Hello, Good-bye…
Boy, Liz Truss, the new and now resigned Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, didn’t last long. I think these are the first words I’ve written about her and they’re pretty much just to say goodbye. She came into office and immediately began promoting more trickle down bunk. You know the bull – tax cuts for the rich, paid for by slashing the social safety net. Lovely. Standard conservative stuff. Comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted. But only the dumbest of the dumb still believe trickle down economics is anything but a scam and even the wealthy in the United Kingdom rejected the idea, aware of how the overall economic damage harms their own businesses. That’s actually a reassuring sign.

To be sure, I doubt the cons in America would balk at more trickle down economics playing out here. But people who understand things around the world seem to be finally rejecting the idea these days. That’s good. So, goodbye Liz. Don’t let the door hit you…

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Time Will Tell…
Okay, just to follow up…yesterday I wrote about the new Georgia election laws and how they might play out over the course of the election. One of my conservative friends posted a response from the Wall Street Journal (a plus) Opinion page (a minus). The message of the writer’s opinion was that voter turnout is rivaling record turnout numbers. A story on CNN supports the assertion but I call the two points unrelated – a non sequitur.

See, a high voter turnout doesn’t necessarily indicate the cons didn’t pass laws to make voting more difficult. It could equally indicate that the people fear the new, more restrictive rules and know they need more time to complete the process. The Democrats started warning lefty voters about the new Republican rules. The Dems had no choice but to try to get out early and vote. To overcome conservative fingers on the scales, there needs to be a large turnout – quite the trick during mid-terms. Really, that’s how the left beat Trump in the 2020 election. Cons think they outnumber Dems and progressives in this once-great nation. They don’t, but they DO turn out more dependably. When the Dems and progressives DO turn out, though, en masse, they normally win. But it still seems true that the new rules make liberal success more difficult in Georgia.

For one, the cons get to decide which votes count in the first place. For the other, it might take a bit of time to correct the various and sundry challenges to voters who get challenged and starting early leaves time to still get a legitimate ballot counted. Cons made mail-in voting more difficult. (Apparently, they feel like they need the “cheating” voting machines for some reason. Quick question: if you really thought the machines cheated, wouldn’t you use them less?) Oh, and where there have been difficulties reported? Largely areas populated by African Americans. Go figure.

On the other hand, high voter turnout could well indicate the anger of the voters at the con’s promises of abandoning the social safety net and their recent elimination of Roe v Wade with the offset to Georgia’s more restrictive laws being a fortunate side-benefit. That’s the one I’m hoping for – more Democratic and progressives turning out trying to stop the slide into moronic fascism and only coincidentally overcoming Georgia’s new restrictions.

The fact is, we can’t tell how the election will play out until the election has played out. High voter turnout could indicate that the Dems were wrong about the new laws. It could also indicate the cons were wrong to attack women’s rights. We’ll all find out together as this thing goes forward…

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Repetition For Posterity…
History likes to do postmortems on once-great nations that fall for one reason or another and I’m pretty sure the United States soon get that treatment. Sadly, the deciding factor will be whether humanity survives long enough to DO a postmortem. When (okay, if) historians get the chance, they’ll line up the usual suspects and, far and away, the vast majority will be either tremendously rich sons of bitches (Charles Koch, for example) and conservative politicians (Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich come to mind), but for my money, the person who will go down in history as having done the most harm to the survival of the Constitutional Republic called the United States of America? “Democrat” William Jefferson Clinton.

I point at him because he signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That act, written by conservatives, really destroyed the independent media in the country by allowing large, rich corporations to buy up nearly as many news outlets – television, radio, and print – as they could. Having so much money, they could – and did. The result? Poor, corporation-favoring information. But democracies and republics can’t survive on poor information.

It used to be the media that exposed political and corporate malfeasance. Now? The corporations mostly squelch stories that make them look bad and they promote stories that blame all problems on politicians. (That’s why oil companies can dictate the outcome of elections by gouging their customers. FAR too few people understand they’re suffering from corporate, not political, decisions, and we have no Walter Cronkite to set them straight…)

Oh, Clinton also facilitated the implementation of Fox “News.” His administration even had to issue a special waiver to allow them to broadcast their attacks on America…

I’ll tell you this: I say this from time to time and I’ll keep saying it. I’m not trying to convince anybody. Historians will make the final call. But if history doesn’t include the intentional, calculated destruction of accurate information as a key factor in the downfall of this once-great nation, it will be a crying shame…