February 1, 2017

Two Republican Senators to vote against Betsy DeVos

Collins (Maine) & Murkowski (Alaska) announced that they're voting No on Betsy. Need to pick up one more Republican vote to dump DeVos, or Pence will be able to break the tie and confirm her. Hopefully, Flake or McCain or someone else will cross over on this. Even most Republicans seem to realize that she is Sarah Palin level unqualified.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/02/01/two-republican-senators-say-they-will-vote-against-devos-for-education-secretary/?utm_term=.6bafcf8e3dcb

February 1, 2017

The best .gif file ever

I just can't look at this without chuckling.

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February 1, 2017

Good - Al Franken is on the Judiciary Committee

It seems like he might be our MVP for questioning nominees. He obliterated Betsy DeVos, which is kind of like saying you beat up Stephen Hawking, but he still did a great job with drawing her into the details and he presents really well.

Gorsich has written a lot of opinions, apparently a number on women's health issues, and a book on physician assisted suicide. Trump was unambiguous how terrific Gorsich will be for ending abortion, and if opinions like that are in writing, the R's will have to exercise the nuclear option, which they probably will. But, there need to be hearings that are nationally watched like Clarence Thomas to put them on the hook for it.

January 28, 2017

The biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning...

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/316420/trump-cia-standing-ovation-vs-peyton-manning-super-bowl-50-investigation/

David Muir was interviewing Twitler last night on ABC and asked him if it was possibly over the top self-promotion for him to be talking at length about his inauguration day crowd size in front of the CIA memorial wall to agents killed in action.

Trump's response to whether he was spending too much time inflating himself?

"That speech was a home run....In fact, they said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl and they said it was equal."

Is it possible for him to be any more continuously egomaniacally delusional? There have to be 200 million people in America who would have been a more stable, rational choice for this job.

January 20, 2017

Why not Howard Dean to head the DNC?

The DNC needs to get started ASAP targeting districts for 2018 and recruiting strong candidates. I know that Howard Dean has taken his name out of the running and I haven't followed the details. But, given the success he had in 2006 and 2008 of an expansive national strategy that worked, wouldn't he be one of the best options? We could use someone that's been there before, knows how things work, and has a track record of success.

I guess that when Dean took the job, he was new to it, so that doesn't mean that new blood can't succeed, but I'd think we need a savvy strategists who can counter all the machinations that will be coming from the other side.

January 18, 2017

Al Franken Would Make a Great President

I was watching some video of him questioning Trump's appointees and he's fantastic - knowlegable, focused - he made Betsy DeVos look ridiculous. He never gets mentioned as a Presidential candiate, but I'd love to see him run. He's not owned by corporate interests, gets along with people on the other side of the aisle while advocating for his principles, is humorous, down to earth, and well versed in the issues.

I think there's the perception that as a former comedian, he wouldn't be saleable in a general election and I'm not sure if he could deliver the passionate oratory like Obama and Bill Clinton did, but he's a candidate I'd really feel good about.

January 12, 2017

Could Bannon/Trump have leaked the golden showers story to Buzzfeed?

Maybe this is farfetched, but Trump could benefit by shifting the focus from his actual collusion with Russia to an uproar over peeing hookers, where he can "divert the flow". Karl Rove supposedly bugged his own office as a stunt and it's likely that Trump/Bannon will have plenty of manipulate the media tricks up their sleeves.

We may never know, but do you think it's possible that Trump orchestrated this the day before his press conference to give him something he could claim was false and distract attention from his real collusion with Russia and conflicts of interest?

January 4, 2017

Does anyone else dislike the subject line format of this board?

I'm new here (started posting after the election). I like the topics/people, having discussions with fellow Democrats/progressives, but compared to other message boards that I've used, I feel like this format, with the altered subject lines, can lead to stunted discussions with one sentence replies because of the the way it's set up with the custom subject lines.

Does anyone else have this frustration?

January 2, 2017

How do we overcome the current media landscape?

I don't think Trump could have happened in the era when everyone depended on Walter Kronkite and their local newspaper for information. The large numbers of people who believed that "Killary" was more corrupt than Trump, who were unaware or didn't care that 70% of what came out of his mouth was provably false, was only possible with the whirlwind of of websites, social media, Fox News and AM radio providing "conservative" narratives.

This started around 1990 with Limbaugh, then all of AM radio, and then Fox News, but social media and the internet has taken it to another dimension. I think everyone could see that Fox said "fair and balanced" with a wink and that they had a bias, but their biggest success was to convince masses of people that they were merely the flip side and that actual fact checked journalism at sources like the New York Times or Washington Post was as biased as they were, but in the other direction.

The situation we have now, with actual news being discounted, or put on an equal footing with propoganda, and a highly manipulated public looking through sources that affirm their ideological bias is the perfect environment for a demagogue to succeed. I'd think Vladimir Putin must almost be surprised with how easily American opinion can be swayed.

What I find most disturbing (in addition to what Trump will do in the next 4 years), is I don't see how this situation will ever improve. We're not going to be able to get back to a time where people have a central source of information that they all trust, so at least the public is operating off of the same understanding of reality. The purveyors of disinformation are only becoming more sophisticated at creating doubt about the facts and playing on people's perceived resentments and often false perceptions.

Can we ever again have a time when the public is not deeply politically divided?

December 22, 2016

Dissatisfied progressives weren't responsible for the loss, the problem was independents

This post got buried as a response 20 posts into a thread on another topic and I was hoping for some discussion on it.

There were Dems who thought Obama compromised too much with the R's, wasn't hard enough on Wall St., was too militaristic with the drones, too slow to come around on gay marriage - but they still turned out and voted for him in 2012 against the greater foe, just like Republicans do.

There appears to have been more of a problem in this election with people lacking enthusiasm for Hillary. She would have helped herself with a more straightforward answer about the email earlier on, so that she seemed more credible. I don't think the problem this election was with disloyal Democrats as much as independents, who (very wrongly, IMO) became convinced that Hillary was as corrupt or more corrupt than Trump and that saw their bad qualities as a trade off.

The media had a lot to do with this, and the legions of fools who see the Washington Post, NY Times as less trustworthy than the BS sources they get online. But, because there was a kernel of truth to Hillary handling her email server inappropriately and she didn't own up to that early, the right was able to piggyback a boatload of narrative on top of it and lots of independent voters bought into that perception.

A "cleaner" Democratic candidate like Biden, would have carried this election easily. I don't think it was about Hillary not being progressive enough and progressives not being enthused. It was the independents who saw a false equivalency of Hillary and Trump both being bad choices.