In a last ditch effort to satisfy their donors, Republicans attempt to kill the ACA and transfer billions of dollars to America’s super-rich by calling it a “middle class tax cut”

By Mark | November 14, 2017

Remember how, this past summer, we all came together, fought like hell, and killed the Republican health care plan that would have robbed some 22 million Americans of their coverage? Well, it looks like it’s time for us to get back in fighting shape, as the Republicans seem hellbent on pushing legislation through Congress before the holidays that would, among other things, increase the taxes of 36 million working class and middle class households by 2027 and leave 13 million Americans without health care.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking… When the Republicans first told us about this legislation of theirs, which they’re calling the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” they said it was a middle class tax cut, right? Trump, after all, said himself that it was “a tax bill for middle class.” In reality, though, it turned out to be a bill for the idle rich, which maintains tax breaks for golf corse owners and eliminates the estate tax, while shifting the burden to middle class families, who would, among other things, lose their state and local tax deductions, and have to start paying taxes on their student loan interest. And, this, as you might imagine, is proving to be somewhat awkward for politicians like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who are now having to walk back their earlier statements… McConnell, for instance, who, just a week or so ago, promised that “nobody in the middle class is going to get a tax increase,” just recently had to confess to the New York Times that he’d “misspoke”, and that taxes would actually rise for a significant number of people in the middle class.

As for why this is happening now, it definitely doesn’t have anything to do with voter sentiment, even among Republicans… According to recent polling, only 17% of Republicans believe corporations are taxed too little, and nearly two-thirds of Americans believe corporate taxes should be increased… But it’s not the voters who the Republicans in Congress are listening to. By their own admission, it’s their wealthy donors. House Republican Chris Collins just recently said that his donors had told him, if he didn’t pass tax reform, he shouldn’t expect another dollar from them. And Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has said publicly that, if this legislation fails to pass, “financial contributions will stop.” Make no mistake, this is all about the idle rich and the CEO class, who want to kill the estate tax, speed the transfer of wealth to the super-rich, and establish themselves as members of a new American aristocracy. And, if you don’t believe me, listen to former investment banker Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council and chief economic advisor to Trump, who has said publicly, “The most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.”

Meanwhile, across town, economist Gene Sperling, who was Director of the National Economic Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama, had a much less enthusiastic take about what this poorly thought out legislation would do to our country.

“But, Mark,” you might ask, “don’t we need to lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy in order to spur growth and create jobs?” Well, the answer is no. There is absolutely no evidence that trickle down economic works. We’ve tried it, and we know the results are disastrous. And, for what it’s worth, we also know what actually works to spur the economy, which is putting money into the pockets of working men and women, and growing the middle class. But this, as I think we’ve established, was never about spurring the economy or creating jobs, but about putting money back in to the coffers of our most rich. The truth is, our corporations are raking in record profits right now. As Trump himself tweeted just a few months ago, “corporations have NEVER made as much money as they are making now.” In spite of that, though, they aren’t investing. And, for what it’s worth, there’s no evidence that they’d start investing if this new Republican tax plan were to pass. In fact, check out this Wall Street Journal video, where Gary Cohn asks CEOs to raise their hands if they intend to invest, should this tax bill get passed. [Spoiler alert, very few hands go up.]

One hopes, now that the Republicans are talking about adding a backdoor Obamacare repeal to the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the American people might actually get motivated to push back, like they did this past summer. [From the New York Times: “Senate Republicans have decided to include the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most people have health insurance into the sprawling tax rewrite, merging the fight over health care with the high-stakes effort to cut taxes… If it becomes law, the repeal would save more than $300 billion over a decade but result in 13 million fewer Americans being covered by health insurance by the end of that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office.“] But, as of right now, I haven’t seen much sign of action. In fact, while I’ve heard that Senator Susan Collins has concerns about the legislation, I’ve also heard that the Republicans currently have all the votes they need in the Senate, which is where the battle will be won or lost.

Given the current makeup of the House, anything that’s brought to a vote will be passed by the Republicans. In the Senate, though, as we saw with this past summer’s multiple unsuccessful Obamacare repeal efforts, there’s a chance, as Republicans like Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and John McCain (Arizona) showed backbone and stood up against the likes Trump, Ryan and McConnell. Sadly, though, I haven’t seen any evidence yet that they might be up for another fight… So, with that in mind, I’d like to ask, if you have a few minutes today, that you call your Senators, especially if you live in states represented by the likes of Collins, Murkowski or McCain… or even Bob Corer (Tennessee) and Jeff Flake (Arizona), who have been more outspoken about the President in recent weeks… and demand that they vote no on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (as even Alan Greenspan has suggested) or, at the very least, hold open, public hearings before bringing the legislation to a vote. And, if, like me, your Senators are Democrats, call them anyway, and demand they do everything in the power to slow this down, giving us time to get the word out about how this will impact the working families of America. [For instance, did you know that, almost immediately upon passing, this legislation would cut Medicare by $25 billion per year? Well, it would. And everyone should know that.]

You can find contact information for your Senators here.

This, as Joe Biden might say, is a big, fucking deal… So far, we’ve blocked every piece of legislation that the Trump administration has tried to pass, and we can’t stop now. We have to keep fighting, if not for ourselves, for our children, who will inherit this mess.

Tell your friends. Call you Senator. Stop this giveaway to the super-rich that’s being funded on the backs of working American families.

And one last thing… To Paul Ryan and those Republicans who keep telling me how awesome this legislation will be for me and my family, as it’ll simplify our tax forms and cut our annual federal tax bill by a few hundred bucks a year… With all due respect (which isn’t much), fuck you. Whatever small amount of savings we may receive, will be immediately eclipsed 100 times over by the loss in services that we’ll experience as the federal government contracts to cover the $1.7 trillion in unfunded tax giveaways in the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”. And I have no doubt whatsoever that whatever extra money we might have, if there is any, will go immediately to help friends left without health insurance due to the passage of this legislation… I get that, in order to get this monstrosity of a bill passed, you have to lie about its contents, but it would be refreshing if, for just once, you had the courage to be honest about your motivations and intent… Why not, for instance, call it the “Make The Super-Wealthy Even Richer While You Pay For The Chemotherapy Of Your Friends Act”?

Oh, speaking of Paul Ryan, did you happen to see this? What a fucking load of shit. Giving working people back a few hundred dollars while slashing Medicare, kicking 13 million people off their health care plans, and increasing the burden on the elderly does not give anyone “peace of mind,” you evil, lying asshole.

Posted in Corporate Crime, Health, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Calling the recent child molestation accusations a “desperate political attack,” far-right Christian folk hero Roy Moore assures his supporters that he’ll continue his run for Senate

By Mark | November 14, 2017

Well, it looks like I was right a few days ago, when, channeling my inner Johnnie Cochran, I proclaimed, “Where there are four, you know there are more.” This afternoon, an Alabama woman by the name of Beverly Young-Nelson came forward to announce that she too had been sexually assaulted by Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore as a teenager, joining Leigh Corfman and the three other women who shared their stories late last week with the Washington Post. [Corfman was just 14 when the 32 year old District Attorney spotted her in a rural Alabama courthouse, where she and her mother were awaiting a child custody hearing, asked for her number, and eventually began seeing her, picking her up around the corner from her family’s home, and driving her to a house in the woods, where, on one occasion, according to her sworn statement, he undressed her, touched her over her bra and underpants, and guided her hand to touch his penis through his underwear.] Young-Nelson’s story, unlike those shared by the other women, however, involves being choked and thrown from a parked car after she refused the older man’s violent sexual advances. Here’s footage from the press conference, followed by an excerpt from the Washington Post.

…Beverly Young Nelson, now 55, said Monday that she got to know Moore, now 70, in the late 1970s when she was a waitress at the Old Hickory House restaurant in the northeastern Alabama town of Gadsden, where Moore lived for much of his life.

