According to a 2022 Siena poll, the bottom three US presidents are Donald Trump, James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson. According to US News, James Buchanan is the worst president in US history.
If Buchanan was worse than Trump, how did the country survive?
Just finished reading the post about the 9th amendment, and the religious basis for the over turning of Roe vs Wade. I’m glad I never had to make the decision to abort a baby, but I support every woman’s right to make that decision /for herself/. Americans talk a lot about freedom, yet it seems that those on the right are working overtime to chip away at the freedoms of all those who are not ‘like themselves’. Awful.
In the United States, the meaning of freedom is different between the far right and everyone left of that position.
It’s about them (between 20 and 30 million) controlling how the other 300,000,000+ may live their lives.
To the left of this lunatic cult, the 300-million plus sees freedom as an individual choice as long as we are not breaking laws like murder, robbery, and fraud. Those fanatics sees freedom as their right to control everyone else while breaking whatever rules they make for the rest of us. The laws they want to create and are creating is to control everyone else, but does not apply to them.
Yes. 😦 What baffles me is how? why? that 300M+ allow them to get away with what amounts to theft!
Too many eligible voters do not vote. And too many either don’t know how to fact check or are too lazy to do it. They let their emotions vote for them.
Decades ago, I was standing in line to vote (years before the internet). and I overheard one of the two women in front of me, who were talking, say she would never vote for Herbert Humphrey because he was bald. Richard Nixon won that election.
That’s another thing I don’t understand! The whole idea of democracy is that the majority will generally ‘get it right’, balancing out the extremes of right and left. It’s a principle that’s been accepted here in Australia since Federation. We all have to vote, end of story. And oddly enough, 99.99% of us do, despite the fact that the punishment for not voting is ridiculously mild.
Out majority doesn’t always get it right, but we don’t swing from one extreme to the other all that often either.
I don’t understand people who believe that the privileges of democracy are a ‘right’ while the responsibility for keep democracy alive is ‘optional’. 😦
It isn’t mandatory in the United States to vote. I think it should be but… voters should be taught in a high school class what it means to vote, how to fact check for lies and BS, and also how to research each candidates’ history to find out who they really are through their previous actions and not what they say.
Passing that class with a B or better should be one of the requirements to earn a high school degree. One class for one semester that may be repeated until that B or better is earned, every semester and summer, a total of 12 chances. But it wouldn’t end there. If they don’t graduate on time and haven’t earned that B or better yet, they may take night classes at a community college with no limit to how many times they could repeat that class.
Meanwhile, once they are legally an adult, they have to pay a fine every year they are not eligible to vote — like 10% of whatever they are earning is deducted each month from their pay. Once they pass that class with a B or better, they get all that money back in a lump sum tax free.
That class must be rigorous with a really tough final that actually requires students to memorize all the crucial points about why it is important to vote and learn who their candidates are.
My parents grew up during the Great Depression and never voted. I asked my dad why. He said because all politicians are liars and crooks and it is a waste of time to vote.
In Vietnam, I learned the hard way why it is important to vote, even if they are all crooks and/or liars, one is often better than the others. So I follow the glass half full rule. If one glass is half full and the other one is empty with holes in the bottom, I vote for the glass that is half full.
Traitor Trump is an empty glass with no bottom. They can’t hold water.
I really like that scenario, Lloyd, but I’d also change the way candidates are selected so that the chance of having to vote for a better crook is less. My way would be to do away with the party system and make all candidates Independents. Then, X number of ordinary citizens from each electorate would be chosen by ballot – like for jury duty – to stand as candidates. Some would be disqualified, but the rest would have to stand, no matter how much they might not want to. Voters would choose from amongst those reluctant candidates and the unlucky ones who are actually elected to office would then have 1 year to get up to speed and 3 years to negotiate with each other to get things done.
Oh! And only 1/2 the candidates would be up for election at any one time so not all of them would be ‘newbies’.
I’m sure there would be abuses to the system, but by and large the candidates would actually represent their communities AND they would not be driven by ego, the way professional politicians are.
I figure…how can Joe Bloggs off the street really be that much worse than a Trump?
Career politicians who serve for decades have plenty of time to make corrupting connections with lobbyists and for a high price sell their souls to corporations and billionaires. Certainly, us working stiffs can afford to bribe them until they are millionaires. For far too many, getting elected and staying elected is winning a lottery ticket that keeps paying off.
Yes, which is precisely why getting rid of even the possibility of career politicians should be a priority if democracy is to survive.
Where did I read that the US Founding Fathers, including George Washington, did not support the concept of political parties? And George Washington never belonged to a political party.
“Washington was re-elected without opposition in 1792. Hamilton built a national network of supporters that emerged about 1792–93 as the Federalist Party. In response, Jefferson and James Madison built a network of supporters in Congress and in the states that emerged in 1792–93 as the Democratic-Republican Party.”
I didn’t know that about George Washington, but it sounds right. And wasn’t Hamilton supposed to be one of THE worst Presidents ever?
So Hamilton got a bunch of cronies together to get elected? Then, of course, the next candidates had to up the ante of miss out. Sheesh.
Clearly, leaving the organisation of democracy open simply allowed bad actors to fill the void.
And I bet that Washington didn’t make voting compulsory [the way Australia did] because he assumed that after fighting off the British, all Americans would want to vote.
Frankly, assuming the best of human nature while ignoring the worst is a recipe for disaster. 😦
Well…. The first edition of the US Constitution only allowed wealthy land-owning white men who were not Jewish vote. No one else was allowed to vote. I think that was about six percent of the population back then. If the original Constutoin had not come with a method to amend it over time, we’d be stuck with that. Through amendments those eligible to vote increased to every adult citizen today.
