I don’t have any particular suggestions of activist things to do today, so I’ll let people leave suggestions.
In the interest of encouraging everyone to be more militant, I’ll relay a story. I was talking with a moderately totebaggerish friend of mine (he works in finance but has totebagger tendencies) and he was feeding me the line that, although he voted for Hillary, he hated having to do choose between a crook (Hillary) and a lunatic (Trump). I’m sure that he, and many people who think this way, get those kinds of ideas by reading MoDo and Bobo and Frank Bruni and the rest. There’s no other way to put it: centrist punditry rots your brain. I used to like to read that stuff to get a sense of how people were thinking, and I still do occasionally hate read it in limited doses. But it does represent a some kind of propaganda state that many people live in, no different from North Korea in its own way. It took me a while — probably a couple years — to get that crap out of my brain once and for all.
Lit3Bolt
It’s Middle School politics 101. Clinton was a nerd, uncool, and was a teacher’s pet. Everyone beat up on her! That’ll show the establishment that we’re HIP and WITH IT.
Baud
Sorry, Doug. Those people suck, but that lie was pushed by haters across the ideological spectrum.
JPL
Flynn apologized to Pence, so all is forgiven.
This is good news for Putin.
AlbertZ
Saw this via LifeHacker this afternoon. Any thoughts? .”Citizen-Centric Advocacy: The Untapped Power of Constituent Engagement,”
? Martin
Interesting.
He clearly focuses on midwest, suggesting that this is a targeted action, that Mexico isn’t going after the US, rather after Trump states.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Baud: Yeah, I was just gonna say he misspelled “Greenwald, DeBoner, Jacobin etc.”
Kropadope
Are you suggesting that it’s possible to validate the right wing’s mendacity while still steering clear of its worst implications and most baseless of assertions? Moderates aren’t possessed of some great wisdom that let’s them see through the BS of both sides? Both sides always being to blame isn’t itself an extreme position?
Surely you jest.
The Thin Black Duke
No thanks. I already know how bigoted white people feel about me, so I won’t waste my time looking for that garbage. Life is too short, y’know?
Ruviana
I always thought of Bruni and Brooks as right wing. Softer perhaps but still right wing. MoDo is just a meangirl.
JPL
Kellyanne is saying that Flynn has the full confidence of the President. Flynn doesn’t recall discussing sanctions with the Russians.
There is no good news here.
aliasofwestgate
That lie has made me throw my hands up in frustration every time. Because there’s no way to really counter it. It’s been around so fucking long that it’s impossible to dissuade people from that line of thought. The main reason i never fell for it was because i have had a functioning bullshit detector since i was in my late teens. Then i added a bit of mass media training and i saw the propaganda and stopped watching the news entirely.
Facts don’t matter. Not to that patter they’ve heard for at least 30 years and isn’t remotely true.
The Moar You Know
If you live in the car thief/arsonist’s district, Darrell “Fucking” Issa is throwing a town hall:
2/21/2017, 6 pm
Jim Porter Recreation Center
1200 Vale Terrace Drive Vista, CA 92084
I plan to be there and will probably get turned away like everyone else. Should be fun.
debbie
@? Martin:
Good. Let’s see how Trump handles this one.
randy khan
So last night I was with a group of friends who are pretty violently anti-Trump. Two people there expressed some distaste for having had to vote for Clinton. Since they were my friends and, in the end, they did vote for Clinton, I didn’t say what I actually was thinking, but I really felt like asking them how it felt to be brainwashed by all of the anti-Clinton propaganda.
(Just for a taste of this, one of them talked about how the Clintons had become rich after he left office, and even expressed some concern that they made money by writing books and giving speeches. I was gobsmacked.)
Tenar Arha (same Tenar, more Nameless Ones)
Every time someone RT’s a villager centrist or even conservative anti-Drumpfer an angel loses its wings.
Baud
@randy khan: I would have said (or hoped I would have said) I was proud to vote for Clinton.
Lit3Bolt
@randy khan:
I once heard from a reliable source that Barack Obama was a Capitalist-Imperialist, as well.
The Far Left is entering Poe’s Law territory.
The Moar You Know
I don’t have any conservative friends and know (i.e. work with) very few of them. So you could say my friends are all “liberal”.
About 75% of them have publicly said a similar thing. I know thirty-plus years of repetition is a hard thing to fight, but damn, it’s amazing to me how many nominally sane people bought the line.
Major Major Major Major
Getting real sick of my coworkers telling me Pence would be worse than Trump.
