“One of the biggest misconceptions about undocumented immigrants is that they don’t pay any taxes. In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda when he said immigration costs US taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.”
A 2017 Gallup poll that asked survey respondents “whether immigrants to the United States are making the [tax] situation in the country better or worse” found that 41 percent said “worse,” while only 23 percent said “better” (33 percent said they had “no effect”).
The reality is far different. Immigrants who are authorized to work in the United States pay the same taxes as US citizens. And, contrary to the persistent myth, undocumented immigrants do in fact pay taxes too. Millions of undocumented immigrants file tax returns each year, and they are paying taxes for benefits they can’t even use.
The best estimates come from research by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, DC, think tank, which suggests that about half of undocumented workers in the United States file income tax returns. The most recent IRS data, from 2015, shows that the agency received 4.4 million income tax returns from workers who don’t have Social Security numbers, which includes a large number of undocumented immigrants. That year, they paid $23.6 billion in income taxes…..
Still, all undocumented workers fund public schools and local government services by paying sales and property taxes like everyone else. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that they pay about $11.7 billion a year in state and local taxes.
And workers who get a paycheck, like Maria, still have payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security withheld from their paycheck, even if they put a fake Social Security number on their W-2 form. The IRS estimates that unauthorized workers pay about $9 billion in payroll taxes annually.”
2013 Estimates
Federal and State & Local costs ~$135B
Federal And State & Local taxes- ~$19B
Total economic impact ————- ~$116B
That’s a 6+ factor of expense over tax gain.
One day you will quote a source that has some credibility.
But not today.
the fen sciafes
I thought they were all dead.
Meanwhile, try to figure out for me how they can come up with the feds spending $60 billion. Cause I take our federal spending on defense, SS and Medicare, and spending for every other us citizen I got no chance to come close to that.
” Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group since 2008 because of its virulent and false attacks on non-white immigrants…..
FAIR founder John Tanton, a man with a lengthy record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and leading white nationalist thinkers, has repeatedly suggested that racial conflict will be the outcome of immigration. In 1998, he told a reporter that whites would inevitably develop a racial consciousness because “most people don’t want to disappear into the dustbin of history,” and added that once whites did become racially conscious, the result would be “the war of each against all.”
Dan Stein, FAIR’s president, is no better. “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing,” he said in 1997. “Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”
Need more examples? Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a longtime member of FAIR’s board of advisors, once said that “new cultures” in America were “diluting what we are and who we are.” And Joseph Turner, FAIR’s former Western field representative, once accused Mexican immigrants of turning California into a “third world cesspool.”
Not to mention FAIR’s “suggested reading” on immigration, which includes white nationalist Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation, a book whose central thesis is that America should remain a country dominated by whites.
FAIR also recommends Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, which argues that America’s shift away from being white-dominated is “one of the greatest tragedies in human history.”
So yes, John and Ken, FAIR is a hate group. Not because it promulgates “facts” and “truths” its opponents would rather ignore but because it promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones.”
“Many politicians who champion the deport-them-all approach to unauthorized immigrants have been relying upon a bloated and deeply distorted report issued by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in July 2010. That report, The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers, is not a credible source of data, yet its numbers have been cited repeatedly in this year’s debates over immigration legislation in the states. The report relies upon flawed and empirically baseless assumptions to inflate its estimate of the costs which unauthorized immigrants impose on federal, state, and local governments. Much of what FAIR counts as the cost of unauthorized immigration is actually the cost of education and healthcare for U.S.-citizen children. In fact, over half of FAIR’s cost estimate consists of educational and healthcare expenditures for the children of unauthorized immigrants, of whom nearly three-quarters are native-born U.S. citizens. These native-born children are counted as a “cost” of illegal immigration if they are under 18, but as U.S. citizens if they are working, taxpaying adults.”
EM, you sure can over react to a source. I note you have yet to actually dispute their estimates. It is easy to understand because there are precious few studies that actally assign costs.
So we cut this down by half or 66%, and that is heritage who has no resume on matters like this by any stretch of the imagination. Add in the approximate $12 billion they pay in state and local taxes.
I love this part, they include “public goods costs such as defense and interest payments on government debt”. You might argue about the debt, but you sure cannot claim our defense costs would be reduced if there were not illegal aliens. That is just hideous.
Another great part, they count citizens as costs, cause if they were not born here from illegals bieng here they would not be here. Their claim here runs up against the founding fathers. The way they write and think, I would advise they run away.
