2020 Archives

Posted at Buzzflash on Oct. 25, 2020

Because We Don’t Have a Right to Vote

In America, the country that is supposed to be the world’s premier democratic republic, citizens do not have an absolute right to vote. Because we don’t have a right to vote, Red State governors can radically cut back on the number of polling places and voting machines so that working class people are forced to stand in line for five, six, in some cases 10 hours to vote.

Posted at Common Dreams on Oct. 19, 2020

How Does a Nation Best Deal With a Leader Who Intentionally Kills Its Citizens?

Covid-19 infections now represent the third leading cause of death in America. This is an extremely contagious, crippling, and deadly disease. On top of that, there's a growing legion of people who call themselves "long haulers," who have been seriously disabled by Covid and are unable to live a normal life because of severe chronic fatigue, screaming nerve pain, and other chronic conditions. And that doesn't mention all the COVID survivors who've had strokes, heart attacks, and permanent heart, lung, kidney, and brain damage.

Posted at Common Dreams on Oct. 12, 2020

It's Time to Unpack the Court

Donald Trump was bragging a week or so ago that Obama had “left me 128 judges to fill” as if Obama was just sloppy. The actual number was 105, but Obama didn’t “leave” them; he’d appointed genuinely qualified people, many women and minorities, to fill every single one of those judicial slots, and Mitch McConnell simply blocked them in the senate for the last two years of the Obama presidency.

Posted at Raw Story on Oct. 7, 2020

The GOP is pursuing a public slaughter strategy — known to some as ‘herd immunity’

People are acting shocked—shocked, I tell you!—that the Trump/GOP strategy on coronavirus is essentially one of promoting herd immunity with the possible downside of as many as 2.5 million dead Americans. We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s simply the logical extension of conservative policies on pretty much everything for the past 90 years—policies that have killed a hell of a lot more than just 2.5 million people.

Posted at Buzzflash on Oct. 5, 2020

Will GOP Voter Suppression Efforts Be Enough to Block the Tens of Millions of Americans Who Have Discovered That Trump and the Republicans Don’t Give a Damn About Them?

In a stunning proof that he doesn’t care about anybody’s life except his own, a sick and infectious Donald Trump ordered two Secret Service agents to join him in “The Beast,“ the presidential limousine, which is “hermetically sealed against chemical attacks“ so it has absolutely no fresh air. The #ProudBoys and other white supremacist groups had gathered outside Walter Reed, and Trump had to go out and wave to his adoring cult members. Meanwhile, news reports tell us that people who work for this administration are in full-blown panic because Trump doesn’t give a damn about their lives, as Mark Meadows, the Chief of Staff, has failed to provide guidance or even instructions on what they should be doing and how they should protect themselves from the virus that seems to be spreading rapidly through the White House.

Posted at Common Dreams on Sep. 30, 2020

Trump Goes Full Authoritarian Dictator

What we saw last night was the dictator's playbook. Tell violent white supremacist racists to "stand by" and encourage them to show up at polling places to intimidate voters. Bully, bluster and threaten like Mussolini did, promoting your brand as "tough guy" when in fact you're a lazy coward.

Posted at Alternet.org on Sep. 28, 2020

The Republican Party's sordid history in Florida shows just how far they'll go to save Trump

Those who forget history, the old saying goes, are doomed to repeat it. “Lawmakers on both sides indicated Tuesday that the Republican-dominated Legislature will call a special session by the end of the week to appoint its own slate of delegates to the electoral college,” wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for The Los Angeles Times on November 29, 2000.

Posted at Alternet.org on Sep. 28, 2020

Here are 8 reasons COVID is so much worse than the skeptics think

America's first COVID death was on February 29 of this year, roughly 200 days ago. In that time, more than 200,000 Americans have died of the disease, the equivalent of 1,000 people a day. That's how many people would have died if between February 29 and today three fully-loaded jumbo jets had crashed every single day, even on weekends, for 200 days.

Posted at Alternet.org on Sep. 24, 2020

Trump keeps telling us how he and Republicans plan to steal this election

Donald Trump became president by exploiting a loophole called the Electoral College. The majority of Americans did not want him or vote for him as president, but he’s there anyway. Now he’s planning on using a different loophole, the 12th Amendment, to hang onto power.

Posted at Raw Story on Sep. 23, 2020

Republicans ruthlessly reshaped America to hold onto power — can Dems do the same thing to save it?

In the power grab to fill the Supreme Court seat announced the same evening as the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell didn’t do anything new. The GOP has a long history of playing hardball power politics. In the late 19th century, Republicans added four states (Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota, and South Dakota) purely to gain eight new Republican senators, a trick Democrats could duplicate today by bringing statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico (and maybe even Guam).