;)
The Commentariat -- November 5, 2018
Late Morning Update:
Trump's Closing Argument. Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker (satire): "Employing the fear tactics that have typified his midterm campaigning, Donald J. Trump told a rally audience on Sunday that electing Democrats would drag the nation back to the dark days of tolerance and decorum. Trump made his closing argument to the Chattanooga, Tennessee, audience by raising the spectre of a return to the dignified and restrained discourse that plagued the nation during the regime of his predecessor, Barack Obama."
Willie Nelson at a September rally for Beto O'Rourke (see today's Comments):
Budapest, U.S.A. David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "I was in Hungary for several days last week and was alarmed at how much the autocratic ruling party there reminded me of the Republican Party here in the United States. And the most alarming thing was how normal Hungary feels to a Westerner.... Like Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party in Hungary, today's Republican Party has repeatedly been willing to subvert democracy for the sake of power. It's the single biggest reason that Republicans need to be held accountable in tomorrow's elections.... What Orbán has done is to squash political competition. He has gerrymandered and changed election rules, so that he doesn't need a majority of votes to control the government. He has rushed bills through Parliament with little debate. He has relied on friendly media to echo his message and smear opponents. He has stocked the courts with allies. He has overseen rampant corruption. He has cozied up to Putin. To justify his rule, Orbán has cited external threats -- especially Muslim immigrants and George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian-born investor -- and said that his party is the only one that represents the real people. Does any of this sound familiar?" Mrs. McC: Leonhardt has two pieces likening Hungary to the GOP, & I borrowed from both of them in this summary. The columns are here and here. ...
... AND Leave Us Not Forget the Confederate Supremes. Matt Ford of the New Republic on "How the Roberts Court Caused Georgia's Election Mess." ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: I happen to agree with the Court's opinion that the Voting Rights Act is discriminatory in that it limits pre-clearance to certain states & districts. Confederate voter suppression has crept north & (especially) west, and I think a new voting rights act should apply to all states for all forms of voter discrimination, including that effected by gerrymandering.
Lydia Wheeler & Harper Neidig of the Hill: "The Supreme Court on Monday put an end to a legal battle over the Obama administration's net neutrality rules, refusing to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that upheld the 2015 regulations. The court declined to hear the appeal from the trade group USTelecom, which represents internet service providers, and Century Link Inc. without explanation. The internet service providers, along with the Trump administration, had asked the justices to toss out the ruling from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals." Mrs. McC: The decision is unsigned, but one can extrapolate from the report who made it: Thomas, Alito & Gorsuch opposed it; Roberts & Kavanaugh recused themselves. That leaves Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor & Kagan as the "deciders."
*****
How Republicans Have Made It Harder to Vote. Danny Hakim & Michael Wines of the New York Times: "Limiting access to voting is rooted deep in American history, beginning with the founding fathers and peaking during the Jim Crow era in the South. But in the wake of the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the idea that disenfranchising legitimate voters was unethical, and even un-American, gained traction. No more. Almost two decades after the Bush v. Gore stalemate led to voting rules being viewed as key elements of election strategy, the issue is playing an extraordinary role in the midterm elections. Restrictions on voting, virtually all imposed by Republicans, reflect rising partisanship, societal shifts producing a more diverse America, and the weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013."
Kevin Roose & Ali Winston of the New York Times: "On Wednesday, minutes after President Trump posted an incendiary campaign ad falsely accusing Democrats of flooding the country with murderous illegal immigrants, virulent racists on an online message board erupted in celebration.... In recent weeks, as Mr. Trump and his allies have waged a fear-based campaign to drive Republican voters to the polls for the midterm elections on Tuesday, far-right internet communities have been buoyed as their once-fringe views have been given oxygen by prominent Republicans. These activists cheered when Mr. Trump suggested that the Jewish billionaire George Soros could be secretly funding a caravan of Latin American migrants -- a dog-whistle reference to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.... They roared their approval when Mr. Trump began stirring up fears of angry, violent left-wing mobs, another far-right boogeyman.... Since the 2016 election, these far-right communities have entered into a sort of imagined dialogue with the president. They create and disseminate slogans and graphics, and celebrate when they show up in Mr. Trump's Twitter feed days or weeks later.... [Trump has given them] a feeling of empowerment -- a sense that the boundaries of acceptable speech are widening in the Trump era...." ...
