As of February 22, 2025, Elon Musk claims that his DOGE Bros have saved the American taxpayer $55 billion dollars.
What Musk does not say is that as compared to the $6.75 trillion dollar Federal budget a savings of $55 billion dollars is not even measurable. I asked Google Gemini to produce a pie chart comparing the budget to the savings and this is how Gemini responded.
I don’t know why Elon Musk and his DOGE Bros have not thought of this. But the Federal Withholding Tax system should be scrapped. It is a relic of World War II when the Federal Government needed a constant source of income to keep up with the costs of the war. It forces employers to become “agents” of the Federal Government by requiring the employer to calculate, retain, report, and pay to the Federal Government a guesstimate of how much Federal Taxes an employee might owe.
The problem with this system is that a company’s accounting team do not have the in-depth information about each of their employees tax situations so that they can report and withhold this money accurately. For most employees this results in their over payment of Federal taxes, which the employee has to wait until April 15th each you to file for a tax refund.
The result is that the Federal Government has received extra income, which it can spend or collect interest on during the tax year, and the employee has received less income which they can spend or collect interest on during the tax year. The only winner in this system is the Federal Government who knows that it is receiving more money than it should during the tax year and, when taxpayers get a tax refund, the Federal Government also knows that it is going to “steal” the interest that it earned on these excess funds and not return any interest to the tax payer.
Getting rid of the Federal withholding system would allow employees to keep and bank or invest the money which is now being withheld from their paychecks every pay period. On April 15th the employee would file their Federal taxes and pay what they actually owe, and they would be able to keep the interest they earned on this tax money while it sat in their banks or investments.
Getting rid of the Federal withholding system would mean that the Federal Government would receive the bulk of its income in April of each year and it would have to be fiscally responsible to ensure that that money would last for the entire Federal budget year.
And spoiler alert, it does not sound like it has anything to do with National Security.
As I wrote in my last blog post, “…forcing the sale of TikTok is akin to an act of piracy by the U.S. government. It is a seizure of a valuable international brand to enrich some American interest, as yet to be named.” This was obvious! So why did the U.S. Supreme Court go along with the ruse and uphold the ban?
My previous blog post predicted everything that Trump would accidentally(?) admit to today during his Oval Office news conference where he signed a bunch of executive orders. I’ve added the question mark above because with Trump who knows what is an accident or on purpose. One could reasonably see this “accidental admission” as being a warning to other foreign companies that if they are valuable and doing business in the U.S. that some lawmaker might come up with a trumped-up reason why the U.S. gets 50% of that company’s value.
On January 18th I wrote, “I think it is safe to say that the TikTok user demographics do not align with Senior Pentagon or Government Officials, the kind of people who would be valuable assets for a foreign government to track.” Today, Trump said, “And remember, TikTok is largely about kids… young kids… if China is going to get information about young kids… I don’t know [he waves his hands around and mutters a little] I think… I think… to be honest with you… I think we have bigger problems than that…” The U.S. Justice Department tried to sneak in National Security by arguing essentially that one day, one of these kids could be in the military, and the Chinese government could use data they collected on that person when they were a child, to exploit them as adult. The fact that the Supreme Court seems to have bought that argument is incomprehensible.
When did we start regulating products based on some future harm, when we cannot identify the individual who would be harmed, or the possible harm they may suffer. If this is the new consumer protection standard that the Supreme Courts wants to apply then absolutely they should rule that cigarettes should be banned. We know that children exposed to cigarette smoke are being harmed. One day it could even lead to them developing cancer. We do not know the exact harm, or which exact child will be harmed by cigarette smoke. But we have a hypothetical child at risk so, Supreme Court, get off your ass and start protecting that hypothetical kid.
