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The Tax Foundation releases a bunch of great reports each year on the differences in state taxation. Finding out where your state ranks can be encouraging, or depressing depending on your local politics. Recently, the Tax Foundation released a great compilation of many of its reports. The Facts &
Figures 2016: How Does Your State Compare? report details a large number of different state tax policies, allowing you to do a deep dive on your state’s rules, and to compare them to the other states in the country.
Read the report here.
More on vital business taxes in the video below:
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Rest in peace Merle Haggard, one of the greatest musicians in history.
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The 2nd Amendment’s actual survival depends on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The 2nd Amendment’s survival is by far the most vital issue voters must consider when heading to the polls this November.
Can there be a bigger horror than the lifetime U.S. Supreme Court appointment of Barack Obama? Here—as NRA president Allan Cors writes in America’s 1st Freedom—is Hillary Clinton’s response to a planted question during a recent New Hampshire town hall meeting. Clinton was asked, according to Cors, “if she were elected president, would she
nominate President Barack Obama to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Clinton’s answer: “Wow! What a great idea. Nobody has ever suggested that to me. I love that. Wow. I tell you, that’s a great idea… He’s brilliant. He can set forth an argument, and he was a law professor. He has all the credentials.”
Makes one sick. Could any 2nd Amendment-supporting voter possibly vote for Hillary Clinton for president? Impossible to comprehend, Democrat voter or not. Voters are going to have to bombard the offices of Democrat senators with a B or better rating from the NRA. Here I am referring to senators Tester (A-), Heinrich (B), Heitkamp (AQ), Donnelly (A), Warner (A), and Casey (B+). (Get the most
recent NRA ratings for all U.S. senators by clicking here for my Liberty & Freedom map) Each of these six Democrats must be called upon to swear allegiance to the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment.
How many Democrat senators, never mind Republicans, would look upon an Obama Supreme Court nomination with utter revulsion? Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are going to have a field day with the 2nd Amendment issue. The stronger the 2nd Amendment position of each, the more likely the Republican nomination of each.
In a recent issue of America’s 1st Freedom, Marshall Lewin wrote, “Hillary Clinton has made her position on the 2nd Amendment frighteningly clear. At a private fundraiser in New York, Clinton said, ‘The Supreme Court is wrong on the 2nd Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get.'”
The voters must make certain that Hillary Clinton never gets to support her anti-2nd Amendment treasonous thinking with one or more supreme court nominations, never mind the horror of a Barack Obama nomination.
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Back in 1789, Thomas Jefferson warned that the Judiciary, if given too much power, might ruin our REPUBLIC, and destroy our RIGHTS.
Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Dec. 25, 1820: The Judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric….
Letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821: The Federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of Jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into
one.
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 Hillary Clinton’s biggest
problem this election season is not Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Nor is Mrs. Clinton’s biggest problem several inspectors general, the intelligence community, or the entire Republican ecosphere colluding to turn her home-brew email system into a fake scandal. At the moment, her biggest problem is the federal judiciary and the judges who enforce Freedom of Information Act, writes Kimberely A. Strassel in the WSJ.
The judges have taken unprecedented steps to resolve this case. It is exceedingly rare—almost unheard of—for a judge to allow discovery in a FOIA proceeding. This is a testament to how grave Mrs. Clinton’s email problem is. In the usual course of things, an outside group demands documents, a judge requires a federal department to hand them over, and the public learns
something.
Fueling the judges’ suspicions has been new evidence that Mrs. Clinton didn’t turn everything over. Judicial Watch recently obtained emails showing that State Department and National Security Agency personnel had big concerns with Mrs. Clinton’s early demands that she be allowed to use a BlackBerry for secure correspondence. They wanted her to
sit at a computer in a secure facility—as everyone else does. These documents include a February 2009 email from then-Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills to her boss, crowing that State was coming around to Mrs. Clinton’s demands, and a return email the same day from Mrs. Clinton saying, “That’s good news.”
These are clearly work-related emails. They speak to the question of Mrs. Clinton’s communications while at the State Department. They aren’t about yoga routines. And yet, guess what? That email chain was not included in the 55,000 pages of documents Mrs. Clinton turned over. Perhaps it was an oversight, but far more likely, the Clinton team—knowing the firestorm over a home-brew
system—chose to withhold documents showing that State and NSA considered Mrs. Clinton’s email demands unsafe and unreasonable. What else did Mrs. Clinton choose to withhold from the public?
The talented Mrs. Clinton has seemingly been able to outfox investigators, Congress, inspectors general, and the press. “But she made the error this time of playing games with a law that federal judges take seriously, and that gives outside watchdogs real leverage.” Read more from Ms. Strassel here.
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 My family happened to be staying in Boston over the weekend. The Sunday Boston Globe was complimentary with our room. Inside was a special editorial section, which I
thought was real news. Turns out it was a hit piece on Donald Trump. The arrogant staff at The Globe owe readers an apology. And they wonder where their readers have gone? Jennifer Harper writes at The Washington Times:
The Boston Globe spent much time and energy to craft a realistic looking but frankly fake front page Sunday, all for an editorial titled “The GOP must stop Trump.” It consisted of imaginary speculation about the nation under the guidance of President Donald Trump — whose “vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American,”
the news organization said. Headlines ran amok, ranging from “Deportations to Begin” to “U.S. soldiers refuse orders to kill ISIS families.”
