SCOTUS judges, Alito, Roberts and Thomas are particularly corrupt and actively working to overthrow this democracy. The RNC is a bonafide Organized Crime Syndicate run by the Libertarian Fascists—those “Corporations are People” gang of Koch/Leo Followers who have installed Puppets at every level of government. Alito and Thomas, as you said, flaunt their allegiance to libertarian fascists. They even have their Mob Boss, Trump, as the Face of their movement, signaling alliance with Russian oligarchs.
We are at the 11th hour. The War has already begun. The fascists have spent the last 50 years to become entrenched. If we are to save this democracy, a sweeping and extreme measure has to be taken: Arrest these traitors. Seize their assets and nationalize Big Energy, Big Pharm, Big IT—all of it. Put them all on a prison ship to await trial for sedition, treason, and insurrection.
. . . But, alas, our AG is a little mouse, cowering in the corner. Our President believes in pure democracy. We have no Churchill or Roosevelt.
Nationalization of anything other than the commons doesn't work out too well, neither does laissz faire capitalism as both are either monopolies or lead to monopolization and there is no incentive for innovation or even cost control.
Our system worked fine when government was not controlled by the money powers (corporations and billionaires) and government actually had he power to , and did regulate corporations., and corporations had a limited life, as did telecommunications, that had to be renewed provided that could prove that they operated in the public interest for the common welfare.
Just enforcing what we have, and making clear that this “crypto” idea is seriously that — crypto and weird and NOT functional for a society. An individual with a computer can play fast and loose with anyone’s “financial portfolio” if there are no rules about what’s allowed and what’s not.
The description of the idea in the link up there sounds like a thirteen-year-old’s idea of the perfect world in which the kid doesn’t have to answer to Mom or Dad.
Stopping and thinking for a SECOND about how such a world would impact 8 billion people, most of whom are NOT computer nerds … Egad. Ludicrous.
Indecent levels of riches flowing to the rich while school kids are denied lunches sound too Dickensian for reality. What would a Tesla cost if Elon weren't squeezing his board of directors for $56 BLLION? How great would the quality be if he weren't siphoning off funds to shore up X? How are plutocrats in major companies keeping us all from having a more affordable, democratic society?
90% of MAGATS, who only comprise about a third of the general population, are net losers when Republicans govern. Vote for the wolves in sheep's clothing to the detriment of their economic and physical well being. In 2020 70 million lumpen did not vote. They trend Democratic.
Those MAGA are visceral. "Trump hates Dogs" works.
Coincidence: 10 pm Pacific time, I have just watched a segment of "Oliver" on TCM. A favorite tale that touched me, a precocious reader; one of only 3 books I read twice as a kid. I am this minute wondering if this is the key to my unlikely morphing to liberal out of the bosom of a thoroughly Bircher upbringing! Maybe "Oliver Twist" stewed in my subconscious to some kind of realization: it has always been a mystery, but when you said "Dickensian," some kind of "trigger." Huh. The power of (soon to be forbidden?) books.
This , being owned by the wealthiest and most corrupt people in government in all areas , is the biggest problem we face . It controls everything . Our quality of life on every level .
From a corrupt dysfunctional Congress who will not do their jobs, to the Supreme Court who has completely reversed and perverted what their job is .
As Thom has said . Money is in charge . It determines which laws get passed ( passed means they benefit the Far Right wealthiest people. )
The Supreme Court has paid little to no attention to the Constitution of the United States for some time now. .
They get their Marching orders from their benefactors , the Heritage Group and the Federalist Society.
And they have been consistently on the side of wealth and power.
This affects every area of our diminished lives while they are calling the shots.
I saw an article this morning about high prices and who’s responsible?
The choices were between the extreme inequity in society or was it just inflation following the pandemic . This was a study done by a bank out west .
What’s interesting is that the determination of this particular study was it was not really inequity.
Many others have disagreed. But the whole of our economy is ruled by a corrupt system of government attached to the power of money .
The laws that can curtail the bought and paid for bribery of the Supreme Court must be passed.
They won’t be passed by Republicans in any branch .
The Democrats and the people at the bottom of the money is power ladder must do everything we can to elect Democrats this year and every year if we g hope to turn this around .
We are not entirely lost yet — but people who don’t know or won’t SEE what has been done in the past three years will THINK we have lost it, if we keep saying we lost it.
We still have not totally lost our democracy!!!! The very people DJT and the Oligarch Right wwant to install for 2025 are the way they will FINALLY put their agenda across. But they are NOT there yet!!!
The very people Donny complains about stopping him in 2020 are the reason it is not lost, and they are the people the 2025 Republicans have pledged to replace.
This election puts it all on the line!!!
That is why, whether we love him or don’t, we should vote for Biden, and as many Democrats and Progressives who caucus with Democrats, as we possibly can!! The Senate AND the House AND the President.
Then get hard to work passing the legislation that protects democracy of, by, and for THE PEOPLE.
ALL th media that used to be all we had is being sidelined by new media — social networks, online commentary, online news sources … Those of us who use our computers and tablets and phones A LOT have many sources where we look for information, not the least of which are FORUMS like this one, where we chat and comment on threads and not only learn from each other, but inform each other, and refine our thinking together.
“The Media” is not what it was a mere few years ago. Even though, realistically, a ton of people still do get their news from mainstream sources, which are more and more controlled by big bucks.
Maybe it’s time to stop picking on “the media,” stop convincing everyone that there’s nothing out there we trust {because destroying all TRUST within a society is a sure way to bring it down}, and start reinforcing what we do believe in and trust, and put our own minds toward fixing the problem that the Current Republican Fascist Party is foisting on our country.
For one thing, keep talking to each other and figuring out what’s up.
Reaching out about who might be a really responsive person to vote on in our area.
Reaching out to voters we know in our area and encouraging them to cast a well-informed ballot.
{Listen, I don’t advocate just “trusting” everything that’s put out. You need to know your sources; you need to listen to and read more than one; you need to hear thoughts and commentary and try to gather context …. But there’s info out there, and “mainstream media” is not even just one thing…it is not a monolith… . So you can trash it, if you want, but where are you actually GETTING your info? From your favorite BIASED sources? From some unbiased sources? {Please tell me where I can find those, ‘cause I’d love one …}
Pat: Truckers and people like salespersons even commuters, get their ideas, I won't call it news as much or all of it is slanted and propaganda over the radio.
The listen to it while jogging and on an exercise machine with ear buds.
The younger folk, don't even bother with TV anymore, they are plugged in via cell phone, and computers are on the way out.
Who watches TV is old farts like moi, and younger old farts like thee, and we watch either MSNBC or Fox. I don't even watch much of MSNBC anymore. I have a DVR, I record shows, will browse a talk show, skip commericials, bore easily. MSNBC regardless of show,has the same daily three topics, with the same "analysts" and guests espousing their opinion on the same three subjects.
For instance they use to feature Col Jacobs, retired, a CMH winner, as a military expert. Hardly, he has no more insight than I do, more than a civilian, but we have both been long retired, and have no idea what is going on in the Pentagon today.
I prefer to watch a movie or series that I have recorded.
Yet another essential biblical text these “Christian” judges ignore is 1Timothy 6:10–that the love of money is the root of all evil. Perversely turning that on its head, our benighted SCOTUS declares again and again that the love of money is the only real virtue, trumping all others. Mr. Hartmann’s proposed solution is a lovely fantasy. The plutocrats have seduced not just the cultists of tfg, FKA the Republican Party, but far too many Democratic legislators as well. Because at root, they are all greedy, all part of the system, all buyable at the right price, which is often shockingly low.
So even if, against the mounting evidence to the contrary, the Democrats win it all in November, don’t expect them to bite the morbidly rich hands that feed them. After 76 years as a citizen of this country, I now believe our system is irretrievably flawed and that any meaningful change will only come in the harshest, most cataclysmic and inevitably violent way.
I so wish to be proven wrong. But I have very little hope I will be.
Well, if that’s YOUR attitude, you won’t fix things.
I actually SEE laws and legislators opposing the rule of the dollar — even though they need dollars to “run” for office. But we are seeing MASSIVE appeals for SMALL donors to step up and fill that bill, not just mega-rich people donating mega-millions.
It’s frustrating to get so many requests for a few bucks to help candidates in lots of states, but THAT is the POINT — getting a few dollars from millions of us, who will also turn around an vote — THAT is how we break the stranglehold of the ultra-monied. So, we should welcome the requests, and give what we can —but especially VOTE the good guys in!
But we have to be willing to do it. And we need a PLAN. And we need to VOTE for legislators who have been funded by our LITTLE dollars, not by mega-donors.
Pat I live in morbid fear that Trump will be elected, and that will be the end of not only Democracy, but the beginning of the decline of America. our freedoms, and our quality of life. Bitch as it is, the homeless in America have it better off than the millions that risk their lives to migrate to Europe and America, many even have cell phones, though not a pot to piss in.
That said I can well understand the reluctance of principled people to dig in their pockets and bank accounts, to elect people who say one thing and then do the opposite, and it is bipartisan.
Reagan held out as a champion of unions, and especially PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controlers), promised he would not appoint anyone that belonged to the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, his first acts were to fire PATCO and appoint TC and CFR members to his cabinet, like Caspar Weinberge.
Clinton held forth as a champion of Unions, blacks, gays, free speech and what did he do, NAFTA, GATT, Telecommunications act of 1996, repealed Glass Steagall, Defense of Marriage Act, Omnibus Crime bill (school to prison pipeline)
Politicians are recipients of donor cash and support and I don't mean Jack and Jill donors) and are expected to deliver if they want to be re elected.
The system is corrupted by money, and to that there is no solution.
Having said that I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Biden and vote Blue, because like in 2020 there is no choice. I am not happy with the Democrats, not by a long shot, but
there is only one viable alternative and it is not palatable
An Alfred E. Neuman could have beat Trump in 2020, but the Republicans have coalesced gotten their act together, with voter suppression and negation, and will take a Heraclean effort to keep Trump out of the Whitehouse again, especially when there are hundreds of thousands of angry and ignorant Muslims, students and young black males screaming Fuck Biden., because they have swallowed HAMAS propaganda, hook, line and sinker.
