Stormy Daniels, Trump and the power of telling the truth
In the face of withering personal attacks from men at the highest levels of government, Stormy refused to back down. Because she knew she was right.

The person we have to thank for the Michael Cohen plea story — the impresario of the entire stunning production — is Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actor known as Stormy Daniels.

Hers is a quintessentially American story. She’s the outsider, the object of disdain, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the star without the veneer of refinement — and the player in this drama who’s winning because she’s the one telling the truth. In the face of withering personal attacks from men at the highest levels of government, Stormy refused to back down. Because she knew she was right.

It’s no surprise that so many people are rooting for her.

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On Tuesday, Cohen admitted to not just tax and bank fraud but campaign finance violations. More than that, President Donald Trump’s longtime consigliere said he committed the campaign-related crimes at the direction of his boss. But Clifford’s lawsuits helped alert prosecutors early on to the facts underlying some of Cohen’s misdeeds, to say nothing of the president’s.

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More than that, Cohen’s plea has set loose a wave of support for Clifford, from the high-minded (“you are now part of American history writ large”) to the not-so-much (“you go, girl”). One online image features a cartoon of Snoopy sitting at his typewriter in his familiar author’s posture on his doghouse composing this text: “…And then, America was saved by a Porn Star. THE END.”

More at Link:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/stormy-daniels-trump-power-telling-truth-ncna903391

Posted this a few weeks ago but it seems very appropriate to post it again today.

I just got Clapper's book from the library and went right to the part about the election. I thought I knew quite a bit, and I certainly know more than the average person, but I had no idea the duration and extent of Russian involvement. It really struck me how she would have won by a landslide without that, and of course all the GOP dirty voter suppression tricks, gerrymandering, etc.

What really bothers me about Michael Moore, and has since 2004, is that he seems to be completely ignorant and oblivious to all that in his explanations for why T "won." And before that, why Bush "won." And that's dangerous because people need to be looking at election integrity as a primary factor in losing elections if things are to change.

And I am certainly not saying we don't need to do absolutely everything in our power with GOTV!
Because of course we do. Voter participation is a HUGE factor, but so is election integrity.

Are we hearing less of the endless discussion about why Hillary "lost" as more info comes out about all the factors that impacted the election?

https://animalencyclopedia.info/20-random-animal-photos-that-will-cheer-you-up/18/

Just saying. So many times I have read a post and had to look at the article source to know if it was satire, and I very often read posts from others saying that. If it's Borowitz or The Onion, then we know it's satire. But when Obama was president, you knew almost immediately without checking the source if it was or not. (Fox news excepted.)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1027536507224113153

Because of Kavanaugh's position on executive power, etc. They know he will rule in their favor.

SHe's talking about it right now in relation to the Nunes tape and going into a lot of detail about Kavanaugh allegedly lying under oath to get his last judgeship.

Edited to add: Nunes said they do plan to impeach Rosenstein but want to wait till after Kavenaugh is confirmed and after the election.

They have to keep the majority "or all of this goes away if Sessions won't resign and Mueller won't clear POTUS, "We are the only ones who can stop it."

RAchel going to post audio and transcript online.

So they gave the women white sailor uniform tops to wear. Those who were breastfeeding obligingly wore them, but cut holes in the tops for their breasts so their babies could access them. So practical! It was many years ago that my dad told me this story, and he is long gone. I don’t remember more details – if it was only the breastfeeding women who were bare breasted, or all of the women. But this story always stuck in my memory because I thought it spoke volumes about the clash of cultural norms, values, and paradigms, and imposing the values and morality of one onto another.

The recent posts about women breastfeeding in public reminded me of this story. I hadn’t thought about in a long time, and thought you all would find it interesting.

Those posts got me wondering if some of the objection to public breastfeeding is that for some, it ruins breasts as appealing sex objects when they are shown being used for a utilitarian purpose.

I was a writing teacher, not a history teacher, but my progressive history teacher friends know and love sociologist and historian James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History.” He is brilliant and insightful, and his observations were never more relevant than today. A new version of Lies My Teacher Told Me was just published; Loewen says that his bestselling book has “new significance … owing to detrimental developments in America’s recent public discourse.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/history-education-post-truth-america/566657/

The Atlantic

How History Classes Helped Create a 'Post-Truth' America

The author of Lies My Teacher Told Me discusses how schools’ flawed approach to teaching the country’s past affects its civic health.

In 1995, the University of Vermont sociologist and historian James W. Loewen published a book that sought to debunk the myriad myths children were often taught about the United States’ past. Framed largely as a critique of the history education delivered in America’s classrooms but also serving as a history text itself, Lies My Teacher Told Me was the result of Loewen’s analysis of a dozen major high-school textbooks. It found that those materials frequently taught students about topics including the first Thanksgiving, the Civil and Vietnam Wars, and the Americas before Columbus arrived in incomplete, distorted, or otherwise flawed ways. Take, for example, the false yet relatively widespread conviction that the Reconstruction era was a chaotic period whose tumult was attributable to poor, uncivilized governance of recently freed slaves. Textbooks’ framing of the history in this way, according to Loewen, promoted racist attitudes among white people. White supremacists in the South, for example, repeatedly cited this interpretation of Reconstruction to justify the prevention of black people from voting.

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Now, with the release this summer of a new paperback version of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen contends that his bestselling book has “new significance … owing to detrimental developments in America’s recent public discourse.” By providing students an inadequate history education, Loewen argues, America’s schools breed adults who tend to conflate empirical fact and opinion, and who lack the media literacy necessary to navigate conflicting information. I recently spoke to Loewen about how the quality of Americans’ history education could affect the country’s civic health. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.

Alia Wong: What’s changed with regard to your thinking on history education since the first edition came out in 1995? What about since the second edition in 2007?

James W. Loewen: Not much has changed in my thinking, and that’s because I think I was right in the first place. What has changed has to do with our current intellectual era. History and social studies, as taught in school, make us less good at thinking critically about our past. For one, textbooks don’t teach us to challenge, to read critically—they are just supposed to provide exercises in stuff to learn. Secondly, the textbooks (and the people who teach from those textbooks) don’t teach causality. They aren’t designed to have students memorize anything about causality—what causes racism, for example, what causes a decrease in racism. That means that those of us who are more than 18 years old and are out of high school and voting may have never had anybody teach us anything about what causes what in society.

Wong: How do you think inadequate history education plays into what some describe as the country’s current “post-truth” moment?

Loewen: History is by far our worst-taught subject in high school; I think we’re stupider in thinking about the past than we are, say, in thinking about Shakespeare, or algebra, or other subjects. We historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears. People in graduate history programs have said things to me like: Why should we privilege one narrative above others with the term “true”? That kind of implies that all narratives are equal—or, at least, that all narratives have some merit, that no narrative has all the merit. But maybe there is such thing as a bedrock of fact. Take the way we talk about the Civil War, for example. A lot of people will say that the war grew out of a pay dispute; many others say it had to do with states’ rights. Well, it’s quite the contrary—the southern states seceded so they could uphold slavery. Sometimes we don’t need nuance.

More at link. Interview well worth reading.