Cruising the Web

Guy Benson has a round-up of all the lies that the Democrats have been making about the Republican’s tax plan.

This reality, and the resulting assignment of an avalanche of ‘Pinocchios,’ comes as no surprise to our readers — who’ve been kept abreast of Democrats’ never-ending onslaught of falsehoods, misinformation, fear-mongering and distortions about the GOP’s tax reform bill. Fact-checkers have been working overtime to correct the record in an exhausting game of anti-lie whack-a-mole, with the Washington Post’s team dishing out 11 Pinocchios to three top Democrats on the ridiculous “private jet tax break” fairly tale alone. This nonsense is still floating around, promoted by the DNC chairman (See original for links).

Even Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, has fought back against that lie. While the Democrats keep pretending this bill is going to “Armageddon” for the country, let’s remember what the real problem is. Benson links to this post by Michael Tanner that exposes how ludicrous all this sky-is-falling rhetoric is coming from Democrats.

“Armageddon,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi warned, calling it “the worst bill in the history of Congress,” as it apparently surpasses the Alien-Sedition Acts, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Indian Removal Act, Prohibition, and the Gulf of Tonken Resolution, among others. Liberal journalist Kurt Eichenwald agreed that “America died tonight,” urging, “Millenials: move away if you can. USA is over. We killed it.” And disgruntled former Republican strategist Bruce Bartlett decried the bill for “raping” middle America.

Maybe not.

Start with the debt. It is wonderful that Democrats, who previously considered the national debt somewhere below lawn mold on their list of priorities, have now been reborn as deficit hawks. And there is reason to be concerned that the tax bill will add to the debt. But to keep things in perspective: Under current law, the federal government is expected to collect $43 trillion in taxes over the next ten years, while spending $53 trillion. That will increase the national debt to $30 trillion by 2028. If this tax bill passes, the federal government will collect $42 trillion in taxes over the next ten years, while spending $53 trillion. That will increase the national debt to $31 trillion by 2028.

Worse? Absolutely, like a drunk asking for one more drink. But it would be nice if everyone got this worked up about the first $30 trillion.

In fact, even after this tax cut, the federal government will be collecting 17.6 percent of GDP in taxes, more than the post-war average of 17.4 percent. The problem is that we will be spending 22.2 percent of GDP, considerably more than the 20.3 percent that we’ve averaged since World War II. We don’t tax too little — we spend too much.

We have to reform entitlements. Washington, particularly the Democrats have been putting that task off for far too long. Remember all the bile shoved George W. Bush’s way when he tried to tackle reforming Social Security? Remember how Paul Ryan was pictured throwing Granny off a cliff for trying to reform Medicare. Sooner or later, Congress will try once again to tackle mandatory spending. And be prepared to hear the Democrats howl that the necessity for doing so is all due to their tax plan. Tanner concludes,

Ultimately, we should recall that taxes, even if a necessary evil, reduce people’s choices and autonomy. Every dollar that the federal government takes from people to spend the way it wants is one less dollar that individuals have to spend the way that they want. As Frédéric Bastiat put it in his parable of the broken window: If the shopkeeper with the broken window hadn’t had to pay to replace it, “he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes or added another book to his library.” Or to put it in today’s context, he might have purchased health care, saved for his retirement, or donated to charity. He might have started a business or hired workers. Or he might have spent it entirely on frivolities. Whatever he might have done, he is now deprived of that choice.

Giving some of that money back falls a little short of Armageddon.

But when Republicans talk about tax reform or tax cuts, the Democrats are automatically programmed to cry “Armageddon.” They can’t stop themselves from dialing the outrage meter up to a 11.

Jonah Goldberg has a handy primer to understand when deficits are truly bad.

In Washington, when you hear people complain that this or that piece of legislation will “explode” the deficit, what they are really telling you is that they don’t like the legislation.

