POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary’s Greatest Nightmare is Coming True No one likes her. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, Hillary Clinton is desperately trying to lure young voters into her artisanal fair trade GMO-free gingerbread house. And they just aren’t interested.

In a desperate effort to get out the youth vote, Hillary Clinton dragged her former nemesis, 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, to New Hampshire to campaign for her. When your best bet for winning over the kids was born during WW2, you have a major problem. But whatever millennial pixie dust the senile Socialist had been wearing before had worn off. “Is anyone here ready to transform America?” he croaked.

Not with Hillary. Not even the most naive college freshman believes in Hillary as an agent of change.

“Bernie’s campaign energized so many young people,” Hillary Clinton insisted. But adding Bernie to her campaign of the living dead didn’t energize it. It slowed it down even more.

Hillary Clinton has the backing of less than half of young voters. And the news only gets worse for the Evita of Arkansas.

Only 47% of adults 18 to 34 are certain that they will vote this year. That’s down from 74% in 2008. Only 17% of voters under 30 are enthusiastic about voting this year. And, just to make things worse, Gary Johnson is pulling in 14 percent of younger voters. In Virginia, Hillary gets only 34% of the under 34 crowd. That’s not just an entertaining coincidence. It’s also an entertaining catastrophe.

That’s why the “Aleppo Moment” is suddenly getting so much media coverage. Johnson is attracting too many of the voters whom Hillary needs. And so the media is targeting the latest threat to Her Highness.

It’s also why Obama and Bernie are both warning about the perils of voting third party. But neither of them seem to be able to shift their following over to Hillary. And the celebrities aren’t doing any better.

Trying to make Hillary seem cool by surrounding her with celebrities only highlights her blandness. That’s what went wrong at the DNC. But surrounding her with Obama and Bernie, the candidates that younger voters chose over her, just reminds them of why they rejected her.

Hillary’s Achilles heel is an older electorate. An older electorate is least likely to be influenced by celebrity tweets and pop culture peer pressure. It is most likely to consist of adults with life experience who have actually worked for a living and understand that everything has to be paid for.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian Fatwa: Women May Not Ride Bicycles Another surreal turn in the Islamic Republic’s war on women. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

Iran’s Supreme Leader and autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an Islamic fatwa regarding officially banning women from riding bicycles. This is only the latest in a growing multitude of activities that the Islamic Republic of Iran had declared haram (religiously forbidden).

A mullah from the Islamic Republic once described the reasoning behind this fatwa to me. He explained that if a male sees a woman in the act of riding a bicycle he would be exposed to her body physique, which will cause him to become aroused. In other words, Iran’s clerics believe that a man cannot control his sexual desires when he sees a woman on a bicycle even when she is fully covered.

Merely for engaging in an activity that millions of women around the world participate in, many women across Iran have recently been arrested. Signs declaring the new law have been installed on the streets reading, “Bicycle riding for women is prohibited.”

This is not the only absurd restriction that the women of Iran must endure. They are also prohibited from watching men’s volleyball games. A British-Iranian woman, Ghonche Ghavami, was detained and jailed in solitary confinement in Evin, notorious political prison, for attempting to watch a men’s volleyball game.

Iran’s President, the so-called moderate, has not raised any objection to this law or similar ones. In fact, under his presidency, the repressive and restrictive laws against women and their inalienable rights have increased.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Comey Predicts Tsunami of ISIS Terrorists Heading for U.S. An administration ignores the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Michael Cutler

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

Huge sums of money are spent by our government and the governments of other countries to enable meteorologists to more accurately predict the weather.

For decades the United States has orbited fleets of ever more sophisticated weather satellites that circle the globe, taking measurements and tracking storms from orbit, while super-computers on the ground create models to predict when hurricanes or tornados may form and then predict the areas that will likely be endangered.

Courageous storm-hunters on the ground, who seek to observe and measure tornados “up close and in person,” drive heavily armored vehicles with a wide array of instruments in efforts to get a front-row view and develop a better understanding of how tornados form and better predict their destructive paths.

Heroic pilots and their crews of intrepid meteorologists fly into the hearts of violent hurricanes for similar purposes.

