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

or watching the nfl, which is the same

it's important for us to go down guns blazin' like Butch & Sundance

that means the womenfolk (Katharine Ross) can go home

pretty sure you could solve voter suppression/id, turnout issues, etc by making voting mandatory and agreeing on a system of implementation and enforcement by small fines, etc.

then again someone dickhead will argue its 'unamerican'.

― carthago delenda est (mayor jingleberries), Wednesday, December 21, 2016 8:45 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is not unamerican, it's just silly. Belgium has this system, where its mandatory. In theory you can get fined about $30 if you don't vote (voting 'blanco' ie. nothing is allowed), abstaining four times could get your voting right revoked. But the administrative hassle too big for the state to actually act up on fines etc.

In principle I think everyone has the right to not vote, not care. Trying to make every vote count in your country seems like a better idea than forcing people to vote.

so no, i'm not going to accept futility, i'm not going to accept a permanent state of despair, not while i'm still breathing. if it helps you to visualize my dead eyes when reading my posts, go ahead and do so.

you don't have to accept futility, but putting mental or emotional energy into anything that requires republican cooperation is a pretty bad plan. we all agree the electoral college is just the worst. (okay, second worst, after the senate.) but overhauling our system of electing presidents isn't something that can happen until most of the country is on board. it is not inconceivable that one day republicans will decide that the electoral college is bad and they too oppose it. it is likely that that will be the day after it costs them an election and not immediately after it wins them one. until then we have to work within the system we're stuck with.

President-elect Donald Trump's doctor recently gave an interview to a health publication and then threatened to end the reporter's career if he published it.

STAT News sat down with Trump's doctor, Harold Bornstein, for three hours earlier this month for his first interview since the election.

Bornstein seemed unconcerned about the effect the stress of the presidency could have on Trump, who is in line to be the oldest any US president has been on Inauguration Day.

"If something happens to him, then it happens to him," Bornstein told STAT News. "It's like all the rest of us, no? That's why we have a vice president and a speaker of the House and a whole line of people. They can just keep dying."

Five days after the interview, STAT reported, Bornstein told the publication he didn't want any photos or an article from the interview to be published.

"I happen to have known the Sulzbergers for 50 years," Bornstein told STAT, referring to the family that publishes The New York Times. "I'm going to make sure you don't ever work again if you do this."

Needless to say, the story was published: http://www.businessinsider.com/stat-interview-harold-bornstein-donald-trump-doctor-2016-12

where have I heard the "if he dies, he dies" line before

The back of his business cards are written in Italian, with the phrase "dottore molto famoso," or "very famous doctor," below his name. (For 10 years, he took private Italian lessons from women he found through Craigslist postings, paying them about $60 an hour for weekly sessions, he said.)

Uh-huh.

Mods can we change thread title to "wallowing in..."

sorry for having made the No Ideas Gang feel like pale imitations of larry appleton

If I said stuff with hope or ideas in it please feel free to FP

...Mulvaney is one of them. In June, he conceded there had been surprisingly little conservative opposition to Trump but promised that Freedom Caucus members would hold the Republican nominee to the same standard as they did to Obama — particularly on the issue of executive power. “I’m not concerned about Donald Trump shredding the Constitution, because I know the people who stand in the House between him and the Constitution,” Mulvaney told me at the time. “We’ve been fighting against an imperial presidency for five and a half years. Every time we go to the floor and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place. So we actually welcome that opportunity. It might actually be fun, being a strict-constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.” Instead, he’s joining Trump’s administration. Mulvaney was recently named director of the Office of Management and Budget, the powerful agency that supervises and coordinates the government’s financial planning.

one of many fun little tidbits in http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443236/donald-trump-conservatism-right-wing-future

These dueling outlooks frame an essential and defining question for Republicans entering the era of Trump: With unified control of government and a president who bullied his way into the White House, will Congress dare to flout recent history and serve as a principled check on the executive?

