December 9, 2016

What is the right way to think about Trump voters?

I vacillate between sheer rage at them and forgiving them, for they know not what they've done.

I feel like we spend so much time worrying about STUFF-- so many stories and subplots and issues and nuances. All these important issue we as liberals care about. How many articles have we read and dissected in this campaign? And then we have this massively important election, where all that shit gets thrown out the window and we elect the most incredibly ignorant obvious conman possible. A man who several major newspapers wrote articles about, not simply not endorsing him, but saying that he was DANGEROUS and DO NOT ELECT HIM. And the American voters went ahead, like bumbling toddlers, voting for him. Except these people are adults and largely lead normal even successful lives.

It's enraging. And I don't whether to be mad at this, or just feel sorry for them, or just what.

December 9, 2016

Olbermann's Resistance #10: Meet the Trump Cabinet, "The Team Of Rival...Batman Villains."

December 8, 2016

Bernie's new push -- a "Brand New Congress"

https://brandnewcongress.org/home

Anyone look into these guys? I just heard a little bit about it. I kind of like the idea of candidates running on a unified progressive theme.

Also, I've thought a lot about running for congress or state government, where I live in a exurb of Indianapolis. We are represented by Todd Rokita, a tea partier. Every year the local Dem, party puts up a hapless candidate who gets crushed.

What are the odds of a progressive winning here, where they reliably vote R year after year?

December 8, 2016

A big question: did Trump's racism and demagoguery ultimately help him or hurt him?

A lot of people were apparently taken in by his "economic" message. But how well would that economic message have stood up without his racism and demagoguery about Muslims and immigrants?

December 8, 2016

TIME: Meet the rust belt voters who voted for Trump

http://time.com/4591112/time-person-of-the-year-donald-trump-voters/photo/voters-donald-trump-person-of-the-year-poy-08-2/?xid=tcoshare

They profile 9 of them. They are pretty stunning. A lot of them are former Dems, who sadly were just conned big time by Trump. They heard his economic message and not much else, it seems.

The first is a doozy:

Shannon Goodin, 24, Owosso, Mich. A first-time voter who doesn’t consider herself a Democrat or a Republican, Goodin says Trump earned her support by being “a big poster child for change,” adding, “Politicians don’t appeal to us. Clinton would go out of her way to appeal to minorities, immigrants, but she didn’t really for everyday Americans.”

Gee, that's not racist, is it?

December 8, 2016

Trump considers naming FDA chief who would radically overhaul the agency

Source: StatNews

President-elect Donald Trump is weighing naming as Food and Drug Administration commissioner a staunch libertarian who has called for eliminating the agency’s mandate to determine whether new medicines are effective before approving them for sale.

“Let people start using them, at their own risk,” the candidate, Jim O’Neill, said in a 2014 speech to a biotech group.

O’Neill has also called for paying organ donors and setting up libertarian societies at sea — and has said he was surprised to discover that FDA regulators actually enjoy science and like working to fight disease.

A source close to the Trump transition team told STAT that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Trump donor who is helping shape the new administration, is pushing for the FDA appointment for O’Neill, his managing director at Mithril Capital Management.

Read more: https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/07/trump-fda-oneill/

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This is fucking INSANE. This person, and Trump, need to be stopped.

Goddamn it.

Best I can tell, this is a legit source, a publication that reports on drug and medical news.

December 8, 2016

What do we do, not if, but when, Trump starts arresting his political enemies?

There will be some "Trumped up" charge of course.

I hope people are developing plans for this sort of thing happening. Is there any chance the Dems will fight this like they need to?

I sure hope the courts will be on the side of decency, tradition and the constitution. But I guess it depends where this happens.

December 7, 2016

A post-mortem of the Dems is largely pointless, because after Trump, we as a people will be so

desperate for someone who is not a crazy conservative, that we will take another neo-liberal or corporate Dem.

Of course that that will not be our first choice, but it may be our only choice of an electable candidate, if they have the other qualities we want.

This is the problem of being a purist party in an election like we just had. Where it seemed obvious there was a clear choice in the candidates, but too many on the left believed Hillary was too corrupt or centrist or warlike, and so didn't turn out for her. Thus we get Trump, and have to suffer the consequences, and then have to settle for someone less optimal.

So the cycle continues...

And yes-- this assumes we actually have another open election in which Dems have a chance, and I'm not convinced that will be true in our Trumpian world.

December 6, 2016

Does anyone have any faith that Trump's cabinet or Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell can keep Trump in

check if he goes off the rails?

His cabinet seems to be as nutty as Trump. Ryan and McConnell seem to be simply selfish clueless bastards.

I'm worried as fuck about this, particularly the China situation is very disturbing.

Olbermann makes the key point that weakening our relationship with mainland China actually helps ... Russia.

And we need China to deal with North Korea's nuclear program.

Trump has already weakened us on human rights too.

Trump is not even in office yet and he's already made us less safe and made us less great.

&feature=youtu.be

FUCK.

December 6, 2016

The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the November election for many liberals is that Hillary Clinton lost because she ignored the working class.

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

I think it's important to get the right lesson from this election... I think this article shows pretty clearly that the election wasn't lost simply on the issue of jobs for the working class.

It was obviously a complex freaky election, and I think the biggest factors for Hillary losing were 1) decades of right-wing smears on Hillary, 2) the overblown email scandal and Comey, and 3) wikileaks and Russian interference.

IMHO.