By Michael Tomasky

The last Congress, the 117th, which sat from January 2021 through January 2023, was controlled by Democrats on both sides of the Capitol. These lawmakers worked in concert with a new Democratic President, so naturally, we witnessed an unusual amount of legislative activity.

Wanna guess how much? The 117th Congress passed, and Joe Biden signed, 362 laws. Now it practically goes without saying that a hefty majority of these were small-bore matters—relatively inconsequential in policy terms. There were the proverbial post office renamings, the Harlem Hellfighters Congressional Gold Medal Act, the Big Cat Public Safety Act, and the like. Still, an unusually high number of them were very consequential indeed: the American Rescue Plan, the hard infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act, and several more. They were aimed at helping people and businesses through the pandemic, solving aching public needs, creating jobs, reshaping industrial policy, and more. Whatever else you want to say about them, these people were earning their paychecks.

The 118th Congress—the current one; the one that opened with the clown show where Kevin McCarthy needed 15 ballots to be elected Speaker by his own party—has not been quite the hive of productivity that its predecessor was. So far, seven months into its term, it has passed, and the president has signed, 12 bills. They’re on track, if they can possibly keep up this scorching pace for the next 17 months, to pass maybe 44, even 45 or 46 bills!

And what laws they are! They’ve renamed a veterans’ clinic. They’ve toasted the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps commemorative coin. Oh, but it hasn’t all been ceremonial. They’ve also pressed forward with the racism for which they are so widely and justly known, notably the bill that revoked part of Washington D.C.’s criminal code—McCarthy called it soft on crime, and Biden quasi-reluctantly signed it to avoid that age-old tag. The only law of any real consequence was the increase in the debt limit, on which the supposedly out-of-it Biden ran circles around the supposedly spry Speaker.

As far as improving the lives of working- and middle-class people, McCarthy’s majority has done absolutely nothing. But by God, don’t call them the “Do-Nothing Congress.” Oh, no! They’ve done stuff. For example, they’ve investigated Hunter and Joe Biden over, under, sideways, and down.

I wonder how many public dollars James Comer and Jim Jordan, respective chairs of the House’s Oversight and Judiciary committees, have spent trying to prove crimes that probably don’t exist but that they insist, every week, will be pitilessly exposed for all the world to see in just a little while, you’ll see—you’ll all see. In fact, Democrats: Why not tell the world how much they’re spending? I’d assume you have access to the basic budgetary materials. How about a Biden Goose Chase Clock toting up the taxpayer dollars being wasted on this sham?

Those two just get more ridiculous every week. Last week, you’ll recall, Comer’s committee had a closed-door session with yet another star witness, Devon Archer, a former Hunter Biden business partner who was supposedly poised to finally blow the lid off the whole thing. “The walls are closing in on the Bidens,” Comer crowed on Newsmax Monday night.

In the end, Archer’s testimony—taken that afternoon, released later in the week—did nothing of the sort. Which Comer might have known if he’d even bothered to show up at his own hearing, which he did not do!

As for Jordan—well, his special new “deep state” committee or whatever it’s called has been an even bigger abuse of the taxpayer dollar. Just Google “Jim Jordan deep state committee” and look at the headlines: “Inside Jim Jordan’s Disastrous Search for a ‘Deep State’ Whistleblower”; “Jordan’s ‘weaponization’ panel is all conclusions, no evidence”; “Jim Jordan’s ‘Weaponization’ Committee Is Misfiring.”

But hey, don’t be too hard on him. He may have other matters on his mind. In late June, the Supreme Court decided that a lawsuit brought by former Ohio State University wrestlers against a team doctor who was found by an investigation to have sexually abused 177 young men from the 1970s to the 1990s can move forward. Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach during part of the period in question; he has always denied any knowledge of the abuse. Two former wrestlers, however, in a complaint to the Supreme Court, allege that Jordan was aware of the behavior of “Dr. Cough” and did nothing: “Because Coach Hellickson, Assistant Coach Jordan, and the athletic department treated Dr. Strauss’s behavior as acceptable, John Doe 23 believed there was nothing he could do to address his discomfort with Dr. Strauss.” CNN reported back in 2020 that six ex-athletes charged that Jordan knew.

