We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says.
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence according to a 12/18/21 piece from Washington Post’s, Dana Milbank.
By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United
States, but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying
conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines,
Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive
techniques herself to this country.
Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to
believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book,
“How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that
their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she
writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at
events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
What Would Nellis Say?
December 2021
What would Nellis Gray say?
“Real” news reports (as opposed to the lies and nonsense broadcast by right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox…which makes no pretense of reporting truth or facts) have been showing clips of Republican gatherings where their supporters keep asking, “When can we get out the guns and start shooting liberals?” and the response by elected officials isn’t, “That’s a really stupid idea.” but rather, “Not yet…”
The invasion of our Capitol by armed fascists was a dress rehearsal for a much broader assault on the very foundations of our democracy in favor of a white-nationalist autocracy funded by the tiny federation of some of our wealthiest citizens. Their campaign was founded in 1958 with the sole intention of dismantling the government for the elimination of taxes and regulations that inhibit their accumulation of vast wealth and ultimate power and installing a two-class system of those who rule and those who serve.
Fox News loses effort to kill Dominion lawsuit over ‘big lie’ programming.
In a ruling issued Thursday in the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting
Systems against Fox News, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis
wrote, “The Complaint is detailed and contains two hundred and four
paragraphs and is one hundred and thirty-seven pages long. In addition,
Dominion attaches three hundred and two pages of exhibits to the
Complaint”according to a 12/18/21 Washington Post report.
There’s a reason for all those pages: When cataloguing Fox News’s republic-destroying coverage of Donald Trump’s claims of 2020 election fraud, there’s way too much material — chiefly transcripts of fact-defying segments hosted by Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity.
Davis found the voting-machine company’s case convincing. “Dominion’s well-pleaded allegations ... support the reasonable inference that Fox’s reporting was not accurate or dispassionate,” he wrote. With such reasoning, Davis denied Fox News’s motion to dismiss the $1.6 billion suit, which Dominion filed in late March.
What would Nellis Gray say?
The Republicans couldn’t accept the undisputed reality that their candidate lost fair and square, so they created the “Big Lie” that the vote was fraudulent, that ballots were magically created, that the voting machines were hacked, or millions of dead people voted.
They invented this narrative months before the first ballots were cast because they knew that their presidential candidate - a con man, liar, fraud, and criminal - couldn’t win.
Fox is not a “News” network. They make no pretense that they employ professional journalists who report truth or facts. It is a well-funded propaganda machine with the sole purpose of keeping the radical-right in a state of panic over completely ridiculous “rumors” (How often does their on-air “personality” start a rant by saying, “We haven’t verified this but…”?)
It’s time to stop worshipping ignorance and lies and turn off Tuckums, Sean, Laura, and the rest of these overpaid moronic “personalities”. and seek out real news based on real facts and reported by real journalists.
MD Gov. Larry Hogan: Mr. Garland, Please Sue My State.
A December 17, 2021 Wall Street Journal letter from Larry Hogan, Democratic Governor of Maryland.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last week
that the Justice Department is suing Texas, alleging that
its Republican-drawn redistricting map violates the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Days later, the Democrat-controlled
Maryland General Assembly overrode my veto of
Maryland’s new congressional map, making the nation’s
most gerrymandered map even worse and creating far
more egregious civil-rights violations than in Texas.
In announcing the Texas lawsuit, Mr. Garland argued that “a core principle of our democracy is that voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.” He’s right. The attorney general should sue Maryland, too says Larry Hogan, Democratic Governor of Maryland.
As Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Baltimore, a former president of the NAACP, recently noted, his city and other parts of Maryland with high minority populations have been “chopped at and bitten at” for decades in redistricting. These gerrymandered maps diminish minority representation by combining them with distant rural and suburban areas, a practice called “cracking.”
Maryland’s current Third Congressional District—which the Washington Post has called “the most gerrymandered district in America”—stretches across the state from rural areas near Annapolis to include parts of Baltimore city and Montgomery County, the affluent Washington suburb where Mr. Garland lives. To add insult to injury, the district’s representative, John Sarbanes, is the lead sponsor of H.R.1, the Democratic antigerrymandering and election-reform legislation.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Martin Luther King Jr. said when urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Minority voters in Maryland deserve the full protection of the law, regardless of what party benefits politically in the short term.
Mr. Garland and the Biden administration can live up to their rhetoric by holding both parties accountable for discriminatory gerrymandering—or it can politicize the Justice Department by holding red states and blue states to different standards.
Mr. Hogan, a Republican, is governor of Maryland.
Maryland's 3rd Congressional District
- the most gerrymandered in America.
What would Nellis Gray say?
It’s time for all voting districts to be determined by non-partisan committees based on geography and population for inclusion of every citizen equally.