07/01/2024. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that presidents have "absolute immunity from criminal prosecution" for acts that fall within the "exercise of his core constitutional powers he took when in office." Presidents, according to the ruling, have "at least presumptive" immunity from other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

Legal expert point out that SCOTUS "invented a new rule" that could even give Trump immunity for "unofficial acts". "The million-dollar question now is how the president's conduct is categorized," said University of Miami School of Law professor Caroline Mala Corbin. "If what he did is considered official conduct, then he has either absolute immunity or at least a presumption of immunity," she said. "And a presumption that will be very difficult to rebut."

Like others, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, called the "official-versus-unofficial act distinction... both arbitrary and irrational." Jackson said "the Court has neglected to lay out a standard that reliably distinguishes between a President’s official and unofficial conduct." Jackson said she questioned whether a president could be held accountable for committing crimes while undertaking official duties. The Supreme Court's ruling lacked detailed parameters of what constitutes an official — and core — presidential act.

Besides creating a dangerously ambiguous legal situation, the purpose of the SCOTUS is to interpret laws, not to write new ones, can anyone please inform us where in the US Constitution or any of the myriad of US laws (either explicit or implied) that the President has absolute immunity? If there is none then they are overstepping what their function is by willing to grant immunity. The conservative judges are "originalist" only when it is convenient to justify their rulings. The founding father clearly recognized that a President could be impeached for criminal acts. Clearly, they recognized that the President is not above the law. Then again, in history, even kings were rarely above the law.

This web site was about supporting President Biden because Democrats are clearly so bad at messaging. Apparently it's time to point out just how bad Trump has been and would be for America. There's a lot to work with, since he not only embodies most of what is evil, he embraces it. The thing is that there is more to it. It has a lot to do with tights and Libertarian ideology that wants to take away all individual rights in the name of money. He who has the most wealth wins. It's pretty ugly and if we want a democracy instead of an oligarchy, we need to know about it and fight it. It's why a working class person simply cannot support a family anymore.

Here are some pages about Trump, the Oligarchs, the Libertarians and how to fight them.
About Trump and the Evil of MAGA Republicans
Trump Image Memes

The main purpose of this is to offer some pithy sayings that you can paste in the comments section of media or in social media that are powerful political truths to disrupt the dishonest Republican narrative. There are a lot more in the sections below. I ordered them the best I could, but there are so many of them.

If you want to understand Trump, his enablers and much of Maga, look at this description of Sociopaths. Their shamelessness gives them great power.

Of all the statements you can post, one statement stands out more than any other because it is such a sad, damning truth. This is especially good to use when a Republican attacks the Democrats or the President with a short, dumb comment. Post this where you can. If you want to have fun, post it in comments sections, on Twitter, on Fox, on Reddit, on WaPo, conservative Facebook groups or get an account on Truth Social if you really what to go for it. Simply post one of these:

(Use all or part as needed.) That's a truth that hurts, because it's true. Republicans haven't legislated and they try to dominate through the courts because no one likes their policies. They don't always even have a known platform but instead just say "vote for us and we will fix everything those despicable socialist Democrats are doing to destroy this country". They love to claim that "Democrats hate America". Worse still, they break things just so they can claim the Democrats have failed and only they can fix them. They damage America to damage Democrats politically.

Paste that one line and you will get every kind of deflection, whataboutism, personal attack and evasion imaginable, but you won't get many lies, because it's so true. There is no answer except more guns and tax cuts for the rich. Post it with a list of President Biden's accomplishments that are listed below. Occasionally, they will reply with something valid. The country has also problems like immigration that neither party can solve for whatever reason. The answers to paste for those are below as well.

Here's one for bonus points because it's a favorite story in the Republican echo chamber. Figure out where you can use it and you will not only annoy them, but confuse them too because "in the bubble" they constantly hear it about Democrats.

Clearly, Maga Republicans do hate American Democracy because they can't get what they want through fair elections. That is also why they work so hard to dominate the courts. Voters just don't like what few policies they seem to have. Republicans actually do like America. They want to rule it though and they are horrible at even governing. They also want to end every program that helps ordinary Americans from Obamacare, to SNAP food assistance, to Social Security that keeps old folks from dying on the cold streets. They practice selfishness and cruelty.

Archive - Made July 2024. This got very long and with all the debunked accusations against President Biden and his family, a lot of it became obsolete. As such, everything about I could remove is being removed. If you don't find something on this page, look there. If you don't see it there, look at the page source since there is a lot in the comments that don't show on the page.

Removed or trimmed topics include:
Tommy Tuberville's blocking promotions.
Most about prosecutions of the Biden Family... which was endless.
Most about Hunter Biden, especially the laptop because it was a nothing burger.
... We'll see.

July 4, 2024. More and more people are looking at the Heritage Foundations 920 page Project 2025 is a detailed policy and playbook for the Republicans if Trump should be re-elected. To put it mildly, it's aa nightmare. The Supreme Court just said that the President is above the law. Project 2025 is much worse and lays out what they plan to do when not controlled by law. It will exert total control over every aspect of your life, in terms of what you look at and what you read, what you mail, what your healthcare is.” The far-right, draconian blueprint has been described as a legislative “wish list” for a Trump presidency that would significantly roll back civil rights.

Note that it is so obviously bad that even Trump is trying to disown it now. A problem with that is that all 3 of the top people in Project 2025 were Trump staffers from his first administration. Some 31 Trump administration officials were involved and Trump's name is mentioned in it 270 times. Trump has been talking about Projeect 2025 policies for two years now. Most of the policies in it are conservative darlings, with a bunch of authoritarian stuff thrown in on the backend. It is extreme enough that even Trump said "I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal." Of course he only said that because he knows how obviously bad many of the ideas are.

Project 2025 builds the foundation of a dictatorship by making government jobs based on loyalty to the President rather than competency and loyalty to America. It gives the President great control of the military.

Project 2025 also aims to “weaponize the Department of Justice as a tool directly under the control of Donald Trump. The document reads, “The DOJ falls under the direct supervision and control the president of the United States as a component of the executive branch. Litigation decisions must be made consistent with the president’s agenda”.

The foreword states that the next president must “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” Good idea, let's rip apart all the American institutions. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation said “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be”. It is literally a far right coup and if we try to stop them they will resort to open violence.

One of the central priorities outlined in Project 2025 includes reimplementing Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of workers so that they could be subject to swifter firing. The Associated Press noted that this could affect up to 50,000 federal workers. The point is to make the government work by patronage and loyalty, how criminal gangs work.

It includes massive tax cuts for the wealthy as well as the destruction of consumer protections. Project 2025, is largely about giving corporations massive profits by removing every protection for consumers and the environment. Get ready for some incredible pollution and with the USDA gone, regular food poisoning. The tax cuts and increase in military hardware spending have to be paid for so it includes cutting and/or eliminating veteran disability benefits, the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare. Cutting military pay is mentioned. That will hurt all of us, except the very rich.

These are only a few things it would do. It would do much much more. The Heritage Foundation also refutes climate science and that could lead anywhere.

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None of this is hidden. The Project 2025 document is on the Heritage Foundation web site. For a more extensive outline of what Project 2025 says and a link to it. It's scary.

Trump promised to cut the deficit. He added $8T to the debt. He promised to build a wall. He only did 458 miles out of 2,000. Most of it was repair or replacement, not new. He promised to make Mexico pay. They didn't. We did. He promised to unveil a new healthcare plan. It didn't exist. He promised a middle-class tax cut. He cut taxes for the rich. The middle class is paying for it. He said he wouldn't play golf as President. He made 250 visits (way more than Obama) to his own golf clubs. It cost taxpayers $150 million. He said he'd increase economic growth by 4%. Nope. Biden did. He promised an infrastructure plan. He had none. President Biden signed a massive one. He promised to hire "the best people." He fired 3/4 of them and then said they were the worst ever, and they said HE was in fact the worst ever. He promised to bring down the price of prescription drugs. He didn't: Biden did. He promised a Hillary lock-up. Nope Promised we'd win the trade war with China. Nope, It cost about 250,000 jobs and hurt Americans, not help them. He promised his corporate tax cuts would help and benefit Workers, and corporations would use that money to invest in American workers. They didn't, they used that money to buy back stocks. *He promised to revive the coal industry. Never happened: more coal jobs were lost during his presidency.

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The statistics for the entirety of Donald Trump’s time in office
The economy lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%. Average weekly earnings for all workers were down 8.7% after inflation.
The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016.
The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.
The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.
Illegal immigration increased 14.7%
Coal production declined 26.5%, and coal-mining jobs dropped by 16.7%. Carbon emissions from energy consumption dropped 11.5%.
Handgun production rose 12.5%in Trump’s last year compared with 2016, setting a new record.
The murder rate in Trump’s last year in office rose to the highest level since 1997.

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Independent voters complain about the economy, however they probably don't know that the value of the US dollar depends almost entirely on the faith that other countries (especially the EU) put on the US system. Once Putin invades Poland (European leaders are making preparations for this event) during a Trump admin, it is guaranteed that Trump won't honor article 5 as he said it several times, besides that is the command from trump's master a.k.a Putin. In this situation, the European nations will be forced to renounce the US dollar as the world reserve currency and they will have to coalesce their economies around the Euro, since they will have to face militarily Russia alone. Under such scenario the dollar drops 80% of its value. Do the independent voters complain about 3% inflation?? They will see what hyperinflation looks like (70% US inflation). Everyone will lose everything. And the independent voters think that this election is no big deal? What about Hand to hand combat in the streets just for bread. Putin will achieve his long term goal (now widely recognized as real) to cripple his major obstacle (the USA) for the revival of the Russian Empire.

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What Trump accomplished: Donald Trump didn't lower your taxes (He deferred them) He didn't get you that healthcare coverage, in fact over 300k lost coverage during his term He did not unite the USA, he divided it He didn't lower your prescription prices Didn't get your roads or bridges built He didn't decrease the deficit He didn't end the opioid crisis, in fact synthetic opioid deaths increased 192% during his term. He didn't revive the coal industry He didn't make covid-19 'disappear' He didn't make Mexico pay for the wall, in fact illegal immigration increased 14.7% even with his Unconstitutional policies, Covid and Title 42 He added $2 Billion a month in tariff costs to the American consumer He has a net-negative jobs creations for his administration, worst numbers of any President since The Great Depression He decreased corporate taxes, passing the tax burden to the workers He added $ 7.8 Trillion to the deficit, more debt than any President serving a 4-year term He incited an insurrection against our government, leading to loss of life and hundreds being imprisoned. He didn’t reduce crime, the national murder rate in his last year is the largest in national history. He didn't put "America first" and he sure didn't "Drain the Swamp...

So when you say "he fought for you". You mean he validated your hate?...Because he didn't do anything else...

In the pursuit of power, the Republicans have created a moral crisis as well as the political one. We very badly need a solution to right the ship of state. More depends on that than you might think. There is a solution that seems to have been overlooked. You just have to look at where we should be and how we got to where we are. It is about power and economics.

Where we need to be: America needs two political parties with competing visions of how to make America better to be able to face an uncertain future and to fulfill the great moral statement of the Preamble to the American Constitution. The voters need to choose which vision they want, including parts of each. Then both parties need to work together to make it real with the loyal opposition working to prevent mistakes.

How we got here: ... Republicans sold fear and Angertainment on Radio, then Television, then Talk Radio, then Fox News, then Social Media. Notably, between Talk Radio and Social Media, something was lost. If we find it again, politics can work again for the Democrats but not for the Republicans as they are today. You can reply back to social media. You just have to remember how it used to be done. You call out the lies. You persuade with reason and truth.

The Ancient Greeks developed democracy. They also developed Rhetoric or persuasive speaking, particularly Political Rhetoric, a very powerful force in a democracy. Notice that there was rhetoric on Talk Radio, soaked in anger, resentment and lies. That emotional appeal doesn't work as well on Social Media. You couldn't very effectively respond to the lies in Talk Radio rhetoric, but you sure can respond to them on Social Media. That needs to be remembered and taken advantage of. This page is about responding to Republican positions, especially the lies on Social Media, with rhetoric and it is very effective because they cannot respond. When they chose winning over everything else, including the wellbeing of America (thanks to "No Compromise, No Cooperation" Newt Gingrich) they also sacrificed honesty which makes them extremely vulnerable to truth. This page is about how to use truth as a political weapon. Even better, it is the political advertiser's dream - targeted messaging. Something that the political parties pay fortunes for. Better than that, it's free. All you have to do is use the rhetoric on this page on social media and you can reach out and touch not only the people of your political persuasion, but more importantly people that disagree with you and need their minds changed.

The most powerful statement or in this case, political rhetoric, is the Pithy Saying. A pithy phrase or statement is brief, but full of substance and meaning. I've tried to collect those. The layout is to put the topic at the head of an expandable section with the Pithy Statements and some details or appropriate explanation with it for background understanding or possibly to use.

How to use this: Anywhere you can comment in news articles or social media, use these sayings as responses. If they say Biden is crashing the economy, look for topics with "Biden" in the header, expand it, select an appropriate response and paste it. You have reached a target audience. It is true and the Republicans have put themselves in a position where it is almost impossible for them to refute it, because they decided to use lies. They can't use their emotional tactics on social media like they did on talk radio because emotion doesn't come through well in text.

You could also look at other topics such as about the economy because the data shows that the Republicans have done a horrible job of running the economy when in power. Just add it to what you paste about what Biden has accomplished. Maybe, just maybe, you can change a mind.

If a rhetorical phrase is a punch, be prepared for the counter punch. Just like someone trained in logic knows the seven (or ten or fifteen...) common logical fallacies used to fool critical thinking, anyone who wants to use rhetoric needs to recognize the standard ways to deal with rhetorical counter punches. The commonest are whataboutisms, deflection, personal attacks (ad hominem), lies and occasionally something with substance. While I wanted this to just be a collection of short pithy sayings with brief commentary, obviously the detail commentary has gotten much longer in some cases. That's OK, because sometimes you will get competent, even occasionally truthful, arguments back and then you will need understanding to properly reply.

... After updating this for a while, I see that this page has grown another function, providing short explanations of political issues. Economics mean that news outlets have to keep churning out content and they have to put a lot of filler in it. This page doesn't need that, so it can provide shorter descriptions of issues. That would make it fall somewhere between a news outlet and Politifact. If there is a current issue you are wondering about, you may be able to get a good introduction to it here. Note that a lot of links I have used as sources are in html comments, sort of hidden in the page source... if you want to look for them.

I ask one thing of you though. For this to work, I need help and that means others pasting these responses (modified some, I hope). So if you do paste from here, please add something like "Pasted from Lib-Talk.com" or "Pasted from Lib-TalkDOTcom" if links get ... blocked. If enough people use this, it can be a force for American Democracy.

