A Liberal Lives In Wisconsin

     I recently read a periodical in which it was stated that a clear "Biden Doctrine" was emerging and that it could best be described as "America First Light." I've never seen a more incorrect assessment of foreign policy, and I felt it necessary to rebuke this accusation.      Donald Trump's "America First" policy was undoubtedly an absolute disaster. He left the World Health Organization, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and countless other agreements designed to protect Americans and bolster the economy while cutting off relations with the Palestinian Authority, slashing refugee admissions, trying to build a wall and separating families while cutting off aid to Latin America, banning Muslims, halting advocacy for human rights and environmental protection, and putting off our NATO allies. His "US-Mexico-Canada Agreement," the "New NAFTA," was only moderately different from th

     It hasn't been all bad news for voting rights in the United States. We all know about attempts at voter suppression passed by the GOP as a direct response to the conspiracy theories surrounding the crushing defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia have already enacted such bills. That is why, alongside the Build Back Better Agenda, voting rights is the number one policy priority in Congress, with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, For The People Act, and Right To Vote Act having already been proposed. However, some states have actually expanded voting rights. Washington, Hawaii, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, North Carolina, and Maine have expanded mail-in voting and eased voter registration restrictions, with voting rights bills proposed in several other states.       The

     America is about the pass the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This represents the largest investment in infrastructure in nearly a century, allocating $600 billion in new funds to roads, bridges, airports, railways, broadband, clean drinking water, and climate-friendly transportation, or a total of $1.2 trillion over eight years.      This is a major victory for Joe Biden for a number of reasons. It represents a bipartisan infrastructure program that Biden has advocated for since his time as vice president, and it will also serve as a stimulus for job creation in a time when jobs are sorely needed. Certainly not least of all, it will tend to an issue Americans on both side of the aisle see the need to address. America needs more than $2 trillion in infrastructure repairs, and, while this investment is significant, it should not be the end of President Biden's work on infrastructure.      Earlier this year, New York announced a $300 billion investment in infrastructure,

     I've said it before, and I'll say it again: $6 trillion will mean we have built back better. If we can end the COVID-19 pandemic, restore the economy, and overhaul our education, employment, healthcare, and infrastructure systems, we can look back with pride at having brought the United States from a new low to a new high. We are on track to do just that, and well before the end of this year. We will still have Congress in 2022, but we will not likely be able to make any investments on the same scale as the $6 trillion Build Back Better Agenda. So, what to do?      Progressives like to point out that we are the party of the New Deal and Great Society, and this is the perfect time to remind people we have not forgotten that. We have a clear vision to replicate the New Deal to fit this moment; 2021, the good and the bad, will be historic. Why not take a page from the Great Society and make 2022 a landmark year in American history? Lyndon. B. Johnson cut poverty in half, and

     It has been encouraging to see the Department of Justice take steps to address police misconduct. Just days ago, the DOJ gave local police departments who assist in federal police investigations permission to release footage of police-involved violence to the public in a major victory for police transparency. This comes as Congress tries to reach a compromise on police reform legislation under the framework of the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act and activists call on President Biden to keep his promise to create a national policing commission. The most impactful moves made this year have been the pattern-or-practice investigations launched in Minneapolis and Louisville in April and Phoenix in August. In cities where settlements are reached, the rate of police violence is cut by more than 60 percent on average.      Huntsville, Alabama, is one of the largest cities in Alabama, a red state with traditional views of policing. This has allowed some gruesome, gross violations of c

     Were it not for FOX News, we might be much closer to being out of this pandemic than we are now. FOX fired up political passions over what should be an apolitical issue-- staying home when possible, wearing a mask, and maintaining a distance of six feet. They made Trump surviving COVID seem the status quo instead of the miracle gifted by doctors and drugs it was. They promoted and continue to promote Ron Deathsantis and Greg Abbott as "geniuses" as the South is about to lose its healthcare system thanks to the virus, and they also promoted using sheep medicine to own the libs and prove that they're not sheep. Whose fault is this clear indicator that Republican rhetoric, bans on mask and vaccine mandates, and blatant misinformation are killing people. Well, last week Joe Biden had no control over Florida, according to DeSantis and FOX, but now he's to blame for everything.      This is the same network that embraced Donald Trump's election conspiracies, which

