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theculturedmarxist · 10 months ago

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The fix is in. To “protect democracy,” democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy.” Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.”

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.

The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.

NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.

For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.

Authored by former NAACP director Ben Chavis, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Iran-Contra Special Counsel Dan Webb, the No Labels letter described a meeting of multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party. In the 80-minute confab, audio of which was obtained by Semafor, a dire warning was issued to anyone considering a third-party run:

Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.

The Semafor piece offered a rare glimpse into the Zoom-politics culture that’s dominated Washington since the arrival of Covid-19. If this is how Beltway insiders talk about how to keep Joe Lieberman or Ben Chavis out of politics, imagine what they say about Trump?

We don’t have to imagine. Three and a half years ago, in June and July of 2020, an almost exactly similar series of features to the recent NBC story began appearing in media, describing another “loose network” of “bipartisan officials,” also meeting “quietly” to war-game scenarios in case “Trump loses and insists he won,” as the Washington Post put it.

That group, which called itself the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), involved roughly 100 former officials, think-tankers, and journalists who gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios. The “loose” network included big names like former Michigan governor and current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and former Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, who in his current role as special advisor to President Joe Biden overseeing the handout of roughly $370 billion in “clean energy” investments is one of the most powerful people in Washington.

The TIP was hyped like the rollout of a blockbuster horror flick: In a second Trump Term, No One Will Hear You Scream… Stories in NPR, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and over a dozen other major outlets outlined apocalyptic predictions about Trump’s unwillingness to leave office, and how this would likely result in mass unrest, even bloodshed. A typical quote was from TIP co-founder, Georgetown law professor, and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, who told the Boston Globe that every one of the group’s simulations ended in chaos and violence, because “the law is... almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”

Podesta played Joe Biden in one TIP simulation, and in one round refused to accede to a “clear Trump win,” threatening instead to seize a bloc of West Coast states including California (absurdly dubbed “Cascadia”) and secede. Podesta’s “frankly ridiculous move,” as one TIP participant described it, was so over the top that a player leaked it to media writer Ben Smith of the New York Times.

The latter in Timesian fashion stuck the seeming front-page tale near the bottom of an otherwise breezy August 2nd story titled, called “How The Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong”:

A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat… They cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede... But Mr. Podesta… shocked the organizers… he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office…

News that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief rejected a legal election result, even in a hypothetical simulation, was obvious catnip to conservative media, which took about ten minutes to repackage Smith’s story using the same alarmist headline format marking earlier TIP write-ups. Breitbart published “Democrats’ ‘War Game’ for Election Includes West Coast Secession, Possible Civil War,” and a cascade of further red-state freakouts seemed inevitable.

“At that point,” says Nils Gilman, COO and EVP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, who served alongside Brooks as TIP’s other co-founder, “we decided we needed to be out about having run this exercise, to prevent the allegation that this was a ‘shadowy cabal’ — not that that narrative didn’t take hold anyways.”

The final TIP report was released the next day, August 3rd, 2020. Titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” the full text was, as any person attempting an objective read will grasp, sensational.

The Podesta episode was worse than reported, with the secession proposal coming on “advice from President Obama,” used as leverage to a) secure statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico b) divide California into five states to increase its Senate representation, and c) “eliminate the Electoral College,” among other things. TIP authors also warned Trump’s behavior could “push other actors, including, potentially, some in the Democratic Party, to similarly engage in practices that depart from traditional rule of law norms, out of perceived self-defense.”

More tellingly, there were multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness. TIP authors concluded that “as an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage” in the upcoming election, and chided participants that “planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” They added the key observation that “a reliance on elites observing norms are [sic] not the answer here.”

Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.”

This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.”

That incident acquires new significance now in light not only of this NBC story, but also the dismal 2024 poll numbers for Biden, a host of unusually candid calls for preemptive action to prevent Trump from taking office, the bold efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in states like Colorado and Maine, and those lesser-publicized, but equally important campaign to keep third party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy from gaining ballot access in key states.

The grim reality of Campaign 2024 is that both sides appear convinced the other will violate “norms” first, with Democrats in particular seeming to believe extreme advance action is needed to head off a Trump dictatorship. Such elevated levels of paranoia virtually guarantee that someone is going to cheat before Election Day in November, at which point the court of public opinion will come into play. The key question will be, who abandoned democracy first?

The TIP report provided an answer. It contained long lists of theoretical Trump abuses that sounded suspiciously more like the extralegal maneuvers already deployed againstTrump dating back to mid-2016, particularly during the failed effort to prosecute him for collusion with Russia. Interpreted by some as a literal plan to overturn a legal Trump victory, its greater significance was as a historical document, since it read like a year-by-year synopsis of all the home team rule-breaking. In other words, the TIP read like a Team Clinton playbook, only with hero and villain reversed.

Bearing in mind that many of the people involved were also Russiagate actors, here’s a abbreviated list of abuses the TIP authors supposedly feared Trump would commit:

“The President’s ability… to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents.”

It’s true a president so inclined can do these things, and possible a re-elected Trump might, but they were clearly done first to Trump in this case. The FBI’s road-to-nowhere Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russian collusion, which made use of illegally obtained FISA surveillance authority, began on July 31, 2016. Trump opponents have been “launching investigations” really without interruption ever since, with many (including especially the recent Frankensteinian hush-money prosecution) obviously politicized.

Likewise, the office of the Director of National Intelligence published an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017, again before Trump’s inauguration, that used information from the bogus Steele dossier to conclude that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” If that isn’t using intelligence agencies to “cast doubt on election results,” what is? Worse, the trick would be repeated, over and over:

“The President and key members of his administration can also reference classified documents without releasing them, manipulate classified information, or selectively release classified documents for political purposes, fueling manufactured rumors.”

This phenomenon also began before Trump’s election, notably with the story leaked on January 10, 2017, about four “intel chiefs,” including FBI Director James Comey, who presented then-President-elect Trump with “claims of Russian efforts to compromise him,” including the infamous pee tape. “Selective” release of “classified documents” then continued through the Trump presidency. Other incidents involved the “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story (February 2017), a Washington Post story about Jeff Sessions speaking to the Russian ambassador (March 2017), the (incorrect) story about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen being in Prague (April 2018), the infamous “Russian bounty” story (June 2020), and many, many, others.

Podesta himself participated in one of the first and most damaging “manufactured rumor” episodes, beginning in late 2016, involving the use of the Elias-commissioned Steele dossier to illegally obtain a FISA warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page. Podesta, who of course knew the real source of the story, reacted to it as if it was news generated by government investigators and publicly derided Page as a Russian cutout, before adding that the 2016 election “was distorted by the Russian intervention.” This was a textbook example of using “manufactured rumors” from intelligence agencies to “cast doubt” on election results as you’ll find.

