Daily Clips: January 31, 2017

Daily Clips: January 31, 2017

Parties of the left…wake up!  Here’s a wonderful quote from the piece: “To start, center-left parties must: Put working-class economics front and center. See the country’s challenges through the lives of working people and be skeptical of conventional wisdom emanating from the elites in metropolitan center.  Acknowledge frontally that immigration needs to be better controlled and people are right to want a framework that includes real borders, new migrants contributing through taxes and learning the country’s language, and a framework where citizens receive greater benefits than non-citizens. Take on the elite, big money special interests that play too big a role and are the prime drivers of economic and social inequality. Offer much bigger economic vision and policies.” Paul Ryan urges Republicans to back travel ban despite anger over rollout:  I cannot tell you how much I despise this man. He is a coward. He is a snake. The psychology of why 94 deaths from terrorism are scarier than 301,797 deaths from guns Three reasons trickle-down tax cuts don’t work:  Excellent article by Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg. Tweet of the day: Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is OUTRAGED Dems are boycotting committee hearing. No doubt he felt the same when GOP wouldn't allow a Supreme Court vote — Robert Elisberg (@relisberg) January 31, 2017  

Daily Clips: January 30, 2017

Daily Clips: January 30, 2017

Flirting with theocracy:  As a young man who interned for a summer at the Secular Coalition for America, religion’s place in politics has always been a key topic for me. While I’ve had issues with American policy before this moment, Trump’s travel orders are a perfect example of why, as a democracy, we cannot let religion play a prominent role in the decision-making process. The opening paragraph of David Leonhardt is poignant: Let’s not mince words. President Trump’s recent actions are an attempt to move the United States away from being the religiously free country that the founders created — and toward becoming an aggressively Christian country hostile to other religions. Trump orders two-for-one repeal of all new regulations:  A key pillar of trickle-down economics, Trump’s executive order shows that he is not a man of the people, but a man of the rich. The ACLU says it got $24 million in donations this weekend, six times its yearly average : Incredible news in dark times. 900,000 Brits Sign Petition to Block Trump’s State Visit Due To ‘Misogyny and Vulgarity’ Tweet of the day: In Missouri in the early 1860s, a 'snowflake' was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery. https://t.co/XtIlA4ARV5 — Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 30, 2017

Daily Clips: January 27, 2017

Daily Clips: January 27, 2017

Tweet of the day: Here are the things that DJT wants to make 20% more expensive: pic.twitter.com/actbMsxYpH — Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) January 26, 2017 US tells the world to kiss the ring…or else: “For those that don’t have our back, we’re taking names, we will make points to respond to that accordingly,” added Republican President Donald Trump’s U.N. envoy. Strong dollar drags US growth to slowest pace since 2011:  For 2016, the US economy grew 1.6%—a clear regression from the 2.6% growth in 2015. David Brooks loves the free market: After calling for a return to capitalism and biblical morality on Tuesday, Brooks devotes his latest column to gushing over Reagan’s embrace of free markets.

Daily Clips: January 26, 2017

Daily Clips: January 26, 2017

Mexico president cancels trip to USA after Trump’s comments about the wall: Our international image is improving already! Awaiting Trump’s Supreme Court pick: The rumored frontrunners for the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Thomas Hardiman, and William Pryor—are all individuals highly recommended by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society because each would be a conservative justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia. Paul Ryan: U.S. will ‘front money’ for border wall, devise plan to Make Mexico Pay Later : Something tells me that Mexico is never going to pay for this wall. US wage disparity worsens: Top wage earners last year made over 5 times what their lowest-income counterparts took home, the widest gap in data going back to 1979, according to the Labor Department. Tweet of the day: Trump just said he considered leaving Obamacare as-is so it would be a political albatross for Dems in 2018. — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 26, 2017

Is This What Trumponomics Looks Like?

Is This What Trumponomics Looks Like?

It’s becoming clear in the first week of his presidency that Donald Trump has been telling us exactly who he is for a year and a half now. He did intend to build that wall, unlike what many of his supporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign. He really does believe that wealth has direct correlation to intelligence, that the amount of money you have is a perfect indication of your IQ, which is why he has claimed that his cabinet —  without question the wealthiest in American history  — has “by far, the highest IQ of any cabinet ever.” And he believes that if you cut taxes and regulations, and if you suppress the income of workers, the economy will grow.   Axios published highlights from a teleprompter-free speech that Trump delivered to a closed-press fundraiser last week, including this snippet where he says exactly that to a room full of wealthy Republican donors: We’re going to cut your taxes. We’re going to get rid of the regulations that are strangling the economy. [Applause.] … I know the biggest businessmen and the small ones that love me and voted for me, and I love them. … Almost every single person that I ask was more excited about the regulations being cut than the taxes, which is surprising. [Applause.] So, we’re going to do that. This is not a new philosophy; it’s one that conservatives have been espousing since the days of Ronald Reagan. Regular readers will know that it’s called trickle-down economics, and it’s based on the idea that if you suppress wages for the working class, cut taxes for the wealthy, and slash regulations for business, those wealthy Americans will supposedly then create jobs, that their wealth will trickle down to the poorest Americans. The problem with this economic philosophy, of course, is that it doesn’t work. Democratic presidents create more jobs , for the simple reason
+ Read More