The statements on this page are meant to be posted as ammunition in a political struggle that has consequences far beyond our country and this time. Freedom is essential to the future of humanity. It is great if you post these on social media to get out the Democratic Message, but also know your politics. Try to understand the issues and politics. Then you can add your own critical thinking and a bit of artistry to these statements. That is what will give them their real power.

Here are a couple of thoughts you might keep in mind.

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Always protect Truth. Lies are easy to invalidate. There is nothing wrong with slanting and sarcasm works well, but there are so many reasons to protect the Truth. Let the Republicans lie. This is a tool for calling them out on their lies.

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Ayn Rand, a writer with a talent for character building and long monologs, is one of the saints of the Republican party. Even more so of the Libertarians since she was basically espousing the Libertarian philosophy that "we are all completely independent of everyone else in our society and civilization". While that point is disastrously incorrect, an important point she made should be kept in mind. It is all about Morality. Everything you do is a moral choice, a choice between right and wrong. Whether it is someone working in a factory putting a nut on a bolt, a parent trying to help their child get an education, or a politician trying to find a path that will keep their voters and donors happy, it is about choosing. It is to be human. The importance of Morality cannot be overstated. Almost every institution teaches it.

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You have heard that "Those that the Gods would destroy, first they make mad". Well, one of the commonest forms of madness is arrogance. There are others, described as the Seven Deadly Sins. There are more. It's not like this is a secret or hard to understand. It is extremely easy to see in politics. There are a few ways to avoid the destruction that inevitably comes from "sins". For an individual or even a country to avoid self-destruction, virtues need to be practiced regularly, such as humility to defend against the danger of arrogance.

In everything I have learned about the potentials of success and failure though, the best way to avoid disaster is to keep Balance in mind. We have all heard of the concept of Ying and Yang, a common expression in many Asia philosophies for the need for Balance in all things. I couldn't find the concept in the West until I talked to some people that knew the story of the Oracle of Delphi, the most revered shrine of the ancient Western World. They knew. They told me about the principle of Balance represented by the 147 Maxims carved into the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The need for Balance is an ancient and universal wisdom that should always be kept in mind, especially in something as important as politics or economics.

If the point of this is about preventing the disaster of having Trump as President again, it is great to fight the social media battle, but it is also critical to organize. Here is a list of some organizations committed to fighting Trump and promoting American Progress. that this site is about

https://OurRevolution.com
https://RedWine.Blue
https://www.Indivisible.org
https://www.DemocratsAbroad.org
https://www.VoteCommonGood.com
https://www.CommonCause.org - Promoting Governance by the People.
https://www.progressivepolicy.org - Radically Pragmatic.

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Another Thing To Keep In Mind...

Underneath all this is a class war. It's why the Republicans want their base fighting the class war so that they don't notice the economic war eating their families alive. Culture war issues do not effect pocket books. The working class and what is left of the middle class are hurting financially. Trump said it was because the game is rigged, and he knew it because he took advantage of it. His success was blaming "liberal elites" for it and somehow convinced his base that he would help them. Really, it's old money, the kind that hates unions and protects their interests by financing Republican causes and candidates. In history, there has never really been a middle class, just the rich and the poor. It seems that much of the conservative goal is to return to that. They want their power with no limits from law.

You should have some understanding of the class wars stoked by the Oligarchs of America and anti-government Libertarians, who support the conservative candidates that make American Capitalism so brutal. It is leading to a situation where not just housing and health care have become unaffordable, but families are becoming unaffordable as well. It is the outcome of the economic war on the middle class. The best description comes from former United States Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich.

You can subscribe to Dr. Reich's free newsletter at robertreich.substack.com. He has a paid subscription service as well, but if you want his lessons about the reality of American Economics, the class war, wealth, poverty, and how the Oligarchs are destroying America, the easiest way to learn is to check out his www.youtube.com/@RBReich.

This site does have some commentary about Dr. Reich's thoughts, but it really more focused on supporting President Biden to prevent the disaster of another Trump Presidency. Economics though is the underlying issue, and you should know something about it.

Are you familiar with the term "Neo-Liberalism"? It's not about what you usually think of the term "Liberal". It refers to how business is treated and was largely started by Reagan. It means Liberalism towards business or perhaps "anything goes Capitalism". It was jobs going overseas. It was Shareholder interests over everything else. It was profits over everything else. It was nations and society serving business instead of business serving society and nations. It's why there is so much wealth inequality and why the world is awash in debt. All the profits of production gains of five decades of growth went to the owners and everyone else lost out. Well, Biden's State of the Union Speech said that was going to change, from Corporate Capitalism we had after Reagan to Democratic Capitalism we had before that, from the time of President Eisenhower. Business would serve the nation again like it did after President Eisenhower, the most prosperous time in America's history.

There is a reasson that corporations keep setting new profit records each year. The corporate monopolies need to be broken up so that prices are set by competition rather than corporate boards.

What does this mean today? Trump got elected for a reason. Many many Americans are hurting. The thing is though that the Republicans have very effectively worked to convince their base that the problem is the result of the culture wars and so they ignore the economic wars that are what are really hurting them. Warren Buffet said that there is a class war and his side is winning. The people that President Biden may be able to help the most are the very desperate people that voted for Trump. Trump isn't going to help them and neither are his wealthy backers.

03/09/2024. Reagan believed in American democracy. He called it “the highest social achievement of mankind” and he recognized that democracy is vulnerable. He said our democracy is “under attack from the outside, and it is under attack by those who would destroy it from the inside.” Now, Reagan’s own party is devoted to eradicating what he cherished. Ronald Reagan said that “democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.” Today, we have a deeply dishonorable man leading the fight to kill democracy.

During a recent Conservative Political Action Conference panel discussion moderated by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, right-wing activist Jack Posobiec said this: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this, right here,” Posobiec said as he pointed to the crowd and raised his clenched fist.

Conservatives make no secret of their intent to destroy democracy. To the contrary, they speak loud and proud of the fact that they reject the notion that America’s destiny should be determined by the will of the majority of its citizens and instead they strive to impose iron-fisted domination by their immoral and evil minority. Reagan Republicans celebrated the fall of fascism and the rise of democracy. Trump Republicans do the exact opposite. They wrap themselves in the flag and wave the Bible, pretending to be patriots and Christians when in fact they’re neither.

Sometimes you are going to see a post saying we shouldn't be helping Ukraine. It might be from a MAGA supporter because Putin was Trump's buddy, or it might be a real Russian Troll paid to "work 9 to 5" spreading disinformation (more on that later). So if you see something like spend American money to secure American borders, not Ukraine's or Ukraine is a criminal nation, just paste one of these.

There is another common post that many people think simply comes from Russian bots. Regardless of where it comes from, it needs to be answered. Many times I have seen the simple statement Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It does seem like classic projection from Russians, accusing their opponent of what they are so guilty of. In any case, the proper response is "Really, a large part of the reason Russia invaded Ukraine is because Ukraine was working to oust the incredibly corrupt officials that were serving Russia". Or just paste in "Thanks for your opinion comrade".

Abortion... Now that's a complex, hot button topic. There is a lot that can be said about it and the details need to be looked at for understanding. It's like the beautiful statues put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy. If they were really just memorials to the past, they would be fine. The problem is that they are being used as propaganda about very current issues. Abortion is the same way. It is an important moral issue, but it is being used as a political weapon. It is just more of the culture wars meant to distract from the economic wars going on that are killing ordianry Americans.

11/17/2023. The number of Venezuelans crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally dropped dramatically in October, when the Biden administration started deporting some migrants directly to crisis-stricken Venezuela, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data published Tuesday.

Border Patrol agents apprehended 29,637 migrants from Venezuela who entered the U.S. without authorization last month, a 46% drop from September, when unlawful crossings by Venezuelans soared to 54,833, a monthly record high.

The Biden administration announced in early October it had reached a deportation agreement with the Venezuelan government, a U.S.-sanctioned regime that had long refused to accept the return of its citizens. Officials at the time vowed to deport those found to be ineligible for asylum or a temporary legal status the Biden administration offered to 472,000 Venezuelans who arrived before July 31.

10/04/2023. President Biden has decided to try new strategy for slowing migration from Venezuela where 7.7 million people have fled crushing economic conditions. An election is coming in 2024 and may offer an opportunity for change.

November 2, 2023, Biden met with 12 political leaders from the Western Hemisphere to propose a plan to stabilize the countries and reduce the incentive for migration. There is a potential for incredible economic development in the countries from Canada to Chile. The countries had been working together over the past 18 months to build their economies from the bottom up. Lifting sanctions on Venezuela, contingent on fair elections in 2024, would open up Venezuelan oil, gas and gold sectors. Lifting the sanctions is also what other South American countries have been wanting so it should change the entire mood, perhaps allowing the cooperation that is needed to invigorate the economy of the continent.

September 2023. The unprecedented increase in migration in the Western Hemisphere has made almost all current immigration policies unworkable. In trying to deal with it, In a budget request to Congress, the administration has asked for an additional $4 billion for border enforcement, including 4,000 more troops, 1,500 more Border Patrol agents, overtime pay for federal border personnel and new technology to detect drug trafficking.

Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said Biden proposed an immigration overhaul on his first day in office that he noted has been blocked by Republican lawmakers. “He has used every available lever — enforcement, deterrence and diplomacy — to address historic migration across the Western Hemisphere,” LaBolt said,

Since Title 42 ended in May, the worst-case scenarios of masses of immigrants at the border didn’t happen and the administration has been touting a 42% drop in illegal border since then. The problem still exists though and the Biden administration has been ramping up deportations. ICE Air, a program that charters multiple planes each week from several states, is used to send migrants back to their home countries.

The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) One mobile app has made it easier to apply for asylum but has also prompted migrants to stay south of the border, because cheating disqualifies you applying for asylum.

At the same time, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s new, stricter asylum policy, which supporters had cited as a key factor in reducing the number of illegal border crossings. The administration is appealing.

07/27/2023 - Check this article out for a comprehensive history of attempts at Immigration Reform by Congress. Suffice to say, the Republicans do not allow it.

05/14/2023 - Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration stance on a surge of migration was working as "over the past two days, the Border Patrol has seen an approximately 50% drop in the number of people encountered at the southern border compared to numbers earlier this week before Title 42 ended at midnight on Thursday. What our rule provides is that an individual must access those lawful pathways that we have made available to them. As of 06/06/2023 that number is down 70% since Title 42 was rescinded? The numbers are lower now than they were under trump in 2019.

The root causes of why people flee their homes in the first instance, Vice President Harris has led the investment of more than $3 billion in the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, a years long effort that began with Obama but was ended by Trump.

The Republicans love to blame President Biden for the Fentanyl epidemic and claim the borders should be blockaded. Instead, in the spirit of openness to trade and travel as well as high-tech security, President Biden has vastly expanded the use of advanced scanning machines - known as "non-intrusive inspection" technology, or NII - as a centerpiece of his interdiction strategy.

The 2024 White House budget released in April includes $305 million for NII upgrades at CBP's ports of entry "with a primary focus on fentanyl detection." The increase is part of a Biden plan to install 123 "new large-scale scanners" by 2026. The new machines will ramp up U.S. inspection capacity from around two percent of passenger vehicles and about 17 percent of cargo vehicles to 40 percent of passenger vehicles and 70 percent of cargo vehicles, according to Biden officials.

The Republican strategy of close borders isn't going to help much anyway because CBP data show the drug is overwhelmingly smuggled through U.S. ports of entry - the official crossings - which account for more than 96 percent of fentanyl seizures along the border since the start of the 2022 fiscal year on Oct. 1. Also, it is mostly transported by U.S. citizens.

Republican claims that illegal immigrants serve as drug mules is far overstated. The cartels often enlist U.S. citizens to serve as couriers. U.S. citizens constitute 86 percent of fentanyl trafficking convictions in 2021, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency of the federal judiciary branch.

In March 2023, the Biden Administration completed negotiations with Mexico to crack down on Fentanyl production in exchange for the U.S. cracking down on guns crossing the southern border.

One of the best ways to lie, a highly regarded skill in Republican circles, is by Logical Manipulation by using Logical Fallacies. The technique is well known. Depending on who you read, starting with Aristotle or Buddhism, there are lots of ways of doing it. Done properly, they can be subtle and convincing. A good liar makes Logical Fallacies hard to spot. It is basic political rhetoric. In political discussions, to see the truth, you need to be good at the logic and reason of critical thinking and the skills of rhetoric. Spotting logical fallacies is a required skill. A logical fallacy is an argument that can be disproven through reasoning, but you have to spot them. I'll just mention a few that I commonly see in the Comments sections.

A logical fallacy is an argument that can be disproven through reasoning. This is different from a subjective argument or one that can be disproven with facts; for a position to be a logical fallacy, it must be logically flawed or deceptive in some way.

A common example we all know is the ad hominem attack that attempts to invalidate an opponent’s position based on a personal trait or fact about the opponent rather than through logic. It is just meant to distract from logic. It may not even be about you or the person being written about. Assume that any insult, no matter how indirect, is an ad hominem attack, meant to distract you from your logic. When you encounter one of these, ignore it or just thank the person for showing that they have absolutely nothing.

There is one Logical Fallacy I keep seeing in the Comments, so be especially aware of it. It is called Conflation which I call Half True, Half False. Saying if one thing is true then the other must be when it is not. Here is an example I saw:
(1) What policies have the Democrats implemented to "benefit ordinary Americans"? The wealthiest upper income percentiles in America continue to make more money while the middle class makes relatively less. That means there is an ongoing, growing wealth disparity. (2) The lead is increasing and voting for wealthy Democrat politicians has produced the opposite of social equity.
Yes, (1) is true, but (2) is false. Don't miss this or let it confuse you. Separate them and call them out. It's just a fancy way to lie with logic.

Here is another one that is more subtle, but you have to catch it.
(1) I'm a Republican. I'm a practicing physician and I help people all day at work. I'm not a fascist, or a nationalist, or a conspiracist. I'm a doctor, and I'm a Christian with traditional American family values. (2) Because your party constantly fails to achieve social equality, it relies upon vilifying normal American citizens.
It's the same thing, (1) may well be true, but (2) is still false. It's a pretty basic example but can be quite effective if you don't know to look for it.

It is important to know Logical Fallacies because you need to spot them in political rhetoric and even though you may spot them logically, you need to be fast at spotting and understanding them or the argument will be over before you can respond. Here is a short list of 15 Logical Fallacies from Grammerly but if you are serious, here is the Master List of 100+ Logical Fallacies With Examples. In this day and age, you need to be good at spotting deceptions... fast.

It's a problem Machiavelli described in The Prince. No matter how good you want to be, if your opponent wants to lower themselves morally, you pretty much have to match them. The problem is that "our" Prince is the Constitution, a moral document and so it can't really lower itself. That is why the Constitution must be defended brutally will all the force of the law that it represents.

