RUTHFULLY YOURS

As a Republican bill that would eliminate most of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction advances through Congress, it is prompting newfound concern from politicians and the media in high-tax states about the burdens their wealthy residents face. California governor Jerry Brown, who helped engineer a massive tax hike on his state’s richest residents in 2012, called the federal proposal to end the exemption for local taxes a “gross manipulation” of the tax code and an “attack” on his state—where 98 percent of households earning more than $1 million use the deduction (on average, claiming $462,000 in state and local taxes on their federal tax form). New York governor Andrew Cuomo labeled the reform a “scam,” though Democrats and Republicans have supported it over the years.

The New York Times, under a headline that urges readers to “take claims about the state and local deduction with a grain of salt,” rejected the principal Republican argument for eliminating the deduction: that it serves as a subsidy for high-tax states because it lets them keep their taxes high while giving their residents a break on federal taxes. Instead, the Times argued, states like New York send more money to Washington in taxes than they get back in federal spending, so residents deserve the federal deduction. “Saying Indiana subsidizes New York through the deduction ignores net revenue and spending,” the Times contends. Echoing that argument, Cuomo calls New York a “donor state” to the federal government.

Politicians from high-tax states like New York, California, and New Jersey have made this case for decades, dating back to when former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan first began tracking taxes paid by residents of each state to Washington and comparing them with the amount of federal money flowing into each state. Others have continued Moynihan’s exercise, tracking these flows, but often in the most superficial ways, designed to create the illusion that some states are “dependent” on Washington because they get more than they send, while others are “donors” to the rest of the country.

Denzel isn’t just one of the most established black actors in Hollywood. He’s one of the most established actors, period. As such, he probably has the leeway to confront Hollywood’s enforced Leftism that most actors do not have.

In an interview, Washington told The Grio where positive change in the black community needs to start: “It starts in the home,” the actor said. He went on to argue:

If the father is not in the home the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me, and every one since.

Washington isn’t talking about boys finding a literal father figure to guide them on the right path. He’s talking about the streets themselves raising kids, and that path is nothing but trouble:

If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home.

Washington is right, of course. Next to slavery, the greatest sin committed by the Democratic Party was the destruction of the black family by LBJ’s supposed “War on Poverty.” It created a perverse financial incentive for America’s black population — the largest recipients of LBJ’s programs at the time, still poor due to Jim Crow laws just being abolished — to no longer live in family units. Many opted to ignore marriage, as single motherhood led to greater benefits.

A strong family — with a father and a mother — does wonders to prevent kids from following in the erstwhile footsteps of many of their peers. In fact, black kids being raised with a married mother and father overcome virtually all of the current differences in outcomes between races.

Denzel Washington clearly understands this. Too bad so many of our politicians don’t have the courage to point out the obvious.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller was supposed to run a narrow investigation into accusations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. But so far, Mueller’s work has been plagued by almost daily improper leaks (e.g., “sources report,” “it emerged,” “some say”) about investigations that seem to have little to do with his original mandate.

Now, there are leaks claiming that Mueller is going after former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for his business practices before he entered the Trump administration. Specifically, Mueller is reportedly investigating Flynn’s security assessment and intelligence work for the Turkish government and other Turkish interests. Yet possible unethical lobbying on behalf of a NATO ally was not the reason Mueller was appointed.

The Roman satirist Juvenal famously once asked how one could guard against marital infidelity when the moral guardians were themselves immoral. His famous quip, translated roughly as “Who will police the police?” is applicable to all supposedly saintly investigators.

Independent counsel Ken Starr was supposed to look into Bill Clinton’s supposed shady Whitewater dealings in Arkansas. He ended up investigating every aspect of Clinton’s life, including his many sexual escapades.

No doubt Clinton was a philanderer. But it was not Starr’s mission to prove to the nation what it had already suspected when it voted Clinton into the Oval Office.

In 2003, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special counsel (by now-notorious former FBI director James Comey) to determine whether Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had illegally exposed the allegedly covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. As with the Starr investigation, Fitzgerald soon presided over a media circus.

When the investigation was over, Libby was charged on five counts even though Plame may not have been a covert CIA agent at all. Also, it was reported early in the investigation that Fitzgerald knew that someone other than Libby (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) was almost surely guilty of first leaking Plame’s status.

