Who are the "Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy," according to Steven Rosenfeld at The New Republic? The three retired election officials in Arizona who thwarted the Cyber Ninja's "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes by simply correlating voting data with widely-available public records, that's who. And they showed that tens of thousands of folks did not vote from beyond the grave or the land of fiction and yes, tens of thousands of solidly Republican voters in the Phoenix suburbs did vote for Joe Biden in 2020. I'd like very much for folks like Benny White to be right that their work could have forestalled the proliferation of the Big Lie if they'd gotten there earlier, though I doubt they are. But we could get ahead of the next Big Lie, thanks to good folks like these.
Ho hum, Netflix made a record $5.3 billion in profits in 2021, but paid a hair over one percent of that in taxes. In each of the four years since the Trump tax "reform" lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Netflix has paid between 0 and 1 percent in taxes, though right-wingers always say we lower tax rates to increase compliance! The Build Back Better Act would have at least instituted a 15% minimum corporate tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion, but our One True Great and Real Lord President Joe Manchin killed that, though he apparently supports it. You know, just like with his own voting rights bill! It ain't just the Pearly Gates that'll be unkind to his works -- history won't be kind, either. I mean, this crap just doesn't read well.
Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut informs us that good Americans are forming banned book clubs in the wake of right-wing book-banning efforts -- with at least one started by a 14-year-old student, and pretty much anyone who remembers being that age knows that such students are the last people you want to tell what they can't read. You hate to see a school board's oversight function devolve into right-wing political correctness, but that's what happened, in too many areas of our great country, and you can tell these groups know they're full of soup by how easily they switch from decrying critical race theory to decrying pornography, as if they know they can't win the argument on the merits unless they keep moving the goalposts. I'll bet Louise A. Spilsbury's anti-bullying book is worth a read, regardless of what various school boards think.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon argues that Donald Trump has "seized control" of the narrative surrounding the January 6 attempted coup, as Democrats take their time with their January 6 Commission and our "liberal" media has "fail(ed) to treat Trump's downright criminal aggression on this front with the gravity it deserves." But though I agree that our media's fallen down on the job again, and no one's ever lost money betting on Democrat weakness, I'm not sure Mr. Trump has actually "seized control" here. We all saw it on TV, after all, and every time he or some Trumphole tries to gaslight us about it, all we need do is recall the Confederate flag flying through the Capitol halls or the Capitol Police officers getting beaten with Blue Lives Matter flags or, well, all the yelling. But yeah, our DOJ should have arrested Mark Meadows already. We can't be nice to him just because he used to be a Congressman.
Finally, in a peripherally-related note, as much as I'd love to believe that Donald Trump was at a rally over the weekend acting "Like a Man Who Knows He’s About to Be Held Accountable for the First Time in His Life," I rather suspect he doesn't really think he's about to go to jail -- he's just playacting for the crowd, pretending he sympathizes with all of their reversals in life. And once you start playing this game, you can't really stop -- in fact, you have to keep upping the rage. Most Republicans already know this, and approve of it; they would just prefer to keep upping the rage a little more slowly.
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