"Will there be a hearing on the health care proposal?" Senator @clairecmc asked today in the Finance Cmte. You should watch: #Trumpcare pic.twitter.com/rmKB0rGnTM
— Senate Democrats (@SenateDems) June 9, 2017
Not a word of this is hyperbole or inaccurate. What Republicans are doing is the legislative equivalent of a mugging. https://t.co/U2CBakuMVS
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) June 9, 2017
Apart from the never-ending #Resistance, what’s on the agenda for the day?
And, re Democrats: "Fundamentally, if we're not helping people, we should go the fuck home."
— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) June 9, 2017
Quite the story from Nancy Pelosi about her first meeting with Trump—and his insistence that he won the popular vote. (via @Morning_Joe) pic.twitter.com/xvmCmJA6el
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 9, 2017
Baud
Baud! 2020!: I’ve had it with these motherfucking Republicans in this motherfucking government!
MomSense
@Baud:
Yes!
rikyrah
Good Morning,Everyone???
rikyrah
@Baud:
Tell it!!!!
Michael Bersin
That’s our Claire.
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning!
Well, Saturday is actually the worst day of the week for me: long busy day at work, and tonight I have to rush home to let the dogs out and then drive to Michigan city to go get that abandoned cat. And I’m not sure where I will put him. Somewhere. Maybe he can be the bathroom cat till he’s fixed.
Betty Cracker
I actually like McCaskill a lot despite her maddening centrism. She keeps it real.
Lapassionara
Good morning everyone. I woke at 3:00 am, so planning on some early morning garden work before it gets too hot to be outside.
Lapassionara
@Baud: Me too!
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Elizabelle
@Baud: Snakes is right. You called it.
Las serpientes. Of course they make it feminine. Adam was outnumbered.
ThresherK
Now, now, I’m sure there’s some Beltway-approved moderate R on the Finance Committee who’s just as blisteringly honest, sitting right next to McCaskill, who said the exact same thing a minute later.
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud: Baud!-fucking-tastic!
bystander
@Betty Cracker: Considering McCaskill is elected from the same state as Blunt is one of America’s little miracles. Speaking of which, where’s Ozark?
@Baud: I agree with the sentiment about the repubs, so why not Baud!2017!? Following a brief but bloodless revolution, that is, led by your campaign manager, TengUPhule. Or almost bloodless.
satby
@bystander: Ozark is apparently on a trip. I miss his morning comments too!
I did hear from Watergirl last night, so she may be able to start popping in again soon. That’s some good news!
Quinerly
@Betty Cracker:
I think she genuinely cares and is a good person. I have met her several times (she always seems to remember, so that’s plus for any pol). Shook hands again with her at the Woman’s March here. I asked her if I could have a picture of us. After the picture (and I have no idea why but I got very emotional at the end of the march), I asked for a hug. She grinned and squeezed me hard. Of course, I cried. Related…Ozark Hillbilly had joined our group for breakfast and marched with us. He was off looking for a bathroom when we were all hanging with Claire. Too much coffee at the diner.?
JPL
@satby: Thanks. I knew that watergirl has been busy, but missed the info about Ozark. Your day sounds hectic, but tomorrow will come.
Elizabelle
@bystander: Tengu Phule? Full on blood. Tarantino style bloodletting.
Quinerly
@bystander:
St. Louis and KC elected our Claire. The rest of this state elected Blunt.? She’s good people. A bit conservative for my taste but the best we can do now from a state that once gave us George McGovern’s first running mate. Funny how things work, ain’t it?
JPL
@Quinerly: In the olden days, there was even a president that was caring and tried to do the best for the country. Oh yeah, that was only six months ago. Republicans need to be called on their lies, and lack of transparency. Good for Claire.
satby
Just saw on the weather that tomorrow starts five days of +90 degree temps here. Grass is already starting to go dormant because it’s been so dry after no real rain for a couple of weeks. Gah!
Betty Cracker
@bystander: I believe he is on vacation.
@Quinerly: Nice story! I liked her account of shot-gunning a beer with her daughter after successfully bamboozling Todd Akin!
Quinerly
Biden is annoying me…and it ain’t because of the Romney encouragement: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/09/joe-biden-mitt-romney-senate-donor-conference-hillary-clinton-239383
Raven
I had blue light cancer therapy yesterday . It’s the third time and I have very little discomfort. I’m hoping it’s because there wasn’t much skin cancer there but I really don’t know. The put this acid compound on your mug for a couple of hours and then burn you with blue light.
Baud
@Quinerly: WTF is he thinking? You can no longer attribute it to an off-the-cuff Bidenism.
Baud
@Raven: I didn’t hear about this. Hope all is well.
randy khan
That was very well done. It deserves wide circulation.
Iowa Old Lady
@Raven: That sounded good until your last sentence.
MomSense
@Raven:
Yikes. I missed the news that you were going through this. Hope you continue to not have discomfort andnthat the treatment works.
Raven
@Baud: It preventative. I had an Md friend who told me “it’s not IF you Nam vets get skin cancer it is when”!
Iowa Old Lady
And wow for that Pelosi story. I hadn’t heard that before.
Raven
@Iowa Old Lady: I https://uihc.org/health-library/blue-light-therapy-warding-skin-cancerdon't know if it was invented at U of Iowa but the medical center there was an early adopter.
Baud
@Raven: I’ve never heard of a preventative cancer treatment. Hope it works.
Raven
@Baud: This is my third one. I researched it a good bit and it seems legitimate.
Quinerly
@Baud:
At least the second time he has said this. Not helpful. Not productive. Very disappointing. Shocks me a bit…doesn’t seem like his style.
Iowa Old Lady
@Raven: I’m glad it’s comfortable so far. Cancer treatments tend to be terrible. I think it was Molly Ivans who said “I’ve had blind dates that were better.”
JPL
@Iowa Old Lady: You can find the entire twenty-two minute interview on MSNBC morning joe. It’s worth hunting it down.
Quinerly
@Raven:
Heard of it. Good luck. Take plenty of downtime this weekend.
Iowa Old Lady
@Quinerly: Biden may be another old white guy who’s slipping and needs to spend more time with his family.
Quinerly
@Iowa Old Lady:
You may be right. It just doesn’t seem to be his nature to slag HRC. He made a decision not to run early on. I just don’t see how this kind of talk to donors helps….even if Dog forbid he thinks he might run in 2020.
JPL
@Quinerly: From the article
Biden is correct about supporting Romney’s run. A moderate republican is the best one can hope for in Utah. Who knows what a moderate republican is though. Isaakson started off that way, and now he’s 100 percent behind the president.
Iowa Old Lady
@JPL: Thanks. I’ll do that.
gene108
Sigh…overall good rant by Sen. McCaskill had a good rant but she got the AHCA and the ACA mixed up.,.
She sad Grassley offered amendments on the Affordable Healthcare Act, even though he didn’t vote for it.
Edit: Did it a couple of times
Betty Cracker
@Quinerly: It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden runs in 2020. I wish he wouldn’t; he’s really not a great presidential candidate, as previous shots at that brass ring demonstrated. He was an excellent VP, and it would be better for his legacy, IMO, if he accepted that as his place in history. But I suspect he’s seen a president when he looks in the mirror for decades, and once people get that in their heads, it’s tough to shake, apparently.
zhena gogolia
@Quinerly:
St. Louis and KC can join us when we secede from the Treasonous states. j/k, I know good people live in every state.
JPL
Talking about old white guys, it’s surprising that’s McCain’s performance at the Comey hearing didn’t receive more attention.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
It is.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker:
God, I hope not.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Just stop looking in the mirror.
Baud
@zhena gogolia: If Wilmer runs, it might be useful to have Biden in there too.
@zhena gogolia: Luckily, I don’t cast a reflection.
Brendan in NC
Nice rant by Claire!! And Kirsten was spot on. Unfortunately, all the attention will be on Kirsten’s f-bombs, and not the substance of her comments.
JMG
@JPL: Washington press corps will do everything in its power to bury McCain’s awful minutes. They love Gramps and they don’t want to think of him like this.
Amir Khalid
@zhena gagolia:
For a politician, Joe has been a good guy most of the time. But even for him, that’s much easier said than done.
Peale
@Betty Cracker: yep. I might write in Jim Webb on my primary ballot if my choices are cuomo, Bernie and Biden. Too untrustworthy, way too old, way way too old.
Kristine
@rikyrah: Good morning! ☕️
Kristine
@Raven: Glad it’s preventative. Hope it prevents.
bemused
Clare was fantastic! I’m loving McCaskill, Gilliland, Kamala Harris and Pelosi telling it like it is this week so much.
I like Nicole Wallace more than I expected to. When she’s outraged by Trump, she can be hilarious, goat rodeo. I remember her comments about the horror of babysitting Sarah Plain during McCain campaign. It must have really left a mark.
I looked at the link to Madame Tussand’s Trump creation downthread. Whoa, I don’t think DT looked that presentable during his campaign, did he? If so, he has gained a lot of weight since then and just generally looks really bad physically now.
Kristine
@Iowa Old Lady: Wonder if it will spike T***p like Dr Who spiked Harriet Jones.
“Don’t you think she looks tired?”
Living in hope, me.
germy
@JPL:
The Washington Post noticed (called it “bizarre“), which surprised me.
Weaselone
@bemused:
Even Trump’s religious devotion to golf outings and general aversion to work in favor of watching Fox isn’t going to shield him completely from the strain of the office, particularly if he doesn’t sleep when he has the opportunity.
Kristine
First day of an expected week-long heat wave here in far NE Illinois. I’m looking at mid-80s to mid-90s unless the magical lake coolness kicks in. Depends on the breeze direction.
This means earlier than usual dog walks for the duration because Gaby hates the heat. I carry water for her, but it’s not enough. She needs shade and stillness if it gets much into the 80s.
Indoor work for me. ::glances at rug that needs vacuuming::
Quinerly
@bemused:
Nicole was very upset early on re her parents…at least her dad’s love of Trump. This was when Jeb! was still in the race. I haven’t heard if her dad has changed. Think all of this is a bit personal. As personal as it can be for someone who made her career tied to the Bushes.
Quinerly
@Betty Cracker:
Big ego. Enough said.
Kay
@Peale:
I think it will be a huge field. If Trump shows anything, he shows that anyone can be President. Literally anyone.
Peale
@Kay: good. Gives Baud a change to peel off the decisive Balloon Juice vote to win New Hampshire.
Oldgold
Biden is a decent pol, but his time has past.
The Democrats need to find some new blood for 2020. Sadly, at this point, I have no idea who that might be.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to who that might be?
debbie
@satby:
I was worried her talk with her boss hadn’t gone well.
dogwood
@Brendan in NC:
Kirsten doesn’t seem to be on any of the Senate committees that are attracting attention right now and putting some Democrats in the spotlight. So she drops the eff bomb at an event that would normally fly under the radar in order to get her 15 minutes. This is all part of living in Trumpland.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
I love Claire’s in your face style and her outrage. More of this from all Dems please. You’d think Wilmer would be out in front of this travesty too – isn’t scolding everyone his thing? Isn’t health care his thing? Oh right, there’s grifting of his gullible cult to do by having a rally including getting their 2 minute Hillary hate on. Just like Trump.
debbie
@Raven:
Sorry to read this, but hope the treatment is a success. Cancer in any form sucks.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That’s certainly true. Heard a conversation recently about California Rep. Swalwell, who has been a prominent Trump critic, and if that signified presidential ambitions. Someone said it isn’t possible to jump from the House to the presidency. Well, if you can jump from running a fraudulent licensing scheme to the presidency, like you said, literally anyone is eligible.
JPL
Biden should write a book about his bromance with Obama. He could retire comfortable, and come out during the next election to support dems. It’s time for those seventy and older to move aside, and encourage younger candidates to run.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
I think Joe should go back to Congress. He’d be a real rabblerouser.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Oldgold:
The Dems I see doing a great job being interviewed consistently are Adam Schiff, Chris Murphy, Ted Lieu. Al Franken is a possibility, along with Gillibrand and Harris. Seth Moulton and Joe Kennedy from Mass. are great Dems.
JPL
@Oldgold: Kamala Harris is impressive, and I always wanted to hear more about Sen. Whitehouse, because I like his name.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@JPL:
The Whitehouse White House would be awesome.
Immanentize
@JPL: @germy: RE: McCain. FTFNew York Times gave it a full column yesterday around page 8.
Immanentize
@Raven: Raven,. I hope the treatment scares off the melanoma. And I appreciate you giving me a moment where I thought of you as a grumpy smurf.
waspuppet
@JMG: My favorite description of McCain at the Comey hearing was “The guy at the book reading who says ‘I have a comment AND a question.”
To which I added: “‘Now, I haven’t read the book, but it seems to me …'”
PsiFighter37
@Oldgold: Kampala Harris looks great on paper, but I would want to see her retail politicking skills in rural Pennsylvania (yes, I know that sucks but we have to do better there next time – we squeezed all we can out of Philly and the burbs) before going all-in.
