06-19-2020, 10:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-19-2020, 10:55 PM by Eric the Green.)
(06-19-2020, 09:28 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I was doing my usual Rachel news dump, and it seems Trump is not holding back.
The head of the US broadcast agencies such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, etc... has just seen to the retirement of the two permanent heads of the agencies and fired the boards of all the various channels. These had been traditionally non partisan positions, kept well balanced between the two party's people, but far more into chasing America's perspective rather than any party. If in the impeachment we caught a glimpse of the non partisan deep state's loyalty to America first and party a distant second, the tradition in the broadcast circle of the US Government has been if anything deeper.
We will have to watch, but it looks like Trump is pulling the pros and replacing them with partisans. If Fox occasionally bucks up against Trump, he is looking for a media force he can truly control and is displacing the existing bi partisan tradition in the process.
In another move, he seems to be going after the prosecutors chasing down international business irregularities in New York. Again, he is ignoring a tradition that only people who grew up in the office step up to take over, and has appointed a partisan to take over, including some particular investigations into a dictator he likes.
Summary? If Trump is starting to recognize that the polls have him as the underdog in the upcoming election, he is pulling the stops and being more Trump like than Trump. If there are reasons he is becoming unpopular, he is not learning from them, but exaggerating them. He is converting parts of the government that served America and trying to arrange for them to serve Trump.
It seems counterproductive to me, but it looks like he is going all in with being himself.
Boy, if he wins he'll set himself up with his own propaganda ministry, even if he hasn't converted the armed forces into his private army yet.
It is a scary thought if he should win. Despite my enthusiasm about turning 8 Lichtman Keys against him, the election is still uncertain. There are the horoscope indicators that remain ambiguous, which means in my capacity as a crystal ball prognosticator I have to remain neutral and rely on other sources.
Mr. Lichtman has not officially turned any more than 4 Keys against him, even though he says the outlook is getting worse for the incumbent. He still marks Key 7 as True, meaning he still thinks Trump has accomplished major policy changes. I don't see this to be the case, because I don't think they are major legal changes or that the people will vote for him because of them, but a case can be made for this Key to favor Trump. He marks the economic Keys 5 and 6 and the social unrest Key 8 as undecided and probably going to turn against him.
Meanwhile Biden is currently increasing his national popular vote lead to almost 9 points, and Trump's job approval is in a 12+ point hole. But even Lichtman, it seems, considers his Keys as indicating primarily the popular vote (which means the Keys were actually wrong in 2016), and we know how much of an advantage Trump has in the outdated electoral college. And the polls in those swing states are still only +Biden about 4 or 5 points on average, with some of the polls at times down to 1 or 2 points. So that's a long way from Biden sewing up the election.
If Trump wins, his war on the environment will cross a point of no return, and his destruction of impartial "deep state" federal service agencies and conversion of them into Trump Organization annexes will be complete. He will appoint still more reactionary judges, so that eventually he'll have enough for the Courts to approve whatever he wishes. This election is a matter of life and death for the Republic. I have never said a Trump victory in 2020 is the absolute end though, if congress takes over defacto during his 2nd term and tosses him out. But there will be no exaggerating the challenge.
I only hope that the every-20-year conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is a sign in the heavens of reaching a cross-over point, because it happens at the cusp of and entry into progressive and congressional sign Aquarius. This conjunction has meant the party-in-power lost 7 out of 11 times, and a long series of presidents dying in office. Saturn has been testing the waters in Aquarius since the big 4-outer-planet conjunction in late March, and we've seen what a powerful correspondence this has been to the ramping up of crisis and progressive change already. And we're just peaking over the threshold now. We will cross over in a more permanent way in December, just after the election, when the conjunction happens. And meanwhile, aggressive energies and possibly the spiral of violence could be getting tighter in the many months between now and early 2021, with Mars in Aries (as in Pearl Harbor 4T times, for example). So, we'll see just what kind of threshold we cross then. But, a threshold it will be.