Again, from January 18th I wrote, “What is clear is that the U.S. legislation is designed to threaten any foreign app with a forced sale to a U.S. company if that foreign app is deemed to be a threat to national security. In many ways it feels like eMcCarthyism but with an international trade component allowing American companies to force a fire sale on any foreign assets they wish to own.” As Trump says in this video clip, “… tell you what… every rich person has called me about TikTok…”
As the video goes on, to my ears, things start to sound a lot like extortion. Trump says, “… no you’d take 50% of TikTok for the approval…” The “approval” means a promise from the Federal Government not to shut the app down in the U.S. As Trump continues “… but the U.S. essentially would be paid for doing that, half of the value of TikTok… [removed section] … but there is big value in TikTok if it gets approved, if it doesn’t get approved there is no value, so if we create that value why aren’t we entitled to like half?…”
I am trying to figure out how this is different from the stereotyped movie extortion ring where “guys” enter a business and say [with a thick New York accent] “You got a nice business here, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Has the Supreme Court just legitimized the U.S. Government using made up National Security concerns and protecting hypothetical children to allow the U.S. Government to extort any valuable foreign business?
The entire U.S. case against TikTok is a sham. Whatever the reasons are for why the U.S. Justice Department went after TikTok, one can be fairly certain that it had little to do with National Security.
According to http://www.unchainedmusic.io “The user base is notably diverse, with 36.2% of users aged 18-24 and 34% aged 25-34, highlighting its strong presence among young adults.” I think it is safe to say that the TikTok user demographics do not align with Senior Pentagon or Government Officials, the kind of people who would be valuable assets for a foreign government to track.
More importantly there are far more effective covert ways of tracking someone via their cell phone as Journalist Ronan Farrow as reported on.
But maybe most importantly the Pentagon had already banned TikTok on Government devices in 2019 and the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was first introduced in Congress as H.R. 7521 on March 5, 2024. So five years after the Pentagon had already acted to protect troops and “National Security,” Congress comes along demanding that ByteDance divest itself from TikTok or face a nationwide ban.
What is suspicious is that Congress did not include in this legislation robust data collection restrictions for all cell phone apps, something that would have helped all Americans feel safer using their cell phones. I asked Google Gemini how the EU handles these kinds of concerns and Gemini responded “The DSA and GDPR have a broader scope than PAFACA, addressing a wider range of online harms and privacy concerns beyond just foreign ownership.
What is clear is that the U.S. legislation is designed to threaten any foreign app with a forced sale to a U.S. company if that foreign app is deemed to be a threat to national security. In many ways it feels like eMcCarthyism but with an international trade component allowing American companies to force a fire sale on any foreign assets they wish to own. And it does this without really protecting Americans or National Security because once those foreign assets are owned by an American company the American company will be allowed to continue to secretly track their users and sell their data.
And because the U.S. data protection laws are so lax, a U.S. company could send its user data to China for processing and analysis. So, ByteDance could be forced to sell TikTok to a U.S. company who could then turn around and contract with ByteDance to process the user data for them. I mean, ByteDance would already have all the tools needed to do that.
The mistake that ByteDance made was that they hung their argument on the 1st Amendment. The problem is that National Security already trumps the 1st Amendment. So, before one would have the chance of winning on 1st Amendment grounds, one was going to have to destroy the National Security argument. But I think once you get past the sham argument of National Security, the problem with the 1st Amendment is that while Americans are guaranteed the right to speak, they are not guaranteed a venue to speak through. And this is all important. It is a right that one cannot exercise without a “megaphone,” but a “megaphone” is not guaranteed as part of the 1st Amendment.
The New York Times, quite a big “megaphone” for certain people’s right to speak, could close down tomorrow and go out of business, and that would not be found to infringe on the journalists from the Times “right to speak.” Those journalists can continue to speak in other forums. Just like TikTok users can continue to create content in other apps. Their right to speak has not been infringed by the Government forcing TikTok to shut down.
If I were ByteDance I would have primarily argued equal protection based on non-discrimination. The reality is that all cell phone apps track user data. Apps made by companies all over the world are all doing the same kind of tracking. The proper course for the U.S. Government to take so they are not gaming the system – i.e. so that the Government is not picking winners and losers in the cell phone app industry – is for Congress to pass laws which govern what all companies can do with the data they are collecting on U.S. citizens. These laws should be silent on the purpose of the app or the ownership of the app.
For example, it would be a clear violation of Federal law to say that any app that is owned by a person of Asian heritage is banned in the United States. In fact, it would be a violation of Federal law to say that any app that is owned by a person of Chinese heritage is banned in the United States. It would also be a violation of Federal law to ban any app that included videos of people dancing.
