Monthly Archives: April 2016

Politics, U.S. Constitution

Mark Zukerberg, TURD

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Zuckerberg is another one of those TURDs who think they can pontificate upon how we should be accepting of whatever the government or corporations throw at us, i.e., open immigration and destruction of our Fourth Amendment Rights, while holding themselves and their families to different standards.  F off Zucker!  TURD

Facebook Spent $16 Million on Armed Guards for Billionaire Progressive Mark Zuckerberg

mark zuckerberg facebook

Steve Jennings/Getty

by AWR HAWKINS28 Apr 20161098

Facebook has spent $16 million on armed security for billionaire progressive Mark Zuckerberg.

This means that even as Facebook was incrementally barring law-abiding citizens–including licensed gun dealers–from advertising firearm sales for self-defense, they were spending millions to keep Zuckerberg surrounded by hired guys carrying guns.

Facebook’s ban on the advertisement of gun sales has even led to the deletion of accounts on which the word “firearms” is included.

According to Quartz, Zuckerberg “famously takes $1 annual salary” from Facebook. However, Facebook “revealed that it spent more than $16 million over the past five years on private air travel and other aspects of Zuckerberg’s ‘overall security program.’”

The amount of money spent on Zuckerberg’s security was disclosed after the SEC pressed Facebook to explain whether “security expenses” were included in “Zuckerberg’s annual compensation package.”

The company, which had previously only disclosed travel costs, provided the SEC with security costs for Zuckerberg as well. “Facebook had previously claimed that it didn’t have to report Zuckerberg’s security costs because the measures weren’t put in place for his convenience, so they didn’t fall under rules governing the disclosure of executive perks.”

Zuckerberg’s number two–chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg–spent $1.25 million on security last year.

Breitbart News reported that private citizens were banned from advertising gun sales on Facebook on January 29.

Politics

Carly Fiorina, TURD!

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The trouble with Carly Fiorina: Top 11 red flags

By Michelle Malkin  •  April 28, 2016 12:14 AM

Ted Cruz’s vice presidential announcement yesterday was intended to galvanize Republicans and provide a boost to his campaign heading into Indiana and California. Many of my friends and colleagues support the decision.

But Cruz’s choice of Carly Fiorina troubles me deeply. Here are 11 red flags:

  1. H-1B. At a time when thousands of American high-skilled workers are gettingsacked and replaced with cheap foreign H-1B visa holders, embracing Fiorina sends a terrible message about Cruz’s commitment to H-1B reform. At Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina was an early adopter of the sovereignty-sabotaging practices now running rampant and undeterred at Disney, Southern California Edison, Abbott Labs, Intel, and countless other American companiescolluding with offshore outsourcers. Old corporate habits and addictions are hard to break.

Flashback:

2. DREAM Act/Amnesty. Fiorina supported in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens during her Senate bid and heartily “applauded and saluted” the Gang of Eight mass illegal alien amnesty/guest worker visa bonanza in 2013 on liberal network MSNBC. She also bungled a debate question on birthright citizenship last fall and called efforts to close the illegal alien loophole an “emotional distraction.”

  1. Fed Ed and Common Core. Cruz promises to repeal Common Core “on Day One.” Similarly, presidential candidate Carly Fiorina condemned the outsized influence of corporate cronies on federal education standards and Common Core last fall. But Fiorina’s newfound position smacks of the very kind of campaign-timed conversion that Cruz says he opposes. In 2010, when she ran her disastrous Senate campaign in California, Fiorina endorsed the Obama Race to the Top program that provided billions in subsidies to states as inducements to adopt Common Core.  Note: It is not a coincidence that the same Big Business companies that push Common Core are the same ones pushing massive expansion of amnesty and guest worker programs.
  1. Government bailouts and stimulus spending. As I wrote back in 2010, “Fiorina served as the economic adviser to [John] McCain, who supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $25 billion auto bailout, a $300 billion mortgage bailout, and the first $85 billion AIG bailout.” She flip-flopped on the bailouts, as well as on the Obama stimulus—whose broadband funding she cheered in 2009.
  2. “Admiration and empathy for Hillary Clinton.” Speaks for itself:

Fiorina participated in two Clinton Global Initiative events and also gave money to the left-leaning, H-1B-hungry Hillary donor TechNet PAC.