Daily Clips: January 25, 2017

Daily Clips: January 25, 2017

Quite the quote from Samuel Adams:   US journalists arrested, charged following anti-Trump protests: Six US journalists are facing up to 10 years’ jail and a $25,000 fine after being arrested while covering protests during Donald Trump’s inauguration. Economist Intelligence Unit claims “US is no longer a full democracy”: A flawed democracy is a country with free elections but weighed down by weak governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation, according to the EIU. Other flawed democracies in 2016 included Japan, France, Singapore, South Korea and India, the report said. Trump’s Labor nominee gets rich on taxpayer’s dime: …by not paying his workers a living wage or providing affordable health care, Puzder is costing taxpayers about $247 million a year in public assistance funding according to an estimate from the National Employment Law Project.

Daily Clips: January 24, 2017

Daily Clips: January 24, 2017

David Brooks believes Saturday’s marches missed the point: A truly nauseating article from Mr. Sanctimonious. He spends most of his column slamming the identity-based political movements of progressives. Meanwhile, he doesn’t say a god damn thing about conservatives electing a racist, white, nationalist into the highest office. And then he ends his piece with this doozy: If the anti-Trump forces are to have a chance, they have to offer a better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission, building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality. Hard pass. The women who helped Donald Trump win:   Trump’s success is specifically among white women without college degrees, 61 percent of whom voted for him. Clinton actually did 7 points better than Trump with white college-educated women. Debt is projected to rise by $8.6 trillion over 10 years How bad biology is killing the economy: Bad biology exerts an irresistible attraction. Those who think that competition is what life is all about, and who believe that it is desirable for the strong to survive at the expense of the weak, eagerly adopt Darwinism as a beautiful illustration of their ideology. They depict evolution – or at least their cardboard version of it – as almost heavenly. John D Rockefeller concluded that the growth of a large business “is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God”, and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs – the biggest money-making machine in the world – recently depicted himself as merely “doing God’s work”.

Daily Clips: January 20, 2017

Daily Clips: January 20, 2017

DT’s inaugural address transcript: Get ready for unbridled nationalism and divisiveness. His words should prepare progressives for what is to come. Trump to develop missile defense system against Iran, North Korea: The fear-mongering begins. Uber to Pay $20 Million to Settle FTC Charges on Earnings Claims for Drivers Sanders: This is a ‘tough day for millions of Americans’ Tweet of the day: Mnuchin failed to disclose $95 million in assets. When a 90-year-old woman underpaid by 27 cents, he took her house. https://t.co/g6uTS1GIlH — Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) January 19, 2017  

Daily Clips: January 18, 2017

Daily Clips: January 18, 2017

Tom Price, almost certainly, did some insider trading: Mr. Price, who will testify at a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, has bought and sold stocks worth more than $300,000 over the last four years, The Wall Street Journal reported last month . His trades included shares of at least two companies that stood to benefit from legislation he voted for, had sponsored or was involved in. Earth sets temperature record for third straight year: “A single warm year is something of a curiosity,” said Deke Arndt, chief of global climate monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . “It’s really the trend, and the fact that we’re punching at the ceiling every year now, that is the real indicator that we’re undergoing big changes.” Inequality is killing the American Dream: Obamacare Repealers: Trickle Downer of the Week Furthermore, the repeal of Obamacare would generate massive tax breaks—about $180 billion, according to an earlier CBO report —for pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, and medical device manufacturers.  

Daily Clips: January 17, 2016

Daily Clips: January 17, 2016

Republicans Plan to Roll Back Endangered Species Act: Reforms proposed by Republicans include placing limits on lawsuits that have been used to maintain protections for some species and force decisions on others, as well as adopting a cap on how many species can be protected and giving states a greater say in the process. It turns out that a major factor in “making America great again” was removing endangered species from protection. Good to know. Wal-Mart to create 10,000 jobs this year: The “classy way” to let companies sponsor parks:  The marketization of our society is near completion. How Cory Booker went from hero to zero: Booker has long faced criticism on the left for cultivating the elite financial ties that much of the Bernie Sanders wing despises. And while it’s true that his vote may have had more to do with the concentration of the pharmaceutical industry in his home state, it’s also only served to confirm some progressives’ suspicions that he’s too closely allied with corporate interests in the Democratic Party.

1 2 3