The efforts of Republican state legislators in 43 states to suppress voting have made the rubber of Republicans politics meet the road of reality. Republicans are pushing the idea that it is imperative to pass laws to protect the sanctity of the vote because their supporters are concerned that the 2020 election was stolen. But, as observers have pointed out, if they want to reassure their voters that the election was clean, the way to do it would be to tell them the truth: the election wasn’t stolen.
I think it might be useful, given his current popularity (not only among Democrats), if Joe Biden were to go on national TV and call out the GOP on their voter suppression antics. Y'know, just tell the GOP electorate - in no uncertain terms - that their leaders are lying to them, that there is zero evidence that the last election was stolen from them, and that they have lost touch with reality if they still believe it was stolen.
Of course, all they have to do is follow mainstream media to know this already, but it seems the GOP nutcases don't do that too much and are more inclined to believe the latest conspiracy theories. But they might tune in President Biden in primetime. Worth a try anyway.
MLB taking the All-Star game away from Georgia, and other economic retaliation against the Confederacy will be the "stick" with which the White Male Southern "Mule" gets hit over the head, so it knows we're here. It would also help if these companies would start lobbying in favor of H.R.1/S.1 because the only way the hydra can be defeated is to cut off all the heads back below the neck.
The "cultways" of the far right have to be smashed.
In addition to not letting up on the rhetoric, the most important action companies and corporate leaders can do now is shut off the money supply that feeds these repressive republicans.
So, in every single one of the 43 states where Republicans are using voter suppression as a lever to hold onto power, the fulcrum stands… on a marsh.
If we switch briefly from metaphor to weird reality, the entire scam depends upon one man’s hypnotic power to make his followers believe whatever he wants them to believe, despite conclusive evidence conclusively confirmed to the contrary.
The scam no longer depends on sleight-of-hand but on over four years of incessant conditioning to make believers believe whatever the hypnotist tells them, even when the message at 3 p.m. is the opposite of that put out at 11 a.m..
Since the whole enterprise is grounded in pure fantasy, descriptions are forced back onto metaphors like that of the Emperor’s New Clothes or the villain in a Tex Avery cartoon running over a cliff edge and keeping on running… until he too realizes there’s no ground under his feet… when he falls.
All this makes the Big Lie seem a very childish action with no power to harm, but that is not so. On the contrary, it threatens immense potential danger for the State. The Taiping uprising in mid-19th century China was grounded in one villager’s visions of himself as the brother of Jesus Christ bringing a Heavenly Kingdom. Civil war lasted 13 years and tens of millions died.
Businessmen may not like all that the new Administration brings but their common concern is with the foundations of the economy. Unless they wish to see the country's future jeopardized all for nothing, it will be in their interest to work with -- and thus influence -- the powers that be, not those that were.
Although I did read your past 2 letters, that was the extent of my involvement. I have been completely sidelined by a particularly nasty reaction to my 2nd Pfizer vaccine. I do hope everyone is getting their 1st and 2nd shots. I am seeing more peer review (Pfizer) that boosters are going to be needed as variants unveil themselves. This should be an expected discovery as we learn more about this pandemic.
That said.
I wonder when someone will call out the GOP for their in plain site lies to the degree that it will make a difference. So far, no one has. It's as though , collectively, this Nation is fine with the perpetual Big Lie. Why is that? The GOP was already fleshing out "The Big Lie" on day 1 of Trumps Presidency as the rest of us sat back in the misaligned illusion that we won Democracy and everything will change forever.
What Stacey Abrams did was colossal, but we don't have 52 of her to pull off next years mid terms.
As I sat back watching the 2020 election results unfold, I couldn't help but think as I keep hearing over and over that we have 4 years to rebuild this country. No we don't. Our window of opportunity is even shorter than I thought it would be considering the push back from the GOP towards Biden from day 1. I expected there would be more bipartisan efforts as Trump would be physically out of the picture and those Republicans could do the right thing.
Biden has done amazing things in his short time in office. For that we should be grateful. I am.
Please add Dell Computers to the list of corporations supporting voting rights and against the Republican push for voter suppression. Is there a list somewhere of all the corporations that are joining the side of democracy? This is the kind of pressure we need against the state legislatures that are passing anti-democratic laws. I hope everyone will personally thank each one of them. I am going to write to Dell and the others of my appreciation for their position. I have no connection with Dell other than buying one of their computer systems a couple of months ago which I'm quite pleased with. I'm also very happy to see Microsoft join the for democracy corporations.