... Mrs. Bea McCrabbie: Good for the Times for linking Trump's racist remarks to the same right-wing extremists a story in Sunday's NYT Magazine (linked here yesterday) demonstrated were more dangerous within the U.S. that foreign-bred extremism. It would seem the Times news division is finally having its Pogo moment. ...
... Keith Collins & Kevin Roose of the New York Times: "Since President Trump's election, his loyalists online have provided him with a steady stream of provocative posts and shareable memes, often filtered up from platforms like Reddit through media channels like Fox News. In return, Mr. Trump has championed many of their messages as his own, amplifying them back to his larger base. This feedback loop is how #JobsNotMobs came to be. In less than two weeks, the three-word phrase expanded from corners of the right-wing internet onto some of the most prominent political stages in the country, days before the midterm elections." The reporters provide a timeline of how the meme Jobs Not Mobs from yer average right-wing nutjob to more prominent right-win nutjobs to Fox "News" & then to the right-wing nutjob in the White House. Mrs. McC Note: the reporters do not use the technical term "nutjob." ...
... ** Mike Levine of ABC News: "... Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to accept any responsibility for inciting violence in American communities.... Little more than a week ago, he insisted he deserves 'no blame' for what he called the 'hatred' seemingly coursing through parts of the country, and outside of the White House on Friday, Trump accused news outlets of fomenting the very violence they have been asking him about. But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 17 criminal cases where Trump's name was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence, or allegations of assault. Nearly all -- 16 of 17 -- cases identified by ABC News are striking in that court documents and direct evidence reflect someone echoing presidential rhetoric, not protesting it. ABC News was unable to find any such case echoing presidential rhetoric when Barack Obama or George W. Bush were in the White House. The perpetrators and suspects identified in the 17 cases are mostly white men..., while the victims represent an array of minority groups -- African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and gay men." Levine lists the cases.
Matt Shuham of TPM: "President Donald Trump on Sunday invented a Fox News poll that he said showed 40 percent support among African Americans. TPM found no evidence of poll results saying that.... [T]he President may have been referring to a daily tracking poll performed by Rasmussen that, according to an Oct. 29 report from the company, showed 40 percent approval for Trump among black voters." --s
Amy Harder & Andrew Freedman of Axios: "When 'Axios on HBO' interviewed President Trump last week, one goal was to get him to reckon with his own government's scientific findings, which unequivocally state that global warming is nearly entirely caused by humans. We thought it might be harder to dismiss the science if we showed him his own administration's most comprehensive report.... We were wrong. Trump disputed that report, said he hadn't seen it and indicated -- while doing a wave motion with his hand -- that the climate goes up and down. These comments ... are among the most extreme he's made dismissing a scientific issue nearly all other world leaders take seriously.... The report is the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment published by the entire federal government, from NASA to the Environmental Protection Agency. It concludes that 'there is no convincing alternative explanation' for the global warming we've observed, other than human causes." ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: Obviously, the Axios reporters failed to account for Trump's "natural instinct for science," which is the basis of his refusal to accept all peer-reviewed analyses of climate change causation.
