Month: November 2016

What kind of democracy is this anyway?

by digby

I have no idea if anything is wrong with the vote count that gave Donald Trump the electoral college victory. It was very close in a few states and Clinton is slated to win the popular vote by a large margin. In fact, she will have won more votes that any white male president ever won in American history including our president-elect. (That is another way of saying she won more votes than anyone but Barack Obama.)

There is also the matter of the hacking that took place throughout the election to benefit Trump. Whether it might have also happened in ways we don’t know about seems remote, but not impossible. Clinton’s large popular vote victory combined with the razor edge electoral vote victory in specific states is bound to raise questions in this environment. Hacking happened in 2016 and there are ways to hack without a machine being connected to he internet. Likely? Not really. But nothing seems impossible these days. After all, we have an unqualified, cretinous white nationalist demagogue as president now, and millions more people voted against him than for him. And there were warnings in the major papers prior to the election about just such possibilities.

Jill Stein is raising money for a recount and is evidently raising millions. I don’t know if it will add up to anything but I can’t see why recounting would hurt anything either. If, as everyone predicts, it will not change the outcome then Trump should probably welcome it.

This piece by Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at the bigger picture:

Hillary Clinton is going to win the popular vote by a margin greater than the total population of 40% of the states

A couple of days after the election I estimated that Clinton would end up winning the popular vote by about two million ballots. That now seems like a significant underestimate.

As of this morning, Clinton is already ahead by nearly 2.1 million votes, and that’s with nearly 1.5 million California ballots still to be counted. California, home to just under 40 million coastal elites, voted for Clinton by a nearly two to one margin, so the outstanding California vote alone is likely to bump Clinton’s lead by another 400,000+ votes.

Most of the rest of the uncounted votes comes from places like New York and Washington, collectively home to 27 million coastal elites. By the time all the ballots are counted, Clinton could well have THREE MILLION more votes than Trump. Note that 40% of the United States of America have total populations of less than three million. In 34 of the 50 states, Clinton’s projected vote margin is larger than all the votes cast in the presidential election in those states.

I’m old enough to remember (which is to say I can remember stuff before December 2000) when the prospect of a presidential candidate winning the electoral college but losing the popular vote was talked about as if it would constitute a potentially major political and even constitutional crisis. After all such a thing hadn’t happened since the 19th century, at a time when democratic norms were much weaker, given that most of the adult population couldn’t legally vote.

Now that the vote has been extended to women, blacks, and other coastal elites you would think it would be, to use what my political science colleagues tell me is the appropriate technical term, a huge fucking deal that the losing candidate is going to end up with many millions of more votes than the winner.

The arguments that it isn’t are all quite lame. The major ones, in ascending order of stupidity, are:

(1) No one knows if Clinton would have gotten more votes than Trump if we had an actual democracy, as opposed to a bunch of creaky nonsense left over from the 18th century aka The Wisdom of the Framers. Yes, this question is like asking what the square root of a million is — nobody will ever be able to solve it.

Srsly, what basis is there for thinking that the national popular vote total would be significantly different in a direct national election? Campaign resources would be deployed differently at the margin, but so what? If this election tells us anything it’s that campaign resources at the margin seem to end up having little effect on the actual vote.

Would turnout be higher overall? And even if you assume it would be, again so what? Some people are actually making the argument that since turnout would supposedly be higher in a national popular vote, and there are more white voters than non-white voters, and the majority of white voters voted for Trump, this means that Trump would have won a national popular vote, or at least that it would have been much closer, because after all more white people would have voted! (That more non-white people would also have voted, and that these people voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, is not being factored into this particular equation).

(2) Whining about the popular vote is like a football team claiming it should have won because it got more total yards even though it scored fewer points. This argument can be summed up as, the rules are the rules so shut up already. Also it’s a terrible analogy. The rules that define which team wins a football game are inherently arbitrary. By contrast, the principle that the person who gets the most votes should win isn’t arbitrary. Rather, it’s called “democracy.”

Speaking of which . . .

(3) America is a republic, not a democracy, derp.

Apparently millions of people don’t know what the words “republic” and “democracy” mean. If the Electoral College was actually an example of a republican form of government it would now vote to make Clinton president, on the grounds that Donald Trump is a ludicrously unqualified joke of a candidate, leaving aside the noxious character of his political beliefs, if any, and therefore it would be best to elect somebody who was vastly better qualified and got millions of more votes to boot.

But I more than suspect that the media are going to treat this increasingly embarrassing situation in the same way they treated the unpleasantness back in 2000,* i.e., we must no longer speak of this, because of the need to unite behind the People’s Choice, even though he actually wasn’t, but who’s counting anyway?

That’s exactly what will happen. I’m waiting for the day that Wolf Blitzer looks at the camera and smirks that Democrats have to “get over it.” That’s how we do this. 2000 was a trial run for the way the nation would deal with this undemocratic bullshit.

This is not common. It happened three times in the first 100 years of the nation and didn’t happen again for another 112:

1824: John Quincy Adams
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes
1888: Benjamin Harrison
2000: George W. Bush

Now it’s happened twice in 16 years. And it’s delivered two of the most ignorant, unfit men to lead the country in our history.

This is not working.

After 2000, I would go to activist gatherings and meetings and someone would ask me what I would change about the constitution if I could and I always said abolish the electoral college, that it was undemocratic, unnecessary and a disaster that was always waiting to happen. To me 2000 was a turning point in our democracy (well, the ridiculous impeachment that came before was the precursor) when the norms really started to fade away and the GOP decided they could win by any means necessary. But I was always scoffed at and laughed at for saying it with people rolling their eyes at me like I was obsessing over something trivial and silly.

But here we are. It’s the most valuable vote suppression mechanism the right has going for it. Twice in sixteen years they have proved to Democratic voters that even if they vote and even if they win, they can still lose. It’s very hard to argue that every vote counts at this point.

If we survive Trump it’s important to get rid of this anachronism. You cannot call yourself a democracy and allow this to continue.

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Happy T-Day everyone

by digby

My chihuahua friend Cheech

Here’s hoping that we can all catch our breath on this long week-end, catch up on some sleep, eat some good food and give ourselves and chance to regroup and recharge. I know I need to.

Have a good one.

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Survival advice for the new reality

by digby

I posted a piece the other day called “Him” by Timothy Snyder, a professor of History at Yale.  If you missed it, I urge you to read it.

Snyder has posted this on his Facebook page that is equally evocative and important:

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom. 

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

These are not things we want to think about. But we probably should.

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Now more than ever: A Thanksgiving Prayer

By Dennis Hartley

I’ve always thought of this as an ironic prayer…

…but now it strikes me as more of a chilling prophecy:

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
Modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and falsify until
the bare lies shine through

Thanks for the KKK.

…or decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for “Kill a Queer
for Christ” stickers.

Thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind their
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Happy holidays!

More at Den of Cinema

–Dennis Hartley

The new hotness
by Tom Sullivan

Nothing like a good drubbing to motivate people. I suppose that’s something to be thankful for this morning. The upside is it seems to be getting people off the couch for the first time ever. Activist friends around the country report that Democratic Party meetings are brimming with new faces. The answering machine at the local Democratic Party office this week stopped picking up messages after maxing out the memory. Callers are almost all women.

“Hello, my name is ____. My phone number is ____. I’d like to volunteer. I want to help organize.” They don’t even know what for. They just need to do something.

Political organizing is mostly long hours and grunt work. That’s not obvious to people jumping in for the first time. People new to politics arrive with unrealistic expectations. (No, we don’t have any paying positions available; we’re all volunteers.) We’re still cleaning up from the election after work and on weekends: shredding walk lists, recycling yard signs, preparing for a special election to fill a vacancy created when one of our candidates got elected to another office. Our governor’s race is not yet settled. Noobs alarmed by the ascendancy of white nationalists may figure we’re old and busted because we’re not there to answer the phones 24/7/365 and waiting with a menu of exciting and meaningful things for them to do RIGHT NOW. So it goes. My job is open in April.

This is a good problem to have. A seriously good problem. But there will be a learning curve. For example, there is a call for a Women’s March on Washington. People here are wondering who is organizing buses, but perhaps prematurely. “[A]fter the stunning upset of a candidate widely viewed as a fascist sexual predator over what might have been America’s first female president, a lot of women had the same idea,” writes Christina Cauterucci:

Originally dubbed the Million Woman March, it’s now the Women’s March on Washington, it’s scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, and, as of this writing, 116,856 people from all over the country have said on Facebook that they are “going.” What they’re “going” to—and when, and where—nobody knows. Not even the people in charge.

The event is “still in its early planning stages.” Planning and logistics for such an event are complex. The National Park Service has “seven permit applications from five organizations for the same sites at the same time” already in the queue. Cauterucci continues with a cautionary tale about looking before leaping:

Without any clear direction from major players in the field, a group of motivated women with no grasp of communications strategy or how busy the Lincoln Memorial might be on inauguration weekend stumbled into the vacuum. These white women basically wished a march on Washington out of the air—and thanks in large part to the sweat and know-how of the women of color who’ve helped them right the ship, some version of that wish looks likely to come true. Perez told me it’s easy to get overwhelmed when an event attracts more than 116,000 RSVPs before a solid plan is in place. “Then your initial next reaction is ‘let’s get organized,’ ” she said. “We’re doing the work. We’re doing the best that we can.”

A lot of this new surge in activism is still emergent.

I called a friend in Raleigh yesterday afternoon to see what she knew about new groups forming for women to address Trumpism, etc. She had to call me back, she said. She was in a six-hour meeting right then doing just that. They were forming the NC chapter of Emerge America:

Emerge America is the premier training program for Democratic women.
We inspire women to run, we hone their skills to win.
Our goal is clear: to increase the number of Democratic women in public office.