William Farrar: WRT the last paragraph of your comment. I am more interested in the one ignorant commenter who tries to characterize anyone he doesn't agree with on the Palestinian/Biden support issue as a dupe of Hamas. What a joke! Desperate Hamas as a wide distributor of propaganda! The Israelis have all the propaganda channels of the world, gaping wide open to swallow the latest Israeli nonsense but you have to focus on a desperately poor, last gasp defender against one of the largest armies in the world, in the process of being wiped out physically. Why does it never occur to one-sided people like you that people can come up with their own disgust with genocide without having to rely on anyone's urging or propaganda. And watching Biden send endless weapons to Israel for its genocide? Of course yelling Fuck Biden is a natural course. No one needs outside help in making that connection. You reveal your own limited intelligence and understanding in trying to paint protesters with that absurd brush.
FYI, Zionists call me an antisemite. I just don't see events through myopic and filtered lenses.
I know the wrong that Israel has done, but the wrong done by HAMAS is inexusable, they slaughtered innocent children, up front and personal and sent video's of the deed back go Gaza,
The raped women and then shot them or burned them alive.
And HAMAS has very effectively used images and video's to spread their propaganda,103 nations belong to the UN, and 57 of them are Muslim. Muslims first loyalty is to the Ummah, the world wide community of Muslims, not to the state in which they have citizenship,not to the country that provides them succor and success but to the Ummah.
Not even Jews have that kind of loyalty, there are atheistic Jews, but there are no atheistic Muslims, there are secular Jews, but no Secular Muslims, if they were they would be murtadd, apostates.
There are 57 Muslim ethnostates, and one Jewish ethnostate,which the Muslims, by religion, hate. yes religiously hate. It goes back to Muhammad ordering the beheading of 600 members of the Jewish Quaryza tribe in Medina. The sacred text of the hadithof al Bukhari, Book 56, Hadith 139, verses 1295/1296 which calls for the obliteration of jews before the arrival of the messiah (mehdi), and also the HAMAS Covenant, especially the preamble and article 7.
And guliible students in the west, filled with propaganda by their wealthy Arab peers, sent to America by their oil rich parents, to learn that which they can't learn in their own universities, and fellowships and professorial chairs paid for by rich Arab benefactors, have taken up the cudgel.
Tools and fools bleed for the Arabs but are indifferent to the slaughter and genocide going on in Ukraine, perhaps infected by Marxist clap trap. spoon fed you as pablum.
And yes the students are doing the work of HAMAS and HAMAS is a terrorist organization that slaughtered innocent women and children, raping the women, and that is who you champion and claim the moral high ground. Hypocrite.
Hamas and its co-conspirators in the Muslim world had been vilifying Jews for decades, starting with their founding charter, which is full of antisemitic bile. They constructed an entire architecture of antisemitism that spanned the world and spanned spheres from academia to religion, politics and culture. There were many people who should have been pushing for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but instead had adopted an ideology of hate that did not see Jews as worthy of a piece of land or even as equal contestants in a historical struggle. It saw them as subhuman.
And sadly, campus idiots have joined them.
I discuss facts, groups, identities, but when the response is first person singular and accusative, they have just declared war and I do not shy away from battle.
William Farrar: I cannot follow all of your claims and historical representations, depending as they do on auxiliary writings and pronouncements and trends in Muslim thought, but I looked up early events at Bukhari and I did go to the Wikipedia article on the 1988 and 2017 Hamas charters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Hamas_charter) and I tried to absorb what I could. It says there that the 1988 Charter was very anti-Jewish but in 2017 the revised version acknowledged that the gripe of Hamas was with Zionists not Jews and that it was based on the very real occupation of Palestine, not a religious hatred.
I get the impression that you are inclined to ignore the 2017 version but go back to 1988 in order to preferentially rain down opprobrium on the heads of Hamas for what they claimed back then.
I also note that as a leit motif in the article, there is the constant refrain along the lines of: "Netanyahu rejected everything that Hamas argued and all of their offers" . It seems that Netanyahu has been a one man Grim Reaper forever, insuring death, occupation and hatred through it all.
I happen to be one who condemns the Israelis for their occupation and their inhuman treatment of Palestinians. In that light, I accept excuses for the Palestinians to struggle for their own freedom or even domination, should it come to that, in the light of their desperation and their enforced military inadequacy. I would not criticize Palestinians, or Hamas as you insist on saying, for their outsized aspirations or their hopes for the future. To my mind, I am more impressed by international law which lays only one obligation on Israel, namely to withdraw and cease their occupation. I am not impressed by Israel's bleating about self-defense. That is a canard, a card played by Netanyahu and his lying American associates who don't care if every Palestinian is expelled or killed. They had no right to defend themselves against the Palestinians and their pathetic garage made rockets. The only right the Israelis had was to cease their occupation. After that, they could talk about their bogus defense against a powerless group.
You talk about Hamas calling Jews subhuman. Maybe that is true. It is completely understandable given the truncated lives being forced on Palestinians by Jews over fifty years. Oppression generates hatred and hatred expresses itself in rabid speech. But the Jews are now widely and publicly calling Palestinians subhuman. Have the Palestinians subjected the Israelis to a comparable occupation? Of course not! So where is the justification in this case? Why would the Israelis feel such hatred as to resort to such rabid speech? Is it just because the Palestinians in merely existing have been a thorn in their side? No, a thousand times no! Israeli hatred of a subjugated people cannot be invoked that way. October 7 provided the pretense. Had I (or you I daresay) been subjected to such oppression for fifty years, we both would have eagerly joined the assailants on October 7. Fortunately for us, we have lived privileged lives and not been called to such dreadful decisions.
Allow me to explain Paul. HAMAS realized, got feedback, that the 1988 Covenant was bad PR, so they amended it, however they did not repudiate the covenant and therein lies the difference, They have not repudiate the goal of genocide of the Jews. And in fact Yahya Sinwar said as much, when he said "we are a nation of martyr's and will come back again and again.
He also said: ' He'll keep some of the hostages forever,” Jacob Nagel said. “This will be his insurance policy that no one will kill him."
As regards the occupation as you call it.
Facts.
Same facts
Theodore Herzl toured Europe after WWI, inducing Jews to move to Jerusalem. There was no state of Palestine, it was a possession of Turkey. The Turks had supplanted the Arabs, who had supplanted the Greco Roman Empire of Constantinople.
There were Jews that had been living in that gawd forsaken desertfor thousands of years, and had suffered pogroms by Arabs.
These Zionists bought the land from the Arabs, they formed Kiggutz's and made the desert bloom, they also cleaned up Jerusalem.
Mark Twain visited Jerusalem and came away saying that it was a garbage dump, and the Jews cleaned it up.
There is something else, more visceral, not only did the Jews clean up Jerusalem and made the desert bloom and that made the Arabs look bad but Jerusalem and indeed the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea is sacred Muslim land, especially Jerusalem, the home of the Haram al Sharif (Dome of the Rock) and al Aqda Mosque.
The Dome of the Rock is especially sacred, because the rock contains the imprint of a prehistoric beast which the Muslims claim was the chimera beast that Mo rode on in his midnite ride.
The midnite ride of Muhammad. It is in the Quran, if you actually read it, A chimera of a beast appeared, body of a horse, face of a human, wings of an eagle and it carried Muhammad. at Mach 1 speeds, 770 miles, from Mecca to Jerusalem, stepped on the rock and carried him into the 7 levels of heaven, where he met the prophets,including Jesus, and Abraham, on his way up to allah (al Lihah, the moon god the Arabs worshiped before Muhammad)
Mo asked al Lihah, how he should be worshiped, he was told pray 500 times a day, on his way down Abraham intercepted him asked him what happened, he told Mo to go back and negotate, he did, Al Lihah dropped it to 50 times a day, and again Abe told him to go back and negotiate again. He did and got a final answer 5 times a day.
The point is that the Jews are defiling Islamic sacred space, and that cannot stand. Kuffir (kufr) or non believers cannot even enter Mecca, which contains the Qabba which contains pieces of a meteorite that Muslims believe is part of their god, the moon can you imagine what it is like for the hated Jew to defile sacred Muslim land.
As regards the "occupation", for the 100th time. The Arabs attacked the Jews on Nov 1948, in an attempt at ethnic cleansing (genocide), they failed, and the Jews did what anyone would do, claimed land taken from their enemy (Egypt and Jordan, to strengthen and secure their borders and this the Arabs call the nagba, well they brought it on themselves,
One thing the Arabs are good at and that is not taking personal responsibility,blame it on the Jews .
The failed in 2948, tried again and again and again, 1956,1967, 1973, 2006 and each time they lost and each time they lost more land. They haven't learned, they can't learn, because it is a religions conviction, obligation and war.
Doing the same thing again and again expecting different results each time, is the definition of insanity. Ergo the Arabs are insane with religious fervor.
And idiots in the west, who are easily swayed and influenced by wails and whines are enablers.
Now let me see the campus idiots and the likes of you, pitch tents, protest, block traffic and whine about the real genocide going on in Urkraine. Waiting.....
William: You have a very interesting response. I intend to look up your references if I can. I read the Koran in English a long time ago and I assume some of your documents are online. I did some research a few years ago to prove for my own edification that Muslims are directed to kill atheists. But in spite of that I believe that Muslims constitute a panoply of views on all subjects, the same as other religions. I was on a boatful of Turkish Muslims on the Black Sea fifty years ago and naively, in my then beginning Turkish, told them I was an atheist. I lived to tell the tale (obviously).
You accuse Hamas of atrocities. I don't know if you are referring to October 7, 2023 or just generally. You say Hamas used rape and killing. Is it so much better to multiply the victims by thousands and blow off limbs and kill and crush under buildings and shoot with tanks while killing whole families? We don't like to compare simple numbers but after a while, the disproportion becomes overwhelming. Six million Jews make a Holocaust while one shooting is just a murder. A hundred thousand Palestinians (and obvious intention to make that into two million) are a genocide, while October 7 was a revenge.
