2023 Archives

Back in 1896 & 1929 people didn’t need a detailed multi-decade, multi-country analysis of Horse & Sparrow to know it was bad news: the Great Panic & the Republican Great Depression convinced everybody. Kevin McCarthy’s House Republicans, in their demand that Democrats gut Social Security and education monies to give more trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, are once again trying the Reaganomics hustle. Only this time with a twist. Boomers and many Gen Xers remember how the media swooned for Art Laffer’s napkin in the 1980s, and then President Reagan turned it into a movement to cut taxes on billionaires because, he lied, it would make average working-class people richer. What most don’t remember — because none of us were alive back in the 1920s or 1890s — is that Laffer and Reagan hadn’t come up with anything novel.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Budgets reflect policy priorities, and the GOP is now telling us what they're really all about: hunger for poor people, low taxes for billionaires, and to hell with students in debt. — If you agree that "God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society" then you're in alignment with 54 percent of all Republicans, according to a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in association with the Brookings Institution. — First they came for American history, now they're coming for science. — Should the new GOP "Fair Tax" should be renamed the "Billionaire Wel-Fair Tax?" — Railroad companies paid off Republican politicians for the Trump administration to block safety rules before the Ohio 150-car train derailment and fireball explosion. — Saudis sentence an American to 19 years in a hellhole prison over a tweet. — In Good News — The Church of England is considering the question: must God be a man?

For the moment, the only defense women have against these noble liars is knowledge of what they are and how they work. Pass it on. Plato (in The Republic) was the father of the “noble lie,” a tale told to people “for their own good and that of society” even though it was utterly untrue. Almost twenty-five-hundred years later, the noble lie lives on in some Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs).

America didn’t ask for a homegrown rightwing terror movement, but now that it’s here we need to take it seriously. They thought that by “completely destroying Baltimore” — shooting up five power substations to blackout the city — they’d so upset white people in America that Trump’s racist base would rise up, begin the Second Civil War, and start slaughtering Black people, Hispanics, and Jews. Instead, Sarah Clendaniel, 27, and Brandon Russell, 34, a co-founder of the white supremacist neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, are in federal custody awaiting arraignment.