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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#15661 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2020-June-11, 17:00

View Postkenberg, on 2020-June-11, 16:15, said:

I have probably exhausted the interest in the topic but I have looked around a bit. Apparently it is much more difficult to find takers for open police inspection than it once was. Maybe due to more options in the improved economy but on an NPR discussion they figured not just that. I do think the current hoopla will make this worse.

Yup, but that has more to do with lots of videos of cops beating up protesters than some "defund the police [and what we mean by that is ....]"-cries.
Or rather, if someone likes joining what they see they probably shouldn't become police...
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
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#15662 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2020-June-11, 17:57

View PostWinstonm, on 2020-June-11, 08:27, said:



I hate to have to burn Atlanta to the ground again, but if you got to, you've got to.


You may find this interesting in your quest for "justice".
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#15663 User is online   PassedOut 

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Posted 2020-June-12, 10:57

When I moved to Atlanta in late 1978 (the company I worked for was setting up a new IT office there), I rented an apartment for a year while I looked for a home to buy. It turned out that the mayor, Maynard Jackson, had an apartment in that same building -- and lived there until Atlanta obtained an official mayor's residence. He was bright and personable and got a lot done for the city. One particular thing I found amusing: Mayor Jackson was often surrounded by an entourage, and when I'd wave from a distance, he'd be the one to wave back; the assumption seemed to be that I couldn't ever be waving at someone else in his crowd. :)

When Andrew Young ran for mayor, he scheduled small get-togethers in homes all over Atlanta, and Constance and I were invited to one in our neighborhood. Andrew Young too was very interesting to talk with, especially about his work as the first African-American UN ambassador, appointed by Carter. Young also did well as mayor, becoming very popular all over Atlanta. He won his second term by a huge margin -- maybe 80% of the vote.

After living in Atlanta for twenty years, over twenty years ago now, I've still got good friends there. And BBO has been a big help!
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#15664 User is offline   akwoo 

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Posted 2020-June-12, 15:40

First of all, I think when all is said and done, what's happening in Minneapolis will end up being no more than a clever piece of union busting.

Second, if anything is going to change, we will need an alternative network of police academies, one that teaches recruits that it's part of their job to accept significant risks to their own lives in order to avoid harming those that turn out to be no threat. Big cities have sufficient needs for a diverse array of public safety responses. Smaller places will still need generalists.
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#15665 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-June-12, 17:06

The end of an error (sic) :P

The crumbling casino and hotel of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City is getting torn down after sitting vacant for years

A symbol of "America's Entrepreneur" is flushed down the toilet.

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Trump sued to have his name removed from the building a month after it shuttered. The complex, which opened in 1984, is one of three casinos Trump built. The other two have since changed names and ownership, according to The Hill.

I thought any publicity was good publicity???

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"It's an embarrassment, it's a blight on our skyline, and that's the biggest eyesore in town," Small said in January according to NJ.com.

Maybe the Manchurian President can build a wall around the crumbling ex-casino. Build that wall, build that wall... It won't cost Atlantic City any money at all because Mexico will pay for the wall.
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#15666 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-June-12, 20:17

Now we know why Trump picked Tulsa for his coming out party:

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Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum on Wednesday blasted one of his police department's top commanders after the officer denied there's systemic racism in law enforcement, then said African Americans "probably ought to be" shot more.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#15667 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-June-13, 09:53

Nate Silver @natesilver538 said:

I guess one thing that really stands out here is that it doesn't take that much to go from a massive Biden Electoral College landslide (if he wins everywhere on the list below, that's 413 EV) to a narrow Biden loss (he's only ahead 3.7 points in the tipping-point state).

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National: Biden +7.6

CO: Biden +15.6
ME: Biden +12.4
VA: Biden +9.5
MI: Biden +8.2
NE-2: Biden +7.4
NH: Biden +6.6
WI: Biden +5.9
NV: Biden +5.7
MN: Biden +5.5
PA: Biden +3.7
AZ: Biden +3.6
FL: Biden +3.5
NC: Biden +2.0
OH: Biden +1.6
GA: TIE
TX: Trump +1.4
IA: Trump +1.6

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The tipping-point state here would be PA, where there's been a real lack of high-quality polling for the past couple months. I doubt that Biden is actually ahead by 8 in MI and 6 in WI but only 3-4 in PA. But, that's what the polls show if you don't blend them with priors.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#15668 User is online   PassedOut 

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Posted 2020-June-13, 21:24

Lindsey Graham weighs in:

https://www.youtube....h?v=g5Xpwyd4aMM
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#15669 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 04:54

View PostPassedOut, on 2020-June-13, 21:24, said:

Lindsey Graham weighs in:

https://www.youtube....h?v=g5Xpwyd4aMM


I gather these are recorded remarks from circa 2015. They might or might not be effective as a campaign ad but for me they shout the question: How, how, just how did we ever get to where we now are?

