As Prospect readers have doubtless noticed, we seem to have entered a golden age of breakthrough progressive proposals. Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress are advancing proposals for universal Medicare, wealth taxes and much more progressive income taxes, full employment, co-determination, more upper-bracket payroll taxes to fund more adequate Social Security payments, and a […]
TAP
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Embarrassment of Riches
The word on the street is that Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders will soon join Elizabeth Warren as economic populists contending for the Democratic nomination. There has been a lot of argument in the press and among Democratic operatives and kibitzers about whether the party is better off with a populist or “someone who can […]
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Saturday Shutdown? Then Saturday Stayaway!
The same 800,000 federal workers who went without pay last month are still in the Republicans’ crosshairs. While Congressional talks have arrived at a border-related compromise—reportedly, 55 additional miles of fencing, costing roughly one-third of Trump’s wall proposal—it’s not yet clear that Trump will accept that deal. Should he not, the federal workers and their […]
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Kevin McCarthy’s Strange Love of the Jewish People
What a pleasure to see House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy deploring anti-Semitism in the context of Representative Rashida Tlaib’s comments about AIPAC. The suddenly philo-Semitic McCarthy tweeted: “Anti-Semitic tropes have no place in the halls of Congress. It is dangerous for Democrat leadership to stay silent on this reckless language.” How very neighborly of the […]
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This Just In: Mother Teresa Will Not Be On the Ballot
Could we please get real about Elizabeth Warren and the great DNA brouhaha? The story so far: Warren listed Native ancestry on a questionnaire and on a Texas bar application. It’s already been thoroughly documented that none of this furthered her career. Every university that hired or promoted her assumed she was a white women—in […]
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The Enduring Shelf Life of Blackface Culture
If we take a step back from the individual cases of Virginia leaders Ralph Northam and Mark Herring, what’s more than a little astonishing and revolting is the persistence of blackface as an apparently normal form of dress-up as recently at the 1980s in some quadrants of American culture. This isn’t to exculpate Northam and […]
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Yes, Virginia, There is a Double Standard
For the past several decades, Republican state governments have systematically targeted black citizens to deny them the right to vote. Republican courts have colluded. We have a new Republican supreme court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who sure as hell looked as if he flat out lied under oath in the face of persuasive evidence by a […]
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State of the Union 2019
Trump doesn’t appreciate it, but Nancy Pelosi did him a big favor when she put off his State of the Union address. And now, Trump has blundered once again when he decided to go ahead with it tomorrow, before the issue of reopening the government is resolved. Trump has two challenges—tone and content—and he is […]
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Race, Economics, Identity, and the Democrats’ 2020 Nightmare
When I had my 15 minutes of fame in the summer of 2017 and managed to help Steve Bannon get himself fired, Bannon told me this: “The Democrats—the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, […]
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Steve Schmidt: Bad Judgment or Bad Faith?
Moderate Republican and campaign guru Steve Schmidt has spent the last couple of years on cable news, quite rightly decrying and disparaging Donald Trump and the Republican Party which has fallen in line behind him. Now, however, he’s emerged in a more sinister guise, as a leading adviser to Starbuck’s Howard Schultz, whose projected independent […]