A broader problem is going to be installing new blood in a Democratic Party encrusted with old ideas and old habits and slow to make way for new talent still on that learning curve. Sen. Chuck Schumer may have rushed to embrace Rep. Keith Ellison’s bid for DNC chair, but he’s reading the wind, not suddenly embracing a fresh vision. There still is not an appetite at top levels for new leadership. The White House is exploring instead whether Joe Biden might be interested or “whether Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez and former Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan would be willing to run for the post.” Whatever their accomplishments and talents, that won’t say “new hotness” to an emerging generation of activists hungry for a party overhaul. It will sound more like “old and busted.” Now, if Michelle Obama wanted the job….

Will they hand over the keys or not?

“Of course, Thanksgiving is a family holiday as much as a national one,” Obama said at Wednesday’s ceremony, “so for the past seven years I’ve established another tradition: Embarrassing my daughters with a corny-copia of dad jokes about turkeys.”

QOTD: A cult member

by digby

A radio talk show host:

“You may be upset Trump has signaled he will not ‘persecute Hillary,’ but you will see in short the this was brilliant strategic positioning,” he wrote on Twitter. “When Trump looks at an apple, he doesn’t just see the apple, he sees the soil and the tree and the farmer and the rain. Trust him.”

You may remember this one from the Bush years:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile. 

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The Man in the High Tower

by digby

Congressman Sean Duffy on the White Supremacists celebrating Trump’s victory with Nazi salutes and chants of “Hail Trump!”

DUFFY: [Trump] did condemn them and that’s a good thing. Someone who says, ‘they maybe endorse me, but I don’t endorse their viewpoint of the world.’ Again, I think it’s important that a leader step forward and make the right move, which is what he did.

My concern is that Barack Obama, when he had a chance, didn’t condemn the riots across America that were in protest of Donald Trump’s victory in the election or didn’t condemn ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It might have taken him time in your viewpoint or in another’s viewpoint, but he did the right thing.

SCIUTTO: You’re equating Americans protesting a politician with outright hate and bigotry from a group that was using the Hitler salute to celebrate Donald Trump’s victory and are nothing more than white supremacists? I mean, that’s not a fair comparison.

DUFFY: No, no, no. Both are disgusting, for different ways.

SCIUTTO: You’re putting them on equal footing? You’re putting political protests on a footing with white supremacists?

DUFFY: Let me explain. I think this is a horrible group, don’t share their values or their viewpoint. But you have people taking to the streets and damaging property, pulling people out of cars and beating them up, little girls getting beaten up in schools for supporting Donald Trump. This was violence on American streets. So they’re different kind of activity by each group, but both groups need to be condemned.

It’s one thing if you stand on the sidewalk and hold a sign in protest. That’s the American 1st Amendment right to protest. But when you get violent and you damage property and you hurt people, that’s something completely different.

This is the right’s bizarroworld alternate reality. Here is reality:

After Trump won the election in early November, “Black Lives Matters” and anti-Trump protesters did not riot to the extent that the Republican congressman suggested. There were mostly peaceful demonstrations across the country for several days. There were a few isolated instances of more destructive protests led by a “smaller segment” of “anarchist-types,” according to a police department official in Portland, Oregon.

Meanwhile, there have been hundreds of incidents of hate crimes committed against people of color, blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and women since Trump’s win.

There have been a couple of incidents of people beating up people who claim to be Trump supporters. Literally a handful. There have been hundreds of incidents reported of Trump supporters committing crimes against people of color, Muslims, Jews, immigrants and women. There are probably many more.

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by digby

I, for one, am shocked, I tell you, shocked:

Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency with less support from black and Hispanic voters than any president in at least 40 years, a Reuters review of polling data shows, highlighting deep national divisions that have fueled incidents of racial and political confrontation. 

Trump was elected with 8 percent of the black vote, 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote, according to the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll. 

Among black voters, his showing was comparable to the 9 percent captured by George W. Bush in 2000 and Ronald Reagan in 1984. But Bush and Reagan both did far better with Hispanic voters, capturing 35 percent and 34 percent, respectively, according to exit polling data compiled by the non-partisan Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. 

And Trump’s performance among Asian-Americans was the worst of any winning presidential candidate since tracking of that demographic began in 1992.

No, Trump didn’t really change his mind on torture

by digby

The recaps of Trump’s NY Times interview yesterday indicated that general Mattis had made him rethink his commitment to torture which surprised me since I’m convinced that brutality and dominance are central to his view of how the world works.

It turns out he didn’t. Here’s the quote:

General Mattis is a strong, highly dignified man. I met with him at length and I asked him that question. I said, what do you think of waterboarding? He said — I was surprised — he said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful.’ He said, ‘I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.’ And I was very impressed by that answer. I was surprised, because he’s known as being like the toughest guy. And when he said that, I’m not saying it changed my mind. 

He was impressed and surprised because you’d think a guy called “Mad Dog” would be as tough as Donald Trump. But he’s not.

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