A little premature legislation from Florida Republicans in Tallahassee and Trump-in-waiting Gov. Ron DeSantis. Their plan to punish Disney for daring to voice opposition to Florida’s “Don’t say gay” law has run into a snag (Miami Herald):
As Florida legislators were rushing through passage of a bill to repeal the special district that governs Walt Disney World last week, they failed to notice an obscure provision in state law that says the state could not do what legislators were doing — unless the district’s bond debt was paid off.
Disney, however, noticed and quietly sent a note to its investors to show that it was confident the Legislature’s attempt to dissolve the special taxing district operating the 39-square mile parcel it owned in two counties violated the “pledge” the state made when it enacted the district in 1967, and therefore was not legal.
The result, Disney told its investors, is that it would continue to go about business as usual.
The special Reedy Creek Improvement District allows Disney, among other things, to “build roads, sewers and utilities as well as the authority to set its zoning laws, establish its police and fire departments, and regulate its construction,” the Herald reports. Disney World has its own water utility and power plant.
Retributionus interruptus
Revoking that arrangement may not stand legal scrutiny.
Since Florida law states that affected counties inherit any debt from such a dissolved district, Orange and Osceola counties will be more than pleased that state Republicans have saddled them with as much as $1 billion in bond debt. Orange County would find $163 million in operating expenses added to its $600 million budget.
Proponents of the bill “had some misconception that Disney’s getting some special property tax break for Reedy Creek,’’ said Scott Randolph, Orange County tax collector. “It’s not.”
In fact, the theme parks of Universal Studios and SeaWorld, which operate under dependent taxing districts, have more tax advantages than Disney because “if those taxing districts didn’t exist, that money would otherwise go to Orange County’s general revenue,’’ Randolph said.
“Under no circumstances will Disney not pay its debts,’’ DeSantis said. He just did not say how.
DeSantis needed to show everyone who’s Boss Hogg. His first effort seems to have failed. He and his allies have more legislative scheming to do.
Imagine how DeSantis might run the country.
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Early voting begins Thursday in the 2022 North Carolina primaries. While I avoid giving space to my media-hound of a congressperson, he managed a scandal double-tap on Tuesday. Madison Cawthorn is next-level.
Let’s start with his second federal “weapon law violation” (The Hill):
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) was cited Tuesday for trying to bring a loaded gun through TSA at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department confirmed with Queen City News (QCN).
For variety, Cawthorn this time brought a different gun than when he was first stopped last summer by TSA. That was a Glock. This time he chose a Staccato. Both in fashionable black.
Jonathan Chait wants to know what the hell is going on with Cawthorn. “Is he a secret Nazi? Some kind of sex weirdo? A compulsive liar?” Chait thinks he’s determined to shoot the moon on scandals. I think he’s compiling an audition tape for Fox News.
By its absence, Chait’s column at New York Magazine must have filed before Cawthorn’s new weapons charge. He leads instead with the insider trading:
The newest revelation, via the conservative Washington Examiner, is that Cawthorn may have violated federal insider-trading laws. On December 29, Cawthorn posted a photo on social media with the main investor in Let’s Go Brandon coin, a cryptocurrency, writing, “LGB legends. … Tomorrow we go to the moon!” The next day, the coin announced a deal that made its value soar 75 percent. Its value has since dropped to 0, but Cawthorn’s promotion may indicate he participated in a pump-and-dump scheme.
A financial-engineering crime would round out the impressively broad portfolio of scandals Cawthorn has amassed in a short period of time.
Chait reviews Cawthorn’s greatest hits. I won’t repeat them here except to note the “Christian” conservative’s eight-month-short, failed marriage that Chait does not. Cawthorn’s traffic stops are by now legendary. The moment his second and third stops made the papers, a knowledgeable source tells me, he dispatched a staffer to pay his first fine in Buncombe County before the charge could be reviewed.
Chait adds:
Taken as a whole, the list runs from the self-interested to the self-destructive, from culturally Neanderthal to libertine, and from ideological to pure frat boy. Possibly, Cawthorn decided that, having started his career in a deep hole of scandal, his best hope for success lay in somehow shooting the moon. Or perhaps he is in the middle of some Brewster’s Millions–style gonzo scandal jag that stands to win him a huge fortune if he can round out the portfolio with, say, a dead stripper in his car and a charge of hunting an endangered species.
