Monday, March 4, 2024

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

There is a new leading scorer in college basketball. With a free throw with 0.3 seconds to play in the first half against No. 3 Ohio State Sunday during her final regular-season game, Caitlin Clark scored her 3,668th point to pass Pete Maravich for the most points in Division I history, men’s or women’s.

Clark finished the game with 35 points, 9 assists, 6 rebounds and 3 steals as No. 6 Iowa held on to take down Ohio State 93-83.

Clark has spent the last few weeks chasing down a number of records. She passed Kelsey Plum on Feb. 15 to become the all-time leading scorer in NCAA women’s basketball. In her most recent contest on Feb. 28 against Minnesota, she eclipsed the 3,649 points scored by Lynette Woodard, the AIAW large-school leading scorer. Now after passing the total set by Maravich in 1970, she stands atop all of major college basketball...

What a great start to Women's History Month!  Congratulations to the history- making collegiate G.O.A.T., whose record could well stand for another 54 years or more.

The bad:

The country’s largest companies dodged more than $275 billion in federal corporate income taxes from 2018 to 2022, a new report from the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds.

The report examined corporate income taxes paid by 342 of the country’s largest companies from 2018 to 2022, the latest year for which companies have reported their earnings. All of them were profitable in all five years covered by the report.

Yet the vast majority used loopholes and special tax breaks to pay an effective federal income tax rate well below 21%, the rate they were required to pay on paper. And 109 — or nearly one out of every three — found a way to pay zero federal income taxes in at least one year out of the five. Those same 109 corporations scored $14.34 billion in federal tax rebates over the five year period.

The findings underscore that the 21% corporate tax rate is “a fiction,” said Matt Gardner, the lead author and an ITEP senior fellow — particularly for huge multinationals.

“The companies most successful at doing this international tax evasion dance… have a roomful of lawyers and accountants whose job it is to redefine taxable income, to move income around on paper in a way you hope will avoid taxes.”

Giants like AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, Duke Energy, FedEx, General Motors, Molson Coors, Netflix and T-Mobile enjoyed an effective rate of less than 5%. The industries paying the smallest overall tax rates were utilities, fossil fuel companies, car makers, and telecom companies.  [snip]

Major companies have leveraged loopholes and tax breaks for years. But the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump, dramatically slashed their starting tax rate to 21% from 35%, giving them a head start on dodging their tax bills...  (our emphasis)

Greed and utter lack of moral or civic responsibility.  Just like TFG who signed that head start for corporate cheats act.

The ugly:

Ohio Republican J.R. Majewski dropped out (again) on Saturday, after he used a slur for intellectually disabled people on a podcast last week. Majewiski was running for the GOP nomination to fight Democratic incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur in November. Kaptur’s seat in Ohio’s Ninth Congressional district is one of just five nationwide where a Democrat has successfully won in a district where Trump carried the vote in 2020. Ohio Republicans are desperate to unseat Kaptur, but Majewski, who has courted controversy his entire political career, which includes losing to Kaptur in 2022, was going to make it particularly difficult. 

Majewski appeared on a podcast released last week in which he said Democrats live in their mother’s basement but “talk shit on the internet.” That, in his estimation, makes Democrats “like being in the Special Olympics. No matter how good you perform, you’re still fucking retarded.”  [snip]

Kaptur easily beat Majewsiki in 2022, despite competing in a district that Trump won by several percentage points in 2020. Kaptur’s 2022 victory was helped by revelations about Majewski’s past—including time spent as a pro-Trump, QAnon-friendly rapper and claims that he was deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11 where he endured grueling conditions (he was not and did not.) Despite his drubbing in 2022, Majewski was determined to challenge Kaptur again—though he dropped out briefly last year and then rejoined the race—and picked up strong support from other Ohio Republicans, including an endorsement from Sen. J.D. Vance (our emphasis)

This valor- stealing, lying, bigoted shitgibbon is actually the perfect Republican candidate, representing the cult's "values" and "principles."  Too bad he didn't stick around to have his dumb ass beat again.


2 comments:

seafury said...

And his supporters feel "cheated" He had to drop out because of liberal lies. I especially like the stolen valor angle. Not that easy to invent a deployment nowadays.

W. Hackwhacker said...

Seafury - well as the saying goes, you can't fix stupid.