Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate right off the bat and she did nothing to ameliorate her major issues. The last thing she needed was a robot running her campaign.

one upshot of all this is that even though his cabinet is going to be filled with people who suck like Newt Gingrich, he's going to be constantly firing and replacing them

― qop (crüt), Thursday, November 10, 2016 10:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm god i hope so

well it'll be an interesting early case bc if he can't privatize medicare he certainly isn't taking on supreme dictatorial power xxp

I hope to God they decide to try that first, privatize Medicare.

also I'm reposting this because it's really good and important imo

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/

medicare thing is crazy overreach and it will blow up in their face

wasn't it exactly this that blew up in george w bush's face after the GOP controlled both the WH and congress after the 2004 election? social security i think

Medicare scheme would make a great chance for a truly diabolical Trump to surprise-veto some deeply unpopular bullshit from Establishment Paul in the name of The People. They sent him there after Obamacare, now it's Medicare?! He makes a big show of defeating the proposal, approval shoots up, Ryan gets primaried and replaced by a Trumpling. Yay.

The next four years are just a wasteland of no-win scenarios. I hope Trump chokes to death on a loose bone from KFC on January 19.

Privatizing Medicare will either break their stranglehold on old white people or they'll all die from lack of care.

OTOH, my mom starts Medicare in December after pay $700/mo for a bronze plan for the last two years so fuck Ryan with a hot poker.

I liked that article tombot, but as an aside I really hate 'love trumps hate' as a protest statement. feel like there's never been a less appropriate time for cute little puns.

xp

Medicare scheme would make a great chance for a truly diabolical Trump to surprise-veto some deeply unpopular bullshit from Establishment Paul in the name of The People. They sent him there after Obamacare, now it's Medicare?! He makes a big show of defeating the proposal, approval shoots up, Ryan gets primaried and replaced by a Trumpling. Yay.

yeah on some level it might be worse than he's not an ideologue and accidentally can do the right thing once in a while

Fucking hell what a month. Was sick as hell, my parents came to visit and my mom woke me up at 5:30 three weeks ago because my dad was unresponsive, I got to call 911 for the first time, he spent three days in the hospital 70 miles away and ended up with a pacemaker, then I got sick again, and now this. I had the crazy heart beat and four hours of sleep Tuesday night, went to a faculty meeting Wednesday morning that felt like a wake and everyone was crying, and have lived in a haze where I've been cycling through the Kubler-Ross stages since then and have settled on angry for a while.

Today one of my students was losing his shit because somebody spray painted "fag" on his boyfriend's car, and one of my many latino students asked for an deadline extension because of some shit that broke out with Trump supporters. When I got home my friend from Venezuela started texting me in a panic cause he thought he was done with authoritarian bullshit and how fucked we are going to be. Then my kid chucked a block at my head, and the shitty christian band that practices across the street was way louder than usual and I went over and rained hell upon them.

On the plus side all of my students seem outraged, even some of the ones I worried were probably 4chan alt-right assholes, and a bunch of them were protesting on campus. And part of me feels like something like this was inevitable and would probably be bad in a different way had Hilary won, so maybe we can just get it over with now and these assholes will get riled up when they realize high-paying factory jobs won't suddenly appear in Dayton and Youngstown. Assuming everything doesn't end up in smoking ruins or just really really awful first.

Still going to get my son a passport soon just in case; I could make it to the canadian border in a couple hours.

In response to the possibility of the likelihood of Trump dropping dead before his four years are up or getting impeached or quitting before his term even begins, people have been pretty regularly responding that Pence would be worse. But Trump is both malleable and seemingly totally cool with passing the actual president-ing on to Pence anyway, so how exactly would that be worse than Pence as filtered through an unpredictable man baby?

because Pence is focused

Trump, in the past, expressed some not-insane opinions. He's malleable but not bright enough to have a coherent ideology of evil. He's Kylo Ren.

Pence, on the other hand, is Darth Vader.

Ted Cruz is old, melted Palpatine.

seriously spooked by that DJT tweet :(

Uh, yeah. So much for dialing back the crazy after you win the election.

