Trump was supposedly a very good high school baseball player so it’s weird that he is refusing to throw out the first pitch this year as presidents always do. Most people figure that he’s too vain to take a chance on failing to throw it over the plate or he’s afraid he’s going to get booed. (He doesn’t ever appear in front of anything but adoring crowds.)
I suspect it’s a little bit of both. That picture up top doesn’t look like the great high school player maintained very good form over the years. But who knows? Maybe he’s just another Fernando Valenzuela. (I doubt it…)
For fun, here are other presidents throwing the first ball:
Also, he doesn’t really have a lot of strength and stamina and seems a little low energy these days. Yesterday he looked downright tuckered and very out of sorts.
I don’t know if this level of liberal activism will hold but I suspect it will. Donald Trump is such an offensive person and he’s surrounded himself with such scary people who want to enact such a dangerous agenda that he’s managed to activate every sector of center and left concern to join the resistance. There’s really nobody who has a benign view of him. Huffington Post reports:
New polling from SurveyMonkey quantifies just how concentrated that enthusiasm is: Self-described liberal Democrats are more than twice as likely as the public as a whole to say they’ve engaged in some form of activism during the past two months. That ratio extends to a wide variety of actions, with liberal Democrats roughly two times likelier to report having shared opinions on social media, signed petitions, written to Congress, donated money, protested and attended local meetings.
By some measures, progressive women seem to be particularly motivated. Although their overall levels of activism were similar, female liberal Democrats were 7 percentage points likelier than their male counterparts to report protesting, marching or demonstrating in the last two months, according to SurveyMonkey, and 6 points likelier to say they’d written to their members of Congress. In another survey, conducted by The Washington Post in February, they were 13 percentage points likelier than Democratic men to say they planned to get more involved in political causes this year.
“I think there was something really catalyzing about this election, for women in particular,” said Laura Moser, a newly minted activist and the founder of a text-message-based system called Daily Action. The service suggests a daily civic action for subscribers to carry out each morning ― often calling a legislator to register opposition to one of Trump’s policies or nominees. Since the service launched last December, according to Moser, it has garnered more than 250,000 subscribers and logs an average of 10,000 calls per day.
The activists flooding congressional offices with those calls are overwhelmingly female, according to a survey conducted by Democratic pollsters Lake Research Partners and shared with HuffPost. Of the more than 28,000 of the group’s members who responded to a poll sent out by text message, 86 percent were women and more than 60 percent were 46 or older.
Because the pollsters don’t have the demographic information on everyone in the group, there’s no way to know exactly how well the responses reflect the total makeup of Daily Action, let alone other activists. But Daniel Gotoff, the head of Lake Research’s New York office, said in an email that he was confident the result represented the group’s most active users ― “the ones making the calls and showing up at events.”
Two-thirds of those polled said they’d joined one of the women’s marches after Trump’s inauguration ― an event that left many attendees eager to continue their activism. They’re especially fired up about health care and climate change, which 37 percent and 36 percent, respectively, named as their “#1 voting issue.” Far fewer named reproductive rights, immigration or the economy as their priority.
Part of that likely comes down to the timing of the survey, which was fielded March 17-20, just as the debate over Republicans’ Obamacare repeal bill came to a head amid intense opposition from those who had voted for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Environmental issues also stand out as an area where Trump’s latest policies fall especially and increasingly out of step with public opinion.
The Daily Action users polled don’t intend to give up the fight anytime soon: About three-quarters said they’d be very likely to attend protests against the Trump administration’s policies in the future. SurveyMonkey’s national polling also finds liberal Democrats strikingly gung-ho about carrying their activism through to the next few years.
But it remains to be seen if progressive’s current level of enthusiasm can last through the 2018 midterms. While poor Democratic turnout likely didn’t cost Clinton the election last year, the party does traditionally struggle in midterms, when many of their base voters, such as younger Americans and minorities, tend to turn out in relatively low numbers.
