President Joe Biden inherited a mess from Donald Trump. When Biden took office, the corona virus was out of control and there was no plan to distribute the vaccines. At the same time, the country was mired in a deep recession. Even though the official unemployment rate was 6.7%, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the actual unemployment rate was 10%. Biden inherited the worst situation of any new president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

Shortly after he took office, President Biden acted. The American Rescue plan passed on March 10, 2021 over united Republican…

Former Governor Dave Heineman has signaled an interest in running for governor in what is already proving to be a crowded field of candidates. Heineman said he won’t be make a decision on the race until this fall. Already, Chuck Herbster, Jim Pillen and Brett Lindstrom have said that they are running for governor.

Then Lieutenant Governor Heineman was elevated to the position of governor when Mike Johanns resigned in 2005 to take the job as Secretary of Agriculture in the Bush Administration. …

The modern day Republican Party is an extreme and authoritarian party unlike any other conservative party in the 1st world democracies. The GOP is the only major conservative party in the world that rejects universal health coverage, the science behind climate change, marriage equality and gun safety reform.

As early as 2012, prominent political scientist Norm Ornstein made this prescient quote: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science: and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

This authoritarianism has translated…

In his closing address to the Unicameral last week, Governor Pete Ricketts did the best he could to spin the session as some kind of victory for himself. Ricketts touted over $1.7 billion in tax cuts over the next two years but he didn’t mention that most of these unaffordable tax cuts were passed in 2020. What’s more, most of the tax cuts that passed during the 2021 session were low hanging fruit and sailed through with near unanimous support. …

Pete Ricketts announced on May 24 that he is yanking the $300 pandemic unemployment benefit as of June 19. The multi-millionaire governor falsely claimed that the $300 per week of additional pandemic unemployment benefits is a disincentive to work. Twenty other right wing Republican governors have made a similar decision in recent weeks.

Ricketts is joining just about every other elected Republican official, big business and the right wing media in blaming unemployment compensation benefits for the current labor shortage. In other words, the former T.D. Ameritrade executive is contending that millions of Americans are lazy bums who don’t want…

May 18, 2021 will go down as a day of infamy in the history of the Nebraska legislature. This day of infamy was brought to you by Governor Pete Ricketts, Senator Julie Slama and other members of Ricketts’ crickets. Ricketts’ loyal lieutenants killed funding for developmentally disabled children to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. You can’t make this stuff up.

Senator Machaela Cavanaugh’s bill (LB376) would have would have helped 850 families with developmentally disabled children and cost $10 million over the next two years. This legislation initially passed unanimously in earlier readings. However, Ricketts’ followers — acting at…

The modern history of mid-term elections doesn’t give the Democrat much hope of retaining their narrow majorities in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. Since 1946, the party holding the White House has lost an average of 26 seats in the House, and an average of four seats in the Senate. The Democrats were routed in the mid-term elections in 1994, 2010 and 2014.

The only three exceptions to this rule occurred in 1934, 1998 and 2002. In the cases of 1934 and 2002, the incumbent president was very popular and the public perception was that the country was in…

Nebraska’s two largest metropolitan areas just completed their election cycles. In Lincoln, the Democrats won big with the most diverse slate in the history of the city. The results in Omaha were inconclusive and were a bit of a draw — Jean Stothert was re-elected in a landslide and the Democrats maintained a 4–3 majority on the city council. In both cities, the status quo prevailed.

In Nebraska’s capital city, the Democrats began the cycle with the mayor’s office and a 5–2 majority on the city council. The results for the Democrats were a clean sweep of all three city…