How badly do we need to want it? Would $100 get em going?

Politics Corner - I considered watching the SOTU, but then I remembered I’d rather dig out my eyes with rusty spoons. Sadly, I couldn’t find any rusty spoons, so I read the Axios report on Trump’s leaked schedules instead. It turns out he spends 60% of his workday in ‘Executive Time’, livetweeting Fox News from the…

You engaged with my argument, I returned the favor, we went back and forth and found some common ground about the rich needing to pay more taxes. Productive dialogue achieved.

Well said. May I add that, by systematically crushing the ability of workers to bargain collectively using their influence over the legislative process (among other venues and other subjects), the very rich have rigged the economy in their favor in a way we haven’t seen in a century? And the only way to effectively…

I don’t want to punish the rich, I want to confront the deficit crisis, fund needed social programs, and curtail the income inequality that is raging out of control to the detriment of our economy and our society. You give up the game when you embrace utilitarianism. You should brush up on your Bentham and Mill. If I…

The trickiest part is the loopholes. When the top marginal rate was 90%, anybody making that much hired the best accountants to make sure they didn’t actually pay close to that rate, but they still paid a lot more than they do now, with a top rate just under 40% and the same commitment to exploiting loopholes.

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it.

I’ll bite. AOC’s 70% top rate is for income over 10 million a year, but I think any income over a million a year should be taxed at 50%. If you make over a million a year, congratulations! You are rich! And your fair share is half your other millions each year - until you get over $10 million, in which case you’re…

Politics Corner goes Big Picture. Should we soak the rich? Bullshit question, based on a false premise. Should we ask them to pay their fair share? ABSOLUTELY! Federal policy has been geared towards soaking the rich in obscene wealth since Reagan. And before you say ‘it’s always been that way’, every reputable study…

I got that. I was just trying to elaborate a bit more for anyone else who didn’t already know about the acting SecDef’s background.

One dinosaur named commenter to another, I manscape my dude nipple hair. It’s a reasonable expectation. Other body hair is fine. I dated a woman who was ideologically opposed to shaving her armpits, and that’s fine. I had a girlfriend who wanted me to shave my chest, and I refused, but then she said she offered to…

It’s funny because the highly qualified SecDef Mattis, who restrained Trump’s worst impulses, resigned in protest and was replaced by a hack corporate exec from Boeing with almost no military or government experience.

Politics Corner - Trump pulled us out of the treaty that banned development of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. Who cares? We both have enough Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to turn the world to ash, why bother with IRBMs when we have all these ICBMs? Because IRBMs can start the nuclear apocalypse 15…

That isn’t a double standard. Exposure of a female nipple on a major broadcast television network for more than two seconds will break the Seventh Seal and unleash hell on Earth. That’s just science. The male nipple, on the other hand, is just a little decorative flourish. It serves no function, and is aesthetically…

I prefer to remember the viper, who comes to vipe my windows. Not all the cannibalism, or how my first pimple is actually probably a hundred baby spiders waiting to erupt from my skull. It’s the one happy one, where the viper is just a helpful guy with an accent. Like that one episode of Black Mirror with a happy…

Next time I watch it, I’m going to pretend the reason Buster Scruggs gets all murdery is he’s afraid them folks is vampires.

Politics Corner - Updating Trump’s feud with reality, as represented by his tantrum against his own intelligence services. FBI Director Wray and Director of National Intelligence Coats backed this up, but I want to focus on the person he put in charge of the CIA, Gina Haspell. I opposed her confirmation because of her…

“Also, this is a movie being made in 2019 and not 1980, when you might expect a movie like this called Fruit Loops to get made.” It ought to also be set in 1980, before Reagan shut down virtually all the long-term institutions that could be a viable setting for this scenario and dumped the severely mentally ill…

If this headline was more literal, and the Tanner family had to cope with the struggles of sudden homelessness, I might actually watch an episode or two.

How is that actually bad for AD’s agent? At all? He gets paid the same as if he’s playing, and because of the reduced injury risk, he’s actually MORE likely to get to that next max contract. That’s a win-win. AD may be competitive/image-conscious enough he doesn’t want to sit, but he’s still getting like $10 million…