JHB
JHB's Journal"Antichrist" you say? As God as my witness, I'll never pass up a chance to repost this
From http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/blog/antichrist/
A little context: the cartoonist, Dave Willis, grew up in a strict conservative evangelical household, and Joyce, the little kid/older kid/young woman in this progression is something of an alter-ego of his about how that bubble bursts for some people, and of some of the hypocrisies that manifest in the people that never leave it.
I would like to encourage my fellow Americans to pronounce DOGE correctly (bear with me)...
The initial "E" of "Efficiency is not silent. Depending on how you pronounce the word, you use either a hard "e" (as in "cheat" ) or soft "e" (as in "meh" ). Therefore, in the abbreviation, it should be pronounced.
Likewise, the "G" stands for "Government", so it should be a hard "g".
So it shouldn't be pronounced like the abbreviation for the Department of Justice turned into a word (doj).
Clearly, the proper pronunciation of DOGE is DOG-E or DOG-eh.
Put a pause in there before the E, because we don't want it confused with "doggie". Doggies are good boys, and everyone associated with DOG-E is pretty much the opposite of good boys.
Thank you for your time and forbearance.
The thing is: Bernie and AOC are only "far left" because they insist on keeping that "democratic socialist" label
The positions they hold are not those of any variety of socialist. What they want is a reversal of the "Reagan Revolution" and an updated New Deal, which is not socialism. Unfortunately, both forget that, as politicians, their job is not to educate, their job is to persuade. They both managed to be successful with the DS label (Bernie from all those years as the mayor of Burlington, giving voters the chance to know they guy, not the label, and AOC because she ran in a heavily Democratic district where the guy who held the seat before her had neglected demographic changes in the district and got caught on a open mike saying he wouldn't have even bothered coming to an event if he wasn't being challenged). But outside their circumstances? They just give themselves an extra hurdle to have to jump over.
Strip away that extra hurdle, and what do they want? To restore some of the lessons we learned from the New Deal and stop allowing the playing field to be tilted toward the rich.
That's not "far left" unless you're an effing right-winger who calls EVERYTHING they don't like "far left".
Western Suffolk county (the 110 corridor) is my home turf
Born and raised there, and even after leaving, job realities brought me back. A lot of Republican voters there, but maybe not this time, at least not for president.
Good news. Not bad for a county whose Republican party had once been (1924-1926) actually Klan-dominated (a fact that I bring up to dispel RW Republican claims of the Klan being a purely Democratic Party creature).
When I argue this same point, I bring up self-interest (because that's a phrase that perks their ears up)...
The system depends on competition, but for each individual business, it's in their self- interest to eliminate competition. Competing against someone else, or a lot of someone elses, cuts in to your profits because if you charge too much people will go to a competitor. But if you get rid of competitors, either by driving them out of business or just buying them up, customers have fewer and fewer places to go, and you have more power about setting prices.
"Simplifying" the tax code by cutting brackets has always been a lie and a swindle
The Trump/Heritage Foundation Project 2025 is a wish list of Conservative/Right-Wing hobby horses, one of them being "simplifying" the tax code by cutting the number of brackets down to two: 15% and 30%.
This is a repeat of the tax cuts in Reagan's 2nd term, with the brackets then being 15% and 28%, with the dividing line being roughly at the median income at the time (in effect 1988-1990). All it got us was a ballooning deficit and the last gasp of actual Republican fiscal responsibility when GHW Bush went back on his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge and signed a feeble improvement by adding one -- count 'em, ONE -- additional bracket at the high end. Bill Clinton signed a reform adding two more. It was still inadequate and didn't go anywhere near really high incomes, but it proved doomsaying Republicans wrong by putting us into budgetary surplus.
The argument for "simplifying" the tax code by cutting brackets was always a lie. All the complicated parts (what's deductible, what type of income is this, can I take these credits, etc.) come before calculating the bill. Calculating what is owed is just math, no matter the number of brackets. It can be tedious, but it's already simple. And that was before these little things called "computers" that, y'know, compute numbers fast.
The highest number of brackets we had was more than a hundred years ago (1919-1921) when there were 56. Let me repeat that: FIFTY-SIX! Fifty six in an age of paper calculations and mechanical adding machines. Today we can make tee shirts with enough computing power to handle the bracket math.
Through most of the post-WW2 era, there were 24. It's been over 10 years since I did some adjusting for inflation, but to take good old 1955 as an example, two-thirds only affected taxable income above the equivalent of $250,000 (in 2013 dollars). Eleven of those only affected taxable income above the equivalent of half a million dollars. The top bracket affected taxable income over the equivalent of a little under $4 million.
It is now and always has been about cutting taxes for the top and sticking everyone else with the bills.
Related discussion: Trump's Project 2025 will bring large middle class tax increase
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219165937
ProLeft Podcast Ep 819 Ridin' With Biden!
Jul 12, 2024 The Professional Left with Driftglass and BlueGal
We're so stabby about the mainstream media right now, it's a swear-fest. Fran is boycotting MSNBC for the Summer to protect her mental health and punish the suits upstairs (Sorry, Lawrence.). And Driftglass remembers the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when Black Mississippians had to fight the Democratic establishment to become the Democratic base. More at proleftpod.com.
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JHB: An unequivocally Pro-Biden perspective from the cornfields of the heartland.
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