Leah McGrath Goodman

Really you cannot ask for more from today. To the gods and humanity entire, thank you.

Right...?

I know everyone is still circulating the details of that 'Original Sin' book by Jake Tapper et al, but is it wrong that what really stayed with me from the New Yorker piece is that George Clooney has a house in Lake Como AND the south of France? I mean, come ON... www.newyorker.com/news/the-pol...

What is corruption? (Since this topic keeps coming up...)

Loved watching this...!

Journalists celebrate 'Journalism' win ! Great metaphor for us right now. And possibly...sign of the times / things to come?

Full decision here, dated April 17, 2025, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, with circuit judges King and Thacker joining in: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT. Astounding words from the judge about ripping U.S. residents off the streets and locking them up without due process. Pls RT. People need to know this. It's not going to stop with just a few scapegoats and everybody knows it.

Well then I guess we're both tight-ass New Englanders ... !

I guess in California, being seen as a 'lifestyle guru' is still supposed to be...desirable? If I recall correctly, Ferriss said 'The Four-Hour Workweek" was originally titled 'Lifestyle Hustler.' Def more honest, and explains a lot.

Can Wikipedia Be Trusted? Crowdsourced Wikipedia entries are more biased than Encyclopaedia Britannica articles.

Should add: Whether people self-promote on Wikipedia or the entry is crowdsourced, researchers say that overall a Wikipedia entry is still more biased than a standard encyclopedia entry, which is more balanced and neutral: insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/can-...

Yes, Wikipedia entries sometimes make mistakes & it is ok to fix them. But done right, it is a true reflection of the public opinion, even global opinion...and if you're a seeker, a lover of the truth, then letting Wikipedia write about you is a good way to come to terms with how you are being seen.

I think the lesson is, online readers don't want promos...they don't want to hear you're a guru (according to you). They want the truth & they want it to have some integrity. They want to see what the highlights are, not according to you, but according to everyone else. And you should want that too.

After hearing this, I asked a close 'very online' friend (and supporter of my work) what he thought. And he said this, which I think was so wise: 'You should let your audience decide when you deserve a Wikipedia entry -- and you should trust them to write it.'

I actually attended a conference where Ferriss strongly advised the audience of authors/writers/journalists to write their own Wikipedia entries. (To this day, you can actually see in the 'Talk' section of his entry that Ferriss's staffer is still asking for tiny things to be updated and added...)

A note to you all about authors and journalists -- and their Wikipedia entries. If you read an entry about anyone or anything and it is just filled with brags, it is VERY likely the person it applies to wrote a great deal of it and is treating their entry as a self-promotion (example):

Currently enjoying

Our ability to absorb masses of information, misinformation and disinformation has been pushed to the limit. And people are struggling just to differentiate between those types of information. Misinformation is getting the facts wrong, while disinformation is an attempt to deliberately mislead.

A Taste for Disinformation Do you know the truth when you hear it?

NEW: COLUMN C: If 'flooding the zone' is a cure for sanity, what is the antidote? columnc.substack.com/p/a-taste-fo...

NOW they all want to speak out? Craven. Absurd.

Every man for himself is the prevailing worldview here. And if you're a billionaire, why not? You'll hoard it and pass it on to your kids. But if you're in the 99%, or in a younger generation who will have to contend with the rising masses of debt, you will be railroaded. And that is the point.

Once the Trump tax cuts take effect, middle-class Americans and those with less will see very little change to their bottom line. That's because the lion's share of funds will flow to the nation's wealthiest, which will plunge the U.S. deeper into debt and damn generations to come.

For those cheering DOGE bc they think Elon's cuts will handily fund the next round of Trump tax cuts, the math shows they won't. The DOGE cuts will barely make a dent; they won't fund the Trump tax cuts. They will just accelerate the wealth transfer to the rich while crushing ordinary Americans.

"...It is societally unfair to give huge tax cuts that disproportionately favor the rich and then try to fund them by taking away programs from the people least able to lose them,” Kogan added. (Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan think tank, for the record.)

Kogan also said (this is a 2-part quote): “If you do a cuts-only approach, then we would probably still see calls for more tax cuts. If you want to fix this, you should start with the cause: We got here in the first place because of tax cuts for the rich..."

"If not for the Bush tax cuts and their extensions, as well as the Trump tax cuts, revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely,” Bobby Kogan told me in 2023 -- a history lesson that's worth repeating. Kogan is a federal budget policy expert at the Center for American Progress.

What changed since the Clinton administration balanced the budget? Back then, America reported surpluses for fiscal years 1998–2001 (the only years ever to have them from 1970 to 2023). It wasn't a massive increase in spending, but the huge decreases in taxes benefitting America’s most affluent.

Before the U.S. plunges itself deeper into debt over Trump's planned tax cuts, it's worth noting that as recently as the 1990s, America had a balanced budget. Our tax system was designed for revenues to grow along with the U.S. economy. But that's no longer the case. So how did the country get here?

Why would Trump hire the most vocal celebrity billionaire in the world to take a torch to govt? He wants to claim that he funded all these tax cuts. But they won't be funded--the cuts will barely scratch the surface. America and Americans will go deeper into debt. The slash-and-burn is all pageant.

A nonpartisan chart showing how Trump's devoted base is the last group of people he's thinking about.