Our first Magic 8-Ball president.

November 25, 2016 10:00 AM

While book-reading president-elect Donald continues to tweet and finally speaks with the New York Times, he also generates news: property in Argentina, conflict of interests and the foreign Emoluments Clause, Foundation tax returns, NASA funding, New York protection costs and disruption, flip-flopping, the Climate Accord, a musical, ending the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and not attempting to prosecute Hillary. New appointments include DeVos as education secretary and Haley as U.N. ambassador, with Michael Flynn tapped as national security advisor. Beyond Trump Tower, the results in three states may be challengeable or challenged, and in the ongoing count, Hillary's popular vote lead exceeds two million (live spreadsheet).

To mod-quote: Don't go after each other, don't poke known sore points. Please check before commenting a link whether it's already been commented. Talk or "OMG!" text is maybe better on Chat. Alternately...

Take it to MetaTalk
* 2016 Election Prediction Contest results.
* MeFi in the time of Trump - managing news.
* What are YOU doing?
* Grief and Coping Thread: Election 2016.
* MeFites offering refuge for the holidays.

For legacy content see the many posts tagged with election2016. The election reference wiki explains some of the terminology used in comments on these threads. There are also recent election-related threads in Ask MetaFilter, such as How can I avoid You-Know-Who?

A few other recent posts
* We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
* How To Call Your Reps When You Have Social Anxiety.
* I Was a Teenage Nazi Wannabe.
* Overtime Exempt.
* History don't repeat, it rhymes.

Elsewhere, Obama's approval rating climbs, there are ongoing election shenanigans in North Carolina (more), early voting in the Louisiana Senate run-off starts tomorrow, Milo is banned from talking at his school, a former MeFite campervan passenger gets a new passport, the Republican victory is a good omen for some, and an ornament receives poor reviews.

Dark satire (everything below here NSFW)
* Watch the John Lewis Christmas Ad and then watch the 2016 US election parody (alternative).
* On the BBC, Frankie Boyle's American Autopsy (alternative).
* Local college professor in altercation with alt-right serviceman.
* Trump contextualised within The 2016 Song by Flo & Joan.

(Post title with permission, by a Mr J. Millard of the USA)

posted by Wordshore (2444 comments total)

Nineteen days since ZERO.

This is going to be a long four years.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 10:05 AM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

Nineteen days since ZERO.

This is going to be a long four years.

Only about 70 more threads at this pace

Could be worse
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:09 AM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

I'm trying to rebrand the alt-right as the Archie Bunker Party, or maybe just the Bunker Party for short.

Perhaps at this party they can have a rousing game of Follow Your Leader.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:14 AM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

What's the vibe that the 2 million 7 million Jill Stein recount fund is actually going to go for a recount and not the coffers of Jill Stein?
posted by Static Vagabond at 10:15 AM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

What's the vibe that the 2 million 7 million Jill Stein recount fund is actually going to go for a recount and not the coffers of Jill Stein?

I'd say if she actually did it her political career would be over but...
posted by Talez at 10:16 AM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

Dear US journalists: (Things are about to change) - Nic Dawes
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:18 AM on November 25, 2016 [16 favorites]

I am also doing a recount that I cannot guarantee, if anyone wants to send me seven million dollars. If a recount does not occur, I CAN guarantee that I will reform my system for storing seven million dollars (currently large cardboard box, but stretch goal is a much bigger cardboard box that i would paint some pokemon on the sides if i have time to swing by walmart and pick up some paint)

I know you're being facetious but you didn't appear on a ballot.
posted by Talez at 10:22 AM on November 25, 2016 [10 favorites]

Just stop. Please, please. Just stop.
posted by slogger at 10:27 AM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

I'd like to carry across a link rory posted at the end of the last thread - "We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned".

This is a very important story, because it demonstrates precisely how so much fake news appeared and why. It is an absolutely natural progression of the pay-per-click advertising model, which when combined with social media has resulted in a process capable of generating six-figure incomes for those prepared to put in the work.

In other words, it can be intensely profitable to comprehensively poison the national discourse, and you can do this at home. One weird trick...

This is going to be very difficult to counter, because it's only profitable if you target your fake news at the right. "Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait."

Do read this. It covers a lot of ground and It explains a very great deal, and the comfort I get from knowing that my gut aversion to pay-per-click models turns out to have practical, ethical and democratic justifications is cold indeed.

It rurns out that, yes, it is all about ethics in journalism after all.
posted by Devonian at 10:27 AM on November 25, 2016 [182 favorites]

Not to be overwhelmingly impressed by Jill Stein, but look, she's a hippie. A rich hippie, and a hippie with overwhelmingly naive politics, but she's not a grifter. If you hang around movement circles, you'll meet Jill Stein-ish people fairly regularly. I mean, from a "what's wrong with America" standpoint and with the exception of temporizing with the anti-vaxxers in her base, Jill Stein doesn't even have particularly problematic politics, as far as I can tell - a lot of us here would agree with a lot of her concerns about capital, DAPL, etc. If she were a local retired, well-off activist, she'd be on various small boards, show up at every court hearing, hector policemen from the position of being an older white woman who probably won't get beat down, etc. She'd probably annoy the fuck out of a lot of activists by giving sort of curtain lectures about our behavior and politics, if my experience is anything to go by.

The problem with her is that she has terrible ideas about government, has no real government experience and she's not a policy person, and yet she thinks she'd be a great president. She has the kind of fool ideas about activism that only an affluent white person with a lifetime of being treated pleasantly by almost everyone can develop. But that's not nearly the same as being dishonest or wanting to see America in flames. She just genuinely doesn't understand social change - except, probably, at a very local, campaign-specific level - and genuinely thinks that once people see how bad Trump is, it will be totally sufficient for everyone to get their heads right and then utopia will arrive.

But I would be absolutely astonished if she does anything but her best to get these recounts rolling.

I think there's a mental habit that almost everyone falls into, where we fail to distinguish amongst out-groups - we lump the entire far right together even though it's full of divisions, the far right thinks everyone to their left is a red-hot communist, etc. It's difficult to see these distinctions and frustrating to try. But Jill Stein is a rich hippie and my genuine belief is that she has bad political ideas but actually believes them and tries to live by them.
posted by Frowner at 10:28 AM on November 25, 2016 [207 favorites]

Greg Nog: “I am also doing a recount that I cannot guarantee, if anyone wants to send me seven million dollars. If a recount does not occur, I CAN guarantee that I will reform my system for storing seven million dollars (currently large cardboard box, but stretch goal is a much bigger cardboard box that i would paint some pokemon on the sides if i have time to swing by walmart and pick up some paint)”

Talez: “I know you're being facetious but you didn't appear on a ballot.”

Exactly! That's another reason to view his as more trustworthy than other dubious vote-recount efforts.
posted by koeselitz at 10:34 AM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

> But I would be absolutely astonished if she does anything but her best to get these recounts rolling.

The fact that she's trying hard is not exculpatory. If you're shit at politics but are taking up space in the public sphere, then you need to go find something else to do with your life so someone else can step in. Even if the ever-increasing donation goals are a result of incorrectly estimating how much it would cost to do the recount (She didn't think about lawyer fees? And then she underestimated those fees by a factor of 2-3?) it shows terrible planning and execution.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:37 AM on November 25, 2016 [14 favorites]

She has the kind of fool ideas about activism that only an affluent white person with a lifetime of being treated pleasantly by almost everyone can develop.

Pulling this out because it's excellent and applies to a lot of people, possibly still including me.

I haven't donated to her recount not just because it was already hitting its goal when I heard about it, but because I suspected the money would largely end up being used for posters, yard signs and general spitting into the wind. I don't think Stein or the Green Party is running a con, not at all; I believe they're sincere. I just don't think they have the political nous to find their bottom with both hands. I would love and adore to be proved wrong. Lord knows I have been this year.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:37 AM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

How do they recount in precincts with electronic voting and no paper backup?
posted by rabbitrabbit at 10:37 AM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

I only just heard about Democrat Foster Campbell's run for the Senate in Louisiana, and I have no idea if he's got a serious shot at winning, but if you're looking for something concrete to do, consider donating to his campaign or volunteering.
posted by the thought-fox at 10:38 AM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

Jill Stein is either a cynical grifter, or a politically gifted fool. Take your pick.
posted by My Dad at 10:39 AM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

The problem with her is that she has terrible ideas about government, has no real government experience and she's not a policy person, and yet she thinks she'd be a great president.

Boy! What a unique President she would be!
posted by y2karl at 10:40 AM on November 25, 2016 [78 favorites]

I don't think any observers think a recount will matter even if it occurs (margins are too large, no signs of actual fraud/hacking of results). And the Electoral College is not going to overturn the election. Trump will be President.
posted by blahblahblah at 10:41 AM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Jill Stein doesn't even have particularly problematic politics, as far as I can tell

I agree with her on a number of things, but she beat the "both sides are equally terrible" drum harder than anyone else this election. That was problematic. She should have been capable of seeing a difference between, say, a candidate who ran on raising the minimum wage and one who said he thought it was too high and/or shouldn't exist. I'm explicitly not saying she cost the Democrats the election, but she spent an awful lot of time poisoning the well against Clinton in a way that achieved nothing for herself.

Anyway, I'm struggling a bit to figure out how to fit something about Jill Stein and a recount into the Marco Rubio/Vice-Pres Potato melody, if someone here can maybe help with that.
posted by zachlipton at 10:44 AM on November 25, 2016 [29 favorites]

Trump will be President.

There are over 55 days till the inauguration. The president-elect is in his seventies and not in the best of health. He has made many enemies. 2016 is the most unpredictable of years.

There may be a few more twists in it yet.
posted by Wordshore at 10:45 AM on November 25, 2016 [45 favorites]

Our first Magic 8-Ball president

Make America Reply Hazy Try Again!
posted by oulipian at 10:47 AM on November 25, 2016 [48 favorites]

"Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait."

As Matty Yglesias pointed out, isn't this the perfect quote for a fake news writer to give to a liberal audience to make his story go viral? This guy is talented.
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:48 AM on November 25, 2016 [129 favorites]

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
posted by MrVisible at 10:52 AM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

What's the vibe that the 2 million 7 million Jill Stein recount fund is actually going to go for a recount and not the coffers of Jill Stein?

The Green Party apparently did get recounts done before, particularly in Ohio in 2004, so the party itself has at least a little history with these kind of actions. I don't expect it to change anything this time except maybe to bring attention (again) to potential problems with touch-screen voting, though.
posted by dilettante at 10:55 AM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

Steve Bannon’s Deep, Weird Adoration of Sarah Palin

...And, he continued, Palin would have the guts to radically shrink the federal government, including shuttering several agencies.

“Forget waste, corruption, and abuse, that’s all marginal stuff,” Bannon said. “This is about going through, shutting down entire agencies. This is about closing entire departments. This is about taking the HUD and closing it.”
Palin wasn’t just qualified for the presidency because she was tough enough to roll back federal housing programs. Another of her selling points, according to Bannon, was her willingness to push myths about the Affordable Care Act.
“She was the first one to get on the death panels,” Bannon said. “And the first one to really get the town halls rockin’ and rollin’.

Bannon is Deplorable.
posted by futz at 10:56 AM on November 25, 2016 [14 favorites]

N.Y. Tenement Museum: 'Unprecedented Number' of Anti-immigrant Comments by Visitors

“People will now share stronger opinions about whether or not they think immigrants are sort of bleeding [the country], they’re taking too much that other people should have, or they’re taking our jobs,” said Miriam Bader, the museum’s director of education.

The museum is located in the heart of the historic Jewish Lower East City of Manhattan. One of its key exhibits is the restored 1878 home of the German-Jewish Gumpertz family. A new exhibit on more recent waves of migrants from China and Puerto Rico is set to open in July 2017.

Museum officials told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that hostile remarks, previously infrequent, now occur every day. The museum’s management put in place the new compulsory training program in September. Since then, guides have begun meeting informally to address challenging remarks that have come up during tours.

Who the hell goes to the Tenement museum to bash immigrants? I mean, why would you even spend your time taking the tour?
posted by zachlipton at 10:57 AM on November 25, 2016 [131 favorites]

Yes, Jill Stein's a grifter. As soon as 5pm EST rolls around, she will board her hypocritical private jet and flee to Venezuela with the 5 million, which she will then proceed to spend on high quality weed, a fleet of Priuses, and the construction of an evil underwater Green Party lair from which to further her sinister ecological agenda. Mark my words.
posted by Sonny Jim at 10:58 AM on November 25, 2016 [20 favorites]

If that's your (outlandish) definition of a grifter, I guess that must be why Jill Stein seems perfectly acceptable to you.
posted by My Dad at 11:02 AM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Jill "Lyle Lanley" Stein
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:03 AM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Could we maybe stop trolling at each other? There's enough disinformation to go around without us adding to it.
posted by Candleman at 11:04 AM on November 25, 2016 [30 favorites]

Is this debate about whether Jill Stein is trying to enrich herself actually serious?
posted by Coda Tronca at 11:04 AM on November 25, 2016 [29 favorites]

Is there any way we can lay out as many of the possible timelines in which Trump does NOT become president as possible, and maybe bet on them?

Put me down for $5 on Electoral College Revolt, $5 on the Stein Recount, and $20 on Elaborate Joke by Andy Kaufman.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 11:05 AM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

and $20 on Elaborate Joke by Andy Kaufman.

43 days from now, the chorus hook finally comes around and Andy jumps out of a cake to lip-sync "HEEEEERE I COOOOOME TO SAVE THE DAAAAAAY"
posted by cortex at 11:06 AM on November 25, 2016 [36 favorites]

Is this debate about whether Jill Stein is trying to enrich herself actually serious?

I figured it was just Metafilter's version of "FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: HILLARY CLINTON MURDERED VINCE FOSTER TO COVER UP HER LOVE TRIANGLE WITH HUMA ABEDIN AND A TIME TRAVELING LESBIAN VAMPIRE!!"
posted by indubitable at 11:08 AM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

Since I posted this at the very end of the old thread not noticing the new one, a repost. This pisses me off. Clinton won TX32 by 5,300 votes.

@Redistrict:
Pretty amazing that Clinton carried GOP Rep. Pete Sessions's #TX32 but Dems didn't even field a congressional candidate.
posted by chris24 at 11:09 AM on November 25, 2016 [53 favorites]

Who the hell goes to the Tenement museum to bash immigrants? I mean, why would you even spend your time taking the tour?

I once had the misfortune of doing a tour of FDR's house with a Tea Partier in our group, who took every opportunity to bash the New Deal and anything the least bit Democrat. Not with anything substantive, mind you, just sloganeering. Dude, why are you even here? Why did you spend money on this? And shut up already -- we are all feeling for your cringing wife.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:09 AM on November 25, 2016 [25 favorites]

Is this debate about whether Jill Stein is trying to enrich herself actually serious?

Apparently. Which is exactly why we have a President Trump. We don't actually live in the Simpsons people, can we please move on to some substantive conversation? Like what will happen when they try to gut Medicare? Will the olds revolt? And how many of you have called your reps to express concern vs just chatting online? I had quite an interesting discucssion with one of my reps top aides the other day, they are Republican but not at all happy about being part of the crazy train. The aides might revolt soon, that would be interesting since they do all the work.
posted by fshgrl at 11:09 AM on November 25, 2016 [31 favorites]

I've got $5 on alien intervention
posted by angrycat at 11:10 AM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

$5 on waking up to realize 2016 was just a bad dream all along.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 11:12 AM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

I don't think many people believe Stein is literally going to take the millions and buy herself a big yacht or something. I do think there are reasons to believe that the fundraising effort has not been run with a particular focus on transparency and integrity. When someone asks for $X to do Y and then turns around the very next day and says, "actually, that was just for this little bit of Y, we need 3X to do Y, which now includes these expenses that have increased dramatically," you tend to question whether they know what they're doing. That's most easily explained by a slapdash effort to put something together quickly rather than a nefarious plot, but the recount campaign has not been conducted in a way that inspires a ton of confidence thus far.

I still think the recount is generally a good idea, though I believe it is phenomenally unlikely to change anything, but I wish they were up front from the start about exactly how much money they needed and where it's going.
posted by zachlipton at 11:15 AM on November 25, 2016 [10 favorites]

With Bobby Ewing in the shower?

Facing towards the showerhead. Towards.
posted by Wordshore at 11:15 AM on November 25, 2016 [33 favorites]

$5 on Trump being late to his own inauguration and isn't aware of the 15-minute rule.
posted by perhapses at 11:15 AM on November 25, 2016 [13 favorites]

Who the hell goes to the Tenement museum to bash immigrants? I mean, why would you even spend your time taking the tour?

"...And ANOTHER thing about the Hispanics--"

"These buildings housed Irish immigrant sir"

*Bigot realizes he has red hair*
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 11:16 AM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

Jill Stein...she's a hippie...but she's not a grifter.

I've been to two Grateful Dead shows and three Rainbow Gatherings, and I can assure you that these are absolutely not mutually exclusive categories.
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:17 AM on November 25, 2016 [56 favorites]

Facing towards the showerhead. Towards.

iunderstoodthatreference.gif
posted by Talez at 11:22 AM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

For those of you who don't understand the showerhead reference see this piece of chatfilter.
posted by Talez at 11:25 AM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think an audit is a good idea because quality control is a good idea, but I don't have evidence to convince me that the Green Party is especially responsible when it comes to spending money.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:27 AM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

If Medicare is to be "voucherized," what would happen to the Veterans Administration medical care?
posted by kerf at 11:29 AM on November 25, 2016

Privatized, from what I've heard.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 11:29 AM on November 25, 2016

Who the hell goes to the Tenement museum to bash immigrants? I mean, why would you even spend your time taking the tour?


I got a taste of something similar to this when I went to the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

They had one of the random flying car prototypes out (bolted on side-wings), and some old dude walked over to me, made a comment about it, and then went on to a glorious rant about how big government stifled progress and robbed all of us of the flying car future.

I guess it's like that. Except racist.
posted by Lord_Pall at 11:34 AM on November 25, 2016 [23 favorites]

In other news, WSJ: Rudy Giuliani Lobbies to Be Secretary of State

The shamelessness of his public lobbying for a cabinet position seems pretty unprecedented.
posted by zachlipton at 11:34 AM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

overheard on Facebook:

"Today, more Americans are shopping for shit they don't need than bothered to vote for a president they absolutely can't do without. Who/what owns you?"
posted by philip-random at 11:41 AM on November 25, 2016 [36 favorites]

% saying country on wrong track
China 10
India 25
Peru 45
US 62
Germany 70
France, Mexico 90 via @dinapomeranz

Germany!!
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:47 AM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

% saying country on wrong track
China 10
India 25
Peru 45
US 62
Germany 70
France, Mexico 90 via @dinapomeranz

Germany!!

With people's largest concern being poverty and social inequality. France is unemployment. Mexico crime and violence and US, terrorism.
posted by Jalliah at 11:55 AM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Secret Service Might Pay Donald Trump For Luxurious Digs In Trump Tower

TL;DR -- The secret service needs to rent space from the Donald in order to protect the Donald, using tax money the Donald doesn't pay. Or something.
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:03 PM on November 25, 2016 [24 favorites]

It's France that will deliver the next election shock - Le Pen next Spring.
posted by Coda Tronca at 12:03 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Conversation:

"I just feel like everyone thinks I'm some kind of huge asshole for voting for Trump. They're outwardly polite, but behind the small talk they're really thinking I'm some piece of garbage. "
(LONG PAUSE)
Me: "Your hair looks nice. Did you do something different with it?"
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:08 PM on November 25, 2016 [192 favorites]

TL;DR -- The secret service needs to rent space from the Donald in order to protect the Donald, using tax money the Donald doesn't pay. Or something.

I'm starting to wonder whether another aftermath of this election will be scores of people simply not paying / filing their taxes because Trump doesn't. For people buying his message on its sound-bite level, that makes you smart, right? I have a feeling they'll have more repercussions for it. Then again maybe that too is OKIYAR
posted by Mchelly at 12:08 PM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

> $5 on waking up to realize 2016 was just a bad dream all along.

Some of us are still holding out hope for the giant meteor.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:09 PM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

> Our first Magic 8-Ball president.

Outlook not so good
posted by farlukar at 12:10 PM on November 25, 2016 [27 favorites]

It's France that will deliver the next election shock - Le Pen next Spring.

I don't even know if Le Pen will be particularly a shock; lots of people seem to be talking about it as a possibility. Don't like the sound of Fillon tacking to the right here, either. If it has to be a conservative, Juppe sounds like a good choice. But anyone but the fascist, really. The only thing consoling me is the polls, and I'm not sure how much to trust those.
posted by Pink Frost at 12:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

So if I were the Russians, whether I had messed with the election or not, after inauguration I would definitely be leaking inconclusive but suggestive documents pointing to hacking the vote somehow.

Maybe fake emails leaked to wikileaks for example. Or a "rogue" official makes a slip of the tongue. Or some code shows up on BitTorrent. As an intelligence officer it would almost be malpractice not to do this. In fact, anyone could get in on the fun.

I guess this is a prediction ....
posted by Rumple at 12:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [10 favorites]

Laurie Penny, Against Bargaining:

Normalization is not just a thing people do because they secretly like fascism and want it to win. Well, not all of them. Normalization is also psychic armour. It is a way of making the intolerable tolerable. It is a survival strategy, and like many such strategies, it is largely available to those with least to lose. Most black and LGBT Americans, along with anyone else who grew up feeling unsafe in America, moved through the stages of grief for a culture that cared about their lives long ago. For everyone else, the same grief is sore and shocking, and it’s causing some strange behavior.

The trouble with the five stages of grief is that one of them is bargaining. . . .

posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 12:12 PM on November 25, 2016 [36 favorites]

France is unemployment. Mexico crime and violence and US, terrorism.
If your #1 fear is Terrorism, you're handing 'terrorists' a total victory. America just LOVES to feel terrorized.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:19 PM on November 25, 2016 [17 favorites]

I donated $29 towards the recount effort because even though I think overturning the election is extremely unlikely, I'm willing to forgo two pizzas to try. I would be willing to give up pizza for the entirety of Hillary Clinton's presidency, if that's what takes to get her there.
posted by double block and bleed at 12:24 PM on November 25, 2016 [45 favorites]

If you support the recount efforts in PA/MI/WI, volunteers are needed in all three states and PA also needs voters in each district to file affidavits requesting a recount. Click on the state name for more info. Let's make this happen -- it's a super long shot in terms of making any real difference to the results, but remember when Trump becoming president was a super long shot? And regardless of that, if recounts help make future election hacks less likely, they're more than worth it.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 12:30 PM on November 25, 2016 [31 favorites]

If your #1 fear is Terrorism, you're handing 'terrorists' a total victory. America just LOVES to feel terrorized.

I'm coming to the conclusion that everything Americans claim to be afraid of is bullshit because they are not acting like they are actually afraid of those things. Terrorism? So where is the massive move to address the culture of online recruitment for the cult of misogyny that is behind, oh, 90 percent of the mass violent attacks in this country? And probably 95 percent of the terroristic threats? And maybe you're a dude and so you're not so much afraid of getting caught up in misogynistic violence, which is selfish and short-sighted and won't protect you when a guy goes on a shooting spree after killing his girlfriend, but why aren't you worried about the growth of a violent right wing, which is responsible for a majority of the political violence in this country?

No, when these people say "terrorism," they mean "Muslim terrorism," and, increasingly on Social Media they also mean Black Lives Matter, who they are convinced are tearing up American cities.

So its not terrorism you're afraid of, is it, you liars? It's brown people.

I am so sick of this shadow puppet game that people play to pretend they aren't raging racists. It makes it impossible to address racism, because they put it in a veneer of reasonableness that fractures the moment it is examined, but they refuse to be in the company of those that force them to examine it, and, when they are, they become belligerent and start relying on closed loop arguments, like refusing to accept any news that doesn't come from a hyper-partisan source that they already agree with.
posted by maxsparber at 12:31 PM on November 25, 2016 [130 favorites]

The only recount Jill Stein is going to fund is the recount of her bank balance as she watches it go up and up and up.