Still, you attempted to divert the conversation to one that was off-topic. I am not defending anything about Muslims or Hamas. I was merely trying to penetrate your fog of anti-Muslim, anti-Hamas hatred to point out that the protesters against genocide are perfectly capable of coming up with their ideas completely on their own, without any reference to what they hear from any Muslim or Hamas source. It is painfully easy, when hearing about the genocide of a whole people to object violently and identify with the people who are being slaughtered. It is then possible to independently object strongly to Biden who insists on supplying the weapons of genocide. Biden is an accomplice to murder most foul. Why would people want to vote for his bloodied hands? Absolutely no reference to propaganda, the way you propose, is necessary and you do a grievous disservice to the protesters by trying to smear them with a bogus gullibility. Despite your pretensions, there is nothing idiotic about protesters. Come down off your high horse and hobnob with us soft hearted mortals.
Here is one for you Paul. How about HAMAS has it's own STAZI
WEEKS BEFORE THE OCTOBER 7, 2023 terrorist attack that resulted in more than 1,000 dead Israelis and some 250 people taken hostage, Hamas’s secret police, the General Security Service, gave a slideshow briefing to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and one of the masterminds of the attack. The slide deck, a presentation summarizing the recent activities of the GSS, was discovered in Gaza by the Israeli military, which passed a copy of it on to the New York Times. The upshot is that the GSS operates a lot like the Stasi, the old East German secret police, with a network of informers spying on everybody and a well-developed system of intimidation to keep people in line and quash dissent.
Secret HAMAS files show how it spied on every day Palestinians
I forgot to mention, after 9/11 I made it a project to study Islam. I studied the Quran, three versions, including a copy of the one Thomas Jefferson kept in Monticello. I also studied the hadiths (there are more than one) and the biography of Muhammad by ibn Ishaq, all these are sacred texts to Muslims and are the sayings and doings of Muhammad and used by Mufti's and Ayatollahs to issue fatwa's and for judicial rulings.
And while at it, there is nothing in any of it, that requires women to wear hijabs, much less those gawd awful beekeeping suits, (abayas, chadors, niqabs, burga's etc that your beloved Palestinian women, Arab and Iranian women, Afghan women are forced to wear.
Can you imagine having to wear those outfits in the heat, and worse, women can't travel without being accompanied by a male, even if it is only a young son.
If you read the Quran then you read about Muhammad having the 600 members of the Jewish Quaryza Tribe, beheaded six at a time in the marketplace of medina.
And especially this: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
Then there is para 7 of art 7
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)., This refers to book 56, hadith 139, verses (sahih) 1295/1296. . This is version of the Covenant was amended in 1985, but not repudiated, They can't repudiate the sacred hadith.
The day of Judgement is the Islamic end times when the mehdi (messiah will appear_
I am talking of Oct 7th, and the difference between the IDF and HAMAS is that HAMAS did it up front and personal, joyful in their performance and live streaming back to Gaza, the IDF is fighting HAMAS, just like the Alies fought the NAZI's and bombed Germany and France, killing, blowing the limbs off thousands of innocent women and children, in France and Germany.
Prove that there is genocide, prove it, there is no proof of genocide,just a bunch of excitable propaganda generated by HAMAS and Muslim professors and student.s
If you are so concerned about civilians getting killed, then express some anger with Putin and Russia, and so should the students. Oh they aren't, there is real genocide going on in the Ukraine, and the IDF, until proven is simply defending themselves, and the only way to defend Israel so that it doesn't happen again is to go after HAMAS.
And HAMAS is hiding, like Cowards, behind the civilians and hostages.
Now you deal with that, instead of trying to constantly accuse me and put me on the defense.
Many on campus are long-time Jewish peace activists, of which there are many, who have over the years made common cause with their Palestinian countryfolk.
You have an extremely biased view, as though every person of Jewish heritage and every person of Arab or Palestinian heritage were cut from whole cloth.
There are open minded, secular Jews, even atheist Jews Pat.
Show me one secular or atheist MuslimI don't use the word Arab, because Arab is an entity based on one's native tongue, not religion, not race, it is a language based ethnicity.
Jew is an ethnic identity based on tradition, not religion
Wht is afoot is a 14000 year old war, of Muslim versus Jews, declared by Muhammad and His followers. Care for an eduction, glad to oblige.
Israel has Jewish (atheist and religious), Bedouin, Arab (Muslim and Christian) and Druze citizens and they all fhave the right to vote, Arabs have even sat in the Knesset.
Now show me one Muslim,much less Arab, country that can claim Jews, much less Christians with full citizenship rights. Heck there are no Jews in Libya, Saudi Arabia,, Afghanistan, in 2021 there were only four Jews in Iraq, 8,4000 in Iraq, 2000 in Morocco, none in Afghanistan, 100-500 Sephardic jews in Indonesia.
Compare to 2 million Arab citizens of Israel in a country of 12 million. 1/6th the population of Israel is Arab.
Here is one for you: Negev Bedouins, a Muslim minority which includes about 12% of Israeli Arabs, tend to identify more as Israelis than other Arab citizens of Israel. Many Negev Bedouins serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Pat,you would do well not to personalize our disagreements and discussions, you have a penchant for using the first person singular, in an accusatory tone, when addressing me.
71 years, here. The terrible question we are faced with, if history teaches about Revolution, is what will the serfs rise up for? Trumpism seems to recruit the serfs to rally to a new king, oblivious to the irony of embracing a new servitude. Apparently there are some models for a "whiplash" effect in Eastern Europe. (Poland and?) where the peons managed to reverse their mistake. I am not sure we Americans, pickled in religiosity, will crawl up easily out from under fascism.
Thank you Thom for the excellent examples. But most of all, thanks for the practical, humane, and legal remedies we can pursue. Your Constitutional quotes to back it up make it easy for us to pass this information on.
Our side of the aisle needs to keep things REAL. It would be great if folks on the left leave the flights of fantasy to the cult members and their psychopathic leader. Trump and the MAGAs are all the crazy this country should have to tolerate.
Let the stripping begin. This Supreme Court has some Justices that are trying to bring down this nation one law at a time. The Republicans' insanity is a cancer on this country. We need to be real about that. It's time for facts and fixes. The bribery must end.
REAL has to be the MECHANICS of voting in the face of FUNCTIONAL barriers. This seems to be a guide to different State rules on verification of mail-in or absentee ballots: https://www.lgbtmap.org/democracy-maps/mail_ballot_verification does it include recent State appellate affirmation (I forget which) that a witness is required? Fewer polling places in select districts. Drop boxes in buildings locked out certain hours. No drop box where there was one before. Fewer machines in select polling places, or mysterious breakdowns. Your registration got systematically challenged, and automatically cancelled, for similar name to somebody somewhere, or whatever. I have a fear that the Republicans already have the fix in.
It's always good to hear from people that identify the problem instead of those who like to imagine all the awful things they think we should do for retaliation. None of the solutions are easy. The fix IS the Republican platform. It is the only way they can win, and it's easy to see they no longer have a moral compass especially concerning voting rights and the election processes.
Thank, Thom, for another inciteful and impassioned piece on the take-over of our Constitutional Republic by the uber-rich, certified by the Citizens United obscenity and the bought and paid for Congress and SCOTUS, waiting as they are to crown our next Emperor, mad king or not. However, for me at least the real question worth exploring are the plans our corporate overlords are making for their survival in the climate collapse as the rest of us float away in the flood waters, die from one contagion after another, are abandoned by our healthcare "industry", swept-up in WW III(s), entertained to death, driven from the truth by "fake news", and left to bake in the global heating they profited from in order to escape the consequences of their hubris and greed. My daily observation of C3S "Climate Pulse" indicates that our temps now are around 0.35 degC above this same time last year and on a trajectory that may bring us to 3.0 degC above the 1991-2020 ave. by 2030. We will surely burn-up before them, but they will inherit a scortched earth and be able to watch their offspring suffer and die prematurely. Who wins in the end? Nature bats last.
Thank you for highlighting how dangerous the current paid-off Supreme Court has become to American democracy and freedom. They had limited women’s rights workers’ rights, voting rights, minority rights, and they are threatening to take away LBGTQ rights. They have also decided that the right for everyone to have a gun supersedes public safety, and that Christians can practice their religion in public places and discriminate based on their prejudicial beliefs. Everyone should read Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s books about how the court has ALWAYS decided that business and profits are more important than people.
This needs to be a major issue in the election, but I fear people have no idea what the court has done.
My current fear is that the election will be so filled with chaos and lies that deciding on the results will end up in the Supreme Court. They will give another 5-4 decision for Trump. We have never recovered from the last time that happened.
In 2020 there were 8 swing states, but because of Republican legislatures and 2022 elecions there are only five swing states. Va, NC, and GA are now red states.
The electoral votes of the swing states are
AZ 10
NV 6
MI-15
PA 19
WI 11
If Biden takes AZ, NV, WI, that leaves MI and PA with 34 votes, 235 and 34 are 269, there are 538 electoral votes, and the election goes to the Congress where each state gets one vote,and there are more red states than blue.
I worry about MI, PA and WI because Biden only won by tens of thousands of votes in 2020
But these states have hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who are threatening to sit out the election, vote third party or vote for Trump. They are doing what Americans do, use their votes as blackmail.
They are flipping Biden the finger and saying, out loud as they have done on campus's, Fuck Biden.
Well if they follow through, they are fucking themselves, because Trump has promised to round them up and deport them, and if they didn't like Biden's support for the Jews, they have a rude awakening coming because Trump is Bibi's brother from another mother.,and his son in law, Jared, has already announced plans for building condo's and resorts on the Gaza beach, along with Israeli real estate speculators who are selling lots in Gaza.
People can be, and usually are stupid. And the fools will blame Biden, because they didn't vote for him. Ayman Mohyledin on MSNBC has already thrown down that marker.
It doesn't matter who the idiots blame, when they are being rounded up .