"You know how to MAGA? Tell Donald Trump to go to Hell".

Exactly. This was obvious in 2015 and most unfortunately it has become a great deal more obvious now. Every country consists of imperfect people sometimes doing some questionable things. But Donald Trump? As LG might have said, give me an effin break. Maybe that should be the 2020 campaign slogan. It pretty well sums up the situation.
Ken
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#15670 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 09:25

Ross Douthat at NYT said:

In 1804, the Corsican upstart Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself as France’s emperor. His mother, born Letizia Ramolino, did not attend the coronation. Informed of her son’s self-elevation, she is said to have remarked coolly: “Let’s hope it lasts.”

In conversations with conservative friends about the Trump presidency these last three years, I often found myself thinking about Mother Bonaparte. Before Donald Trump’s election I made a lot of dire predictions about how his mix of demagogy and incompetence would interact with real world threats: I envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises, sustained domestic unrest. Having lived through the failed end of the last Republican presidency, I assumed Trump’s administration would be a second, swifter failure, with dire consequences for both the country and the right.

In 2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn’t come to pass. Trump was bad in many ways, but the consequences weren’t what I anticipated. The economy surged; the world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but otherwise relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump delivered on his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had shared my apprehensions would tell me that, simply as a shield against the left, the president was doing enough to merit their support in 2020.

To which I often murmured something like, “let’s hope it lasts.”

It hasn’t. Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump presidency, with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass protests — and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety or extinct.

In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a firewall against whatever post-2020 liberalism might become.

This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure, an agent of its marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the federal bench.

In situations of crisis or grave difficulty, Trump displays three qualities, three spirits, that all redound against the movement that he leads. His spirit of authoritarianism creates a sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents, uniting left-wingers and liberals despite their differences. His spirit of chaos, the sense that nothing is planned or under control, turns moderates and normies against him. And finally his spirit of incompetence means that conservatives get far less out of his administration than they would from a genuine imperial president, a man of iron rather than of pasteboard.

You can see the convergence of these spirits in the disaster at Lafayette Park, where an authoritarian instinct led to a chaotic and violent police intervention, a massive media freakout, blowback from the military — and left the president with an impious photo op and control of six blocks around the White House to show for it.

That last image, the president as a dictator of an island and impotent beyond it, seems like a foretaste of what would await conservatives if Trump somehow slipped through to a second term. Maybe he would get to replace another Supreme Court justice — maybe. (In a Democratic Senate, not.) But everything else the right needs would slip further out of reach.

Conservatism needs a response to the current movement for social justice that answers just claims and rejects destructive ones. Trump delivers a conservatism of Confederate war memorials that vindicates the left.

Conservatism needs new ideas about how to use power, a better theory of the relationship between state, economy and culture than the decadent Reaganism that Trump half-overthrew. Trump offers only a daily lesson in how to let power go to waste.

Conservatism needs a way to either claim more space in America’s existing elite institutions, or else a path to building new ones. Trump offers a retreat to the fortresses of OANN, TPUSA, QAnon.

Above all, conservatism, now a worldview for old people and contrarians in a country trending leftward, needs a mix of converts and sympathizers to be something other than a rump. Trump did win some converts in 2016, but he has spent four years making far more enemies, and their numbers are growing every day.

What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won’t continue at this pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump — and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#15671 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 13:18

Why would anybody think the US needs the Affordable Care Act? Our health care system is perfect!

Seattle Man Gets $1.1 Million Coronavirus Hospital Bill: Report

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Michael Flor, a Seattle resident, surprised doctors and family members when he recovered from a life-threatening coronavirus infection this spring.

Then he got his own surprise ― a hospital bill for $1,122,501.04.

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Just the charge for his room in the intensive care unit was billed at $9,736 per day. Due to the contagious nature of the virus, the room was sealed and could only be entered by medical workers wearing plastic suits and headgear. For 42 days he was in this isolation chamber, for a total charged cost of $408,912.

He also was on a mechanical ventilator for 29 days, with the use of the machine billed at $2,835 per day, for a total of $82,215. About a quarter of the bill is drug costs.

I personally don't see the big deal about a hospital bill of a million plus dollars B-) Mr. Flor could easily pay for this bill if he used coupons when shopping and used regular instead of premium gasoline in his car. WTP?
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#15672 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 14:02

Trump Tries To Explain Awkward West Point Walk That Lit Up Twitter Critics

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The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery. The last thing I was going to do is “fall” for the Fake News to have fun with. Final ten feet I ran down to level ground. Momentum!

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Earlier, during his address to cadets, Trump took an awkward sip of water: He used his right hand to lift a glass, then used his left hand to push the glass, still clutched in his right hand, all the way to his mouth.

