#can my suffering at least mean trump doesn’t get re-elected this year | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

saint-hildegard-of-bingen · 5 years ago

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If you love our country, please read this article, and continue to work to save our democracy. And stay hopeful!

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The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depressionafter grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.

In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.

The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”

I reached out to a number of therapists, who said they’re seeing this politically induced misery in their patients. Three years ago, said Karen Starr, a psychologist who practices in Manhattan and on Long Island, some of her patients were “in a state of alarm,” but that’s changed into “more of a chronic feeling that’s bordering on despair.” Among those most affected, she said, are the Holocaust survivors she sees. “It’s about this general feeling that the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail,” she said.

Kimberly Grocher, a psychotherapist who works in both New York and South Florida, and whose clients are primarily women of color, told me that during her sessions, the political situation “is always in the room. It’s always in the room.” Trump, she said, has made bigotry more open and acceptable, something her patients feel in their daily lives. “When you’re dealing with people of color’s mental health, systemic racism is a big part of that,” she said.

In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year. These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt Gingrich, is now represented by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie Landsman. She was in a dark place.

“It’s like watching someone you love die of a wasting disease,” she said, speaking of our country. “Each day, you still have that little hope no matter what happens, you’re always going to have that little hope that everything’s going to turn out O.K., but every day it seems like we get hit by something else.” Some mornings, she said, it’s hard to get out of bed. “It doesn’t feel like depression,” she said. “It really does feel more like grief.”

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the truth is, there’s no reason they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological. First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy.

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation. Russia, which has long wanted to prove that liberal democracy is a hypocritical sham, is the natural friend of the Trumpist Republican Party, just as it’s an ally and benefactor of the far right Rassemblement National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Barack Obama, we’ve never before had a president who treats half the country like enemies, subjecting them to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with straight faces that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s inspector general’s report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

To those who recognize the Trump administration’s official lies as such, the scale of dishonesty can be destabilizing. It’s a psychic tax on the population, who must parse an avalanche of untruths to understand current events. “What’s going on in the government is so extreme, that people who have no history of overwhelming psychological trauma still feel crazed by this,” said Stephanie Engel, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who said Trump comes up “very frequently” in her sessions.

Like several therapists I spoke to, Engel said she’s had to rethink how she practices, because she has no clinical distance from the things that are terrifying her patients. “If we continue to present a facade — that we know how to manage this ourselves, and we’re not worried about our grandchildren, or we’re not worried about how we’re going to live our lives if he wins the next election — we’re not doing our patients a service,” she said.

This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at that moment, to choke back tears. In truth, there are few bigger snowflakes than the stars of MAGA world. The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing The Daily Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult, anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

#rumors and misinformation #dump trump #keep america great

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cindylouwho-2 · 4 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, August 19, 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the late July report, although some may be older than that.

Please note I am taking the next week off, starting tomorrow (Aug. 19), so I might be a little slow in replying to any comments.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

USPS has become the focus of investigations due to reported mail slowdowns. Some small businesses who rely on USPS to deliver are suffering. “The longer the policy has been in effect, the worse the backlog gets.” As of today (August 18), the postmaster says they will rollback the changes until after the election in November. This is a rapidly-moving story in part due to the push for voting by mail, and should concern anyone who ships to US customers using regular mail (as opposed to couriers). Meanwhile, they plan to temporarily raise commercial rates during the holiday shopping season, but retail rates will not change.

Ecommerce sales are still up year over year. "Before Covid-19 hit the US in March, e-commerce made up roughly 12% of retail sales in the country. That figure grew as states issued shelter-in-place orders that shut stores and kept shoppers at home, creating tailwinds for a company like Amazon. But even as states have begun to reopen, e-commerce has remained elevated, according to Bank of America data."..."The Economist used Google search traffic for hints of how lifestyles are changing and found users are still searching terms related to cooking, crafts, and exercise above pre-pandemic rates. There has been a noticeable spike in interest around such products as gardening supplies, baking flour, and Crocs." The UK is still seeing a good increase despite the ease in reduction in lockdown restrictions. The growth is slowing a bit in the US, though.

Half of US small businesses fail in the first year (and other stats on small business).

It’s been second quarter report season, covering company performance from April to June 2020. Here are results for major companies involved in ecommerce in some way (comparisons are year-over-year):

Amazon US: sales up 40%

eBay: sales up 26%

Etsy: sales up $146% [click the link to read my summary]

Facebook: revenue up 11%

Google: revenue down 2%

PayPal: revenue up 22%

Pinterest: revenue up 4%; active users up 39%

Shopify: revenue up 97%

Walmart [2nd quarter ran May to July]: ecommerce sales up 97%, same-store sales up 9.3%

ETSY NEWS

Admin are now posting a monthly update thread, in case you fear you have missed anything. This is how they chose to announce that non-seller accounts can no longer post in the forum. Since those account owners can still read the forum, that doesn’t mean you can call out your customers now.

Sadly, there wasn’t much media coverage of Etsy’s nearly-annual billing screw up, but this one did get some attention.

Etsy continues to get good media coverage for masks, including masks for your dolls. They also apparently got a decent slice of Google ranking for various pandemic-related searches in May [scroll down to the “Protection and Prevention” section].

However, Etsy is getting some bad press (along with Amazon), for allowing QAnon merchandise, because “the FBI has warned of the movement's potential to incite domestic terrorism.” Etsy replied to a request for comment saying that “that product listings associated with certain movements are allowed as long as they don't violate the company's seller or prohibited items policies, which ban items that promote hate or that could incite violence. The company said it is continually reviewing items on the site and could remove items in the future if they're found to violate Etsy's policies.”

More search trends on Etsy, this time kids’ items. I love how they think tie-dye was a ‘90s thing and not a ‘60-70s thing LOL. “a 318% increase in searches for kids tie-dye items...71% increase in searches for dinosaur wall art or decor*, and a 37% increase in searches for school of fish items….we’ve seen kid-friendly crafts spike in popularity, with searches for DIY kits for kids up 336%.”

Also, the holiday trends guide is out. “With the holidays approaching, and most shopping happening online, more shoppers will be looking for your help to make the season feel special.” The report is lengthy, covering Halloween to New Year’s, and most listing categories, while pointing out the possible pandemic changes to the usual trends. There is also an accompanying podcast with transcript.

Speaking of the holiday season, here are Etsy’s tips for shops. Note that it is a bit late, as businesses need to have their holiday items posted no later than July if they want to be eligible for most fall media coverage. Almost every point refers to an Etsy tool or feature, some of them costing you money, so use this as a very broad guideline & be careful to read between the lines.

They are still rolling out Etsy Payments to more countries: Morocco & Israel are the most recent. Note that Etsy Payments is not yet compulsory in these new countries.

Etsy Ads once again has graphs. Do you find them useful? (I haven’t run ads at all this year, so I can’t check.)

Sendle is the latest shipping company to have a label integration with Etsy shops.

Etsy asked US sellers to lobby their reps for more support for small business and other initiatives in the pandemic aid package.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Google has stated that content on tabs is indexed and contributes to ranking as if it were on the page instead, but yet another test demonstrates that tabs may limit you.

Due to the pandemic, Google has delayed finalizing mobile-first indexing until March 2021. (They originally announced it would be finished this September.) That means you have more time to update your website’s mobile version, ideally with responsive design.

Site speed does matter to SEO, and Google is now asking some searchers how fast certain sites loaded for them.

User comments on your products, blog posts and website can help you improve your SEO. The article suggests ways of getting that feedback, and ways to use it. [I’ve even had buyers give me new keywords to describe my items, in their messages and reviews.]

Getting links back to your site is important to SEO, but don’t annoy people while doing it. [sort of humour & sort of a rant, but does give some useful background on why backlinks matter.] Internal links also matter.

There are some special tricks for food/recipe SEO, including structured data and even a WordPress plugin.

Another WordPress plugin: submit any new or updated pages to Bing to be automatically re/indexed.

Do your keyword research before setting up your website’s sections and sub-sections, as they should serve the buyer experience, not your perception of it. Same with choosing which pages link to each other.

SEOs are still trying to work out what happened with recent Google algorithm changes. Search Engine Journal claims that the May update was at least in part about demoting sites that had out-of-date or inaccurate information, so they suggest getting rid of the bad content on your site, or at least updating it. “Content pruning” has some advocates, but I wouldn’t worry about investing tons of time in this unless you have tons of time to spend. Just get rid of the blog posts that were wildly wrong, and the out-of-date filler. If you have a lot of sold out products, redirect those to relevant active pages.

Meanwhile, a “glitch” on August 10 led people to think there was a massive Google algorithm update happening, but it all got fixed in less than a day.

If you are behind on Google search news, here is a 7 minute video [with time stamped subtopics & resources links listed below], direct from Google.

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

It’s tough to get started in social media if you don’t know the terminology, so here’s a list of the basic definitions you can consult if you get lost when reading.

Don’t know how to blog? There are formulas you can use; here are eight options, nicely laid out, with downloadable templates. Don’t forget to figure out what your audience wants to read. And make sure you avoid these common blogging mistakes.

If you have an email list but do not know how to take advantage of all the bells & whistles the companies (MailChimp, Constant Contact etc.) offer you, here are 4 ways to segment your lists. You can then send different offers or newsletters to different segments.

You can optimize your social posts for people with visual impairments; excellent tips here.

By the time you read this, the TikTok mess will likely have changed again, but here is an article on Trump’s order to prohibit US companies from doing business with TikTok owner ByteDance if the platform is not sold by September 15.

Instagram has released its TikTok challenger, Reels, in more countries.

Instagram is now offering a fundraising option, although it is a slow launch with some beta testing in the US, UK & Ireland to start.

Here are step-by-step instructions on setting up your “Shop on Instagram.”

Pinterest says that searches around self-care & wellness have spiked during the pandemic lockdowns. “Pinterest has recently seen the highest searches ever around mental wellness ideas including meditation (+44%), gratitude (+60%) and positivity (+42%) that jumped from February to May….Pinterest says that searches for ‘starting a new business’ are up 35% on average, as are searches for ‘future life goals’ (2x), ‘life bucket list’ (+65%), ‘family goals future’ (+30%) and ‘future house goals’ (+78%).” There were also some searches clearly about spending more time at home: “Productive morning routine (up 6x), Exercise routine at home (up 12x), Self care night routine (up 7x)”

LinkedIn has a new algorithm; here’s how to make it work for you. [Many of these tips also apply to social media in general.]

Spotify is now doing “video podcasts”. Apparently a lot of their podcasters already did a video version of the Spotify podcasts, but had to publish it elsewhere up until now.

Twitter now admits it is considering offering subscriptions to shore up its revenue numbers. “Shares of Twitter rose 4% in early trading Thursday following the earnings results....Twitter's growth plans are under close scrutiny as many advertisers pull back due to the pandemic. On Thursday, Twitter reported second-quarter ad revenues of $562 million, a 23% decrease compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company has also been hit by advertisers participating in an ad boycott of social media, linked to the nationwide racial justice protests.” Also, the recent hack is not helping them.

That said, it is still possible to market using Twitter, and here are some of the basics.

YouTube is no longer sending email updates when a channel you follow posts new content.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Ad spend has increased again as lockdowns end, in some cases beating last year by a decent margin.

The Buy on Google program is ending its commission fees. Participants will also be able to integrate their PayPal and/or Shopify payment options. As often is the case, they are starting with the US first, but plan on rolling it out to more countries in the future. There are more details here, and a review here (with some of the drawbacks).

Google Product Ads are now showing the item’s “material” on the listing card (before you click). If you are doing your own feed for your website, you may have the ability to add the attributes needed for the details to show up.

If you find Google Ads too expensive, consider buying search ads on Bing.

eBay is experimenting with showing ads mixed in with unpaid listings; placement would depend on the same algorithm.

Here’s a new guide to Facebook Ads [videos & text]

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

Bing has launched a new version of Webmaster Tools.

