Victims' safety matters - Reckless endangerment causes crash/damage

 

Victims' lives matter - say their names: Dr. Beth Potter and Robin Carre

Family, friends remember couple murdered at UW Arboretum one year ago

Posted: March 31, 2021 5:02 PM

MADISON, Wis. — It’s been one year since a Madison doctor and her husband were shot and killed at the UW Arboretum.

A jogger found Dr. Beth Potter and Robin Carre’s bodies in a ditch on March 31st, 2020. Their identities were released the next day.

Two teens, including one that had dated the couple’s daughter, face charges in the case. A Dane County judge ordered separate trials for 19-year-olds Khari Sanford and Ali’ja Larrue. Both have motion hearings in their cases next week.

April 27, 2021

MADISON, Wis. — Authorities say a Wisconsin 19-year-old who is accused of helping kill the parents of a friend’s girlfriend after a dispute over COVID-19 restrictions has signed a plea agreement.

Ali’jah Larrue is charged with two counts of party to the crime of first-degree intentional homicide.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports that he will likely plead guilty next month to amended charges. Sentencing for Larrue would be delayed until after the outcome of the case against his friend, Khari Sanford.

Victim's lives matter - say their name: Michael Farmer and his dog Bruce

abc news online 4.27.21 On Location: April 27, 2021 

 A woman has been arrested after allegedly running over and killing a man and his dog while they were out for a walk in a hit-and-run incident while fleeing at a high speed from another hit-and-run incident with a vehicle only minutes before striking Farmer and his dog.

 The incident occurred on the evening of Sunday, April 25, shortly before 8 p.m. in Sandy Springs, Georgia -- a suburb north of Atlanta -- when police responded to a hit-and-run incident involving a pedestrian, later named as 25-year-old Michael Farmer of Sandy Springs and his dog, a Catahoula named Bruce. An initial police investigation found that Farmer and his dog were walking on Hammond Drive near Glenridge Drive in Sandy Springs when a white sedan traveling eastbound at a high rate of speed struck the victim and fled the scene, according to a statement from the Sandy Springs Police Department. 

Farmer and his dog both died in the accident as a result of the injuries suffered in the collision. However, during the course of the investigation, Sandy Springs Police Traffic Investigators found that the exact same vehicle had been involved in another hit-and-run incident with a vehicle only minutes before striking Farmer and his dog. “Sandy Springs Police Traffic Investigators learned that minutes prior to this deadly incident, the same hit-and-run vehicle had been involved in an additional hit-and-run crash with another vehicle while in the area of Roswell Road and I-285,” Sandy Springs Police Department said in a statement on social media. 

“The suspect was fleeing the first incident at a high-rate of speed when it struck the pedestrian and his dog; causing fatal injuries to both.” Through their investigation, Sandy Springs Police Department was able to identify the vehicle as a 2020 white Chevy Malibu with Florida tags and, with the help of the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office, they were able to find the vehicle and the owner, 38-year-old Dominque Houston of Newnan, Georgia -- about 50 miles south of Sandy Springs -- before placing her under arrest.

 Houston was then taken into custody, interviewed by authorities and subsequently charged with vehicular homicide in the first degree, reckless driving, two counts of hit and run, and one count of following too closely. Houston has now been booked into the Fulton County Jail on the above charges and is awaiting prosecution.

Letter to Laura Kelly - sent snail mail today

 

4-25-2021

 

Governor Laura Kelly

300 SW 10^th Ave  

Topeka KS 66612-1590

 

Dear Governor Kelly:

 

Our democracy is in dire jeopardy when our elected officials openly consider corporations, not citizens, their constituents.

 

Clearly, elected officials have for years depended on financing in order to get reelected and have been heavily influenced by donors, lobbyists and potential donors. But now, for money to rule the day seems a deep offense to the very nature of our experiment in living with respect for all.

 

Perhaps your stance is demanded by the Democratic Party to which you belong? It seems they are the purveyors of a large false narrative that proclaims to be “for the people” with an “I know what’s best for you” attitude. My observation is that there are precious few people currently available willing to serve as statesmen (or statespeople, if you prefer) thinking of the good of the system that has allowed us to live peaceably with more individual freedom than any other in history.

 

The DNC’s concern for “diversity” is only skin deep. It does not extend to diversity of thought, diversity of individual priorities, diversity of economics.

