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

ultimate troll move: give POTY to hillary throwing two middle fingers up on the cover

this week i showed my government students the ava duvernay doc "13TH" and we read a chapter from the new jim crow. they're doing self-directed projects next year. the cool thing about teaching government is that its not a state-tested subject and also my school more or less lets me do whatever i want bc they have bigger fish to fry.

liberals becoming huge CIA fans... takin' my yuks where i can get em

it's certainly weird

strange bedfellows

foster campbell just got beat handily in lousiana guess we shouldn't have expected anything different

― 龜, Sunday, December 11, 2016 3:36 AM (two hours ago)

it's depressing that literally every single straw we've grasped at over the last month has turned out to be a bust. we lost almost every important election, the recounts won't change anything, the cabinet appointments are terrifying, trump hasn't toned down his message and if anything seems more insane and unqualified than he did before the election. now ppl are clinging to the shred of hope that an electoral college largely composed of people who are fanatically loyal to a party that values its own power over everything will somehow do the right thing and throw the election to the person most hated by the party base. and i'm still hoping for that too! when you're in a situation this dangerous you try every strategem you can think of, no matter how ridiculous it is. maybe they'll impeach him, i keep thinking. but if republicans don't give a shit that a hostile foreign power intervened to help elect their guy, they're not going to care about anything he does in office enough to impeach him. maybe they'd impeach him if he raised taxes.

Should we blame Nelly The Elephant for hyping up the Trump, Trump, Trump?

& now i guess it's all one great big circus.
So run away.

Innit?

good mourning!

strange bedfellows

Is it really so strange? Given the Dem element that was actually gung ho for The Most Qualified Hawk Ever?

I'll take the Most Qualified Hawk Ever over the Least Qualified Anything Ever any election.

Given we still have several weeks to go, I don't see how this daily drip/deluge of agitation can sustain itself, honestly. He's done absolutely nothing to mend wounds and no doubt will be even more inflammatory during his interview today, further embolden by his bubble of supporters/enablers. Meanwhile, the same rage and frustration that helped him get barely elected is out there and real, and I think generally hopeful but hardly reassured by his election. Meanwhile, the rest of those invested in American politics seem at the least pretty unsettled, from career politicians to plebes like us, and the best the most optimistic have to offer is, hey, maybe it won't be as terrible as we all expect.

I was out to dinner with friends last night, and my banker pal, who is prone to devil's advocating, kept coming back to Trump as a distraction, and the GOP as possible solvers of a few real fiscal problems America is facing at a federal and state level. But I kept pushing back that Trump is more than a distraction, he is a fulcrum, and that nothing good, from GOP piggy bank shaking to dem services, will come of the US government as long as he is in office and emboldened. The more I think about it, the more I think there's something endemically sour about the state of things, from the audacious stonewalling over Scalia's replacement on the federal level, to the fact that Illinois' GOP governor has refused to sign a state budget into law for about a year. Both those tactics preceded Trump, and I have a feeling things like that will only get worse and worse while he dicks around with our country's very fundamentals and foundations. So yeah, he is a distraction, but the worse kind of destructive distraction who has to be faced or dealt with on several levels before we can even get around to addressing all the other ways the country is broken and fucked up.

I'm not talking about "taking," Josh, but the cheerleading Isn't She Great crowd.

The inflation of Russian chicanery to "PUTIN INSTALLED TRUMP" strikes me as the kind of whingeing that indicates the Dems will run 33 shitty Senate candidates in two years, and likely nominate someone as vile as Andy Cuomo in four (if there's an election).

Also, Trump describes Sec of State-designate Exxon Tillerson as "a player" in his fuxNews interview. Just think, if Yam was a man of the left, we could be looking at Warren Beatty in the Cabinet.

The inflation of Russian chicanery to "PUTIN INSTALLED TRUMP" strikes me as the kind of whingeing that indicates the Dems will run 33 shitty Senate candidates in two years, and likely nominate someone as vile as Andy Cuomo in four (if there's an election).

"The straw men shrieking in my head confirmed my biases, again!"

xps

GOP as possible solvers of a few real fiscal problems America is facing at a federal and state level.

the gop is really adept at convincing people they're the party of fiscal responsibility without ever having earned that title with actions when in power. in theory it'd be great if this widely held belief were confronted more strenuously but it's so much harder to engage in a substantive discussion of the nuances of fiscal issues than it is to say "party of small government" and "shrink the deficit" even when neither of these things are true on any level

http://i.imgur.com/8rEEYrW.jpg

lol

I think my friend's argument - and he votes dem -is that at least the GOP talks about it, even if for myriad reasons they don't deliver. Like, he's sees much of the world on the precipice of systemic financial failure, and the US in particular vulnerable to collapse, due to borrowing, pensions, that sort of thing. That's the problem in Illinois, but internationally he thinks Europe (he's Croatian) is a mess, and that no one is offering real solutions, just delaying and dithering. We were arguing about Carrier, and how Trump really accomplished nothing, so he asked, well, what would you do to keep Carrier from moving jobs to Mexico? What can you do? It's not like Dems have offered solutions, however unlikely, which helped them lose.

