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Joe Nation

Joe Nation's Journal
Joe Nation's Journal
March 1, 2019

Just like Russia, the U.S. has organized crime running the country.

This is no coincidence. As we all know, an organized crime syndicate headed by Putin has been running Russia for years. The Russian people know this. The world knows this. And now thanks to this criminal organization, with nukes...just sayin', the U.S. is now being run by a criminal organization not substantively different than the criminals running Russia.

How did we acquiesce to this so easily and find ourselves mired in this situation when we should have already marched on Washington en masse and taken our government back from these criminals? If Russia proves anything, the longer we wait, the more entrenched they become. I think Cohen's warning about the handover of power not going well if Trump loses the 2020 election was a dire warning. I believe him on this point 100% especially if it means Trump will then be indicted upon leaving office.

I think that this summer has to be the summer we take this country out of the hands of the Republicans and their idiot leader. We need march after march on Washington until we once a again have a democracy we can take pride in.

February 28, 2019

The Tax Thread: Trump's Middle Class Tax Cut Will Bankrupt YOU!

I just went out at lunch today and picked up my taxes from the accountant. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect given that my household income was pretty much the same as last year, my tax deductions and federal withholding amounts were not much different than last year, and my dependents stayed the same.

After all was said and done, I paid an extra $1,000 dollar in taxes on April 15th last year. This year, I will owe an extra $4,000 in federal taxes.

If you haven't done your taxes this year, you can pretty much expect to be in shock at what your middle class tax cut will end up costing you. At least you can take comfort in knowing that millionaires and billionaires can now deduct the cost of their private jets.

Has anyone else here had the same experience? I feel your pain.

February 28, 2019

Standing in line at the pharmacy today when the octogenarian ahead of me....

...turned around and started talking about the cost of prescriptions and how they keep going up. I thought, "Okay, this guys wants to complain a little and he has the right, he's been around long enough." The next words out of his mouth I maybe should have expected but I was still amazed to hear them just the same.

He said that that crazy woman in New York was going to promise everything to the young people like free medicine, free schooling, free everything just to get votes. I had to ask, but I think that I already knew, what crazy woman he was talking about. He said, "that Ocasio woman". I told him that those things weren't true but that is how Republicans were trying to characterize her policies. In his best Fox News parroting voice he said, "That it was socialism."

He went back to talking about health care and said that we couldn't afford the 9 million dollars for free health care for everyone. I knew what he meant...kind of. So I said, "How is it that places that aren't nearly as rich as this country like Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and pretty much every industrialized country on the planet can afford to provide health care for their citizens and we can't?"

I didn't know an 80 something year old could snap his head back around that fast. I didn't stop. I told him that we could easily provide that same health benefits our European allies provide to their citizens. I told him that the U.S. spends about 34 trillion on health care in 10 years and if we had universal health care, it would actually cost about 2 trillion less over the same period. I just kept whispering facts and statistics over his shoulder as he waited for his turn.

You've never seen a man so grateful to finally reach the head of any line.

February 25, 2019

One Hellava blizzard yesterday!!!

My God! I've lived in the Midwest most of my life but I have never seen anything like this. Leaving Des Moines. IA yesterday, going west was impossible, going north was impossible. Fortunately, I was going east and drove out of a weather hell-scape. My son was heading to Minneapolis at 9:00 AM yesterday, and as of 9:00 AM today he isn't even half way home. Several hours stuck on I-35 then a hotel overnight and the roads are still closed for a couple more hours. Visibility yesterday out on the road was 1 foot. We've had plenty of blizzards here but this one was something special. Wow! Hope everyone makes it home safely.

February 25, 2019

If you could pick from the current Democratic candidates and put them in the following postions...

...who would you put in each position right now? Feel free to skip any you wish and add people that may or may not announce a run for the presidency. In other words, what would you ideally like to see the next government look like?

1. President
2. Vice President
3. Secretary of State
4. Secretary of the Treasury
5. Secretary of Defense
6. United States Attorney General
7. Secretary of the Interior
8. Secretary of Agriculture
9. Secretary of Commerce
10. Secretary of Labor
11. Secretary of Health and Human Services
12. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
13. Secretary of Transportation
14. Secretary of Energy
15. Secretary of Education
16. Secretary of Veterans Affairs
17. Secretary of Homeland Security

Here is a helpful list from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/2020-presidential-candidates.html

January 28, 2019

Someone on AM Joy finally said what I've been saying.

If Trump or any of the repukes ever shuts down the government again, federal workers should walk that day. All of them. Then see how long the shutdown lasts. By continuing to show up every day and working for no pay, the effects of the shutdown take a month or more to really be felt by the public. From travel to food inspections, the situation tends to grow more precarious day-by-day as we saw but if every federal workers walks day-one, then the shutdown will end over night. Let's hope it doesn't happen again but at least we learned how to end it quickly the next time the idiots in Washington have a pissing match. I guess we have to be the adults.

January 17, 2019

I don't know when, but at some point we'll learn that Trump got reimbursed for the Hamberders

You know it's coming. You know even though he bragged that he paid for the 300, I mean 1,000 hamberders, he will end up being reimbursed for the expense.

I give it a month.

November 12, 2018

Yes, Tuesday did stick a knife into the gut of the GOP

and sorry for the violent imagery, but this moment is exactly the right moment to twist that knife back and forth. This is not the time to sit back and rest. Get out there and protest everything. Take the momentum we just witnessed and move our agenda forward. Forget the bragging and needling of the other side, heck, pretend we lost on Tuesday and come out of the gate this week with even more resolve than we saw on Tuesday. They are hoping that we get smug and stop pushing. Take it to them before they can regroup, and you know that they will. Lets reclaim sanity in this country from those that are content with willful ignorance. I am open to ideas that can be played out on either local or national stage. Please give us your best suggestions for carrying this fight for our democracy forwards and sweeping the ugly nationalists back under their rocks.

November 9, 2018

A Neighbor From The Rural Community I Grew Up In Just Won the Minnesota State Auditors Race

She is a wonderful, wonderful young woman. My brother and I would take turns babysitting her and her sister when they were just little kids in our rural farming community. She will do an incredible job for Minnesota. She is brilliant, kind, and as nice as a human being comes. The auditor's office in Minnesota has a 30 billion dollar annual budget and normally has been occupied by a Republican but Julie handily beat the Republican this time around. I couldn't be more proud of her. This truly is the year of the woman candidate and if Julie is any indication, we have a fantastic crop of new leaders coming into their own and we will all be better off for it.

November 9, 2018

Really Beginning to Get Suspicious of All These "Close" Elections

When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands to millions of votes, what are the odds that both candidates get roughly the same number of votes again and again? I understand that the real odds are determined by how many people vote and that close elections are inevitable occasionally, but it just seems like statistically we shouldn't have as many close elections as we always seem to have.

Can anybody explain to me the statistics behind why we would see so many knotted up election outcomes election after election? It just seems like the vote counts have to be manipulated to keep getting these close calls once the number of votes reaches millions and millions. Have we just accepted the fact that we have a lot of close election outcomes or are there statistics that prove that close elections are an anomaly after so many votes have been cast?

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