The US Hamster Wheel

[boing]

The far right remains in the comforting denial afforded by blind allegiance to a country (or more accurately a construct) now lead by a feckless narcissist who can't even string together a coherent sentence
I pity them not as their decline is entirely self-inflicted

Clarification here please Bob. Are you referring to the US or the UK.

[Boac]

Good point, boing - it could be either. But Bojo is streets ahead of Trump on procreation.

[Bob]

boing you are right to make a comparison, I fear the only difference is a simple matter of degree.
As to which place I'm actually referring to perhaps paying attention to the title of the thread in which we are posting might furnish one with a hint

[Boac]

Might be a bit advanced, there, Bob..........

[boing]

I am, of course, well aware of your intent. I was merely pointing out the paradox.

.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Ah good to see... A luta continua... but is "a vitória é certa?"

[boing]

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

Mahatma Gandhi

[TheGreenGoblin]

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

Mahatma Gandhi

I will not argue with the Mahatma, and his Satyagraha that so infuriated Churchill and the British Empire...

[Undried Plum]

And I realize Winston Churchill was half-American.

Who also said that Democracy was the worst form of government .... but better than all the alternatives.

Who also said that:
The Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted every other possibility.

[boing]

GG,
I thought you would appreciate a comment from a fellow South African.


.

[llondel]

llondel

The beauty of our system is that the wash comes out in November, when the people have had their say. There is a scramble now to see how many votes the Democrats can steal by virtue of vote by mail, but the backbone of America is used to that and they have prevailed recently. I'm hoping that continues.

That's where I have to disagree with you. I've always voted by mail in the US, states where it's set up and functioning just fine have a very low incidence of fraud. I believe Oregon is 100% vote by mail too. The only thing I take issue with is the concept of accepting votes postmarked on election day, I prefer it to be the responsibility of the voter to get his ballot in by the close of polling, so all votes can be counted at once rather than have them trickling in for a few days after the election.

Where votes are being stolen is in states that make it very hard to register to vote, such as requiring specific forms of ID and then making it very hard to acquire that form. Purging the rolls is something else that seems haphazard and prone to abuse - use the UK system, where every year the electoral people contact every address in a specific month and ask them to confirm the voters resident at that address. If you don't respond then you're off the roll, if you do respond then you're on. That puts the onus on the voter to make sure they respond and provides an annual confirmation of numbers. It's consistent, so people know when it's going to happen and then it's definitely their fault if they don't respond, rather than turning up to vote and finding that they were purged from the roll last month but no one told them.

[BenThere]

My contention with 'vote by mail' is not with the process of doing that, but with the structure of it not being protective of the integrity of the vote. Should the proponents of 'vote by mail' come up with solid constraints against fraudulent votes, especially in urban, Democrat-ruled precincts where votes seem to materialize in close elections to push the Democrat over the top, I think 'vote by mail' isn't such a bad idea. But if it is a conspiracy to enable the stealing or miscounting of the voters' intents, I object. And that's what I suspect is the Democrat objective, and the lax procedures Democrats endorse to enable illegal aliens, felons, and such to vote, serving the same purpose, leaves me cold.

Despite what proponents of the process say, fraudulent voting in the US is a problem, and it almost always runs in favor of Democrats.

[Boac]

This, from our favourite right-wing newspaper, the Grauniad:

"You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.

How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.

On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything

Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.

Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.

Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.

Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.

What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.

What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president.

Trump’s tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.

When he’s not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown restrictions.

He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.

And he lies incessantly.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.

His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better."

[barkingmad]

Well, if that’s what’s (not) happening in US guvvment, it’s likely COG is in action. Simples innit?!

[nomorecatering]

There is virtually nothing true in BenThere's last post. It does however perpetuate the right wing narrative that there is massive voter fraud in the United States and that it is at the behest and to the benefit of the Democratic Party. They offer no proof and neither does BenThere. The current chronically aggrieved racist POS occupying the White House even disbanded his own commission on voter fraud without it producing any systemic evidence of fraud.

If there is a problem with voting in the United States it is because of gerrymandering and voter suppression. The GOP knows they have an ever decreasing base and they are doing they best to disenfranchise everyone else.

[Undried Plum]

This, from our favourite right-wing newspaper, the Grauniad:

"You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.

How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.

On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything

Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.

Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.

Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.

Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.

What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.

What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president.

Trump’s tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.

When he’s not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown restrictions.

He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.

And he lies incessantly.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.

His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better."

An excellent piece.

[Seenenough]

Who was the author of the "excellent piece" one might ask.

Ah ,it was Robert Riech,a Berkeley Professor (obviously )who spends his time trashing Trump day in and day out,much like our forum's Three Amigos.

[Undried Plum]

Yeah! Shoot the messenger.

That'll make things right.

[Seenenough]

Here is the Professor once again

[Undried Plum]

I'll take a look at what Robert Reich actually says on YouTube, and perhaps get back to you.

He's on my 'short list'.