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America’s Critical Medical Device Industry Gets A Needed Tax Cut Henry I. Miller and Erik Paulsen

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/26/americas-critical-medical-device-industry-gets-a-needed-tax-cut/

Medical devices may not be as glamorous as blockbuster drugs, but they include some of the genuine miracles of modern medicine: pacemakers, artificial joints, replacement heart valves, scanners, and cancer radiation-therapy machines. The U.S. has been the global leader in medical devices, one of the few major industries that both boasts a net trade surplus and is a job creator. The sector employs 400,000 Americans directly and is indirectly responsible for almost 2 million more that supply and support the highly skilled workforce. Most important, its products are essential elements of modern medical care, including everything from CT scanners and pacemakers to blood pressure cuffs and robots used by surgeons.

But Washington politics has put this made-in-America success story at risk. For years, the medical device industry was ravaged by unwise public policy, including a devastating 2.3% excise tax that took effect at the beginning of 2013 as part of ObamaCare. It was included largely as an afterthought with little debate or consideration, as one of a grab bag of taxes, fees and fines used to finance the law’s litany of new spending programs.

After a decade, the omnibus spending bill just approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump has finally relegated the device excise tax to the dustbin of history.

The tax, which required the payment of billions of dollars by device manufacturers, was especially pernicious because it was assessed on gross sales, not profits. To put this in perspective, imagine that you’re a manufacturer of medical devices and had a profit of $100,000 on sales of $1 million after all your costs and expenses for everything from materials and labor to research. The excise tax would be $23,000, wiping out almost a quarter of your profits.  

Think that example is extreme? Well, Signus Medical, a small Minnesota company that makes cutting-edge devices used in spinal surgery, ended up paying an effective tax rate of 79%.

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German Parliament: Its Resolution to Ban Hezbollah is Just a Legal Charade – Part II by Soeren Kern

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15346/german-parliament-hezbollah-update

Gatestone Institute wholeheartedly supports U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to ban Hezbollah in Europe. The Bundestag resolution, however, calls for an incomplete ban, which appears aimed at providing the German government with political cover that would allow Berlin to claim that it has banned the group even if it has not.

It is utterly implausible that Germany, one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced countries in Europe, is unable to ascertain the organizational structure of Hezbollah within its own borders.

“Six months ago, the AfD presented a resolution in the Bundestag to ban Hezbollah, a resolution which you vehemently rejected and which since then you have blocked in caucus…. What is needed is the complete ban of Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s propaganda and terror financing in Germany must be stopped… This, by the way, is also demanded by the Bundestag’s Anti-Semitism Resolution, which expressly calls for the deportation of supporters of anti-Semitism. If this does not apply to supporters of Hezbollah, which wants to send Jews to the gas chambers, and wants to destroy Israel, then to whom could this apply?” — Beatrix von Storch MP, Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] party, to the Bundestag, December 19, 2019.

Von Storch noted that the Bundestag’s resolution, if implemented by the German government, would allow Hezbollah’s 30-plus German-based mosques and cultural centers — where the group raises funds and spreads anti-Israel propaganda — to continue to operate. Moreover, not one of the 1,050 known Hezbollah operatives now in Germany would be deported.

Gatestone Institute recently reported that a December 19 German parliamentary resolution, which claims to call for a complete ban in Germany of Hezbollah (Arabic for “The Party of Allah”), actually falls short of demanding a comprehensive ban of the terrorist organization. A senior US government official called the article “flat wrong”. It would have been nice if had been.

Gatestone Institute wholeheartedly supports U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to ban Hezbollah in Europe. The Bundestag resolution, however, calls for an incomplete ban, which appears aimed at providing the German government with political cover that would allow Berlin to claim that it has banned the group even if it has not.

The Bundestag itself has issued a statement which states that it is calling for an activity ban (Betätigungsverbot) of Hezbollah, but not an organizational ban (Organisationsverbot) — an important distinction because the activity ban is legally weaker than the organizational ban.