Republicans in Georiga, Texas, and elsewhere are irrationally out of touch with what's happening in the country. When big companies are speaking out against voter suppression and Republicans (REPUBLICANS!) are seeking to punish them, there's a disconnect with reality. The big question is what's the next step? The companies aren't going to pack up and leave places like Atlanta and Dallas. Instead, they're going to devote their sizable lobbying efforts to influence Congress. And that may be enough to sufficient push the Manchins and Sinemas to finally oppose the filibuster.
It’s absurd and highly undemocratic to retaliate against these companies that speak out against their former Republican sponsors’ bills. Whether they should have had the special privileges is a separate question. But stopping the voter suppression bills in their tracks is critical to moving the country forward.
On the murder trial of George Floyd, I'd like to point out not only the racial arrogance of the policemen involved but also their misogyny when they ignored the offer of help from the woman off-duty EMS professional and wouldn't even let her talk through the steps to get Mr. Floyd's pulse.
While public statements by large firms are certainly welcome, Republican legislators will respond more readily when the checks to their campaigns and PACs stop arriving, or, worse, are diverted to Democrats.
In addition, consumer product companies such as Coca Cola are very aware that a boycott by minority consumers is a real possibility with very real effects on the bottom line. A similar boycott by Trumpistas, I think, would not be nearly as effective and thus is less of a threat.
"In 1890, southern white leaders promised the North that voter suppression would make the South bloom. They were wrong: by concentrating wealth and power among a few white leaders, it kept the South mired in poverty for at least two generations. Rejecting voter suppression this time around could write an entirely different story.”
The question which presses more and more upon Americans is whether the GOP leaders care about average people being “mired in poverty?” Indeed it appears that this is precisely where the GOP and its billionaire backers want to push Americans-- in the ancient belief of oppressors that an ignorant, impoverished people is a passive and quiescent people, manipulable because they have no real independent intentions of their own.
The authoritarian intention behind the GOP revealed itself openly under Trump, though its mob mentality had been increasingly on display at Republican conventions. It seems to me that the dark money people and their minions have calculated that now is the time to come out of the closet and stop pretending altogether to care about justice and equality, to fight for the power which is their overriding concern. The wealthy don’t want to be subject to the needs of their fellow citizens, they want their fellow citizens to be functional subjects, servants of their intentions and whims.
This at any rate is how it appears to me. So far as I know the only politician who has been addressing this directly is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. We need more of his caliber.
“They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” then added: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”
Wait, does this guy think that Big Capital is the dog biting them? Does he imagine that he and his cronies have all the power in this relationship?
That’s going to be one hell of a wake up call.
Oh and I love Ralston proclaiming his love of Pepsi. He’s probably the first person to point out the futility of boycotts.
>>Last week, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell claimed in a court filing that “no reasonable person” would believe that her lies about election fraud “were truly statements of fact.”<<
Here we have a Republican saying explicitly what we always suspected: the GOP regards its own voters as stupid and gullible.
The scary thing about the Repugnant Party is its ignorant cult base, which disdains science, verifiable facts and even law & order. The manipulative politicians discovered this cult mentality by accident when a conspiracy driven, mentally defective conman garnered great support and they latched onto it, knowing it was all a con game. Now they are stuck trying to figure out logically how to play it before enuf intelligent ppl pull back the curtain and see the fraud. There are 74 million verifiable idiots out there in the cult base, so it’s worth a gamble. Even tho they have put idiots in Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who yesterday filed a bill to fire Dr. Fauci without having a clue that Congress can’t do that. He is protected in his position by civil service regs and can’t be fired without cause, which there are none because he follows science & not politics as required of his position. The same with the Repugnant Georgia legislators who do not understand the concept of symbiosis & want to start a trade war with Delta Airlines. I have been thru the Atlanta Airport – you need a tram to get from one Delta concourse to another. Delta gets tax breaks as incentive to locate in Atlanta, the same as movie studios and tech industries. But, these companies rely on intelligent workers of many races who may not want to live in 1950s Dixie. Also, these companies are subject to approval of a diverse public who may boycott them if they side with bigots.
