Trump lies about everything, and now he is speaking about the new tax bill he is trying to pass. The big lie right now is that the bill will save the middle class and hurt the rich. Really? Let’s see!. There is a proposed reduction of corporate tax from 35% to 20%. Who will benefit from that? Trump and his conservative lackeys want you to believe that this will help create jobs but it never has. Every time the rich get a saving it only creates more wealth in their portfolios. There is no historical or economic evidence to back up the theory that if the rich make money they create jobs with it because they don’t. The concept that reducing the corporate tax rate will help the middle class is nothing but a lie.
But, what’s this? The top tax rate will go from 39.6% where Obama put it to 35%. But that, Trump tells us, is not an advantage for the rich. Really? It sure looks like one to this writer. Let’s take a look at that one. If your taxable income is $2 million and you pay 39.6% you end up with $1,208,000 to spend. If the tax rate is 35% you end up with$1,300,000.. That’s a difference of $92,000. In guess Trump and Mark Meadows, his lackey on the tax committee, are so rich that an extra hundred grand doesn’t mean much to them.
Now carry those numbers out to the guys who are making $20 million ($920,000) or $200 million ($9,200,000) or even $2 billion, ($92,000,000) and you end up with some serious numbers. So tell me again; how does that help the poor or the middle class? The fact is, Trump lies every time his lips move and you just have to understand that.
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Retired Lt. General Russell Honore, who was in charge of the Katrina recovery, was on the air yesterday proving to anyone who wasn’t already aware of his disastrous handling of Katrina what an incompetent fool he is. Of course he’s not the only one. People keep screaming about getting supplies to Puerto Rico but a view of the Puerto Rican docks shows container after container filled with supplies. The immediate problem isn’t as Trump has stated, getting the supplies to an island in the big ocean, it’s distributing those supplies when they arrive. IT seems that Puerto Rico needs trucks and drivers in large numbers to get those containers where they have to go. That lack shows PPPP on the part of those on the ground when the hurricane was brewing. You go figure it out.
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Ali Velshi a journalist who I greatly admire jumped the shark today when he went after FEMA director Brock. Long. This is a truly functional operative, who has been buried by Houston, Florida and now Puerto Rico. Ali should stop being so thin skinned about Trump’s attacks on the press. It’s part of the presses franchise to get attacked by turkeys like Trump. Long has done a fantastic job of dealing with the myriad weather disasters we have been hit with this season. The big problem in Puerto Rico seems to have been poor prior planning by the Puerto Rican government, probably due t the financial hole they were trying to climb out of before the storm. A big part of Puerto Rico’s financial hole was dug by the Jones Act, a nasty little piece of maritime protectionism that says only ships under American flags are able to transport goods from one American port to another. This very successful piece of lobbyist-generated legislation has done enormous harm to all American states and territories that are not contiguous to mainland United States. This includes places like Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. This increases the cost of goods to those places by 50% and in many cases more. This puts them at a distinct disadvantage to mainland America in all matters financial. It also makes a hell of a lot of money for American Flag fleets. So why aren’t American fleets all rushing to help bring supplies and personnel to the islands? Because their greedy shits!. All the cruise lines plus all the container lines should be lined up at island ports loaded with supplies and equipment or loading passengers who are fleeing the devastation.
Storm warnings were plentiful and deadly accurate. An economically viable island could be held accountable for not having what they would need on hand. The island’s power grid was already ready for the junk heap and hadn’t been replaced because Puerto Rico was too far in debt to be able to pay for new infrastructure. The first thing that goes south in a hurricane, a tornado or a flood is the power grid, usually because it’s run on poles instead of underground. Poles are cheaper, faster and more facile in a developing place and they don’t get replaced until they get blown down, especially when money is tight as it was in Puerto Rico. If they had money maybe they could have loaded up on generation but they didn’t, so now they pay. Let’s hope they spend the FEMA money the right way this time and let’s hope they set up their system to run on renewables. Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands; these are all tropical locations where the sun shines all day all year. None of them, nor any other tropical location should ever run on oil again. Every building that is rebuilt in any of these locations should have a roof covered with solar panels. That way they won’t even need a new grid.
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One more look at the now manipulated message of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested police brutality and racism in America. Those who gave a damn and followed this series of events have seen Donald Trump emerge at his most clever and twisted as he managed to change the message from police brutality against the black community to disrespect for the flag by privileged, rich, mostly black athletes This distortion of the truth was possible because Trump speaks to a significant segment of the population that see America through the same racist lens as he does. That segment of the population doesn’t want to hear about police violence against blacks even though they are now being made aware of it on an almost daily basis. They do want to hear about rich black athletes that because of their talent, make up a more than significant or acceptable percentage of their pro football teams, demeaning the flag or being disrespectful to our National Anthem. Why do they want to see this? Because it promotes their prejudices and makes reinforces their belief that their racist attitudes towards others are justified. This fits neatly into Trump’s racist reaction to Charlottesville, his embrace of the army of KKK, and White Supremacists, his birther bullshit and the rental abuses in his real estate holdings before he was President.