On the other hand, lol @ "Melania and Michelle got along very well"

Who's organizing to keep protests ongoing? We don't need to blow up in an orgy of anger now, protests need to be day-in-day-out for four years to drive him into saying and doing more and more crazy shit. Different city every night, only have to turn out once a month.

I liked that article tombot, but as an aside I really hate 'love trumps hate' as a protest statement. feel like there's never been a less appropriate time for cute little puns.

Absolutely. The first two words are "love trump" and I read it often as "love Trump's hate" which...uh yeah, that's kind of what people are getting on board with

In response to the possibility of the likelihood of Trump dropping dead before his four years are up or getting impeached or quitting before his term even begins, people have been pretty regularly responding that Pence would be worse. But Trump is both malleable and seemingly totally cool with passing the actual president-ing on to Pence anyway, so how exactly would that be worse than Pence as filtered through an unpredictable man baby?

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Thursday, November 10, 2016 11:46 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because Pence is focused

― sleeve, Thursday, November 10, 2016 11:48 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah.

I mean, Trump's unpredictability (and temperament, and narcissism, etc) is worrisome, but I for one would be more frightened of the people he is likely to surround himself with. I honestly believe that Trump wanted to be president so he will have been president, and will leave all of the policy stuff to Pence, etc. That's scary.

*wanted to be president JUST so he will have been president

i don't see how the street protests are accomplishing anything! there's no goal, no training, no plan, just show up and then inevitably a handful of people will vandalize things live on cable news and how does this do anything but empower trump and his authoritarian calls for law and order?

Until Pence upsets him somehow. We see how things worked out with his campaign managers.

what do you think the protestors should do? they absolutely should be out there right now! just...uh please don't break anything

My husband thinks Pence will be the first one that Trump throws under the bus the first time there is any kind of disruptive outrage over something that Trump signed that he knew nothing about other than that Pence told him to sign it.

obama's graciousness with trump today seemed like it could have been part of a deep strategy. beyond just basic politeness he also tried to make inside quips with trump, giving him jokey tips on how to deal with reporters etc. hopefully, he is trying to win trump over via flattery and wield some influence over him. trump loves flattery, and what could be more exciting than having a world historic figure like obama as a friend?

it's also what they have to do - how primed was everyone on the Clinton side to roast Trump if he didn't concede?

by everyone I mean voters/supporters

this quote from today fucked me up

"We're going to move very strongly on immigration," he said. "We will move very strongly on health care. And we're looking at jobs. Big league jobs."

i don't see how the street protests are accomplishing anything!

They bother him so much that he stole his Twitter account back and started whining - two days after what should be the pinnacle of anyone's life.

At work I explained it like this, "it feels like we fired our CEO and replaced him with an 8 year old kid, and now all of us are going to spend our careers trying to figure out what he likes on his cheeseburgers and when his nap time should be to best avoid temper tantrums"

Constant protesting helps keep the media from normalizing Trump and his behavior over the next four years.

i have a very liberal and sympathetic friend who is nevertheless convinced on principle that street protests, when they involve harm to others—in the technical sense, of any unmerited inconvenience, even—are unjust, i.e. immoral. he thinks, basically, the right to protest in public should always be upheld but that it can't disrupt the flow of life for people who don't want to pay attention to it. and he's ON OUR SIDE.

i've already seen a handful of 'independents' or trump supporters or whomever in the past couple days in my extended network pointing to the protests as if they were morally equivalent to the incidents of harassment and violence this week. people who think like that will only ever be repelled by the constant protests we're in for. : /

On the day of the debate, Megyn Kelly writes, she woke up feeling great. Then an overzealous, suspiciously enthusiastic driver picked her up to take her to the convention center. He insisted on getting her coffee, though she’d repeatedly declined his offer. Once it was in her hand, she drank it. And within 15 minutes, she was violently ill, vomiting so uncontrollably that it was unclear if she’d be able to go on and help moderate that evening. It was so bad that she kept a trash pail beneath her desk throughout the debate, just in case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/books/review-megyn-kelly-tells-tales-out-of-fox-news-in-her-memoir-settle-for-more.html?_r=0

We already live in Russia.

