RUTHFULLY YOURS

As we hoped, the Republican tax legislation improved as it moved through Congress. Harmful ideas such as eliminating the adoption tax credit were abandoned. Some tax relief for the working poor was added. The final bill should increase investment, reduce the distortionary effect of tax breaks, and lighten the especially excessive burden that the federal government puts on parents. While the bill is nobody’s idea of perfection, it is nonetheless a solid accomplishment and we are glad that Congress is moving quickly to pass it.

Our 35 percent corporate tax rate has stayed in place for decades as our major trading partners cut their rates. The new tax rate of 21 percent should help us compete better for capital. Allowing businesses to write off the cost of investments more rapidly is another pro-growth win in the bill.

The legislation rightly pares back two major deductions: the ones for mortgage interest, which will be capped at mortgages of $750,000 rather than the current $1 million, and for state and local taxes, which will be capped at $10,000 rather than being unlimited. In both cases we would have preferred more aggressive action, but the more moderate course chosen has the virtue of reducing the number of people who will face tax increases thanks to the bill. If some high-income households react to this change by leaving high-tax states, perhaps those states will in turn be moved to rethink their policies.

The bill’s major contribution to tax simplification is the expansion of the standard deduction. That expansion will make tax deductions less important: Only a small percentage of taxpayers will find it worthwhile to itemize. The bill also reduces the number of people who will have to calculate their taxes twice, by limiting the reach of the alternative minimum tax.

Thanks largely to the interventions of Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, the legislation expands the child tax credit. We have long favored a large tax credit for children as the most practical way to remedy a disparity in our old-age entitlements: They overtax parents, who pay the same tax rates and get the same benefits as childless adults no matter how much they have contributed to those programs by raising children.

Following Roy Moore’s defeat in the Alabama Senatorial race, the political Nostradami of both parties are furiously predicting either doom or salvation for the other party. Dems think Doug Jones’ win means the South is up for grabs, and flipping the Senate and maybe even the House is possible. Donks predict that with the toxic Moore off the table, Jones’ win will no more flip the Senate than Scott Brown’s win did for the Republicans in 2010. More interesting is what Moore’s rise and fall tells us about our dysfunctional political culture.

Take the weaponization of sexual harassment and assault charges. A movement that started with Harvey Weinstein, a blatant offender who left enough credible evidence to start a criminal investigation, expanded into an orgy of accusations including clumsy flirting, boorish passes, juvenile gags, and other behaviors that in a workplace might constitute sexual harassment, but would not be subject to legal sanction. The level of subjective interpretations involved in many of these charges confuses the issue even further, and can leave determining “sexual assault” in the eye of the beholder. And of course, false charges are easy to manufacture once we are instructed to believe every accuser before any corroborating evidence is available.

An example of how subjective the standards are for making a serious accusation can be seen in the case of one of the three women who recently accused Trump of sexual impropriety. Here’s NBC’s reporting of one woman’s charge:

[The accuser] said when she competed in Trump’s Miss USA pageant in 2006, Trump came backstage unexpectedly when she and other contestants were wearing nothing but robes and he personally inspected the contestants. “I just felt so gross,” she said. “Just looking me over like I was a piece of meat . . . “Nobody dreams of being ogled when you’re a little girl wanting to wear a crown,” she added.

As reported, this charge is preposterous. We’re talking about a beauty pageant, not a spelling bee or the Academic Decathlon. These contestants are chosen for their physical beauty, including their sexual allure. I’ve never seen an obese homely woman in one of these pageants. And wouldn’t the accuser have shown more of her body during the swimsuit competition than Trump would’ve seen when she was wearing a robe? And isn’t being “ogled” the whole point of parading around on stage in a bikini? Given the accuser’s standard, every male judge and audience member was guilty of sexual assault.

Time has named #MeToo its ‘Person of the Year’ and every other day the hashtag lynch mob drags someone else in front of the spotlight. The accusations range from rape to harsh words. The evidence is hearsay. The target is shamed, fired from every job he ever held and purged from polite society.

Some are guilty. Some might be innocent. But we’ll never know because there’s no investigation. The time frame between accusation and purge is hours or days when it takes your average HR department a week to file a form. Just like in every totalitarian leftist state, the accusation is enough.

