The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why doesn’t anybody mention that Trump himself is the biggest recipient of his “settlement” $1.776 billion fund? — America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in. — Welcome to the Golden Era, where six in ten Americans can’t afford lunch. — The Trump administration tried to ban voting machines in half the country, and we’re only finding out now. — Marco Rubio is about to inherit a starved island, and he’s calling it a legacy. — If you wanted a green card, the new rule is: leave the country to get it. — rump, acting like a 10-year-old bully, posted an AI video of himself beating up Stephen Colbert and throwing him in a dumpster. The White House posted it too.

The hard-right fantasy behind Bezos’ “no income tax” pitch, and who really profits from it… The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC yesterday that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer. First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.

From defying Congress to rewarding loyalists and ignoring constitutional limits, America is confronting a dangerous new era where the rule of law no longer restrains those in power… Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army. It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant. Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was. I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.

By the time George W. Bush became president in January 2001 neoliberalism had defeated even the Perot faction of American thought: politicians who opposed it, like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown on the left and Mike Lee and Ron Paul on the right, were dismissed as cranks and outliers trying to stand in the way of progress. Bush continued the process, with his largest success being the privatization, with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, of a large chunk of the nation’s premiere government-funded healthcare program, Medicare. The new “Medicare Advantage” programs, entirely run by private entities, cost the federal government on average 11% more than Medicare and were given the freedom to deny services to their customers the way health insurance companies have been scamming their customers for generations.