Dear patient readers,
Do any of you who are good transcriptionists have some free time between now and Tuesday-Wednesday evening that you could devote to a smallish project? I have a 20 minutes of good quality audio it would help to have transcribed. This does NOT have to be perfect: two passes would do. I could do the final cleanup as needed.
Alternatively, if you could only do 10 minutes of a rush transcription, I could parse out the most important sections.
If you are game, please let me know how much you could do via yves@nakedcapitalism. Please put “Transcription” in the subject line. Thanks a ton!
Departing Obama Tearfully Shoos Away Loyal Drone Following Him Out Of White House Onion (John C)
60% of primate species now threatened with extinction TreeHugger (resilc)
Man killed by crocodile in Australia’s Northern Territory BBC :-(
Interview: Artist David Luke Shows the Boundary Waters’ Warm, Dry Future | Quetico Superior Foundation. Chuck L: “I’m suggesting this link mainly because of the troubling photos but the copy and links are worth looking at as well. It will be 64 years ago this coming summer when I made the first of nearly 30 treks into the BWCA/.Quetico roadless wilderness on the Minnesota-Ontario border.”
Drivers Use Tesla Autopilot at Their Own Risk, Investigators Conclude Motherboard (resilc). One side effect is that Silicon Valley will now be fighting Big Pharma’s effort to vastly curtail dietary supplements (there have been a lot of dodgy scare stories re vitamins, which is a proof of Big Pharma trying to get vitamins sold on via prescription, which would lead to a big increase in prices. Mind you, the Agricultural Department recommended vitamin supplements in 1938 because the soil was too depleted for consumers to get all the nutrients
Skittles Scattered Across Highway Were Destined For Cattle Feed: Mars Investigating Consumerist
One Of The World’s Top Aging Researchers Has A Pill To Keep You Feeling Young Fast Company (Lawrence R)
A Greek tragedy: how much can one nation take? Financial Times. Important.
New Cold War
The most dangerous moment in the US-Russia relations failed evolution
Syraqistan
Turkey asks to be immediately admitted in the EU Defend Democracy
Turkey Parliament Triggers Referendum on Presidential System Bloomberg
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Baltic States in a Post-NATO Environment: An Interview with Edward Lucas Deep Baltic (resilc)
The Inaugural. Trump made a lot of noise on behalf of downtrodden workers, but the only part of his program that might help them is trade (and jawboning Big Pharma, but that wasn’t in the speech), and even if he delivers, the gains will be a while in coming and won’t do much for now-poor towns that lost factories. And if he goes full bore with tariff increases, you’ll see higher costs for quite a few goods in the meantime. Big talk re infrastructure but the way he wants to do it (equity tax credits) won’t add up to much and will again take quite a while to get going. Wants to cut back on NATO spending but otherwise sounded much more hawkish than when campaigning for the nomination.
Trump vows to end ‘American carnage’ BBC. Unfortunately, he was not referring to our wars.
The full text of Donald Trump’s inauguration speech Guardian
Trump’s Sharp Rhetoric Takes On Beltway Establishment Wall Street Journal
5 takeaways from Trump’s inaugural address Politico
Trump’s first speech as president: the key points Guardian
President Trump’s speech puts the world on notice Ed Luce, Financial Times
German dismay at Trump inauguration DW
Hillary Clinton meets Donald Trump and looks glum during inauguration Telegraph
Trump Transition
The Dream of the Enemy Corey Robin, Harper’s. Today’s must read.
Chris Hedges on How the ‘Deep State’ Will Influence the Trump Presidency TruthDig
In rural Minnesota, high hopes for President Trump Minnesota Public Radio News (UserFriendly)
Anti-Trump protesters pepper-sprayed in Washington DC Daily Mail (resilc)
Trump takes office with just 2 Cabinet secretaries Politico
Magician’s dust Frontline (Sid S)
Russell Brand: Reality under Barack Obama and Donald Trump will not be too different Irish Times
Disillusioned in Davos Mark Thoma. Larry Summers is shocked to discover that squillionaires are opportunists.
Will the World be Safer or More Dangerous Under a Trump Presidency? Global Guerrillas (resilc). “Trump inverts that policy relationship. In Trump’s post cold war world, US foreign policy will be dominated by trade policy. Even national security policy will be subservient to trade policy. If trade policy is dominant, we’ll see China, Mexico and the EU (Germany) become competitors. Russia, in contrast will become an ally since it doesn’t pose a trade threat.”
Theresa May to emphasise value of EU and Nato to Trump Financial Times
When a Study Cast Doubt on a Heart Pill, the Drug Company Turned to Tom Price ProPublica (resilc)
Trump Administration Suspends Insurance Cut for Risky Mortgages Wall Street Journal
How the Women’s March Could Resurrect the Democratic Party New York Times. Resilc: “This crap got them out of power in just about every state. Jobs jobs jobs and anti anti wars!!!!!!!!! is what they need.”
The 9 biggest marches and protests in American history Business Insider
Clinton Democrats In No Position To Say They’re ‘The Resistance’ Shadowproof (Judy B)
Is It Time To Revoke John Lewis’s Lifetime Civil Rights Hero Pass? Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report. Ouch.
2016 Post Mortem
Barack Obama Won The White House, But Democrats Lost The Country FiveThirtyEight (resilc)
How the Fake News Crisis of 1896 Explains Trump Atlantic (resilc)
Obamacare
Trump signs executive order that could effectively gut Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate Washington Post (furzy)
Mark Zuckerberg sues over 100 Hawaiians to force them to sell them their ancestral land Boing Boing (resilc). The only upside is maybe this means he is not running for President.
New McCarthyism
Researchers Created Fake News. Here’s What They Found. Wonk Wire (furzy). 8% has to be low….
How Some Hedge Funds Have Ripped You Off Barron’s (DO)
Trump vs Yellen MacroBusiness
Debunking the NAIRU myth FT Alphaville
A surging dollar under Trump poses biggest threat to global economy, BlackRock boss warns Telegraph
Class Warfare
Uber to pay $20m to ‘misled’ drivers BBC (David L)
A Tale of Two Economies Bloomberg
55, unemployed and faking normal: One woman’s story of barely scraping by PBS NewsHour (martha r)
Antidote du jour. Jose M: “Calvin for President.”
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
420 comments
Comments are closed.
Waiting for a train in London and the TV is showing images from the marches around the world and the “concern” over Trump and “his positions on women’s rights, global warming, and nuclear weapons”. I’d be the first to join the march (if I hadn’t been on a million marches to no avail, perhaps) but I’m just wondering where all these liberals were when Obama signed a one trillion dollar upgrade program of short range nuclear weapons — the most destabilising kind?
Of course with US and NATO troops now in Poland and Norway, maybe they think they need them?
What a frigging world. Might have to go cold turkey on the news for a month or so, as I did aeons ago when Reagan was elected.
Good luck, NC readers, in this crazy new world. Mind you, I’d be no less concerned with a Hillary presidency.
Pavel
January 21, 2017 at 7:30 am
In the US we have a liberal brand and a conservative brand. No principles involved. And on things that involve the rich getting richer (no prosecuting mortgage fraud…or any rich people for anything, e.g., Corzine) or all war everywhere, remarkable consensus. But just as people who drink Coke think the sugar water they are drinking is different than Pepsi, our politics provides a simulacrum of choice.
+1000 @fresno dan
At risk of pummeling Dan’s excellent metaphor into the ground:
Many drink one brand or the other because it is a quick, relatively inexpensive beverage option in their otherwise harried struggle to make ends meet.
Others, because they have never been exposed to the idea that there are better options.
Others still because they have been eternally bombarded with messaging on how bad the other brand is.
But lastly there are those who drink one or the other and not only think there is a difference, but stridently defend their choice and actively work to prevent other options from arising on the market. These latter are the most dangerous.
Excellent.
Not only entertaining, but it makes me thirsty too. I think I will go get myself another glass of unsweetened organic soy milk now.
You know what everyone?
This site was established because someone cared about other people. Because that someone wanted to provide this site as a service to others. For their well-being. Naked Capitalism entails increasing our understanding of other people, their needs, wants, and desires, indeed, the world around us if you will.
Whether or not our own are met.
There are many men and women who are able to attend one of the marches happening across the world today, not because they are “anti-Trump”, but simply because they believe in contributing to the well-being of others, and a chance to create a better future for one and all. There may well be no reward in this creative and collaborative endeavor, but it sure beats seeing or adding to further significant “carnage” in our world.
I’m not marching today. However, it will make me happy and proud if some people walk away happy and proud that they participated in democracy together and did their best to send a message that they, their mothers and their daughters are important. If the message is, as a constituency, we matter, or that each of us is not alone, they’re good messages to march for (and this is what I see reported as the intent of this march) and definitely ones no one should be ashamed of in a healthy democracy.
Daughter went to the march with her father and wife. They arrived at 8:30am but left around 2:30pm, because the march hadn’t yet begun due to looonnnggg stream of speakers and bands. People can’t simply stand on cement packed together for 6 hours, and many were leaving with her, making jokes about talking rather than walking.
She said it was packed (est 300-400K) but police had no big presence. Emphasis was women’s issues, not letting them go.
Sorry, where were these people on election day (lowest voter turnout since 1996). And weren’t we told that anyone who did not accept the result of an election was the worst sort of deplorable anti-democratic person? Oh, and where were they when the mellifluous handsome African-American was ordering $1 trillion in new nukes and backing policies that impoverished (and killed) women around the globe? This was pure narcissistic feelgood fluff.
@OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL – Why are so many people assuming that these marchers did not vote? I’ve heard it all over the MSM and some alternative media. Where is the evidence? Any quotes form the marchers saying they didn’t vote? Nothing personal HAL, but this is ridiculous. Maybe they’re the almost three million vote margin that Hillary got over Trump. We don’t know and we can’t know, so continuing to promote this meme is, I think, counter-productive.
Thanks Emma,
I look forward to the day when the common good is valued above the individual. Let’s get started.
Confused as to how this relates to my post. Did I say something wrong?
You may have omitted the reason people drink coke or pepsi is that the quality of the liquid is reliable which is more than you can say for the tap water in the USA.
Now that is a crime! and a thousand or more cities and towns have seriously polluted drinking water.
Good point. As a façade to cover up the deliterious external effects of polluted tap water– considering most people’s harried lives– Coke/Pepsi is a reasonable option. Wish I could say as much for the Dem/Repub parties.
You didn’t say anything wrong. The original commentary was on the marches though and some of us(I’m noticing particularly women) saw it as overly critical and cynical.
I, in particular, found the fact that I or others like me are only supposed to be able to voice “concerns” for our rights if we marched in support of or opposition of x(nukes), y, (Afghanistan)or z(anything else other than women’s issues) during the Obama administration a little condescending.
I hear you, but you must admit that it is more than a little nauseating that many of these women are shedding genuine tears that Obama has left the White House, and have uploaded pictures of the Obama family as their Faceborg profile pics. I am sorry, but having grown up in Eastern Europe, this reminds me too much of the cults of personality erected around our Dear Leaders. Only in Eastern Europe these cults were forced upon us and just about everyone knew them to be a complete joke, while in the America of 2016-2017 this cult is genuine, voluntary, and heartfelt. I cannot and will not place my faith and support in people like that. I can understand not marching against Obama’s noxious neoliberal policies. I can not understand and excuse the heartfelt sense of loss at his departure from the White House.
RabidGandhi, and the drink contains toxic sugar to boot!
Yes, that is the genius of Dan’s analogy: the subject is utterly toxic in both cases.
When I (infrequently) go into a junk food restaurant, and hear the waitress apologetically explaining that they have Pepsi instead of Coke, as though it were something really serious, a deep philosophical and moral chasm, I know that I am witnessing educational and economic tragedy.
Similar to distant relatives visiting from out of town whose main commentary about our surroundings are about the price of gas.
Clearly never seen a Coke man rip a place apart when he gets that news, have you Dave?
“Obama signed a one trillion dollar upgrade program of short range nuclear weapons ”
This upgrades everything we have, plus new submarine nuke ICBMs, “battlefield nukes”, and even brand new research to see if we can get more bang for the buck from our atoms.
Between us and the rooskies rolling out their brand new ones, we’ll be able to blow the entire inner solar system to hell. This is necessary because of our space exploration and colonization programs…
.. that puts a whole new meaning to ‘blowing chunks’. craazyboy ..
Also, when we do finally immolate the planet, Gnarths at the Snootz Observatory on Beta Centuri III will be able to announce in about 400 years that there had once been a technical civilization in the Sol system. Finally! Communication with an alien civilization!
Ya’ know this is one of the most interesting questions in the SETI endeavor. It seems pretty clear now that planets are very common throughout the galaxy (we have already found thousands). If we assume that the evolution of life is as common it begs the question why we aren’t flooded w/signals from more advanced worlds. The question is this. Do technological civilizations endure…or self-destruct?
I heard one theory, perhaps put forth in jest, that all alien civilizations enter the industrial revolution, then cease to exist 200-300 years later.
But we are on the edge of our galaxy. Everyone towards the center is in the much older part of town. We’re the youngsters. So this theory makes me nervous.
I think Fred Saberhagen was right, myself. It’s obviously the Berserkers. They’re responsible for the Fermi Paradox.
BTW: “Beg the question” does not mean what you think it does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
Damn the English. How about “invites the question”? Always welcome to the knowledge of this entertaining community
Root Node Leader, Homo Simpsons Release II, terminated message with, “Duh!”
Included in that are “dial a yield” weapons where a nuke can be tweaked to provide a smaller bang for the Trillion bucks, or, dialed up to give you our money’s worth.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0309/Martz-0309.html
All these weapons essentially rot fron the inside out making thrm dangerois and unstable rather than just dangerous.
Heck, the trchnology doesnt exist to even store the waste in a long term stable manner.
FUBAR
There is an ongoing “inadvertent” experiment involving underground storage of radioactives at Fukushima, Japan. So far, results are mixed.
Storage implies stable containment…
Not so much at Fuku
Yes, “mixed”. They couldn’t figure out why radioactive soil was being transported to faraway prefectures in Japan, turns out there are regs that say protective actions are only taken if one prefecture’s background radiation levels exceed that of the average of all of the prefectures. Problem solved!
I went to an anti-war/Peace rally/march in D.C. In 2005. Flew all the way from Montana with a group of women. Then on Monday we went to lobby our reps. Ha. Ha. Ha. They did NOT cover the rally at all on CNN other than to say it was just a small bunch of peacniks – under 100,000. There was clearly over 200,000. And no reps were in their offices. Good for comradery but mostly a waste of time.
But this rally is getting non stop breathless coverage on CNN and MSNBC. Well, of course. It’s not a Peace rally or a Health Care as a right rally pushing for HB 676. That would be anti-establishment. This is an establishment sanctioned rally because it’s not dangerous to TPTB.
good point
Plus it has the added benefit of keeping us divided.
I came across a facebook (and youtube) account called ‘sane progressive’ recently whose proprietor also decries the divide & rule, reactionary approach embodied by this non-movement, which gained a decent following during / after this primary. Bit rough around the edges, but otherwise on point.
Excellent point indeed, Montanamaven. On a slightly similar note, recall the virtual blackout on coverage of Bernie’s huge rallies by CNN et al. It was all Hillary, all the time — when it wasn’t Trump.
Just for the record, my first march was in NY against the Vietnam war with my very leftist and pacifist parents — that ages me, obviously! It’s just so depressing the students today haven’t marched against any of Obama’s wars. What about the women in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, whose homes and families are destroyed by his drones and bombs?
We’ve never known not being at war. We’ve been at war for more than 1/2 my life and I’m 32. As much as Obama bombed so many more countries there was never a point at which the fighting seamed to dramatically intensify. Hard to rally people around opposing what has been the status quo your whole life.
TPTB picked Obama precisely for his superb capacity as a Trojan Horse that would protect and massively advance the gains they’d made under Bush, having sedated a large portion of ‘soft’ progressive opinion and criticism – many to this day.
Too true about the value of visibility. I remember the “riots” at the 1972 conventions on Miami Beach. Actually set up to look like the “drug crazed” hippies were attacking the “righteous defenders of the American Way.”
The Vietnam war was lost, at home, by Mom and Pop watching Junior getting blown away in the jungles of Indochina. News was still free form. Journos got killed plying their trade. Today, “embedment” takes care of what journos get to see, and thus report from the front lines of America’s Imperial wars. The same goes for domestic reporting. See the “fake news” controversy for a lesson in that field.
Maybe a March should be organized that purports to be about one Identity Politics Group and then after the permits and MSM cameras are rolling, reveal a broader agenda, like Ending Neoliberalism/Neocon Rule of the planet. There are even some political marches that might get covered “Preserving Obama-Care” then it turns out to be about Healthcare as a Right, Medicare for All and Ending Military Spending to pay for it.
Nice sentiments, but to explore it a little further, where have you been for the last eight years as women and girls have been bombed and mutilated by our Nobel Peace Prize winner throughout the Middle East?
Or, do only perceived rights, possibly being taken away from the ex-shoulder pad, MBA, SUV driving, most over privileged group of women in human history, matter to you?
Did you fly in a P.J.? [private jet] or go commercial?
What was your contribution to global warming from your trip?
Just akin’.
So, I watched a number of the anti-Trump rallies on C-SPAN, and what struck me the most is that I couldn’t really discern what it was that was being protested against or being advocated for. With NoDAPL or BLM, for instance, it’s pretty clear what the concern is. Or, just the other day at my City Council meeting, a number of immigrant groups showed up to support Iowa City as a sanctuary city. Whereas with these rallies, there were so many different speakers with so many different and sometimes conflicting agendas that it almost seemed as if they were protesting for the sake of protesting, to “resist” as the meme goes. But by being almost absurdly inclusive–and I say this as someone who is broadly sympathetic–there is no real message. It all just gets muddled. And if you’re trying to address a constituency that is not sympathetic to your concerns at all, throwing out some mealy mouthed gesture is a good way to get ignored.
Not to mention, by insisting on an entire and expansive ideological program, you swiftly alienate anyone who would be more than willing to sign up for a particular cause (e.g. Healthcare for All, Not Treating Muslims Like Second Class Citizens, etc.) who may not want to subscribe to your newsletter.
Uahsenaa
January 21, 2017 at 11:54 am
To quote Sherlock Holmes
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
The fact that the dog did not bark when you would expect it to do so while a horse was stolen led Homes to the conclusion that the evildoer was a not a stranger to the dog, but someone the dog recognized and thus would not cause him to bark.
From what I have seen, little attention, if any, OR drawn away by other goings on, with regard to economic distress or lousy jobs.
