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xtruss · 1 year

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West's Nord Stream Media Psy-Op to Fall Apart at Seams if Hersh's Source Decides to Speak Out

The Biden administration is trying to push back against Seymour Hersh's Nord Stream bombshell through its subservient mainstream media, but a ridiculous tale about two divers blasting the pipeline is failing the apparent damage-control operation, international experts told Sputnik.

"The new narrative that a handful of civilians blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on their own is on its face ridiculous," Hans Mahncke, a US investigative journalist and lawyer, told Sputnik. "I assume The New York Times realized how preposterous this tale is, which is why they left out all the details."

"Zeit however did print the details and they are beyond absurd. We are supposed to believe that someone rented a private boat, sailed to the heavily monitored Nord Stream site, and then had two lonely divers carry out the extremely sophisticated operation. What is more, these divers are said to have operated at 100m depth, which is beyond the limit of most technical divers. To top it off, Zeit also claims that after this motley crew of private citizens pulled off the crime of the century, they forgot to clean the boat," the US lawyer continued.

On March 7, The New York Times and Die Zeit released two separate articles claiming that international investigators had managed to trace the September 26, 2022 sabotage attack to a "pro-Ukrainian" group unaffiliated with either Kiev or Moscow. In early September 2022, the purported gang of six, which included one woman and five men, sailed a yacht to the area over Gazprom's pipelines and attached explosives to them. The media outlets said that there are still many unknowns pertaining to the story, adding that the authorities are not disclosing the nature of the new intelligence or its specifics.

"My first thought was: Here we (they) go with an attempt at distracting people away from Hersh's story and from the truth. Another psyops has started," Norwegian investigative journalist and intelligence veteran Geir Furuseth told Sputnik.

Furuseth does not rule out that the release of the two articles was intentionally scheduled for a day ahead of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh's weekly Substack publications related to the Nord Stream sabotage. "It could very well be, but I think it would have appeared anyway," the Norwegian intelligence veteran said.

"The timing of The New York Times and Zeit stories could be connected to a number of ongoing issues," echoed Mahncke. "It could be a deflection from Biden's domestic problems, such as the new revelations about the January 6 protests. It could be that Biden is preparing the ground for uncoupling himself from [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, by ultimately blaming him for the sabotage. In my view, the most likely explanation is that Biden is trying to push back against Hersh and this ridiculous tale about the two divers is all they could come up with."

Indeed, it took a staggering four weeks for the US mainstream media to come up with some sort of an alternative to Hersh's story following months-long silence of the European authorities, which have been conducting their own Nord Stream inquiries since at least October 2022. And still the two mainstream reports appear to be great cry and little wool, according to Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist.

"Against a famed, living legend, Hersh's former employer – The New York Times – could only wait so long before trying to address his startling and certainly not debunked claims. Now they have and others will have to follow suit into dangerous territory," Ortel told Sputnik.

Hersh's Nord Stream Bombshell May Become Legal Nightmare for Team Biden & Its Nordic Allies! following the sabotage, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden kicked off separate inquiries into the attack. Sweden was reportedly the first to leave the planned joint investigation team; Denmark followed suit. Thus, Germany was left to investigate the matter on its own. (February 11, 2023)

Why hasn't Sweden or any other of the implicated governments made their investigations public? This secrecy undermines all western credibility! — Geir Furuseth, Norwegian investigative journalist and intelligence veteran. (February 11, 2023). Why Norway? "[NATO Secretary General] Stoltenberg is one reason. Another reason is the competence (excellence) of our Navy Special Forces," Norwegian investigative journalist and intelligence veteran Geir Furuseth told Sputnik.

"If Hersh's source is right – and we have no reason to doubt the source – the executive branch under Biden has unilaterally decided to wage war against Russia," the lawyer said. "Aside from the obvious folly of such a decision, there are many legal problems, such as failure to inform Congress or even the congressional Gang of Eight. It is ironic that the military service chiefs - who for many years considered it their primary job to keep [then-US President Donald] Trump under control, including having clandestine conversations with Chinese counterparts behind Trump's back - did not raise any alarms when Biden decided to blow up Nord Stream 2." (February 11, 2023)

"In 2016, Hersh explained to me that inside many governments there are always pitched battles when it comes to making decisions," continued Ortel. "In his career, Hersh has distinguished himself by bringing atrocities to light, while protecting his sources. Doing so using Substack, as he has, gave him the needed element of surprise as Hersh did not need to involve editors and others in the mainstream press, he just clicked a button on his Substack control panel and off his bombshell reporting went." (February 11, 2023)

"I suspect more revelations are coming that will connect dots concerning bipartisan corruption in service of the false god of unregulated globalism," Ortel pointed out. "The Biden administration has crises over trust, over competence and over decency. No one can puzzle through a disagreement rejecting facts or logic (…) The known facts about Biden family corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere are damning." (February 11, 2023)

"Plausible deniability may be a useful tool at times, but it doesn't work that well with credibility," the Norwegian journalist remarked. (February 11, 2023)

"Germany should be extremely upset with the US but won't say anything because Germany is effectively a vassal state which, like all western countries, is completely dependent on US security guarantees," the US investigative journalist said. "The reality is that the US is running the show among western countries. US contributions to Ukraine exceed those of other countries by a factor of 20 or more. So if the US decides to blow up the pipeline, everyone else will toe the line, irrespective of what their own views are." (February 11, 2023)

However, it appears that the Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter won't let the potential culprits off the hook. "You are assuming I am done reporting...not so," Hersh told Sputnik. (February 11, 2023)

Is Washington Ready to Throw Zelensky & Ukraine Under the Bus?

Remarkably, before tracing the blasts to Ukrainians on Tuesday, the NYT singled Kiev out as having a clear motive to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines on December 26, 2022. Having said that the pipelines "had no shortage of adversaries," the newspaper at the time quoted a 13-page letter to Poland written by Ukrainian regulators as part of a coordinated effort to stop Nord Stream 2 from coming online. The letter, obtained by the newspaper, claimed that Nord Stream 2 "will negatively impact on Ukraine’s national security."

The newspaper noted that Ukraine received an average of $1 billion a year in transit fees for Russia's pipelines heading to Europe through the country. Attacking the pipeline may have made financial sense for Ukraine, the newspaper claimed last December, adding that Kiev's capability to carry it out is "unclear."

On March 7, 2023 the NYT doubled down on chastising Ukraine. Despite mentioning that there is no evidence that Zelensky or his lieutenants ordered the attack, the media lamented the fact that Kiev is "not always transparent with their American counterparts about their military operations," which "have frustrated US officials."

Among the Ukrainian ops "unnerving" the White House, the newspaper cited a strike in early August on Russia’s Saki Air Base on the western coast of Crimea, a bombing attack on the Crimean Bridge, December drone strikes against Russian military bases in Ryazan and Engels, and an August car bomb that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. The newspaper particularly underlined that the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines took place five weeks after Dugina’s killing. Does this unusual ramble mean Washington is about to throw the Ukrainian leadership under the bus?

"I would say it may rather be a preparation for it. It could also be a subtle warning to the hard-liners in- and outside of the US," said Furuseth.

"Biden and the US establishment are too invested in Ukraine to ever throw Zelensky under the bus," argued Mahncke. "In fact, they helped create the image of Zelensky as the new Churchill. However, it is entirely possible and even likely that Biden is trying to create some distance to Zelensky so that defeats on the battlefield, out of control corruption, and other failures aren't directly attributable to Biden. Biden is effectively sending a message that Zelensky is doing his own things, outside of US command and control."

For his part, Ortel drew attention to the fact that "the US has no significant national interest in Ukraine of all possible places," so it may easily sacrifice it.

"[H]istorical tensions in Europe have already brought America into two horrible World Wars," the Wall Street analyst said. "While America has ties with many European nations and while there are deep reserves of friendship towards European peoples, at this time with open borders, rampant crime, failed schools and other vexing challenges, America should not be instigating dangerous conflict, in particular, for a nation such as Ukraine that stands credibly accused of improperly paying off the Biden family. In contrast, Donald Trump was impeached (but not convicted) for asking Zelensky to enforce anti-corruption laws that likely had ensnared Hunter Biden and his father by 2019."

Germans Need to Wake-Up

The release of the two reports, which were followed by Wall Street Journal and Der Spiegel pieces on March 8, came on the heels of European peace protests, which brought together over 50,000 in Berlin alone. German right-wing and left-wing politicians are calling on the government to kick off an investigation into Hersh's story, which alleges that Berlin's two NATO allies, the US and Norway, nixed the Nord Stream gas infrastructure.

However, Mahncke is not optimistic about the Germans' willingness to fight against the globalist establishment:

"The German public has been completely brainwashed about the situation in Ukraine," the US lawyer noted. "The nascent peace movement faces an uphill battle, far more so than in the US, where skepticism of the war is far more widespread, at least among the general public. For instance, the US public is beginning to understand that the ridiculous notion that Russia will attack a NATO country next is a fake narrative put forward to convince people to send weapons and money to Ukraine. Even Elon Musk, whose provision of Starlink services to Ukraine has been immensely important, has tweeted about no one is pushing this war more than Victoria Nuland."

At the same time, a looming recession, the unfolding energy crisisб and skyrocketing prices could force the Europeans to take a tougher stance towards the military adventurism of their respective governments, according to Ortel.

"In Germany in particular, losing inexpensive energy sources and also being forced into much higher military spending will create uniquely difficult choices for a nation with a dangerous history from which my own family left in 1853, hoping for opportunity which quickly materialized in a free America," the Wall Street analyst said. "If I were German today, I would demand to learn the whole truth on the Nord Stream attacks before committing one more euro in support of the Ukraine project and I would be prepared to dramatically adjust my relationships with foreign governments that may have attacked an important part of my energy infrastructure."

US Counter-Terror Expert Scott Bennett: US May Peddle Lies About Nord Stream Blast But Can't Escape Accountability! (March 09, 2023)

— “The technical requirements of such a mission essentially disqualify Ukraine and point to a few countries as responsible; and indeed the NATO vessels that were conducting drills in the area indicate are most likely the culprits," the counter-terror expert. (March 09, 2023)

— "The technical requirements of performing a deep sea diving mission are enormous in order for a diver to be sufficiently trained in the necessary mix of oxygen and other gases for deep sea operations in extremely cold water [and] is something only Navy frogmen can do, not volunteers from a Ukrainian group," said the former US State Department counter-terrorism analyst, ridiculing the assumption that six people on a yacht could conduct such a sophisticated mission. (March 09, 2023)

— "Clearly this is a feeble attempt to generate a highly imaginative narrative and is in reality simply a maneuver by the United States to escape the incoming investigation and exposure that Russia is demanding at the United Nations level," said Bennett. "It is interesting that this followed the visit of Germany’s leader Scholz and his meeting with Biden on March 3, 2023. (March 09, 2023)

— "The New York Times has been notorious as a CIA mouthpiece and no doubt has released this story in response to German [Chancellor Olaf] Scholz desperately crying to [US President Joe] Biden for help because he realizes the German people are very close to overthrowing him and the German government and abandoning the reckless self-destructive and indeed suicidal policies the United States has forced Germany to undertake against Russia, and indeed the entire European continent is about to explode into revolution and desperate measures as they realize half of the continent may freeze to death next winter without Russian gas and the United States is not coming to their aid. Indeed, the Europeans have at last seen the face of the gorgon and they are now turning to stone." (March 09, 2023)

Western Governments Know Pretty Well Who Blew up the Pipes

Meanwhile, the Western establishment's apparent hope that it could overshadow Hersh's narrative is likely to prove futile, according to Furuseth.

"Initially I think it did [distract the public], but judging by the way the Norwegian MSM have treated this story, I think it'll do the opposite!" the Norwegian investigative journalist remarked. "If you start talking about 'another theory,' even poor journalists will have to at least mention Hersh's story. That will at least make the more awake segments of the public, so long kept in the dark by their keepers in the MSM, think again. Maybe even some of them will start reading Hersh's stories now."

Furthermore, the US has a long record of false flags, subversive ops, and disinformation operations – something once summarized by ex-CIA Director Mike Pompeo in his famous line: "We lied, we cheated, we stole." Against this backdrop, Hersh's story appears to be one deserving close attention, according to Ortel.

"Hersh's claims that actors in the US and Norway governments, possibly in league with UK and other government actors opened a path hurtling towards military conflict with Russia certainly seems plausible to me, having learned of the Tonkin incident Hersh covered in a later piece and considering how Libya was bombed and Gaddafi was killed. In the latter case, we must remember that Biden was vice president then, that Hillary Clinton has still not explained the wider context of what happened September 11, 2012 [during the Benghazi embassy attack – Sputnik], and that many Obama alumni are centrally pulling strings for Biden against Russia."

On top of this, one needs to bear in mind, that there is no interest among US or EU leaders to investigate anything, Mahncke pointed out: "They know the truth already and are merely trying to maintain the appearance of an impasse, making it look as if we'll never find out who did it," he said. "Western narratives about the Nord Stream bombing are simply part of the propaganda war."

Hersh's Latest Piece: One Would Go to Prison to Stop War

The day after the US and German newspapers broke their story, Hersh released his op-ed "My Fifty Years With Dan Ellsberg" on Substack. The story had no direct relation to Nord Stream, but described a story of former United States military analyst Daniel Ellsberg who in 1971 leaked portions of a classified 7,000-page report that detailed the history of US intervention in Indochina from World War II until 1968.

The Pentagon Papers leak appeared to axe the publicly stated justification for the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg was unmasked and brought to the US attorney’s office in Boston, where a journalist asked him what he thought about going to prison. Hersh quoted the military analyst as answering: "Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?"

Ortel does not rule out that this story sends a sort of a veiled message to the NYT, Zeit, and their government backers that Hersh's source may start talking publicly if the ongoing US proxy war on Russia gets tougher.

"I suspect further that Hersh may have multiple sources," said Ortel. "Moreover, it is likely that numerous Biden 'loyalists' are losing their stomachs for supporting him or Kamala in 2024. So, as the geopolitical and economic landscapes continue to darken more, I believe Democrat and globalist puppeteers may throw Biden-Harris under the bus to hope for better results in November 2024. In all this, Hersh in 2024 may prove more successful than Ellsberg was in 1972."

— Ekaterina Blinova | March 10, 2023

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cancerjupiter · 3 years

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🌱earth moons🌱

Those with earthy Moons react in a very grounded, matter-of-fact way. The reaction may be so self-contained in those with Taurus or Capricorn Moon, in fact, that others may wonder if there has been any reaction. Those with Virgo Moon, on the other hand, react rather quickly, mentally, and sometimes nervously to any stimulus in a way obvious to everyone, even if the person is trying to contain his or her emotional reaction. Just like the earth itself, those with an Earth Moon have a crust over their emotional reactions; and they prefer to present a certain form to the public rather than to reveal their vulnerabilities.

taurus moon

The Moon is extraordinarily happy in the comfortable, stable sign of Taurus, for the emotions are steady and the person has little self-doubt. Those with the Moon in Taurus are not easily perturbed, even by powerful attacks or shocking events that would strongly affect others. They are in fact amazingly resilient, bouncing back from any defeat, disappointment, or trauma. Perfect examples are politicians Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, and celebrities Demi Lovato and Lindsay Lohan; who, despite unmerciful attacks, still manage to have their shit together and maintain at least some degree of popularity.

The poise with which Taurus Moon people face life’s demands and unpredictability is remarkable, and they therefore have a steadying influence on others, who appreciatively value their reliability. Note that I said “reliability,” not necessarily readiness! This sign is known for being the slowest in the zodiac, moving actively only when they are good and ready and insisting on their own pace in everything they do in life. Their inner contentment and resistance to change can thus make them frustrating to deal with if their considerable stubbornness causes them to dig in their heels to resist what you want. The other side of the coin is their remarkable persistence when they are focused on attaining a certain goal.

Those with Taurus Moon are attuned to the rhythms of nature and the earth, and this gives them their particular pace of life and much of their strength. They are notably physical and sensual, and have a great need for the “pleasures of life.” And they insist on taking the time to enjoy them. This unique attunement leads to a trust in earthly life that enables them to accept others with few demands and to take life as it comes. They are pleased with life (generally) and rather pleased with themselves. This can of course result in smugness, conceited self-satisfaction, and self-indulgent laziness. As Grant Lewi wrote, the key to improving oneself for Taurus Moon is to “turn self-satisfaction into active self-confidence”.

Emotionally, those with this Moon sign are not at all cold, but neither do they readily reveal their feelings. They are good listeners and are usually warmly responsive and solidly supportive, but not gushingly effusive. They really prefer not to allow anything to affect them. Some comments from questionnaire responses add additional perspectives to this lunar type:

1. “Seems very positive, giving men good relationships with women. It also appears to give talent in crafts such as cooking and other home arts.”

2. “ … sensual, heightened sense of material/physical aesthetics (e.g., clothing, home, colors, etc.), wonderful sense of humor, stubborn, and sometimes impervious to what’s going on beneath the surface of things.”

