It seems that the countries of the world are realigning. Russia and China have joined forces, and Iran is joining them, as is India to some extent. Brazil, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates are also part of this group, and today, I read that Turkey is joining them as well.

This group is committing to international trade agreements and alliances. It appears they are forming an international group to stand up to America, NATO, and 19 other non-NATO countries like Japan.

The country I mourn the loss of the most is Iran. The Iranian people love America and want freedom. They elected moderate leaders who worked with America to limit their country’s nuclear program, which was accomplished under Barack Obama. When Trump entered the Oval, he quickly withdrew from the agreement, and the result was that the moderate Iranians were quickly replaced with hardliners who immediately restarted their nuclear program. Iran is expected to have a nuclear bomb within the year, and they just became allies with Russia instead of America. Good job, Trump!

This group seems to think the USA and the West need to be taken down a peg. It will be interesting to see how this power play… plays out!

In the 2024 election, Democrats must run on Supreme Court issues.

Pull the threads of the current concerns of the American people, and many lead back to the recent decisions made by this unbalanced Conservative Supreme Court. From civil rights, voting rights, gun rights, LGBTQ rights, and personal individual rights to the authority of the federal government to enact changes to benefit the lives of our citizens, the Right-wing Justices are making unpopular, unprecedented, and arguably unconstitutional decisions.

In less than two years, this Right-wing controlled Supreme Court has enacted politically motivated decisions on all the issues we care about. According to polls, only about 25% of voters trust that the Supreme Court is “mainly motivated by the law.” With the politicization of the High Court and new evidence of the corruption by Justices Thomas and Alito, the country is ready for a remedy, and as Democrats, we must lead in reforming the Supreme Court.

The only fix to the court-packing done by the GOP is to rebalance the Court by adding four new Justices, taking it from 9 to 13. There is ample evidence that all the Conservatives appointed have outright lied during their confirmation hearings when they said they would support the Court tradition of Stare Decisis.

Stare Decisis is a Latin term that means “let the decision stand” and “holds that courts and judges should honor “precedent” — or the decisions, rulings, and opinions from prior cases.”

This Supreme Court has gutted Civil Rights Laws and Voting Rights Laws, which have long been considered constitutional by the High Court. They overturned Roe which had been challenged and upheld many times over 50 years. They just threw it out, leaving families at the mercy of state legislators.

And finally, they decided that the administration didn’t have the authority to give students loan relief, which they clearly do. $757 billion in loan forgiveness was given over a two-year period of time with the PPP cash loans. Much of it went to millionaire Republicans in Congress, while the student loan forgiveness, which the Right does not support, would be a “10-year cost of roughly $305 billion, as measured by reduced cash flows into the government, according to the Education Department.” And it would provide relief to low- and middle-income borrowers. For many Americans, that’s a ticket to the middle class.

This court packing cannot stand. Mitch McConnell has already said if the GOP retakes the Senate, he will not allow any candidate presented by President Biden to have a hearing… he’ll Garland them! The President doesn’t want to add more Justices because “it might politicize the Supreme Court,” but I have news for the President: the Court is already politicized, and the GOP intends to further politicize it if given the opportunity.

When the Republicans win, they break the rules with bold abandon and cram their extreme policies down the throats of the American people. It started before Trump, and we need to grasp the fact that this is not going to change. The President has managed to get some bi-partisan cooperation from the GOP in his first two years in office… but if the Republicans take the Senate in 2024, they will not continue to cooperate, particularly on the Supreme Court.

That is the feather in their cap and the hill they’ll die on. Save the Supreme Court. Save democracy in America. VOTE BLUE IN 2024!

A M E R I C A!
Future historians will tell the story of what happened to America but in the present… it’s all still unfolding in a blur of confusion. Once the world’s leader, our nation is now being dismissed and doubted across the world.

While President Biden leads the charge to save the soul of America and to secure the democratic values established globally after World War II, the reputational damage dealt to America in the four years of the presidency of Donald J. Trump is currently immeasurable. It’s devastating.

