1. Alison Byrnes’s dream vacation. Maybe yours too?
2. Kate Wynja, high school golfer of the year.
“. . . it broke my heart for the team.”
3. Restaurants of the future. Count me as pro simplification.
4A. Female members of congress by party affiliation.
4B. The future of the Democratic Party. Maybe.
A confession. Sometimes when I add “LOL” onto a text message, I’m not LLOL (literally laughing out loud). However, this satirical essay by George Saunders, one of the best examples of satirical writing anyone has ever written, since the beginning of time, including probably, you know Napoleon or whoever, left me LLOL multiple times.
Looks like it’s going to be ALMO, but maybe it should be Ana Puga given her fearlessness.
As a cyclist who cut his teeth in Los Angeles, I am comfortable in traffic, but this tour around Mexico City begs the question, can one be too comfortable in traffic? Without a doubt. Still, this is so BADASS on many levels, including her flat out speed, I can’t help but embrace it.
Mexico City like you’ve never seen it.
Of course Karl Rove is down with Trump’s tax cuts.
“President Trump is justifiably proud of passing tax reform last December, telling audiences ‘because of our tax cuts, you can keep more of your hard-earned money.’ He’s right: American taxpayers will save $75 billion this year and $189 billion next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.”
To which any thinking person should ask, “WHICH American taxpayers will save those estimated billions?” Rove leaves out that the savings are skewed to the New Aristocracy of which he is a charter member.
Proving he’s the exact kind of Establishment Republican the Trumpeters despise almost as much as Democrats, he notes that, given the evolving Trade War, Trump’s tax cuts will be cancelled out by higher prices on imports coupled with some job losses.
“Yet the president’s tariffs on imports could negate much of the tax relief he’s been bragging about. These levies are not paid by foreign countries or companies. They are passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices for either foreign or U.S.-made goods.
The Trump tariffs are now clawing back tax savings at a rate of roughly $10.6 billion per year. The levies already in place include 25% on steel (imports in 2017 were an estimated $23.4 billion), 30% on solar panels ($8.5 billion), 10% on aluminum ($18 billion) and 20% on washing machines ($1.8 billion). That’s chump change compared with what may be coming.”
The harsher the left’s criticism of all things Trump, the more inclined Trumpeters are to blindly follow him. Eventually, inflation and increased outsourcing of manufacturing jobs will test their knee-jerk, self-sabotaging love. Right?
After attending my first Quaker meeting in North Carolina 25 years ago, someone approached me. “You know,” he said with a hushed voice, “we’re not going to invite you back.” It wasn’t rude, the message was simply, “Cool if you return, cool if you don’t.”
Evangelicals are the opposite, their whole raison d’être is to persuade others to believe and behave like them. So when it comes to immigration, what do they want non-believers, Quakers, more social justice minded Christians, and the huddled masses to believe?
In “Why Rank-And-File Evangelicals Aren’t Likely To Turn On Trump Over Family Separation”, fivethirtyeight.com explains that for now they want everyone to just “. . . obey the the law and defer to the president’s authority.”
“Robert Jeffress, the pastor of Dallas’s First Baptist Church and a strong Trump supporter, told FiveThirtyEight that the separation of children from their parents was ‘disturbing’ but quickly added that Trump has the “God-given responsibility” to secure the border in the way he deems appropriate and punish people breaking the law, even if it appears harsh.”
When the national political pendulum inevitably swings, and a newly elected liberal president promotes more progressive immigration policies possibly including amnesty, don’t expect Robert Jeffress to wax philosophic about deferring to the president’s “God-given responsibility”.
Jeffress isn’t saying Trump is advocating exactly what evangelicals think Jesus might if he were advising on immigration policy today. In fact, I don’t think he’s referencing Jesus’s interactions with the poor and dispossessed at all. He’s saying everyone should respect the authority of the president because us evangelicals share his views on immigrants.
What are those views?
“. . . polling on white evangelical Protestants has shown that they’re more likely than any other religious group to support hardline immigration policies and to have negative views of immigrants overall. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants are in favor of expanding the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.”
Does crossing the border illegally give evangelicals cart blanche for thinking of immigrants negatively? How does that justify their “hardline immigration policies” given Jesus’s preference for the poor, the downtrodden, the illegal? Evangelicals, what’s the biblical basis for your viewing immigrants so negatively?