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A New French Leader: Joachim Son-Forget by Grégoire Canlorbe

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15319/joachim-son-forget

What shocks the elites of Paris or Brussels about President Trump is that he actually embodies real governance, which is totally inadequate in their mode of operation.

Clandestinely, North Korea is at the forefront of computing, which allows it to siphon significant funds through the blockchain [bitcoin].

Kim Jong-un has no interest in denuclearization. His program is total and irreversible, not to mention verifiable…. He has promised that its effect… will change the “strategic status” of North Korea… Why would his regime comply with adopting a position of weakness?

Joachim Marie Son-Forget, a French politician born in South Korea, since 2017 has been a member of the French National Assembly (lower house of the French Parliament) representing French residents overseas. Formerly active in the Socialist Party and later La République En Marche!, he resigned in late 2018 to start his own political party, Valeur Absolue.

Grégoire Canlorbe: How do you react to the EU’s attitude: hostile to Trump but friendly towards the mullahs of Iran?

Joachim Son-Forget: I do not think that the EU is particularly hostile to Trump, except that it denounces the trade war that has been declared. I fully understand the US President’s decision to increase tariffs on goods such as European wines or Airbus aircraft. Trump is defending America’s economic interests, and from his point of view, he is right to do so. As I am concerned with French and European interests, I am obliged to approve the tariff sanctions with which the EU has promised to respond. But Trump is a great President; I regret that he cannot find in [French President Emmanuel] Macron an interlocutor who answers him from a position him of strength — as a leader who skillfully and ferociously defends his own economic and geopolitical interests, like Kim Jong-un, who has been so skillful despite his age and his education in Switzerland.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Dems Target Tulsi “Present” vote on impeachment sparks call for Gabbard to resign from Congress. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/tulsi-gabbard-target-junkyard-dog-democrats-lloyd-billingsley/

Former congressman and Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports, has called for Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to resign “the sooner the better” following her vote of “present” on the articles of impeachment against President Trump.

Abercombie is co-chair for the campaign of Kai Kahele, a Democrat running against Gabbard, and the former governor cited Gabbard’s missing votes “on everything” as the reason for his resignation call. On the other hand, fallout from the call has focused on Gabbard’s impeachment stand.

“Throughout my life, whether through serving in the military or in Congress, I’ve always worked to do what is in the best interests of our country,” Gabbard explained last week. “Not what’s best for me politically or what’s best for my political party. After doing my due diligence in reviewing the 658-page impeachment report, I came to the conclusion that I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no.” That aside, Tulsi Gabbard has been a target-rich environment since October, when she made her most controversial statement.

“Trump won the election in 2016,” Gabbard said in the CNN debate that turned out to be more of an impeachment inquest and socialist shout-out. In effect, Tulsi Gabbard was saying, “Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016,” a clear violation of the Democrat speech code. The former First Lady had been repeating the claim that she defeated Donald Trump, telling PBS “Obviously, I can beat him again,” and that she was panting for a “rematch.” With Tulsi Gabbard, as with Trump in 2016, Clinton saw the evil hand of Russia at work.

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The Plot Against the President Lee Smith’s new book exposes the biggest political scandal in American history. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/plot-against-president-daniel-greenfield/

The Five W’s are the essential infrastructure of good journalism. It’s important to be able to tell a good story. But if the story doesn’t contain answers to who, what, where, when, and why, it’s meaningless.

Fortunately, Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President digs into the origin of the coup against President Trump in the old-fashioned Five W’s sense. While the book still leaves plenty of questions buried in reams of classified documents, it’s an excellent resource for organizing and making sense of the mess.

Rarely has a government investigation been clouded in this much secrecy or required so many investigations of the investigation. The points of the spiderweb between private contractors, the media, and government figures still vanish into darkness. But Smith follows the work of Rep. Devin Nunes and his team (the subtitle for the tome is The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History) and that comes with its own infrastructure of the Five W’s.

