Thursday, September 14, 2017

America Needs An "Equalization Amendment." Al Franken, the Senate's Male Buffoon. Tax Return On A Post Card and Implications.


Whether authentic or not it tells the story of what is wrong.

This was sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader and I asked was there a racial message in this video? https://youtu.be/AQsvs9r4dqM
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Kids nowadays are taught to have high self-esteem. They are told that they should feel good about themselves because they’re unique, which makes them special. This, though, is exactly the wrong advice. Why? Because telling kids to have high self-esteem is telling them to think highly of themselves for doing…nothing. In this week’s video, Matt Walsh, writer for TheBlaze and author of “The Unholy Trinity,” explains why self-esteem is self-defeating. Watch the video here.

Prager is a kill joy.  I always felt bad for myself when someone "more deserving" got the trophy. What our nation needs is an "Equalization Amendment."  

The Declaration of Independence states 'it is self-evident that all Men are created equal.' The problem is that after one is born things begin to happen that make us unequal.The fact that we are different in various ways, as God must have intended, shows that those who wrote our Declaration of Independence got it all wrong. Therefore,since  genetic scientists in California have the ability to rectify this problem equalization is something we sorely need and should insist we have as an entitlement. Then, all lives would matter equally and fascists would be out of business and our statues and history would be secure.
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Al Franken is the Senate's valedictorian comedian.  He even hams up whatever Trump wants. (See 1 below.)
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More outrageous Obama rules being erased. (See 2 below.)
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Most everyone in the mass media are commenting about Trump's willingness to do deals with Democrats.  Some say he will lose his base, some are giddy over the angst he has caused his party and particularly McConnell and Ryan. Others, myself included, are somewhat circumspect about any deal Trump  strikes with the likes of  Schumer and Pelosi.  One can at least draw comfort Harry Reid is gone but his personal pick is running to take his place.

When I hear revenue neutral I guess that allows for income from projected growth.

If I can do my tax return on a postcard and eliminate the annual cost of an accountant and aggravation I go through in maintaining tax records and seven years of past returns I would be delirious. This can be accomplished by taking away all deductible items, increasing the joint/family allowance and pay gross income at a severly reduced rate.

Would I lose deductions for capital loss offsets against capital gains?

Should we continue to be double taxed on dividends and interest income?

Then the question becomes would we still give as much to charities we support since  we would receive no deductions.

Stay tuned.

And

As for DACA.  Trump will dance around calling it amnesty and eventually all children and probably their illegal families will be allowed to stay.  They may have to wait to apply for citizenship or some such attached mild slap on the wrist and pay some penalties etc. but it is something that needs to be resolved. If Trump agrees will he then demand nothing happens until our borders are secured and we get more enforcement? Call it a wall, call it a fence call it whatever you want.

If Congress cannot accomplish this then who needs them. They all should be fired.  Trump has momentum. If he moves forward and Congress remains stuck in the mud they will be seen as the impediment to progress and will sink even lower in the eyes of the public. Trump has Congress over the barrel they put themselves there because of their inability to get anything done.

McConnell accused Trump of not understanding the arcane pace at which Congress moves, while accomplishing nothing, after they failed to pass health care legislation.  Trump understands incompetency.  He understands stonewalling. He understands excuses for failure.  He has dealt with it all his real estate life. He was elected to shake things up if not drain the swamp.  He is up against a tide of resistance.  Will he drown in his effort to drain the swamp?

The only things Trump has going for him is his love of combat, his ability to rally the people who basically are on his side and  are fed up with Congress and his own ability to continue pointing to Congress and some of his fellow Republicans as the people's enemy.

FDR did it when he coined the phrase: " Martin, Barton and Fish" referring to three members of Congress who were opposed to everything he was attempting to accomplish. He proved effective.

Stay tuned.
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Dick
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1)

WSJ: Grassley Must Stop Dems' Obstruction of Trump's Nominees


The Democratic Party’s abuse of Senate rules to obstruct President Donald Trump’s nominees have become so petty and absurd that it’s time for Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley to put a stop to it, The Wall Street Journal editorial board declared on Wednesday.
The editorial cites Minnesota Democrat Al Franken’s refusal to return his “blue slip” on the nomination of Minnesota Supreme Court Justice David Stras to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Blue slips are a bipartisan tradition whereby senators can block votes on nominees to the lower federal courts from their home states and were once reserved for nominees with ethical baggage.
But the editorial states that Franken has turned the procedure into a sham. Stras is held in high esteem across Minnesota legal circles, including earning the highest rating from the liberal American Bar Association, and even Franken has been unable to come up with a flaw in his legal record.
That, however, has not stopped Franken from trying to disqualify Stras due to his choice of those he admires. Stras has called Justice Clarence Thomas a role model and worked as a law clerk for him, and Stras also “talked about how the jurisprudence of Justice [Antonin] Scalia helped to shape his own views.”
The editorial criticized the absurdity of disqualifying someone who admires widely esteemed Senate-confirmed Supreme Court justices and pointed out that “Trump was elected in part on an explicit promise to appoint judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia, so the Franken standard pre-emptively disqualifies any Trump nominee.”
There is no reason for Grassley to stand for this nonsense, the editorial stated. He has the authority under Senate rules to suspend the blue-slip tradition on a case-by-case basis, as other judiciary chairmen have done in the past.
The editorial added that the Democrats’ frustration over how the Republican-controlled Senate refused to even give a hearing to President Barack Obama’s nominee Neil Gorsuch “doesn’t give them the right to block a president’s nominees merely because a left-wing senator thinks someone admires the wrong justices.”
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2) Sexual Politics

