Ted Rall for May 24, 2023

Indeed. They don’t change because in the USA there is no other rational attitude to take. Rational but not wonderful. Voting against the worst is the way our system works.

And the beat goes on….

Nail on the head today Ted! Basically things will not change until the leadership is changed. As long as people who are more sympathetic to conglomerates, Wall Street and their lobbyists than the citizens they represent are running the DNC nothing will change for the blue party. I think the repubbas are well past the point of no return.

A lot of things are at stake; the environment and green initiatives, labor and finance reform for the citizens, ethical treatment as far as civil rights go, civil liberties, women’s rights, immigration, health care etc…… If the same corporate opportunists continue to control things on a national level, we will never see real change. How to start? Perhaps a grass roots effort to bring progressives in at the local level and advance the cause up the food chain until the elitists are forced to give the people a real seat at the table, not just the lip service the DNC spouts every election cycle. This unfortunately is a long term process as getting old fossils out of their leadership positions is difficult at best and often next to impossible: e.g. Mitch McConnell and Diane Feinstein.

On the short term, unseating some repubbas would also be key to flip the house back and muzzle individuals like Manchin and Sinema who have been assisting the repubbas in blocking anything constructive coming out of the senate unless it is watered down with pork.

The US two party system isn’t just an institutional prison, it’s a mental prison.

Democrats are not perfect, but republicans are bat-crap-crazy. America does not need their desired dictatorship.

I get it frustrating but change is slow you just need to wait

I was somewhat surprised to read that at least some state legislatures have their own version of the Freedum Caucus.

That IMO shows why the GQP is so dangerous. They got together and made a plan way back in 1992 after GHW Bush lost to Clinton. And they have stuck with that plan. They knew it would take a long time, but since they are Authoritarians it was working for them, at least until Trump became their candidate. They thought the Party pros could control Trump, that he would dance to their tune. Except he didn’t

Ranked Choice voting

If there’s any single proof that US democracy is failing it’s the fact that a majority of the US population favors reasonable firearms control legislation; yet a minority of that population controls the issue and wants even fewer laws and less regulation of firearms.

Yup. It’s always someone else’s candidate that is the problem.

But it’s actually impossible to vote for change. Anyone different will get taken out in primaries.

Gawd is this ever true! It’s been a long time since I voted for POTUS with enthusiasm.

While Ted Rall has a point, it is the decision of the bulk of the voters that this situation remain. Until enough voters leave one of the two candidates, the situation will remain. It is why I don’t agree with term limits. Vote them out!

It’s sad to think, constituents keep voting the same loons,nuts and wack jobs back into office. It’s because, either they’re just as wacky or they’re too lazy to research whose name they’re putting the “X” by.

Yep, mostly been voting for the lesser of two evils for nearly fifty years.

Ahh, the old Nirvana Fallacy, Mr. Rall’s favorite trope.

One possibility is to get involved: run for local office, pass out flyers, get on a phone ban, drive people to polls, ….

fusilier

James 2:24

No one is the “nominee,” for either party. That won’t happen for more than a year. So if there is an actual person, who is actually running or might run, you could actually try to drum up support for that person to help them win.

Or, y’know, complain vaguely that other people aren’t doing something-or-other, so the world sucks and we might as well be totally disengaged in order to help the Russian-backed candidiate win. Like you often do.

(Quick tip: if one of your complaints is about how old the presumptive candidates are, a “Draft Bernie” campaign will find little traction.)

Also: things HAVE changed. A lot. To the right, over the past thirty years. If you’re on the left, you might want to fight back against that.

Vote for the candidate that you want. It hasn’t been Dem or Rep for many elections. The notion that you’re wasting your vote for not going with one of the two is false. The only vote wasted is the one not cast. By voting for one of the two, you’re telling them you agree 100% with them. They will change if 30% of the country didn’t vote for them.

Ted, you didn’t answer my question, do you want the wall?:

BTW, the 25 Aug 2022 podcast, really nice (tongue in cheek) outdated man/woman joke about how having four wives is a punishment greater than being hunted by America.

Douglas Adams’ lizard problem in a nutshell. You have to vote for a lizard, otherwise the wrong lizard will get in.