I think the march could have some utility with an emphasis on holding Trump to his PROMISES – JOBS, JOBS, JOBS! What could Trump say about that???
So was this whole thing funded and organized by the 1%…..I would hope people would not be as cynical as me….
C’mon fresno dan. One cannot be too cynical today. It’s almost becoming ‘hip.’
“No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” Lily Tomlin
Ambrit …. if what you say is sooth …. then I’m ’bout ready for hip replacement …
cuz this new Cynicism … It really hurts me so !! … ‘;[
I need to go wedge some clay and loosen up those distals …
WNYC is covering the DC march, the NYC area gatherings, and taking calls from any marchers anywhere in the US and the world. So far I heard callers from a local march I didn’t know about that had a very good attendance and from callers from London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels. I wasn’t around the radio for the entire program.
Mostly it seems, while the core group and those who developed and implemented the whole things were women, DC and all the other areas are being attended by people who believe in truly progressive social and economic issues. Yes, women’s rights and healthcare are strongly supported, and most women realize that without birth control rights they lose the right to control their own bodies, but they also realize and talk about the absolute necessity of decent jobs.
From what I’ve heard, I’m pretty impressed. Especially by all those saying attending is important, but getting to work locally is absolutely imperative.
BTW, it seems Trump is going after Planned Parenthood and the National Endowment for the Arts.
All I can say, as someone from NJ who learned long ago about how Trump cheated his subcontractors by trying to never make a final payment to them, I cannot see that Trump holds any contract, much less verbal promises, as something he will end up standing by.
I hold out hope he will enact better relations between the US and Russia…but I’d warn Russia to never trust his word.
I’ve been confused by this whole march business too – nobody seems to know exactly what it’s for.
Maybe that’s because the purpose has changed? Wasn’t this march planned before the election to be a bunch of women celebrating Clinton’s inevitable victory? And then when that didn’t pan out the purpose became more nebulous – “resisting” the big cheeto because he said mean things twenty years ago or something?
But because it’s establishment sanctioned we’ll be hearing about it for years.
And the millions who marched worldwide against the Iraq war are already at the bottom of history’s dustbin.
It’s mostly against Trump.
But yes, as it is Establishment encouraged,, we will be hearing about it for years.
If Sanders had won, we’d be seeing them cover the right wing pro-Trump anti-Sanders protests.
I don’t think it had anything to do with Clinton. One woman said a couple of weeks ago she had this dream to organize a group of women to go out and protest and it grew exponentially from there. Learned about this on MSNBC Rachael Maddow’s show. And how some women were getting together and showing up at their senator’s and rep’s offices to voice their concerns regarding issues.
“Learned about this on MSNBC Rachael Maddow’s show.”
That’s the Clinton tell, Susan C
Not guilty! I did not vote for Clinton! But as a newbie to MSNBC since I had to turn away from CNN, NYT and WaPo, I like their reporting on the cabinet picks and the Russian hacking, ex-spy story – sounds like there will be more to come on this story next week. I know they are liberal but I have to say they haven’t disappointed me yet. To their credit, they rarely, if ever, mention the C word. Otherwise I don’t know what I would do.
Rachel and Joy-Ann basically lie non-stop. They act as propagandists for the Democratic Party and its destructive deceit. I was under the impression the rest of the line-up is not significantly better.
Something to bear in mind.
Oh I know that but am especially interested in the Russian hacking story, the dossier and Christopher Steele so have been pretty surprised with some of the people that come on like Corn to speak to all that – and the CIA/FBI angle. Sounds like the investigations are still on and more news on this should break next week. I mean what other MSM sources are out there to trust – CNN, NYT and WaPo have completely failed in my mind.
David Corn?! You must be kidding me. And MSM sources to trust?! NYT?! The one that published Judith Miller’s fake story on Saddam’s WMDs, and still employs her co-author, Michael Gordon?! OK, you have left me speechless, a rare feat. Well done!
When you live and work in NYC, as I did for 20 years in the past, you read the New York Times. It changed during the past several months and nearly all the political headlines are very biased against Trump and Republicans. This is obvious. Miller is a complete disgrace. At times they did fantastic reporting such as on MCI WorldCom and I believe Enron.
But Corn is a liar, too. You’re listening to non-stop propaganda, it sounds like. Are you doing this because it’s interesting to analyze how the false narrative is being spun out?
Pretty much. Always good to see what people are saying and what they are not saying.
Noam Chomsky regularly cites the New York Times as a news source, i.e. for what happened. He just doesn’t believe anything it says about WHY something happened.
“Concerns regarding issues”
OK, what issues are they protesting, or what to these women want.
List them?
Here’s what I have synthesized from talking to “concerned women” today. Who, BTW, didn’t go to the marches.
“We want equal rights”
What rights do women not have?
“We want the same rights men have”
Which rights are those?
“The right to be paid the same as men”
Are there two different pay levels listed for men and women doing the exact same jobs?
“We want the right to control our bodies”
Have aliens taken over women’s’ bodies, or zombified them so they have no free will”
“We want the right to control our fertility”
What’s stopping you?
“I want you to stop harassing me!”
That is a fair question. From what I have picked up by watching the never to be mentioned again MSNBC and c-span for the signs, the marches are quite a surprise to most people right now – that so many attended and in so many cities and in Europe. I imagine there is resentment towards Trump for one and their fear that things will now start going backwards in America – he does seem to represent the 1950s mentality in spades. They are concerned that women will start being disrespected and treated unfairly and bullied. For women’s bodies, there is also the abortion issue and there could be concern about the next supreme court nominee. And women still do not make what men make – no matter if making a dollar per hour rate or at a professional job. But at the end of the day, there were a lot of things that came to light because of the marches. I see these as the beginning of a grander involvement in politics for women and all the others who joined in today – they expressed themselves with their signs and numbers – it is about time they got out there and stood for something – they made a dent in America’s consciousness and in the consciousness of the world. Pretty spectacular I thought – Chicago, NY and DC and San Fran, Seattle and so on. Seriously – it reminded me of the demonstrations I used to participate in in college against the Vietnam war. There is power in solidarity with others, on the streets like that. It sends a statement to the government that people are not happy for some important reason. And certainly they are not happy with Trump in terms of their futures and the futures of their children.
I don’t either. I get it’s a D event, but there are anti-Russia signs, I’m with her t-shirts, Debra Messing did some bizarre speech and the head of the DNC, who was fired for rigging the D primary, was speaking.
The big money behind pre-printed professional signs just scream astro-turf.
Definitely agree. I may be incurring in confirmation bias here, by my inkling of US society has always been the following. In my country, protests and resistance (not #Resistance) are generally organised around the organisations that comprise civil society: unions, churches, neigbourhood associations, etc. They do not rise out of nowhere, but are rather the result of long-term organisation, preferably grass-roots.
By contrast in the US, most of these organisational units have been decimated by years of class warfare. In addition to the geographic atomisation created by a car culture and the time and resource constraints imposed by years of worker precarisation, unions are practically non-existant, churches have been co-opted, and a dominant libertarian ideology has made neighbourhood organisations practically impossible. Yet, with my biases, I see these as the soils from which any real opposition would spring– not from some resistencia ex-machina as the Democrat nomenklatura would like.
In my 30,000 feet view (not sure how much a foot is but I’m far away from there), the election of Trump has done a valuable service in showing that there are a lot of people in the US– most likely a majority– who are rightly outraged at the way they have been treated over the last 30+ years. This “outing of the outrage” is important, because if they see they are all suffering, this awareness of each others’ suffering can serve to unite them. And it is from that unity that civil society can be rebuilt, by organisations that can mount a true Resistance, not just to Trump, but to the entire ruling class.
That is, if Scott Pruitt’s global warming or Mike Morell’s nuclear holocaust don’t eviscerate us all first.
Great post!
Me gusto!
Yes!
I, too, have been considering a news blackout of my own. I find everything too depressing.
The news is a lot more depressing than reality. And the comments about the news are far more depressing than the news.
It’s like a twisting corkscrew, the farther it grinds down the more pain it produces.
when it gets all the way down into the darkness of the psychotic human heart, there’s nothing but a wild terrorizing scream. I saw my neighbor today go out to “the March”, she’s probly mid-30s bookish serious type — a prototypical “liberull” — and she had a cardboard sign that said “Our Future Isn’t Up for Grabs”.
I asked if she was going to protest our president and she “the more the merrier’ then we walked up the block silently and went our seperate ways — she to protest and me, to the deli to get two cupcakes. Honestly, that’s where I was going. It’s not exacttly a form of rebellion. I admit.
Nearly every single thing that I see, feel, hear, read or think about politics thunders in my mind with a terrifying stupidity, a reductive and soulless absence of even the detritus of conscious sensitivity to the possibility of mistaken impression and error. It begins, or nearlly all of it, from a fixed illusion formed so solidly in the mind that it not only ursurps but in fact fully replaces a studied assessment of the full complexity of real reality. Well I guess every infinity needs a dimensional reduction or else what can a person do except sit there and stare.
At any rate, the cupcake was good. Hahah
Only you can decide if a deli cupcake was a better option than a post-inauguration protest, but it was almost certainly better than the inaugural fake copy-cake.
It looks good! I don’t think everything Obama did was bad. The cake is good. i’d copy it too. Why not?
Just a few things he did were not so hot, but unfortunately they were important things. At any rate, this may shock and incense some people but I don’t think he’s all that bad a dude. I mean man, if I was president — which would never ever happen, I couldn’t even get myself together to vote, much less run — I’m sure millions of people would find all sorts of things about me to hate and despise. Some of them may even be legitimate reasons. It makes me sober and reflective about what any president has to deal witih.
The cake! A good cake it was and I don’t blame Trump for copying it
I hope that you didn’t get the cupcake from Marie’s Bakery. Their motto: “Let everyone eat cake!”
and she had a cardboard sign that said “Our Future Isn’t Up for Grabs”.
—————————-
hahaha. That’s actually a bit witty. I saw another sign, ” We Are Women. Hear Us Roar!”
Seems there is a tsnunami of feline wrath and anger out swirling about. Be careful out there. You could lose a hand!
You could lose more than that. Anybody remember Lorena Bobbitt?
Whoa. Even Charles Dickens would have thought twice before penning that name. Much less penissing it. Oh man. How coould that really have happened? It doesn’t seem like it should happen. Who made the world where that stuff can happen? It’s a not something easily answered, I suppose.
Honest to God I don’t have any idea what they’re protesting. I read lots of interviews — well, one anyway — that’s alot for me — with Trump supporitng females and they were like “WTF are these women protesting for?” They didn’t get it. Even Trump’s pussy comment was something alot of guys would have thought, if they had the chances he had. I mean really. That’s what the male mind is wired to do! They put a picture of a lion for an antidote and evvery body ooohs and aaaha. Not the gazelle! But if a guy gets frisky with women who throw themselves at him, voluntarily, then he’s Satan. Maybe there’s a deep thought there. Holy smokes (whoa no pun intended). My day job is just killing me with too much exhaustion, not to whine, but I’m down with another cold today laying around. Its not wonderful, but I think maybe I’ll have a sloppy Joe tonight. I just thawt of that. that sounds good.
Fukkk. Maybe Trump will be a big bust, but he hasn’t done ANYTHING yet and they’re out protesting! Amazing. I guess it’s precautionary and also they’re not maklking any movies right now for all those actresses to be in, so they have to find cameras and photographers to get the publicity. I think most of them are halfway nuts and/or completely crazy anyway — the actresses that is. The women themselves are just wandering a bit lost in existence. It kind of makes me think of a Sylvia Plath poem but that’s a sad thought so I’ll stop.
I just assumed it was a fake name. A pen name of sorts. To protect the innocent, like an alias Mr. Bobbit or part of the witness protection program for Ms Bobbit. I figure an FBI agent came up with the name after cruising some porn sites. But really, the real Mr. Bobbit sure wouldn’t want to show up at work after that news broke and Ms Bobbit would have heck of a time on dating sites.
Clearly, they are protesting Trump. When I ask myself, “Wafo”, the rational part of my brain says things like Rovy Wave, Planned Parenthood, etc…but it would be comforting to hear it from the millions outside my head. Then again, maybe they haven’t heard about groupies and gold diggers chasing around the rich and famous and rock stars. Our they’re pissed Trump hasn’t thought about groping them yet. That could be. It’s one of the mysteries of the Universe. I dunno. I blame God.
Jobs suck. I found out I’m much happier without one. Haven’t had a serious cold in 10 years either. Try It!
I’ve been watching the “Vikings” by the History Channel lately. All 4 seasons. That’s a lotta blood and guts. It was set in 800 AD and everyone was crazy as a rabid loon back then. But things haven’t changed that much today. Just fewer people carrying axes. But they got some hottie actresses. Just don’t piss ’em off – they make Ms. Bobbit seem like a nice girl.
At least we won’t have to wait more than another 100 days to find out what Trump is really up to. He says he’s gonna come out of the gate fast.
Awesome as always (the 4 years I’ve been following NC) and often the high point in my day. Really just to let you know your wit, wisdom and soul are highly appreciated. Thanks Craazyman. Live long and … continue to comment
Craazyboy,
I just love you forever, you and and your whole salient, perceptive and hilarious gestalt.(!)
Pavel
January 21, 2017 at 7:30 am
Can someone name me one poor group that Obama actually helped?
Defective Skittles to feed cattle? I suspect we’re not that far off from irrigating our crops with Gatorade, either.
Cows might like Nestles milk chocolate too?
FWIW
Quite a few feedlots in our neck of the woods. Cattle in feedlots are fed a mix, grains, vitamins, minerals, molasses etc., whatever the feedlot guys think will produce the highest profit beef. I’m pretty sure nobody’s pulling up to the feed trough and dumping a load of skittles.
Is it not interesting, that the SAME “food” (fed a mix, grains, vitamins, minerals, molasses etc.) that is fed to cattle, to fatten them up for the slaughter house; is what we lovingly feed to ourselves, and to our loved ones? Are we fattening up ourselves for the “surgeon”? This is what I see all around.
IMO, don’t eat sugars or grains, no matter how healthy the Yellow Press swears that this serf food is. “Healthy” wholemeal bread, ha ha ha
This is one of my all-time favorite (changed my life) essays;
ARE WHOLE-HEALTHY-GRAINS DEFENSELESS?
http://roarofwolverine.com/archives/3432
“In a world full of animals that bite, claw, sting, envenomate and gore, it’s nice to know that there are perfectly defenseless plants for the weak at heart to hunt. But are plants really as defenseless as they appear? We all know that there are plenty of highly toxic plants in the world, but certainly the ones we
eat aren’t poisonous.
Think again. There have been weapons of mass destruction created from plant toxins, like ricin (used by the Soviets during the cold war), but I know of no WMD ever derived from animals.
Every single living thing on this planet has one goal in mind
– to proliferate its genetics. Nothing wants to be eaten –
life has a mechanism to protect itself and its offspring. The nice thing about animals as a food source is that their defenses typically die with them. Whether it’s sharp teeth, powerful jaws, stingers, horns or hooves they are no longer a threat after the animal is dispatched. Even a rattlesnake is quite edible once it is dead.
Plants have evolved a much different way to protect themselves – and especially their offspring. Any species that does not develop a mechanism to protect its children would have certainly went extinct by now……..”
“I’m pretty sure nobody’s pulling up to the feed trough and dumping a load of skittles.”
They’re a story about that above. It turns out that, YES, they are.
Links-
https://consumerist.com/2017/01/20/skittles-scattered-across-highway-were-destined-for-cattle-feed-mars-investigating/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/skittles-spill-mars-investigating-headed-for-cattle-feed/
Kudos for the Idiocracy Gatorade reference!! :)
It’s what plants crave!!
Thanks for the movie night suggestion … now I know what I’ll watch tonight, along with ‘Doctor Strange…love’ ….
Dude, that’s not Gatorade, it’s Brawndo™! :)
Worse than that, agriculture is irrigating with fracking waste water:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/03/22/stop-irrigating-organic-food-fracking-wastewater-new-petition-says
In re: baltic states post nato ed lucas…snowden is a russian operative…well Lucas has to sell that book of his but I suspect snowdens grandfather might be a bit shocked at the idea…
The mouse that roared…baltics…they have that disease everyone else seems to have about how now that they have hung out under the bleachers with half the team, they get to choose terms…
estonia is going to go up “the value chain”…
no more low end tourism…
no sir ree bob…
no more low value manufacturing either…
tomorrow they will build rockets and airplanes and self driving golf carts…
Didn’t thailand just shoot itself in the foot insisting that they will no longer support “zero dollar” tour groups from china…
everyone thinks they can just magically flip a switch and charge more by replacing white plastic chairs
with greens ones…
Weezie…cue the record…
oh were movin on up…
And Lucas is an ex-MI6 operative. Seriously. In Moscow in the late 90s we all knew. One assumes so did the Russians.
Of course, here I am assuming that there is such a thing as an ex-MI6 operative.
So dont be fooled by his constant and habitual anti-Russian sentiment. Its just business.
Wait a minute. There’s a REAL MI6 agent named Lucas that was based in Moscow in the ’90s?
You’re not just making a joke about Spooks/MI5?
Yves — looks like the comment on the Tesla link might actually go with this one instead:
One Of The World’s Top Aging Researchers Has A Pill To Keep You Feeling Young Fast Company (Lawrence R)
Drivers Use Tesla Autopilot at Their Own Risk, Investigators Conclude Motherboard (resilc). One side effect is that Silicon Valley will now be fighting Big Pharma’s effort to vastly curtail dietary supplements (there have been a lot of dodgy scare stories re vitamins, which is a proof of Big Pharma trying to get vitamins sold on via prescription, which would lead to a big increase in prices. Mind you, the Agricultural Department recommended vitamin supplements in 1938 because the soil was too depleted for consumers to get all the nutrients
I’m still wondering about my investment in ChromaDex (Nicotinamide Riboside and Pterostilbene’s licensed manufacturers?) I’m guessing, we’ll be seeing them gobbled up by IG Farbenindustrie AktienGesellschaft, once fahklempt boomers take to Scott’s Miracle Grow’s Round-up Ready sinsemilla or GE Iranian poppy OxyContin? I’m guessing you’ll soon be able to get your first dose free just for beta testing Acadami’s See Something Say Something app? Though I do forsee autonomous cars’ cameras replacing police cruisers?
Still opportunity in the pot biz, methinks. I expect Zig Zag, 3M and Johnson & Johnson to form a joint venture and design a line of multicolored doctor prescription forms which can be used to purchase a gram of pot at the pharmacy, then conveniently, not to mention fashionably, roll a joint in the Zig Zag prescription paper. Doctor appointment is required.
