Trump’s press secretary said many stupid, mock-worthy things during the “reboot” press briefing today, but one set of talking points pissed me off on a personal level. Via TPM:
White House press secretary Sean Spicer downplayed on Monday the massive women’s rights marches that took place Saturday in Washington, D.C. and across the United States, saying that protestors were actually “not against anything,” let alone Donald Trump.
That car trip my crew and I took over the weekend? Not an afternoon drive. And this isn’t a photo of some friends who just happened to be chilling in the same space:
Millions of us marched, in cities all over the fucking world. We marched to reclaim our status as full citizens of this country, after the election of Spicer’s boss implied our worth as human beings is linked to some leering, tiny-fingered old goat’s opinion of our boobs.
More broadly, we marched to send a message that Trumpism isn’t the future of this country, that those of us who embrace a diverse, inclusive, equal future are still here, and that we won’t give up without a fight.
And yes, we marched AGAINST Donald Motherfucking Trump:
Spicer again:
“There were people that came to the mall, as they do all the time,” he added. “Sometimes in smaller numbers.”
ALWAYS in smaller numbers, asshole. Don’t make me come back up there.
clay
Assholes gonna ass.
Spanky
This is excellent! Spicer sure knows how to keep his base riled up.
OK, maybe not his base ….
Iowa Old Lady
The lies about the march are especially preposterous because so many people participated. They know what went on and so do lots of other people they’re in contact with. So do those of us who watched but didn’t go. Crazy lies just point out that the liar is crazy.
Mnemosyne
hovercraft found an epic whine from Spicer, including this gem:
I guess somebody needs a safe space, or at least a participation trophy.
Major Major Major Major
With Trump we might finally get our wish and see the end of the correspondents’ dinner.
ET
Over or under 1 year before Spicer flames out and quits or his ulcer explodes and he is forced to quit? Rule one of being stuck in a hole – stop digging.
greengoblin
Is he trying to say that there was no protest on Saturday but just a bunch of visitors who just happened to be at the Mall at the same time? Seriously?
If so, how dumb does he think the residents of this country are?
J.
You know what they say about guys with small crowds…
You — and your sister and your kid — rock, Betty!
Also, too, a brief guide to “Alternative Facts” and Kellyanne Conway’s new (awesome) nickname.
trollhattan
Great signage shots! Here’s my absolute favorite so far.
Yoda Dog
I think we’re definitely going to have to go back up there. Specially since Propoganda Spice let it slip that we’re hurting fuckstick’s feelings. And clearly Sean didnt understand the message from Saturday so we should just take it upon ourselves to do it again and speak up even louder next time. Sooner the better.
Corner Stone
@greengoblin:
All the way dumb, Katie!
Yoda Dog
@ET: I give it a month, tops.
dmsilev
Are we supposed to be feeling sorry for Trump?
It’s actually kind of interesting, since a big part of Trump’s self-image is that he’s the ultimate alpha male who doesn’t give a shit about whether you like him or not, but he’s going to get the job done regardless. And just a couple of days in, his mouthpiece is whining about how Trump’s media coverage is demoralizing to him.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Nothing will ever top this all-time classic.
tarragon
@Spanky:
Maybe he does. My Trumpy uncle was all quiet this last week, but today he’s positing to FB like it’s his full time job. And of course one of his “points” was about all those people who don’t have jobs so they have time to… Blah blah blah.
Kay (not the front-pager)
@Mnemosyne: I don’t know if he’s talking about Donnie’s relationship with father, or his dating life.
trollhattan
@dmsilev:
Once the ExLax works you stop taking it, know what I mean, Sean?
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
How can he be demoralized if he never had any morals to begin with?
David ?Alternate Facts? Koch
It took Nixon 6 years to break down and cry on his knees while pleading with JFK’s portrait, “why don’t they love me!”
It only took Comrade Trump 24 hrs to do the same.
Sad!
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Good point. My tire gauge doesn’t go below 0 ppi, for instance.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: Maybe he’s gone from amoral to anti-moral?
pamelabrown53
Hi Betty Cracker.
WTF does Spicer think about the sea of pink pu**y hats? Nothing to do with the shitgibbon? Beyond both pathetic and preposterous.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
It took Nixon 6 years to break down and cry on his knees while pleading with JFK’s portrait, “why don’t they love me!”
It only took Comrade Trump 24 hrs to do the same.
Sad!
MisterForkbeard
@Mnemosyne: To be fair, Trump probably does hear “It’s not big enough” about at least two body parts on a regular basis.
cmorenc
Spicer’s approach to commenting on the march is consistent with the way the official GOP propaganda channel (Fox News) tried to deal with it – first, attempting to marginalize participants as Starbucks-swilling urbanite liberals (etc.), and second, doubting it would amount to having much significant lasting political impact beyond last Saturday.
In short, Fox and Spicer’s approach to march participants is LA LA LA LA LA I can’t HEAR you.
Betty Cracker
@tarragon: Saw on Twitter where some Trumpster counter-protester taunted marchers with the “We have jobs!” thing. The marcher said, “It’s Saturday, asshole. And YOU’RE here too!” :)
FlipYrWhig
@dmsilev: OMFG. “Guys, listen, you’re hurting the President’s feelings.”
geg6
@cmorenc:
Well, if he was trying to make sure it did have a lasting impact, he couldn’t do much better than that condescending bit.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: That is awesome! One of my favorite signs said something like, “So bad, even introverts are here!”
rikyrah
ON ALL SEVEN CONTINENTS!!!
janeform
I took a photo of that Putin’s puppet sign. It’s excellent. Another one I saw in the metro: urine trouble.
pat
I still like the one that Dana Milbank mentioned:
In needlepoint: “I made this so I could stab something 35,000 times.”
opiejeanne
@J.: You know, I thought her outfit looked an awful lot like a Barbie outfit, but the colors were different.
p.a.
People can forgive a lot, rightly or wrongly, even being lied to. But being lied about…
charluckles
Unfortunately, I think you will definitely need to go back there. And bring friends.
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
AKA FSB minders.
Gelfling 545
@MisterForkbeard: You’d think Spicer might want to consider his choice of words and not hand us the jokes pre-written.
zhena gogolia
@Iowa Old Lady:
I went by my office today — the semester starts Thursday, so there weren’t many people there. Of those I saw, EVERY SINGLE ONE had gone to one march or other.
David Hunt
@greengoblin:
Well, enough of them were dumb enough to elect Donald Trump, so I guess he figured he had a lot of inherent leeway…
Elizabelle
They would not be screaming if they did not get thwacked, but good.
Keep up the thwacking. Good on Betty Cracker and everyone who turned out. It’s important, and it’s got them skeered.
LongHairedWeirdo
@greengoblin: If you’re going to rule by lie and talking point, you have to establish your ground early.
The point isn’t quite to convince people that it didn’t happen – it’s to call into question that it was as big a deal as the liberal media made it out to be. A year from now, someone might remember “and besides, wasn’t that march a bit overstated? Weren’t there questions over how *many* people actually participated?” And it will become common knowledge that it was so, and it’s just the liberal media saying otherwise.
Logan Brown
@cmorenc:
That doesn’t make them wrong though. I loved seeing thousands of people out in North Carolina but a) most of them were from the cities and voted D and b) are so gerrymandered that the R’s and the General Assembly can laugh and move on with their agenda since they have, and will probably maintain, the super majority (especially if those Dems under 30 decide to skip ’18). I’m glad you are pissed but that isn’t enough right now. My Facebook friends who are conservative are having vapors over Madonna and Ashley Judd while ignoring the orange haired muppet’s tweets. They are the ones who need to be convinced.
greengoblin
@efgoldman: Not by popular vote! Almost 3 million more smarties.
laura
Something tells me you’re going to be driving up and back a couple 2, 3, 1000xs in the next few years.
Best check the tires and change the oil or get a rail pass.
Some ass is still going to need kicking.
Major Major Major Major
@greengoblin: Well, unfortunately, that’s not how we pick ’em.
guachi
I made a post to Facebook about the rally and immediately had to add Spicer’s quotes after I loaded the BJ front page. My post was about how conservatives shouldn’t mock the rallies but should fear them. Spicer’s quotes fit right in.
zhena gogolia
@Logan Brown:
Очень жалко, что вы недовольны.
