Texas governor: Church shooting may seem 'heavy right now,' but relax. Hitler was worse.

Greg Abbott

By Laura Clawson  

Monday Nov 06, 2017 · 12:16 PM USMST

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Don’t worry, folks. Mass shootings are not a problem, because Hitler was worse. Rest easy, it’s only because things are happening now that they seem “heavy.” Those bits of wisdom come to you from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in relation not just to Sunday’s killing of 26 people in a church in Sutherland Spring, Texas, but also in reference to the killing of 58 people in Las Vegas in October and a few other recent mass murders as well:

We have acts of evil taking place, and because they are close in time to us right now, we think this is something heavy right now. But put this in the context of history. Look at what happened with Hitler, the horrific events during that era, and Mussolini. 

If that’s the standard, then 9/11 really was no big thing at all. Gosh, guys, look at what happened with Hitler! MUCH bigger than 9/11, so put that in the context of history and realize that this is not something so heavy happening right now. Actually, you know what? Hitler, schmitler. Look at what happened with the 1918 flu pandemic and the Black Death.

Here’s a thought: we can fight bad things now even though there were worse things in the past.

Trump groped them and called them liars. These women just want us to remember that.

Summer Zervos

By Laura Clawson  

Friday Nov 03, 2017 · 8:04 AM PDT

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Donald Trump is hoping to keep his gross treatment of women out of court. The women who’ve come forward to tell their stories of being groped, kissed, and grabbed by Trump over the years are hoping that a lawsuit brought by one of them, former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, will at least mean that their experiences are heard and taken as seriously as those of Harvey Weinstein’s victims.

Or Bill Cosby’s. Or Kevin Spacey’s. Or Mark Halperin’s.

Not that any of those accusers got justice, even in the court of public opinion, quickly—but they didn’t have to watch their harassers or rapists be inaugurated president, either. The White House press secretary didn’t call them liars on national television. And it’s that response that’s at the center of the lawsuit that Trump’s victims hope will let them be fully heard:

The plaintiff in the lawsuit — Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Mr. Trump’s show “The Apprentice” — is represented by the law firm of Gloria Allred, who has helped bring cases against Bill Cosby and other high-profile defendants. They claimed that Mr. Trump defamed Ms. Zervos during the campaign when he repeatedly described her and other accusers’ accounts as “lies” and “nonsense” and said the women either were being put forward by his opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign or were motivated to come forward by getting “10 minutes of fame,” according to the complaint.

Mr. Trump has sought to dismiss or stay the case, claiming that a sitting president cannot be sued in state court and that his comments amount to political speech, arguments that were reaffirmed by his legal team in a brief filed on Tuesday. But lawyers for Ms. Zervos point to the United States Supreme Court ruling that allowed Paula Jones to bring a sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office, and several law professors have filed briefs supporting the legal grounds for such a suit.

Trump’s lawyers are fighting this one hard. It’s almost like they know that if he was deposed, he might say something that would look bad. (Or impeachably dishonest.)

But we can fulfill part of this lawsuit’s goals right now by just taking these women seriously and including Trump on every list of powerful men who abuse women.

Trump's Tax Cuts Are the Biggest Wealth Grab in Modern History

Donald Trump. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

By Josh Hoxie, Fortune

04 November 17
readersupportednews.org

 
n Nov. 2, Republicans in Congress finally released the details for their tax plan. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a massive overhaul of the tax code and spending priorities—and nothing short of a boon to the very wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

I’m old enough to remember way back to Nov. 1, when CBS released a poll showing most Americans wanted to see the wealthiest households and biggest corporations pay more, not less, in taxes. This is in sync with poll data from Gallup, collected year after year since 1992, that shows a solid majority of Americans believe the wealthy pay too little in taxes.

Given such overwhelming support for raising, not cutting, taxes on the wealthy, it makes sense that President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress would present their tax plan as benefiting the middle class rather than the rich. It’s about “people who are low- and middle-income,” says House Speaker Paul Ryan, “not about people who are really high-income earners getting a break.” Trump has even claimed “the rich will not be gaining at all with this plan.”

The plan includes weakening and then eliminating the federal estate tax, a levy paid only by the wealthiest households in the country—it only kicks in on estates worth over $5.5 million for individuals and $11 million for couples.

It also eliminates the alternative minimum tax, which exclusively benefits households with incomes over $200,000. And it drops corporate tax rates to 20%, the overwhelming benefit of which goes to the very wealthy and—contrary to what the president might say—will not create jobs, as a study by my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Sarah Anderson found earlier this year.