     The Minnesota GOP is "in ruins," in the words of a former board member. State GOPs in places like Oregon, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana have already had to undergo their own reckonings. (In the case of the Beaver State, GOP politican Mike Nearman led an assault on the state capitol before pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges, being the first state lawmaker there to be expelled from his seat, and being banned from holding it again.)       It looked good for the Minnesota GOP in 2020. Donald Trump managed to turn Minnesota into a swing state, and the GOP hoped to portray themselves as the "law-and-order party" at the epicenter of the Floyd protests. Then, in November, Joe Biden won Minnesota by seven points. With urban voters being heavily Democratic and rural voters heavily Republican, suburban voters, especially in the Midwest, have been the key to winning elections; this is what allowed Trump to win the electoral (if not the popular) vote in 2016. S

     Ty Garbin's life was already one of mediocrity and failure, and maybe that has something to do with why he decided to try to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, in October 2020. He was born in Wayne County but lived in a trailer park in Livingston County at the time of his arrest, working as an airplane mechanic. His father was an Army veteran who, according to the younger Garbin, beat him as a child and continued to abuse an adult man somehow.      Garbin became involved with the violent alt-right Wolverine Watchmen when he met them at a Second Amendment rally in Lansing. Throughout the summer of 2020, fanned by Donald Trump's vitriol against the "woman from Michigan," Garbin offered his home for weapons training, stalked Whitmer's summer home, offered to paint his boat in a planned lakeside kidnapping, and suggested blowing up a local bridge to distract law enforcement.      It was all in extensive text records, and Garbin decided to change h

     Franklin D. Roosevelt's story is bigger than World War II, just as President Biden's story is far different from that of the second Roosevelt, a cousin of the bold TR and a member of one of New York's wealthiest and most powerful families. FDR served in various positions, including the 1920 Democratic nominee for VP and the assistant secretary of the navy, but he earned his fame for his bold response to the Great Depression as governor of New York. Biden, on the other hand, has served in politics since 1971, as a county councilman who quickly rose to become a high-ranking senator and serve as second-in-command under President Obama. However, the two have some similarities, including making it to the nation's highest office in spite of debilitating medical conditions. The two wives were and are both educated women, with Eleanor Roosevelt famously giving birth to modern human rights and Jill Biden being a PhD college educator who was the first second lady and first f

     On August 24th, 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Animal Welfare Act, a landmark piece of animal welfare legislation. Governing the treatment of all warm-blooded animals, this act requires research labs to receive federal licensing and inspection and sets standards of care for the animals used as subjects. All acts regarding lab animal welfare since then have been amendments to the Animal Welfare Act. While the act was far from complete and comprehensive, it launched the mainstream movement against testing and changed the legislative debate on animal welfare forever.

       Gretchen Whitmer turns 50 today. Few have made so massive a mark and caused such a stir in their home state and at the national level by this age. In 2020, she made national headlines when she gave the Democratic response to the 2020 State of the Union Address, causing Donald Trump to refer to her as "the woman from Michigan" and resulting in an attempt by right-wing terrorists to kidnap her. A prelude to the violence perpetrated by Trump supporters after the 2020 election, it should not have come as a surprise.      When she instituted a mask mandate and a stay-at-home order to contain COVID-19, the Republican legislature stripped her of her powers and sent an angry mob with assault rifles to storm the Michigan State Capitol. She has been able to make some progress in her home state, securing billions of dollars in new infrastructure spending.       Why the anger? Male fragility runs the right. Whitmer served in the Michigan State Senate and was the first woman electe

       Bill Clinton's loss of control of Congress from 1995 to 2000 didn't prevent him from implementing some major reforms to help middle-class Americans through both the use of executive power and through compromises with GOP lawmakers.      On August 22nd, 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. While the law incorporated conservative goals by placing a limit on legal immigrants receiving benefits and by imposing a five-year maximum, it reduced the number of people on welfare while continuing to decrease the number of impoverished people, increasing effectiveness with state oversight, providing increases in the child care benefits, and enhancing enforcement of child support.      For the people who were working, things got quite a bit easier. The day before, President Clinton signed into law a 21 percent increase in the minimum wage, or 90 cents, from $4.25 an hour to $5.15 an hour by September 1st, 1997. That would be the equival

     The Voting Rights Act of 1965 worked. Even over the filibuster of Southern senators who claimed that voting is a state matter while suppressing African-American voters, the federal government was given the power to enforce the right to vote in 15 specific states, among countless other provisions. It was this provision, though, that was struck down in the Supreme Court case Shelby v. Holder  in 2013, essentially giving states free reign to pass restrictive voter suppression laws and giving impetus to the modern fight for voting rights.      These are the laws that are being passed and/or proposed in virtually every state across the nation. Based on the unproven (and, as a matter of fact, disproven) lie that Donald Trump was cheated of a second term, states like Arizona, Georgia, and Iowa have passed laws giving partisan boards control over electors and election boards, making minor technical voting violations felonies, strictly limiting early voting and voting by mail, banning same

     Ultimately, the January 6th Capitol insurrection failed in its immediate goal, to stop the certification of the 2020 election results confirming Joe Biden as president with a Democratic-led Senate and House of Representatives. What posed a more worrisome potential consequence (aside from nine deaths), and, ultimately, proved to be the case, was that it was the first breach of the U.S. Capitol in decades and opened the door to other attacks, not without the support of the Republican Party's rhetoric.       On April 2nd, Noah Green, a mentally-ill man with apparent sympathy for the Nation of Islam, killed Officer Billy Evans and assaulted another Capitol police officer before being killed himself. Last week, however, the GOP and its QAnon cult was responsible for two mass shootings: in the UK, the 23-year-old QAnon believer, Trump supporter, and Incel Jake Davison killed five people and then himself in the first mass shooting in the nation in a decade; in California, Matthew Tay

       Although the projects were canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to coronavirus, Jimmy Carter has otherwise made building homes with Habitat for Humanity an annual mission of his retirement. Nearly a century old, he has nonetheless organized volunteers to build 5,000 homes around the world since 1984. In the United States, Canada, Mexico, Haiti, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, Nepal, South Africa, Hungary, and numerous other nations, these homes have helped tens of thousands of people have a warm, safe place to live, specifically in communities affected by poverty, conflict, and natural disasters. Even when afflicted with brain cancer and while recovering from falls, Carter has made human rights and dignity his primary focus in life. Thank you, President Carter!

     President Clinton has a lot to be proud of on his 75th birthday. The childhood tragedies William Jefferson Blythe endured had no negative bearing as he went on to Oxford, became the attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, and met President Kennedy, climbing the ladder that led him to the White House from 1993 to 2001.      During his administration, he created more jobs than any president in history, balanced the budget by taxing the wealthy, implemented NAFTA, proposed a universal healthcare system, negotiated the Good Friday Agreement, brought an end to the ethnic cleansing and war in Bosnia and Kosovo, raised the minimum wage while reforming welfare, cut crime by a third, launched major initiatives that cut teen pregnancy and smoking, saved the Mexican economy with a low-interest loan, restored democracy to Haiti, banned chemical weapons and proposed a total nuclear ban, negotiated the Wye River Memorandum and the Oslo Accords, ushered in the internet with telecommunica

       Marjorie Taylor Greene is one crazy conspiracy away from getting kicked off of social media for as long as she holds elected office. I give her a week, tops. From the first emergence of Greene's crazy altercations and beliefs in February to her falsely claiming that Guam was a "foreign land" to this woman with an Adam's apple losing a flag battle of neighboring congressional offices over transgender rights, she has, quite simply, failed and lost.      Earlier this summer, Greene, who believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory (which claims that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are ringleaders of a Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophile cabal), went on a tour with literal sex trafficker and fellow Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz of Florida. Their trouble started out in California, where, not surprisingly, venues who found out Greene and Gaetz wanted to appear their dropped the duo like hot cakes. Upon her return to Washington, D.C., she decided to claim the violent m

     Woodrow Wilson was certainly fond of women. Having lost his wife of nearly 30 years and the mother of his three children, Ellen, in 1914, he proclaimed the first Mother's Day that year. On women's suffrage, he remained quiet for much of his life. Personally for it for over a decade, he said it should be a state matter in the 1912 and 1916 presidential elections. By midway through his second term, however, he was vocally for the right of women to vote, speaking before Congress in 1918 urging them to pass the nineteenth amendment until the Senate ultimately passed it in 1919 and it went into effect in on August 18th, 1920, 101 years ago today.      Wilson usually gets all the credit, and he certainly deserves a small amount. However, the suffrage movement needs to be a reminder that Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Belva Lockwood, Victoria Woodhull, Harriet Tubman, and countless thousands of others fought for nearly 50 years

     Almost exactly a year ago, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who became a household name in politics for becoming perhaps the biggest thorn in Donald Trump's side and for putting the nails in the coffin of Andrew Cuomo's career, picked another titanic target: the National Rifle Association. This is the single largest gun lobbying group in America, buying off politicians big and small to defeat everything from major gun law overhauls to even bipartisan gun safety measures with ads and endorsements catering to their trigger-happy following of buffoons.      Former CEO Wayne LaPierre and numerous other officials in the group-- including the treasurer, CFO, executive vice president, and general counsel-- engaged in gross and pervasive financial misconduct, according to Attorney General James, by siphoning nearly $65 million for personal use in just three years, or more than 10 percent of the group's income. The NRA claimed they were being persecuted for their politi

       I'm watching the news right now. I'm watching the Taliban regain control of Afghanistan. I've seen a lot of horrible things around the world, and I have learned to view things not emotionally, but factually. I'm thinking right now, about the United States.      Less than a month from now, it will have been exactly 20 years since the September 11th terrorist attacks killed 3,000 people, and in October, it will have been 20 years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. It goes back a lot further than that, to the Cold War: Afghanistan was a playground for American-backed Islamic fundamentalists to fight Soviet invaders. There was the Soviet-Afghan War and then three civil wars, with the Taliban holding control of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Then, of course, came the forever wars. 43 years of fighting have killed more than two million people.      Taliban-led Afghanistan was hell: acts of genocide, ties to the al-Qaeda ins

     America's census results were not what anyone expected yesterday, and it provides some seeming bad news for Democrats in the short term and good news in the long term. The bad news is that Republicans could gain 0 to 10 seats in the 2022 midterm election; they only need five to switch the House of Representatives.       However, demographically, Democrats have a good chance in the long-term, if we play our cards right. The percentage of Americans who are white fell for the first time in history, and by a lot: 8.6 percent in a decade. Just 57 percent of Americans are white, which means that the idea of "minorities," which is, to begin with, a construct of the 16th century, will no longer be relevant by 2040 or 2050. In Georgia, for example, just 50.1 percent of citizens are white. The number of Americans living in urban areas in which Democrats do well skyrocketed across Southern states, with Hispanic and black Americans driving the population growth.      For America

       On August 14th, 1935, the United States joined the rest of the developed world when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, a landmark piece of legislation that drastically cut poverty rates among the elderly with the Social Security system.      Part of his "New Deal," Roosevelt signed the law with public support to allow the elderly to retire with dignity. Its constitutionality was upheld in two Supreme Court cases in 1937.

     The Child Tax Credit has existed for years, but the American Rescue Plan Act was the largest expansion of this tax cut for the middle class in American history. It increased the amount from $2,000 per child under 17 to $3,600 per child under six and $3,000 per child under 17 annually while also making the payments come monthly instead of after taxes are filed and making the funds refundable for single parents making $75,000 or less and families making $150,000 or less. Now, in the American Families Plan the Senate is working on, the Child Tax Credit expansion in the American Rescue Plan Act would be made permanent. We've already seen an impact, and it was bigger than expected by even the most optimistic: this alone reduced the number of children living in poverty from 14.2 million to 5.6 million, a decline of 61 percent in just a few months. This is the largest cut to child poverty in American history.      Meanwhile, Democrats are fighting for a higher minimum wage. The funct

     Donald Trump's retirement has been nothing short of disastrous for the disgraced former president. Every prediction the MyPillow guy has made about "reinstatement" has fallen flat. Trump was exposed for what he did by the impeachment trial in February, and every prediction he made about Joe Biden being a "terrible president" has also been, not surprisingly, false. He's been sued for the Capitol riot and a number of shady business practices, his honeymoon of successful business related to his time in the White House has been replaced by near bankruptcy, and his company and its CFO have been criminally charged. That's not to mention his break with Jared Kushner, his being ranked among the worst presidents in American history, his ban from social media, his failed blog, and his preferred candidates losing primaries in Texas and Ohio. All in just over six months.      Now, Trump's glorified welfare scheme has hit a new snag, by which I mean leaked e

     Out of all the nonsense Marjorie Taylor Greene has pulled to earn herself a place in the funny farm, only the second thing she is facing consequences for (after her losing committee assignments for threatening Nancy Pelosi) is her COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation on social media, in this case Twitter. Twitter, aside from marking false information when it sees it, also punishes users who continuously violate their terms of service. They give people five strikes; Marjorie is on her fourth strike. The first is a warning without restrictions, the second and third are 12-hour account suspensions, the fourth is a seven-day account suspension, and the fifth is a permanent ban. If she decides to lie about COVID one more time, she loses her Twitter account permanently. Needless to say, if this happens, she will either try to make a scene and stick to using Parler or will face a fate like that of the other politician who got his account suspended, Donald Trump. When Twitter banned