There are ways to reduce the amount of traffic that Google Analytics designates as “direct traffic”; here are 15 of them.

Currently in closed beta testing, the Google Search Console now has an “Insights” function, just like Google Analytics. I’ve found the GA one useful for telling me things I don’t always look at, so crossing my fingers that they release this to everyone soon.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Shopify helped many businesses stay open during pandemic lockdowns, giving it the boost to start competing with the likes of Amazon in ecommerce. “Shopify merchants that had previously or entirely relied on brick-and-mortar sales would later report they were able revive nearly 95% of that revenue online.”

eBay started rolling out its Managed Payments system to more sellers worldwide on July 20th. Things seem to be going slowly, with some confusion.

But eBay is also having a 25th anniversary party for sellers on September 25th; don’t forget to register.

Walmart is still delaying its new subscription model to challenge Amazon Prime, Walmart+.

Amazon in the UK has launched a “Face mask store” part of the website. I haven’t seen this on other versions of Amazon. They’ve also increased some fees for some UK sellers, based on the new UK digital tax. And they are launching a site & presence in Sweden.

The Competition Bureau of Canada has launched an investigation of Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers. “The bureau is asking any person or business that has conducted sales via Amazon.ca to contact them if they have any insights into the issues it is investigating.“

Amazon Prime Day has been postponed to later dates this year, starting with India on August 6-7. The remaining countries will apparently be announced soon.

If you use WooCommerce, here are a bunch of free plugins, with brief descriptions.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Buyers do not all make purchase decisions the same way; Google uses its massive collection of data and some new studies to provide some examples. “Worldwide, search interest for “best” has far outpaced search interest for “cheap.”

It’s cheaper to keep repeat buyers than it is to find new ones; here are 16 ways to do that. One of my favourites is ““proactively providing information on how to avoid problems or get more out of your product” creates a 32% average lift to repurchase or recommend.”

It seems that researchers can never produce enough marketing guides on Gen Z and millennials.

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

I see a lot of new sellers, and some older sellers, confused about the idea of a business plan. HubSpot not only explains them, but also provides a downloadable template.

If you are thinking of changing careers, or just want to add skills to better run your current business, Google has many different courses, some of which they offer for free.

There are ways you can increase your productivity without (usually) working more hours. “A study published by John Pencavel of Standford University found that how much employees get done takes a sharp drop after 50 hours of work in a week, and even more drastically after 55 hours. The study found that employees working 70 hours per week actually produce nothing more in those extra 15 hours...taking a power nap in the middle of the day can help you process new information and even learn new skills.”

#SEO #seo tips #etsy #contentmarketing #ecommerce #smallbiz #ecommercetips #social media

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potteresque-ire · 5 years ago

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A Virus By Any Other Name ...

This post is about the “Chinese Virus” controversy. It’s admittedly somewhat painful for me to write. Under the cut, for this is long.

Please call the coronavirus by its official name, COVID-19, but please, also, never forget which GOVERNMENT allowed the once easily containable virus to spread to the good people around the world, starting from the people which the same government is supposed to look after, the people of Wuhan, China.

Do not let this GOVERNMENT get away with its propaganda. Yes, the virus could’ve originated anywhere in the sense that the first animal-to-human transmission could’ve happened outside China, but it was the Chinese GOVERNMENT who hadn’t learned from SARS, who’d turned a blind eye to the selling of wildlife in filthy, inhumane conditions in the Huanan Seafood Market (武漢華南海鮮批發市場). It was the Chinese GOVERNMENT who reprimanded and silenced the good doctors, among them Dr. Ai Fen (艾芬) and Dr. Li Wen Liang (李文亮), who tried to alert their colleagues of a new SARS-like virus detected among their hospital’s newly admitted patients working in the seafood market late December 2019. It was the Chinese GOVERNMENT who lied to the people in Wuhan that the virus would not transmit from animals to humans until January 20th, days *after* the city of Wuhan, with permission from the GOVERNMENT, held a 40,000 family feast (萬家宴) in celebration of Chinese New Year.

Every loss of life contributed to the virus from every country could have been avoided if this GOVERNMENT did not cover up, is not still covering up. Dr. Ai’s interview has been taken offline the day after it was posted and she has disappeared, like so many who have dared to speak the truth about this GOVERNMENT. Dr Li has passed away from the virus. Due to the coverup, doctors like him couldn’t wear proper PPEs. He was only 33.

It is true that the lockdown of Wuhan and the Hubei province bought Europe and US time to prepare for the virus, which the Western countries have largely squandered. But just because the Western governments have their fault doesn’t mean the much greater crime of the Chinese GOVERNMENT is automatically absolved. For now, of course, the attention should be focused on taking care of yourself and your loved ones, monitoring your government to make sure they are doing the right things, but when this is all over -- and it will be over -- please remember that, as it was said in The Hunger Games, who the real enemy is. Please remember while a virus is responsible for a disease, a GOVERNMENT is responsible for an outbreak. Outbreaks of this nature is also a repeated offence for the Chinese GOVERNMENT, which made the same mistake 17 years ago for SARS and pulled the same dirty trick to absolve itself from responsibility. Its coverup of the SARS outbreak in the Guangdong province late 2002 (also from wildlife trade) resulted in 299 deaths in Hong Kong in Spring 2003 -- 299 isn’t a large number, but Hong Kong is only one city -- and up to this day, most people in China remain convinced, thanks to the GOVERNMENT’s propaganda, that the virus originated from Hong Kong and in fact, their GOVERNMENT saved Hong Kong from the outbreak.

This GOVERNMENT is shameless. This GOVERNMENT has been taking advantage of the kindness of the Western world, its desire to rise beyond its racist, imperialist history. It has, and will continue to claim that drawing any link between this virus and China is xenophobic.

It isn’t. It isn’t when the Chinese GOVERNMENT is indeed responsible for the outbreak. Associating the virus specifically with the Chinese PEOPLE is unfair. Associating it with the Chinese GOVERNMENT is fair game.

Having issues with a government isn’t the same as discrimination against its people. This is especially true when the government isn’t elected. And just like being anti-Tories isn’t the same as anti-Brit and being anti-Trump isn’t being anti-US, being anti-CCP (for Chinese Communist Party) isn’t the same as anti-Chinese. Katniss Everdeen pointed her arrow on President Snow and President Coin but she was never against the people on Panem. She was for the people of Panem. Likewise, when you resist the lies the Chinese GOVERNMENT is spreading, when you insist on remembering, speaking the truth about this virus and this pandemic, you’re pointing your arrow at a fascist regime, not only the CCP but dictators everywhere who want to silence and wipe the memory of their people.

You are helping the people of the country.

Please show the Chinese GOVERNMENT that their efforts to re-write the history of this pandemic will be futile. This display needs not be violent. For the last 30 years, on every June 4th, thousands of Hong Kongers sit in a candlelight vigil to remember the victims of the 1989 June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre. These vigils carry one simple message: we haven’t forgotten. We remember who the killers are. We remember who rolled the tanks over thousands of students who demanded little more than reforms, a chance to speak with the GOVERNMENT as equals.

Meanwhile, please try to not cast the blame of the pandemic on the Chinese PEOPLE. It can be difficult at times, I understand; I read what the Foreign Ministry of China has been saying, what the state-run tabloids like People’s Daily and Global times are reporting and I fume. Smoke-out-of-my-ears-fume. I also feel unbearably ashamed because my ancestry, at some point millennia ago, converged with those despicable beings who wrote and said those things. But ... please remember that many Chinese PEOPLE have also suffered and lost their loved ones, that while the Chinese GOVERNMENT’s propaganda machine may be touting their sacrifices, but these PEOPLE have never been asked if they’re willing to make such sacrifices in the first place. Their GOVERNMENT has betrayed them by not containing the virus early, by neglecting to alert them and ask them to take proper precautions. Their GOVERNMENT has valued their lives below its own petty need to save face and create illusions of Good Times, and this betrayal has ended up costing the world. No lucrative business deals, no promise of a 1.4 billion people market can ever repay this loss, and when this is all over, there will be politicians and business giants in your country, wherever you are, who’ll tell you otherwise. Do not let them have their way.

Please call COVID-19 by its official name, but please, also, preserve its history. Viruses are a part of nature, they’re not the enemies here. Instead, remember who let it loose and ravage our world. The perished lives, regardless of their race, skin colour and nationality, deserve at least that much.

#pie speaks

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jewrocker · 4 years ago

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Biden’s “Impossible Dream”

Along with the other eighty-million Americans with an IQ over five, I too am doing backflips at the prospect we’re just weeks away from flushing this unprecedentedly corrupt and incomprehensibly cruel administration into the cesspool of infamy where they belong. However, as ecstatic as I am at the thought of an actual human being once again occupying the Oval Office, one must still be realistic as to what to expect going forward. Sadly, it seems, to the contrary of our president-elect.

President Biden’s statement that he intends to be a president ‘...to all Americans’, while admirable and more than a welcome change from the incoherent ramblings of the Mad King, seems to be more than a bit out of touch with what’s actually going on in this country in 2020, and beyond. While he may indeed devote every ounce of energy to this seemingly insurmountable task, unity is still a two-way street. Last we checked, there’s a massive concrete divider in the middle of this one. A concept that the president-elect inexplicably doesn’t seem to fully have grasped. Especially, considering, as a former vice-president, he lived through eight years of Senate Republicans sticking it to his boss every chance they got. I mean, “Hello, McFly?” Do you really believe Congressional Republicans are just going to snap out of their near twenty-year trance because you’re friends with them?

Exhibit One: Leader McConnell.

If you’re old enough to remember the Obama years, you’ll have no trouble recalling the now-infamous line uttered by that bastion of Honor and Ethics, Mitch McConnell. That being, “My only goal for the next four years is to make Obama a one-term president.” Aside from being borderline treason for a Senator to openly admit he’s going to spend every waking moment betraying his oath in order to achieve his despicably anti-American goal, “Moscow Mitch,” as he’s now affectionately known, hasn’t changed a bit. In fact, he’s gotten worse, and, thanks to his miraculous re-election in a state that had him at just an 18% approval rating, more emboldened.

After shamelessly defending our Russian-asset POTUS at every opportunity, including predicting the outcome of an impeachment hearing before it actually took place, the worst leader in the history of the United States Senate spent the past four years doing NOTHING, but filling an unprecedented number of conservative judgeships; including, surprise, the Supreme Court, where the louse seemed to actually revel in reneging on his own call to wait until after the election to choose a replacement for Justice Ginsberg. No policy. No compromise. No nothing. Nothing, that is, but increasing the deficit by trillions and making sure his corporate cronies are exempt from responsibility due to their shameful response to the pandemic. I guess that’s something.

Thus, unless our incoming president is suffering from severe amnesia, he should have no illusions that, following the Georgia runoffs (should Republicans maintain the stranglehold they currently enjoy), there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell McConnell, the demonic amphibian he is, will allow any dissenters to side with the president, on anything. Not a bill to curtail the amount of robocalls one gets on a daily basis, nor a motion to change the ketchup dispenser in the congressional cafeteria.

Exhibit Two: Trump’s Minions

If, after witnessing 126 House Republicans sign onto what is nothing short of a statement supporting the overthrowing of our Democracy, as well as several Republican Senators coming out in support of objecting to the States’ already-certified electors, anyone who thinks president Biden will somehow get these cockroaches to join hands singing Kumbaya, is living on another planet. In fact, from what we’ve seen in the last six weeks, alone, it’s fair to say Congressional Republicans are now more of a threat to our nation than ISIS. Yes, that ISIS. At least, the Islamic State have the decency to tell you to your face exactly what their objective is: The total destruction of American Democracy. Period. Modern day Republicans have proven they have the same exact goal; they just do it from within, disguised as “patriots.”

