Well here is some of the new-developing bad:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 83ade24da2

So, what this would do is start to take back the relatively small tax breaks that middle-class folks are getting on the federal side, by looking to pass on more costs for infra-structure to states, which will have to find other ways (almost certainly regressive forms of taxes) to raise funds to cover the costs the feds will no longer be willing to take on due to the bigger deficits Trump is creating. Additionally, it will further burden blue states that already are subsidizing rural states. (The blue states get fewer dollars back in federal funding that benefits their citizens than those states' citizens pay out in federal taxes , while the red states typically get back more federal dollars than their citizens contribute.) Combined with the eliminated or capped deductions taxpayers would be able to take for state and local income taxes and property taxes, this insures that the blue states' wealth transfer to rural states becomes even worse -- all while rural states' ballots give those small-population states' voters a very disproportionate say in federal government.

More of the costs of running the country are being covered by an increasing regressive overall balance of taxes (federal income taxes, state and local income taxes, property taxes, and sales and other consumption taxes), and the tax benefits of the federal bills being proposed go very much in absolute dollar to the very rich, rich and near-rich.

This also shows what a stupid tactician Trump is. Announcing this now only confirms that his overall plan is even more insidious and unfair than is inherent in the bills before Congress.

First of all, the only plan out there right now is the senate tax plan. Not Trump's. If Trump's tax plan was the one being debated on the hill right now we would be talking about a 15% corporate tax rate, not 20. Call it the GOP tax plan, as it was hammered out through negotiation with a lot of RINO's. I would prefer the Trump tax plan.

Secondly, again, 45% of Americans pay no federal taxes, the top 20% of earners pay 84% of the nations taxes. So I find the attack that the middle class isn't getting as big a break utterly ridiculous. It's common sense the highest earners will be getting a bigger break, they are paying the vast majority of the taxes! Duh. I'm middle class, my feelings are not hurt.

But small businesses are getting tax breaks, which is huge. Small businesses are currently creating about half of new jobs in the country. (if I remember correctly the last stat I saw was 45%)

Unemployment will get even lower. More people working and paying taxes. States will save money by paying less for welfare and food stamp benefits. Also, the lower the tax rate and the higher the growth more money is invested, and more taxes on that. Both these make a huge difference and one reason why those predicting a bigger deficit could be totally full of crap.

As I posted last week. When there was a dramatic tax cut in the 20's tax revenue rose 60%. ... When JFK cut taxes in 60's tax revenue actually increased 62%. ... And when Reagan cut taxes in early 80's tax revenue rose a staggering 99.4%.

When Bush cut taxes revenue raised as well but there was a 42% spending increase following 9-11 so we still developed quite a deficit.

That's why I pay no attention to the attacks right now. History simply is not on their side.

Hillbilly,

Can you provide a link to the article you are citing? Sounds like the kind of thing Breitbart would write as political propaganda. No one with any credibility denies that ocean levels are rising and that human activity contributes to it.

But fake and/or misleading packaged news and science seeking to rebut the overwhelming evidence of those facts exists in far-and-away a much high volume as any purposeful effort to exaggerate the actual extent of global warming. So, on both sides, one needs to consider the reliability of the source and how the reports in question stand up to review by the scientific community at large.

I decided to search for the article you are looking at. Turns out it is Breitbart!

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... evel-rise/

Here is the scientific journal Breitbart pulled out of all the science out there and elected to summarize to support its pre-existing views:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 017-0020-z

Hillbilly, you say you have seen at least four articles that claim there is fake science behind climate change and are convinced its all a scam? Sea levels are clearly rising overall (not dropping - the actual article explains that both land and sea rise and fall which makes adjustments to raw numbers essential, but they question whether the adjustments used are appropriate. Breitbart however show only the comparison of raw numbers -- which the scientists who Breitbart relies on agree need to be adjusted to be made proper sense of-- to the adjustments used. For example, look at the Y axis of each chart included n the Breitbart article and look at the full study and it becomes clear that the complexity of the analysis is much more than people at Breitbart want to paint it to be. They are at completely different ranges of the stated base scale. What a surprise? Who knew oceanic science could be so complicated?).

