Recent Comments

1. about 10 hours ago on Jeff Stahler

   I and my socially-progressive/fiscally-conservative family left the Republican party when the “Southern Strategy” took hold and the Dixiecrats/segregationists began to massively register as Republicans after LBJ signed the Voting/Civil Rights Acts into law.

2. about 11 hours ago on Jeff Stahler

   Briefly, during the Eisenhower era over six decades ago.

3. about 11 hours ago on John Deering

   Do the Q/MAGA cult members believe that TFG is innocent or do they just not care about being civil/ethical/moral with other human beings?

4. about 12 hours ago on Kevin Necessary Editorial Cartoons

   At the start of 2024 …

   “… Yes, Republican states are now starting to emulate the Civil War-era south

   The Texas governor rejecting federal immigration laws has echoes of the Confederate states

   We’re not even a full month into a crucial election year in the United States, and it already feels like the country is coming apart at the seams.

   In a standoff that has dragged on for weeks now, Texas governor Greg Abbott, a right-wing Catholic, has refused to allow federal Border Patrol agents to enter a public park along the Rio Grande where refugees and asylum seekers are known to cross. As summarised by Camilo Montoya-Galvez, reporting for CBS: “Federal law requires Border Patrol to process migrants who enter the US illegally to determine whether they should be deported, transferred to another federal agency, sent to a long-term immigration detention centre or released pending a review of their asylum claims.”

   Operating outside that chain of command, Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to deploy razor wire as a gruesome “deterrent” to migrant crossings, and these troops have refused to allow the Biden administration to remove the razor wire. While states can have their own laws on many things in the American federal system, federal supremacy in immigration and border enforcement is a long-established precedent. Troublingly, only five of the nine justices currently occupying seats on the illegitimately stacked, right-wing partisan Supreme Court proved willing to uphold this precedent in a recent decision on Texas’s defiance.

   That narrow decision preserved federal control over immigration policy, but Abbott continues to deny federal agents entry to the park in direct defiance of the Supreme Court. …" — opendemocracy .net /en /5050 /usa-texas-greg-abbott-civil-war-confederates-biden

5. about 13 hours ago on Clay Bennett

   And in perspective …

   visualcapitalist .com /inflation-projections-by-country-in-2024

6. about 13 hours ago on Jeff Danziger

   " Six years after the Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear accord, Tehran is rapidly accumulating enriched uranium, some of it very close to weapons grade. Experts fear that a bomb could be a short dash away." — Washington Post, Apr 10, 2024

7. about 13 hours ago on Clay Bennett

   How does the division/exclusion/authoritarianism proposed by the divisive Q/MAGA cult help the United States live up to its name and become a more united/resilient constitutional federal republic?

8. about 14 hours ago on Jeff Stahler

   I miss the cautiously conservative Republican party that used to defend the status quo [in Congress and court] and never took chances on the long odds or irrationally clung to — the no longer pragmatic — processes from the past, when well-vetted proven/productive changes could be sensibly introduced.

9. about 14 hours ago on Henry Payne

   Did you ever notice that nations with a high quality of life ranking never complain about taxes? The USA always used to have a great quality of life when trust/honor/respect were present in a collaborative, work accros the aisle, Congress rather than today’s self-inflicted, irrational, partisanship with distrust/dishonor/disrespect that leads to an obstructive dysfunctional costly government,

10. 1 day ago on Lisa Benson

    " … Bilateral relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States began in 1933 when full diplomatic relations were established and became formalized in the 1951 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. Despite the differences between the two countries—an Islamic absolute monarchy versus a secular constitutional republic—the two countries have been allies ever since. The core logic underpinning the relationship is that the United States of America (U.S.) provides military protection to the Kingdom in exchange for a reliable oil supply from the Saudis, pricing of oil in U.S. dollars, and Saudi support for American foreign policy operations across the world. Ever since the modern relationship began in 1945, the U.S. has been willing to overlook some of the kingdom’s domestic and foreign policy aspects such as Wahhabism, its human rights, and alleged state-sponsored terrorism as long as it maintained oil production and supported American national security policies. …" — Wikipedia