2023 Archives

It’s time to call a fascist a fascist, speaking of CNN’s upcoming attempt to rehabilitate Trump with a sanitized “Town Hall” and a mostly MAGA audience... Next week, CNN will take a shot at normalizing American fascist movement leader and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, a man who openly embraces murderous Nazis, Vladimir Putin, white supremacy, misogyny, religious bigotry, and political violence. They will feature and fete a career criminal who over 20 women have claimed raped or sexually assaulted them.

The only businesses Republicans support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors & giant monopolies - and none of those are good for average Americans or the US economy… “The chief business of the American people is business.” — Calvin Coolidge. As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn. All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans destroy small business

The Best of the Rest of the News. — a Bizarre confluence of events could be setting America up for a real crisis in a year and a half. — A new study explains why Republicans are working so hard to make it more difficult for students and young adults to vote. — Earlier this week I wrote about a woman from Oklahoma who had to go to Kansas to get an abortion to save her own life. Soon, even Kansas may be shut down as a place of refuge for women in crisis. — Bed, Bath & Beyond is a poster child for the damage Reagan’s deregulation of capitalism has caused America. — Senator Dick Durban says a SCOTUS ethics overhaul is coming. — A new ocean warming study is so distressing, writes Julia Conley, that some scientists don’t want to talk about it. — Video of the Day: Wow. Hakeem Jeffries is so good at this. — Crazy Alert! This is what happens to people when they take money from fossil fuel billionaires.

The US government has never, in our country’s entire history, defaulted on its debt. Neither, in recent history, have most other advanced democracies. Debt default is very much a Third World thing… Kevin McCarthy is playing with fire, and he’s on very shaky constitutional grounds. He believes that he can hold hostage payments for goods bought and services already provided to the federal government — debts of the United States — in exchange for forcing the Biden administration to go along with draconian cuts to veterans benefits, food stamps (SNAP benefits), Medicaid, the Inflation Reduction Act (particularly its subsidies for green energy), and the permanent establishment of Trump’s massive tax cuts for billionaires. Republicans started using the so-called “debt ceiling” — based on a law passed back in 1917 — as a cudgel to beat up Democratic presidents in 1995 during the Clinton administration. It was one of Newt’s “bright ideas.” Clinton and Obama went along with the GOP, but now their demands have become so extreme that President Biden is threatening a veto (if the bill even gets through the Senate, which it probably won’t).