Andrew Higgins & Ken Vogel of the New York Times: Putin- and (allegedly) mob-connected Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska may be successful in his attempt to avoid U.S. sanctions against his business empire. "... the current lobbying effort on behalf of Mr. Deripaska's companies still appears to have made substantial headway. In recent months, Mr. Deripaska's firms have notched initial victories by winning multiple postponements from the Treasury Department of the sanctions on the oligarch's holding company, EN+, and the giant aluminum company it controls, Rusal. Now, with the administration closing in on its latest self-imposed deadline to make a final decision by Dec. 12, there are signs that Mr. Deripaska's companies could escape the sanctions entirely. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, has signaled that he is open to a plan under which Mr. Deripaska would reduce his stake in his companies in return for the sanctions being lifted. But sidestepping the business sanctions is not Mr. Deripaska's only goal. His team is preparing an audacious and previously unreported campaign to remove the personal sanctions on him, too."
Election 2018
... Robert Costa of the Washington Post: "Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City who is considering a 2020 presidential campaign, took another step closer to that possibility Sunday with a $5 million national advertising effort that encourages voters to support Democrats in Tuesday's midterm elections -- and offers Bloomberg's centrist politics as a counter to President Trump. Bloomberg's two-minute television ad, which features him speaking directly to the camera and standing before an American flag, will first air Sunday during CBS's '60 Minutes.' It will air again Monday during the evening news programs on broadcast networks and on MSNBC and CNN."
Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "President Trump is painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign's final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty.... Trump is claiming that Democrats want to erase the nation's borders and provide sanctuary to drug dealers, human traffickers and MS-13 killers. He is warning that they would destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and unleash a wave of violent crime that endangers families everywhere. And he is alleging that they would transform the United States into Venezuela with socialism run amok. Trump has never been hemmed in by fact, fairness or even logic. The 45th president proudly refuses to apologize and routinely violates the norms of decorum that guided his predecessors. But at one mega-rally after another in the run-up to Tuesday's midterm elections, Trump has taken his no-boundaries political ethos to a whole new level -- demagoguing the Democrats in a whirl of distortion and using the power of the federal government to amplify his fantastical arguments. In Columbia, Mo., the president suggested that Democrats 'run around like Antifa' demonstrators in black uniforms and black helmets, but underneath they have 'this weak little face' and 'go back home into Mommy's basement.'"
CNN Thumps Racist Trumps. Amy Wang of the Washington Post: "CNN ... refused to run an election ad released by ... President Trump earlier this week, a video that featured Luis Bracamontes -- an undocumented immigrant who was convicted in the murder of two California sheriff's deputies -- in an apparent attempt to drum up fears about immigration. 'I guess they only run fake news and won't talk about real threats that don't suit their agenda,' Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, linking to a shorter, 30-second version of the ad. 'Enjoy. Remember this on Tuesday. #vote #voterepublican' CNN's public relations department promptly fired back..., repeating a statement that the network's reporters had made last week: The ad was racist. 'CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist,' CNN PR tweeted. 'When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Update. BUT NBC Is Good with Stoking Racism in Football Fans. Daniel Victor of the New York Times: "In the middle of a highly anticipated 'Sunday Night Football' broadcast, NBC aired an immigration-themed advertisement, approved by President Trump, that CNN publicly declared to be too racist to accept as a paid ad.... It was a shorter version of an ad that the president shared on Twitter last week, which falsely claimed about Mr. Bracamontes that Democrats 'let him into our country' and 'let him stay.' The network dedicated substantial editorial coverage to the longer ad, sometimes showing clips as anchors and chyrons declared it 'racist.' The 30-second version run by NBC did not include the false claim about Democrats, but it still drew a direct connection from immigrants to crime, a tactic the president has repeatedly used. (Many studies have shown immigrants do not drive an increase in crime.)" ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: I do have to compliment Trump's campaign for finding the perfect venue for its racist ad. There are few national shows that attract as many violence-loving idiots than do professional football broadcasts. I put pro football right up there with automatic rifles, kiddie porn & Donald Trump. ...
... Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post: "On election night 2016, I described the news media's campaign performance as 'an epic fail.'... So now, with the midterm elections upon us, it's fair to ask how much improvement has there been. The short answer: not enough.... There's still one overarching problem: Too many journalists allow Trump to lead them around by the nose, which is why you've heard so very much about that migrant caravan in recent weeks.... And as Trumpian falsehoods have wildly escalated in recent weeks, the media have not figured out how to deal with them, other than to point them out after the fact."
Georgia. In Desperate Measure, Kemp Abuses His Office. Mark Niesse of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Just two days before the election, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office launched an investigation Sunday into the Democratic Party after an alleged attempt to hack the state's voter registration system. Kemp, who is the Republican candidate for governor on Tuesday's ballot, didn't provide any evidence of hacking when his office announced the probe. He faces Democrat Stacey Abrams in the election. The Democratic Party of Georgia called the allegation '100 percent false' and 'an abuse of power by Kemp's office." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... The New York Times story, by Alan Blinder & Richard Fausset, is here. "Ms. Abrams, in a round of television interviews on Sunday morning, said Democrats had done nothing wrong and accused Mr. Kemp of 'trying to rile up his base by misleading voters yet again,' as she put it to an Atlanta TV station. In a CNN interview, Ms. Abrams added, 'He is desperate to turn the conversation away from his failures, from his refusal to honor his commitments, and from the fact that he's part of a nationwide system of voter suppression that will not work in this election.'" ...
... AND this from the New York Times' "Tip Sheet," which doesn't mince words: "Although Mr. Kemp's office raised the specter of wrongdoing by Democrats, word of the inquiry was certain to heighten fears that Mr. Kemp was seeking to tamper with the integrity of the election. Democrats have spent weeks calling on Mr. Kemp to resign his post, arguing that he could not independently oversee an election in which he is running." ...
... Raphael Warnock, chair of the New Georgia Project & pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, in a Washington Post op-ed (Nov. 1), cites some of the ways Brian Kemp & GOP-writ state laws are purging eligible voters from the voting rolls. "The system is functioning exactly as it was designed. They're the consequence of the policies pursued by Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp (who, like a boxer refereeing his own bout, oversees the election in which he's running).... Georgia has followed seemingly every strategy in the voter-suppression playbook, like partisan gerrymandering and closing polling locations. It even charged a poll worker with a felony for helping someone use a voting machine." ...
... Remember This? Curt Devine & Drew Griffin of CNN [Aug. 14]: "... Republican candidate for governor Brian Kemp has sought to assure voters that his state's election system is secure and that any allegations to the contrary are 'fake news.' But Kemp, who is also the secretary of state in charge of Georgia's elections, is now being accused in a federal lawsuit of failing to secure his state's voting system and allowing a massive breach that exposed voter records and other sensitive election information.... The suit describes how a private researcher discovered the records of more than 6 million registered Georgia voters, password files and encryption keys could be accessed online by anyone looking. Days after the lawsuit was filed, technicians erased the hard drives of the server in question.... Because the data was destroyed, an independent review cannot be conducted.... Kemp has criticized news reports that raise questions about the integrity of state election systems." --s ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: It occurs to me that Kemp's failure to address the breach was a feature, not a bug. Kemp could not have known who his Democratic opponent would be in 2018, but that's beside the point; he knew s/he would be a Democrat, and he knew he would run for governor. Even had he lost the primary, his control (or lack thereof) of the voting system would leave him with the opportunity to manipulate it for Republican candidates in the public ways he has done & in secret ways we don't know. His purpose was always to destabilize the system, and what better way than to leave it vulnerable to hacking, then -- without evidence, as the new idiom goes -- to finger Democrats? ...
... Josh Marshall of TPM: "It turns out the backstory to Brian Kemp's accusation against the Georgia Democratic party is about as stupid as you could imagine.... But the gist is this. There was a security vulnerability in the system Kemp's is responsible for securing. His office was alerted the vulnerability. Then instead of focusing on fixing it he put out a press release accusing the state Democratic party of trying to 'hack' the state system. Shocking and awful and about as bad as you can imagine." --s ...
