NEW: Kyrsten Sinema raised $631,800, nearly half her joint fundraising committee's Q1 funds, from executives and employees of three private equity giants: Blackstone, KKR, and The Carlyle Group. https://t.co/IIKRFLrPad

— Sludge (@Sludge) April 17, 2023

https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-lgbtq-pride-event-disneyland-ron-desantis-threatens-prison-2023-4

Disney announced its first-ever LGBTQ event at Disneyland shortly after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened during a press conference to build a state prison next to Orlando’s Walt Disney World Resort.

Disney said in a tweet on Monday afternoon that “Disneyland After Dark: Pride Nite” would be coming to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, during Pride Month in June.

The two-night event, which will be held on June 13 and 15 inside the amusement park, will celebrate the LGBTQ communities and allies, Disneyland said in a blog.

The move was seemingly the latest development in a public spat between Disney and DeSantis, which began in early 2022 when Disney said it would work to repeal Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, Insider’s Kimberley Leonard reported.

DeSantis has strongly defended the controversial legislation, which limits classroom instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation, with his administration pushing its expansion to all grades.

DeSantis said in March that Disney had “crossed the line” when it called for the repeal of the law.

This latest event was first announced by Disneyland on its blog last Thursday, but Disney’s decision to publicize it on the company’s official Twitter account came just hours after DeSantis made a threat about building a prison near the Florida amusement park during a press conference on Monday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/17/clarence-thomas-disclosures-harlan-crow-respect/

During his much-too-long tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas has been totally, tragically wrong about almost everything. But for a long time, I tried to convince myself that he was at least sincere in his deplorable ideology.

Silly me.

I was never sympathetic. I believed Anita Hill, who testified at Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991 that he had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at two government agencies. And for Thomas, a far-right Republican apparatchik, to take the seat on the nation’s highest court vacated by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement, was always an abomination.

But I did understand how a Black man born in Pin Point, Ga., in 1948 might have a great big chip on his shoulder. I understood how growing up under the jackboot of Jim Crow might lead him to the philosophy of Black self-sufficiency articulated by Malcolm X, which Thomas espoused in his youth. And I almost — but not quite — understood how a deep distrust of government, perhaps along with some personal issues involving self-image and self-worth, might have produced his tear-it-all-down judicial nihilism.

It was hard for me to believe that Thomas could be as much of a puppet of the most reactionary forces in American society as he seemed. But now, there is overwhelming evidence that that’s exactly what he is.

Thanks to reporting this month by ProPublica, we now know that Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a hard-right Republican activist, have been treated to lavish vacations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by Harlan Crow, a politically active Texas billionaire. These jaunts included a vacation in Indonesia in 2019 that involved flights on Crow’s private jet and an island-hopping tour on a superyacht — a nine-day trip that alone would have cost the couple more than $500,000. If they had paid for it themselves. Which they did not.

There were also other trips on Crow’s jet and frequent stays at properties he owns in the Adirondacks and in East Texas, according to ProPublica. Accompanying the Thomases as guests, at times, were conservative business executives and thought leaders.

And for some reason, Thomas failed to report any of these gifts — any of them — on the disclosure forms he is required to submit annually.

Nor did Thomas disclose the fact that Crow purchased the Georgia house the justice’s mother lives in, then made tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of improvements to the dwelling, ProPublica subsequently revealed.

We should have seen this coming. From 2003 to 2007, on his disclosure forms, Thomas checked the box labeled “none” for his wife’s income. During that period, Ginni Thomas earned more than $686,000 from the conservative Heritage Foundation. When called on the lie, Thomas said it was an error “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”

Likewise, regarding the trips he took at Crow’s expense, Thomas issued a statement claiming that early in his time on the Supreme Court, he “was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

Stop laughing. All right, yes, it is hilarious. Thomas expects the nation to take seriously his views on the subtlest contours of the Constitution. He also expects us to believe he cannot understand a clear and simple instruction on a disclosure form; that he sees no distinction between “personal hospitality” and trips halfway around the world by private jet; and that he sees nothing wrong about having a member of the board of the conservative American Enterprise Institute purchase and fix up his mother’s house.

A little context: In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned after it was learned that he had accepted, then returned, $20,000 from a Wall Street financier. At the time, Chief Justice Earl Warren felt it was important that Fortas step down to preserve the court’s reputation.

Thomas accepted gifts from Crow worth many times that amount, even counting for inflation, and failed to report them. And then there is all the money Ginni Thomas has received from right-wing organizations that lobby on issues before the court — plus her outrageous involvement in the “Stop the Steal” putsch that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Thomas doesn’t believe in affirmative action or protecting voting rights, though he benefited from both. He does believe in living the good life among millionaires and billionaires whose interests he just happens to protect in his opinions.

My mental image of Thomas used to be of him sitting on the Supreme Court bench during arguments, silent and scowling. Now, I see him on vacation, smoking a cigar with Crow and his buddies, laughing as though he doesn’t have a care in the world. The joke is on us.

Bernie op ed in the Guardian

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/17/bernie-sanders-minimum-wage-living-wage

Congress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working families – many of whom are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families.

One important way to do that is to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. In the year 2023, nobody in the US should be forced to work for starvation wages. It should be a basic truism that in the US, the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you do not live in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do morally. It is also good economics. Putting money into the hands of people who will spend it on basic needs is a strong economic stimulant.

The federal minimum wage has lost over 27% of its purchasing power since it was last raised 14 years ago
When over 60% of American workers are now living paycheck to paycheck, when the life expectancy of low-income Americans is in decline, when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country, we can no longer tolerate a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a wage that has not been raised since 2009.

That is unacceptable. Millions of Americans cannot be allowed to fall further and further behind economically, unable to afford the housing, food, healthcare, childcare and education they desperately need in order to live in health and dignity.

Whether they are greeting us at Walmart, serving us hamburgers at McDonald’s, providing childcare for our kids or waiting on our table at a diner in rural America, there are too many Americans trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour. It cannot be done. This injustice must end. Low-income workers need a pay raise and the American people want them to get that raise.

Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for raising the minimum wage to a living wage. But it’s not just polls. In 2021, the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives voted to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The bad news is that we lacked the votes to pass this legislation through the equally divided Senate. Not only did a $15-an-hour minimum wage bill fail to win the vote of a single Republican in the Senate, eight Democrats voted against it as well.

That was then. Now is now. And things are changing. As a result of years of congressional inaction, cities and states all across the country are taking the low-wage crisis into their own hands and raising their minimum wage. Some are doing it through legislative action. Others are doing it through ballot initiatives.

Since 2013, the people of 12 states – New Jersey, South Dakota, Arkansas (twice), Alaska, Washington, Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Florida, Nevada and Nebraska (twice) – have voted on ballot initiatives to raise their state’s minimum wage. Every single one of these initiatives passed, none with less than 55% of the vote. And these are not just strong “blue states” voting for economic justice. In the recent November 2022 midterm election, two states that voted in Republican governors, Nebraska and Nevada, voted to raise the minimum wage. In 2020, the citizens of Florida, with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, also voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The MIT living wage calculator estimates a living wage as a salary that is adequate enough to support a family without luxuries. For two working adults and one child, a living hourly wage for each adult would be $18.69 in West Virginia, $17.55 in South Carolina, $21.57 in Maryland, $20.01 in Utah and $19.33 in Wisconsin. Even in my own state of Vermont, the living wage is $19.58, more than $6 above the current state minimum wage.

But there are many families that do not have two working adults and rely on single moms who are raising their children on their own. In that case, the required living wage is much higher. As an example, a single mother in West Virginia would need to make $33.39 an hour to support herself and one child.

So it is not radical to suggest that raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour over a period of several years is the right thing to do. In fact, had my 2015 bill to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour that was indexed to median wages became law, the federal minimum wage this January would be at least $17.40 an hour. And while we deal with the minimum wage, we must also address the scandal of the tipped wage, which has been stuck at an abysmally low $2.13 an hour for more than 30 years thanks, in large part, to the powerful restaurant lobby which has spent millions in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses since 1991 to keep workers in poverty.

Together, these two proposals would provide an increase in pay for tens of millions of desperate Americans – disproportionately women and people of color. It would also be a huge boost to single moms. Let us not forget that these are the essential workers who kept the economy going during the worst of the Covid pandemic. At that time we called them heroes and heroines. Well, rhetorical praise is nice. A livable paycheck is better. Let’s do it.

On #Deconstructed, @ryangrim speaks with @marwilliamson about her growing popularity with Gen Z, why her message focusing on the economic hardships Americans are facing resonates, and what the Democratic Party is missing. https://t.co/pRnj07SqII

— The Intercept (@theintercept) April 18, 2023

https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-wants-tax-rich-heirs-increase-estate-tax-2023-4?amp

Bernie Sanders is once again calling for higher taxes on Americans who inherit millions.

Sanders, alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jimmy Gomez, is introducing new legislation targeting heirs who receive over $3.5 million. Called the For the 99.5 Percent Act, the proposal would levy a 45% tax on estates that are worth $3.5 million, and a 65% tax on estates worth over $1 billion. It’s similar to legislation that Sanders has proposed in several iterations over the last few years, and it comes as some Republicans seek to roll back the estate tax entirely.

“It is unacceptable that working families across the country today are struggling to file their taxes on time and put food on the table, while the wealthiest among us profit off of enormous tax loopholes and giant tax breaks,” Sanders said in a press release.

The amount of money exempt from the estate tax has increased significantly over the last two decades, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2001, only the first $675,000 of an inheritance was tax-free, and that cutoff went up to $1 million by 2002. By 2009, it was at $3.5 million; after rising steadily, the exemption pretty much doubled under President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax package, going from around $5.5 million in 2017 to $11.1 million in 2018.

Now, for 2023, the estate tax exemption stands at just under $13 million, a large bump from around $12 million in 2022. As of 2019, the most recent year that the IRS has data on, just 0.08% of adult deaths were eligible for the estate tax. The Tax Policy Center similarly found that fewer than 0.1% of people who would die in 2020 would owe estate tax. And the estate tax rate only goes up to 40% on estates that are worth a million dollars more than the exempted amount.

Sanders’ proposal also targets loopholes that the ultra-wealthy can employ to shield their assets from taxation, like dynasty trusts that don’t incur estate or gift taxes when the family doles out money from a passed-down trust.

However, like Sanders’ previous attempts to hike taxes on the rich, the proposal is unlikely to make it far. Even when Democrats held both chambers of Congress, centrist sentiment stymied proposed hikes on big corporations and closing loopholes for private equity investors. Now, with tax-averse Republicans holding the House, any legislation to hike rates is likely dead on arrival.

Slaton, who is married, is considered one of the most conservative members of the chamber.
Is “youth minister” synonymous with “pedophile?” pic.twitter.com/j59jaM6COn

— George K Fahnbulleh (@gkfahnbulleh) April 15, 2023

The GOP estate tax repeal bill would give:

$1.8 trillion to billionaires
$88 billion to the Walton family
$72 billion to Elon Musk’s family
$46 billion to the Bezos family
$0 to 99.9% of families

And they want you to know how deeply concerned they are about the national debt.

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) April 18, 2023

2015 Redux, this time with Biden, but weaponizing Feinstein’s illiness.

If Tester is right about this it marks a dramatic change in Senate behavior. When Republican Ben Sasse resigned in January, his replacement, Pete Ricketts, was not barred from all committees. That's a dangerous standard for Republicans who have an 89 year old of their own. https://t.co/wxPmaxhJay

— Alex Sammon (@alex_sammon) April 19, 2023

As the Supreme Court is poised to rule TODAY on sweeping restrictions on abortion pills, a major anti-abortion group is going after them in a different way, using wastewater laws and the Endangered Species Act.
https://t.co/J0ytoX1WzN

— Alice Miranda Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) April 19, 2023

dissolve the department and rebuild it from scratch imo https://t.co/RFcCkAruIv

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) April 19, 2023

Flip answer by Cooper. Brandon Johnson doesn’t have the luxury of rebuilding from scratch; he takes office in less than a month. There are unions and seniority to consider.