The problem with the "no Kings" movement is that they have no idea what they are talking about, which I affirm as someone who has lived in monarchies (UK, Canada, and Belgium).
The real issue is the duopoly, which is realy only one party pretending to be different. The duopoly is the tool of the oligarchy, which is disgustingly obvious if one wants to admit it.
The US needs new players and parties that actually represent the people.
There are many advantages to ending the duopoly, but I am not sure I would go with the parties and the leaders proposed by this. While I talk about the Westminster system, coalition governments are much better than the gridlock which is endemic to the US system.
One thing I notice when I watch non-US media (Sky News Australia as an exception) is that they usually try to have opposing opinions. Not so in the US. I have yet to see a serious opposing opinion on the US media. For example, I have yet to see someone who voted for a third party in a discussion of why US politics is screwed. Even Joe Rogan has not interviewed Jill Stein.
That's pathetic.
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| OK, I wanted a picture of steak frites... |
Likewise, I heard a Fox News piece on "Climate Change" hypocrisy which didn't feature anyone who had a real idea what goes on in the environmentalist community. So, they were making it sound as if people who are Green are vegan.
Tu rigole ! I like to eat meat, but I don't do it that much for various reasons: more in line with my health than the planet. Slow food, on the other hand, which is traditional and regional cuisine that encourages farming of plants, seeds, and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem makes more sense to me than having people go vegan. I'm not alone in this since people who push veganism can be shouted down for a lot of reasons: one of which is that truly being vegan is actually a difficult thing to do. Food needs to be certified as vegan!
On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to knock local meat production while eating quinoa flown in from South America.
Anyway, if you really want to get down to it: not having children is the best thing you can do to fight climate change. That gets really interesting when the vegans start their attempts to get people to go on their diet.
The problem is that things are indeed an echo chamber without opinions being challenged.
I am going to make a disclaimer that I believe in true public broadcasting, but US public broadcasting is commercial. It has commercials in the form of "underwriting" by large corporations, which is pretty much the same thing as being commercial. Yes, the fact that it is not free of big money influence make it a part of the rest of US media. Big business can threaten to take away its money and PBS is SCREWED--BIG TIME!
Which takes us to this clip from PBS News Hour where one of the commentators says "There hasn't been any obvious gaffes, big scandals, or anything like that."
Funny how Hunter's Laptop has been missing from the media (and I never heard back from Burisma about my job application).
It will probably also be missing again this election cycle (PBS shut off comments to this).
I should add that these two clowns are from the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos who would be eating 50 cent burritos if the duopoly wasn't in power and was whacked by someone vaguely like Bernie Sanders enforcing US competition laws.
But this gets to where Fox News is wrong: The Democrats are nowhere near left wing. In fact, the Republicans have also strayed from their true populist roots, which makes it even funnier when I read Shot in the Foot's blog: they might want to look up Minnesota Justice Harry Blackmun. Or even better, look up Richard Nixon's comments about firearms ownership.
As I like to say, I was rather shocked when I watched a documentary about Nixon (on PBS) and realised how lefty he seemed in the early 1990s!
Sorry for the digression, but US Politics has moved to the right. The Democratic Party has pretty much extinguished anything vaguely New Deal-Roosevelt, which means that someone like Bernie Sanders has no part in that party. Which is why I distrust anyone who claims to be to the left and is associated with that party. It cannot be fixed from within.
The reason that Biden is president is that he appeals to the big donors, which is why the Tech giants can deny the existance of Hunter's laptop and what it means to Joe Biden. So, that really wasn't that much of a digression.
There isn't much of a "lefty media" in the US other than some things on the internet (E.g.: Real News Network and Democracy Now), but they don't have much of an audience. Which means we are left with Fox News and Sky News Australia who get only part of the story, and are taken about as seriously as Democracy Now.
I feel like someone in occupied Europe trying to get reliable information when I look at the US media because it isn't there.
