Happy Monday! It's time for a very long post (related to the Politico piece I shared yesterday but will re-share at the bottom) so don't read this until you, like me, have had your coffee (while the ratio of my long posts to having coffee isn't exactly 1:1 it's very very close). One of the fundamental problems of our body politic (among many!) is the false dichotomy of liberalism and conservatism. It shrinks down a whole range of issues into either-or scenarios. By a lot of m

Alright I've been up for 3.5 hours and had my prerequisite 2 cups of coffee so let's go through all the stuff that just happened. I'll start with a summary of the Democratic argument in short and then move on to what I could reasonably ascertain to be the GOP's flailing attempts to discredit Bob Mueller. During the election, the Russian government undertook a serious and complex plan to tilt the election in favor of one candidate, Donald Trump. They did this by a variety of m

Today Bernie Sanders, along with Ilhan Omar and other members of Congress, has announced a plan to cancel all student debt via federal spending (less canceling of debt and more the government buying it back from the citizens). He would pay for this by a fraction-of-a-percent tax on all trading on Wall Street. The total student debt in this country is now roughly 1.6 trillion dollars, something like 4-5% of our annual GDP. That makes student loans functionally an entire sector

Because the House is having hearings on the idea of slave reparations, I thought I'd briefly weigh in on the idea and a bunch of misconceptions about the idea. First off - it's really naive to pretend (as Mitch McConnell does) that we somehow ended racism in 1865. For the next hundred years black people would still be denied basic rights like a fair education and the ability to vote. Even since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, black people in Ame

So the main problem - among many - with Trump's foreign adventurism is the utter lack of a point to any of it. Generally speaking, our foreign policy is OUTCOME oriented. For instance, when W went into Afghanistan, it was ostensibly to destabilize the Taliban and their support for al-Qaeda, ultimately making America safer and making sure the only people getting blown up were service members overseas. When we went into Iraq it was to demonstrate that dictators were bad and the

As much as I rag AOC for being generally kind of terrible when it comes to things like facts and truth, her style contrasts with Amy Klobuchar's in an interesting way. The Green New Deal remains a laughably impractical piece of legislation, but it shifted the whole conversation on environmental policy from "I don't know, is climate change a thing" to "okay maybe we shouldn't be QUITE so aggressive about it." Meanwhile, Amy K introduced a sweeping infrastructure plan and......

Of the two candidates who ran for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, one of them has declared unequivocally that she won’t run for President while the other has declared that he will run for President. So naturally the dynamics of the race will more directly impact Bernie Sanders than they will Hillary Clinton. But their fates are seemingly tied together because of the events of 2016 even as the country looks ahead to 2020. At the present time, Bernie Sanders is the f

I will defend Nancy Pelosi until my dying breath. By virtually any objective measure (such as they are), she's the most skillful legislator since the Johnson Administration. In two years of unified government she passed a host of actual progressive legislation, some of which was signed into law and some of which died in the Senate. She took bold action on the environment, the economy, and expanded healthcare to 20 million previously uninsured people. She knocked several items

In general Michael Cohen corroborated everything we've known about Trump from his days as a sh*tty Manhattan developer to his days as a sh*tty President of the United States. He's a liar, a con man, and a racist (in no particular order). He ran his entire campaign as a publicity stunt to build his flailing brand back up. He didn't expect to win because he didn't think Americans were dumb enough to elect him. There was no plan for what happened if he won. He committed crimes f

A lot of people confuse the moment for the person because it's hard to take a longer historical perspective on things. The Democratic Party needed someone to challenge Hillary Clinton that wasn't Lincoln Chaffee (actual person who ran for the nomination!) or Jim "You can't ask my opponent anything because I threw a grenade at him and he's dead now" Webb. The frustrations of the Obama Administration, despite its successes, left a whole lot of people in search of more radical s

Trump won a minority election by a whole lot of votes. His job as the President is to build support among A MAJORITY of the population. And a majority of people don't want the Wall. If he wants the Wall, he should offer people enough incentives that they support it as part of a broader package. The reason this shutdown happened is that Trump believes he can govern for 35% of the population and that's not how our system was designed to work. If he were a competent executive he

Anyone who has worked on a large scale construction project from the economics side of things, will tell you it is common for them to run over budget and behind schedule. A construction project on the scale of the proposed border wall (or fence, or whatever he's calling it today) isn't large, it's staggeringly massive. Keep in mind that there already exists a towering Mexico-U.S. border barrier, and that it was built over the course of many years, and continues to be maintain

The Guardian is reporting that in March 2016, shortly before or around the time that he joined Donald Trump's campaign, Paul Manafort went to London to meet with Julian Assange and didn't sign in at the Ecuadorian embassy. First off, it's worth noting that embassies are almost entirely staffed by members of a country's intelligence community. So if you visit any embassy, that's who you're going to see. But let's set aside the colossal stupidity of this move and talk about the

Paul Manafort violated his plea deal as he continues to lie Some quick thoughts about the Manafort news today (basically Mueller said he violated his plea deal and continued to lie to the FBI after the fact). It's worth noting that this opens up the possibility of another trial of Manafort, or just harsher sentencing by a judge. Either way, Mueller almost certainly doesn't make this accusation without lots of evidence - not just testimony, but documented evidence. You don't m

Another look at the so-called Green New Deal. An in-depth look at what saving the planet and starting here at home, would actually take. You may have heard recently that a member or two from the incoming class of Congress-persons from the Democratic party have been pushing hard to get the United States to flip to 100% green energy within the next 10 years. (Read Chris Baugh's article on The Green New Deal to better understand what I'm talking about) When I hear strongly worde

Let's talk about the Green New Deal and climate change policy in a larger sense! First off - what IS the Green New Deal? It's three words that like a lot of political conjuring spells mean whatever you, in your heart of hearts, want them to mean. Seriously. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a whole page on her website dedicated to creating a House Subcommittee to create the Green New Deal legislation. But aside from a plan to craft a plan, there's not much substance. Sean McElwee

Seasoned Democrats try and keep from drowning in a constant deluge of what-ifs, half truths, falsities, and fear as many from the Progressive bloc clutch to them, risking taking the new House majority down before they even begin. HOOOOOOOOO BOY. I just read a recent piece by Eric Levitz in New York Magazine and funny enough I was wondering how long it would be before Pay-Go came up as the latest cudgel against the idea of Pelosi's Speakership. Where to even begin unpacking th

With a seemingly endless stream of misinformation, we take a more in-depth look at the 52nd & 55th (same person) Speaker of The House, Nancy Pelosi. In case my views on Nancy Pelosi, the Once and Future Speaker, have not been made PAINFULLY clear, in the wake of Five White Guys trying to wrest the Speakership from her and give it a person to be named later, let's talk about Nancy Pelosi...one more time. Nancy Pelosi is the most effective legislator in the past 50 years (since

As Democrats regain the House, a small group of 10+ Democrats want to replace the anticipated Speaker of The House, Nancy Pelosi. That may not be a good idea. Let's revisit her accomplishments. For all the flack Nancy Pelosi gets as a legislator (mostly because the GOP holds her up as a boogeywoman specter of evil liberalism), she is arguably the best Speaker since Tip O’Neill. I mean look at the tape: Had unified government for one session of Congress Had a President who was

After having had control of all branches of government for 2 years, we revisit what the GOP under Trump has accomplished (or failed to) So for part-one of this monster post, I talked about how the Democrats have ideas and actually implement those ideas when given the chance. Now I’d like to talk about the exact opposite of that, which is Republican governance. Remember the halcyon days of Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the Freedom Caucus running on abject fucking racism to w