Because 80% of the people are lemmings to their party. They cannot THINK about actually selecting a better candidate outside the 2-party system. Try looking at Independent, or some other.

We are inundated with negative information about anyone who considers running for a national office. When I was a kid, 70 years ago, candidates spent their money telling you how wonderful they were. It presented a rosy glow of opinion about all candidates. You felt that you were voting for the best candidate, but the other one was obviously pretty wonderful too.Since then, both parties have become less interested in telling you about how great their candidate is and more interested in telling you that the opponent is awful. Any negative opposition research on a candidate is framed in as negative a way as possible, and when the general population has heard enough of that to have a bad opinion, and it still isn’t a sure thing, they just start blaming everything bad that has happened in the the last 25 years on the candidate. If that still isn’t working, they make up child sex rings being run out of a pizza parlor basement in a pizza parlor that doesn’t actually have a basement.Hillary is the perfect example. She has done more that can be verified for working class people than pretty much anyone alive. But, decades of negative Republican propaganda has convinced people that she’s the devil incarnate. No one who has that opinion can quite tell you why, because they had doubts that the negative stuff they heard was even true when they heard it. But enough negative eventually has to cloud anyone’s opinion.The upshot of all this is that we believed in our government in 1950, and thought the people running it were pretty nice.In 2023, we have no faith in the people running the government and by extension, little in the country itself.In reality, politicians are people flaws included. Accepting that all politicians are crap ( and the electoral college fiasco) is what allowed one that actually is crap to take over the White House and create the mess we are in now.

It’s the nomination process of candidates that is the problem. A select few pick who the rest of us are stuck with. All it takes is for a mosque, a church group, a large club (think NRA), an ethnic group… to rally it’s members.. and you are stuck with their philosophy.

More proof that Scott Stantis is the paint bucket holder on the Rall/Stantis podcast: on the 25 Aug 22 podcast, Stantis avers that only 7 percent of the students in California universities are Californians. While it is difficult to get the very stats needed to counter this contention, I do have these figures, which basically show that the state’s most precious school system, the U.C. system of universities, which would be the most sought after by outside applicants, realized over a 70% California resident enrollment of freshmen over the last 3 years. It would stand to reason that the less-valued university / college systems in the state would have higher CA resident levels. I mean, Stantis says something that first and foremost, does not pass the sniff test. 7% of student enrollment is Californian. Does that make sense to you, Ted? You didn’t push back on the podcast. In that same piece Stantis admits to dropping out of college. While I’m not here to over value college, I would suggest that Stantis could generally stand to discipline his research. Maybe, then he’d poop out fewer FALSE EQUIVALENCY pieces.

It kind of sucks to live in the descendancy of a nation. The United States was ambitious idea. A pity its citizenry isn’t up to the task.

Things never change because millions of other voters don’t share your opinion that things are wrong.

Which part of “self government” don’t you get? Every idea in mankind’s history began with one person. Find someone better. Work to convince others. Get them into the primaries. VOTE. We’ll always have the complainers who want to sit back and let others do the heavy lifting, even back to 1774. Ignore the sparrows and fly with the Eagles.

Welcome to politics in a democracy. You must be new here.

Term limits and a third party. Democracy is dying due to the same trash/think tank and party obligations.

So, once again, the electorate may be called on the vote for the lesser of two evils? Biden is not evil at all. His actions do credit to our nation. He has rolled back the national debt already. He needs our full throated support.

Oh, I know, I’d like it is he was a bit younger, more forceful, more articulate, but all of that might be in abundance with the Repub side, but what they’d actually do would be catastrophic. Allowed to take power back again, the Repubs would destroy what’s left of our democracy and lead us further into fascism. They are evil incarnate.

Time was that our candidates didn’t have to campaign. They had their supporters doing that. That’s what we are called upon to do now. Let Biden lead government toward fiscal responsibility and gaining respect with the world, and we should do our best to keep him there.

Shoot yourself and your country in the foot. Vote Republican!

This time for sure!