People with the Moon in Taurus like to be touched, especially to be hugged. Also, I’ve noticed a certain resistance to change. This resistance ranges (in different people) between a reluctance to accept the moods of another and a reluctance to allow any out-of-the-ordinary spontaneity to enter their life (usually hate surprises).

virgo moon

Those with Virgo Moon need a sense of order in their own minds and in the environment to feel comfortable and secure. This leads to their instinctive analytical reaction to all life experience, sorting their perceptions and thoughts into categories and discriminating between them according to their personal principles or prejudices. This need for order also motivates their obsession with neatness and cleanliness. They likewise feel more secure by making definite improvements in their environment, in their scientific, artistic, or intellectual pursuits, or—something not always appreciated with this sign—in other people. In fact, as one woman wrote in a questionnaire, “Sometimes they can be busybodies, putting others’ lives in order with advice—usually not so tactful. They’re so busy organizing friends’ lives that they forget about their own”. This “workaholic” tendency can also manifest as a broad range of criticism from afar directed even at total strangers who, evidently, just don’t measure up to the Virgo level of perfection.

Being helpful makes them feel better about themselves and aids them in overcoming their habitual self-doubt and sense of personal imperfection. In fact, “perfectionism” is a keyword for Virgo, and their unavoidable awareness of their own imperfections leads often to excessive self-consciousness, sometimes of a type so severe as to render them unable to use their genuine gifts with any confidence. Their tendency to notice the imperfections of others, and to voice those observations far too often, frequently makes the other person feel uncomfortably and unproductively self-conscious. Those with Virgo Moon would do better to heed their deep need to serve and to help others or improve things in the outer world. By doing so, they can eventually gain a sense of having improved themselves—at least in the modest way they will allow themselves to acknowledge. Virgo is the most modest sign in the zodiac—one of the few, in fact. Virgo Moon people can seem shy and reserved.

Habitually nervous types with a tendency to worry, Virgo Moon people often find their personal tranquility and self-validation in work and compulsive “busyness.” Work also provides an escape from the unpleasant emotions or depressing feelings of guilt or worthlessness that so often afflict those with this Moon position. But, because emotions interfere with productivity, as Donna Cunningham points out in Moon Signs, they are conveniently put aside or suppressed in the routine of daily life. Hence, Virgo Moons are among the few people who love all kinds of petty, boring activities — even housework. A friend with this placement even admitted to dreaming about being a mother/grandmother, so she could do chores and serve her family all day (of course, she’s also a Cancer Rising).

Doubt and skepticism pervade their mode of thinking and reacting, and of course there is always something to criticize in any person, place, thing, or concept. The infinitely small is always available as a target! This constant mental tension and the sensitivity of their nervous system, and their hyper-attunement to hygiene and purity, make these folks fascinated by and eager for involvement in the areas of nutrition, biological sciences, natural therapies, the healing arts, and/or the medical professions. This natural affinity also, however, bends them toward hypochondria, at its worst, or at least to a sensitive digestive and/or intestinal system. The quality of the food they eat is of utmost importance, since it directly affects their nerves and mental state, not just their digestion.

Their talent for detailed work is without equal (except for those with certain other planets in Virgo), and they often get great satisfaction from employing their natural craftsmanship in the practical or fine arts. Because their mind can always find something wrong with any idea or plan, indecision often afflicts those with this Moon placement. Moral indecision as well is often observed, as their perfectionist and puritanical tendencies battle with their more practical or sensual needs.

capricorn moon

Those with Capricorn Moon, as is also the case when other major planets or the Ascendant are in Capricorn, seem unnaturally old and serious when they are young, but they can lighten up as they grow older. In their youth, they are unusually capable, disciplined, and conservative, taking the well-trodden path to their goals of worldly achievement or to follow a vocation. Their real confidence is late-blooming, as their sense of inner security develops over time and they feel that their age at least, if not their accomplishments, has earned them some respect they have always craved. Capricorn Moon people eventually learn to relax somewhat and to trust life and other people to a greater extent. The aura of melancholy that those with Capricorn attunement so often carry around with them can also slowly dissipate over time, sometimes helped by a more and more adventurous—but dry—sense of humor.

The fluctuating, responsive, emotional Moon is not at all naturally comfortable in a sign that is often rigid and distant, and prides itself on not revealing any sign of vulnerability or personal need. People with Capricorn Moon have instinctive reactions to life that are characterized by self-control and caution, and sometimes by a defensiveness or negativity that is almost shocking. They feel that they need to manipulate and control the world (and their feelings) in order to attain the power, authority, and recognition that they deeply desire. In fact, they are most secure within themselves when their identity is confirmed by a social role, title, specific duty, or mantle of authority. Even at an early age, Capricorn Moon people are comfortable assuming responsibility and feel perfectly at home in the role of provider, protector, or organizer. They are most relaxed and truly themselves when they are carrying some weight, or when others have to depend on them! Very hardworking, these folks share with Virgo first place on the list of people who absolutely love to work, which often ultimately results in professional success. They may not always be fun, but they will often get the job done.

Perhaps the most oppressive thing about this group occurs in those who become too obsessed with being recognized as important and having authority; sometimes, there is a persistent “one-upmanship” that pervades their personal and professional lives. The constant drive to be “on top” can cripple their capacity for any human intimacy and eliciting automatic distrust from others. As psychologist-astrologer Glenn Perry, Ph.D., wrote,

“The tight controlled responses often lead to loneliness and despair as it prevents the individual from flowing and responding to the changing mood of others. Moon in Capricorn nurtures by taking charge and giving orders. This dry mechanical approach to feelings is not sympathetic and tends to imply that the other is incompetent. Unable to respond directly to emotional needs, Moon in Capricorn gives the impression of being callous, hardened and unaffected by the tender side of life. (Aspects magazine, Fall 1981)”

If the emotional suppression and denial become chronically extreme and rigid, the result can be a person who others may respect but not love. However, from another view (from the inside, so to speak) of this Moon sign’s emotional nature, I quote here from an interview with a Capricorn Moon young woman who characterized herself to me as having “a seriousness about the emotional life, an interest in getting down to bare bones, an impatience with small talk, and a need to get to the core emotionally.” She continues:

“All Capricorn Moons I know (there have been a lot) have a certain gravity to them, an ability to take the emotional life seriously. The women especially are almost never giggly or flirty — we’re too serious to flirt much. The women are kind of ‘masculine’ I guess, sort of businesslike in their manner (men too actually… it’s not a placement I ever see that is friends with everyone and instantly, openly affectionate). I think ‘a few serious, long-term friendships’ sums up all the Capricorn Moons I know.”

A questionnaire reply from another woman also emphasized that women with this capable, ambitious orientation are liable to feel “ambivalent about their sexual identity,” although they have strong physical needs, and that women with Capricorn Moon have “a great need for appreciation to develop their self-worth”. Two other questionnaires confirmed the self-disclosure quoted above regarding the practical agenda underlying emotional commitments. The words they used were “cool in affections and looks out for self” and “very calculating—not necessarily bad—just a lot of planning, no spur-of-the-moment reactions.” Another quite thorough questionnaire reply from an experienced practitioner of astrology included the following:

“this Moon placement shows marked proficiency in handling the self in the material world, or at least a lot of concern over and attunement to material affairs. They are very shrewd in taking care of their financial needs. Very often they are involved in some secure structure, like working for the government, etc. They like a secure financial position. For all, they take things very seriously; they approach many things cautiously. This is also a very sexual placement in laid-back ways.”

In conclusion, the Capricorn demeanor of slowness, caution, and hesitation should never mislead you. They may be conservative in most attitudes, but they are actually very progressive and results-oriented in action. They just don’t like to make mistakes.

#astrology #moon signs #taurus moon #virgo moon #capricorn moon #moon in taurus #moon in virgo #moon in capricorn #cap is longer bc that's my sign therefore i understand it better

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daikini-in-the-twilyhtmist · 3 years

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Oracle of the White Rabbit

I was recently quite excited to learn about the newest Matrix movie, which was kind of weird for me, as I haven't been much into tv & movies for quite a while now. To my surprise, it was the soundtrack to the preview that immediately captured my attention - almost more then the preview itself... and then it got stuck in my head - for DAYS, on repeat.

**Cue the Morpheus voiceover: "What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.... You don't know WHAT it is, but it's there - like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."** Yeah, that song was dead set on getting my attention.

When I finally got rid of it, I started realizing a few days later that I understood it beyond the surface meaning; and basically, I decoded the story that it was telling - it turns out to be all about right NOW. Is it prophetic? Subconscious social engineering? Quantum entanglement between the life and the art, so that they mirror and reflect each other? Who knows...

It appears to me to be a sort of trigger, or a reminder of what to do when the time comes, of what you NEED to do - and yes, I realize that this sounds very MK ultra secret agent-y; but it is what it is. I assumed it was probably just a message for me, but then I had 2 separate YouTuber's basically confirm the message in their own unique way, and then supplied additional info that is... quite compelling and pertinent to keep in mind, and utilize. So I'll link those two vids below the song decoding portion, but please watch them as they have some VERY helpful info in them - especially the 2nd half of Naughty Beav's vid, the Alba Weinman part. Anyways, here's the song with lyrics, and the decode I got for it:

https://youtu.be/YE3ZXm92CJ0

Preface: The story overall is describing the multidimensional aspects of the human being, and how certain "controllers" have manipulated the general population into thinking that we are only ONE SINGLE aspect (i.e. this linear 3D realm template of a human) of our various extended selves - and have waged war (and still are) to maintain that control over us to keep their positions power.

Song: White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane

ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER AND ONE PILL MAKES YOU SMALL These “pills” are alternate dimensional perspectives - the actual embodiment of them from a larger and smaller POV - Annunaki are generally around 10-16 feet tall, and the Fae are considered to be tiny little elemental beings; BOTH sizes make you visit WONDERLAND though! You can SEE & FEEL that there is MORE beyond just this vessel and life viewpoint, more to YOU that goes on to other places where this particular body-ego cannot. AND THE ONES (pills) THAT MOTHER GIVES YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING AT ALL The world perspectives and programs installed in our parents are for a different agenda, time and place - they've since expired and are therefore useless to us... those POV's just don't do anything, except stagnate you. GO ASK ALICE (<your inner child, direct connection to Source Creator) WHEN SHE'S 10 FEET TALL (<in her Annunaki 5th dimensional or above form) Oh yeah, I'd LOVE to see you try and argue those belief systems with THAT version of her/YOU, that'll be fun! Good luck with that, BwahahaaHaahaaa!!!

AND IF YOU GO CHASING RABBITS This "You" ISN'T YOU - it's a hypothetical scenario. As in: If YOU were part of a group of dark, nefarious beings, who CAN'T timeline jump to higher realms on their own, but wanted to... wouldn't YOU chase those 'rabbits', to sneak in after them, (or somehow piggyback on them) to go thru the (portals) tunnels that they naturally create? Well... wouldn't you?!!! AND YOU KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO FALL These beings know their time is limited; as the energetic frequencies of the earth raises - LITERALLY - we have to ELEVATE with Earth (or die, as it’s not compatible); but they can only FALL since they cannot follow us - their heavier energies & choices aligned with that vibe basically anchor them down. When the Earth sheds those lower energies, they appear to “fall’ - Earth rides a sine wave up and down in a continuous cycle; right now the rollercoaster is ascending. TELL 'EM A HOOKAH SMOKING CATERPILLER HAS GIVEN YOU THE CALL Say it with me: COVER STORY!!! So just tell them that you've contacted extraterrestrials, or "Ashtar Command" in a higher dimension, who relays "guidance" to you while you're in a channeling state of mind... exchange your religious/guru worship programming (it’s SO last year) for an unvetted channeled source to worship and obey blindly instead. Pick your poison, ‘cuz dying is fun (whether that be literal, spiritual or otherwise).FYI: I am anti-establishment regarding religions; your connection to Source Creator is meant to be direct & personal, always growing - those outside things are GUIDEPOSTS for consideration and participation when you deem it useful. Not necessary, though, and CERTAINLY not mandatory... they can be helpful though, nevertheless. CALL ALICE WHEN SHE WAS JUST SMALL No doubt they WOULD try to contact you while you were young and vulnerable (and they might have already) - train a child up in the way they should go, and all that. It applies whether it be physically done or in the astral/dream state - it's also prime alien abduction time, in both cases, too: it happens most often around the 3-10 years old timeframe, generally. **Alternatively, this could mean that YOU need to recall your inner child/younger self, when you were more pure - and RECONNECT to (the true you, prior to life’s enforced programming) yourself from there, as a means of counteracting and recognizing any false “messages of light”.**

WHEN THE MEN ON THE CHESSBOARD This is the Masonic, Illuminati and other controller group factions (alphabet agencies included) - The chessboard is primarily associated with the Masonic lodges, though, like the ladder - it's their way of bypassing the middle path (opening the 3rd eye, spiritually evolving through kundalini awakening and such), but still attempting to climb up to 'higher planes'... through magickal rituals and workings of one sort or another, I think. The Sun and Moon pillars are on either side, the battle of fire and Ice. THEY are the ones that "play the game" with humanity, as it were, and “set the stage” on the gameboard in many ways.

It’s like this in their art and iconography...

But it’s like THIS in the physical body structure, see:

Side Note: I learned this and wrote it down/drew it up by watching and following Lavette's channel on YouTube - her channel is under this (her real) name, so if you want to understand & decode the esoteric symbology and all that, check her out, she has a wealth of knowledge to share... it's great stuff!!!

Anyways, moving on with the decode...

>> when the men on the chessboard << GET UP AND TELL YOU WHERE TO GO Or where you CAN'T go, or things you can’t go DO - lockdowns, anyone? AND YOU'VE JUST EATEN SOME KIND OF MUSHROOM Or taken some kind of drug, to check out (with alcohol, pharmaceuticals) as a means of coping; or perhaps just a medically coerced and/or forced untested injectable... that shall remain unnamed. (a la Voldemorte) AND YOUR MIND IS MOVING LOW Because your consciousness and/or interdimensional capacities are capped, having been anchored down into lower frequencies due to your choices. ASK ALICE I THINK SHE'LL KNOW Ask your inner child/spiritual connection WHAT TO DO

WHEN LOGIC AND PROPORTION HAVE FALLEN SLOPPY DEAD That's RIGHT NOW, with the media, the actions of the government, corporations & the alphabet agencies - everything from them is WAY out of proportion, (they're self contradicting) and illogical... it's “fallen sloppy dead” is about as literal of a description as you can get. AND THE WHITE KNIGHT IS TALKING BACKWARDS Is this Biden? Maybe Trump? Could be whomever you deem to be our hero, or fixate on as a knight "in shining armor" charging to our rescue, I suppose. AND THE RED QUEEN'S "OFF WITH HER (THEIR) HEAD!!!" The red queen is the sentient A.I. computer located under the airport in Colorado from what I understand... so this could be indicating the weather warfare or DEW, the internet consciousness battlefront, or a whole host of other things that could be directed by that (besides the jabs), which seeks to kill off a great swath of humanity. The Red Queen could also be a means to direct the jib-jabbed peoples like zombies when they're "turned on" like antennas, once the graphene in the injectables does its work. It would certainly explain all the “zombie apocalypse” protocols and policies that have been made by certain corporations and agencies - all of which was done in a serious manner... so here’s that.

So, now THIS is where it gets interesting (for me, anyways).

Every. Single. Time. That I hear this next verse, I hear it spoken a DIFFERENT way, like a glitch that simultaneously layers a different version on top of the other one, so that they are both communicated at once. This is the 'secret key', the ANSWER - remember, this part of the song says: When this & that happens, and when this person and that ‘person’ are acting THIS WAY - THEN:

REMEMBER WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAYS Dormouse - a tiny squirrel-like mouse, that is rather famous for being able to HIBERNATE for EXTENDED PERIODS OF TIME - sometimes 6 months of the year, or more, if the temperatures stay cold enough. The lower the frequency, the cooler the temperature, usually. (The Sleeper MUST Awaken! ~ Dune) << This word - Dormouse - transforms into DHARMA. So the verse: "Remember what the Dormouse said" turns into "Remember what the DHARMA SAYS". For more on dharma, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma

The dormouse speaks of the head - waking up and remembering mentally; but when it morphs into dharma, it speaks of the heart waking up; and returning to it’s inherent wisdom, returning to the spirit-soul self. So that is the key message that keeps coming thru on this:

Remember what the dormouse/dharma Says: FEED YOUR HEAD-HEART CONNECTION (and stack your dharma)!!! Spiritual GAINS, baby!

The final verse is repeated twice; I believe this indicates that the areas to apply it to are your outward actions here in the outer world, and your inner realm locals: your thoughts and feelings. FEED the CONNECTION on each level, to be and do good, and to stand up in integrity and defend that sacred space on EACH LEVEL whenever it's needed. The mind-heart connection and coherence part is actually mentioned specifically in The Naughty Beaver video linked below, too... but there will undoubtedly be internal emotional and mental attacks that only you can recognize and shield against, or fight back against to maintain your inner calm and wholeness of spirit. The stronger the mind-heart coherence is, though, the higher you vibe naturally; so it grants you a certain level of protection automatically - I feel that's why they push the jab-berwocky so hard through social/economic pressure, and emotional guilt and gaslighting; to block that potential before you ever reach it, so you can still be "hacked", or locked down, energetically.

Feed your head = higher mind = higher perspective. Maintain THAT, then ACT FROM THERE. (Faith without works is dead, yo) See the other two vids below, and thank you for reading thus far. You/We’ve got this - Be Excellent to (yourself and) Each Other... and Party On!

