I've seen a lot of "I'm voting my conscience" drivel the last few days and it's got me concerned. Hopefully it's all people who wouldn't have voted democrat anyway. Yes it sucks to not have a candidate you want. No I am not excited for Biden. But I don't want excitement. I don't want more shutdowns and speaker battles and trump threatening everyone who doesn't look and think like him.
In fact, government should be the least exciting thing in the universe; if a government is doing its job and we, the people, are okay with their policies and their results, then we should more or less push them to the farthest recesses of our minds.
The fact that (at least, in the US) politics somehow became akin to sports teams is fucking bizzare.
Like yeah I hate cars and try to avoid using mine as much as possible but 1) I accept reality and 2) if my kid is sick I'm putting them in a car and driving. We are in dangerous times and yes I will gladly take the less-bad option.
This is what I forgot about a few weeks ago, in the mess of all the awful things he’s done, as one of the worst and most egregious reasons not to re-elect him.
Everyone remember in cities across the country, him deploying un-marked, unidentified federal law enforcement to protests to essentially kidnap protestors off the street.
These weren’t the governors deploying the national guard either, or your local police/sheriff, if was Trump and his associates deploying federal officers.
I don’t even honestly remember hearing what happened to many of these people, they were extrajudicial kidnappings; they weren’t even read their rights, they just pulled up in unmarked vehicles, no clear display of badges, or identifying information covered up, and pulled people into their vehicles.
This was very much applied to BLM protestors, but could easily be applied to abortion protestors, or really any kind of protestor.
Reading up on it a bit now years later, apparently taken to a secondary location, then read their miranda rights, photographed, and questioned; released with no record of arrest. Very much not the way to handle protests
It gets really tiring to listen to these people threaten to take away everyone’s freedom and still be in the race for the position. Hate is a really ugly thing
So what everyone is saying is that whomever is in command and all military personnel in the chain of command are going to follow any orders no matter how illegal? Seriously? The military has already told Trump to pound sand.
Milley told him to pound sand. Given that christofascists have been working hard to indoctrinate the enlisted and many of those enlisting are already christofascists or come from areas of extreme poverty and conservatism, don't think that these people aren't making plans to remove those who won't play ball to clear the way for more agreeable officers. If you see a sudden boost of former enlisted guys suddenly returning in early summer 2024, brace yourself.
Orders will be couched, as much as possible, in legal orders to “keep the peace”. IANAL, no idea what that looks like. But you’re right, the brass is not going for any of this shit.
The republicans are currently holding up all the military leadership promotions/appointments which may be totally unrelated to stuff like this, but it also may not.
As much as I loathe defending Republicans, it is very specifically one Republican (Tuberville) and several of his colleagues have been trying to get him to stop.
Sure, but they could easily revoke his committee memberships or vote to censure him. But they aren't. They're using kid gloves and are letting him do as he pleases.
I refuse to give republicans credit just because they're not all acting the worst. If they won't bother to do what's needed, they can all collectively share the blame.
I agree they should but literally the only ones who can stop him and get this train moving are his voters. Unless they recall him/vote him out he can do this as long as he wants no matter what the senate does to him. That's all I'm pointing out. Your phrasing made it sound like it was some multi-person effort.
Well yeah, that's because the Republicans can stop him by their own internal methods, they're just refusing to actually hold his feet to the fire in any meaningful way, so I blame the lot of them.
Don't let the Republicans get away with blaming tubbyville for their inaction in stopping him. It's not only the voter's responsibility to deal with him, the caucus can and should do so, and the lack of any meaningful action by the GOP as a whole is tantamount to complicity and/or tacit agreement with his actions IMO.
ONE Republican is holding appointments hostage and the rest are getting pissed off and antsy about it. They’re bringing votes to the floor in batches now, even though each one requires an individual vote, rather than a mass approval.
Except Trump is strategizing with them. Maybe he's just humoring them. Maybe not. As things stand, I'm more willing to accept that he's an active participant and will use their plans than not. The man has more than once stated he intends to make those who opposed him or turned on him pay dearly.
It’s nothing until it actually happens. Our system relies heavily on honor and tradition. It won’t stand up to someone who has no honor and no respect for tradition.
