When the Democrats are little better than the Republicans what does it say about American Democracy?
Man Examining Fake News On Newspaper Through Magnifying Glass A group of top US agents, mostly Democrats, pumped hundreds of fake news stories into the mainstream media, it was revealed at the weekend.
In September 2020, George Santos’ congressional campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800—the maximum amount—to his first bid for a House seat. Their listed address was 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey.
A search of various databases reveals no one in the United States named Victoria or Jonathan Regor. Moreover, there is nobody by any name living at 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson. That address doesn’t exist. There is a New Mexico Street in Jackson, but the numbers end in the 20s, according to Google Maps and a resident of the street.
Conservatives have been losing their sh*t over what is taught in schools and books. Educators are being harassed, and books are being taken off the shelves. If a book is about to be banned, read it. Florida is at the center of book bans and taking schools to task for daring to do their jobs. After all, Florida is governed by a wannabe authoritarian.
Redacting history and historical facts. The Germans teach and are reminded from the cradle to the grave of their part prior to and during WW2. All of Germany pays attention to its history good or bad. They as a consequence now have a more tolerant and united nation as a result compared to DeSantis’s, Trump’s and the GOP’s America.
“Florida is doing its best to shut down discussions about race, slavery, anything having to do with a challenge to the idea that racism is still a real factor in American life today,” said one author and former professor.
Why is this such a regular consequence for those joining America’s and the Wests fight for “freedom and democracy”? AlQaeda, ISIS, and now Afghani Allies were all once America’s allies and are now prepared to join forces to fight against America who simply shrugged turned their backs and walked away
Many ex-Afghan security personnel accuse the United States of abandoning them after the Taliban regained power last year. They also say poverty and security concerns are factoring into their decisions to take a private Russian mercenary group up on its recruitment offers.
The Pentagon just failed its fifth audit in as many years. After 20 years of war, there are better ways to spend tax dollars than on an agency that can’t even account for half of its assets.
During more than five hours of oral arguments in two cases that will probably spell the death of affirmative action in colleges and universities, the racism of the six right-wingers on the Supreme Court was on full display. It appears the court will overrule existing precedent that permits limited affirmative action.
President Joe Biden noted Friday evening concerning the assailant who fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer in the Pelosi home in San Francisco that “that the same chant was used by this guy that they have in custody that was used on January 6, the attack on the U.S. Capitol.” Both that attacker and the insurgents chanted “Where’s Nancy Pelosi?” That is, the president suggested, the attack on the Pelosis was a continuation by other means of the violence that Donald Trump unleashed on January 6, 2021.
What do you call a country where nearly one in 10 adults have medical debts and a broken bone can boot you into bankruptcy? A country where a city of more than 160,000 residents recently had no safe drinking water for weeks? A country where life expectancy has dropped for the second year in a row and poor people sell their blood plasma in order to make ends meet? A country where the maternal mortality rate of black women in the capital is nearly twice as high as for women in Syria?
You call it one of the richest countries in the world.
“Luring asylum seekers under false pretenses and then abandoning them on the side of the road thousands of miles away is not the solution to a global challenge — in fact, those are the kinds of tactics that smugglers are arrested for.” According to UC Berkeley associate history professor Hidetaka Hirota, the goal is to “embarrass pro-immigration politicians and create the appearance of chaos to justify cruel policies.” It is a pandering gimmick, photo-op and political statement to score political points with Trump’s cruel constituency and burnish “presidential” credentials. All at the expense of tragically vulnerable people, who’ve traveled 1000’s of miles with hope as their only capital and currency.
If it seems like nothing works anymore in the US, you’re not imagining things. Record-low public investment and declining private investment have given us a failing, decrepit infrastructure.
Covid and the Flu are nothing compared to the Right-Wing Media fury backing Trump and their effort to take control of America.
The baseless claim that the FBI may have planted evidence while carrying out a court-approved search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday has surged through right-wing media, as the former president’s allies continue their effort to turn their audiences against the probe and shield Trump from accountability.
Meanwhile Putin is doing to the Ukraine what Trump wished he could have done to America.