Prove me wrong, Jill.
posted by Justinian at 12:31 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you don't think recounts are a good idea that's one thing. If you think they're a good idea but still oppose them because you don't like the person who's leading the effort, well, welcome to the American left I guess.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 12:35 PM on November 25, 2016 [38 favorites]

@WI_Elections A recount petition has not yet been received by @WI_Elections from Jill Stein campaign. Deadline 5pm. We will issue press release when filed
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:38 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

It's not that we don't think they are a good idea, it's that we don't think Jill Stein has any intention to follow through. At least I don't.

see also: WI_Elections
posted by Justinian at 12:40 PM on November 25, 2016

Who the hell goes to the Tenement museum to bash immigrants? I mean, why would you even spend your time taking the tour?

people who are hella nostalgic for the time when immigration to the US was mostly white europeans, like their own ancestors, and when federal laws existed to specifically exclude certain races/nationalities.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:43 PM on November 25, 2016 [14 favorites]

There's a lot of space between (a) skepticism toward Stein's motives and ability to deliver on her promises, and (b) opposing the recount itself. I'm less frustrated by Stein than I am frustrated that other folks, including Clinton and her team, decided to take a pass, leaving the door open for perhaps the worst possible messenger to assume the mantle.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:44 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

Yeah, the kind of person who shits up a visit to the tenement museum doesn't think of white people as immigrants, or their own ancestors as immigrants. It's another flavor of fuck you, got mine. It's a side effect of turning the word immigrant into a thinly veiled slur, as well.
posted by palomar at 12:46 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

@kwelkernbc Two PEOTUS staff positions today: Kathleen McFarland for Dep. Nat. Security Adviser and Don McGhan, WH Counsel. Neither need senate conf.

Reuters Trump names Washington lawyer McGahn White House Counsel

McGahn, a partner at Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, served as counsel to Trump during his presidential campaign.

A former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and considered a top elections lawyer, McGahn may be charged with untangling the thicket of potential conflicts of interest that Trump, a real estate mogul with holdings all over the world, presents.

Trump has said that as president, he will try to separate himself from running his company, turning it over to his children, but has resisted calls to place his assets in a blind trust.

Trump may also look for a legal means by which to bring his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, onto his White House staff, circumventing a law that prevents federal officials from hiring family members.

Gee how will he get around that pesky nepotism law. Stay tuned and find out.

McFarland, who served in three Republican administrations and was an aide to Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, will work with Lt. General Michael Flynn

I'm beginning to believe his idea of draining the swamp is you turn over every rock and find the creature wriggling underneath and install them in the White House.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:47 PM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

I'd say if she actually did it her political career would be over but...

Hey, the scheme worked for Kucinich... Who I voted and prosthelytized for as presidential candidate for years before I figured out that scam.

But I figure: A) Stein will use some of the money for the recount and B) If there was fraud, the Republican machine is better at scheming then the Green party is at winning. And that's coming from somebody who C) voted for Stein in 2008.
posted by formless at 12:50 PM on November 25, 2016

Put me down for $5 on Electoral College Revolt, $5 on the Stein Recount, and $20 on Elaborate Joke by Andy Kaufman.

I'd take the other side of those wagers.
posted by jpe at 12:50 PM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm feeling a little bad for my proud Trump supporter student. The day after the election I went into class wearing all black and saying I was grieving she innocently said *why* like I think she really thought my mom died or something.

Two days before, on election day, she told me she had voted for Trump and me, looking 538, Sam Wang, I was all, okay, you voted for Trump, you know I'm a pinko, and together, knowing Trump is going to lose, we exist in harmony.

I have 100% not baited her post election but I have seen her get more and more and more surly. Not towards me, but just like *I hate everybody*. Dollars to donuts she's repeatedly heard that she's a dumb hick and, you know? I get why dumb hicks get sad when they're called dumb hicks. I was a dumb hick for a long time myself, and that would make me sad to know that a large portion of the country thinks that I'm a piece of shit.

And this little microcosm of an interaction is one of the reasons why each day since the election I've woken up with the thoughts *war is coming no don't be stupid no I really think war is coming*. Every day I tell myself, look, I'm being a paranoid stoner stop it the sky is not falling and then I read Krugman or Blow to be all it is not end times and then those dudes are kind of like, nope, we're not here to reassure you, things are fucked.

It's just so easy to see:

Stupid Trump whatever bombed in wherever
Trump decides to bomb the shit out of whatever
The left is like HELLS NO NOT AGAIN
Shit goes down in the U.S.

I mean that's before we get to whatever monsters the Sec of Ed and Paul Ryan let out of the cage on the domestic front.

I mean I keep looking at this and being all, no no no, everybody will calm down, angrycat you are stoned and paranoid.

And it's like, but I'm really sober right now. In my coldest sober moments, I look at this shit and I feel war coming, I feel it in my bones.
posted by angrycat at 12:56 PM on November 25, 2016 [84 favorites]

The Hill Report: Trump team wants Romney to apologize

Fox News is reporting that Donald Trump’s transition team wants Mitt Romney to publicly apologize for railing against the president-elect during the campaign.

A transition official told Fox’s Ed Henry that some in Trump’s inner circle want the former Massachusetts governor to apologize in order to be seriously considered for the secretary of State.

Trump is reportedly considering whether to pick Romney or former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the coveted cabinet position.

Giuliani is the preferred choice of Trump’s loyalists and grassroots supporters, while Romney is a favorite of establishment conservatives.

This is sickening and I don't even like Romney. It is Authoritarianism in all its shitty glory. Romney must first humble himself to the Dominant silverback and then he may or may not be offered the position. Any decent President would stand next to Romney and announce "I know we have had our differences in the past but I have convinced Mitt to work together for the good of the country." No prostration required.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:59 PM on November 25, 2016 [114 favorites]

This is sickening and I don't even like Romney. It is Authoritarianism in all its shitty glory.

Authoritarianism? Bullying. Not that I have much respect for Romney at this point, either.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:04 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

$5 on a divorce for Jared and Ivanka to get around nepotism laws.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:08 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

I may not be a huge fan of Romney, but Russia seems pissed at the prospect of him, so I'll take it.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 1:09 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

@angrycat, yeah. I think the last time I remember feeling like this was, actually, 9/11. Highschool. People were screaming about wanting to carpet bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age, I started screaming back; the thought of more innocent people being killed after the brutality of the towers was sickening and inevitable. Elected officials were having a patriotic sing-along on the Senate floor, the same herd of trucks roaring around the street with US flags and a lot of anger. That ugly flare of mob rule. That very sober, very quiet but very deep feeling of "people will die for this." I feel you.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 1:10 PM on November 25, 2016 [32 favorites]

Kathleen McFarland for Dep. Nat. Security Adviser

Jesus he can pick them...here is TPM from March 2006 carrying a story first published in the New York Post:

A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

"Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.

"She wasn't joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton's people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom," added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

And she is going to be the Deputy National Security Advisor. I think Trump Tower must have a side entrance labeled: Wingnuts apply here.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [44 favorites]

Secret Life of Gravy: " I think Trump Tower must have a side entrance labeled: Wingnuts apply here."

Successful applicants soon to be relabeled the "West Wingnuts."
posted by Riki tiki at 1:16 PM on November 25, 2016 [35 favorites]

The Greens are live broadcasting their filing and WI_Elections aren't tweeting about it. COME ON HIPPIES, GET IT TOGETHER.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 1:17 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Daddy, Will the Fallout Shelter have WiFi? Alison Bechdel sees the future (and it's murder).
posted by Rumple at 1:20 PM on November 25, 2016 [10 favorites]

This is going to be very difficult to counter, because it's only profitable if you target your fake news at the right. "Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait."

I'd love to believe that this was true, but I suspect what they mean is, it's more difficult, so they don't bother. Fake news is all about pandering to peoples' prejudices, and isn't really different in any important regard to tabloid journalism, which has at best a casual and uncommitted relationship to the truth, anyway.

Ironically "Liberals never share fake news, we tried and only the reactionary idiots on the right do" would make a pretty good piece of left-leaning fake news. Hmmm.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:25 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

Who the hell goes to the Tenement museum to bash immigrants? I mean, why would you even spend your time taking the tour?

The same people who go to Starbucks and spend money just to hear the barista say "Trump." In other words, people who are permanently aggrieved, and who feel the rest of the country now owes them, paid in humiliation and suffering.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:27 PM on November 25, 2016 [13 favorites]

I've seen plenty of fakeish liberal news, it tends to fall in the magic vitamins/magic cancer cure range though.
posted by emjaybee at 1:28 PM on November 25, 2016 [18 favorites]

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has a long analysis of the election results in terms of conceptual frames, political language, and metaphor: A Minority President
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 1:33 PM on November 25, 2016 [14 favorites]

Cards Against Humanity is digging a giant hole in the earth. This makes more sense to me than American politics at the moment.
posted by localhuman at 1:33 PM on November 25, 2016 [36 favorites]

DirtyOldTown: “Me: "Your hair looks nice. Did you do something different with it?"”

See, that's why Thanksgiving was MST3K and quesadillas for me. (Crujido de Caballero to be precise. A Croque Monsieur, but on a tortilla. I did make them with turkey instead of ham in a concession to the holiday.) The nicest possible thing I might say to such a… person … is, "God might forgive you, but I NEVER will."
posted by ob1quixote at 1:36 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

Authoritarianism? Bullying. Not that I have much respect for Romney at this point, either.

The word "bully" always sounds like a label used for children. The more accurate labels for this kind of adult would be "abuser," "narcissist," and "authoritarian," or "autocrat." Maybe "tinpot dictator."
posted by krinklyfig at 1:37 PM on November 25, 2016 [26 favorites]

Successful applicants soon to be relabeled the "West Wingnuts."

It could be the lead-in to Stephen Colbert's Late Show and his newest segment: "Better Know a Wingnut". [fake :(]
posted by Talez at 1:37 PM on November 25, 2016

The WI recount petition has been filed.
posted by zachlipton at 1:39 PM on November 25, 2016 [46 favorites]

@WI_Elections: The Commission has received the Stein and Del La Fuente recount petitions. Details and news release posted soon at http://elections.wi.gov .
posted by threeturtles at 1:40 PM on November 25, 2016 [20 favorites]

Anyone dusted off the old "Surely this..." generator? Or do we need to build a new version?
posted by fungible at 1:42 PM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Wow, I really thought they would take the money and run.
posted by Justinian at 1:43 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is this debate about whether Jill Stein is trying to enrich herself actually serious?


Jesus, the smug attitude on this site, sometimes.
posted by My Dad at 1:44 PM on November 25, 2016 [13 favorites]

I've seen plenty of fakeish liberal news, it tends to fall in the magic vitamins/magic cancer cure range though.

Yes, but it's decidedly on the fringe, sometimes becoming talking points and platform positions for the Green Party. The problem with the Republican Party is that the fringe has become the base, and in the meantime the existing base has been otherwise trained not to trust the "MSM" in favor of Fox and other conservative media.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:46 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

I never thought they would take the money and run -- good grief, there'd be huge consequences to that. Stein may be politically naive and unqualified for the Oval Office, but she's perfectly capable of understanding the principle and aims of a recount, and she's doing the right thing here. Thank heavens for her.
posted by orange swan at 1:47 PM on November 25, 2016 [70 favorites]

So is the recount push happening because it's close in general and people would like to be sure, or because of stuff like this? (a tweet referenced).

"It’s worth noting that these three precincts only got caught because the extra votes they gave to Donald Trump just happened to push the presidential vote totals above the overall vote totals in those precincts, making it easily spotted by online gawkers."

(Not sure if I'm being suckered in by something I desperately want to be true or there's something to this. I didn't see this specific piece linked yet.)
posted by ODiV at 1:48 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Trump would have taken the money and ran.
posted by maxsparber at 1:48 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

So is the recount push happening because it's close in general and people would like to be sure, or because of stuff like this?

As I said in the last thread, I personally donated because, even if we don't flip a state, we keep the news cycle narrative about questioning the legitimacy of Trump's win for several more weeks. Everything we can do during his (hopefully short) term to keep the media from falling into a cycle of regurgitating whatever is currently dribbling out of the racist yam's mouth is a minor victory.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 1:51 PM on November 25, 2016 [33 favorites]

From the Wisconsin Election Commission site:

The Stein campaign will be required to pay for the entire estimated cost of a statewide recount before a recount will be ordered. We need your help in determining how much it will cost for you and your municipal counterparts to conduct this recount. It is recommended that you start looking at figures from the 2011 Supreme Court recount and cost projections that you or your predecessor put together for the Associated Press. One option is to look at the number of ballots that were recounted in 2011 and to extrapolate based upon the number of ballots counted in the presidential election.

So if the Wisconsin Election Commission has only just directed the counties to determine how much this will cost, it's probably worth cutting the Greens some slack over those inflating estimates. It's a lot easier to understate the cost of something like this than to overstate it.
posted by Mothlight at 1:52 PM on November 25, 2016 [54 favorites]

To be fair, the magic vitamins/cancer cure stuff targets conservatives, too, at least in my observation. After all, look what doctor Donnie chose to tell the world how healthy he (Trump) was on the campaign trail.

It seems that, by and large, it's easier to lead conservatives down a rabbit hole of blatantly fake news. As I said in one of the earlier election threads, it's as if the High Weirdness By Mail cranks are now leading the country.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 1:54 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Why does the responsibility for paying fall on a third party? Doesn't the government have a vested interest in a functioning democracy?
posted by Yowser at 1:55 PM on November 25, 2016 [26 favorites]

The word "bully" always sounds like a label used for children. The more accurate labels for this kind of adult would be "abuser," "narcissist," and "authoritarian," or "autocrat." Maybe "tinpot dictator."

Possibly, but I always prefer bully because it underscores and reinforces the continuity of our adolescent social behaviors and "adult" ones. We do act like children a lot of time, even as adults. I think we tend to compartmentalize our bullying behaviors as adults in ways that cleverly delude is into feeling self righteous and justified about it, but the basic mechanics of our social politics aren't much different than life on the playground; we just become more competent sneaks as we gain experience... /cynicalmoment
posted by saulgoodman at 1:55 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

I've seen plenty of fakeish liberal news, it tends to fall in the magic vitamins/magic cancer cure range though.

Back when I used to hang out at Daily Kos regularly, I'd see a lot of fake-ish news. Probably none of it was from a concerted effort to mislead anyone, but rather the rumor mill going amok from the sheer paranoia of the Bush years. One example I remember well, because I was naive enough to repost it here, was of a change of orders to a carrier group which allegedly would put it in position to bomb Iran within a few days. I also remember a lot of stuff surrounding Cheney, even after he was sidelined by Bush in the second term, and how he was going to ensure the Bush Administration would somehow cancel elections or start imprisoning bloggers, etc.

That's the sort of fake news I expect to see on the left in the next four years. When reality itself is weird and paranoid, and the administration shadowy and secretive, it's going to be difficult to parse out what's real and what's not.
posted by honestcoyote at 1:56 PM on November 25, 2016 [17 favorites]

So hypothetically. The recounts end up showing that someone's been fiddling with votes. What happens?
And what happens if the votes are unfiddled and it points towards Clinton getting more?

Complete and utter hell breaks loose?
posted by Jalliah at 2:02 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

To me, a big chunk of it is also that we need to retain the idea that voting matters. That the actual count of the vote matters. That this isn't just a popularity contest that you can win by having a slight edge when the earliest unreliable totals are posted. I'd really like to get away from the idea that winners and losers should actually be announced that night, or even the following morning, at all. The actual correct number of votes ought to matter more than the number of votes as reported at the end of voting on Election Night, but we've gotten very used to treating it like those details don't matter.

I'm seriously starting to think that a huge chunk of the American population now is getting used to thinking of democracy as an obsolete and largely ceremonial thing. People are getting used to the idea that money controls government and that government controls us and it might as well be Trump because it's all shit no matter what. That kind of lack of faith in the legitimacy of the government is something that's been keeping me up at night on a regular basis now.
posted by Sequence at 2:03 PM on November 25, 2016 [74 favorites]

What happens?

You know the scene in Airplane when the stewardess asks if anyone can fly a plane?
posted by maxsparber at 2:04 PM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

Donald Trump's national security chief 'took money from Putin and Erdogan', says former NSA employee. The former general will not require Senate approval to take up the senior security position

Russian propaganda helped spread 'fake news' during Donald Trump's election victory, say experts. Putin, a former KGB officer, has previously announced his desire to 'break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams'
posted by homunculus at 2:04 PM on November 25, 2016 [17 favorites]

Why does the responsibility for paying fall on a third party? Doesn't the government have a vested interest in a functioning democracy?

States pay the cost for recounts when it's within a set percentage where there's a decent chance of a realist change. And the recount is automatic. When it's not within that percentage, the appealing party pays.

EDIT: Or what hippybear said.
posted by chris24 at 2:05 PM on November 25, 2016

Possibly, but I always prefer bully because it underscores and reinforces the continuity of our adolescent social behaviors and "adult" ones.

Well, I don't think the word "bully" fully explains the type of behavior involved. Abuse and narcissism isn't adolescent behavior for most adolescents; they describe patterns of behavior that are common to many adults, and which affect other adults, sometimes in a manner that will affect the health and well being of the victim. I mean, just ask people who have PTSD from abuse, like myself, how much Trump triggers them. I wasn't sexually abused, but his narcissism is so obvious that he sets off all my alarms and red flags. I can't listen to his voice for too long without feeling the pain familiar to my PTSD creep into my body. These are adult problems (although for many of us, the abuse occurred before we were adults).

Anyway, this kind of extreme narcissism is common in authoritarian leaders and dictators. These aren't children either. They may have developed these problems as children, but their behavior as leaders causes suffering, death and destruction.
posted by krinklyfig at 2:05 PM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

The Hill Report: Trump team wants Romney to apologize

@GossiTheDog: Mitt's book title was great. (jpeg)
posted by Golden Eternity at 2:05 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Someone upthread said Trump was in poor health. Do we have anything factual on that? He's a very overweight man in his 70s with a grifter as an MD but beyond that we know nothing. If he were to drop dead in 2016 there's a bottle of very good Scotch that's going to get consumed and I ain't pouring out a drop for the fucker. But I need something to base this dream upon.
posted by Ber at 2:08 PM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Recount request sent to Wisconsin...
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:09 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

WaPo: Trump isn't interested in daily intelligence briefings. Anyone surprised? We're in for yet another lesson, courtesy of the Republican Party, in what happens when the US goes without a chief executive for four or eight years.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 2:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [26 favorites]

Doctors see a new condition among immigrant children: fear of Trump. Pediatricians serving undocumented immigrants report a spike in anxiety and panic attacks after the US election, as children live with threat of deportation
posted by homunculus at 2:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [11 favorites]

There's a Dec 13 deadline by which states have to certify their vote in order to be sure their electors will be able to participate in the EC vote. There's a chance this recount could drag on past that, meaning the WI electors would have to separately meet before Jan 6, and then it would be up to the House to decide whether to count WI electors I think (obviously Paul Ryan will make sure they're counted).

At this point, I'm hoping for endless lawsuits.
posted by melissasaurus at 2:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [11 favorites]

I think Jill Stein demanding the recount is actually kind of genius because it takes the pressure totally off the Clinton team, for whom demanding a recount could be really bad optics. I hope a bunch of wealthy Clinton donors are funneling money in that direction.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:12 PM on November 25, 2016 [97 favorites]

Sequence: I'm seriously starting to think that a huge chunk of the American population now is getting used to thinking of democracy as an obsolete and largely ceremonial thing. People are getting used to the idea that money controls government and that government controls us and it might as well be Trump because it's all shit no matter what. That kind of lack of faith in the legitimacy of the government is something that's been keeping me up at night on a regular basis now.

Another "if only I had a million favorites to give" comment. I agree with you. It's something that has been worrying me for some time, and it honestly has been keeping me awake at nights (and helping me profit the Ambien manufacturers) since the election. There is a basic lack of civic investment and literacy I am seeing, and where it really sticks out is at the state and local level. Democrats and progressives need, I hate to say this, something that would work like the Tea Party movement, on a grassroots level. (And no throwing anyone under the bus, either. LGBT people, POC, women, are all as worried as the much-vaunted Working Class White voter about economic security. They're all more likely to be poor! Black unemployment is twice that of whites! Trans people have a sky-high level of unemployment and poverty! "Economic security for all" is a big big tent!)

This is what I want to focus on in my going forward with what I'm going to actually do about The Looming Orange.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 2:12 PM on November 25, 2016 [31 favorites]

He's a very overweight man in his 70s with a grifter as an MD but beyond that we know nothing.

The very rich don't die. Cheney has been without a heartbeat since 2010 and he's still doing whatever he does.

Oh, playing sports, apparently.
posted by maxsparber at 2:13 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

PSA: there is no Clinton team.
posted by Yowser at 2:13 PM on November 25, 2016

People are getting used to the idea that money controls government and that government controls us and it might as well be Trump because it's all shit no matter what.

I can't really see how anyone could disagree with the first two concepts, if not more.
posted by Coda Tronca at 2:18 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think we just hope if that happens that Trump realizes he could make a hell of a lot of money being the guy that Clinton "stole" the election from and making a lot of noise about that for the next decade or so.
posted by dilaudid at 2:21 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

He would definitely prefer that.
posted by Coda Tronca at 2:26 PM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

Democrats were pretty responsible and didn't jump on this election rigging story. And their reward was Dem voters gave Stein $5mm.
posted by My Dad at 2:27 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Like what will happen when they try to gut Medicare?

We got these huge ice floes, they're just tremendously big, the best in hundreds of years. Not disappearing at all.
posted by bonehead at 2:27 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

Sequence: I'm seriously starting to think that a huge chunk of the American population now is getting used to thinking of democracy as an obsolete and largely ceremonial thing. People are getting used to the idea that money controls government and that government controls us and it might as well be Trump because it's all shit no matter what. That kind of lack of faith in the legitimacy of the government is something that's been keeping me up at night on a regular basis now.

No. Trump won because he opposed free trade, and Clinton had a long history of supporting it. As Michael Moore correctly pointed out, the states which put Trump over the top were the exact same states which twice supported Obama. That's a brutally depressing point, but also very revealing. Trump "winning" is karma for Democrats (especially the Clintons) supporting free trade, an absolute betrayal of the working class. This is why it's crucial for the Democratic Party to double down on job protection, even going as far as making it their number one priority going forward.
posted by Beholder at 2:28 PM on November 25, 2016 [25 favorites]

she beat the "both sides are equally terrible" drum harder than anyone else this election. That was problematic

"Problematic" isn't the word for it.

Which is a horse I've beaten into the ground, so I'll focus on another aspect of the Explaining Jill Stein motif.

Awhile back, I happened to look up the Unitarian Jihad satire from 2005. I remember it as being funny, and it kind of still is. But the point it emphasizes is one that I don't think most social liberals are willing to subscribe to anymore (though maybe we should), which is that (to quote it) sincerity is not enough. Just because you believe something doesn't make it true, and even if it's true, that doesn't make pursuing it a morally neutral act.

We're willing to reject claims that Trump voters are good but misguided people, but I think we need to apply that same level of scrutiny to the extreme left. Believing in a cause isn't enough when the choices it justifies are harmful. I'm sick of sincerity, and I'm sick of coddling the very sincere people who damage due to their overwhelming naivety.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 2:37 PM on November 25, 2016 [23 favorites]

Trump won because he opposed free trade, and Clinton had a long history of supporting it.

