2017 Mar 26^th

So the great deal maker got dealt with! The health care defeat is no surprise, this substitute bill had a 17 percent approval rating. The AMA, the American Hospital Association, the American Association of Retired Persons and several other outfits whose shtick is health care, opposed it. Apparently, our national embarrassment assumed he had no need to talk to these groups, or to the “we hate government all to pieces” right wing caucus of his own party to push this legislation through. He was probably right; he couldn’t have done anything to save this. OK, now it’s on to his next fiasco which will be the tax issue.

As it stands now the surtax on high income people stands. Trump’s tax plan will cut the capital gains tax, eliminate the estate tax that affects a tiny percent of the highest net worth people and cut the awful, awful corporate tax. Very few corporations pay this 35 percent federal corporate tax anyway. The average corporate tax paid is about 17 percent, which is the corporate tax rate in most other countries, You can be sure that once the legal rate drops to perhaps fifteen percent, tax attorneys will again figure a way to eliminate it altogether for their clients.

Trump and company have far more troublesome problems: General Flynn was being paid by Turkey to represent their interests here in the US. Congress gave this information to the Trump transition team headed by Vice President Pence. Pence claimed he knew nothing about it. (I’m reminded of the dimwitted Sergeant Schultz in “Hogan’s Heroes” whose line was always “I know nothing; I know nothing.”) Pence is not supposed to be a clone of a dimwitted German sergeant in a “B” comedy, still, maybe he is.

Turkey wants the US to extradite a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Turkey claims this resident of Pennsylvania is somehow responsible for the recent revolt by some members of the Turkish military. Gulen is no friend of Premier Erdogan and he would much prefer a more democratic Turkey but it seems unlikely that he could influence events in Turkey half a world away. General Flynn’s lobbying group is employed by Turkey, which pays them many hundreds of thousand dollars for their efforts on behalf of the Turkish government. As a result, General Flynn has lobbied the US government to extradite Fethullah Gulen back to Turkey. One of the principles here, Bijan Kian, claims that Gulen is “leading a cultural invasion of the United States.” Kian is a very right-leaning monetary official who has also presented the curious statistic, favored by the right , that 93 million Americans are out of the labor force. (As I’ve said before, this ignores retirees. college students and stay at home mothers. Kian, like many right wingers, is only interested in misleading, not in informing.)

So we have the interesting case of General Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor, a position requiring no  senate conformation, working for the Turkish government while he is privy to the very secret intelligence briefings accorded to the President of the United States. To paraphrase one of our president’s earlier utterances, “What the hell is going on?”

(Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed that nothing was posted yesterday. I was busy celebrating my 90^th birthday with a number of friends. In another ten years I might take another day off.)