turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalWhy This House Tax Scheme Is For IDIOTS
The House tax bill is an all-out attack on the future prosperity of America, not that any of the major news organizations are telling you that in plain English. Lost in the dense bureaucratic language of modern news reports is the simple fact that the House bill takes from striving students so that the already rich and major corporations can have more.
This bill is a long-term disaster in terms of what economists call opportunity costs. That term refers to a benefit that a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action. This tax bill gives up the future wealth from investing in brainpower in favor of permanent tax cuts for the already rich and corporations.
This tax bill should be called the Intellectual Destruction Initiative Outrageous Tax Savings Act, a.k.a. the IDIOTS Tax Act of 2017.
Are we idiots?
What we need is more investment in education and, especially, education of the most serious and scholarly students. I have a name for what we need—the Intellectual Quality General Education National Investment University Scholarship Act or IQ GENIUS Act.
What will we tell our Congress, if anything, about this tax bill and the one being written in the Senate? Hopefully, it’s that we are not idiots and we want to develop more genius minds.
https://www.dcreport.org/2017/11/17/why-this-house-tax-scheme-is-for-idiots/
David Cay Johnston
At conservative conference, Neil Gorsuch cracks joke about frozen trucker nearly left to die
During Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court seat Senate Republicans held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, the judge was dogged by questions about a case in which he voted against a trucker who nearly froze to death in a broken down truck. Thursday evening, Gorsuch turned this case into a punchline.
The case involved Alphonse Maddin, who was driving in subzero temperatures when the brakes on his trailer froze. Maddin waited hours for assistance, but none came. Finally, after he began to show symptoms of hypothermia, he unhitched the trailer — despite instructions from a supervisor not to do so — and left seeking help. He was later fired for “violating company policy by abandoning his load while under dispatch.”
The case eventually reached a three-judge panel that included Gorsuch. Gorsuch’s two colleagues sided with Maddin in his suit against his former employer. Gorsuch sided against Maddin.
In his dissenting opinion, Gorsuch suggested this was an easy case. The relevant federal law permitted truckers in a situation like Maddin’s to “refuse to operate” their truck out of safety concerns. Gorsuch claimed that Maddin was fired for operating his truck — when he disconnected the trailer and left to get help. “It might be fair to ask whether TransAm’s decision was a wise or kind one,” Gorsuch lectured his two colleagues. “But it’s not our job to answer questions like that.”
https://thinkprogress.org/at-conservative-conference-neil-gorsuch-cracks-joke-about-frozen-trucker-nearly-left-to-die-e4b5fc0e4f5f/
Hey Gorsuch, you should be IMPEACHED
Your not a legitimate justice, or did you forget how you were crowned..................ask Grassley and McConnell and the other republicans, since they have decided to tear up the Constitution
Chemical Workers Have No Say On Their Own Safety
By Jordan Barab, Confined Space
In a 3-1 vote, the Chemical Safety Board voted Tuesday to withdraw recommendations calling for the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement to strengthen worker participation requirements and to take measures to prohibit retaliation against workers who use their rights. Chair Vanessa Sutherland, joined by members Manny Ehrlich and Kristen Kulinowski voted to rescind the recommendations despite a spirited defense by board member Rick Engler, who voted to keep the recommendations.
In April 2016, the board unanimously approved a 4-volume “Macondo Investigation Report” in response to the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon blowout that killed 11 workers, injured 17 and spilled 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The report contained a number of recommendations, including four recommendations calling for the bureau to significantly strengthen its regulations requiring worker participation in the employer’s safety program, and enhanced whistleblower protections for workers participating in safety activities. Last month, however, the board’s recommendations staff recommended that these recommendations be withdrawn in the face of opposition from the bureau, which claimed that it has no jurisdiction to adopt the board recommendations.