Gillibrand would be nice too. An Al Franken run would be a lotta fun as well. We have good choices on our side, but this election cycle is going to be more like 1992 or 2004…hopefully we get a Bill Clinton and not a John Kerry.
waspuppet
I think McCaskill did great, and I don’t mind Gillibrand’s F-bombs; I just wish they (and other Dems) would start using the word “un-American.” Republicans use it so casually they don’t even realize they’re doing it, and in this situation it’s accurate.
Kay
First, let me say I swear constantly. Admitted. Swear words are really useful.
However. I don’t think candidates for President or Senators should be cussing up a storm publicly. Is it the same as skimming some charity dollars and directing them to a golf club you happen to own as “expenses”? No. But it’s still a lower standard and standards are low enough.
Oldgold
Speaking of McCain’s decline, Hatch did not appear to have his A game going in his exchange with McCaskill.
germy
@PsiFighter37: Gillibrand has said she’s not running for president 2020. Maybe she’ll change her mind.
If she does run, I expect a flock of brand new trolls here with various nyms calling her a sellout and corporatist.
Mary G
I thought Claire was terrific. Women shouldn’t be trying to be like men; showing emotions is genuine and voters respond to it.
The really interesting, and not in a good way, in that interchange is Orrin Hatch. He’s approaching McCain levels of confusion and his female staffer has to come up and tell him what to say. And it’s a flat-out lie.
Chyron HR
It’s a good thing that Our Revolution is going to primary all these bitches so we can have good honest white working class men in their seats.
Corner Stone
Did anyone happen to catch Congressperson Maxine Waters on Chris Hayes last night? I only caught snippets but from what I saw she went the full Maxine during the interview. Am going to have to find the clip and re-watch at some point today.
Baud
@Kay:
I’m sorry I can’t count on your support, Kay.
Baud
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Is that People’s March thing going on in Chicago? I haven’t heard much about it, which I consider a good thing.
Corner Stone
@Mary G: I love that the mic picked up her statement to Hatch. He was caught flat footed and turned around to basically repeat every word she told him to.
You kind of have to give Hatch a break though as he is new to this. In his world women don’t challenge the male.
JPL
@Immanentize: Wow! A quick search on nytimes, brought up a few articles, one which had the transcript. His family needs to suggest an appointment with a doctor.
germy
@Corner Stone: Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASQ4pftUu14
“The president is a liar.”
Immanentize
@Kay: I agree about coursening the language. We need to go in the opposite direction, perhaps.
As for 202O candidates — really none of us can know who the heros of this moment will be. Julian Castro would be a great candidate but doesn’t have the national exposure needed. John Bel Edwards? Mark Dayton? Roy Cooper? I think 2020 will be an anti-corruption and competency campaign which will favor governors.
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker: Speaking of a D pol that I wish would go away and stfu.
germy
Ice Cube clears things up for Bill Maher.
And Symone Sanders reminds Bill that she was yanked away from Wilmer’s entourage during his campaign.
Immanentize
As to age, my mother is 86 and still firing on all cylinders. She voted for Hillary, but lamented that she was too old to be President. “They all are just too old to do that job.”
Biden, Sanders, Warren, Pelosi all range from sorta to very not young.
I think maybe Mark Warner from Virginia wants to run. He’ll ‘only’ be 66 in 2020.
Kay
@Baud:
Remember all those limits? “not enough experience!” “too many skeletons in the closet!” “completely and utterly dishonest!” “we don’t actually know anything about the candidate!”- those are all gone. WIDE open. Anything goes.
It’s gotten to the point where it’s silly. Trump says something or other and everyone yawns because they know it’s bullshit. He lied to their faces at a press event yesterday, was contradicted by the person standing next to him, and it doesn’t matter at all.
With the low bar they’ve set for Trump they all attribute the constant lying to his lack of experience but I don’t think it’s that at all. He’s been sued for 40 years and it shows. He’s relying on the meaning of the word “discuss” – he’s parsing words, not being a “straight shooter”. You saw his defenders doing this at the Comey hearing. “Has there ever been a case where someone ‘hoping’ someone else would drop an investigation has been obstruction?”
This is the opposite of “bluntness”, what he does. It’s (im) plausible deniability.
gene108
@germy:
Her husband works on Wall Street. She is literally in bed with Wall Street.
That will create quite the kerfuffle from the Bernie backers.
Peale
@Immanentize: I think it will need to be a governor. Or a new Senator. Any senator that served pre-Obama is probably going to be compromised by that Era’s “see I’m not a liberal. Watch me reach across the aisle” politics. (See Biden, Joe) and I don’t think dems are really in the mood for that in the primary.
Baud
@Kay:
Only for the GOP, Kay, as you well know.
Quinerly
Very good Saturday Morning Edition on NPR. Oddly, broadcasting from the state that produced 4 of the 5 of my grandfather’s wives….Alabama! At least the first hour has been excellent. I’m off to Soulard Farmers’ Market and Tower Grove Farmers’ Market..morning music at the latter. (And for all the NPR haters, I’m well aware of things that some people don’t like and therefore boycott it…been listening to it 25 years and hope to listen for at least the next 25 years…a lot of human interest stuff, book stuff, science stuff…I’m not going to change). Have a great day!
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Baud:
Dave Weigel was live tweeting it yesterday. It opened with a video showing a BLM protestor with a sign saying “Super Predator” next to Clinton (with hearty boos), and then Sanders making room on stage for BLM protesters (cheers), with Wilmer watching from the audience, apparently in approval. Of course he was the one who voted for the bill, but nothing matters to those idiots. Basically it was a Trump Lite rally for Trump Lite.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
First words out of Trump’s mouth was “I won the popular vote”. What a useless twat.
I love her line “the people who voted for him, any mammal would do”
germy
@Peale:
In the above clip, the senator admits to Hatch that “we made mistakes” with the ACA. This is after she tells him they let republicans make amendments.
I think those were the mistakes.
Democrats believe in government, and so they believe in reaching across the aisle; compromise. But if you’re running on the R ticket and basically there to dismantle anything that costs Sheldon Adelson or the Mercers, you’re not there to play ball. You’re there to bulldoze the sports arena.
dogwood
@Quinerly:
I’ve always liked Nicole Wallace. In ’08 the men on the McCain campaign made the decision to go with Sarah Palin and then passed the buck to Wallace to handle. Nicole tried to work with the situation, but ended up not even voting for her boss. What I most appreciate about her is the fact that she always seems to tell the truth as she sees it. I might not always agree, but I don’t get the sense she is spinning, weaving, and dodging to promote her side. I think one of her best moments lately was last week on the Today show when they were discussing Eric Trump’s tweets and interviews about the lack of moral character among his father’s critics. She said that anyone who kills baby elephants for fun has no place criticizing anyone’s character.
Kay
@Immanentize:
I’m not predicting anything. I’m shocked people elected Trump. It isn’t the “merit” part I’m shocked about- it’s that he’s a mean-spirited, petty asshole who lies constantly. You don’t have to do any research to see that.
They’re reluctant to say it because it reflects on Trump voters but you don’t need a graduate degree to spot a complete lack of character. We all do this, every day. We decide whether to trust people, to a greater or lesser extent and it doesn’t matter what the job is- “can he fix my dishwasher without coming back and robbing my house?” . They trusted this guy. Whatever else they are one thing is clear- they’re piss-poor judges of character. That’s settled.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Trump also did that thing again where he attempts to shake down NATO member countries like a cheap mafia hood going after a neighborhood bakery that hasn’t paid its protection money. It doesn’t seem possible at this point that no one has explained to him that that’s not how it works. So either he knows it’s not true that NATO countries are in arrears for payments to the US and he’s lying about it for effect, or he has forgotten how it works. Either way, it’s embarrassing.
Raoul
@Betty Cracker:
Holy crap. He and Bernie can just todder off now, ok? I don’t frankly give a fuck if I’m being ‘ageist’, they’ve had their very very long turns at governance and I’ll thank them for their service and say, retire, dudes.
I don’t actually feel the same way about Pelosi, who is older than Biden, but that’s because she gets how coalition politics works. Biden I think did when he was a Senator, and I think he was a good foil for Obama during his presidency. But we need new blood, new leadership.
I’m starting to pay more attention to Kamala Harris, for example. I’d been watching her for several years, I have friends in CA who started talking about her when she was A.G. there. She’s nominally a Boomer, but as a ’64 vintage, I’m open to her style.
Who else are folks watching for 2020 that aren’t in their 70s? Again, it’s not the age … it’s that their generational cohort has fucked up so much shit, I am over it. The Orange Ignoramus is the zenith/nadir of Boomer egomania. Enough.
JGabriel
@germy:
IIRC, Gillibrand has said she has “no plans” to run for President. It’s slightly less definitive than declaring she absolutely won’t run.
Anyway, Gillibrand would have to say that. She’s up for re-elect in 2018, and, for the time being, isn’t in a position to equivocate over whether she would finish her term. There’s no upside to letting her eventual opponent use it as a talking point against her.
Another Scott
@Quinerly: To be fair – it’s Politico. There’s no surrounding context for the remarks, and the actual quoted words in the story are not even complete sentences. Politico exists for clicks and “controversy”, so Biden could have given the most anodyne remarks in the history of America and Politico could find a way to create news from it.
Note there’s no transcript or audio.
Uncle Joe should know better than to say things that can be taken out of context (if he did), and he should know better than to play both-sider-ism (if he did) when we’re fighting for the future of our national government, but he’s a good guy. He’s also a guy with no political power now…
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Oh wow. That’s something.
Mai.naem.mobile
@Betty Cracker: I used to find McCaskill annoying because of her centrism too but I think 1/ she’s changed a little since she had breast cancer and 2/ I think the centrism is just her political survival skills. She’s been there for the votes unlike Manchin who i think has better name recognition in WV and could get away with some courageous votes but he’s too chickenshit.
Baud
@Another Scott: Fair point.
germy
@JGabriel:
Good points. And it shows how we hold ourselves to a higher standard. Because look at Rubio.
rikyrah
@Raven:
Sending you positive thoughts and prayers
Kay
@Baud:
It’s so dishonest, the whole conversation, One of the NYTimes reporters tweeted the other day that “people” said they “shouldn’t cover” Clinton’s emails. No one said that. Ever. They said (correctly) that focusing on Clinton’s emails for 16 months was ridiculous and served no one but them.
Did you listen to that Comey hearing? Both Republican and Democratic Senators were using extreme language to describe the Russian interference- “most important work we have ever done”- like that. It wasn’t covered during the election, when it mattered. Instead we read boring, stolen Clinton campaign emails. It’s not just that it’s important- it’s also really interesting! It’s like a spy story! Because it IS a spy story! Those spy books sell millions of copies because people want to read them, so this isn’t even “markets”- it isn’t even “we have to compete because we’re a business”. We got rice recipes instead of The Story.
JPL
I’m off to venture with the snakes. (the yard kind) Yard work has become more problematic, because of the critters. So far, I’ve seen the nonvenomous ones, but truthfully, I don’t stay around long enough to ask. ugh.. I’ve been told that they’ll move along as soon as the chipmunk population reduces. The oddest thing I saw was a hawk getting one on the driveway, then being surrounded by crows, who decided they wanted it. The crows won.
rikyrah
@Oldgold:
I think that it’s a scam.nothing wrong with either one. Just faking
Raoul
@JPL: As the person in my family who was the first to start noticing/commenting on dad’s slippages and disorientations, to family that held firm to denial for a few years, I’m not surprised.
JGabriel
MSNBC Chyron (via Anne Laurie @ Top):
Don’t you think he looks tired?
rikyrah
@Kay:
I love that you keep on bringing up this point
Another Scott
@JMG: The national political press always ignored the decline of long-serving senators. I don’t think I’ll ever forget some young male aid to Thumond sitting behind him and saying “without objection, it’s so ordered” then Strom parroting it, some time when Strom was presiding officer of the Senate for some important bit of business (might have even been in the Clinton years). It was clear that he was not capable of doing the job anymore, but it went on for months/years before he finally retired in 2003 (he died 6 months later at 100)…
Voters should and must be able to pick whomever they want to represent them (with very few exceptions), but the Senate (and House) must have ways of making sure the country’s business is done in ways that aren’t held captive to those who are infirm. (Trump, and too many others in Congress, aren’t mentally up to the job.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Kay:
All the garbage that’s fit to print.
randy khan
@JGabriel:
I think Gillibrand is running. And I hope she is, too.
Corner Stone
@Another Scott:
Are you being serious? Almost every word that has come out of his mouth the last 6+ months has been to slag HRC or D’s in general. Or self-promote one Joseph Biden. Honestly, I can’t wait for him to find a nice fishing cabin and keep his damn fool mouth shut if he isn’t going to be helpful.
zhena gogolia
@Oldgold:
I FIRMLY BELIEVE BOTH THOSE OLD FARTS WERE FAKING IT.
kindness
I love me some Nancy Smash! She isn’t my Congresscritter but she’s N. Cal so close. What I have been amazed at is Nancy is a liberal and all but she’s a highly moral and principled woman. She had 5 kids. She’s a good Catholic, which includes the right to choose and birth control as it should in my book. Yet for over a decade the right paints the woman as Satan’s wife. Seriously, how can one project such things against this woman?
