Author Archives: eehines

Do This In Parallel

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There’s a movement afoot in Congress to subsidize employees, lost employees, and prospective employees through employers and prospective employers.

The House plan would give employers enough money to cover up to 80% of their wages and benefits, up to $45,000 per worker, plus a credit for fixed expenses like rent. Eligible companies would simply keep taxes withheld from employees’ paychecks. If that isn’t enough to equal the credit, they could get additional money from the Internal Revenue Service.
Smaller businesses would get the subsidy for all workers, while larger ones would get it only for furloughed workers still receiving wages or benefits. The break would be scaled to each employer’s revenue loss during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Long Overdue

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The People’s Republic of China has been able to raise billions of dollars for its various business outlets by listing them on American stock exchanges—all while being exempt from the same public visibility and auditing requirements that other nations’ companies and our domestic ones must satisfy on our exchanges.

Maybe that’s changing.

Legislation passed by the Senate—and now introduced in the House—would kick Chinese companies off US stock exchanges unless their audits are inspected by US regulators.

And

The Senate legislation requires the Chinese companies with shares traded here to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission whether they are owned or controlled by state authorities.

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State AG Nessel…Objects

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Michigan’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, is doubly upset with President Donald Trump.

Nessel said she believes Trump has been at odds with the state’s top three leaders recently, in part because they’re all women.
“I guess if any one of us were doing Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo’s dishes, he might be fine with us. But since we’re not and we’re actually running the state of Michigan, he seems to have a real issue,” she told NPR.

And

Michigan is the only state with women who hold our three executive offices and just in the last—we’re the only state where the president has individually gone after each one of us. You do the math.

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Land of Taxes

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New York City is suffering from loss of reduction in tax revenue as a result of the city’s and the State’s economic shutdown by government fiat during the Wuhan Virus situation.

One 49-year-old tech entrepreneur told The Wall Street Journal he and his family have moved permanently to their second home in the Hudson Valley from Manhattan. …
For tax purposes, he says, he and his peers are aware that if their children still attend school in the city, it is hard to argue the family has left. The man is considering pulling his children from the city’s elite private schools and is looking at public and private schools in the suburbs. He estimates that if he can persuade the city he is no longer a resident he will save more than $100,000 a year in city taxes alone.

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Joe Biden Has Become Clear

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A host on The Breakfast Club, interviewing Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden, said at the end of the interview,

Listen, you gotta come see us when you come to New York, VP Biden, it’s a long way until November, we got more questions—

At which point Biden interrupted:

You have more questions, but I tell you if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump then you ain’t black.

This is the pinnacle of the Progressive-Democratic Party telling a black man that if he doesn’t think properly, he’s not a black man.

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Fly-Over Country

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is being picked over by Progressive-Democrats because he recommended the firing of a misbehaving Department Inspector General. On that excuse, Pompeo’s private dinners are being looked into, in particular, one in which he hosted a collection of Kansas folks, including the retiring Kansas Senator Pat Roberts (R) and a few other State dignitaries.

Senator Bob Menendez (D, NJ), in particular, has taken notice.

What type of foreign-affairs work goes on in Kansas?

There’s that utter contempt for middle-America citizens that Progressive-Democrats have.

Is this dismissal of millions of Americans as beneath notice what we need running our nation?

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Memorial Day Celebrations

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I first posted this in 2012.  It bears repeating.

Enjoy this holiday.  Take the time to kick back, relax from the hard work you’ve been doing, and just goof off for a bit.

While you’re doing that, though, do something else, also.  Invite that veteran in your neighborhood, who came back from his service wounded or maimed, and his or her family, to your celebration.  Invite the family in your neighborhood whose veteran was killed in his or her service to your celebration.  They need the break and the relaxation and the support, also.  And they’ve earned your respect and remembrance.To which I add this, excerpted from Alex Horton’s remarks on the significance of the day to him and his:

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Limit FISA Surveillance?

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Certainly, the process is beset with vast, and serious, problems.

Mr [DoJ Inspector General] Horowitz’s staff reviewed a sample from a recent five-year period, October 2014 to September 2019, during which the eight FBI field offices applied for more than 700 surveillance warrants on US persons. Each of the reviewed files contained errors, inconsistencies and omissions. After reviewing the report, the FISA court’s Chief Judge James E Boasberg issued a rare public order. He told the government to undertake steps to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications. Yet inaccuracy isn’t the only problem. The use of FISA against a US citizen presents a fundamental threat to civil liberties. It essentially suspends the Constitution.

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An Expansionist Germany

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Not military expansion, but a more insidious one: legal expansion.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court [Federal Constitutional Court] ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.

And:

The key legal question was whether foreign nationals in other countries were covered by Germany’s constitution….

Why, yes, yes they are. Because German sovereignty reaches deep inside other nations’ borders, other nations’ legal and political jurisdictions, overrides those nations’ own sovereignty. Germany’s laws not only apply outside German borders, they apply inside other nations’ borders.

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“The US Doesn’t Need a New Cold War”

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So says Robert Zoellick in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

We truly do not need another Cold War. But this one is being forced on us, anyway, by the People’s Republic of China and the economic war it’s prosecuting against us. The environment for this one also was facilitated by the multi-polar world so enthusiastically built by ex-President Barack Obama (D).

Baker also is operating from a defeatist proposition.

The New Cold Warriors can’t contain China given its ties throughout the world; other countries won’t join us. Nor can the US break the regime, though the Communist Party’s flaws could open cracks within its own society. The US can impose costs on China, but to what end, and at what price to Americans?

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