Ron DeSantis’s crusade against “woke ideology” was always a thinly disguised assault on the rights of Florida teachers and their unions. His recent “Teacher’s Bill of Rights” only makes it explicit.
DeSantis doesn’t pretend to be moderate; being a far-right culture warrior is his brand. Journalist/author and scholar Henry A. Giroux analyzes DeSantis’ appeal in a scathing article published by Truthout on December 16, and he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. DeSantis, Giroux warns, is “fueling the emergence of fascist politics in the United States.”
Women’s right. Personal responsibility. Personal freedom. Equality. The role of the Supreme Court. Roe v Wade wraps all those issues into one. And like the frequent but unexpected tornadoes the locals have learnt to live with, it swept through US politics this week – showing the power of voters galvanised by a single issue.
The Republicans calculated that by focusing on inflation they could immunize themselves from the growing backlash against the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. They were wrong.
What would be the global ramifications of America going full fascist after the midterms, and entrenching severely anti-democratic outcomes by notionally democratic means?
We might be about to find out.
The results of next week’s midterms could represent the endgame of a frankly fucking terrifying strategy carefully implemented by the likes of Mitch McConnell as he let the world be distracted by the performance of a grifting gimp as President.
We are so fortunate in Australia to have compulsory voting as a duty required of every Australian citizen. America doesn’t require its citizens to vote. If that is the case why not allow all American “residents” to vote citizens or not? Republicans want neither as they command the votes of the wealthiest minority in the nation and while their numbers are shrinking their proportion of voters remains high despite the fact they have been captured by MAGA Trumpists.
My friends, we owe it to generations before us who fought and died for democracy and the rule of law, and to generations after us who will live with the legacy we leave them — to get out the vote next Tuesday, to vote out the traitors and liars, to renounce the party that has forsaken the precious ideal of self-government, and to vote in people who are dedicated to making our democracy stronger and better.
As soon as they’d lost the election Peter Dutton flew to America to seek advice
The New York Times has just released a study into the language used by a group of Republicans it labels “the objectors.” This is the radical posse that most stridently fights the fact that Biden won the election. Together with partisan media, this group of congressmen and women have done incalculable damage to the civic space in America, and may have broken it altogether. We have the same forces at work in Australia, battling to destroy our own democracy. The movement here is nascent, but so was the American version once.
Fossil fuel giant Koch Industries has poured over $1m into backing – directly and indirectly – dozens of House and Senate candidates who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s win on 6 January 2021.
Koch, which is controlled by multibillionaire Charles Koch, boasts a corporate Pac that has donated $607,000 to the campaigns or leadership Pacs of 52 election deniers since January 2021, making Koch’s Pac the top corporate funder of members who opposed the election results, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending.
Unless Republicans win there’s no voting system that will be declared fair in America. So Republicans simply want to either do away with voting altogether or simply have a one party system in place for America. The fact is Palin lost because Republican Alaskans didn’t want her to win.
“Scam to rig elections”: Tom Cotton fumes over Sarah Palin loss as GOP fans cry “stolen election” | Salon.com
The man who should be President and knows he never will be
Bernie Sanders is holding rallies in cities across the country — not to stump for candidates but to broadcast ordinary people’s struggles, build enthusiasm for the labor movement, and promote pride among the working class. That’s exactly what we need.
Did Australia leap ahead and stop this process by ridding itself of the Morrison/ LNP? Or because we are generally regarded as being 20 years behind are we merely witnessing a delay in this forward movement? If the Dutton/ LNP continues it’s Abbottesque nope nope nope opposition it doesn’t bide well for our once two party bipartisan Democracy but rather indicates what might be seen as the continued Monkey Pod room push for a future coup. In a true Democracy a loss must be accepted as much as is a win. Is that what Dutton is doing?
Candidates who amplified false claims about Donald Trump winning in 2020 did very well in this month’s primaries. Their victories are one more step in the direction of authoritarianism.
For years Trump threatened anyone ready to speak out against him with money or the courts. He was the most practised Don in the country with 4000 court cases to prove it. However, the Jan 6th Committee hasn’t been bought or a court it’s simply there to gather the facts for the American legal system to decide whether charges should be brought. However, Trump while President made every effort to swing that system his way. The question remains just how much and solid must the evidence be against Trump be for an indictment to be made?
Donald Trump famously joked that he was so popular with his fans that he could literally get away with murder.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, he bragged while campaigning in Iowa back in 2016.
Never mind the voters. Here we are, 18 months after his presidency, staring at clear evidence that Trump led a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the 2020 election and the constitutional duties of Congress. He intentionally incited a violent mob that he knew was armed to mount an attempted coup on Capitol Hill.
We need a criminal investigation into Donald Trump | Richard Wolffe | The Guardian
The legitimization of American Neo- Nazis is real and in plain sight
Carl Paladino apparently loves Trump rallies and finds them similar to another foreign leader in history. So do we, but not in a good way.
Paladino was asked by host Peter Hunt how to rile up the people for change.
