464 Comments

There is so much fear in this country right now. The previous administration ruled with fear. It continues to instill fear with lies. As a mental health professional, I can tell you fear is underneath powerlessness, and it is the basis of trauma. Those believing the lie live in anger which masks their fear and those that understand the truth of this situation live with a fear of losing our democracy. We live in the land of the free…yet we are not free because we live in fear.

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Trump tore a hole in the body politic and his troops won’t let it heal because the wound nourishes them - the festering works to their benefit like flies laying eggs in the eyes of the dying.

They pick the scab, and will keep picking it, pouring their salted lies into it and spreading their poison coast to coast until they either die at their own hand, or so foul the system that in desperation, the people succumb, sacrificing their liberty to an autocrat.

We came perilously close to that fate, and today, instead of acknowledging the damage done by following their leader down his path to perdition, the party of Lincoln embraces him. They have undeniably cast their fate with his.

Banish the fetter of bipartisanship, Democrats. There is no bargaining with a boil. Lance it and be done with it. Move forward with the Agenda – pass the legislation needed to stop the bleeding and begin the healing.

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While the GOP appears to have lost all ability to be even somewhat reasonable, why are the Dems insisting on "working with them"? It's not like the GOP rolled out the red carpet of bipartisanship over the last 12 years (specifically). The GOP is batshit crazy, but the Dems need to stop letting the minority party pull all the strings. Enough is enough!

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I really cannot get my head around the fact that those who instigated (trump and his criminal family), those who were complicit (republican congress people) and the terrorist minions who participated (everyone in the videos) in the attempted and violent January 6th political coup have not been indicted, tried, found guilty, and thrown in jail for the rest of their pathetic lives.

Why is the rule of law not taking hold here? I just don't get it and as far as I can tell, we are sinking further and further into the abyss of lawlessness and the type of 3rd world country that succumbs to and accepts violent and repressive "ideology" as a way of life. Thankfully, the majority voted the Biden/Harris administration into office BUT with the abject stupidity of a large subsection of the masses, who obviously can't distinguish their hind ends from their elbow, and the evil that currently directs republican mindset, IMO we are in deep bird doo as a country.

But hey, real estate prices are increasing at a ridiculous rate so there's a "shiny" new distraction . . . . wow people are "making a bundle" so who cares about politics anymore as long as I get mine?! Yeesh.

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"Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has maintained he can work with the Republicans, commented: 'So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country…. I’m still praying we’ve still got 10 good solid patriots within that conference.'"

What will it take to convince the West Virginia senator that to the Republican Party, "good solid patriotism" is today defined as abject, obsequious loyalty to the former president. Or silence; a profound, deep, deafening silence, broken only by the single voice of Liz Cheney.

Congressional bipartisanship is dead, and wishful thinking by Joe Manchin will not bring it back to life. However, continued wishful thinking on the part of Senator Manchin can enable the Republicans to block any signficant initiatives by Democrats.

Got that, Joe?

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HCR paints a grim picture. But it’s worse than she describes. It’s not that “…our Republican lawmakers, who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, are trying to protect their leader…” It’s that Republicans, in facing a choice between abiding by the Constitution, and wielding power, have decided the Constitution has to go. We keep thinking the Trump party is torn between their obligation to follow the rule of law and fealty to Trump. They’re not. As McCarthy and McConnell and Graham and all the rest keep demonstrating, it’s all Trump. They’ll tear the Constitution into shreds, and gleefully toss the confetti at the next Trump “The Election was Stolen” rally. Soon, the Arizona auditors will report that thousands of votes were fraudulent. Then similar audits in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania will do the same (see yesterday’s brilliant report from WaPo - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/05/21/arizona-election-audit-trump-maricopa/) We keep underestimating the Trumpists, at our peril.

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Dems should stop trying to beat them and join them, asking for recounts in some of the elections Dems thought they might be able to win but didn’t. Jaime Harrison. Theresa Greenfield. Cal Cunningham. MJ Hegar. It just seems like whenever the GOP points out smoke, there is actually a fire but they’re the ones with the lighter fluid and matches in their hands.

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Very early in my training as a hostage negotiator, I learned a variety of skills for specific situations; dealing with a hostage taker who was engaged in criminal conduct and found themselves in a law enforcement trap (think bank robbery interrupted) is what we’d call a “barter” situation while someone who was emotionally overwhelmed (think someone holding spouse and kids over an infidelity and wanting to “make a point”) was what we’d call more of a “vent snd solve the problem” situation. For a terrorist situation, there was one rule: “don’t negotiate with terrorists”

Today’s Republiqans are holding democracy itself hostage. Do not negotiate with them. There is no “bipartisan” in today’s congress. From McConnell’s stated objective to stop everything President Biden wants to do to the man who “won’t take yes for an answer” McCarthy they have demonstrated they are not playing the same “game” as the Democratic Party.

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Today’s read makes me think of a subject that is always at the back of my mind. When the US started it was 13 states. This covered a landmass that seemed genuinely huge. States seemed to be a reasonable notion given that they were trying to get agreement. Let the local areas govern themselves and we will come together only on the big issues. Stepping way back this is what I have taken from those beginning days.

