Perhaps we can move on from confirming judges to passing legislation for reform.

I am pleased to see that with 98% of the vote counted, Democrats are winning two Senate seats for Georgia. The odds were against either one of the Democrats to prevail in this election. I went to bed last night expecting that they would lose. Even the statisticians at FiveThirtyEight were not that optimistic. Today I see that Raphael Warnock has won his race. Jon Ossoff leads by 16,000 votes at the moment. We can expect a change in the color of the tide in the news today.

Once both races are called, we can fairly assume that someone like Mitch McConnell will take a subordinate role in the Senate later this month. This is a long-overdue change. Mitch McConnell has been maintaining a logjam of legislation for years now, protecting the GOP members of the Senate from votes that would require them to show their constituents which side they’re really on. …

Trump is about as anti-establishment as Richard Nixon.

I know Trump supporters who tell me that Trump is doing great things and that he’s one of the best things that ever happened to this country. In a backhanded way, I have to agree with them. Trump is waking up the progressive and liberal base in a way that no other politician has roused them before. Yet my conservative friends tell me that if Trump could retain power, he’d do some very nice things in a second term.

So far, I haven’t seen it. I find it interesting that Trump had no problem pardoning a former Congressman convicted of spending campaign funds like it was his own money. Trump had no problem pardoning four military contractors who were worked for Blackwater, that were convicted of committing heinous crimes in Iraq that resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. Trump had no problem pardoning people who lied to the FBI to cover political crimes under Trump’s watch. He even pardoned Roger Stone, and that guy worked on Richard Nixon’s campaign. …

Be agnostic about everything.

I am gentle with reality. I am aware that even our best science is not even sure what reality is. I still respect reality, I’m just not sure if my sense of it is accurate. While we certainly have our perceptions about reality and what it means to us, science has built instruments to see more clearly what reality is, and I’m not even sure if what our instruments tell us about reality is consistent with our experience. …

Some simple arithmetic tells us that the government is tipping the scales.

I’ve been thinking about billionaires. I’ve been thinking about how it could be possible for one man can earn a billion dollars. So I did a little bit of math to consider the problem of how someone can earn a billion dollars. Part of the problem is scale. Our brains are simple creatures when it comes to life. We like to break things down to abstraction so that we have at least a chance to escape predators and to comprehend the numbers we like to throw around. …

I’m not progressive for the free stuff. I just want an economy that works for everyone.

Long ago, I read or heard the following phrase, “Socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else”. I also read of variations on the theme like, “privatize the profits, socialize the risk”. I read many books and articles about how the powerful serve themselves at the expense of everyone else, and then tell us, “Get over it. That’s just how the economy works.” These concepts speak to the rules of the way our economy works and the deceptions being played upon most of us about the way things work.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been rethinking my politics, trying to better understand what’s happening to our country. I’ve been noticing more and more, how deceptive conservative economics has been since Reagan was president. It’s easy to see how wages have stagnated while CEO pay has gone through the roof. If the $7.25 an hour minimum wage had kept up with the gains in productivity due to technological innovation and inflation, it would be about $24 an hour today. This result is due to a policy decision, not the way economics works. It might seem then, that we have a lot of dependent millionaires and billionaires who need our support. …

Another positive outlook.

I really don’t share the gloom and doom that I see so much in the news and my social media feeds. Yes, I know it’s there. I know that there are people out there suffering the sufferable. I know that for many people, 2020 was a lousy year. I saw so much focus on the negative in the news and among the people I follow on social media. I saw how people glommed onto negative news and how unattractive good news was. Yet, throughout the year, I kept a positive outlook, pandemic notwithstanding.

There are some who may say that I’m a privileged white boy who never really knew how bad life can be for others. There might even be some truth to that narrative. I am white. I am middle-aged. But I’m blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. I have nystagmus, a brain disorder that makes me “look at you funny”. I’m kind of not normal. I don’t have a college degree so I missed out on many of the jobs that I could easily have had with a degree. I’ve made mistakes that I could spend a lifetime regretting, but I don’t anymore. I tried that and found it wanting. I could be baleful and spiteful about my disabilities, and everything that didn’t go right in my life, and I’ve done that. …

Mitch McConnell understands target fixation better than we do.

I see that a very important piece of legislation is riding on the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. Presently, he’s working hard to sideline a $2000 stimulus check (a raise from $600) to every American suffering from the recession resulting from our very poor response to the pandemic. Millions of people are out of work, can’t pay their bills, can’t pay their rent or their mortgages and there isn’t much that can be done until we can get past this virus.

The latest bill passed by the house to up the stimulus to $2000 per person ($600 per dependent kid), has been passed by the House and awaits action in the Senate. What does Mitch McConnell do? He attaches two other bills to it, one to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and another to authorize investigations into alleged election fraud in the 2020 election. …

Tis folly to believe that the government can do no good at all.

I’ve known and met conservatives who say that the government adds nothing to the economy. I’ve encountered them on social media, and I read about them in the news. I see the talking heads on YouTube spouting their proverbial line that governments add nothing to the economy, and they say that we should limit the size of the government to the greatest extent possible.

For some insight into where all of this was coming from I read a few articles, this one in particular, about and a book by an economist and historian, Michael Hudson. …