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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Clinton’s 65% Killer Death Tax The Democrat heads further toward Bernie Sanders Nirvana.

Hillary Clinton says she wants the votes of Republicans who are troubled by Donald Trump, but you wouldn’t know it from her continued left turns on the economy. On Thursday she decided that her proposal to raise the death tax to 45% from 40% isn’t enough and endorsed even higher levies that would apply to thousands of estates.

Though she defeated Bernie Sanders in the primary, she is adopting the socialist’s death-tax rate structure. She’d tax all estates over $10 million at 50%, apply a 55% rate on estates over $50 million, and go to 65% on assets above $500 million. The 65% rate would be the highest since 1981 and is another example of how she is repudiating the more moderate policies of her husband and the Democrats of the 1990s.

The left claims only the super-wealthy will pay high rates, but the Sanders plan that Mrs. Clinton is copying did not index exemption levels for inflation. One reason a bipartisan movement emerged to reform the death tax in the 1990s was because the then 55% rate engulfed ever more taxpayers over time. Mrs. Clinton would also end the “step-up in basis” on stock valuations for many filers, triggering big capital gains taxes for a much broader population.

She also knows most of her rich friends will set up foundations, as she and Bill Clinton have, to shelter most of their riches from the estate tax. As Americans have learned, these supposed charities can be terrific vehicles for employing political operatives while they wait for Chelsea to run for the Senate.

George H.W. Bush and Hillary’s Fake Conservatives Bush gave us the Clintons. And now the Clintons may end the Bush legacy. Daniel Greenfield see note please

The author is absolutely right…..by naming the Saudis best American friend as vice president, Ronald Reagan paved the way for George Bush (1) and his buddy James Baker to destroy the real Reagan/Goldwater legacy…..even as they took spurious credit for “ending the cold war” as son Jeb stated…..rsk

Ronald Reagan’s worst mistake was named George H.W. Bush. Bush was the price that Reagan paid for the support of fake conservatives.

And the price ended up being his legacy.

Reagan had never felt good about naming Bush as his second, worrying about “turning the country over to him.” And he was right to worry. Once in office, Bush disavowed Reagan’s economic policies, which he had always hated, got deep into bed with the Saudis with disastrous results, and lost a winnable election to Bill Clinton. Reagan had handed Bush victory and Bush had brought Republicans utter defeat.

Bush was the ultimate political insider, with shaky popular appeal, but impeccable political connections. Loyal to party, rather than principles, he was trusted by the establishment in sensitive positions. His final task was to undermine the Reagan Revolution. It’s unsurprising to hear that he will vote for Hillary.

George H.W. Bush ran against Reagan as a left-leaning Republican. In Congress he had backed a plethora of destructive leftist programs. On his way to the White House, he was for abortion and the ERA and the FHA. Described by his wife as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, he failed to live up to even that low bar in the White House.

Past party labels, George H.W. Bush has a great deal in common with Hillary Clinton. Both of them emphasize social welfare in domestic policy and Muslim appeasement in foreign policy. They both view the role of government as that of patron rather than representative. They see political leaders as wiser than the people they serve. They despise “religious fundamentalism” of the non-Islamic kind, hate Israel, cheer Planned Parenthood and want to fight as many wars for the Saudis as they can manage.

Bush is not unique in that regard. The latest Bush incarnation, Jeb, ran on that same noblesse oblige of an unwanted elite lecturing taxpayers on their obligations to the Democratic Party’s voter base. Bush I had no interest in what the people in his district thought of his social welfare votes at their expense. But this philanthropic contempt runs through much of the fake conservative class which incessantly lectures conservatives on the virtues of illegal immigration, freeing drug dealers and social welfare.

Weaponized Immigration Suicide is not an act of compassion. Michael Cutler

The United States is at war with international terrorists, who, as the 9/11 Commission noted, must first enter the United States in order to attack it.