I used to be something of a skeptic when it came to claims of “filter bubbles” — the sort of epistemic closure that comes from only seeing material you agree with on social platforms. People tend to click links that align with their existing opinions, sure — but isn’t that just an online analog to the fact that our friends and family tend to share our opinions in the real world too? I ate up studies (from Facebook and others) that argued the site actually encouraged a certain kind of information diversity, because your Facebook friends are likely drawn from a wider group of people (the guy you went to middle school with, your mom’s neighbor, that rando you met that weekend at the beach) than the people you discuss news with in real life.

But I’ve come to think that the rise of fake news — and of the cheap-to-run, ideologically driven aggregator sites that are only a few steps up from fake — has weaponized those filter bubbles. There were just too many people voting in this election because they were infuriated by made-up things they read online.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/

Organized protests are going to have less violence and fewer negative consequences than an outpouring of grief anyway.

xxp - people who think like that are a lost cause anyway when they have the option to choose a shitty politically incorrect maverick

Anyway, not that we need to point out the hypocrisy of the GOP any more, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts you don't hear a fucking word about emails from pearl-clutching Republicans anymore. Keep hearing "Hillary should have won, but in the end she had too much baggage" and it's like....no she really didn't, you just decided to accept this weird story that she was a criminal and possibly a murderer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/books/review-megyn-kelly-tells-tales-out-of-fox-news-in-her-memoir-settle-for-more.html?_r=0

We already live in Russia.

"Next thing I knew, she was bleeding out of her...wherever"

guys what if the aliens show up while he's in office

Aliens from where

don't know if this was mentioned yet, I've been seeing this pop up on my fb feed from a number of sources. A simple way to show solidarity to any people who are feeling more at risk:

http://www.vox.com/presidential-election/2016/11/10/13586322/trump-brexit-safety-pin

I think Keith Ellison is a solid dude but why is an endorsement from a non-democrat such a great idea? Is Sanders considering joining the party again? Is he giving out ideas on RNC chairs next?

A bunch of friends have shared Sanders' endorsement and I am just like wtf

Way to reform from without and not within you fly by night candidate

Outer space, Evan, duh

My parents are on medicare after a decade-plus-long rough patch after my dad lost his job (he worked again and continues to, and a much lower salary, and never had employer insurance again), during which they paid out a huge part of their income to insurance premiums. I breathed such a sigh of relief a couple years ago when they finally got on medicare. I really do hope that's an overreach that blows up in their faces.

seems like bernie sanders has upset you, mh

I think Keith Ellison is a solid dude but why is an endorsement from a non-democrat such a great idea? Is Sanders considering joining the party again? Is he giving out ideas on RNC chairs next?

A bunch of friends have shared Sanders' endorsement and I am just like wtf

― mh 😏, Friday, November 11, 2016 12:21 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Way to reform from without and not within you fly by night candidate

― mh 😏, Friday, November 11, 2016 12:21 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No one gives a shit about this "not a real democrat" shit except the party insiders who lost this election.

He can endorse whatever he wants but someone who joined the democratic to run and then immediately left seems like a weird endorsement to share for an administrative position

it seems it would be pretty rich for 'actual' democrats to be all 'tyvm but we need to let people committed to our party make these decisions', given that they have no credible leadership

is there any reason he immediately left than for some sort of idealistic purity?

I mean, it's a party, which is a non binding thing in the US but idk wtf

Missed this one earlier: https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/sources-donald-trump-listened-in-on-phone-lines-at-mar-a-lag

paintings with eyes that mysteriously follow you

is there any reason he immediately left than for some sort of idealistic purity?

I mean, it's a party, which is a non binding thing in the US but idk wtf

― mh 😏, Friday, November 11, 2016 12:27 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All he is now is the Senator from Vermont and that's how his constituency elected him. Only seems right.