Philadelphia city government finally releases results of the "needs assessment" survey it conducted about Comcast in advance of a renegotiated franchise agreement. Spoiler alert: Comcast is less beloved by the residents of the city it calls home (or, more precisely, the city it calls "Kabletown") than by residents of other cities, and Comcast also charges Philadelphians more for its service, on average, despite getting tax breaks from the city. So we need to pressure Mayor Michael Nutter, who is about as corporatist as Democrats get, to use the city's leverage to get more out of Comcast.
I know someone else will announce their Presidential candidacy today, but this is more interesting: former Rhode Island Senator and Governor Lincoln Chafee, a Republican until 2007, has formed an exploratory committee to run for President as a Democrat in 2016. He did his share of union-bashing in 2011, which I find difficult to forgive, but he was an actual moderate once upon a time, one who voted against the 2002 AUMF that led to the Iraq War and joined a Democrat filibuster of Estate Tax repeal while still a Republican, and his rigidity on church-state separation and fierce opposition to charter schools, sadly, both qualify as courage these days. In other words, the Democratic primaries sure could use him, even if nobody would run through a wall for a moderate.
FactCheck finds an ad saying President Obama's immigration orders will result in taxpayers being "stuck with the bill," and responds, "what bill?" Give the ad's makers credit for the zipper-mouth graphic and for using it over virtually every candidate, Democrat or Republican (well, not Lincoln Chafee, but who saw that coming?). But they're clearly only counting the part of the "bill" that supports their claim, rather than the part where more immigrants means more tax revenue coming in, to the point where the same CBO from which they got their hysteria actually tells us immigration resulting from Mr. Obama's orders would reduce the federal deficit.
The ever-alert David Sirota informs us that a lot of the corporations appalled by Indiana's "religious freedom" law have been donating buku bucks to anti-gay politicians for a long time. Key finding: nine corporations signed a well-reported letter urging Gov. Pence to scale back the law -- and six of them have given to Mr. Pence's campaigns, some of them copiously. No use arguing that they gave to Mr. Pence because he thinks like them economically, because politicians who think like them economically are a dime a dozen, and if they really found his social agenda so appalling that they'd even think of cutting Indiana off, they'd have found some other candidate upon which to shower their largesse.
Ho hum, an apparent Tea Party protest against Florida state plans to turn Everglade sugar farms into conservation areas turned out to be a "protest" using paid actors. $75 per person (50 showed up) for two hours! Who can pay that kind of money, I wonder? I'll tell you who can't pay that kind of money: a real grassroots protest movement.
Finally, the Straight Dope reminds us "What Are Vaccines Saving Us From, Exactly?" They're saving us from diseases that used to ravage us, but don't anymore, but then that's always a possibility when things change for the better -- that what changes becomes status quo and no one will remember why things had to change anymore. The all-regulations-are-bad zombie meme won't die, for example, at least in part because no one's around who remembers a life without clean water, and President Reagan was able to slash the top tax bracket so deeply (for another example) at least in part because few folks still lived in 1986 who could recall how deep the rich-poor gap had become before the era of the high marginal tax rate.
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