Exhibit Three: Seventy-Million Idiots

In spite of the Deplorables on The Hill, the biggest hurdle the president, and vice-president, have in front of them may very well be the American People, themselves. While there’s got to be a few million in the human Chernobyl’s base of seventy-million-plus who aren’t full-blown, racist psychopaths, there are still way too many who’ve shown they’re fully committed to the cult of Trump. Even now. Even though their government led them into a year-long nightmare of misery and misinformation: even as their apathetic leaders choose to bail out their billionaire buddies, while sending them a $600 slap in the face, they continue to support them. Unmoved.

Even though Benedict Donald has spent the past two months proving he has zero interest in/reverence for this Democracy and in a peaceful transference of power, truth is, outside of maybe a handful of ‘awoke’ individuals who’ve finally seen enough, he’s most likely not lost a single one of his hardcore supporters. In fact, many of them have doubled down in their support of the village idiot - going as far as to organize a “parallel inauguration” on Universe Two - the fantasy world where Trump will still be president (Most pundits refer to Trump supporters as living on ‘Earth 2,’ but their thinking is so alien to facts/common sense, IMO, they deserve their own universe.). These sad, sorry fools fell hook, line and sinker for the president’s claims of “fraud”, to the tune of stocking his post-election war chest with a cool quarter-billion dollars. Translation: you’re looking at an entire sect of people who have no basis in reality. So, who’s worse? The Trump supporter? Or the one who tries to reason with the Trump supporter?

These Trump-described “suckers,” who, in spite of everything they’ve seen, in spite of the fact we have a president who’s golfing while millions can’t even put food on their table during the holidays (those still alive that is) are still so consumed with hate for the other side, they’d rather see their nation brought to the brink of civil war than be governed by a Democrat. They’d rather elect a corrupt, bottom-dwelling QAnon conspirator to Congress, than an honest, sane liberal whose major crime is refusing to believe Tom Hanks and Bill Gates are partners in a global kiddie porn empire. Case in point, the more than dozen House seats that flipped red this past November, and, with them, some who actually believe the above. This kind of unhinged, spiteful, masochistic thinking suggests the hate modern day Republicans have towards liberals is greater than the love they have for their own children. Good luck overcoming that type of home-grown martyr, Mr. President.

Exhibit Four: Biden, Himself:

The welcome, sorely needed public comments seeking to reunite a hopelessly divided nation, notwithstanding, by stating what the New York Times calls “no interest” in pursuing any type of retribution/Justice, re: the myriad of crimes committed by this horrific administration, IMO, the president-elect has already stepped in it. Especially after the Georgia phone call.

It’s never a good idea to address your supporters, many of whom feel they’re owed some form of payback after being forced to watch helplessly as their Constitution was consistently used as toilet paper by a mob boss POTUS for four, long years, and, right out of the gate, say you’re just going to forget the whole thing. After all, this isn’t Nixon we’re talking about here. This is a thousand Nixons... on steroids. This is treason in all its forms. The attempt to “find” 11,780 votes, just one more than Biden, is the most egregious crime ever committed by a U.S. President. Yet, the president-elect continues to spew this type of disappointing, non-confrontational rhetoric. While hopefully just said for the cameras, it definitely gives many of the incoming president’s supporters, including Yours Truly, night sweats.

In fact, IMO, SDNY aside, letting these, spineless, racist, anti-American miscreants sail off into the sunset, with free health care for life and full pensions, on us, would be worse than all their crimes put together. As it will not only show the next corrupt bunch of lawless idiots to come down the pike they can do whatever they want and they’re guaranteed a free pass from the next guy, it will end our experiment in Democracy as we know it; as it will have all-but-proved the president is, in fact, above the law. I really hope I’m wrong. Fingers crossed Biden is just doing his job and saying all the right things, while privately working to nominate Sally Yates for A.G. IMO, should Ms. Yates get the nod, she will see to it Justice is served on all fronts. If not, you can bet there’s a damn good reason.

Mueller made the fatal mistake of playing fair with Trump and Barr, and their legion of sycophantic sheep in Congress, and wound up looking like a timid, outmatched eunuch. After living through the Obama years, after living through The Trump years, after seeing the literal definition of treason on a daily basis, it appears Biden is choosing to ignore these screaming red sirens and walk down that path, as well, at least with his words.

How much more proof does the president-elect need to know these individuals on the other side of the aisle are only interested in one thing? Total Dominance, by any means necessary. Even if it’s a flagrant violation of their oaths to defend The Constitution. Every single low-life choosing to join a wanna-be fascist in his reprehensible attempt to overturn our national election are only Americans by birth. That’s where it ends.

In Alan Parker’s classic film, Mississippi Burning, there’s a great line in the scene where the two FBI agents, played by Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman, realize playing by the rules with these racist bastards will never get them the Justice they seek. Straight-laced Dafoe says, “Don’t drag me into your gutter, Mr. Anderson.” To which, no-nonsense Hackman replies, “These people crawled out of a sewer, Mr. Ward! Maybe the gutter’s where we outta be!” Here’s hoping there’s more of Anderson than Ward in our next president.

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dwestfieldblog · 4 years ago

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THOSE WHO DO NOT WANT TO HEAR MUST FEEL

This temporary apocalypse could be seen as a globally overdue Long Night of the Soul, an initiation of sorts which might result in a deeper understanding of what actually matters for human evolution (despite the very best efforts of the scum who are trying to reverse any spiritual progress because it weakens their hold.) There are several ways in which the negative side could truly take over, starting with the horror nightmare prospect of DT (aka ‘Just Another Scumbag’ as Bannon once called him) re ‘elected’. The realistic pessimist in me is sure that if he wins, this planet in this dimension is finished. His winning will be a final signal to the world to give us up. In my lifetime, we have never been so close to the mass breakout of totalitarianism and utter lack of empathy than we are now. Actual fascist populists, not some wet Liberal bleating but the real thing, ready to go live. Covid has bankrupted hundreds of thousands of businesses, millions have lost their jobs, migration from the truly poor and dangerous countries continues...into the becoming poor and dangerous countries. Those who live there and are already ruined by the disasters in every home will be easy prey for the populists. Speaking of whom...

Steve Bannon has spent a great deal of time and other people’s money in setting up a network to overthrow the (arf arf arf) ‘deep state’ and replace it with... a new deeper state...still run by the rich, who will use the populists, who in turn will use the mass of the angry and frightened...etc etc...And power, as most people recognise it, will stay in the hands of the unhuman swine with the most gold and the least soul. WER NICHT HOREN WILL, MUSS FUHLEN...

‘...the human nervous system properly programmed, can edit and orchestrate all experience into any gestalt it wishes. We encounter the same dismal and depressing experiences over and over again because they are repeating tape loops in the central programmer of our brains. We can encounter ecstasy over and over by learning the neurosciences that orchestrate all in coming signals into ecstatic tape loops.’ R.A.Wilson. Prometheus Rising, Hilaritas Press.

It takes a lot of effort and Will to do this but what else is worth it other than to attempt to break out of the vicious cycle and evolve? Even I have managed this when I focus on choosing it. Giving up ingrained behavioural habits often hurts; this is, however, a choice. It doesn’t have to unless you are a masochist.

Flew to England for three weeks in August, full flight sold out, all of us wore masks (apart from one 6 foot 6 mad eyed American who kept pacing up and down the cabin.) Right up to the point where we were all given a bottle of water, some crisps and two biscuits...All masks off at the same time, all passengers attempting not to breathe while we drank and ate. Love seeing how many in both countries wear masks under their nose or even only on their chin. As Bill Hicks would say ‘Any questions why we’re f.....d up as a race?’ As Jonathan Pie does say; ‘Put a f...... mask on.’ I have been coughing since February, and drinking heavily, so not especially optimistic about getting C19.

I avoided almost all of the news while in UK, watched five minutes in total on the TV and only read headlines in the paper. It was enough. Since I have been back in Prague I have continued to avoid the news other than that which I am told by friends and students but I can tell from daily receiving over one hundred emails that things are truly breaking. Hexagram 23 and total Weltschmerz is upon us. Mental health is twisting up globally. One by one, all my friends are suffering serious damage, one way or another. Hearts are breaking apart and many damnable souls, who should be burning, are not. People are afraid to breathe or to embrace, looking to the very worst set of leaders in my lifetime for answers and being manipulated en masse to mass crises.

(Jaz Coleman....On the Day the Earth went Mad...watch the video, listen. Feel. Weep. Rage. Change.) QUI NOLERUNT AUDIRE DEBERE SENTIRE.

Love the interviews I saw with those who voted for Trump and realised they made a mistake...after FOUR YEARS. What clued them in? Which particular excremental atrocity of his foulness gave them the alert? Will the Electoral College let him ‘win’? Before I left, I saw the Trump interview where he said ‘It is what it is’, with regard to the massive number of deaths in the USA. ‘We are below the world’. Blood pressure rising, I even checked his Twitter account where he published two letters, one from the eternally unlovely NRA and the other from the American Police Federation, assuring him he was the best president to ever serve their interest and they would back him to the hilt. His plan to stir the US up into open civil war continues and Putin sits back and smiles. As does Jared it seems, the smug sadist advisor in the same style as (England’s off Broadway Trump) Boris’s Dominic Cummings. Herd Immunity? Well yes it might work at some point after a few years and millions dead. You evil alien bastards. The main individuals in the British Government will make millions from a no deal Brexit, perfect timing. The country will die.

The newest PC bullshit has got even the wonderful JK Rowling into trouble just for speaking her mind politely about transgender issues. I love PC... it is how dumb useless Liberals can act out their secret fascist impulses and feel hard of c..k and wet of p...y...feel good to be so righteous... same with overly ill humoured religious folk, but the PC tribe cannot use God to justify anything so they are a bit weaker...You morons... ‘People who menstruate’, People with a cervix’? PEOPLE? Really? Women is a bad word is it? Too specific? (Well it has the word men in it, so seems almost inclusive.) You bastards are annihilating language; raping semantics...get another hobby you ridiculous cretins. (Be sure the populists well understand how to manipulate such fools.)

Extinction Rebellion is being used (among a multitude of other groups in other countries, hello Black Lives Matter) by the Kremlin to stir up shite, they are mostly well meaning on the road to Hell. Stop being so dumb and stop helping those who are against you at home and abroad. Dogmatic faith leads to mistrust, violence and hatred, says the lone derranger...And as for the absurd Q Anon, it is those who seek a Deeper State who are using you to do it. Well done.

Jacob Blake, shot seven (count them) times in the back by police even though charged with no crime and paralysed was handcuffed to hospital bed. That goofy twat of a 17 yr boy who wanted to be a policeman, shooting at blacks because he believed he had carte blanc (arf) from Trump to defend his country against ‘terrorists’...he will probably escape much punishment because... he was bullied at school...WHO WASNT?? The only people who weren’t were bullied at home. Guns ‘open carry’ in various states as the NRA rejoice in what they encourage. ‘Your first amendment means I can say your second amendment sucks d...s’. JimJeffries. Damn straight. By the time even I was 17, I had grown out of wanting to kill half the world. Wannabe cops are a little slower.

Everything is the new normal. Too late for a mid life crisis unless I die at 108 but I never forget that statistically there is more chance of being killed by death than anything else. ‘Heres to my love! O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.’ Walking... see three funeral services shops in the road leading to/away from the hospital, clever businessmen...walking...masks off, between two conveniently placed flower shops and smoking outside the fuming crematorium in black suits and highly polished shoes. Waiting. That’s us.

I MISS YOU MARLENE. I MISS YOU MARLENE. I MISS YOU MARLENE. Nice headline seen on US newspaper...‘Can any good from cyberstalking your online crush?’I wondered that after falling in fascination with a woman in Germany who wrote like a poet and wove a spell of stories to charm and beguile. I would have walked from London to Hamburg to see if she was real. Everyone expresses love and the need for it in different ways. Reprogramming a deeply imprinted circuit is usually uncomfortable and so it proved for both of us. We shall see...if there is time. ‘One of us is crazy and the other one’s insane’

I can remember one of the days I Changed (seven years old?) We had a history lesson and were told about English kings and their ‘Divine Right’ to rule. Because God told them. And they told the people. And the people believed them. I remember the light in the classroom, where I was sitting, the smell of the tables, old unused ink wells, pencil shavings... and just thinking whatever a child’s version of F..K OFF...THATS BULLSHIT ISNT IT? would have been. That was the first moment I started questioning the class system, gullibility and bastards. A couple of years later, the absolute freedom of being, sent to collect the class register, walking down the empty corridors and not in the classroom...a beautiful feeling of being OUTSIDE. Free. Two of many experiences which have never left me. (The Angel Choir, the Rituals, the EYE across the Multiverse dream, the Reconnection...) Even if Freedom turns out to be as much of an illusion as everything else, it is still as beautifully sensual to me as music.

One summer night in 1990 after my 3rd breakdown, I had a dream. I think. Bear (or even bare) with me on this, I know how this sounds but it is only reporting what I saw in my mind. Two Aliens, thin and shadow like, came though my open bedroom door in the night (I could see the silhouettes) and one took a long shiny silver needle like a hypodermic for a horse and stood behind me and pushed the needle in through the top and centre of my skull, penetrating my brain. I FELT it slowly being pushed in, it hurt but I was paralysed. There was no voice but I heard (try not to laugh) ‘So now you have Superintelligence’. They moved out, the door closed, I slept. As usual with me, I remember every single dream I have ever remembered as if they were films I have watched over and over...and after a dream, the atmosphere stays with me for 23 whores. Later that day, I picked a big hardback book to find some info on something (A Cyclopaedia) with pages as thin as a bible. I sat almost motionless and without food for eight hours, DEVOURING every subject in it. Economics, geometry, geopolitical events, medicine, beliefs, systems.....the next day I finished ninety percent of it and went on to read books by five philosophers from second hand shops, started watching insects, stopped swearing, worked out, and read and read and read. All the knowledge I hadn’t cared about in school and college I picked up that one summer. It led to making new friends, new possibilities, new work, new love and led me to fly to Prague in this sequence while continuing to practice many ‘New age’ techniques by a writer called Stuart Wilde. They all worked and I continued...with regular fallings and breakthroughs.

‘Religion was invented when the first scoundrel met the first fool’. Faith is believing what you know not be true’. The seeker finds a belief and stops thinking for themselves...‘Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion.’RAW

I had a four hour conversation with a Christian bloke, thirty, intelligent, believes in Satan as an actual being with horns. Etc. He couldn’t quite see any flaw in saying that any prophet who saw angels, white light and heard the voice of God, healed, etc but was not actually Christ, was only being tempted and used by the devil. He told me to watch the beautiful side of evil...

‘Every act of authority is, in fact, an invasion of the psychic and physical territory of another’. Human progress ‘is the concrete manifestation of some person’s refusal to bow to Authority.’

‘WE GOT ELECTED ON DRAIN THE SWAMP, LOCK HER UP, BUILD THE WALL. THIS WAS PURE ANGER. ANGER AND FEAR IS WHAT GETS PEOPLE TO THE POLLS. THE DEMOCRATS DON'T MATTER, THE REAL OPPOSITION IS THE MEDIA, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ Said Bannon, who also said. ‘Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. Thats power.’ Has he met Putin yet? Is he also on speed dial along with Boris and Trump? People! Create better leaders. NOW.

Happy birthday Aleister Crowley on the 12th October and Happy Halloween to all readers, stay healthy and sane (arf) Remember you are magick...buy the re-release of Musick to Play in the Dark by COIL and become moonlight... And those in America, if you actually do truly believe in a good God...go and vote and remove that evil ego and his cohorts in the White House with absolute overwhelming victory or we are done in this lifetime. Be healthy.

LOVE!!!

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keywestlou · 5 years ago

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MORNING STEW #32

Lost several days last week because of platform problems. Thrilled to be back!

So many thoughts left unwritten. I have picked out those that still have interest and share them with you today in a Morning Stew presentation.

Per the usual, there is no order in which they appear. I write as the topics appear in my notes.

Syracuse/Duke last night. Syracuse lost 97-88. A good first half. Syracuse began sliding in the second half.

Syracuse played well in January. Won 6, lost 1.

Syracuse lost last night for 2 reasons. They were unable to control their offensive backboards. Also, Duke’s in your face defense prevented Syracuse’s 3 point game.

Occasionally, I have written re myths surrounding George Washington. Like…..He did not chop down the cherry tree, he did not meet with Betsy Ross in 1776 re creating an American flag.

Another myth involves Washington’s teeth. Poor. Down to nothing at some point in his life.

Story has it Washington’s teeth were made of wood. False! His false teeth consisted of 3 sources: The teeth of slaves, filed down teeth from animals, and those fashioned from ivory.

Mark Twain was not always an author. The Civil War got him into writing.

Mark Twain his writing name. His real name Samuel Longhorne Clemens. In the years immediately prior to the Civil War, Clements was a qualified pilot on the Mississippi River.

Commercial traffic on the Mississippi ceased when the Civil War began in 1861. Clements went to Nevada and California hoping to strike gold and silver. No luck.

He turned to writing. Took the professional name Mark Twain. Wrote much about the Mississippi River. Became recognized as one of America’s greatest authors.

Tino as an extra. A homeless person. Tino says he is selected to play a homeless person often.

On this day in 1931, Pauline Hemingway was out fishing with husband Ernest. She caught a 7′ 1�� sailfish. The sailfish set a season record.

Bolton did not get to testify. Trump and the Republican Senators successfully barred the truth from the trial.

A trial is not a trial without witnesses and document exhibits. I know. I tried cases for 46 years.

A trial without witnesses and exhibits amounts to a cover-up and sham. Should not even be called a “trial.” In this instance, the Senate “trial” defrauded the American people.

The truth will out in due course. Before the November election. Hopefully it will affect the judgment of voters at that time.

Get rid of Trump!

Today a big one in American history. Groundhog Day!

The world’s most famous weather predictor.

The first groundhog event occurred on February 2, 1887. The groundhog’s name Punxsutawney Phil. Today’s groundhog still so named.

The crowds gathered this morning immense.

Punxsutawney Phil emerged at 7:28 am. A light snow falling. He did not see his shadow. Means an early spring.

Many things are broken in the U.S. The federal government one. Especially the Presidency and Republican Senate.

Another is the criminal justice system.

A 36 year old Pennsylvania woman with advanced cancer a perfect example.

The lady stole $109.63 in groceries from a supermarket. She wheeled the cart out without paying.

She was arrested. It came out prior to and during the proceedings that she had about 1 month to live. Advanced uterine cancer and cervical cancer. She required immediate surgery to remove her uterus and tissue around it. A last ditch effort. Her doctor told her, “If you don’t get this done, you will die. It is eating you up inside.”

She was sentenced Monday. That same day she had an appointment with her doctor to make final arrangements for the surgery.

The judge sentenced her to at least 10 months in jail.

The woman had a record of petty thievery and drug addiction.

Should not have been an issue under the circumstances.

The supermarket says it had nothing to do with it. The authorities are responsible. Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governor has gotten involved. Said he was going to the supermarket and pay the bill himself. The supermarket said again out of their hands.

The United States of America. Doesn’t sound like it. Or, maybe it does. We seem to be in a steady decline in all respects.

Appears Trump will be acquitted of Impeachment on Wednesday. So be it. I hope American voters will remember all the deviousness involved in the proceeding and vote Trump and whatever Republican Senators they can out of office in November. Throw out the Republican Congresspersons also.

We need a clean slate!

The Trump tragedy we are experiencing did not begin with Trump’s election. It goes back to 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC Rulings. The decision determined a corporation was a “person” and could contribute funds in an election.

Major corporations are contributing mega-bucks.

Money can and does buy elections. It is happening. Trump a benefactor. The 100 plus federal judges McConnell has successfully appointed to the bench another example.

It is the money that controls. Not Trump or McConnell. They are merely the beneficiaries and tools of the rich.

Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten Buttigieg was in Key West Wednesday evening for a fundraiser.

Stock Island was once famous for its dog track. One was built in 1953. Took all of 6 weeks to build. Opened with a crowd of 4,000.

How times have changed. Can’t build anything of significance today in 6 weeks. The soon to start repair work to the Cow Key Bridge an example.

The Key West Citizen continues to publish May Johnson’s diary. From 1896.

May a 19 year old school teacher.

I mentioned last week my suspicion that May’s Mom did not like Miguel. Miguel appears to be May’s boy friend.

The newspaper’s Citizens’ Section printed a comment in yesterday’s paper: “Inquiring minds want to know when May and Miguel hook up. Can’t wait.”

China is the worst hit by the coronavirus epidemic. The Florida Keys are also affected. though not by the virus itself. Rather by the huge number of spiny lobster shipments Chinese brokers have cancelled.

China loves spiny lobsters from the Florida Keys. Import them big time.

The Chinese New Year celebration last week was cancelled. Crippled Keys’ sales.

Last year at this time, spiny lobsters were selling for $20 a pound. Three weeks ago, down to $10 a pound. Now, $6 a pound.

Primarily because of China cancelling orders.

You do not have to get the bug itself to suffer.

Today, Super Bowl. Tonight at 6:30. Most of America will be watching.

An exciting event!

There was a time I attended Super Bowl religiously. Eleven consecutive ones till I retired to Key West. Key West replaced the Super Bowl trips for me pleasure wise and fun wise..

The most memorable Super Bowl in history involved the New York Jets and Baltimore Colts. The AFL and NFL.

The AFL was relatively new. NFL teams were the powerhouse.

Super Bowl III was played January 12, 1969.

Joe Namath was quarterback for the New York Jets. Considered a loud mouth at the time. The AFL second rate.

The Colts were projected to win decisively. Namath did not agree. Three days before the game he said, “We’re gonna win the game. I guarantee it.”

The Jets won 16-7. Namath was correct. Eventually became respected as one of the great professional quarterbacks of all time.

Enjoy the Super Bowl!

Enjoy your Sunday!

MORNING STEW #32 was originally published on Key West Lou

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somethingusefulfromflorida · 3 years ago

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13 Keys to the White House

I hate politics with a burning passion. The whole subject just makes me depressed and stressed, but like a moth to the flame I find myself unable to escape it. My politics posts were topical and relatively popular during the lead up to the 2020 election, but things have quieted down considerably a we adjust to the new normal under a sane but useless president. For this reason, I've decided that the best way to spend my time is to try and make prediction about 2024, because it makes me feel like I have some semblance of control over my life when in reality these things are well out of my hands.

Allan Lichtman is a political analyst who has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1984, and working backwards his method correctly accounts for every election since 1860; with the only hiccup being 2000 when he predicted Al Gore would win (by all rights he did; he won the popular vote and he would have won the Florida recount if George W. Bush's brother hadn't illegally stopped it and delayed it until it was too late to restart).

Lichtman gives 13 yes or no statements to assess the performance of the incumbent party over the last four years, and has determined that if eight or more are true then the incumbent party wins another term. If six or more are false, the challenging party wins instead. From Wikipedia they are:

Midterm gains: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.

No primary contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.

Incumbent seeking re-election: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.

No third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.

Strong short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

Strong long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.

Major policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

No social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

No scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

No foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

Major foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

Charismatic incumbent: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

Uncharismatic challenger: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

In 2020 the chips fell thusly:

False: the Democrats won more seat in 2018 than the Republicans in 2014

True: Trump was the only Republican candidate, and in fact many states canceled their primaries to give it to him

True: Trump was running for another term

True: the libertarians and the greens didn't get nearly as much air time as they did in 2016

False: Covid recession

False: Trump dug a hole so deep it'll take us years to crawl our way back out of it

True: McConnell's court packing scheme, 3 justices, America First foreign policy, sucking up to dictators, alienating our allies

False: George Floyd protests

False: too many to name

True: not failing doesn't necessarily mean succeeding

False: case in point, he didn't accomplish any of his goals like ending the war in Afghanistan or disarming North Korea

False: although his base worships him as the second coming of Christ, they only make up 40% of the country, and the other 60% HATES him

True: Biden is a boring old man that both right-wingers hate and progressive leftists hate. Only moderates and centrists really like him

That's 6 true and 7 false. Trump needed 8 true to win, so Lichtman called it for Biden in summer. While we can make some assumptions about the future, we can't predict everything, so there will be a lot of unknowns that prevent us from drawing solid conclusions. I'll update this post as time goes on; we should have a fairly solid picture by early 2023 after the midterms.

Almost certainly false: the Democrats are hanging on by a thread as is, and 2022 will see dozens of competitive House seats redrawn by Republican to give themselves an advantage going forward. I'm pretty sure the Republicans will take back the House, but even if they don't there's no way the Democrats will manage to hang onto as many seats in 2022 as they won in 2018 (235)

Probably true: to hear Biden tell it, he's a spring chicken at the top of his game and wholeheartedly intends to run for re-election in 2024. I give it 50/50 odds that he bows out due to declining health and gives it to Kamala Harris, but either way they have the nomination in the bag. Nobody is going to challenge Biden, and nobody serious will challenge Harris.

Unknown: see above

Unknown: this one is leaning towards true, but it's too soon to tell. We think of third-party candidates as being fringe, but they played major roles in 1980, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2016. I don't expect the networks to give as much airtime to the libertarians and the greens as they did in 2016, but then again all the media outlets made off like bandits during the Trump years. Love him or hate him, he made them a shit load of money, and helping a third-party campaign will ensure another candidate like Trump gets elected

Probably true: it'll be hard for Biden to fuck things up more than they are now. I don't think we'll see ANOTHER recession in less than 4 years, but then again we thought the Great Recession of 2008 would be a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Absolutely true: Obama's second term was prosperous, Trump's term put us deep in the red, so they average out to neutral; as long as Biden can do better than literally nothing, he has this one in the bag.

I don't think so: 2021 was the Democrats' best chance at changing things, but they fumbled like we all expected them to. They have majroties in both houses of Congress and could conceivably railroad through any legislation they want, as Trump did in his first 2 years, but no, they want to play fair, they want to be bipartisan. They extend an olive branch when the other side wouldn't piss on them to put them out if they were on fire. None of Biden's campaign promises will get done.

Probably true: I don't think things can get worse than 2020. Biden is, if nothing else, inoffensive. Republicans are trying to make him out as this socialist boogeyman, but nothing really sticks because he is nearly economically identical to Trump (both party establishments are economically neoliberal). If we were going to go to war, it would have been last year. I don't think there's anything Biden can do to screw things up that badly.

Probably: like I said, Biden is boring, which means he's not take any risks. I think even he has sense enough to realize that the entire country is watching him with a magnifying glass, waiting for him to make any mistake. He's playing it as safe as possible with relative transparency, so I don't see him doing anything shadier than any other president. If the Republicans take back the House they might impeach him as revenge for Trump, but he'll be acquitted and public opinion will probably be on his side.

Unknown: Democrats love to fumble, so this one's up in the air

Unknown: pulling out of Afghanistan might be a success, but the Taliban will just retake control once we're gone and it'll be back to square one. It'll be this generation's Vietnam; a 20 year long waste of time that we ended up losing. I'm still not convicned the withdrawal will even go through.

False: Lichtman didn't call Biden charismatic in 2020, I know for a fact he won't suddenly become MORE popular by 2024. Hes boring. If he didn't run and gave it to Kamala Harris I still don't see this flipping true. She has more energy, sure, but she's disingenuous at best and a two-faced enemy of the revolution at worst. She's a cop.

True: calling it now, nobody the Republicans choose will have national appeal. Lichtman noted that these last two keys are incredibly subjective, but you know it when you see it. For his definition of charisma he cites presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama (2008 Obama, not 2012 Obama; the novelty wore off real quick and we realized he was the Republicans' doormat and a war criminal). If Trump tries for a second term, he'll be even less popular then than he is now, and none of his underlings inspire as much confidence in the party. Ron DeSantis, my state's governor, appears to be the front runner of non-Trumps, but he's so dumb he makes that whole family look like a Rhodes Scholars. America is so divided that I don't think there will ever be another super charismatic candidate with bipartisan appeal.

That's 3 false, 4 unknown, and 6 true. Biden needs 8 true to win a second term, but he has plenty of unknown keys which would turn in his favor. Even Trump avoided a major foreign policy failure, so I'm sure Biden can cinch that key, bringing him up to 7. That and the third-party key seem the most likely to flip true, meaning Biden will probably win, though I could very well see this becoming a repeat of 2000 and 2016 where he wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college. In that case, I expect civil unrest going into whatever Republican's term, verging on total civil war.

One-term wonders are exceedingly rare. Trump was a historically weak candidate who only won because of low voter turnout in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He saw an Alabama senate seat flip blue, as well as all four seats in Arizona and Georgia, he lost the house and the senate in quick succession, and was impeached twice. He was a loser through and through, and I don't think he'll be coming back.

At least I certainly hope so.

#politics #2024 #prediction #election

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Democracy Grief Is Real https://nyti.ms/2LRLcSL

I have been in a deep depression since Thanksgiving and feel totally defeated and exhausted so I'm heartened to know there's a reason for it. 😭😭😭

Democracy Grief Is Real

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

By Michelle Goldberg | Published Dec. 13, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year. These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt Gingrich, is now held by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie Landsman. She was in a dark place.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Obama, we’ve never before had a president that treats half the country like enemies, subjecting it to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with a straight face that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican Senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s Inspector General report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at that moment, to choke back tears. In truth there are few bigger snowflakes than the stars of MAGA world; The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing the Daily Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult, anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit, and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

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Ukraine’s Leader, Wiser to Washington, Seeks New Outreach to Trump

President Volodymyr Zelensky still needs backing from the administration. He is proposing a new ambassador and weighing hiring lobbyists to build better ties.

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Andrew E. Kramer | Published Dec. 13, 2019 Updated 12:44 PM ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — Eager to repair their country’s fraught relationship with Washington, allies of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine have met with lobbyists with close ties to the Trump administration, hopeful of creating new channels of communication.

After more than two months of anxious waiting, Mr. Zelensky finally appears to have won support from the White House for a candidate to fill Ukraine’s vacant ambassadorship to the United States.

And Mr. Zelensky, still deeply dependent on American assistance, has been signaling, in hardly subtle fashion, that he and his officials will not assist in the impeachment process, keeping quiet in particular about the fact that his government knew weeks earlier than it has publicly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had frozen nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Nearly every world leader has struggled to figure out how to deal with Mr. Trump. But few face greater pressure to find the answer — or more hurdles to doing so — than Mr. Zelensky.

Wiser now to the ways of Washington, he and his team are carefully trying to reestablish themselves in a variety of ways as an important ally with a substantive agenda deserving of Washington’s attention and support.

They have a long ways to go. Mr. Zelensky’s team has been discouraged by the absence of expected support from Mr. Trump for Ukraine’s peace talks with Russia, as well as the lack of follow-through from the White House on a promised Oval Office meeting with Mr. Zelensky that the administration had quietly signaled might happen in late January.

Mr. Zelensky’s allies were frustrated further by Mr. Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. And when the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani paid an unexpected visit to Kyiv last week in a continued effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump’s political opponents, no Ukrainian government officials met him.

Asked by an official at the German Marshall Fund on Friday what the Zelensky administration wants from Washington, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, who has been in Washington this week meeting with administration and congressional officials, said “all we are asking from our colleagues in the U.S. administration is fair treatment.”

He added, “We don’t want to be shamed and blamed.”

The continued push to try to overcome Mr. Trump’s grudge against Ukraine suggests Zelensky administration officials have concluded that impeachment will fail in the Senate and that they will almost certainly need to work with Mr. Trump for at least another year, and possibly another five years if Mr. Trump is re-elected.

“Our relations are not in good shape,” said Olena Zerkal, a former deputy foreign minister under Mr. Zelensky. “I don’t believe in any chemistry between our leaders.”

Mr. Zelensky’s willingness to accommodate the Trump administration has hardly gone unnoticed in Kyiv.

After the White House released a rough transcript of a July 25 call between the American and Ukrainian presidents, Mr. Zelensky was panned in Ukraine on social media for seeming too eager to please Mr. Trump. That included signaling a willingness to pursue the investigations sought by Mr. Trump into political targets like the family of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Monica Zelensky,” the Ukrainian president was called on social media in Kyiv, in a reference to the intern whose sexual relations with Bill Clinton led to the last impeachment proceedings of an American president.

Even a White House visit, if it happens, risks being seen not so much as a triumph for Mr. Zelensky as more kowtowing to Mr. Trump, who could cite it as evidence he never linked such a visit, or American military assistance for Ukraine, to investigations that would benefit him politically.

“In Kyiv, we have to place bets on the current power in Washington,” said Nikolay Kapitonenko, professor at the Institute of International Relations. But outreach to the Republican administration is not risk free, he said, adding, “Zelensky understands that taking any side is dangerous.”

The importance of American support for Ukraine — and the desire for more of it from Mr. Trump — has been on display in recent days.

An American diplomat traveled to Kyiv to express support for the Ukrainians headed into Mr. Zelensky’s first face-to-face meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday in Paris.

But Trump administration officials privately told the Ukrainians that Mr. Trump himself would signal support, according to Americans and Ukrainians familiar with the matter, either via Twitter, as first reported by The Daily Beast, or possibly even an invitation for Mr. Zelensky to visit the White House next month. While Mr. Trump posted more than 100 tweets on Sunday, none expressed support for the Ukrainians headed into the peace talks.

The Trump administration had also resisted calls to levy sanctions against a Russian gas pipeline that would circumvent Ukraine. The White House reportedly worked to undermine congressional efforts to block the pipeline, though sanctions language was added to a $738 billion military policy bill that passed the House on Wednesday. And the military assistance that Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of using as leverage to force the investigations reportedly still has not fully reached Ukraine.

Those are among the issues that may help explain why the Ukrainians are considering stepping up their lobbying in Washington, despite potential political and financial costs.

During his campaign and early in his presidency, Mr. Zelensky proclaimed that he had no need to hire lobbyists like the government of his predecessor. “I never met a single lobbyist,” he said. “I don’t need this. I never paid a coin and I never will.”

Yet, in the weeks before Mr. Zelensky was elected in April, his advisers quietly worked with a Washington lobbying firm, Signal Group, to arrange meetings in Washington with Trump administration officials, as well as congressional offices and think tanks that focus on Ukraine-United States relations.

Mr. Zelensky distanced himself from the arrangement, even though Signal Group reported in a filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, that it was paid nearly $70,000 by Mr. Zelensky’s party through a lawyer named Marcus Cohen. Mr. Cohen, on the other hand, claimed that the money came from his own pocket, not from Mr. Zelensky’s party.

The Justice Department’s National Security Division, which oversees FARA, sent a letter to Mr. Cohen requesting information about the arrangement, then urged him to register as a foreign agent, according to people with knowledge of the situation. One of the people said that the division also audited Signal Group’s filings, informing the firm in a letter in October that the inquiry was closed.

Signal defended its FARA filings as accurate, and referred questions about Mr. Cohen’s representations to him or Mr. Zelensky’s team. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Zelensky “may find that it is best to be his own spokesperson on this subject for a while to prevent others from interpreting his words for him,” at least until “trust can be rebuilt,” Heather A. Conley, who was a deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of European and Eurasian affairs from 2001 to 2005, said in an email.

Ms. Conley, who is director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was among the think tank officials who met with one Mr. Zelensky’s advisers in April in a meeting arranged by Signal and Mr. Cohen.

They discussed Mr. Zelensky’s anticorruption and economic overhaul plans, Ms. Conley said, adding, “Ukraine faces a fraught landscape in Washington — with or without a lobbyist.”

The discussions about hiring a lobbyist, which are described as preliminary, have divided Mr. Zelensky’s team.

