Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Trump cultists continue to call for mass armed violence against the US government, and the loudest voices of the insurrectionists are members of the Trump family themselves.

 

Despite violent rhetoric from her family inciting the January 6th insurrection, Lara Trump suggested vigilante violence against people perceived to be from south of the southern border during a Saturday night appearance with Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro.

The former president's daughter-in-law suggested residents of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California should arm themselves and prepare for violence.

"And I don't know what you tell the people that live at the southern border," she said. "I guess they better arm up and get guns and be ready — and maybe they're going to have to start taking matters into their own hands."

She went on to say people shouldn't not make the "dangerous" journey to America despite the right of asylum being guaranteed by U.S. and international law.

 

Calls for bloody, lethal armed violence against immigrants are the central tenet of the right-wing "replacement theory" that Democrats are allowing "illegals" into the country in order to take jobs, cast votes, and to "outbreed" white Trump voters.  FOX News tumor Tucker Carlson spouts his hateful rhetoric about this five days a week, while plenty of Republicans casually parrot this notion that immigrants, particularly coming over the US Southern border, need to be gunned down.

It's all related. The GOP tantrums over "Critical Race Theory", the replacement nonsense, the open carry firearms provisions in states, the election law changes to allow Republicans to nullify Democratic victories, states now suing the Biden administration for hundreds of billions in order to build a border wall, all of it is in service of a Republican party now wholly dedicated to the last gasps of preserving white supremacy in America.

When you realize that everything the GOP does is in service to maintaining white supremacy in America, it all makes sense. That includes setting up Joe Biden as a race traitor and increasingly calling for violence against the government he leads, and against the people who voted for that government.

Your Primary Consideration, Con't

The "first in the nation" primary war for 2024 has now been declared in earnest as Nevada enters the fray to take on Iowa and New Hampshire.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak on Friday signed a law that would make Nevada the first state to vote in the 2024 presidential primary contests, bumping Iowa and New Hampshire from their leadoff spots.

Signing the law is a gamble.

It’s likely to set off maneuvering by other states, especially Iowa and New Hampshire, to move up their contests. The national political parties would need to agree to changes in the calendar, or state parties could risk losing their delegates at presidential nominating conventions.

The Democratic National Committee has not yet signaled whether it would support the calendar shakeup and isn’t expected to start writing rules for its nominating process until next year. Republicans in four early presidential nominating states this week all jointly opposed the move, saying they’re committed to preserving the historic schedule.

Democrats in Nevada, including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, launched the push this year to boost their state after the 2020 primary contest left members of the party questioning the process. They noted Iowa’s problem-plagued caucuses and the fact that the two traditional early states are overwhelmingly white, unlike Nevada.

Before he went on to win his party’s nomination, President Joe Biden performed poorly in Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary. In Nevada, with a much more racially diverse population that mirrors the U.S. as a whole, he finished second.

That gave Biden momentum heading into South Carolina’s primary, which then catapulted him to a string of Super Tuesday victories.

The new law changes Nevada’s contest from a party-run, in-person caucus meeting to a government-run primary election. Democrats nationally started shifting away from caucuses to primaries before 2020, citing the difficulty of attending an in-person meeting and the fiddly math involved to determine who wins the most delegates.

The law will require the presidential primary to be held on the first Tuesday in February in a presidential election year.

 

So now begins the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, where both the Dems and the GOP come to an agreement with the other early states: NH, IA, SC, and increasingly, Texas, Florida, and California, who all want to decide primary winners well before Valentine's Day. 

Of course, if the horse race for the conventions is decided six months before the actual convention, that doesn't leave much of a race to cover for the media. An agreement on a national primary day for all 50 states and all territories and ex-pats would be the actual solution people are looking for, but of course that will never happen.

Well, at least until the fighting gets so bad it does. Or, you know, we lose our democracy to fascism. Hey, at least we're finally getting rid of caucuses. That's actually progress.

Sunday Long Read: It Taxes The Imagination

Our Sunday Long Read this week is ProPublica's massive new report on just how much in income tax America's richest billionaires pay, and the answer is "nowhere near enough", while middle-class Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck because they pay as much or more in taxes than their net worth increased in the last 15 years.

 

And thanks to Congress, among them some of the richest people in the country, it's all 100% legal.

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.

The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.

We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth for people their age. From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value of their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.

 

You want to know who the biggest tax scammer in the nation is? Not Bezos, not Zuck, not Elon, not Bloomberg, but Warren Buffett. He made close to $25 billion from 2014 to 2018, and paid only $24 million in taxes.

 

His tax rate was 0.10%.  One one-thousandth of what he made.

 

Bezos at least paid a billion in taxes over five years on his $99 billion. But Buffett? There's a guy who deserves to see the inside of a tumbrel. 

Well, they all do.

Warren goes first, however.