The entitlement mentality of the wealthy

If you want to see the sense of entitlement that rich people have, you could do no better than the affidavit submitted by an FBI agent in support of the indictment. The affidavit contains verbatim transcripts of wiretapped conversations that the parents had with those scheming to falsely create credentials for their children. The transcripts include conversations involving Gordon Caplan, who before the scandal broke, was co-chairman of a major international law firm, and who yesterday issued a statement saying he would plead guilty to fraud for faking his daughter’s disability in order to enable her to get special testing conditions under which she not only got extra time but also enabled the proctor to change her answers to give her a higher score.
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Locker room behavior

This phrase ‘locker room behavior’ is used to suggest that the rules of socially acceptable behavior are relaxed in the locker rooms used by the people who use such rooms. The phrase is sometimes invoked to try and excuse atrocious speech and behavior, most infamously by Donald Trump when during the 2016 campaign he was caught on tape boasting about his sexual assaults on women.
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How the debate over minimum wages has changed

It is interesting how ideas that less than four years ago were portrayed as controversial have now become mainstream. Republicans used to demand the repeal of Obamacare but now they claim that they oppose any lifting of the ban on denying people insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The idea of people being able to keep their children on their plans until they reach the age of 26 is also very popular. Bernie Sanders’ proposal of Medicare for All has been adopted by pretty much all the Democrats running for president.
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Vanity license plates

Some people like to get vanity license plates for their cars to send some message. I have never quite seen the appeal of this nor of putting bumper stickers but it is a harmless enough practice. But states that issue these plates have to be constantly on their guard to ensure that people are not slipping past them some plates that have an underlying message that violates the state’s requirements that the plates be in good taste and not offensive. This is not an easy task since people are quite imaginative.
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Congress votes to cut US support for war in Yemen

In a welcome move, both houses of Congress have passed a joint resolution to withdraw support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The House of Representatives voted 247-175 in favor of the resolution yesterday and the US Senate voted 54-46 in favor in March. The resolution “directs the president to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities in or affecting Yemen within 30 days unless further engagement is authorized by Congress.” In the House, 16 Republicans voted in favor and no Democrats voted against while in the Senate seven Republicans voted in favor and no Democrats voted against.
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Ryan the Clueless

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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A new stage in whale evolution discovered

The evolution of whales is one of the most fascinating stories in evolution because it goes in the opposite direction to the conventional story, of a land animal becoming a water-based one. The outlines of this have been pretty well established but now comes a report of the discovery of a new fossil of a large whale with four large legs that showed it to be capable of life on land and sea.

Photograph: A. Gennari/CellPress

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More drama on Brexit

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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Guess who gets tax audited the most?

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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