The ice caps and glaciers world-wide are clearly melting. All of it is observable in our lifetimes and the rates are highly accelerated in relationship to geologic data showing past ups and downs of warm/hot ages and ice ages. Changes that have happened in the past 100 years are more akin to what normally would take thousands of years. You base your overall conclusion based on a dispute of water level changes based on sporadic measurements taken at one desert country near the Equator?

Yeah, it is much more believable that the vast majority of scientist are raising concern about global warming, melting ice-caps and glaciers, dying of species, historically atypical patterns of increasing frequent and violent storms throughout the world, changing drought and flood patterns, etc. just because they are in a conspiracy to . . . do what?

Hillbilly,

Trump has no plan and never did. He has only had uninformed targets that made no effort to deal with any of the real-world complexities of making a tax plan that has any realistic chance of being workable. That is why he left it to the House and the Senate to actually do the real work needed to come up with a plan of some sort and to do it in such a short window of time that there was no way for it to be thoroughly thought out and vetted. (There are two bills now, not just the Senate bill. The two will be reconciled next.) Two years is a more realistic time-frame to try to get this done right. He demanded two months and we are all going to be dealing with the waste caused by his and the Republican's haste.

Why? Because they want to be able to claim a "win" at all costs in order to be able to pretend they know how to govern. Thus, the primary goal was to try to create something that would create a bubble effect that looks good in time for next year's elections. Little care if the longer term prospects of the plan may prove a disaster. Its all about staying in power, regardless of how many people they hurt in the process.

I believe you when you say that is not how you see it. But it is the way I see it, and I am pretty sure I am seeing it right. Perhaps this will be the first time trickle down economics actually works as advertised. But I highly doubt it, because I do not see any realistic explanation how it will benefit anyone but the super-rich in the medium to long term.

Hillbilly, do you remember what happened after the "roaring 20's" bubble? Absolute tax rates today are not near what they were when those other (more recent) top tax-rate cuts you mention were made. Where is the demand going to come for the bigger market you foresee? Who is going to have the money to buy all this additional stuff? Tax reform was needed, but it should have been aimed bottom-up, not top-down.

In any event, it should have done with care and real bi-partisan discussion and debate. Instead, it was thrown together recklessly, one-sidedly, and in unprecedented haste.

As to Trump being a bigot, I would not have thought that before the election. But time and again, when the chips are down he talks and acts the part. Plus, I learned during the election about his past history discriminating against minorities in housing. He reminds me of some adults I knew growing up in Ohio, who could be perfectly nice to people different from them to their faces, but as soon as they walked out the door the truth came out.

Trump's prejudices against hispanics and muslims and even the black community have shown thru again and again. The birther stuff was disgusting. When people show me who they are again and again, I believe them.

It's quite evident that Trump is clueless. Completely unqualified to run the country. All you have to do is look around and observe all the people he has surrounding him.....from his family to all the people he has appointed to important posts. He and the republicans want to drain the swamp, I just want to drain the cesspool.

CNN had an excellant report on Global warning this past weekend: Arctic melt

Wish you could have seen it.

NeedToImpeach is steady on her course. When I signed the petition two weeks ago, .8 million signed the petition. Today the NeedToImpeachOMeter is up to 3.5 million.

Since the senate emergency revisions in the gop tax bill took place last week, did republicans now add the deduction for wildfire and earthquake victims in California. They were going to end the deductions. The revisions to the tax plan came before the recent onslaught of wildfires in Southern California.

Yes, I originally heard about doctored data from Michael Savage but the blurb I posted was from Breitbart. You trying to say the two Australian doctors didn't blow the whistle on doctored data? I hope not.

There are more. Like this one from Fox News and Forbes where the same sort of thing happened like 5 years ago ...

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/06/17/ ... -data.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylo ... 5ff9337f9d

Of course there is the now infamous hockey stick report too.

I hope you are not waiting on CNN or MSNBC to report on such things. If you are only getting your news from left wing news sites, Peter, you are in the dark. You probably still think Hillary won the election by 10 points.