The “Naughty Beaver” confirmation, perspective & guidance on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHeDnhc8Jfg

The “YellowRoseforTexas” standpoint and confirmation:

https://youtu.be/tmYdSFj3WYE

As a final thought... look how unbelievably FREAKING CUTE dormice are IRL! ! ! ! KAWAII ! ! !

#matrix ressurections #naughty beaver #yellowrosefortexas #white rabbit #spiritual gains #highermind #jefferson airplane #dormouse

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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

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A Democratic president just entered the White House, so it’s time for Republican state officials to start discussing secession once again. After Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, disaffected conservatives flooded the White House petition site with calls to leave the Union. (They were predictably denied.) Now a smattering of state party leaders and lawmakers are once again raising the question: Should we stay or should we go?

“We need to focus on the fundamentals,” Wyoming GOP chairman Frank Eathorne said in an interview with Steve Bannon last week, according to The Casper Star-Tribune. “We are straight talking, focused on the global scene, but we’re also focused at home. Many of these Western states have the ability to be self-reliant, and we’re keeping eyes on Texas too, and their consideration of possible secession. They have a different state constitution than we do as far as wording, but it’s something we’re all paying attention to.”

Kyle Biedermann, a Republican state lawmaker in Texas, recently claimed that he plans to introduce a bill to hold a referendum on leaving the United States. “The federal government is out of control & doesn’t represent the values of Texans,” he wrote on Twitter last month. “That is why I am committing to file legislation that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.” Allen West, the Texas GOP chair, said after the Supreme Court refused to overturn Biden’s lawful victory that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.” Many took this as a reference to secession.

I’ve previously tried to make a moral and democratic case for the Union. Balkanizing ourselves over transitory political differences is short-sighted and anti-democratic. But as this feeble specter rears its head once more, it’s also worth also considering the practical and economic case for the Union. And to truly understand that, we need look no further than those responsible for the Union’s existence in the first place: the British.

Four and a half years ago, Britons narrowly voted to leave the European Union, the economic and political bloc that tore down borders and barriers across the continent. Brexiteers sold the country’s departure as a way for the U.K. to take back control of those borders and build new trade relationships outside Europe. It was a fantastical exercise in populism that spent little time grappling with the hard reality of how Britain would extract itself from a 40-year governance relationship, let alone with the rocky roads that a United Kingdom would traverse once it was disunited from the continent. Four years of bargaining and two toppled governments later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally signed an exit deal with EU leaders last month.

How have Britain’s first few weeks of “independence” gone? Not great. Goods and services used to flow nearly frictionlessly across British soil and the rest of the continent. Now they’re ensnared in a complex system of border controls and customs checks. Perishable goods are hardest hit. Scottish seafood is struggling to get into continental Europe; Northern Ireland is experiencing food shortages because goods can’t easily cross over from the south. The Bank of England warned that the country’s gross domestic product could drop by 2 to 4 percent because of Britain’s withdrawal, largely as a result of the added paperwork and regulation.

And then there’s the long-term damage. Nostalgic Brexiteers sold the referendum as a potential boon for Britain’s once-dominant manufacturing sector. But roughly four-fifths of the modern British economy is actually driven by its service industries, which were largely left uncovered by the exit agreement with the EU. London is unlikely to lose its status as a world financial hub any time soon, but firms are already relocating jobs and accounts to Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, and other European capitals—the better to retain smooth access to the EU financial sector. Britain is also forsaking its role in the EU’s Erasmus program, cutting off British students from study opportunities across Europe—and blocking European students from easily studying at British universities. That sort of lost potential is hard to quantify but easy to mourn.

But in many ways, the U.K. leaving the European Union is easy compared to Texas Texiting the U.S. Britain was already an independent country, despite what the pro-Brexit enthusiasts liked to suggest, with a highly skilled civil service and a world-class diplomatic corps. It already possessed all the trappings and organs of a modern developed country. The economic tumult it’s experienced over the past few weeks—and negotiated over the past four years—largely comes down to a mismatch of paperwork between two different regulatory systems.

Extracting oneself from the U.S. would be far more complicated. For starters, Texas would have to fund and staff something resembling a modern regulatory state. Some of this framework already exists at the state level, but not all of it. There would need to be a Texas Food and Drug Administration, a Texas Environmental Protection Agency, a Texas Securities and Exchange Commission, and much more. Texas would have to buy property to build embassies in foreign capitals and hire diplomats to staff them. It would have to build its own army, navy, air force, intelligence service, and postal system. That costs a lot of money. Texas doesn’t even have a state income tax; one-third of its budget comes from the federal government.

Would Texas use its own currency? It would have to create its own central bank and monetary policy if it did. Since Britain never adopted the euro, this is one major complication of leaving the EU that never came up. When Scotland weighed leaving the rest of the U.K. in 2014, Scottish independence leaders proposed that they would keep the pound sterling and maintain some sort of currency union with the rest of their former country. But London itself wasn’t keen on the idea, and the Scottish National Party now favors adopting the euro in a post-Brexit world. Texas could always take the route adopted by El Salvador and adopt the U.S. dollar outright as its currency. So much for national sovereignty if it did, though.

Free movement would be another issue. It’s virtually impossible to denaturalize a U.S. citizen against their will, so most Texans would retain their American citizenship unless they voluntarily renounce it. And even though birthright citizenship would obviously not apply within a foreign country, the children of those U.S. citizens could still be eligible for citizenship under existing federal laws. Texas’s Republican leaders often brag about how its growth is fueled by businesses and residents leaving other states for lower taxes and lighter regulations. But that formula would invert itself after independence: Most of Texas’s population would easily be able to decamp back to the U.S., while residents of the other 49 states would have to go through some sort of immigration process to live in Texas.

And then there’s the problem of trade barriers. The Constitution forbids one state from imposing tariffs or taxes on goods from another state. It’s also virtually impossible for states to lawfully block Americans from entering or exiting them. (The current system of “travel restrictions” due to the pandemic is one of the only exceptions to that rule.) Indeed, the entire American economy is built around the free flow of goods and most services between California, Texas, New York, Florida, and everywhere in between. Without that freedom, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of Nafta-like deal between itself and the rest of the U.S. to carry out basic economic functions without significant difficulty.

That’s where the #Texit dreams really fall apart. Why would Texas and the U.S. need to create some sort of trade deal? Again, look no further than Brexit. If Britain had not reached an accord with the EU before the legal deadline of December 31, 2020, it would have crashed out of the union in what was called a hard, no-deal Brexit. Trade between the U.K. and the EU would have defaulted to World Trade Organization rules, raising all manner of tariffs and duties on everyday goods. The resulting economic fallout spurred leaders on both sides to strike a bargain. While Europe is not as dependent on British trade as Britain is on EU trade, enough of its businesses would have been affected that few leaders truly wanted to see a no-deal break happen.

So, in addition to funding and creating all of the features of modern nationhood, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of trade agreement with the U.S. to actually survive. Like Britain, it would be somewhat at the mercy of the much larger trading partner. But the U.S. also has no interest in making it easier for states to leave the Union, so it would have no incentive to play as nicely as the Europeans did with the British. At minimum, Texas would almost certainly have to compensate the U.S. for the loss of all sorts of federal property: Fort Hood and other military bases, Johnson Space Center and other NASA facilities, various post offices, courthouses, prisons, and so on. It would likely also have to play by rules set by U.S. regulatory agencies and conduct most of its business on terms set by U.S. trade negotiators. Texas, like Britain, could easily end up in a much worse position than the status quo it enjoys now.

All of this assumes that Texas peacefully leaves the Union with Congress’s assent. That’s the only constitutionally valid scenario suggested by the Supreme Court’s ruling in, ironically, Texas v. White in 1869, in which the justices held that states can’t unilaterally secede and the so-called Confederacy never lawfully existed. We’ll set aside the unlikelihood of a peaceful departure for now, and instead ponder its alternative. Secession was a gambit at best in 1860 when almost a dozen rebel-led states tried to withdraw by force. It took the U.S. five years and 600,000 dead to force the Confederate armies to surrender in the Civil War. The asymmetry between the modern U.S. military and whatever state militia Texas could muster is so great that putting down a rebellion this time might only take five weeks.

But let’s go back to the peaceful option once again. If the Texas legislature voted to secede tomorrow, there is zero chance that a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president would support its departure. And if a Republican president and a Republican Congress held power—as they did not but two years ago—Texas, Wyoming, or any other Republican-led state wouldn’t want to secede in the first place. Why would Donald Trump or any future Republican president want to let their biggest batch of electoral votes walk out the door? Secession’s greatest challenge isn’t that it’s a bad idea but that the incentives make it all but impossible to carry out.

Finally, notice that I used Texas as the example here instead of Wyoming. That’s because Texas stands a better chance of actually surviving as an independent country than any other state, except perhaps California. It would be among the largest economies in the world if it became a sovereign country tomorrow—and it would immediately struggle to maintain anything resembling its current standard of living. Wyoming, despite the dreams of its state GOP chair, would be doomed to failure if it seceded. That’s one reason why the Union is so great in the first place, of course. Everything may be bigger in Texas, but everything is ultimately better in the U.S.

#secession #2

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Monday, May 17, 2021

Colonial shutdown shows how Americans pay the price of efficiency (Washington Post) The drivers stuck in gas lines after the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, the Texans freezing in their homes after the February grid collapse, the Californians sweltering through their own power failures last summer—all were paying the unintended and unexpected price of efficiency. The market-driven energy sector has spent a decade or more cutting costs, streamlining and digitizing. Four big oil refineries have shut down in Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 2010 because it’s cheaper to bring in gasoline by pipeline from the Gulf Coast, 1,500 miles away—as long as that pipeline stays in operation. Texas and California have driven the price of electricity down by throwing out the old regulatory structure—the structure that made sure utilities earned enough to invest in backup resources. In the name of efficiency, “resilience was assumed,” said Daniel Yergin, a historian and author of “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.” But even as American fossil fuel producers proudly declared the country to be energy independent once more in recent years, the energy sector has stripped redundancy out of its systems, at the risk of leaving customers in the lurch when things go wrong. Some companies have declined to take the precautions needed to survive the unexpected, whether it’s bad weather or a cyberattack.

Police in Cities Across U.S. Brace for a Violent Summer (WSJ) Police departments in New York City and other large metro areas across the U.S. are bulking up patrols and implementing new tactics to prepare for what they say could be a violent summer. States lifting Covid-19 restrictions and more people out in public spaces in warmer weather increase the likelihood of more shootings, as well as less-serious crimes, officials say. Many crimes, including violent ones, normally rise in summer. Gun purchases also rose during the pandemic and cities have seen an increase in guns being used in crimes. Shootings and homicides in big U.S. cities are up this year again after rising last year. In the last three months of 2020, homicides rose 32.2% in cities with a population of at least one million, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report. In New York City, the number of homicides has reached 146 for the year so far, an increase of 27% from 115 during the same period in 2020. In Dallas, police have counted 75 homicides this year, up from 58 during the same period last year. Chicago police have recorded 195 homicides, up from 160 in the year-ago period.

Tensions Among Democrats Grow Over Israel as the Left Defends Palestinians (NYT) With violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories forcing the issue back to the forefront of American politics, divisions between the leadership of the Democratic Party and the activist wing have burst into public view. While the Biden administration is handling the growing conflict as a highly sensitive diplomatic challenge involving a longstanding ally, the ascendant left views it as a searing racial justice issue that is deeply intertwined with the politics of the United States. For those activists, Palestinian rights and the decades-long conflict over land in the Middle East are linked to causes like police brutality and conditions for migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Party activists who fight for racial justice now post messages against the “colonization of Palestine” with the hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter. With President Biden in the White House, traditional U.S. support for Israel is hardly in question from a policy perspective; he has made his support for the country clear throughout his nearly 50 years in public life. Still, the terms of the debate are shifting in Democratic circles. On Thursday, a group of leading progressive members of Congress offered a rare break from party unity, giving fiery speeches on the House floor that accused Mr. Biden of ignoring the plight of Palestinians and “taking the side of the occupation.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York directly challenged the president, who had asserted that Israel had a right to defend itself. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” she asked in an impassioned address. “Do we believe that? And if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.” “The base of the party is moving in a very different direction than where the party establishment is,” James Zogby said. “If you support Black Lives Matter, it was not a difficult leap to saying Palestinian lives matter, too.”

Bleak futures fuel widespread protests by young Colombians (AP) Thousands of young people and college students have been at the forefront of Colombia’s antigovernment protests for more than two weeks, armed with improvised shields made from garbage cans and umbrellas. They have taken the brunt of the tear gas and gunshots from security forces, and dozens have paid for it with their lives. The young men and women have become the voices for Colombians fed up with a government they say has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic and crushed hopes of a better future. “To a large extent, we found that there was no fear of death. Sometimes it is the only thing that remains when the system is starving us and there are no opportunities,” said Yonny Rojas, a 36-year-old law student who also runs soup kitchens in one of the poorest areas of Cali, the city where the government response has been especially violent.

Pandemic triggers new crisis in Peru: lack of cemetery space (AP) After Joel Bautista died of a heart attack last month in Peru, his family tried unsuccessfully to find an available grave at four different cemeteries. After four days, they resorted to digging a hole in his garden. The excavation in a poor neighborhood in the capital city of Lima was broadcast live on television, attracting the attention of authorities and prompting them to offer the family a space on the rocky slopes of a cemetery. The same plight is shared by other families across Peru. After struggling to control the coronavirus pandemic for more than a year, the country now faces a parallel crisis: a lack of cemetery space. The problem affects everyone, not just relatives of COVID-19 victims, and some families have acted on their own, digging clandestine graves in areas surrounding some of Lima’s 65 cemeteries. The desperate lack of options comes as the country endures its deadliest period of the pandemic yet. More than 64,300 people who tested positive for COVID-19 have died in Peru, according to the Health Ministry, but that figure is almost certainly an undercount. A vital records agency estimates that the true figure is more than 174,900, counting those whose possible infection was not confirmed by a test.

UK readies for major reopening but new variant sparks worry (AP) Travelers in England were packing their bags, bartenders were polishing their glasses and performers were warming up as Britain prepared Sunday for a major step out of lockdown—but with clouds of worry on the horizon. Excitement at the reopening of travel and hospitality vied with anxiety that a more contagious virus variant first found in India is spreading fast and could delay further plans to reopen. On Monday, people in England will be able to eat a restaurant meal indoors, drink inside a pub, go to a museum, hug friends and visit one another’s homes for the first time in months. A ban on overseas holidays is also being lifted, with travel now possible to a short list of countries with low infection rates. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are following similar but slightly different reopening paths.

Turkey eases COVID-19 restrictions but keeps many curfews (AP) Turkey’s interior ministry on Sunday lifted a full lockdown that had ordered people to stay home to fight COVID-19 infections, shifting to a less-restrictive program that still involved curfews on weeknights and weekends. Shopping malls will be able to reopen. Some businesses will remain closed, including gyms and cafes, but restaurants will be able to offer take away in addition to delivery. Preschools will resume in-person education but upper grades will continue remote learning. Turks can return to their workplaces but will have to stay home from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. on weekdays and all day Saturday and Sunday, with the exception of walking to a market to buy food. Civil servants will continue working remotely or in shifts in offices. Foreign tourists and workers with special permits are exempt.

Syria’s Surprising Solar Boom: Sunlight Powers the Night in Rebel Idlib (NYT) When the Syrian government attacked their village, Radwan al-Shimali’s family hastily threw clothes, blankets and mattresses into their truck and sped off to begin new lives as refugees, leaving behind their house, farmland and television. Among the belongings they kept was one prized technology: the solar panel now propped up on rock next to the tattered tent they call home in an olive grove near the village of Haranabush in northwestern Syria. “It is important,” Mr. al-Shimali said of the 270-watt panel, his family’s sole source of electricity. “When there is sun during the day, we can have light at night.” An unlikely solar revolution of sorts has taken off in an embattled, rebel-controlled pocket of northwestern Syria, where large numbers of people whose lives have been upended by the country’s 10-year-old civil war have embraced the sun’s energy simply because it is the cheapest source of electricity around. Solar panels, big and small, old and new, are seemingly everywhere in Idlib Province along Syria’s border with Turkey. “There is no alternative,” said Akram Abbas, a solar panel importer in the town of al-Dana. “Solar energy is a blessing from God.”

India to start evacuating parts of west coast as cyclone approaches (Reuters) India is preparing to evacuate thousands of people from low-lying areas along its western coast as a powerful cyclone is expected to make landfall on Tuesday morning in the state of Gujarat. Cyclone Tauktae, which formed in the Arabian sea, is expected to cross Gujarat with wind gusts of up to 175 kmph (109 mph) and is expected to make landfall in the state the following morning. The meteorological agency warned that there could be destruction of houses and flooding of escape routes. Disruption to railway services was also expected until May 21.

Israel stages new round of heavy airstrikes on Gaza City (AP) The Israeli military unleashed a wave of heavy airstrikes on the Gaza Strip early Monday, saying it destroyed 15 kilometers (nine miles) of militant tunnels and the homes of nine alleged Hamas commanders. Residents of Gaza awakened by the overnight barrage described it as the heaviest since the war began a week ago, and even more powerful than a wave of airstrikes in Gaza City the day before that left 42 dead and flattened three buildings. There was no immediate word on the casualties from the latest strikes. A three-story building in Gaza City was heavily damaged, but residents said the military warned them 10 minutes before the strike and everyone cleared out. Gaza’s mayor Yahya Sarraj told Al-Jazeera TV that the airstrikes had caused extensive damage to roads and other infrastructure. He also warned that the territory was running low on fuel and other spare parts. The U.N. has warned that Gaza’s sole power station is at risk of running out of fuel. The territory already experiences daily power outages of 8-12 hours and tap water is undrinkable.

