Trump Dumps Another IG In The Dead Of Night. He apparently flew too close to some Pompeo misdeeds. Effective oversight must not be countenanced.
For Those Of You About To Die For The Dow, We Salute You. Paul Krugman tries to make sense of the Rethug obsession with ‘America’s Back’.
House Passes $3 Trillion Relief Package. But not before one of the so-called ‘endangered’ Democrats insisted on dropping a provision that would have provided $10,000 of student loan relief. And not before most progressive proposals ended up on the cutting-room floor. A snippet of the snippings:
The real message in the bill was sent not to Trump but to progressives inside and outside Congress. With Congress dispersed, Pelosi and her committee chairs maintained iron control of what went into the bill. And the message to progressives was clear: Not yet. No to recurring cash payments. No to guaranteed paychecks that would keep workers off unemployment, despite Representative Pramila Jayapal’s success in gaining widespread support for the proposal across the caucus. No to Medicare paying the health care costs of the unemployed. No to a jobs guarantee. No to a moratorium on rent and mortgage payments. No to student debt forgiveness. No public ownership stake in companies that are bailed out. No prohibition of corporate mergers or greater protection against private equity predators’ picking the bones of weakened companies. No major green infrastructure initiative.
While progressive initiatives were left on the cutting room floor, corporate lobbies cleaned up. Lobby associations made themselves eligible for the Payroll Protection Program. The wealthy got tax relief with the repeal of the limit on state and local tax deductions. Nothing was done to reverse the obscene $170 billion real estate investor tax break that was tucked into the first rescue package. And most brazenly, the bill calls for paying the full Cobra payments for the unemployed, a direct, costly, and shameless subsidy to the insurance companies.
Brilliant Editorial On Wisconsin’s Reopening. A snippet:
Make no mistake. An election that made people wait three hours to vote during a pandemic in Green Bay and Milwaukee was ridiculous, as the now-famous sign said.
And it is ridiculous that Wisconsin is the first state in the union to be opened by court order — and not a unanimous order with clear legal precedent, but one based on the whims and political ideologies of just four Supreme Court justices: Patience Roggensack, Rebecca Bradley, Annette Ziegler and Daniel Kelly.
One of those four, Kelly, was soundly defeated as an incumbent in the April 7 election and will be off the court by July. We can safely assume the decision would have been 4-3 in the opposite direction had the candidate who voters chose over Kelly taken her seat on the court.
The decision is one of momentary legal authority and zero moral authority.
All four justices who overturned the governor’s power in a health emergency had campaigned against judicial activism.
They proved to be against judicial activism until they were for it. They are against judges writing laws unless the special interests that put them up and backed them for office want them to write their own laws.
Everything Falls Apart, Ctd. US. Global. The latest carnage: 1,443,397 confirmed cases and 87,568 deaths in the United States. Over 1600 more deaths yesterday. In another week or so, we will see the inevitable spikes caused by reopening.
A Case Study In Corporate Welfare. The unshocking conclusion? It wasn’t worth it. It rarely is, but states continue to pony up. And/or, in Delaware’s case, a non-public agency does the ponying and doesn’t have to answer to the public even though the public pays for it.
Plant-Based Bottles In Our Future? Well, this is an encouraging development.
Lawsuit Claims Couple Will Suffer ‘Irreparable’ Harm If They Can’t Rent Out Their Beach Condo. They file a Federal lawsuit against Carney. Two words: Fuck ’em.
What do you want to talk about?