Opinion

America has a deficit problem. But the country's biggest deficit isn't the federal budget deficit. It's the deficit in public investment.

The public investment deficit is the gap between what we should be investing in our future — on infrastructure, education, and basic research — and the relatively little we are investing.

Increasing public investment needs to be a major goal of the Biden administration.

Public investment is similar to private investment in that we invest today because of the payoff in the future. The difference is public investment pays off for all of us, for America.

Sometimes it's not the wine inside the glass that is poisoned, but the glass itself.

The Republican Party and the right wing have a new obsession: "cancel culture." They hope to turn this into a winning political theme for 2022 and beyond.

For those of us who have things to do other than pay attention to politics, Mitch McConnell is probably best known for one thing: the United States Supreme Court. Specifically, the Senate minority leader is best known for smashing the rules and norms that normally would have prevented his party from placing two extra justices on the court but didn't, thanks to his cynical and cold-blooded willingness to smash them.

His success in this regard has won him praise from his party, obviously, but also from respectable people who admire explicit or even ostentatious demonstrations of power. The press corps in Washington, for instance, habitually describes him as a "master tactician" whose knowledge of procedure knows no rival. Fact is, McConnell has only been as effective as his GOP conference allows him to be. That's the way of things in the United States Senate. Those of us who pay attention to politics despite there being other things to do understand quite well that McConnell's reputation is overrated.

Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."

Only a few hours after arresting the 21-year-old suspected shooter alleged to have gunned down eight people near Atlanta, Cherokee County sheriff's deputy Captain Jay Baker appeared to offer a sort of rationalization of the suspected motive for the murderous rampage. "He was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope," Baker said Wednesday during a press conference.

Charlie Kirk is finding Twitter less supportive these days now that the man he spent four years promoting was banned two months ago from the social media platform.

The far right wing conspiracy theorist and propagandist who created a niche by milking the right wing claim that conservative college students were being silenced – because their views were and continue to be extremely unpopular, especially among educated Americans – on Thursday decided to send some support Vladimir Putin's way.

George White of North Carolina served two terms in Congress between 1897 and 1901. He was the only Black member during those years, and he would be the last Black person elected to the U.S. House for nearly another three decades.

This article was originally published at Salon

There's still much that's unknown about the shootings in Atlanta on Tuesday night. The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, appears to have been targeting massage parlors. Eight people have been killed, including six Asian-American women. Early reports from the sheriff's office indicate that the shooter targeted the victims because he blamed them for his supposed "sex addiction." While the sheriff pointed to such comments to deny any alleged racist motivation, it's rare that such misogynistic motives don't come with a heavy dose of racism as well.

The attack happened at a time of heightened national concerns over domestic right-wing terrorism, and for good reason. In Donald Trump's America, hate groups exploded in number, and hate crimes hit record levels. In the past year, hate crimes against Asian-Americans, in particular, have spiked, fueled by Trump and his allies trying to pin the blame of the coronavirus on East Asians. And, of course, there was the Capitol insurrection Trump incited on January 6, which most Republicans refused to hold him accountable for. All of this is after Republicans blocked anti-lynching legislation last summer.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's threat Tuesday to unleash never-before-seen "chaos" on the Senate if Democrats take aim at the legislative filibuster was viewed by progressives as a strong signal that the Kentucky Republican is beginning to get nervous about losing his most powerful tool of obstruction as support for weakening—or outright abolishing—the archaic rule continues to mount.

Just hours after Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) became the highest ranking Senate Democrat to speak out in support of filibuster reform, McConnell—the upper chamber's chief obstructionist—took to the floor to vow "a completely scorched-earth Senate" if the majority party moves to eliminate the 60-vote threshold, which effectively gives the minority veto power over most legislation in a narrowly divided chamber.

The Republicans have failed so far to land any punches on the new president or the Democrats newly in control of the United States Congress. They tried "cancel culture." They tried Dr. Seuss. They tried Mr. Potato Head. They tried lying (obviously). But nothing so far has breached the membrane of Fox News and other right-wing media. This is why many of them seem downright relieved to discover a "crisis" on the border.

Let's be clear. There is a real crisis, but it's not the fake crisis the Republicans want you to believe. For the last year or so, teenagers and children have been attempting to cross the southern border without any adults by their sides. Where there was at first a trickle, there is now a steady stream. As many as 500 minors are crossing over daily.

During the Trump years, there was an excessive amount of hand-wringing over the fact that he and his administration were exploding all the "norms" that had previously held our government institutions together. His insulting behavior and crude lack of decorum woke up many a pundit to the idea that much of our system was dependent upon a good faith adherence to the spirit of democracy as much as any formal rules, regulations and laws. He came to Washington without any serious understanding of how government worked and he didn't care when it was pointed out to him. Many were left shocked at how feeble our institutions had turned out to be in the face of someone who had no respect for them.

But let's not kid ourselves. Those norms had always only been as strong as the people who were charged with upholding them and those agreements were unraveling long before Trump entered politics. So we should have seen it coming.

It is the year 2021. But Republicans and the right-wing movement are trying to pull the American people back to the past.

This article first appeared in Salon.

If you haven't heard anyone tell you, with complete confidence, that President Joe Biden is senile and has had numerous strokes, it says something about you.

You have no right-wing friends.

Tucker Carlson really wants his audience to die. The notorious Fox News host and primary mainstreamer of white nationalist views was at it again on Monday night, presenting the coronavirus vaccine as some kind of evil conspiracy and discouraging his audience from getting it.

This article was originally published at Salon