  1. Gender card exploitation. I was one of the few who pointed this out at the time and I haven’t forgotten: Fiorina acted and sounded more like a radical campus left-wing feminist/Black Lives Matter activist than a lifelong conservative in 2009 when she derided her “white man” GOP primary opponent, Chuck DeVore.
  2. BFF Jesse Jackson. Perhaps Fiorina learned the “white man” rhetoric from her pal, race-hustling shakedown artist Jesse Jackson—whom Fiorina embraced while at Hewlett-Packard and repeatedly praised.
  3. A vote for Sonia Sotomayor. In keeping with her identity politics pandering, Fiorina said she would have voted for reliable liberal SCOTUS justice andlongtime open-borders champion Sonia Sotomayor.
  4. Super PAC funny business. The dealings between Cruz’s super PAC and Fiorina’s super PAC just don’t smell right.
  5. Record of failure. In business and in politics, Fiorina has a long track record of failing upward (and being a deadbeat to boot.)

It’s more than just the desperation of Cruz’s VP pick that is problematic. It’s the dissonant bad judgment of choosing a running mate who resembles theduplicitous “campaign season conservative” whom Cruz has spent this entire election cycle disavowing.

Finally, #11:

When the best person you can find to be your running mate is a twice-failed candidate who accused you of saying anything to win, that’s not a red flag. It’s a four-alarm fire.

Government

City of Seattle, TURDs

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RECYCLE THIS! CITY’S GARBAGE SPIES KICKED TO CURB
Mandate ‘promoted a policy of massive and persistent snooping’
author BOB UNRUH

The city of Seattle’s policy of inspecting residents’ garbage and issuing fines for throwing away too much food has been declared an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

The ruling from Chief Civil Judge Beth Andrus on Wednesday granted a motion for summary judgment by residents who sued the city over the garbage can inspections.

The Pacific Legal Foundation brought the case on behalf of Seattle residents Richard Bonesteel, Scott Shock, Steven Davies, Sally Oljar, Mark Elster, Greg Moon, Keli Carender and Edwin Yasukawa.

PLF attorney Ethan Blevins called the ruling “a victory for common sense and constitutional rights.”

“A clear message has been sent to Seattle public officials: Recycling and other environmental initiatives can’t be pursued in a way that treats people’s freedoms as disposable,” he said.

Is Orwell’s nightmare already here? Read about what’s happening in “Police State U.S.A.”

Blevins said Seattle “can’t place its composting goals over the privacy rights of its residents.”

“By authorizing garbage collectors to pry through people’s garbage without a warrant, the city has promoted a policy of massive and persistent snooping,” he said. “That’s not just wrong as a matter of policy, as the judge has correctly ruled, it is wrong as a matter of law.”

As WND reported in 2015, the city imposed a policy requiring garbage collectors to check residents’ trash and then red-tag the address or even impose fines if more than 10 percent of the contents were compostable materials.

But the lawsuit argued the Washington state constitution provides that, “No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of law.”

The complaint explained citizens are to be afforded due process before they can be penalized, and the state Supreme Court already has ruled that “a person has a legitimate expectation that, absent a warrant, the contents of his or her garbage cans will remain private and free from government inspection while placed curbside for collection.”

It Orwell’s nightmare already here? Read about what’s happening in “Police State U.S.A.”

Blevins said when the case arose that the “food waste ban uses trash collectors to pry through people’s garbage without a warrant, as Washington courts have long required for garbage inspections by police.”

PLF Principal Attorney Brian Hodges, who is managing attorney with PLF’s Pacific Northwest Center in Bellevue, said that while “it’s laudable to encourage recycling and composting, the city is going about it in a way that trashes the privacy rights of each and every person in Seattle.”

