The Pentagon – the U.S. “Defense” Department – was just audited for the fifth time. And they just announced they failed for the fifth time. If that’s not accountability, I don’t know what is!
Source: Pentagon Admits They Can’t Account for Half Their Assets – scheerpost.com
When 35 people were murdered by a lone gunman in Tasmania in 1996, the conservative government did something the American government hasn’t: it quickly banned automatic and semiautomatic weapons.
Source: When Australia Experienced a Mass Shooting, the Government Enacted Gun Reform
The MAGA promise
21 are dead in another mass shooting, including 19 schoolchildren. The white slavers of the Old South used to call US slavery our “peculiar institution.” Nowadays we have another peculiar institution, the gun culture.
Source: When it comes to Guns, the US is a Third World Country run by Corporate Lobbyists for a Profit
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the US blockade of Cuba, a collective punishment of the Cuban people for their independence from US control. The blockade needs to end.
Source: The US Blockade of Cuba Must End
There is no Independent bipartisan system in the USA and the Republicans know that while the Democrats still dream of Democracy. Actual rule is from the top down and that needs to be guaranteed Republican no matter who is in government. Trump merely ensured that was welded into the system and all its major institutions. SCOTUS, the ultimate system’s safety switch.
It’s very hard to fathom why the right seems so determined to prolong the deadly COVID-19 pandemic but it’s obvious that they are. From politicians banning mask requirements to media celebrities pushing disinformation about vaccines, there is no escaping the fact that Republicans and their allies simply do not care that more than 850,000 thousand Americans are dead in less than two years from this scourge and that hundreds of thousands of them are still dying because they refuse to take life-saving vaccines. That the majority of them are their own constituents who have died because they believe right-wing conspiracy theories is just mind-boggling, but apparently they are convinced that this is good for them politically and gives them great ratings.
Source: The radical right’s takeover of the Supreme Court is complete | Salon.com
The Great American Experiment has become a diseased version of what was once intended and they keep feeding that disease rather than curing it. The System is very broken and there is no equivalence to the actions on both sides of the divide. There is no common purpose the ‘we’ is just ‘me’. One group still wants to Serve America while the other simply Service it. Trump has been doing the latter all his life and Mary his neice warned and told America so.Even she didn’t believe he’d get as far as he has.
If voters and activists are going to care, they need to start seeing consequences happen, and not just to the foot soldiers who stormed the Capitol. Trump, Meadows and other co-conspirators who organized and led the coup are all walking around free, openly plotting another coup, while also cooking up various schemes to defraud their own supporters. As long as the Department of Justice treats an organized conspiracy to overthrow the government as beneath attention, Democrats can’t expect voters to take this seriously. Yes, even if they release a bunch of text messages proving what everyone already suspected.
“The U.S. government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange makes it clear that this prosecution is a punitive measure, but the case involves concerns which go far beyond the fate of one man and put media freedom and freedom of expression in peril.”
Source: Julian Assange’s Health Central to Ruling on Extradition to U.S.
Overall, the U.S. facilitated evacuation of about 117,000 people who were not U.S. citizens from Afghanistan, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday, although that figure includes more than just SIV applicants. More than 20,000 Afghan refugees were being housed at military bases within the U.S. as of Wednesday, with another 40,000 awaiting processing at military bases abroad, CBS News reported. All refugees and SIV applicants are extensively vetted.
Source: U.S. Left Most Afghans Who Helped Americans Behind | HuffPost
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.”
The American warfare state’s upper reaches are filled with bloodthirsty megalomaniacs. But few have been as deranged as Donald Rumsfeld, whose appetite for imperial violence combined with free market zealotry produced one of the most spectacular failures in all of US military history.
Source: Donald Rumsfeld Was a Bloodthirsty Warrior for the Free Market
and
Joe Biden has announced a series of policies aimed at curbing gun violence in the US, a phenomenon the President described as an “epidemic” and “international embarrassment”.
Source: Joe Biden announces gun violence executive orders after mass shootings
The US has far less mobility and equality of opportunity today than almost the entire European Union
The ‘American Dream’ of upward mobility is broken. Look at the numbers | US news | The Guardian
There are a great many ways we could organize this inventory of shame we have accrued since Donald Trump began monopolizing our lives more than four years ago.
How Did He Shame Us? Let Us Count the Ways | The Smirking Chimp
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.
6 January 2021: America’s new ‘day of infamy’
When it comes to Donald Trump, too many people in the mainstream media and elsewhere have tried to impose complexity onto simplicity. For many such observers there must always be some other explanation for Trump and his movement’s anti-democratic behavior and overall evil. Therefore, we must ride the hamster wheel of shock and surprise at each new example of Trump’s ignominious behavior.
Trump’s latest crime “shocks” the media: His niece, Mary Trump, is not surprised | Salon.com
Supporters of President Donald Trump, following his encouragement, stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, disrupting the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. Waving Trump banners, hundreds of people broke through barricades and smashed windows to enter the building where Congress convenes. One rioter died and several police officers were hospitalized in the clash. Congress went on lockdown. While violent and shocking, what happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t a coup. This Trumpist insurrection was election violence, much like the election violence that plagues many fragile democracies.
Cairo on the Potomac: The siege on US Capitol was the election violence of a fragile democracy
A trillion dollars could maintain wages at pre-crisis levels for all workers in America, enabling people to stay home and stop the spread of the virus, for four months. Instead, it’s gone into the personal piggy banks of a handful of billionaire owners and investors.
US Billionaires Have Increased Their Riches By $1 Trillion During the Pandemic
The truth is, the European leaders feel alone because they know that what Trump has dismantled cannot be rebuilt so quickly and so easily,” she said. “As for the others, Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, they must be telling themselves what we already knew: They can do everything, because the US isn’t a leader anymore.”
US Presidential Debate: Trump-Biden face-off prompts shock, despair and, in China, glee
He doublecrossed the Kurds to get their oil wells. Has stayed in Syria for Exxon’s sake. Refuses to leave Iraq and is still in Afghanistan. But he’s turned his back on his European allies for not paying him. However, he doesn’t pay the UN and has left the WHO in order to bring them to their knees and says he’s not a” sucker”. Bye Bye American Pie. (ODT)
via ‘We don’t want to be the suckers’: US to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany
Although this is not the first time an unarmed Black person has been killed by the police, yet the protests this time are very different. In the past, it used to be mostly a Black versus White affair. However, this time many diverse forces have joined the protests. In some places, even the police and parts of establishment have joined the protests. There is dissent at the highest levels, particularly to the idea that the US Army should be called to deal with the protestors. This poses a very serious challenge for the establishment. This raises the possibility of a fundamental change in the American system. Maybe the Blacks and all other people besides the rich and the powerful will also matter and they all can breathe.
Donald Trump’s short but indelible political career has been based around the principle of divide-and-fool. His acquittal in the impeachment trial by the US Senate will further fan the flames of the most profound national split since the Vietnam war, perhaps even the civil war.
First, expect Trump to be cocky and take a victory lap, falsely claiming “exoneration” just as he did after special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation left him bruised but unbowed. A day after Mueller’s leaden testimony to Congress, the president felt able to act with such impunity that he made his bullying phone call to the leader of Ukraine.
Death by Trump (ODT)
Before he was deported, Jimmy Aldaoud had never stepped foot in Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi refugee parents, he immigrated to the United States with his family via a refugee resettlement program 40 years ago, when he was just 15 months old. He considered himself American and knew hardly anything of Iraqi society. Still, on the afternoon of June 4, he found himself wandering the arrivals terminal of Al Najaf International Airport, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, with around $50, some insulin for his diabetes, and the clothes on his back.
olddogthoughts 