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Are we witnessing the death of american democracy?

kidwoo

kidwoo

Artisanal Tweet Curator
Aug 25, 2003
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SkaredShtles said:
Who is going to be the violence-instigators? The Golden Corral Militia?
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You already knew the answer.

www.seattletimes.com

1 person shot in Olympia during clashes between pro-Trump demonstrators and counterprotesters

The shooting came after a couple hours of on-and-off clashes during a rally in support of President Donald Trump. No information was immediately available on the shooting victim's condition.
www.seattletimes.com www.seattletimes.com

The previous saturday these chuds shot at someone (thankfully missed). More weeks ago in DC, three people were stabbed, happening again this weekend in DC....

It's officially instigated. It never really stopped since columbus landed to be honest.
 
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eric strt6

eric strt6

Resident Curmudgeon
Sep 8, 2001
24,839
15,941
directly above the center of the earth
The Unbearable Weakness of Trump’s Minions
Senator Josh Hawley isn’t just engaging in civic vandalism—he is an emblem of a weak and rotten Republican Party.


Those hoping for a quick snapback to sanity for the Republican Party once Donald Trump is no longer president should temper those hopes.
The latest piece of evidence to suggest the enduring power of Trumpian unreality is yesterday’s announcement by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri that he will object next week when Congress convenes to certify the Electoral College vote.

Hawley knows this effort will fail, just as every other effort to undo the results of the lawful presidential election will fail. (A brief reminder for those with faulty short-term memories: Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes.) Every single attempt to prove that the election was marked by fraud or that President-elect Biden’s win is illegitimate—an effort that now includes about 60 lawsuits—has flopped. In fact, what we’ve discovered since the November 3 election is that it was “the most secure in American history,” as election experts in Trump’s own administration have declared. But this immutable, eminently provable fact doesn’t deter Trump and many of his allies from trying to overturn the election; perversely, it seems to embolden them.

One such Trump ally is Tommy Tuberville, the newly elected senator from Alabama, who has suggested that he might challenge the Electoral College count. And there are others. But what makes Hawley’s declaration ominously noteworthy is that unlike Tuberville—a former college football coach who owes his political career in a deep-red state to Trump’s endorsement in the GOP primary against Jeff Sessions—Hawley is a man who clearly knows better. According to his Senate biography, he is “recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers.” A former state attorney general, Hawley has litigated before the Supreme Court. He graduated from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006. He has clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts; he taught at one of London’s elite private schools, St. Paul’s; and he served as an appellate litigator at one of the world’s biggest law firms.
Republicans are going down a dangerous road It is one thing for Hawley to position himself as a populist, something he had done even before he was elected in 2018; it is quite another for him to knowingly engage in civic vandalism and, in ostentatiously unpatriotic ways, undermine established norms and safeguards. This is precisely what Senator Hawley is now doing—and he is doing so in the aftermath of Trump’s loss, when some political observers might have hoped that the conspiracy mindset and general insanity of the Trump modus operandi would begin to lose their salience.

A longtime acquaintance of the Missouri senator explained to me Hawley’s actions this way: “Hawley never wants to talk down to his voters. He wants to speak for them, and at the moment, they are saying the election was stolen.”

“He surely knows this isn’t true,” this acquaintance continued, “and that the legal arguments don’t hold water. And yet clearly the incentives he confronts—as someone who wants to speak for those voters, and as someone with ambitions beyond the Senate—lead him to conclude he should pretend the lie is true. This is obviously a very bad sign about the direction of the GOP in the coming years.”
Think about this statement for a moment: The incentives Josh Hawley and many of his fellow Republicans officeholders confront lead them to conclude that they should pretend the lie is true.
Those who have hoped that Republicans like Senator Hawley would begin to break free from Trump once he lost the election have not understood the nature of the change that has come over the party’s base.

Trump was the product of deep, disturbing currents on the American right; he was not the creator of them. Those currents have existed for many decades; we saw them manifested in the popularity of figures such as Sarah Palin, Patrick J. Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, and many others. But their power grew in force and speed over the past decade. In 2016, Trump tapped into these currents and, as president and leader of the Republican Party, he channeled those populist passions destructively, rather than in the constructive ways that other Republicans before him, such as Ronald Reagan, had done. (Even if you’re a progressive who loathed Reagan, the notion that he was a pernicious and malicious force in American politics in the style of Trump is simply not credible.)
Tom Nichols: This Republican Party is not worth saving
What is happening in the GOP is that figures such as Hawley, along with many of his Senate and House colleagues, and important Republican players, including the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are all trying to position themselves as the heirs of Trump. None of them possesses the same sociopathic qualities as Trump, and their efforts will be less impulsive and presumably less clownish, more calculated and probably less conspiracy-minded. It may be that not all of them support Hawley’s stunt; perhaps some are even embarrassed by it. But these figures are seismographers; they are determined to act in ways that win the approval of the Republican Party’s base. And this goes to the heart of the danger.


