RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-tax-wisdom-1533850010

Imagine how high the U.S. economy can soar if President Trump resolves the arguments he started with America’s trading partners. Already the conventional wisdom on the tax law he signed in December is moving in his direction. Whereas prior to the law critics suggested it would provide a modest temporary boost, there’s now an emerging consensus that the law may pull so much investment into the United States that it could impoverish governments across the globe.

Nothing says establishment consensus like the International Monetary Fund. The Journal reports on the findings of a new IMF working paper forecasting the results of the suddenly more competitive United States:

Companies will be more likely to put profits and real investment in the U.S. than they were before the U.S. lowered its corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, according to the paper. That will leave fewer corporate profits for other countries to tax.

This obviously suggests that foreign governments will be collecting less revenue from U.S. firms. Is Mr. Trump really going to drain swamps all around the planet? While that may be rather an appealing thought, the good news is that even voracious governments will be more likely to see the benefits of maintaining a competitive tax system. This will allow them to keep businesses in their jurisdictions, still generating government revenue.

The Journal notes that “other countries are likely to chase the U.S. by lowering their corporate tax rates, too, creating the potential for what critics have called a race to the bottom.”

For a long time the U.S. refused to join this race. The IMF paper notes that prior to the new law, the U.S. corporate income tax rate was the highest in the OECD “with no significant change over 30 years.” The IMF economists add: “Compounded by investor-level taxation of dividends and capital gains, high tax rates discouraged equity investment in the corporate sector while creating a marginal subsidy for debt finance.”

Now we’re competing in a race that can have many winners. Just ask Ireland and the countries of Scandinavia, which enjoy low tax rates on corporate income. And there can be many more winners as pro-growth policies catch on. The Journal notes, “When one country cuts tax rates, usually other countries follow,” said Alexander Klemm, deputy division chief of the IMF’s tax policy division and one of the paper’s authors.”

America is no longer a follower. Separately the Journal reports that economists are now raising their expectations for the U.S.:

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/trump-pushes-prison-reform-with-state-leaders-who-have-found-success

President Trump will spend Thursday afternoon huddling with administration officials and state leaders to discuss a path forward for prison form in Congress, something his administration has privately pushed for in recent weeks.

The 4 p.m. roundtable at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey will include four Republican governors, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Lousiana, and Attorneys General Pam Bondi and Ken Paxton of Florida and Texas, respectively.

White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley noted in a statement Thursday that each of the participants hail “from states that have already implemented” reforms similar to those contained in the First Step Act, a bill that passed the House in May and could be the foundation for a bipartisan deal in the Senate.

The president and his team have been working behind the scenes in recent weeks to modify the legislation to include changes to current sentencing laws and measures that would target recidivism rates among previously incarcerated individuals.

According to the Washington Post, the White House is in close contact with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah on the issue.

But efforts to amend the prison system and reduce sentences for crimes like nonviolent drug offenses could be met with resistance among conservative lawmakers who typically support the president. Some have even suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions could complicate matters given his longstanding hard-line views on criminal justice.

“With all that I have done to help Sessions, to keep the president from firing him, I think [he] ought to stay out of it,” grassley told the Post on Thursday.

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

Zach Carter of the Huffington Post is telling Baby-Boomers that they are getting their knickers all in a twist and really should tone down their worries since, after all, “socialism is good now.”

Carter, senior political economy reporter at the HuffPo, evinces dazzling ignorance and misdirection as he leads Millennials down a path that will prove disastrous to them.

Carter asserts that we are re-entering the “Golden Age of American Paranoia” and any genuine concerns about the spread of communism are delusional. Has Carter ever perused The Black Book of Communism (1999), edited by Mark Kramer? He would learn “the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres.”

Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of communism over seventy years.

‘Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit,’ Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience – in the China of ‘the Great Helmsman,’ Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under ‘Uncle Ho’ and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin’s destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu’s leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the wide scale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao’s Red Guards.

