Just after 1:00 this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named The One Big, Beautiful Bill.
Lyndon Johnson was a complicated man, but he rose to the challenges of a society in need and the massive civil rights moment. It's sad that the Vietnam War , which he neither began nor embraced, tarnished his legacy.
And it was Johnson who nailed it when it comes to why so many "average" (not rich) Americans vote against their own financial best interests. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Remember, it is not just the Republicans who are doing this to us. They were enabled by 77 million (mostly non-rich) Americans. Half a trillion from Medicare will hurt most Americans except the very richest! In addition, hurting (and KILLING more than would have naturally passed) the very poorest to give to the very richest. It's just a gross, immoral country we are all forced to live in now.
And they are also cutting $500 BILLION from MEDICARE in an extremely under-reported portion of the "Big Ugly Bill" that the Republican majority is trying to shove down the throat of the country.
We are, as Heather puts it, condemned to a soulless wealth for one reason and one reason alone. Too many people believe the cynical lie that "soulless wealth" and "capitalism" are different phrases expressing the same meaning.
The founding principle of capitalism is the name of Adam Smith’s book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), aka “treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot.”
Capitalism works only because millions of people at every level in organizations all over the world are moral actors. Unfortunately, most of the top one percent—who think of themselves as the only capitalists—think the founding principle of capitalism is “I’m right, you’re wrong if you disagree with me, and this conversation is over.” And the vast majority of real (moral) capitalists just assume the top one percent must right (with no due process).
Not me. I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Jump in. The water’s fine.
This looks more like fascism to me. the Atlantic ran a piece by David Graham asking "Does anyone in the white House Know what is going on?"
The level of ignorance takes your breath away. The ONLY qualification is loyalty to the leader, who by the way also claims now that he doesn't know any thing ( remember when he alone could fix everything?). Up till now, the courts have been able to do nothing to enforce their "decrees" so that is no different than anyone of us issuing a "decree".
Every time a person responds to a conflict of interest with some version of "I'm right, you're wrong, and this conversation is over," that person's level of ignorance ratchets up one notch. People like Donny 2 Dolls, Adolph Hitler, and Stephen Miller continuously upped their level of ignorance from childhood. Maybe Marco Rubio as well, or maybe he's just a fast learner.
FYI -- Michael Luttig has recently reported that the president is running roughshod over the Congress and the Judiciary {now new news there); that the Supreme Court cannot stop this president; and trump does not want the Supreme Court to hear any one of these cases against his actions; that his adherents have long held to their wanting a complete revolution; he is revolting against everything that has been American; if you asked trump if he were conducting a revolution he would proudly say "yes!"; however, a president is not allowed to revolt against the federal government; the only two solutions he posited were impeachment - not goin' to happen; and mid-terms. Beyond that he had nothin'.....
In other words, I'm beyond Michael Luttig. I had something.
Stanley McChrystal had something today if you watched Deadline White House. He and I agree. We can sit back and watch the authoritarians destroy democracy, or we can stop them. It's up to us.
As I’ve repeated, it’s over. In the 4 plus months we have shifted into an authoritarian state in which the judiciary after passing this bill is useless. We have turned 3 branches of government into one executive branch. We must assume some of this blame because we kept pushing to the left without even being aware of it. No, I’m not going to elaborate because I always castigated here when I have. But our democratic political apparatus has pushed and pushed. And now we have an authoritarian government and these governments exist for one purpose, which is to rape and pillage the wealth. I have no answers.
The dear birds and fish don't vote. Resist! Join liberal cause groups and donate as much as you can to them. The mid-terms can stop the bleeding. We just have to get there.
IMHO, both ends of the political spectrum pushed each other into increasingly extreme positions. I have no data but I suspect most people are between those two extremes.
The bill passed - medicaid, Biden's green energy efforts will get the ax, the waiters and waitresses will no longer have to pay a tax on their tips, and my blue state can now deduct its state taxes -- I am still not celebrating.
Just to be clear - the only tips NOT taxed are cash - which tbh was never really taxed because there is no way to prove how much you made - waitstaff always underreported. Taxes via credit card (how majority of people pay) are still included as taxable income. Even the "good" stuff passed is still trash
The one change they made years ago that I don’t hear anyone talk about is that tips were estimated based on the restaurant receipts and you were assigned a dollar amount for tips received even if you didn’t get them. That way cash tips were taxed. I bet the people thinking they’re going to get a big boon from this bill will be shocked. I also read that most of these people don’t make enough to pay taxes but that can’t be true for full time servers. I made huge amounts. I think these people are looking at Vegas workers when they planned this. Lots of cash there.
So will there be a push from the restaurant industry to encourage tips be in cash? Just like the nail salons who ask you to tip in cash. “Please tip in cash so our staff doesn’t have to pay tax and it makes our credit card accounting easier? And we can pay lowers wages?”
But a LOT of those place are going cashless (at least around here). You can leave a cash tip-sometimes. But mostly it's at the pay point. So, yes, a worthless filler in a disaster of a bill that Drumpf made a huge deal about in his campaign that will really not benefit a lot of people unless they work either high flow or high dollar places with cash tips.
As one who has been on Medicare for a long time, I appreciate what it does for my medical bills. I especially need it this year, because it is apparently the year of surgeries for me. I've had one, definitely need a second one, and probably a third one, which would be the most difficult and most expensive. I have just been learning today about what the repubs want to do to Medicare. Thank you for mentioning it.
It seems to me that this is an important, under-emphasized item in the bill:
>> items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,”<<
Yep. A clear violation of the separation of powers, which is one of the most basic, most foundational components of the system of checks and balances built into our Constitutional democratic Republican form of government.
We are currently seeing the danger Benjamin Franklin alluded to when a woman asked him when he emerged from what has become known as the Constitutional Convention, what form of government they created: “A republic. If you can keep it.”
Republicans and their monied special interest allies are doing their damnedest to create a plutocratic oligarchy, a government of, by and for the wealthiest few.
After the Republicans have ruined our education system, our systems of governing, destroyed our relationships with foreign friends, forgotten those who have worked to free themselves of poverty and starvation, denied the wise guidance of our medical system in exchange for lies and vodoo economics, what will they do with the disorder and chaos? Will they ever be able to receive the truth and work to live it out in humility and service???
When we live only to ourselves, and only for ourselves, our lives become small and empty.
Why are we allowing human beings to starve to death in Gaza?
Yo.. J.., as you must know.., Wether or not it violates 'some law' is a 'no factor' to this bunch. They just want words in there to fore-stall (STALL being the operative word) any fool-hardy lawsuit. one by one, every police-force in every town is going to have to sign on with ICE or fear retribution for being obstinate. Those who continue to be "obstinate" will be subjected to fear of retribution in addition to the losss of their job. We are faced with a tsunami... can we survive it?
I read it cuts 500 billion out I’d Medicare over a period of time. I’m not sure of the timeline. There is a part of the bill that does deal with individuals not being charged with contempt of court, if they ignore a court order. That I believe is a violation of separation of powers. If not, trump gets another pass on ignoring the Supreme Court and several federal courts. I’m not a legal scholar so forgive my ignorance, if I am incorrect.
What makes you think constituents matter to them? There may not be any election to vote in, as far as JT is concerned. He’s been very clear that he doesn’t care. At this point, all rules have been twisted beyond recognition.
Ahhhh.., Karen.., beware.., the knock on your door. You are guilty of inciting obstinate behavior - you must come with us. Duck you head please, stop struggling.
Should the “Big Beautiful Bill” pass with the provision to prevent the courts from administering justice upon those who break the laws it will destroy what is left of our embattled Constitution and put yet another nail in the coffin of what has been our treasured Constitution for the past 237 years. The passage of this provision will be the end of the Supreme Court’s ability to be an effective and critical part in what was designed to be a system of checks and balances. With the destruction of the checks and balances that were instituted by the framers of the Constitution, we will no longer be “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” The passage of this bill will be noted in history as end of a functional Democracy in the United States.
However, this ongoing destruction of our Constitution nor any new draconian provision can prevent us from creating a better Constitution nor a modern and just economic system. The root of the word “Courage” comes from the French word “Coeur” or heart. No regime can take away the courage of our hearts unless we choose to give up.
The Trump regime will fall, I am sure of it. We are racing towards the economic downfall of the current regime that will gravely impact the lives of 90% of our population be they liberal, conservative or ultra-conservative. We also entering an era of cascading crises or “Polycrisis” triggered by the collapse of our environment which the scientific community is now agrees is progressing far faster than their original predictions. Due to the machinations of the Trump regime, our treasured 237 year old constitution with its 27 amendments is also reaching its tipping point of relevancy and effectiveness. Due we continue to try to amend the Constitution version 1.27 or begin to design Constitution 2.0 in a proactive fashion?
Due to the rapid progression of the polycrisis and the misery it entails, the current authoritarian regime will fall as other regimes have before. When this occurs, it is totally possible that our political Democracy and our economy based on capitalism will be in a wreckage. At that time will we attempt to rebuild on the same failed economic and political system that has let us down or will we build a modern system that can sustain us into the future?
Marc, you’re scaring me but also offering some hope. I can see that what you say is accurate. On a slightly different note, yesterday it sorta came to me that Trump is a “straw man.” Would that be the correct use of that term? Thanks
Susana, I believe you are correct. If Trump were to eat one too many big Macs or some other dietary indiscretion that pushes him to the side, we can be sure that the oligarchs are already working on contingency plans. Planning ahead is what has made them so successful and certainly they would apply this type of planning to the political arena as as they are the power behind the throne as it were. Certainly, they might lose a person with a certain type of charisma to be their front man, but that would not stop the machinations from going forward with or without him. The mainstream media would influence us to believe that Trump is the main driver behind all of this, but I do not believe it is so. They do depend on Trump to keep the base stirred up, and there is probably no one else who can do it so effectively as him. But even if he was to the side, the Oligarchs behind him definitely would not stop in their tracks.
We built our political/economic system for the benefit the wealthy and the owners of the means of production. And in that, we have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Though we pretend to be "middle class" and never talk about it, we are now a more unequal nation than we have ever been before.
Politics yield to the desires of the wealthy. But there are tipping points:"things that cannot go on forever, don't". "Trees do not grow to the sky."
It is not possible for us to continue to become more unequal forever. So what comes next?
Every contribution by democratic presidents since WWII wiped out by. this reptile in half a year! Heather could not have painted a more contrasting picture between him and Lyndon Johnson....
It will be CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE outlawing abortion, more than 2 genders and interracial marriage. The idea will be to enshrine 1950's morality in law. I believe it will be like the Russian Constitution. Who will form a new order? The Christofacists will still be in power. We are heading for the destruction of America. Once the courts are totally abolished, the end of democracy is assured.
I'm also concerned that the enormous number of guns that exist in our U.S.A. will provide a nasty backdrop for cuts in our "SNAP" budget, as more people lose subsistence benefits. The current "mis-administration" wants the least able to withstand poverty to find "other alternatives". The USAID program that DJT destroyed helped Agribusiness by purchasing surplus food commodities that would be stored, refrigerated or wasted. Using resources for our Nation's friends in poorer countries. This is "penny wise and pound foolish"... !
When in 1988 the Mianis River Bridge disaster occurred, Connecticut did not attempt to just repair the collapsed section; it rebuilt a new bridge based on the latest engineering that was designed to withstand any present and future stresses. It was an eight-year project that was undertaken to replace it with a more resilient and wider bridge based on the most modern engineering and construction techniques available.
So, before the Trump regime completes the collapsing of our current economy and political system, it behooves us to take heart to design and prepare to implement a more sustainable, just and humane system to take us into the future. You can explore and comment on those discussions on the “Crisis and Transition, A Common Way forward” Substack at: https://crisistransition.substack.com/ and more specifically at https://crisistransition.substack.com/p/the-time-for-planning-is-now
It's plain to see that this " Trump mis-administration" is balancing the budget by eliminating any thought of it's legacy! Where are our "consistently unemployed, or under-employed people to do? The key to living in a Democracy is the "consent of the governed", many of us do not agree with the slim Republican balance in Congress !
That'll be the task at hand Marc. But, I might add, if we have a printed copy of the Constitution or any of our current laws, etc.., in hand, hide it. Because when we do try to re-invent our nation we will need the original for reference. A lot of great work went into it. Imagine, relying on some digitized version.... YGTBSM..., would be a joke, because it will have been changed before our eyes can even see. Already it's hard to know which way is up. There'll be no blueprint, they will have been expunged like books from a library.
True - we are experiencing an orgy of idiocy. trump et al will now have the power to pursue destruction of the society away from prying eyes, the press and the public.
Is that provision constitutional? I am dubious. Can one branch prevent another from operating? Could Congress deny funds for the White House to carry out functions that Art. 2 allocates to the executive? Doubtful.
Agreed. I hope some substack writer today is addressing that issue. I would hope that 7 Suoreme Court justices (the other 2 are bought and paid for so no hope there) would say that the executive branch getting Congress to take away from the judicial branch the power of contempt proceedings violates the separation of powers. But that could take so much time that other evils (packing the court to make the 7 a minority) might prevent the right result.
Every lawyer who is a member of Congress who lets that provision in the Ugliest of Anti-American Bills stand should be disbarred.
Likewise I'm wondering about charging the New Jersey congresswoman with trespassing on a private ICe prison within her district when she tried to prevent the arrest of the city's mayor.
I lived in DC during the Johnson administration, and I recall that a certain Virginia congressman drove home nightly from the Capitol drunk as could be. The suburban Virginia police resisted arresting him because of Congressional immunity.
This is just a different way to get to the "Enabling Act" passed by the Reichstag giving Hitler ultimate control of the government. I have to wonder if all of the demonstrations planned nationwide for "No Kings Day" on June 14th will be what "enables" trump & his cronies to declare Martial Law & to give orders for his militias to act/attack?
He probably DICTATED The Art of the Deal and edited by having it read back to him. My hypothesis is that he's severely dyslexic and can barely read at all.
Yes, I used that one in another context for the same reason. Indeed, I can’t wait for the ‘lone and level sands’ to bury MAGA. Just hope it doesn’t take as long :)
It has always seemed to me that none of this will stop until the people who voted for Trump feel enough pain, inflicted by him in terms they CANNOT dispute. The 'I didn't think the leopard would eat MY face", pain.
Sandra, I believe you are 100% correct. I only question that they will ever blame trump. More likely it will be Joe Biden's fault. Or Hillary's. Or Obama's. Or Hunter Biden's laptop. Or Benghazi. Or ...
Dana, yours is a serious, thoughtful, and passionate post. I read it a few minutes after hearing the breaking news that 215 abusive Republican lawmakers in The People's House passed the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Thereby, they continued for another year their fifty-year record of heaping abuse on the American people. The abuse is not just financial, but, as you wrote, will be lethal for some of us. Compared to that, I suppose those of us who are not killed have to be considered lucky that we are merely financially abused and so only likely to lead impoverished lives lacking health care, food and (due to other punishing Republican policies) lacking freedom and justice. These abusive members of Congress were enabled (your very appropriate word) by those 77 million self-abusing Americans who put these freaks in office.
I look forward to the TV News, newspaper coverage, where many of our Citizens get their news. Debate is necessary. I am concerned by the many draconian dimensions to this. I am concerned that our Country has more guns than good sense in Congress! Wanna make a bet that the National Crime rate will rise?
Thank you for reminding us that many who helped to put Trump and his thugs in power include people from many backgrounds. Just look at the smiling faces at a Trump rally. LBJ was indeed a complex man but he was a compassionate and wise person and skillful politician. He “ done good “ by us.
Pres. Lyndon Johnson was right about the racism of the "lowest white man." The phenomenon of whites voting against their own best economic interests was further explained in Thomas Frank's book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" [2004] and Heather Cox Richardson, "How the South Won the Civil War." [2020] "The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?" is a study published in the Feb. 2018 edition of the peer-reviewed journal, Critical Sociology. What the two Univ. of Kansas professors found is that Trump's voters agreed with Trump's desire to crush and punish immigrants, women and gay right's advocates, minorities, etc. MAGA, in my opinion, is 21st century KKK. One more book - Timothy Egan, "A Fever in the Heartland," about the rise of the KKK in the Midwest in the 1920's. Really a must read.
I've been thinking about "average" Americans lately. I consider myself an average American. I'm a retired teacher. Neither rich nor poor. This tax bill will hurt people like me. It also goes against my beliefs. I graduated in 1964, just when Johnson was describing the kind of society he wanted to build. Eighteen years old and deep in Republican country, I had no idea what Johnson said. But 61 years later, at age 79, that's exactly what I always worked toward. My kids are working toward that world. But we'll lose under this bill. What do the authors of this "Big Beautiful Bill" have in mind for people like us. We can't win under this bill. But we do important work for society. It will no longer pay to be a teacher or nurse or social worker. We're vital for society. But why should we struggle to get the education and do the hard work these professions demand when we're just going to be crushed by this system? We're a very idealistic group, but we still get tired. We struggle to make ends meet. We quite obviously aren't valued. My grandkids could watch all this and say, "Not for me.". If they're going to be underpaid and under valued, why not do it without the college loan debt?
I don't really think that Trump is too fond of the middle-class as they are a threat to his power. Anyone who is educated and has enough time to educate themselves about what is really happening because they are not desperate and worried about starving, is a threat. As Heather has pointed out previously, there are different factons (with slightly different goals that mostly overlap nicely) that are all part of this Trump Administration but none of them benefit from educated people who can feed themselves and will not so eaily be distracted by divide and conquer politics. It is the reason they all despise federal workers. Federal workers are mostly educated people who have (or had rather) job security, good benefits and did not have to worry about 'hustling' every minute of every day so they could read the news, become informed about politics and vote in their own best interests. That is the LAST THING that Trump and the Republicans want. The goal is to get all the wealth and power for themselves (mostly white males) and to make the rest of us so desperate and poor that we dutifully fight each other for their scraps rather than going after them (the people who are REALLY stealing from us).
Joan, I am also a retired teacher just in the middle of it all. I also graduated college in 1964 with a teaching degree in Biology. It wasn't easy. But now, I wonder what will happen to people like us?
Was it this one, if you can convince someone a demi-god rose from the dead to absolve you of an original sin and ascended into the heavens, or that a prophet was whisked away by a winged beast to those same heavens you can convince them of anything?
Will there be a day when people realize they gave away the farm and they're never going to get it back? People are probably not so stupid (at least I hear that humans are basically good) that they will not fight to restore our lost freedoms. Sounds like that test is coming right up.
Bingo on the “money quote” from Lyndon Johnson: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
I love this quote from Johnson. Thank you. The key is educating people, but it seems that at least at this moment many are caught up in the moment of thinking Trump cares about them -- more importantly that they are finally a part of something -- with their MAGA hats and T-shirts.
I keep looking at it from every angle--economics, fallout from Covid, the rise of disinformation platforms/influencers, etc and while all of these things played a factor (especially disinformation), the primary reason for the entire Trump era seems to me to be racism (with sexism thrown in of course). Back in 2016 when we still funded science, more than a few studies supported the premise that it was 'racial animus' more than anything else that predicted a vote for Trump. In one study, when white people were reminded that non-hispanic whites were on track to become a minority by 2050, their views on immigration and politics became much more conservative. Likewise, we have seen a rise in far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe. I think the UK would still be part of the EU were it not for anti-immigrant sentiment, which relates to racism as the immigrants tend to be darker people from poorer areas. Related to this is the rise of Asia as a center of world power which is a change that is freaking out the Europeans (land of the 'white' people) just as much as becoming a minority is freaking out the white people here. Racism has always existed in the USA and was foundational to it, I would say. What became the Atlantic slave trade for the US started in VA in 1619 before the Mayflower even landed in Cape Cod. Hard to argue that racism isn't interwoven into our entire history. PS As to one of your other points, imagine what would have happened if Obama had accepted a $400 million plane from a Muslim country who funds Hamas, as a personal gift like Trump just did. They literally would have lost their minds.
You likely are selling yourself short but thank you for the compliment. Heather’s posts and the smart, engaged people here are helping to keep me sane in insane times!
My father was one of the architects of the War on Poverty, helping to craft a proposal for a national negative income tax, championed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and improbably adopted by Richard Nixon later as a way to reform the very concept of welfare. That concept didn't win --- snuffed by Senate conservatives who didn't think it had enough work requirements and liberals who thought it had too many.
My father passed before the first abhorrent Trump regime came to power. For that I will always be grateful -- it would have crushed him to see what America became under this foul cult of greed and cruelty, now back for a second go-round at infamy.
I was born in 1942. Went to Europe and Northern Africa with Dwight Eisenhower’s Showcase of American Youth, People to People diplomacy, sponsored by the Red Cross and the UN. Graduated high school in ‘60, Vanderbilt in ‘64, U of Fla School of Law ‘66. Went to work with the War on Poverty’s Legal Services program 1967-1971. Went didn’t solve the problems of the world but we made a dent in them — and we genuinely tried and cared. We admitted our shortcomings and tried innovated ways to new approaches. And the vast majority of us continued to do pro bono and civil rights litigation throughout our long careers ever trying to make a difference for those who had been handed the short stick. At 82, I follow today’s legislators and and the executive branch and I’m at loss how this can be the country I grew up in and cared about. That this utter abandonment of everything I’ve always been proud of about our country could have occurred during my lifetime still surprises me — and sickens me.
Take the power of enforcement away from the judiciary? Do away with habeas corpus? No birthright citizenship? More burdens on the poor while less tax and responsibility on those who have the most wealth? I’m at loss how that could have happened. My first vote was for LBJ. I thought Nixon would be our low point. Then Bush/Cheney. Then DT 1st. But 2024 astonished me — and ‘25 has proven my fears to be well placed.
Aging is coming to grips with mortality as we experience loved ones die one by one, and it prepares us for our endings. This I've faced, but I never expected to see the death of all I knew to be true about our social/moral fabric and of our country's legal underpinnings. Pulling the rug out will leave millions in misery; however real that will be, love and kindness will also sprout. We are seeing a consistent withdrawal of support for basic human needs and for life itself. Gulags in other countries and hospice dormitories here.
Yes, it is hard for me to fathom the depths of depravity that allows minds to think up this legislation and to somehow also think that it ok to do this to our fellow Americans. This bill is truly a Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the already battered poor and giving it to the already obscenely rich, smfh.
MAGA people have a hard time making sense of a complicated world; have little patience for boring, detailed explanations; doubt experts, data and evidence rather than themselves. The dumbing down of America .....
Victoria, I have been wondering for awhile why they don't just take the poor and infirm out and shoot them? Or would that be considered (by them), 'too kind'?
I would like to thank you, Elizabeth, for your efforts throughout your lifetime. America was in such a good position to accelerate the good in this world, and show the rest of the world how it is done.
I am in tears this morning, and still hope the Senate will stop this disgusting legislation from passing, but I fear, from what I have seen, there are too many hateful people in that body as well.
We have slid into despotism. I hold out hope that as more Americans feel the pain associated with this administration, enough of us will come out against it to bring it down and put empathetic people in it's place. I hope.
I am 89, my first vote, John F. Kennedy Jr. in Jim Crow Nashville TN., 1960.. and so we have been witness to OUR country thru the 60’s, Civil Rights, 3 ‘assassinations’, Viet Nam….. and the McCarthy and UnAmerican trials…. And Roy Cohn had a serious roll in where we are today….. So! WE WILL Prevail…. We MUST!!!! And I am fearfully hopeful as I read all of us in our responses to Heather, the Bulwark, The Guardian, The Centurion… and as with you Elizabeth, I am absolutely fearful…..
For me, my pursuit of pride obscured reality. LFAA and TCinLA have been a catalyst for a relief from that pursuit. This is an exciting time to be alive. (I’m 82, sober alcoholic Vietnam Veteran.)
Thank you, Elizabeth, for your service to some of our nation's highest goals and achievements. Who could have imagined we would be here today? (The authors of Project 2025, I see.) Still, some Americans had an opportunity to experience a better life as a result of the Great Society.
Gee Whiz, Elizabeth! Me too! I got my B.S. college degree to teach that same year you did. Now, I'm also 82 and find it unbelievable what is happening as I am living through this destruction of our country which once I worked so hard to make a better place.
Thank you for sharing this very dear synopsis of your life.
You are correct....this is NOT the America we grew up in!
We arrived at this low point day by day. Still, I have heard the voices of heroes who are speaking out....so must we. We must support our decent leaders. They need to know they are not alone.
My husband and I will be at another rally in June. There are lots of us older ones standing up for our country.
I am grateful for the goodness in your heart and your brilliance which you chose to sacrifice in service for others. You will find a way to serve even in these difficult times.
My wife and I are post-WWII war babies. I retired from two National Labor Unions. I enjoy debate and intelligent speech. This very draconian budgetary plan will face a very spirited debate. Now that Trump has destroyed "USAID" any foreign aid will have to be in monetary currencies, Harrumpf. Trump is a "me, me, mine" sort of person who is absorbed with his own self importance. His tiny fingers grasp and claw at all of the power he can grasp. Nixon disgraced himself! This bozo is run by the Republican Party and it'll take a team effort to compromise "Tiny Fingers"!
Soon I'm reading historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's "An Unfinished Love Story."
This recounts the 1960s she spent with Richard Goodwin (they married), key to The Great Society times, and years after.
But it's the 1960s that have turned on us now, as it was that era which Lewis Powell and his corporate rich friends all hated -- women's rights, blacks, the working poor, and others of color getting federal benefits, and new government agencies getting funded to protect the environment, worker safety, and health care for the non-rich.
Most readers here by now know the history of the U.S. far right following the Aug. 23, 1971, Powell memo, from the defunding of U.S. public ed (at all levels) to the removal of humanities from most public schools, from the onerous new conceits of testing to the near-total rule by the rich following Citizens United.
Can Dems organize? Can anyone enlist those from the working classes who will soon see the bite of the White House criminal's corruption for himself and killing of public programs for everyone else? Can we have national teach-ins on a scale introduced recently by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Phil ,13 minutes after Midnight this early Thursday Morning the House voted 217-212 to bing the "1 Big Bad Bill" (1 BBB) to the House Floor for "debate".
Only 1R voted with the Dems, THOMAS MASSIE, in Opposition.
If passed, 1BBB, would go to the Senate sometime in June but, in any case after D-Day.
UPDATE 5/22 5:00 AM Eastern:
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The House of Reps is in Session. There have been a number of last-minute changes to 1 BBB as the result of intense brokering.
Ali Vitali, MSNBC's "Way to Early" Anchor, has identified a number of hot changes but, I will not comment further without reading confirmed legislative text.
BREAKING 5/22 8:03 AM Eastern:
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Ali Vitali just reported the over 1100 page 1BBB has passed the House.
Ali reports there is a 40 page "Manager's" record of the compromises.
UPDATE: 5/22 11 AM Eastern: FINAL House Vote Tally: 215-214.
Since I posted the above, I've seen video of the corrupt orange felon hosting the president of South Africa in the White House. And lecturing that Mr. Ramaphosa on how he -- the president of South Africa -- presides over a systematic genocide of whites in that country.
This mad, lying caricature is beyond disgusting and insulting -- it's just more of how colored immigrants in the U.S. "are eating the dogs and the cats."
And supposed "adults" -- nearly all the MAGA Republicans in Congress -- just eat up this racism. Even black Republicans approve.
Ya...I've often wondered how Tim Scott sleeps at night. I can't think of another individual who has more betrayed the legacy of civil rights battles than this pompous black man with a white racist soul.
Buy the audiobook. Doris reads it. You’ll hear JFK and LBJ read speeches that Richard Goodwin wrote. You’ll cry. Johnson’s words that Heather put in today’s column were written by Richard. They remind us of what America could be … again.
" . . . what America could be ... again," Lawrence?
Would take a miracle.
Pasternak believed in miracles. Auden treated them seriously. Joan Didion experienced some. Joseph Brodsky saw them as serendipity -- which stands exactly opposite what both testing and demagogue authoritarians everywhere enforce.
For the standardized testers and the dictators, Lawrence, a mechanical assembly line rules. No individuals have any humanity here, only groups, abstractions, and categories -- all running by stupid linear causality only, a causality necessitated by a vocabulary where no people exist.
No people exist in these corrupt Republicans' cultism to fear, hatred, and need for the cult leader's lawlessness.
He succeeds, they succeed, in proportion to how American schools all fell.
Pasternak, Auden, Didion, Brodsky all championed the individual (messy, idiosyncratic, contradictory) over the machine-gradable, abstracted monolithic. How many times recently has anyone here heard anyone in any media cite Pasternak, Auden, Didion, or Brodsky?
By "the working classes" do you mean the *white* working classes? I see this all the time in posts by white commenters, and I wish they would pay closer attention to (1) their language, and (2) the racial and ethnic makeup of the working classes in the U.S. Some clarification of what they mean by "working classes" would also be helpful. IOW, is it primarily about occupation (e.g., blue collar or pink collar) or income/financial status (e.g., one's income comes entirely from work, not investments) or something else?
You ask, Susanna, if our working classes simply reduce to the white.
I can only report to you my sources:
films like “The Florida Project,” “Knives Out,” and “Winter’s Bone”;
novels like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” Walter Mosley’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” Tom Hanks’ “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” and many by Richard Russo and Stephen King;
memoirs like Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From,” Jeannette Walls’ “The Glass Castle,” and Erin Gruwell’s “The Freedom Writers Diary,”
essay collections such as Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride,” Sarah Smarsh’s “Bone of the Bone, and George Packer’s “The Unwinding”;
biographies such as Lindsey Stonebridge’s “We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience”;
histories like Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel,” Heather Cox Richardson’s “How the South Won the Civil War,” and Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom”;
poems such as Philip Levine’s Detroit factory poems,
songs like Tim Grimm’s “Broken Truth,” Bob Seger’s “Feel Like a Number,” Carsie Blanton’s “Rich People,” and any number of Bruce Springsteen or hip hop Ari Melber will cite.
So are you saying that the “working classes” are by definition white or that the term covers workers of other colors and ethnicities? IOW, you’ve listed plenty of sources but you’ve avoided the question.
I read your question and it piqued my curiosity. From what I was able to search working class is a contested socioeconomic term. It could apply to type of employment, income level or other factors. However, no definition referred to race. I wonder if some aren't reading race into the term?
We all read into words and terms. It surprised me that Susanna seemed to equate "working class" with white workers. As someone who married into a strong union family, the ideals of the IWW shape my opinion: all workers are brothers and sisters.
Kearns’ book is excellent! But for us aging liberals to contemplate where both the hopes and the hubris of those times have led us is beyond sobering.
My touchstone is JFK’s speech at American University in the spring of 1963, right about the time I was graduating from high school. The world had just scared the hell out of itself over the Cuban missive crisis, and there was a sense that sanity might be on offer. That lasted until Dallas.
Johnson’s Great Society promised much, and had it not been for our hubris in Vietnam, who knows what we might have made of it all. But The Best and The Brightest blew it, and my sense is that we’ve been headed toward Trump and his collection of lickspittles ever since.
For those of tender years who may not recognize the Powell Memo (aka the Powell Manifesto), it was written by Lewis Powell, the head of the national Chamber of Commerce. It’s core message is that big business must capture and take control of the government for the benefit of business, especially corporations.
Richard Nixon awarded him with a seat on the Supreme Court.
Below is a link to the document.
“The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy
You must be so proud of your father. My father was a republican for most of his life. During one of our final conversations about politics, he told me that he voted for Barack Obama in 2027 because the party had changed. He was unhappy with their war mongering and defense spending. Although he was not focused on their policies on human rights and race, I was proud of him for his ability to change his vote.
I spent my time as a very young person protesting that war over and over again. LBJ could have ended it by radical means though not practical. Then the street radicals ruined it for the democratic convention in 1968. I despised them for destroying Humphrey’s chances for success. The Abbie Hoffmans and Bobby Seales — all of them. They gave fuel to the far right. It completes the metamorphosis today. What has emerged from the cocoon is a monster in a country I no longer recognize. It is not the nation of my birth.
To World Leaders: Stay the Hell Out of the Oval Office
By now one would think that prime ministers and presidents and dictators and kings and queens would not fall prey to a Trumpian invite to the Oval Office. With cameras rolling and lights blaring, the executive team of metastasized executive misfits recording from their prepared scathing texts, each one outdoing the other in hopes of a pat on the ass by the chief ass-patter, The Donald as another presser unfolds. This time it’s South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa on the hot seat.
So it’s time to set the rules for foreign leaders for their own good: No cameras, no press. A private meeting allowed. Tea or coffee and crumpets served. For each extra loud administrative mouthpiece present, a foreign staffer will compliment the visitor.
There, fixed it. Now when will the bond markets crash and make the Great Depression look like a groundhog hole. We are in it for a while in case you haven’t guessed. If you recall, some outrageous event occurred every week and often every day in the last T (I don’t want to keep saying that distasteful word) administration.
I wish I had something positive to offer. I don’t. Please don’t shoot the messenger.
To start with, the Oval Office no longer exists. This gold-bedecked travesty, with a large model aeroplane on a little gold table, a bevy of yes-men, and the press circus. Today's performance, with its "visual aids", surpassed the Zelinskyy episode - full marks to Ramaphosa for keeping his dignity.
The upside of the oval office trumpfests is that they give an accurate view to the world of the utter lack of intelligence, class, and competent leadership at the helm in the US.
I would much rather have had Hubert Humphrey elected. I didn't understand at the time that he was so limited on what he could say and do by Johnson. What I remember most about the time was his ability to make a strong case for one side, then make an equally strong case for what he considered the other side. I so badly wanted just one side to be expressed as the clearer choice, only later coming to think it was because he was so limited by Johnson.
I did volunteer for Vietnam, though, so others wouldn't have to go ( I wished we could have only used volunteers). I wanted to see for myself, what Dickie Chappell had shown in a National Geographic article, at the time, and still opposed to communist takeovers by brute force with very little hope of being able to reclaim honest self governance (with so much of the potential and real opposition eliminated.
After serving there through late 67 to late 68, traveling about 60,000 miles through Vietnam and Thailand, often solo, I came to think that despite the original mistrust we actually ended up more appreciated than any other outsiders. Most troops I saw along the way were mostly looking out for each other and only about 20% really dedicated to doing the best they could for the Vietnamese we were supposed to be fighting for. Even then, the vast majority of our troops still made many friends with Vietnamese civilians. The NCO's I started out with in two or 3 man teams basically showed me by example, how to get some of the combat troops in from the field to get the occasional trouble makers to back off simply by asking the larger group to get their guy under control. They also on 4 occasions with them and later by myself, talked individual drunk or troubled troops into handing over their weapons they were threatening other or themselves with.
There was only one occasion where a very troubled Army soldier approached me (a 3-stripe airman at the time (by myself), to tell me he had been forced to help "wipe them all out in Pinkville." At the time, all I could do was listen to his story, suggest he see a Chaplain, and promise to pass on what he told me, which I did after finishing up an emergency 3 stop trip ending up at the Dak To II Special Forces camp. I spent about 4-1/2 hours with a CID agent when I got back to Saigon. Though the information I had passed on wasn't much to go on, I at least passed on to competent authority, what I'd been told about what turned out to be the My Lai Massacre. I believe it was rare and the worst that occurred while I was there (though there was another possibly as bad that, to me, may have been more suppressed from the news).
If younger, I'd be volunteering for Ukraine, which seems a much clearer case.
I will tell this story especially to Viet vets along with another story. I was out on streets protesting that war from the age of 14 onwards. Several years ago I paid homage to The Wall in DC. I recall as I solemnly walked past names etched on the stone and up ahead of me I saw a few folks on scratching a pencil over paper of the name of a deceased family member. And as I neared I could hear the sniffles and I knew what they were reminiscing. And as I walked away from The Wall that day, I realized that no one walks away from the wall dry-eyed and that included me. And it didn’t matter which side of the war we were on.
I did the same at a combined Catholic/Buddhist service at a mass grave where many of the VC that attacked Tan Son Nhut were buried.
A Vietnamese Recon Marine acquaintance I met years later in college had served several years on small teams operating over the lines, in the special units that wore the Tiger Stripe uniforms that our MAAGV advisors wore way back when before many others started wearing them. He respected the VC I assume more than the NVA, but he still shot a childhood friend who had chosen the VC side, when they faced off far from any other help. He made sure, though, that his friend's body was returned to his neighbor's family by the Vietnamese Boy Scouts (as the mutually respected means to do such things). One of the VC that they captured alive apparently became like the "Kit Carson" scouts if not actually one of them. The were ones who became convinced they had been fighting for the wrong side later in the war, I think, because of the way the best of our troops treated them and their countrymen. I'd always rather win friends than kill "enemies" that didn't have a chance to see what could be better for both sides later in the war.
I knew better than try to trust it to anyone else out in the field. At the time I thought I would have shot Calley under the circumstances he described (ordered to keep on killing people, he implied was an hour or more, after the higher command had ordered them to stop. I learned later that Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who had landed and ordered his crew to shoot anyone who tried to kill anymore women and children, had been the one who got the higher echelon to order the halt. He had flown some victims out, but Calley seems to have been the soldier's platoon commander that ordered (and threatened), them into continuing shooting more of them. Captain Medina's unit stopped as ordered as far as I can tell, while Calley ordered them to resume after Thompson left. Many of them including Calley spent decades seeing mental health professionals, if the ones I knew of in Florida were any indication. I would rather see a thousand of them get the help they need for themselves and to help newer troops avoid the same, than to waste my time trying to get one convicted in a system that often only convicts the lowest level and does far less to get future troops to think for themselves on what is a real legitimate order and what isn't.
From my dad and his other 1st Sgt friends, I had thought instantly of shooting him if I had to to stop him (then looking for his senior NCO that, like my dad and his friends said, were supposed to keep their young inexperienced officers from making such mistakes). After hearing how poorly he was prepared to lead people in combat, though, I did have some sympathy, even for him, but not enough to ever consider letting him continue after he ordered his men to resume the killing after higher echelons ordered them to stop.
My father was there as a radio reporter, running through the streets, reporting his observations into a tape recorder. The brutality he witnessed by the Chicago PD upon protesters kept him from ever visiting Chicago after that assignment.
I worked for the DNC at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and I will never forget how forsaken Chicago looked as we drove into town. Daley had refused to settle a transit strike, and the streets were almost empty. The woman I had driven out with from the East Coast was instructed to put her car in a designated garage and not to take it out until she left town. After that we were assigned a driver, a proud thug and a seminary drop-out, to chauffeur us about town. I remember thinking that this is what a dictatorship looks like, and I mostly stayed within the Hilton Hotel where I had a room, even though the halls were often filled with tear gas. India Edwards, a California woman whom Adalai Stevenson had wanted as his vice president, blamed Johnson for giving the convention to Daley's Chicago. As much as I admired Johnson's Great Society and his courage in getting the Civil Rights Act signed into law, I have to agree with Mrs. Edwards that a convention in Chicago was a huge mistake.
And in that same vein … the murder of the two Jewish people in front of the Jewish Museum and who work in the Jewish Embassy… will en flame the right … There are better ways to fight for justice…
Not so fast. He ordered the false Gulf of Tonkin incident (later, W invented the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to 'legalize' his war). Johnson lost his bearings, his moral and political compass, by following the hubris of his insane advisors. His tragic mistake tore this country apart. We have succumbed to the predominance of white, Christian, Republican patriarchy and all the grift, lawlessness, and fascism that comes with it. The FAILURE of the Great Society is what we should be remembering in this fateful moment.
There needs to be a reality check about just how much progress America has made on civil rights and racial discrimination. After all, you've ended voting twice for the most racist president since Woodrow Wilson. Trump's display of material his minions had pulled from the internet to substantiate his absurd claims of 'white genocide' in South Africa was compared today by NAACP with Wilson's airing of 'The Birth of a Nation'.
I was a teenager during the Johnson administration and remember clearly his repeated and obvious lies about the Vietnam war, the bragging about body counts, the relentless build-up of the number of committed troops, the draft debacle, and all the rest. Blame his advisors if you will, but in the end, as Truman said, the buck stopped with him. He was speaking about improving lives out of one side of his mouth while he was destroying them from the other. Indeed a complicated man but never to be a hero to my way of thinking.
Thank you, Susan. 🤝🏻As a little one at that point without grand-parents, L.B.J. became a proxy grand-father and Mrs Johnson my proxy grand-mother. 🙏🏾 The Australians loved President Johnson, at least in the mid-1960s. ❤️ Ah, what might have been 💔 . . . . were it not for gun violence, police violence, and a ghastly war. 😢
Hopefully, the old republic still has some life left in her. 🤞🏼
One can hope when leaders express visionary ideas of how
together we create a better world. This is the America I experienced as a middle child girl born to a middle class family in early 1950’s. We were never perfect but we hand empathy. We had ideals. We valued integrity. What are people hoping for today? I’m afraid for our grandkids. And if I’m not OK, how can they be OK?
For retirement I chose to leave the US, and while there were multiple reasons, the first was that I was exhausted from the stress of waiting for the Republicans to destroy medicare, and steal the money we have paid into it.
I did not want to spend my golden years dying from illness that I could not afford treatment for, or going bankrupt to get the treatment. I knew it was not like this in other wealthy countries, and that they have an overall lower cost of living, but health care is one of the things that makes them lower cost. The US would have you believe that health care is inferior elsewhere, but it is not. Each place has its strengths and weaknesses. I wrote this to compare the US and Germany where I am living now.
…together we create a better world. This is the America I experienced as a middle child girl born to a middle class family in early 1950’s. We were never perfect but we hand empathy. We had ideals. We valued integrity. What are people hoping for today? I’m afraid for our children. And if I’m not OK, how can they be OK?
I visited my favorite cousin earlier this week. A manly guy, never macho. He is quiet but quite perceptive. His better half of forty-five years is very bright. Both plain-spoken, never affectatious. Each is terrified, not for the world of their well settled adult children, but for their grand-children.
The world changes. My mother was born in Germany the year after Hitler came to power. She later came to the US and studied and stayed. Now her granddaughter is studying in Germany, and may end up staying here, or go to another country, or back to the US. My daughter does not think of Germany the way that my mother does, because she is not living here in Nazi times. I assume that the US will be viewed differently by the world for a long time to come. Let us continue to hope that it can be changed for the better at some point.
A new dance craze is sweeping the nation called, The Goose-Step, Two-step March. This invigorating new exercise is easy to learn! First, link arms on the dance floor. As you move backward in line, turn your head to the right and lift your left leg straight up as high as it will go. Then step forward as you turn your head to the left and lift your right leg straight up in the air.
It's very similar to square dancing or line dancing. Soon the dance floor will be filled with goose-steppers. Forward, backward, round and round. If you step out of line, you are tagged, the caller detains you, interrogates you, strip searches you, and sends you off to detainment camps for disloyalty.
This new dance craze is not to be confused with serious charges of criminal activity. By the time the youngins reach the age of reason, they will be quick to form into lines upon request for impromptu Goose-Step, Two-Step Marches and other forms of family entertainment.
I look back on that tarnishing now as Republican & their Media allies Dem-bashing.
Just like Covid was all Biden’s fault.
Just like inflation following post-Covid global shut/slowdowns was all Biden’s fault
Just like Trump’s Economy is all Biden’s fault
Legacies of Democrats who help the masses are largely covered over by loud, heavy criticisms of Republicans and their racist, sexist supporters who would rather suffer than share good fortune with women and people of color.
Unfortunately he did embrace it, albeit with more misplaced hubris, macho, and deeply flawed advice than with any understanding. Remember that it was LBJ who demanded the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which put the war powers in his hands. And it was Johnson’s administration that chose to finance the war under the table and lie about its progress with ever increasing intensity.until Tet and the release of the Pentagon Papers exposed the whole tottering structure for what it was.
It cost the lives of over 50,000 of my brothers-in-arms, untold innocent Vietnamese, and a loss of trust in government from which we have never recovered.
Complicated? He illegally had Nixon's 'phones wiretapped and in doing so discovered his treasonous plan to sabotage peace talks with North Vietnam yet dared not exposed this plan because he would then have to explain how he came by this damning information. The release of the Pentagon papers shows that he had lied to the American people for years about the conduct of the war in Vietnam including his merciless bombing of civilians.
Agree but keep it in context. LBJ was a victim of WWII and anti communist mentality. He was of that generation. So many were of the opinions that the communists had to be stopped. It’s always a new reason. Today it’s the Arabs. At this point my sympathies are with Arabs not Israel as a facist state.
The Domino Theory? Both he and Kennedy failed to understand the national identity of the communists concerned. To characterise countries in south-east Asia and later in Latin America as 'dominos' was incredibly insulting and America has paid a terrible price for its astonishing hubris. To this day, your country is still not reconciled to a settled view about what the Vietnam experience means. It probably explains Carter's reluctance to intevene in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide.
The same addled thinking affects Middle East policy where Islamist fanaticism is seen everywhere. The US can't see that any country in the Middle East that allowed free and fair elections would inevitably elect a muslim government. So it continues to support grossly autocratic states as what it sees as the lesser of two evils.
No doubt, Susan. Johnson was a complicated man, and the Vietnam War was not his only complication. I remember vividly the act that he and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, committed by recalling the F-4 Phantoms in mid-flight from the deck of the USS Saratoga that were to intercept the Israeli war planes and PT boats that attacked the USS Liberty. Make no mistake, Johnson did a lot of great things for this nation, and we are indebted to him for his courage to turn his back on Richard Russell's Southern Strategy and move this nation forward. However, leaving the crew of the USS Liberty to its fate under Israeli attacks is irredeemable in my viewpoint. With over 70 crew members dying, and over a 130 injured, it is too much to simply get over. And the help his government gave to cover up this atrocity was more than anyone should bare to see or feel. Both Johnson and McNamara should have been impeached for leaving The Liberty to twist in the wind. The hell of it is that US governments overall and by a majority that have sat in the WH, still assists and turns a blind eye to the atrocities the Israelis commit on any given day. On this score, both parties in two of the three branches are guilty as hell. I won't comment on the Judicial branch as they theoretically don't have much of a say (aside from the blatant illegalities of deportations) in foreign policy.
Or very few. I have wondered for a long time whether FDR purposely quarantined Japan to force them to attack us so we could more easily declare war. Was it ths planned. There was considerable resistance to entering another war. And the too, thee was a Nazi American movement he needed to overcome.
There’s been much speculation about what FDR may or may not have done to get American involved in the war. He certainly understood that sooner or later we would have to become involved. But we ought to remember that his primary focus at the time was on Germany and how to help Britain. Having ignored war preparations for decades we barely had enough on hand to do that, let alone start something in the Pacific. And in any case he already had incidents in the North Atlantic (the sinking of the Rueben James among others) that he could have used.
American intelligence was warning of Japanese action in the Pacific, but the bulk of that was focused on other possible areas. Also, of course, American naval doctrine held that Pearl Harbor was too shallow for airborne torpedo attack.
All in all, I think there is sufficient reason to doubt that FDR deliberately enticed the Japanese attack. And had he done so, I suspect the warnings going out to Pearl and the Philippines would have been a good deal more pointed than the speculative kind of warnings that did go out.
Susan, so well put in so few words. LBJ’s legacy includes giving me and so many of my generation ( I am 76) opportunities to find success and to invest in the opportunities for others. Sadly some have used their “ success “ to close and lock the door behind them having convinced themselves that those who have not succeeded just did not work or pray hard enough.
And in just over 100 days, we are seeing Lyndon Johnson's once, "Great Society" become what? A society; of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich...at the expense of most every other American. As we slide towards economic bankruptcy; the social, moral and ethical fabric that once held our society together is torn. And the Republicans cheer as America weeps.
Yes Susan, and that we, as a nation seem to have succumbed to tabloid"ism". Not sure what to blame that on. Human nature is the first thing which comes into my mind. Nothing new there, it's been with us since the beginning, whenever that was.., so many eons ago. Lyndon and 'lady-bird' Johnson, an under-rated presidency and couple - Americans.
Heather, if I remember correctly, you have mentioned that this current GOP is legislating and Trump is ruling (I won’t say leading) as if they will never again lose an election. We have to prove them wrong.
Hello J L ... "Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,”.... Seems that the Regime is trying to defang the Courts as Well... DJT can only Rule as a Despot....
"(Sec. 70302) This section limits the ability of U.S. courts to enforce a citation for contempt for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order. Specifically, if no security was given when the injection or order was issued, the citation of contempt may not be enforced using appropriated funds. This limitation applies to injunctions or orders issued before, on, or after the date of enactment."
Take careful note of that last line *issued before, on, or after the date of enactment*
In other words any previously issued contempt citations/orders would be NULL
as some cartoonist had it the other day, "They're eating the checks! They're eating the balances!" (though with much more truth than Trump's deranged rant about the cats and the dogs in Ohio...)
Anyone know how much of this they can put in the bill and still have it qualify as a financial bill that qualifies for "reconciliation" that escapes filibuster in the Senate?
Some of us think the US already is gone. It is not defined geography but is a compact - an agreement among the states to be bound by a constitution. The existing contempt orders and the many other unconstitutional actions and the disrespect for the constitution are undeniable. Secession isn’t needed.
These crooks need to be named, shamed, and plastered on billboards. If the shoe were on the other foot, the Repugnant Party would be having kittens—screeching on every network, clutching pearls, and staging performative tantrums on the Capitol steps. It's time the Dems took a leaf out of the MAGA meltdown manual and unleashed a Category 5 public hissy fit. Yell it loud enough so even the most apolitical dude in a backwater town gets it: TRUMP IS ROBBING THE POOR TO FEED THE RICH.
on the other hand, it was not the Democrats who put themselves into a minority in both houses of Congress - and thus made them largely impotent.
Some of them have been very effective critics of the Administration - but one needs a free and active and untimidated and unservile press to tell people about it.
Terry, my mother used to say ‘if you make a doormat of yourself, people walk on you.’ And, ‘kindness can be mistaken for weakness’. Both remind me of the Dems passivity right now. I’d add, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ Time to stand up and fight.
Democrats are complicit not because of being without ideas but because they are impotent . When they were able to do something legal and through congress to prevent the maga party and it's extreme right wing Project 2025 to replace our Constitution, they didn't. That's why we are impotent and watching from outside how our Country is being destroyed from the inside out.
We should have followed the examples of Germany and Romania that are defending themselves legally and actively. They are no committing collective suicide 😢
Francine, I still remember very simply and to the point designed political messages on billboards from many years back . It's a great idea and not too expensive. Thanks👍
Richard and Francine: a pained chuckle thinking of Lady Bird Johnson’s fight to get endless unsightly billboards off the highways as part of Great Society beautification. Is there any value left for natural beauty in our new “Guilded Age”? Does anyone wonder, as I do, whether the White House can ever be restored from the tastelessness of the current occupant? And the National Arts and Sciences? The Smithsonian?
I’ve said the same thing. Where is the outrage?? Tantrums on the Capitol steps every damn day—get on it! Enough with decorum! When they go low, we go lower. Let’s go!
You can't go lower than the lowest, And they have most of big money on their side. We have to defend rule of law, but no, there is no point in hoping for conscience on the part of the current "GOP". We have to speak and react to what is real, and be smart about it, and do so as a united front. Solidarity is the most reliable cure for despots, no matter what other form resistance may take.
Get to work, y’all. Let’s get behind Jasmine and go. If someone else comes along with her humor and common sense, we can persuade her to wait. But meanwhile…
It may be time for a national strike to shut down the United States and hold the people responsible for this horrific bill & administration accountable.
It is truly an awful bill and then Donold and the wretched Magats rub it in our faces by calling it a 'big beautiful...I can't finish writing it, it makes me cringe and queasy, it's so enraging that they have to push it through under cover of darkness and secrecy.
Let it be known as Don the Con's 'Bigliest bombastic bilge by bumbling brigands'
So true horhai. I just finish writing to Susan Collins, Jared Golden and Don Bacon. I will email our wonderful Senator Angus King who totally supports ALL of his constituents, not just the rich ones.
As you say, Angus King is a wonderful Senator. We in Maine are fortunate to have him representing us. After I emailed him several weeks ago to thank him for his terrific speech on the floor of the US Senate, I received a long email back from him, telling me that we live in dangerous times & giving many examples of how this was true. It was the longest letter I have ever received from a public official.
I wrote to both King and Collins this morning: to Susan Collins in hope against hope that she'll do the right thing and to Angus through abundance of caution. Every time I write to them (1-2+ times/week), I get a well-reasoned response from Sen. King's office. I just got my FIRST response from Sen. Collins - a mealy-mouthed excuse for why she won't hold a Town Hall, opting instead for photo ops with cherry-picked constituents. We must replace Susan Collins next November.
I'm amazed that Collins approval rating has dropped from 80% to somewhere in the 30% range since 2012. Her rating was 2nd to Bernie in the entire Senate at the time.
I've requested that she leave the Republican Party several times to serve her constituents better, but she has never replied. About 1 out of 10 emails to her have received a response whereas all of the emails to King have.
I've lived in 10 states in my 70 years and Angus King is the best Senator I've ever had and I've actually had some very good ones besides King.
I have to agree with Susan that LBJ was one tough cookie. He inherited the Vietnam War and was lied to by Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, and General Westmoreland, who inflated the numbers of the Vietnam Congress killed by America troops. But at the same time, he did accomplish passing the Civil Rights Act, which was monumental. His wife, Lady Bird, encouraged him to convince states to beautify their surroundings, cities and highways, with flowers because they brought “hope”. We sure could use a lot of flower power right now.
Many years ago, when I was in junior high, I had the privilege of meeting Lady Bird, who thanked our marching band for playing during a dedication ceremony of a park in Washington DC she helped support. She was approachable and kind.
My two children are third cousins to Lady Bird through their grandmother, Barbara. It's easy to see the relationship between Barbara and Lady Bird when looking at their pictures. They're ringers for one another.
I have to agree with Susan that LBJ was one tough cookie. He inherited the Vietnam War and was lied to by Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, and General Westmoreland, who inflated the numbers of the Vietnam Cong killed by America troops. But at the same time, he did accomplish passing the Civil Rights Act, which was monumental. His wife, Lady Bird, encouraged him to convince states to beautify their surroundings, cities and highways, with flowers because they brought “hope”. We sure could use a lot of flower power right now.
LBJ could have written those words today, which I assume is why they’re echoing in your head, Heather. The underlying themes of our country keep repeating. Trump’s full-throated embrace of white supremacy, as evidenced by his treatment of the president of South Africa today, echoes our past. Concentrating wealth and leaving workers unprotected and unsafe is another eternal theme. Our work will never end. WE are continuously working on bending that arc toward justice. It doesn’t bend on its own.
Linda, I saw the video of the meeting and it was clear that Trump/minions planned a “gotcha” moment for SA president Ramaphosa, but Ramaphosa didn’t take the bait and respectfully, but firmly, pushed back. Good for him in countering the blather and conspiracy theories that are being pumped to Trump.
