First day back -- a visit to "Some Assembly Required".

Here's some stuff from "Some Assembly Required"  --  more reason to bury your head in your hands and cry.  And no, it's not all the "libruls", it's not "them damned hippies", it's "The Very Serious People", the "businessmen", the "Conservatives" (AKA - RADICALS), and all the Racist-Right-Wing-Christianist-Republicans, the ones who would rather die than see Obama succeed  --  and the USA be damned.

Please follow link to original.
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http://ckm3.blogspot.com/

Return To Sender: The MSM says the Republicans and the Administration are talking past each other. Not true. They're not talking at all. Republicans just don't want to hand Obama anything the press will perceive as a victory. Anything 'bipartisan' would, they feel, be seen as surrender, so they will accept nothing short of the President's complete surrender to their demands – serious cuts to social spending, no new taxes, no loopholes closed. It is not a failure to communicate, it is a refusal to communicare.

“No Discernible Effect”:That's what the research says, minimum wage laws laws cause “little or no employment response”. In other words, raising the minimum wage modestly does not kill jobs nor drive business under. It just makes the Republicans mad to see the poor getting anything at all resembling a fair shake. 

Scoop: In order to keep cigars from being taxed like ordinary tobacco products, Congress granted cigar companies an exception that has allowed a dozen tobacco companies to evade as much as $1.1 billion in US taxes by making their products heavier – by adding kitty litter. Not post-consumer kitty litter, but the same clay used in kitty litter. No wonder those things taste like... kitty litter.

And Now For Something Completely Self-Destructive: European leaders are “strongly considering” making depositors as well as investors in Cypriot banks take a serious hit as part of a bailout. Makes some sense, for Cyprus is a tax haven and most of the money on deposit is undoubtedly of questionable provenance, but if all deposits over 100,000 euros are confiscated – or very heavily taxed – then the same folks will take their “more than 100,000 euro” deposits out of lots of other eurozone banks. Ah, a continent-wide bank run!

This Just In Deleted: The Congressional Research Service reported that it “found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth”, and that “reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth.” Mitch McConnell didn't want it bandied about, so he had the report un-reported.
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There is A LOT MORE  --  go there.