For years it worked like a charm, at least from the 1980s until around 2016. Even when Democrats did win elections, they had to eschew labels like “liberal” and take positions like Bill Clinton’s infamous “the era of big government is over,” as was “welfare as we know it.” President Barack Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, added billions to the coffers of big insurance and drug companies and continued to legally prevent Americans who were under 65 (and not disabled) from accessing Medicare. And then, in 2015, a real estate mogul and reality TV star burst onto the scene, blowing up the carefully crafted Potemkin village that his fellow billionaires had built over two generations.

Will service workers benefit, or will hedge funds and big banks reclassify bonuses or bribes as tips? Back in 1982, Republicans and the Reagan administration determined that they needed to raise taxes on average working people to pay for part of the massive tax break they were giving billionaires (they dropped the top income tax bracket from 74% to 28%). Reagan imposed income taxes on elderly people on their Social Security income, ended the tax deductibility of interest on car loans and credit cards, and ended the tax deduction on two-income households. But one of the most truculent ways Reagan went after average working people to fund his tax cuts for billionaires was to sign legislation and issue new rules requiring the IRS to more aggressively require employers to track and report tips earned by their employees, and tightening penalties on tipped workers who’d failed to report their tip income. Speaking last month in Nevada — the state with the highest percentage of tipped workers in the nation — Donald Trump proposed eliminating taxes on tips altogether. Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris has also endorsed the idea. But there are big differences between the two.

How expanding and regulating the court could save America from GOP billionaires. The six Republicans on the US Supreme Court are up to their old tricks, ruling this week that Texas’ draconian abortion ban can continue without modification, meaning that more women in that state will die or bleed out to the point where their lives are in danger and/or their ability to have future children is ended. They are doing this, in part, because the Court has been captured by a fringe rightwing Catholic death cult, the result of an intentional, well-funded campaign.

The pandemic's psychological toll and the rise of Trump's dangerous movement… Could the Covid disaster of 2020 — which Trump botched so badly that America has had more Covid deaths than any other nation in the world except Peru (whose president denied Covid was dangerous) — be what's fueling the Trump MAGA cult? Are we, in other words, as a nation suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that's driving a national mental illness crisis that opened the door for Trump's cult to grow? — Colorado elections worker Tina Peters, for example, was just sent to prison for nine years for her role in trying to subvert the 2020 election; she'd completely bought into Trump's lie that Democrats had stolen that election and is paying for it with the rest of her life. — My barber was telling me this past weekend about how one of his regulars is stocking up on guns, ammunition, and dried food in anticipation of a second Civil War. This guy is now fully in the Trump cult and is thus perfectly willing to kill his neighbors for politics, once somebody declares the war is now underway (as many of these guys expect Trump to do in the next few weeks). — All across America, families are being torn apart by the Trump cult, and sometimes the conflicts even lead to violence.