aaaaahh!
aaah haahaha! hahahahahaha!!! aaaahhaahaaahahahaaAAAA! HA!!!! HAAAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!!! AAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA
AAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAYES YES YES YAHAHAHAHHAHAHA AOHHAHAHHWOOOOOAAAAAAAAAhttp://i.giphy.com/FYnYcQoFmlPeU.gif
http://i.giphy.com/4EAsUT8kcgIta.gif

I'm definitely getting the feeling that WH staff are trying to give it their best shot heading into January but are also so ready to take a nice 2+ month vacation very far away

sorry for having made the No Ideas Gang feel like pale imitations of larry appleton

If I said stuff with hope or ideas in it please feel free to FP

― a Warren Beatty film about Earth (El Tomboto), Wednesday, December 21, 2016 11:50 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't let my doom and gloom influence or persuade you to any degree, I have my own idiosyncratic reasons for reacting like that, and they're short-term reactions anyway. Doing something's better than doing nothing, I just hope people do things differently than the ways that got us here in the first place.

Lol chris hayes's segment on Trump's doctor

well FWIW probably shouldn't take my bitter rage at the wallowers and pessimists as anything more than sour grapes because we're all doomed

zackly

I just hope people do things differently than the ways that got us here in the first place.

may i introduce you to the Democratic party?

what is the point of this withering fatalism about the democrats, morbs?

sisyphean effort to teach you dang whippersnappers a thing or two

I'm just kind of hung up on their signature achievement of the last 25 years being dismantling the New Deal.

I'm just kind of hung up on their signature achievement of the last 25 years being dismantling the New Deal.

Morbs wants a Democratic Party that actively fights for the poor, minorities and working class. He is constantly disappointed because there are only a smattering of Democrats who meet his demanding criteria, not nearly enough to produce the results he craves. He's an embittered idealist. There are worse things to be, but his bitterness (on ilx at least) has very little sweetness to temper it.

well, as Bea Arthur once said to Rufus Wainwright, "I'm not your fucking grandmother."

thread moves fast (and painfully); has this shown up yet
http://www.allamericanball.com/entertainment/

Get ready to party like never before!!!

Get ready for a magical night of music, fun and excitement. The All American Inaugural Ball is a toast to American culture, featuring a stellar list of special guests, plus multiple areas of entertainment and attractions, which represent the diversity, energy and promise of America.

There are FIVE large party zones, featuring NINE amazing acts and FOUR dance floors, plus several strolling entertainers, celebrity speakers and interactive attractions.

Non-stop Entertainment – Five Party Zones:
American Hero Ball Room: (Live music & DJs playing mix of popular dance music; American Hero Award Ceremony)
New York, New York Lounge: (Smooth tunes from the Rat Pack and others)
Decades Dance Club: (All hits from the `70, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s)
Red Elephant Dance Club: (Modern club dance music)
eNaugural Webcast Studio: (Filming a live webcast of the ball)

featuring buzz aldrin, oliver north, a fox contributor, DJ Freedom and 80's cover band The Reagan Years
tapas plates and sliders with crudite!
also featuring a $250 presale cover!

beyonce singing "at last" it ain't

FWIW the Virginia GOP puts that thing on every four years regardless

i'm just luxuriating in whatever schadenfreude i can get away with tbh

listening to Barack and Michelle on CBS from a few days ago and realizing how huge the gap is between what "the country needs" i.e. calm resolve from the sitting POTUS - and what the country needs in terms of a vibrant and electrifying leader of the opposition i.e. not calm resolve at all more like verbal molotov chucking and angry disgust at the spineless GOP and shameful, embarrassing, insulting joke of a PE they're lining up behind

FWIW the Virginia GOP puts that thing on every four years regardless

― a Warren Beatty film about Earth (El Tomboto), Wednesday, December 21, 2016 9:34 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looool

actually I have to redact that - it looks like it gets put on by a local company (http://gocityevents.com/) and they got, like, Ashley Judd for the 2013 one

This article about the Trump cabal's inability to book anyone to sing for Il Douche is hilarious.

"If anyone does do it, I hope that the check that they get is in the nine figures. Because it’s probably the last check they’re ever going to get,” Dixie Chicks manager Simon Renshaw told TheWrap on Friday.