And please, let us not forget that liberals were pushing "Global Cooling" in the 1970's.

http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/0 ... rmism.html

During the 1970s the media promoted global cooling alarmism with dire threats of a new ice age. Extreme weather events were hyped as signs of the coming apocalypse and man-made pollution was blamed as the cause. Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had some support in the scientific community, and gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, which showed a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions

I believe in climate change, but believe it is a natural occurrence that goes back & forth. And if it was so obvious liberals wouldn't have to constantly doctor their data to try to prove any thing.

Liberals constantly want to bash right wing news sites because they absolutely do not wanting you to hear the other side of any argument. From the Saul Alinsky playbook. Hillary was a follower and used his tactics well. Liberals have been doing since the 90's. Demonized those you disagree with. Tear them down.

They want you to watch Rachel Maddow and believe that is the only side to the story. But fact is it was not Fox News that had to suspend a "journalist" last week for taking the word of one anonymous source and running with it and proved to be totally wrong. That was an ABC reporter. It was not Breitbart that reported this week that the Mueller special investigation subpoenaed Trump's bank records at Deutsche Bank, only to have to clarify later that it wasn't Trump's records. That was Reuters.

And those were just the two big ones from the last week. This has been the same broken record for the last year and a half. A liberal media with Trump Derangement Syndrome hell bent on bringing the man down continuously takes the word of one anonymous source and runs with it later to have egg on their face. A year and a half of one bullshit story after another. All from the left wing media.

First site I visit when I wake up in the morning with my coffee is Drudge. I follow Breitbart on social media. When I turn the TV news on it is either Fox, OAN, or Newsmax, depending on the time of day and which program is on. And when I'm listening to talk radio in the car I have on the Patriot Channel. I absolutely know that these are right wing media groups. But I am very well informed and very rarely ever misled. I'm very happy.

But let us please not act like every news outlet other than the ones I mentioned above have a far left bias, and have been wrong about one story after another for the last year and a half.

Our old buddy Don Surber has a book out that highlights how wrong the media and pundits have been about Trump.

https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Press-Surb ... +The+Press

But one can start by reading this....

.

I’m A Liberal, And I Agree With Sean Hannity That American Journalism Is Dead

The 2016 election opened my eyes to this ‘Truman Show’-like media universe we’ve all been inhabiting.

By Saritha Prabhu

November 30, 2017

I’m a liberal Democrat who didn’t realize for a long time that our mainstream media is biased. For years, I consumed news and commentary from my favorite media sites uncritically: CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. From time to time, I watched Fox News to see what “the other side” was saying.

I lived in a kind of information bubble, but like most bubble-dwellers I didn’t know I was living in one. Ironically, the 2016 election opened my eyes to this “Truman Show”-like media universe we’ve all been inhabiting.

My awakening came accidentally when I realized in 2016 that I just couldn’t support Hillary Clinton (I ended up protest-voting for Gary Johnson). I thought Clinton was arrogant, entitled, corrupt, and dishonest. I couldn’t believe the Democratic Party would nominate someone who was the subject of an FBI investigation.

But as 2016 rolled on, I became quietly incensed. I couldn’t help noticing repeatedly that the mainstream media was shielding and enabling Clinton in her dissembling and media avoidance. I noticed that the commentators at CNN, MSNBC, and the NYT either ignored or made light of Clinton’s many problem areas: the private email server, compromising of state secrets, and the questionable multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation. (Yes, the Times broke the story in 2015 about Clinton’s personal email account, but I’m talking here about its 2016 treatment of her candidacy.)

Ironically, had I been a Clinton supporter, I’d have likely been blind to the media bias. To be clear, I’m not talking about individual reporting, which is usually great, but a persistent institutional bias that colors almost all coverage and commentary.

Then I Couldn’t Un-See the Bias

Once you become aware of something, you keep seeing it all the time. So, almost every time I watched or read something, I saw the media bias: in the way headlines were framed, in what they chose to cover, in the way they devoted the barest minimum time to Clinton’s problems.