I think it might be useful, given his current popularity (not only among Democrats), if Joe Biden were to go on national TV and call out the GOP on their voter suppression antics. Y'know, just tell the GOP electorate - in no uncertain terms - that their leaders are lying to them, that there is zero evidence that the last election was stolen from them, and that they have lost touch with reality if they still believe it was stolen.
Of course, all they have to do is follow mainstream media to know this already, but it seems the GOP nutcases don't do that too much and are more inclined to believe the latest conspiracy theories. But they might tune in President Biden in primetime. Worth a try anyway.
Excuse me if I sound naive. I probably am.
MLB taking the All-Star game away from Georgia, and other economic retaliation against the Confederacy will be the "stick" with which the White Male Southern "Mule" gets hit over the head, so it knows we're here. It would also help if these companies would start lobbying in favor of H.R.1/S.1 because the only way the hydra can be defeated is to cut off all the heads back below the neck.
The "cultways" of the far right have to be smashed.
In addition to not letting up on the rhetoric, the most important action companies and corporate leaders can do now is shut off the money supply that feeds these repressive republicans.
So, in every single one of the 43 states where Republicans are using voter suppression as a lever to hold onto power, the fulcrum stands… on a marsh.
If we switch briefly from metaphor to weird reality, the entire scam depends upon one man’s hypnotic power to make his followers believe whatever he wants them to believe, despite conclusive evidence conclusively confirmed to the contrary.
The scam no longer depends on sleight-of-hand but on over four years of incessant conditioning to make believers believe whatever the hypnotist tells them, even when the message at 3 p.m. is the opposite of that put out at 11 a.m..
Since the whole enterprise is grounded in pure fantasy, descriptions are forced back onto metaphors like that of the Emperor’s New Clothes or the villain in a Tex Avery cartoon running over a cliff edge and keeping on running… until he too realizes there’s no ground under his feet… when he falls.
All this makes the Big Lie seem a very childish action with no power to harm, but that is not so. On the contrary, it threatens immense potential danger for the State. The Taiping uprising in mid-19th century China was grounded in one villager’s visions of himself as the brother of Jesus Christ bringing a Heavenly Kingdom. Civil war lasted 13 years and tens of millions died.
Businessmen may not like all that the new Administration brings but their common concern is with the foundations of the economy. Unless they wish to see the country's future jeopardized all for nothing, it will be in their interest to work with -- and thus influence -- the powers that be, not those that were.
Thanks Heather.
Although I did read your past 2 letters, that was the extent of my involvement. I have been completely sidelined by a particularly nasty reaction to my 2nd Pfizer vaccine. I do hope everyone is getting their 1st and 2nd shots. I am seeing more peer review (Pfizer) that boosters are going to be needed as variants unveil themselves. This should be an expected discovery as we learn more about this pandemic.
That said.
I wonder when someone will call out the GOP for their in plain site lies to the degree that it will make a difference. So far, no one has. It's as though , collectively, this Nation is fine with the perpetual Big Lie. Why is that? The GOP was already fleshing out "The Big Lie" on day 1 of Trumps Presidency as the rest of us sat back in the misaligned illusion that we won Democracy and everything will change forever.
What Stacey Abrams did was colossal, but we don't have 52 of her to pull off next years mid terms.
As I sat back watching the 2020 election results unfold, I couldn't help but think as I keep hearing over and over that we have 4 years to rebuild this country. No we don't. Our window of opportunity is even shorter than I thought it would be considering the push back from the GOP towards Biden from day 1. I expected there would be more bipartisan efforts as Trump would be physically out of the picture and those Republicans could do the right thing.
Biden has done amazing things in his short time in office. For that we should be grateful. I am.
Be safe, be well.
Please add Dell Computers to the list of corporations supporting voting rights and against the Republican push for voter suppression. Is there a list somewhere of all the corporations that are joining the side of democracy? This is the kind of pressure we need against the state legislatures that are passing anti-democratic laws. I hope everyone will personally thank each one of them. I am going to write to Dell and the others of my appreciation for their position. I have no connection with Dell other than buying one of their computer systems a couple of months ago which I'm quite pleased with. I'm also very happy to see Microsoft join the for democracy corporations.
