With regards to regarding

From the first sentence in Congressman Nadler's letter the other day to Attorney General Barr:

I write to you regarding troubling media reports relating to your handling of Special Counsel Mueller's report...

Just awful! Instead this should be "I write to you about troubling media reports on your handling of Special Counsel Mueller's report..." (without the italics, of course.)

Either "about" or "on" is always better than "regarding," which you should never use.

I've written about this grotesque usage before: Regarding on and upon.

Whenever Nadler is on TV, he's admirably plain-spoken and articulate. The blame probably lies with his staff, and he just signed the clunky letter.

See also Gagging the "globe" for a "decade."

Tax cut for corporations and millionaires

$29 billion tax break

David Leonhardt:

Amazon. Delta Air Lines. Chevron. IBM. General Motors. Molson Coors. Eli Lilly.

What do these companies have in common? They paid no federal taxes last year.

Thanks to President Trump’s 2017 tax law, the number of Fortune 500 companies that pay no federal taxes roughly doubled last year, to 60, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group. Some of them effectively paid negative taxes, because they received a refund.

The number of companies paying no taxes has risen for two main reasons. First, the Trump tax law expanded some corporate tax breaks, such as the one for the purchase of machinery and vehicles. 

Second, the law reduced the top-line corporate tax rate, which means that some companies now have a low enough tax bill that they can wipe it out entirely with tax breaks.

Altogether, the law led to a 31 percent decline in corporate-tax revenue last year. That decline has helped cause an increase in the deficit. As the law professors Rebecca Kysar and Linda Sugin have written, the Trump tax cut is financed “on the backs of future generations”...

The Republican ethos: "Tough" guys don't care

In today's NY Times:

...In 2002, the political commentator Luca Sofri, writing on his blog Wittgenstein, noted that the word “buonista” or do-gooder had become “an alibi for the bad guys to be bad: If you do good then you are a do-gooder.”

In 2008, La Repubblica, the liberal Rome daily, wrote that the center-right had redefined the positive word as “synonymous with softy” and that some politicians, especially when it came to the issue of migration, sprinkled do-gooder around “like parsley.”

...But there are real-world consequences to making good bad and bad good, not least a more permissive atmosphere to be downright mean, uncivil or even violent.

As Mr. Salvini has increasingly attacked migrants verbally, more Italians have done so physically, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors hate crimes. Some liberals have embraced the redefinition as a reality, and have proudly worn “buonista” T-shirts. But others see it as a dangerous erosion of Italy’s values...(In Italy, heaping ridicule on nation's "do-gooders.")

Rob's comment:

This is familiar stuff, since we see it deployed by our country's right wing, particularly by President Trump. It's a symptom of the stupidity fostered by toxic masculinity, the notion that to be "tough" you have to be cruel.