This should be a warning to everyone that the idea that tax cuts produce jobs and increased revenue was always magical thinking. Not that the supply-siders will pay attention because for them this is a religious belief.
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David Silverman is the president of American Atheists and is a person who was born to wear the label of ‘militant atheist’. CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of some of the most extreme conservatives in the country, many of whom are extremely religious. Samantha Bee sent one of her producers to see what happened when Silverman attended CPAC three weeks ago.
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In watching Michael Moore’s film Where to Invade Next that I reviewed here, I was struck by a segment that he had on the role of women in Iceland. In 1980, that became the first country to democratically elect a woman as president of a republic (though not the first country to elect a woman as an executive head of state which happened in Sri Lanka when it elected a female prime minister twenty years earlier) and she went on to serve four consecutive terms. Every major political party in Iceland now requires a minimum of 40% of women members.
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President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court. Garland seems to be a well-respected jurist, by all accounts not particularly ideological in any clearly identifiable way but instead someone who will bring a proper degree of thoughtfulness to the weighty matters the court deals with.
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Jon Schwarz discusses the differences between how men and women view the remaining candidates. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz all have net unfavorability ratings among both men and women. There seems to be no gender difference with Cruz in that men and women dislike him equally but women dislike Trump a lot more than men do, while men dislike Clinton a lot more than women do.
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Desperate people are easily exploited and now another one of those exploiters has been exposed. An outfit called the Christian Prayer Center advertised that they could get many people to pray for one’s need and provided testimonials to the power of such mass prayers. It turns out that those testimonials were fake and that no one actually was praying on behalf of those who sent in money.
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Another day, another plan to stop Donald Trump is reported in the news, along with criticisms of such moves. I have stopped paying much attention to these reports as they have become so numerous as Trump continues to inexorably increase his lead among delegates for the nomination. This is mainly because these plots never address the crucial end-game: If they do manage to stop Trump, then who becomes the nominee and how do they prevent Trump’s supporters from revolting at what would essentially be a coup by party insiders against them?
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I came across this news item in the British newspaper The Independent about a row within the ruling Conservative Party following the resignation of a cabinet member who says he objects to major cuts being made in disability payments.
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This is an excellent film. It is a lightly fictionalized version of the events that led up to the financial crash of 2008 due to the housing bubble. It focuses on several individuals who looked closely at the way that housing prices were rising at a far faster rate than the rise in people incomes would predict, looked closely at the mortgages that were being handed out that enabled people to pay ever-increasing prices for the same homes, and came to the conclusion that the whole system was rotten with no accountability and was destined to crash.
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Schadenfruede is not generally an honorable emotion. It seems wrong to rejoice in the tears of others. But in some cases, the guilt is removed and one can rejoice openly and gleefully and one of the pleasures of the Republican primary race is seeing the hopes and ambitions of one awful candidate after another being dashed. The pleasure would be even sweeter if the remaining candidates were not as bad or even worse.
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