“Additional presidential powers subject to misuse include… his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”

As for restricting internet communications “in the name of national security,” Racket pauses to laugh. The growth of state-aided censorship initiatives like the ones we studied all last year in the Twitter Files began well before Trump’s election, for instance with the creation in Barack Obama’s last year of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which later worked with Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership to focus heavily on posts deemed to be attempts at “delegitimization” in the 2020 election. Stanford’s group even flagged a story about the TIP in its final report as “conspiracy theory.”

Not to say that these bureaucracies couldn’t be abused by a second Trump administration, but so far they’ve been a near-exclusive fixation of Democratic politicians and security officials. There’s a reason Joe Biden is the only candidate slated to enjoy a censorship-free campaign season, while Trump and third-party challenger Robert F. Kennedy have been repeatedly removed or de-amplified from various platforms.

“There is considerable room to use foreign interference, real or invented, as a pretext to cast doubt on the election results or more generally to create uncertainty about the legitimacy of the election.”

This may have been the most amazing line in the TIP report, given that the entire Trump presidency was marked by stories like “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump” (New Yorker) “Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable” (Wired), “Russia ‘turned’ election for Trump, Clapper believes” (PBS), “Yes, Russian Election Sabotage Helped Trump Win” (Bloomberg), and a personal favorite, “CIA Director Wrongly Says U.S. Found Russia Didn't Affect Election Result” (NBC). There was so much “Russia hacked the election” messaging between 2016 and 2020, in fact, that our Matt Orfalea made two movies about it. Here’s one:

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In the 2018 midterm elections, officials warned that Russia was going to “attack” the congressional vote. Stories like “U.S. 2018 elections ‘under attack’ by Russia” (Reuters) and “Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections” (New York Times) were constants, until the Democrats retook the House in a “blue wave,” at which point headlines began saying the opposite (“Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says” from the Times was a typical take). The TIP was written during a repeat version, as stories like “Lawmakers are Warned that Russia is Meddling to Re-Elect Trump” (New York Times) were near-daily fixtures in 2020 pre-election coverage. After Biden won, headlines like “Putin Failed to Mount Major Election Interference Activities in 2020” again became fixtures in papers like the Washington Post.

This brings us to the last and most controversial angle on the TIP report. When the original TIP text came out, Michael Brendan Daugherty in National Review wrote in an offhand tone that he got the feeling “some progressives are steeling themselves for a Color Revolution in the United States,” because winning a normal election “just isn’t cathartic enough.”

To this day, the color revolution idea makes TIP organizers laugh.

“The idea that some rando in Los Angeles,” Gilman says, referring to himself, “was secretly planning a color revolution (which he published a report about months in advance, which you gotta admit is a pretty weird move for a guy allegedly plotting a revolution) is a textbook example of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style.”

Brooks is also incredulous, saying the color revolution thesis is a “profound misunderstanding” of the TIP report. “They aren’t plans or predictions, they’re efforts to understand how things might play out,” she wrote, adding that the TIP participants were merely asking, “What could go wrong?”

They may have asked that. Still, the group’s final report contained a string of references to “plans and predictions,” with entries like “Plan for a contested election,” “Plan for large-scale protests,” and “Make plans now for how to respond in the event of a crisis.” As for the “profound misunderstanding,” Brooks gave a friendly interview to a New York Times writer who was apparently laboring under the same “profound” delusion.

Weeks after the National Review piece, Michelle Goldberg in the Times wrote of Daugherty: “He’s right, but not in the way he thinks.” She explained that Democrats don’t relish the thought of an uprising, but look upon it as something to be dreaded, that “must nonetheless be considered.”

She then quoted Brooks. The Georgetown professor, who in her most recent book about life in the Defense Department described getting “a coveted intelligence community ‘blue badge’” to pass into “the sacred precincts of the CIA,” told Goldberg that in the event of a Trump power grab, “the only thing left is what pro-democracy movements and human rights movements around the world have always done, which is sustained, mass peaceful demonstrations.”

That did sound like a description of the Eastern European color revolutions, which generally involved mass street actions, sustained negative press pressure, and calls by NGOs and outside countries for the disfavored leader to step down. A major reason the “color revolution” theme struck commentators in connection with TIP had to do with the presence in the TIP simulation of Barack Obama’s former chief ethics lawyer, Norm Eisen. Eisen wrote a manual called The Democracy Playbook for the Brookings Institution that is often referred to as the unofficial how-to guide for America-backed regime-change operations abroad. Anyone who’s been forced to read a lot of “democracy promotion” literature, as I had to in Russia, will recognize familiar themes in the TIP report.

One of the controversial features of “color revolution” episodes is that the U.S. has at times supported ousters of perhaps unsavory, but legally elected, leaders. Was the TIP group contemplating the “sustained” protest scenario only in the event of Trump stealing an election, or if he merely won in an unpleasant way, i.e. via the Electoral College with a popular vote deficit? Brooks at first indicated she didn’t understand the reference.

“I am not sure what the question is?” she wrote. “Peaceful protests, mass or otherwise, are constitutionally protected.”

I referred back to the Times piece and the “movements around the world” quote, noting that while those outcomes might arguably have been desirable, it’d be hard to call them strictly democratic.

“I am not an expert on the color revolutions,” she replied. “It is certainly true that on both left and right, in both the US and abroad, there are nearly always... I guess I’d say spoilers, or violence entrepreneurs — who try to hijack peaceful protest movements.”

Lastly: one TIP simulation also predicted, with something like remarkable anti-clairvoyance, that Trump would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of “insurrection” for protesting a “clear Trump win”:

The Trump Campaign planted agent provocateurs into the protests throughout the country to ensure these protests turned violent and helped further the narrative of a violent insurrection against a lawfully elected president.

That passage was published on August 3, 2020, long before most Americans knew or cared that the word “insurrection” had political significance. We’d be instructed in its use within hours of the riots, when Joe Biden said, “It’s not protest. It’s insurrection,” and everyone from Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell to media talking heads to the authors of the articles of impeachment like Jamie Raskin fixated on the word. Still, not until December 2021 did a public figure explain how the 14th Amendment might be deployed strategically in the post-January 6th world. The insight came from Elias, who has since deleted the tweet:

We’re of course now seeing that litigation, notably in the form of a Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, which was handed down after complaints filed citing the 14th Amendment provision alluded to by Elias.

All this is laid out as background for the coming nine months of campaign chaos, if we even end up having a traditional campaign season. Revolt of the Public author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri summed up the situation in a piece for The Free Press titled “Trump. Again. The Question is Why?” The money quotes:

The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks… The implications are clear. Not only Trump, but the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him, must be silenced and crushed. To save democracy, it must be modified by a possessive: “our democracy.”