Nelson said at a news conference at a New York hotel that Moore, then the district attorney of Etowah County, was a regular at the restaurant and would sometimes compliment her looks or touch her long red hair. She showed a copy of her high school yearbook that she said Moore signed Dec. 22, 1977, with the inscription: “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”

On a cold night about a week or two after that, Nelson alleges that Moore offered to give her a ride home from work after her shift ended at 10 p.m. Instead of taking her home, Nelson said that Moore pulled the two-door car into a dark and deserted area between a dumpster and the back of the restaurant.

When she asked what he was doing, Nelson alleges that Moore put his hands on her breasts and began groping her. When she tried to open the car door and leave, Nelson said he reached over and locked the door. When she yelled at him to stop and tried to fight him off, she alleges that he tightly squeezed the back of her neck and tried to force her head toward his lap. He also tried to pull her shirt off, she said.

“I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him. I was terrified,” Nelson said during the news conference, often becoming emotional as she described the attack that she alleges occurred about 40 years ago. “I thought that he was going to rape me.”…

According to Young-Nelson, who was accompanied at this afternoon’s news conference by attorney Gloria Allred, Moore, after attacking her, said, “You’re just a child,” as he shoved her from the car, adding, “I am the District Attorney of Etowah County. And if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you.”

Nelson, who cried as she read her prepared statement, said she quit her waitressing job the next day, so that she’d never have to see Moore again, covered the bruises on her neck with makeup, and didn’t speak about what had happened for two years, when she confided in her sister, who has since confirmed the account. [According to Nelson, she also told her husband of the assault before they were married, as well as her mother, who she told approximately four years ago.]

“Mr. Moore attacked me when I was a child,” Nelson told members of the press, adding that the District Attorney had begun flirting with her when she was just 15, lending considerable credence to the theory that Moore was actively grooming several young women during this period of his life. [The New Yorker is reporting today that, according to several sources, “Roy Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall and the YMCA for his inappropriate behavior of soliciting sex from young girls.]

Here’s an excerpt from Nelson’s written statement, in which she discusses Moore’s attack.

In spite of this, some conservatives continue to support Moore. Alabama Republicans have, in recent days, both suggested that Moore’s infractions were not more serious than stealing a lawnmower, and biblically sanctioned, given that Joseph was an older man when he married Mary. And, of course, there are some suggesting that all of this is nothing more than a political hit job, ignoring the fact that both Corfman and Young-Nelson are conservatives who voted for Trump. [Young-Nelson said today, “My husband and I supported Donald Trump for president. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the Republicans or the Democrats. It has everything to do with Mr. Moore’s sexual assault when I was a teenager.”] Republican propagandist Dinesh D’Souza just said that Young-Nelson’s statement “seems crafted by someone who is very savvy about politics”‏, and Breitbart has apparently dispatched two of their “journalists” to Alabama to discredit the women who have come forward‏ thus far. [Keep this in mind when people ask why it took so many years for these women to come forward. Not only, in Young-Nelson’s case, was she apparently choked and told that no one would believe her, but now Breitbart and others are actively trying to destroy her life.]

Thankfully, however, some on the right have begun to turn on the former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court… Sure, they probably should have turned on him long ago, considering that he, among other things, has said that homosexuality should be illegal, that 9/11 was God’s punishment for sodomy and abortion, and that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in elected office‏, but better late than never, right? [Sadly, I suspect many of these folks are finally turning on Moore not because he’s a vile human being, but because they’ve done the political calculus, and know that, having him in the Senate, would be worse for the GOP than electing a Democrat. Still, though, I’ll take it.] Today, two of Moore’s biggest supporters in the Senate, John Cornyn‏ and Ted Cruz‏ both withdrew their endorsements, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just came out to say that he believes the allegations and feels as though Moore “should step aside”‏. And, what’s more, the head of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee went on the record saying that, if Moore wins the race, he should be expelled from the Senate… Oh, and Senator Jeff Flake said that, given the choice between Moor and a Democrat, he’d “run to the polling place to vote for the Democrat.” But here are my two favorite conservative quotes of the day, from Republican Senators Claire McCaskill and Susan Collins.