Hardly. Trump won because he was willing to talk shit about brown people. It turns out almost nobody gives a shit about free trade. However, in railing against free trade, Trump was able to repeatedly paint a portrait of an America humiliated by China and Mexico, playing on the racial unease of his audience.
posted by maxsparber at 2:37 PM on November 25, 2016 [93 favorites]

A Jeb! op ed in the WSJ

Where Republicans Go From Here

Republicans should support convening a constitutional convention to pass term limits, a balanced-budget amendment and restraints on the Commerce Clause, which has given the federal government far more regulatory power than the Founders intended.[...]

What will this mean? The GOP should use its power in Congress and state capitals to test ideas to transform education, limit burdensome regulations, accelerate innovation and unleash our economy. Republicans should stand behind emerging technologies that are helping people customize their lives in new and dramatic ways. This is our chance to contrast our approach, which trusts people to make good choices, with the failed Democratic and progressive top-down approach, which prefers government to decide almost everything.

Most critically, Republicans should reverse the Obama-era policies that have made America weaker, both here and abroad. We need to repeal and replace ObamaCare, eliminate business-killing regulations, and reverse the massive expansion of government. While we protect our borders and our laws, we should also take on the hard work of reforming legal immigration and affirming the role that immigrants play in building up our economy and our nation.

More of that voodoo shit. Unleash businesses from regulation and watch our economy grow! Shrink the feds and everyone's* life will be so much better.

Everyone = does not include anyone who is poor, sick, not of the majority race, not of the majority sexual persuasion, not of the majority way of thinking/religiosity.


No. Trump won because he opposed free trade, and Clinton had a long history of supporting it. As Michael Moore correctly pointed out, the states which put Trump over the top were the exact same states which twice supported Obama. That's a brutally depressing point, but also very revealing

You know what else that Trump and Obama (and G. Bush) had in common? They were fresh on the scene. My life did not immediately become better so let's try someone new. Oh, and they were all male. But you already knew that.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 2:38 PM on November 25, 2016 [28 favorites]

Oh goody. If we're in for another round of leftist circular firing squad I'll just check back out of the Thread and go work on some more activism.
posted by threeturtles at 2:38 PM on November 25, 2016 [24 favorites]

WaPo: Trump isn't interested in daily intelligence briefings. Anyone surprised? We're in for yet another lesson, courtesy of the Republican Party, in what happens when the US goes without a chief executive for four or eight years.

I'm okay with this. Let Sir Humphrey deal with it.
posted by ocschwar at 2:43 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

So hypothetically. The recounts end up showing that someone's been fiddling with votes. What happens? Complete and utter hell breaks loose?

As opposed toooooo . . . ?
posted by petebest at 2:46 PM on November 25, 2016 [11 favorites]

Hardly. Trump won because he was willing to talk shit about brown people. It turns out almost nobody gives a shit about free trade.

But the only surprises were rust belt states. Michigan and Ohio just magically flipped for Trump, and trade had nothing to do with it? It was all immigration rhetoric? Well, Romney also supported border security and deportations, yet he lost those states. Again, those are states which were solid victories for a Black President with a foreign sounding last name.

It's too convenient to blame this on immigrant bashing. Yes, that was part of it, but that is no excuse for Democrats not to come full circle on trade and acknowledge the devastating impact it has had on the American working class. Democrats must embrace job protection or they risk losing this issue to Republicans.
posted by Beholder at 2:51 PM on November 25, 2016 [22 favorites]

Re: Trump appointments: You know that moment in an old school RPG where you're in the last dungeon and on your way to fight the Big Boss you have to fight all the shitty lesser bosses that you already defeated in previous dungeons? And you're just like, for real? This dude is back again?

Yeah that.
posted by supercrayon at 2:51 PM on November 25, 2016 [52 favorites]

HUD Is Essential to the Fight Against Poverty. Ben Carson Will Lobotomize It.
posted by Golden Eternity at 2:52 PM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Hill Report: Trump team wants Romney to apologize

Fun thing from that article: Trump's surrogate is Mike Huckabee, who takes pains to call out Mitt's dissent as the "Salt Lake City" speech. Huckabee also might well be the only politician to make hay over Mormon theology while facing Romney as opposition.

Mormons sooo want to believe they're cultural allies with Evangelicals and the rest of the Christian world. It's almost funny. Just about as funny as the working chunk of the country that really genuinely thinks that Republicans are their tribe.

Of course it's not a religious dig, right Mike? Wouldn't be a Christian thing to do.
posted by wildblueyonder at 2:53 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

So hypothetically. The recounts end up showing that someone's been fiddling with votes.

Any recount is virtually certain to return slightly different numbers than the original election, if only because the small smattering of inevitable, basically-random errors in the recount will be different from those in the original election. This won't mean anyone was "fiddling" with anything.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:55 PM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

HUD Is Essential to the Fight Against Poverty. Ben Carson Will Lobotomize It.

Where is my button for "Thanks for posting this but it makes me sad."
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 2:57 PM on November 25, 2016 [11 favorites]

Ctrl-alt-right-delete
posted by chavenet at 2:59 PM on November 25, 2016 [26 favorites]

Has anyone said "The Producers, but with America" yet?

(on preview, yes)
posted by ODiV at 3:00 PM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

From the HUD link:

Carson’s appointment is par for the course for a GOP administration. “Modern GOP presidents have relegated the HUD secretary to an affirmative-action posting, a spot where Republicans like to demonstrate their alleged commitment to diversity in the cabinet, while giving those people authority for all the programs Republicans don't care about, or would like, ideally, to get rid of,” Stephanie Mencimer wrote in Mother Jones in 2008. Ronald Reagan once mistook his own HUD secretary Samuel Pierce, the only black member of his cabinet, for a mayor at a White House reception. Pierce, whose tenure was characterized by corruption and graft, also used his post to staunchly defend cuts to HUD’s housing subsidies.

I...ugh. Words fail me. I think what I am feeling is just sad sadness.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:03 PM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

Well if the general election recount does happen to result in a Democratic victory-from-jaws-of-defeat, I would like to propose that Mitt be charged by the country to put Trump in a crate, tie him to the top of his car, and drive him back to New York City where the former president-elect can spend the rest of his miserable existence in a pillory outside Trump Tower having rotten fruit and polyglot invective hurled at him every day.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:04 PM on November 25, 2016 [23 favorites]

This whole Stein thing feels pretty bananas (but I'm not complaining). Anyone have predictions on what will happen? If there were irregularities found and if the results were changed in even one state, it feels like it would have a pretty massive impact on the way we talk about Trump.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:06 PM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

This whole Stein thing feels pretty bananas (but I'm not complaining). Anyone have predictions on what will happen?

If Wisconsin flips? The shitshow continues for another couple of weeks. If it doesn't life goes on pointlessly as before.
posted by Talez at 3:10 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

As to the value of HUD, possibly worth noting that Kiefer Sutherland's character now-President Tom Kirkman on Designated Survivor was the designated survivor (that is, not welcome at the State of the Union) because he was the HUD secretary who was about to lose his job.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:10 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Michigan and Ohio just magically flipped for Trump

He won by 10,704 in Michigan. Ohio went Republican in 2000 and 2004, and they had a big bailout in Obama's second turn. These are battleground states with relatively thin margins every year, so I don't think we can point to free trade as being necessarily the reason they flipped, or even the particular reason they flipped.
posted by maxsparber at 3:14 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

If Wisconsin flips? The shitshow continues for another couple of weeks. If it doesn't life goes on pointlessly as before.

So shitshow either way, great, thanks!
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:14 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Anyone have predictions on what will happen?

The recounted results will differ from the original ones by 500-1500 votes.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:17 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Could we maybe stop flinging "brown people" around just because it's how we imagine the median Trump voter talking?
posted by Etrigan at 3:19 PM on November 25, 2016 [17 favorites]

So shitshow either way, great, thanks!

Yes but in the case of the second shitshow we know we're fucked. In the first scenario we have false hope for another couple of weeks that we can avoid this disaster.
posted by Talez at 3:19 PM on November 25, 2016

Any recount is virtually certain to return slightly different numbers than the original election, if only because the small smattering of inevitable, basically-random errors in the recount will be different from those in the original election. This won't mean anyone was "fiddling" with anything.

I know the count won't be the same. 'Fiddling' in that the it's not just slightly different but counts that point in the direction of out and out rigging it so Trump would win.
posted by Jalliah at 3:24 PM on November 25, 2016

Yes but in the case of the second shitshow we know we're fucked. In the first scenario we have false hope for another couple of weeks that we can avoid this disaster.

So you're not in favor of a recount?

False hope or no, if there were irregularities exposed it would have a massive impact on the 2020 elections--either institutionally or in terms of a narrative about Trump as a candidate. Shitshow where republicans sneer about having won the game fair and square (which is what my republican relatives are saying) when there may or may not be vote tampering or fudging that happened seems like the worst timeline to me.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:26 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

Could we maybe stop flinging "brown people" around just because it's how we imagine the median Trump voter talking?

I can not in any way imagine that the median Rump voter would use the term brown people.
posted by ethansr at 3:26 PM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

it's really only been 19 days? I'm so over this. STOOOOOOOOOOP
posted by yueliang at 3:30 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Lakoff article posted above is good. It's reliant on some background of what he always talks about so it's longish and remedial to start, but it answers my continuing question regarding wtf was up with the polls.

Tl;dr: polls measure issues via demographic data, voters vote values which aren't the same thing at all.

Also, the HRC campaign approach, re: ads

If a conservative says, “we should have tax relief,” she is using the metaphor that taxation is an affliction that we need relief from. If a liberal replies, “No, we don’t need tax relief,” she is accepting the idea that taxation is an affliction. The first thing that is, or should be, taught about political language is not to repeat the language of the other side or negate their framing of the issue.

The Clinton campaign consistently violated the lesson of Don’t Think of an Elephant! They used negative campaigning, assuming they could turn Trump’s most outrageous words against him.

And (vis á vis Nurturing Parent / Strict Father view of liberal/conservative)

What a Strict Father Cannot Be

There are certain things that strict fathers cannot be: A Loser, Corrupt, and especially not a Betrayer of Trust.

Trump lost the popular vote. To the American majority, he is a Loser, a minority president. It needs to be said and repeated.

Above all, Trump is a Betrayer of Trust. He is acting like a dictator, and is even supporting Putin’s anti-American policies.

And lastly:

Right now the majority is fighting back, pointing out what is wrong with Trump day after day. In many cases, they are missing the message of Don’t Think of an Elephant!

By fighting against Trump, many protesters are just showcasing Trump, keeping him in the limelight, rather than highlighting the majority’s positive moral view and viewing the problem with Trump from within the majority’s positive worldview frame. To effectively fight for what is right, you have to first say what is right and why.
posted by petebest at 3:32 PM on November 25, 2016 [22 favorites]

To be fair, Jeb! is kind of right about the commerce clause. The view that almost all sorts of activity, commercial or not, can have an "indirect" effect on interstate commerce, and thus falls under federal purview is a pretty huge power grab, and is why the DEA can come and take your pot plants even if you grow them in your own garden for your own use, for instance.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:39 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

No. Trump won because he opposed free trade, and Clinton had a long history of supporting it.

Remember all those folks that are not getting unemployment insurance but are also not included in the great "full employment" stats? May not have steady jobs (if any) but they are around to vote.
posted by sammyo at 3:49 PM on November 25, 2016

I've seen plenty of fakeish liberal news, it tends to fall in the magic vitamins/magic cancer cure range though

Yes, but it's decidedly on the fringe, sometimes becoming talking points and platform positions for the Green Party. The problem with the Republican Party is that the fringe has become the base, and in the meantime the existing base has been otherwise trained not to trust the "MSM" in favor of Fox and other conservative media.


I don't know that I would call this stuff "fringe" - it's very popular. However it's also not actually strictly popular on the Left.
posted by atoxyl at 3:53 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

If Jeb! wants to talk about increasing the power of the states, it cuts both ways. The blue states - which voted for Clinton, who want to expand rather than curtail rights for LGBT people, who have more ethnically diverse populations, who are less conservative Christian, who want to legalize pot or at least OK it for medical use - are the economic powerhouses. California, the land where same-gender couples can get married and blaze up at the reception, is an economic powerhouse with a GDP larger than many actual countries.

Jeb! might think that lessening the power of the federal government would universally push the US back to being white and Christian. Nope. Not on California's watch, or Massachusetts' either. And these are the states with the wealth.

I really do not want another constitutional convention on the Republicans' terms, but I don't think it's going to be as easy as Jeb! might think to bring the blue states in line with his vision of White!Christian!'Murika!
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 3:53 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

To be fair, Jeb! is kind of right about the commerce clause. The view that almost all sorts of activity, commercial or not, can have an "indirect" effect on interstate commerce, and thus falls under federal purview is a pretty huge power grab, and is why the DEA can come and take your pot plants even if you grow them in your own garden for your own use, for instance.

Except you'd kiss goodbye federal minimum wage laws, federal healthcare regulation, the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and there's probably enough states to bring in the pot equivalent of the 18th amendment anyway.

So yeah, just gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater on that one.
posted by Talez at 3:56 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

Mormons sooo want to believe they're cultural allies with Evangelicals and the rest of the Christian world. It's almost funny.

Between R-Money finding his principles and Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn going relentlessly hard against the alt-right on twitter, I am honestly wondering if this election is going to have the creation of Social Justice or Reform Mormons as a side effect.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 4:16 PM on November 25, 2016 [20 favorites]

Ronald Reagan once mistook his own HUD secretary Samuel Pierce, the only black member of his cabinet, for a mayor at a White House reception.

ok that's just funny
posted by mannequito at 4:35 PM on November 25, 2016 [13 favorites]

I got really rip-roaring wasted on beet vodka of all things last night. I have a blurry memory of bellowing, *9/11, now that, that I could get my head around. of course people want to blow up the World Trade Center. But this, man, this, we okay, we go from Obama to this fucking mess. What the fuck? Why? 9/11, that was reasonable, in hindsight*

And then upon hearing that a relative had a) announced his vote for Trump on FB and b) urged everybody to come together post election via FB post, I was all *FUUUUUUUUUUCK THAT GUUUUUUYYY*

My SIL usually tries to shut me down when I start swearing like a sailor in front of my little niece, maybe she tried and I was just sort of flailing.

But beet vodka, man. Watch out.
posted by angrycat at 4:44 PM on November 25, 2016 [19 favorites]

ronald reagan probably once mistook his cat for his secretary of defense
posted by indubitable at 4:50 PM on November 25, 2016 [24 favorites]

Also, liberal academics, say hello to your Liberal Professor Watch list
posted by angrycat at 4:50 PM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

For one last time, I think the racism vs. economic anxiety debate is a false dichotomy. One inflames the other. And having rational fear in one thing doesn't excuse bigotry and persecution. It's sort of like this.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:08 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

WaPo: Trump isn't interested in daily intelligence briefings. Anyone surprised? We're in for yet another lesson, courtesy of the Republican Party, in what happens when the US goes without a chief executive for four or eight years.

He has a server receiving encrypted GRU reports that are way better
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:12 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Historic Cash-in Continues

"We've got another. A long-stalled Trump building project in Georgia (the country) is back on track and ready to go just days after Donald Trump's election. That's major new nugget in a WaPo round up of how Trump's election less than three weeks ago is already turbocharging Trump building projects around the globe."
posted by chris24 at 5:16 PM on November 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

So, it seems that Jill Stein's approach to democracy is the same as my approach to writing term papers.
posted by schmod at 5:18 PM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

I would love to see a clear, solid anti-free trade stance become a core democratic principle.

You could probably win an election with it, and as soon as people realised that their wages hadn't increased enough to match the increased cost of cheap consumer goods, you'd be turfed out on your arse.
posted by holgate at 5:18 PM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

It's notable how most of the Organization's co-branded property projects are in countries that one doesn't associate with stable or transparent government, but instead have ruling parties and personalities who cultivate their own favourites in private enterprise.
posted by holgate at 5:20 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

Also, liberal academics, say hello to your Liberal Professor Watch list

Turning Point USA. I wonder if they'll eventually become the Trumpenjugend.

You could probably win an election with it, and as soon as people realised that their wages hadn't increased enough to match the increased cost of cheap consumer goods, you'd be turfed out on your arse.

Exactly. Wait until all the shit in Walmart goes up by 35% c/o Herr Trump. It doesn't solve the essential problem in that unskilled service positions are paid too low a wage. The pendulum of profit distribution has swung way too far towards executives and shareholders and that's the crux of the issue. Telling Mexicans to fuck off and stop making air conditioners is a band-aid for gangrene.
posted by Talez at 5:23 PM on November 25, 2016 [28 favorites]

How should Trump protesters organize themselves, from NY Mag. There are three general themes:

1. Focus on policies more than personality:

The Times offered a vivid example of the limitations of focusing one’s ire on a big, audacious personality just a few days ago: “Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition,” wrote Luigi Zingales on Friday. “It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different.”

2. Be more inclusive:

Munson took that critique even further. “This has historically been one of the differences between the left and the right,” he said, “and it’s one of the things the left can learn from the right. What my research has found is that the right has far fewer ideological purity tests for activism than the left does. So they’re taking all comers and they’re converting people in action. Just come, and just do it. By contrast, there’s a whole language you need to know from some of the left groups — your ability to be involved often depends on already having a healthy résumé of doing other lefty things. I think that that basically makes it a kind of echo chamber, and it doesn’t allow you to bring in new blood.” The right, he said, has historically been more inclusive. “The anti-abortion folks are the ones that I know the best, but the right, they set up internships and they have summer programs and they organize these campaigns, and anyone who shows up they just take. And you’ll either be turned off and leave or you’ll become one of them.”

3. Be committed to nonviolence.

“There’s a lot of evidence showing that violent protests do trigger backlash,” said Rojas. “For example, my research on campus protests shows that student activists are less likely to get what they want if they use violent protest.” Rojas also pointed to the work of Omar Wasow, a politics professor at Princeton, who has written papers arguing, as Rojas put it, that “riots in the 1960s helped trigger the law-and-order backlash of that era” — an argument other political scientists and sociologists have made as well.
posted by triggerfinger at 5:29 PM on November 25, 2016 [34 favorites]

Speaking as an Oaklander, it's great to say "be committed to nonviolence" (I've taken a 2-day "introduction to Kingian nonviolence" training, as far as which way I lean), but nobody seems to have practical suggestions for how to deal with the black-clad crew who come in at the end of otherwise-peaceful protests to get their smashy-smashy on. Photographing them doesn't work. It's starting to seem like the only way for the peaceful folks not to get blamed for the people who come to the protests with the explicit intention of vandalism is to preemptively take them down... at which point that's not too peaceful, is it?
posted by Lexica at 5:38 PM on November 25, 2016 [26 favorites]

I'm happy about the recounts (especially happy that Stein appears not to be a scammer about the funds she raised). Not because I think a surprise victory is likely, but because any sand we can throw in the gears is good.

I do think not focusing on Trump as a person is good advice. If only because our long game isn't just to get him out, but all his Tea-Party/crony buddies too. He also hates being ignored, so it's win-win to focus on policies, not the person.
posted by emjaybee at 5:44 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

ronald reagan probably once mistook his cat for his secretary of defense

Well . . .
posted by petebest at 5:45 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

"but instead have ruling parties and personalities who cultivate their own favourites in private enterprise."

Harold Lloyd dolls would be cool.
posted by clavdivs at 5:49 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

How should Trump protesters organize themselves, from NY Mag. There are three general themes:

Note that none of them were "quit using the Republican's framing language".

I think Lakoff really has a point there.
posted by petebest at 5:53 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've taken a 2-day "introduction to Kingian nonviolence" training

I misread that as "introduction to Klingon nonviolence" and dismissed it right away.
posted by Servo5678 at 5:54 PM on November 25, 2016 [52 favorites]

Okay, if this has been theorized forgive me- but if the recount reveals even a shred or nugget of evidence of tampering, maybe Russian tampering, this empowers the electors to be that last line of defense Hamilton was talking about in Fed 68. So, how do we lobby them?
posted by vrakatar at 6:07 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

No. Trump won because he opposed free trade, and Clinton had a long history of supporting it.

I honestly feel that anything Trump reflexively and loudly rails against is something we should take a very close and careful look at it before completely tossing into the trash. I don't think it takes a genius to say there's a problem with trade, but it does require more of a brain to fix it, and that includes being able to observe and learn from other globalized countries that have been more successful in keeping competitive in manufacturing, while still participating in free trade. The very same countries that Donald loves to demonize (yet he still says they're winners!).
posted by FJT at 6:07 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

I misread that as "introduction to Klingon nonviolence" and dismissed it right away.

Introduction To Klingon Nonviolence 101

IN THIS CLASS WE INSTRUCT IN THE MANY GLORIOUS AND NEARLY NON-LETHAL COMBAT USES OF THE WOODEN BIT OF THE BAT'LETH
posted by Jon Mitchell at 6:12 PM on November 25, 2016 [42 favorites]

It's more telling Mexicans to fuck off and stop picking all the non-machine-harvestable food in our fields to feed us

I keep telling people that if you remove illegal immigrants, every restaurant shuts down, Day One. My husband is desperate to hire more cooks, but starting pay is $8.00/hr regardless of experience (He can't raise it, it's a chain restaurant.) American citizens are not beating down the door to work those jobs. The only people willing to do it are illegal immigrants (who are working several jobs under different names, which is something I wasn't aware was a normal thing), people on drugs (who tend not to be the best cooks or most reliable employees), or teenagers (who move on quickly.)

I mean, yes, I think the pay needs to be raised, but if that happens it's not going to be possible to go get a steak for $12.99 anymore. Any the working class people who want to go out are going to be mighty upset when they can't afford food. And that doesn't even touch agricultural workers.

Like with trade and goods manufacture, a hard line either way is going to likely to make the system crash. We have to strive for a middle ground where wages are better and fewer workers are being exploited but there is enough flexibility that goods and food are still affordable to those same workers.
posted by threeturtles at 6:17 PM on November 25, 2016 [29 favorites]

It's more telling Mexicans to fuck off and stop picking all the non-machine-harvestable food in our fields to feed us
...

I keep telling people that if you remove illegal immigrants, every restaurant shuts down

Alabama and Georgia passed strict laws cracking down on undocumented immigrants in 2011. It devastated their farming industries because non-immigrants didn't want those jobs.
posted by chris24 at 6:22 PM on November 25, 2016 [54 favorites]

The only people willing to do it are illegal immigrants (who are working several jobs under different names, which is something I wasn't aware was a normal thing), people on drugs (who tend not to be the best cooks or most reliable employees), or teenagers (who move on quickly.)

In F and B you get burnouts, retreads, and has beens. Usually with a drinky/druggy nexus.
posted by vrakatar at 6:22 PM on November 25, 2016

Alabama and Georgia passed strict laws cracking down on undocumented immigrants in 2011. It devastated their farming industries because non-immigrants didn't want those jobs.

Apparently Vermont's new Republican governor has gone off to a meeting with other New England Republican governors about what to do about Trump's anti-immigration posturing/policy. Because guess who's powering the dairy industry?
posted by hoyland at 6:33 PM on November 25, 2016 [13 favorites]

Seems about right.

Many in Florida Count on Obama’s Health Law, Even Amid Talk of Its Demise

"Dalia Carmeli, who drives a trolley in downtown Miami, voted for Donald J. Trump on Election Day. A week later, she stopped in to see the enrollment counselor who will help her sign up for another year of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

“I hope it still stays the same,” said Ms. Carmeli, 64, who has Crohn’s disease and relies on her insurance to cover frequent doctor’s appointments and an array of medications."
posted by chris24 at 6:39 PM on November 25, 2016 [21 favorites]

nobody seems to have practical suggestions for how to deal with the black-clad crew who come in at the end of otherwise-peaceful protests to get their smashy-smashy on.

Not just them but the well-meaning socialist or other predominantly white political group that uses every protest as their personal education in how to use a megaphone.

