On Jeff Sessions’s recommendation.
BREAKING: WH statement. Letter from Trump to Comey. And AG Sessions recommendation. pic.twitter.com/BPjIJ4MVvH
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) May 9, 2017
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Assholes, Both Sides Do It!, Bring On The Meteor, DC Press Corpse, Fuck Yeah!
On Jeff Sessions’s recommendation.
BREAKING: WH statement. Letter from Trump to Comey. And AG Sessions recommendation. pic.twitter.com/BPjIJ4MVvH
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) May 9, 2017
This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, Both Sides Do It!, Bring On The Meteor
so who will be the first Very Serious Columnist to get behind Zuck 2020? Easy money is on Friedman, but…
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 8, 2017
Macron's win shows the best antidote to rancid nationalism is a somewhat random guy who seems too young. Done. https://t.co/2zI2aV5gRt
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 8, 2017
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Too late!…
Can the US elect a young centrist disruptor his starts his/her own party?
Yes, we can. https://t.co/EgHzSu2y1r
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) May 7, 2017
“Commentary: My Mark Zuckerberg problem — and ours”
@Atrios I made a #Zuck2020 ad. I'm serious pic.twitter.com/bjZvLJcfLn
— Hot Weather Takes (@paulythegun) May 8, 2017
Late Night ‘Our Failed Media’ Open ThreadPost + Comments (48)
This post is in: Dolt 45, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Both Sides Do It!
Opinion | Trump needs an intervention https://t.co/tQR6ydpQbS #ObamaWiretapLeaks pic.twitter.com/rraOt1KYh5
— Ann Telnaes (@AnnTelnaes) March 5, 2017
Given contrast w Obamas 1st mos in office amidst crisis, Trumps self inflicted shitshow may amount to epic white privilege performance art.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 6, 2017
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Apart from taking what pleasure we can, what’s on the agenda as we start a new week?
Big challenge for the media today is distinguishing b/w a claim being *serious* bc POTUS made it and being *credible* bc POTUS made it
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) March 5, 2017
You'd think some Republican member of Congress would see there is a huge opportunity to be the first to call for Trump's resignation.
— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) March 6, 2017
Some backstory, for those of you sensible enough to stay away from news media over the weekend…
"It's Obama's fault" is a brand new storyline… promoted by Trump and his media allies… here's the origin story https://t.co/GfFRuzPSXp
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 5, 2017
.@MarthaRaddatz to WH spokesperson on Trump's unsubstantiated wiretap claim: "You keep saying if, if, if" Watch: https://t.co/3QsPwEPTMq pic.twitter.com/LhfWHcN38l
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 5, 2017
The woman Raddatz is jousting with is Sarah Huckabee Sander, whose only marketable skill seems to be having been born Mike Huckabee’s daughter, bless her heart.
Monday Morning Open Thread: At Least We Have A Circus to Amuse UsPost + Comments (167)
by DougJ| 134 Comments
This post is in: Both Sides Do It!, Our Failed Media Experiment
This one belongs in the false equivalence hall of fame
There are differences, but who remembers when Clinton banned a reporter she didn't like from her pool? https://t.co/8ecpilFvOr
— Annie Linskey (@AnnieLinskey) February 24, 2017
by David Anderson| 17 Comments
This post is in: Absent Friends, Grifters Gonna Grift, Hail to the Hairpiece, Both Sides Do It!, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Fucked-up-edness, Get Angry, Go Fuck Yourself, Good News For Conservatives, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Make The World A Better Place
Okay, now it’s real so let us rely on two great philospophers for the next four years:
And it looks like America agrees with Ron Burgundy
It has been 10 weeks since Donald Trump was elected president, and more Americans disapprove (48 percent) than approve (37 percent) of the way he has handled his presidential transition. They are split on his cabinet picks. Views divide heavily along party lines.
Just days before his inauguration, Donald Trump’s favorable rating (32 percent) is the lowest of any president-elect in CBS News polling going back to Ronald Reagan in 1981, when CBS News began taking this measure.
Well we’ll have to survive being “governed” by the Brietbart comment section so we can either laugh or cry while we bang our heads into our desks today.
Two great philosophers for the next four yearsPost + Comments (17)
by Betty Cracker| 354 Comments
This post is in: Bernie Sanders 2016, Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Assholes, Both Sides Do It!, General Stupidity
Remember last week when some folks were reassuring us that criticism of “identity politics” in the wake of the Democrats’ loss wasn’t code for throwing marginalized people under the bus? Here’s TPM’s report on a speech Bernie Sanders delivered in Boston yesterday:
In a speech Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) urged attendees to move away from “identity politics” and towards policies aimed at helping the working class.
Sanders spoke to a crowd of more than 1,000 mostly young people at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, according to a report from WBUR.