“These findings line up with results from other surveys too, like a 2017 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that white evangelical Protestants were the only religious group in which a majority (57 percent) said they’re bothered when they encounter immigrants who don’t speak English. They were also the likeliest to say that they have little or nothing in common with immigrants.”
I wonder if Jesus was bothered by people who spoke different languages? I wonder if he felt like he had little or nothing in common with those crossing borders. Also, I wonder how many evangelicals really know any immigrants on a personal level. My guess is, for the vast majority, immigrants are abstractions largely created by conservative news outlets that play on their default fear of the unfamiliar. Do evangelicals have more than sporadic, cursory, largely economic interactions with immigrants?
I’m lucky to be married to someone who teaches numerous immigrants English. A few have become family friends. The one distinguishing characteristic among all of them is their incredible work ethic. I find that, coupled with their desire to improve their families’ lives, tremendously inspiring.
“Daniel Cox, the research director at PRRI, said these findings help explain why evangelicals aren’t likely to abandon Trump over the child separation crisis, even if they’re troubled by it. ”More than other groups, white evangelical Protestants seem to perceive immigrants as a threat to American society,’ he said. ‘So even if they don’t like this particular policy, they’re on board with Trump’s approach to immigration in general, and that makes it likelier that they’ll see this as a tactical misstep rather than a breaking point.'”
How will evangelicals’ “hardline immigration policies” impact their efforts to fulfill their destiny by continuously adding to their fold? They must hope to convince potential converts that immigrants are a detriment to our nation’s well-being. And to ignore our nation’s history. And to fear cultural differences. And to defer to this President’s authority (but probably not the next).
Good luck with that. Thomson-DeVeaux concludes, “Hardline immigrant policies won’t necessarily work forever.”
“Past PRRI polling has shown that younger white evangelicals are much likelier than older white evangelicals to believe that immigrants strengthen the country or to agree that immigrants are the victims of discrimination, which may reduce their support for restrictionist immigration policies in the long term.”
When it comes to evangelicalism, the future can’t come quick enough.
They’re very different one from another. Too often, people paint them with a broad brush.
The Buffets, Gates, Bloombergs, Allens are intent on contributing to the common good. Big time. In the case of the Gates Foundation, they seek to enhance global healthcare and reduce extreme poverty, and in America, to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.
Then there’s the oil billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch. Read what motivates them, in “How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country“.
“The Kochs’ opposition to transit spending stems from their longstanding free-market, libertarian philosophy. It also dovetails with their financial interests, which benefit from automobiles and highways.
One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs’ conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seatbelts, tires and other automotive parts. Even as Americans for Prosperity opposes public investment in transit, it supports spending tax money on highways and roads.
‘Stopping higher taxes is their rallying cry,’ said Ashley Robbins, a researcher at Virginia Tech who follows transportation funding. ‘But at the end of the day, fuel consumption helps them.'”
The Koch brothers oppose whatever slows their fortune from growing ever larger. Things like low income people gaining mobility and conserving natural resources.
David Koch’s networth is between $50 and $60 billion. How much is enough? Based on his actions, no amount.
What do we do with the Roseanne Barrs, Michael Richards, Donald Sterlings of the world? The race to condemn them and the impulse to ostracize them is understandable, but we shouldn’t expect either of those responses to help racists overcome racism.
Another way of asking the question is how do we create less racist communities? More specifically, can the obviously racist—the Roseanne Barrs, the Michael Richards, the Donald Sterlings of the world—be rehabilitated? Can they learn to tolerate cultural diversity, let alone appreciate, value, embrace it?
The educator in me believes so. An integral part of anti-racism work is found three-fourths of the way through yesterday’s New York Times essay, “Sex and Gender on the Christian Campus”.
Molly Worten explains that an increasing number of evangelical Christian college students are beginning to question their conservative parents’ and professors’ theological and political assumptions. For example, Ashley Brimmage at Biola University. Worten writes:
“Ms. Brimmage is not a typical Biola student, but she is not unusual either. There is a small but increasingly vocal progressive community on campus, including L.G.B.T. organizations. When Biola applied for an exemption from the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX in 2016, students protested.
I asked Ms. Brimmage how she came to her views on gender and racial justice. Did she encounter a new theological argument in a book or a class? ‘The biggest answer is relationships with others, not working through these things on paper,’ she said. Female mentors and friendships with gay and nonwhite students compelled her to revise her theology (almost half of Biola’s students are now nonwhite or international).
