Late yesterday afternoon, Anne came by to tell me they had found me a place, and I was overjoyed. After dinner, I looked at the pictures she emailed, and am now thoroughly frustrated. It’s too small to fit all my stuff. Nevertheless, I’ll probably be moving there in eight days, until they can find me a better place. ARGH!
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:32 (average 4:59). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: The government of Iraq announced on Tuesday that it would seek to build an international coalition to establish democracy in the state of North Carolina.
Speaking to reporters in Baghdad, the Iraqi President, Barham Salih, said that Iraq had reached out to regional powers including Canada and Mexico to launch a military invasion of North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District to “protect the North Carolinians’ right to self-determination.”
While many in the international community commended Salih’s desire to bring democracy to North Carolina, some critics warned that the effort could wind up destabilizing other American states.
“If North Carolina gets democracy, it’s only a matter of time before the people of Wisconsin, Georgia, and other failed states demand it as well,” Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi politician and cleric, said. “Iraq could find itself in a quagmire with no exit strategy.”
Dang Andy! Can we trust them after the way the Republican Reich trashed their country? RESIST!!
From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Robert Mueller Memo On Flynn Shows Cooperation On Three Investigations (52 min.)
I think she’s right that we are not in the end game after all. Dig in. RESIST!!
From Think Progress: In the lead-up to the enactment of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, Donald Trump’s massive tax cut that mostly benefited rich people and big corporations, a coalition of powerful business interests formed with one major priority in mind: slashing the corporate tax rate. The Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably (RATE) Coalition comprised dozens of companies and trade groups that all insisted lowering corporate taxes would mean more jobs.
A ThinkProgress review found that about half of RATE Coalition’s members have made layoffs since the law’s enactment. In other words, not only did the expensive tax cut not bring more jobs, it couldn’t even forestall significant job losses.
In 2017, the RATE Coalition’s website identified 32 companies and trade groups who had come together around the singular mission to “reform the tax code, making it fairer and simpler and improving the prospects of growth and jobs in the U.S. economy by reducing the corporate income tax rate to make it more competitive with our nation’s major trading partners.” Together, they constituted a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization (first launched in 2011) and promised that a corporate tax rate reduction would “boost job creation and economic growth.”
Their membership list was a who’s who of Big Business: Aetna Inc., AT&T, Altria Client Services, Association of American Railroads, Boeing, Brown-Forman, Capital One, Cox Enterprises, CVS Caremark, Edison Electric Institute, FedEx, Ford, General Dynamics, Home Depot, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, Liberty Media, Lockheed Martin, Macy’s, National Retail Federation, Nike, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Reynolds American, S&P Global, Southern Company, Synchrony Financial, T-Mobile, UPS, Verizon, Viacom, and Walmart.
In just the second quarter of 2017 alone, their combined corporate lobbying on taxes and other issues exceeded $48 million. [emphasis added]
That’s what happens when we give welfare to billionaires. RESIST!!
Cartoon:
9 Responses to “Open Thread – 12/5/2018”
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5:49 Another day when the pieces wanted to snap AT me instead of FOR me.
Brand new and very topical Randy Rainbow – and the rhymes will knock your socks off.
Fourteen very good questions from Wired
TNY – Nothing to add. (The latest is that the legislature has introduced a bill which would require the Election Board chair to be a Republican in election years. Srsly.
Rachel – All the people whose opinions I respect, at Daily Kos, AlterNet, Raw Story, Crooks and Liars, and elsewhere are saying we are not in the end game yet, and I concur. The Fourteen Questions article I cited earlier in this comment is also pertinent. Thanks for posting Rachel.
TP – Yeah. And that’s what happens when we give power to Republicans.
Cartoon – Good thing.
Thanks for Randy ?, Joanne. He’s really on a roll, isn’t he?
Randy is absolutely spot on! He is such a joy . . . his mother must be very proud of him!
OMG, Randy Rainbow, how BRILLIANT is he!! ?
Thanx for that Joanne, i subscribed!!!
So glad you got a new place TC, so sad it’s small!!! ?
NYer: Best yet, Andy!
RM: WOW. Amazingly detailed, w/more to come! thx, Joanne for the Wired link, still reading that one. RR is spot on!! Love that guy!
*thx for posting!
TP: ugh!!! The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer! Shame!
Cartoon: Thank God, right?
Gee, I hope that they find you a place that suits & fits your needs. That would be good news if they did. Enjoy your evening, take care, and Thanks, Tom.
*This just in: “Trump uses an 8 car motorcade (parade stretch Presidential Limo) to visit the Bushes, to offer condolences, at the Blair House. It’s a 750′ foot journey. It wasn’t raining, but bone spurs, perhaps?” Pat B.
So, half of the astroturf organization RATE wound up laying off workers instead of creating new jobs. It figures. The Big Business fat cats had no intentions of creating jobs, only of taking the corporate welfare and running.
New Yorker: At least it’s not the Saudis who want to “help” out.
Rachel: Can anyone imagine how many Political Science, and History researchers, and Ph. D’s are going to be able to build careers around the cess pool that has surrounded the Orange Empty in recent years, and is still going forward? Flynn has apparently been of major help to Mueller, Cohen, and the Enquirer publisher, Pecker, and whomever else, appear to be spilling all over the place; Manaforte may have been an unwitting reverse mole; HANG ON TO YOUR HATS!!!!!!!!
TP: Who is surprised, really?
‘Toon: I once met a fellow who said that his wife was a niece of Einstein’s. Good thing we took in THIS immigrant. Who knows what geniuses we are pushing away?
NY: Keeps getting better, Andy.
RM: Great details. Sure there’s so much more to come.
TP: What’s new? He has done nothing except for the 1%. Plus even promising more jobs?? Hate to tell him that he is wrong again…Look at GM.
Joanne: Like the Randy Rainbow.
Sorry to hear about your new place being small, I’ll pray that they can find you one a little bit larger within the next 8 days..
3:17 Sorry, no fish left to fry for you, TomCat.
TNY: That parody is so razor sharp it really hurts, Andy.
Rachel Maddow: What the heck Mueller is waiting for? How much more evidence does he need? We’ve been hearing for so long that Mueller is under threat of being fired, or his investigation ended or thrown out by the new acting DOJ head Whitaker, so what are the chances that Flynn has by lying his a$$ off and then gets away with it because he was so ‘helpful’ in an investigation which most important results never see the light of public day? Will we ever see an endgame?
TP: Don’t tell anyone here is surprised by this news. I doubt we can call it news; this was exactly the outcome we expected. And of course the only outcome the 1% was interested in. They pushed a few million dollars across as an investment and got their returns in hundredfold. Business as usual, right?
Cartoon: I wonder if Einstein would be granted a visa in this day and age.
So sorry to hear about your temporary move to an unsuited apartment, TomCat. They know about how much room you need and also that you’re just a week out of hospital and come up with this? How terribly inconsiderate. Although that may not be the term you have in mind for it. ?