Eight Months From Today, The America We Know Will Be Gone
For better or for worse, America will be truly changed after November’s midterm elections.
Eight months from today, America will vote for thirty-nine Governors, the entire U.S House of Representatives — all 435 seats — and thirty-six U.S. Senators. And that doesn’t even include state legislatures or local elections. Forty-six states will hold elections for some form of state legislative office. And there will be mayoral elections in fifteen major U.S. cities and countless others. Untold numbers of elected officials, from Congressmen and Governors to dog catchers, will be on the November 2 ballot. Primaries have already begun for some of these seats, in Illinois and Texas.
This is a major election, and while not a presidential election year, many seats are up for grabs, especially as term limits are automatically throwing incumbents out of office. Voter anger is high — as is America’s obsession with politics. And rightly so. Whether that anger turns out to more people showing up at the polls is always the question, but those the most angry are often those who show up to “throw the bums out.” Yes, if you’re the incumbent, you could be on thin ice. (Who’s on the thinnest? HuffPo says these eight.)
For better or for worse, or perhaps both, the America we knew just a decade ago has been erased. Much of the progress we saw in the Clinton years has been eviscerated. And what we thought was progress in the Bush years was wiped clean before he even left office.
There’s much at stake here. Too much to not get involved.
Right now I’m in the middle of looking at all the races I can, and figuring out where I want to focus. I’m committed to removing the homophobes, like Virgina Foxx (remember her horrific comments about Matthew Shepard? Fight back. Join FireFoxx!) and Iowa’s Steve King from office. And there are so many more.
What’s at stake? Who controls the House and the Senate. Whether states have Republican or Democratic governors. Whether cities have Democratic or Republican mayors.
Why does this matter? Well, while the Democrats have been no friend to the LGBTQ community, the GOP has been actively hostile. Let me stress that before you start writing me mail about how I shouldn’t support the Democratic party. I’m not.
Let me also say, vote for a candidate and not a party. If you’re going to contribute money, do not contribute to a political party — contribute to a candidate who fully supports LGBTQ rights. Do your homework. Does your candidate support repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and DOMA? Do they support enactment of ENDA? Did they vote for or against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes bill? Do they support same-sex marriage — not just civil unions, but marriage? And are they brave and transparent enough to be squarely on the record on all these points?
Don’t know? Can’t find their position anywhere? Call them. Write them. Demand a response.
Aren’t getting one? Ask me and I’ll do my best to find out.
So, again, why does this matter? Because governors sign — or veto — same sex marriage legislation. Governors and mayors include — or exclude — the LGBTQ workforce from their anti-discrimination policies. (Thank you again, newly sworn-in Virgina Governor Bob McDonnell, for removing protections for LGBTQ state workers, even though you campaigned on an agenda that you claimed wasn’t about social issues, but financial ones.)
Why does this matter? Because there still are Republicans who would like to not only ensure DOMA doesn’t get repealed, but that there’s a federal marriage amendment written into the constitution that clearly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Think that’s impossible today? Not when support for same-sex marriage in some polls is slightly declining, and not when the last time the Federal Marriage Amendment was voted on was less than four years ago. (And not when just two weeks ago, Senator Mike Pence called for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage!)
We’ve seen the pendulum swing both ways.
It’s important, no, vital, that we see the pendulum swinging our way, that we, as a country, move more to the left than to the right, that Democrats get the message that we aren’t a “center-right” nation, that Democrats realize that voting for Democratic ideals is why we put them in office.
Please. Get involved. Involve your friends, your family, your coworkers, your neighbors, everyone you can. When people have the ability to vote on our rights, when we are second class citizens, when the Party of No could become the Tea Party, when the wall between religion and politics becomes slimmer and lower, when corporations become people and money becomes speech, yes, I’d say our very lives are at stake.
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President Donald Trump thrilled his supporters in New York on Friday as he shared how he came up with his latest nickname for Democrats — his explanation included a spelling lesson.
“Blue means Dumocrat,” the president said. “That’s a new name I came up with.”
“I was, I was thinking about this character we have in the House. His name is Hakeem Jeffries,” Trump said to boos from the audience.
“And he’s a low IQ person, very low IQ.”
“And I watched what he was saying, and what the horrible things he was saying, and I said, ‘He’s a dumb guy.’ I said, Wait a minute, he’s a Dumocrat. That’s how I got the name,” Trump excitedly said.
“You take the ‘e’ out, you don’t use the ‘b’. A lot of people don’t know ‘dumb’ has a ‘b’ in it, actually. You don’t need it. You discard the ‘b.’
“But you take the ‘e’ out, and you replace it with a ‘u.'”