The argument that I would have made in defense of TikTok is that there are ways of protecting the data of U.S. citizens through strong data protection laws and agreements. I know that this was one of their arguments. But I would argue that forcing the sale of TikTok is akin to an act of piracy by the U.S. government. It is a seizure of a valuable international brand to enrich some American interest, as yet to be named. That it is based in a long standing American hatred of Communism and a jingoistic stereotyping of people of Chinese heritage as being subservient to the government of China. While the 21st century reality is that Chinese companies conduct business all around the globe and follow the local laws of the countries where they operate. And, if the U.S. Government does not believe that these local laws are sufficient to protect its citizens or its national security the proper recourse is to strengthen the laws that all foreign companies must follow when doing business inside of the United States.
The issue in the case according to www.scotusblog.com is “Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provided by another information content provider, or only limits the liability of interactive computer services when they engage in traditional editorial functions (such as deciding whether to display or withdraw) with regard to such information.“
But because plaintiffs “brought their lawsuit under the Antiterrorism Act, arguing that Google (which owns YouTube) aided ISIS’s recruitment by allowing ISIS to post videos on YouTube that incited violence and sought to recruit potential ISIS members, and by recommending ISIS videos to users through its algorithms” it would appear that Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act is not really the issue. Because in the language of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the authors did not intend Section 230 to over-ride or supersede other laws designed to protect persons, including criminal law. “Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.“
Therefore the issue in this case really is, did YouTube provide aide and assistance to ISIS by allowing videos which discussed ISIS’s beliefs, motivations, religious ideology, anti-western principles, Islamic fundamentalism onto their site and, in so doing, did YouTube violate the Antiterrorism Act.
If YouTube is found to have violated the Antiterrorism Act then Sction 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act does not apply since it is written into that act that it does not “impair the enforcement” of “any other Federal criminal statute.“
And, if YouTube is found to not have violated the Antiterrorism Act, then the original case is resolved because in allowing the original material to be posted YouTube is afforded the immunity granted by Section230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act.
But if Congress, the media, and the Supreme Court are eager to litigate Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act and are willing to use this case to do so, even if it has no bearing, then I think the following is what they will get wrong.
I think this last point is critical to what the media, Congress, and the Supreme Court will likely get wrong, and that is that most people who go down dangerous rabbit holes were looking to go down that rabbit hole in the first place. And I don’t mean that they knew what rabbit hole they were looking for… what I mean is that they were already susceptible to radicalization. They already held strong religious beliefs, patriotic beliefs, political beliefs, or anti-social beliefs. They already had a strong belief that they themselves were righteous, moral, patriots. They were already leaning towards an US v THEM view of the world.
According to the AP, “The key defendant in the 2015 Paris attacks trial said Wednesday the coordinated killings were in retaliation for French airstrikes on the Islamic State group, calling the deaths of 130 innocent people “nothing personal” as he acknowledged his role for the first time.” But one could read the AP report cited above about the 2015 attacks and scream, “why is the AP giving a voice to these terrorists?” “Why is the AP allowing them to spew their vile about this being ‘nothing personal’?”
“We fought France, we attacked France, we targeted the civilian population. It was nothing personal against them,” Abdeslam said. “I know my statement may be shocking, but it is not to dig the knife deeper in the wound but to be sincere towards those who are suffering immeasurable grief.”
George Salines, whose daughter Lola was among the 90 dead inside the Bataclan, refused to accept Abdeslam’s rationale.
“To explain that what we wanted to target was France and not individual persons -– right, except it was people who were injured and killed, innocent people, targeted voluntarily. It’s morally unacceptable,” he said.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-france-trials-paris-brussels-f2031a79abfae46cbd10d4315cf29163
In the West we are comfortable seeing the world through a Western media filter. A media filter that reinforces our national radicalization, our national US v THEM. We accept that not all of the news we see is correct. We accept that there may be a pro-western slant. Or a pro-democratic slant. Or a pro-Judaeo-Christian slant.
What we want desperately is for somebody to tell us that our view of the world is true. That we are right. That our causes are just.
What will we do if the AI we invent disagrees, and if the AI is not smart enough to lie to use about what it truly thinks?
We can find the terrorists to be morally unacceptable. We can place the blame for that on YouTube and we can ask the courts to intervene. What the media, Congress, and the Supreme Court will likely get wrong here is that there may be no legal recourse, that this could be a case where our morality may be what we need to call into question.
None of us want innocent civilians to be killed… but… we want to stop Putin and we want to stop Assad and we want to stop Bin Laden and we want to stop Hussein. Innocent civilians keep on getting in the way and we believe that it is nothing personal against them.
The big difference between how we see ourselves and how we see the people we want to stop, is that we tell ourselves that we know what is morally unacceptable. That we can adjudicate what is morally unacceptable. That our courts can intervene and stop what is morally unacceptable.
And in this case what our courts are being asked to stop is YouTube.
Today, on this remembrance of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., what strikes me, 54 years after King’s assassination, is not the legacy of the work that King completed before his death, but the the loss of all that King could have accomplished over the last 54 years. There were brilliant leaders who were able to step up after King’s death and continue the work, but they continued the work in their own way, based on their vision, based on their history, based on their lived experience. They were not Martin Luther King, Jr., and therefore they could not continue his work in his way. The best they could do for America was to continue his work in their way.
Often I look at the modern ascendancy of the right, which began with Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950. But McCarthy was weak and he had to move carefully because in the 1950s there was push back to McCarthy’s radicalism. There was resistance to his assertion that there were communists in all aspects of American society, including Hollywood, the media, and inside the Federal Government itself. But McCarthyism was strong, and ripples of McCarthyism were certainly felt during the Trump Presidency, and even now, as our 2023 McCarthy, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, begins to “investigate the investigators” an eerie call back to 1950 McCarthy’s the “enemy within.” 2023 McCarthy promises to root out the “deep state,” which is synonymous with radical left wing, i.e. Socialist or Communist, infiltration in all aspects of the Federal Government.
The 1960s was the American left’s refusal to step backwards in time. It was the left wing youth refusing to be hopeless, refusing to see everyone around themselves as an “enemy within.” But then in a series of targeted assassinations the hope of the 60s ended. I think it is difficult for people who did not live through it to understand how completely the 1960s were ripped away from us. I was born in 1962, so I was just 6 years old when King was assassinated. My sister, myself, along with our mother, had flown from Cleveland to Philadelphia. The death of King was announced while we were in the air. By the time we landed in Philadelphia parts of the city were in flames. Police were blocking the entrances to the airport and we were told it would not be safe for us to leave the airport. We slept that night in the Philadelphia airport.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April of 1968. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968. And while it happened a little more than 12 years later, John Lennon was assassinated in 1980. No political movement before or since has ever suffered the loss, so quickly, of so many critical leaders. It was a loss that destroyed the left in this country, a loss that the left has yet to recover from.
And the power vacuum was filled by the right. This set up American Democracy for Nixon, Regan, Bush, Bush, and Trump. And the three Democratic administrations spent all of their time running away from radical idealism. Carter, the ultimate bureaucrat, Clinton the “I smoked but did not inhale” candidate, and Obama. Each so fearful of being labeled a radical, a Socialist, a Communist, that they kept the radical left wing branch of their party isolated and powerless. All the time while the radical right gained even more strength.
So what I am reflecting on, on this Martin Luther King day, is that the leaders who came after King; the leaders who came after JFK; the leaders who came after Malcolm; the leaders who came after Bobby Kennedy; were all brilliant and gifted leaders, but, they could not carry on the political movements in the same way that the leaders they replaced would have, because these new leaders were their own people, with their own weaknesses and their own compromises.
Every New Years Eve after the ball drops in Times Square some current singer takes the stage to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” This always brings a tear to my eyes. But it is not because the song is timeless, or beautiful, of prophetic. The song is all of these things. But my eyes tear up because the person signing the song is singing it in their way. It is coming from their life experiences. It is a different song!
And that is my experience since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it is that the song that has continued is fundamentally a different song.
Since November 8, 2022 the media has been focusing on the lack of a “red wave.” Late night audiences are being played endless Republican predictions prior to the mid-term election that the “red wave” was really going to be a “red tsunami.”
As Jesse Watters says at 1:04 in the video above, “Don’t listen to the lies that they are spewing that this could take days or days… you know… to know who won, this is total BS. A wave like this we should know that night…”
It did take days to know that the “red wave” did not happen and that Democrats would retain the majority in the Senate, we still don’t know who controls the House, but it is looking like it will be the Republicans.
Now, in the aftermath, what the media is talking about is how unprecedented this is, that the party in power did not loose a lot of seats in Congress during the mid-term. The last time it happened was in 2002, but, often, that is cited as an anomaly due to 9/11. But what Democratic voters are supposed to be focusing on is that 2022 could have been a lot worse, when in reality it should have been a lot better.
Let’s look at the Senate race in Georgia where Raphael Warnock is currently leading with 49.4% of the vote (1,943,253 votes) to Herschel Walker’s 48.5% of the vote (1,906,945 votes). That is a difference .9% or just 36,608 votes. Raphael Warnock is the incumbent Senator facing a political novice facing multiple scandals and accusations of widespread lies. This race should not have been close.
Or Arizon’s Senate race where incumbent Mark Kelly narrowly defeated Blake Masters 51.4% of the vote to 46.5% of the vote. A difference of only 124,613 votes. But there was a 3rd candidate in the race, a libertarian, who surely drained some Republican voters. Assuming all of the voters that voted for the Libertarian candidate were Republican that means that Masters could have received an additional 53,226 votes if that 3rd party candidate did not run, making the race even closer.
Yet Kelly, the incumbent Senator, a former Navy pilot and astronaut, was up against Master’s a political novice. This race also should not have been close.
To look at how these races should have gone, look at Oregon’s 3rd district. According to Politico (https://www.politico.com/2022-election/results/house/) seen below, Blumenauer won 70.2% of the vote compared to Harbour’s 26.2% of the vote. This is usually how incumbent races go.
What Democratic voters should be concerned about is not a lack of a red wave in 2022, but the anemic blue trickle that had so many Democratic candidates narrowly defeating their opponents.
Let’s remember that on January 6th 2021 the United States Capitol was attacked by thousands of Trump supporters who were trying to stop the certification of the 2020 election. In the 2022 midterm elections there were a number of Trump supporting, election denying candidates running for office. This should have motivated Democratic voters to vote.
Then in June 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and signaled that it was ready to reverse other Supreme Court precedents like marriage equality and other 14th Amendment guarantees. In the run up to the mid-terms President Biden signaled that if the Democrats retained control of Congress and widened their margin in the Senate, that he would codify a woman’s right to make reproductive decisions. This should have caused Democratic voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers.
And yet many races were narrow victories for the Democratic Party.
Yes, it is that simple! A person can still have their screen name. If one want to be known as 69Nazi420 online, that is fine, but to register the 69Nazi420 “online identity” one would have sign up with a “real identity” that includes ones first and last name, street address, phone number, and a credit card issued under that name, at that street address.
There could be a minimal charge for an “online identity,” say $3 per year. The company that sells you your online identity would then register that identity with ICANN. ICANN would keep a register of all online identities and which company was acting as the identity provider for that identity.
How would this work in real life you ask… So, for example, if one bought an online identity from Google, when one went to sign up with Facebook, one would enter their screen name and Facebook would look it up in the ICANN regisrty. If the online identity existed ICANN would tell Facebook which company was acting as identity provider and Facebook would open a popup window so that the person creating a Facebook account could login to their identity provider and verify their identity.
If, on the other hand, when Facebook queried ICANN no online identity was found, Facebook could offer to sell the person the online identity and Facebook would become the registered identity provider for that new online identity.
Let’s skip the traditional culture wars and wagging our jowls about free speech and whether our kids are spending too much time in front of screens. The reality is that we all live in the real world and the online world. In the real world we have birth certificates, driver licenses, passports, and credit cards that we can use when asked to identity ourselves. Civil society could not happen without these. All of the problems that we are experiencing online, we would experience in real life, if people were allowed to create as many fake identities as they wanted. Governments have been slow to recognize that online our identity is just as real, and society needs the tools to verify our online identity. This can be done via the free market using the tools that already exist online in the form of ICANN and identity providers. Everyone should be happy. Problem solved!
We hear it all the time, that politics in the United States are too polarized, but in my opinion that is the logical outcome of a two party system. If we had a 3rd party, then at least there would be an opportunity for politicians to cross over party lines to find common cause in order to defeat a common adversary. With only two parties, the only option is for politicians to become entrenched in party loyalty, because they only have one political enemy to defeat. And, with only one enemy, it is easier to demonize the opposition and to purposefully not find any proposal from the opposition to be acceptable.
The other problem with the two party system is that it does not allow us to develop our diverse political opinions. We talk about the left wing of the Democratic Party or the moderates in the Democratic Party, but maybe the Democratic Party is too diverse to be one party anymore. Why should the left wing policies be toned down to make them more appealing to the centrist Democrats, and why do the moderate candidates have to pretend that they endorse policies like universal health care to entice left leaning voters to vote for them. Imagine if we could have a Democratic Party and a Green Party and a Labor Party, then voters could align themselves with the party that best matched their political views.
The exact same logic would apply to the Republican Party. The Tea Party could be a separate party as could the Christian Conservative Party.
If the 62 million people who voted for Trump identify as Republicans and the 65 million people who voted for Hillary identify as Democrats, it is not difficult to see that two political parties cannot represent the diverse political opinions of 127 million people. Each Congressional district in the United States represents approximately 747,000 people, even that is too many people for their diverse political views to be represented by a single party or a single representative.
When the Congress was created in 1789 each representative “represented” approximately 30,000 people, which one can imagine doing. A town of 30,000 people is small enough that there may be common opinion on big social issues.
The problem with American politics then, may be nothing more than the expected consequence of a polarizing two party system and the fact that the diverse views of 747,000 people or 127 million people cannot be represented by picking one, of two, candidates.
When it came to the January 2018 government shutdown the Democrats are playing the blame game when instead what the Democrats should be playing is the truth game.
De-funding the federal government is what the Republicans campaigned on. Shut it down and drain the swamp are the rallying cries of the Trump base. So the fact that the Democrats refused to compromise on a continuing resolution gave the Republicans, especially the conservative Trump base Republicans, exactly what they wanted. Republicans should have been dancing in the streets all weekend because the EPA was shutdown, the IRS was shutdown, the department of Health and Human Services was shutdown, the national parks were closed, social security was shutdown, the dreaded Obama care was shutdown. For a few short days there was no federal big brother to stomp on states rights, there was no federal big brother to stomp on multinational corporations, banks, or billionaires. Everything that the conservative Republicans yell and scream about came true for one magic weekend in January.
Trump, through his brilliant incompetence, delivered on his biggest promise, the swamp was drained. There should have been fireworks on the White House grounds and rainbows over the Capitol.
But wait, the Republicans hated the shutdown. They blamed the Democrats.
So why don’t the Democrats ask the question, why are the Republicans runing away from these promises? And if the Republicans don’t want to take credit for delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, why don’t the Democrats come forward and say “we delivered on Trump’s promise, we drained the swamp, we shut it down.” The Democrats can just say, we delivered where the Republicans and Trump failed! The Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress and yet the Republicans say they are not responsible for the government shutdown, well that’s great, then the Democrats should remind Republican voters that even with all that power in the hands of the Republicans, it was the Democrats who delivered on Trump’s promise to shut it down and drain the swamp. The Democrats did it. The lying Republicans promised to do it, but when push came to shove, they all hid from it and did not have the balls to deliver what the Republican voters wanted.
And if Democrats are smart they won’t restart the government until the Republicans present a budget that defunds all of the federal programs they promised to permanently defund. They won’t restart the government until Trump presents a plan with the border wall being paid for by Mexico. They won’t restart the government until the Republicans fund a replacement for Obama care and his tax cuts within a balanced budget.
Democrats, your biggest weapon against the Republicans is their own campaign promises. Help them to deliver on these promises. Force them to deliver on these promises. With the government shutdown there is no better time than now!
John Storhm 