03/07/2024 The Antitrust Division has been at the forefront of the Biden administration’s economic agenda as it files suits against companies engaged in monopolistic practices and blocks mergers that would increase prices for consumers, including a recent successful suit against the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.

On Tuesday, Biden announced that the Antitrust Division would lead a strike force on unfair and illegal pricing along with the Federal Trade Commission. “If you keep prices high while engaging in illegal practices that are fraudulent or unfair or deceptive or anti-competitive, ... we will enforce the law,” Biden said.

Unfortunately, the already underfunded agency would have to take on this additional work with a smaller budget if Congress maintains the cuts written into the budget bill for the next fiscal year. Those cuts come by effectively nullifying a bipartisan law enacted in 2022 that increased filing fees that corporations pay prior to merger authorization. The Merger Fee Modernization Act increased these fees for the express purpose of providing more resources for the Antitrust Division and the FTC as they file antitrust lawsuits against the largest corporations in the world ― and their well-paid attorneys.

02/15/2024. - Special counsel David Weiss has charged an FBI confidential source Alexander Smirnov, 43, on one count of making a false statement and one count of creating a false and fictitious record related to statements he made to the FBI on a document known as an FBI Form 1023. Smirnov is the same person that Republicans have called "a highly credible FBI source" and have used to claim Joe Biden is corrupt, according to multiple senior congressional sources.

His allegations of Biden corruption spilled out into public nearly a year ago, when (R) Sen. Chuck Grassley took the extraordinary step of releasing the confidential FBI informant's unverified claim that, years ago, the Biden family "pushed" a Ukrainian oligarch to pay them $10 million. The claim -- which Democrats and the White House immediately denied -- has since been cited by congressional Republicans to justify their impeachment inquiry.

Smirnov allegedly reported to an FBI agent in March 2017 that he had a phone call with the owner of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, and noted Hunter Biden was at the time a member of Burisma's board. Three years later, Smirnov allegedly made false statements in recounting two meetings in 2015 or 2016 in which executives associated with Burisma told him they had hired Hunter Biden to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems." Smirnov further said the executives paid $5 million each to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden while the latter was in office as vice president, so that Hunter Biden "will take care of all those issues through his dad," referring to the then-criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian prosecutor general into Burisma.

Those events were fabrications, Weiss alleged in his new indictment. Instead, Smirnov had only contacted the Burisma executives in 2017 after the end of Joe Biden's time as vice president and after the Ukrainian prosecutor general had already been fired, according to the indictment. "The indictment alleges that the [Smirnov] transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [President Biden] after expressing bias against [Biden] and his presidential candidacy," Weiss' office said in their statement announcing the charges.

Donald Trump wants to overturn the 2020 election. He claims there was massive fraud and that he actually won. It didn't happen. After three years, the Republicans still can't show any evidence of election fraud.

Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was not particularly close. He won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump's 232, and the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots.

Because the Electoral College ultimately determines the presidency, the race was decided by a few battleground states. Many of those states conducted recounts or thorough reviews of the results, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory.

Trump was repeatedly advised by members of his own administration that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Nine days after the 2020 election, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history." The statement was co-written by the groups representing the top elections officials in every state.

Less than three weeks later, then-Attorney General William Barr declared that a Justice Department investigation had not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud. Barr, who had directed U.S. attorneys and FBI agents across the country to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Attorney General William Barr told Trump the election fraud allegations were “bulls**t.”

The Jan. 6 House committee report details additional instances where administration officials and White House staff refuted Trump’s various allegations of voter fraud.

Facts are great and the facts show overwhelmingly that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, but he has repeated that there was fraud so many times that he has convinced a lot of people that there was fraud. It's interesting to think just how few people spread the claim of fraud really. Rudy Giuliani, Sydny Powell, Mike Lindell and of course Trump. Trump is the one that matters. Giuliani has said he lied. Even the Maga crowd considers Powell and Lindell to be whacko. Still, the Maga crowd is fervent. Trump goes on and on, day after day on different forms of media, claiming the election was stolen from him. You will not reach his followers with reasons. If you want to engage them in writing or especially in person, you need patience and some verbal Ju Jitsu. Instead of trying to convince them with facts, ask questions. Really, it is often what Trump does. Ask them to defend the absurd. Wait for an answer.

Be aware of one of the commonest arguments people will offer for why there was fraud: "when I went to bed, Trump was winning, but when I got up he had lost". That was because the mail in ballots were for Biden and they were counted last.

It seems that Hunter Biden's laptop is back in the news. The story is that Rudy Guilaini aquired a laptop computer that Hunter Biden had left in a repair chop. Early on were accusations about the contents of his laptop, but besides endlessly repeating the term "Hunter's laptop", that was dropped pretty quickly because, aside from evidence that Hunter was a troubled kid, there was nothing to incriminate the real target, his father Joe.

Fifty-one former senior intelligence officials signed a letter that warned the report’s contents and emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” — a letter that now-President Biden referenced in a debate against Trump. But the former intelligence officials noted that they did not have evidence of Russian involvement, and contents of the hard drive were later authenticated by other news outlets such as WaPo, CBS and NYT. All the intelligence agencies thought at first that the laptop must be a Russian Disinformation hoax, because it seemed so absurd.

Even Fox News and Rubert Murdoch initially dismissed the laptop as Russian Propaganda. No wonder the intelligence agencies thought the same thing. Fox News had “credibility concerns” about the files alleged to have come from Biden’s laptop, which is how the Post got the scoop.

The Intelligence Agencies had genuine concerns — after decades of experience — with Russian disinformation campaigns here in the U.S. It’s false to imply they were in any way pressured or didn’t legitimately believe they saw a number of tell-tail signs of it, based on their years of encounters with Russian disinformation and then fighting it. They also clearly stated it their letter that it was they saw “signs” but didn’t have hard evidence. There is nothing wrong with Blinken encouraging them to publicly and clearly state those concerns as that. Concerns, not facts.

Greg Treverton, a signatory who previously served as chair of the National Intelligence Council, defended the letter in a statement to Fox News Digital. "This is very old news," Treverton said. "What we said was true, we were inferring from our experience, and it did look like a Russian operation. We didn't, and couldn't of course say it was a Russian operation. Enough said."

01/05/2024 - The US labor market just had one of its best years of the decade.

The US labor market just finished a year that many thought would see a recession with one of the highest 12-month job totals seen in the last decade. Including an unexpectedly strong December report, the US labor market added a total of nearly 2.7 million jobs in 2023. Excluding the rebound from pandemic-era firings and re-hiring in 2021 and 2022, 2023 had the most robust job increases since 2015 and the third highest since 2000.

The unemployment rate ended 2023 at 3.7%, just slightly above the March 2022 level of 3.6%. The average unemployment rate for the year, 3.6%, matches 2022's reading as the lowest since 1969.

The job market recovery following the pandemic-induced 2020 recession is like no other in history. The portion of prime age workers in the labor market hit an annual average of 83.3% in 2023, the highest average in 21 years. "The ongoing rebound in participation in the labor force, I mean, it's massive," said Bank of America US chief economist Michael Gapen.

Among all private employees, average hourly earnings growth in 2023 ended at 4.3%, the third-highest total since 2008.

06/10/2024. Violent crime dropped by more than 15% in the United States during the first three months of 2024, according to statistics released Monday by the FBI. The new numbers show violent crime from January to March dropped 15.2% compared to the same period in 2023, while murders fell 26.4% and reported rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased during that period when compared to last year by 12.5%, according to the data, while robberies fell 17.8%.
v The numbers released Monday were gathered from 13,719 of the just over 19,000 law enforcement agencies from across the country, according to the bureau.

Meanwhile, property crime went down 15.1% in the first three months of this year. Burglaries dropped 16.7%, while motor vehicle theft decreased by 17.3%. The declines in violent and property crimes were seen in every region of the US.

In a statement Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland stressed the new data “makes clear that last year’s historic decline in violent crime is continuing.”

12/21/23. One of the main political strategies of the Republicans is to scare their base about everything. It is a good motivator. One of their primary scare tactics is to claim that crime is out of control. They repeatedly showing videos of isolated criminal activity and claiming cities led by Democrats have burned to the ground have been wildly successful. A recent Gallup poll found that 63% of Americans “describe the crime problem in the U.S. as either extremely or very serious, up from 54% when last measured in 2021.”

That same poll though shows that only 17% of Americans “say the crime problem in their local area is extremely or very serious.” That shows how effectively we’re convincing people that Democratic President Joe Biden has turned the country into a criminal hellscape, even though those same people see no actual evidence to that effect. Recent data says that the truth is that crime is down.

New FBI data comparing crime from January through September of this year with the same period last year shows a number of trends
  Violent crime is down 8%.
  In cities of more than 1 million people, violent crime is down nearly 15%.
  Murder is down 15.6% nationally and down 25% in cities of more than 1 million people.
  Robbery is down nearly 10%, and burglary is down nearly 12%.
  Motor vehicle theft, in one instance of good news, is up 10%.

Crime data analyst Jeff Asher at AH Datalytics has the murder rate down 12.6% over last year, and recently wrote that this could be “either the largest or one of the largest national declines in murder on record.” He also wrote: “The decline in crime shown in the quarterly data – if realized – would be historically large. To put some of this in perspective, a 4 percent decline in the nation’s violent crime rate relative to 2022’s reported rate would lead to the lowest violent crime rate nationally since 1969.”

Recently the National Retail Federation released what The New York Times called a “startling estimate that 'organized retail crime’ was responsible for nearly half the $94.5 billion in store merchandise that disappeared in 2021, a figure that helped amplify claims that the United States was experiencing a nationwide wave of shoplifting.” Facts intervened again and the federation had to retract that claim, as apparently retail theft is down, the group was using faulty data and an expert reported that “organized groups were likely responsible for just about 5 percent of the store merchandise that disappeared.”

One thing is for sure though. The Republicans will keep saying America is facing a crime spree the likes of which we’ve never witnessed.

06/30/2023. Republicans claim Democrats can’t keep us safe – crime data disagrees.

Third Way, a center-left think tank, has found that states which voted for Trump in the 2020 election had overall higher murder rates than those which supported Joe Biden. This trend, called the “red state murder gap”, has been consistent for 20 years. The pattern remains the same even if the most populous county in each red state is excluded – undercutting an argument common on the right that large cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, are to blame for homicides. This is especially true in the South that has traditionally had a high murder rate.

Overall though the analysis suggests that it's not as much about state politics as much as local policy, particularly gun laws. Unfortunartely though, gun laws are only as good as those in the next state over.

There are signs that the pandemic-era wave of murders has crested. Statistics from AH Datalytics indicate murder rates in 90 US cities until the end of May have fallen by about 12% year on year, including in New York City, where Jordan convened a hearing of the judiciary committee into the city’s purported crime problem shortly after Bragg brought his charges against Trump.

07/17/2023. Republicans claim illegal immigrants bring a crime wave. The trouble is that it is completely false. “When you look at the data, the data shows quite strongly — this is specifically data from the Texas prison system — that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, though at slightly higher rates than people who come through the legal immigration system,” he said at the time. “So we know that there’s really no correlation between increased migrant arrivals and spikes in crime.”

What the Republicans do is mention are specific instances of crimes, such as Kate Steinle or Laken Riley, allegedly committed by people in the country illegally. Well, yes, there is crime committed by illegal immigrants, but generally less than by citizens. It would be better if no crimes were committed by immigrants, but the problem is not nearly as bad as the Republicans like to scare their base with.

At the same time, Republicans repeatedly vote to cut funding to the FBI, IRS, and even Homeland Security as well as have maintained roadblocks to processing immigrants so they can be legally deported faster.

06/13/2024. How did a disease get so politicized? The link above gives a very good retrospective on the U.S. response. It was a new disease that had never been seen before. The CDC recommended following the protocols for flu which included masks and 6 foot social distancing. Because of what has been learned about the transmission, the masks were probably more help than the distancing. Both saved thousands of lives.

Diseases are just part of life. Even some diseases get diseases. This is far from the first human pandemic and far from the last. Diseases evolve and there are a lot of human hosts that travel all over the world. There are a number of known avian flus that the CDC is watching and concerned about. The disease early warning systems started by President Bush and dismantled by Trump must be rebuilt or we will have the same or worse problem. While Covid killed over a million people, it was not as dangerous as a lot of diseases.

11/22/2023. This Medium article excellently discusses two of the power brokers in American politics: the Media, especially Rupert Murdoch, and the Donors, especially the oil companies that the Republicans have to keep happy. Combined, Murdoch and many other media magnates are heavily invested in the oil industry. This is why while a large majority of Americans, even Republicans, are concerned about the climate change, media only lightly covers it.

The Republicans’ largest political donors are all from the oil industry. For example, from 2021 to 2022, Koch Industries gave them $27,375,317, Occidental Petroleum gave them $8,052,913 and Chevron Corp gave them $7,591,109, along with plenty of others. And that wasn’t even an election year! Overall, 80% of oil industry political funds go to Republicans. For that money to continue to flow, these companies want to see pro-fossil fuel legislation and anti-climate action rhetoric being pushed.

Murdoch owns a vast plethora of media outlets, from Fox News to the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, along with even more international written and visual media. He isn’t a hands-off owner either. He actively ensures editors and producers are publishing and airing angles, which he agrees with. Every bit of media that comes from his vast empire is carefully curated to manipulate vast swathes of the population to his whims.

As such, if a candidate, no matter how low in the pecking order, can garner support from Murdoch and other similar media moguls, they can ensure positive coverage on some of the most consumed media in the country and even get them to defend them against scandals or even hide legislation they support that the general public will not. For example, Fox News killed the Stormy Daniels story to protect Trump’s 2016 election. As it happens, Murdoch was an avid supporter of Trump until his 2020 election loss. As this coverage is what the vast majority of people base their vote decisions on, this is a crucial part of winning a modern American election.

The Republican candidates know their positions, policies and rhetoric aren’t aligned with the democratic voice of their party, let alone the country. But they aren’t targeting them. Instead, they are on the campaign trail to raise more funds and amass media support necessary to reach office. This means pandering to the upper echelons of the 1%, who, in return for pushing their interests, will use vast amounts of funds and nationwide flattering news coverage to manipulate the general public and get these paid-for representatives into power.

11/22/2023. Sinclair Media personifies Right Wing fear mongering in media.

Every year, local television news stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting conduct short surveys among viewers to help guide the year’s coverage. A key question in each poll, according to David Smith, the company’s executive chairman: “What are you most afraid of?” The answers are evident in Sinclair’s programming. Crime, homelessness, illegal drug use, failing schools and other societal ills have long been core elements of local TV news coverage. But on Sinclair’s growing nationwide roster of stations, the editorial focus reflects Smith’s conservative views and plays on its audience’s fears that America’s cities are falling apart,

Sinclair’s local network of 185 stations across the country makes it an influential player in shaping the views of millions of Americans, especially at a time when local newspapers are rapidly being gutted - or closed altogether.