Moser said she hopes the current level of progressive engagement will last through the setbacks inherent in facing off against a Republican-controlled White House and Congress.
“I think that’s a real concern that we’re all grappling with,” she said, noting that the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare had helped to buoy activists’ spirits after their failure to prevent the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.
“I think the energy will return as the midterms approach more…. It’s really hard for people who’ve invested so much of themselves in these battles to confront the reality that we will lose a lot. I do think 2018, as it gets closer, it’s a more concrete thing we can do. I hope people can sustain it, but I understand why the fatigue can set in.”
That poll result at the top refers to a recent Gallup poll of Democrats asking whether they want Dems to compromise with Trump. The vast majority say no or are neutral.
If the Democrats want to keep this level of resistance to Trump at a high enough level to possibly shift one house of congress in 2018, they’ll keep that in mind. The fasts way to disillusion their troops will be to advance that monster’s legitimacy in any way.
Are you arguing about heathcare with a sockpuppet?
by Spocko
Sheri Lewis and Lamb Chop, a good sock puppet
I was out-of-town* away from electronic communications last week, when I got home I heard and read about the successes of all my various activist friends in the healthcare front. Good job folks!
To catch up I listened to Sam Seder and Digby for an analysis of the whole situation. The conversation started before the vote to repeal Obamacare happened, and ended right after they heard it failed.
As a time-traveling Vulcan I know how this will end, but for the rest of you it is good to hear Digby and Sam giving the correct analysis, which is, “Okay we beat this back. Now they will work to sabotage the rest.” Digby and Sam also talk about how Trump and Ryan will work to sabotage the ACA. Because you know they will, but what specifically will they sabotage?
Here is what to expect, stories about:
ObamaCare fraud committed by PATIENTS (which is the rarest kind, but fits their bias of brown people getting something for nothing.)
“Ill-eagles” getting FREE healthcare
High premium costs for users (this one is legit, but came about because of the end of subsidies, something that could be remedied.)
Insurance companies leaving states with the BS reason that, “ObamaCare’s a disaster” (the real reason, not enough fed and state money to make barrels of money–only buckets.)
So where are we going to see these stories? The usually places, but this time they will also pop up in your own self-selected, online world. In fact, it probably already has.
Example: When I returned I read a story from NBC’s Lester Holt on Facebook. It was shared by a friend. I was going to start replying to one of the commenters I knew. He was using a flawed premise with an Ayn Randian worldview. But since he does respond to facts and proof I did some research first. That’s when I found dozens of “people” making the same type of comments.
Now this happens a lot when people are exposed to a steady diet of right-wing crap, but I noticed something different about these comments. The commenters were all pushing ideas that specifically benefited healthcare insurance companies. More research revealed 100’s of similar accounts, making the same kind of comments, spread out over 5 months in the comments sections of various publications and websites. I had stumbled across a sockpuppet campaign for the healthcare insurance companies.
Woman posing in front
of future sockpuppet army
Good Sock Puppet = Lamb Chop Following Citizens United one voice no longer represents just one vote. 100’s of thousands of “voices” can now represent a handful of people. People think it will be easy to spot and ignore sockpuppets. Not so fast folks, this isn’t the easily spotted sock puppet Lamb Chop.
In my case the story was a real one from NBC and it was shared by a real friend. In the comments real people were discussing it, sincerely. I didn’t recognize all of the people discussing this, but I thought they must be friends of friends. I was going to engage, but first I looked up one person I was going to respond to. She was from San Antonio, had a military background and was a Republican. Okay, I know people like that, and it made sense she would say these things. But for some reason I decided to look a level down, that’s when I found out she was a construct. An avatar. A sockpuppet.
“These sockpuppets don’t have any real impact. Besides, they only influence stupid people. Serious people spot them and ignore them.”
–Savvy McSavvyington [He ignored the impact of talk radio too.]