Peale
@? Martin: I’ve thought about how Mexico could game this to make it hurt. I think they should just stop negotiating with Trump since all he wants to do is punish Mexico. We have a large trade deficit with Canada as well, and Canada competes with the US in a number of industries and directly with a number of multinational companies. Trump apparently told Trudeau today that he has no problem with Canada – that its Mexico that’s the problem. So fuck it. If the great white northern countries want to band together to beat up on Mexico, they should just exit. Mexico doesn’t have to raise tarrifs on US goods that much. There’s no need to punish its consumers. It doesn’t have that many industries to “protect.” But they should do the bear minimum allowed by the WTO for tarrifs on commodities and then lower those tarrifs for any countries that compete in the export markets with the US. Europe has a huge farm surplus right now. There’s no point in pretending that Mexico needs US agricultural staples.
They can do the same with manufactured goods. Just do what they can to reduce the market share US and Canadian companies have. There’s no point in trying to build, say, their own multi-national corporations to compete with the US. Just slowly erode their share.
Aleta
Republican voters have such weird ideas. People of color, any woman, doctors, poor people can be called immoral or criminal for doing things that are legal. Wealthy white men and corporations break laws and stay in power.
MCA1
Apropos of nothing in particular, I guess, but in three weeks in office per today’s Gallup tracker we’ve seen a -15 swing in approval levels for Agent Orange. A repeat of that amount of movement would have us closing in on Crazification levels by Spring Break.
Probably just harvesting of the lower hanging fruit in that -15, I guess, so doubtful the pace of peeling off continues like that. It’s mostly the foolishly hopeful totebaggery types Doug’s talking about. But still. He’s losing 5 percentage points PER WEEK and doing NOTHING to get any of them back on his side. We are within spitting distance of a landscape in which emperor wears no clothes declarations like Franken’s become the primary narrative of our politics.
Miss Bianca
I just had this spat with a FB friend, who was talking about “yeah, we may all be against Trump now but I stopped being a Democrat and I’m now an independent and Democrats lost because they SUCK and he held his nose and voted for Hillary but corruption and DNC shenanigans and never forget that BOTH SIDES DO IT and we need new ideas and fresh blood.”
So I had to let him have it. And asked him whether, as one of the newly-elected vice-chairmen of our county’s Democratic Party, I counted as “fresh blood”? And that if so, this fresh blood was telling him: You want the party to change? Rejoin. EIther become part of the solution or stay on the sidelines and hug yourself in your purity, but that I was really tired of white liberal meeping that just regurgitated right-wing and media talking points. Either man up and join up or stop whining about how HARD it is to have to do the right thing when the Republicans represent real evil that is really trying to destroy the government and the country.
Keep expecting him to unfriend me. Maybe I’ve actually done it this time!
Gin & Tonic
@JPL: Isn’t is pretty customary for an aide to have the President’s “full confidence” right before they’re sacked?
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Tough shit. If we have an opportunity to get Congress to impeach Trump, we take it.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major:
There’s definitely a case to be made there. The problem is that the arguments for either one being worse rest on assumptions we may never got the opportunity to fully test (for better or for worse).
Cacti
The epitaph of our Republic will be:
“But her e-mails”.
Followed by:
“Both sides do it”.
Ian G.
I find it rather tragicomic that, depending on whether you think the the botched Yemen raid was a foreign policy failure worse than Benghazi, we’re less than a month in and we’ve already had the Shitgibbon regime outdo the email, Clinton foundation, and Benghazi “scandals”. By the standards of his own supporters, Shitgibbon should have been hanged already.
geg6
@Peale:
I’m sure the Chinese will be happy to discuss trade options with them.
Baud
@Ian G.:
They have none.
randy khan
@Gin & Tonic:
Next: Trump supports Pence 1,000%.
J R in WV
No one has told me that they think Hillary Clinton is a crook. I don’t actually talk to anyone who thinks that. But if someone did say that, I would ask them how they thought Hillary had avoided indictment and arrest, after being investigated by a special prosecutor who spent years and tens of millions of dollars investigating her and Bill Clinton.
I would go on: In America we know someone is a criminal after they have had a trial and been found guilty, like Oliver North, or Scooter Libby, or Chelsea Manning, who were all tried and found guilty. Hillary was not, she was actually exonerated of every accusation that has been thrown at her, and there were plenty of baseless accusations. Therefore anyone who accuses her of criminality is actually committing libel or slander. Not technically in the legal sense, perhaps, but surely morally.
Adding one more thing: Has anyone ever accused Ms Clinton of criminal acts who didn’t stand to personally gain from making the accusations, and who wouldn’t stand to benefit were people to believe those evidence-free accusations? No? I’m about to rest my case here.
Last thing: anyone who believes that a Methodist church-going grandmother, who spent a career working for the improvement of opportunities for kids, is a greedy criminal based upon no evidence is a sucker with no critical thinking skills who has been fooled by people with an ax to grind. That’s an opinion based upon the evidence of my own eyes.
