Wrong. You're defending georbeob1's opinions as if they were facts and logic.
His opinions are severely illogical and false assertions of cause and effect, e.g.
Referring to decreased oil production, less restrictive immigration policies, and the seeking of an agreement with Iran as liberal authoritarian failures is purely a matter of opinion, politically partisan and ideological, and are not examples of facts and logic.
When asked about the issue of nuclear power in an interview, Thurnberg reacted pragmatically. "Personally, I think it is a bad idea to rely on coal as long as the nuclear power plants are still running," Thunberg said. "But of course this is a very heated debate," she added. Asked whether the NPPs should be shut down at all after the current crisis phase, Thunberg said: "It depends on what happens."
The "anti-nuclear movement in Germany" has existed since 1970 and to this day has various causes and supporters from the most diverse camps.
The strength of this support had diminished in the 1980s as well as at present.
I think Pete Buttigieg would make a good president. I only wish I believed that he could get the support he would need to mount a viable candidacy.
It might seem quite inexplicable that george (or anyone else) could be guilty of such a clear inversion of reality but it really isn't.
He's just substituting thinking and study for something he finds far more comfortable.
The USA can't solve it's racism problems.
A mainstream political party welcomes white nationalists into its fold. So I repeat, why wouldn't people find these trends objectionable?
I remain fascinated by the strange projection, by this Administration and its supporters, of their own, observably undemocratic totalitarian authoritarianism, on their political opponents, Republican and otherwise.
Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer issued a statement: “We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box…. [V]igilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints.”
The presence of armed vigilantes outside of voting places is a scene directly out of the 1876 “redemption” of the South.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party used the federal government to defend equality before the law and to expand opportunity for ordinary Americans. After the war, they included the newly emancipated southern Black population in their vision of an economy based on legal equality and free labor. When white southerners tried to force their Black neighbors back into submission, Congress passed the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act, establishing the right of Black men to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions.
White southerners who hated the idea that Black men could use the vote to protect themselves terrorized their Black neighbors to keep them from voting. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers and calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop southern Republicans—both Black and white—from voting in favor of the new state constitutions. They killed nearly a thousand Unionists before the 1868 elections, terrorizing their neighbors and undercutting democracy in the South.
Even more effective than Ku Klux Klan ropes and clubs and bullets in the long run, though, were the new tactics to which white Democrats turned when they realized that the violence of the Ku Klux Klan simply hardened Republican resolve. They insisted that government policies promoting black equality were simply a redistribution of wealth as poor men—especially poor Black men—voted for lawmakers who would agree to fund roads and schools and hospitals with tax money. In the postwar South, the people most likely to own taxable property were white men.
Black voting, they insisted, was “Socialism in South Carolina.”
In 1876, “Redeemers” set out to put an end to the southern governments that were elected in systems that allowed Black men to vote. “Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.
Their intimidation worked. Democrats took over the South and created a one-party system that lasted virtually unbroken until 1965. Without the oversight that a healthy multiparty system provides, southern governments became the corrupt tools of a few wealthy men, and the rest of the population fell into a poverty from which it could not escape until the federal government began to invest in the region in the 1930s.
The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans in both parties agreed that the government should protect equality before the law and promote equal access to resources. That system gave us highways, business regulation, world-class universities, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air and water, labor protections, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.
But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision opened the way for those opposed to the so-called liberal consensus to claim that white tax dollars were paying for Black benefits. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the subsequent shift of Black voters to the Democratic Party, Republicans increasingly accused Black voters of looking for handouts. By 1980, Ronald Reagan made it to the White House with stories of a Black “welfare queen,” promising to put money back in the pockets of taxpayers. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration (Motor Voter) Act, Republicans began to insist that Democrats won only by cheating. They began to rewrite election laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning populations to vote.
And now, we are in the next stage of that pattern: Republicans are using intimidation to keep Democrats from voting. In addition to the direct intimidation in Arizona, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security in August arrested 19 people who had been assured by state officials that they could vote; Georgia Republicans are launching mass challenges to Democratic voters, overwhelming election offices; and in several states, pro-Trump activists have hounded election officials out of office.
If we continue in this direction, we already know how it turns out: with a corrupt one-party government that favors an elite few and mires the rest of us in a world without recourse to legal equality or economic security.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. At our most successful moments, Americans have backed not the vision of the Confederates but that of Lincoln, working to create a government of laws, not of men, and of equal access to opportunity for all.