The ‘why’ isn’t hard to grasp, but the ‘when’ remains elusive. Smith makes a good case for the smear campaign associated with the Steele Dossier predating the former British operative whose continental credentials and FBI connections were used to sell a political assault ordered by the Clinton campaign.

Instead, Smith describes a series of ‘protodossiers’ which were used to eventually shape the Steele Dossier. These protodossiers were works in progress, bits of opposition research focusing on Trump’s international business connections, put together and fed to the media in a conventional fashion. There’s nothing especially controversial (or palatable) about this type of opposition research. But, even from the very beginning, these work products were not merely opposition research intended for the public.

Their real audience can be assessed from the linkages to Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, and a friend of Steele’s, who would act as a conduit for the Steele dossier, and the warnings that Trump was a national security threat. Accusing Trump of Russian ties was not a strategy meant to win an election. It was a justification for an unlimited investigation of Trump and his associates using methods and degrees of secrecy that would otherwise be off limits against Americans.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Richard Jewell as Everyman Carol M. Swain *****

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/

I left the theater saddened after watching Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial work, “Richard Jewell,” a film about the falsely accused Atlanta Olympic Park bomber and the media’s rush to judgment.

I was disheartened because Jewell, now deceased, represents every American and especially the Trump “ deplorables.” Any of us can be falsely accused of a crime, and our ability to defend ourselves often depends on resources and knowledge that many of us lack.

We live in a society where trials-by-media are commonplace, and due process and the presumption of innocence are fading away, part of a bygone era. In the U.S. judicial system, due process is supposed to mean that every citizen is accorded legal rights and protection from governmental overreach.

We find protection in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and it applies to the states via the 14th Amendment.
Due process is accompanied by the presumption of innocence, unless proven guilty in a court of law. So much for that: Witness the recent cases marked by a total breakdown in due process and the presumption of innocence for both Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Roy Moore in their media trials. They represent current examples of a trend that started more than two decades ago.

In the Jewell story, we see a flawed and man-eating media, as well as an FBI that apparently either forgot or ignored its own mission statement to protect the American people and uphold the U.S. Constitution.
Here we are today, more than 20 years after the Atlanta bombing, and once again the FBI—or at least elements and former elements of the FBI—has been brought into question concerning not only the current impeachment proceedings but also that the FBI might have spied on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. For real. Protect whom, uphold what?

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

1917: A Somber Journey into Hell By Kyle Smith

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/movie-review-1917-contrived-technique-director-sam-mendes/

Sam Mendes is the real star of Sam Mendes’s new World War I drama.

The list of great films about World War I in Europe is surprisingly short: After the acknowledged masterpieces All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957), there aren’t many more worth discussing. 1917 is a splashy attempt to join the list that is well worth seeing yet suffers from comparison to the far better film covering the same ground that was released just eleven months ago.

That movie, the Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, was meticulously, devastatingly real. 1917, by contrast, starts out convincing but comes to seem unforgivably contrived around the halfway mark, and by the end it asks us to suspend disbelief to such a degree that the effect is nearly absurd. I was reminded of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, whose protagonist developed into a kind of Buster Keaton figure who miraculously bumbled his way through a storm of violence so focused that it seemed as if the Wehrmacht’s sole purpose was to kill this random citizen.

1917 is defined also by its surface contrivance: Sam Mendes has designed the film as a single take (followed, after a brief blackout in the second half, by another single take). Like Birdman, though, as well as the fantastically complicated opening scene of Mendes’s own James Bond film Spectre, 1917 is actually composed of many shots ingeniously woven together using digital wizardry to look like a single take. I dislike the gimmick, at least at this length; staying on a single take creates a sense of hanging in midair as we wonder when we’ll finally hit the ground, and it works beautifully for a single scene like the opening of Spectre or Touch of Evil (1958), the Orson Welles film that inspired all subsequent one-take sorcery. Keeping a take going for an entire movie, though, is a mistake. It redirects the attention from the story to the technique. To be slightly rude about it, it makes Sam Mendes, not his characters, the star of the movie.