JPL
@Gin & Tonic: Of course. The other way to think about it is that Putin, said Flynn is my man. He stays.
Brachiator
Reductionism again. A fool is a fool, and that includes progressives like Nader, Greenwald, Sanders, Stein.
Idiotic comparison, but still would be an easy choice. Never go with a lunatic.
@Major Major Major Major:
Different kind of bad. Pence is a zealot, Trump is insane.
germy
Revelation 3:16
Kropadope
@Ian G.:
Which standards? They have at a minimum two identifiable sets.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope: Pence would be terrible but he’s not an existential threat to the existence of the nation/humans, and he hasn’t committed any impeachable offenses that I’m aware of either, unless running with trump counts.
ETA: getting rid of Trump also salvages what’s left of our reputation, which is valuable too.
randy khan
@Kropadope:
Pre-inauguration, I might have agreed that there was a case either way. But as of now we’re mostly getting what we’d have gotten from any Republican on domestic policy and demonizing Muslims, plus the extra bonuses of utter incompetence on everything else and the constant fear Trump will do something so stupid on foreign policy that it costs a lot of lives or wrecks the economy. With Pence we probably just get the standard Republican evil, which is bad enough, but not nearly as bad as what we’re seeing from Trump.
Ian G.
@Baud:
@Kropadope:
I know, I know. He’s a god-king to them. It’s like a real life sociological experiment just to see which of our neighbors would be happy in North Korea.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
Maybe a can of peaches will help the lump get out of your head.
*I love anyone who loves The Presidents of the United States of America.
Mike in DC
@MCA1:
Rasmussen is the wing nut fallback poll. Started at 59 approve, 41 disapprove. Currently at 52-48. Bush’s low mark with them was around 31-33%. I am looking forward to Trump dropping below 50 in their polls, then the slow but steady death March to “historic low approval” territory.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major: Didn’t Pence cause an HIV epidemic in Indiana? Something about closing Planned Parenthood then dragging his feet on needle exchanges after the problem was identified?
Seems like a pretty existential threat from my POV.
randy khan
@J R in WV:
And there’s always what I said to people during the election (and even last night): She’s been investigated so much that either she’s actually innocent, or she’s the world’s greatest criminal. Either way, I want her on my side. (Somebody last night pointed out that she’s been accused of dozens of murders, too, and suggested that if she really were a serial killer of that order, you *really* don’t want to get on her bad side, which I thought was a nice addition.)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Thank you Doug!for following different with from. I’ve seen so many uses of than lately that I almost cringe when I read “diff” and want to avert my eyes.
/pedant
Ian G.
@Major Major Major Major:
Pence would be a George W. Bush redux: awful, but we’d survive, and we’d probably not even have another Iraq War. Bannon and Miller make me wonder about what might be left of human civilization after Trump.
I’d go with Pence.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope: He did many bad things as governor of Indiana. The HIV thing was separate from the PP thing, though.
Being an existential threat to a subset of the people of a nation is, however, different from being an existential threat to the nation.
randy khan
@Mike in DC:
Wow – a 14% swing in Rasmussen after 3 weeks? Words fail me.
Calouste
@randy khan: Also, Republicans in Congress won’t be as afraid of Pence voters (evangelicals basically) as they are of Trump voters. The GOP has managed to string along evangelicals for decades without giving them much, they can keep doing that. The nuts that are Trump fans are a different matter.
Baud
@Kropadope: Unfortunately, if you want to engage in this exercise, you really do have to add up and compare the potential casualty counts of both men.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major: My understanding was that Planned Parenthood was the only place in some counties in Indiana where one could be tested for HIV infection. Closing PPs is also awful for other reasons, but lack of testing definitely helped exacerbate the epidemic.
ETA: But yes, being an existential threat to people is different than being an existential threat to the nation (unless you kill all the people of the nation, I suppose).
Kropadope
@Baud: If I had to choose one of them to get us all killed, I’d definitely choose Trump. The nukes get the job done way faster.
The Lodger
@Brachiator: Seconded. They’re all crooks. The few that are lunatics are far more dangerous.
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
I have an old friend who, if you talked to him casually would not expect him to hate the Republican president. But he does, with a fiery passion. And he voted for Clinton but said he did because those were his choices. He doesn’t like her but didn’t know why. I told him that 30 yrs of lies and bullshit on TV plants doubts in your head if you let it.
Propaganda.