The DeVos revision of sexual-abuse rules will reveal who stands where on due process.

By 

In the annals of American justice, it will be hard to exceed what the Obama administration tried to do with its Title IX guidance letter in 2011. The letter from the Department of Education—most ironically, from its Office of Civil Rights—effectively eliminated centuries of due-process rights at every institution of higher learning in the U.S. That transgression is about to end.


Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is expected to rescind the rules imposed by the 2011 letter in the next week or two. In advance of formal rule-making, according to senior officials, the department will issue interim guidance on handling campus sexual-abuse cases.
On the crucial issue of evidence, the interim guidance will permit schools to immediately adopt the higher “clear and convincing” standard of proof. It will tell schools they should give equal legal treatment to both parties in these cases, as in the calling of witnesses or the presence of attorneys.
Formal rules will emerge after a public notice-and-comment period, which is the federal rule-making requirement President Obama’s appointees tossed aside.
While the interim guidance isn’t mandatory, the department will retain and if necessary use its enforcement authority after the formal rules emerge.
Mrs. DeVos is not going to threaten to withdraw a school’s federal funding, as happened with the Obama diktat. That hammer likely won’t be necessary.
By now most institutions want a modus vivendi on this issue to replace what had become a crudely run jihad by left-wing lawyers in the Obama Education Department and the network of ideological enforcers their order created on the nation’s campuses.
Indeed, after Mrs. DeVos’s speech last week announcing her intention to rescind the rules, it was striking how muted the public opposition was. Among what’s left of serious minds in academia, there was an awareness that something here had gone waaaay off the rails. Faculty at both Penn and Harvard law schools had already issued statements decrying the Obama sexual-abuse rules as fundamentally unfair to the accused.
It is difficult to express what a big deal this is—or should be. Basic due process guarantees have existed in English-language law since they were embedded in the King John’s Magna Carta in 1215. The U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment reads: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him . . . and to have the assistance of counsel.”
One has to ask: How in 2011 did this rule roll out of the Obama Education Department and become the law of the land in academia without so much as a peep of outrage from them or the American press? Imagine the revolt if an administration attempted to impose on every U.S. newspaper such a sweeping dilution of the First Amendment. Donald Trump’s mere accusation that the press is fake news has produced a nonstop death struggle between the media and White House.
The explanation that the universities caved because the Obama lawyers threatened to withhold their federal-funding fix is persuasive but insufficient. Policy ideas like the 2011 sexual-abuse standards have a provenance, usually among left-wing faculty of the sort who emerged when the Obamas got their degrees in the 1980s. So it was with the Title IX “guidance,” which jumped overnight—by fiat—from the outer edge of feminist legal theory to established federal policy.
In testimony presented to Congress in 2014, Nancy Chi Cantalupo of Georgetown Law School’s Victim Rights Law Center made a detailed case for the rules. “It is downright dangerous,” she wrote, “to conflate civil rights and criminal justice approaches to sexual violence and allow criminal justice responses to dominate our collective imagination regarding how to address this violence.” Meaning sexual abuse is a unique, transcendent category of injury, which justifies diminishing due process.
The most definitive criticism of the Obama Title IX enforcement was written in 2015 for the Yale Law & Policy Review by, of all people, Janet Napolitano, who was Mr. Obama’s first homeland security secretary and is now president of the University of California system. Ms. Napolitano’s careful but forceful essay—actually a precursor to Mrs. DeVos’s speech last week—described all sorts of compliance problems and dilemmas created by “ambiguous legal requirements” and congressional legislation.
The creation of an atmosphere on campus akin to the Salem witch trials was the result of Mr. Obama’s explicit policy choice to manipulate bedrock legal principles for a political goal. After the DeVos speech last week, former Vice President Joe Biden denounced “any rollback of Title IX protections.” Thus, demoting due process standards is now Democratic dogma.
After the DeVos announcement restoring widely accepted legal principles to America’s campuses, we’re going to find out fast who stands where on this subject.
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