The Thread of Democrats

[Brian Peacock]

[Tero]

And yet...we will be in much the same situation for 4 years.

Bring back Nancy Reagan's psychic to run the country.

[Tero]

Not the time to be civil. Need action. Or worry about anyone's feelings.

Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York, has spoken favourably of some Trump policies and not ruled out switching parties and running as a Republican in future.

Asked by the New Republic magazine if Democrats are flirting with surrender to authoritarianism, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut replied: “So I don’t know that I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re preparing for surrender yet. But these are critical moments. And I do think that if you go from now until January 20 and not raise the specter of how dystopian this world could be, then start doing it on January 20, it loses a little bit of credibility.”


Many Democrats do remain sharply critical of Trump, especially as his joint effort with billionaire Elon Musk to scupper a spending bill in Congress this week shoved the government towards a shutdown. But there also risks in providing knee-jerk responses to every Trump outrage in the manic news cycle and losing sight of the bigger picture.

Speaking from California, Watts, who was a Harris campaign surrogate, commented: “I see members of Congress and governors commenting, but I don’t see anyone saying this is the way forward. It seems more like it’s a daily analysis of Donald Trump and his future administration’s actions or behaviors, and many of them signal that we should be alarmed and alert – but no one is telling us what to do with those feelings.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -president

[Tero]

Elsewhere: Democrats just twiddling their thumbs about what went wrong. Lost the uneducated!

You're not, but the party leadership is still going to insist on tacking to the right to try. They would rather insist on chasing after unreachable repugs rather than trying to retain or regain their traditional communities.

It's the trap the traditional left parties have laid for themselves ever since the USSR collapsed, that they must forever chase the right in economic and most social policy rather than sticking to their own.

[L'Emmerdeur]

That communist fascist Sanders has ideas (article in The Guardian) but the grovelling 'centrist' Democratic Party isn't interested, aside from fellow Marxists like Ocasio-Cortez.

'Medicare for All Tops Sanders' Prescription to "Make America Healthy Again"'

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has an ambitious New Year's resolution: a nine-point policy proposal to "Make American Healthy Again" by reforming the United States' "broken and dysfunctional healthcare system."

In an op-ed published in The Guardian on Tuesday, Sanders said his ideas were informed by his time serving as the chair of the U.S. Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which will end in 2025.

"We are the wealthiest nation on Earth," Sanders wrote. "There is no rational reason as to why we are not the healthiest nation on Earth. We should be leading the world in terms of life expectancy, disease prevention, low infant and maternal mortality, quality of life, and human happiness. Sadly, study after study shows just the opposite. Despite spending almost twice as much per capita on healthcare, we trail most wealthy nations in all these areas."

Sanders first prescription for a healthier nation? Medicare for All.

"Healthcare is a human right," Sanders argued. "The function of a rational healthcare system is to guarantee quality healthcare to all, not huge profits for the insurance industry. The United States cannot continue to be the only wealthy nation that does not provide universal healthcare."

The other eight reccomendations on Sanders' list are:

• Lower the cost of prescription drugs;
• Paid family and medical leave;
• Reform the food industry;
• Raise the minimum wage to a living wage;
• Lower the workweek to 32 hours with no loss of pay;
• Combat the epidemic of loneliness, isolation, and mental illness;
• Address the climate and environmental crisis; and
• Create a high-quality public education system.

[JimC]

But that means the very wealthy will not be able to buy a second luxury yacht!

[pErvinalia]

This class war needs to stop. The rich are victims here.

[Sean Hayden]

Works for me?

[Tero]

test
did not change anything from this morning

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's gratifying to see the Justice Department carry through its duty to get to a swift resolution in the case of the corrupt former Democratic US senator Menendez. On the other hand it's dismaying that (thanks to Merrick Garland's unwarranted deference) the Justice Department was unable to do the same in the case of the now current president. (He's a convicted felon, but that was a New York state court, not federal.)

'Former US Senator Bob Menendez sentenced to 11 years in prison in gold bar bribery case'

Former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced on Wednesday to 11 years in prison for taking bribes including gold bars in exchange for favors for Egypt and New Jersey businessmen.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein imposed the sentence at a hearing in Manhattan federal court, following Menendez's conviction last July.