Hello Barbara... Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth were there as well... Marco Rubio is over-rated... Seems that his former Colleagues are regretting their Confirmation Votes in the Senate...
Hello Barbara... They are Pathetic Sycophants... Marco Rubio has Delusions Of Grandeur... He Hopes To Be President Next... Did You See Kristi Noem's Testimony?....
Yes, Apache, I saw it….both sad and very very disturbing….THESE are the folks heading crucial agencies??!!….I am beyond appalled. I miss the Biden/Harris admin when I wasn’t afraid to turn on the news each day!
LBJ was basically talking about beating back evil with the Great Society programs. Evil NEVER, NEVER goes away; it just lays low for a while. The proposed cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and other programs, often in violation of previous laws, are EVIL. Not caring for the poor, hungry, sick, disabled, widows, orphans is sinful. This country has the resources to care for all our population. The morbidly rich will have a little less money, but other people will have food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and jobs. Such despicable actions will come back to haunt the rich and their bought off politicians. Revolution may come, and revolution often eats the rich.
I don't travel in those circles so have no idea but aren't there any billionaires with a conscience? Do they all support the "rob from the poor to make me richer" regime? Is there no one who will stop this train wreck?
Bill Gates has done a lot of very good work around the world, fighting disease. Mark Cuban was an active and vocal supporter of Harris. Warren Buffett is still a mine of common sense kindness. There are some ... but more should be speaking up.
Kathy, I believe there are many billionaires who have a conscience, but because of that trait, they don't draw attention to themselves and we aren't aware of them.
Bill Gates is getting undeserved credit for being a "good guy" because he has sanitized his reputation by spending a lot of money on good causes. But his running of Microsoft was anything but ethical. He does not deserve to be on your list.
One ethical billionaire who is frequently overlooked is Black actor, filmmaker, and playwright, Tyler Perry. He spends on charity, but not on political influence, so he may not help to stop the train wreck, but he's a decent billionaire.
Dolly Parton is worth "only" $650 million, but she's an ethical millionaire. She carefully avoids politics, so she won't help with the train wreck either.
Unfortunately, wealthy people who are politically active engage in politics out of self-interest. They may help to stop the MAGA train wreck, but they expect to get something for their investment.
Trump was disrespectful of the president of the African country he represented. Trump often is rude to his guests. why does he meet with them, only to treat them without respect?
Any meaningful democracy requires an educated, informed, and engaged society. Furthermore, the extreme concentration of wealth is incompatible with any attempt at democracy as it places significant power and wealth in the hands of the few.
The GOP knows this. It is why they have continued on a path of tax giveaways for the wealthy, the dismantling of public education, and encouraging the consolidation of media making it easier to "Manufacture Consent".
While the "corruption in your face" of Trump is disgusting, he is simply the barker in front of the circus and has, by last count, 1/3 of the voting population gleeful about his actions without regard to legality or constitutionality. The "Big Beautiful Bill" as you write is the culmination of years of wealth concentration to the wealthiest in the United States who then, like Elon Musk, pump a percentage of their ill-gotten gains back into subverting the system for their self-enrichment.
Our justice system was designed to protect property, not people. It was ill-prepared and not established to remove elected officials who participated in the insurrection of J6 (despite the 14th Amendment). Knowing this, the criminal-elect and his cabal of idiots masquerading as a Cabinet and "advisers" like Stephen Miller have turned the system around to attack itself.
Hello George... So this 'Big Beautiful Bill' was passed during the Darkest Hours... Among other things, it takes Food From Hungry Children, and Medicine From The Sick... Meanwhile apparently DJT's Weekend Golf Trips have cost over $100,000,000 so far, and to refit the "Free" Qatari 747 for temporary Presidential use will exceed $1,000,000,000, and will be DJT's Personal Plane when DJT leaves Office .... This Spending Bill Shows DJT's Heart...
...and still the MAGAts are waving their little flags. Are you becoming poorer? Blame it on Biden. Have no food? Blame it on Biden. Your environment is being killed by Musk's data mining centers? Blame it on Biden. A hurricane flattens your home? Blame it on Biden. FEMA doesn't show up? Blame it on Biden. Drought dries up your river? Blame it on Biden. You can't get your wife pregant? Blame it on Biden.
Ah, life is so simple when you're a MAGA cultist...
Thanks Dutch Mike... Didn't DJT say that DJT Loves Uneducated Voters... They are merely 'Useful Fools To Him'... DJT is the Center Of His Own Universe, next, The Mar-a-Lago Crowd...
Hello Dutch Mike... I would think that for DJT.... It is ME.ME.ME... LBJ grew up on a Poor on a Dirt Farm in Texas.... DJT was a Spoiled Rich Kid... I Hate Spoiled Rich Kids...
Thanks and yes. If he had one, it would show the depth of his corrupt criminality. I really wish the International Court of Justice at The Hague would invite him to pick up his big beautiful gift waiting for him in a "Palace in a Courtroom" there.
True, although I suspect so-called "lawyers" like Bondi and others were pre-corrupted. They simply found each other like corruption maggots. I mean magnets.
Thanks George... Seems that DJT's Bottomless Corruption just Furthered them on that Path... Michael Cohen is a Good Example... Michael Cohen eventually found the Strength to Save Himself....
Our government is becoming more and more corrupt daily, and our leaders no longer care about our citizens. Once we were greater than we are today. Autocracy awaits on our doorstep.
Hello Carolyn...This Fall of the American Empire It will Rival Gibbon's "The History Of The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire".... The Founders had that Story in Mind when they created the Constitution... Ben Franklin told People that We-The-People had a Republic as long as We could keep it... Ben Franklin was skeptical as Franklin knew that Corruption, i.e. Shortcuts, Laziness, Cheating, was in Human Nature... Empires Tend To Collapse From Within First... Indeed Chinese, Egyptian Dynasties, if Successful, last only about 250years... The American Experiment is now about 250years old.... Ancient Rome, and Athens, became Corrupted from their Founding Principals, and became ruled by Demagogues, and their Mobs..... DJT is a Demagogue, and the MAGAs are his Mob... It Is Time For A 'Hard Reboot' For American Democracy... The Constitutional Safeguards That We Have Assumed
Would Keep Us Safe, Are Failing Thanks To The Roberts Court....
Yes, it is deeply disturbing. The probability that it will simply be a "Putin-style" election where the results are published a week before voting takes place seems higher each passing day. I'm surprised Musk hasn't announced "VoteX" a new blackbox voting system to be single-sourced and used in all future US "elections".
It's not "as if". There will be no more elections in the US. Trump promised it himself: "You only have to vote one more time. Then we'll fix it. You'll never have to vote again." The only elections that will be held are Putin-style "elections".
Look at The Election Truth Alliance data analyses on YouTube. Study them. Even with all the voter suppression and media sanewashing of Trump, and with racism’s and gender bias, some important info was overlooked.
I will keep annoyingly repeating that Elon Musk's Texas registration of two new corporations, The United States of America, Inc. and Group America, LLC, should be scaring the bejeezus out of all Americans. He didn't create these corporations just for funsies. I don't know how, but his creation of the city of Starbase, TX, is part of a larger plan. The new capital city of the United States? With Donald as king and Elon as prime minister? Next, he will convince the buffoons in Austin to subtract 4 letters and rename the state "X."
And the SC making, encouraging, ordaining that money equals speech and therefore unlimited “donations,” aka bribes, is just fine. This will prove to be the absolute undoing of this country.
Very true -although now it is out in the open. When SCOTUS allowed unlimited secret donations to flow into "Super PACs" they unleashed a major mechanism for bribery, er, I mean campaign "contributions".
Our government has duties to ALL of the people. It is not a license for part of the country to bully the rest.
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." - Lincoln
The GOP have not only completely disregarded their constituency, but also their conscience. That is the biggest problem. They are stealing from the poor, ignoring the law as they see fit, "playing war" on Signal but with real lives at stake, kicking children out of the country and putting people in jail just because they like to - and they have absolutely NO moral problems whatsoever with doing so.
So disgusting, and depressing. No, this is not the country I grew up in. We had hope. We joined together to fight injustice. What's happening now is unrecognizable to me. No, that's not true. I recognize it in the fascist histories of Spain, Italy, Romania, Argentina, Russia, China, dozens and dozens and dozens of other fascist dictatorships throughout history. But never before in the United States.
The Trump/MAGA Big Sadistic Bill is the same financial agenda we've seen since Reagan and Voodoo economics.
The Rich are the rightful stewards of government and the Rest are the working poor, needy parasites and freeloaders looking for handouts. Same socially bankrupt Pig. Slightly different lipstick.
None of these will save him or MAGA from their self imposed doom:
- High tariffs on consumers in America
- Hugh tax cuts for the Rich in America
- Destroying a liberal arts education in America
- Destroying medical research in America
- Destroying healthcare in America
- Destroying science research in America
- Expelling immigrants from America
- Breaking Constitutional laws in America
- Destroying relations with allies of America
- Controlling the media in America
- Embracing Russia for America
- Embracing the middle east Gulf states
- Amassing $100 billion personally
But these will build our Resistance. The end is coming for the Greedy fascists
It's as if the USAs enemies dreamed up and implanted a government that would cause maximum harm to all of the things that actually made it great in the first place.
Right now, at 2:35am, Republicans use the wee, witching hours to churn out their 'big beautiful' conspiracy of idiocy and evil. They do it at the same hour for the same reasons Dr. Frankenstein pilfered corpses from the cemetery. Lies, imaginary battles against made-up monsters like 'waste, fraud and abuse' do best without the light of day, in the absence of transparency, devoid of integrity and honor.
We once pursued the Great Society based on a concept of shared destiny. Now we give power to those whose only goal is to deny that destiny, dismantle the good in us in order to build the Scumbag Society where the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want and the rest of us endure what we must.
Why and how we traded generosity of spirt and nobility for pure greed and ignominy is a dark mystery I fear at age 70 I will never be able to fully understand.
What a tragic prospect we face. I sometimes grieve that the American people do not deserve the lofty goals set in earlier eras, that our careless, lethargic apathy has damned the U.S. to a future more like a medieval hellhole than some shining city on a hill described, ironically by one of their once revered heroes. I have a hard time grasping that I was born into a world battling to eradicate a monstrous, evil scourge only to spend my closing years on the precipice of descending into just such a fetid cesspool we once skirted.
Yes, I have lived from one to the other, and watched repubs follow a script laid out in 1985, but started much earlier. Now it’s my grands and yours left with his nightmare.
From the Alt National Park Service: “Inside Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is Judicial Silencing (Sec. 80121(h)). This might be the most authoritarian section in the entire 1,100+ page bill.
What it says:
“No court shall have jurisdiction to review any action taken by the Secretary, the EPA Administrator, a State or municipal agency, or any other Federal agency […] to issue a lease, permit, biological opinion, or other approval.” 🧵
What it means:
- If the government approves drilling, mining, or development, even illegally, you can’t sue.
- It applies retroactively, killing lawsuits already in progress.
- Tribes, environmental groups, citizens, even states, lose the right to challenge these approvals in court.”
I am very happy to be reminded of President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society". His contributions to American society have been too seldom mentioned.
In other news, it appears that the House is preparing to take $500 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund -- our FICA "payroll tax" contributions during our working years -- to pay for the tax cuts that the B'zillionaires don't need.
FICA "payroll tax" the Billionaires don't even pay . . . presently only earnings up to $176,100 are taxed for Social Security . . . sooooo the filthy rich don't even pay what I'd consider a "fair share"
I was led to believe that because the Social Security/Medicare Trust Fund is non-discretionary, it is therefore inviolable, set aside, not to be used for any purpose other than that for which it was established. The neoliberals have been salivating over the trust funds for many years. $500 billion would not deplete the trust fund, but if that "borrowing" is not replenished it would hasten the time when the fund won't be adequate to pay full benefits to all recipients.
This eloquent and timely writing AI will never do.
Such ability for expression evolves through a lifetime of study and reflection. Pulling together the threads of historical reflection requires a sense of humanity and vision for the evolution of mind and heart.
Lyndon Johnson was a complicated man, but he rose to the challenges of a society in need and the massive civil rights moment. It's sad that the Vietnam War , which he neither began nor embraced, tarnished his legacy.
And it was Johnson who nailed it when it comes to why so many "average" (not rich) Americans vote against their own financial best interests. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Remember, it is not just the Republicans who are doing this to us. They were enabled by 77 million (mostly non-rich) Americans. Half a trillion from Medicare will hurt most Americans except the very richest! In addition, hurting (and KILLING more than would have naturally passed) the very poorest to give to the very richest. It's just a gross, immoral country we are all forced to live in now.
And they are also cutting $500 BILLION from MEDICARE in an extremely under-reported portion of the "Big Ugly Bill" that the Republican majority is trying to shove down the throat of the country.
And remember. All the while we are paying in taxes for them to have the best insurance possible. And their families too.
We are, as Heather puts it, condemned to a soulless wealth for one reason and one reason alone. Too many people believe the cynical lie that "soulless wealth" and "capitalism" are different phrases expressing the same meaning.
The founding principle of capitalism is the name of Adam Smith’s book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), aka “treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot.”
Capitalism works only because millions of people at every level in organizations all over the world are moral actors. Unfortunately, most of the top one percent—who think of themselves as the only capitalists—think the founding principle of capitalism is “I’m right, you’re wrong if you disagree with me, and this conversation is over.” And the vast majority of real (moral) capitalists just assume the top one percent must right (with no due process).
Not me. I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Jump in. The water’s fine.
This looks more like fascism to me. the Atlantic ran a piece by David Graham asking "Does anyone in the white House Know what is going on?"
The level of ignorance takes your breath away. The ONLY qualification is loyalty to the leader, who by the way also claims now that he doesn't know any thing ( remember when he alone could fix everything?). Up till now, the courts have been able to do nothing to enforce their "decrees" so that is no different than anyone of us issuing a "decree".
Every time a person responds to a conflict of interest with some version of "I'm right, you're wrong, and this conversation is over," that person's level of ignorance ratchets up one notch. People like Donny 2 Dolls, Adolph Hitler, and Stephen Miller continuously upped their level of ignorance from childhood. Maybe Marco Rubio as well, or maybe he's just a fast learner.
Everyone in the White House knows what is going on. Project 2025 is very clear.
FYI -- Michael Luttig has recently reported that the president is running roughshod over the Congress and the Judiciary {now new news there); that the Supreme Court cannot stop this president; and trump does not want the Supreme Court to hear any one of these cases against his actions; that his adherents have long held to their wanting a complete revolution; he is revolting against everything that has been American; if you asked trump if he were conducting a revolution he would proudly say "yes!"; however, a president is not allowed to revolt against the federal government; the only two solutions he posited were impeachment - not goin' to happen; and mid-terms. Beyond that he had nothin'.....
In other words, I'm beyond Michael Luttig. I had something.
Stanley McChrystal had something today if you watched Deadline White House. He and I agree. We can sit back and watch the authoritarians destroy democracy, or we can stop them. It's up to us.
yes Luttig would know
that seems to be the case
The impotence of the court...their pronouncements, when they make them, Hot Air with no ability to enforce
As I’ve repeated, it’s over. In the 4 plus months we have shifted into an authoritarian state in which the judiciary after passing this bill is useless. We have turned 3 branches of government into one executive branch. We must assume some of this blame because we kept pushing to the left without even being aware of it. No, I’m not going to elaborate because I always castigated here when I have. But our democratic political apparatus has pushed and pushed. And now we have an authoritarian government and these governments exist for one purpose, which is to rape and pillage the wealth. I have no answers.
4 months in and 44 more months to go. The future for the United states of America looks pretty bleak. And, the future of the human race.
Frankly, I only care about the innocents: the birds, the fish, etc. etc. etc.
The dear birds and fish don't vote. Resist! Join liberal cause groups and donate as much as you can to them. The mid-terms can stop the bleeding. We just have to get there.
BK, your last sentence “ I have no answers” is I think the most on point, honest thing you’ve ever written.
Not true I always write honestly but your truth may not be the same as my truth. Unless of course I'm writing satire than all hell breaks loose.
IMHO, both ends of the political spectrum pushed each other into increasingly extreme positions. I have no data but I suspect most people are between those two extremes.
The bill passed - medicaid, Biden's green energy efforts will get the ax, the waiters and waitresses will no longer have to pay a tax on their tips, and my blue state can now deduct its state taxes -- I am still not celebrating.
Just to be clear - the only tips NOT taxed are cash - which tbh was never really taxed because there is no way to prove how much you made - waitstaff always underreported. Taxes via credit card (how majority of people pay) are still included as taxable income. Even the "good" stuff passed is still trash
The one change they made years ago that I don’t hear anyone talk about is that tips were estimated based on the restaurant receipts and you were assigned a dollar amount for tips received even if you didn’t get them. That way cash tips were taxed. I bet the people thinking they’re going to get a big boon from this bill will be shocked. I also read that most of these people don’t make enough to pay taxes but that can’t be true for full time servers. I made huge amounts. I think these people are looking at Vegas workers when they planned this. Lots of cash there.
So will there be a push from the restaurant industry to encourage tips be in cash? Just like the nail salons who ask you to tip in cash. “Please tip in cash so our staff doesn’t have to pay tax and it makes our credit card accounting easier? And we can pay lowers wages?”
Hmmm… the merchant/business does pay a credit card fee based on the total charge. Plus a fee for the transaction. That can add up.
But a LOT of those place are going cashless (at least around here). You can leave a cash tip-sometimes. But mostly it's at the pay point. So, yes, a worthless filler in a disaster of a bill that Drumpf made a huge deal about in his campaign that will really not benefit a lot of people unless they work either high flow or high dollar places with cash tips.
Hey I think you left our 500 billion medicare cuts
I am certainly not unmindful of that. I receive medicare though my insurance plan. I'm just glad I don't have a chronic illness.
As one who has been on Medicare for a long time, I appreciate what it does for my medical bills. I especially need it this year, because it is apparently the year of surgeries for me. I've had one, definitely need a second one, and probably a third one, which would be the most difficult and most expensive. I have just been learning today about what the repubs want to do to Medicare. Thank you for mentioning it.
My best wishes that the surgeries will resolve your medical problems.
Thank you, Marge. It looks like after 5 month I have a chance of getting the second one going. Good news.
Under Advantage, you would have likely been delayed and denied.
I know how stressful that can be. I’m so glad that things are starting to be better.