Even with his coterie of rabid racist followers, Trump wouldn’t be able to pull this off if it weren’t for a generous portion of the press that is still giving him a pass by ignoring the fact that his attacks are not based on what is really happening but on what he wants us to think is happening.
Trump is a crook and a con man and in situations like this he is up to his knees in the kind of mud he knows how to roll in. But even the most ignorant member of the public should understand that his message is a lie. These guys aren’t disrespecting anything. By kneeling, they are making a most respectful statement, which they want the public to hear. None of this has anything to do with the flag and only peripherally to the National Anthem. It has to do with an existing condition of racism and violence against blacks. Nothing more and nothing less!
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So we’ve had another massacre; this one in Vegas. It was an atrocious act that seems to have no connection to anything else. But there is one point of absolute connectivity… guns! Guns in the hands of people who seem to have a perfect right to carry anything that can kill their fellow man.
This guy had no political or religious affiliations. He didn’t seem to have any associations that would lead to this, except his association with guns. This guy had close to fifty weapons either in the hotel room with him or at his home. Why? That’s the question that gets asked after every one of these events and you better believe there are more and more each year. You also better believe that the number will increase exponentially with each coming year mainly because our losers in congress refuse to stand up on their hind legs and face the NRA.
This article could have been written ten years ago or five or two and it would have had exactly the same impact as it will now unless we tell our legislators that we have had enough; that if they don’t vote to tighten the gun laws this minute, if they don’t choke off the supply of guns, they will not get a chance to vote again.
The arguments for owning an automatic or semi-automatic weapon are all specious and pathetically weak. A shotgun is all anyone needs for home protection.. As a former FFL I can state unequivocally that most gun owners don’t know how to handle an automatic weapon safely enough to keep from killing themselves or their own family. For those paranoid crackpots who think the government is coming to get them; forget it. If the government wants you they will get you simply because they have way more firepower than you can ever accumulate. All that arming against the government will get you is killed.
The real bad guys in the gun debate are the gun manufacturers. They are the ones who have carefully fed you this bullshit about home protection and government intervention. Most would say the NRA is the bad guy but it’s really just an owned and operated tool of the greedy gun manufacturers who don’t care how many Americans their guns kill as long as they get that extra yacht. Like big tobacco, big oil, big coal and any number of killer industries, the gun manufacturers only care about their bottom line and your kids dead body just doesn’t figure into that calculation.
An interesting point brought up by reporter Mike Barnacle is that for the last thirty or so years we have been living in this country guided by the politics of fear. Yes, they’re coming for you. Not necessarily the government who you can’t fight but all those others. They will definitely be at your door when when the grid goes down or the apocalypse rolls across the nation and those who have these guns, the fairy tale goes, are the only ones who will be able to survive. They will do that by killing their fellow man. Maybe then, the fake news goes, they will be able to survive.
This fable appeals to the truly paranoid gun owners because you can’t prove a negative. There is no way to prove that the apocalypse isn’t going to happen, especially when one looks at the White House and sees a madman like Trump occupying it. We have a nutcase in the Presidency who threatens other countries with nuclear war, who abandons allies and tries to make friends with our enemies. Why wouldn’t anyone be paranoid?
It becomes very difficult to argue with some gun toting asshole that holds up his AK47 and tells you that when the food runs out he’ll be able to feed his family while you’ll be digging in garbage cans. He got this philosophy by listening to our politicians who have discovered that they can get stuff done by feedingour worst fears and our very existence. “They’re coming for your guns.” “They want your job and your women.” “They’ll make you worship their God.”
No politician ever says anymore, “Do this and everything will be all right.” All politics are now scare politics. “They’ll take away your healthcare”. “Your healthcare is collapsing.” “Hospitals will go out of business and you’ll have no place to go.” We have to understand and accept that paranoia and we have to learn how to answer it before we can get the guns away from the guy in Kansas who has a rack of AR15’s in every room of his house. We have to convince him that he will be safe without them, that he really is safer without them because there is no external threat except his own guns. To do that our political class has to change its tone. It has to speak positively despite all the negative aspects of the Trump administration and the foreign threats we face. There is no apocalypse coming, at least not in this lifetime. There will be no reason for an apocalypse as long as we hold onto our values and each one of us does the right thing.. Of course, the reality is, “each one” of us will not do the right thing, but if the majority does, at least we have a chance to hold the fort until we get a real President in the White House, a man who will appoint a real Cabinet that knows how to run a county without making bullying threats to everyone that disagrees with him.
There are two ways that officialdom gets armed people out of buildings. They talk them out or they shoot them out. One has generally good results, one not so much. We have been having the gun debate for too many years. Maybe if people aren’t terrified about what’s going on around them every single minute of their lives they won’t feel they have to be armed to the teeth, just to survive. It’s worth a shot because something certainly has to be done about the constant negative approach to everything that is going on around us. If we don’t make a change, the next step will surely result in more violence.