The Right Side of the News

I hadn't even heard of Mark Levin until I started listening to conservative talk radio after the midterm elections last Fall. Llke Rush Limbaugh who also started out rejecting Trump, he eventually came around, whether in time to vote for him I don't know, and he's now a strong Trump supporter. I also started out thinking I couldn't vote for Trump. So we changed our minds.

I don't want to "talk" anyone out of any of that, the whole point of posting the article was so its reasoning could be considered. If you are happier without reading it there's nothing I can do about that.

What we are trying to say is that there is a lack of reasoning. Just calling something "Communist" does not make it wrong, or even communist.What we are asking you to do is look at what Democrats actually propose, not what right wing radio hosts think they propose. For example, what do you find wrong with Medicare For All? Do you think we shouldn't have a single payer system? If so, why?

Heavens, I KNOW what Democrats propose and it is scary. The article on the book goes into more detail about how similar today's Democratic party and Leftist policies are to those of the thirties. You may think the policies are all lovely, but it might be eyeopening to find out they are right out of the Marxist playbook.

I apologize, Faith. I misread your previous post and didn't realize that you were referring to a single article, and one short enough that there isn't much reason to avoid reading it.At any rate, having read the article, Harry Stein, the author of the article, doesn't show himself to be very credible when it comes to history. But the main point seems to be how the current left is supposedly like the Communists of the '30s, let's just get to that.Stein's errors can be summed up by his paraphrase of Eugene Lyons: - What makes this such a wonderful quote is that Stein doesn't acknowledge that just ten years after Lyons published his book, the McCarthy witch hunts (and Trump should look into this to see what a witchhunt really looks like) we in full swing and it was the Anti-Communists who were liquidating careers and disappearing reputations.Here is what Stein says about the witch hunts: Stein acknowledges that most of McCarthy's victims weren't even potential subversives, but their purge was somehow justified as because handful of Stalinists actually existed.I guess liquidated careers and disappeared reputations are okay if we do it, but bad when they do it.Just for yucks: Yeah, and one can shudder what might have happened if Eisenhower really was a secret Soviet agent, or if Stalin could fire laser beams out of his eyes!-Meanwhile, what are some examples showing how the contemporary Left is like 1930s Communism? First, I'll point out that unlike the majority of victims of the McCarthy purges (or, for that matter, the majority of victims of today's Islamophobia), the examples here actually did what they were accused of.Second, it wasn't even an organized witch hunt that led to these gentleman being fired; they were fired by their corporations for reasons that corporations have alway used, rightly or wrongly, to fire people: creating a hostile environment for their colleagues or creating a situation where the company may lose customers.-This is just a small portion of the article, but I found the rest of it to be similarly weak tea.

Like what?

I occasionally comment on articles over at Fox News where I'm Percy00. Apparently if they don't like what you say they delete it. My comment on Sen. Graham: Nancy Pelosi is 'biggest loser' now that Mueller will testify was deleted, even though it got 4 likes. It was rather mild, and even though I did quote the Mueller report saying they couldn't exonerate President Trump I don't understand why they deleted it.The replies to my comment are still there, just unanchored messages with no context. If you click on the above link it will take you straight to my deleted message and you can see the replies. Weird.Even more weird is that I keep replying to the guy who replied about collusion, and that keeps getting "disappeared" with no indication it was ever there. I seem to have caught someone's attention at Fox News. All I said was:

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"Besides, what evidence do you have of this collusion?"

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I wasn't originally going to reply, but the original message has been deleted, so I'll just say that my comment was about obstruction, not collusion, which isn't mentioned in the Mueller report anyway.

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Strangely, this is the third time I've posted this to you, but it keeps disappearing, don't know why. Hope you get a chance to see this.

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I've never had a comment deleted at the Washington Post or the New York Times.AbE: That reply got disappeared again, so I just put it back again. I wonder how long this will go on?AbE: I thought it disappeared again, but I didn't see the "3 more comments" link before posting it again.--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.Edited by Percy, : AbE.

I used to comment at Fox News a couple years ago my comments started to disappear. I guess I did not think much about because I have never thought of them as a news organization.Now that I think about it, this may be something an intrepid reporter might want to look at. Fox claims they are a news org but in reality are a propaganda organ of the GOP. Censorship like this further exposes that fact.

From The New York Times: Supreme Court Limits Agency Power, a Goal of the RightA long term goal of the Right has been to reign in the regulatory authority of the executive branch and regulatory agencies. The problem, of course, is that the regulations interfere with the redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to the Republicans' wealthy donors, but insincere blather about the unconstitutional usurpation of Congress' legislative function plays better in the media.In a 5-4 decision - I think, it's another weird fracturing of the Court in split opinions and separate concurrences - the Court in a very narrow way limited the abilitity of the Department of Veterans Affairs to resolve the ambiguities of the laws and regulations it is responsible for.In Kisor v Wilkie, a veteran was initially denied benefits of PTSD he had developed while deployed in the Middle East. He appealed and won the appeal, but his benefits were only retroactively applied to the date his case was reopened, not to the date of his initial application. He appealed this, but the courts recognized that agencies have broad latitude in interpreting the laws and regulations they are to enforce.(By the way, that the Dept of Veteran Affairs has been using "loopholes" to deny veterans of the Forever Wars necessary benefits is an old problem: here is an old article from The Nation.)At heart are two court cases: Bowles v Seminole Rock & Sand Co, decided in 1945, and Auer v Robbins, decided in 1997. I don't know much about these cases, but evidently these are the cases that established the interpretive authority of regulatory agencies to perform the duties Congress intended.The suit asked the Court to overturn these precedents.Kagan, writing for the majority, merely placed reasonable limits on the agencies' interpretive authority. The courts cannot just defer to an agency's interpretation; they must actually do the work of carefully examining the intent of Congress in enacting the law and the reasonableness and consistency of the agency's interpretation. In simply deferring the to the agency's interpretation, the lower courts had avoided their responsibility, and the case is now sent back to them.But what is fascinating it that the summary (I haven't yet read the opinions themselves) spends most of its length not on the case at hand, but speaking about the importance of legal precedence and these precedents in particular.In reading the summary, I got the impression that the majority, including Roberts, are getting pretty nervous about the "burn it all down" attitude of the Republican nihilists and the damage that can be done by the apparatechniks they managed to put on the Court.Although these issues aren't ordinarily ones I find very interesting, I am interested in reading the opinions written by the various justices in this case,

In a NYT editorial (How Mueller Can ”Fix His Mistakes’) Jed Handelsman Shugerman argues that Mueller made two significant mistakes:

1. Mueller wrongly concluded that it was ambiguous whether foreign-provided opposition research constitutes "a thing of value," that it might be First Amendment protected speech. True, "a thing of value" is vague, but foreign attempts at interference cannot be constitutionally protected because the government "has a compelling interest in limiting such corruption."
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2. Mueller used the wrong definition of coordination, saying that "We understood coordination to require an agreement ” tacit or express..." But Congress clearly defined coordination in 2002, saying, that campaign finance regulations "shall not require agreement or formal collaboration to establish coordination." Following this guidance the FEC's regulations state:
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   “Coordinated means made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate,” with no need to show any kind of agreement.