Seattle’s program had instructed garbage collectors to enter an “Exception Code 25” and “Rate Charge” into an onboard computer “any time the collectors observe more than 10 percent of combined recycling, food waste and compastable paper in a resident’s garbage can,” the judge explained.

Then they also were to leave “adhesive SPU red tags” on all “non-compliant cans.”

They also had the option of leaving a sign stating: “It’s not garbage anymore. We found food, recyclables or yard waste in your garbage. Per Seattle Municipal Code 21.36.083, food, recyclables and yard waste are not allowed in the garbage. Starting July 1, 2015, a fine of $1 will be levied on your garbage bill for each violation.”

The judge explained the state Supreme Court previously had ruled that a defendant’s garbage could not be searched by police without a search warrant.

“The Supreme Court held that any resident who places garbage in a can and puts it on the curb for collection reasonably believes the garbage will not be subjected to a warrantless governmental search,” the judge wrote. “In other words, we expect the collector to pick up our garbage and remove it for proper disposal; we do not expect that the government will search the contents of our garbage bags to identify evidence of wrong-doing.”

She continued, “If a person has a privacy interest in their own garbage and a garbage collector cannot give the garbage to a police officer to perform a warrantless search, then the collector himself could not conduct such a search either.”

Copyright 2016 WND

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/citys-garbage-snooped-kicked-to-curb/#3vEs7X0c1REw3dTp.99

Politics, Right to Keep and Bear Arms

California Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), TURD

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Democrat Pushes to Expand ‘Secret’ Gun Confiscations in California

CA Gun Confiscation AP

by AWR HAWKINS27 Apr 2016480

California Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) is pushing to expand firearm confiscations by allowing co-workers and others to file a complaint that sets the “secret” confiscation process in motion.

The confiscations are tied to Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVROs), which were passed by CA Democrats following Elliot Rodger’s May 23, 2014 Santa Barbara attack. GVROs were touted as a vehicle through which families could petition a court for the seizure of guns from a family member. With order in hand, police could confiscate firearms from the family member without notice.

The GVROs were signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown (D) on October 1, 2014 and became effective January 1, 2016. Assemblyman Ting is now pushing AB 2607 to expand GVROs so co-workers, employers, teachers, and others, can petition a court to have the “secret” confiscations ordered.

In an April 27 press release, the Firearms Policy Coalition observed:

[Ting’s] bill massively expands a controversial law that has only been in place for 4 months. At present, current law permits family members and peace officers to petition a court, in secret, in order to restrain an individual from possessing firearms. AB 2607 compounds this measure by adding, to the list of qualified petitioners, employers, coworkers, mental health workers, and employees of a secondary or postsecondary school.

This would add thousands of people (including complete strangers) to the list of people who could petition a court to restrain a person from possessing firearms, triggering a warrant and armed law enforcement raids—without trial, conviction, or opportunity to defend oneself before a court.

Expanding the “secret” confiscation process to include teachers will have a chilling effect on gun owners who may not agree with a professor’s point of view at the university, but refuse to speak up for fear of having their gun rights suspended. In the same way, gun owners with treatable mental health problems may be tempted to stay away from caregivers in order to insure the uninterrupted continuation of their right to keep and bear arms.

Politics

To Sanders’ Supporters: Subjugated by Socialism?

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To Sanders’ Supporters: Subjugated by Socialism?

Posted On Apr 25 2016
By :

Gray people living in gray houses having gray lives and gray destinations… Socialism is based on mediocrity. Anyone who excels, anyone with aspirations and individuality, anyone who dares challenge the order and demonstrates ability – is not welcome. Left-forward, march! Sing the International and be happy in the herd!

You can see this still, anywhere socialism is extant: China, for instance. Chinese students coming to the United States are devoid of imagination. They excel in math and memorization, but give them an essay topic – and they are like a stranded seaman on a raft without a paddle or sail. They sail with the wind.

