It looks like... pardon the term...Barbara Boxer is easy. I mean you scratch her back to retain her position and viola! A tax holiday appears. Sadly, others have been scratching Kerry and Schumer's backsides as well. It's no wonder that we are spending more tax monies than we collect. Yet, if we do manage to close these loopholes, you can bet that corps will pass their new tax burdens on for their consumers to pick up. Life in America Inc. is becoming less fun.

Oh, of course! Tax holidays to underfund government and SS/Medicare. So what if the 98% of Americans suffer so that 2% can enjoy the higher than high life on the 98%'s nickel.
That's been the plan all along.

So is Shelly Berkley's plan a sell-out or a "compromise?" Is the 35% maximum statutory rate going to be altogether eliminated if some other plan isn't put into place? It sucks that these loopholes exist at all, and I love DPM's characterizatio n of what the corps really want from us lowly taxpayers -- but why would these reps & sens, dems especially, be pushing this tax holiday in the current climate, esp Berkley, who is now running for Senate? Is it just that the story is so under the radar that they feel they can do it & no one will notice? Is there no one we can trust to actually represent the interests of the common good? I tend to trust Matt Taibbi implicitly -- "Griftopia" is the best explanation EVER of how the 2008 collapse happened -- but it seems like there should be more behind this story than the same old everyday greed and self-interest, in a climate where "tax holiday" should be fightin' words for all us lowly cits who actually PAY taxes...

Someone is pulling the strings in this Kabuki theater. Can you see the orchestration? It is almost too predictable. Why are they all so well rehearsed, like the Republican Governors all carrying out the same agenda as each other?

“We do not have the framework for multi-party democracy,” he said. “What happened in Parliament (on Saturday when a Zanu PF mob stormed into the chamber and beat up MPs) will not happen where there is a foundation for multi-party democracy. Zanu PF does not believe in multi-party democracy. They go to an election that will produce one result - a Zanu PF victory. They say if we lose we go to war.”

This is a quote from a current Zimbabwean newspaper about their political situation. I don't know about you, but if you swap out "Parliament" for "Congress" and "Zanu PF" for "Republicans", and instead of "beating up MP's", you think "crushing Democrat's cujones (and also coochies...let' s not forget to be gender-inclusiv e). sounds pretty much to me like what's goin' on in THIS Third World country right here!

As for the infamous Zimbabwean hyper-inflation that had a roll of toilet paper costing $417 (sounds like Pentagon procurement, doesn't it?) and utterly destroyed their currency while impoverishing everyone, except of course Mugabe, look for it coming soon in a town, county or state near you!

Greece...Greece ...We don't need no stinkin' Greece! We got Zimbabwe as a perfect role model for things to come! Thanks, Mr. President, Mr. Speaker. You guys are the nuts! Thanks MSM. Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite would be proud of you. And my kids too.

Let's limit the tax holiday to companies that have no overseas operations and no offshore accounts. The the money they save will stay here and improve our economy.

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire...about Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.'That's not the way the world really works anymore' he continued.'We'r e an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judicio usly, as you will-we'll act again, creating other 'realities', which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

--Ron Suskind, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush", N.Y. Times Magazine, 10/17/04.

Swap out "The Bush presidency" for "The current Republican Party", and you've got the core template that's metastasized into the current GOP insanity in Washington. Repeat: GOP Insanity. Reality is yesterday. Think Tea Party Empire. The needs of citizens are superfluous.

The White House Press Secretary, on camera during interview with Chris Matthews last night, DID NOT KNOW THE LOOMING DATE OF DEFAULT! He said "It may be Aug 1st or Aug 2nd, I'm not sure". After all this monumental crud, he doesn't know the exact date, A WEEK AWAY??!! Who ARE these people, in BOTH parties? They couldn't find their collective asses with both hands and a flashlight! THESE fools are our "leaders". Nov, 2012, I'm voting for Yosemite Sam as a write-in.

In California there is a congressman named Garamendi who doesn't believe in this junk. He actually tries to figure out what the hell we've done to get ourselves into the mess we're in, and he's very clear that further tax breaks for the corporations are not going to get us out. He must feel very lonely among the weird people that other districts have sent to Congress.