Media watch: The Times Knows Tax Avoidance
A New York Times “investigation” described how President Trump found ways to avoid taxes — and the Times “ought to know,” snarks Ira Stoll at The New York Sun, because the Gray Lady and “the Ochs-Sulzberger family that control it have done the same thing.” Trump, for instance, used losses in some years to lower his taxes in others. Likewise, in 2008, the Times lost $58 million and then cited a net income-tax “benefit” of nearly $6 million. The paper “complains” of Trump’s foreign investments and payments to his kids to avoid the gift tax. Yet the Times also has foreign business and has paid multiple family members six-figure salaries. The paper is painting “Trump as somehow corrupt for doing things that the Ochs-Sulzberger family has itself been doing for years.”
Iconoclast: Supreme Tit-For-Tat
After Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Benjamin Wittes and Miguel Estrada wrote that “the only rule that governs the confirmation process is the law of the jungle: There are no rules,” and The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan H. Adler agrees. He’d prefer the Senate “focus on the objective qualifications of nominees” and not whether “a judge embraces the proper judicial philosophy.” That non-ideological approach led to “the unanimous confirmation” of Scalia and “near-unanimous confirmation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite the fact that many senators disagreed with them on many issues.” But more recently, both sides have joined in “an escalating game of tit-for-tat.” And when President George W. Bush re-nominated a failed Bill Clinton nominee, the “minor gesture was never reciprocated, nor repeated,” teaching the lesson: “De-escalation is for suckers.”
Campaign desk: A Biden Labor Ally’s Disgrace
Harold Schaitberger, “one of Biden’s closest labor allies,” announced he will not be running for re-election as International Association of Firefighters president “amid a federal probe into allegations that he illegally siphoned more than $1 million from the union treasury,” reports The Washington Free Beacon’s Yuichiro Kakutani. The IAFF was “the first major national union to back the former vice president,” but Schaitberger’s exit “may dampen the union’s support for Biden, especially since many rank-and-file members objected to the endorsement.” The union prez has denied any misconduct — but however the investigation turns out, his “fall from grace” is a loss for Biden. Just hours after the announcement, the union’s Philadelphia chapter endorsed Trump.
From the right: Comey’s Tinseltown Fans
James Comey is an object of bipartisan hate, observes the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe, thanks to infamous “preening and grandstanding” that may have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election before becoming a headache for President Trump. But not in Hollywood. Showtime has now adapted the ex-FBI boss’ memoir, with Jeff Daniels playing Comey and coming off as “even more self-aggrandizing.” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gets painted as a villain, “a conniving caricature of the menacing Jew manipulating all of the noble gentiles.” Worse, “the show attempts to exonerate Comey of any charges of politicizing” major investigations and turns anti-Trump FBI operatives like Lisa Page into “sexy” heroes. “Only Hollywood is capable of missing” why it’s impossible to rehabilitate Comey and his reviled coterie.
Education beat: Universities Lack Free Speech
In theory, universities should be spaces of free discussion and inquiry. But the College Free-Speech Rankings — a new interactive site with data from nearly 20,000 students at over 55 schools across the country — show that “colleges have become perilous places to express unpopular ideas,” laments RealClearPolitics’ Nathan Harden. Students are comfortable sharing their beliefs “where their political opinions line up with the majority,” and liberalism is the dominant political ideology at 80 percent. But dissenting students and faculty “fear being shouted down, shunned or, in some cases, fired or expelled.” In the face of this campus “speech crisis,” the new database will expose schools that are “failing to protect open inquiry, academic freedom and free speech.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board