Ladies and gentlemen I urge you to consider the words of Thomas Jefferson…
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782
Jefferson is saying of course that we cannot maintain Liberty absent that conviction. He’s quite right. But just as important…..Underneath that conviction of whence rights come is another conviction… That God exists.
Both historically and currently government itself is the biggest usurper of Human Rights. Is it any wonder that the Believers in big government have been trying to use the power of government to convince us that God does not exist? To separate the American people from that belief?
Just something to think about today.
Hmm.
Instapundit, today:
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:Academic: Teachers must prevent ‘assimilation’ of ‘whiteness.’ “Without active, ongoing efforts to cultivate ethnic pride, the paper warns, immigrants and students of color will ‘begin to see how society works’ and learn to emulate those ‘whose behavior is acceptable and rewarded.'”
OK, several comments.
* First this confirms something that I’ve been saying for 20 years here and elsewhere. That being that 90% of what gets passed off as race issues, are really cultural issues.
* Secondly, it shows clearly that the goal of the left is to eliminate outright, the dominance of the mainstream American culture in America. Thereby, the tearing down of society. Japan for example recognize this danger early on. And if you want to kill a society, dilute its culture.
* I observe that it’s nearly impossible to separate by subgroups a unified culture. It is much easier for governments politicians and some extremist groups to do so when we are separated and segregated by subculture. Thus are they more easily controlled. I do not see such control as a net positive. As an example of where such Division and control leads, there is a reason for example, that India never succumbed to The Lure of socialism. It’s culture was far too strong.
Finally, these people are teaching our young. The danger of that should be clear.
Two rock heads, otherwise called geography professors rail against gentrification, from Toni Airaksinen, Campus Reform:
Two San Diego State University (SDSU) professors recently criticized farmers’ markets for being “white spaces” that contribute to the oppression of minorities.
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J Bosco, two geography professors at SDSU, criticized the “whiteness of farmers’ markets” in a chapter for Just Green Enough, a new anthology published by Routledge in December.
[…]
This social exclusion is reinforced by the “whiteness of farmers’ markets” and the “white habitus” that they can reinforce, the professors elaborate, describing farmers’ markets as “white spaces where the food consumption habits of white people are normalized.”
[…]
Citing research they conducted in San Diego, however, Bosco and Joassart-Marcelli claim that 44 percent of the city’s farmers’ markets are located in census tracts with a high rate of gentrification, leading them to conclude that farmers’ markets “attract households from higher socio-economic backgrounds, raising property values and displacing low-income residents and people of color.”
So good luck getting the city fathers on board with the idea of lowering property values. I believe it was David Souter who opined that municipalities had constitutional right to economic growth.
So two rock heads think gentrification is somehow bad. Heather Mac Donald, Nation Review offers a slightly different perspective:
New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety. The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent. Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks. In 2000, whites were one-third of the black population in Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights; now they exceed the black population by 20,000. The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.
The idea that when blacks and whites are mixed that the blacks somehow assimilate from whites is not exactly novel.
Do the hoaxsters pushing the anthropogenic global warming protest too much? Scientific arguments can be refuted by evidence and not complaints about semantics. President Donald Trump tweets about the weather,
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
Note that the President used the word perhaps. The tweet was presented as a suggestion or question, and not as an assertion. Yet at least one partisan of the anthropogenic global warming hoax felt motivated into rebutting a quip, from Axios:
The semantics around climate change, or global warming, are almost as divisive as the science itself. Global warming was the default term up until the last decade or so, when climate change became more popular among those urging action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That shift was partly to respond to comments like Trump made Thursday by clarifying that a higher global aggregate temperature does not mean the entire planet would be getting universally warmer.
Whoa, it does seem that climate change hoaxsters are willing to blame every bad weather event on anthropogenic global warming, from NRDC:
Higher temperatures are worsening many types of disasters, including storms, heat waves, floods, and droughts. A warmer climate creates an atmosphere that can collect, retain, and drop more water, changing weather patterns in such a way that wet areas become wetter and dry areas drier. “Extreme weather events are costing more and more,” says Aliya Haq, deputy director of NRDC’s Clean Power Plan initiative. “The number of billion-dollar weather disasters is expected to rise.”
