About Last Night

A few hi-lites

Elizabeth Guzman and Hala Ayala both defeated Republican incumbents tonight to become the first-ever Latinas elected to the Virginia House of Delegates! #ElectionDay #VirginiaElection pic.twitter.com/6XApF5WTrO

— Women's March (@womensmarch) November 8, 2017

Kathy Tran came to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam when she was an infant. Tonight, she became the first Asian American woman elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. Congrats @kathykltran! pic.twitter.com/NSynRwHJ7d

— Women's March (@womensmarch) November 8, 2017

 

This is Robert Marshall's sister.

Marshall is who Danica Roem, the first openly trans person elected to office in VA, beat for the Virginia House seat.

His sister pulls zero punches.
This is beautiful.#WednesdayWisdom pic.twitter.com/SIvD9ToAYC

— Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) November 8, 2017

 

BREAKING: @voteforfowler has won the election in HD21 for the Virginia House, flipping the seat from red to blue - the 16th Democratic state legislative flip in 2017. Congratulations, Kelly! pic.twitter.com/oPL9plt6kd

— DLCC (@TheDLCC) November 8, 2017

 

BREAKING: @ct_4_vab has won the election in HD85 for the Virginia House, flipping the seat from red to blue (the 29th for Democrats in state legislatures in 2017!) in a district that Trump won in 2016.

Congratulations, Cheryl! pic.twitter.com/DaaE8uVHtF

— DLCC (@TheDLCC) November 8, 2017

 

BREAKING: @carterforva has won the election in HD 50 for the Virginia House, flipping the seat from red to blue - the 12th red-to-blue flip of 2017. Congratulations, Lee! pic.twitter.com/amQOL6QCPu

— DLCC (@TheDLCC) November 8, 2017

 

THIS IS HUGE, let justice roll down like a river: Remember reporter Alison Parker who was tragically shot & killed live on air during a morning broadcast. Her boyfriend became an activist for gun violence reform, his victory flipped the Virginia House of Reps! I’m crying. 👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/Imlk3HJdtY

— Eduardo Samaniego (@EduSamani) November 8, 2017

 

About That Tax Thing

Robert Reich, the experiment, and why good ol' Keynesian economics is what we need to get back to.

An Audience Of One

45*'s inner circle will never stop pimping the lies, and ensures 45* will never stop believing he has the support of the majority.

And of course, that's the biggest problem with all the constant propagandizing - the danger that you start believing your own bullshit.  I'm pretty sure we passed that point quite a while back with this guy.

So, he will never see this - not in this form anyway:

The Guardian's story:

Officials reportedly said her speech was the most registered event of the three-day assembly, but that tight security had meant not everyone had been able to enter the hall before the doors were closed for the duration of the speeches by Abe and Trump.

However, the Guardian arrived at the hall 10 minutes before the event began and witnessed no long lines of people waiting to get in. Another attendee who entered as the doors were closing said just a handful of people were milling around outside.

Post Truth Personified

...but I'm not going to pretend the kind of bullshit coming from the White House is new in any way.  Maybe the sheer mass of the bullshit is something we haven't seen before, but we can't afford to start thinking this is normal.

NYT, Frank Bruni:

It hit me this week, around the time when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blithely seconding Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Civil War revisionism, that I missed Sean Spicer.

I missed the panic in his eyes, which signaled a scintilla of awareness that he was peddling hooey. I missed the squeak in his voice, which suggested perhaps the tiniest smidgen of shame.

He never seemed to me entirely at home in his domicile of deception; she dwells without evident compunction in a gaudier fairyland of grander fictions. There’s no panic. No squeak. Just that repulsed expression, as if a foul odor had wafted in and she knew — just knew — that the culprit was CNN.

True, she hasn’t told a lie as tidy as Spicer’s ludicrousness about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds. But her briefings are breathtaking — certainly this week’s were. For some 20 minutes every afternoon, down is up, paralysis is progress, enmity is harmony, stupid is smart, villain is victim, disgrace is honor, plutocracy is populism and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia if anyone would summon the nerve to investigate her (because, you know, that never, ever happens). I watch and listen with sheer awe.

With despair, too, because Sanders doesn’t draw nearly the censure or ridicule that Spicer did, and the reason isn’t her. It’s us. More precisely, it’s what Trump and his presidency have done to us. Little more than nine months in, we’ve surrendered any expectation of honesty. We’re inured.

Today's Pix

 click on a pic to start the show

Bruce Bartlett

Farmers' Advance, Bruce Bartlett:

I know something about this subject. Forty years ago, while working for New York Rep. Jack Kemp, I helped originate the Republican obsession with slashing taxes that came to be called “supply-side economics.” While I believe this theory played a useful role in economic theory and policy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it has long outlived its usefulness and is now nothing but dogma completely divorced from reality.

It will be hard for many to believe, but once upon a time, Republicans genuinely cared about the budget deficit. From Dwight Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush, many of them were actually willing to raise taxes and oppose tax cuts to reduce it. And that includes Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes in 1981 but then supported 11 tax increases to offset a ballooning deficit.

And here's the crux of it all - this is what the GOP is all about.

The 1978 passage of California 's Proposition 13, which slashed the state’s property taxes, was critical in convincing Republicans that tax-cutting was more popular than deficit reduction. But to maintain some semblance of consistency, Republican intellectuals such as Irving Kristol and Alan Greenspan developed a theory called “starve-the-beast,” which says that spending will only be cut when tax cuts increase the deficit so much that there is no alternative.

If my goal is to dismantle the "welfare state" - to kill all that FDR Socialism Stuff - then the policy agenda pursued by Repubs for the last 60 years is almost exactly how I'd do it.

