Former Republican reminds us that "There is No Free Speech Crisis on Campus" -- only opportunistic right-wingers who were uninterested in going to Berkeley a year ago, until they realized they might get unearned attention for attracting protestors. Meanwhile, Adam Serwer at The Atlantic reminds us that too many on the right "insist() those on the left are sensitive snowflakes who cannot sustain a dissenting view," but "simultaneously angrily demand() that the state and society sanction the left for the expression of political views it finds distasteful." In other words, right-wingers are weaklings. It really can't be said enough.
Adam Johnson reminds us that the "liberal" media has virtually ignored the matter of two journalists facing decades in prison on bogus felony rioting charges, merely because they covered the protests at the Trump inauguration. So reporters are failing to report on the reporters who face jail time for reporting on the same Administration that reporters have warned would stamp out unfavorable reporting? The hypocrisy here is just icing on the cake, really.
You already know the "tax cuts create jobs" argument is a total myth, but here comes Hedrick Smith to buttress your knowledge with some deep, deep support. When fewer than one in four multinational corporations say they'll invest their tax cut windfall in job creation, when corporations that buy tax cuts from Congress don't hire more workers as a result, and when corporations spend more and more money on stock manipulation and less and less on research and development, it's really no wonder that so many Americans look at corporations and say why do those assholes deserve a tax cut?
President Trump has been treated a bit unfairly, for once, after twittering that Puerto Rico was already having a tough time of it with debt and infrastructure issues -- but of course he contributed to that state of affairs by sticking Puerto Rico with tens of millions of dollars of that debt when his golf course failed there. And that tells you what kind of "infrastructure" plan he'd go for -- the kind that makes executives rich when the infrastructure doesn't get built. Always they say "make shareholders whole" when they ought to be saying make taxpayers whole.
After Sen. Luther Strange's completely unsurprising loss in the Alabama Republican Senate primary runoff, erstwhile Strange supporter Donald Trump deletes all his twitterings supporting Mr. Strange. He just can't be associated with a "loser," can he? You know what that means: it means he's deathly afraid everyone will find out that he is a loser. And at that moment -- perhaps when we finally get to see his tax returns and find out he's really dirt poor -- I suppose we'll have a massive terrorist attack so we can "rally around our President." Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have.
Finally, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has died at the age of 91. Even if we put aside his magazine's relentless objectification of women, the victory of libertarian values ("anti-censorship," "consumerist," "hedonistic") attributed in part to Mr. Hefner's work is not entirely a positive thing, even if it allows us to cuss more or talk politics at work. We don't need to live in a world where everyone needs to wear a gray flannel suit to their job, but worrying about the stultifying conformity of wearing gray flannel suits to your job was a luxury in a society where federal tax policy all but mandated full employment; now, in a society where federal tax policy lets CEOs do pretty much what they like, we worry about the next health care crisis breaking us financially or the long-term effects of our household debt, and in this we have not created a more perfect union.
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