Socialism is founded on conformity. It subjugates character and individuality, shaves off sharp edges and disciplines you whenever you diverge, refusing to toe the line. When I was in kindergarten, they used to take us out for a walk. We had a rope with regular knots on it and we had to hold the rope, arranged in pairs like little soldiers. We were not allowed to run or scatter. In high school, we all had military drill exercises in PE classes: turns, salutes, or simply standing in line – all in regular, precise order.

Perhaps that is what is needed when people do not appreciate their freedom? Perhaps, there is too much liberty in our modern capitalist world and people do not appreciate it? Perhaps, we all long for order and want to be drilled and commanded?

Our Founding Fathers gave US a Republic: the response is attributed to Ben Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. Dr. James McHenry’s notes read: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin: ‘Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy.’ – ‘A republic,’ replied the Doctor ‘if you can keep it.’”

Indeed – our Freedom, if we can keep it!

The magnitude of Sanders’ supporters is truly astounding. They will argue that capitalism is evil – or at least so imperfect that we need socialism, or “more socialism.” They are persuaded that “we already have socialism” and point at the social security and Medicare as examples. Those government instituted redistribution plans have nothing to do with socialism though. They could not exist in socialism, because socialism takes from everyone and allots everyone the same: there is one plan for everybody. It is inconceivable to sue and get paid when injured, because government is the only insurer and you cannot sue the socialist government.

Plans like Medicare and social security are the advantages of market economy: hospitals and insurance companies still compete, although under the umbrella of state & federal governments. Some regulation is good, but not when it concerns the outcome or distribution. You can regulate where the crash barriers are, where the sidelines will be and where the goalposts are. You cannot regulate everything along one white line pole-to-pole – not unless you want to turn the whole state into a prison.

Imprisoned minds, imprisoned bodies. Socialists do not build walls to keep people out – but to keep them in. As someone who was arrested crossing the border to the Free World, strip-searched, cross-interrogated while machine guns were pointed at me in cross-lights of two lamps in an underground bunker by two KGB super-rats, subsequently jailed and publicly reprimanded, I have stories to tell…

To those who want more socialism, I would say: there is no perfect system or political arrangement. The best system is such which provides for most freedom, competition, self-determination and self-reliance. It is not socialism in any of its forms. Liberal democracy is not socialism. Democratic socialism is socialism. Social democracy is a term misapplied to liberal democracy by Sanders and other fanatics who want to mislead you. Social democracy is “social” only to the extent to which it is “liberal” and representative. Representative democracy may be called social democracy, but never democratic socialism. The latter is an oxymoron, because there is nothing democratic about socialism. Socialism is a system of government redistribution of everything: from your personal property to how much you are allowed to learn, to your healthcare.

Recently, I have been scornfully asked by a “Bernie” supporter who accidentally crossed my path: “What do you base it on? Yourself? Ha-ha!” Well, yes, my experience. What more do you want than the experience of someone who knows, who has been there? If you will not read the Animal Farm, 1984, Hayek and others… at least, pray to God, listen to someone who means well and knows better.

Socialism starts by instructing you what to say and when. You may not say anything against the Party. The next step is to make everybody belong to the Party, to “turn them.” Most will do it out of “free will,” because it will provide them with a more secure job, a position in a government agency or organization which depends on the system. Next, all opposition must be ridiculed and restricted, forced onto the Right Path. If they resist, they will suffer under the pressure of government Agencies: properties over $1mil must belong to the State or some larger cooperative under the state, taxes on everything which endangers the Party, for instance guns, corporate mergers, foreign imports which undermine “domestic” companies (those in close cahoots with the Party). You see, underground economy, bribes and corruption will be all that is left from free market under socialism…

The greatest paradox is that people will follow the idealist panderer to the grave – and beyond – with hope and trust that they are doing it to better humankind and make everyone better off, somehow more equal and fair and just… They call it “social justice,” but it is, in fact, “socialist justice.” In capitalism, people give freely for charitable causes which the market (market is people) determines worthy of support. In socialism, government gives equally to all causes it deems politically expedient. In capitalism, you may achieve true greatness, which is reflected by the appreciation of other people in your income and living standard. In socialism, only the Party is great; individuals have the same “equal” “social” value, thus they all deserve the same and will be allotted the same.