 

The record shows you have lived long enough to know better and cannot be desperate for finances. Please stop your participation in the dictatorship of the corporate interest and listen to the will of the people.

 

If there is a rationale behind your considering corporate interests and denying the decisions of Kansas’s elected representatives, I’d be grateful to hear it.

 

Concerned citizen,

 

 

 

 

Dorothy Youngblood

(formerly of Hutchinson, Kansas)

705 Forest Glen Cir

How do we stand up to Private Corporations now ruling our country?

"Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed two bills that would have changed election laws, such as requiring counties to verify signatures on early voting ballots and making it illegal for any person to knowingly alter a postmark on a mail-in ballot. The bills were House Bill 2183, which the state House passed 80–42 and the state Senate passed 27–11, and House Bill 2332, which the state House passed 83–38 and the state Senate approved 27–11. Kelly alleged the bills would have suppressed votes.

 “Although Kansans have cast millions of ballots over the last decade, there remains no evidence of significant voter fraud in Kansas. This bill is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. It is designed to disenfranchise Kansans, making it difficult for them to participate in the democratic process, not to stop voter fraud,” she said in a statement.

 “We also know what happens when states enact restrictive voting legislation. Hundreds of major companies across the nation have made it abundantly clear that this kind of legislation is wrong. Antagonizing the very businesses Kansas is trying to recruit is not how we continue to grow our economy.”

More money makes schools better - Less money makes police better?

The same people on the left who contend that education can be improved by spending more money also propose to improve policing by defunding police. An officer on his own is more likely to rely on lethal force, than one with backup. A school (from my first-hand experience) is more likely to reinforce current methods, given additional money - not innovate or self-examine and revise.

For the record - border crisis

The number of illegal border crossings has surged under Biden, leaping from 75,315 in January to 168,195 in March. The number of unaccompanied minors, or kids not accompanied by parents or other guardians, leapt nearly 13,000 to 18,663 from January to March. The United States has struggled to contain the kids, opening over a dozen new facilities and asking foster parents to take them in.

Biden on "right verdict"f

Letter to the President. IF THIS HEADLINE IS ACCURATELY QUOTING YOU, IT SEEMS YOU ARE UNDERMINING CONFIDENCE IN RULE OF LAW WHICH SHOULD ALLOW OUTCOMES TO BE DETERMINED BY OUR EXPLICIT PROCESS, NOT BY POPULAR OPINION. ANYTHING LESS, IS THE EQUIVALENT OF A LYNCHING - PREDETERMINED AND EMOTIONALLY DRIVEN. You are the head of our executive branch and are required to respect the judicial branch and allow judicial procedures to run their course to determine the matter. To presume you, not a jury of 12, can (without sitting through the trial) can state what the "right verdict" is -- seems overwhelming and frightenly authoritarian. Biden praying for 'right verdict' in Chauvin trial, believes case 'overwhelming' By JONATHAN LEMIRE and MICHAEL BALSAMO, Associated Press 1 hr ago 14

Play - free children's brilliant minds NYT Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Alison Gopnik