Too soon to predict how highway wars go, but I believe car headlights will be an effective anti-optical sensor weapon in our self driving future.
Through the whole yuppie reservatrol fetish, I’d known yard workers busy tearing Japanese Knotweed out of upscale suburbanite gardens & selling the ground-up rhizomes to All organic, natural supplement wholesalers. Now, I suspect everyone’s going to be shelling-out $54/ a month for what we were trying to get from Turkish pomegranate, organic blueberries & hops (suitably et-up & pooped-out by yeast cultures). GW Pharmaceuticals PLC, Bayer and Chromdex are simply ahead of the curve we’d ALL seen coming four decades ago; that if Hemp ever was legalized, we the peons would STILL go to jail for hybridizing non patent, open-pollinated strains. We must’ve been friggin’ HIGH to be so damn paranoid? I remember, working with very right wing dude while hearing about 9/11 over his CB. We BOTH figured “bin Laden’s kid kid was pissed-off that KBR was stealing his opium profits?” As a punk kid, we used to smoke dope & make out in a small park beside CMU’s Porter Hall, not infrequently being startled by robots, flying or walking like crabs through the trees.
Ha. I got suckered initially in the resveratrol craze. Paid $20 for a little bottle of caps. Then learned CA red grapes at the supermarket were far cheaper and better. CA red wine was best. Lately, saw the same size bottle on sale for $1.98 at my online vitamin store. I bought it.
Well, I personally always preferred blueberries, pomegranate, acai rosa rugosa hips and elderberry to Japanese Knotwood rhizomes, but I’m sure reservatrol’s a worthwhile thing? Your earlier premise, that “patent medicines” will be marketed, exclusively to upscale customers at exponentially escalating prices, through their perfectly rational concerns over depleted, dead and poisoned soil; heavy metal contamination; it’s certainly nothing new? Fear is a swell way to move any bad product upscale, just look at Robby Mook! Everybody needs to feel special, entitled to protection the hoi-polloi can’t afford? Isn’t this how the mob’s always interacted with the entitled bourgeois? Everybody gets a cut. Opium, cocaine, cannabis were LEGAL when just white folks used tinctures, teas or powders. http://www.ecowatch.com/organic-farming-vs-fracking-1882021549.html
Heck, wasn’t their a Twilight Zone with a snake oil salesman named Trump? Isn’t that what put the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, in Oz? Medicine men RULE!
The silver lining is our government still asserts that Toyota ignition switches can be faulty and dangerous. But those are electromechanical devices.
I see where the establishment is all in a tizzy that Trump, by merely pointing out how f*cked up the country is, has just committed an outrage. Apparently the pundits think this is beyond the pale, beyond Reagan pointing out the recession and inflation. I get the impression that Trump disparagement of the meritorious establishment, and He who was virtuous beyond compare, was a grave insult to this land of happy, shiny people…
I can actually remember when Presidents talked about the country’s problems. But Reagan came along, and it was nothing but shining cities on hills. OPTIMISM. If you weren’t optimistic there was something wrong with you. Reagan also instituted incessant yammering about deficits, but doing the opposite of reducing them. Soon after, the dems realized there was nothing gained by telling the truth. And flags on lapels were more important than having actually served.
So the US became the indispensable nation. And we now are in the world of pretending that every one is employed, and has health insurance that works well.
Do I think Trump will change anything….no. But simply by not yammering the incessant, never ending bullsh*t that so engulfs this country, maybe we can start the process of change. I’m sure soon enough Trump will start slinging bullsh*t too. And people will understand that they can fire Trump too.
But people learned something in this last cycle. The two brands standard “product” doesn’t have to be accepted, no matter how much advertising (Thanks Jeb! and Hillary) Maybe next time they will even consider an off brand….
Is It Time To Revoke John Lewis’s Lifetime Civil Rights Hero Pass? Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report. Ouch.
It’s time to ask whether Civil Rights Hero status from 52 years ago is really enough to cancel out or ignore all this, and what purpose John’s Hero status serves today. John Lewis is in the news now because he called Big Cheeto’s presidency “not legitimate.” But why?
Is it because Lewis fears Trump will pursue more than 6 bloody wars, that he will deport millions of innocents, expand mass surveillance and militarized policing? Is it because Lewis knows the Donald will help greedy banksters stay ut of jail and he’ll enable hedge fund parasites to gentrify, plunder and privatize public education, nature and the commons? Probably not, because these are all Obama policies which Trump is expected to double down on.
John Lewis’s problem with Trump is that the CIA and FBI, which helped assassinate King and cover it up says that Russia helped elect him, and Lewis believes it. Big Cheeto did a Twitter fight with Lewis the other day and some of his followers called Lewis the n-word.
========================================================
I would say the above lends credence to my 8:57 am comment
Speaking of John Lewis, Chris Floyd has a few observations:
Brucie A.
January 21, 2017 at 10:10 am
Well, exactly right. I always wonder with the avalanche of information on CIA wrongdoing, when exactly did the CIA become a virtuous truthteller???
The moment it became politically expedient for the liberuls to claim so? Much easier and painless compared to taking responsibility for their own ineptitude and for 3+ decades of throwing their voters under the neoliberal Acela train they hopped onto for their own personal profit.
But of course, yours was a rhetorical question :)
Forget whether Trump was illegitimate or not, why wasn’t Lewis working to over turn the Electoral College? Why wasn’t he once again on the front lines to get rid of the obstacles and out trying to register people regardless of the obstacles. I mean if voting was so important before…
I’d say it wasn’t the CIA report that fueled Lewis to anger, it was his realization that Democrats were rapidly becoming redundant for the moneyed classes who had become his ‘friends’ over the years because the Party had worked so hard to empower the opposition they destroyed themselves. The hack was the accepted method of protesting Trump’s legitimacy because it was the one thing that neither party could be use in the future, blaming Russia was just the cherry for the IC and MIC. His grift was endangered. But I’m a cynic that way.
A minority party House spot is a great gig when the minority party controls the White House. You don’t have real responsibilities for governing, but you can go on TV and get invited to all the cool parties.
Now, Lewis won’t get invited to cool kid parties.
I think we have to either reform both the Electoral College and the Senate, not just the former, or leave them as they are.
We’re going to do the latter. Forever.
I’m shooting from hip here but Hillary’s 2.8 M vote majority came entirely from two regions: large California cities, and all around the D.C. Beltway. The Electoral College gave the rest of the country some say in the matter, and both sides knew the rules. If Trump had been playing to win the popular vote, who is to say he wouldn’t have won it?
i’m sure he would have done better, but the media was so pro clinton; i’m not sure he could have overcome that handicap in a popular vote election.
Thanks. Harsh but really good.
fresno dan
January 21, 2017 at 8:57 am
I see where the establishment is all in a tizzy that Trump, by merely pointing out how f*cked up the country is, has just committed an outrage.
Exactly right. But fortunately we have our news outlets to set the record straight. NPR told me last night as I drove home from work that “Trump inherits the best economy in 20 years” with historically low unemployment record healthcare coverage and rising everything so all is awesome don’t listen to those nattering nabobs of negativism…unless it’s one of my Democratic friends telling me now we’re going to see really bad things can get.
timbers
January 21, 2017 at 11:31 am
If people were logical, consistent, critical thinking, and truthful, every “progressive” would drop down to their knees and thank their deity (who is all good but never actually does anything good….) that now with Trump in office, the all encompassing bullsh*t can end and the MSM will start reporting how sh*tty this place is….
….sheesh, talk about fake news…
I’ve been anything but a Trump fan. When I got in from my canoe trip my wife was all in a lather about Trump’s speech mainly because the talking heads told her to be. She said I just had to listen to the ghastly thing. So I did. I’m sure she was expecting another of my anti-Trump tirades. I told her I had no problem with it. I actually liked it. An if he acts on it, which I don’t expect, I’ll support him.
Usually I fear the Democrats won’t do what they promise and I fear the Republicans will do what they promise. My fears are usually justified.
james brown
January 21, 2017 at 9:47 am
The question I have is why is the punditocracy so against Trumps speech?
I have 3 hypotheses:
1. The MSM is in the tank for dems. I dunno – Trumps “trashing” of the country doesn’t seem that much worse than Reagans’ trashing of Carter. If anything, Reagan’s ignoring of race was less realistic and less humanitarian. (again, this about speech – whether Trump ACTUALLY does anything is a different issue)
2. Corporate America, and the MSM (but I repeat myself) cannot allow ANY acknowledgement of issues that…GASP!!! – might somehow diminish, obstruct, or impede in any way imaginable the total 24/7 stripmining of any wealth, resources or even potential for happiness, no matter how minuscule, of the 99%
3. After 40 some years of non stop bullsh*t of the shining city on a hill, indispensable nation, and the yuppie belief that money is success and happiness, this country falls into a Willy Loman funk if it can’t believe it is doing great.
So I believe its kinda of a 50/50 split between 2 & 3.
1 trump made a frontal attack on dem identity politics. Naturally Msm lib knees were knocking, they took it very personally. Great opportunity to show righteous indignation for minorities without actually doing anything for them… and while big o continued deporting 200k/month.
2 neocons control both parties as much as banks do, and Russia is the basis for the most expensive weapons systems, the ones with the most profits. Have to have a story of Mig dogfights to justify fleets of f35’s. and have to blame something for losing to the most unpopular politician in America, and obviously can’t be dem competence, either in selecting candidate or running campaign… spent twice the money, had the candidate with world class experience, the establishment Msm including comedy, plus the support of the last three presidents, and as noted the most unpopular/incompetent opponent bill personally selected… and she lost.
Damn, those russkies are good at fake news! Maybe they could train the CIA…
I wouldn’t say that the mainstream U.S. media is in the tank for the Democrats exactly – more like they are in the tank for the DC elite consensus of how things should be. If Jeb Bush for example had won they would have been talking about how great his speech was (regardless of what he said). If Hillary had won they would have been talking about how great her speech was (regardless of what she said). If Bernie Sanders had won the nomination and gone on to win the presidency I’m pretty sure those media voices would be just as horrified at his speech as they were at Trump’s and condemning it just as strongly (regardless of what he said).
There is huge outcry (it seems) about the “American carnage” bit. Well, however monstrous Trump may be (and he is), here he is spot on. Leaving aside the foreign carnage over 50 years or more (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc etc etc ad nauseum), there is ongoing carnage in the US inner cities, just as he says. I’ve travelled to cities around the world and whilst there is more appalling squalor in, say, Bangkok, or more absolute poverty in rural Brazil (impoverished people without shoes, under a crude tin roof), no where is there the contrast between the ruling elite and the urban poor (mainly black, of course).
And visit these cities: Baltimore, Newark, Detroit… decades of neglect, usually under Democrat governments. Trump does have a point.
The schools are absolutely atrocious. I once heard someone say: if your car only worked 20% of the time, or Walmart’s goods were only defect-free 20% of the time, you’d be irate. Yet we accept public schools in the inner cities where only 20% of the kids can read or write or do maths at the appropriate level.
[Ultimately nothing will change in the inner cities until the “war on drugs” is over, but that is a separate topic.]
If the MSM and others are so shocked by the “American carnage” phrase they’re going to have a hard time dealing with its reality.
Most people do not connect Trump’s reference to “American carnage” to its militarism overseas and increasingly at home. They tied the term to Trump’s talking about drug deaths and black on black crime, among other things, and not even cops killing blacks.
From Trump’s inaugural speech:
Here in NYC, it would be nice if someone could put some pants on poor black males (or at least a belt) and occasionally give them a shower. In the winter its always fun to watch a subway car’s passengers squash against each other to try and maximize the distance between them, and the incredibly smelly, mentally ill, homeless black person sleeping on one of the seats.
I sometimes wonder what happens to white people who suffer mental illness? Where do they go?
I sometimes wonder what happens to white people who suffer mental illness? Where do they go? Here in Chicago, they go to the Kennedy Expressway and Lake Shore Drive underpasses. Occasionally on the Red Line and Brown Line trains and subway station platforms, too. Some of them are quite smelly, so it appears that personal hygiene or lack thereof is a function of homelessness, mental illness, and individual characteristics, not race. Shocking, amirite?
you’ve never seen or smelled a homeless white person in nyc? most homeless are white, many are mentally ill, and just about all of them smell to some extent, being, wait for it, homeless.
“Soon after, the dems realized there was nothing gained by telling the truth.”
Telling the truth has become the ultimate crime. Ask Manning, Snowden, etc.
That’s why Trump’s speech was so great. He dared to articulate the fact that that both parties have colluded to destroy our economy over the last 40 years. He even said they exported our middle class. Whether he can fix it or not is not as important as the fact he called them out to their face at the very moment he stripped them of all their power. His example of achieving the impossible is an inspiration whether the opposition likes it or not. Demonization is not working. Time for them to think of something more classy.
It was such the contrast to bankster stroking Chucky Schume’rs … uh … lofty & hollow rhetorical bull sh!t !
I liked most of Trump’s speech came, hated some of it. But personnel is policy and Trump’s appointments are universally the absolute worst ever. Perhaps he’s playing some kind of long game like Obama’s eleventy dimensionsal chess but we all saw how that turned out. Don’t trust charismatic men with stirring speeches. Pay attention to what they actually do.
Steve C
January 21, 2017 at 11:25 am
I can’t refute ‘look at what they do, not what they say’ – but I do think a Rubicon has been crossed. Trump is the start, not the finish.
Like they say on HGTV, all remodels start with demolition. This leaky drafty house with a backed up toliet, no matter what the landlord tells you, needs a total gut job….
I would like nothing more than to be pleasantly surprised by Trump being a working class hero. But so far he has done nothing that wasn’t a plutocrat’s wet dream.
No question that some of his cabinet picks have a history that raises some questions. Right now, I’m going to my happy place because he has at least said things that needed to be said. NATO is obsolete. Being friends with Russia is a good idea. No more nation building or regime change. Our infrastructure is a mess. The inner cities need massive investment. The manufacturing hemorrhage will stop. He is not going to sell us out like his predecessors.
This declaration of his clear intentions faces massive opposition from vested interests. Maybe he’s assembling his own posse of plutocrats for the big fight ahead.
And yes, unlike Obama, he likes a fight.
Yes, that’s part of the problem:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/21/donald-trump-era-begins-with-obamacare-rollback-and-missile-defence-orders
Well, a “state of the art” missile defense system is one that costs a horrendous amount of money and isn’t able to shoot down any of the missiles it’s supposed to defend against – never mind things like cruise missiles, submarine launched ballistic missiles fired at short range, aircraft carried bombs or for that matter smuggled ones. Who could be against that? Fer cryin’ out loud the executives of the munitions companies need to be able to buy million dollar cars and multi-million dollar houses you know!
Just like Saint Ronnies “Star Wars” missile defense system.
As the engineer standing in the rubble of the wrecked factory building said; “It looked good on paper.”
I figure the oligarchy got tired of the middlemen raking off a share (CGI?) and just decided to cut them right out.
I think that just as Trump couldn’t get any real talent to play at is inauguration, he couldn’t get any real talent to be in his cabinet. So he took what he could get.
Maybe as time passes and everyone settles down Trump will be willing to play his reality TV game of “You’re fired!” and send a few of these early cabinet nominees packing for someone better if they fail to perform.
One can always hope, for a little while at least.
Yes, pretty bad. On the plus side the picks at state, defense and CIA imply we might avoid WWIII over the next four years. Let’s just take this four years at a time.
@Reno Dino – And he dared to articulate it from a platform seen worldwide! The more I think about that, the more amazed, and a little afraid for him, I’m feeling!
After Trump finished that one scathing litany of carnage (i.e., rusted out factories scattered like tombstones), I imagined what he might be saying to himself in his mind, to all those behind him who scoffed at him, dismissed him and sought to destroy him: “These are the kind of things people want to hear you talk about, you motherfuckers — not more pie in the sky bullshit and more of the “we’re already great” nonsense. This is how you win.” Of course, he might also been thinking about how much longer it was going to be before he could take a leak. Who knows?
So was that Bannon’s speech?
My take on his speech is that he was taking on Congress directly. The last time I checked, the GOP have a majority in both the Senate and House and have had that for a few years. So the big question is whether or not the GOP shares his vision.
“..spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” – Bush Administration and GOP Congress led that initiative
“Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” – sounds like Democratic Party from 1933 – 1991 – Trump has basically stolen the Democratic mid-century platform in the same way that Clinton stole the moderate Republican platform and Obama stole the Heritage foundation model for health care.
One of the key reasons that our government has been dysfunctional has been that the parties have been stealing each others ideas (not necessarily for the better). The extreme partisanship over the past two decades means that parties then need to abandon their ideas because they have been appropriated by the other side.
That leaves a vacuum of ideas because one party is implementing somebody else’s idea with a great deal of cynicism while the party who originally had the idea is left bereft of ideas since they now have to fight against their own idea and haven’t come up with a new one. This is why the Affordable Care Act repeal is in chaos because there isn’t a replacement unless they the GOP adopts Bernie Sanders’ ideas.
I’m sure Bernie wouldn’t mind.
Theresa May to emphasise value of EU and Nato to Trump. At first I thought that the FT allowed a typo in the headline. Then I read the article and discovered that Theresa May wants to have her cake and eat it too. That, and her belief that the EU is “strong”, almost made me spurt my coffee all over my screen. The idea of May enlightening Trump is a bit too radical for an early Saturday morning.
strange days indeed
RE: “CLINTON DEMOCRATS IN NO POSITION TO CALL THEMSELVES ‘THE RESISTANCE’”
The headline says it all. So true. The article gives specific examples.
Note that while Hellary supporters stand on a bridge chanting her pathetic slogan “Love Trumps Hate” during Trump’s inauguration, Bernie supporters have been more productive by winning local elections–to make a real change.
Dem party? Clueless.
Which president was this?
1. Born rich
2. Succeeded a president who grossly mishandled an economic crisis
3. Posed as a traitor to his class
4. Inspired fear and loathing among the establishment and welcomed their hatred
5. Survived multiple coup attempts, protected by a few army generals
6. Appeared to possess a second-class mind but somehow got his way
7. Main purpose was to save capitalism through imperialism, or perhaps the other way around
Well played! However, the key was the “first-class temperament.” Doesn’t seem likely this time.
The key to FDR’s success was full employment. He took his eye off that ball in 1937 and suffered a setback.
FDR is remembered fondly because, except for 1937, people’s lives improved throughout his 12 years. Democrats have been living off that memory through 70 years of throwing working people under the bus. 2016 was the year that cupboard was finally bare.
Other than that, FDR was a snake like all the rest of them without exception.
And that little program that further infuriated the Powers That Be — Social Security.
