You gotta love a headline that goes "Corporate Incentives Cost U.S. $45 Billion in 2015, Don’t Really Work." Not just because it's true, but because it reminds us that one does get tired pointing out the obvious -- and it's perfectly OK to let on that you're tired of pointing out the obvious! Feelings are never wrong, after all. Though if a 33-state, 26-year database helps validate your feelings, you take it.
Two Pennsylvania towns ban fracking wastewater injection within their borders -- and the Pennsylvania DEP sues them. And conservatives all over America rally to the side of Grant and Highland townships, celebrating their flexing of local power! Well, conservatives, maybe -- but the reactionaries who call themselves conservative are of course complaining about every local town picking and choosing which laws it wants to follow. Of course, they said similar things about Rosa Parks.Maddie Oatman at Mother Jones asks why President Trump is so obsessed with bringing back coal jobs, and ignoring the growth of wind power all over the Midwest. Seems commonsensical, dontcha think? The wind and the sun are everywhere, even in depressed areas of the country left behind by corporatism and "free" trade. Of course, we know Mr. Trump ignores this phenemonon: he's just aping his votaries who think renewable energy is something only liberals like, and thus something to be despised as if it were Satan himself. Look at them balls swing!
From the "My God Right-Wingers Never Stop Whining" file: the acting SEC Chair has delayed implementation of a Dodd-Frank CEO-to-worker pay-ratio rule, citing the "unanticipated compliance difficulties" corporations are suddenly having. It took the SEC almost seven years to write this rule, and these are our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs -- the TV always says so! -- but still they find reporting executive-to-worker pay ratios "onerous"? And they want us to feel sorry for them? Let them cry into thousand-dollar bills.
Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer calls ProPublica a "left-wing blog" in dismissing its reporting about Mr. Trump's newfound (and undisclosed) ability to draw money at will from businesses in his trust -- and ProPublica responds with 15 tweets taking him down. I'd have just left it at number four myself, but I understand their frustration. One can only hope that Mr. Spicer becomes more like Scott McClellan and Tony Snow, who couldn't hide their disgust at shilling for Tha Bush Mobb after a while, than Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino, who happily peddled Bush Mobb swill.
Finally, some bad news: the Kansas state House fails to override Gov. Brownback's veto of the legislature's Medicaid expansion bill by a mere three votes. The final tally was 81 to 44; two legislators who voted against the expansion voted for the override, but also vice versa, and I would hate to think this was all theatre for the benefit of "moderate" Republicans. And remember when you read that "opponents of expansion questioned whether Kansas could afford it" that these folks all voted for the tax-cuts-for-the-rich that put them in this mess.
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