So there’s this lovely concept that I like of the numinous. And sometimes it’s connected with spirituality, but I don’t think it has to be. It’s this idea that you’re going through the world. And often, quite suddenly, if you’re an adult, everything in the world seems to be significant and important and important and significant in a way that makes you insignificant by comparison. My colleague, Dacher Keltner, has studied awe. And awe is kind of an example of this. But the numinous sort of turns up the dial on awe. And part of the numinous is it doesn’t just have to be about something that’s bigger than you, like a mountain. It could just be your garden or the street that you’re walking on. And suddenly that becomes illuminated. Everything around you becomes illuminated. And you yourself sort of disappear. And I think that’s kind of the best analogy I can think of for the state that the children are in. And it’s worth saying, it’s not like the children are always in that state. So the children, perhaps because they spend so much time in that state, also can be fussy and cranky and desperately wanting their next meal or desperately wanting comfort. They’re not always in that kind of broad state. But I think they spend much more of their time in that state. That’s more like their natural state than adults are.EZRA KLEIN: Do you think for kids that play or imaginative play should be understood as a form of consciousness, a state? ALISON GOPNIK: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s really a kind of coherent whole about what childhood is all about. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think there’s a whole lot of other things that go with that. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that it’s the thing that you do when you’re not working. Now it’s not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but it’s a form of activity. It’s a form of actually doing things that, nevertheless, have this characteristic of not being immediately directed to a goal. If you look across animals, for example, very characteristically, it’s the young animals that are playing across an incredibly wide range of different kinds of animals. Sometimes if they’re mice, they’re play fighting. And if they’re crows, they’re playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. So, what goes on in play is different. But it’s really fascinating that it’s the young animals who are playing. And all of the theories that we have about play are play’s another form of this kind of exploration. So it’s another way of having this explore state of being in the world. Now it’s not so much about you’re visually taking in all the information around you the way that you do when you’re exploring. Now it’s more like you’re actually doing things on the world to try to explore the space of possibilities. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. There’s a certain kind of happiness and joy that goes with being in that state when you’re just playing. And again, it’s not the state that kids are in all the time. But it’s the state that they’re in a lot of the time and a state that they’re in when they’re actually engaged in play. One of the things that’s really fascinating that’s coming out in A.I. now — and I’ve been spending a lot of time collaborating with people in computer science at Berkeley who are trying to design better artificial intelligence systems — the current systems that we have, I mean, the languages they’re designed to optimize, they’re really exploit systems. What you do with these systems is say, here’s what your goal is. You go out and maximize that goal. And it turns out that if you have a system like that, it will be very good at doing the things that it was optimized for, but not very good at being resilient, not very good at changing when things are different, right? I’ve been really struck working with people in robotics, for example. When people say, well, the robots have trouble generalizing, they don’t mean they have trouble generalizing from driving a Tesla to driving a Lexus. They mean they have trouble going from putting the block down at this point to putting the block down a centimeter to the left, right? I mean, they really have trouble generalizing even when they’re very good. And it turns out that if you get these systems to have a period of play, where they can just be generating things in a wilder way or get them to train on a human playing, they end up being much more resilient. They’re much better at generalizing, which is, of course, the great thing that children are also really good at. EZRA KLEIN: Do you think for kids that play or imaginative play should be understood as a form of consciousness, a state? ALISON GOPNIK: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s really a kind of coherent whole about what childhood is all about. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think there’s a whole lot of other things that go with that. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that it’s the thing that you do when you’re not working. Now it’s not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but it’s a form of activity. It’s a form of actually doing things that, nevertheless, have this characteristic of not being immediately directed to a goal. If you look across animals, for example, very characteristically, it’s the young animals that are playing across an incredibly wide range of different kinds of animals. Sometimes if they’re mice, they’re play fighting. And if they’re crows, they’re playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. So, what goes on in play is different. But it’s really fascinating that it’s the young animals who are playing. And all of the theories that we have about play are play’s another form of this kind of exploration. So it’s another way of having this explore state of being in the world. Now it’s not so much about you’re visually taking in all the information around you the way that you do when you’re exploring. Now it’s more like you’re actually doing things on the world to try to explore the space of possibilities. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. There’s a certain kind of happiness and joy that goes with being in that state when you’re just playing. And again, it’s not the state that kids are in all the time. But it’s the state that they’re in a lot of the time and a state that they’re in when they’re actually engaged in play. One of the things that’s really fascinating that’s coming out in A.I. now — and I’ve been spending a lot of time collaborating with people in computer science at Berkeley who are trying to design better artificial intelligence systems — the current systems that we have, I mean, the languages they’re designed to optimize, they’re really exploit systems. What you do with these systems is say, here’s what your goal is. You go out and maximize that goal. And it turns out that if you have a system like that, it will be very good at doing the things that it was optimized for, but not very good at being resilient, not very good at changing when things are different, right? I’ve been really struck working with people in robotics, for example. When people say, well, the robots have trouble generalizing, they don’t mean they have trouble generalizing from driving a Tesla to driving a Lexus. They mean they have trouble going from putting the block down at this point to putting the block down a centimeter to the left, right? I mean, they really have trouble generalizing even when they’re very good. And it turns out that if you get these systems to have a period of play, where they can just be generating things in a wilder way or get them to train on a human playing, they end up being much more resilient. They’re much better at generalizing, which is, of course, the great thing that children are also really good at. What does this somewhat deeper understanding of the child’s brain imply for caregivers? What does taking more seriously what these states of consciousness are like say about how you should act as a parent and uncle and aunt, a grandparent? ALISON GOPNIK: Well, I think here’s the wrong message to take, first of all, which I think is often the message that gets taken from this kind of information, especially in our time and our place and among people in our culture. The wrong message is, oh, OK, they’re doing all this learning, so we better start teaching them really, really early. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story We better make sure that all this learning is going to be shaped in the way that we want it to be shaped. And we better make sure that we’re doing the right things, and we’re buying the right apps, and we’re reading the right books, and we’re doing the right things to shape that kind of learning in the way that we, as adults, think that it should be shaped. And that’s not the right thing. That’s actually working against the very function of this early period of exploration and learning.