Some are concerned that hiring a lobbying firm with ties to Mr. Trump could jeopardize Democratic support. And some are wary of becoming involved with K Street at all, because of the specter of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, who was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for crimes related to his lobbying for a deeply unpopular former Ukrainian government.

Yet two of the firms being discussed for possible lobbying engagement have links to Mr. Manafort, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

A representative of one of the firms, Mercury Public Affairs, which worked with Mr. Manafort on his Ukraine effort, met in Kyiv last month with a top aide to Mr. Zelensky. The lobbyist, Bryan Lanza, has ties to the Trump White House, and was in Ukraine on unrelated business according to people familiar with the meeting.

It was arranged by an American lawyer named Andrew Mac, who himself registered last month with the Justice Department as an unpaid lobbyist for Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Mac, who splits his time between Washington and Kyiv, was appointed by Mr. Zelensky last month as an adviser responsible for building support among the Ukrainian diaspora.

In a sign of the scrutiny in Kyiv on its new government’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Trump, and efforts to calm it, secretly recorded video and photographs circulated of Mr. Lanza’s meeting with the Zelensky aide in a restaurant.

In an article featuring the photographs, a Ukrainian news outlet noted that Mr. Lanza helped lift sanctions against the corporate empire of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin ally. That arrangement was assailed by critics in Washington as a sweetheart deal that represented a capitulation to the Kremlin, while Mr. Lanza also lobbied to help remove potentially crippling sanctions on the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

Mr. Mac said Mr. Lanza had been “very effective in working for his clients on difficult matters.”

Another firm that was discussed by Mr. Zelensky’s aides, Prime Policy Group, also has a Manafort link — albeit a more dated one. It was started by Charlie Black, a former business partner of Mr. Manafort’s in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Black’s firm has represented other clients in Ukraine, including Sergey Tigipko, a Ukrainian billionaire and former official in the government of Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Mr. Black said he had not had any conversations with Mr. Zelensky’s team about a possible contract, but would not be opposed to such an engagement.

Mr. Mac met this month in Washington to discuss Ukrainian energy issues with the former Representative Billy Tauzin, a Democrat turned Republican from Louisiana who is now a lobbyist. While someone with knowledge of the deliberations said Mr. Tauzin was not being considered as a potential lobbyist for Ukraine, he has connections that could be helpful. His congressional staff once included Dan Brouillette, who was confirmed this month as secretary of the Energy Department, upon which the Ukrainian government has relied for help with its power supply during brutally cold winters.

Ms. Conley suggested that Mr. Zelensky would be better served by an ambassador than a lobbyist, but the process of filling that vacancy has not been quick.

At least three names had been floated in recent months, and the Zelensky administration’s current preference for the position, Volodymyr Yelchenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, had been awaiting approval since late September or early October, according to people familiar with the process. They said that the State Department had signed off on Mr. Yelchenko weeks ago, but that the Ukrainians had grown anxious waiting for the White House to do so.

Officials in Kyiv were told that the approval would be formally communicated this week, they said. The White House and State Department did not respond to questions about the approval of Mr. Yelchenko.

Some attributed the delay to a quiet push by some Trump allies for a prospective ambassador who is closely aligned with Mr. Giuliani, Andrii Telizhenko, who had served as a low-ranking diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington under the previous government.

He was embraced by Mr. Trump’s allies after claiming that the former American ambassador to Kyiv and other Ukrainian officials worked to undermine Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. In recent months, Mr. Telizhenko has worked closely with Mr. Giuliani to advance those claims. As part of the effort, the two men traveled together to Hungary and Ukraine last week to record interviews with former Ukrainian officials for a series of programs by a conservative cable channel seeking to undermine the impeachment proceedings.

It is unclear whether Mr. Zelensky’s team ever seriously considered Mr. Telizhenko as an ambassador candidate.

Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv.

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The Party That Ruined the Planet

Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.

By Paul Krugman | Published Dec. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn’t the revelation that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn’t see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren’t paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America’s two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it’s hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated.

However, the scariest reporting I’ve seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.

But the terrifying political news and the terrifying climate news are closely related.

Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate, and why is it still failing to act even as the danger gets ever more obvious? There are, of course, many culprits; action was never going to be easy.

But one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.

And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.

As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”

But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.

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Donald Trump Wanted Another Roy Cohn. He Got Bill Barr.

EVEN BETTER.

By Caroline Fredrickson, Ms. Fredrickson is the author of “The Democracy Fix.” | Published December 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

President Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Demanding a stand-in for his old personal lawyer and fixer, Mr. Trump has actually gotten something better with Bill Barr: a lawyer who like Cohn stops seemingly at nothing in his service to Mr. Trump and conveniently sits atop the nation’s Justice Department.

Mr. Barr has acted more like a henchman than the leader of an agency charged with exercising independent judgment. The disturbing message that sends does not end at our borders — it extends to countries, like those in the former East Bloc, struggling to overcome an illiberal turn in the direction of autocracy.

When Mr. Trump sought to have President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announce an investigation of his political opponent, he likely expected a positive response. After all, politicized prosecutions had been part of Ukraine’s corrupt political culture for years.

On Monday, when Michael Horowitz, inspector general for the Justice Department, released a report that affirmed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was justified, Mr. Barr immediately turned on his own agency in defense of the president.

“The F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said.

Similarly, Mr. Barr’s response to the report from Robert Mueller on Russian interference and Mr. Trump’s purported presidential misconduct was to cast doubt on his own staff, questioning their work product as well as their ethics and legal reasoning. Even before he became attorney general, Mr. Barr questioned Mr. Mueller’s investigation of the president for obstruction of justice in a 19-page legal memo he volunteered to the administration.

And where he could have neutrally passed Mr. Mueller’s findings to Congress, he instead took the widely criticized and unusual step of making and announcing his own legal conclusions about Mr. Mueller’s obstruction inquiry. He followed up this Cohn-like behavior with testimony in the Senate, where he insinuated that the United States government spied on the Trump campaign. Mr. Barr apparently has decided that, like Cohn, he serves Donald Trump and not the Constitution or the United States, flouting his oath of office and corrupting the mission of the Justice Department.

In the past, the United States has, however imperfectly, advanced the rule of law and supported governments committed to an anti-corruption agenda. According to George Kent, a State Department official who testified in the House impeachment inquiry, Russia sees corruption as a tool to advance its interests. So when the United States fights a kleptocratic culture, it serves not only lofty humanitarian goals but also our national security. Mr. Zelensky ran a campaign and was elected on a platform that put fighting corruption at the forefront. He should have received extensive and unmitigated support in that effort.

In the former East Bloc countries, despite the hopes of many for a post-Soviet era where democracy would thrive, the parties and politicians in power have consolidated their control in a manner reminiscent of the Communist era.

Autocrats understand that supposedly independent institutions such as the courts and prosecutors are vital to locking in their power. In Romania, a crusading anti-corruption prosecutor who was investigating top government officials was fired at the same time as the government advanced legislation to cabin the ability of other prosecutors to pursue cases against political officials. Poland’s right-wing populist Law and Justice Party has attacked the independent judiciary and has sought to remove judges who do not follow the party line. Hungary has followed suit. Bulgarian politicians have persecuted civil society groups that have criticized their abandonment of the rule of law.

While several United States ambassadors have attempted to support anti-corruption efforts in the region, they have been continuously undercut by the White House. In addition to firing Marie Yovanovitch, who served as ambassador to Ukraine, in part because of her anti-corruption focus, Mr. Trump hosted Viktor Orban of Hungary in Washington over the objections of national security officials who did not want to elevate a corrupt leader with close ties to the Kremlin; furthermore, the president has tried to cut funding for anti-corruption programs.

Mr. Trump’s focus on cultivating foreign leaders who can help his re-election has overwhelmed our national interests in the region. That is certainly a shame for the anti-corruption activists in former Communist countries who have depended on our help and leadership since the end of the Soviet era and who have seen their justice system turned to serve political ends.

But for Americans, we must worry that we face a similar domestic situation: a prosecutor who bends to the political needs of the president. Mr. Trump may no longer be able to call on Roy Cohn, but he now has a stronger ally in the United States’ top law-enforcement official, who thinks that if the president does it, it can’t be wrong.

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How Trump Weaponized the Justice Department’s Inspector General

The president and his allies have turned investigations into a political tool for use against their enemies.

By James B. Stewart, Mr. Stewart is a New York Times business columnist. | Published Dec. 13, 2019, 6:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Dec. 13, 2019

In his report on the origins of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and in testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the Department of Justice demolished President Trump’s most sensational allegations about the Russia inquiry: He concluded that the opening of the investigation was lawful and legitimate, that there was no improper “spying” on the Trump campaign and that the F.B.I. wasn’t part of some “deep state” conspiracy to overthrow the president.

That hardly stopped Mr. Trump and his allies. The report “was far worse than expected,” the president asserted — after already predicting it would be “devastating.” “This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it and they got caught, they got caught red-handed,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

Attorney General William Barr was quick to pile on, too: “The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said in a Justice Department statement.

Media coverage and Senate hearings quickly shifted to the F.B.I.’s procedural failings, which Mr. Horowitz labeled “gross incompetence.” By the end of the week, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the F.B.I. was indeed part of some sinister coup attempt — precisely the opposite of what Mr. Horowitz had concluded.

So much for the supposedly nonpartisan and independent office of the Department of Justice Inspector General — a position that, before the Trump administration, most Americans hardly knew existed. To a striking degree, Mr. Trump and his allies have turned the post into a potent weapon aimed at his supposed enemies in the federal law enforcement agencies.

Their ability to wreak political havoc with the latest Horowitz report is part of what has now become a clear pattern: Call for an investigation of a favorite Trump target; speculate about the likely outcome; seize on any collateral evidence that emerges; spin the results; then move quickly to the next investigation. Repeat.

The White House and Republicans in Congress insisted the inspector general open an investigation into the origins of the Russia inquiry, even though it was already thoroughly covered in a report from the special counsel Robert Mueller. Investigators armed with virtually unlimited time and budget will nearly always find something (as critics of the special counsel role have long argued).

Mr. Horowitz uncovered some new details, and the irregularities he discovered in the F.B.I.’s FISA application process may well prompt a needed overhaul of the standards for intrusive surveillance of American citizens. But Mr. Horowitz conceded that even if all of those problems had been corrected, he couldn’t say the outcome would have been any different. Nor do they fundamentally change our understanding of how and why the Russia investigation began — already reported in considerable and accurate detail, including in this newspaper and in my recent book, “Deep State.”

But no matter how redundant, such investigations can serve as useful fishing expeditions. Six House committees conducted investigations of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks. All of them absolved her of any wrongdoing. But it was in one of those investigations that a committee uncovered her use of a personal server for her email correspondence, which led to the F.B.I.’s Clinton email investigation. That provided candidate Trump with his “Lock her up” chant — and arguably cost her the presidency.

Mr. Horowitz, citing requests from members of Congress and the public, spent 17 months examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case. His conclusion: There was “no evidence” that the decision not to seek charges against Mrs. Clinton was “affected by bias or other improper conclusions,” the opposite of what Mr. Trump had been asserting for months.

But during that investigation Mr. Horowitz uncovered hundreds of texts between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, that suggested animus toward Mr. Trump and also revealed that the two had in the past engaged in an extramarital affair — information eagerly disseminated by the Justice Department and Trump allies.

Since then Mr. Trump has tweeted about Ms. Page over 40 times, caricaturing her and Mr. Strzok as “love birds” conspiring to bring down the president, with Mr. Trump often using the most vulgar terms to whip his supporters into a partisan frenzy. At a rally in October, Mr. Trump simulated an orgasm while saying: “I love you, Peter! I love you, too, Lisa! Lisa, I love you. Lisa, Lisa! Oh God, I love you, Lisa.”

Citing that incident as the last straw, this week Ms. Page sued the Department of Justice for unlawfully releasing the texts, which she said had “radically altered” her day-to-day life.