Ethiopia again delays national election amid deadly tensions (AP) Ethiopia has again delayed its national election after some opposition parties said they wouldn’t take part and as conflict in the country’s Tigray region means no vote is being held there, further complicating Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts to centralize power. The head of the national elections board, Birtukan Mideksa, in a meeting with political parties’ representatives on Saturday said the June 5 vote in Africa’s second most populous country would be postponed, citing the need to finish printing ballots, training staffers and compiling voters’ information. The board said she estimated a delay of two to three weeks.

Sharks use Earth’s magnetic field as a GPS, scientists say (AP) Sharks use the Earth’s magnetic field as a sort of natural GPS to navigate journeys that take them great distances across the world’s oceans, scientists have found. Researchers said their marine laboratory experiments with a small species of shark confirm long-held speculation that sharks use magnetic fields as aids to navigation—behavior observed in other marine animals such as sea turtles. The study sheds light on why sharks are able to traverse seas and find their way back to feed, breed and give birth, said marine policy specialist Bryan Keller, one of the study authors. “We know that sharks can respond to magnetic fields,” Keller said. “We didn’t know that they detected it to use as an aid in navigation ... You have sharks that can travel 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) and end up in the same spot.”

#headlines #news

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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When Machiavelli wrote, “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt …,” he was pointing to the truth that knowing what one is up against is a powerful incentive for dealing with it intelligently. Genesis tells us that only in Moses’ time did the Egyptians make clear how harsh was the alternative to the Exodus by deciding to kill their longtime slaves’ baby boys.

Today, the oligarchy that controls American society’s commanding heights leaves those who are neither its members nor its clients little choice but to marshal their forces for their own exodus. The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

What forces can and can’t this oligarchy bring to bear? We have a hint from Time magazine’s Feb. 4, 2021, valedictory of “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” by leaders of business, labor, and the media, in cooperation with the Democratic Party, that “got states to change voting systems and laws” for the 2020 presidential election in contravention of black-letter constitutional law. Rulings by judges in Michigan and Virginia that changes to those states’ absentee ballot laws were blatantly illegal matters not one whit.

Why not? Because the coalition of masters controls the levers of the state and the press. As Time reveals, they “helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” Because these elites realized that “engaging with toxic content only made it worse,” they decided on “removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.” Instead of answering facts and arguments with which they disagreed, they would ignore their substance and smear whoever voiced them.

The boldness and novelty of these as well as of unmentioned tactics delivered the desired electoral result, and power heretofore unimaginable: Americans in 2021 are being fired or “canceled” from society for whatever anyone connected with the oligarchy finds objectionable—even for asking for evidence of the oligarchy’s assertions. Yet Time tells us that because the process of defeating Donald Trump’s voters angered them further, these oligarchs worry that they gained only “a respite.” Hence the united oligarchy must seek, as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it, permanent “national political dominance.”

Though that dominance seems at hand, the general population’s compliance with it is not. That is because isolating and alienating anybody, let alone half the country, is the proverbial two-edged sword. Anytime you isolate and alienate someone else, you do the same to yourself. The boundaries that the oligarchs have drawn, are drawing, separate them from the American people’s vast majority, whose consciousness of powerlessness and defenselessness clarifies their choice between utter subjection and doing whatever it might take to exit a system that no longer seems to allow for the prospect of republican self-government.

…

By this century’s second decade, the oligarchs who occupy the commanding heights of American life had ceased trying to persuade. Self-government has declined as corporations have wielded public powers with private discretion. America’s ruling class—bipartisan, public and private—grew to disdain the rest of America’s religiosity, patriotism, and tastes. But until our own time, most Americans either had not noticed their loss of status as citizens or assumed that they could vote to regain it. But the rulers inspired no confidence and ruled by pulling rank.

…

Hate-as-identity was key to the ruling class’s victory in the 2020 election. For the elites, indulging sentiments of moral superiority, promoting hate, and rubbing “deplorable” faces in the dirt is a means to secure and mobilize supporters, which itself is incidental to securing the material benefits of power. For those who deliver the votes, indulging hate is affirmation of identity.

Ruling people by insulting and harming them is problematic, and not reversible. The use that the oligarchy made of the COVID epidemic added to insult and injury, as well as to its power, in a manner previously unimaginable. Boldly dismissing without argument the fact that viral infections cannot be stopped from running their course once they have taken root in a population, they asserted that acquiescing to indefinite cessation of social and economic activities they deemed to be nonessential would stop the disease’s progression. The ensuing lockdowns, mask mandates, and other measures made life for most Americans worse in every way. But these strictures also crippled the sectors of American society independent of and resistant to the oligarchy—religious institutions and small businesses. They isolated people and limited what they could hear from and say to each other, leaving them prey to one-way propaganda narratives backed by nightly threats of mob violence.

Correctly, however, the American oligarchy, which resides these days in the Democratic Party, feared that the weaponized, mutually validating narratives with which it had bombarded the population could not guarantee that the American people would vote differently in 2020 than they did in 2016, widespread public dislike for Donald Trump notwithstanding. Not a few suspected that the COVID heavy-handedness had increased resentment among people who had learned to be suspicious of pollsters, reporters, and opinion-samplers.

Ordinary credulity was never enough for swallowing the narrative that universal vote by mail, coupled with drop boxes for ballots and ballot harvesting by self-proclaimed civic groups, plus the reduction or elimination of verification of signatures, would do anything other than transfer electoral power from those who cast votes to those who count them—that is, to the oligarchy and its party. Even so, the ruling class’s victory depended on tens of thousands of votes out of 156 million, in some of the most corrupt counties in the land. In Pennsylvania, the vast majority of all mailed ballots were for Biden. The oligarchy sealed the victory as brazenly as they gained it: by meeting demands for transparency with ad hominem accusations backed by threats of social ostracism and enforced by control, which itself was attained in part by issuing naked threats backed by legislative and bureaucratic power—all over partisan, monopoly digital platforms which eventually participated in censorship.

The oligarchy’s power over American institutions public and private, however, does not change the fact that it rests on near universal voluntary compliance. The irrevocable alienation of and from at least half of Americans has canceled much of the oligarchs’ moral legitimacy and left them obliged to rule by further alienating and punishing—to rule a house that they divided against itself. Hence, the unprecedented power it gathered will prove less significant than the manner in which it did the gathering.

…

The deplorables plainly stand no chance of dismantling the new American system. Corporate executives, not legislatures, governors, or presidents are the ones who decide what happens to the trillions of dollars created jointly by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. They are the ones who regulate speech and attitudes, who for the most part decide who rises and who does not. And they are the part of the oligarchy most insulated from republican institutions.

…

In our time, millions of people have grown up or been educated no longer to want or be able to live as citizens of what had been the American republic. Partisans in mind, heart, and habit, their support of the oligarchy’s partisan rule has left the United States with two peoples of opposing character, aspirations, and tastes within its national borders. The government bureaucracies are led by persons selected and habituated against the deplorables. The same can be said of the educational establishment and corporate boardrooms. What sort of dictatorial power would it take to purge them? Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst. That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.

Some sort of mostly peaceful exodus is within our powers to achieve. A very bad imitation of Mr. Smith was able to convince 75 million to rise against dangers that were still largely theoretical in 2016. Better imitators can lead many more to act against present ones, and to live within institutions of their own making. We can withdraw our compliance, go our own way, and build anew.

…

Our American exodus won’t be led by a Moses. The Republican Party, with the exception of a few national-level personages, may be as useless as ever. But politics is a collective activity, and the lack of top-down leadership notwithstanding, our exodus is already in progress, thanks to Americans’ legal structures and traditions of state and local autonomy, as well as our Tocquevillian taste for organizing ourselves into ad hoc groups for the common benefit.

…

What to do about the media’s banning or restricting the circulation of ideas with which it disagrees, including the distribution of books and movies, is a major issue of national politics. Without shame, medically unqualified “fact checkers” censor the writings of physicians on medical matters, while defining their own beliefs about gender and race as “science.” Letting such pretenses stand also ratifies the negation of the First Amendment. Overcoming them requires ending the exercise of what amount to governmental powers, indeed of police powers, by nongovernmental persons and entities.

Not so long ago, government power was the only threat to the First Amendment. But oligarchy’s essence is precisely the blurring and blending of public and private power in a partisan manner. Hence, media malpractice must be dealt with as part of a bigger political problem, namely expanding the Bill of Rights’ coverage to ostensibly private entities.

What is to be done about private companies that subject employees to training aimed at convincing them that there is something wrong with being white—or at least pretending to convince them? Or that they must abide by the oligarchy’s preferences? To be sure, state governments may outlaw such training within their borders, as part of their general police power. But big employers may object to such laws as contrary to their own freedom of speech, while asserting that the employees’ attendance at those sessions is voluntary. Even if courts back them up, governors and mayors don’t have to listen and can impose their penalties. Public figures, or brave employees, can organize many if not most employees to stay away and to explain just how wrong it is to racially stereotype. Management can’t fire them all. Yet republican self-government can return to at least some Americans only if and when a bloc of major states puts itself in the position of dictating what will and will not happen within their borders.

…

Until recently, graduation from highly selective colleges seemed to certify their graduates as better for having been admitted, and doubly so for having learned more than students at lesser schools. But for a generation, the Ivy League, Stanford, and others have made a point of admitting many students with lower scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test rather than students with higher ones. In general, and with the exception of physics, chemistry, and pure math, the more highly rated the college, the less work it expects from its students. And since learning is inherently proportionate to studying, graduates of these academic peaks often know less than kids out of Podunk State. Yet they give their students something of supposedly greater practical value than knowledge: prestige, pretentiousness, and access to enviable careers.

Which leads one to ask why the nation’s most powerful consulting groups, private equity firms, and big banks hire Ivy League types and pay them so much. They are not necessarily all that bright or knowledgeable. Why then are they so valuable? Not because of what they know, but who they are: junior members of the oligarchy, identically chosen, trained, and confirmed to defend its interests, to communicate its priorities, and preserve its hierarchy. How come the public-private oligarchy was able to use the COVID challenge to crush independent business, thus transferring massive wealth to itself? Because its various parts are staffed by interconnected people who, whatever their differences, instinctively trump the Smiths’ priorities with those of their own class.

…

The oligarchy’s cancellation of most ordinary people out of its desired America leaves the latter with the choice between helotry and exodus. But since submission to inconstant, inept masters is impossible, common sense suggests counter-canceling: limiting involvement with the oligarchy to minimizing its interference on individuals who don’t share its aims and preferences.

The oligarchy’s cancellation of ordinary working people—of those who actively participate in forms of organized religion, and are otherwise attached to the common norms and values that prevailed in America and shaped the civilization in and by which most of us live—signals an alienation deeper than that between citizens of different but friendly nations. Asking how this cultural chasm has come to be detracts from the hard task of understanding its depth and making the best of it. Like married couples who have lost or given up what had united them, trying to work through irreconcilable differences only drives Americans’ domestic quarrels toward more violence.

#angelo codevilla #tablet magazine #read the whole thing

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theliberaltony · 3 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight has issued its final presidential forecast. There hasn’t been a lot of change over the past 24 or 48 hours, as most of the late polling either came in close to our previous polling averages, or came from — frankly — fairly random pollsters that don’t get a lot of weight in our forecast.

Of course, you can click over to the forecast right now if you’d like to see what it says — I’m sure most of you have already done that. But in these accompanying write-ups, I like to provide some context. When I wrote about our final presidential forecast in 2012, for example, I was trying to explain why a race that everyone assumed was close actually reflected a fairly decisive advantage for Barack Obama. When I wrote about our final forecast in 2016, conversely, it was pretty much the opposite. I was trying to explain that, although Hillary Clinton was favored, what most of the media was portraying as a sure thing was a highly competitive contest between her and Donald Trump.

This year … I’m not really sure what I’m trying to convince you of. If you think that polling is irrevocably broken because of 2016 — well, that’s not really correct. On the other hand, if it weren’t for 2016, people might look at Joe Biden’s large lead in national polls — the largest of any candidate on the eve of the election since Bill Clinton in 1996 — and conclude that Trump was certain to be a one-term president. If you do think that, please read my story from earlier this week about how Trump can win and why a 10 percent chance needs to be taken seriously.

Nonetheless, Biden’s standing is considerably stronger than Clinton’s at the end of the 2016 race. His lead is larger than Clinton’s in every battleground state, and more than double her lead nationally. Our model forecasts Biden to win the popular vote by 8 percentage points,5 more than twice Clinton’s projected margin at the end of 2016.

Indeed, some of the dynamics that allowed Trump to prevail in 2016 wouldn’t seem to exist this year. There are considerably fewer undecided voters in this race — just 4.8 percent of voters say they’re undecided or plan to vote for third-party candidates, as compared to 12.5 percent at the end of 2016. And the polls have been considerably more stable this year than they were four years ago. Finally, unlike the “Comey letter” in the closing days of the campaign four years ago — when then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that new evidence had turned up pertinent to the investigation into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state — there’s been no major development in the final 10 days to further shake up the race.

Now, there are also some sources of error that weren’t as relevant four years ago. The big surge in early and mail voting — around 100 million people have already voted! — could present challenges to pollsters, for instance. Still, even making what we think are fairly conservative assumptions, our final forecast has Biden with an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, as compared to a 10 percent chance for Trump. (The remaining 1 percent reflects rounding error, plus the chance of an Electoral College tie.)

But what’s tricky about this race is that — because of Trump’s Electoral College advantage, which he largely carries over from 2016 — it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting. Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.

So as we did four years ago, let’s run through a few stress checks here. On average in past elections, the final polls have been off by around 3 percentage points. How would the map change if there were a 3-point error in Trump’s direction? And what about a 3-point error in Biden’s direction? Keeping in mind that some states move more than others in accordance with national trends, here’s what our final forecast shows:

How a 2016-sized polling error would change our forecast

Biden’s projected margin of victory or defeat in the most competitive states

with 3-point national error … State Final 538 Forecast IN BIDEN’S FAVOR IN TRUMP’S FAVOR New Hampshire +10.6 +14.5 +6.7 Minnesota +9.1 +12.1 +6.0 Wisconsin +8.3 +11.6 +5.1 Michigan +8.0 +11.2 +4.9 Nevada +6.1 +9.5 +2.8 Pennsylvania +4.7 +7.7 +1.7 NE-2 +3.2 +6.4 -0.0 Arizona +2.6 +5.8 -0.7 Florida +2.5 +5.7 -0.7 North Carolina +1.8 +4.7 -1.1 ME-2 +1.6 +4.8 -1.6 Georgia +1.0 +3.6 -1.6 Ohio -0.6 +2.5 -3.7 Iowa -1.5 +2.0 -5.0 Texas -1.5 +1.7 -4.7 Montana -6.4 -3.3 -9.5 South Carolina -7.5 -4.8 -10.2 Alaska -8.5 -5.3 -11.7 Missouri -9.4 -6.3 -12.5

First, before we get to the Biden-friendly or Trump-friendly scenarios: Suppose this is one of those happy years when there isn’t any systematic error in the polls — that is, Biden wins by about 8 points nationally. In that case, then Biden’s going to win the Electoral College, even if there might be polling misses in individual states. Biden’s easiest path to victory would be to win back three of the so-called “Blue Wall” states that Hillary Clinton lost: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Coupled with the states that Clinton won in 2016, that would get Biden up to 278 electoral votes, more than the 270 required. Pennsylvania is the most tenuous of the “Blue Wall” group, but even if Biden lost it — unlikely if polls are about right overall — he’d have plenty of other options as he’s also narrowly ahead in our final forecast in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia and only narrowly behind Trump in Ohio, Texas and Iowa.

What if there were a 3-point polling error in Biden’s favor? Then he’d be a favorite in all of the aforementioned states. Coupled with the 2nd Congressional Districts in Maine and Nebraska, where he’s also favored, that would result in his winning 413 electoral votes. Other states that are traditionally extremely red could even come into play for Biden too, with Montana being the most likely possibility, followed by South Carolina, Alaska and Missouri. This scenario would also make for an 11-point popular vote margin for Biden, the biggest by any candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and the biggest winning margin against an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt against Herbert Hoover in 1932.

But with a 3-point error in Trump’s direction — more or less what happened in 2016 — the race would become competitive. Biden would probably hold on, but he’d only be the outright favorite in states (and congressional districts) containing 279 electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state, he’d be projected to win by 1.7 percentage points — not within the recount margin, but a close race.

Such a scenario would not be the end of the world for Biden. The extra cushion that he has relative to Clinton helps a lot; it means that with a 2016-style polling error, he’d narrowly win some states that she narrowly lost. Biden has polled well recently in Michigan and Wisconsin in particular and has big leads there. Still, this would not be the sort of outcome that Democrats were hoping for. For one thing, because Biden would probably be reliant on Pennsylvania in this scenario — a state that is expected to take some time to count its vote — the election might take longer to call. For another, it could yield a fairly bad map as far as Democrats’ Senate hopes go, as Biden would be a narrow underdog in several states with key Senate races, including Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Iowa. So while Biden isn’t a normal-sized polling error away from losing, he is a normal-sized polling error away from having a messy win that might not come with control of Congress.