Smith, an enthusiastic supporter of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump who has built Sinclair into one of the largest television station operators in the country, purchased the Baltimore Sun last month. In a private meeting with the Sun’s journalists, he urged them to emulate coverage at the local Sinclair station, Fox45, which in 2021 produced a documentary titled simply “Baltimore Is Dying.” In 2019, a Sinclair station produced an hour-long documentary titled “Seattle Is Dying,” which described how “the appeal of the city is giving way to rampant crime, homelessness and disgrace.”

As Sinclair increasingly fills the void left by newspapers, it offers its viewers a perspective that aligns with Trump’s oft-stated opinion that America’s cities, especially those run by Democratic politicians, are dangerous and dysfunctional. A 2019 study by researchers at Stanford and Emory universities showed that a Sinclair acquisition of local stations resulted in “substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics” and “a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.”

03/25/2024 Washington Post.
A previously undisclosed $50 million investment helped launch Newsmax into a Fox News competitor, a new report shows, and it came from an unexpected place: the Qatari government. In 2019 and 2020, a former Qatari government official and member of the royal family, Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, invested tens of millions into the fledgling far-right media company, according to documents leaked by a Cayman Islands–based financial services provider and reviewed by The Washington Post.

This was during a moment of acute Middle East tensions during the Trump administration. The investment bolstered a key conservative media outlet at a time when Qatar was facing intense diplomatic pressure from its neighbors and seeking allies in the United States. At the time the investment was made, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had established a diplomatic and economic blockade against Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorist groups across the Middle East. Qatar had counted on its relationship with the United States for protection, but President Donald Trump initially sided with its regional rivals, praising their move in 2017 and criticizing Qatar for funding terrorism.

After the investment, Newsmax reporters were told not to crtiticized Quatar. Further, it became a pro-Trump outlet, more extreme even than Fox News. According to a report released on Jan. 4 by House Democrats, the Qatari government paid over $460,000 during Trump’s presidency to Trump World Tower in New York City for properties it owned, and in 2018 members of Qatar’s ruling family spent more than $280,000 at Washington, D.C.’s Trump International Hotel. In August 2018, a firm that had received significant financial backing from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund also bailed out a company controlled by the family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, on a troubled Manhattan real estate investment.

Trump then changed his tune as well. “They are investing very heavily in our country,” Trump said of Qatar during the 2019 White House meeting. “They’re creating lots of jobs.”

04/10/2024. "Money talks," or so they say. Unfortunately, in the United States, a pair of billionaires have been sending money to some media outlets to talk about the supposed benefits of oil and gas and deny the existence of human-caused global heating. According to the Guardian, Farris and Dan Wilks have been sending millions of dollars to pro-dirty-energy and evangelical organizations.

Among the media entities to have received funding from the Wilks brothers is PragerU, an unaccredited university that provides "edutainment" videos for classroom use. The Guardian cited Texas financial records that show the Wilks have handed over at least $8 million to PragerU. "The goal of [the] Wilks and those that share their ideology is to gain control of levers of power and control information," Texas-based campaign finance analyst Chris Tackett told the outlet. "That's why they invest heavily into politicians, agenda-driven nonprofits and media organizations like PragerU and the Daily Wire. It is all connected. and they are far from alone in paying for the spread of disinformation."

Climate Change Deniers. They'll drive you nuts because they are more fact and evidence resistant than even the anti-vaxers. There's not much you can do with them but shut them down or maybe lay out a short convincing argument if it seems appropriate. You aren't just pasting these for them. Others read what you post, so it's best to have convincing arguments ready.
Try these:

It seems that climate change deniers often like to post that in the 70's the scientists were saying we were heading for an ice age.

Climate Change Deniers usually don't care any about evidence or facts but I'll throw a few out here for if you want to use them. The data very easy to find.

There is another detail you should know about though if global warming concerns you. The oil companies have no intention of allowing cutbacks in the use of oil. That makes sense in a lot of terms. Yes, global warming caused by CO2 from fossil fuel use may really really mess up the Earth and kill of a lot of the life here, but that is not what corporations are about. Corporations are about making money and can take on a life of their own. The strategy the oil companies are using is to make so much investment in oil infrastructure that it will be impractical not to use oil and waste the huge investment. That is why there is so much fighting over pipelines. Along with that they are building out huge plastic manufacturing capability to prevent the change to non-petroleum based plastics, which seem to be their own environmental curse. There are a lot of conspiracy about secret rulers of the world. If there is one though, it’s the oil companies. Don't think for a minute they aren't financing climate denial using the same companies that were paid to spread the word that cigarettes aren't hazardous.

Interesting Reading: Mark Meadows Powerpoint presentation about how to overthrow the election.

02/16/2024. Dinesh D’Souza documentary, 2000 Mules was released in May 2022, based on claims by Texas-based True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips who claimed to have evidence of 2,000 ballot “mules” stuffing drop boxes in five key battleground states, as proof that the 2020 election had been stolen.

AP 02/14/2024. True the Vote filed complaints with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2021, including one in which it said it had obtained “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta” during the November 2020 election and a January 2021 runoff.

A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group’s refusal to share evidence with investigators. True the Vote just told a Georgia judge that it doesn’t have any names or evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the 2020 election. It was able to use the claim though to collect millions of dollars over the years from supporters.

04/24/2025. Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass on Thursday presented text messages from an editor at the National Enquirer that suggested participants in Donald Trump's alleged hush money scheme knew their actions were criminal in nature. According to the texts, read aloud by Steinglass, former National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard wrote to an unnamed relative, "[Trump]'s just been named President-elect... at least if he wins I will be pardoned for electoral fraud."

At the time of the payment, Pecker went to great lengths to keep the deal secret from the rest of the AMI newsroom. “I believed that that payment would raise a lot of questions and issues and be communicated to the rest of the editors, which is something I didn’t want to happen,” he testified Thursday.

Pecker's discretion and Howard's texts appear to contradict the argument of Trump's lawyers, who have called the falsification of business records to conceal the hush money payments as a "bookkeeping" case and "a very minor thing."

Since this was written to a family mmember, it is not admitted as evidence.

A slightly peculiar thing is that Mr. trump was claiming the election was rigged against him at least 6 months before the election. Then he claimed election was stolen and claims it to this day, even though pretty much everyone that knew, such as Attotney General William Barr and Chief of Staf Mark Meadows, said that it wasn't.

Well, I ran across a story that makes some sense if you listen to Mr. Trump's recent claim that his supporters don't need to vote, that it is taken care of.

Read up on Project 2025. The Republicans plan, and they do have an interesting plan, to steal the 2025 Presidency no matter what happens in the 2024 election. They literally want to give red state legislatures the ability to override the results of the election if it doesn't go their way. They would do so by giving those legislators unprecedented ability to simply declare an election fraudulent, with or without evidence, and send whatever electors they want. Once they steal the Presidency they want to consolidate power to that President (the official website for the project deifies Trump so you can safely presume he's who they want to install) and have him essentially rebuild the entire executive branch with cronies by changing the employment status of every executive branch employee so they can be fired without blowback. After that they have a 180 day agenda that strips basically everyone other than wealthy, older, white, male, property owners (think bankers, not homeowners with mortgages) of essentially every federal right that they've fought to attain over the last 150 or so years under the guise of "states rights." They want to completely dissolve the social safety net and all regulations on businesses, as long as they aren't "woke" and funnel all the money and power to their allies. And they want to make it permanent.

There seems to be a variation on this involving the "No Labels" party trying to force a "contingent election", but it's essentially the same plan. Use the State Houses to steal the election from the voters. It's explained more here and here. I want to hear what the Legal Eagles have to say.

Now this is going to take some follow up. Project 2025 is certainly real. It's publically published. This plan to replace anyone not loyal in the government has been talked about since Steve Bannon pushed it and Project 2025 lays out how to do it. It would also explain Trump's statements about not worrying about voting.

(06/07/2023) The Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC was created in 2012 by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts as a way for states to share government data, in an effort to keep their voter rolls up to date. It allows election officials better insight into when their voters move and die and the rare times when they vote twice in different states, which is illegal. The Republicans are doing everything they can to get states to pull out of it. They seem to be promoting voter fraud.

12/08/2023 - A good update on the ongoing Republican attacks on ERIC. It's all political and part of how the Republicans want to steal the Presidency by corrupting the election and throwing it to the State Houses.

"The little secret is that maybe more than 10 years ago, if somebody voted in Ohio, in Florida, in Arizona and Texas, you would have never known," Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an interview with NPR in February. "With ERIC, we can compare our voter rolls to those states."

Eight Republican states have now pulled out of ERIC, including many with voting officials who are on the record as praising the partnership as recently as a few months ago.

J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney, has long been a critic of how ERIC operates. But he told NPR: "It's this crazy zeal to get out of ERIC ... that is going to cause voter fraud to flourish."

---

So what happened? Here are five takeaways from NPR's investigation:
1. A far-right website kicked things off.
2. Local "election integrity" groups are a political force.
3. A Trump ally has coordinated an election denial machine.
4. Republican primaries are a driving force behind the ERIC exodus.
5. ERIC withdrawals will make for "dirtier voter rolls" and an emboldened far right.

(06/10/23) This article gives a bit more detail, including: The bottom line? ERIC has been a bipartisan success story in election administration, restoration and accuracy. It was lauded by officials in every state that joined the partnership — 32 at its peak, almost evenly divided between red and blue.

Then came the lies. The Gateway Pundit began posting articles that falsely described ERIC as “essentially a left wing voter registration drive” bankrolled by billionaire George Soros and aimed at getting Democrats to win elections.

The site had some help. Cleta Mitchell, a zealous adherent to the lies about a supposedly stolen 2020 election, began targeting ERIC on her voting podcast, “Who’s Counting.” She called it an “insidious organization.” This is the same woman who was on the phone call in January 2021 when then-President Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him nearly 12,000 more votes. An election denial infrastructure has since emerged, repeating lies about voting and ERIC while instructing people to pressure state lawmakers and election officials to end their partnerships. In just the space of a year, eight Republican-led states abruptly pulled out of ERIC.

They all listened to a lie, despite countless election experts, administrators and scholars — from across the country and from both parties — touting ERIC as a bipartisan institution that can catch and eliminate voter fraud, whether by ne’er-do-wells or outdated voter rolls. As well as high-ranking officials in those states (like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) initially praising ERIC, or even calling it “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have.” Why would Republicans, who have been screaming about voter fraud for years, try to dismantle perhaps the best mechanism we have to protect against it?

According to Charlotte Hill, the interim director of the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, the flip-flopping lawmakers typically cite two flimsy excuses for bailing on the partnership (with “typically” meaning they all seemed to get the same memo on how to explain their exit).

The Second reason usually given seems the most important. That is ERIC’s requirement that all members conduct outreach to offer residents the chance to register if eligible. Well, of course! Many studies have shown that those most likely to register in voter outreach efforts are poor people, young adults and people of color. You guessed it: Those people are more likely to vote for Democrats. Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has described the voter outreach requirement as “harassing people.” You guessed it again: Ashcroft is a Republican.

So there it is. Forget about voter fraud, which is rare and is usually “stop the steal” Republicans anyway. No, it is more important to supress the vote than to protect it.

The Republicans love to say how Trump gave us energy independance and how Biden has destroyed the American economy by killing off projects like the (environmental disaster) Keystone Pipeline. It's the usual right wing lies.

Recent Citibank research says “Total gross crude and other liquid exports hit a record of 11.128 million barrels per day, more than the total output of either Russia or Saudi Arabia,” Citi energy analysts wrote on March 1 2023. “U.S. net crude imports fell to lows not seen since the 1950s.”

Many Americans think U.S. “energy independence” is a thing of the past, overtaken by President Biden’s focus on green energy. But Citi is highlighting data showing that American dependence on foreign energy has continued to decline under President Biden, even besting levels reached under President Trump, who championed fossil fuels.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts U.S. oil production of 12.5 million barrels per day in 2023, inching up to 12.6 million barrels next year. That would slightly exceed the 2019 record of 12.3 million barrels per day. Natural gas is often a byproduct of oil drilling and will likely hit new production records this year and next, as well.

American Energy Independance

12/01/23   A recent Energy Innovation study found that nearly all of America’s coal plants — a whopping 99% — would cost more money to maintain than to simply replace. In this case, the money-saving replacement was either a wind or solar plant. “All but one of the country’s 210 coal plants are more expensive to operate than either new wind or new solar,” the report states.

It also encourages steps to make the transition as smooth as possible — ensuring the technology that will be adapted for wind and solar plants is up to date, utilizing available finance programs, and having state legislatures “plan for and fund” the transition.

12/10/23 Renewables are reaching the point where they are outcompeting fossil fuels on price — setting the stage for their predicted dominance of the energy sector by midcentury.

When it comes to the surging demand for new electric generation, wind and solar prices are now the cheapest options almost everywhere, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Building new wind and solar projects is also cheaper than running existing coal plants, according to a report from Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan climate policy think tank.

Shades of the 50's. When Donald Trump isn't calling his democratic opponents "Far-left", he has taken to calling them "Communists". Since communism is about revolution by force, somehting Trump has advocated, that seems to again be his accusing his opposition of what he is guilty of.

There is one major problem with worrying about communism in Ameica. There are no Communist politicians. Of the 435 Members of the House of Representitives, only 4 that are Socialists.

As for communism, "Far-left" would indicate a move towards communism (as far-right is to fascism). Communism is an anti-capitalist ideology that aims to nationalize banks, resources and property. Since there is literally no effort being made by the democrats to do any of this (not even by our most "progressive" representatives like AOC and Bernie), it stands to reason that his accusation holds no water. It's just to get his base excited.

It is worth keeping in mind as well that Democratic Socialism is quite far from Soviet Communism.

Lack of affordable housing is one of the biggest problem facing ordinary Americans today. The largest part of that problem is that Americans are bidding against corporations for home ownership. Hedge funds (in the form of corporations, partnerships, and real estate investment trusts that manage funds pooled from investors) buy up modestly priced houses to make a profit off reselling them or renting them. Over and over, home buyers all over America that find a house they want to buy will see it dropped off the market because of a cash sale. A couple weeks later it will reappear on the market for tens of thousands of dollars more. Often it just reappears as a rental, especially in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Democrats have introduced a bill in both houses of Congress to ban hedge funds from buying and owning single-family homes in the United States. It would require that these funds sell off all the single-family homes they own over a 10-year period and would eventually bar them from owning any single-family homes at all. This would slow the rapid increase in the cost of housing and start to bring abck affordability to ordianry Americans.

