A molti dei miei connazionali americani piace pensare alla loro nazione come un paese eccezionale, un esperimento politico unico, diverso da tutto il resto. Per alcuni, questa è una buona cosa; gli Stati Uniti si distinguono in alto, come ha detto Ronald Reagan, “la città splendente su una collina”.
Per altri, invece, è una terra di eccezionale disuguaglianza, violenza, corruzione e avidità. E, negli ultimi 4 anni, un numero crescente di americani vede anche il proprio paese come unico — almeno nel mondo sviluppato — per la mancanza di fiducia nel proprio governo, nelle sue istituzioni rotte, nella sua incompetente amministrazione. …
There is a debate raging currently that has cleaved the progressive Left in twain. On one hand, there is well-known leftist comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore who has called for the progressive Squad to demand a floor vote on Medicare For All in return for their supporting (voting for) Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.
The disastrous performance of the House Democrats in this year’s election has left the Party’s majority so slim, Dore says, that just a few progressive members threatening to withhold their votes could put Pelosi’s speakership in jeopardy.
Indeed, the Democratic losses in the 2020 election mean that if just five House members withheld their vote, then Nancy Pelosi could not be Speaker. …
America likes to think of itself as an exceptional country, a unique political experiment, different from all the rest. For some, this is a good thing; the US stands apart but on high, that “shining city on a hill.”
For others, however, it is a land of exceptional inequality, violence, corruption and greed. …
The US is exceptional in many ways when it comes to elections. First, we are the only industrialized country that disenfranchises so many of its citizens, denying them the right to vote. Second, of those that are allowed to vote, the US has one of the lowest rates of voter participation of any “first world” country.
The US is also unique in how we vote. Unlike most of the so-called “western democracies,” the US relies almost exclusively on electronic voting systems. In some cases this includes touch screens, in some cases marked paper ballots are scanned, and in some cases mail in ballots are processed by hand. …
Republicans including President Donald Trump, backed up by former Assistant US Attorney Sidney Powell, are launching a series of bombastic attacks against an electronic voting system vendor called Dominion Voting Systems. They claim that the company colluded with Democrats to “flip” thousands of Trump votes to Biden, and/or simply manufactured additional Biden votes in order to steal the election.
In short, Powell and GOP leaders are accusing the Democrats of a massive electoral fraud involving thousands of votes across multiple states.
At first blush, these accusations seem as baseless as they are outrageous. But if you review the history of electronic voting systems (EVS) in the US, you can see exactly why the Right is flipping out. It is not just Trump; the entire Republican Party and the conservative establishment really, really REALLY hate Dominion Voting Systems. …
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made news recently with a bombshell interview that appeared in The New York Times. In the piece, AOC offers a critique of the Democratic Party, specifically in the way the party spends its campaign funds.
The DNC and its campaign arms, the D.C.C.C. and the D.S.C.C., are mired in the past, according to Ocasio-Cortez. “Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence,” she says. “And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent.”
AOC is brilliant, but what she fails to mention (although I am sure she is aware) is that the purpose of the Democrats’ campaigns is not so much to elect candidates as to generate revenue for the DC consulting class that dominates the Party establishment. …
The Democrats have won a Pyrrhic victory with Joe Biden. They got rid of Trump, but in electing Joe Biden they may have set the Democratic Party on a death spiral that could culminate in four years.
One surprisingly disastrous aspect of the 2020 election is the poor performance of “down ticket” Democrats running for Congress and State legislatures. Democrats performed horribly: they loss 6–10 seats in the House and failed to take back the Senate.
In short, the “down ballot carnage” that Jim Clyburn warned would happen if Bernie Sanders were the nominee has come to pass — but with the nominee that Clyburn himself helped to capture the nomination. …
Why did Biden and the Democrats and the Media get it so wrong? Simple. They massively overestimated the importance of the Coronavirus among the general population. And they massively underestimated the importance of the economy.
They could not understand just how much the working people and small businesses of America appreciated Trump’s calls to re-open the economy, and his promises not to allow another lockdown.
The Liberal elites failed to understand how much Americans love their FREEDOM, and that they are willing to pay almost any price for it. For example: Americans are willing to tolerate levels of gun violence and firearm-related death (homicide, suicide and accidents) that no other civilized country would tolerate, all in the name of freedom and “rights.” …
If he wins without the Left, progressives like Bernie and AOC will be stripped of all power.
Berniecrats who still support Bernie should do everything they can to oppose Biden.
Here’s why:
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, when the centrist Democrat Hillary Clinton had failed to beat Trump, the Democratic Establishment famously refused to do a post mortem to find out WHY they lost. Officially, their theory of the case was that the Russians had helped Trump win, and that the Trump base that elected him were an irredeemable group of racists and white supremacists anyway.
But in the backrooms and quiet hallways of power in DC, the Democrats knew differently. They knew that their failure to attract Bernie supporters may have cost them the election. …
Amy Coney Barrett is currently the latest judicial lightning rod, drawing virtually universal condemnation from one side of the political divide and universal praise from the other.
Still, it seems that everyone from the Left who is engaging in that “debate” is failing to see the real threat she poses.
Everyone makes a big deal of the idea that she might vote against Roe v. Wade, but that is missing the point. That is what the Establishment want us to think about. “Oh no,” the Democrats say, “she will overturn Roe!”- HORSESHIT.
The Democrats have had 47 years — almost a half a century — to actually codify the Roe decision into law. The right of a woman to control her own body should NOT be left to the courts. People say that the right to an abortion is “the law of the land” but that is HORSESHIT. There is no law that says a woman has the right to an abortion. Abortion rights are all predicated on the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that a woman has a “right to privacy” when choosing to have an abortion. …
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