It's really telling that @billmaher, who swoops in as some kind of crusader for free speech every time a neo-Nazi is banned from social media, is absolutely fine with BDS supporters being stripped of basic freedom of expression rights by ostensibly democratic governments.
Like, this guy had a problem with people deplatforming Milo Yiannopoulos when he was strutting around saying that pedophilia isn't that bad really. But Israel banning people from entering the country based on political speech? That's cool with him.
It's not hard to see that @billmaher has a very tortured, and skin-color-based, view of whose free speech matters and whose doesn't.
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With Detroit seeing a population and economic rebound, it's worth exploring what exactly caused the city to fall so hard — because there are REALLY important lessons for a lot of other U.S. cities, some of which are making similar mistakes to Detroit and not realizing it.
The standard answer that politicians and economists will give you is "the auto industry changed, there weren't as many jobs as there used to be, so the population declined."
This is true, but it's really not the whole story.
The follow-up question here, that rarely gets asked, is, WHY does a population crash mean the city goes bankrupt? There are fewer taxpayers, sure, but there's also fewer people using public services, so shouldn't it all kind of even out?
Biden gave Netanyahu months — literally months — to explain what his plan was for keeping the civilians he forcibly evacuated to Rafah safe if they bomb that area.
He was very clear they needed to have that plan or we'd cut him off.
Netanyahu ignored him. Totally blew him off.
The U.S. has *already* at this point bent several of its own laws that require countries receiving our weapons sales to allow a certain level of humanitarian aid in, to keep Israel supplied for a war that it absolutely has the money and manufacturing to prosecute 100% on its own.
Netanyahu has no one to blame but himself for Biden losing his patience and drawing a line on invading Rafah.
Yes, Hamas has been a bad faith actor. Yes, they started the war. That doesn't mean Israel gets a pass to flatten civilians in the city ISRAEL TOLD THEM TO GO TO.
Actually, it's bad that California's average property tax rate is that low. Really bad.
Excessively low property taxes is a big reason why California is so unaffordable for middle-class workers, and why so many of them are moving to Texas.
Ever since Proposition 13 set hard limits on property taxes in California, cities there have had a big problem. Previously when they had budget deficits on infrastructure, education and public services, they could raise property taxes to plug the gap. But now, they can't do that.
So what these cities do is, instead of taxing the people who own the houses, they tax the developers building the houses. It's called "impact fees." Developers have to pay cities tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for every unit of housing they build.
Sigh... every year I have to explain this. THIS PART OF THE TAX CODE HAS A VERY GOOD REASON FOR EXISTING.
Of course the IRS doesn't expect criminals to follow it. The idea is that when they DON'T follow it, they can then get charged with tax evasion on top of their other crimes.
Organized crime bosses are hard to prosecute because they can kill, threaten, or intimidate any witnesses to their crimes.
But it's MUCH harder for them to beat tax evasion. Because they clearly have the money, and clearly didn't file a tax return and declare how they earned it.
That is why this provision exists. So that in the event that a mobster silences anyone who could prove their murder, racketeering, etc, the IRS can still nail them for not reporting how they got their ill-gotten gains.
Neither side wants "a secular binational one state solution for Jews AND Palestinians" because both sides are (rightly) terrified of what would happen if the other elected a majority to rule over that combined country.
The *only* path to peace is both of them getting a state.