Just A Question

[HARDCORE]

10-1-2022


“JUST A QUESTION?”

WHATEVER HAPPEN TO THAT DAY AND AGE WHEN THE PRIMARY CONCERN IN OUR NATION FIRST?

IT IS GREAT TO HAVE REAL ALLIES AND FRIENDS AROUND THE WORLD BUT THE BOTTOM LINE HERE IS THAT “OUR NATION” MUST COME FIRST AND FOREMOST!

ALL TALKERS & NO ACTION! BUT AGAIN – AFTER ALL – IT IS OUR NATION AND HER PEOPLE WHO ARE AT STAKE HERE!

IN MY OPINION – IT IS NO LONGER A QUESTION OF POLITICAL PARTY ALONE BUT RATHER IT IS AN URGENT QUESTION OF NATIONAL SURVIVAL.

SO WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT TO YOU?

Hardcore

[Boats]

The Threat to Our Democracy’s Survival, and What We Can Do About It
By: Jabari Simama - Governing The Future of States & Localities - 01-26-22
Re: https://www.governing.com/now/the-th...an-do-about-it

Things will not get better if those of us who see what is going down give in to fear. There are things elected officials and the public in general can do to safeguard our bedrock principles.

Within my lifespan I have witnessed democracy’s ebb and flow, from the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and bipartisan support for the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to the attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I am as concerned today about democracy’s survival in the U.S. as anytime during my adult life.

I moved to Atlanta in 1973. Despite the progress achieved by the landmark legislation of the previous decade, it was a time when Black Americans, along with other moderates and liberals, were still grieving the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose 93rd birthday we recently commemorated. In addition to King’s death, we had lived through and mourned the assassinations of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Sen. Robert Kennedy and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

I began to feel hopeful that democracy might have a chance after Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter, was elected president in 1976. Among other encouraging steps, Carter appointed civil rights activist Andrew Young as U.N. ambassador and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founder and leader John Lewis as associate director of the national volunteer organization ACTION. Over the ensuing decades, I remained relatively positive over the possibility that our republic could become a more inclusive, just and equitable nation, despite the limitations of what was achieved under the two terms of President Barack Obama’s administration.

I had at least a small basis for my optimism in those years. Building on the success of the civil rights movement, there were vigorous antiwar, counterculture, women’s rights and other social justice movements pressuring the establishment to transform its institutions. There was always a stealth right wing that attacked and criticized these movements, but the proponents of change were determined to be heard and forced their agenda upon society. The right wing that opposed them was not the core of the Republican Party, nor was the party openly sympathetic to antidemocratic forces, white supremacists and violent militia members.

As I write today, I feel less sure that our democratic institutions, not to mention the idea of democracy itself, will survive what we are now going through.

Progressives and Democrats in Georgia and elsewhere did a superb job in 2020 getting voters to the polls, which resulted in historic wins for the presidency and the Senate. But, egged on by the former president’s “big lie” that he won, in 2021 19 states enacted at least 34 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote, according to the Brennan Center’s tally.

Meanwhile, last week’s failure by the Democrats to secure the support from two of their most conservative senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, resulted in no changes being made to the filibuster, a procedure that throughout history has been used to deny Black rights and that today stands in the way of passage of the federal voting rights bills. All Democrats were needed to be on board to protect what President Biden called our “threshold liberty,” since no Republican in the Senate would break ranks for fear of being primaried by candidates recruited by the ex-president.

My skepticism over democracy’s survival is not based just on the cowardice on the part of some federal elected officials or their refusal to place the country’s interest over that of their party. I am equally disturbed over what state officials are doing, particularly those with safe Republican majorities, to make it more difficult for even conservative voters to cast a ballot. Nowhere am I hearing bipartisan opposition to these anti-democratic developments.

Even Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, both of whom refused to yield to pressure from the former president to overturn the 2020 Georgia election, have repeatedly defended the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly’s voter-suppression laws on the grounds that they make for better voter integrity.

These are indeed scary times in the U.S., and things will not get better if all of us who see what is going down give in to fear. It is also important, however, to remember the five purple states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that voted blue in the 2020 elections, as well as the prospects this year for Democrats to win governorships now held by Republicans in states including Arizona, Georgia, Maryland and Massachusetts due to the strength of minority and blue-trending suburban votes. To protect those victories and support these possibilities, there are some things that I believe elected officials and the public in general can do to better safeguard democracy.

First, all people of good will must wake up and recognize that the country is in grave danger of being taken over by antidemocratic forces. Then, constituents should screen candidates for public office based on their steadfast support of America’s bedrock principles of democracy. This won’t be easy in an alt-right environment where a large percentage of voters has had politicians prey upon their fears and feed them lies as to the reasons they are economically insecure.

Second, Republicans who are not afraid of or indebted to the former president must carefully weigh the cost of remaining silent against the dangers of losing democracy as we’ve known it and to what this loss could mean to the ruin of the American economy they depend on for wealth.

Finally, and unfairly, it will probably continue to fall on the backs of racial minorities, workers and women who have historically and persistently been denied the fruits of full participation in America’s democratic institutions to double down on their efforts in fighting racism, fascism, and voter suppression and subversion of all types.

