Only Money

Another 12,000,000,000 pissed down a rathole because the so-called precedent (sic) is probably the most incompetent motherfucker who ever held a government job.

Updated 8:58 PM Wednesday 25 July: Speaking of big money, is it possible that somebody is finally going to derail Donnie's gravy train? Violations of the so-called emoluments clause are just the tip of the iceberg when we're taking about Donnie's blatant corruption, but we've got to start somewhere.

Facebook market value takes big hit. Good.

Updated 1:14 PM Friday 26 July: Donnie Hump is usually able to buy the silence of people he's fucked with a payoff of some kind. It would be amusing if it didn't work this time. 

What waste.

Pissing money down a rathole, update 20 June:

Donny Ringworm pisses away millions of dollars firing off Tomahawk missiles to create an illusion of strength in Syria. He pisses away more millions on weekend golf excursions. Now, he's pissing away millions to confine children in cages in his version of concentration camps. With this motherfucker, we may as well shovel money into barrels and burn it.

Strange but true

The United States is spending about four times as much for Donnie Dildo's frequent golf outings as we're spending to conduct Robert Mueller's investigation of Donnie's crimes. Think of all the things we could've done with 64,000,000 bucks... TING *

* There Is No God

Two for the show

Politicus USA discusses the new problems that Rudy Tootie is creating for Donnie Cornholio. It's always fun to watch one of Donnie's bright ideas explode in his face, and bringing in Rudy to reinforce his legal team isn't working out as planned. The article makes a good point: Donnie and Rudy are both largely creations of their own imaginations and lots of self-promotion, and they both love media attention. Rudy's been out of the spotlight since the so-called inauguration, and now he's making up lost time. Being a top story on TV news programs isn't going to impress Mueller, though.

Speaking of ideas that seemed great at the time, it wasn't too long ago that Republicans were strutting around, gloating because they'd sneaked their Tax Freedom for Billionaires legislation through Congress after plastering it with stickers that said "Tax Reform" and "Middle Class Tax Relief."

This was supposed to be the bill that was going to give them another decade or two of power. Hmmm...

It didn't need to be like this.

Vox: There's a better way to accomplish the things the GOP claims they're trying to accomplish with the terrible tax legislation moving through Congress.

Political Science

But, but, but... you'll be able to file your IRS return on a postcard.

Republican politicians know the people who vote for them are stupid, and they hope the rest of us are.

That's pretty much all you need to know to understand what's happening in Congress these days.

Copied from the Vanity Fair article at the link

“The Trump team is arguing that massively cutting taxes for corporations will somehow translate into significant wage increases for working people,” David Mendels, the former C.E.O. of publicly traded software company Brightcove wrote last week. “This argument fundamentally disregards everything we know about how companies actually decide to hire and how much to pay their employees. As a C.E.O. (and in previous roles) I was involved in hiring and determining salaries for thousands of people over 25 years. From real-world experience I can tell you that tax rates literally never came up in any discussion about hiring or pay levels.”

Tax Cut Con Game

Catherine Rampell (Washington Post) has written an excellent column on the GOP tax reform con, maybe the best single op-ed I've seen yet on the subject.

Update 5:00 PM Sunday: The single most important reason that Donnie Jerkinov has failed so far as a so-called precedent (sic) is that Congress has consistently overreached since the session began. They're doing it again as part of their tax care for billionaires scam.

What corruption looks like

This is Sheldon Adelson, for those who've never seen what he looks like. Sheldon is a perfect example of the kind of billionaire who should be subject to confiscatory taxation, maybe in the 96-98 percent range. 

3,000,000

Politico reports the estimated cost to taxpayers to finance the so-called president's weekend getaway at his Florida resort will be around three million bucks. This job is turning into a sweet deal for the fat guy.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Republicans hated if Obama did it.

The computers are down? No shit.

Now that the government is operating again, the media have turned the spotlight on the technical failures hanging up Obamacare implementation. One of the problems I've always had with turning government functions over to private sector contractors is that when the shit hits the fan (as it often does), the people who built it are never ready to accept any reponsibility when it falls down. I had experience with privatization during my government service career, and the federal government under Bush 43 privatized as much of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they could get away with.

My philosophy now is very simple: If the government wants a job done right, it should do the job itself instead of shopping it off to the lowest bidder, whose main concern is making a profit.

Enterprising

The Texas Enterprise Fund is in the news again. If anything symbolizes the rotten condition of state government and the rotten governor, the TEF scam does. Sadly, most Texans don't give a shit.

Ante Up

An article in USA Today discusses something I find interesting. A number of states have experienced increases in tax revenue, and have more cash available now than during most of the past five years. Several governors plan to increase spending on public education and state services, or at least restore some of the funding that was slashed during leaner budget periods.

What makes this interesting to me is that some of these governors (e.g., Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Florida) are Republicans. It's nice to know that somewhere there are a few GOP leaders who are capable of an occasional intelligent thought, unlike the worthless cheesedick that Texans keep electing.

Santoragenda

According to a story in the Dallas Morning News, Rick Sanitarium will soon announce his so-called economic freedom agenda. Knowing what I know about his social agenda, I imagine he'll propose that adults discontinue the practice of having sex for purposes of procreation. People will be amazed by how much extra cash they'll have... and that spells freedom.

