Amihal Glazer at The Conversation reminds us that New York City ought to be glad Amazon pulled out, given the failed promises of job creation other corporations have made to other states and localities. Let's see: there's GE vs. Boston, GM vs. White Marsh, and Foxconn vs. Wisconsin, plus a few dozen studies demonstrating that corporate welfare does not, in fact, reliably lead to either higher job creation or increased tax revenues, and now you know another reason that poll finding that most New Yorkers approved of the deal isn't particularly instructive -- the poll essentially asked whether $3 billion for 25,000 jobs was a good trade, but what if you don't even get the 25,000 jobs? Foxconn promised Wisconsin 13,000 jobs and now is looking for an out after creating a total of 178 jobs.
Ho hum, CNN anchors call Medicare-for-All and the Warren wealth tax "very far left" and "far left of center," despite these proposals getting majority and even supermajority support in polls. I've been saying this for over a decade now: what Our Glorious Elites call "extreme," you and I call popular. Funny how that works. Remember that when they tell you Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown can't win because they're "too far left."
When we confront the fact that our "liberal" media can't seem to identify austerity policies as the cause of misery in Europe even when the evidence stares them in the face, we are reminded that Greg Palast taught us that the whole point of a one-continent currency is to prevent any one country from stimulating its economy by printing more money, which (again) suggests that Greece would do better to leave the EU than Britain would (the U.K., you recall, has been using the pound the whole time it's been in the EU!).
Now here's an interesting headline: "FBI Scientist's Statements Linked Defendants to Crimes, Even When His Lab Results Didn't." And then we read about "image analysis," and how it's not as scientifically sound as it's cracked up to be on, say, The X-Files. Would it be too harsh to call Richard Vorder Bruegge, who has "single-handedly built a body of case law that has kept the FBI unit's testimony admissible in the courts," the Andrew Wakefield of image analysis? Why, it's even possible that Mr. Vorder Bruegge has done more harm, and given all the otherwise intelligent people Mr. Wakefield has helped convince to stop immunizing their kids, that's saying something!
We learn that our Administration's Labor Secretary once cut a deal to get a billionaire sex-trafficker off light without telling any of the sex-trafficker's victims. For the QAnon crowd, of course, this news is just more proof that our President is that much closer to smashing the worldwide child sex abuse ring that is his putative reason to exist -- I'm sure there's a lot of he put Acosta close to him so he could draw out his evil! on the message boards as we speak, though I'm not going to make sure. Again, this is why we leave our President's votaries to God.
Finally, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wonders "What's the Point" of our President's new climate change panel -- you know, given that our President just ignores everything he doesn't want to hear anyway. It's a valid question, but I don't think it's just "a sort of global owning the libs" -- maybe our President really wants government-approved legitimacy for what he already wants to do, so he can claim he really "drained the swamp." Sooner or later he's gonna have to give an example, after all, and all the clean air and clean water regulations he's actually failed to change won't be enough.
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