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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?
#17401
Posted 2021-January-05, 20:15
#17402
Posted 2021-January-05, 21:42
#17403
Posted 2021-January-05, 22:45
Eric Trump said:
Eric who?
#17405
Posted 2021-January-06, 02:12
[Update: sources close to Joe Manchin confirm he is not a socialist.]
#17406
Posted 2021-January-06, 03:26
I'm sure I don't need to spell out what all those forces of control are
In fact I'm wondering when all my various presences on the Web will be closed down or even my access to the Web or any uncontrolled communication at all
#17407
Posted 2021-January-06, 03:35
thepossum, on 2021-January-06, 03:26, said:
Sorry I am a little behind the curve - could you spell it out for me, please?
#17408
Posted 2021-January-06, 03:43
cherdano, on 2021-January-06, 03:35, said:
Sorry I'm only prepared to explain to those with the capacity or disinterest or objectivity to have observed it themselves
Actually and those who dont start with an obnoxious patronising and sarcastic attack in attempt to put down
But if you insist I will write something up and post it
But I actually think you know full well and are attacking a rhetorical post in an attempt to undermine.
I realise my sentences may run the risk of disrespect. As would anything else I posted
Dangerous times for speaking freely
But I do always try to speak respectfully unless I feel I have been disrespected first. So for everyones elses benefit. If you ever want to engage me a conversation and ask for clarification kindly ask in a respectful way. I've had enough of obnoxiousness from all the elites over recent years. And despite maybe not havng all the letters many of you have I can more than hold my own against all of you and deserve respect in the same way. Some of you need to learn that
But I do think your post, its tone and how any reponse or explanation was dealt with are a good example of the very problem I think the world faces
I will answer your question with another question. How many times have the Deomcrats controlled all houses and how many times did the privileged elites in real power actually do anything for the less powerful around the world. But they rely on lies to the less privileged and the votes of the less privileged. But its always the same class that rules despite any attempts and abuses they make of identity politics
The Deomcrats use all manner of abuses of privilege discourse and identity to preserve the power bases of the elite classes. If nobody can see that they must be from another planet
But as I said I am used the disrespect and attitudes of people on many forums despite my own knowledge and training on issues. That arrogance has been growing and getting more and more dangerous by the day for years now and especially though 2020. Now it will reach a peak danger point as far as I can see. Where is the counterveilling power at all
There is far too much of this attitude that just because someone obtained some set of letters that firstly they are all equivalent or of equal merit or that they have any more right to speak on anything
But from what I can see all the ingredients of full blown global facsism are falling into place. And some of us despite our own merit have come up against that corrupt use of power and observed it in action on many occasions
Maybe I should list a few porblems I see
Major forces of control aligned
Big government
Big media
Big tech
Big pharma
Big data
Big academe
China
Edit sorry nearly forgot big bloated climate - thats been going for 30+ years and has immense and excessive power too. They are ll lined with tech essentially
Oops - didnt intentionally leave out big EU
When I use the word Big I mean bloated for decades with money and control from the likes of China
Then we get a pandemic which coincidentally manages to benefit all those power groups and control anyone who speaks up on any other issue
The pandemic also hurts many of thos bloated classes - they start to feel the pain - that is always a big danger
You know who suffers. The billions around the world who have been ignored though 2020 whose children are dying or suffering from countless povert and inequality related issues - not Covid
And all those privileged interest groups in their discssions ver major issues never really see past their own privileged interests to what the people starving in the world need. Its all about preserving privilege and inequality. There is never any true discussion of the real causes of issues, the inequalities in energy for example. And of course everything conveniently has a tech solution. Avoid the political inconvenience of every trying to address inequality. The Low Income Countries are being smashed to smithereens. The progress they made may be lost forever
Do I need to go on
... but final point and not being melodramatic at all. I do wonder how long before I am totally silenced in various forums for being one of the few to speak out
EDIT Something else. Just seeing the cesspool of social media ovetr the last several years. Many of the worst offender in that cesspool were from the elites from the so-called progressive side of politics. One example of their bottom of the pond level attitude is the way they talked about First Lady Melania Trump for the last 5 years. That is the the attitude and group of people that concerns me. They made the mistake of letting themslves out on social media and being so arrogant to think that the obnoxious attitudes and views some of us know they have in private are acceptable out in the world. They aren't acceptable anywhere but what frightened me was the arroagance of them all polluting the Web for years. Any wonder I have concerns. Its bad enough having to bite your tongue and stay silent at social engagements with those obnoxious elites. But not to be able to speak up on social media for fear of being cancelled or silenced etc
#17409
Posted 2021-January-06, 04:12
* The (potential) 50-50 tie in Senate means the GOP will find numerous ways to slow everything down. VP Harris will need to appear in the Senate many more times than in any recent history to cast the tie-breaker vote.
* The "progressive" wing of the Democrats will now have the power to obstruct; they probably are too incompetent to use such power. If anything, they will manage to scuttle a few of the initiatives of the Biden administration.
* Pelosi's lead has whittled down to a bare sliver. She will forever be beholden to AOC and the likes. Worse still, Pelosi thinks she has the right to "know" the correct course and she will try all sorts of shenanigans to have her way in the House.
Fun all around.
But then I suppose the situation is still much better than having Mitch McConnell running the show in the Senate.
#17410
Posted 2021-January-06, 04:29
shyams, on 2021-January-06, 04:12, said:
* The (potential) 50-50 tie in Senate means the GOP will find numerous ways to slow everything down. VP Harris will need to appear in the Senate many more times than in any recent history to cast the tie-breaker vote.
* The "progressive" wing of the Democrats will now have the power to obstruct; they probably are too incompetent to use such power. If anything, they will manage to scuttle a few of the initiatives of the Biden administration.
* Pelosi's lead has whittled down to a bare sliver. She will forever be beholden to AOC and the likes. Worse still, Pelosi thinks she has the right to "know" the correct course and she will try all sorts of shenanigans to have her way in the House.
Fun all around.
But then I suppose the situation is still much better than having Mitch McConnell running the show in the Senate.
I would have predicted that Moscow Mitch would have refused to bring any Federal judge nominees to a vote, rallied GOP support to refuse to confirm any of Biden's cabinet and agency picks, and threatened to shut down government by refusing to consider budget bills unless he got major concessions just to let government continue as is. Republicans in Congress have shown that they don't really care if government shuts down so they act like the terrorist they are to get their way. Democrats always blink in these situations because they actually believe in government.
#17411
Posted 2021-January-06, 04:50
johnu, on 2021-January-06, 04:29, said:
Agree!
The GOP Senators remind me of the Keyzer Soze scene (link). Quote "They realised that to be in power, they didn't need guns or money, or even numbers. They just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't". Perhaps a fitting quote for these Senators.
#17412
Posted 2021-January-06, 04:53
#17413
Posted 2021-January-06, 05:56
David Leonhardt at NYT said:
And Joe Biden’s chances of signing ambitious legislation — to fight climate change, reduce economic inequality and slow the coronavirus pandemic — got a lot bigger, too.
The Democrats appear to have won both Senate runoffs in Georgia last night, giving them control of the Senate. The Rev. Raphael Warnock has beaten Senator Kelly Loeffler by about 2 percentage points, according to Times estimates. Most news organizations have not yet called the race between Jon Ossoff and Senator David Perdue, but Ossoff leads by about 16,000 votes and the outstanding votes come from Democratic-leaning areas.
The Times’s Nate Cohn, who analyzes election returns, said he believed Ossoff would likely end up with a lead of more than 0.5 percentage points — large enough to avoid a recount. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report wrote that he considered both races to be over.
The apparent victories will give Democrats control of both the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in 10 years.
True, their control of the Senate will be by the narrowest of margins — a 50-50 tie, broken by the incoming vice president, Kamala Harris. That narrowness will mean that Democrats will rarely be able to overcome a filibuster and will often be reliant on their most moderate senators, like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
But a Senate majority will still make a profound difference to the Biden administration. It will be able to pass budget bills and confirm judges (neither of which tend to be vulnerable to filibusters) so long as Democrats remain united.
Mitch McConnell will no longer be Senate majority leader, with the power to decide which bills come up for a vote. Chuck Schumer will be in charge, for the first time.
Much of the economic agenda that Biden proposed during the campaign is now in play. And it was a boldly progressive agenda, including plans to reduce medical costs, expand Medicare, create manufacturing jobs and promote clean energy, as well as raise taxes on the rich. Many of those policies — as well as measures to accelerate a mass vaccination program and increase economic stimulus — can be included in a budget bill this year.
Before last night, the 2020 election looked like a decidedly mixed picture: victory over an incumbent president for the Democrats, combined with a surprisingly good showing for down-ballot Republicans. Last night didn’t erase all the good news for Republicans, but it did rob them of their biggest prize — Senate control.
Biden will now have much more of a chance to be a president who gets things done.
More analysis of the results:
- Senate control will allow Biden to use a coronavirus stimulus package “as a vehicle for hundreds of billions of dollars in spending to boost the renewable energy economy,” Coral Davenport, a Times climate reporter, says.
- “Senator Mitch McConnell has plenty of experience in gumming up the works as minority leader. Get ready to hear a lot about Senate moderates in both parties and a procedure called ‘reconciliation,’ which allows some legislation to skirt a filibuster,” Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, says.
- Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, told CNN that final results would probably be available by lunchtime today.
- Josh Kraushaar of National Journal noted that Perdue ran well ahead of Ossoff in the election’s first round two months ago — suggesting that the last two months of events had hurt Republicans.
- Maggie Haberman of The Times pointed out that the Republican losses came despite Trump’s campaigning in the state: “This is the first indication of the damage he’s done his own level of influence in the party in the last two months.”
- Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review wrote on Twitter that Perdue and Loeffler suffered from three problems: “being unimpressive candidates, GA shifting purple, and Trump being a maniac.”
- Nate Cohn wrote that, compared with the November elections, turnout fell the most in rural and heavily pro-Trump parts of Georgia and the least in heavily Black areas.
- Until 2020, no Democrat had won a statewide race in Georgia since 2006. And one person — Stacey Abrams — is most responsible for Georgia’s new status as a Democratic state, Reid Epstein and Astead Herndon of The Times write.
https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a
#17414
Posted 2021-January-06, 06:23
Matt Yglesias said:
https://twitter.com/...9880146944?s=20
Wesley Lowery at CBS said:
#17415
Posted 2021-January-06, 06:31
Jeff Flake, former Republican Senator from Arizona said:
Unfortunately, President Trump refuses to accept the reality of his substantial loss, and so becomes determined to create an alternate reality in which he won. As he crosses that rubicon, Mr. Trump has taken many in my party with him, all of whom seem to have learned the wrong lessons from this anomalous presidency. George Orwell, after all, meant for his work to serve as a warning, not as a template.
How many injuries to American democracy can my Republican Party tolerate, excuse and champion? It is elementary to have to say so, but for democracy to work one side must be prepared to accept defeat. If the only acceptable outcome is for your side to win, and a loser simply refuses to lose, then America is imperiled.
I once had a career in public life — six terms in the House of Representatives and another six years in the Senate — and then the rise of a dangerous demagogue, and my party’s embrace of him, ended that career. Or rather, I chose not to go along with my party’s rejection of its core conservative principles in favor of that demagogue. In a speech on the Senate floor on Oct. 24, 2017, I announced that because of the turn my party had taken, I would not run for re-election: the career of a politician that is complicit in undermining his own values doesn’t mean much.
As a lifelong conservative Republican, I was surprised to find myself so profoundly at odds with my own party and with the man who had used its ballot line to vault to power. But the values that made me a conservative and an American were indeed being undermined, the country was paying a steep price for it, and I would be a liar to my family, my state and my conscience if I were to pretend otherwise.
It is hard to comprehend how so many of my fellow Republicans were able — and are still able — to engage in the fantasy that they had not abruptly abandoned the principles they claimed to believe in. It is also difficult to understand how this betrayal could be driven by deference to the unprincipled, incoherent and blatantly self-interested politics of Donald Trump, defined as it is by its chaos and boundless dishonesty. The conclusion that I have come to is that they did it for the basest of reasons — sheer survival and rank opportunism.
But survival divorced from principle makes a politician unable to defend the institutions of American liberty when they come under threat by enemies foreign and domestic. And keeping your head down in capitulation to a rogue president makes you little more than furniture. One wonders if that is what my fellow Republicans had in mind when they first sought public office.
But if it was my obligation to end my congressional career by speaking out in defiance, then my time in Congress had begun in awe.
It was the first few days of my first term in Congress — Saturday, Jan. 6, 2001, 20 years ago today — when I witnessed an act of civic faith that was simply extraordinary. With utmost fidelity to our founding principles and the reverence the United States Constitution deserves, one presidential administration handed over power to another, peacefully and with dignity, after the most highly contentious election in more than a century, an election decided by just a few hundred votes in a single state. Perhaps most moving of all was that this ritual transition of our democracy had over the time since our founding become so ordinary.
A kid from Snowflake, Ariz., doesn’t often get to witness such history, and so I kept a journal:
One thing I left out of my journal entry was that in affirming that his opponent, George W. Bush, would be our next president, Mr. Gore said this: “May God bless our new president and new vice president, and may God bless the United States of America.”
Mr. Gore’s was an act of grace that the American people had every right to expect of someone in his position, a testament to the robustness and durability of American constitutional democracy. That he was merely doing his job and discharging his responsibility to the Constitution is what made the moment both profound and ordinary.
Vice President Mike Pence must do the same today. As we are now learning, a healthy democracy is wholly dependent on the good will and good faith of those who offer to serve it.
Today, the American people deserve to witness the majesty of a peaceful transfer of power, just as I saw, awe-struck, two decades ago. Instead, we find ourselves in this bizarre condition of our own making, two weeks from the inauguration of a new president, with madness unspooling from the White House, grievous damage to our body politic compounding daily.
My fellow Republicans, as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia has shown us this week, there is power in standing up to the rank corruptions of a demagogue. Mr. Trump can’t hurt you. But he is destroying us.
Message received?
#17416
Posted 2021-January-06, 07:51
Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:
Both Republicans were favored after President-elect Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in November. After all, the last two times this happened — in 1992 and 2008 — Democratic candidates lost badly in Georgia Senate runoffs after a Democrat won the presidency.
What changed? My sense — and of course we’re still in the guesswork phase — is mainly two things. The first is Trump. It’s a cliche to say that he gets away with things that others don’t, but it’s still not true. Trump’s appalling behavior after Nov. 3 had real consequences. While most outgoing presidents — even those who’ve been defeated — become more popular as they leave, Trump’s approval ratings have actually fallen some. If he had been around 46% approval instead of 42%, these contests might’ve gone the other way. And that’s before we get to the other ways he made life impossible for Georgia Republicans: his war on the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state, his impossible-to-follow flip-flops on the relief and stimulus bill, and his insistence on keeping all the attention on himself no matter what.
The shorthand for the other factor is Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate. But as strong as her record is for organizing she’s only a stand-in, as Nadia E. Brown and Bry Reed explained in the Monkey Cage last month, for years of grassroots efforts by many people, especially Black women, across Georgia. Turnout was strong throughout the state on Tuesday, but it was especially strong for Democrats and among Black voters. Some of that was Trump, and some of it was demographic change, but a large part of it was individual citizens getting organized.
We can also step back and reassess the 2020 election cycle, which is now complete. It looks a lot better for Democrats than it did at first. Republicans still picked up 11 or 12 net seats in the House, enough to narrow the Democratic majority considerably. But Democrats won the White House solidly, and have now picked up three net Senate seats and the (slimmest possible) majority. That’s probably still a bit shy of what they had hoped for on Election Day in November, but certainly a result they would’ve gladly accepted a year ago. Republicans did well in state legislative races, but Democrats did quite well in local politics in 2020.
The most important immediate effect is that Biden will be able to fill his cabinet and his administration without major obstacles and the Senate will consider and confirm most of the judges he nominates. We won’t know to what extent Republicans would’ve blocked judicial and executive-branch nominations had Mitch McConnell remained the majority leader, but all the evidence suggests they wouldn’t have held back. Now Biden’s nominees will only be subject to the kind of foot-dragging that Democrats used against Trump’s picks, not full-out blockades.
Legislation will be a more complicated story. As long as the filibuster survives — and that seems more likely than not — many Democratic priorities will need 60 votes in the Senate. We’ll be hearing a lot about reconciliation, the budget procedure that allows (some) things to pass with a simple majority. But even when 50 votes (plus the vice president) are enough, moderate Democrats beginning with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin will have the key swing votes, along with any moderate Republicans (such as Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski) who might be willing to cut deals in some policy areas. Democrats are certainly happy to have the majority, but it’s a fragile one. And don’t forget that we’re still in the midst of a pandemic that may make it even harder than usual to produce all 50 Democrats on the Senate floor or in committee chambers for votes.
There’s plenty of time to assess all of that in more detail. For now, Democrats can celebrate — and Republicans may want to think about what went wrong and what they might do differently in the future. Meanwhile, although Senator Kelly Loeffler’s defeat means there will be one fewer woman in the 117th Senate, Warnock will be only the 11th Black senator in the history of the republic, while Ossoff, at 33, will add some badly needed age diversity. And with David Perdue’s defeat, we’ll have one fewer dynastic senator as well. So if nothing else, these runoffs were good for Senate diversity, and that’s something everyone can celebrate.
https://www.bloomber...s?sref=UHfKDqx7
#17417
Posted 2021-January-06, 08:14
#17418
Posted 2021-January-06, 08:53
Quote
Some Republican senators have expressed concerns that voting to certify — and against Trump — would open them up to a primary challenge from the right, while others worry that voting to object would make them vulnerable in a general election, a person familiar with the deliberations said.
“I think it is revealing that there is not a single senator who is arguing that the election was stolen from President Trump,” said Josh Holmes, an outside adviser to McConnell.
This post has been edited by Winstonm: 2021-January-06, 09:34
#17419
Posted 2021-January-06, 09:41
Quote
“I warned them,” he told me.
“I warned Mark Meadows at my oversight hearing. I warned the Jim Jordans,” he said, referring to his congressional testimony from less than two years ago as well as Trump’s current chief of staff and other notably pro-Trump GOP House members. His message: “I know what you’re doing. I know the Trump game plan, because I wrote it, and it didn’t work out for me. And it’s not going to work out for you.”
“Donald Trump,” he said, “will push people to the brink, and unless they want to end up disbarred and imprisoned and financially ruined, like what Trump did to me, they better open their eyes.”
[snip]
“Each of the Republicans that have signed on to Trump’s chaos are not doing it out of loyalty to Trump,” Cohen said. “They’re not doing it because they even believe in what Trump is doing. They’re doing it because they fear his Twitter wrath and believe that the supporters, the base of Trump supporters, will vote against them in any upcoming election for not siding with Trump. This is more about their survival than anything else. And that’s sad and pathetic.”
#17420
Posted 2021-January-06, 10:37
Wesley Lowery@CBS said:
They did so by attacking MLK's church while supporting the disenfranchisement of millions of voters. It is difficult to think of two things more attuned to energising the Dem vote in GA. For a party that bases its entire election strategy on voter suppression, these were monumental errors in a close campaign.
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