Netizen: 3: Zoho

Friday, October 03, 2025

3: Zoho

How the shutdown ends In the unfriendly skies ......... Trump and Republicans will cave (he won’t admit he’s caving, of course, but he will cave). ....... Recall the last big shutdown that started in late 2018 and went on for 35 days — a record. What ended it? Air traffic controllers. ........ In January 2019, several controllers at a facility near Washington, D.C., that handles air traffic for most of the region, called in sick. ......... As a result, flight delays along the East Coast began to stack up. The delays quickly cascaded to Atlanta and beyond. ...... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “The #TrumpShutdown has already pushed hundreds of thousands of Americans to the breaking point. Now it’s pushing our airspace to the breaking point too.” ........ A hearing into the causes of the midair collision in Washington earlier this year that claimed 67 lives revealed a decline in aviation safety due to increasingly busy skies and overworked controllers. ......... My prediction: This shutdown will end sooner than the last one. Air traffic controllers will ensure it does. Within the next few weeks, a few will call in sick. Then the flight delays will cascade. ........ Why on the White House and congressional Republicans and not on congressional Democrats? Because Republicans now control the government — the presidency, both chambers of Congress, and, effectively, the Supreme Court. They own it. ......... They and Trump will be blamed for the shutdown, and they’ll have to get the nation out of it — even at the cost of giving in to congressional Democrats.

Declining American Democracy: Trump is a Symptom, Not the Cause The modern GOP is inherently authoritarian ........... It’s now undeniable that American democracy is in very big trouble. An autocratic president, abetted by collaborators in the Supreme Court and the Republican party, is actively attempting to use the military, the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, trade policy, voting rolls, federal spending, and any other weapon he can get his hands on to punish his critics and lock in permanent power. Yet it still comes as a shock to have the dire state that the country is in confirmed by the experts. ............ On Wednesday G. Elliott Morris directed us to the findings of Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor the functioning of democracy in many countries. They now rate the United States as an “illiberal democracy”. That means that the ruling party can still lose elections, so we aren’t a full autocracy just yet. However, that democracy is on the ropes because the power of the state is being used to put a heavy thumb on the scales, tilting us towards autocracy. ............. Much of our legacy media is still in denial about this reality, or is actively trying to cover it up. I still see news reports describing some offense by the Trump administration as potentially “worse than Watergate” – a description that is ludicrously quaint when applied to

an administration that does things worse than Watergate several times a week

. .............. Nixon, who was a piker by comparison to Donald Trump, was repudiated by his own party. Not only is Donald Trump a wannabe dictator, surely the worst person on multiple dimensions ever to occupy the White House, but he made his intentions clear in the January 6th insurrection and his promises of retribution if re-elected. But unlike Nixon, Trump is backed by a Republican party that has become so extreme, so unwilling to acknowledge that opposition is even legitimate that none of his actions matter. Today’s Republicans show no hesitation whatsoever in adopting the Führerprinzip, the “leader principle”, in which Trump’s diktats override all written law and democratic norms. ..............
There is now a wide gap between even the least conservative Republican and the least liberal Democrat
........... the centrist, bipartisan bloc that forced Nixon out no longer exists. ......... Ideologically, Northern Democrats have hardly moved since 1950. Republicans, on the other hand, moved very far to the right .......... While the de-Dixiecratted Democratic Party broadly looks like a center-left European party, the GOP doesn’t look like the European center right. Instead it looks like Germany’s AfD or Hungary’s Fidesz, extremist parties with a clear authoritarian streak. .................. And all of this happened before Trump, certainly before Trump’s return to power in the 2024 election. Trump is clearly hell-bent on destroying American democracy and turning us into a rogue nation. He is personally cruel, corrupt and vindictive. ............ it’s the nature of Trump’s party, not his personal depravity, that is responsible for the decline of American democracy. ................. the larger question of why “populist” parties have been on the rise throughout the Western world. ......... there are a lot of potential explanations, ranging from rising income inequality and the power of the plutocracy, to the problems of left-behind regions, to men not working, to the injured pride of white men who feel that they have lost their dignity and their privilege, to the social anomie caused by the Internet. .......... racism never went away and has become increasingly overt again. ........
the threat to U.S. democracy is much bigger than Trump himself. And it won’t end when he leaves the scene.