The term "court packing" has a very specific meaning. It refers to adding seats to the supreme court to shift the balance.
The term "court packing" has a very specific meaning. It refers to adding seats to the supreme court to shift the balance.
This year they literally canceled the presidential primary in several states so, no, we don't have a primary every four years.
Radical consolidation of the media industry has largely killed independent journalism. There is a long list of media personalities who were taken off the air for daring to speak the truth. Anchors are selected to represent the establishment perspective on everything. Media ownership and the establishment work together to dominate the narrative. For profit or non-profit is irrelevant. PBS is now as captured as the private networks.
New media caught the establishment by surprise and did manage to make inroads, but that has largely been brought under control. Democrats and Republicans cooperated long enough to pressure social media companies to tweak the algorithm to direct viewers to "trustworthy" news sources, a group that laughably includes FOX News and MS-NBC and excludes independent news providers.
Electing Biden can't preserve democracy where none exists. There was that study out of Stanford that showed zero statistical correlation between the policy desires of voters and what legislation gets passed. We have the facade of democracy, but no actual democracy.
What we do have is the fight for Democracy, and that fight has a much better chance under Biden than Trump. That's not a minor distinction. I will not get behind allowing the Democratic establishment to portray itself as the defender of Democracy. They are democracy's enemies, and they are my enemies. The entire fight for democracy in an age of media manipulation is a fight to pull back that curtain. That fight doesn't stop because of Trump.
I like the part of the election cycle when some good things are allowed to happen.
I don't even blame Biden for waiting. Americans have such short memories that getting elected means having to hold some things in reserve, and getting reelected or passing the office on are genuinely important factors. It just sucks that people had to wait.
Congrats to everyone helped by this!
It's hardly unthinkable. Half the party has been thinking it, now the other half is waking up.
We can still get back to democracy. This isn't democracy. Did you even read my comment btw? This knee jerk canned response isn't even human.
Then let's hold a primary.
Well, at least in the states where they didn't succeed in keeping everyone else off the ballot.
There was no real primary. Even 2020 wasn't a real primary. The fix is in with mainstream media and the major outlets taking their queues from the establishment.
The idea that we have an actual democracy is laughable, and the Democratic party does everything in their power to keep it that way. Biden won in 2020 because the establishment picked him and the media did as they were told. There is no democracy without an independent press.
Biden is a better choice than Trump for a multitude of reasons, but not saving democracy.
I am so damn tired of the bad guys winning. Voters in this country are ignorant as fuck so money beats all.
With Hillary weighing in on the side of AIPAC to endorse the challenger, I'd say that the establishment is pretty comfortable taking AIPAC's money.
Dems also changed their minds one actually supporting the incumbents here.
This has never been a standard they apply to progressives.
Not everyone was a D, at least not the voters. There was a massive push to reregister a lot of Republicans and Independents as Democrats.
Why not both?
This is so much better than all the posts shaming voters for not wanting to vote for Biden.
Biden is a far cry from the President that I want, but it's ignorant to claim he hasn't been a hell of a lot better than Trump, or even Obama and Clinton. After 50+ years of really shitty Presidents and an even worse Congress, Biden is arguably the best we've had. It's entirely possible to promote Biden with honest accounting without trying to silence the voices saying the Democrats must do better.
That said, of the Democrats try to force Harris on us without an actual primary in 2024, then it's time to repeat the 1968 national convention. Our FPTP system means that primaries are effectively the only real democracy we get, and the way they are run by the DNC (and RNC) is abysmal.
That's awesome. They had no significant development costs and still racked up a $15m loss in the last year. Yep, definitely a Trump enterprise.
The Republicans voted to pass a bill in the House to send the weapons. It will almost certainly fail in the Senate but, even if it doesn't, Biden would have to sign it into law. I don't see Biden signing a bill to override himself, and there is no way that Congress would get the required 2/3 in each chamber to override. This bill was just a performative stunt.
Obama was practically the platonic ideal of the perfect neoliberal president. He said all the right words, checked all the right boxes, and effortlessly combined warmth and charm with an air of stern authority. He was, in all likelihood, the best neoliberal president we will ever get. Neoliberalism is clearly not enough.
It's time for the Democratic party to stop pretending they can serve the elites while paying lip service to the proles. In a rational world, the proles would have no option. Democrats are not their friends, but they will never be as bad as Republicans. But it's not a rational world, and fascism thrives with the disaffected masses. When faced with the choice between "bad" and "worse", "worse" is far more attractive than it should be.
I kinda think the same for all Republicans.
Justified genocide as collective punishment achievement unlocked!
