Those who champion Elon Musk as a promoter of free speech, apparently have no idea that Twitter is a privately owned company that can censor or ban anyone they want from their service. Nor does Twitter have anything to do with journalism. It is a purveyor of rumor, misinformation, hate and fear. We would all be better off if it just went away. In fact, social media in general, could turn out to be one of the greatest threats to the Republic and thereby to Democracy in history, a wonderful example of our inability to properly deal with advancing technology.
Just because someone has a lot of money is no indicator of their ability to make good choices for how the rest of us want to live. The founders knew this, which is why they wanted “We The People,” and not a relative handful of merchant bankers in charge of the country. It appears the founders may have failed. We’re not quite there yet but it feels like we’re getting awfully close as Elon Musk, threatens to open the door on a booming return to Trumpism in America.
A failure to adequately regulate Capitalism will inevitably lead to Neo-Feudalism. In the words of Radar O’Reilly, “Wait for it.” The Republicans opened the door with Reagonomics, and it’s on the way.
Free trade has nothing to do with allowing monopolies. Preserving Democracy does not mean supporting fraud. Free speech has little to do with supporting false information. We might have to allow it, but it needn’t be encouraged and even celebrated.
Before long we could all be begging for the scraps under the oligarch’s tables, here in America, in Russia, and anywhere else a handfull of uber-wealthy people are allowed to gather up most of the wealth and thereby most of the power.
We have gone from suffering through four years of waking up each morning and turning on the tv to find out what new madness Donald Trump had unleashed on the country and the world to now doing the same for a man Trump has declared to be a “genius,” the Russian butcher of women, children and the elderly, Vladimir Putin.
How some Americans can still be so misinformed as to support Donald Trump, is something that should concern us all. Reversing the spread of misinformation and disinformation in the American media should be a priority.
Americans must be made aware of the critical need to preserve the transmission of fact-based information, real journalism, in America. They need to be made aware that not everything that came to us through the “Reagan Revolution” was a benefit to the country. Some of it, like the extreme deregulation of the media and media ownership, may have actually weakened our democracy.
The Federal Government, should perhaps, be considering legislation to restore some power to the FCC. Bringing back some version of the Fairness Doctrine might be a start, with the regulation covering not only broadcast and cable outlets, but American originated internet news outlets of a certain viewership and income, as well.
Something must be done to prohibit alleged news outlets from pitching pure propaganda disguised as legitimate news to a vulnerable public. At the very least, news outlets should be required to separate out and clearly label legitimate fact-based news from opinion.
We simply cannot and must not let Donald Trump and his supporters do to America what Vladimir Putin has done to Russia, through the use of misinformation and outright lies.
Anyone else see the parallels between Trump and Putin, with both men willing to destroy their countries rather than admit failure? It seems so obvious, but maybe it’s just me. However, both also share techniques, like rigging or trying to rig elections, and calling anything that casts them in an unfavorable light, “fake news.”
For a time I thought the Russians might have been giving Trump instructions on how to use disinformation and a few other techniques to overthrow American Democracy, which is clearly what he was trying to do. I still wonder if that’s not the case. So much of this stuff is right out of an old KGB playbook.
The degree to which Trump and his minions have employed Russian tactics to convince millions of Americans that real news is fake and vice-versa, is both astounding and frightening.
Why aren’t these factors being brought to the surface and discussed? Feels like there’s a reckoning coming, doesn’t it?
Is it because there is a fear, a very deep-seated fear, of Americans once again choosing sides and going after one-another? A second Civil War to settle this current surge of white supremacy? Is that the reckoning? Or is it another fear, that of war with Russia, possibly a nuclear war, breaking out over Putin’s need to win something, anything, before stopping his maniacal obsession with these ongoing, pointless attacks on Ukraine?
Aren’t we being hit with both at the same time? A failure to fully deal with the fascism that was Stalin’s Russia and the many failures of reconstruction in the United States?