01/10/2023. Kim Griest wrote in Medium the real reason the Middle Class is disappearing, as a summary of Thomas Piketty’s, long, definitive analysis. It's not just that trickle down doesn't work. That just speeds the destruction of the middle class, but it is only part. He pointed out that in all of history there has just been a few very powerful rich that basically control all wealth and the rest are poor. That is the power of capital. The political upheavals and wars of the 20th century disrupted that some, spreading the wealth around and creating the middle class. The middle class is disappearing and homelessness is one of the results. There is a simple equation that shows how this happens and what is needed to reverse it.

There is an economic law that determines whether the middle class wealth is growing or shrinking. It is just the comparison of two numbers: g, the percentage yearly growth of the economy (very roughly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increase), and r, the yearly return on investment of capital (for example, think average yearly percentage yield of a stock market portfolio).

The law says that if r is less than g, then the middle class will grow, and if r is greater than g, the middle class will shrink. This law is discussed extensively and shown to be true in Piketty’s book. What happened during and after the world wars caused r is less than g, so the middle class grew (and the wealth of the rich shrunk). In the 1980’s changes in g and r meant that r is greater than g, so that since then the top 1% own an ever larger share of the wealth, meaning the middle class share of wealth is dropping.

In America, this started with the Reagan tax cuts on the wealthy. If it doesn't change, if the wealth continues to be concentrated, America will become like many third world countries with the rich living in gated communities, with the police paid to protect them. Everyone else will basically be serfs, living precariously in some kind of dirty slum, or homeless.

01/18/2024. Nearly 270 millionaires and billionaires urged world leaders congregating in Switzerland for The World Economic Forum on Wednesday to tax their wealth, warning that if their elected representatives don't address the drastic rise in economic inequality, the consequences will be "catastrophic."

"Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society," the letter signed by 268 millionaires and billionaires from 17 countries and published Wednesday.

"This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations' economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future."

"Inequality has reached a tipping point, and its cost to our economic, societal and ecological stability risk is severe -- and growing every day. In short, we need action now," the letter states, adding that philanthropy and one-off donations will not fix the issue.

The letter comes as a new poll published Wednesday shows that 74% of wealthy people support higher taxes on their fortunes, while 75% support the introduction of a 2% tax on billionaires, as proposed by the European Union Tax Observatory.

"Throughout history, pitchforks were the inevitable consequence of extreme discontent, but today, the masses are turning to populism, which is on the rise throughout the world," Abigail Disney said in a statement.

"We already know the solution to protect our institutions and stabilize our country: it's taxing extreme wealth. What we lack is the political fortitude to do it. Even millionaires and billionaires like me are saying it's time. The elites gathering in Davos must take this crisis seriously."

While politcs is a mess instead of the solution it is suppsoed to be, that is parly because it's not the problem. The greatest problem for most Ameicans is the economy. It's about kitchen table economics. Americans are having trouble providing the 3 essential H's - Healthcare, Housing and Higher Education and it is messing with the F words, Family and Food. It's because the working class is competing with corporations and they don't stand a chance in the fight. There has been so much consolidation of industries and businesses that there is no competition and the consumer is forced to take what just a few corporations offer.

Republicans hate Social Security and always have. They hate all policies from the New Deal and want to end them. The thing is though they are immensely popular with most citizens and are called a "third rail of politics", meaning touch them and you are dead. That has not stopped the Republicans from repeatedly floating ideas for how to cut or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Then they have to walk them back, but they clearly want to cut them and that is part of why they insist on calling them "Entitlements" even though working folks have paid into them all their lives. Nope, Republicans want people to work and then die. They want a wealthy ruling class that is above the law, and the rest of us.

Major cuts to Social Security are back on the table. Medicare and Social Security are "defined retirement programs". The Republicans calls them "entitlements" so they can claim they are a gift that is undeserved and it would be fair to just take them away. They are porogframs that have been paid for by working people for their whole lives..

A group of Republican lawmakers aims to balance the federal budget and slash government spending by targeting programs like Social Security — and some seniors could see a major reduction in lifetime benefits if the plan makes it into law.

The proposal was unveiled June 14, 2023 by U.S. House conservatives, Bloomberg reported. One of its main features is to raise the full retirement age (FRA) at which seniors are entitled to the full benefits they are due.

The 176-member House Republican Study Committee (RSC) approved a fiscal blueprint that would gradually increase the FRA to 69-years-old for seniors who turn 62 in 2033. The current full retirement age is 66 or 67, depending on your birth year. For all Americans born in 1960 or later, the FRA is 67.

While most Democrats want to boost Social Security through higher payroll taxes or reductions to benefits for wealthy Americans, the GOP has largely focused on paring down or privatizing the program. As previously reported by GOBankingRates, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) recently told Fox News that this month’s debt limit bill was only “the first step” in a broader Republican agenda that includes further cuts. “This isn’t the end,” McCarthy said.

In 1985, social security was made solvent for 75 years, that's the year 2060. That was the magic number to get the program to have adequate funding to cover all of the boomers. That was the fix that was paid for by boomers for boomers. There were 4 big changes that affected us: an increasing income cap, a higher payroll tax on the worker and the employer, wealth taxing social security income and raising the retirement age. The boomers did their part with the promises made.

... According to Robert Reich who was involved in Social Security policy making...

The Social Security trustees anticipated the boom in boomer retirements. This is why Social Security was amended back in 1983, to gradually increase the age for collecting full retirement benefits from age 65 to 67. That change is helping finance the boomers’ retirement.

So what did the trustees fail to anticipate? Answer: the degree of income inequality in 21st century America.

Put simply, a big part of the American working population is earning less than the Social Security trustees (including me) anticipated decades ago — and therefore paying less in Social Security payroll tax.

Had the pay of American workers kept up with what had been the trend decades ago — and kept up with their own increasing productivity — their Social Security payroll tax payments would have been enough to keep the program flush.

At the same time, a much larger chunk of the nation’s total income is going to the top than was expected decades ago.

Here’s the thing: Income subject to the payroll tax is capped. Every dollar of earnings in excess of the cap is not subject to Social Security payroll taxes. This year’s cap is $160,200.

The Social Security cap is adjusted every year for inflation, but the adjustment is tiny compared to what’s happened to incomes at the top.

As the rich have become far richer, more and more of the total income earned by Americans has become concentrated at the top. Therefore, more and more total income escapes the Social Security payroll tax.

The obvious solution to Social Security’s funding shortfall 11 years from now is to lift the cap so that the super-rich pay more in Social Security taxes.

To make sure it’s the super-rich — and not the upper middle class — who pay, it makes sense to eliminate the cap altogether on earnings in excess of, say, $400,000.

Bidenomics is supposed to be going back to the Citizen Democracy we had from Eisenhower to when Reagan changed America to a Corporate Democracy. It was America's most prosperous time and tax rates on the wealthy were quite high, with incentives for them to invest in the American economy. It's about having an industrial policy so that America can compete better in the world, especially against China. It's about investment, which seems to be working well. It's about supporting unions. It should be about anti-trust and anti-monopoly legislation, ... which seems to be slowly moving forward.

Bidenomics is 47 million jobs created as of Sept 2023. 336,000 new jobs in Sept 2023.

Bidenomics is a 4.9% gain in real GDP, adjusted for inflation, in the 2023 second quarter. That’s not unprecedented, but it’s about twice the norm during ordinary times, when the economy is growing. Yeah, but inflation. Luckily the rate has dropped sharply from a high of 9% in 2022 to 3.7% now. It is also much lower than in the rest of the world. Inflation was largely driven by corporate profit taking anyway.

Bidenomics is investment such as the giant Infrastructure bill that has led to a manufacturing boon across the country.

Bidenomics is investment in Rural Broadband to help rural areas support businesses and education.

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07/26/2023 - Bidenomics is working like gang busters. The S&P 500 is up 16% since Jan 20, 2021, when Biden was inaugurated, 20% over the past year. NASDEQ is up over 35%. There have been 70 record stock market closes, and 10.5 million new-business starts.

Unemployment at 3.6%, under 4% for 17 months, the best in 50 years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2023, the average has been 314,000 new jobs per month. 2 million new jobs were created this year by July 2023. This has led to 4 million new jobs above pre-pandemic levels. (Trump lost 4 million jobs.) 13 million jobs have been created since Biden was elected, more than under any other President in a full four year term. That's more jobs than the last 3 Republican Presidents combined. Much of it is in heavy industry and manufacturing. It's the highest since George W. Bush was President, 800,000 new jobs and (Forbes) has reported $200 Billion in new projects. Morgan Stanly said it is driving a boom in large scale infrastructure projects. They even had to revise their GDP growth estimates upward. There also has been no recession, that everyone predicted. Inflation dropped (12 months in a row) to 3% in June. The rest of the world still has high inflation. Wages in the U.S. are up 4%, more than inflation and Americans are saving more and have more in the bank. Income inequality has even been reduced some.

12/13/23. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, in prepared remarks to be delivered at a U.S.-China Business Council event said that former President Donald Trump's policies toward China “left America more vulnerable and more isolated in a competitive global economy that demands that nations take exactly the opposite approach". She said that the Trump administration “failed to make investments at home in critical areas like infrastructure and advanced technology, while also neglecting relationships with our partners and allies that had been forged and strengthened over decades.”

Her comments come as the U.S. rebuilds its relationship with the Asian superpower, including a November meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco. The two nations agreed to curb the production of illicit fentanyl, a deadly component of drugs, and agreed to resume military-to-military communications.

“Over the past three years, the Biden administration has course-corrected," she says. “We’re investing at home through President Biden’s Investing in America agenda," citing new laws on infrastructure, climate and semiconductors, among others.

12/20/23 12/20/23 The Biden administration’s antitrust agencies finalized a sweeping overhaul of rules the government uses to determine whether deals violate competition law in a bid to extend a crackdown on illegal mergers and acquisitions. The 11 new guidelines published Monday by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are designed to thwart companies seeking to dominate their industries by buying up rivals.

“The finalized merger guidelines are a game-changer for antitrust enforcement,” said Erik Peinert, research manager and editor at antitrust advocacy group American Economic Liberties Project. “The new guidelines provide a road map to bring first principles of the antitrust laws into the 21st Century.”

Under President Joe Biden, the US has doubled down on efforts to block more mergers after decades of a light-touch approach by government. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter and FTC Chair Lina Khan have argued previous administrations were too permissive, leading to a rise in corporate concentration that has limited choices for consumers and contributed to higher prices.

“For too long, unchecked consolidation has meant big corporations getting bigger, giving them the power to raise prices for Americans and provide consumers with fewer options,” Biden’s National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard said in a statement. The new merger guidelines are “an important step to lower costs for consumers, ensure a level playing field for small businesses, and ensure antitrust enforcement is fit for purpose in today’s economy.”

Republicans seem to hate American Democracy and even America. There strategy is to tear down the nation, not to build it or to build America's future.

While it was really Newt Gingrich that formulated the "No Cooperation, No Compromise " as his Congressional strategy, it was embraced through the Tea Party to the entire Republican establishment.

Only one thing seems to unite Republicans and that is to be united against anything Democrats want to do regardless if it will help country. This Republican “no compromise non cooperation” strategy was made official in January 2009 when Mitch McConnell convened a strategy session after Obama’s presidential win. According to former GOP Senators George Voinovich (Ohio), Bob Bennett (Utah), and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), as well as others, it was at that strategy session that Mitch McConnell gave Republicans the marching orders to oppose everything the Democrats proposed in order to make Obama a one-term president – as Voinovich phrased it: “If he [Obama] was for it, we had to be against it.” McConnell openly stated: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." In the years since that time, anyone who has been paying attention can see that Republicans have continued to employ that no-compromise philosophy in virtually every aspect of governmental interaction. The nation cannot function like this and their obstructionist ways will affect the safety of the entire world.

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01/10/2023. Trump has repeatedly suggested that Democrats are encouraging migrants to flow into the country illegally in order to register them to vote in the 2024 election. The claim is unsupported, but many people believe it.

These claims ignore the facts around noncitizen voting in federal elections, which is illegal and remains exceedingly rare even as it is thoroughly scrutinized, according to Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice. Anyone registering to vote in the U.S. must attest under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen, Morales-Doyle said. Lying is punishable by fines, imprisonment and deportation, he said — such steep penalties that very few people are willing to accept the risk. On top of that, federal law requires states to regularly maintain their voter rolls and remove anyone ineligible, a process that identifies immigrants living in the country illegally. Even with this and other vetting processes in place, only a small number of noncitizen voters have been uncovered — evidence that Trump's theory has no teeth, Morales-Doyle said.

After the 2016 election, an examination of 23.5 million votes cast including some of the most populous counties in Arizona, California, Florida and Texas, election officials found only about 30 cases of potential noncitizen voting.

A Georgia 2022 audit of its voter rolls found fewer than 2,000 instances of noncitizens attempting to register to vote for 25 years, none of which succeeded.

As it stands now, as of 06/02/2023. James Comer, House Oversight Committee Chair co-chair of the House Oversight Committee (and Sen. Chuck Grassley) are demanding a June 2020 Form FD-1023 from the FBI that alleges that President Biden took a bribe that effected his policy making. The Form FD-1023 is used to document unevaluated tips the FBI receives. Anyone can submit one. Citing anonymous sources, CNN reported Wednesday that the tip came from a batch of material that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani obtained from Ukraine and was provided by pro-Putin political groups when Biden was working for the US and EU to get rid of the pro-Russian Ukrainian prosecutor. The politician that gave Giuliani the documents was arrested by Ukraine at the start of the war and traded for Azov POWs at the personal request of Putin. That seems to describe something between a flimsy source of evidence and a Russian PsyOps. You can stop right there.

At the time they were received, they seemed so dubious that Bill Barr said they should be reviewed by a United States attorney in Pittsburgh to make sure they did not taint the ongoing Hunter Biden investigation in Delaware. Don't you think Bill Barr would have run that straight to the GOP had he uncovered a crime?

When Grassley was asked why he wanted to make a copy of the document public, he said "Well, listen: I’m oversight of the FBI. I got to know what they think about it". Comer’s very narrow subpoena demanded the document but didn’t specify that the chairman wanted the FBI’s evaluation of the tip.

If history is any guide, there is absolutely no truth to the allegations in the tip, but it will make great political points for the Republicans who will claim that it is Gospel truth. Rejecting the FBI's evaluation of the tip would allow them to spin the story any way the Republicans want to. Even Hannity questioned Comer about why he wanted to release this Form FD-1023.

12/15/23 About Hunter Biden's Taxes. Since the Republicans have no interest in policies to benefit America or ordinary Americans, such as making a budget, their preferred politics is prosecution in the courts where voters don't matter. This is true even if there are no crimes. There Republican persecution of Hunter Biden is Benghazi 2.0. It is, in the words of Gingrich, "investigating to create an impression of wrongdoing".