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If Shugerman's interpretation is accepted it means that Mueller incorrectly concluded that the Trump campaign did not conspire with the Russian government to defraud the American people in an election. It is safe to assume that the Democrats' legal team reads the papers and will give these possibilities consideration as the Democrats decide whether to pursue impeachment.Since the Senate would never vote to convict (McConnell has said the Senate wouldn't even take up for consideration any articles of impeachment, so there wouldn't even be a vote), impeachment would be a merely political exercise designed to hurt Trump's reelection chances. Given that most people won't make the effort to understand the rather subtle distinctions that Shugerman makes, I don't think his arguments will carry much sway with Democratic leaders.But Shugerman might well be right that these are two very significant Mueller errors. Had the Mueller report followed the path outlined by Shugerman then the House might be considering articles of impeachment as we speak. But he didn't, Barr has already created the impression in the minds of most Americans that the report exonerated Trump, and Shugerman's opinion piece won't change that.What Mueller can do is state once again that the report does not exonerate Trump on obstruction. And someone might want to ask him what he thinks about Barr's exoneration of Trump.--Percy

EPA Unilaterally Imposes New Union Contract Slashing Telework, Easing Firing

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The Environmental Protection Agency has cut off negotiations with its primary union and informed the labor group it will unilaterally implement a new contract, stripping away many of the rights and privileges employees currently enjoy and setting up yet another legal battle between the Trump administration and the federal workforce.

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The new, one-sided agreement is set to go into effect on July 8 and severely limit telework, evict union representatives from agency office space and restrict employees from filing a grievance over disciplinary actions, among other changes. EPA blamed the American Federation of Government Employees for the unilateral implementation of the new contract, telling the union its refusal to open up the entire agreement to negotiation required the agency to take action on its own.

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The dispute follows an ongoing pattern in the Trump administration, which has frequently butted heads with unions across government. Representatives of employees at the departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs are all fighting their agencies' efforts to curtail negotiations or otherwise limit unions’ power. Trump previously attempted to cripple federal employee unions through an executive order, but a federal judge largely struck it down. The administration is currently appealing that decision

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Almost certainly illegal; the number one principle of contract law is that there must be an offer and acceptance. A contract cannot be forced unilaterally.

But this is just another in an unending stream of anti-little-guy actions by the Trump administration. How in the world the regular guy/gal Trump supporter still thinks Trump is on their side doing good things is beyond me.They should all think back to a time when they were cheated and how it happened. They probably trusted someone they shouldn't have but who seemed perfectly trustworthy at the time. They should use that experience to inform their current thinking, though that would require gathering actual facts instead of listening to Trump or to most Republicans in Congress or to the propaganda-outlet-posing-as-news-media arm of his administration. Gee, that leaves only the mainstream media, the part of the media that wins Pulitzers and such, but everyone knows that's all just fake news.--Percy

Paul Krugman wrote several columns last week that I thought were good. Here's one. The S Word, the F Word and the ElectionKrugman makes the point that nothing that any of the candidates advocated during last week's debates were socialist, yet we all know that no matter who gets the nomination (even Biden!) will be labeled "Socialist". He also predicts how the media won't bother to offer a correction since Republican extremism is simply accepted nowadays as normal.But he does point out the "tut tuts" and complaints about uncivil discourse if the Republicans were to be called "fascists" even though, as overblown as it is, it is closer to the truth than "socialist Democrats": -On the other hand, the US rightwing has largely stripped "socialism" of most of it negative connotations (except for its base, I guess) by labeling as "socialist" any commonsense policy that would improve people's lives. Polls show that more people have a more positive opinion of socialism, and Krugman has claimed before that this is because they've come to think that the "radical" Democrats' social democracy is "so cialism ", and that's what people want!Krugman isn't sure whether the Republicans' "that's socialism!" tactic will work overall, but he thinks it will at least be less effective than in the past.-Another tactic that may be less effective: Edited by Chiroptera, : Oops. Cut'n'pasted the wrong quote.

Gosh those horrifying conditions at the border. Created by the overwhelming invasion of illegals which the existing facilities can't handle cuz the money wasn't appropriated to handle them. Of course that's blamed on the Republicans even if it's the Democrats' doing. But hey, would EvC ever hear that this House member voted AGAINST funding for humanitarian needs at the border and yet she's complaining about the humanitarian problems at the border?

It wasn't a problem before the Trump administration, even when there were more crossings than there is now. The funding wasn't any different. The difference is the policy which requires incarceration.