Credit: yukonfed
The dogma of supply-side economics has dominated American politics for nearly four decades, even as the evidence has discredited the right-wing ideology and its central tenets time and again. Trickle-down economics should have been cast into the dustbin of history way back in 1988 at the end of the Reagan years — during which the national debt nearly tripled — but 30 years later it is still the dominant ideology in Washington (at least within the party that currently controls every branch of government).
Whether most of those who still espouse the supply-side doctrine genuinely believe in its claims, however, is doubtful. Though there are surely some ideologues who are still convinced that slashing taxes for the wealthy will increase revenues and that the newly-created wealth will trickle down to the majority (rather than exacerbating inequality, as it always has), there’s a much better explanation for most proponents of supply-side theory: They are lying. Indeed, the past few months have basically confirmed what those on the left have long maintained: Supply-side theory is simply a pretext for right-wingers to wage a class war […]
Vladimir Putin
Credit: Sputnik International
“They are laughing their asses off in Moscow.” And thus President Trump may have uttered his most accurate analysis yet of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 Presidential election. With Robert Mueller’s investigation advancing—The special counsel indicted thirteen Russians, on Friday—and H. R. McMaster, Trump’s own national-security adviser, telling a crowd of international dignitaries that the evidence against Russia was “incontrovertible,” Trump was apparently forced to find a new line of argumentation.
It wasn’t so long ago—last November—that, after having talked with Putin privately during a summit in Vietnam, Trump declared that he was ready to believe the Russian President’s denials. “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that, when he tells me that, he means it,” he said. But a growing and increasingly undeniable body of evidence suggests that he did, and it has forced Trump to change his tack: no matter what happened, Trump seems to be arguing, let’s not talk about it because it makes America look […]
Credit: AR15Armory.com
A group of third graders in Missouri has been asked to sell raffle tickets for an AR-15 military-style assault weapon after a similar gun was used in a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Community baseball team coach Levi Patterson told The Kansas City Star that the decision to sell raffle ticketswas made before the shooting that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The weapon was reportedly donated by the co-founder of Black Rain Ordnance Inc., who is the father of one of the players.
Patterson told the paper that he initially considered raffling a different item after the mass shooting, but he changed his mind after receiving criticism from what he called a “hate group” on Facebook. After that, Patterson said that he decided to turn the AR-15 raffle “into a positive thing.”
But Patterson later admitted that he did not know if the messages on Facebook came from a “hate group.”
“I applaud them for standing up for what they believe in. I just think they have feelings to this specific type of gun […]
A public domain image of a US Customs and Border Patrol agent in an airport.
A few months ago I wrote about how you can encrypt your entire life in less than an hour. Well, all the security in the world can’t save you if someone has physical possession of your phone or laptop, and can intimidate you into giving up your password.
And a few weeks ago, that’s precisely what happened to a US citizen returning home from abroad.
On January 30th, Sidd Bikkannavar, a US-born scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory flew back to Houston, Texas from Santiago, Chile.
On his way through the airport, Customs and Border Patrol agents pulled him aside. They searched him, then detained him in a room with a bunch of other people sleeping in cots. They eventually returned and said they’d release him if he told them the password to unlock his phone.
Bikkannavar explained […]
Republican Senator Charles Grassley Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans ended a century-old tradition Thursday that will accelerate the appointment of right-wing federal judges in purple and blue states, where they will preside over thousands of cases that will never reach the Supreme Court.
The move, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa, was the most egregious partisan intervention in the judiciary since Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked 2016 hearings on President Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, which would have given the court a center-left majority. (After the 2016 election, conservative Neil Gorsuch was appointed and confirmed.)
“Michael Brennan gets voted out of Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines despite fact that he refused to acknowledge implicit racial bias in the justice system,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama. “Grassley kills the blue slip tradition with this vote. Brennan voted out over […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