As the death toll mounts – as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia … the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the … ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.

But, you retort, Carter never mentions the word “communism” in his article. It is exquisitely important to remember that according to Vladimir Lenin, “the goal of socialism is communism.”

In fact, Adrian Krieg writes that “the worst despotic governments of this century were: Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, Communists in the USSR, [Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, (and) Vietnam[.]” Each was supposed to be a “paragon of socialist endeavor.” The end result was that the leaders of “these countries murdered more of their own civilian citizens than they lost in military conflict.” It is why socialism always results in tyrannical rule.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/amazon-sells-make-israel-palestine-again-t-shirt-despite-removing-hate-products/

Late last month, Amazon stopped selling Neo-Nazi and KKK products after Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) sent a letter urging the site to remove all products from Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated “hate groups.” On Wednesday, the company stopped endorsing products from Infowars’ Alex Jones. Even so, the site is still selling “Make Israel Palestine Again” t-shirts, without revealing where the t-shirts come from — suggesting they come direct from Amazon.

Is Amazon endorsing the destruction of the State of Israel? If a user chooses a specific size, the site will reveal that this product is “In Stock” and that it “Ships from and [is] sold by Amazon.com.” This contrasts with a great deal of merchandise Amazon sells that comes from third-party sources.

Amazon does not reveal who produces these shirts, as it does with most products on “Amazon Fashion.” It seems reasonable for a user to believe that the company itself is designing and selling this product.

The slogan “Make Israel Palestine Again” appears across social media, and as separate accounts on Twitter and on Instagram. The Twitter account shows a picture of President Donald Trump wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, with the text altered to read “Make Israel Palestine Again.”

Anti-Israel activists with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement have adopted the slogan.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Amazon reviews are highly publicized and polarized. Three users rated the “Make Israel Palestine Again” t-shirt with five stars. “Get tons of compliments everywhere I wear this shirt!” RK reported. “One day the Palestinians will have their home again,” YoYo chimed in. A user named “ethan allen” added, “I love this shirt.”

Others gave the shirt one-star reviews. “Joanofark06” denounced the shirt as “ISRAEL HATE,” declaring, “This is a HORRIBLE, EVIL shirt, and I will not stand for this. I will refuse to buy from Amazon, ever again, until this shirt gets taken down, as Israel is God’s land, an our bible mentions Israel over 100 times.” The user went on to paint with a broad brush, declaring that “Muslims hate the Jews, just like satan does.” While not all Muslims “hate the Jews,” anti-Semitism is rampant in the Muslim Middle East, and opposition to the state of Israel’s very existence seems the last acceptable form of anti-Semitism. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270964/new-anne-frank-play-casts-ice-nazis-matthew-vadum

A new leftist politics-tainted theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Los Angeles outrageously compares the Trump administration to the German Nazi regime by replacing Nazis hunting for Jews with ICE agents tracking down Latino illegal aliens.

Although the play is set to open Sept. 6 in Los Angeles, the comparison between Anne Frank and illegal aliens in the United States is beyond farfetched.

Illegal aliens enter the U.S. without permission. They are, legally speaking, the authors of their own misfortune. Nonetheless, efforts to apprehend them are not persecutory, and when they are caught, they are not persecuted. They are treated humanely at all times. They are given a hearing and due process. If they are found to be present unlawfully in the country, they are removed from it, not sent to forced labor camps of death camps.

Apart from trivializing the deaths of six million Jews and many others under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, the play treats those who enforce our nation’s immigration laws as monstrous genocidal brutes and absurdly equates the idea of maintaining national borders with violent governmental persecution. It is a theatrical manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16098.html

An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 12 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday. In one seven-hour stretch, starting around midnight on Saturday, at least 40 people were shot, four fatally, as gunmen targeted a block party, the aftermath of a funeral, and a front porch, reports the Chicago Tribune. Over two and a half hours that morning, 25 people were shot in five multiple-injury shootings, including a 17-year-old who died after being shot in the face. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old girl were also hit over the course of the weekend’s bloodbath. Mt. Sinai’s emergency room shut down for several hours due to the overload of bodies; in May, the entire hospital went into lockdown following a virtual riot in its lobby among gangbangers, reported Tribune columnist John Kass.