By doing so, they might end up saving democracy not just for themselves but for us all.

Note: Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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A 2nd post titled: Can Federalism Save American Democracy? Maybe …
By: Donald F. Kettl - Opinion 01-18-22
Re: https://www.governing.com/now/can-fe...emocracy-maybe

State and local governments are still trusted more than Washington, though they’re having their
own brushes with incivility and polarization. But they’re still the best bet for preserving our
traditions of governance.

“Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar,” Dustin Hoffman once quipped. “They keep
telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.” But our
Canadian friends are increasingly worried that things downstairs are moving from disorder to danger.

In the country’s leading newspaper, Toronto’s Globe and Mail, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon
wrote recently, “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political
instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed
by a right-wing dictatorship.” The United States “is becoming increasingly ungovernable,” he wrote,
and wondered, “How should Canada prepare?”

It’s not just the Canadians who are worried. An NPR/Ipsos poll published in early January found that
64 percent of Americans agreed that “American democracy is in crisis and at risk of failing.” One in
four believed that it was sometimes OK to use violence to protect American democracy, although of
course it’s their own version of democracy they’d want to take up arms to protect.

In a few short years, we’ve moved from the world’s very model of democracy to a government that,
in the eyes of other nations, is anything but. A European think tank’s 2021 report classified the U.S.
as a “backsliding” democracy, with “the sustained and deliberate process of subversion of basic
democratic tenets by political actors and governments.” Commentary around the anniversary of the
Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection was united in the conclusion that “American democracy is
tottering,” as a Vox headline put it.

Even biker bars have rules that aim to keep at least a semblance of order. Critics are pointedly
wondering if the same can be said for American democracy.

The federal government is a mess. So it’s worth asking: Can state and local governments, closer
to the people, provide a lifeline to the nation’s grand traditions of governance? Can federalism
save American democracy?

There’s a strong case that the answer is yes. After all, the biggest fear of some of the founders
was that so much power would accumulate in Washington that liberty would erode. They believed
that preserving the power of states, as the new nation’s building blocks, would prevent tyranny.

Worrisome Battles

So if the United States is backsliding, can its state and local building blocks stop the skid?

There’s certainly hope. Congress is the Hells Angels of biker bars, with Gallup finding public trust
in the federal government to handle domestic problems at 39 percent, near the historic low.
(And that may be an optimistic number: The Pew Research Center found that only 24 percent
trust Washington “to do what is right just about always or most of the time.”) But while
Americans’ confidence in state and local governments has been slipping in recent years,
those levels of government still enjoy much higher levels of public trust: 57 percent and 66
percent, respectively, according to Gallup. A Deloitte study put it simply: “the more local,
the more trusted.”

Yet despite the headlines about Washington’s dysfunction, some of the more worrisome
battles are raging at the state and local levels. In 2021, at least 34 laws were passed in
19 states that restricted voting, the Brennan Center for Justice tallied, with more such
legislation teed up for 2022. Brennan called this an “alarming and unprecedented attack
on our democracy.” Meanwhile, record amounts of money are cascading into once-sleepy
races for state secretaries of state, from groups trying to set up the next round of vote
challenges.

Just as alarming are the full-blooded battles that have erupted at school board meetings
around the country. In many communities, these meetings used to be downright boring
affairs, mostly poring over the details of school budgets. But COVID-19 and the culture
wars have changed all that.

In Rapid City, S.D., and Kalispell, Mont., for example, conservatives who were furious
about mask mandates ran to gain control of local school boards. In a suburban school
district near Columbia, S.C., a battle over pandemic restrictions led to the ouster of the
school superintendent who was the state’s reigning Superintendent of the Year.

In Texas, a new state law forbids teachers from being forced to discuss “a controversial
issue of public policy or social affairs” in the classroom. That spun off into a battle to ban
the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in local schools, even though there’s no evidence
that local schools were teaching it. CRT was, until recently, a relatively obscure college-level
issue focusing on whether race is woven into legal systems and political practice. But now
any issue involving race attracts the CRT label — and an argument to ban it. The battle led
a Black principal accused of promoting CRT to resign from a school district near Dallas.

And in Virginia, in November Republican Glenn Youngkin surprisingly won the race for governor
on the back of attacks on CRT, although the evidence that the issue won the race for him is
controversial. Noncontroversial was the problem itself: Virginia teachers don’t teach CRT.

It’s not just issues around race. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on the Texas Education
Agency to conduct a formal criminal investigation into “the availability of pornography” in
the state’s public schools. It wasn’t clear where rivers of obscenity were flowing through
the schools. In any event, the TEA has no investigators or prosecutors. In Williamson
County, near Austin, county commissioners temporarily delayed allocating millions of
dollars in federal money to two local school districts in a battle over what they claimed
were offensive books on library shelves.

A New Civil War?

Americans might trust state and local governments more than the feds because the more local a government is the more trusted it is. But, on the other hand, the more local a government is, the easier it is to create flashpoints on issues, mobilize crowds to overwhelm debates and terrify elected officials into relenting.

