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

it is true that life is in many (but not all) ways better for people of color, women, and queers than it was in 1974, but let's see what the future holds fight the future.

he election of Trump is a direct affront to any movement in this direction, from civil rights to the environment to education to diplomacy, the reactionary drumbeat of "anti-PC" basically an aggressive fuck you to empathy, which is key to progress. I've noted it earlier, but for all this country's faults going forward, we've really yet to go backwards.

Look at 1964 and 1968. At the height of achievement you can see the abyss below you. That's history, man. It's a bitch.

it's not a straight line, etc

are you saying that the arc of the moral universe is more of a scribble

it's more of a Mad Libs.

the arc of the moral universe bends toward Kanye

I've noted it earlier, but for all this country's faults going forward, we've really yet to go backwards.

http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/031208/031208_reaganobit_hmedium.grid-6x2.jpg

("this facial expression" there, dragged into optimism+triumph by sheer will)

I'm one of those minorities that has benefitted from the constitutional advances of the last 20 years but, no, I don't think history evolves unceasingly.

No one answered my question about who has grounds to sue the president for violating the Emoluments Clause.

xxp DLH otm

I'm hoping Perlstein is at work on a Reagan-to-Trump book.

― clemenza, Wednesday, December 14, 2016 10:37 AM (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you see https://washingtonspectator.org/press-trump-perlstein/ (posted previously)?

man do I love Ronnie's hair

If John Kasich wanted to be my dogwalker he might make it past the first round of interviews.

Romney wouldn't.

you're saying you don't want your dog strapped to the top of the car and driven cross country for 14 hours?

No one answered my question about who has grounds to sue the president for violating the Emoluments Clause.

It's not who has grounds, it's who has standing, and so far nobody seems to have a good answer. The prohibition of generalized grievances seems like it would apply here, so Adler's WaPo blog on the topic is probably an accurate take: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/11/21/the-emoluments-clause-is-donald-trump-violating-its-letter-or-spirit/

Whether or not one concludes that Trump’s business dealings violate the letter or the spirit of the Emoluments Clause, the underlying controversy is almost certainly non-justiciable. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which someone would have standing to challenge Trump’s arrangements, and even harder to think what sort of remedy could be ordered by a court. In other words, if there are concerns about how President Trump handles his various investments, the only remedies will be political.

non-justiciable, son

Didnt know that was a word

You'll probably have ample opportunity to familiarize yourself with its usage in the coming years.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547

In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

yup. The story I read about the computer in the back office behind the locked door - Ada, wasn't it called? is way worse than any email server bullshit. It's bad sci-fi.

this one; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/

You have to wonder if Clinton's health and endurance was partly also why they didn't do more of those smaller directed outreach in some states.

you don't have to, really

the fact that in the last 24 hours i've read that politico article plus an article that claimed - with quotes from campaign workers -that podesta got hacked because he asked the tech dude whether an obvious phishing email asking him to change his password was a phishing scam or not and the tech dude answered back via email "this is a legitimate email" when he meant to write "this is an illegitimate email" are really boggling my mind

smaller directed outreach

fwiw they just didn't even go to some states at all, like Wisconsin and Michigan. i don't know about the health/endurance line, they still found time to fly home to NY every day to catch the evening news.

this quote from that politico article:

But there also were millions approved for transfer from Clinton’s campaign for use by the DNC — which, under a plan devised by Brazile to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, got dumped into Chicago and New Orleans, far from anywhere that would have made a difference in the election.

iirc the big GOTV insight of the obama campaign was that direct and repeated contact between prospective voters and canvassers was by far the most effective method of ensuring turnout. that the hrc campaign went in a totally different direction is just mind-boggling.

the best fuckups money can buy

see also

https://twitter.com/gatorgoat/status/809064589715456000

It's not who has grounds, it's who has standing, and so far nobody seems to have a good answer.

If nothing else, I should think that members of the Congress would have standing, as representatives of a coequal branch of government under the Constitution.

well the House can initiate impeachment proceedings (I'm sure) for violations of the Emoluments Clause, how likely do you think Paul Ryan is to allow that

iirc the big GOTV insight of the obama campaign was that direct and repeated contact between prospective voters and canvassers was by far the most effective method of ensuring turnout. that the hrc campaign went in a totally different direction is just mind-boggling.

Which reminded me of something brought up earlier this year, that the reason Wasserman-Schulz was still head of the DNC was that the 2008/2008 Obama For America orgs disbanded after victory, whereas one group probably should have replaced the other.

those are good tweets. I knew there was a reason we brought you back

not sure how enamored I am with obama for america when they spent their last days pimping the goddamn TPP

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?_r=0

the depth and breadth of incompetence is truly astounding

i don't really buy kevin drum's curiously fatalistic take on the election but it's worth considering

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/stop-it-there-are-no-big-lessons-2016-election

elite/well-connected/hillary-partisan dems really are trying to settle on a CW that everything was great except for comey and putin and the damned 'white working class'

we're just going to have an endless retread of the primary instead of any kind of honest self-examination from the party, aren't we.

p much

I dunno, blame game + zero self-examination seems to be working pretty well for the other side.

^^^

elite/well-connected/hillary-partisan dems really are trying to settle on a CW that everything was great except for comey and putin and the damned 'white working class'

we're just going to have an endless retread of the primary instead of any kind of honest self-examination from the party, aren't we.

― goole

until the 2016 dem primary when they get pounded to dust, yes.

yea it sucks but drum's not entirely wrong imo, in a few even very slightly different scenarios this would've been the clinton victory everybody predicted. a few more visits to WI, MI, PA, whatever, and that could've been that. doesn't change the picture for democrats in state governments though

elite/well-connected/___________ always are trying to settle on a CW that everything is great except for the boring and dumb 'working class'

that's not really how I read that, or the Levy piece that he references, at all. his endnote and his PS make the point pretty clear:

OK, fine, you want a big lesson? Here it is: our country is now so polarized at a partisan level that it almost literally doesn't matter who runs. Republicans will vote for the Republican and Democrats will vote for the Democrat. There's probably not much more than 3-4 percent of the population that's truly persuadable anymore.

POSTSCRIPT: This is all about national-level politics. I don't think there's any question that Democrats took a huge beating at the state and local level, where they were already weak. If you want to write a smart piece about what's wrong with Democrats, that's the place to start. Forget Hillary Clinton. Tell me instead why Democrats have such dismal prospects at the state level.

yea it sucks but drum's not entirely wrong imo, in a few even very slightly different scenarios this would've been the clinton victory everybody predicted. a few more visits to WI, MI, PA, whatever, and that could've been that. doesn't change the picture for democrats in state governments though

― marcos

the problem with basing your party around clintonian pragmatism is that it requires you to actually win in order to sustain it.

but I agree more with the twitter account Morbius linked to above (holy shit we're through the looking glass here people): treat poor people with actual respect by getting them programs that work and that they can use. Make it absolutely clear the reason we can't have nice things is all about the GOP still trying to drown government in the bathtub.

Twitter was told it was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to a source close to the situation.

...

According to Coby, Dorsey personally intervened to block the Trump operation from deploying — as part of a $5 million deal between the social media company and the campaign — an emoji showing, in various renderings, small bags of money being given away or stolen. That emoji would have been offered to users as a replacement for the hashtag #CrookedHillary, a preferred Trump insult for his Democratic opponent.

please define "honest self-examination" because most of the iterations I've seen so far have all pivoted around "how can we make this white supremacy train work in our favor"

lmfao xp

pls trump destroy twitter somehow im begging you

holy shit at that twitter story