Month: August 2014

Burger King plans to merge
with Canuck coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons and base
the company’s headquarters in Canada, where it will enjoy the kind
of reasonable corporate tax structure that Democrats continue to
obstruct here in the United States. And the move has provoked
a fresh
round of moral panic, faux patriotism, and confusion from
those on the left. 

But the Burger King move isn’t really about tax “inversion”
anyway, argues David Harsanyi. This is a merger. Tim Hortons has a
$9.9 billion market cap and generated more revenue than Burger King
last year, so it seems implausible that the deal was made for
reasons of tax sedition alone. When you merge with a company from
another country, one that helps diversify your reach worldwide, it
seems like a basic fiduciary responsibility to place your
headquarters in the spot that offers you the best business climate.
And that’s probably what’s driving a lot of the overwrought
reaction to this merger: The consequences of high corporate
taxation could not be more apparent. 

View this article.

• The White House today
  refused to give a date by which President Obama intends to take
  executive action on immigration reform, and will likely delay until
  after the midterm election. Obama himself
  will be scarce from battleground states until after the
  election.
• The Pentagon says it’s spending about
  $7.5 million a day in Iraq, and we’ve spent $560 million so
  far. The U.K. raised its terror threat level to “severe.”
  Someone found ISIL’s “laptop of doom,” which contains all kinds of
  instructions on nasty things like
  weaponizing the bubonic plague. Nadal Hasan, the Fort Hood
  Shooter, wrote a letter to the leader of ISIL
  asking for citizenship from the Islamic State.
• Ukraine announced today it wants to become a
  member of NATO … for obvious reasons. Russian forces
  captured a strategic town on the Azov Sea. Nearly 3,000 people have been
  killed since Russia began its war in Ukraine, says the U.N.
  Putin warned the world “It’s
  best not to mess with us,” presumably while stroking a nuclear
  warhead.
• Israeli forces are in Golan Heights trying to find
  44 U.N. peacekeepers captured by Al Qaeda-linked militants in
  Syria. 
• The NFL is toughening
  its domestic violence policy following outcry over Ray Rice’s
  two-game suspension for allegedly beating his then-fiancée. How
  about lightening up on drug penalties while they’re in the mood for
  change?
• After 11 years on the air, Dancing With the Stars featured
  
  its first same-sex couple.  

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File this under incredibly
creepy. The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting the private detectives
hired by the Illinois Republican Party have been intimidating
people gathering signatures to get the Libertarian Party on the
state ballot for November. Check it out, from
columnist Dan
Mihalopouls:

A couple of months after Julieus Hooks signed [the Libertarian
Party’s] nominating petitions, a man with a gun walked up to Hooks
as he left his home in Oak Park.

The man said he was a private investigator. He told Hooks the
petition that he had signed was fraudulent and asked him to sign
something. Hooks hastily agreed to sign the paper.

“I did not have time to fully review this document because the
man with the gun instructed me to sign it, and I was afraid of him
and what he may do to me if I refused,” Hooks says….

Hooks had signed a petition for the Libertarians in May. He
recanted his story in the affidavit that the man with the gun got
him to sign. But then Hooks swore a second affidavit saying he did
not mean what he said in the affidavit for the armed man.

According to the most recent version of his story, Hooks said,
“On or about July 20, 2014, I was exiting my house when a tall
Caucasian man and a woman approached and startled me. The man had a
gun, which was visible. They told me that the woman who had
circulated the petition sheet that I had signed had violated the
law because she had obtained too many signatures and committed
fraud. I was then given a piece of paper and told to sign.”

Sarah Dart, who was paid to circulate petitions for the
Libertarians and obtained Hooks’ signature, told me a similar
story. Dart says a private investigator named Carlos Rodriguez
contacted her, asking about a missing girl who knew someone she
supposedly knew.

She believes the story about the missing girl was a ruse. When
she met with Rodriguez, Dart says he confronted her with a stack of
petitions and asked her to admit that the signatures for the
Libertarians were obtained fraudulently. She refused, and the
state’s hearing officer later found that her signatures were
legitimately gathered.

Dart says Rodriguez displayed a holstered gun when he met her.
He gave her a business card showing he works for Morrison Security
in Alsip. The company’s owner is the Palos Township Republican
leader, Sean Morrison.

More here.

The Sun-Times

also reports that:

Bruce Rauner’s spokesman says the Republican nominee for
governor knew nothing about the unusual strong-arm tactics used by
his allies in their failed effort to keep the Libertarian Party
candidates from appearing on the November ballot.

The statement from Rauner’s campaign followed my column last
week on the Republican deployment of armed private investigators to
challenge the Libertarian slate’s nominating signature
petitions.

“Bruce wants as many people engaged in the political process as
possible,” Rauner spokesman Mike Schrimpf said in an e-mail. “Bruce
has no knowledge of these alleged activities, and if they are true,
he strongly denounces them. Bruce doesn’t agree with any form of
voter intimidation.”

As of now, the state election board has ruled the LP has
gathered enough valid signatures to be on the ballot in the fall,
where the Libertarian is expected to take votes away from the
Republican candidate Rauner.

The story isn’t over yet, though: the Illinois LP has filed
criminal
complaints with the state attorney general the Cook County
state attorney over the alleged intimidation. Here’s hoping
the whole story comes out and is dealt with quickly, publicly, and
fairly.

Hat tip: John
Avlon.

Hey, remember when Paul Waldman
in The Washington Post
wondered where the libertarians were on Michael Brown’s killing
in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Sen. Rand Paul wrote a
big op-ed in Time the next day denouncing both the
militarization of the police and the racial injustices of the way
blacks are treated by law enforcement and courts?