Consider the preface of the official government report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” that begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

Furthermore, although much has been made of the lack of integrity with respect to the U.S./Mexican border, the 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel observed that most terrorists had entered the United States through international airports and then committed visa fraud and immigration benefit fraud to embed themselves in the country.

Page 54 of the report contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot,” which makes these issues crystal clear:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

Koskinen Admits to Making False Statements About Email Destruction By Debra Heine

The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday denied that he ordered his staff to destroy thousands of emails sought by Congress in 2014 during its investigation into the IRS targeting scandal.

Unapologetic and defiant two years ago, John Koskinen appeared very subdued and contrite today as he expressed “regret” for making incorrect statements during his testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2014. “Some of my testimony later proved mistaken,” Koskinen conceded. But he insisted that he had testified honestly to the best of his knowledge at the time.

Via the Washington Examiner:

Republicans on the judiciary panel slammed Koskinen for presiding over the destruction of backup tapes that housed Lerner’s emails.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, highlighted the “coincidence” that occurred when documents that had sat untouched for two years disappeared off the tapes shortly after investigators requested copies.

Koskinen faces potential impeachment at the hands of House conservatives over his handling of the IRS targeting probe, particularly over his pledge to provide emails that had already been erased at the time of his testimony.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asked Koskinen about his false statement under oath that “every email has been preserved.”

“What did you mean by every email?” Gowdy asked.

“I meant that every email that the IRS had that I knew of had been preserved,” Koskinen stated. “That was my honest belief.”

“Well why didn’t you say that?” Gowdy pressed.

“Well — If I knew then what I know now, I would have testified differently,” said Koskinen. “But at the time, I testified honestly about what I knew and what I’d been told. Nobody regrets more than I do that in some ways this case has been the case that keeps on giving with more information coming out. I wish that all the information had been put out to begin with,” he added.

“It is always always an option to answer,’I don’t know,'” Gowdy said. “Loretta Lynch has made a living of saying ‘I don’t know.'”

He added, “But you were incredibly definitive. You said nothing had been lost. What did you mean by nothing?”

Koskinen answered: “I meant at that time that I had been advised ‘nothing,’ but you’re exactly right, in retrospect, I would have been better advised to say ‘to the best of my knowledge,’ or ‘on the basis of what I’ve been told’ — which was in fact the basis of my testimony.”

Is the Justice Department Hiding ISIS Connection in NY-NJ Bombings? By Patrick Poole

Images released of the journal of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspected NY-NJ bomber, show mention of a recently killed ISIS leader, but that reference is curiously missing from the federal indictment filed against him yesterday.

Is the Justice Department again trying to hide an obvious ISIS connection or inspiration from this past weekend’s attacks, just as they did when they censored Orlando mass killer Omar Mateen’s pledge to ISIS?

Reporters began showing pages of Rahami’s journal earlier today:

First look at bloody journal discovered with alleged bomber Ahmad Rahami, this page cites Al Qaeda & ISIS leaders pic.twitter.com/AT9VsZS9qu

— Mike Levine (@MLevineReports) September 21, 2016

One of the references on the page is to “Brother Adnani,” an ISIS leader killed in a U.S. drone strike just a few weeks ago.

Media reports place Adnani at the head of the ISIS unit responsible for conducting external terror attacks.

Terror expert Tom Joscelyn noted the Adnani mention, as well as other ISIS-related items, from Rahami’s journal.

NYC Bomber Notes Reveal ISIS Inspiration : Paul Sperry

It appears from notes written by captured New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami that he was motivated by ISIS orders to carry out attacks inside America.

A newly released FBI complaint reveals a passage from a journal Rahami kept that contains “a reference to the instructions of terrorist leaders that, if travel is infeasible, to attack nonbelievers where they live.”

While the terrorist leaders are not identified in the complaint, it quotes fragments of a related passage: ” … back to sham [Syria.] But [unintelligible] this incident show the risk are [unintelligible] of getting caught under [unintelligible].”

