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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 November 2015

by tadeusz444 Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to Marian, the second Friday the 13th of the year isn’t unlucky. Is this really a thing? Or is she just yanking my chain?

Beats me. But why take chances? This week our (mostly) black cat gets a rest, and our lovely gray-and-white cat takes center stage. She does not look like she expects any kind of bad luck at all. And she was right! By rolling over and looking adorable she got an immediate tummy rub. Life is good.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 November 2015

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Conservatives Need to Admit That Racism Still Exists

by Kerstin50Z Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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I hopped over to The Corner to see what was going on, and the answer is….political correctness. Here are first few headlines I saw:

The Hidden Cost to Crazy Leftist Domination of Universities

Yale & Missouri: Power Play

The Left Is Starting to Tear Itself Apart: College Coeds Are Like Yazidi Slaves?

Campus Cattle Actually, I believe the correct term is “veal.” -ed.

The Mugging Continues

Conservatives are really flooding the zone over this. And since there’s obviously been some bad behavior on the part of the Yale and Missouri protesters, they have an easy time mining a few days of outrage over it. As for myself, I haven’t said much of anything, for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not just a middle-aged white guy, I’m a middle-aged white guy who grew up in Orange County and now lives in Irvine. Off the top of my head, I can remember only one black schoolmate while I was growing up, and pretty much none in the neighborhood I live in now. So I’m not exactly well placed to have any deep insights on interracial relationships.

Second, when things like this erupt, it’s often the case that the proximate cause is merely the last in a long series of things that already have everyone simmering. So the provocation itself (say, a fairly anodyne email about Halloween from a residential master) is often easy to mock because it really is sort of trivial on its own. And the reaction (“friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals”) can seem absurdly delicate. But fixating on a single incident like this is as silly as trying to figure out why all those European countries really cared so much about Archduke Ferdinand. In both cases, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

And this is why the conservative reaction to this stuff always seems so shallow. Sure, students shouldn’t scream at people. Sure, professors shouldn’t call in “muscle” to kick people out of public spaces. Sure, yet another demand for more diversity training can seem tiresome. Go ahead and criticize all this stuff. Plenty of people on the left have done so too.

But at the same time, if you are going to comment on these affairs, take the time to understand not just the (possibly trivial) proximate cause, but the underlying problems that have been building up for months or years. At least acknowledge what the real grievances are. I haven’t spent a lot of time reading about the Yale and Missouri protests, but even I know that there are a whole raft of complaints about racist behavior that have been accumulating for some time. Is it asking too much for conservatives to at least mention this, and perhaps condemn it? Even a “to be sure” paragraph would be better than nothing.

For what it’s worth, I think the hair trigger that campus lefties seem to have for all manner of isms often goes too far. It’s not just tiresome, it’s counterproductive, since it convinces too many people that they shouldn’t engage with these issues at all. One wrong word at the wrong time bears too much risk of career or education-threatening blowback—especially in an era when social media can randomly pluck people out of obscurity to become sacrificial lambs. Better to just hunker down and say nothing. Unfortunately, the result is that you lose the engagement of some of the very people it would be most helpful to have on board. Just a thought.

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Conservatives Need to Admit That Racism Still Exists

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The Chinese Are Coming….To Syria

by ShelbyNorthcott Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a typical election, candidates move from the extreme to the middle as the campaign progresses. If you’re a Republican, for example, you start out as a fire-breathing conservative in order to win the early primaries, and then slowly move to the center to win the later primaries and the general election.

Donald Trump has flipped the script, though. Now, you start out outrageous in order to get some attention, and then slowly become more sober-minded in order to appear more plausibly presidential. Will it work? Wait and find out! But it sure looks like Ben Carson has been taking lessons from the master. In Tuesday’s debate he seemed to suggest that China had troops in Syria. Today, his business manager and all-around campaign major-domo, Armstrong Williams, took away any possible doubt:

When MSNBC’s Tamron Hall told Williams on Wednesday that the Chinese are not in Syria, Williams remained steadfast.

“From your perspective and what most people know, maybe that is inaccurate,” Williams told MSNBC….”Just because the mainstream media and other experts don’t want to see any credibility to it, does not mean some way down the line in the next few days that that story will come out and will be reinforced and given credibility by others,” Williams said. “But as far as our intelligence and the briefings that Dr. Carson’s been in and I’ve certainly been in with him, we’ve certainly been told the Chinese are there.”

Carson—or Williams—really ought to tell us who these experts are that keep briefing the campaign on foreign policy issues. Are these the same guys who told him that seizing the Anbar oil fields in Iraq could be done “fairly easily” and that ISIS could then be destroyed in short order? I mean, I like the can-do attitude here, but I’m still a little curious about what the exact battle plan would be. Maybe Carson will share that with us in the next debate.

