From the Left
/Politics
Congress votes to arm violent mobs that storm through capitols around the world
Terrified political leaders watched the police who were assigned to protect them melt away. They fled as an angry mob of hooligans, riled up by sketchy allegations of rigged elections, stormed up the stairs of the government building that hosted the debates and deliberations of their venerable democracy. The rioters, reactionary right-wingers ...Read more
Biden and the Democrats could change everything. But they won't try.
"When someone shows you who they are," Maya Angelou said, "believe them the first time." We're about to be reminded who and what the corporate-owned Democratic Party is -- something it showed us in 2009.
A pair of upset victories in the widely watched pair of Georgia senatorial runoff elections has handed Democrats what they said they needed to...Read more
In a crisis, a compromise is worse than no solution at all
Late last month, I wrote that there was a strong chance -- I called it 50-50 -- that Donald Trump would engineer a "self-coup" in order to remain in power despite having lost the election.
The president, I explained, is a desperate cornered rat. Once he leaves office, he becomes vulnerable to a variety of criminal investigations. By far, the ...Read more
In a crisis, a compromise solution is worse than no solution at all
The raging argument on the left between progressives who argue for radical change and centrists who advocate for incrementalism is hardly new. Nearly a century ago, progressive titan and Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt were often at loggerheads over the same question.
Roosevelt, La Follette complained,...Read more
Will the Media's Newfound Stridency Continue Under Biden? No.
"In his first rally since losing the election last month, President Trump continued to spout conspiracy theories about voter fraud, falsely claiming that he had defeated President-elect Joe Biden." That was the lede of a news story in the Dec. 5 Washington Post.
The Associated Press took a similar tack. "President Donald Trump flooded his first...Read more
Why didn't the xenophobe in chief close the borders?
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis tailor-made for a xenophobe like Donald Trump. The coronavirus provided an ideal opportunity to turn the president's biggest liability -- the nativist bigotry that went so far as to lock children in cages and then lose hundreds of their parents, which elicited disgust even among some of his supporters -- into a...Read more
December will be very dangerous
It's too early to celebrate, back-to-brunch Democrats.
Liberal voters are counting President-elect Joe Biden's corporatist Cabinet picks. But we still don't know for sure that President Donald Trump will let them hatch. There's still a significant chance -- I would put it at 50-50 -- that the "outgoing" president will engineer a coup d'etat in ...Read more
Hey, Joe! These are our demands
Progressives and other leftists promise/threaten to pressure/take to the streets to make demands of President-elect Joe Biden if/when he falls short of our expectations. We on the left don't want to be one of those bad bosses who tells you your work isn't good enough but never says what they expect from you in the first place, so you're reduced ...Read more
Democrats still don't get it
Why, Democrats have been asking, do so many poor white people vote for a Republican Party that doesn't care about or do anything for them? The most common reply is: Democrats are snobby coastal elites who talk down to them. Classic example courtesy of former President Barack Obama, who said of voters in the Rust Belt: "They get bitter. They ...Read more
Both parties lost the election. Now the real trouble begins
My liberal friends are relieved. I am terrified.
Democratic voters got what they wanted last Saturday: the electoral defeat of Donald Trump.
By this time next year, if not sooner, Joe Biden's win will look like a Pyrrhic victory.
Rather than pushing an affirmative platform of policy proposals, Biden's entire campaign boiled down to opposition...Read more
Trump tees up a new type of coup
Donald Trump revolutionized political campaigning. It was by accident. Because he was too lazy to prepare for or memorize a stump speech, he ad-libbed his rallies; TV networks carried them because something he said might prove newsworthy. Because he was cheap, he made appearances at any random dump that would have him for free; he used the money...Read more
Previewing a Biden presidency: Dementia, impotence, collapse
At this writing, two days after the election, Joe Biden appears to be six electoral votes away from winning the presidency.
The Trump campaign has requested a recount in Wisconsin. Republicans are suing in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada to demand the right to observe vote counts and challenge absentee ballots and COVID-...Read more
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