The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe. I’m guessing that many of them haven’t read Nietzsche, but they have embraced his philosophy of perspectivism, which in its crudest form posits that there is no objective truth, no authoritative or independent criteria for determining what is true or false. In this view, we all get to make up our own facts and create our own narratives. Everything is conditioned on what your perspective is. This is exactly the sort of slippery epistemic nihilism for which conservatives have, for more than a generation, reproached the academic left—except the left comes by it more honestly.
The single most worrisome political fact in America right now is that a significant portion of the Republican Party lives in a fantasy world, a place where facts and truth don’t hold sway, where “owning the libs” is an end in itself, and where seceding from reality is a symbol of tribal loyalty, rather than a sign of mental illness. This is leading the party, and America itself, to places we’ve never been before, including the spectacle of a defeated president and his supporters engaging in a sustained effort to steal an election.

The tactics of Hawley and his many partisan confreres, if they aren’t checked and challenged, will put at risk what the scholar Stephen L. Carter calls “the entire project of Enlightenment democracy.” This doesn’t seem to bother Hawley and many in his party. But what he should know—and, one hopes, does know, somewhere in the recesses of his heart—is that he has moved very far away from conservatism.
Read: The Republican plan for the next four years isn’t normal
Whether the Republican Party can be salvaged is very much an open question. I don’t know the answer. But here is what I do know: Patriotic Republicans and conservatives need to fight for the soul of the Republican Party, for its sake and for the sake of the nation. America needs two healthy and sane political parties. Trump’s departure on January 20 should open up space for at least a few brave and responsible figures to arise, to help ground the GOP in truth rather than falsehoods, reality instead of fantasy, and to use the instruments of power for the pursuit of justice.

Their task won’t be easy; right now the political winds are in their face rather than at their back. Trump’s hold on the GOP remains firm, and separating from Trump and Trumpism will trigger hostility in an often angry and radicalized base. The right-wing ecosystem is in a mood to find and (figuratively) hang traitors, whom it defines as anyone in the Republican Party who doesn’t acquiesce to Trump’s indecency and paranoia. Which in turn means that those hoping to lead a Republican reclamation project need to find ways to be shrewd and persuasive, to be crafty while maintaining their integrity. They need to connect with the base but find ways to elevate it instead of pandering to it. In better times, many Republican leaders have done so, starting of course with Abraham Lincoln, “the great hero of America’s struggle for the noblest cause,” in the words of his early 20th-century biographer Lord Charnwood. But others have done so as well.
Our collective hope should be that principled Republicans will find their voice and prevail—one courageous step at a time, one act of decency at a time, one year at a time.


PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues,
 
Sandro

Sandro

Terrified of Cucumbers
Nov 12, 2006
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Found out I need to cancel some culture as Iced Earth's Jon Schaffer was part of the mob that took a tour of the Capitol while Ariel Pink attended Trump's rally beforehand.

Edit: Great, John Maus was at the rally too. I knew he was a nut job, but not that kind of nut job.
 
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Jm_

Jm_

sled dog's bollocks
Jan 14, 2002
20,651
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Sandro said:
Found out I need to cancel some culture as Iced Earth's Jon Schaffer was part of the mob that took a tour of the Capitol while Ariel Pink attended Trump's rally beforehand.

Edit: Great, John Maus was at the rally too. I knew he was a nut job, but not that kind of nut job.
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There's a lot of nutjobs out there. Mustaine is nuttier than a squirrel in an almond grove. I don't stop listening to classic Megadeth because of that though.
 
Sandro

Sandro

Terrified of Cucumbers
Nov 12, 2006
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Jm_ said:
There's a lot of nutjobs out there. Mustaine is nuttier than a squirrel in an almond grove. I don't stop listening to classic Megadeth because of that though.
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I have no problems with Mustaine style craziness and I was totally fine with Maus' nutty professor persona. But attending Trump rallies is a pretty surefire indicator of being a total asshole. I mean most artists are and lots have supported questionable political causes, but something really irks me about this. Maybe I'm just shocked that there were more psychedelic pop than country acts at this rally.
 
