Kyrsten Synema (D - Az) brings a cake into the Senate to downvote min. wage hike

[pbrower2a]

(04-19-2021, 12:39 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-18-2021, 10:42 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(04-18-2021, 08:53 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-17-2021, 10:50 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: You ignore that no single tradition defines America. Many different traditions have validity in America, and if you do not recognize this, then you do not fully understand America. 

There is plenty to despise about Donald Trump: his marital infidelity, his bigotry against many identifiable groups (including the handicapped), his sleazy history as a businessman, his suspect loyalty to America when Russia offered him more, his disdain for old decencies that make democracy work in America... were it not for his wealth, his business practices would have gotten him a prison term if he were not wise enough to allow his dreams to match what is allowed to people. 

The more that I saw of the Trump administration and of the personality behind it the more I despised and dreaded it. You saw the stunt in which he had unidentifiable forces attacking protesters so that he could carry a Bible (that he neither heeds nor reads) in front of a church that he does not attend and show the most pitiable display of fake devotion that I have ever seen. I look at the personality cult and I see a dictator. I look at the vans in Portland and Seattle that had Trump banners and a US flag that took away protesters, which is how a secret police operates. I mocked that inchoate secret police as "Trump-Trump Macoutes" after the brutal secret of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. I do not mock the Haitian people who deserve far better than that. 

In the end we had a President who denied his manifest defeat and sought to set aside electoral results that he disliked -- with people willing to use force and violence. In the end, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made clear that Joe Biden had won the election and would become President on January 20, 2021. They needed say no more and needed explain nothing.



Joe Biden may not be one of those people who runs on a law-and-order stance, but that's not to say that he needs to.

Germany was a democracy before Hitler and the Nazi party were duly elected and sworn in and changed the rules/laws and took control over the country. A prime example of democratic socialism being used as means to gain control over a country. The most recent example of it being used for the same purposeis Venezuela. We ain't dumb or needy or naive or deaf and blind. So, of the 80 million who voted for Biden to save them from something, how many million are either dumb, impressionable or naive? How many are cream puffs who fear violence who don't have the courage to defend themselves or the heart to hurt anyone? How many are potheads who have little to no interest in working like Rags? How many have a mental illness of some sort that requires medicine for them to functions?

German democracy was shaky. Germany had no responsible conservative party. The significant German National People's Party was far-right, and irresponsible. From Wikipedia:

Quote: In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, journalist and historian William Shirer wrote that the DNVP's status as a far-right party rather than a mainstream conservative party was one of the main reasons for the Weimar Republic's downfall. In Shirer's view, the DNVP's refusal to "take a responsible position either in the government or in the opposition" during most of Weimar's existence denied Weimar "that stability provided in many other countries by a truly conservative party."[209] Along similar lines, conservative British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote about in his book The Nemesis of Power about the DNVP the following:

Quote:Had the German Conservatives reconciled themselves to the Republic—bringing to it that wealth of experience and knowledge which they had accumulated in the past, and performing those invaluable services which are always fulfilled in the government of any country by an able constitutional Opposition, ready to take office should the occasion arise—they would have conferred a considerable benefit not only upon Germany—to whom they would have given that which she had so long lacked, a genuine Conservative Party—but also upon the cause of Conservatism throughout the world. They did not do this. Under the cloak of loyalty to the Monarchy, they either held aloof or sabotaged the efforts of successive Chancellors to give a stable government to the Republic. The truth is that after 1918 many German Nationalists were more influenced by feelings of disloyalty to the Republic than of loyalty to the Kaiser, and it was this motive which led them to make their fatal contribution to bringing Hitler to power. The sequel is to be found in the long list of noble names among those executed after the Putsch of July 20, 1944, when many expiated upon the scaffold the sins which they or their fathers had committed a generation earlier.[210]

Hitler quickly suppressed the Social Democrats, his main opposition in 1933. Hitler used the word "socialism", but he even called himself a democrat -- a "real" Democrat unlike one of those Jewish-influenced or even Jewish democrats like FDR  (whom Hitler thought was Jewish). 


