US Politics

Might make a Thigh curry later.

You've got me going now. I feel the urge to pop out to the local Thigh Restaurant.

I sometimes Bangkok on my Thai.

You mean your Thigh. Ah, OK, I see what you did there...

There was an Ankle wat one too until I double checked my geography.

Yeah, that's in Cambodya, though.

Yah, I like know that, yah.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/09/politics/mount-rushmore-trump-south-dakota/index.html

Raising the bar of the unimaginable every day.

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1292956445944606721

Trump has effectively destroyed the US postal system.
He reassigned/fired the entire executive committee and put a large Republican donor in charge.
Mail has stopped moving in many places.

I'm in Winnipeg and see the normal incoming mail go through our air cargo.
There has never been days with zero before.

Clearly Trump is trying to stop voting by mail. By shutting polling stations in select areas and preventing voting by mail the GOP are interfering with the election. The precedent was set recently in Georgia, where some largely black areas had only one polling station and voters had to wait up to 8 hours to cast ballots.

He seriously believes he is doing a good job and deserves to be on Rushmore.
His Axios interview was pathetic but there are reports he told staffers it went really well.
He has legions of rabid fans on twitter, even from Canada.
For him and his fans, they are past the point where they are too stupid to realise they are stupid.

Genuinely scary.

In russia, etc.
I cannot believe something like this is even possible in a country that calls itself the land of the free. A two party system eventually only can go wrong if you think about it. Is there even the slightest chance of political reform of that?

So Kamala Harris. Strong choice. Let's hope the election manipulation fails... 2 votes from this household - though in california so not much help in the big picture.

I cannot believe something like this is even possible in a country that calls itself the land of the free.

Emphasis on the words 'calls itself'. But isn't.

Harris is a strong choice why?

To team Biden she makes sense for fairly awful reasons;
She is no direct threat (she has proven to be neither popular or charismatic).
She’ll back corporations/donors.
She’ll happily argue for right-wing stance on law & order (against body-cams, for three-strikes, for marijuana over-policing, for criminalising parents of truant kids).

She adds some gender and racial diversity to the ticket but at a cost. As Nina Turner said. Voting for Biden is the “eating half a bowl of ...” option.

Yeah, you'd think the sight of a black woman being so cynically instrumentalised by an old white dude with a long history of backing racist policy would turn most people's stomachs. Joe has a women problem and a race problem, and in this pick he's shielded himself from both. It's smart politics, I guess, but it's not exactly 'yay, diversity!'. I guess it helps that Harris is cynical enough herself to not give a fuck about being instrumentalised, so who are we to care?

Edit: to be very clear, I also think Kamala Harris is a terrible person. She’s not a victim here, and given Biden’s obvious poor health has a strong chance of being president at some point in the next four years (assuming Joe can get over the line, that is).

Think proper diversity has to wait. Anything to get Trump gone and we can get back to normal and pick up the path to diversity where we left it

Sadly this mirrored is the main argument for Trump –

‘anything to keep the liberals out’.

Neither elevate the debate. It also kinda excuses both parties for drifting-away from promoting decent people and solving real problems.

I mean, if the election is reduced down to 'how much can you mobilise your respective bases', then the GOP will win and keep winning, because they've gerrymandered the hell of the voting districts, put up barrier to voting in Democratic wards, and now are even fucking with USPS.

And even without all that chicanery, the GOP has been better at mobilising its base ever since it decided to take up the cause of disgruntled white people who miss the days when non-white people were structurally beneath them.

So I'm sceptical that a pure gleaming leftwing character would win, even if one actually existed.

Anyway - Biden/Harris seems like a reasonable ticket to win over swing voters who can't stomach Trump but are scared of the hard left. I'm not going to sing their praises, but I don't think they're the pure evil some people are making them out to be.

Let's hope historian Allan Lichtman is correct - and he typically always is, having correctly called the winner in each Presidential election since 1984 - and Biden gets in. Sadly, since nothing much surprises me any more, anything could happen.

"Professor Lichtman walks us through his system, which identifies 13 'keys' to winning the White House. Each key is a binary statement: true or false. And if six or more keys are false, the party in the White House is on its way out."

13 Keys to the White House

It's a bold strategy...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jkxq/trump-just-admitted-hes-sabotaging-the-usps-to-screw-up-the-election

https://twitter.com/TheRickyDavila/status/1293553818261577730?s=09

If I understand this article correctly, then two US counties are now officially recognising local militias, including providing financial support.

"... Between January and March, residents of at least eight counties brought “militia resolutions” to their boards of supervisors, requesting formal recognition of a militia and funding. The resolutions were similar, and generally vague about what the militias would actually do once formed. Only two actually passed. ... "

Being an old cunt I remember Yougoslavia going from a reasonably functional country to a complete mess, and how each step of the process seemed impossible until it actually happened. Small events like the above militia funding can seem irrelevant, but the precedent can potentially be enormous.

Speaking of step by step. I remember early 2014 and working with seemingly switched on people who had never heard of IS/Daesh. AFAIK only Channel 4 bothered reporting on how they and/or Jabhat al Nusra were gradually strengthening their fire power by regularly capturing the weapons of poorly motivated government forces. The moment Iraqi government troops simply walked away from their tanks etc outside of Mosul was a non-event for many, until it suddenly it was THE event.

https://twitter.com/tprstly/status/1295733569206333440?s=21