pbmus
pbmus's JournalSo the Mueller investigation...
Will hand over the Trump investigative file to politicians....
Until I heard that, I was holding out a chance for justice in America....
Not anymore....
I am sorry to say I am becoming one of the dystopian reminders for the foreseeable future...
My family has been in this country since mid 18th century, males fought in every war for this nation...and I am seriously looking to leave...
I will leave it to the thumpers...to build heaven .
Paul (The Liar) Ryan on the Tax Plan...
Cool, Cindy gets an extra $700 a year.
Except, Cindy will have to pay $350 per month toward student loans, and will no longer be able to deduct interest.
Oh, she’ll also have to pay $830 per month for healthcare for her and her two kids - that is, until her premium goes up because you’re trying to do away with the individual mandate. And then when she can’t afford health insurance anymore, she’ll no longer be able to deduct any out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Oh, and if Cindy gets a better job and needs to relocate, she’ll no longer be able to deduct moving expenses.
Oh, and if that new, better job wants to pay Cindy’s tuition to go back to school to earn a higher degree, that tuition will now be taxed as income.
Oh, and if Cindy is working at a college or university so that when her kids are old enough, they’d be able to attend tuition-free, their tuition will also now be taxed as income.
Oh, and if god forbid there’s a fire or flood and Cindy and her family experience any damage to their home, they can no longer deduct those losses.
So really, Paul, Cindy’s going to need that $700 just to begin to cover all the new bullshit you’re putting her family through, while you’re off giving actual substantial tax breaks to private jet owners.
Paul, from Cindy, and from so many of us, take that $700 and shove it up your spineless, intellectually dishonest libertarian ass.
Trump wins the first round in court. The public is likely to be the loser: Our view
When two competing “acting directors” showed up for work this week to lead the federal government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — one an Obama administration holdover, the other named by President Trump — it was not only a bizarre moment but proof of how desperately Republicans want to defang the aggressive agency.
The CFPB, created in 2010, is the first federal agency to focus on protecting people from the excesses and scams of banks, credit card and mortgage issuers, debt collectors and other financial players.
GOP lawmakers — and their generous campaign donors from the financial industry — have been cringing since the bureau's inception at every bold move the agency made under director Richard Cordray, who resigned last week.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/28/showdown-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-editorials-debates/902611001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories
Fed chair nominee Powell says case for rate hike 'coming together
Fed chair nominee Powell says case for rate hike 'coming together.
“The case for raising interest rates at our next meeting is coming together,” Powell told the Senate Banking Committee. Asked if that means the Fed will raise rates, he said, “I think the conditions are supportive of doing that.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-powell-rates/fed-chair-nominee-powell-says-case-for-rate-hike-coming-together-idUSKBN1DS24D?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29
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Tax cut and interest rates rising.....Who does that benefit???
Rex Tillerson: state department can be cut as we will soon solve global conflicts
Rex Tillerson said on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s proposal to slash the state department and foreign aid budget is partly based on an expectation it will be able to resolve some of the global conflicts that have been absorbing costly diplomatic and humanitarian support.
But in a vivid display of the most urgent diplomatic challenge facing the US, Tillerson was speaking as North Korea carried out a new ballistic missile test – the first since it fired a missile over Japan in mid-September.
The secretary of state presented this rationale for the budget cut at a time when he is under fire from former US diplomats for gutting his state department at a time of multiple crises around the world – an allegation Tillerson denied.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/28/rex-tillerson-state-department-can-be-cut-as-we-will-soon-solve-global-conflicts?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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This guy sounds like the Big Con....
Clarence Thomas must resign
Utah Republican Orrin Hatch called “bullcrap” on Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown last week. The Senate Finance Committee lion tore into Brown for “spewing” that the Republican tax plan to transfer a trillion dollars to the rich was in reality a Republican tax plan to transfer a trillion dollars to the rich.
I got my first dose of Hatch during the wall-to-wall coverage of the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, George H.W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee. Hatch was the Republicans’ designated questioner of Anita Hill. She was called to testify because she’d told the FBI that Thomas had sexually harassed her ten years earlier, when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education.
Sitting behind her were her mother, Erma (“who is going to be celebrating her 80th birthday”); her father, Albert; her sisters, Elreathea, Jo Ann, Coleen and Joyce; and her brother, Ray. No way she was going to lie to the committee, or to us, in front of them.