It the hoaxsters behind the anthropogenic global warming scare want to convince skeptics of their case, they will need more than opinion surveys and word diarrhea.
Liberals like to call themselves “pro-choice.” Yet the only choice they support are those of which they personally approve. Likewise they call say they support diversity, whatever that may mean. Again while they trout diversity, the go apoplectic over any non-conforming point of view, from State, via Townhall:
Hallmark Channel, owned by the Kansas City, Missouri-based greeting-card giant, has boomed since Trump began campaigning. In 2016, Hallmark was the only top-15 entertainment channel with double-digit ratings growth, and viewership has jumped another 16 percent this year. Meanwhile, Hallmark’s Christmas programming, which this year began before Halloween, generates more than 30 percent of its annual ad revenue and has helped Hallmark become the season’s highest-rated cable network among women aged 25-54. More than 70 million Americans watched Hallmark Channel Christmas movies last year.
The network has already approached that number in 2017, with three weeks and five premieres remaining. And the network’s strongholds map to Trump’s Electoral College victories.
After watching a few of Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas films, the network’s burgeoning red-state appeal comes into focus. As much as these movies offer giddy, predictable escapes from Trumpian chaos, they all depict a fantasy world in which America has been Made Great Again. Real and fictional heartland small towns with names such as Evergreen and Cookie Jar are as thriving as their own small businesses, and even a high school art teacher (played by Trump supporter and the face of Hallmark, Candace Cameron Bure) can afford a lavishly renovated Colonial home. They brim with white heterosexuals who exclusively, emphatically, and endlessly bellow “Merry Christmas” to every lumberjack and labradoodle they pass. They’re centered on beauty-pageant heroines and strong-jawed heroes with white-nationalist haircuts. There are occasional sightings of Christmas sweater-wearing black people, but they exist only to cheer on the dreams of the white leads, and everyone on Trump’s naughty list—Muslims, gay people, feminists—has never crossed the snowcapped green-screen mountains to taint these quaint Christmas villages. “Santa Just Is White” seems to be etched into every Hallmark movie’s town seal.
Points:
- Hallmark is an entertainment, not a news channel. As such they have no obligation to be balanced.
- Finding an under served market and catering to it is marketing. Heck it works for Lifetime, Harley-Davidson and WWE.
- So Hallmark appeals to the red states. Hollywood certainly does not. If Hollywood actually practiced diversity, Hallmark would not have the market all to herself.
- So Hallmark markets fantasy. That is what made Walt Disney rich.
As Cecile Richards might saw, if don’t like the Hallmark Channel, don’t watch it.
Just as John Kerry was for the invasion of Iran before he was opposed to it, Bernie Sanders(democratic socialist – Vermont) was against the tax cut, from Real Clear Politics, 1 December:
Mr. President, I have not the slightest doubt as I have said before, that after the Republicans pass this huge tax giveaway to the wealthy and large corporations, they will be back on the floor of the Senate. And when they come back, they’ll say, ‘oh, my goodness, the deficit is too high. We have got to cut social security, medicare, medicaid, education, and nutritional programs.’
In other words, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires and to large, profitable corporation, they’re going to cut programs for the elderly, the children, working families of this country, and the poor. This legislation will go down in history as one of the worst, most unfair pieces of legislation ever passed. But I say to my Republican colleagues, as you saw on November 7, the American people are catching on.
Before he was for them, from Hill:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday agreed the tax cuts for the middle class in the GOP tax bill are a “very good thing” — but added they should have been made permanent.
“That’s why we should’ve made the tax breaks for the middle class permanent. But what the Republicans did is made the tax breaks for corporations permanent, the tax breaks for the middle class temporary,” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
Boy do the liberal talking points change fast. Prior to tax cut, the ‘rats were calling the tax cut the worst proposed legislation since what the Fugitive Slave Act, of 1850
Edtor’s note:
Once again as in years past, I’ve found my inbox filled with messages from longtime readers who wonder if I’m going to be re-posting “A Bithead’s Christmas”, and begging me to do so.
As I believe I’ve told you in previous years, I get more email about this one single post, these 2900 or so words, then I have about anything else written here. And it happens every single year. Either this one post is particularly good, or the rest of it is comparatively bad. You’ll forgive me if in my vanity, I believe the former. I take that they’re using Email, instead of simply leaving comments, to mean that I’ve struck a very personal and private nerve. Touching people in that fashion is a very rare thing, and one I take very seriously, so the answer to the question is “Yes, of course I’ll run it again”.
