Starting with some excerpts from Bernie’s town hall last night.
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"We’re going to go in masses to the voting booth. I’m counting on our Muslims across the country to know we have to take out the man who birthed the Muslim ban. We have to make sure we outvote the hate." –@RashidaTlaibpic.twitter.com/AUh0EtvXC8
“Our president and his administration and the Republicans who support his policies have actively worked to ban people like myself from this country… Our existence, our dignity, our humanity is on the ballot.” –@IlhanMNpic.twitter.com/iQ5u0z8Gsn
“Focus on what we all share: we all need to drink the water, we all need to breathe the air, we all need a decent living, we all want to retire someday, we all need to get some health care, we all need to develop our minds.” –@keithellisonpic.twitter.com/EJ7TkZAn3M
"Medicare for All says you get the all choice you want of doctors because there is no more middleman, there is no more [health insurance] CEO making $14 million… this is not a radical idea. Every other major country on Earth does this." –@AbdulElSayedpic.twitter.com/UIwIcH961K
Amy Coney Barrett, if her confirmation process goes as Republicans hope, could still be serving on the Supreme Court in 2050. By then, the United Nations estimates that anywhere between 25 million and one billion people will have been displaced by the impacts of global warming within and between countries, as large stretches of the planet become unbearably hot. Crop yields in America’s grain belt and Southwest could be decimated. The Arctic Ocean may well have been ice-free for 15 years.
Just 10 percent of the U.S. population by that point is expected to live outside of cities. Should Barrett die in office at a similar age to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, senators representing tiny and increasingly uninhabitable slivers of this country will still be empowered to confirm her replacement.
We can avoid parts of this future. But it’s getting increasingly hard to imagine doing so if today’s judiciary branch remains intact. The future Supreme Court, and the 6–3 conservative majority that now seems imminent, won’t just be empowered to overturn Roe v. Wade, as many are focusing on this week. It will also likely rule on the most important components of any prospective climate action: any new attempts by the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, for example, and the EPA’s leeway to interpret statutes like the Clean Air Act. The same anti-democratic crusade that made reasonable solutions to the climate crisis seem unimaginable has also made Barrett’s confirmation feel inevitable.
At this point, any new climate policy is likely to face the threat of a legal battle. “We know from recent history that if movements and the Democratic Party get behind the kind of legislation we need imminently to respond to climate crisis,” says Samuel Moyn, a constitutional law professor at Yale, “the judiciary can be devastating, and not just in really open ways but through interpreting the law and selectively invalidating it. To me, the struggle is about getting the Supreme Court out of the way.”
Getting climate policy through the courts, however, means going toe to toe with a decades-long project to dominate courts at every level and inject them with previously fringe ideas about the relationship between politics, government, and the economy. Dressed as constitutional originalism, the right’s focus on the judiciary has benefited not just the National Rifle Association or religious groups looking to avoid current norms toward tolerance but also business interests looking to avoid pollution controls and, for practical and ideological reasons, to wholly dismantle an administrative state that might infringe on their profits.
I’m not sure about that 10% rural thing. It seems people are abandoning cities in droves, and moving ever outward. Rural real estate is HOT, and I don’t mean in California.
Yes I have a friend up in the Peninsula or beneath it sort of in Washington, and her business is going like hotcakes. People who can are fleeing the Covid hotspots
I spent about an hour over the weekend filling out my ballot for the 2020 general election. As an immigrant from a country where elections were not free until 1994, I understand the privilege of the franchise. Every two years, when it’s time to vote in national elections, I rip open my voting packet with a sense of sacred, nerdy seriousness. I’ll even study the positions of the candidates for school board. But that feeling never lasts; by the time I finish filling in all the bubbles, I am bitter and angry, weighed down by the pointlessness of the whole exercise.
Like more than 100 million other Americans, I live in one of the dozens of states that do not really matter in determining the makeup of our national government. Because I’m in California, the country’s most populous state and its biggest economy, my vote in The Most Important Presidential Election of Our Lifetime is hardly worth the paper it’s printed on.
The roots of my despair are well known. There is the Senate, which gives all states equal representation regardless of population, so voters in Wyoming, the least populous state, effectively enjoy almost 70 times more voting power than us chopped-liver Californians. And there is the winner-takes-all Electoral College, in which a tiny margin of victory pays off, with the whole pot of electoral votes going to the winner. This means that millions of presidential votes, from both Republicans and Democrats, are effectively wasted — all the votes cast for the loser in each state and all the excess ones cast for the winner.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in California by more than four million votes. But in our bizarre system, Clinton’s four million Californians were ignored, superseded by the 80,000 voters who gave Trump the narrow margin he needed to win in three other states, and he became president.
