Month: November 2016

A lesson in tone deafness
by Tom Sullivan

A piece up at Bloomberg yesterday looked at what Donald Trump’s data team saw that others did not:

Trump’s numbers were different, because his analysts, like Trump himself, were forecasting a fundamentally different electorate than other pollsters and almost all of the media: older, whiter, more rural, more populist. And much angrier at what they perceive to be an overclass of entitled elites. In the next three weeks, Trump channeled this anger on the stump, at times seeming almost unhinged.

They identified what people wanted to hear and went with the hard sell:

Trump’s team chose to focus on this electorate, partly because it was the only possible path for them. But after Comey, that movement of older, whiter voters became newly evident. It’s what led Trump’s campaign to broaden the electoral map in the final two weeks and send the candidate into states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that no one else believed he could win (with the exception of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who deemed them “Brexit states”). Even on the eve of the election Trump’s models predicted only a 30 percent likelihood of victory.

The message Trump delivered to those voters was radically different from anything they would hear from an ordinary Republican: a bracing screed that implicated the entire global power structure—the banks, the government, the media, the guardians of secular culture—in a dark web of moral and intellectual corruption. And Trump insisted that he alone could fix it.

The system is in fact corrupt and economic inequality a cancer on democracy, as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have argued on the left. Except where they really want to fix it, Trump called forth people’s darkest impulses to get himself elected to a position of great power. With Trump, as with Obama, supporters saw in him whatever they wanted to see. Except where Obama offered hope, Trump offers himself. Trump is the anti-Obama.

This is not a man who has ever in public memory expressed either empathy for the plight of others or a desire to help anyone but himself. Chance are slim any of his policies will impact the wealth he boasts of possessing or help those below his station except as a byproduct of enriching his kind. For the rich, money is how they keep score. It is a surrogate for real power if not a kind of power in and of itself. Trump will soon have more than he’s ever dreamed. Perhaps he’s found a new drug.

But while the left tries to understand how it got sucker punched, some Democrats are still tone deaf to the populist anger that Trump used to beat them. An interview last night on NPR’s All Things Considered made that plain.

Ari Shapiro spoke with Rep. Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat, and with Tamara Draut from Demos, the progressive advocacy group. Shapiro asked whether the Democratic Party was too close to Wall Street. He had to push Becerra to answer the question as Becerra hedged. The chairman of the House Democratic Caucus spent his opportunity on air not talking about helping the little guys, but bent over backwards to defend the financial sector and address its concerns:

TAMARA DRAUT: We need to shed any remnant of a more Wall-Street-friendly approach to the economy. And I think that’s why you saw so much support for Bernie Sanders and why you have Elizabeth Warren as sort of the new leader of the Democratic Party. We need to make it clear to people that we believe the heroes of our economy are janitors and home health aides, not Wall Street CEOs. And that wasn’t clear to people. We had a problem with the trade issue on the Democratic Party. We had been the party of these trade agreements that Trump was running against.

SHAPIRO: Congressman, do you agree that the Democratic Party should distance itself from Wall Street more than it has?

XAVIER BECERRA: My sense is that Democrats should be prepared to stand by the things that give Americans reassurance that we’re going to fight for them. We don’t want to…

SHAPIRO: Does that mean closer or farther from Wall Street?

BECERRA: Well, we – what we don’t want is to drive business out of the country. And I think it’s important to recognize that all of our different business sectors, whether it’s the financial service sector, whether it’s communications, whether it’s construction, hospitality – we want to fight to have businesses start up here in America, to create jobs here.

SHAPIRO: Including Wall Street.

BECERRA: Including Wall Street. I think every sector that helps create more opportunity to build the economy and create jobs – and good-paying jobs – that’s what we want. And Wall Street can do that, too. We just don’t want to let Wall Street to take advantage of any American who’s working really hard.

Becerra was tone deaf. Draut took him to task for his “long exposition” on the importance of bankers:

DRAUT: So, Ari, I would have answered that question completely differently. And I actually think that this is an important thing that the Democratic Party needs to have a debate amongst ourselves. And that is that Wall Street is not helping create jobs in America. It is enriching itself. And if we can’t answer a question about our posture towards Wall Street and how it has been so destructive – let’s not forget the Great Recession that most people are still feeling deeply. And if we cannot say as a party that we are going to reform Wall Street and not let it play this outsized role in the values that our companies practice, then we have a problem.