Meantime, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written. Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding “transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals,” to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the “names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual’s gender.” Last Thursday, a so-called anti-violence march shut down Lake Shore Drive to demand that the CPD hire more black officers and that City Hall spend more on social programs in the black community. Few voices, in other words, are tackling the actual cause of Chicago’s violence: the breakdown of the black family structure and a demoralized police department.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/hard-to-trust-doj-fbi-cia-without-accountability/

How can Americans now trust the intelligence agencies shown to be corrupt in the very recent past?

No doubt Russia must be watched for its chronic efforts to sow more chaos in American elections — despite Barack Obama’s naïve assertion in 2016 that no entity could possibly ever rig a U.S. election, given the decentralization of state voting.

Lately the heads of four U.S. intelligence and security agencies — Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone, and National Security Adviser John Bolton — held coordinated White House press conferences to remind America of the dangers of Russian chicanery. Trump, who is prone to conflate documented Russian efforts to meddle and cause chaos with unproven accusations of Trump-Russia collusion, should heed their warnings and beef up U.S. counter-espionage efforts and cyber deterrence.

But why do our intelligence heads seem to feel so exasperated that they’re not getting through to the American people? Why do they need to reassert the immediacy of the Russian threat?

The FBI joined forces with one political campaign to thwart the efforts of the opposing campaign. Has that happened before in American history?

Is it because Trump has poisoned the waters of American espionage and surveillance by his understandable furor over the never-ending Mueller investigation and his perceived downplaying of “Russian meddling”?

Not really.

Consider the larger context.

Most recently, it was disclosed, two years after the fact — and despite the FBI’s kicking-and-screaming refusal to release subpoenaed documents — that the FBI did, as alleged, offer to pay Christopher Steele to dig for dirt on the Trump campaign.

The FBI also knew that Steele was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign to find dirt on Donald Trump. We now also know that the FBI used at least one informant to spy on members of the Trump campaign. In other words, the FBI joined forces with one political campaign to thwart the efforts of the opposing campaign. Has that happened before in American history?

Pause for a minute and examine the recent history of the FBI leadership. The fired former director James Comey likely lied frequently to congressional committees when he claimed that the Steele dossier was not really a primary source for the FISA court writ against Carter Page.

Comey did write an FBI summary about the Clinton email scandal, exonerating Clinton, before he interviewed Hillary Clinton and many of the major figures in that scandal. Comey leaked at least one likely classified document, written on FBI equipment on FBI time, in a successful gambit to get a special counsel appointed, which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.

Comey misled a FISA judge by not fully disclosing the full origins of the Steele dossier as a product of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He also deceived a president by briefing him of selected bits of the dossier’s contents, but not informing the president that the source of most of that information was paid by the Clinton campaign.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/04/where-is-carter-pages-

Two years ago this month, President Obama’s FBI began investigating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Four campaign associates were targeted: campaign manager Paul Manafort; Trump’s foreign policy advisor and Obama’s former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn; and foreign policy aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

The timing was not coincidental. Polling in late July 2016 showed the presidential race tightening following a relatively successful Republican National Convention and a messy Democratic National Convention marked by intraparty strife. The FBI was still under fire after James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton from any wrongdoing related to her private email server.

Although the reigning political wisdom at the time was that Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Trump in November, top FBI officials wanted a backup plan in the event their favored candidate lost. In August 2016, then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly met with lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI counsel Lisa Page to concoct an “insurance policy” in case of a Trump victory.