Then, of course, there is the Supreme Court nomination that Republicans are ramming through the Senate. Because Republicans derive much of their political strength from many small states, the Senate amplifies their power; as CNN’s Ronald Brownstein pointed out last month, the 47 Democratic senators represent nearly 169 million people, more than the 158 million people represented by the Senate’s 53 Republicans.
If Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is confirmed along partisan lines, the Supreme Court will cross “an undemocratic milestone,” as Adam Cole pointed out in Vox. For the first time, “a controlling majority of the court will have been put there by senators whom most voters didn’t choose.”
It boils my blood, all of it. Is it any wonder that the United States has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout among developed nations? The system is corrosive. We are told by everyone, everywhere, that voting is the path toward a better country, but in every election, we are shown that some votes matter much more than others, and that we should all just live with it, because smart people a long time ago decided it should be so.
T and R, jcb!! 🙂 Horseshit. The despair in the above read is exactly what the fascist/corp mfers bank on. They have been pulling and manipulating this mental garbage for centuries. The folks are coming out in droves to vote. Maybe they will realize (finally) when a bunch of the fascist crap is blown out, that they count.
I do know that in my small social circle that their is anger and disgust toward politicians locally, Their sick of being taken for granted and having their wants and needs ignored. A few like the Keifer Sutherland “designated Survivor” scenario and want to start over.
In a victory for President Donald Trump and a blow to civil rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the administration can order the Census Bureau to halt this year’s count of the nation’s population prematurely.
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represented the plaintiff’s in the suit in question, National Urban League, et al. vs. Ross, said the court’s majority order was a “disappointing” decision that “will result in irreversible damage to the 2020 Census.”
“We know the Bureau has indicated that it takes several days to terminate the enumeration process,” said Clarke. “As we explore options, we will continue to push undercounted communities in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi to participate while the counting process remains open and active. This fight is about ensuring that our nation’s hard-to-count populations, including Black people, communities of color, immigrants and other vulnerable populations were captured in the count.”
Reversing decisions by lower courts that forced the administration to keep counting until October 31, the high court granted an emergency stay requested by Trump’s Department of Justice. There was no explanation for the decision, which required the assent of at least five of the court’s eight justices.
While the order itself was unsigned, Justice Sonya Sotomayor issued a dissent warning the “harms caused by rushing this year’s census count are irreparable” and that “respondents will suffer their lasting impact for at least the next 10 years.”
In her lone dissent, Sotomayor argued that “even a fraction of a percent of the Nation’s 140 million households amounts to hundreds of thousands of people left uncounted. And significantly, the percentage of nonresponses is likely much higher among marginalized populations and in hard-to-count areas, such as rural and tribal lands. When governments allocate resources using census data, those populations will disproportionately bear the burden of any inaccuracies.”
This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS allowing Trump admin to cut census short to intentionally undercount immigrant communities & people of color in order to preserve conservative white power for next decade through anti-democratic means https://t.co/BUThk3Jqr5
Needless to say this has the media wringing its hands, mostly because Democratic nominee Joe Biden won’t say whether he would back such a move. He is wisely refusing to submit to their harangues, knowing full well that they are itching to turn this issue into another “Hillary’s emails.” And of course the Republicans are shrieking like rabid howler monkeys at the mere idea that Democrats might finally realize they can use their constitutional powers to rebalance the scales.
Considering what they have done, the Republicans do not have a leg to stand on. Their abuse of the “advise and consent” role in the nomination process makes any protestations about fairness laughable. Moreover, the number on the court has changed many times in the past. The Constitution does not designate a specific number on the court, which some of those “originalists” should consider may have been on purpose, as one of those “checks and balances” we used to be taught were so important.
It hasn’t been done recently, but that’s because we haven’t had one of the political parties go completely rogue and start abusing the system to place extremists throughout the federal judiciary in quite a while.
Biden has said that he’s “not a fan” of the idea of expanding the Supreme Court, which is not surprising. Very few Democrats want to do it. It’s going to be a bloody battle with a sanctimonious GOP suddenly rediscovering the necessity for norms and a media desperate to prove they are “fair and balanced” after four years of Trump. But if Democrats win and then don’t do what’s necessary to rebalance the judiciary and repudiate what these rogue Republicans have done, average Americans will pay a very steep price for their ineffectuality.
This idea that Supreme Court nominees can only be confirmed when the same party controls the Senate and White House is the most radical upheaval of the Constitution on the Judiciary in history, and it’s the official GOP position now.
Agree, but I don’t see how they will be punished. They seem to prefer staying in the shadows of a majority Republican party when they do lose. Or just becoming Republican.
And the only bold bones Joe has in his body are the corpse bones.
If I’m wrong, I’ll make you something, jcb, maybe a moist bread that can travel or a little zentangle. I would like nothing more.
And we can work to get good people elected. But our votes are going to be split a little bit as more and more third parties join the races.