The Biden campaign, stuck in a seemingly irreversible poll freefall, has put all its rhetorical chips on the theme of “protecting democracy.” Biden mentions Trump’s “assault on democracy” at every opportunity, and even recently resorted to Apollo Creed-style imagery, campaigning at Valley Forge flanked by a dozen American flags and red, white, and blue lights. (Red-and-white striped trunks can’t be far off.) The DNC’s daily “talkers” memos for months have asked blue-party pols and friendly reporters to stress “the existential threat to freedom and democracy that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent,” while pointing to stories like Vanity Fair’s, “There Is No ‘Both Sides’ to Donald Trump’s Threat to Democracy,” in its CONTENT TO AMPLIFY section.

This messaging would likely have worked after January 6th, when Trump’s post-electoral conduct rankled voters, as evidenced by an exit approval rating of 34%. It can’t now, since the word “democracy” has been appropriated to refer exclusively to the party that declared its New Hampshire primary “non-binding” and “meaningless,” canceled its Florida primary, is preparing mass technical challenges against third-party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (and has a rich history in that area; see accompanying Nader piece), is seeking to kick the GOP front-runner off the ballot, has mass-filed bar complaints against attorneys who represented that candidate, and has piled criminal counts atop its main electoral opposition.

Many who couldn’t stand Trump, would never vote for him, and have been willing consumers of the awesome amount of propaganda published on the Trump subject, now need to face the fact that they’ve been had. Transformed into the avatar of all bad things — a crude domestic combo platter of Saddam, Milosevic, Assad, and Putin — this vision of the über-villain, Trump, has been used to distract mass audiences from the erosion of “norms” at home. “Protecting democracy” in the Trump context will be remembered as having served the same purpose as Saddam’s mythical WMDs, the shots fired in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Gaddafi’s fictional Viagra-enhanced army. Those were carefully crafted political lies, used to rally the public behind illegal campaigns of preemption.

Voters, by voting, “protect democracy.” A politician who claims to be doing the job for us is up to something. The group in the current White House is trying to steal for themselves a word that belongs to you. Don’t let them.

#2024 presidential election #matt taibbi #trump #biden #democrats #dnc #our democracy #russiagate #john podesta #project 2025 #Youtube

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largemouthbassnation · 6 years ago

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Un Experimento Genético lo convirtió en un Oso Siberiano Sígueme en Facebook: Sígueme en Twitter:Hugo Van ... source

#AiA #Bass elite #bass fishing #bass fishing tournaments #Bassmaster Clasics #bfl bass tournaments #fishing for bass #FLW tourneys #gerald swindle #Joe Bassin #Kevin VanDamm #kvd #professional fishing #usa bassin

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feelingbluepolitics · 3 years ago

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They have their reasons. They aren't "good" in any sense of the word.

"[A]fter more than a decade of McConnell’s obstructionism and half a decade of the GOP capitulating to [t]rump, the fact that Manchin, Collins, and Murkowski seem genuinely surprised that they couldn’t get 10 Republicans to agree to this is almost more maddening than the expected filibuster itself. It’s only natural, after all, for the perpetrators of a crime to want to avoid an investigation into it. The people who can’t recognize that, even as they seek accountability? They’re the disappointments. 'If your negotiating partner gets everything they asked for and still won’t agree,' wrote Ian Bassin, founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, 'you don’t have a good faith negotiating partner.'"

And that goes for Collins and her endless amendments, too.

Murkowski? Is she the best of the worst? No, she's right in there with them. After the way she maneuvered back into the Senate, she, more than any, knows of the option to call herself an independent and caucas with whichever side she believes in at any moment. She's a Republicon. Her role is to trot out as a Republicon, like clockwork, and garner some seemingly moral points to provide her party with on-going slack to act continuously in heinous, nation-destroying ways.

Manchin? He also got everything he asked for -- a laboriously negotiated and entirely, meticulously, bipartisan proposal -- that didn't work because Manchin's Senate killed it, like everyone knew would happen. He doesn't have any good faith either. His faith is absolutely wrong. Grotesque, under the circumstances. Manchin is to the filibuster as Republicons are to trump: a horrible thing held up to obeisant reverence even if it wrecks our country.

Manchin is so entirely wrong, that he is on target to be ultimately the reason why Republicons can -- and will -- destroy American democracy, to replace it with a trumpian autocracy. The one infinitesimal sliver of good news in the meantime is that Manchin is now unlikely to make it official and join his Republicon friends in their party, because they made him forever the fool with their determination to block truth and national security at any cost, and their utter indifference to providing "ten solid patriots."

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thebookworm-lebouquineur · 4 years ago

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ANOTHER MUSICIAN-WRITER: Eric Clapton

Au cours de mon enfance, vers l'âge de six ou sept ans, j'ai commencé à avoir l'impression que j'étais différent. Peut-être était-ce la façon dont les gens parlaient de moi, comme si je n'étais pas dans la pièce. Ma famille vivait au 1, the Green, une petite maison à Ripley, dans le Surrey, qui donnait directement sur le Green du village. Elle faisait partie de ce qui avait été autrefois des hospices et était divisée en quatre pièces : deux chambres minables à l'étage, une petite pièce à l'avant et une cuisine en bas. Les toilettes étaient à l'extérieur, dans un hangar en tôle ondulée au fond du jardin, et nous n'avions pas de baignoire, juste une grande bassine en zinc accrochée derrière la porte. Je ne me souviens pas de l'avoir utilisée.

Deux fois par semaine, ma mère remplissait d'eau une petite baignoire en fer blanc et m'épongeait, et le dimanche après-midi, j'allais prendre un bain chez ma tante Audrey, la soeur de mon père, qui vivait dans les nouveaux appartements de la rue principale. Je vivais avec maman et papa, qui dormaient dans la chambre principale donnant sur le Green, et mon frère, Adrian, qui avait une chambre à l'arrière. Je dormais sur un lit de camp, parfois avec mes parents, parfois en bas, selon la personne qui restait à ce moment-là. La maison n'avait pas d'électricité, et les lampes à gaz émettaient un sifflement constant. Cela m'étonne maintenant de penser que des familles entières vivaient dans ces petites maisons.

