Surprise, surprise, a Guardian investigation reveals that bots produced one out of every four Twitterings about climate change during that period in 2017 where our President was mulling pulling out of the Paris Accords, and surprise, surprise, the vast majority of these bot-tweets promoted climate change denialism. Cue Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: "but what is a 'bot,' really? Do we really understand the deep epistemological and ontological questions we raise when we say something is a 'bot'?"
I'm not sure I would call the litany of tax ideas our Administration is throwing against the wall in an election year as "pasta policymaking" -- I usually go for a more colorful phrase -- but it is apt. You'd be right to question why we need more tax reforms when we supposedly did a big tax "reform" in 2017, but the tax "reforms" they're floating -- invest your first $10,000 in the stock market tax-free if you make less than $200,000, like we all have money laying around to throw into the national roulette wheel! -- would continue our Administration's efforts to "preside over an upward redistribution of wealth." And if a minimum corporate tax is such a great idea, you have to wonder why they didn't go to bat over it in 2017, when Congress repealed it.
David Swanson puts the absurd hand-wringing over Medicare-for-All's "costs" perfectly: "How Are We Going to Pay for Saving Trillions of Dollars?" You remember, after all, that the Koch brothers-sponsored Mercatus Institute said Medicare-for-All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, while the Centers for Medicare Services said our total health care spending, using the system we have now, would be $49 trillion over the same period, meaning we'd save $1.7 trillion annually (versus the $450 billion the Lancet study says we'd save, which number Mr. Swanson cites here). He goes on to describe how you might actually fund Medicare-for-All and other "impossible" initiatives, but I trust the point is taken.
Ho hum, our President's choice for acting (of course!) National Director of Intelligence used to work for a Moldovan politician who's now on the run and can't get into the U.S. because of anti-corruption laws. I guess we can't discount the possibility that our President put him there in order to get said Moldovan politician into the country! He only lets the best people in, after all. Naturally, we can find no shortage of qualified observers who will note that the new acting DNI broke the law, has exposed himself to blackmail, and shouldn't even have a security clearance, let alone lead an agency specializing in a field in which he has no experience. Imagine the whining from the right if Mr. Obama had done any of this!
Finally, we learn that a Republican Super PAC spent millions of dollars trying to promote a liberal in North Carolina's upcoming Democratic U.S. Senate primary, in the hopes that it'd help incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis. And this liberal asks: are you guys sure that's wise? They say they're taking a page out of Chuck Schumer's playbook, but when Democrats ran ads supporting Todd Akin in the 2012 Missouri Senate Republican primary, they promoted a guy who nattered on about "legitimate rape." On the other hand, Erica Smith is an ordained minister, an engineer, and a math teacher in addition to being a state Senator; Republicans had better hope there's something under that hood -- other than her support of Medicare-for-All, I mean! -- or they might have thrown all that money away, and thus provided yet another argument to those of us who think some folks have too damn much money.
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