Kay
Oh, boo hoo. Most people don’t like them. If they don’t like it why don’t they all resign and go back to whatever scam job they were doing before they got this one?
This demanding to be LIKED is unbearable. They can’t demand that! It’s an individual emotion, a judgment call.
I’m allowed to believe they’re horrible, sleazy people and I do. That’s what I believe. I’m right, too.
Feebog
Shorter Sean Spicer: “Leave Donald Trump alone”.
Miss Bianca
@ET: Hell, Quinerly in one of the other comment threads was giving Spicer 90 days…
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: That was MajorX4’s mom’s sign!
Barbara
@dmsilev: The birther in chief thought being president would be all love all the time? He really must have problems with memory retention. For pete’s sake.
Barbara
@Logan Brown: No they aren’t, actually. The fact that they are seizing on Judd’s or Madonna’s statements while ignoring Trump’s is proof of that. The people who need to be persuaded are those who stayed away and sat on their hands because they thought none of this mattered or that Hillary Clinton was actually dishonest compared to Trump.
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
Yes, I keep hoping their feelings will get so hurt they’ll go back to their gold-encrusted penthouses and leave us the fuck alone.
p.a.
Great line from Atrios: daily press briefings to be renamed Daily Airing of Trump Grievances.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: @Betty Cracker:
My favorite from the London march: “I’m really quite cross about this.”
Ah, English understatement at its frosty best…
hovercraft
Reports: Centers For Disease Control Climate Summit Canceled After Election
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention canceled a climate change and health summit months in the making without offering an official explanation, multiple news outlets reported Monday.
One summit co-sponsor reportedly claimed that the CDC had canceled the event in anticipation of political uncertainties posed by the new Trump administration.
An email from CDC officials, first reported E&E’s Climate Wire, does not offer an official explanation from the Climate and Health Summit, originally scheduled to be held in Atlanta during Feb. 14-16.
“We are currently exploring options so that the Summit may take place later in the year,” it reads, as quoted by Climate Wire.
A unnamed employee of a nonprofit that had planned on attending the summit told the Huffington Post that it had been planned “for months and months.”
But Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, which was a co-sponsor on the summit, told the Associated Press that he was told CDC officials canceled in order to avoid a clash with the incoming Trump administration.
Rather than face conflict from the Trump administration, or a last minute cancellation, Benjamin said the CDC opted for a “strategic retreat.”
“They decided the better part of valor was to stop and regroup” he told the AP.
A CDC official confirmed the agency’s decision last month to cancel the event to AP.
Howard Frumkin, former director of the CDC Center for Environmental Health, told Climate Wire that the CDC had made a practice of avoiding controversy.
“Sometimes the agency is subject to external political pressure; sometimes the agency self-censors or pre-emptively stays away from certain issues,” he said. “Climate change has been that issue historically.”
opiejeanne
@greengoblin: He lost the popular vote to Hillary by 3 million, but he lost the popular vote by about 10 million.
Mnemosyne
@tarragon:
You can give him the same reply a woman in NYC gave a whiny Trumper: “It’s Saturday, bitch.”
zhena gogolia
@hovercraft:
Yes, because tornadoes in Georgia in late January are so, so normal.
sukabi
@ET: under…60 days tops.
Kay
Also, would someone tell these whiners that their jobs are EASY compared to what Obama faced? The fucking world economy was tanking when he took over and he didn’t whine.
Donald Trump just has to not fuck it up. That’s all he has to do. He could golf for the next year and no one would care as long as gas prices don’t go up and unemployment stays down.
They have no pressing emergencies so they’ve settled on fucking up health care, but no one told them to do that. It’s voluntary.
Giant whiny coddled toddlers, the lot of them. “Me, me, me! Like ME! Pay ATTENTION to me!”
No. I don’t want to. Go leech off of someone else.
Yoda Dog
@Logan Brown: Nah, not if they voted for it. Fuck trying to convince those assholes, I’ll stick with the third party and non-voters. There’s hope there, there’s no hope talking sense to a trump supporter. Any trump supporter, I could give a fuck his or her reasons for doing so. Worthless, the whole lot of them.
LAC
I hope he sweats so much that he slips on it and cracks his head open. Was in Chicago visiting my wonderful friends and we went to the March. It was amazing and inspiring. We marched even when they canceled it because , SPICER YOU DOUCHECANOE FUCK FACE, it was wayyyyy more than expected.
greengoblin
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks, Hamilton!
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Careful.
People righteously get nervous when anyone writes, “With Trump we might finally get our wish and see the end of ….”
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Word. We don’t have to give all the Tflunkies the time of day.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Logan Brown: Nope. We don’t need to be chasing that imaginary leprechaun.
All sorts of stuff is going on in NC. The Match has boosted the energy in the Resistance like you wouldn’t believe.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
It seems like more classic abuser behavior to me. “You’re stuck with me, so you’d better learn to love me” sounds an awful lot like an abusive husband.
MisterForkbeard
@LongHairedWeirdo: I’m seeing a lot of this from high-school friends of mine who are Trump supporters now. Their current big play is to ask for everyone to just slow down and understand that Trump supporters aren’t racist, and that the media is biased! In fact, Fox is JUST as biased as MSNBC and CNN, and everyone should just accept that.
schrodingers_cat
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Its funny isn’t it that these positive threads are always infested with no, this won’t amount to anything whining.
hovercraft
We need to make the media walk and chew gum. While it is important for them to point out the ridiculousness of the new administration, they must also focus on the terrible things they are doing. We need more than just the liberals blogosphere screaming about this shit.
The whining is pathetic, how do you volunteer for the world’s most criticized and second guessed job, and then bitch that you are being criticized. The campaign was spring training for the minors, this is the show, asshole get used to it.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@ET:
Under, like 30 days, tops.
rk
@Logan Brown:
If your friends are disturbed by Madonna’s and Ashley Judds comments and voted for the guy who boasted about grabbing a woman’s genitals, then I doubt if anything will convince them. I think the democrats have to convince other democrats to turn out to vote. Trump won by a small sliver of votes in the electoral college. A decent educated, brilliant man like Obama could not change conservatives. They hated him for no reason and showed that they prefered a mentally challenged, irredeemably vulgar low life white male. These people are a lost cause.
rikyrah
@Kay:
They will receive the same level of respect that they showed #44.
Period.
Quinerly
@Miss Bianca:
Or they will just quit having briefings. I don’t see him growing into this job. He doesn’t have the temperament plus he doesn’t seem too knowledgeable. Also read that Trump wanted someone else but Reince won out with the pick. But then again this train wreck of a president doesn’t have the temperament and the knowledge for his job. Who the hell knows?
trollhattan
@Roger Moore: Yup, right before “I didn’t want to hurt her, but she made me do it.”
A Ghost to Most
@zhena gogolia:
Hey, you’re in America now!
Speak Spanish.
/Paul Gonzalez?
cmorenc
@Logan Brown:
Actually, I had those same thoughts later Saturday after coming home from the march. But complacency by the Rs about the extent of their “safely red” districts can lead to their surprise undoing, much as Clinton was too complacent about her wall of “safely” blue states (Pa, Mi, and Wi), and much as the democrats were complacent about the status quo congressional map in 1994 and again in 2010. What’s easy to lose sight of is that the Ds don’t have to flip but a very modest portion (5-10%) of the shallowest end of Trump voters (and in congressional elections, voters not formally registered to either party) in order to cause a profoundly different political map. TRUE there are going to be many districts where the voter composition is simply too heavily red for this to work, but OTOH it’s difficult to gerrymander a guaranteed majority of hopelessly noncompetitive 65-35 districts – there’s many districts where the R lean is only 2 to 5 points where the voter demographics and inclinations are more potentially volatile than in say, southern Alabama.
Yoda Dog
@Logan Brown: I mean shit, Logan, I’m in NC. I guess, silly me, I shoulda just stayed home cuz fuck it, why even try? Is that about it?
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
I began thinking that but reviewing the old photos demonstrates there’s no way to echo the level of anti-Obama hate of the last eight years. Can’t be done by decent people.
