NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton Plans a Corporate ‘Exit Tax’ Proposal would be meant to deter companies from merging with smaller overseas firms By Richard Rubin And Laura Meckler

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the U.S. will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.

Like Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton wants to prevent companies from leaving the U.S. tax system by merging with a smaller foreign firm. That rule could have discouraged Medtronic PLC from putting its tax address in Ireland and could complicate the similar transaction that Pfizer Inc. is attempting now. Both of those deals use a law that allows such inversions as long as the U.S. company’s shareholders own less than 80% of the combined business.

The Obama proposal has gone nowhere in Congress, stopped by Republicans who say it amounts to erecting walls around the U.S. tax system rather than making it more favorable. Mrs. Clinton would go further, requiring companies to pay U.S. taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold, a campaign aide said Monday.

Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, will speak about corporate taxes on Wednesday in Iowa. The aide said she would unveil “another major component” of her plan then.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Parsing Obama’s Palaver by Edward Cline

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation of “reassurance” and “resolve” on the evening of December 6th had all the substance of cotton candy. It took up a lot of space but essentially there was nothing there. It was a fluffy repeat of the same old deception, misdirection, taqiyya, and dissimulation. The only thing his fifteen-minute, nineteen-hundred word spiel reassured us of was that he wasn’t going to change his policy towards ISIS (aka ISIL) or his determination to protect Islam. Let’s examine the speech.

The first paragraph was a howler.

Good evening. On Wednesday, 14 Americans were killed as they came together to celebrate the holidays. They were taken from family and friends who loved them deeply. They were white and black, Latino and Asian, immigrants, and American born, moms and dads, daughters and sons. Each of them served their fellow citizens. All of them were part of our American family.

Actually, Obama wasn’t so much talking “with us” as he was talking down to us. Also, he failed the bean-counting test. He forgot to mention that the victims were also someone’s cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, and in-laws. But, apparently, there were no Muslims among the victims. What a relief! Well, to Obama it was a relief.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

COP 21 agrees on draft climate agreement, divisions remain :Craig Rucker

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

Week one of COP 21, the UN climate conference in Paris, concluded with the adoption of a draft “outcome.” You can read it at CFACT.org.

This was the must-have first step if the UN is to have a chance of adopting a full treaty this week.

While the COP (Conference of the Parties) reached a milestone, the draft is riddled with unresolved divisive issues. The draft contains multiple versions of many key provisions within square brackets and placeholders for future text.

For instance, did the UN adopt a draft of a binding treaty or a toothless nonbinding agreement? No one in Paris can say for sure.

Resolving these disputes is what the negotiators in Paris will be working on as they reconvene at a ministerial level.

It remains to be seen whether the COP can bridge all divides and agree to a final text.

Two factors argue the UN might pull it off.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

PBS-TV aired a “travel documentary” by travel writer Rick Steves titled “The Holy Land.” By Janet Levy

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

In A HISTORY LESSON FOR RICK STEVES Exposing PBS’s biased documentary on the Holy Land.
The author, Joseph Puder, omitted the fact that OF the original British Mandate for Palestine (Israel), 78% of it was given away by Churchill to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (Jordan). Palestine (Israel) was left with a mere 22% of its promised traditional homeland, where the Jews had lived continuously for over 3,700 years – even after the Romans destroyed their state of Judea in 70 A.D.
Not only was this land grab for Transjordan a violation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (Israel) but it went against the San Remo Conference of 1920, the Treaty of Lausanne and the Treaty of Sevres.
All of this occurred following World War I when the Turkish Ottoman Empire was being divided to create Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan.
Shame on Rick Steves!

Janet Levy,
Los Angeles

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Eternal Youth and Living Death By: David P. Goldman

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

op-culture has never seen anything like this: Unprecedented ratings, a cult-following without a rival and the kind of events no other show has ever pulled off,” gushed Troy Smith in Cleveland.com on October 13th. “This past Friday night, ‘The Walking Dead’ drew more than 13,000 zombie-crazed fans to Madison Square Garden in New York City for a special premiere of Season 6.” This degree of enthusiasm for what barely counted as a B-movie genre a generation ago is one of the strangest, and most revealing, features of American popular culture.

In the 1930s, when Universal Studios brought out its classic monster films, one out of 300 features was a horror film. Monsters were different back then: exotic imports, party-crashers who clearly did not belong. We humans always guessed their hidden weaknesses, then drove a stake through their hearts. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, though, the monsters began to win for the first time. Satan successfully begat an heir in “Rosemary’s Baby,” and the devil’s child wiped out the competition in The Omen.

Ten years ago the horror genre, thrillers with an expressly supernatural element, supplied one out of 25 film industry products. By 2013 the proportion had risen to one in eight. Horror films touch a number of sore points in the American psyche. Vampires embody a perverse eroticism, which Anne Rice was tasteless enough to make explicit. Satanic apocalypse stories address a more generalized fear. The Frankenstein monster and his emulators speak to our fear of technology. Intelligent scripts and artful acting occasionally have found their way into these themes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Daniel Greenfield Moment: Migration is the Greatest Threat to National Security

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/07/daniel-greenfield-moment-migration-is-the-greatest-threat-to-national-security/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Migration is the Greatest Threat to National Security, unveiling something Obama and the Left just can’t seem to understand: It’s not the weather, it’s the terror.