It’s not immediately known if Rahami attempted to travel to Syria and join ISIS and its jihad there. But for the past several months, ISIS has called on its supporters to strike in the West if they were prevented from traveling to the lands of the so-called caliphate, including Syria and Iraq.

In May, ISIS spokesman Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani advised followers that if American and other Western authorities “have shut the door of hijrah [migration] in your faces,” then “open the door of jihad in theirs.” In his notes, Rahami appears to comply with the plan, praying to Allah to help him carry out “jihad” at home without interference from “the F.B.I. & homeland security.” He started ordering bomb components in June.

“Make your deed a source of their regret,” said al-Adnani, who was killed earlier this month. “Truly, the smallest act you do in their lands is more beloved to us than the biggest act done here; it is more effective for us and more harmful to them.”

Added al-Adnani: “If one of you wishes and strives to reach the lands of the Islamic State, then each of us wishes to be in your place to make examples of the crusaders, day and night, scaring them and terrorizing them, until every neighbor fears his neighbor.”

Adnani told would-be jihadists they should “not make light of throwing a stone at a crusader in his land,” nor should they “underestimate any deed, as its consequences are great for the mujahidin and its effect is noxious to the disbelievers.”

In its latest issue of Dabiq magazine, “Break the Cross,” the Islamic State encourages Muslims in the West who are unable to migrate to “the Caliphate” to “serve a much greater purpose” by striking “behind enemy lines.”

“The blood of the disbelievers is obligatory to spill by default. The command is clear. Kill the disbelievers, as Allah said, ‘Then kill the polytheists wherever you find them,'” the magazine said.

“As they haphazardly kill Muslims in their war against the mujahidin,” it exhorted, “it becomes even more obligatory for you to attack the Crusader nations and their citizens in their homelands.”

Islamist Killers Do Not Have a ‘Right’ to Be Here By Daniel John Sobieski

Those who believe that sharia law trumps the Constitution should not be allowed in. And those who look the other way should never become president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton, responding to the knife attack in a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall for which ISIS took credit and the bombing in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood by a gay-hating Afghan-born Islamist who was a naturalized American citizen, warned us about the dangers if radical Islamic terrorism, but of intolerance to Muslim-Americans:

“[L]et us remember, there are millions and millions of naturalized citizens in America from all over the world. There are millions of law-abiding peaceful Muslim Americans,” Clinton said.

Yes, Hillary, there are a lot of naturalized American citizens, including the 858 from what are euphemistically called “special interest countries”, naturalized by “mistake” due to the use of multiple identities and fingerprints not digitized in any database. This speaks to Donald Trump’s about a cessation of admitting refugees from these countries until we know what we’re doing. Clearly we do not. What other mistakes are being made that will naturalize the next Mohammed Atta?

Dzhokhar Tsanaev became a naturalized citizen before he and his brother used pressure cookers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Ahmad Khan Rahami became a naturalized citizen before he became a jihadi Johnny Appleseed, planting pipe and pressure cooker bombs in New Jersey and New York neighborhoods. Both in effect took up arms against the United States and its citizens, which one would think amounts to a renunciation of their U.S. citizenship. Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled repeatedly to Dagestan and Chechnya, once spending six months there. Rahami traveled to Afghanistan, returning radicalized. Did anyone care to monitor their movements and motives? Hillary says if you see something, say something, yet is the first to cry “profiling” and “Islamophobia” when we monitor Islamist activities and conduct surveillance radical mosques. The San Bernardino shooters could have been stopped if a neighbor had not been intimidated by political correctness into not reporting their suspicious activity.

There are those who warn against trading liberty for safety and protecting the Constitutional rights of naturalized American citizens. Well, my Constitution has a clause about protecting the rights of all American citizens against our enemies, foreign and domestic. We have a right not o be killed. Naturalized citizens are invited to be American citizens on condition of their loyalty to this country and its beliefs. They do not have a “right” to be here.

