The Debate Over Infrastructure Funding Gimmicks Is Exactly What’s Wrong With Washington
Posted By: PeterWolosin, 7/21/2021 11:18:07 AM
After a conservative backlash, Republican senators negotiating an infrastructure bill have objected to an increase in funding and authority for the IRS. In lieu of additional revenue obtained from auditing taxpayers, how do lawmakers now propose to fund increased federal spending allegedly on roads and bridges? Through a budget gimmick. In short, Congress now wants to repeal a rule that 1) hasn’t gone into effect and 2) likely won’t ever go into effect, so it can take the phony “savings” associated with repealing something that won’t happen anyway and use it to “pay for” real increases in spending.
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After a conservative backlash, Republican senators negotiating an infrastructure bill have objected to an increase in funding and authority for the IRS. In lieu of additional revenue obtained from auditing taxpayers, how do lawmakers now propose to fund increased federal spending allegedly on roads and bridges? Through a budget gimmick.
In short, Congress now wants to repeal a rule that 1) hasn’t gone into effect and 2) likely won’t ever go into effect, so it can take the phony “savings” associated with repealing something that won’t happen anyway and use it to “pay for” real increases in spending.
Speaking on comedian Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Academy Award-winning actor Sean Penn said he thinks he would not be permitted today, by Hollywood’s woke standards, to play Harvey Milk in the 2008 film “Milk,” since Penn is a straight man. The real Milk was one of the first openly gay lawmakers.
“Today, almost certainly, I would not be permitted to be cast in that role [of Harvey Milk],” Penn said. “We’re living in a time where if you’re playing a gay lead character, you would have to be a gay man.
We love this country, but are growingly concerned with its top-down control. We love freedom, but that same freedom is abused by immoral and evil people, with an end result of far less freedom than before. The confluence of philosophy and reality weaves a complex – sometimes hopeful, sometimes bleak – future.
Lately, I have found myself holding mutually exclusive thoughts regarding the current status and prospective future of America. The problem for many conservatives, as I see it, is that we are resolute in our defense of many American principles but simultaneously recognize a growing problem
“Black Lives Matter is not political, it’s basic human rights,” my coaching staff and teammates heading our new “Call to Action Committee” told me and the other team members after practice. They were responding to some of the concerns I had expressed prior to the team meeting.
By the next game, while running out of the tunnel 10 of my 13 Davidson College teammates and all four of my coaches were wearing T-shirts with “Black Lives Matter” bannered across the front. When the national anthem played and with our U.S. Army veteran team doctor behind us, most of my team dropped to one knee in protest of America’s “institutional racism.”
Chances are you haven’t yet heard about 17-year-old Hunter Brittain who, despite being unarmed, was shot dead by police during a traffic stop. It’s not that this isn’t a shocking and tragic story, but there has been a complete national media blackout on the incident because, unfortunately for Brittain’s family, they’re all white.
Brittain was pulled over in the middle of the night last week in Cabot, Arkansas, for reasons that remain unclear.
The economist Thomas Sowell distinguished himself in the early 1970s as a critic of the traditional civil rights leadership, but in earlier decades he had been optimistic about the direction of the civil rights movement. Sowell was born into an extremely poor family in rural Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and raised in a New York City ghetto in the 1940s. Like many other blacks of that time and in those places, his family was uneducated. The men mostly worked as laborers or in the service sector, and the women typically were domestics. Racist laws had reduced opportunities for black Americans and thus limited their upward mobility. CORRECTION*
A Democratic congressman from California suggested that the Catholic Church ought to lose its tax-exempt status if the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) decides to follow Church law and deny Communion to pro-abortion politicians like President Joe Biden.
In a June 18 tweet, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) said, “If they’re going to politically weaponize religion by ‘rebuking’ Democrats who support women’s reproductive choice, then a ‘rebuke’ of their tax-exempt status may be in order.”
Huffman, who serves on a variety of caucuses — including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Equality Caucus and the
The Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada recently hosted its first-ever drag queen show at one of its on-base dining and entertainment clubs, according a base spokesperson.