We have been seeing it in action. It brought us a disaster of a executive branch, to go along with the congressional one. This is what the results of a successful propaganda campaign looks like. Disaster. Because if it wasn’t going to be a disaster one wouldn’t have had to lie and bullshit about it.
clay
While Pence would be awful domestically, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t cede America’s moral, economic, and political standing in the world to Russia and China. He may squander that standing, a la GWB, but he wouldn’t voluntarily cede it, like Trump seems intent on doing.
Sure, he’d try to clamp down on gay rights and abortion rights, but I don’t think you can re-bottle those genies as easily as the theocrats seem to think you can. True, he’d be awful on the environment, but Trump is already awful.
And finally, Pence doesn’t seem to want to break everything, which is what
TrumpBannon wants. Give me Pence any day of the week.sunny raines
only if you let it – the failure of US corporate news to be news, and the smarmy he said/she said of “centrist punditry” is no excuse for a lack of critical thinking!
J R in WV
And another thing!
We have been contributing to Planned Parenthood monthly for years now. Since the election I have diverted the funds that we were contributing monthly to Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the ACLU and to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which works for equal rights, especially for voting rights,and against established hate groups, like Milo’s bunch of amateur fascists, the KKK and White Knights and such asses.
I’m not sure where we will invest the remaining funds, maybe local groups.
@Kropadope:
I think Pence closed drug treatment facilities while ending needle exchanges, causing mostly hepatitis infections, along with some HIV problems too. I don’t think his odd hatred of Planned Parenthood was related to those health problems, but he definitely killed people with poor decision making.
That was part of why he was willing to be The Donald’s running mate, Indiana was going to fire him, which would have made him look for a real job, eventually.
Iowa Old Lady
@randy khan: Yeah, the trend is essentially the same.
zhena gogolia
@clay:
My sentiments exactly. And he has no Hitler-y charisma.
Baud
Back to the thread topic, liberals like the ones we’re talking about are the only thing that really depresses me. Given how many lies have been told about liberals, you would think liberals would be the ones who are most conscientious about avoiding spreading very similar sorts of lies against our allies, and especially our standard-bearing. I know they are a minority of us, but it’s enough to cost us close elections.
Mike E
POT
USA!
I phone bank for an enviro org, I can walk from this office to my f/t jobby in 5 mins… resource conservation advocacy reaches all peeps, so I stay nonpartisan pretty easily tho I can definitely dish it out where needed ;-)
Uncle Ebeneezer
@randy khan: I went to an Indivisible meeting yesterday evening. A 90 year old woman sitting next to me said something like “Hillary just had so much baggage, we needed somebody else…” As my face reddened and steam emitted from my ears, while pondering just how nasty I could be to a nice, 90 year old lady, my wife fortunately interjected “Yeah, no. We don’t agree with that at all, but ANYWAYS…”
The meeting itself was okay but many of the people there were really new to any kind of political action whatsoever. Which was encouraging but it was a bit 101-level with a lot of handholding. I’m glad the lady running it has the patience for that sort of thing but I don’t know how regularly I’ll go. I’m more into picking a couple issues, finding the other people interested in them and getting to work.
Mike in DC
There is a distinction, I think, between a political moderate and a political centrist. While both may define themselves as between the two poles of the spectrum, I think moderates have actual policy ideas and positions, while centrists tend to define themselves as supportive of splitting the difference or “can’t the two sides work together on a sensible solution”. Centrists seem deeply unserious to me. But moderates can be serious and sincere.
danielx
I believe the French have a saying to the effect that if you have to choose between a crook and a fascist, always pick the crook. Which is obnoxious in this instance, since I do not believe HRC to be a crook.
Kropadope
@Mike in DC:
Quoted for truth and I’ll add that anyone looking for an example should compare Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama.
Boatboy_srq
@Baud: Yes they do: they’re just for teh wimminvolk, Blahs, and the rest of Those Other People©.
Turgidson
@randy khan:
Right. Early on, before I had taken a full measure of how much of an unhinged, narcissistic lunatic Trump really is, I thought he stood a decent chance of being the least-awful potential Republican president other than mayyyyyyyyybe Kasich. I thought his Build the Wall shit was more for laughs than a real thing, I didn’t see the Alt Right influence on him yet. Since he’s a New York libertine, I thought he’d be better, or at least less bad, on culture war bullshit than other Republicans would be. And I thought maybe he’d break the GOP’s Ayn Randian economic bullshit orthodoxy, which long run ought to be a good thing.
I went into the 2016 campaign thinking all of the more typical GOP candidates were lying crooks who would basically do the opposite of the right thing on just about every conceivable issue. And I haven’t revised that opinion of the other candidates at all. But most of them were not demonstrably mentally ill in a clinical sense (their political ideologies, however…) and I wouldn’t have wondered if they would respond to a negative tweet with a flurry of nuclear missiles.
