Monday Open Thread

13 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. 

   John Steigerwald @Steigerworld

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   Al Sharpton loves BO's tax increase proposals. He owes $4 million in back taxes. Doesn't get any better than that.

   2:22 PM – 21 Jan 2015

    

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   1. I hereby call for the Rev. Al Sharpton to pay all back taxes, penalties and interest for any and all income made outside his prescribed religious duties. 

      I also call for all American Corporations to bring all off-shored cash, legal and illegal, to repatriate that cash and pay all income taxes, penalties and interest (the money would be taxed at a 35% rate minus whatever tax a company already paid on it to a foreign government.)

      Mmultinational companies have accumulated $1.95 trillion outside the U.S., up 11.8 percent from a year earlier, according to securities filings from 307 corporations reviewed by Bloomberg News. Three U.S.-based companies — Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. — added $37.5 billion, or 18.2 percent of the total increase.

      “The loopholes in our tax code right now give such a big reward to companies that use gimmicks to make it look like they earn their profits offshore,” said Dan Smith, a tax and budget advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which seeks to counteract corporate influence.

      Just think, not you AC, of the roads/bridges/water/broadband access, the schools that could be refurbished, the high tech environmental and technical advances that could be made with some of those taxes.

      And just think of the reality of the increase in profits and sales those very same companies would make if that money was doing more than just sitting offshore, hidden from profit sheets, as the most successful and profitable of our American Corporations reject the idea that they should help pay for the very government that has given them such an exalted place in the market.

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   2. You must be getting very discouraged. No matter what you folks do Obama's approval rating continues to inch up and has ever since the election. Just today Gallup, which was never one of the outliers in a positive direction for Obama , is posting this result, despite all of your efforts. Got this off your beloved RCP:

      Gallup

      Approve 50, Disapprove 45

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2. Middle Class fights back in Greece……….will this mark the end of economically irrational Austerity measures taken in Europe and the U.S. and those politicians who support(ed) them by their actions or silence.

    

   A Break in the Greek Tragedy
   

    

   Europe should count itself lucky that a leftwing anti-austerity party won the Greek elections, swept into office by citizens who've had enough. Elsewhere in Europe, seven years of stupid, punitive, and self-defeating austerity policies have led to gains by the far right. If a radical left party is now in power in Athens and sending tremors through Europe's financial markets, the EU's smug leaders and their banker allies in Frankfurt, Brussels and Berlin have only themselves to blame. Alexis Tsipras, leader of the winning Syriza coalition, says he doesn't want Greece to leave the Euro. He just wants Europe's leaders to renegotiate Greece's debt. It's about time.

   This crisis could have ended years ago with far less suffering for ordinary people who had no responsibilities for the offending policies. Greece, after all, has about two percent of the EU's total economic product — and it has about 25 percent less than it had before the crisis.

   Writing off Greece's debt outright would have cost peanuts, and still would.

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3. After declaring that "Hickenlooper Evolves On Legal Weed," we now see the governor begin his de-evolutionary creep:

   Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana was a bad idea, the state’s governor said Friday.

   Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed the 2012 decision by voters to make pot legal, said the state still doesn’t fully know what the unintended consequences of the move will be.

   

   “If I could've waved a wand the day after the election, I would've reversed the election and said, 'This was a bad idea,’ ” Hickenlooper said Friday on CNBC's “Squawk Box.”

   “You don't want to be the first person to do something like this,” he said.

    

    

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4. Bipartisanship, DC Style

   Here's a longer clip of how the Democratic amendments were handled by McConnell, and it's worth watching to see Markey as well as his colleagues Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed (D-RI) get shut down.

   Just for fun watch the woman in yellow, McConnell's floor aide, as she prompts Republicans too lazy to pay attention as to when to raise their hands, and how another whispers instructions on how to dispense with Democratic objections to the presiding officer, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE). So now I guess we know how McConnell is going to handle his promise to give Democrats votes on their amendments—as soon as they try to bring them up, there will be a motion to table, and then they'll be totally shut down. But then McConnell can say "look at all the amendments I'm allowing from Democrats!"

   We know he's going to do that because McConell already did:

   “We've actually reached a milestone here that I think is noteworthy for the Senate. We just cast our 15th roll-call vote on an amendment on this bill, which is more votes—more roll-call votes on amendments than the entire United States Senate [did] in all of 2014."

   Technically, yes, even though half of them were votes to table Democratic amendments. 

   Poor Michael Bennet who wants everything to be bipartisan in the Washington of his mind. Who will point out to our doe-eyed leader that Mitch McConnell is far more cynical, devious and duplicitous a politician than Bennet could imagine?

   Do both sides do it, Michael, do both sides really do it this way?

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   1. It's all good the smart money is on Michael Bennet getting reelected.

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      1. Just curious. I wonder how many HRC lovers are Bennet haters and why? It makes about as much sense a being a Romanoff lover and Bennet hater, based on anything other than Romanoff having been a DLC centrist Clinton supporter and Bennet having been the centrist favored by victorious team Obama. I still can't grasp how objective reality figures into these intensely different reactions to remarkably similar centrist pols with remarkably similar records on economic and social issues. Visceral, I guess.

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5. A friendly reminder:

   Rocky Mountain National Park is 100 years old today!

   Thanks to Enos Mills and all of those responsible for promoting this ecologically diverse and scenic are of Colorado as America's 10th National Park.

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   1. absolutely, PR! 

      +100.

      Was just going to post a link to this nice DPost photo essay on RMNP.

      Hate to make everything political, but don't forget R's have threatened and lied about our federal park employees, they've cut support and maintenance of national parks since the Reign of Reagan (almost forgot about that monumental moron James Watt), they would like to sell off all our parks to their well-heeled friends, and they would love no more than to see fracking wells and waste ponds where the deer, elk and moose now thrive.

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6. Seriously, Republicans? You're going to kill a bill that would grant small emergency grants to rural areas that experienced economic downturns after disasters? WTF is wrong with you?

   As reported by the Grand Junction Sentinel, and  Denver Post Editorial Board, Loveland Representative Donovan's SB36, the Rural Economic Emergency Grant Assistance Program, was sent to the State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee, otherwise known as the Bill Graveyard, by Republicans.

   Good luck with those rural voters, boys and girls.

    

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   1. Donavan represents SD5, Delta County, Hinsdale, and Gunnison, not Loveland. My bad.
       

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   2. Seriously. That's how they roll. 

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