There was a time when public figures where dismissed and shunned because of their lies and hypocrisy. I am sorry but that time was before mine and certainly not now. As a nation we’ve gone off the rails. Look to see who propels us there and who likes it because they think they will rise because of it. Those are the real dangerous ones for us.
Kay
I like Gillibrand a lot despite her incessant cussing but they have to come up with a realistic plan to handle what will be real sexism, because it exists. Obama didn’t actually ignore racism, because he’s not a fool and he wanted to win. He handled it – deliberately, and with a plan. We can allow disagreement on whether sexism exists, a lot of people, including some SCOTUS justices deny racism exists- allowing that doesn’t matter. They’ll say “it’s not sexist!” and arguing with them is a waste of time. They can say it. We can know better and plan for it. I don’t know what the plan should be but clearly the Clinton approach wasn’t effective. Liberals are supposed to be smart and creative. Start thinking about that.
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah:
Right.
Corner Stone
@Kay:
Did you also happen to notice that Comey testified he was first made aware of Russia’s active measures campaign against our democracy in *the summer of 2015* ? 2015!
Hal
A Facebook friend went on one of her many liberal media rants yesterday in defense of Trump. According to her Comey’s testimony proved no one in the Trump administration, including Trump, colluded with the Russians to rig the election. That Trump never asked Comey to stop any investigation , and my favorite, Comey is a yes man and a terrible FBI director who was in over his head, yet Trump demanded loyalty and fired him when he didn’t get it.
Don’t ask what she thought about Comey when Obama was in office and the fbi was investigating Hillary Clinton. When Trump’s approval ratings are under 30% and I ask who the hell thinks he’s still doing a good job, I know she’ll be one of those 27 percenters.
bystander
@Quinerly: Born in KC and college in St. Louis, during the Warren Hernia era. Imagine an Eagleton today and the reaction to his admission of treatment for mental illness?
@Elizabelle: Yeah. Tarantino-style. .
Raoul
@Oldgold: I took that as Orrin experiencing a combo of shame for his obvious crassness in ramming this thru, and shock that McCaskill wasn’t playing by the Senate rules of cordial acquiescence by Dems.
amk
mayexit has begun.
Corner Stone
@germy: Yes, that’s the segment I was referring to with Maxine and Hayes. She has Chris laughing out loud a couple times when she forthrightly answers his questions.
Kay
@Corner Stone:
I did! I had a long drive so I listened to the whole thing. Thank goodness for Chicago AM radio. I was in the middle of nowhere and I couldn’t get anything else. So funny- my 8th grader was with me and he doesn’t know what AM radio is.
He thought I was doing something extremely clever and somewhat.. technical :)
Raoul
@Kay: I have mixed feelings about this. I get that we might want to not just go all in on further coarsening our politics. But I think she showed a toughness in the particular way she said what she did. She wasn’t just F-bombing for shits-n-giggles, she was speaking in the way real people do when they are real-talking about stuff.
Dems get slagged all the time for not being rough and tumble, too. A few carefully timed (and I mean few) swears, in these craptastic and frightening times, can be emboldening, not something to feel pensive about.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo fka Edmund Dantes
@amk:
Apparently, there’s a fair divide between Scottish Tories and English Tories, and the Scottish leader is threatenening to bolt if DUP is brought in.
Plus, the IRA will likely get restive over anything approaching a hard BREXIT, not to mention local issues.
Maybe time to start donating to NORAID.
Raoul
@Immanentize: I love what he is doing in MN. But not Mark Dayton. Not even for Veep. Minnesotans have long forgiven him for his strange behavior after 9/11, but he’d be savaged in a presidential run. (NPR: “Time magazine later labeled him ‘the Blunderer,’ and named him one of the nation’s five worst senators.”)
Now, other Dem governors are I hope watching him closely on how to say f-you to a bizarrely emboldened state GOP. Again, I’m thrilled that he’s pushed back so hard here. But as a Minnesotan, I gotta say look elsewhere for 2020 potus talent.
Kay
@Raoul:
I agree- I use them all the time- but I also don’t use them all the time. I don’t use them in court, for example. I have a friend who is religious. She’s really liberal but she was raised and remains “religious”. She just doesn’t use these words. But, I can tell she gets a kick out of it when I use them – she covers her mouth- “oh, you are so bad!” – that’s what you’re talking about, I think. Tapping into that. SHE won’t say it but it is expressing something she feels. But- you have to be careful or it’s just meaningless.
Shalimar
@Baud: Careful, you might lose the motherfucker vote. Which is the whole south and half the west.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Great point, and maybe the strategy to deal with sexism would look a lot like the one Obama used to defuse racism as an issue in 2008, to wit, optimism — a “we’re better than that” attitude. Truth is, we aren’t really better than that, but we like to believe we are, and I think Obama’s approach capitalized on America’s self-congratulatory view of itself.
Another Scott
@Immanentize: Warner has been building himself up as a Moderate Giant Of The Senate for years. It was sickening (to me) when he was doing his Gang of N preening, but he’s been on the right side of important votes. He’s saying the right things about Russia’s ongoing interference with our elections. I sent him (and Kaine) a letter about the upcoming AHCA vote yesterday AM and already got a form-letter-ish e-mail response from his staff. (Nothing from Kaine’s staff yet, but I think they send paper letters eventually.) He seems to be trying to do the “constituent outreach” stuff right. (I never got a response so quickly in the past.)
Life-story-wise and political-slant-wise, I like Kaine more than Warner. Warner still seems afraid of taking sensible liberal positions without being able to give a both-sider argument about why it makes sense and why he kinda reluctantly supports it over the alternative. (Kaine’s deeply religious, but keeps it to himself and while personally anti-abortion he recognizes the importance of not imposing his views on others and strongly supports choice.) But Warner is apparently finally growing into the job at the right time.
I don’t know if I could vote for Warner in the presidential primary, but of course it depends on who he would be running against.
I agree with you that anti-corruption and competence would seem to be a winning tack at this point, and governors might have a leg up (again), but it is still very, very early. Foreign policy and the economy could very well become overwhelmingly important in the not too distant future. Look at how quickly the Qatar situation exploded. Imagine the chaos if Kim decided to kidnap a bunch of American sailors, or something… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
@zhena gogolia: And, likewise, Trumpanzees are all over the place, even in deep blue states. They bear watching.
Quinerly
@bystander:
Coastal NC transplant here for SLU Law, ’82-85. Loved the CITY vibe and stayed. Always had a fondness for Eagleton. Glad our new (several years ago) federal courthouse was named after him. Good man, honorable man.
Villago Delenda Est
@Shalimar: Yeah, but the motherfucker vote in the west looks impressive on the map while not adding up to much. You look at Oregon on the map, and 3/4 of the state is red. The catch is that most of the population is in 1/4 of the land area, and is deep blue.
dogwood
@Kay:
Obama definitely had a plan to deal with racism. He didn’t ignore it, but he didn’t make it one of the central themes of his campaign. Clinton thought making her gender a central issue would attract more women voters than it actually did.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Funny (though hardly surprising) that Wilmer-bros have created this mythical narrative of his eager embrace of BLM. In a few years it’ll be “he marched with King AND Deray!!” Watching the video and hearing Marissa Janae Johnson’s take on it gave very little indication that Birdie was real interested in letting them speak. Even watching the video, Wilmer, after eventually being convinced by a staffer to step aside, stands in the background and pouts much like he did at the Dem Convention when HRC paid tribute to him. Also, it’s always notable that his fans who love this new Bernie So BLM myth, leave out the first part of the story.
gene108
@Kay:
One thing that started to annoy me is as and when her emails cleared government records, they were made public. They were (are) on the State Department website. A Google search will pull up the page.
There was no conspiracy to hide them.
Anyone in the world could read them.
Yet it was portrayed as some sort of enterprise to keep things hidden.
Wish the media would’ve informed people her emails were available for anyone to read. They were not a secret.
Another Scott
@Corner Stone: Meh.
Cheers,
Scott.
dogwood
@Another Scott:
Warner is fine, but his spoken style is difficult to listen to. I doubt he would play well on the national stage.
Baud
@dogwood: I can’t speak for HRC, but I thought we were much stronger in 2016 than we were.
Baud
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Have the BLM folks signed on to the retelling?
D58826
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Der Fuhrer is crazy like a fox and this is part of a plan to distract media attention from other very important issues.
To wit:
last week on the domestic side:
1. the House gutted Dodd-Frank
2. the Senate is preparing to do a secret/backdoor repeal bill of AHA
3. 80% of the Senate confirm-able slots are still unfilled
4. EPA continues to roll back environmental regs and
5. those are just the ones I remember seeing
last week in foreign policy:
1. in a tweet Monday Der Fuhrer poured gasoline on the situation in Qatar,
2. according to NBC he doesn’t know that we have a major airbase in Qatar,
3. he offered condolences to the Iranians on the deaths in the ISIS attack but added this is what you get when your a terrorist nation,
4.S-O-S tried to calm things down over Qatar and an hour later in the Rose Garden Der Fuhrer dumped all over Qatar again,
5. refused to answer a Romanian reporters question about Russian meddling in eastern Europe,
6. again in the Rose Garden said an economic package was not discussed with the Romanian PM and then the Romanian PM said they had discussed it (Der Fuhrer looked daggers at the PM and would have reduced him to ashes if he could), and
7. S-O-S referred to a certain vital body of water in the Middle East as the Arabian Sea. (According to a ME expert of Twitter that is flipping the bird to 80 million Iranians. Now over the years I’ve seen occasional references to the body of water as the Arabian Gulf but way more time it is referred to as either the Persian Gulf or the more neutral term ‘the Gulf’)
And none of this even begins to touch on the most important issue of what Russia did during the 2016 election and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again. In fact I would be willing to offer the Congressional GOOPers a deal – we will give Der Fuhrer a complete and unconditional pass on the events leading up to Comey’s firing, including any collusion with the Russians, if they are willing to set up an independent commission to investigate the Russian interference in 2016 and recommend/enact policies/laws/funding to prevent it from happening in the future. While I would love to see Der Fuhrer, Jared, Ivanka, et.al being frog marched out of the WH in orange jump suits, what happened in 2016 is past, we can’t rewind the tape. We can try and prevent it from happening again in 2018 however. And at this point we are doing nothing to prevent a repeat. Given the success and lessons learned in 2016 I think it is a leads pipe cinch that not only will the Russians meddle again in future elections but they will actively try and change vote totals.
Raoul
@Betty Cracker: Well, as we all know, Trump doesn’t experience embarrassment. He just doesn’t, not in his emotional make up.
But more importantly, he doesn’t care if Dan Drezner or Michael Gerson or even the Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee get in a tizzy. Donald’s base thinks Europe is all toffy nosed socialists, they are freeloading on our US military, and Donald is finally ‘collecting on that past due bill’. Sure they’re stupid rubes. But they are his stupid rubes.
And as long as Paul Ryan will debase himself with horrible things like this weeks “he’s a rookie” excuse, Donald will say outrageous shit about NATO and grin from ear to ear, knowing exactly how it sounds to his base.
Whether his base is enough to sustain him, I don’t think he is quite strategic enough (hah!!) to grasp. That’s the weakness in his grift. But he will never stop talking to his marks. It’s what he knows and what he will always do.
Pete Downunder
Franken’s new book “Giant of the Senate” is excellent. He should run.
Peale
@Corner Stone: at some point, the precious sources and methods are so brilliant that it would be a shame to risk exposing them by acting on that information. They are beatiful sources, we can agree on that.
Another Scott
@dogwood: Speech coaches can do wonders. GHWB had a whiney tone and cadence, but (no link) he got much, much better with coaching.
Cheers,
Scott.
D58826
And I forgot to add McConnell is basking in the court packing victory that started with the stolen SCOTUS seat. Der Fuhrer will be able to load the courts with people who would oppose the Magma Carta.
Tenar Arha
@Kay: See this moment and him contradicting his Sec. State about Qatar 90 minutes later yesterday had me literally flashing back to last fall. My father, who’d owned and lived in the same house for decades thought he was going to be evicted over Thanksgiving weekend. And later in January he didn’t remember he’d agreed to sell his car.
Between Trump and McCain I’ve been having too many feels about watching elders losing their faculties in public. It’s very distressing, because my impulse in most cases would be to give those assh*les sympathy. Instead I’m feeling disgusted at them and their families for their grifting ways. You know you’re mad as h*ck when your empathy is being compromised by your visceral disgust at men who’ve lost all dignity.
Betty Cracker
@D58826: I don’t think Congressional Republicans would take that deal because I suspect a bunch of them benefited from collusion too. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going down the tinfoil hat road, but damn it, there was a report in that commie rag, the WSJ, a week and a half or so ago in which a GOP operative in Florida admitted he solicited and received stolen voter data from a Russian operative and made it available to fellow Republicans, one of whom said in that same article that he used the data to make outreach decisions in a tight House race that the GOP candidate won. And he said he’d do it again.