It seems to me that this is an important, under-emphasized item in the bill:
>> items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,”<<
Isn't this a violation of separation of powers?
Yep. A clear violation of the separation of powers, which is one of the most basic, most foundational components of the system of checks and balances built into our Constitutional democratic Republican form of government.
We are currently seeing the danger Benjamin Franklin alluded to when a woman asked him when he emerged from what has become known as the Constitutional Convention, what form of government they created: “A republic. If you can keep it.”
Republicans and their monied special interest allies are doing their damnedest to create a plutocratic oligarchy, a government of, by and for the wealthiest few.
Ed Guerrant,
After the Republicans have ruined our education system, our systems of governing, destroyed our relationships with foreign friends, forgotten those who have worked to free themselves of poverty and starvation, denied the wise guidance of our medical system in exchange for lies and vodoo economics, what will they do with the disorder and chaos? Will they ever be able to receive the truth and work to live it out in humility and service???
When we live only to ourselves, and only for ourselves, our lives become small and empty.
Why are we allowing human beings to starve to death in Gaza?
But Trump and his Republican
enablers are enriching themselves and their corporate interests, beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.
Any others are simply collateral damage of no particular interest or import.
Yo.. J.., as you must know.., Wether or not it violates 'some law' is a 'no factor' to this bunch. They just want words in there to fore-stall (STALL being the operative word) any fool-hardy lawsuit. one by one, every police-force in every town is going to have to sign on with ICE or fear retribution for being obstinate. Those who continue to be "obstinate" will be subjected to fear of retribution in addition to the losss of their job. We are faced with a tsunami... can we survive it?
I like your name for Trump's bill ... "Big Ugly Bill" definitely describes it more accurately
I refuse to believe that the Senate is going to allow Medicare to be cut. Doing this to their constituents is political suicide....
I read it cuts 500 billion out I’d Medicare over a period of time. I’m not sure of the timeline. There is a part of the bill that does deal with individuals not being charged with contempt of court, if they ignore a court order. That I believe is a violation of separation of powers. If not, trump gets another pass on ignoring the Supreme Court and several federal courts. I’m not a legal scholar so forgive my ignorance, if I am incorrect.
What makes you think constituents matter to them? There may not be any election to vote in, as far as JT is concerned. He’s been very clear that he doesn’t care. At this point, all rules have been twisted beyond recognition.
Who’s your representative. Post this in whatever sources you can. And ask friends to post this dishonest behavior. He should be voted out
Ahhhh.., Karen.., beware.., the knock on your door. You are guilty of inciting obstinate behavior - you must come with us. Duck you head please, stop struggling.
Should the “Big Beautiful Bill” pass with the provision to prevent the courts from administering justice upon those who break the laws it will destroy what is left of our embattled Constitution and put yet another nail in the coffin of what has been our treasured Constitution for the past 237 years. The passage of this provision will be the end of the Supreme Court’s ability to be an effective and critical part in what was designed to be a system of checks and balances. With the destruction of the checks and balances that were instituted by the framers of the Constitution, we will no longer be “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” The passage of this bill will be noted in history as end of a functional Democracy in the United States.
However, this ongoing destruction of our Constitution nor any new draconian provision can prevent us from creating a better Constitution nor a modern and just economic system. The root of the word “Courage” comes from the French word “Coeur” or heart. No regime can take away the courage of our hearts unless we choose to give up.
The Trump regime will fall, I am sure of it. We are racing towards the economic downfall of the current regime that will gravely impact the lives of 90% of our population be they liberal, conservative or ultra-conservative. We also entering an era of cascading crises or “Polycrisis” triggered by the collapse of our environment which the scientific community is now agrees is progressing far faster than their original predictions. Due to the machinations of the Trump regime, our treasured 237 year old constitution with its 27 amendments is also reaching its tipping point of relevancy and effectiveness. Due we continue to try to amend the Constitution version 1.27 or begin to design Constitution 2.0 in a proactive fashion?
Due to the rapid progression of the polycrisis and the misery it entails, the current authoritarian regime will fall as other regimes have before. When this occurs, it is totally possible that our political Democracy and our economy based on capitalism will be in a wreckage. At that time will we attempt to rebuild on the same failed economic and political system that has let us down or will we build a modern system that can sustain us into the future?
Marc, you’re scaring me but also offering some hope. I can see that what you say is accurate. On a slightly different note, yesterday it sorta came to me that Trump is a “straw man.” Would that be the correct use of that term? Thanks
Read "Ministry For the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson. Also scary, but offering hope as well.
Susana, I believe you are correct. If Trump were to eat one too many big Macs or some other dietary indiscretion that pushes him to the side, we can be sure that the oligarchs are already working on contingency plans. Planning ahead is what has made them so successful and certainly they would apply this type of planning to the political arena as as they are the power behind the throne as it were. Certainly, they might lose a person with a certain type of charisma to be their front man, but that would not stop the machinations from going forward with or without him. The mainstream media would influence us to believe that Trump is the main driver behind all of this, but I do not believe it is so. They do depend on Trump to keep the base stirred up, and there is probably no one else who can do it so effectively as him. But even if he was to the side, the Oligarchs behind him definitely would not stop in their tracks.
I completely agree. Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I really appreciate it.
“No regime can take away the courage of our hearts”
Hungry people look for food. Sick people cannot show up at the barricades. It’s not lack of courage. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Marc Nevas, your comments are so on target. We are headed for a major economic collapse.
We built our political/economic system for the benefit the wealthy and the owners of the means of production. And in that, we have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Though we pretend to be "middle class" and never talk about it, we are now a more unequal nation than we have ever been before.
Politics yield to the desires of the wealthy. But there are tipping points:"things that cannot go on forever, don't". "Trees do not grow to the sky."
It is not possible for us to continue to become more unequal forever. So what comes next?
Every contribution by democratic presidents since WWII wiped out by. this reptile in half a year! Heather could not have painted a more contrasting picture between him and Lyndon Johnson....
That was an extraordinarily rose-colored portrayal of LBJ.
It will be CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE outlawing abortion, more than 2 genders and interracial marriage. The idea will be to enshrine 1950's morality in law. I believe it will be like the Russian Constitution. Who will form a new order? The Christofacists will still be in power. We are heading for the destruction of America. Once the courts are totally abolished, the end of democracy is assured.
I'm also concerned that the enormous number of guns that exist in our U.S.A. will provide a nasty backdrop for cuts in our "SNAP" budget, as more people lose subsistence benefits. The current "mis-administration" wants the least able to withstand poverty to find "other alternatives". The USAID program that DJT destroyed helped Agribusiness by purchasing surplus food commodities that would be stored, refrigerated or wasted. Using resources for our Nation's friends in poorer countries. This is "penny wise and pound foolish"... !
When in 1988 the Mianis River Bridge disaster occurred, Connecticut did not attempt to just repair the collapsed section; it rebuilt a new bridge based on the latest engineering that was designed to withstand any present and future stresses. It was an eight-year project that was undertaken to replace it with a more resilient and wider bridge based on the most modern engineering and construction techniques available.
So, before the Trump regime completes the collapsing of our current economy and political system, it behooves us to take heart to design and prepare to implement a more sustainable, just and humane system to take us into the future. You can explore and comment on those discussions on the “Crisis and Transition, A Common Way forward” Substack at: https://crisistransition.substack.com/ and more specifically at https://crisistransition.substack.com/p/the-time-for-planning-is-now
It's plain to see that this " Trump mis-administration" is balancing the budget by eliminating any thought of it's legacy! Where are our "consistently unemployed, or under-employed people to do? The key to living in a Democracy is the "consent of the governed", many of us do not agree with the slim Republican balance in Congress !
Ronald MacInnis,
"The remaking of our governing systems is the point..." of this administration.
We are watching our country, our Constitution being destroyed day by day.
This is NOT a movie!!!!
Marc Nevas,
Thank you...."Crisis and Transition, A Common Way Forward"....substack...
That'll be the task at hand Marc. But, I might add, if we have a printed copy of the Constitution or any of our current laws, etc.., in hand, hide it. Because when we do try to re-invent our nation we will need the original for reference. A lot of great work went into it. Imagine, relying on some digitized version.... YGTBSM..., would be a joke, because it will have been changed before our eyes can even see. Already it's hard to know which way is up. There'll be no blueprint, they will have been expunged like books from a library.
sadly, true. These people no longer want to govern, but rule.
That's true Marc. The gutless in Washington just abolished America. You and I are now living in a shithole countey run by a dumb dictatorr.
True - we are experiencing an orgy of idiocy. trump et al will now have the power to pursue destruction of the society away from prying eyes, the press and the public.
Is that provision constitutional? I am dubious. Can one branch prevent another from operating? Could Congress deny funds for the White House to carry out functions that Art. 2 allocates to the executive? Doubtful.
Agreed. I hope some substack writer today is addressing that issue. I would hope that 7 Suoreme Court justices (the other 2 are bought and paid for so no hope there) would say that the executive branch getting Congress to take away from the judicial branch the power of contempt proceedings violates the separation of powers. But that could take so much time that other evils (packing the court to make the 7 a minority) might prevent the right result.
Every lawyer who is a member of Congress who lets that provision in the Ugliest of Anti-American Bills stand should be disbarred.
Likewise I'm wondering about charging the New Jersey congresswoman with trespassing on a private ICe prison within her district when she tried to prevent the arrest of the city's mayor.
I lived in DC during the Johnson administration, and I recall that a certain Virginia congressman drove home nightly from the Capitol drunk as could be. The suburban Virginia police resisted arresting him because of Congressional immunity.
The one who landed in the fountain?
This is just a different way to get to the "Enabling Act" passed by the Reichstag giving Hitler ultimate control of the government. I have to wonder if all of the demonstrations planned nationwide for "No Kings Day" on June 14th will be what "enables" trump & his cronies to declare Martial Law & to give orders for his militias to act/attack?
Should my next sign say: -
"No Kings," and No "Enabling Act of 1933, Now or Ever"
Clearly Trump has never read his Keats. “Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. “
Where is the evidence that he has ever read anything?
Oh, I’m sure he’s read The Art of the Deal, and I’m betting he’s also read substantial parts of Project 2025, despite his denials. :)
He probably DICTATED The Art of the Deal and edited by having it read back to him. My hypothesis is that he's severely dyslexic and can barely read at all.
Nor has he read Shelley's "Ozymandias."
Yes, I used that one in another context for the same reason. Indeed, I can’t wait for the ‘lone and level sands’ to bury MAGA. Just hope it doesn’t take as long :)
The people in Chad and Turkey have protested their autocrat's suppression, treason and other nefarious acts - where's the similar outrage here????
Exactly my reaction, Marc. Maybe the provision to limit the power of the courts is more damaging than the atrocious tax bill.
“Land of the greed and home knave “
Will the Courts strike it down as unconstitutional ?
Let’s stop using their vocabulary. It’s the Big Billionaire Boondoggle.
I call it the Big Bloated Budget Bill.
YES!
And open the doors wide to PROJECT 25
With their plans for Womens’
bodies and a splash of Christianity to glue the families together.
OMG. Does any congress person man or woman even know what is in this over 1,000 page bill? God help us!
It has always seemed to me that none of this will stop until the people who voted for Trump feel enough pain, inflicted by him in terms they CANNOT dispute. The 'I didn't think the leopard would eat MY face", pain.
Sandra, I believe you are 100% correct. I only question that they will ever blame trump. More likely it will be Joe Biden's fault. Or Hillary's. Or Obama's. Or Hunter Biden's laptop. Or Benghazi. Or ...
You’re right, Dan. That’s why I qualified it by saying, in effect, they’ll have their noses rubbed in it such that there will be no question.
Dan, a few of them have realized that they are wrong, but too many are still busy owning the libs.
Remember what Zola said: "Those who can make you believe in absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
Agreed...sadly, by then the damage to our country and our freedoms will be done
They will just believe what Faux, OAN, Newsmax tell them to beleive.
Dana, yours is a serious, thoughtful, and passionate post. I read it a few minutes after hearing the breaking news that 215 abusive Republican lawmakers in The People's House passed the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Thereby, they continued for another year their fifty-year record of heaping abuse on the American people. The abuse is not just financial, but, as you wrote, will be lethal for some of us. Compared to that, I suppose those of us who are not killed have to be considered lucky that we are merely financially abused and so only likely to lead impoverished lives lacking health care, food and (due to other punishing Republican policies) lacking freedom and justice. These abusive members of Congress were enabled (your very appropriate word) by those 77 million self-abusing Americans who put these freaks in office.
Unfortunately, many - too many - Americans have a fealty to a dangerous strain of governance.
Well said and exactly right.
I look forward to the TV News, newspaper coverage, where many of our Citizens get their news. Debate is necessary. I am concerned by the many draconian dimensions to this. I am concerned that our Country has more guns than good sense in Congress! Wanna make a bet that the National Crime rate will rise?
Thank you for reminding us that many who helped to put Trump and his thugs in power include people from many backgrounds. Just look at the smiling faces at a Trump rally. LBJ was indeed a complex man but he was a compassionate and wise person and skillful politician. He “ done good “ by us.
Pres. Lyndon Johnson was right about the racism of the "lowest white man." The phenomenon of whites voting against their own best economic interests was further explained in Thomas Frank's book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" [2004] and Heather Cox Richardson, "How the South Won the Civil War." [2020] "The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?" is a study published in the Feb. 2018 edition of the peer-reviewed journal, Critical Sociology. What the two Univ. of Kansas professors found is that Trump's voters agreed with Trump's desire to crush and punish immigrants, women and gay right's advocates, minorities, etc. MAGA, in my opinion, is 21st century KKK. One more book - Timothy Egan, "A Fever in the Heartland," about the rise of the KKK in the Midwest in the 1920's. Really a must read.
I've been thinking about "average" Americans lately. I consider myself an average American. I'm a retired teacher. Neither rich nor poor. This tax bill will hurt people like me. It also goes against my beliefs. I graduated in 1964, just when Johnson was describing the kind of society he wanted to build. Eighteen years old and deep in Republican country, I had no idea what Johnson said. But 61 years later, at age 79, that's exactly what I always worked toward. My kids are working toward that world. But we'll lose under this bill. What do the authors of this "Big Beautiful Bill" have in mind for people like us. We can't win under this bill. But we do important work for society. It will no longer pay to be a teacher or nurse or social worker. We're vital for society. But why should we struggle to get the education and do the hard work these professions demand when we're just going to be crushed by this system? We're a very idealistic group, but we still get tired. We struggle to make ends meet. We quite obviously aren't valued. My grandkids could watch all this and say, "Not for me.". If they're going to be underpaid and under valued, why not do it without the college loan debt?
What will happen to my segment of society?
I don't really think that Trump is too fond of the middle-class as they are a threat to his power. Anyone who is educated and has enough time to educate themselves about what is really happening because they are not desperate and worried about starving, is a threat. As Heather has pointed out previously, there are different factons (with slightly different goals that mostly overlap nicely) that are all part of this Trump Administration but none of them benefit from educated people who can feed themselves and will not so eaily be distracted by divide and conquer politics. It is the reason they all despise federal workers. Federal workers are mostly educated people who have (or had rather) job security, good benefits and did not have to worry about 'hustling' every minute of every day so they could read the news, become informed about politics and vote in their own best interests. That is the LAST THING that Trump and the Republicans want. The goal is to get all the wealth and power for themselves (mostly white males) and to make the rest of us so desperate and poor that we dutifully fight each other for their scraps rather than going after them (the people who are REALLY stealing from us).
Joan, I am also a retired teacher just in the middle of it all. I also graduated college in 1964 with a teaching degree in Biology. It wasn't easy. But now, I wonder what will happen to people like us?
Great quote, first time hearing it—“if you can convince…”. So spot on today, again (still)
Was it this one, if you can convince someone a demi-god rose from the dead to absolve you of an original sin and ascended into the heavens, or that a prophet was whisked away by a winged beast to those same heavens you can convince them of anything?
Voters will wake up by 2026 and elect the Congress to stop BBB. DEMs are now winning all state and local elections, I hear.
Will there be a day when people realize they gave away the farm and they're never going to get it back? People are probably not so stupid (at least I hear that humans are basically good) that they will not fight to restore our lost freedoms. Sounds like that test is coming right up.
Bingo on the “money quote” from Lyndon Johnson: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
I love this quote from Johnson. Thank you. The key is educating people, but it seems that at least at this moment many are caught up in the moment of thinking Trump cares about them -- more importantly that they are finally a part of something -- with their MAGA hats and T-shirts.
All ‘made in China’!
I keep looking at it from every angle--economics, fallout from Covid, the rise of disinformation platforms/influencers, etc and while all of these things played a factor (especially disinformation), the primary reason for the entire Trump era seems to me to be racism (with sexism thrown in of course). Back in 2016 when we still funded science, more than a few studies supported the premise that it was 'racial animus' more than anything else that predicted a vote for Trump. In one study, when white people were reminded that non-hispanic whites were on track to become a minority by 2050, their views on immigration and politics became much more conservative. Likewise, we have seen a rise in far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe. I think the UK would still be part of the EU were it not for anti-immigrant sentiment, which relates to racism as the immigrants tend to be darker people from poorer areas. Related to this is the rise of Asia as a center of world power which is a change that is freaking out the Europeans (land of the 'white' people) just as much as becoming a minority is freaking out the white people here. Racism has always existed in the USA and was foundational to it, I would say. What became the Atlantic slave trade for the US started in VA in 1619 before the Mayflower even landed in Cape Cod. Hard to argue that racism isn't interwoven into our entire history. PS As to one of your other points, imagine what would have happened if Obama had accepted a $400 million plane from a Muslim country who funds Hamas, as a personal gift like Trump just did. They literally would have lost their minds.
Dana, I love and admire your thoughts. If I could write as clearly as you, I would say the same things!
You likely are selling yourself short but thank you for the compliment. Heather’s posts and the smart, engaged people here are helping to keep me sane in insane times!
Gina, you are so right in your thinking. It is sad that 77,000 idiots could not come close to your way of thinking or mine.
And displaced his "War on Poverty". And for what?
My father was one of the architects of the War on Poverty, helping to craft a proposal for a national negative income tax, championed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and improbably adopted by Richard Nixon later as a way to reform the very concept of welfare. That concept didn't win --- snuffed by Senate conservatives who didn't think it had enough work requirements and liberals who thought it had too many.
