Good news! Donald Trump's tax plan is out. He claims it's revenue neutral, and, remarkably, doesn't claim that this is because of dynamic effects that will supercharge the economy. It's just plain revenue neutral. But let's put aside this extremely unlikely claim for the moment and look instead only at how Trump's plan affects his rich golfing buddies. Here are all the aspects of the plan that benefit the rich:

• Cut the top marginal rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent
• Eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax
• Eliminate the estate tax
• Cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent
• read more: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/09/donald-trump-releases-tax-plan-rich-will-love

Mona Charen makes a questionable assertion:

A Rubio/ Fiorina ticket (or Fiorina/Rubio) could win in 2016.

I doubt that these candidates will be on the 2016 ticket in either position when all is said and done, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that Republicans choose Rubio and he then chooses Fiorina as his running mate. That would leave the GOP with a ticket that has the least experience in national politics in almost seventy years. The two candidates would have remarkably little foreign policy experience between them, the presidential nominee would have no executive experience at all, and the vice presidential nominee would have some experience marred by a tenure widely regarded as unsuccessful. The ticket would be dogged by attacks on Fiorina’s corporate background and layoffs at H-P, and it would suffer from the fact that neither of them has a single legislative accomplishment or policy success. This is a ticket that would likely thrill movement conservative pundits, but they have an uncanny instinct for picking candidates that even Republican primary voters end up rejecting. By almost any measure, this would not be a successful presidential ticket for the GOP, and I suspect that Republican voters will realize that by the time it comes to vote.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-rubiofiorina-mirage/

The House Republican caucus is close to ungovernable these days. How did this situation come about?

This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.

By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible. Conservatives of this disposition can be dull, but they know how to nurture and run institutions. They also see the nation as one organic whole. Citizens may fall into different classes and political factions, but they are still joined by chains of affection that command ultimate loyalty and love.

All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/opinion/the-republicans-incompetence-caucus.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

Welcome to what we got rid off, hopefully... The Abbott regime was a bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced nightmare... It has been replaced by a bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced bad dream with elegance...

...

At the Reagan Library, Sen. Ted Cruz promised, “If I am elected president, on the very first day in office, I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee thundered that what is at stake with that agreement is “the survival of Western civilization.” Given that, the eventual Republican nominee “must, simply, make it very clear that the next president, one of us on this stage, will absolutely not honor that agreement, and will destroy it and will be tough with Iran, because otherwise, we put every person in this world in a very dangerous place.”

Born-again hawk Jeb Bush insisted that “the first thing that we need to do is to establish our commitment to Israel which has been altered by this administration. And, make sure that they have the most sophisticated weapons to send a signal to Iran that we have Israel’s back.”

“If I’m elected president,” Cruz promised, “our friends and allies across the globe will know that we stand with them. The bust of Winston Churchill will be back in the Oval Office, and the American embassy in Israel will be in Jerusalem.”

Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, confided that “having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him.”

Flipping back again to defending his brother’s foreign policy, Bush asserted that “there’s one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe.”

In a 21st-century reprise of the stab-in-the-back myth that prevailed in Germany after World War I, the other GOP contenders joined the former Florida governor in standing shoulder-to-shoulder in defense of the proposition that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq had made us safer and that it was only President Obama’s pusillanimity in failing to negotiate a status of forces agreement with Baghdad to keep American forces in the land between two rivers in perpetuity that opened the door for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to take control of large swathes of Sunni territory. Florida Senator Marco Rubio spoke for many when he concluded that events in contemporary Iraq challenged “the belief that somehow by retreating, America makes the world safer.”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-popular-is-peace/