It is as if the Jews blamed Hindenburg for the Holocaust, because he appointed Hitler Chancellor.
hope you are correct, because if you aren't we plan to sell our property, withdraw my wif'es 401(a) and 507(c) funds, and take a boat to Canada, hoping they will take us in as political refugees.
damn! I let it go too long to ask the old family dual Canadian cit. friend to marry me! Bill, you are probably too late! Canada probably is competent to effectuate the equivalent of a wall!
I have some confidence that MiI WI, and PA can still go for Biden because of a lot of good organization and they all have Democratic governors and have been trending toward the Dems. It depends on getting the vote out. North Carolina has gone way over to the crazy side. It also has a Democratic governor, although the gerrymandered legislature has taken away most of his power.
I felt the same as you, until the Muslims threatened not to vote for Biden, and the same with Young Black Males. They have been all over MSNBC , they and even Hispanics, saying that they won't vote for Biden, because they haven't got all they demand and wanted.
You would think that Hispanics would be a sure vote, but they aren't. They are culturally conservative, patriarchic, and despise illegals because they are responsible, so they feel, for the discrimination because Anglo's can't tell the difference between a legal and illegal.
We are now in an era where the inferior Catholic High Court has decided that they are in charge because so many millionaires and billionaires support them financially. Five of the six Catholic justices need to be removed for lying to the Senate to get their jobs and for taking bribes and and that recusing themselves on cases they should and must recuse themselves on. In other words this so-called Supreme Court is actually a total shit show.
And as a social control vehicle it far surpasses any sectarian ideology.
Because once you convince people fear that which they cannot see, but which they have been told to believe exerts power over everything,including you after death, then you have them by the reproductive organs.
Ignatius Loyala, founder of the Jesuits, said "Give me a boy by the age of 8, and I own him the rest of his life.
Few are those that break with the traditions and beliefs in which they are raised. Rather they defend them to their death, as they are the foundation of their identity.
Identities are multi faceted male, female, neither, both, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and they are broken into subsets, and then there is race, physical characteristics,, vocation, avocation. .
The last is interesting, Ask a Swiss what they do, and they will reply, well I'm a skier, ask an American and they will recite their occupation.
Ask me, and my answer is "whatever I feel like, at the moment".
I don't believe in any god or gods, but don't identify as an atheist, others may need to peg me as such, but atheist is not part of my identity.
I don't identify as a socialist, or capitalist. I find fault with both, and agreement in [art. with both.
I pledged an oath, which I have not revoked, to the Constitution of the United States, so that is part of my identity.
Very good and valid points. My identity appears to be very much like yours so I appreciate what you are saying even thought I sometimes forget the points you made.
I guess as a former catholic I abhor evangelicals who claim to be christian but are instead demented dominionists. I also have problem with the catholic inferior high court formerly the supreme court. I will not have them push an american inquisition on this country. I am like Ingersoll, Blanchard ans Spinoza that way.
"This process of “court-stripping” is based in Article 3, Section 2 of the US Constitution, which says:
“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
If we survive the next 6 months of GOP mayhem, and if we the actual people of the US retain the White House, Senate, AND regain control of the House - our very first order of business is taking down and remaking the now terminally corrupt majority of SCAMUS (Sociopathic Conservative Advocate Magistrates of the United States).
This is job number 1 atop the stack of "job number 1's"...
Foreign and domestic money in our politics is killing us - and I mean all of us - not just "lefties", but everyone, especially the ignorantly fearful who believe they will be rewarded for their obedience to awful, despite their own best interests. There will be no cookies given to low-level dipshit loyalists on the right. None.
Thom is on target when he underscores the necessity of an all-out political blitz if America is to restore its faith in democracy and trust in justice. That is because we need to overcome the widely-held American stereotype that the wealthy are exceptional people who deserve to be in power.
As a kid on the playground at recess I once heard it said in an argument: "Oh yeah? Well if you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" That was in 1957. Today, I have heard middle-aged MAGAs assert similar views in interviews at Trump rallies: "American needs a businessman like Trump, because they know how to fix the country." They also boast that they themselves are proud capitalists unlike the "radical liberal socialist (aka communist) Democrats." Then they get into their F150s and drive to work the next morning in order to get their paychecks clueless that they are proletariat, and unlikely to ever live off their wealth like a real capitalist.
It is difficult to ignore that Americans culturally equate wealth with power and privilege. The wealthy deserve to be in charge. Trump deserves to be president because he is a billionaire. So does RFK jr. because his family is rich. The rich ARE above the law, and it is weaponization of government to dare to hold them accountable for their crimes. It is the communist liberals who are ruining the country handing out privileges to the lazy homeless, and both ethic and sexual minorities at the expense of the patriotic capitalists. Unless, as Thom suggests, we start rubbing their noses in reality of our capitalist corruption, we will continue on a reactionary path that will replace democracy with fascism.
I would have all judges take a test to see if Covid disabled their minds making them unable to do the job. Since they are the best in the world, anyone not getting 95% would be put on disability and retired.
No minds affected by COVID or anything else Clayton, SCOTUS is ideologically on track and consistent. Like Mike Johnson, their guide is a higher power than the constitution, for Mike Johnson it is the sock puppet he calls the Bible, for 6 justices it is the sock puppet they call the Catholic church and it's teachings., bu the two meld into one when it comes to rule of the male, the patriarchy.
Sweep the election. 70 million voters failed to vote in 2920. Trend Democratic. FT6 uses data mining to identify millions of unregistered folks who trend heavily Democratic.
You mention culling the rolls. Republicans are still at it. But we have the capacity to find them and get them registered as Democrats. Republicans did us a favor by enacting the six week abortion ban, putting abortion (and marijuana) on the ballot. 80% of all women oppose. 30 electoral votes. Trump won the state by 3.2% in 2020. If we flip 2% we win. IMHO there may be enough disgruntled Republicans to do it, but just in case, most of the unregistered, and the more than 3 million "no party" are women, trending at 80%.
They turned us from a red to a purple state verging blue. A similar phenomenon is happening in North Carolina, because the Republican governor candidate is an antisemite who says women should not vote. 16 electoral votes. Trump won North Carolina by 1.34% in 2020. In one day at the FT6 Summit, 11,000 new North Carolina Democrats were registered.
Millions of unregistered folks trend heavily Democratic. Register Democrats, save the world.
This needs to be a big issue in the election. Clinton didn't make it so and look what happened. Write to your friends, and also to all of the news media you use. Tell them that this court has lost all of its legitimacy and is corrupt and needs to be held accountable.
Of course, they worship the same god, and are probably supported by the same money, much of it originating in Russia, but of course, no one can trace it because the courts would stop that.
I share your concerns. But I view a “vote” for fascism as an oxymoron. There’s the rub, eh? Too many Americans, indeed too many people, are morons. And yes, that is the elitist view of a summa cum laude grad of UCLA in history and a grad of Harvard Law with an illustrious legal career behind me. But despite that, I am prepared to risk a revolt of the people. Historically, they have been led by middle class people. That doesn’t mean they have all gone well, or without huge reverses. But sometimes just a culling of the herd is a good thing.
Unfortunately, those I would cull will likely survive, because their money will save them. Until, that is, their guardians get greedy and realize how weak their bosses are. Anarchy may then result. But the aftermath could be something worthwhile. I mean, with all its flaws, the France of today is better than that of Louis XVI for the great majority of people in France. Less so in Russia, or Haiti, perhaps. Baby steps. With lots of blood. That seems our human way.
Thank you Tom for putting into concrete acts exactly what I have been saying to all of my Democratic family members. If we win it all this November here is what BLUE must do!
By the way I said I was raised the Catholic but I left the Catholic church when I was 14. Actually wrote a letter of resignation to the Pope.
Blanchard was quite famous Paul Blanchard American freedom and Catholic power. He wrote a whole series of books about the Catholic Church back in the 20s and 30s I believe. We're singer was always from the 1800s and he really had it down his understanding of religion is spot on
KOC. Was invited but never joined. They were used by the catholic bishops of america to funnel 1 mil to Frank Schaeffer to include Catholic anti abortion propaganda in their movie ( I think) how shall we then live.
I'll put Wheless on my reading list. thank you for the suggestion.
I just had a (strangely friendly?)(I was paying mine off) conversation with a customer service rep. of major credit card company. Anecdote from border Texas was, there's a massive repo/default wave coming on these $50,000+ trucks and their towed multi-10-thousand $$ toys. People are figuring out that they can make maybe a few of the usurious payments, and then come and get them. Perfectly rational. So eat that, you don't want to even limit late fees!
There’s blood in the water, and the Libertarian Fascists can’t wait for the CryptoLibertarian Fascist takeover that WILL wipe out the middle class.
https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-enabler-states/
https://fee.org/articles/the-sovereign-individual-how-to-survive-and-thrive-during-the-collapse-of-the-welfare-state-by-james-dale-davidson-and-lord-william-rees-mogg/
“The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein.
SCOTUS judges, Alito, Roberts and Thomas are particularly corrupt and actively working to overthrow this democracy. The RNC is a bonafide Organized Crime Syndicate run by the Libertarian Fascists—those “Corporations are People” gang of Koch/Leo Followers who have installed Puppets at every level of government. Alito and Thomas, as you said, flaunt their allegiance to libertarian fascists. They even have their Mob Boss, Trump, as the Face of their movement, signaling alliance with Russian oligarchs.
We are at the 11th hour. The War has already begun. The fascists have spent the last 50 years to become entrenched. If we are to save this democracy, a sweeping and extreme measure has to be taken: Arrest these traitors. Seize their assets and nationalize Big Energy, Big Pharm, Big IT—all of it. Put them all on a prison ship to await trial for sedition, treason, and insurrection.
. . . But, alas, our AG is a little mouse, cowering in the corner. Our President believes in pure democracy. We have no Churchill or Roosevelt.
Nationalization of anything other than the commons doesn't work out too well, neither does laissz faire capitalism as both are either monopolies or lead to monopolization and there is no incentive for innovation or even cost control.