1975 Biden - new senator fought to prevent USA from spending money to help Vietnamese we left behind in S. Vietnam

From The Atlantic Daily 4.14.21 President Joe Biden now has a second chance to redeem his mistake. “In April 1975, as a first-term senator, he was an outspoken opponent of using American money and risking Americans’ safety to rescue the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who had bet their lives on American promises,” George Packer reminds us.

From AMERICAN CONSEQUENCES

 High Taxes & Deep Debt Will Jeopardize Americans' Prosperity

By Brandon Arnold

The COVID-19 pandemic may be nearing an end, but its economic repercussions will be felt for decades, if not longer. Over the course of a little more than one year, the United States has spent more than $5.3 trillion to combat the disease and the economic devastation it has wreaked. That massive sum is more than the U.S. government's entire budget in 2018. Or, in other words, more than the entire GDP of every nation in the world, except the U.S. and China.

Some of the spending was broadly supported – such as appropriating more than $800 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program to keep small businesses afloat or boosting unemployment benefits to ensure displaced workers could pay their bills at a time when many companies were forcibly shuttered. But much of the spending was wasteful or unrelated to the COVID emergency – like a private pension bailout to satiate the union lobby at a cost of approximately $100 billion, according to the Heritage Foundation, or $200 million that was spent on the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The good news is the COVID spending spree appears to be coming to an end. Vaccines are rapidly being deployed and the economy is beginning to reopen, which is already spurring economic growth and job creation. Unfortunately, the dangerous levels of red ink in Washington, D.C. will persist.

Indebted for Decades

In March, prior to the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, the Congressional Budget Office ("CBO") projected that the United States will reach unprecedented levels of debt in just 10 years. When that happens, the debt-to-GDP ratio will hit 107%, exceeding the historical high set during World War II. It gets worse from there, with the national debt expected to be more than double the size of the economy from 2042 to 2051. This level of debt is unsustainable and the potential repercussions are immense...

As the CBO states, the projected levels of debt "would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis – that is, a situation in which investors lose confidence in the U.S. government's ability to service and repay its debt, causing interest rates to increase abruptly, inflation to spiral upward, or other disruptions."

It should be clear to any objective observer that – following the COVID spending binge that spent trillions of dollars – the nation needs some degree of fiscal restraint. Unfortunately, instead of austerity, the Biden administration is supporting a massive tax-and-spend package. This contains a toxic mix of economically damaging tax hikes and debt-financed new spending that will combine to exacerbate the debt problem and slow the recovery.

While some have cited former President Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hike as an analogue, the comparison simply doesn't hold water. Yes, the Clinton plan included big tax increases, but its primary purpose was to shrink the deficit and balance the budget, which is why it is often referred to as the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993. Instead of trillions in new spending – like Biden's proposal – Clinton's plan paired tax increases with hundreds of billions in spending cuts. This, combined with pro-growth policies achieved on a bipartisan basis in subsequent years, led to a strong economy and federal budget surpluses.

Unprecedented Spending

Biden's plan contains neither pro-growth tax policies nor substantive spending reductions. To the contrary, the first part of his plan would spend an additional $2.25 trillion under the auspices of infrastructure. Only $115 billion of these funds – or about 5% – are allocated to repairing bridges, roads, and highways, which is what's commonly regarded as traditional infrastructure. Some of the remaining amount would be dedicated to electric vehicles ($174 billion), R&D investment ($180 billion), universal broadband ($100 billion), and so-called "human infrastructure."

To fund this ambitious spending package, Biden proposes $2 trillion in higher taxes, primarily on corporations. His plan would push the corporate tax rate to 28%, which would – when combined with the 4.4% average state and local corporate tax rate – give the United States the dubious distinction of having the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. This would harm the competitiveness of U.S.-based companies and likely reduce the number of new firms created here.

An even larger problem with raising corporate tax rates stems from its incidence, or who will shoulder this higher tax burden. Of course, many proponents of higher corporate taxes believe the burden will be entirely paid by faceless corporations with bottomless bank accounts. However, virtually all economists – regardless of ideology – would dispute this notion.