The story got a little attention, but nothing like the blockbuster reception it deserved, considering that it outed a sitting member of the US House of Representatives, Brian Mast R-FL, as the beneficiary of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. I can’t believe those two GOP operatives quoted in the WSJ are the only ones who benefited from open collusion with Russian hackers.
gene108
@Kay:
What worries me is how hard a would-be First Gentleman would get slagged.
Hillary got a lot of shit, in 1992, because she had a career independent of her husband’s political ambitions. So Presidential spouses can become campaign issues.
Bill is immune from the “who wears the pants in that house” shit that will dog any woman’s husband, who puts his career on hold to back his wife’s run for the Presidency, because Bill was President. He did not put his career on hold for his wife.
The amount of shit any husband will take will be mind boggling.
JMG
Trump was contradicted by the Romanian President in public about a conversation they’d had like 30 minutes before. Is that onset dementia? Or was Trump just not listening and daydreaming about how he could leave in an hour and his weekend rounds of golf? When I worked I did a lot on Friday afternoons.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I think Obama did more than that. Much more. Defusing racism was really central to his campaign. It’s about accepting the additional burden as reality. Insisting that it shouldn’t exist won’t work. He knows. It doesn’t matter who else knows. He doesn’t need them to admit it. In fact, he was probably sure they were very attuned to waiting for him to raise it directly and then denying it because denying it exists is part of it.
Think about the Philadelphia speech. That was a great speech but it was also politically, tacticly, brilliant. He made it safe for people to think about it in a very high-minded way, a way that is appealing to them, that makes them feel like good people.
The day after Obama’s election I got a call for a (very) R lawyer (he’s now a judge). He told me he felt really good about the country watching Obama get elected although he campaigned for McCain. He told me “that was incredible and inspiring”. Obama somehow made it safe for him to get there. I really get that it’s unfair that Obama had to do that, in an ideal world it wouldn’t matter BUT IT DOES. In a way it’s a kind of privilege, what (white) women do when they insist it shouldn’t matter and I AM a white women. Of course it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter for black people either but it does. Admitting it matters isn’t a capitulation. It’s acceptance that can lead to a way to diffuse it and winning is the thing here. Obama wasn’t curing racism. He was getting elected.
Tenar Arha
@D58826: Shortest: NOPE.
Slightly longer: No thanks. That’s what we did with Nixon & Iran Contra and that’s why they still think it’s politically okay to be treasonous creeps to gain power. We need to follow the leads and punish the guilty OR this will happen again. We need to make them all Benedict Arnolds, so they learn the lesson.
dogwood
@Baud:
I definitely could be wrong, but my sense is that to defeat Trump in 2020 we, need to have the discipline to make it clear that competence, and honesty are the cornerstones of good governance. If 2016 taught us anything, it should be that matching Trump tweet for tweet ala the Clinton campaign and people like Elizabeth Warren is a losing proposition. He will always win that contest. It’s no secret that I don’t hold Bernie Sanders in high regard, but one lesson we should learn from his campaign is that you don’t need to be cleverly responding on Twitter 24/7 to build a base of support. It’s no secret that millions of people who voted for Trump didn’t like him. Finding a likable candidate might not be a bad idea next time.
Peale
@dogwood: the problem is that if our candidate doesn’t respond to insults, he or she will be seen as too whimpy for the job.
Cheryl Rofer
I tweeted some thoughts on the Qatar thing this morning. Here’s the start to the thread.
Guests coming tonight. Got to clean the house and make food.
Raoul
@Kay: Yes, exactly. Very occasional, just-the-right-moment swears have impact. I personally rarely swear. The only time I tend to is while driving, and after 11 years together it still shocks the BF when I do. He can’t understand why I’m so angry. I’m not, really. But I drove deliveries in NYC as an 18 year old (loved that job!) and swearing seems to be programmed in while behind the wheel. I’d never, ever talk that way anywhere else.
I also think back to (ugh) Cheney’s semi-famous telling Pat Leahy to go f*** himself. Yes people were shocked, but it was part and parcel of Dick’s tough-guy positioning. He also – correctly – rode out any mild repercussions, as should Gillibrand. That’s part of showing the toughness.
Someone upthread said Gillibrand swears a lot, publicly. That I think is not a good strategy, if true (I’m far from her orbit, so just don’t know). I am encouraged that we seem to have some solid possibilities for another woman to run for potus for ’20.
Thoughtful David
@dogwood:
FTF Mark Warner. He almost lost to Ed Gillespie in 2014, because he ran away from Obama and the ACA at Mach 4. This year, yes, he has voted against Gorsuch and DeVos, but only after much waffling.
Admittedly, he has been doing ok in the Senate committe, and better on most things, but he’s always late to the party.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Baud: No. Among the BLM activists and BLM-adjacent podcasters, bloggers etc., the re-writing to cast Wilmer as some Brave Ally who eagerly stood with the protestors is usually met with extreme eye-rolls and sarcastic derision. There’s a reason #BernieSoBlack went viral (and was lots of fun), after all. It’s kind of a perfect example of revisionist White Liberals ™ in action. And MJJ herself, to the best of my knowledge, still laughs when people suggest that Wilmer just stepped aside nicely and let her speak.
amk
@Kay: yeah, for all the alt-right’s and other rw’ers’ deriding of safe spaces, it’s the same entitled scums that were insisting one. fuck’em.
D58826
@Tenar Arha: As I said I would like to see all of them in orange jump suits but there is a difference between Russian interference and the cases you listed (Arnold may be close however). The cases you listed were crooks but they were our crooks. In the case of Iran/Conta Reagan and his aides broke the law and behaved in ways that were incredibly stupid but they were trying to protect American interests, however misguided. In the case of Russian interference we have no way of knowing whither our elected officials owe their allegiance to the Constitution or to Putin.
The Russian actions were a cyber Pearl Harbor and act of war. If the only way we can get the GOP to pay attention to the most important threat to our sovereignty since 1776 then I’m willing (however distasteful it is) to let Der Fuhrer off the hook. As long as the GOP treats investigating Russia as the left trying to get Trump then they will slow walk the entire investigation.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
We do this thing at the high school where we “interview” them for jobs. They bring in adults who hire people and they do an interview with us. I talk to the (always lower income) kids about what they wear. My son, who is a higher income kid, lectures me about how it shouldn’t matter what they wear. But it does and they don’t know what to wear and he does. If I want to drive him crazy I would say “privilege- you’re swimming in it” :)
Tell them the fucking secret! They need this info! They have a burden. Denying they have it or handling it in a way that harms them short term isn’t helpful. It’s principled! But it isn’t helpful and they’re (and they should be, HAVE to be) self-interested.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
Revisionist history is all they have to feed their delusions, so MJJ can eye roll all she wants, according to them she just doesn’t know what’s best for her. I’m stuck in a week long twitter thread I don’t know how to get out of with several roses now insisting Hillary owned slaves in Arkansas. These people are not allies, they’re deep in a cult.
gene108
@D58826:
The Arabian Sea is an actual body of water off the west coast of India.
There should be no confusion between it and the Persian Gulf.
Serious geography fail by Tillerson.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I got a serious question and it might be good thing for a front pager to address; has Trump done anything serious as President in the last five months? It’s seems like everything out of Trump is just some cheesy, meaningless BS or posing like his constant signing orders. Firing shooting missles at Syria, doing a State of the Union speach, firing Comy and signing a budget extension seem like it for Trump actually being presidental. There are some claims that Trump second childhood is an act to distract us from what’s really going on, so what else is there?
zhena gogolia
@Villago Delenda Est:
Oh, yes.
D58826
@Kay: I wentgf to Temple U. in the middle of the poorest neighborhood in Philly. I remember being in a discussion that some of the local kids had never seen City Hall. You can stand in the middle of N. Broad and look south and see the tower with Billy Penn on top. So there is no way they can do a job interview, for example, on the same playing field that some kid from the suburbs. And I’m making an assumption that at least in terms of approaching a job interview for example an A/A graduate from upscale Radnor high has the same tools. He/she might still be operating under the handicap of skin color but that is a bigger issue that interview tactics won’t fix
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@gene108:
It’s shocking but not surprising how mediocre these big deal rich white guys actually are when put under the microscope. No wonder they all hated extraordinary Obama with such a passion.
Raoul
@gene108: Serious everything fails by Tillerson. Trump is such a headline grabbing disaster that we don’t nearly often enough notice what a godawful SOS we have.
I’m sort of shocked that Exxon managed to make a profit, now that we see what a useless twaddle he is. But he probably had a fleet of actually capable people that he somehow crowd surfed over (not by charisma, that’s for sure) to get to the top of that heap.
D58826
@gene108: thanks. should have looked at a map but I have seen on occasion the gulf referred to the Arabian gulf but it was an exception. And S-O-S was defiantly not referring to that body of water next to India
Cheryl Rofer
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: He appointed a very conservative Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, to the spot reserved for a Republican appointment by Mitch McConnell, obstructionist.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Why? Just mock them as the same type of worthless idiots who think the earth is flat and the movie Prometheus is a doctromenty. It’s up to them to prove their stupid assertion, not you to disprove it.
dogwood
@Kay:
Obama has always understood that to move the situation as it is to a situation that is closer to the world as it should be requires power. But to amass power you have to understand where the electorate is at a given moment in time and work within the parameters of what you need to do to win votes. The online base sees this as selling out, but I’m not sure that a lot of these people really care about winning elections.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: IIRC, Obama’s Philly speech was one he didn’t want to have to give; it was necessary to defuse the Rev. Wright flap. And yes, it was brilliant. It spawned a million wingnut memes, but the hardcore haters weren’t the target; fence-sitters were, and it was effective.
I guess my point is, I think what made your Republican judge friend get to that level of acceptance was that PBO’s election made him feel proud of America, perhaps more than it warrants. It made a lot of white people feel that way, including me.
Obama acknowledged the burden but didn’t showcase it and expressed optimism about our ability to move forward. I never bought in to the post-racial myth, but I did underestimate the toxicity, both in 2008 and 2016, when I should have known better. Privilege: I’m swimming in it! ?
H.E.Wolf
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The current President is a disgusting person. I would respectfully ask, as I did yesterday, that gendered slurs be avoided when describing him – as it furthers the implicit identification of female qualities with bad/negative qualities.
The current President has made a lifetime habit, in word and deed, of demonstrating his contempt for women. No need for us to do his work for him.
D58826
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Most significant is SCOTUS appointment, the slow appointments of appellate/district court judges, and rolling back the admin state that protects people and the environment. All in the background under the radar stuff that will affect us for a generations
pat
@Michael Bersin:
I’m going to dig her fundraising mail out of the recycling bin and chip in.
I saw it on TV last night, and that was awesome!
Raoul
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Indeed. Nothing gets the knives out so much as a very competent person.
I do not compare myself with Obama in any meaningful way. But I used to get the stink eye (or worse) in school because I was often the ‘curve breaker’ who would get a 96 or 98 on a really tough test. They never took their own lack of prep as a problem. I was the problem.
It’s part of the reason I never worked in corporate America. I got a biz degree from a good univ, but by the time I graduated, I couldn’t stand the people I knew were headed for management. Suck-asses who would use talented technicians and competent co-workers, but step on their heads the second a promotion was possible.
Obama on the other hand, you could see set tough standards, expected great things from his staff, and respected them as part of a real team.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
When the Obama Bros interviewed their old boss for their podcast, one of them used that phrase in a question in a way that made me think it was something Obama liked to say, instead of “clusterfuck”. It is a great image.
germy
I think they’re looking for a fight. I hope they are ignored.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
I’m not white and the flip out to Obama in 2008 and 2009 caught me off guard.
By 2016, I came to accept that for a certain subset of voters, any politician who makes being able to say nigger again in public acceptable, like their grandpappy could, was going to get their vote.
Tenar Arha
@D58826: Since Richard M. Nixon every Republican president has violated some longstanding norms & some have probably violated laws to get elected.
1. Nixon torpedoed the Paris peace talks.
2. Reagan torpedoed the hostage negotiations.
3. GHWB pardoned a whole bunch of criminals who were covering for a probably impaired President with Alzheimer’s who conspired to violate a law passed by Republicans & Democrats in Congress.
4. GWB’s family connections got the legally required recount stopped
5. DJT he begged the Russians to help him get elected publicly and at minimum his campaign probably colluded with a foreign power directly to get him elected.
6. The current congressional majority itself may be tainted by that same hacking and collusion.
The GOP is a bad party, but they are also fundamentally tainted from 50 years of party over country. There is no one left in the inside who has enough integrity and power to make a deal that could stick. There really needs to be sunlight on all of them, on everything, and then and only then can we talk about leniency for their probable crimes and their complicity.
debbie
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Can you link to it? I would love to read your reactions.
D58826
@dogwood: I agree and that goes to the heart of what I have been ranting about with regard to Bernie and the selection of progressive candidates. In order to win elections you have to pick candidates that fit within the environment and parameters of the electorate. In this case the electorate in N. Carolina will be different than the electorate in Mass. Bernie might win in VT and Lizz in Mass but neither would win in NC or Iowa. Now I’m not suggesting that the D’s select a grand dragon of the KKK to win in SC, but a candidate still has to represent the voters of his/her district/state. In other words to regain control of Congress the D’s will have to select blue dog democrats.
Tenar Arha
Help! & a hearty FYWP. Are lists a no-no in word press because I just posted a comment & it ethered?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@D58826: the way Ossoff talks about budgets and spending drives me crazy, but he knows his district. I’m sure Jason Kander would have pissed off a lot of people here in office, but it pains me almost physically that he came so. damn. close.
for Missourians: are there rumors about McCaskill running for President? I always thought that the things I don’t like about her, and geography, would make her a strong candidate
Tenar Arha
Going to re-post w/o numbers
@D58826: Since Richard M. Nixon every Republican president has violated some longstanding norms & some have probably violated laws to get elected.
– Nixon torpedoed the Paris peace talks.
– Reagan torpedoed the hostage negotiations.
– GHWB pardoned a whole bunch of criminals who were covering for a probably impaired President with Alzheimer’s who conspired to violate a law passed by Republicans & Democrats in Congress.
– GWB’s family connections got the legally required recount stopped
– DJT he begged the Russians to help him get elected publicly and at minimum his campaign probably colluded with a foreign power directly to get him elected.
– The current congressional majority itself may be tainted by that same hacking and collusion.
The GOP is a bad party, but they are also fundamentally tainted from 50 years of party over country. There is no one left in the inside who has enough integrity and power to make a deal that could stick. There really needs to be sunlight on all of them, on everything, and then and only then can we talk about leniency for their probable crimes and their complicity.
D58826
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree. She has a great sense of humor. She also has real life insight into what happens within an administration and in dealing with a president.
Hopefully she can also adopt a somewhat detached approach to republicans other than Trump. I don’t expect her to become a raving Bernie gal but try for some balance even with a GOP filter. After all in a sane world the GOP side of the political debate should be heard and sometimes enacted into law. I remember GOPPERs like Rockefeller, Hugh Scott, Ev Dirkson, and even Goldwater. There was a time that Orin Hatch and Teddy Kennedy worked together on legislation.
Tenar Arha
Ugh. 3rd and final attempt if these all get fished out later.
@D58826: Since Richard M. Nixon every Republican president has violated some longstanding norms & some have probably violated laws to get elected.
Nixon torpedoed the Paris peace talks. Reagan torpedoed the hostage negotiations. GHWB pardoned a whole bunch of criminals who were covering for a probably impaired President with Alzheimer’s who conspired to violate a law passed by Republicans & Democrats in Congress. GWB’s family connections got the legally required recount stopped. DJT he begged the Russians to help him get elected publicly and at minimum his campaign probably colluded with a foreign power directly to get him elected. The current congressional majority itself may be tainted by that same hacking and collusion.
The GOP is a bad party, but they are also fundamentally tainted from 50 years of party over country. There is no one left in the inside who has enough integrity and power to make a deal that could stick. There really needs to be sunlight on all of them, on everything, and then and only then can we talk about leniency for their probable crimes and their complicity.
Tenar Arha
No links.
Since Richard M. Nixon every Republican president has violated some longstanding norms & some have probably violated laws to get elected.
Nixon torpedoed the Paris peace talks. Reagan torpedoed the hostage negotiations. GHWB pardoned a whole bunch of criminals who were covering for a probably impaired President with Alzheimers who conspired to violate a law passed by Republicans & Democrats in Congress. GWB’s family connections got the legally required recount stopped. DJT he begged the Russians to help him get elected publicly and at minimum his campaign probably colluded with a foreign power directly to get him elected. The current congressional majority itself may be tainted by that same hacking and collusion.
The GOP is a bad party, but they are also fundamentally tainted from 50 years of party over country. There is no one left in the inside who has enough integrity and power to make a deal that could stick. There really needs to be sunlight on all of them, on everything, and then and only then can we talk about leniency for their probable crimes and their complicity.
Corner Stone
The first hour of AMJoy was fairly sub-par. I had hoped she’d get some snap in the second hour but she has this loony tune Trump supporter on her first panel. So not looking good.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@D58826: I always thought she was a run-of-the-mill GOP flack, then I saw her on Letterman (so this was a while ago) and I was astounded at how stupid she seemed, even Letterman seemed to shift into “bless her heart” mode. There was a clip going around from the View at the same time that also made her look pretty bad. I was listening to the post-Comey coverage on MSNBC on Sirisu, and she sounded much sharper than I ever remember her. Maybe watching the destruction of Jeb and the Republican establishment in the spring of 2016 gave her some kind of shell shock.
I also heard tweety in that coverage, and he hasn’t quite been able to let go of the Archie Bunkerism that made him trump-curious. He was talking about trump’s “pursuers” and there was something in his tone that suggested that trump is being picked on. What little I see of him when I turn on the Hayes show and tweety’s last blather is trying to sound insightful, he’s been increasingly anti-trump, I thought.
Betty Cracker
@gene108: Good point. We should keep in mind that, barring impeachment or massive heart attack mid-rage tweet on a gold-plated toilet, whomever the Dems choose for 2020 will be up against a candidate who runs on an overtly white identity platform. For all their faults and dog-whistles, McCain and Romney didn’t do that.
Villago Delenda Est
@germy: The thing is, if you relabled Sharia Law “Jesus Law” and presented it to these vile authoritarian shits, they’d have no objections to it.
D58826
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That’s my point. And the thing is, given how much most folks pay attention between elections, as long as Ossoff minds constituent concerns and doesn’t vote for Sharia law his voters will forgive him if he votes for some what more liberal legislation. Voters hate Congress but love their congress person. After all they usual send them back to DC every 2/6 years
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: a candidate who runs on an overtly white identity platform. For all their faults and dog-whistles, McCain and Romney didn’t do that.
eh, I think you’re being too generous. McCain gets all kinds of tweety-ish love for telling his aides to stay away from Rev Wright, but they unleashed Palin and “pallin’ around with terr’rists”. The racists heard her and knew what she meant.
Romney hammered Obama’s other-ism every chance he got: talking about “the apology tour”, saying Obama “doesn’t understand what it is to be an American”, “no one ever asked to see my birth certificate ha ha ha”. The only moment of admiration I ever felt for Romney was when he refused to pay court to trump like the rest of the seven dwarves did, until stopped refusing. He looked like he was smelling a nasty fart the whole time they were together, but they were together. And it was because of, not in spite of birtherism, that he did that, and had trump record robocalls for IIRC PA, OH and MI.
The biggest differences between Romney and trump were class, tone (which probably cost him with the true haters and howler monkeys) and SS/Medicare, that trump swore up and down the campaign trail he wouldn’t touch.
Miss Bianca
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: WTF with this “Hillary owned slaves in Arkansas” thing? Do they imagine they’re being serious, or is this some kind of grotesque metaphor?
And as for the whole “blaming HRC for the superpredator remark” while giving Wilmer a pass for actually *voting* for the crime bill…I am so goddamned sick of the American disease of wilfully mistaking symbol for substance that I could scream. Talk always speaks louder than actions as far as Americans are concerned. It doesn’t matter if you can’t be bothered to actually *do* all the great things you *talk* about wanting to achieve (looking at you, Wilmer. *And* Trump) as long as people like the way you look while you’re talking about it. Meanwhile, you can work your ass off actually *doing* things that are good for people and important, but if the vast right-wing conspiracy and the slightly less vast but almost more annoying left-wing dorkitude brigade decides it doesn’t like how you look, they’ll seize on one thing they don’t like (emails! Superpredators! Dean Scream! Eye-rolling!) and use it to tar everything useful you’ve ever done. Particularly if you’re not a white guy and you can’t count on the white guy grading curve.
It makes me sick. And crazy.
Cheryl Rofer
@Tenar Arha: Comments released from the trash. Alain has asked folks to email him about stuff like this so he can fix it. His address is in the pull-down menu.
D58826
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I guess time and place. If the interview was while the 2008 campaign was going on or was just talking during the Obama years then maybe you are right. But between Trump and having a different platform on her TV show might be making a difference. The other day she pretty well shut down the GOP flack that was on the panel rather than just letting him talk.
SiubhanDuinne
@H.E.Wolf:
Thank you.
Camembert
@D58826:
Enh, I remember all the (completely appropriate) complaining about how it is absolutely unreasonable to accept a pro-life Democrat in this day and age from the centrists. So there are standards. It’s just that Dems who are fighting the Class War for the oligarchs are always acceptable, no matter where they run. The Blue Dog thing is cover.
Kay
So the thing that most alarmed me in the Comey testimony was the question about why he didn’t report the Trump obstruction up the chain. That’s a good question. I feel like the context of his testimony made it clear that the reason he didn’t report it up the chain is Jeff Sessions. He didn’t trust Sessions. In fact, he went to great lengths to go around Sessions.
That’s the AG of the US, folks. The “top cop”. This is okay! Sure! Everything is FINE.
I also think that’s why Sessions planted that bullshit in the NYTimes about his “feud” with Trump 2 days before the testimony, but of course Comey maybe doesn’t think that :)
He was always the worst Trumpster. He has an enormous amount of raw power. Kushner can’t really DO shit. Sessions can do real damage.
Baud
@dogwood:
I’m sorry I can’t count on your support.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I can’t find it but I swear there was a poll last fall that showed Bubba had higher favorables with Wilmerites than HRC– because W and his peeps are all about NAFTA, Glass-Steagal, the 94 (right?) crime bill and welfare deform, and Hillary did those, not her husband the president, or something. Same thing with all the Biden love– I like Onion/Uncle/Handsome Joe as much as anybody, but the actual Senator he was either supported or fucking wrote, and bragged about writing, the legislation that HRC always got pilloried for, up to and including the Iraq AUMF. Yet he got a stamp of approval from good lefties that they would never give HRC (and I’m not sure that approval would have withstood an actual campaign)
Camembert
@Miss Bianca:
The bill contained the Violence Against Women Act. You cannot tell me that you would not be excoriating Senator Sanders for voting against it if he had.
There’s a difference between voting for a difficult bill that has necessary parts and actively working to make the bad parts worse. You know this, and so does everyone else making this intellectually dishonest criticism.
Miss Bianca
@Camembert: Has anyone told you to fuck off yet today, Stinky Cheese Man? Fuck off.
Camembert
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Bubba’s not running. I think way higher of Clintons and other DLC types when they’re not running. My 2c.
Camembert
@Miss Bianca: I 100% agree that the proper pro-oligarchy Democrat response to statements of fact and public record is to tell the messenger to fuck off.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Camembert: what costume are you wearing today, Cosplay Shapeshifter?
D58826
@Tenar Arha: I agree that the GOP is a bad party. But we can add a few more items to the list, some by dems
1. Ike and the bay of pigs
2. jfk and the bay of pigs
3. lbj and tonkin gulf/lying us into vietnam
4. tricky dick and Cambodia
so they all push the limits and do things that they mark secret as a cya tactic.
Gelfling 545
@Kay: On FB this morning I commented that this is what happens when ypu hang around with a bunch of vulgar old men like the Senate. Thinking of some of McCain’s more precious remarks. Also the king of vulgarity in the oval office. Personally I find I have been cursing a great deal more since November. It’s still better that punching people…probably.
Miss Bianca
@Camembert: My point, ass clown, is that your intellectual peers – and I use the term “intellectual” loosely – are blaming HRC for the stuff they don’t like about the crime bill, and for one reference to “superpredators”, when she was not in the Congress at the time, and didn’t vote on the bill. Meanwhile, as you helpfully point out, there actually was a lot more to that bill than the stuff people are screaming about years later. Wilmer gets a pass for actually voting – or not – because he mouths platitudes that white liberals like to hear, but doesn’t actually do very much.
Shut the fuck up, idiot.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I thought it was just me. I’m fine with cursing, do it a lot, all the time, but it’s starting to feel more than a little forced, and forced authenticity-signaling doesn’t work. In fact it backfires.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@debbie:
I dropped out of the thread a couple of days ago, and it’s still going. It was started by Sally Albright, so if you follow her you can try and find the roses – especially the double roses. The “Hillary owned slaves” started a couple of days ago, from something one of these brainwashed clowns gleaned from her 20 year old book “It Takes a Village”, which apparently is missing these idiots and has just been uncovered, because you know, neoliberalism is sneaky like that. You can’t refute these people and their idiocy – it’s like talking to the dining room table, like enemy of the revolution Barney Frank said, accurately.
Kay
@Gelfling 545:
I like the Rules of Decorum. The more angry you are the more you need them. In my job I find I get more formal the more worked up I am. “You, SIR…” :)
Elaborate politeness helps me hold my temper and I always, always regret losing my temper.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: also, too, HRC says Russia tipped the campaign to trump>> media/centrist outrage for days. Mitt Romney says Hurricane Sandy cost him the 2012 election (cause OH was all about Sandy, I guess), chins are stroked and wise nods confirm, he’s got a point.