Our system worked fine when government was not controlled by the money powers (corporations and billionaires) and government actually had he power to , and did regulate corporations., and corporations had a limited life, as did telecommunications, that had to be renewed provided that could prove that they operated in the public interest for the common welfare.
No nationalization required,
Just enforcing what we have, and making clear that this “crypto” idea is seriously that — crypto and weird and NOT functional for a society. An individual with a computer can play fast and loose with anyone’s “financial portfolio” if there are no rules about what’s allowed and what’s not.
The description of the idea in the link up there sounds like a thirteen-year-old’s idea of the perfect world in which the kid doesn’t have to answer to Mom or Dad.
Stopping and thinking for a SECOND about how such a world would impact 8 billion people, most of whom are NOT computer nerds … Egad. Ludicrous.
Dawna, Garland is no mouse, he is complicit, a right winger.
Indecent levels of riches flowing to the rich while school kids are denied lunches sound too Dickensian for reality. What would a Tesla cost if Elon weren't squeezing his board of directors for $56 BLLION? How great would the quality be if he weren't siphoning off funds to shore up X? How are plutocrats in major companies keeping us all from having a more affordable, democratic society?
90% of MAGATS, who only comprise about a third of the general population, are net losers when Republicans govern. Vote for the wolves in sheep's clothing to the detriment of their economic and physical well being. In 2020 70 million lumpen did not vote. They trend Democratic.
Those MAGA are visceral. "Trump hates Dogs" works.
Here's proof. https://rvat.org/
13 million unregistered folk trend Democrat. Register Democrats -- save the world.
https://www.fieldteam6.org/all-volunteer-ops
I will be working to end Trumpocracy!
Coincidence: 10 pm Pacific time, I have just watched a segment of "Oliver" on TCM. A favorite tale that touched me, a precocious reader; one of only 3 books I read twice as a kid. I am this minute wondering if this is the key to my unlikely morphing to liberal out of the bosom of a thoroughly Bircher upbringing! Maybe "Oliver Twist" stewed in my subconscious to some kind of realization: it has always been a mystery, but when you said "Dickensian," some kind of "trigger." Huh. The power of (soon to be forbidden?) books.
This , being owned by the wealthiest and most corrupt people in government in all areas , is the biggest problem we face . It controls everything . Our quality of life on every level .
From a corrupt dysfunctional Congress who will not do their jobs, to the Supreme Court who has completely reversed and perverted what their job is .
As Thom has said . Money is in charge . It determines which laws get passed ( passed means they benefit the Far Right wealthiest people. )
The Supreme Court has paid little to no attention to the Constitution of the United States for some time now. .
They get their Marching orders from their benefactors , the Heritage Group and the Federalist Society.
And they have been consistently on the side of wealth and power.
This affects every area of our diminished lives while they are calling the shots.
I saw an article this morning about high prices and who’s responsible?
The choices were between the extreme inequity in society or was it just inflation following the pandemic . This was a study done by a bank out west .
What’s interesting is that the determination of this particular study was it was not really inequity.
Many others have disagreed. But the whole of our economy is ruled by a corrupt system of government attached to the power of money .
The laws that can curtail the bought and paid for bribery of the Supreme Court must be passed.
They won’t be passed by Republicans in any branch .
The Democrats and the people at the bottom of the money is power ladder must do everything we can to elect Democrats this year and every year if we g hope to turn this around .
We are not entirely lost yet — but people who don’t know or won’t SEE what has been done in the past three years will THINK we have lost it, if we keep saying we lost it.
We still have not totally lost our democracy!!!! The very people DJT and the Oligarch Right wwant to install for 2025 are the way they will FINALLY put their agenda across. But they are NOT there yet!!!
The very people Donny complains about stopping him in 2020 are the reason it is not lost, and they are the people the 2025 Republicans have pledged to replace.
This election puts it all on the line!!!
That is why, whether we love him or don’t, we should vote for Biden, and as many Democrats and Progressives who caucus with Democrats, as we possibly can!! The Senate AND the House AND the President.
Then get hard to work passing the legislation that protects democracy of, by, and for THE PEOPLE.
I absolutely agree but there is a need for movement now .
And we will receive no help from the Rt wing media .
ALL th media that used to be all we had is being sidelined by new media — social networks, online commentary, online news sources … Those of us who use our computers and tablets and phones A LOT have many sources where we look for information, not the least of which are FORUMS like this one, where we chat and comment on threads and not only learn from each other, but inform each other, and refine our thinking together.
“The Media” is not what it was a mere few years ago. Even though, realistically, a ton of people still do get their news from mainstream sources, which are more and more controlled by big bucks.
Maybe it’s time to stop picking on “the media,” stop convincing everyone that there’s nothing out there we trust {because destroying all TRUST within a society is a sure way to bring it down}, and start reinforcing what we do believe in and trust, and put our own minds toward fixing the problem that the Current Republican Fascist Party is foisting on our country.
For one thing, keep talking to each other and figuring out what’s up.
Reaching out about who might be a really responsive person to vote on in our area.
Reaching out to voters we know in our area and encouraging them to cast a well-informed ballot.
Making a difference …
That may be but I cannot “trust” the mainstream media. I believe in reality .
And where do you learn what is real?
{Listen, I don’t advocate just “trusting” everything that’s put out. You need to know your sources; you need to listen to and read more than one; you need to hear thoughts and commentary and try to gather context …. But there’s info out there, and “mainstream media” is not even just one thing…it is not a monolith… . So you can trash it, if you want, but where are you actually GETTING your info? From your favorite BIASED sources? From some unbiased sources? {Please tell me where I can find those, ‘cause I’d love one …}
Where?
I cannot give you the answer that you want . Look up Sinclair media on various sites and see what you think.
Pat: Truckers and people like salespersons even commuters, get their ideas, I won't call it news as much or all of it is slanted and propaganda over the radio.
The listen to it while jogging and on an exercise machine with ear buds.
The younger folk, don't even bother with TV anymore, they are plugged in via cell phone, and computers are on the way out.
Who watches TV is old farts like moi, and younger old farts like thee, and we watch either MSNBC or Fox. I don't even watch much of MSNBC anymore. I have a DVR, I record shows, will browse a talk show, skip commericials, bore easily. MSNBC regardless of show,has the same daily three topics, with the same "analysts" and guests espousing their opinion on the same three subjects.
For instance they use to feature Col Jacobs, retired, a CMH winner, as a military expert. Hardly, he has no more insight than I do, more than a civilian, but we have both been long retired, and have no idea what is going on in the Pentagon today.
I prefer to watch a movie or series that I have recorded.
Yet another essential biblical text these “Christian” judges ignore is 1Timothy 6:10–that the love of money is the root of all evil. Perversely turning that on its head, our benighted SCOTUS declares again and again that the love of money is the only real virtue, trumping all others. Mr. Hartmann’s proposed solution is a lovely fantasy. The plutocrats have seduced not just the cultists of tfg, FKA the Republican Party, but far too many Democratic legislators as well. Because at root, they are all greedy, all part of the system, all buyable at the right price, which is often shockingly low.
So even if, against the mounting evidence to the contrary, the Democrats win it all in November, don’t expect them to bite the morbidly rich hands that feed them. After 76 years as a citizen of this country, I now believe our system is irretrievably flawed and that any meaningful change will only come in the harshest, most cataclysmic and inevitably violent way.
I so wish to be proven wrong. But I have very little hope I will be.
Well, if that’s YOUR attitude, you won’t fix things.
I actually SEE laws and legislators opposing the rule of the dollar — even though they need dollars to “run” for office. But we are seeing MASSIVE appeals for SMALL donors to step up and fill that bill, not just mega-rich people donating mega-millions.
It’s frustrating to get so many requests for a few bucks to help candidates in lots of states, but THAT is the POINT — getting a few dollars from millions of us, who will also turn around an vote — THAT is how we break the stranglehold of the ultra-monied. So, we should welcome the requests, and give what we can —but especially VOTE the good guys in!
But we have to be willing to do it. And we need a PLAN. And we need to VOTE for legislators who have been funded by our LITTLE dollars, not by mega-donors.
And we need to believe it’s possible.
Pat I live in morbid fear that Trump will be elected, and that will be the end of not only Democracy, but the beginning of the decline of America. our freedoms, and our quality of life. Bitch as it is, the homeless in America have it better off than the millions that risk their lives to migrate to Europe and America, many even have cell phones, though not a pot to piss in.
That said I can well understand the reluctance of principled people to dig in their pockets and bank accounts, to elect people who say one thing and then do the opposite, and it is bipartisan.
Reagan held out as a champion of unions, and especially PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controlers), promised he would not appoint anyone that belonged to the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, his first acts were to fire PATCO and appoint TC and CFR members to his cabinet, like Caspar Weinberge.
Clinton held forth as a champion of Unions, blacks, gays, free speech and what did he do, NAFTA, GATT, Telecommunications act of 1996, repealed Glass Steagall, Defense of Marriage Act, Omnibus Crime bill (school to prison pipeline)
Politicians are recipients of donor cash and support and I don't mean Jack and Jill donors) and are expected to deliver if they want to be re elected.
The system is corrupted by money, and to that there is no solution.
Having said that I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Biden and vote Blue, because like in 2020 there is no choice. I am not happy with the Democrats, not by a long shot, but
there is only one viable alternative and it is not palatable
An Alfred E. Neuman could have beat Trump in 2020, but the Republicans have coalesced gotten their act together, with voter suppression and negation, and will take a Heraclean effort to keep Trump out of the Whitehouse again, especially when there are hundreds of thousands of angry and ignorant Muslims, students and young black males screaming Fuck Biden., because they have swallowed HAMAS propaganda, hook, line and sinker.