$80,000,000, not enough. 100 million, now you're talking

Maybe ABBA will do it.

arent there a ton of country singers who will do it

i will do it

even if it's the last check i ever get

it's called LIVING

i would do it for 100 million dollars tbh

but what if you agreed to do it and even signed a contract promising you wouldn't say something mean about trump, and then you got them to pay you in advance and then you sang this wild song that begins in a generically patriotic fashion before leaning into some of the more negative-sounding trump campaign language, then abruptly country-rocks so hard about how terrible trump is and how we will all regret the day, then busts into an impossibly catchy chorus indicting everyone in his entire cabinet, and soon it's a #1 hit single and everyone in the US knows the names of all the terrible cabinet members and why they suck so bad, so it becomes an educational political and revolutionary triumph as well, and then you use all the 9-figure inauguration money you got to launch a presidential challenge in 2020 and you easily win but as you're rolling into DC at the helm of your platoon of Revolution X tanks you find out that trump won't accept it and is retweeting a bunch of shit about how you're the false prophet that triggers the apocalypse and it makes you so mad that you go ahead and try to make the apocalpyse happen and it's really violent but also you write a song about it that rocks so hard that it almost seems like the whole thing was worth ithttp://i.imgur.com/5uiAe7J.png

kudos

hahaaaaa

in an otherwise bad article on vice there is this disturbing nugget:

The best-performing stock in the S&P 500 since Trump’s election has been none other than Transocean, the offshore driller that operated the Deepwater Horizon rig.

sorry for having made the No Ideas Gang feel like pale imitations of larry appleton

I dunno, I don't see much difference between embittered fatalism and pipe dreams about the abolition of the Electoral College. Not a single person here is in a position to effect the change that would matter (ie not losing every race other than President).

I have a negative net worth, live in a one-party state and I'm a former Wobblie who probably has some stone age social media lurking where I advocated the assassination of Dubya - I can't push the Democrats to have ideas or take a lead. Why don't Democrats get behind a popular issue like ending weed prohibition? It polls well, particularly with young people, it's fundamentally a social justice issue effecting one of the major Democratic constituencies most heavily, it's an economic boon... but the closest the party can get is Hillary saying she'd only make it the same as oxycontin legally.

They're afraid of getting labeled soft on crime or the GOP being meanies, I suppose... I'm not sure how much longer a party afraid of being labelled can pretend to be relevant. It was terrible and craven when they caved to Dubya after 9/11, it will be worse this time.

I'm no entirely certain that forcing people who don't want to vote, to vote, will combat the actual celebrity.

LOL, fucking idiot.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-38397644

On the positive side, 50% chance that Nicola Sturgeon can get Scotland recognised by the US for the price of a wind farm.

I love you Karl Malone.

but what if you agreed to do it and even signed a contract promising you wouldn't say something mean about trump, and then you got them to pay you in advance and then you sang this wild song that begins in a generically patriotic fashion before leaning into some of the more negative-sounding trump campaign language, then abruptly country-rocks so hard about how terrible trump is and how we will all regret the day, then busts into an impossibly catchy chorus indicting everyone in his entire cabinet, and soon it's a #1 hit single and everyone in the US knows the names of all the terrible cabinet members and why they suck so bad, so it becomes an educational political and revolutionary triumph as well, and then you use all the 9-figure inauguration money you got to launch a presidential challenge in 2020 and you easily win but as you're rolling into DC at the helm of your platoon of Revolution X tanks you find out that trump won't accept it and is retweeting a bunch of shit about how you're the false prophet that triggers the apocalypse and it makes you so mad that you go ahead and try to make the apocalpyse happen and it's really violent but also you write a song about it that rocks so hard that it almost seems like the whole thing was worth it

and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

That scenario is impossible, Trump would never pay. Otherwise, spot on!

One of the teensy scraps of hopeful thinking I cling to is the fact that Trump still hasn't really made any big public appearances before anyone but his supporters. The inauguration is going to open his eyes, I believe.

Not 'open his eyes' in the sense of inspiring self-reflection or thought but I mean actually forcing his little lizard slits to widen when he's face-to-face with the extent to which he's reviled.