First of all, the CV pandemic is affecting/killing off a lot of wrinkles in the old age group. Byedone is lucky that he ain’t one of them. Plus, all the bozos showing up at tRump rallies will get infected. Quite a few will die. 11/3 will show the evidence.
right at the moment, today, not that concerned about fascists’ takeover
but that was in my mind as I voted early yesterday in Columbus OH
i mentioned this to a few people in line and they agreed
but, with Amy on the court, we can look forward to massive changes from the court
the dems don’t know how to play political hardball and not clear that they will ever learn
*** reading Graham Harman’s book on Latour “Prince of Networks”
he notes that Karl Rove’s strategy is to attack on the opponents strong point
that is what they do
they attack on the strong points of democracy and republican form of government
Graham Harman has an interesting couple of pages in which he imagines Karl Rove attacking Kant, one of the half dozen greatest philosophers in history.
in the fictions encounter, he finds and publishes scandalous material on Kant
but his supporters, which is almost all of us in the modern world, and even the professional philosopher, are unmoved. Because Kant’s material has been incorporated and internalized so much that it would be too hard to change.
** I grew up with a naïve view of rationality.
just have a good argument and a person can be convinced
didn’t realize how much the worldview is invested in a particular topic
recall in 1968 living for grad school in AZ the right to life people with their baby photos and I thought that they would soon just disappear. Could not have imagined that it could be used as a wedge issue for the next 50 year.,
** we have learned how strong is the world view of the dem party
No, Don, unfortunately we have learned how powerful and pernicious is the role of organized Christian religion in this country. Look who has exploited it over the decades.
The Dems DO know how to play hardball. They play it against progressives all the time. They are invested in the same system as the Repubs, and it’s all theater to keep the masses invested in the team fandom for one side or the other. Keeping us divided.
It was the day before Thanksgiving, but the 2000 presidential election was far from over in Florida, where the tortured tug-of-war over a recount was about to trigger a melee.
Gore had phoned Bush to concede only to recant as the gap between the candidates shrank to several hundred votes in the state, with thousands of “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” and “dimpled chads” and “pimpled chads” to contest.
Geller had walked into the “Brooks Brothers riot,” a protest organized by Republican campaign operatives, congressional staffers and lawyers.
Unlike the Gore campaign, which focused on filing motions in Florida courts to keep the recount going in key counties such as Miami-Dade, the Bush campaign waged a broader, costlier effort on multiple fronts, Blakeman said.
“It was a three-pronged effort,” he said. “It was a court battle. It was a recount organization. And it was also a PR effort because, although the voting effort ended, the campaign never did until there was a definitive and defined winner.”
The question of whether to support Biden at the ballot has led to a great deal of leftist infighting. On Twitter, leftists like Knight complain of being “vote-shamed” — attacked by liberals who accuse him of willfully harming the country without fully acknowledging his legitimate grievances with Biden. Knight argues that vote-shaming is unproductive, forcing people to concede to politicians instead of vice-versa and turning away people the left needs to mobilize.
Both sides, to some extent, overstate the importance of the vote itself. Liberals who criticize nonvoters often give the impression that voting is the ultimate form of political action and civic duty. Nonvoting progressives seem to regard their vote as a reflection on themselves, and worry about selling out by giving Biden their approval at the poll. But a vote is not a sacred pact. It is merely one tactic of many.
Everyone on the left should strive to both minimize harm and facilitate as much good as possible. The next president will either be Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and even his most aggressive critics on the left almost all concede Biden is the lesser evil. It’s true that Biden’s platform doesn’t go far enough in giving working people the relief they need after decades of abandonment by the political and corporate class. But voting is, ultimately, a small piece of a much larger progressive project that needs to take place.
It’s important for people who all want the same thing, whose hearts are in the right place, to stick together, even if they disagree on strategy. Progressive nonvoters may be miscalculating when it comes to harm reduction, but they must still be part of the political movement. They can be invaluable assets to grassroots campaigns, attend and help with rallies, knock on doors, make phone calls, distribute literature, support strikes, and donate. If their conscience won’t let them vote for Biden, they can still support down-ballot progressives, as Knight does.
A formal split between the party’s establishment and progressive wings is likely at some point, but the infrastructure isn’t there yet. In the meantime, a Biden presidency may relieve certain pressures, especially for people hurt by the COVID economy. Democratic presidents are more susceptible to pressure from the left, from President Obama at Standing Rock to Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act. There’s no telling what a President Biden will do. But putting out the neofascist fires of Donald Trump may foster a more favorable landscape for real progressives to build and continue their movement.
wpDiscuz
https://newrepublic.com/article/159766/supreme-court-designed-kill-climate-policies
I’m not sure about that 10% rural thing. It seems people are abandoning cities in droves, and moving ever outward. Rural real estate is HOT, and I don’t mean in California.
