Idiocracy

[bustaheims]

Word on the newswire is that Trump signed the EO to get Bannon on the NSC but didn't know that was in there (because he didn't/can't read) and is now miffed. I think the best way forward for the Resistance is to turn the two of them against each other (and in turn, against the GOP).

Sad, but hardly surprising. It's been clear for some time that Trump is really just a puppet, and that he'll basically sign anything that's being put in front of him if someone he trusts says it's good.

 

[mr grieves]

Word on the newswire is that Trump signed the EO to get Bannon on the NSC but didn't know that was in there (because he didn't/can't read) and is now miffed. I think the best way forward for the Resistance is to turn the two of them against each other (and in turn, against the GOP).

Yes. Under/unemployed midwesterners who didn't care enough about the 2016 election to vote will surely respond to Politico articles about disorder in the White House and divisions in the GOP camp.

 

[herman]

Yes. Under/unemployed midwesterners who didn't care enough about the 2016 election to vote will surely respond to Politico articles about disorder in the White House and divisions in the GOP camp.

No need to move the base when one can simply poke the fragile ego through Twitter from the comfort of his mom's basement. Say a few Heil President Bannons and we'll be on our merry way.

 

[mr grieves]

An interesting article in attempting to explain the Trump victory, Clinton vs Trump supporters, and the why and wherefore as it stands:
[...snip...]
Full article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions

Yeah, the Guardian has been publishing some great writers who have a pretty good handle on the American scene.

Some favorites:

Thomas Frank, "Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there"
Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine...

To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they?d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn?t mean what they said about Trump?s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country?s well-being, or maybe both.

link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals

Gary Younge, "How Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump"
As Obama passes the keys and the codes to Donald Trump at the end of this week, so many liberals mourn the passing of what has been, remain in a state of disbelief for what has happened, and express deep anxiety about what is to come. It is a steep cliff ? politically, rhetorically and aesthetically ? from the mocha-complexioned consensual intellectual to the permatanned, ?pussy-grabbing? vulgarian.

But there is a connection between the ?new normal? and the old that must be understood if resistance in the Trump era is going to amount to more than Twitter memes driven by impotent rage and fuelled by flawed nostalgia. This transition is not simply a matter of sequence ? one bad president following a good one ? but consequence: one horrendous agenda made possible by the failure of its predecessor.

link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/how-barack-obama-paved-way-donald-trump-racism

Chris Arnade, "What I learned after 100,000 miles on the road talking to Trump supporters"
America has changed fundamentally over the last 35 years, and I saw and heard the impact of those changes. America had finally started upending a longstanding and ugly racial hierarchy, removing legal barriers that had made the playing field anything but level. For this, minorities overwhelmingly supported the new system, despite still suffering economically and socially more than white Americans.

Yet we replaced that system with one based on schooling, building a playing field that was tilted dramatically towards anyone with the ?right? education. The jobs requiring muscle decreased (many going overseas) while the jobs requiring school increased. Compounding the pain from this, we started giving the winners a much larger share of the profits.

The early Trump voters I met were the losers from these changes. Their once superior status ? based only on being white ? was being dismantled, while their lack of education was also being punished. They lived in towns and communities devastated by economic upheaval. They were born in them and stayed in them, despite their fall. For many, who had focused on their community over career, it felt like their entire world was collapsing.

link: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/trump-supporters-us-elections

 

[mr grieves]

Yes. Under/unemployed midwesterners who didn't care enough about the 2016 election to vote will surely respond to Politico articles about disorder in the White House and divisions in the GOP camp.

No need to move the base when one can simply poke the fragile ego through Twitter from the comfort of his mom's basement. Say a few Heil President Bannons and we'll be on our merry way.

Of course, the base did turn out. That's not the problem.

 

[hockeyfan1]

 

[L K]

Betsy DeVos getting confirmed has to go down as one of the biggest shams in US political history.  She is profoundly under qualified and showed an absolutely lack of regard for anything related to the knowledge of the education portfolio.  She also donated massive sums of money to Republicans prior to the vote to buy her confirmation.  The Republican Party is an amoral disgrace.

I feel devastated for the children who are going to suffer the consequences of this decision.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

Betsy DeVos getting confirmed has to go down as one of the biggest shams in US political history.  She is profoundly under qualified and showed an absolutely lack of regard for anything related to the knowledge of the education portfolio.  She also donated massive sums of money to Republicans prior to the vote to buy her confirmation.  The Republican Party is an amoral disgrace.

I feel devastated for the children who are going to suffer the consequences of this decision.

I think it was Schumer who said something like if the GOP senators vote in DeVos it basically proves there's literally nobody Trump could have appointed that wouldn't have received their blessing.

Good on the two Republican senators who didn't vote for her. And it's sad that Trump-critics like Graham and McCain couldn't have grown a big enough backbone to get 1 more vote.

 

[herman]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/politics/elizabeth-warren-silenced/

Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions -- now an Alabama senator -- as Donald Trump's attorney general. Reading from King's letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: "Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge."

Republicans cried foul -- charging that Warren violated Senate rules against impugning another senator. A vote along party lines upheld that decision, turning what could have been an ordinary late-night partisan floor speech for political devotees into a national story.