This is one of the reasons I laugh these days when I hear Republicans say of Democrats, as McCarthy and others did during the D.C. criminal code debate, that Democrats are soft on crime.

And oh yeah, the other (and main) reason: Donald Trump. Today’s Republicans are the softest-on-crime bunch of legislators in the history of the republic. They wanted, until they got hooted out of town for it, to “expunge” Trump’s impeachments! I’m putting that in scare quotes because there’s actually no such thing as an “impeachment expungement,” but you know, there was no such thing as holding family members guilty for someone’s crimes until Stalin decreed it, either.

The GOP’s lies are operatic, bald-faced, and so nakedly and obviously untrue that one experiences a kind of wonderment just watching these people actually go out in public before cameras and say these things. Here was McCarthy, for example, shortly before Trump’s arraignment: “I could say the same thing that Hillary Clinton says about her election that she lost.… I can say the same thing about those in the Democratic Party from the leadership on down about George Bush not winning, that Al Gore did. But were any of them prosecuted? Were any of them put in jail?”

I mean … what?! Do I even have to answer that? Clinton made some noises about votes being off but conceded to Trump the day after the election. Gore fought the 2000 outcome to the Supreme Court, as anyone would have, but the court issued Bush v. Gore on December 12 and Gore conceded on December 13. Neither egged on a riot on our most sacred national building (a riot that McCarthy denounced at the time himself!). I can’t help but think that when these guys and their handlers sit around dreaming up what they’ll say next, they just howl to one another: “We can say anything—the mainstream press, drunk on their weird notion of ‘objectivity,’ can’t really challenge us because if they do, we can accuse them of showing liberal bias, and the gullible idiots on our side will be our echo chamber!”

I’d call these people a joke, but it’s far worse and more frightening than that. They are a menace. Congress has been littered with racists and drunks and bribe-takers throughout its history. But it has never been this bursting at the seams with people like this. They lie about everything. They denounce and seek to destroy our system of government. They use their power to conduct taxpayer-funded fishing expeditions for which they have no evidence, where they’re just praying they get a bite so that, in classic fascist-projection fashion, they can accuse Biden of that which they know Trump to be guilty.

And as for trying to do anything to improve the lives of the American people—i.e., doing their jobs? Please. Don’t be naïve. To their mind, American people don’t need health care or wages or a cleaner planet. They need tax cuts and guns and protection from those 100 or so transgender high school female athletes (yes, in the whole country) and, most of all, Donald Trump as their President for life. Come to think of it, the fewer laws these maniacs pass, the better.

For anyone who questions President Biden’s statement  in his SOTU address last night, claiming some Republicans want to sunset Social Security & Medicare, the source is linked here.

While serving as Chairman of the Senate Republican Campaign, Sen. Rick Scott published the 12-Point Rescue America plan. In Point 6, he says, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Federal legislation includes Social Security, Medicare, veteran benefits, housing and food supplementation programs, etc.

Republicans consider many federal programs to be examples of “socialism.” If in power, do we really think the GOP would pass them again?

The Republicans, a new House, and Healthcare in the U.S.

When I wrote and first published this post, the House of Representatives was poised to elect a new Speaker since the Republicans took control and Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi lost the gavel. They did, but now need to do it again, since they voted out the Speaker they elected then. Here is a look at their party platform in regard to healthcare, a topic they are not focused on now for multiple reasons.

Based on the results of the 2022 midterm election, Republicans are the majority party in the United States House of Representatives for the next two years. That means there will be a new Republican Speaker of the House, who is second in line of succession should the President be incapacited. It is likely any House decisions regarding healthcare will follow the views expressed in the Republican…

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Why they deserve to lose.