In my city, I've come to recognize the repeat offenders and can probably find them on Facebook. Im wondering if pointing out to them with evidence that they hurt the cause would work at all.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:46 PM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

ronald reagan probably once mistook his cat for his secretary of defense

Grab 'em by the secretary of defense?
posted by mochapickle at 6:49 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Yes, that was part of it, but that is no excuse for Democrats not to come full circle on trade and acknowledge the devastating impact it has had on the American working class

It actually hasn't though. NAFTA was a huge boon to the US economy, creating an order of magnitude more jobs than it lost, and lowering prices for all consumers. Trade displaces jobs, of course, but if your job was lost due to a trade agreement, you can get money from the feds! Moreover, no one gives a shit about free trade, preferences over free trade arent driven by what job you have or if you work in an industry vulnerable to free trade, and when people lose their jobs they become more supportive of welfare.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:49 PM on November 25, 2016 [11 favorites]

What to do about the dairy industry and undocumented? Well just raise the wages and voila.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:58 PM on November 25, 2016

As far as I can tell, arguments on free trade are largely arguments of faith since the data and supposition can be made to support differing views on the strengths and weaknesses of it. There is little clear overall agreement on free trade's ultimate value as a whole, though in some smaller areas of effect more agreement can be found. I'm sure there are some voters for whom free trade is a huge deal as they believe it to be a job killer, for themselves or generally, but I have a hard time believing there are huge numbers of people who are fully versed in the subject, since that would go against pretty much all other complex understandings people exhibit, and that it is a signal issue upon which the presidency is won or lost, though, sure, vague slogans about immigrants, jobs being shipped overseas and the like make for nice scare quotes, but the connection between the quotes and enacted policy is something different.

None of that is to say there aren't things that can be improved or that free trade is an unvarnished good, but that it seems a lot more complicated than just opposing it would justify.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:00 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's my understanding that while NAFTA is seen as a net positive for US jobs by economists, China has been shown to be a net negative. Of course, I'm pretty sure no economist has ever lived lost their job as the result of a trade agreement.
posted by Slothrup at 7:02 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

'cat' Weinberger.
posted by clavdivs at 7:03 PM on November 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

The same would go for raising wages too I'd suggest, the impact of wage increases would likely not be evenly distributed for good and bad, and could cause real harm in some communities even as they would benefit others.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:04 PM on November 25, 2016

'Prison for woman who helped Michigan farms get illegal labor'
posted by clavdivs at 7:11 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't think we're saying "Yay underpaid immigrants, let's keep that!" more "Republicans seem not to understand that by cracking down on immigrants, they are going to have to deal with things being more expensive." It's about not understanding the consequences of your policies.

I feel confident in this because my Trump voting brother, who builds houses, complains every time I see him how much harder it is to get "workers" (i.e. undocumented Mexican workers) and how the white guys he hires are a. thin on the ground b. don't work as hard c. flake off frequently.
posted by emjaybee at 7:15 PM on November 25, 2016 [55 favorites]

Even looking past food service and agricultural jobs, today is Go To The Mall and Buy Something Made In SE Asia Day. However you choose to define "middle America", it's never reported as if this festival of buying stuff is a bad thing (aside from the fights and stampedes and shootings, which seem to have declined from their peak in recent years). It is a done thing. Stuff that is already cheap in relative terms compared to times past gets sold for even less.

So there's a huge framework of cultural expectations around consumption that keeps humming along -- in part because US media depends on advertising, in part because Americans like consuming -- while being detached from the question of who's doing the work on the production side.
posted by holgate at 7:16 PM on November 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

I keep telling people that if you remove illegal immigrants, every restaurant shuts down

The undocumented also have also put about $13 billion into social security they will never take out.
posted by srboisvert at 7:17 PM on November 25, 2016 [34 favorites]

The undocumented also have also put about $13 billion into social security they will never take out.

That $13b is annually, not total.
posted by chris24 at 7:19 PM on November 25, 2016 [72 favorites]

today is Go To The Mall and Buy Something Made In SE Asia Day.

The holidays are here, and everything in America is going really well. To celebrate Black Friday, Cards Against Humanity is digging a tremendous hole in the earth.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 7:20 PM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

Or are we the party of I really like those unlimited breadsticks so underpay someone to bring them to me and when they get caught by immigration just replace them with someone else?

I think we all know what the answer is to that.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:22 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

But do you see not how there are a lot of different issues referenced directly and indirectly in this paragraph, that there are a variety of different solutions that come to mind, and that maybe continuing to exploit illegal immigrants at 16K per year (you know they aren't getting overtime) is not really an acceptable solution.

Do YOU not see the very next line of my post that you quoted where I said "I think wages need to be increased?" But I also accept that prices of consumer goods and especially food have been kept extremely low through reliance on foreign workers and immigrants and a suddenl astronomical jump in price is going to do great harm to those of us living around the poverty line. Yes, I have applied for food stamps in the last year, thanks. (It took too long to get approved by which point my husband was working two jobs and making too much.)

It's easy to say "Just raise all the prices, I'm willing to pay more" if you're making six figures. Personally I can't spend any more on food or I'd have to stop paying for medication or housing or transportation. My husband is one of the food industry workers working 60 hour weeks and getting no overtime (thanks to the recent court injunction), though as a manager he's making more income, but divided hourly it's less than $15/hour.

People don't want to work hard jobs for $8/hour and they don't want to pay what goods would cost if everyone made $15/hour. That's reality and you can say "people should be different" but that's not going to get anyone anywhere.

Saying "kill all free trade" and "raise all wages" is one thing, but if you don't somehow have a plan for how that economic hit is going to come from the 1% instead of the bottom 30% I'm not going to take you too seriously.
posted by threeturtles at 7:23 PM on November 25, 2016 [42 favorites]

The Cards Against Humanity hole FAQ is excellent.

What’s happening here?
Cards Against Humanity is digging a holiday hole.

Is this real?
Unfortunately it is.

Where is the hole?
America. And in our hearts.

Is there some sort of deeper meaning or purpose to the hole?
No.

What do I get for contributing money to the hole?
A deeper hole. What else are you going to buy, an iPod?

Why aren’t you giving all this money to charity?
Why aren’t YOU giving all this money to charity? It’s your money.

Is the hole bad for the environment?
No, this was just a bunch of empty land. Now there’s a hole there. That’s life.

How am I supposed to feel about this?
You’re supposed to think it’s funny. You might not get it for a while, but some time next year you’ll chuckle quietly to yourself and remember all this business about the hole.

How deep can you make this sucker?
Great question. As long as you keep spending, we’ll keep digging. We’ll find out together how deep this thing goes.

What if you dig so deep you hit hot magma?
At least then we’d feel something.
posted by fomhar at 7:27 PM on November 25, 2016 [58 favorites]

Something else that the article pointed out - trying to round up undocumented immigrants in Alabama took a tremendous amount of legwork and police power. The cops hated doing it, and the public hated that the police were devoting so much time trying to ferret out the undocumented at the expense of other, needed police work. Lose-lose all around.

Trump's coming war on sanctuary cities: “The first question that comes to mind when you are talk about deporting two to three million people is: Who are the bodies that are going to do that?” For mass deportations to actually happen, the local police departments and the immigration authorities are going to have to present a united front - and, in California sanctuary districts at least, local police departments are not willing to do so.

I might add, it's going to be the same with state-legal pot: No matter what Trump or Sessions or whoever does become Attorney General wants, if the local po-po don't buy into Prohibition, or they don't want to arrest affluent white people, Trump is SOL.

Unless the federal government wants to hire and train an enormous number of new law enforcement in ICE and the DEA, this is another area where Trump's mouth wrote a check his ass can't cash.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 7:43 PM on November 25, 2016 [34 favorites]

nobody seems to have practical suggestions for how to deal with the black-clad crew who come in at the end of otherwise-peaceful protests to get their smashy-smashy on.

I asked my husband, who's an anarchist but not the smashy sort, and he was reluctant to assist with tactics.

The longer answer I drug out of him is that the perception on the anarchist side is a strong distaste for liberals' abhorrence for property violence and perceived relative comfort for state violence, so short of having established anarchists lead your protests or do negotiations with the community likely to engage in it, , it may be an unsolveable solution.
posted by corb at 7:43 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Saying "kill all free trade" and "raise all wages" is one thing, but if you don't somehow have a plan for how that economic hit is going to come from the 1% instead of the bottom 30% I'm not going to take you too seriously.

Tax the shit out of the top 5% (not just income, get capital gains, dividends and wealth) and hand it back via higher welfare, the child tax credit and a childcare benefit.

Hand money back to the people who will actually fucking spend it not just leave it in a bank account to see how many zeros they can accumulate.
posted by Talez at 7:47 PM on November 25, 2016 [34 favorites]

Even looking past food service and agricultural jobs, today is Go To The Mall and Buy Something Made In SE Asia Day. However you choose to define "middle America", it's never reported as if this festival of buying stuff is a bad thing (aside from the fights and stampedes and shootings, which seem to have declined from their peak in recent years). It is a done thing. Stuff that is already cheap in relative terms compared to times past gets sold for even less.

Yep. Most Americans have gotten used to being surrounded by such excess (whether we can afford much of it or not) in the last few decades that we can't even imagine anything less. Some stuff on Amazon is so cheap it offends me. The free shipping on these dirt cheap items also offends me. In general there is way too much stuff that is available for so cheap that people just think of it as replaceable garbage. But how do we get away from that when our way of life increasingly depends on this economic model?

One of my fears about Trump bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, coupled with his lack of interest in environmental protection, is the environmental destruction and severe pollution that would bring to our country if production in general keeps up at the pace it's been at for the last decade or so. Maybe more people need to see it firsthand in order to appreciate how bad it is. Or maybe in general people just don't care as long as they are comfortable in their own homes.
posted by wondermouse at 7:57 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've been rebuilding my house since April, as has everyone in about a three town radius. I would guess that about 80 percent of the labor is done by Spanish speaking workers. my point is that there is zero chance these three towns could have rebuilt without the Latinx crews. There is a non zero chance that some of the crews are undocumented. But man, I have never seen a crew of white boys climbing on roofs when it's 110 outside, and I've seen dozens of Latin crews doing just that.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 8:08 PM on November 25, 2016 [15 favorites]

Unless the federal government wants to hire and train an enormous number of new law enforcement in ICE and the DEA, this is another area where Trump's mouth wrote a check his ass can't cash.

See I'm worried that that's where armed right-wing militias will come in. With police in major cities saying they won't do this work, I doubt Trump and his axis of evil cronies are going to go WELP okay then plan's off guys! I think they are going to start getting 2nd amendment Well Regulated Militias (wink) to do what they do best - ie bear arms and terrorize the vulnerable.
posted by supercrayon at 8:10 PM on November 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

When I saw Roots as a kid, I thought a lot after, about what it must have been like to live in a time where there were slaves. An entire culture of humans, simply property, able to be disposed of at will. What would I have done had I seen that? Would I have fought and died to help keep those people free?

Years later I began to see the people who cut lawns, who make food, the ones with the leaf blowers, and I can see this entire culture, not enslaved by evil per se but fighting and loving and trying for a better life than where they were before. But they keep their heads down, in this city, they don't make eye contact. Their "betters" are all around them and they don't know which are going to offer a job and which are just going to steal from them once more. What have I done, now I've seen this? Would I fight and die to help keep these people, these human beings here beside me, keep them free?

I want the answer to be yes, but I'm human and frail, so who knows?

How this relates to Trump: I think one day someone is going to point out to him that slavery is still legal, if you sentence someone to it for a crime. This provides an entire workforce that can basically be hucked over the wall with a trebuchet when he's done with them. And before that, you can lease them to good American citizens.

(Why yes I do think Josh Marshall's Trump's Razor puts too much emphasis on the clown and not enough on the Antichrist. Trump can be both.)
posted by bigbigdog at 8:13 PM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

Have you seen the prison labor system? There's already a workforce in there, some getting sub-third-world wages. Expanding that is entirely foreseeable.
posted by zachlipton at 8:21 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th is excellent on these points.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:26 PM on November 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

I might add, it's going to be the same with state-legal pot: No matter what Trump or Sessions or whoever does become Attorney General wants, if the local po-po don't buy into Prohibition, or they don't want to arrest affluent white people, Trump is SOL.

I remember when the Feds raided Oaksterdam University back in 2012.

OPD were not pleased and didn't go out of their way to assist. My husband and I were doing a "citizen journalism" livestreaming thing at the time and had watched OPD officers at numerous protests before that. It seemed clear that they were doing the bare minimum necessary and unless there was obvious cause to arrest somebody, they wanted nothing to do with it. The gray-haired guy with the "US Marines" jacket jamming his walker into the front wheel of the Fed vehicle to keep it from driving away? *yawn* said OPD, guess that's your issue to deal with.

But at the same time, that was in one of the most cannabis-friendly cities in a cannabis-friendly state. This was 16 years after Californians voted to legalize medical cannabis under Proposition 215 and eight years after Oakland passed Measure Z, which directed the city and the cops to "Make investigation, citation and arrest for private adult cannabis (marijuana) offenses the City’s lowest law enforcement priority". Despite that, and despite the Obama Administration's statement that the DOJ would stop raids on medical cannabis, the Feds still came in, and OPD still assisted when required.

It's not safe to rely on "our local cops won't cooperate with the Feds", I think.
posted by Lexica at 8:30 PM on November 25, 2016 [12 favorites]

I am honestly wondering if this election is going to have the creation of Social Justice or Reform Mormons as a side effect.

I think we will see a growth of liberal/left folks who identify as very religious and explicitly connect their social justice politics to their faith. Pope Francis Catholicism + rise in power of evangelical women against Trump + anti-Trump Mormonism + religious communities standing together against potential unconstitutional behavior targeting faith (Muslim) and the rise of neo-Nazism.

I predict we'll also see a revival of explicitly patriotic messaging from the left, especially if the stories of "Russia-loving Trump" and "Trump puts global private business over presidency" and "China steps into trade role abandoned by the US" continue.

This piece by Ross Douthat captures something that makes me keep coming back to it even though I disagree with most of it:

The contemporary college student lives most fully in the Lennonist utopia that post-’60s liberalism sought to build, and often finds it unconsoling: She wants a sense of belonging, a ground for personal morality, and a higher horizon of justice than either a purely procedural or a strictly material politics supplies.

Thus it may not be enough for today’s liberalism, confronting both a right-wing nationalism and its own internal contradictions, to deal with identity politics’ political weaknesses by becoming more populist and less politically correct. Both of these would be desirable changes, but they would leave many human needs unmet. For those, a deeper vision than mere liberalism is still required — something like “for God and home and country,” as reactionary as that phrase may sound.

And this from Mark Shriver, on Pope Francis:

Francis . . . . challenges us all to not just provide support to the poor but to learn from them as well, to listen to them, to be with them.

And by poor, he does not mean only those who are struggling financially. He means those who have physical and psychological and spiritual problems. In other words, he means all of us. He is calling upon each of us to be truly merciful with one another, in real and meaningful ways. Not just being a bit nicer or writing checks to charity; no, he is challenging us to intimacy with one another, and with God. . . . When he says that “life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort” and goes on to ask us to “leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others,” he is telling us to get out of our comfort zones. He is saying to me, a supposedly progressive Catholic who works on behalf of poor kids and families: Don’t be isolated and content, enter the chaos and the pain and the joy of others’ lives.

Pantsuit Nation has in a lot of ways reflected this desire for community on the left and an emphasis on reaching out affirmatively - even though people are acting out their beliefs there less than perfectly, it's an absolute deluge of well-meaning-ness.

And what the Dalai Lama wrote earlier this month:

This helps explain why pain and indignation are sweeping through prosperous countries. The problem is not a lack of material riches. It is the growing number of people who feel they are no longer useful, no longer needed, no longer one with their societies. . . . Indeed, what unites the two of us in friendship and collaboration is not shared politics or the same religion. It is something simpler: a shared belief in compassion, in human dignity, in the intrinsic usefulness of every person to contribute positively for a better and more meaningful world. The problems we face cut across conventional categories; so must our dialogue, and our friendships.

Facebook facilitated the spread of fake news like wildfire this election season, but it also facilitated these secret communities of people coming together to offer support, and (in the wake of the election) to connect and begin to plan.
posted by sallybrown at 8:37 PM on November 25, 2016 [31 favorites]

Have you seen the prison labor system? There's already a workforce in there, some getting sub-third-world wages. Expanding that is entirely foreseeable.

Colorado tried to abolish slavery as punishment (WaPo) in November and lost. It's unclear whether this is because Amendment T was too confusingly written for people to understand. I'm still gobsmacked by the result.
posted by mochapickle at 8:40 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Pope Francis Catholicism

The Pope was one of those single individuals who could have tipped the election and he made a few tepid and oblique statements that were ignored. He could have stood against the concept of the ostensible leader of the free world not being something who openly embraced torture and murder, hated and deceit, and meekly backed off.

Yes, there would have been consequences, but that's what people on the side of good are supposed to be willing to risk.

Don't count the Pope to save us.
posted by Candleman at 8:51 PM on November 25, 2016 [16 favorites]

Colorado tried to abolish slavery as punishment (WaPo) in November and lost. It's unclear whether this is because Amendment T was too confusingly written for people to understand.

Yeah, I'm a college professor (i.e., pretty high reading level) and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I left it blank because I had no idea what it was trying to do. I wouldn't read too much pro-slavery support into this outcome.
posted by forza at 8:53 PM on November 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

This isn't a question of party: Americans collectively have chosen unlimited breadsticks, and the political position is either to be honest about the repercussions of a high-skill, high-wage economy, or to lie about them. This year suggests that lying is a winner.

And I think bigbigdog touches on something: the growing visibility of that invisible workforce is perceived as disruptive. If you're in a somewhat hard-up NC town, you don't want to think too much about the hundreds of indigenous Guatemalans brought in to slaughter chickens as long as they keep among themselves and you have your cheap chicken. It's when they have kids old enough for school or branch out into lines of work that don't involve slaughtering chicken that they get noticed, and not necessarily in a good way.
posted by holgate at 8:54 PM on November 25, 2016 [17 favorites]

I left it blank because I had no idea what it was trying to do.

I think a lot of people felt the same way. I had to go look it up on ballotopedia. And perhaps people thought slavery was already abolished. It's a shame it wasn't written more clearly.
posted by mochapickle at 8:56 PM on November 25, 2016

Don't count the Pope to save us.

The Pope's job, and role, is so much staggeringly larger and different than a U.S. election, and he most certainly has a far different idea of what "saving us" entails than you do.

And frankly, as someone who adores this Pope in comparison to any other Pope I've experienced, I still do not want him explicitly interfering in our politics. The morals he champions and values he seeks to encourage in American Catholics? Yes, I want those to play a role. But a religious figure himself? No. Just like I disdain the showboaty bishops who threaten to withhold communion from pro-choice politicians.
posted by sallybrown at 8:58 PM on November 25, 2016 [33 favorites]

I think a lot of people felt the same way. I had to go look it up on ballotopedia. And perhaps people thought slavery was already abolished. It's a shame it wasn't written more clearly.

This discussion and the linked Denver Post article has me slightly less ready to want to fight everyone I pass on the street here in the Denver metro area.

wtf is wrong with people
oh they don't read
I guess that's better than wanting to sentence criminals to slavery
posted by deludingmyself at 9:32 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

And while the reality-based community debates whether or not the pope should have made a clearer statement on the election, the far-right fake news machine assured the teeming millions that Francis endorsed Trump months ago.

A lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting its pants on.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:46 PM on November 25, 2016 [15 favorites]

Tax the shit out of the top 5% (not just income, get capital gains, dividends and wealth) and hand it back via higher welfare, the child tax credit and a childcare benefit.

Yes. But use more different word things.

Let's encourage the top 5% to give care for those who, like all of us, need support as children. Through wealth creation, market expansion, and shared value.
posted by petebest at 9:46 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Let's encourage the top 5% to give care for those who, like all of us, need support as children. Through wealth creation, market expansion, and shared value.
posted by petebest at 11:46 PM on November 25

You forgot elimination of troublesome regulations that inhibit growth.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 9:49 PM on November 25, 2016

Fidel always had an impeccable sense of timing.
posted by holgate at 10:24 PM on November 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Damn, and I modge podged my last Cohiba.
posted by clavdivs at 10:37 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Romeo y Julieta petit corona or bust, clav.
posted by holgate at 10:49 PM on November 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

ronald reagan probably once mistook his cat for his secretary of defense
posted by indubitable at 0:50 on November 26 [12 favorites +] [!]

Finally, I know what angrycat is named after. The slightly random 80s military engagements also now make a lot more sense.
posted by jaduncan at 11:03 PM on November 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

dribbling out of the racist yam's mouth

"Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters." - via NYTimes
posted by fairmettle at 11:13 PM on November 25, 2016 [18 favorites]

Electoral College must reject Trump unless he sells his businesses, top lawyers for [G.W.] Bush and Obama say.
posted by bryon at 11:20 PM on November 25, 2016 [50 favorites]

Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition.

But owning most of the non-state-owned TV stations and leaning on the state-owned ones helped.
posted by holgate at 11:27 PM on November 25, 2016 [17 favorites]

Another reason illegal immigrant farm labor is preferred, beyond low wages, is that illegal immigrants don't complain about safety violations because they don't want to get deported. Sometimes it's your usual corner-cutting grain silo safety stuff that some farmers do regardless and risk for themselves too. But other times -- my law school had a clinic that was working on a couple dozen cases of illegal immigrant laborers in NC who had been kept working in the fields while the fields were crop dusted which is hella illegal. Tons of pesticide violations with farmers literally spraying workers in the face rather than having them stop work for 30 seconds. And lots of them were locked in at night.

They were generally not allowed to speak with doctors even when clearly suffering from poisonings. Locking them in helped prevent it. They had to buy their own groceries and sometimes these were stolen from them when they left bunkroom to work.

They had the right to speak to attorneys, although their employers forbade it. Most didn't know that, and were too scared to anyway. (Priests and ministers were often the secret vector for talking to them.)

It'll be interesting if there actually is a crackdown and some farms (and some big box stores, and some ag processing plants) not only lose their illegal immigrant workforce but are expected to comply with ultra basic worker safety because now their workers feel secure in reporting being sprayed with poison or locked overnight in a firetrap or robbed of food by their employer. There's a big chunk of mostly-GOP leaning agribusinesses who have zero interest in complying with the law, and pay is the least of it. Be interesting to see how they react to a GOP administration that's actually serious about cracking down on undocumented immigrants in a way that hurts profits.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:56 AM on November 26, 2016 [117 favorites]

And frankly, as someone who adores this Pope in comparison to any other Pope I've experienced, I still do not want him explicitly interfering in our politics. The morals he champions and values he seeks to encourage in American Catholics? Yes, I want those to play a role. But a religious figure himself? No. Just like I disdain the showboaty bishops who threaten to withhold communion from pro-choice politicians.

Once significant figures in your organization have taken a side, remaining silent is not the same as remaining neutral.

I don't want the Church interfering in American politics either, but I'm afraid they already are exerting considerable influence.

At the very least it would have been appropriate for his holiness to explicitly disavow the fake news story Rhaomi's link mentions if Catholic leadership were aware of it, which, given how these things spread through social networks, it seems as though they probably ought to have been.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:05 AM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

There's a big chunk of mostly-GOP leaning agribusinesses who have zero interest in complying with the law, and pay is the least of it. Be interesting to see how they react to a GOP administration that's actually serious about cracking down on undocumented immigrants in a way that hurts profits.
posted by Eyebrows McGee 13 minutes ago [3 favorites +] [!]

This is the most tedious part of the 'Republican' worldview - follow many of their 'social' initiatives out to their logical conclusions and you run into a dead end in the form of a corporation resisting because of lost revenues or local gov nor willing to shell out for soc.services.

Because that, of course, would be the ramifications of the whole 'no more illegals!' Oh, ok, so you're gonna pay a living wage now? Of course you aren't - that average joe on the street doesn't see this very simple connection always always always surprises me.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:17 AM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

so. much. arizona is red. who's gonna cut the fucking grass in 2017? to a fair, here in blue colorado, who's gonna be roofing and framing?
posted by j_curiouser at 1:22 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

William Gibson @GreatDismal has been trying to articulate the post-election sensation of Trump's "win": "It feels a like a coup, but the way Uber feels like a cab company. Neither is either, legally. 'Disruption', as in [entrepreneur]-speak"
posted by Doktor Zed at 3:01 AM on November 26, 2016 [16 favorites]

From an outsider's perspective, cheap labor is a huge part of what has undone parts of the US. Not because of immigrants stealing jobs, but because of a lack of incentive for improvement.
Some 15 years ago, I visited two sister plants, one in Tennessee, one in Denmark. The one in Tennessee was huge, incredibly dirty and messy and had no structure to their production. The workers were unionized and had healthcare, but still their wages were less than half of those at the Danish plant. The Danish plant was small, as clean as a hospital (well cleaner..) and most of the work was done by robots in structured processes. Recently the Danish owners called me and told me they had taken over all the production and the Tennessee plant had been closed down. So yeah, people lost their jobs to globalization, but not to underpaid Chinese workers: to highly skilled Europeans with good wages and free healthcare.
Similarly: in the EU, there are very strong regulations on agriculture, protecting the animals and the land, not at all perfect, but way stricter than in the US. Also, even though most farmhands are migrant laborers in Europe too, most of them still get better pay than illegal immigrants in the US. This makes it difficult for European farmers to compete with American farmers on the global market and even within Europe in spite of tariffs. But more and more farmers are discovering that they can compete on quality, rather than price, and are changing to organic farming and smaller scale farming.
A decade ago, 9 out of 10 apples in my supermarket would have been American. Now there is rarely one box of American Granny Smith, even in Aldi. Instead there is a huge variety, and many organic choices, as well as many types of apple juice and cider. Even in poor neighborhoods and small towns. High costs have forced the manufacturers to develop high quality products or give up.
In Asia, where people worry a lot about the safety and quality of their food, organic products from Europe are selling more and more.
We still have a lot of bad industrial agriculture in Europe, and the VW scandal and inhuman labor-camps for tomato harvest in Southern Italy, and flaming racism, and there are strong forces trying to use that racism as a force to change Europe into something much more like the US, as in Brexit; but the point is that there is an incentive for change and improvement built into the rights for workers and high taxes, and that is a good thing which is acknowledged even by a lot of the big capitalists.
But also: the whole point of the EU is that all of this needs to be regulated on an international scale through trade agreements. A trade agreement can help secure workers rights as does the common market in Europe. This is the argument between Brussels and London right now: London wants a free market without free movement, and Brussels says no: workers need equal rights and protections throughout the market. I'm happy that TTIP is probably dead on arrival, because American policies seem to be dominant in the actual deal, but theoretically, a TTIP could mean a huge boost to American workers and to food and drug safety regulation. Global trade agreements are not per definition a bad thing. A new TTIP after Brexit, and when Trump is gone would have a much more European approach.
posted by mumimor at 3:36 AM on November 26, 2016 [51 favorites]

Clearly the solution is for all those struggling Rust Belt and Coal Country folks to move to the cities and take the jobs that will soon be vacated by undocumented immigrants when the mass deportations begin. I'm sure they'll get right on that.

More realistically, what we'll get a is TV Show version of many of these policies, coupled with a barrage of fake news claiming big, real successes. Look for occasional, high-profile "raids"by ICE with little real followup (both in terms of general impact and in terms of sorting who is and isn't actually undocumented). Expect social media to light up with false statistics and claims about X% or X million deportations after the Big Raid, the one Obama wouldn't authorize.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of undocumented workers will continue being hired for sub-minimum wages by the usual suspects, and Trump's people will quietly assure the governors of various staters that there'll be no real impact on the labor supply or the wage structure that props up agribusiness. People, will be happy to hear of deportations, real or false, and happier when it's "proven" that mass deportations don't *really* have any of the predictable effects on food prices or the labor supply.
posted by kewb at 4:15 AM on November 26, 2016 [19 favorites]

The Pope was one of those single individuals who could have tipped the election and he made a few tepid and oblique statements that were ignored. He could have stood against the concept of the ostensible leader of the free world not being something who openly embraced torture and murder, hated and deceit, and meekly backed off.

I have family in two different archdioceses who are catholic. The word that came down through the pulpit from the archbishops was to vote for trump. The main reason given was the supreme court and abortion. I should also add that these family members voted Hillary. Their takeaway from the message was that the church doesn't give a shit about the already living.

Although he should be at the top of the decision chain, the pope doesn't seem to wield much power with American church leadership as you might expect.
posted by SteveInMaine at 4:52 AM on November 26, 2016 [17 favorites]

As part of my personal bit of protest I wrote: The Strange Case of Donald Trump and Mr. Hyde.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:26 AM on November 26, 2016 [31 favorites]

Cannot sufficiently favorite the above, this is outrageous, must have larger and more profound favorites.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:30 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Trump's coming war on sanctuary cities: “The first question that comes to mind when you are talk about deporting two to three million people is: Who are the bodies that are going to do that?” For mass deportations to actually happen, the local police departments and the immigration authorities are going to have to present a united front - and, in California sanctuary districts at least, local police departments are not willing to do so.

California sanctuary districts? Sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?
posted by Servo5678 at 5:33 AM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

But owning most of the non-state-owned TV stations and leaning on the state-owned ones helped.

I'm presuming at this point that with the effective dissolution of the FCC, Trump will make sure his friends can buy up the terrestrial broadcasters, while removing any rules that prevent them becoming propaganda arms. And those who don't like NPR will soon have nothing to worry about.

Some helpful reading.
posted by Devonian at 6:11 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

> "Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters."

Grimes: Can you believe that guy? He's in his office making a pathetic attempt to look professional.
Carl: Hey, what do you got against Homer, anyway?
Grimes: Are you kidding? Does this whole plant have some disease where you can't see that he's an idiot? Look here. [points out a chart tacked to the bulletin board] Accidents have doubled every year since he became safety inspector, and, and meltdowns have tripled. Has he been fired? No. Has he been disciplined? No, no.
Lenny: Eh, everybody makes mistakes. That's why they put erasers on pencils.
Carl: Yeah, Homer's okay. Give him a break.
Grimes: No! Homer is not okay. And I want everyone in this plant to realize it. I would die a happy man if I could prove to you that Homer Simpson has the intelligence of a 6-year-old.
Lenny: [to Carl] So, how are you doing?
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:19 AM on November 26, 2016 [24 favorites]

Can we stop acting as if Catholics follow the Pope/the Church round like ducklings? The USCCB is forever trying to interfere politically (remember when they wanted to refuse John Kerry communion?). American Catholics have a lifetime of experience ignoring things the Church says.

If Francis came out hard against Trump, yes, it might make a difference in turning out politically disengaged Catholics for whom Catholic social teaching has some resonance. And, yes, if those people are in the right states, that matters. But that's a far cry from Francis commanding millions of votes, which seems to be where this thread is, as if it's 1960 and god forbid Kennedy kissed someone's ring.
posted by hoyland at 6:28 AM on November 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

I was listening to a podcast this morning (Interrobang) in which the host tried to explain how she felt as a Jew when she saw a Nazi flag. She explained how it opened a file in her head and all the grotesque results of Hitler's regime came tumbling out: pictures of the starving children in the ghettos, piles of skulls, gay men being torn from their family and thrown in the ovens, and so on. It made me think about we how we have grown accustomed to the term and overused it (Grammar Nazi, Soup Nazi) and we have lost the visceral impact the word should invoke. Tia Tequila dressed up in a Nazi uniform and giving the salute should be hounded out of society as a monster but we just grimly accept that she is trolling us and we move on.

It also made me wonder if any of these modern day Nazis can be reached. If you sat them down and forced them to watch documentary footage of the Holocaust would it make them rethink their ideas or would they be hugging themselves in glee at the thought of being allowed to treat other human beings like vermin? I guess I am wondering if these guys are theoretical Nazis or do they actually want to bring on another Holocaust?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:49 AM on November 26, 2016 [38 favorites]

> Between R-Money finding his principles and Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn going relentlessly hard against the alt-right on twitter, I am honestly wondering if this election is going to have the creation of Social Justice or Reform Mormons as a side effect.

> I think we will see a growth of liberal/left folks who identify as very religious and explicitly connect their social justice politics to their faith.

It blows me away, but I've been using faith & patriotism to fairly strong effect when countering my Trump-supporting friends & family. My roots are upper-middle class, suburban, mainline protestants & catholics - all very active Republicans, a close friend of the family even has GOP on their vanity license plate. I am the black sheep liberal. My faith was also greatly shaped by my Quaker boarding school experience - which further drives my faith-based political activism, which is on the liberal side for reasons I've never fully comprehended... how/why in the heck are peace and equality liberal ideals?

A decade or so ago, I was in South Africa with mom and the church I grew up in. We were traveling throughout the country looking at various groups & organizations doing various things so that we could come back to the States and speak to local organizations wanting to send funds over. Much of the trip was truly inspiring - great people doing great things with poverty, education, and AIDS. One stop, however, shook my faith like nothing else had before or, until the election, since.

We were in a rural farming community visiting a mission that seemed to be mostly about providing wealthy white high school & college students from Cape Town a nice couple months out in the country. I paired up with a few of the kids as we went to a day care center of some sort. Lots of little kids (4-8), all poor and undereducated, getting a boost to help get them ready for school. We pulled up with trunks filled with food and warm clothes. During recess an adorable little boy came up to us and asked for an orange. The girl I was with said, "I can give you an orange, but if you tell me you've accepted Jesus Christ in your heart, I can give you this bag of food, too." My reaction was less then kind. When I returned to the Mission and met up with my mom, I told her what happened and added "and you wonder why I don't go to church or say that I am a Christian. I want nothing to do with it."

I've held that disgust for years, but was able to compartmentalize it - to say, in modern ways, #NotAllChristians. This election has shaken me in a very similar way. So many Christians spitting on the qualities (acceptance, equality, and love) of the man they've named their faith after in order to, somehow, prove their faith and make their religion stronger.

In some ways, I feel like my discussions and debates have gone backwards - instead of arguing that Pro-Choice is, actually, the Pro-Life stance (for my friends who are near single issue voters for the rights of the unborn), I'm now focused on the very basics of love & equality. But in other ways, I feel like I am now, finally, patching up the crumbling foundation. Tensions are a bit high post election, but I think the work here will have a much stronger, longer lasting effect.

Or, well, I hope so.

> I don't want the Church interfering in American politics either, but I'm afraid they already are exerting considerable influence.

The Church, for better and worse, has always had a massive influence on American politics. It's not all bad - providing a safe place for Blacks to come together, being a driving force in the abolition movement, and changing the way we treat mental illness are but a few good things. It's not about getting the Church out of our political sphere (that's an impossible task), it's about understanding how & why the church is involved, and then working to make sure it's doing more good than harm in the political realm.
posted by imbri at 6:54 AM on November 26, 2016 [43 favorites]

@EvieN:

This is the worst fucking verse of We Didn't Start the Fire ever.
posted by Wordshore at 7:04 AM on November 26, 2016 [31 favorites]

I wonder if Billy Joel would do an entire verse of We Didn't Start The Fire using Trump's cabinet appointees?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:13 AM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

Clearly the solution is for all those struggling Rust Belt and Coal Country folks to move to the cities and take the jobs that will soon be vacated by undocumented immigrants when the mass deportations begin. I'm sure they'll get right on that.

These folks are already, in large part, moving to metro areas. Especially the rust belt areas, where rural counties have been losing population for a while. A lot of them are absolutely bleeding young people; if you look at their population pyramids there's a major drop-off as soon as people hit 18, especially for men.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:16 AM on November 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Fidel Castro is dead!

Ladies and Gentlemen, your President-Elect of the United States.
posted by Talez at 7:17 AM on November 26, 2016 [36 favorites]

It also made me wonder if any of these modern day Nazis can be reached.

I suspect so. I have seen reports that the same de-radicalization techniques designed for muslims work on white supremacists. But it's tricky because messing up the process can cause them to double down on their hatred. And of course all this requires infrastructure dedicated to the effort.

I wonder if there is too much baggage associated with the term Nazi for people to to the mental legwork of saying "oh yes, that is happening here." Maybe if we flip the tables and use the language the right uses against Muslims, it will resonate more. I want news stations across the land asking "What is the President Doing About the Radicalization of White Youth??"
posted by C'est la D.C. at 7:17 AM on November 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

You forgot elimination of troublesome regulations that inhibit growth.

No that's the Strict Father language that that goatf--ker Paul Ryan wants us to use. It'd have to be "growing together to overcome outside challenges".

Or something.
/Lakoff
posted by petebest at 7:30 AM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

A good summary of the situation, actions and thoughts of the Clinton campaign on the vote and recounts by the campaign's election lawyer Marc Elias.

TL;DR They have done a lot of investigation and analysis of the results to see if there was suspicious activity and didn't see any which is why they didn't file for recounts. But they will participate in the the recounts now that Stein has filed.

Listening and Responding To Calls for an Audit and Recount
posted by chris24 at 7:35 AM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

A Scottish comedian's view from before the election "He wants to be the President, place would be a toilet if he became President." Skip to about the 2 minute mark if you want to skip the Chicago architectural tour. Also do watch the John Lewis ad and parody linked at the top of the thread.
posted by epo at 7:36 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

rise in power of evangelical women against Trump

Yeah, I think that one is a non-starter. White evangelical women embraced Trump with near unanimity. They think he's fine. There's no reason to think they're going to reject him.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:40 AM on November 26, 2016 [26 favorites]

White Evangelical women love them some Strict Father, amirite St. Teresa's?

Unless they lost the popular vote like a Loser, and Betrayed their Trust by forgetting to fix everything, day 1.
posted by petebest at 8:05 AM on November 26, 2016

My white evangelical mother doesn't consider Trump a Christian but voted for him anyway because of the Supreme Court, abortion and the gays.
posted by Slothrup at 8:19 AM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

One of the NPI speakers did an election demographics post mortem. His claim was Trump killed Clinton with the evangelicals for absolutely free when he said in my White House we will be saying Merry Christmas.
posted by bukvich at 8:20 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

holgate: "It's notable how most of the Organization's co-branded property projects are in countries that one doesn't associate with stable or transparent government, but instead have ruling parties and personalities who cultivate their own favourites in private enterprise."

I'm not sure if this is a direct reflection on the brand or if like a pyramid scheme where Trump has grabbed the low hanging, high profit fruit and now has to keep moving to more distant and less profitable suckers markets to keep the scheme going.
posted by Mitheral at 8:21 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

C'est la D.C.: Maybe if we flip the tables and use the language the right uses against Muslims, it will resonate more. I want news stations across the land asking "What is the President Doing About the Radicalization of White Youth??"

@AkilahObviously: Donald Trump won't say "radical white nationalists."
posted by deludingmyself at 8:27 AM on November 26, 2016 [31 favorites]

His claim was Trump killed Clinton with the evangelicals for absolutely free when he said in my White House we will be saying Merry Christmas.

Here was his pledge:

If I become president, we're gonna be saying Merry Christmas at every store ... You can leave happy holidays at the corner.

So not just in the White House, but at every store. It is such a ridiculous claim that I'm surprised anyone would believe it. Just another one of his many promises that will never be fulfilled.
posted by zakur at 8:50 AM on November 26, 2016 [17 favorites]

So not just in the White House, but at every store. It is such a ridiculous claim that I'm surprised anyone would believe it. Just another one of his many promises that will never be fulfilled.

Oh believe me this was a Hot Topic! at our house, we chewed on this endlessly. For example, "So in the land of Freedomz we will force Business owners to say Merry Christmas. How exactly?" However when confronted on this topic our religious family members deflected it so easily. "Businesses want to say Merry Christmas but some customers get offended and they are afraid of being sued." "Most Americans are Christians, why doesn't Liberals understand that? We live in a Democracy yet you never let the majority decide." Blah blah blah. Nobody's mind was changed.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:57 AM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

A friend with some skin in the crypto game has just sent me a long document about the inter-relationships between power structures in America and the legal and constitutional framework that defines their abilities (grim reading indeed). I'll doubtless get back to this once I've digested it and worked out whether it's being paranoid or realistic, but this rather caught my attention:

"We note in passing that the President has been granted the authority to call out the military for domestic policing purposes at his sole discretion, simply by virtue of declaring an “emergency.” (The most authoritative look at these matters to date can be found in William Arkin’s oddly incomplete and strangely unhelpful book “American Coup.”) To put the point bluntly, the President has been granted dictatorial authority without either checks and balances or oversight also being put into place."

Is this accurate?
posted by Devonian at 8:58 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

At least we learned how little you have to promise in order to get evangelical Christians to compromise their alleged beliefs.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:59 AM on November 26, 2016 [45 favorites]

zakur: "So not just in the White House, but at every store."

Can't wait till the synagogue gift shop employees start saying Merry Christmas.
posted by Mitheral at 9:02 AM on November 26, 2016 [25 favorites]

You forgot elimination of troublesome regulations that inhibit growth.

It's much simpler if you just say "pro-cancer".
posted by srboisvert at 9:03 AM on November 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

I think that corporations are pretty easily bullied, and they'll say Merry Christmas if the assholes put enough pressure on them to say Merry Christmas. I've personally witnessed assholes chewing out minimum-wage-earning sales people for saying Happy Holidays, and frankly I'm willing to let the Christian supremacist trash have that one to spare retail workers their abuse. I don't really understand why anyone would want to make their holiday greetings into hate speech, but I've come to the conclusion that there are a lot of things about Christians that I'm never going to understand.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:04 AM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

The evangelical Trump voters I know get way more upset about "Happy Holidays" and Starbucks cups than the children living in poverty in their towns. That tells me all I need to know about their beliefs and morals.
posted by melissasaurus at 9:07 AM on November 26, 2016 [130 favorites]

Businesses want to say Merry Christmas but some customers get offended and they are afraid of being sued."

I'm bad a dog whistles but I assume they mean it's the Jews who want to sue?
posted by Room 641-A at 9:08 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have family in two different archdioceses who are catholic. The word that came down through the pulpit from the archbishops was to vote for trump. The main reason given was the supreme court and abortion.

In my experience, there's near perfect overlap between the archbishops, bishops, and parish priests who freely lecture their congregations about how they should or shouldn't vote and those who grumble about Pope Francis (and Jesuits in general). They also tend to be um...poor emissaries of the faith and especially bad at retaining young people in their parishes.
posted by sallybrown at 9:11 AM on November 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Oh believe me this was a Hot Topic! at our house, we chewed on this endlessly. For example, "So in the land of Freedomz we will force Business owners to say Merry Christmas. How exactly?" However when confronted on this topic our religious family members deflected it so easily. "Businesses want to say Merry Christmas but some customers get offended and they are afraid of being sued." "Most Americans are Christians, why doesn't Liberals understand that? We live in a Democracy yet you never let the majority decide." Blah blah blah. Nobody's mind was changed.

Majority rules is not a particularly strong argument right now, but sure, let's do it, I'll gladly trade them Merry Christmas for a Hillary Clinton presidency.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:13 AM on November 26, 2016 [39 favorites]

I'm bad a dog whistles but I assume they mean it's the Jews who want to sue?

No. This time it's godless liberals. In reality nobody gives a shit. Like if you go to Dubai and someone says As-salamu alaykum once a transaction finishes you'd have to be a complete dick to take it personally.
posted by Talez at 9:14 AM on November 26, 2016 [11 favorites]

I took a Psych 101 class in college, as part of which we had to volunteer for experiments being put on by the grad students in the Psych program. For mine, I showed up and was ushered into a small room with the lights off and a TV playing. The TV alternated 2 or 3 minute clips of historical footage of Nazis with the little Jerry Seinfeld comedy bits that opened episodes of Seinfeld. I was asked to rate my feelings and general vibe at the time and about two hours after the experiment ended. At the time I was grossed out. Two hours later my feelings of disgust and horror had grown substantially, and I was filled with dread. It was like the clips had poisoned my mood, and there was something about the bits of banal comedy in between them that just amped up the horror.

(Thinking of this in retrospect, especially with the connection between Bannon and Seinfeld, is so creepy and weird.)
posted by sallybrown at 9:18 AM on November 26, 2016 [14 favorites]

I found this Anne Helen Peterson piece on The New Evangelical Woman vs. Trump really interesting. Glennon Doyle Melton, whom she writes about, just came out.

I get why so many are dubious, but I think there could be some coalition-building opportunity with young evangelical women in the next four years...
posted by sallybrown at 9:21 AM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

Guys evangelicals (mostly) don't think Trump will actually force businesses to say "Merry Christmas." It's just social signaling. "The thing you are pissed off about? I too am pissed about it! Or at least I understand your concerns!" It's just pandering and they know it, but it's the sort of pandering they require to get on board with the candidate. Liberals have their own required pandering stuff that you have to say to signal your group sympathies but follow-through is understood to be limited.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:27 AM on November 26, 2016 [32 favorites]

Evangelical Christians are not an organized, monolithic group. I grew up as one and have many relatives who still consider themselves Evangelical. Many voted for Clinton or didn't vote for a presidential candidate at all.

Exit polls suggested that upwards of 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Hillary Clinton got a lower percentage of the white evangelical vote than Obama did in 2012. White evangelicals actually were pretty monolithic on this one, and your relatives are apparently outliers.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:30 AM on November 26, 2016 [26 favorites]

Post death, Trump condemns Castro as "brutal dictator"

from the article, Trump used to not hate Cuba so much and then he got accused of violating the 1990s embargo and voila

Ha ha ha ha ha sob we are so fucked.
posted by angrycat at 9:31 AM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

Post death, Trump condemns Castro as "brutal dictator"

Glass half-full view: at least Trump still disagrees with Putin on something.

(The White House's statement was so anodyne...strange to find myself more in agreement with Trump, even if I think his statement is over-the-top and has more to do with optics than any informed opinion.)
posted by sallybrown at 9:34 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I swear half the political conversation online recently has read like people are trying to predict what happens in the next episode of LOST
posted by beerperson at 9:38 AM on November 26, 2016 [35 favorites]

Here is Nancy Pelosi's statement, which I think is much better than the White House's or Trump's.
posted by sallybrown at 9:38 AM on November 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Thinking back to the glory days of the Cold War, I'm surprised that nobody's used the term 'domino effect' to describe how Brexit emboldened Trump, and Trump will embolden Le Pen.

It seems a suitable time to revive the idea. (Somebody probably has, and I missed it.)
posted by Devonian at 9:38 AM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

The White House's statement was so anodyne..

But that's what international politics is. It's about holding your tongue and being diplomatic. Trump could learn a lesson about being a statesman here but is apparently still running for president. You don't walk into a room with your biggest rival, fart in their face and walk out flipping the bird with both hands without looking back.
posted by Talez at 9:39 AM on November 26, 2016 [27 favorites]

Clinton campaign: We are taking part in the recount
posted by XtinaS at 9:39 AM on November 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

The TV alternated 2 or 3 minute clips of historical footage of Nazis with the little Jerry Seinfeld comedy bits that opened episodes of Seinfeld.

So, what's the deal with fascism? Everyone marching around, saluting, yelling the same slogans. It's kind of like the government has taken some lessons from Apple, except the government doesn't give you a shiny new phone - they give you a shiny new ultranationalism.
posted by nubs at 9:46 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee's comment on pandering reminded me of Mark Lilla's turn on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday [transcript] and I wanted to reach through the radio and punch him in the voice box to get him to shut. up.

LILLA: To take one example, I mean, the whole issue of bathrooms and gender - in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people. People were misinformed about certain things, but it was really a question of where young people would be going to the bathroom and where they would be in lockers. Is that really the issue we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.

INSKEEP: I'm just imagining some of your fellow liberals being rather angry at you saying such a thing.