I took a call.
I heard the call.
This was a call.
I didn't make the call.
And it was a call.
Very short call.
It was a very nice call.
I can't take a call.

Tax the rich, universal basic income, single payer. Dems could run on that imo.

I'm so glad i'm the only one with biases

christ, apparatchiks, huh?

http://i.imgur.com/0rxLi2Q.jpg

who can ask for anything more?

It might be fun to have a fresh nullification crisis, maybe someone can viciously beat Mitch McConnel on the senate floor

Tillerson at State brings some clarity/madness to my mind.

the US and Russia together go to war with Iran in order to split Iran's oil reserves amongst themselves. There are pretexts, including Iran's nuclear program and its alleged threat to Israel. Europe howls and is left out of the spoils. I don't know what China does, probably nothing directly. Brazil and India sit this one out, there's too much trouble at home to be worth the bother.

I'm not a betting man but if I were, I'd put money on it.

yeah, i'll be protesting that one when it's appropriate

Russia and Iran have very good relations - economically, politically and militarily. Russia is building Iran's nuclear reactors, for a start. xp

There's no reason Russia can't continue to build those reactors after "regime change".

but I am happy to be talked out of this nutty idea.

It would make the ongoing collaboration of Russian and Iranian troops in Syria pretty awkward and it would potentially destabilise Russian allies including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Armenia. John Bolton is definitely up for it but i think it's practically unimaginable Russia would be.

^^ Let alone all those legitimate reasons, Putin nationally has far more to gain by being a hardman towards the US instead of making up and being friends.

now seems like an appropriate time to know the difference between hamas and hezbollah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUe4sFKvJUY

the hamas/hezbollah thing was from september 2015

And I'm sure, now that the time is appropriate, Trump can totally tell the difference now.

it's depressing that literally every single straw we've grasped at over the last month has turned out to be a bust. we lost almost every important election, the recounts won't change anything, the cabinet appointments are terrifying, trump hasn't toned down his message and if anything seems more insane and unqualified than he did before the election. now ppl are clinging to the shred of hope that an electoral college largely composed of people who are fanatically loyal to a party that values its own power over everything will somehow do the right thing and throw the election to the person most hated by the party base. and i'm still hoping for that too! when you're in a situation this dangerous you try every strategem you can think of, no matter how ridiculous it is. maybe they'll impeach him, i keep thinking. but if republicans don't give a shit that a hostile foreign power intervened to help elect their guy, they're not going to care about anything he does in office enough to impeach him. maybe they'd impeach him if he raised taxes.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, December 11, 2016 1:49 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think it's really, really important to get dug in for a long, challenging fight right now and not grasp at straws. Bc yeah, Campbell, recount, investigation of Russia changing things, these are all extreme longshots/hail maries. Even impeachment, which seems slightly more probable than the others, is kind of out of our hands and only going to happen if he displeases the GOP establishment.

So I think we have to think about how to protect our own, obstruct, win seats in 2017 and 2018 elections or at least hold ground, shift public opinion, etc. I'm not going to completely knock any approach people are trying, but I'm a little concerned about desperation and unstrategic flailing around and screaming playing into their hands.

this remains essential reading;

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-hillary-clinton-united-states-europe-516895

Aside from the arguments over what might and might not have happened, the whole election campaign exposed Eichenwald as a fantasist who knows nothing about Russia. Take anything he has written with massive emphasis handfuls of salt.

Not sure why my phone added emphasis there!

I took a call.
I heard the call.
This was a call.
I didn't make the call.
And it was a call.
Very short call.
It was a very nice call.
I can't take a call.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Sunday, December 11, 2016 11:11 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could only read this in Seinfeld's voice.

:)

US and Russia together go to war with Iran in order to split Iran's oil reserves

This would be a much bigger fiasco than the Soviets in Afghanistan or US in Iraq. It just plain would not work irl.

I imagine "emphasis handfuls" to be the technical term for that gesture conductors make during crescendos like they're deadlifting the planet by her bazooms

Lol

Did not know! Thanks - it's written in a tone of such authority.

It's pretty insane to watch Joe Walsh slowly grow a conscience in the wake of all this Russia information.

https://twitter.com/walshfreedom/status/807703919069630464

i wonder how many more of those that supported trump in the election are already coming to terms with having been swindled

3?

yeah none

oh OK thx

There's a whole tumblr for it y'all

sorry, an insignificant number of people

stop the straw-grasping. quit looking for silver linings. get ready for a fight

yeah, after 17 months of campaigning it isn't like people didn't know who they voted for