Another Scott
@Cheryl Rofer: I assume the word “deal” (given its relation to other FYWP words) might be a FYWP word, but don’t know for sure.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Gelfling 545:
I think people like rules too. I can bring the roughest person into court. I tell him to take his ball cap off and he’s like an obedient 1st grader. I get that. This is serious bidness and he appreciates that because it’s about him. He’s important. I like when they hand me their gum. Eew. Swallow that. I don’t want it.
You wouldn’t believe what you have to tell people. People who chew tobacco (there are a lot of them) need a spit cup. You wouldn’t think you’d have to tell them not to bring it in, but you do. They will probably die of poisoning if they don’t spit so they have to get rid of their gross wad completely. OMG, put SOME effort in! I can’t do this alone!
Camembert
@Miss Bianca: No, your point is to pretend that it wasn’t kinda racist to reinforce the “superpredators” bullshit when it actually completely was. And the mass incarceration that was the result of that and other bills of the same type was a hugely destructive policy that she (and the bill’s author, Joe Biden) supported until it became clear that it was a bit much. It was a major policy error based on fairly ordinary white elite mild racism of the time. A politician’s record of which policies they supported is, in fact, a good thing to discuss in a democracy.
At the time, I bought the “superpredator” myth and was frightened by it, so I guess was as racist as she was. So I have some sympathy. But I was also a 17-year-old suburban white boy with zero life experience, and she wasn’t. So, pros and cons.
Look, the primary’s over. Your person won. Then she won the popular vote in the election, so clearly the primary was basically functional. But that doesn’t change the fact that the people who didn’t vote for her in the primary still have the exact same policy differences they had with her before she won the primary, and pretending that all criticisms of HRC are invalid doesn’t change that.
The DLC Dems made a deal with the devil of white racism to get elected. Maybe that was ok, and maybe it’s what we could do in 1991. But it was still a deal with the devil, and it is still almost 30 years later, so asking whether or not we can do things differently now is utterly valid.
Camembert
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It turns out the Corporate Media is Republican and basically dishonest.
Miss Bianca
@Camembert: I *didn’t* buy the “superpredator” thing, I made the mistake of taking that “ooh, it’s so racist line” to the people I was working with at the time. I got my ass handed to me by these same people, all part of the South-Side Chicago African-American community. THEY supported that bill, THEY were the ones who were sick and tired of their communities being torn apart, THEY were the ones grieving over their dead children, THEY wanted these guys locked up, and they made it very clear to me, a suburban white girl, that as far as they were concerned,I didn’t know WTF I was talking about. So don’t pull that “oooh, only racists supported it” bullshit with me. Unless, Mr. Suburban White Boy, you’d like to argue that *these* folks were the REAL racists?
debbie
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Ah, like my family, then.
Kathleen
@Raven: Wishing you a comfortable and complete healing.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Miss Bianca:
[insert rose here] No, but they just don’t know what’s best for them, because Hillary owned slaves. [insert rose here]
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: are roses a Wilmerite thing?
Camembert
@Miss Bianca: You’re eliding two things — the bill itself, which had support in some places but ended up being the wrong answer to a real problem — and the “superpredator” myth.
Look, you’re talking to the wrong guy on a basic level. I have no idea why I was being asked in 2016 to vote for someone who supported the War of W’s Wang. My litmus test for Democrats has been “no enabling Republicans” for 15 years. So HRC was not my choice on a deep, profound level, same as Obama and Biden. But apparently “don’t support Republicans when they want awful things” is way too high a bar for my leadership to clear, and I’m super racist and sexist for even wanting that.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Lordy, yes.
D58826
@Miss Bianca: As a suburban white boy who did not have the experiences that you are describing even as a suburban white girl I will pass on that part of the argument.
What I found depressing during the primary and now with the argument the two of you are having is that things were said and done, say with the crime bill in 1994/superpreditors (and I heard more than one reference to that from others besides Hillary) is we are holding people in 2017 locked into a position that they took in 1994. It doesn’t account for the time/place/political environment of the time, i.e. 1994. It doesn’t account for the idea that people of honest intention thought this was the best way to solve a problem. It doesn’t account for voting for a bad piece of legislation because the alternative pursed by the other side is even worse. It doesn’t account for personal growth over time as one sees and learns what the results of the legislation are.
Note I’m not saying we should totally ignore what a politician has said and done in the past but we also have to look at what they have done since then.
A few examples
1. How many folks were in favor of gay rights, let alone marriage, in 1994 or even 2008?
2. Sen. Byrd of WVA a KKK member in his youth but a champion of civil rights late in life
3., G. Wallace apologized for his racist past shortly before he died.
4. Lincoln did not start his presidency as the Great Emancipator. I believe he said something to the effect in 1860 that if the price of saving the union was the continuation of slavery then he could live with that. The emancipation proclamation was a way to buck up Union spirits as much as a statement of some profound change of heart. And it only applied in confederate states. The folks in Union Maryland could keep their slaves.
5. Even Ronald Reagan came to recognize the scourge of AIDS. Granted it took 7 years and the death of his friend Rock Hudson but he changed (and I don’t like St. Ronulus the Unready)
A personal story that has nothing to do with race. I had eye surgery in 1948 at the age of 2. . My parents could see me twice a week. They ran pediatrics like a marine boot camp. According to my Mom I had the 2yr old version of a nervous breakdown when I came home. At nine I had more surgery and can still remember coming out of the anesthetic with my eyes bandaged and my writs tied to the sides of the bed so as not too tear off the bandages. AND BEING ALONE in that room. By the time I was 11 and had my appendix out my folks could visit every day but there still were very defined visiting hours. Today Mom and Dad move into the hospital room. Were the doc/nurses of 1948/1955 evil people? Should we hold them responsible for actions that were considered good medical practice at the time? It seems to me that we are judging political candidates in 2017 solely on the basis of what they did/said in 1994 when that was the ‘good medical practice’ of the time.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@D58826:
I don’t know – that seems like a pretty nuanced position from someone who knows what they’re talking about and how things work. You’ll never fit in a cult. Sounds like you might be a liberal instead of a progressive.
aimai
@dogwood: This is such a stupid way of looking at it. You simply don’t remember that Obama was forced by the Republicans and the press to make race a central issue in his campaign and even had to give an INCREDIBLY FAMOUS AND GROUND BREAKING SPEECH about race. The candidate doesn’t get to choose how the voters see them–especially black or female candidates. In all cases some voters want to see/hear/feel how their non traditional choice matters and others want to see/hear/feel how it doesn’t. Some voters won’t cop to their internalized racism or sexism and some will. ITs a very complex situation that doesn’t boil down to a “choice” that the candidate “makes.”
D58826
@Camembert:
I gave Hillary a break on that vote because I honestly do not know how I would have voted if had been in her place.
The convention wisdom of all the western intelligence service was Sadaam had WMD. I would not have voted for war if it had only been gas/germs since they did not directly threaten the US. The nuclear piece on the other had was a concern. We discovered in 1991 that he was much closer to having a bomb that our intelligence people had thought. They could have been mistaken again in 2003 since the inspectors had been out of the country for several years. So based on what was public knowledge in Oct. 2002 I think I would have voted yes. Now if I had access to the same intel that Hillary had as a senator, I think I would have voted no, since the intel was much shaker than than W/Chaney were saying. One further caveat, IIRC there was supposed to be a follow on vote to actually approve sending in the troops. So even with shakey intel I might have voted yeas in Oct. to ramp up the pressure on Saadam. And it worked, he let in the inspectors. I would have definitely voted no on that never taken second vote because we had much more information. The inspectors found no evidence of a WMD program or a nuclear programs therefore the entire rational for the invasion was invalidated. At some point, to repurpose a watergate phrase, I think we have to judge our candidates based on what did they know and when did they know it. Holding them responsible in 2016 for doing something in 2002 that we discovered was wrong in 2004 is a mistake. And don’t get me wrong I’m not criticizing the folks who voted no in 2002. They, based on limited info got it right.
aimai
@Camembert: No, just really stupid and not understanding what politics can and can’t do.
D58826
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: well I was a progressive until liberal came back from being a curse word. I like to think of myself as a pragmatic liberal. So if there was/is a that every one who needed food assistance was helped and no one went to bed hungry and it was done thru churches and scout troops then fine we don’t need SNAP. Since our experience tells us that churches/local food banks won’t get the job done then we need another alternative. And as a society we passed SNAP.
Camembert
@D58826:
…kinda? I mean, that period of time is absolutely replete with genuinely horrifying tales of medical hate and cruelty. The folks in charge of the profession certainly were deranged on a basic level.
It really depends? I mean, entry-level docs and nurses with no power, no. But a doc who explicitly endorsed those exact practices and/or wrote the procedure manual?
I am vaguely willing to accept, “Look, white people were super racist at that time, and this is totes the best we could have hoped for from a Boomer. And the bill itself had important things in it, so who cares about the rhetoric surrounding it? Also, we trivially didn’t know about the lead-crime hypothesis then, so we didn’t know that all of this was environmental and that the 1970s EPA had already saved us.”
But some people didn’t buy that shit in 1994, and they should also be lauded.
Camembert
@D58826: I never understood the idea that W could have possibly been telling the truth. It wasn’t something he ever did.
Mnemosyne
@Camembert:
Of course, one of the people who did buy into it was Bernie Sanders, because he voted for the bill.
Why is Hillary Clinton evil for something she said in an interview but Bernie gets a free pass for voting to make that bill law?
I mean, other than the fact that Bernie has a peni$ and Hillary does not, which makes her an evil witch in your eyes.
J R in WV
@gene108:
Teh Republicans in general offered up at least dozens if not hundreds of amendments to the ACA, many of which were accepted into the law, before all voting against it. So I doubt she was confused, if that’s what you are thinking was confused.
She ain’t John McCain, after all !!!
Ruckus
@Raven:
Sorry about that you need treatment. Good luck.
Interesting treatment
They’ve used liquid nitrogen on me. A half dozen times. Stings that does. Worse is on top the balding head.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: Your criticism is a bit off. No one was lauding Clinton for her comments on the crime bill. The only reason we’re talking about it is that the left turned it into a weapon to damage her. What’s incredible is that, having achieved that goal, they are still going back to that well. It’s no different that what the Republicans are doing.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
It’s just that he keeps trying to find a reflection.
And of course Baud beat me to his own joke.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
I’m pissed because only Hillary gets tainted with that bill, even though she did NOT vote for it. You know who did vote for it? Bernie fucking Sanders. And yet it’s Hillary who gets repeatedly bashed TO THIS DAY for something she said in an interview, while Sanders’ actions sent people to jail.
Sorry, but fuck anyone who whines about Hillary letting the word “superpredator” pass her lips while giving Sanders a free pass for actually opening the school to prison pipeline.
D58826
@Camembert:
I totally disagree. I don’t think most of the medical profession was motivated by hate and cruelty. Sure the syphilis experiments had a huge load of racism and stupidity but in general these folks were practicing what they though was good compassionate medicine. Even when I was older and was aware of what was happening I never felt that I was being mistreated because the nurses or doctors were cruel or deranged. And as far as people being deranged or cruel back then lets look at the damage that ONE discredited medical journal article about a link between autism and vaccines is doing TODAY. This guy published any article with stats that he knew were false. GUMP happens
Yes they should. On the other hand there are many examples of people who voted against something because they thought, in good faith, it was wrong and time has proven that they were wrong not the legislation.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: I agree. It’s hypocritical. But I wanted to point out that Camembert moved the goalposts.
D58826
@Baud: Didn’t some one once say ‘FSM from my friends, I can take care of my enemies’?
And we are still seeing it. HRC is being told to exit stage left because she is …… shrill? Nixon became a respected elder statesman. Romney gets to speak out. McCain is on MTP more than Chuck Todd. Bush 41 is given a respectful hearing. And 43 gets 100k for speaking gigs before friendly crowds. But Hillary…………..
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Which is why I was asking Camembert to explain why Sanders is a holy innocent when it comes to the bill Sanders voted for while Hillary is held personally responsible for it.
If you weren’t making that argument like he was, you can walk on by. ?
Elizabelle
I really like that video clip of Claire McCaskill. And former/future Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Would not have seen otherwise. Thank you.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@D58826:
I was a shop steward in the 70s for a public service union organized by a self-identified and proud Trotskyite, so I find the 20 something’s know nothing know-it-all purity police giving me a hard time for my liberal pragmatic stance about how progress is mostly non-linear rather… condescending and arrogant.
Tenar Arha
@D58826: I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you arguing that Democrats are equally bad, or even that all Presidents do/have done bad things?
Actually probably we’re done here because writing this I’m beginning to realize I’ve got moral objections to treasonous people being allowed to simply walk away without consequences. I really can’t accept the idea that anyone who participated in this won’t suffer lifetime social opprobrium. The only way that happens is a full investigation of them all. (Benedict Arnold escaped but he never returned to US or regained what he assumed was his place in society).
ETA ? Huis clos/exile for DJT & company would maybe satisfy me.
