July 25, 2016

Trump doubles down on NATO pullback, slaps at GOP Senate Leader McConnell for second-guessing him

Source: LA Times

Donald Trump reiterated his call for the U.S. to pull back from its commitment to NATO and said the Republican leader of the Senate was wrong to ascribe the proposal to "a rookie mistake."

"He's 100% wrong. OK?" Trump said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "He's 100% wrong if he said that."

Trump shocked many in the country's defense and foreign policy establishment when he said Wednesday in a New York Times story that, as commander in chief, he would not automatically come to the defense of America's NATO allies if they were attacked.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who had given a less-than-rousing speech in support of Trump's nomination at the Republican National Convention, responded by suggesting the remark showed the political neophyte's inexperience and the need for guidance from more seasoned lawmakers.


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-1469369642-htmlstory.html

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Any coincidence that a Russian hack turns into an anti-Dem disclosure?

July 13, 2016

Dallas tragedy proves a good guy with a gun shouldn't be the only thing that stops a bad guy ...

...with a gun.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-skelton-dallas-shooting-gun-control-20160711-snap-story.html

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Well, that gun lobby rubbish was again disproved in Dallas.

Twelve good guys — law enforcement men and women trained to shoot — were stopped by one bad guy. Five officers were killed and seven wounded. Two civilians also were injured before the bad guy was finally stopped by a bomb-carrying robot.

How many good guys with guns were there trying to subdue this bad guy? Maybe 100? More?

The bad guy himself, like so many killers, apparently also was a good guy, until he wasn’t anymore — until he decided to shoot white cops. Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old black man, had no known criminal record or ties to terror groups. He was formerly a U.S. Army reservist stationed in Afghanistan.

July 9, 2016

New Yorker - "The Horrific, Predictable Result of a Widely Armed Citizenry"

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-horrific-predictable-result-of-a-widely-armed-citizenry/ar-BBu6Dpl

The killings in Dallas are one more reminder that guns are central, not accessory, to the American plague of violence. They were central fifty-plus years ago, when a troubled ex-Marine had only to send a coupon to a mail-order gun house in Chicago to get a military rifle with which to kill John F. Kennedy—that assassin-sniper also fired from a Dallas building onto a Dallas street. They are central now, when the increased fetishism of guns and carrying guns has made such horrors as last night’s not merely predictable but unsurprising. The one thing we can be sure of, after we have mourned the last massacre, is that there will be another. You wake up at three in the morning, check the news, and there it is.

We don’t yet know exactly by whom and for what deranged “reason” or mutant “cause” five police officers were murdered last night, but, as the President rightly suggested, we do know how—and the how is a huge part of what happened. By having a widely armed citizenry, we create a situation in which gun violence becomes a common occurrence, not the rarity it ought to be and is everywhere else in the civilized world. That this happened amid a general decline in violence throughout the Western world only serves to make the crisis more acute; America’s gun-violence problem remains the great and terrible outlier.

Weapons empower extremes. Allowing members of any fringe of any movement to get their hands on military weapons guarantees that any normal dispute—political or, for that matter, domestic—can quickly lead to a massacre. Our guns have outraced our restrictions, but not our imaginations. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, annihilation replaced street theatre and demonstrations as the central possibility of the enraged American imagination. Guns allow the fringe to occupy the center.

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Once again, it needs stating because it can’t be stated too often: despite the desperate efforts of the National Rifle Association to prevent research on gun violence, the research has gone on, and shows conclusively what common sense already suggests. Guns are not merely the instrument; guns are the issue. The more guns there are, the more gun violence happens. In light of last night’s assassinations, it is also essential to remember that the more guns there are, the greater the danger to police officers themselves. It requires no apology for unjustified police violence to point out that, in a heavily armed country, the police officer who thinks that a suspect is armed is likelier to panic than when he can be fairly confident that the suspect is not. We have come to accept it as natural that ordinary police officers should be armed and ready to use lethal force at all times. They should not be. A black man with a concealed weapon should be no more liable to be killed than a white man with one. But having a nation of men carrying concealed lethal weapons pretty much guarantees that there will be lethal results, an outcome only made worse by our toxic racial history. Last night’s tragedy was also the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. There were nothing but good guys and they had nothing but guns, and five died anyway, as helpless as the rest of us.

