged the law’s real highlight—its central focus—was its overdue and comprehensive reform of the corporate tax system. As this page’s editorial columns noted, the cuts on the individual side weren’t nearly “as ambitious,” making only marginal trims to top rates.

The corporate changes were specifically designed to restore America’s global competitiveness, which had eroded over decades. It cut the top corporate rate, which at 35% was the highest in the developed world. It got rid of a backward “world-wide” tax system, in which U.S. companies paid taxes in countries where they earned income and again if they returned money here. This was fundamentally a “pro-America” reform.

And it worked. An estimated $1.6 trillion flowed back into the U.S. from 2018 to 2020, which businesses poured into American factories, American jobs, American wages.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ida-remnants-hit-northeast-with-rain-flooding-tornadoes-11630554939

States in the Northeast began recovery efforts Thursday after the remnants of Hurricane Ida unleashed record-breaking rainfalls, flash floods and tornadoes in a powerful burst that blindsided some in the region and killed at least 45 people.

The death toll doubled late Thursday afternoon, when New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy reported the tally in his state. At least 23 people died there, the majority caught in vehicles by floodwaters, Mr. Murphy said. Some people were missing since the storm, but he didn’t say how many.

“We are still very much in the midst of the impacts of Ida,” he said at a news conference.

The storm cut a path from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night, trapping some people in basements in fast-rising water and others in cars on flooded roads. In southern New Jersey, tornadoes tore through homes, farms and trees.

Thousands of people across the region had to be rescued by first-responder crews traversing waist-high waters in boats and other vehicles, according to officials in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/taliban-better-armed-nato-afghanistan/

It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing an ‘elite unit’ of the Taliban. In a season finale that the most dystopian screenwriter would have struggled to invent, the elite Taliban unit was itself bedecked in US military kit. That is, they were not only wearing uniforms and protective kit provided by the fleeing US army, but were parading the airport with US-provided guns in US-provided vehicles.

This was the culmination of a two-week period that the White House is still trying to present as a success. One of the biggest airlifts in history, they insist. In reality the Biden administration has pulled off a feat few of us thought possible. A military-political defeat that gets worse the more you look at it.

Take the issue of the kit that the Americans have left behind. I’m sure by now everyone has seen the lists of armaments that the US left with the swiftly dissolved Afghan army that America and its allies struggled to train for two decades.

The Taliban inherited that defeated army’s kit in its entirety. That entirety includes 33 Black Hawk helicopters, 43 MD 530 helicopters, 32 Mi-17 helicopters, 23 A-29 light attack planes, at least 33 other attack planes and three gigantic Hercules aircraft thrown in for good measure. Thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer, the Taliban now has more attack helicopters than the UK, and is better armed than almost every Nato country, apart from the US.

When these facts emerged this week, a portion of the commentariat tried to pretend this was no great shakes. These last defenders of the President insisted it didn’t matter that the Taliban had control of all these Black Hawks. For how could a group of goat-herders, who have barely learned to operate their rusty old Soviet motorcycles, be expected to retrain as helicopter pilots? As if they were listening, right on cue, the Taliban began flying one of their new Black Hawks over the skies of Kabul. That was quite the F-you: top kit, in new hands, only one previous owner, hardly used.

Perhaps aware this does not look great, the US military is claiming to have disabled some of the kit they left behind. On Monday, Gen. McKenzie said that before leaving Kabul airport the US military permanently disabled 150 vehicles and aircraft so they can ‘never be used again’. The rocket air defense system was reportedly kept online until the last minute and then demilitarized.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/01/is-our-military-woke-broke-or-both/

The fall of Kabul is not the end, as Joe Biden seems to think, of the Afghanistan nightmare. 

It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.

In the hours after the horrific deaths of 13 servicemen, we have been reassured by our military that our partnership with the Taliban to provide security for our flights was wise. We were told that the terrorist victors share similar goals to ours in a hasty American retreat from Kabul. We were reminded that Afghan refugees (unlike U.S. soldiers) will not be forced to be vaccinated on arrival. Such statements are either untrue or absurd.

On the very day of the killing of Americans, the command sergeant major of the U.S. Army callously reminded us in a tweet that diversity is our strength in commemorating not the dead, but Women’s Equality Day. 

If so, then is the opposite of diversity—unity—our weakness? Will such wokeness ensure that we do not abandon the Bagram airbase in the middle of the night without opposition?

Recently the Office of Naval Intelligence, in reaction to the Kabul news, warned all its active duty and retired service members that they must not criticize their Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden. The office correctly cited prohibitions found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice barring any disrespect shown to senior government leadership. 

That is true. And indeed, the U.S. Marine Corps just relieved from active duty a lieutenant colonel who posted a video accurately blaming the military and civilian leadership for the Afghanistan nightmare. 

But until January 20, retired top brass had constantly smeared their elected commander-in-chief with impunity.

Recently retired General Michael Hayden retweeted a horrific slur that unvaccinated Trump supporters should be put on planes back to Afghanistan where they presumably would be left to die. Hayden earlier had compared Trump’s border facilities to the German death camps. 

Other generals and admirals in 2020 variously called their president an emulator of Nazi tactics, a veritable Mussolini, a liar, and deserving to be removed from office sooner than later. None of these retired politicized four-stars faced the sort of repercussions that the Office of Naval Intelligence just warned about.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democratic-norm-breakers-jan-6-committee-bennie-thompson-subpoena-call-records-house-republicans-11630532406?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Critics feared that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s probe of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot would be partisan, and the latest proof are subpoenas for the private phone records of House Republicans. This is a violation of political norms that Democrats will come to regret.

Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.), chair of the House special committee, sent letters Monday to 35 companies, from AT&T to Facebook to Parler, asking them to preserve information about account holders charged with crimes related to, or “potentially involved with discussions” in planning, the Jan. 6 riot. The companies are requested to preserve emails, and voice, text and direct messages in preparation for subpoenas to come.

The letters contained a list of individuals whose names haven’t leaked. But CNN reports that nearly a dozen House Republicans are on the committee’s “evolving” radar, including Jim Jordan, ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Republicans are furious, and rightly so. Indiana Rep. Jim Banks noted in a letter to Mr. Thompson that this “authoritarian undertaking” would depart “from more than 230 years of Congressional oversight.” The move recalls California Democrat Adam Schiff’s public release of the call logs of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes in 2019.

At least Democrats claimed the collection of Mr. Nunes’s information was incidental to other records it targeted. The special committee is using its oversight power to snoop on political opponents. They’d gain access to information far beyond the events of Jan. 6.

Democrats say they need the call lists to see if Members of Congress fomented the assault on the Capitol. They hope to confirm their narrative that the riot was a planned “insurrection,” though Reuters reports that the FBI has found no such evidence in six months of looking. Conspiracy is a crime and matter for the Justice Department, not Congress.