Tag Archive: “bad leadership”

How American Government Self-Correction Works, in Brief.

Posted in society by Adam

9 January 202112 October 2021

Our system of checks and balances and reacting to bad government.

This past week a large body of Republican legislators did a dookie during the counting of the electoral votes. Partly as a result, a large mob of Americans, who have been trained to adore feces by years of shit-filled media, stormed the Capitol to rub their own faces in it. For weeks there was talk about the plan, how stinky their poop was to be, who would join in the squeezing out, while a powerless majority said they should not do a bowel movement in Congress at all. Got me thinking, not about fecal matters, but about writing how our government is built to respond to these partisan poopers and to the likes of Donald John Trump.

There are norms and there are laws. Norms are things like don’t shit where you eat (which, in the case of these Republican shitheads, happens to be exactly where they shat). Laws are things like, if you pressure an election official to falsify election returns, you should be prosecuted and tried for that.

There’s been a lot of folks trying to figure out, over these past four years, if the diaper’s-full crowd does a stinky, what do we do about that shit?!

The basic structure is this:

If a bad actor does bad actions, tell them to cut it out.
If they don’t, impeach and convict them. (For executive officers and judicial officers; legislature can censure and even eject their members if they are bad.)
If the people who should impeach, convict, or otherwise remove fail to do it, it’s up to the voters to also reject their candidacies at the next election.
If the people fail to keep a clean house of government, the state of the nation will worsen until people either do vote responsibly, people revolt, or the government authority completely collapses or becomes authoritarian from how bad it got.

We do have laws and checks and balances, and when they are ignored because some idiot politicians have been ordered by an authoritarian to poop in public, it is on the people to vote those poopy-heads out.

The fact that over 100 Republicans are not properly potty-trained should give everyone who supports that party great pause. The fact that their shit was stinky enough to attract a mob is a whole other problem for our country.

But while Donald John Trump added copious bulk fiber to the weight of the turd that was dropped, it was those Republicans who opened their bowels, who know better, and it was the other Republicans who did not forcefully seek to stop that turd from dropping, who deserve most of the blame. Donald John Trump has been a turdmonger for a long time. Most Republican politicians, while they might indulge in the occasional shart, do not typically cross into the full scatological arts we have seen recently. They must either regain their bowel control or be evacuated from our government.

Joe Biden’s inauguration will occur a week from Wednesday.

The Oddity of Opening

Posted in society by Adam

9 May 202012 October 2021

Reopening prematurely and without adequate measures planned just makes no sense.

The polling and reporting tells the following story:

Most people think that the measures aren’t there to reopen.
Republican-connected groups have been pushing protests to reopen.
Based on that, some Republican governors have been getting ahead of themselves and reopening.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. While some businesses have a majority of Republicans supporting reopening, a lot do not, and even where there’s a majority, it’s still split (though maybe less or more if you factor in margins of error). There is, once again, a minority Republican view being pressed and causing policy here.

More importantly, there’s a huge business case to be made to pay what’s actually needed to reopen (testing and tracing). It could even be done in a VAT or similar vehicle! But instead of doing it correctly, there are businesses pushing for blanket immunity.

The self-described pro-business lobbies always seemed a bit fucked in the head, but they’re really smashing the old Budweiser can on their forehead this time. If the virus gets worse, all those businesses that reopen will just keep losing revenue. Immunity from lawsuits doesn’t pay bills.

It’s been months now, coming up on five if you count from when the administration had a heads-up from the intelligence community. There’s been ample time to stand up supply chains, to ramp up testing. They haven’t been able to do it.

The problem is this: most people in most states aren’t going to be John Rambo, so most will stay home. Business revenue won’t be improving in the way the open-uppers think it will. But there also won’t be a viable way to open up more or get people back in public, because they still aren’t working on test-trace. So the economy stays a bummer, the virus stays a plateau, and we continue to waste time and money spinning our wheels. It’s stupid. It’s ridiculous. It’s Donald John Trump.

In order for an economy to function, you need supply and demand. The supply is shut for health reasons, but also for demand reasons. Even before stay-home orders hit, many businesses were seeing demand plummet. There is demand—aspirational, “wouldn’t it be nice” demand. But there is not “I’m getting in the car, let’s go now” demand, and there won’t be unless and until there’s a good bet you won’t get sick.

From a numbers point of view, if even 50% of regular demand is there, that’s probably not enough, and if new upticks in cases happen even under depressed demand, that 50% will drop even lower and won’t recover the next time a reopen is attempted.

From a numbers point of view, the cost of the shutdown is very high, far higher than what it would cost to implement real testing and tracing, and yet… the governments are still not saying that. They aren’t doing that. They are ignoring the facts that are plain as day.