It’s really that simple. Good legislation, like good food, movies, novels, and pretty much everything else except for dogs (they’re all good), is in the eye of the beholder. A politician or partisan who thinks a proposal is worth doing will think it’s worth doing even if it increases the deficit. If he thinks a proposal is bad, he might argue that it’s bad on the merits. But you can be sure that if it also increases the deficit, he will cite this fact as a major reason why it is bad.

That is the role deficits — and the national debt — play in our politics. Anti-debt talk serves as a dye marker for some more fundamental objection.

Almost everyone thinks deficits are bad in the abstract, but that their badness should only be a problem for the other side. In 2008, for example, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said that the $4 trillion in debt rung up under George W. Bush was “unpatriotic.” But his actual complaint wasn’t about the debt but what that money was spent on — the Iraq war and tax cuts.

Under Obama, the national debt soared from $11 trillion to just under $20 trillion, but that deficit spending was justifiable, according to Democrats, because it went to combating the financial crisis and paying for various other domestic programs.

Goldberg argues that the difference between how Republicans and Democrats regard deficits lies in their attitude toward the federal government.

As a matter of economic policy, conservatives believe that the people themselves are better at spending their money than the government is. Cutting taxes and regulations drives economic growth. Liberals, meanwhile, believe that the government is the prime, or at least an indispensable, driver of economic growth.

This is why liberals tend to talk about spending on everything from infrastructure to education as an “investment.” The Obama stimulus was sold as an investment that would pay huge dividends, thanks in part to Keynesian “multipliers” — the idea that every dollar of government spending results in more than a dollar in economic growth. Obamacare, we were told, would reduce the deficit by cutting health-care spending and improving economic growth.

Conservatives make similar arguments about tax cuts. Over the weekend, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News that the tax cuts would yield more than enough economic growth to make up for the deficit the bill creates on paper.

On the philosophical side, there’s an even starker conflict of visions. Liberals tend to start from the assumption that the government is entitled to as much revenue as it needs, and so tax cuts amount to giving people money.

They always ignore the uncomfortable reality that the money that supposedly being given to people was their money to begin with.

Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a budget that would add at least $21 trillion to the debt over a decade. But when the Senate passed the GOP tax bill, he tweeted, “Historians will look back on Dec. 1, 2017 and conclude this was one of the great robberies in US history because Republicans are looting the Treasury.” For Sanders, letting people keep more of their own money is theft — because it’s really the government’s money.

Conservatives, on the other hand, start from the assumption that money belongs to the people and businesses who earn it. Letting people and businesses keep more of their money isn’t a handout or giveaway, never mind a robbery: It’s fairness.

The ultimate problem is that everyone says they care about the deficit, but few people care about it enough. Democrats think spending is more important than the deficit, and Republicans think cutting taxes is more important. And that’s why the national debt is more than $20 trillion, and growing.

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The Washington Post looked at an episode that seems to have disappeared from public discussion – the attack on Senator Rand Paul by his neighbor. They explore the possible reasons why his neighbor, Rene Boucher, might have attacked Paul. Those on Boucher’s side, especially his attorney, claim that there was nothing political in why Boucher tackled Paul, without warning and when Paul was mowing his lawn and had earplugs in. Of course, that is in Bouche’s interest since there are federal charges that could be filed for attacking a U.S. senator for political reasons. They want us to believe that he attacked Paul simply over differences in landscaping care. Neighbors of the two men seem to be divided on whether to believe that the attack was motivated by landscaping differences. It’s all a bit he said/he said. But James Freeman raises an interesting observation.

For good reason, nobody is asking if Gwyneth Paltrow or Ashley Judd did something to annoy Harvey Weinstein. But the crack staff at Jeff Bezos’ newspaper thinks it’s perfectly appropriate in the Paul case to suggest that the assault victim might have had shortcomings in the area of lawn maintenance.

This column has heard from various other residents of the Rivergreen community who say the Pauls are excellent neighbors who have no such shortcomings. But even if they did, a violent assault would hardly be justified.