In the case of Hunter Biden, this has been a 5 year saga. Early on were accusations about the contents of his laptop, but besides endlessly repeating the term "Hunter's laptop", that was dropped pretty quickly because, aside from evidence that Hunter was a troubled kid, there was nothing to incriminate the real target, his father Joe.

The current situation is about two things Hunter admits he is guilty of, a gun charge and tax evasion. Hunter paid back taxes, interest, fees and penalties in 2022. Indictments were filed in November 2023, well after he paid the taxes. Somehow, these charges that are generally never prosecuted in his situation (no crime committed with the gun, all taxes paid) have become the focus of extended Congressional investigations. This is not about Congressional business or even Hunter Biden. This is about Republican corruption of the legal system for political gain. But why not, besides lies, it is all the Republicans have to politic with. Their policies sure won't help them.

The Deficit and resulting National Debt are from unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthy by the Republicans. Trickle down doesn't work, but it cuts the revenue needed to run the country. Taxes are the price of civilization and civilization is where all modern wealth comes from. If Republicans actually cared about controlling the debt, they’d repeal the Trump tax cuts or pass taxes on the rich. When the Republicans are in power in Washington, the National Debt isn't a problem, but they see it a huge problem when the Democrats are in control.

The Debt Ceiling, while a real problem, is just more of what the Culture Wars are about, including the Guns Rights and Anti-vaxer folks. They are issues keep the keep the base riled up and sending donations. At the same time they hide the economic wars being waged on working folks.

For a very realistic and informative discussion of the National Debt, see The national debt isn’t worth holding the U.S. and global economy ‘hostage’. The consequences are just too great.
“The trajectory for the debt is clearly a problem, and I think everybody agrees, because if you look at the forecast, we have debt increasing with no end in sight,” Louise Sheiner, policy director of the Brookings Institution’s Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, a center-left monetary and fiscal policy research organization, told Fortune.

But the U.S. is also accustomed to running up a tab, as the government has run a surplus only five times in the last 50 years. Economic policy experts and former government officials tell Fortune that addressing the country’s fiscal sustainability is important, but there is no universally agreed-upon point where debt begins to harm the economy. Meanwhile, mechanisms that weaponize the debt for political goals, like the ongoing ceiling standoff, might do much more damage than high debt ever could, and even risk creating the sort of intergenerational crisis Republicans say they are desperate to avoid.

“Regardless of whether you think there is or isn't a problem, and regardless what you think of the merits of McCarthy's plan, the approach being taken is not okay,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, told Fortune. “You can't hold hostage the entire U.S. and global economy.”

Balancing America’s budget is an “equation” with two components, Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School who focuses on budgetary and public finance issues, told Fortune. “There's a revenue side and a spending side...You cannot balance the budget or get anywhere close to it by cutting spending without raising revenues. The equation just does not work.”

"I cannot imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wager. That is a sacred element of our country. They can't use the debt ceiling to negotiate." - Donald J. Trump when president.

Economists say if the Treasury Department defaults on its debt or even fails to pay other obligations to be able to avoid defaulting on the debt, economic chaos and likely a recession would ensue.

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05/23/2023 - Referring to the bill on the debt limit and spending cuts that passed the House with only Republican votes, Gaetz said: “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow & they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” according to a reporter for Semafor.

CAP Action, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, said, “Rep. Gaetz said the quiet part out loud ― this was never about fiscal health, and always about holding our economy hostage to enact an extremist economic agenda that experts predict would push the economy into recession.”

At the same time, House GOP leaders’ remarks later in the day supported the idea Democrats should not expect to get much, or anything, in return for making concessions to Republicans. Asked what Democrats can expect to get, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters, “That we’re going to raise the debt ceiling.”

That position was reiterated by Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee and one of McCarthy’s designated negotiators in the talks. Asked what Republicans were putting on the table to incentivize Democrats to make concessions, McHenry said simply, “The debt ceiling increase.”

Gaetz’s remarks were not the first time a prominent Republican had referred to the debt limit in kidnapping terms. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who helped broker a deal in 2011 to avoid a default, made a similar comparison a year later after reflecting on what the GOP had won. “What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming,” he told NBC News.

Republicans, who have insisted on spending cuts, appear to be just fine with government spending — as long as it's on programs they support.

The Deficit and resulting National Debt unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthy by the Republicans. Trickle down doesn't work, but it cuts the revenue needed to run the country. Taxes are the price of civilization and civilization is where all modern wealth comes from. If Republicans actually cared about controlling the debt, they’d repeal the Trump tax cuts or pass taxes on the rich.

The Debt Ceiling, while a real problem, is just more of what the Culture Wars are about, including the Guns Rights and Anti-vaxer folks. They are issues keep the keep the base riled up and sending donations. At the same time they hide the economic wars being waged on working folks.

With the Republicans controlling the House, we are having the usual Debt Ceiling fight that leads to threats of a government shutdown as it has in the past or a default on the National Debt. A small part of the Republican party is basically holding the entire party and the United States hostage over this. They are demanding cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans hate things that might benefit ordinary Americans and that is much of why they have intentionally built the National Debt up since Ronald Reagan. That and to give tax cuts to the wealthy as well as to starve social programs that might benefit the Democratic Party politically .., and incidentally, ordinary Americans. When the Republicans are in power in Washington, the National Debt isn't a problem, but they see it a huge problem when the Democrats are in control.

I'm lifting this part pretty directly from Robert Reich because he seems to have said it best.

The only reason the GOP is pushing the lie that 87,000 IRS agents will be hired is for fundraising. They will tell any lie that is useful for that.

The IRS’s staff size today is the same as in 1970, and there are a lot more tax returns to deal with today. The IRS has had its budget cut nearly 20% since 2010. An understaffed IRS is of greatest benefit to the rich, whose finances are more complicated to evaluate, and who are more adept at finding loopholes.

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The GOP is pushing a policy they call "Fair Tax" to get rid of the IRS and replace it with a 30% national sales tax. If they want that, apparently trickledown economics of unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy didn't transfer enough wealth to the to the already rich. Since the young, the old, the poor and the working class have to spend most of their money to survive, they would pay 30% of everything they earned... compounded through the layers of the economy as money changed hands from person to person. (The cost to tourists would end tourism in America.) It would penalize everyone but the wealthy because they only spend part of their money. The richer you are, the smaller percentage you would be likely to pay. A person like Warren Buffet that is wealthy but isn't extravagant might get their tax rate below 1%.

Here’s the reality: The IRS is understaffed, overwhelmed and digitally dated. Thirty years ago, the IRS had 117,000 employees. Today, it has 78,000. It faces an expected wave of 50,000 retirements this decade. Its budget has been slashed by nearly 20% since 2010.

These circumstances have created a massive backlog. For example, according to the Treasury Department, nearly 200 million taxpayers called the IRS for assistance in the first half of 2021. There were 15,000 employees available to assist them. That’s one person for every 13,000 calls.

Funding from the Inflation Reduction Act aims to address these shortfalls by hiring 87,000 new IRS employees ― over the next 10 years, not all at once. And most of the hires will be to replace all those retirees. Will all the money go toward hiring IRS agents to audit taxpayers? Nope.

· $45.6 billion will go toward hiring more enforcement agents, shoring up legal support and investing in “investigative technology.”

· $25.3 billion will cover routine costs, like rent, facilities, printing and postage.

· $3 billion will go to customer services, such as prefiling assistance and education, and the possibility of creating a free direct e-file program.

· $5 billion will go toward modernizing the IRS’s business systems and customer service technology. Some agency computers still use programming language that dates back to the 1960s.

Audits have declined most dramatically for the wealthy. For example: In 2012, the percentage of companies with at least $20 billion in assets subjected to audit was 93%. By 2020, it was just 38%.

The resulting tax gap — what people owe versus what they pay — is estimated to be more than $600 billion. Much of this is due to drastic cuts in the IRS’s budget, courtesy of Tea Party fanatics a decade ago.

Since then, the number of IRS auditors has fallen by more than 40% even as the tax code has gotten more complex. The agency’s auditors are no match for the battery of pricey accountants and tax attorneys who help the affluent avoid or evade their tax obligations.

Sidebar: In the past decade, the tax code has been amended or revised more than 4,000 times. Keep in mind that the agency doesn’t make those changes; Congress does. So while Congress was making tax law more complex, it gelded the agency tasked with tending to its directives.

IRS Audits of the Rich Deliver Huge Bang for the Buck - June 2023.

Researchers at the Treasury Department, Harvard University and The University of Sydney looked at IRS data for about 710,000 in-person audits. They found that audits generate a substantial return for the government — and while audit costs rise for those with higher incomes (because wealthy people typically have more complicated tax filings) the returns rise even more. Every additional dollar spent on auditing taxpayers in the top 10% of earners generates more than $12 in revenue for the government.

Washington Post Columnist Catherine Rampell lays out another way to think about the new data: “On average, the direct revenue collected from audits exceed costs by a factor of 2 to 1,” she writes. “But, that payoff varies by income. For money spent auditing the bottom half of taxpayers, the IRS only roughly broke even. Meanwhile, the agency pulled in $3.18 for each dollar spent auditing the top 1 percent, and $6.29 for the top 0.1 percent.”

The study also found a lasting benefit from the audits: taxpayers who were audited voluntarily pay more taxes going forward — for at least 14 years after the initial audit. “For every $1 an audited person pays during their audit, they pay $3 more on their taxes in the subsequent years,” Harvard Economist Nathaniel Hendren, one of the paper’s authors, tweeted.

The Congressional Budget Office models only modest lasting effects from stepped up enforcement, but the new study finds that longer-term deterrence results in about three times the revenue of the initial audit. Taxpayers either get scared straight or correct unintentional errors they previously made, resulting in higher tax payments over time. “Our finding of significant deterrence effects throughout the income distribution differs from existing CBO scores,” Hendren notes. There is a problem. Republicans have managed to cut out $21 Billion of the oney alloted to them by the Inflation Reduction Act. If cut to IRS funding comes out of enforcement and audits, it could mean that lawmakers just gave up hundreds of billions more in revenue.

How four decades of tax cuts fueled inequality - The Center for Public Integrity - May 2023. This is an excellent telling of the story of American Taxes and how unfair and unproductive they are. Here are a few comments from it.

“It’s vastly oversold that tax cuts will generate job and economic growth,” said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “When you cut taxes for the upper income, you give them more after-tax income, but you don’t do anything for growth.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reached essentially the same conclusion in 2012 that tax cuts don’t spur growth but do increase income inequality. After Senate Republicans heatedly objected to the report, CRS withdrew it.

For decades leading up to 1980, all incomes from top to bottom rose at nearly the same pace. But that changed dramatically afterward. While median family income was largely stagnant, top incomes soared.

In 1980, the top 4% of taxpayers earned as much as the bottom 39%. By 2019, the top 4% earned as much as the bottom 57%, according to a Public Integrity analysis of the most recent IRS data.

As more money flowed upward, the gap in accumulated wealth widened. In 2019, the top 10% of Americans had three times the wealth of everyone else in the country combined.

The pandemic greatly exacerbated the trend. The stock market has been volatile this year, but a June study by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies concluded that 745 U.S. billionaires had grown $2.1 trillion richer since the start of COVID-19.

Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans and an income tax foe, had this to say about the estate tax: “Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest.” But laws enacted by Republican-controlled Congresses slashed the number of taxpayers paying it from 27,568 in 1982 to 2,584 in 2021.

Over the past four decades, the federal tax system has been transformed into something akin to a private-equity fund for wealthy taxpayers, giving them remarkable returns from multiple sources. As Congress showered them with benefits, most Americans struggled to keep up with the cost of living.

Since 1960, Congress has raised the ceiling 78 times — 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents. There have been numerous clean debt ceiling hikes in recent years, including three times during the Trump administration and Republicans controlled Congress. Something else also began happening after 1960: tax cuts, a steady stream of them, all of them substantial.

From 1944 through 1963, top taxpayers paid a tax rate above 90% (94% at its peak in 1944). Inconceivable today. In 1964, the top marginal tax rate for individuals began to fall. It was lowered to 77%, then to 70% for the tax years 1965 through 1981. From 1982 to 1986, the top marginal tax rate was lowered to 50%, eventually falling to 31% in 1991. It currently sits at 37%.

In 1960, the corporate tax rate was 50%. It fell to 35% by 1993. The Trump tax cuts of 2017 dropped it to 21%. But the amount corporations actually pay — the effective tax rate — fell from 16% in 2014 to 9% in 2018, according to the Government Accounting Office, and half of all large corporations paid no federal income taxes at all.

Every tax cut takes a big bite out of federal revenue and increases the federal debt. The Trump tax cuts, for example, which included the reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, caused a 25% increase in the federal debt ― “the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration.” Those who laud Donald Trump for his 2017 tax cuts have it backward; his most enduring legacy just might be the historic rise in the national debt due to those tax cuts.

A study by the Center for American Progress argues that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and the Trump tax cuts of 2017 have caused a 57% increase in the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy).

“Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently,” the report said.

And in a truly absurd irony, one of the things Republicans want to cut is the money that has already been budgeted for an increase in the IRS’s ability to collect taxes.

2024-02-07. Most millionaires want a wealth tax. Extreme wealth and income inequality will eventually destroy a real democracy. Why? Because that disparity of power and resources allows a relatively small number of people and groups to subvert the popular will, undermine checks and balances, the law, and other democratic institutions, and to manipulate the public through a variety of means into making decisions that are contrary to their interests, and democracy and the Common Good more broadly.

Chuck Collins was born into the Oscar Mayer meat and cold cuts family fortune and has written several books on how most of the ultra-wealthy are so removed from the rest of the world. The ultra-rich as a class really do live in a different world and feel no connection to “regular people” or obligations to humanity as a whole. Wealth is a type of disconnection drug. You operate in a bubble; You don't see the impact on real people. They have a powerful justification story. They live with a mythology of justification, whatever it is. It is causing a crisis in world democracy. "we cannot solve the global democracy crisis without first confronting extreme wealth and income inequality and other forms of resource hoarding by the moneyed classes".

He also shared new polling which shows that a large percentage of wealthy people in the G20 countries (those with at least one million dollars in assets excluding their homes) understand that extreme wealth and income inequality is undermining global stability and that it is in their long-term interest to give something back to society in the form of paying a fair tax and providing other redistributive supports.

There's a growing segment of wealthy people who say, "Oh, this is this is going to be bad for me too." They are starting to think in terms of their long-term self-interest about, for example, how late-stage capitalism is bad for the bottom 90 percent of the public — but that same system can come back and bite them too.

