In their desperation to ensure that taxes are not raised on their corporate sponsors, Republicans have been successful in convincing their followers, as well as their poodles in the corporate media, that only the rich — not the poor and middle class — pay taxes.
That is not just a lie — it is a big lie. Via Andrew Sullivan:
Right now, you should be saving $25 to $50 when you buy an airplane ticket. Why? Because Congress didn’t approve a bill to keep the FAA running, which means the FAA doesn’t have the authority to collect taxes on airfare, which should mean no taxes for you! Too bad the airlines are pocketing the difference.
As of Saturday, the FAA and federal government is losing out on $25 million a day in tax revenue, $25 million of which should technically result in consumer savings but instead is fattening the pockets of airlines. In anticipation of these airfare taxes expiring, airlines shrewdly bumped up their fares “by the same amount as the federal taxes.” That means even though there are no taxes for consumers to pay, consumers all still paying the same price as before (with the airlines taking all the “tax” money).
But just as its unfair, even immoral, for the airlines to pocket the windfall resulting from the failed reauthorization, it’s also unfair to blame “Congress,” writ large. The failure to reauthorize the FAA is 100 percent the fault of Republicans:
At a meeting of the House Republican freshmen and their leaders on Wednesday, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room — including the speaker’s.
Representative Martha Roby of Alabama had just finished reading an e-mail of support from a one-time Tea Party opponent, recognizing the tough choices that the new Republicans faced in the vote to raise the debt ceiling.
Mr. Boehner, who has become well known for his occasional displays of emotion, joined others in the room by crying a bit during the closed-door session.
Finally — the Republican Party establishment is fighting back against tea bagger insurgents. Of course, the push back is not coming from the GOP establishment in Washington, where they cower in their boots at the thought of a tea party opponent in the primaries, but from Ohio, where they want to protect the interests of homeboy Speaker John Boehner:
U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan’s open defiance of Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to solve the debt-ceiling crisis could cost the Urbana Republican his safe seat in next year’s election.
Two Republican sources deeply involved in configuring new Ohio congressional districts confirmed to The Dispatch today that Jordan’s disloyalty to Boehner has put him in jeopardy of being zeroed out of a district.
“Jim Jordan’s boneheadedness has kind of informed everybody’s thinking,” said one of the sources, both of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity. “The easiest option for everybody has presented itself.”
Sarah Palin sent a warning to freshman Republicans on Thursday not to forget the promises made to voters in 2010, adding her outsized voice to the flurry of last-minute arm-twisting before a key debt ceiling vote in the House.
In a post on her Facebook page from “proverbial politico flyover country,” the former Alaska governor reprinted a letter she sent to newly elected members last fall, emphasizing the need to “rein in out-of-control government spending” and “check the growth of spending on our entitlement programs.”
…The message does not include marching orders for the proposal offered by House Speaker John A. Boehner that is on the floor Thursday. But Palin has said recently she was not convinced that a fiscal doomsday was imminent if the debt ceiling was not raised by Aug. 2.
“We cannot default but we cannot afford to retreat right now either. Now is not the time to retreat, it’s the time to reload,” she said on Fox News Channel earlier this month.
In a loaded postscript to her Facebook post, Palin reminds the House freshmen: “Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.”
Later this afternoon, Speaker Boehner called off the vote on his budget bill, a clear sign that he does not have the votes to pass it in the House. Think Progress has been tallying the votes:
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One of the casualties of the tea party takeover last year was the North Carolina Legislature, where Republicans gained control for the first time in over a century. Since then, the tea bagger brigade has done its best to turn North Carolina, historically the most moderate of the Old Confederate states, into Kansas, particularly by passing a series of draconian laws targeting women’s reproductive rights.
The only person with the power to stop them is the state’s embattled Democratic governor, Bev Perdue, who has issued a series of vetoes that represent a profile in courage. Substituting for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night, Mellissa Harris-Perry — a graduate of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem who also received her PhD from Duke University in Durham — covered Perdue’s plight and put into the context of the political history of North Carolina in a way that only someone who has lived in the state could understand.
After watching Sarah Palin’s performance during a recent interview with Greta Van Susteren, Palin’s resident publicist at Fox, Joe McGinnis, the investigative journalist whose book on Palin, “The Rogue,” will be published this fall, has come to the conclusion that she will in fact run for president next year:
I think “The Rogue” says important things about Sarah, about religious extremists (especially Christian Dominionists), about how it’s possible to create a political identity out of a total lie, about mainstream media in America today, about racism (especially Sarah’s special brand), about the difference between image and reality (a question that has interested me since “The Selling of the President,” 1968,) about what loving and raising — as opposed to using — children really means, about her whole story of her pregnancy with Trig and his birth, about hate and divisiveness and the shadows of violence that hang over our land…
But right now I just can’t stand the sight of Sarah’s face or the sound of her voice. I’ve seen one and heard the other too much over the past three years.
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
