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Refusing to Censor Speech Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with It

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Ted Rall
           If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you’re supposed to talk over them until they shut up. Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door. Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?             Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-known former Harvard Law professor, announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because the party’s organizers allowed pro-Palestinian speakers to address its convention in Chicago. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]–a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Senator Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the…
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We Need a Universal High Income

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Ted Rall
          “Get a job!” That’s the clichéd response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can’t?             That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model. Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer spending. Most spending is sourced from personal income, overwhelmingly from salaries paid by employers. But employers will need fewer and fewer employees. You don’t need a business degree to understand the nature of the doom loop. A smaller labor force earns a smaller national income and spends less. As demand shrinks, companies lay off many of their remaining workers, who themselves spend less, on and on until we’re all in bread lines. Assuming there are any charities collecting enough donations to pay for the bread. The workforce participation rate has already been shrinking for more than two decades, forcing fewer workers…
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We Have Big Problems. The Parties Offer Tiny Solutions.

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Ted Rall
            The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you’re talking about thousands of billions. ($4.5 trillion is the sum total of annual military spending that exceeds what we need to defend the United States homeland, the higher interest paid on the national debt due to the Fed’s attempts to fight inflation, federal subsidies paid to people and companies who don’t qualify for them, uncollected taxes the IRS doesn’t even attempt to get and foreign aid, much of it to rich countries.)             So much money, so little imagination.             The 2024 presidential campaign highlights the small-bore thinking that dominates electioneering and journalistic punditry. Trump and the Republicans called for eliminating taxes on tips; Harris and the Democrats followed suit. If enacted, this change would only affect 2.5% of wage…
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Cut the Defense Budget by 97.5%

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Ted Rall
           The United States is one of the most politically polarized countries in the world. Because effective lawmaking requires bipartisanship and members of Congress are, like their constituents, at their most ideologically divided point in a half century, cooperation is in increasingly short supply. As a result or, more precisely non-result, the U.S. Congress passes fewer bills every year.             There is, however, one consistent area of agreement on Capitol Hill: defense spending. Each year for the past six decades, the massive National Defense Authorization Act—Washington-speak for the federal defense spending bill has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Defense appropriations are so sacrosanct that the press often describes the NDAA as “must pass”; it is routine for Congress to add in hundreds of millions of dollars of extraneous spending that the Pentagon does not want or request.             In the U.S. Congress, even “antiwar” voices support the military. Obama’s 2008 campaign was primarily predicated on his opposition to the U.S.…
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Don’t Get Obama-ed Again

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Ted Rall
           Barack Obama’s 2008 run, a classic identity play, emphasized the history-making potential of electing the nation’s first Black president. No one knew or cared much about Obama’s policy positions, and he didn’t bother to share them. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 bids were policy arguments focused around a succinct set of issues: student loan debt, the minimum wage and healthcare. The fact that he would have been the first Jewish president was scarcely noticed. If I were one of the Democratic strategists advising Kamala Harris’ rump 2024 campaign for president, I would focus on an identity play emphasizing her race and gender over a run about a set of policies. Which is exactly what she’s doing. “The longer the Harris campaign can portray her as a cultural phenomenon,” The New York Times reported on July 31st, “the longer she can avoid articulating details of her policy agenda that could divide her support…For now, the Harris team intends to skip…
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Make Kamala Earn Our Votes

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Ted Rall
           Democrats were relieved when President Biden finally pulled out of the presidential race. That was understandable. It was easy to see why they quickly coalesced behind Vice President Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement: time was short, there’s no standard party process for putting on a snap second round of primaries, passing over a woman of color who has served dutifully if not impressively would have been a bad look for the party. Completely inexplicable, on the other hand, is the Democrats’ immediately creating an “I’m with her” cult of personality for Harris—the same slogan that helped sink Hillary Clinton in 2016 because it violated the #1 rule of politics: the politician is supposed to be with us. Why are gullible Democrats donating at record levels for a candidate who has yet to make a single campaign promise? They’re lining up to volunteer for an incumbent politician who didn’t accomplish a single thing in her current job—no new law attributable…
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No Sympathy for Biden I

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Ted Rall
           Poor Joe.             No.             Poor us. Poor United States. Poor Democratic Party.             We’ve been suckered. While we were fearfully obsessing over the ethically-challenged Donald Trump, a much more talented grifter—Joe Biden along with his hidden passel of co-conspirators—conned the electorate, the news media and most of his own party’s leaders out of the American presidency.             The Bidenite scam sounds like a fourth entry in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” of 1970s political thrillers. A populist socialist senator takes an early lead in the 2020 primaries. Ruling-class elites panic. Who can stop him? Alarmed party bosses and their mouthpieces in the corporate media recruit an unlikely centrist champion to take him on: the oldest person ever to run for president, a washed-up hack who came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. Even more worrisome, the elderly man presents with signs of dementia. He “campaigned unevenly and delivered uncomfortably meandering performances at the debates that…
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Violent Speech Might Not Cause Violent Acts. So What?

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Ted Rall
          With the exception of those who explain themselves, like John Wilkes Booth and Leon Czolgosz, political assassins tend to take their motives to the grave. Though the real reasons for their acts tend to be personal to the point of quirky—like John Hinckley hoping to impress Jodie Foster—Americans often point the finger at inflammatory rhetoric. Dehumanizing speech, we assume, is bound to prompt some weak-minded weirdo to act out.             Anti-JFK “wanted for treason” posters distributed in Dallas shortly before the November 1963 assassination were cited as evidence that right-wing extremism had created a toxic atmosphere, implying that the city itself had sort of killed the president. But Dallas didn’t shoot Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald did. Though his motives were nebulous, his politics leaned Left.             After Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by her constituent in 2011, liberal media outlets took note of a map tweeted by a PAC associated with Sarah Palin released nine months earlier, which…
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Biden’s Senility Obscures Trump’s Senility

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Ted Rall
           Why, frustrated Democrats are asking, is the news media ignoring signs that former President Donald Trump is (also) suffering cognitive impairment? Why are they focusing on President Joe Biden’s debate performance and calling on him, but not Trump, following his conviction on 34 felony counts, to drop out of the campaign?             You have reasonable questions, I have answers:             Biden is the incumbent, not Trump. As much as Democrats would prefer otherwise, elections are a referendum on the incumbent.             Voters have long been worried about Biden’s age. The debate confirmed their concerns about the 81-year-old leader and added a new one: Democrats and their media allies have been gaslighting them about Biden’s physical and mental condition.             Trump’s felony convictions, though politically problematic are not inherently disqualifying. A felon can perform the duties of president. A senile person cannot.             Trump has been out in public, unscripted, a lot more than Biden. His performance was no worse…
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Biden Probably Has Parkinson’s Disease

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Ted Rall
          What, exactly, is wrong with Joe Biden? It’s probably not Alzheimer’s. I wrote a syndicated column bearing the headline “Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw from the race” in March 2020. Democratic gaslighting aside, he has been sick for a long time. As I witnessed as caretaker for my mother, who died a month before I wrote the above, Alzheimer’s tends to progress faster than what we’re seeing, especially at Biden’s advanced age.             Biden’s affliction is some other form of dementia, defined by the CDC as “not a specific disease but is rather a general term for the impaired ability to remember, think, or make decisions that interferes with doing everyday activities.”             Many things can cause and present as dementia: hearing loss, traumatic brain injuries, liver disease.             One cause is the degenerative nerve disorder made famous by Michael J. Fox, Parkinson’s disease.             According to Johns Hopkins’ website: “Parkinson disease causes physical symptoms at first.…
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