2022 Archives

Bringing our manufacturing back from overseas will reverse the 40-year-long slide of the American middle class and rebuild our nation’s security & economy. China is threatening the United States: this could get very ugly, very quickly. Here’s what’s happening. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is planning a trip to Taiwan, the first for a Speaker in a quarter-century, as part of a larger trip to the region that will include Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia. China broke away from Taiwan in 1949 and has claimed ever since that the island nation is part of China proper. Taiwan, one of the worlds’ most vibrant democracies, wants to maintain their independence as a separate, sovereign nation. China is not happy about Pelosi’s trip and the increased level of US recognition of Taiwan’s independent existence that it endorses, making implied threats of military or significant diplomatic punishment if she goes through with the trip.

No republic in history has ever survived as a functioning democracy more than a few generations once political bribery is legalized or becomes widespread. A recent poll from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics found that a majority of Americans agree that the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me.” Sixty-six percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats agreed with that statement; only 9 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats disagreed.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Unless you've been living under a rock or watching Fox "News" you know that the January 6th Committee delved deeply into the 187 minutes during which Trump watched an armed crowd attack the Capitol and kill five people while looking to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House. — Arguably the most important "stabilizer" of the US government is our Civil Service, made up of around 2 million federal employees. — One in five Americans now says that violence against other Americans to achieve a political goal is acceptable. — Three Republican-controlled counties in Pennsylvania are refusing to certify the recent primary election, in an apparent test of their ability to refuse to count mail-in ballots, which come predominantly from Democrats. — Apparently some evangelical Christians have started reading their Bibles. — Idaho Republicans say if it's a choice between a fetus or mom, mom dies and the fetus lives. — A handful of rightwing billionaires have put up about half of all the money raised by the two major GOP super PACs that work to elect Republicans to the House and Senate. — Donald Trump Junior ripped off investors, vendors, employees and customers of a company he started while his dad was in the White House. — The UN's Secretary General, António Guterres, tells the world that humanity now faces "collective suicide" if we don't take prompt action to stop climate change. — Geeky Science! Will monarch butterflies soon be extinct? — A special note about Monday. I'm on a book deadline for The Hidden History of American Democracy and taking Monday off from the radio/TV show as well as this newsletter. You'll get the Sunday Book Excerpt tomorrow, then I'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Thanks for understanding… — Crazy Alert! Josh Hawley has broken the internet, as people all over the world are rolling on the floor laughing

War is the use of armed violence to achieve political ends. If the armed, uniformed militias who attacked our Capitol on January 6th weren’t “levying War against” America, what were they doing? America is now under armed assault, a tyranny that suppresses free speech and has produced almost-daily mass- and school-shootings, in a gun ownership frenzy fed by people who claim their power comes from the Constitution. Their entire argument — that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to form private militias and then turn their guns against the government — is a complete and utter scam.