Rocky Mountain Voice

Author: Kelly Sloan

Sloan: Leaving the door ajar on a wealth tax
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Sloan: Leaving the door ajar on a wealth tax

By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice The progressive’s unquenchable appetite for exacting every last ounce of flesh from those who have accumulated more wealth than Bernie Sanders thinks appropriate may have gotten a bit of unsolicited help from the Supreme Court last week. The Court, in Moore v. U.S., upheld a provision from the 2017 tax reform, the mandatory repatriation tax (MRT), that assigned a one-time tax on shareholders of predominantly U.S.-controlled foreign firms, on retained (and therefore untaxed) earnings proportional to their ownership stake. The 7-2 ruling – with Thomas and Gorsuch dissenting – was rather narrow, as Justice Kavanaugh took pains to note in his opinion joined by Chief Justice Roberts, focusing solely on the specifics of the case...
Sloan: After DA Alvin Bragg’s unorthodox case against Donald Trump, now what?
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Sloan: After DA Alvin Bragg’s unorthodox case against Donald Trump, now what?

By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice It is pretty much universally accepted, at least quietly and with furtive glances, that Manhattan Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump was… er… unorthodox, to say the least.  The legal gymnastics required to take a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has long since expired and transmogrify it into 34 felonies are almost disturbingly impressive. They are similar, in reverse, to the circumlocutions that liberal DA’s go through to reduce charges and keep real criminals out of jail. It’s nearly impossible, for instance, to get convicted of a felony and get sentenced to prison in Denver, the local appetite being more geared towards pleading down to misdemeanors whatever crimes the Colo...
Sloan: The unhinged morality of the international community
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Sloan: The unhinged morality of the international community

By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice If anyone still harbored any illusions that the International Criminal Court at The Hague was a serious institution with a shred of legitimacy and a moral mandate, those illusions have surely been put to rest. ICC prosecutor Karim Khan issued arrest warrants in late May for Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in what may be the finest demonstration of absurdity in international affairs so far this century. And given the continued omnipresence of the UN, that’s saying a lot. Granted, Khan and his team of charlatans also issued warrants for a handful of Hamas bosses, but the ludicrous equivalence only seems to lend an even greater sense of incredulity to the episode; it...
Sloan: The DEI facade is showing cracks
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Sloan: The DEI facade is showing cracks

By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice Last week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's board of trustees did what only a short time ago would have been considered an unthinkable act of social regression: they voted, unanimously, to not only cut the $2.3 million funding of the institution’s DEI program, but to reroute that money into public safety – yes, meaning campus police.  It is but one example of the slow, but steady retreat from the madness of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs that have metastasized throughout our culture in the wake of the civil unrest stemming from the killing of George Floyd in 2020. The innocuous-sounding trifecta – who could argue against those values in a pluralistic society? – disguised a far m...
Sloan: The greater threat to the planet
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Sloan: The greater threat to the planet

By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor George Will recently wrote a rather chilling column, pointing out something so obvious that it has escaped much attention. That is this: while much of the world is obsessed over climate change, to the point of spending trillions of dollars annually, virtually no attention is being paid to another hypothetical scenario, one that is at least as real in potential (if not more so) as climate change and which bears far more immediate and devastating consequences – that is the threat of nuclear war. Will refers to a book by reporter and historian Annie Jacobsen titled “Nuclear War: A Scenario” in which the author details how a modern-day nuclear exchange could play out – and how quickly – along with the aftermath. The consequences described are every bi...
Sloan: The Roots of Disorder
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Sloan: The Roots of Disorder

By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice The disruptions on university campuses around the world continue, to the point that on many colleges actual conduct of educational activity is something available only to the most resourceful. We know the cause of the day that serves as the catalyst for the disorder; support for Hamas and implicitly – and often explicitly – antisemitic hatred for Israel. That, of course, is merely symptomatic; the real hatred is broader, and more generally revolutionary – a hatred for Western Civilization and all of the manners, morals, and customs that accompany it.  The most immediate question is what to do about it, the answer being: that’s what society has police officers, jails, and courts for. But it is fair to probe a little d...
Sloan: Weighing the immunity question facing the Supreme Court
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Sloan: Weighing the immunity question facing the Supreme Court

By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice A fortnight ago, on CBS’s Sunday morning show “Meet the Press”, one of the guests interviewed was Doris Kearns Goodwin, Presidential historian, author of “Team of Rivals” and former staffer for President Lyndon Johnson. Mrs. Goodwin is a frequent guest of the show and, while unabashedly Democratic, often brings up some interesting points, as befitting her role as historian. On this episode, the conversation turned, naturally, to the pending threats to American Democracy – meaning, of course, Donald Trump. Goodwin expressed concern, as all good Democrats do, that the former President would, again, not accept the results of the upcoming election, and how deleterious an impact that could have on America’s political founda...
Sloan: What to do about the Columbia University protestors
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Sloan: What to do about the Columbia University protestors

By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice What is it about Columbia University that seems to attract anarchic, fanatical madness? One may recall the 1968 campus revolt, which ultimately took the University well over a decade to recover from. Twenty years after that ignominy, a new generation of malcontents tried to replicate the whole thing, in the course protesting… oh, who knows, Nicaragua, or Ronald Reagan or something. Today of course, we are treated with headlines of the campus again being shut down by swarms of leftist goons, this time in support of Hamas and their declared goal of wiping Israel off the face of the Earth. Columbia, of course, isn’t the only university so infested. Similar scenes are playing out at Yale, Harvard, Tulane and others around ...
Sloan: Mr. President, “don’t” is not a foreign policy
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Sloan: Mr. President, “don’t” is not a foreign policy

By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice After receiving intelligence reports that Tehran was up to something in response to Israel’s successful strike in Syria that eliminated some top Iranian General’s who were leading Hezbollah units, President Biden publicly told the Iranian’s “Don’t”. Well, they did. And boy did they fail spectacularly. Of the 110 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles and 170 drones that the Iranian military fired at Israel, virtually none survived to reach their targets. Reportedly a couple landed near an airbase, lamentably injuring a 7-year-old girl, but not even causing a pause in the airbase’s operations. Now, there’s a lot to unpack with this episode, including the again-demonstrated vacuousness of the Biden Administration’s ...
Sloan: Speaker Mike Johnson has chance to lead on Ukraine
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Sloan: Speaker Mike Johnson has chance to lead on Ukraine

Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice House Speaker Mike Johnson is experiencing a defining moment in his career. As Congress resumes, he seems to have successfully – one hopes – hammered out a workable deal to finally get arms flowing to the Ukrainians as their defense starts to falter. Effective support for Ukraine’s defence is the central foreign policy question facing Western leaders today. There are, of course, no shortage of serious foreign policy dilemmas – one could toss a dart at a world map and chances are pretty good that wherever it lands there is some kind of trouble brewing – but it is difficult to understate the importance of Ukraine. The Israelis are tough and will likely prevail with or without American support (though how much better for our ow...