You know sometimes you think politicians can’t get worse then Tennessee’s politicians and pastors are trying to blatantly marry children and make pedophilia, sex abuse, and forced marriage legal.
What makes this photograph remarkable is you see a group of people on stage perfectly willing to let children die for money being confronted by someone who is not. That is absolutely what is happening in this picture.
America is lost. And as long as people keep on believing that their freedom depends on the tea leaf interpretation of late 18th century document written by pre industrial rich landed white men for the benefit of pre industrial rich landed white men, then it’s doomed
Never forget that Jews fleeing Hitler in 1938 were accused of being “so-called refugees”who“hate our institutions and want to overthrow them.” Never forget that security concerns about a secretive foreign“menace” are always used as a pretext to turn away vulnerable and desperate people deemed racially undesirable. Never forget.
At a school in Texas a transgender student was not allowed to use the girls restroom or the locker room even though they have since 7th grade. There was a protest and now it might be believed there are students targeting those part of the protest. Bring attention to transgender rights and lgbt rights all together!
When George W. Bush was in power and set about creating this vast system and asserting the right to ever more extreme unilateral powers in the name of national security, Democrats were outraged, decrying these measures as an attempt to create an “imperial presidency.”
Seven years later, as one of their own was handed the reins to this extraordinary power, this outrage melted away. Rather than use Obama’s election to dismantle the national security state they had once railed against, Democrats allowed it to expand under Obama’s virtuous hand.
As Democratic leaders and liberal pundits ignored issues of civil liberties and presidential excess, relegating what was once a central critique of Bush into a niche issue, various commentators sounded the alarm over entrusting Obama with such expansive powers. In 2012, speaking about the Obama administration’s drone program, the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi stated:
Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.
A year later, the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote about the broad national security powers claimed by Bush and Obama, warning that such tools could eventually be misused by a tyrant:
Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We’re not special. Our voters won’t always pick good men and women to represent us. Some good women will be corrupted by power, and some bad men will slip through.
As Jeremy Scahill said earlier this year, before Trump had even become the Republian nominee, “It will be very interesting to see, if a Republican wins, how many of the MSNBC pundits and other, you know, so-called liberals — what their position will be on these very same policies.”
The basic argument civil libertarians stressed again and again was simple: You might like the current president. You might even trust him or her. But all leaders eventually transfer power to someone else — someone not likely to share your political beliefs or party affiliation.
As Glenn Greenwald suggested when he questioned if liberals would trust figures like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich with such powers, the alarm over the latest field of unhinged GOP nominees that comes around every four years should have made progressives particularly attuned to this fact.
Some were. After all, back in 2012, when the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president was looming, the Obama administration rushed to establish rules around its totally lawless and oversight-free drone program in case he won. After Romney lost the election, these efforts again took a back seat.
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
If conservatives want to interpret the Constitution by sticking to what the Founding Fathers intended, then the 2nd Amendment protects your right to own a single shot musket AND NOTHING ELSE.
hey so the Democrats are in charge at this very moment. They could enshrine abortion rights in the constitution at this very moment. Why would they wait until after midterms to do something, and if they aren’t gonna wait until after midterms, wtf does this have to do with midterms?
The only way to “enshrine it in the constitution” would be to make it an amendment. This requires a 2/3 vote from both the House and the Senate.
Which… wouldn’t pass.
I know this is shocking. But “being in charge” doesn’t actually mean unlimited power.
This post mentions the midterms because it 1. Could give us a super majority needed for this kind of amendment and 2. Would affect STATE governments which could safeguard abortion on a state level.
Vote these midterms. It has never been more critical to stop this shit. Those playing the long con game have been waiting for this most of all. The more freedoms they remove from us the stronger they get. Stop the backwards slide to remove rights from everyone but the rich white male.
right. every single time this happens people tell us to vote. and then we do. and now this. and obama swore to codify it into law as his first act. and didn’t. biden did the same, and didn’t.
so.. what exactly is next?
vote harder?
honestly fuck voting. voting ain’t done shit for anybody. find abortion providers who are willing to do abortions even after laws pass. distribute abortion pills. feed people. house people. discriminalize drugs. abolish cops and prisons. ALL of those things will do more to actually fucking help people than just saying “go vote.”
Cool, so we just let them keep taking away our rights?
Fuck you. Biden is still trying to fix Trump’s mess while dealing with the Ukraine crisis.