SHAPIRO: Congressman?

DRAUT: You can’t operate a business and open a new establishment without credit these days. And you need a bank that will help you do that. You know, every sector of our economy has a role to play. It’s when it becomes abusive that we have to take action. And so I would simply say that whether it’s a bank or whether it’s the mom-and-pop down street, we want to make sure they can all succeed without exploiting the American worker who works very hard.

SHAPIRO: It’s that without-exploiting-the-American-worker phrase that I think might be the source of the disagreement because I think that there’s a big portion of the country that feels that Wall Street is inherently exploitative and that saying Wall Street is great as long as it doesn’t exploit the American worker is saying, in the view of these voters, that wolves are great as long as they don’t eat sheep. Well, that’s what wolves do.

BECERRA: If you can name me a society and a particular civilization that hasn’t had someone who’s helped finance the building and construction of that civilization, then I’m willing to look at it. But we all rely on the help of someone, whether it’s the federal government – our government – or the private sector, to help us move forward because we don’t always have the collateral – the cash – in our pocket.

SHAPIRO: Tamara Draut, what do you make of that?

DRAUT: Well, I would have started maybe with that point, right? I think that long exposition about how we need banks in our lives to do things is absolutely right. Of course, we do, but that actually happens to be what banks aren’t mostly doing in our economy today. But the big banks aren’t playing this ma-and-pop role in our society. And I can tell you people would love it if they did – if they actually went back to being able to go down the street and say, I want to start a new enterprise. Will you give me a small business loan? I think everybody hungers for those days, but that’s not the banking world that we are living in right now. And if the Democrats want to fight to get back to that day, to being able to go to a neighborhood bank, then we have to start with that point and make it really clear that that is not how the banking system is operating.

So long as Democrats in leadership spend more time talking about the concerns of the urban power structure than they do on those of rural voters who feel like “everyone’s punching bag, one of society’s last remaining safe comedy targets, they will find themselves in the political wilderness.

 by digby

… to Trump’s side:

Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin singled out The New York Times in particular for it’s biased coverage of Donald Trump‘s presidential victory Thursday, saying that its post-election headline could have come straight from the satirical newspaper The Onion. 

“I love The New York Times. I think it’s a great institution…” Halperin said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, holding up a copy of the print version. “Look at the headline of this story.” 

The front page headline of The Times read “Democrats, Students And Foreign Allies Face The Reality Of A Trump Presidency.” “This is the day after a surprising underdog sweeping victory,” Halperin pointed out. 

“Their headline is not ‘Disaffected Americans Have A Champion Going To The White House’ or ‘The Country Votes For Fundamental Change.’ The headline is about how disappointed the friends of the people who run The New York Times are about what happened,” he said.

Good for the New York Times. Their pimping of the email story bears seroius responsibility for what happened. “Disaffected Americans” do not have a champion going to the White House. A bunch of fools just sent an odious demagogue to the White House because he told them a fairy tale that made them feel good about themselves. Marks, every last one of them.

Mark Halperin is one of Trump’s marks too, apparently.

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Dylan Roof must be thrilled

by digby

The celebrations begin:

While one report of Ku Klux Klan activity in North Carolina following Donald Trump’s election as president was debunked, the real KKK has announced a rally in the state.

Trump, a Republican, was officially endorsed by the KKK during his campaign against Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. Trump won North Carolina on his way to winning the presidency, defeating Clinton here by nearly 5 percentage points.

Details on the rally celebrating Trump’s victory are scarce. It’s being held by The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which is based in Pelham – a small, unincorporated community about 45 minutes north of Burlington, near the Virginia border.

The group was behind a rally in South Carolina last year protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol building.

According to the group’s website, a North Carolina rally will be held Dec. 3. However, the KKK has not yet publicly announced a location or time for the rally.

The website refers to it as a “Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade” and announces in all-caps that “Trump’s race united my people.”

A report of KKK activity in Alamance County on Wednesday was debunked by the News & Observer and our partners at PolitiFact North Carolina.

Sounds like fun for the whole (white) family.

California Love

by digby

We’re the biggest bluest state in the union but we don’t matter in national elections at all. The only people who matter are white people in the midwest and the south. We might as well be a foreign country.

But anyway, our leaders did have something to say about the election:

SACRAMENTO – California Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) released the following statement on the results of the President election:

Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California.

We have never been more proud to be Californians.

By a margin in the millions, Californians overwhelmingly rejected politics fueled by resentment, bigotry, and misogyny.

The largest state of the union and the strongest driver of our nation’s economy has shown it has its surest conscience as well.

California is – and must always be – a refuge of justice and opportunity for people of all walks, talks, ages and aspirations – regardless of how you look, where you live, what language you speak, or who you love.

California has long set an example for other states to follow. And California will defend its people and our progress. We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress at the height of our historic diversity, scientific advancement, economic output, and sense of global responsibility.

We will be reaching out to federal, state and local officials to evaluate how a Trump Presidency will potentially impact federal funding of ongoing state programs, job-creating investments reliant on foreign trade, and federal enforcement of laws affecting the rights of people living in our state. We will maximize the time during the presidential transition to defend our accomplishments using every tool at our disposal.

While Donald Trump may have won the presidency, he hasn’t changed our values. America is greater than any one man or party. We will not be dragged back into the past. We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.

California was not a part of this nation when its history began, but we are clearly now the keeper of its future.

And so it begins

by digby

In case you were wondering, it’s already clear,he’s not going to follow the traditions, norms and rules:

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday refused to let a group of journalists travel with him to cover his historic first meeting with President Barack Obama, breaking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on the nation’s leader.

Trump flew from New York to Washington on his private jet without that “pool” of reporters, photographers and television cameras that have traveled with presidents and presidents-elect.

Trump’s flouting of press access was one of his first public decisions since his election Tuesday.

Trump’s meeting with Obama on Thursday will be recorded by the pool of White House reporters, photographers and TV cameras who cover the president.

News organizations had for weeks tried to coordinate a pool of journalists who could begin to travel with Trump immediately after Election Day if he won election. But his campaign did not cooperate with those requests and his senior advisers refused Wednesday, the day after the election, to discuss any such press arrangements.

Trump also broke from tradition as a candidate, refusing to allow a pool of campaign reporters, photographers or cameras to fly on his plane as he traveled to events.

Every president in recent memory has traveled with a pool of journalists when they leave the White House grounds. A pool of reporters and photographers were in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

The pool was just steps away from President Ronald Reagan when he was shot outside a hotel in the District of Columbia, and was stationed outside his hospital room as he recovered. The pool also travels on vacation and foreign trips and at times captures personal, historic moments of the presidency.

News organizations take turns serving in the small group, paying their way and sharing the material collected in the pool with the larger press corps. The pool also covers official events at the White House when space doesn’t allow for the full press corps.

It’s just the beginning.

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They created him now they’re normalizing him

by digby

I wrote about the press giving Trump a clean slate today for Salon:

Last spring when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were sewing up their parties’ respective nominations, I wrote about a phenomenon that I could see was going to be a problem going forward: the media’s need for “balance” making them normalize Trump and demonize Clinton. The contours of the coming general election were starting to form and what I saw wasn’t healthy. Over time it became downright toxic and the poison still infects our politics now that the election has been decided.

Throughout the primaries Clinton’s opponent Senator Bernie Sanders had declined to attack her about “her damn emails” and he was right to do so. The “email scandal” is a spurious charge that by having a private server she was guilty of a federal crime which is ridiculous. That belief spawned the execrable chants at Trump rallies of “lock her up” and “Hillary for Prison” and this became Trump’s primary attack against her. It was a very serious charge fraught with baggage that went back more than 20 years when the press demonized her as a “congenital liar” and a criminal (neither of which were true then either.)

Clinton, meanwhile, was trying to hit a moving target, a man who is thoroughly immoral and corrupt in every way, crudely insulting everyone except his loyal followers until it all seemed to merge into a cartoon caricature that his voters didn’t take seriously. His “policy” pronouncements from building a wall to banning Muslims to torturing terrorist suspects and killing their families were cheered on wildly by his fans and reported dutifully in the press as if he were a normal politician offering up his views on a highway bill. His myriad business failures were discussed but never put into the context of politics. His plans to keep his businesses going after the election wasn’t questioned.  His mistreatment of women was covered extensively and then dropped.

Month after month, Clinton was hammered in the press over the arcane email story with new “tranches” being continuously released under the Freedom of Information Act. Then Wikileaks began dumping the hacked, uncurated private correspondence from her staff, each new group creating headlines but revealing nothing criminal or even unethical.  It was an a relentless drumbeat that ceased to have any specific meaning early on and instead became a symbol of Clinton’s dishonesty, untrustworthiness and finally, her criminality.

The Gallup poll asked people this fall what were they were hearing about the two candidates:

As you can see, people had heard a whole lot about Clinton’s emails and it certainly wasn’t in a positive context. Trump, on other hand was associated with a bunch of different ideas that didn’t add up to much.

This was not because the media didn’t report all the negative Trump stories. It’s that they didn’t break through in any cohesive way while Clinton’s were highly focused on one issue that served as a proxy for her allegedly dishonest character. When FBi director James Comey dropped his email bombshell in the last week of the campaign the news media went wall to wall on the story, despite the fact that it was no more of a criminal matter than it had been before. The NY Times ran their front page with screaming headlines two days in a row.

And it made a difference. As Matthew Yglesias concludes in this interesting article for Vox:

Analysis of Trump’s victory will naturally tend to focus on the broad structural forces that drove his rise. But elections are close-run things. The difference between a narrow win in Florida and a narrow loss in Florida is just a few thousand votes. The typical Trump supporter was drawn to him out of either baseline partisanship or attraction to the peculiarities of his message. But the marginal Trump supporter is the reason he won. And that supporter was very likely influenced by the overwhelming media focus on the email matter.

Clinton won the popular vote but she lost the electoral college by very small margins in a number of states. There is little doubt that the email story contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat and as Yglesias says, it “is and always was overhyped bullshit.”

One might have hoped that the fact this absurd pursuit of a non-story may have changed the course of history (and not in a good way) that the media would do some soul searching about how they covered an election between a mainstream qualified woman and an unfit confidence man. But if the first 24 hours of coverage are any example, it’s unlikely.  For example, Maeve Reston of CNN tweeted this:

There is a totally inaccurate narrative out there that Trump didn’t get vetted by the press or got special treatment. That’s just wrong.

— Maeve Reston (@MaeveReston) November 9, 2016

It’s not that they didn’t vet Trump. It’s that they vetted him badly, in a way that people couldn’t understand. And where CNN and the other networks are concerned, the hours and hours of free airtime, the bending of the rules for him, the normalizing of his outrageous campaign rhetoric, which the network honchos admitted was great for ratings, certainly adds up to special treatment.

But if we thought they had “normalized” Trump before, it was nothing to what’s happening now. They assume that Donald Trump has “pivoted”, shorthand for their ongoing assumption that at some point Trump would drop the cretinous imbecile act he uses to entertain the rubes and morph into the intelligent, thoughtful businessman he really is.  This anticipation of the pivot was a regular feature of the campaign which obviously never actually happened — or ever will. Trump is Trump.

Nonetheless, the usual panels have been convened and the analysis of the election has gelled into an anodyne “change” message in which “the people” are just tired of the status quo and voted out the party in power.  The discussion is all about how President-elect Trump and the Democrats will have to reach out and bring the nation together.  The odious campaign he just ran to get to the White House, the ugliness he exposed in our body politic, has been disappeared. Donald Trump has been given a clean slate. It’s like it never happened.

The good news is that until presumptive Attorney General Rudy Giuliani brings Trump’s promised indictment against Hillary Clinton we won’t have to hear about the emails. The only time they came up yesterday was when someone actually asked if President Obama planned to give her a presidential pardon before he leaves office. She’s committed no crime and yet may face some sort of show trial to satisfy the slavering Trump voters still eager to see her punished, so the White House was non-committal.  The media’s normalization of Donald Trump is complete. The demonization of Hillary Clinton continues.

“Trump’s victory is a valuable lesson”

by digby

Considering that the media and most thinkers in the country now believe that this race really did have nothing to do with sexism, here’s a spot on right wing explanation for Trump’s win.

Never Bet Against the Patriarchy, Kids
Trump’s victory is a valuable lesson, if you’ll pay attention

Hegemonic masculinity scored a big win Tuesday night. Every feminist on Twitter was shrieking in despair and raging in fury at the result of the election in which Donald Trump’s win was interpreted as a referendum in favor of racism, sexism, homophobia and every other species of hate.

“All my friends on Facebook are going crazy,” my daughter-in-law said, when she came to pick up my grandson Wednesday. (Grandpa is an experienced babysitter, in addition to being an award-winning political commentator.) My daughter-in-law is 23 and her young friends had apparently bought into the liberal media narrative of the campaign, i.e., Trump is basically Hitler.

“Just don’t tell anyone how you voted,” I advised her.

“Oh, trust me, I won’t.”
Do I know that my daughter-in-law voted for Trump? No. For all I know, she might have voted for that dopehead Libertarian Gary Johnson. I interviewed Johnson once, in Las Vegas in 2010, and drew the conclusion that his pro-marijuana stance was not strictly a matter of politics, IYKWIMAITYD. Anyway, I can’t be accused of “outing” my daughter-in-law as a Trump voter, but certainly she wasn’t “going crazy” like her young friends on Facebook, for whom the defeat of Hillary Clinton was an apocalyptic catastrophe.

If you were (a) married, (b) white and (c) Christian, you probably voted for Donald Trump, whether you were male or female. Whereas unmarried women preferred Hillary Clinton by nearly a 2-to-1 margin, married women were almost equally divided, according to the exit polls published by CNN.

The day she joined the oppressive patriarchy.
My daughter-in-law is white and Christian, but so are most of her friends. Unlike her Trump-hating friends, however, she’s married. My son is not a huge Trump fan, but he is a married man, and that’s a 58% Trump demographic, whereas the anti-Jesus vote went 59% for Clinton. (Democrats hate God.)

The typical Trump voter was over 40 and also white. Yet the fact is, even younger white voters preferred Trump to Clinton. Notice that white people amounted to more than 70% of the exit-poll survey. Despite all the talk about multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, there are still upwards of 200 million white people in America, and it’s still legal for white Americans to vote. Also notice that 64% of the electorate is over 40, and no matter how much noise you Millennials make, we old folks still got y’all outnumbered.

Notice something? While only 4% of black women voted for Trump, black men were about three times more likely (13%) to vote for Trump. When you consider how many times Trump was labeled “racist” (basically Hitler) by Democrats and their media buddies, it’s pretty impressive for him to get about 1-out-of-8 votes from black men, and Trump got 1-out-of-3 votes from Hispanic males. Why? Because he’s a man, baby — a very successful man who says what he thinks and isn’t going to let some woman boss him around. Trump es muy macho, Trump es el hombre grande, and you’ve got to figure a lot of Latino guys respect a man with that kind of old-fashioned swagger.

Money talks, right? Trump’s business success was his basic claim to fame, and he did best with middle-class and upper-income voters who, in case you didn’t notice, comprised 65% of the electorate. A majority of voters (55%) reported household income between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, whereas only 36% came from families earning less than $50,000. The rich might feel sympathy for the poor, but folks with money in the bank usually vote Republican.

He’s not wrong.  Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote but Trump won the Real American vote. And they are the only people who have ever mattered in this country.

Amanda Marcotte has more on this, from the slightly less celebratory perspective.

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Bullshitter-in-Chief
by Tom Sullivan

Until a week ago, this saying was familiar to Chicago Cubs fans: “They wouldn’t be the Cubs if they didn’t break our hearts.” Then the lovable losers won the World Series. Early Wednesday morning, not-so-lovable Donald Trump won the presidency. Propelled by a nation discontented with all the losing he told them they’d experienced at the hands of suspicious foreigners and political sharks, Trump now has to deliver all that winning he promised supporters they would get sick and tired of. Charlie Pierce wonders how long it will take him to break his supporters’ hearts:

He will break their hearts, sooner or later. He likely will not build a big, beautiful wall for which Mexico pays. He will sign a budget that makes their lives harder. Their nephew with cerebral palsy will lose his Medicaid funding, or a fracking company will ruin their water or cause the ground under their homes to shake, or their father will get called up and die in some attempt to “destroy” ISIS, or someone in their family will call the local pharmacy and discover that a pre-existing condition makes a considerable difference again.