Just thought I should remind folks about that happening nearly
two weeks ago.

In completely unrelated news, presumptive Democratic candidate
for president Hillary Clinton finally weighed in on the events in
Ferguson yesterday. The Washington Post has some video
footage of her prepared comments
here. She makes a vague reference to the militarization of
police by saying “Nobody wants our streets to look like a war
zone,” but she focused much more on the racism inherent in how our
current justice system operates:

Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers
were three times as likely to be searched by police during a
traffic stop as black drivers instead of the other way around. If
white offenders received prison sentences ten percent longer than
black offenders for the same crimes. If a third of all white men –
just look at this room and take one-third – went to prison during
their lifetime. Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of
so many of our fellow Americans in so many of the communities in
which they live.

Her comments aren’t bad at all (though her vagueness on
militarization suggests to me that she doesn’t see the distribution
of equipment as a problem but rather its use in these
circumstances). But it certainly took her a long time to articulate
simple thoughts about racial injustice that aren’t actually all
that controversial or new and haven’t already been said in response
to Ferguson. Remember, this is the woman who campaigned against
Barack Obama with the famous “3 a.m. phone call” that she would be
more ready to lead at a moment’s notice than any of her Democratic
rivals:

There’s nothing wrong with taking a day or so to get your
thoughts together over the complex issues that drove what happened
in Ferguson. But two weeks after everybody else? It makes her look
like she wanted to evaluate what everybody else was saying first.
 

I know very well that you don’t read Armond White’s articles to
be convinced by them, and I feel a little silly taking up my pen to
argue against something he wrote. Still, his latest piece
for National Review is bizarre even by his gloriously
strange standards, and I feel compelled, as though mesmerized by
some magickal Troll Crystal, to debate it.

It’s called “The
Year the Culture Broke.” The year in question—the time, White
tells us, that partisan division finally overtook the country, as
“no-longer-impartial media used their prominence to drive those who
disagreed into quiet but resentful enclaves”—is 2004.

No, really:

In the spring of 2004, there was the
media’s lynch-mob excommunication of Mel Gibson and his film
The Passion of the Christ, soon followed by the Cannes
Film Festival’s ordination of Michael Moore’s anti–G. W. Bush
documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. These events proved the
effectiveness of pre-release hype, furthered acquiescence to
cultural authority, and discouraged social unity. This was a moral,
aesthetic, intellectual, and political shift—a break and a
decline.

Through these two films, religion and politics—topics one had never
argued about in polite company—became the basis for categorizing
moviegoers as members of factions. Beliefs and positions calcified.
Passion became a red-state movie, and Fahrenheit
became a blue-state movie.

That turning point may also be where the canard of calling for a
“conversation” (about race, sex, violence…take your pick)
began.

I included that last sentence just to show how much recent
history White has forgotten. No, people did not start calling for
national conversations in 2004. The phrase
took off in the ’90s, most famously when Bill Clinton called
for a “national conversation
about race.”

That’s a minor point, but it underlines how much amnesia is at
work in this essay. When White finally alludes to some earlier
moments of partisan division, near the end of his article, he
treats them as a mere prelude to the Moore/Gibson face-off, though
every one of the examples he cites had a more lasting impact than
either film did:

This break in public
civility—unbridled hostility for Bush, disrespect for the office of
the presidency, ruthless personal attacks on ideological
opponents—resulted from pent-up political differences and partisan
complaint going back to Robert Bork’s dismissal, Clarence Thomas’s
Supreme Court nomination hearings, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and
Al Gore’s concession in the 2000 presidential race.

“Pent up”? There’s nothing pent up about that series of events.
They exploded, one after the other, making a rubble of “public
civility” each time. Needless to say, it’s easy to extend the list
of rancorous battles long
before Bork. And needless to say, the parallel universe of
conservative alternative media—what White calls “quiet but
resentful enclaves,” though they’ve never been quiet in my
lifetime—existed
long before 2004. If anything, in the last 10 years it has been
unprecedentedly easier, not harder, for outsiders to hear what
those once-enclaved voices have been saying. That’s part of the
actual significance of Gibson’s film: It proved that those
alternative networks could make a movie a hit.

But what makes 2004 an especially odd place to locate the break
is that Fahrenheit and Passion, despite the hype
around them, were not irresolutely opposed. Gibson and Moore,
unlike Bush and Gore, actually admired each other. Here’s a New
York Times report from
January 2005:

Asked if he had seen Mr.
Gibson’s film, Mr. Moore lighted up.

“I saw it twice,” Mr. Moore said. “It’s a very powerful film. I’m a
practicing Catholic. My film might have been called ‘The Compassion
of the Christ,’ though. The great thing about this country is the
diversity of voices. When we limit the voices, we cease being a
free society.”

When Mr. Gibson walked to the press room lectern, he and Mr. Moore
seemed delighted to meet each other.

“I feel a strange kinship with Michael,” Mr. Gibson said. “They’re
trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it’s a
hologram. They really have got nothing to do with one another. It’s
just some kind of device, some left-right. He makes some salient
points. There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on.
However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to
me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we’re there, why we
went there, and why we’re still there.”

I suspect there was more than a little overlap between the two
films’ audiences too. Certainly much more overlap than there was
between the supporters of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.

Bonus link: In a sidebar of sorts, White
offers capsule
descriptions of 20 films that “effectively destroyed art,
social unity, and spiritual confidence.” If you ever wondered what
would happen if they asked Ed Anger to fill in for Leonard Maltin,
here’s your chance to find out.