You can only commit “treason” against someone, or something, you belonged to.
So…Comey was originally in Hillary’s pocket?
“Treason” is not the word. “Damned poor choice” alleviates personal accusation, and may well be justified, given the circumstances. Reminiscent of Colin Powell. But absent clear and unquestionably disloyal behavior, treason does not apply.
What would be the reaction if I said, “‘Female genital mutilation,’ is too culturally insensitive! From now on, I will call it simply genital cutting.” You know, to avoid offense.
How do we like that plan?
Not a very good thread as I even noted then, the latest news are giving us an example of how the bias at FOX even affected their reporters and their reporting, and the latest complaint from Fox News anchor Kelly Wright, shows that FOX needed to do, not only a cleanup of the misogyny isle, but also on the racist one.
Of notice are also the early links in that Climate Crocks article that point to other examples of the conservative deplorables that mix bigotry and climate change denial. For some reason bigotry also pops up a lot among extremists from the right that are also climate change deniers.
Even I on this message board has had encounters with very conservative posters that mixed those items that were also mentioned by the OP. There is a lot of cleanups that conservatives need to do among their ranks; unless what is going on is that they prefer power more than to see America progress.
They are willing to risk a bigger fall than the Republicans had after supporting prohibition for so many years and electing a president that also did not have much political experience in the 30’s.
Are we reading the same Wikipedia? It’s often comically slow or behind the times when it comes to current events, IME.
I’m okay with it. Why do you ask?
Because it changes the way we describe something, and it seemed to me that it did so poorly.
[quote=“Velocity, post:1, topic:784989”]
[ul]
[li]Trickle-down economics doesn’t work.[/li]
…
[li]Tax cuts would probably worsen the national debt.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
It looks like another dose of trickle-down might be in our future. Would anybody like to keep track of what results are promised by various politician, maybe make some predictions of our own, and come back in a few years to see who was right?
The current tax cut proposal does not (so far as I can see) contain spending cuts to offset the revenue loss the tax cuts will engender. . . so it seems a pretty safe bet to say it will increase the deficit.
I am curious about the new pass-through tax proposals for small businesses. I plan on talking to my accountant to see how difficult it would be for my business to make the adjustments to qualify for that rate, assuming that it goes through.
I dunno whether or not I will. If I do, then I approve, if I don’t, then I disapprove.
Now, while that sounds self serving, I suppose, I am also a pretty good example of what people actually think of when they thing of small businesses. I have 10 employees, nearing 1/2 million in sales, and I pay myself far far less than minimum wage. If I benefit from these tax policies, that means that millions of other small businesses will as well. If I do not benefit, then likely the small businesses that get the benefit are not the small businesses people think of, but are small businesses like the koch brothers.
Agreed, but it’s not just our predictions I’m interested in. One of the topics of debate in this thread is what it means to say that trickle-down “works”. I think one way to answer that is whether it fulfills the promises made by the people who promote and enact it. The next few years may give us that chance.
And as I understand it, at the moment this plan is just one page of bullet points. Who knows if there will be any spending cuts attached before, and if, it becomes law. Still, I think it will be interesting to see if the people who railed against deficits for the last eight years do anything about it.
I hate to say this, but I don’t see anything in your explanation that makes it any less self serving. You have the classic small business, congratulations. And if this proposal helps you it may help lots of other small businessmen like you. That doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing for the nation.
Not that I’m looking to punish you, either. Small businessmen are part of this country and the government should serve their interests as much as anyone else’s. But why more so?
I’ve shifted my position rightwards on immigration. I’m a Social Democrat, but hearing what’s going on in Europe with mass immigration has me concerned about the wisdom of our country doing the same thing. It’s not even so much terrorism which concerns me, but the inevitable overreaction and right-wing backlash that will ensue afterwards if we don’t tighten up our immigration policies. I don’t think we should turn a blind eye to the suffering of the world, but open borders aren’t the way to address it. We should address it through humanitarian and military interventions to help people in their own countries stay safe.