The board’s discussion focused on whether the bureau has authority to forbid retaliation, or whether it would better be placed at OSHA (or the Coast Guard) and whether Congress would be more appropriate to effect change than the board. This was progress from the Oct. 16 meeting when the discussion revolved mostly around whether there was enough evidence in the report to justify the recommendations. Apparently, the board members satisfied themselves that there was actually enough evidence of causation.
https://www.dcreport.org/2017/11/16/chemical-workers-have-no-say-on-their-own-safety/
Walking While Black
THE JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF’S OFFICE issues hundreds of pedestrian citations a year, drawing on an array of 28 separate statutes governing how people get around on foot in Florida’s most populous city. There is, of course, the straightforward jaywalking statute, barring people from crossing against a red light. But in Jacksonville, pedestrians can also be ticketed for crossing against a yellow light, for “failing to cross a street at a right angle,” for not walking on the left side of a road when there are no sidewalks, or alternatively for not walking on a sidewalk when one is available.
The sheriff’s office says the enforcement of the full variety of pedestrian statutes is essential to keeping people alive in a city with one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the nation. The office also says the tickets are a useful crime-fighting tool, allowing officers to stop suspicious people and question them for guns and or drugs.
However, a ProPublica/Florida Times-Union analysis of five years of pedestrian tickets shows there is no strong relationship between where tickets are being issued and where people are being killed. The number of fatal crashes involving pedestrians, in fact, climbed every year from 2012 to 2016, the most recent years for which complete data is available.
What the analysis does show is that the pedestrian tickets — typically costing $65, but carrying the power to damage one’s credit or suspend a driver’s license if unpaid — were disproportionately issued to blacks, almost all of them in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In the last five years, blacks received 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, while only accounting for 29 percent of the population. Blacks account for a higher percentage of tickets in Duval County than any other large county in Florida.
https://features.propublica.org/walking-while-black/jacksonville-pedestrian-violations-racial-profiling/
FCC Weakens Media Ownership Rules Designed To Support Local News Outlets
Source: Talking Points Memo
By TALI ARBEL Published NOVEMBER 16, 2017 3:01 PM
NEW YORK (AP) — Federal regulators have weakened rules meant to support independent local media.
Now, one company can own newspapers and broadcast stations in one market, undoing a ban in place since 1975. Thursday’s decision by the Federal Communications Commission also makes it easier for one company to own two broadcast TV stations in one market and coordinate operations with stations owned by others.
Although the changes won’t affect AT&T’s pending bid for Time Warner and its cable channels, they come as cable and phone companies have grown into industry giants through acquisitions. The newspaper and broadcasting industries say they need the changes to deal with growing competition from the web and cable companies.
The Republican-dominated FCC approved the changes in a 3-2 vote along party lines. The two Democratic commissioners and other critics say that dumping these rules, by encouraging consolidation, hurts media diversity. Free Press, a group that opposes media mergers, said Thursday that it will challenge the rule changes in court.
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fcc-weakens-media-ownership-rules
“This act will pave the way for massive broadcast conglomerates to increasingly provide local viewers with nationalized cookie-cutter news and corporate propaganda that’s produced elsewhere,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat."
You think it's time to bring some form of the "Fairness Doctrine"? I think so.....................
Ben Carsons public housing plan would be crippled if the GOPs tax bill passes
The GOP’s tax bill would severely curtail its own administration’s plan to solve the country’s $49 billion backlog of public housing repairs. That estimate doesn’t include repairs related to damage from the recent hurricanes — repairs that could also face serious slowdowns if the House GOP’s plan passes.
The House tax plan would tax private activity bonds — a tax-exempt funding mechanism that allows developers to borrow money for a host of projects, including affordable housing projects, at low-interest rates. Lawmakers claim eliminating the exemption would save $38.9 billion (even as the tax bill would grow the deficit by an estimated $1.7 trillion). But housing advocates warn taxing those bonds would make it unnecessarily difficult to rebuild affordable housing, including housing destroyed by the recent hurricanes, and severely cripple the only program that has effectively addressed the backlog of essential repairs for America’s 1.1 million public housing units.