One more thing, their use of average educational costs throughout the country. I can guarantee one thing, no way in the world do the illegal children and the US citizens counted as illegals receive education at those cost levels. Far from it. And quite frankly, I am sure it is the same with every other service added to their bills.
You got one hate group, and one group of imbeciles stating clearly untrue numbers, combined with a lack of knowledge of the Constitution.
EM, you only brought numbers for one side of the equation. From your opening quote: “…In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda when he said immigration costs US taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.””
Everything I’ve found supports his statement, and you have brought nothing to actually refute his comment. Questioning the motives of a source and not its data is not a refutation.
One more snaky act by heritage(they spent their entire history at this). They do credit SS taxes paid by illegals. But, they subtract half because the employers “pay it”.
EM, I did not include the lead of the reference because it failed to support either position, and was without numeric value. Remember you have been complaining about the number values and sources I provided, and yet you have failed to provide a full set to refute them.
Um, it supported the lead. Even illegals pay taxes. Even the cretins at heritage and the other reprehensible group admit that.
This is just another take on the rwdw meme of makers-takers. In this case they have the makers-takers cake with the incredible addition of racist whipped cream. You can run the same numbers, even real numbers, with all low income workers in the US. But now you can add in that delicious topping.
And yet the numbers will show the same thing. Even when applied properly there will be that taker sum. And it has been true forever in this country, and every country in the world.
Why does it persist? Because without those workers, the country does not function. Throw out every single illegal immigrant and that fact would not change one bit.
Strangely, there is a solution to all this that is very simple. Raise the income of low income workers.
Never occurs to rwdws. And I can say that is not about their racism. That is about cash.
EM, and my data also supported the lead, just not the opening sentence. If that was your original point in attacking all my sourced data you failed dramatically, and let your emotions muddle your message.
“Well before the liberal imagination began fever dreaming of Oprah in the Oval Office, and Cynthia Nixon announced her candidacy for the governor’s mansion, the progressive wing of the sports world spent much of the past year half joking, and half not, that NBA coaches Gregg Popovich, of the San Antonio Spurs, and Steve Kerr, from the Golden State Warriors, should become the next celebrity politicians and run on a Popovich-Kerr ticket in 2020. While the NBA’s players have led the league’s charge on social and political issues, Kerr and Popovich have become particularly outspoken since President Trump’s election….
To that end, we’ve condensed, combined, and lightly edited comments made by Kerr and Popovich, respectively, into speeches ready for the trail.
Kerr
“I’ve been fortunate enough to meet President Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama. I didn’t agree with all of them, but it was easy to set politics aside because each possessed an inherent respect for the office.From a September 2017 article in Sports Illustrated. Watching the last debate, Trump would make a crack at Clinton and you could hear the fans in the stands:From a pregame interview on November 9, 2016. ‘Ohhh, no he didn’t.’ This is a presidential election. It’s not The Jerry Springer Show. I thought we were better than this.”
Popovich
“My big fear is … we are Rome.
That’s my real fear. That’s what gives me so much pause — that the country is willing to be that intolerant, and not understand the empathy that’s necessary to understand other groups’ situations. I’m a rich white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it. I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now, or a woman, or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person, how disenfranchised they might feel
It’s got to do with the way one individual conducts himself, and it’s dangerous to our institutions and what we all stand for and what we expect the country to be.
This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. We have a pathological liar in the White House — unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day.
The people who work with this president should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it
. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Kasich, who I disagree with on a lot of political things, had enough fiber and respect for humanity and tolerance for all groups to say what they said about the man during the election
But now it seems like it’s condoned. I’m more worried and confused by the people around our president. This is their shame most of all.”
“I am told regularly by people I admire and respect to hold my cynical tongue about all the career conservatives and television flotsam from the late and unlamented Avignon Presidency who now are all over the airwaves deploring the terrible things being done to the Republic by the president* and his dwindling band of loyalists down at Camp Runamuck. Be nice, I am told. These are valuable allies.
Try not to say so loudly that, as soon as the Republican Party casts off the First Millstone, these people all will be right back to promoting the ideas and the policies that made him possible in the first place—voodoo economics, wars of choice based on deceit, ticking-bomb excuses for torture, and night sweats over the impending rise of the liberal power elite. Keep that stuff to yourself, they say . . . . .