And then it’s on to the next one.

There’s nothing American about #MeToo. It’s the revolutionary justice of a leftist purge where random political violence against ideological enemies is used to heal social ills. If there’s poverty, shoot a few rich men. If there’s unhappiness, string up some priests. And if there’s sexual assault, destroy whichever names are passed along by a few influential, but enigmatic figures, Ronan Farrow, Yashar Ali, with ambiguous backgrounds and agendas, through pressure campaigns aimed at their employers.

And don’t ask any questions. Only bad people ask questions. Only bad people want proof. Only bad people don’t instantly believe an accusation. And you’re either with #MeToo or with its targets.

But maybe we should start asking a few questions.

Six years ago, I was stopped by a reporter and asked if I believed a rape victim.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund who was likely to be the next president of France, had been arrested for sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Local tabloids and cable news quickly descended on the case of the suave powerful man who had assaulted a refugee hotel maid who had been gang raped in her own African country.

The French reporter who accosted me asked me if I believed the victim. He wanted to know what Americans thought should happen to Strauss-Kahn. I told him that in this country we put people on trial and we get all the facts before we punish them.

France didn’t wait for all the facts.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s political career ended. Sarkozy became the next President of France. And there were always rumors that the whole thing had been a setup by his political opponents. Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid, had managed to lie convincingly about almost everything. She had even lied about soldiers in Guinea gang raping her and what she had done right after the attack.

Finally, prosecutors gave up.

“In virtually every substantive interview with prosecutors, despite entreaties to simply be truthful, she has not been truthful,” they wrote about their own witness. “The nature and number of the complainant’s falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt.”

She lied.

Like many of the accused men, Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared to have little control over his appetites. But his reputation had been destroyed based on an accusation.

And an accusation alone should not be enough to destroy a person.

In the longest and most expensive trial in American history, members of the McMartin family were prosecuted for Satanic child abuse. The Los Angeles case dragged on for 16 years. The whole thing proved to be groundless.

During the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow and many other leftists championed the case of Jamie Leigh Jones who worked for a Hailburton subsidiary in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Jones claimed to have been gang raped by her fellow employees. After 6 years, the case completely collapsed.

The University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity won millions from Rolling Stone after being vandalized and harassed because of the magazine’s recent rape hoax article. ‘Jackie”, the woman in question, had made the whole thing up. But by then the witch hunt had already been unleashed.

That’s why Believe All Women is a terrible idea.

With the news that his people illegally obtained the Trump transition emails – many of them having no conceivable bearing on his “inquiry” — Robert Mueller’s investigation proceeds even further into disintegration.

This is not at all how it was supposed to turn out. Hillary, the DNC, and the #NeverTrumpers no doubt hoped that the special counsel would result in the ouster of Donald Trump, or at least the crippling of his administration. For his part, Mueller very likely foresaw a few easy convictions and the humiliation of a president followed by the customary best-selling book, lucrative lecture tour, and a secure place in the pantheon of left-wing heroes somewhere between Woodward, Bernstein, and Valerie Plame.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Mueller’s effort lurches unstoppably toward the abyss, while the counsel himself more and more closely resembles Captain Edward John Smith, standing rooted on the bridge while the iceberg glides inevitably closer.

The Mueller team’s lunge into criminality reveals exactly how desperate they’ve become. (and despite what you may have heard from Our Loyal Media, seizing those emails was in fact a crime – presidential transition materials remain private by federal statute. Mueller never should have been allowed near those messages.) Soon enough, they’ll be accused of more crimes than anybody they’re investigating

Even if Mueller were somehow to stumble across actual wrongdoing, the voting public would never, at this point, believe it. Donald Trump would have had to have been smuggling Russian nukes into New York on behalf of Czar Vlad to justify the activities of Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Ohr, and company. Thanks to arrogance and his willingness to hire every Clinton zombie in the federal bureaucracy, Mueller is looking at a wrecked reputation, if not the opportunity to model an orange jumpsuit. (This, unlikely though it may seem, is in no way an impossibility, since Mueller clearly has no control over his staff and no idea what tricks they’ve been pulling, or what they might pull tomorrow.)