Enough of the Manchurian President bashing. Everybody knows West Point was directly in the path of Hurricane Dorian. If there isn't a map with sharpie markings that shows this to be true, just wait a couple of minutes. There is a lot of rain and dangerous high winds during a hurricane. This also explains why the Grifter in Chief had trouble drinking water. I have to commend the Grifter in Chief for risking his life to attend graduation ceremonies in the middle of a hurricane. MAGA, MAGA, MAGA
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#15673 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 14:37

Devin Nunes and the Republicans all harp about free speech, but when it comes to critics of Nunes, his feelings are not Moo-tual.

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“They’re doing more than allowing Liz Mair, the cow and the mom to post a tweet,” Biss said. “They’re censoring, they’re promoting an anti-Nunes agenda, they’re banning conservative accounts and they’re knowingly encouraging it.”


Nunes sued to stop the cow from posting on Twitter - and how did that work out, Devin?:

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The anonymous accounts have grown massive audiences since Nunes filed a lawsuit against them. The cow account, @devincow, has more than 700,000 people following messages that mock the congressman as “treasonous cowpoke.” It had about 1,000 before the lawsuit.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#15674 User is offline   PeterAlan 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 16:42

On possibly a lighter note, I have a twin brother, but we have different birthdays. His is today, and he shares it with Donald Trump. Mine is tomorrow, and I share it with Xi Jinping. Sometimes you just can't win.
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#15675 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 16:57

View PostPeterAlan, on 2020-June-14, 16:42, said:

On possibly a lighter note, I have a twin brother, but we have different birthdays. His is today, and he shares it with Donald Trump. Mine is tomorrow, and I share it with Xi Jinping. Sometimes you just can't win.


You already won by having a brother. Posted Image



"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#15676 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 18:07

View PostPeterAlan, on 2020-June-14, 16:42, said:

On possibly a lighter note, I have a twin brother, but we have different birthdays. His is today, and he shares it with Donald Trump. Mine is tomorrow, and I share it with Xi Jinping. Sometimes you just can't win.

https://www.youtube....h?v=_z-1fTlSDF0
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#15677 User is offline   akwoo 

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Posted 2020-June-14, 22:31

Conservatism is sadly dead.

What we have left is a coalition of degenerate calvinists - people who believe a cruel and sadistic God has chosen their small group to lay waste to everyone else - and neo-hobbesians - people who believe the natural and proper state of affairs is a war of all against all and governments exist to organize them into a gang to do battle with other gangs. They don't have theories about what the state should look like, what the purpose of political power is, or any of that. There is no sense of good and evil(*). It's all solely about oppressing others for their benefit.

(*) Well the degenerate calvinists talk about good and evil, but they think of it as something arbitrarily defined by God according to His cruel and sadistic whims, not some transcendent collection of principles - God as King precedes God as Word.
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#15678 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-June-15, 07:45

There's a lot riding on this coming election:

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Shortly after his first reelection in 2014, Orbán gave a speech outlining his political project. Citing globalization's economic and social failures, Orbán defended the course he had set by noting that those nations best prepared for the future were "not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies." Drawing on that message, he defined a form of regime change. "The Hungarian," he said, "is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened, and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#15679 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2020-June-15, 12:58

I have to say that we live in the strangest of times. The former National Security Adviser publicly says that the sitting POTUS committed impeachable acts across the entire gamut of foreign policy, that he broke the law on innumerable occasions by withholding personal and non-confidential documents that should have been available, and that policy was driven purely by reelection chances even where that was clearly bad for the country as a whole....and noone even finds it unusual or worthy of a single comment? Similarly I have watched CNN a few times in the last days and not seen even a single mention of the statement put out by Simon & Schuster. Can anyone imagine a similar scenario playing out in conservative news outlets, radio chatshows and forums had even the suggestion of such a story broken about Obama? Perhaps people are waiting for the book itself hoping that that will make the impact stronger. In the meantime, count me in as seriously shocked and confused that Americans seemingly care so little for the highest office in the country.
(-: Zel :-)
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#15680 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2020-June-15, 13:12

View PostZelandakh, on 2020-June-15, 12:58, said:

I have to say that we live in the strangest of times. The former National Security Adviser publicly says that the sitting POTUS committed impeachable acts across the entire gamut of foreign policy, that he broke the law on innumerable occasions by withholding personal and non-confidential documents that should have been available, and that policy was driven purely by reelection chances even where that was clearly bad for the country as a whole....and noone even finds it unusual or worthy of a single comment? Similarly I have watched CNN a few times in the last days and not seen even a single mention of the statement put out by Simon & Schuster. Can anyone imagine a similar scenario playing out in conservative news outlets, radio chatshows and forums had even the suggestion of such a story broken about Obama? Perhaps people are waiting for the book itself hoping that that will make the impact stronger. In the meantime, count me in as seriously shocked and confused that Americans seemingly care so little for the highest office in the country.


No, it's not tat. It's that Bolton had his change to be a genuine American hero by speaking up and testifying during the impeachment and trial but chose not to do so. Whatever Bolton has to say at this point is done just to promote his books sales. We ain't buying.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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