... ** Richard Hasen in Slate ties it all together: "... the latest appalling move by Kemp to publicly accuse the Democrats of hacking without evidence is even worse than that: Kemp has been one of the few state election officials to refuse help from the federal Department of Homeland Security to deter foreign and domestic hacking of voter registration databases. After computer scientists demonstrated the insecurity of the state's voting system, he was sued for having perhaps the most vulnerable election system in the country. His office has been plausibly accused of destroying evidence, which would have helped to prove the vulnerabilities of the state election system.... What Kemp has done now goes beyond the pale. He's accused his opponents of election tampering without evidence on the eve of the election, and plastered the incendiary charge on an official state website in the days before his office will administer that election. This is some banana republic stuff."
Kansas. Speaking of Our Formerly-Favorite Voter Suppressor Guy ... Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian: "The Republican candidate for governor of Kansas, Kris Kobach, who has close ties to the Trump administration, has accepted financial donations from white nationalist sympathizers and has for more than a decade been affiliated with groups espousing white supremacist views. Recent financial disclosures show that Kobach, a driving force behind dozens of proposals across the US designed to suppress minority voting and immigrant rights, has accepted thousands of dollars from white nationalists. Donors include a former official in the Trump administration who was forced to resign from the Department of Homeland Security this year after emails showed he had close ties to white supremacists.... Now Kansas secretary of state, Kobach is running in a tight race against the Democrat Laura Kelly. The election has drawn the concern of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), after the single polling place located in Dodge City was moved outside the town, in what some claimed to be an attempt to suppress the Hispanic vote."
Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress: "In what will almost certainly be a victory for the religious right, the Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will decide whether the Constitution permits a local government to display 'on public property a 40-foot tall Latin cross, established in memory of soldiers who died in World War I.'... In the long term..., such a blow to the separation of church and state could embolden Christian nationalists and distort American politics..., and this decision in unlikely to be the last gift the Court's Republican majority gives to the Christian right."--s
** Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian: "In the 158th year of the American civil war, also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of course, but also immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise jurisdiction over their bodies. The Confederacy battles in favour of uncontrolled guns and poisons, including toxins in streams, mercury from coal plants, carbon emissions into the upper atmosphere, and oil exploitation in previously protected lands and waters. Its premise appears to be that protection of others limits the rights of white men, and those rights should be unlimited.... As Michelle Alexander reminded us recently: 'The whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all, and those who resisted.' She argues that we are not the resistance; we are the river that they are trying to dam; they are the resistance, the minority, the people trying to stop the flow of history." --s ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: This is a concept we settled on way back BTE (Before the Trump Era), when we decided to more accurately name most self-described "conservatives" as "confederates," a descriptor contributor Monoloco suggested.
Peter Maass of The Intercept: "The latest terror attacks in America have provoked a new wave of indignation against [Fox News], culminating in a widely noted call by the U.S. editor of the Financial Times, Edward Luce, for an advertiser boycott.... It's a worthwhile idea, but its impact will be limited.... The network's main source of revenue is from cable subscribers, not advertisers.... Rupert Murdoch and his heirs are welcomed into the halls of power and money even though their network has done irreparably more damage to America than Breitbart News, the media platform [Steve] Bannon once controlled.... What would ostracism of the Murdochs look like? To begin with, it would probably involve the rescinding of invitations to all the conferences and galas they regularly attend [and refuse their donations]. They would become as toxic to business-as-usual as Bannon has become.... The question now is whether America's great and good, having deplored the rising tide of far-right violence, are willing to confront the family that controls the largest platform of intolerance." --s