When Sanders calls for taxing Wall Street and that “Wall Street” will pay for everything – and his supporters blindly repeat it – they do not pause to think: What is Wall Street? A street? A corporation? What is it? Wall Street is a figure of speech, which refers to all US financial markets, similar to when we say Hollywood and we refer to the film industry. When Sanders says “Wall Street will pay for your college,” he is saying “U.S. financial markets will pay.” This means the free market economy will be taxed – every transaction on every good, every stock purchase or sale. Your parents and family who own stocks will own nothing, because it will all be “used by the government.” The goods will have to be more expensive because all companies will be taxed not twice (currently 40%) but three times: the government will determine the “final tax” or “value added tax” – the value? You may get something in the end, if you still want to go to college. But why would you, if everyone is paid the same and your job is secured – because everything is in some way tied to the Party and the Government? Go back to your gray house and be happy in your gray existence, you, gray mouse of socialism!

I am not making this up. I have been there before – and I ain’t going back!

Government, Politics

Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, TURD

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Speaker Paul Ryan Pushes Puerto Rico Bondholder Cram Down on Conservatives

House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wants Congress to pass a law that would cause Puerto Rico bondholders who own $73 billion in notes from the territory’s government to be treated the same way the federal government treated Chrysler bondholders back in 2008 and 2009.

Friday morning, Ryan addressed a special meeting of the GOP caucus to attempt to persuade recalcitrant conservatives the cram down is a good idea.

If the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA)

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI)

52%

has sponsored and Ryan supports becomes law, Puerto Rico would use the special dispensation provided the territory in the bill to force bondholders to accept pennies on the dollar prior to or during a bankruptcy filing.As George Mason University professor Todd Zywicki and the Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk wrote of the Chrysler bondholder cram down:

In bankruptcy, the secured status of these bonds should have meant that the secured creditors would be paid in full before any money was allocated to subordinate creditors, such as the UAW’s VEBA plans. Instead, the plan imposed by the government forced Chrysler’s secured creditors to accept only 29 cents on the dollar, while the UAW recovered most of the value of its claims.

As Breitbart News reported previously, if PROMESA passes, Puerto Rico’s bondholders would receive the same kind of treatment as Chrysler’s bondholders.

[The] plan that would let Puerto Rico wipe out $33 billion of its $73 billion debt in bankruptcy.
Leadership of both political parties are backing the creation of a federal “control board” and legal authorization for Puerto Rico to file bankruptcy. The effort would pave the way for a “cramdown” of about 45 percent of the island’s debt, without any spending cuts.

Conservatives in the House say that’s a bad idea.

Ryan is technically right that the PROMESA bill is not the same kind of immediate bailout of billions in direct loans to Puerto Rico as the 2008 auto bailout of Chrysler and General Motors, a good portion of which was subsequently written off.

But in many respects, his argument today echoes the words of former President George W. Bush, who defended the TARP bailout of banks that he later used to bail out the auto companies when he infamously said: “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market.”

Ryan’s need to intervene in order to save the increasingly unpopular Puerto Rico bailout is urgent.

On Wednesday, the House Natural Resources Committee rejected PROMESA in a surprise move, preventing it from coming to the floor of the House for a vote.

The bill’s passage through the committee was expected to be a slam dunk.

As recently as Tuesday, a confident Natural Resources Committee Chairman,

Rob Bishop TURD_1

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT)

, said “It is the Island’s best shot to mitigate its financial collapse and future calls for a bailout, which would be untenable. Congress must act now to avoid a humanitarian crisis that will severely impact 3.5 million Americans living in Puerto Rico and millions of Americans on the mainland.”The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Sean Duffy, was equally confident:

The three and a half million Americans living in the U.S. territory deserve the attention and support of Congress. After decades of mismanagement, Puerto Rico’s investors also deserve better. A protracted and chaotic legal battle would not serve the interest of creditors or the island. Worse would be a mutli-billion dollar taxpayer bailout thrust on the shoulders of America’s taxpayers and retirees. The PROMESA Act will ensure that the island meets its debt obligations in a controlled, responsible manner, without saddling the U.S. taxpayers with the bill. If we get this right, we have an opportunity to put the people of Puerto Rico on a path to economic opportunity. However, if we do nothing, the American people will be on the hook.

