it's impressive to me that obama, biden and even >trump< wanted to eliminate the carried-interest loophole. this should be a signal that it should be removed from the tax code, like, yesterday. of course, this situation once again makes the case for removing big money from politics, but we all know that such corruption is like a contagious disease, and will plague all americans until something big happens that will truly shake up the system. i wonder what that "something big" will be and when it will happen?
oh, and technically speaking, ticks are not insects. they are arachnids. i'm allowed to be a pedant because i'm a PhD-carrying zoologist.
For the last four decades we have heard the mantra of small government and low taxes. This is not what Adam Smith intended, rather the opposite. The founder of capitalism wanted progressive taxation, and strong government, to protect the market from being distorted by wealthy predators.
I was struck yesterday by how Senator Toomey defended the existing (Trumpian) tax cuts for corporations, while at the same time denying that he would deny health benefits to Veterans. Did I hear him say money would have to come from Medicare and Social Security?
What is his problem? Is he no longer a capitalist?
The corporations did just fine before Trump. Now they have more money than they know what to do with.
I like the Ed Koch line: "I like paying more taxes at the end of the year. It means I made more money."
With all due respect, I don’t care to focus on either Manchin’s or Sinema’s agendas. I am singularly focused on presenting as robust a package of relatable accomplishments as possible to voters as a downpayment to justify holding the House and picking up at least 2 Senate seats. My understanding (and hopefully I’m correct) is that the current 48 Senators, including the Centrists, are prepared to modify, if not abolish, the Senate filibuster and bring much, if not all, of the 150+ bills that have passed in the House to the Senate floor for debate and an up or down majority vote.
Though slightly off topic, a second critical objective is to prevent Republicans in select states from attaining trifecta control—control of both legislative state Houses and the governorship. I understand “The States Project” is particularly focused on states holding races for governors and Secretaries of State, plus on state Houses that are primed to flip.
Manchin almost never uses ‘we’ when he refers to Democrats. Sometimes, it’s “they.” When Trump was president, he used ‘we‘ to refer to the people who voted for him, and ‘they’ for everyone else.”
As most people know, there are certain clues, some subtle, others not so subtle, that betray the fact that one is in the presence of certain undesirable companions: vampires, zombies, Nazi spies.
With Manchin, the telltale giveaway is if he refers to the party to which he nominally belongs as the “Democrat Party.” This is a game Republicans have been playing for about thirty years: in referring to it as the “Democrat Party” (never mind that it’s been chartered as the DemocratIC Party since before Andrew Jackson’s day), Republicans’ insinuation is clear -- that the (upper-case) Democratic Party is (lower-case) undemocratic.
It’s not just a game, of course: Republicans have known for a generation or more that the side that controls the language of a debate controls the debate, hence their seizing terms like “partial-birth abortion” and “socialism” to misrepresent the nonsensical, the non-existent and the unprovable aimed at that cohort of voters they cynically calculate are too stupid to know the truth and too lazy to bother to find out what it is.
As for
“But I do know, from fifty year’s [sic] experience in and around Washington, that most of the people who serve in our nation’s capital have very, very large — shall we say? — ego’s.”
That’s EGOS: apostrophes are not used to make plural forms of words and names in English.
Just shows us how the senate and house are bought and paid for! Oh lord help us! Corporations are people! People without any responsibility or consequences for their actions! Surely there is a way to break the corporate shield!
It is my opinion that if Sen. Manchin doesn't like being labelled as the one who killed the 'Build Back Better' then he not be the gigantic stick in the mud that killed the agenda to help millions of people, especially those in his state that he claims to be there to support. As for Sinema... she's treating being in the senate as a popularity thing, and all the attention just adds into it all. Along with all the millions of dollars she's accepting from Big Pharma or her blocking the whole raising the minimum wage increase.
Yes, yes and yes. You are correct. But it’s also true that if things were working as they were designed, in Congress (and elsewhere), Manchinema would never have been “spawned;” because there would have been enough Republicans to pass a bi-partisan bill without these two hypocrites. It’s time for the press to stop blaming the Dems for legislative failures when the GOP votes as one and stops any meaningful progress on a host of vitally important issues. And it’s time for the Dems to show some courage and remove Manchin from his committee chairmanship and cut the strings beholding them to the oligarchs right here at home. The Dems need to get back to basics and what made them an attractive alternative to the GOP. At the moment they have no wind in their sails and act deflated. Playing nice isn’t working in the context of an active coup trying to take our democracy down. The coup is perilously close to success.
Oh geez, the iron grip the elites have on this country is way worse than it appears. Manchinema are a grotesque example of the minority's tyranny over the majority, or the federal judge in Florida who could decide that an entire nation shouldn't wear masks on public transportation during a pandemic. ( the CDC disagreed but nothing's changed) NYT has an article today on Hailey, Idaho and how no one can afford any housing there but the rich, I mean, not the director of the YMCA or a principle of a school, and they can't get teachers they need and nurses and other professionals can't afford to live there, it's been taken over by the uber rich, so has Aspen, Colorado. My multi-millionaire friend with a time-share there complained about health care and said the millionaires were "getting crushed by the billionaires." When educated professionals are priced out of living areas in the US, we are f_____! It's already reported they are finding housing in trailer parks, can't even to that in Hailey, Idaho. Meanwhile, workers in CA ARE living in trailer parks and can only get water with arsenic, no one to advocate for them. We ARE living with the reign of terror of the ruling class and these stories of rich people getting "crushed" by richer people is a view of how bad this will still get for a majority of Americans, this is the canary in the coal mine. Impoverished people are suffering terribly and have for a long time, that world is coming for us all. Manchinema represents our captors. This is no democracy. Don't get lost in the weeds watching these two people, look at the rapid deterioration of the country. The rich live in gated communities, enclaves, they contribute almost nothing to our society. They're destroying it.
Repulsive, both of them . As are the lobbyists for the hedge-hogs and wall street . That the buying of, and control over these two trollops and the rest of the saleable legislators is just out there, obvious, LEGAL, accepted and plain for all to see, turns my stomach. It's just indicative of the warped and morally vapid system we/they have allowed to flourish. Disgusting, the whole package. 💩
Major changes to the Affordable Care Act. The nation’s biggest-ever climate bill. The largest tax hike on corporations in decades. And dozens of lesser-known provisions that will affect millions of Americans. If enacted, it would represent one of the most consequential pieces of economic policy in recent U.S. history.
We need this bill to justify team support. I don't know who said that legislation is like sausage, but at this point any links, patty or churrasco, salami, kielbasa will do. No baloney.
I call them S&M because they enjoy inflicting pain on voters and relish the pain on themselves and other democrats
it's impressive to me that obama, biden and even >trump< wanted to eliminate the carried-interest loophole. this should be a signal that it should be removed from the tax code, like, yesterday. of course, this situation once again makes the case for removing big money from politics, but we all know that such corruption is like a contagious disease, and will plague all americans until something big happens that will truly shake up the system. i wonder what that "something big" will be and when it will happen?
oh, and technically speaking, ticks are not insects. they are arachnids. i'm allowed to be a pedant because i'm a PhD-carrying zoologist.
For the last four decades we have heard the mantra of small government and low taxes. This is not what Adam Smith intended, rather the opposite. The founder of capitalism wanted progressive taxation, and strong government, to protect the market from being distorted by wealthy predators.
I was struck yesterday by how Senator Toomey defended the existing (Trumpian) tax cuts for corporations, while at the same time denying that he would deny health benefits to Veterans. Did I hear him say money would have to come from Medicare and Social Security?
What is his problem? Is he no longer a capitalist?
The corporations did just fine before Trump. Now they have more money than they know what to do with.
I like the Ed Koch line: "I like paying more taxes at the end of the year. It means I made more money."
With all due respect, I don’t care to focus on either Manchin’s or Sinema’s agendas. I am singularly focused on presenting as robust a package of relatable accomplishments as possible to voters as a downpayment to justify holding the House and picking up at least 2 Senate seats. My understanding (and hopefully I’m correct) is that the current 48 Senators, including the Centrists, are prepared to modify, if not abolish, the Senate filibuster and bring much, if not all, of the 150+ bills that have passed in the House to the Senate floor for debate and an up or down majority vote.
Though slightly off topic, a second critical objective is to prevent Republicans in select states from attaining trifecta control—control of both legislative state Houses and the governorship. I understand “The States Project” is particularly focused on states holding races for governors and Secretaries of State, plus on state Houses that are primed to flip.
All Dems must get out and vote in November, and every subsequent election, to make Manchin and Sinema irrelevant !
Big oil just made more than 17 billion off the backs of the working class. That should pay for a lot of poli-tic-tians.
I love the Machinema - it sounds like machine enema - which I like about as well as Manchin or Sinema. Great post.
Manchin almost never uses ‘we’ when he refers to Democrats. Sometimes, it’s “they.” When Trump was president, he used ‘we‘ to refer to the people who voted for him, and ‘they’ for everyone else.”
As most people know, there are certain clues, some subtle, others not so subtle, that betray the fact that one is in the presence of certain undesirable companions: vampires, zombies, Nazi spies.
With Manchin, the telltale giveaway is if he refers to the party to which he nominally belongs as the “Democrat Party.” This is a game Republicans have been playing for about thirty years: in referring to it as the “Democrat Party” (never mind that it’s been chartered as the DemocratIC Party since before Andrew Jackson’s day), Republicans’ insinuation is clear -- that the (upper-case) Democratic Party is (lower-case) undemocratic.
It’s not just a game, of course: Republicans have known for a generation or more that the side that controls the language of a debate controls the debate, hence their seizing terms like “partial-birth abortion” and “socialism” to misrepresent the nonsensical, the non-existent and the unprovable aimed at that cohort of voters they cynically calculate are too stupid to know the truth and too lazy to bother to find out what it is.
As for
“But I do know, from fifty year’s [sic] experience in and around Washington, that most of the people who serve in our nation’s capital have very, very large — shall we say? — ego’s.”
That’s EGOS: apostrophes are not used to make plural forms of words and names in English.
Just shows us how the senate and house are bought and paid for! Oh lord help us! Corporations are people! People without any responsibility or consequences for their actions! Surely there is a way to break the corporate shield!
It is my opinion that if Sen. Manchin doesn't like being labelled as the one who killed the 'Build Back Better' then he not be the gigantic stick in the mud that killed the agenda to help millions of people, especially those in his state that he claims to be there to support. As for Sinema... she's treating being in the senate as a popularity thing, and all the attention just adds into it all. Along with all the millions of dollars she's accepting from Big Pharma or her blocking the whole raising the minimum wage increase.
Congress -- legalized prostitution
Yes, yes and yes. You are correct. But it’s also true that if things were working as they were designed, in Congress (and elsewhere), Manchinema would never have been “spawned;” because there would have been enough Republicans to pass a bi-partisan bill without these two hypocrites. It’s time for the press to stop blaming the Dems for legislative failures when the GOP votes as one and stops any meaningful progress on a host of vitally important issues. And it’s time for the Dems to show some courage and remove Manchin from his committee chairmanship and cut the strings beholding them to the oligarchs right here at home. The Dems need to get back to basics and what made them an attractive alternative to the GOP. At the moment they have no wind in their sails and act deflated. Playing nice isn’t working in the context of an active coup trying to take our democracy down. The coup is perilously close to success.
Oh geez, the iron grip the elites have on this country is way worse than it appears. Manchinema are a grotesque example of the minority's tyranny over the majority, or the federal judge in Florida who could decide that an entire nation shouldn't wear masks on public transportation during a pandemic. ( the CDC disagreed but nothing's changed) NYT has an article today on Hailey, Idaho and how no one can afford any housing there but the rich, I mean, not the director of the YMCA or a principle of a school, and they can't get teachers they need and nurses and other professionals can't afford to live there, it's been taken over by the uber rich, so has Aspen, Colorado. My multi-millionaire friend with a time-share there complained about health care and said the millionaires were "getting crushed by the billionaires." When educated professionals are priced out of living areas in the US, we are f_____! It's already reported they are finding housing in trailer parks, can't even to that in Hailey, Idaho. Meanwhile, workers in CA ARE living in trailer parks and can only get water with arsenic, no one to advocate for them. We ARE living with the reign of terror of the ruling class and these stories of rich people getting "crushed" by richer people is a view of how bad this will still get for a majority of Americans, this is the canary in the coal mine. Impoverished people are suffering terribly and have for a long time, that world is coming for us all. Manchinema represents our captors. This is no democracy. Don't get lost in the weeds watching these two people, look at the rapid deterioration of the country. The rich live in gated communities, enclaves, they contribute almost nothing to our society. They're destroying it.
Repulsive, both of them . As are the lobbyists for the hedge-hogs and wall street . That the buying of, and control over these two trollops and the rest of the saleable legislators is just out there, obvious, LEGAL, accepted and plain for all to see, turns my stomach. It's just indicative of the warped and morally vapid system we/they have allowed to flourish. Disgusting, the whole package. 💩
CITIZENS UNITED made all this possible.
Major changes to the Affordable Care Act. The nation’s biggest-ever climate bill. The largest tax hike on corporations in decades. And dozens of lesser-known provisions that will affect millions of Americans. If enacted, it would represent one of the most consequential pieces of economic policy in recent U.S. history.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/28/manchin-schumer-climate-deal/
There is no "I" in "team"?
We need this bill to justify team support. I don't know who said that legislation is like sausage, but at this point any links, patty or churrasco, salami, kielbasa will do. No baloney.
Go team! (Boomerang, boomerang sis boom bah!)