There are those who remind us that the Statue of Liberty invites the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We indeed invite those to America who wish to become American, but not those who live in Islamist enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis. We are Americans who yearn to keep on breathing, unimpeded by shrapnel from exploding pressure cookers, or being stabbed at the mall by an Islamist who sees America as an infidel waiting to be slain.

Did Christie’s ‘Islam Problem’ Lead to the Ahmad Terrorist Attacks? By Lauri B. Regan

In a recent column, Bret Stephens recognized that one of the lessons from this past weekend’s terror attacks is that “there is [a]… benefit in the surveillance methods that allowed police in New York and New Jersey to swiftly identify and arrest Mr. Rahimi before his bombing spree took any lives.” A Wall Street Journal editorial that same day noted that “Since 9/11… the NYPD has made great progress in being able to track down terror suspects.” And while the New York and New Jersey police departments deserve high praise for their handling of these attacks and quick apprehension of those involved, I cannot help but wonder if the injuries to its 29 victims could have been prevented.

In the years following 9/11, the NYPD, under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, organized the Demographic Unit, a creation of CIA officer Lawrence Sanchez who established it in 2003 while working at the department. The unit was designed as a surveillance program in which undercover officers infiltrated New York and New Jersey Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, and Islamic schools in order to detect terror threats before they were executed. According to a New York Times article:

The goal was to identify the mundane locations where a would-be terrorist could blend into society. Plainclothes detectives looked for “hot spots” of radicalization that might give the police an early warning about terrorist plots. The squad, which typically consisted of about a dozen members, focused on 28 “ancestries of interest.”

Unfortunately, the program was discovered in 2009 and under public pressure from local Muslim communities as well as legal challenges to the program, Kelly’s successor, William Bratton, ultimately closed down the unit. One of the loudest critics of the undercover surveillance was New Jersey governor Chris Christie who, joined by then-Newark mayor Cory Booker, called the program “disturbing” and “deeply offensive.” Christie took issue with the fact that, notwithstanding the Newark police department’s involvement with the program, neither he nor the feds were informed. In 2012 Christie stated, “I know they think that their jurisdiction is the world. Their jurisdiction is New York City. My concern is this kind of affectation that the NYPD seems to have that they are the masters of the universe.”

Christie also reportedly approached Attorney General Eric Holder with his concerns. However, after a three-month investigation, New Jersey attorney general Jeffrey Chiesa “concluded there was no evidence to show the NYPD’s activities in the state violated New Jersey’s civil or criminal laws.” Nonetheless, within several months of that finding, the NYPD caved to pressure and pulled out of New Jersey and by 2014, much to the delight of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, the program was shuttered completely.

One has to wonder what universe Christie is living in in which he believes that terrorists abide by geographic and law enforcement jurisdictional lines. When this story broke, the Associate Press reported that the NYPD was also secretly monitoring the activities of campus Muslim student groups at over a dozen colleges in the Northeast. While not exactly the politically correct thing to do (as we all know from the degrading treatment every American receives going through TSA lines), PC behavior is not going to save us from radical Islam. An honest discussion about the indoctrination that occurs within local Muslim communities, and most especially their mosques, is warranted and necessary rather than the indefensible focus on offending a demographic that is taking no outward steps to help prevent terrorism.

A Debate About Terror More than Hillary Clinton, the election is about the Democratic Party’s mind-set on terrorism. By Daniel Henninger

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is in charge of Monday night’s cage match between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, lists three topics on its website for the 90-minute debate: America’s Direction, Achieving Prosperity and Securing America.

Moderator Lester Holt, a news man, knows that as of last Saturday, this debate is mostly going to be about an Afghan-American named Ahmad Khan Rahami and a Somali-American who stabbed nine people in a Minneapolis mall.

If they can get in a few thoughts on “America’s Direction,” that’ll be nice, but national security—terrorism—has muscled its way to the top of a presidential campaign’s stack of issues. We were there last in 2004, when Americans decided they’d take George W. Bush over John Kerry in the lingering shadows of 9/11.
Now the choice is these two.
Ahmad Khan Rahami’s pressure-cooker bomb blew up in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, about five blocks from where I live. Within the hour, my phone was buzzing with the same text message from family and friends: “Are you all right?” This is the way it is now. Thousands of identical texts—are you all right?—surely poured into St. Cloud, Minn., Saturday after the stabbing spree.

On whether Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump is better able to deal with the mass-murder compulsions of Islamic terrorists, opinion polls before Saturday essentially said Hillary is ahead by a point or two. You might expect that on so grave an issue, a former secretary of state and two-term U.S. senator would be ahead by more than a nose of someone she describes as totally unfit to be on the same stage with her.

But he is, and they’re tied, so the American people must be seeing something the conventional media wisdom can’t or won’t on terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Pretentious Badge of Poverty By Marilyn Penn

I haven’t read Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, “Born to Run,” but I read Dwight Garner’s review of it (NYTimes 9/21/16) and was incredulous about the following declaration: “Mr. Springsteen’s father was a frequently unemployed bus driver among other blue-collar jobs; his mother a legal secretary. They were fairly poor. In their houses – half-houses, more often – there was generally no telephone and little heat.” Bruce grew up in the 50’s and 60’s in the state of N.J. – not in Yoknapatawpha County in the backwoods of Mississippi. In America during the the 50’s, two thirds of all homes had phones and though air conditioning was not yet common, heating certainly was. I won’t quibble about whether or not these statements are partially true but I will say that a boy whose mother was a legal secretary was not poverty-stricken, so why the desire for that illusion? Does it increase his creds as a man of the people to boast that despite being a member of the 1% now, he came from dirt-poor beginnings?

Wealthy democrats in America are often confused and guilt-ridden about their extreme affluence. Hillary Clinton ranted about being in debt when she and Bill left the White House, a statement that was not only a lie but a telling one reflecting her embarrassment about their net worth. Do politicos believe that wealthy people can’t be seen as empathic towards the need of the poor? How strange, considering the billions of dollars that wealthy people have bestowed upon charities to help the needy not to mention to improve parks, libraries, schools, hospitals,, museums, cultural centers – urban environments that exist for all members of society to use and enjoy.

Once upon a time America was super-proud of those super-rich democrats Jack and Jackie Kennedy whose White House was decorated in a manner befitting lifestyles of the rich and famous. No false modesty or embarrassment in the elegant couture of our fashionable first lady or the family compound on Cape Cod – rich meant cultured, sophisticated, articulate and charming. Today, despite the preponderance of so many billionaire democrats – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, Oprah, Kanye and Beyonce, David Geffen – to name but a few – wealth is more commonly associated by the media with the Koch Brothers in a pejorative way that implies Republican influence peddling and nefarious finagling. The NY Times, whose advertisers represent the shops frequented by the 1% and merchandise too expensive to be labeled, uses its editorial and op ed pages to disparage the very audience at which the ads are pitched.

This is what we know as cognitive dissonance and it should make us squirm with its inherent dishonesty. There was a time when lower middle-class people were proud of being productive workers who didn’t consider themselves poor. Many of them were immigrants who came from the old country where poor meant people without enough to eat, without a house to live in, without the opportunity to work and support a family. Coming to America meant coming to a land of opportunity with free education and the chance to work hard and move on up – if not in one generation, certainly in two. Those people would not have exaggerated their poverty – that would have stripped them of their dignity. Today’s mores allow super-rich celebrities and politicians to tout their humble beginnings as proof of how deserving they are of their subsequent fortunes. I’d prefer reading that Bruce Springsteen was proud of his legal secretary working mom and a father who tried to find work wherever he could. I suspect that any family with enough expendable cash to buy their son a guitar probably had enough for a phone and portable heater. Bruce deserves his fame and fortune by virtue of his creditable talent – no need to flaunt his deprivation of a phone which jars us by ringing so untrue.