“A major liberal group has drawn up a multimillion dollar plan to make Joe Biden cooler online,” with the White House’s “blessing,” Politico’s Holly Otterbein reports. “Democrats have largely relied on paid advertising and traditional media organizations to get their message out,” but “people are paying less attention to those spaces as they shift to streaming services” and “news sites put up paywalls.” ProgressNow’s “$70 million project” centers on an its app, Megaphone, which lets users “scroll through a series of liberal memes, videos and graphics created by the organization, add their own captions, and then quickly share them on social media platforms.” It’s “an important test of whether Democrats can successfully market the oldest president ever to an electorate that has consistently expressed reservations about his age and wished that another person would be the party’s standard-bearer.”
The IRS’s “focus on squeezing ‘high-income earners’ as part of a ‘historic effort to restore fairness in tax compliance’” is hardly fair, grumbles Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. Since the agency’s definition of “high-income” is half the White House’s $400,000 cutoff, “the tax man’s scrutiny is likely to sweep farther and wider than we’ve been told.” The “juicy targets” are the millions of middle-class Americans. Reason reported in January that “the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep.” That, Tuccille says, is “the reality of what the IRS does.”
As Rupert Murdoch plans to step down “after seven consequential and highly successful decades,” the Wall Street Journal’s editors offer “a word about his role at” that paper. When he bought it in 2007, “the digital revolution was taking its toll. Most of the company’s net profit was paid out in dividends, and there wasn’t much left to invest in digital innovation and product enhancement.” But he “invested in journalism. International and other reporting expanded,” the “opposite of the choice made by many other publications.” Fact is, “At his core Mr. Murdoch is a newspaperman. He likes the news business and believes in its mission to inform readers and, if possible, make the world better and freer for more people.” And “even as he turns the helm of his companies over to his son, Lachlan, he said on Thursday he will stay ‘involved every day in the contest of ideas.’ Let’s hope so.”
What made Sen. Bob “Menendez a standout in Washington was not his corrupt inclinations, but his utter audacity in following them,” argues Jonathan Turley at The Hill. If the new allegations “are proven,” he “pursued gifts with a reckless abandon, endangering others whose corruption was more circumspect.” Notably: “In a town known for a certain finesse in influence peddling, Menendez broke with industry custom by allegedly accepting direct items like gold and a car.” So he’ll “need to be isolated as a pariah for his conspicuous consumption.” Yet his fellow Democrats “made Menendez the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, twice. They gave him the power of leverage with countries where bribery is an accepted practice. It was like making a known arsonist the CEO of the International Paper Corporation.”
“Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Sept. 20 congressional testimony was disgracefully evasive,” thunder the Washington Examiner’s editors. Garland claimed “he can’t even ‘recollect’ whether he ‘had personal contact’ with anyone at the FBI” about the Hunter Biden probe. That’s “simply not believable.” He repeatedly used “circular logic,” as when he said David Weiss didn’t need special-counsel status but suddenly became “obliged” to take the title. Garland “adopts a pose of doe-eyed ignorance while refusing to take responsibility for anything.” The Justice Department’s “leftward politicization has been overwhelming”; it’s “an abusive menace to liberty,” and its “rot starts at the top.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board