Who'd have thunk it? I just don't know what to think anymore.
More than a week ago, news anchors were predicting this very capitulation ,er... outcome. I mean, to a tee! Why not at least be a little mavericky and do something that might surprise even a news chuckler. If your "strategy is predicted by every 'Who Flung Dung' in front of a camera, I would like to suggest that it isn't a strategy at all.
I won't repeat myself about letting everything expire and then...blah, blah, blah.
When the President described the tax cuts that the middle class could count on, he said, "Not only the Bush tax cuts, but" also the ones from last year. (that last phrase is not a direct quote, but it paraphrases his statement)
Is there any reason in anyone's thinking that he could not utter the words, "The Obama tax cuts?"
Anyone?
Seriously, I hope enough Democrats walk away from this to doom it.
Well, if they do, I just can't see any reason to support them any more. 2 years? Who do they think they're kidding?
The Bush cuts were designed to expire this year because they were unsupportable beyond this year (actually they were always unsupportable).
Two years? Three years? If that goes down we are "governed" by Democratic cowards and Republican thieves.
Let them all expire, and let the Republicans take the responsibility! If Democrats don't let that happen then they are passively accepting the Republicans' goals.
How else can you explain the outrage of the President going on a State Visit? Cost? That is only the excuse. I honestly think that these people object to this trip because there is an accepted "truth" among republicans that our President is just living in the White House, but he is not actually Our President. How else can one explain the "Opt In" for students nation-wide to hear the message that President Obama gave in September? Can anyone imagine anything equivalent with any former President? Yet they get away with it.
My first OPEN THREAD referred to Virginia Thomas, because I didn't feel that it was appropriate to refer to "Ginny," as she is known by all who love her. Now, I think I know her really well, but I still definitely don't love her. I just prefer to call her "Ginny," because my mother was named Virginia and she hated the name GINNY.
Has anyone except me wondered why Virginia Thomas called Professor Hill's office at 7am on a weekend and left a recorded message for all to hear (and parse)? If she had just called and spoken to her she could actually claim that she had extended an olive branch, and it would have been her word against Hill's. Her recorded words completely refute her stated reason for the call; after all, an olive branch doesn't usually include an accusation of perjury.
Jesus Ochoa reluctantly announced that rescue efforts will be terminated due to the fact that three of the 33 trapped miners had not paid 75 pesos for "Rescue Insurance." When asked about the other 30 miners who had paid up, Ochoa responded that it was a tough call, but a necessary one.
This is more of a rant than a thoughtful blog, but I just want to register my opinion on this concept of billionaires using THEIR OWN MONEY to run for office. I have been struck by the way this has been portrayed, as though it stemmed from some altruistic motive of the billionaires to serve our country. How about reporting that most of the self-financing politicians run on the backs (and donations) of poor schmucks who give a hugely larger percentage of their income in the false belief that the wedge issue republicans are on their side.
In 2008 Tom Periello (a Democrat) challenged Virgil Goode (a very conservative Republican who had a good record of responding to constituent requests), and Tom won in a state --Virginia -- that we could all agree has become purple, rather...
From ThinkProgress.org there is news that may give us all some hope:Just when you thought the last nail had been driven in the public option coffin months ago, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the public option has once again returned...
I won’t try to paraphrase this Lithub excellent essay by Rebecca Solnit.
This is just one example in the well-wriiten look at how things have changed on the empathy train:
...PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?”
In a sublime case of poetic justice, the so-called Tax Cut and Jobs Act is backfiring on the Republicans big time. Most voters are unimpressed, and Republicans themselves are ceasing to emphasize it in their campaign material.
Fox News host who said Trump’s fixer ‘knows real estate’ has a portfolio that includes support from Department of Housing and Urban Development, a fact he did not mention when interviewing secretary Ben Carson last year
[....] Hannity’s chosen investment strategy is confirmed by thousands of pages of public records reviewed by the Guardian, which detail a real estate portfolio of remarkable scale that has not previously been reported.
In East New York, Brooklyn, a police observation tower still hovers over the intersection where a 16-year-old boy was gunned down on his way home from playing basketball last November.
They are interviewing him (James Shaw, Jr.) on CNN TV right now, he is a really soft-spoken, polite, humble guy; impressive "young black male," that the Nashville police have already labeled a "hero"no holds barred. By the way, the shooter was clearly white.
Home page lede: Theresa “Red” Terry is trying to stop a natural gas pipeline from coming through Virginia land granted to her husband’s family by the king of England in colonial times. For three weeks, she has endured rain, snow, hail, high winds and nighttime temperatures in the 20s. As the stalemate drags on, “I stand with Red” has become a rallying cry for opponents of the 300-mile, $3.5 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline.
But what Comey’s actions and book reveal is a tendency toward a corrupting belief that his “higher loyalty”—which lifted him above partisan politics—somehow bestowed upon him the right to take actions that were well beyond his role as FBI director. It’s a very dangerous attitude, and one that resulted in him taking unprecedented actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, with devastating consequences.
Verdejo still believes Sanders’s core message about economic inequality is important, but it doesn’t capture the racial complexities of the America that he and other people of color live in — especially in the wake of police shooting after police shooting and recent news about two young black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks simply for asking to use the bathroom of without ordering anything first.
If he runs again in 2020, it won't be the same as 2016 - count on it.
By Friday evening, when the American cruise missiles actually started flying, the vaunted attack had been reduced to a single predawn volley against three Syrian government chemical-weapons facilities, carefully chosen to avoid hitting known Russian or Iranian bases and thus escalating a war from which Trump himself had recently demanded an exit. The strike was bigger than last year’s, but hardly the sustained response with “all instruments of our national power” that the President promised in his televised address announcing the attack.
Fox News and CNN On Wednesday again traded blows on the air with Fox News's Sean Hannity comparing CNN's Anderson Cooper to Jerry Springer and Cooper hitting Fox for not reprimanding its top-rated host.
The back-and-forth jabs seem to be happening on a regular basis between the two cable news networks, with MSNBC, which is currently second to Fox News overall in the cable news race, rarely being dragged into the fight [....]