J R in WV
@Raven:
My dad had melenoma, stage 3+. He was lucky, got past it after surgery.
Any little warty-looking thing should be looked at. Keep on it, be safe!!
Baud
@Mnemosyne: Your life. The damage has been done. I don’t really care what excuses they have at this point.
Tenar Arha
@Tenar Arha: Hmm, I imagine Huis Clos in exile with access to none of his properties for DJT & company would be an appropriate punishment for a man as attached to his homes & golf courses as Don the con.
Baud
@D58826: Too bad. They are stuck with her as long as she wants to do it.
Tenar Arha
Help again. I’m apparently being marked as spam in this thread. Because I can’t comment in reply to anyone including myself.
D58826
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: or has been said by others – politics is the art of the possible and watching legislation being enacted is like watching sausage being made. If we spend the next couple of years looking for the purity pony then the left/liberals/progressives/whatever simply cede the ground to the GOP. And I suspect that there really is no ‘purity pony’ to be found. While I wasn’t one of them I was on campus in the mid sixties with the student radicals, the students for a democratic society. etc. And from the outside it seem that they spent more time arguing who was going to be more revolutionary pure than getting anything done. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before there will be a Bernie version 2.0 who is even more BERNIE-PURE than the current Bernie Ver 1.0
Ruckus
@Oldgold:
Was thinking about asking the same question this morning when I woke up.
I think there are a number of suggestions.
Harris, Gillibrand are two that come to mind.
The other part of the question for me is who might be governor of CA? Brown is termed out. Or senator of CA or NY? Where is the depth in our field? For CA this is a problem, we are, as people have stated, the 6th largest economy in the world, being governor is a pretty big job and we’d like it done right.
Have another question.
Is it time to ask, once again about term limits. REASONABLE term limits, that allow a career in politics without allowing a lifetime sinecure. Think McTurttle. Elected in 1985 with around 900,000 votes only in KY, he has outlandish control on your fate. That’s 32 yrs to mis-learn his job.
D58826
@Ruckus: rather than term limits, maybe age limit – no running for re-electron after age 70 possibly. I realize that might not be practical with a 2 year house seat. SCOTUS maybe
80
dogwood
@aimai:
What I remember clearly is reading books and interviews post ’08 where people like Plouffe and Axelrod Talked about their advise that Obama not take race head on, and Obama’s insistence that it would have to be addressed eventually. The speech in Philly was not just reactive. It’s was something he always knew would be necessary. Maybe Obama had a “dumb way of looking at it”, but that’s on him not me.
J R in WV
@rikyrah:
You need to look up the video – McCain was disoriented and very confused!
He didn’t seem to know that the email investigation was of events from 5-8 years ago and that’s why it was closed, they were DONE with it after months of work; the Russia investigation is of events 18 or 24 months ago, it just started, couldn’t possibly have been completed already.
If that had been my dad, I would have had him to his Dr that afternoon. It was terrible. And I have always thought McCain has been a shiftless user of anyone around him willing to be used, but this was not that kind of interaction, he was dazed and confused.
Ruckus
@Mary G:
McCain is 80 and Hatch is 83.
Time for them to move on. Past time actually.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I only recently discovered this. I have a BLM shirt with a protestor with a raised fist holding a rose. Had no idea at the time, just liked the shirt. Fortunately, the fabric is too heavy/hot for an always sweaty guy like me in SoCal weather so it was easy to stop wearing it. Now I use my “Raise Better White People” tee shirt (available at tee spring, $ goes to Ferguson Response.)
Camembert
@Mnemosyne:
It’s funny because there’s no such thing as a bill with good and bad parts in it that one has to vote for or against on the aggregate!
Seriously, my thesis was right there — if one is referring to a large entity with good and bad parts, looking at which parts the person advocated for (or, in Biden’s case, you know, wrote) is relevant. HRC used a racist and terrible meme to advocate for bad parts of the bill.
@D58826:
I think that there was a consensus indifference to individual suffering, which was motivated by a lot of things, not least of which just being the fact that the folks in charge all had PTSD from WWII. It takes a certain state of mind to make it a standard procedure to strap a 2-year-old to a bed and not keep track of them, and that state of mind is not healthy. That doesn’t mean there weren’t also other things going on.
IOKIYAR. And white. And male. Which is why I’m so doctrinaire on not enabling these pieces of shit, because that is bullshit.
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Many of us who grew up under Reagan don’t buy that whole idea set. Things get better or they get worse, but there’s no “progress”. The dial can be yanked backwards as easily as it can be pushed forwards. That’s probably the origin of the disconnect.
dogwood
@J R in WV:
McCain isn’t the smartest or most clever politician. He was dazed and confused because he couldn’t really understand the convoluted and ridiculous talking point some staffer handed to him. It looked like he was reading the questions he was trying to ask for the first time. Maybe it’s dementia or maybe it’s just lazy lack of preparation.
SgrAstar
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: !!! Let’s try gutting the EPA, shutting down climate research, severely shrinking the NSF, helping to sell/pass the AHCA, meddling in ancient conflicts of the ME, destroying formerly solid alliances, preparing to pack the courts with Federalist Society hacks…and there’s tons more. These people are evil and committed to the Bannonite program of total destruction. They are executing their plans widely. Be afraid, get mad, and get ready for 2018.
Mnemosyne
@Camembert:
Wow, you sure are an amazing mind reader to know that Bernie only voted for the good and pure parts of the bill, while Hillary only advocated for the evil parts of the bill. Do you do children’s parties to show off your amazing talents?
And you should probably, you know, actually read the interview in question rather than relying on what other people have told you she said. But we already know you’re not exactly evidence-based when you make these pronouncements. Bernie told you Hillary is a racist, you believe it, no need to bother your beautiful mind with any actual facts.
Mnemosyne
@Camembert:
Bernie is considered the voice of the new Democratic generation even though he lost the primary, and Hillary is a pariah despite winning the popular vote by 3 million.
So, no, you don’t even have to be a Republican, just a white male like Bernie, to have people like yourself making a million excuses for why he’s so much better than a mere woman.
D58826
@Camembert:
Actually I was 7. I have no memory other than what my Mom told me of the operation when I was 2. I have no idea as to whither a nurse popped in periodically to check on me, just that when I woke up I was alone. And it makes perfectly good sense to strap the hands to the side of the bed to keep you from removing the bandages and ripping out the stitches. I must have gone back to sleep because I don’t remember anything else. Just like I have a memory of them putting the either cone over my nose prior to one of the operations and then waking up in recovery. . I assume you think it would be more merciful to just do the surgery awake. To this day I drink hard liquor because the alcohol smell reminds me of the OR
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Considering how “small time” the person they got elected really is makes it very hard to believe this is the extent of it. Either it is much bigger or the Russians were just getting started and wanted to see if it worked. But all the things we’ve heard since then have convinced me that the guy in FL was just the visible tip of the iceberg.
J R in WV
@Cheryl Rofer:
The link doesn’t go to your twitter, it goes to someone named Tamara Cofman.
D58826
@Camembert:
Oh wow, not sure there is a shark big enough to cover that leap of ill founded assumptions. And while my Dad wasn’t a doctor, as a WWII vet her certainly didn’t suffer from PTSD.
D58826
@Mnemosyne:
Actually in 1994, outside of VT. I suspect that you could have had Bernie stand on the pitchers mound at Yankee stadium and the crowd would have said – who the h** is he? So Bernie’s views/inputs/etc on the bill in 1994 were probably pretty small.
Mnemosyne
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
You gotta love how the woman who gave the Mothers of the Movement a spotlight at the DNC is the real racist because of a word she used in an interview 20+ years ago.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Camembert:
That’s just self masturbatory bullshit. There is no straight line for progress. It requires pragmatism because it requires imperfect people practicing politics requiring compromise in dynamic situations.
Thaddeus Stevens: Oh, how you have longed to say that to me. You claim you trust them, but you know what the people are. You know that the inner compass that should direct the soul toward justice has ossified in white men and women, North and South, unto utter uselessness through tolerating the evil of slavery. White people cannot bear the thought of sharing this country’s infinite abundance with Negroes.
Abraham Lincoln: A compass, I learned when I was surveying, it’ll… it’ll point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp… what’s the use of knowing true north?
D58826
@Mnemosyne: IIRC the early 90’s were the height of the crack epidemic. There was the fear that crack addicted babies would grow up to a life of crime due to their addiction. In fact I seem to remember that the superpreditor idea was in part framed by the issue of those crack babies growing to adulthood. All other things aside we did learn in fairly short order that the babies could be successfully weaned off of the crack and if given the opportunity grow into normal healthy kids and the adults.
Ruckus
@Raoul:
Excellent! I think a lot of people saw President Obama as a true leader. One who gets people to work hard and give their best, because that’s what he does. And his best is damn good.
Look at drumpf. He’s giving his best, but it’s beneath crap. He’s not a leader, he’s a bully, with the maturity of a 4 yr old.
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
I’m pissed at the hypocrisy. Bernie lets his mouthpieces attack Hillary over a bill he himself voted for, just like he used her tax returns to attack her while refusing to release his own.
The reason Bernie’s fans spend so much time squealing about how the DNC “cheated” is that they know perfectly well that Bernie cheated by holding Hillary to a standard he himself refused to meet, and they want to distract us from that.
Sorry, Broflakes, Bernie is not the Last Honest Man. He’s the worst kind of cheater — the one who accuses everyone else of doing what he himself did.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Mnemosyne:
It’s that very act of hers, and her brave alt-right speech, that probably turned enough rust belt whites against her to help make the difference. Some of the exit polling from the upper midwest, Ohio River Valley/PA showed that BLM/Colin Kaepernick was the number one motivator of whites to vote for Trump – even whites who voted for Obama (probably in 2008) because they thought that his election would “keep the coloreds from making trouble”. That was expressed in interviews by more than a few of Bernie’s precious WWC. But don’t call them racists.
Baud
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I agree. Remember also that the “deplorables” in her speech were the bigots.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Mnemosyne:
He’s exactly like Trump in every way that matters.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Baud:
She got so much shit for calling them Deplorable, when all she did was name something everyone could see to be true. In a million fucking years, could you imagine Wilmer giving that speech and calling them out like that? LOL. No, he identifies with them. The “progressive” fraud even picked their side against Hillary,
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
The NYT did an interesting article about it back in 2014: who came up with the term, why there was some scientific consensus around it, why it turned out to be wrong.
But the Berniebros don’t have any time for nuance and reflection when there’s an uppity bitch who needs to be punished for having the temerity to beat their hero at the ballot box.
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Politically, yes. I still don’t know if he really understands that he’s helping tear the country apart, but I’m pretty pissed at him doing it either way.
D58826
@Mnemosyne: AND HE IS STILL NOT A REGISTERED DEMOCRAT> But somehow has declared himself the heart and soul of the democratic party. You know what Bernie and his Bros – go off and form your own party. See how many votes you get as a standalone party.
I suspect that a lot of the votes he got in 2016 were from good long term democrats who agreed with some of his ideas and wanted to push the party in the direction of things like single payer. I also suspect that for many who voted for Hillary that they agreed with Bernie’s broad ideas but realized like the Chinese proverb says a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. Many of the things that Bernie wants will take many steps to achieve.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Mnemosyne:
You watch what happens if another woman emerges as a Dem leader. The cult will pull the same shit. When Warren didn’t endorse Sanders (because she works with him and can’t stand the fucking grandstanding PITA fraud) they turned on her just as much. They disgust me, and Sanders disgusts me. He’s just like Trump – enjoys the attention, the rallies, the cult devotion, which he only gets by shit talking Dems, of which he refuses to be one. Narcissistic one note fraud.
Mnemosyne
@Camembert:
I have to admit, it’s pretty amazing how you parrot Reince Priebus while claiming to be leftier than the rest of us. But I guess your true belief is bros before hoes and everything else is subservient to that.
D58826
@Mnemosyne: Should be some interesting times in the Sanders household. Saw that Jane is forming a PAC or some such thing. Guess the legal fees from her failed college are adding up (snark). Wait failed college hmmm who else had one? let me think …. and yes I’m being a bit sarcastic. Der Fuhrer was a fraud from day 1. Not sure that Jane was but don’t know enough of the details.
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
As I keep saying, I have no problem with the people who supported him in the primary and accepted the fact that he lost, fair and square.
The only people I’m pissed at are the Broflakes who showed up to Berniecon this weekend so they could chant Lock her up! whenever a photo of Hillary flashed on screen.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@D58826:
Jane and Bernie have been grifting since he was mayor in Burlington – he put her on the city payroll and it was controversial at the time. Took care of her daughter’s woodworking school while tanking the college, threw college cash to an ally on the board of trustees who owned a Caribbean resort. Stole kids college degrees, while her fraud of a husband was promoting a tax increase for everyone to pay for free college. LOL. Tad Devine is filthy with Manafort’s Russian money too, and you can bet Jane and Tad had their hands in that Old Towne Media cookie jar. That trip to the Vatican did not come cheap, and neither did that third house they paid cash for. Purity is pretty lucrative.