Pesqueeb

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
42,799
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jimmydean

jimmydean

The Official Meat of Ridemonkey
Sep 10, 2001
43,811
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Pesqueeb said:
Yo @jimmydean, get a handle on your peeps!

www.oregonlive.com

Video clearly shows Rep. Mike Nearman helping right-wing demonstrators breach Oregon Capitol

Security video obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive under a public records request clearly shows Rep. Mike Nearman, a Republican from Independence, open a door to the Capitol during a Dec. 21 special legislative session, allowing raucous demonstrators who were protesting immediately outside the...
www.oregonlive.com www.oregonlive.com
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Seriously, that's some shady shit right there. The fact there was a group there Wednesday isn't shocking, but that shit is uncalled for.
 
kidwoo

kidwoo

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Aug 25, 2003
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Squirtin ketchup n' mustard on charred flesh
slyfink said:
I wasnt sure where to post this, but this seems as good a place as any:

www.pbs.org

How the Iroquois Great Law of Peace Shaped U.S. Democracy

Season 2 of Native America is a groundbreaking portrait of contemporary Indian Country. Building on the success of the first season, this four-part Native…
www.pbs.org www.pbs.org
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"And then we all voted in a democratic manner to slaughter them all and ignore every single treaty we ever signed with the Iroquoi and every other tribe from there on out. And since it was democracy it was obviously good!"
 
slyfink

slyfink

Turbo Monkey
Sep 16, 2008
9,915
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kidwoo said:
"And then we all voted in a democratic manner to slaughter them all and ignore every single treaty we ever signed with the Iroquoi and every other tribe from there on out. And since it was democracy it was obviously good!"
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I know right?! They gave us maple syrup, corn, and democracy. We gave them them death, starvation, disease, and discrimination. how pathetic are we...

I work for the Federal government here in Canada. Our current government is making an honest effort at truth and reconciliation. But seeing how institutionalized the inertia is, how deeply rooted the prejudice is, down to the processes that underpin the institutions... it's an uphill battle. One that each public servant has to take on on their own. It helps to have leaders that believe in it, model good behaviour, and try and take on the task, but that sentiment is not (yet) prevalent. There's still lots of work to do.
 
DaveW

DaveW

Space Monkey
Jul 2, 2001
11,835
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The bunker at parliament
slyfink said:
I know right?! They gave us maple syrup, corn, and democracy. We gave them them death, starvation, disease, and discrimination. how pathetic are we...
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And oh the tears of rage & despair when Trump pretty much tried to do the same to them in turn.
Where's Syndasti when you need him for an irony check. :(
 
Jm_

Jm_

sled dog's bollocks
Jan 14, 2002
20,651
11,152
AK
Sandro said:
Found out I need to cancel some culture as Iced Earth's Jon Schaffer was part of the mob that took a tour of the Capitol while Ariel Pink attended Trump's rally beforehand.

Edit: Great, John Maus was at the rally too. I knew he was a nut job, but not that kind of nut job.
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You are also missing the fact that A, those guys were from Florida originally and B, Matt Barlow was so taken with 911 that he became a cop.
 
Inclag

Inclag

Turbo Monkey
Sep 9, 2001
2,788
475
MA
kidwoo said:
whites only

www.ajc.com

Georgia representative arrested after governor signs elections bill

Georgia Capitol police arrested state Rep. Park Cannon as Gov. Brian Kemp was announcing he had signed an elections bill into law on Thursday.
www.ajc.com www.ajc.com
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Fuck Brian Kemp.

It would be rich to see the backfire..... Given what happened in Georgia these past 4 years I wouldn't put it past Stacey Abrams and Killer Mike go into activist mode once again and engage the majority to register for ID's and coordinate in a response. Meanwhile the privledged minority continues to be lazy and arrogant resulting in the voting gap only widening....
 
Adventurous

Adventurous

Starshine Bro
Mar 19, 2014
11,070
10,358
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Inclag said:
Fuck Brian Kemp.

It would be rich to see the backfire..... Given what happened in Georgia these past 4 years I wouldn't put it past Stacey Abrams and Killer Mike go into activist mode once again and engage the majority to register for ID's and coordinate in a response. Meanwhile the privledged minority continues to be lazy and arrogant resulting in the voting gap only widening....
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x2. Having someone arrested for "knocking and interrupting" is pathetic. Find some fucking courage and respect.