Without that, and LBJ’s following up with Medicare/Medicaid, we would have far more people giving the Repubs what they so desperately desire — the “takers” following their “Hurry Up and Die” solution to the nation’s problems.
8. Set up concentration camps to inter a minority population.
9. Tricked his country into an unpopular war.
I dunno. It seems like the unholy union of the two Duoplocrat candidates fits this bill.
I know! The light just went on above my head! Churchill!
Would that Churchill “inspired fear and loathing among the establishment and welcomed their hatred”.
Well, his mother was, gasp, an American.
Yes, they are a group with a rather low threshold for “fear and loathing + hatred”. Cheeky buggers.
Never let it be forgotten. +++
I think you meant to type intern. Despite the infamous wrong, most were not actually buried.
You are completely correct, apologies to all proper English speakers!
https://twitter.com/bejohnce/status/822922218002792448
About point 6. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr made this observation about FDR, not you or me. I doubt Holmes would declare the most brilliant of the world’s current technocrats to be second rate minds. The guy made complex legal arguments, then distilled them into brilliant one liners that did the subject justice and made them accessible to everyone.
I use to use his quotes when I did high school debate.
“Most of what we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers did them and our neighbors do them. And the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think.
On the second-rate mind point, regarding FDR I was thinking of that famous quote but also how he replaced VP Wallace with Truman while knowing he would probably not live long, and that Truman would do whatever he was told; hence Hiroshima, etc. With Trump, it’s too soon to tell if his mind is second rate, however that is what his critics like to say about him.
crittermom
January 21, 2017 at 9:04 am
While Democrats marinated in the unverifiable news of President-elect Donald Trump’s “golden shower” dossier, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Bernie Sanders put forward an amendment, which called for the establishment of a “deficit-neutral reserve fund” to “lower prescription drug prices for Americans by importing drugs from Canada. It was rejected, 52 to 46, even though Trump favors renegotiating drug prices and said pharmaceutical companies are “getting away with murder.”
Thirteen Democratic Senators voted against the amendment, an early sign of what’s to come. Their votes ensured the amendment failed.
=========================================================
So, as there are 52 repubs and 46 dems and 13 dems voted against it……(takes out tentacles and starts counting) and of course a couple of independents….so 11 or 13 repubs actually voted FOR IT…..
Of course, whips and leadership, once they know a bill will fail, can give a “pass” to ‘representatives’ so that they can pretend to vote for a bill when if the bill was REALLY going to pass and their vote was needed to thwart passage, the representative would vote his/her true feelings against the bill. So who knows how many of those repubs are “true” supports (AND the same can be said for the dems as well).
“I was actually for pharmaceutical reform before I voted against it”
Of course, for flat out hypocrisy in this case, the repubs are worse. So much for “free trade” if it actually results in less profits for pharmaceutical companies….or lowering the cost of drugs the US government buys…..or doing anything to enact laws not written to benefit special interests…
AZ Senators Flake and McCain voted for this bill.
Arizona Slim
January 21, 2017 at 11:03 am
According to the Daily Kos website (yeah, yeah, but it was the quickest one I could find with an actual listing of names of repubs who voted FOR, and dems who voted AGAINST.
John Boozman (R-AR)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Ted Cruz (R-TX)
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Dean Heller (R-NV)
John Kennedy (R-LA)
Mike Lee (R-UT)
John McCain (R-AZ)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Rand Paul (R-KY)
John Thune (R-SD)
Here are the 13 Democrats:
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Cory Booker (D-NJ)
Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Bob Casey (D-PA)
Chris Coons (D-DE)
Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Bob Menendez (D-NJ)
Patty Murray (D-WA)
Jon Tester (D-MT)
Mark Warner (D-VA)
==========================================
Who is the most surprising vote?
Lets do it by party. My votes
Patty Murray (D-WA)
Mike Lee (R-UT) I pick this guy because I remember when I worked at FDA the other Utah senator was most in the tank for vitamin manufacturers, so I thought this guy would be getting some of that grift too.
So I welcome everyone’s opinion on
most despicable vote
most hypocritical vote
bravest vote (just to prove I am not ENTIRELY cynical…I think I have two non cynical atoms in my 8th tentacle far sucker….)
And insights on number of geezers in the state are welcome….
Patty .. to whom I’m unproud to call … ‘My Senator’ ….
I have other things I could call her … but this is a quasi-family blog ….
The “Mom in tennis shoes” has evolved into a total creature of WA DC, not WA State. Name one thing she has done in her 5 (going on 6) terms as Senator. A disgrace.
Rotating villains, etc.
1/2017 roll call for drug re-importation
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=115&session=1&vote=00020
01/2012 roll call for drug re-importation
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=2&vote=00108
12/2009 roll call for Dorgan amendment for drug re-importation
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=1&vote=00377
Least surprising to me, because I lived in the state for 5 years, Bennet D – CO. He has a long voting history against the people, but stellar when it comes to supporting his largest funders including the usual subjects; banks, insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas.
Your most surprising(?) Patty Murray was a TPP supporter.
It is unsurprising she would NOT vote this way as Big Pharma did not get the TPP she supported, so this could be a consolation prize.
A link to the her earlier TPP action:
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/241297-sen-murray-breaks-with-dem-leaders-on-trade-bill
Now one could suggest Murray was looking out for home state employees of the Boeing company with the 2015 TPP vote.
.
But it is not clear that TPP would have increased Boeing’s sales that much, so that may have been political cover for Murray as she helped Big Pharma.
The positive effects of TPP were more evident for Big Pharma.
Murray does get money from the Pharmaceutical/Health Products industry (483K from 2011 to 2016), per https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n00007876
I believe Murray’s vote to support Big Pharma belongs in the unsurprising category.
Oh, T/U for the listing: Now I can call BOTH of my NJ senators.
They do love them those Big PhRMA donations sooooo much, how could they vote for the bill????
Grrrr.
Most Surprising? Ted Cruz by a mile. for the D’s I’d have to say Heidkamp. Mostly because a D from ND would have to know the history of the populist ‘Non Partisan Legal’ and this kind of spits in the face of that.
Yup – they serve the cartels, in this case the pharma cartel that also controls the FDA. FY entertainment from the northwest corner:
“http://nwcitizen.com/entry/senators-murray-and-cantwell-work-for-the-pharma-cartel-not-for-you”
Sen Casey’s office staff gave me that excuse (“I was actually for pharmaceutical reform before I voted against it”) then added “worried about the safety”. Ask them to direct you to the piles of bad med killed Canadians as someone (Lambert?) suggested. Oh, that’s right they are here in the US killed by opioid addiction.
Next time you hear that BS remind him that version passed in and was signed in 2000 and never enacted. It’s a lame excuse to let the executive kill it quietly later.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/27/us/in-a-turnaround-white-house-kills-drug-import-plan.html
One of my D friends ran on a platform that was a lot like Bernie Sanders’.
She won the primary. And then she won the general election.
She is now in the Arizona House of Representatives.
So, yes, it can be done.
I am baffled that Nancy Pelosi was re-anointed to House minority leader. In parliamentary systems, a party that was expected to win and then doesn’t has its leaders resign the next day. New leaders arise from the ashes. Only a minority party that was not expected to win keeps its leaders as long as it did as well as expected – they often hold the balance of power in minority governments.
The opposition parties in parliamentary systems are usually known as the “loyal opposition.” The Democrats will be known as the “clueless opposition.”
rd
January 21, 2017 at 12:18 pm
Years ago there was a book called the “Peter Principle”
The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence.
Witnessed that first-hand when I worked on the campuses of the University of Arizona and the University of Pittsburgh.
The Democratic Party is a professionals’ trade association, not a vehicle of power (which is mob rule according to liberalism). Thus, the Party’s procession is guided by the principles for which the Party stands: good old competitive office politics.
The long term effects of Team Blue recruiting, supporting self funding nothings interested in buying a title as opposed to pursuing change, are at play.
The average member of the Team Blue caucus had no desire to take the job because it requires busy work Nancy actually has to attend to. With policy, they can dump work on staffers, but scheduling the Congressmen requires another Congressman. Pelosi has to attend to these needs. It’s a job no one wants.
Then of course, there is the direction of the party. I would say 2/3 of the Democratic caucus are basically trumped up city council types who filled in a pot hole once where the city manager makes all the real decisions. What do they do? Their messiah was a dunce. Their savior just lost to Donald Trump. The DNC is a complete mess. The party simply doesn’t exist and has no direction. If you ran for Congress to buy a title, isn’t it easiest to just vote for Pelosi? She already knows where her office is. Anyone else will be responsible for the busy work and the direction of the party.
Ask yourself why does Tulsi Gabbard jump out from the pack? Or Allen Grayson? Or Sanders when he was in Congress? It’s due to the poor quality of the caucus as a whole.
Al Franken is a great example. He’s a comic writer and real smart guy, but he has no government experience. I don’t believe he went on the orientation for new members because of the recount, but despite his lack of experience, he was considered a policy wonk almost immediately. This is code for “the other senators are morons who can’t be bothered to understand basic policy implications.”
Clueless? Hardly. The Clinton wing has known from Day 1 that their primary purpose was to keep the left out of power. Win a few elections? Fine, just keep the left out.
Far from clueless. Job well done.
They also had to get in a couple of times to do things like NAFTA, the Crime and Welfare bills and financial deregulation. Their owners needed those things to happen, and the Republicans were having trouble getting it done.
I’m not sure if their owners still need them to be in power at this point. I guess it depends on what happens under Trump with trade.
I’ve been clearing brush at a place we own in Door Co, WI for 20 years. This past spring I could honestly say that I didn’t recognize any of the plants except Queen Anne’s Lace (which has a two invasive cousins that look much like it). Everything else had shown up in the last 10-15 years. McIntosh apple trees along the road that I used to pick in the fall are now being choked by wine grape vines, obviously spread by birds from the trendy vinyards just inland. Japanese Knotweed can grow 10 feet high in a summer and is impossible to kill without chemical warfare.
When I was a kid in the ’70s Lake Michigan was so muddy you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face (and the invasive Lamprey Eel was finishing off the top of the food chain). Now Lake Michigan looks like the Caribbean as the (non-native) Zebra Mussel has filtered every nutrient out of the water.
The climate has been warm in the past but it is the presence of the invasive species that will do the most damage to the upper Great Lakes. Even if the climate cools again, the ecosystem will be forever changed.
Well, that zebra muscle filter-feeding will at least save SCal and AZ a lot of money on treatment of the water that the Chinatown Kleptocracy plans to pipe across 2/3 of the country to fill their pools and water features and water hazards and almond and pistachio and alfalfa ag-thievery… so all is going according to plan… Winners and losers– Second Law ensures that all games are in the end negative-sum.
How are we Californians going to secede from the Deplorables without their water then?
Jesse Ventura said it: “Let them eat sand.” Big Al Franken changed that to “Let them drink from the Dustbowl.” (fake quotes, I think)
Start a stillsuit factory …..
Any vacant sietches available in the golden state ??
I highly recommend “The Rambunctious Garden” by Emma Marris for some interesting ideas on what are and are not problems with invasive species.
Meanwhile I plant native plants, shrubs, and trees in my yard since they are an essential part of the ecosystem and most of the highly productive land has been turned into suburbs and farmland. Douglas Tallamy’s work has been informative regarding this.
Non-point source pollution from industrial agriculture as well as ongoing urban wastewater discharges (especially combined sewer overflows) are devastating to rivers, lakes, estuaries, and coral reefs. The blue-green algae outbreaks are from this.Much of the damage to coral reefs is due to bottom trawl fishing and poor water quality from terrestrial discharges.
Interestingly, another invasive species (round goby) is helping to control zebra mussels. So it is causing problems with native fish populations as it eats their eggs but it is managing zebra mussel infestations. Ecosystems are really tough to figure out.
rd
January 21, 2017 at 12:27 pm
And the great thing is they take care of themselves. Most days I just say to my plants, chat amongst yourselves….
You could possibly aid them in their craic by planting them all in one pot with mycelium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSGPNm3bFmQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-4w5xYLwiU
Batchelder said he ….hopes the new president will inspire a return to an older style of patriotism.
“Just work a little harder for your country,” he said. “Ask for a little less.”
He hopes Trump will cut taxes and regulations on small businesses. Mainly though, Batchelder hopes Trump will make health insurance more affordable for him …
So his definition of “asking for a little less” is to get more?
It will be interesting to watch these people get thrown under the bus for the next four years the same way Obama’s supporters did. They only difference is that most of Trump’s people have guns.
“Ask for a little less” is for the proles … Big business will, as usual, get a little more (tax cuts, less reg’s).
Was he misquoted?
Did he say ‘ask for a little less costly’ health insurance, so you can be healthier and work harder for your country?
I spend about two hours a day reading online, and real books. From liberal blogs to left like counterpunch….and I have to say again…..this site is still such a haven of sanity and critical thinking. I have to donate soon. The links pages alone are just so great.
I agree. This is my favorite site. Every day I look forward to coming here and learning the real news, and reading great analysis and comments.
Indeed.
Yesterday, I made the mistake of logging into the Faceborg. Place was in full meltdown mode.
NC was refreshingly free of such childish behavior.
Hear, hear, and kudos as always to Yves and Lambert. NC and CounterPunch are indeed oases of sanity, though (pace CounterPunch) with the comments enabled here this is more of a community.
This here is the only comments section I know of that I don’t wish was disabled or at least concealed. As I latecomer (last couple of years) I don’t even know it got to be that way: my guess would be the combination of exceptionally thoughtful, mostly mutually respectful contributors and the enormous amount of work put into hands-on moderation. (Huge thanks to everyone — especially those whose comments I’ve disagreed with publicly — for that.)
A parallel Counterpunch ‘community’ might be nice, but on the whole I’m glad the ‘discussion’ there is invisible to those of us who don’t use F*ceb**k, because bitter personal sniping is so ubiquitous on the Left, and it’s depressing at best to see people you generally respect tearing at each other’s throats. For example the discussion threads on Libcom.org were quite good for a while and the site’s archive is amazing, but eventually the spectacle of notional ‘comrades’ — including personal friends/acquaintances — verbally eviscerating one another just got too grim. (No need, by the way, to call it ‘trolling’, because this sort of thing wasn’t born yesterday.)
The best.
(Sadly, real news doesn’t travel as wide or far as fake news)
Agree 100%.
I come here every day to try to learn more about the world as it is, without it being obscured behind the curtain of corporate media screens and pages.
Whatever. I’m only here because Dmitri keeps my dacha stocked with Stolichnaya.
Kidding! (it’s actually Smirnoff)
I now regret my vote for Stein, I could have been voting for Calvin. It may be late but I’m jumping on that bandwagon.
That is one handsome boy who is far more Presidential than either of the main candidates were.
I don’t know. He looks like he thinks he’s seeing a Putin lurking in his window to me. Of course Jill did too, much to my dismay.
I regret my Jill vote for the same reason.
I regret it too. We need a real third party, not the pretend version.
Me three.
Me four.
I’m a deplorable …. I like meteors …..** orange ones ‘;]
** pulls out Time cover to prove it …
You may be deplorable, but there is a special place in hell for Bernie Bros like me, especially ones who are also “f*cking retarded” leftists who have “sacrificed the good at the altar of perfect.” Especially today with the million women marches, I dare not say a peep on Faceborg lest I be quartered and denounced by my liberul women friends and the low-testosterone liberul males in their orbits, who think that this is the perfect opportunity to finally get to third base with a living, breathing female.
Anytime you get #BernieBro flack on social media, respond with some tweets of #HillBots spewing “We Don’t Need You!” @ #Berners post-Dem-convention … folks get quiet real quick-like …
I love how the Hillbots + Snowflaks are now on the receiving end of the ‘Get Over It-Grow Up !’ line that they so flippantly spewed at the Bernie bros. not so long ago ….
Just Sour desserts !
We need a second party.
Agreed.
…There are a group of issues that are widely supported by the public of all political leanings but have no representation. The only question is who’s going to pick up the power we see lying in the street, and for what purpose?
NotTimothyGeithner
January 21, 2017 at 11:26 am
LOL! Its funny because ITS TRUE!!! As usual, the best pithy comment of the day!!!
Actually, don’t need “pithy” best comment of the day!
“The rent is too damn high” got a (homeless?) candidate for governor on the ballet in NY. One way to push the national Democrats around would be to replace all those phony leftish mayors. A second party based on livable wages, rent control, anti-usury, and smaller classrooms could build into a national force.
Considering my other choices were Clinton, and Trump.. I don’t regret a thing. So Jill Stein has said some off color things since the election, jumped onto some bandwagons and all that.. but that doesn’t change the fact that the policies of the Greens are 18 times saner than anything we’re going to see under Trump, or would have seen under Clinton. The policies are what I voted for, not necessarily Stein herself. You know, the actual issues.
It goes without saying that Calvin would have had teh best policies.. and the best purrs.
This.
The decision was Stein or literally to write in Bernie Sanders.
I voted Stein, my husband wrote in Bernie. Where are the final write-in counts?
We may never know considering the recount effort uncovered in Michigan supports election fraud
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/05/recount-unrecountable/95007392/
But hey everyone wants to focus on the fact that she used the government’s own statements to make the argument the recount should happen instead of the fact that her efforts uncovered stuff like the above.
Re Corey Robin, Sanders and the politics of fear: Robin’s rosy tinged view of Sanders doesn’t entirely comport with reality. Whether or not Sanders was a “sheepdog” for the anything but rosy tinged HRC (as claimed by BAR), his intentions at the beginning seem to have been to pull Hillary to the left and therefore make her more viable rather than win outright. You could see this in the way he pulled his punches about the emails in the first debate. Insiders in his campaign said it was only after he began to win primaries and draw those huge crowds that he believed he might win. When he didn’t get the nomination he very much looked backwards and vigorously endorsed Clinton out of fear that “some Republican”–ie Trump–might take power. This was also his initial rationale for not running third party which given the result–Clinton lost anyway–would have arguably been more useful. By trying to reform the Dems Sanders was tilting at windmills but he did so out of fear of the GOP.
However it is a new era and Hillary is now that thing we definitely don’t want to look back at and turn into a pillar of salt. Trump says he wants practical, not ideological solutions. Perhaps Sanders, Warren and others can hold him to that uncertain claim.
I can see Sanders and Trump working together on an infrastructure rebuilding program.
Arizona Slim, nice vision!
Here’s my thinking:
Trump, love him or hate him, does know how to get things built. Yes, I know that he runs roughshod over his subcontractors, but that isn’t uncommon in the construction industry.