Moore, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to be backing down. While his story did evolve a bit over the past several days, with him now saying that, sure, he may have dated young girls, but he never did so without the permission of their mothers, he’s still sticking to his guns, and claiming that these charges aren’t legitimate… “These allegations are completely false, and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” Moore said when the first allegations of child molestation were made public last Thursday. And Moore’s campaign chairman Bill Armistead added the following today. “Gloria Allred is a sensationalist leading a witch hunt,” he said, “and she is only around to create a spectacle.” He then went on to say, “Allred was the attorney who claims credit for giving us Roe v. Wade, which has resulted in the murder of tens of millions of unborn babies. We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: Judge Moore is an innocent man and has never had any sexual misconduct with anyone. This is a witch hunt against a man who has had an impeccable career for over 30 years and has always been known as a man of high character.” Echoing Trump, Moore’s campaign also put out a statement calling the accusations “garbage” and “the very definition of fake news.”

Here’s Moore saying that he couldn’t have choked and thrown the 16 year old Young-Nelson out of his car, as he didn’t even know where the Old Hickory House was.

I could go on about Moore’s hypocrisy, and what his continued support among conservatives tells us about the current state of the Republican party, but, as I don’t suspect I’d be telling you anything you didn’t already know, I’ll just say goodnight and pass along a link to the campaign page of Moore’s Democratic rival, Doug Jones, who, to my knowledge, is not only not a pedophile, but a damn fine man, who, as a U.S. attorney, successfully prosecuted the members of the KKK responsible for bombing a black church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four young girls. [Please, if you can, give his campaign a few dollars, so we can not only help put him in the Senate, but start building a grassroots Democratic infrastructure in Alabama.]

It’s hard to believe we’ve gotten to this point in American history. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether or not I thought it could be possible that, one day, we might have a considerable number of people that would rather see an accused child molester in office than a Democrat, I probably would have said that you were out of your mind. But here we are, one year after electing an admitted “pussy grabber,” with no end in site. We now live in a world where all that matters, it would seem, is winning at all costs, where, thanks to a constant diet of Fox News, the tribalism has grown so fierce that we have actual real human beings in Alabama saying things like, “(Moore) could have killed Obama, and we wouldn’t care.”

Child molestation doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter. What matters is winning, and defeating our enemies. If people really cared about the safety of children, everyone who was so irate about Hillary Clinton’s imagined involvement in the “Pizzagate” child sex ring, would be in the streets right now, demanding that Moore be “locked up.” But they’re not. They knew the story about Clinton was bullshit. And, right now, they could care less what Moore did to this young girls. All that ever mattered was winning. Everything else was just a lie.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m fairly certain that the first step is to end Moore’s political career right here, and right now. Because, if we can’t do that – if we can’t keep a child molester out of the United States Senate – what chance of we got of saving our country?

Earlier today, Beverly Young-Nelson said, “I want Mr. Moore to know that he no longer has any power over me.” Hopefully, as a nation, we’re getting to the point where we can collectively say the same thing to those on the far right, who, for far too long now, have been leading us down this path, to the point where we’re now openly supporting white nationalists, child molesters and con men, thinking that it’s completely normal to do so.

Posted in Church and State, Civil Liberties, Other, Politics, Religious Extremism, sex, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 64 Comments

Trump just warned that Mueller’s investigation has offended Putin, and that “people will die” if it continues.

By Mark | November 11, 2017

There doesn’t seem to be audio yet, but it’s being reported by several new agencies that, today, while flying aboard Air Force One from Da Nang to Hanoi, Trump doubled down on his ‘the Russia investigation is fake news’ narrative, telling members of the press that he’s chosen to accept the word of Vladimir Putin on the matter, apparently in spite of the evidence to the contrary. According to the accounts of those who were on Air Force One, Trump, after repeating that the whole story was an “artificial Democratic hit job,” said that he’s asked Putin whether or not the Russian government meddled in our election, and that Putin has denied it. And this, Trump told the journalists who were present, was enough to satisfy him. “Every time (Putin) sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,'” Trump told them, “and I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.” And, he added, “Everybody knows there was no collusion.”

Trump, according to the reports of the journalists who were there, indicated that he and Putin had, in fact, just discussed the matter again. “I just asked him again,” Trump said. “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election.” Trump then went on to imply that Mueller’s investigation was making the world a less safe place, as Putin was becoming “insulted by” the whole thing. In fact, Trump warned that “people will die” if this continues. But, he added, there’s still an opportunity for our two nations to put this behind us and move on. “(We) have the potential to have a very good relationship,” Trump told those assembled for the 26-minute question and answer session. “I think it’s a shame that something like this can destroy a very important potential relationship between two countries that are very important countries Russia could really help us,” Trump added.

Refusing to acknowledge that many within his own administration, like White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and White House Counterterrorism adviser Thomas Bossert, acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump said the whole thing was dreamed up by “political hacks.” The following is a direct quote from Trump… “So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker. So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with them.”

Well, as you might imagine, not everyone is enthusiastic about what Trump had to say. Here are just a few examples.

Michael McFaul, U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012 to 2014) and Stanford professor of political science: “I am disturbed that our president believes a KGB agent and continues to refuse to believe the CIA. I can never remember a time in our history when this was so. I hope Trump’s national security team will be more forceful in convincing the president of the basic facts of Russia’s violation of our sovereignty last year.”

Thomas Wright, Director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution: “The worst part of this is not that Trump takes Putin’s word over the evidence based analysis of his own intelligence agencies. It is not even that he plays the role of a useful idiot as he kowtows to Putin yet again. The worst part, by far, is that a hostile power is engaged in an ongoing attack on America’s political system and Trump is deliberately stripping the nation’s defenses bare and leaving us exposed to future assaults. It is unilateral disarmament plain and simple… We have never seen this type of weakness in a U.S. president before.”

CIA spokesperson: “The director (Mike Pompeo) stands by and has always stood by the January 2017 intelligence community assessment entitled: ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.’ The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed.”

At this point, I have to think that Trump is daring the intelligence community to arrest him.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

The University of Michigan, with an increasingly wealthy student body, sets out to return the “common man” and increase economic diversity

By Mark | November 9, 2017

Politico has a really interesting piece today about the increasingly wealthy University of Michigan student body, what that means in practical terms when it comes to economics and politics in the state, and what University leaders are doing to reverse the trend, and increase economic diversity on campus. And, interestingly, they’ve decided to tell the story from the vantage point of Ypsilanti, a “working-class city just seven miles from the university’s campus in Ann Arbor,” where, they argue, “(graduating high school) students would, in theory, benefit greatly from the opportunities that open up to Michigan graduates.” [Ypsilanti Community Schools Superintendent Ben Edmondson, who was interviewed for the report, told Politico that he’s only aware of one Ypsi High student, out of the 400 that have graduated over the past two years, that has gone on to attend the University of Michigan.]

For what it’s worth, the report isn’t a straight-up “hit” piece on U-M. [They didn’t even bring up the name Jake Croman.] The author not only acknowledges that, to some extent, the University’s pursuit of more affluent students was necessitated by the fact that state support for higher education has dropped approximately 30% since 2002, but notes that the University has, at least in recent years, been doing more to attract and prepare non-affluent, in-state students though programs like HAIL: High Achieving Involved Leader (a new scholarship program aimed at high-achieving, low-income, in-state students), the Go Blue Guarantee (a promise of free tuition for admitted in-state students whose families make less than $65,000 a year), and Wolverine Pathways (a free, intensive, year-round college preparedness and free tuition program offered in the communities of Detroit, Southfield, and Ypsilanti). As Politico also suggests, this isn’t a situation unique to the University of Michigan, as a number of the so-called “public ivies” are facing the same reality due to a confluence of factors. Not only, for example, are non-wealthy kids less prepared for college, due in large part to the increasing resegregation of American public education, but, perhaps for the first time since World War II, working-class high school graduates aren’t seeing higher education as something worth striving for, as a degree no longer carries with it the guarantee of a stable career and a middle class life.

As for why Politico chose to focus on the University of Michigan, when there are other schools facing the very same issues, I suspect it comes down to two things. First, the presence of Ypsilanti, just seven miles away, offered a compelling foil. And, second, James Angell, the University’s longest-serving president (1871–1909), actually put down in writing that the University of Michigan existed in order to ensure that this relatively new nation of ours not establish an aristocracy… Here’s a clip from the Politico piece.

The University of Michigan’s most legendary president coined what’s become an unofficial mission statement for one of the nation’s first public universities: to provide “an uncommon education for the common man.”

Michigan, he declared, would be an antidote to aristocracy.

“Have an aristocracy of birth if you will or of riches if you wish, but give our plain boys from the log cabins a chance to develop their minds with the best learning and we fear nothing from your aristocracy,” that president, James Angell, said in 1879. “In the fierce competitions of life something besides blue blood or inherited wealth is needed to compete with the brains and character from the cabins.”

Angell’s words are still a part of life at the Ann Arbor campus these days, but the spirit is missing: Today’s University of Michigan includes more than its share of blue bloods and people with inherited wealth. Like many other flagship state universities that were founded to provide a leg up for the common man, Michigan has become a school largely for students with means. A full 10 percent of its student body comes from families in the top 1 percent of earners, according to data from the Equality of Opportunity Project. Just 16 percent come from families in the bottom 60 percent of earners combined. The median income of parents of students at the university is $156,000, roughly three times the median income of Michigan families…

I won’t go too much deeper into it here, as I think you should really just follow the link at the top of the post and read the article. I really do hope, however, that, after reading it, you’ll come back and join us in a conversation about the role U-M plays in regional economic segregation, and these recent efforts on the part of the University to steer things back in the direction of James Angell’s “common man.”

Oh, and if you don’t have any interest in education policy, you should still check out the article, as there are some good photos of Ypsi, like this one. [The photos approach ruin porn territory, but, thankfully, never fully commit.]

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure what the answer is… Clearly, on one hand, we need to fight for public education, and demand that our children, regardless of where they live in Michigan, are properly educated. And that’s a big part of this problem. We just aren’t turning out non-wealthy high school graduates that are prepared for the University of Michigan… As we’ve discussed here several times in the past, not all school districts are equal, and the system is rigged against those without either the financial means, or the family support, to successfully navigate an extremely complicated landscape, where neighborhood schools have given way to schools-of-choice and an ever-changing lineup of unregulated for-profit charters. Sure, Ann Arbor schools, which are better funded, open up slots, as more wealthy parents in their district opt for private schools, but how many kids in Ypsi, especially kids from poor families, can make the trip to and from Ann Arbor each day? And what happens here, in our public school district, which is saddled not only with debt, but with the costs associated with educating those students with special needs, who aren’t wanted by the wealthier surrounding districts? The result, as we’ve seen, is consolidation and collapse. [I believe Ypsi has closed six schools over the past ten years.] Sure, we have examples of success and growth, like we just saw with the opening of the Ypsilanti International Elementary School, which is really thriving, but the bottom line is, even with these offers of free tuition, we’re not turning out kids that are prepared to do well on the SATs, or succeed at U-M, and that needs to change. [Wolverine Pathways is a great first step toward filling the gap, but there needs to be more.] As a state, we need to invest more in education, especially in communities where kids struggle with the effects of poverty.

As for how to slow the rising cost of higher education, I’m a little less clear… All I know is, we’re moving in a direction that isn’t good for the long term health of our democracy, with access to quality college education moving beyond the grasp of our shrinking middle class. And, if we don’t solve the problem soon, we’re going to create a permanent aristocracy in the United States like the one James Angell cautioned against. [This, by the way, is a huge reason to retain the inheritance tax, which, if anything, should be increased, not eradicated as the Republicans are now suggesting.] So, I am extremely thankful that the University of Michigan is making efforts to reverse this trend, launching programs like the ones noted above, and paying the tuition of those students who need assistance. [As Politico notes in the story, the University already spends in excess of $170 million each year on need-based aid for undergraduate students.] The question is, is it enough?

Posted in Ann Arbor, Education, Photographs, Uncategorized, Ypsilanti | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Democrats make significant gains, as voters indicate an abandonment of Trumpism

By Mark | November 7, 2017

Had former Enron lobbyist Ed Gillespie won Virginia’s gubernatorial race today, you can be certain that prospective Republican candidates everywhere would have taken notice and done their best to follow the same script… recreating themselves, as Gillespie did, in the image of Trump, talking nonsensically about hispanic gangs, confederate monuments, kneeling football players and sanctuary cities, instead of issues that really matter, like health care and the growing economic instability that American families are feeling. Fortunately, though, Gillespie appears to have been beaten handily by Virginia’s Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, who, as I understand it, is poised to win the race by a larger percentage than any Democratic candidate has won the state since 1985. While I’m hesitant to read too much into it, as I realize that things will continue to evolve between now and the midterm elections, today’s results, at least to me, demonstrate that Trumpism may finally be on the decline.

Trump, of course, is now trying to distance himself from Gillespie, saying that the long-time denizen of the Washington swamp hadn’t done enough to “embrace” the ideals that won him the White House, which is a baldfaced lie. The Truth is, Gillespie ran as Trump in what’s essentially a swing state, and he was handed his ass.

And, for what it’s worth, those four House races Trump refers to didn’t take place today, but this past summer, when Republicans picked up a congressional seats in special elections held in deep red states like Montana, Georgia, and South Carolina. Today, however, the outcome was different. Today, for the first time since Trump came to power, we saw signs that that his political philosophy might be losing its some of its power over the American people. And, more importantly, we saw evidence of a rising resistance, with more women and people of color winning races over Republican incumbents than perhaps ever before.

Not only did Northam win decisively in Virginia, but, in New Jersey, it looks as though the Democrats took back the Governor’s mansion, with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Phil Murphy projected to beat Republican Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno. And, not just that, but there’s a pretty good chance that, by the time all the votes are counted, the Democrats may have also taken control of the Virginia House of Delegates, where former TV news anchor Christ Hurst, whose girlfriend, as you may recall, was murdered on air last year, defeated a Republican incumbent, and transgender candidate Danica Roem beat a 13-term Republican incumbent who actually referred to himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe.”

That’s right, the people of Virginia replaced the author of their state’s proposed “bathroom bill,” with our nation’s first openly transgender politician… Let that sink in.

I know it’s premature to suggest that Trumpism is dead, but it’s a damn site weaker today than it was yesterday, and, one would hope, as a result, we’ll see fewer candidates adopting his demeanor, and fewer images like this (taken from one of Gillespie’s race-baiting ads), in the future.

There will certainly still be challenges to face, but, for right now, with Trump’s approval rating lower than that of any American president in modern history, and him freaking out and blaming others for the fact that Republicans are no longer winning by parroting his divisive talking points, I feel a tiny bit of optimism. Will today’s results be enough to make the Republicans in Congress finally turn on Trump? I doubt it. But I suspect we’ll see things begin to shift a bit in the coming days. And, if Trump fails to deliver on tax reform, I suspect he’ll find himself impeached, as Republicans attempt to salvage what they can over the remainder of the term with Pence.

Speaking of tax reform… It dawned on me today that the wealthy should really just leave it in the hands of god.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 62 Comments

Connect

BUY LOCAL... or shop at Amazon through this link Banner Initiative The Prisoner