In what looked like a coordinated messaging campaign over the weekend, the organized left threatened to “take to the streets” if and when President Trump fires Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

MarchForTruth was the “central organizing account” for the 150+ cities that demonstrated on June 3, 2017, “to call for urgency & transparency on #TrumpRussia.”

Soros-backed MoveOn.Org is organizing “emergency ‘Nobody is Above the Law’ rallies around the country” in the event Trump fires Mueller.

The anti-Trumpers have been in a lather over the possibility that the president could fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller before Christmas, after Congress leaves Washington for the winter recess.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that he has no plans to fire Mueller, but that didn’t stop Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) from repeating the “rumor” on California’s KQED News on Friday.

“The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on December 22, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller,” Speier said.

Some prominent members of the Resistance spread the message this weekend, including President Obama’s former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Attorney Walter Shaub, who resigned in July, was one of the first to tweet about “taking the streets” on Friday.

Shaub blocked everyone who reacted negatively to his hysterical tweet — including this writer, who wondered how he had managed to miss Hillary Clinton’s many ethical lapses while she was secretary of state (when he was Obama’s ethics czar).

Shaub later tweeted: “This tweet apparently triggered the tiki torch crowd. My theory is people with violent tendencies will hear violence in the language of peaceful protest. But you literally have to agree to the policy of nonviolence and complying with all law enforcement orders to sign up, so…”

Because everyone who finds him ridiculous is apparently a white supremacist.

Left-wing celebs soon jumped on the bandwagon.

Rob Reiner (aka “Meathead”) on Saturday morning urged his followers to prepare to “take the streets.”

George Takei encouraged “massive and sustained protests.”

Attorney and law professor Seth Abramson went on a long Twitter rant over the rumored firing, calling it a “constitutional crisis” and “actual emergency.”

Naturally, he too called upon his followers to “take to the streets.”

Worst of all, Eric Holder, Obama’s disgraced former attorney general, also called for massive protests if Trump ends the witch hunt:
CONTINUE AT SITE

With last week’s confirmations of Don Willett and James Ho to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, President Trump set a record for most appellate judges confirmed in a president’s first year. Twelve judges have joined the federal circuit courts in 2017, beating by one the record previously held by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. The quality of these new appointees is exceptional, with seven having clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court and six appearing on Mr. Trump’s impressive list of potential high-court candidates.

Add Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation, and that’s quite a year. Even after Candidate Trump released his list of prospective justices, conservative legal elites were not at all confident that President Trump would—or would be able to—execute a concerted plan to put a stamp on the judicial branch. Credit goes to White House counsel Don McGahn, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley —and to the president, who deferred to their legal expertise and political strategy.

At the same time, with only six confirmed district-court judges, Mr. Trump’s total number of judicial appointments stands at 19, not even close to a record. While President Obama didn’t prioritize judges in his first term, George W. Bush filled 28 slots on the federal bench his rookie year and Bill Clinton 27 (plus Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ). Ronald Reagan had 40 lower-court judges confirmed his first year, along with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Many executive-branch positions remain vacant because Mr. Trump has not put forth nominees. Not so for judges. With 58 judicial nominations, Mr. Trump is second to George W. Bush at this point. Instead, the problem is that Senate Democrats have demanded “cloture” votes on all but one of the nominees. That is, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has forced votes on whether to proceed to a final vote, each of which eats up 30 hours of Senate floor time. That’s been the case even for district-court nominees, the closest of whose confirmation votes was 79-16 (the nays notably including potential 2020 presidential contenders Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ).

Not surprisingly, the votes on most of the circuit judges were much closer. Ralph Erickson sailed through to the Eighth Circuit 95-1, with only Ms. Warren in the negative. Kevin Newsom of the 11th Circuit somehow drew 16 Democratic ayes, for a 66-31 tally. But the others have faced a blue wall. With the occasional exception of Democrats representing states Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly, the votes were essentially party-line. While the average Bush and Obama circuit nominee received about 90% of senators’ vote—many confirmed unanimously or by voice vote—Mr. Trump’s have averaged less than 60%, and have all been subjected to both cloture and roll-call votes. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans are poised this week to cut taxes for most American workers and businesses, fulfilling a core campaign promise. But before the House and Senate vote, it’s worth noting that they may do so without a single Democrat in support. How has the party of the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s and the co-writers of the Reagan reform in the 1980s become implacably opposed to pro-growth tax policy?