LILLA: Well, those are the liberals who don't want to win. Those are the liberals who are in love with noble defeats, and I'm sick and tired of noble defeats. I prefer a dirty victory to a noble defeat. The president who did the most for black Americans in 20th century history was Lyndon Johnson, and he got his hands dirty by dealing with Southern senators, Southern congressmen, horse trading with them, cajoling them, learning what not to talk about. And he got civil rights passed and Great Society programs. That should be the model. Get over yourself.

Get over myself? No. I don't think so. The right says a lot of stuff that scares me, and no one is telling them to be quiet about abortion rights, voter disenfranchisement, or climate change conspiracies because it might make this baby liberal cry. I do get the whole idea of winning at any cost and I can even sympathize with it to an extent, but I don't want to belong to a party that's too cowardly to do the right thing with respect to the civil rights of minority groups just because they'll scare people and lose elections. It's time to fight dirty, but they should take the fight to the Republican members of government, not just zip their lips because scared conservatives might have to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple or use a bathroom that a transgender person might have used once.
posted by xyzzy at 9:52 AM on November 26, 2016 [51 favorites]

Seriously, Tom Cotton?

"Fidel Castro created hell on earth for the Cuban people. He will now become intimately familiar with what he wrought."
posted by box at 9:53 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jokes on you, Ton Cotton! There's no afterlife and he's just dead. Sometimes the bad people win. C.f. Trump.
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:58 AM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

heh, someone tweeted back that the location of hell on earth was actually Arkansas
posted by angrycat at 10:01 AM on November 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

Shorter Lilla: The "under the bus" idiom is great, but what if Democrats could win an election by literally driving a bus back and forth over its core constituencies? Why, who among us wouldn't sign up to be the drivers?
posted by tonycpsu at 10:05 AM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

Tom Cotton, the perfect person to lecture us about dictatorial, hateful, authoritarian impulses and restricting the rights of others.
posted by sallybrown at 10:06 AM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

When Trump calls someone a brutal dictator, I'm pretty sure he does so with admiration, and a grim resolve to be more brutal than that dead chump.
posted by bigbigdog at 10:06 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

> You don't walk into a room with your biggest rival, fart in their face and walk out flipping the bird with both hands without looking back.

Based on what I've read, I wouldn't be flabbergasted to learn that Lyndon Johnson did, in fact, do this.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:12 AM on November 26, 2016 [23 favorites]

Could we save the Castro stuff for the Castro thread?
posted by corb at 10:23 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Recounts Are Far More Likely To Help Trump Than Hurt Him

Here’s the thing: the chances that the outcome in the three decisive states will be overturned are almost nil. The odds are against Trump losing the Electoral College votes of even one state. And when the recounts validate his Electoral College in his victory, this will serve to legitimize his presidency. There might good-government reasons to do the recounts anyway. But contrary to a lot of arguments I’ve seen, one thing these recounts are not is good hardball politics. They will almost certainly work to Trump’s benefit by suggesting that the election was on the square and serving to mask the many ways in which the election was, in fact illegitimate. [...]

But, of course, it is nearly impossible for an election to be rigged in the way that Trump and Republican vote suppressors claim that Democrats rig elections. The recounts are not going to reveal a lot of voter-impersonation fraud or ballot-stuffing.  But this isn’t the point. The 2016 election was, in fact, a massive fail for American democracy: [...]

Focusing on one, narrow element of the election that probably wasn’t severely dysfunctional is a great way to conceal and stifle discussion about what really went wrong. Trump will get to trumpet that the election was fair when it was anything but. If this is hardball anti-Trump politics it couldn’t be any more illogical.

To be clear, for once I don’t think Stein is trying to help Republicans here. Given that she’s a sucker for conspiracy theories, she may well think there’s a real chance that this will help Clinton. But, as usual, she’s wrong. The recounts will almost certainly help to legitimize Trump rather than undermining him.

posted by tonycpsu at 10:26 AM on November 26, 2016 [25 favorites]

Yeah. If anything they need an audit not a recount.
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:29 AM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

From the Wisconsin Election Commission:

A recount is different than an audit and is more rigorous, Haas explained. More than 100 reporting units across the state were randomly selected for a separate audit of their voting equipment as required by state law, and that process has already begun. Electronic voting equipment audits determine whether all properly-marked ballots are accurately tabulated by the equipment. In a recount, all ballots (including those that were originally hand counted) are examined to determine voter intent before being retabulated. In addition, the county boards of canvassers will examine other documents, including poll lists, written absentee applications, rejected absentee ballots, and provisional ballots before counting the votes.
posted by Mothlight at 10:45 AM on November 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people

Whatever tiny morsel of truth this might contain, and it would be tiny, is just swamped by his refusal to consider that there are also lots of voters that actually like trans people and homosexual people and will actually turn out to the polls to defend them. That this "identity politics" stuff is something that motivates liberal voters.

The president who did the most for black Americans in 20th century history was Lyndon Johnson, and he got his hands dirty by dealing with Southern senators, Southern congressmen, horse trading with them, cajoling them, learning what not to talk about. And he got civil rights passed and Great Society programs.

This is just pig-ignorant nonsense. He got civil rights passed because nonsoutherners were disgusted by Jim Crow and there were enough of their representatives in Congress to force it into law over the opposition of southern MCs. He didn't work with southern senators and representatives -- or if he did, he did a really size-extra-shit job of it because almost none of them voted for it -- he just had enough support elsewhere to make them not matter.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:47 AM on November 26, 2016 [25 favorites]

examined to determine voter intent before being retabulated.

Oh hi, hanging chads, I missed you. Said no one ever.
posted by corb at 10:50 AM on November 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

My white, evangelical, very southern mother called Trump a "bigot and pig" and Pence a "creep". From a southern lady, those are very strong words. I don't think I've ever heard her call anyone a bigot with the exception of David fucking Duke when he was running for something back in the 90s and lived in our town.

Pretty sure my mother has voted straight Republican her entire life but would tell anyone who would listen this time around why she was voting Clinton. Same with my fiscal-conservative deacon father. Neither of them "liked" Clinton but they were highly motivated to vote against Trump, and they live in a battleground state now.

Among the younger, Christian southerners I know on facebook I do not see a single one pleased about the election. I see an awful lot of hand wringing actually about the state of American Christianity.

The NPR article linked about pollster definitions of what an "evangelical" is kind of mirror my own confusion every time this gets talked about in the news. What IS an evangelical? Are my parents? My old church friends from the deep south? Some of the definitions used seem to range from "culturally Christian" to specific groups like the SBC. It really makes no sense to me and I grew up in that culture.
posted by bradbane at 10:53 AM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

Welp here is Kellyanne Conway's take on the recount:

@kevcirilli First comment from Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway on Clinton joining Wisconsin recount: "What a pack of sore losers."

The link takes you to her full statement that continues

After asking Trump and his team a million times on the trail, "Will HE accept the election results? it turns out Team Hillary and their new BFF Jill Stein can't accept reality. Rather than adhere to the tradition of graciously conceding and wishing the winner well, they've opted to waste millions of dollars and dismiss the democratic process. The people have spoken. Time to listen up.

1. Nice bit of sexism there. Compare "Trump and his team" vs. "Team Hillary."
2. Dismissive bit of sarcasm "BFF" describing the relationship which was a move instigated by Stein and interested party being interested.
3. The reason why Conway's candidate was asked a "million" times if he would accept the results is because he indicated he would not if he lost.
4. Hillary Clinton did adhere to the tradition of graciously conceding.
5. "They" have opted to waste millions. Who is "they"? Not Clinton. And I would argue that the money is not being wasted.
6. The charge of "dismissing Democracy" is really rich because Democracy means everyone's vote is counted. Which is why a recount is valuable.
7. I would suggest that since millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton than DJT, perhaps Conway et al need to listen up. Just a thought.

Man she is able to pack a whole lot of disagreeableness in one short paragraph. I can't wait for her to become press secretary! (said SLofG with a massive eyeroll.)
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:13 AM on November 26, 2016 [25 favorites]

The president who did the most for black Americans in 20th century history was Lyndon Johnson, and he got his hands dirty by dealing with Southern senators, Southern congressmen, horse trading with them, cajoling them, learning what not to talk about. And he got civil rights passed and Great Society programs.

This is just pig-ignorant nonsense. He got civil rights passed because nonsoutherners were disgusted by Jim Crow and there were enough of their representatives in Congress to force it into law over the opposition of southern MCs.

Yeah, Johnson also had Democratic majorities in both the house and senate for the first half of his term, and Democratic supermajorities in both the house and senate for the second half of his term.
posted by galaxy rise at 11:23 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's just social signaling.

like a dog pissing on every upright thing it encounters.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:23 AM on November 26, 2016

The Times just posted a long deep dive on Trump's global businesses and conflicts of interest, Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President, involving 12 credited reporters and researchers around the world:

“It is uncharted territory, really in the history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and before that at the Defense Department.

The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.

posted by zachlipton at 11:34 AM on November 26, 2016 [16 favorites]

The Last Democrat Left Fighting - If Foster Campbell can win a run-off for Louisiana’s Senate seat, the Democrats will be that much closer to stopping Donald Trump.
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:40 AM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

Another article about how Trump's many businesses outside the United States will impact American Foreign Policy

NYTimes Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President

In Ireland and Scotland, executives from Mr. Trump’s golf courses have been waging two separate battles with local officials. The most recent centers on the Trump Organization’s plans to build a flood-prevention sea wall at the course on the Irish coast. Some environmentalists say the wall could destroy an endangered snail’s habitat — a dispute that will soon involve the president of the United States.

And in Turkey, officials including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a religiously conservative Muslim, demanded that Mr. Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. More recently, after Mr. Trump came to the defense of Mr. Erdogan — suggesting that he had the right to crack down harshly on dissidents after a failed coup — the calls for action against Trump Towers have stopped, fueling worries that Mr. Trump’s policies toward Turkey might be shaped by his commercial interests.

These tangled ties already have some members of Congress — including at least one Republican representative — calling on Mr. Trump to provide more information on his international operations, or perhaps for a congressional inquiry into them.

“You rightly criticized Hillary for Clinton Foundation,” Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, said in a Twitter message on Monday. “If you have contracts w/foreign govts, it’s certainly a big deal, too. #DrainTheSwamp”

Starts with an overview of the situation (including the question of who provides security for Trump businesses in the Middle East) and then gives particulars on a country by country basis.


Ack! Zachlipton beat me to the post but I will just leave this here as I have chosen different quotes.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:43 AM on November 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

The Recounts Are Far More Likely To Help Trump Than Hurt Him

You know what? I've made the mistake of wading into comments sections and red state Facebook pages, and every last Trump supporter out there that I've read anything from believes as absolute fact that the 2 million and growing lead for Clinton in the popular vote is entirely attributed to the fact that there are "3 million illegal aliens" in the US. Who voted, apparently. Anything at all that finally goddamn proves--at least for the historic record, since none of the hardcore Trumpites will believe it anyway--that there was no such showing at the polls of those ineligible to vote, at least in the sample size of a handful of states, is fine by me.
posted by blue suede stockings at 11:46 AM on November 26, 2016 [25 favorites]

The Guardian is reporting that the Russians were attempting a military coup in the capitol of Serbia

Serbia has deported a group of Russians suspected of involvement in a coup plot in neighbouring Montenegro, the Guardian has learned, in the latest twist in a murky sequence of events that apparently threatened the lives of two European prime ministers.

The plotters were allegedly going to dress in police uniforms to storm the Montenegrin parliament in Podgorica, shoot the prime minister, Milo Ðjukanović, and install a pro-Moscow party.

Fuckin Putin. I think I have read more about Russia in the past 2 months than I have in the past 20 years. I can't wait for them to be booed at Eurovision again.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:47 AM on November 26, 2016 [20 favorites]

Anything at all that finally goddamn proves--at least for the historic record, since none of the hardcore Trumpites will believe it anyway--that there was no such showing at the polls of those ineligible to vote, at least in the sample size of a handful of states, is fine by me.

I agree, but the folks spreading that stuff are just going to say "but California" and it will start anew.
posted by zachlipton at 11:51 AM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Donald Trump Has Broken the Constitution - The President-Elect is a figure out of authoritarian politics, not the American tradition
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:53 AM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

Anything at all that finally goddamn proves--at least for the historic record, since none of the hardcore Trumpites will believe it anyway--that there was no such showing at the polls of those ineligible to vote, at least in the sample size of a handful of states, is fine by me.

I agree, but the folks spreading that stuff are just going to say "but California" and it will start anew.

Yup, that's why I clarified it's not for their sake, it's for the historic record. We've lost the truth war with that portion of the population but goddamn if I don't want to etch into stone the truth somewhere for the future, whatever that "future" even looks like now.
posted by blue suede stockings at 11:54 AM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oddly enough I was thinking about California (and New York's) state of blueness and wondering how we can bottle that up and sprinkle it around the rest of the United States. Is it just living cheek by jowl with a more cosmopolitan crowd? In other words the city vs. the rural vote? Or are Californian rural voters also more inclined to vote Democrat? What is the difference between Pennsylvania or Florida and California? Why is California more reliably Blue? Both Senators have been Democrats since 1992 and the last time CA voted for a Republican President was 1988, George H. W. Bush.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:07 PM on November 26, 2016

'My blood ran cold': Christiane Amanpour on Trump media comments
posted by Golden Eternity at 12:16 PM on November 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Why is California more reliably Blue?

I would guess generally speaking, the prevailing divide is urban/rural. California is one of the more urban states. Further divide between suburban/exurban/city might help explain differences between states with similar urban/rural divide.
posted by cell divide at 12:16 PM on November 26, 2016

Statement from President-Elect Donald J. Trump on the Ridiculous Green Party Recount Request
posted by zachlipton at 12:17 PM on November 26, 2016

It certainly wouldn't hurt for some of the big tech corporations to spread their facilities out to more states, set up a big Google HQ in Michigan, for example, or if some relatively progressive company moved some jobs to other midwest states, then the economies there would do better as more retail and entertainment options grew and more people moved there to work or support those who worked for the companies. Spread the wealth like the military supply companies do and more states will support policies attractive to the company and their workers. It also helps diversify the populations and the production capabilities for the areas, which is good for longer term local stability.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:17 PM on November 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

I swear that Tulsi Gabbard has been discussed in this post but CTRL F came up with zilch. I am not going to link but david duke is thrilled that she might be SOS.
posted by futz at 12:18 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

set up a big Google HQ in Michigan

It exists already in Ann Arbor.
posted by cell divide at 12:19 PM on November 26, 2016

Trump's people may be right about Stein, this will be the most attention she ever gets and is getting a lot of money for doing it to likely little end of note. Still, people in desperate times seeking desperate measures in hopes of a better alternative sin't surprising either.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:20 PM on November 26, 2016

There is also a correlation between education level and being "Blue," especially when you get to people with post-graduate degrees. Cities like NYC and San Fran are very expensive and very competitive work-wise, and I would guess they have higher ratios of people with post-grad degrees than more conservative areas do. That and people flock to be with like-minded others, increasing the divide. You also see this kind of a deep-deep blue pocket in DC and its burbs, also very high-education areas.
posted by sallybrown at 12:22 PM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

It exists already in Ann Arbor.

Ah, the pain of not fact checking comes home. Nonetheless, further spreading the wealth, in theory, could still be a help, even if my chosen example wasn't too keen.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:24 PM on November 26, 2016

The point still stands, but I don't think it will happen for political reasons, it will happen for economic reasons. Ann Arbor is becoming a knowledge and autonomous vehicle hub, mainly because of the excellent (state-funded) University. It also happens to be a very "Blue" city in more ways than one. There are other places around the country which are trying to develop knowledge and technology hubs in "Red" states, and if they succeed other powers in Silicon Valley and New York will surely take notice.
posted by cell divide at 12:30 PM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Now, this is interesting. Trump comes out swinging (twitter) against the recount but against Jill Stein, very deliberately painting this as a Green Party effort: "This recount is just a way for Jill Stein . . . to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount . . . . This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded . . . ."

I disagree with Ben Jacobs that this is "taking the high road," but am not sure what it is. Trump wanting to portray himself and Clinton as a united front? Playing down the number of people unhappy with the result?
posted by sallybrown at 12:32 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would have to think many workers would, eventually, find such locations more attractive too just for affordability reasons if nothing else.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:33 PM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

There are other places around the country which are trying to develop knowledge and technology hubs in "Red" states, and if they succeed other powers in Silicon Valley and New York will surely take notice.

I think that when that happens, though, it tends to create or exacerbate political and social divisions *within* states. People benefit really unequally: there are those who have the skills and education (and proximity) to get the new, good jobs, and there are other people who feel left behind or hurt by things like rising property prices. And the people who feel left behind can sometimes resent taxes funding things like public universities or infrastructure improvements that help the cities and college towns that benefit. I'm 100% in favor of more tech investment in red and purple states, but it's not going to be a panacea.

Anyway, I think a lot of the difference between states is just straight-up demographics. Something like 45% of Californians and 60% of New Yorkers identify as non-Hispanic and white. In Pennsylvania, it's more like 80%. In Iowa, where I live, it's close to 90%. New York and California are also much more urban than Pennsylvania, let alone Iowa. I don't think there's any reason to think that future elections will follow the same demographic voting trends as this one, but I think it would have been hard for Trump to overcome the demographic factors that worked against him in New York and California.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:58 PM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think that when that happens, though, it tends to create or exacerbate political and social divisions *within* states.

It does exacerbate tensions between urban and rural areas, but it also can increase diversity within the populations, which is the best way to spread tolerance and understanding between groups. There simply is no way back to 1950s America, so anyone wanting that is going to be disillusioned anyway. The best we can do is spread the wealth more evenly so others can take advantage in both material and non-material ways, and of course hope that it isn't too late for that to happen given the rise in authoritarianism, desire for isolation, and to stop time. Slowing the rate of change would be nice, but probably unlikely, so better acclimatizing people to it and inoculating people from its worst effects might be our only way to keep things together.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:12 PM on November 26, 2016

From that "more likely to help Trump than hurt him" article: "Wikileaks hacked one campaign and released the material to its stooges in the American media."

No Wikileaks didn't. Russian intelligence did, as confirmed by the NSA, the Director of National Intelligence, and the independent security firm CrowdStrike, who discussed their evidence in detail.

It may be hard to believe because it is so unprecedented, but it really happened.

It's because of this unprecedented involvement of a foreign government in this year's election that I agree with J. Alex Halderman:

"Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots"
posted by OnceUponATime at 1:13 PM on November 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

"This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded . . . ."

and the yam knows a scam when see one, because he has the biggest, best scams, believe me... yooge scams
posted by entropicamericana at 1:21 PM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon It is happening here...Whose side are you on?

Farce, failure and incompetence are among the better possible outcomes of a Trump administration. The worse outcomes — which come more clearly into focus with every noxious new appointment, and every new report of a hate crime that the president-elect hasn’t heard about or blandly disavows — are almost too much to think about.

posted by kingless at 1:30 PM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

It does exacerbate tensions between urban and rural areas, but it also can increase diversity within the populations, which is the best way to spread tolerance and understanding between groups.

I certainly hope you're right, speaking as a lefty Jewish transplant to Iowa. But I think that's a long-term project, and in the short-term, it just means that the places where people like me move end up being cast as a mini version of New York or L.A.: 'elite', un-Christian, non-white, commie, not really America, etc. And that can lead to people electing state governments that do some very weird and counterproductive things like declaring war on public higher education, which is not in anyone's best interest but can sometimes appeal to voters who don't like feeling left behind in the shift to a knowledge economy. You'd think that people would vote for better funding for higher ed, which would open opportunities to everyone, but sometimes the opposite happens. You can see that in Wisconsin, for instance, which seems to be hellbent on gutting their excellent university system for basically no good reason.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:35 PM on November 26, 2016 [20 favorites]

From kingless' link: Trump is too lazy and stupid to be a good Führer

Yes, we're reduced to hoping our President is too much of a shiftless imbecile to do as much harm as he might.
posted by Justinian at 1:35 PM on November 26, 2016 [67 favorites]

But I think that's a long-term project, and in the short-term, it just means that the places where people like me move end up being cast as a mini version of New York or L.A.: 'elite', un-Christian, non-white, commie, not really America, etc.

Yes, there does seem to be some real difficulty in any initial growth stage, where the first signs of diversity and change are noted, but before that growth can fully take hold. I'm not sure what to make of that since there definitely can be concerted efforts to stop change or shift a state economy early on. In states with big cities, the resentment of the more rural areas is pretty strong, some of that due to the cities getting more attention due to population, and some just due to opposition to the diversity in city life.

Many or most college towns at least lean towards acceptance of more liberal ideals, so even red states do have blue areas and can develop further along those lines with people from the state and from outside, and that's the hope, but getting past the resentment is tough. My own brother-in-law, who I rarely see, evidently didn't want my nephew to attend college purely because he didn't go so he didn't think my nephew should either. Whether out of pride or spite or fear, who knows? But the dynamic is a real one.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:46 PM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

It certainly wouldn't hurt for some of the big tech corporations to spread their facilities out to more states, set up a big Google HQ in Michigan, for example, or if some relatively progressive company moved some jobs to other midwest states, then the economies there would do better as more retail and entertainment options grew and more people moved there to work or support those who worked for the companies. Spread the wealth like the military supply companies do and more states will support policies attractive to the company and their workers. It also helps diversify the populations and the production capabilities for the areas, which is good for longer term local stability.

It absolutely would hurt those companies.

One of the strongest effects of cities is that they concentrate talent and multiply its effects. I could pretty much go to a programming talk and eat free food every night of the work week (and a few lunches too) in Chicago. I am pretty sure this is even easier in SF or NYC.

I am surrounded by smart people who do what I do and who I can talk to if I choose to. I learn from them. I compete with them.

If I lived in Michigan there would be far less of that.

So if a company worked for wanted me to move to Michigan or any economically depressed red state area my answer would be "Next Job Please".
posted by srboisvert at 2:57 PM on November 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Now Stein is attacking Clinton again for no reason: Why would Hillary Clinton—who conceded the election to Donald Trump—want #Recount2016? You cannot be on-again, off-again about democracy.

The Clinton folks pretty clearly stated that, if there's going to be a recount, they will participate to ensure their side is represented. If they explicitly wanted a recount, they would have asked for one and paid for it themselves.
posted by zachlipton at 3:01 PM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

Not sure about this source but he does cite.

Ahead of recount, Wisconsin has already wiped out 5,000 imaginary Donald Trump votes

"Donald Trump has gone from originally having 1,409,467 votes to now having just 1,404,536 votes in Wisconsin. In other words, a total of 4,931 votes were reported for Trump on election night that never existed. In contrast Hillary Clinton has gone from 1,382,210 votes down to 1,382,011 votes, a difference of less than two hundred votes. In other words, Wisconsin essentially had Clinton’s vote total correct all along, but is now acknowledging that nearly five thousand of the supposed votes for Trump simply never existed. Where did these votes come from? Who originally padded his numbers and how? If this was indeed due to an organized effort to pad Trump’s voting totals in various precincts across the state, the recount should fully expose it.
posted by futz at 3:05 PM on November 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Futz - can you update the link? It's broken right now.
posted by samthemander at 3:11 PM on November 26, 2016

http://www.palmerreport.com/news/ahead-of-recount-wisconsin-has-already-wiped-out-5000-phony-votes-for-donald-trump/234/
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 3:13 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's an update to that article (which Joy Reid literally just tweeted three minutes ago) claiming, if you trust the Palmer Report anyway, that one "reporting unit" initially had its results counted twice due to a problem with a modem (yes, really).
posted by zachlipton at 3:17 PM on November 26, 2016

KKSSHHHHEEEEEEEWHAAAAAAEEEEWHAAAAAEEE
CCKCKCKCKCKCKCKCKZZZSXZSXZS

modems have always been a problem. A joyous cacophonous problem. And now, the sound of a paper ballot being counted.

