Sunday 28th of April 2024
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loaded guns and loaded votes...

undemocratic america

The United States has temporarily avoided federal default. As the Republicans lick their wounds, the Democrats are triumphant. But no one should be happy, because the debacle has exposed just how broken the American political system truly is.

The president kept things short, speaking for only three minutes on Wednesday night to praise the debt compromise reached by Congress. After he finished, a reporter called after him: "Mr. President, will this happen again in a couple of months?" Barack Obama, who was on his way out the door, turned and answered sharply, "No."
But such optimism has proven to be unrealistic in the past. With his re-election in 2012, Obama thought he could break the Republican "fever." Instead, the conservatives paralyzed the government and risked a federal default just so they could stop Obama's signature project: health care reform. And this despite the fact that "Obamacare" had been approved by a majority of both houses of Congress, was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and was endorsed by the American people in the voting booths.No, the democratic process cannot reduce this "fever," and probably won't during the next fight, either. On the contrary, the political crisis has turned out to be a systemic crisis.America's 237-year-old democracy is approaching its limits. Its political architecture was not designed for long-lasting blockades and extortion, the likes of which have been enthusiastically practiced by Tea Party supporters for almost the last four years. The US's founding fathers proposed a system of checks and balances, not checks and boycotts.In hardly any other western democracy are the minority's parliamentary rights as strongly pronounced as they are in the US, where a single senator can delay legislation, deny realities, and leverage the system.


Non-Representative Democracy

In Germany, the government is built from a majority in parliament. In America, the president and his allies in Congress have to organize majorities for each new law. But for a long time Obama has hardly been able to find any -- not for immigration reform, or new gun control laws, or even for the budget, as the world's largest economy has been making do with emergency spending measures since 2009.

Scarcely 50 right-wing populists, led by Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz, have been pushing their once proud Republican party into a kamikaze course. Why are the other Republicans letting them do this? They are afraid of radical challengers within their own party in their local districts.

Meanwhile, the Democrats hardly pose a threat, because over the past several years the borders of the congressional districts have been manipulated in such a way that they almost always clearly go Republican or Democratic. As a result, America loses the representative nature of its representative democracy. In the congressional elections in 2012, Democrats won 1.17 million more votes than Republicans, but Republicans got 33 more seats in the House of Representatives.

Changes in majority rarely exist anymore. Not even 10 percent of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are considered competitive. As a result, those who would be willing to compromise in Washington are already punished during the primary seasons back home, which was how the last moderates were pushed out of Congress.

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/commentary-us-budget-shutdown-has-exposed-deep-political-flaws-a-928393.html

frightened by the voters...

NOTHING FRIGHTENS today’s Republican Party quite like the voters. Before the 2012 elections, GOP lawmakers in statehouses across the country tightened voter identification laws with one goal in common: to suppress turnout on Election Day among likely Democratic voters, especially minorities and the poor. It didn’t work.

Now, harking back to the days of Jim Crow, they are at it again. In Arizona and Kansas, GOP officials are moving to adopt a two-tiered voting system, the effect of which would be to disenfranchise thousands of voters. The ploy relies on requiring birth certificates, passports and other documents that establish proof of citizenship in order to register to vote in state and local elections. Such documents are not necessary to register for federal elections.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kansas-and-arizona-continue-voter-suppression-efforts/2013/10/18/b8d43b54-3695-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html?hpid=z3

black is back and fox is crap...

 

There were a few areas of agreement. Surprisingly, perhaps, Lord Black was critical of the US health system, noting that it was excellent for 70 per cent of the population, but poor for the remaining 30 per cent. "I am no socialist but it just won't do in a rich country," he said.

Sometimes the two men, who are on friendly terms, disagreed, though not strenuously. Mr Carr was supportive of the Obama administration's handling of the Syrian crisis; Mr Black thought Obama had let his diplomacy be hijacked by "Russian thugdom".

"Which is better, Conrad," said a genial Carr, "the George Bush approach or that of the Obama administration?"