I used to support Black Lives Matter. But then I learned about the statistics. Only a tiny proportion of black homicide victims die from police, and most of those are entirely justified. It’s not “politically correct” to say this, but blacks have a much higher crime rate than whites. It’s logical to expect that a higher proportion of them would die at the hands of police than whites. If you really want to stop people from dying at the hands of police, crowdfund some public service announcements: “Don’t commit crimes. If you ignore this advice or are mistakenly arrested anyway, don’t resist arrest. That’s all you need to do to not be killed by a cop.”
Most job growth is in small businesses. Small businesses doing well means the economy is inclined to do well. I spend every dollar I take in, and then some, and most of that goes to paying employees. I need more employees, but it is an effort and a cost to hire them, so I can only hire them when I am at a fairly stable point, meaning that I can only hire one every few months. If I received a fairly sizable tax break, then I could accelerate that hiring process, and create another job sooner, as well as expanding my business faster and hiring the next person even sooner again.
In any case, whether you agree or not that a small business like mine receiving tax breaks is good for the economy, I think we both agree that cutting taxes to “small businesses” like the Koch brothers is not going to create very many jobs.
And that is the root of my question. Is this type of tax break something that is going to be actually aimed at small businesses in the traditional sense, or is this going to be another giveaway to the wealthy?
Several cases, recorded on video, showed Black guys that followed that advice and still were shot.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article144190724.html
And on other cases while there was some resistance the video also pointed at overreactions from the police.
That is what many are protesting about.
It’s a nuanced issue, and I’m not going to pretend that cops do never do wrong. I think we could train police to do their job better. But Black Lives Matter doesn’t seem like the best vehicle to enact positive change in this regard. There are several problems:
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They are a decentralized movement, like Occupy Wall Street. Without a single authorized spokesperson, their opponents are going to focus on the nutcases which distracts attention from any legitimate complaints.
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By making this issue a racial one, it makes it much less likely to gain support from white voters, which are still a substantial portion of the voting population. If they rebranded themselves as “Concerned Citizens For Responsible Policing”, I’d be totally behind them. Blacks aren’t the only ones who have bad encounters with the police. Why not build a broader coalition?
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If they insist on focusing on the racial angle, it should be more than just the rare instances of “White Cop shoots Unarmed Black.” For example, I think the denial of Medicaid expansion by many Republican states, which disproportionately harms African Americans, should be a BLM issue.
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Even if we could wave a magic wand and abolish racism in this country, the inertia of past discrimination would still leave a mark for a very long time. I think just about every public policy that could be addressed to help the black community could also help poor white communities and could be rebranded in race neutral terms. BLM needs white allies to succeed, which is difficult to do when their very name forces us to focus on race.
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They need to stop treating Michael Brown like a martyr. He attacked a police officer and tried to steal his gun. His death may have been tragic, but they were caused by Brown’s own actions. The fact that he still being held up as a poster child for police brutality makes BLM seem like a religion to me. They stubbornly cling to their beliefs, regardless of pesky facts.
Ok, but BLM was not the only group that is protesting what is going on.
https://www.aclu.org/other/fighting-police-abuse-community-action-manual
IMHO a lot of what is going on is that conservative sources of information concentrate on BLM in an effort to dismiss abuse issues. Because they are the most controversial group now.
I may well have missed it, but when did we agree this tax cut represented “trickle-down” economic theory?
We didn’t, and since this is still so preliminary we probably can’t. But history leads me to expect that this tax cut will be similar to other Republican tax cuts, and its backers will make the same promises for it. But it’s still early, maybe they’ll surprise me.
Can we agree on what “trickle-down” means? According to Wikipedia, trickle-down is essentially supply-side economics, which it describes as:
If these tax cuts go predominantly to high earners and business owners, it’s promised that the benefits will eventually be felt by everyone, and that the resulting economic growth will make up for the lost revenue to the government, I would consider that to be classic trickle down.
When has anyone ever suggested that police violence is a leading cause of death for black people?