My father passed before the first abhorrent Trump regime came to power. For that I will always be grateful -- it would have crushed him to see what America became under this foul cult of greed and cruelty, now back for a second go-round at infamy.
I was born in 1942. Went to Europe and Northern Africa with Dwight Eisenhower’s Showcase of American Youth, People to People diplomacy, sponsored by the Red Cross and the UN. Graduated high school in ‘60, Vanderbilt in ‘64, U of Fla School of Law ‘66. Went to work with the War on Poverty’s Legal Services program 1967-1971. Went didn’t solve the problems of the world but we made a dent in them — and we genuinely tried and cared. We admitted our shortcomings and tried innovated ways to new approaches. And the vast majority of us continued to do pro bono and civil rights litigation throughout our long careers ever trying to make a difference for those who had been handed the short stick. At 82, I follow today’s legislators and and the executive branch and I’m at loss how this can be the country I grew up in and cared about. That this utter abandonment of everything I’ve always been proud of about our country could have occurred during my lifetime still surprises me — and sickens me.
Take the power of enforcement away from the judiciary? Do away with habeas corpus? No birthright citizenship? More burdens on the poor while less tax and responsibility on those who have the most wealth? I’m at loss how that could have happened. My first vote was for LBJ. I thought Nixon would be our low point. Then Bush/Cheney. Then DT 1st. But 2024 astonished me — and ‘25 has proven my fears to be well placed.
Aging is coming to grips with mortality as we experience loved ones die one by one, and it prepares us for our endings. This I've faced, but I never expected to see the death of all I knew to be true about our social/moral fabric and of our country's legal underpinnings. Pulling the rug out will leave millions in misery; however real that will be, love and kindness will also sprout. We are seeing a consistent withdrawal of support for basic human needs and for life itself. Gulags in other countries and hospice dormitories here.
Yes, it is hard for me to fathom the depths of depravity that allows minds to think up this legislation and to somehow also think that it ok to do this to our fellow Americans. This bill is truly a Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the already battered poor and giving it to the already obscenely rich, smfh.
MAGA people have a hard time making sense of a complicated world; have little patience for boring, detailed explanations; doubt experts, data and evidence rather than themselves. The dumbing down of America .....
Victoria, I have been wondering for awhile why they don't just take the poor and infirm out and shoot them? Or would that be considered (by them), 'too kind'?
I would like to thank you, Elizabeth, for your efforts throughout your lifetime. America was in such a good position to accelerate the good in this world, and show the rest of the world how it is done.
I am in tears this morning, and still hope the Senate will stop this disgusting legislation from passing, but I fear, from what I have seen, there are too many hateful people in that body as well.
We have slid into despotism. I hold out hope that as more Americans feel the pain associated with this administration, enough of us will come out against it to bring it down and put empathetic people in it's place. I hope.
I am 89, my first vote, John F. Kennedy Jr. in Jim Crow Nashville TN., 1960.. and so we have been witness to OUR country thru the 60’s, Civil Rights, 3 ‘assassinations’, Viet Nam….. and the McCarthy and UnAmerican trials…. And Roy Cohn had a serious roll in where we are today….. So! WE WILL Prevail…. We MUST!!!! And I am fearfully hopeful as I read all of us in our responses to Heather, the Bulwark, The Guardian, The Centurion… and as with you Elizabeth, I am absolutely fearful…..
For me, my pursuit of pride obscured reality. LFAA and TCinLA have been a catalyst for a relief from that pursuit. This is an exciting time to be alive. (I’m 82, sober alcoholic Vietnam Veteran.)
you voted along party lines..not admitting the obvious corruption ie Jan 6th was a 'taster'
Thank you, Elizabeth, for your service to some of our nation's highest goals and achievements. Who could have imagined we would be here today? (The authors of Project 2025, I see.) Still, some Americans had an opportunity to experience a better life as a result of the Great Society.
Gee Whiz, Elizabeth! Me too! I got my B.S. college degree to teach that same year you did. Now, I'm also 82 and find it unbelievable what is happening as I am living through this destruction of our country which once I worked so hard to make a better place.
Elizabeth du Fresne,
Thank you for sharing this very dear synopsis of your life.
You are correct....this is NOT the America we grew up in!
We arrived at this low point day by day. Still, I have heard the voices of heroes who are speaking out....so must we. We must support our decent leaders. They need to know they are not alone.
My husband and I will be at another rally in June. There are lots of us older ones standing up for our country.
I am grateful for the goodness in your heart and your brilliance which you chose to sacrifice in service for others. You will find a way to serve even in these difficult times.
My wife and I are post-WWII war babies. I retired from two National Labor Unions. I enjoy debate and intelligent speech. This very draconian budgetary plan will face a very spirited debate. Now that Trump has destroyed "USAID" any foreign aid will have to be in monetary currencies, Harrumpf. Trump is a "me, me, mine" sort of person who is absorbed with his own self importance. His tiny fingers grasp and claw at all of the power he can grasp. Nixon disgraced himself! This bozo is run by the Republican Party and it'll take a team effort to compromise "Tiny Fingers"!
Soon I'm reading historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's "An Unfinished Love Story."
This recounts the 1960s she spent with Richard Goodwin (they married), key to The Great Society times, and years after.
But it's the 1960s that have turned on us now, as it was that era which Lewis Powell and his corporate rich friends all hated -- women's rights, blacks, the working poor, and others of color getting federal benefits, and new government agencies getting funded to protect the environment, worker safety, and health care for the non-rich.
Most readers here by now know the history of the U.S. far right following the Aug. 23, 1971, Powell memo, from the defunding of U.S. public ed (at all levels) to the removal of humanities from most public schools, from the onerous new conceits of testing to the near-total rule by the rich following Citizens United.
Can Dems organize? Can anyone enlist those from the working classes who will soon see the bite of the White House criminal's corruption for himself and killing of public programs for everyone else? Can we have national teach-ins on a scale introduced recently by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Phil ,13 minutes after Midnight this early Thursday Morning the House voted 217-212 to bing the "1 Big Bad Bill" (1 BBB) to the House Floor for "debate".
Only 1R voted with the Dems, THOMAS MASSIE, in Opposition.
If passed, 1BBB, would go to the Senate sometime in June but, in any case after D-Day.
UPDATE 5/22 5:00 AM Eastern:
**************************
The House of Reps is in Session. There have been a number of last-minute changes to 1 BBB as the result of intense brokering.
Ali Vitali, MSNBC's "Way to Early" Anchor, has identified a number of hot changes but, I will not comment further without reading confirmed legislative text.
BREAKING 5/22 8:03 AM Eastern:
******************************
Ali Vitali just reported the over 1100 page 1BBB has passed the House.
Ali reports there is a 40 page "Manager's" record of the compromises.
UPDATE: 5/22 11 AM Eastern: FINAL House Vote Tally: 215-214.
We're cratered, Bryan.
Since I posted the above, I've seen video of the corrupt orange felon hosting the president of South Africa in the White House. And lecturing that Mr. Ramaphosa on how he -- the president of South Africa -- presides over a systematic genocide of whites in that country.
This mad, lying caricature is beyond disgusting and insulting -- it's just more of how colored immigrants in the U.S. "are eating the dogs and the cats."
And supposed "adults" -- nearly all the MAGA Republicans in Congress -- just eat up this racism. Even black Republicans approve.
That display of ignorance and bigotry was revolting. Mr. Ramaphosa kept his composure -- he had great class, whereas the orange felon has none.
Ya...I've often wondered how Tim Scott sleeps at night. I can't think of another individual who has more betrayed the legacy of civil rights battles than this pompous black man with a white racist soul.
Republicans, MAGA and otherwise are the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is melting.
Buy the audiobook. Doris reads it. You’ll hear JFK and LBJ read speeches that Richard Goodwin wrote. You’ll cry. Johnson’s words that Heather put in today’s column were written by Richard. They remind us of what America could be … again.
" . . . what America could be ... again," Lawrence?
Would take a miracle.
Pasternak believed in miracles. Auden treated them seriously. Joan Didion experienced some. Joseph Brodsky saw them as serendipity -- which stands exactly opposite what both testing and demagogue authoritarians everywhere enforce.
For the standardized testers and the dictators, Lawrence, a mechanical assembly line rules. No individuals have any humanity here, only groups, abstractions, and categories -- all running by stupid linear causality only, a causality necessitated by a vocabulary where no people exist.
No people exist in these corrupt Republicans' cultism to fear, hatred, and need for the cult leader's lawlessness.
He succeeds, they succeed, in proportion to how American schools all fell.
Pasternak, Auden, Didion, Brodsky all championed the individual (messy, idiosyncratic, contradictory) over the machine-gradable, abstracted monolithic. How many times recently has anyone here heard anyone in any media cite Pasternak, Auden, Didion, or Brodsky?
By "the working classes" do you mean the *white* working classes? I see this all the time in posts by white commenters, and I wish they would pay closer attention to (1) their language, and (2) the racial and ethnic makeup of the working classes in the U.S. Some clarification of what they mean by "working classes" would also be helpful. IOW, is it primarily about occupation (e.g., blue collar or pink collar) or income/financial status (e.g., one's income comes entirely from work, not investments) or something else?
You ask, Susanna, if our working classes simply reduce to the white.
I can only report to you my sources:
films like “The Florida Project,” “Knives Out,” and “Winter’s Bone”;
novels like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” Walter Mosley’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” Tom Hanks’ “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” and many by Richard Russo and Stephen King;
memoirs like Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From,” Jeannette Walls’ “The Glass Castle,” and Erin Gruwell’s “The Freedom Writers Diary,”
essay collections such as Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride,” Sarah Smarsh’s “Bone of the Bone, and George Packer’s “The Unwinding”;
biographies such as Lindsey Stonebridge’s “We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience”;
histories like Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel,” Heather Cox Richardson’s “How the South Won the Civil War,” and Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom”;
poems such as Philip Levine’s Detroit factory poems,
songs like Tim Grimm’s “Broken Truth,” Bob Seger’s “Feel Like a Number,” Carsie Blanton’s “Rich People,” and any number of Bruce Springsteen or hip hop Ari Melber will cite.
So are you saying that the “working classes” are by definition white or that the term covers workers of other colors and ethnicities? IOW, you’ve listed plenty of sources but you’ve avoided the question.
I read your question and it piqued my curiosity. From what I was able to search working class is a contested socioeconomic term. It could apply to type of employment, income level or other factors. However, no definition referred to race. I wonder if some aren't reading race into the term?
We all read into words and terms. It surprised me that Susanna seemed to equate "working class" with white workers. As someone who married into a strong union family, the ideals of the IWW shape my opinion: all workers are brothers and sisters.
Kearns’ book is excellent! But for us aging liberals to contemplate where both the hopes and the hubris of those times have led us is beyond sobering.
My touchstone is JFK’s speech at American University in the spring of 1963, right about the time I was graduating from high school. The world had just scared the hell out of itself over the Cuban missive crisis, and there was a sense that sanity might be on offer. That lasted until Dallas.
Johnson’s Great Society promised much, and had it not been for our hubris in Vietnam, who knows what we might have made of it all. But The Best and The Brightest blew it, and my sense is that we’ve been headed toward Trump and his collection of lickspittles ever since.
For those of tender years who may not recognize the Powell Memo (aka the Powell Manifesto), it was written by Lewis Powell, the head of the national Chamber of Commerce. It’s core message is that big business must capture and take control of the government for the benefit of business, especially corporations.
Richard Nixon awarded him with a seat on the Supreme Court.
Below is a link to the document.
“The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/
And here we are still in the same Catch-22…
“Senate conservatives who thought it far too liberal and liberals who thought it too conservative.”
Thank you for sharing your father’s experience.
Foul cult of greed and cruelty, yes, It’s Come to This. Well said.
You must be so proud of your father. My father was a republican for most of his life. During one of our final conversations about politics, he told me that he voted for Barack Obama in 2027 because the party had changed. He was unhappy with their war mongering and defense spending. Although he was not focused on their policies on human rights and race, I was proud of him for his ability to change his vote.
Thank you to your father….
I feel your pain. I was thinking the very same thing about my mother who died in 2011. She would be sickened by what is now happening to our nation.
Nixon also wanted to make universal healthcare for our country? In an interview he said, not accomplishing that was his biggest regret.
Nixon accomplished so many positive things. The EPA is closest to my heart. Now the worst president of all time is dismantling it.
I spent my time as a very young person protesting that war over and over again. LBJ could have ended it by radical means though not practical. Then the street radicals ruined it for the democratic convention in 1968. I despised them for destroying Humphrey’s chances for success. The Abbie Hoffmans and Bobby Seales — all of them. They gave fuel to the far right. It completes the metamorphosis today. What has emerged from the cocoon is a monster in a country I no longer recognize. It is not the nation of my birth.
To World Leaders: Stay the Hell Out of the Oval Office
By now one would think that prime ministers and presidents and dictators and kings and queens would not fall prey to a Trumpian invite to the Oval Office. With cameras rolling and lights blaring, the executive team of metastasized executive misfits recording from their prepared scathing texts, each one outdoing the other in hopes of a pat on the ass by the chief ass-patter, The Donald as another presser unfolds. This time it’s South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa on the hot seat.
So it’s time to set the rules for foreign leaders for their own good: No cameras, no press. A private meeting allowed. Tea or coffee and crumpets served. For each extra loud administrative mouthpiece present, a foreign staffer will compliment the visitor.
There, fixed it. Now when will the bond markets crash and make the Great Depression look like a groundhog hole. We are in it for a while in case you haven’t guessed. If you recall, some outrageous event occurred every week and often every day in the last T (I don’t want to keep saying that distasteful word) administration.
I wish I had something positive to offer. I don’t. Please don’t shoot the messenger.
To start with, the Oval Office no longer exists. This gold-bedecked travesty, with a large model aeroplane on a little gold table, a bevy of yes-men, and the press circus. Today's performance, with its "visual aids", surpassed the Zelinskyy episode - full marks to Ramaphosa for keeping his dignity.
Anne-Louise, I concur.
Ramaphosa calmly delivered a zinger: " I don't have an airplane to give you".
They should rename it the Garish Office
To quote Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars: It's a trap!
The upside of the oval office trumpfests is that they give an accurate view to the world of the utter lack of intelligence, class, and competent leadership at the helm in the US.
I would much rather have had Hubert Humphrey elected. I didn't understand at the time that he was so limited on what he could say and do by Johnson. What I remember most about the time was his ability to make a strong case for one side, then make an equally strong case for what he considered the other side. I so badly wanted just one side to be expressed as the clearer choice, only later coming to think it was because he was so limited by Johnson.
I did volunteer for Vietnam, though, so others wouldn't have to go ( I wished we could have only used volunteers). I wanted to see for myself, what Dickie Chappell had shown in a National Geographic article, at the time, and still opposed to communist takeovers by brute force with very little hope of being able to reclaim honest self governance (with so much of the potential and real opposition eliminated.
After serving there through late 67 to late 68, traveling about 60,000 miles through Vietnam and Thailand, often solo, I came to think that despite the original mistrust we actually ended up more appreciated than any other outsiders. Most troops I saw along the way were mostly looking out for each other and only about 20% really dedicated to doing the best they could for the Vietnamese we were supposed to be fighting for. Even then, the vast majority of our troops still made many friends with Vietnamese civilians. The NCO's I started out with in two or 3 man teams basically showed me by example, how to get some of the combat troops in from the field to get the occasional trouble makers to back off simply by asking the larger group to get their guy under control. They also on 4 occasions with them and later by myself, talked individual drunk or troubled troops into handing over their weapons they were threatening other or themselves with.
There was only one occasion where a very troubled Army soldier approached me (a 3-stripe airman at the time (by myself), to tell me he had been forced to help "wipe them all out in Pinkville." At the time, all I could do was listen to his story, suggest he see a Chaplain, and promise to pass on what he told me, which I did after finishing up an emergency 3 stop trip ending up at the Dak To II Special Forces camp. I spent about 4-1/2 hours with a CID agent when I got back to Saigon. Though the information I had passed on wasn't much to go on, I at least passed on to competent authority, what I'd been told about what turned out to be the My Lai Massacre. I believe it was rare and the worst that occurred while I was there (though there was another possibly as bad that, to me, may have been more suppressed from the news).
If younger, I'd be volunteering for Ukraine, which seems a much clearer case.
I will tell this story especially to Viet vets along with another story. I was out on streets protesting that war from the age of 14 onwards. Several years ago I paid homage to The Wall in DC. I recall as I solemnly walked past names etched on the stone and up ahead of me I saw a few folks on scratching a pencil over paper of the name of a deceased family member. And as I neared I could hear the sniffles and I knew what they were reminiscing. And as I walked away from The Wall that day, I realized that no one walks away from the wall dry-eyed and that included me. And it didn’t matter which side of the war we were on.
I did the same at a combined Catholic/Buddhist service at a mass grave where many of the VC that attacked Tan Son Nhut were buried.
A Vietnamese Recon Marine acquaintance I met years later in college had served several years on small teams operating over the lines, in the special units that wore the Tiger Stripe uniforms that our MAAGV advisors wore way back when before many others started wearing them. He respected the VC I assume more than the NVA, but he still shot a childhood friend who had chosen the VC side, when they faced off far from any other help. He made sure, though, that his friend's body was returned to his neighbor's family by the Vietnamese Boy Scouts (as the mutually respected means to do such things). One of the VC that they captured alive apparently became like the "Kit Carson" scouts if not actually one of them. The were ones who became convinced they had been fighting for the wrong side later in the war, I think, because of the way the best of our troops treated them and their countrymen. I'd always rather win friends than kill "enemies" that didn't have a chance to see what could be better for both sides later in the war.
Thank you so much for that story.
I hope you know the weight of the trust that soldier placed in you; not the topic, but the trust. No higher honor, in my mind.
Thank you.
I knew better than try to trust it to anyone else out in the field. At the time I thought I would have shot Calley under the circumstances he described (ordered to keep on killing people, he implied was an hour or more, after the higher command had ordered them to stop. I learned later that Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who had landed and ordered his crew to shoot anyone who tried to kill anymore women and children, had been the one who got the higher echelon to order the halt. He had flown some victims out, but Calley seems to have been the soldier's platoon commander that ordered (and threatened), them into continuing shooting more of them. Captain Medina's unit stopped as ordered as far as I can tell, while Calley ordered them to resume after Thompson left. Many of them including Calley spent decades seeing mental health professionals, if the ones I knew of in Florida were any indication. I would rather see a thousand of them get the help they need for themselves and to help newer troops avoid the same, than to waste my time trying to get one convicted in a system that often only convicts the lowest level and does far less to get future troops to think for themselves on what is a real legitimate order and what isn't.