But we have all the humor at our disposal!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@schrodingers_cat: So very interesting, isn’t it? I’m thinking zhena gogolia has the right idea for responding to that crap.
hovercraft
@Quinerly:
They cut off the public phone lines, redirecting them to the book of faces. Releasing a written statement would not be beyond them, or better yet setting up a feed like the crap they set up after the debates where they are talking to only friendly “reporters”.
Mnemosyne
@LongHairedWeirdo:
The problem with that is that, out of my office of 24 people, I know at least 4 who went to the LA march. People are going to personally know people who went, and that’s a lot harder thing to cover up.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: And the negative threads, and the morning threads…
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: Do you mean we have Concern Trolls???
Quinerly
@hovercraft:
Saw that.
schrodingers_cat
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Plus an unknown handle, at least to me. Gogol’s wife should try speaking to our new concern troll in the language he understands.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: @opiejeanne: Da. What is Russian for concern troll?
brendancalling
my favorite part was how Sphincter kept whining about being treated unfairly by the media. whine whine whine. cry cry cry.
Also too, Sphincter is from my neck of the woods and two friends of mine went to high school with him. Apparently he was a shithead then too. I blame the parents.
rikyrah
@rk:
TRUTH
Elizabelle
@Logan Brown:
Uh, no. Some folks are not reachable. Don’t waste our energy or breath.
@Mnemosyne: Prezactly. And these are not wildhaired fanatics who showed up. It’s the mom next door; the nice people from around the water cooler. It’s neighbors, co-workers, friends, relatives.
I loved that WaPost story about Williamsport PA having enough marchers to fill three buses. I bet a lot of those people thought they were the only unicorns they knew.
No. Pink hats rule!
rikyrah
@LongHairedWeirdo:
There were marches ON ALL SEVEN CONTINENTS.
The most brilliant part of this is the satellite marches. because, the local media was forced to cover it, and then switch to add the coverage of the Washington one.
hovercraft
@trollhattan:
We don’t have to duplicate their vitriol, but we can duplicate and even exceed their intensity and their numbers. Getting the media to take us as seriously as they did a couple hundred assholes on scooters is the challenge.
rk
I’ve reached the conclusion that Trump is just a miserable unhappy sod. Nothing will make this guy happy. He won the presidency after being dismissed by everyone! But does that do it for him? No, not at all. He just has to whine, complain and moan. Even if 75% of the people loved him, he’ll spend all his time being pissed about the 25% who don’t. He wants complete adoration from everyone at all times. He looks miserable, his wife and son look miserable. The people who work for him look miserable. If you look at Kellyanne conway, she looks haggard and sickly. Seriously what is wrong with this guy? How do you get to be rich and powerful and miserable?
Quinerly
Trump has issued a proclamation declaring his inauguration day “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.”
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Logan Brown.
I was thinking, is that you, Scott?
les
@greengoblin:
Dumb enough to give him the job. And he knows his hard core is dumb enough to believe any old bullshit he chooses to shovel.
Mnemosyne
@Logan Brown:
I think you need to be clear on something right now: those people will never be convinced. The best they will ever do is claim that Trump isn’t a real conservative and they never liked him anyway. More likely, they will happily sink on the SS Republican rather than ever be forced to admit they were wrong about anything.
The people you might be able to convince are the idiots who fell for the “both sides do it!” con, but the ones whining about the march are a lost cause. Sorry.
aimai
@Logan Brown: Really? Do you think those people are going to be converted? They aren’t–its the people on our side who didn’t come out to vote, or the third party morons, or the republicans who are about to lose their healthcare and discover that “obamacare” is the ACA who need to be reached.
Miss Bianca
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: completely o/t, but was it you who recommended “The English Heiress”? Just finished it last night!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Speaking of needing safe spaces, McCrony was in DC Saturday. We now have a bill in the GA to make it a felony to “intimidate” a politician.
PhoenixRising
@hovercraft:
Not sure that tactic will work as well on the main whining, mindless, relentless bloodsucking threat to public health and national order as it does on Trump’s people.
That was a mosquito joke. I’ll see myself out.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Miss Bianca: Yes!
Your thoughts?
aimai
@Mnemosyne: Yup, a lot of people on fucking weight watchers went, and posted about it on their weight watchers site. The right wing fatties are sad and whining because their safe/no politics space was invaded but a hell of a lot of us were out there marching.
A Ghost to Most
@hovercraft:
Just sit back and watch the shitheads do their thing. Some of the media may be coming around. Even the Fucking NYT kinda, sorta said maybe they shouldn’t have sat on what they had before the election
PhoenixRising
@Mnemosyne: @Logan Brown:
You misspelled ‘marginalized’. Shamed, outnumbered and marginalized. They lost too, they just haven’t figured it out yet.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: The Googles show them on maybe five threads over two years.
brendancalling
@rk: remember how funny Trump was -even to lefties- in the beginning of the campaign?* He could take the piss out of the rest of the humorless and boring GOP candidates like nobody else. because he was “the outsider” making fun of the establishment. And like any comedian, he had some pretty good zingers.
But now he’s not the comedian anymore. He’s the guy he USED to make fun of. And, like most bullies, he can dish it out but he can’t take it. So of course he’s miserable.
* this isn’t meant as a sop to Trump or to rewrite history. He’s a horrible person… who also said genuinely funny things about the GOP during the primary.
Ohio Mom
@Logan Brown: One way to start with “friends” like that is to agree with them on one point. I actually think they are right about what Madonna said. Expressing a wish to blow up the White House was dumb in many ways.
Then, when they are nodding in agreement with you and their defenses are down, you say something like, “I wish there was a way to raise the level of ALL the discourse. I also don’t like it when…” and then fill in the blank: When people chant Lock her up! And explain the difference between having a justice system (I am SO proud to live in a country where people get fair trials) and mob rule.
Will this approach work? In my experience, probably not. But I enjoy the looks of confusion on their faces as I say things I know they agree with, and don’t expect a liberal to say (She’s liberal AND patriotic? How is that possible?).
You can even say things like, Bet you didn’t expect to hear that from me, huh? To rub it in a little more.
trollhattan
@aimai:
How sad! Trump’s views on “RW fatties” would be interesting to hear. “You voted for me; that makes you hot. Pence, get over here!”
greengoblin
@opiejeanne: Thanks for that. I had not seen that number before.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: So only strategically deployed.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
Funny how conservatives are all about “safe spaces” when they’re the ones in the minority, innit?
rikyrah
@Kay:
Healthcare, which is 1/6 of the American Economy
Cain
So Trump got rid of us being part of the TPP. In general, I actually support this since I really hate the regressive IP laws that we have in the west. As a person involved in open source and free software, I have found the way we do software patents abhorrent. But more than that, the shitty stuff that trade organizations like MPAA and RIAA do also create a lot of issues. But here is a great link on reddit that I really appreciate giving a run down on the effects of what NAFTA did for us and why it failed to provide jobs. This is the kind of thing we need to learn about when Democrats are in charge because I think Clinton fucked up there and we did lose jobs due to NAFTA and we suffered for it.
But general, the TPP specifically targeted service level jobs like nursing and moving them overseas, but that is also true of programmers as well. The thing is there is no support from government to make up for those jobs and I don’t think there will be as long as we have the current political climate we’ve had. Also fuck Alan Greenspan.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: Or just an infrequent commenter. Let’s stop talking about them unless they come back.
New question: how do we feel about sucker-punching Richard Spencer?
dm
So, has anyone seen a Stein supporter saying: “See, we told you Trump getting elected would heighten the contradiction and get people in the streets!”?
With 3-4 million people marching, even if only 1% of them get in the habit of attending Congressional town halls to echo the sentiments of the march, that’s enough to send a Republican member of Congress scurrying out the back door. If that 3-4 million have 2-3 friends who couldn’t go, but are inspired….
I’m thinking it’s better than 1%, though, because I’ve been seeing a fair amount that’s organizing-related. And, well, there’s a lot of infrastructure already (Organizing for America, Democracy for America, MoveOn, ActBlue…)
(Did anyone tune into the MoveOn/Indivisible conference call last night?)
trollhattan
@hovercraft:
Isn’t it funny “conventional wisdom” has the media under our control when in reality we can’t get them to do straight, in-depth reporting for shit? I’d love to know how to untangle that knot. Regular beatings from the WH will just make them more submissive.