"All the News fit to Print" is propaganda, or at least explains their editorial policy in that they only feel they need to print what they believe should be printed.
And Hunter's laptop and associated scandal is nowhere to be seen.
And pointing out how much the Democrats have blown it with continuing their witch hunt on Trump while ignoring their own problems, which I'm not going to bother mentioning if you aren't aware of them by now.
This story is only "Ã la un" on the broadcast media. The print media are like the Private Eye "Heir of Sorrows" series where it listed off headlines from the British dailies. In this case, the French are concerning themselves with issues of French interest.
That is pretty much the strike relating to the change in retirement regulations making people have to wait longer to retire.
And you wonder why I prefer Europe to the US. Especially when the US has become a banana republic having to resort to political prosecutions instead of addressing the issues it needs to. The partisanism is totally disgusting to me.
On the other hand, I am extreme fringe left in the United States being aligned with Bernie Sanders. I find my home in the US with the Green Party and Democratic Socialists. I'm trying to figure out which party comes closest when I start looking at European politics, which gets interesting since some things which are called "Socialist" in the US are taken for granted in European politics. In fact, trying to take them away would make one an incredibly unpopular candidate.
But the US doesn't talk about how overworked it is until someone mentions that Europeans usually start a job with 3 weeks of vacation and work up. They also don't work more than 40 hours a week.
It's things like that that make me question the 2020 election where people were prevented from working, yet a candidate who talked about not living in fear during a period of enforced unemployment lost the election. Things like Universal Basic Income make sense when someone is told they cannot work. Likewise, so does having housing and medical care paid for.
On the other hand, it is easier to play the ad hominem card of "that candidate/party/person is a progressive..." when it's obvious that the term doesn't really apply when one properly looks at the issues.
As I like to say, if the Democratic Party were as socialist or progressive as the right/Fox news likes to claim: wouldn't it have made sense to run Bernie Sanders instead of the candidates who they did run???? Of course, Fox news would be even more embarassed since it seems that Sanders was popular on a town hall they ran.
Anyway, despite this I have to admit that I am blissfully ignorant of US politics, which was made apparent since I had no idea who Ketanji Brown Jackson was or what made up the US Supreme Court. For good reason, the institution is blatantly political. It makes decisions which are not really based in law.
And it fucking well doesn't need to.
I'm not sure if being a US Supreme Court Justice is something worthy of being: especially since it it is a purely political position. The reason I go by Laci is that someone joked that my dog had been in more courtrooms than Harriet Miers, which was probably true.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to pretend reverence for a document most people don't understand and is horrible out of touch with modern society. And they forget can be amended. Even though they say they like certain of the Amendments.
Yes, diversity is a good thing, especially if it is properly applied.
Unfortunately, there isn't too much diversity in the marketplace of US ideas, despite the First Amendment. Which is why it is amusing to me that French Newspapers could be government subsidised.
I agree with him about the quality of the current debate: especially that opposing opinions tend to be ignored.
I occassionally watch Fox News for an opposing opinion, which is where I heard about Kari Lake. I am pretty sure I don't agree with her on most issues, but her being questioned about "election denial" was very interesting. One thing I learned is that one needs to use the same vocabulary when discussing an issue. If "election denial" is a term meaning that there is some sort of conspiracy to steal an election, then it makes things look like anyone who points out the fact that US elections are anything other than free and fair and held on a secret ballot sound cray-cray.
On the other hand, one of the essential principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is:
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. . . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."
Article 21, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
The United States and other western nations spent a good part of the 20th Century pushing these principles on other countries, yet the US has moved further and further from this principle since the end of the Cold War.
The funny thing is that the election denial comes from the results of the electoral college and the fact that US elections are not "democratic". Bernie Sanders would probably be president if that were the case.
And people would probably love him. Just remember that Vermont is pretty much a "red state", and I mean that in the ass backward US sense where "red" is conservative. Otherwise, it might make sense that they have a socialist representing them. Yet another thing which gets lost in the US media.