Readers will note that Mr. Boucher’s attorney is not denying that his client attacked Sen. Paul. And as the Post notes, according to police on the day of the attack Mr. Boucher did not deny it either, even though he has since pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge….

Like various other media outlets, the Post has been happy to publish the speculations of Paul critics on what he might have done to precipitate the attack. Is there any other assault victim—in Hollywood, in Washington, or anywhere else—for whom the Post would regard such coverage as acceptable?

As Rand Paul’s wife, Kelley, has written,

This was not a “scuffle,” a “fight” or an “altercation,” as many in the media falsely describe it. It was a deliberate, blindside attack. The impact left Rand with six broken ribs, three displaced, pleural effusion and now pneumonia. This has been a terrible experience; made worse by the media’s gleeful attempts to blame Rand for it, ridiculing him for everything from mowing his own lawn to composting.

Robert Tracinski explains why the CFPB employees who are determined to resist any diminution of their powers are not Dumbledore’s Army and, instead, are much closer to Dolores Umbridge. First there is the problem of simplistically adopting metaphors from children’s literature and don’t seem to understand that those fighting for liberty in kidlit are not the same as bureaucrats who want to give more power to the national government.

They like to play around with symbols of the heroic fight for freedom and of individualistic resistance against authority, then turn around and impose rigid codes of conformity and demand a big, intrusive government staffed by exactly the kind of power-hungry bureaucrats they just told us they were against.

Maybe it’s a form of overcompensation. The more they advocate tyranny, the more they have to cosplay as freedom fighters. They play at being the Resistance to keep from having to recognize that they are loyalists of the Empire. Or they play at being Dumbledore’s Army to avoid looking in the mirror and seeing Dolores Umbridge.

Those rebellious bureaucrats are angry because Republicans want to limit their power.

ake the case of the CFPB. Its resistance to Mick Mulvaney began when he was appointed as their acting director in place of the successor outgoing director Richard Cordray had chosen. Since when did an executive agency head get to pick his own successor? Since Congress created the CFPB with legislation that tried to give the bureau its own little island of authority with no accountability either to Congress or to the chief executive. President Trump had to assert the overriding law—and the constitutional structure of government—in order to insist on his own appointment for the agency’s head. But bureaucrats don’t like that, so they’re trying to undermine the policies of the elected head of the executive branch.

This has been something of a pattern since the last election, with mid-level bureaucrats doing things like starting rogue Twitter feeds for various government agencies, or setting up networks where they discuss policy by way of encrypted messaging apps to avoid the scrutiny of their superiors, as well as congressional oversight and Freedom of Information Act requests. That’s the symbol of the Resistance: the rogue federal bureaucrat fighting to reassert policies the permanent administrative state favors over those voters have chosen. It is rule by and for mid-level bureaucrats, by and for Umbridge and her equivalent.

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Add in another congressman using taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit against him for sexual harassment – Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat from Florida. Roll Call reports,

The Treasury Department paid $220,000 in a previously undisclosed agreement to settle a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment that involved Florida Democrat Alcee L. Hastings, according to documents obtained by Roll Call.

Winsome Packer, a former staff member of a congressional commission that promotes international human rights, said in documents that the congressman touched her, made unwanted sexual advances, and threatened her job. At the time, Hastings was the chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, where Packer worked.

Hastings has called Packer’s charges “ludicrous” and in documents said he never sexually harassed her.

“Until this evening, I had not seen the settlement agreement between the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and Ms. Packer,” the congressman said in a statement Friday night. “This matter was handled solely by the Senate Chief Counsel for Employment. At no time was I consulted, nor did I know until after the fact that such a settlement was made.”

Hastings said that the lawsuit that Packer filed against him and an investigation by the House Ethics Committee were ultimately dismissed.

“I am outraged that any taxpayer dollars were needlessly paid to Ms. Packer,” he said.

The 2014 payment to settle the case involving Hastings was not apparently included in a breakdown of payouts to settle discrimination complaints against House lawmakers from the past five years released last month by the Office of Compliance, which approves the payouts. That total included only one payment to resolve a sexual harassment claim — $84,000 paid to settle a complaint against Texas GOP Rep. Blake Farenthold.