Ma mère avait six soeurs : Nell, Elsie, Renie, Flossie, Cath et Phyllis, et deux frères, Joe et Jack. Le dimanche, il n'était pas rare que deux ou trois de ces familles se présentent, et ils se passaient les ragots et se mettaient au courant de ce qui se passait pour nous et pour eux. Dans la petitesse de cette maison, les conversations se déroulaient toujours devant moi comme si je n'existais pas, avec des chuchotements échangés entre les sœurs. C'était une maison pleine de secrets. Mais petit à petit, en écoutant attentivement ces échanges, j'ai commencé à me faire une idée de ce qui se passait et à comprendre que les secrets me concernaient généralement. Un jour, j'ai entendu une de mes tantes demander : "Tu as des nouvelles de sa mère ?" et j'ai compris que lorsque l'oncle Adrian me traitant en plaisantant de petit bâtard, il disait la vérité.

L'impact de cette prise de conscience sur moi a été traumatisant, car à l'époque de ma naissance, en mars 1945 - malgré le fait qu'elle était devenue si courante en raison du grand nombre de soldats et d'aviateurs d'outre-mer passant par l'Angleterre - un énorme sentiment de honte était encore attaché à l'illégitimité.

Bien que cela soit vrai pour toutes les classes sociales, c'était particulièrement vrai pour les familles de la classe ouvrière comme la nôtre, qui, vivant dans une petite communauté villageoise, ne connaissaient guère le luxe de la vie privée.

À cause de cela, ma position est devenue très confuse et, à côté de mes profonds sentiments d'amour pour ma famille, je soupçonnais que, dans un endroit aussi minuscule que Ripley, je pouvais être pour eux une source d'embarras qu'ils devaient toujours expliquer.

La vérité que j'ai finalement découverte était que maman et papa, Rose et Jack Clapp, étaient en fait mes grands-parents, Adrian était mon oncle, et la fille de Rose, Patricia, issue d'un précédent mariage, était ma vraie mère et m'avait donné le nom de Clapton.

Traduit à l’aide de moteurs de traduction. The autobiography / Eric Clapton. Broadway Books – 2007.

#eric clapton #The autobiography / Eric Clapton

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djamila-tambouillachauffer · 5 years ago

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By joe Bassin

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leblogdemarinaetjeanmarie · 3 years ago

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MARDI 12 AVRIL 2022 (Billet 2 / 3)

Et quant à la « chose », on l’a dit dès le début, c’était juste un prétexte de sortie. Cette « chose », ce sont les martiens qui ont débarqué dans le grand bassin. Des petits bonshommes tout verts !

Lisez plutôt…

Fabrice HYBER

« Les 30 ans de l’Homme de Bessines, 2022 »

Du 4 avril au 30 mai 2022 à l’invitation du centre des Monuments Nationaux, Fabrice Hyber fête les 30 ans de l’Homme de Bessines au palais Royal.

Répondant à une commande publique pour la commune de Bessines (Deux-Sèvres) Fabrice Hébert crée en 1991 6 sculptures de 87 cm de haut (la moitié de sa taille) percées par 11 orifices d’où jaillissent des filets d’eau.

L’Homme de Bessines est le gardien d'un nouveau monde fait de réseaux et d’informations. Les fluides matérialisent les échanges entre les humains et le monde. Symbole d’un environnement en mutation, il existe dans des matières, des genres et des tailles différentes.

Depuis la première installation, nous retrouvons la sculpture partout de Lisbonne à Shanghai, de Tokyo à Londres.

À l’occasion de cette anniversaire Fabrice Hyber a créé une « FemmeHomme de Bessines » présentée ici comme l’espoir de la 31e année

(Source : "La plaque située à côté du bassin")

Et puis nous avons fini notre balade en traversant la célèbre Cour d’honneur du Palais Royal, avec ses « Deux Plateaux », communément appelés « COLONNES DE BUREN », classés monument historique en 1994.

"Courageux mais pas téméraires"... au contraire de beaucoup d'autres, vous verrez que nous n'avons pas choisi la colonne la plus haute.

Juste avant, sur le parvis de la Cour d’Orléans, entre le Conseil Constitutionnel et le Ministère de la Culture, un regard triste sur les 2 « FONTAINES A BOULES » de POL BURY (1985), qui ne sont plus fontaines depuis bien longtemps. L’art et la manière pour l’Etat français de vouloir toujours p… plus haut que son c. !!! Il ne fallait pas les commander en tant que fontaines dont chacun sait, au moins depuis Louis XIV, qu’elles ont un coût de revient très élevé. Dommage, avec l’eau et le décor environnant, ces boules qui tournaient légèrement sur elles-mêmes, offraient un spectacle assez magique pour peu qu’on s’approche d’elles !

Comment éviter pour reprendre le Métro, de choisir, face à la Comédie Française, le « KIOSQUE DES NOCTAMBULES », la « bouche » de Jean Michel Othoniel commandée par la RATP lors du passage à l’an 2000 pour célébrer le centenaire du Métro.

Vous connaissez notre admiration pour cet artiste, aussi baroque que contemporain. Une admiration que ne partagent pas du tout nos amis Anne et Anthony W. Mais comme le disait Joe E. Brown à la fin de « Some like it hot » (« Certains l’aiment chaud ») de Billy Wilder : « Well… nobody’s perfect ! ».

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euroedo2016 · 4 years ago

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MUOVERSI A MULHOUSE

Tram e autobus

I tram vanno più veloci delle auto a Mulhouse!

Queste parole, tratte da una canzone di Joe Dassin, mostrano l'importanza del trasporto pubblico nella zona di Mulhouse: 22 linee di autobus, 3 linee di tram e una linea di tram-treno che fermano nelle 33 città e villaggi della regione. Tutte le stazioni hanno distributori automatici di biglietti che accettano carte e monete. Puoi anche acquistare i biglietti nelle 2 agenzie Soléa del centro commerciale Porte Jeune e della stazione Gare Centrale e anche in alcuni negozi.

