Get Ready for Much Simpler Taxes!

The GOP gave up today on reconciling the House and Senate tax plans.

"It just wasn't going to happen," admitted Mitch McConnell. "Just getting all of our lies straight was going to take a whole day, and some on the committee had plans to sexually harass their interns during lunch."

Instead, they just wrote a whole new, simpler plan.

Inspired by Paul Ryan's goal to put your entire tax form on a postcard, the new plan goes even further.

"This one fits on a business card," Ryan said proudly, removing a small card from his wallet. "We've cut the number of tax brackets even further as well, down to two. We're really excited about the simplicity we're offering the American people."

Here's how the new plan would work. Between January and April, each tax payer would receive a tiny form in the mail. Those in the lower tax bracket, representing the 0-99th percentile of earners, would get a card that looks like this:

You are in the lower tax bracket. You are a loser. Your tax rate is 100%. Please send the IRS all your money.

Check this box to show you understand you have no choice in this matter.

Earners in the top 1% and all corporations would fall into the upper tax bracket and would receive a card that looks like this:

You are in the upper tax brack. Your tax rate is 0%. Keep all your money!

Check here if you would like an invitation to the Winner's Ball, a tax-payer funded party to celebrate your wealth and success.

"This tax form takes the average American about one-and-a-half seconds to fill out," Ryan boasted. "It actually takes the upper tax bracket longer because they often get distracted thinking about what they'll wear to the ball."

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell expressed his support of the new plan. "This plan relieves the stress on the deficit and still everyone receives a huge tax cut." When pressed with figures that show that 99% of all Americans would in fact face a tax increase, on average, of 800%, the Senator amended his comments. "Well maybe not everyone would get a tax cut. But everyone I know would."

The plan includes many of the non-tax amendments of the original bills, granting personhood to fetuses, opening ANWR to oil drilling and, in a concession to Tea Party Representative B. Meisterburger, outlawing children's toys in all states that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

President Trump, supportive of the plan, has offered a new name for it. While the president labeled the old plan the "Cut Cut Cut Plan," he's calling this new plan the "Stab Stab Stab-in-the-Back Plan."

"It's less wimpy," the President explained through a mouthful of mock McDonald's quarter-pounder.

A White House spokesperson elaborated. "Our marketing research has shown that a substantial percentage of voters actually like getting fucked over by those they've elected to office. That finding has prompted us to be more direct with our messaging." The spokesperson paused for a moment before looking down at her notes and adding hurriedly, "Also, this about jobs."

The Stab Stab Stab-in-the-Back Plan is expected to pass narrowly along party lines.

What will Happen in Washington Today

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn't lose any voters.

--Donald J. Trump

Yesterday, the president admitted he intended to obstruct an FBI investigation when he fired James Comey. GOP members of Congress just shrugged.

Here's what's on tap in Washington for today:

8:00 am: Upon learning that American Ninja's ratings are beating out the best season of his Celebrity Apprentice, Trump borrows a Secret Service weapon, stands outside the White House and shoots someone.

8:30 am: Fox News covers the incident. With a slick graphic it compares Trump's "presidential shooting" to previous presidential shootings (Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan, Monica Lewinsky's dress) and concludes that Trump's shooting had the largest audience.

9:00 am: At a press conference Sean Spicer explains that the shooting was recommended by Jeff Sessions, Don McGhan, and "that new FBI guy who's been wandering around."

9:30 am: Four moderate Republicans scratch their chins and say they are "concerned" that the president would shoot someone. 

10:00 am: An emergency session of the House is called to discuss whether insurance companies should consider being shot by the president a pre-existing condition under the AHCA.

10:30 am: Paul Ryan meets with the president to discuss plans for a tax cut.

11:00 am: In an interview with the Economist, Trump explains that he had always planned to shoot someone. He was going to shoot someone no matter what anyone said.

11:30 am: Sean Spicer begs the president to please shoot him next.

Noon: Lunch.  Trump orders eight bowls of ice cream. His aides each get a sprig of parsley. No one says anything.

1:00 pm: Mitch McConnell addresses the Senate. Wearing his hurt and befuddled face, he wonders why Democrats should be so bothered by the president shooting someone. However, in what he calls a "concession," he agrees to investigate the shooting, announcing he will assign a life-size cardboard cutout of Inspector Gadget to the case. He expects the investigation to take about twenty-seven years.

2:00 pm: The president plays a round of golf. Despite a dismal score, the president doesn't shoot anyone else.  The New York Times reports this as a "positive development."

3:30 pm: The president shoots someone else.

4:00 pm: Five moderate Republicans express concerns about "a developing pattern of presidential shootings." 

4:30 pm: Paul Ryan meets with the president to discuss a new round of tax cuts.

5:00 pm: Trump has a private dinner with Russian Ambassador Sergey Ivanovich Kysliak. As a show of trust, Trump has the White House staff use nuclear weapons blueprints for tablecloths. During the dinner Kysliak consoles the president after his "hard day." "Maybe you don't know this," the ambassador says, "but President Putin shoots people all the time. He's gotten used to it.  You will too." 

Evolution of Mendocracy

Donald Trump lies. A lot.  If that's news to you, then let me be the first to congratulate you on your recent emergence from your years-long coma. You should probably eat something and hydrate before you do anything else. And, to avoid shocking your system, stay away from cable news for at least a week. You're good? You sure? Ok, let me bring you up to speed, gently, with a little story.

Recently Donald Trump ran for president. His campaign consisted almost entirely of lies. During most of the campaign, the press listened to him lie, but they didn't like to just say, "he's lying," because that seemed so rude. Even his political opponents were unwilling to say "that's a lie" to every word that came out of his mouth and anyway, it wasn't like he was actually going to win, so, whatever . . .  Instead they all sent his lies to "fact-checkers" who questioned the accuracy of what he was saying. Now doesn't that sound nicer?

But he actually became president (I know . . . take as long as you need . . . Ok?) When he did actually become president, the lies became more sinister. Mostly because they carried more weight and more consequences, but also because he began putting them in the mouths of other people. Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway were his most visible victims. They've learned to parrot his lies so well that some are convinced they are actually human beings.  Maybe they were, once.

Trump appointed people to powerful positions like Attorney General and Secretary of Education and  head of EPA and the Supreme Court. These were not good people for those jobs. They had done bad things like suppress voters and steal funding from public school kids and help polluters dump shit everywhere and plagiarize. So these nominees lied about their pasts.

The Republican Senators who could have prevented them from taking these positions thought it wasn't so bad. So they ignored the lies. Everyone lies a little, they reasoned. Who doesn't lie at least a little? It would cause a lot of trouble if all of a sudden everyone had to tell the truth all the time, even under oath.

Also they told people who tried to speak the truth, like Elizabeth Warren, that they had to shut the fuck up. You know, because it wasn't nice.

Seeing all the attention and success Trump was getting for all of his lying and elevating liars to important positions, some people, let's call them Republican Congress People for lack of a better term, got jealous and thought: You know, it's not like Trump invented lying. We've been doing it for a long time, especially about healthcare, and we're pretty good at it too.

So they lied a whole bunch to try to pass a healthcare bill.

Now some people were getting tired of the lies and were getting better at saying "you lie you fucking lying liars!" and as you can see not being nice about it at all and at first it looked like they were going to beat the lying people.

But the lying people thought: We won't go down like this, we just have to lie even harder! So they put more and more and more lies into their lying healthcare bill and they said, "See? Now we fixed it!" Which was a lie.

And they passed their healthcare bill.
(Oh, your coma is probably a pre-existing condition. Just so you know.)

But Trump doesn't like losing. He said so and it may be the only true thing anyone has ever heard him say other than some things about grabbing that we can't get into right now. So he said "Republican Congress People, you are not the most bigly liars! I am and I will prove it now!"

So he made up the biggest lie ever. It was huge. It was such a bigly lie he thought maybe no one would ever top it. He loved his lie. He kept his big lie to himself for a whole week, just to enjoy some private time with it. Then he fired his FBI chief and he said his big lie.

He said: "I did this because the FBI man was so so mean to my good friend Hillary Clinton, and not at all because he was trying to catch me and my friends doing naughty stuff with Russians." To celebrate his big big lie, he went and did some naughty stuff with Russians. Right there in the Oval Office. There are pictures.

Everyone agreed that this was a very bigly lie. Maybe the bigliest. The Republican Congress People just wanted to laugh and laugh at it. I swear I don't know how they didn't.

That's where the story is now. It will go on. There are some people who could stop the lying, or try. They are called Republican Senators. Maybe you remember them from earlier in the story. They are the ones who didn't mind the lies told by the nominees for Attorney General and Director of the EPA and Secretary of Education and Justice of the Supreme Court.

Maybe the Republican Senators will change their minds and they won't like lies so much and they will try to stop all the lies.

Or maybe not.

Censorship Real and Fake

After graduating from college in 1990, I set off, as one does, on a backtracking trip around Europe. It was a strange time. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and most of Eastern Europe had separated from the Soviet Union. On a visit to Prague I found a city and country overwhelmed with it's reintroduction to the West. Prices were astonishingly cheap: a cab ride was a dollar, our two bedroom flat cost us five bucks a night, multi-course dinners were just a few dollars. Newly opened nightclubs had lines of Czech youth waiting outside of them but as Westerners, we were beckoned straight to the front. There was great excitement but also great resentment. The money pouring in caused out-of-control inflation. Locals didn't want us in their bars and it was difficult to argue with them. After a day or two of living like a king, I grew guilty and donated most of the money I'd changed to a local charity.

Before that though, there was something that I wanted for myself: a copy of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the original Czech. No, I couldn't read it, but the English translation had been an important book for me in college and I thought a Czech version would look sophisticated on my bookshelf. I stopped by three or four bookshops and asked if they had a copy. They didn't. Of course they didn't. Kundera had been exiled in the 70s under Soviet totalitarian rule and his books had been banned since then. I would have had an easier time finding what I was looking for in the USA. It would be another eighteen years before a Czech language edition of Kundera's most famous work would be widely available in his native country.

This is the effect of real censorship. It approaches total erasure.

But Ann Coulter, because she can't speak in a prime location at a convenient time at UC Berkeley, is not being censored. Not really. You can verify this by entering a bookstore and asking for a copy of one of her books. They'll have some on the shelf and if they don't they'll order any or all of them for you. Or you can go to Amazon and order them yourself. Or you can Google YouTube videos. By the same test, Milo Yiannopoulos, despite what he says, isn't really being censored either. Nor is Charles Murray.

Overstating censorship is not a purely right wing tactic either. In fact, it's more often, though more innocently, employed by the left. Despite what you hear during Banned Books Week, Harry Potter isn't really censored because some church groups disapprove of it. And Huckleberry Finn isn't really censored because some school boards fear a book that contains the "n" word. The books are at the bookstore, on Amazon, and in the library, even if some of them have been moved to the adult section. Note the head-scratching irony of every library's banned books display: the books that have been "banned" are all stacked up, ready to be checked out.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't condone the violence on the UC Berkley or Middlebury campuses, and I believe that Berkeley should have found a way to let Coulter speak when and where her sponsors wanted. And I think we should expose our kids at home and in their classrooms to all sorts of ideas even if it makes them uncomfortable and no one should be allowed to get in the way of that or even make it inconvenient. We should not fear words or ideas. Period. We should combat ugly words with beautiful ones. We should combat lies with truth, bad ideas with better ideas.

And that's why we should be careful of overusing the label "censored" or even the vaguer term "banned." Our language is muddied enough. Real censorship comes from a central power, it's enforced through law and threat and exile and raids and violence. Thanks to tireless and heroic work, for the moment--and who knows how long that moment will last--real censorship is largely non-existent in the US today.

Yet now our President declares that CNN is censoring him because it won't run his propagandist ad. This is not censorship. CNN, of course, has the freedom to air or reject any ads that come its way. It would, on the contrary, be unconstitutional to simply force the network to use it's air time to broadcast the President's views. If you are worried that the President is in fact being censored, you can put your fears to rest by watching his ad on YouTube right here.

By claiming fake censorship is real censorship, we are undermining the very concept of censorship. This is especially dangerous right now as the nation faces a real threat of authoritarianism and with it, real censorship. Just as Trump undermines the concept of real news by calling everything he doesn't like "fake news," he wants to undermine the very meaning of censorship, claiming to be one of its victims even as he moves forward with plans to impose real censorship on the American people.

Trump has already proposed rewriting libel laws so that he can silence his critics. His Justice Department is prosecuting a woman for doing nothing more than laughing at Jeff Sessions. The White House's immigration policies create implicit denials of free speech to those who appear Hispanic or Muslim. After all, if simply taking your children to school can get you detained or deported, why would a parent make herself more visible by attending a rally or speaking loudly against the government?

These are acts and policies of real censorship that must be denied, resisted and legally challenged. And we can't do that if we don't even know what censorship means.

Let's not let Coulter or Trump get away with co-opting the term and let's restrain the use of it ourselves. I propose, for instance, changing Banned Books Week to Not-Quite-Banned Books Week which will even better highlight and celebrate the diligent work of activists and lawyers who have throughout modern American history stood up to would-be-authoritarians and kept our words and ideas available and free.