       The Liberty Caucus in Texas is going to be wiped out by COVID-19. A photo has emerged of six of these men in a photo. Three of them (Dave Nalle, Jeff LeBlanc, and H. Scott Apley) have now died of COVID-19. The latter of the men expressed anti-vaccination and anti-mask views, promoting public mask burnings while harassing doctors and officials who promoted the vaccine. He and his wife, both equally obese, managed to find their respective tools and produce a baby, who will now grow up without a father because he decided to promote conspiracy theories and deny science. His wife has set up a GoFundMe; this is the sort of "thoughts and prayers" approach that Republicans take toward any form of human suffering, from poverty to school shootings.      And this may be the perfect demonstration of what is increasingly becoming a Republican virus. Donald Trump started off poorly, saying that COVID, or "Kung Flu/Chinavirus," as he liked to start hate crimes with, was a D

     It's a sad day in America when the Republican Party thinks it's honestly a good idea to root for China over the United States. The shirts Trump supporters love to wear reading "I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat" are no hyperbole. Conservative trolls took aim at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. This was the first Summer Olympics held after the election of Donald Trump; it would have been held while he was in the White House, but his ineptitude in handling coronavirus prevented that. I think it's for the best: President Biden supports our Olympic athletes and welcomes them with open arms.      Conservative trolls were out for blood on social media. This was the first time American Olympians kneeled, having take place after the George Floyd protests against the murder of black Americans by the police. For the party that decries "cancel culture," they canceled the Olympics awfully quickly. They think the idea of a Cambodian diver adopted by a single g

       The United Nations was established in 1945, following World War II, with the aim of promoting international security, cooperation, assistance, and lawfulness. Now including every recognized sovereign state on Earth, President Harry Truman made the United States the first nation to ratify the agreement on August 8th. While the organization had little success during Truman's own presidency, it has since been used extensively to resolve conflicts and support democracy, and it is now the most powerful intergovernmental organization in the world.

     Mike Parson, to begin with, has no soul. Hell, who can blame him? I would be upset if I were a man given the middle name "Lynn," too. The fact that he grew up to look like Lou Dobbs' brain-damaged older brother probably didn't help. Still, the way he decided to compensate for his lackluster, well, everything, is indefensible.      Just the other day, Mike Parson pardoned the McCloskeys, a gun-toting (and poorly, I might add) couple that threatened Black Lives Matter protesters walking past their home and pleaded guilty to criminal assault charges. Aside from the fact that they pleaded guilty, accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. Conveniently, or perhaps not, as Republicans turned the couple into virtual martyrs when they spoke at the 2020 RNC, Mr. McCloskey is running for Senate in 2022. I guess women still aren't allowed to do certain things in Missouri. Martyrs? They live in a mansion, dress like the uppity teens at a prep school, and served no time

     On August 7th, 2010, Elena Kagan made history as the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor. Why so historical? This was the first time that three women served on the court at the same time. Kagan was certainly suited for the lifetime assignment.      A former legal advisor to the Clinton administration, she served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009 and Solicitor General of the United States from 2009 to 2010. Nominated in May of that year, she was confirmed in August. Kagan, appointed by President Obama, is a member of the court's liberal wing, but has been seen as more of a moderate liberal.        Only 50 at the time of her confirmation and 61 today, she is one of the court's younger members. She wrote the majority opinion in Cooper v. Harris , which ruled North Carolina's racial redistricting violated the Constitution. Her writing and legal tone has been described as c

       President Biden spoke on a wide variety of topics today but with a singular focus: to increase vaccinations in order to continue economic recovery and growth and help rebuild America's middle class. He wore a tan suit, seemingly mocking the right-wing pundits who, almost exactly seven years ago, mocked President Barack Obama for doing the very same thing.      This comes on the heals of a string of victories for progressives: after Cori Bush slept outside Congress when the body failed to extend the eviction moratorium, the CDC announced a new eviction moratorium covering COVID "hotspots," or roughly 80 percent of counties and 90 percent of the U.S. population, as the White House urges state and local governments to quickly distribute more than $40 billion in housing aid funds. Then, in the same day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reversed earlier statements in which she doubted the ability of a president to cancel student loans by executive order and the White House an