This has been an awful day, one of too many lately, so I’m going ahead with the positive-thinking piece I had planned.
If we’ve learned one thing from the Drumpf sh*tshow over the last two years, it’s that the norms we’ve lived with all our lives are treated by the right as mere suggestions. Where Dems have been held back by media criticism and vague notions about “the way things are supposed to be done,” Republicans just go stomping through every barrier and expect the media and everyone else to come running after.
So after we win back Congress in November, we need to stop thinking small and worrying about what the TV pundits will say. Nothing’s off the table. Impeach Drumpf and Pence — and once they’re gone, the real work begins.
But first, a word from our sponsor!
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Here are a few of my suggestions for our incoming Democratic government. The first two are my top priorities, the rest are in no particular order.
Voting rights protections with teeth. Restore the Voting Rights Act. Make Election Day a national holiday. Automatic voter registration. Vote by mail for anyone who wants it. Illegally preventing an eligible citizen from voting should be met with prison time. Not fines: they’d just make that part of their campaign budget. Vote suppression is election fraud, and it should lead to prison.
Climate change, climate change, climate change. Green energy everywhere we can get it, whether it’s profitable or not. You’ve probably heard that just 100 companies are responsible for 70% of climate change. Whatever we need to do — nationalize them, shut them down — the future of the planet is at stake.
Dump the Electoral College. The person with the most votes gets to be president. Until we can get the Constitution changed, concentrate on getting more states into the reciprocal agreement to give their state’s votes to the national popular vote winner. And while we’re at it, let’s find ways to make Congress more small-d democratic. Congressional districts to be drawn up by a nonpartisan entity. The Senate will be more difficult, but we’ll start with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. And there’s nothing sacred about state boundaries: states have been split up or put together before.
Get those immigrant kids back with their families, yesterday.
Universal, single-payer health care.
Free college.
Real campaign finance reform. Get rid of all the dark money loopholes.
Progressive taxation. Get it back up to 1980’s or even 1950’s levels, and tax the hell out of capital gains.
End the drug war. Take the money that would have gone to further militarizing the police, and fund treatment programs instead.
Sensible gun laws. Universal background checks. Licensing and registration like cars. Bring back the automatic weapons ban.
An Equal Rights Amendment that includes gender, orientation, and identity.
Impeach Kavanaugh. And charge him with perjury. And since apparently there’s no statute of limitations for sexual assault in Maryland, do a real investigation of him and Mark Judge.
Look back in order to look forward. If any of the crimes from the mortgage scandal, torture scandals, etc., are still within the statute of limitations? Start prosecuting. Nobody’s too big to jail. And yes, of course that applies to those who conspired with Russian election sabotage.
Add your suggestions! And when the right and the pundit babblers cry “OMG socialism!”, remember, they were going to do that to the small-scale, incremental changes that Democrats usually try to do.
On to Top Comments!
From Crashing Vor:
Elwood Dowd at 6:37:27 in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup, which is too bloody early for top comments.
Highlighted by Hinoema01:
In Mark Sumner’s diary, Trump and the nationalists are pulling out all the stops to delegitimize the Democratic Party, accumbens makes a correction, the diarist responds, and qazplm caps it with a top comment.
Highlighted by Elizabeth NYC:
In the same Mark Sumner diary, waydownsouth makes a gut-wrenching comment on seeing our children deal with the current state of our country.
Top mojo, courtesy of mik:
Picture quilt, courtesy of jotter: