What many Muslims (and leftists) believe
In the light of the Paris attacks many people have been bemused at multiple contradictions in what many Muslims (and leftists) have been saying. For example, on one hand many believe Mossad carried out the attacks, but on the other hand they also believe the attacks are the inevitable result of Muslims being ‘persecuted’ by Israel and other Western countries. So, here is a reminder of a simple chart which clearly shows how rational many Muslims (and leftists) really are about politics.
It seems that Israel’s tax cuts under Prime Minister Netanyahu provide a real world example of how to increase investment and wealth. Paradoxical as it may sound, phasing out U.S. economic aid may also have made Israelis better off.
Since I’m a big fan of the Laffer Curve, I’m always interested in real-world examples showing good results when governments reduce marginal tax rates on productive activity.
Heck, I’m equally interested in real-world results when governments do the wrong thing and increase tax burdens on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship (and, sadly, these examples are more common).
My goal, to be sure, isn’t to maximize revenue for politicians. Instead, I prefer the growth-maximizing point on the Laffer Curve.
In any event, my modest hope is that politicians will learn that higher tax rates lead to less taxable income. Whether taxable income falls by a lot or a little obviously depends on the specific circumstance. But in either case, I want policy makers to understand that there are negative economic effects.
Writing for Forbes, Jeremy Scott of Tax Notes analyzes the supply-side policies of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
President Obama reiterated his determination to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay despite the attorney general’s affirmation to Congress that the administration would be breaking the law by moving detainees to U.S. soil.
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged that “as the administration has stated, the closure of Guantanamo Bay is something that is part of the administration’s policy and the Department Of Justice supports that as well.”
“At this point in time I believe the current state of the law is that individuals are not transferred from Guantanamo to U.S. shores,” Lynch said. “…And certainly it’s the position of the Department of Justice that we would follow the law of the land in regard to that issue.”
“I believe that it is the view of the department that we would certainly observe the laws as passed by Congress and signed by the president. Only very rarely would we take the step of finding that an unconstitutional provision was something that we could not manage.”
White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett said criminal justice reform that reduces the prison population would make America safer.
Jarrett also said President Obama is focused on tackling the issue along with Congress and is not a “lame duck.” Obama has directed federal agencies to “ban the box,” which prohibits them from asking about an applicant’s criminal history. Jarrett said Obama wants Congress to do the same for federal contractors as well, which requires congressional action.
In addition, the Justice Department has decided to release about 6,000 inmates from federal prison who were convicted of drug-related offenses.
Jarrett was asked if reforming the criminal justice system could cause crime to rise.
“We are seeing crime go up in some cities. We’re also seeing it leveled in others and going down in the third category,” Jarrett said during the “Race and Justice in America” Summit held by The Atlantic.
Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), who rode a wave of Tea Party support into the House last year, said the Paris terror attacks were the deciding factor in her presidential endorsement.
Love told Fox News today that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who recently paid a visit to her home state, will get her support.
During that visit, she said, “for the first time in a long time, I felt someone who really loves this country and doesn’t take advantage of, take for granted the benefits that this country has and also willing to put himself and take on responsibilities of being a citizen in this country.”
“I saw him inspire people, but this [terror attack] just solidified things for me,” Love said. “He’s been talking about these threats from the very beginning. He talked about the threat with ISIS. He’s very strong when it comes to foreign policy and national defense, and this is a time when we need a president who is going to make sure we are strong.”
On November 5, the White House released the text of the 5,544 page Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Obama had just finished negotiating under the FastTrack authority that Congress gave him. That trade pact can no longer be amended. The up-or-down votes in the House and Senate will take place as early as January 2016.
So what’s in the TPP? Here’s a quick summary:
A legislative body superior to Congress
A vehicle to pass Obama’s climate change treaty
Increased legal immigration
Reduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticals
Quotas on U.S. agricultural exports
Increased currency manipulation
Reduced U.S. power
That’s the summary. Here are the details.
“That’s what happens when a federal agency serves as its own detective, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. As Mr. Wright observed, the FTC’s record is “a strong sign of an unhealthy and biased institutional process.” And he puts it perhaps most powerfully: “Even bank robbery prosecutions have less predictable outcomes than administrative adjudication at the FTC.” Winning against the federal government should never require losing so much.”
Sometimes winning is still losing. That is certainly true for companies that find themselves caught in the cross hairs of the federal government. Since 2013, my organization has defended one such company, the cancer-screening LabMD, against meritless allegations from the Federal Trade Commission. Last Friday, the FTC’s chief administrative-law judge dismissed the agency’s complaint. But it was too late. The reputational damage and expense of a six-year federal investigation forced LabMD to close last year.
While the Atlanta-based company was in business, its work required securely storing personal-health data and medical records in compliance with Health and Human Services Department regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, often known as HIPAA.
So it was alarming when, in May 2008, LabMD was contacted by Tiversa, a company that describes itself as a “world leader in P2P cyberintelligence,” alleging that it had found on the Internet a LabMD insurance-agent file containing the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 9,000 patients. Oddly, Tiversa wouldn’t disclose where or how it discovered the file. But the company demanded a fee of $40,000 to mitigate the situation.
The Islamic State attacks in Paris have reopened the debate over antiterror surveillance, and a good thing too. President Obama’s CIA director John Brennan said this week that it has become more difficult to identify terrorists and break up their plots “because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role.”
Mr. Brennan mentioned no names, but by “unauthorized disclosures” he surely meant Edward Snowden, the spook who stole and absconded to Russia with details of the National Security Agency’s most highly classified antiterror surveillance programs. Jihadists responded by changing their communications habits, making them harder to detect.
We’ll learn more about why the French failed to prevent the Paris massacre, but it’s already obvious that it was in part an intelligence failure. French security had at least one, and maybe more, of the jihadists on their watch lists. But they either lost track of their movements, or failed to find or properly read clues about their intentions. The French are good at local surveillance—and you can bet they aren’t following the U.S. Army Field Manual in their interrogations—but the West needs global intelligence collection to fight global jihad.
Gunmen took 170 people hostage on Friday morning at a hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali, a West African nation where French troops are at war with al Qaeda militants.
Soldiers and police surrounded the Radisson Blu hotel in a standoff, said Capt. Baba Cissé, an army spokesman. The Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel Group, which operates the hotel, said two gunmen were holding 30 of its workers and 140 of its guests inside.
The U.S. embassy asked its citizens to stay indoors.
Mali is a somewhat forgotten front in the West’s war on Islamist insurgencies. Al Qaeda allies took control of the country’s desert north, including the fabled city of Timbuktu, in 2012. In 2013, French troops and United Nations peacekeepers arrived to combat those terrorists.
When no one is out there to protect freedom and democracy, groups masquerading as democratic forces move in to serve the designs of their masters.
Anyone questioning the authorities’ interpretation of Islam is dealt with in a barbaric fashion, from the 2am “knock on the door” to sham trials, public floggings, protracted imprisonment, rape, beatings, torture and extrajudicial murder. In some countries, the lawyers who represent such clients are also murdered.
Mauritania passed a new anti-slavery law this year, but has yet to start jailing slave-owners instead of anti-slavery activists. The government has yet to release award winning anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, arrested last year for organizing a peaceful demonstration against slavery.
Many theocracies have little-to-no respect for law; freedom of expression; equal justice under the law; freedom of (or from) religion; for women’s rights; tolerance of homosexuals or other sexual preferences — but they condone the sexual assault of children.