I’m also acquainted with a guy who worked for a Trump hotel in Chicago. He said that the senior management had been at this hotel for a long time — that’s pretty uncommon in the hospitality industry. And it was a well-run hotel.
As for The Donald, all of the senior management was on a first-name basis with him. No Trump-phobia among them.
Now, let’s look at Bernie Sanders. The guy has been in one office or the other since the early 1980s.
In addition to his well-documented skills in rallying large numbers of people to his causes, Sanders knows how to work with those who don’t share his point of view. In order to get things done in Congress (witness the recent drug re-importation vote) or as mayor of Burlington, VT, he has to reach across party lines.
Let’s look to Bernie and his people to define the type of rebuild program that will be most acceptable. And watch The Donald focus on the mechanics of getting it done.
That’s the most believably optimisticthing i’ve read in several weeks. What’s clear is that if trump sticks with the reactionary shock doctrine stuff that the republicans, especially in congress, want, then trump will get very unpopular very quickly. He’ll have to change course or face failure. I expect he’ll change course. He’d rather be loved by average people and hated by elites.
Something of that nature happening is my dearest hope. Making lemondade out of….an’ all that. :)
If Trump really means any of what he said yesterday, he and Sanders can be very useful to one another.
With regard to Trumps cabinet, remember he made his name with “You’re Fired!”, which habit he was accustomed to from NY construction well before he branded it on TV.
Half his cabinet is buss fodder to be thrown under when the moment is right, can’t really tell which half, but that has to be what Perry is there for: it will make an hilarious episode.
I was thinking of Trump’s whole “You’re fired” persona myself in relation to his cabinet. To what extent did he hire a bunch of hard-core Republicans to — in the short term — molify the Republican establishment and to some extent, his base, while in the longer term, supply himself with a slew of expendables that can he fire in as showy fashion as needed for a “real wrath of God” demonstration.
I am so looking forward to “The Cabinet Apprentice Show”! Will Ivanka and Jared to be on the panel? Please, God, in Your Wisdom, let this all be televised, and available worldwide (for us Kiwis to enjoy too)!
Love it!
Can’t wait to see the episode featuring very special guest judge Vlad Putin.
Ты уволен!
Here’s hoping Nikki Haley is on the short list.
There’s that optimism again. I thought we talked about this..
I can too. What will enable that curious vision will be when the DNC stabs Sanders in the back just that one time too many.
Cory Robin starts with “God” turning Lot’s Wife into a pillar of salt. What did “God” have to do with it? The disaster that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah was, for everyone around, an “end of the world” natural catastrophe. Lot’s wife, who perished in the disaster, is no model for anything. The model in the story is *Lot’s Daughters* who immediately started to create new lives and to repopulate the world.
After reading Robin’s article and Carolinian’s comment several times I am having some difficulty understanding where your reaction is coming from. Robin’s idea was to take the pillar of salt as a symbol of being entombed in the past rather than starting to create a new future. Are you taking issue with that? Or would you like somehow to take the metaphor in a different direction?
Yeah by getting their dad drunk and fornicating with him while he was passed out. Just saying….
Needs must and all that….
The first step in holding him to anything is to show some strength; otherwise, he won’t respect Sanders, Warren, Merkley, Gabbard, Kaptur, or whomever. How do we show some strength? We need to defeat a few of his very bad choices for cabinet officers. If people don’t call their Senators with objections to the nominations of Pruitt, Mnuchin, Price, DeVos, and Sessions, it will be very difficult to influence Trump.
It’s really easy to do this. On Monday morning (or afternoon), call an office of one of your Senators on the telephone, and tell the person who answers that you don’t want your Senator to vote for Pruitt or one of the others. Then repeat the process for your other Senator. It’s as easy as commenting here at Naked Capitalism. If you’re busy on Monday, do it on Tuesday.
For those who you who don’t have this contact information saved, here it is:
http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
We want our Senators to post messages like this on their web sites, and then to follow through:
https://www.casey.senate.gov/newsroom/releases/casey-announces-voting-decision-on-three-top-cabinet-nominees
You gotta love how pointing out that the government is supposed to work for the people and sorry to say this that the government’s first responsibility is to the well being of America and its citizens is now crash and tacky. I am also cynical enough to remember when tens of thousands showed up to protest the George W Bush taking the oath of office and there was minimal coverage. (And for the record I do think there was more reason for that protest than the idea that Russians screwed up Hillary’s turn!)
There are real things to protest. The fact is that Donald Trump is President is a symptom his position as President is not THE problem. Civil Rights have been under attack for my entire life, that didn’t end with Obama’s election, in fact he attacked and eliminated a few. Race, women, class, health, climate, oligarchy…all have been ongoing problems. Protestors need to figure out what they want and attack on real terms. An art project in Astoria where people get to yell “He Will Not Divide Us!” at a camera is not going to do diddly but make a few artsy fartsy privileged people feel engaged. (Thanks Shia Le Beouf.) The Women’s March may be useful. May. If the marchers can take the momentum from it and engage further to work to elect people who support the goals and promote legislation that advance them. If it is just a nice outing or place to vent and pout because a woman isn’t President, not so much.
Pat
January 21, 2017 at 9:43 am
I agree a squillion percent. Pointing out the grift endangers the apple cart….and NOBODY in our supposed diametrically opposed parties wants that…
Trump has the opportunity to be a great president since he owes little to anybody in the political class and truly owes his election to his voting base, many of whom really do need help. Very few people in “the ruling class” can walk into his office and put a chit for favors owed on his desk.
His racist, misogynistic, fascist campaign rhetoric indicates he may struggle to have the vision to accomplish what he sets out as his goals in his inaugural address.
How the Women’s March Could Resurrect the Democratic Party New York Times. Resilc: “This crap got them out of power in just about every state. Jobs jobs jobs and anti anti wars!!!!!!!!! is what they need.”
GOOGLE tells me:
More telling is the gender breakdown among white voters: Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent. This was close to Romney’s margin in 2012. While Mr. Obama won 35 percent of white, male voters in 2012, Clinton lost to Trump among this group by 63 percent to 31 percent.
=========================================================
just don’t learn
If all they are attempting is to protest they didn’t get their female president, you are right.
And while I think access to affordable birth control, health care, child care, family leave, etc is important, considering my position, the position of most of my female family members and probably half of my friends good jobs, decent wages and adequate benefits attached to those jobs is huge in things women need. See, in many cases these women are the sole support or main support of their family. And their jobs are largely shit.
As I said above, if this is an excuse to pout (and for many I am sure it is) it is pretty pointless. Or as you say they don’t learn. But if they work to elect people who don’t just talk the talk, this could be good. It would be important to most of the women and a whole lot of men to know what you really want – let the Democrats figure out how to be relevant again on their own.
As the largely female contingent on msnbs breathlessly narrates the “massive” gathering (bigger than the inauguration) and relentlessly recounts the “evidence” of Trump’s misogyny that will inevitably become policy, I can’t help but wonder–where is the woman of the hour?
Where is the woman whose unconscionable abuse at the hands of cads like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Bernie Sanders galvanized this outpouring of solidarity and commitment? I think she’s in the vicinity–I could swear I saw her, just yesterday, clad in ralph lauren winter white, stoically suffering the ultimate humiliation of Trump’s inauguration.
The wayback machine from February, 2016 may provide some insight. That was when someone presciently proclaimed, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”
Or maybe the organizers of the march didn’t have a spare $250,000 to toss her way.
Remnick: just showing up at the inaugural was her brave act of defiance. Or something like that…
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hillary-clintons-personal-march-on-washington
Oh Remnick, is there an elite liberal bunghole he hasn’t slurped dry and proclaimed its discharge superior to the ambrosia of the Greek gods in taste and nutritional content?
Oh my. Just like the Aztecs. The “Flowery (Phrase) Wars.” Followed by ritual sacrifice.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_war
Everything that was old is new again.
Gives a whole new aspect to “flower power.”
Pat
January 21, 2017 at 10:03 am
http://heragenda.com/your-complete-guide-to-the-womens-march-on-washington/
“The origin story of the March on Washington is as cool as it gets (well, given the circumstances). Legend has it that a grandmother in Hawaii invited 40 of her friends on Facebook to protest with her in the nation’s capital. Friends invited Facebook friends, who invited similarly minded Facebook friends, who invited similarly minded Facebook groups. Someone then posted about it in Pantsuit Nation, and $@*t got real.
However, despite the huge surge behind the march, it wasn’t without its controversies. First there was the issue of appropriation. Shortly following were issues of representation and intersectionality. Then there was the issue of issues – how did organizers feel about pro-life groups joining along? How do sex workers fit into this? Indeed, it was an intersectional time (and discussion) for American feminists.”
======================================================
So that is what I find. Maybe its not the real Women’s March on Washington website? Who knows nowadays. I’m not trying to troll the march
But the very “Heragenda” reminds me a lot of “I’m with her” – is this a Clinton/dem substitute?
But I do not even see the word “jobs” on this page. I do not even see “economic distress” or any synonym for it on that page.
If someone has a link that fills out what the people are marching for, I would really like to see it. Labeling oneself a liberal and BEING a liberal are two different things.
Nothing wrong with being anti Trump. And nothing wrong with protesting. But as so many of today’s links document, how much of what one dislikes about Trump is just a continuation of what Obama did? Of course, specifics might make that all too obvious…..
Heard on msnbs this morning: they kicked the pro-life “feminists” out, but they’re coming anyway.
Some, perhaps. I just read an article that says some are staying away.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-womens-march-abortion-20170121-story.html#nt=oft03a-1gp2
If that story is accurate, they didn’t kick them out but refused to partner with one specific anti-abortion group, and the subsequent discussion on the Facebook page was nasty enough some people decided to stay away. Unfortunate. Nobody needed to be quite so hostile or so self-righteous, and people who don’t learn when to seek common ground and work together are less likely to get things done.
Family leave? Don’t get me started.
I am self-employed and have been for 22 years. And I have an elderly relative for whom I am responsible.
To the proponents of family leave, I have this question: Who grants this benefit to people like me?
Done right you would have this leave through a mix of employment taxes and the common good. Unfortunately for self-employed, there are other problems which would need to be explored. How can a small business survive if someone is not working? How can you make it so an independent contractor can take the time necessary and still have the regular gig to come back to? Or if the commons could provide you with someone to cover your usual work for this time
See I suppose you have to ask a couple of questions here.
Do you think that people who have a new born or a child, spouse, parent, sibling etc with health issues who need care have to choose between providing that care or keeping a roof over their head and food on their table? Should a civilized society have a means where we can care for our loved ones without possibly sacrificing everything?
If yes, then shouldn’t we find a way to make this possible, certainly for the majority with the goal to be to find a way to do it for everyone. even if takes trial and error because no obvious answer to everyone’s issue is apparent? OR If it can’t be provided for everyone from day one should no one get it?
Now some might see my position on ACA as being at odds with my stand on this. It isn’t. I want that ability to care for family without losing everything to be available to everyone. We don’t really have a clear path that shows how to do this with family leave, we might have to try a few things. . We did have a clear path with health care, it was called Medicare and could have been expanded fairly easily to Medicare for All. That was jettisoned to produce an expensive non universal plan that actually lowered the amount of health care available to most Americans, even if a few lucked out.
A key economic benefit that the GOP doesn’t understand about affordable universal health care is that it provides a lot of freedom to people who want to start their own business or work part-time. In countries like Canada, somebody can leave their job and start their own business without worry that an illness would be untreated or saddle them with massive medical costs. In the US, many people stay in their job because that is the only way they can have health insurance. The ACA is starting to change that, but it is mind-bogglingly complex for many people to navigate in their decision-making. Adding uncertainty of repeal and replacement will maximize the difficulty in decision-making about starting a business.
Well sure if they can afford to pay for the premiums and the deductibles and don’t get caught in some blind billing thing when they actually need some health care. Many people starting a business are not going to be able to afford five or six THOUSAND dollars a year for a policy with equal deductible. Oh, wait, there are subsidies if you make less than $48,000/year, which gets less and less the more you make. So I guess profitable is not on that small business agenda. Hope you have savings to live on.
I’m sorry but that key benefit you are talking about was missed by the Democrats as well. Because ultimately ACA is NOT universal health care it is mandated very expensive insurance that would have provided less and less health care the longer it is allowed to exist. It was mind-bogglingly complex by design to disguise that very little of what it offered was either affordable or health care.
The ACA wasn’t designed to provide healthcare to anyone. It was designed to protect hospitals from uncollectable bills and to give Big Pharma an excuse to raise prices to the sky because…insurance pays. Very few people feel “protected” when they have to cough up the first $12k!
I’m just glad I’m no longer immobilized, with all fours, tied taunt to ropes, stretched over that fire ants’ nest called the individual ‘extortionist’ mandate …….
‘Sigh’ …. a good one for a change !
In Sweden, the state. One’s taxes, even if self employed, pay for family leave. So it’s possible.
Especially since all the net gains in jobs since 2007 are in jobs without benefits, a large portion of which are freelance jobs.
It’s like the Dems never heard of people who don’t work for corporations, whether in the political way of holding out your hand or in the more mundane way of showing up to a cubicle 9-9, 24/7.
ArizonaSlim,
Bernie talked a bit about compensating this kind of important work.
And Go Pitt! And not just their basketball team/football team,. I’m rooting for their choir which puts on a superb Christmas show at Heinz Chapel and their debate/inventors teams. And Go Tartans. The Kilt wearers’ soccer team is actually pretty good, but I suspect they have the advantage of small swarms of micrbot bugs putting the appropriate spin on the ball. (Do NOT give Belichek (sp?) this idea before tomorrow.)
They really truly don’t learn, take a look at the women’s march mission statement .
It must have been a challenge to fit so many idpol keywords into such a short statement.
Economic justice forget about it. Women do certainly face discrimination and it should be addressed, but this comes across as the ultimate in “rich feminism”. I’m almost certain all the identities they identify in their mission statement will be represented, but I’m equally certain they will all represent the same class as well. The class that has the time, money, and enough lack of awareness to realize outside of “woke” economically comfortable liberals, this “march” amounts to a self parody of their failed identity politics.
Those 53% of white women likely voted for trump because they are more concerned about the ability to put food on the table in these dire economic conditions, than they are about not resting until “women have parity and equity at all levels of leadership in society.”
That this “march” seems to completely ignore them, says this is a class based movement more than it is a women’s movement, to me.
Considering a few of the people I know doing this, I was and am willing to give some of the participants the benefit of the doubt. Those that have reasons beyond the disappointment in the person who got elected will have to do more and harder things after today’s march for it to really mean anything. But yes, most of the organizers and the people who attend will do this, consider it a big middle finger to those who had the audacity to vote for someone other than Clinton and think they have done something meaningful even as it is forgotten by next month.
HBE
January 21, 2017 at 11:49 am
Thank you so much HBE
http://lgbtqia.ucdavis.edu/educated/glossary.html
I actually had to look LGBTQIA up….man, I do feel sorry for those asexual people….(that means people who ain’t getting any? man, that IS sad)
MISSION STATEMENT (in part):
In the spirit of democracy and honoring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice who have come before us, we join in diversity to show our presence in numbers too great to ignore. The Women’s March on Washington will send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights. We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.
We support the advocacy and resistance movements that reflect our multiple and intersecting identities. We call on all defenders of human rights to join us. This march is the first step towards unifying our communities, grounded in new relationships, to create change from the grassroots level up. We will not rest until women have parity and equity at all levels of leadership in society. We work peacefully while recognizing there is no true peace without justice and equity for all.
======================================================
I kinda thinking show me the money would be mo’ effective to mo’ people – maybe with long version of show me the jobs, show me the raises, show me the infrastructure for the wonky….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRl_sBg6GX8
More letters keep getting added, and I always wondered what the Q stood for. Quixotic? Questioning? Quantity? Now there is IA to contend with.
What about Ursula?
Some lesbians, particularly butch dykes, also participate in Bear culture referring to themselves with the distinct label Ursula.
This requires some refinement by getting the definition of “butch dykes” straight. Going to the dictionary here is the definition for butch.
A gender expression that fits societal definitions of masculinity. Usually used by queer women and trans people, particularly by lesbians. Some consider “butch” to be its own gender identity.
The dictionary falls a bit short because no definition is given for “dykes”.
The Politically Correct Lord of the Flies returns, this time as real life and arguably an even bigger farce than the original.
“Who will join My .. uh .. er .. LGBTQIA ..Tribe …!?”
And no “Veronicas!” Que lastima!
M. Those who prefer m@sturb@tion to any kind of sex with a partner. Actually that’s probably a decent chunk of the population if they were honest about it.
One of the big “hidden secrets” of human copulatory relations is that for many, it actually is, conceptually, m——–ion with a live object.
Rather sad, but probably true. I would prefer m@asturb@tion to that kind of intimate relationship. Much more honest that way, to oneself and to his/her partner.
In Germany there are 60 genders and counting: German MP speaks out on diversity bill, addressing 60 genders (VIDEO)
The Women’s March website map shows 673 events all across the US and around the world. Participation, organizational history and potential future activity of protesters, intersectionality, networking and list-building, etc. will vary. Sometimes things are just what they are, sometimes part of something larger.
Nice map, but what do they stand for? I look at the Our Mission page and all I see is the usual middle class ID politics.
I suspect that what they stand for depends on who they are. If there are over a million worldwide (or even in this country, perhaps), there are probably at least a million different standpoints. The original organizers may have had a narrow vision, but the activity of individuals will give a different character to each group.
(Estimated 150,000 in Chicago, 60,000 in St. Paul.)
I just heard on CNN that someone they interviewed at the march said that it was a chance to get out of their bubbles. OK. So they think that getting out of their bubbles is going to DC and hanging with other people just like them who hate Trump listening to Madonna and Michael Moore; rather than going to rural towns in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and desolated cities like Allentown, PA and Newark, NJ? They are bubbleheads in bubbleland.
Another organizer interviewed said they came to be part of organizing a Tea Party for the Left. Sigh. The powers that be continue to divide and conquer.
Okay here’s another quote from a marcher. “We’re going to be back in two years for the midterms. And then two years later.” So much for grass roots local politics.
Oh and Ferrara said something like “We got blindsided by this. So we are not gonna let them happen again. We are going to be ready in four years.” Again, no lessons learned about jobs, jobs, jobs and stagnant wages being ignored for 40 years. Sigh.
In other words, #Democrats need their own PR vehicle to shine up Soros’ intentions and money.
If they start talking about Maidan again, run for cover.
It looks like nothing but an astroturf event. Here’s the spreadsheet of the event organizers….
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zYoQoffWRAHrECq2PDshlPvNpNDSLtdmNjtW-gUuhqw/htmlview
The best info on who put this together is @AsraNomani. The write up states that 50 of the groups are Soros.
