I just saw this, and it’s important to keep in mind.
I know some people are unhappy that they didn’t get the presidential candidate they wanted, and have declared that they will never vote for Hillary Clinton.
Fine.
Refocus.
You aren’t going to get Bernie Sanders this time around. You aren’t going to get Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, either. But if you could work to shift the balance in those lower level offices, you can make a difference.
After the Republican national convention, I was stuffed to the gills with cynicism and despair. It was a week-long orgy of America-hating yahoos ranting about the people who aren’t white American men destroying the world, and as one of them, it made me feel awful for my species.
Then I watched bits and pieces of the Democratic national convention. It started badly, with more people chanting “No! No! No!” and generally being irrational, but it got better, starting with Sarah Silverman.
To the Bernie or Bust people…you’re being ridiculous.
Yes. It is possible to favor Sanders’ ideas without being an ass about it, and to recognize reality. You know, even if Sanders had the nomination, it wouldn’t be as if you flicked a light switch and the world got better, right? That whether it’s Sanders or Clinton, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us?
Bernie Sanders also demonstrated principled graciousness.
In these stressful times for our country, this election must be about bringing our people together, not dividing us up. While Donald Trump is busy insulting one group after another, Hillary Clinton understands that our diversity is one of our greatest strengths. Yes. We become stronger when black and white, Latino, Asian-American, Native American – all of us – stand together. Yes. We become stronger when men and women, young and old, gay and straight, native born and immigrant fight to create the kind of country we all know we can become.
It is no secret that Hillary Clinton and I disagree on a number of issues. That’s what this campaign has been about. That’s what democracy is about. But I am happy to tell you that at the Democratic Platform Committee there was a significant coming together between the two campaigns and we produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party. Among many other strong provisions, the Democratic Party now calls for breaking up the major financial institutions on Wall Street and the passage of a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. It also calls for strong opposition to job-killing free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Our job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House and a Hillary Clinton presidency – and I am going to do everything I can to make that happen.
I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children.
Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her here tonight.
Now it’s time for all of us who voted for Sanders in the primary to follow his lead.
And Michelle Obama set the right tone.
It’s looking like we won’t be wallowing in a week of hate, and I’ll be coming out of this with a lot more optimism.
Mano has the latest John Oliver video. Savor the “feelings”.
I’m baffled by the math in Trump’s latest ad, though. He is proud of the fact that his convention speech was 75 minutes long (yeah, I can talk for a long time, too, it doesn’t make me a hero) and that people applauded for 24 minutes (so? It’s the Republican convention), and then he calculates that 24/75, or 33% of the time was spent in applause, as if that were an accomplishment. Oliver points out that is actually 32% of the time, so he even got the simple math wrong…but shouldn’t it actually be 24/(75+24), or 24% of the hour and a half of the final speech?
Of course, if feelings are what matters, it was 24 minutes divided by an intolerable unendurable indefinitely long period of misery, so subjectively the period of applause was an infinitesimal fraction of the total pain.
Here’s my take on the wikileaks exposé of DNC emails: there was nothing illegal done (other than the hacking of private servers, that is). We’ve got a set of private communications that confirm that Hillary Clinton was the establishment candidate, and the establishment was working to skew circumstances to favor Clinton while trying their best to seem impartial, when they weren’t. It’s the politics of deception, saying you’ll do one thing while doing something different, and nobody should be surprised that politicians do that sort of thing. It does not invalidate the Clinton nomination, because every politician is working within an institutional framework, and is part of a team — Clinton just had deeper roots and a more effective team than Sanders.
But it still disappoints me.
One thing that Charles Pierce points out about it is that it was just plain stupid. If the establishment wants to support an establishment candidate, be forthright and competent about it. This makes the DNC look like a pack of babbling amateurs.
Further, Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been exposed as a political hack, and not a very good one at that. She is an embarrassment too prominent to hide, and so has resigned as DNC chair…which is only appropriate. But then Hillary Clinton has immediately re-hired her to co-chair her election committee! If Clinton wanted to confirm that she was not running a fair nomination campaign, she couldn’t have come up with a more effective strategy. Appearances matter in politics, and that is one ugly relationship.
And then there is the reminder that not even the Democrats represent me, and that the Democratic establishment sees atheism as a useful tool for sliming candidates. This email is simply repellent.
It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.
It would also serve to highlight his Jewishness to the electorate: win-win!
Isn’t it nice to know that the citizenry of the USA are more bigoted against atheists than Jews, and that the DNC would consider exploiting that? And that now, thanks to the incompetence of their staff, the Republican party, which is even more bigoted, will be using this information against the Democrats?
I take it back. This is lose-lose.
Some days, this is exactly how I feel:
The system is broken. It’s tainted and corrupt. Democracy itself is deeply flawed; it’s only as good as the electorate, and the electorate is a swine pit full of yahoos and holy rollers and used car salesmen.
But it’s the only system we’ve got.
So put away the torches and pitchforks. If democracy is a system that gives a voice to liars and scoundrels, chaos is worse, allowing the most unprincipled to freely claw their way to the top. We have to work within this system and get it to change.