And I hope they do. The response to the problem of, why do we keep losing despite having rigged the odds in our favor should never be, we should rig it some more! It should be, how do we appeal to a broader cross section of our constituents while also encouraging those constituents to make their voices heard. But I suppose that isn't and never has been the point.
 
kidwoo

kidwoo

Artisanal Tweet Curator
Aug 25, 2003
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Squirtin ketchup n' mustard on charred flesh
Probublica did another awesome (you should read it, it's good), and then shared with the class.

www.propublica.org

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
www.propublica.org www.propublica.org


And rather than actually look into some of the issues raised........the IRS does this :rofl:

www.wsj.com

IRS Is Investigating Release of Tax Information of Wealthy Americans

The commissioner of the IRS told lawmakers that it is looking into how the tax and income details on Jeff Bezos and others were released. ProPublica published the information.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com


couldn't decide whether to post this here or the religious psychosis thread because at this point, undying loyalty to unfettered capitalism is absolutely another dipshit religion, complete with its own gods. bUt lAwS n stuff :rofl:
 
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Adventurous

Adventurous

Starshine Bro
Mar 19, 2014
11,070
10,358
Crawlorado
kidwoo said:
Probublica did another awesome (you should read it, it's good), and then shared with the class.

www.propublica.org

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
www.propublica.org www.propublica.org


And rather than actually look into some of the issues raised........the IRS does this :rofl:

www.wsj.com

IRS Is Investigating Release of Tax Information of Wealthy Americans

The commissioner of the IRS told lawmakers that it is looking into how the tax and income details on Jeff Bezos and others were released. ProPublica published the information.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com


couldn't decide whether to post this here or the religious psychosis thread because at this point, undying loyalty to unfettered capitalism is absolutely another dipshit religion, complete with its own gods. bUt lAwS n stuff :rofl:
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The IRS response is almost as predictable as the people crowing that those named by ProPublica pay all taxes obligated by law and that they are smart to reduce their tax burden as much as possible.
 
rideit

rideit

Bob the Builder
Aug 24, 2004
25,390
12,982
In the cleavage of the Tetons
Hunh, tell us ‘woke’ people something that is not glaringly obvious...

www.newsweek.com

Allies Believe U.S. 'No Longer a Good Model of Democracy,' Poll Shows

A new survey spanning 16 nations and regions, most of them U.S. allies, has shown the country's global image rebounded after President Joe Biden succeeded former President Donald Trump, but not a single country believed the United States any longer constituted a good example for democracy.
www.newsweek.com www.newsweek.com
 
kidwoo

kidwoo

Artisanal Tweet Curator
Aug 25, 2003
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Squirtin ketchup n' mustard on charred flesh
eric strt6 said:
www.nytimes.com

Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Focused on Democrats in Congress (Published 2021)

The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Look. You've probably never heard of this but there was a guy named adolf, art school dork who had a thing for shorts and long socks who honestly thought he could rule germany one day. He even had all these weird street bullies, mostly boys, that were for some reason really proud of their german-ness, whiteness and bunch of other national bullshit. That was strange. But anyway, that dumbass tried to take over a part of austria by storming a beer hall, got arrested......and thankfully, the law and the order definitely did its thing and completely did what courts are supposed to do. Nobody believes me on this but if that hadn't happened and he hadn't been held to account for his outlandish (and pretty racist) shit, that could have led to some really bad things.

Thankfully our courts and justice system will fully, and completely take care of this little trump thing and make him and......."this" just a blip in history. Because we're a country of laws. And stuff.










:rofl:
 
jonKranked

jonKranked

Detective Dookie
Nov 10, 2005
89,787
27,937
media blackout
Breaking:

The DOJ Office of the Inspector General is initiating a review of DOJ's use of subpoenas and other legal authorities to obtain communication records of Members of Congress and affiliated persons.
 
mykel

mykel

closer to Periwinkle
Apr 19, 2013
5,663
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sw ontario canada
Not sure if right thread, but close enough.

In Florida, now that they have the mow down a protester law....

Who wins if a driver "fleeing for their safety" mows down a few people and somebody in the vehicles path pulls a stand your ground and shoots the driver?

Just a curious thought I had when reading about the ability to mow down protesters.
 
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