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Month: July 2016

If you could see the future …

If you could see the future …

by digby












I had seen this old movie “The Dead Zone” before but it was on the other night and I had it on in the background. It struck me as an interesting flick for the current period:



A high school teacher and soon-to-be wife winds up in a fateful car crash that turns his life upside down. When he awakens from a five-year coma, he discovers that through physical contact he can predict a person’s ultimate fate. This power can serve to be a gift, or a curse, as Walken soon realizes when he shakes the hand of a power-hungry politician.

Martin Sheen really chews the scenery in this one as the megalomanic politician. And to think he had never seen Donald Trump at the time …


This is a re-run of an earlier post. I think I’m going to re-run it once a month until November.

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No more Mr Nice Guy

No more Mr Nice Guy

by digby

He’s just losing it. He started off his rally yesterday morning pissed off at the fire marshal for refusing to let too many people into the room because these people “don’t know what the hell they’re doing”  — and they might be Hillary people. The fire marshal.

Then there was this when the lock her up chant started:

“I’ve been saying let’s just beat her on November 8th. But you know what, I’m starting to agree with you,” Trump said.

The comments, which came in his first public appearance since Clinton ripped him in her speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, marked an about-face for Trump, who in the last week has resisted joining in on his supporters’ chants and instead urged them to channel their anger at the ballot box.

“You know it’s interesting. Every time I mention her, everyone screams ‘lock her up, lock her up.’ They keep screaming. And you know what I do? I’ve been nice,” Trump explained to his supporters in this evangelical bastion of Colorado Springs. “But after watching that performance last night — such lies — I don’t have to be so nice anymore. I’m taking the gloves off.

Needless to say he’s lying. His Nuremburg rally speech at the RNC was the first time he ever said “lets beat her in November.” He’s been saying for months that she should be in jail:

After months of insisting that Clinton was “guilty as hell,” Trump argued in June that Clinton should “go to jail” over her email use, which Trump and Republicans allege may have compromised national security.

Meaningless, I know, to point such things out anymore. It’s actually more useful to point out the rare times when he isn’t lying or bragging or otherwise being a cretin.

Yes, he also said he wanted to hit someone (Bloomberg) for saying mean things about him and he says he takes these insults personally.

But nothing, nothing comes close to this batshit crazy comment:

I was curious to see whether she’d do a class act and not mention my name,” the Republican nominee said at a rally with supporters in Colorado. “Or mention it with respect, like, say, ‘I’d like to congratulate my Republican opponent for having done something that nobody has ever done in the history of politics in this nation.’”

“See, I thought she might do something like that. I thought she’d give me a big fat beautiful congratulations. If she did that, would that have been cool? Would that have been great?,”

Yes, he actually said that. And it wasn’t a joke. That’s the weirdest projection I have ever seen. Twisted, bizarre, freakish. He think he’s the one who has “done something that nobody has ever done in the history of politics in this nation.” And he’s angry that Clinton didn’t congratulate him for it.

The mind boggles.

By the way, here’s what John McCain did when Obama won his nomination in 2008:

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Outwit. Outlast. Outplay. Outorganize. by @BloggersRUs

Outwit. Outlast. Outplay. Outorganize.
by Tom Sullivan

Have been observing the aftermath from the Democratic convention among grassroots supporters of both Secretary Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders. It is a small sample, but feelings are still raw.

A friend who worked the 2008 Obama campaign (and numerous others since) had some advice for Clinton supporters in the virtual space. They need to be graceful winners and less gloaty:

To my friends that are being mean to BernieOrBusters:

Point I’m trying to make is that most of these BernieOrBusters are either first time voters or sporadic voters, not solid Democrats, with some notable exceptions. And these voters kinda need to be coddled and nurtured into growing from sporadic voters to precinct organizers. And the DNC, to this point, has told them to fuck off. My experience is that more fuck off will not turn their heads. Telling them that they owe us their vote — also not a winner. Telling them that they owe this to themselves — that has a shot.

Remember the recent lesson of G. W. Bush. In 2000 Gore lost New Hampshire partially due to a successful Green Party movement that splintered off enough votes to give the state to Bush. If Gore had won that state, then the fuckery in Florida wouldn’t have mattered, and probably wouldn’t have even taken place. The Democrats first solution was to whine about it for four years. The result was a Bush reelection. Yes, there was some fuckery in Ohio, but Bush won that election.

Enter Howard Dean as chair of the DNC who decreed that we will stop blaming voters whom don’t vote with us and instead, explain why it’s best for them if they do, everywhere. Result: took back both houses of congress and the majority of state governments in the very next cycle and gave the Democrats their first landslide presidential win in a generation the cycle after that.

So please stop calling BernieOrBusters shitheads, ’cause we need them and you are tired of doing all of the precinct organizing and voter registration yourself — you are doing those things, yes?

“Coddled” might not sit well with people. But his point is taken. Bernie Sanders’ grassroots supporters have energy and a fire in their guts that Democrats will need, not just for this coming election, but beyond. Losing is always tough. The trick is to learn from it, to pick yourself up and channel that energy. Besides, as one Sanders delegate told a friend after the convention, “We may have lost the battle, but we won the war.”

Colleague David Atkins (who has won a few and lost a few) seems to concur (above).

The counterpoint to my friend’s comments above is that Sanders supporters are now positioned to leverage the knowledge and experience they’ve gained and the networks they’ve built into party leadership and renewal, and into legislative gains around the country. If. They. Stay. Engaged.

Progressives politics is an unending struggle to advance the ball, to make this world a better, more inclusive place for more people, and to be a check against those corrupted by power. That’s what democracy is. That’s what Bernie supporters have worked for. It is a struggle for the power to enact change and to displace or co-opt those with whom we disagree.

Already some of my Bernie friends are re-registering as independents, unwilling to participate further in the Democratic Party after an election contest in which, one supporter alleged, the party “wouldn’t let Bernie win.”

Seriously? Seriously? Letting your opponent win is called throwing the fight. That’s not how elections work. Think opponents across the aisle will be so nice?

Plus, why would anyone expect human dynamics inside a political party to be different from politics in any other organization? You can find assholes anywhere. Families feud. Clubs have fallings out. Churches have schisms. Team members don’t get along. Parties have internecine struggles. So it goes.

Parties are like unions. Joining doesn’t mean you are signing away your immortal soul. You don’t join a union because every provision of the charter perfectly aligns with your deepest principles, or because you agree with the union president, or because you like everyone you work with or stand beside on the picket line. People join political parties for the same reason they join unions: to find strength in numbers. That’s why I did.

Now, not everybody is a joiner. (By nature, I’m not.) Non-joiners prefer to stand apart, and politically independent. Sometimes defiantly so. That’s their choice. But if having less of a voice in the political process makes them feel marginalized, they are marginalized by choice. They are not being excluded. To riff on that old Irish joke, it’s not a private fight. Anybody can get in. All they have to do to join is register. All they have to do to participate is show up and work. Sometimes alongside people they don’t much like.

Gaining influence, credibility, authority? That is something else. You don’t walk into a church for the first time and expect people to ask you to preach the sermon. You don’t walk in a third time and expect people to ask for your sage counsel. We all understand that. So we don’t get offended when they don’t. So it is in party politics. Bernie friends say they want R-E-S-P-E-C-T. What they really want is to be taken seriously. But credibility is not conferred by registering at the DMV. Credibility, you have to earn over time.

Nothing gets accomplished, resolved or advanced by leaving the game after your first setback. So to those ready to bail, which is truer? Your opponents wouldn’t let you win, or by abandoning the field you let them beat you?

This ain’t the Montessori School. Jumping into this fight, would-be revolutionaries are vying to lead the most powerful country on the planet. You are promising voters you are going to take on and subdue the most powerful corporate entities in the world. Are you going to run home now because Little Debbie was mean to you? Give me a fucking break.

After the starship Enterprise’s first disastrous encounter with the Borg, the entity Q tells Captain Jean Luc Piccard:

Q: If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.

People’s futures are on the line. The world is. If you expect to win at this game, first learn how to play it. If you expect to advance your agenda and defeat your rivals inside your own party – any party – you’d best learn how they play it. Better yet, cooperate with and win them over. Or else outwit, outlast, and outplay them. But this isn’t “Survivor.” This is for real. And in the long run, that’s what it takes to win. Plus allies. Lots of allies.

This is democracy, warts and all. At the end of the day (and on Election Day it is the end of the day) we count votes. That’s how we determine winners and losers. There is math involved. We don’t count passion or ideology or likeability or past decisions or check-off boxes on candidate questionnaires. Politics is a competition. It’s a contest. You must be present to win. If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit.

Friday night soother: Good people

Friday night soother: Good people

by digby

Via the Dodo:

It pays to have friends, especially ones with such big hearts.

Last weekend, the Montez family got a call they had long given up hope of ever receiving. Their dog, Corky, who’d gone missing in 2009, had been found and rescued nearly 7 years later. He was brought to the Humane Society of North Texas after being picked up as a stray wandering along a busy street. Thanks to a microchip, rescuers were able to track down his rightful owners.

“We were in shock when we got the news,” Corky’s owner, Jimmy Montez, told The Dodo. “We just couldn’t believe it.”

Corky has been back with his family for less than a week now, but it’s already clear that things wouldn’t be complete without Captain there, too.

“They’re as thick as thieves. Wherever Captain goes, Corky is right there with him,” Montez said. “I think Corky had been helping him out on the streets because he’s missing an eye. He always lets him eat first and they always nap together. Corky looks after him.”

And this:

It just wasn’t that long ago…

It just wasn’t that long ago…

by digby

… that women were literally second class citizens.

Retiring Senator Barbara Mikulski was celebrated at the DNC as the first Democratic woman to become a US Senator in her own right. She wasn’t young when she won the seat. She was already 51. (Republican Margaret Chase Smith had been elected in her own right back in the 1950s when Northeast republicans were the country’s leading liberals.)

Only fifteen women had ever served in the Senate before Mikulski got there, almost all of them appointed or serving in their late husband’s seats. There have only been 30 in the years after she arrived.

Mikulski was first elected in 1987, only 29 years ago. That is not ancient history.

And then there’s this:

[T]here are no fewer than 400,000 women in the United States [who were born before women got the right to vote.). In the Census Bureau’s 2015 estimates, some 428,000 women were born in 1920 or earlier. The 19th Amendment was ratified in August 1920. Of course we’ve lost some of those women who were alive in 2015, but there are still hundreds of thousands — more than 1 out of every 1,000 people in the country — who predate suffrage and can vote for Clinton.

My own mother was born before women could vote. (Black women who lived in the south, like black men, did not get the unequivocal right to vote until even later, of course.) She didn’t live to see this day but I’m sure she would be pleased. She was a very smart women and women of her age suffered many insults to their intelligence and were often infantilized throughout their adult lives. As a divorced woman in the 1950s she suffered many indignities, including having to get her father to co-sign for a checking account when she was in her 30s.

Here’s one of the 400,000. 102-year-old honorary Arizona delegate Geraldine “Jerry” Johnson Emmett gained attention July 26 for her enthusiastic announcement of her state’s support of Hillary Clinton:

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QOTD: Stopped clock edition

QOTD: Stopped clock edition

by digby

David Brooks:

This week I left the arena here each night burning with indignation at Mike Pence. I almost don’t blame Trump. He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders. It is the “sane” and “reasonable” Republicans who deserve the shame — the ones who stood silently by, or worse, while Donald Trump gave away their party’s sacred inheritance.

It as actually America’s inheritance that they thought they owned but whatever. He’s right about Pence and all the others who have shown their cowardice and their willingness to put their parochial self-interest above their country. #Neverletthemforgetit

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They didn’t like him, they really didn’t like him

They didn’t like him, they really didn’t like him

by digby

I don’t know how people will respond to Clinton’s speech but we know how they responded to Trump’s:

Trump’s speech got the least positive reviews of any speech we have tested after the fact: 35% of Americans interviewed last weekend said it was excellent or good. Of the nine previous speeches we have rated, the top one was Barack Obama’s in August 2008, which 58% of Americans rated as excellent or good. The lowest-rated speech other than Trump’s was Mitt Romney’s in 2012, with 38% excellent or good.

It goes on to point out that he received better reviews from people who watched the whole convention which one might assume was Republicans. This is pretty brutal:

Of those who watched very little or none of the convention, 19% rated Trump’s speech as excellent or good.

And this:

The self-reported net impact of the GOP convention was also negative. Overall, 51% of Americans say the convention made them less likely to vote for Trump, while 36% said it made them more likely to vote for him. This is the highest “less likely to vote” percentage for a candidate in the 15 times Gallup has asked this question after a convention. The previous “less likely” high was 38% after both conventions in 2012, and after the GOP conventions in 2004 and 2008.

They pulled out 2004 (barely) but haven’t been too successful since.

We’ll see how Clinton did. Considering polarization and many people’s general loathing of her as a speaker, I won’t be surprised if her numbers aren’t any better. But Trump’s Nuremberg Rally speech didn’t test well at least and that’s a big relief.

Meanwhile, like the emotional 12 year old he is, nothing is ever his fault fault:

After promising a “showbiz” Republican National Convention that would dazzle the American public, Donald Trump shrugged off responsibility for staging it after seeing the higher ratings and production values the Democrats’ convention had to offer this week in Philadelphia.

“I didn’t produce our show — I just showed up for the final speech on Thursday,” Trump told The New York Times in a phone call this week.

Trump actually broke with tradition by making multiple appearances during the Cleveland convention, coming on stage to introduce his wife Melania on the convention’s opening night and appearing onstage with running mate Mike Pence, who followed Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) non-endorsement speech on the convention’s third night.

He also dialed into Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show while a mother who lost her son in the Benghazi terrorist attacks described her experience on the RNC stage.

The real estate mogul acknowledged these other unannounced appearances but told the Times they didn’t distract from the convention programming because “nobody even knew” he would be making them.

His claim that he had no hand in the convention programming was also eyebrow-raising, given that campaigns typically dictate the speaker roster and many of the RNC speakers had direct ties to Trump. Among those were five members of the Trump family, the manager of Trump Winery and ‘80s sitcom star Scott Baio, who said Trump personally invited him to speak at a campaign fundraiser.

Fun fact: Paul Manafort produced Reagan’s Morning in America convention.

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A unified hatefest

A unified hatefest

by digby

Someone should tell Republicans to delete all their Twitter accounts. They don’t have a sense of humor and they just end up embarrassing themselves:

The chief strategist of the Republican National Committee (RNC) accused Hillary Clinton of plagiarism in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination.

Spicer’s tweet references a portion of Clinton’s Thursday night address where she seemingly paraphrased Alexis de Tocqueville, the political scientist who wrote “Democracy in America.”

“But here’s the sad truth: There is no other Donald Trump — this is it,” Clinton said in Philadelphia. “And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn’t get: that America is great — because America is good.

“So enough with the bigotry and the bombast. Donald Trump’s not offering real change. He’s offering empty promises.”

“America is great because she is good” is often quoted from de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” According to an analysis from The Weekly Standard, however, the passage does not actually appear in de Tocqueville’s work.

And this too:

That’s adorable. And it’s true. Except for the #NeverTrump movement and the delegate walkouts and the Major Party figures refusing to vote for him and the runner-up showing up on the stage in prime time and refusing to endorse him it was a model of party unity.

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Here’s a quote for you

Here’s a quote for you

by digby

I just …

During her headline speech on Thursday at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Clinton noticeably cleared her throat twenty-two times. In and of itself, it could be written off as temporarily being under the weather. Given its persistence, however, questions arise about the Democrats’ presidential nominee. She seemed to have deliberately timed her throat clearing during manufactured applause directed by her audience managers.

These right wingers are going to keep talking about her “health.” They have been saying she’s having strokes and had some kind of brain damage already. I would look for Trump to pick it up soon.

It’s all about portraying her as old and decrepit. Trump is older than she is but there’s this so no problem:

Donald Trump’s personal physician released a statement on the GOP presidential candidate’s medical history on Monday, declaring that the real estate magnate would “be the healthiest” president ever. 

“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” said Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, a gastroenterologist from Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. 

The full letter is written in true Trumpian fashion, full of hyperbole and boasting of greatness. Bornstein calls Trump’s blood pressure “astonishingly excellent” and Trump says in his own statement he was “fortunate to have been blessed with great genes.” The physician also says Trump has “no history of ever using alcohol or tobacco products.”

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“You have sacrificed nothing!” by @BloggersRUs

“You have sacrificed nothing!”
by Tom Sullivan

It was hard to imagine the final night of the 2016 Democratic Convention could be more dramatic than the first three. The heavy hitters had spoken Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: Michelle, Elizabeth, Bernie, Joe, and Barack. Secretary Hillary Clinton’s historic acceptance speech as the first woman nominated for U.S. president was expected to be the best of her career. It was. But as she herself admits, “I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.” She does not pretend to be a great speaker. Sometimes it’s not oratorical skill that matters.

When the parents of a fallen American Muslin soldier, 27-year-old Army Captain Humayun S.M. Khan, stood on stage to speak of their sacrifice and that of their son, it was the most iconic moment of the convention. I couldn’t have been the only one undone by Khizr Khan. Donald Trump certainly was, but not in a good way.

One of the things that most infuriated Republicans in the 1990s about Bill Clinton was how he appropriated what they saw as “their’ policy positions. This week, under Hillary Clinton, Democrats took back the flag and patriotism too. One wonders what besides anger and resentment Republicans have left.

Slate provides some backstory:

Humayun Khan was born in the United Arab Emirates and immigrated to the U.S. as a small child, growing up in Maryland and attending college at the University of Virginia. He was a 27-year-old Army captain when he was inspecting the gates of his camp in Baquba, Iraq, and a speeding vehicle approached. Khan told his fellow soldiers to hit the ground and he signaled at the vehicle to stop. He took 10 steps toward the vehicle, which had in it two suicide bombers and a large amount of explosives. The car exploded, injuring 10 of his fellow soldiers and killing Khan. The captain was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, and Khizr Khan believes his son’s actions saved the lives of many of his fellow soldiers.

“We still wonder what made him take those 10 steps,” Khan’s father has said in the past. “Maybe that’s the point where all the values, all the service to country, all the things he learned in this country kicked in. It was those values that made him take those 10 steps. Those 10 steps told us we did not make [a] mistake in moving to this country.”

That’s all you need to know. Watch.

I got nothin’.