September 12, 2022

Political polls, including the Republican-friendly ones like Rasmussen and Chamber of Commerce, are now reporting an unambiguous shift toward the Democrats. Why is this? Reasons include the massive anger of women at the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The disdain for democracy that is now GOP orthodoxy. The flock of inept and toxic candidates the Party is currently foisting on the electorate. Plus, of course, the mounting evidence of Donald Trump's ongoing crime spree, his pilfering of government secrets and likely indictment.

But there's one further explanation for why voters are souring on Republicans. And that's their bizarre insistence on opposing any legislation that might be the least bit popular. For example, a Gallup poll conducted in May reported that 71% of Americans support legal same-sex marriage. At the same time, YouGov and The Economist released polling data showing most Americans also favor free access to birth control. Yet about three quarters of the House Republicans will reliably vote against ensuring a right to gay marriage or contraception.

In June, 192 House Republicans and 34 GOP senators voted against a Democratic bill addressing gun violence, the first such major gun safety legislation in decades. They did this despite Pew Research's finding that nearly two-thirds of US adults (64%) approve of the new law, including 32% who strongly approve, while only 21% disapprove.

Or, consider last month's Inflation Reduction Act. Among other things, it addresses climate change by ramping up the production of clean energy. Not a single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for it. Yet polling reveals the new law is extremely popular: 73% of likely voters support it (41% strongly so) and only 21% are opposed. Data for Progress even found that most Republican voters backed its provisions.

Survey after survey has found huge majorities favoring such proposals as Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, raising taxes on corporations and the rich, expanding Social Security, abolishing the Electoral College, and reforming campaign finance laws. Yet Republicans steadfastly resist any of these notions, preferring instead to call for suppressing voting, restricting women's rights and cutting taxes for the rich.

According to the latest Monmouth University poll, the public prefers that Democrats control Congress rather than Republicans by seven percentage points. Even Mitch McConnell openly worries the GOP will not win back the Senate. However, one key reason for this always seems to elude GOPers. And that's their continuing indifference to the wishes of the American people. Except for those who are wealthy. Or incorporated.

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Welp CPAC was a fucking nightmare this year

Eradicated. They’re just using words like eradicated now. With whooping fucking applause.

The thing about the "official" CR Reddit is that it was founded by the same person who founded the Fandom Critical Role wiki. At the time of founding in late 2015 he was 18, and in my experiences with him through the Fandom wiki I found his management and personnel skills to be...shall we say, understandably lacking, given that he's a programmer in his early 20s. He also stopped keeping up with the show with the end of the Vox Machina campaign if not before; and I think was just generally entirely unprepared for Critical Role becoming more than what it was in late 2015 in terms of actually having large fandoms in need of serious moderation in spaces like Reddit. He also equated being a frequent contributor to the Fandom wiki (cannot personally speak to the Reddit) as being a worthy moderator to the point of asking someone whom a more competent admin had once admonished for outright plagiarism if they were interested in being an admin. This persisted, despite, at the time of his leaving, him and one of the other moderators of the Fandom wiki having held those positions while being almost entirely absent from editing for years.

So anyway I say all this because as result of those communities being created by someone young, inexperienced, and lacking in the awareness to realize these limitations, these issues have propagated. Moderators in a lot of fan-run Critical Role spaces have been selected not on the basis of any merit or community consensus but rather by sheer volume or by ingratiating themselves to the previous mods. From personal experience on the Fandom wiki and from reliable hearsay about the Reddit it seems that they tend to embrace their privileges as mods while eschewing their responsibilities. I also find that there's an ongoing hangover in both these spaces of not really knowing how to deal with the fact that Critical Role is still rolling nearly six years after the end of the Vox Machina campaign, because a lot of these people were ultimately fans only of Vox Machina and more generally Critical Role as it was during that era. They're still acting as though the cast is very directly involved with the fandom and are the final word on various decisions, as they were in the very early days, even though that's long since ended. This in turn is I think behind the knee-jerk resistance to change - moving away from the old chapter system on the Fandom wiki and even implementing basic infrastructural changes to accomodate the fact that there are now multiple campaigns, for example, was met with pretty significant pushback. They still really struggle to cover anything that's not Exandria canon because, well, in late 2015 no one could have predicted Candela Obscura. And on the Reddit side, I think that's why changes that are purely production-related and should not affect your enjoyment of the show as a work of fiction (pre-taping, merch, having other people GM one-shots sometimes, taking longer breaks) are similarly treated as harbingers of doom.