First, do not dismiss sockpuppets as inconsequential
These sockpuppets can influence others, who then make the same points. These messages come via a channel that they trust, making them more powerful. Sockpuppets can be subtle, they don’t have to start ideas to influence, just reinforce those of real voices.
Facebook provides an excellent way to inject these ideas into self-isolating, self-reinforcing sub-groups. (You know those strange requests to be friends with someone you don’t really know, but has one mutual friend? That’s how they get into these groups.) The people in these groups then spread these ideas to people who wouldn’t normally see them, like friends and family.
BTW, Homeland just included a storyline about sockpuppets. It was filled with lots of exposition about it and all the laws that were being broken–if it came from within the government. But these healthcare insurance sockpuppets aren’t coming from governments. They are coming from private companies, who keep their clients’ identities private.
These healthcare insurance companies spend millions to keep the spice money flowing. I know this not from my time traveling, but from listening to the actual financial conference calls of health insurance companies, reading the required reports of public drug companies and talking to insurance experts like my friend Wendell Potter. (I’m looking forward to his new non-profit, Tarbell, investigating this.)
There is public information that these healthcare insurance companies all got assurances from Republicans that they were going to get at least 18 months where nothing would impact their positive cash flow. This includes guarantees of no cuts in drug profits. And they got what they wanted.
The truth is out there, it’s just not tweeted.
Newly created sock puppets ready to decieve.
Will they push healthcare insurance company
propaganda, or climate change denial?
What this means is that healthcare insurance companies were allies in keeping the ACA going. Especially the parts that kept money flowing to them.
Now they will pivot to figuring out ways to “improve the ACA” and by improve I mean get rid of anything that costs them money. They will hire the usual paid protesters (aka lobbyists) to bring back lifetime caps and to kick people with pre-existing conditions out of the insurance pool. They will frame this as “relief” from the horrible regulations of Obamacare. They will claim it is bankrupting them so they have to leave states and exchanges (specifically the ones that aren’t subsidized.) Then, in the next quarterly conference call, they will tell investors the steady infusion of government cash will not stop and profits are steady.
The push to “fix” the parts of ACA that COSTS healthcare insurance companies money will happen out of the headlines and at super PAC fundraisers. Now that Trump, Ryan and the Freedom Cactus did us a favor by bringing the benefits of ACA to the surface, the healthcare insurance lobbyists will hire firms to push the parts of Obamacare they reluctantly accepted, like removal of lifetime caps and being forced to accept people with pre-existing conditions. They will also employ an army of sockpuppets.
Chris Hayes put together a must-watch mashup of how Donald Trump used his patented Trump University flim-flam to win the White House. Watch it here.
The lawsuit against Trump University ended yesterday in a settlement for his victims:
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel ruled in favor of a $25 million settlement between President Trump and customers of his defunct Trump University, NBC reports. Trump and his lawyers reached a settlement shortly after the election; Trump did not admit to wrongdoing in the case, but nevertheless agreed to settle.
“This never was a university,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last June. “The fraud started with the name of the organization. You can’t just go around saying this is the George Stephanopoulos Law Firm/Hospital/University without actually qualifying and registering, so it was really a fraud from beginning to end.”
One wonders how the rest of us can collect damages as victims of what was never a presidency. The sort of glitz and bamboozlement that worked for Trump in his business dealings is failing him horribly on the world stage. Leaders of world powers are not so easily bamboozled, Trump being the exception that proves the misrule. Trump’s poll numbers in his first 100 days have sunk lower than Obama’s lowest, and Obama is the president Trump seems most eager to best.
President Trump brought his chaos-and-loyalty theory of management into the White House, relying on competing factions, balanced by trusted family members, with himself perched atop as the gut-instinct
decider. He now realizes this approach has flopped, and feels baffled and paralyzed by how to fix it, numerous friends and advisers tell us.
[…]
The chaos dimension has created far more chaos than anticipated. Come nightfall, Trump is often on the phone with billionaire, decades-long friends, commiserating and critiquing his own staff. His most important advisers are often working the phone themselves, trashing colleagues and either spreading or beating down rumors of turmoil and imminent changes.