“The working class of this country is being decimated — that’s why Donald Trump won,” Sanders said, according to the same report. “And what we need now are candidates who stand with those working people, who understand that real median family income has gone down.”
Sanders also urged the crowd to move the party away from what he called “identity politics.”
“It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ That is not good enough,” he said, according to the same report. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industries.”
Let’s unpack some of the insulting, revisionist implications that follow from this speech. My first “Go Fuck Yourself, Sanders” goes to the implication that Clinton ever asked anyone to vote for her just because she’s a woman. She didn’t, so fuck that bullshit, and fuck Sanders for implying that she did.
The second goes to the wholesale purchase of the cherished and increasingly accepted in some circles wingnut-fomented meme that the Democrats don’t represent “real America” and got what was coming to them for turning their back on the working class in favor of embracing the elites. That’s a lie we believe at our peril.
The DLC is dead, and good riddance. I agree there has been too little attention paid to those hurt by globalization, too much happy talk about the jobs that would flow in from that process, too much eagerness on the part of some Democrats to curry favor with big donors. We’ve debated that endlessly here throughout PBO’s two terms; it was debated endlessly in the primaries, and that message was incorporated into the Democratic Party platform. Sanders didn’t invent it, and he doesn’t own it now.
But since we’re the reality-based party, supposedly capable of handling nuance and complexity, we can — in theory — simultaneously acknowledge the accomplishments of a highly successful two-term Democratic president who pulled us from the brink of a second Great Depression, got an additional 20 million people access to health care coverage, helped make sure marriage equality became the law of the land, turned a catastrophically high flood of job losses into a stable, less than 5% unemployment economy, etc.
During the primary, Sanders shit all over that, as did Trump in the general. But it doesn’t follow that a Sanders-like message — from anyone, including Sanders — would have been a winner. For every one WWC vote an “everything sucks after eight years of Obama” platform might have pulled in, how many votes would be lost from Democrats who believe in this president and have supported his agenda? Greater than Trump’s margins in the Rust Belt, is my guess.
And finally, what I find most infuriating about Sanders’ take is that he’s ignoring the people who actually DID embrace identity politics in this election cycle: That would be Donald J. Trump and the millions of voters who embraced WHITE identity politics. The Democrats ran on an inclusive message. Trump did the opposite. Again, for every WWC vote we’d gain by embracing a very specific kind of identity politics to chase Trump voters, how many would Democrats lose? Well, mine, for one.
Two final thoughts: the first is that politicians are running around trying to pound the round peg of this election loss into the square hole of their own agenda. Yes, we need to examine the causes and learn the appropriate lessons, but they are myriad. Any simple solution, such as turning the party’s soul over to a man who couldn’t win the Democratic primary, would be compounding the problem rather than solving it, IMO. Yes to sharpening the economic message to more loudly broadcast an appeal to ALL voters. Yes to making sure future candidates’ messages — and arguably the candidates themselves — excite people since we seem to be in the reality TV era of politics. But not just “no” but “FUCK NO” to the idea that the Democrats lost because of “identity politics.”
Second, so much of this intramural squabbling is crab bucket politics. We’ve got an unhinged, pathological liar, authoritarian conman poised to take office, and he is shaking out the KKK bedsheets and emptying the armoires where the brown shirts are stored to fill his administration with the very worst pricks imaginable. A man who is openly setting up a kleptocracy to funnel loot to the pack of parasites who are accompanying him to DC. A man who will rage-tweet all night about perceived disrespect shown at a Broadway show to his beady-eyed, bible-humping VP and remain utterly silent about the hundreds of hate crimes psychos nationwide are perpetrating in his name.
Perhaps we have more important things to focus on, is what I’m saying. And it’s flat-out unseemly for a politician with standing in the Democratic Party to focus elsewhere, even if he does have a book to flog.
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 164 Comments
This post is in: Election 2018, Open Threads, Both Sides Do It!
TS says:
November 12, 2016 at 8:28 am (Edit)2008 – Republicans lost the house, the senate and the presidency – they then proceed to impede in any way possible (with the help of a few dems) anything that the President tried to do. They stated it was their goal and they voted 100% in unison. The Media helped them with their non stop attacks on the new President – and the support of the birthers.
Democrats now need to stop talking about why and how & who won the vote and what is wrong with the electoral college & who should lead the party & how they can attract the undesirables. Democrats should be working as a united group to impede each and every thing this government wants to do. Don’t assume they can just “do it” – didn’t work that way in 2009/10.
This lot have NO idea what the President does – nor how he does it. Time to work non stop to show them up every hour of every day.
WereBear says:
November 12, 2016 at 9:46 am (Edit)@Enhanced Voting Techniques: What are Republicans? CUT TAXES AND SERVICES.
What are Democrats? TAKE CARE OF PEOPLE.
There. Done. You’re welcome.
New tag: Election 2018. Should get a lot of use, I suspect.