That said, on Friday night, if I had a firearm, I’d have Elvis-ed my electric teevee screen over something Wallace said to KDM concerning the Trump camp’s attacks on good ol’ James Comey, Man of Immutable Integritude. To wit:
WALLACE: Look, I just think it’s another illustration of the complete decimation of the Republican Party’s standing for anything that it was supposed to stand for. And I know you’ve never been a fan, but I’m a former practicing member of the party, and it never stood for character assassination of a man like Jim Comey, who served Republican presidents. And you may disagree with every single policy that George W. Bush advanced, but Jim Comey was a faithful and loyal servant in the George W. Bush Justice Department. So to have today’s RNC crafting a plan and staff a war room to smear him is a disgrace.
Bold face mine, indicating the exact point in the show when I had a stroke….
Instead of venting my anger, and in my usual attempt to calm the roiling political sea, I offer the following test questions to all the Republican Penitents currently d/b/a Never Trumpers. These questions are based on Wallace’s remarkable assertion above as to what Republicanism is and is not, and what it has been and has not been, over the course of my life of political observation.
So, Nicolle, and Steve Schmidt, and Michael Steele, and Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough, and Butcher’s Bill Kristol, and Andrew Sullivan, and David Frum, and the rest of you. Please take out your No. 2 pencils, open your test booklets and begin. We start with an easy one . . .”
My personal favorite:
“1) Many of you have expressed your dismay at how Sinclair Broadcasting forced its local anchors to read a canned statement about the curse of “fake news,” divining, correctly, that this was the company’s way of delegitimizing serious coverage of the many and varied corruptions of the current administration*. In 2004, when Sinclair forced its local stations to run a meretricious fake documentary slandering John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, were you as offended as you are today? Were you public with your disapproval? Did you take your concerns to upper echelons in the Bush campaign and the Bush White House? To whom did you take them?
2) Please provide an example of how you pushed back against the entire Swift Boating of Kerry? Did any of you upbraid the people who were peddling Purple Heart Band-Aids at the 2004 Republican Convention?”
While I did not like Kerry skipping his visit to Detroit and how the DNC handled the penalty for moving up of the 2008 primary for Michigan, Kerry did deserve better treatment from the media and the DNC in calling out the lies promulgated by Republicans and their moneyed keepers.
LOL! What a posse of straw men that young Trumpenproletarian has rallied! Nothing in the Trump bombing last year saved Syrian lives or prevented gas attacks. Nothing in the latest bombings will either. Real conservatives oppose US acts of war where there are no US interests at stake.
Centrists of both parties are committed neocons of the closet Wolfowitz variety.
Both party’s centrists fear losing military industrial complex support from kick backs on trillions of dollars spent in over arming the past 17 years. Stand-off weapons are so easy and the war profiteers come out in favor! ARAMCO benefits too!
No one has shown one scrap of evidence that the two annual April gas attacks were done from fast or slow moving aircraft. Cannisters and rocket bodies delivering gas cannot be exploded nor exposed to high temperatures. With all the iPhones and Androids there would be hundreds of pix of intact debris.
While videos of supposed decontamination clinics are stage the medics have no protective gear and are using water hoses. In presence of sarin the medic die too, while water does not decontaminate the drops.
The center is always looking for an excuse to deliver organized murder in the interest of limiting civilian casualties or righting someone using a banned weapon except in Yemen, Gaza and the West Bank.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about undocumented immigrants is that they don’t pay any taxes. In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda when he said immigration costs US taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.”
A 2017 Gallup poll that asked survey respondents “whether immigrants to the United States are making the [tax] situation in the country better or worse” found that 41 percent said “worse,” while only 23 percent said “better” (33 percent said they had “no effect”).
The reality is far different. Immigrants who are authorized to work in the United States pay the same taxes as US citizens. And, contrary to the persistent myth, undocumented immigrants do in fact pay taxes too. Millions of undocumented immigrants file tax returns each year, and they are paying taxes for benefits they can’t even use.
The best estimates come from research by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, DC, think tank, which suggests that about half of undocumented workers in the United States file income tax returns. The most recent IRS data, from 2015, shows that the agency received 4.4 million income tax returns from workers who don’t have Social Security numbers, which includes a large number of undocumented immigrants. That year, they paid $23.6 billion in income taxes…..
Still, all undocumented workers fund public schools and local government services by paying sales and property taxes like everyone else. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that they pay about $11.7 billion a year in state and local taxes.
And workers who get a paycheck, like Maria, still have payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security withheld from their paycheck, even if they put a fake Social Security number on their W-2 form. The IRS estimates that unauthorized workers pay about $9 billion in payroll taxes annually.”