** Damian Carrington of the Guardian: "Toxic air is now the biggest environmental risk of early death, responsible for one in nine of all fatalities. It kills 7 million people a year, far more than HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined, for example.... The lost lives and ill health caused are also a colossal economic burden: $225bn in lost labour income in 2013, or $5.11tn per year (about $1m a minute), if welfare losses are added in, according to a 2016 World Bank report, which called the figure 'a sobering wake-up call'. Air pollution is getting worse in the developing world and, while it is getting better in some developed nations, our knowledge of how comprehensively it damages our bodies and minds is growing even faster." --s
Way Beyond the Beltway
Anthony Boadle & Gram Slattery of Reuters: "For Brazil's right-wing President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, attacking critical press outlets almost daily on social media is not enough. Once in office, he vows to hit their bottom line. With half a billion dollars in public-sector marketing budgets coming under his discretion, the fiery former Army captain is threatening to slash ad buys with adversarial media groups, striking at the financial foundations of Brazil's free press.... [T]he prospect of a president out to punish unfriendly coverage has put many reporters on edge.... [Many] have started to throttle back their criticism, fearing backlash from a Bolsonaro government -- and violence from his supporters.... Bolsonaro's supporters said the Brazilian media has a leftist bias and they have turned to social media for news about him." --s
The Daily Beast: "Some Saudi Arabian citizens, enraged by the criticism leveled at the country by The Washington Post over the slaughter of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, have started a movement to boycott Amazon, another company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Bloomberg News reports that 'Boycott Amazon' was dominating Twitter in Saudi Arabia for 'several hours' Sunday.... Participants were reportedly especially upset about an op-ed written by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that appeared in the Post on Friday, which addressed the remaining mysteries surrounding Khashoggi's death." --s
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Reader Comments (14)
Maybe a slight revision for our time?
"We have nothing to fear but fear mongers themselves."
(Doesn't scan neatly, but...)
It’s also possible that Kemp, the R candidate for guv in Georgia, is pulling a Trump, or planning to, with his last minute surprise “hacking” charge. Should he lose, it gives him a perfect excuse for ordering all sorts of investigations which will likely find every Democrat in the state guilty of something horrible. Then he can reject the outcome of the vote and declare himself the winner.
and don't forget that Georgia is one of the states using a paperless voting system.
Chris Hedges once again is crying foul on our broken system. His premise has always been that we will not arrest the decline even if the Democrats regain control of the House; at best we can briefly slow it. He sees the corporate engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war untouchable. He has continually stressed that the corporate power will do its dirty work regardless of whether it be the "friendly facist face of the Democrats or the demented visage of the Trump Republicans." If we want real change, he says, we must mobilize. mobilize, mobilize...we need to destroy the corporate destructive structure.
Reading Hedges is like having ice water thrown in your face after a nice snooze in the sun. But I have always found him to be sincere and passionate and worth listening to. Here's a passage from his latest piece that stinks to high heaven––the content, not the writing of.
"The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it. Take a look at the flight roster of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of prostituting dozens of underage girls and ended up spending 13 months in prison on a single count. He flew political insiders from both parties and the business world to his secluded Caribbean island, known as “Orgy Island,” on his jet, which the press nicknamed “the Lolita Express.” Some of the names on his flight roster, which usually included unidentified women, were Bill Clinton, who took dozens of trips, Alan Dershowitz, former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers, the Candide-like Steven Pinker, whose fairy dust ensures we are getting better and better, and Britain’s Prince Andrew. Epstein was also a friend of Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago."
and so it goes~~~~~~~~~~
@ PD
Coming from the millennial generation, the ecocide is what horrifies me the most. Political corruption and the corporate reign has always existed in American. But the massive downpayment to decades of intense industrialization is only coming due now, and the interest is exponential as we figure out a way to pay it back. If we will.
People LOVE deregulation like they love their Jeezus, but the environment can only take so much. Sure, we had flaming rivers in the past and maybe we'll need more flaming rivers to finally act in minimalist steps. But environmentally speaking, the days of burning rivers were the glory days. Back then, industrial devastations were regional, now they're global.
Add the incessant degradation of the environment into the mix of the current xenophobia, racist fear mongering, shameless divide & conquer politics, and I only see things going downhill.