Which is another thing Kari Lake attacks.
The reality is that the US needs serious election reform, yet it won't get it if it obfuscates the issues. The Electoral College is problematic, yet no one is willing to address it. Point out that Trump won the election despite losing the popular vote and his supporters aren't upset. I won't get into the machinations of the 2020 elections, but they are another glaring example of the need for election reform in the US. Had Barack Obama won an election with only 23% of the vote, I am sure that the people defending the "Constitution" would realise what an Amendment actually means and that the founders were well willing to use that process when the Constitution proved to need tweaking.
Maybe what is needed is to have some serious, adult discussions about the issues facing the United States instead of tossing ad hominems.
"It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions," Neuman said. "The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."lwv.org/press-releases/league-refuses-help-perpetrate-fraud
Neuman said that the campaigns presented the League with their debate agreement on
September 28, two weeks before the scheduled debate. The campaigns' agreement was negotiated "behind closed doors" and vas presented to the League as "a done deal," she said, its 16 pages of conditions not subject to negotiation.
Most objectionable to the League, Neuman said, were conditions in the agreement that gave the campaigns unprecedented control over the proceedings. Neuman called "outrageous" the campaigns' demands that they control the selection of questioners, the composition of the audience, hall access for the press and other issues.
"The campaigns' agreement is a closed-door masterpiece," Neuman said. "Never in the history of the League of Women Voters have two candidates' organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding and self-serving demands."
Neuman said she and the League regretted that the American people have had no real opportunities to judge the presidential nominees outside of campaign-controlled environments.
open debates run by an impartial body like the League of Women Voters, shorter election cycles, open primaries, ranked choice voting, return of the fairness doctrine and equal time rule (Trump used the lack of it to get shitloads of free publicity), campaign finance reform--if not publicly funded campaigns, easier access to the ballot for parties, reform or abolish the electoral college, end gerrymandering, handcounted paper ballots or receipts, and I am sure that is only the beginning.While one can dream that there will be internal change, it doesn't seem likely since the parties still seem entrenched in the same behaviours which have led to the US political system being the disaster it is.
The public’s understanding of government and politics is also influenced by the extent to which they trust – or distrust – the information they hear from various news sources. In other words – how open people are to the political news and information put forth by various outlets, including those they do not actively consume.
In general, the survey finds that there is more trust than distrust of news sources. But there are substantial differences in trust and distrust across the ideological spectrum.People who took this poll were asked if they had heard of 36 different news sources. If they had heard of the source, they were then asked to what level they trusted the accuracy of that source. Those with consistently liberal political values had heard of more sources than any other ideological group – on average, about 26 out of the 36 – and trust about twice as many as they distrust (10.5 vs. 4.8). Respondents with mostly liberal views or with about an equal mix of conservative and liberal views have heard of fewer sources, on average, but still trust more sources than they distrust.
One example is the Economist. Only 34% of panelists have heard of the outlet, but within that group there is far more trust (12%) than distrust (2%), when it comes to news about government and politics. The BBC is recognized by a greater portion of respondents (76%), but is similarly more trusted (36%) than distrusted (7%).
"Events, like those organized by Glenn Beck or involving Jon Stewart and Steven [sic] Colbert, are political, and therefore Post newsroom employees may not participate. By participate, we mean that Post newsroom employees cannot in any way put themselves in a position that could be construed as supporting (or opposing) that cause. That means no T-shirts, buttons, marching, chanting, etc. This guideline does not prohibit Post newsroom employees from observing — that is, watching and listening from the sidelines. The important thing is that it should be evident to anyone that you are observing, as journalists do, not participating, whether you are covering the event or not."The article mentions this obviously applying to recent rallies - Beck's evangelical political rally on the date and site of the Martin Luther King event in August, and the progressive "One Nation" rally featuring MSNBC host Ed Shultz among the roster of other speakers.
