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

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.

It just better not be windy is all I'm saying

given that he's spent more time since the election taunting Hillary Clinton than attending intelligence briefings, I really have no clue how that's going to go

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.

― iatee

but this plan _doesn't_ require republican cooperation. all it requires is for democrats to gain control of the state governmental apparatus of states totalling 270 electoral votes, and promising to deliver popular things people want is a pretty good way of getting that control.

"we have to work within the system we're stuck with" feels to me like one of the worst things you can tell anybody right now if your goal is to improve things.

"all it requires"

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.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z)

here's what i don't get about morbs-style embittered futility. the "mainstream democratic party" has never been weaker. their entire ideology has just failed disastrously. rather than ranting about how terrible donna brazile or whoever is, we should be moving in and taking over. nobody votes in primaries. if we just run candidates who inspire people to show up and send out counter-programming flyers against the Official Approved Party Candidates, the party will be ours.

seriously, all we have to do is start showing up to meetings every once in a while. this is not some insurmountable obstacle.

"all it requires"

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

it's _necessary_. if we don't do this, we are completely and totally fucked.

xp

absolutely. The Tea Party proved it's not as hard as people think to change the direction of a party with a relatively small group of committed activists. I don't think you'll see quite the same degree of focus on the left, but I think you'll see larger numbers of people getting involved.

I'm not doubting you! But it's a herculean task for which the Dems have shown no interest.

xpost

"the Dems" are whoever pushes there way into the party. It's not some fixed institution with its members only appointed from the top. Show up at local party meetings, run for local office as a democrat, you're a democrat. A lot of county dem organizations are barely functional and could easily be taken over.

it's _necessary_. if we don't do this, we are completely and totally fucked.

or we just do a better job campaigning in swing states. the electoral college is pretty annoying but overhauling it doesn't actually guarantee us anything in the future. even if the dems found themselves in a spot where they could make this happen via controlling 270 state electoral votes, that plan only works until exactly one of those states gets a republican government, which does actually happen once in a while. real change is only going to happen once there's broad consensus, not via some loophole. and there's no *worse* time to be looking for broad consensus on the subject, because republicans who probably didn't have a strong opinion on the electoral college a year ago now believe that it is a very good and necessary thing.

I had this realization this election cycle, when I was also feeling frustrated with the Democratic party and how terrible it seems to have gotten -- I thought back to my college years, and remembered who the campus democrats were, and how annoying and corny they seemed. Student government dorks, etc. And suddenly I thought "those people are the people moving into power positions in the democratic party now, them and their counterparts on other campuses -- why? Because they bothered to get involved. And I didn't." Like, you can complain all you want about the democratic party, but the democratic party is just made up of the people who involve themselves in it (although obviously money plays a huge role and that's a different issue). And I've never involved myself in it before. So I feel like I need to start involving myself, rather than just complaining about its direction.

Also, iatee OTMFM -- it's one thing to have a long-term moonshot vision, it's another to completely avoid thinking strategically in doing so.

The Democratic Party is still ruled by politics, even at the local level, no matter how corny the people involved seem. A friend of mine in college graduated and got involved in Democratic campaigning, and worked on the successful Hoboken mayor's campaign. She seemed corny as fuck on the outside, total student government dork, but if you knew her she was a complete sociopath. Not malicious or anything, but still a total sociopath.

On the national level, just look the Clinton/Sanders dynamic.

was there a coherent thought somewhere in that post that I missed?

Yeah, it's called having actual experience in what you're talking about.

I have more direct examples, but I don't want talk about that. It's not magical fairyland where you can just waltz into an established power structure with tons of money and ruthlessly ambitious people involved.

if we just run candidates who inspire people to show up and send out counter-programming flyers against the Official Approved Party Candidates, the party will be ours

no it won't - the DNC will just have Sarah Silverman call us ridiculous again for not towing the party line

we need a long-term strategic plan for dealing with the threat of sarah silverman being mean to us

Right, not saying you can just walk into your local dem office and determine the direction of the DNC tomorrow, but you can only start in that direction by being involved.

Also stuff like this does happen:

http://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/09/sanders-coalition-takes-over-brevard-democratic-leadership/95105028/