@gnutelephony So Biden is the problem here? I wonder how the conversation has juddered to blaming Biden in a thread that begins by noting that Trump instructed his followers to out and vote for him even if they risked their health and death by doing so. I only see one gun held to anyone's head here — and Biden's not holding it.
"Trump told supporters in Indianola on Sunday that even if they were 'sick as a dog,' it was worth braving the chill to vote. If they then passed away, 'it’s worth it,' the former president added."
Andy Levy responds:
“So ‘Vote and Die,’ ... that is the new slogan. If you want anything that sums up Trump perfectly, I mean, this is it. ‘Go out and do this thing for me, and then if you die, it’s fine.’”
Robert B. Hubbell offers (citing NBC News) a rundown of the Iowa electorate:
∙ White voters account for 97% of Iowa caucusgoers. ∙ Evangelical white Christians account for 51% of caucusgoers. ∙ 66% said they don't think President Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020. ∙ 58% of GOP caucusgoers say they'd favor a federal law banning all or most abortion. ∙ 63% of caucusgoers say they consider Trump fit for office even if he is convicted.
"In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Cannon has just refused to enforce a routine deadline & it's entirely clear she has no intention of letting this case go to trial before the election or possibly ever."
~ Joyce Vance as quoted by Natalie Venegas
Aileen Cannon continues to be a disgrace to the Florida bar and the national judiciary.
"15 G.O.P. governors shut out food aid for 8 million children. Congress approved a Biden administration initiative to feed poor children during the summer. But 15 states led by Republican governors opted out."
Madeleine Jane and Ayodeji Rotinwa report that, despite allegations by more than 2 dozen followers of rape, forced abortions, and torture the Pentecostal megachurch ministry founded by Nigerian TB Joshua, The Synagogue, Church of All Nations (SCOAN), is now being replicated across continents.
Joshua claimed to be a prophet who raised the dead, cured HIV, and fixed the "demon" of homosexuality.
"Christie was the last high-profile GOP contender who was fighting for whatever remains of the soul of a Republican Party that, for all intents and purposes, has evolved into an authoritarian cult of personality with Trump as its center—posing what the former governor described as a real and present threat to democracy and national security."
"The most significant, in our view, are the hardwired constitutional structures that are inimical to any modern understanding of democracy: the Electoral College, which could put Trump in office without majority support for a second time, and the equal allocation of two seats in the Senate to each state (an arrangement that gives a Wyoming voter 70 times more senatorial clout than a Californian)."
"The original Constitution was written when democracy meant something radically different than it does today. Over time, Americans have amended the Constitution to make it more democratic, but shortcomings remain."
Jason Linkins asks why the self-anointed grave arbiters of everything in our mainstream media have been so quick to go to very strange lengths to discount "the one part of the Constitution that was designed to prevent the crisis we now face" with Trump running for the presidency.
These are the same media gurus who told us when he was president that he'd "grow into" gravity and presidential behavior.
The effect of the media's behavior will be the following:
"The Roberts court has been vastly aided and abetted by our political media, who after waiting so long for Trump to discover virtue, have quickly declared the Article 3 tool to be a vice—either searingly unfair to use in this instance or invalid on its face."
"When the decision eventually comes, the press will have created an environment in which the Supreme Court’s disregard for the Constitution’s text won’t be viewed as a radical act.
That this consensus was reached so quickly is something of a surprise, as the dominant mode of the pundit class is to venerate the Constitution as a peerless document, the final answer to all questions."
As Linkins notes, the "most idiotic case" the grave gurus are making is that "the people," not courts and Constitutions, should decide if Trump is fit for office.
"But where did Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment come from, if not 'the people?' These words were ratified through the same democratic process as every other amendment to the Constitution. They weren’t put there by gods or monsters."
"Snow [i.e., the rapid loss of snowpack due to rising temperatures] is a reminder that, actually, a lot of the changes we’re dealing with aren’t that incremental. We may not be able to see rising temperatures in quite the same way. But in many cases, those changes are just as sudden and dramatic and are happening faster than people thought they were."
"The wildfires we saw last year, for example, were wildly out of proportion from anything we’ve seen before. Records aren’t getting broken by small degrees now. They’re getting broken by leaps and bounds."
"[T]his book is a reflection on the era associated with former president Donald Trump—especially with the shocking events after the November 2020 election, when avowed Christians, acting for explicitly Christian reasons, were at the forefront of those who sought to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th US president. Their dangerous attitudes were seen most strongly in those who violently breached the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.”
David Gushee in the introduction to his new book Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023) on how "Christians turn out to be among the leading threats to democracy in much of the world" — a damning indictment.
“This crisis of democracy is far more than merely a US trend. Despite national differences, the characteristics of what I will call authoritarian reactionary Christian politics are widely shared. This is a global phenomenon.”
"The slide away from democracy and toward right-wing authoritarianism in nations including Russia, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and the United States today, and other nations in the past, is connected to and exacerbated by the historic and contemporary attitudes of a substantial part of the Christian populations of these lands. There are ‘Christian’ versions of populism, fascism, authoritarianism, and nationalism."
“It is interesting that the main group in the United States expressing fears that the US Muslim community constitutes a threatening antidemocratic population are the far more numerous fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who could pose a much more profound threat to democracy."
Interested in building a better world and standing in solidarity with others who share that goal. For biographical information, please see https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/109539508828689842 "Writing is the way I fight." ~ James Cone #solidarity #democracy #HumanRights #LGBTQ