I find the idea of a Pence presidency pretty terrifying in its own right. But after the past year and a half of getting to know just how sick a person and infirm a mind Donald J. Trump is, I’d take him over Trump without hesitation.
tobie
@randy khan: That was my weekend in a nutshell. Met with some acquaintances and the husband complained that it was terrible that Americans had to choose between two horrible candidates and that perhaps in the future the Democratic party could become a truly progressive party. When I asked him what made Hillary in his view corrupt, he told me that he had read enough about the Clinton Foundation and Haiti to know that she had been mixed up with shady stuff. Hard to rebut accusations that in the end turn out to be utterly vague.
Turgidson
@Kropadope:
I look at Obama as a pretty solid liberal who was happy to use moderate means to achieve progress towards liberal ends, if that was what the political circumstances allowed.
Joe Lieberman was just a sanctimonious asshole.
Kropadope
@Turgidson:
That’s why I tend to look at “moderate” as more of a temperament than an identifiable point on the political spectrum.
germy
@Baud:
MCA1
@J R in WV: Did you write that with Martin Sheen’s voice in mind? ’cause that’s how I read it. Thumbs up!
Baud
@germy: Too radical for Indiana. Now that is something.
germy
@Baud: And too radical for Indiana republicans. That’s REALLY something…
Baud
@tobie:
This election cycle has made me question whether that would be a good thing.
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
Compared with the corrupt stuff that the Trump gang is openly doing, Hillary Clinton is a saint.
PVDMichael
Kelly Anne Conway: “Flynn has Trump’s full confidence.”
These people are wretched.
danielx
@J R in WV:
Pretty much – if Pence had run for re-election, he would have been beaten like a big bass drum. His multiple fuck-ups included the RFRA debacle and dragging his feet on needle exchange programs until it was too late – including one particularly egregious case in which Austin, a Scott County town with a population of around 4,000, had 190 HIV cases as of April 2016.
Bless his heart.
Baud
@Brachiator: Compared to me, Hillary Clinton is a saint.
JDM
@Miss Bianca: had an acquaintance who stopped talking to me because when he brought up Bill Clinton’s blowjob as if it were a both sides thing comparable to Bush’s Katrina inaction (then current) and I said I don’t give a shit about Bill Clinton’s affair.
It was the incivility, you see.
Fast forward a few years and he started talking to me again about the time he stopped voting Republican due to McCain picking Palin for VP. Now he enjoys telling his rightwing North Carolina neighbors how much he saved with Obamacare and he votes straight Democratic.
Sometimes they wake up. Whether my input helped with his wake up call I don’t know, but sometimes you need to whack the mule with a board to get his attention.
AMinNC
Speaking to your call for suggestions, Doug, in my weekly email to friends for action items, here’s what I focused on this week:
1. Call your senators and rep and ask that they call for a special investigatory commission to look into connections between members of the Trump Administration (and his political advisors) and Russia, a hostile foreign government that we know meddled in our electoral process.
2. Call the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and ask them to call for a special investigatory commission to begin an investigation into these troubling conflicts: (202) 224-4751
3. The GOP is already putting out memos outlining their plans to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Call Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Chair of the House Financial Services Committee and leader of the charge to undo these protections) and express your disapproval of his actions and your strong support of the CFPB (202) 225-3484.
If anyone wants to receive weekly emails outlining actions like this, let me know and we can figure out how to connect.
Mister Forkbeard
@J R in WV: I’ve had that conversation with a lot of people. And the answer is always that “She’s so well connected that everything is hushed up. They’re *killed* people, you know?”.
I’ve tried explaining why the Clinton Body Count is BS, or asked why Republicans in office with a lot of power and reason to investigate her have never been able to nail her with anything. And again, the answer is that “Hillary controls or kills anyone who might be brave enough to challenge her”, and is often accompanied by a protestation that this is obviously true because multiple groups have proved treason/murder/perfidy/EMAILS so she should be arrested but isn’t, because of said connections.
There’s no real arguing with these folks. But they appear to be a majority of Trump supporters. And some independents/liberals who’ve absorbed rightwing talking points and don’t appear to realize it.
Patricia Kayden
@The Moar You Know: Ooooh. If you get in, videotape it so we can see his humiliation. He deserves every ounce of humiliation that he gets.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
Wait…You have an email server in your basement?
Ridnik Chrome
@Turgidson: I’ve always believed that Lieberman was a Republican mole. It was William F. Buckley and the National Review who got him elected in the first place, because they hated Lowell Weicker.
Patricia Kayden
@Major Major Major Major: Perhaps he would be worse than Trump but so what? Wouldn’t that just mean that we oust him in 2020 and wave elect Democrats so that our side takes over Congress and undoes the damage done by Republicans? Bringing down Trump, even if it means a President Pence, is a good thing in my opinion since it was embarrass Republicans as a whole. It would show their lack of judgment in picking such an unqualified man to lead this country. Don’t see any downside.