Thanks to funding cuts in Congress over the years, public housing authorities are not receiving enough money to make important repairs and renovations for their decades-old public housing apartment complexes. In some places, public housing facilities have fallen into such a state of disrepair that they are are almost uninhabitable.
https://thinkprogress.org/gop-tax-bill-2dfd444b11b6/
House Republican says tax cuts always boost the economy. Theres just one problem
He's full of trickle down BS
https://thinkprogress.org/steve-scalise-says-trickle-down-economics-works-every-time-3d152e95e21e/
Chesapeake Bay newspaper seeks answers after Trump administration terminates funding
Source: Think Progress
A Maryland newspaper filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week, seeking records that might explain why the agency canceled a grant awarded to the newspaper in January 2016.
After awarding the Bay Journal $1.6 million in a competitive grantmaking process, the EPA terminated the grant in August, telling the newspaper that distribution of funds were being cutting off “due to a shift in priorities.” The agency told the Bay Journal, a nonprofit publication owned by Pennsylvania-based Bay Journal Media Inc., that the termination was not based on any failure by the newspaper to comply with the terms of the grant.
In its lawsuit, filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Bay Journal asked the court to require the EPA to produce information regarding the specific role of John Konkus, a political appointee, in the grant termination. Konkus is a Trump administration appointee with little environmental expertise who was given unprecedented oversight to vet hundreds of millions of dollars in annual EPA grants. His primary focus is cutting grants that include the words “climate change.”
The EPA made two distributions of the grant award — $350,000 in February 2016 and $350,000 in February 2017. In July, the EPA emailed Bay Journal editor Karl Blankenship to confirm that the Bay Journal would be receiving an additional $325,000 in grant funding in February 2018, and then successive payments of $325,000 in February 2019, $300,000 in 2020, and $300,000 in 2021. But on August 23, Blankenship received another email from the EPA informing him that the agency was terminating the grant.
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/maryland-newspaper-sues-epa-7fb031dbd1ad/
Now this administration is going after newspapers-that say words like "climate change" and wants to censor newspapers
Was Hannity Picked Up On Wiretaps Of Julian Assange?
Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.
Sean Hannity either broke a massive bombshell implicating the Trump administration in ongoing, illegal spying on journalists on his Fox News show last night, or he casually pushed yet another baseless conspiracy theory to his audience of 3 million viewers.
Just past the 50-minute mark on a program largely devoted to discussing the purported crimes of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, Hannity closed out a panel segment by telling his guests, “By the way, I have sources saying that all of us are being surveilled illegally, just in case you’re interested.”
“Just telling you,” he added. “Anyway. Hope that’s good news.”
http://www.nationalmemo.com/hannity-picked-wiretaps-julian-assange/
Hey Hannity, since you feel that its just fine and dandy to possibly be complicit in treason, and like when you out there supporting the Bundy crowd, and them basically trying to overthrown the rule of law and the government with them breaking the "law" I really do hope that your are brought in and questioned, on this off the cuff remark.
I have no pity for traitors or supporters of traitors
Defaulted Federal Loan Official Resigns After Pro Publica Report
Source: National Memo
Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
A senior official in charge of a federal loan guarantee program resigned after ProPublica reported his prior role in obtaining a guarantee under the same program as part of a deal that failed.
The official, Gavin Clarkson, stepped down Monday as deputy assistant secretary for policy and economic development in the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was appointed in June and his position did not require Senate confirmation.
At the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Clarkson supervised a program that provides loan guarantees to Indian businesses. As ProPublica reported, in his previous role as a businessman and academic, he had arranged financing and a $20 million guarantee, under the same program, for a loan that helped an Indian tribe buy a Wall Street brokerage.
The loan did not appear to meet the department’s guidelines for a guarantee but one was approved anyway. The brokerage ultimately went bankrupt and the loan was defaulted on. The department is still fighting that liability in court. (Even though the loan went sour, Clarkson and his company were paid $327,500, according to a filing in a related lawsuit.)
Read more: http://www.nationalmemo.com/defaulted-federal-loan-official-resigns-pro-publica-report/
Garnish his wages....................problem solved............
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