The Left-leaning Tax Policy Center, a project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, suggests that workers bear 20% of the cost of corporate taxes, with the remaining 80% falling on capital or investment returns. By contrast, the Tax Foundation reviewed numerous studies over recent decades that "found labor bears between 50% and 100% of the burden of the corporate income tax, with 70% or higher the most likely outcome."

Eat the Rich

In short, this means that higher corporate tax rates correspond with a reduction in compensation for workers. Indeed, the Tax Foundation modeled President Biden's proposal to boost the corporate rate from its current 21% to 28% and found it would eliminate 159,000 jobs and reduce wages by 0.7% for workers, on average. Even worse, those workers who can least afford to be negatively impacted – those in the bottom quartile of income – would see a 1.45% reduction in after-tax income in the long run due to a 28% rate. That's bad news for working-class Americans.

In addition to a higher statutory rate, Biden's infrastructure plan proposes imposing a corporate minimum tax, which is intended to ensure that no corporation can evade taxes by exploiting loopholes in the tax code. While the intention may have merit, the impact of such a tax on "book income" would be problematic because this measure of income does not account for legitimate expenses such as capital investments. Under a minimum tax scenario, a corporation would effectively be penalized with higher taxes for making investments in machinery and equipment that can enhance productivity and competitiveness. As Nicole Kaeding, formerly of National Taxpayers Union Foundation, explained:

Taxable income and book income vary for good reason. Taxable income allows companies to deduct their capital investments and carry forward their previous losses to better align their taxable profits with their economic profits. Taxable income isn't perfect – expensing, for example, should be made permanent and expanded to all assets – but it serves as a better tax base than book income.

Unfortunately, Biden's proposal to raise taxes on corporations by $2 trillion is only the tip of the iceberg... Democrats on Capitol Hill are emboldened by their majority status in both the Senate and House of Representatives and are aggressively looking to enact tax policies that would, in their estimation, reduce income inequality – though the economic merits of these ideas may be lacking.

In particular, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party – led by liberal stalwarts like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) – have amplified their attacks on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. For instance, Senator Warren's "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" has garnered significant attention in the media and on Capitol Hill. Her legislation would apply a tax on the net wealth of anyone with $50 million in assets. Her tax starts at two cents per dollar of wealth, but can escalate to 6% if certain conditions are met. She often pitches this as a minimal sacrifice that the extremely wealthy can easily afford for the betterment of other Americans. Her rallying cry of "just two cents" may have struck a nerve with the populist Left, but her proposal leaves much to be desired.

First of all, it's extremely difficult to tax wealth, as doing so requires assessing the value of all of an individual's assets. That includes real estate, privately owned businesses, stocks, cars, antiques, coin collections, artwork, wine collections, and much more. The precise value of these assets is not only extremely hard to ascertain, but it's also extremely volatile.

Tax Evasion

This lends itself to a host of tax avoidance strategies that wealthy people can employ. As Andy Puzder, former CEO of CKE Restaurants, noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: "The tax would also give wealthy Americans an incentive to own illiquid assets with values that are easier to understate, rather than publicly traded stocks and bonds that have an observable value the Internal Revenue Service can feast on."

Indeed, this is exactly what happened in Europe. As recently as 1990, 12 European countries had a wealth tax... Today, only three still do. Other large countries like India have also experimented with a wealth tax before abandoning the concept. It wasn't a change in sentiment toward billionaires that caused a reversal in these policies. Rather, it was real-world experience in implementing a wealth tax.

Senator Warren at least partially acknowledges this problem in her own legislation. She allocates $100 billion over 10 years as a boost for the Internal Revenue Service to administer the tax. This would represent a near doubling of the agency's budget, which is projected to be $12 billion in fiscal year 2021. But even with an unlimited budget, real-world experiences in other countries suggest that it's unlikely the IRS could be successful in administering a wealth tax.

France imposed a wealth tax, but it was riddled with exemptions that allowed wealthy individuals to shield certain assets from taxation. These exemptions included rugs, antiques that were more than 100 years old, stamp collections, zoological specimens, and items having numismatic value. And because it's France, wine and brandy were also excluded.

The result was a tax that collected a fraction of its estimated revenues. French bean counters expected it to bring in 5 billion francs, but it delivered only 2.8 billion in its first year. Even after repealing the wealth tax in 1986 and reinstating it in 1988, it remained an administrative nightmare for French tax collectors. According to a 2008 study, the tax reduced GDP by roughly the same amount as the revenue it produced. Furthermore, it led to an exodus of high-wealth individuals. Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe estimated that due to the wealth tax, 10,000 people left the country over a 15-year period – taking with them 35 billion euros in net worth.

The dubious tax was repealed in 2017 as France joined the majority of European countries that had experimented with a wealth tax before ultimately repealing it.

Outside of Europe, other countries found similar administrative problems. India repealed its wealth tax in 2015... once again, not because of any affinity for the wealthy. As Indian Financial Minister Arun Jaitley noted when the tax was repealed, "Should a tax which leads to high cost of collection and a low yield be continued or should it be replaced with a low cost and higher yield tax?"

The Great Financial Imbalance

Real-world experience demonstrates that wealth taxes simply do not work. Yet, this remains a high priority of the progressive Left in America. This is a clear indication that populism is a driving force in the current political arena. Indeed this same mentality has hatched other ideas intended to punish job-creators. These punitive tax measures include higher personal income tax rates, higher taxes on investment earnings, a new tax on financial transactions, an expanded estate tax, and much more.

One might sympathize with these policies if the goal was to bring the national debt under control with a combination of revenue raisers and spending cuts, as Clinton did in 1993. But that is not the case here... Biden's massive tax hikes are combined with spending increases that would, on net, increase deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars. Warren's wealth tax is intended to partially offset the cost of her government-run health care proposal – Medicare for All. By her own math, the wealth tax would generate $1 trillion in new revenue, which pales in comparison to the cost of her health care plan, which could reach $34 trillion.

The federal budget is in complete disarray. Absent corrective measures, it will be out of balance for decades to come and future generations of taxpayers will be saddled with untenable levels of debt. President Biden and his progressive allies on Capitol Hill believe more taxes are the remedy. In truth, their proposals represent a toxic combination of bad policies – higher taxes that would slow the economic recovery and more debt that would exacerbate our fiscal imbalance. Instead of looking for more ways to raise taxes and expand the government, their time would be better spent reining in excessive spending and allow American job creators and innovators to help bring the nation out of the ongoing economic crisis.

	Brandon Arnold is the executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. He has testified on fiscal policy before Congress and has also appeared on several television and radio networks including C-SPAN, Fox News, Fox Business, and more. Brandon's writings have been published in Politico, The Hill, the Seattle Times, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and more.

Love us? Hate us? Let us know how we're doing at feedback@americanconsequences.com.Fro

True childhood joy - what they miss when we do it all for them

 Have you ever watched a child make something from "nothing" -- To do so is to witness pure magic: a fort from couch cushions, a carseat for a doll from paper and tape, a cape from a Christmas tree skirt -- a child's joy!

A recent review of a new book on the beginnings of NPR - mostly women because men wouldn't work for so little - reminds me of this:

“It was so much fun, maybe more fun than I ever had in my life, because we were inventing something new with almost no resources,” Stamberg said in an interview with Next Avenue.

Taibbi - The Two Faces of Joe Biden

 

