It’s been a week, so enjoy an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm
There’s lots of meat in President Trump’s tax reform proposal:
Individual Reform
Tax relief for American families, especially middle-income families:
Reducing the 7 tax brackets to 3 tax brackets of to%, 25% and 35%
Doubling the standard deduction
Providing tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses
Simplification:
Eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers
Protect the home ownership and charitable gift tax deductions
Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax
Repeal the death tax
Repeal the 3.8% Obamacare tax that hits small businesses and investment income
Business Reform
15% business tax rate
Territorial tax system to level the playing field for American companies
One-time tax on trillions of dollars held overseas
Eliminate tax breaks for special interests
Texas House passes anti-Santuary City bill that fines officials for violating federal immigration laws.
North Korean ballistic missile test fails. Cue the sad trombone.
Obama’s Iran deal was even worse than we thought. “By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces.”
The highest-profile Democratic-party supporters are increasingly smug Hollywood actors, rich Wall Street and Silicon Valley elitists, and embittered members of the media, along with careerist identity groups and assorted protest movements — a fossilized 1972 echo chamber.
Democrats’ politically correct messaging derides opponents as deplorable racists, sexists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, and nativists. That shrill invective only further turns off Middle America. Being merely anti-Trump is no more a successful Democratic agenda than being anti-Nixon was in 1972.
Dishonest medical equipment startup Theranos used a shell company to secretly buy outside lab equipment to actually run the lab tests they were faking as coming from their own equipment. And check out that picture caption: “[CEO] Elizabeth Holmes speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.” Because of course she did.
Liberals love denouncing the imaginary Christian theocracy of The Handmaid’s Tale (now a miniseries) because it keeps them from having to think about the real Islamic ones oppressing women all over the world right at this very moment.
I’m still not wild about President Trump’s decision to strike a Syrian airfield with cruise missiles last night, but the decision makes more sense if you look at it less of a tool to make Bashar Assad mend his ways than as a warning shot across the bows of Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-Un and Xi Jinping, the latter of whom President Trump just happened to be meeting with while the missiles were hitting Shayrat.
Jobless claims “are hovering near the lowest level since the early 1970s.” Now the trick is to produce enough sustained growth to get the Obama-discouraged long-term unemployed back into the workforce…
“Conniving, spineless, duplicitous, misleading, double-crossing—Chuck Schumer is a fitting exemplar for the modern Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Mike Pence’s rules for not being alone with other women are probably less about preventing adultery than to prevent him from being framed and smeared by feminists.
Obviously there’s too big a flood of Clinton corruption news to do this weekly, so this might be a daily feature (or pretty close to it) until the election, which is (finally!) just a week away.
More on the Podesta-Kadzik relationship. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which asks: “At this point, is there anyone working at the Justice Department who hasn’t been tainted by the stench of Clinton corruption?”)
Hmmmmmmm: “Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has not been on Clinton’s campaign plane for the last three days, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin reported Monday.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Scott Adams: “Allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero than an ass-covering weasel….In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.”
James Carville melts down, “Asserts FBI, GOP, and KGB in Cahoots.” He may be the first Clinton toady to completely lose it this election cycle, but I doubt he’ll be the last. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
OK, I’ve got to go ahead and put this up before another giant wave of Clinton Corruption news breaks…
Neither Google nor Disney plan to bid on Twitter, despite reports saying both were interested. Recode says that Apple is likely also out of the picture. And Verizon immediately dismissed speculation that it was considering a bid. Facebook is also said to be uninterested, according to CNBC. And while Microsoft’s name has been tossed around, no one seems to think the acquisition would make any sense for an increasingly enterprise-focused company.
It seems that Twitter’s stock price has nosedived precipitously since appointing radical Social Justice Warrior Anita Sarkeesian to their newly formed “Trust and Safety Council.” Since then, Twitter has:
And after having damaged their brand and destroyed billions worth of shareholder value, lo and behold, no one wants to buy them! Gee, turns out that alienating half your user base at the behest of a tiny cadre of radical feminists is a lousy business strategy…
In case you missed it over the weekend, Hillary Clinton collapsed in pubic.
Here’s the video:
“Her campaign later said that she was overheated and went to rest at her daughter’s apartment. She later came out from the apartment to demonstrate her condition to the media. She did not take questions.”
Yup, nothing at all suspicious there. As Ace of Spades notes: “If someone was unsteady on their feet and needed to be propped up, then buckled and fell, wouldn’t you take that person to the hospital? You would — unless this was a fairly frequent occurrence you had just gotten used to dealing with in-house.”
Team Hillary’s spin is that she just happens to be suffering from a number of completely unrelated health issues that all just happened to occur in a short period of time. The coughing? Allergies. The collapse? That was because she was “overheated.” No, wait, we mean she has pneumonia.
You know what they call someone who suffers a bunch of unrelated illnesses in a short period of time? Sickly. Or just plain sick. If she was a character in a Gothic novel, they’d be asking “Will sickly Mrs. Clinton succumb to the baleful atmosphere of vast, chilly Kickback Manor?”
Among the Hillary emails released by Julian Assange was one by an aide (Jake Sullivan, if I remember right) giving her a summary on the effectiveness of a drug called Provigil — a drug often used to combat the mental lapses and lack of focus typical of Parkinson’s sufferers.
The video does have a Zapruderish “back and to the left, back and to the left” quality to it. So be prepared to tighten or loosen your tin foil helmet, per your own comfort level.
Nonetheless, much of it seems plausible.
He explains the freeze in front of the crowd many have discussed at 11:15. He says this is a common Parkinson’s reaction to overstimulous — the brain freezes, and needs a sort of ‘reset” to get going again. He notes that she repeats the words her handler says to her during the freeze, which he claims is a common Parkinson’s symptom, echoing the last thing you heard to get your brain firing regularly again.
He also explains the coughing fits. He says this is not bronchitis. Rather, he claims, Parkinson’s patients frequently have swallowing problems. They accidentally swallow food or liquid into their airways, their lungs. This aspirated food and water then causes pneumonia.
He doesn’t say this, but it can be guessed out: Per his theory, Hillary has had this case of pneumonia for a long time because she keeps getting pneumonia due to this tendency towards aspiration pneumonia.
It should be noted that aspiration pneumonia is a common symptom of Parkinson’s — indeed, it’s the leading cause of death among Parkinson’s sufferers.
Here’s the video Dr. Ted Noel put together:
And here’s that painful extended coughing fit she suffered earlier this month:
I raise this second possibility because of Hillary’s history of neurological illnesses (blood clot in brain, concussion), hints raised on the internet in Wikileaks documents and by others that she may have a neurological disease like Parkinson’s, and her by now well documented history of recurrent coughing fits. This second possibility is that she has an aspiration pneumonia.
Aspiration pneumonia occurs when fluids and food particles that normally enter the esophagus instead enter the windpipe and lungs. It is commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease or similar diseases where the nerves to the swallowing mechanism are not working properly. This is especially worrisome because it is likely to recur given the underlying, usually incurable disease process and because it can be a life-threatening event.
I consider aspiration pneumonia to be the more likely cause because it unifies all the pieces of disparate information that are available on Hillary’s medical condition. A diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia raises profoundly troubling implications for her possible election as president.
Remember Dr. Drew Pinsky expressing concern about her health and how Team Hillary got Google to hide search results on Hillary’s health. (And they’re still doing it. Even today, Google won’t auto complete “Hillary Health,” only “Hillary Health Care.” Of course, it’s a Pyrrhic victory, since the second search autocomplete result is now “hillary clinton seizure.”)
How bad would Clinton’s health have to get for Democrats to consider replacing her? And would it even be legal to do so at this point? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Massachusetts takes rent-seeking to the next level, taxing ride-sharing services to subsidize taxis. Next up: Taxing cars to subsidize railroads and horses.
July in the U.S. was one of the least hot months ever. Maybe not in Austin, but elsewhere…
Speaking of which, the 1936 heat wave must have been a nightmare to live with without air conditioning. It hit 121°F in North Dakota…
At one level, this piece is a good look at Gawker’s demise. At another, it’s shows New York media professionals at their whiny, narcissistic, incestuous, entitled worst. “It’s an inevitable consequence of living in today’s New York: Youthful anxiety and generational angst about having been completely cheated out of ownership of Manhattan, and only sporadically gaining it in Brooklyn and Queens, has fostered a bloodlust for the heads of the douchebags who stole the city.” Waaaah, the world owes me Manhattan real estate because I think I’m so much cooler than people who can actually afford it!
I know that when I think of Jewish history, I naturally think of Yoko Ono. And when I think of people who need Kickstarter to get funding, Yoko is way up there…
The tragic history of RC Cola. Too bad Diet RC tastes like crap. (That goes for that crappy offbrand Maine soda as well.)
Important Safety Tip: Don’t have sex on a neighbor’s roof, naked and high on meth.
I’m not going to pony up $200+ to attend the Texas Tribune Festival, and I doubt I could finagle a press badge. But Phil Collins being there does indeed make it more tempting, if only I could be sure I could get all my old Genesis albums signed…
A few bits on the ever-expanding, always boiling Climategate scandal.
First, here’s a link to, of all things, a single post in a Slashdot thread that concisely articulates a very important point: The lamentable tendency of many Global Warming boosters to label anyone who questions any part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) narrative as “deniers.” There are varying degrees of skepticism, ranging all the way from “Global warming is all completely bunk and nothing you ever say will change my mind” to “Hey, I believe it’s every bit as bad as the AGW proponents claim, but maybe Kyoto and Copenhagen aren’t the best way to address it.” I myself am in the “Global warming may be real, but we don’t know how bad it is, don’t know how much of it is natural and how much (if any) is man-made, and in any case we should do a lot more study and measurement before ceding control of vast stretches of our economy to unelected transnational bureaucrats” camp.
However, the response of Global Warming proponents to just about any criticism of the consensus AGW narrative seems to be “The science is already settled, and anyone questioning it is as bad as a Flat Earther, a Creationist, or a Holocaust denier. Now sit down, shut up, and hand over all your money and power to us.” (And here’s the LA Times attempting a textbook “scientists are smart, Americans are stupid, questioning global warming is as bad as Creationism, so shut the hell up” approach.) As long as they keep trying to pull this “Nothing to see here, now move along” crap about Climategate, more and more people are going to question what they say. And rightly so. Especially since the overwhelming majority of people pushing AGW are the very same people who push bigger government and higher taxes as the solution to just about every problem. A lot of the people questioning the consensus narrative aren’t just random bloggers, they’re people with PhDs in related fields who are saying the science just doesn’t add up.
Here’s the reply of Watts Up With That author Willis Eschenbach to the Economist article (which can be found as the source link for the aforementioned Slashdot thread), rebutting their analysis (or lack thereof) of his original article (which I linked to here). (For extra credit, diagram that previous sentence.)
Here’s the actual IPCC reports, which some who have read them all the way through (Disclaimer: I haven’t managed to do that myself yet. Mea culpa.) say don’t make anywhere near the ironclad case for AGW that many proponents claim.
Is Google trying to suppress Climategate? My own quick search would tend to suggest no, they aren’t. I see a few AGW-critical sources (American Thinker (hey, is that the same J. R. Dunn that writes science fiction?), Washington Times) near the top of my date-sorted list. Clearly Google leans fairly heavily to the left, and I’m nowhere near the “Google can do no wrong” camp, but sometimes it just takes time for their server caches to be updated. At least once before (antedating this blog by several years) I jumped the gun on accusing Google of hiding something, only to have it show up a day or two later. (Mmmm, egg. It’s what’s on my face.) If they are trying to suppress the story, they’re doing a pretty piss poor job of it.
Finally, here’s Ralph Peters in the New York Post: “A thriving economy can do more to protect the environment than a desperate one. And let’s not forget the ‘human ecology’ of families struggling to put food on the table. Extreme environmentalism is a rich man’s sport that rides hell-for-leather through the poor man’s fields.”
