It’s time to end the filibuster and bring democracy to the US Senate.

The filibuster was invented by “the Grandfather of the Confederacy” John C. Calhoun, and its only purpose is to block legislation that otherwise has broad popular support but is opposed by racists and big corporate special interest groups.

It’s not even in the Constitution; the Founders were horrified by the thought of such a thing, because it allows a 2/5ths minority of senators to block any action by the senate majority.

Sadly, two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are blocking the Senate from killing this democracy-crippling anachronism. …

For many Americans, it’s just now starting to seriously sink in that on January 6th Donald Trump’s allies killed five people in an attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States and replace it with an strongman oligarchic dictatorship.

Their violence was so severe that additional dozens were hospitalized and the Vice President, members of Congress and their staffers spent hours hiding in terror. One policeman was murdered, a second committed suicide, and dozens of others were viciously beaten. …

A technological arms race is underway right now between China, the United States and Western Europe.

The stakes include military superiority, economic prosperity, and the status of being the political and economic system the world wants to emulate.

China’s most urgent priority is to become independent of American technology, as Fareed Zakaria highlighted on his January 24th CNN show.

At the moment, many products manufactured in China require parts from America, including products sold into the domestic Chinese market and equipment used by the Chinese military. They’re throwing massive resources into becoming technologically independent of the United States.

In this, China is simply doing what George Washington and Alexander Hamilton laid out in 1791, and if we don’t get back to that vision quickly, the 21st-century will, indeed, be the “Chinese Century.” …

In politics, framing is everything, and Democrats must get with the program or 2022 will be a disaster.

Framing is when you define an issue by placing it within a particular context, usually done by careful choice of language.

For example, when the fabulously wealthy multi-billionaire Walton family wanted to reduce the estate tax their heirs would have to cough up, they paid Frank Luntz to come up with new language that would get average Americans to oppose a tax that only affects the tiniest percentage of the very richest Americans.

Luntz famously suggested changing the name from “estate tax” to “death tax,” even though it’s a tax on income given to people who didn’t work for or earn it, but just falls out of the sky when a relative has passed away. …

Trump’s impeachment trial is coming up in the Senate, and already his allies are trying to throw up procedural roadblocks to exhaust the effort to hold him accountable. Should America “move beyond” Trump? No friggin’ way!

America must stop giving criminal Republican presidents a pass. Every GOP president since Dwight Eisenhower used treason or deception to come to office (or inherited office from one who did), and it needs to end. It’s a truly astonishing and horrifying story.

It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon. …

Since the Reagan Revolution, America has been slowly dying. Democrats must focus like a laser on three things to breathe new life into our country. They are Education, Healthcare, and a Green New Deal.

Education

Student debt pretty much didn’t exist before the Reagan Revolution. When I went to college in the late 1960s I paid my own tuition and room-and-board working part time pumping gas at the local East Lansing Esso station, and washing dishes at Bob’s Big Boy chain restaurant. My wife, Louise, put herself through college as a “waitress” (the word at the time) at north Lansing’s Howard Johnson’s restaurant. …

The king is dead; long live the [new] king.*

With today’s transfer of power in Washington, DC, Trump isn’t dead, but the best hope for the future of America and the world is that his political movement does, in fact, die an ignominious death.

Trump, of course, didn’t create Trumpism; like pretty much everything else in his life, he stole it.

When Fred Koch poured his money into the John Birch Society to protest the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision in 1954, helping fund billboards across America proclaiming that Chief Justice Earl Warren must be impeached, the scar of racism that was etched into our nation at our founding entered a new turning of our political cycles. …

Thanks to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Supreme Court has become a menace, and only Congress and President Biden can fix it.

In 2010 conservatives on the Supreme Court, over the loud and clear objections of members of the moderate and liberal minority, doubled down on earlier suggestions that corporations are not “dead and soulless creations of the law,” as one of America’s first Supreme Court justices called them, but actually “persons” and, as such, have access to those rights we find in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Today’s Supreme Court just chose to hear a new case that may radically expand those “corporate rights” by letting corporations conceal the people funding their actions in the political sphere. …