Still, as much as we’ve tried to strike a note of caution, Democrats have a right to be pleased about where they wound up. Sure, Biden could be in a meaningly safer position with a larger polling lead in Pennsylvania or Arizona, where his numbers have slipped a bit down the stretch run. Nonetheless, if we’d told our Democratic readers six months ago that Biden would be heading into election morning ahead by 8 points nationally, also ahead by 8 points in Wisconsin and Michigan, by 5 points in Pennsylvania, by 2 or 3 points in Florida and Arizona, and even a little bit ahead in Georgia and with a pretty decent chance to win Texas, we think they’d be fairly pleased.

It’s also worth keeping in mind the background conditions in the country today. Trump only barely won the election four years ago, against a highly unpopular opponent in Clinton. In 2016, 18 percent of voters in the national exit poll disliked both Trump and Clinton, and those voters went for Trump by 17 points. If they’d merely split evenly, Clinton would have (narrowly) won the Electoral College. Many of those voters actually like Biden, though, who has much better favorability ratings than either Clinton or Trump.

Meanwhile, the election comes at a time where a 2:1 majority of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country amid a COVID-19 pandemic that his killed 233,000 Americans — and which has gotten worse in recent weeks — along with high (though improving) unemployment, a summer of racial protests, and continuous erosions of democratic norms by Trump and his administration. Trump’s approval rating has been in negative territory through virtually the entirety of his presidency. Trump’s electoral record is hardly unblemished: Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House by nearly 9 points in 2018, about the same margin that Trump now trails in national polls, in an election where polls and forecasts were highly accurate.

In other words, given everything going on in the country — and Biden’s popularity relative to Clinton — it simply shouldn’t be that hard to imagine a small number of voters switching from Trump to Biden. Indeed, that’s what polls show: There are more Trump-to-Biden voters than Clinton-to-Trump voters. The lion’s share of people who voted for Gary Johnson or another third party candidate four years ago also say they plan to vote for Biden.

Trump might be able to overcome this with a disproportionately high Republican turnout. But while Republican turnout might be very high, Democratic turnout almost certainly will be too, as evidenced by, among other things: Democrats’ equal or higher enthusiasm level in polls; their very high numbers in early and absentee voting, and their greater fundraising prowess throughout the cycle.

Again, this is not to deny that Trump will turn out his voters, too. Our model projects overall turnout in the race to be a record setting 158 million, with an 80th percentile range between 147 million and 168 million. But if persuadable voters and independents are mostly flipping to the other party, you need your turnout to be high and for the other party’s to be low to have much of a shot, and that latter condition doesn’t appear likely for Trump.

Still, 10 percent chances happen, there’s never been an election quite like this one and this isn’t a moment that anybody should be taking anything for granted. We hope you’ll follow our coverage for as long as it takes to determine who won.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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rotationalsymmetry · 4 years

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Why many people with YOUR political values (assuming you’re against colonialism) are hesitant to vote Biden, even though his opposition shouldn’t be in charge of cutting his own fingernails, let alone be the President of the US. (After this I’ll do another post on why it’s actually strategically OK and even a good thing to acknowledge this ambivalence, even if you’re pretty sure everyone should be voting Biden.)

Here’s a fandom analogy, OK?

Consider an Avatar: The Last Airbender AU where 1. Zuko never gets exiled but is basically the same person, the kind of kid to speak out in a war meeting that he was barely even allowed to listen to on a matter of principle, but also a loyal Fire Nation prince who thinks the Fire Nation is a force for good in the world, and 2. For some reason the Fire Nation is a democracy and Zuko is running for the position of Fire Lord against his father Ozai.

Say you’re a Fire Nation citizen who, unlike Zuko, thinks that the Fire Nation shouldn’t actually be waging a war of conquest against the rest of the world. You think the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribes should be left to govern themselves, and that destroying the Air Nomads was an unjustifiable act of genocide.

(Even if you’ve also been taught and genuinely believe that the Air Nomads had a standing army, even though you’ve also been taught that the Fire Nation is giving the colonies a better quality of life, basically even though you’ve been lied to by your government your entire life. Even though your entire family, your neighbors, your coworkers, and at least some of your friends think that the Fire Nation’s colonialism is basically a force for good in the world.)

Ozai is “crazy” and shouldn’t be in charge of cutting his own fingernails, let alone being the Fire Lord. He’s sadistic, without ethics, without concern for his own people or his own children, and wants to literally wipe out the entire Earth Kingdom.

Zuko would be...less bad as a Fire Lord. He cares about the wellbeing of people under him. He’s honest and has ethics. He wouldn’t wipe out an entire nation just for resisting Fire Nation rule. There would be a big difference between Zuko as Fire Lord and Ozai as Fire Lord, and one is clearly better than the other.

But also, pre-exile!Zuko isn’t a *good* person to have as Fire Lord. Because, again, he’s been lied to all his life like everyone else in the Fire Nation, and he thinks that the Fire Nation invading and colonizing other nations is basically a good thing. He’d keep doing it. It’s what he’s been taught. It is consistent with his values and his understanding of the world.

(Would Iroh, after the Seige of Ba Sing Se? Not clear.)

This is what the Democrats as a whole are. They’re more dove-like than the Republicans, but they still think that American intervention in the rest of the world’s affairs is basically good. They prefer a hegemony (influence) and neoliberalism approach over military invasion, but they still want control over how other nations run their business and they still think that control is a good thing.

(And this isn’t even getting into the capitalism/corporate power side of things, at least not directly. Democrats have to be OK with accepting large amounts of money from huge powerful corporations in order to get elected to office, especially as major an office as president of the US, and that means they’re only willing to do so much to restrict corporations’ ability to do whatever the heck they want.)

So, back to the Fire Nation. Zuko gets elected Fire Lord. He implements some changes: less military aggression, Ba Sing Se remains free and the Northern Water Tribe is more or less at peace; but the Earth Kingdom colonies are still in place, Boiling Rock prison and earthbender prison ships still exist and are still cruel, and everyone in the Fire Nation is being constantly lied to by the government.

Aang comes out of the iceberg. Do you think he’s not still going to need to take the Fire Lord down?

I hear a lot of talk on here of “damage control” and “voting the lesser of the two evils” (which btw is something that liberals who are NOT AGAINST COLONIALISM also say.) I haven’t been seeing people NAME what the lesser evil is. This is what the lesser evil is. It is pre-exile Zuko. It is colonialism and lies and control and prisons and human rights violations, and the slow erosion of Depression era protections and tax rates, and the sort of racism that’s an “I don’t see color” racism rather than a (you know, I’m not even going to go there) racism, and wanting non-affluent disabled people to live at the poverty level rather than just die.

It’s possibly to acknowledge a difference between Biden and his opposition, and also see a major difference between Biden and someone who actually has good politics.

And we can’t conceivably undo colonialism unless we name colonialism when we see it.

#political #us politics #us election 2020 #biden #biden’s opposition #long post #atla I guess #swearing #cw mentions of several awful things #colonialism #idealism on main

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evilelitest2 · 4 years

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Hey there. I recently wondered why Sanders didn't manage to be primary candidate for the democratic party (at least in terms of popularity). In fact, I got the impression that despite even social media hyping him up, quite a few weren't really that invested on what he had to say/wanted to do. As a non-American, I get the feeling that Americans themselves might be a bit averse to change, even though many do want it. Is the US generally more socially conservative which might explain Bernie's los?

Eh, its a mix. The general conservatism of the US did mean that Sanders had a staunch opposition right from the word go, but I think Sanders also made a ton of mistakes during the 2020 race on top of that. Because he really should have done better than in 2016, unlike then he had massive name recogonition, the DNC didn’t have the more sleezy rules anymore, he already had a massive fundraising apparatus, Biden was a weaker candidate, and the donor class/centrist politicians were divided. But he made a few mistakes and I’m still of the opinion that he shouldn’t have run in 2020, and let somebody younger with less bad blood take up the torch. So what went wrong beyond a centrists not liking socialism

1) Sanders was too old. This isn’t entirely his fault, but a 78 year old who had a heart attack on campaign is at a huge disadvantage, and people are wary for voting for him because of that. Now Biden is a 77 year old man with his own health concerns, but it really didn’t help, doubly so with the heart attack

2) Sander has earned a lot of enemies for the 2016 election, sometimes for shit he did and often times for shit he didn’t do, but he was a divisive figure in a way that somebody like Warren would not be. His hyper confrontational style made a lot of people dislike him, and probably helped contribute to the centrists dropping out when they did .

3) The vote was split with Elizabeth Warren, which he never found a solution too (see below)

4) Ok but those first three things weren’t really his fault. One of the things that was his fault is that he didn’t really...bother to campaign . At least in the traditional sense. Sander’s entire strategy was to win the prmiary with only 30-35% of the vote, assuming that the Centrists would divide themselves until it was too late. Not only was this not true in terms of Centrist unity, the problem with this plan is that it meant he didn’t really bother trying to win over the remaining 70% of the race. Which mean that even though he won the first three states, he didn’t manage to capitalize on this by convincing people, if you didn’t like Sanders after Iowa, you weren’t going to like him after New Hampshire.

5) He made no effort to court specific leaders. This was the most evident with the Black Community (See below) but just in general, Sanders aimed his campaign at rallying people who liked him, and not on getting existing Democratic leaders to endorse him. And I get that sentiment, but it really fucked him over in South Carolina. He didn’t even bother to ask for Clyburn’s endorsement

6) Young people don’t come out to vote and his entire plan was based on the youth vote

7) Unlike a lot of class oriented Leftist, Sanders does believe in internationality (see below) but he still has a bit of a tin ear on the issues of women and minority issues. hIs platform on both were good and I don’t think he is a sexist or a racist, but he tends to fall into this “A rising tide raises all ships” mentality which isn’t that helpful, he has always struggled to take his larger rhetoric of social revolution and apply it to racial issues or gender issues, which is very frustrating because race more than class has defined American politics. A lot of black people didn’t really feel like he “got” how their issues are unique beyond just class, even though his platform was pretty good.

8) Antisemitism. It was a factor we shouldn’t ignore it

9) He ran his campaign more on changing the dialogue about Socialism than he did to actually win. Which in many ways is a really admirable strategy, and he did a great job on changing American minds on a lot of issues but it doesn’t help you actually win a race

10) Americans, especially Black Americans, didn’t really want to take a risk in 2020. A lot of leftists in 2016 thought “oh Clinton lost so the dems will embrace a leftist” when in reality the message the Dems got was “Ok,....embrace a white man with a less controversial record” And Biden is seen as safe. The Black community in particular, who have been really hurt by the Trump administration, didn’t want to take any risks.

11) In 2016 Sanders got a ton of working class whites in rural/industrial areas to support him against Clinton, so the assumption was “hey these guys are open to socialism”. And in 2020 they all went to Biden, because it turns out they weren’t for Sanders, they just hated Clinton, and sexism played no little part in that

12) Sanders didn’t do a good job reaching out to Warren. He didn’t even bother to ask her for an endorsement until after Super Tuesday. After that one debate (ugg) Sanders made no effort to reach out and or do Damage control, which effectively alienated him from the other wing of the Progressive Left.

13) Sanders and especially his fans, did not take Biden seriously. The entire primary assumption was that Biden was going to be like Jeb Bush in 2016, and the real threat would be Mayor Pete/Bloomberg/Harris/Warren/Booker/the ghost of Hillary Clinton’s career, anything but Biden himself. And so Biden kinda...avoided most of the Ire of the Sanders campaign, and when he went into South Carolina, he had very little that actually hurt him. Biden was the Front Runner from the start, and nobody really bothered to knock him off that perch

14) Ok now we need to talk about the ugly side of things. Sanders himself is a good man and not a bigot. Some of his fans though...not so much. The so called ‘Dirtbag Left” or the “Red Brown Alliance”, basically Class Reductionist “Anti Identity Politics” leftists who openly indulge in racism, sexism, homophobia and all types of abusive internet tactics. Its a tiny minority of Sanders fans, but because they are super active online (and make a habit of harassing journalists) they start to dominate the conversation. Podcasts like Chapo House, Cumbucket, True Anon, or Red Scare, pundits like Angela Nagle or Glenn Greenwald, or Taibbi, there is an entire cottage industry of so called “Socialists” who spend most of their time peddling conspiracy theories, indulging in bigotry (but its ok because they support Universal Healthcare) and above all harassing people online. And a toxic fandom ruins your ability to reach out to people, which is sort of the point of an election. This isn’t really Sanders fault because he is a 78 year old grandpa, but his campaign really didn’t make any effort to clamp down on the toxic fanbase that surrounded the movement and it ruined their ability to do outreach. The tweeting of snakes at warren was a big part of this

#ask EvilElitest #Dirtbag left #Bernie Sanders #Elizabeth Warren #2020 primary

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enviroblog-spring21 · 3 years

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Blog IX: Providence Lost a BIG Opportunity for Environmental Planning.

The number of living people on planet Earth reached one billion people in 1804, an unprecedented milestone after 200,000 years of our species’ ascendence. Although it took 200,000 years for the human population to reach one billion people, it took only 200 to reach seven billion. In 2009, humanity cleared yet another milestone, the number of people residing in cities exceeding those living in rural areas for the first time in human history.[1]Current population trends centuries in the making act in tandem with the current climate crisis, of which more humans than ever will be forced to deal with in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Chapter six of Living in the Environment heavily focuses on Earth’s carrying capacity–– i.e., the number of people that existing natural capital and ecosystem services can adequately support. Debate about the physical boundary to human growth has gone on for centuries. Notably, in 1798, Thomas Malthus hypothesized that exponential population growth coupled with comparably stagnant food production created a proverbial ceiling for the exponential population growth he identified. Of course, during Malthus’s time, industrial agriculture was somewhat of an oxymoron, he could have never predicted that food production too would also increase exponentially due to industrialized agriculture.

During my History of Capitalism, I was required to read Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. The book delineates an environmental history of what is perhaps the ultimate rejection of Malthus’ hypothesis: The Green Revolution. After World War II, philanthropic efforts on the part of the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller foundation introduced industrial agriculture technologies such as pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation infrastructure, and high-yield crop variants to what they saw as destitute peasant populations, most notably in India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Although the intentions of the foundations were good, (although incredibly utilitarian in hindsight) what ensued was the disenfranchisement of peasants from their land, followed by the swelling of slums encircling cities such as Mumbai, Mexico City, and Manila, contributing the lion’s share of urban development globally. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations assumed that the peasants, needing not to grow their own food any longer, would live a metropolitan urban lifestyle as they enjoyed in the West.

Urban slum dwellers in the global South account for the majority of the world’s urban expansion. In summary: More people today are living in cities today but in the ever-expanding rings of slums within and surrounding cities. I can already see North American urban planners looking at global urban demographics and concluding that the pro-urban sentiment espoused by the authors of their dogma over the years has finally caught on, and people are ascending to a new urban rapture. Slum-dwellers, the vast majority of urban populations in the Global South, endure the most reprehensible environmental conditions in the world. The largest city in North America, Mexico City, has a dirty environmental secret that foreign visitors to places like Chapultepec Park seldom know. The city hoards several tons of feces in open-air garbage dumps, located next to or on top of the city’s slums. Slum-dwellers are known to scavenge dumps and landfills in hopes to find something of sustenance or utility, and particles of shit carry through the air often irritating the throat and lungs of people unfortunate enough to be in proximity to them. In Mumbai, not many people other than slum-dwellers shoulder such disproportionate burdens of climate change. Slum dwellings are often constructed out of scrap metal with no ventilation or proper insolation. When monsoon season arrives dwellings often flood, and when the water drains out it leaves mold behind to be perpetually inhaled. The tin walls and rooves of slum buildings in the summer make the unfortunate residents inside feel like they’re baking, even more so with rising temperatures.[]

North American urbanists may think that cities have a default setting towards environmental friendliness, as we see in the global South, they do not. This sentiment may come from, the improving environmental condition of cities in the Global North (although they have a long way to go.) Mayor Bloomberg’s “PlaNYC” initiative provides excellent examples of what cities ought to do in order to effectively mitigate climate change. Two things from the plan I find incredibly interesting are congestion pricing and the creation of beautiful waterfront parks, perhaps the most physical representation of Bloomberg’s legacy (aside from rebuilding from the rubble of Ground Zero.) Congestion pricing in New York City is effectively a toll on vehicles moving in and out of Midtown Manhattan during times where traffic is heaviest. Cities such as London, Milan, and Stockholm show that levying tolls on rush hour traffic is an effective way to incentivize transit ridership and get carbon-emitting cars off the road. The majority of New York City residents don’t even own a car anyways[2], making the weight of each resident’s carbon footprint a whole lot lighter. Fewer cars on the road equates to lower carbon emissions. Unfortunately, however, New York City lags behind its international counterparts due to the reluctance of Trump DOT under Secretary Elaine Chao to implement anything of the sort. Biden’s DOT, however, recently lifted the roadblocks to congestion pricing leftover from the previous administration, and the city should be set to implement it in a matter of months.[3]

The Bloomberg administration also constructed some magnificent and beloved waterfront parks on top of former industrial sites. One of the best examples of this Bloomberg initiative is Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP.) The park makes for a great case study in sustainable design,[4] I believe that it represents part of what other coastal cities in the Northeast ought to be doing with their waterfronts to mitigate the effects of climate change. Old industrial piers on the edge of Brooklyn Heights were transformed into Brooklyn Bridge Park using recycled wood and granite for park benches, structures, and decking, as well as recycled fill material from the (long-delayed) East Side Access Project. BBP also restores vital habitats of native plants, birds, and marine life by recreating the salt marshes and meadows that were destroyed as Brooklyn grew. Notably, the BBP also partnered with the Billion Oyster Project to restore oyster reefs to the Hudson. The reintroduction of oysters is in large part responsible for the estuary’s dramatic environmental turnaround from a deathly polluted waterway to a place where even whales and seals have returned.[5]

Providence has the opportunity to create its own iteration of a Brooklyn Bridge Park-style sustainable green space, but that opportunity is already diminished and threatened to be completely decimated by development. In 2002 the Rhode Island Department of Transportation completed work on relocating an old elevated viaduct of Interstate-95 that separated Downtown Providence from the Jewelry District for over half a century. While I would have preferred the complete demolition of I-95 within Providence, still, it was a great first step by the state’s tragic history of land-use planning. Being such a poor city, however, and desperately wanting to scrape off residents from Boston and New York, the city put as much land as it possibly could up for development.

