What we’ve been waiting for.
This post is in: America, Best President Ever, Domestic Politics, Don't Mourn, Organize, Open Threads
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2018, gun safety, Open Threads, Voting Rights, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
WATCH: Susan Bro, mother of Heather Heyer, remembers her daughter — and what her daughter stood for in #Charlottesville — on the 1-year anniv. of her death. pic.twitter.com/W76fl51czf
— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 12, 2018
There are some good people in the world.
The guy accused of starting the Holy Fire in Orange County, CA has two cats. His neighbor, whose cabin was destroyed in the fire, is looking for the cats to adopt them since he's in custody.
Cat ladies rule.
— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) August 13, 2018
Click on any of the tweets below to read the whole thread…
1. Here's a little public service announcement about your vote & the November elections. If you live in a state that is pruning its voter rolls or moving people to inactive status & you want to make sure you can vote on 11/6, what should you do? Read on, the time to act is now.
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) August 11, 2018
5. How do you keep this from happening to you in November? The NVRA/Motor Voter Act prohibits states from engaging in voter roll maintenance closer than 90 days to an election. We are now within that 90 day timeframe. That means you should go & update your registration NOW.
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) August 11, 2018
Same for this tweet-string:
As we wrap up #GSU18, I want to thank the 1,000+ volunteer leaders – including 300+ gun violence survivors – from 47 states and DC, who attended. Just 5 years ago, I skyped with 5 women trying to figure out how we could build @MomsDemand. As of last week, we are 5 million strong. pic.twitter.com/gHwfjFyd3M
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) August 12, 2018
The influx of tens of thousands of new volunteers in the wake of the shooting tragedy in Parkland strengthened us to pass more good gun bills than in any prior legislative session, and to stop 1,000+ bad @NRA bills, for a win rate of over 90% for the 4th straight year in a row. pic.twitter.com/O1m6Chv9AB
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) August 12, 2018
.@MomsDemand volunteers also doubled down this year on fighting gun violence in marginalized communities. If we want to end gun violence, we have to fight the systemic racism that can cause it, too. We must we listen to those most affected by gun violence and work together.
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) August 12, 2018
Finally, while I’ll probably put up a dedicated post later, you will no doubt be pleased to hear that the #UniteTheReich Reunion Rally… did not live up to its proponents’ hopes…
Embarrassing day for the alt-right. Meager turn-out to massive opposition. When police let reporters into their area, we easily outnumbered them. Permit was until 7:30 but they began leaving by 5.
— Matt Ford (@fordm) August 12, 2018
Monday Morning Open Thread: Reasons to BelievePost + Comments (92)
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2018, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Midterms are referendums on the party in power. I think a message of "I'm not those guys" is more than enough.
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) August 5, 2018
how narrow is Trump's base?
in new Gallup poll, his rating among whites without college degrees is 58% approve, 39% disapprove
among all other Americans, it's 29% approve, 66% disapprove
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 6, 2018
I am not a historian, but I endorse this thread:
Why are all the #twitterstorians arguing with Dinesh DSouza? He’s not a historian, he’s just a right wing grifter and propagandist, he’s not interested in truth and neither are any of his followers. Every time you argue with him you’re just promoting him and increasing his sales.
— Moshik Temkin (@moshik_temkin) August 6, 2018
These corrections aren't aimed at him or any of his followers.
They're aimed at normal people who don't have the actual facts at hand and have to encounter this nonsense from friends or family members in the real world and, of course, random partisans here on the internet.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 7, 2018
I'm not going to suggest any causality here, but as the opening of this film has apparently been the weakest opening he's ever had, I'm not sure there's much to the argument that we're boosting his ticket sales.https://t.co/A8bCM3JxFO
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 7, 2018
I understand the arguments against, but personally I feel we have a duty to engage with this hackish history, as much as scientists have a duty to push back on climate change deniers and doctors have a duty to push back on the anti-vaxxers.
Because if we don't do it, who will?
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 7, 2018
And yes, a lot of times it feels like mopping back the ocean.
But in the end, I'd rather push back with the truth than let the lie stand. As I see it, that's a basic part of our job description.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 7, 2018
As Kevin says, it’s not about the nonsense-peddlers; it’s about the prospective buyers.
— Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) August 7, 2018
"it's still magic, even if you know how it's done"
(Terry Pratchett) pic.twitter.com/fo7oaFKZKt
— Paul Bronks (@BoringEnormous) August 5, 2018
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Respect the ExpertsPost + Comments (106)
This post is in: Dolt 45, Don't Mourn, Organize, Local Races 2018 and earlier, Open Threads, Popular Culture, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
monday night – cant wait – come sing with us broadway folk 7 pm @KremlinAnnex #stopTRUMP pic.twitter.com/lI8wWuv9Fe
— ROSIE (@Rosie) August 3, 2018
From NYMag‘s Vulture blog:
There’s no telling what the political effectiveness will be, but in terms of driving President Trump completely up the wall, there are few protest ideas more powerful than Rosie O’Donnell singing show tunes outside the White House. According to the Associated Press, the SMILF star and one of Donald Trump’s many, many arch-nemeses is helping recruit Broadway performers for a musical protest this coming Monday, August 6. The demonstration is being organized by host Seth Rudetsky and producer James Wesley of, appropriately enough, Sirius XM’s On Broadway….
Variety has an interview:
…. O’Donnell is jumping on a bus on Monday in New York City to head to Washington, D.C. to perform musical numbers with a team of Broadway actors at the Kremlin Annex, a three-week-old nightly protest against President Donald Trump in front of the White House that encourages participants to be so loud that they hope the president will have trouble sleeping.
Variety caught up with O’Donnell at her apartment in New York City just hours after having flown home from the Boston set of her Showtime series “SMILF” to talk Trump, Roseanne Barr, LeBron James and why she won’t be running for office anytime soon.
You’re going to Washington to do two of your favorite things — politics and musical theater.
Exactly. Merge them when you can. Look how it helped “Hamilton.”
Where did the idea come from to sing Broadway songs in front of the White House?
I called [Sirius/XM radio On Broadway host] Seth Rudetsky and said, “I am going to rent a bus and I’m going to get as many people as I can on the bus with a drum team and do a drum circle at the White House. But then we got such a great response from the Broadway community that we said we’ll do the drum circle the next time. For now, let’s just get as many Broadway people as we can. We want to remember what is good about this country and what they love while voicing their disgust with this administration and what’s become of our nation’s reputation. I made sure with [Kremlin Annex organizer] Adam Parkhomenko was okay with it and he said, “Of course, that’s what we’re here for.”…
Are you hopeful for the midterms?
Yes, I’m hopeful. I think Americans will turn up in numbers that will astound everyone. And I am hopeful we are going to take the House and if we’re lucky, the Senate and then we’re going to get rid of him as soon as possible — a day after we win. And I think people will be rejoicing all over the place, all over the world.
Tennesseans have a choice to make this November. Do we stand with Donald, or Dolly? ???? #TNSEN pic.twitter.com/8seGcRDoYL
— Smoky Mountain Values PAC (@MountainValues) August 4, 2018
Monday Morning Open Thread: Just A Song At TwilightPost + Comments (172)
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links, Science & Technology, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Cybersecurity
I’m counting on all you tech wizards to explain how and where this all goes wrong, but *I* thought it was interesting. Katrina Brooker, in Vanity Fair:
“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it…
Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.
For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted.
This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever…
The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”
For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding. “One person turns up every few days. Some of them have heard about the promise of Solid, and they are driven to turn the world upside down,” he says. Part of the draw is working with an icon. For a computer scientist, coding with Berners-Lee is like playing guitar with Keith Richards. But more than just working with the inventor of the Web, these coders come because they want to join the cause. These are digital idealists, subversives, revolutionaries, and anyone else who wants to fight the centralization of the Web. For his part, working on Solid brings Berners-Lee back to the Web’s early days: “It’s under the radar, but working on it in a way puts back some of the optimism and excitement that the ‘fake news’ takes out.”…
It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won. As public outrage grows over the centralization of the Web, and as enlarging numbers of coders join the effort to decentralize it, he has visions of the rest of us rising up and joining him. This spring, he issued a call to arms, of sorts, to the digital public. In an open letter published on his foundation’s Web site, he wrote: “While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people—and can be fixed by people.”…
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Don't Mourn, Organize, How about that weather?, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, All Too Normal, Clown Shoes
Portrait of a dog for whom it is ninety-nope degrees outside pic.twitter.com/yujamF6Ez4
— laura olin (@lauraolin) July 3, 2018
Not that you guys are liable to need it, but handy format for sharing…
A friendly reminder. pic.twitter.com/PreW6xno3T
— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) July 2, 2018
(Plenty humans not crazy about ‘spontaneous’ bang-bangs, either. Have a thought for your friends & neighbors with PTSD, as well as the fourfoots among you.)
But at least it’s a day off, mostly…
Celebrating Independence Day feels weird now. Like when Facebook sends you a birthday reminder for one of your friends who’s dead.
— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) July 3, 2018
Do we need or want a separate post for the many amazing #SecondCivilWar tweets? So many great examples have been shared in various comment threads already, not to mention that twitter feed in the right-hand column —->
REMINDER: We are carpooling to the civil war tomorrow. NO SINGLE DRIVERS. Honestly, if we can't wage war AND conserve energy, who even are we.
Oh, and Sandy can't bring brownies, someone else will have to step up. NO NUTS, please. https://t.co/UwKymYXiXs
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) July 3, 2018
I see Alex Jones' July 4th prediction as an attempt to incite violent acts from the right and not just something to be casually laughed off. A lot of people casually laughed off Trump's candidacy and look how well that turned out.
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) July 2, 2018
It's especially transparent given that they're in control of all three branches of government. Laura Loomer unironically tweeted that the Civil War had already begun. Charlie Kirk same. They all get the same talking points every day.
— Enchiladas con Nihilism (@WideLightImages) July 2, 2018
Dear father,
I've arrived at the outpost. No one seems to be here. Are you sure you sent me the right coordinates?
Awaiting further instructions.
I'm so lonely.
#secondcivilwarletters pic.twitter.com/AFyEktNFOV— InsaneClownPresident (@InsaneClownPrez) July 3, 2018
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Happy Fourth!Post + Comments (116)
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Immigration, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Daydream Believers
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren: "We need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality" https://t.co/H4335KtXj1 pic.twitter.com/0hX3DeJgjy
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 30, 2018
If you didn’t get a chance to read Balloon Juice over the weekend, you will want to go back and be inspired by Cheryl’s amazing job collating the pics from so many of your fellow Daydream Believers: start here, then here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
And, of course, many thanks and kudos to you who marched, whether or not you sent photos!
I’m not seeing nationwide crowd estimates yet, but the turnout — given the short notice, and for much of the country the heat of the day — seems to have been a major surprise to our media “betters”. Lisa Ryan, at NYMag‘s ladyblog The Cut, has an excellent aggregation of “The Most Powerful Scenes From the Families Belong Together Protests”.
And the Los Angeles Times — no surprise — has the best summary I’ve seen so far:
Galvanized by the images and voices of migrant children separated from their parents by President Trump’s immigration policies, hundreds of thousands took to the streets Saturday in major cities and small towns across America to express outrage that they hope will carry over into the fall election.
From coast to coast, several hundred rallies dubbed Families Belong Together ranged from the large and boisterous — thousands clogging the Brooklyn Bridge in New York — to more modest ones, such as a protest that drew about 200 people to a street corner in West Hartford, Conn.
In Los Angeles, tens of thousands assembled in front of City Hall just before noon in a star- and politician-studded rally that centered on messages of humanity and empathy transcending borders. Organizers said they were not only protesting the separation of families but also Trump policies “criminalizing” migrants and leaving in limbo the fate of those protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shielded from deportation young immigrants brought here illegally when they were children…
Many marchers were veterans of protests against other Trump administration policies, including the Women’s March and the March for Science, but some were newly energized to speak up. For Debbie Greenspan, a protest Saturday in Hollywood, Fla., was the first demonstration she ever attended.
“I just can’t bear babies being taken from their parents or even putting the whole family in jail,” Greenspan said. “I mean, what is wrong with these people? It’s beyond comprehension.”…
The midterm elections were on the minds of protesters all over the country. In Dallas, marchers carried signs reading, “November is coming.” In Denver, protesters at the state Capitol chanted: “Vote them out! Vote them out!”…
Marching in Chicago was Margo Chavez-Easley, who immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala with her mother when she was 9.
“To be an immigrant and an American, I feel a mix of pride and shame,” Chavez-Easley said. “… That’s a child’s biggest fear, is to lose their mom and dad.”
Protesting side by side in Denver were Henny Pattirane, 26, an immigrant from Indonesia, and her friend Joseline Umulisa, also 26, an immigrant from Rwanda.
Umulisa said she was moved to tears when she thought about what some immigrants had been through.
“The only reason you were born here is because you were lucky,” she said. “I came out today because I had to do something, and it beats crying in your bed.”
Funny thing, though…
It's hard to get accurate numbers, but I think it's clear that the #WomensMarch (x2), the #MarchForOurLives and #KeepFamilesTogetherMarch were all bigger than the biggest of the Tea Party events and yet somehow are not nearly as interesting to the media.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) July 1, 2018
Monday Morning Open Thread: Keep FightingPost + Comments (119)