SiubhanDuinne
@ET:
Oh, under, well under. I’m guessing by the end of April.
Yoda Dog
Oh shit, Shia LeBeauf SCREAMED down a trumper. Fucking nice. I’ve never been a fan of his work but god bless his activism, especially in times like these.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: That’s possible too.
Miss Bianca
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: “Interesting” ; )
A bit overwritten, but I like ’em like that. I like that she made an effort to inject some actual history into her historical romance.
What I didn’t like…which could,be a sign o’ the times of when it was written…is the plot that hinges on the The Big (or a series of of Little) Misunderstanding(s). Like, “people, if you just TALKED to each other about how you felt, you might learn that all these heart-burnings are bs!”
Also, too…I’m sorry, but she lives with the guy for *two years* in Paris, but he can’t marry her when they get back to England because he’s afraid of what people are going to say about him being a fortune-hunter?! WTF??! I mean…talk about a contrived plot complication! What they’d say about him if they found *that* part out would make “fortune hunter” pale in comparision!
But I read it all the way thru’ and liked it, and I was prompted, while I was waiting for it to arrive via Amazon, to read a story by the same author in an anthology called “Irish Magic” which I *really* liked. Bottom line: I don’t think the 18th-19th century is really her period, but I I bet I’d like her medieval stuff a lot!
PhoenixRising
@dm:
Not yet, but if you do, please feel free to respond ‘Oh, we’re definitely going to see people in the streets. Good job, dumbass.’
Mnemosyne
The Onion continues to be on point.
A Ghost to Most
@SiubhanDuinne
Six weeks for Baghdad Bob. That man is coming apart.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
Contract that out to LGM: “Is it OK to Punch Nazis? Spoiler Alert: Yes”
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
I am in favor of sucker-punching fascists. If you call for violence against other people, you need to man up when someone responds to you the same way.
Roger Moore
@hovercraft:
I think the first thing to do is to have a bunch of people show up to challenge Republicans at every damn meeting about “Repeal and Replace”. Doing that at the town-hall meetings about Obamacare was a huge thing that convinced the media the Tea Party was a political force. If we can do the same thing but on the opposite side when they’re trying to repeal, it will do direct good by scaring the Republicans (and heartening Democrats) while helping to convince the media we’re a real force.
Seanly
I think that a lot of the support for Trump as well as 3rd party useful fools is soft. Trump is going to have to produce jobs and lots of them to people whose skill sets are not in high demand. The coming conservative avalanche of the Kansas-ifaction of the USA will cause a recession, lots of job losses, and major discontent. The conservative media can spin it all they want – all these job losses are due to Obama. At the end of the day though, Trump will have to deliver on some of his promises of a populist agenda or the Republicans will face an angry electorate.
For the record, I don’t think the Republican congress will enact much of Trump’s more populist items – they would require spending money on things.
Brachiator
@Cain:
How do you move nursing jobs overseas?
Also, a question. How does one make money or earn a living from “open source and free software?”
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
Take it up with Melania.
Elizabelle
GHW Bush on the mend; out of ICU and might go home from the hospital on Friday. Barbara already released.
I am good with that.
And it did my heart good to see James Earl Carter at the inauguration “festivities” although, Jesus, what a shitwad to be taking the oath. It’s like “I survived cancer to see this?!”
Cacti
@Cain:
Simply abandoning the TPP as done by Donald with the endorsement of Bernie, rather than renegotiating it, just hands China an unearned victory in regional international trade. Free trade will continue throughout the Pacific rim. We’ve just ensured that it will be on Beijing’s terms rather than Washington’s.
dm
@Roger Moore:
This is already happening.
Yoda Dog
The blitzkrieg on Poland was a sucker punch. And Russia. They had a written pact and everything, IIRC. I say game on, payback’s a bitch.
danielx
Posted this on the book of faces….
She knew going in and knows now that the media were after her scalp; they’re always after a scalp, particularly a Clinton scalp. The big difference between her and the…incumbent…is that she does/did not regard every single unflattering thing written or said about her as unfair. Also, too…as an adult she understands that “fairness” has very little to do with anything in the real world, most particularly in DC and the vicinity. I got that concept down cold when I was about 12 myself; it’s understandable although not attractive in a child. The Trumpenführer is fucking seventy years old and still publicly whining about it.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@ET:
He doesn’t look healthy to me… puffy, pasty, on very on edge. Anger is a toxin.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: Mmyep.
@Yoda Dog: Yeah, but Spencer doesn’t exactly have an army backing him here. Nor did he at any point. He’s somebody espousing Nazi ideology, not an actual acting Nazi.
I dunno it makes me uncomfortable.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
I’m not the only one to suspect the Bushes called in sick on purpose, am I?
Mary G
No climate change? After six years of historically low rainfall, it’s hailing at my house in SoCal, enough not to melt and cover the patio table. I have never ever seen that before. The cats are terrified by the noise.
Also, too, just made my latest call to Darrell Issa’s local office and he must be feeling the heat. No one answered and the mailbox was full.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
Too bad they didn’t take his head clean off. Violence is the only thing Nazis genuinely understand.
rikyrah
@Major Major Major Major:
He’s a phucking Nazi who wants me dead. I could care less about him being punched out
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
If you advocate for genocide, you accept the consequences of that choice.
If he doesn’t want people to sucker punch him, he can stop calling for all Black people to be murdered.
Lurking Buffoon
For all we’re rightly laughing at Spicer’s alt-facts and Cheeto Benito’s feelings, has he only been speaking through intermediaries since the march? I don’t do social media so the only tweet that I’m aware of is that polite response to the march that some hapless aide wrote after snatching his phone. Given how he’s behaved since… forever, you know the Mandarin Menace must be furious and has absolutely 0 impulse control. So why are we only hearing the joke-press secretary Spicer and the real press secretary Conway? Is the Shitgibbon’s mental health deteriorating faster than we thought? Are the would-be puppet masters busy cocooning him from the outside world so they can work uninterrupted?
Some may say that it’s too soon to ask these questions, or themselves ask if it’s irresponsible to speculate. I say it’s irresponsible not to.
debbie
@dmsilev:
What Trump feels is the result of the same kind of shit he and others were doing to Obama. Look at how much better Obama dealt with it, and grow a pair, you loser.
Yoda Dog
@Major Major Major Major: Yea, I was being cute.. or trying to. Im with you, the guy should be prosecuted. You can’t go around randomly punching people no matter how much they deserve it. Its the law.
ETA: Im also very glad the motherfucker got decked too, to be clear.
Baud
@Ohio Mom: That seems like an awfully long-winded way of saying “Fuck you.”
rk
@brendancalling:
I just find it bizarre. How do you get to be a thin skinned 70 year old? But what gives me some satisfaction in this awful situation is that he is never going to be able to beat Obama. He got into this(supposedly) because of Obama’s mockery. He wanted to prove that he could become president and be better than Obama. But he will never be loved the way Obama and Michelle are loved. People voted for Obama for positive reasons. Most of Trump’s voters are just as negative and loathsome as he is. Even they don’t come across as happy. They know deep down that they voted for something sick and ugly. I hope it eats at him till the day he dies.
randy khan
@cmorenc:
This is right – to make the Republican gerrymanders work in a lot of places, they had to pull voters from safe R districts into other districts to tilt the balance – in essence they set up a bunch of 55R-45D districts and a few 80D-20R districts. Those gerrymanders work fine in normal elections, but they’re very risky in wave elections. The R plan, of course, is to make wave elections difficult, but it’s hard to make them impossible.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
It’s a given that we’re all mocking Lil’ Seanie, but how’s he faring on the national stage? More pointing and laughing?
Mnemosyne
@Yoda Dog:
I don’t have a problem prosecuting the guy who punched Spencer. I’ll even donate to his defense fund. But let’s not pretend that anyone is shocked that an asshole bully like Spencer got punched.
Actions have consequences. Spencer chose his path of advocating violence and hatred, and he doesn’t get to whine about how mean and hateful everyone is towards him since he started down that path.
Major Major Major Major
@Yoda Dog: With you on both points, I think.
@Mnemosyne: I’m not shocked, I don’t feel terrible, and I’ve certainly had my share of giggles about it, but still.