Ashley’s “biggest answer” jives with my experience of learning to embrace cultural pluralism and with my helping young adults learn to interact smartly and sensitively with diverse people. It’s about close, interpersonal relationships with people different than oneself. Only then do negative preconceived notions that are a byproduct of implicit biases begin fading away.
Yes, let’s take away racists’ public platforms which are privileges—whether television shows, comedy club gigs, or professional sports teams—but let’s not completely ostracize them; instead, let’s surround them with diverse people whose life stories are our best hope to begin changing their hearts and expanding their minds.
I thought Memorial Day was for remembering the sacrifices of male and female military killed in service to the country.
The President’s tweet this morning changes that:
“Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!”
Now, Memorial Day is for self promotion. Making my “no profanity” pledge difficult to keep.
First, Friedman in praise of greed or “economic self interest”.*
Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales on what Friedman and his fellow free market true believers got and get wrong:
“. . . the conclusion is that this idea, which seems to have taken hold that companies should be all about making money and that indeed managers, the CEO, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be concerned only with the bottom line. We think this is wrong — a serious mistake. Actually if they want to act — be loyal to their shareholders — which is what fiduciary duty means, they should actually ask them what they want. That’s the loyal thing to do. Rather than just assume that it’s making money at the expense of all else.
* Seriously underrated. . . Phil Donahue’s hair.
Tax day is almost upon us in the (dis)United States of America. What better time to press pause and reflect on wealthy Republicans’ rhetoric about how unfair the tax system is.
Wealthy Republicans routinely lament that The Left “plays the victim” time and time again, but that doesn’t stop them from complaining endlessly about how unfair it is that they have to pay such a large percentage of the country’s taxes. When I listen to them complain about the unfairness of it all, they kinda, sort of, almost sound like victims.
I might have some empathy for them if they weren’t getting wealthier over time, but they are, and that point is lost on passive readers of recent tax headlines. It’s time for at least a little critical thinking by digging deeper into the much publicized 20%-87% refrain.
Specifically, key details from a recent Wall Street Journal article deserve closer scrutiny.
Drawing on research conducted by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, they report:
“For 2018, households in the top 20% will have income of about $150,000 or more and 52% of total income, about the same as in 2017. But they will pay about 87% of income taxes, up from about 84% last year.”
There’s two very different ways to read this. The wealthy Republican way is to focus exclusively on the second sentence. “Hey, now we’re paying even 3% more of the total, whah, whah, whah.” The other way is to ask, “What effect did that 3% bump have on your total income?” The details in the article show that in 2017 the top 20% earned 52.1% of the country’s total income, in 2018 it is projected to be 52.2%. As they used to say on the tough streets of Cypress, CA, no harm, no foul.
Two more critical sentences for our wealthy Republican friends to try to spin:
“To be sure, this analysis doesn’t include the flow-through effects of corporate-tax cuts, which benefit higher earners more than lower earners, or the doubling of the estate-tax exemption to about $11.2 million per person. Neither levy is part of the individual income tax.”
Those ultra-wealthy tax advantages mean the total wealth of the top 20% (including stocks, real estate, and other assets) continues to increase relative to the remaining 80% at an even faster clip than income.
Therefore, all of these things are true:
• the wealthy pay a lot in taxes
• in 2018, the wealthy will pay a slightly larger share of total taxes
• the income of the top 20% tax-payers; and especially their total wealth, continues to increase relative to the bottom 80%
Wealthy Republicans are determined to distract the masses from the fact that their share of the economic pie continues to increase. One tried and true way to do that is control the message by repeating over and over that the tax system is inherently unfair.
Also, ever notice how they keep threatening to stop working as hard given their unfair tax burden, and yet, somehow, their proportion of total income and wealth continues upwards?
Here’s another sentence our wealthy Republicans friends will wrap themselves in like a warm, cuddly blanket.
“Roughly one million households in the top 1% will pay for 43% of income tax, up from 38% in 2017. These filers earn above about $730,000.”
The above logic applies to this factoid in the exact same manner.
In summary, wealthy Republicans only want one question asked, “What share of the income tax do the wealthy pay?” They work tirelessly to avoid anyone asking “How are the wealthy doing vis a vis everyone else?”
Because I’ve raised it, I will now be entering the Witness Protection program. Hoping to land in a warmer, sunnier locale. Depending on how Cleveland does in the playoffs, I will be changing my name to LeRon.
Postscript: WSJ commenters are scary conservative. The linked article has 815 comments attached to it. I would rather serve a ten year sentence in a Turkish prison than have to read any of them.
Pressing Pause 