What it means locally is, starting tomorrow, voters in NC-11 will get a chance to determine whether the kid gets yet another of his second chances. The state’s Republican establishment has already had enough of Cawthorn’s bad press. (See update below.) After new congressional maps were revealed, Cawthorn announced he would renounce his NC-11 constituents to run in what he thought a more favorable district (NC-13) until courts ordered that district redrawn. Then he came crawling back to ask for votes in NC-11.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has endorsed state Sen. Chuck Edwards, one of Cawthorn’s seven Republican primary challengers. Edwards may be no less fringe than Cawthorn, just more subtle and tasteful about it.
Michelle Woodhouse, cousin to Dallas Woodhouse, the NCGOP’s clown-in-residence and former state executive director, is also running to unseat Cawthorn.
The other five candidates may also draw off some votes. A winner must earn at least 30 percent on May 17 or else the top two candidates go to a July runoff.
Cawthorn’s problem Among Cawthorn’s problems is his principal vote comes from his home in Republican-heavy Henderson County. Both Edwards and Woodhouse live in Henderson. A three-way split there could either end Cawthorn’s career or force a runoff, most likely with Edwards.
Some of my progressive friends have changed their registrations to UNAffiliated to be able to vote against Cawthorn in North Carolina’s partially closed Republican primary. A waste. The numbers are not there to be meaningful, but they want the emotional satisfaction. They lose their chance to select the Democrats who will run locally and statewide this fall. Their loss.
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Did you expect otherwise? The question is whether or not Kevin McCarthy — being pressed by Trump to do it, of course, as payback — can manage this situation. I doubt it. If he becomes Speaker he will be very weak. And if anyone thinks there will be push-back from Republican House members during a presidential election cycle with Donald Trump running, they’re nuts. I will be very surprised if they don’t do this:
Enthusiasm for impeaching top Biden officials has spread from the fringes of the House Republican conference to its mainstream — foreshadowing the intense pressure Kevin McCarthy will face from his colleagues if he’s Speaker next year.
For the first year of President Biden’s term, it was mostly the hard right of the GOP who entertained impeaching the president and his Cabinet secretaries. But those deliberations are now happening among a much larger group — even with virtually no precedent or legal justification.
The largest body of conservative House members — the Republican Study Committee, which represents more than 150 members — is laying the groundwork to push for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Many committee members already want to impeach him, according to a member of the group.
A letter 133 members sent Mayorkas on Monday — led by Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the committee chairman, and Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), the Border Security Caucus co-chair — sets the predicate for impeachment even without mentioning the word.The only reason the RSC hasn’t already called for impeachment is because it wanted to build consensus and get sign-off on its strategy from party leaders.
They’ve favored a more restrained approach to impeachment, according to a source familiar with the group’s discussions.
House Minority Leader “Kevin [McCarthy] wants to make the case before we go for the jugular,” the source told Axios.
The hardcore strategy is prevailing.
Among the 133 House Republicans who’ve signed on so far are McCarthy, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the Republican Conference chair.
McCarthy stopped short of outright calling to impeach Mayorkas when asked about the possibility during a news conference at the border on Monday.
Nonetheless, he said, “if someone is derelict in their job, there is always the option of impeaching somebody. But right now, he’s got 30 days.”
That reference was to the 30 days the committee gave Mayorkas to answer its questions.
Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached by the House, and later acquitted by the Senate, in 1876 for allegedly taking bribes.
Neither that history, nor the spiraling precedent of trying to oust Cabinet members for pursuing a rival administration’s policies, is proving to be any deterrent to the House GOP.
If the conference emerges with control of the chamber after the midterms, the urge to impeach Biden himself or his top officials could force McCarthy into action quicker than he might ideally like.
The impulse would be strong even if the gesture would be futile, given the challenge of getting 67 votes to convict in a Senate still expected to be closely divided regardless of whether the GOP also wins control of it.