There was no alternative, and no way in which to say "no". That is little different from how things are done in North Korea today. 


Just because the ballot reads "Reichstag for Freedom and Peace" foes not mean that Germany was in any way free, and that peace and war were strictly the choice of the Fuehrer. The Nazi Party claimed to be Socialist, which like much else about the Party, its leadership, and its agenda were enormous lies. German workers would soon be serfs to their employers, unable to quit their jobs without the consent of their employers. Such was the arrangement between feudal lords and their peasants in the late middle ages.  Nazi Germany was socialist only in nationalizing property of Jews -- basically the "socialism of thieves".

Don't ask me to defend Hugo Chavez or his successor Nicolas Maduro. Chavez slowly degraded democracy in Venezuela and Maduro has kept the screws tight.  

...81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden in a way that got him 306 electoral votes, which is how he became President. Many of those voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but you didn't see them challenging the election even though she lost the Electoral College despite getting a plurality of the vote. Nobody can credibly accuse Donald Trump of winning through fraud, either his or that of someone else, so we were stuck with him. Claims that Trump got cheated in 2020 are shakier than those in which might have been used against the Trump election of 2016 (there were allegations of Trump getting help from his friends in Russia, but that can't quite be proven -- and it is too late to do anything about that. 

You can fault people for voting for someone other than Donald Trump for reasons that you consider specious. This said, President Trump did much to degrade American democracy, and enough people saw the danger of that in 2020. His attempted self-coup on January 6 demonstrates his contempt for Constitutional norms, in that he is much more like Hugo Chavez than you might want to believe, except that Chavez degraded Venezuelan democracy more slowly and effectively

Down with Donald Trump and Nicolas Maduro alike!

Actually, the Democrats were guilty of degrading democracy as you say.  It was the Democrats who got away with breaking the law by changing election laws with the use of lower level/local courts.  I don't expect a lowly partisan hack like yourself to be honest enough to admit it or view it as wrong/illegal or understand the consequences of going along and making excuses for them doing that shit. You are more of a Democrat than an American at this point and I don't see that changing as long as your alive.  Me, I tend to go by what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I lowered my standards by quite a bit to even up the playing field so to speak. I have no problem with the Republican party doing the same thing.

Electoral rules were changed to accommodate the reality of a dangerous epidemic. Due to COVID-19, voting in person, like any mass meeting, could have become a spreader event. Early, absentee, and by-mail voting (the line between the three is hazy, but the controls against multiple voting  were still in place. State legislatures and the courts approved of the changes for 2020. 

If more people voted than usual... then at the lest there were portents, including the unusually-heavy voting in a midterm election in 2018.

Crookedness? It has never been more difficult to cast a dishonest vote or to invalidate  the votes of a disqualified voter. Someone who cast a vote on September 25 and died on October 25 was likely to have his absentee ballot disqualified due to death. My county clerk reads the obituaries, and someone who dies is automatically removed from the voter rolls. I asked about that with my deceased parents.

Results were slightly better than expected for the GOP. Polling just before the election suggested a D landslide, but the election proved close. You do not have a case on that. I saw the vote totals come in, and in general in the five states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and two other states that were close -- Nevada and North Carolina) a pattern emerged based on the order in which the votes were counted:  the rural votes that could be counted early and were strongly R were counted early and gave early advantages to Donald Trump. Urban and many suburban votes that could not be counted quickly were announced only upon completion of the count in precinct. In-person votes were counted first and posted as public results. Absentee votes which were typically cast earlier and were heavily D were counted later. In North Carolina the urban vote that came in late was not enough to give the state's electoral votes to Donald Trump. In the other close states, figures of the news media recognized that the last votes to be counted would be those from  Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. The votes from those cities had their usual results, and those overpowered what had been narrow Trump advantages in the early count.  

The order in which votes are counted reflects reality and state law. That the votes that get counted last go a way that you dislike them going (and, yes, Trump had an early lead in Minnesota, too  but that also vanished as the votes came in from the Twin Cities) does not disqualify them. 

America is changing, perhaps into something uncomfortable to you. Maybe you need to get out and about more. America is becoming less Anglo, white, and Protestant.