But Fitzgerald was desperate for a big administration scalp. So he continued to lead an investigation that resulted in Libby’s conviction on four charges — in part based on Libby’s supposed disclosures to journalist Judith Miller. In her memoir, Miller later disavowed that Libby had ever given her classified information.

Special-counsel investigations are only as good as the society at large that orders them. The idea that a godly inquisitor, invested with extralegal authority, can somehow use superior wisdom and morality to solve an unsolvable ethical problem is a stretch.

Usually, these chasing-your-own-tail appointments are born out of media and political hysteria. The special counsel immediately feels enormous pressure to find anything to avoid being accused of running a “whitewash” or wasting time and money.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has become ground zero in President Trump’s fight to “drain the swamp” permeating the deep state in Washington, D.C. This bureau was created during the Obama administration under the draconian Dodd-Frank Act, with the purpose of regulating various financial products directly affecting consumers, such as mortgages, credit cards, bank accounts and student loans. Barack Obama’s pick to run the agency as its director was Richard Cordray, who used the unilateral powers of his office to browbeat financial institutions, large and small. Mr. Cordray resigned late last week. A duel broke out between two claimants for the position of “acting director” to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Cordray until President Trump nominates, and the Senate confirms, his successor as director. Mr. Cordray tried, just before his resignation, to install his own pick for acting director, while President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, someone he trusts to jump start immediately the changes he believes are necessary to place some reasonable constraints on the run-away, unaccountable regulatory bureaucracy. For the moment, a federal court has supported the authority of the Trump administration’s appointment, but the opposition is considering various options, including an appeal. While it’s doubtful an appeal will succeed, it doesn’t look like the Deep State is ready to concede this battle just yet.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was originally the idea of then-Professor and now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, who regularly attacks anything connected to the financial industry. To ostensibly protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from any political interference, Congress granted the bureau’s director extraordinary unilateral powers. It also decided to delegate to the Federal Reserve Congress’s constitutional authority to appropriate the funds to run the bureau.

Before resigning his post a week earlier than planned, Director Cordray sought to extend his bureau’s overbearing regulatory regime for as long as possible by handpicking his own “acting director” to replace him temporarily. He did this through the artifice of appointing a deputy director, Leandra English, just before his resignation took effect. He based his action on ambiguous language in the Dodd-Frank Act, which he claimed empowered his just-appointed deputy director to automatically take over as the “acting director” upon his departure.

President Trump promptly used his authority, as the head of the executive branch, under a provision of a separate statute dealing with the filling of temporary vacancies, to appoint his own acting director, Mick Mulvaney (who is also serving as the budget director). The president served notice that he would not allow the swamp to continue as is at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Nancy Pelosi’s head-spinning defense of her Democrat colleague, the credibly accused serial sexual predator John Conyers Jr., is throwing a spotlight on the appalling double-standard Democrats apply when their own are under fire.

Of course, it is axiomatic that the more important the politician being accused of sexual wrongdoing is to the left, the more creatively and vigorously left-wingers will defend him.

But in this new era of populism, Americans are demanding accountability for the powerful. Public revulsion over sex-related abuses is mowing down the powerful like blades of grass. Hollywood’s answer to Caligula, Democrat mega-donor Harvey Weinstein, was the first to fall, and new stories of rape and his otherwise farm animal-like behavior seem to come out hourly. It takes a lot for the money-hungry left-wingers at HBO to cancel a blockbuster series like “House of Cards,” but that’s exactly what they did after actor Kevin Spacey was credibly accused of trying to force himself on an underage boy years ago. The political career of that crazed frat-boy who can’t keep his hands to himself, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), is now hanging on by a thread as the trickle of loyal Democrats abandoning him is growing into a raging river.

Republicans and conservatives are no angels but hardly any have gotten caught up in this great awakening that began in the autumn. This helps to explain why mainstream media shrieking about unproven sexual misconduct allegations against President Trump and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama keeps growing louder.