By the time of the civil war the US had expanded to include much more landmass and many more states. The north and the south had differentiated into industrial and agricultural areas and states still maintained their ability to be very different. Over slavery, but really many other issues as well, the war started. At its end the US as a whole had decided that abject legal slavery was out but the states were still maintained as self-governing entities allowed to culture differing ideas and standards.

Racial repression became one of the biggest areas of cultural difference between the states and sparked many conflicts between our national identity and our local identities. We were still not one country. During WWII we came together to fight an outside repressive regime. While I feel certain the underlying regional and state level cultural differences were still there they didn’t play a clear or obviously detrimental role on the battle fields. Perhaps, at this time we were as united as we have ever been.

After WWII we entered a period of prosperity based on a wide spread and agreed upon craving for safety and normalcy. Eisenhower, our hero of the war, became president and seemed to embody that character of normalcy but in fact he was the one that started black ops and the attempted control of communism through the covert overthrow of governments in what we considered the ‘little’ places in the world. The domino theory dominated fears but turned out to be false in actuality. During this time the state level differences quietly grew back as local areas were influenced by local personalities often ones who simply craved attention and power and knew that emphasizing differences rather than commonalities was the way to get it.

Nationally we took on the cold war, the space race, and the computerization of industry and society. A whole generation mobilized to get us out of Viet Nam, a war that our leadership seemed incapable of either winning or loosing. We saw our selves as the arbiters of freedom in the world while at home we were quietly dividing at the state and local levels driven by personalities that were gorging on fear, division and the ease of distorting the facts through local radio. These personalities recognized that they could command the attention of huge but local audiences and develop a popularity that fed them. Seeing this success the moguls of industry began buying local media stations and fostering personality driven news entertainment as actual news. This was coddled under our sacred if sanctimonious devotion to the idea of free speech the underlying tenant of which is that the average American is too educated and too smart to be constantly lied to, however, this turned out not to be true.

Then came the incredibly fast growth of the internet and social media took the stage; news entertainment had found its new home. Network TV and its attendant regulations that had been our safe guard were marginalized and finally thrown out as simply obsolete. All this while Face Book and its progeny occupy a national and international position was and is done at the local and state level because individuals get to choose what they read and look at and the attention of those individuals is more easily drawn to level of local topics. In short state and local politics became or remained the most important.

Then enter the current tide of Senators who made the filibuster a push button option that requires no energy or maintenance. Senators are state level elected officials controlled by the agenda and issues promoted in their home states. While members of a national group Democrats or Republicans for the most part they are ultimately controlled by the state level machinery that does or does not keep them in office. At one time politicians were envisioned to be ordinary men (not women) who had real lives and professions that they returned to after serving their country in a leadership role but this day is long past. Politics is now a life long career choice and therefore when elected it is paramount, not to lead, but to remain elected and this fact has governed us. Ultimately election facts are local and they are controlled by that same carefully tuned machinery of local disinformation and entertainment news that was purchased by huge non-local financial special interests.

So our national agenda is ultimately controlled by state level and local level concerns and the information quality delivered at that level. We have painfully learned that that information is not poor, because it is a most expertly crafted message tuned precisely to the smaller audience it is courting, it is simply not often actually true. So true has this been that the very notion of truth is now questioned.

So what do we do? How does this ocean liner of momentum turn? We have Texas rewriting the history it teaches its young. We have voter suppression laws locally being passed on the basis of the fear of election fraud well after our officials in charge of such things have been repeatedly vindicated in court. We have division in our country at a level unprecedented in history because we are now at a different position in history.

Then, miracle of miracles, our national identity reasserted itself partly due to the extreme distaste of what arose from the unexpected quarter of individual hubris and the attempt to elect the first female president. Disinformation, manipulation abounding in that contest put a such a ridiculous figure in office to the point that he could be disposed by a majority of American voters despite all the local entertainment (fake) news. To do it we had to embrace a true gentleman and elder long-term statesman, a bastion of respectability and one who has made efforts to see the country as a whole but has our ocean liner actually changed course? He can’t quite get the media to focus on him and what he is doing because the loud ruckus coming from the local entertainment news and their despicable star character keep playing to the crowd.

And, I think, because though he is captain of the ocean liner, commander in chief, he hasn’t actually turned the wheel and that is what he has to do. He has repaired or started to repair major holes in the boat and the boat may not be sinking quite like it was but it is still headed in the same direction it was before. That is a lack of meaningful long term national government, a willingness by our governing bodies to be controlled by personalities and power structures that are not national but rather stem from the local aberrations and blatant disinformation fed to local audiences by a media controlled by financial special interests. Our head is moving but our shoelaces are tied together. The inevitable fall is predictable.

What would it mean to actually turn the wheel? How is that done? By introducing bills that will never even make it to the Senate floor? By backroom discussions with life long politicians who have been put into office and maintained there by the very financial special interests that own the local entertainment news industry? By being quiet and respectful and a perfectly beautiful statesman in a world gone crazy with loud lies and liars?