Former federal prosecutor Michael Stern suggested that TrumpWorld is trotting out the claim because the FBI may have found damaging evidence at his home.”I have written hundreds of search warrants. Lawyers and people whose homes are being searched are routinely not present during the search,” he wrote. “That Trump is now talking about ‘planted’ evidence means he knows there is something damning they found.”
The 2021-2022 Supreme Court term will go down in infamy. The right-wing majority behaved as if they were kids in a candy store, stuffing their faces with all their favorite goodies knowing there was no one who could stop them and no one who could hold them accountable for having done it. On gun rights, abortion, religion and the environment they took a wrecking ball to the court’s precedents and created bold new tests out of thin air. It was a breath-taking exercise of sheer institutional power — and they’re just getting started.
While 88% of Americans want Strict Gun Control Fox News and Murdoch Media to speak and broadcast to less than the 12% to insure the 88% aren’t heard. Who is paying? The corporate gun manufacturers behind the NRA
“Avoid attending school if your leaders fail to do the job and keep us safe from gun violence.”
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.
Would this political moron have been Morrison’s LNP captain’s pick In Australia’s election 2022? Would Murdoch be running her gun campaign here?
In a chaotic, but absolutely riveting, Twitter rant Tuesday, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s proposed gun laws could result in a Russian invasion.
Thoughts and prayers are of little value unless we accept the fact that our laws reducing access to weapons need to be greatly strengthened, not loosened. Gun supporters and expedient politicians who take NRA, firearms industry and other military/industrial complex big donor money while expressing heartfelt prayers, thoughts and condolences for dead children, grieving parents and disrupted communities are disingenuous, disgusting, and deserving of maximum shame for their preposterous and irresponsible scapegoating of the mentally ill while letting politicians, devotees of loose access laws and the profiteering gun industry itself continue to squirm out of any responsibility.
Salvador Ramos, strode into a store and bought two AR-15s the week before the attack, an apparent birthday gift to himself. Anyone paying attention gets that the ease of purchase for such weapons — which are frequently used in mass killings — is an indication of how deep the gun problem in America runs.
Between 2014 and 2018, the 25 wealthiest Americans collectively earned $401bn, but paid just $13.6bn – about 3.4% of that – in taxes, according to a bombshell ProPublica investigation into the finances of the wealthiest Americans released on Wednesday.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia Rep. Matt Gaetz of FloridaRep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin Rep. Chip Roy of Texas
America’s new Democracy. There are now voices in the LNP who are already suggesting voting should be made voluntary and our AEC Australian Electoral Commission be privatized. Australian politicians pushing for a more American style democratic voting system.
When voters arrived at their polling place on March 1 in Azle, Texas, a small city outside of Fort Worth, they saw a framed, printed sign with standard voting instructions: no phones, printed materials allowed. Taped to it was another handwritten sign that read: “Sorry — No Democrat voting (not staffed).”
While Putin is “doing it” the West merely “postures”.
It shouldn’t be difficult to seize—or at least freeze and hang onto—the wealth Russian oligarchs have deposited in the West. After all, a mega-yacht is hard to miss, and private jets, some of the most valuable assets that can be purchased, can barely move across an airport taxiway without being directed and tracked by air traffic controllers. Earlier this week, France did manage to seize the 290-foot Amore Vero, owned by close Putin associate Igor Sechin, but it was one of the few oligarch-linked items taken since the war started.
After 400 plus years America has a new experiment and promise
Fueled by Trump’s allegations of election fraud, New Hampshire Republicans introduced more than two dozen bills that would chip away at voting rights. They could spell trouble for Democrats in the midterms.
Chief Justice Roger Taney said that members of the “Negro race” were not U.S. citizens and that they had no federal rights at all that white men were bound to respect, including the right to sue in federal court. He actually spoke of whites as the “citizen race” to the exclusion of “Negroes” and “Indians,” who were not eligible (unlike white immigrants from Europe) for naturalization. So President Biden’s nominee will be joining a court that once upon a time denied that Harriet Robinson Scott was or could be a citizen or had any human or civil rights at all. Harriet lived to see the Emancipation Proclamation and the Fourteenth Amendment, which bestowed citizenship on everyone born in the US. Only people who privately still believe in the exclusive privileges of the white “citizen race” will complain about having an African-American woman on the Supreme Court, in an epochal slap in the face to moral monsters like Chief Justice Taney.