That’s led some analysts to warn starkly that the U.S. stands on the verge of a new civil war. In The Atlantic’s Jan. 6 issue, Barton Gellman argued that “January 6 was practice” and that the “next coup has already begun.” Barbara F. Walter, the author of the new book How Civil Wars Start, tells us, “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

That’s a tough message to hear but, she writes, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

And, back to the Canadians, journalist Stephen Marche, in The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, warns of the escalating “tolerance for violence.” He writes, “Eventually somebody acts on it.” In The Globe and Mail, Homer-Dixon worries that “we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.” Our neighbors are worried about what’s going on downstairs in the biker bar of American democracy.

A Democracy-Building Strategy

There’s a way out, but it won’t be easy. In the Deloitte study, John O’Leary, Angela Welle and Sushumna Agarwal suggest a simple strategy: Go local, since people tend to trust the government that they interact most with; go focused on individual governmental functions, since people tend to trust the programs and agencies that deliver value to them; go digital, since satisfaction with digital services is connected with higher levels of trust; and go transparent, since it’s easier to trust the things we see than the mysteries we don’t.

The best bet for saving American democracy lies, as always, with state and local governments. Working to uproot the incivility and polarization that has infected local governments — especially local school boards — would be an important first step. The second step lies in the collection of trust-building strategies that local governments have close at hand. In the raucous politics spreading through local governments, that’s possible, with strong leadership. But it’s a very tall order.

Or the disruptive battles wracking local politics could continue, or perhaps even escalate. That would be both sad and dangerous. Sad, because it would eat away at the foundation of American government. Dangerous, because without that foundation, the worries of our Canadian neighbors could come to pass.

America is in genuine trouble. Federalism can save it, or sink it. For clues about which way it’s going to go, check in with your local school board. And tell those bikers to cool it.

Note: Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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Personal note: So as we can see - we are not the only country wondering what is happening
to the American ideals - and the recent issues of late; which seems to indicate that the U.S.
is currently having to deal with. What once was - has now morphed into something other.
-
How this "other" plays out - has yet to be defined - nor will it reinstate the values and
governing rules - that have been in place since it's conception.
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This is the question! Will the US bounce back for fall forward into a conception other than
the ideals of it's democratic rulings?
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Note: This is like the 3rd world order operation's. Where ciaos rules. Will we become a
Broken Republic? They had better fix it - or sure as hell - we will fall.
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[HARDCORE]

Are you better off with biden or when trump was in office?

You don't have to like trump but he did live up to his promises.

Mrs. Hardcore

[Boats]

Hi Mrs. Hardcore
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1st of all - how's your HC (your husband doing?) - I hope he's feeling better?
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To answer - Your Question: I Favor Neither;
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Trump dug his ditch when he attached Congress - and Biden is just too damn
old (sorry to say). In his day he was much better but the age has caught up
to him and he's not as sharp as he once was.
-
Both are not my choice's. I'm waiting to see who will jump in and offer
his or her services (as an option) - and run for office.
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The issues today are beyond both of these gentlemen to resolve,
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Russia: Putin is a rascal and he's bitter as hell - and absolutely power
hungry. We also know about his health - it isn't that good either.
He needs to be replaced.
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I'm waiting to see who will run besides these two men. There has to
be someone better than these two guys - to run for office.
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[Who knows maybe Sara Palin may run again? - Yea right!]
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I don't trust anyone - like I once did. Age is also an issue and ones
mental abilities to work out the issues of the day - are questionable.
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Ukraine will handle their own issues - their pretty good at it.
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I want to see a concentrated effort to the issues we here are
currently facing of late. More so since the nation seems to be
more radical and divided - of late.

Congress needs a weeding as well. The old dogs have got to
step down. Its the big money that is filtered to them for
support of their issues or needs must be limited.
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Our current two parties "do not" work together - and haven't for
years. This also restricts their abilities to get US issues resolved.
Dem's & Rep's are never on the same page. The end result is a
always a passage of ill-meaningful changes - subject to compromise.
So, in order to pass just about anything it's doctored & then useless.
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No Presidents 65 and older to run for office - it should be same for
Congress. Old idea's don't allow new ideas - to be put into something
more promising. I'd lift their allowed compensations as well. We are
paying for a lot of dead horses (or wood) of late many should retire.
-
Their mannerism's of late - within the power's to be - are are all skewed
with old habits from each house. The People - are in left field - most
of the time.
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These Left and Right actions need to be less frequent and more
meaningful - to the Nation's people.
-
Big money is buying; or lets say getting the most benefits our of
this country.
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As for Trump he made an ass out of our government by his image and
his antics. He's also a Draft Dodger - with a foot aliment - yea right.
He uses - and abuses people - and his personal image is overbearing.
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He's got many lawsuits filed on him now - and the taking of Secret
documents to his Mar Logo Florida residence was the most stupid thing
he could ever have done - plus its highly illegal / as hell.
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I'm sorry but neither of these two guys if running for office will get my
vote. I can't tolerate either of them - any more.
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Tell HC I hope he feels better / Boats