The Two Faces of Joe Biden The press is building an image of a "radical" progressive hero, while reality looks like the same corporate Democrat Matt Taibbi Apr 9 “I once caught a fish this big.” Biden after signing the American Rescue Plan On April Fool’s Day, CNN ran an “analysis” of Joe Biden’s presidency: Will JRB take his place alongside FDR and LBJ? CNN explained “JRB” had just unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan “to boost ordinary working Americans rather than the wealthy,” a program that together with his $1.9 trillion Covid rescue doubles “as a bid to lift millions of Americans out of poverty.” The news is like high school. One day, one kid comes in wearing Dior sneakers and Nike X Ambush pants, and two days later, that’s all you see in the halls. The “Biden-as-FDR” stories raced around News High, with headlines like “With nods to FDR, JFK and LBJ, Biden goes big on infrastructure plan” (Yahoo!) and “Can Biden achieve an FDR-style presidency? A historian sees surprising parallels” (Washington Post). Even the New Yorker’s naysaying take, “Is Biden Really the Second Coming of F.D.R. and L.B.J.?” read at first glance like an affirmation. That this high-flown language came on the heels of Biden’s people whispering F.D.R. comparisons in the ears of reporters for weeks, and Biden himself calling his plan “a once-in-a-generation investment in America,” seemed not to bother anyone. We live in a time when a president can be said to have “sharply cut poverty” the moment he signs a relief bill, so why not say, as CNN editorialists Stephen Collison and Caitlin Hu did, that this new bill’s passage would immediately allow Biden to “lay claim to a spot in the Democratic pantheon alongside Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson?” This would only be natural, they said, since “Scranton Joe” has long despaired over the silver spoon inequities of Donald Trump’s trickle-down economy: The President complained as he unveiled his plan in Pittsburgh -- the kind of gritty blue-collar city he loves -- that the top 1% saw their wealth rise by $4 trillion during the pandemic while millions of Americans lost jobs. "Just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become," Biden said. "Wasn't always this way. Well, it's time to change that." Left unmentioned was that the same gritty, blue-collar president oversaw the TARP bailout, which resulted in a similar Trumpian windfall for the 1%. The richest saw their share of America’s wealth increase from 30% in 2010 to 39% in 2016. Median household net worth fell 34% from a peak in 2007 to the end of the Obama-Biden presidency, while banks in 2009 had the best year they would have until 2020, that “unfair” bailout year Biden complained about. Pundits have long been working on revising that history. By last summer, the Atlantic was writing this about Biden’s management of the other bailout: Critics on the left faulted him and Obama for not making the stimulus package bigger (though keeping it below $1 trillion was the price of winning necessary Republican votes for its passage in the Senate). That’s just not true. Certainly, Republicans would have hammered Obama for a stimulus of any size, but Obama officials decided on those levels on their own. We’ve known this since 2012, when the New Yorker published a piece outing the fact that Larry Summers advised the incoming president to prioritize deficit reduction over stimulus. You can read the 57-page secret Summers memo here. With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape, commercial media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with audiences. In the case of Biden, we’ve seen in the first few months that the upscale, cosmopolitan target audiences of outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post want to believe they’re living through a “radical,” “transformative” presidency, the political antidote to the Trump years. The same crowd of West Wing power-tweeters was leading the charge against “purity” in politics about eight minutes ago. In fact, in the 2019-2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders was regularly lambasted by the same blue-leaning press outlets for trying to re-imagine F.D.R. through programs with names like the “Green New Deal.” Proposal after proposal that had been directly inspired by F.D.R. was described as too expensive, unrealistic, or a political non-starter heading into a general election. Now that the real version of that brand of politics has been safely eliminated, a new PR campaign is stressing that Democrats did elect F.D.R. after all. Moreover, a legend is being built that crime-bill signing, PATRIOT-Act inspiring, Iraq-war-humping Joe Biden wanted all along to be a radical progressive, but was held back by the intransigence of the evil Republicans. Is that even remotely true? Observe, for instance, the hilarious Ezra Klein editorial that just ran in the New York Times, called “Four Ways to Look at the Radicalism of Joe Biden” (someone actually wrote that headline!): Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts… Over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here… The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills.  Question for Ezra: did Obama also accelerate the drone program, expand the surveillance state, and abandon enforcement of white-collar crime to a degree that made John Ashcroft look like Eliot Ness, in a similar effort to reach across the aisle? Or were those Executive Branch behaviors just expressions of unrequited love? Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 contrasted himself with Hillary Clinton by insisting he would be the guy to stop kowtowing to special interests. On health care, he was incredibly specific: he would green-light drug re-importation from Canada and allow Medicare to negotiate bulk pharmaceutical prices, insisting also he was a “proponent” of single-payer. Obama went so far as to do an ad blasting former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who went from helping write the ban on Medicare bargaining to going to “work for the pharmaceutical industry making two million dollars a year” at the lobbying group PhRMA. “Imagine that,” said Obama. “That’s an example of the same old game‐playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game‐playing.” Tauzin later described the deal, saying it had been “blessed” by the White House, and emails later released showed a union official who was part of health care bill negotiations explaining how Obama’s White House planned on paying for its PR campaign: “They plan to hit up the ‘bad guys’ for most of the $.”The year after this ad ran, Obama was meeting with that same Billy Tauzin in, ironically, the Roosevelt Room of the White House (Tauzin would end up visiting a dozen times). There, they hammered out a deal: Tauzin’s group, PhRMA, would fund a $150 million ad campaign boosting Obama’s health care program, in exchange for the Obama White House agreeing to kill the reimportation idea and leave the ban on Medicare negotiation in place. Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d push aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year later and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry actors, paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan. This history — important history — is now being rewritten by people like Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that the Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only say “lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found “Republican votes” for “Obamacare.” Something like Obama’s PhRMA one-two is happening again, and predictably, it’s not getting much press. A hundred countries have formally asked the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property laws that only allow companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca to make Covid-19 vaccines. Favoring the waiver: Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and hundreds of millions of poor and mostly nonwhite folks in other countries who are nervous about the whole dying thing. Opposing (drumroll, please): that same PhRMA lobbying group, which says such waivers would “undermine the global response to the pandemic, including ongoing effort to tackle new variants.” Meaning, industry will stop developing vaccines now, and certainly won’t develop any the next time, if you don’t let it cash in. Without the ability to make generics, countries like Mexico have to be grateful for handouts of some of the tens of millions of excess vaccine doses we have sitting in storage. In fact, in what the New York Times called a “notable step into vaccine diplomacy,” Biden agreed to send 2.5 million doses to Mexico in return for Mexico promising to increase patrols on its southern border with Guatemala. To recap: while waffling on patent waivers, Biden traded 2.5 million doses of vaccine to Mexico for a promise to crack down on the Central American migrants who have become a pain in this administration’s public relations tuchus. Perhaps Biden eventually will push for the patent waivers, but for now, does anyone even have to ask what the headlines describing that kind of lives-for-fewer-immigrants deal would have looked like if Trump brokered it? This has so much been the story of Biden’s presidency, which is certainly less chaotic than Trump’s and does have some clearly different ambitions, but in many ways represents continuity with both his predecessor and his predecessor’s predecessor. What would we have said if Trump promised to stop wall construction, then went ahead and kept building it anyway? Candidate Biden promised not to build “another foot of wall,” and although it is true that he’s frozen Defense Department funding for Trump’s project, his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the decision left “room” for the administration to “make decisions” about “areas of the wall that need renovation and “particular projects that need to be finished.” So F.D.R. is building more wall. Others have made plenty of hay about the discrepancies in covering unaccompanied child detainees now, versus a few years ago. Agencies from the AP to the Washington Post are using the word “challenge” instead of “crisis” or “horror.” It’s of course only a coincidence that this is the word Press Secretary Psaki started using back on March 18th (correcting the use of “crisis”). The cries of hypocrisy about the non-use of the term “kids in cages” is, I think, overblown, because separating children from families was an intentional aim of the Trump administration — remember, Trump officials were hoping for a lot of media coverage about separated kids, with the specific aim of producing a “substantial deterrent effect.” That was substantially more deranged than any Biden policy. That doesn’t make it not ridiculous that the Washington Post called the following structures “migrant facilities”: When pressed on the absurdity, the Post noted that it hadn’t necessarily said what was happening at the border was a good thing, even quoting activists saying it was a “huge step backward.” The Post hastened to add that the same activist said of the Carrizo Springs, Texas facility, “I consoled myself with the fact that it was considered the Cadillac of [migrant child] centers.” Again, is it hard to imagine what the response would have been if anyone, inside or outside the Trump administration, had tried to sell us on the idea that immigrant kids were staying in the “Cadillac” of detention centers? The “Cadillac cages” and “Cadillac concentration camps” jokes would have written themselves. The dull truth about Biden is that he’s governed, domestically, as a slightly more progressive version of the Obama administration, with a more ambitious bailout, while his foreign policy is a notch or two more hawkish — a wash, overall, though most of the stories about policy continuity from Afghanistan to Iran to Ukraine and beyond, don’t get headlines. During the recent all-consuming furor over the Major League Baseball all-star game, for instance, news that the federal defense budget under Biden will likely remain at the same astronomical levels they reached under Trump went mostly unnoticed. A few outlets that paid attention used the common defense industry talking point that the numbers actually represented a cut, since the increase was smaller than the rate of inflation. Same with Biden’s continuation of the storied presidential tradition of punting on withdrawal of support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine territories, reported via headlines like, “Joe Biden is not planning to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Reporters and audiences decide what they want to believe now, and get there together. Highlight the facts you want — “JRB” is raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent! Then, downplay stuff that doesn’t fit, like that the Obama/Biden administration once proposed lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent, or that Biden is declining to raise that rate back to pre-Trump levels, and you can argue anything. We don’t know much about Biden’s presidency yet, but it’s crystal clear what narrative they’d like us to believe.