“They are Dumocrats. You know why? ‘Cause their policies are dumb. Their policies are very dumb. All of their policies.”
Critics mocked the president.
“His uncle taught at MIT, but Trump just recently learned there is a b in dumb,” wrote political strategist Jeff Timmer.
“Dumbo @realDonaldTrump here is the only one who doesn’t know there’s a b in DUMB,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock.
“It’s impossible to overstate how f— — stupid Trump looks on the world stage,” wrote another online commenter.
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s controversial Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is resigning.
“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” DNI Gabbard wrote to President Trump, Fox News reports. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”
“During pivotal moments,” NBC News reports, “as Trump deliberated over possible military action or watched live video feeds of operations in Iran or Venezuela, Gabbard was often not in the room, underscoring her outsider status.”
“Gabbard has had a tough tenure being sidelined on Venezuela and Iran. Last month, Trump floated replacing her with Pam Bondi, but some advisers saved her,” reported WIRED’s Hugo Lowell.
President Trump wrote that Gabbard had done an “incredible job,” and “we will miss her,” while Reuters reports that the White House ”forced” Gabbard “to resign from her post, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Dave Brown called Gabbard’s tenure “tumultuous.”
Critics were quick to respond.
“Good riddance. The Iran war has been the biggest display of intelligence incompetence in decades,” wrote U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI).
“Tulsi Gabbard leaves this administration in disgrace after helping Trump drag the country into yet another forever war in the Middle East,” wrote political strategist Mike Nellis. “She built her entire image on opposing these wars, then abandoned that principle the second it became politically inconvenient. That’s her legacy: a complete fraud, completely full of s— — about the one thing people thought she genuinely believed in. Good f— — riddance.”
“Also, is anybody in Congress or the media going to get to the bottom of the whistleblower’s story about Tulsi Gabbard withholding classified intercepted intel for political reasons?” Nellis continued. “What the hell happened there, or are we just going to pretend that didn’t happen?”
“Are we ever going to found out if Tulsi Gabbard broke how many different national security laws by allegedly refusing to hand over investigative documents, or is that just going away now?” asked writer Charlotte Clymer.
Professor and policy analyst Adam Cochran called Gabbard’s resignation “shocking,” and added: “Can’t imagine what they would ask to do that is too out of line for her…”
Associate Professor of Political Science Christopher Clary said Gabbard “will go down as perhaps the most ineffective and incompetent DNI in the short history of that position.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump managed to effectively raise taxes on the majority of Americans through his tax policies, while handing the richest five percent a tax cut. Now, many Americans want to see the rich pay their fair share — and that could mean increasing their taxes.
The former chief economist of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Professor Zachary Liscow, argues there’s a “slow, boring” yet “easy” way to do so.
“The United States is seeing an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top and a worsening national debt,” Liscow writes in an op-ed at The New York Times. “For many Americans, taxing the rich more is an obvious move.”
He details some of the “novel proposals to curb the many intricate ways the rich make and hide their money,” including a wealth tax, a tax on unrealized gains, and a tax on “loans that billionaires take against their stock.”
But, Liscow warns, while novel, these methods would not raise the substantial amount of money the U.S. needs.
“The boring truth is that Congress can accomplish a lot simply by raising the rates of the taxes already on the books,” Liscow explains.
He examines U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) proposal to tax “fortunes above $50 million,” and says there are “serious constitutional and policy arguments for this idea, but the Supreme Court’s current members would probably strike it down.”
There is a billionaire’s tax proposal by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that would tax unrealized capital gains, “the appreciation in the paper value of assets such as stocks.” That would likely find a Supreme Court challenge.
There are other tax vehicles, like fixing the “buy, borrow, die” loophole, which would tax loans taken against stock portfolios, but that would likely not raise sufficient funds: “It’s just not where the money is.”
He finds that “the most powerful lever is also the simplest one,” and concludes that “Congress has a simpler, tried-and-true tax policy to choose from: raising the rates.”
Liscow is advocating to restore the “top marginal ordinary income tax rate to its pre-2017 level of 39.6 percent” — where it was before Trump’s first term in office.
“In addition, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent toward the 35 percent it had been set at historically would add hundreds of billions in revenue for the government,” he says.
“Raising the rates,” Liscow concludes, “the simple, boring answer — is where the real money lies.”
Image: Christopher Penler / Shutterstock.com
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The ‘Slow, Boring’ and ‘Easy’ Way to Tax the Rich: Expert
Trump’s Latest ‘Executive Time’ Grievance Session Reveals What He’s Really Worried About
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News4 days agoTrump’s Latest ‘Executive Time’ Grievance Session Reveals What He’s Really Worried About
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