Josiah Mortimer reports on a family's campaign for change at company Bolt
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On one side, we have Elon Musk as a critic of fiat money. On the other, we have Ford and Edison—the tech-billionaires of their time—as fans of fiat money. Who do you trust? Neither: you work it out for yourself from first principles. And this is much harder that just ranting about “fiat money” on … Continue reading "When Billionaires Collide"
A conservative vision for America Is there a single term for describing these people? Revanchist? Political Luddite? Social Darwinist? Misanthrope? None of those quite capture it. Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah famously told a campaign-stop crowd in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it … Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.” Last week, @BasedMikeLee (yes, it’s his personal account) asked, “Until the mid-1930s, the federal government’s footprint didn’t extend much beyond the departments of state, defense, treasury, justice, and interior, along with the postal system. Are we better off with everything we’ve added since then?” His question is rhetorical. But Lee seems to think We collectively are not. We would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public services that make the United States a place of opportunity that people from around the world want to come to. That’s a problem? Maybe making the U.S.
From the founding, the loudest “believers” never did Josh Marshall finds the Times framing on “fixing” the social safety net wanting: Social Security is not broken. Or bankrupt. Or whatever other doomsaying framing its longtime enemies deploy to trick the public into thinking so. “In about a dozen years,” Marshall tweets, “it will likely require additional revenue – not even that much. When the pentagon needs more revenue we don’t know it’s broken. There are very straightforward ways to provide that revenue – mostly tied to raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. Not complicated.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman concurs, Marshall continues. “There are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.” What’s the issue with raising (or eliminating) the cap on payroll taxes? Marshall adds, “It’s a significant hike on anyone who makes much over 250k a year. If you make 5 million in a year it’s a big deal.
There was some polling done in Arizona recently and it’s very interesting: Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) leads Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and a series of other Republicans in potential match-ups for Arizona’s 2024 Senate race, according to a new poll. The poll from OH Predictive Insights released Thursday showed Gallego leading in eight hypothetical match-ups, four of which against Sinema running independently and four with Gallego facing a Republican in a head-to-head race. The four Republicans included in the poll was former Gov. Doug Ducey, former gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, former gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and former Senate nominee Blake Masters. In a three-person race, Gallego leads by as little as 5 points in a race with Ducey and as much as 9 points in a race with Masters. He leads by 7 points in the race with Taylor Robson and by 8 points in the race with Lake. He also leads in the two-person match-ups, but the margin varies significantly based on who the Republican candidate is.
It looks like they’re going to try… Each new iteration of wingnut budget “expert” is more extreme than the last. Meet the latest GOP budget guru Russ Vought who now works for a Trump think tank (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and is the guy who was behind the Freedom Caucus’ extortion of Kevin McCarthy: Vought’s agenda represents a major departure from traditional conservative ideas about balancing the federal budget. Once, former house speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the main drivers of federal spending, as the answer. Vought argues for something different. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the former president’s insistence that the popular federal retirement programs — which go to the middle and upper classes as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Republicans on the untested premise that the GOP can push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.
That’s from a twitter thread by Seth Cotler: A dispatch from the same shit, different day files. In 1976 Jon Voight’s great-uncle, a virulent anti-semitic far right propagandist named Joseph Kamp, wrote an article for The Spotlight (published by neo-Nazis) identifying Jimmy Carter as a puppet of radical left “globalists.” That same 1976 newspaper (that was in the possession of Oregon's Walter Huss, a far right activist with neo-Nazi ties who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978) featured this story about how Carter was supposedly going to grab all of your guns. The same 1976 newspaper quoted far right, Christian Reconstructionist theologian R.J. Rushdoony to "prove" that Carter, with his affinity for the Bilderbergers and other "globalists," was a strange (and wrong) kind of Christian. The back page summed it up nicely. Carter is controlled by "a globalist clique" and his main advisor is a beta male who is dominated by his wife but who is also an all-powerful pinko brainwasher. Wouldn't be a far right moral panic without drugs thrown in there somewhere…and as we all know, Carter was totally a cocaine runner who was just running a peanut farm as a front.
What???? Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said he is not sure if President Donald Trump installed him to slow the response to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. During a Sunday discussion on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program, a caller confronted Miller about his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “What do you say to all the people that believe that you, Kash Patel, Chad Wolf, Charles Lamb all were installed for one reason, and that’s to delay the response on Jan. 6?” a caller named David asked. “They were only deployed after the coup had failed. They failed because [then-Vice President Mike Pence] wouldn’t leave the building.” “I think it’s complete bull—you know what,” Miller shot back.
Just another Republican, doing what they do: A Republican consultant was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in conspiring to illegally funnel contributions from a Russian national to former President Donald Trump‘s 2016 presidential campaign. Jesse R. Benton, 45, of The Woodlands, Texas, was convicted in November on a series of charges including conspiracy, contribution by a foreign national, and causing false records to be filed with the Federal Election Commission. It’s the second time Benton, who has advised numerous GOP lawmakers on campaign strategy, has been convicted of charges related to political contributions. According to court documents, Benton schemed with Roy Douglas, another political adviser, to pass contributions to Trump’s campaign from a Russian national who wanted to meet and take a picture with the candidate. At the time, Benton was a strategist for the Great America PAC, a super PAC that backed Trump in 2016. The Russian national allegedly wired $100,000 as part of an arrangement with Benton to attend a Trump campaign fundraiser.