Hello Frank. Unfortunately I don't see the irony to which you are referring, while at the same time I don't see the end of our republic either. We have overcome worse situations in our history, and, as I indicated, the forthcoming elections are likely to mark the the beginning of the end of the dominance of the far Left Ideologs in the contemporary political scene. They have enjoyed complete control of our Government for the past two years, with the Presidency, both houses of Congress and the continuing support of a permanent Executive bureaucracy, which over the past few decades has assumed large elements of both the legislative & judicial branches of our government. With little effective opposition, they have implemented many of their their policy goals, and in the process confronted our people with the reality of their fast rising and destructive economic and social consequences, something that will likely likely lasting changes.
Hard to know how fast(or slowly) our recovery from it may proceed. To some extent our contemporary scene also reflects ongoing trends throughout the Western world. Happily, events in Ukraine have wiped away formerly widespread illusions (particularly in Germany) about the possibility of luring Putin and the oligarch who have supported his regime for the past decades into meaningful cooperation with the EU, and confronting Europeans directly with the consequences of both their dependence on Russia for gas & petroleum and the folly of their green energy policies. (Even that esteemed energy scientist and engineer Greta Thunberg has urged Germany to keep its remaining Nuclear Power plants in operation.)
As an aside I truly wonder what country or countries were behind the recently established detonations that destroyed the Nordstrom Pipeline in the Baltic? Hard to establish credible motives for anyone here.
Amusingly, Like American Democrats, European "Liberal" political groups stunned by the recent emergence of real opposition have taken to similar projection of their own undemocratic and authoritarian faults on rising opponents who challenge them, most recently in Italy.
As I indicated, we're still at an early stage (indeed the election hasn't yet occurred), however the prospects look very favorable. Lib. Dem. policies have yielded only economic decline, sustained high inflation, rampant crime and social disorder (San Francisco is a very far cry from the colorful, many faceted and beautiful place it once was - increasingly unsafe streets littered with human waste, tents, debris and sad -looking bums shooting up and harassing passers by: shuttered stores, smashed windows on parked cars and crime everywhere.. I haven't been to New York in a couple of years, but from what I read it is more or less the same there.
While the international situation looks grim it appears that Chairman Xi of China has fully revealed his Communist colors (the scene of his security people forcibly escorting his Predecessor (in his new role) out of the conference as it concluded, was instructive. Xi is imposing political controls on China's economy and social life worthy of Mao, and, which in the long run are likely to yield, the same stagnant fate that befell the USSR.
Rishi Sunak has issued a plea for unity in the face of a "profound economic challenge" after winning the race to be the next prime minister.
He won the Tory leadership contest after rival Penny Mordaunt failed to secure enough backing from MPs.
In his first speech, Mr Sunak said bringing his party and the UK together would be his "utmost priority".
Mr Sunak will become the UK's first British Asian prime minister and the youngest for more than 200 years.
Mr Sunak - a 42-year-old practising Hindu - is expected to take office on Tuesday after being formally appointed by the King.
InfraBlue wrote:Wrong. You're defending georbeob1's opinions as if they were facts and logic.
Nonsense. I've not done anything of the sort. All I did was explain what George meant when you misunderstood one of his sentences.
Since when do opinions need defending? I do share many of his opinions, but I am not aware of any need to defend those opinions.
InfraBlue wrote:His opinions are severely illogical and false assertions of cause and effect, e.g.
How can an opinion be false or illogical? It's an opinion.
InfraBlue wrote:Referring to decreased oil production, less restrictive immigration policies, and the seeking of an agreement with Iran as liberal authoritarian failures is purely a matter of opinion, politically partisan and ideological, and are not examples of facts and logic.
I think the question of whether leftist administrations pursue such policies is a factual matter.
The question of whether the policies are a failure depends strongly on how failure is defined. Has anyone here agreed on what constitutes failure?
I wasn't referring to your explanation of his sentence;
I was referring to you and him referring to his notions of cause and effect in regard to US immigration policy and the drug smuggling at the US southern border; and decreased oil production, less restrictive immigration policies, and the seeking of an agreement with Iran as liberal authoritarian failures as facts and logic when they are merely erroneous opinions.
You defend them as facts and logic when they are merely illogical opinions devoid of facts.
And yet, you defend them as facts and logic.
The assertion in question, however, is that these policies are authoritarian, let alone failures, and are not facts and logic, but merely politically partisan and ideological opinions.
Failure as defined through political partisanship and ideology are hardly facts and logic and are merely opinions.
You are referring to imaginary posts that I have never made.
How Brazil’s Leader Built the Myth of Rigged Elections
For years, President Jair Bolsonaro has attacked Brazil’s election systems. One of his claims has been that apparent patterns in vote results show proof of fraud. He has repeatedly said that election officials count votes in secret, suggesting they could manipulate results. And he has said that he suspects hackers tried to steal the presidential election from him in 2018, but failed.
Those claims are false, according to Brazil’s election officials, fact-checking agencies and independent election-security experts who have studied the country’s electronic voting system.