To be sure, the media on the Right is often biased as well. The degree to which Sean Hannity carries water for Trump is often amusing to watch. But the mainstream media’s bias is something else, and it affects me personally. It leaves me feeling angry, betrayed, frustrated.

As an immigrant from India who didn’t know much about the politics of this country 15 or 16 years ago, for years I trusted many mainstream outlets to give me an honest view of current events. It is now apparent to me that they haven’t presented an objective picture of current events, but a slanted, curated version that serves their purposes.

As an avid media consumer, I expect from journalists objective, honest, fair-minded presentation, and analysis of all the facts available in any situation without taking sides. Commentators and pundits, of course, can take sides, but they’re still expected to be fair, honest and rational. It is what I, as a part-time opinion columnist, try to do when I write for my city paper.

The minute journalists take sides and favor one side over the other, and try to actively effect a desired outcome, they lose credibility with their viewers and readers. Once lost, that credibility can’t be regained.

The 2016 Election Was a Blizzard of Bias

Throughout 2016, I watched with increasing trepidation what was happening to American journalism. Many media organizations decided to suspend normal journalistic practices to save the republic from Donald Trump, whom they believed was a danger to democracy. I agree that Trump is a danger to democratic norms, but think journalists seriously harmed their institutions by entering the fray.

Some examples: The Times’ left-leaning columnists wrote mostly anti-Trump columns for much of 2016, and acted like Hillary’s problems were happening in a galaxy faraway. Paul Krugman, especially, lost credibility in my eyes for literally becoming a Hillary shill in 2016, insisting repeatedly that her email troubles were overblown and a right-wing concoction.

I couldn’t bear to watch Rachel Maddow in 2016 and still can’t. She’s a fine journalist who has wide knowledge and command of the facts, but her relentless, overdone partisanship was and is too much for me.

Things got so bad that The New York Times issued a post-election letter to its subscribers, saying they looked forward to “rededicat[ing] ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.” But it was too late, at least for me. The damage was done, and I’ll never look at the paper the same way again.

Preening Is Not the Job of a Reporter

Things got even worse after the election. The mainstream media, shamed and humbled by Trump’s election victory, decided to attack him with a vengeance on everything he said and did.

They didn’t actually have to overdo it. By virtue of his personality, President Trump gave them a lot of material, and they’d have been fine if they’d covered his flaws and missteps straight up. But they overplayed their hand, and not a little. Many mainstream journalists have become a little grandiose. They’ve joined the “Resistance,” and see themselves as grand defenders of democracy, as brave protectors of norms and institutions.

The result is, you see a lot of preening, grandstanding, boundary-crossing journalism. It is painful to watch CNN’s Jim Acosta often preen and editorialize on-air even though he is a White House correspondent and his job is to report. It is painful to watch White House reporter April Ryan ask an overwrought question, such as “Does this [presidential] administration think that slavery is wrong?”

It is equally painful to see that these shenanigans play well with Democratic viewers. Unfortunately, liberal audiences have become so conditioned, so bubble-oriented that they don’t recognize the journalistic malpractice going on before their very eyes.

Donna Brazile’s Accusations Were Big News

What actually prompted me to write this article was something that seemed to me like the last straw. It was the Donna Brazile story—her recent explosive allegations that the 2016 Democratic Party primary was riddled with malpractice, that Hillary had secretly taken over the Democratic National Committee a year before becoming the Democratic nominee.

You’d think this was a huge news story, but not if you were following CBS, NBC, ABC, or The New York Times. In the crucial initial days, these outlets devoted little or no time to it. They covered the story days after Politico broke the story, and Brazile appeared subsequently on “Morning Joe,” ABC’s “This Week,” and so on, but it was too late.

The Times especially outdid itself. It buried the Brazile story deep within a story titled, “Hillary Clinton Gets an Award and Tears are Shed.” In the first couple days when the story broke, I got a better sense of the story when I watched “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and read Glenn Greenwald’s commentary.