Applicability of the 2nd amendment is highly selective. All it took for Reagan to push through gun control in California was the Black Panthers arming themselves.
For thousands of years we shit and drank from the same rivers. That wasn't the most dangerous thing around either, but I'm kinda glad we stopped that too.
I wonder which half.
The more despicable Trump is proven to be, the more pathetic she looks for losing to him.
There is no dropoff of EV purchases, just Teslas, and just barely. One contributor to that is that there is a wait-list. A bigger contributor is that being associated with Elon isn't as cool as it once was.
I'm not a tankie, and it's not a good thing, but this isn't exactly a great time for the US to puff it's chest out about our right to protest and protections for whistle blowers.
You would be surprised how many on the left own guns and know how to use them. Also, while military membership leans conservative, they do not tend to like Trump.
From what I know of history, they seem pretty Christian to me.
This is an extremely common trope from establishment Democrats who like to pretend the left is just naive children. Let me make this perfectly clear to you. Yes, we get politics. Yes, we understand that Biden can't get everything he wants. Yes, we get that Republican obstruction is a thing.
Now, here are some things for you to try and grasp. Most of the time, Biden and the Democratic establishment is leading the opposition against the left. The establishment also plays dirty to get their unpopular candidates past the primary, then blames the left when they lose in the general.
It's not generally the politically active left that doesn't vote blue. Most of us are well practiced at holding our noses at the ballot box. It's normal non-political Americans who see no point in getting engaged when neither party even speaks to their problems.
It's almost like they're acting like a public corporation.
Despite being born into money, he managed to take on so much risk that it society had to bail him out. Even so, I'm certain that his net worth after bankruptcy was significantly higher than the vast majority in gen-z.
Just imagine the US goes to war and Elon shuts them off because some foreign leader strokes his (let's say) ego.
Biden has given a massive boost to unions in multiple ways, restarted enforcement of anti-trust laws, eased enforcement of Marijuana laws / moved towards decriminalization, and has forgiven $138 billion in student debt.
I'm no fan of Biden and we should definitely demand better, but it's ridiculous to claim he hasn't done just one thing to make people's lives better. This list is just off the top of my head, except the figure for student debt. I didn't even include climate issues since there has been some bad to subtract from the good, but he's been far better than any Republican would be.
Learn to tell the difference between leftists and right wing trolls. Anyone can call themselves a leftist. There is no leadership in the leftist movements that have come within a thousand miles of equating Trump and Biden. Biden is an old school right wing corporate Democrat, not fascist Trumpian garbage.
That's what happens when the establishment uses their stranglehold over mainstream media to strong arm a primary. The right wing is going to right wing, and misinformation is their whole game. Democrats can learn to be a party that can win in that environment, or they can let institutional inertia destroy the country. They seem to be leaning to the latter.
There is no population crisis, unless you mean there are too many people. Most of the work we do is entirely unnecessary and only exists to help billionaires become trillionaires. At least that's the case in countries that don't need meat to throw in front of bullets.
Necessary jobs are mostly farming, mining, manufacturing, and customer service. The first two have already been automated to need only a tiny percentage of the workforce they once require. Manufacturing is mostly there as well, and is getting closer all the time. Customer service still employs a lot of humans, but even those jobs are being replaced or augmented with physical or logical bots.
Sometimes it may be subsidized somewhat, sure, but the vast majority of it is coming out of pocket for these companies.
You seem awfully sure about that. What are you basing it on? MRNA research alone was massively funded with taxpayer money. Coding for new proteins is almost trivial compared to what went into developing the technology.
Please, can we not go to war on behalf of Israeli fascists? Please?
They aren't protecting us from TikTok, they are protecting themselves from us. They put a lot of resources into controlling mass media then got blindsided by social media. Now they have social media mostly under control, but only in this country. They can't risk the next Bernie Sanders giving people hope for a better world.
There are socialists, and then there is a fairly new wave of terminally online toxic assholes borrowing socialist rhetoric.
There is a difference between activism and empty virtue signaling. A huge portion of the online left is more interested in letting everyone know how pissed off they are than actually making the cultural gains necessary to improve anything.
Austerity programs in the US have nothing to do with saving the government money. It's literally the goal to make life worse for working Americans, this making them more subservient to employers.
Got it.
Um, what? Vote Biden to save Democracy, and fuck you if you want a different candidate.
I'll vote for Biden's corpse in 2028 if it's still the only way to keep Trump out of the Whitehouse, but give up the "save Democracy" schtick. That ship has sailed. Democracy is dead, and it's not just the Republican's fault.