Understand going in, it may not be politically correct. I seek no absolution, no forgiveness, for it’s being overtly Christian in nature, any more than I seek absolution or forgiveness for anything else that I put into these spaces. It is what it is, because Christmas is what it is, and because I speak my mind on the topic at hand, whatever that is.
Christmas, and thereby, Christianity itself, has been going on for a little over 2000 years, in spite of all the naysayers, protesters and government regulations that history has managed to toss up in those 2000- plus years. It does so, because at the core of it all, is a message…….. a message that all the naysayers, protesters and government hacks will never understand, much less conquer. It is a message that will survive the ravages of time, government, and liberals, fascists, and anything and everything else, long after you and I are no longer even a memory in this world. The Christmas message, you see, is eternal, and ever green.
(Evergreen. I am suddenly struck with the symbolism here)
There is something of a journalistic precedent for this as well. . . I do not pretend to hold myself quite so high in the world as these media outlets who have such traditions as “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”… but they’ve been getting away with such things for well over 100 years, so I suppose I can get away with it, here.
One of the things that man has always found fascinating about the Christmas story, is that you can reread it all your life, and every time you reread it, you find a new truth buried within it, so perhaps that’s WHY we get away with repeating such stories. It’s perhaps where such traditions come from.
So with all this in mind, and with the hope of helping you find new meaning in this season… and peace… a personal peace… in these troubled times, I will offer once again this year:
A Bithead’s Christmas
I find myself wanting to take more seriously, the challenge of writing to the subject of Christmas, today, than I have in years past. It’s not clear in my mind as to why, but this isn’t unusual… I never really do have a firm grip on why I want to attack a subject in these spaces. In fact, the writing of a coulmn for me has becomes more an effort of exploring a subject; the codification of random thoughts. The act of putting those thoughts into words on a screen allows me to think about, and RE-think about the subject at hand. My thoughts on a given subject often do not fully take shape until such time as I’ve re-written them twice. Often, indeed… usually, the ideas are already there, waiting to be cast into words, but not fully defined until the act of sitting down and typing them out. I suppose this subject is no exception.
To this effort, some blogs, this time of year will quote the great Gospels of Christ’s arrival, and expound on that. And that’s worthy, and right. Some others will take the secular angle of the holiday and go off on that. That too, is fine, though frankly it’s always for me missed the core of the topic, a little.
But not me, for either of those tacks. Not this year. I’m going to go off the beaten path, for this post, at least in context of this blog, given it’s Christmas, and off the beaten path in terms of the Liturgical calendar, given it’s me. I’m going to stick with the meaning of Christmas, but to point it up, I’m going to turn to something a little later… about 30 years later… for my subject. I trust you’ll see why when I’m done.
This story is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We’ll use Luke’s version for the purpose.
In Luke 18 it reads:
15 Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 17 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
Now, all three versions add a little something to the story, and I suggest you read them yourself to get it all.
Most times that Christians hear this text or read it, a child is being baptized. The apparently intended thrust of reading it in those situations is to make a loose connection with the Children being accepted by Christ. And, that’s a valid angle for the story. But, think about the story line, here, so you can get the flavor of what I’m going to describe to you. There’s a far bigger angle that many miss.
See, Christ has been playing “superstar” for a while, now. He’s been attracting flat out huge crowds wherever he goes. The disciples are starting to become concerned for the (human) well being of Christ. Children are, then as now, a source of some stress to adults already under stress, so the disciples decide, wordlessly to give the Lord a break. But Jesus says.. “Hey… No.. Let ’em come… It’s OK. ” Apparently, seeing some remaining resistance in their eyes, he reinforces the command with a statement that must have shaken them badly. “It’s to the likes of these as belongs the Kingdom of God.”
Now, It’s not hard for us to imagine what’s going on in the minds of the disciples…. They must have felt a little put back… While not saying so, they must have figured they had an inside track to Heaven. (Shrug) It’s human nature.
The passages don’t record if they said anything, but you just know what they’re thinking, here… “Comon, Jesus… We’re tryin’ to give you a break here! And you elevate these lowest of low, mere children, into the ownership of heaven? You raise a polite nothing to a path to heaven and eternity? What’s THAT about?”