Perhaps there is a standoff coming between two kinds of people. Those who demand the self-determination and freedom of Democracy, and those others, who are willing to unthinkingly and blindly follow a tyrant wherever he might lead. Fascism vs. Democracy, and those of us who have the courage to stand up for what we believe?
This is a photo of my Uncle, Bud Olsen, a naval aviator who gave his life in WW II when his plane, a Grumman TBF, went into the ocean. He was 21. Just a kid. Because of him, and so many others like him, I thought this madness had ended. And yet, here we are, with freedom once again demanding eternal vigilance. Confronted with a voice from the past, demanding that business left unfinished in 1945, must be dealt with now.
It was then, at war’s end on the European continent, that the British had drawn up plans for “Operation Unthinkable,” A massive attack which had the Brits and the U.S. joining forces with what was left of the German Army and the Poles, and going after the Russians, driving them back into Russia. The operation, of course, was never carried out. And here we all are.
Churchill, who had asked for the plans to be drawn up, was proving himself to be a true visionary, possessing the insight that even with the departure of Stalin, others, like Vladimir Putin, would be waiting for an opportunity to express their own peculiar brand of madness, slaughtering children and the elderly and destroying themselves, and possibly their country, in the process.
This needs to be vetted by lawyers, but it would appear that talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, may have found a legal roadblock preventing Donald Trump from ever holding another federal public office in the U.S. It’s Title 18 of the U.S. Code, subsection 2071, which says-
“(b)Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Finding fault with Joe Biden for the way he got us out of Afghanistan, is just plain nuts. Would you rather still be there? It’s similar to condemning John Kerry, for being awarded three purple hearts for his service in Vietnam. They did that too, and it was equally crazy.
Mr. Biden, put an end to what was being called America’s “endless war.” He then came in and had to pick up the Covid ball Trump had dropped and left sitting on the floor for several months. Mr. Biden has appointed 42 federal judges. Under President Biden, unemployment is down to 3.9% and the economy is strong with a GDP of 5.5%. A fact check by USA Today, found Donald Trump to have the worst jobs record of any president in U.S. history. The newspaper reports, “More jobs were lost during the Trump administration than any other in history. Approximately 4 million fewer people were employed from January 2017 to September 2020, according to the most recent publicly available data.”
Is a comparison between the insanity of four years of Trump and one year of stability with Joe Biden, even possible? Why isn’t this ever mentioned? By anyone? Are we still so shell shocked from Trump and his band of bullies storming the Capitol that we need even more time to sort it all out? Isn’t it all perfectly clear?
The Democrats biggest problem right now could be that they don’t direct enough attention to their achievements when faced by nearly impossible opposition from anti-American Republicans, particularly in comparison to four utterly miserable years with Donald Trump, with all of us waiting day by day for the next insanity.
Compared to Trump, we are now in political Nirvana.
But the Dems, can’t seem to punch back. It appears they are still under the impression that compromise is possible with this current batch of Trumpist Republicans, when it is beyond clear after eight years with Mr. Obama and now one year with Mr. Biden, that the Republicans have no interest in compromising with anybody about anything if it means even an appearance of achievement for the Democrats. Even if it hurts the country. Even if they must sell their souls. Even if it kills American Democracy.
With this current bunch of Republicans, it’s all for sale. There doesn’t appear to be a single patriot among them. Not one who is willing to put country above personal interest or party. Not one.
No, check that last comment. There are at least two, and they’re both sitting on the 1/6 Committee. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, two Republicans trying to hold back a tide of corruption and deceit.
A Facebook friend in France posted a photo that really hit me. It’s a picture of a small group of U.S. ex-pats gathered around an American flag. The thirty or so people didn’t all know one-another, but they were all there for the same purpose. To honor another American, a veteran of WW II. They were all smiling and appeared happy to be there, regardless of their individual political persuasions.