Nellis Air Force Base said in an email statement to Breitbart News:
Nellis Air Force Base and the 99th Air Base Wing hosted its first-ever drag show Thursday, June 17, at the Nellis Club. The event was sponsored by a private organization and provided an opportunity for attendees to learn more about the history and significance of drag performance art within the LGBT+ community.
In this installment of our weekly Sunday Six conversation, PF Whalen and Parker Beauregard of The Blue State Conservative reflect on Father’s Day and their roles as fathers as they discuss six observations regarding fatherhood.
#6: Fathers are quite frequently taken for granted, and that’s okay.
PF: To support this point, I would cite Father’s Day itself as evidence. While Mother’s Day generally comes with much more hype and pomp, celebrating Father’s Day is barely a celebration at all. In my experience as both a father and a son, it generally consists of a greeting card or two in the morning, a modest gift such as a
An NBC News politics reporter fell hard for an obvious troll by GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert during a House hearing this week.
The exchange happened during a virtual hearing between associate deputy chief of the Forest Service Jennifer Eberlien, Gohmert, and the House Natural Resources Committee about public lands issues, climate change, and the impact of sun and lunar activity on the climate of the earth.
The COVID nightmare in America is over. There are other countries in which the virus is still a serious concern, but not here. President Joe Biden and the rest of the leftist Democrats are thoroughly disappointed with this fact, as they slowly watch their ill-gotten grip on tyrannical power slip away, but it’s a fact, nonetheless. By virtually every metric – new cases, deaths, active cases, vaccinations – the effects of the COVID pandemic on Americans and our society are rapidly disappearing. It may be too soon to declare eradication, but it’s not too early to reflect on some of the heroism
In two weeks, when Iran is scheduled to hold its presidential election, Narges Mohammadi will be staying home. One of her country’s most courageous human-rights activists, she views the upcoming vote as a sham.
“The principle of absolute jurisprudence has invalidated all the principles of the Iranian constitution and reduced the power of other institutions to zero,” she told me in an WhatsApp interview from Iran. The country’s unelected supreme leader and the country’s Guardian Council, which vets presidential candidates and can overturn laws passed by Iran’s legislature, have consolidated power.
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The United States women's soccer team was just trounced by Sweden at the Olympics — and forward Megan Rapinoe is acknowledging, "We got our asses kicked." Sweden scored a stunning 3-0 victory over the United States in women's soccer at the Olympics on Wednesday, The Associated Press reports. It was an upset after the U.S. had been the favorites to win gold, the AP notes, while Sweden was ranked No. 5. The loss came after Sweden previously defeated the U.S. in the quarterfinals at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. "We got our asses kicked, didn't we?" Rapinoe said after
A fresh wave of pandemic lockdowns like the ones that crippled the country last year loom on the horizon if people don’t wise up and get vaccinated against COVID-19, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned. “These shots need to get in everybody’s arms as rapidly as possible or we´re going to be back in a situation in the fall that we don’t yearn for — that we went through last year,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said at a news conference Tuesday, adding, “This is not complicated.” Asked about comments from Utah Gov. Spencer Cox alleging that conservative pundits are killing people with
President Joe Biden’s administration is weighing the idea of more mask mandates for Americans during the coronavirus pandemic — even if they are vaccinated, according to a report published Wednesday.
Details of the masking discussions were reported by the Washington Post.
The White House is weighing these options as the “Delta variant” of the virus is spreading, even among the vaccinated.
The report noted that federal health officials are considering whether they would update masking guidance, asking all Americans to wear masks indoors in public places.
The White House would likely face strong pushback from vaccinated Americans
Donald Trump Tells Dinner Guests He is Running
for President in 2024, According to New Report 35 replies
for President in 2024, According to New Report 35 replies
Donald Trump is primed to give the presidency another run in 2024, according to a new report broken by the Rolling Stone.
“Trump has told at least three people he’s dined with in recent months that he plans to run in 2024, a former senior official at the Republican National Committee tells Rolling Stone.”