William Farrar: WRT the last paragraph of your comment. I am more interested in the one ignorant commenter who tries to characterize anyone he doesn't agree with on the Palestinian/Biden support issue as a dupe of Hamas. What a joke! Desperate Hamas as a wide distributor of propaganda! The Israelis have all the propaganda channels of the world, gaping wide open to swallow the latest Israeli nonsense but you have to focus on a desperately poor, last gasp defender against one of the largest armies in the world, in the process of being wiped out physically. Why does it never occur to one-sided people like you that people can come up with their own disgust with genocide without having to rely on anyone's urging or propaganda. And watching Biden send endless weapons to Israel for its genocide? Of course yelling Fuck Biden is a natural course. No one needs outside help in making that connection. You reveal your own limited intelligence and understanding in trying to paint protesters with that absurd brush.
FYI, Zionists call me an antisemite. I just don't see events through myopic and filtered lenses.
I know the wrong that Israel has done, but the wrong done by HAMAS is inexusable, they slaughtered innocent children, up front and personal and sent video's of the deed back go Gaza,
The raped women and then shot them or burned them alive.
And HAMAS has very effectively used images and video's to spread their propaganda,103 nations belong to the UN, and 57 of them are Muslim. Muslims first loyalty is to the Ummah, the world wide community of Muslims, not to the state in which they have citizenship,not to the country that provides them succor and success but to the Ummah.
Not even Jews have that kind of loyalty, there are atheistic Jews, but there are no atheistic Muslims, there are secular Jews, but no Secular Muslims, if they were they would be murtadd, apostates.
There are 57 Muslim ethnostates, and one Jewish ethnostate,which the Muslims, by religion, hate. yes religiously hate. It goes back to Muhammad ordering the beheading of 600 members of the Jewish Quaryza tribe in Medina. The sacred text of the hadithof al Bukhari, Book 56, Hadith 139, verses 1295/1296 which calls for the obliteration of jews before the arrival of the messiah (mehdi), and also the HAMAS Covenant, especially the preamble and article 7.
And guliible students in the west, filled with propaganda by their wealthy Arab peers, sent to America by their oil rich parents, to learn that which they can't learn in their own universities, and fellowships and professorial chairs paid for by rich Arab benefactors, have taken up the cudgel.
Tools and fools bleed for the Arabs but are indifferent to the slaughter and genocide going on in Ukraine, perhaps infected by Marxist clap trap. spoon fed you as pablum.
And yes the students are doing the work of HAMAS and HAMAS is a terrorist organization that slaughtered innocent women and children, raping the women, and that is who you champion and claim the moral high ground. Hypocrite.
Hamas and its co-conspirators in the Muslim world had been vilifying Jews for decades, starting with their founding charter, which is full of antisemitic bile. They constructed an entire architecture of antisemitism that spanned the world and spanned spheres from academia to religion, politics and culture. There were many people who should have been pushing for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but instead had adopted an ideology of hate that did not see Jews as worthy of a piece of land or even as equal contestants in a historical struggle. It saw them as subhuman.
And sadly, campus idiots have joined them.
I discuss facts, groups, identities, but when the response is first person singular and accusative, they have just declared war and I do not shy away from battle.
William Farrar: I cannot follow all of your claims and historical representations, depending as they do on auxiliary writings and pronouncements and trends in Muslim thought, but I looked up early events at Bukhari and I did go to the Wikipedia article on the 1988 and 2017 Hamas charters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Hamas_charter) and I tried to absorb what I could. It says there that the 1988 Charter was very anti-Jewish but in 2017 the revised version acknowledged that the gripe of Hamas was with Zionists not Jews and that it was based on the very real occupation of Palestine, not a religious hatred.
I get the impression that you are inclined to ignore the 2017 version but go back to 1988 in order to preferentially rain down opprobrium on the heads of Hamas for what they claimed back then.
I also note that as a leit motif in the article, there is the constant refrain along the lines of: "Netanyahu rejected everything that Hamas argued and all of their offers" . It seems that Netanyahu has been a one man Grim Reaper forever, insuring death, occupation and hatred through it all.
I happen to be one who condemns the Israelis for their occupation and their inhuman treatment of Palestinians. In that light, I accept excuses for the Palestinians to struggle for their own freedom or even domination, should it come to that, in the light of their desperation and their enforced military inadequacy. I would not criticize Palestinians, or Hamas as you insist on saying, for their outsized aspirations or their hopes for the future. To my mind, I am more impressed by international law which lays only one obligation on Israel, namely to withdraw and cease their occupation. I am not impressed by Israel's bleating about self-defense. That is a canard, a card played by Netanyahu and his lying American associates who don't care if every Palestinian is expelled or killed. They had no right to defend themselves against the Palestinians and their pathetic garage made rockets. The only right the Israelis had was to cease their occupation. After that, they could talk about their bogus defense against a powerless group.
You talk about Hamas calling Jews subhuman. Maybe that is true. It is completely understandable given the truncated lives being forced on Palestinians by Jews over fifty years. Oppression generates hatred and hatred expresses itself in rabid speech. But the Jews are now widely and publicly calling Palestinians subhuman. Have the Palestinians subjected the Israelis to a comparable occupation? Of course not! So where is the justification in this case? Why would the Israelis feel such hatred as to resort to such rabid speech? Is it just because the Palestinians in merely existing have been a thorn in their side? No, a thousand times no! Israeli hatred of a subjugated people cannot be invoked that way. October 7 provided the pretense. Had I (or you I daresay) been subjected to such oppression for fifty years, we both would have eagerly joined the assailants on October 7. Fortunately for us, we have lived privileged lives and not been called to such dreadful decisions.
Allow me to explain Paul. HAMAS realized, got feedback, that the 1988 Covenant was bad PR, so they amended it, however they did not repudiate the covenant and therein lies the difference, They have not repudiate the goal of genocide of the Jews. And in fact Yahya Sinwar said as much, when he said "we are a nation of martyr's and will come back again and again.
He also said: ' He'll keep some of the hostages forever,” Jacob Nagel said. “This will be his insurance policy that no one will kill him."
As regards the occupation as you call it.
Facts.
Same facts
Theodore Herzl toured Europe after WWI, inducing Jews to move to Jerusalem. There was no state of Palestine, it was a possession of Turkey. The Turks had supplanted the Arabs, who had supplanted the Greco Roman Empire of Constantinople.
There were Jews that had been living in that gawd forsaken desertfor thousands of years, and had suffered pogroms by Arabs.
These Zionists bought the land from the Arabs, they formed Kiggutz's and made the desert bloom, they also cleaned up Jerusalem.
Mark Twain visited Jerusalem and came away saying that it was a garbage dump, and the Jews cleaned it up.
There is something else, more visceral, not only did the Jews clean up Jerusalem and made the desert bloom and that made the Arabs look bad but Jerusalem and indeed the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea is sacred Muslim land, especially Jerusalem, the home of the Haram al Sharif (Dome of the Rock) and al Aqda Mosque.
The Dome of the Rock is especially sacred, because the rock contains the imprint of a prehistoric beast which the Muslims claim was the chimera beast that Mo rode on in his midnite ride.
The midnite ride of Muhammad. It is in the Quran, if you actually read it, A chimera of a beast appeared, body of a horse, face of a human, wings of an eagle and it carried Muhammad. at Mach 1 speeds, 770 miles, from Mecca to Jerusalem, stepped on the rock and carried him into the 7 levels of heaven, where he met the prophets,including Jesus, and Abraham, on his way up to allah (al Lihah, the moon god the Arabs worshiped before Muhammad)
Mo asked al Lihah, how he should be worshiped, he was told pray 500 times a day, on his way down Abraham intercepted him asked him what happened, he told Mo to go back and negotate, he did, Al Lihah dropped it to 50 times a day, and again Abe told him to go back and negotiate again. He did and got a final answer 5 times a day.
The point is that the Jews are defiling Islamic sacred space, and that cannot stand. Kuffir (kufr) or non believers cannot even enter Mecca, which contains the Qabba which contains pieces of a meteorite that Muslims believe is part of their god, the moon can you imagine what it is like for the hated Jew to defile sacred Muslim land.
As regards the "occupation", for the 100th time. The Arabs attacked the Jews on Nov 1948, in an attempt at ethnic cleansing (genocide), they failed, and the Jews did what anyone would do, claimed land taken from their enemy (Egypt and Jordan, to strengthen and secure their borders and this the Arabs call the nagba, well they brought it on themselves,
One thing the Arabs are good at and that is not taking personal responsibility,blame it on the Jews .
The failed in 2948, tried again and again and again, 1956,1967, 1973, 2006 and each time they lost and each time they lost more land. They haven't learned, they can't learn, because it is a religions conviction, obligation and war.
Doing the same thing again and again expecting different results each time, is the definition of insanity. Ergo the Arabs are insane with religious fervor.
And idiots in the west, who are easily swayed and influenced by wails and whines are enablers.
Now let me see the campus idiots and the likes of you, pitch tents, protest, block traffic and whine about the real genocide going on in Urkraine. Waiting.....
William: You have a very interesting response. I intend to look up your references if I can. I read the Koran in English a long time ago and I assume some of your documents are online. I did some research a few years ago to prove for my own edification that Muslims are directed to kill atheists. But in spite of that I believe that Muslims constitute a panoply of views on all subjects, the same as other religions. I was on a boatful of Turkish Muslims on the Black Sea fifty years ago and naively, in my then beginning Turkish, told them I was an atheist. I lived to tell the tale (obviously).
You accuse Hamas of atrocities. I don't know if you are referring to October 7, 2023 or just generally. You say Hamas used rape and killing. Is it so much better to multiply the victims by thousands and blow off limbs and kill and crush under buildings and shoot with tanks while killing whole families? We don't like to compare simple numbers but after a while, the disproportion becomes overwhelming. Six million Jews make a Holocaust while one shooting is just a murder. A hundred thousand Palestinians (and obvious intention to make that into two million) are a genocide, while October 7 was a revenge.