It struck me that the photo is a portrait of the way we used to be, almost Rockwellian in nature, and I wondered if we might ever get back there again? Together in our support of the country, happy and smiling regardless of one political party or another? It led me to wonder if we have been so torn asunder by misinformation, disinformation, greed and anger that we’ll never be able to find our way back home?
I thought about those old sci-fi movies, where the Earth comes under attack by men from Mars, with all us earthlings forced to cast off our differences , coming together for the common purpose of survival of our species. “Is that what it’s going to take?” At that same moment it hit me that we’re already there, with the ongoing threat of Covid-19. However, instead of uniting us in a common goal, Covid has has been turned into a political weapon to separate us even more.
I dunno, this might be the big one, the one we can’t dig ourselves out from under – not when we can’t agree on whether facts are facts or Covid-19 is for real, even while it claims some three-thousand American lives a day. It’s a KGB dream scenario, a national implosion, as a constant stream of disinformation turns reality on its head, causing Americans to distrust one-another to the point that they’re ready to ignore a pandemic and sell out the country to a tyrant who never delivered on a promise to release his taxes while snuggling up to Vladimir Putin at every turn.
Really? Could it get any worse? Well, it does.
With more than one-hundred Republican members of congress signing onto a motion to set the election aside and effectively kill our democracy in favor of a autocrat, you have to wonder. Sure, the Supremes said “no” to the proposal to discard democracy by throwing out our free and fair national election, but millions of Americans, 38% of all Republicans according to one recent poll, continue to believe the election was rigged. Crooked. That the fix was in. And it was, except that they’ve got it backwards. It was Trump and not the Dems who tried to shut down the Post Office, to hamper mail-in voting. The Republicans, in fact, were fairly tripping over themselves in an effort to keep people away from the polls, particularly in areas populated by people of color. Imagine that.
And so I have to wonder, when I see a photo of smiling Americans, united in purpose, regardless of political persuasion. I wonder if we’ll ever get there again? Of if we were ever really all that united to begin with, replacing reconstruction with Jim Crow, leaving the open wound of the Civil War just sitting there to fester. For decades. Until now. The present. With an entire party working to throw out an election because they, the Republicans, the party of white America, the party that weaponized a pandemic for political purposes, lost.
And we still can’t admit that it was mostly about race? How do we get past that?
Millions of Americans who have been duped into believing the election was rigged aren’t going away. The forces that led them to believe that up was down, fact was fiction and fiction was fact, will still be with us. As will unlimited amounts of dark money flowing into our political process thanks to the Supreme Court’s unimaginably bad decision in the infamous “Citizens United” case.
2024 is coming and we are still in trouble. More trouble perhaps, than many of us can, or are willing to recognize. An honest analysis of the past, admitting that it was our forebearers constant striving to live up to the ideals of the founders that made us great, is just too difficult to face.
For those who would destroy our democracy, those who seek to eliminate our self-determination, the election of 2020 was just a temporary setback. Nothing but a political hiccup. History continues to demand eternal vigilance.
After four years of Trump, it’s okay to be a little giddy about the Biden/Harris win. That said, I worry that Kamala Harris, beloved by some on the progressive side of the party, might sink the Democrats in 2024 if the Republicans come up with a moderate like Mitt Romney to run against her.
Joyous as I was to see Joe Biden’s win, marking a return to sanity for our Federal Government, I was equally alarmed that the Dems chose Harris as his running mate. I fear she may be a little too happy, a little too far to the left for a great many moderate and right-of-center Americans. If a woman was mandatory for the ticket, then Susan Rice would have been a better choice. She projects an inner-strength that Harris simply does not have, and she does it on camera, which is all-important. Would Reagan have been elected were it not for his on-camera persona?
So, I’m happy Biden was elected, but feel the Dems blew it with regard to his running mate, who, it is clear, is already being groomed to take over in four years, if she can get elected. I doubt that she can. The possibility of another four years of Trump, makes me shudder.
The Dems need to stop making decisions based upon what would be “just wonderful!” and need to get closer to baseline reality regarding who will be electable in a politically volatile country.