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The Chinese Are Coming….To Syria

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Ted Cruz Is Not Going to Eliminate the IRS

by AlannahVKGC Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz wants to eliminate the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and HUD. Big deal. Even if he could do it, all it means is that all their functions would get divvied up among other departments. Wake me up when Cruz tells us what actual programs he’d eliminate.

But Cruz also thinks he can eliminate the IRS. Or, in any case, “the IRS as we know it.” Has anyone asked him just why he thinks this? His tax plan still has a 10 percent income tax. It has a standard deduction. It has a child tax credit. It has an EITC. It includes a charitable deduction. It includes a home mortgage deduction. And there’s a business VAT to replace the corporate income tax. So who’s going to oversee and collect and audit all this stuff? Tax fairies?

And while we’re at it, I’m still waiting to hear more about Carly Fiorina’s three-page tax code. Can’t we at least see a rough draft?

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Ted Cruz Is Not Going to Eliminate the IRS

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Here’s Why Other Candidates Are Giving Ben Carson a Pass

by LupitaPrior Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Why didn’t any of the other candidates go after Ben Carson last night? He’s a frontrunner, isn’t he?

Yeah, he is. Here’s my guess: when you see a guy digging himself into a hole, why get in the way? More and more, as the stress of the campaign gets to him, Carson is freely exposing himself as an honest-to-God crackpot. Not just a hardcore conservative like Ted Cruz or an ego-driven windbag like Donald Trump, but a true Glenn Beck/Michele Bachmann/Alex Jones type who really and truly believes in fever swamp conspiracy theories. Criticize his past and he goes full frontal on every bit of listserv crankery about Barack Obama—and he does it pretty fluently, too. He obviously knows this stuff cold. Push him on his odd world view and he starts spouting off about how “secular progressives” are destroying America and probably trying to kill him. Ask him about his theory that the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain, and he doesn’t blink. Sure he still believes that. Put him in a friendly setting and he’ll give you the full nine yards about how political correctness is responsible for everything from drug addiction to persecution of Christians to Marxist tyranny and gun confiscation.

This is a guy who’s set to implode all by himself, so why waste energy attacking him? Eventually he’ll suggest that the pope is actually Satan or something, and then he’ll be forced to slink back to the rubber-chicken circuit—with a higher speaking fee to soothe his pain. In the meantime, better to worry about the folks who might actually pose a real threat.

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Here’s Why Other Candidates Are Giving Ben Carson a Pass

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Chart of the Day: Republican Tax Plans for the Middle Class

by DeanaMoeller Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Of the five leading candidates, four have released semi-detailed tax plans. We’re still waiting on Ben Carson’s tithe-based plan. Still, I thought everyone ought to get a look at how their plans affect the middle class vs. the rich. After all, we liberals keep nattering on about how these guys all want to “cut taxes on the rich,” so let’s see the evidence.

Well, the Tax Foundation is a right-leaning outfit, so you have to figure they’re going to give Republican plans a fair shake. And their distributional analysis of Rubio, Bush, Trump, and Cruz shows that their tax plans are all pretty similar: tiny gains for middle-income workers and huge gains for the top 1 percent. I’ve used the static analysis, since it’s the most tethered to reality, but even if you use the magic dynamic estimates you get roughly the same result: the rich make out a whole lot better than the middle class.

That said, you really have to give Ted Cruz credit. When it comes to giving huge handouts to the rich, he’s the true Republican leader.

Originally posted here – 

Chart of the Day: Republican Tax Plans for the Middle Class

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John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

by LutherDetwiler Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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How would John Kasich cut spending? Answer: his father was a mail carrier blah blah blah. OK, but did you want to name any specific steps, sir? Why certainly:

We would move the Medicare system from a 7 percent growth down to about a 5 percent growth. And I have a whole series of ways to do that. In Ohio, we reduced Medicaid funding for the poor from 10 percent to 2.5 percent, didn’t cut one benefit or didn’t take anybody off the rolls. Why? Because we’re innovators. I’ve been an innovator my entire career. And I really don’t care what special interests or lobbyists have to say. I have a job to do when I take over a public office. Now, we freeze non-defense discretionary for eight years. We also put an increase in defense spending. Our tax cuts balance out. And at the end of the day, we will get to a balanced budget.

So here is Kasich’s plan: cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut domestic discretionary spending, and increase defense spending. And we already know he wants to cut Social Security. So his plan is to cut every single aspect of domestic spending and increase defense spending. And this guy is the moderate in the field.

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John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

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Finally! It’s Tax Fantasyland Season Again!

by WilliamThrelkel Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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One of the more entertaining aspects of the 2012 presidential race was keeping track of the ever-expanding array of fanciful tax plans from Republicans. Even after Herman Cain announced his absurd 9-9-9 plan, other plans that would cut taxes even more kept coming down the pike. No candidate was willing to give up the mantle of biggest tax cutter.

