The Theater of Democracy
Posted By: zephyrgirl, 8/29/2022 7:47:21 AM
In the United States, there have always been two realities with regards to the aboveground political culture. One reality engages in politics as it is presented in the media and the election process. The other reality, smaller and operating off the grid, looks at conventional politics as a farce or a fraud. The former group is larger and gets all of the attention, but the latter group seems to be on the upswing. For the most part, the American political system is a drama, a theater staged by the political class to keep people engaged.
Below, you will find ...
Most Recent Articles posted by "zephyrgirl"
and
Most Active Articles (last 48 hours)
Most Recent Articles posted by
zephyrgirl"
Sunday schadenfreude: 96% of Disney’s
32,000-member Florida union reject its
contract offer 10 replies
32,000-member Florida union reject its
contract offer 10 replies
The Walt Disney Company is in a world of hurt in Florida. Having inserted itself into Florida politics by advocating injecting homosexual sex into K – 3rd grade classrooms, the company just lost its special privilege to act as the local government for its vast real estate holdings around Disney World. And now, the major union at Disney World has overwhelmingly rejected the company’s new contract offer. The New York Times reports:
Four of the five former Memphis Police officers indicted for their role in the death of Tyre Nichols were suspended or received a written reprimand during their tenure with the department, with only one charged officer avoiding internal disciplined during his tenure. In personnel files obtained through a public records request by The Commercial Appeal, four officers were either reprimanded or suspended for their failure to report when they used physicality, failing to report alleged domestic violence, or for damages sustained to their squad cruisers.
Prince Harry has sensationally claimed that his brother William called Meghan 'rude' and 'pointed a finger at her' during a furious bust-up after the Duchess of Sussex told Kate that she must have 'baby brain because of her hormones'. Details of the alleged row have appeared in Harry's bombshell memoir Spare, which has been published in Spain.
My last column, “Why Many Conservatives Won’t Be with Their Children or Grandchildren This Christmas,” dealt with the issue of parents whose left-wing adult children have cut off all contact with their parents because the parents are on the Right — children who will not even allow their parents to have contact with their grandchildren. One would think that any person with a functioning conscience and a normal human heart would feel for these parents.
The Times Does the Twitter Files
5 replies
New York Times media reporter Michael Grynbaum gives us the Times’s first take on the Twitter Files. RealClearPolitics links to an accessible version of Grynbaum’s story published at DNYUZ. Turning to the story posted here on the Times site, I see that Grynbaum’s story is published on page B5 of today’s Times. Between the national news and the sports section falls the shadow. Grynbaumn provides a bemused account of the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents.
DENVER (KDVR) – Video captured by a Cherry Creek resident shows thieves getting into the car and then callously taking what they please. The owner of the car said this has become a sad routine for him and his family. Working on his car has always been a pastime for Juergen Waldvogel. “This is the third time that we’ve experienced this in the last year, maybe two,” Waldvogel said.
Unfortunately for him, he’s now dealing with thefts from those cars. His Cherry Creek home, near First Avenue and Steele Street, was the target of thieves.
Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder who was once compared to Steve Jobs before she was convicted of defrauding investors who backed the now-defunct blood-testing company, was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison on Friday. The pregnant Holmes, dressed in a dark blouse and black skirt, was given 135 months behind bars by US District Judge Edward Davila in the same San Jose, Calif., courtroom where a jury convicted her on four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy in January.
LAKEWOOD, Colo. (KDVR) — Two boys not old enough to get a driver’s permit now face two charges of first-degree murder and arson in a fire that killed a mother and her young daughter on Oct. 31. Both suspects appeared for their first court hearing Monday afternoon from a WebEx virtual link at the Jefferson County courthouse, where their ages were revealed as 12 and 14. The two were arrested on Sunday. Because of the ages of the juvenile suspects, their names cannot be released under Colorado law. A defense motion to close the court hearing to the media was denied.
NEW YORK — Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City. Sometimes, it does so on the street, but more often, it happens when the owner is recharging the lithium ion battery. A mismatched charger won't always turn off automatically when the battery's fully charged, and keeps heating up. Or, the highly flammable electrolyte inside the battery's cells leaks out of its casing and ignites, setting off a chain reaction. "These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,"
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is a national treasure. Frighteningly, Biden is rapidly despoiling this treasure. The Reserve consists of four sites (Bryan Mound, Big Hill, Bayou Choctaw, and West Hackberry) with a combined storage capacity of 714 million barrels of crude oil. It is the largest strategic oil reserve in the world. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and the resultant oil crisis contributed to western governments’ recognition of how vulnerable their countries were to disruptions in Middle East oil.
Ex-POTUS Smackdown: George W. Bush Pops
Up to Campaign for Anti-Trump Candidate
Joe O’Dea 31 replies
Up to Campaign for Anti-Trump Candidate
Joe O’Dea 31 replies
Former President George W. Bush is taking time away from his retirement to campaign for Senate candidate Joe O’Dea of Colorado — who has bucked his party by saying he would not support former President Donald Trump as the next GOP nominee. According to Bridget Bowman of NBC News, the last Republican president to win the popular vote at least once will come back out of retirement to campaign for O’Dea:
Prince Charles was pictured heading to church in Balmoral alone this morning after claims he continues to find Harry and Meghan's jibes at the royal family 'painful' and is 'completely bewildered' by their behaviour. The Prince of Wales drove himself to Crathie Kirk this morning, with no sign of the Queen, who is normally a regular attendee and has been dealing with mobility issues in recent months. It comes as the royal family, many of whom have spent the last few weeks in Balmoral during the summer break with Her Majesty, prepare for more bombshells following the arrival of the Sussexes in the UK.