I haven’t finished yet, but the Corey Robin piece was correctly listed as today’s reading in contrast to today’s event.
I read in the local paper (thus no links) that in Seneca Falls there is a Woman’s Rights march today.
Those that attend are asked to wear white, gold or purple clothing because we now know(?) that is what activists wore back in the day. So, we finally learn that the fight for a women’s right to vote was often mistaken for a themed pageant with a strict dress code. Which finally explains why it took so long to get those laws enacted.
HRC’s purple concession speech probably has not seen it’s last re-purposing.
Here ya go, temporal. Also, here’s one from the Rochester paper that has numbers and reactions, etc.
“The chant “Love, not hate, that’s what makes America great,” went up among at least 5,000 people who attended a rally at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, Seneca County. Marchers reported an approximately mile-long traffic backup on the New York state Thruway as people tried to get into town for the event.
The cry, “Love trumps hate” came from approximately 1,500 people who filled Washington Square Park in downtown Rochester.”
‘German dismay at Trump inauguration DW’
to be a blunt realist—the TV images of endless lines of migrants heading to Germany juiced the GOP turnout/Dem. crossovers—by how much no one will ever prove as it’s an ‘unpollable’ question (virtue signalling).
The GOP should send Merkel a thank you gift basket.
No kidding. I’ll bet the upper echelons of the German government are real “dismayed.” They know their time is coming.
“German officials and the public are unimpressed by the festivities in Washington. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned that some of Trump’s rhetoric was troublingly reminiscent of the 1920s.”
But what could they possibly be referring to?
The Left is falling into the same rut as the Left did during the Nixon years—-letting the loons/anarchists of the Left do retar__ed things that at best drive the silent middle into indifference, at worst make the middle more sympathetic to a law/order president.
protestor punching journalist. spraying graffiti onto a bus stop.
https://twitter.com/samjcharles/status/822634725252694016/video/1
Defining that person/act as ” the Left” is your first mistake.
hmmm…. people attacking symbols of elite privilege (corporate monopoly media) and indulgences (limos).
Ian Welsh wrote that he felt a signal to a point of change would be when citizens tore down cameras.
Mine was when people metaphorically built guillotines… in other words, making the powerful uncomfortable. As state violence ramps up in response to meager displays of anger, and citizens support further dissolution of civil rights, increasing surveillance of their friends and neighbors, spending more on police repression and building private prisons to cage those who offend their personal hierarchy of permissible public behavior, people are going to need to be careful and creative in how they fight back against those that are immiserating their lives.
I almost believe these peple are corporate hired. They give anarchy, if by this they mean total non-centralized planning/absolute liberty, a bad name. Here in Pittsburgh at the G-20 Economic summit, the anarchists ruined the march for everyone else by smashing a BMW dealerships’ windows and then vans full of stormtroopers, which had been hiding in the BMW and Mercedes dealerships, (maybe that is why they were smashed?) were unleashed. Attack dogs and a sound machine tank followed and forced everyone onto our street. The marchers had very little signage or even T-shirts communicating what the marchers were protesting, so onlookers, like our Chinese neighbors, were saying things like “Don’t they like economics?”. GreenPeace rocked with big banners from bridges. Which brings me to my point. NPR had some commentary yesterday about Trump protesters “making a scene”. Why not when you march/protest make a literal scene by holding seperate papers that form an effective political cartoon/message people can understand? The “Making a Scene” scenes could be crowdfunded, lovely and tailored to the groups size.
I think it’s causing confusion when the meaning of words Left or Anarchy in this case are turned on their heads by very few who are violent (assuming they actually know what Left or Anarchy means and aren’t provocateurs to begin with), to utterly destroy meaning of these words.
We can’t have a Left or Anarchists, as in non-violent, anti war, etc… if we keep allowing a few bad eggs to utterly co-opt base definitions. And I believe the overwhelming majority of those who identify as Left or Anarchist hold nonviolence to be of great importance.
Now ask yourself, who wouldn’t want that to maintain cohesion? Or are you/we allowing ourselves to be framed out of reason? When a few bad apples cause a stir, we sure rush to blame many thousands of peaceful victims.
Disillusioned in Davos Mark Thoma. Larry Summers is shocked to discover that squillionaires are opportunists.
My objection is not to disagreements over economic policy. It is to enabling if not encouraging immoral and reckless policies in other spheres that ultimately bear on our prosperity.
======================
“… our prosperity.” Apparently, this guy would believe Hell is a pretty good place UNTIL Trump shows up….
Yesterday I said no mammal could be stupid enough to say what Thoma said about trade.
I was wrong.
No protozoa could be that divorced from reality to say what Thoma said about the people at Davos.
At the rate this guy is going, he is trying to have less knowledge than a virus. Maybe in a week he can have less awareness than an electron….
Comments like these are why I keep coming back to NC.
I read that electrons, whatever they actually are as scientists keep digging, are apparently aware of pretty much everything in the universe, via various interconnections.
And speaking of that warthog hypocrite Summers and his “please God don’t send me to hell when I die ” Concerns, and Ed Burke, and a reason that Liberal mopes will never have their “rights” and Maslovian minimal-needs security under their trickster “leaders,”
1770
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
— Edmund Burke
If we’re lucky, fresno dan, Mark Thoma will shrink all the way down into quantum foam …never to be heard from again … at least in this universe anyway.
…. double-plus good if he takes Larry with him !
0bamacare is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving. My mother’s plan last year went bankrupt (the Land of Lincoln co-op) and I had to select a new plan for October through December. I did select a BCBS plan, and after keeping the coverage through October and November, cancelled it for December through the exchange, as directed. Of course, the issues plaguing the exchange are still there, and that cancellation was never reported to BCBS, or if it was, BCBS didn’t act on it because who in their right mind would want to cancel such a great plan, with beautiful narrow networks and deductible and premium so high one can get altitude sickness? To put the cherry on the cake, BCBS thinks that my mother re-enrolled in that plan for 2017, even though she enrolled with a different company, and keeps sending her bills for December, January, and February. After waiting for 45 minutes to reach a human at BCBS, I was told that they will look at the mix-upbut in the meantime the bills must be paid. Fat chance they are getting even a penny, but the time suck and the strain on our nerves are facts, and there is nothing that can be done to fix these injuries. So one more time, thanks 0bama, and f*ck you very much.
That said, I am dismayed that the Republicans want to repeal 0bamacare, rather than let it die under its own weight of crappiness and actuarial unsustainability. Are they dumb, or are they trying to save 0bama’s legacy by making 0bamacare a seeming victim of their own sociopathy?
It’s the new Kafkaesque. Obama’s vanity legacy project. As you say doing nothing to solve the problem would have been better than a half baked solution because eventually the true villain–health care costs in general–are going to force a change.
That said, I am dismayed that the Republicans want to repeal 0bamacare, rather than let it die under its own weight of crappiness and actuarial unsustainability.
Trouble is, it never works like that. Keeping a lousy law that benefits big money interests around just invites worthless tweaking and endless legislative posturing and partisan “debate.”
Case in point is the no-negotiating for drug prices law. Unable to acknowledge this naked giveaway to big pharma and just dump it, we get the annually failing legislative “solution” of “re-importation” which means, absurdly, let’s get the Canadian government to negotiate our drug prices because we’re too feeble to do it ourselves. Meanwhile, the beneficiaries in the drug industry are papering it over with bogus zero copays, rebates and “get your first prescription free” offers to get people hooked and make it seem not so bad.
And the law endures.
As opposed to, say, Glass-Steagall, which just got wiped off the map wholesale. Things changed pretty quickly after clinton did that.
The problem is simple – US healthcare is exorbitantly expensive compared to the rest of the developed world: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-healthcare-system-global-outlier-not-good-way/
As a result, it requires Rube Goldberg complexity to try to get anything to come close to “working”, especially after the lobbyists for the corporations are done. We see the same thing in the financial sector where we have numerous tax-deferred retirement accounts all with different rules. Any attempt to simplify and mandate less expensive solutions runs afoul of the lobbyists. However, market forces (aka Vanguard and Blackrock) are slowly grinding away so that we are getting better and cheaper investment options year-by-year . Its not quite clear yet what could accomplish the same in the health sector in the coming decades.
i found it very hard to cancel a plan i got through the aca. months of wrangling with aca reps and bcbs.
From The Harper’s article on “A Resistor’s Guide”. This Particapatory Budgeting (PB) Sounds like a good idea:
“This expansion of the political community happened partly because P.B. enables participants to draw on lived experience and wisdom that does not depend on formal schooling. If a question is raised, for example, about which areas feel unsafe at specific hours, local knowledge carries as much weight as technical expertise, and it’s harder for elites to dominate the conversation. Participants report that P.B. deliberations allow them to inhabit more than one aspect of their identities — for example, their lives as African Americans, as parents, as sports fans, as city dwellers, as Midwesterners — and connect with people they might otherwise assume they have nothing in common with.
The goal is not consensus, which can often serve as a mask for domination, but generative conflict. Neighbors focus on changing the policies that shape their lives rather than, say, getting rid of the people down the street. The practice combats what Henry Giroux, a theorist of critical pedagogy, calls “civic illiteracy” — “the inability to see outside of the realm of the privatized self.”
In my neighborhood, getting rid of the people down the street would be a very good thing.
If you don’t kill them off, those people just become someone else’s nightmare.
There are times when I’m tempted, but …
… I’d rather not be a murderer.
It happens. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/crime/article24591469.html
A friend of mine from mountaintop Tennessee reports his father (affectionate with guns) would occasionally say of some particularly annoying or awful miscreant, “He needs(ed) killin’.”
And of course I’m not suggesting anything of the sort, Just reporting a common sentiment, and the reality of what sometimes happens to people that are so predatory and vicious and mercenary that they finally transgress the last bounds of restraint and decency…
Why’d you guys post a two year old infomercial of an article about a supplement, filled with shutterstock photos of old people looking athletic?
The company was recently in the news. It’s being sued by the sole supplier of its main ingredients. https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/16/a-new-lawsuit-alleges-anti-aging-startup-elysium-health-hasnt-paid-its-supplier-and-is-in-breach-of-agreement/
So is someone going to send matt damon/ human untellegence zyborg up there to set things right or what ?
Gerontology is a favourite subject here.
I really (really) laughed out loud. Thanks Ambrit
Cool. That’s the word.
Happy trails pardner.
WRT supplements: they’re a multi-billion dollar BS market.
Realize: All of the initial research is done on whole foods, after which the researchers (have to) make lots of reductionist assumptions about the causal chain. Basically, the antioxidant power of, say, an apple, after being measured, is then attributed to one or a few of the constitutive elements (eg vit C), because that’s the only way to get it published. (Journals don’t accept papers in which ‘apple’ is the agent — it’s unprofessional, because nonreductionist.)
At best, this is like measuring the performance of an army, then calling some of the agents ‘officers,’ and attributing the strength and success to them. Assuming they are even correctly identified, the biggest problem comes with the next step: isolating and mass-producing the officers, and selling them in lozenge form — which is where the money is to be made. In quite a few cases (vit. E, most notably), it turns out that consuming large doses of concentrated officers is not just useless, but actually harmful. So please don’t bother, and just eat more fresh/frozen vegetables.
For more, if interested, see T. Colin Campbell’s Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition.
Our president:
How appropriate then that he immediately promises to give us what we have all longed for.
Trump to develop missile defense system against Iran, North Korea: White House
That’s a bit vague but thnx for the link. Of course Obie and Dubya have already deployed ABMs in Eastern Europe against Iran’s non existent nuclear missiles. N. Korea on the other hand may actually have a few.
But woohoo we’re not going to be fighting Russia!
Some of the Trump cheerleaders here these last few days have had me alternating between chuckling and banging my head against a desk because they have pretty much done the same thing Obama supporters have done by projecting what they think Trump will do with what he is actually doing. It’s all one big eleventy dimensional chess game. The only difference is substituting the magnificent Trump who is going to fight everyone to fix America and make it great again for regular people for Obama who was providing hope and going to change everything to help regular people.
You seem to be one of those people who take Trump “literally but not seriously” to use Thiel’s phrasing. Here’s what Pepe Escobar has to say
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201701191049765550-how-trump-presidency-will-play-out/
Indeed it’s possible that everything Trump says is some kind of negotiating position since he seems to see himself as a big dealmaker. It’s also possible that everything he says should be taken literally. Some of us are just waiting to see what happens.
I very thoughtfully voted for Trump because he seemed the most likely person to wreck everything in DC. So far he has exposed the moral bankruptcy of both parties in detail, humbled the mainstream media and put them in his pocket, and picked out a Cabinet of world class fools. There’s not a statesman among them. That’s a damn good start.
But the real dismantling of America’s overseas military Empire will not begin until after Trump thoroughly disappoints his job-hungry, regular-Joe supporters by not causing decent paying jobs to appear in their lives. This he must do by default, since it is not possible for decent paying jobs to appear again in America until the wealthy are taxed as they were in FDR’s era, and those monies redistributed to the masses. FDR did it by handing out shovels and paychecks as needed, mailing the old folks monthly money, and then gearing up every factory in the country for a world war. Trump will get the best bang for the buck by simply mailing out monthly checks to “Resident” at every street address in America.
If that’s what it takes for teh Donald to win the admiration of regular Americans (deplorables), he’ll by God try to do it, but the wealthy, aka the deep state, will deep six President Trump before they let him take a penny of what’s coming to them. They stole their squillions fair and square, and they’re keeping it all, and by the way they want all the rest.
When they dispense with Trump, they will get what’s coming to them. Even Machiavelli knew you cannot rob an entire people of opportunity, food and health forever. Comes a day when they just aren’t governable any longer. It’s called blowback, and it’s what Trump is destined to unleash, right here at home.
The last paragraph you wrote above is THE reason why pervasive surveillance and tracking of ALL citizens is being rolled out so far and furious. They WILL try to continue wringing water from the rock that is the 99% today, well beyonds the normally ungovernable line by force of technology and brute force.
8 years into the Trump reign: but Obama …
The difference is that the Obama cheerleaders kept cheering even after seeing that what he was doing was often the antithesis of what he said he’d do.
I don’t think that is going to happen with those here willing to give Trump some very small benefit of the doubt until they see what he’s actually up to.
PS: I always like your comments because you like most people here can see that if something is bad when one party does it, it’s just as bad when the other does too. And you aren’t afraid to stick up for things you believe in strongly. I wasn’t 100% in agreement with the way Stein called for the recount but I definitely appreciated your point of view which didn’t allow her efforts to be dismissed out of hand. I’m guessing the discussion we had for quite a while here didn’t even exist at most other places.
I watched some of the newz on the teevee yesterday. All about the inauguration. In every single instance, the prez was behind bullet-proof glass.
Is this new? They went to a lot of trouble with camera angles to hide this, but it was always there.
This is pretty much standard procedure.
I watched some live streams from the “hot spots” in the Washington streets. Not much of a riot at any location. Appearances were a small cadre of agitators embedded in a larger body of ‘disaster tourists’ and smaller journos.
Now let’s see how the women’s marches come off. As others have commented, if this appears as yet another try at identity politics, then the bankruptcy of so called progressive politics will be confirmed. If the representatives of the marching women come out for specific policies that help women, then there is a chance for some progress. If the marches come off as against what or whoever, then all will be suspect as being partisan organized disruption. It is a basic tell. Don’t just say, “We hate X.” Say, “We hate X’s so and so policy.” That gives the appearance of fair play. Giving “X” a way out, changing a policy say, makes the point that the protestors are intent on positive change and are inviting “X” to join in the ‘goodthink.’
On another front, it struck Phyl and I that the slimy crushing of Bernie Sanders by the Democratic Party nomenklatura helped elect Trump. Phyl remarked that, roughly, the DNC absolutism turned a major part of the electorate off to the Democratic Party “brand.” Many stayed home in disgust on voting day. Another part of the formerly Democratic Party support held it’s collective nose and voted for Trump in an “anything but the DNC” gesture.
Every time I think I have descended to the lowest level of Cynic H—, I am unpleasantly surprised. Before me sweeps a new descent. How low will this go?
Even better: We hate X’s policy on [name of issue here], this is what we propose instead, and here’s how we plan to make it happen. Join us.
Agree. That formulation is even better.
Even better yet: “We want policy Y! … and this is why we need it…”
Don’t even mention X’s policy. Make him have to march it up the hill and fight on your ground.
Can someone explain to me why it is that heterosexual working class men get to have an identity but everyone else is supposed to jettison theirs?
The reality is that women have a right to be concerned about a Donald Trump presidency. He’s on the record as saying he’d like to overturn Roe v Wade. He’s on the record as a sexist jackass.
The reality is LGBT have a right to be concerned about their well being while he has called gay marriage settled law the right has attacked the on multiple fronts on a state level and Donald Trump has removed anything resembling their civil rights from the White House website.
Immigrants have a right to be concerned. The guy running things has hyperbolically attacked them and promised that he’s going to deport people.
Muslims have a right to be concerned the guy running things says he wants a registry and is talking about banning travel to Muslim regions potentially cutting people off from their families.
In my opinion being part of a movement shouldn’t mean rejecting identity, and forcing people to jettison their belief sets or concerns as a result of them. It means you build on each others experience in order to build a better society.
The organizers of the march have said this rally is not meant to be Anti Trump, as it stands the organizers are already getting flack for not “honoring or even inviting Clinton”(and as a matter of fact one of the organizers was a Bernie Bro not a Clinton supporter). So from what I’ve seen this is less about Democratic identity and more about women showing up to defend things like their reproductive rights(and yes that means pro life women were told to create their own March on DC.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4143112/Women-s-march-organizers-face-fury-snubbing-Hillary.html
I wish people would just calm down and let people express themselves. Let them take comfort from each other if that is what it takes to get by.
Sorry to have hit a nerve there. I cannot rebut your central thesis. However, in the practical political sphere, the final bills being enacted are the litmus test; not the marches, speeches, and commercials. Perhaps I’m being too cynical here, but much of what passes for “establishment approved” dissent is mere dissipation of energy, which redounds to the status quo’s benefit. I hope that this is a stand alone event, but I’m suspicious that it has been hijacked by the “usual suspects” in the Ruling Elites.
As for the pro-life women, well, their “movement” has been very much a creature of the Ultra Patriarchical party. However, denying them solidarity with other, non like minded women is counter productive to any concept of inclusive feminism. Basically, these women have been told that, unless they agreed with the “mainstream” feminist cliques values, they aren’t women. That’s doing the anti-feminist’s work for them. As the Rightists argued after Nixon’s visit to China, exposure to the West’s “superior” values will rub off on the Chinese and slowly convert them to Western values. By excluding the pro-life groups, the march organizers have eschewed any chance of influencing the “fallen sisters.”
