EDUCATION Comments turned off

Blue State ‘Charity’ Rubbing SALT into the wounds of school-choice scholarships.

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-state-charity-1534546826

Any day now the IRS will release new rules that address efforts by states including Connecticut, Oregon, New York and New Jersey to evade last year’s tax reform by masking tax payments as charitable contributions. The danger is that nonprofit scholarship organizations that are funded in part by tax credits could end up as collateral damage.

The issue arises because certain states—mostly left-leaning—have been looking for gimmicks to claw back the state and local deductions that were capped at $10,000 in the new tax reform. State politicians understand that because taxpayers can no longer fully deduct their high state taxes on federal forms, they are going to pay a higher price for their states’ big-spending ways.

Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo have concocted a scheme to get around this. Essentially they’ve set up fake charities, which would collect in charitable contributions money that taxpayers formerly deducted from their federal taxes—which the states would then use to pay for state programs. Because the tax reform didn’t cap charitable deductions, taxpayers would effectively be taking a charitable deduction as a substitute for their formerly unlimited state and local tax deductions.

The IRS is rightly skeptical and in May issued Notice 2018-54 indicating it would adopt new regulations for such proposals. The danger now is that these new rules will not distinguish between “charities” that are really government fronts to collect taxes and Scholarship Granting Organizations that are not government entities, that do not funnel money back to the state, and that were set up by the states to expand opportunities for students.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kofi Annan, Former United Nations Secretary-General, Dies at 80 He died after a short, unspecified illness R.I.P.

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

NO COMMENT….RSK HE DID LOOK GREAT IN A TUXEDO

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Press Abets a Coverup There is much to know about America’s own spies in 2016, but it would be impolitic to ask. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-abets-a-coverup-1534544446?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

The two biggest shoes are yet to drop in the 2016 investigations. We still don’t know the origins and back story of the intercepted Russian intelligence document that was pivotal in James Comey’s unprecedented, ill-advised and possibly decisive (according to numerous Democratic and independent election analysts) interventions in the presidential race.

Depending on what report you credit, the information was false, it was planted by the Russians, or it accurately indicated an illegal conspiracy to obstruct justice by the Clinton campaign and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch. If it was a Russian fabrication, then Mr. Comey was spoofed by the Kremlin into his improper intervention in the race. If the parties to the incepted exchange were simply misinformed, it’s hard to understand Mr. Comey’s reason for intervening.

Presumably some of the questions are answered in a still-secret annex to the inspector general’s report that criticized Mr. Comey’s performance, but even that won’t tell us everything we need to know. What did fellow intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, tell the FBI about this intercept? What did they advise Mr. Comey to do?

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Gender Is a Construct—Except When It’s Not For academic feminists, male and female biology is either interchangeable or immutable, depending on what complaint they need to lodge. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/gender-construct-16117.html

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. Among the relevant findings:

Two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s patients are female;

Seventy-five percent of people with autoimmune disorders are female;

Females are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease;

Adult females have twice the rate of depression as adult males;

Females have outbreaks of genital herpes at higher rates than males;

Male and female brains respond differently to early childhood neglect, with males losing gray matter in areas governing impulse control and females losing gray matter in areas governing emotion;

Women are more likely to abuse alcohol after trauma;

Males and females smoke for different reasons and have correspondingly different success rates with the nicotine patch;

The X and Y sex chromosomes, whose pairing determines a person’s sex, influence how the other 23 chromosomes in each cell read the genetic instructions contained in DNA.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Obama’s “N Word” Tape Went Public and the Media Covered It Up There have been a thousand times as many news stories about the hypothetical existence of a Trump “N Word” tape as there are about the real and verified existence of the Obama-Farrakhan photo. August 17, 2018 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271064/obamas-n-word-tape-went-public-and-media-covered-daniel-greenfield

Even though the media admits that Omarosa has less credibility than a drunken sailor on shore leave, it keeps buzzing about the existence of a Trump “N Word” tape.

Does it exist? Doesn’t it exist? Will it change anything?

Obama’s own equivalent of the “N Word” tape was released after his time in office. It was a photo of him posing with Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan had praised Hitler and was the head of a hate group that believes white people are devils, created by genetic engineering, who will be wiped out.

That’s a whole lot worse than a racial slur. (Obama’s mentor Jeremiah Wright, whose black nationalist church the Obamas had attended, used his own racial slurs during services.)

The photo was released. And the media embargoed it. A handful of publications mentioned it.

To this date, no reporter has directly asked Obama about it.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Dereliction of Leadership Imperils Military By Mike Berry

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/army-chaplain-disciplined-for-following-rules-threat-to-religious-liberty/

An Army chaplain and his assistant may be disciplined for following his denomination’s rules while accommodating a same-sex couple.

In my 16 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, both on active duty and now in the reserve, I have had the privilege of serving with many fine officers. I know firsthand that the difference between life and death is often a matter of leadership. Whether in combat or in training, strong and decisive leadership inspires confidence, improves morale, and contributes to the ethos of professionalism that has made the U.S. military the finest fighting force in the world.

As director of military affairs for a religious-liberty law firm, I have recently observed a disturbing trend that, if left unchecked, threatens to weaken our military from within. What began as passive-aggressive political correctness has devolved into open hostility to religious liberty in the military. Recent disturbing events within the U.S. Army are a perfect example of both.