While a sustainable park was implemented in the execution of the former I-95 land’s master plan, it is much smaller than it needs to be. Therefore, the park’s potential utility as a public amenity that both protects Downtown Providence from rising sea levels and provides Providentians much-needed greenspace is considerably diminished. Even the existing parkland is threatened by a high-rise mixed-use luxury condominium building that would become the tallest structure in the state.

If I were in control of land-use planning of the land formally under the Interstate, I would strictly follow the Smart Growth Tools outlined in Chapter 20 of Living in the Environment. First, I would cordon off everything east of Dyer Street from development and hire the same landscape architecture firm that built Brooklyn Bridge Park to build a park on the model of BBP. Certainly, I would make the blocks of the new streets way smaller as to fit in with the historic streetscape of Downtown Providence and the Jewelry District to promote a mixture of uses and encourage transportation alternatives to automobiles. Scattered across the blocks I may create smaller urban parks on the model of those such as Father Demo Square in Greenwich Village. Some of my zoning ordinances would impose constrictive parking maximums instead of minimums, call for each building to implement green roofing, and encourage density and the mixing of uses, and inciting tax incentives would be offered to buildings that achieve high LEED ratings. Unsurprisingly, none of these incentives are being implemented by the State of Rhode Island or the City of Providence.

When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City, Brooklyn Bridge Park withstood better than city officials expected. The park absorbed much of the blow the storm dealt to surrounding neighborhoods.[6]Unlike New York, Providence has the geographic advantage of not being a low-lying archipelago. The city’s geography is characterized by steep rolling hills and deep river valleys and flatlands, the former comprises more of the city than the latter. Therefore, the city is naturally going to be more resilient than many of its northeastern counterparts. The only parts it needs to protect is its immediate waterfront and the flatland valleys of Downtown Providence. It seems as though the city’s urban planning department has been reduced to a wealth management agency. They would rather boost property tax rates and cram as much new development they can under the city’s arcane zoning laws rather than conserve and protect our irreplaceable, historic urban patrimony with a public amenity capitalized on to its full potential.

WC: 1,559

Question: The "15-Minute City," where people can find all of their needs and wants within a fifteen-minute walk from their home is often cited as one of the strongest answers cities give to climate change, by inducing less consumption (especially in the transportation sector.) However, I fear that designated 15-Minute city areas could become enclaves for the rich. Arguably, places like Greenwich Village in New York, or Wayland in Providence are already rich enclaves of the 15-minute city.

If we do not address inequality while implementing 15-minute city plans, will all

the environmental benefits be offset by the larger consumption habits of rich populations?

[1] United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Division https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/urbanization/urban-rural.asp#:~:text=By%20the%20middle%20of%202009,urbanization%20remain%20among%20development%20groups. [2] NYCEDC: New Yorkers and Their Cars, https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars#:~:text=According%20to%20recent%20census%20estimates,own%20three%20or%20more!). [3] Kuntzman, Gersh. Congestion Pricing May Not Go Anywhere Unless Biden Wins, Mayor Says. Streetsblog NYC, 14 July 2020 https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/07/14/congestion-pricing-may-not-go-anywhere-unless-biden-wins-mayor-says/ [4] https://www.brooklynbridgepark.org/about/sustainability/ [5] https://untappedcities.com/2021/02/03/history-new-york-city-oysters/ [6] https://www.ecolandscaping.org/01/managing-water-in-the-landscape/stormwater-management/weathering-the-storm-horticulture-management-in-brooklyn-bridge-park-in-the-aftermath-of-hurricane-sandy/

#blog9 #rhodeisland #environmentalplanning

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quakerjoe · 4 years

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Biden, #MeToo, and why I can’t support him.

Anyone who supports Biden, by my reckoning, is fine with putting their name to yet another sexual predator in the White House

Where’s the outrage, people? All you #MeToo supporters out there are fantastically quiet about the accusation leveled against Biden. Where are all of you who were appalled at the recording of trump bragging how the rich and powerful can just walk up and grab a woman by the pussy? That’s what Biden actually DID (allegedly). If you’re fine with Biden, hand in your #MeToo card and strike the word ‘feminist’ or ‘humanist’ from your personal bios.

If you don’t know a woman who’s a survivor, then you don’t know women. That means that none of them have trusted you enough to tell you their stories. I’ve heard many. Once upon a time, I was in a relationship with one and I heard her horror story. She felt that her freaking out when we tried to get intimate with me was unfair so she left. Then she killed herself.

Is Biden REALLY better than trump? Really? Really? Of trump, whom I loathe more than anyone else on Earth, I can say, with all honesty, this much: I KNOW where I stand with him and his band of fuckwits. ALL of his fuckery has been mostly done out in the open. While everyone’s freaking out over it, they’re all huddling behind Biden; many out of such sheer desperation to remove trump that they’ve literally allowed the Democratic party to compromise them and their morals and core beliefs. IF you’re supporting Biden, you’re not compromising, YOU’VE BEEN COMPROMISED. You ALLOWED the Democratic party to lower their own standards SO low they’re practically as filthy as the GOP only there’s one sad, horrible difference between them and just one- While the GOP is openly vile, reprehensible, and are more than willing to fuck you all to your face; fuck you and fuck yours and go fuck yourself... Democrats smile, say nice things, then stab you in the back. Democrats now only pay lip service, make half-baked and half ass attempts to try to convince you that they’re Left in some way, all while being far right of where they were years ago. There IS no Left anymore, and you’ve been dragged along with them. When is enough, enough, people?

There’s clearly only ONE person the Democrats hated more than trump- Bernie Sanders. Between mainstream media ignoring him and Dems ganging up to defeat him, clearly the party doesn’t give a flying fuck about YOU. They’re just not into you, baby; it’d interrupt the cash flow from their donors, most of them being the same rich twats buying GOPers. Look how fast Bloomberg bought Dems!

Now you’re all acting like trump supporters for the BlueMAGA. Seriously? Really? The rapist? The guy whose motto is essentially “Don’t worry, I won’t change shit; I’ll just bring us back to normal (meaning back to the era that brought us trump in the fucking FIRST place).

How many of you BOTHERED reviewing Biden’s super-shitty policies and actions over his career? (crickets) How many of you have any spine enough to see just how fucking useless he is at this stage? Fuck me, man; this asshole can’t even speak! We already have that. He’s already got various degrees of sexual assault on the books. We already have that. He’s all to eager to work with the GOP and cater to the rich. We already have that! He’s boring as fuck, abrasive and he does NOT inspire voters to come charging out this November.

Trump does, though. His fanatics are breaking down the gates during a pandemic; you can bet your privileged asses that they’ll be out come November assuming they did’t keel over dead from COVID-19. That may be the only edge that Biden gets as he does and says fuck-all nothing except hope that trump screws up enough to get his base to stay home and enough of his own Biden Bros to show up. That’s his big plan, kids.

Kiss your $15/hr good-bye. You don’t seriously thing team biden will really pull that off, do you? For fuck sake, according to Liz Warren, if the min. wage kept up with cost of living and inflation, it should be at $23/hr NOW. According to Robert Reich, it’s even higher. $15/hr was what we needed well over a decade ago. If biden does pull it off, it’s a token fist in your ass at best, you puppet.

Kiss M4A good-bye. It’s evident that you’d rather dump your cash into the overpriced, empty promises of insurance companies, big pharma, and stoke the fires of endless war with financing the Military Industrial Complex than live a safe, healthy life.

Kiss any sort of Green New Deal good-bye while Pelosi and the others sneer at it and look down their noses at you.

I certainly don’t WANT more of trump...

...but thinking biden will make things better is foolish. Trump will happily stab you through the chest, but the likes of biden prefer to smile while they stab you through the back using the blade forged out of empty promises and lip service. Fuck, if you’re keeping track of the Dem. pundits, they’re already lining up to blame biden’s apparent loss on Sanders and people like me. They’re ALREADY gearing up for him to LOSE. What does THAT tell you? His popularity is utter shit compared to HRC back in 2016.

Let’s not forget that most of Bernie’s supporters backed HRC in 2016 and voted for her. Before that, let’s not forget HER followers’ loyalty when MOST of them bailed on Obama to support McCain.

I won’t put my name to a vote for Biden. I won’t. I’ve heard too many tales of horror from Survivors and given that Al Franken’s career was burned for much less, I don’t appreciate the HYPOCRISY of the #MeTooExceptBiden rhetoric. MY moral compass, my values, my principles will no longer be something I give the DNC permission to shit on and compromise. If the US needs another 4 of trump burning the house down to wake the fuck up and LEARN that the Dems are a band of feckless twats on the take and actually start voting for PROGRESSIVES and those who are actually LEFT, then so be it. Let the children learn by touching the hot fucking stove; I’ve warned them enough, for years and years now. It’s time to grow a pair of whatever inspires you and wake the fuck up and stop fronting rich, white guys who are all for helping the rich scam us into tax breaks and socialism for them and their corporations while fucking us all in the ass without a kiss first, a grease up, or so much as a reach-around.

Year after year we do this shit and it’s getting worse. Yay, we won the House. So fucking what? What have they ACHIEVED? Pelosi scoffs at saving lives with M4A and we, as a party and a nation failed to get the Senate. The GOP is still cock-blocking everything, good or bad, passed by the House, so really, no big “blue wave” there to brag about.

These people are not stupid. They know the general population is complicit and disinterested in change. Look at all the anti-gun protest after every school shooting? Has much been done since? Technically, trump’s been more hard-ass over gun control than Obama! Holy shit, guys! The “Pussy Hat” march. What’s changed? Meh. Not much. To the GOP and corporate/establishment Dems, women are cheap and nobody cares. Point gone like a fart in the wind. The GOP and the Dems alike know that they can keep you all punching DOWN instead of taking a moment to glance up and see who’d really punching YOU. So long as they let you march, protest, bitch and scream now and then, you’ll get it all out of your system and then it’ll settle down and go back to “normal”.

“Normal” didn’t used to be finding it acceptable to have a documented sexual predator in the White House.

IF you have no problem with Biden, then you must also have no problem with Weinstein, right? Cosby? Judge Kavenaugh?

Uh huh.

I don’t want trump. I want him gone. I refuse to do it with biden taking his place because seriously, the guy wanted to shitcan SS and Medicare/Medicaid. He was gung-ho for Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a bucket of charred turds.

Look all the women you love, if you have the courage to do so, and you tell them “Hey, I’m fine with electing another rapist for president!” because that’s literally what you’ll be doing. Why don’t you beat and slap her around for a bit before you go out to vote while you’re at it. Backing biden only continues giving permission to the Dems to offer you the worst possible candidate so they can keep their cash flow going.

Have some courage. Have some dignity. Have some fucking empathy and compassion, for fuck sake. Then, maybe, a woman might trust you enough to tell you HER horror story of survival.

#MeToo #MeTooExceptBiden #BlueMAGA #SayNoToJoe

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imagitory · 4 years

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*exhales heavily*

Okay...I don’t usually go off the deep end in political essays that often. If it’s a quick thing like “f**k Neo-Nazis,” then sure, fine, that’s easy. I don’t have to explain why Neo-Nazis -- especially the cowardly ones that try to label themselves as the “alt-right” in a vain attempt to seem more acceptable to modern society -- can go screw themselves. Everyone already knows they’re awful -- or at least, everyone should already know they’re awful. If you’re the sort of person that wants to try to “teach” me about how the alt-right are not Neo-Nazis, then this post isn’t for you, so kindly don’t interact and keep scrolling.

This post is instead for my Democratic followers, whether you support Bernie, Biden, Warren, whatever. Please feel free to skip over it, though, my dear followers -- I know this whole political season has been very draining, and I have a lot more positive posts on my blog that you can consult instead. If you do want to read my thoughts, though, here’s a cut.

Hi, guys. How’s it going? We really dodged a bullet with Bloomberg dropping out of the race, didn’t we? At least now no one should be able to say Democrats and Republicans are alike, right? The Democrats kicked their racist, sexist, obnoxious, out-of-touch billionaire accused of multiple sexual assaults to the curb, while the Republicans made theirs president.

On that note, though...we still have the Republican version of Michael Bloomberg -- the one and only Donald Trump -- in office. We all remember how he got there...Hillary won the popular vote, but thanks to the ridiculously outdated electoral college rules and Russian interference, the electoral votes went Trump’s way. We could conjure up multiple reasons for Hillary’s loss, but at least in my opinion, I would say we learned a few lessons from the 2016 election that I think we should keep in mind. (Alongside making sure Russians butt the hell out of our elections and fact-checking all the rampant misinformation from our media outlets.)

1) We Democrats have more things in common than we might think, sometimes.

Clinton was infinitely closer to Bernie, politics-wise, than Bernie was to Trump or Gary Johnson. Yet there were those who were so upset about Hillary’s nomination and the role Democratic Party officials had in coaxing delegates to support her that they protest-voted against Hillary, even if that vote wasn’t in their best interest. We don’t have a system that lets us rank who we want for office from most to least, so sometimes we have to accept a bird in the hand rather than reach for two in the bush. You might feel good about voting your conscience in the short term, but you probably won’t when it results in your vote being a drop in the bucket that doesn’t prevent someone like Donald Trump from winning. We’ve already seen this happen not just in the Trump-Clinton election of 2016, but in the Bush-Gore election of 2000.

2) Despite that first point, if we want unity, our Democratic candidate must be aware of how diverse our party is.

Even if we do end up having to settle for a less liberal candidate in order to win an election, that candidate MUST acknowledge that we are not like the Republican Party. We will not march lock-step with people we don’t agree with just because they’re in our party or we agree with some things, and we will certainly not be satisfied with simple pacifism. The Republican Party has been tilting farther and farther to the right over the last three decades, to the point that their policies now involve mass internment of Mexican immigrants and family separation, directly paralleling plans carried out by the THIRD EFFIN’ REICH. We cannot keep begging for civility and peace and trying to reach a compromise -- you cannot compromise with this kind of extremism without sacrificing all of your principles, because those kinds of people do not make concessions.

I remain convinced even after four years that Hillary should’ve chosen Bernie to be her running mate -- if she had, the rift between the centrist and more liberal branches of the Democratic Party might have been healed enough that we could’ve looked at our ticket with excitement and hope, as we had for Obama and Biden back in 2008. Instead Hillary chose Tim Kaine, an inoffensive centrist Democrat who added absolutely nothing to her presidential bid. He couldn’t even help Hillary out by boosting the campaign with youthful energy or natural charm -- Bernie would’ve both boosted morale among younger and/or more liberal voters and lit a fire under those who were anxious about what a Trump presidency could lead to. The same could’ve been true if Bernie had been chosen to be president -- if he’d chosen Hillary, she could’ve better appealed to moderate voters intimidated by the thought of voting for a Democratic Socialist and run on her international experience as Secretary of State.

3) In order to make any difference at all, we must vote, and we must win.

I’m the first person to acknowledge that I hate voting against my convictions. If the Democrats had chosen Michael Bloomberg, I would’ve probably been ready for whole-scale revolution, right then and there. But let’s be frank here -- in 2016, we got complacent. We assumed that Trump would lose. We assumed that America wouldn’t choose racism, or Islamaphobia, or sexism, or Nazism. BUT WE DID. In the end, our country -- like many other countries before us were -- is more afraid of the promise of social change than we are of the threat of fascism. Yes, I called Trump’s vision of the country fascism, and I stand by it. Fascism is defined as far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial authority, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy and often supplemented with government-sanctioned racism -- and yeah, given that Trump clearly wants to do whatever he wants whenever he wants without facing any consequences for his actions, persecute any so-called “enemies,” make money for himself while in office (even using his office and political power to achieve that end), and scapegoat minorities, I think my point is made. And so I will state it again -- America is more afraid of the future and the progress that could come with it than it is of the cruelty, bigotry, and tyranny of our past. It’s an absolute tragedy, but it’s true. Americans were absolutely terrified of Obamacare until it actually became law and people saw how cool it was, not to be booted off your care for preexisting conditions and stuff. Once that happened, Americans were ready to bite off the hand of any Republican who made any move toward repealing it. If it’s something we’ve never done before, it’s beaten back like the plague, but once it’s something we’ve become accustomed to, you can tear it from our cold, dead hands.