From my dad and his other 1st Sgt friends, I had thought instantly of shooting him if I had to to stop him (then looking for his senior NCO that, like my dad and his friends said, were supposed to keep their young inexperienced officers from making such mistakes). After hearing how poorly he was prepared to lead people in combat, though, I did have some sympathy, even for him, but not enough to ever consider letting him continue after he ordered his men to resume the killing after higher echelons ordered them to stop.
Daly's Gestapo in Blue started it.
My father was there as a radio reporter, running through the streets, reporting his observations into a tape recorder. The brutality he witnessed by the Chicago PD upon protesters kept him from ever visiting Chicago after that assignment.
I worked for the DNC at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and I will never forget how forsaken Chicago looked as we drove into town. Daley had refused to settle a transit strike, and the streets were almost empty. The woman I had driven out with from the East Coast was instructed to put her car in a designated garage and not to take it out until she left town. After that we were assigned a driver, a proud thug and a seminary drop-out, to chauffeur us about town. I remember thinking that this is what a dictatorship looks like, and I mostly stayed within the Hilton Hotel where I had a room, even though the halls were often filled with tear gas. India Edwards, a California woman whom Adalai Stevenson had wanted as his vice president, blamed Johnson for giving the convention to Daley's Chicago. As much as I admired Johnson's Great Society and his courage in getting the Civil Rights Act signed into law, I have to agree with Mrs. Edwards that a convention in Chicago was a huge mistake.
And in that same vein … the murder of the two Jewish people in front of the Jewish Museum and who work in the Jewish Embassy… will en flame the right … There are better ways to fight for justice…
Not so fast. He ordered the false Gulf of Tonkin incident (later, W invented the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to 'legalize' his war). Johnson lost his bearings, his moral and political compass, by following the hubris of his insane advisors. His tragic mistake tore this country apart. We have succumbed to the predominance of white, Christian, Republican patriarchy and all the grift, lawlessness, and fascism that comes with it. The FAILURE of the Great Society is what we should be remembering in this fateful moment.
I second Bill's expression of thanks.
There needs to be a reality check about just how much progress America has made on civil rights and racial discrimination. After all, you've ended voting twice for the most racist president since Woodrow Wilson. Trump's display of material his minions had pulled from the internet to substantiate his absurd claims of 'white genocide' in South Africa was compared today by NAACP with Wilson's airing of 'The Birth of a Nation'.
Yeah, weve come long ways. Mostly downward.
I was a teenager during the Johnson administration and remember clearly his repeated and obvious lies about the Vietnam war, the bragging about body counts, the relentless build-up of the number of committed troops, the draft debacle, and all the rest. Blame his advisors if you will, but in the end, as Truman said, the buck stopped with him. He was speaking about improving lives out of one side of his mouth while he was destroying them from the other. Indeed a complicated man but never to be a hero to my way of thinking.
Can't think of a President who didn't have at least a little bit of a 'soft-underbelly'. It must be in the nature of being a politician. 🫤
Well said. Thank you.
Thank you, Susan. 🤝🏻As a little one at that point without grand-parents, L.B.J. became a proxy grand-father and Mrs Johnson my proxy grand-mother. 🙏🏾 The Australians loved President Johnson, at least in the mid-1960s. ❤️ Ah, what might have been 💔 . . . . were it not for gun violence, police violence, and a ghastly war. 😢
Hopefully, the old republic still has some life left in her. 🤞🏼
One can hope when leaders express visionary ideas of how
together we create a better world. This is the America I experienced as a middle child girl born to a middle class family in early 1950’s. We were never perfect but we hand empathy. We had ideals. We valued integrity. What are people hoping for today? I’m afraid for our grandkids. And if I’m not OK, how can they be OK?
For retirement I chose to leave the US, and while there were multiple reasons, the first was that I was exhausted from the stress of waiting for the Republicans to destroy medicare, and steal the money we have paid into it.
I did not want to spend my golden years dying from illness that I could not afford treatment for, or going bankrupt to get the treatment. I knew it was not like this in other wealthy countries, and that they have an overall lower cost of living, but health care is one of the things that makes them lower cost. The US would have you believe that health care is inferior elsewhere, but it is not. Each place has its strengths and weaknesses. I wrote this to compare the US and Germany where I am living now.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/copy-us-health-care-is-like-rotten?r=f0qfn
So, my lifelong work and thus payment into the system of medical insurance in the US is going to line the pockets of people I despise.
Thee is a chance I too will leave. I have my horizons set.
Left in '71 after experiencing, in no part. order:
- JFK, Evers, X, MLK, RFK
- DC riots post-MLK
- Viet Nam War (I'm a Vet)
Unlike Serpico, I never returned.
Where did you go?
Love your moniker, there, Okie.
Bill, here is a piece I wrote on deciding to leave the US.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/a-plan-b-for-catastrophe?r=f0qfn
Great essay, Linda!
…together we create a better world. This is the America I experienced as a middle child girl born to a middle class family in early 1950’s. We were never perfect but we hand empathy. We had ideals. We valued integrity. What are people hoping for today? I’m afraid for our children. And if I’m not OK, how can they be OK?
I visited my favorite cousin earlier this week. A manly guy, never macho. He is quiet but quite perceptive. His better half of forty-five years is very bright. Both plain-spoken, never affectatious. Each is terrified, not for the world of their well settled adult children, but for their grand-children.
Yes,it’s my grandchildren that I worry about. Will they remember/understand what America was like before Trump?
The world changes. My mother was born in Germany the year after Hitler came to power. She later came to the US and studied and stayed. Now her granddaughter is studying in Germany, and may end up staying here, or go to another country, or back to the US. My daughter does not think of Germany the way that my mother does, because she is not living here in Nazi times. I assume that the US will be viewed differently by the world for a long time to come. Let us continue to hope that it can be changed for the better at some point.
They may never know what hit them.
My adult daughters don’t plan on having children. While it makes me sad, I completely understand.
Welcome to The New Snazzy Nazi States of America
(Introducing The Goose-Step, Two-Step March)
A new dance craze is sweeping the nation called, The Goose-Step, Two-step March. This invigorating new exercise is easy to learn! First, link arms on the dance floor. As you move backward in line, turn your head to the right and lift your left leg straight up as high as it will go. Then step forward as you turn your head to the left and lift your right leg straight up in the air.
It's very similar to square dancing or line dancing. Soon the dance floor will be filled with goose-steppers. Forward, backward, round and round. If you step out of line, you are tagged, the caller detains you, interrogates you, strip searches you, and sends you off to detainment camps for disloyalty.
This new dance craze is not to be confused with serious charges of criminal activity. By the time the youngins reach the age of reason, they will be quick to form into lines upon request for impromptu Goose-Step, Two-Step Marches and other forms of family entertainment.
(Donald's Vanity Tantrums")
Entertaining.
Constance, that is why I wrote this piece after the November election.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/a-plan-b-for-catastrophe?r=f0qfn
And, for students, I wrote this, because I know that it is easiest for students and retired people to leave.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/study-abroad?r=f0qfn
I look back on that tarnishing now as Republican & their Media allies Dem-bashing.
Just like Covid was all Biden’s fault.
Just like inflation following post-Covid global shut/slowdowns was all Biden’s fault
Just like Trump’s Economy is all Biden’s fault
Legacies of Democrats who help the masses are largely covered over by loud, heavy criticisms of Republicans and their racist, sexist supporters who would rather suffer than share good fortune with women and people of color.
Unfortunately he did embrace it, albeit with more misplaced hubris, macho, and deeply flawed advice than with any understanding. Remember that it was LBJ who demanded the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which put the war powers in his hands. And it was Johnson’s administration that chose to finance the war under the table and lie about its progress with ever increasing intensity.until Tet and the release of the Pentagon Papers exposed the whole tottering structure for what it was.
It cost the lives of over 50,000 of my brothers-in-arms, untold innocent Vietnamese, and a loss of trust in government from which we have never recovered.
Complicated? He illegally had Nixon's 'phones wiretapped and in doing so discovered his treasonous plan to sabotage peace talks with North Vietnam yet dared not exposed this plan because he would then have to explain how he came by this damning information. The release of the Pentagon papers shows that he had lied to the American people for years about the conduct of the war in Vietnam including his merciless bombing of civilians.
Agree but keep it in context. LBJ was a victim of WWII and anti communist mentality. He was of that generation. So many were of the opinions that the communists had to be stopped. It’s always a new reason. Today it’s the Arabs. At this point my sympathies are with Arabs not Israel as a facist state.
The Domino Theory? Both he and Kennedy failed to understand the national identity of the communists concerned. To characterise countries in south-east Asia and later in Latin America as 'dominos' was incredibly insulting and America has paid a terrible price for its astonishing hubris. To this day, your country is still not reconciled to a settled view about what the Vietnam experience means. It probably explains Carter's reluctance to intevene in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide.
The same addled thinking affects Middle East policy where Islamist fanaticism is seen everywhere. The US can't see that any country in the Middle East that allowed free and fair elections would inevitably elect a muslim government. So it continues to support grossly autocratic states as what it sees as the lesser of two evils.
No doubt, Susan. Johnson was a complicated man, and the Vietnam War was not his only complication. I remember vividly the act that he and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, committed by recalling the F-4 Phantoms in mid-flight from the deck of the USS Saratoga that were to intercept the Israeli war planes and PT boats that attacked the USS Liberty. Make no mistake, Johnson did a lot of great things for this nation, and we are indebted to him for his courage to turn his back on Richard Russell's Southern Strategy and move this nation forward. However, leaving the crew of the USS Liberty to its fate under Israeli attacks is irredeemable in my viewpoint. With over 70 crew members dying, and over a 130 injured, it is too much to simply get over. And the help his government gave to cover up this atrocity was more than anyone should bare to see or feel. Both Johnson and McNamara should have been impeached for leaving The Liberty to twist in the wind. The hell of it is that US governments overall and by a majority that have sat in the WH, still assists and turns a blind eye to the atrocities the Israelis commit on any given day. On this score, both parties in two of the three branches are guilty as hell. I won't comment on the Judicial branch as they theoretically don't have much of a say (aside from the blatant illegalities of deportations) in foreign policy.
LBJ created and employed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. There are no innocent bystanders in our democratic Republic.
Or very few. I have wondered for a long time whether FDR purposely quarantined Japan to force them to attack us so we could more easily declare war. Was it ths planned. There was considerable resistance to entering another war. And the too, thee was a Nazi American movement he needed to overcome.
There’s been much speculation about what FDR may or may not have done to get American involved in the war. He certainly understood that sooner or later we would have to become involved. But we ought to remember that his primary focus at the time was on Germany and how to help Britain. Having ignored war preparations for decades we barely had enough on hand to do that, let alone start something in the Pacific. And in any case he already had incidents in the North Atlantic (the sinking of the Rueben James among others) that he could have used.
American intelligence was warning of Japanese action in the Pacific, but the bulk of that was focused on other possible areas. Also, of course, American naval doctrine held that Pearl Harbor was too shallow for airborne torpedo attack.
All in all, I think there is sufficient reason to doubt that FDR deliberately enticed the Japanese attack. And had he done so, I suspect the warnings going out to Pearl and the Philippines would have been a good deal more pointed than the speculative kind of warnings that did go out.
Susan, so well put in so few words. LBJ’s legacy includes giving me and so many of my generation ( I am 76) opportunities to find success and to invest in the opportunities for others. Sadly some have used their “ success “ to close and lock the door behind them having convinced themselves that those who have not succeeded just did not work or pray hard enough.
And in just over 100 days, we are seeing Lyndon Johnson's once, "Great Society" become what? A society; of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich...at the expense of most every other American. As we slide towards economic bankruptcy; the social, moral and ethical fabric that once held our society together is torn. And the Republicans cheer as America weeps.
With all his faults, and they were numerous, he still stands as one of the greats with Lincoln, the Roosevelts, et al
They are destroying his legacy.
As Biden's unwillingness to back out gracefully from a second term tarnished his.
rather different in kind and scale of tarnish, don't you think?
Yes Susan, and that we, as a nation seem to have succumbed to tabloid"ism". Not sure what to blame that on. Human nature is the first thing which comes into my mind. Nothing new there, it's been with us since the beginning, whenever that was.., so many eons ago. Lyndon and 'lady-bird' Johnson, an under-rated presidency and couple - Americans.
In 1964 The Great Society begins.
In 2025 The Raped Society begins.
In May 22, 2025 The One Big Beautiful Republican Orgasm consummates the rape.
Heather, if I remember correctly, you have mentioned that this current GOP is legislating and Trump is ruling (I won’t say leading) as if they will never again lose an election. We have to prove them wrong.
If we lose rule of law and the ultimate authority of the aggregate public, the USA will no longer exist in any meaningful sense.
Hello J L ... "Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,”.... Seems that the Regime is trying to defang the Courts as Well... DJT can only Rule as a Despot....
Specifically it says:
"(Sec. 70302) This section limits the ability of U.S. courts to enforce a citation for contempt for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order. Specifically, if no security was given when the injection or order was issued, the citation of contempt may not be enforced using appropriated funds. This limitation applies to injunctions or orders issued before, on, or after the date of enactment."
Take careful note of that last line *issued before, on, or after the date of enactment*
In other words any previously issued contempt citations/orders would be NULL
He is demented, hence hates checks, balances.
Expect a fast GOP descent into madness (DIM).
as some cartoonist had it the other day, "They're eating the checks! They're eating the balances!" (though with much more truth than Trump's deranged rant about the cats and the dogs in Ohio...)
Anyone know how much of this they can put in the bill and still have it qualify as a financial bill that qualifies for "reconciliation" that escapes filibuster in the Senate?
Sorry, but I think we’re already there.
Don't be sorry Reader. We are already there.
Yup . This we know.
Never give in.
Heather's post made me cry. We have lost so much, and the destruction continues every day. There seems to be no end to their evil and venality.
It’s already lost. Smell the coffee.
Some of us think the US already is gone. It is not defined geography but is a compact - an agreement among the states to be bound by a constitution. The existing contempt orders and the many other unconstitutional actions and the disrespect for the constitution are undeniable. Secession isn’t needed.
These crooks need to be named, shamed, and plastered on billboards. If the shoe were on the other foot, the Repugnant Party would be having kittens—screeching on every network, clutching pearls, and staging performative tantrums on the Capitol steps. It's time the Dems took a leaf out of the MAGA meltdown manual and unleashed a Category 5 public hissy fit. Yell it loud enough so even the most apolitical dude in a backwater town gets it: TRUMP IS ROBBING THE POOR TO FEED THE RICH.
Unfortunately Kass, the democrats are too much by the book and what's proper. That's an invitation to collective suicide.
I say the dems are impotent, without ideas, and complicit in destroying democracy...
on the other hand, it was not the Democrats who put themselves into a minority in both houses of Congress - and thus made them largely impotent.
Some of them have been very effective critics of the Administration - but one needs a free and active and untimidated and unservile press to tell people about it.
I agree. I’m expecting the Democrats to do the job of the mainstream press - once an independent, principled entity.
Terry, my mother used to say ‘if you make a doormat of yourself, people walk on you.’ And, ‘kindness can be mistaken for weakness’. Both remind me of the Dems passivity right now. I’d add, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ Time to stand up and fight.
Democrats are complicit not because of being without ideas but because they are impotent . When they were able to do something legal and through congress to prevent the maga party and it's extreme right wing Project 2025 to replace our Constitution, they didn't. That's why we are impotent and watching from outside how our Country is being destroyed from the inside out.
We should have followed the examples of Germany and Romania that are defending themselves legally and actively. They are no committing collective suicide 😢
I know Ricardo, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch.
And if they don't play by the book, you can be damned sure they will be held to the fire . See above comments re: LBJ.
Why aren’t we using more billboards with our messages? People are still driving…
Indivisible is putting up billboards in red states as we speak. They could use $$ so they can do more. Indivisible.org
Francine, I still remember very simply and to the point designed political messages on billboards from many years back . It's a great idea and not too expensive. Thanks👍
Richard and Francine: a pained chuckle thinking of Lady Bird Johnson’s fight to get endless unsightly billboards off the highways as part of Great Society beautification. Is there any value left for natural beauty in our new “Guilded Age”? Does anyone wonder, as I do, whether the White House can ever be restored from the tastelessness of the current occupant? And the National Arts and Sciences? The Smithsonian?
Reading Heather's post today, I was thinking how different are Lady Bird's and T---p's definitions of "beautiful".
More like Wilted Age than Gilded Age.
Cost money.. got to fund local political pac’s
I’ve said the same thing. Where is the outrage?? Tantrums on the Capitol steps every damn day—get on it! Enough with decorum! When they go low, we go lower. Let’s go!
You can't go lower than the lowest, And they have most of big money on their side. We have to defend rule of law, but no, there is no point in hoping for conscience on the part of the current "GOP". We have to speak and react to what is real, and be smart about it, and do so as a united front. Solidarity is the most reliable cure for despots, no matter what other form resistance may take.
Vivid writing, Kazz -- your style is like a tuning fork ringing the sounds of today's harsh truths.
LOUDER!
Who’s going to plaster their names on billboards? Certainly not the Democratic National Committee, they’re far too busy having lunch.
I fear that 2026 will be too little, too late.
https://youtu.be/0CrPgKwHIGI
EDIT: conservative judge from my conservative school. It took Hitler less than six months to lock in a dictatorship after being elected.
Our situation differs in some important respects, but yes, we can't wait. The battle rages.
Ruling as if we will never again HAVE an election. That's The Plan.
It's been in between lines all along in the Project 2025 MaryPat.
Meaning they'll never have to win another election, because they aren't planning on any more fair elections.
Get to work, y’all. Let’s get behind Jasmine and go. If someone else comes along with her humor and common sense, we can persuade her to wait. But meanwhile…
They are acting as if they will not have to face electors in such numbers that they will lose.
I believe it is more the case of grabbing what one can get while the getting is good in the hopes of the coerced measures remaining permanent.
https://youtu.be/0CrPgKwHIGI
Trump has said, “we will no longer need to vote.” He expects to continue to call himself “king,”
Trump’s reiterated the ‘no more elections’ announcement many times in this most recent campaign for office. 😨
It may be time for a national strike to shut down the United States and hold the people responsible for this horrific bill & administration accountable.