Don’t miss it!

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The Big Three Villains — Laziness, Stupidity, Corruption — and the Gun-Control Debate: Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

There are many popular demons in American public life: Barack Obama and his monarchical pretensions, Valerie Jarrett and her two-bit Svengali act, or, if your tastes run in the other direction, the Koch brothers, the NRA, the scheming behind-the-scenes influences of Big Whatever. But take a moment to doff your hat to the long, energetic, and wide-ranging careers of three of our most enduring bad guys: laziness, corruption, and stupidity, which deserve special recognition for their role in the recent debates over gun control, terrorism, and crime.

The Democratic party’s dramatic slide into naked authoritarianism — voting in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, trying to lock up governors for vetoing legislation, and seeking to jail political opponents for holding unpopular views on global warming, etc. — has been both worrisome and dramatic. The Democrats even have a new position on the ancient civil-rights issue of due process, and that position is: “F— you.” The Bill of Rights guarantees Americans (like it or not) the right to keep and bear arms; it also reiterates the legal doctrine of some centuries standing that government may not deprive citizens of their rights without due process. In the case of gun rights, that generally means one of two things: the legal process by which one is convicted of a felony or the legal process by which one is declared mentally incompetent, usually as a prelude to involuntary commitment into a mental facility. The no-fly list and the terrorism watch list contain no such due process. Some bureaucrat somewhere in the executive branch puts a name onto a list, and that’s that. The ACLU has rightly called this “Kafkaesque.”

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The Tolerable Level of Terrorism: David Goldman

Posted By on December 7th, 2015

“Round up the usual suspects” was the brunt of President Obama’s address to the American public after last week’s San Bernardino massacre. Obama offered nothing new, only “airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” in the Levant. Like his French counterpart Francois Hollande, Obama thinks that a certain level of terrorism is tolerable, and far preferable to the bloody and difficult work of rooting out jihadist terrorism entirely. There is something to be said for the notion of a tolerable level of terrorism, but neither Obama nor Hollande are likely to achieve this as matters stand.

“Since the attacks in Paris,” the President said, “we’ve surged intelligence-sharing with our European allies. We’re working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria. And we are cooperating with Muslim-majority countries — and with our Muslim communities here at home — to counter the vicious ideology that ISIL promotes online.” None of this is new and none of it is persuasive.

The trouble is that number of terrorist attacks is rising exponentially, along with the number of countries affected, according to the 2015 Terrorism Index of the Institute for Economics and Peace. The notion of a tolerable level of terrorism applied to a world in which Muslims killed each other far from the West. The recent attacks in Paris and California as well as Israel suggest that the old approach to containing terrorism has collapsed, along with the credibility of leaders who advanced it. More than 30,000 people died in terror attacks in 2014, compared to fewer than 8,000 in 2011. More important, 17 countries lost more than 250 people in terror attacks in 2014 vs. only 5 countries in 2011.

BOOKS Comments turned off

ISIS Diaries: New channel chronicles daily life in the Caliphate BY Lisa Daftari

Posted By on December 7th, 2015

If you aren’t inspired to go fight alongside the Islamic State, perhaps hearing their personal accounts will make you change your mind. That’s what the newest ISIS-linked Telegram Messenger account is hoping.

“Diary of a Mujahid,” is a new channel showcasing “inspiring narratives” from ISIS fighters in English, directed toward recruiting others abroad to join.

“May this channel be a source of guidance, enlightenment, inspiration and motivation,” the account manager posted upon its launch last week, followed by daily posts from individuals sharing their experiences, pushing back on the notion that life under the Caliphate is anything less than utopian.

The Telegram Messenger app has been the Islamic State’s go-to messaging platform for communication and propaganda.

Several ISIS accounts frequently post updates showing everyday life under the Caliphate, the sunrises, the supermarkets, the food, the good life as well as the battles, martyrs and public punishments.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Restore the U.S. Sixth Fleet In the Middle East, ships on the sea can be as important boots on the ground. By Seth Cropsey

Posted By on December 7th, 2015

Whatever else was accomplished, the congressional hearings on Benghazi last month were a reminder that the Obama administration’s Libyan expedition failed. Libya has been in turmoil since the beginning of the Libyan civil war in 2011. American airstrikes and a no-fly zone helped a mix of moderate and Islamist groups topple Moammar Qaddafi’s brutal regime in 2011, but the country is no more stable. Libya descended into civil war again in 2014, with the internationally recognized government fighting for control of the country against Ansar al-Sharia and the Islamist New General National Congress.

The situation is much worse today. As of October 2015, the Islamic State (IS) has taken military control of the area around Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace. Sirte lies along the Libyan coastline, positioned between the major ports of Tripoli and Benghazi. The Islamic State now has full control of a strategically positioned coastal area in an unstable country that has become a proxy battlefield for Middle Eastern powers, and through which millions of refugees from Africa might be allowed to pass on their way to Europe.