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It’s their own fault and they’ve done it to themselves.  What’s worse, they hate the idea of being held accountable, in ANY way, for reducing their taxpayers to being just ATM machines.  In that they are doing a great job because it’s not like they are solving their real problems (e.g., wanting to spend $60 Billion on a high speed choo-choo to nowhere when they can’t even keep their road or education systems in decent shapes).

On another note, as the Republicans continue on with tax reform (yeah, let’s see if these Congressional nitwits can get ANYthing done), has anyone noticed how often they say that they can’t do this, or can’t do that, or say this is the ONLY way we can do it because we can’t enlarge the national debt (their own rules say by more than $1.5 Trillion)?

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SHOT:

There has been no change in the current policy regarding the anthem. The agenda will be a continuation of how to make progress on the important social issues that players have vocalized. Everyone who is part of our NFL community has a tremendous respect for our country, our flag, our anthem and our military, and we are coming together to deal with these issues in a civil and constructive way (NFL).

CHASER:

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Stated another way, that’s $34,200 per year.

UPDATE: I was at a meeting in Manchester and ran into a old friend of the ‘Grok and without prompting, he brought up that his Obamacare plan, bought on the exchange, is mirroring my aquaintance’s below: it has just from about $1,000/month for his family to over $2,000 / month.  He makes too much as an independent engineer to receive any kind of tax subsidy – he has to float his own boat.  He’s now wondering if he has to go bare.

Commenter Jeemo has called me a liar and that I’m making this up – sorry Jeemo, but life is sucking badly when Government actions have all but destroyed the individual healthcare marketplace and made life miserable for million whose only purpose, in the Saul Alinsky word of wealth transfer from Haves to Have-Nots, is to fund others.  For the recipients of the tax subsidies, life is now better.  For the rest of us that were happy with our plans, life sucks.  And Jeemo makes fun of my friends.

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I’ve known him for years and have had him come over to house as a contractor on a number of cases; he was here a couple of days ago.  Usually I leave contractors alone to let them do their work and only wander in just because I like to admire peoples’ skills to do work that I can’t do (being a software engineer, I can build castles in my mind but you never want to put a saw, hammer, and a screwdriver into my hands at the same time).  However, he smiled as I greeted him coming out of his truck and he exclaimed “great, a fellow conservative to talk with!” as he deals with a lot of public housing projects owned by “public service organizations” that trend rather liberal.  One of the topics that came up, as he is self-employed”, was the cost his Obamacare plan; his frustration was BEYOND frustration.

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That’s apparently what CNN was doing when it published a story Monday under the headline, “Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.” How is that newsworthy? Well, it’s newsworthy if Trump acted like a boor and pounded the precious koi with an overabundance of food. Such appears to be the case if you look at the video below, which starts with a shot of Trump, alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, flicking spoonfuls of food from a wooden box into the koi pond below. Then the shot narrows to Trump himself, and he empties the entire box.

Another instance of presidential boorishness abroad? As Mediaite pointed out, that’s how it played out among some media types. There’s that CNN headline, for starters, which places outsize significance on the president’s handling of the box. Jezebel headlines, “Big Stupid Baby Dumps Load Of Fish Food On Japanese Koi Pond.” The New York Daily News: “Photo of Donald Trump dumping fish food into koi pond during Japan visit draws Obama comparisons.” And more than one prominent journalist wrote tweets fixated on the fish-food box-dump.

However, what the MSM is portraying is, once again, not quite the real reality.

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“They’re evil, we’re the good guys” state Sen @BarbaraFavola on Virginia Republicans to a packed hall of Arlington Democrats #VirginiaWay pic.twitter.com/8DuUE5T81j

— Fenit Nirappil (@FenitN) November 1, 2017

And what’s worse is that the Democrat nominee for Virginia Governor won’s disavow it:

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From the NY Post:

Adam Lanza expressed his desire to commit the Sandy Hook massacre years before the tragedy took place — and when a witness alerted police, cops said there was nothing they could do, newly released FBI documents reveal. In 2008, the witness, whose name has been redacted, heard Lanza (inset) say that he had access to assault weapons and planned to kill students at the elementary school, along with his mother, Nancy Lanza, according to a cache of documents released this week.

“Lanza allegedly [said] that he planned to kill his mother and children at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut,” the document reads.

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under the proposed Tax Reform that is now in movement in Congress.  And the Democrats / Progressive Totalitarians are losing their minds – the HORROR of it that those evil RICH people get to keep more of their money!  The SHAME that Government will get less!  How DARE they!  It oesn’t make any difference that poor people pay very little in income taxes! The explanation from former Congressman and now head of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney (reformatted, emphasis mine):

OMB later cited internal data to the Washington Examiner that said the top 20 percent of people to pay income taxes account for 94.8 percent of those taxes in 2016. That appears to be a jump from just a few years ago. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 20 percent of income earners paid 84 percent of income taxes. Mulvaney explained:

If you break the income tax universe into what we call quintiles, so equal sized 20 percent columns, the first two columns, the first quintile and the lower quintile, don’t pay any taxes at all. In fact they net positive. We pay them when they file a tax return.

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As the Democrats are always saying, society suffers from Power Inequalites.  Colt’s distant cousins, Heckler & Koch, made it equal (reformatted, emphasis mine)

Good Samaritan Stops Kidnapping With Gun
“If I didn’t have a firearm, I don’t think there’s much I could have done.”

On October 5, a vigilant Las Vegas resident, Justin Pearson, noticed a BMW zooming through his neighborhood and abruptly stopping in front of a neighbor’s house where a 6-year-old boy was playing in the front yard. As Pearson watched in horror, the driver quickly hopped out of the vehicle and grabbed the boy. While the kidnapper’s height was similar to his own (over 6 feet), Pearson could see that the man had a much larger build — Pearson would not be able to take him on pound for pound.

As the Las Vegas Journal Review notes, “Fortunately, Pearson had a trump card — a Heckler & Koch VP9 pistol legally resting on his right hip.”

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