People across the world are shaking their heads and asking, “What happened to America?”

And at the moment, our country seems to be nearly evenly divided, with close to half of our citizens supporting Trump or Trumpism, which is nothing but hate and political revenge. His supporters talk about admiring his policies, but he really doesn’t have any consistent policies. He’s a card-carrying flip-flopper, and his followers don’t actually seem to care.

The Right in America wants a leader who is not a part of “the establishment,” which means they want an inexperienced outsider who has no idea how our government works or likely has any interest in learning. If they chose their surgeon with the same criteria, they’d likely end up in the morgue!

How can half the nation want someone who is clueless about running a government, a hapless baffoon on the world stage, and a lying dictator-wannabe to be our leader? And then there are the immoral, corrupt, anti-Constitution, and seditious insurrection qualities that the Trumpers seem to love!

At this moment, even having a woman’s right to choose stripped from American families, half of the people lean toward Donald J. Trump rather than Joe Biden. Why? Because he’s three years older than DJT?

Keep your passports up to date and handy, folks… we’re in for a very bumpy ride!

The MAGA crowd is acting just like the foreign terrorists!

Not entirely sure that we have a functioning country at this point. It feels more like Afghanistan, where rural warlords exercise their power with defiance toward the central government. And here, as there, they’re armed with an entirely different set of facts and beliefs and a reality that has no resemblance to actual reality. They are also literally armed to the teeth!

Like the Afghani Taliban, these American Trumpers are committed to forcefully taking over the country’s levers of power. They disparage our Constitution’s value of Separation of Church and State and insist that all Americans adopt their religion and make Christianity the national religion.  They substitute their religious faith for science and seek to enforce their control over women’s bodies and lives.

It’s hard to govern an ungovernable country and hard to know what’s really going on. So are the elected Republicans choosing misinformation for ideological reasons? Or are they deliberately sabotaging Biden’s attempt to control this pandemic and playing politics with Afghanistan relations? Unfortunately, many of the elected GOPers don’t believe half of what they’re saying. They just seem to be going along with the MAGA crowds.

Past experience playing along with Trump has often backfired on the GOP… so their reasoning is questionable.  And at this point, the MAGA crowd now controlling the GOP has started to go even further right than Trump himself. That was obvious when his rally crowd booed as he encouraged them to take vaccines. So perhaps Trump and the GOP have lost control of their Frankenstein!

Republicans cannot govern. They don’t even want to govern; they just want to win!

We really need to hang together for the next two elections. We can now see the scope of the damage done to our nation, from the rampant voter suppression, the conservative-stacked judiciary to the violence aimed toward our very government by the right-wing terrorists.

We need to STOP our circular-firing-squad if we’re going to save the country.  Our continued nit-picking of our own Party can only end in discouraging our own voters from showing up for the next two elections.  And preventing the GQP from retaking control is the imperative goal.

The Democratic Party is not the enemy; it is the vehicle we need to save our democracy.  If we have to compromise and don’t get the exact legislation exactly the way we want it, then that’s what we have to do.  Our choice at this point, if we want to keep power out of the hands of the GQP, is to remember to be adults and maintain the ability to compromise, at least on the edges.

STOP calling the Dems “cavers” and realize that compromising was the intention of our Founders in setting up the three branches of government.

I haven’t written in my blog for three years and six days. It’s been a long three years for our nation, and right now our country seems to be just holding its breath. Maybe the world is too.

So America’s back. Maybe. We hope. But with all our failings now exposed and revealed, we have a new reality. The arrogant American, believing that we’re #1 and better than all other nations, has come face to face with our failure to address our sins of racism and violence — and our past sense of self-importance is dashed.

We flubbed the pandemic. Russian cyber wizards have invaded our government sites and now have all our secrets. Our people no longer have faith in our American institutions. We’re lost and we can’t hide or pretend anymore.

We begin to question what we stand for: Win at all costs? Does truth matter? Is cooperation still an American value? Can we trust our fellow Americans? Who are we as Americans?

