The war against young people is continuing.

The ugly face of Republican authoritarianism.

Two simple changes to U.S. law, both things based in other laws that we already know and like, could solve most of America's gun violence problem:

1. Treat all semi-automatic weapons in a similar way under the same laws as fully-automatic weapons.
2. Regulate gun ownership and usage the same way we regulate car ownership and usage.

The meme that I was hearing over and over after the Florida shooting, and I was yelling at the TV, the meme that they kept promoting that was making me so crazy was, "oh, if you see something, say something - we should have been able to see this coming." As if to say that only in the United States do we have people who have mental illness problems. This is just total crap.

As the school shooting in Parkland, Florida has shown, what was considered insanely corrupt political behavior 40 years ago is now normal. And you can thank right-wingers on the Supreme Court.

This should be the metric by which we determine what is public and what is private - public being government-run, we all own it collectively, and private being privately owned, it's owned by capitalists, essentially.

Everybody has the right to education. It's a basic right. Everybody has the right to housing. It's a basic right. Everyone has the right to food. It's a basic right.

This is fascinating because the Trumpistas, the Republicans, just released a budget which is going to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps. It's going to cut everything. It's just right across the board, it's three trillion dollars in cuts over a ten-year period. Three hundred billion dollars a year.

This scam has been killing wages and enriching billionaires for decades.

"The only thing wrong with the U.S. economy is the failure of the Republican Party to play Santa Claus."

-Jude Wanniski, March 6, 1976

Meagan Day writing over at Jacobin magazine is quoting from a new study that was published in Psychological Bulletin written by Thomas Curran

W.J. Hennigan wrote a fairly lengthy piece in Time magazine on the first of February. He writes:

The rich get richer, and the poor will never be able to retire.

The #GOPTaxScam was the straw that broke the markets’ back. Here’s why and how.

First, America is hugely in debt (known as “overleveraged” in econ wonkspeak).

The corruption of small D democracy, the corruption of human rights, the corruption of civil rights, the destruction, actually, of civil and human rights, the destruction of the public sphere, the the deconstruction of government - or as Steve Bannon famously said, the deconstruction of the administrative state, in other words taking apart government.

There are two bright-red warning lights flashing right now on the dashboard of what's left of American democracy. While Donald Trump is hyper-aware of both of them, the media and most of our politicians are ignoring them.

They are War and Crash.

War