A little history shows how remarkable this is. The Kennedy marginal tax-rate cuts were pushed by White House economist Walter Heller and powered the economic expansion for another half-decade. In the 1981 tax debate, William Brodhead of Michigan and other Ways and Means Democrats offered an amendment that cut the top rate on investment income to 50% from 70% in the first year.

The 1986 tax reform was driven as much by Democrats as by Ronald Reagan. Dick Gephardt and Dan Rostenkowski helped move it through the House, and Bill Bradley was a leading architect in the Senate. Thirty-three Democrats voted for the bill that passed the Senate 74-23 and cut the top marginal income tax rate to 28%.

Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, but after his re-election he compromised with Newt Gingrich in 1997 to cut the capital-gains tax rate to 20% from 28%. That drove investment and growth through the rest of the decade. Even as recently as 2001, a dozen Democrats in the Senate and 28 in the House compromised with George W. Bush to cut the top income-tax rate to 35%.

Ten quick thoughts on the hideously corrupted “Russia investigation”.

1) Let me start with an immigrant’s observation: My sweetly naïve understanding of an “independent counsel” is that he should be “independent”. For example, even in the presently desiccated condition of the Commonwealth, it’s generally understood that, when you’ve got a problem and you want someone independent to investigate it, “independent” means outsider. Three examples off the top of my head:

~Twenty years ago, after the Good Friday Agreement, some guy was supposed to be appointed to supervise the decommissioning of weapons by paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Obviously, if he’d been some hoity-toity English civil servant, the IRA would have said nuts to that. Likewise, if he’d been some Papist republican from Derry Town Council, the UVF would have told ’em to shove it. So they appointed a Canadian general, John de Chastelain …because he was an outsider, and thus independent of the competing interests.

~Likewise, in 2003, when various factions in the Solomon Islands risked tearing the joint apart, the guy brought in to sort it out was Australia’s Nick Warner (who steps down this weekend as head of Canberra’s Secret Intelligence Service) …because he was independent of those factions.

~And in 2009, when the Government of the Turks and Caicos Islands was suspended for corruption, it was after an investigation by the English judge Sir Robin Auld …because he was entirely independent of the various local sleazebags.

I appreciate that all the above is easier to do in the remnants of empire than it is in the American system. But there isn’t even the figleaf of “independence” when you appoint a career swamp-dweller like Robert Mueller, a man who has relationships with every player in Washington going back decades. The parade of hacks infesting the cable shows to inform us solemnly that they’ve known Mueller for years and he’s the very apotheosis of a straight shooter is, in fact, the strongest evidence of why he should never have been appointed: he’s the insiders’ insider. When Mueller decided to stage his pre-dawn swoop on Paul Manafort’s bedroom, for example, he was raiding the home of a longtime client of his own law firm, WilmerHale.

2) As for that “straight shooter” guff, as I wrote last year about the previous “eagle scout”:

Conservative commentators assured us that, when it comes to straight arrows, no arrow is straighter than FBI honcho James Comey – non-partisan, career public servant, will follow the evidence whereso’er it leads…

All bollocks. Bollocks on stilts… A 6′ 8″ gummi worm would be more of a straight arrow.

And so it goes with Comey’s successor as Trump’s Javert. My advice is that, whenever lifelong swampers assure us of the integrity of any individual, assume “straight arrow” is Beltway-speak for “slimey duplicitous permanent-state operator” and you can’t go wrong.

3) One of the first things Mueller did was to appoint FBI counter-intelligence honcho Peter Strzok to his “independent” team. He should not have done that. Not because Strzok is a Democrat (presumably almost everyone at the FBI votes either Democrat or Republican), but because Strzok had been a key player in Comey’s Hillary investigation. The investigators’ comparative treatment of the two candidates was already an issue, and the subject of the Russia investigation had already spent the better part of a year denouncing the investigation of his rival as a sham and a disgrace. In effect, Trump had already, without even knowing of the guy’s existence or his Zelig-like ubiquity, questioned Strzok’s integrity. So why appoint him to a second investigation?