While there are plenty of people with money who choose not to profit from war and other disasters, it is also true that there is a segment of capitalists who prey on disruption. Private equity firms are moving into the rental housing market. If people won't be able to own a home, these bad actors reason that they will put a squeeze on vulnerable people and make even more money from doing it. Student loans are another example where these predators can profit by exploiting vulnerable people. There are disaster capitalists who are of course trying to make money off the global climate disaster. Basically, their plan is to party until the music stops.

Compliments of Economist Robert Reich...

Conservative types seem to love to point out that America is a Republic, not a Democracy. It is about the only way they can rationalize the minority rule they need for power. It is partly true and partly not. It was more true when senators were chosen by state legislatures, prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. With Senators being elected by voters instead of voter representatives, America became much more of a democracy. The President is still elected by the representatives through the Electoral College, so in that sense, America is still a Republic. Just be aware of the point of the conservatives bringing this up. It is to claim that State's Rights supersede Federal Laws. They like that because in general, modern conservative policies are not popular with the voters and very often conflict with the laws of the Constitution. A variation of this is the claim that the Articles of Confederation, written before the Constitution, take precedence over the Constitution. In any case, an appropriate answer is:

Thomas Jefferson said he viewed with “solemn reverence that act of the whole of the American people” which established “a wall of separation between church and state.” George Washington approved a treaty that explicitly stated, “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” The very First Amendment in America’s Bill of Rights states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The principal author of the Constitution, James Madison, in his treatise, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” described 15 reasons why the U.S. government must avoid backing any religion.

There is a reason the word “God” does not appear a single time in the Constitution. The founders were breaking with an England and Europe that were still in the thrall of the idea that rulers derived their powers from heaven above, “the divine right of kings.” But in the Constitution it explicitly states their view that the powers of government are derived “from the consent of the governed.”

Madison said that “religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together” and saw the separation of the two as essential to avoiding “the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries”—a sentiment that clearly resonates with our own times. Washington celebrated that the U.S. had at last created a form of government “that gives to bigotry no sanction.” Benjamin Franklin wrote at length about the pernicious nature of religious tests in government documents.

Republicans always claim that the Democrats want to control everyone. that really seems like a bit of projection considering:
It's the Republicans who want to control your bedroom.
It's the Republicans who want to control your private health care decisions.
It's the Republicans who want to control your religion.
It's the Republicans who want to control what you read.
It's the Republicans who want to control what you say.
It's the Republicans who want to rule rather than lead or govern.

Really though, that's not what it's about. Those are all a just a path to the power the the right wants. If you look at Democrat desires and policies of control, you see something different. More than anything, they seem to want to protect people's rights and prevent the society from being controlled by the oligarchs. Right wing control is really a proxy for that.

One of the favorite claims of the Right is that Biden is compromised by China. A simple, appropriate response would be:

One of the commonest posts seems to be short comments about the Biden Crime Family or Biden Family Corruption. Evidence is never offered, just the accusation. I think the appropriate answer is:

President Biden is a hard target. He's smart and loves America. He accomplished many good things before becoming President and may good things for American as President. He is a skilled politician and diplomat. He is a survivor of many personal tragedies. I doubt he even wants to be President, but he will do it for America.

As said in the introduction, the main strategy of the Republicans has come to be attacking their opponents because they have nothing good to offer. Attacks on President Biden will be relentless. It's very common to see comments about Biden is senile, or Biden destroyed the economy, or Biden hates America generally. They don't have much body as they are just meant as emotional messages. The best thing to do is respond with Biden accomplishments, cuz that's a twofer, make them look bad and message what President Biden really has accomplished... Try the one below.

The expected responses will be deflection or whataboutisms, maybe a personal attack. It's just another weak defense, an opening for another jab. Use it.

The easiest way to respond to the commonest stupid statements like "Biden crashed the economy" or Biden is a "communist" or any of the number of stupid, unsupported statements we all constantly see is to list his accomplishments. Turnarounds are fair and you are putting out a great targeted, political ad for free that will be seen by people of all parties. Done properly, with the right message, some will learn and the attackers will be shut down. Mix and match these as appropriate.

There's another one I love to post. Something you can hammer home is that like any family, business or country, investment is essential. This great when they want to talk about tax and spend dems. Use part or all. Start it with "Republicans grift, Democrats invest."

Mix it up some... Post this instead

Or paste this...

Are you familiar with the term "Neo-Liberalism"? It's not about what you usually think of the term "Liberal". It refers to how business is treated and was largely started by Reagan. It means Liberalism towards business or perhaps "anything goes Capitalism". It was jobs going overseas. It was Share holder interests over everything else. It was profits over everything else. It was nations and society serving business instead of business serving society and nations. It's why there is so much wealth inequality and why the world is awash in debt. All the profits of production gains of five decades of growth went to the owners and everyone else lost out. Well, Biden's State of the Union Speech said that was going to change, from Corporate Capitalism we had after Reagan to Democratic Capitalism we had before that from the time of President Eisenhower. Business would serve the nation again like it did after President Eisenhower, the most prosperous time in America's history.

What does this mean today? Trump got elected for a reason. Many many Americans are hurting. The thing is though that the Republicans have very effectively worked to convince their base that the problem is the result of the culture wars and so they ignore the economic wars that are what are really hurting them. Warren Buffet said that there is a class war and his side is winning. The people that President Biden may be able to help the most are the very desperate people that voted for Trump. Trump isn't going to help them and neither are his wealthy backers.

The issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are. It’s how old our ideas are." President Biden.

---

The Republicans love to comment that Biden is senile and has dementia. It’s a lie and it’s projection. Biden’s speeches are coherent, reasoned and clear. Compare that to the word salad and grunts of Donald Trump. There are tapes.

When President Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he laid out a plan to rebuild it through policies designed to boost job growth, prop up small businesses, reduce healthcare costs and invest in emerging technologies. Of Those 10 Promises Made, How Many Did He Keep? Most of this information is compliments of Politico. Overall, it looks like 5 successes, 2 maybes and 3 stalled by Congress. In terms of politics and political reality, it looks fairly good. It is about policies that are good for America and Ordinary Americans at least.

1. Rebuild the Economy: GDP growth was strong in 2021, slowing in 2022. The high inflation that started before he was in office. It is debated if the U.S. is headed for a recession. Large investments were made in infrastructure, emerging technologies and other areas that should pay off in the longer run.

2. Stoke Job Growth: The unemployment rate is near 50-year lows, the U.S. economy has added tens of millions of jobs and average wages have been on the rise.

3. Help the Economy Recover from COVID-19: Biden gets high grades in this area because of various programs to contain the virus and help small businesses and workers recover, particularly the 2021 American Rescue plan.

4. Forgive Student Loan Debt: The plan has been stalled by a series of legal battles, and many experts say it is unlikely to be implemented in its current form.

5. Create 1 Million Auto Industry Jobs: As of December 2022, only about 290,700 new direct auto industry jobs had been created. However, many more jobs are expected to be created due to investments in other areas connected to the auto industry. Whether that’s enough to get to 1 million jobs by the end of Biden’s first term remains to be seen.

6. Raise the Corporate Tax Rate to 28%: The proposal is not likely to get approved by the Republican-led U.S. House, however.

7. Let Medicare Negotiate Lower Drug Prices: Biden has succeeded on that front. Politico rates it a “kept his promise,” largely because the Inflation Reduction Act gave Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for seniors.

8. Provide 12 Weeks Paid Family and Medical Leave: This promise remains stalled, but still possible by the end of the current term. But again, chances are the U.S. House will vote against it.

9. Expand Healthcare: Biden gets a high grade in this area. Eight days into his tenure the president signed an executive order to strengthen Medicaid and Obamacare. He followed that by signing the American Rescue Plan, which expanded eligibility to help low- and moderate-income Americans purchase Obamacare coverage.

10. Expand Child and Elder Care Access: Politico gives this a “stalled” in negotiations with Congress..

The claim that Biden did not have the authority to declassify documents as vice president is “complete nonsense,” Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a public-interest law firm, told USA TODAY in an email.

McClanahan, who also teaches at the George Washington University Law School, said that under a 2009 executive order signed by Obama, the vice president is included in a list of "original classification authorities," meaning Biden had the power declassify anything he classified.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-classified-national-security-information#:~:text=This%20order%20prescribes%20a%20uniform,the%20activities%20of%20their%20Government

The Washington Post also reported vice presidents have the authority to declassify https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/11/biden-trump-classified-documents-an-explainer/ anything they classified. The New York Times similarly reported that the vice president has the power to declassify, while noting the scope of that authority "has never been definitively tested."

"It is longstanding practice in the executive branch to treat the vice president as having the same amount of authority in that respect as the president unless the president explicitly says otherwise," McClanahan said.

---

Bradley Moss, a national security attorney at the law office of Mark S. Zaid, PC, agreed that Biden held declassification authority as vice president.

"Vice presidents would (also), at least according to the minimal FOIA case law on the subject, be bound by the same declassification procedures that ostensibly apply to a president," Moss said.

One such procedure includes a vice president having to notify any agency affected by the declassification of certain material beforehand, according to Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers.

The 2009 executive order is still in effect, David Weinstein, former assistant U.S. attorney, told USA TODAY in an email.

A variation of the 2009 executive order was implemented through executive order by former President George W. Bush in 2003, Weinstein said.

The Right loves to talk about corruption in Biden's dealings with Ukraine. They claim that he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son, Biden. The story is as far from the truth as the maga crowd tends to wander.

06/13/2023 -There was a nice current summary offered by CNN: Here’s what to know about GOP claims of a Biden scandal. Nothing has changed for a while. There was a good summary of the situation though:
Two of these are misdemeanor charges about Hunter’s failure to file taxes, and a third is a felony tax evasion charge that would allege he over-reported business expenses. The fourth potential charge is about a false statement on a federal form Hunter filled out when buying a gun in 2018 (he claimed he was not a drug user). He he will probably be convicted of these charges. He may or may not be given a jail sentence. If anything he would likely be asked to pay a large fine. It does not seem like there is real criminal activity here and neither did Barr or Special Counsel Durham. Certainly there is nothing to warrant a Congressional investigation... other than politics and typical Republican strategy. It's just Benghazi all over again, except this time, by family association.

Stock buy backs buybacks are not good for the country. They merely enrich people who own shares of stock (the richest 10 percent of Americans own 92 percent of the stock market) rather than add to the productive capacity of America.

Researchers at Deloitte point out that buybacks and dividends have soared as a share of GDP, while corporate investments in equipment and infrastructure have stagnated. Many of the social costs of this failure to invest have been shifted to the public-at-large.

Stock buybacks don’t create more jobs. They don’t increase wages. They don’t grow the economy.

Before 1982, it was illegal for corporations to purchase their own stock to artificially prop up share prices. Then Ronald Reagan’s SEC adopted a rule protecting corporations from being charged for this kind of stock manipulation.

Jump ahead to 2017 and the Trump-GOP tax cuts added fuel to the fire. Since then, stock buybacks have more than doubled, reaching a record high $1.2 trillion in 2022 alone.

That’s $1.2 trillion that did not go into improving quality of life for American workers or building the American economy. It just went straight into the pockets of already-wealthy shareholders and CEOs.

Once again, Wall Street gains at the expense of working families.

Which is why the Inflation Reduction Act imposes a 1 percent tax on buybacks. And why Biden wants to raise it to 4 percent. The Stock Buyback Accountability Act of 2023, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown and Ron Wyden, would do just this.

As Explained by Robert Reich

Culture War vs Class War. This is about Class War and Desperation.

This whole political mess may look absurd, but it is serious. There is reason and hard money behind it. Besides, the Class War has been the normal during history, but that's a more complicated story. The problem becomes when the balance is lost.

The Republicans have convinced their base that the class war is actually a culture war. Those voters think Trump will protect them from "coastal elites" when it is the Republicans that are fleecing them... and they are hurting, which is why they are supporting Trump... Somehow, I doubt that he will actually help them. This is the real grievance and why so many Americans are desperate enough to follow a populist leader, even an autocratic one. They want and need their problems solved. They are desperate.

Class war is about money and is very realistically important. It's about the investment class (who they call the upper class) exploiting the working class (they call the lower class) for profit and transferring their wealth by various means. It's why while the wealth of the nation and prices have gone up for the last 30 years, all the excess wealth (and then some) has been going to the investment class. None of it has been going to the working class so now the working class can't afford housing, health care, higher education... vacations or even families. It is kitchen table economics.

Culture wars are things that don't hurt you like if someone is gay or if they have an abortion or they aren't the right religion or they might know CRT or be woke or their might be a gay character in a book or that the Democrats are pedophiles that drink the blood of children or vaccines are poison or global warming is a conspiracy. All the rest of the things the Republicans use to excite the base. It's about anger and fear, not money. They don't want you to think about that. None of those hurt someone but that is what the Republicans want us to fight about so we don't see what hurts us, the economics of the class war. That is not wha this site is about, but I highly recommend that you learn about it and the best way is probably from Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. His site has great resources for understanding how the economy has gotten to how it is now. to get an idea of what his work is like, may I recommend a short video he mad about The Powell Memo: How and Why Corporations Took Over America.

Trump is adored by his followers. Dave Chappelle explained why

“I’m just being honest with you, I live in Ohio amongst the poor whites,” he said, adding, “A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular (and) … very loved.” Chappelle — who acknowledged in his monologue that he’s a Democrat — then delivered a comedic explanation for why Trump is adored by his followers.

He joked that Trump was an “honest liar” who told the unvarnished truth about a system set up to help the rich and powerful. And he recounted how Trump openly admitted as much during a 2016 campaign debate: “He said, ‘I know the system is rigged because I use it.’ ”

The comedian then joked about how Trump, accused during that debate by Hillary Clinton of not paying taxes, shot back: “That makes me smart.”

Chappelle shared that for many working-class Americans struggling to makes end meet, Trump’s “honesty” in revealing that the rich and powerful have been taking full advantage of a system designed for their benefit only enhanced his stature.

Democrats have occupied the White House for 18 of the last 26 years. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during the first two years of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations.

During these years, Democrats scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during this time.

Yet the most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a left or right. There is no longer a moderate “center.” The underlying choice is either Trump Republican authoritarianism or Democratic progressive populism.

Democrats cannot defeat authoritarianism without an agenda of radical democratic reform — an anti-establishment movement. Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, and classes to unrig the system.

Trumpism is not the cause of our divided nation. It is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. While Trump authoritarianism masquerades as being anti-elitist, it is backed by some of America’s richest corporate and financial leaders — such as money manager Stephen A. Schwarzman, industrialist Charles Koch, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, and almost every major American corporation and trade association.

The central goal of the corporate and financial backers of Trump authoritarianism has been to split the bottom 90 percent of Americans into warring factions so they don’t look upward and see where all the wealth and power have gone.

We have yet to discover whether their ploy succeeds in the long run.