Hmm, that isn’t exactly correct. Some adult citizens who ended up in prison lost their right to vote in some states like Florida where more than a million can’t. And most of them have dark tinted skin.
Oh! I didn’t know that about who was allowed to vote originally. I wonder how the non-wealthy militia men who actually fought the British felt about that? 😦
The wealthy white, male landowners leading the US revolution (and some of them wrote the Constitution) against the British Empire were locals and the British Empire wasn’t popular.
Then there’s this: In the United States or what would become the US, “literacy remained fairly steady between 1700-1790 for men, around 60%, while it rose in women from 40-50%.”
“According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), 79% of U.S. adults have English literacy skills that allow them to complete tasks that require paraphrasing, comparing and contrasting information, or making low-level inferences. However, 54% of adults have a literacy level below sixth-grade level, and 21% of Americans 18 and older are illiterate.”
Adults that can NOT read are easy to fool. I wonder what the literacy rate is for MAGA, and is it mostly below 6th grade or illiterate? If that’s a fact, no wonder these deplorables worship Traitor #45, who had been quoted saying he doesn’t like to read.
https://theweek.com/articles/915606/trumps-lethal-aversion-reading
Reading this made me wonder what the stats are like for Australia. I couldn’t find comparative stats but I did find this article about teaching methods that /don’t/ work:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/grattan-institute-reading-report/103446606
I remember the Offspring couldn’t get the hang of the ‘whole language’ method because essentially it required guessing what the words might be by looking at pictures. I ended up having to teach the Offspring to read using a concept called? syllabaries. It’s kind of like phonics in that kids learn the sound of syllables – like cat, mat, hat, bat etc – and only learn about the exceptions once they’ve mastered the parts of the language that are regular.
As an ex-teacher, I loathe ‘whole language’. I suspect it was devised to make life easier for teachers, not kids.
When I was still teaching, district administration forced us to follow the whole language approach to teaching English. Most of the teachers knew what it was and knew it was flawed, BS flawed. We even stood as one and fought holding it off for two years before district level management, with a top down, forced management styl, mandated that whole language BS had to be taught and even told us to throw away grammar and mechanics books. Said we wouldn’t need them anymore.
I hid my set. Then some of us became stealth teachers finding ways to introduce mini lessons usually the last 10 to 15 minutes of class on Fridays. That actually worked.
When the top down turds gave us our marching orders to do or die, I got so mad, I had a nose bleed and had to leave that department meeting. My blood pressure went that high.
Over the next few years, district admin had site principals and VPs recruit student spies to make sure we were doing what they told us to do. One of their spies, I still don’t know who it was, turned me in for those 10 to 15 minute stealth moments of real teaching.
That meeting didn’t go well. The principal got in close shouting at me triggering my combat PTSD. The VP witnessing that meeting in the principal’s office saw where my eyes were and the look on my face and stopped him, letting me go. I think she knew that I was planning to rip out his jugular with my teeth. She’d seen it in my eyes. After that, if I was walking down a hall between classes and that princapl turned a far corner headed my way, he always made an about turn and walked faster back the way he’d come.
About ten years after that all started, the whole language magic bullet BS, quietly went the way of the Dodo bird, and we were told to teach like we use to even if it meant buying new grammar and mechanics books. The reason, the reading test scores for the entire district had plummeted like a Nasvy SEAL jumping out of an aircraft for a HALO drop from higher than 30,000 feet.
That whole language BS came in with a lot of BANGS!!!!!, and went out with an almost silent whimper as if it had never existed. I hated that flawed crap.
LMAO – Oh I would have loved to see that confrontation! I’d stopped teaching by the whole language percolated through to the Aussie education system. Unfortunately, it hasn’t percolated /out/ yet. I’m not boasting when I say that I’m a bloody good teacher but the system drove me out. Like a lot of other good teachers, I wanted to teach, not play silly games dreamt up by idiots who either never set foot in a class, or scarpered at the first opportunity. Flawed crap indeed.
About 20 years in to the 30, I wanted to get out of teaching, but I couldn’t find a job I wanted. Administration can’t be I never classroom all the time, so I still had a lot of time to teach without those idiots interfering.
A good VP pulled me aside once during my planning period and warned me that district administration was holding meetings about me trying to figure out how to get rid of me because I fought back without mercy using the pen as a weapon that kept blowing them up until they pretty much left me alone the last few years.
So, I stuck it out until I turned 60, when I fled, swearing that if I had to find a job to survive again, I’d volunteer to blow myself up to take out some terrorist cell somewhere — and get paid enough to pay off the house so my daughter inherits it without a mortgage.
After 1983, public schools in the US turned into battlefields during the Reagan administration when that asshole released a cheery picked misleading report called A Naton at Risk blaming the schools for everything, even coining a phrase “school to prison pipeline” and blaming public school teacher for sky rocketing prison population in the US that was President Nixon and Regan’s fault when they declared war against recreational drugs like marijuana, and that manufactured war against the Public Schools in the United States spread to other countries like Australia.
I read that New Zealand finally had enough and stopped that BS. Don’t know if that is a fact or not. Finland kept them out for a long time, but from what I read recently, the destroy public education movement now has a foothold there too.
Everything that’s happened in that war against public education has always profited a few in the private sector outside of education. Waging war against public schools became a gold rush for those few and they are still at it taking in public money getting wealthier as they keep coming up with new ways to teach that don’t work but make them richer in the process.
30 years fighting them… -shakes head- I applaud your courage but…life’s too short for that much stress. 😦
I went from teaching kids to computers and tech support, and from there to tech writing, and from there to fiction writing. I wonder how many former teachers ended up writing too?
I suspect the biggest number of teachers who end up writing taught English.
I wouldn’t be surprised. I actually taught French and Japanese, but the core principles are not that different.
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