So what are we supposed to believe about this fund and the payments it’s made if there are other payments that went out from some other funds? And how convenient that they made the settlement without, apparently, talking to Hastings. But I’m always wary of trusting anything that comes from Alcee Hastings. Remember that he was once a federal judge who was impeached and thrown off the bench for accepting bribes to lessen the sentences of two felons and lying under oath about it. The Senate threw him out of office but didn’t bar him from seeking federal office and so he ran in 1993 and has been in the House ever since. And who knows exactly what happened. Not this conclusion from Roll Call.

Packer sued under a federal statute that allows individuals to seek damages against federal officials for violations of civil rights. But Hastings was dropped from the lawsuit in 2012, after he argued that the law didn’t apply to a member of Congress. The suit continued against the commission.

The House Ethics Committee closed its investigation in December 2014. It interviewed eight witnesses and concluded that the most serious allegations against Hastings were “not supported by evidence” although he “did admit to certain conduct that was less than professional.”

How typical that a law was passed that didn’t apply to members of Congress. Wo what was “less than professional” conduct he admitted to? Why did this Commission decide to pay a settlement if he was so innocent that he persuaded the House Ethics Committee?

This is the newest way to survive in socialist hellhole Venezuela.

Crisis-wracked Venezuela has become fertile ground for what’s known as gold farming. People spend hours a day playing dated online games such as Tibia and RuneScape to acquire virtual gold, game points or special characters that they can sell to other players for real money or crypto-currencies such as bitcoin. The practice, which has previously cropped up in other basket-case economies such as North Korea’s, has become so popular with Venezuelans that they’re now spreading inflation inside the virtual worlds.

“We’ve never made this much before,” says Efrain Peña, 29, who plays seven days a week at the Mona Pizza cybercafe to support his wife and child. Most Venezuelan gold farmers make the equivalent of a couple of dollars a day, but in many ways they’re better off than salaried workers, because their earnings are indexed to Venezuela’s black-market dollar exchange rate. “What job can match what we’re making now?” says the onetime graphic designer.

Inflation has spiraled into quadruple digits. The bolívar has shed almost all of its value against the dollar this year and was trading at 108,279 on the black market on Dec. 4. “It’s shameful. I never thought game currency would be worth more than that of our country,” says Enegebe Sención, 30, an out-of-work computer programmer who for the past five months has played Tibia to support his family.

As CNN has had to retract its breathless scoop that someone had shared the WikiLeaks dump on hacked DNC emails before that information was posted publicly only to later have to acknowledge that their sources had made a mistake on the date and that sharing took place after the information was already posted, there are lots of questions as to why CNN first made the mistake and now won’t make public who were the sources who gave them false information. Glenn Greenwald, no conservative, calls it the media’s “most humiliating debacle in ages.” He chastises the network for first airing the information when it had never even seen the email and had only had it described to them.

All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question — one which CNN refuses to address: how did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way, and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?

He points out that the news spread far and wide throughout Twitter as countless people tweeted and retweeted out the story. The retraction didn’t get anywhere near the play that the original story did. And CNN waited hours before acknowledging their mistake.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived — filled with false news and propaganda — by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy — which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like — would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email, and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

MSNBC also published the story. The reason why CNN is protecting those sources who disseminated false information suggests that they are protecting people with high-level access to secret information and who have been sources of leaks to them before so they want to protect those sources. Greenwald suspects what a lot of people are suspecting.

Think about what this means. It means that at least two — and possibly more — sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial information to the public: which “multiple sources” acted jointly to disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s largest news outlets?

The public should be allowed to judge what happened, but it can’t while CNN, CBS, and MSNBC protect these rogue sources.

Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by PR executives and lawyers.

How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?

The more serious you think the Trump/Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the U.S. media as “Fake News,” the more you should be disturbed by what happened here, the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding. If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them. It is debacles like this — and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate — that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.

