Bob Lord

Bob has mostly wound down his 39-year career as a tax and business lawyer (with a 1-year interruption to run for Congress in 2008 (CD3), when he tried to unseat John Shadegg. Bob now serves as the senior advisor on tax policy for the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who believe the light taxation of America's rich is destabilizing our democracy, and as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Bob has been writing for Blog For Arizona since late 2011, concentrating mostly on federal issues, with an occasional foray into Arizona state politics.

Explaining the Election: Dem Establishment Logic

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The explanations from the Ready for Hillary crowd as to what happened vary a good bit. The BlueMeanie has focused on the voters who stayed home. Some blame the third-party voters. Some blame the millennials who didn’t support HRC in sufficient numbers. I even saw one piece where millennial men (Bernie Bros) were blamed because … Read more

How Bad Things Will Happen (If They Do)

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The specter of White nationalism is real. We ignore it or discount it at our peril.

The problem already is upon us, as Benji Hart explains in White Nationalism Lives and White People Need to Fight It:

More recently, white nationalism has been linked with a spate of police murders. Scott Michael Greene, who killed two officers in Iowa in late October, allegedly did so because he was enraged that Black athletes kneeling for the national anthem had not been arrested. Over 70% of police killings in 2016 have been carried out by white men, a fact around which many have noted a telling silence among conservatives. The FBI itself has been warning of growing white supremacist activity within law enforcement for more than a decade, and some pundits have gone so far as to call white nationalism the greatest standing threat to national security.

Impending demographic change undoubtedly will worsen the threat. Whites will be in the minority by 2042, according to projections. Emily Schwartz Greco explores the connection of that reality to white nationalism in Will Trump Target Both Documented and Undocumented Immigrants?

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Where Progressives and Establishment Dems Can (and Should) Collaborate

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Ask most establishment Dems — you know, the Ready for Hillary crowd — and they’ll tell you it was those third-party voters who cost Hillary the election. Progressives see it differently (I’ll stop there). But what if all those Stein voters (truth is, there weren’t that many) could have had their votes count for Clinton … Read more

What Paula Pennypacker Knew

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This is the post where I eat crow served by my Facebook friend Paula Pennypacker. This is particularly foul-tasting crow. Normally, I’ll eat my crow in good humor. Not this time.

So, what did Paula know that I didn’t. I could write it off as just a lucky call. After all, it did take a perfect storm for this to happen.

But very clearly one ingredient of that perfect storm dominated. The election was lost in the rust belt, what Chris Matthews calls the Scranton to Oshkosh corridor. Check out the vote in Scranton last night to how it voted in 2012. A sea change. And Clinton has roots in Scranton. Those hollowed out industrial towns simply said hell no to business as usual. We Merlot drinking progressives thought Clinton won the debates handily. But I’ll bet the only part the folks in the Scranton to Oshkosh corridor remembered was that early moment in the first debate when Trump eviscerated Clinton for her ever-changing, ever-nuanced position on the TPP and other trade deals.

And, ugly as it may be, immigration played a role in this.

Paula understood this at a level I didn’t, and maybe couldn’t. 

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Debate 2: What Clinton Slipped in While Trump Was Being Trump

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Despite what the gasbags had to say about Trump’s improvement over his first debate performance, he was pretty terrible last night.

And he’ll continue to implode.

And the Clinton campaign likely has at least one or two more doozies from Trump’s past it will let fly. My guess is one about Trump acting out his “locker room banter” (why has nobody made the point that 60 year-olds don’t engage in locker room banter?). I’d say the timing will be after the news cycle has fully digested Trump’s worst moments from last night, and sufficiently in advance of next Tuesday’s debate to allow Trump time to react in the worst way possible.

Finally, the Democratic establishment scolds can relax. Neither Stein nor Johnson will cost Hillary the election. Yes, the BlueMeanie will reward readers with a few more three thousand word warnings about “wasting their votes,” but even Steve, Liza and For Sure Not Tom will be saying to themselves “blah, blah, blah.”

Hopefully, that allows us to focus a bit on what Hillary has in store for us come January. Here are the tidbits I caught last night.

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