First an admission, the image and headline were lifted from another site. Also borrowed from a comment stream there:
All the votes matter, not just those in proverbial swing states and districts. Harris isn’t swinging for the fence. The relief and excitement are palpable and real.
Harris isn’t just campaigning against Trump, as she said tonight, or even for the future. She’s running against Reagan and Reaganism, and the now half century old lie that government – and taxes – aren’t the solution, they’re the problem. That legacy has left us to the tender mercies of unrestrained capital.
She’s brought together two real personalities, who showcase a potentially better future, and how far from that future Donald Trump and JD Vance would take us. Her future will be imperfect and won’t all come out as intended, but imagine what Donald Trump’s future would be.
[italics added] The mantra, "Democrats are just tax and spend," THINK!
Wtf is government for anyway? There are private sector for profit opportunities, and there are needed social goods which are not profitable, but needed. Infrastructure, for example. For infrastructure which serves private sector employers and their workers, for keeping that maintained and growing as the population and levels of commerce grow, the government taxes, and then spends, buying from the public the contracting, labor, materials and construction needed.
Yes, government can work well, or poorly, at taxing and spending. There can be inequitable taxation falling more on lower and middle class citizens while the wealthy skate. They lobby, they skate. There can be waste. There can be featherbedding of the government payroll. The opposite error is underfunding needed regulatory attentions which sanely police the private sector against willful pirates and their piracy. All of that is textbook Econ/PoliSci 101. Everybody knows it, but Republicans lie about it, and deficit spend so the weight of paying is deferred to our nation's children's adulthood. Cheating the future so the fat cats can get fatter. Fat cats taking unfair advantages are the problem, not childless cat ladies.
Start now with what Walz is not. He is not a fast-talking monied Yale educated venture capitalist bullshitter-suit with a funny trimmed beard in his campaign airplane playing softball with favored media people by scapegoating immigrants who want the same thing everybody wants, a better more prosperous life. It is the corporations shipping jobs to China, not Walz or any of the Democrats. So scapegoating the Chinese and immigrants ignores who are taking advantage of cheaper foreign labor by moving factories. Who, really, are gaming the system? Who are getting the tax breaks where Reagan and every Republican President after him have given yet more tax cuts to the rich?
After George Floyd's murder, Walz understands the Black rage over danger-packed unfair policing. Walz spoke after the close of Chauvin's trial, when the jury was deliberating, with an aim to sensibly fixing things to work better. He and Dem AG Keith Ellison having worked together to best assure Chauvin was held responsible for the murder of a fellow human being. Trump wants more police doing nothing less hostile. A bigger boot on the face of non-white, non-wealthy "trouble makers." White privilege is Trump's mantra, and his voting base matches. We had that, it has not worked. We move forward with common sense policy, or we scapegoat and dissemble. One path makes sense. The other is weird.
Okay. Next link. Because I regard the man as the second best Senator Minnesota has had, (after Paul Wellstone as Number 1); Al Franken, on YouTube answering simple questions simply. Cleanly. It's short, and worth watching. No JD Namechange from Al. He is and always has been Al.
Enough for now.