Past time Ernest. But the misery has to spread further it seems.
It is truly an awful bill and then Donold and the wretched Magats rub it in our faces by calling it a 'big beautiful...I can't finish writing it, it makes me cringe and queasy, it's so enraging that they have to push it through under cover of darkness and secrecy.
Let it be known as Don the Con's 'Bigliest bombastic bilge by bumbling brigands'
So true horhai. I just finish writing to Susan Collins, Jared Golden and Don Bacon. I will email our wonderful Senator Angus King who totally supports ALL of his constituents, not just the rich ones.
As you say, Angus King is a wonderful Senator. We in Maine are fortunate to have him representing us. After I emailed him several weeks ago to thank him for his terrific speech on the floor of the US Senate, I received a long email back from him, telling me that we live in dangerous times & giving many examples of how this was true. It was the longest letter I have ever received from a public official.
I wrote to both King and Collins this morning: to Susan Collins in hope against hope that she'll do the right thing and to Angus through abundance of caution. Every time I write to them (1-2+ times/week), I get a well-reasoned response from Sen. King's office. I just got my FIRST response from Sen. Collins - a mealy-mouthed excuse for why she won't hold a Town Hall, opting instead for photo ops with cherry-picked constituents. We must replace Susan Collins next November.
I'm amazed that Collins approval rating has dropped from 80% to somewhere in the 30% range since 2012. Her rating was 2nd to Bernie in the entire Senate at the time.
I've requested that she leave the Republican Party several times to serve her constituents better, but she has never replied. About 1 out of 10 emails to her have received a response whereas all of the emails to King have.
I've lived in 10 states in my 70 years and Angus King is the best Senator I've ever had and I've actually had some very good ones besides King.
Past time.
How would that be organized?
It’s been organized. Sign on and share! https://generalstrikeus.com/
Way past time - we should have done it a month ago...
I have to agree with Susan that LBJ was one tough cookie. He inherited the Vietnam War and was lied to by Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, and General Westmoreland, who inflated the numbers of the Vietnam Congress killed by America troops. But at the same time, he did accomplish passing the Civil Rights Act, which was monumental. His wife, Lady Bird, encouraged him to convince states to beautify their surroundings, cities and highways, with flowers because they brought “hope”. We sure could use a lot of flower power right now.
Many years ago, when I was in junior high, I had the privilege of meeting Lady Bird, who thanked our marching band for playing during a dedication ceremony of a park in Washington DC she helped support. She was approachable and kind.
I always liked her and felt she was the smarter of the two. She had a vision for students to learn and appreciate the nature that surrounded them.
My two children are third cousins to Lady Bird through their grandmother, Barbara. It's easy to see the relationship between Barbara and Lady Bird when looking at their pictures. They're ringers for one another.
Behind every great President is a great woman that keeps them on the right path.
Too bad Melania is such a loser.
I have to agree with Susan that LBJ was one tough cookie. He inherited the Vietnam War and was lied to by Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, and General Westmoreland, who inflated the numbers of the Vietnam Cong killed by America troops. But at the same time, he did accomplish passing the Civil Rights Act, which was monumental. His wife, Lady Bird, encouraged him to convince states to beautify their surroundings, cities and highways, with flowers because they brought “hope”. We sure could use a lot of flower power right now.
LBJ could have written those words today, which I assume is why they’re echoing in your head, Heather. The underlying themes of our country keep repeating. Trump’s full-throated embrace of white supremacy, as evidenced by his treatment of the president of South Africa today, echoes our past. Concentrating wealth and leaving workers unprotected and unsafe is another eternal theme. Our work will never end. WE are continuously working on bending that arc toward justice. It doesn’t bend on its own.
Linda, I saw the video of the meeting and it was clear that Trump/minions planned a “gotcha” moment for SA president Ramaphosa, but Ramaphosa didn’t take the bait and respectfully, but firmly, pushed back. Good for him in countering the blather and conspiracy theories that are being pumped to Trump.
Hello Barbara... Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth were there as well... Marco Rubio is over-rated... Seems that his former Colleagues are regretting their Confirmation Votes in the Senate...
Yeah, this POTUS is definitely NOT surrounding himself/choosing the best & brightest!!! [assume he doesn’t want to be upstaged!]
Hello Barbara... They are Pathetic Sycophants... Marco Rubio has Delusions Of Grandeur... He Hopes To Be President Next... Did You See Kristi Noem's Testimony?....
Yes, Apache, I saw it….both sad and very very disturbing….THESE are the folks heading crucial agencies??!!….I am beyond appalled. I miss the Biden/Harris admin when I wasn’t afraid to turn on the news each day!
Hello Barbara... Prime Examples of "Everything That Trump Touches Dies!!!"... DJT Can Only Thrive In A Corrupt Universe...
He chooses incompetents, every single time…
He chooses camera-ready sycophants. The depths of their stupidity are bottomless.
So true, it is deliberate and done for revenge and owning the libs.
LBJ was basically talking about beating back evil with the Great Society programs. Evil NEVER, NEVER goes away; it just lays low for a while. The proposed cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and other programs, often in violation of previous laws, are EVIL. Not caring for the poor, hungry, sick, disabled, widows, orphans is sinful. This country has the resources to care for all our population. The morbidly rich will have a little less money, but other people will have food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and jobs. Such despicable actions will come back to haunt the rich and their bought off politicians. Revolution may come, and revolution often eats the rich.
I don't travel in those circles so have no idea but aren't there any billionaires with a conscience? Do they all support the "rob from the poor to make me richer" regime? Is there no one who will stop this train wreck?
Bill Gates has done a lot of very good work around the world, fighting disease. Mark Cuban was an active and vocal supporter of Harris. Warren Buffett is still a mine of common sense kindness. There are some ... but more should be speaking up.
Pretty much the only three, except the aforementioned former wives; MacKenzie Scott has been doing good things, as has Melinda French Gates.
The discarded first wives seem to have the conscience among these partnerships.
At the bottom of it all, it is racism- don’t let those people of color do better than me…
I don'tknow if it possible to become a billionaire for anyone with a social conscience...
Kathy, I believe there are many billionaires who have a conscience, but because of that trait, they don't draw attention to themselves and we aren't aware of them.
Bill Gates is getting undeserved credit for being a "good guy" because he has sanitized his reputation by spending a lot of money on good causes. But his running of Microsoft was anything but ethical. He does not deserve to be on your list.
One ethical billionaire who is frequently overlooked is Black actor, filmmaker, and playwright, Tyler Perry. He spends on charity, but not on political influence, so he may not help to stop the train wreck, but he's a decent billionaire.
Dolly Parton is worth "only" $650 million, but she's an ethical millionaire. She carefully avoids politics, so she won't help with the train wreck either.
Unfortunately, wealthy people who are politically active engage in politics out of self-interest. They may help to stop the MAGA train wreck, but they expect to get something for their investment.
Open Secrets provides good information. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors
Bill Gates, Marc Cuban, and Warren Buffett come to mind.
Trump was disrespectful of the president of the African country he represented. Trump often is rude to his guests. why does he meet with them, only to treat them without respect?
Thank you Professor Richardson.
Any meaningful democracy requires an educated, informed, and engaged society. Furthermore, the extreme concentration of wealth is incompatible with any attempt at democracy as it places significant power and wealth in the hands of the few.
The GOP knows this. It is why they have continued on a path of tax giveaways for the wealthy, the dismantling of public education, and encouraging the consolidation of media making it easier to "Manufacture Consent".
While the "corruption in your face" of Trump is disgusting, he is simply the barker in front of the circus and has, by last count, 1/3 of the voting population gleeful about his actions without regard to legality or constitutionality. The "Big Beautiful Bill" as you write is the culmination of years of wealth concentration to the wealthiest in the United States who then, like Elon Musk, pump a percentage of their ill-gotten gains back into subverting the system for their self-enrichment.
Our justice system was designed to protect property, not people. It was ill-prepared and not established to remove elected officials who participated in the insurrection of J6 (despite the 14th Amendment). Knowing this, the criminal-elect and his cabal of idiots masquerading as a Cabinet and "advisers" like Stephen Miller have turned the system around to attack itself.
Hello George... So this 'Big Beautiful Bill' was passed during the Darkest Hours... Among other things, it takes Food From Hungry Children, and Medicine From The Sick... Meanwhile apparently DJT's Weekend Golf Trips have cost over $100,000,000 so far, and to refit the "Free" Qatari 747 for temporary Presidential use will exceed $1,000,000,000, and will be DJT's Personal Plane when DJT leaves Office .... This Spending Bill Shows DJT's Heart...
...and still the MAGAts are waving their little flags. Are you becoming poorer? Blame it on Biden. Have no food? Blame it on Biden. Your environment is being killed by Musk's data mining centers? Blame it on Biden. A hurricane flattens your home? Blame it on Biden. FEMA doesn't show up? Blame it on Biden. Drought dries up your river? Blame it on Biden. You can't get your wife pregant? Blame it on Biden.
Ah, life is so simple when you're a MAGA cultist...
Thanks Dutch Mike... Didn't DJT say that DJT Loves Uneducated Voters... They are merely 'Useful Fools To Him'... DJT is the Center Of His Own Universe, next, The Mar-a-Lago Crowd...
Yes, he said that. And Whereas Lyndon B. Johnson advocated the "we"-principle, I think you can sum the principle of Rump's reign up very simply: "ME."
One word that repubs think includes them, surprise.
Hello Dutch Mike... I would think that for DJT.... It is ME.ME.ME... LBJ grew up on a Poor on a Dirt Farm in Texas.... DJT was a Spoiled Rich Kid... I Hate Spoiled Rich Kids...
You mean spoiled narcissistic rich kids like Elon Musk?
As W said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on. And they did, Tea party led to this.
Thanks and yes. If he had one, it would show the depth of his corrupt criminality. I really wish the International Court of Justice at The Hague would invite him to pick up his big beautiful gift waiting for him in a "Palace in a Courtroom" there.
DJT is too much a Coward to face a Tribunal Like that.. Ever notice how DJT Corrupts His Lawyers?....
True, although I suspect so-called "lawyers" like Bondi and others were pre-corrupted. They simply found each other like corruption maggots. I mean magnets.
Thanks George... Seems that DJT's Bottomless Corruption just Furthered them on that Path... Michael Cohen is a Good Example... Michael Cohen eventually found the Strength to Save Himself....
Our government is becoming more and more corrupt daily, and our leaders no longer care about our citizens. Once we were greater than we are today. Autocracy awaits on our doorstep.
Hello Carolyn...This Fall of the American Empire It will Rival Gibbon's "The History Of The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire".... The Founders had that Story in Mind when they created the Constitution... Ben Franklin told People that We-The-People had a Republic as long as We could keep it... Ben Franklin was skeptical as Franklin knew that Corruption, i.e. Shortcuts, Laziness, Cheating, was in Human Nature... Empires Tend To Collapse From Within First... Indeed Chinese, Egyptian Dynasties, if Successful, last only about 250years... The American Experiment is now about 250years old.... Ancient Rome, and Athens, became Corrupted from their Founding Principals, and became ruled by Demagogues, and their Mobs..... DJT is a Demagogue, and the MAGAs are his Mob... It Is Time For A 'Hard Reboot' For American Democracy... The Constitutional Safeguards That We Have Assumed
Would Keep Us Safe, Are Failing Thanks To The Roberts Court....
He has no heart. Just a bottomless pit of entitlement and revenge.
They behave as if they know there will be no elections in 2026, no accountability for them whatever. I wonder how much they know we don't....
Yes, it is deeply disturbing. The probability that it will simply be a "Putin-style" election where the results are published a week before voting takes place seems higher each passing day. I'm surprised Musk hasn't announced "VoteX" a new blackbox voting system to be single-sourced and used in all future US "elections".
He will reveal it in the coming months, I'm sure of it.
It's not "as if". There will be no more elections in the US. Trump promised it himself: "You only have to vote one more time. Then we'll fix it. You'll never have to vote again." The only elections that will be held are Putin-style "elections".
When he said that, most just shrugged. My blood ran cold.
That was (and remains) the correct response.
Look at The Election Truth Alliance data analyses on YouTube. Study them. Even with all the voter suppression and media sanewashing of Trump, and with racism’s and gender bias, some important info was overlooked.
I will keep annoyingly repeating that Elon Musk's Texas registration of two new corporations, The United States of America, Inc. and Group America, LLC, should be scaring the bejeezus out of all Americans. He didn't create these corporations just for funsies. I don't know how, but his creation of the city of Starbase, TX, is part of a larger plan. The new capital city of the United States? With Donald as king and Elon as prime minister? Next, he will convince the buffoons in Austin to subtract 4 letters and rename the state "X."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/elon-musk-incorporated-two-new-texas-companies-in-october/ar-AA1swi5w
And the SC making, encouraging, ordaining that money equals speech and therefore unlimited “donations,” aka bribes, is just fine. This will prove to be the absolute undoing of this country.
Very true -although now it is out in the open. When SCOTUS allowed unlimited secret donations to flow into "Super PACs" they unleashed a major mechanism for bribery, er, I mean campaign "contributions".
I’m disgusted that the GOP has completely disregarded their constituency. They are an abhorrent group. I’m beyond pissed off
Our government has duties to ALL of the people. It is not a license for part of the country to bully the rest.
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." - Lincoln
The GOP have not only completely disregarded their constituency, but also their conscience. That is the biggest problem. They are stealing from the poor, ignoring the law as they see fit, "playing war" on Signal but with real lives at stake, kicking children out of the country and putting people in jail just because they like to - and they have absolutely NO moral problems whatsoever with doing so.
Been amoral for most of my long life, or maybe evil all along.
Stop calling them GOP Amy, it's the maga party now.
Trumpublicans
So disgusting, and depressing. No, this is not the country I grew up in. We had hope. We joined together to fight injustice. What's happening now is unrecognizable to me. No, that's not true. I recognize it in the fascist histories of Spain, Italy, Romania, Argentina, Russia, China, dozens and dozens and dozens of other fascist dictatorships throughout history. But never before in the United States.
The Trump/MAGA Big Sadistic Bill is the same financial agenda we've seen since Reagan and Voodoo economics.
The Rich are the rightful stewards of government and the Rest are the working poor, needy parasites and freeloaders looking for handouts. Same socially bankrupt Pig. Slightly different lipstick.
None of these will save him or MAGA from their self imposed doom:
- High tariffs on consumers in America
- Hugh tax cuts for the Rich in America
- Destroying a liberal arts education in America
- Destroying medical research in America
- Destroying healthcare in America
- Destroying science research in America
- Expelling immigrants from America
- Breaking Constitutional laws in America
- Destroying relations with allies of America
- Controlling the media in America
- Embracing Russia for America
- Embracing the middle east Gulf states
- Amassing $100 billion personally
But these will build our Resistance. The end is coming for the Greedy fascists
Beyond my lifetime for sure, they have pulled out all stops…
It's as if the USAs enemies dreamed up and implanted a government that would cause maximum harm to all of the things that actually made it great in the first place.
they did, and published it as Project 2025. Enemies can be internal ... and often they are the worst.
250 years ago, a government was founded by white landed gentry and approved by Puritans. What could go wrong?
Right now, at 2:35am, Republicans use the wee, witching hours to churn out their 'big beautiful' conspiracy of idiocy and evil. They do it at the same hour for the same reasons Dr. Frankenstein pilfered corpses from the cemetery. Lies, imaginary battles against made-up monsters like 'waste, fraud and abuse' do best without the light of day, in the absence of transparency, devoid of integrity and honor.
We once pursued the Great Society based on a concept of shared destiny. Now we give power to those whose only goal is to deny that destiny, dismantle the good in us in order to build the Scumbag Society where the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want and the rest of us endure what we must.
Why and how we traded generosity of spirt and nobility for pure greed and ignominy is a dark mystery I fear at age 70 I will never be able to fully understand.
#shorts - Jake Auchincloss on watchdog committee over healthcare
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ2pNwCAuyE/?igsh=OGFidHkyamRhdDU5
What a tragic prospect we face. I sometimes grieve that the American people do not deserve the lofty goals set in earlier eras, that our careless, lethargic apathy has damned the U.S. to a future more like a medieval hellhole than some shining city on a hill described, ironically by one of their once revered heroes. I have a hard time grasping that I was born into a world battling to eradicate a monstrous, evil scourge only to spend my closing years on the precipice of descending into just such a fetid cesspool we once skirted.
Yes, I have lived from one to the other, and watched repubs follow a script laid out in 1985, but started much earlier. Now it’s my grands and yours left with his nightmare.
From the Alt National Park Service: “Inside Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is Judicial Silencing (Sec. 80121(h)). This might be the most authoritarian section in the entire 1,100+ page bill.
What it says:
“No court shall have jurisdiction to review any action taken by the Secretary, the EPA Administrator, a State or municipal agency, or any other Federal agency […] to issue a lease, permit, biological opinion, or other approval.” 🧵
What it means:
- If the government approves drilling, mining, or development, even illegally, you can’t sue.
- It applies retroactively, killing lawsuits already in progress.
- Tribes, environmental groups, citizens, even states, lose the right to challenge these approvals in court.”
Anybody sues, it matters not.
I am very happy to be reminded of President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society". His contributions to American society have been too seldom mentioned.
In other news, it appears that the House is preparing to take $500 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund -- our FICA "payroll tax" contributions during our working years -- to pay for the tax cuts that the B'zillionaires don't need.
"You know what? That makes me mad": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL29n3_knM4
FICA "payroll tax" the Billionaires don't even pay . . . presently only earnings up to $176,100 are taxed for Social Security . . . sooooo the filthy rich don't even pay what I'd consider a "fair share"
It’s been since Reagan
The irony of a "trust fund" in the hands of thieves.. You can't make this stuff up.
I was led to believe that because the Social Security/Medicare Trust Fund is non-discretionary, it is therefore inviolable, set aside, not to be used for any purpose other than that for which it was established. The neoliberals have been salivating over the trust funds for many years. $500 billion would not deplete the trust fund, but if that "borrowing" is not replenished it would hasten the time when the fund won't be adequate to pay full benefits to all recipients.
Thus fulfilling a dream they've had since the 1980s...
This eloquent and timely writing AI will never do.
Such ability for expression evolves through a lifetime of study and reflection. Pulling together the threads of historical reflection requires a sense of humanity and vision for the evolution of mind and heart.
I cried reading this column, so clearly does it paint the picture of what we are losing. I’m fighting, but………..