Iowa Democrats win massive upset...

Iowa Democrats win massive upset to break GOP supermajority

Catelin Drey's victory may portend more good news for Democrats next year

An 11 point Republican advantage turned to a 10 point Democrat win by Catelin Drey..

It would be gutwrenching if similar results to this had not occurred but this is a modicum of good news.

Whether it will translate to the midterms if indeed the midterms are allowed to reflect voters' wishes in the ballots is another question.

I have the suspicion that the Republican strategy is to provoke a national (notional?) emergency so that the midterms can be cancelled or falsified and I don't see how that can be prevented without an "American Spring" or the death of an ogre.(would love to be proved wrong,not in the last eventuality of course )

Edited August 27Aug 27 by geordief

5 minutes ago, geordief said:

"Uploading Attachment...

Iowa Democrats win massive upset...

Iowa Democrats win massive upset to break GOP supermajority

Catelin Drey's victory may portend more good news for Democrats next year

Uploading Attachment...

It would be gutwrenching if similar results to this had not occurred but this is a modicum of good news.

Whether it will translate to the midterms if indeed the midterms are allowed to reflect voters' wishes in the ballots is another question.

I have the suspicion that the Republican strategy is to provoke a national emergency so that the midterms can be cancelled or falsified and I don't see how that can be prevented without an "American Spring" or the death of an ogre.(wouldlove to be proved wrong,not in the last eventuality of course )

Yes my expectation is that riots will be stirred up on some pretext or other (and blamed on pinko woke libtard Democrats), so that a state of emergency can be declared and the mid term elections suspended. It is what we have seen all over the world in similar situations, where an authoritarian wants to hold onto power without explicitly abandoning the fig leaf of democratic process. But maybe they hope the gerrymandering of voting districts will be enough. We'll see.

4 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Yes my expectation is that riots will be stirred up on some pretext or other (and blamed on pinko woke libtard Democrats), so that a state of emergency can be declared and the mid term elections suspended. It is what we have seen all over the world in similar situations, where an authoritarian wants to hold onto power without explicitly abandoning the fig leaf of democratic process. But maybe they hope the gerrymandering of voting districts will be enough. We'll see.

I don't see how gerrymandering alone would be enough.Maybe,if they play thst game the Dems will come out on top as well - as the natural swing that seems to be there against the Republicans this time around..

A pity there isn't an "open your eyes" pill that would crack open the Maga base but I fear that is just who they are and they are seeing what they want to see.

Still ,they are nothing like a majority.

1 minute ago, geordief said:

I don't see how gerrymandering alone would be enough.Maybe,if they play thst game the Dems will come out on top as well - as the natural swing that seems to be there against the Republicans this time around..

A pity there isn't an "open your eyes" pill that would crack open the Maga base but I fear that is just who they are and they are seeing what they want to see.

Still ,they are nothing like a majority.

No, but close to a majority voted for a dictator at the last presidential election. Not just the hardcore MAGA morons.

40 minutes ago, exchemist said:

No, but close to a majority voted for a dictator at the last presidential election. Not just the hardcore MAGA morons.

Yes,that result is set in stone.The rest of the world will have to put down the tinted spectacles when it comes to dealing with America,whatever comes next.

In addition the whole world is changing at an accelerating pace and America will no more keep abreast than any of us.

I remember a conversation back in the 60's where I was talking to a friend who happened to be one of the visible disruptors in the local Gilberd school( I was friendly with the son of the headmaster who was really cheesed off about it/him-thought he was a middle class poser)

Anyway his words to me were that he would like to destroy the system and "see where the cards fall" (I assumed he was an anarchist)

I don't suppose he espouses that view now but these are the times he was wishing for back then.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Yes my expectation is that riots will be stirred up on some pretext or other (and blamed on pinko woke libtard Democrats), so that a state of emergency can be declared and the mid term elections suspended.

I’m pretty sure there’s no legal avenue for this to happen. Not that Trump won’t try something illegal. But it’s not happened before, even during the Civil War. Martial law doesn’t suspend the Constitution and congress sets the date of federal elections.

54 minutes ago, exchemist said:

No, but close to a majority voted for a dictator at the last presidential election. Not just the hardcore MAGA morons.

Almost a majority of people who voted. Trump isn’t on the ballot and dissatisfied people who didn’t vote in ‘24 might be motivated to show up

6 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m pretty sure there’s no legal avenue for this to happen. Not that Trump won’t try something illegal. But it’s not happened before, even during the Civil War. Martial law doesn’t suspend the Constitution and congress sets the date of federal elections.