But that wasn’t the truly entertaining part. The entertainment came from the fact that the candidates were all willing to describe in almost loving detail what they’d cut: capital gains vs. regular income; different tax brackets; precise rates that millionaires would have to pay; and so forth. But when anyone asked which tax deductions and tax credits they’d kill in order to make their plans revenue neutral, they’d blush like schoolchildren and insist that only Congress could make that call. So brave!

Josh Barro reports today that even with only a few candidates yet in the race, Republicans are already tying themselves in knots over taxes:

There are a few ways the 2016 Republican candidates can avoid the Romney middle-class tax trap. They can break with party tradition and abandon the position that there should be significant tax-rate cuts for top earners. They can forthrightly defend the idea that people with low and middle incomes should pay more. They can abandon the promise of revenue neutrality — so a tax cut for the rich does not need to be offset by tax increases elsewhere. They can be as vague as possible.

So far, apparently, the scorecard looks like this:

Carson, Cruz and Paul are calling for flat taxes but are taking the classic position that they’ll talk about ways to stay revenue neutral sometime…..in the future. Like maybe the 14th of never.
Christie has a slightly modified version of the classic. He won’t talk about how he’ll stay revenue neutral either, but he’s also claiming that he might just let the deficit take some of the hit, which would mean fewer hot-button deductions to eliminate that could wreck his candidacy.
Rubio, the boy genius of the Everglades, goes even further, taking what I’ll call the Sam Brownback position: screw the deficit, he says. He’s just going to lower taxes and leave it at that. After that we’re in God’s hands.
Finally, Jeb Bush has taken the most unusual position of all: he’s not even talking about taxes. He’s generally in favor of lowering taxes, but that’s as much as he’s willing to say.

That’s only six candidates, and there are many more to come—and we can expect plenty of tax fantasyland from all of them, I think. I mean, can you imagine what Lindsey Graham or Carly Fiorina are going to come up with? The mind reels. With the exception of the poor shmoes at the Tax Policy Center, who have to pretend to take this stuff seriously while they trudge through their analysis of each and every farfetched plan, it should be plenty of fun for the rest of us. Which candidate will come up with the most ridiculous, most pandering plan of all? Your guess is as good as mine.

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Finally! It’s Tax Fantasyland Season Again!

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Marco Rubio Is a Moron

by AdelaidaH Posted on May 18, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s the latest from Florida wunderkind Marco Rubio:

Marco Rubio Struggles With Question on Iraq War

Under a barrage of questions from Chris Wallace of Fox News, Mr. Rubio repeatedly said “it was not a mistake” for President George W. Bush to order the invasion based on the intelligence he had at the time. But Mr. Rubio grew defensive as Mr. Wallace pressed him to say flatly whether he now believed the war was a mistake. Mr. Rubio chose instead to criticize the questions themselves, saying that in “the real world” presidents have to make decisions based on evidence presented to them at the time.

“It’s not a mistake — I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Rubio said on “Fox News Sunday.”

A moment later, as Mr. Wallace tried to pin him down on his view, Mr. Rubio began to reply, “Based on what we know now, I think everyone agrees — ” but Mr. Wallace cut him off before he finished the thought.

“So was it a mistake now?” Mr. Wallace asked.

“I don’t understand the question you’re asking,” Mr. Rubio said.

The truth is that I don’t care about Rubio’s actual position on the Iraq War. The guy’s trying to run on a platform of more-hawkish-than-thou, and that’s pretty much all I need to know. Most of the time he sounds like a ten-year-old trying to sound tough in front of the older kids.

But I’m seriously beginning to wonder if he has a 3-digit IQ. After Jeb Bush’s weeklong debacle trying to answer this question, every Republican candidate ought to have their own answer figured out. And not just figured out: by now their answers ought to poll-tested, cut down into nice little soundbites, and so smoothly delivered you’d never even know this was a tricky issue in the first place.

But no. Rubio sounded like this question came as a total surprise. Seriously, Marco? This guy does not sound like he’s ready for prime time.

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Marco Rubio Is a Moron

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Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 15 May 2015

by ElaineDAPY Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s been a traumatic week for Hilbert. He and Hopper were upstairs chasing each other around when he made the fateful decision to climb onto the bathroom counter and then leap to the top of the shower door. Why? Who knows. But he did it, and immediately discovered that the shower door railing is only about an inch wide. So he tumbled into the bathtub, and was then faced with an even bigger problem: my sister keeps the shower doors closed when they’re not in use.

A good deal of piteous meowing ensued until Karen investigated and found poor Hilbert trapped in the bathtub. She let him out—after taking a picture, of course—and reports that he spent the rest of the evening cuddled on her lap recovering from the indignity of it all.

Karen now leaves the door open and says that the bathtub has quickly become the final resting place for a succession of cat toys. This is probably Hopper’s doing. Either that or Hilbert got over his trauma mighty fast.

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Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 15 May 2015

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