Yet in speeches, interviews and hundreds of posts on social media, the president has consistently and methodically repeated those baseless claims and many others about Brazil’s voting system.
The result has been a yearslong campaign that has undermined millions of Brazilians’ faith in the elections that underpin one of the world’s largest democracies. In a poll this month, three out of four of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters said they have little or no trust in Brazil's voting machines.
Now, Brazil is bracing for turmoil. While Mr. Bolsonaro has warned of voter fraud for years, he has never lost an election in three decades in politics. But in the contest for president on Sunday, he may be facing defeat.
And he has suggested that he would not accept it...
I wasn't referring to your explanation of his sentence; I was referring to you and him referring to his notions of cause and effect in regard to US immigration policy and the drug smuggling at the US southern border; and decreased oil production, less restrictive immigration policies, and the seeking of an agreement with Iran as liberal authoritarian failures as facts and logic when they are merely erroneous opinions.
That's exactly it in a nutshell.
The Midterms’ Stakes for Democracy: A Scenario
The independent state legislature theory in action.
Two reasons the stakes are high for the November 8 midterms: the Big Lie and the far-right U.S. Supreme Court majority. It is no exaggeration to say that these two factors will determine whether our system of representative democratic government lives or dies.
If the House of Representatives swings to Republican control, the January 6th Committee’s investigation into the Capitol insurrection will cease, and the House will take up investigations into the current president and his family. Attorney General Merrick Garland could still pursue high-level indictments, including possibly of Donald Trump himself, but criminal investigations, indictments, trial preparation, trial, and appeals take time. Garland will lose his job on January 20, 2025 if a Republican wins the White House. That leaves him scarcely over two years to finish these enormous tasks.
But the heart of the threat to American democracy has little to do with whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden runs for president in 2024.
If the GOP takes over the House and the Supreme Court decides a case called Moore v. Harper as the GOP wants it to, it is entirely possible that Democrats will be locked out of the presidency for the foreseeable future, regardless of the popular vote and the Electoral College vote tally. Republicans will keep control of the White House because Republican state legislatures will say so.
Moore involves the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” which is routinely billed as involving whether state courts and state constitutions can weigh in on federal elections. But that framing obscures the more far-reaching implications of the case. To understand why warrants a brief lesson in the text of the Constitution.
Two reasons the stakes are high for the November 8 midterms: the Big Lie and the far-right U.S. Supreme Court majority. It is no exaggeration to say that these two factors will determine whether our system of representative democratic government lives or dies.
If the House of Representatives swings to Republican control, the January 6th Committee’s investigation into the Capitol insurrection will cease, and the House will take up investigations into the current president and his family. Attorney General Merrick Garland could still pursue high-level indictments, including possibly of Donald Trump himself, but criminal investigations, indictments, trial preparation, trial, and appeals take time. Garland will lose his job on January 20, 2025 if a Republican wins the White House. That leaves him scarcely over two years to finish these enormous tasks.
But the heart of the threat to American democracy has little to do with whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden runs for president in 2024.
If the GOP takes over the House and the Supreme Court decides a case called Moore v. Harper as the GOP wants it to, it is entirely possible that Democrats will be locked out of the presidency for the foreseeable future, regardless of the popular vote and the Electoral College vote tally. Republicans will keep control of the White House because Republican state legislatures will say so.
Moore involves the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” which is routinely billed as involving whether state courts and state constitutions can weigh in on federal elections. But that framing obscures the more far-reaching implications of the case. To understand why warrants a brief lesson in the text of the Constitution.
Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution governs elections. It does not establish an affirmative right to vote (which exists nowhere in the Constitution). It only states that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations” (emphasis added).
So, state legislatures are responsible for laws governing federal elections, unless Congress passes a national law. The independent state legislature theory contends that only legislatures can regulate federal elections—not state judges, governors, or other officials who may be otherwise delegated that authority under state law. In Moore, the specific law under contention is a gerrymandered congressional map in North Carolina. But state legislatures make all sorts of other laws governing federal elections, including laws involving voter registration, mail-in voting, ballot access, and the counting and certifying of votes. If another pandemic were to hit close to an election, it would mean that fifty state legislatures would have to independently meet and formally change statutory state law to adapt to the crisis. Governors, secretaries of state, state court judges, and other election officials would be powerless to step in. State constitutions—which often have stronger protections for voters than the U.S. Constitution—would become meaningless for policing federal elections.