4) Furthermore, why similarly appoint his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, to both investigations? The FBI has over 35,000 employees. Yet the same handful of key players are running both the Clinton and Trump cases, even though the latter is supposed to be “independent”. So the same operatives are meeting with MI6 dossier-concocter Christopher Steele, and going to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants, and entrapping Michael Flynn. The appalling Mueller effectively merged the two investigations into one continuous caper run soup to nuts by the same crowd. Phase One: Get Hillary off the hook. Phase Two: Get Trump on it.

5) Just as the Hillary investigation merged with the Trump investigation, so both merged with Fusion GPS, the oppo-research guys working for the Clinton campaign. The conflicts of interest intertwine so thoroughly that they reach up beyond the FBI into the highest reaches of the Department of Justice. At this stage, it would be no surprise to learn that Mueller and Comey had accidentally failed to disclose that they were the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of Fusion GPS. Am I exaggerating? By maybe a hair. This week it emerged that the Associate Deputy Attorney-General, Bruce Ohr, “failed to disclose” that his wife Nellie was working for Fusion GPS.

Oh, really? On the reception desk? As a security guard? No, she was hired by Fusion GPS to do anti-Trump research.

A series of new revelations about the FBI under James Comey has provided more evidence that partisan agents may have abused their agency positions for political purposes during the Hillary Clinton email investigation and 2016 presidential campaign.http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/14/fbi-hillary-clinton-email-investigation-peter-strz

Top FBI agent Peter Strzok, the public now knows, was removed from the Mueller investigation after a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (IG) investigation revealed damning text messages between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

The messages show Strzok and Page praising Clinton, discussing whether Strzok could use his position to protect the country from Donald Trump — whom they described as “that menace” — and referring to an unnamed “insurance policy” in case Trump beat Clinton.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40” Strzok said of Trump in one message to Page. “Andy” referred to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has close ties to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Strzok is reported to be the agent who officially signed into existence the Russia investigation that now plagues the Trump administration.

During the Clinton investigation, Strzok led the interviews of top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin — neither of whom faced consequences for making false statements in those interviews.

President Trump ought to direct his Justice Department and FBI to provide the House Intelligence Committee with the FISA warrant application — any FISA warrant application — in which they relied on information from the Steele dossier in seeking court permission to spy on the Trump campaign. It may well be that they did not rely on the dossier. It is ridiculous, though, that we are still in the dark about this.

I have long experience with how scrupulously the FBI and Justice Department work in the often controversial foreign-intelligence realm. They care deeply about their honorable reputation with the FISA court, just as the judges of that secret tribunal care deeply about not being perceived as a “rubber-stamp” for the government. I have thus given our agencies the benefit of the doubt here.

While urging that we have disclosure (with all due care to protect intelligence methods and sources), I have presumed that the FBI and DOJ would never fraudulently present the FISA court with fanciful claims attributed to anonymous Russian sources as if they were a refined product of U.S. intelligence collection and analysis. This, after all, is a “dossier” that former FBI director James Comey dismissed as “salacious and unverified” in Senate testimony just six months ago.

When a court is asked for a warrant, the government must provide the judge with a basis to believe the information proffered is credible — by vouching that the source has been reliable in the past, by corroborating the information offered, or both. If Comey adjudged Steele’s information unverified in June 2017, it had to have been unverified ten months earlier. That’s when the FBI and Justice Department obtained a FISA warrant for Carter Page, who had been loosely described as a Trump campaign adviser.

Consequently, I have assumed that the following happened. The FBI already had information that Page was something of an apologist for the Putin regime — although the record, we shall see, is more complex than that. Thus, the FBI and DOJ may have combined that information with some claims mined out of the dossier; but they would not have included Steele’s claims without corroborating them independently. This combination of information, doubtless added to by intelligence not known to us, was crafted into the application presented to the FISA court. This would be the normal, appropriate process.