Mollie Hemingway poses 18 reasonable questions CNN should answer about what went wrong. For example,

2. Does CNN believe it’s ethical to write about a document and not let readers and viewers know up front that reporters and editors haven’t seen the document?

3. If CNN didn’t see the email, who told CNN about it?

4. Why did CNN believe these sources?

5. Were they Democratic Members of Congress on the House Select Committee on Intelligence leaking information from this week’s testimony?

6. Were they staff of these members?

7. Are these sources independent or in the same office or otherwise related to each other?

8. What other stories have these individuals sourced for CNN and what dates were they published?

9. What is being done to check these stories out for inaccuracies?

10. How many of these stories related to the Russia investigation?

11. How many other stories has CNN reported where it never actually saw the documents it reported as fact?

12. Can CNN point to another big story anchored to documents that its journalists haven’t authenticated?

So far, they’ve been stonewalling on all of them. The Daily Caller reminds us of seven times CNN messed up in its reporting this year. Amazingly, all the mistakes leaned the same way in how they reported or spun stories about Trump. Trump does enough idiotic things on his own; why do they need to make up stuff is beyond me. But their actions help to explain why Trump gets so much traction when he decries #FakeNews.

Of course, Fox News isn’t pure when it comes to reporting fake news. For example, when one of Roy Moore’s accusers admitted on Friday that she had added the date and place of Moore’s inscription in her yearbook, Fox News twisted that story to make it seem that she had admitted forging the entire inscription.

On Friday, Fox News claimed that one of Roy Moore’s accusers forged some of a yearbook inscription which had previously been used to substantiate Moore’s connection with the alleged victim.

Fox News tweeted that, “Roy Moore accuser admits she forged part of yearbook inscription attributed to Alabama senate candidate.” (Fox later deleted the tweet without explanation.)

There is a big difference between admitting that she wrote in the time and place and saying she forged the whole thing. How many Alabamians saw the first tweet and took it as one more reason not to believe the accusations against Moore? That is irresponsible journalism.

By the way, how incompetent is Gloria Allred as a lawyer that she allowed her client to put this yearbook inscription out there without clarifying this point in the first place? And then she stonewalled for a month while people discussed how the handwriting in the original inscription didn’t match the rest of it. Hint to women making accusations against powerful men – do not hire GLoria Allred or her daughter, who once defended Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior, to defend you.

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Andrew McCarthy reminds us that, Trump really wanted to get to the truth on whether the FBI used the Steele dossier to get a FISA warrant or whether Obama officials were improperly unmasking the names of Trump campaign officials, all Trump would have to do is order that information made public or, at least, turned over to the proper investigative committees in Congress. But he hasn’t done so. All he’s done is bluster about what might have happened. Could it be that Trump knows that the information released wouldn’t be to his benefit? It’s an interesting question.

In the unmasking controversy, it seems Trump was more interested in politically exploiting the specter of abusive unmasking than in ordering the disclosure of what actually happened. Is the same thing true of the dossier? I don’t know why the FBI and Justice Department are stonewalling the Intelligence Committee. Suffice it to say, however, that the president could order disclosure if he wanted to. He hasn’t. If he persists in that posture, we have to assume he would prefer that we not know what the FBI told the FISA Court.

This episode should be in Diplomacy for Dummies of what not to do as an ambassador.

The French ambassador to the United States used Pearl Harbor Day as an occasion to bash America’s position on World War II in the 1930s.

“In this Pearl Harbor day, we should remember that the US refused to side with France and UK to confront fascist powers in the 30s,” Gérard Araud wrote Thursday night in a now-deleted tweet.

How smart is it for the ambassador to the U.S. to bash us on Pearl Harbor Day. And does he want to open up a discussion of France’s and Britain’s appeasement of Germany in the 1930s? The U.S. wasn’t the one closing its eyes to Hitler’s move into the Rhineland. The U.S. didn’t meet at Munich to hand Czechoslovakia over to the Germans.