Literally FUCK YOU. And with that attitude maybe you better learn how to say it in Russian, because if you get your way that’s what we’ll all be speaking in ten years.
Y'all do know that you can do both, right? Like you can vote, AND you can do mutual aid, protests, etc. You SHOULD do both if you can!
But fucking take the hour or whatever to vote in people who live on this plane of reality and at least aren’t trying to make shit way worse.
I just do not understand this resistance to voting in people who *might* help or might not, as opposed to allowing people who are guaranteed to push a fascist agenda to keep power and make things much worse.
People don’t understand how truly fucked up American politics is.
The fact that Biden can’t get shit done because McConnell and Trump colluded to stack the courts is not something they really comprehend. Some of them understand that Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema are bad people who won’t vote for stuff we need, despite being Democrats, without grasping that this means we can’t get stuff we need. We cannot expand the Court, we don’t have enough Democrats in the Senate to do it, because some of them suck. The solution to this is not to throw up your hands and say fuck voting, but to work to get enough of them in that it will actually help.
Let’s be clear: once upon a time, Republican vs Democrat was actually a choice reasonable people could make. But now there is the party of Governing and the party of Political Posturing And Pandering To The Worst Humans In The Country. The party that let a raging narcissist make matters worse while hundreds of thousands of people died, because he needed to feed his ego and make the pandemic look unimportant. Do you really think we’d be in that position if Hillary had been president instead? Donald Trump’s opinion would have been completely unimportant and the right wing noise machine didn’t have any inherently good reason for wanting Republicans to kill themselves, they were just pandering to Trump’s narcissism. Now Biden can’t get the monkeys back in the barrel and they’ve had a lot of baby monkeys because they had time to run around the country screeching and throwing poo, and you’re gonna blame him for not being able to control the situation when it was too late by the time he took power? 30% of the country think he’s not a legitimate president because Donald Trump just flat out lied about it so much that there’s now an entire voter suppression movement energized by that lie, plus an attempted coup.
Democrats cover a range of good and bad people, like normal politicians always have. But they are not locked into manic support for the Objectively Worst Ideas Ever. Jesus Christ, you think we’d have anything if Biden hadn’t won and McConnell was still Majority Leader in the Senate?
This situation is really really fucking serious. There is a group of people who hate everyone who’s not a wealthy cis het Christian white male or a cis het Christian white female who’s willing to be subservient to the first one. And they are trying to turn this into a fascist theocracy and destroy democracy in this country. Also, setting the world on fire because a lot of them think the destruction of the world is the will of God and necessary for them, the good people, to all go to heaven, and the rest are beholden to big energy companies. And right now, the only tool we have to stop them is voting for anyone who isn’t one of them. Including Joe Manchin, who I hate, but if he was replaced with a Republican then Mitch McConnell could continue to just prevent good bills from ever getting voted on.
“The Democrats are in power” – no, they’re not, because Trump stacked the courts, and the courts are one of the three co-equal branches of government, and because there are like 2 Democrats who are politically more aligned with the ideals of the old Republican party, which were still bad, just not as cosmically horrible as the new Republican party. To actually repair the damage Trump and McConnell have done, we need to take away all of McConnell’s power by having either 60 Democrats in the Senate, or three more who are enthusiastically in favor of getting rid of the filibuster entirely (or at least changing it to the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington kind where you can only filibuster as long as you’re on the floor talking and the moment you have to leave to go to the bathroom, if no one else takes your place you’re done.) We also need to keep all the power we have in the House. We also need to replace state governors and legislatures, because the federal government doesn’t have the power to stop the Don’t Say Gay bill; education is a power specifically given to the states. And because if there was a federal mask mandate or vaccination requirement, and enough judges who understand fucking science to make sure that doesn’t get thrown out for political reasons, the government still couldn’t enforce it in states that don’t support it because the entire apparatus of law enforcement mostly works for states, and the FBI has better things to worry about than Karen and her husband not wearing masks. Oh, and because the entire apparatus of law enforcement works for states, and if we want to defund the police, control of states is where it has to be done.
People who are like “but we voted in Democrats and nothing got better” a. don’t understand politics and b. don’t understand harm reduction. They’re like “vandals totally trashed my apartment so I hired a guy with a vacuum cleaner but the windows are all still broken, what was the point of hiring the guy with the vacuum cleaner?” Friend, you need to hire a lot more people than you have already if you want to fix things and not just slow the slide toward them getting worse.