The tax plan includes eliminating tax deductions that benefit many middle-class Americans as well. On the chopping block are the state and local tax deduction and the student loan interest deduction, among others.

It was just a week ago that House Republicans passed a budget proposal that paved the way for this tax cut plan. That budget included nearly $6 trillion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, and other public services.

Make no mistake, this will hurt. To understand just how much, consider the opportunity cost. The tax plan includes adding $1.5 trillion over 10 years to the national debt, or $150 billion a year that’s not accounted for by increasing revenue elsewhere or cutting spending.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that $150 billion would cover doubling Pell Grants for low- and middle-income college students, doubling cancer research funding at the National Institutes of Health, providing child care assistance to six million children, providing opioid addiction treatment to 300,000 people, funding the full backlog of needed maintenance at the National Park Service, and training 3.5 million workers for in-demand jobs—combined.

Instead of doing any of that, the plan proposes shoveling that money over to the already wealthy.

Given such tradeoffs, it’s a wonder this plan has seen the light of day, much less has a significant chance of becoming law. The more we learn about this proposal, the more there is not to like, which is an incentive for Republicans in Congress to pass it before the public understands what’s going on.

Don’t get caught sleeping on the biggest wealth grab in modern history.

The Republican 'tax plan' is getting bad reviews from the public—and from Republican allies

Failure on parade.

By Hunter  

Friday Nov 03, 2017 · 10:46 AM PDT

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The public is not buying the Republican spin on their new would-be "tax plan." They're not buying the spin at all.

But nearly 60 percent of people believe corporations won't "use that money to create jobs," according to the CBS poll. [...]

The plurality of respondents — 39 percent — say they don't have an opinion about whether the tax plan is good or bad, according to NBC/WSJ. Just over one-third said it's a bad idea, and 25 percent said it's a good idea. [...]

CBS found that 58 percent of Americans believe taxes on the wealthy should be higher.

This is polling that took place before the details of the bill were even revealed. Now that Republicans have presented it, however, it's not just voter opinion that Republicans will need to reckon with; the virulently anti-tax Club for Growth is furious it didn't go far enough, while the National Federation of Independent Business said the bill “does not help most small businesses.”

The housing industry wants none of it—the National Association of Home Builders, noting that about one-third of the homes in California alone would suddenly be stripped of the mortgage interest deduction, went to far as to speculate on the bill “potentially causing housing recessions.”

So yes, it's another dead fish of a bill from a Republican Congress so up their own behinds in ideological rhetoric that they can't be bothered to notice that even their actual supporters bloody hate the legislation they're trying to pass. It's "Obamacare repeal" all over again, and for the same reason: To try to shove through a tax windfall for the very richest Americans, and to hell with what happens to the rest of you.

Top Six Trump Administration Crimes That Ought to Bring Indictments

Trump watches as Steven Mnuchin is sworn in as Treasury Secretary. (photo: Getty Images)

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

3 November 17
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ne. Jeff Sessions lied under oath, saying he never met with any Russian official during the Trump presidential campaign. He met the Russian ambassador twice. The GOP impeached Bill Clinton for perjury in what was a minor personal matter, but stand by Sessions despite his perjury regarding a matter of national security. Mueller should indict.

2. Scott Pruitt met with the CEO of Dow Chemical last spring. Twenty days later, he decided not to ban Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide from being sprayed on food. The problem with chlorpyrifos is that it can have a negative impact on brain development in fetuses and small children. We should look into whether young Trump was exposed to it or something similar in the late 1940s. Evangelicals, the main support base for Trump, are always going on endlessly about abortion being a genocide and are continually interfering with women’s constitutional right to have one. So you would think they’d be up in arms about a pesticide that could harm an embryo, right? Not so as anyone could tell. Pruitt’s own Environmental Protection Agency scientists have confirmed the dangers of chlorpyrifos but he ignored them. This is child endangerment and child abuse on a massive scale. I’d say, even a high crime and beyond a misdemeanor. Jail time would be appropriate.

3. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke swung a $300 mn. contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid to a tiny company on the verge of bankruptcy with two employees, Whitefish, which happens to be based in Zinke’s home town. That is corruption pure and simple. Puerto Rico has annulled the contract, quite rightly. Imagine if Trump had tried to treat Houston that way! Somebody should indict.

4. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also allegedly perjured himself when he denied that the company he headed, OneWest, engaged in robo-signing (backdating mortgage documents and forging them) even though there are substantial indications that the company did so. Mnuchin is the reincarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge. He actually made people homeless for being 27 cents behind on their mortgage. Now he is seeking one of the largest transfers of wealth to the US rich since the days of Andrew Carnegie.

5. When he was Secretary of Health and Human Services and flying around on million dollar flights at taxpayer expense, Tom Price also spent money earmarked by federal law for encouraging people to sign up for Obamacare on negative ads attempting to discourage them from doing so. Just because Price is out of office doesn’t mean he can’t be indicted. What could be lower than trying to take away people’s health care insurance?

6. Despite promises that he would avoid investments that raised red flags about foreign influence while he was president, Trump is looking at deals in India. If the Indian government of PM Narendra Modi grants these licenses, worth a substantial amount of money, won’t that be an emolument of the sort banned by the constitution?

Except for Sessions, this list has nothing to do with Russian influence on the 2016 presidential race, and probably is actually beyond Mueller’s purview. But somebody should lock these creeps up.

Republicans worry their tax giveaway to the rich will be viewed as a tax giveaway to the rich

By Kerry Eleveld  

Wednesday Nov 01, 2017 · 12:07 PM PDT

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This is rich: Republicans are catching on to the fact that raising the tax rate on the lowest income earners doesn't look good when you're lowering the tax rate on the highest incoming earners. The Hill writes:

Under the framework Republicans are using, the seven tax brackets now in the tax code — including the lowest 10 percent bracket and the highest 39.6 percent bracket — would be collapsed into three, taxing people at 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent, depending on their income levels. [...]
But Republican senators fear it will be difficult to explain to voters why they’re raising the tax rate for low- and middle-income Americans while cutting the tax rate for the wealthiest.

Um, yes—yes, it will.

A Reuters-Ipsos poll released last week found that less than a third of Americans support Trump’s tax plan.

Whatever Republicans release, it will be a disaster to sell. They're talking about bad optics but don't seem to be making the logical leap to bad substance.

And they still have a math problem they're not even close to fixing.

Good luck.

Before and after Russia indictments, Fox News worked feverishly to discredit the investigation

Fox News host Sean Hannity

By Hunter  

Tuesday Oct 31, 2017 · 8:01 PM PDT

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Just before it was publicly disclosed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had filed indictments against as-of-yet-unnamed Trump-tied figures, Fox News went on an absolute tear against Mueller—with talking heads like Sean Hannity demanding the special counsel resign. They also engaged in one of the most transparent attempts at partisan propaganda-peddling the network had ever undertaken, suddenly puffing up a conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton to uranium mining that had never before taken root among conservatives because it had always been a wee bit too stupid-sounding even for the Sean Hannity crowd.

A week later, that push appears to be clear evidence that Fox had information that indictments were forthcoming—and was seeking to undermine their impact. This would be unthinkable for a "news" operation, but as a network devoted to propagandizing the news in service to a narrow subset of the Republican agenda, it was unsurprising. 

Vox took it upon themselves to analyze how the Fox network covered the Mueller investigation, the guilty plea of Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos, and the indictment of campaign head Paul Manafort. The Fox efforts to propagandize the news were robust, consisting both of substantive omissions.

Fox also talked significantly less about George Papadopoulos — the Trump campaign adviser whose plea deal with Mueller provides the most explicit evidence thus far that the campaign knew of the Russian government’s efforts to help Trump — than its competitors.

And contrafactual misdirections:

Both of these stories were used by Fox News to say the Mueller investigation is really about Clinton and the FBI. Conservative news outlets bought into this framing and ran with it. In fact, even as Mueller was about to bring indictments, Fox News couldn’t stop talking about the investigation in the context of Clinton:

And after the indictments were made public, Fox doubled down on their efforts to discredit not the indicted Trump aides, but the man who indicted them.

As intriguing as the network's coverage (or non-coverage) of the indictment of Trump campaign officials may be, it is at this point par for the course. It is a given that the Fox network will intentionally slant the news they present to the American public in order to paint a picture that boosts Republicans and renders all news that may be unflattering to Republicans "suspicious" or the result of a conspiracy against those Republicans.

But the efforts Fox took to preemptively attack Mueller on the eve of the released indictments, now that's interesting. The urgent (and bizarre) focus on a new "Uranium One" conspiracy came just days before the Mueller investigation produced its first guilty plea from a member of the Trump campaign team; outside observers can be forgiven for wondering whether the network had received advance information about the state of the Mueller probe that drove the new efforts to muddy the waters of the Russia election-hacking investigation.