But that confidence evaporated in 48 fast moving hours.

As The Hill reported:

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will try to sell fellow Republicans on a bill to help Puerto Rico deal with its debt crisis at a special meeting Friday.

Ryan said the morning conference meeting would be solely devoted to Puerto Rico, in an effort to educate members and bring them on board with the bill, which has faced persistent conservative opposition.

“A lot of members are just coming up to speed on this,” he said Thursday. “It is why tomorrow morning, we’re doing a policy conference on just the issue of Puerto Rico. The members who have been spending a lot of time on this are going to give a presentation to the broader conference to bring people up to speed.”

The fate of that legislation took a turn for the worse late Wednesday, when the House Natural Resources Committee abruptly canceled a markup of the bill.

Republicans said the delay was spurred by Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration. Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) said the administration was still trying to alter the bill, making a markup impossible.

And Ryan contended that the bill did not receive consideration because Democrats were not willing to back it.

But a Wednesday morning hearing on the bill also made clear there was ample conservative discontent as well. Several committee members lambasted the proposal, arguing it was a bailout for an island territory with a record of fiscal mismanagement. . .

The current bill does not commit any federal funds to Puerto Rico. Instead, it establishes an outside control board to monitor the island’s finances, and allows the island to go to court to try and restructure some of its debt if voluntary negotiations with creditors fail.

On Thursday, Ryan gave an advance preview of his pitch:

There is chaos occurring. Puerto Rico passed a law negating, arguably, their debt. We want to bring order to the chaos. And the need for Puerto Rican legislation is to bring order to the chaos. And my number one priority as speaker of the House with respect to this issue is to keep the American taxpayer away from this. There will no taxpayer bailout.

We want an oversight board, just like we did with the District of Columbia a number of years ago, to be involved, to provide the kind of leadership and structure that is necessary for Puerto Rico to gets its own fiscal house in order and to guide the kind of debt restructuring that is necessary so that Puerto Rico can continue to access the capital markets and keep the taxpayer out of this.

That is our primary responsibility is to protect the American taxpayer and to help bring order to the chaos that will befall Puerto Rico if the status quo continues going in the direction it’s going.

Ryan took exception to television ads calling PROMESA a bailout of Puerto Rico:

I’m not going to characterize who is behind what ads because I don’t know who is behind what ads. A bailout is getting the taxpayer involved. We are — our whole entire purpose of this is to prevent the taxpayer from getting involved and not having a taxpayer bailout. That is why we are going the path we are going to prevent to taxpayer from being involved in this.

What Ryan fails to note is that Puerto Rico has been a regular recipient of funds from federal taxpayers for years, and PROMESA will do nothing to change that pattern of support.

In fact, Congress is currently considering a separate proposal to increase federal subsidiesdirectly to Puerto Rico residents through the extension of Earned Income Tax Credits. That’s a neat trick, especially since residents of Puerto Rico currently do not have to file or pay any federal taxes.

In 2013, the federal government spent $2 billion on food stamps to residents of Puerto Rico, and that amount appears to be increasing with each additional year.

An estimated one-third of the island’s residents receive food stamps.

Forbes contributor Martin Sullivan argues that Puerto Rico is already receiving $8 billion in subsidies from an obsure IRS ruling:

There’s no one in the administration or in D.C. that’s contemplating a federal bailout of Puerto Rico,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on June 29. That statement is simply false. It may be true that the Treasury is not contemplating cash subsidies or loan guarantees for Puerto Rico, but it already is providing something just as good: tax credits for U.S. companies operating in Puerto Rico on a Puerto Rican tax designed to give those companies U.S. tax credits.

