TAP

… the chasm between his rhetoric and reality—which is a government of, by, and for billionaires? This is trickier than it seems. The tax bill, as we’ve all read, is a phony. It delivers most of the benefits to the rich, and screws middle-class homeowners in high-tax states. But it does deliver modest help to […]

Maybe Trump’s crowing about the tax bill is premature. He staged a truly disgusting display at the White House, promising the legislation as “a Christmas present for the American people,” but a Christmas tree bill for lobbyists is more like it. However the true Christmas present is that the bill seems to be in trouble […]

…in the Alabama exit polls that should petrify Republicans, a few fairly jump out. A good deal of attention has been paid, and rightly so, to the level of African American turnout, which, at between 28 and 29 percent of the overall electorate, actually exceeded black turnout in 2012, when President Obama was on the […]

The election of Doug Jones portends several hopeful things. First, it shows that under the right circumstances, 30 percent of white Alabamians will vote for a Democrat, even a pro-choice Democrat; and that black anger can be turned into black voter mobilization. We may have a biracial progressive coalition yet. Second, it deepens the schisms […]

Sometimes, when you’ve been in a fight for a long time, you pick up allies so unlikely that your initial response is, “What the hell are they doing here?” So it is, apparently, with the foes of fracking, who’ve long been lobbying state and local governments, and sometimes the feds as well, to put a […]

As I wrote yesterday, Democrats made a huge mistake of both principle and tactics by throwing former Senator Al Franken under the bus. They hoped that ousting Franken would create a dramatic contrast with the Republicans’ indulgence of Roy Moore. But Moore continues to deny that he did anything wrong. Who thinks the ouster of […]

As the Republicans see it, the purpose of national government is to rein in states and localities that believe in and enforce a social contract. The GOP tax bills are still to be reconciled with each other, but both have been designed to force Democratic-controlled states to roll back their progressive taxes and, with that, […]

In recent years, The New York Times has morphed into something more than our paper of record with occasional mistakes. In its advertisements, particularly in its print editions, it has become the Weekly Shopper of the Very Rich—and not just the New York Very Rich, but, keeping up with the lifestyles of Milllionaires Without Borders, […]