I was unenthused about Clinton. She’s a creature of the establishment, and isn’t going to change the world, and in fact, will probably accentuate some of the worst features of the American way of doing things: a reverence for the status quo, a kind of selfish pragmatism, and a callous disregard for the billions outside of our borders. I’m even less happy with Kaine, because he seems to be the kind of blithe liberal who puts a smiling face on stasis. Worse, he’s a clear signal that the Democratic party has decided that the wretched boogeyman of Trump is so awful that they can just say “fuck you” to progressives and put up a slate of the same damned thing they always do and change nothing. What this country really needs for democracy to work is a sane, principled, responsible conservative party so that our liberal party has to really work to differentiate themselves…and so that when the liberals lose, as they do, the country doesn’t immediately descend into missile-launching, jesus-screaming, hate-mongering capitalist viciousness.
Resign yourselves. This isn’t the election that will revolutionize the country (we hope). November is a holding action. We need to hold the wolves at bay for a little longer, so vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. One immediate positive effect of electing Clinton/Kaine is that maybe the far right Republican party will react by becoming even more extremist and complete their self-immolation, so that a more rational party can emerge. (Unless they win, which means we’re in really big trouble for at least a generation, so don’t let them win).
Then please pay attention to something other than the presidential elections. It’s a disgrace that we get almost 2 years of media hype building the process for this one office into a giant suck of time and money, and then everything evaporates at the equally important mid-term elections, and the turnout drops off to shameful levels. Vote in every election, and for or against every candidate. Everything matters, your school board matters, your congressional representative matters, your senator matters, and yes, the president matters…but if we continue to elect the same idiots to the senate and house of representatives, the president matters less than you think.
But right now, we — and by “we”, I mean the Left, progressives and liberals and centrists, and even you so-called “classical liberals” and Libertarians and Rockefeller Republicans and cautious conservatives — have one job to do, and that is to stop the great orange fascist asshole from winning. That’s the number one priority for us all. Don’t screw it up. Don’t go flitting off to Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or some other spoiler. Hold your nose and vote for Clinton.
And if you don’t like the establishment Democrat — I don’t blame you at all — then work locally to get change in the years to come. Get good progressives into positions that can influence the government in productive ways. You don’t like the rules that rig the elections for establishment favorites, like this super-delegate nonsense, or the electoral college? Work to change those before they become a factor in future elections (I suspect everyone who is squawking now will forget about it immediately after this election, and then four years from now will start squawking in indignation again). If Clinton annoys you now, tough — she’s going to be the nominee. But you can support a primary challenge four years from now, if you start working now to build a climate that gives such a person a framework.
I swear, one of the worst things about the American system of democracy is the way we treat the trivial act of pulling a lever as the be-all and end-all of citizen involvement in politics, and the way this simple-minded approach to democracy leads to a crisis every four years.
I’d say it was disturbing if it wasn’t so unsurprising. Donald Trump seems to have an awful lot of ties to Putin.
Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin’s increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there’s quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support of Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.
I remember a time when getting cozy with the Russians would have been the kiss of death for a politician, especially a conservative politician. But nowadays, our right-wing authoritarians love them a right-wing authoritarian no matter what country they’re from.
It’s so beautiful. It’s something that brings people of different nationalities together in the common cause of tyranny.
We’re learning more about the teenage boy who murdered 9 people in Munich.
The teen gunman who killed nine people in a shooting rampage in Munich on Friday was a mentally troubled individual who had extensively researched spree killings and had no apparent links to ISIS, police said.
Speaking at a press conference in the southern German city Saturday, police officials said the 18-year-old lone attacker — who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound — had no political motivations, and no references to religion had been found in documents in his home.
OK, definitely not ISIS-related. But what’s this about no political motivation? He was obsessed with mass killers, chose to go on his rampage on the 5th anniversary of the coward Breivik’s killings, and had Breivik’s image as an online avatar. He chose his victims: people who looked like immigrants to Germany.
The teenage friends comprised two boys of Turkish origin and two girls from Kosovan families, bolstering the theory that Sonboly chose his victims as he rampaged through McDonald’s and into a busy shopping centre. In all, seven of his victims were teenagers and the oldest was a 45-year-old mother of two of Turkish descent.
He was politically motivated, all right. These are the actions of a follower of the alt-right. That’s only non-political to a media that treats far right villainy as the default.
I’m reading the news about Hillary Clinton’s pick for a VP.
Hillary Clinton has chosen Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine to be her running mate, turning to a steady and seasoned hand in government to fill out the Democratic ticket, she announced Friday.
I thought that was Clinton’s reputation: steady and seasoned.
It may be an anti-establishment year, but Clinton’s running mate is an insider: A senator and former governor from the critical battleground of Virginia and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
After a campaign in which Bernie Sanders gave her a strong run for the nomination, she picks the establishment guy. OK.
Kaine, 58, has long been seen as a seasoned and safe choice for Clinton, who could help shore up support among white working-class voters.
Bored now.
He went to Harvard law school, but before graduating served a year as a missionary in Honduras.
It was an experience that cemented his Catholic faith and strengthened his fluency in Spanish.
There’s nothing there to get me enthused, that’s for sure.