Almost a majority of people who voted. Trump isn’t on the ballot and dissatisfied people who didn’t vote in ‘24 might be motivated to show up

I naturally hope, fervently, you are right. But the speed and comprehensiveness with which the US system has already been neutered or dismantled does not make me optimistic that the Project 2025 people around Trump won't have a plan to deliver the mid terms safely into their hands. The docility of Congress is key to all the rest, as it is that which gives Trump carte blanche to act like an absolute monarch.

If Congress sets the election dates, the current supine Congress could easily agree to postpone them, could it not?

Edited August 27Aug 27 by exchemist

1 hour ago, geordief said:

An 11 point Republican advantage turned to a 10 point Democrat win by Catelin Drey..

I know this area, it's basically Sioux City, and it pivots more readily than the truly deep rural Iowa. I've seen places like that go for a Rethuglican president and then vote for a Demo state legislator. This relates more to local levels of knowledge on state compared to national issues. But there can also be a disgruntled-by-clownocracy current there, too. And they could show up on that hook in 26.

By coincidence there's an article in today's Guardian from a law prof at Amherst College, that touches on this. I quote it in full:

"January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.

So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.

What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of inequity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police.

Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed.

Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”?

While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.

Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day?

In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest? Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots, and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days.

As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable."

So while I concede that I may be jumping at shadows, being a European, I can relate pretty strongly to Fraenkel's analysis. We've seen this all before. I don't really see what makes the US so fundamentally different, especially as it seems this is what to close to half the country either wants, or is happy to accede to.

Way to go, INow 👍
Were you out there stumping ?

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

I naturally hope, fervently, you are right. But the speed and comprehensiveness with which the US system has already been neutered or dismantled does not make me optimistic that the Project 2025 people around Trump won't have a plan to deliver the mid terms safely into their hands. The docility of Congress is key to all the rest, as it is that which gives Trump carte blanche to act like an absolute monarch.

And a complicit majority on SCOTUS, who might just create some power out of thin air, as they’ve done before.

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

If Congress sets the election dates, the current supine Congress could easily agree to postpone them, could it not?

Section 4 Congress

• Clause 1 Elections Clause

• The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-4/

Laws are already on the books making election day uniform (second Tuesday in November). Most states have some form of early voting, but those rules are up to the states

The 20th amendment says when congress is to be sworn in, and the elections have to be certified, so I don’t see much leeway in moving the date later, but who knows what SCOTUS would say, but how clueless can they be if there’s a pissed-off electorate? I think screwing with elections won’t play well with even Republican voters, outside of super-hardcore MAGAts.

11 hours ago, exchemist said:

my expectation is that riots will be stirred up on some pretext or other (and blamed on pinko woke libtard Democrats), so that a state of emergency can be declared

They’re already claiming states of emergency for bullshit things like potato chips are too delicious.

They’re already extracting people into foreign prisons without due process, including citizens with “guaranteed” rights and paying no penalty for ignoring court rulings to reverse.

They’re already normalizing having military on the streets to enforce the whims of the administration.

They’re already normalizing the idea of killing people found “guilty” of their false accusations and having militia style gangs scoop people up off the streets without a warrant or charge or even an uncovered face.

They’re already using pay to play to take over industry and already punishing harshly all dissent.

Their riots are exactly what are needed to reverse these trends, yet paradoxically will be used to amplify them. This gets worse for a long while before we see something better.

The globalization and saturation of propaganda and PsyOps only intensifies and accelerates it.

8 hours ago, MigL said:

Way to go, INow 👍
Were you out there stumping ?

I think Rob Sand (the ONLY democrat to win statewide office in the last cycle, specifically for auditor) has a decent shot at the governors office. He’s a smart decent guy though, so voters will surely reject him despite being a hunter and fiscal conservative.

I see that as well as admitting openly he is trying to gain "a majority" of Trumpies on the board of the Federal Reserve, Trump is now attempting to prosecute George Soros. I presume this is to stop Soros bankrolling Democrat senators and congressmen at the mid terms.

51 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Trump is now attempting to prosecute George Soros.

Just standard social media hot air from Gasbag 47. There's zero legal basis for going after a philanthropist who's been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Turnip is just embarrassing himself. Unless Turnip develops the craft to stuff grand juries, and maybe establish a military junta, this is just another distraction.