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17229018/undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes
EM, this organization has a different set of numbers. http://www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burden-illegal-immigration-united-states-taxpayers
2013 Estimates
Federal and State & Local costs ~$135B
Federal And State & Local taxes- ~$19B
Total economic impact ————- ~$116B
That’s a 6+ factor of expense over tax gain.
One day you will quote a source that has some credibility.
But not today.
the fen sciafes
I thought they were all dead.
Meanwhile, try to figure out for me how they can come up with the feds spending $60 billion. Cause I take our federal spending on defense, SS and Medicare, and spending for every other us citizen I got no chance to come close to that.
You sure can pick ’em.
” Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group since 2008 because of its virulent and false attacks on non-white immigrants…..
FAIR founder John Tanton, a man with a lengthy record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and leading white nationalist thinkers, has repeatedly suggested that racial conflict will be the outcome of immigration. In 1998, he told a reporter that whites would inevitably develop a racial consciousness because “most people don’t want to disappear into the dustbin of history,” and added that once whites did become racially conscious, the result would be “the war of each against all.”
Dan Stein, FAIR’s president, is no better. “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing,” he said in 1997. “Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”
Need more examples? Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a longtime member of FAIR’s board of advisors, once said that “new cultures” in America were “diluting what we are and who we are.” And Joseph Turner, FAIR’s former Western field representative, once accused Mexican immigrants of turning California into a “third world cesspool.”
Not to mention FAIR’s “suggested reading” on immigration, which includes white nationalist Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation, a book whose central thesis is that America should remain a country dominated by whites.
FAIR also recommends Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, which argues that America’s shift away from being white-dominated is “one of the greatest tragedies in human history.”
So yes, John and Ken, FAIR is a hate group. Not because it promulgates “facts” and “truths” its opponents would rather ignore but because it promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones.”
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2012/08/10/how-do-we-know-fair-hate-group
“Many politicians who champion the deport-them-all approach to unauthorized immigrants have been relying upon a bloated and deeply distorted report issued by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in July 2010. That report, The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers, is not a credible source of data, yet its numbers have been cited repeatedly in this year’s debates over immigration legislation in the states. The report relies upon flawed and empirically baseless assumptions to inflate its estimate of the costs which unauthorized immigrants impose on federal, state, and local governments. Much of what FAIR counts as the cost of unauthorized immigration is actually the cost of education and healthcare for U.S.-citizen children. In fact, over half of FAIR’s cost estimate consists of educational and healthcare expenditures for the children of unauthorized immigrants, of whom nearly three-quarters are native-born U.S. citizens. These native-born children are counted as a “cost” of illegal immigration if they are under 18, but as U.S. citizens if they are working, taxpaying adults.”
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/statistical-hot-air-fair%E2%80%99s-usa-report-lacks-credibility
There are many more, but it is a waste of time.
EM, you sure can over react to a source. I note you have yet to actually dispute their estimates. It is easy to understand because there are precious few studies that actally assign costs.
Since you don’t like the FAIR estimates, here’s a 2013 Heritage study. https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty-the-us-taxpayer
” There are approximately 3.7 million unlawful immigrant households in the U.S. These households impose a net fiscal burden of around $54.5 billion per year.”
That’s a little less than 1/2 of the FAIR amount.
That’s a 2-3+ factor of expense over tax gain depending upon which taxes paid number you use.
If you don’t like the numbers I provided so far, find some of your own so we can have a reasonable discussion of the costs estimates.
EM, incidentally, I did a search for a reference to FAIR in the Heritage Report to check for circular reporting, but failed to find such a reference.
So we cut this down by half or 66%, and that is heritage who has no resume on matters like this by any stretch of the imagination. Add in the approximate $12 billion they pay in state and local taxes.
I love this part, they include “public goods costs such as defense and interest payments on government debt”. You might argue about the debt, but you sure cannot claim our defense costs would be reduced if there were not illegal aliens. That is just hideous.
Another great part, they count citizens as costs, cause if they were not born here from illegals bieng here they would not be here. Their claim here runs up against the founding fathers. The way they write and think, I would advise they run away.
One more thing, their use of average educational costs throughout the country. I can guarantee one thing, no way in the world do the illegal children and the US citizens counted as illegals receive education at those cost levels. Far from it. And quite frankly, I am sure it is the same with every other service added to their bills.
