Paul Ryan would rather you didn’t know what he was up to on taxes

Republicans want to solve the problem that the rich aren't rich enough. And the less you know about that, the better.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/18/paul-ryan-would-rather-you-didnt-know-what-he-was-up-to-on-taxes/



Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan by CNBC’s John Harwood. The “distributional tables” they’re talking about are those like the one below, showing the impact of one of Ryan’s tax proposals by income group.

HARWOOD: On taxes, your predecessor as Ways and Means chair, Dave Camp, when he came out with a comprehensive tax reform a few years ago, he adopted as a principle that it was going to be distributionally neutral. It wasn’t going to advantage any group over the current system. Is that still a principle that you think is appropriate for the Republican tax agenda?

RYAN: So I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables. What you’re talking about is what we call static distribution. It’s a ridiculous notion. What it presumes is life in the economy is some fixed pie, and it’s not going to change. And it’s really up to government to redistribute the slices more equitably. That is not how the world works. That’s now how life works.

***

RYAN: I think most people don’t think, “John’s success comes at my expense.” Or, “My success comes at your expense.” People don’t think like that. People want to know the deck is fair. Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/moderate-john-kasich-is-actually-terrifying-20160318

John Kasich is such an appealing guy, isn't he? He went to a same-sex wedding once. He thinks Donald Trump's plan to deputize the violent thugs at his rallies so they can kick out all the brown people is pretty unreasonable. His folksy Midwestern-dad charm gives Democrats fits of terror when we imagine facing him in the general election.

He's the anti-Trump and the anti-Ted Cruz, neither a demonstrably racist egomaniac nor a pinched and sleazy blowhard.

Add that all together, and it spells M-O-D-E-R-A-T-E.

Kasich was always supposed to be the moderate in the race, which is why he wasn't given much of a chance of surviving until Iowa, let alone this late in the game. But on Tuesday, he won his home state, winner-take-all Ohio, throwing a genuine wrench into Trump's march toward the nomination.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-stop-trump-movement-is-a-pathetic-joke/2016/03/17/96a87c24-ec6f-11e5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html?postshare=651458307319789&tid=ss_tw

We can no longer pretend this isn’t happening. Donald Trump will very likely be the Republican nominee for president, and there is a non-zero chance he could win in November.

Trump won at least four of the primary contests Tuesday, including winner-take-all Florida. If you count Missouri, where he seems to have beaten Ted Cruz by a scant 1,726 votes, he won five out of six, losing only in John Kasich’s home state of Ohio. Cruz and Kasich are his only remaining rivals — all others have been vanquished — and Trump has won more primaries and convention delegates than the two of them put together.

If we were talking about a normal candidate, rather than a dangerous demagogue, we’d say he had pretty much sealed the deal for the nomination. But otherwise-sensible people seem to be gambling on some kind of miracle — rather than focusing on what needs to be done to keep Trump out of the White House.

The stop-Trump “movement” in the Republican Party has been, thus far, a pathetic joke. The fecklessness of the whole endeavor was encapsulated by Mitt Romney’s performance earlier this month: He told voters why they should not vote for Trump but stopped short of endorsing an alternative.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-went-wrong-with-marco-rubio-20160318



If there was a moment during the early primary season when you could almost feel the self-delusion infecting the Republican establishment, it was on the night of the South Carolina primary, when an utterly deflated Jeb Bush, onetime shoo-in for the nomination, suspended his campaign, and Marco Rubio, the supposed "last best hope" of the GOP, declared a sort of victory without actually winning. The Florida senator had come in second, barely, eking out a win over Ted Cruz by two-tenths of a point – though, as it would be argued incessantly, this was a score, given that Rubio came in fifth in New Hampshire and had almost been left for dead.