[...]


Adding fuel to the backlash, supporters noted the apparent hypocrisy that Warren's male colleagues were able to read from the letter uninterrupted. Sen. Mark Udall read the letter to enter it into the congressional record Wednesday morning and Sen. Jeff Merkley was allowed to read from King's letter Tuesday night, though he couched his remarks as only reading portions of the letter and with the context to be in line with Senate rules.

Warren is now forbidden from participating in the floor debate over Sessions' nomination ahead of a confirmation vote expected Wednesday.

"I literally can't be recognized on the floor of the Senate," she told Lemon. "I have become a nonperson during the discussion of Jeff Sessions."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defended evoking Rule 19, a rarely evoked chamber regulation that prohibits senators from impugning each other.

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted," the Kentucky Republican said on the Senate floor, delivering an instantly classic line -- the kind liberals imagine being replayed ad nauseum in TV ads in a future presidential campaign.

 

[L K]

McCain is only a Maverick when it's not time to make decisions.  McCain has one of the lowest voting rates for going against party lines.  The average is something like 2.7% and McCain is at 1.8% over his career.

 

[Kin]

It's interesting because if you asked me in a context neutral sense I'd say that Senate Confirmations shouldn't really be job interviews. I think there's a responsibility on the part of the Senate to make sure there aren't gross conflict of interests or something but traditionally the President has had a fairly wide latitude to select their cabinet and I'm fairly sympathetic to the idea that if you don't want Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education or the Treasure or State then the time to stop it is on election day.

That said after all these years of senate obstructionism during the Obama administration and the spectacularly unqualified candidates he's choosing it does feel like it's a fairly different ball game.

The real problem with the American system though is that if there's no middle ground, really nothing is ever going to be done.

 

[WhatIfGodWasALeaf]

The real problem with the American system though is that if there's no middle ground, really nothing is ever going to be done.

Nail on head.

I have friends calling for a boycott of Tesla because Elon Musk dares to try to talk to him and improve the country.

It's a real problem for the far left in America, they've become authoritarian and are stifling discussion.

 

[bustaheims]

I have friends calling for a boycott of Tesla because Elon Musk dares to try to talk to him and improve the country.

It's a real problem for the far left in America, they've become authoritarian and are stifling discussion.

Yeah. Both sides have become way too dogmatic. I mean, there's no way Elon Musk supports a wide range of Trump's policies, but, he recognizes that it's in everyone's best interests to at least see if he can get him to take a more measured approach in areas like energy, the environment, etc.

 

[Kin]

I have friends calling for a boycott of Tesla because Elon Musk dares to try to talk to him and improve the country.

It's a real problem for the far left in America, they've become authoritarian and are stifling discussion.

Yeah. Both sides have become way too dogmatic. I mean, there's no way Elon Musk supports a wide range of Trump's policies, but, he recognizes that it's in everyone's best interests to at least see if he can get him to take a more measured approach in areas like energy, the environment, etc.

I really don't buy that the Left has become too dogmatic. If anything the reverse is true. Republicans have empirically taken positions further and further to the right and then expected Democrats to meet them in a new middle. The first President Bush was willing to discuss cap and trade to deal with carbon emissions, the current Republican president thinks Global Warming is a Chinese Hoax. Likewise, the Insurance Markets that make up the bulk of the ACA were ideas put forth by Bob Dole and adopted by Mitt Romney when he was running Massachussetts.

There's really been very little where Democrats have held firm. Certainly not to the point of dogma.

 

[mr grieves]

The real problem with the American system though is that if there's no middle ground, really nothing is ever going to be done.

Nail on head.

I have friends calling for a boycott of Tesla because Elon Musk dares to try to talk to him and improve the country.

It's a real problem for the far left in America, they've become authoritarian and are stifling discussion.

No, the problem with America is that it's a two-party system wherein, at present, we have a neoliberal party that's pro-diversity and anti-racism and a neoliberal party that's primarily a home for white supremacists. And, when you take the basic economic/material issues that used to be "politics" out of the political sphere, a lot of people don't see much point in voting.

 

[Kin]

I have to think that if there's one thing we can all agree on is that there's certainly more than one problem with America these days.

 

[McGarnagle]

If there's anything even approaching a silver lining in the last few months, I'd wager that a lot of average people have learned a lot more about the mechanisms of the American government.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

If there's anything even approaching a silver lining in the last few months, I'd wager that a lot of average people have learned a lot more about the mechanisms of the American government.

They'll be able to tell their kids about them after they've ceased to exist.

 

[Frank E]

If there's anything even approaching a silver lining in the last few months, I'd wager that a lot of average people have learned a lot more about the mechanisms of the American government.

They'll be able to tell their kids about them after they've ceased to exist.

We can't be too judgy here in Canada.  We've got our own liars up here, saying whatever it takes to get into office. 

 

[bustaheims]

We can't be too judgy here in Canada.  We've got our own liars up here, saying whatever it takes to get into office.

Every country with free elections has those. Only some have the type that disregard/disrespect/don't understand the system after they get into office.