When John Adams is having a discussion with Thomas Paine, you know you’re on the right site.
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The lazy lefties who dismiss your concerns are the children of Neville Chamberlain, deluded fools who see the world as they wish it were. And we all know where that got us.
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China is an authoritarian dictatorship with a managed economy that arguably is quite productive. If we are unfortunate enough to fall into a quasi fascist GOP ruled authoritarian state, to be honest, by the nature of the beast, I can’t see them managing buggerall. I think it would be a misfeasant kleptocracy of the very worst kind and would collapse in quick order.
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Fun fact - nearly all the founders loathed Paine because he was a true pain in the ass. Never knew when to back off or accept a compromise. He was a fanatic who gave the rest of them a migraine…
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…. and not dental flossing.
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Aided and abetted by the evils of social media disinformation bubbles. Everyone likes to blame Fox News as a culprit, but without Facebook and Twitter it wouldn’t be nearly this bad.
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Oooooh epiphany! You mean elections depend on who manages to get more supporters to show up and vote? Who’d a thunk!?!?!? Reading shit like that makes me so crazy I worry I’ll snap and end up found under an overpass somewhere naked and writing pidgin poems in my own feces.
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I don’t blame Garland. IBM says “the system is the solution” but in Garland’s world, the system is a problem. That “system” is a relic of medieval European monarchy complete with it’s own jiggery-pokery Latin liturgy and black robed cos play encumbered by precedent where the dead rule the living. Those features of our moribund “system” need to go the way of the buggy whip.
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That only cures anal warts, silly. Don’t ask me why. Or, rather, Moscow Mitch.
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I’m really glad he is putting it in the context of democracies that include more than just ours. We keep looking at this under a microscope and we’re missing the currents that are shaking democracies all over the western alliance. I’m glad to see this conference on it.
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“Fustest with the mostest.”
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The Founders’ Socrates.
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Switzerland adopted a constitution based on the US constitution in 1848. It reformed its upper-house body in the 1990s to correct for the imbalance in representativeness. The US, in contrast, continues to slog it out with the Great Compromise of 1787 that gives every state two senators, even in eras when state-creation has gone stale. The sputtering out of American expansion puts 340 million citizens at the legislative whims of 100 people, or 41 if you count the filibuster. 37 states have below-median populations, with 7 having populations of less than 1 million (e.g. a suburb of Los Angeles). Without more states, the natural mechanism for correcting this disparity, the Senate is increasingly toxic to democracy. A great example was the tanking of Saule Omarova. It cemented the notion that cowards are easy to find on both sides of the aisle in the Senate.
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Let’s look right here at TPM. Their fixation on Trump “porn” in a quest to get clicks is indicative of the problem. Competency and decency don’t sell, outsized coverage of the despicable does.
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“But we’ve been doing it that way for 240 years!!”
“Yeah, and you’ve been doing it wrong for 240 years!!”
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Typical Hill blather. You turn off an economy and turn it back on and you get a V-shaped recession and recovery. Longer term, you have about 10% of the service sector displaced, with automation, robot and AI playing significant roles. A century from now, that will be the historic event.
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If our democracy is on the decline, it’s important to give credit where credit is due:
“Now Brandon! Now Bannon! Now Mitchell McConnell!
On Cotton! On Hawley! On Kevin McCarthy!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”
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I think everything is weird.
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That should be Alan Abramowitz.
Dershowitz is still trying to convince folks he kept his tighty-whities on.
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I’ve given him a year, but we’re near the end of said year. I also think that the 1-6 Commission is putting the DOJ to shame a bit because they’ve come up with an incredible amount of evidence in a very short period of time and are able to piece together a narrative.
A lot of legal experts are big on process and on building a case to sustain a burden of proof, but seem to forget context. The decision to bring a case is necessarily a judgment call. There are many fact patterns on successful obstruction cases which have less hard evidence of corrupt intent than what we’ve seen in the Trump matter(s) re: the Russia probe (and evidence on other matters like the UKR impeachment and the insurrection) yet prosecutors will still claim it’s a tough case. Well, if you don’t go to trial, then you’ve rewritten the standard and told folks that if you’re wealthy, well connected and know how to find loopholes, the system will back off. Fear of losing at trial outweighs anything else in their minds. In my view, losing at trial is fine. It puts something into the case law that becomes a precedent to limit or strengthen based on reflection and adjustments. Did we benefit from the Arbery murder trial and the Rittenhouse trial even though the risk of losing was reasonably high in each case? Yes. We have precedent. We can distinguish the cases. We can tell what looks like strong precedent and what will be limited. We can address the impact of a judge’s conduct on politically sensitive trials. Not taking a matter (or matters) as serious as this (or these) gives political crimes a pass. That shouldn’t be the case in a functional democracy. A functional democracy doesn’t leave it all up to the voters to punish those who commit political crimes. A functional democracy should put those who commit political crimes on trial.
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