And, that in turn is why I suspect the other CR-related subreddits that have since sprung up have such a reputation for being all negativity - it's people who got understandably fed up with the ridiculous rules and culture of the first Reddit, so their roots are in venting, which is valid. But it can be very difficult for a community built on venting to stop being only that, especially under Reddit's structure, and they're also still largely influenced by that Reddit and share and propagate those biases towards what the show was in 2015-2017.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois spoke on the House floor for the final time on Thursday after declining to seek re-election.

Kinzinger, a member of the January 6 committee and one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection following the Capitol riot, has emerged as a key critic of the GOP from within the party.

In his farewell speech, Kinzinger declared that "our democracy is not functioning" and said Republicans have "embraced lies and deceit." Despite not mentioning Trump by name, he made numerous references to the assault on the Capitol.

"Republicans once believed that limited government meant lower taxes and more autonomy," he said. "Today, limited government means inciting violence against government officials."

He also criticized the leadership of the Republican National Committee, which used the phrase "legitimate political discourse" as it moved to censure him and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming for their participation in the January 6 committee.

"Our leaders today belittle, and in some cases justify attacks on the US Capitol as 'legitimate political discourse,'" Kinzinger added. "We shelter the ignorant, the racist, who only stoke anger and hatred to those who are different than us."

Kinzinger also criticized Democrats for helping to boost election-denying candidates in Republican primaries this year in order to produce weaker general-election nominees, a controversial tactic that some top Democrats publicly defended.

"To my Democratic colleagues, you must too bear the burden of our failures. Many of you have asked me: where are all the good Republicans?" he said. "Over the past two years, Democratic leadership had the opportunity to stand above the fray."

"Instead, they poured millions of dollars into the campaigns of MAGA Republicans, the same candidates Biden called a national security threat, to ensure these good Republicans did not make it out of their respective primaries," Kinzinger continued. "This is no longer politics as usual. This is not a game."

Sunset Legislation of Federal Programs Clearly Outlined in Rick Scott's 12-Point America Rescue Plan

Republicans consider many federal programs to be examples of “socialism.” And they hate socialism. If in power, do we really think the #GOP would keep programs like #SocialSecurity?

President Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) address last night was outstanding. I especially enjoyed how he turned the tables on Republican hecklers who called him a liar about GOP plans to “sunset” Social Security. Phenomenal! The “Sunset” Source But for anyone who may question President Biden’s statement in his SOTU address, claiming some Republicans want to “sunset” Social Security &…

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What the Republicans plan for your healthcare

Even though we don't have a national election for president until November of next YEAR, there will be a Republican candidate debate next WEEK. There are now 8, possibly 13, eligible candidates for the debate. This post reviews what their party platform says about health care. I wonder how much of it they will debate? So far the campaign rhetoric seems to focus more on personality than positions.

update August 16, 2023 This post was published in 2020 when the Republican Party renewed its 2016 party platform and nominated Donald Trump to run for reelection. In 2022 I published a series of posts reviewing the platform’s healthcare policies and proposals. Here’s a link to one of them. The Republican Party’s views on marriage, family, and gender We affirm the Constitution’s fundamental…

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Hey, hey dude I hate to be the bearer of bad news but uh, your boy is being killed in your own graphic. Like he's actively being murdered....yea idk what to tell you dude he's like Dead dead there

Here’s some ridiculous horseshit in Texas

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"These books come from a Missouri public library," Valentina Gomez said in a video posted to social media site X, formerly Twitter, which has since received over 431,000 views. "When I am in office, they will burn."

The only thing that surprised me is that she didn't use an AR-15.