Still, you attempted to divert the conversation to one that was off-topic. I am not defending anything about Muslims or Hamas. I was merely trying to penetrate your fog of anti-Muslim, anti-Hamas hatred to point out that the protesters against genocide are perfectly capable of coming up with their ideas completely on their own, without any reference to what they hear from any Muslim or Hamas source. It is painfully easy, when hearing about the genocide of a whole people to object violently and identify with the people who are being slaughtered. It is then possible to independently object strongly to Biden who insists on supplying the weapons of genocide. Biden is an accomplice to murder most foul. Why would people want to vote for his bloodied hands? Absolutely no reference to propaganda, the way you propose, is necessary and you do a grievous disservice to the protesters by trying to smear them with a bogus gullibility. Despite your pretensions, there is nothing idiotic about protesters. Come down off your high horse and hobnob with us soft hearted mortals.
Here is one for you Paul. How about HAMAS has it's own STAZI
WEEKS BEFORE THE OCTOBER 7, 2023 terrorist attack that resulted in more than 1,000 dead Israelis and some 250 people taken hostage, Hamas’s secret police, the General Security Service, gave a slideshow briefing to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and one of the masterminds of the attack. The slide deck, a presentation summarizing the recent activities of the GSS, was discovered in Gaza by the Israeli military, which passed a copy of it on to the New York Times. The upshot is that the GSS operates a lot like the Stasi, the old East German secret police, with a network of informers spying on everybody and a well-developed system of intimidation to keep people in line and quash dissent.
Secret HAMAS files show how it spied on every day Palestinians
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/world/europe/secret-hamas-files-palestinians.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I forgot to mention, after 9/11 I made it a project to study Islam. I studied the Quran, three versions, including a copy of the one Thomas Jefferson kept in Monticello. I also studied the hadiths (there are more than one) and the biography of Muhammad by ibn Ishaq, all these are sacred texts to Muslims and are the sayings and doings of Muhammad and used by Mufti's and Ayatollahs to issue fatwa's and for judicial rulings.
And while at it, there is nothing in any of it, that requires women to wear hijabs, much less those gawd awful beekeeping suits, (abayas, chadors, niqabs, burga's etc that your beloved Palestinian women, Arab and Iranian women, Afghan women are forced to wear.
Can you imagine having to wear those outfits in the heat, and worse, women can't travel without being accompanied by a male, even if it is only a young son.
If you read the Quran then you read about Muhammad having the 600 members of the Jewish Quaryza Tribe, beheaded six at a time in the marketplace of medina.
As regards the Jihad against the Jews. read the HAMAS Covenant.https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp in particular the preamble.
And especially this: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
Then there is para 7 of art 7
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)., This refers to book 56, hadith 139, verses (sahih) 1295/1296. . This is version of the Covenant was amended in 1985, but not repudiated, They can't repudiate the sacred hadith.
The day of Judgement is the Islamic end times when the mehdi (messiah will appear_
I am talking of Oct 7th, and the difference between the IDF and HAMAS is that HAMAS did it up front and personal, joyful in their performance and live streaming back to Gaza, the IDF is fighting HAMAS, just like the Alies fought the NAZI's and bombed Germany and France, killing, blowing the limbs off thousands of innocent women and children, in France and Germany.
Prove that there is genocide, prove it, there is no proof of genocide,just a bunch of excitable propaganda generated by HAMAS and Muslim professors and student.s
If you are so concerned about civilians getting killed, then express some anger with Putin and Russia, and so should the students. Oh they aren't, there is real genocide going on in the Ukraine, and the IDF, until proven is simply defending themselves, and the only way to defend Israel so that it doesn't happen again is to go after HAMAS.
And HAMAS is hiding, like Cowards, behind the civilians and hostages.
Now you deal with that, instead of trying to constantly accuse me and put me on the defense.
Your turn now.
Many on campus are long-time Jewish peace activists, of which there are many, who have over the years made common cause with their Palestinian countryfolk.
You have an extremely biased view, as though every person of Jewish heritage and every person of Arab or Palestinian heritage were cut from whole cloth.
Sad.
There are open minded, secular Jews, even atheist Jews Pat.
Show me one secular or atheist MuslimI don't use the word Arab, because Arab is an entity based on one's native tongue, not religion, not race, it is a language based ethnicity.
Jew is an ethnic identity based on tradition, not religion
Wht is afoot is a 14000 year old war, of Muslim versus Jews, declared by Muhammad and His followers. Care for an eduction, glad to oblige.
Israel has Jewish (atheist and religious), Bedouin, Arab (Muslim and Christian) and Druze citizens and they all fhave the right to vote, Arabs have even sat in the Knesset.
Now show me one Muslim,much less Arab, country that can claim Jews, much less Christians with full citizenship rights. Heck there are no Jews in Libya, Saudi Arabia,, Afghanistan, in 2021 there were only four Jews in Iraq, 8,4000 in Iraq, 2000 in Morocco, none in Afghanistan, 100-500 Sephardic jews in Indonesia.
Compare to 2 million Arab citizens of Israel in a country of 12 million. 1/6th the population of Israel is Arab.
Here is one for you: Negev Bedouins, a Muslim minority which includes about 12% of Israeli Arabs, tend to identify more as Israelis than other Arab citizens of Israel. Many Negev Bedouins serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Pat,you would do well not to personalize our disagreements and discussions, you have a penchant for using the first person singular, in an accusatory tone, when addressing me.
That only invites discord.
71 years, here. The terrible question we are faced with, if history teaches about Revolution, is what will the serfs rise up for? Trumpism seems to recruit the serfs to rally to a new king, oblivious to the irony of embracing a new servitude. Apparently there are some models for a "whiplash" effect in Eastern Europe. (Poland and?) where the peons managed to reverse their mistake. I am not sure we Americans, pickled in religiosity, will crawl up easily out from under fascism.
Thank you Thom for the excellent examples. But most of all, thanks for the practical, humane, and legal remedies we can pursue. Your Constitutional quotes to back it up make it easy for us to pass this information on.
Our side of the aisle needs to keep things REAL. It would be great if folks on the left leave the flights of fantasy to the cult members and their psychopathic leader. Trump and the MAGAs are all the crazy this country should have to tolerate.
Let the stripping begin. This Supreme Court has some Justices that are trying to bring down this nation one law at a time. The Republicans' insanity is a cancer on this country. We need to be real about that. It's time for facts and fixes. The bribery must end.
REAL has to be the MECHANICS of voting in the face of FUNCTIONAL barriers. This seems to be a guide to different State rules on verification of mail-in or absentee ballots: https://www.lgbtmap.org/democracy-maps/mail_ballot_verification does it include recent State appellate affirmation (I forget which) that a witness is required? Fewer polling places in select districts. Drop boxes in buildings locked out certain hours. No drop box where there was one before. Fewer machines in select polling places, or mysterious breakdowns. Your registration got systematically challenged, and automatically cancelled, for similar name to somebody somewhere, or whatever. I have a fear that the Republicans already have the fix in.
It's always good to hear from people that identify the problem instead of those who like to imagine all the awful things they think we should do for retaliation. None of the solutions are easy. The fix IS the Republican platform. It is the only way they can win, and it's easy to see they no longer have a moral compass especially concerning voting rights and the election processes.
Thank, Thom, for another inciteful and impassioned piece on the take-over of our Constitutional Republic by the uber-rich, certified by the Citizens United obscenity and the bought and paid for Congress and SCOTUS, waiting as they are to crown our next Emperor, mad king or not. However, for me at least the real question worth exploring are the plans our corporate overlords are making for their survival in the climate collapse as the rest of us float away in the flood waters, die from one contagion after another, are abandoned by our healthcare "industry", swept-up in WW III(s), entertained to death, driven from the truth by "fake news", and left to bake in the global heating they profited from in order to escape the consequences of their hubris and greed. My daily observation of C3S "Climate Pulse" indicates that our temps now are around 0.35 degC above this same time last year and on a trajectory that may bring us to 3.0 degC above the 1991-2020 ave. by 2030. We will surely burn-up before them, but they will inherit a scortched earth and be able to watch their offspring suffer and die prematurely. Who wins in the end? Nature bats last.
Thank you for highlighting how dangerous the current paid-off Supreme Court has become to American democracy and freedom. They had limited women’s rights workers’ rights, voting rights, minority rights, and they are threatening to take away LBGTQ rights. They have also decided that the right for everyone to have a gun supersedes public safety, and that Christians can practice their religion in public places and discriminate based on their prejudicial beliefs. Everyone should read Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s books about how the court has ALWAYS decided that business and profits are more important than people.
This needs to be a major issue in the election, but I fear people have no idea what the court has done.
My current fear is that the election will be so filled with chaos and lies that deciding on the results will end up in the Supreme Court. They will give another 5-4 decision for Trump. We have never recovered from the last time that happened.
Oldandnot inthe way.
It takes 270 electoral votes to win
Blue and blue leaning states have 226
Red and red leaning states 235
In 2020 there were 8 swing states, but because of Republican legislatures and 2022 elecions there are only five swing states. Va, NC, and GA are now red states.
The electoral votes of the swing states are
AZ 10
NV 6
MI-15
PA 19
WI 11
If Biden takes AZ, NV, WI, that leaves MI and PA with 34 votes, 235 and 34 are 269, there are 538 electoral votes, and the election goes to the Congress where each state gets one vote,and there are more red states than blue.
I worry about MI, PA and WI because Biden only won by tens of thousands of votes in 2020
But these states have hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who are threatening to sit out the election, vote third party or vote for Trump. They are doing what Americans do, use their votes as blackmail.
They are flipping Biden the finger and saying, out loud as they have done on campus's, Fuck Biden.
Well if they follow through, they are fucking themselves, because Trump has promised to round them up and deport them, and if they didn't like Biden's support for the Jews, they have a rude awakening coming because Trump is Bibi's brother from another mother.,and his son in law, Jared, has already announced plans for building condo's and resorts on the Gaza beach, along with Israeli real estate speculators who are selling lots in Gaza.
People can be, and usually are stupid. And the fools will blame Biden, because they didn't vote for him. Ayman Mohyledin on MSNBC has already thrown down that marker.
It doesn't matter who the idiots blame, when they are being rounded up .
It is as if the Jews blamed Hindenburg for the Holocaust, because he appointed Hitler Chancellor.
IMHO NC and FL are swing states based on exigent circumstances.
