#john thune

[imkeepinit]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[william-r-melich]

Trump Wins Again - 02/28/2024

Good news, 82-year-old Mitch McConnel, Rhino, is stepping down as the senate GOP leader this November. They're talking about replacing him from a selection of three candidates; John Thune, John Barrasso, and John Cornyn. Cornyn is the more likely because of the three he's the biggest Trump supporter. I personally would like to see Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan as their leader. It's a long time until this November so a lot can happen, you just never know, especially in politics. One thing I know that is pretty certain, almost 100% that Nikki Haley will not be nominated in the republican primary this year. Donald Trump won Michigan last night, getting 68.1%. Nikki Haley got 26.6%. That's a victory margin of 41.5 percentage points. It's time for Nikki to go home, but apparently, she's hanging around at least through Super Tuesday on March 5th. Even if she does go the distance it looks to be impossible for her to win. What is possible is for her to lose all 50 states. I seriously doubt that she'll stay in it to the end. By losing her home state of South Carolina where she was elected twice for Governor, she may have already put a nail in her political coffin.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

I’ve said many times that Moscow Mitch would be replace by one of his two henchmen, Thune or Cornyn. They’re both old school Republicans, oligarch puppets, but they aren’t deranged MAGA cultists. A small distinction as one group will impoverish using the system while the other will extra-legally slaughter us in the streets.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dartagnan at Daily Kos:

As anti-Israel protests have spread across many of the country’s most prestigious college campuses this week, several Republicans in Congress have sought to burnish their pro-Israel credentials by calling for the U.S. military to respond.  Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton exhorted President Joe Biden to send in National Guard units, while obliquely encouraging motorists to run over protestors. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley similarly demanded a militarized federal response “to protect Jewish Americans,” while Mitch McConnell and John Thune penned a letter, signed by 25 of their fellow GOP senators, calling the demonstrators “anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist mobs” and demanding that “federal law enforcement” respond.

Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson paid a visit to Columbia University’s campus on Wednesday where he was greeted by catcalls and boos. Upon leaving, Johnson also declared he would be demanding that Biden deploy the National Guard to quell the protests if they continued.  As Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, observes, these reflexive calls by Republicans for a military response to protests seem to be less rooted in genuine concern that the protests pose a serious danger to the public or Jewish people than “because these powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive.” Serwer points out that school administrators have, when necessary, called in local police to address potential violence, harassment, and property damage, and thus far, the protests do not evince the kind of “mass violence and unrest” that would normally suggest the need for federal involvement. He also notes that such a deployment of federal troops would likely escalate the protests. 

Without debating the relative merits or lack thereof of the protests themselves, then, it’s important to note that these demands for a federal militarized response are coming almost entirely from one side of the political aisle. As Serwer points out, they echo the same sentiments Republicans expressed in 2020 in response to the protests by Black Lives Matter over the police murder of George Floyd. 

In other words, thus far we have seen a markedly asymmetrical, political response by Republicans to  campus protests this week. But we are also witnessing something else: an explicit acceptance of a militarized solution to protests where Republicans find it politically advantageous. Notably, another well-known Republican has also proposed sending the U.S. military and National Guard units to quell anticipated public protests, albeit of a far different nature, should he be afforded another term in office. That person is Donald Trump, and the people he proposes to target are those Americans he suspects would turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest the policies he intends to implement.

Prominent Republicans such as Tom Cotton, Donald Trump, and Mike Johnson are demanding a militaristic response to end the pro-Palestinian protests across the nation's campuses as a way of burnishing their pro-Israel Apartheid bona fides.

Such a response would further escalate protests instead of quell them.

See Also:

Vox: Student protests are testing US colleges’ commitment to free speech

The Nation: The Crackdown on Campus Protests Is Happening Everywhere

[trench]

Thoughts and Prayers: Politics in the wake of The Covenant School shooting

I’ll be honest with you. I’m not sure how to start this post since there’s so much ground to cover. I guess we should start at the beginning. This past March, 28-year-old Aubrey Hale shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville. Tennessee. Three of their victims were 9-year-old children. You can read my take on the shootings in my previous post. This shooting caused an uproar…

[dodypaz]

Iniciativa para dar a Biden nuevos poderes para prohibir TikTok avanza en el congreso

“Senadores avanzan en un proyecto de ley para otorgar al presidente de EEUU Joe Biden el poder de prohibir la popular red social de TikTok por peligro en la seguridad nacional” Dos senadores estadounidenses han dicho al medio informativo Reuters este lunes, que sus esfuerzos para abordar las amenazas tecnológicas extranjeras estaban avanzando y que este martes presentarán una legislación…

