Tag Archives: SNL

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The Media Are Missing the Mark In Their Trump Coverage

Did you know President Trump’s press secretary and the media were engaged in an all-out war over the size of the crowd at the inauguration?

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White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer blasted the media on Jan. 21, accusing them of intentionally falsely reporting on the size of Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd.

Do you know that Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich has been suspended for a tasteless tweet about Trump’s 10-year-old son Barron: “Barron will be this country’s first homeschool shooter?” And that about 80,000 people have signed a Change.org petition demanding that Rich be fired?

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Madonna at the Women’s March

How about that attention-hogging Madonna said “Fuck” multiple times in her remarks to the Wash., D.C. Women’s March, that a Time magazine reporter incorrectly said in a tweet and a pool report that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office, or that actor, James Franco, who had a breakout role in 1999’s “Freaks and Geeks”, said he’s “spiraled into a depression” following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump?

You have probably heard about all this because the media loves this stuff and figures you do too. But in the media’s obsession with being adversarial and entertaining in its coverage of the new Trump Administration, they are falling into a trap of covering the non-consequential.

To an unfortunate degree, the media has gone from its obsequious coverage of Barack Obama, what Noah Rothman called in Commentary a “kind of vapidity that typified political media in the Obama years,” to a 24-7 hostility to Trump that can’t distinguish between the trivial and the significant.

Meanwhile there’s real consequential governing going on.

Today, for example, Trump signed executive actions that cut aid to groups that provide or promote abortions overseas, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and impose an immediate federal hiring freeze.

Trump’s administration also has signaled it is unlikely to move quickly to discontinue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program Obama established in 2012, that it is rethinking its earlier promise to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and that plans to penalize so-called sanctuary cities are expected to move ahead.

If the media really wants to perform a service for the American people, they need to move away from distracting audiences with inconsequential blathering, petty grievances and tit-for-tat arguments and commit to focusing on significant events in the United States and around the world that have the potential to change our lives.

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Our Oregon: shooting Oregon in the foot – Dems and unions want more money to spend on more “stuff”

 

Tax big business. “Yeah.. that’s the ticket! Yeah, you betcha!,” SNL’s Tommy Flanagan would say.

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A Better Oregon, a campaign organization operating under the umbrella of Portland-based Our Oregon, a coalition of unions and progressive groups, agrees.

A Better Oregon is promoting Initiative Petition 28 for the November 2016 ballot. The measure would raise the corporate minimum tax on Oregon sales of more than $25 million a year from the current minimum of $50,000 to $30,001 plus 2.5 percent of the excess over $25 million. The tax would be based solely on sales, not profit.

The Legislative Revenue Office estimates the corporate tax measure would raise $5.3 billion during the 2017-2019 biennium. Corporate taxes during that biennium under the current system are projected to reach about $1.1 billion.

In other words, the measure would increase corporate tax collections per biennium by a whopping 400 percent in one fell swoop.

Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D-Portland), when endorsing the measure, said it would eliminate much of the constant need to choose between funding critical budget concerns each legislative session. “If that passes, we’ll have a lot of money to pay for stuff,” Greenlick said.

Otherwise, Greenlick said, most of the additional revenue in the economic forecast for the 2017-2019 budget would go to cover increased PERS liabilities and the state’s increased share of Medicaid funding, leaving little additional revenue for new stuff.

But not to worry, says Ben Unger, executive director of Our Oregon. The extra money won’t come out of your pocket. It will come mostly from large out-of-state corporations.

About 1,000 corporations doing business in Oregon, mostly multi-state corporations, would be affected by the higher taxes.

“This measure will make sure that large and out-of-state corporations do their part to fund the schools and services that will make Oregon thrive,” Our Oregon says on its website.

As long ago as I can remember advocates for higher taxes in Oregon have been making “out-of-state corporations” the bogeyman, the malignant beast that’s doing Oregonians wrong and needs to pay.

But as attractive a target as these corporations are, they’re not fools. They will find a way to avoid paying the taxes or they’ll pass on the added taxes to Oregon consumers as a stealth sales tax.

Moving a company’s headquarters to another state with a more congenial tax environment, as GE is doing with its recently announced shift from Connecticut to Massachusetts, won’t solve the problem, but there are always run-arounds.

Maybe some businesses will change their ownership form to get sales in Oregon under the $25 million trigger. Others may institute some special, higher regional pricing.

Some creative companies may become benefit corporations. Our Oregon thought it was being clever and supportive of the “good guys” when it inserted a provision in its initiative to exclude benefit companies under ORS 60.754 from the higher taxes. But this opened a loophole ripe for exploitation.

The liberal coalition behind Initiative petition 28, recalling their success in a tax increase battle in 2010, may be figuring they have a sure thing again with another measure targeting big business, but hopefully Oregonians in their wisdom will see this  proposal is a reach too far.