Bad News

The news on the economic front is the creation of 243,000 new jobs and a small drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent. There are many people for whom this is welcome news, but none of them are Republicans. The GOP has an agenda that can't be implemented until they control all three branches of the federal government again, and a gradual economic recovery will make it harder to capture the White House. So it's not surprising that the party's public reaction to the report is more gloom-and-doom. Why do Republicans hate America ?

Dorkitude

Rep. Eric Cantor is the latest in a long line of worthless turds who rose to the top of the Republican dung heap. His spokesman tells us that Eric the Dork will expect any disaster relief spending required as a result of the latest hurricane to be offset by other federal budget cuts. Tom DeLay was a fucking waste of oxygen, and Cantor is cut from the same pattern.

Breaking Bachmann News

Add Michele Bachmann's name to the list of House Republicans who claim they won't vote for any increase in the debt ceiling any time, any place, anyhow. These are the kinds of claims you can make when (a) you have a misguided obsession about becoming President, and (b) the only people who will vote for you are as crazy as shithouse rats, and (c) you know that regardless of how YOU vote on the bill, the sane people will eventually work out a settlement and you will NEVER have to suffer the consequences of your ridiculous bullshit.

Money Matters

If Obama continues to push a deficit reduction plan that involves the elimination of special interest tax breaks in addition to trillions in spending cuts, and if congressional Dems stand firm behind him, it looks like the Republicans will walk away without approving an increase in the debt ceiling.

There seems to be mixed opinion on what happens then. Conservatives mostly agree that it's no big fuckin' deal. Everyone else seems to believe the economic consequences will be catastrophic. Since I wasn't an economics major, I don't know which side is right.

One thing I do know is that if the conservatives are wrong and everything goes to hell in a handbasket this fall, it's critically important that American voters realize who caused the holocaust by refusing to compromise. The only upside to an economic disaster would be seeing the GOP locked into minority status for the duration of my lifetime. That would be one less thing for me to fret about.

House Broken

As one result of last year's elections, there are about 90 new Republicans in the House of Representatives who have no business being there. Apparently they're all cut from the same pattern as Michele Bachmann; they have an inflated view of their own importance and have decided the federal government should orbit around them. At the moment they're playing games with budget bills -- threatening, for example, to shut off paychecks to members of the military if they don't get their way.

He probably won't do it, but Obama needs to go ahead and bust these motherfuckers right now. The longer he puts it off, the more obnoxious they're gonna get. They'll keep shitting on the floor until Obama gets 'em housebroken.

Budget Cuts Hit Home

Apparently the Houston Chronicle has permanently discontinued its daily online crossword puzzle. I worked it nearly every day, occasionally at 11:00 pm on days when I needed to complete the puzzle before it changed at midnight. I never saw a formal announcement, so I guess eliminating the crossword was another austerity measure, similar to the hacking and slashing taking place in Austin these days.

Fortunately, USA Today and the Dallas Morning News still offer their online puzzles, so it's not like I'm being forced to go cold turkey. Still, it looks like learning to do without stuff is becoming part of the daily routine around here.

Hey buddy, educate this.

I've just finished a column by conservative William McKenzie of the Dallas Morning News, and apparently this is what passes for serious analysis when right-wingers deal with education issues:

McKenzie says that since public education is the big ticket item in state budgets, the expense of educating children will need to be reduced to avoid any tax increases. McKenzie has done some checking and has decided the solution is to do away with restrictions on class size, meaning that Texas can get away with hiring fewer teachers. Hell, if class sizes were doubled, we could theoretically reduce faculties by fifty percent !

Since almost everyone agrees that smaller classes are conducive to learning, McKenzie says we need to offset the larger classes by only hiring master teachers. You know, the kind of teachers who inspire movies like "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "To Sir With Love."

To make sure only unusually gifted mentors are in charge of those larger classrooms, school districts will need to cull out the average ones by changing the way teachers are evaluated and compensated.

I taught school for one year and if a few things had worked out differently when I was younger, I probably would have made public education my life's work, either as a classroom teacher or a guidance counselor. As it is, I married a career teacher and have a daughter who wants to be one, so the state of things in Texas schools is a topic that interests me.

The problem I have with McKenzie's recommendation is this: School teachers in Texas are already among the lowest-paid professionals. If class sizes are increased, so are the workloads of individual teachers. After all, somebody has to grade all that homework and all those tests, and do all the paperwork the bureaucracy mandates for each student. Does a hack newspaper writer like William McKenzie seriously believe that first-rate teachers, those who function at the highest level of skill mastery, are going to bear the burden of substantially-increased workloads without substantially-increased salaries to make it worthwhile ? My experience as a manager was that I was constantly required to deal with high turnover among my best employees. The best workers were always in demand and could easily move across fences into greener pastures. Average workers who were merely competent would be with me forever.

Bottom line: Anyone who says the solution to the budget crisis is to increase class size, decrease faculty size, and retain only teachers with superior ability is either a fucking idiot or a fucking liar.

Conservative Republicans oppose the whole concept of public education. They believe that like wars and most other things, education should be privatized. They love the idea of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize vouchers for private religious schools, where praying's legal and they don't have to mess with all those government regulations. If Texans really cared about preserving and improving public education, they wouldn't keep electing conservative Republicans to run things.