Some 400 South Carolinians had shown up for Rubio's election-night watch party, which was held in a cavernous event space in Columbia. A series of huge, looming TV screens broadcast Fox News. It was absolutely clear, and had been clear within an hour of the polls closing, that Donald Trump had not only won the state, but had won by a small landslide, just as he'd done in New Hampshire, and would later do in Nevada, Alabama, Georgia and even in Rubio's home state of Florida, as he marched ever closer to the nomination. The Fox commentators treated Trump's 10-point lead as data from some parallel universe. "I don't think it's in any way a foregone conclusion," opined Charles Krauthammer, a Fox regular who has effusively spoken of Rubio as "Kennedyesque" (and who Trump has called a loser). Krauthammer pondered what the race might look like were Ben Carson and John Kasich, like Bush, to quit. There was no indication of this happening then, but whittling down what was once a 17-candidate field to a two- or three-way contest had been a fantasy of the GOP cognoscenti for months. "Look, Trump got 31 percent of the vote," said Krauthammer, though actually, Trump got 33 percent. "In a three-way race, that's a dead heat!"

Strains of nondescript country-rock music swelled the room – the campaign recently gave up playing Axwell and Ingrosso's "Something New" after getting a cease-and-desist letter from one of the Swedish DJs – as Rubio strode triumphantly onstage, followed by his wife, Jeanette, and four children. Rubio has one of the most perfect-looking families in national politics. He also looks as if he could be running for president of the Young Republicans, with a smooth, unworried face, full head of dark-brown, perfectly parted hair, and an easy, seemingly genuine million-watt smile. "When I look at Marco Rubio, I think of one of those dressed-up little-boy figurines spinning around on a birthday cake," says the writer T.D. Allman, author of Finding Florida: The True Story of the Sunshine State, who also sees Rubio as an equivalent of the Florida housing bubble.

This was Rubio's second nonvictory moment: In Iowa, Rubio had finished third, yet it was in some ways declared a win, since he "overperformed expectations," as The Washington Post put it. A slew of media outlets concurred: Rubio was clearly the GOP candidate with the broadest appeal. New Hampshire had been a disaster, of course, but then Rubio rebounded – "Marcomentum!" Here at the podium beside him stood his three local surrogates, Rep. Trey Gowdy, who is white; Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina's first African-American senator; and the state's popular Indian-American governor, Nikki Haley, one of the GOP's rising stars. Over the past two days, the three had barnstormed across the state with Rubio, providing a feel-good image of an inclusive GOP that, having been carefully stage-managed to project just this narrative, was duly captured on every video and cellphone camera. "This new group of conservatives taking over America looks like a Benetton commercial," Haley said.

Lee Andrews, lead singer of the Philadelphia doo-wop group Lee Andrews & the Hearts, died Wednesday. He was 79. Andrews' son, the Roots drummer Ahmed "Questlove" Thompson, confirmed his father's death with a written tribute where Questlove called Andrews "the Greatest Teacher in my life."

"I love you," Questlove wrote to his father. "For every backstage experience. For every drum lesson. For giving me your tireless work ethic. For our father & son record binging expeditions. For our arguments over the summer I discovered #ItTakesANationOfMillions. For the look on your face when I told you 'Imma give this rap thing a try' (I waited til our 2nd album to have this convo btw) For the look on your face five years later when I told you, 'You don't have to work no more.' For the look on your face when a year later I was like, 'Seriously dad, you don't have to work anymore!' For bringing my mom & my sister into my life. For the years we fell out. For the years we put it back together. But really, for the last two conversations we had. I understand why you were so hard on me praying I didn't succumb to a fate not meant for a teenager in west Philly in the mid 80s. I didn't understand it at the time. But I appreciate it now. I hope Donn & I do you proud."

Born Arthur Lee Andrews Thompson in North Carolina, Andrews' family moved to Philadelphia when he was two. Andrews and the Hearts formed in 1953 and subsequently recorded singles for labels like Chess, United Artists and Gotham. Their biggest hits came in 1957 and 1958 with "Long Lonely Nights" (Andrews and the Hearts performed the song on the fifth national episode of American Bandstand), "Tear Drops" and "Try the Impossible," their last charting single.

After a brief breakup in 1960, Andrews and an amorphous lineup of the Hearts – renamed at times as the 5 Hearts or the Famous Hearts – continued recording together until 1968.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lee-andrews-doo-wop-singer-and-questloves-father-dead-at-79-20160317