A Liberal Lives In Wisconsin

     The 2019 Virginia midterm elections are proof that your vote has consequences. Immediately after Democratic Governor Ralph Northam gained control of the Virginia legislature, a top priority became the decriminalization of cannabis possession. He signed the bill on March 8th, 2020, and decriminalization went into effect on July 1st, 2020.      On March 25th, 2021, Governor Northam received a bill that would have legalized possession and dispensary sales of marijuana effective July 1st, 2024. Northam recommended the bill be amended to legalize marijuana possession by July 1st, 2021, and dispensary sales by July 1st, 2024; keeping possession illegal until 2024 would have resulted in thousands of unnecessary arrests.      The legislature took up the revised bill on April 7th, 2021, and after a tie-breaking vote was cast by the lieutenant governor, the law went into effect with the governor's recommendations. The total number of marijuana-related arrests declined by 90 percent with

     Let's get one thing straight: there is no "labor shortage." In a free-market economy, people reserve the right to not work for multibillion-dollar corporations that pay their workers starvation wages. The COVID pandemic made it clear that all that work we needed to isolate ourselves from our families to do was a construct that was used to control the proletariat. People are demanding to be treated like human beings, and companies are going to hurt until they get the pay and benefits they deserve. It is working. Almost 250,000 workers are striking, the anti-work movement went from 625,000 members to 950,000 in just a month and should pass 1 million promptly and 1.25 million as the new year comes upon us, and wages are seeing their largest increase in 40 years as the functional minimum wage is on track to pass $15 per hour.      Rather than raising wages, employers are whining and pointing the finger while demanding more and more out of trapped workers, which only make

       Micah, Micah, Micah... I don't know where to start with you, in part because I've never heard of you until today. D-list actors are the worst for multiple reasons. They have egos bigger than any famous people without any reason for it, and their mediocrity allows them to fly under the radar when they do bad things. Today, I think we have reason to make Micah Beals infamous.      Born in 1984 in Michigan and active in New York since 2005, Beals goes by the stage name "Micah Femia," and he has had a few minor roles in CSI: New York (2005), Parks and Recreation (2011), and Pop Star  (2013). He has also played leading roles in The Lion, The Witch, The Wardrobe and The Wizard of Oz for The Village Theatre Group and Circle Theatre Company.       Apparently, Micah has a long history of violent white supremacy. He has previously appeared on the cesspool of hate-filled conspiracy theories known as Infowars , and he was in Washington, D.C. on the night of the January 6

     The number five is of growing importance in the fight to end the COVID-19 pandemic. In my last writing on COVID, I laid out an initiative aiming to get 83.33 percent, or five out of six, Americans fully vaccinated, which would end the pandemic in the U.S. If we do not achieve this, the U.S. will likely suffer a fifth wave of coronavirus, which could push the death toll over a million people for the first time in history and make it deadlier than almost all U.S. wars put together. On another note, COVID is currently on track to be AT LEAST the fifth-deadliest event in WORLD HISTORY.      Right now, we have reason to be hopeful. As of today, the U.S. has hit two important milestones for COVID vaccination. The elderly are leading the fight, with 97 percent having gotten at least the first dose. However, as of today, more than 80 percent of Americans over 18 have gotten the first dose of the vaccine. 70 percent have been fully vaccinated. 70 percent have at least gotten the first dose

       On October 28th, 2009, Barack Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard And James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named after two men brutally murdered in separate instances in 1998 because of their sexual orientation. The law expanded existing hate crime legislation to include gender, disability status, sexual orientation, and sexual identity; removed requisites that made hate crime cases harder to prosecute; appropriated funding to prosecute these offenses; and mandated the FBI track statistics on hate crimes based on sexual orientation and identity (statistics on women and the disabled were already tracked at the time).      This law has resulted in dozens of successful prosecutions, including a group of men who ran a Hispanic man off the road, a group of men who branded a Swastika into a disabled Navajo man, a family that killed a gay man, and a man who killed his transgender ex-girlfriend.

     The Black Lives Matter movement underwent a major revolution in 2020. It went from being a movement of simply protesting to end police brutality across American to a movement to dismantle systemic racism. Murders of young black men and women went from being tragedies met with raw anger and mourning to rallying cries for change. The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are on track to end carotid holds and no-knock warrants, respectively, even as Floyd's killers, at least, continue their felony criminal cases.      Like I said, it's not just police brutality. Ahmaud Arbery was lynched by three white men driving a rusty truck with a Confederate flag license plate who called him the N-word and his murder was covered up by a corrupt DA. After this horrifying incident, Georgia, one of only four states in the nation without hate crime laws and Arbery's home, signed hate crime legislations adding modifiers to increase penalties for crimes based on race, sex, religion, et

     Remember John Eastman? He spoke at the "Save America" rally on January 6th, which was immediately followed by the insurrection at the Capitol. Eastman was a member of Trump's "Kitchen Cabinet 2.0" in the final weeks of his presidency, which also included the likes of MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell. His memo, which claimed that Mike Pence had the authority to refuse to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, was one of the main pieces of the insurrection puzzle. Eastman is facing the penalties he deserves. He resigned from Chapman University, where he taught law, a week later. Now, this month, bar officials are reviewing whether to revoke his license to practice law entirely. He's not just walking back his beliefs about January 6th, he's running them back. He has since admitted he believed there was no way Trump could have remained president. Still, contrary to his beliefs, that probably won't be enough to save this Rudy Giuliani-wannab

     A brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman, John Sherman of Ohio was one of the more major politicians in the years between the Civil War and World War One. The author of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act, he would craft much of the legislation passed under President Benjamin Harrison, whose other achievements included establishing the Appellate Court system, bringing six states into the United States, revamping the U.S. Navy, providing bonuses to Civil War veterans, and establishing the first national forests. The Sherman Antitrust Act would be used 11 times by Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley combined before being used over 40 times by Theodore Roosevelt and over 70 times by President William Howard Taft.      By 1914, it was obvious that the law needed an update, however, and this came when President Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act on October 25th, 1914. The law built on the Sherman Act by expanding the activities prohibited to

       Bill Clinton's presidency was unique for a reason that is rarely discussed: he was president from 1993 to 2001, bridging the 20th century into the 21st. More than just an eight-year span of meaningless dates, his time in the White House saw the first major legislation relating to and implementation of the internet, which, in today's society, is a world its own and a luxury few remember a time without.      On October 21st, 1994, he launched Whitehouse.gov, the official presidential website, which has been updated regularly and served as a reliable source of news and policy information for the public relating to every subsequent president.       On February 8th, 1996, he signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which provided the first overhaul of telecommunications in 60 years, including internet for the first time. On June 30th, 2000, he signed the E-Signatures Bill, which allowed for the acceptance of electronic signatures in interstate commerce. These two laws opene

  The Capitol insurrection was the worst attack on America's democracy since the Civil War and the worst attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. I always hear people bring up 9/11 when this point is made. Nobody is disputing the tragedy of at least 3,000 deaths. However, what most people don't understand is that no foreign threat will ever break America. After 9/11, Americans came together and America's allies rallied around America; our approval rating as a nation hit a record high of nearly 75 percent, indicating that even many people who call our adversarial nations home felt for our suffering. The only thing that has ever come close to breaking America is internal division and extremism, and that is why the January 6th attack was so dangerous.      From almost going to war with Iran to COVID-19 becoming the deadliest event in U.S. history and causing an economic collapse to Trump's first and second impeachments to the Black Lives Matter protests to the record t