OT: Don't let Peanut Die For Nothing

The US has always had thousands of illegal immigrants. They are exploited as cheap labour - not as cheap as slaves, but less of a capital investment.

The framers of the US constitution didn't like political parties, but the constitution that they wrote didn't prevent them from forming.

Political parties seem to be pretty much inevitable. Countries with proportional representation and multi-member electorates tend to have quite a few political parties, and coalition governments.

Matters that get dealt with privately as factional conflicts within the two dominant parties in two-party democracies get debated publicly between coalition partners in multi-party democracies. This seems to work better.

European parliamentary systems were pretty rudimentary back in 1786. They've got a lot better since then. The Australian constitution got set up in 1901 and missed the cutting edge stuff that the Swedes and the Dutch worked out a few later. The 1948 German constitution copied them and seems to work well.

The 1956 French constitution was a De Gaulle ego trip, and doesn't work quite a well. The executive president idea appeals to egomanics, and they are the last people you want in the job. Look at Trump.

I'd say he remains in grave peril. I don't trust the CIA goons. He should surround himself with the 'wall of meat' the Bikers for Trump offered him, augmented by a few Oathkeepers for good measure. It was the CIA that whacked JFK - as I assume everyone knows now.

It was insane to have old Joe in the WH given the state he was in. Seems the US only woke up to his deterioration in that first live TV debate with Trump. But it was no secret to the rest of us that he'd been in a bad way for at least 2 years before that. The MSM covered for him very well. Can you imagine them doing that for Trump? This is why fewer and fewer people pay any attention to the legacy media nowadays and get their news from other sources. Zerohedge has run some amazing exposes that were vehemently denied and mocked by the MSM - but they were subsequently proven 100% correct. They've saved my lilly white arse more than once, in fact.

You can't tell me that Hopeless Harris was the best the Dems had to offer. They threw away their chance with this pick. Having the prospect of the 'first black woman ever to be US president' might sound grand to you or your cohort, but it's utterly meaningless to folks who care more about their pocket-book than the colour or gender of a candidate. As someone once said, "It's the economy, stupid."

Ignorant people like Bill Sloman think that squirrels are just rats with a bushy tail, but they are *way* more intelligent and social. They're easy to tame and enjoy human company. And they care about each other more than a lot of humans do.This short clip is very touching and shows this not untypical behaviour:

Definitely not, we'll get to watch every gory detail of the succession crisis (and it's already happening.) The vultures are already circling.

I've got my popcorn stocked up..

Early in the campaign (long before there was any discussion of Biden not being the nominee), I would ask Biden supporters if, hypothetically, Biden didn't run, was there anybody the Dems could nominate that they wouldn't vote for? With one exception, every single Biden supporter said no, they'd vote for whoever the democratic nominee happened to be. The single exception was one smartass who said that if the Dems nominated Trump, he wouldn't vote for him. That guy gets points for snark, at least.

When it developed that Biden was in fact *not* running, I asked the same question about Harris and got the same answer.

I really don't think it mattered at all who the Democratic nominee was; the vote would have turned out pretty much the same.

Love him or hate him, you have to give marketing props to Trump. He successfully made the entire election about ->him<- and nothing else.

World's most famous man and his sidekick the world's richest man successfully voted in as world's most powerful men. Film at 11.

I think you may be in luck. They'll find a way to thwart Trump and the will of the people yet. These bastards are utterly ruthless and will stop at literally nothing to get their way. But they're no friends of yours, either. Whatever utopia you may be dreaming of if Trump's out of the picture, you won't find it delivered by THEM.

You're talking about Democrats, though. I'm talking about the kind of candidate who could have won over the floating/undecided voters in the swing states.

Look on the plus side. They're rich enough not be hired for rent like the typical politician is. You can't buy guys like them.

Only the conspiracy theory nuts like Cursitor Doom who like their demented conspiracy theories to be totally implausible.

He was fine when he had the time to work through the problems he was faced with. He'd been making speech errors all through his career, and he really wasn't in state to produce instant responses in a debate.

Trump doesn't have that problem. He refuses to study anything in detail, and improvises off the the cuff all the time, in part by lying, which he does a lot.

Cursitor Doom's favourite right-wing fantasy factories might have been saying that, But only people addicted to implausible fantasises - like Cursitor Doom - took them seriously.

More of Cursitor Doom's implausible fantasies.

They fact-checked him extensively from 2016 to 2020. and found that he lied a lot more than previous presidents. He's unlikely to be any more accurate in his second term.

Fewer a fewer right-wing nuts bother reading stuff that isn't curated for their pervserse tastes.

Not that you can cite a single example. You may have got stories from them that played well with friends of yours that share your perverse tastes, but Zero Hedge exists to serve a lunatic fringe market.

The Murdoch media and Fox News cater the more numerous market of the moderately demented, but they are in the same business.

Trump doesn't need much thwarting. His first term made it blindingly obvious that he lacks the political skills to make things happen on large scale. During the Covid-19 epidemic he made it obvious how his intellectual defects made it difficult for him to do anything much, and quite a few more Americans died of Covid-19 than woukd have done if he'd been more competent.

With Trump, they don't have to. He'll hang himself out to dry.

Nobody's dreaming of any utopia - the word means "no place".

"It literally translates as "no place", coming from the Greek: οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place"), and meant any non-existent society, when 'described in considerable detail'.

America would probably be run better if Trump was out of the picture, but a century of ant-union and - incidentally, but necessarily, anti-socialist - propaganda means that it unlikely to be as well run as most of Europe with universal health care, good education for all and less economic inequality. The biggest improvement would probably come from making it more difficult for billionaires to spend loads of money on helping politicians they like.

Trump was an unintended consequence of the Tea Party movement funded by the Koch brothers from 2010, none of whose preferred candidates was able to out-perform Donald Trump in the primaries for the 2016 presidential election. If you were spineless enough to appeal to the Koch brothers, you were too spineless to appeal to the electorate.

Obviously not. You are a right-wing lunatic, and not susceptible to rational argument.

The economy was actually doing fine under Biden, but the inflation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic meant that regular citizens didn't realise this, and it's not an easy idea to get across.

Trying to do it in a late-starting campaign doesn't seem to have been seen as practicable.

Of course you can. But you don't use money. Trump met with Kim Jong Un because it offered him an unparalleled photo-opportunity, and you can always tempt a narcissist by offering to put his face on a lot of front pages.

Elon Musk seems to have been bought by Trump with much the same sort of inducements.

There is stuff that money can't buy directly.

Oh gosh CD, they say laughter is the best medicine and I think my neighbors heard me spit my coffee out and fall out of my chair.

I don't know if you're for real or some fashion of performance artist but I appreciate you either way. Lol..

Most of whom weren't well educated, and were susceptible to Trump's lies.

A Democrat candidate who could have out-lied him is conceivable, but no name springs to mind. Trump has been lying on a industrial scale for most of his career and has a string of bankruptcies to show for it.

The take-away message is that America needs to clean up it's secondary education system, but it is unique in that it's primary and secondary education system is run and paid for by tiny school districts.

The US constitution was written before universal education was economically feasible - it took Turnip Townsend's agricultural revolution to make it possible - and education isn't a responsibility of the nation or the individual states.