JCJ
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire:
Lump lingered last in line for brains and the one she got was sorta rotten and insane…
Wait, is the first word in that line really supposed to be “Trump?”
Mister Forkbeard
@Uncle Ebeneezer: I’ve gotten into this discussion with my wife as well. She also believes that Hillary had a lot of baggage. She believes that baggage is largely made up and the result of 30+ years of propaganda, but says that what matters is that people BELIEVED she had baggage and the media was happy to back up that delusion.
She’s mostly right, I would think. Strategically, Hillary wouldn’t have been the best choice even though she certainly should have been good enough to win out over Trump, absent awful media/FBI malfeasance/Russian intervention. Not that Wilmer would have been a better choice either. I’ve had this same discussion here a couple times, in regards to female nominees: Basically, female nominees have additional risks and baggage than male candidates, and given two equal candidates I would probably just choose the male for strategic reasons. Though of course, given a better female candidate and a worse male candidate, I’d go with the female one.
cosima
Along those same lines, today I was talking with another mum at the riding stables. Born & raised Scot, husband oil, so has spent much of the past 20 years out of the UK in various countries, mixing with a lot of US oil trash. She was explaining to me that one of her Louisiana friends had told her that she & her family were life-long Dems, but had voted for the shitgibbon b/c she ‘just couldn’t bring herself to vote for Clinton.’ I said to her ‘well, that would be the end of it that friendship for me.’ She was quite taken aback and went on to try to explain to me that her friend isn’t a racist, said she felt like she didn’t have a choice b/c Clinton was so awful, blah blah…. I told her that in my opinion LA and the other southern states are steeped in racism, it’s endemic & systemic, built-in, and you rise above it, or you internalise it, and only someone who has internalised & normalised it could have voted for that vile person, because there is a line in the sand for truly non-racist people, and he crossed it over & over. I told her that I understand that culturally they’re different from NW US folk like me, but that doesn’t excuse it.
I don’t think she’ll be talking to me again, but I’m certain my life won’t be diminished by that lack. I wonder what she’d think of her ‘Louisiana friend’ if she heard her spouting pro-Trump shite. I cannot — ever — be friends with someone who voted for &/or supported that person.
Uncle Ebeneezer
For potential action items, I saw this on the Book of Faces:
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I have something in my basement. No need to go into it now.
Ruckus
@JDM:
I was reading your comment and thinking jackass rather than mule, but the concept of board was the same.
efgoldman
@randy khan:
Well if THAT isn’t mendacious, greedy evil, I don’t know what is.
Apparently way more people than we ever expected turned off their brains at puberty, or something.
efgoldman
@Tenar Arha (same Tenar, more Nameless Ones):
And they crunch when you step on them….
? Martin
Despite being home to ⅓ of the nations Planned Parenthood clinics and having expanded abortion access, California’s abortion rate continues to fall faster than the national rate, with credit going primarily to expanded access to birth control – both due to it being over the counter now, and the state subsidizes birth control for low income households.
Kropadope
It just occurred to me that Republicans are employing the soft bigotry of low expectations against their white supporters. They don’t think white people can succeed if they suffer professionally for being assholes or if they don’t have a leg up due to selective law enforcement or turning a blind eye to bias in pay and hiring.
We white people should proudly stand up and declare that we don’t fear being on equal footing with our fellow Americans!
efgoldman
@Miss Bianca:
Hey! Good for you!!
lapassionara
@AMinNC: I like that idea. Count me in.
Kropadope
@randy khan:
That’s like the most honest buck that any politician has ever made.
efgoldman
@Gin & Tonic:
Like baseball managers and football coaches.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
I think it’s actually the switch never got turned on in the first place. They just glide along, hoping that things work out, not having to trouble themselves in pretty much any way except to figure out what crappy beer to like or who to screw today.
Miss Bianca
@Uncle Ebeneezer: will do.
@efgoldman: aw, thanks!
Davis X. Machina
No possibility that the notion that HRC is a ‘crook’ had a transmission vector with the initials ‘BS’?
Aleta
@Major Major Major Major:
to the world. to the ecosystems
randy khan
@tobie:
The Clinton Foundation thing is incredibly frustrating because you almost couldn’t have a better compare and contrast with the Trump Foundation. I usually just tell people that I’ve looked at the tax returns (true) and that as the former treasurer of a non-profit I wish we could have spent so little of our money on fundraising and admin and so much on programs that helped people. It doesn’t always shut them up, but most people are so astonished that I actually looked at the tax returns that it works.