And a huge chunk of the “well, we voted in Democrats and nothing got better” are the same people who were “Well, I’m not voting against Donald Trump because my candidate didn’t win the primary”.
I know for a fact no one in an emergency would ever call on these losers for help. Useless.
Like the conservatives got all this via voting but tell me how voting is meaningless?
a rabid white minority gets shit done BECAUSE they have no hesitation about identifying institutionalized power as the most important power, BECAUSE they don’t whine about the terrible ideological burden posed by casting a ballot
but sure. voting mysteriously becomes meaningless & seeking institutionalized power becomes silly cringe behavior only when it’s NOT primarily white men seeking power to act in the interests of white men at the expense of everyone else. sure.
One thing to remember however: this didn’t happen overnight.
This has happened over forty years of slowly picking away at democracy with votes and legislation and policy and conviction. Forty years of slow wearing down, of teaching Americans that they’re special and that they deserve peace and prosperity and never having to make hard choices between the bad and the worse.
It’s true that your vote in the next elections may make little difference this year. But the votes that the conservatives gained in 1980 didn’t make much difference either: at least, not that year. But they kept voting. And they kept voting. And they persuaded others to keep voting along with them.
And forty years later, you’re staring down the barrel of a dysfunctional democracy, and what looks like it’s very much going to turn into a Christian theocracy. (I am deeply cynical that it will stop at Roe v Wade. Deeply cynical.)
Do you have the courage to stand up and fight for the rest of your life? Do you have the vision to plant trees for an orchard you’ll never get to enjoy? Do you understand the weight of one vote and one vote and one vote and one vote and one vote, year after year after election after election after decade after decade?
Or do you just want “one and done”?
The dude in the tweet above wants “one and done”. He’s not willing to put his shoulder to the wheel and work for his democracy. Look, he’s not unusual in that - the truth is that most Americans aren’t. They were taught that the world they inhabited wasn’t just a privilege that they enjoyed but their right to have and to keep without expending any effort to ensure that it remained so.
It’s true that after the next election, things will look no better than before the election. But keep pushing at the election after that, and the election after that, and the election after that…
Don’t want to expend the energy?
Then STFU about the broken system! It was your lack of expended energy - or the energy you spent persuading others that ‘marginal change’ was just as bad as ‘no change at all’ (*coughs*NeverHillary*coughs*) - that contributed to the broken system today. Put in the work - put it in over the time period that the conservatives who are now shaping your world against your wishes did - and you might very well see the results.
The current state of American politics didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen.
Changing it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen - ifyou work to make it happen.
If the left stops voting then the right would just dominate and it will get worse.
Simply voting for the president won’t matter. You need to vote in local and state elections. You have to pay attention to the stances of the candidates.
Go to primaries. Support progressive candidates and push for them. Help do campaign work. Help advertise the stances.
Also pay attention to what is going on and voice your opinions to them. Especially for local issues.
I have this fantasy that I can go back in time and get everyone who voted in 2008 to also have voted in 2010. Imagine how much better the country would have been had the GOP not had any power at all after the Bush debacle?
But nope. We handed the house to the GOP a mere 2 years after starting to clean up their mess. And as a result, almost nothing got done and the government was shut down a couple times.
The GOP is going full fash. Getting them out of power is, like, the very least you can do to stop them.
Roe v. Wade being overturned was only able to happen because conservatives have a 6 to 3 supreme court majority.
Conservatives have that majority because they got to place 3 judges.
They got to place three judges because they won the 2016 presidential election.
The Roe v. Wade decision can be traced back to a single critical election loss using only three logical steps and morons like this are still saying voting doesn’t matter. This was an election in which many self identified progressives chose not to vote, and looking at the numbers it could have been won if more progressives had voted. If this doesn’t cement a decision to vote in every single election you possibly can for the rest of your life then you simply are not paying attention.
This is a particularly dramatic and straightforward example of the principle talked about above: Elections shape the future, not the present, and we often don’t feel the real consequences of a win or loss for years. Every election matters.
If you do not strategically vote you are not progressive. Strategically you are centrist.
anyone who tries to convince you there’s no point in voting is ACTIVELY TRYING TO SUPPRESS YOUR VOTE.
If you’re one of those chumps who says that voting doesn’t work and that the only way to get results is protest and other grassroots action towards ~La Révolution~ or whatever, I remind you:
You can engage in activism and vote. You can do both. You should do both.Youmustdo both.
Anyone who says voting is pointless and all politicians are the same needs a smack around the legs.