The backstory: On Jan. 21, 2021, Biden’s first full workday as president, far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced H.R. 57.
It called for impeaching Biden for “enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors” for actions by his son Hunter while Biden was vice president.
Nobody co-sponsored her bill, and many of Greene’s colleagues privately regarded it as a joke.
Be smart: The one that’s garnered the most support is a resolution introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), the former Freedom Caucus chair.
He’s proposed to impeach Mayorkas over border issues.
His measure has 29 co-sponsors.
I think Democrats need to make this known to their voters. Maybe they don’t care, I don’t know. But they need to let them know before they decide to sit out 2022.
CNN is relentlessly flogging a prediction from Deutchebank today that the US is heading for a brutal recession based upon inflation (which they say is going to get much, much worse) rising interest rates (which they claim are going much, much higher) and a roaring job market (which they claim is only going to “cool” if we get a recession.) How nice. Apparently, the markets were convinced by their assessment because they tumbled. The Dow lost 800 points.
But I was surprised by all this because that’s not the prediction of a bunch of other economists and financial institutions. For instance, Goldman Sachs issued their statement yesterday:
The U.S. economy probably will grow 3.1% this year even as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy to quell inflation, Goldman Sachs said in a forecast on Friday.
That would be the second-fastest pace in 17 years, following 2021’s 5.7% spike in GDP. The unemployment rate probably will fall to 3.3% from 3.9% in 2021, and the pace of home-price gains likely will slow to 8.7% from last year’s record 19% gain, the forecast said.
At issue is whether the Fed will be able to raise its benchmark rate and shrink its balance sheet without sparking a recession. In a survey earlier this month by the Wall Street Journal, economists predicted a 28% chance of a recession within the next 12 months. Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist, put the odds at 15%.-
“History proves, some investors argue, that the inflation overshoot and overheated labor market have made a recession all but inevitable,” Hatzius said in Friday’s forecast. “But such claims exaggerate the lessons of a handful of past episodes and understate the uniqueness of the current situation.”
Those unique factors include the worst pandemic in more than a century, which created the supply-chain bottlenecks that sparked inflation, followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine that sent energy costs soaring, the Goldman Sachs forecast said.
They acknowledge that Ukraine or COVID lockdowns in China further affecting the supply chain could change their forecast. But overall, they just don’t have the grim view that Deutchbank has and I haven’ heard much about it.
Fears of a US recession are the most widespread since the coronavirus locked down the economy in early 2020, but the latest data suggests there’s little to worry about.
With the Russia-Ukraine conflict roiling supply chains and lifting inflation even higher, economists’ outlooks toward the recovery are weakening fast. Growth will very likely come in below initial forecasts, but that doesn’t mean the US is plunging into a new downturn. By nearly all measures, the economy is still roaring back to life, and at a much better pace than seen after the Great Recession.
“We are a bit more remote from the immediate effects of the war compared to Europe, but we will be feeling them over time,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said during a panel discussion on Thursday. “But the US economy is very strong, performing very well. By most forecasts, we’ll have another strong growth year this year.”
Markets reporter Sam Ro was even simpler when detailing his optimistic outlook in a Sunday newsletter.
“Despite high inflation, rising interest rates, and geopolitical uncertainty, the economy most certainly doesn’t seem to be headed for a recession any time soon,” he wrote.
The US rebound is alive and well, from breakneck job creation to Americans’ record-breaking spending spree. Here are three charts detailing the strength of the economic recovery amid new recession warnings.
“Despite high inflation, rising interest rates, and geopolitical uncertainty, the economy most certainly doesn’t seem to be headed for a recession any time soon,” he wrote.
The US rebound is alive and well, from breakneck job creation to Americans’ record-breaking spending spree. Here are three charts detailing the strength of the economic recovery amid new recession warnings.
The labor market has flashed some of the most bullish indicators of how the country is rebounding.
Recent data showed the US adding 431,000 nonfarm payrolls in March, a sum that’s still more than double the pre-pandemic average despite high inflation and the labor shortage. The unemployment rate also fell more than expected to 3.6%, nearly hitting the record lows seen before the coronavirus recession started.
