foxbat

My guess is that one of the first witnesses to be called to testify against the President will be ... Donald J. Trump. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/430215-trump-says-he-didnt-need-to-declare-emergency-but-wanted-faster FTA: "I want to do it faster. I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster," Trump said during a press conference at the Rose Garden in the White House.

While I appreciate her general fervor, she needs to be careful that she's not reading her own press releases.

I wasn't looking at it from a W2/1099 perspective, but more from the standpoint that I don't think it's going to move the needle unless the last of my charitable stuff, Goodwill, kicks me over that $24,000 floor. It's going to be a lot like tracking medical expenses for me in the past as I normally couldn't get past that 7.5% of AGI ... which I guess is actually a silver lining in a different way.

There's a lot of items that used to make the green numbers spin in TurboTax that don't this year. Used to be that, once I got done entering in the wages section and taxes withheld, I was at a little green and then, once I started putting in all of the charitable deductions, mortgage interest, property taxes, and education stuff, that sucker would spin. This year, I'm almost done with all of the charitable stuff and it's still just staring at me unmoving. Kind of a bummer when you put in a single , nearly five-figure donation, and that number doesn't move. I used to track my mileage for volunteer coaching, even created a spreadsheet so all I had to do was enter in the number of practices and game locations and it would automatically crack out my mileage for me. Probably not going to need that anymore. One thing I'm curious about will be if ancillary charitable deductions will be impacted moving forward. I expect that won't be the case with folks' core charities, but I wonder if there would be a potential drop in charitable giving or, at minimum, a change in the timing ... e.g., give twice as much every other year and nothing in the intervening years to be able to get an advantage that would be lost by giving a regular amount each year.

Ironically, the easy one would be over immigration again. Fertility rate, tied to replacement, has sustainability right around 2.1. The US is below that, so without immigration, US population will begin to shrink. The next president could say it's a national crisis, without even worrying about Constitutional gun crisis, and like Ronald Reagan said to Mr. Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall."

Those things weighed a ton. I remember when we switched those things out for the 3180s. It was a modularized contraption that had four components to it and you could get them repaired pretty quickly without needing a repairman or any real knowledge about hardware. COBOL is my unemployment/retirement golden ticket. With the vast majority of COBOL programmers dying off and the vast number of systems that still are running it, I could always do a little COBOL consulting work if things ever get thin in retirement.

There is no one that is surprised. And if you still believe that he is, then there's not much to a discussion about this because it's pretty clear that this is about ego and not national security. The fact that his claims about drug implications don't fit with reality also indicates that he's not approaching it logically. Similarly, the fact that some 400 people just tunneled under a stretch of existing wall shows even more disconnect from reality. Should Trump ever get out of the courts to complete his wall, it's likely that it might be studied along with other ill-advised structures like the Maginot Line. As for the graph, correlation does not specifically mean causality. A much more likely explanation for decrease is tied to an increase in Mexico's economy, especially as more US jobs went further south, as well as a drop in Mexico's fertility rates which has it right above the sustainability level sans immigration. Less competition for jobs in Mexico, better jobs in Mexico, and a better economy in Mexico than in the 20th century are all contributing factors to a lowered rate. BTW, you do realize that a growing issue for illegal immigration isn't border crossings, but instead overstayed visas? In 2016-2017, almost two-thirds of undocumenteds came with a visa and overstayed while just a bit over a third came from border crossings. For the last seven years, overstays have outpaced illegal crossings.

What's going to be REALLY funny is when the Democrats force a vote on Trump's "national emergency" to give everybody a chance to go on record. Mitch will then have to, by himself, refuse to bring the vote to the Senate. He will get blowback from some of his colleagues who ABSOLUTELY want to go on record against an Executive Branch powergrab, but even worse, he's going to take away the potential for folks like Collins to be able to try to defend herself on record. He may well be jeopardizing a couple of Senate seats even if he may get to keep his own.

Two years refers to the time that Trump has been in office that apparently it wasn't enough of an emergency to act on. By the way, note that we are in pre-Reagan numbers when looking at apprehensions. In other words, comparatively, it's not an emergency.

To be fair, said "ramming" included some 309 GOP-offered amendments, 188 of which were adopted. plus an additional 20 bi-partisan amendments of which 17 were adopted. In addition, there were 79 committee hearings as well as a CBO scoring of the plan. The Senate Finance Committee spent more time in mark-up on that bill than any bill in the last 20 years. It took a full 8 months AFTER the bill left the House before the Senate voted on it. Another example, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held 14 bipartisan round-table meetings and 13 public hearings. Also, given the time gap just from the House vote to the Senate vote, and the fact that the summer break for Congress fell into that time zone, there were MANY townhalls conducted on both sides that allowed for several unsavory narratives to come into play such as death panels which helps to "expand the debate further." As for GOP ramming, or perhaps just Trump ramming, we're all about to get a peak at that ... most likely today ... when Congressional money gets re-appropriated for a wall that is unlikely to work. This is where the test of GOP stones will come into play. For all of the talk on the Constitution, etc. if Congress, especially the GOP Congressmen, let this go through without a fight, it may be the last of things that they stood for being let go along with balanced power, fiscal conservatism, free trade, strong US allies, and comprehensive immigration reform.

I thought @Coach Nowlin was allergic to horses. Lord, and @Coach Nowlin,I apologize for that.

The same folks calling it a coup are also the same folks that are going to be completely OK with calling a two-year event a national emergency to get around Congress. They will also be the ones cheering US intervention in Venezuela.