Remember Paul Ryan? The former house speaker and Ayn Rand devotee who grovels before the rich and said that even when he was still in college he fantasized about cutting benefits to the poor? That he is a truly awful person goes without saying. It turns out that he is also utterly self-unaware, as can be seen from the advice he offered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when he met her after her victory in November.
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Yesterday, the British parliament passed by the narrowest of margins 313 to 312 a motion proposed by backbenchers and supported largely by the opposition and opposed by the government that if there was no Brexit deal by the April 12 deadline, the UK would ask the EU for an extension of Article 50 rather than leave with no deal. The bill does not say how long the extension should be nor is there any guarantee that the EU would agree to it. This bill was vehemently opposed by hardline Leavers who seem to be hoping that the current deadlock will lead to a default no-deal outcome.
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I have never been audited by the IRS. Many people fear getting audited because even if you have done nothing wrong, you might get tripped up by the complexity of the tax laws and make a mistake and an audit reportedly requires you to produce all manner of supporting documentation. You would think that the people who are most likely to get audited are the very wealthy who are in a position to deprive the government of large amounts of revenue by all manner of devious practices, because even though the tax system favors the rich, they still want to avoid paying even what the tax laws rightfully requires.
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Democratic senator Cory Booker has long been the protégé of a grifter known as rabbi Shmuley Boteach, an ardent right-wing, anti-evolution advocate of Israel who cares nothing for Palestinian rights. Booker, like many politicians, has been a frequent speaker at AIPAC conferences, the premier Israel lobby organization, and spoken of his unswerving loyalty to Israel, ignoring the rights of Palestinians and the way they have been treated by Israel. But the mood is changing when it comes to giving Israel a pass on its human rights abuses, especially in the Democratic party, along with the rise of the BDS movement.
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While the British parliamentary machinations over Brexit have been depressing to watch, one of the few bright spots (for me at least) is watching the speaker John Bercow in action. He has been speaker through a tumultuous period, none more so than the past few months with the Brexot chaos. His attempts to control a sometimes rowdy chamber has been a treat to watch.
But all good things must come to and there are rumors that Bercow may be stepping down from this role sometime in the summer, though he himself has not confirmed it.
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Christopher Ingraham tweets a link to an article that he wrote for the Washington Post has gone through the data compiled in the General Social Survey and says that the number of young men who have not had sex during the previous year has nearly tripled in the last decade and has now reached 28%.
Stunning chart: the share of men under 30 who aren't having sex has nearly tripled in the past decade https://t.co/0aazxCijYP pic.twitter.com/HVVmffy7Jc
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) March 29, 2019
Katie Halper interviews Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Aaron Maté of The Nation about how much of the mainstream media glommed onto the Trump-Russia collusion story, predictably called ‘Russiagate’, for so long to the exclusion of many other important stories, and left themselves wide open to the kind of blowback that they are now experiencing because of the Mueller report seemingly saying (at least as far as the released short summary goes) that there was no such collusion. The entire interview is well worth reading but here are a few excerpts. (MT refers to Taibbi, AM to Maté, and KH to Halper.)
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I have never seen the appeal of professional wrestling because violence, even if simulated, makes me cringe so I never watch it. Also, even with scripted fights, there is real wear and tear on the body and actual injuries. The scandal of professional wrestling is not that the whole thing is faked because everyone knows that. It is that the wrestlers are treated like dirt by the monopolistic WWE and its owner Vince McMahon that results in many of them dying young and poor, as John Oliver points out in this expose.
Four indicative proposals for Brexit were selected by the speaker for debate and voting and just now it was announced that all four failed to get a majority, joining in the dumpster the eight from last week. The closest that lost by just 3 votes (273 to 276) was one proposed by a pro-European Conservative Ken Clarke though most of his party voted against it. This was seen as a minimally disruptive Brexit that would consist of a UK-wide customs union with the EU.
A disappointed Clarke reportedly said that “his customs union did not get a majority because some people’s vote supporters would not back it because they only wanted to back a second referendum. And some MPs would not back it because they wanted common market 2.0, even though they would have been happy with the customs union plan too, he says. He says he sometimes thinks this house is not very good at doing politics.” That seems like an understatement.
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On Monday, the British parliament will votes on a new set of indicative votes, hoping to find one that contains the elusive formula that can gain a majority that will pass as a legislative option, after the previous such exercise sent all the options to defeat. It now appears that Theresa May is also planning to put forward her thrice (or twice depending on how you view the third vote) defeated Brexit plan to parliament for a fourth vote later in the coming week. This time she has upped the stakes and threatened to call for a general election if it fails, no doubt hoping that the fear of Jeremy Corbyn winning the election and becoming prime minister will scare the hell out of all the Conservatives and neoliberals within the Labour to vote to pass her plan.
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