KCRag Forum

Robert Mueller’s Brilliant Strategy for Outmaneuvering Trump Pardons

The president cannot save Paul Manafort.

http://tinyurl.com/y8y39rl2

The downward spiral for Trump finally begins at the polls. Even DEMs were surprised by the elections yesterday. Some DEM Governor wins and a lot of other DEM seats won, 14 House seats flipped to DEM.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/736020/d ... -victories

And Trump approval ratings back to dismal...
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epoll ... -6179.html

I'm actually rather surprised there doesn't seem to be a bunch of people howling about voter fraud.

earthling wrote: Even DEMs were surprised by the elections yesterday.

mean wrote:I'm actually rather surprised there doesn't seem to be a bunch of people howling about voter fraud.

So... at least some on the left are surprised to see Dems win in blue states? They're surprised that the losing side doesn't have a "scream helplessly at the sky" day to protest election results?

mean wrote:I'm actually rather surprised there doesn't seem to be a bunch of people howling about voter fraud.

The voter fraud commission setup to look at this idea has people questioning it as government waste. Some members don't even know when meetings will be held.

It's hard to cry wolf when you've already setup a team of hunters to stalk the wolf and are failing to find one.

Once you've already demonstrated in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that you are convinced there is, in fact, a wolf, and you are happy to cry about it loudly and often, even when the veracity of your wolf claims are in doubt by virtually everyone who knows what they're talking about, I'm not likely to give you the benefit of the doubt that you'll not do it this time.

AllThingsKC wrote:

earthling wrote: Even DEMs were surprised by the elections yesterday.

mean wrote:I'm actually rather surprised there doesn't seem to be a bunch of people howling about voter fraud.

So... at least some on the left are surprised to see Dems win in blue states? They're surprised that the losing side doesn't have a "scream helplessly at the sky" day to protest election results?

Well VA is incredibly gerrymandered (Romney won, I forget the exact number, but something like 54 or 55 of the 100 state House of Delegates districts as Obama carried the state by 4%), so even if you consider it a blue state, the GOP had a +32 margin there and the majority was not expected to be in play. Northam also seemed to be running a poorer campaign than Dems would have liked to see, although it obviously didn't matter in the end.

Virginia tends to only vote blue during the big elections--meaning a lot of Democrats only come out to vote in elections for governor, senator, and president. Outside the cities, there are lots of Republican voters who always vote. Virginia would be probably be consistently blue if Democrats voted in every single election.

There are also voters who only show up to vote for president/governor, and who may not pay attention to state house and senate races, and since they don't know the candidates, don't vote for those seats. They don't fill out the entire ballot.

Just another reason why as a nearly a life long republican, I will never vote for another republican. The party got hijacked by the people with the worst intentions in the US. An all out assault on science and education is now part of the GOP tax plan. They know exactly what they are doing here.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... 9a35113d2f

I would not have had a career if not for tuition waivers for grad students. At the tops schools in the country, it will just ensure that only students from rich backgrounds can afford to attend.

Yes, the tax plan is an enormous con job: a tax hike on millions of middle class families to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy, for people who earn income passively rather than through active labor, and for corporations (and as an added bonus, the corporate tax cut in practice means an approximately $700 billion giveaway to the foreign shareholders of American corporations). And things like the tuition waiver that directly implicate the tax code are only the beginning -- when the promised economic growth fails to cover the loss of revenue, the solution to close the deficit will be more budget cuts, surely including other forms of financial assistance to students.

How can anybody propose eliminating the estate tax and amt with a straight face?

I mean the modern Republican party is depraved, so I'm not surprised that they can pitch this stuff with a straight face. What bothers me is how terribly this plan is polling (even among Republicans and Trump voters), how brazen they are about the fact that they're just doing it to please the donor class (and that it must be done to please the donor class), and that in the end we'll be saddled with this thing and most of them won't face any real repercussions for it. The Dems might -- might -- capture a narrow majority in the House next year, if they manage to do at least as well as the did in Virginia on Tuesday. Meanwhile the Senate, which is all but out of reach no matter what happens, is about to confirm a 36 year old judicial nominee who has practiced for three years and is unanimously rated "not qualified" by the ABA. So board lawyers, take note -- say enough truly reprehensible things to get on the Federalist Society's radar and lock up lifetime employment.