“I have three friends who’ve had dinner with him in the last couple of months,” the report said citing the former RNC official. “All three reported that his current plans are to run for president in 2024.”
“Now, whether he does or not is a different issue,” the official added.
We’ve all seen this before, as has every leader of every country in the world. A sitting President of the United States cannot put together a coherent answer to a simple question. (snip) Asked an unchallenging question of 12-year-olds and vaccination, he drifted off in the middle of a sentence, and, as he so often does, looked down, got that Deliverance banjo player look on his face, and appeared to be listening to something in his earpiece, and then strung together a sequence of words that were not grammatically related to the rest of the sentence, but which, on their own, were coherent.
The Woke War on Air Conditioning
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As summer reaches peak heat, a recent piece in Time magazine on air conditioning exemplifies the rot pervading academia and threatening the nation.
Eric Dean Wilson, an instructor and graduate student at City University of New York, wrote about how air conditioning will destroy the planet. His essay demonstrates the confluence of such intellectually fashionable ideas as environmentalist extremism, critical race theory, equity, and the condemnation of capitalism and “white supremacy.”
Wilson has no training in climate science or mechanical engineering. Yet he teaches “climate-themed writing and environmental justice” at the City University of New York. Wilson describes his recent book
Failing the pandemic test, as World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus believes the world is, means even countries with high vaccination rates could once again find themselves back where they were in March 2020. Ghebreyesus has long advocated for high-income countries to help fill inequities in health care by sharing vaccine doses with other countries' most vulnerable populations. Focusing on a country's own people and not the world's population allows for more mutations of the virus to pop up and in a global world, a deadly variant in one place poses a threat to everywhere. "The more transmission
The Milwaukee Bucks won their first NBA championship in 50 years, downing the Phoenix Suns 105-98 in Tuesday's Game 6 of the NBA Finals in Milwaukee.
Star Giannis Antetokounmpo led the Bucks with 50 points and 14 rebounds. Khris Middleton chipped in 17 points and Bobby Portis had 16. Phoenix's Chris Paul led the Suns with 26 points.
Antetokounmpo was the first player to have at least 40 points, 10 rebounds and five blocks in a Finals' game since blocks were first recorded in 1974, the NBA tweeted. He became the seventh player to have at least 50 points in the championship round.
In news that’s flying below the radar a bit, more evidence of just how corrupt and compromised the FBI has become emerged today.
You may recall the much-ballyhooed plot to supposedly kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year. Arrests were made in October of 2020, with the claim being that the FBI had stopped the kidnapping plot as well as a plan to overthrow the government. After it came out in the weeks following the bust that one of the participants was anti-Trump and a Black Lives Matter supporter, the story quickly died down.
All of this was intertwined
The first marking period is over and President Biden’s grades are coming in.During his bitter, hard-fought race with former President Donald Trump, Biden made promises that include beating the coronavirus, reviving the economy and restoring bipartisanship and national unity.Six months after Inauguration Day, some of his pledges have been kept while most remain either clear failures or unfulfilled.Meanwhile, Biden’s longstanding tendency toward gaffes has political opponents questioning whether age is finally catching up with him after being sworn in at 78 to become the oldest president in US history.
Young, unvaccinated people dying from COVID-19 say they wish they had received the coronavirus jab, one Alabama doctor claims. Dr. Brytney Cobia, who works at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, made the assertion in a devastating Facebook post published on Sunday and shared more than 700 times. 'I'm admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he‘s not worried about a bill meant to combat homelessness exacerbating the problem because the state embraces everyone looking for “new beginnings.” The Democrat made the comment when asked about the possible unintended consequences of signing the $12 billion AB-140 housing bill. Officials are required to “develop a framework for the California Dream For All Program, the goals of which would … [make] homeownership more affordable.” “To the extent that people want to come here for new beginnings and all income levels, that’s part of the California dream and we have a responsibility to accommodate and enliven and inspire, and the California dream
Comments:
Spend, spend, spend. Democrats are bad, but Republicans aren't much better.