That said, we've only one life and one world, so things must be taken a step at a time. And the first step back to sanity is a vote against Trump tomorrow.
More Painfully Obvious Lies
What will Fatty do when the midterms end? He'll have to start holding rallies to keep up his sense of his own personal greatness. Then again, as soon as the midterms are over, he'll start holding rallies for his own re-election.
He has now taken to announcing that nowhere in history have political rallies drawn larger crowds than those who have flocked to soak in his sublime wonderfulness in person. Nowhere ever. In the history of politics.
As usual, he's wrong. Not just wrong, but wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Here's just a few political events that leave Fatty's tiny crowds in the dustbin of history:
Tiananmen Square, 1989, one million
Obama inauguration, 2009, 1.8 million on the Mall
Rome, 2003, protest against Bush's War of Choice, 3 million
2017 Women's march, over 4 million
2017 March for Science, over a million
(The last two were marches essentially contra Fatty, his policies, hatred, lies, and rhetoric.)
March on Washington, I have a dream speech, 1963, 300,000
Obama, Berlin, 2008, 200,000
And that's just for starters. Appeals to bigotry, hatred, and tribalism simply cannot attract the numbers that inclusion and hope and appeals to truth and justice can garner. Were there millions of people at any one of his shindigs? 200,000? 100,000?
No. So much for political history.
Fatty's claims of ten, twenty, fifty thousand people attending his hoedowns for racists and misogynists are routinely debunked. A rally in Houston whereat he forced Tailgunner Ted to bow and kiss his ring, Fatty claims attracted 50 thousand. Authorities estimated this "historic" crowd at 3,000. But we all know that Fatty has a knack for estimating crowd sizes.
So do his courtiers. Liarbee Sanders recently shouted that Fatty won the 2016 presidential election by "an overwhelming majority"....um, no. He didn't. Not even close. He lost the majority vote. By MILLIONS.
So, if a few thousand drooling Trumpbots show up at an airport in Macon, GA and Fatty wants to interpret three thousand as thirty thousand, or three million, it's right in line with his claims to be the best and greatest at everything.
Except at being a decent, intelligent human being. Who's great at estimating crowd sizes.
He might not be the worst human being--of the group of people who are not clearly criminally insane--but he's within shouting distance.
@Akhilleus: So 3,000 people showed up to see Trumpy & Teddy do Houston? Whoop-de-doo. No wonder Trump inflated those 3,000 to 50,000. BTW, Newsweek verifies your numbers. Way back in late September, Ted's rival Beto O'Rourke, with a little help from Willie Nelson, drew a crowd of 55,000 in Austin.
Republicans think "Texas Democrat" is an oxymoron, & of course Beto & Willie are not even U.S. senators or U.S. presidents*, but they sure are a bigger draw than Teddy & the Trumpster.
On our ballot tomorrow, here in Michigan, is Proposition 18-2.
A proposal to transfer the power to draw the state's congressional
and legislative districts from the state legislature to an independent
redristricting commision. A 13 member panel of 4 Dems, 4 Rs and
5 independents.
It's an interesting thought, but we are so gerrymandered that I don't
see any chance of this going anywhere.
For example, my vote won't count since I live in about a 15 by 20
square mile area full of liberal voters. Our area has been attached to
a totally republican area to the north of us with 20 times the population
(think the Betsy DeVos cottage and all her Republican neighbors,
not all of them the 1% but close.)
Does anyone think the Republicans in charge will vote for this when
it would mean that they might possibly lose control of the state if
elections were fare? I don't think so.
Busy day here in Skagit County WA.
Held signs at a busy intersection this AM supporting a local measure to establish a county charter, which could replace the increasingly undemocratic three commissioner system this growing county is saddled with. Am running as a (as I like to call it) "freeloader" myself.
As usual in our oligarchic times, there's a ton of big money opposing the measure, but as I have told my colleagues, at least we're costing the opposition big time.