The short version is that we must be punished for not having the foresight to be born into better circumstances.

Short example: There will be about 5000 American deaths this year that will result in any kind of tax liability under the Estate Tax laws.

5000 out of about 2,600,000 in an "average year".

Less than 2% will pay anything in taxes on the wealth they inherit - and they pay taxes only on the amount in excess of $10,000,000.

If my estate is $50 million, then my poor pitiful survivors will have to figure out how to squeak by on a share of about $35,000,000.

I have no sympathy for legacy pukes who complain about paying the taxes that keep them from being roasted alive by the people who do the work and pay them rent.

Today's Tweet

We've all been suckered with this kinda shit once or twice.

This shit-talkin’, gun-lovin’, Trump votin’ all American (racist) gal was actually...a Russian propaganda account.https://t.co/OuQigkbzD1

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) November 3, 2017

I see comments online about how Hillary's this horrible Neo-Liberal bank bitch who emulates Henry Kissinger to the point where it's hard not to think she might have a dick, etc etc etc.

And I've heard that Bernie's a totally misogynistic asshole faggot who made regular trips to Havana so he could give Castro a blow job, and learn more about stealing tax dollars while masquerading as an "Independent" - that fucking Commie mole...

...and blah blah fucking blah.

It's trite and stale and clichéd, but this is good ol' fashioned Divide-n-Conquer.

I have to start by assuming the extreme hyperbole that comes thru (regarding Hillary vs Bernie eg) is designed to keep me isolated from somebody I should be making common cause with.  If I'm less inclined to think he's a complete jerk for supporting that misogynistic Commie faggot, I'm less likely to dig in my heels and blindly support the Neo-Liberal bank bitch.

I'm not mewling about Can't We Just Get Along. And I'm not running for the shelter of Both-Sides - but if we wanna get anywhere...

Working towards the election - no matter how it's going for you personally - chop wood and carry water.

After the election - no matter how it turned out for you personally - you chop the wood and you carry the water.

A Quote

You won't find anything in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

--Jim Hightower

We have to figure out how to get past that thinking without believing we can make a compromise on facts that's worth a shit.

2+2=4. 

Not 5. 

And it serves no good purpose to "compromise" at 4½. In fact, it does us all harm.

The answer is 4, and no other answer will do.  Because if you start with a false premise, it's all but impossible to arrive at a true conclusion.

How Great I Art

Lawrence O'Donnell loves me.

Well - O'Donnell's tweet wrangler saw my mention and hit 'like'. This one time.

But that's how we do it now - so Yay Me!

Awareness Schmawareness

Last month it was Breast Cancer Awareness and this month it's Diabetes Awareness and March is MS month and June is Alzheimer's and on and on and on.

I have an idea - let's declare Where's-The-Goddamed-Cure-For-These-Diseases-And-Why-The-Fuck-Do-We-Have-Suicidal-Drug-Addicted-Homeless-Veterans-And-All-The-Rest-Of-This-Shit Awareness Month. And that month can start in January and end in December every year.

Can we try that for a while?

Charlie Pierce

Esquire's Charlie Pierce:

The only things one can be sure of regarding whatever it is that the Republican congressional majorities come up with for a tax plan is that it will shove more of the nation’s wealth upwards, that the math will be mostly magical thinking, and that there will be various strategies employed to keep the country from noticing these first two characteristics. From Politico, we learn that, yes, the Republicans are pretty much a mess on this front, too.
-and-

Look at this mess. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, who is perhaps the worst legislative politician since the Five Minutes of Bob Livingston passed into history, desperately needs this win. Passage of this tax bill is the only reason he’s put up with the antics out of Camp Runamuck at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But, unfortunately, those pesky 2018 midterms have put the gallows in everyone’s eyes, especially Ryan’s.
And let's not ignore this from some polling a coupla months ago:

Today's Tweet

“How could one of the most experienced politicians in history lose to the most unfit candidate ever?” Trump asked reporters (snark snark).

But it's a valid question - maybe somebody should look into it.

Trump Accuses Clinton of Deliberately Losing Election So He Could Be Impeached https://t.co/bcH3OKKEb2

— Gary McKnight (@TenDem) November 2, 2017

 

Keith

"...un-indicted co-conspirator..."

More Of This, Please

One of the real problems with 45* as POTUS is the phenomenon of the Drama du Jour. ie: every day, a new, and at least semi-outrageous bit of Sturm-und-Drang comes up that pushes yesterday's High School Fuckaround Bullshit off to the side, forcing us to address this new crap, leaving no time to deal with much of anything, including the issues that really do require some thought and oughta get noticed.

And I'm really hoping nothing in that first paragraph comes as any kind of surprise to anybody.

The good news is that there's some good news once in a while.
WaPo:

The former chief of a small township in New Jersey has been arrested on federal hate crime and civil rights charges for what federal authorities described as a pattern of racist comments and behavior — including slamming an African American teen’s head into a metal door jamb and saying that black people are “like ISIS.”

Frank Nucera Jr., 60, who had been chief of the Bordentown Township Police Department, was arrested, and the charges against him were unsealed Wednesday. The allegations are notable for the blatant racism they describe in a law enforcement leader.

According to a criminal complaint in the case, filed in federal district court in New Jersey, Nucera frequently referred to African Americans by racial slurs and espoused violence toward them.

The Meme's The Thing

We get all het up because we're seeing something cool and new, and it's hard to slow it all down enough to consider what shitty things can be made to happen if the cool new thing is manipulated in an attempt to drive us in a direction not of our choosing.