US election 2020

[Jezza]

If the liberal-leaning judges held the majority in the SC, would you be in favour of dissolving the entire bench?

Yep. Should never have been a presidential appointment, regardless of ideology.

An alternative is that they could all be up for review every five years. But I fear that that wouldn’t solve the central problem.

In a perfect world, I agree with you.

But we both know this won't happen. It's hyper-partisan politics, so the gloves are off on both sides of the spectrum.

[Sicks Bux]

They're having a US election special on Q&A tonight. I might check it out later in the week at ABC on demand.

[Tannin]

[stui magpie]

Sleepy Joe off to a flying start. Either caught telling lies (which makes him a perfect candidate for POTUS) or he's just senile and has NFI

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/20/poli ... peditorial

[Sicks Bux]

[David]

I actually think you're both right here: the Democrats are ruthless when it comes to overseeing their own party and rigging things for their big-money interests and preferred candidates, but when it comes time to fight the Republicans they turn into paper tigers desperate to play nice for some reason.

I remember someone summing up the outlook of the Obama administration as basically the Democrats taking the attitude that they needed to compromise and the Republicans refusing to budge an inch. So the Democrats would come to congress having already offered a compromise, or a compromise of a compromise, at which point they'd already lost either way. McConnell played them like a fiddle in those years. Let's hope they've learned something.

[roar]

^^ Wishful thinking, David. They have chosen Biden so I doubt they have learnt anything.

I also think the Dems are just as prone to cheating where they can. Just look at the dirty tricks and covert operations against Trump the first time round.

[pietillidie]

The Christian Taliban and backward whack jobs continue to drag the US into a new dark age. This means more guns, more repression, more environmental destruction, more unchecked executive power, more science denial, more conspiratorial nuttery, burgeoning prison populations, more unchecked corporate interference in elections, more nefarious global actions and more chaos and instability.

As the rest of the world tries to decouple from a flaky, unstable and incompetent US, the Christian Taliban will try to control the world through sanctions regimes and trade wars. Not a good dynamic brewing at all.

[Jezza]

A remarkably glib avoidance of the real issue here: filthy dishonest actions - not just dishonest, filthy dishonest - by right-wing politicians. Make no mistake here, this is not one of those "bit of dirt on both sides" situations. The Republicans have been utterly shameless in their hypocrisy, deceit, and naked cheating on this matter.

For the last twenty-odd years, the Democrats have been remarkably reluctant to smash the decencies and throw fair play out the window, all things considered. Over and over again, it has been the Republicans who have cheated their way to power, and been prepared to sacrifice good government, fair play, and democracy itself to their narrow political aims. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, abuse of process, and stacking the courts - no act is too low.

Sadly, that is going to stop. The rest of America is not going to take it lying down anymore. They have swallowed so many dirty tricks over the years, and tried to stick at least somewhere near the rules. Never again. The Democrats are going to do whatever it takes to restore the balance. No more Mr Nice Guy. America will never be the same again.

Remember, the Republicans lost the vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but appointed 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court judges. It wasn't chance. They cheated.

Remember, no one cares about the popular vote. It's the electoral college that matters.

If the popular vote was in place, the overwhelming majority of states would be neglected by Presidential candidates during an election cycle, and they would solely focus on the half dozen most populated states in the country.

No more "Mr Nice Guy" from the Democrats? What have they been doing for the past three years then with impeachment, RussiaGate, enabling violence on the streets through radical organisations such as BLM and Antifa and rigging their primaries to ensure the establishment candidate wins?

[pietillidie]

^And yet two monumental failed wars of aggression, one global trade war, monstrous deficits and two financial crises somehow slide straight through to the keeper.

When your perspective becomes that divorced from important metrics, you know you've taken leave of your critical faculties.

[Tannin]

If "no one cares about the popular vote", as Jezza pretends, democracy is dead. That's what democracy is - people vote and the majority rules.

I am honestly dumbfounded at many of the comments in this thread. Yes, sure, the hard right left the truth and honesty building many years ago and has been living in fantasyland ever since, but this goes way beyond that. We see idiotic comparisons made between very, very serious and absolutely blatant cheating at the highest level of public office (stacking the Supreme Court, for example) and chickenshit internal party trivia. We see the repetition of absurd, no-evidence-whatsoever claims about "covert operations" against the Trump campaign when (as we all know, or at least all of us who still subscribe to reason and evidence as ways of coming to a belief) the actual dirty tricks, and lots of them, were carried out by the Trump campaign. Numerous Trump flunkies are serving jail time (or have been pardoned by their corrupt leader), the evidence is all out there on the public record.

But various people here simply ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist. When evidence and reason are no longer relevant to a conversation, it's time to walk away.

I give up.

[pietillidie]

Trump and the Christian Taliban showed no interest in curtailing a deadly pandemic, especially when it mainly affected blue states. But curtailing the life opportunities of young women is another thing altogether. Much like the religious crazies who idolise him, Trump's been interfering with young women for decades. Why stop at a mere unwanted grope?

The Trump administration has been executing a coordinated attack on what it sees as a critical public health issue. Unfortunately, the offensive is not targeting the COVID-19 pandemic, which has infected over six million people and claimed almost 200,000 lives in the US. Instead, the campaign has its sights set on women’s sexual health and reproductive rights, especially abortion. With the recent death of Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg threatening the fate of Roe v. Wade, the security of abortion rights has never been more precarious.

The administration’s brazen anti-abortion agenda includes not only well-publicized executive actions such as the expansions of the global and domestic gag rules, “conscience” exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, and the packing of courts with anti-abortion judges.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-right ... -you-think

[Sicks Bux]

I see Trump has skipped out to a two vote lead in our poll.

[watt price tully]

Stephen Colbert was very good last night:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d2mvmeklx ... pQ&index=1

[David]

No more "Mr Nice Guy" from the Democrats? What have they been doing for the past three years then with impeachment, RussiaGate, enabling violence on the streets through radical organisations such as BLM and Antifa and rigging their primaries to ensure the establishment candidate wins?

BLM and Antifa have nothing to do with the Democrats. You can argue that they didn't condemn them hard enough, or whatever (much like Trump's "good people on both sides" comments about white supremacist protests), but in no way are they affiliated with the Democratic Party or acting in concert with them.

On the other hand, the Democrats were indeed dogged about impeachment and Russiagate. But note what their target was in each case: getting rid of Trump. Both were all about their pathological obsession with him and the theatre of discrediting him, and had absolutely nothing to do with scoring political victories against Republicans or actually getting Democratic policies through. When the time has come to vote on important, society-altering stuff, like Trump's massive tax cuts, they've mostly waved it through or offered the weakest possible opposition.