The Southern Poverty Law Center has now tabulated over 860 incidents of hateful harassment from the 10 days after Mr. Trump's election. Almost a third targeted immigrants (or perceived immigrants!) and another one-fifth targeted black folks, but women, Jews, Muslims, and gays also got targeted. You'd think the racists who love Donald Trump would show a little dignity in victory, instead of run rampant like it was the day after 9.11 or something. Gosh, maybe they have something to hide.
America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, updates us on the state of the Presidential race recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Forget about finding evidence of Russian hacking -- these recounts hope to establish that votes were rejected for ridiculous reasons -- like, that the machine reading the votes simply misread them, because (most likely) it's a bad machine that a poor district could afford. Also, provisional ballots often don't get counted, but not necessarily because the voter did anything wrong. The recount still won't address all the vote suppression that went on before Election Day, nor will it address Democrat refusal to inspire more voters to come out and thus "play above the referees," as Phil Jackson might say.
Jim Naureckas at FAIR notes that "liberal" media coverage of the "deal" Donald Trump made to allow Carrier to outsource only 1,000 (rather than 2,000) jobs to Mexico seems to posit the only two job creation choices as corporate welfare or nothing. Bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and closing tax loopholes will force corporations to spend money on job creation, but for the "liberal" media that never seems to come up, though it worked pretty well in the '40s and '50s, a.k.a. "the country I grew up in" according to most Tea Partiers. Technology doesn't kill jobs, either, or else (and I did not know this!) manufacturing jobs wouldn't have doubled between 1939 and 1979, held mostly steady until 2000, and then took a precipitous fall, which makes it unlikely, as Mr. Naureckas says, that "American business had suddenly discovered technology."
Ho hum, a Tax Policy Center analysis finds that nearly eight million middle-class families would actually pay more under Mr. Trump's tax plan. Not a surprise, if you noticed his proposed two-percentage point hike for incomes between $0 and $9,275 and the proposed five-percentage point hike for income between $112,500 and $190,150, but the Trump tax plan would end personal exemptions (even as it doubles the standard deduction), which would make things worse for working families with children. We do want more working families to have children, do we not?
In a related note, Trump Treasury Secretary nominee Steve "I'm So Not a Hedge Fund Manager Who Gets Away with Murder" Mnuchin says the rich won't pay less under the Trump tax plan. That beggars belief, if you just do the math (the top tax bracket would come down seven percentage points!), but Mr. Mnuchin assures us that the rich will have "less (sic) deductions," without saying what they'll be, of course. But this is all theatre, so that Mr. Trump's votaries can later claim his tax cut didn't cut taxes massively for the rich when those of us who did the math know they did.
Finally, because it can't all be bad news, Congress passes the Consumer Review Freedom Act, which would prevent corporations from using "non-disparagement" clauses (a.k.a. "gag" clauses) in consumer contracts. The idea that a corporation would have the "right" to prevent people from exercising their own First Amendment rights in reviewing products negatively online is noxious, apparently, even to Congress. And any corporate hack tempted to whine about all the trouble freedom causes them should view the exceptions in Sec. 2(b)(2) and (3) before commencing with said whining.
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