Capitalism is the use of capital as a tool of productivity. All forms of government use capitalism. That is pretty much how every bridge, building, power plant, airport and government building is built by any government from kingdoms to democracies to socialisms to communisms (though there China has used human capital a lot). It is by investment. The trouble is that capital is a great power and tends to get misused to amass more power. It is often used as a bludgeon and even the laws can be purchased. As they say, money never sleeps. It can take on a life of its own.

Greed is a funny thing. In Western Culture it is known as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In some other cultures, it has a worse reputation. It's just a natural thing in many ways but what is the point of it? You can't take it with you. Greed by itself, is problematic, but only so dangerous. When it becomes dangerous is when it is actually driven by the ' human instinct for dominance and control. Then it lays waste to everything it touches.

Capitalism is the use of capital as a tool of productivity. It needs to be regulated so that it serves society or it will inevitably enslave it.

It's really not about capitalism anyway. It's about ownership. Every nation and society needs to use capitalism, because really, it's just investment. It is how families, nations and businesses thrive.

The problem is plutocracy (who owns the capital) and greed (what they do with it). Even greed isn't all that bad... unless it is used for power, then it is evil. Instead of capital being used for productivity, it is being used for control... and unfortunately there is no off switch to greed. It always wants more, especially more power.

Keep in mind, revolutions are destructive and create chaos that is where the psychopaths thrive. Attacking capitalism is attacking the golden goose of investment. We need laws to regulate capitalism, not destroy it. We need anti-trust and anti-monopoly legislation.

Fascism and Antifa are common topics these days. They need to be understood. This is a description meant to be relevant to current events. Your mileage may vary. It's long, but tough luck.

It has been said that power is the power to kill. In human history, that has often been a basic fact that comes from biology. It is a strategy that works. It is "might makes right". War has been so much of history. Both Buddhism and Stoicism were philosophies developed to cope with the horrors of war. Christian philosophy was a strategy for ending it. Democracy was developed as a way to prevent war for political gain by relying on law rather than force. It was a different moral authority. Of the two primary instincts one can easily find inside oneself and others, competition and cooperation, it represented the mandate and win-win strategy of cooperation. Competition was not only allowed but encouraged to test the function and efficiency of different strategies, but violence has been unacceptable and prevented by the authority of law.

This should start with the standard definition of Fascism: a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government. A more developed description could be of society as a group whose members share the same attitudes, beliefs, desires, view of history, religion, language and so on. It is not a collective; it is more like what Othmar Spann described as a "super-individual." And ordinary individuals are more like cells in a single large biological organism, not competing independent organisms important in themselves. This also means that the society is limited to those that hold that belief and all others are outsiders. We see that version more in current politics with Mr. Trump leading, but what is the us versus them ideology he is espousing? It is basically a claim by some that they are "Real Americans", meaning everyone else isn't. It is the American myth of self-reliance and hyper individualism. It is the mythos of the gun. It includes racism. It includes much of the Christian Evangelical establishment. It includes many from rural areas that feel left behind. Others are welcome too, just as long as they espouse that ideology. They feel they are real Americans supporting America and everyone who is not a real American, like all those Socialist Democrats are trying to tear America apart. Be very sure that there is a huge propaganda machine pushing this idea because it can be turned into money and power.

It's certainly not about democracy. So what do I think is the appropriate description of Fascism in the current political environment? It is a bit different in ways, but I think quite useful and not without history. It is the use of violence for political objectives in a democracy. It is the use of violence against those that are not Real Americans. (This applies in other nations and societies too.) It does not necessarily require a leader though. Mr. Trump represents a rather typical fascist strongman leader, perhaps others as well. but there is a huge organization behind this oriented around an ideology that can exist without a strongman leader. Really, it includes pretty diverse beliefs now.

Democracy is fairly novel and a new creation. It represents a surprisingly large change from the governments before it that all relied on violence for authority. Even if they said that God was their authority, they came to power through violence. Power came from the power to kill. That difference cannot be emphasized enough. Democracy is about persuasion with ideas. Democracy is about people holding the power of the state and embodying it in law. Violence for political gain is the opposite of democracy. Fascism is when violence is used as persuasion in a democracy. Democracy is different from that form of government and has no room for violence as part of politics. It is one or the other. Democracy inherently allows dissent because it is considered valuable enough that it is not penalized.

So why is that meaning considered important? Because of where Antifa came from. While the history of Antifa might go back further, what we see today originates with the events at the end of World War II. Axis soldiers that returned from the war may have lost their leaders and control of their national governments, but they still intended to rule using violence as before the war. Especially in Austria, Antifa acted as an uncoordinated force to prevent the fascists from using violence for political gain. Fascists do use economic, legal, and other methods, but those are considered part of the democratic process. The problem is though that violence is a notoriously effective strategy in a civilization and the purpose of Antifa was to prevent the success of that. Antifa has been called many things and they do tend to be leftist, but they have stuck to the ideal of preventing violence from subverting democracy by trying to neutralize it. Antifa fights for democracy at the most basic level.

A problem is that Antifa necessarily walks a fine line. Their use of violence can only be morally justified when it is to prevent or neutralize violence. Sometimes though, they have to deal with threats of violence or incitement to violence. Threats work just as well as violence in a civilization. Then they are accused of being the aggressor and violating people's right to free speech. In all cases, an individual like someone reading this, must step back, try to observe what is happening and make a moral judgment more even than a legal judgment of what is right or wrong. The moral struggle is not a war to be won, but the daily battles of all good men and women to preserve their future.

If you find a really annoying Russian Bot and often they aren't hard to recognize, just paste in:

Who is George Soros that the Republicans use as their boogeyman and so love to hate?

Holocaust survivor Mr. Soros initially focused his activism on nurturing the democracies that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As we all know, Putin's greatest dream is to re-unite the USSR, much to the concern of the very countries that emerged from that dissolution of the Soviet Union. Fascist entities despise Soros efforts to democratize these former fascist states and have thus spent billions demonizing and mischaracterizing him. It easy to identify the anti-democracy zealots because they repeat the Soros lies.

Facists need enemies to give as the reason they need power. George Soros is about all they have to work with but it's incredible what they have accused him of. He's not that accomplished. He's actually a small time operator compared to what the Koch brothers accomplished, but the truth doesn't matter to the fascists.

After Manhattan District Attorney DA Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump, he and many Republican officials have sought to distract attention from the facts of the case at hand by branding DA Alvin Bragg as “Soros-funded,” Claiming that Soros played a role in Trump's indictment.

The facts:
*George Soros has never met, spoken with, or otherwise communicated with Alvin Bragg.
*Neither George Soros nor Democracy PAC (a PAC to which Mr. Soros has contributed funds) contributed to Alvin Bragg’s campaign for Manhattan District Attorney.
*Between 2016 and 2022, George Soros personally and Democracy PAC have together contributed roughly $4 million to Color of Change’s PAC, including $1 million in May 2021. None of those funds were earmarked for Bragg’s campaign.

June 2023 - This is informative. New study says high housing costs, low income push Californians into homelessness

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June 2023 - Houston Progress - In 2011, the Houston area had one of the largest homeless populations in the country. With the threat of homelessness only increasing, and dismay over decades of substantial investments without results, our community was propelled into action.

So, what changed? In 2012, we came together as a unified, regional, homeless response system called The Way Home and chose the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County as our lead agency.

Then we made three crucial decisions. First, we decided to work together as a collaborative system, aligned around a standardized set of goals, processes and strategies, rather than as individual organizations and government entities each trying to chip away at the problem. Today, more than 100 entities in the Houston area are working together.

Second, we embraced the data-proven best practices of Housing First, a strategy focused on getting individuals and families out of homelessness and into permanent housing before helping them address any other problems. We do this via voluntary wraparound support services, e.g., mental health or substance abuse counseling, health care, job training and so on. The services help keep the person housed, and the housing is what makes the services effective.

Third, we housed the most vulnerable people first. When the average person sees someone experiencing homelessness and struggling with mental illness, they assume that individual is dangerous or needs hospitalization. Our experience is that most of these folks stabilize in housing with the appropriate level of services.

Moreover, we have found that most people fall into homelessness because of rapid and unexpected financial losses — those that needn’t result in catastrophe, if only we had the right policies in place — and that homelessness often exacerbates mental health deterioration and the need to self-medicate. In other words, mental illness is not the driver of homelessness in most cases.

Houston has not solved homelessness in its entirety. But by investing in proven, effective intervention — housing — we are making homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring for people. In fact, in our latest performance evaluation period, approximately 90% of people we helped house did not fall back into homelessness for at least two years.

May 2023 - Portland - had long opted for a mostly hands-off policy to the camps that had come to dominate too much of the city. Now, at the urging of many of the residents, the city is clearing camps, sometimes daily, and planning to encourage unhoused people to relocate to centralized communities.

“The only policies I’ve seen are compassion on top of compassion,” local businessman Jessie Burke said. “Anyone who works with these populations knows there are people who respond to carrots and people who respond to sticks. Everyone who responds to carrots, good work; you got them. Most of the people that are left respond to enforcement.” Local residents say that Most of the long term homeless have a serious mental health or addiction problem. They will choose living on the streets over shelter or transitional housing as long as they are allowed to do so.

The change in policy came with the election last fall of the Portland city commissioner, Democrat Rene Gonzalez who ran on a more “law-and-order” approach. His central argument, according to his campaign website: “Taking a hands-off approach to homelessness is not compassionate or progressive; it’s dangerous and inhumane.”

Gonzalez promised not only to work for increased shelter capacity and access to mental health and addiction services, but also to relocate illegally parked RVs and “clean up” parks and neighborhoods.

Gonzalez’s election also came as the embattled mayor, Ted Wheeler, and other officials were hard at work on a new approach: both enforcing the ordinances that prevent people from “sleeping on sidewalks” and enabling the construction of a half-dozen “Safe Rest Villages” with space for up to 150 residents apiece.

Not surprisingly, The twin initiatives – a ban on tent camping on city streets and the village-building – are wildly unpopular among homeless advocates and the unhoused themselves. Only about 10% of Portlanders swept from encampments and offered shelter between April 2022 and February 2023 remain in temporary shelter. And fewer than 1% found permanent housing, according to data on 1,700 unhoused people released in February for Multnomah county, where Portland is located. The rest, presumably, remain outside.

30 Cities With the Highest Homelessness Problem - May 2023. Very interesting information and facts.

Homelessness is one of the worst things anyone can go through. For people accustomed to living with a roof over their head since childhood, the perils that a lack of a permanent shelter brings are unimaginable. Living without a home leaves people without access to a toilet, a shower, a bed, or a stable source of water - all of which are basic necessities of life. These things also prevent homeless people from getting a job and improving their situation since applying to job interviews and appearing in them also requires money.

Homelessness leads to lower economic output and productivity which impacts a country's gross domestic product (GDP). At the same time, ending homelessness not only contributes to higher economic growth but also saves the taxpayer money. Data from the National Alliance to End Homelessness shows that the taxpayer can save as much as $35,578 if the homelessness problems is resolved since these are the direct taxpayer costs that result from homelessness. In fact, the alliance's data shows that just by placing homeless people in supportive shelters can reduce these costs by almost 50%.

Taking a look at the economic impacts, a White Paper from the Hot Potato Initiative tries to take a look at the impact of homelessness on the Canadian economy. It shares that homelessness might have cost the Canadian economy $4.5 billion in 2007. At the same time, it also outlines that not only are homeless people 70% more likely to visit a doctor, but they also face higher levels of incarceration. At the same time, Canada spent nearly $8 billion to tackle homelessness - or half of what it had spent in giving businesses subsidies. The higher proportion of homeless people requiring medical facilities is also mirrored by research conducted in the U.S.

A major part of the problem is that ACLU and other libertarian groups gutted the anti-vagrancy laws in 2015. Then Reagan a conservative president signed legislation that defunded outpatient mental health care. It caused a perfect storm. There seems no will to reverse their incredible damage to mental health care and resulting homelessness.

The homeless per advocates working with them are 65% permanent brain damaged including 14% veterans with war injuries. 75% substance users, most of whom also have brain injury.

It's one heck of a problem.

“It is a fact that other Americans are a direct threat to my way of life,” Leonard said. “It is not a fact that my way of life is a threat to theirs.” The problem isn’t polarization but, rather, the GOP-led assault on the rights of millions of Americans.

A lot of this current mess started with "No Compromise, No Cooperation" Newt Gingrich's Contract on America. He likes biology and saw Darwinian "Law of the Jungle" as the best way to get the policies victories the Republicans couldn't get through elections, because no one really liked their policies. That is also the reason the Republicans have worked to dominate the courts. It is why the Constitution is an inconvenience for the Republicans because it is the legal foundation of American Democracy and American Law. It represented the compromises and cooperation necessary to democratic government. They don't want Democracy. They want to rule. This is not new. Just look at history.

Everything really did get dramatically worse when Newt Gingrich brazenly announced that the other side wasn't a group of colleagues to be negotiated with and have dinner and drinks with; they were enemies to be treated as enemies, stopped at every opportunity, and crushed whenever possible. They were to be painted as evil and an existential threat to all that we hold sacred and the lives of ourselves and our children.

They do that through horrid straw man arguments and dramatic, hyperbolic exaggerations of the other side's positions. Because their audience lives in a nearly perfect information silo, they are vulnerable to this kind of misinformation and demagoguery. They literally don't know any better.

They take fearful people, make them ever more afraid, and then give them a laundry list of Bad Things That Democrats Do, and make them thoroughly terrified. And they're totally made up.

Then, they send their candidate out to say, "I, alone, can fix it."

It was a very long run of political Mutually Assured Destruction before that, but Newt ... went nuclear when nobody else really had.

He's still doing it today, and his followers have taken pages straight out of his playbook.

People like to play the political blame game when it comes to China, but there's no point to that. From Nixon on, political leaders knew they had to engage with China. Everyone had high hopes that they would be a constructive international partner. It really was not anyone's fault, not even the multi-national corporations that were just in it for the profits. It looked good and we had to hope for the best, but it has not worked out that way. China rapidly globalised its economic influence by exploiting the West’s illusion that, once admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), it would engage in trade according to WTO rules and norms. But from the outset it denied foreign businesses free and fair access to its domestic market and used massive state subsidies to capture market dominance for its own products and systems across the world.

From 2018, the US has led a de facto trade war against this, while remaining uncomfortably tied to the Chinese economy by enduring debt and supply-chain dependencies.

Subsequent geopolitical and economic tensions have progressively worsened due to China’s human rights abuses, political interference, cyber espionage and IP theft, mistrust and sourcing disruption caused by the pandemic, alignment with Russia, and threats to Taiwan.

This has led to an accelerating exodus of major Western companies from China to more reliable regional bases in South-East Asia, India and Bangladesh. The low cost of factory labour in China, formerly a major draw for FDI, no longer applies. Factory wages in South China are now around three times higher than in equivalent South Asian industries.