Turgidson
@Patricia Kayden:
Absolutely. The best case scenario now that Hair Furor actually is in office doing horrendous shit every.single.fucking.day is for him to be so busy making a huge ass of himself, being ridiculed for it, lashing out in response, [repeat weekly] that he doesn’t have much time left over to actually do too much of the heinous shit he supposedly has planned. And eventually the spectacle will get so egregious, and/or he’ll do something so breathtakingly impeachable, that even the amoral invertebrate shits-for-brains in the GOP Congressional caucus can’t take it anymore and shitcan him. The impeachment process, even if it is an open and shut case, will drag on for months and force the GOP to take sides in an intraparty brawl.
That shitshow, plus the regrettable likelihood that the economic recovery will stall at some point – we’ve already gone way longer than usual without a contraction – should create an electoral opening so wide even the Democrats can’t figure out how to fuck it up.
While I think it’s pretty likely that the Trump shitshow is, in a normal world, so spectacularly awful that he deserves impeachment, my theory of the case breaks down at the point where the Congressional GOP steps in and does the dirty work. Paul Ryan would sooner leap over the Empire State Building in a single bound before he would shiv Trump, no matter how bad it gets.
efgoldman
@J R in WV:
What about WVa Public TV. What the hell is up with that?
Calouste
@Mister Forkbeard:
The choices were Hillary or guy with who kept lying about releasing his tax returns, had a campaign manager with ties to Russia, couldn’t articulate his rather fantastical plans, and had, to put it mildly, a blind spot with regards to minority and women’s issues.
Both in the general and the primary. There were no other choices.
Calouste
@randy khan: You can also look at the donors to the Clinton Foundation. They got tens of millions from governments of countries that are known for their lack of corruption. They wouldn’t get that if those governments didn’t think they were solid.
efgoldman
@Mister Forkbeard:
The right answer is: “If she really had that power, why are Issa, Gowdy, and especially Chaffetz still alive?”
J R in WV
@MCA1:
Thanks!
Gosh. Maybe late at night I have a secret career as a screen play writer for Hollywood!! No wonder I’m so tired!
Brachiator
@Mister Forkbeard:
But didn’t Trump do an interview with Bill Or’Reilly where he suggested that political murder is no big deal?
The Clinton crap is nonsense, but it won’t go away for some people who should know better.
efgoldman
@Patricia Kayden:
True. On the other hand, we’d have to be ready for them to go after the next Dem president (and probably the one after that) for sneezing without a clean handkerchief, or something.
Baud
@efgoldman: Remember, what they did to Hillary was simply a turbo-charged version of what they did to Gore and Kerry.
efgoldman
@Baud:
And what they were waiting to do to you!
Seth Owen
@Mike in DC: What is amazing to me is the erosion in his approval rating even though he has not really done anything or screwed up in a disastrous way. Sure, the Muslim ban was egregious and we have daily outrages like Kellyanne, Miller, Devos, etc., but none of those compares to a war, hostage crisis, economic downturn, terror attack or other crisis that hobbled other administrations. Just wait until China seizes an American ship, or Russia shoots down another airliner, or some North Korean commandoes kidnap Japanese beachgoers or some big bank suddenly collapses or a meteor wipes out a city or whatever Big Thing fate has in store for us. Does anyone, anyone at all, think Trump has the chops to respond in an appropriate, effective way to any real crisis?
Taylor
@Mister Forkbeard:
Kelly Gillbrand’s gender is a major plus for me if she is running in 2020 IMO.
This fucking country* owes an apology for the travesty of the last election. The least it can do to make amends is to elect a fucking female next time.
* I include woman-hating women who voted for Trump or one of the Trump enablers, not matter what their fucking mealy-mouthed excuse was. And don’t get me started on the miserable wastes of space who didn’t even fucking vote.
permafrost
@J R in WV: Hillary was tried and convicted in the media. No trial necessary.
J R in WV
@efgoldman:
Well , the new “Democrat” governor is Jim Justice, coal billionaire (really, not like Trump!) who owns many many coal companies AND The Greenbrier, a famous resort in SE WV. So he’s buddies with lots of Republican coal men, who hate Public services of all sorts, but especially PBS and NPR. And he needs to balance a very badly screwed up budget, and WV PB is nearly $5,000,000.00 – in a multi-billion dollar budget!
Jim’s best commercial in the election was, “I’m a Coal Man! Heck, My Dad was A Coal Man! So I understand the Coal Bidness! I can bring Coal Back to WV!” He’s rich, not smart.
