I have never been to Georgia so I have never seen the lines of black people waiting to vote after being driven by bus from church services. I don't know how feasible it is for them to be carrying food and water after coming directly from church. I don't know the level of poverty so I don't know how many of them can afford to own a car. I don't know how many of them are old and in bad shape, maybe even using walkers, so I don't know whether they would be damaged by thirst or hunger. This law didn't exist before. I infer that if it was newly introduced by Republicans who were upset that their state went Democrat, that their motive was to screw the black voters.

Why do you ASSUME any are old, any are poor and at a poverty level. Seems to me you are just stereotyping black people as you on the Left do to make us all feel sorry for those old darkies, as you would have us believe they are. Let's try another version here shall we? I suspect those people in the churches are not ALL black as you would have us believe, that there are white parishioners there too in the same churches. I suspect many of them are young people who enjoy going to church and who have good jobs in well paying companies.

Look at you, portraying them in walkers, old and in bad shape. Golly gee whiz, are you honestly trying to paint a picture of just after the Civil War when those po old black folk was goin day to day just lookin fo some vittles to put in their babies little stomachs. Damn my friend, you sound just like that lying POS, Hillary Clinton doing her po black folk routine. Admit it. You haven't the faintest clue WTF you are talking about and yet you just keep talking trying to make a piss poor point. I think most black people who would read what you just wrote would be pretty damn pissed off for you putting them down like that as if they cannot figure this crap out all by their lonesome. For God's sake, let these black people go. Free them from the God awful and corrupt Democratic Plantation. They are not playthings, they are intelligent people who can do just fine without the Democratic Party.

Is there some reason the people on buses cannot stop to purchase water or maybe the church provide water for them? Maybe Miss Scarlet can have someone bring up a bucket from the well.

Dennis

Opinion: Republicans are sprinting away from democracy

Opinion by
Catherine Rampell
Columnist
May 17, 2021 at 5:20 p.m. EDT

Almost half of Republicans are now saying the quiet part out loud: They’d prefer to ditch this whole democracy thing.
So finds CBS News-YouGov polling conducted in mid-May. The survey asked Republicans a series of questions about the required level of fealty to former president Donald Trump, their views of the 2020 election and priorities for the party going forward.
The results were bleak.

Two-thirds said it was “important” for Republicans to be “loyal to Donald Trump now.” The same share said they did not believe President Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. (They apparently missed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) recent assertion that “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.”)
But the most troubling results came from a question about the party’s best strategy for winning in 2022 and 2024. If you were consulting for the party, respondents were asked, would you focus on developing a message and “popular policies and ideas” to win over more voters? Or would you prioritize changes to the voting rules in states and districts?


A whopping 47 percent chose the latter option. In other words, nearly half of those who still identify as Republicans appear to have given up on a key premise of democracy: that you earn the right to govern by proposing ideas that appeal to a majority of the public. They’d prefer to short-circuit that process and, instead, make it harder for their opponents to vote.

So much for “party of ideas,” as the GOP once called itself.
In truth, the Republican Party mostly stopped coming up with new ideas about three decades ago, when it declared Reaganomics gospel and rarely looked back. No matter what evidence has since become available, GOP officials insist that tax cuts pay for themselves and that less regulation is always better (well, except when it comes to immigrants or trade or personal enemies of a Republican president, perhaps). But the GOP at least still pretended to generate novel, popular ideas and therefore be the party better suited to governance. To this day, some Republican politicians claim that it’s really Trump’s policy ideas, incoherent though they may be, that energize the base — rather than, you know, the cult of personality. Or the racism.

But party leaders let slip last summer that they no longer stood for any fixed principles whatsoever except loyalty to Trump. This was made clear when the Republican National Committee announced that it would not adopt a platform for a presidential election for the first time since the party’s founding more than 160 years earlier. Instead, the RNC released a groveling resolution that it would “continue to enthusiastically support” Trump and his “America-first agenda,” whatever its particulars might be.

Since then, party officials have prized allegiance to Trump above all else — as exemplified by, among other things, the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her party leadership role. They have likewise abandoned any pretense of pursuing policies that voters want or that could otherwise improve their constituents’ lives; GOP political rhetoric is instead consumed by rants about fake burger restrictions or Mr. Potato Head. Meanwhile, their actual policymaking apparatus has been laser-focused on voter suppression. So far this year, legislators in at least 47 states have introduced bills that would restrict ballot access; at least 12 states have already made it harder to vote.
The only real GOP policy divide, it seems, is over whether to try to thwart the will of the voters ex-post or ex-ante. One faction of the party favoring ex-post measures is pushing crazy election lawsuits or ballot “audits” in Arizona. Then there’s the supposedly more respectable contingent, who view the hunt for hidden bamboo fibers as a little crass, and prefer to pass laws that make it harder to cast ballots in the first place. Some of the state and local Republican officials once treated as (small-d) democratic heroes for resisting Trumpian pressures to overturn the 2020 election have also been on the vanguard of ex-ante voter-suppression measures.

It’s easy to believe that cynical politicians — regardless of political persuasion — might do anything to hold onto power, including disenfranchising opponents. And presumably it feels freeing for politicians to pledge nothing more to their followers than to remain in power, as opposed to having to deliver on policies that might improve people’s lives.
But what is more perplexing, and disturbing, is that so many constituents apparently demand nothing more either. Half of Republicans apparently ask only that the people wearing their same jersey salute the boss and stay in office, by whatever anti-democratic means necessary.

There has been much hand-wringing the past few years about “democratic backsliding," a phrase that conjures images of a populace passively (perhaps unknowingly) slouching toward authoritarianism. What this and other polls suggest is that many Americans are instead running headlong into its arms.

I have never been to Georgia so I have never seen the lines of black people waiting to vote after being driven by bus from church services. I don't know how feasible it is for them to be carrying food and water after coming directly from church. I don't know the level of poverty so I don't know how many of them can afford to own a car. I don't know how many of them are old and in bad shape, maybe even using walkers, so I don't know whether they would be damaged by thirst or hunger. This law didn't exist before. I infer that if it was newly introduced by Republicans who were upset that their state went Democrat, that their motive was to screw the black voters.

Why do you ASSUME any are old, any are poor and at a poverty level. Seems to me you are just stereotyping black people as you on the Left do to make us all feel sorry for those old darkies, as you would have us believe they are. Let's try another version here shall we? I suspect those people in the churches are not ALL black as you would have us believe, that there are white parishioners there too in the same churches. I suspect many of them are young people who enjoy going to church and who have good jobs in well paying companies.

Look at you, portraying them in walkers, old and in bad shape. Golly gee whiz, are you honestly trying to paint a picture of just after the Civil War when those po old black folk was goin day to day just lookin fo some vittles to put in their babies little stomachs. Damn my friend, you sound just like that lying POS, Hillary Clinton doing her po black folk routine. Admit it. You haven't the faintest clue WTF you are talking about and yet you just keep talking trying to make a piss poor point. I think most black people who would read what you just wrote would be pretty damn pissed off for you putting them down like that as if they cannot figure this crap out all by their lonesome. For God's sake, let these black people go. Free them from the God awful and corrupt Democratic Plantation. They are not playthings, they are intelligent people who can do just fine without the Democratic Party.

Is there some reason the people on buses cannot stop to purchase water or maybe the church provide water for them? Maybe Miss Scarlet can have someone bring up a bucket from the well.

Dennis

Leo: no need to feel sorry for me
I do not believe the vast vast majority of Democrats want to do away with your guns. Many of us, including myself, own guns. Sure, there are a small few who may feel that way and a few politicians. It is not anywhere near a majority.
I am unsure exactly how you can ask the same rules apply to cars and marijuana. They are not apple to apple or orange to orange true comparisons. Still, I get the idea. There are rules and consequences for both. There may be allowed medical marijuana, but don’t try smuggling in a kilo or anything more than a small amount. Possession is often still a crime, often for 30 grams (and up). Marijuana is not killing people with the likelihood of weapons, in my opinion and belief. You can lose your right to drive, pretty readily and insurance will shut you down pretty quickly, as well. The Gov’t seizing your weapons is such a far-fetched idea that it is not even realistic. Heck, Gov’t cannot get the most simple least invasive legislation through, much less get to taking away your guns. Democrats in huge numbers would oppose it.
Motorcyclists have had similar problems and fears, but we still hear loud pipes. Gun folks need to realize large segments of the population see unfettered purchase of guns as, at least, partially responsible for the totally out of control mass shootings. Ya gotta start somewhere trying to be responsible and letting people see that the vast majority of gun owners are responsible and law-abiding citizens. If some compromise cannot be seen as beneficial to gun owners eventually people will have had enough and the populace may turn on us. We all need to recognize some need to meet the needs of the many.
By the way, for those who think I am against motorcycles, think again. I have owned almost 30 in my lifetime. I have even ridden one with loud pipes. I try to do better, but loud pipes can be fun. They do hurt us in the long run, though.

I'm sorry for you if you believe that. Various democrats at all levels have explicitly said they want to ban guns. They are absolutely coming for guns unless they are stopped.

Some people who aren't allowed on airplanes definitely should not have guns. All violent criminals and some non-violent criminals should not have guns.

Gun registration, absolutely not. That is a list for the aforementioned democrats to use to confiscate guns.

Possession of a weapon, which includes guns among various other weapons, during commission of a felony should result in automatic maximum penalty possible with no possibility of parole and hard labor during incarceration.

One criteria for any sort of "sensible" gun laws is whether you (the generic you meaning all on the left calling for "sensible" gun laws) would be willing to have the same rules put in place toward automobiles, alcohol, marijuana, banking etc..

I have never been to Georgia so I have never seen the lines of black people waiting to vote after being driven by bus from church services. I don't know how feasible it is for them to be carrying food and water after coming directly from church. I don't know the level of poverty so I don't know how many of them can afford to own a car. I don't know how many of them are old and in bad shape, maybe even using walkers, so I don't know whether they would be damaged by thirst or hunger. This law didn't exist before.