It is an odd, ambitious and detailed project doubtless involving multiple reporters, designers and editors tasked with fabricating “stories” that bandy about the name of Donald Trump, along with Gov. Chris Christie, who’s cast as the U.S. attorney general, and Fox News host Megyn Kelly.
It is hard to say whether Globe readers would have preferred such efforts go to, say, a tutorial on national security, personal finances or family values. The project earned considerable press, but not much criticism.
“Can anyone imagine the outrage that liberal media pundits would have had if say, The New York Post or The Washington Times had created a fake page predicting that President Obama would force people off the insurance they wanted to keep, and food stamp use would soar by 70 percent?” demanded Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research
Center, a conservative press watchdog. “Imagine those complaints and transfer them to this: A serious newspaper doesn’t satirize the news. It leaves it to The Onion.”
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Recently, President Obama weighed in on the Justice Department probe of Hillary Clinton’s private server. In an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Bob Woodward commented that Mr. Obama did not just touch a hot stove, but that “he put his arms around it,” with his defense of Mrs. Clinton in the FBI’s ongoing investigation.
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 Sayer Ji writes at GreenMedInfo that turmeric could turn the entire drug-based medical model on its head.
There is a medicinal spice so timelessly interwoven with the origins of human culture and metabolism, so thoroughly supported by modern scientific inquiry, as to be unparalleled in its proven value to human health and well-being.
Indeed, turmeric turns the entire drug-based medical model on its head. Instead of causing far more side effects than therapeutic ones, as is the case for most patented pharmaceutical medications, turmeric possesses hundreds of potential side benefits, having been empirically demonstrated to positively modulate over 160 different physiological pathways in the mammalian
body.
While no food or herb is right for everyone, and everything has the potential for unintended, adverse side effects, turmeric is truly unique in its exceptionally high margin of safety vis-à-vis the drugs it has been compared with, e.g. hydrocortisone, ibuprofen, chemotherapy agents. Furthermore, nothing within the modern-day pharmaceutical armamentarium comes even remotely close to
turmeric’s 6,000 year track record of safe use in Ayurvedic medicine.
Read more here.
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Yesterday, the Justice Department announced a $5 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs for its role in the financial crisis. On the one hand, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys. On the other hand, it’s an opportunity to consider if anyone could have fled a smoldering crater and gotten off lighter than
Lloyd Blankfein and Company.
And the answer is… of course they could! A literal smoking crater in the form of the war against Libya will do. Of course, it wasn’t really a war that caused that crater; at the time, our commander-in-chief was at pains to make clear it wasn’t a war, so as to show that he didn’t require congressional approval. It was, in a phrase that would become a Washington joke, a
“kinetic military action.” Sure, we were dropping munitions out of military aircraft in the confines of a treaty agreement on to human beings engaged in political exertions who were killed by those bombs, but hey… whoa, “war”? What are you trying to suggest here, buddy?
It’s worth looking back at the track record of Washington’s war mongers, and the smoldering wreckage they have created. It’s a project I tried to inspire with my piece celebrating [Anne-Marie] Slaughter Day.
The problem with this sort of writing is a) it takes time and research, and b) it is impolite. Pointing out idiotic things one’s peers have written and shining a bright light on their results is not the way to win friends and influence in Washington. It is a worthwhile calling for the analysts among us who care about right and wrong, but it is terrible for getting ahead in Washington, a town where
truth is beside the point.
And at least Slaughter and Kristof and Beinart simply stopped writing about their Libya experiment once it destroyed Libya and created ISIS. Upping the chutzpah quotient is Shadi Hamid, who got a twofer: urge the United States into a war, then rewrite your own rationale after the fact and
write a counterintuitive Think Piece explaining why the critics were wrong and the war was a success. Ben Friedman says what needs to be said to Hamid at the National Interest . But don’t hold your breath for a response. If anything,
Hamid might get a book deal out of the thing.
Ask yourself: If you were paid for nothing more than predictions regarding your area of expertise, how long would you continue to be paid if you were monumentally wrong on the matters you chose to discuss and declined to subject yourself to criticism on the matter? Or what if you played tendentious games with history, like Hamid?
Fry cooks at McDonald’s face stronger standards of accountability than do our modern-era Kennans. For our foreign policy mandarins, there’s no need to respond to the lowly scribes who point out their fatal errors.
It’s awful that Blankfein and his henchmen got off as clean as they did. But at least they have natural predators. When it comes to the Washington foreign policy community, no one even pretends to care. If we start a war and destroy a country, that’s all just Over There. No prosecutor with any sense is going to chase down that offense.
So as things unfold over the next week or two with Goldman, consider: Yes, they have given up $5 billion. It will fix nothing. But perhaps we should aspire to a state in which the architects of our war-crazed foreign policy faced at least the superficial amount of public scrutiny that our financial gurus have faced. Sad to say, it would be better than the level of accountability they face at
present.
Related video:
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