Image source: Merriam-Webster
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights
Noun: a chess opening in which a player risks one or more pawns or a minor piece to gain an advantage in position
Ninety percent of Fox Propaganda employees are fully vaccinated. The employees are required to disclose their vaccine status. The network tests the 10% that refuse daily, presumably barring them from the property, and mandating they quarantine if they test positive. For the record: that's more stringent than the Biden administration, which only has a weekly requirement. Even as talking heads push hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, bear bile, and other quackery to their viewership.
The pawn is the least powerful chess piece, but it can be promoted into any other chess piece (except for a king). As Philidor once said, "Pawns are the soul of chess!" Chess.com
The disdain Rupert Murdock's network has for its viewership is only matched by the congruent ghoulishness of Kevin Q-Carthy, Moscow Mitch, and the death cult crew. The debt ceiling has been with us since 1917, the year before the last pandemic. It has been since the Obama administration, a game of chicken; a hostage tactic. It's not one side of the chessboard or the other: it's the entire field or the republic.
Congress has always restricted federal debt. The Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 included an aggregate limit on federal debt as well as limits on specific debt issues. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Congress altered the form of those restrictions to give the U.S. Treasury more flexibility in debt management and to allow modernization of federal financing. In 1939, a general limit was placed on federal debt.
Federal debt accumulates when the government sells debt to the public to finance budget deficits and to meet federal obligations or when it issues debt to government accounts, such as the Social Security, Medicare, and Transportation trust funds. Total federal debt is the sum of debt held by the public and debt held by government accounts. Debt also increases when the portfolio of federal loans expands.
Congress has modified the debt limit 14 times since 2001. Congressional Research Service Report
We have now exceeded the death toll of the 1918 flu pandemic. Gaslighting has replaced ideas, emotion has been substituted for substance. The "American Pravda" rage machine found out last year Rage Against the Machine is a political band that probably doesn't favor their worldview. Fox Propaganda and the "gang of Putin" are solely dedicated to killing any bills that help the citizens of the United States, and the world at large, and anything that would make oligarchs and corporations pay the taxes they've dodged in particular. Neither has had any ideas since the "trickledown" 1980s. Income inequality is worse now than in the Gilded Age, with the one percent profiteering off the pandemic. Their wealth is literally built on the bones of 716,849 Americans. By Christmas, we'll be over a million. In a gambit, the Fox viewership/republican constituents' deaths are acceptable losses.
Yet, the criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party in Congress, in statehouses, has an opportunity to regain majority status. Why? Because of the raw exercise of POWER. Appealing to emotion, "owning the libs" haven't improved the lives of their constituents. It has convinced them their "representatives" hate the "others" they hate. It is an addiction to sadistic dopamine. The other acceptable casualty is the federal republic.
It's sad when the problem of 3.5 to 1.5 trillion is solvable with simple math. $3.5T over 10 years is $350B/year. $1.5T over 4 years is $375B/year. Then, Democrats can dare Republicans to run against it in 2022, and 2024. Once Americans experience expanded Medicare, free hearing aids, and glasses for seniors, free childcare, free community college (that will reduce the cost of four-year college), some movement on climate change that they can SEE, and FEEL, the political ads write themselves. This is an example of government functioning to HELP a stated need. Socialism is tax cuts for wealthy individuals, and corporations after failure in the "free market." Socialism is government subsidies to the fossil fuels industry since the Bolshevik Revolution. There would be no logical argument to take away something every American would have experienced in the positive, even though logic for Putin's party has been bereft for some time. Manchin gets what he wants, progressives get what they want. That, in my humble opinion, would be the strategic exercise of power.
If Republicans are a criminal enterprise, they behave like a functional Mafia family, capable of loyalty to the heinous, and in witness to obvious crimes by a chief executive, Omerta. Democrats, for all my support, behave like a herd of "woke" cats with Twitter fingers as itchy as the useless troll, Marjorie Taylor Green. I have called my congressional representative. Politics is the "art of compromise" and the "art of the possible." If you cannot compromise with a recalcitrant cult, do what's possible on your own. You will be RICHLY rewarded for it.
"Pawns are the soul of chess!" An informed citizenry is the soul of democracy.
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