Advisers to Clinton see Kaine as a stable force on the bottom of the ticket, foregoing the allure of a pick that could provide more star power in favor of one they are hoping will be void of drama
Oh, jebus. So bored! Even the news stories are emphasizing his lack of pizazz.
Safe safe safe safe safe safe safe safe. I guess it’s one way to run the campaign, and it might very well work…but it’s really going against the grain of the political impetus this year.
I guess she figures all the reasonable people are already planning to vote for her, having no choice in the matter, so she is going to avoid taking any risks at all.
Clinton’s running mate is a catholic “personally against abortion, but…” writes informed consent and parental consent restrictions against the practice. He favors deregulating banks and businesses.
Shit.
I read the transcript of Trump’s nomination acceptance speech. It was a grisly horror that painted a picture of an America that is a dystopian horror right now, which will be magically and instantaneously transformed on the very day he becomes president, and it was full of lies. The responses (and here’s a typical one) are all about how he twisted statistics dishonestly to make his rhetorical points.
I hate to say this, but the facts don’t matter. You can declare that unemployment rates are down, but those people who are out of work don’t care — and they’re the people Trump is yelling at. You can point out that he’s lying when he says crime is rising, but the people who have been mugged don’t care that they’re a statistic, and they’ll listen to Trump. Worse, people who haven’t been mugged will have been watching the crime stories on their local television station and Fox News, and have the perception that there is all kinds of lawlessness going on around them. Throwing national statistics at people who are counting one, two, many isn’t going to change their minds.
Furthermore, as Trump so ably demonstrates, all too often statistics are used not to identify a truth, but to justify a preconception. I was recently cooly informed that Muslims commit 98% of all terrorist attacks…never mind that the FBI has determined that 94% of all US terror attacks have been by non-Muslims. The guy is convinced that Islam is the source of all evil in the world, and he has a number that reassures him that his opinion is correct.
So here’s our terrifying problem: our little homegrown fascist is tapping into the fear and anxieties about their future of a significant number of people in the country. These fears are partly legitimate, and partly the product of a media that has been stoking them for years. You don’t reassure individuals by telling them that the average person is better off or that the trend lines are all rising — they don’t give a damn about averages when their problem is personal. In fact, waving tables of numbers and graphs at people to tell them their grievances are false is going to be more enraging than reassuring. And meanwhile, Trump will lie about the statistics and validate their gut feelings and pander to every prejudice they’ve got, and guess who they’re going to want to believe?
We’ll counter that by dumping a pile of actuarial tables on them. Yeah, that’ll work.
I’ll also point out that we’re seeing that policy doesn’t matter, either. For years, people have been voting against their own objective self-interest because demagogues have effectively whipped them into a froth of fear over religion, or guns, or abortion. See, for instance, Brownback’s Kansas. Progressive policies are almost always more appealing to the people, when presented without a label…but the media have effectively attached a lot of the hated positions to the Democrats (and rightly so — progressives should support women’s autonomy, minority rights, and oppose war and violence). Witness also Ivanka Trump’s bizarre speech at the RNC yesterday: she basically promoted the Democratic party platform and tried to attach it to her father. You can say he’ll do anything, and the disgruntled voters won’t care.
What are we to do? Data doesn’t matter, policy doesn’t matter. Politics is personal.
I see two strategies (I know there are more). The first necessary step is to recognize that the unhappy people who want Strong Man Trump to cure all their ills actually have legitimate problems — you cannot wave them away with a chart. So you can try to win them over by actually addressing their concerns, which would be ideal, except for the fact that one of their concerns is driven by raw, naked racism. Or you can simply write off that portion of the population as a regressive, deluded mess, and hope that the remainder are sufficiently numerous and motivated to vote, so you can get real political progress despite the unhappiness of that minority (which, if you’re a real progressive, you’ll then try to alleviate).
I think we should definitely be very afraid. The fascism is openly unmasked, and we’re facing a serious risk that it could be victorious in a few months. I dread waking up to newspapers that look like this.
Oh, damn. I did. That’s the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune this morning, featuring Great Leader surrounded by flags. And this is my nightmare.
And then shoot them.
Amanda Marcotte writes about the performative worship of the police at the Republican National Convention. Meanwhile, in Miami, a black caregiver trying to help a severely autistic man who wandered away from a group home, was confronted by police who’d been called by someone who said the man was wielding a gun (it was actually a toy truck). The caregiver ends up lying in the street with his hands up and clearly empty, trying to explain to the police that he was trying to help the man, and please don’t shoot.
So shot him, obvs.
“When I went to the ground, I went to the ground with my hands up,” Kinsey said, “and I am laying there just like this. Telling them again there is no need for firearms. He is autistic. He has a toy truck in his hand.” …
“I’m like this right here, and when he shot me, it was so surprising,” Kinsey said. “I thought it was a mosquito bite, and when it hit me I had my hands in the air, and I’m thinking I just got shot! And I’m saying, ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’ and his words to me were, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
Then they handcuffed him. Why, I don’t know. I think the new logic has changed from “if you see a criminal, shoot them” to “if you shoot them, you see a criminal.”