Brachiator
@Cacti:
True. There was a recent photo of Japanese and Chinese officials celebrating a trade deal. And it is very interesting to see both England and the US try to remove themselves from current international trading partnerships, leaving unclear how they can improve their negotiating positions.
And soon we will have Jared Kushner talking with the Canadians about trade. Just mind boggling.
debbie
@Logan Brown:
Yes, they’re demanding an investigation into whether the stars were paid to show up, which they think will discredit the entire march.
Paul in KY
@Logan Brown: Throw those odious tweets in their face. Make them comment on them.
dm
@cmorenc: I’ve been hearing about organizing. For example (cited by the do-we-still-call-it-Great-Orange-Satan-or-has-that-title-been-usurped?):
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Miss Bianca:
Well, that plus he doesn’t want her to “settle” for him when there are much better men available. I think it helped my opinion of the book that I read the sequel first and saw some of his first marriage through his son’s eyes. So when I finally got my hands on this one, I kept saying, “Man, she really did do a number on him, didn’t she?”
I like this book OK; I love the sequel. Which also has problems with the misunderstandings, but the reasons the couple don’t just talk it out are a bit more sensible. Plus, it lampshades the tired trope of “quality passing as common folk”. That made me soooo happy.
Medieval is really her period; it’s what one of her degrees was in. The Heiress books were still above average for when they were written, especially wrt the history.
Paul in KY
@Miss Bianca: He’ll last longer than that. If he took the job in the 1st place, that means he’s a toadie’s toady. Sure the money is fine, so he can make all kinds of internal mental gyrations to keep the job, IMO.
Gelfling545
I’m waiti g for the county dem. committee meeting to start. It’s a “what to fo next” meeting. They’ve now got about 3x the number of attendees they anticipated and more arriving.
Aleta
@Mnemosyne: This reveals much about the fears that drive Tp’s insane competition with Barack Obama.
Don K
@Corner Stone:
bigly dumb!!
Carolina Dave
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: 5 years in prison for chanting “Shame!” at elected officials. In a place outside of the jurisdiction of North Carolina. Blatantly unconstitutional. These yahoos think they are our rulers rather than public servants. Oh a McCrony is such a little chicken shit.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: Hear,hear! He will receive the same amount of latitude that Pres. Obama faced from the Repubs. No more, no less.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
Not gonna happen. He is incapable of acknowledging that Obama did a good job of anything, except perhaps of vacating the White House on schedule. If he were capable of graciousness, or anything else that smacks of empathy, he probably wouldn’t have run.
A Ghost to Most
Fucker got knocked off his hateful soapbox, and now he’s whining. Good, and about time. Too bad he didn’t break Spencer’s jaw.
I’ll contribute to a defense fund, and throw in his favorite refreshment.
Baud
@Paul in KY: I don’t know. I might give him less.
Trentrunner
@Ohio Mom: You do know you’re taking what Madonna said out of context, right?
She said she fantasizes about blowing up the White House, but then comes to her senses and realizes there’s real work to do.
Also, fuck those people. We’re never get through to them.
SiubhanDuinne
@rk:
This. In the past 24-36 hours, I’ve seen a photo of a grim-faced Melania backing away from her husband at the Inaugural Ball as though he had the breath of a tiger (but later dancing with a military guy with a joyous smile on her face). There’s a photo of Donald and Melania at the Inaugural Luncheon which makes 1992-era photos of Charles and Diana look like Romeo and Juliet pre-demise. There’s that picture of Donald at the White House greeting the Obamas, while Melania is left sadly behind on the other side of the car to make her own way, unescorted, up the steps. Heartbreaking. I think she loathes him and I hope she leaves him.
As for Barron, he’s underage so I’m not going there except to note that he looks either angry or anxious in pretty much every photo I’ve seen of him. I wish him well.
Aleta
@J.: Re Propaganda Barbie (I love it)
My partner calls her the Spin Donkey
Mary G
@Elizabelle: I was so happy to see President Carter walk in on his own two feet. I can’t help but feel that some decent Republicans (there must be at least one or two in all of America) had to look at him and the current occupant of the office side by side and feel ashamed of their moral cowardice.
Barbara
@Yoda Dog: I would be happier if they had thrown a pie in his face. I just can’t condone violence. I believe his official position is that the U.S. should deport people who are not white to “where they came from” or something like that. Not kill them, exactly, just disrupt their lives forever and send them to places that they have never been, assuming those places can be identified and are available for repatriation. I don’t know what his Plan B is if these other countries won’t go along with his plan. For people like him, it is apparently of no moment that nearly 100% of U.S. residents who identify as African-American (a) have a lot of European ancestry JUST LIKE HIM and (b) have original ancestors who came to the U.S. hundreds of years before most white/European immigrants did. I am not going to excuse it as a sickness.
Major Major Major Major
@Carolina Dave: I heard McRory wouldn’t even hand over the keys to the Governor’s social media accounts.
@Barbara: Yes! Pie! Pie I can condone!
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne:
Of course he can, have you listened to these people? You just described the entire right-wing MO. Say hateful shit, cry about it when there are consequences.
geg6
@Logan Brown:
Your conservative FB friends will never be convinced and we’d be idiots to even waste our time trying. There are more of than there are of them. Fuck your FB friends. I got rid of all Shitgibbon fans on my FB. I’ll never speak to any of them again and I wish them nothing but misfortune. And told them so. You want to hang out with assholes, that’s your business but no one here is under any illusion that those people are persuadable except you.
danielx
@Major Major Major Major:
Sucker punched? He should have been cock punched. Repeatedly.
Paul in KY
@Elizabelle: Not with Barbara. Hope her end is very painful & protracted.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Cacti:
As an average technology user not in a tech field, I want a product that is well edited and debugged before rollout, reliably performs its core function and is reasonable secure unless I do stupid or reckless things.
I will always pay for that set of privileges.
I don’t want to tweak my stuff for the perfect user experience (that won’t come anyway). For that reason, I don’t do android phones, and don’t get wrapped up in Linux and all the forever tweaking. The products are generally neat enough as is, and I get thoroughly pissed over changes do the sake of change (I’m still mad about not being able to get HP 4 laser printers new anymore).
randy khan
@Ohio Mom:
I guess you have a stronger stomach than I do because I’m actually quite annoyed at how what Madonna said is being taken out of context, and would be much more likely to tell people that they’re cherry-picking. The line about blowing up the White House is a rhetorical device – without even a hint of a suggestion that it’s a good idea, she talks about how she’s thought about doing it, and immediately pivots to the point that we can’t think that way. Then she quotes Auden: “We must love one another or die,” and *that’s* the point of what she was saying. It actually is quite thoughtful and entirely on-message. (And the people clutching their pearls about her language are even worse, apparently never having paid much attention to what Trump says.)
Miss Bianca
@Cacti:
That…is my fear.
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne: Nah. And I would not mind if they had well-timed health crises over and over during The Stinker’s administration. Take the spotlight off him a bit.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: It’s not so much a fear as something literally happening right now.
Baud
@Cacti: I take it you’re not a believer of the “he negotiates the best deals” theory.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Barbara:
For him, I can come all sorts of violence.
danielx
@dmsilev:
Get a minion to go out and buy you some big boy pants and grow the fuck up, Donald. If you’re demoralized now, in six months your staff will have to pry you out of a fetal position for public appearances.
Mnemosyne
@dm:
We have a brand new local group called Rise Up LA that was started by two pissed-off white ladies. They formed right after the election and are now going to be partnering with the National Action Network (including the local affiliate) and Indivisible.
I think that Occupy and BLM failed because they deliberately tried to stay leaderless and unorganized. You can’t do that when you’re facing an organized, lockstep enemy.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Good idea, Baud. Less is certainly deserved.
Miss Bianca
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: There’s a sequel? Uh-oh…
randy khan
@geg6:
FWIW, I decided to keep the Trump fans as Facebook friends, partly as a way of doing recon, but also partly because some small number of them may be reachable over time. (Even 1% could help make a difference.) Everybody’s tolerance level varies, though, so I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone.
Cacti
@Brachiator:
There’s a substantial segment of the population in both places that thinks we can hit the reset button on 70 years of globalization, now that the benefits aren’t flowing exclusively to the west.
The problem is Asia isn’t going to play along.
Cacti
@Baud:
Not so much.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
You want positive? Google for Piers Morgan’s whining tweet about starting a men’s march and then look for Oswalt Patton’s many tweets in response. They’re very funny.
This Facebook album has all of them, but there are plenty of links to articles also.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
That’s the sort of deal a multiply bankrupt vendor and investor stiffer makes.
That Sanders agrees with him about it is the cherry on the shit sundae. That’s like the singularity of wrongness.
Roger Moore
@randy khan:
This is the way gerrymandering always works. There’s a trade-off between maximizing your benefit in typical elections and maximizing your safety in atypical elections. The bigger an advantage you design for yourself, the smaller a swing it will take to upset it. I think there’s also a problem with the benefits of gerrymandering declining over time as people move, get old enough to vote, die, change party affiliations, etc., which makes it dangerous to try for too small an edge.
Paul in KY
@randy khan: I think the problem is that if you did ‘blow up the White House’, many innocent butlers/cooks/etc. would be killed. Now if she said something that only resulted in The Combover Caligula & some of his most nasty aides buying it, then (IMO) there would be nothing to apologize about.
Bombs are very indiscriminate.
Edit: Of course if you offed Shitgibbon & Cotton Mather Jr., you’d get the zombie eyed granny starver as president & he might be alot better at presidentin than the above 2. Sort of like killing Hitler in 1939 & Heydrich ends up succeeding him & we’re all wearing lederhosen or really snazzy uniforms in whatever job in the armaments industry we have.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
I loved it! I hear he cried.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: OK, OK, don’t know who the guy is and yes, I deplore violence in general etc etc, but damn…setting that clip to to that “Hamilton” song was fucking genius and made me LOL. Particularly after I’d read the titles to some of his “articles”.
Mnemosyne
@Barbara:
He says outrageous white supremacist shit to get people pissed off and thinks he’s safe from any consequences to himself. Now he knows better.
As I said, I have no problem with the puncher being prosecuted, and will happily donate to his defense fund, especially if Spencer is put on the stand and forced to repeat his opinions under oath, preferably to a mixed-race jury.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
Makes sense. If we devote all our attention to that and continuing the Benghazi investigation, there won’t be any time left to investigate Trump’s ties to Putin.
aimai
@rk: I think they had a reason. If only I knew what it was? I think it started with the letter b….b something.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: If it makes y’all feel more conflicted, my annoying leftie friends who use words like ‘neoliberal’ and vote for people like Jill Stein love the idea of beating up Spencer and think we should do more of it.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: I love the idea of beating up on your annoying leftie friends. Conflict resolved!
Citizen Scientist
My wife and about 8 other ladies went down to the march. I really enjoyed seeing family members slag the whole effort on social media the next day, particularly those who insisted that “women don’t need anymore rights” and “nobody knows what they were marching for.” I think even my MIL downplaying the whole thing finally got h Mrs. CS thinking about not going on vacation with them this year (FINALLY!!!).
Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major: Which is also my fear. That qwe’re so pig-ignorant in this country, and have the collective attention span of a fruit fly, that this is happening *now* and we won’t talk about it, we won’t talk about alternatives, we’ll just get “Ugh, TPP Bad, Trump Good for nixing it!”
@Citizen Scientist: that’s been the right-wing “womanly woman” meme on my FB feed. Plus, too, don’t forget, women in Saudi Arabia can’t drive, so we have nothing to cry about!
LongHairedWeirdo
@Mnemosyne: Sure, but keep in mind that they don’t have to sow doubts in the minds of the people who were there and supported the march. They only have to have established that doubt in the minds of people who didn’t care or were actively hostile.
My claim is, next year, they’ll lie about this, and they’ve sown the ground for those lies. And you’ll know it’s a lie, as will tens of millions of others, heck, maybe *billions* of others. But they don’t care about that – they just care that they can brush it aside with their supporters.
It might not work, but remember that the GOP is shameless. They called Obama incompetent and unlawful and divisive – three lies that should have choked any normal human being. They had former prosecutors flat out lying about whether Hillary Clinton engaged in criminal behavior. They don’t care if their opponents are shocked and appalled by how shamelessly they’re lying… so long as their supporters fall for the big lie. Remember that the purpose of the big lie isn’t to get people to believe the literal big lie, but to start to argue that, okay, clearly the big lie isn’t true, but no one would say such a thing if there wasn’t a *bit* of truth to it. I won’t be surprised if, by next year, there’s a GOP talking point that the number of marchers was roughly equal to the number attending the inauguration.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Excellent solution.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: I’m telling you, the looks of confusion on their faces is worth it. Very amusing.
geg6
@Barbara:
No, he has blogged about wiping out the African American population. Fuck him. He has no redeeming qualities and isn’t some kind of “moderate” Nazi who wants to ship them back to Africa. He advocates genocide. I’d punch him in the face if I saw him and not feel an ounce of remorse. Jesus.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major:
I just had a vision of 3 1/2 years from now about people telling me how awesome Andrew Cuomo is and if I don’t agree I’m a racist and don’t dare question his status as a pure paragon of the democratic party.
Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t think we should do more of it, but…wait!
@Baud: What Baud said!
Corner Stone
@danielx: “Cock punch, cock punch. What ya gonna do? What ya gonna do when The Cock Knocker comes for you?”
Mark Hamill’s greatest role.
Cacti
@Kropadope:
No one doubts that 3 1/2 years from now, you’ll still be fighting the real enemy: elected Democrats.
debbie
@geg6:
I heard an interview with Spencer on NPR. He’s very slick in how he talks around his true aims, but the most the interviewer could get him to say was that he wanted America to return to what it was originally intended to be: a nation of Northern Europeans.
Yoda Dog
@Trentrunner: It was still a dumb thing to say..
Miss Bianca
@Gelfling545: yay! Give us a report later!
@debbie: I know some Native Americans who might disagree with that assessment…oh, wait, where is he planning to deport *them* to?
Kropadope
@Cacti: I thought according to you the real enemy were the voters.
Cacti
@geg6:
Nazis have never hesitated to punch a face to gain power. They count on their more civilized opponents not responding in kind.
Screw that. Fascists need to be fought, not hugged.
Paul in KY
@Citizen Scientist: Kudos to you & spouse!!! See, the women’s march did accomplish something!
bemused
I will never, ever get used to hearing “What the White House is saying now” on my tv. It’s like hearing there was a major, shocking, for real “breaking news” story while you are making dinner while news on on, only half listening. I can’t adjust to it not being the Obama WH and don’t want to, now that the WH is being run by the criminally and dangerously insane.
Aleta
@SiubhanDuinne: She lives with a vicious suspicious guy who threatens anyone who disagrees with him. He seems to hate grown women and compete with his sons. I doubt he gives her any control over money. He watches over everything she says.
If it’s clear to us how sick he is, I can only imagine how destructive living with him would be, especially trying to protect a child. Seems reasonable that she looks empty and afraid to make a mistake. I pity her if she has tried to leave him.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: Baud! is such a uniter!
@Kropadope: I’m not quite sure what this word salad means but I’m going with the safe bet that it’s super annoying!
ETA: @Kropadope: Or this!
Paul in KY
@Kropadope: If Cuomo could whip the Cheeto Benito when he runs for re-election, I’d be all for him.
And yes, I know of what I say.
BeezusQ
Hi all,
I just got this message (in blue below) from another friend—same idea but using snail mail, and doing it today, for the biggest flood at one time. Especially useful if the phone lines remain busy for the phone call version. Or do both.
Received this today. Creative idea … easy and worth a try.
Listen Up! The Republicans need to get the message from the majority of Americans that we value and need the benefits of Obamacare. Here’s how we do that:
On January 23rd, everyone who feels that way (our numbers are legion) sends a note to Donald Trump with a simple message:
“Don’t make America sick again. Improve Obamacare. Don’t repeal it.”
One envelope for every ACA supporter in your household…even if they are under 18 years old.
Just that simple message. Put it in an envelope, and put a stamp on it.
On January 23rd, mail it to:
“President” Donald T-Rump
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Can you imagine the picture of 53 MILLION letters arriving at the White House by January 26th? It will be a mountain. That image might help deter the Republicans from killing the most substantial improvement to American healthcare since the discovery of Penicillin.
