I think my fellow liberals are reaching a bit in alleging that Robert Mueller's contention late last week that "if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that" is a "message to Congress" that they should, or must, impeach our President. Mr. Mueller also said that "(i)t would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of an actual charge" (referring to the Justice Department opinion that sitting Presidents can't be charged with crimes), saying that's why "we concluded that we would not reach a determination -- one way or the other -- about whether the President committed a crime." I'm tempted to say we need to spend less time trying to get our President out of office and more time proving he's unfit for that office, but even that isn't really the point -- we need to put our vision of a better America forward, and we need to keep putting that vision forward until it drowns out the drama upon which our President thrives. And it should go without saying that "we should work in a bipartisan manner with the people who are trying to destroy us" is not such a vision.
Sen. Sanders reiterates that taxes will go up to pay for Medicare-for-All, and naturally right-wingers respond with hysteria. The only flaw I'd find with this article is that it forgets to mention that the $32 trillion cost of Medicare-for-All over 10 years compares favorably with the $49 trillion projected cost over the next decade on the system we've got; possibly Mr. Corcoran figures it's piling on to spell that out, since he had already pointed out that TEH AVURAJ CANADIAN FAMILY SPENDS TEH $12,000 ANNYULLY IN TEH TAXEZ!!!! is not only flat-out wrong, but that the average American spends almost that much annually in taxes and premiums. And it's no use arguing that "the employer pays the premiums," because that could money could just as easily be part of your salary. Mr. Sanders might be thinking far ahead here: if he comes out and says he'll force corporations to count what they're spending on health insurance as worker salary and then extract that money as a payroll tax, the right will lie about it anyway, but if he calls it a tax at the beginning, and then explains how it'll result in lower health care costs without actually cutting into your paycheck, he might better fight those lies.
I try to avoid calling housing and health care "human rights" -- even though most of us, liberal and conservative, really have long assumed that they are -- but Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) makes the best case I've yet seen for calling housing a "human right" -- by saying that "our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else’s privilege to earn a profit." If you're going to call something a "right," calling its main obstacle "privilege" is a damn good way to do it. Where it trips up a bit is "someone else's privilege to earn a profit" -- I might have said "some corporation's privilege to earn a profit," and not least because a corporation isn't a person and shouldn't have the rights of personhood that our Supreme Court has been granting it for close to 150 years. I would say you, as a person, have a right to earn a profit -- which is certainly not to say you have a "right" to gild the plumbing in your 19th vacation home, since your rights don't get to trample other people's rights, but you have a right to save money, both for future projects and as a bulwark against catastrophe. But I would not say a corporation has a "right" to make a profit. Hell, I wouldn't say it has a "right" to exist.
All the news programs seems to be talking about our President's announcement that he'll hit Mexico with tariffs until they fix the undocumented immigration problem, but all those folks who are cluck-clucking at his "stupidity" don't get what he's doing: he's linking the two issues that galvanize his base (trade and immigration) and using the one issue that attracts more independent-minded voters to him (trade) to bait them into aligning with him on the other (immigration). So when all the smartypantses on their TV say "tariffs don't work" and "you don't solve one problem by attacking the other," I can't be mad at anyone who gets mad at them -- TV is full of smartypantses, after all. And when my fellow liberals complain that "even the Republicans are against it," we'll have to remind them that that's part of the drama. This is why I say that, absent a complete collapse of the economy which I don't want to see and don't think tariffs against China and Mexico will bring about, that our President has a very good chance at winning re-election -- unless, of course, a courageous, straight-talking Democrat who changes the subject to the real causes of our problems wins the nomination, a phenomenon I haven't yet seen in my lifetime.
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