The economy has now recovered about 93% of the jobs it lost during initial lockdowns. It took just 25 months to reach that level of progress, an extraordinary speed when compared to other post-war recoveries. By comparison, it took the same period during the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis just to hit the labor market’s lowest point.
The return to the pre-pandemic jobs count is also set to happen three times faster than the employment recovery of the early 2010s. While job growth is likely to slow as the country gets closer to full employment, the labor market’s V-shaped rebound and unusually strong demand for workers suggest the US is far from another downturn.
Consumer spending counts for about 70% of economic activity, making it a crucial fuel for the economy as it returns to pre-pandemic health. The fastest inflation in 41 years raised concerns that high prices would curb shoppers’ spending spree, but data shows the boom lasting well into 2022.
Personal consumption expenditures — the most sweeping measure of Americans’ spending activity — rose 0.2% in February to a record-high $16.7 trillion, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said on March 31. That followed a massive 2.7% leap in February.
The improvement doesn’t just extend the rally, but keeps it handily above the pre-pandemic trend. Government stimulus and pent-up savings boosted spending as the economy reopened in early 2021. Yet the streak has held strong even as aid dried up and inflation soared. There may be new risks on the horizon, but Americans are still spending like the economy just reopened.
The massive spending seen throughout the recovery has also buoyed the measure that Wall Street cares about the most: corporate earnings.
About a fifth of S&P 500 companies have reported first-quarter earnings so far, and the results show little sign of a weakening economy. Seventy-nine percent of companies that have reported their latest figures beat earnings-per-share forecasts, and 69% reported stronger-than-expected revenues, according to FactSet.
More broadly, companies are raking in much bigger profits than they did before the pandemic. S&P 500 earnings per share hit a record $204 at the end of 2021, up more than a third from pre-crisis levels. If first-quarter reports continue to beat forecasts, that figure will climb to even loftier all-time highs.
The stock market isn’t the best economic indicator for forecasting a recession, but with companies notching record profits and spending still on the rise, the recovery is looking plenty healthy across the board.
Now, I happen to think those record profits are largely price gouging which is hugely contributing to the inflation that has everyone spooked, but that’s another subject. Maybe it was just herding today and the markets will recover tomorrow. There’s been a lot of that lately. But it will sure be weird if the conditions laid out in those charts led to recession.
I have no idea what’s going to happen, of course. But it’s clear that those who do engage in predictions are not all on the same page and if the media feels the need to run scare stories, the least they can do is make it clear that there is no consensus.
The news that ELON MUSK is buying Twitter has thrown Washington into a tizzy over one major question: Will DONALD TRUMP return to his old favorite social media platform and start tweeting again?
As it turns out, no one is more petrified of this than members of Trump’s own party.
On Monday night, in a series of calls and texts with several top GOP insiders, every single one of them told us that they hoped the former president stays the hell away from Twitter, lest he sink their chances at flipping the House and Senate. Some of his allies even think that a return to his old Twitter habits could damage his own brand ahead of a possible third presidential bid in 2024.
“If I’m a Democrat, I’d pray that Elon Musk puts Trump right back on Twitter,” said one House GOP leadership aide, who asked not to be named to speak candidly. “I don’t think it costs Republicans the House, but it certainly will elevate Trump’s opinions — and is going to put Republican candidates and members back having to answer for that.”
The person added: “It’s enough to create headaches — and it’s enough to probably cost us a couple seats.”
Some may find this a rather surprising reaction, given that many Republicans have both accused Big Tech of censoring conservative voices (the former president being the most prominent example) and showered praise on the Musk takeover. But as is often the case with the GOP and all things Trump, privately, they feel very differently.
To be sure, there’s a lot yet unknown about whether or not Trump will return to Twitter.
Will Twitter allow it? Questions abound over whether Musk’s new leadership team will allow the resurrection of the now-defunct @realDonaldTrump handle. (The Tesla and SpaceX impresario, however, has blasted Twitter’s permanent bans and what he views as its censorship of free speech.)