"Bob, I will not be portrayed as an apologist for George Bush. I think he was a bonehead," Lord Black retorted.

But it was the US justice system, of which he has direct experience, that got Lord Black most steamed up.

"The justice system, which is close to the moral heart of a country, is an utter disgrace: a 99 per cent conviction rate, terribly severe sentences, a semi privatised prison system that is totally corrupt, and 98 per cent of cases settled without trial because of the plea bargain system.

"Yet generation after generation, the Supreme Court sits there drinking its own bath water. Where the hell have they been while their great Bill of Rights is being shredded," he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/why-bob-carr-loves-fox-news-20131104-2wwvh.html#ixzz2jfoefKYS

 

soros fighting against restrictive voting laws...

 

A Democratic legal fight against restrictive voting laws enacted in recent years by Republican-controlled state governments is being largely paid for by a single liberal benefactor: the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

Mr. Soros, the Hungarian-born investor whose first major involvement in American politics was a voter-mobilization drive in the 2004 presidential race, has yet to commit the many millions of dollars that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s allies hope he and other like-minded billionaires will pour into the “super PAC” directly aiding her campaign.

But it turns out that Mr. Soros has already agreed to put as much as $5 million into the litigation effort, which Democrats hope will erode restrictions on voter access that they say could otherwise prove decisive in a close election.

The lawsuits — which are being led by a lawyer whose clients include Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — are attacking a variety of measures, including voter-identification requirements that Democrats consider onerous, time restrictions imposed on early voting that they say could make it difficult to cast ballots the weekend before Election Day, and rules that could nullify ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

The lawyer, Marc Elias, who specializes in voter-protection issues, was in contact with Mr. Soros in January 2014 when Mr. Elias was exploring a series of federal lawsuits before that year’s midterm election and in advance of the 2016 campaign, according to Mr. Soros’s political adviser, Michael Vachon. (Mr. Elias declined to comment on Friday about the funding of the lawsuits.)

The goal is to try to influence voting rules in states where Republican governors and Republican-led legislatures have enacted election laws since 2010, and to be ready to intervene if additional measures are passed over the next 17 months.

Mr. Soros described himself as “proud” to be part of the legal battles. “We hope to see these unfair laws, which often disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in our society, repealed,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/05/bankroller-of-democratic-voting-rights-cases-george-soros/?_r=0

 

See at top...

 

see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11236

 

 

a lot of turgid water has passed under the bridge...

 

See toon at top and read from top...

The Potomac sewer has bustted after leaking for many years... No difference...

 

Can it be only last year that I was making the out-of-touch liberal elite laugh, in publicly subsidised theatres throughout pre-Brexit Britain, by saying that “Donald Trump” sounded like the kind of name Walt Disney would come up with if he was asked to invent a fart that could speak?

Happy times.

It seemed then that Donald Trump was destined to become little more than the answer to a pub trivia question, fondly and foolishly remembered, and filed alongside Faith Brown’s Rusty Lee impression, Spike Milligan’s sitcom Curry & Chips, and an almost heroically offensive sentence my dad shouted at a woman on a gangplank near Greenwich in 1997 as an example of the dying light of a distant dark age.

And can it be only last year that Brexit’s bogus cheerleader Boris Johnson, who remains incomprehensibly at large like a clever piglet, was reassuring us that we could leave the EU and stay in the single market, as his policy was “having cake and eating it”? Where is your cake now, fatty? Or, as Pliny the Younger might have said, “Ubi nunc est subcinericius panis, sterculus?”

And can it be only two days ago that a cakeless Theresa May, desperate to proffer illusory options before forcing through article 50 with the compliance of an immolated opposition, went lamb-like into the Playboy-encrusted office of Donald Trump? Friendless in Europe, she began trade negotiations with the kind of rogue state we might once have proudly imposed sanctions on. We didn’t buy Apartheid oranges. Henceforth let us boycott Dunkin’ Donuts, hardcore pornography and Adam Sandler movies, America’s most choice exports.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/29/donald-trump-70s-w...

 

Note: Gus hates Adam sandler movies...