Fascists are about to take over and too many people are too busy hating the Jews/Palestinians/Trans folks, or chasing UFOs, the wealthy have us all fighting each other while their fascist puppets take over.
It’s funny, because I’ve often wondered just how it was that Germany came to be dominated by the Nazis, because it just seems too insane to even be possible.
And now I’m watching the same basic thing play out in the US, and I still don’t understand how it’s happening, and it still seems too insane to even be possible.
If he loses another election–especially if it’s by a decent margin–then the Republicans will finally have to ditch him. Or just keep losing elections, which is fine…
If voters won’t abandon him, what exactly can we do? Give up on democracy?
How? What, exactly, are they not doing? They lack control of Congress and the Supreme Court. Anything Biden tries that would limit it would wind up struct down by the Federal courts. At least that's my view, so please, by all means, explain to me how the Democrats are doing nothing and are complicit.
Biden could be using executive orders AND be pressing for more supreme court seats. That's without mentioning the hard tac he should have taken against sinema and manchin.
So use desperate strongman measures to prop up democracy lest it would fall to the fascists?
Have you ever read about the last three democratically elected administrations of the Weimar Republic, and how they tried to use increasingly desperate measures like emergency orders to prevent the Republic from falling - which paved the way for the National Socialists to simply use the established standard and bypass Parliament completely once they were in power?
This would probably have exactly the opposite effect. Right now people see Biden as the reasonable moderate and Trump as a fringe weirdo, and they’re polling accordingly: it’s looking like an easy Biden W in the next round. If Biden starts throwing his weight around, appointing more justices and abusing executive orders, then Trump is much more likely to win. That’s a disaster.
By being sane and reasonable, Biden is likely to win the next election. That’s what we need. If Trump is a clear loser, the Republicans will ditch him and his bullshit, and hopefully, hopefully we can go back to having two sane parties again.
Or maybe the Republican party could split. That’d be even better.
So doing the same thing Trump was rightly criticized for. Gotcha.
The Senate is not filibuster proof, so making a change like adding Supreme Court seats would never fly. Speaking of that, with the razor slim majority the Dems have there, taking a hard tack against Sinema and Manchin would have been like arguing with a shotgun whose trigger had been pulled not to blow your head off. Or do you think Sinema and Manchin are idiots who didn't know they could get their bread buttered from either side of the aisle and still come out smelling like roses? Those two held all the power and they knew it.
The idea that something like that can never happen here is ubiquitous. Even now, while we are literally going through a transitional stage into authoritarianism there are those that still deny it is happening. Ok, that was more than two words.
Sorry - I must not have explained myself well, because you misconstrued my point.
I don’t understand how it happened when it did in Germany. It seems too insane to happen at all.
The thing that’s significant about it happening in the US is that it’s happening right now in real time where I live, rather than almost 90 years ago in another country.
And it’s weird and unsettling that even with that - even with it happening moment-by-moment right in front if me - it still seems too insane to be possible.
It seems like there should be some context to make it at least sort of make sense - something that I wouldn’t know about because I wasn’t living in Germany in the 1930s, but that I should be able to see here and now.
But there isn’t - not as far as I can see. It’s just insanity.
First of all propaganda. When you visit SNS you can see how people get caught by convenient points of view.
In case of Germany, there was also a financial crisis. People wanted a reform, and Hitler found out that blaming it on the Jews manipulates people efficiently.
The next thing is the flaws in election. To win a government you don't need 50% of voters. Some don't vote, some can be gerrymandered away, and you can often win with a 30% of votes in a multi-party system.
There was a lot going on in Germany, but I'm not here for a full history lesson.
I just want to repeat a quote that I heard while studying the German language many years ago. This is not an exact quote, but this was the gist of it: "Hitler was just a funny, ridiculous little man. No one took him seriously, but he was very entertaining."
This haunts me because a) Hitler and b) for a long time I've felt like Americans tend to elect the biggest joke or novelty candidate on the ballot when it comes to president.
The two exceptions I would see in the last 40 years are Bush 1 and Biden. Bush rode in on Reagan's coat tails and lasted one term. Biden is the inanimate carbon rod who has been running for president since 1987 and finally got his chance.
Him doing that would very likely kick off another civil war. Some governors would absolutely refuse to release their state national guards for this duty, which would be a massive constitutional crisis, but frankly probably way better than just letting it happen.
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