Pelosi has put some distance between herself and the Michigan lawmaker since her Sunday appearance on “Meet the Press,” which was an unadulterated public relations debacle for the California congresswoman who serves as House minority leader. But her stunningly tone-deaf TV performance shows the normal rules still don’t apply to Democrat dinosaurs like Conyers, currently the longest-serving member in Congress. The TV spot has also done significant damage to the Democrats’ brand as the party that champions women.

Eighty-eight-year-old Conyers, who was first elected to Congress in 1964, is “an icon” who deserves due process and respect, Pelosi told a slack-jawed Chuck Todd.

“John Conyers is an icon in our country,” she said of the big-city Sixties radical. “He’s done a great deal to protect women,” Pelosi said, referencing his support for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Her laudatory remarks were promptly echoed by other Democrats in Congress.

Evidence suggests Conyers has also done a great deal to harm women, treating them like sexual playthings.

Conyers has acknowledged he settled a 2015 sexual harassment claim for $27,000 of taxpayer funds without admitting wrongdoing. He silenced his alleged victim by forcing her to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He has temporarily stepped down as ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee while he is being investigated.

Four other female Conyers employees signed affidavits saying he sexually harassed them.

In the 2015 case, Conyers settled with an ex-employee who claimed she was terminated for refusing to “succumb to [his] sexual advances.” Still bound by the nondisclosure agreement, the victim has reportedly asked for the prohibition on speaking publicly about what happened to be lifted.

According to apparently authentic redacted affidavits, the lawmaker “repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sexual favors, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public.”

“On the shores of her Cambridge mansion, by the shining Charles River waters, stood Elizabeth Warren, pointing with her finger at the White House.”
The Song of Warrenwatha

Senator Elizabeth Warren, America’s greatest living fake Indian, is outraged.

“There he was, at a ceremony to honor Native Americans,” the former Harvard Law prof, who claimed to be Native American on account of her grandfather’s high cheekbones, fumed, “And President Trump couldn’t even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur.”

The “racial slur” was calling a woman who is as Indian as the pilgrims, Pocahontas.

Taunting an American Indian that way might be a racial slur. Taunting Warren that way doesn’t insult her race. The millionaire former asbestos lawyer is as white as cottage cheese. It insults her character. It reminds everyone that Warren is as much a fighter for the “little guy” as she was a Cherokee.

The Senator from the High Cheekbones Tribe of Harvard isn’t just a fake Indian. She’s a fake class warfare activist.

And a fake everything.

Warren was a Republican before she turned Socialist. Before she was fighting corporations, she was helping corporations deny compensation to asbestos victims. And before she was protesting the high cost of education, Harvard Law was paying her $350,000 to teach a single course. A multinational corporation owned by billionaires then gave her a $525,000 advance to tell her tale of rising from “poverty” to fight for ordinary people who don’t get their own chair funded by Wall Street lawyers.

It would take a heart of stone not to make Pocahontas jokes about a blue-eyed scam artist so shameless she passed herself off as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color.” A grifter whose campaign tried to prove she was really Indian by citing the work of her cousin who wrote the ‘Pow Wow Chow’ cookbook containing such authentic Indian recipes as Cold Omelets with Crab Meat and Mexican Oatmeal Soup.

Unfortunately the Cold Omelets with Crab Meat recipe turned out to be plagiarized from the braves of the New York Times. Warren’s Cherokee claims are as fake as her outrage over being exposed as a liar.

There’s only one racist in this story. It’s Elizabeth Warren.

It has been 10 weeks since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico. The devastation was fierce. Yet it cannot explain why almost half the generating capacity of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (Prepa) is still down.

Credit for that goes to Congress, which in June 2016 passed the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act, a k a Promesa. It opened the door to debt defaults that violate the Puerto Rican constitution and U.S. law. As is always the case when the rule of law takes a back seat to politics, it has fueled chaos.

Prepa blames its disastrous post-hurricane decisions on a shortage of cash. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the storm, a group of Prepa bondholders offered the company fresh debtor-in-possession financing that included a swap of $1 billion in existing debt for $850 million in new bonds and $1 billion in new cash.

Puerto Rico rejected the offer. “The bondholders’ proposal is not viable and would severely hamper and limit Prepa’s capacity to successfully manage its recovery,” Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority said at the time. It added that the offer had the “appearance” of “being made for the purpose of favorably impacting the trading price of existing debt.” Heaven forbid.