Perhaps we are at one of those existential moments. Will our democracy survive?

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Having a major déjà vu moment.  The feeling in the national zeitgeist right now seems very similar, and eerily familiar, to the 1990s when Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City in his anti-government, anti-liberal act of terror.  Pulling on that string of instinct I ask myself, “WHY does it feel so much like that time twenty-two years ago?”

I recall the horror that our nation felt when the innocents were slaughtered and the buildings crumpled.  And, I recall President Bill Clinton coming to the podium beseeching the Right to put a halt to the hate-talk-radio venom being spewed into the heads of the susceptible.  It was so clear that all the hatred directed at our government was based on the Right’s inability to accept a Democrat in the White House.  The violent anger inspired by a political loss resulted in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Democrats lost this last 2016 election, bigly, and so the violent uprising in the streets and in the “air” is not caused by angry Democrats.  Oh, we’re angry alright, but when we take to the streets it is in peaceful marches, holding our signs up high and demonstrating our power in sheer numbers.  No, while the feeling of violence is the same, the cause is the Right again — this time they won the election, and they take this to mean that they not only won an election — but that they are conquerors and the rest of us have to bow down and concede that they were right all along.  After all — the president lets the far Right know that he’s really with them … the dog-whistles are loud and clear — and this time we can all hear them.

Trump won.  They won.  The rest of us lost.  Surrender.

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FOLLOWING IS AN ACTUAL SENTENCE FROM THE MOUTH OF PREZ-ELECT TRUMP.

And, we wonder why the world is laughing at us!

“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, thepower and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power ofwhat’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?),but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now itused to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, Iwould have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because,you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarterright now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them aboutanother 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

Transcribed from this video, if anyone is interested in deciphering in real time. The video is from a year ago. Why are people just now figuring out he’s not all there?

REPOSTED FROM THE DAILY KOS

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The Democratic Party has to do some major rethinking — and it has nothing to do with going to the Left or moderating on issues.  It is waking up to the reality that we have no partner in governing, no partner willing to compromise, no partner to partner with in the interest of our nation.

We’ve had a Democrat in the White House for eight years who worked hard to be bi-partisan and to reach across the aisle.  He executed many GOP ideas over his two presidential terms, from a healthcare system first implemented by Republican Mitt Romney in his term as Governor of Massachusetts, to being willing to be branded “the deporter in chief” of undocumented workers in unprecedented numbers.  I believe that he deported huge numbers of the undocumented in an attempt to show the GOP that he could be reasonable, and isn’t an ideologue but a pragmatic leader.

Obama offered to the Congressional GOP a trimming of the so called entitlement programs, that Dems support, in a package that included tax reform that the GOP claims they want.  The Grand Bargain. The Republicans walked away from the deal because they couldn’t bring themselves to support anything that Obama offered, even if it was what they also wanted.

The more Obama offered to compromise, the further to the Right Congress went.

And, now the lesson of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton:  Hillary enlisted the support of most of the high level Republicans in her general election effort;  she reached out to moderate Republicans in the media; and she appealed directly to the rank-and-file members of that party.

Here’s my conclusion:  Both Obama and Clinton reached out to try to unite the country, by not being ideologues and by expressing a willingness to work with the Republican Party.  And in the end, in both cases, the Republican Party could not bring itself to work with a Democrat.  In the end, the moderate Republicans voted for Donald Trump; in the end the GOP would not deal with Obama — because when all is said and done, the Republican Party tribalism beats pragmatism.

The GOP sticks together with its other members of the tribe — no matter what, and THAT’S why the Democratic Party has to rethink strategy.  It’s time to realize that the GOP doesn’t want to work or play with others and their philosophy is “my way, or the highway.”   The only option left to the Democratic Party is to work our asses off to win and win BIG.  It’s time to make a long-term plan for the hearts and minds of American citizens.

The Democratic Party needs a new strategy, because without a partner in compromise the nation just stays stuck, and being stuck means falling backward.

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