Monthly Archives: August 2013

Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, Redux

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I wrote earlier about the Muslim Brotherhood and their assault on their fellow Egyptians’ freedom and on their very lives.

Here’s an update.

  • [Muslim Brotherhood] demonstrators torched two government facilities in Giza
  • attacks on Coptic Christians and their churches continued for a second day—as many as 39 incidents of violence against churches, monasteries, Coptic schools, and shops
  • protesters trapped a police Humvee on an overpass near the Nasr City camp and pushed it off…images…showed an injured policeman on the ground below, near a pool of blood and the overturned vehicle

Yet President Barack Obama is threatening a regime that answered the call of the people to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood dictator Mohammed Morsi.  He’s condemning their role in attempting to restore order and reopen parts of Cairo occupied by the Brotherhood while saying nothing about the Brotherhood’s violence, torchings, and murders beyond the usual Obamatalk blandishments about the need for…restraint.  And he’s cancelled joint exercises with the Egyptian military—cancelled them, rather than postponing them so they’re not a distraction while the Egyptians attempt to restore order.

Progressive Racism, Again

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[Sigh]

Here it is, made appallingly manifest, by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

It’s been obvious that they’re doing everything they can to make him fail.  And I hope, I hope—and I say this seriously—I hope that’s based on substance and not the fact that he’s African-American.

Because it’s impossible for a white man to criticize a black man.  That would be racist.

Never mind that Reid’s racism is an insult not just to every American, but in particular to those Americans who also happen to be black: Reid is saying that a black man is simply too child-like, too immature, too unintelligent to be able to handle being criticized by a fellow American who happens also to be white.

The IRS Sends a Letter

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Thousands of small-business owners have received letters from the Internal Revenue Service questioning whether they are underreporting their business income….

Tax officials say the letters don’t constitute an audit and instead are simply a request for more information.

Sure.  Except that they’re not “requests.”

One typical letter to a small-business owner is headlined, “Notification of Possible Income Underreporting.”  It begins, “Your gross receipts may be underreported.”

The letter instructs the owner to complete a form “to explain why the portion of your gross receipts from non-card payments appears unusually low.”  It says the business owner must respond within 30 days.

No.  Tell me what crime you’re claiming I’m committing or at risk of committing.  Then we can talk about my business model, my decision to emphasize card transactions in my business.  And 30 days is a short deadline for small businesses to investigate their records of individual transactions over the year supposed to be in question.  While you’re about it, explain to me why I’m obligated to do cash transactions at a rate that suits your whim.  Cash imposes additional costs on me, including more accounting effort (card transactions automatically generate their own audit trail for my internal, business use) and greater security costs from having all that cash on hand.

And there’s this example of IRS disingenuousness:

Peter Fleming, a small-business accountant in Carnegie, PA, said a client with a gift and souvenir shop received a letter from the IRS in December saying the revenue she claimed in tax returns the previous year was lower than sales reported in merchant card and third-party payments data.  The retailer reported gross receipts of $243,462, versus $249,994 in the payment data, according to the IRS.  The letter told her to ensure she was “fully reporting receipts from all sources” and gave her 30 days to respond.  Mr Fleming said the discrepancy was because payments data included sales tax, which wasn’t included in revenue claimed in tax returns.  For small retailers, “Sales tax is a liability and is not reported as revenue,” Mr Fleming said.

Of course, the IRS knew a priori this discrepancy was sales tax; the IRS has lots of access to state and community sales tax rates and records.

And a final bit of IRS cynicism:

The IRS has told accountants that a principal aim of its program is to verify the quality of the card-transaction data the agency is getting.

Clearly not.  I if this were true, the IRS would have said so in its dunning letters to those 20,000 small businesses.

Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo

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While the world, including our own government, decries the Egyptian government’s efforts to clear two Muslim Brotherhood encampments in downtown Cairo, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind, regardless of what we might think about that crackdown.

The violence, the bloodshed, is entirely on the hands of the Brotherhood.  The police went in with water cannon and tear gas, and they were met with gunfire (including mortar rounds in other cities, as the Brotherhood’s decision to riot spread).  They’re openly rioting, but they’re cynically not limiting themselves to opposition to the Egyptian police: they’re also butchering any Coptic Christians that they can reach (generally in southern Egypt, as the Christians have been hunted out in the north, by this gang and others), desecrating these Christian churches in the process.  Never mind, just kill them all, seems to be the Brotherhood’s attitude.

The Brotherhood could have kept their protests peaceful.  Think what a powerful statement that would have been in the face of the force—however gentle—the police would still have had to use to clear those encampments.  Instead, the Brotherhood demanded violence, demanded to be killed in their protests so that they could be martyred.

This is a violent movement, bent on violent destruction of all who disagree with them.

Again, Progress

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EEOC v Freeman concerned an events company that used [criminal and credit] background checks in employment decisions between July 2006 and August 2011. The company had experienced problems with employee drug use, embezzlement, and workplace violence, and saw background checks as a legitimate way to screen applicants.

US District Judge Roger Titus scored the agency for…putting employers “in the ‘Hobson’s choice’ of ignoring criminal history and credit background, thus exposing themselves to potential liability for criminal and fraudulent acts committed by employees, on the one hand, or incurring the wrath of the EEOC for having utilized information deemed fundamental by most employers.”

And if that wasn’t a clear enough message, he continued: “Something more, far more, than what is relied upon by the EEOC in this case must be utilized to justify a disparate impact claim based upon criminal history and credit checks.  To require less, would be to condemn the use of common sense, and this is simply not what the discrimination laws of this country require.”

There’s more to this:

[T]he [EEOC] didn’t show that Freeman Co discriminated against black applicants by using criminal-background checks or credit checks in its hiring process.

Well, duh.  The judge went on:

The story of the present action has been that of a theory in search of facts to support it.  But there are simply no facts here to support [the EEOC’s claim that black applicants were improperly discriminated against].

Freeman has 4,100 full-time and 25,000 to 30,000 part-time employees; that part-time to full-time ratio is a potful of turnover—which puts a premium on those background checks.

Progress, indeed.