You got one hate group, and one group of imbeciles stating clearly untrue numbers, combined with a lack of knowledge of the Constitution.
These guys are the wuwt of immigration.
Shouda’ known
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/01/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-illegal-immigration-costs-113-bi/
Same links as yours, .. You guys are all alike.
EM, bring numbers not attitude.
I brought numbers, you then brought numbers that were so clearly bogus they defy description.
FAIR is nothing but a racist organization. Heritage is where science and thought go to die.
You brought racists and imbeciles with you.
Nothing new there though.
EM, you only brought numbers for one side of the equation. From your opening quote: “…In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda when he said immigration costs US taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.””
Everything I’ve found supports his statement, and you have brought nothing to actually refute his comment. Questioning the motives of a source and not its data is not a refutation.
Why are you always so angry?
Read the whole lead. pal. Learn something about writing and reading comprehension.
I am a very happy person, I get angry talking about most things with RWDWs, mainly because they are total ahs.
Here is the lead.
““One of the biggest misconceptions about undocumented immigrants is that they don’t pay any taxes.”
You parse numbers and words with the exact same intent.
One more snaky act by heritage(they spent their entire history at this). They do credit SS taxes paid by illegals. But, they subtract half because the employers “pay it”.
No one thinks that.
EM, I did not include the lead of the reference because it failed to support either position, and was without numeric value. Remember you have been complaining about the number values and sources I provided, and yet you have failed to provide a full set to refute them.
Um, it supported the lead. Even illegals pay taxes. Even the cretins at heritage and the other reprehensible group admit that.
This is just another take on the rwdw meme of makers-takers. In this case they have the makers-takers cake with the incredible addition of racist whipped cream. You can run the same numbers, even real numbers, with all low income workers in the US. But now you can add in that delicious topping.
And yet the numbers will show the same thing. Even when applied properly there will be that taker sum. And it has been true forever in this country, and every country in the world.
Why does it persist? Because without those workers, the country does not function. Throw out every single illegal immigrant and that fact would not change one bit.
Strangely, there is a solution to all this that is very simple. Raise the income of low income workers.
Never occurs to rwdws. And I can say that is not about their racism. That is about cash.
Nice people.
EM, and my data also supported the lead, just not the opening sentence. If that was your original point in attacking all my sourced data you failed dramatically, and let your emotions muddle your message.
Stop emoting and think.
The opening sentence IS the lead. And that is what the post shows. You are cherry picking again. Notice the beginning of your chosen lead?
“In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda”
Full stop there. It is showing what Trump will do. And he did. And he will.
Got my ticket for 2020.
“Well before the liberal imagination began fever dreaming of Oprah in the Oval Office, and Cynthia Nixon announced her candidacy for the governor’s mansion, the progressive wing of the sports world spent much of the past year half joking, and half not, that NBA coaches Gregg Popovich, of the San Antonio Spurs, and Steve Kerr, from the Golden State Warriors, should become the next celebrity politicians and run on a Popovich-Kerr ticket in 2020. While the NBA’s players have led the league’s charge on social and political issues, Kerr and Popovich have become particularly outspoken since President Trump’s election….
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/what-if-gregg-popovich-and-steve-kerr-ran-for-president.html
CR,
Even if we accept your grammatically incorrect reading and ignore the ” set the tone for his coming immigration agenda” , there is
“”Illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year. And this is what we get,” Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/01/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-illegal-immigration-costs-113-bi/
Now go away.
To that end, we’ve condensed, combined, and lightly edited comments made by Kerr and Popovich, respectively, into speeches ready for the trail.
Kerr
“I’ve been fortunate enough to meet President Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama. I didn’t agree with all of them, but it was easy to set politics aside because each possessed an inherent respect for the office.From a September 2017 article in Sports Illustrated. Watching the last debate, Trump would make a crack at Clinton and you could hear the fans in the stands:From a pregame interview on November 9, 2016. ‘Ohhh, no he didn’t.’ This is a presidential election. It’s not The Jerry Springer Show. I thought we were better than this.”
Popovich
“My big fear is … we are Rome.
That’s my real fear. That’s what gives me so much pause — that the country is willing to be that intolerant, and not understand the empathy that’s necessary to understand other groups’ situations. I’m a rich white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it. I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now, or a woman, or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person, how disenfranchised they might feel
It’s got to do with the way one individual conducts himself, and it’s dangerous to our institutions and what we all stand for and what we expect the country to be.
