8 Replies to “Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill”

  1. Assuming that the final results of the US election give a clear win for Joe Biden and it looks very much as though that will be the case, then this is one of the greatest weeks (or fortnights) for the future of our planet and all the people, plants and animals on it.
    Being rid of that simply dreadful man, Trump, should give everyone optimism and hope for the future in these difficult times.
    We should all celebrate being rid of Trump now and when he actually goes in January.

    1. Well said Alan. A few weeks ago Trump signed an executive order to open up the world’s largest old growth temperate rainforest in the Tongas, Alaska to logging. He has spent four years doing his best to reverse and rubbish anything Obama did purely out of spite and jealousy. This included cancelling one of the world’s all to rare marine protected zones off Maine’s coast. Getting some cheap support and votes from the fishing sector was probably an incentive too. As long as the USA is the world’s largest economy and democracy its president is effectively ours too. With that idiot monster Trump in the White House our lives and efforts were effectively being carried out on the deck of the Titanic, it was just a matter of time. I suspect many of us have been spending a lot of time eyeing the situation in America for months now and this has come as a great relief.

      Hopefully it’s also a sign that the growing authoritarianism we’ve been seeing across the world is now in reverse. Pinochet’s constitution has been thrown out in Chile, they’re fighting tooth and nail for real democracy in Belarus, Thailand, Hong Kong and in Poland they’ve hit back at women’s right to abortion being taken away. I just wish more was happening against that bastard Orban in Hungary. Of course Trump was a great fan of all the dictators, inspirational figures to him. Another good sign is that apparently many of the young people that came out in force at the election have a strong interest in the environment and conservation. For the past four years it’s not been easy to feel positive about the direction the world was going in so this has been a fantastic week, great to feel a wee weight off the shoulders and generally rather calm and ‘chilled’. Magic.

  2. The system is even more bonkers for the Senate election than it is for the presidential race. Every state, irrespective of size has two senators which means, for example, that Wyoming with half a million inhabitants has exactly the same representation as California with its 40 million inhabitants!

    The original aim of this may have been to provide a counter to a hegemony of populous urban areas over rural areas but the upshot today is that small populations in mostly conservative rural states wield a totally disproportionate amount of influence in the Senate.

    As a result Biden’s presumed eventual victory in the presidential election will to some degree be a pyrrhic victory as the Republican controlled Senate will be able to block much of whatever he tries to do. In the first instance the Senate’s powers for approving foreign treaties may tie his hands with respect to his intention to bring the US back into the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

    One way and another, what we have seen over the past week has not been a great advertisement for American democracy.

    1. All that effort and ceremony they put into honouring those who’ve died for their freedom, an absolutely phenomenal amount of money spent on the military supposedly to keep it – then the most blatant and nauseating voter suppression to stop Americans from voting for non Republicans. Black people in Georgia finding that they had to wait up to eleven hours to vote, ex felons in Florida being stopped from voting through technicalities, although the bulk of the population wanted voting rights returned to them. State Republican parties trying to pass as much legislation as possible to throw out likely Democrat ballots. All utterly disgusting and I hope the new administration highlights all of these shenanigans and hopefully makes them impractical for future elections. Hilary Clinton actually got 2.8 million more votes than Trump did in 2016, yet we all ended up with that monstrosity inflicted upon us for the past four years thanks as you say to their ludicrous system.

  3. There will be no change for the vast majority of the people from a Biden win. Nice as it was to see Trump defeated he is being replaced by a decrepit leader of a corporately corrupt party. Remember that it was a previous Democratic president, Obama, who increased the number of wars the US started(ably assisted by it’s UK pet poodle) and drone bombed anybody the US deemed they wanted to. Who was his vice president? Oh yes Biden. I wonder if the US hegemon has entered the imperial end times. The trouble is, unlike previous empires it is nuclear armed.

  4. The planet, and all decent human beings on it have just breathed one of the biggest sighs of relief ever heard! Let’s hope that we can finish the job and wipe out fascism for good.

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