This has created a toxic culture of intense suspicion and insecurity. The drama is worse than what you read.
Neal Gabler admits he, like many others, got Trump wrong. While Trump may dsiplay the style of fascist leaders and have the temperament, he lacks the skills:
It’s not Trump’s ability to marshal the forces of repression that should terrify us. It’s his inability to marshal forces to conduct even the most basic governance. Trump really is a presidential Joker. He knows how to wreak havoc, but he doesn’t seem to know how to do, or seem to want to do, much else.
The threat from Trump isn’t fascism, Gabler believes, but anarchy. From an anarchist leading anarchists, in fact. Exhibit A: the Republican insurance plan that was doomed to fail:
Just think about it for a moment. The Republican replacement was really a non-insurance bill, by which I mean it flew in the face of the most fundamental principle of insurance — the healthy pay for those who aren’t. It is the sort of community of interest that is anathema to conservatives who believe it is every man for himself.
The upshot is that you cannot have “conservative” insurance. It isn’t tenable. When you have freedom of choice with every person getting to choose whether to be insured or not, and with those who are insured getting to choose what they want to have covered, you do not have a viable insurance system. You have anarchy. Anarchy was built right into the Republican plan.
Built in because it was never a plan at all. Like Trump, Republicans never had any interest in one. But huge tax cuts for the already rich is a hill they will die on.
When you come down to it, Republicans are really anarchists dedicated to undermining government in the furtherance of an economic state of nature where the rich rule. What we saw these past few weeks was not the failure of Republicanism, as so many pronounced on Friday, but its logical and inevitable conclusion. Republicans are great at opposing things, destroying things, obstructing things, undoing things. They are really, really terrible at creating things because they have no desire to do so.
The rich ruling explains Trump’s fascination with Vladimir Putin as much as theories about Trump’s Russian business connections. Putin is the total package. Money plus the authoritarian muscle Trump lacked. For his royalist legions — more Tory than T-party — Trump is the king they secretly long for. It’s all the same to them if he is a mad king.
Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner have tried to sell the Trump White House’s serial failures as the normal glitches experienced in any tech startup. It’s a sign of Trump’s entrepreneurial derring-do.
On a day of cozy coastal grays — soft cloud cover, a silver foil-wrap sea — a dozen gray fur balls brought visitors the most comfort.
Bobbing 20 feet from a harbor walkway, the sea otters were part of a record number in California. They once were believed to be as extinct as the dodo bird or the Tyrannosaurus rex.
But there they were, a raft of otters drifting by a line of tourists.
Several pups rested their heads on their mothers. The biggest otter cracked a clam on a flat rock balanced on her chest. They lounged belly-up and, with a thump of their paws, rotated like rolling pins.
“I feel so lucky,” said Erica Baumsteiger, a San Francisco pediatric nurse. “Seeing them is serendipity in such a lovely way.”
Martin Beijst, from the Netherlands, broke a stare-off with a bright-eyed pup. “Who is watching who?” he asked his wife, Charlotte, in Dutch.
In May, the annual otter count found more than 3,090 along the California coast. They are the only ones left. If the numbers stay above that threshold set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for three years running, the otters can make it off the endangered species list.
In Morro Bay, their survival is looking hopeful.
For years there have been a handful of otters hanging out here. But now 40 to 60 can be seen on any day, floating around the docks and along the sand strip by the landmark Morro Rock.
A record number of sea otters have flocked to Morro Bay this year. Scientists estimate 30 to 40 adults and up to 20 pups have settled around the embarcadero T-piers this season. (Joe Johnston / San Luis Obispo Tribune) (Joe Johnston / The Tribune San Luis Obispo)
They are a familiar sight to locals in one of California’s last working-class beach towns, where Central Valley families go for the weekend and fishermen and restaurant workers live on boats and in trailer parks.
Rory Kremer, a deep-voiced, deadpan fisherman, doesn’t sigh like a tourist over the whiskered, furry mammals.