June 24, 2016

Ryan, House Republicans to unveil U.S. tax reform plan

Source: MSN/Reuters

U.S. House of Representatives Republicans want to lower the top individual income tax rate to 33 percent and slash the corporate tax rate, according to a blueprint released on Friday as an agenda for this year's re-election campaign.

The tax reform plan, to be officially unveiled on Friday morning at the U.S. Capitol, is the sixth and final plank of a conservative policy agenda being rolled out by House Speaker Paul Ryan in an effort to unify Republicans after a divisive primary campaign.

Ryan, the country's highest-ranking elected Republican, has described the agenda as a way to offer voters a coherent policy message across key legislative areas for 2017. He has already released segments on poverty, national security, regulation, constitutional authority and healthcare.

Aides describe these issue areas as common ground between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Ryan, who withheld his endorsement of the billionaire businessman until recently.

Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ryan-house-republicans-to-unveil-us-tax-reform-plan/ar-AAhz54v

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Vote Republican in November so that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan can bring the right wing utopia that is Kansas to the rest of the country.

June 22, 2016

MJ - Today Brings Yet More Obamacare Non-Failure

While the corporate media continues to run stories noting that healthcare costs have continued to grow notwithstanding the ACA, what they frequently ignore is that the rate of growth has not only slowed, but has grown at a slower rate than forecast.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/today-brings-yet-more-obamacare-non-failure

I've written frequently about the fact that the rapid growth in US health care costs has slowed down in recent years. Here's the latest version of the slowdown, courtesy of the Urban Institute:



The raw data for this chart comes the national health expenditures forecast issued annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. As you can see, their latest forecast for the year 2019 is about $500 billion less than it was in 2010. The cumulative forecast for 2014-19 is now $2.6 trillion less than it was in 2010.

It's hard to say how much, if any, of this decrease is due to Obamacare. My own guess is that the cost-saving parts of Obamacare haven't had time to really kick in yet, which means the recent slowdown in health care costs is most likely just an extension of the slowdown that's been percolating behind our backs for more than three decades.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing to say about Obamacare here. CMS did forecasts both before and after Obamacare passed, and they predicted that Obamacare would increase spending. Lots of conservatives predicted the same thing. But it didn't happen. Here's the chart for private health care spending:

June 20, 2016

Trump's plans would cause 'lengthy recession,' cost millions of jobs: analysis

It is funny given the lack of specificity of Trump's proposals that Moody had to test Trump’s plans under three scenarios: one in which Trump is taken at face value and his plans are enacted exactly as he has described, a second where his policies are adopted but at a more modest level, and a third where a skeptical Congress scale back Trump’s plans due to “political realities.”

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/284095-study-economy-would-be-significantly-weaker-under-trump

Donald Trump’s economic proposals would isolate the United States, hurt its economic growth, increase the federal deficit and cost millions of American jobs, according to new analysis.

The grim findings from Moody’s Analytics state that the nation’s wealthiest would benefit the most from the presumptive GOP nominee's proposals, while middle- and lower-class Americans would be hurt the most.

“The economy will be significantly weaker if Mr. Trump’s economic proposals are adopted. Under the scenario in which all his stated policies become law in the manner proposed, the economy suffers a lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office,” the report said.

“By the end of his presidency, there are close to 3.5 million fewer jobs and the unemployment rate rises to as high as 7%, compared with below 5% today. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, the average American household’s after-inflation income will stagnate, and stock prices and real house values will decline.”

June 12, 2016

Donald Trump Reaches Out to Evangelicals, Promising Antiabortion Judicial Nominees

Trump is courting the evangelical vote noting that his list of possible Supreme Court judges are pro-life.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-reaches-out-to-evangelicals-promising-antiabortion-judicial-nominees-1465588284

Seeking to build new bridges to religious conservatives, Donald Trump Friday pledged to nominate antiabortion justices to the Supreme Court and to protect Christians’ religious freedom in a carefully scripted speech to leading evangelical activists.

“We will restore faith to its proper mantle in society,” Mr. Trump told the annual conference of the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington, D.C. “We will respect and defend Christian Americans.”

Although the bombastic New Yorker, a thrice-married billionaire who used to support abortion rights, isn't a natural fit for many social conservatives, Mr. Trump drew leverage from the fact that many in the audience cared more than anything about who will pick the next justices on the Supreme Court.

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He pointed to what was perhaps his most important step of his campaign toward easing concerns on the religious right: The list he released last month of the judges with strong conservative credentials whom he would consider for the vacancy on the Supreme Court. “By the way, these judges are all pro-life,” he said. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast “will appoint radical judges,” he said.

June 4, 2016

Disney/Marvel - Captain America In the Era of Donald Trump - A Hydra (Nazi) Agent All Along

When Captain America was originally conceived, he punched Hitler. In Civil War, he was a voice for civil disobedience in opposing the oppression of mutants. However, as the Republican party under Donald Trump rises to prominence with a message of intolerance and hate, Disney and Marvel re-imagine Captain America to represent America today, as an agent of the Nazi terrorist group Hydra. It is a pretty honest and bold move for Disney and Marvel to embrace the America of today where millions of Americans so willing embrace Donald Trump, a man unapologetically makes racist, sexist and religious based attacks on his adversaries. But then again, since Donald Trump's rise has been compared with rise of nationalists and facists, it would be fitting for Marvel/Disney's character to continue to be an ardent opponent of facism.

So, America, we now have a hero who is the proper face of Donald Trump's vision of America.

http://www.newstalk.com/When-Marvel-turned-Captain-America-into-a-Nazi-fans-donated-to-the-Holocaust-Memorial-Museum

Hell hath no fury like a fanboy scorned, as the recent revelations in the new Marvel comic of Captain America have shown. Fans of the movie franchise will know that the WWII super soldier Steve Rogers, frozen solid after sacrificing himself, awakens in the modern world to find his old nemesis HYDRA, an evil Nazi group with ties to the occult and power grabbing, still active and everywhere. But now a twist in Captain America: Steve Rogers No. 1 has revealed one of the biggest twists in comics history – Captain America has been a HYDRA sleeper agent all along.

Plot twists like this are the bread and butter of the comic book industry, but fans have not been taking Captain America’s secret very well. Mostly down to the fact that HYDRA has undeniable ties to fascism and Nazi Germany. Even Chris Evans, the US actor who plays the Captain in Marvel Studios' billion dollar cinematic universe franchise, weighed in on the twist on Twitter:

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In all the online sound and fury over the plot turn, a surprising response emerged among disappointed fans to challenge the comic: donate the price of the issue to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Rockscanfly, the name of the Tumblr user who came up with the idea, saw it shared far and wide across the Internet, finding favour among fans of the comic book character created by two Jewish cartoonists in the middle of WWII – whose very first cover saw him knocking auld Adolf’s blocks off with a single punch.

June 4, 2016

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Primaries and Caucuses

John Oliver brings his usual wit to the discussion of primaries can caucuses with sufficient irreverence to amuse and annoy Hillary and Bernie supporters alike.

May 31, 2016

Bernie/Trump/Hillary On Trade Policy - When You Say You Are Against Free Trade Agreements

When I hear folks railing against free trade agreements and that we should repeal them, what specifically are we proposing to have happen?

1. An embargo against trade?
2. Higher tariffs on imported goods?
3. A subsidy on some or all of American goods?

It is one thing to say you want to cancel trade agreements, but what do folks think will happen if those agreements are cancelled? Also, if we are thinking higher tariffs are the way to go, why would there be a different result then what happened following the imposition of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff, which was imposed by Republicans and, in fact, it was due to Herbert Hoover's support of such protectionist measures that he won the Presidency.

Kind of curious, since we have vox on the left and CNBC on the right critiquing the respective trade views of Bernie and Trump.

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11139718/bernie-sanders-trade-global-poverty

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/10/trump-trade-plans-could-cause-global-recession-experts.html

Are these critiques fair or do you think the analysis misrepresents the views of the respective candidates?