Sound complicated? Yep. That’s why nobody is paying attention. Think about it this way: Puerto Rico imposes a tax that the federal government pays. U.S. companies operating there are just the middlemen.

Here are the details.

Since 2011, approximately 20 percent of Puerto Rico’s total revenue collections have come from a temporary excise tax on certain products manufactured in Puerto Rico. . .

Now here’s the financial magic. On March 30, 2011, the IRS released Notice 2011-2 ruling that this new excise tax was a foreign tax creditable against U.S. taxes. The notice stated that the new tax was novel and that “determination of the creditability of the Excise Tax requires the resolution of a number of legal and factual issues.”

Until these issues were resolved, the IRS would not challenge taxpayers’ claims that the tax was creditable. Further, if the IRS decided the credit was not creditable in the future, the new position would apply only prospectively. Thus, most of the new tax burden imposed on multinationals doing business in Puerto Rico was eliminated by Treasury.

In 2008, President George W. Bush acknowledged that he abandoned free market principles when he tried to sell the TARP bailout to the American people.

At least President Bush was honest about what he had done.

Speaker Ryan, it seems, wants to obscure the real consequences of PROMESA as he tries to sell it to his House colleagues.

Politics

The Obama White House Censors French President Who Mentions ‘Islamist Terrorism’

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This asshat, the domestic terrorist living in the White House, just cannot leave office soon enough, IMHO.  When found out the White House offered this explanation:

“Published on Apr 1, 2016 –  A technical issue with the audio during the recording of President Hollande’s remarks led to a brief drop in the audio recording of the English interpretation. As soon as this was brought to our attention, we posted an updated video with the complete audio here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoW61…) and on WhiteHouse.gov (https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and…), which is consistent with the written transcript we released yesterday. {{Note that the second link does not work.}}

From The Federalist dated 4/1/2016 by :

President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande met in Washington on Thursday to discuss ways for the two countries to work together to defeat terrorism. But the White House apparently had zero appetite for Hollande’s mention of Islamist terrorism, since it censored the phrase from the official White House video of the meeting posted on the White House website.

Media Research Center, a non-profit media watchdog, was the first to report the White House censorship.

While the official transcript available on the White House web page includes Hollande’s use of the phrase “Islamist terrorism,” the White House video of the remarks muted the audio during that portion of Hollande’s remarks. The audio of the French-to-English interpreter stops right before Hollande characterizes “Islamist terrorism” as the root of terrorism in Syria and Iraq.

“But we’re also well aware that the roots of terrorism, Islamist terrorism, is in Syria and in Iraq,” Hollande told Obama, according to the transcript of the exchange provided by the White House. “We therefore have to act both in Syria and in Iraq, and this is what we’re doing within the framework of the coalition.”

Watch and listen to the video below, which is available on YouTube through the White House’s official account, and you can hear the audio cut out right before Hollande says “Islamist terrorism”:

Here is the transcript of what Hollande said, with strikethrough notation to show what the White House censored in its video of the exchange between the two presidents:

Europe has been hit more, given that it is also the target of the terrorists and ISIS. We’ve seen it in Paris last year, as well as in Brussels. And together with President Obama, we worked on coordinating further our commitments, our organizations, our services when it comes to fighting against these terrorists. We are also making sure that between Europe and the United States there can be a very high level coordination.

But we’re also well aware that the roots of terrorism, Islamist terrorism, is in Syria and in Iraq. We therefore have to act both in Syria and in Iraq, and this is what we’re doing within the framework of the coalition. And we note that Daesh is losing ground thanks to the strikes we’ve been able to launch with the coalition. We are continuing to support Iraq. This is also a decision we have taken, supporting the Iraqi government and making sure that they can claim back their entire territory, including Mosul.

In the video, the entire audio of the feed is muted right before Hollande says “Islamist terrorism.” After he says the phrase, the audio returns, but without an English translation. The interpreter’s voice is not restored in the video until 12 seconds later.

Hollande’s use of the phrase “Islamist terrorism” is also censored in the White House’s official MP3 recording of the event.

You can read the full transcript of the event here or watch the full videohere.