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June 2018

I blogged last week that Seattle's city council pulled its head tax less than a month after the members passed it after legitimate pressure from Amazon, Starbucks, and other businesses. I detailed in my blog the trouble with unnecessary corporate taxes such as fewer new jobs and less expansion. Despite this, the cities that make up California's infamous Silicon Valley wants to pass its own head tax.

President Donald Trump has attacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open borders policy, tweeting that "the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition." President Trump's comments come at a time when Chancellor Merkel faces a bitter power struggle within her Christian conservative alliance—with her Catholic Bavarian ally, the CSU party, threatening to abandon the government over immigration.

When Amazon s***canned us from the Amazon Associates program, it made a point to tell us it was holding back and would not pay us any money we had accumulated as referral fees:
"... Amazon will not pay you any outstanding advertising fees related to your account ...."
I don't know how much Amazon took from us, because by the time I received Amazon's notice that we were terminated, the data was wiped clean as to unpaid earnings when I logged in. It's probably not a Yuge amount, certainly not in comparison to Amazon's capitalization and Jeff Bezo's net worth.

Last week the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s official summer camping arm, the National Ramah Commission (NRC), pledged not to partner with an activist group of Ramah camp alumni affiliated with the far-left “IfNotNow” (INN) group. In a letter distributed on June 11th to its institutional partners, whose programs this summer include more than 11,000 children and staff members in the U.S., Canada and Israel, the leaders of Camp Ramah explicitly noted that they will “not engage in any way” with INN as an organization.

A new narrative is taking form among liberals and never-Trump Republicans. According to them, the GOP is becoming a Trump cult. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee is one of the latest to push this ridiculous idea.

Just three months into her fourth term, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel faces the biggest crisis of her career. Her Catholic conservative Bavarian ally, the CSU, has threatened to abandon the coalition government over immigration policy. Germany's Interior Minister and long-time CSU leader, Horst Seehofer, wants to push for tougher immigration laws, which will include refusing entry to illegal immigrants at the border. According to German newspaper reports, if the country's Interior Minister goes ahead with the new restrictions without Merkel's consent, she will be forced to fire him, putting an end to her freshly-baked coalition government. Her political future hangs in the balance, as CSU leaders meet on Monday to decide the future course of action.

Have you noticed that in the last few days the issue of children separated from parents arrested while illegally crossing the Mexican border has become the latest anti-Trump fury and obsession. This is not a new issue, but is now dominating the media and social media landscape as so many other issues have filled a slow news cycle void. The problem of separating children is a problem caused entirely by people crossing the border illegally with their children, which puts U.S. border enforcement in a terrible dilemma of either not enforcing immigration laws or separating families.