Finally, who says that “heterosexual working class men” do have authentic identities? I’m arguing that the “identity” being offered simply through association with today’s marches is too artificial and other oriented to spur on any significant work by the participants. Now, if the movement so suggested does continue and grow in influence, I’ll gladly beg your pardon and apologize. Fair enough?
I think if people are being told that we have to wait to make determinations on Trump and accept what he says in good faith that we should be prepared to do the same for demonstrators and not just assume anything is “establishment approved.”
The people that organized this event have every right to decide why they were marching(strongly in support of reproductive choice) and to tell pro life people to organize their own march if they couldn’t be supportive of that. The right side of the aisle is very good at telling the left to be inclusive while at the same time telling the left that anyone who disagrees with their point is a baby killer or a deviant or any other number of things that aren’t in keeping with a productive discussion. So yes, I agree that these organizers have a right not to have their event hijacked by people who have a history of unproductive dialogue and insistence that women who make a choice different than what they believe should be victimized and/or demonized(I have no problem with women choosing to have children; I had 5. I do have a problem with women telling other women they HAVE TO have children especially since they aren’t the ones who have to live with the consequences of the very important choice.)
As far as hetero white working class men go, I never said they weren’t an identity(I’m married to one and he’s an incredible human being), what I said is they aren’t and shouldn’t be the only identity that gets to stand up and say I deserve to be heard. Women, immigrants, LGBT and any other identity has every right to stand in solidarity and allow their voices to be heard on issues that impact them too.
(and yes I understand that increasing benefits such as wages matter to everyone, but it doesn’t negate that reproductive choice matters more to women since we bear the gift and or burden of actually carrying the next generation to term. Unlike our male counterparts we can’t walk away once a pregnancy occurs. We have to make choices and bear the consequences of those choices. Women literally are responsible for a life or death choice -for both the person who is pregnant and the potential human growing inside them.)
Anyway, we shall see, in the interim ,I’m content to say I’m with her in spirit to this woman
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/she%e2%80%99s-54-white-rural-and-a-lifelong-republican-why-is-she-protesting-donald-trump/ar-AAm5HuJ?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=iehp
instead of pillorying her as a “tool of the establishment.”
Sometimes people seem a little angry when women want to be treated with respect. I always find that shocking, but it continues. Any group trying to deny rights to another is not inclusive and has no real desire to be. I saw the majority of participants in this march as being a) pissed off for a good reason and b) incredibly supportive of each other’s freedoms. On the other hand, somebody who wants to make laws or threats against other people’s right to have a child or not, or to love who they love, is not in solidarity with anybody, and probably lacks the maturity to feel real solidarity. I think today’s speeches provided a real opportunity to listen to diverse women and men who aren’t heard in our media. Maybe today was an opportunity to learn something new.
I’m curious here. Earlier you used “working class” without racial differentiation. Now the “white” slipped back in. I admit to being weak in this area. The need to eliminate race, whenever possible, from the discourse drives self censorship in my thinking. (I’ve taken the Harvard test Mz Yves mentions, and am, like almost everyone else who takes it, surprised, and chastened by the results.)
The reproductive choice struggle is a basic and definitive one for society. If I reason rightly, the control of fertility is a boundary line for women. If men make the decisions, then the women involved are reduced to the status of chattels. I can see how important this is.
All in all, I suspect that we as a culture are entering a testing phase, with all that implies.
While I am not a person who subscribes to the concept of “white privilege” I do recognize that white males have controlled the levers of power in this country for years, often to the detriment of minorities. I also see the white males in charge managing to sell to the white working class males that the only thing standing in the way of them achieving the American dream is those minority classes. That’s what I felt I saw this election cycle from Trump.
People say that Clinton ran an identity driven campaign. I agree with that. However, I also think Trump ran an identity driven campaign. His treatment of women was sold as “boys will be boys.” His conversation on immigration was reduced to people from Mexico being rapists and drug dealers or people from the ME being terrorists. He told AAs that felt police brutality targeted them based on their ethnicity to “go back to Africa if you feel your lives don’t matter here.” The only area I would have given him was LGBT where he consistently said he saw gay marriage as settled law(but spoke out of both sides of his mouth since he ALSO said he’d sign a law that allowed people to discriminate against LGBTQ folks if they did so on religious grounds.) Much of his campaign, in my opinion, was a giant permission slip for the white working class men to embrace fear and hate towards those different than them(which is why you had folks like David Duke embracing him).
Anyway I suck at self censorship and I agree with you that these next 4 years are indeed a “testing phase.”
I hate to tell you, it was not “sold” as “boys will be boys”. Most women I know reacted just that way. What do you think men do when with other men, particularly young men? Many and in some settings mot talks about what women they find hot and why, and they brag about conquests. Any woman who has worked in mainly male environments knows this well.
> white males have controlled the levers of power
white males who control or answer to capital have controlled the levers of power
Fixed it for ya.
Agreed. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. While it is true that much of the left seems to have abandoned reason and critical thinking in service of being anti-Trump, and that many of these same people have been behaving quite shamefully since the election, and it is true that overplaying identity politics is counterproductive, avoids other important issues, and in fact leads to the kind of severe backlash we are seeing.. equal rights and civil rights under the constitution are not nothing. These are significant issues and what progress we have made is being threatened.
Yes, white cis male privilege is a real phenomenon, believe it or not. There are factions who actively pushing to turn it back into a non-issue. We should be careful not join them in the service of calling out the left on their hypocrisies.
Please, no “cis” — please.
I think I’m with the person who is taking time off to go get drunk….. the Ds must be accepting of the pro-life what? point of view? arguments? I’m trying to figure out what the Ds are for if they just keep lurching right. I could have sworn women having the right to choose with regards to basic healthcare was a basic tenet of the platform.
I also thought the Ds just lost in part because of the identity politics and am baffled by the language ‘cis’.
I guess I just need to stay away from Ds as they go through their self inflicted death throes.
They gave that up, because bipartisan.
“We all agree that abortion is bad, but…”
That’s not how you start things out.
Bad word choice on my part. I actually meant ‘hetero’. My post was not meant to address women’s right to choose in any way.
Now this is where I get confused, you know, about turfing the pro-life ladies. If a woman has the right to choose, doesn’t she have the right to choose either option?
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”,
E. B. Hall
hmmmm…..Someone else is going to have to take this… this looks like adopting right-wing “pro-abortion” v pro-life and ignoring pro-choice v pro-life when I thought the D party position was pro-choice. Pro-life has always demanded eliminating a woman’s right to choose (use of state violence will be necessary to enforce).
I’m so old, I remember when it was a bad idea to force a vaginal probe (state assault) on women for the right to basic healthcare.
But I’m not a D quisling centrist.
The key word is “choice.” Most Ultra Patriarchalites deny women agency in toto, not just reproductive choices. So, the argument is that the Ultras will not only “disapprove of what [someone] say(s),” but kill them for saying it.
My argument was akin to a United Front option. It has been rejected.
As Ben Franklin is reported to have said; “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
The problem is that the “anti-choice” ladies are, in fact, anti-choice. In a pro-choice paradigm, the government stays out of the decision-making, leaving the woman to make a decision for herself, in conjunction with her doctor, if meaningful medical intervention is necessary or warranted. She has the agency. She can confer with her partner, her parents, her girl squad, her priest, her pot dealer, whoever. But the decision is hers.
But the women styling themselves as “pro-life” are no such thing. They are advocating for OTHER WOMEN NOT TO BE ABLE TO CHOOSE. They are not in favor of “life” since their position can result in the mother’s death or the fetus’ death; this ideological position is often co-located with opposing social spending on children including vital necessities like food, warmth and life-saving medical care.
Being pro-choice means supporting women that wish to have children and women who don’t. Women who wish to have the option to abort a fetus, and women who don’t believe that’s an acceptable option. I would never force another woman to have an abortion, and I, in fact, advocate for social spending and legal paradigms so that any woman might be better able to carry a fetus to term. But the anti-choice women do not grant me that same right. Their goal is to take away my choice.
That’s yet another reason why marches like this can be problematic. Why not let the anti-choice women into a “women’s march”? That seems mean. If it had been officially a reproduction rights march, then excluding these anti-choice women wouldn’t have seemed petty.
But we can’t have that, because this was connected to Hillary Clinton, who isn’t really pro-choice, I guess.
Yes, I’m going to march with a bunch of Bay Area women who are very worried about all that you describe. At the same time, they believe that the disemployed of the Rust Belt deserve their fate for being so stupid and lazy or so stubbornly insistent on refusing to acknowledge the world has left them behind, as not to have educated themselves and moved to the coasts, or moved to the coasts and then educated themselves. After all, refugees and immigrants have done just that. Some of their own relatives left family behind in other countries in order to go to med school or get engineering degrees here. Not to mention the boat people — why can’t former coal miners take a lesson there?
They feel betrayed (actually one woman used the phrase “stabbed in the back”) that Rust Belt states would vote against the interests of Bay Area straight, gay and immigrant women when California supports those states with our federal taxes; they feel that those people should have instead been grateful that the California wealthy were willing to vote for Clinton and therefore higher taxes on themselves in order to support backwards and failed lives.
They’re certain we’re at full employment, thanks to Obama. If we’re not, well — as liberal feminists, they believe prostitution is work like any other, and the only problem there is that the work is “stigmatized.” (Never mind that if legal, exemptions would have to be made to just about every worker-protection law and regulation in the U.S.) Yes, the loss of federal abortion rights would be devastating — it would be terrible for pregnant red state women to have to take time off work and pay for airfare to California; a $6,000 deductible and possible balance billing for a complicated childbirth, though, is something red state women should be smart enough to be grateful for. Affordable childcare is essential — immigration is an overall benefit. And Uber is the best thing since sliced bread. (I’m expecting any day now that Uber will get onto that “prostitution is work like any other” thing.) Equal pay is crucial — minimum wage workers DO get equal pay, which would be inflationary if raised beyond $12 in 2020. Support for the arts is also crucial and “Hamilton” was spectacular — everyone should know that degrees in humanities or the arts are worthless, and if they can’t pay their student loans they should learn to code (plus move to California — where are we going to house everyone? Don’t know, but RE prices keep going up up up, hooray!) Male violence against women is horrific — the beating and strangulation and multiple (family blog) of women on film is free speech and no one who loves it should be shamed. (Not to mention that participating in such is also a possible solution to female disemployment, if such exists, which it doesn’t thanks to Obama and therefore such participation is freely chosen as an act empowerment and not in any way economically coerced.)
Every day I hear Social Darwinism, economic libertarianism, and regressive Third Wave choicey-choice neoliberal bullshit trumpeted by women who, yes, are worried about the loss of their rights and freedoms under Trump and, yes, have reasons to be worried. They flat out refuse to see, though, that even as they’ve gained what they now fear to lose (or have merely profited by what an earlier age won for them) other American women have already lost a great deal, and that none of those losses were a result choicey-choices made in a vacuum.
This is without even talking about the new Cold War jingoism. I have no idea what will happen when people here realize nuclear missiles don’t care about blue vs. red, or about meritocracy.
If it weren’t for Naked Capitalism, I’d drink too much, and if I drank too much, I’d say too much, and if I said too much, I’d be a pariah here in the bluest heart of the bluest state in the best of all possible meritocracies.
Ah yes, the rage of the credentialed meritocrats. Corey Robin’s reminder of the original use of the term “meritocracy” in today’s link to The Nation should be required reading for these women. Love the reference to the Panglossian mindset, too. Great comment!
I feel bad for you and your choice to be silent instead of stating your piece and standing up for what you believe.
Personally, I’d rather be a pariah then pretend to agree with things that I believe in my heart to be wrong(and I live in Appalachia so I’ve been arguing for years that things like universal health care, free 2 year college or trade school are things red staters should be supporting instead of stubbornly insisting everyone can and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I’ve been arguing that while socialism may indeed have a spotty track record that clearly capitalism does not seem to be working out as much better when you have CEOs wrecking companies and walking away with six figures while the guy who worked diligently for 16 years gets to train his cheaper replacement and 6 months unemployment.) As it stands you never win the argument that you make the choicy choice not to make. Additionally as it stands by making that choice you are pretty much ensuring that people will not even consider a mindset other than their own because you aren’t presenting a differing view out of fear.
Feel free to forward my email to one of your Bay area compatriots. I’m more than willing to share with them MY experiences as someone located in the Rust belt and share my observations with them beginning with the idea that education is something everyone can obtain for nothing or that the cost of moving to another part of the country is negligible and the opportunity cost of moving across the country is losing the social safety net you’ve known in hopes that the federal one can and will support you despite the regular efforts to jigger with it regularly.
I’ll agree with you about the value of standing up for yourself. However, I’ve noticed that there is a control mechanism at work in the working classes, employment and the “rules” attached thereto. When one needs work to survive, making adherence to, or at the least silence concerning some socio-political issue a requirement to obtain that needed employment is an ultimate tool. Starkly put, it is played out as “conform or starve.” Obviously, we haven’t yet got to the point of raising the obvious counter strategy, revolution. Neoloberalism is approaching the point of no return. When the mass of the people perceive that they have nothing to lose, someone will see that power lying in The Street, pick it up, and throw it through the windows of the local mansions.
I’m beginning to sound like a Cassandra. Well, it’s better than being Iphigenia.
If there is ever a California NC Meet-Up we’re both at, dandelion, you come sit by me. I’m downstate.
I agree with most of what you say, but prostitution is just like any other job so long as those doing it aren’t forced into it because of financial distress.
I’m not seeing the connection to prez under glass with protesters in DC.
Re: A Greek tragedy: how much can one nation take? I think that the way the Greek people have been treated would be a very good reason for leaving the EU (if I were a member). If the banks that loaned the money to Greece do not have to answer for their own malfeasance, then why do the people of Greece have to answer for their government’s malfeasance? The world is a odious place when a group of innocent people are made to pay for others’ obnoxious behaviour!!
Of course that plaint, “when a group of innocent people are made to pay for others’ obnoxious behaviour!!,” is the fundamental nature of “civilization…”
Extinction of primates — We are cutting off the branch we are sitting upon, thinning the web of life and depleting habitat in the manner of an invasive species. Worse than a parasite, we’re a cancer because we’re killing our host. And the destruction is about to be ramped up.
It’s the Cheney Doctrine all over again: “If there’s even a 1% chance that another primate species could some day evolve to threaten us with pointed sticks, we must destroy them preemptively before it’s too late.”
It is a terrible thing to watch a neighbour’s government become the plaything of billionaire oligarchs. I weep for the people who have to undergo this “experiment” in governing.
Don’t feel too sorry for us JEHR. This situation has been happening at various levels of intensity for decades. Now, the billionaire President has had the honesty to bring it all out into the open. Shock therapy is probably the only course left to restore some balance in the body politic of America.
Trump is now “on the spot” to reconcile the aims of the elites and the needs of the populace. The previous President ran on a populist theme supposedly from the Left. He and the apparat he represented have been thoroughly discredited. Now a similar populism shouts it’s message from “the Right.” When that ideology is also visibly discredited, what is left? Now is the time for any “real” progressives who might be lurking to begin, if they haven’t already done so, constructing their own organization. Be ready for the next debacle and be ready to seize power. This is, after all, but another enumeration of the observation that one should not let a crisis go to waste. Trump, no matter his own motivations, is the embodiment of “Peak Neoliberalism.”
Re “Peak Neoliberalism”: Agree, Ambrit. Thanks.
Appreciated Russell Brand’s keen perspective in the Irish Times link on the likely policy similarities between the now departed Obama administration and the expected policies of the incoming Trump administration. Like Brand, I too expect a difference in style, symbolism and policy emphasis, but little change in overall policy effects.
Both “teams” are clearly channeling the utterly unnecessary and economically damaging Austerity-budget deficit reduction mantra on behalf of the 0.1 Percent. Rather than “trade agreements” with their ISDS feature and financial markets as the looting vehicles of choice, I expect the Trump administration to focus on privatization of publicly owned assets, targeted tariffs, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and cuts to social support programs through the Republicans’ traditional “Public-Private Partnerships” under the guise of jobs creation and economically damaging and recession-inducing “federal deficit reduction” (which is again being painted as constructive). That the Trump administration has loaded the boat with Squid is the tell.
But I did appreciate Trump’s rhetoric in his inaugural address regarding the DC establishment. The level of discomfort among his listeners on the dais was palpable, and that alone was worth seeing. Only wish Trump had included similar observations about the TBTFs, their fellow Wall Street travelers, and the MIC in his speech. Based on this address, though, perhaps we will be subjected to less propaganda, obfuscation, word parsing and political illusion going forward for a while at least.
It was all right as rhetoric, but what I can’t get out of my head is a picture of Trump with McConnell a few days after the election. McConnell looked so excited you’d have thought he’d gotten everything he asked Santa for AND a pony.
McConnell is vastly underestimating Trump. That’s not a safe attitude to take.
So, I fear, is almost everyone else.
Yes, I must agree there. It is so easy to drift off into Authoritarian thinking when one has vast power and burning desire.
Actually, despite all the desperate attempts by the legacy media to get eyeballs with the rapture is just around the corner nonsense…
methinx we are entering the era of “peak hate”…
Radio was “controlled” by “regulation” 100 years ago…The net can’t be…
ott sites are exposing themselves via unsubstantiated and unsustainable hype to the same fall off that entertainment enterprises and acts suffer and suffered…
Despite all the purported eyeballs, xela senoj has to huckster his vegavidavitamins to keep up appearances…since he has fallen for the video is “needed” noise of the garggle monster…
hollyrude marketing and chasing z0mbie apocalypse survival and gold gold gold can pay a few bills, but when the end of the end of the world is upon the eyeballs…
those kookoorands can’t really buy you a shave and a haircut
The sinternet has evolved to the point of no return…
The hate on either side is not increasing…
Putin didnt march any troops into the Crimea…they were already there at the naval base…he was probably shocked at how the ukranians gave up their navy without even a fight…
We are fed this cuban komookneesta nonsense yet to whom does/did the castro brothers sell all that military grade nickel to exactly…and how many operating migs does the cuban airforce have available ??
Humanity has very little interest in killing their fellow humans…
it is just the vivid imagination of some bernaze infused fools who studied manipulation strategies for 8 years and have a double PhD in mezmerization…
I have yet to see one image of 50 (cr)i$i$ actors/fighters in one picture
The delusion of illusion…
I am glad all those women went for a walk instead of watching the repeats on 572 channels or looking for the next googtube hero…
Kathartic noise belched out from confusion and fear is not “hate”…
it is just acceptance that the self indoctrinated myths that have led to this point are turning into kidney stones…
Alex:
I’ve seen these Crimea stories repeated several times lately and think it’s time they be debunked. Since I live in Crimea and experienced these event up close and personal I think I’m a good person to do the debunking.
1. The naval base in Sevastopol was the property of the Ukraine government. After the union fell apart in 1991, the two governments negotiated a lease giving the Russian navy the right to use the property. However, there were restrictions. First, the number of personnel allowed on the base was limited. I believe the number was 16k. That’s the number I heard were there when the occupation started. So the 38-40k number often quoted is false. Second, the lease restricted where the navy personnel were allowed access. They were confined to the base and the town of Sevastopol. They were not allowed free access to the Crimea. In all the years I lived here, prior to the occupation, I never saw a Russian sailor in uniform except in that town. So arguing that they were already here is … crap. The majority of the troops either flew in (there is a commercial airport in Simferopol and several military strips including one at Sevastopol) or may have arrived by ship at the naval base.
2. The Ukrainian navy had two anchorages in Crimea. One was in Sevastopol and the other, secondary port was in Lake Donuzlav, on the northeast coast. As I’ve been told, the Ukrainian navy in Sevastopol woke to find the guns from the Russian ships trained on their ships and the Russian commander issuing a directive to stand down and surrender their positions. This they did as the alternative was to be sunk at anchor. The ships up north were stranded at anchor when the Russians sank a derelict freighter in the harbor’s mouth, blocking their escape. The only Ukrainian ships that survived were returning from a foreign port call at the time and sailed to Odessa.
3. As far as I know, only 1 Ukrainian soldier was shot during the confrontation. He fired first. The Russians were extremely patient in getting the various Ukrainian garrisons to disarm. In many cases local citizens assisted as they knew the base commanders. The Ukraine soldiers were offered Russian papers or a train ticket home. Not sure how many took the former.
uh, take a look at home, compatriot.
Re: ‘Womens March’ – It’s about 2pm where I am, and thus far, I am seeing no hard numbers on the number of marchers in Washington, even though it was to begin at 10am. There are a lot of loose estimates of ‘hundreds of thousands’, at WashPo for instance, but surely there should be something more definitive from the police by now. The NYTimes is also remarkably vague. Also, I note WashPo & Times are not leading with this story in the online edition, in fact it is the equivalent of ‘below the fold’.
Here in New York, at around 11am, the local radio news station was reporting about 2,000 people, which is very small potatoes for New York City. That’s about the same as the Phillipine national parade; the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Irish, etc. pull in well over a 2 million on the average. Of course, those aren’t pulled together in 60 days over Facebook exclusively, either.
I also note there are no photographs of the NYC march, and very few in Washington. Unless I’m missing something.
I was just over at Zero Hedge, where the headline number for the DC march is 500,000. However, when you get into the text, that number is derived from the march organizers. The District of Columbia is relying upon the organizers estimate; still no number from other sources.
Posted link below to aerial photos.
“The new U.S. administration of President Donald Trump said on Friday its trade strategy to protect American jobs would start with withdrawal from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-trade-idUSKBN1542NR
welcome news.
That is welcome news indeed. Thanks for posting this, flora.
looks like mr. obama missed his chance to grab china by the p••sy.
Links to aerial photos in a number of cities:
http://www.vox.com/2017/1/21/14345972/boston-denver-chicago-march
nice, thanks. Quite a few here in Hartford CT where I was today.
Thanks. Also, I see the Daily Mail (UK) now has a lot of photos of Washington, which are instructive. Daily Mail is doing much better of late in the US photo and breaking political news sweepstakes than many US publications. Of course, it’s still 70% dross, but…
The BBC is already calling it a “movement:” Women’s March on Washington: What is it?
That was quick.
I notice that the BBC’s inquiry into this event doesn’t seem to touch on who or what is behind it.
I hate the smell of astroturf in the morning.
NYT seems to believe it’s the redemption event for the Ds. I’m actually surprised by the partisanship, the virtue signaling and ID politics. 2020 is going to be another painful election to watch.
Resurrection: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/how-the-womens-march-could-resurrect-the-democratic-party.html?_r=0
Perry/Kirchick: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2uikoeWEAIhDP7.jpg
Perry/Booker/PP:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2uir6aWIAATRB5.jpg:large
Tampons: https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/822910976622264320
Judd Nazis: https://twitter.com/joanneleon/status/822847836316401664
The organizing/funding is coming from Soros groups. Just one example:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2ud6-bWIAAfvpN.jpg:large
Cassady Fendley is Open Society a Soros Group.
This mov’t is going to be like Susan Komen walks…..make people feel good, nothing consequential comes from it, gives those in charge and politically connected a comfortable living
I’ve decided to go on a bender. Just a few days. No worries, only good red wine. Later, my love.
From the lyrics to the song;
… “Red, red wine, I’m gonna hold on to you,
Hold on to you ’cause I know you love truth.”
Know you love Truth too, STO. Feel better soon.
May I recommend inexpensive champagne? Fewer tannins means less hangover. Plus, no “mentat” purpled lips n teeth. A votre santé.
100+ for the Dune reference ….
.. and as we know, the former face-dancer in chief couldn’t tee off, after flying out west, due to the funky weather ……
A #NoDAPL update:
On January 18 a notice was published in the Federal Register advising the public that
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/18/2017-00937/notice-of-intent-to-prepare-an-environmental-impact-statement-in-connection-with-dakota-access-llcs
Tribal officials issued a statement thanking “supporters and the many government workers who it took to bring us to this point today.”
Note that the comment period ends 2/20/2017:
Apparently they are not letting Canadians join in the protests:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/20/womens-march-canada-protesters-denied-entry-us
To be honest, as a Canadian I’d rather they do it if Trump actually did something bad, which judging by his Cabinet, he will soon enough.
the whole thing is so nonsensical; they should deny them entry back into canada.
if they were really concerned about women, they would be protesting canadian arm sales to saudi arabia.
Canadians are having marches at home in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Kingston, Calgary, Charlottetown, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton (not in Newfoundland because of snowstorm, so held virtually).
I attended the march in Denver today. The crowds were indeed massive. There were a fair share of signs that disappointed me such as referencing comb overs, tiny hands, Putin and an illustration of Trump getting a golden shower.
Overall, it was focused on women’s rights and resistance to any policy to infringe on those rights. The positive statements included some chants for equal pay, but couldn’t grasp much of anything else being advocated.
I’m not sure what the point is of equal pay (except for pure fairness) is when so many men are paid so little. What is the point of equal pay unless it’s at least a living wage? Fight for 15 at least raises the minimum for everyone. It seems a better strategy than equal of crumbs. Until wages of vast quantities of people in this country improve, there isn’t much to emulate.
True, a living wage is needed, but meanwhile, on average, men’s crumbs are bigger than women’s crumbs, and that is about more than abstract fairness for the ones with the smaller crumbs.
The perceived importance of equal pay likely differs by class. There was a survey done in 2016 which showed the largest pay gap was in Finance, Insurance, Professional, Scientific and Technical services. Also, over 20% of women with an MBA or PHD perceived gender inequality at their employer vs. 8% of those with a high school diploma or no degree.
http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-pay-gap
Those perceptions may not exactly match the actual pay gap, but it shows that the issue is much more likely to resonate with the credentialed. The appeal to fairness you mentioned probably gives the issue the traction that it has. I feel like it could be paired with the fight for 15 as part of a living wage for all campaign, but the credentialed advocates for equal pay may not take kindly to that.
As the IWW pointed out over a 100 years ago, “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” is a conservative motto.
Maybe then.
Nixon was a conservative then, now he’d be right there with Bernie.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
I think that once Trump does something, then there will be reason to protest.
An example, if Trump actually does decide to go ahead and screw the rest of the world in a Global Warming Negotiation, that is something very specific.
Right now, a case could be made that he has made some questionable appointments:
1. Secretary of State used to be the CEO of Exxon Mobil
2. Treasury is run by a Goldman Sachs alumni
3. Justice Department is a racist
Those are specifics that can (and I’d say should) be attacked, by both the left, along with his base (although his base probably likes #3).
Burning a few cars in downtown because you don’t like Trump doesn’t really do much right now. Worse, it actually worsens the stereotypes that people have.
Ah, but secstate does not advocate confrontation with Russia and/or no fly zone in Syria. And neither does secdefence. Granted his opponent had both public and private positions, but there is no basis for assuming her private position was more peace loving than the well-expressed public one. Certainly the rep neocons, to a man, were with her.
Let’s not be greedy, my bottom line was to avoid WWIII over the next four years.
Furthermore, we will see if the new admin is substantially more neolib than the last one… and we survived that, granted some have done better than others.
Count your blessings.
Fair enough – risk of a nuclear exchange is much lower.
The CEO of Exxon may have his own reasons though for the job.
http://inthesetimes.com/features/rex_tillerson_exxon_trump_secretary_of_state.html
Mostly related to making money. I guess that’s better than nuclear war. Averted nuclear war, but apparently doom by global warming. Granted, Clinton would not have done anything about global warming either.
Sign seen in a picture from a women’s rally, uploaded by a friend: “Payback is a b*tch, and she votes.” I felt compelled to remind my friend that Trump did win the women vote. The reply is not fit for a family blog :)
You mean the white women vote.
Who did vote payback to the corrupt dem party.
Not true:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/
I think you may have been thinking of white women, for whom your statement may have been true. Pew’s data presentation is terrible, and I can’t find a source with a straightforward tabulation. They should all take lessons from the Census Bureau.
Either way, the sign is wrong because either not enough women are b*tches, or their votes don’t matter. Kind of pointless to threaten to vote against him, when your first vote against him failed to keep him out of the White House. If that slogan has any use at all, it is that it demonstrates the general uselessness of sloganeering on behalf of useless and divisive identity politics.
A majority of women in the US did not vote for either HRC or Trump. So there’s that.
Wow that Baltic expert is a real piece of work straight out of 1985.
“I think Corbyn is a disastrous leader and I disagree with him about almost everything. So I’d be happy to get onto some other questions.”
Disturbing especially as a Latvian myself. Though I am a minority since especially the diaspora is so conservative in America. Leadership in Latvia the same. No wonder why so many young people move away.
as of now!, “trump” appears 170 times on this page.
ew.
there were 635 womens’ marches around the world.
in this country 2.5 million demonstrated
I just went shopping and the crowds getting out of the subway were wreathed in smiles, it looked like the 4th of July. Lots of couples with their children.
I have not seen DC this happy since the election. the cloud has been lifted, at least temporarily.
and wow, Trump must now know that all over the world, women REALLY hate him.
why didn’t anyone ever protest mr. obama’s incinerating afghans?
Because he did so with compassion and class, and then gave a pretty speech about something.
Did you attempt to organize an event with that particular purpose?
.
nope. but i did spend that last 8 years trying to lift the fog from the heads of people who suddenly thought the world was right again when mr. bush left office.
that unto itself has been most taxing.
i, of course, see your point and it is well taken.
I wonder what the numbers are for people who despise these hypocritical, shallow and ineffectual protests?
One, maybe.
No polls have been taken in this regard, but my hunch is that most women “all over the world” haven’t the foggiest who Donald J. Trump is.
Are you kidding? The rest of the world cares a lot about who leads the empire. It could be life or death for them.
I live in the “rest of the world”. In my small corner, most people don’t know or care. Most people are dirt poor and live in Asia. While it is true that the government of the empire does have a huge global impact– potentially a lethal one– it is nevertheless conceited to think that most people struggling for their everyday existence know or care about something seemingly so distant.
Your last sentence is EXACTLY what worries me. Trump has all the power. Provoking him like this, without even giving the self-styled dealmaker the face-saving gesture of making a concrete demand he could then counter, seems like it could backfire horribly for the vast majority of those smiling people.
It’s also so cruel. The people who have been living under a cloud for eight years or twenty years or thirty years can’t go to DC for fun and buy branded scarves for the day. DC became obscenely wealthy under Obama. I can’t work up a lot of sympathy for the sad, sad fiat currency gluttons who live in DC. I’m glad all these people got to throw a nice party, with the billionaire-controlled media sanctifying it. I still remember CNN refusing to show Bernie supporters when they marched right outside CNN’s offices.
I really think convincing Donald Trump that women all over the world hate him isn’t going to work out well. For women. We’ll see.
I think even Trump is capable of working out that an event is a team building exercise. You can’t have a D v R captured system if you can’t get your constituencies to stay in their particular tents.
The billionaire owned media covering a billionaire sponsored generic event isn’t very surprising. The Ds took a big hit, the media invested a lot of money in the Ds, they are trying to redeem the Ds and they have propagandizing to do if the Ds are going to be patched up (pretty much a corpse at this point) and put back on the field in four years.
I would love to grab this pussy and cuddle with it: http://www.boredpanda.com/two-faced-cat-yana/. A definite Antidote candidate!
I was at the march in Montpelier, VT today. The organizers were expecting somewhere between 5-7 thousand people but the Montpelier police estimate the actual crowd was somewhere between 15 and 20 thousand. The crowd was so large they had to shut down two exits on the interstate!
http://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2017/01/21/vermonters-swarm-into-montpelier-for-womens-march
It appeared to me that the crowd was about evenly split on gender lines with many social issues represented in the signs (reproductive rights, gay rights, climate change, economic justice, health care etc.). Bernie Sanders made a suprise appearance and gave a rousing speech that the hometown crowd loved. In his speech he emphasized economic justice and talked about creating a movement that united workers, women, environmentalists etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Z5s7T9WNs
I know many people on this thread feel that these marches were shallow, hypocritical, virtue signalling, etc., but that was not the feeling I got from this particular event. Sure, there were some signs I thought were stupid, but I didn’t get the sense that these were die-hard Clinton supporters, pissed about the failed coronation or liberals who wanted to go to a protest in lieu of doing the hard grassroots work that building a movement requires. Vermont being such a small state, I recognized dozens of people I knew from other movements and causes and am fairly confident that many of the people there will be (if they aren’t already) working really hard to build the political revolution we need in the years ahead. I decided to go at the very last minute to show my pre-schooler what peaceful protest looks like and I left feeling proud of my “brave little state,”
Same here in Hartford. It didn’t feel shallow, even if those typing on their keyboards from home think they were. And many of the attendees here were about bigger issues and not just gender issues. Medicare, Social security, increasing minimum wage, etc.
Were there people working the crowd to start funneling all that energy in concrete ways?
What I’m seeing online looks like very counterproductive astroturfing and virtue-signalling. Cory Booker with a branded, pink Planned Parenthood scarf around his neck being highlighted by the MSM made me want to jump through the screen and strangle him. It would be great if the attempted manipulation and capture got subverted.
Yes, I remember them marching to save Social Security as Obama’s Grand Bargain threatened to destroy it. Look, I have no doubt that he vast majority of the attendees deeply care about some issue or another. However, they did not march for these issues, they marched against Trump. Thus all they did is serve the interests of the duopoly, falling for the divide and conquer of the elites. Do you think that the unemployed or the underpaid “deplorable” in Ohio got the idea that these women marched for Social Security, $15 minimum wage, etc? No, all they saw on tee-vee are the anti-Trump signs and Madonna inviting him to suck a d!ck. Since they believe, rightly or wrongly, that Trump represents the opposite of the establishment they voted against, I fail to see how today’s marches served to do anything other than divide the country even more, and to allow these women to vent some steam.
I’m with Mariah.
I marched today in Lancaster, New Hampshire, with about 400 others. It was a good chance to get together with neighbors and friends, and we all enjoyed walking up and down the length of our Main Street that we work so hard to maintain and improve.
Trump is a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, vulgar, climate change-denying, white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. Those who smugly welcome his fraudulent presidency are losers, crooks, or fools.
Favorite sign of the day: “MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN”
So what, as to what Trump “is” or “isn’t”. Presidencies are about policies, so talk about those. Makes it harder to forget (it’s always about) those once the next “respectable” candidate is voted into office, if nothing else.
> those typing on their keyboards from home
It’s because some of us are typing on our keyboards from home that you get to post this comment.
#JustSaying.
Thanks for your report, especially noting the multiplicity of issues. Turn-out far exceeding organizers’ expectations happened in large and small locations. Whatever the original organizers, the celebrities in DC, establishment Dems, or George Soros may or may not have intended, I don’t believe that’s what happened today. It was a surprise – like some 100+ Occupy’s springing up within days of the original OWS, like Ferguson became #BLM, like the Sanders campaign. It may have been too brief to have a sustained impact in many places; it may have been too crowded in places for long-time activists to do effective networking; it may get forgotten or co-opted. But I think it happened.
https://twitter.com/bobocek/status/822938939782823939
That’s good news! Thanks for the report.
This is a lovely report. And I’m truly glad to hear it. I would not doubt that a lot of the local events really were like that. I will continue to be cynical regarding my local event (NYC) and the main event in DC, especially after the news coverage here locally.
And that should not be taken as an insult. NY and DC are large bubbles, the very make up of a large segment of their population lends themselves to clueless entitlement. Grass roots are what is going to fuel change in this country. Sure there is some of that in the bubble, but both with Trump and more optimistically Sanders we saw that it is outside those bubbles where grass roots flourish and spread and become a force. So go Mountpelier! And a similar cheer to small cities and towns across America who had a similar experience yesterday. Lead the way.
Jose M: Calvin’s got my vote. Handsome cat!
The Cory Booker quote in the Shadowproof is priceless:
“New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, one of the more notable Democrats who voted against the Klobuchar amendment, believes he will lead the “resistance” to Trump. He tweeted “like Picard did The Borg, I will resist the things [Trump] does that will hurt [New Jersey] and America”
Has he seen the episodes in question? Picard stated he would resist the Borg, the Borg said “Resistance is irrelevant” and proceeded to make him a fully cooperating and helpful part of the Borg collective. He only got out of it because Riker managed to rescue him and “de-Borgify” him!
The idea of Cory Booker putting up a resistance to anything except genuinely progressive and helpful policies and people is laughable.
I’ve been taking Elysium’s Basis for 4 months now and giving some to an old dog I have too. Can’t say much about myself so far (I’m entering my 50s) but must say my dog seems more lively and playful since I started him on it (he’s 13).
Myself, I’m interested in fending off a familial tendency to degenerative disk disease of the lower back and if keeping my cell biology young-ish might do it then I’ll go for it. I also take a low dose of metformin each day even though I’m not remotely diabetic. Metformin is a cheap, old drug that has actual scientific evidence for extending lifespan behind it, even though that was never it’s intended function. Basis and metformin. I’ll see if it has any real benefit.