This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. We have a pathological liar in the White House — unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day.
The people who work with this president should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it
. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Kasich, who I disagree with on a lot of political things, had enough fiber and respect for humanity and tolerance for all groups to say what they said about the man during the election
But now it seems like it’s condoned. I’m more worried and confused by the people around our president. This is their shame most of all.”
Column of the year.
“I am told regularly by people I admire and respect to hold my cynical tongue about all the career conservatives and television flotsam from the late and unlamented Avignon Presidency who now are all over the airwaves deploring the terrible things being done to the Republic by the president* and his dwindling band of loyalists down at Camp Runamuck. Be nice, I am told. These are valuable allies.
Try not to say so loudly that, as soon as the Republican Party casts off the First Millstone, these people all will be right back to promoting the ideas and the policies that made him possible in the first place—voodoo economics, wars of choice based on deceit, ticking-bomb excuses for torture, and night sweats over the impending rise of the liberal power elite. Keep that stuff to yourself, they say . . . . .
That said, on Friday night, if I had a firearm, I’d have Elvis-ed my electric teevee screen over something Wallace said to KDM concerning the Trump camp’s attacks on good ol’ James Comey, Man of Immutable Integritude. To wit:
Bold face mine, indicating the exact point in the show when I had a stroke….
Instead of venting my anger, and in my usual attempt to calm the roiling political sea, I offer the following test questions to all the Republican Penitents currently d/b/a Never Trumpers. These questions are based on Wallace’s remarkable assertion above as to what Republicanism is and is not, and what it has been and has not been, over the course of my life of political observation.
So, Nicolle, and Steve Schmidt, and Michael Steele, and Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough, and Butcher’s Bill Kristol, and Andrew Sullivan, and David Frum, and the rest of you. Please take out your No. 2 pencils, open your test booklets and begin. We start with an easy one . . .”
My personal favorite:
“1) Many of you have expressed your dismay at how Sinclair Broadcasting forced its local anchors to read a canned statement about the curse of “fake news,” divining, correctly, that this was the company’s way of delegitimizing serious coverage of the many and varied corruptions of the current administration*. In 2004, when Sinclair forced its local stations to run a meretricious fake documentary slandering John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, were you as offended as you are today? Were you public with your disapproval? Did you take your concerns to upper echelons in the Bush campaign and the Bush White House? To whom did you take them?
2) Please provide an example of how you pushed back against the entire Swift Boating of Kerry? Did any of you upbraid the people who were peddling Purple Heart Band-Aids at the 2004 Republican Convention?”
I’d Like to Offer This Sanity Quiz to All #NeverTrump Conservatives” Charles P. Pierce Apr 13, 2018 Esquire
There are plenty more, and they follow exactly the pattern of the discussion that dominated this thread. Beyond sad.
EM:
While I did not like Kerry skipping his visit to Detroit and how the DNC handled the penalty for moving up of the 2008 primary for Michigan, Kerry did deserve better treatment from the media and the DNC in calling out the lies promulgated by Republicans and their moneyed keepers.
https://www.facebook.com/johnburk1775/videos/2025231711138538/?t=126
Let’s try this one: https://www.facebook.com/johnburk1775/videos/2025231711138538/
@CoRev,
LOL! What a posse of straw men that young Trumpenproletarian has rallied! Nothing in the Trump bombing last year saved Syrian lives or prevented gas attacks. Nothing in the latest bombings will either. Real conservatives oppose US acts of war where there are no US interests at stake.
Trump, May and Macron* are easily conned.
Centrists of both parties are committed neocons of the closet Wolfowitz variety.
Both party’s centrists fear losing military industrial complex support from kick backs on trillions of dollars spent in over arming the past 17 years. Stand-off weapons are so easy and the war profiteers come out in favor! ARAMCO benefits too!
No one has shown one scrap of evidence that the two annual April gas attacks were done from fast or slow moving aircraft. Cannisters and rocket bodies delivering gas cannot be exploded nor exposed to high temperatures. With all the iPhones and Androids there would be hundreds of pix of intact debris.
While videos of supposed decontamination clinics are stage the medics have no protective gear and are using water hoses. In presence of sarin the medic die too, while water does not decontaminate the drops.
The center is always looking for an excuse to deliver organized murder in the interest of limiting civilian casualties or righting someone using a banned weapon except in Yemen, Gaza and the West Bank.
*Macron is certainly the moral authority when it comes to establishing a red line to excuse state level mayhem!