Republicans in Georiga, Texas, and elsewhere are irrationally out of touch with what's happening in the country. When big companies are speaking out against voter suppression and Republicans (REPUBLICANS!) are seeking to punish them, there's a disconnect with reality. The big question is what's the next step? The companies aren't going to pack up and leave places like Atlanta and Dallas. Instead, they're going to devote their sizable lobbying efforts to influence Congress. And that may be enough to sufficient push the Manchins and Sinemas to finally oppose the filibuster.
It’s absurd and highly undemocratic to retaliate against these companies that speak out against their former Republican sponsors’ bills. Whether they should have had the special privileges is a separate question. But stopping the voter suppression bills in their tracks is critical to moving the country forward.
On the murder trial of George Floyd, I'd like to point out not only the racial arrogance of the policemen involved but also their misogyny when they ignored the offer of help from the woman off-duty EMS professional and wouldn't even let her talk through the steps to get Mr. Floyd's pulse.
While public statements by large firms are certainly welcome, Republican legislators will respond more readily when the checks to their campaigns and PACs stop arriving, or, worse, are diverted to Democrats.
In addition, consumer product companies such as Coca Cola are very aware that a boycott by minority consumers is a real possibility with very real effects on the bottom line. A similar boycott by Trumpistas, I think, would not be nearly as effective and thus is less of a threat.
This is a beginning. Those with a voice must take a stand to support the right to vote.
"In 1890, southern white leaders promised the North that voter suppression would make the South bloom. They were wrong: by concentrating wealth and power among a few white leaders, it kept the South mired in poverty for at least two generations. Rejecting voter suppression this time around could write an entirely different story.”
The question which presses more and more upon Americans is whether the GOP leaders care about average people being “mired in poverty?” Indeed it appears that this is precisely where the GOP and its billionaire backers want to push Americans-- in the ancient belief of oppressors that an ignorant, impoverished people is a passive and quiescent people, manipulable because they have no real independent intentions of their own.
The authoritarian intention behind the GOP revealed itself openly under Trump, though its mob mentality had been increasingly on display at Republican conventions. It seems to me that the dark money people and their minions have calculated that now is the time to come out of the closet and stop pretending altogether to care about justice and equality, to fight for the power which is their overriding concern. The wealthy don’t want to be subject to the needs of their fellow citizens, they want their fellow citizens to be functional subjects, servants of their intentions and whims.
This at any rate is how it appears to me. So far as I know the only politician who has been addressing this directly is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. We need more of his caliber.
“They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” then added: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”
Wait, does this guy think that Big Capital is the dog biting them? Does he imagine that he and his cronies have all the power in this relationship?
That’s going to be one hell of a wake up call.
Oh and I love Ralston proclaiming his love of Pepsi. He’s probably the first person to point out the futility of boycotts.
>>Last week, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell claimed in a court filing that “no reasonable person” would believe that her lies about election fraud “were truly statements of fact.”<<
Here we have a Republican saying explicitly what we always suspected: the GOP regards its own voters as stupid and gullible.
Republicans would sacrifice their states’ economic well-being to suppress voting. How pitiful is that?
The scary thing about the Repugnant Party is its ignorant cult base, which disdains science, verifiable facts and even law & order. The manipulative politicians discovered this cult mentality by accident when a conspiracy driven, mentally defective conman garnered great support and they latched onto it, knowing it was all a con game. Now they are stuck trying to figure out logically how to play it before enuf intelligent ppl pull back the curtain and see the fraud. There are 74 million verifiable idiots out there in the cult base, so it’s worth a gamble. Even tho they have put idiots in Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who yesterday filed a bill to fire Dr. Fauci without having a clue that Congress can’t do that. He is protected in his position by civil service regs and can’t be fired without cause, which there are none because he follows science & not politics as required of his position. The same with the Repugnant Georgia legislators who do not understand the concept of symbiosis & want to start a trade war with Delta Airlines. I have been thru the Atlanta Airport – you need a tram to get from one Delta concourse to another. Delta gets tax breaks as incentive to locate in Atlanta, the same as movie studios and tech industries. But, these companies rely on intelligent workers of many races who may not want to live in 1950s Dixie. Also, these companies are subject to approval of a diverse public who may boycott them if they side with bigots.