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Communist Cuba Enslaves Physicians Havana sends them abroad, steals their wages, and forces them to act as spies. By Marion Smith

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/communist-cuba-enslaves-physicians-11577299061?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

What do you call a system that combines slavery with espionage? In Communist Cuba, you call it humanitarian aid. For decades Havana has sent tens of thousands of doctors abroad as a supposed sign of goodwill, only to steal their income and use some as unwilling spies. Fortunately, more nations are rejecting Cuba’s “help.”

After toppling socialist dictator Evo Morales in November, Bolivia expelled more than 700 Cuban doctors, accusing them of fomenting protests demanding Mr. Morales’s return to power. Ecuador moved to evict the 400 or so Cuban doctors within its borders a few days earlier. One doctor said she and her colleagues received only a third of their promised salaries, with Havana keeping the rest. She also said Cuban authorities forced them to “send messages of support to the revolution.”

In late 2018, incoming Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro demanded that Cuba allow the more than 8,500 doctors in his country to bring their families and collect their full salary, which was paid for by Brazilian taxpayers. Havana soon recalled the doctors. A year before, at least 150 Cuban doctors in Brazil filed lawsuits detailing their mistreatment. One said, “There comes a time when you get tired of being a slave.”

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‘It hasn’t stopped him’: Trump racks up wins, even as impeachment grips Washington by David M. Drucker

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/it-hasnt-stopped-him-trump-rolls-up-wins-even-as-impeachment-grips-washington

President Trump enjoyed an extraordinary period of policy successes over the past two weeks, even as Democrats seeking to remove him from office moved articles of impeachment through the House.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats damaged Trump politically, the two negotiated an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement, allowing the president to tout a previously elusive trade deal after three years of promising he would complete it. And he and House Democrats compromised on $1.4 trillion in spending that funds critical aspects of Trump’s immigration agenda and delivers on his vision for the Space Force, the first new U.S. military service branch in more than 70 years.

The House voted along party lines to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, an action the president had lamented would amount to a black mark on his legacy. A trial in the Senate, presumably in January, awaits. “But it hasn’t stopped him from having two of the best weeks of his presidency,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters.

Former congressman Jason Altmire, a Democrat from western Pennsylvania who now lives near Jacksonville, Florida, said the spate of deal-making that coincided with impeachment was advantageous to both Trump and congressional Democrats. In part to convince voters that impeachment was unwarranted, Trump needed legislative accomplishments. Democrats, especially in swing districts, needed to show constituents that impeaching Trump was not their only priority.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Is a Tech Superpower, and America Needs It on Its Side John Hannah And Annie Fixler

Posted By on December 26th, 2019

https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/israel-zionism/2019/12/israel-is-a-tech-superp

The number of AI and cybersecurity startups in Israel makes up close to 20 percent of the world’s total, likely eclipsing China and second only to the United States.

We find ourselves in strong agreement with the two central contentions of Arthur Herman’s valuable new essay in Mosaic, “The Impasse Obstructing U.S.-Israel Relations, and How to Remedy It.” First, China’s growing penetration of Israel’s economy over the past decade, particularly in the high-tech sector, poses real risks to the U.S.-Israel relationship if left unattended. But second, if addressed in a spirit worthy of the profound alliance that has bound these two great liberal democracies together for decades, the China challenge should serve instead as a major opportunity to propel the strategic partnership to new heights.

Indeed, that’s precisely the case that one of us, John Hannah, made in an article earlier this year:

Working together in close consultation, with the protection and strengthening of the alliance uppermost in their minds, [U.S. and Israeli policymakers] should make sure that China becomes the catalyst for the next major leap forward in the U.S.-Israel relationship rather than a dangerous source of division.

Herman is also spot-on in identifying the struggle for technological primacy as the central arena that will shape the geopolitics of the 21st century, in particular the escalating strategic rivalry between, on the one hand, the United States and other free societies, and, on the other hand, China, Russia, and the camp of anti-American authoritarians.