The judge ordered Menendez to begin his prison term on June 6, allowing him to attend his wife Nadine Menendez's corruption trial starting in March.

"You were successful, powerful. You stood at the apex of our political system," Stein said at the sentencing. "I don't know what led you to commit these crimes."

Menendez, a once-powerful Democrat who represented New Jersey for 18-1/2 years in the Senate and chaired that body's foreign relations committee, was found guilty in July on all 16 felony counts he faced, including bribery and fraud.

He was also found guilty of acting as a foreign agent, a first for a U.S. senator.

Menendez, 71, resigned from the Senate in August.

In a tearful address to the court before being sentenced, Menendez said he was "chastened" by the verdict, and asked that his decades as a federal and local elected official weigh in favor of leniency.

"Other than family, I have lost everything I have cared about," Menendez said. "For someone who spent his entire life in public service, every day I'm awake is a punishment."

[Tero]

Capitulating to Trump: why people are warning about ‘Vichy’ America
As Trump creates unprecedented chaos, Democrats have offered little more than platitudes – sparking comparisons to France’s collaborationist second world war regime

While Donald Trump has rapidly and ruthlessly thrown the federal government into unprecedented chaos, the leaders of the Democratic party have offered up little more than limp banalities and platitudes. “Presidents come and presidents go. Through it all. God is still on the throne,” tweeted the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, at the end of Trump’s first week in office.

Asked who was leading the caucus’s pushback, the Senate minority whip, Dick Durbin, told Semafor on 23 January: “I can’t answer that. Give us a little time.” Another senator said, “We’re obviously in a bit of disarray,” though Senate Democrats have arrayed themselves enough to provide bipartisan support for a number of Trump’s cabinet appointees.

For the leftists and liberals who had hoped to see the opposition party mount some kind of opposition to Trumpism, this spectacle of capitulation has inspired a new historical analogy, or at least a new insult. La Résistance is dead. Welcome to Vichy France.

“If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime,” wrote John Ganz, a left-leaning author, in a Substack newsletter on 21 January. “It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics.”

Ganz was not the first to invoke the collaborationist regime that administered part of France after its rapid and spectacular defeat by Germany at the beginning of the second world war. In November, after Joe Biden welcomed Trump back to the White House and promised a “smooth transition”, the political cartoonist Ted Rall reimagined their Oval Office meeting as an updated version of the infamous handshake between Adolf Hitler and Philippe Pétain that marked the fall of France’s Third Republic and rise of the Vichy era.

‘Vichy Democrats’ has become an increasingly popular expression of disgust with the feckless opposition party
“Unlike you fascists, we promise a smooth transition of power … to you fascists,” Biden/Pétain says to Trump/Hitler in the cartoon, titled Aloha to the Vichy Democrats.

Indeed, “Vichy Democrats” has become an increasingly popular expression of disgust with the feckless opposition party, whether in viral tweets (“The Vichy Democrats are really proud of themselves for peacefully handing over the country to a person they said was a fascist,” wrote the X user SxarletRed in response to the California senator Adam Schiff’s boast that the Democrats had certified Trump’s election without launching a failed insurrection) or a headline by Esquire (“Vichy Democrats take note: the Republican Congress is coming for everything”). On the alternative social media site Bluesky, the senior US senator from Pennsylvania, best known for wearing gym shorts to Congress and his recent rightward shift, has been deemed “John Fetterman (D-Vichy)”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -democrats
bit more text at link

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah, it's difficult to reconcile 'Trump is a fascist' with promising a smooth transition.

[Tero]

scratch.jpg (14.58 KiB) Viewed 73 times

"It's only a scratch! Democracy will survive!"

[Woodbutcher]

Well, this is what you get when you only have two parties competing. Both are owned by the elite rich. Get ready for price hikes when tariffs set in. That gives the US companies a chance to up their prices because the competition is gone.

[pErvinalia]

Yeahbut there'll be no more transgender people preying on children.