Amazon is only a 1% now. For the first decade or so it was a struggling startup.J said:Amazon is red herring because there is always a 1%.

Amazon is only a 1% now. For the first decade or so it was a struggling startup.J said:Amazon is red herring because there is always a 1%.
There is already ample reason to leave. This is garbage corporatist nonsense that says companies will simply decide to leave because of "uncompetitive taxes" or whatever. That is a lie. It isn't true.
Give corporations the ability to reduce their taxes $2 for every $ they pay in salaries and benefits up to a certain amount, they will spend more money paying employees. They won't leave the country because that is cost prohibitive for all but the largest companies, and you won't attract top talent from American universities by living overseas.
That would be good, too, once the necessary stuff is done.
J
Grazing, bailing and harvesting. Obviously.What necessary stuff?
Elizabeth Warren twice badly underperformed national Democrats in her Senate campaigns. I don't think she is a good presidential candidate. She did herself no favors with the ridiculous DNA stuff, but that's not the reason she's a weak candidate. She's a weak candidate because she doesn't have broad appeal and isn't a good campaigner. I don't think you're going to beat Trump with a Harvard law professor. And if Trump is going to beat himself, I don't think she is the person you want shepherding the party through elections past 2020 that have the potential to be bad for Democrats.
I don't think Bernie will do well against younger people who he can't position himself to the left of. The thing I can't figure out about him is, he has the ability to go much further out there, start talking up stuff like reparations and a jobs guarantee, really get out on the actual American left and get people fired up. But he hasn't. I'm grateful that he appears to have won the party over on single payer/universal guaranteed coverage, but his post-2016 career has been uninspiring.
The reason is Medicare. If it’s provided for those making $15 an hour, there will be pressures to provide it for most workers. Otherwise, uncovered workers might stage a political rebellion or switch from today’s low-paying private-sector jobs to the better-paid public-service jobs, as the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip notes. The same logic applies to child-care subsidies.
I'm sure it'll happen again. :-(
I think Gavin Newsom will be the pick for the top. Kamala Harris will give him a run for his money but I don't think they'll stack the ticket with two Californians.
What's the problem with her?
But here’s another doozy: The People (of California) v. Efrain Velasco-Palacios. In this unpublished opinion from the Fifth Appellate District, the California Court of Appeal reveals that state prosecutors and California Attorney General Kamala Harris continue to be part of the problem. Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray committed “outrageous government misconduct.” Ms. Harris and her staff defended the indefensible—California State prosecutor Murray flat out falsified a transcript of a defendant’s confession.
Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray added two lines of transcript to “evidence” that the defendant confessed to an even more egregious offense than that with which he had been charged—the already hideous offense of molesting a child. With the two sentences that state’s attorney Murray perjuriously added, Murray was able to threaten charges that carried a term of life in prison.
When confronted with the defense’s motion to dismiss the indictment for outrageous prosecutorial misconduct, Mr. Murray claimed his own false alteration of the transcript was “in jest,” a “joke” between two lawyers, and harmless to the defendant. Mr. Murray lobbed in another little bombshell for good measure, swearing that defense counsel had said that the defendant’s defense was “not viable.”
California Judge H.A. Staley got it right. He found that Mr. Murray’s fabrication of “evidence”—falsifying the transcript of a confession during discovery and plea negotiations—was “egregious, outrageous, and . . . shocked the conscience.”
The trial judge saw no laughing matter—and neither should the rest of us. He dismissed the indictment completely, and in a scathing opinion, also quoted by the appellate court, wrote that the prosecutor’s actions “diluted the protections accompanying the right to counsel and ran the risk of fraudulently inducing defendant to enter a plea and forfeit his right to a jury trial.” The court refused to “tolerate such outrageous conduct that results in the depravation of basic fundamental constitutional rights that are designed to provide basic fairness.”
Undaunted by the criminal conduct of a state prosecutor, or the district court’s opinion, Ms. Harris appealed the decision dismissing the indictment. According to the California attorney general, only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment. Fortunately for all of us—and the Constitution—she lost again.
This is Ms. Harris’ third strike in hardly as many months—and those are only the ones that have come to our attention.
There is the outrageous misconduct by the state court agents and investigators in the Sierra Pacific/Moonlight Fire case that caused a state judge to enter a multi-million judgment against Cal Fire. And only a few weeks ago, Ninth Circuit Judges Kozinski, Fletcher and Wardlaw saw misconduct so egregious that Judge Kozinski raised the specter of a perjury prosecution of the prosecutor during the oral argument. Attorney General Harris had to reverse course on that case, but she did so only after the Ninth Circuit judges made clear that she would not like the opinion that would be forthcoming if she did not correct it herself. In that case, Baca, the state court of appeal saw evidence that the prosecutor himself had committed perjury. If Ms. Harris’ office had its way, it all would have been swept under the rug.
Trump's first 100 days felt like years... It's hard to believe that we've only had him in office for less than 2 years... its been a slog.But I actually think this will play very differently in 2020 than it did in 2016. Ordinarily, for the party with the presidential incumbent, there is, after 8 years X-fatigue, ("Obama-fatigue," e.g.). I think Trump will have generated Trump-fatigue in four years. I think America is largely tired of him already. In fact, long tired of him by now.
+1 on Gavin Newsome. I've been saying/thinking he was the guy since before the 2016 election. I also like Kamala Harris... @Lexicus -nobody's perfectI think Gavin Newsom will be the pick for the top. Kamala Harris will give him a run for his money but I don't think they'll stack the ticket with two Californians.
California could have seismic impact on 2020 Democratic presidential race
The nation’s most populous liberal state has moved its presidential nominating contest to early in the 2020 calendar, a shift its leaders hope will give it maximum impact on the selection of a Democratic nominee and push candidates to address progressive issues such as climate change.
The reshuffling means California voters, who can cast ballots weeks before primary election day, will be helping to determine a nominee at the same time as those in traditional early primary states such as New Hampshire.
“It’s a big deal,” said Ben Tulchin, a San Francisco-based consultant who worked as a pollster for Democratic U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. “The traditional schedule had smaller states, more affordable states, retail politics. California is not like that.”
The shift to so-called “Super Tuesday” in March 2020 will change how campaigns structure their efforts and require tough decisions about allocation of resources, Democratic Party sources and strategists say. Competing in California, with its large, expensive media markets, may only be possible for the most deep-pocketed campaigns.
That factor alone might be enough to keep some of the two dozen or so Democrats who are considering entering the race from getting in.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...20-democratic-presidential-race-idUSKBN1OD191
Will the choice between Democratic candidates and the agenda be influenced as much as this article of Reuters suggests ?
It will very likely quash the "I don't really think I have a chance but let me get in the door in Iowa and see what happens" crowd.