More unthinkable was ruining the “flat broke” image the commonwealth has been cultivating so it can write down debt and skip the matching requirements necessary to receive Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. It’s also more convenient to tap taxpayers than to borrow money from private entities asking for accountability. This is particularly true for a state-owned monopoly like Prepa, which is as much a political instrument as it is an electricity company. CONTINUE AT SITE

How difficult should it be for law enforcement to get cellphone records showing a suspect’s past location? That’s the question before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in Carpenter v. U.S., which challenges decades of Fourth Amendment law.

Timothy Carpenter is serving 116 years in prison for a string of armed robberies. During the investigation, the government obtained 127 days of location data from Carpenter’s wireless carrier, showing that his phone connected to cell towers near the crime scenes.

The first question is whether this constitutes an “unreasonable search,” which would trigger Fourth Amendment protections requiring a warrant. The government says no, arguing the location data didn’t belong to Carpenter, but were business records created by the phone company. This distinction is important, since it invokes the “third-party doctrine” that police investigations have relied on for decades.

This doctrine mirrors the basic idea that law enforcement may gather evidence from witnesses. Just as police can canvass neighborhood shopkeepers, they ought to be able to ask a phone carrier whether its network “saw” the suspect. Ten minutes before the robbery, did he make a call that was handled by a cell tower down the street? Or was he texting in Toledo?

More hilarity ensued in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s game of thrones Tuesday when the acting acting director Leandra English got her head handed to her by a federal judge.

After doing photo-ops with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Ms. English continued pretending to be the CFPB acting director. But by the day’s close, the drama queen was formally deposed. Federal judge Timothy Kelly denied Ms. English’s petition for a temporary restraining order to block Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney from serving as the real acting director. President Trump appointed Mr. Mulvaney on Friday under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act after Richard Cordray resigned and anointed Ms. English.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel affirmed the President’s authority to appoint Mr. Mulvaney. And even CFPB general counsel Mary McLeod affirmed this legal interpretation in a memo to staff on Saturday.

The opinion “confirms my oral advice to the Senior Leadership Team,” she wrote, which suggests that both Mr. Cordray and Ms. English were aware that their political stunt was illegal but went ahead anyway. So the supposedly noble Mr. Cordray was setting up his young protégé to be embarrassed.

Ms. English called up former CFPB senior attorney Deepak Gupta, who filed the lawsuit for her as an individual. To obtain a temporary restraining order, she’d have to show she would suffer immediate irreparable harm from being usurped—beyond the humiliation she’s inflicted on herself. She couldn’t and now must decide whether to continue as deputy under the real acting director or quit in embarrassment.

Some legal questions are tough. The question of who should lawfully be considered the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not one of them. President Trump unquestionably has the power to name Mick Mulvaney (his Senate-confirmed budget director) to the position, and he has done so. The lawsuit seeking to block this appointment, filed by the CFPB’s deputy director Leandra English — who hopes to take the job herself — is frivolous and offensive.

The CFPB is an unconstitutional monstrosity that ought to be abolished. Indeed, the current tiff is but a symptom of the underlying disease: The political progressives who created the CFPB sought to make it an “independent” agency, beyond political accountability and inter-branch checks and balances. It would be a boon if the dust-up over the acting leadership of the agency would spur a case that could invalidate the entire enterprise.

That is unlikely, though, so let’s stick to the narrow, easy question before us.

The CFPB, brainchild of former Harvard law professor (now senator) Elizabeth Warren, was rammed through by the Democrat-dominated Congress in 2010. Under the statute creating the CFPB (section 5491 of Title 12, U.S. Code), the director is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the deputy is appointed by the director.

There was partisan infighting over leadership of the agency. Finally, in January 2012, President Obama unconstitutionally installed Cordray as a “recess appointment” despite the fact that the Senate was not actually in recess. Cordray was nevertheless confirmed in 2013, and he failed to fill the deputy position after it became vacant in August 2015. The acting deputy was David Silberman. Leandra English was Cordray’s chief of staff. On his last day in office, Cordray abruptly appointed English as deputy.