Will Trump even want to rejoin? Trump said on Fox News on Monday that he doesn’t intend to return to the platform, and will instead stick to his own social media startup, Truth Social. “I am not going on Twitter,” he said. “I am going to stay on Truth.”
Here’s the thing: Nobody really believes him.
Republicans we spoke with predicted that Trump won’t be able to resist the urge to see millions of retweets and likes on his posts, to say nothing of his ability to drive any news cycle with a message to his 88 million-plus followers. Could he stay on Truth Social? Sure, but that platform has been something of a disaster (read here and here). Trump himself seems to realize this, and has posted on it only once.
“The lure of Twitter … may prove as irresistible for Trump as it is a potential return of a migraine headache for Republicans, who have not missed the tweets and the barrage of questions from the Trump-generated outrage du jour,” said DOUG HEYE, a longtime GOP political strategist watching this closely. “There is no faster way for Trump to be front and center [in] the political conversation than rejoining Twitter, and he knows that.”
The entire situation is giving those of us who covered the House GOP during the Trump administration a case of deja vu. Back in the day, Trump would tweet something outrageous in the morning, and reporters would spend the rest of the day asking Republican officeholders for their reactions. In fact, then-Speaker PAUL RYAN was so sick of journalists peppering him with questions about Trump’s latest incendiary utterance that he took to denying he’d ever seen them and couldn’t comment. “I haven’t seen the tweet!” he’d say, dodging. We’d all roll our eyes.
These days, however, it’s more than just a pesky annoyance for the GOP. For a while now, most Republicans and quite a few Democrats have scoffed at the notion that the midterms would center on anything other than voters’ kitchen-table concerns — inflation, gas prices and crime. But if Trump is out there spewing falsehoods about the 2020 election on Twitter every day, putting his every thought into the ether for analysis and debate, the former president will help at least some Democrats frame the 2022 election not as a referendum on President JOE BIDEN, but as a choice between two parties: one led by Biden, the other led by Trump.
“He has the world’s biggest microphone on Twitter,” said one Republican working on GOP campaigns. “He could do a lot of good with it — or bad. It will make every GOP politician’s life more difficult.”
That’s to say nothing of the nightmare GOP leaders will have if they flip Congress and suddenly have to compromise with a Democratic president on government funding and the debt ceiling while facing incoming fire from Trump online. “This isn’t going to save Democrats’ majority, but it would make governing and passing those big, must-pass bipartisan items all the more excruciating,” said BRENDAN BUCK, a close former aide to Ryan who remembers the drama of Trump’s first two years well himself.
I get a fair amount of flak for writing about Donald Trump and tlaking about him on the radio and podcasts all the time. But he is the putative GOP nominee for president in 2024 and the undisputed leader of the party so I think you have to keep talking about him whether you like it or not. Citizen awareness of what he’s saying and doing — and what the party is doing at his behest — is vital to getting Democrats to take the threat seriously.
The Senator from Kentucky obviously think Putin has a point
I wish I could understand these pro-Russia Republicans, libertarian or otherwise. I would say they just love the idea of powerful nations invading other nations but that doesn’t explain Rand Paul (who opposed the Iraq war) taking the Russia line on Ukraine.
“So I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.” Senator John McCain on Rand Paul, 2017. pic.twitter.com/Sbl04J82CF
He’s all over the place on foreign policy and always has been. But he is the first in line to argue the Russian point of view when it comes to Ukraine which is just odd. And, needless to say, he takes the position that anything negative that happens in this world is the fault of US policy.
This is, I believe, the ideology (if there is one) of the new right and it’s just as fatuous as the old right which believed the US could do no wrong.
From the start, she wrote in the book, “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, COVID-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late,” she was unequipped to deal with the toxic political atmosphere that was the Trump White House
And even though she was the only one on Trump’s team with on-the-ground experience dealing with a deadly pandemic, she was constantly sidelined, she said.
But many Americans have come to associate Birx with her failure to more forcefully correct Trump during that White House press briefing on April 23, 2020.
New York City had recently closed its playgrounds and, according to Birx, a Department of Homeland Security scientist had just briefed Trump on how it appeared sunlight made them safe.
“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn’t been checked because of the testing,” Trump said. “And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too.”
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that,” the president continued.
“I wanted to be able to reassure the parents that the natural disinfection activity of the sun, with its ability to produce those free radicals that eat these viruses and bacteria and fungi, their membranes, that that would work,” Birx told Ashton. “And that they could get their children outside to play on the playground.”
But when Birx said she saw Trump and the government scientist informally continue their conversation before cameras – and the president make the leap to publicly question whether humans could be treated with disinfectant – she shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
Birx also addressed that moment in a Monday interview with “Good Morning America.”
“This was a tragedy on many levels,” she told co-anchor George Stephanopoulos.
“I immediately went to his most senior staff, and to Olivia Troye, and said this has to be reversed immediately,” she said; Troye was an adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“And by the next morning, the president was saying that was a joke,” Birx said. “But I think he knew by that evening, clearly, that this was dangerous.”
Birx said she was concerned Americans thought Trump had been speaking directly to her, when in reality he was mainly speaking with the Homeland Security scientist. Trump did at one point, though, ask her: “Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light, relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?”
“Not as a treatment,” she replied. “I mean, certainly fever is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond. But not as — I’ve not seen heat or (inaudible).”
It was almost 2 years ago to the day.
A lot of right wingers think it’s impossible to believe that Trump could have lost the election when he had big (super-spreader) rallies and Biden didn’t. There are a lot of reasons he lost, not the least of which was that his approval rating never reached above 45% his entire presidency. But it was the pandemic, stupid. He showed his incompetence during a major crisis. That day was the perfect illustration. A lot of people died who didn’t need to because of it.
I understand that Birx thought she needed to show fealty because it was the only way to function in that White House and she took the job seriously. But she should have done more. When she got sidelined, she could have quit and taken her concerns to the public. The media would have listened.
Not that it means anything (except for cancelled subscriptions), but the Washington Post’s Editorial lineup (before it refreshed) is uniformly bearish on Republicans. It’s deserved, of course, but it makes it hard to know where to begin reading. Even Jason Rezaian’s celebration of Slovenian voters’ rejection of its authoritarian strongman bodes ill for Republican autocracy in this country:
Macron’s victory in France may have restored some of our faith in the future of the free world at a time when we desperately need it. But believe me when I say: Slovenia is something to behold. That is even more true now that it voted against the tide of illiberalism.
In its post-truth, anti-democracy, pro-autocrat, white-nationalist configuration, the late, great Republican Party has once again displayed just how vacuous are its moral-patriot-Christian affectations. It is the “all flag, no pole” version of “all hat, no cattle,” all visible to the naked eye.
Catherine Rampell observes that radicalized Republicans have cast aside conservative tropes:
During the Trump years, the GOP kept its eyes on the prize. Republican politicians seemed willing to overlook their standard-bearer’s nest-feathering and politicalshakedowns. They shunted aside their professed devotion to free trade, free speech, low deficits and family values, all in pursuit of a single goal: tax cuts.
Or, so I and other pundits surmised at the time.
Today, however, tax cuts no longer appear to be the GOP’s top priority. Recent events in Florida suggest Republicans have made room in their hearts — and their policy agenda — for an even higher objective: the culture wars.
Principle, principal, whatever works, ya know?
The rest is about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s war with Disney over its criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In revenge, he plans to revoke the state’s largest employer’s special administrative status. Forget about cozying up to capital. Conservatives want now to go full Conan:
Not only DeSantis, but Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott wants to crush enemies too:
Scott has said that the federal government should require every American to pay at least some minimum amount of federal income taxes. Given that roughly half of Americans pay no federal income taxes, that would require raising taxes on … roughly half of all Americans. Scott couched this proposal in the language of moochers, takers and freeloaders, with culture-war rhetoric dating to the welfare-queen references of the Reagan era. No matter that most of those who’d be affected already contribute to federal and state coffers through other taxes, such as payroll and excise taxes.
Scott’s proposal, if taken literally, would raise taxes not only on low- and moderate-income workers but also on millions of retirees. More than half of those 65 and older currently pay no federal income tax, the Tax Policy Center estimates.