Lies are like balloons, bright and colorful and eye catching. But they are ultimately fragile and easily popped. This balloon is maintained by a single support. It is continually pumped up by fear but its pressure valve is simple. It is the filibuster. To pop the balloon and allow the majority of American’s to have their will expressed by their government the filibuster simply needs to change such that votes take place in the Senate again.

Our captain keeps hoping that the boat will change course without his having to actually turn the wheel. That he can get government to act as it once did in fondly remembered days before all this division was created. But the filibuster in its current form isn’t a natural part of our government. Its current form is simply a creation of the same disinformation and local politic and special interest financing that is dependent upon it. No founding father felt that the process of government, the bringing of bills to the Senate floor for debate and an eventual vote could be affected, delayed, or out rightly killed by sending an email. Bills can still legally pass by a majority vote it is the vote itself that is blocked by the filibuster.

Biden simply has to come out against the current form of the filibuster and campaign loudly, daily, personally and persistently to challenge specifically those few Senators that, controlled by their local desire for re-election, are preventing the majority of Americans from having a democratic government guided by majority rule. Even those local politicians and their local entertainment news backers will offer change in their positions once they are relentlessly called to national attention and once that national attention brings legitimate news to those local Americans who are the actual voters that support those politicians. If this is not true, if turning the wheel actually doesn’t turn the rudder and thus the boat then we are lost. But if we loose without even turning the wheel then we have been lost all along.

It all makes me feel that the time of states rights is showing its age. We live in a small world now. While we still live locally the issues that come to our doors are now global. We must actually become a nation and a world even while we look out our windows at our yards and our neighbors.

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Why, when the republicans continually pull the football away à la Lucy to Charlie Brown, why do the Democrats not cut their losses and pass their legislation and leave the republicans to stew in their own juices? Can Democrats on the state level petition the courts there to prevent these sham audits of election ballots? What other recourse do we have before the 2022 elections to stop the republicans?

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Perhaps it is because HCR is so articulate or because of the mood I am in, but I feel so ineffably sad about all this this morning. Though I get their hunger for power and money, I get that many of them are being threatened in one way or another, I get that many are the products of abuse, I get the unhinged nature of the paranoid philosophies that led them to public office, and I get the craven obeisance to the white grievance MAGA crowd, I still cannot get my head around how so many people in our Congress have sold their souls for a pack of blatant lies. One would think there must be a limit, a place where the circuit breaker trips and they say to themselves: now we have gone too far, now the Republic itself is at risk, now we are on the precipice, now we call on an honor and patriotism that transcends ideology to salvage what we can of decency and this fractured, toxic nation. The fact that they cannot do this actually made me cry today. I understand they don't agree with me, with us, with people like us, and that's fine. But what they are doing now is tearing this country to shreds and we may never recover, not completely. There is damage being done that--potentially at least--cannot be undone.

I have never embraced the concept of patriotism because it too often devolves into sectarianism, jingoism, and xenophobia. But this morning I am a patriot, a man who loves his country and is mired in deep grief that a cadre of hate might just bring it to ruin. I am doing what I can, every day, to counter them, but some days it feels futile and discouraging. How do I even live in a world that contains such monsters?

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(Sweden)

Reading this very concerning letter about US democracy, there is one major question: What is the stand of the military? They have promised to defend the constitution, but they would be likely also to have about 40% supporters for Trump, maybe with some more higher rank officers? So, it is a matter of twisting the constitution. - The world remembers 9/11 in Chile, where the legal majority of 60% was overthrown by the 40% minority, including the military. The military/industrial complex in the US, I hope, is very far from the same in Myanmar, but it is huge and largely unknown, even if Eisenhower warned you.

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Makes you proud, doesn’t it Senator Manchin? Too bad you can’t do anything about the filibuster.

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Dr Richardson’s letter tonight is alarming; it’s meant to be because she is detailing the actions of an obdurate minority unwilling to behave in a democratic, honest, legal and fair manner. Thanks for your good work as their actions are un American and most definitely will not prevail. Our democratic roots are strong, deep and fiercely resilient. We all need to be part of the healing process now underway. We won’t convince most of the 70 million who voted for trump but some will wake up. Our majority will get larger and stronger as this happens. A new R party will emerge at some point chastened by the undemocratic and excessively obstructionistic behavior of the party of McConnell and yes, of Liz Cheney as well.... trump will be forgotten except as a warning to the future. In the meantime Joe and his supporters who succeed him will have put America not just on track again but transformationally in harmony with the needs and wants of the people of the world...and that will be what unites us perhaps as we’ve never been before in our history as a group of people who define our nation.

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"Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) questioned whether the rioters were Trump supporters"

Seems like he would be among the first to insist on an investigation to uncover the "real" leaders of the riot.

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I don’t think that the former president could maintain his focus on anything for a day much less six months. There isn’t a scintilla of patriotism in the man. He drapes himself in the mythological flag of a patriot. The only thing that has ever been a motivator for him in this world is money. I think that he has found that perpetuating the lie is a way (a really easy way) for him to get (lots of) money. He does not care that it’s dangerous for our country. Senator Manchin and fellow democrats, wake up.

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