Citizens for Tax Justice also thinks the "border tax" is a bad idea. Claims that ZOMG TEH BORDER TAX WOULD RAISE TEH 1.2 TRILLYUNZ DOLLARZ!!!! (over 10 years) tend to ignore the fact that the Republican proposal would actually lose $4 trillion over 10 years (largely because it repeals the corporate tax). Of course we should never tolerate when corporations pass on their taxes to consumers, but we shouldn't be dumb enough to think that wouldn't happen, either, particularly given the Republicans' utter lack of a law-and-order bent when it comes to corporate behavior.
Ho hum, Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues his hot streak by withdrawing an Obama Administration memo aiming to reduce private prison involvement in detaining undocumented immigrants. Because how can our government do the job all by itself? Private prisons do a worse job just like private everything does a worse job of fulfilling government functions, and we shouldn't leave it to Bernie Sanders to remind us that private prisons gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign, though I'm still glad he did.
Zaid Jafani at The Intercept notes the irony, as it were, that the Trump Administration wants to leave transgendered-folks-in-bathrooms policy "up to the states" but won't leave marijuana enforcement up to the states that have legalized the drug. "States' rights" is one of the most intellectually-bankrupt concepts in American history, having long been little more than a synonym for a state's "right" to own black slaves. Everyone wants the smallest possible governmental unit to have the most direct power over people's welfare, but people have rights, and "states' rights" can't be an excuse to run roughshod over those rights. Plus, pot ain't an opioid, so using opioid problems to justify cracking down on pot doesn't make sense.
Issie Lapowsky at WIRED says President Trump's immigrant deportation plan isn't just cruel, but suffers from "bad math." Long story short: your plan has a smaller chance of success the bigger its ambitions -- and deciding that deporting every undocumented immigrant is a bad way to use finite resources. Plus that Skittles analogy is really, really stupid -- "three in a handful" itself vastly overstates how many refugees commit violent crimes.
Another day, another quite correct diagnosis that playing defense isn't enough and Democrats need to start taking a few more chances if they're ever going to come back. "We must fight to either disengage the Democratic Party from its corporate masters, or to develop a viable third party," Leonard C. Goodman writes -- though the latter might be the only way to achieve the former.
Finally, Colin Beavan tells us "What It Takes to Change Hearts and Minds." Basically, we shouldn't pound numbers and facts so much, but we should "align() communication about (our) cause with the most deeply-held values and aspirations of (our) friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow citizens." I'll admit it takes a lot of practice to discern between doing that effectively and just telling other folks what you think they want to hear. Keep in mind, though, that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano crazy and can only be contained in their damage, and that's just as true now as it was under Tha Bush Mobb. So we work on the 75% who aren't crazy. And that's why I'm an optimist.
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