[conandaily2022]

2022 South Dakota senate election results: John Thune, Brian Bengs, Tamara Lesnar

2022 South Dakota senate election results: John Thune, Brian Bengs, Tamara Lesnar

election date: November 8, 2022 country: United States state: South Dakota position: member of the U.S. Senate incumbent senator (party): John Thune (Republican) term: January 3, 2023 – January 3, 2029 ELECTION RESULTS (South Dakota senator) PARTYCANDIDATE VOTESRepublicanJohn ThuneDemocratic Briang BengsLibertarian Tamara Lesnar

[simply-ivanka]

Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), John Cornyn (R-TX), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Kennedy (R-LA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), John Thune (R-SD), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Todd Young (R-IN)

VOTE THESE PIECES OF SHIT OUT OF CONGRESS.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The vast majority of the Senate Republican caucus united last week to introduce a bill that would permanently repeal the estate tax, targeting one of the few provisions in the U.S. tax code that solely affects the richest 0.1% of Americans.

Led by Sen. John Thune (South Dakota), the top Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Taxation and Internal Revenue Service Oversight, 40 Republicans reintroduced their bill to ensure that ultra-rich individuals seeking to hand off tens of millions of dollars — or more — to their heirs can do so completely tax-free. The extremely regressive proposal has been a longtime goal of Republicans, who have already massively watered down the estate tax in past years.

Currently, the estate tax threshold is $12.9 million, and nearly $26 million for couples. Amounts under this are exempted from taxes. This is nearly triple the threshold from 2016 and earlier, as Republicans more than doubled the estate tax cutoff in their major tax overhaul in 2017. The threshold is now so high that it is estimated that less than 0.1% of Americans are subject to the tax.

Evidently, these tax cuts are still not enough for Republicans, who had tried to repeal the tax altogether in 2017. In a press release on the bill, Thune, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) attempted to couch their support of the repeal in efforts to supposedly support farmers — claims that reveal themselves to be a farce when more closely examined.

“For years I have fought to protect farm and ranch families from the onerous and unfair death tax,” Thune said. “Family-owned farms and ranches often bear the brunt of this tax, which makes it difficult and costly to pass these businesses down to future generations.”

Thune’s statement is a misrepresentation of the truth. The vast, vast majority of “family-owned farms” are not subject to the estate tax. In 2020, a mere 0.16% of farm estates owed the tax, according to data from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is an exceedingly small number of farms. As the Tax Policy Center estimated, only 50 farms total paid any estate tax in 2017, and this research was done before lawmakers doubled the threshold.

The criticism of the estate tax in defense of farmers is disingenuous for another reason, as Inequality.org pointed out in a blog post this week. The tax code “already has provisions that protect the very few families with farms and businesses subject to estate tax,” wrote Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow and senior adviser for Patriotic Millionaires Bob Lord. “If the bill sponsors truly cared about family farms, ranches, and businesses, they could have proposed legislation to expand these protections but leave the estate tax intact.”

In reality, deep-pocketed lobbyists with the Farm Bureau have long been pushing a repeal of the estate tax — and the group’s deep ties to big business and Wall Street are well documented.

Perhaps not coincidentally, repealing the estate tax would complete the loop of tax avoidance for the wealthiest Americans. The bill targets the “die” part of “buy borrow die,” a common tax dodging scheme used by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes; it is part of the reason that the wealthiest Americans are able to pay little to no taxes year over year.

In the practice of buying, borrowing, and dying, the rich first pour their wealth into assets like stocks, building up a large portfolio. Those assets are then used as collateral for taking out large loans with low interest rates — lower than, say, the income tax rate — that become a wealthy person’s spending money. Then, they die, and hand off their wealth to the next generation, maintaining their dynasty for decades to come.

At very few points do taxes come into the buy, borrow, die equation. Buying and keeping stocks doesn’t incur a tax bill. Taking out loans allows the wealthy to claim very low incomes to skirt income taxes. The estate tax is essentially the only guarantee, and even then, the wealthy have come up with extreme loopholes to dodge the estate tax, too. Republicans, then, are hoping to make tax avoidance even easier by legalizing it entirely; Lord has pointedly labeled the bill the “Billionaires Pay Zero Tax Act.”

The proposal stands in sharp contrast to progressives’ views on taxation. Pointing to extreme and growing wealth inequality, progressives have been calling for increasing taxes on the rich and specifically targeting their wealth and stock portfolios, rather than endlessly allowing the “buy” and “borrow” portions of the cycle.