Hill testified that Thomas had repeatedly asked her out, and that she repeatedly refused. So he demeaned her. He told her someone had once “put a pubic hair” on his Coke can. He said porn star Long Dong Silver had nothing on him in the endowment department.
Hatch called her charges “contrived” and “sick.” He claimed she’d stolen them. The pubic hair, she’d taken from page 70 of “The Exorcist.” Long Dong Silver, she’d lifted from a Kansas sexual harassment case.
Hill agreed to a polygraph test, and passed. Thomas refused. He called the hearings a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.
https://www.salon.com/2017/11/28/clarence-thomas-must-resign_partner/
The Last AntiWall Street Agency in DC Is Being Eaten from the Inside
Despite all the bluster and drain the swamp rhetoric, the first year of Donald Trump's presidency has laid waste to the very pretense of good government. Billionaires with flagrant conflicts of interest dictate economic policy. The president and his immediate family constantly draw cameras and bodies to commercial properties they own, and along the way get richer. The Trump Hotel in DC is a cesspool of lobbying by nebulous interests none of us can really understand. The legal system is apparently incapable of convicting anyone of corruption who is not caught on camera saying. "I am being bribed and I like it." The Republican Congress has been relentlessly pro–Wall Street, last month voting to roll back a not-yet-effective regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would have made it easier to sue banks.
But until this week, the CFPB represented a lone brick in the vast federal bureaucracy that, at least when Congress didn't get in the way, was holding it down for the little guy. Now the Trump administration is using a bureaucrat's resignation to set the stage for the destruction of the agency. And they might get away with it.
After a financial crisis precipitated in no small part by a toxic mortgage boom gone bust, legislators—at least on the Democratic side—were determined to set up a watchdog with some real muscle behind it. The brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who before she was a senator and the butt of Trump's racist jokes was a consumer advocate and Harvard law professor, the CFPB was empowered by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law with issuing rules (a.k.a. regulations) governing a wide variety of financial products. The CFPB can impose legally-binding restrictions on everything from mortgages to payday loans to debit cards; it can also fine offenders, ban bad practices, and dish out relief to wronged consumers
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evbjnn/the-last-antiwall-street-agency-in-dc-is-being-eaten-from-the-inside
Keith Olbermann Explains His Decision to Retire From Political Punditry
Keith Olbermann on Monday announced that he's had enough, and is ending his Donald Trump-focused digital video series for GQ after two seasons and 187 episodes.
Olbermann began the series in September 2016, about two months before the presidential election. He said Monday's episode of The Resistance With Keith Olbermann would be the last because he's more confident than ever that Trump's presidency will end in either impeachment or resignation.
The former MSNBC and ESPN star also announced in the episode that he's quitting the political punditry game entirely. In a brief email interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Olbermann said he wanted to be clear with his viewers about his decision to step away from the craft that made him famous. "To not be specific about that is to leave people in doubt about why there isn’t a new video or tweet," he said.
Asked whether he had always been planning to end the series — originally called The Closer — on Monday, Olbermann said: "The plan was for them to stop on November 9, 2016. So much for plans!" Olbermann, in a follow-up email, clarified that the decision to end the series was his alone, "as was my right."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/keith-olbermann-retires-political-punditry-1062096
OPEC won't deliver the 9-month extension to output cuts the market is expecting, Citi warns
Oil producers are unlikely to extend their deal to limit production by nine months, according to Citi Research.
Traders are expecting the extension through 2018 and will likely sell out their positions in crude futures if OPEC only extends the deal by six months or puts off the decision, Citi warns.
Russia's domestic policy is the main stumbling block, while Saudi Arabia will fight for the nine-month extension, Citi says
Oil producers are unlikely to extend a deal to cap their output by nine months, a move that could result in a sharp pullback in prices, Citi Research analysts warned on Tuesday.
Citi made the call just two days before OPEC and other oil exporters led by Russia are due to deliver the closely watched decision in Vienna, Austria. Analysts say current oil prices reflect the market's expectation the deal will be extended through the end of next year.
"Our expectation is that something short of a nine-month extension is delivered, likely either a shorter extension or a deferral of the decision until" the first quarter of 2018, when the deal is set to expire, Citi analysts wrote in a research note on Tuesday.
If Citi's call is correct, it expects traders to liquidate their crude positions, leading to a sell-off likely to exceed the $3 per barrel swing in May when OPEC's last meeting disappointed the market.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/28/opec-wont-give-the-market-the-opec-extension-its-expecting-citi-warns.html
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