Soléa ti offre tutti gli strumenti di cui hai bisogno per muoverti facilmente nell'area urbana di Mulhouse e nella valle della Thur

https://www.fluo.eu/fr/actualites/3/vitici-simplicim-lorraine-et-vialsace-cedent-la-pl/11/2

Fluo.eu è il nuovo Sistema Informativo Multimodale, raccoglie tutte le informazioni relative ai trasporti sul territorio del Grand Est. Pochi click danno accesso ad orari e prezzi, trasporti su richiesta, mappe di rete, ecc. per l'intera rete regionale! Calcola i percorsi porta a porta all'interno e intorno al territorio del Grand Est (fino all'Île-de-France e ai paesi limitrofi), combinando tutti i modi di trasporto disponibili: trasporto pubblico regionale e urbano (treno, tram, autobus, bus, navetta, ecc.), bicicletta, a piedi e in auto (compresi car pooling e car sharing). La sua ambizione è quella di supportare tutti gli spostamenti giornalieri o occasionali fornendo tutte le informazioni utili in tempo reale * (disturbi legati alla circolazione stradale e ferroviaria, lavori, scioperi e viabilità invernale, numero di posti liberi nei parcheggi, disponibilità di biciclette self-service , eccetera.). Fluo.eu è anche l'unico portale di registrazione per il trasporto scolastico fornito dalla Regione Grand Est. Fluo.eu risponde al desiderio della regione di offrire all'utente un servizio più efficiente e di facile utilizzo. È stato sviluppato dalla Regione Grand Est con il supporto delle Autorità Organizzatrici di Mobilità del proprio territorio, che forniscono dati e informazioni utili su tutta la mobilità in tempo reale * e cofinanziano il route planner. Fluo.eu sostituisce Vitici nella Champagne-Ardenne, SimplicIM in Lorena e Vialsace in Alsazia. Scopri il servizio in video qui!

https://www.fluo.eu

Suggerimento: P + Tram! Puoi parcheggiare la tua auto in uno dei due parcheggi ai margini della città (Université e Nouveau Bassin) per raggiungere il centro con facilità. Una tariffa unica di 2 € significa che puoi parcheggiare e ottenere i biglietti di andata e ritorno per tutti i passeggeri (massimo 7 persone).

Bicicletta Approvata come città bike friendly nel 2012, Mulhouse e i suoi dintorni dispongono di numerose strutture e servizi dedicati ai cicloturisti: oltre 300 km di piste ciclabili, una stazione di pompaggio, noleggio bici self-service (Vélocité), negozi di noleggio bici, riparazioni e negozi di pezzi di ricambio, rastrelliere per biciclette sicure in tutta la città, ristoranti e alloggi adatti alle biciclette, ecc.

WWW.VELOCITE.MULHOUSE.FR VÉLOCITÉ IOS MOBILE APP BIKING IN MULHOUSE VIALSACE - PLAN YOUR TRIP

AUTO

Se vuoi raggiungere Mulhouse in auto, c'è una vasta gamma di opzioni di parcheggio per soddisfare le tue esigenze: tariffe di parcheggio a lunga sosta negoziate, parcheggi express gratuiti, parcheggi dei supermercati e altro ancora. Si tratta di un totale di 3310 posti auto interni e sotterranei a pagamento e 4100 posti auto in strada tra cui scegliere. Puoi anche pagare il tuo parcheggio tramite SMS o tramite l'app per smartphone per sfruttare al massimo il tuo tempo senza dover parcheggiare vicino al tassametro! Ultimo ma non meno importante, se preferisci guidare di tanto in tanto, troverai diverse compagnie di autonoleggio a Mulhouse presso la stazione, l'aeroporto, il centro città e la periferia. Plus Auto'trement dispone di 6 stazioni di car sharing.

CAR RENTAL

SIXT : 3 rue Louis Pasteur - 68100 Mulhouse 03 67 05 00 09 - [email protected]

MYDRIVER BY SIXT : 01 76 54 68 88 - [email protected]

CARSHARING CITIZ

Taxi

There are lots of taxi ranks in the heart of town and several companies are available 24/7.

Radio-taxis Mulhouse Tél. : +33 (0) 389 45 80 00TAXI

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burlveneer-music · 6 years ago

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FreeFallRadio - FreeFall 827 - sweet mix of jazz & fusion grooves (Mixcloud)

David Bassin hosts an eclectic two-hour mix of future jazz, R&B, global grooves & abstract beats on San Francisco Community Radio (SFCR/formerly KUSF in Exile), that has received international acclaim since it's debut in 2000. The program is rebroadcast weekly on Invader.fm (UK), FutureJazz.com (Germany), AudioGraffiti.com and available as a podcast 24/7 from iTunes, Mixcloud, Pod-o-Matic and others. More information is available at freefallradio.com.

Brother's Testament - Moonwalker (feat. Gordon Wedderburn & DJ Jazz T) - Ascent (Brother's Testament) Emma-Jean Thackray - Ley Lines - Ley Lines (The Vinyl Factory) 2000Black - Mononymous (2000black) Gallowstreet - Glitterbox - Hot Lava Sex Machine (V2 Benelux) Nicola Conte & Spiritual Galaxy - Essence Of The Sun - Let Your Light Shine On (MPS) Sean Khan - Moment of Collapse (feat. Heidi Vogel) - Palmares Fantasy (Far Out) Stanley Clarke - Silly Putty - Journey to Love (Epic) The Stanley Clarke Band - Enzo's Theme - The Message (Mack Ave) Cameron Graves - Kahuna - Planetary Prince: The Eternal Survival (Mack Ave) Abiah - My Man's Gone Now - Abiah Sings Nina (Madoh) Howard Tate - She's A Burglar - Howard Tate (Atlantic) The Last Poets - Understand What Black Is - Understand What Black Is (Studio Rockers) Quantic y Los Míticos del Ritmo - Hotline Bling (Tru Thoughts) Equals - No Right (feat. Awks) - 1997 (Equals Music Akua Naru - My Mother's Daughter - The Blackest Joy (Code Black) Soulstance - Arem - Electronic Chamber Jazz (Irma) Joe Armon-Jones - London's Face (feat. Oscar Jerome) - Starting Today (Brownswood) Jessica Lauren - Simba Jike - Almería (Freestyle) Nicola Conte & Spiritual Galaxy - Me Do Wo - Let Your Light Shine On (MPS) Tommaso Cappellato - Fly (feat. Nia Andrews) [Alex Attias Remix feat. MdCL] - Aforemention Remixed (Ropeadope)

#FreeFallRadio #david bassin #soul #jazz #future jazz #fusion #r&b #worldbeat #2018 #San Francisco Community Radio #sfcr #kusf #mix #mixcloud

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freenewstoday · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2020/12/12/democrats-fear-and-loathing-over-trump-appointed-judges-totally-unfounded/

Democrats’ fear and loathing over Trump-appointed judges totally unfounded

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a leading candidate to become the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has railed about the corruption of Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, where corruption is defined as following the wishes of large conservative donors and enacting the Republican agenda. Other commentators have argued that the president’s judicial appointments put the American experiment in democracy at risk. Ian Bassin, the leader of a left-wing group called Project Democracy, stated that “History is replete with examples of countries that … lost” democracy “because they allowed raw power grabs to capture and corrupt courts.”

But the judges whom Trump has appointed have turned out to be singularly uncooperative conspirators in the assault that Whitehouse and Bassin claim to fear. Not one Trump-appointed judge has supported the president’s claims of a stolen election.

The Supreme Court this week unanimously refused to take up the case challenging his loss in Pennsylvania. Not one justice — including Trump appointees Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanagh, and Amy Coney Barrett — noted any dissent from that ruling.

Nor did any of those three justices dissent from a Supreme Court ruling that dismissed the Texas Attorney General’s suit asking to overturn the result in four states Joe Biden won.

The most scathing opinion from the lower court on the president’s election challenges came from a judge whom he appointed, Stephanos Bibas. He rejected all of Trump’s complaints about the election in Pennsylvania, refused to allow the campaign to amend its complaint, and declined to prevent Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from certifying Biden as the victor there. Bibas was emphatic in his dismissal of all the arguments: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

Tony Gutierrez/AP

In declining the Trump campaign’s effort to prevent certification, Bibas made clear that the lawsuit was a threat to democratic accountability. “The number of ballots it specifically challenges is far smaller than the roughly 81,000-vote margin of victory. And it never claims fraud or that any votes were cast by illegal voters. Plus, tossing out millions of mail-in ballots would be drastic and unprecedented, disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate and upsetting all down-ballot races too.”

Bibas’ was not the only opinion by a judge appointed by a Republican president to make short work of Trump’s complaints. The campaign had also challenged the result in Pennsylvania based on the Elections Clause of the US Constitution that empowers state legislatures to set the rules; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court permitted late arriving mail-in ballots to be counted. Brooks Smith, a judge appointed by George W. Bush, rejected this lawsuit on standing grounds, arguing that the congressional candidate challenging the Elections Clause was not the object of its protection, because he was not a state legislator. Thus, his claims were based on a general interest in having the state follow the law, which is not enough to get into federal court. Judge William Pryor, another judge appointed by Bush, also gave the back of his hand to a lawsuit seeking to reverse the certification of Biden’s victory in Georgia. Pryor made clear that the court had no jurisdiction to hear garden-variety claims of election misconduct. Pryor’s opinion shows his adherence to the limited jurisdiction of federal courts and to federalism.

Formalist judges, like Pryor and those whom Trump appointed, are dedicated to upholding sound constitutional principles, not reaching particular results.

The assault on Trump-appointed judges is just the latest effort in a long-term strategy to demonize Republican judges more generally. When they were appointed and confirmed, Smith and Pryor, as well as Bibas, were the objects of sustained attack on the left. Bibas was confirmed with only one Democratic vote in favor, despite being rated “well qualified” by the ABA and being one of the most cited law professors at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s top law schools. Brooks Smith was subject to spurious charges by interest groups that he was biased; he was narrowly confirmed. The campaign to keep Smith off the appellate court was so notorious that it resulted in a book, “The Borking Rebellion,” that recounted its excesses. Pryor was repeatedly filibustered by Democrats and took office with only a single Democratic vote.

President Trump

Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Today we are immersed in a great debate about the nature of constitutional interpretation. Judges appointed by Republican presidents believe that the lodestar of constitutional interpretation should be the document’s original meaning. Democrats disagree. This is a legitimate matter of political contention — but many Democrats maintain that Republican judges are corrupt hacks, foot soldiers in a vast right-wing conspiracy. Their probity and attention to the facts in Trump’s election lawsuits should silence these baseless charges. Judges appointed by Republican presidents, including Trump, have punctiliously followed the law and protected the Constitution. They deserve the gratitude of all Americans, regardless of party.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University and a contributing editor of City Journal, where this piece first appeared.

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#Amy Coney Barrett #Brett Kavanaugh #Donald Trump #neil gorsuch #opinion #Supreme court

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largemouthbassnation · 6 years ago

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Fishing for Bass in TOPWATER FROG HEAVEN!! (Epic Day) My friend Brandon and I fished a new lake in central florida that I had never been to. We caught a lot of fish on topwater frogs (spro) early but as the fog burned off and the sun came up we... source

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magaratimes · 4 years ago

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#ActualiteCD. | Bassin du Congo : l’administration Biden va coopérer avec la RDC notamment dans la protection de la biodiversité et des forêts

La nouvelle administration des États-Unis sous le président Joe Biden présente plusieurs opportunités de coopération pour la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) notamment dans la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique. Cette opportunité que la RDC doit saisir s’inscrit dans le cadre du retour des USA à l’Accord de Paris sur le climat. ” Ceci représente une opportunité pour les États-Unis et…

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#ActualiteCD #avec #Bassin #Biden #biodiversité #Congo #coopérer #dans #Des #forêts #ladministration #notamment #protection #RDC

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newstechreviews · 4 years ago

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The car horns blared as Joe Biden took the stage just before 1 a.m.—not to proclaim victory, but to urge his supporters not to lose hope, no matter what President Donald Trump might say. “We believe we are on track to win this election,” the former Vice President told the crowd in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 4. “It ain’t over until every vote is counted. Keep the faith, guys.”

As the new day dawned and dragged on, it increasingly looked as though Biden was right. Having flipped Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, Biden appeared to be inching toward victory. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina remained too close to call as of the evening of Nov. 4. Independent forecasters believed Biden was likely to eke out the requisite 270 electoral votes when all the votes were counted, over the President’s noisy objections.

Even with the White House nearing their grasp, Biden’s supporters could be forgiven if they found it hard to keep the faith. The 2020 election did not go according to plan for the Democrats. It was a far cry from the sweeping repudiation of Trump that the polls had forecast and liberals craved. After all the outrage and activism, a projected $14 billion spent and millions more votes this time than last, Trump’s term is ending the way it began: with an election once again teetering on a knife’s edge, and a nation entrenched in stalemate, torn between two realities, two cultural tribes, two sets of facts.

TIME illustration

Even if he has lost, a President who trampled the rule of law for four years was on pace to collect millions more votes this time. And though they braced for a bloodbath, the congressional Republicans who enabled him instead notched gains across the board. The GOP appeared poised to retain the majority in the Senate and cut into the Democratic House majority, defying the polls and fundraising deficits. Republicans held onto states such as Florida, South Carolina, Ohio and Iowa that Democrats had hoped to flip. They cut into Democrats’ margins with nonwhite voters, made gains with Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley, and racked up huge turnout among non-college-educated white people, while halting what many conservatives feared was an inexorable slide in the suburbs.

Amid record turnout, Biden seemed sure to win the popular vote, possibly with an outright majority—a resounding statement by any standard. But many Democrats expected more. They believed that voters had soured on Trump and his party, that his mishandling of the pandemic and divisive style had alienated a wide swath of voters, that a new political era was about to be born and Trumpism banished to history’s dustbin. Instead, they awoke to a different reality. “Democrats always argued, ‘If more people voted, we would win,’” says GOP strategist Brad Todd, co-author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. “Well, guess what? Everybody voted, and it didn’t help the Democrats. There is a multi-racial, working-class ethos that is animating the new Republican coalition.”

As the votes were tallied into the following day, the candidates’ positions fell along predictable lines. The challenger encouraged the core exercise of democracy to continue, while the President tried to stop it. Biden’s camp urged patience; Trump voiced unfounded suspicions about fraud and cast unwarranted doubt on still incoming returns. Despite widespread fears of chaos, the vote was mostly peaceful and devoid of major irregularities. The President’s baseless declaration of victory was a sign that the test he has posed to American institutions isn’t over yet.

Biden’s campaign was predicated on a return to the pre-Trump political order, a “normal” that may always have been a figment of the collective imagination. If he emerges as the winner, his achievement—toppling an incumbent who manipulated the levers of government to try to gain an advantage, and made voter suppression a core campaign strategy—shouldn’t be discounted. But even if he becomes the next President, it seems clear that he will be governing Trump’s America: a nation unpersuaded by kumbaya calls for unity and compassion, determined instead to burrow ever deeper into its hermetic bubbles. Win or lose, Trump has engineered a lasting tectonic shift in the American political landscape, fomenting a level of anger, resentment and suspicion that will not be easy for his successor to surmount.

Whoever takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 will be tested by a historic set of challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has just entered its worst phase yet, rampaging across the country virtually unchecked. The economic fallout from the virus continues to worsen without new federal aid. Trump has given few hints of what his next months in office may hold, but few expect them to be smooth. An urgent set of policy problems, from climate change to health care to the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, may run into the wall of divided government. America’s democratic institutions will continue to teeter. “If in fact Biden wins, it’s still the case that an openly bigoted aspiring authoritarian not only won the presidency but captured the complete loyalty of one of two major political parties, and—but for a once-in-a-century pandemic—he might have been re-elected,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a non-partisan legal group. “If that doesn’t tell you that something is completely rotten in the foundations of our democracy, I don’t know what would.”

The story of American politics in the 21st century has been one of escalating polarization and gridlock, a nihilistic feedback loop that has made the country all but impossible to lead. For years, a chaos-ridden nation has waited to deliver its verdict on Trump’s unorthodox presidency. But this is 2020—the year when up was down and real was fake, the year of the plague, the year of the unexpected: of course it would not be that easy. Both sides hoped for a knockout blow, a landslide that would forever settle the question of which version of America is the true one. Instead, our identity crisis continues.

The campaign unfolded over a year so convulsive that the third presidential impeachment in history now seems a distant memory. COVID-19 upended Americans’ lives and drained their bank accounts. Millions of people, from all walks of life, took to the streets to protest police violence. The West Coast’s sky was blotted by fire for weeks, while the East was battered by a record hurricane season. And yet, against this backdrop of chaos there was an odd political stasis: Trump’s standing in polls remained about where it had been when Biden first entered the race—a sign, Democrats believed, that Trump had little chance of persuading an electorate that had long since rejected him.

Not that he particularly tried. Strategists of both parties believe the campaign was winnable for the incumbent if he had embraced a more traditional strategy and style—something his entire presidency has shown him to be uninterested in doing. Discarding the advice of the political professionals, Trump insisted on rerunning the 2016 election, down to the leaked emails and antiestablishment rhetoric. He made little alteration to his bull-in-a-china-shop attitude, even though the hellscape he raged against was now one that unfolded on his watch. “COVID certainly didn’t help, but this election was about the President’s performance over the last four years, not just the last nine months,” says Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to the GOP ex–House Speaker Paul Ryan. “It was four years of bumbling his way through every issue, alienating everyone who didn’t agree with him, and never being able to use the tools he had for any particular good.”

As Trump careened from one outrage to another, Biden limited his campaign to theatrically cautious appearances: masked speeches to small, distanced groups; “drive-in” rallies where attendees sat in their cars. The longtime pol known for his garrulousness and gaffes stuck unerringly to the script. Many lines in his final TV ads were identical to what he said when he launched his campaign a year and a half before. Unusually for a general-election candidate, Biden actually saw his standing with the public improve over the course of the campaign. Only about 10% of the ads aired by Biden’s campaign and allies were attacks on Trump, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. His campaign believed that his themes of unity, compassion and expertise were an implicit rebuke to the incumbent. “The message has been incredibly consistent: an implicit contrast between Trump’s character flaws and their consequences for real people,” says Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Trump is self-absorbed and chaotic; Biden is the opposite: in it for others, stable, the antidote to everything Trump represents.” But Democrats now wonder if Biden, like Clinton before him, put too much emphasis on character and not enough on kitchen-table issues, and whether his decision not to campaign more in person was a missed opportunity.

Biden was buoyed by a vast grassroots movement: the Trump era has seen a frenzy of political action, with thousands of newly motivated activists leading local political groups. Middle-class women gathered their Facebook friends to drink wine and make canvassing phone calls; disaffected Republicans waged a multimillion-dollar campaign to mobilize their peers. A weak fundraiser who ended the primary essentially broke, Biden shattered general-election fundraising records—his campaign hauled in $952 million, dwarfing the incumbent by more than $300 million—as liberals showered donations on him and the party’s congressional candidates.

Angela Weiss—AFP/Getty Images“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election. That’s the decision of the American people.” — Joe Biden, at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., just after midnight on Nov. 4.

Peter van Agtmael—Magnum Photos for TIME“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.” — Donald Trump, in the East Room of the White House early on the morning of Nov. 4.

But Trump had his own army of enthusiastic supporters. His massive rallies—held at cavernous airport hangars and sports arenas with no social distancing and limited mask wearing—were not just aimed at flattering Trump’s ego or creating images of enthusiastic throngs for local and national media. Republican National Committee (RNC) teams perched outside each event, registering new voters and creating a database of supporters. “People sometimes pooh-pooh the rallies and say there’s really no campaign structural benefit to them,” says Brian Ballard, a Republican lobbyist with close ties to Trump. But they allowed the campaign to “utilize the crowds that not only go, but the crowds that registered to go, and sometimes that number is five times the amount of folks that actually show up.”

Trump’s campaign also kept up its field-organizing program through the summer, while Biden’s team hung back out of safety concerns. The joint field program between the RNC and the Trump campaign boasted 2.6 million volunteers, according to figures provided by the RNC. They made more than 182 million voter contacts—more than five times what they did in 2016—and added nearly 174,000 new GOP voters to the rolls. Early voter-registration figures in Florida, North Carolina and other states showed that Republicans had “essentially neutralized what had been a Democrat advantage” by mobilizing new voters, says John Podesta, who ran Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid.

Democrats underestimated the Trump tribe’s breadth to their detriment. “I think you miss some of the Trump quotient [in polls] because these folks come out of the woodwork, and they’re out of the woods and waters of South Carolina,” says former GOP Representative Mark Sanford, a Trump critic whose Charleston-area district Republicans took back on Nov. 3. Despite putting more than $100 million behind Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, Democrats fell short of defeating Senator Lindsey Graham by double digits. “These Trump rallies and Trump parades and all those kinds of things, they don’t strike me as the type that would be answering a polling call,” Sanford says.

Having made the decision to forgo traditional field organizing, Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon instead turned the Biden campaign into what may be the largest digital-organizing machine in American political history. “Jen O’Malley Dillon took a risk in investing as much in digital acquisition as she did,” says Patrick Stevenson, chief mobilization officer at the Democratic National Committee. “You’re putting down $1 million in April that you’re expecting to show back up as $5 million in August.” By September, the digital operation was printing money. Digital organizers recruited more than 200,000 volunteers and deployed them on hundreds of millions of text messages and phone calls. But the result raises questions about whether this virtual juggernaut could really substitute for old-fashioned face-to-face campaigning.

Lorenzo Meloni—Magnum Photos for TIMEThe different style of the campaigns— and of their supporters—was echoed in their Pennsylvania offices.

Lorenzo Meloni—Magnum Photos for TIMEDavid Lawrence, a Republican supporter, in Erie on Nov. 3.

What comes next is anybody’s guess. There are 2½ months until the next Inauguration. A lame-duck President with the world’s biggest platform, an even larger ego, and millions of supporters who internalized his rhetoric about election “rigging” could stir a lot of trouble on his way out of town. So much, including the odds of violence erupting, depends on Trump’s rhetoric in the days and weeks to come. Then there is the question of tapping the federal treasury on the way out—his companies and family have pocketed millions in government funds during his time in office—and whether he might seek to pardon himself and his allies. “His impulse might be to abuse executive authority, and my hope and prayer is that those around him would restrain him, though they haven’t been very successful so far,” says Tom Ridge, the GOP former Pennsylvania governor and Homeland Security Secretary who endorsed Biden. “I have never felt that this President has ever truly respected the Constitution, the rule of law and the freedoms embodied in our democratic process.”

If Biden does take office, he will confront a set of challenges like few Presidents before him. He has laid out a comprehensive—and expensive—federal plan to combat the COVID-19 pandemic that includes promoting mask wearing, ramping up testing and the production of protective equipment, improving information transparency and scientific reopening guidance, and creating and distributing a vaccine. Democrats have previously proposed trillions in new spending to help individuals, businesses and local governments and shore up the health care system needs that will only grow in the coming months.

The coronavirus is far from the only problem Biden and the Democrats have promised to solve. A former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden would likely devote great attention to restoring America’s traditional trade and security alliances. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently said the congressional agenda for 2021 would include a major infrastructure bill and an expansion of health care. Liberals will be pushing for fast action on police reform, climate and immigration. Democrats have been remarkably unified since Biden effectively sewed up the nomination in March, but the party’s left wing has signaled it will not be so deferential once victory is in hand. Progressive groups have been circulating lists of potential Biden nominees they would (and would not) accept for key Administration posts.

John Locher—APReflecting the exhaustion on both sides of the aisle, a Trump fan rests on a table at an election-night party in Las Vegas.

Four years of Trump have left Democrats with few worries about overreading their mandate. “If we win the election, we have a mandate to make change, period,” says Guy Cecil, president of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA. But if Republicans retain their hold on the Senate, prospects for major legislation will be dim. Republicans had won 48 seats as of the evening of Nov. 4, with at least one January runoff in Georgia that could decide the balance of power in the chamber.

Whatever the ultimate result, the election exposed the shaky edifice of U.S. democracy. From the antiquated governing institutions that increasingly reward minoritarian rule, to the badly wounded norms surrounding the independent administration of justice, to the flimsy protections of supposedly universal suffrage, to the nation’s balky and underfunded election infrastructure, Trump’s presidency has laid bare the weaknesses in our system. But initiatives to reform campaign finance, government ethics and voting rights seem fated to run aground in a divided Washington.

A round of harsh recriminations seems certain for the Democrats, who had assumed that their coalition of minorities, college-educated white people and young voters was destined only to grow as a share of the electorate, while the post-Trump GOP would be doomed to rely on a dwindling population of older, white, non-college-educated voters. Instead, Republicans appeared to have increased their share of the Black and Latino vote. Democrats failed to topple any GOP incumbents in Texas and lost a congressional seat in New Mexico. Their hopes for a surge of college-educated suburban voters also fell short, suggesting that the GOP’s attacks on liberal ideology proved effective in places like Oklahoma City and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Democrats need to ask themselves why someone like Joe Biden is an endangered species in the party,” says Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University and author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality. “Why is the party of experts, urban intellectuals and woke social-movement activists not producing candidates who can mobilize people in Montana, Ohio, North Carolina? It just doesn’t look like a national party.”

Republicans, even if they lose the presidency, are likely to feel emboldened to continue pursuing Trump’s themes. “Donald Trump isn’t going away,” says Buck, the former Ryan adviser. “He’s still going to be the leader of the party and the biggest voice, and he’ll at least flirt with the idea of running again. It’s going to continue to be a populist, grievance-fueled party.”

Some elections mark a breakthrough—the emergence of a new American majority after years of conflict and gridlock. A landslide like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1932 or Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 would have signaled a nation ready to move on from its cultural and ideological cleavages and seek some way forward together. Instead it looks more bitterly split than ever. “There was a substantial political divide in this country before Donald Trump was elected,” Ridge says. “His presidency has exacerbated that divide to an almost unimaginable degree. But that did not begin with Donald Trump, and it will not end with him, either.” —With reporting by Charlotte Alter, Brian Bennett and Tessa Berenson/Washington; Anna Purna Kambhampaty/Honolulu; and Mariah Espada, Alejandro de la Garza and Simmone Shah/New York

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cutsliceddiced · 4 years ago

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New top story from Time: Even If Joe Biden Wins, He Will Govern in Donald Trump’s America

TIME illustration

Peter van Agtmael—Magnum Photos for TIME“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.” — Donald Trump, in the East Room of the White House early on the morning of Nov. 4.

Lorenzo Meloni—Magnum Photos for TIMEThe different style of the campaigns—and of their supporters—was echoed in their Pennsylvania offices.

Lorenzo Meloni—Magnum Photos for TIMEDavid Lawrence, a Republican supporter, in Erie on Nov. 3.

John Locher—APReflecting the exhaustion on both sides of the aisle, a Trump fan rests on a table at an election-night party in Las Vegas.

This appears in the November 16, 2020 issue of TIME.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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