An Army investigator under the command of Major General Kurt Sonntag recommended that Army chaplain Scott Squires be found guilty of “dereliction of duty” for rescheduling a marriage retreat that Squires is prohibited from facilitating so that another chaplain could handle it. A same-sex couple had registered for the retreat, and Squires is endorsed by the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board (NAMB), which prohibits its chaplains from conducting marriage-related events for same-sex couples. NAMB’s policy clearly states that “endorsed chaplains will not conduct or attend a wedding ceremony for any same-sex couple, bless such a union or perform counseling in support of such a union . . . nor offer any kind of relationship training or retreat, on or off a military installation.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Burma’s Rohingya Muslims Need the Trump Administration’s Help By Nina Shea

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/burmas-rohingya-muslims-need-trump-administrations-help/

President Obama stood idly by as the Burmese government slaughtered the Rohingya. President Trump can and must do better.

Throughout its second term, the Obama administration downplayed mounting evidence that Burma’s Rohingya community was being deliberately eradicated by the country’s military. Genocide was an inconvenient fact for an administration eager to claim a foreign-policy achievement in Burma’s democratic transition. With U.S. help, in 2015–16, Burma had been transformed from a pariah military dictatorship into a democracy headed by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, an international human-rights icon. But Burma’s deplorable religious-freedom record was hardly a secret.

Since 1999, Burma has been designated a severe and systematic religious persecutor under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act. Its ethnic Rohingya Muslim and Kachin, Chin, and Karen Christian minorities have been regularly oppressed and subjected to brutal attempts of forcible conversion by its Buddhist majority. Violent conflict between them and a military bent on “Burmanization” has raged on and off since the country’s 1948 independence from Britain.

In 2012, the attacks against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s northern Rakhine state became particularly intense. That year, Genocide Watch issued an emergency alert that these Rohingya were being slaughtered and driven from their homes. On May 20, 2013, noted human-rights advocates Jose Ramos Horta, Muhammad Yunus, and Benedict Rogers wrote of these early warning signs of genocide in the New York Times:

The Rohingyas were recognized until the 1982 Citizenship Law stripped them of their citizenship and rendered them stateless. Since then, they have faced a slow-burning campaign of persecution, which exploded last June and again in October, resulting in the deaths of at least 1,000 and the displacement of at least 130,000. . . . Human Rights Watch has published evidence of mass graves and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The University of Virginia Goes Nuts Again By George Leef

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-virginia-marc-short-miller-center/

Big universities are prone to bouts of craziness and one that’s particularly susceptible is the University of Virginia. The campus has been in an uproar one year after the alt-right vs. Antifa riot last summer. The turmoil was triggered by a horrible, provocative move by a center located at the university — it hired someone who worked in the Trump administration!

Charlottesville native and frequent Martin Center contributor John Rosenberg writes about the resulting affray in this essay.

Marc Short, who served as Trump’s legislative director, was recently hired by the Miller Center, which focuses on politics and the presidency. But hiring anyone who ever had anything to do with Trump is now verboten — at least in the minds of woke faculty members.

Said another prof at the Center, “Short’s hiring is an institutional and moral crisis” because “the Trump presidency does not represent American democracy and has upended the political order.”

Rosenberg’s comment on the ranting over Short’s hiring: “The unrecognized irony here, of course, is that there is a name for the intolerance of universities and other institutions refusing to hire anyone defending illiberalism: McCarthyism.”

Two Miller Center faculty members resigned rather than work under the same roof as Short. He’s being treated like a leper just for having been part of the Trump team.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump at 36 percent approval among African-Americans, new poll finds William Cummings,

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/08/16/trump-approval-rating-african-americans-rasmussen-poll/1013212002/

Even as cable news networks debate reports of the existence of a recording of President Donald Trump using a racial slur, a new poll from Rasmussen Reports says that the president’s approval rating among African-Americans is at 36 percent, nearly double his support at this time last year.

“Today’s @realDonaldTrump approval ratings among black voters: 36%,” Rasmussen said in a tweet. “This day last year: 19%.”

That is a staggeringly high number for a man who only won 8 percent of the African-American vote in 2016.

It is even more unexpected given the president’s rocky history on matters related to race, including his current nasty feud with former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who has alleged Trump said “n word” on the set of the reality-TV show “The Apprentice.”

Conservatives celebrated the poll as a sign of trouble for Democrats in upcoming elections.

Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA, cited the poll as evidence that Trump “is breaking the Democrat party as we know it.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“Never That Great” Andrew Cuomo’s widely panned comments say more about him than about America. Bob McManus

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/andrew-cuomo-16114.html

New York governor Andrew Cuomo says that America was “never that great,” and he’s entitled to that view, but it would be interesting to know where the U.S. ranks in his personal list of great nations. And it’s amusing to imagine what the late Mario Cuomo, who so frequently praised America for the singular place that it is—“the greatest nation in the only world we know”—would have to say, especially in private, about his impulsive son’s latest outburst. Cuomo delivered his caustic observation at a bill-signing ceremony cum campaign pep rally on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and it might be a mistake to take it for much beyond what it was: just another rhetorical drive-by shooting aimed at Donald Trump, the bête noire of New York Democratic politics.

But let’s unpack it anyway.

“We’re not going to make America great again,” Cuomo said. “It was never that great. We have not reached greatness. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged.” Perhaps the governor meant “perfect” when he said “great”—his language skills aren’t profound when he’s in political mode—and that would have the advantage of being true. Humans aspire to perfection, but never achieve it; greatness is a relative goal, reachable but open to mischievous rhetorical abuse.

Perhaps Cuomo was conjuring the spirit of his father’s keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a carefully composed, skillfully delivered attempted takedown of President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” campaign theme. But this was an infinitely larger stage in a game played for immensely greater stakes, and Mario Cuomo was a masterful public speaker. At best, Andrew Cuomo’s crack was an uninspired knockoff of his father’s singular statement of principle and purpose. Just as Trump is no Reagan, Andrew is no Mario when it comes to political oratory.