Yes I have a friend up in the Peninsula or beneath it sort of in Washington, and her business is going like hotcakes. People who can are fleeing the Covid hotspots
As one of the 19+ million residents of another neglected state, I can feel the author’s pain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/opinion/california-voting.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
T and R, jcb!! 🙂 Horseshit. The despair in the above read is exactly what the fascist/corp mfers bank on. They have been pulling and manipulating this mental garbage for centuries. The folks are coming out in droves to vote. Maybe they will realize (finally) when a bunch of the fascist crap is blown out, that they count.
I think it’s less despair but anger that voters in states that drive this country’s economy are completely ignored.
I do know that in my small social circle that their is anger and disgust toward politicians locally, Their sick of being taken for granted and having their wants and needs ignored. A few like the Keifer Sutherland “designated Survivor” scenario and want to start over.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1316121841652715522?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1316121841652715522%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F2020%2F10%2F13%2Fcivil-rights-advocates-warn-supreme-court-order-victory-trump-will-result
Hope there are some public servants in the census bureau willing to disobey the illegitimate court’s ruling.
https://www.salon.com/2020/10/14/yes-biden-should-pack-the-court-its-time-to-fight-back-against-mitch-mcconnells-power-grabs/
am not convinced that dems will take bold action
need to keep the neo liberal econ system going at all costs
heck with democracy
They have the chance, and if they fail, they will be punished. It’s up to progressives to hold their feet to the fire.
Agree, but I don’t see how they will be punished. They seem to prefer staying in the shadows of a majority Republican party when they do lose. Or just becoming Republican.
And the only bold bones Joe has in his body are the corpse bones.
If I’m wrong, I’ll make you something, jcb, maybe a moist bread that can travel or a little zentangle. I would like nothing more.
And we can work to get good people elected. But our votes are going to be split a little bit as more and more third parties join the races.
Well punished included losing to the Republicans
First of all, the CV pandemic is affecting/killing off a lot of wrinkles in the old age group. Byedone is lucky that he ain’t one of them. Plus, all the bozos showing up at tRump rallies will get infected. Quite a few will die. 11/3 will show the evidence.
“Will you please like me” How pathetic
when will the Republicans have gone too far?
right at the moment, today, not that concerned about fascists’ takeover
but that was in my mind as I voted early yesterday in Columbus OH
i mentioned this to a few people in line and they agreed
but, with Amy on the court, we can look forward to massive changes from the court
the dems don’t know how to play political hardball and not clear that they will ever learn
***
reading Graham Harman’s book on Latour “Prince of Networks”
he notes that Karl Rove’s strategy is to attack on the opponents strong point
that is what they do
they attack on the strong points of democracy and republican form of government
Graham Harman has an interesting couple of pages in which he imagines Karl Rove attacking Kant, one of the half dozen greatest philosophers in history.
in the fictions encounter, he finds and publishes scandalous material on Kant
but his supporters, which is almost all of us in the modern world, and even the professional philosopher, are unmoved. Because Kant’s material has been incorporated and internalized so much that it would be too hard to change.
**
I grew up with a naïve view of rationality.
just have a good argument and a person can be convinced
didn’t realize how much the worldview is invested in a particular topic
recall in 1968 living for grad school in AZ the right to life people with their baby photos and I thought that they would soon just disappear. Could not have imagined that it could be used as a wedge issue for the next 50 year.,
**
we have learned how strong is the world view of the dem party
No, Don, unfortunately we have learned how powerful and pernicious is the role of organized Christian religion in this country. Look who has exploited it over the decades.
The Dems DO know how to play hardball. They play it against progressives all the time. They are invested in the same system as the Repubs, and it’s all theater to keep the masses invested in the team fandom for one side or the other. Keeping us divided.
SUPREME COURT OCT. 12, 2020
Amy Coney Barrett’s Judicial Neutrality Is a Political Fiction
Clarence Thomas’s twin–another super dumbshit on the court.
Ending hunger: science must stop neglecting smallholder farmers
Policymakers urgently need ideas on ways to end hunger. But a global review of the literature finds that most researchers have had the wrong priorities.
To Stop an Electoral Coup, Study What Went Wrong in the 2000 Florida Recount
I lived through it. Ralph Nader was a major part.
Nader had some impact but was simply a convenient scapegoat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/15/its-insanity-how-brooks-brothers-riot-killed-recount-miami/
Al Gore had a much more major part.
How progressives should navigate their Biden conundrum
From the article
Damn good article Thx DM
^^^^This^^^^
Robert Lighthizer Blew Up 60 Years of Trade Policy. Nobody Knows What Happens Next.
Trump’s trade representative joined the administration with one mission: Bring factory jobs back from overseas. The results so far? Endless trade wars, alienated allies, and a manufacturing recession.