2025 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The toadies's Trump has installed to run our federal agencies, in this case Social Security, are apparently just as good at lying as is Trump himself. — Republicans are suing to stop American citizens from voting — Trump and DOGE/Musk gutted the National Weather Service and now people in Texas — including children camping — are dead and missing. — Never forget that this is that most catastrophic bill passed in our lifetimes: no Republican who voted for it should get reelected or forgiven. — Trump continues his regular phone calls with Putin, who's obviously now giving him instructions. — CBS/Paramount paid an extortionate bribe to Trump to seal a billion-dollar merger deal and Senator Ron Wyden wants them prosecuted for bribery. — The Six Republicans on the US Supreme Court are now officially complicit in Trump's corruption and destruction of American democracy. — Pam Bondi's Department of Justice is looking at prosecuting local and state election officials if they think too many Democrats are getting elected. — "Kill them!" A convicted (and pardoned) January 6th rioter is now helping the DOJ investigate Democrats who Trump alleges tried to "weaponize" the Justice Department when they prosecuted him. — Challenging the idea of free speech and the distribution of publicly-available information, Trump and his minions are investigating Joshua Aaron, the young man who created the ICEBlock app for smartphones that crowdsources details on ICE raids. — Wild Killer Whales are more empathetic than Trump and MAGA. — Hunter in a Farmer's World: Neurodivergence and the Climate Crisis: Are ADHD Brains Wired to Save the Planet? — Wisdom School: The Lost Gospel of the Kingdom: Why Jesus Was a Revolutionary, Not a Mascot

Trump's "Big Ugly Bill" isn't just cruel: it's the latest salvo in the war against democracy and the "We" society… Societies are typically organized along one of two lines: "We" or "Me." We societies drive wealth and rights from the bottom up; Me societies do it from the top down, much like the kingdoms of old. It's a choice every nation must make. Franklin Roosevelt turned America into a We society with the New Deal; Reagan began the process of turning us into a Me society with the Reagan Revolution. And his and the GOP's efforts are now coming to full fruition.

Why Republicans want to destroy the hidden link between Middle Class wealth and democratic power… A Pew poll published last week finds that 59% of Americans say the GOP's "Big Beautiful Bill" that cuts taxes for billionaires and raises them for working-class people "would hurt lower-income people and 51% think it would hurt middle-income people." And they're right. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill will measurably reduce the income and spending power of low- and middle-income people while giving a ~$4 trillion gift to the morbidly rich. Americans have figured this out: according to a Fox "News" poll published last week and reported on by Newsweek: "Only 38 percent favored the bill, while 59 percent opposed it, a 21-point gap against the bill. About half of all voters believed the legislation would be detrimental to their families, and just a quarter thought it would deliver any benefit." So, why would Republicans want to further reduce the size and wealth of America's middle class?

The maintenance and growth of a middle class depends on wages rising over time, both to keep up with inflation and to steadily improve the lot of working people, as America saw between 1933 and 1981. But working-class wages have been steadily declining ever since the Reagan Revolution, and it can’t entirely be attributed to the GOP’s war on organized labor. It turns out that income taxes are another way conservative and neoliberal policies have taken a chunk out of the income and wealth of working people, but not in the way you probably think. In fact, income taxes affect working class people in a completely different way than they impact the morbidly rich.