FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

Even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
 
– Aeschylus

• My conservative friend, T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, educates us on the goals of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We learn from T. Paine that Dr. King was not interested in transforming America. His only goal was preserving and perfecting it. The goal of equality would be much closer to achievement if it had not been for liberals along the way. Like Barack Obama.
   
• @bjork55 at Bjork Report reports without comment as Dana Loesch explains the real reason Martin Luther King died.
   
• Max’s Dad remembers what he learned as a child the evening Martin Luther King was killed. Seems a little different from the lessons the NRA’s Dana Loesch and my friend T. Paine learned.
   
• Tommy Christopher covers the tax reform roundtable discussion at which my President repeats his famous analysis of ethnicity and sexual attacks: See? I told you Mexicans were rapists.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports as Mexico finally capitulates and agrees to pay for Donald Trump’s psychiatric care.
   
• Green Eagle takes a look at targets, subjects, investigations, and the world’s greatest negotiator.
   
• At Stinque, nojo sniffs about the administration and counts the smells.
   
• Wisconsin’s best conservative writer, James Wigderson, is getting impatient. The problem with democracy, according to James, is that voters are getting everything wrong.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post does his usual thorough research, then screams at us about the ominous rise of reactionary media groups.
   
• Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica reviews the video footage and draws reasoned conclusions about a police shooting of an unarmed man.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to a New Jersey bill that would allow exemption from vaccination for religious reasons because the ONLY exemptions are religious.
   
• Author John Scalzi spends a not-so-bad afternoon relaxing in the emergency room for chest pains.
   
• “2017 was a decent year for films,” says Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar, “with a solid crop of noteworthy movies.” Actually one of the best noteworthy events is Batocchio’s review of this year’s this year’s Oscars.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Time Magazine with the real story behind Trump and Amazon and the United States Postal Service.
   

From the Archives:
Supply-Side seems to be experiencing a revival with the recent tax cut rush, primarily for the extremely wealthy.

I started writing here 10 years ago. George Bush was still President, Senator Obama was campaigning for the job, and America was suffering from a Republican recession that looked like an approaching depression. I wrote about the prevailing conservative economic theology:

You could take what most of us know about economic theory, put it into a mosquito, and still have room for a Republican’s heart. Pay attention anyway, because America’s economy has been dramatically damaged by an obscure professor and an elegant idea.

What may turn out to be the fatal blow to everyone’s wallet came at a dinner in November 1974 when Arthur Laffer sketched a curve on a napkin for a few key Republicans. The idea was very simple.

Imagine a widget company paying sales staff on a commission basis. If the sales people are paid 100% of what they sell, what will the company make in profits? Zero, of course, since every sale makes nothing for the company.

Now, then, if the sales people are paid 0% for what they sell, what will the company make in profits? Zero, again. Since sales make nothing for sales people, they won’t sell anything. The company makes 100% of nothing.

So the greatest possible profit for the company will result from a commission rate that is somewhere between zero and 100%. Anything above that whatever-rate or below will reduce profits.

Same with taxes, said Laffer. We tax rich folks too much. If we cut taxes on the wealthy, they will be inspired to earn more and so pay more in taxes. Cut rates and raise more revenue: the ultimate public free lunch.

Republicans won in 1980, and President Ronald Reagan slashed tax rates on the wealthy and corporations. So tax revenues zoomed, right? Not so much, no. Tax revenues went up eventually, when payroll rates on working folk shot up in 1983 and again when corporate taxes went back up in 1986.

Later, the budget was actually balanced for the first time since 1969 when President Clinton…wait for it…raised taxes on the very wealthy. Now, many Bush-tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy later, the budget is way in the red, bills are due, other countries are crowding us, jobs are cut, and good people suffer.

In 2004 someone ran a reality check on tax rates in industrialized countries against the Laffer Curve, and found the mad stagger of a wandering drunk.

 
This compares the Laffer theory with the Laffer reality. I took it from Wikipedia.org

So, in the end, conservative Supply Side has turned out to be just a huge, steep Laffer cliff over which America is being pushed.

 
From Dave Dubya:

Manipulation of fear, anger, hate, racism and blame has been a primary tool of fascists and tyrants throughout history. Ours is no exception:

Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. “Caravans” coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!

Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!

These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!

As the MAGAt-in-Chief spews his trademark fear-stoking white nationalism, he’s been attacking our free press in new and destructive way.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

The census is important. But the bigger threat posed by the Commerce Department’s decision to add a question about citizenship is not about the damage to Democrats or degrading an essential data source. The basic health of American democracy is at stake.

The Trump administration’s move is best seen as another example of the Republican party playing “constitutional hardball,” defined by law professors Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen as a “political maneuver” that “violates or strains constitutional conventions for partisan ends.”

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

My schedule has been kind of bananas lately, which has precluded regular blogging, but I couldn’t help but weigh in on The Atlantic‘s troublesome new affirmative action for conservatives hire, who has made statements in his columns, etc., that have been interpreted as racist, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic. I think The Atlantic is perfectly free to promote a writer in the name of ideological diversity if the editors think this is a good thing to do, but they had best just recognize that disdain, contempt, cancelled subscriptions, and sternly-worded missives will, perforce, necessarily follow in the wake of such a decision.

No lie, I don’t read the National Review much, from which Williamson comes, although I can’t help but think that calling a small black child a “primate” and filling his mouth with an improbably stereotypical dialog (I feel, if not apocryphal, this child has certainly been embellished by the author) probably fit in far better there than it will at his new perch. But as for the outrage regarding his statements that women should be hanged for seeking abortions, which, it seems, Williamson has said more than once or twice, and not just in tweets?

Well, there’s your ideological diversity, because this isn’t some weird fringe-y thing that Williamson alone on the right has espoused at all.

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From Infidel753:

Trumpanzees’ gullibility and imperviousness to evidence can be maddening to deal with. Tell them anything they don’t want to hear and they’ll just say “fake news”, no matter how solid your sources of information. This is really the natural culmination of a trend which has been part of the right-wing mentality for decades. People who reject evolution, global warming, Keynesian economics, etc. need to develop the ability to ignore mountains of evidence while believing only what their trusted puppet-masters tell them — and eventually they’ll start applying that ability everywhere. It’s no wonder right-wing sites are festooned with ads of the “dermatologists HATE this man” and “INSANE credit card” genre. Scammers know just where to find the kind of easy marks who think they’re “standing up to the experts” when in fact they’re just being conned.

Yes, it’s frustrating to deal with, but what if we could turn the tables by treating this Trumpanzee attitude as a resource to be exploited for positive purposes?

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From Frances Langum:

Maybe the eyes and ears of American voters should just go to the highest bidder? Why worry, since people out there have multiple corporate news media outlets to choose from?

Matt Welch of Reason Magazine thinks it’s no big deal that Sinclair Broadcasting wants to buy up so many television outlets that their one conservative narrative pushing business model will eventually reach three-quarters of American households. That’s no reason to get the anti-trust people excited!

Matt Welch thinks that journalists have an overblown sense of their own importance.

Jonathan Capehart brings it back to the important point: Will Donald Trump have ANY check on his power without an independent media?

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