December 27, 2020

How to keep the Senate (if we win in Georgia) and the House in 2022? Do what Andrew Yang suggested:

Begin $1,000-per-month payments to Americans as a way to compensate American workers for the thousands of jobs that have been outsourced to other countries.

Yang suggested these payments as a way to offset job loss due to automation, but it's just as valuable as a way to offset job loss due to outsourcing. He proposes paying for it with a value added tax (VAT). From a 2019 PBS News Hour article:

[link:https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-would-andrew-yang-give-americans-1000-per-month-with-this-tax|


I think we should do some form of the value added tax, but more importantly, pay for it by taxing the profits of the American corporations who have moved their production, call centers, and IT departments overseas.

Many people voted for Trump in 2016 because they were angry and frustrated over the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas outsourcing. Trump declared that he would bring manufacturing jobs back and make companies who outsourced face consequences. He didn't do that, so I have no clue why people voted for him again in 2020. But that anger over disappearing jobs is still very much there.

The Democratic Party could begin to convince lower-income Americans that they truly are the party of the people by actually enacting consequences against those companies. A tax on companies that outsource used solely to fund a monthly $1,000 payment to American workers would be something concrete and incredibly beneficial to lower-class and middle-class Americans.

December 6, 2020

When the blessed day comes when Typhoid Trump is out of office, could families of Covid victims file

a massive wrongful death class-action lawsuit against him in civil court, in other words, in a state court, so that no pardon would apply (although if he's out of office, I guess that wouldn't be a concern anymore, right?).

Can you imagine? By January 20, there could be 500,000 Covid victims, so a possible 500,000-count wrongful death suit.

I'm not a lawyer, so not sure how these class-action lawsuits work, but it's how the Brown and Goldberg families got some bit of justice for the wrongful deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldberg.

OJ Simpson has yet to pay the millions he owes from the settlement and it's a foregone conclusion that Trump would never pay up. But this murderer needs to be hounded for the rest of his sad, pathetic, stupid life and reminded daily that he is responsible for the deaths of half a million Americans and for the shattered lives of millions of Americans who lost family members because this callous idiot lied about the seriousness of the disease and failed to take action to mitigate its spread.

December 4, 2020

Laurence Tribe just explained on Lawrence O'Donnell why Trump could not self-pardon.

Tribe's reasoning was that it would violate the next article that says the president must faithfully execute the laws. He added that if presidents knew they were able to self-pardon, then they would come into office knowing they could get away with anything, since a self-pardon made them essentially above the law.

That was reassuring, until I remembered that it doesn't matter if Trump can't self-pardon because he can just resign and have Mike Pence pardon him instead.

Which made me wonder: How on God's green earth is it Constitutional, then, for a vice president to be able to pardon the president for whom he served? Isn't that almost exactly the same as the president doing a self-pardon?

And why, after Ford pardoned Nixon, didn't Congress pass a law to ensure that a vice president could not pardon a criminal president ever again?

I guess this explains why Roger Stone has that stupid-ass tattoo of Nixon on his back. At least something makes sense.

Goodnight, DUers!

December 2, 2020

Regarding Trump's pay-for-pardon scheme: Could the House bring impeachment charges in 50 days?

The president's pardon power is absolute except in cases of impeachment, right? If the House could fast-track an impeachment in December, and then the Senate voted to convict and remove him (and yes, I know that's unlikely), then maybe all of those corrupt pardons would be nullified.

Even if the Senate failed to convict Trump, another impeachment trial would at least bring this latest outrage out in the open.

Even as I write this, I know this plan is dead in the water, coming so close to Biden's inauguration. Still, you would think somehow, someway that justice would find a way to prevail.

It just makes me ill to think of the incredulous glee Trump must have felt when his lawyers first explained to him the power of the pardon: "I can pardon ANYBODY?! For ANYTHING? Nooooo! Really???? Really???? Even MYSELF?????