1) Yes. This is true and annoying especially if you care about short term cash flow. If you super care about this you can play games with your W4 to cut down your withholding and instead pay quarterly tax payments. Though if you screw up and underpay you'll owe penalties.

2A) Indeed I agree. Though personally I put the chance of this ever happening at precisely zero due to the political optics.

2B) The difficulty of determining what is a capital gain and what is income is, in fact, one of the biggest theoretical arguments against a zero cap gains rate.