“I was thinking the other day about somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds. And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just — they were hypnotized by him. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer, has been there and done it.”
It used to be verboten to even mention the Nazi leader when bashing a political rival in Congress, but Paladino is using Hitler as his inspiration.
With the rise of white supremacy throughout the Republican party and Fox News because of Trump, his comparison will be celebrated.
During an NYC Town Hall on April 20, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained that if the Republicans had control of the House on January 6, 2021, the insurrection would not have been thwarted and Trump might still be in office. “This is no joke. January 6 was a trial run and a lot of people don’t seem to understand that,” AOC said.
“Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill, a member of the Select Committee, characterized the January 6 attack on our democracy as a “dry run” – implying it could happen again – perhaps successfully. It will happen again – unless we put mechanisms in place to constrain a corrupt president from exploiting the absolute power presently conveyed by the Insurrection Act. That change needs to happen now – before yet another authoritarian – or even the same one – tries another Jan. 6 and succeeds,” he argued.
In Arizona, for instance, the tax cuts enacted last year figure to deliver 55.5 percent of their benefits to the state’s top 1 percent. Arizonans making over half a million dollars will save an average $30,000 off their tax bills. Taxpayers making between $21,000 and $40,000 will average $13 in savings.
“Patriots were determined to “Kill Pence” and “Kill Pelosi” no matter what they wish they were called that fact remains they were Patriots of Treason. They were armed and weren’t simply exercising any right of protest. They were there at the behest and invitation of Trump to stop Biden from being officially rubber stamped as President. They were there to do what Pence refused to unceremoniously do for Trump. In short, to prevent the duly elected change of the Presidency. Theirs was an attempted unpatriotic coup!
There is a more accurate term than insurrectionists to describe the people who stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January, forever smearing the seat of the American republic with fear and fascism. Although their activities inspired terror and were planned in part by members of white supremacist groups, they object to being labeled as “terrorists” or “white supremacists”. Calling them “rioters” doesn’t quite capture the political motivations of the pro-authoritarian mob of Maga fanatics. Perhaps we should view them as historical re-enactors. After all, they were only recreating the effort to undermine democracy, freedom and the US constitution that has repeated itself for centuries. Yet, if you asked them, they would undoubtedly say they were “patriots”.
In the opening of his 1911 proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the chamber, Victor Berger, a socialist congressman from Milwaukee, complained that the Senate “has become an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth.” You could make more or less the same case today.
Most Americans, however, are waking up to the damage Reagan’s 40-year-long experiment with Friedman’s neoliberalism has done to America. In these days of dark news ranging from the rise of great power militarism to a crushing new wave of Covid, there are green shoots growing through the cracks: neoliberalism is finally being replaced by social democracy around the world and in many states in America. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Thomas Paine told us in 1776. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Our work has just begun.
Manchin applies his political tactics like Kim Jong-Un. Nothing he says runs true.
Notably, however, Manchin said Monday that he knew from the beginning — five months ago — that negotiations between himself and Democrats would ultimately fail. Nonetheless, he allowed Democrats and Biden to try and appease him.
If the pieces fall together just so, and the debt ceiling is added to a bill that keeps the government running and assists those in distress from the storm, Republicans will find themselves in a tremendous bind. “The combination would present a triple threat,” reports Politico, “daring GOP lawmakers to go on record in opposition to aid for disaster-hit communities, staving off a debt default that could throw financial markets into chaos and preventing a government shutdown.” Some will no doubt shrink at the idea of playing political hardball with money meant to help storm victims, but it is precisely that brand of ruthless certitude that has allowed Republicans to run (or stall) the country as a minority party for the third Democratic presidential administration in a row. There’s no doubt that disaster relief will pass one way or another, and in the meantime, doing this puts the Republicans on record for voting to basically burn the country down to the stumps. That seems to be what a lot of elected GOP officials want, but it isn’t likely to play well come ballot-casting time.
But a significant portion of right-wing media personalities responded by attacking the officers for their testimonies and insulting them on personal levels. For example, after Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn described how a crowd of rioters had yelled racial insults against him — something that Dunn, who is Black, said he had never experienced before while in uniform — The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis tweeted Tuesday afternoon that Dunn had made his claim “without evidence.” Just to be clear, Dunn was describing an event that occurred directly to him on January 6 — but Davis instead questioned whether “left-wing politics might have influenced his claims today.”
Beginning with a “massive national call-in to every U.S. senator,” the Poor People’s Campaign on Monday launched a monthlong campaign to push Congress to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster, pass the For the People Act, restore the gutted Voting Rights Act, and raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour—progressive goals that have been thwarted by a combination of Republican obstructionism and Democratic acquiescence.
By virtually any metric, the United States Senate is one of the most undemocratic legislative bodies in the advanced capitalist world. Given the geographic distribution of America’s population, the majority living in nine states wields a mere eighteen votes to the minority’s eighty-two: a balance of forces so disproportionate, most citizens of other countries would probably find it incomprehensible. In no other country could a jurisdiction the size of California (home to nearly 40 million people) possess the same legislative clout as Wyoming (home to less than 600,000). The Senate, in fact, is not so much undemocratic as it is antidemocratic — its design acting as a check on majority rule by default.
There are so many paradoxes to America’s current state of political dysfunction that no one could possibly list them all. The party that has embraced the task of trying to save democracy at the last moment, however awkwardly and incompletely — and however poisoned by its own internal contradictions — won, but very nearly lost. The party that has gone about 94 percent of the way into white nationalism and primitive fascism lost, primarily because of its contaminated figurehead — but could not possibly have come so close to winning without him. As for the massive question of whether liberal democracy can be saved, let’s put a pin in that one, as we say these days. As Pankaj Mishra points out repeatedly in his recent collection of essays, “Bland Fanatics,” Western-style liberalism had a perhaps-fatal flaw built into it from the beginning: Its expansion of human rights and representative democracy and the “free market” and whatever other noble and purportedly universal principles were always dependent on exploiting less powerful nations elsewhere in the world, first to extract raw materials and human capital, and then to serve as captive export markets.
At the same time, Republican governors in states from Texas and Mississippi to Alabama and West Virginia have been loosening or eliminating COVID-19 restrictions in response to declining COVID-19 numbers. Earlier this month Walensky urged policymakers to be mindful that Americans would not be truly safe until as many people are vaccinated as possible, adding that the rise of variants could “complete lose” the gains made so far in defeating the pandemic.
America now has its own Green Zone in downtown Washington, D.C., where the Mall is closed, the city is locked down, and protective fencing has gone up around the Capitol. You only need a Green Zone, a safe small space completely under the control of the government, if the rest of the country is a Red Zone.
Political unrest within the White House led to a domestic terrorism event some in the media have compared to the attack on Pearl Harbour, writes Dr Lee Duffield.
Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed that a video of President Donald Trump admitting his presidency is ending is actually a sign that he will stay in office. In reality, it’s more of a sign that the community is dedicated to its delusion of a Trump second term in office regardless of the facts.
Discredited right-wing video producer James O’Keefe and his organization Project Veritas have released a new video spreading voter fraud conspiracy theories by targeting some of the most vulnerable Americans and their right to vote.
The two-minute video from January 4 fearmongers about homelessness advocacy groups in Georgia allowing unhoused people to use the groups’ mailing addresses for voter registration in the lead-up to Tuesday’s Senate runoff election in the state. O’Keefe’s group is known for infiltrating progressive organizations and campaigns and secretly recording people connected to them, then heavily editing the footage to suggest wrongdoing.
To recap: Pelosi blocks the bill and the Progressives stick to their guns, she loses her Speakership. She lets it come to a vote and it dies, this exposes the corporatist wing of the party. It comes to a vote, it passes but dies in the Senate, the corporatists there are exposed. It passes both Houses of Congress, Joe Biden has already said he will veto it. Biden and the entire political establishment of both parties would thereby be exposed as the corrupt tools of oligarchy we have long suspected they were.
Anything but the REAL facts on the Economy of the USA. It’s just about defending Trump and neutralising REAL change.
Anything REAL is forbidden like real data on GE, Climate, Health Education Guns and Racism. All about FAKE victimisation of a divided America not the union of Multiculturalism. (ODT)
They get This is important, because while the Democrats have an 18 to 12 majority in the chamber, there must be 20 members present for a quorum — meaning nothing can be done until at least two members return.
“It’s time for the Senate Republicans to show up and do the job they were elected to do,” Oregon Governor Kate Brown said.
The president’s lawyer’s comments came weeks after Trump himself tweeted that his campaign staff made an attempt to gather information from a Kremlin-linked lawyer about Hillary Clinton
“Corporations routinely sacrifice the lives of some of their customers to increase profits, and we are all better off because they do,” according to a textbook that the billionaire industrialist is spending millions to push on public schools.
“I’m Afraid of Americans” might as well be the national anthem of any country with a sizable Muslim population. Or oil. And Allah help you if your country has both.
Muslim-Americans are living in a totalitarian police state with worsening harassment, profiling, and surveillance. The United States’ government may claim liberty and justice for all; however, in p…
On Tuesday, the Center for Medical Progress—an anti-abortion group that has little to do with actual medicine—released the eighth in its series of undercover videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood officials have profited from illegal sales of fetal tissue.
By virtually any metric, the United States Senate is one of the most undemocratic legislative bodies in the advanced capitalist world. Given the geographic distribution of America’s population, the majority living in nine states wields a mere eighteen votes to the minority’s eighty-two: a balance of forces so disproportionate, most citizens of other countries would probably find it incomprehensible. In no other country could a jurisdiction the size of California (home to nearly 40 million people) possess the same legislative clout as Wyoming (home to less than 600,000). The Senate, in fact, is not so much undemocratic as it is antidemocratic — its design acting as a check on majority rule by default.
On Tuesday, the Center for Medical Progress—an anti-abortion group that has little to do with actual medicine—released the eighth in its series of undercover videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood officials have profited from illegal sales of fetal tissue.
olddogthoughts 