“They’re tough critters. They’re mean. They have retractable claws like cats and a jaw like a dog. A 600-pound sea lion will go around an otter. The Salinan Indians called them the bears of the sea,” he said. “But, yeah, the babies are cute I suppose.”
Southern sea otters — unlike their Alaskan counterparts — don’t eat fish, so Kremer said he has no beef with them.
“The only thing is these do-gooders from L.A. who put their kayaks between the fishing boats and the otters. Now why would you put a kayak in front of a 25-ton boat?
“If I see a baby otter, I’m going to cut the engines. I wouldn’t hit an otter. Now, I can’t say say the same thing about those otter ladies.” [lulz — ed.]
About 2:00 every morning, one particular otter wakes up Thomas “Sarge” Pauley, a retired Army sergeant who gives harbor tours on his Tiki boat, and his girlfriend Jodi Truelson, a former intensive care nurse. The otter likes to open clams by banging them on their houseboat.
“What are you going to do?” Pauley asked with a shrug.
Southern sea otters were hunted to near extinction by the fur trade in the 1700s and 1800s. It was believed that the last colony was slaughtered near Monterey in 1831.
But in 1938, Howard Granville Sharpe, owner of a small ranch near Big Sur, looked out the telescope on his porch and noticed something odd in the kelp beds. There were creatures with fur and webbed feet that looked like land otters he had once seen on a tropical lake in the Philippines.
He reported the discovery to the Hopkins Marine Station, four Fish and Wildlife officials and three newspaper editors. None took him seriously.
Finally, a Capt. Lippincott with Fish and Wildlife and three junior officers came to have a look. Sharpe wrote an account of the scene:
“They peered through the scope, there came an odd silence. One officer wiped the lens, peered again. Lippincott backed away, hand across eyes. Looking at the object glass he adjusted the eyepiece to shorter focus. Gradually his body grew taut; his voice came in a sharp whisper: ‘Sea otters … sea OTTERS!’ ”
It was worldwide news.
Guards were assigned to protect the newfound otters. But poachers took shots, killing at least one otter and sending the others scattering. Sharks attacked.
Ever since, it has been touch-and-go for the species, which first was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The otters are threatened by oil spills, toxins, bacteria and a range limited in part by sharks.
Researchers believe the recent boom may be the result of starfish dying from a mysterious wasting disease, leaving more sea urchins for the otters to eat.
In addition to urchins and clams, the otters feast on crabs — which eat sea slugs, which nibble algae off the leaves of sea grass, keeping it clean and healthy.
Sea grass provides habitat for fish, cleans surrounding water and takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But these underwater meadows have been dying because of agricultural runoff.
Three years ago, researchers linked the re-population of otters to sea grass returning to Elkhorn Slough on the Central Coast — despite fertilizers flowing in from Salinas-area farms. But the larger environmental connections didn’t seem to be the foremost thing on people’s minds on a recent Morro Bay evening.
As usual, the fishermen dumped fish heads in the water as their workday ended.
“It’s my favorite time of the day,” said Richie Begin, the musical entertainment on the patio at Tognazzini’s Dockside restaurant. Earlier, a giant, bellowing sea lion had interrupted his rendition of “Tiny Bubbles.”
“Right around sunset, here comes the entire ecosystem of Morro Bay,” Begin said, pointing to the water. “The top of the pecking order is my nemesis over there, the sea lion — I call him Ralph in my head. I’ve seen pelicans dive-bomb him and literally take fish from his mouth. Here come the cormorants and gulls.
“And look! Here’s our nightly cavalcade of otters.”
They stretched out in a line, evenly spaced.
Tourists gawked. Fishermen cleaning off their boats paused to look too.
“They were gone,” Begin said. “You just can’t look at them without being reminded to not take any of it for granted.”
Grab a drink and watch the Morro Bay sea otters cavort for a few minutes. You’ll feel better, I promise:
