onfocus

Putting a 25% tax on 750 people to benefit the 330 million other members of the American public? Maybe you can see why it's not a radical idea when middle-class people are already paying higher rates themselves. To be clear, those affected by the rate increase would continue to be billionaires—it's just that their fortunes would grow past a billion at a slightly slower pace.

Escape velocity is a great way to think about when enough is enough for any one human to have. Society doesn't see much benefit from allocating so many resources to a small number of individuals. The standard argument is job creators! but that's a joke in a world where record profits lead to mass layoffs.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

This is the media functioning as its owners want: smoothing the way for autocracy in America so they can optimize profits.

At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent…You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend.

So strange that everyone at the NYT is working on this project to normalize Trump. Shouldn’t there be high profile resignations or some indication of unease from professional journalists?

Butler told CNN how he unknowingly helped Nauta deliver boxes of classified information from Mar-a-Lago to the former president’s plane in June 2022 – the same day that Trump and his attorney were meeting with the Justice Department at Mar-a-Lago about the classified documents.

Seems bad for national security.

Cuban needs no more convincing on who he’ll vote for come November. Speaking to Bloomberg this month, he shrugged off concerns about Biden’s advanced age: “If they were having his last wake, and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given last rites, I would still vote for Joe Biden.”

Pretty funny for a billionaire.

I mean, yeah, I don't know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can't—Joe Biden's only been president for three years, so he can't—it made no sense.

A good interview with the journalist who broke the SOTU rebuttal trafficking lie on TikTok.

Reporting (endlessly) that Biden is old without noting that Trump is deranged is not “independent” journalism, it’s just bad journalism.

The NYT is basically the PR division for the Republic party. They have fully embraced fascism and trolling for attention.

So we can see that Republicans don’t even actually care about securing the border in the cruel ways they say they want to secure it; not as much as they want to establish that only they get to decide what happens to human beings in this country whether or not those human beings are at the border or anywhere else. A bipartisan bill allowing them to do everything they say they want to do simply doesn’t send the authoritarian message as much as doing it illegally in defiance of a Democratic president would.

Speaking of newsletters that recently moved away from Substack, I’m happy to see The Reframe free. Democrats need to stop playing this game where they try to give Republicans everything they want to shut them up. They will not be appeased and their requests gain legitimacy in the process.

Her case highlights a chilling reality of post-Roe America: Medical exceptions to abortion bans have not stopped doctors from turning away patients with significant pregnancy complications, often with harrowing consequences.

Abortions are health care. If Texas doctors are erring on the side of legal caution at the expense of someone’s life, something is seriously wrong.

Drone armies, expanded overtime pay and over-the-counter birth control pills are just some of the new things Biden has ushered in as president that you might not have heard about.

Things we might know about if we had a functioning media.

California Senate candidate and Congressmember Adam Schiff is calling for a major overhaul of American institutions, including getting rid of the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court and eliminating the filibuster.

More like this, please.

Ladapo’s colleagues in science and medicine face the challenge of understanding what drives someone with Ladapo’s credentials — a Harvard education and a stint on the medical faculty at UCLA — to descend so deeply into professional irresponsibility.

The death cult brain worms never rest. We need to continually work to remove dangerous people from positions of power. Please vote accordingly, even in Florida.