Back to more sign waving this PM after a meeting of our local progressive radio show hosts. I imagine there will be some mention of politics around the edges of our radio talk.
Liked Akhilleus' compilation of real numbers and like him would also guess (dearly hope) there will be much wailing, teeth gnashing and loud cries of "So unfair!" from the Repugnants when the ballots are counted tomorrow.
And as my Mac is now bedded comfortably at the local CityMac r & r center, please send best wishes for its early recovery. I have more work to do, and my wife, generous as she is, often think she needs her computer.
Forrest,
I can think of two answers to your question.
No and no. Gerrymandering is like mother's milk to wingers.
Abrams and Gillum, two progressives, will have one power in their term(s) in office, and that is the veto. Both will be facing GOP majorities in both senate and house. It will be a task to advance any program against a dug in and defeated legislature. The most important use of the veto will come with the redistricting after the next census.
Sorry for the length of this post, but it's D-Day eve and there's lots to address.
First, @forrest: where in Michigan are you? Not asking for a street address, just a general spot on the mitten. I'm in Ypsilanti Township, about 10 miles from Ann Arbor, where I was born and grew up. One of the members of my political support/activist group is deeply involved in the Voters Not Politicians (Prop 2) campaign, and it looks like it has a good chance of passing. So don't lose hope just yet. We're currently gerrymandered to a fare-thee-well, but if we can just...yeah...GOTV for our side, maybe we can start to turn the tide. Which brings me to...
@PD and @safari: because I'm cynical by nature, and depressed by circumstance, I find a kindred spirit in Chris Hedges. He's one of the Cassandras among us and, being another, I completely agree with his take on the current state of affairs. The system is broken, and it may not be hyperbole to extrapolate that the planet is doomed. This is, ahem, not a pleasant thought: I have five grandchildren (4 boys, 1 girl) and as of Sept. 22, five great-grandchildren (4 boys, 1 girl). Most of them, and especially my new great-granddaughter, would normally stand a good chance of still being alive in the year 2100, but given what we're doing to the planet, I'm not sure they'll live as long as I already have (I'm 72). Hostages to fortune, indeed.
On a positive note, my daughter lives in Tennessee and two of her children live in Florida. All are Democrats. My daughter told me she plans to vote straight-ticket Democratic. I expect her husband will also, and I'm pretty sure my grandkids will do the same in Florida. They live in states where their votes matter even more than mine, so I take some hope from this.
That said, I'm still going to be curling up with my three shelties (and a bottle or two of "Three-Buck Chuck" -- what can I say? It's Ann Arbor.) for the duration.
Oh -- a PS for PD: I'm all too frequently reminded of your constant exhortations during 2015-16 on the subject of what you called The Supremes. (Great vibes for us Boomers!) I was with you all the way then and I think you've earned the Platinum "I Told You So" award for that, together with a lifetime membership in the Cassandra Club of America. <sigh> FWIW
@Rose in MI: Saugatuck, the Key West of the Midwest. We keep
saying if we had Ann Arbor here on the lake, the population would
swell into the millions.
@safari and Rose: thank you for responding. safari's the "Coming from the millennial generation, the ecocide is what horrifies me the most" is what should horrify EVERYONE, but unfortunately this is not the case. I am most upset about people's priorities on their list of concerns; climate change is not one of them. If we had a president along with his agency heads that brought this issue front and center the clarion call would be out there. Rose, of course, is right to be concerned for her grandchildren who will be the ones that will suffer the most–-we here are getting just the beginning of the end. It's that old problem of solving problems for future good: Old men plant trees they will never see.
and Rose–-I certainly was concerned about the Supremes but you may be thinking of Kate (who left us some time ago) who constantly sounded that drumbeat–-she wanted us to shout it out, "Remember the Supremes!"wherever we went and I kidded her ––that we needed to wear a tee with the faces of the court or otherwise people would think we would be yelling about the musical group.