Every Black member of the Mississippi state Senate walked out of the legislative chamber in protest on Friday as the Republican-led body passed a bill critics say will ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, from kindergarten through college.
Julia Conley January 13, 2022 Blocking an executive order from the White House that public health experts said would prevent hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, the right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large private employers, claiming the Labor Department does not have the congressional authority to impose such a requirement. The court ruled 6-3 against the mandate, which would have applied to employers with 100 or more workers. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer dissented.
In under nine minutes, MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Tuesday night summarized the American right wing’s transformation in recent years into a political movement that openly celebrates violence, zeroing in on America Fest 2021—a conservative gathering taking place in Phoenix this week where Kyle Rittenhouse was celebrated by influential Fox News hosts and received a standing ovation.
The American Experiment after 450 years has proven to be on the brink of failure. 1) With No guarantee of a universal or compulsory voting system the nullification of voting has become the Republican reason for being. In a Democracy all parties must be prepared to lose and they aren’t 2) There appears to be no constitutional or uniform or path that guarantees the independant management of the electoral process itself 3) Gerrymandering, the election of referees and disputes are held in courts and institutions where there is no unbiased Separation of Powers 4) When it comes to transparency and an informed electorate there is no constitutionally guaranteed truely independent publicly funded national broadcaster. No real, financially free media. 5) Corporations whose primary interest is the interest of their shareholders have the same status and rights as citizens. They are organized and fund politicians of their choosing. 6) American Freedom witnessed almost 14,000 gun deaths in one year. While the UK saw 30. That alone spells Anarchy lunacy and not Democracy.
On one hand, it’s hard not to laugh. Who cares if Trump and his buddies separate MAGA fools from their money? On the other hand, the problem is these frauds aren’t merely frauds. They really are financing what is so far an extremely successful effort to lay the groundwork for stealing the 2024 election. The fascist movement is very real, even if there’s a lot of fraud wound into it by leaders hoping to get their beaks wet while they end democracy. Our legal system’s inability to deal with the fraud aspect is just a symptom of a larger problem, which is a failure to deal with these arsonists of democracy at all. If that doesn’t change, this country will have a lot more to worry about than idiot retirees emptying out their bank accounts for the latest “stop the steal” scam.
Revised The murders by a high school student in Oxford, Michigan, who was given a gun by his parents even though he was making death threats and the school called them to conferences out of concern, have shaken the state and become national news. That is because the parents are being charged with criminal negligence in the deaths of those young people, as well. The gun used was a Glock semi-automatic of a sort developed by Austria for its army but which is freely available to civilians in the US because gun manufacturers have bought Congress. Coinciding with this tragedy,
“more Americans think Iran possesses nuclear weapons than think Israel does. While Israel has been known to possess nuclear weapons for decades (without officially acknowledging it) and Iran is not known to have ever possessed any, the American public perception presumes a different reality: 60.5%, including 70.6% of Republicans and 52.6% of Democrats, say Iran possesses nuclear weapons — compared to 51.7% who say Israel does, including 51.7% of Republicans and 51.9% of Democrats. More Americans think Iran possesses nuclear weapons than think Israel does.”
Only in America is there the Republican blind opposition to vaccine mandates and a blind misogynistic support for a mandates forcing women to give birth. The rich are advantaged in every which way. If they want an abortion th leave the country make the poor populate it. It’s the slavery of old. There is no need to vaccinate, mask or distance in a mansions or the broader leafy burbs of white America. What is being opposed to is the lack of hierarchy, universal public health and good old male dominance over women their breeders.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Texas GOP delegation in Congress, led by Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Ted Cruz, are threatening to shut down the federal government over vaccine mandates, according to the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle quotes Roy’s interview at Fox News: “Congress needs to man up, stand up and fight for the American people — and that means don’t fund a government that is tyrannically forcing people to get a vaccine that they don’t want to get.’ So it is tyranny for the government interfere in the personal privacy of the body. Then the Chronicle quotes Ted
AT&T and Facebook are unaccountable. Donald Trump’s still free. This week saw an overwhelming number of stories all pointing to the same conclusion: American authoritarianism is on the rise, juiced and protected by some of the richest and most powerful people in the United States. Due to a combination of whistleblowers, investigations, and, in many cases, utter shamelessness on the part of fascism enablers, this is now out in the open. And yet, despite Democrats controlling both Congress and the White House, serious action to fight back and save American democracy remains underwhelming to nonexistent.
If you are waiting for an American general to resign or be fired over the drone strike that killed seven children and three men in Kabul last month, you will likely experience the meaning of infinity.
Amnesty International welcomed the acknowledgement of civil casualties by the US military on Friday but called for prosecuting those “suspected of criminal responsibility” in the attack. “Survivors and families of the victims should be kept informed of the progress of the investigation and be given full reparation,” Brian Castner, senior crisis adviser with Amnesty’s crisis response programme, said in a statement. “It should be noted that the US military was only forced to admit to its failure in this strike because of the current global scrutiny on Afghanistan.”
They could change their embargo and sanction policies on Cuba but won’t
The United States could help to rebuild Afghanistan, after having bombed the country back to the stone age (to use the old Cold War idiom). Instead, it is now washing its hands of the situation and leaving. Similarly, Washington could end support for free-market policies that impose poverty on millions of people. But it shows no signs of shifting course. As such, both Democratic and Republican governments are set to continue the Cold War’s history of military intervention, with all the destruction and economic inequality that they entail.
Today’s cruel and partisan Supreme Court is squandering what remains of its authority. It is also imposing unnecessary suffering on those least able to bear it.
Republicans love to hijack democratic and progressive concepts, such as “free speech,” and apply them in a hyperbolic context that is counterintuitive to the original intent. While this tactic burgeoned in recent years, Donald Trump’s presidency and toxic wake has elevated the issues and urgency to defeat this.
A mere month after the conviction of whistleblower Daniel Hale, who did more than any other to reveal the grotesque illusion of reliability behind the US drone program, UAV warfare was again shown to be a butchering enterprise praised by the precisionists and found politically wanting. Those attending the funerals of the slain family members, an event taking place in the shadow of US power in retreat, needed little convincing who their enemy was.
Stoking fear of Afghan refugees, Stephen Miller — architect of Trump’s ethno-nationalist agenda — used the Afghanistan withdrawal and the ISIS airport attack as another opportunity to spread Islamophobia. Just hours after Kabul fell to the Taliban, Miller focused on an anti-immigrant message: “It is becoming increasingly clear that Biden and his radical deputies will use their catastrophic debacle in Afghanistan as a pretext for doing to America what Angela Merkel did to Germany and Europe,” he wrote, referring to Syrian refugee resettlement through 2016. In Miller’s racist imagination, Merkel allowed the masses of Middle Eastern refugees to “defile” Europe’s traditional heritage while failing to identify Muslim terrorists hidden in their midst.
And then the Soviet Union collapsed — and nothing changed in the U.S. military’s global posture. Or, put differently, everything changed. For with the implosion of the USSR, what turned out to remain truly uncontained was our military, along with the dreams of neoconservatives who sought to remake the world in America’s image. But which image? That of a republic empowering its citizens in a participatory democracy or of an expansionist capitalist empire, driven by the ambition and greed of a set of oligarchs?
“On January 6, did you speak before during or after the Capitol was attacked?” the reporter probed. Jordan looked up in the air making believe he had a think about it. “Ahhh, I’d have to go…IIiiiiii I spoke with him that day after. I think after,” his voice raised almost an octave higher. “I don’t know if I spoke to him in the morning or not? I just don’t know. Have to go back, I mean, I don’t don’t don’t–” he stammered.
olddogthoughts 