However, the purpose of all of these efforts is not simply garner information as a matter of academic curiosity, but to make certain that those who may be at risk are warned about the risks they face. Once the likely track of dangerous storms are established, those who live within the path of the storms are warned to take appropriate action.

Such action may require residents of low-lying areas or those areas along threatened coastlines to evacuate their homes and head for higher ground. It may require that homeowners and store-keepers board up windows and doors and remove anything from their property that could become a dangerous flying projectile.

Those in the path of such monstrous storms might be advised to stock up on food, water, batteries and other supplies to help them ride out the storm.

Those in the path of tornados are alerted to head for their storm cellars to maximize their likelihood of surviving the onslaught of winds and destruction.

Storms of course, are not the only threat we face, especially in this turbulent and volatile era. Increasingly terrorists have gone on bloody rampages around the world and here, within the borders of our nation.

Huge sums of money and Herculean efforts are being expended by various elements of our military and intelligence and law enforcement agencies to develop effective intelligence about the activities of these terrorist organizations that, not unlike major storms, are on the move around the world. The intelligence reports that these agencies produce forecast threats America and Americans face- not from natural events but from threats posed by America’s adversaries.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

London Chronicle: Brexit & Free Speech By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

The last time I was in London, in June, I was witness to the amazing populist recovery of sovereignty the world now knows as Brexit. I reported on it several times in this space (here, for example, and here, here, here, and here). It was amusing, back then, to observe the evolution of respectable sentiment about Brexit. On the run-up to the vote on June 23 almost everyone who was anyone agreed on two things: 1) those supporting Brexit were ignorant, xenophobic yobs and 2) Brexit would never pass.

The smug certainty that, of course, Brexit could never happen yielded first to incredulity, then to rage when it was clear that not only had the referendum passed, but also that it had passed handily, 52% to 48%. It was partly amusing, partly alarming to watch the flailings of the politically correct mandarins attempting to explain to each other what happened. Some called for a new referendum, since the one that delivered Brexit was impossible, while others warned of imminent financial collapse and British isolation from the light-giving fish of EU dispensation.

In the event, nothing happened. Or, to be more precise, the British stock market stabilized and then shot up, the pound lost a small percentage of its value, making British exports more attractive, and life went on as usual.

The immediate question was, would Theresa May, the new prime minister, really pursue Brexit? She was known to be a mild “Remainer” but otherwise was something of a cipher.

In the event, her declaration that “Brexit means Brexit” turns out to have been in earnest. At the Tory Leadership Conference in Birmingham, which is ongoing as I write, Mrs. May just announced that she would trigger Article 50, which would formally initiate Britain’s exit from the tentacles of the EU, “before March next year.” That alone should console supporters of Brexit, as should her otherwise straightforward, no-nonsense tone. Negotiations would be complex, she acknowledged, but her administration would work tirelessly to get “the best deal” for Britain.

A preliminary step, she explained, is replaying the 1972 European Communities Act, which “enshrined” Britain’s new relationship with Europe. “It’s an important step we are taking,” Mrs. May said, “because first of all it makes clear to those who voted to leave the EU, that is exactly what we will be doing.”

That’s the news, and it is good news, as of a few minutes ago.

I came to England a few days ago in order to participate in a conference in Winchester on the fate of free speech in the academy, U.S. as well as British editions. We’ll be publishing the papers for that conference in The New Criterion come January, but I can reveal now one thing that struck me about our deliberations. Two years before, we had held a conference on a similar topic (which you can read about here): “Free Speech Under Threat.” To some extent, what transpired in Winchester a few days ago comes under the rubric of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again.”

But there are differences. In the couple of years since we last considered the issue of free speech, blatant assaults on free speech have grown much more common to the point where they are less scandalous than simply business as usual. People are harassed, shunned, sacked, fined, even jailed in some Western countries for expressing an unpopular opinion.

It is difficult to maintain a perpetual sense of emergency, however, and it’s my sense that many incursions upon free speech are now met more with a weary shrug than the outrage they would have occasioned even a few years back. Novelty is the handmaiden of outrage, and there is, alas, nothing novel about the assaults against free speech on campus today.

One of the most conspicuous strategies to limit free speech on campuses in the United States these last few years has been via the weaponization of victimhood. This is where the demand for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and the anxiety over “micro aggressions” makes common cause with political correctness to curtail free speech and establish the reign of politically correct orthodoxy.

It’s my impression that this latest gift of American academia has yet to be fully transplanted to England. The toxic rhetoric of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro aggressions” is beginning to catch on here and there but has not, so far as I can see, really taken root here.

I’m sure that will change before long. It’s just too potent a weapon to ignore.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ethiopia Stampede Kills Dozens at Religious Event Police use tear gas, rubber bullets to disperse crowd, causing stampede

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

BISHOFTU, Ethiopia—Several dozen people died in a stampede Sunday morning when a religious celebration in Ethiopia turned into an antigovernment protest that led police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets.

Witnesses said people were crushed in nearby ditches as they tried to flee the chaos.

An estimated two million people were attending the annual Irrecha thanksgiving event in Bishoftu town southeast of the capital, Addis Ababa. The event took place in one of the country’s most sensitive regions, Oromia, which has seen several months of sometimes deadly protests demanding wider freedoms.

Ethiopia’s government acknowledged deaths during Sunday’s event. Through a spokesman, it blamed “people that prepared to cause trouble.” The spokesman’s office said many people were taken to hospitals. It didn’t provide figures for deaths or injuries.

Witnesses said the crush began as protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and pushed toward a stage where religious leaders were speaking. Some threw rocks and plastic bottles. Police responded by using tear gas and firing rubber bullets. People tried to flee.

Before the stampede, an Associated Press reporter saw a crowd of people holding up crossed wrists in a popular gesture of antigovernment protest. The reporter also saw police firing tear gas and, later, several injured people.

POLITICS Comments turned off

CLINTON’S CHARITY AND TAXES

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

The Clintons donated used underwear to charity, wrote it off on taxes

Here is the report from The New York Times:

In previous returns, when Mr. Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas and his wife was a partner in a Little Rock law firm, the Clintons had gone so far as to deduct $2 for underwear donated to charities. The deduction was ridiculed by comedians and pundits, and the White House did not itemize the Clintons’ $17,000 in charitable contributions on the 1993 return.

POLITICS Comments turned off

BILL CLINTON’S GREAT SKIVVIES GIVE-AWAY BY LLOYD GROVE DEC. 1993

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

It’s that time of year again, Mr. President.

Time to celebrate the lingering Yuletide spirit and the bright promise of the year to come. Time to savor the companionship of friends and family.

Time to donate your underpants to a charitable organization so you can later claim a deduction on your 1993 tax return.

If the recent past is any guide, Bill Clinton and his wife, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been spending the past few months gathering up unwanted belongings — from old shoes to shower curtains to jogging shorts to, yes, apparently used underwear — carefully enumerating each item alongside dollar amounts on handwritten lists, and giving the lot to such worthy causes as the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries.

The Clintons’ tax returns over the past decade — which “obviously were prepared with an eye toward being released,” according to White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers — are rife with detailed supporting documents that may someday prove a rich boon to historians and psychohistorians studying the forces that shaped the Clinton presidency.

As political figures are wont to do, particularly those with White House aspirations, the Clintons have over the past few years thoughtfully disclosed their tax returns, providing citizens with a fascinating window on a heretofore unexamined aspect of their lives.

Several experts were consulted about Clinton’s tax-deductible donations, especially of underwear. Paul Offenbacher, a longtime Washington-area tax accountant, said it is highly unusual to take an itemized deduction on donated underwear; indeed, he had never heard of such a thing. Adelphi University psychology professor George D. Goldman, a New York-based psychoanalyst who studies the unconscious symbolic meanings in human behavior, said the donations are, at the very least, fodder for intriguing speculation.

“Obviously I can’t tell you what Clinton’s individual symbols mean; all I can do is give you my own analysis — which is that he’s airing his dirty wash or maybe trying to take his dirty wash and make it cleaner,” Goldman said. “I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I voted for him, but there’s something, let’s say, grandiose, both too personal and a bit inappropriately intimate, to give your underwear away for someone else to wear, and then to think that your underwear is worth giving this sort of a valuation to.”

But another clinician, psychologist John Marr, pooh-poohed as fanciful such theorizing about a guy who donates underwear, itemizes the donation, and then discloses it to the public.