How will they react, all those people who made up just enough of a margin in just enough states to put Donald Trump in the Oval Office? Will they actually blame him, or will they realize at some level that to blame him is to blame themselves? History indicates that they will offload that anger and dread onto the usual targets. But, this time, they might not. And woe betide the president who is president when that finally happens.

As Mr. Spock once observed, after a time “having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting.” Kansans, including Republicans, have found that to be true of Gov. Sam Brownback’s magic bean theory about tax exemptions for business owners producing economic unicorns. Jobs have disappeared and budget holes are chronic. Democrats Tuesday picked up seats in both houses of the state legislature. “There’s very likely to be an anti-Brownback majority in the Legislature,” according to Bob Beatty, a political scientist as Washburn University. Now Donald Trump has to make good on even more grandiose promises.

Owing in part to the media chasing yet another Clinton faux scandal, Paul Waldman writes, “Donald Trump, the most unqualified, ignorant, authoritarian, impulsive, reckless candidate in history is going to be president of the United States in part because, and let me repeat this, Hillary Clinton used the wrong email address.” Trump certainly possesses those many flaws, but perhaps his worst is something else.

An aphorism I live by is that the most important thing you need to know in life is what you don’t know. A medical degree does not make you a brain surgeon. An engineering degree does not make you a rocket scientist. Business success does not make you a statesman. Trump’s greatest flaw is not knowing when he doesn’t know something. The man with no international affairs experience blusters that he knows more about defeating terrorism than his soon-to-be generals. The man who never served in the military bullshitted his way through a debate question about the nuclear triad he will soon control. The man who ascended to the presidency on attacks against Hillary Clinton’s email habits may not even know how to use a personal computer, and bullshits his way through questions about “the cyber.” Trump being Trump, he will try to bullshit his way through passing legislation and through who-knows-what national or international crisis that presents itself.

Popular disgust with the status quo propelled Trump to the presidency as a Republican. It arose because after decades of being played for dupes by their leaders, the GOP base finally caught on that they were being bullshitted. Finally, people rebelled. Also against Democrats more interested in business interests than voters’. What made Trump their champion was how he out-bullshitted the bullshitters. Somehow, in spite of his sketchy personal history, this made him seem more honest and trustworthy. We will see how far Trump’s talent for bullshitting gets him with supporters once he breaks their hearts.

Fuck it, I’m posting this anyway

By Dennis Hartley

On the eve of a newsworthy cliffhanger, it’s a common journalistic practice to have rough drafts standing by to cover either outcome.

And so it was that I had selected the perfect movie clip to express my anticipated feeling of unfettered ebullience, should Hillary win.

She didn’t.

But you know what? I politely refuse to let this ruin my day (that was relegated to last night, salved by some dark chocolate and an OC).

So just watch this, because (as my pal Digby likes to say) you need it:

Because after all…

I’m rational as hell and I’m not gonna take this! 

By Spocko

We can push back against bullies. But they don’t just roll over. They fight back. They use dirty tricks. They have an enemies list. They are the Watergate burglars, people who use their power to harass and punish.  They use their power to get more power. When WE get in power and DON’T go after them, it means they get away with it.

If we fight them, they will go after us. We will prepare for it. When they do hit us, we USE that attack to gather more strength. Americans love the underdog. So much so that even the rich and powerful want to be the underdog. They always position themselves as the victim and want people to feel bad for them when they get their feeling hurt by someone calling them “fat cats.”

Don’t give up people! It’s not about just “surviving” this, it’s about seeing this as an opportunity for great things.

My friend Athenae has a piece about “surviving.”

Women got the vote in no small part because Alice Paul starved herself in prison to ask rights of a Democratic president. Because Susan B. Anthony was beaten in the street. Because Ida B. Wells lived under daily threat of lynching. Those people didn’t “survive” something. That wasn’t their goal.

And a lot of them didn’t survive. A lot of them threw their bodies on the wheels and gave everything they had to stop what was happening.
America didn’t survive their losses. America is America because of their losses. Because of their sacrifices. Because of their heroism.

I’m not gonna take this! And neither should you.

Push for investigations.  Spending time on investigations isn’t a waste of time if it uncovers actually lawlessness.

The right is going to govern for their buddy lobbyists. But there are now a lot of pissed off women and men whose lives are going to be destroying who have nothing left to lose. There are people whose lives were destroyed but the left didn’t want prosecute.

If we are successful with investigations and prosecutions Trump might get credit, but justice will still be done, and don’t we still want that? If we fail, then that is another thing that his supporters can see he failed in and lied about.

 For years I’ve noted that the things that upset the left aren’t the same things that upset the right.  If you wanted to leak something that upsets his base you leak him calling them suckers or how he is planning to rip them off and laughing at them. You don’t show how he cheated China, you show evidence of deals he cut with China and Russia that keep US jobs going offshore.

I wonder why oppo research people didn’t leak stuff that would upset Trump’s base? I think it’s because they only thought about what would upset them as rational people. What would upset people who considered themselves moral?

People who believe they were looked down upon and picked on for being “normal” see themselves as victims.  You don’t use the same message with all audiences. What works with one audience doesn’t always work for another.

To satisfy the fact-based law side, look into all the hacking

• Voting machine hacks
• Personnel and financial records
• Email and database hacks

If it’s not the NSA taking our data, who is? 

Prosecute, Prosecute, Prosecute

The government didn’t want to go after the state powers that hacked the Office of Personnel Management. or the massive JPMorgan Chase hack. But they do know who did it. They didn’t act because they didn’t think the foreign power would use it–widely. But evidence shows that data from hacks was used to assist in the DNC phishing attacks.

Look into voting machine hacks and the manipulation of social media. 
Examine the attacks on the US internet. 

There is a lot if data and hard evidence there. I’ve talked to tech journalists who have written about this in detail, but I’ve noticed that nobody in the political press have picked up on this. Partly this is because the government doesn’t’ want to talk about it. But now?

Did all of this have an impact on the election? Hell yes!

Did people in Trump’s organization give aid and comfort to our enemies?  I think so, but let’s find out for sure because there is a law about this in the constitution.

Imagine all the men and women who are privy to information they might leak. They were afraid of the consequences of leaking data before, imagine the consequences after Trump is in power.

The good news is the mainstream media just might take this seriously now. If they don’t, we can, and screw them for not doing their job in the first place.

The media followed Trump around listening to his alternative reality instead of calling up the people who could provide info about Trump that would disgust EVEN HIS BASE.  Somewhere out there is a woman who was a 13-year-old girl with a story to tell about her and Trump. Are the allegations real? We don’t know, but whatever it was, now it’s a cover up.

Look into the voting suppression and voter intimidation with guns at polls
Then change the laws! We have evidence why it matters.

Look for violations of federal laws and prosecute people NOW, during the next 8 weeks while laws are still in effect. For people who think “It’s a lame duck session, what’s the point?” This work doesn’t have to stop in January! It can intensify!

Remember this guy from Animal House? He’s a fictional character but he didn’t take it either! I’m a real person, based on a fictional character, but Star Trek and Spock inspired me. So let Bluto inspire you! After all, he became a senator!

I’ve modified his speech a bit to fit the moment. But the SPIRIT, the GUTS he talks about are what we need. And maybe this situation does require a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.
LLAP
Spocko

Animal House, “I’m not I’m not gonna take this! (link to quote)

“What the f–k happened to the Progressives I used to know? Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts, huh? This could be the greatest day of our lives, but you’re gonna let it be the worst. ‘Ooh, we’re afraid to go with you, Spocko, we might get in trouble.’ (shouting) Well, just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I’m not gonna take this. Trump, he’s a done man! Pence, done! Giuliani…

Kirk “Spocko’s right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now, we could fight ’em with conventional weapons. That could take years and cost millions of lives. No, in this case, I think we have to go all out. I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.”

We’re just the guys to do it…LET’S DO IT!

Animal House clip