In the 1930′s, Germany had a choice between three political parties -- the Communists, the Democratic Socialists, and the Nazis -- and in the end, the reason the Nazis got power was because the Communists and the Socialists could not band together to stop that greater threat. The Nazis were able to paint a pretty picture to the German people of returning their country to its supposedly long lost, mythic greatness, and they won power, even if they were still not the majority when Hitler got into office. And as soon as the Nazis got power, they never let it go and went out of their way to destroy both Communists and Socialists, just like they did with Jewish people, the Romani, and the rest. We are at such a crossroads now. I am deathly afraid that the Republicans will try to find some way to keep power even if Trump were to lose, but we cannot let that happen. We must stand together, strong and united.

The more liberal of us must acknowledge that radical change cannot be put into place quickly. Our system is broken and falling apart thanks to the Republicans’ on-going sabotage, and we cannot hope to remodel our house until our foundation is secure. Even the Republicans were not able to destroy our country in so many ways these last four years without dismantling a lot of other things first -- corrupting our elections with money thanks to the Citizens United ruling -- sparking two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that drained us of money and added to the backlog of veterans that have yet to receive their deserved financial support -- intimidating political officials away from substantive gun control legislation -- chipping away at abortion rights nation-wide -- stacking the courts, both local and Supreme, with unqualified, strongly right-leaning candidates -- gerrymandering districts like crazy so as to split Democratic-leaning areas and puff up Republican-leaning ones -- even spreading misinformation through shows on their own private so-called “News” network. It will take time to repair all of the damage the Republicans have wrought, but we must first win if we are even to have the chance to try.

On the flip side, the more centrist of us must acknowledge that we cannot go back to the way we were because the way we were was WRONG. We might have nostalgic visions of it being more civil and peaceful, but the tremors of war were still rippling under our feet. The Neo-Nazi rats that elected Trump were gathering under us, and we let them. We let them gain enough confidence to come out into the light in large numbers and we stood by, assuming that they wouldn’t succeed in their goals. We ignored the rampant spread of anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamaphobia -- we downplayed the racism, the homophobia, and the sexism. Sometimes it was due to arrogance, and sometimes it was due to flat-out indifference, because those things didn’t directly affect us. We should know by now that that rosy view of our past was not how things were -- just as many of our Founding Fathers were still slave owners, and America interned our own citizens in camps during World War II, and the supposedly great Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye while thousands of Americans died of AIDS, our country saw the signs of racism, xenophobia, and ultranationalism coming out in full again and didn’t fight back. And now that racist, xenophobic ultranationalism is in control of the Oval Office. If we have any chance of stopping them, we can’t simply go backwards -- we must charge ahead. We can’t simply pretend like everything can go back to normal -- we must accept responsibility for what we’ve done and pursue justice in making things right. We must fight back against these far-right, tyrannical policies and we must pay restitution to those our country has hurt. I do not want the Mexican families we have destroyed to be treated the way our Japanese American brethren were after they were released from the internment camps in the 40′s -- dismissed and forgotten, with our flag figuratively slapping them in the face every time some stupid guy crowed his head off about America being the greatest country on earth. I may have hated Trump’s immigration policy -- I might not have voted for him -- but he still represents my country, and therefore me, to the rest of the world, and even if he’ll never apologize for a single damn thing that he’s done, I want my country to make things right.

Maybe once a Democrat -- even if it’s a centrist like Biden -- is in the White House again, we’ll have the chance for real change -- good change. We certainly won’t get it as long as we’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Now of course, even when this whole presidential thing is done, we can’t rest on our laurels. We must get out in force for local elections too -- we must take back the Senate and keep control of the House. We must pressure our lawmakers to get the money out of politics, and fix gerrymandering, and restore environmental protections, and hold corporations accountable, and tax the rich, and abolish the Electoral College, and put term limits on Congresspeople, and impeach Brett Kavanaugh, and fund dismantling the backlog on VA benefits, and cancel student loan debt, and implement universal health care, and pass gun control legislation, and do all the other things we need done.

I really hope that whichever candidate we end up with -- whether it’s Biden (*sighs begrudgingly*), Bernie (*smiles*), or Warren (*wiggles in glee*) -- that candidate will strongly consider choosing a Vice President who is either more centrist (if they’re more liberal) or more liberal (if they’re more centrist) and filling their Cabinet with those other ex-presidential hopefuls who still have something to offer. Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California -- why not have her become Attorney General of the United States next? How about Tom Steyer as Head of the EPA, or Cory Booker as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

Here’s the thing about us being more diverse in thought than the Republicans -- it means we have a great swath of very different members with very different skill sets, as well as the ability to learn, critique, rationalize, change, and improve. And if we are to defeat an institution like Trump’s that demands lock-step, mindless obedience and praise, it seems to me that’s something we should use to our advantage.

#excuse me politics coming through #personal #hopefully I won't get too many of my followers upset with this #feel free to ignore this if you're not in the mood for politics I get it #democrats #republicans #i just republiCAN’T #donald trump #joe biden #elizabeth warren #bernie sanders #opinion #oh boy here i go

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phroyd · 5 years

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Senate Republicans are vowing to quickly quash any articles of impeachment that pass the House and warn that Democrats will feel a political backlash if they go forward and impeach President Trump.

Republican senators say there are no grounds to impeach Trump and are daring Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to embark on what they dismiss as a fool’s errand that will turn off swing voters.

“My response to them is go hard or go home,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over impeachment. “If you want to impeach him, stop talking. Do it. Do it. Go to Amazon, buy a spine and do it. And let’s get after it.”

“I think the public will feel like it’s more harassment,” he predicted.

Republicans say that impeachment will boomerang on Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who have tried to resist pressure from the left to impeach Trump for more than a year.

Senate Republican Whip John Thune(S.D.) warned that Democrats are embarking on a politically perilous journey.

“It’s a risky strategy on their part. I know they’re under a lot of pressure to do it, but if you’re the leadership over there, you got to think long and hard about what the implications are if it looks like you’re overreaching,” he said.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday argued there is no basis for impeachment, especially after Trump pledged to release an unredacted transcript of his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said, “You can’t tell me they’re talking about impeachment when the president is cooperating with them 100 percent to release these things.”

“It’s premature to talk about impeachment,” he said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a staunch Trump ally, signaled the House impeachment push would hit a dead end in the Senate.

“I think the Democrats have made this such a partisan exercise that I think most of the public has discounted the idea of it, because I think most believe that it’s become sort of a political attack on the president and nothing more,” he said.

Paul, however, said it’s hard to predict exactly how events will unfold in the Senate because so little is known about the latest allegations.

Trump has acknowledged that military aid was withheld from Ukraine and that he discussed former Vice President Joe Biden with Zelensky during a discussion on corruption. He has said there was no quid pro quo between the two issues and that there was nothing improper in his communications.

A whistleblower within the administration did file a complaint, and the administration has refused to turn that over to lawmakers. While Trump said he would give Congress the transcript of his call with Zelensky, he did not mention the whistleblower complaint.

Senate experts say that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is required to act on House-passed articles of impeachment, which would require 67 votes, or a two-thirds majority, to convict the president.

But McConnell has broad power to set the rules and could ensure the trial on the Senate floor is as brief as possible. He could strictly limit the arguments of House Democratic prosecutors as long as he’s backed up by his fellow GOP senators.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts would likely preside over a Senate trial, but he would have to follow the rules and traditions of the Senate, where the majority leader sets the schedule and has the right of first recognition.

Under the Senate manual’s rules for impeachment trials, Roberts would rule on all questions of evidence, but any senator could ask for a formal vote to appeal a decision.

It would take a majority under Senate rules to sustain or overrule a ruling from the chair.

That means Democrats would need to convince at least four Republicans to break with the GOP conference in order to bring in any witnesses or exhibits that McConnell decides to block.

McConnell on Tuesday declined to say what he would do, telling reporters only that it’s up to the Senate Intelligence Committee to review the complaint that an unnamed whistleblower filed with intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

Atkinson and acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire are scheduled to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session on Thursday.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday said articles of impeachment based on the report by former special counsel Robert Mueller would be disposed of quickly in the Senate, reiterating comments he made in May, a month after the report’s release.

“Yeah, if it’s based on the Mueller inquiry,” Graham said when asked if he still believes the Senate will quickly quash articles of impeachment.

Graham said it’s harder to say how the Senate would handle articles of impeachment based on a whistleblower complaint because little is known about its contents.

“Who knows what’s in it,” he said of the Ukraine-related complaint. “I haven’t heard anything. I’m not going to speculate on stuff like that.”

Polls conducted since the start of 2017, when Trump took office, have shown voters consistently oppose impeachment.

An NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll conducted in July showed that 50 percent of registered voters nationwide oppose the launch of impeachment hearings, while only 21 percent said they supported the start of hearings.

In March, the percentage of voters who opposed impeachment hearings stood at 47 percent, according NBC News–Wall Street Journal polling.

An ABC News–Washington Post poll conducted at the end of June and beginning of July found that 59 percent of adults nationwide opposed the start of impeachment proceedings. That number was up from 54 percent in March.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another member of the Judiciary Committee, said there haven’t been any discussions among Senate Republicans about how to handle an impeachment process because GOP lawmakers assumed that Pelosi wouldn’t embark on a path that registers so much disapproval from voters.

“I just can’t imagine a universe in which Democrats are stupid enough to do that,” Cornyn said hours before Pelosi’s press conference. “I can’t imagine a universe in which that would happen because Nancy Pelosi is simply too shrewd to allow things to get out of control.”

Cornyn said there haven’t been any preparations for impeachment.

“You prepare for the probable, not the improbable,” he said.

Some moderate Democrats are also skeptical about moving ahead with such a divisive process.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said articles of impeachment aren’t going anywhere in the Senate and said the smarter strategy is to push Republicans to conduct oversight of the Trump administration, such as by pressing them to ask for the intelligence community inspector general’s report on the whistleblower complaint.

“The last time I checked, this body is controlled by Republicans. I'd rather get government to work functionally and hold people accountable. I'd rather get the Republicans over here to hold Donald Trump accountable on all sorts of stuff, from building a wall to how he treats our allies.”

Phroyd

#gop #moscow mitch #impeachment

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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How Can Republicans Win The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-can-republicans-win-the-house/

How Can Republicans Win The House

House Republicans’ 2022 Strategy To Beat Democrats: Target Socialist Agenda And Job Killing Policies

How Republicans can win back the White House

House Republicans have laid out their path to winning back the chamber they came close to flipping in 2020. They plan to rely on a similar playbook: slamming the Democrats as socialists who will implement “job killing policies,” while at the same time downplaying any divisions within the GOP.

Since President Biden has taken office, the National Republican Congressional Committee has honed in on the impacts of closing the Keystone XL pipeline and delays in reopening schools.

“It’s going to come down to two different agendas: one is about freedom one is about having the right to self-determine your economic freedom, your individual liberties. The other one is about big government,” National Republican Congressional Committee chair Tom Emmer said in a call with reporters on Wednesday.;

“Every voter is going to have a clear understanding of the Democrats’ socialist agenda and the damaging impact it’s going to have on their daily lives.”

The party is;targeting 47 Democrats and needs a net gain of five seats to flip the chamber. The committee has split its targets into three categories: battleground districts where Mr. Biden lost or won by less than 5%; districts where House Democrats trailed his margins or where they won by less than 10%; and districts in states expected to add or lose congressional districts.

“Liz Cheney not losing her position really showed, ‘Okay we’re going to move on,'” she said.

Reality Check : The Democrats Legislative Fix Will Never Happenand Doesnt Even Touch The Real Threats

Its understandable why Democrats have ascribed a life-or-death quality to S. 1, the For the People bill that would impose a wide range of requirements on state voting procedures. The dozensor hundredsof provisions enacted by Republican state legislatures and governors represent a determination to ensure that the GOP thumb will be on the scale at every step of the voting process. The proposed law would roll that back on a national level by imposing a raft of requirements on statesno excuse absentee voting, more days and hours to votebut would also include public financing of campaigns, independent redistricting commissions and compulsory release of presidential candidates’ tax returns.

There are all sorts of Constitutional questions posed by these ideas. But theres a more fundamental issue here: The Constitutional clause on which the Democrats are relyingArticle I, Section 4, Clause 1gives Congress significant power over Congressional elections, but none over elections for state offices or the choosing of Presidential electors.

Opinion: The House Looks Like A Gop Lock In 2022 But The Senate Will Be Much Harder

Redistricting will take place in almost every congressional district in the next 18 months. The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in midterms following their inauguration President Barack Obamas Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trumps Republicans lost 40 in 2018 but the redistricting process throws a wrench into the gears of prediction models.

President George W. Bush saw his party add nine seats in the House in 2002. Many think this was a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America nearly 14 months earlier, but the GOP, through Republican-led state legislatures, controlled most of the redistricting in the two years before the vote, and thus gerrymandering provided a political benefit. Republicans will also have a firm grip on redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The Brennan Center has found that the GOP will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats, though the final numbers could fluctuate once the pandemic-delayed census is completed. Gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity. In 2022, Republicans just have much better prospects. Democrats will draw districts in Illinois and Massachusetts to protect Democrats, while in Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas, the GOP will bring the redistricting hammer down on Democrats.

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Voting With The Party

This section was last updated in 2014.

The following data comes from OpenCongress, a website that tracks how often members of Congress vote with the majority of their party caucus.

The average Republican voted with the party approximately 93.6 percent of the time.

The average Republican voted with the party approximately 94.3 percent of the time.

The top Republican voted with the party approximately 98.2 percent of the time.

The bottom Republican voted with the party approximately 75.1 percent of the time.

Reality Check : Biden Cant Be Fdr

Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?

But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.

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The 2024 Presidential Election Will Be Close Even If Trump Is The Gop Nominee

One very important thing we should have all taken away from both the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests is that the two major parties are in virtual equipose . The ideological sorting-out of the two parties since the 1960s has in turn led to extreme partisan polarization, a decline in ticket-splitting and and in number of genuine swing voters. Among other things, this has led to an atmosphere where Republicans have paid little or no price for the extremism theyve disproportionately exhibited, or for the bad conduct of their leaders, most notably the 45th president.

Indeed, the polarized climate encourages outlandish and immoral base mobilization efforts of the sort Trump deployed so regularly. Some Republicans partisans shook their heads sadly and voted the straight GOP ticket anyway, And to the extent there were swing voters they tended strongly to believe that both parties were equally guilty of excessive partisanship, and/or that all politicians are worthless scum, so why not vote for the worthless scum under whom the economy hummed?

The bottom line is that anyone who assumes Republicans are in irreversible decline in presidential elections really hasnt been paying attention.

Can Republicans Win The House

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee came out with a memo yesterday asserting that the House was not likely to land in Republican hands, but Nate Silver thinks its more likely than Democrats may want to admit:

The DNCC memo, of course,; is meant to serve a purpose other than providing an accurate forecast of November theyre trying to make sure that the base doesnt become so demoralized that they stay home and make a bad election even worse.

Im still not certain that Republicans can take back the House, but its certainly possible for the reasons Silver points out.

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How Republicans Can Win In 2022

STUART WESBURY | Special to LNP | LancasterOnline

For Republicans, the only goal must be to win back the U.S. House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

That should be easy. In November, even though Donald Trump was not reelected president, the down-ballot races boded well for the GOPs future. But we Republicans are not acting like we want to win anything. So where do we go from here?

Of late, Republicans have separated themselves into several distinct groups, each with a different attitude and view.

For one group, retribution is the goal. These enthusiastic Trump supporters, distressed by the seven Republican U.S. senators who found Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial, are in a very unhappy mood. While the Republican Committee of Lancaster County did not pass a vote to censure Sen. Pat Toomey, other local committees did. The Pennsylvania Republican Party rebuked, rather than censured, Toomey.

The other senators who voted with Toomey to convict Trump were subjected to a variety of admonishments, as was, most notably, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. It began to look like an inquisition.

This is very serious. A very large group of Republican voters, numbering in the millions throughout the United States, are similarly angry. They continue to challenge the validity of President Joe Bidens election, wrongly insisting victory was stolen from Trump in November.

In other words, the fight goes on and many solid Republicans are on the proverbial chopping block.

Republicans Will Likely Take Control Of The Senate By 2024

How the GOP can win the house in 2022

The usual midterm House losses by the White House party dont always extend to the Senate because only a third of that chamber is up for election every two years and the landscape sometimes strongly favors the presidential party . But there a still generally an out-party wave that can matter, which is why Republicans may have a better than average chance of winning in at least some of the many battleground states that will hold Senate elections next year . If they win four of the six youll probably be looking at a Republican Senate.

But its the 2024 Senate landscape that looks really promising for the GOP. Democrats will be defending 23 seats and Republicans just 10. Three Democratic seats, and all the Republican seats, are in states Trump carried twice. Four other Democratic seats are in states Trump won once. It should be a banner year for Senate Republicans.