And so began the first known federal investigation into a sitting president’s political foe and potential successor in U.S. history.

No Charges
Two years later, three of the four original suspects remain in legal trouble. Paul Manafort is now on trial and being held in solitary confinement, indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in two separate jurisdictions for charges unrelated to alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security advisor who resigned after being set-up by Obama holdovers, is awaiting sentencing for pleading guilty to one count of lying to federal agents. And George Papadopoulos is scheduled to be sentenced next month on one charge of making false statements to federal investigators.

The only man still not charged with any crime is Carter Page. Two years later, the Trump campaign volunteer who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russians is a free man. And the FBI has yet to explain why.

Page—an Eagle Scout and Naval Academy graduate—arguably has suffered the greatest personal price. After helping the FBI nab a Russian foreign agent in 2016, Page suddenly became an FBI target when then-candidate Trump announced Page would serve as one of his foreign policy advisors. (Page has never met Trump and was not paid by the campaign for his work.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-versus-mueller-bill-clinton-starr-strat

The Clinton playbook works. But that does not commend it.

President Trump is using an interesting strategy. Interesting, not novel. It is the same “scandalize the prosecutor” strategy that the Clinton camp used against Ken Starr in the 1990s. Far from being condemned back then, it was aided and abetted by the same media-Democrat complex that today clutches its pearls in anguish.

One aspect of this strategy has many legal commentators aghast: the bombastic performance of my old boss, Rudy Giuliani. He has always been brash, but in the role of Trump’s lead lawyer, he no longer seems like the meticulous pro of yesteryear. Thus, he’s been lampooned: a cartoonish figure who can’t keep his story straight. But have you seen the approval polls of the Russia investigation since he took over the president’s defense team? Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is now viewed unfavorably by 45 percent of Americans, according to a recent Washington Post/George Mason University poll. That’s up markedly from 31 percent at the start of the year.

We’ll come back to that in a second.

First, let’s assess the latest iteration of this strategy: President Trump’s tweet storm on Wednesday. Clearly, all the tweets (seven in total) had one objective: to attack the Mueller probe. But we must split them into two groups because their ramifications are different. Group 1 (the firstthree tweets and the last one) presents a full frontal assault on Mueller and his staff, with a sideswipe at Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal, which paved the way for the special counsel’s appointment and remains a stone in the president’s shoe. Group 2 (here, here, and here) addresses Mueller’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, in which a trial is underway in a Virginia federal court.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21466/trump-derangement-syndrome-a-prelude-to-anarchy http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The election of President Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the emotional stability of those living in subjective reality because they cannot tolerate the threat of objective reality that President Trump represents. The clash between subjective reality and objective reality has launched what is now known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDR) or more recently Trump Anxiety Disorder (TAD). The incursion of objective reality is so threatening to anti-Trumpers that they break down psychologically and require medication and psychological services.

In times of severe emotional stress such as death, divorce, loss of a job, it is not uncommon for individuals to have a period of adjustment when they need time to come to terms with the reality of their new situation. In extreme cases of traumatic stress individuals may even withdraw from reality until they are strong enough to deal with the facts of their new situation. What is different about anti-Trumpers is that their coping mechanisms are so underdeveloped that they are traumatized by election outcomes and refuse to accept the loss of their preferred candidate. What happens? They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDR).

Mark Alexander posted an article he wrote 8.1.18 titled, “Therapists Rebrand ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome'” exploring the subject:

“The pop culture Urban Dictionary defines Trump Derangement Syndrome as “a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason. Symptoms for this condition can be very diverse, ranging from hysterical outbursts to a complete mental break. . . I would suggest that the increasing frequency and intensity of hysterics associated with TDR is greatly exacerbated by the unmitigated, constant consumption of hateful Democrat/mainstream media propaganda, 24/7/365. The result is a mass movement of those so intent on undermining Trump that they are now far off the reality reservation and utterly obsessed with defeating peace and prosperity.”