Do it today! Drop it into a mailbox near you on Monday, January 23rd.
Please send this email to 20 (or more) of your friends, neighbors ann fellow Americans. Ask them to do the same.
This also helps out the US Postal Service, with about $20 Million of stamp sales.
Corner Stone
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Oh, gross. Eeewwww…
Lizzy L
Punching people — even a Nazi person — is illegal, unless you are defending yourself against a physical attack by the Nazi person, in which case I say, You go. But if you put me on a jury and asked me to convict the puncher of assault, I would convict on the lowest charge possible (littering?) and refuse to vote for jail time. Because if someone is really truly a contemporary Nazi, then he or she really truly wants to kill me and most of my friends, and could maybe do with a little punching. So fuck you Nazi person.
bemused
@tarragon:
I like the story, probably here, about the woman hanging out her SUV yelling at marchers they can’t have jobs if they have time to protest. Someone walking by said, “Bitch, it’s saturday”.
Ohio Mom
@Trentrunner: I know what she said. She could have been less specific and more vague about the revenge she finds herself fantasizing about. Everyone could have filled that in with their own fantasies. But Madonna was born to be provocative.
Roger Moore
@Aleta:
Who now controls the world’s foremost spy apparatus and has demonstrated the kind of personality that wouldn’t hesitate to use it for personal vengeance.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: The punch thrower needs to work the heavy bag and learn to throw an actual goddamned punch. I want him crying like a baby on the street.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Miss Bianca: Several, actually. The Cornish Heiress is next up, though I can’t seem to find it in the Kindle store any more.
Paul in KY
@BeezusQ: Couldn’t hurt. I’ll send one.
mai naem mobile
I found Lumpy’s tweet about why the people who protested did not vote. It was almost like he was saying “you guys didn’t vote and now I am here and I did not even want to be here. I just wanted to grift some money using the campaign.”
randy khan
@Paul in KY:
Not to be obnoxious about this, but *she* *didn’t* *say* *we* *should* *blow* *up* *the* *White* *House*. That was my point. People who are saying she did not only are wrong, but clearly didn’t pay attention to what she actually said.
Corner Stone
@EBT: I know, right? That was fucking weak if you’re going to punch a Nazi.
Major Major Major Major
@EBT: Definitely agree that that wasn’t a particularly amazing punch.
SiubhanDuinne
@Aleta:
I know. I started out feeling rather scornful of and superior to her, but in the last few months I’ve changed that. In part I pity her, but I don’t think that’s a very helpful emotion (and arrogant, which is not what I intend). I feel some kind of solidarity and sisterhood with her. Don’t know how else to explain it, as on the surface no two people could be more different than Melania Trump and SiubhanDuinne. But I honestly think that if she possibly could have, she would have been out marching and wearing a pink pussyhat on Saturday.
Major Major Major Major
@Corner Stone: Indiana Jones would haz a sad.
Of course, even he wasn’t wandering around sucker-punching them on the street.
Yoda Dog
@EBT: Yea that was a pretty weak punch. Guy was prolly all nervous… I would be too even though I’d like to believe I would have nerves of steel and hit him like Iron Mike in his prime.
bemused
@Logan Brown:
Did those FB friends go to Trump rallies? I wouldn’t call the language there genteel.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: Your so willing to speak for me white cis het friends? Tell them a real tranny thinks they suck.
Mnemosyne
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Even people who didn’t care or are hostile personally know people who participated.
Kathleen
@Mnemosyne: Or a blue pill for crowd size dysfunction.
Miss Bianca
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Hey, The English Heiress was only, like, $2 in dead-tree version from Amazon!
dm
@Mnemosyne:
Wasn’t the whole women’s march on Saturday started by two pissed-off ladies? Really kind-of wonderful. And people are fretting about “where will it go from here?”
So…. I’ve been listening to the Scholar’s Strategy Network podcast, No Jargon. A while back (before the election, I think) they had a sociologist who explained purity ponies. I’m not going to do his argument justice, but he said you can understand them a bit better by realizing there are two kinds/models of politics — the one focused on getting things done (the “art of the possible”, and all that), and one which is focused on conversion, on getting its message out. This crowd seems pretty dominated by the art-of-the-possible types. You don’t have to sympathize with the get-the-message-out crowd, but it might make them a little easier to put up with.
Since I’m blathering about podcasts, Ezra Klein interviews Heather McGhee about Trump, race, and empathy. McGhee is the head of Demos, and some of the stuff she says might help Logan Brown talk his Facebook friends out of their Trumpery.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne:
Blank canvas on which to project. That said, my guess is she was ready to walk from the marriage, in the not too distant future. But then the fool got himself an Electoral College victory.
Elizabelle
In moderation, for mentioning the blasted pussyhat.
Major Major Major Major
@dm: In my experience there’s a big cohort that intersects heavily with the purity ponies who actually like losing.
Trentrunner
@SiubhanDuinne: LOL, you’re way ahead of me.
I still at the stage where I’m 99% certain that Trump makes Melania peg him on his back while she wears an Ivanka mask.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne:
Blank canvas on which to project. That said, my guess is she was ready to walk from the marriage, in the not too distant future. But then the fool got himself an Electoral College victory.
ETA: We are all so screwed.
Mnemosyne
@dm:
The problem with the “get the message out” crowd is that they seem to think that getting the message out is sufficient. Unfortunately, merely getting the message out that (for example) Black people are really pissed off about police shootings doesn’t do much to solve the actual problem of police shootings.
dm
@Major Major Major Major: I haven’t talked to anyone I’d describe that way since Carter was President. But even at that time I was a bit taken aback at the suggestion that electoral politics was part of the problem (“don’t vote, it only encourages them”). At that time I sort-of wrote it off the “sixties envy”.
@Mnemosyne: I didn’t say it would make them more persuasive, just a little less annoying. It’s not so different from the liberal illusion about “if we only got our message through to them, they’d agree!”, though, is it?
Elizabelle
PS: thanks to whoever suggested the way to deal with pussyhat was to italicize part of it. Thanks!
Baud
@dm: I often see it pitched as “stand up to the two-party system.”
Aleta
@BeezusQ: That’s great. I’ve decided to use the mail too. I decided to print an aerial photo of a city march as the image on the back of each postcard as a reminder of how many agree with me.
Yesterday a friend said that when paper mail comes in to a Congressional office, no one is sitting there entering into the computer the full message, or the signature or address.* All they do is record Yes or No. (*Perhaps tracking of mailing location, if they happen to have PO type scanners to read the stamped machine code. I have to ask about that.)
I think one reason the marches matter is the photo to remind Congress of how many thousands will be voting in 2018. And that’s why they are so desperate to claim similar numbers for Trp.
MCA1
Random thoughts:
– y’all have posted a lot of great signs and slogans from the marches, but the one my wife showed me a picture of was my favorite: it read “Super Callous Fascist Racist Extra Braggadocious”
– I take some solace in the difficulty that the connectivity of our modern communications age adds to the prospects of successfully pulling off a full-fledged stagecraft propaganda effort, which is exactly what this Maladministration has signaled they’ll be attempting. EVERYBODY, even those stuck in the bubble, could see what was going on in their Facebook and Instagram feeds. Even if they countenance it for now from an epistemic closure perspective, they know that Spicer and Drumpf are straight up lying. There’s no confusion about it, for anyone.
– Spicer won’t last 120 days.
– Agreed with all who have determined to give no quarter to anyone who affirmatively voted for Drumpf. F ’em all. They cannot be reached and don’t want to be. It’s either an unforgiveable sin, an unfathomable level of foolishness and irrationality, a symptom of epistemic closure/wholesale media failure and the disintegration of the social contract, or some combination of those things that led to their vote. There is no winning those people back. They may come crawling over and pretend they were never on the other side if the PO(tu)S becomes the constant object of derision and a symbol of failure and they want to get in on the yuks and turn on him. But there is no rational way to reach these people or change their minds, because they are literally not living in the same world as us.
– as Betty said, that world is one in which pluralism is a given. That nearly half the country signaled a rejection of that very concept is perhaps the most heartbreaking, treasonous, disparaging thing about this election, and why I’m firmly in the “Take My Country Back” category now.
– isn’t it amazing that the day after an inauguration people in mixed company felt perfectly comfortable absolutely shredding the new occupant of the White House? Millions of them, at social gatherings all over the country in addition to the marches, are ALREADY openly hating on him in front of strangers and friends alike. That is what the protests Saturday achieved, and I think we’ll look back on them as a massive moment in American political history – they encouraged the silent majority (yes, we’re now a part of that, too) to step back out of the shadows and start fighting back in full knowledge that millions and millions agreed with them.
Emerald
@dm:
Nothing would make them easier to put up with.
amk
This is how they will try to trivialize the movement and the fucking media will aid them. Only solution is to follow up with votes. 2016 was a great and an unique opportunity lost due to disunity and indifference.
Aleta
@tarragon:
Yeah, tell him to just wait til all the federal contract workers (temps without unions to grieve) are let go and have time on their hands.
Paul in KY
@randy khan: Sorry, randy. My bad.
dm
I’ve been expecting this: Trump reacts to the reports of Saturday’s march sizes, Downfall version. A pity they didn’t colorize his hair orange.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: Also, the message they think they are getting out isn’t the message received by a bunch of non-crunchy folks.
Paul in KY
@Baud: That’s like ‘stand up to the system of exchanging work for that thing they call “money”‘
Aleta
@Roger Moore: And knows all her family back in the old country.
mainmata
I was right behind the lady with the Putin the Puppeteer prop. Pretty good one and there were many other great signs and a great atmosphere during that march.
Major Major Major Major
@Paul in KY: Another idea that’s popular out here in the bay area.
sharl
Here’s a photo of the march in Haines Alaska, a small community up an inlet running northwest from Juneau. Those are some tough, determined folks!
From here.
Corner Stone
@Major Major Major Major:
I strenuously disagree. I am pretty sure Indy coldcocked Nazis just about everywhere he found them.
He melted the fucking faces off a whole damn group of them at once! And I’m supposed to think he has a problem punching a Nazi in the fucking face?
Don’t think so.
Yoda Dog
@sharl: Holy shit that is awesome. Dedication, right there, I love it. Bless all those folks.
sharl
It was cold for the folks over in Nome in west Alaska by the Bering Strait, but at least they had a sunny day for their march.
A few other Nome photos here.
sharl
Final one from Alaska: march in northernmost town in U.S., Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow, until returning very recently to their original native name).
Paul in KY
@Major Major Major Major: That’s funny, as even the commies used money.
Cain
@Brachiator:
I think it depends on what that software is. If you’re writing a web app, probably not a lot. But if you’re participating in say the Linux kernel or a large project that actually does things in that space then yes, you can make a lot of money. Open source is big business now, and you can make a lot of money in contracting and consulting. I worked in our open source business unit at Intel for the last 5 years, and all the pro-bono work I did for the 15 years prior came to the fore and now I make money by being a community person. (well hopefully, I have a job pending) But yes, it can be done.
Larkspur
@Major Major Major Major:
I feel really shocked about it. If I had been there, I’d have run to fetch an ice pack, and I’d have applied it to his face. Really really hard.
Cain
@Cacti:
I agree and in general that was the assessment in that thread. However, there were mistakes made when it was implemented for NAFTA. I agree that just getting out of TPP is probably not a good idea, but you know it was never going to work in this political climate. We wouldn’t have gotten the kind of programs needed to move jobs that were lost (again). Also, people cling to the jobs they have, they don’t have the motivation to do something else orthogonal. It’s difficult doing it.
wvng
To me the big story here is that this lie by Spicer was not significantly different in magnitude than the lie he told on Saturday about the inauguration crowds that earned him such ridicule from the press – and yet they let this one pass without even blinking. Two days ago they were all up in arms about being fed an obvious lie. Today they are fed an obvious lie and … nothing. We are so screwed.
dogwood
@Elizabelle:
Arriving at the WH before the swearing in, Trump got out of the limo, hurried up the stairs, and was finished greeting the Obamas before Melania had cleared her side of the car. After the photo op, they turned to enter and Trump walked into the WH ahead of the other three. Barack and Michelle linked their arms behind Melania and gently escorted her in. It was so awkward and so embarrassing. He’s a vile and foolish man.
dm
@Major Major Major Major: I’m conflicted, though I had been thinking Carl Paladino deserved as much.
Corner Stone
@wvng:
Fucked. The word you are looking for there is, “We are so fucked.”
Larkspur
@dogwood: President Obama also had to pretty much clean up after Trump when Trump greeted Bob Dole on the dais. Trump briefly shook Dole’s hand and turned and walked away. Barack then shook Dole’s hand, held it briefly while he spoke to Dole. Dole responded and smiled, then Barack leaned over to greet Elizabeth and kiss her cheek.
wvng
@Corner Stone: Yes, fucked also works. Notice that the entire 280 entry discussion here and I was the first to note the lack of media responding to the lie.
Captain C
@ET: Under.
Ksmiami
@MisterForkbeard: oh fuck them- I’m surprised Trump supporters know how to crap on their own accord. worthless fuckwits all
Ruckus
@rk:
1. He isn’t near as rich as he tells people he is nor as rich as he’d like to be and has been telling everyone for years.
2. He’s been a miserable asshole his entire life. He won’t change at 70 unless he really, really wants to. And all he really, really wants is for everyone to
likeadore him, even through that’s totally impossible. Even for a likeable person. And he’s anything but.3. I’m not sure he actually knows how powerful he is. He ran his campaign as a vanity project, not a political campaign. He won because assholes think everyone else is a vain as they are or are worthless.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m not for violence unless it is very, very necessary for life.
Motherfucker deserved having his head taken completely off, not just bruised.
Ruckus
@Cacti:
drumpf is such a shrewd businessman, you’d think he might understand that. I mean look at all the bankruptcies he’s negotiated.
Ruckus
@debbie:
He’s had 70 yrs to grow a pair and it hasn’t happened yet, so I’m going with, it’s not even possible.
Ruckus
@A Ghost to Most:
I read that as donate to his defense fund and throw in to his retirement.
zhena gogolia
@Major Major Major Major:
Of course it makes you uncomfortable. We should not be condoning violence.
zhena gogolia
@mai naem mobile:
That’s how it struck me! It was like, why the hell didn’t you vote and save me from all this?
zhena gogolia
@randy khan:
Yes, and people will understand that just as well as they understood all the reasons why Hillary Clinton had a private e-mail server. Or that she did not actually say that ALL Trump supporters were “deplorables.” Forget it, it’s now Holy Writ that Madonna said she wanted to blow up the White House. I heard it from two people just tonight at dinner.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
I am personally pretty old to be getting into physical fights – one reason I have a carry permit, besides it making it easier to transport guns to target practice with friends.
But I fully support younger people sucker punching Nazis like poor Richard Spencer. He’s not a nazi collaborator, he’s trying to be hitler. And we don’t just talk hitler down, we take him down. Poor Richard needs punched everywhere he goes. Nazis make my skin crawl.
We took our cow to a neighbor’s farm, to breed with his bull. An older guy, who liked to talk. It was a hot summer day, and we sat in his living room – you could smell the dust – and after an hour or so, after he got to know us a little better, he told us about his Army days – his unit was first into one of the death camps of Europe. The GIs tried to help the few survivors, but they couldn’t eat the food the soldiers were carrying across the battlefield Europe was, so they died.
People who admire Hitler and the Nazis are between sociopaths and psychopaths. Society needs to be protected from them, just like we need to be protected from rabid wolves. Poor Richard is one of them.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Trigger warning:
Poor Richard would push you, Major ^4, into the “shower” and turn on the gas, and then make your husband drag your body to the furnace, if only he could. That’s what they do when they win.
It’s what he wants, more than love, more than luxury, the power to kill the untermenschen, like you, like me. Like Alecia Keys, and Stevie Wonder, and Aretha. He’s a monster, and only not dangerous yet because he doesn’t have power, yet.
Poor Richard is a monster in human costume. He needs to be punched until he goes away and hides, where he can’t hurt anyone, and can no longer attempt to sell his horror-story of a “political party” to other haters.
O. Felix Culpa
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
I prefer chasing real leprechauns.
sharl
Report from Salt Lake City: