It's no secret that we're more than likely heading into some pretty bad times. Here's a look at a moment from 80 years ago - from what we were taught was among the worst times ever - with a slightly corrected perspective.
It does not mean things weren't as bad as they seemed. Look at it for fuck's sake - those folks are not having a party. They're barely scraping by. The point is that they did scrape by. They made it. They hung together, they worked their asses off, and they helped make it better.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi went all badass yesterday.
She seemed a bit nervous, and on the whole, I take that as a good sign. I think it shows how serious this is, and how well she understands how serious this is.
Some will say "Well it's about fuckin' time". I've been kinda on the fence - wondering, along with most everyone else, what was holding her back, trying to keep in mind that we're never allowed to know everything these people get to know. So there's always that kernel of doubt. Sometimes, that's what politicians count on to do what's right, in the right way - this joint is planted thick with process intended to help us do it right - but at the same time all that process, and the necessary element of doubt, is what makes a man like 45* so fucking dangerous.
"Can we work something out?"
That's Donald Trump living in Smarmspace. He's not going to ask straight out. He's not going to make it plain that he's offering some quid pro quo. He's not going to give orders in specific terms for people to do illegal things. He always couches his shit in soft passive unassertive language. Just like Michael Cohen explained when he testified in committee.
"Yes, Mr President - you can tell your people to obey the law."
That's Nancy Pelosi speaking softly but carrying a big stick.
I'll say it again: These women will help us save ourselves, if we can figure out how to keep our mouths shut and stay the fuck outa their way.
Rudy is way far up somebody's ass - maybe his own too, but definitely a few others' as well. I'm hoping to live thru this massive nation-wide GOP fuck up just so I can read a few good histories of it. Cuz this shit is gonna keep an awful lot of academics very busy for a very long time.
Taking a peek around the pay wall to see what I (and plenty of others) have been saying this whole fucking time. NYTimes, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.
The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.
Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.⚠️
That right there is worth including in the definition of "Smarmspace" - the distance between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.
Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions function only when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win by any means necessary, politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.
Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy.⚠️ Your favorite blogger begs to differ, but please continue. They are driven by fear.⚠️ Exactly - fear of democracy.
Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.
But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.
Take German conservatives before World War I. They were haunted by the prospect of extending equal voting rights to the working class. They viewed equal (male) suffrage as a menace not only to their own electoral prospects but also to the survival of the aristocratic order. One Conservative leader called full and equal suffrage an “attack on the laws of civilization.” So German conservatives played dirty, engaging in rampant election manipulation and outright repression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.
Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may bebelow 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.
Demography is not destiny, but as California Republicans have discovered, it often punishes parties that fail to adapt to changing societies. The growing diversity of the American electorate is making it harder for the Republican Party to win national majorities. Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections just once in the last 30 years. Donald Trump captured this Republican pessimism well when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2016, “I think this is the last election the Republicans have a chance of winning because you are going to have people flowing across the border.”
“If we don’t win this election,” Mr. Trump added, “you’ll never see another Republican.”
The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril.
So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality. Most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South are Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field. Since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have adopted new laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Republican state and local governments have closed polling places in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, purged voter rolls and created new obstacles to registration and voting.
In Georgia, a 2017 “exact match law” allowed authorities to throw out voter registration forms whose information did not “exactly match” existing records. Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously Georgia’s secretary of state and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, tried to use the law to invalidate tens of thousands of registration forms, many of which were from African-Americans. In Tennessee, Republicans recently passed chilling legislation allowing criminal charges to be levied against voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms or miss deadlines. And in Texas this year, Republicans attempted to purge the voter rolls of nearly 100,000 Latinos.
The Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question in the census to facilitate gerrymandering schemes that would, in the words of one party strategist, be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” fits the broader pattern. Although these abuses are certainly less egregious than those committed by post-bellum Southern Democrats, the underlying logic is similar: Parties representing fearful, declining majorities turn, in desperation, to minority rule.
The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.
Such a transformation is less far-fetched than it may appear right now; indeed, the Republican National Committee recommended it in 2013. But parties only change when their strategies bring costly defeat. So Republicans must fail — badly — at the polls.
American democracy faces a Catch-22: Republicans won’t abandon their white identity bunker strategy until they lose, but at the same time that strategy has made them so averse to losing they are willing to bend the rules to avoid this fate. There is no easy exit. Republican leaders must either stand up to their base and broaden their appeal or they must suffer an electoral thrashing so severe that they are compelled to do so.
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The GOP is not particularly interested in the kind of "elections" they can lose. The Plutocracy Project is in full swing and out in the open.
Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.
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Republicans make a lot of noise about "the marketplace of ideas", and then they spend a shit ton of money time and energy manipulating that marketplace - up to and including their efforts to manipulate the voting itself.
Take everything NYT says in this piece and then go that one step further to include the increasingly obvious factor that the GOP is hell-bent on tearing down our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy - the Daddy State.
We can't afford to let these guys up easy this time.
Burn the lifeboats and leave the survivors to the sharks.
Here's a video about The Dzhanibekov Effect or Tennis Racket Theorem - how spinning objects behave.
As long as there's something like gravity to govern the object's behavior, it's harder to observe the effect, and we don't see it as any kind of big problem because we have relatively stable conditions, and the objects generally rotate on either of the two axes that are most prevalent. Remove gravity, and the thing flip-flops regularly and frequently enough for us to see it plainly in real time.
Imagine a politician or a political party - and further imagine that the governing force is the basic morality of an individual. Now think of a democratic self-government where you have a process of checks and balances built in, but you systematically remove pieces of that process over time. That 3rd thing - the 3rd axis that we don't spend much time or energy noticing - becomes a more dominant factor. There are some vexing questions rattling around in my head right now. eg: How did "the party of Lincoln" become the party that fights to reinstate so many of the things Lincoln (and other Republican presidents) fought to abolish? How did "the party of fiscal responsibility" become the party that dramatically increases our Revenue Deficit and the National Debt every time they're in power? How does "the party of freedom and patriotism" become the party that builds concentration camps? What is the political (ie: human) equivalent of that 3rd axis, other than morality, ethics and a sense of honor? I don't know. And that bugs the fuck outa me. I also don't know that it hasn't always been this way - and that really bugs the fuck outa me.
Miami Herald, Julie K Brown: For two decades, Jeffrey Epstein built a sex trafficking enterprise that reached across state borders and spanned the globe. Using an almost bottomless quarry of wealth and connections, he not only employed recruiters around the world, but enlisted the help of an array of seemingly legitimate people — from hairdressers to psychiatrists to immigration lawyers and dentists.
Even doctors who prescribed his victims birth control and screened them for sexually transmitted diseases.
While many of his survivors were underage, there were countless others who were 18 to 23, a group of women who have been reluctant to come forward because, despite the ordeal they went through, they are ashamed and believe that the public doesn’t look at them as victims at all.
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article235247637.html#storylink=cpy
Does it surprise anyone - really - that these guys (Epstein, Trump, Deripaska, maybe Clinton, and a metric fuck ton of others) operate almost in perfect synch with the the way the old school mobsters operated?
Gambling
Drugs
Prostitution
Public corruption
Money Laundering
Masked by "legit businesses"
The "captains" have divvied up the territories, but instead of geography, they're each moving to consolidate their power within any given industry - and that shit of course has been crossing international boundaries for decades - while the bosses (ie: POTUS, Premiere, Chairman, etc) are the enforcers sittin' pretty on top of what is fast becoming recognizable as just a handful of empires. It's known as Oligarchy in Russia of course - I call it Plutocracy here in USAmerica Inc.
Anyway, the pimps and the sharpers and the sharks and the pushers - are all working more or less in concert with the über-riche as they steal from various national treasuries and launder the money thru a small(ish) network of banks so it all looks legit, which allows them to do whatever the fuck they wanna do, right out in the open. And back we slide to the 1750s. This is pretty fucked up.