We’ve been kicking in to NPR monthly for many years. We used to listen to their programming a lot, when they had lots of classical music. That mostly went away last June 30, when the fiscal year turned. They could save $22K by running BBC World News, which didn’t cost anything as they already subscribed to BBC news. So we don’t listen as much. We don’t get a PBS TV signal into the hollow where we live except very occasionally. But we still kick in, so far. It is the best broadcast news outfit in the state.
BBC World News is good, but not restful and soothing at bedtime, as the classical music overnight show was. We would leave the radio playing set for 90 more minutes when we turned the lights out. Now I have CDs with multiple MP3 albums from our CD collection, which we leave playing, etc. You can get 10 or 12 albums on a CD with a little compression.
J R in WV
@permafrost:
Well, yeah, the “mass media” is now a propaganda arm for right wing fascists, that’s clear. I dunno what t do about it.
@efgoldman:
I also wrote a long letter to Governor Justice supporting WV Public Broadcasting, pointing out that cutting their budget was penny wise and pound foolish. There’s no other state-wide broadcast network of any description. In an emergency you would have different screaming dummies on every TV station, leading with bleeding.
I didn’t mention that I worked for W V Educational Broadcasting as it was known back then for 2 years in the 70s. But still, I made my points. Not that it will matter.
randy khan
@Calouste:
But, but, she* took money from a Nobel Prize winner she’d known for years and then met with him while she was Secretary of State.
*Well, technically the foundation, but you know all that money secretly was funneled to her through a secret account set up by zombie Vince Foster and the Rose Law Firm.
Mister Forkbeard
@Calouste: Oh, no argument there. Among the choices in the primary/general, Hillary was by FAR the best choice.
This is a more “blue sky” hypothetical.
@Taylor: Yep. I really like Harris. She’s good, from what I can tell. I would dearly love for a female president in 2020, and what was done to Hillary was morally awful.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Taylor:
Amen. Most of Hillary’s “baggage” was overtly sexist double standards being applied to her unfairly. The people who call themselves Progressives and Leftists who simply chose to throw their hands up or complain about a candidate having baggage (as they all do) rather than pointing out how much bullshit said baggage was and fighting the sexism at every turn, really have lost my respect. HRC was a great candidate. Period. Full stop. Some of us tried to help everyone we could influence, see that fact. Others simply said “baggage” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or worse continually added fuel to the fire. I have zero patience for having these discussions with them now.
Miss Bianca
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Word.
Daulnay
While all the anti-Trump protests encourage me and give me hope for the future, the comment section of this blog leaves me in despair.
Authoritarian-hugger Trump threatens the end of our Republic; we need to gather allies, paper over minor differences, and win over as many conservatives as we can. Liberals, moderates, conservatives, … we can all go back to our usual arguments after we’ve staved off dictatorship and driven the actual Nazis back into their caves.
What do I find here? People re-hashing the anti-Bernie stuff, the complaints about press unfairness towards Hillary, and pooh-poohing of peoples’ misgivings about her. Seriously? Water under the bridge, isn’t it? She lost, and all the what-ifs and dumping on doubters for being insufficiently blinded by her brilliance just gets in the way.
I started to read Balloon Juice years ago when John was still a conservative who was willing to think and reason. I did because of certaintly that we have to engage and listen to people who disagree with us if we’re going to have a civil society and a functioning democracy. This used to be a place that tolerated disagreement, but lately too much of this comment section fills with disdain for those who disagree with the group-think.
IMO, Hillary’s ‘bullshit baggage’ cost her the election. A lot of silicon ink was spilled here denying that she had actual baggage or that it could cause problems, instead of facing up to it. Taking $10 million from bankers for a few hours of secret speeches is a big red flag, and should raise serious doubts about any candidate, male or female, black or white, Christian or Muslim. It’s scandalous that she was nominated, and the party’s dogged refusal to see that is a significant hindrance in its struggle to recover.
NR
@Calouste:
Wow, what a horrible candidate. It sure is a good thing we picked Hillary over him or we might have lost the White House to a clown. Good thing we dodged that bullet!
XTPD
@NR: Killgrave would’ve won.
J R in WV
@Daulnay:
“…taking $10 million from bankers for a speech…”
Now I’m speechless! If you have the delusion that Hillary ever was paid $10MM for making a speech, you are mentally defective past all repair or healing. And if that is the kind of insane exaggeration that you find appropriate in a political discussion, you are socially unacceptable in polite society.
Go now, and DIAF… please!
Doug!
@Tenar Arha (same Tenar, more Nameless Ones):
I view the anti-Trump conservatives differently from the professional centrists. They’ve really had to go in a new direction by criticizing Republicans and I’ve got to give them some credit for it.
Daulnay
@J R in WV:
Really? You edit my quote so that it says something that I never said, and attack me for it? Balloon Juice has gotten worse than I thought.