I explained to a local candidate on the sidewalk yesterday the Republican effort to “defund the left” at the state level. They mean to strip blue cities of revenue-generating public assets, provoke a financial crisis, force municipalities to cut services and/or raise taxes, then claim (after voters have forgotten why their cities are in financial straits) that it’s what you get when you let Democrats run things.
Don’t forget Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s attack on his own state’s economy. It’s war. Do they have to spell it out?
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Shanghai is a massive prison while spreading Covid in the U.S. is the essence of freedom?
MAGAworld thinks wearing masks indoors and on planes is tyranny?
CNN’s “This is the video Chinese censors don’t want you to see or share” is classic clickbait. But the story itself involves a montage video documenting Shanghai’s nearly five-week lockdown. Residents freaked out by harsh anti-Covid measures compiled it and are sharing and re-sharing it online as quickly as censors can block it. The video itself is a string of audio clips. CNN’s coverage is more visually disturbing.
Shanghai’s 25 million residents have been shut in their homes for weeks while officials try to contain a severe Covid-19 outbreak.
The six-minute montage features audio clips of the local population criticising insufficient food supplies and complaining about poor medical conditions.
“We haven’t eaten for days now,” one person can be heard pleading.
“This virus can’t kill us. Starvation can,” another man says.
The video, titled The Voice of April, was being widely shared on the popular Chinese platforms Weibo and WeChat.
The Shanghai lockdown is being lifted in stages.
On this side of the Pacific, freedom is being redefined situationally by conservative judges, says Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick in conversation with Larry Gostin of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. They discuss Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s opinion striking down the Biden administration’s requirement that passengers on trains, busses, and airplanes wear masks.
Lithwick is not only disturbed by Mizelle’s reasoning on “sanitation” rules enforceable by the CDC, but by her definition of “liberty”:
Dahlia Lithwick: She writes that people are forcibly being “removed from their airplane seats, denied boarding at the bus steps, turned away at station doors, all on the suspicion that they will spread a disease. Indeed, the mask mandate enlists local governments, airport employees, flight attendants, ride sharing drivers to enforce removal measures.”
She is making this massive liberty point. And it’s such a funny thing to invoke the idea that you have vast liberty rights to get on planes without a mask, but you actually don’t have those liberty rights in a whole bunch of other contexts, including reproductive freedom.
Larry Gostin: Yeah, that’s right. Let me just dig in a little further on these things. Just from a commonsense point of view and for your listeners, if truly the CDC only had the power to sanitize, it would be useless. Sanitation is useless against COVID-19. It could do nothing to protect the American public. And then, on liberty, I’ve been just struck by the modern conservative ideological notion of liberty, because traditionally, if you look at conservatism, stopping the spread of infectious diseases was always the exception to liberty.
That is, you have a liberty interest to do anything you want to your own body that is self-regarding behavior, but nobody has the liberty of transmitting a potentially lethal infectious disease to another person. That’s never been the understanding of liberty since John Stuart Mill. I know of no intellectual position that would say that a person has the right to take measures that are likely to transmit an infection to others that could potentially kill them.
The right has reduced the rule of law to “for thee but not for me.” The crowd that once wagged fingers at the left for what it deemed moral relativism has revealed itself as unbound by any rules it does not wish to follow. This applies to both the administrative state and to personal behavior. After all, Donald John Trump is the right’s patron saint of “Do your own thing.”
Neighbors are at risk. People with compromised immune systems risk death from Covid. And children too young for the vaccine. Even a minor case can do damage to people’s brains and hearts. But no. Looking out for one’s neighbors is no longer as “Christian” as expressing one’s glorious Self in defiance of reason, science or self-preservation. Decisions on public health affecting whole communities has been left to the “do your own research” people.
Gostin: The America we live in is just do it, no matter what the cost. In this case, the cost is death. But you just stand by your guns and you make your political point. If we can’t come together in a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis, I don’t know when we can. … And so I think conservatives should be careful what they wish for. Because one day there will be a really major threat to America and you don’t want CDC to be diffident.
Where the Chinese are too hot on social responsibility and government maintaining order, the American right is too cold.
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