And what's really frustrating is that the GOP is probably right to be more afraid of the cash spigot getting shut off for failing to pass the bill than any blowback from their voters for pushing it through.

phuqueue wrote:Yes, the tax plan is an enormous con job: a tax hike on millions of middle class families to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy, for people who earn income passively rather than through active labor, and for corporations (and as an added bonus, the corporate tax cut in practice means an approximately $700 billion giveaway to the foreign shareholders of American corporations). And things like the tuition waiver that directly implicate the tax code are only the beginning -- when the promised economic growth fails to cover the loss of revenue, the solution to close the deficit will be more budget cuts, surely including other forms of financial assistance to students.

I don't have a major issue with cutting corporate tax because the US has the highest corporate tax of the developed world. Sometimes I wonder why corporations pay any income tax at all - tax the main benefactors of corporate income - the stockholders and upper management at the personal tax level at a much higher level than they are taxed today. No need to have a huge tax on corporations, let them plow back capital and improve conditions for employees. Trump however seems to be trying to settle scores with this tax plan and the tax on graduate student waived tuition is an attempt to shut down science and hit liberal universities without even thinking about the collateral damage. I know educated people in the republican party who think colleges have lost their way and become liberal breeding grounds, especially at the graduate school level. Ditto for another Trump constituency, religious conservatives, who have misgivings about a host of sciences (evolution, geology, stem cell research). I haven't heard anything from the GOP about taxing the tuition portion of scholarships for athletes, Trump knows if the Crimson Tide doesn't roll, he might lose a few redneck votes in Alabama.

The US has the highest nominal tax rate for corporations in the developed world, it definitely does not have the highest effective corporate tax rate. And if the tax bill did for corporations what it claims to do for everyone else -- lower the nominal rates but broaden the base -- and had a zero net impact, that would be one thing. But it doesn't have zero net impact, it blows a huge hole in the budget, a hole that a year from now Republicans will clamor to close (but certainly not by simply reversing their ill-conceived tax cuts), and it's all for the sake of a cash handout to corporate shareholders. There's no reason to believe that they will "plow back capital and improve conditions for employees," especially not to the extent that Republicans are promising. Corporations are already sitting on mountains of cash or could take advantage of historically low interest rates to make those kinds of investments if they were interested in doing so. Companies respond to market conditions and will make those investments when they make business sense. And they don't make a lot of business sense if potential customers aren't buying -- for instance, because they've seen their real incomes chipped away for decades and are now looking at a personal tax hike to finance the corporate tax cut. This is a tax "reform" that privileges the passive income by which wealthy people grow even wealthier over the income that ordinary people earn by doing actual labor, that seeks to redistribute the already comparatively meager earnings of the latter to the already ample income of the former. It's a scam.

phuqueue wrote:But it doesn't have zero net impact, it blows a huge hole in the budget, a hole that a year from now Republicans will clamor to close (but certainly not by simply reversing their ill-conceived tax cuts)

It was excessively optimistic to think it would take them a year to start fretting about deficits. Now they're talking about adding backstop provisions that will automatically trigger "if" (or rather, when) federal revenues collapse. If you asked me to name something worse than passing this tax bill in the first place, I'd be hard pressed to come up with much, but automatic austerity triggers that kick in regardless of the broader economic context would definitely be part of the answer.

Yikes!

Missouri candidate decries ‘floozy attacks’ on ‘legendary patriot’ Roy Moore

In a dramatic video, a U.S. Senate candidate from Missouri called Roy Moore a “legendary patriot who stands up and fights no matter what,” and he implied the reporting of sexual assault allegations against Moore could lead to the destruction of America.

Courtland Sykes — who recently moved to Missouri as he attempts to unseat Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat — released a 40-minute “mini-documentary” Tuesday in which he rails against the Washington Post, which reported sex assault allegations against Moore by several women. Sykes gave his “unequivocal support” to Moore, who is a U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics ... 87973.html

Here is the link to the candidates YouTube site, so you can watch the video if you can't see the Star article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_H9mzYQunA

Who the hell is this guy, its like he was just created out of thin air to unseat another democratic seat, his linkedin profile seems fake.
The guy is not even from Missouri, are people that stupid that they will just vote for him because he has an R next to his name. Politics is basically sports now and you will stick by your team no matter what.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtland-sykes-544056123/

GOP primaries are a race to the bottom, but if you prevail you will be favored to win the general no matter what you did.

I'm very pessimistic about Claire's chances but you'd hope even in a state as far gone as Missouri that a two term senator could win an election against an apologist for sexual predators who only even moved to the state in the first place specifically to run for the seat.

But I'm guessing the GOP nom will go to Hawley, who is monstrously terrible in his own right but probably far more electable than this Sykes person.

Hawley's trying the Bannon route, so no telling what might come out of his mouth.