Mike Lofgren
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."
Articles by this author
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Views Wednesday, October 21, 2020 Damnatio Memoriae: The First Step to Recovery in a Post-Trump America “After Domitian’s death the senate appointed Nerva to rule and it condemned Domitian’s memory (damnatio memoriae)”—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. III In a previous piece , I proposed ways in which Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden could limit the sabotage and... Read more |
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Views Monday, October 12, 2020 A Modest Proposal to Prevent Sabotage by the Trump Regime For complex historical reasons, Federal employees don’t get much love. Republicans already had begun their war on expertise nearly 90 years ago, when they condemned the New Deal for being run by distant bureaucrats. Joseph McCarthy made a career accusing those bureaucrats of being Soviet spies... Read more |
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Views Friday, September 25, 2020 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Peril of America's Aging Elite “The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have said. Despite the mordant wisdom most of us see in that statement, an alarming number of people refuse to follow his implicit advice. Many of us, particularly in America, the land of rugged individualism, see... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 17, 2020 Trump Supports the Troops, Alright! Since the campus anti-Vietnam war disturbances of the 1960s and 70s, Republicans have pretty much owned the whole patriotic magilla, including support of our troops. In the last four years, that reputation has come in for a few lumps, what with a Republican president calling American war dead... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 10, 2020 Is Trump a Murderer? A consistent rule of the Trump presidency is that no matter the subject, the retrospective evidence will demonstrate that Donald Trump’s actions, and those of his appointees, were more twisted and criminal than the previous speculations of his bitterest critics. This phenomenon may spring from what... Read more |
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Views Saturday, August 22, 2020 A Commission to Investigate Presidential Crimes is a Terrible Idea On August 15, Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California proposed , through the medium of (what else?) Twitter, that after the election a “Presidential Crimes Commission” should be created to investigate the manifold derelictions of Donald J. Trump, including “[s]abotaging the mail to... Read more |
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Views Friday, August 07, 2020 Remind Me, What Was the Civil War About, Anyway? Remember the good old days? That’s when neo-Confederates (who of course never called themselves that; they were just defending their “heritage”) passionately argued that the American Civil War was emphatically not about slavery. Rather, it concerned issues of principle involving states’ rights, or... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 03, 2020 Don't Let the Corruption of the Powerless Bring Down the Democrats “You may not be interested in ideology, but ideology is interested in you.” I have taken a bit of liberty with a quote widely attributed to Lev Trotsky—he actually is supposed to have said that about the “dialectic,” but it’s a two-dollar word that’s almost meaningless in everyday English, so I’ve... Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 04, 2020 Beware Donald Trump's Electoral Cleansing On May 26, as the U.S. coronavirus death toll passed 100,000, former Bush speechwriter and NeverTrumper David Frum appeared on a cable news show and made a stunning pronouncement about Donald Trump and his handling of the pandemic. If correct, Frum didn’t merely echo all the armchair psychiatry we’... Read more |
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Views Saturday, May 09, 2020 "Reopen the Economy": the Republicans' Nero Decree The New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman is one of the few fixtures of the major prestige media honest enough to forthrightly explain why there should be no “controversy” (a word beloved of journalists) about Republican policies. These policies are not just mistaken, nor are they something about... Read more |