“Whether you’re a Freudian, a Jungian or a behaviorist, you always have to look for the simplest explanation first,” said Marr, who practices in Fayetteville, Ark., where, coincidentally, he has played poker with Clinton. “If you donate, you have to itemize what you donate.”

“We don’t get too much underwear here; I don’t think people want that too much,” said Joe Cheslow, a senior resident at the Union Rescue Mission, a haven for homeless people in Little Rock, Ark., that has been a frequent beneficiary of the Clintons’ tax-deductible largess. The mission thrift shop has been known to sell used underwear, displayed in bins, at 95 cents a pair.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton Campaign Admits Hillary Used Same Tax Avoidance “Scheme” As Trump By Tyler Durden

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/573730

Well this is a little awkward. With the leaked 1995 Trump tax returns ‘scandal’ focused on the billionaire’s yuuge “net operating loss” and how it might have ‘legally’ enabled him to pay no taxes for years, we now discover none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton utilized a $700,000 “loss” to avoid paying some taxes in 2015.

The Clinton Campaign was quick to jump on the leaked Trump tax filing with Robby Mook tweeting…

And Hillary following up, adding Trump “apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades—while tens of millions of working families paid theirs.”

However, a look back at Hillary Clinton’s tax returns from 2015 (here), proudly displayed by the campaign proving she has nothing to hide – shows something awkward on page 17…

While not on the scale of Trump’s business “operating loss”, Hillary Clinton – like many ‘wealthy’ individuals is taking advantage of a legal scheme to use historical losses to avoid paying current taxes.

As Bloomberg notes, this federal tax break is among the wealthy’s most used avoidance schemes…

Those 1.1 million folks in the 1 percent, as measured by the TPC, have annual income that averages a little less than $700,000. The top one-tenth of that group, some 110,000 households, average about $3.6 million, according to Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the TPC.2

The middle of the pack, some 33 million people, have pretax income ranging from $45,000 to $80,000. The lowest one-fifth of taxpayers, a universe of about 47 million Americans, have income up to about $24,000.

Among the biggest of these givebacks, courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service (well, really Congress), are capital gains and dividends—these are the biggest way the wealthiest benefit.

In the words of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, “this bombshell report reveals [Hillary Clinton’s] past business failures… and may show just how long [Hillary Clinton] may have avoided paying taxes.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Progressives for Trump Tax Reform The media are shocked that business losses reduce tax liability.

Posted By on October 3rd, 2016

Who would have believed it? Donald Trump has driven his political opponents to embrace the cause of tax reform so the wealthy have fewer loopholes to exploit. That seems to be the inescapable logic of the media and Clinton campaign’s reaction to the weekend story that Mr. Trump may have used large income losses to reduce his tax payments.

The New York Times reported Saturday that it had received an anonymous gift in the mail of three pages from three of Mr. Trump’s state tax returns from 1995. The real-estate and casino magnate, who was having well-known business problems at the time, reported a loss of $916 million on those New Jersey, New York and Connecticut returns.

The Times concludes from these losses and after consulting those it called “tax experts” that the resulting tax deduction “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” Cue the synthetic shock and outrage.

Note that word “legally.” No one, not even the Clinton campaign, is claiming Mr. Trump broke any tax laws 20 years ago. Had he done so you can bet the IRS would have noticed, since the tax agency doesn’t routinely ignore tax losses that large.

The details from three pages are scant and don’t reveal the specific tax deductions that Mr. Trump might have exploited in 1995 or other years. But even average taxpayers who declare self-employment income know that business losses are deductible, often across several years. This reflects that the cycle of business investment and sales isn’t confined to a calendar tax year.

The real-estate business is also notorious for complex accounting and depreciation practices that can reduce tax liability. Developers borrow heavily, and the interest on that debt is deductible. Mr. Trump didn’t write the tax laws he was exploiting, though President Bill Clinton did have a hand in writing them since he pushed a major tax bill through Congress in 1993 with a Democratic Congress. Maybe Hillary Clinton should blame her husband and party for tolerating such rules. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight by Benjamin Gladstone

Posted By on October 2nd, 2016

Benjamin Gladstone is a junior at Brown University.

Providence, R.I. — Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.

That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist students would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation.

Of course, I still believe in the importance of accepting refugees, combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut out of these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to fight oppression.

My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus. They don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine have.