In Pa, O, WI, enough Amish to swing the vote to Biden. They vote 100% Republican -- but I have a plan. 200,000 Amish nationwide.
hope you are correct, because if you aren't we plan to sell our property, withdraw my wif'es 401(a) and 507(c) funds, and take a boat to Canada, hoping they will take us in as political refugees.
damn! I let it go too long to ask the old family dual Canadian cit. friend to marry me! Bill, you are probably too late! Canada probably is competent to effectuate the equivalent of a wall!
There is a problem with Canada though, There is a fascist drift in the provinces, and AFIK it hasn't reached the west (British Columbia)
I have some confidence that MiI WI, and PA can still go for Biden because of a lot of good organization and they all have Democratic governors and have been trending toward the Dems. It depends on getting the vote out. North Carolina has gone way over to the crazy side. It also has a Democratic governor, although the gerrymandered legislature has taken away most of his power.
I felt the same as you, until the Muslims threatened not to vote for Biden, and the same with Young Black Males. They have been all over MSNBC , they and even Hispanics, saying that they won't vote for Biden, because they haven't got all they demand and wanted.
You would think that Hispanics would be a sure vote, but they aren't. They are culturally conservative, patriarchic, and despise illegals because they are responsible, so they feel, for the discrimination because Anglo's can't tell the difference between a legal and illegal.
As proof I submit Mayra Flores, rep of 18th Congressional district, a radical right winger, a naturalized citizen. Google her, meanwhile here is a link https://dccc.org/mayra-flores-doubles-down-on-extremism-welcomes-endorsement-from-maga-mike-johnson/
Haley got12.4% in WI primary.
She got 150,000 votes in pa, -- 16.6%
If half stay home, Biden wins.
In NC she got 23.3%
In FL she got 14.9%
We are now in an era where the inferior Catholic High Court has decided that they are in charge because so many millionaires and billionaires support them financially. Five of the six Catholic justices need to be removed for lying to the Senate to get their jobs and for taking bribes and and that recusing themselves on cases they should and must recuse themselves on. In other words this so-called Supreme Court is actually a total shit show.
The most sacred holy Catholic High Court, formerly known as the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
... most sacred holy Catholic church of the new American inquisition and members of the American Fascist party, formerly the republican party.
Religion Muslim, Christian, Jew Hindu has never been about love, compassion or anything, only about social control and patriarchal hegemony.
Absolutely correct!
Ideologies are either sectarian or secular.
Religion is a sectarian ideology.
And as a social control vehicle it far surpasses any sectarian ideology.
Because once you convince people fear that which they cannot see, but which they have been told to believe exerts power over everything,including you after death, then you have them by the reproductive organs.
Ignatius Loyala, founder of the Jesuits, said "Give me a boy by the age of 8, and I own him the rest of his life.
Few are those that break with the traditions and beliefs in which they are raised. Rather they defend them to their death, as they are the foundation of their identity.
Identities are multi faceted male, female, neither, both, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and they are broken into subsets, and then there is race, physical characteristics,, vocation, avocation. .
The last is interesting, Ask a Swiss what they do, and they will reply, well I'm a skier, ask an American and they will recite their occupation.
Ask me, and my answer is "whatever I feel like, at the moment".
I don't believe in any god or gods, but don't identify as an atheist, others may need to peg me as such, but atheist is not part of my identity.
I don't identify as a socialist, or capitalist. I find fault with both, and agreement in [art. with both.
I pledged an oath, which I have not revoked, to the Constitution of the United States, so that is part of my identity.
Very good and valid points. My identity appears to be very much like yours so I appreciate what you are saying even thought I sometimes forget the points you made.
I guess as a former catholic I abhor evangelicals who claim to be christian but are instead demented dominionists. I also have problem with the catholic inferior high court formerly the supreme court. I will not have them push an american inquisition on this country. I am like Ingersoll, Blanchard ans Spinoza that way.
This right here:
"This process of “court-stripping” is based in Article 3, Section 2 of the US Constitution, which says:
“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
If we survive the next 6 months of GOP mayhem, and if we the actual people of the US retain the White House, Senate, AND regain control of the House - our very first order of business is taking down and remaking the now terminally corrupt majority of SCAMUS (Sociopathic Conservative Advocate Magistrates of the United States).
This is job number 1 atop the stack of "job number 1's"...
Foreign and domestic money in our politics is killing us - and I mean all of us - not just "lefties", but everyone, especially the ignorantly fearful who believe they will be rewarded for their obedience to awful, despite their own best interests. There will be no cookies given to low-level dipshit loyalists on the right. None.
Thom is on target when he underscores the necessity of an all-out political blitz if America is to restore its faith in democracy and trust in justice. That is because we need to overcome the widely-held American stereotype that the wealthy are exceptional people who deserve to be in power.
As a kid on the playground at recess I once heard it said in an argument: "Oh yeah? Well if you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" That was in 1957. Today, I have heard middle-aged MAGAs assert similar views in interviews at Trump rallies: "American needs a businessman like Trump, because they know how to fix the country." They also boast that they themselves are proud capitalists unlike the "radical liberal socialist (aka communist) Democrats." Then they get into their F150s and drive to work the next morning in order to get their paychecks clueless that they are proletariat, and unlikely to ever live off their wealth like a real capitalist.
It is difficult to ignore that Americans culturally equate wealth with power and privilege. The wealthy deserve to be in charge. Trump deserves to be president because he is a billionaire. So does RFK jr. because his family is rich. The rich ARE above the law, and it is weaponization of government to dare to hold them accountable for their crimes. It is the communist liberals who are ruining the country handing out privileges to the lazy homeless, and both ethic and sexual minorities at the expense of the patriotic capitalists. Unless, as Thom suggests, we start rubbing their noses in reality of our capitalist corruption, we will continue on a reactionary path that will replace democracy with fascism.
I would have all judges take a test to see if Covid disabled their minds making them unable to do the job. Since they are the best in the world, anyone not getting 95% would be put on disability and retired.
No minds affected by COVID or anything else Clayton, SCOTUS is ideologically on track and consistent. Like Mike Johnson, their guide is a higher power than the constitution, for Mike Johnson it is the sock puppet he calls the Bible, for 6 justices it is the sock puppet they call the Catholic church and it's teachings., bu the two meld into one when it comes to rule of the male, the patriarchy.
What can we do? Deja vu. 8 pm est 5 p tonight. Robert Hubbell is speaking at a Field Team 6 event called “How you can turn your dollars in Democrats!”
Sign up here: https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/event/622159/
https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/event/622159/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Sweep the election. 70 million voters failed to vote in 2920. Trend Democratic. FT6 uses data mining to identify millions of unregistered folks who trend heavily Democratic.
You mention culling the rolls. Republicans are still at it. But we have the capacity to find them and get them registered as Democrats. Republicans did us a favor by enacting the six week abortion ban, putting abortion (and marijuana) on the ballot. 80% of all women oppose. 30 electoral votes. Trump won the state by 3.2% in 2020. If we flip 2% we win. IMHO there may be enough disgruntled Republicans to do it, but just in case, most of the unregistered, and the more than 3 million "no party" are women, trending at 80%.
They turned us from a red to a purple state verging blue. A similar phenomenon is happening in North Carolina, because the Republican governor candidate is an antisemite who says women should not vote. 16 electoral votes. Trump won North Carolina by 1.34% in 2020. In one day at the FT6 Summit, 11,000 new North Carolina Democrats were registered.
Millions of unregistered folks trend heavily Democratic. Register Democrats, save the world.
https://www.fieldteam6.org/
This needs to be a big issue in the election. Clinton didn't make it so and look what happened. Write to your friends, and also to all of the news media you use. Tell them that this court has lost all of its legitimacy and is corrupt and needs to be held accountable.
Maga Mike just gave a speech supporting biased judge Ailene Cannon!!
Of course, they worship the same god, and are probably supported by the same money, much of it originating in Russia, but of course, no one can trace it because the courts would stop that.
When the manure hits the fan, I'm just going to have to have a bumper sticker or t-shirt that says, " Don't blame me, I voted for democracy! "
I share your concerns. But I view a “vote” for fascism as an oxymoron. There’s the rub, eh? Too many Americans, indeed too many people, are morons. And yes, that is the elitist view of a summa cum laude grad of UCLA in history and a grad of Harvard Law with an illustrious legal career behind me. But despite that, I am prepared to risk a revolt of the people. Historically, they have been led by middle class people. That doesn’t mean they have all gone well, or without huge reverses. But sometimes just a culling of the herd is a good thing.
Unfortunately, those I would cull will likely survive, because their money will save them. Until, that is, their guardians get greedy and realize how weak their bosses are. Anarchy may then result. But the aftermath could be something worthwhile. I mean, with all its flaws, the France of today is better than that of Louis XVI for the great majority of people in France. Less so in Russia, or Haiti, perhaps. Baby steps. With lots of blood. That seems our human way.
Thank you Tom for putting into concrete acts exactly what I have been saying to all of my Democratic family members. If we win it all this November here is what BLUE must do!
Great article and guide. Keep em coming!
By the way I said I was raised the Catholic but I left the Catholic church when I was 14. Actually wrote a letter of resignation to the Pope.
Blanchard was quite famous Paul Blanchard American freedom and Catholic power. He wrote a whole series of books about the Catholic Church back in the 20s and 30s I believe. We're singer was always from the 1800s and he really had it down his understanding of religion is spot on
KOC. Was invited but never joined. They were used by the catholic bishops of america to funnel 1 mil to Frank Schaeffer to include Catholic anti abortion propaganda in their movie ( I think) how shall we then live.
I'll put Wheless on my reading list. thank you for the suggestion.
I just had a (strangely friendly?)(I was paying mine off) conversation with a customer service rep. of major credit card company. Anecdote from border Texas was, there's a massive repo/default wave coming on these $50,000+ trucks and their towed multi-10-thousand $$ toys. People are figuring out that they can make maybe a few of the usurious payments, and then come and get them. Perfectly rational. So eat that, you don't want to even limit late fees!