No third party is going to make it in the US if it only focuses on winning national elections from the very start. It is a longer term project but any third part needs to focus on winning local elections first. Get some wins in towns and cities, then leverage that in State Houses, then the House and Senate and only then front a candidate for the Presidency. With a proven party record of governing and a wide enough base of support a third Party candidate could win a three way race for national office.

No party’s constituents are completely happy with their candidate on all points. The Democrats more accepting of this, the divisive GOP embracing the pejorative RINO to those they disagree with. Stating the obvious.

By all means, either vote for a not-conservative alternative party candidate or vote for a Republican candidate.

Either way, the Republican candidate wins.

And over the succeeding four years:

Every federal court position is packed with a RWNJ Heritage Society Christian Dominion MAGA Nationalist Nazi.

Zero even remotely/slightly progressive legislation is signed into law.

America is returned to a form of international isolationism similar to that of the 1930’s, with the exception of at minimum quasi-alignments with authoritarian governments — e.g. Hungary, Belarus, Russia — any anti-liberal democracy headed by a self-professed Christian nationalist leader (another great example being the former Brazilian president Bolsanaro).

American RWNJ Christian theocrats quite likely mount an overt, determined campaign to legislatively establish legal supremacy of Biblical text in every instance where secular law is in contradiction to same.

The USA government will officially reject and silence any suggestion that AGW climate change is an existential reality, will cancel all existing legislative projects which acknowledge and attempt to deal with it, and instead enact policies which increase emissions, decrease the size of forests and wetlands, discourage green energy production, etc.

And after the worst extremes of all these outcomes are well on their way to realization, according to Ted Rall philosophy, A MIRACLE HAPPENS!

And voters “wake up” and democracy is restored and RWNJ Christian extremist federal court justices instantly become objective jurists not invested with Christian supremacist beliefs and ocean life isn’t dead and instead of catapulting toward 3.5C minimum increase the biosphere heads back toward ~250 ppm carbon and kumbaya!

US politics has degenerated into an irrational, hightly-emotional, non-collaborative, combative, winner-take-all battle of contrived, negatve FUD abount the opossing party’s ideology. The problem-solving, moderate middle has been gutted and replaced by whiny/boisterous, do-nothing, obstructive extremists that voters are forced to choose from based on who will do the least damage.

No, see, if I vote for the evil candidate, the more evil candidate will lose. This is going to eventually lead to a good candidate getting elected, somehow.

Vote for Cthulhu. Why vote for a lesser evil?

Real change takes generations. 60 years + and many things are so much better for more and more of us. Unfortunately, too many can’t stand change or see any change as a loss of privilege and a diminishment.

Ted, you are the worst false-equivalency both-sidesist in the whole world of political cartooning, but let me answer your question about why this never changes.

It was actually changing very nicely until the Supreme Court, in the 1977 decision Buckley v. Valeo, equated corporations with individuals and political contributions with protected speech. Since that decision it has become impossible, with very few exceptions for unusually charsmatic candidates in a limited number of places, like Bernie Sanders in Vermont, to win an election for Federal or even state offices without catering to corporate needs. It is for the same reason why robbers choose to rob banks: That’s where the money is. And without money you do not attract votes.

So Democrats have been given a choice — at least try not to be an overt danger to corporate interests or lose elections. They differ from Republicans in that Republicans have the EXCLUSIVE interests of corporations at heart and seek to divide us socially to motivate us to vote against our best interests as human beings and families.

So, with Democrats we do get a lot of kowtowing to business interests, but with Republicans we get both corporate rule and social division.

Thanks to decades of accusing Democrats of evil. Rush Limbaugh is one of the worst anti-American criminals of all time

Rall makes a good point.

All the news just repeats itself, like some forgotten dream, that we’ve both seen…………….I’m old enough now to see it in real time.

There aren’t two sides here. Not anymore, and not for a long time.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is the reason an old white career politician with dementia was elected president.

So vote during your party’s primaries. Or even, if your state permits it, during the other side’s primaries. What are you complaining about?

Yeah, Ted said right-wing populist cartoonist, Dick Wright, came out of retirement and now was at his best…………………….here’s his best: https://politicalcartoons.com/cartoon/274930 .