Ted Rall for September 27, 2021

Maybe. Although I have a feeling that “we” overstates the degree of connection between various sects… I mean political persuasions within our society. Or to put it from the other side: When it comes to taking action to fix a problem, first we have to

Agree it is a problem

Agree to some kind of solution

And then fund the solution

And the obscenely rich (at least, if not others) have a vested interest in preventing any of those things from happening. Examples abound: “Women getting abortions”: Problem or not? Or how about “There are homeless people living on the streets?” What solution can we agree on? Or how about “The roads all have bad potholes”. Who’ll volunteer to raise taxes?

It was totally evil the way Trump ignored Public Heath and spread covid and murdered hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Trump administration assumed ‘everyone was going to get COVID anyway’: Interview with ex-FDA chief reveals

An interview with former President Donald Trump’s FDA Commissioner revealed that the administration was dismissive of any efforts to fight COVID-19 because they assumed “everyone” was going to get it anyway, and they essentially wanted to get it over with.

“I remember one White House official cavalierly saying to me, and this was around the time that then-President Trump was pushing for schools to reopen,” Brown recalled. “They said, ‘Well, we just need to get kids back in the class because everybody is going to get this virus at some point or another, and it’s going to spread wildly, and there’s no way to contain it.’ It stuck with me how casual they were about that, as you just pointed out as one of the issues you didn’t believe was actually true.”

The questions many had at the time were why the Trump administration was restricting access to things like building test kits or even running the tests from accredited university medical labs.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-failures-herd-immunity/

True evil always has a banal face.

Those are the Republicans’ “Values”, Rotten Russian Rall, not America’s.

Most hypocritical nation in history. Even the British Empire at its most sanctimonious doesn’t measure up.

Ted should name this particular strip : “Lip Service” because while Banker Joe is very mediocre at many things, his administration is certainly good at giving lip service. Joe feels everyone’s pain, he understands but it always seems like he simply can not get the votes to do everything he promised, and he blames others most of the time….. Granted, admitting that the acts in panels 1, 2 and 3 are wrong is an improvement over the previous occupant (who was definitely worse than mediocre) of the White House but words are not stronger than actions.

Getting some good legislation passed is action and due to the infighting in the Democratic party, initiated by some in the right wing and others probably tied to big corporations and their big money, this will be difficult. We might see some very diluted and underfunded programs which are different than the progressive ideas we have heard and read about. This is better than nothing but by no means a victory for the people yet I suspect Joe will try to spin it as a major victory for his administration and for our society which will simply be more lip service…….

Strange that some folks here and Ted seem to think Biden should just make things happen by the power of his office (which is not possible) but forget that’s exactly the kind of executive power Trump tried to exercise to our horror. Dictatorial power of the executive branch is wrong no matter which party holds the presidency. Living up to what our values are supposed to be begins with voters, and the appalling lack of values among the American electorate is not something any president can fix by himself/herself. To think otherwise is foolish.

You’ll “love” this, Ted:

California Set to Decriminalize Jaywalking

Pedestrian and civil rights advocates have long argued that jaywalking laws are overly punitive and unequally enforced.

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/09/114769-california-set-decriminalize-jaywalking

More of “our” values:

The news anchor Frank Somerville was said to be removed over a dispute about Gabby Petito coverage.The anchor was “suspended indefinitely,” The Mercury News reported.Sources told the outlet Somerville had wanted to note coverage disparities in missing-women cases.

we need more access to politics for 3rd parties

U.S. values are reflected in the way large parts of society are ignored, criminalized, marginalized still. Why should we treat people overseas any differently?

It’s funny Theodore, because when the black man mentions injustice, the white woman affirms violence as an American value!

sadly that is exactly what every government does…unless they are unabashedly totalitarian regime and don’t feel any kind of need to act like they care about actions like that.

Sigh. A stunning display of irrelevant, immature and even hateful comments.

Sometimes Ted Rall swings and misses, but this one is a big home run over the green monster.

Burn your flag.

With the correct people in charge, and using the wisdom of our underlying PRINCIPLES, we can change those VALUES. The old nations of England and Europe like to sneer, after all this time, at the American upstart that replaced them in status. We helped them in their time of need about 80 years ago. May they put away their envy and resentment to now help us. “We hang together, or we hang separately.”

To lower the temperature of the debate here, an op-ed by Max Boot is relevant and notable for its factual content and realistic appreciation of the problems:

“Fundamentally, Biden has to balance between those on the right who want to let almost no one in and those on the left who want to let almost everyone in. Is he doing a perfect job? No, but then no president in recent decades has had a great track record on immigration issues. There is simply no perfect solution to the underlying issue: virtually infinite demand around the world to come to the United States but a quite finite willingness on the part of Americans to welcome new arrivals.

Biden is doing the best he can to manage a difficult dilemma with no help from Congress, which hasn’t passed a major immigration bill since 1986. If African American and Latino voters desert the Democrats over this issue, as some activists are threatening to do, they will wind up bringing Republicans back to power — and that, in turn, will lead to far worse policies for immigrants and people of color."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/27/biden-gets-no-credit-making-immigration-more-humane/

Just like Apple!

I think I’m just about done with democracy.

…and every one of those guards was hired personally by Biden…

Here’s another of our values: a USMC LCol just got fired and jailed for publicly asking where the accountability is for the hopelessly bungled evac from Afghanistan.

^It’s not that simple. sources for this are infowars and similar sites. The least emotional and most complete source I saw was the Yahoo report. The guy was officially ordered to stop posting on social media and then immediately posted the order on social media in direct opposition to that order.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/outspoken-marine-officer-went-viral-002110217.html

Something that is NOT in “our” value system, and certainly not our Constitution:

“Most international coverage of the German elections is focused on who will replace Angela Merkel after her 16-year term as chancellor ends, but for everyday Berliners, just having the resources to pay the rent is a bigger concern. Berlin’s efforts to lower the fast-rising rents in Germany’s capital city have led to a referendum which could expropriate and socialize almost a quarter of a million apartments primarily from Deutsche Wohnen, the largest real estate company in Europe and one of the largest companies in Germany.”

And it would be 100% legal: it’s in the Grundgesetz [Basic Law; Constitution] and is dependent only on a successful city-wide vote in favor.

Und was blockiert uns? [ And what’s blocking us? ]

Apropos the Berlin housing referendum: the People won, 240,000 (yes, 240 THOUSAND) apartments are now in public hands, and the plan is to manage them anarchically, i.e., with fully-devolved democracy.