And you know, Jesus knows it too. He knows full well what they’re thinking, because watch what he comes back with: “I’ll tell you the truth;”, he says, “Unless you change… Unless you transform, and accept the kingdom of heaven like a child, you’ll never enter it.”
But what does he mean, here? He’s talking, I’m afraid, about how you lose touch with happiness and the sense of wonder, as you become an adult. That loss prevents us from seeing the Kingdom of heaven as it is.
For most of us, the happiest times of our lives was when we were children. When we’re younger, we have less in the way of cares, and troubles. Let’s admit, too, that as we get older, we become aware of, and allow more and more sadness into our lives.
It’s true; It’s a hard world out there, and being adults we’ve come to understand this, in a way of understanding that only long exposure and experience… and lots of scar tissue, can bring.
It seems that every year we have more worries and concerns.
Oh, yeah, do we EVER worry. We worry about our health, and those concerns increase with advancing age. We worry about our jobs, about our investments, our savings, about the future in general. Retirement is a concern. Will we have enough? We’re too fat, we’re too skinny. We’re too tall, we’re too short, our once wavy hair is still waving… Only, it’s waving bye-bye. We worry about the future our kids will have and the normal growing up problems, but we also worry about the future that we’ve left our kids. We look at the news, and we wonder what kind of a world have we left them? We even worry if we worry too much.
We’ve seen marriages and relationships we thought would pass the test of time, pass away, instead. Things we had hoped would come to pass, didn’t, and those we’d not dreamed, in our wildest nightmares would happen, did. We see loved ones die. Jobs disappear. Hearts get broken.
And friends, those are just the hum-drum... The everyday worries that every generation has had, since Cain bopped his brother’s bean with a rock. Then you get into the problems particular to us and our times; AIDS, oil shortages, cancer, drugs, the way our own technology seems to be spiraling out of our control…
And Islamofacists.
Ah, yes, there’s nothing at all, to my mind, like the specter of 3000 plus people dying on national television, in Washington, NY and Pennsylvania… while we watch, to remind us that we’re not in control.
And yes…. it’s all about control, if you think on it for long. All these things I’ve listed are worries about things we cannot control, try as we might.
The list of these reverses, these scars, gets longer as the years progress, and it starts eventually, to break down the positive outlook in every one of us… Each according to their ability to resist. Each step, each worry, each bit of emotional scar tissue, if you will, moves us farther away from the relative joy of our comparatively carefree childhood.
By now the sharper among you will notice where I’m going with this; This is where Christmas comes in. This is why Christmas holds a special place in our hearts, and our traditions.
You see, even for the not-so-religious, it is a time of renewal of our fragile human spirit. All of the hurts, small and large, become less pronounced, and fade under the soft glow of the lights, the candles, the fireplace, and the smile of the children.
Have you ever noticed that it’s the children, in fact, that do us the most healing? Christmas, it’s said, is for the children. Presidential speechwriter and WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan noted recently about some of the qualities of children:
“They are susceptible to wonder. A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are sadder than those who do.”
Of course, we move away from that ability as we grow older. Our long experience has hardened us to the realities of the world around us, and perhaps jaded our point of view. But here comes Christmas, which gives us, individually and collectively, the chance of looking at the world through the wonder-filled eyes of a child once again… Becoming childlike ourselves in the process, and becoming healed and renewed.
The experience is a far deeper one for those who have accepted the Christmas promise, and it’s meaning. Reacting to that promise includes allowing someone else to run the controls of our lives. Remember I said it was all about control? Well, I want you to think about the features of being a child. It was Randall Jarrell, I think, who once quipped:
“One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”
Well, let’s remember.
You’re NOT in control of much of anything. Someone who knows better, and is by far more powerful than we, is running things. And looking back, I’m sure most of us would conclude that having that situation back would be of comfort to us. Haven’t we all wished to resign from the world of adulthood at times?
I guess this would be a good place to slip in a parallel story.
Consider the fictional person of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Think about how the story develops; He’s had some serious emotional setbacks in early life… and those have become a self-feeding, never ending circle by the time we meet him, 7 years after his best friend’s death.