D58826
@Mnemosyne:
Science works by fits and starts. Some ideas get to be general laws (i.e. gravity) others are well accept theories (in the scientific definition – evolution) and some are still being argued over (e.g climate change while generally accepted isn’t at the theory of evolution stage yet) and some generally accepted ideas get replaced (steady state universe replaced by big bang). These words have specific meanings within science that are somewhat different than in general usage)
D58826
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: (Sigh) the hash slings and arrows of those who do not recognize greatness when they see it. It must be a real cross (mixing religious metaphors here) for Bernie to bear.
And if I remember correctly before he latched on to politics he was a never do well failure.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@D58826:
Yes, Tad Devine convinced him to run as a Dem. The biggest crime of DWS’s in my opinion is letting him in the tent to piss all over everything and everyone inside. He’s as toxic as Trump.
D58826
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I suspect if he had run as an independent he would only be remembered in Trivial Pursuit. I guess DWS was think better to have him inside the tent pissing out rather than outside pissing in. She didn’t realize he wasn’t/isn’t house broken.
The sad thing is, if he were a team player he did excite the younger voters, he was pushing ideas that would help the country if enacted over time, and even as an old white guy could have mentored a generation of new young leaders in the party.
But then as the saying goes there is no I in team and he may not have started out that way but by the end of the primary season and still now is all about ‘I’.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@D58826: he was a “shitty carpenter”
ETA @the Conster, la Citoyenne: @D58826: I don’t have much use for DWS, but was this her decision to make? I assume he got enough signatures to get on primary ballots, no?
Ruckus
@D58826:
I’d bet that I could find a few younger congress people who have overstayed their welcome to the rest of the country but keep getting elected in their districts. And after years of this they have “standing” in the community and run for higher office. And spend decades in the disservice to our country.
And I said reasonable. People keep thinking that a district has a right to elect a complete asshole. They really don’t, because we don’t have a large representative branch, not for the size of our population. And those people who stay too long can be very bad for our country. To me the job of a politician is to make laws, enforce laws and run our country. It’s not like other jobs. It has a level of power that most other jobs do not. And that power can corrupt, massively. We should control how long someone can hold that power. We also should be having a turnover in our political class so that it can actually be more of a government by and for the people, rather than a government by and for the rich or powerful. Mitch McConnell has been in the senate since 1985. He was in political life in 1964. He was 22. His entire adult life has been politics and power. And money. And he has all three. It’s the system that allows that.
And no I don’t care how much money he makes out of power, just like President Obama or Hillary Clinton. I care a lot how much power a politician has and abuses while in office.
germy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
And that’s the part that would have tripped him up if by some miracle he’d won the primary. Republicans would have quoted every weird thing from forty years ago he wrote on deadline and then promptly forgot.
They would have made him spend his campaign explaining every stupid quote.
dogwood
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I think there’s a myth about populism tapping into the anger and resentment of the voting public. While some of that might be true, I see populist hucksters like Trump and Sanders, and to a lesser extent some of the people who are very popular among online democrats, using populist rhetoric to actually create anger and resentment where it doesn’t exist, or exacerbating it when it wasn’t the much of a factor to begin with. I saw it in real time with friends who went Bernie nuts. People who really are living the “American Dream” who all of a sudden were talking like hopeless victims of the “establishment”. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and ridiculous.
Ruckus
@D58826:
And I thought that I liked hard liquor (when I used to drink) because when I was 3 my parents had a party and I walked around and swilled from the glasses that people set down. Mom said I was drunk but I don’t remember. Cause I was drunk? Probably fortunately someone saw me. Imagine dying of alcohol poisoning at 3. So I don’t think I can use the ether excuse from my first surgery at 7.
D58826
@germy: Yep. Hillary didn’t use much, if any, of that. and the media gave him a free pass because he wan’t shrill and din’t have EMAILS
D58826
@Ruckus: :-)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@dogwood: I think the reelections of Ron Johnson and Rob Portman (with the endorsement of the Ohio Teamsters) kind of blow a hole in the Great Narrative about Rust Belt populism, free trade and elitist policies, to say nothing about John Kasich being one of the most popular governors in the country.
@D58826: I’m sure Republicans would have treated Bernie Would’vewon with the same kid gloves the Clintons did, so….
D58826
@dogwood:
Have to dust off my history books but I’m not sure the populism of 2017 is the same as the populism of the 1890’s. May be mistaken been a long time since read up on the subject.
D58826
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
and the twin lines of the people were looking for a progressive savior (aka Bernie) and Hillary would have won WI if she had only gone to a couple of Packers home games.
dogwood
@Ruckus:
One summer my father decided to dig a basement under our house. So he got a bunch of regulars from the bar he owned to help. My mother probably cooked and my dad provided cases of beer in wooden crates. I was 5 and my sister was 2 1/2. The only thing I remember about the basement digging is that we woke up one morning to find my little sister singing and stumbling all over the front lawn. She had gone out and started drinking all the warm, flat dregs from the discarded bottles. She was hammered.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and all the way back to the OP:
link to her fundraiser deleted, you can find it if you want it
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@dogwood:
I saw that too – the most entitled white suburban kids my kids went to school with whose parents paid for their private college education were the biggest Berniestans, and the people my age who were in his cult – women for the most part – have lives that involve advanced degrees and comfortable circumstances. It’s like there’s a strain of whiteness that just has to see themselves as victims of something, anything, so it’s the economy that’s rigged against them. We know the economy is rigged – but they get it backwards as to why and how. Yes, Wall Street has created a tilted playing field that money balls we create roll down hill to the .01%, but without women and PoC securing their rights as first class citizens, that cannot be fixed. The entire economy is structured to exploit women and PoC to the benefit of white males, and to fix it, whites/males have to look in the mirror. Instead, they like to think they’re victims of neoliberal economic policy. It’s a con, and like Trump, Wilmer has monetized a way to pander to the need to avoid the hard truth.
burnspbesq
@Brendan in NC:
I think the f-bombs were calculated. She’s speaking to the Berniebros in a language they understand, being transgressive and blowing shit up. If a more mainstream candidate can pull the Bros away from Bernie, then the race for the 2020 Dem nomination becomes less of a minefield.
D58826
@dogwood: I was 12-13 and a beer distributer truck lost a case load of beer cans on the street. It was a summer afternoon, most parents weren’t home. Well it would be nice to say that the neighborhood 12-16 year olds did the honorable thing and called the beer company and asked them to pick up the case of beer. (Did I mention the bridge I’m sell). However honesty compels me to say that by 5pm ever can had been opened and ether consumed or sprayed over each other. The street smelled like a brewery, obviously. But a good time was had by all, except, I suspect, by the truck driver who had to account for the missing case of beer
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The editor of Teen Vogue who got a letter from Hillary Clinton praising her work and offering support has created a shit storm of death threats towards her over the last two days. But don’t say it’s misogyny because it makes Bernie’s bros and his precious WWC feel icky.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@D58826: If Bernie had run as an Independent, Trump would have won. Reasonable people would conclude that he threw the election to Trump and of course all the B-Bros would be claiming that Hillary was the real failure. So actually, not much would be different, just replace “Nader” with “Bernie” and crank the obnoxiousness knob to 11.
Steeplejack
@J R in WV:
If you click on Cheryl Rofer’s tweet, not the link within it, it takes you to her Twitter stream.
Here it is.
D58826
@Uncle Ebeneezer: think jill stein/ and the guy who didn’t know what an alleppo was (sigh)
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
Imagine the self-righteous screeching if it was Sanders that lost to Trump in the EC, and won the popular vote. Would Thomas Frank and Michael Moore be telling him to go away too? LOL. No one but us here at BJ it seems will tell him to STFU. Instead he’s held up by the left male pundits like Jeet Heer and Yglesias as the Dem path forward for 2020. OMG it makes me crazy – can you tell? LOL
Camembert
@Mnemosyne:
Why do people do this? I’ve never understood defeating a strawman when there’s no money on it. HRC used a racist meme to support a racist part of the bill. No one here even remotely implied that she didn’t also support, for example the VAWA.
Camembert
@Mnemosyne:
HRC voted for the Iraq War. I straight up don’t believe that you care about disloyally supporting Republicans.
I think that resolutely ignoring class when trying to craft policy is as destructive as resolutely ignoring white supremacy or patriarchy. I suspect HRC’s supporters agree with me, they just really like her personally.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Bernie and HRC both played by Queensbury rules during the Primaries, as they should have. DWS didn’t, but DWS was and is an incompetent hack who is also corrupt and mean.
divF
@Camembert:
Actually, Bernie did not. He kept saying how the Democratic party was corrupt and dominated by plutocrats, thus setting the stage for BernieBros to sit out or vote Jill Stein.
D58826
@Camembert:
And the GOP should have voted against a declaration of war in Dec. 1941 because it was a democratic president?
D58826
@divF: @Camembert:
DWS had very little to do with the outcome of the primary. She did after all let Bernie run as a dem. If your talking about the leaked e-mails of DNC conversations:
1. they were written after Hillary had wrapped up the delegates needed to win
2. and of course the DNC favored Hillary. She had been a mainstay of democratic politics for 30 years. She had raised money for both the party and individual candidates
3. She had campaigned for them
4. Bernie was and is, not to put to fine a point on it, a carpetbagger. He used the party apparatus for his own ego trip.
Mnemosyne
@Camembert:
Your attempts to imitate American English are failing you again, comrade. What you’ve been doing is parroting Republican talking points and pretending to criticize Hillary from the left.
Here’s a hint: if you claim to be a liberal and yet you use the exact same attacks as the RNC does, you’re either a liar or a dupe. Which is it, comrade?
Another Scott
@dogwood: Yup. I think that’s exactly right.
Another example is all the people on the right talking about all the “tyranny” they have to put up with. By, I dunno, driving on the right side of the road or something.
Words matter. Rhetoric that riles people up matters. I’m not sure how we combat it when monsters use it to seize power… :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
D58826
What we really need here is a moment of levity. The link is to a twitter stream about a demonstration in Texas to protect the statue of Sam Houston from ah from ah well I’m not sure from whom exactly. But never mind they are protecting Sam Houston. Apparently they are afraid some liberals will take the statue down because of historical cleansing of Confederate statutes.
Buried in the thread is the fact that Houston was opposed to the Confederacy but you know this is the alt-fact universe. The photos are hilarious of these guys armed to the teeth, some in battle rattle, one looks like he belongs in one of Julius Cesears Roman legions defending the Empire along the Rhine. Of course the beer bellies make it a bit more………..
https://twitter.com/evan7257/status/873565225869598720
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@D58826:
It’s amazing to me how ridiculous these people look, with zero self-awareness of it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
yes, yes, Bernie Dumbledore vs Delores Wasserman Umbridge
Sometimes I think of Wilmerites as high-strung adolescents. Other times I think that’s overestimating them.
We always focus on Wilmer as carpet-bagger, Wilmer as a self-righteous, delusional crank with a Messiah complex. I think it’s important to remind ourselves from time to time that, whatever else he is, Wilmer is also a just a garden-variety asshole.
Camembert
@Mnemosyne:
Ok, the red-baiting finally helped me figure it out. Thanks.
Ruckus
@dogwood:
Seemingly I had the good sense not to draw attention to myself. I’m figuring because it allowed me to drink more. I followed this credo through all my drinking days.
Applejinx
Well, this has been a balloon juice thread :/
For fuck’s sake. The claim out of Clinton’s book is not that she ‘kept slaves’ in Arkansas.
It’s that she was served by prison labor, in Arkansas, because that’s how they ran the Governor’s house and it didn’t strike her in any way as odd or wrong. Instead, she thought it was a nice aspirational way to have prisoners be a credit to the race.
She commented on how she learned some of them were redeemable! This was apparently worth notice, expressed as a discovery worth passing on. Also, she had opinions she picked up from that context, to the effect that murderers were better servants. Those who committed crimes against property made for bad servants.
Pretty sure my sympathies are more with those who committed crimes against property, and I’m not at all sure if it was good for them to learn to be good servants in Arkansas. Even if there were hundreds of years of tradition behind it.
We did fight a war over that ‘tradition’.
And the Clinton family’s had a hell of a lot of troubling interactions with prisoners and prison keepers. It speaks to their personal loyalties, and that’s politically important and explains a lot, but it’s also been a problem.
D58826
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Is that damning with (very very) faint praise?
Mnemosyne
@Camembert:
Yes, good thing the Russians had nothing to do with interfering in the 2016 election. Pointing out that they are well-known for spreading propaganda through left-leaning outlets is just crazy talk, amirite?
Mnemosyne
@Applejinx:
Oh, you mean the Tweets with the cherrypicked quotes from a 20-year-old book? The story that World Net Daily and other right-wing outlets immediately pounced on and amplified?
Don’t you find it really fascinating that every time Trump shows how unfit for office he is, avowed Bernie Sanders supporters step forward with anti-Clinton propaganda that right-wing outlets immediately pick up? Why is that, do you think? What is it about attacks on Trump that make Bernie’s supporters viciously attack Hillary?