NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Former Justice Department Lawyer Testifies to Voting Section’s History of Abusing Its Authority. “At a hearing Tuesday intended to build support for HR 4, Maureen Riordan did the exact opposite. A career attorney who served in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for more than two decades, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the long history of abuses she witnessed while working at the department.”
[Bret] Stephens’ Twitter account now says merely, “Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules.”
Stephens previously wrote a devastating critique of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning undertaking to date America’s founding from the importation of the first African slaves. Stephens noted the comprehensive scholarly rejection of Hannah-Jones’ assertions before calling the undertaking a “thesis in search of evidence.”
In February, Stephens penned a column objecting to the way longtime New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. “resigned” after public backlash that he had said the n-word while chaperoning his daughter’s field trip — to ask about the context in which it was used. The New York Times ultimately refused to print Stephens’ column, which was published by the New York Post.
Twitter did not immediately respond to inquiries about the reason for the suspension.
UPDATE: “A previous version of this article erroneously claimed that Twitter suspended New York Times columnist Brett Stephens after he denounced equity as racism. Stephens voluntarily deactivated his Twitter account in 2019. The original claim has been removed; the article and its headline have been revised.”
Related: “Indian Point Energy Center (I.P.E.C.) was a three-unit nuclear power plant station located in Buchanan, New York, just south of Peekskill. It sits on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 36 miles (58 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. The facility has permanently ceased power operations as of April 30, 2021.”
23 out of 1.4 million (assuming two doses for the 2.8 million in the report) seems like a pretty low incidence. Not sure what would be considered significant in a normal medical trial.
The study's authors said all patients were physically fit and had no history of cardiac diseases.
Layne’s Chicken Fingers made the offer after restaurants have endured a severe worker shortage for months due to enhanced unemployment payments that are keeping people home.
The president is a placeholder for the people who really run the country. The elections were rigged. And most of the American media cheers along.
No, not the United States: Iran. The peace-loving, centrifuge-spinning, flag-burning regime has a new president, Ebrahim Raisi. The Biden administration did promise us a new era in US-Iranian relations, and here it is: Raisi will be the first Iranian president to take office while under sanctions for mass murder.
In the 1980s, Raisi was a young regional prosecutor. He was part of a four-man ‘death committee’ which ordered the disappearance and killing of thousands of the Islamic revolution’s enemies. You may be shocked to hear human rights’ groups claiming that due process was frequently ignored during this judicial massacre.
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Raisi is what Hannah Arendt would have called a schreibtischtäter, a ‘desk murderer’: a functionary who orders dirty work while keeping his own hands clean. Amnesty calls for his prosecution for ‘crimes against humanity’. The New York Times, adopting the vocabulary of Clueless, calls this an ‘awkward predicament’ for American diplomats. It’s more than awkward, and more than clueless: it’s deeply incoherent and dangerous.
Based on past performance, Barry, Ben and Valerie must be feeling awfully chuffed right now.
That grotesque abuse of power largely was designed to weaken opposition to Obama’s statist agenda and make it easier for him to win re-election.
Now there’s a new IRS scandal. In hopes of advancing President Biden’s class-warfare agenda, the bureaucrats have leaked confidential taxpayer information to ProPublica, a left-wing website.
Here’s some of what that group posted.
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. …ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate. …those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.
Since I’m a policy wonk, I’ll first point out that ProPublica created a make-believe number. We (thankfully) don’t tax wealth in the United States.
So Elon Musk’s income is completely unrelated to what happened to the value of his Tesla shares. The same is true for Jeff Bezos’ income and the value of his Amazon stock.
And the same thing is true for the rest of us. If our IRA or 401(k) rises in value, that doesn’t mean our taxable income has increased. If our home becomes more valuable, that also doesn’t count as taxable income.
The Wall Street Journalopined on this topic today and made a similar point.
There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. …ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculating what it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. …what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth.
Some journalists don’t understand this distinction between income and wealth.
Or perhaps they do understand, but pretend otherwise because they see their role as being handmaidens of the Biden Administration.
Consider these excerpts from a column by Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times.
Jeff Bezos…added an estimated $99 billion in wealth between 2014 and 2018 but reported only $4.22 billion in taxable income during that period. Warren Buffett, who amassed $24.3 billion in new wealth over those years, reported $125 million in taxable income. …some of the wealthiest people in the United States essentially live under a different system of income taxation from the rest of us.
Mr. Appelbaum is wrong. The rich have a lot more assets than the rest of us, but they operate under the same rules.
If I have an asset that increases in value, that doesn’t count as taxable income. And it isn’t income. It’s merely a change in net wealth.
And the same is true if Bill Gates has an asset that increases in value.
Now that we’ve addressed the policy mistakes, let’s turn our attention to the scandal of IRS misbehavior.
The WSJ‘s editorial addresses the agency’s grotesque actions.
Less than half a year into the Biden Presidency, the Internal Revenue Service is already at the center of an abuse-of-power scandal. …ProPublica, a website whose journalism promotes progressive causes, published information from what it said are 15 years of the tax returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other rich Americans. …The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. …The timing here is no coincidence, comrade. …someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner? This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more… As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica? …Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.
And Charles Cooke of National Review also weighs in on the implications of a weaponized and partisan IRS.
We cannot trust the IRS. “Oh, who cares?” you might ask. “The victims are billionaires!” And indeed, they are. But I care. For a start, they’re American citizens, and they’re entitled to the same rights — and protected by the same laws — as everyone else. …Besides, even if one wants to be entirely amoral about it, one should consider that if their information can be spilled onto the Internet, anyone’s can. …A government that is this reckless or sinister with the information of men who are lawyered to the eyeballs is unlikely to worry too much about being reckless or sinister with your information. …The IRS wields an extraordinary amount of power, and there will always be somebody somewhere who thinks that it should be used to advance their favorite political cause. Our refusal to indulge their calls is one of the many things that prevents us from descending into the caprice and chaos of your average banana republic. …Does that bother you? It should.
What’s especially disgusting is that the Biden Administration wants to reward IRS corruption with giant budget increases, bolstered by utterly fraudulent numbers.
Needless to say, that would be a terrible idea (sadly, Republicans in the past have been sympathetic to expanding the size of the tax bureaucracy).
At around 7 a.m. in March 2020, an Alberta SWAT team knocked in the door of the home rented by Joshua Bennett and Jennifer Hacker. At the same time, an armored vehicle knocked out their living room window and cops fired tear gas into the home and tossed in a stun grenade. They arrested the pair, took them to Calgary police headquarters and questioned them for more than three hours, demanding to know where the drugs they expected to find were. Bennett told them there was some marijuana in the basement. But the cops said they didn't care about marijuana. They wanted to know where the meth was. There was no meth. The raid stemmed from the fact that a suspected drug dealer was seen at their home, and Bennett was seen at her home, plus a confidential informant claimed that the woman used rural homes to stash her drugs. Bennett said he only bought some marijuana and used clothes from the woman. The raid caused $50,000 in damage to the home, and now the police are refusing to pay for repairs.
Seven cops swarmed the home of an Alabama mom charged with the dastardly crime of taking a painkiller prescribed by her doctor while she was pregnant with her son—who, by the way, is perfectly fine and now 8 months old.
In 2020, stay-at-home-mom Kim Blalock of Florence, Alabama, was pregnant with her sixth child. A year earlier, she'd had surgery for back problems resulting from a car accident. She also suffered from arthritis and a degenerative disc disease, and was prescribed hydrocodone to ease her chronic pain. Though she had stopped taking the drug when she learned she was expecting, the pain got worse as the pregnancy wore on—and she had five other kids to take care of. Six weeks before her son was due, she was in such agony that she went back to her orthopedist and he renewed her prescription.
When her baby was born and tested for drugs, which seems to be routine, the results came back positive. The Department of Human Resources (DHR), the state's child services division, investigated and quickly closed the case, according to AL.com. But the cops and the district attorney? They smelled blood.
Prosecutors couldn't charge Blalock with taking illegal drugs, because she had a prescription. They couldn't charge her with abusing the drugs, either. (Not for lack of trying, though: DHR had actually counted how many pills she had taken.) Nor could the authorities charge her with getting the legal drugs by illegal means, such as doctor shopping, or forgery. What they could and did charge her with was not informing her doctor that she was pregnant. They labeled this prescription fraud: a felony.
This represents "the literal policing of pregnancy," says Ellie Lee, Director of the Centre for Parenting Studies at the University of Kent in England, one of the rare schools with a department focused on parenting policy.
Wisely, the Alabama state legislature had already passed a 2016 law to make sure moms taking drugs prescribed by doctors could not be prosecuted. But Blalock wasn't protected by that law, ostensibly because she might not have received the prescription had she informed the doctor of her pregnancy.
Blalock visited the doctor in person, but was in her car, due to COVID-19 restrictions. Authorities asserted that her obstetrician would have weaned her off the opioid, but Blalock countered that she did indeed tell her ob-gyn.
In either case, hydrocodone just isn't very dangerous. While babies exposed to the opioid in utero may have some withdrawal symptoms once born—including "irritability, excess crying, poor feeding, and tremors," according to AL.com—those symptoms "are not life-threatening."
Obviously, no one wants a baby to suffer. But no one should want a mother to suffer, either. And when a pregnant woman is in debilitating pain, there is no solution that promises perfection all around.
Rather than recognizing that fact, police officers waited until two months after the baby was born and then "swarmed Blalock's house while she and her husband were out of town." Her two teenagers were at home and said at least seven armed officers entered, asking questions about her whereabouts. The teenagers were so rattled that they went to stay with their grandparents.
A public information officer with the Florence Police Department declined to answer questions about the raid because the investigation remains open.
Emma Roth, a lawyer with the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, is representing Blalock along with other attorneys. Roth has asked that the charges be dropped. Hanging in the balance is not just Blalock's fate but the fate of any woman who goes to the doctor and does not inform them that she's expecting.
This reminds me of the CDC recommending that women who are pregnant or even could be pregnant avoid all alcohol. That means basically no drinks from middle school to menopause. The federal government's impulse was the same as the Florence police department's: focusing so intensely on the fetus that the woman is barely an afterthought.
"This is another leap forward in the long march toward erasing pregnant women as people," says Joan Wolfe, an associate professor of women's and gender studies at Texas A&M University, and author of Is Breast Best?
"If I had known what I know now, I would rather lay in bed my entire pregnancy in pain than take a pill," Blalock said. "I didn't think it was a big deal. My son is perfectly fine."
The fact that this prescription drug is not known to cause any lasting damage to a child means there is no reason to prohibit a mom in pain from taking it and feeling better.
The answer is that they aren't very good at statistics.
I’m very interested in how doctors think. How do we use the information gained from talking to and examining a patient to reach a reasonable list of likely diagnoses (a so called “differential”)? When we order a test, what specifically are we looking for, and how will we react to the result that comes back? More cynically, I’m curious about the extent to which we … Read more
Parents at a meeting of the superwoke Loudoun County school board were arrested Tuesday after the board ended public comment and told the rowdy/patriotic crowd they would be trespassing if they stayed.
Plus: “Anyway. It’s not clear why Fauci didn’t reveal the conference call before his emails revealed it for him. But then we’re used to him holding back information from the public by now.”
(Since this blog is more of a substitute for a Twitter timeline than an actual blog, I’ll often use the date as the post title and update the post throughout the day.)
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Only a state run by liberals could regulate the marijuana business into needing a government bailout. Remember when the argument was that if we legalized pot (which I favor, by the way), governments would rake in tax revenue? California has demonstrated — again — what Ronald Reagan once said about government’s attitude towards business: If it moves, tax it. If it still moves, regulate it. When it stops moving, subsidize it.
California offers $100 million to rescue its struggling legal marijuana industry
Los Angeles will be the biggest beneficiary of the money, which was proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to help cannabis businesses acquire permanent licenses.
But let’s definitely tell everyone to get their (COVID-immune) teens vaccinated! Because who takes that “first do no harm” stuff seriously anyway? Big Pharma and The Party certainly don’t.
Draper teenager hospitalized with blood clots after COVID-19 vaccine shot
DRAPER, Utah (ABC4) – The day after his COVID-19 vaccine shot, 17-year-old Everest Romney felt his neck swelling. In the coming days, he suffered from severe headaches. His mother, who tells …
CDC Investigating Heart Inflammation in COVID-19 Vaccinated Teens, Young Adults
The CDC said it is investigating reports of heart inflammation in teenagers and young adults who have received the CCP virus vaccine.
Actually, we looked into this kind of thing among our own graduates some years back, and it turns out that bar passage rates correlate pretty tightly with LSAT scores. This isn’t surprising: One’s a big stressful law-related exam, and the others a bigger, more stressful law-related exam. So if you admit a cohort with lower LSAT scores, that cohort will tend to have a lower bar passage rate. And it’s not linear — there’s a cutoff below which the passage rate plummets sharply. This is, in fact, well-known in legal academia. Many think it’s immoral to admit students at or below that cutoff because their chance of passing the bar is so low. But many schools do so anyway.