All these setbacks have made him cold, and hard, and for all outward appearances, non-feeling. He’s covered with emotional scar tissue. Being hard, is his way of dealing with what he cannot control. Only after his overnight experience do all these cares get swept away, along with his anger of not being able to control his situation…. The realization comes to him that he never really WAS in control in the first place, so stop fretting about it all… Think about what are essentially the first words out of his mouth as he realizes that the weight of his worries.. Not unlike worries you and I have had, are gone; “I’m as light as a feather….” The weight of that scar tissue… And all the concerns they represent having been lifted off his shoulders…
“…and as giddy as a Schoolboy!”
Like.
A.
Child.
“I’ll tell you the truth”, he said, “Unless you change.. Unless you transform, and accept the kingdom of heaven like a child, you’ll never enter it.”
Amazing parallels, aren’t they?
I’m reliably informed that Charles Dickens was not as a rule what one would call very religious. Yet, in looking at the parallels in these two story lines, I must wonder in all honesty if he didn’t have some help with “A Christmas Carol”.
Now, you’ll notice I took some liberty with the way the Biblical text was quoted. Some liberty, I say, but not very much, really, since it’s long been pointed out by Bible scholars that the word that earlier versions of the text had as ‘change’ were really translated from the ancient Greek word for “transform”. This is a major point, because it demonstrates what the first step is, and whose it is… yours.
And no, change and transformation are not the same thing. The best description I’ve ever thought of to explain the difference between the two, runs along these lines:
If I take a rock, and in the other h
and I take a large hammer, and I hit the rock with the hammer, and break it, I’ve changed that rock. If I take that same rock, and take a small hammer and chisel, and very carefully, perhaps over a period of decades, sculpt that rock into a flower, I’ve still merely changed that rock.
Transformation, on the other hand, is when the rock itself, as a matter of responding to it’s own will, becomes a flower. And of course that’s beyond the normal power of the rock, by any standard we know.
What Christ therefore is saying is, that we must become children, as of a matter of our own will. Which is, as I say, impossible by any standard we know…. Which in turn leads us to the source of all things, who teaches us how, and gives us the power to do it.
You see, the externalities I mentioned, the lights, the fire, the children…and that which Dickens writes of… the giving, the being open to what joys are around us, and so on, helps toward the goal of understanding the Christmas promise, but it’s not the whole deal.
At the core of it all… (and this is a connection that, alas, many people never make…) is that the one whose birth is being celebrated every December the 25th, is the one who takes over that long list of worries. But understand, here…THAT’S WHY WE CELEBRATE!!
With those worries removed, lives get changed, hearts mended, child-like perspectives restored in a way that the lights, carols and greenery can never do on their own. And the newly remade Children find that t
he authority and responsibility and all the ponderous weight connected with them, are taken away by the one who said “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”.
Now, I must warn you; There are those who will resist being told all of this… to the point of removing such joy as they find, wherever they may find it, often using the power of governments, and force of arms to have it removed from town squares and schools, mocking, persecuting and yes, even killing those responsible for the spreading of the news of this miracle.
It’s a sad truth, that a world used to darkness, you see, will continually fight to see the darkness continued. That warning given, however, I will say to you also, that it’s no accident, Christmas being called the season of light, and that Christ is called the light of the world.
If I have one wish for this Christmas, it is that you will be open to the light…. With the wondering eyes of a child.
How can one have a coherent conversation with a party stupid enough to think that Charles “Chuckles” Schumer and Nancy “Miss Botox” Pelosi are their two best congressmen?
The ‘rats are making a comparison between the [Un]Affordable Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, and the just approved tax cuts. In both cases the bills passed with nary a vote from the party in opposition, and with the ‘rats making wild speculative statements. In the case of Obamacare, the bill cost the ‘rats control of both houses of Congress. The ‘rats are looking to return the favor.
The problem for the ‘rats was that everything they said about Obamacare was a lie. You could not keep your doctor or your insurance plan. Obamacare make healthcare more expensive and more restrictive. In contrast, the tax cuts will put more money in the pockets of taxpayers. Take that to the polls in ‘Eighteen.
