@impracticalproposals.com
Writer-editor-photographer. Lifelong activist & Democratic Party dissident. Neoliberalism spent, Trumpism shredding government & Constitution, & capitalism raping planet: what comes next? Democracy, community, equality, saving planet: Devil's in details.
Santa Barbara is my hometown. This news is just horrible.
Though November congressional elections may knock MAGA back for a while, US democracy longer-range depends primarily on grassroots mobilization of the widest possible spectrum of the Americans. To be relevant let alone successful, the Democrats will need to be more than "We're Not MAGA!" this time.
Here’s something you might not know if you’re not super rich.
Today is the day that people who make $1 million a year stop paying into Social Security.
Working people pay all year, but the rich get a break.
Lift the cap and pull millions of seniors out of poverty.
Country Joe's recent passing was a reminder that we also used to have a peace movement.
"We want the embargo to end. We want the cruel, inhumane oil blockade by the Trump regime to end. We want the current administration’s posturing toward war games and invasion to end. We want engagement, not escalation. We want friendship." Agreed. But punishing Cuba has been U.S. policy 75 yrs not 1
Trump’s brutal makeshift jails have been blasted as “concentration camps,” a term freighted by a century+ of deplorable history. But experts are using these words to describe the feds' warehousing of tens of thousands of men, women and children, snatched from their communities by masked agents.
Dick Durbin explains what's wrong with the Save America Act.
Sen. Cornyn: Those are all matters that could be addressed by amendments to the bill itself if we get on the bill.
Sen Durbin (bemused): When's the last time we amended a bill?
It's not progressives but centrists who are out of touch. Moderate voters are not like the people who purport to speak for them. And that’s crucial for Democratic candidates and strategists, as well as journalists, to understand. They're not looking for a nominee with a Republican-lite platform.
Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections. Wealthy donors are reaping the rewards.
Would we be here if there had been repercussions for the attack on Afghanistan in 2001, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Obama's drones program or continuing genocide in Palestine? We need true accountability for these crimes. And the only way to get it is to wage a struggle against militarism every day.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on Somalis in Minnesota ignores a longer history: decades of US intervention that helped produce the violence and displacement Somalis fled.
Framed as a strike on “evil,” Washington and Tel Aviv’s attacks leave Iran with few off-ramps. Tehran’s incentives now point toward escalation as a matter of survival.
Hey, hey, Donald J.,
How many kids did you kill today?
Trump will be gone soon. We must plan for what comes next. It won't be possible to return to what was; no matter, it wasn't that great anyway. So how will we make the next American republic more democratic? More equitable? More just? More peaceful? Safer? Power to the people or to the oligarchs?
Killing (or snatching) a country's leader doesn't assure regime change. Will old cohort install new leader? If an opposition seizes power, will it be better? If there's civil war, do we intervene? Will we install a puppet? If there's resistance, do we invade? Do we occupy? Or just destroy and run?
'Trump announced at 2:30 a.m. Saturday via Truth Social that the strikes had occurred, urging the Iranian public to rise up against its leadership and “seize control of your destiny.”'
What say we try that?
Democratic leadership has descended into self-parody.
Last month, we teamed up with YouGov to ask voters in Minnesota and Michigan their opinions on Democratic leadership. The results paint a clear picture: Chuck Schumer is one of the most staggeringly unpopular politicians in America.
A tax on these high-income earners is the most effective way to redistribute benefits to workers once again.
So-called deficits are actually strengths: "a sense of solidarity, compassion, a merging of the mind and the body, learning and willing to take risks, embracing passion, connecting knowledge to power, and being attentive to the injuries of others and embracing a sense of social justice."