By not giving this story the coverage it deserved in the initial days, the mainstream media, in some ways, confirmed to me what President Trump has been saying for some time: that they are often dishonest and biased. Commentators like Michael Kinsley and Glenn Greenwald have written about this general bias. I still watch CNN and enjoy the Times’ non-political articles. But I watch and read their political coverage with cynical, distrusting eyes.

It’s not just our politics that is broken; our media is broken too, and hopelessly. The bias used to be hidden, but now it is open, glaring, and shameless. Our media outlets have become very tribal and are openly rooting for or against the party and politician of their choice—truth, fairness, honesty, justice, and journalistic principles be damned.

I didn’t go to a fancy journalism school, and don’t even have a journalism degree, but I know enough to realize that what is happening is bad, and that when the media self-divide into rabidly partisan camps, citizens suffer and democracy suffers. When Sean Hannity says “journalism has died in America,” I agree with him.

Make it 3 times in the last week.

CNN reported today that Donald Trump JR and members of the Trump team were sent an e-mail by Wiki leaks on Sept. 4th 2016 with info and decryption key of information on Clinton that they released to the general public on Sep. 13th. Insinuating that the Trump team worked with Wikileaks to release information hurtful to Clinton campaign.

Problem is, the email was actually sent to Junior and team on Sept. 14th. One day after they had already released it to general public. And Junior never even opened or replied to the e-mail.

And took them 8 hours to correct the story.

CNN, the most trusted name in FAKE NEWS.

I know we all like to get our info from like minded individuals. And we all love red meat. But you guys continue to get spoon fed crap and told it's prime rib. And you keep lapping it up. All the while singing the evils of Fox News. Well you enjoy. I do so love watching the mainstream media being wrong about everything almost daily.

I used to tune into some of the left wing media from time to time to see what they were talking about. Till after the election. Then all I heard was "Russia Russia Russia!" (kept hearing that in Jan Brady's voice, Marcia Marcia Marcia!) ... Hope you guys aren't still holding your breath about that BS. The biggest story that is going to come out of this whole dog and pony show is how the Deep State Obama-Clinton Cabal worked to try to bring down a presidential candidate. Bigger scandal than Watergate coming. You won't hear about it on mainstream media till they have to, but there is a storm brewing fellas...

Trump, Bannon, and Moore are three peas in a pod and just plain evil. their conduct has been disgusting and extremely unprofessional.

Obama invokes Nazi Germany in warning about today's politics

Washington (CNN)

Former President Barack Obama urged voters this week to stay engaged in democracy, warning that complacency was responsible for the rise of Nazi Germany.

"You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we've seen societies where that happens," Obama said at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, according to video of the event.

"Now, presume there was a ballroom here in Vienna in the late 1920s or '30s that looked and seemed as if it, filled with the music and art and literature that was emerging, would continue into perpetuity. And then 60 million people died. An entire world was plunged into chaos," Obama said. "So you got to pay attention -- and vote."

During the event, the former President mentioned similar themes of responding to a changing political landscape, mentioning examples from America's history.

"FDR is one of my political heroes. In my mind, the second greatest president after Lincoln. ... But he interned a bunch of loyal Japanese Americans during World War II. That was a threat to our institutions," he said. "There have been periods in our history where censorship was considered OK. We had the McCarthy era. We had a President who had to resign prior to impeachment because he was undermining rule of law. At every juncture, we've had to wrestle with big problems."

Obama also defended the necessity of a free press.

"During my presidency, the press often drove me nuts," he said. "There were times where I thought reporters were ill-informed. There were times where they didn't actually get the story right. But what I understood was that principle of the free press was vital, and that, as President, part of my job was to make sure that that was maintained."

Obama over the past year has occasionally voiced thinly veiled criticisms of the Trump administration's policies, particularly on climate change, though it's not clear from the video that he was directly addressing his successor.

Jobs report was released today and it was awesome again.

228,000 new jobs added last month.

Unemployment rate holds at 17 year low, 4.1%.

In his last year the U.S. lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs a month under Obama. Since Trump has been president we have added 159,000 manufacturing jobs in 10 months.

Making America Great Again!