The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down

it's because it's incredibly difficult to get anything passed, the US legislative system has too many checks and balances. Every "check and balance" is another group that has to reach consensus for a proposed action and another point for an adversarial opponent to grind everything to a halt.

I contend that it is better to have a government that can reach consensus easily and act, and that is easy to change if they no longer reflect public consensus, than to have "checks and balances" where absolutely 100% of the government needs to be in consensus to do anything. Gridlock should not be a design feature of a government but that's how the system was engineered (deliberately - it dates from a time when states didn't view themselves as federal subjects but independent states, and this was supposed to help get everyone on board that "no, really, we're just going to do the things that absolutely everyone agrees on", there were many groups who were afraid of being steamrollered without their own special little body and checks on other authorities).

Unicameral parliamentary systems are better - one house to pass legislation, one PM who is a member of the majority in parliament, so everyone is on the same page. Snap elections if they do something that nobody likes, if they don't want to listen to the public then the queen can dissolve parliament and call for new elections.

(the queen actually is a very interesting role in the UK, she is kind of an "oracle" that decides deadlocks between the public and the parliament. When the two are in disagreement about whether to call elections she can resolve the stalemate. She really doesn't do much normally but in times of constitutional crisis can serve as a trusted independent authority - a very interesting safety mechanism that evolved almost by accident.)

(caveat: you said "things" which I took to mean something like "governmental products" which tend to have a high amount of inertia; if you had something else in mind this may not apply)

Republicans are just as adept at constructing things as deconstructing things. Look at No Child Left Behind (fundamental reconstruction of education), the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA (large new bureaucracies), or the TCJA (fundamental reconstruction of the tax system).

I think what we actually witness in government is two different phenomenons. First, Republicans act as a largely cohesive block that requires less coalition building. Second, Republican governing philosophy has as a central tenet the idea that government is inefficient and market-based solutions are better, from Reagan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." to Grover Norquist's Starve the Beast theory "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

And the inverse of this is also true, there is an aphorism about the two parties voters, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line." It seeks to explain why getting voters that agree with Democratic policies to the polls seems to be more difficult than getting voters that agree with Republican policies to the polls. This extends to the politicians, who pick largely from the same menu of issues but at different priority levels. This leads to the Democrats having to expend more effort to build coalitions, an example would be something like healthcare reform. Market-based solutions like the ACA have as much a home in the Democratic party as government-based solutions like Medicare For All (M4A). With a wider gamut of policy positions, more effort inevitably must be spent getting people to consensus.

This means that Republican governments get more of their goals done, and because of their governing philosophy many of those things are deconstructing existing programs. They are capable of putting new programs into place, I named a few but there are others, so it doesn't seem to me that the main difference is constructing new thing vs deconstructing existing things, but the amount of effort it requires to get your coalition to take action.

This all is an analysis of the efficacy of the two parties in accomplishing their goals, without really treading on the more dangerous ground of "who has the better goals?" I, like everyone else, have some opinion no this matter, but to try to keep the inevitable angry responses when discussing politics to a minimum, I'm going to just avoid discussing that altogether.

This is just the nature of reality. Creation is incredibly difficult and requires immense struggle. Destruction is effortless. It took billions of years of biological evolution to reach a point where a mass of cells can be conceived, nurtured, and grown into a thinking breathing organism capable of manipulating its' environment. One single mindless, simple burst of radiation can completely destroy that. You're battling against entropy. The natural order of things is chaos, disorder, and dissolution. When the will to fight and struggle for an ideal is lost, the inevitable result is decay.

This is just the nature of things. It’s easier to destroy a car than to build one. Same for houses, plants, animals... anything complex, really. Destruction is generally easier than creation.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/08...

It seems Donny is trying to take out his frustration with lackluster polling on Star and Stripes, despite that not having been the publication that conducted the poll. It is a more widely read US armed forces publication, though.

To note on the poll, officers would rather have another Commander in Chief by about a 3-2 margin.

From the article:

> The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.

That's 0.0022% of the Pentagons budget, i.e. essentially nothing.

The answer to this question is in the eighth paragraph of the article, right before the discussion on how congress actually refunded the publication, the decision now resting with the senate and how the Pentagon ordered it to shutdown anyway which is unusual.

I will hasard that when you said you looked at the article it was to be taken literally and didn't imply that you actually read it.

I hope we all got a good laugh over the idea that the Pentagon would ever be concerned with costs on the scale!

> The memo ordering the publication’s dissolution claims the administration has the authority to make this move under the president’s fiscal year 2021 defense department budget request. It zeroed out the $15.5 million annual subsidy for Stars and Stripes.

> The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.

The implied reason is “because its funding wasn’t included in the (non-binding) presidential budget proposal “

And how did this article get out he was cutting it?

His base is in part military and family's it's not something he would logically do 3 months before an election.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13019688734875648...

Who harassed more journalist and whistle blowers during their time in office, Trump or Obama. Neither was great but the prior administration set new standards for threatening those who would make government justify its actions. The difference is one was a media darling and the other is a media flashpoint

This memo happened before the story you linked.

I don't see what's inherently negative about government journalism, although I certainly wouldn't trust the independence of say Voice of America based on the way it's run. But the BBC shows it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.