Read Also: What Republicans Voted For Impeachment In The House

Reality Check #: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the partys national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clintons 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Bidens 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call wasted votesDemocratic votes that dont, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.

The response from aggrieved Democrats? Abolish the Electoral College! In practice, theyd need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasnt seen support from a single red or purple state.

Why Republicans Are Likely To Win The 2022 Mid

The public opinion in the United States may indeed be generally opposed to the Republican Party coming to power in the 2022 mid-term election, yet we should not close our eyes to the fact that the GOP is still well-positioned to take back the House and change the balance of power in its favor.

Taking a glance at what happened during recent months, it seems highly probable that the Republican party may have little to no chance to win the 2022 mid-term election. The first and the most noticeable incident that helps this idea prevail is that it was a Republican president who instead of leading the country towards peace in a time of crisis back in January, actually added fuel to the huge fire of division and riot in the U.S. and encouraged his extremist supporters to attack the Capitol Building, creating a national embarrassment that can hardly be erased from peoples memory.

To compound the puzzle, while no one can deny the destructive role the former president Donald Trump had in plotting for and leading the , in the battle of Trump against the truth, the members of the Republican party chose to opt for supporting the former at the cost of sacrificing the latter; It was on this Wednesday that Republican leaders in Congress expressed their opposition to a proposed bipartisan commission designed and created for investigating the Capitol riot that was carried out by Trumps supporters.

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The Plausible Solution: Just Win More

Whether the public sees Democratic demands for these structural changes as overdue or overreaching, the key point is that they are currently exercises in futility. The only plausible road to winning their major policy goals is to win by winning. This means politics, not re-engineering. They need to find ways to take down their opponents, and then be smarter about using that power while they have it.

They certainly have issues to campaign on. In the few weeks, we have learned that some of Americas wealthiest people have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all. Even as the Wall Street Journal editorial writers were responding to a Code Red emergency , the jaw-dropping nature of the reportfollowed by a New York Times piece about the impotence of the IRS to deal with the tax evasions of private equity royaltyconfirmed the folk wisdom of countless bars, diners, and union halls: the wealthy get away with murder.

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for defunding the police can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness.

Filed Under:

For The People Act Matters

Gerrymandering, under state laws, can be done by the party in power. That means the GOP has a significant advantage as they control the legislature in most states. In some states, redistricting is done by an independent commission, but that’s a rarity. According to Ballotpedia, the GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, compared to the 15 by Democrats.

In a bid to break their dominance over redistricting, the Democrats have introduced HR 1 or the For The People Act. Amongst other things, the bill bans partisan gerrymandering and state-level voting restrictions, which would make it harder for the GOP to limit voting rights. So naturally, the party filibustered the bill in the Senate. TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier told Mother Jones, “Absent the passage of HR1, the GOP is poised to gerrymander their way to a House majority.”;

If HR 1 is passed, it would abolish partisan gerrymandering by state governments in favor of independent commissions. It also invalidates existing maps that have the intent or effect of unduly favoring or disfavoring one political party over another. This is an issue that has to be fixed in Congress because as the Supreme Court ruled in 2019, federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering. There is however some hope for Democrats. A stripped-down version of HR1 has been proposed by Sen Joe Manchin. It does get rid of some of the more controversial measures but keeps in the ban on partisan gerrymandering.;

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Republicans Can Win The Next Elections Through Gerrymandering Alone

Even if voting patterns remain the same, Republicans could still win more seats in Congress through redistricting

In Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are whats perfectly legal and that its simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest.

And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman said aloud whats supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering.

We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country, Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. That alone should get us the majority back.

Hes right. Republicans wont have to win more votes next year to claim the US House.

In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7m votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control.

If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails and they have given every indication that they will theres little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well.

How The Republicans Can Win The White House In 2016

The Republican Party finds itself in an odd place heading into the 2016 presidential election. Theyve made tremendous gains at the state level under President Obama, hold a near-unbreakable majority in the House, and now control the Senate as well.

But theyve come up short by a significant margin in the last two presidential elections, where turnout is higher and the electorate is more diverse, and have plenty going against them in the next one.

Presidential elections are unpredictable and it often appears that one party can’t lose until it does. Democrats bounced back from three demoralizing blowout losses to win in 1992 against an incumbent, President George H.W. Bush, who seemed unbeatable earlier in his presidency. Republicans could do the same in 2016.

So what does the GOP have to do to finally crack the White House? These are some broad theories on how they win:

Cut Into the Democratic Base

The guiding principle behind a number of Republican candidates is that the party can only win when it reverses its losing margins with Democratic-leaning groups. That means winning converts among the most important planks of President Obamas winning coalition young voters, minorities, and single women.

Recommended Reading: What Is The Lapel Pin Republicans Are Wearing

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theliberaltony · 4 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Earlier today, President Trump tweeted that the 2020 election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

Postponing the election, of course, is not something the president can legally do. But it’s also kind of besides the point. Trump has already been fighting to delegitimize the results come November, claiming that voting by mail can lead to mass voter fraud.

So let’s dive into that. How would you describe Trump’s efforts to throw November’s results into question? He did something similar in 2016 when facing Hillary Clinton. How is this different?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, in many ways it’s exactly what Trump was doing in 2016. It’s just that he’s president now. And thus, his words are even more damaging (and they were already very damaging in 2016).

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): There’s also a very important distinction here. Before, Trump was just a candidate casting doubt on the election, but now he’s a sitting president doing that.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I’d characterize this as an exercise in control and influence over his party and the news cycle. Everyone is forced to respond to what he says, even if they’re not responding positively. Trump isn’t effective at that many aspects of the job, but he’s pretty effective at agenda control.

clare.malone: I would also say that calling for the delay of the actual vote feels VERY dictatorial in nature. Like, we’ve perversely gotten used to the “fake votes,” “fake news” stuff. But encouraging a change in the election date feels sort of explicitly over a line.

sarah: And to ask a somewhat obvious question — but one that has to be asked — this is another unprecedented, norm-defying and democratic-value jeopardizing moment, right? To put it another way, has another sitting president ever done this?

julia_azari: I’m always nervous about the “never” question with past presidents, but yeah, most presidents have not been willing to take on all the formal rules, the legal system and other branches of government while in office. Congress — which has the power to change the date of an election — used to be stronger, too, and there was no Twitter. My go-to example for this is we still had a presidential election in 1864, during the Civil War.

geoffrey.skelley: And in modern times, incumbents who have lost reelection have exited office without too much of a fuss. Take George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, or if we go further back, Herbert Hoover. Granted, incumbents don’t often lose. So it’s important to note that each of those incumbents lost decisively, meaning there wasn’t much to stand on even if they had wanted to fight the result. But it’s not like Gerald Ford created a stir in 1976 when he lost narrowly.

julia_azari: Candidates have also conceded even when the election was a mess. See Al Gore in 2000, Samuel Tilden in 1876.1

sarah: But on this question of actually changing the election date. How much power does Trump have to do that?

clare.malone: He does not have the power to change the date of the election.

julia_azari: None. It’s up to Congress, and elections are administered by the states.

clare.malone: Here’s my question, though: What happens if Trump refuses to leave the White House on Jan. 20, and there are no official election results at that point?

Like, in that dire scenario (Trump not leaving, no clear winner) does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi become president and someone has to haul him out of the building?

geoffrey.skelley: If for some reason the Electoral College hasn’t acted or the electoral votes haven’t been certified by Congress, Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20, according to the 20th Amendment. So there’d be an acting president, who would be the Speaker of the House per the order set out by the Presidential Succession Act — assuming congressional elections occurred.

But of course, that’s how it’s written, not how it might go.

sarah: Did someone mention

the 20th amendment

julia_azari: I keep imagining this scenario, and I have to say, I have a hard time imagining that Trump refuses to leave office. I don’t want to be complacent, but like a lot of people on Twitter, Trump seems to be comfortable tweeting out bold ideas and not as great at standing firm under political pressure.

So as I see it, there would be a couple of components needed for this to actually happen. There would be the political pressure — what are advisors, including Jared and Ivanka, telling him to do? This would help us understand if there are people who have influence over Trump who have some interest in seeing the system remain intact and legitimate.

The second thing would be the actual formal power — does the Secret Service force him out? Does the military gets involved? These are wild scenarios.

I would be surprised if these institutions don’t have plans for this somewhere, even if they are not publicly known.

geoffrey.skelley: Not to take things down an even darker road, but in this scenario, I think it’s important to consider how other institutions like the military act and how the president’s supporters behave in the face of attempts to delegitimize the election results.

clare.malone: Totally. I think that’s where many people’s minds go, too. And as a country, I think we are deeply uncomfortable (and rightly so) with the military being involved with a power transition. I mean, I personally find it incredibly chilling to consider.

geoffrey.skelley: I’ve seen Seven Days In May. Great movie but, uh yeah, disturbing.

But it’s a sign of the times when you have Biden actually saying he thinks the military would escort Trump out of the White House if he refused to leave.

sarah: Because that’s the thing, as you’re all saying, there are mechanisms via the 20th amendment to ensure Trump leaves office. But there’s still a very real question of how some of this would actually be enforced if it came to this, right?

julia_azari: Exactly. The 20th amendment was ratified to shorten the period between the presidential election in November and the inauguration, which had been in March. There was growing instability around the time it was ratified, after the 1932 election, and that’s some of what it intended to deal with, but it wasn’t really designed with this problem in mind.

I’m trying to stake out the ground that acknowledges a lot of people won’t have much incentive to let Trump violate the rules in this way.

clare.malone: Julia, when you say that a lot of people won’t have incentive to let Trump act contrary to the rules, whom are you thinking of?

julia_azari: I guess I’m thinking of people who might want to run for president later.

clare.malone: Republicans?

julia_azari: Or make money off the Trump brand. This includes his kids, and yeah, other Republicans.

clare.malone: That is, people with sway over him. Got it.

julia_azari: Military leaders, too, as we saw many of them push back after the D.C. protesters incident in June.

sarah: So let’s talk about the other big doomsday scenario here: The results aren’t considered legitimate. What are the signs that that idea is already taking root?

julia_azari: That’s a good way to frame that, but I’m not sure there are signs that it’s taking root any more than it’s sorta been lurking in the conversation since 2016 — and even before.

geoffrey.skelley: In the face of COVID-19, states are expanding absentee voting and, in some cases, vote-by-mail. But the president is making the case that mailed ballots are illegitimate and highly vulnerable to fraud — this is not true, of course, but by casting aspersions, he’s setting up the potential for delegitimizing the results as they come in, on and after Election Day. And the after part is probably what really matters, especially if the election is close.

clare.malone: Yeah, I was going to say, we’ve spent the past 4 to 5 years conditioning a certain segment of the population to distrust most everything in American life, unless it comes from the president’s mouth.

Someone shared this 2017 survey that found that around half of Republicans would be ok with delaying the 2020 election. Granted, the question was framed around whether people would support delaying the election to make sure people weren’t voting illegally (a big claim of Trump’s in 2016). But I still thought that was surprising.

It’s especially striking when you get to 2020, and the questions revolve around the pandemic. I was shocked to see, for instance, the share of Republicans and Democrats who were willing to delay the election because of the pandemic (roughly 39 percent of Americans supported delaying the election, according to that survey from April).

sarah: Yeah … it is mind boggling. That finding is also at least somewhat corroborated in this paper FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman published with the Voter Study Group earlier this year. In an examination of democracy in the U.S., Drutman and his coauthors found that both Republicans and Democrats were open to their preferred presidential candidate “rejecting the legitimacy of the election if they claim credible evidence of illegal voting or foreign interference.” And in that vein, 29 percent of Republicans said it would be appropriate for Trump “to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting.”

julia_azari: One quibble with that study, though, knowing I have the utmost respect for Lee and his coauthors, is that each scenario lays out a justification for delaying the election, which I think makes it harder to say no. And I think people’s willingness to tolerate this in practice is conditional on their evaluation of that evidence, the credibility of the claims and the person making the claims. (E.g., Trump, who isn’t very popular.)

clare.malone: Totally fair.

I was pretty shocked in general to see how amenable people were to changing this very foundational thing! Even with the reasonings the survey questions provided them.

julia_azari: I was, too, but I think it’s not unreasonable for people to have limits on how much they trust elections if they think those elections were not administered fairly.

geoffrey.skelley: And if the election is close and a state or two is in doubt, any questions about administration could become explosive. See: the 2000 election.

julia_azari: Right. It’s actually amazing how explosive that wasn’t. But things are different now — I wonder how this plays out if we flip it around.

Let’s say Trump wins.

(I mean, this sorta already happened in 2016. Trump won, yet he went right ahead and tried to delegitimize parts of an election he had won.)

But let’s say it happens again, and he wins narrowly once again? Who questions the results? And would that be the right thing to do?

geoffrey.skelley: Yes, I wanted to bring this up! Trump said there were at least 3 million illegal votes in an election he won — conveniently undoing Clinton’s popular vote margin. And then he set up a task force to investigate fraud after he took office. It found nothing.

julia_azari: But there will likely be this question of “credible evidence,” as they cite in that Voter Study group paper. What if Trump wins, and people were standing in hours-long lines in Black neighborhoods in Ohio?

In other words, I think there will be a question of how much skepticism about elections is reasonable, and how much is chaos?

clare.malone: I think there is just going to be skepticism about this election, full stop.

geoffrey.skelley: I would not discount opponents of Trump taking to the streets in that scenario. A recent simulation by a group of experts about what could happen in these sorts of scenarios did not bring me much comfort. They found that every scenario — Trump winning or losing but someone defying the result — ended in street-level violence and political gridlock.

sarah: Oof. It’s interesting to me, though, that the desire to delegitimize results isn’t purely a Republican thing, as that Voter Study paper found. Democrats also showed signs of also being willing to reject the legitimacy of the election if it helps their preferred candidate.

clare.malone: Stacey Abrams’s non-concession concession speech in 2018 provided an interesting template for a potential Biden response (in case of a loss to Trump).

Though I do think Biden is such a conventional politician and institutionalist that he wouldn’t respond in the same way Abrams did, justified or not.

sarah: Yeah and Biden obviously isn’t waging a campaign of disinformation in the way that Trump is either. But perhaps one unintended effect of all this is, to Clare’s point, that skepticism of the election (depending on its margin) is going to be rampant.

julia_azari: Although Biden seems like … truly angry at times about the Trump presidency. It’s not obvious what the institutionalist move is in that scenario, IMO.

clare.malone: A good point!

julia_azari: I think there’s a strong possibility that skepticism is persistent and embedded in Trumpist ideology and among his followers, but not that widespread if the election is not close.

clare.malone: I mean, let’s go back to 2016.

If Trump had lost, we were all preparing for the launch of Trump TV, a perch from which he would rail for the impeachment of President Clinton.

I can sort of see something similar happening if Trump loses (unless, of course, he’s too tired to start the Trump TV experiment!)

geoffrey.skelley: OANN would love to have him.

julia_azari: Again, I don’t want to be complacent. I spend way too much time on politics Twitter. I spend all my time on politics Twitter.

But if Biden wins by a lot and Trump tweets a bunch, most Americans will just go on about their lives. That’s sorta how 2000 played out, and that was obviously really close and subject to questions, too.

geoffrey.skelley: Thing is, I can’t imagine Trump conceding in a 2000-esque situation in the way Gore eventually did.

clare.malone: Of course, 2000 is the election that a lot of people point to as the start of mistrust in elections as institutions. And like, the era of “voter fraud” alarmism really ramped up under George W. Bush.

julia_azari: But the angry minority has demonstrated that it can drive politics and policy to a great degree. So I don’t want to be complacent, but I do want to be specific in my fears.

clare.malone: So you could say people went on with their lives, but there were corrosive effects.

julia_azari: If he loses, I sometimes imagine that people around Trump will say, “People will say nice things about you if you do a good concession speech,” and so he does. But it’s not encouraging that that’s what it might come to.

clare.malone: Right, the integrity of democratic institutions might come down to a pep talk from “Javanka?”

sarah: So at the outset of this chat, I asked how Trump’s tweet to postpone the election was different from what he’s already done to try and delegitimize November’s result. And we’ve also pointed out that there have been prior points in American history where voters have mistrusted election results.

But I think given the abnormal aspects of Trump’s presidency, it’s easy to point to historical comparisons without really probing whether the moment we’re in doesn’t have a historical comparison, as historian Rick Perlstein did in his tweet, telling the media he didn’t want to do more interviews on how this moment might compare to 1968.

julia_azari: I think Perlstein is right, but I also think that we should be precise about how abnormal politics interacts with normal politics, because that has been the story of the Trump presidency IMO.

clare.malone: So, I mean, I take Rick’s point in this tweet; there’s this instinct that we have to comfort ourselves with history (i.e., American democracy has weathered much worse) but I do think that we sometimes dwell a bit in history without facing the new challenges that Trump presents us.

We sort of have to respect the new paradigm that’s been created and understand that there are limits to what history can teach us in this particular case; i.e., Twitter, plus Trump, plus 20 years of diminishing electoral trust.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s interesting that people would comfort themselves with history — I take little comfort from it. We’ve been on the brink before with the 1876 election, for instance.

julia_azari: I think that’s absolutely true. I don’t see history as a comfort but rather as a guide to how much luck and skill it takes to maneuver through this stuff.

I also think history is helpful because it shows what’s not normal. (And what shouldn’t be, but is.)

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