Of even greater concern are Moore’s implications for presidential elections. The Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887 governs the process for casting and counting electors, and establishes a timeline. States appoint presidential electors under state law based on the popular vote cast in November, and those electors have historically almost always voted in line with the state results. But the U.S. Constitution contains no requirement that a state’s electoral votes be based on actual vote totals from individual citizens. Nothing in the Constitution prevents state legislatures from independently meeting and deciding who gets the Electoral College votes from that state. In fact, although the ECA provides that electors cast their votes in December and that Congress convene in January to formally count them, if a state has “failed to make a choice” by the December deadline, then the law holds that “the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.” So if a state legislature deems the November election a failure, it can quickly meet and decide who wins the state’s Electoral College votes—even if that means throwing out every single ballot cast in that state. The ECA also generically states that “Each State may, by law, provide for the filling of any vacancies which may occur in its college of electors when such college meets to give its electoral vote.” There is nothing in the statute explaining—or narrowing—this broad language, either. (The House passed an ECA reform package last month, but it has yet to pass the Senate.)
Meanwhile, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution, 345 election deniers are on the ballot in November, including nearly 200 running for the U.S. Congress. An estimated 58 percent have a high chance of winning their respective races. They include potential governors and secretaries of state—who may play a role in certifying elections under state law—as well as attorneys general and state legislative candidates. There is no reason to doubt that these folks will follow through on their platforms by denying the legitimacy of elections, using their power to stop the seating of legitimate winners from the opposing party. This is no idle possibility: Remember that 147 members of Congress already voted on Jan. 6th to overturn the 2020 election.
Here, then, is how it all could play out:
Republicans, including a majority of election deniers, win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022.
The Supreme Court in Moore holds that only state legislatures can make laws governing elections (Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and possibly Brett Kavanaugh have already signaled support for the theory), unless Congress steps in, which a GOP majority in the House won’t do.
After two years of incendiary political investigations in Congress, likely even including Biden impeachment proceedings, 2024 will bring a presidential election with a Democrat and a Republican on the competing tickets—maybe a Biden-vs.-Trump rematch, but it won’t really matter which candidates.
Republicans currently control 54 percent of all state legislative seats nationally. Come November 4, 2024, regardless of the popular vote, Republican legislatures will use their newly minted constitutional prerogative to decide the “law” governing that state’s election for president, and give the Electoral College votes to the Republican nominee. Not every state will need to take this action—the flipping of the results in just one or two states with GOP-controlled legislatures could suffice to thwart the national result.
The GOP-led Congress will abide by that decision in January 2025. And if the state legislatures fail to anoint a Republican president, the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives will refuse to certify the results. (The House breaks presidential ties under the Twelfth Amendment; the Senate does so for vice presidential deadlocks, so neither a Democratic-controlled Senate nor Vice President Kamala Harris will be able to stop this.)
Is this outcome a certainty? No—but none of these steps is implausible, and the whole grim scenario seems to grow more likely with each passing day.
Although one could hope that the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t make such a sweeping change to our electoral process, especially since the justices are not elected, the track record of the current right-wing majority offers no such comfort. Also pending this term is Milligan v. Merrill, a Voting Rights Act challenge to a gerrymandered Alabama map that a three-judge panel (including two Trump appointees) struck down as illegal. Rather than let stand the decades-old previous map for this election cycle, so-called conservatives on the Court stepped in with emergency relief to reinstate the controversial map for 2022—despite the possibility that it could be deemed illegal after full briefing and oral argument, which occurred on October 4.
This Court knows that the November midterm election will decide who has power in America for a long time to come. Voters need to wake up to this reality as well—and quickly.
InfraBlue wrote:I wasn't referring to your explanation of his sentence;
My explanation of his sentence was the only time that I had addressed his posts recently.
I've since done so a second time, but had not done so when you started referring to imaginary posts that I've never made.
Post 7,271,168
georgeob1 wrote:I that some kind of litmus test??? What is your purpose here?
Progressives ask those questions when they are (once again) unable to address facts and logic, and need to change the subject to something else.
InfraBlue wrote:I was referring to you and him referring to his notions of cause and effect in regard to US immigration policy and the drug smuggling at the US southern border; and decreased oil production, less restrictive immigration policies, and the seeking of an agreement with Iran as liberal authoritarian failures as facts and logic when they are merely erroneous opinions.
You are referring to imaginary posts that I have never made.
InfraBlue wrote:The assertion in question, however, is that these policies are authoritarian, let alone failures, and are not facts and logic, but merely politically partisan and ideological opinions.
The question of whether a policy meets a given definition of "authoritarian" is a factual matter.
A useful conversation on the matter should start out by reaching an agreement on a definition of "authoritarian".
InfraBlue wrote:Failure as defined through political partisanship and ideology are hardly facts and logic and are merely opinions.
The question of whether something meets a given definition of "failure" is a factual matter.
A useful conversation on the matter should start out by reaching an agreement on a definition of "failure".