Most Active Articles (last 48 hours)
Former U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan is doubling down on his belief that former President Donald Trump is the wrong choice for Republicans in 2024, saying he would not support Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee for president.
“There are too many people like me in the Republican Party who would not support him if he were the nominee, and that is why I don’t think he’ll be the nominee,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an interview.
WASHINGTON— The U.S. military on Saturday shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast after it traversed sensitive military sites across North America. China insisted the flyover was an accident involving a civilian aircraft and threatened repercussions.
President Joe Biden issued the order but had wanted the balloon downed even earlier, on Wednesday. He was advised that the best time for the operation would be when it was over water, U.S. officials said.(Snip) ..(Video) China responded that it reserved the right to “take further actions” and criticized the U.S. for “an obvious overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.”
The Biden administration was aware of the Chinese spy balloon entering United States airspace on January 28 but tried to hide its existence from the American public until being forced to go public, according to a report on Saturday. Bloomberg News reported that the Biden administration was “well aware” that the balloon had entered U.S. airspace on Saturday, January 28, but decided to keep quiet about it so as not to ruin a planned trip by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China.
Fighter jets shot down the Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic today after Joe Biden vowed to 'take care of it' and the FAA shutdown three airports in the Carolinas.
The balloon was seen bursting at 2.38pm and its payload - the metal structure carrying its cameras - appeared to have been separated as it plummeted towards the ocean off Myrtle Beach.
The Biden administration confirmed the shoot-down order around 2pm after the President this morning vowed, 'We're gonna take care of it,' as he stepped off Air Force One at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, upstate NY.
Anne Holton, wife of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), denounced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as “fundamental in enshrining slavery.”
Holton made the comments as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) new history standards were approved 5-3 by the Commonwealth’s Board of Education, upon which she sits. She said:
To an audience as inclusive as our Virginia is, you cannot reference the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as ‘remarkable documents’ without also acknowledging that they [are] fundamental in enshrining slavery, and limiting the protections that they provided only to white property-owning men.
Bloomberg, which exists to serve active traders on Wall Street, is throwing shade on the January jobs report that “surprised” a lot of people with its positive numbers. Before addressing the technical factors used to produce the rosy numbers, consider the buried lede hundreds of words into the piece. Stripped of all the technical jargon is this stark reality:
"On an unadjusted basis, payrolls actually fell by 2.5 million last month."
Joe Biden praised the Top Gun fighter jet pilot who shot down the Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina today after he vowed to 'take care of it.'
An F-22 Raptor out of Langley Air Force base took the balloon down with a single AIM-9X sidewinder missile at 2.38pm, separating its surveillance payload and sending it plummeting towards the ocean off Myrtle Beach.
Footage showed the jet screaming towards the spy aircraft before firing the missile as stunned locals watched from the coast.
An operation was underway to recover the wreckage and retrieve any valuable intelligence before it sinks into the ocean.
Houston activists call for arrest of armed
taqueria diner who shot, killed robbery suspect 28 replies
taqueria diner who shot, killed robbery suspect 28 replies
Community activists in Houston are calling for a restaurant patron who shot and killed a robbery suspect during a holdup to be arrested, saying he went beyond self-defense despite many calling him a hero.
Customers were eating inside a local taqueria when 30-year-old Eric Eugene Washington entered and pointed a pistol at them and demanded cash. As he gathered the cash, an armed patron can be seen on surveillance video getting up from the booth he was sitting in and shooting his pistol at Washington multiple times.
"He was within the law when he fired the first initial shots," said activist Quanell X in a
Three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s not uncommon to see people wearing masks in public. I try not to judge people when I see someone wearing a mask; after all, the person may have a legitimate need to wear a mask.
But what I’ve noticed is that there seem to be a lot of healthy younger people — teenagers and people in their early 20s — who wear masks often, and I have a difficult time understanding it.
I’ve had a theory about this phenomenon for some time. I think some people like to keep masking because it makes them feel anonymous. I’m convinced that some people
The U.S. was able to collect valuable information on China’s surveillance capabilities while observing the spy balloon as it traversed the continental U.S. for several days, a senior military official and senior defense official claimed Saturday.
President Joe Biden asked for possible military options for removing the threat of the suspected Chinese spy balloon Tuesday, but the Department of Defense (DOD) opted against doing so Wednesday over concerns falling debris could endanger civilians, officials said at a briefing Saturday. However, they did not clarify whether a military option was considered when the craft transgressed U.S. airspace over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28,
Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took a below-the-belt shot at one of her congressional colleagues Friday in a spicy Twitter exchange.
The Georgia Republican invoked Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) purported dalliance with suspected Chinese honeytrap Christine Fang, aka Fang Fang, after the California Democrat made a bawdy joke at the expense of Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), who has spent the week passing out AR-15-shaped lapel pins to pro-Second Amendment House members.
White female professor endeavors to help
‘damaging’ white people dismantle
their ‘whiteness 26 replies
‘damaging’ white people dismantle
their ‘whiteness 26 replies
A white, female Willamette University professor is scheduled to host a veritable struggle session this month at a local library “for white people to reflect together on what it means to ‘do our work’ as white people.”
The professor, Emily Drew, predictably “teaches courses about racism, white supremacy, immigration, and social change,” according to a biography.
“Her research agenda revolves around understanding how race and racism get institutionalized, with the goal of helping to illuminate more effective strategies for interrupting systemic inequality,” the biography reads.
She also performs work for Crossroads, an “antiracism” consulting form whose mission centers on “dismantling racism” and “building racial justice in institutions.”
Comments:
For several years, I've been asking "why vote Republican?" This sums up my reasoning, but unfortunately, doesn't answer the question.