The existence of an investigation provides the president and his allies with unlimited opportunities to speculate about the outcome, while the inspector general is bound by confidentiality restrictions until the report is released. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, confidently predicted the inspector general’s report would demonstrate a “system off the rails” before he read it.

This may help explain why Mr. Trump, in his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government to open investigations of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, didn’t really care whether the Ukrainians actually conducted such an investigation — only that one be announced. That would have given him and his allies the opportunity to speculate about what the investigation was finding to tar the Bidens without any risk that an investigation would exonerate them.

It doesn’t matter if the report itself turns out to be something of an anticlimax. To his credit, Mr. Horowitz didn’t abandon the objective evidence in an effort to please his overseers. He certainly didn’t reach the answers about Russia or the Clinton email investigation for which President Trump and his allies so fervently hoped.

Yet there’s just enough in the Horowitz report to fuel “deep state” conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump has seized on reports from the inspector general to excoriate James Comey, Andrew McCabe and other former F.B.I. employees as “traitors.” Many media reports have focused on Mr. Horowitz’s “scathing” criticism of the F.B.I. rather than his broader conclusions.

Mr. Trump can be confident that few people will actually read the dense, legalistic prose of the Horowitz report — just as relatively few Americans read the entire Mueller report — which shows the F.B.I. largely fulfilling its mission in extraordinary circumstances.

The pattern has already started again. Mr. Trump has moved on to the next Russia investigation being conducted at Mr. Barr’s behest by United States Attorney John Durham of the District of Connecticut. This week Mr. Durham took the extraordinary step of criticizing the Horowitz report, fueling renewed speculation that this time Mr. Trump will finally get a result he wants.

“I do think the big report to wait for is going to be the Durham report,” Mr. Trump said, once again speculating about a report that hasn’t been written. “That’s the one that people are really waiting for.”

James B. Stewart is a New York Times business columnist and the author of “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law.”

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In the era of President Trump, it’s become fashionable to presume that politicians can do whatever they like and get away with it. But if recent elections to Congress are any guide, scandals do have large and measurable effects. So when Chris Collins, the Republican U.S. Rep. from New York’s 27th Congressional District, was arrested on insider trading charges on Wednesday morning, it took a seat that had looked to be fairly safe for Republicans and put it into the competitive category.

I’m going to be fairly circumspect in this article because I’m knee-deep in finalizing our House model, and I don’t want to scoop our own forecast. But one of the things we evaluated in designing that model is the electoral effects of scandals, based on the dataset of scandals put together by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich.1

Below is a list of scandal-plagued incumbents since 1998 who made it to the general election and faced an opponent from the opposite party.2 I’ve compared each incumbent’s actual margin of victory or defeat against a projected margin based on “fundamentals” model that accounts for: (i) the incumbent’s previous victory margin,3 (ii) the partisan lean of the district,4 (iii) the generic ballot at the time of the election, (iv) Congressional approval ratings at the time of the election (which are a good proxy for the overall mood toward incumbents), and (v) the incumbent’s Congressional voting record (representatives who break with their party more often overperform on Election Day). This is a slightly pared-down version of what our House model will look at, but it should be a fairly robust and reliable model.5

How much do scandals hurt incumbents?

It depends on how competitive the district is

Year District Incumbent Projected Margin Of Victory Actual Margin of Victory or Defeat Net Effect Of Scandal 1998 GA-6 Newt Gingrich 31.2 41.4 10.2 1998 ID-1 Helen Chenoweth 23.4 10.5 -12.9 1998 IL-6 Henry J. Hyde 32.6 37.2 4.7 1998 IN-6 Dan Burton 51.4 55.3 3.9 2000 GA-7 Bob Barr 21.0 10.5 -10.5 2004 OH-14 Steven C. LaTourette 34.0 25.5 -8.5 2006 MI-14 John Conyers, Jr. 78.1 70.6 -7.5 2006 PA-10 Donald Sherwood 25.1 -5.9 -31.0 2008 FL-16 Tim Mahoney 7.6 -20.2 -27.8 2008 NY-15 Charles B. Rangel 82.4 81.3 -1.2 2010 MA-6 John F. Tierney 22.3 13.9 -8.4 2012 FL-26 David Rivera 12.5 -10.6 -23.2 2012 NY-11 Michael G. Grimm 10.3 5.4 -4.9 2012 TN-4 Scott DesJarlais 24.8 11.5 -13.3 2016 NC-9 Robert Pittenger 27.2 16.4 -10.9 2016 NH-1 Frank C. Guinta 5.4 -1.3 -6.8 2016 TX-27 Blake Farenthold 28.5 23.4 -5.1 Overall average 30.5 21.5 -9.0 Districts less competitive than NY-27 45.7 42.0 -3.7 Districts more competitive than NY-27 19.8 7.1 -12.7

Shaded districts were more competitive than NY-27 based on their partisan lean.

On average, the scandal-ridden incumbents … won re-election by 21.5 percentage points! But that’s quite a bit worse than their projected margin of victory, which was 30.5 percentage points. The net effect of a scandal is about 9 points, therefore. (This finding is reasonably consistent with previous research on the topic.) Fourteen of the 17 incumbents underperformed their projection by at least some amount, and the three exceptions came a relatively long time ago, in 1998. (There’s no evidence of the effect of scandals decreasing in recent elections; if anything, it’s increased slightly over the course of the data.)

Moreover, the effect of scandals is potentially greater in competitive districts, where the other party has an opportunity to mobilize a real alternative. Let’s use New York’s 27th Congressional District as a dividing line, for instance. It has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R +22, meaning that it’s 22 points more Republican than the country as a whole based on its voting in recent presidential and state legislative elections.6 That type of district is ordinarily quite safe, but is just on the fringe of what could become competitive if everything breaks right for the opposing party — for example, in an election in a wave year against a candidate who just got arrested by the FBI. In districts less competitive than NY-27, scandals cost the incumbents only 4 percentage points, on average. But in districts that were as competitive or more competitive than NY-27, candidates with scandal issues underperformed their fundamentals by an average of almost 13 points.

So does that make Collins’s race a toss-up? You could do a little mental math: If the scandal costs him 13 percentage points, and the national environment favors Democrats by 6 points, that could produce a 19-point swing toward Collins’s Democratic opponent, Nate McMurray — almost enough to offset the strong Republican lean of the district (22 points). But you’d be leaving one thing out: Collins is still an incumbent, and incumbents usually outperform the partisan lean of their districts.

In fact, the incumbency bonus in recent elections has been in the very low double digits — on the order of 12 percentage points.7 (It used to be quite a bit higher.) That’s just about the same as the magnitude of the scandal penalty. The typical scandal, therefore, essentially wipes out a candidate’s incumbency advantage and makes the district perform similarly to an open-seat race. But it doesn’t necessarily reverse the advantage. Republicans would be favored to win an open-seat race in NY-27, even amidst a very blue national political environment, so they’re probably still favored with Collins on the ballot too.

There’s one more complication, however, which is that this data suffers from survivorship bias. The candidates with really bad scandals will often retire rather than seek re-election, or they may lose in their primary. If all scandal-plagued incumbents were forced to be renominated, we’d probably observe a scandal penalty even larger than the 10 or 12 points we’re showing here.

But in some ways, Collins and the New York GOP are in a position where their hand has been forced. New York has already held its primary and Collins is the nominee; the general election is in only three months. He seems disinclined to bow out. And it isn’t entirely clear whether it would even be possible to replace Collins on the ballot even if Republicans wanted to.8 This is the type of scandal that might have induced a retirement if it had occurred a year ago, but the GOP may not have that choice.

The Cook Political Report moved NY-27 from non-competitive to its “Likely Republican” category after the news on Wednesday morning. I might go one step further and put it in the “Lean Republican” category instead, even though it’s a really red district. (It went for Trump by 25 points in 2016.) Soon, we’ll be able to tell you what the FiveThirtyEight House model thinks too, so it’s back to work on that.

But in general, Republicans face a very long list of potentially competitive districts — places where Democrats aren’t necessarily favored at even odds, but have a fighting chance when they have no real business doing so. That list got one seat longer after Collins’s arrest. Cashing in a few of those lottery tickets is what might turn a near-miss for the Democrats into a narrow majority — or a narrow majority into a wave.

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2018 midterms.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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jwood718 · 7 years ago

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NPR’s 1A featured an interview with a not-so-representative of the 1%. Oh, yes, he has the money, he’s a venture capitalist, he has all the toys, and he basically says “Yeah, I got that.” He also advocates for a much higher minimum wage, yes, at the expense of more profits for the 1% and their corporations.

Now, you can tell me I’m down my own silo here, but this man sums up what I’ve thought for decades. A rising tide may lift all boats, but if you have a canoe, and your neighbor has a 200′ yacht, what does it matter if the tide comes in? You’re still in a canoe, and your neighbor can trade up for a yacht that’s another 50′ longer.

On 1A’s show page are links to two opinion pieces penned by Hanauer for Politico. The second, “To My Fellow Plutocrats, You Can Cure Trumpism,” was the basis for the radio interview. Published in July of this year, Hanauer lays out his case for a re-imagining of socio/eco/political modes: pay everyone a living wage of at least $15/hour and the economy will improve. That business leaders and the chambers of commerce don’t want this has nothing to do with “killing jobs,” it has to do with the fact that people with money don’t want to give up getting more money (I’ll save my own commentary for some other time).

To wit (and with apologies to Mr. Hanauer and Politico):

Since Election Day, I’ve been overwhelmed by anguished calls, emails and conversations from you, my wealthy friends, who, for the first time, are confronting the real possibility that our cozy utopian, urban, pluralistic lifestyles may be in peril. I share your fear. And with good reason.

Three years ago, in these pages, I warned you that the pitchforks were coming. I argued that 30 years of rising and accelerating inequality would inevitably lead to some sort of populist revolt that would disrupt the fantastic lives we elites enjoy. I cautioned that any society which allows itself to become radically and indefensibly unequal eventually faces either an uprising or a police state—or both.

Our new president was swept into power through exactly the kind of populist anger I predicted. He was an historically terrible candidate, and his behavior and actions as President have confirmed my worst fears. There is a thuggish, violent undercurrent to everything he says, tweets and does. Even scarier, his supporters relentlessly attack our democratic norms and institutions...People are hurting, and they lashed out—by voting for the guy who was lashing out too.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t console yourself for a minute that in electing a fellow plutocrat, our side won. President Trump isn’t on any side but his own...

My own ideas about the effect of inequality on social instability align with the work of social scientist Peter Turchin. He and his collaborators use mathematical models to study the rise and fall of societies—an analysis that postulates a new American civil war arriving as soon as 2021 (and in a highly-armed nation already suffering from an epidemic of gun violence, he doesn’t mean “civil war” metaphorically)...if you have a deep sense that something is very wrong with our nation, you are almost certainly correct.

...Yes, Trump is a manifestation of a serious civic sickness. But treating the symptom by removing Trump won’t cure the disease, even if it temporarily makes us feel better. No, to heal the body politic we must confront the disease itself.

I believe that we in the American political and economic elite face an extraordinarily inconvenient but undeniable truth: Our country will not get better until our fellow citizens feel better; and they will not feel better until they actually do better. And this is the hard part for many of you: The American people will not do better until they are actually paid more.

And they won’t be paid more until we change the way we manage our economy. This is the stark, simple fact at the heart of our ailing political system. Nothing is going to get better until we enact laws and standards that persuade or oblige every business to pay every worker a fair, dignified and livable wage. Everything else, from Trump on down, is a distraction or a lie.

Pretty much everyone Hanauer talks to mumbles something about “you can’t pay them more ‘cause...” and trot out the same lines of denial we’ve heard for decades about not raising the minimum wage. Hanauer’s response? “Bullshit.”

The truth is that when economic elites like us say “We can’t afford to adopt these higher standards,” what we really mean is, “We’d prefer not to.” We like to frame our claims as objective truths, like the so-called “law” of supply and demand, but what we’re really asserting is a moral preference. We are simply defending the status quo.

And he goes on. Seattle for instance, as a case study of sorts, having rolled-in higher wages has seen an increase in labor participation, and an unemployment rate of less than 3%. If restaurant workers get paid more, they also spend more - on eating out, say - which leads to more and better services available - like more restaurants.

Listening to him tell it on the air was like a breath of fresh air.

ANYway, go read his full piece: “To My Fellow Plutocrats...”

PoliticoMagazine

NPR 1A 1A story page with audio link.

Also: see this post on heroes.

From the Department of Irony files: on the Politico page are, of course, advertisements (it is a capitalistic world), including this one:

while Hanauer writes:

Another elite excuse for inequality is “education.” If everyone had a Harvard MBA, the argument goes, then we’d all be fine. Don’t get me wrong; the better educated our citizens, the better off we all will be. But someone is still going to need to clean the hotel rooms, flip the burgers, pour the coffee, assemble the cars, cut the hair, etc. But if that job doesn’t provide a decent and dignified life, then we have made little collective progress...Churning out more college graduates can’t close the inequality gap if wages are stagnating or falling across the board.

That just might make it in the wiki entry under “ironic.”

#society #NPR #1A #Nick Hanauer #wow-just-wow

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fatmiddleagedginger · 8 years ago

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Of Course It’s a Muslim Ban!

A mountain of evidence proves Trump signed his executive order to target Islam.

By William Saletan

On Monday night, Donald Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to enforce his executive order on immigration. The order, issued Friday night, temporarily bars the entry of anyone from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Trump and his supporters insist that the order is valid and that the Justice Department must enforce it, because its text doesn’t explicitly target a particular faith. Yates disagrees. She says the order is religious discrimination because the intent behind it, manifest in statements by Trump and his aides, is to exclude Muslims.

Yates is correct. A mountain of evidence shows Trump did this to target Islam.

Trump’s executive order doesn’t use the word Muslim, and it doesn’t apply to all Muslim countries. Based on these distinctions, Trump and his defenders in the conservative media insist it’s “not a Muslim ban.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, while cautioning that we mustn’t alienate Muslim allies, says: “I’m not going to make a blanket criticism of this effort.” The office of House Speaker Paul Ryan, noting that the ban is technically “not a ban on people of any religion,” contends: “President Trump is right to make sure we are doing everything possible to know exactly who is entering our country.”

Yates takes a different view. On Monday, she sent Justice Department attorneys a letter instructing them not to enforce the order. She conceded that the department’s Office of Legal Counsel had approved the order as “lawful on its face.” But this level of scrutiny, she argued, “does not take account of statements made by an administration or its surrogates close in time to the issuance of an Executive Order that may bear on the order’s purpose.” According to the New York Times, Yates rejected the order based on “repeated comments from Mr. Trump and his advisers about barring Muslims from entering the United States.”

Yates has the facts on her side. The record of anti-Muslim demagoguery behind this order is overwhelming. Ryan, McConnell, and anyone else who defends the president’s ban should be required to review the record and explain why, in light of it, they’re giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Here’s a recap.

Dec. 7, 2015: Following the terror attack in San Bernardino, California, Trump calls for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He bases this on a confused and distorted claim that “large segments of the Muslim population” favor Sharia (Islamic law) and violence against Americans.

Dec. 8, 2015: Trump rejects arguments that his proposal is discriminatory and wrong. On MSNBC, he says even supposedly innocent Muslims are guilty of protecting terrorists. He escalates his threats, falsely accusing Muslims of failing to report the San Bernardino plot:

The Muslim community is not reporting what’s going on. They should be reporting that their next-door neighbor is making pipe bombs and they’ve got them all over the place. The mother’s in the apartment, other people, his friend was buying him rifles. Nobody was reporting that. … The Muslim community has to help us, because without the Muslim community, we would have to get very tough and much tougher.

Jan. 14, 2016: In a Republican primary debate, moderator Maria Bartiromo asks Trump: “Is there anything you’ve heard that makes you want to rethink this position?” “No,” he says. “We have to stop with political correctness.”

March 9: Trump tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Islam hates us.” Cooper asks: “Is there a war between the West and radical Islam, or between the West and Islam itself?” Trump replies: “It’s very hard to separate, because you don’t know who is who.”

March 10: At another debate, Sen. Marco Rubio says: “If you go to any national cemetery, especially Arlington, you’re going to see crescent moons there. If you go anywhere in the world, you’re going see American men and women serving us in uniform that are Muslims.” Trump brushes off these objections: “You can be politically correct if you want. I don’t want to be so politically correct. I like to solve problems. We have a serious, serious problem of hate … where large portions of a group of people, Islam, large portions want to use very, very harsh means.” He suggests additional reasons to beware of Islam: “Women are treated horribly, and other things are happening that are very, very bad.”

June 13: In a speech responding to the terror attack in Orlando, Florida, Trump pledges to “suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies.” This formulation—which, according to Rudy Giuliani, was orchestrated by Trump’s advisers as a legally permissible alternative to his original “Muslim ban”—appears to replace the explicit ban. But Trump suggests that Muslims from other countries are still a problem: “Each year, the United States permanently admits more than 100,000 immigrants from the Middle East, and many more from Muslim countries outside the Middle East.” He also adds a new rationale for excluding Muslims: that “they’re trying to take over our children and convince them how wonderful ISIS is and how wonderful Islam is.”

July 17: On 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl reminds Trump that his running mate, Mike Pence, once called a Muslim ban unconstitutional. Trump shrugs: “So you call it territories. OK? We’re gonna do territories. We’re gonna not let people come in from Syria …” Stahl asks: “So not Muslims?” Trump replies: “You know, the Constitution, there’s nothing like it. But it doesn’t necessarily give us the right to commit suicide as a country, OK?”

July 24: On Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asks whether the territorial ban is a “rollback” of Trump’s position. Trump says no: “In fact, you could say it’s an expansion. I’m looking now at territories. People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. ‘Oh, you can’t use the word Muslim,’ ” he says, mockingly. “But just remember this: Our Constitution is great, but it doesn’t necessarily give us the right to commit suicide, OK?”

July 27: At a press conference, Trump repeats that Muslim neighbors and congregants are responsible for terrorism: “I think that the people in the community know what’s going on, whether it’s in a mosque or it’s in the community. And they have to report these people.” The next day, at a rally in Iowa, he warns: “If a community isn’t going to report when they know something’s going to happen, those people have to suffer the consequences.”

Aug. 15: Trump extends his proposed crackdown. “In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups,” he says, “we must also screen out any … who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.” This clause taps into a misconception that Muslims who revere religious law, unlike Christians who do the same, can’t accept pluralism. By making such reverence disqualifying, Trump is able to exclude many more Muslims.

Sept. 14: Trump says of Syrian refugees: “We don’t know if they have love or hate in their heart, and there’s no way to tell. We can’t let these people come into our country.” On its face, this statement makes the presumption of unacceptable risk unfalsifiable.

Oct. 9: At a debate, ABC’s Martha Raddatz asks Trump about the Muslim ban: “Was it a mistake to have a religious test?” He doesn’t answer. He says the ban “has morphed into extreme vetting from certain areas of the world.” Raddatz presses: “Would you please explain whether or not the Muslim ban still stands?” Again, Trump refuses to say yes or no. “It’s called extreme vetting,” he says. “We are going to areas, like Syria.”

Nov. 10: Two days after his election, Trump speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol. A reporter asks: “Are you going to ask Congress to ban Muslims from entering the country?” Trump stares at the reporter, says “Thank you, everybody,” and walks away.

Dec. 21: In Florida, a reporter asks Trump whether he has decided “to rethink or re-evaluate your plans to create a Muslim registry or ban Muslim immigration to the United States.” Trump replies: “You know my plans. All along, I’ve been proven to be right.”

Jan. 27: In an interview for the Christian Broadcasting Network, David Brody asks Trump: “The refugee changes you’re looking to make—as it relates to persecuted Christians, do you see them as kind of a priority?” Trump says yes. “If you were a Christian in Syria, it was impossible, at least very tough, to get into the United States,” he says. “If you were a Muslim, you could come in. But if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.” This characterization is grossly misleading. But Trump concludes that the process “was very, very unfair” to Christians. “So we are going to help them.”

Later that day, Trump issues his order. It suspends “entry into the United States of aliens” from countries in which “a foreign terrorist organization has a significant presence.” In practice, this means seven Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The order doesn’t mention Christians, but it commits the United States to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”

Jan. 29: Trump tweets: “Our country needs strong borders and extreme vetting … Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” Trump doesn’t mention Shiite Muslims, who are executed in greater numbers and are less likely than Christians to be admitted to the United States.

No principled person, looking at this record, would tolerate, much less defend, a Trump-initiated ban on migration from Muslim countries. The temporary character of the ban, the avoidance of explicit references to Islam or Christianity, and the omission of other Muslim countries don’t excuse the obvious animus behind the order.

In every way, Trump has targeted Muslims as a class. He has rejected the distinction between Islam and radical Islam, since “you don’t know who is who.” He has assigned all Muslims the burden of proving they’re not radical, since “there’s no way to tell.” He has held all Muslims responsible for terror plots that go unreported. He has added rationales—Sharia, sexism, conversion—for excluding Muslims without regard to terrorism. He has proposed better treatment for persecuted Christians but not for persecuted Shiites. He has never conceded that a ban based on religion is wrong, nor has he retracted it. He has said his current approach is an expansion of it.

Anyone who thinks Muslims would be the sole casualty of unchecked Trumpism is naïve. Throughout his crusade against Islam, Trump has dismissed the Constitution as a politically correct impediment to national survival. Nor does he respect the Geneva Conventions: Last week, in an ABC News interview, he endorsed torture (so we’re “playing on an even field” with ISIS) and the seizure of Iraq’s oil (to get “wealth”). Trump is an incipient despot and war criminal, and this order is his first attempt to test how far his party and country will let him go. Sally Yates has drawn her line. Where is Paul Ryan’s?

Click here for the original article with hyperlinks to other articles!

But while all of this has been happening, there have been some very good things happening too such as...

1. Federal hiring freeze is reversed for VA (Veteran Affairs).

2. Court order Partial stay of the immigration ban for those with valid visas.

3. Green card holders can get back in country.

4. Uber pledges $3M and immigration lawyers for its drivers after #DeleteUber trends on Twitter.

5. Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) enrollment ads are still going to air.

6. The ACLU raised 24M over the weekend (normally 3-4Mil/year).

7. HHS, EPA, USDA gag order lifted.

8. EPA climate data no longer scrubbed from website.

9. More people of different career/religious/economic/race backgrounds are considering running for political office than ever before.

10. MOST importantly, since we live in a participatory democracy, the people are engaged.

While more is needed, sometimes you have to celebrate your wins. Stay vigilant, but also take self care seriously. Activist burnout is a thing. Marathon, don't sprint.

#resist

#resistanceisbeautiful

#resistanceisnotfutile

And here is some more food for thought:

Trump is not a normal politician, so why are people protesting as if he is?

If you want to protest Trump, don't protest US consulates, or government buildings. Picket his hotels. Picket stores which carry his lame lifestyle products. Picket stores which carry his daughter's clothing line. Attack his business interests. Attack his ego, by attacking any building which carries his cursed name. And boycott his products and the companies he has investments in (amazon, new balance, uber, hobby lobby, miller/coors).

The protests need to be pointed where they can actually have maximum effect

See you next week!

Check out my weekly podcast on Podbean every Tuesday at 2 p.m.!

http://fatmiddleagedginger.podbean.com

Check out my channel for new videos every Monday through Friday!

http://www.youtube.com/user/middleagedfatass

Become a part of my Facebook community!

https://www.facebook.com/middleagedfatassPDX

Follow me on Ello!

https://ello.co/fatmiddleagedginger

And check me out on Twitter!

https://twitter.com/midagefatassPDX

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Check me out on Google+ too!

#nevertrump #usa politics #muslimban #immigration #human rights #civil rights #government #news #current events #politics #world #people #blogs

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