The Trump tax cuts have cause the ‘rats to lose their mind. One such example, John Cassidy, New Yorker:
As the night progressed, it was clear that the criticisms of the bill had rattled some Republican senators. Not content to quibble over the implications for individual family budgets, some of them resorted to outright fantasizing. “First, this is not a health-care bill,” Tim Scott, of South Carolina, declared. Further, Scott went on, “No one loses their insurance.” This was nonsense. The bill that Scott was voting for abolishes the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, a central element of the Affordable Care Act. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the mandate’s elimination will result in thirteen million fewer Americans being insured over ten years.
So on what planet, does eliminating the state mandate to purchase a lousy product, to wit Obamacare, constitute a taxpayer losing? It is as if the state ordered Mr. Cassidy to feed his family steak twice a week, and then withdrew the order. Would Mr. Cassidy then complain the government was taking food from the mouths of his family? Film at Eleven.
Here’s what we should be doing about this…
* Immediately withdraw all funding from the UN. Every last dime.
*Tell the members of the UN to pack up and leave the United States. They have 24 hours.
* Arrange for that ungodly firetrap on Turtle Bay to be torn down. It simply isn’t useful to its original purpose of world peace. All it does is Give legitimacy to criminals.
*Immediately end all foreign aid to any Nation who voted against us in the UN. If we’re not getting anything for the money we invest, why invest it?
It’s time to stop paying for an organization that gives Thugs and terrorists like Iran Noth Korea, Cuba, Syria and so on, legitimacy.
This is over reaction, say you? No. It is not an overreaction. It’s time for the remainder of the world to get itself in line. This is by far the more reserved path. The more restrained response.
I will remind you that I have long been of the opinion that the cause of World Peace would have been best served by dropping a nuke on Turtle Bay… preferably when the general assembly was in session.
Elsewhere…
The truth of the matter is Billy that what they’re pissed about is giving more of their dollars, not less.
Think..the majority of the people complaining are in high tax states such as New York New Jersey Pennsylvania California Oregon and so on. In other words, democrat-run States. These states have been subsidized by the rest of the country for generations now because they were able to write off their state taxes. Now, with this new tax bill, they won’t be able to do that anymore.
Now Ponder this. For all of the screeching about tax the rich, what this comes down to is the higher-income people’s in those States who find themselves unable to write off their state-level taxes to the federal government and there for the rest of the country are the ones that are hit the hardest and the ones that are currently screeching the loudest.
Apparently they don’t want to tax the rich after all.
Democrat politicians aren’t happy with, for two reasons. First to forestall rioting they’re going to have to start cutting back on their lavish spending. And they really don’t want to tax the rich anyway because that’s where the Democrat donors are.
Rick Moore;
Every single one of the 128 nations that voted to condemn the US today should lose any US funding they receive. Same with the 35 abstentions who are equally guilty and also cowards.
No question. If they aren’t going to support us on the world stage then they don’t deserve anything from us. It’s time we started pulling the plug on this gravy train if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.
AT&T Inc. (t) said it plans to boost capital spending by $1 billion, and pay out more than $200 million in employee bonuses, once the tax bill approved by Congress is signed into law. The telecom company for the bonuses, it will pay a $1,000 special bonus to more than 200,000 employees in the U.S., all who are union-represented, non-management and front-line managers. The company said if President Donald Trump signs the bill before Christmas, the bonuses will be paid over the holidays. “This tax reform will drive economic growth and create good-paying jobs,” said Chief Executive Randall Stephenson. AT&T is currently battling with antitrust regulators over its proposed merger with Time Warner Inc. (twx) as the Trump administration has sued to block the deal. AT&T’s stock rallied 1.3% in afternoon trade. It has dropped 9.4% year to date, while the S&P 500 (spx) has climbed 19.8%.
I’m just going to leave this here.
You know, given the usual level of protection for their fellow Travelers from corruption charges and so on, one wonders if Menendez’ current legal issues weren’t allowed to slip through the cracks and take him down, in retaliation for this attack on the Obama Administration…. Which at that point in time would include Hillary Clinton who was running the state department…
For precedent in the matter, see also Bob Traficant.
Does anybody really think that there’s no relationship between the rollback of net neutrality and the sudden Resurgence of concern over cell phone radiation?
Elsewhere…
So let’s make sure we understand each other. You guys consider the use of the word more of an offense then what brought the use of the word about?
I mean if you’re concerned about being labeled with a stereotype perhaps the trick is to not behave in a manner so precisely matching the stereotype.
Just a thought
