The President says so!

Donald Trump used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.

In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.

“We are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world,” Trump said in the 19-minute speech, delivered from Cross Hall of the White House. “We have all the cards. They have none.”

If you believe that, you are so gullible you probably voted for Trump.

A lot of people with a lot of money didn’t believe him, since the S&P 500 declined in real time over the course of the speech.

(I do wish to complain: not basing the Y-axis on zero tells me this segment of the chart was selected to emphasize the drop.)

So what’s next?

Ticking through a list of claimed achievements, Trump said Iran’s navy and air force had been decimated, leaving the country weak and “no longer a threat” to the US and the world. He, however, said the US would continue to hit Iran “extremely hard” for next several weeks.

“We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said, even as he said “discussions were ongoing”.

The war is nearly over, so now is the time to throw even more bombs, and the goal is to send a nation of over 90 million people back to the stone age. That’s not a reasonable conclusion, and says we aren’t at all interested in the welfare of the citizens of Iran. More bombs also won’t rescue his terrible poll numbers with the citizens of the USA, which is his real goal.

The courts are demanding them, though. I’ve heard of something like this before.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Pennsylvania to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination but said it did not have to reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific group.

First, you get a list of all the Jews at the university. Then you fire them, imprison them, and kill them. This was the trend in the 1930s and 1940s, when there were sweeping purges of Jewish professors, led by prominent non-Jewish scientists. Here’s a useful word to remember: Rassenhygiene.

The emergence of eugenics as an ‘applied science’ culminated in the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Society was to be cleaned of all alien contamination, hence the German phrase ‘Rassenhygiene’ meaning ‘racial hygiene’. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with hereditary diseases were deprived of their human rights, herded into concentration camps, used for scientific experimentation and murdered. And the scientists who provided the scientific backing were respected university professors or researchers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS), the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Many of them remained in renowned positions even after 1945, influential enough to delay an unbiased historical confrontation.

These things sneak up on you. You provide a list for the purposes of “an investigation into antisemitic discrimination,” and next thing you know, Stephen Miller is holding it.

I have another useful word to add to your vocabulary: Lebensborn.

The Lebensborn e.V. (e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein or registered association), meaning “fount of life”, was founded on 12 December 1935,[1] to counteract falling birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.[2] Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders.

Sound familiar? This was an organization designed to promote racial purity by determining who was a good Aryan.

The USA doesn’t have an official Lebensborn policy yet, but I note that it is so important to Trump that we end birthright citizenship that he is actually attending Supreme Court hearings today on that subject, an unusual move to use his vast prestige and power to influence a court decision. Let’s hope it backfires on him and that the court decides that the 14th Amendment stands.

I’ve got a lot of family in Washington state, and now the governor has slammed them all with a massive new tax.

Governor Bob Ferguson signed a new tax on income over $1 million into law, affecting less than half of one percent of Washington residents while aiming to provide relief to millions, the governor said in a release.

Senate Bill 6346, known as the Millionaires’ Tax, does not apply to income under $1 million.

“It does not tax the first million dollars. If you’re fortunate to earn $900,000 in the year, you will not be taxed under this legislation,” Gov. Ferguson said before signing the bill. “So for example, if you make $1.2 million in income in single-year, you pay taxes on the $200,000 over the 1 million that you made”

Oh. Wait. I don’t think anyone in my family makes a million dollars a year. They won’t notice this tax at all. But you know what they might notice?

The legislation funds free breakfast and lunch for every K-12 student, expands the Working Families Tax Credit to 460,000 new working families and reduces or eliminates the B&O tax for an additional 138,000 small businesses.

The bill also invests more than $320 million into affordable childcare in the first full biennium and eliminates sales tax on diapers, over-the-counter drugs and hygiene products.

There are some novel objections raised against this policy.

Furthermore, Todd Myers from the Washington Policy Center explained that future legal challenges could come down to the question of whether income constitutes property under the constitution.

In 1933, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down a graduated income tax 5-4. The majority ruled that income is property and cannot be subjected to an unequal tax.

I did not know that! I knew there was no income tax in the state when I lived there, which was nice, but that instead we had that damned ubiquitous sales tax that afflicted all of us sort of equally, which was not nice — if you were rich, you didn’t care about paying an extra 6 cents on a dollar, but it was terrible if you were a kid earning a little spending money by mowing lawns. If you’re concerned about inequality, why would you ever impose a sales tax? I’m all in favor of an unequal tax that hurts rich people a little more.

Then there’s a familiar argument.

Legislators and community members also raised concerns about the potential for millionaires to leave Washington.

Strangely, they never do leave. The things that make a state or a city an attractive place to live are still appealing, and millionaires aren’t really hurt by losing a few pennies on a dollar. They’re not going to want to leave Seattle to live in Pocatello, Idaho (nothing wrong with Pocatello, but it lacks the amenities of Seattle). If they do want to leave, though…bye bye, have a nice trip, you won’t be missed.

What can we do to get a version of this law in Minnesota?