.
posted by petebest at 3:30 PM on November 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Not that I think the explanation should just be accepted at face value, but it does make sense to me as a plausible explanation that a modem-related process could function successfully, but produce behavior that the user interpreted as a failure, and then the user re-started the process and hence accidentally submitted the same value twice.

It's like how some old credit card handling web sites would display the message "ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PRESS THE ‘SUBMIT’ BUTTON AGAIN NO MATTER WHAT" in the final step. Ideally the system would be designed to cope with that sort of problem without recording duplicates, but we do not live in a perfect world.
posted by XMLicious at 3:36 PM on November 26, 2016

Padding? Really? WTF is going on?

Ok moving on....

Hours later and I am still angry about that Conway statement. She sounds so belligerent and spiteful-- hardly the tone you would expect from the winning Presidential team. When she says "listen up" all I hear is "sit down and shut up." It is part and parcel of the authoritarian message. The leader speaks and the followers obey without question. The winning team gets to talk and the losers must shut up. The parent speaks and the children obey, cheerfully and without dissent.

Ugh. I put up with that shit when I was a kid, I do not have to put up with it now.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:39 PM on November 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

Mod note: Deleted a couple -- trolling and a response that quoted the trolling comment. Please repost your excellent comment (just without the troll-quote included), Thella!
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 3:45 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Somebody has to say it:
Donal Trump's statement about Stein's recount campaign is the EXACT SAME argument about "just a fundraising scam" that many MeFites have made. When you're agreeing with Dishonest Donald about ANYTHING, you need to sit back and do some soul searching.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:46 PM on November 26, 2016 [34 favorites]

From The Guardian article linked above

...In requesting the recounts, Stein is acting on behalf of a loose coalition of academics and election experts. Her Wisconsin petition features an affidavit by J Alex Halderman, the director of Michigan University’s Center for Computer Security and Society, who has for years detailed vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines used in the US.

One of the leaders of the coalition, John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, expressed frustration that critics were accusing Stein of exploiting disappointment over the election result to collect money and gather contact details from liberal activists.

“This was all driven by the nonpartisan election integrity community,” said Bonifaz, a constitutional attorney, in his first interview about the recount effort. “I’m the one who asked Jill Stein to file these petitions.”

Bonifaz also defended Stein’s decision to increase her fundraising target from its original $2.5m, which led to more criticism. Bonifaz said the coalition had retained the New York law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, which has extensive experience in election disputes and had advised them to budget $7m for the effort.

“This is going to be a very costly campaign,” said Bonifaz, adding that the average contribution from the tens of thousands of supporters who had donated was about $42. “But it is something that a lot of people clearly want.”
... ...
The coalition had approached the Clinton campaign but received no official response, according to Bonifaz.

In his online posting, Elias said: “Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves.

It is very important for the integrity of democratic processes in this time of high cynicism, that it becomes widely known that the push for a recount came from concerned experts and not a political party. That they turned to political parties for support is how the representative process works. At stake is not the presidential election this year, but the integrity of the whole electoral system in years to come.
posted by Thella at 3:54 PM on November 26, 2016 [83 favorites]

On the topic of the distribution of jobs and political implications thereof, I found this new article to be excellent:
Fuck Work: What if Jobs are Not the Solution, but the Problem?
posted by kaibutsu at 4:29 PM on November 26, 2016 [19 favorites]

SLoG: The Guardian is reporting that the Russians were attempting a military coup in the capitol of Serbia

Important to note that although the plotters were based in and deported from Serbia, they were planning to assassinate the prime minister and overthrow the government in Montenegro, since 2006 a neighboring sovereign country.

According to Wikipedia and that article, for the last year Montenegro has been in the final stage of joining NATO, against strong opposition from Russia.
posted by XMLicious at 4:42 PM on November 26, 2016 [11 favorites]

Now Stein is attacking Clinton again for no reason:

Twist ending: the scorpion in that poem Trump kept reading was Jill Stein all along.

I never thought she was trying to billk anyone out of money. I just think she was a toxic presence in the campaign with her "Clinton is worse than Trump" noise. Seeing her now question the results seems like buyer's remorse to me

Of course, this mirrors the response of many of my "too pure for Clinton" Friends who are now publicly gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over Trump. Well, guys, this is what happens when you split the vote. Congratufuckinglations. You have your morals we all have a troll doll as president.

I'm lukewarm on the recount. I think it's wishful thinking at best. Both hope I'm proven wrong, but I'd rather spend my money supporting Standing Rock or PP just at the moment. Godspeed to everyone who is working to make it happen but Stein could have helped more by withdrawing from the race.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:06 PM on November 26, 2016 [19 favorites]

On the topic of the distribution of jobs and political implications thereof, I found this new article to be excellent:
Fuck Work: What if Jobs are Not the Solution, but the Problem?

Labor is a pretty fundamental thing to being-human, I think. Anyone who's ever been unengaged in labor for an extended period knows that even if your situation is such that you are financially secure, you do need to find ways to "keep busy", or engage in productive labor, whether that be dedicating time to job hunting, volunteerism, labor outside the formal labor market (child care, housework, projects that produce some tangible outcome), etc.

When the Industrial Revolution happened, we saw a similar thing happen. Humans had to transition from an economy where nearly everyone was engaged in subsistence farming/husbandry or direct secondary work to the great task of making sure there was food, clothing and shelter like smithing and tailoring, to an economy where labor-saving devices could produce goods incredibly cheaply, and those benefits might accrue to the owners of those machines or might be passed to ordinary workers in the form of a living wage and restrictions on working hours.

What we need now is a second movement toward, maybe, a 20-hour workweek. There's not enough work to go around post-Information Revolution, and the work has to be divided relatively equally among people or we will face structural unemployment.

(Did I say "will face"? I should have said, we have been facing this problem for at least 20 years and have been papering over it with bubble after bubble because there isn't the political will, either at the US national level or at the global level, to address this crisis.)
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:18 PM on November 26, 2016 [19 favorites]

Of course, this mirrors the response of many of my "too pure for Clinton" Friends who are now publicly gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over Trump. Well, guys, this is what happens when you split the vote. Congratufuckinglations. You have your morals we all have a troll doll as president.

I feel like we're being forced into their position: in a moment where no one to the left of Paul Ryan has any real leverage, are we all unwilling accelerationists now?
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:20 PM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

A look at Steve Bannon and his years at Harvard Business School
posted by Golden Eternity at 5:24 PM on November 26, 2016

look at Steve Bannon and his years at Harvard Business School

Huh, I grew up in a white-working class Midwestern neighborhood and went to Christian school all the way through university.

Can I call him a coastal elite now? Pretty please?!?
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:29 PM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

en forme de poire: I think Jill Stein demanding the recount is actually kind of genius because it takes the pressure totally off the Clinton team, for whom demanding a recount could be really bad optics. I hope a bunch of wealthy Clinton donors are funneling money in that direction.

Hillary: *holding a Netgear router to Jill Stein’s head* "File for a fucking recount or I swear to Christ I’ll turn this thing on." [Fake]
posted by Morfil Ffyrnig at 5:32 PM on November 26, 2016 [21 favorites]

Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.

posted by Western Infidels at 6:04 PM on November 26, 2016 [18 favorites]

@saladinahmed: cool I thought america was a late capitalist racist dystopia in catastrophic meltdown but it turns out we were just hacked by the russians
posted by Golden Eternity at 6:28 PM on November 26, 2016 [15 favorites]

Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group
posted by bukvich at 6:36 PM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

America is a late capitalist racist dystopia in catastrophic meltdown AND it turns out we might have been hacked by the Russians.
posted by OnceUponATime at 6:57 PM on November 26, 2016 [24 favorites]

3 California mosques threatened in letter praising Trump

Local Islamic leaders are asking for increased police protection after at least three California mosques received a letter that threatens Muslims and praises President-Elect Donald Trump.

Over the past several days, Islamic centers in Long Beach, Claremont and San Jose all received the same photocopy of a handwritten letter addressed to “the Children of Satan.” The letter calls Muslims “vile,” “filthy” and “evil.” It then states that Trump – who, during his campaign, proposed making Muslims register and blocking people of faith from entering the country – is going to “cleanse America.”

“He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews,” the letter reads. “You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

The letter is signed “Americans for a Better Way.”

Despicable & Deplorable and makes me want to cry. I had a conversation with my (very receptive) Thanksgiving guests about not letting the smallest slight slide when you observe it whether it is an offhand comment in the line at the grocery store or a shouted slur from afar etc. There are small and large ways that you can show support. Speak up if you are able and feel safe. Some guests were elderly and I wouldn't expect them to take the same measures that I would but there are little things that they can do or say. I explained the safety pin and what it meant (touched briefly on the issues surrounding it) and just asked them to be aware of what was going on around them and to think about what they could or might do if a situation arose.

More eyes, more ears, more action.
posted by futz at 7:02 PM on November 26, 2016 [14 favorites]

I would like to request an update to the "surely this" of the Cheney Crime Gang years.

While others continue to stay current via mainstream outlets, I will endeavour to not. Can't. Y'feel me. But back then, a good "surely this" had some stuff on it - this was the step too far, this will wake everyone up to what a travesty the latest GOP flatulentia is, etc.

I realized today that for me, that started with Reagan. But now we've smashed the surely this. Maybe there never was a surely this. And since there are no evens, not even any just evens or f--king evens, even - I'd like to ask the writers of 2016 for some new surely this that might actually help.

A wish for wings that work, as it were.
posted by petebest at 7:06 PM on November 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

Is it possible that Clinton team DID see shenanigans in Wi, MI and PA but thought the optics would be better for stein to carry that torch? Are they possibly in cahoots?
posted by ian1977 at 7:15 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's a story that Jerry Falwell Jr. told the AP he was offered Secretary of Education but he turned it down.

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. says president elect-Donald Trump offered him the job of Secretary of Education, but he turned it down for personal reasons.

Falwell told The Associated Press on Saturday that Trump offered him the job last week during a meeting in New York. He says Trump wanted a four- to six-year commitment, but Falwell says he couldn’t leave Liberty for more than two years.

Falwell says he couldn’t afford to work a cabinet-level job in Washington for longer than that and didn’t want to move his family, especially his 16-year-old daughter.

Trump announced Wednesday he had selected charter school advocate Betsy DeVos for the job.

Falwell says he thinks DeVos is an “excellent choice.”

An "excellent choice" who he thought he'd trash by telling everyone she was a second choice. Also note the "couldn't afford" bit; cabinet secretaries make $205,700/year.

And also, holy shit, he thought Jerry Falwell Jr. was qualified to be Secretary of Education?
posted by zachlipton at 7:19 PM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's gonna be a new thing for various shitbags to brag 'yeah I was offered a cabinet position too' kinda like the new 'yeah I remember when I had my first beer'
posted by ian1977 at 7:22 PM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

scoop d'etat?

No? Okay, just spitballing.
posted by petebest at 7:24 PM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

If this hasn't been posted yet... it's a pretty good summary of Trump's connections to white ethno-nationalism to share with those who haven't been paying attention:

Trump Still Navigating White Supremacists' Support

'Spencer's group, the National Policy Institute, drew headlines for their recent gathering where some attendees mimicked the Nazi salute as they feted Trump. Spencer told The Associated Press the salutes were "ironic exuberance" that "the mainstream media doesn't get."'
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:25 PM on November 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

various shitbags to brag 'yeah I was offered a cabinet position too

In this post-fact world who even knows if it is true. If it is, fuck that noise hard.
posted by futz at 7:27 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm going to put this here because I don't know where else to, I've tried raising it elsewhere and gotten no response or attention. I am not a statistician or political scientist, but early after the election Sarah Kendizor on twitter was raising questions about the validity of the Missouri vote. I decided to see if there was any method of determining the likelihood of hacking. It turns out there is.

It's called Benford's Law and it states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small. However, in election results, it's actually the SECOND digit that matters and that it should follow a regular pattern as shown here.

So I took the county-by-county election results for the state of Missouri, copied down all the second digits and ran a correlation test to that chart. I got a correlation of 0.5225890493, which if my very brief study of statistics in grad school is right, means a pretty good correlation - no fraud.

I was feeling like Wisconsin seemed odd, though, even before the letter from the experts. I ran the same test on the Wisconsin county-by-county data. The correlation this time was NEGATIVE. -0.1575801778. I would really love for someone who knows something about poli sci and statistics to let me know their thoughts.
posted by waitingtoderail at 7:31 PM on November 26, 2016 [22 favorites]

Interesting. Can you dumb that down a titch waitingtoderail?
posted by ian1977 at 7:34 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Your here link just leads to the cover of a book?
posted by ian1977 at 7:35 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd like to ask the writers of 2016 for some new surely this that might actually help.

I think George R. R. Martin is kind of busy right now figuring out what to do with that Ice and Fire series thingy.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:38 PM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can you dumb that down a titch waitingtoderail?

Heh, I don't know that I can, I hardly understand myself. Basically the numbers should follow a regular pattern. In Missouri's case they do, if not STRONGLY, but in Wisconsin's case they are actually slightly reversed from what they should be. That is my understanding, anyhow.

Your here link just leads to the cover of a book?

Sorry, not sure how to get a good link. It's page 165-166 of that book.
posted by waitingtoderail at 7:51 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Basically the numbers should follow a regular pattern.

Which numbers? The preview isn't showing pages 165-166.
posted by wondermouse at 7:54 PM on November 26, 2016

Which numbers?

Well, in theory, any list of statistical data. In this case, the county-by-county vote totals, specifically, the second digit in each of them.

The preview isn't showing pages 165-166.

That's odd, it does on mine. Basically, the lower the number, the more often it should show up.
posted by waitingtoderail at 7:56 PM on November 26, 2016

Benford's Law and Elections

PDF on the topic
posted by Rumple at 8:04 PM on November 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!

--@realDonaldTrump

This recount business seems to be getting to him.
posted by zachlipton at 8:09 PM on November 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

So I took the county-by-county election results for the state of Missouri, copied down all the second digits and ran a correlation test to that chart. I got a correlation of 0.5225890493

You wouldn't do it that way. Flipping around in the bits of the book available online, you would need precinct-level data and do meow meow math meow ending up with a chi2 test.

I don't mean to be harsh about this, but let's take Column A: Rural whites in the midwest really liked the racist shit Trump was spouting -- crap so awful and direct that nobody had really dared to say shit like that since George Wallace -- and showed up for him in droves. And in Column B, we have a conspiracy to alter the vote. By the nature of the voting process in the US, it would have to be large and decentralized, involving people in hundreds to thousands of polling places, including Democratic poll workers and observers. None of whom have blabbed while drunk or put it in their suicide notes or whatever. It really can't be any more centralized than the polling places because poll workers and observers will have recorded and remember what the vote totals from their polling place were. Column A is... more likely.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:09 PM on November 26, 2016 [11 favorites]

On a cursory glance those appear to be dismissive of the method, this is completely possible. This is why I've tried to turn to those in the know. Thanks!
posted by waitingtoderail at 8:10 PM on November 26, 2016

This recount business seems to be getting to him.

Good.
posted by emjaybee at 8:12 PM on November 26, 2016 [23 favorites]

Column A is... more likely.

Sure. Knowing that Russia was meddling around in the lead-up to the election, though, would indicate that maybe we should be making sure they didn't go further?
posted by waitingtoderail at 8:13 PM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!

"Incorrectly" doesn't sound like a word that he would use. Is that an iPhone tweet?
posted by indubitable at 8:13 PM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

Thanks for explaining the math a bit more.
posted by waitingtoderail at 8:17 PM on November 26, 2016

Sure. Knowing that Russia was meddling around in the lead-up to the election, though, would indicate that maybe we should be making sure they didn't go further?

Also, Scott Walker is still the governor and I basically wouldn't put anything past him at this point.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 8:17 PM on November 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

"Incorrectly" doesn't sound like a word that he would use. Is that an iPhone tweet?

Android.
posted by chris24 at 8:19 PM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

If it gets under trumps skin it's priceless.
posted by ian1977 at 8:21 PM on November 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

I don't mean to be harsh about this, but let's take Column A: Rural whites in the midwest really liked the racist shit Trump was spouting -- crap so awful and direct that nobody had really dared to say shit like that since George Wallace -- and showed up for him in droves. And in Column B, we have a conspiracy to alter the vote. By the nature of the voting process in the US, it would have to be large and decentralized, involving people in hundreds to thousands of polling places, including Democratic poll workers and observers. None of whom have blabbed while drunk or put it in their suicide notes or whatever. It really can't be any more centralized than the polling places because poll workers and observers will have recorded and remember what the vote totals from their polling place were. Column A is... more likely.

The only thing I can think of that seems doable for column B would be absentee ballot fraud.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:31 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Benford's Law is used all the time in detecting financial and other kinds of fraud. If WI precinct data is giving odd results, then something fishy is most likely going on.
posted by localhuman at 8:32 PM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

"How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines to change the outcome of a presidential election? Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls."

Apparently this infection of physical media bit is how StuxNet worked. So it's not completely theoretical.
posted by OnceUponATime at 8:41 PM on November 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

If WI precinct data is giving odd results, then something fishy is most likely going on.

I was using county level data, maybe not so accurate? I'd like to see what someone who knows what they're doing comes up with.
posted by waitingtoderail at 8:48 PM on November 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

more, re: berlusconi...

Populists as snake oil sellers - "four points of similarity between snake oil salesmen and populist politicians"

First, patent remedies weren’t entirely ineffective. They often contained alcohol or opium which gave people at least a short-term pep. As Ran Spielger shows (pdf), if people mistake this short-term boost for a genuine cure (which is especially likely if their ailment would have cleared up anyway) then demand for quacks will grow. In this tradition. Trump is mixing harmful anti-globalization policies with a helpful fiscal stimulus.

Secondly, the very fact that patent medicines failed to eradicate chronic ailments meant that the market for them grew over time as more people got ill. And ill people are desperate, and willing to take risks... people who feel they are losing out from the existing order gamble on change.

Thirdly, patent medicine sellers devoted huge efforts to marketing – an effort which consisted of gross over-hype, claiming their products to be “most efficacious in every way.” ... Genuine doctors were powerless against this sales drive, because ill-informed customers could not distinguish between quality and quackery...

There’s a direct parallel between this [and] the inadequacy of the media today. The BBC’s decision to become impartial between truth and lies means that the “independent authority” that might help people distinguish between quacks and experts is indeed absent.

Finally, quacks succeeded by denying that proper doctors had any genuine expertise – a denial aided by the fact that their expertise was indeed limited...

And the methods work. Liberals like to think that in the marketplace for ideas, good ideas will beat bad ones, just as in the marketplace for products good ones will displace bad ones. History, however, warns us that in both cases, it isn’t necessarily so.

The consent of the governed: The hole at the heart of economics - "Institutions are organisations or patterns of behaviour built by societies to help solve social or economic problems which the law or private markets cannot fully address... And the fact that such dynamics are woolly and defy easy efforts at modelling or measuring cannot be an excuse for continuing to ignore them. Economists will never understand the world if they cannot explain how institutions work and why they sometimes fail us."

American Democracy Is Dying, and This Election Isn’t Enough to Fix It - "The foundation of our political system is broken. And repairing it will take more than just your vote."

also btw...
-Steve Bannon and the Last Crusade
-This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America
-Trump’s Top Fundraiser Eyes the Deal of a Lifetime
-Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House
posted by kliuless at 9:06 PM on November 26, 2016 [46 favorites]

Finally, quacks succeeded by denying that proper doctors had any genuine expertise – a denial aided by the fact that their expertise was indeed limited...

This persists with the "miracle cures they aren't telling you" informercial template. It persists with the huge supplement/para-medical industry, particularly in the awful US healthcare non-system, because supplements don't require a prescription.

And the con merchant as we now know it is a pure product of America, a nation where you could change your identity and your marks for the next grift.
posted by holgate at 9:40 PM on November 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Serbia has deported a group of Russians suspected of involvement in a coup plot in neighbouring Montenegro, the Guardian has learned, in the latest twist in a murky sequence of events that apparently threatened the lives of two European prime ministers.

I have a co-worker from Serbia and one with family ties to Montenegro. The one from Serbia is pretty leftist, but hates Nato and insisted that Russia has no interest in invading any countries - and wouldn't accept any push back.

The one with ties to Montenegro is a Bernie or Bust Jill Stein Russia Today quoting hardliner. I finally decided to hide this one's posts on facebook after a story that the Clintons were running a pedophile ring.

I'm really curious if they bring this up at all. We do talk about politics quite a lot at work.
posted by maggiemaggie at 11:42 PM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Actually I see the date on The Guardian article is Nov 11, which is before our discussion about Russia and NATO.
posted by maggiemaggie at 11:47 PM on November 26, 2016

And the con merchant as we now know it is a pure product of America, a nation where you could change your identity and your marks for the next grift.

I believe the modern nomenclature is 'microtargetted messaging'.
posted by jaduncan at 11:49 PM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

I had an interesting interaction with some pro-Trump guy on twitter who referred me to a video of Obama telling "illegals" they can vote. After I pointed out that's not what he said, he continued to insist it was.

He must know that's not what Obama was saying. I'm left wondering what is going on with him. Is he a troll? Is he just engaging in "information war?" If so, why are liberals so scary and considered such a big enemy? Obviously he got it from conservative media and it's probably shared around in conservative circles; I guess without anyone doubting it. Why would he want to believe it? Does he have a deep-seated fear of immigrants? Anyway, there is little possibility for continuing a conversation if we can't agree on what was actually said I guess.
posted by Golden Eternity at 12:54 AM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

Transcribe the words from Obama's speech and attribute them to Giuliani. Once he says he agrees with Giuliani, point out those were actually the words to Obama's speech. I have done something like that nine times just to watch the words meaning miraculously transform into the opposite of their meaning depending on who said them. It's satisfying if entirely unsuccessful at changing minds.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:19 AM on November 27, 2016 [53 favorites]

I just remembered why mention of Montenegro was tickling my memory-bone: in the previous politics thread someone linked to a picture of a billboard featuring a photo of Trump and a photo of Putin, with the caption "Let's make the world great again — together", which turned out to be in Montenegro.
posted by XMLicious at 2:05 AM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

He must know that's not what Obama was saying. I'm left wondering what is going on with him. Is he a troll? Is he just engaging in "information war?" If so, why are liberals so scary and considered such a big enemy? Obviously he got it from conservative media and it's probably shared around in conservative circles; I guess without anyone doubting it. Why would he want to believe it? Does he have a deep-seated fear of immigrants? Anyway, there is little possibility for continuing a conversation if we can't agree on what was actually said I guess.

Probably either a paid flack or an idiot who can't acknowledge when he's wrong and back down gracefully. The latter seems more likely, although it's awfully cheap to pay people per comment. English language articles criticising Putin or Assad also have an impressive amount of comments defending them. If you're looking in Russian or Chinese language sites, the volume of bullshit Kremlin driven and "50 cent army" comments will (often actually salaried propagandists, these days) comments will astound you if you haven't been there before. Harvard have an interesting linked study on this in the Chinese context, abstract follows but the headline figure is a guess of 448 million paid for comments a year from the CCP:

The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called “50c party” posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of the vast majority of posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet, almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime’s strategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large scale empirical analysis of this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject [emphasis mine], as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.

We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program, and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes.

I have little assumption of good faith left in most places, it's too easy to pay for bullshit and/or attempt to break the usability of the comment thread via bots. It was very notable on the Clinton campaign twitter feed, for example, and it's unsurprising to me that Russia in particular might be extending the same model into what is clearly a prolonged attempt to influence politics across the Western world.
posted by jaduncan at 3:08 AM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

Bah, I copy-pasted the wrong part of that Halderman article. Meant to include this:

"It doesn’t matter whether the voting machines are connected to the Internet. Shortly before each election, poll workers copy the ballot design from a regular desktop computer in a government office, and use removable media (like the memory card from a digital camera) to load the ballot onto each machine. That initial computer is almost certainly not well secured, and if an attacker infects it, vote-stealing malware can hitch a ride to every voting machine in the area. There’s no question that this is possible for technically sophisticated attackers. (If my Ph.D. students and I were criminals, I’m sure we could pull it off.)"

I guess Halderman is saying that there is no evidence of this actually having happened, but that it would be hard to find such evidence without manually counting paper ballots as a check.

I am interested in hearing the people in MeFi with more expertise than me in computer security weigh in on the feasibility of such a scenario.

It's different than "rigging" in the sense that a political party might be accused of or that might have been possible 50 years ago (counting dead people's votes, etc.) It's just straight up hacking, and it really does seem conparable to the Stuxnet worm, to me, which is not something script kiddies could have pulled off, but which really worked to sabotage supposedly highly secure and not internet-connected machines... with the resources of a national intelligence appartus to help deploy it.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:35 AM on November 27, 2016 [18 favorites]

What is missing in all the discussion around 'hacking' the vote is a sense of proportion - and by that I mean on the one hand it would take a lot of organizing to do and a lot of man power and some real tricky stuff and you would need to enlist a lot of people to do it and... But think about doing anything hard, just because you can't think of how to do it, or you think it would be 'really hard!' doesn't mean it hasn't been done or that it would be, for someone used to operating in that capacity, difficult.

I don't think the Russian's hacked the vote. I do think some enthusiastic Trump/Cheeto Jesus supporters did pad things in as many ways as they could imagine. That said, I would not be as surprised as I was by Trump's win if it turns out to be true that Russia messed around. (Where Russia = anyone, really, though Russia will get the blame, who ever is might be behind it.) Also, I want Trump to lose. So I'm biased. Because holy fuck the idea of that megalomaniac running the country makes my heart run fast and shallow.
posted by From Bklyn at 4:05 AM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

In particular I am wondering if it would be possible to do this in a way that would not jump out as an anomaly in demographic analysis like they did at FiveThirtyEight. My understanding is that the places in, eg, Pennsylvania that overperformed for Trump were demographically similar to places in upstate NY that overperformed for Trump without winning him NY. Ditto Wisconsin (which he barely won) and Minnesota (which he lost, but with similar pattern of overperforming in areas similar to the ones where he did so well in Wisconsin.)

It seems like it would be possible to just barely increase the winning margin in counties Trump was already winning? Like a pretty simple "IF he's winning this county, THEN add 2% to his margin in this county" piece of code could preserve all the demographic trends and make it hard to detect the tampering through demographic analysis? But how many states would this have to have happened it, for it to not jump out as unusually high over performance in just, say, Wisconsin's results? Would you really have to attack Minnesota and New York too? And how hard would it be to pull off attacks like this in more than a handful of states, given the differences in voting systems?

It does still seem unlikely, but not impossible. Like it would take years of work by a highly sophisticated team (probably more sophisticated than Halderman's grad students, even) to make the effect subtle enough and widespread enough to be undetectable with a simple statistical analysis and yet still sufficient to win. But Russia is pretty damn sophisticated and seems pretty motivated. Under this scenario, all the DNC and Podesta hacks and so on would just be an effort to keep the race close enough for a plausible swing. And all the talk of not accepting a loss would have been bait to get Democrats to definitely commit to accepting a loss.

And then there is the fact that intrusion attempts were detected in a lot of states, actually... More than 20, with successful intrusions detected in at least two (Arizona and Illinois.) It's hard to count the successful intrusions that aren't detected. But how many would it take to yield consistent demographic patterns?

Sorry to keep posting about this, but it's really bothering me. I hope Stein gets the recount going in all three states (maybe I'll kick in again). I personally will have an easier time accepting this result once the paper ballots are counted. And as damaging as a Trump presidency will be, I think if these rumors got going after it was too late to count ballots, they would be impossible to put to rest, and might completely undermine the legitimacy of our government. Better to count the ballots now while we still can.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:32 AM on November 27, 2016 [21 favorites]

(Incidentally, FiveThirtyEight seems to misunderstand Halerman's argument, even though they link to it. You can't cross the whole state of Michigan off as a hacking target just because they use paper ballots, if the paper ballots are never manually counted. Halderman is saying the optical scan machines that read the paper ballots could have been targeted. Still, they and others make a pretty persuasive case that the hacking would have to be very widespread in order to not produce anamolies in the demographic data.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:47 AM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

That's impossible, even for a computer!

/womprat
posted by petebest at 5:08 AM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

From the African American Intellectual History Society, a brief discussion of race and elections in the US.

Slaveholding states’ artificial advantages in the House of Representatives and Electoral College combined with a two-party system that wanted to discuss any issue other than the one that threatened to split their coalitions cleanly in half. Antislavery activists made headway, but the pervasive racism around them made building a movement challenging.

posted by kingless at 5:14 AM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Sorry for referencing Arrival; that should have gone in the Fanfare thread. Really good movie, though.

Anyhoo, can anybody be like a narcissists do this for me with a regard to Trump's latest barrage of tweets w/r/t the recount, because, Jebus, the first time I really started paying attention was when he got upset. My limited reading suggests that the recounts are not going to change the result, are we all still on that same page?

But instead we get Conway doing things like blah blah sore loser blah #YesMyPresident? Yes My President? How about Yes My Foot in Your Ass? I mean I am really not agitating for civil war here but I hope I am not being a shitty white person by borrowing this metaphor from a Palestinian relative: you put a cat in a corner, sooner or later it's going to scratch you. Why are they sticking fingers in eyes, to mix my metaphors?

So I guess my basic question is there an endgame in here aside from weird dysfunctional impulses. Because it kind of seems like some of these shits really don't care if the world burns or don't know that the world can burn or really want it to burn, I don't know.
posted by angrycat at 5:54 AM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I just learned something yesterday - this happened, of course, during the Obama administration but it is a foretaste of things to come as well.

A friend of a friend's cousin - a fairly young guy - had fled here from [country redacted] to escape gang activity. He was deported three weeks ago and was immediately killed on his return. He was sent back and killed! Right away! They tell you about this in news articles and it seems remote, but it actually happened to the family of someone I've had conversations with. They just sent him back to die, just like that, and he did die! It's just horrible. It was horrible of the Obama administration, and if deportations are stepped up under Trump, more people will die in this way.

There's another Duluth case where they want to send back this Cambodian guy who has been here all his life - he fired a bb gun at a car in 2010, which means he's a criminal alien. Since then he has "turned his life around" (from doing some stupid bullshit, admittedly, but it was just stupid bullshit) and has several little kids and a wife. It's not even "sending back", since he's never lived in Cambodia.

And of course, people flee these places because the US - either through military operations or through trade wars and installing bad regimes - has destabilized them.
posted by Frowner at 6:04 AM on November 27, 2016 [41 favorites]

They tell you about this in news articles and it seems remote, but it actually happened to the family of someone I've had conversations with.

This was not a good comment for me to make. I was trying to express how terrible and shocked I was feeling, but of course, for many people this does not "seem remote" at all, because it's people' daily reality. I apologize for writing such a fool thing in my shock - it was privilege talking.
posted by Frowner at 6:11 AM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

@TedMcClelland
Donald Trump will replace Fidel Castro as the most prominent Russian-backed leader in the Western Hemisphere.
posted by chris24 at 6:12 AM on November 27, 2016 [64 favorites]

Wow he is on a twitter rant this morning--7 tweets quoting HRCs concession speech.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:20 AM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

He's nervous? Or offended? Or outraged? Or all 3?
posted by ian1977 at 6:31 AM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

Maybe he will get so mad and nervous that he will tweet 'wouldn't it be nice to get along so well with Russia that they helped un-rig our crooked election?'
posted by ian1977 at 6:33 AM on November 27, 2016

Honestly I don't think the recount will find anything but the more Trump freaks out I'm beginning to wonder.
posted by chris24 at 6:38 AM on November 27, 2016 [18 favorites]

Trump's like a pet, though, he might be freaking out because there's reason to, or maybe because he's Trump
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:39 AM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

Or it might be the coke
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:40 AM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

Bernie Sanders meets Spike Lee: ‘Where do we go? Where is the hope?’

"It would be hard to suggest that the people of this country were enthusiastic about the Clinton campaign. There was not the energy we have seen in the Obama campaign, and what ended up happening was voter turnout was low. She won the black community overwhelmingly, but turnout was low. She lost a lot of white, working-class people. That’s just the fact."

Actually, not the fact. Turnout will be higher than than 2012. So fuck off Bernie.

Oh, and enthusiasm? Per 538:

"The latest ABC News survey reveals that, in fact, Clinton’s voters feel about as positively about their candidate as any candidate’s supporters have felt about their own preferred candidate since 1980. Trump voters are less enthusiastic about him: Since 1980, no group of supporters has been less affirmative in its support for its candidate."
posted by chris24 at 6:49 AM on November 27, 2016 [46 favorites]

He might be freaking out because there's reason to, or maybe because he's Trump.

Schrödinger's Trump
posted by C'est la D.C. at 6:51 AM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

God I'm so grossed out by Trump's recent tweetstorm and Conway's spin. Clinton didn't request a recount! You're making a stupid point using stupid quotes for stupid purposes!

Your paper gets an F.

I'm amazed I can still get outraged by this sort of thing, but this kind of straw(wo)manning makes me furious.
posted by dis_integration at 7:07 AM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

@BraddJaffy:
On #MTP, @KellyannePolls tells @chucktodd Trump & Obama have been talking regularly; "They talked just yesterday ... about 40 to 45 minutes"
posted by chris24 at 7:37 AM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

They talked just yesterday ... about 40 to 45 minutes Trump Inc's acquisition of America Inc.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:44 AM on November 27, 2016

Hi, I'm Bernie Sanders, and I'm trying to find a way to make every actually reliable group of Democratic voters as unreliable as old racist working-class whites in the midwest! Jackass.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:46 AM on November 27, 2016 [30 favorites]

2016 is still counting, but it seems to me that turnout of Democratic voters was lower than in 2012. An article at PBS notes that WI turnout was down 3% and OH down 4%, and black and Latino minorities did not turn out like they had for Obama. Clinton also pulled in a lower share of voters between ages 18 and 29. (article is seven days old however)
posted by scrowdid at 8:15 AM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Trump : Burn, Mittens, Burn!!!!


posted by PROD_TPSL at 8:15 AM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, I agree with you, Burhanistan. And part of me is screaming that Romney should tell Trump to fuck right off, while another part of me would weep hot tears of gratitude if an actual adult sacrificed his pride to try to keep US-international relations from getting exponentially worse. Even if that adult was Romney.
posted by GrammarMoses at 8:16 AM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

We have to resist normalization, but also engage in harm reduction. It's a nearly impossible needle to thread.
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:48 AM on November 27, 2016 [45 favorites]

It's easier to needle this thread than to thread that needle.
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:50 AM on November 27, 2016 [29 favorites]

Quite.
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:53 AM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

In "On taking the Electoral College literally", Adam Kotsko argues that the EC can only continue to function as long as it is possible to pretend that it is a pro forma mechanical process, not the product of a set of conscious choices by the actual electors themselves:

If this fact became vividly undeniable, then the EC would suddenly be intolerable. Actualizing the EC as “originally intended” would immediately delegitimate it — which shows that it is de facto illegitimate right now. Taking it literally breaks the spell. From a Schmittian perspective, breaking that spell is indeed a risky move, and I don’t pretend to know what would happen if, for instance, the Electoral College did choose Hillary Clinton. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth it. Maybe it would break a much bigger spell. But the fact is that the Electoral College is a ticking timebomb, a standing affront to all common sense democratic instincts. All that allows it to keep happening is a constant charade that it isn’t happening — that it’s an impersonal mechanism, that it fulfills some valuable function, that it isn’t 538 individual flesh-and-blood human beings who have the privilege of choosing the president every four years.

This point has been made before in the thread, but it can't be said enough: talk about Trump having "broken" American democracy misses the point. It was always broken at its core. Having seen the casual recklessness with which Republicans shredded all the informal norms that held the system together, coupled with the accelerating loss of public confidence in government and the erosion of commitment to the democratic ideal itself, it's hard not to view this crisis as the start of the final unraveling.
posted by informavore at 9:29 AM on November 27, 2016 [47 favorites]

2016 is still counting, but it seems to me that turnout of Democratic voters was lower than in 2012. An article at PBS notes that WI turnout was down 3% and OH down 4%, and black and Latino minorities did not turn out like they had for Obama.

Both Ohio and Wisconsin passed strict vote restrictions since 2012. Wisconsin passed the notorious Voter ID law that could've disenfranchised as many as 300,000. Ohio passed a law requiring those without ID to cast provisional ballots. Data from previous elections show that only 10 to 15% of those who cast provisional ballots end up certifying their eligibility through the local registrar in time for their votes to be counted.

Regarding minorities, this was the first election since the demise of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. 900 polling stations in minority neighborhoods were closed. Poll hours were greatly reduced, and in places like North Carolina, the traditional last Sunday before the election Souls to the Polls was eliminated. Plus sundry other voter suppression.

Also, expecting anyone to match the first black president, and the greatest politician of our generation, in turnout from blacks is a bit unfair. And it's a really rich complaint coming from Bernie who lost the black vote by 40 points to Clinton in the primary. He has no basis to argue anything about enthusiasm from the black community.
posted by chris24 at 9:31 AM on November 27, 2016 [90 favorites]

My only hope for the recount efforts is I think they have to go look at provisional ballots, which will hopefully result in some light shining on why people have to cast them which hopefully will cast light on voter suppression efforts in general. The real scandal in this election is that hundreds of thousands of people couldn't vote who should have been able to. That those voters were overwhelmingly non-white (or poor and white) and thus exactly the turnout expected for a Democratic candidate makes "enthusiasm" criticisms hilarious.

Or what chris24 said while I was typing this.
posted by R343L at 9:35 AM on November 27, 2016 [25 favorites]

I think it's generally more in Russia's interest to spread FUD and cause people to doubt the integrity of all institutions, including elections, than to actually manipulate vote totals.

If a recount can focus attention on voters suppression, which is an area Clinton's team can be effective, then it will well be worthwhile though.
posted by zachlipton at 10:49 AM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Meanwhile, here's Kellyanne Conway saying that Trump has been "incredibly gracious and magnanimous" to Clinton (re not prosecuting her, as if that's something he could do) as her team joins the recount effort.
posted by zachlipton at 10:52 AM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

Not taking the time out of his busy schedule of graft and preening to figure out how to prosecute someone before he has any actual executive power doesn't seem to balance the grace and magnanimity seesaw away from flying in a bunch of women her husband fucked.
posted by Etrigan at 10:54 AM on November 27, 2016 [30 favorites]

It's back in abusive partner mode: "I've been so gracious to you, now don't go let your lawyers protect the interests of millions of voters as part of a standard legal process or I might have to hurt you."
posted by zachlipton at 11:11 AM on November 27, 2016 [42 favorites]

Is there any way to collectively support the people in the remaining 74 odd lawsuits? By covering legal fees if they lose or protecting them from intimidation so we actual drag Trump into court repeatedly instead of letting him coerce them into setting the rest?
posted by C'est la D.C. at 11:22 AM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm slightly disappointed that the Forbes cover article on Kushner (posted by kliuless) hasn't generated any discussion here, because it's one of the most enlightening explanations of the election outcome that I've come across. Essentially he invented the idea of harnessing social media data mining to identify people's fears and xenophobic/fascistic leanings, and using artificial intelligence to microtarget individual cognitive biases and deficiencies. He quite literally employed Silicon Valley technology/methodologies to "disrupt" the election, and set some frightening precedents.

Arguably it's an extension of how politics has always worked...but the speed at which his system can operate, and identify/scale messages which generate Pavlovian responses, is really what sets it apart.

How Jared Kushner Won Trump the White House

“I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff,” Kushner says. “They gave me their subcontractors.”

At first Kushner dabbled, engaging in what amounted to a beta test using Trump merchandise. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner says. Synched with Trump’s blunt, simple messaging, it worked. The Trump campaign went from selling $8,000 worth of hats and other items a day to $80,000, generating revenue, expanding the number of human billboards–and proving a concept. In another test, Kushner spent $160,000 to promote a series of low-tech policy videos of Trump talking straight into the camera that collectively generated more than 74 million views.

...

Kushner structured the operation with a focus on maximizing the return for every dollar spent. “We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,” Kushner says. “I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did.

...

Just as Trump’s unorthodox style allowed him to win the Republican nomination while spending far less than his more traditional opponents, Kushner’s lack of political experience became an advantage. Unschooled in traditional campaigning, he was able to look at the business of politics the way so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have sized up other bloated industries.

Television and online advertising? Small and smaller. Twitter and Facebook would fuel the campaign, as key tools for not only spreading Trump’s message but also targeting potential supporters, scraping massive amounts of constituent data and sensing shifts in sentiment in real time.

“We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly,” Kushner says. “It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked.”

This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.

Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.”

For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors.

As the election barreled toward its finale, Kushner’s system, with its high margins and up-to-the-minute voter data, provided both ample cash and the insight on where to spend it. When the campaign registered the fact that momentum in Michigan and Pennsylvania was turning Trump’s way, Kushner unleashed tailored TV ads, last-minute rallies and thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls.

And until the final days of the campaign, he did all this without anyone on the outside knowing about it. For those who can’t understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote by at least 2 million yet lose handily in the electoral college, perhaps this provides some clarity. If the campaign’s overarching sentiment was fear and anger, the deciding factor at the end was data and entrepreneurship.

“Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn’t. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That’s a big deal,” says Schmidt, the Google billionaire. “Remember all those articles about how they had no money, no people, organizational structure? Well, they won, and Jared ran it.”
posted by prosopagnosia at 11:23 AM on November 27, 2016 [32 favorites]

I'm slightly disappointed that the Forbes cover article on Kushner (posted by kliuless) hasn't generated any discussion here

IIRC, We discussed it in the previous thread. I think I posted the link but I am not going to go looking right now.
posted by futz at 11:28 AM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Reassuring.

@reillybergs
On @CNN, @KellyannePolls says Trump getting foreign intel from "many sources" - just not the daily US intelligence briefings. @MalcolmNance
posted by chris24 at 11:32 AM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

By the way, my previous comment wasn't meant to be dismissive! I found it fascinating and worthy of discussion and would love to continue to to talk about it.
posted by futz at 11:35 AM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Sociopath
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:36 AM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

covering legal fees if they lose or protecting them from intimidation so we actual drag Trump into court repeatedly
before the trump u settlement, i was musing to myself, "why shouldn't some fabulously wealthy dem promise to make the plaintiffs whole, even if they lose? just to get cheetoh jesus on the stand."

yo, fatcats, 74 more opportunities...
posted by j_curiouser at 11:37 AM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

On @CNN, @KellyannePolls says Trump getting foreign intel from "many sources" - just not the daily US intelligence briefings. @MalcolmNance

Jesus take the fucking wheel.
posted by lydhre at 11:44 AM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

Joy-Ann Reid: Already Happening: Media Normalization of Trumpism

With Donald Trump about to ascend to the White House, the media risk being tamed by their devotion to access and the belligerencies of the notoriously vengeful resident of Trump Tower and his right-wing wrecking crew of a team. We face a singular test, both as a profession and as a country: will we allow ourselves to see what we see, or will we mentally drape the naked emperor in our midst?

posted by zachlipton at 11:48 AM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

@mmurraypolitics Irony of Stein recount effort: HRC trails Trump by 10K votes in MI; Stein got 50K. HRC trails Trump by 22.5K votes in WI; Stein got 30K.

Something I haven't seen too much discussion on is the polling results leading to over confidence. I believe Clinton led so strongly for so long that many people felt that they could vote third party without the danger of electing Trump. What if the polls had shown them neck and neck in the week before election? Would that have persuaded people to vote the "lesser of two evils"? As it stands I hope anyone who voted Green party in Michigan and Wisconsin is now deeply, deeply regretting that decision.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:54 AM on November 27, 2016 [46 favorites]

Yeah that doesn't make me want to grab anyone by the ears and shout in their face or anything.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:56 AM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

Yeah that doesn't make me want to grab anyone by the ears and shout in their face or anything.

Yeah, like sitting at the Thanksgiving table with your sister when she voted for whatshisnuts and she's an employee of a 20,000 member church who almost certainly voted the same and then she tells you that you KNOW she's not racist, so why are you badmouthing people who voted for him and why the fuck am I even talking about it I think I'll go get another glass of wine and some pie.
posted by Mooski at 12:01 PM on November 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

That Forbes article on Kushner looked like a total puff piece to me. You are going to need an N>>1 to prove to me that web marketers can influence an election at all.

Some of those idiots send me targeted ads for only God knows what they are computing on. They know I am a dude. Other than that they do not have a clue what I actually spend money on. Except that they send me ads all the time for stuff I just bought and don't need any more.
posted by bukvich at 12:02 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

That is my whole point. Stein said she'd rather have Trump. By staying in the race, she and her supporters were one of many factors that allowed us to have Trump. She got what she wanted and now she's leading a recount effort? As much as I'd love for it to result in something (defined as "overturning the results") she could have better prevented this result by dropping out and encouraging her supporters to vote Clinton.

The good news is if there are still elections in 16 years, we will get to experience this all over again as a new generation of progressive come of age and are too moral to make a pragmatic choice that benefits them more in the long run than allowing whatever dumb fuck the conservatives are running to get elected.
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

HuffPo Group Funded By Trump’s Education Secretary Pick: ‘Bring Back Child Labor’

The Acton Institute, a conservative nonprofit that is said to have received thousands of dollars in donations from Betsy DeVos and her family, posted an essay to its blog this month that called child labor “a gift our kids can handle.”

“Let us not just teach our children to play hard and study well, shuffling them through a long line of hobbies and electives and educational activities,” said the post’s author, Joseph Sunde. “A long day’s work and a load of sweat have plenty to teach as well.”

I was listening to the Vox podcast "In the Weeds" yesterday and a remark made by one of the hosts really struck me "Paul Ryan is clearly signaling that the lower classes need to lower their standard of living."

I have been thinking about that all day because I don't know what that looks like. When you are driving an unreliable car that you can hardly afford the insurance on or using sketchy, nearly nonexistent public transportation, how do you shift downwards? When you can barely afford to keep your family fed and clothed on crappy food and cheap clothes how do you lower your expenditures? When you work three jobs in order to survive, go without medical, dental or eye care, live in the cheapest housing possible and forgo most pleasures in life, how do you work harder or make do with less? Well, I didn't think about putting the kids into the workforce but maybe that is the next step.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [48 favorites]

A note from bizarro social media land: Someone responded to my relative's heartfelt anti-Trump facebook message with a note that it was time for Dems to "give him a chance, just like Republicans gave Obama a chance."

That any literate adult person could not only believe this to be true but actually type it out with their own functioning fingers fills me with that combination of despair and fury I get when I see someone fuck with an animal for no reason.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [42 favorites]

A note from bizarro social media land: Someone responded to my relative's heartfelt anti-Trump facebook message with a note that it was time for Dems to "give him a chance, just like Republicans gave Obama a chance."

I have no trouble giving Trump the same chance the GOP gave Obama
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [74 favorites]

I think it's generally more in Russia's interest to spread FUD and cause people to doubt the integrity of all institutions, including elections, than to actually manipulate vote totals.

Trump's too. Huh.

We face a singular test, both as a profession and as a country:

With much respect to Ms. Reid, that's not true. The test is over. The results of said test are left as an exercise to the reader.

Seriously, Journalism as we know/knew it is way dead. Blowed up, sir! All that we see before us are the remnants - after-effects of what once was, still visible, ghosted across our screens. In time, these final failures to democracy and American ideals will cease to be and the information cosmos will roll on as before.

Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.
posted by petebest at 12:16 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

The total vote count in 2016 will be around 4-5 million higher than in 2008 and around 7 million higher than 2012. This was not a low turnout election. Anyone who claims it was is trying to sell you something (spoiler: they are selling you "won't sombody please think of the racist white people").

Clinton lost for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was not low turnout except in the trivial sense that every candidate who loses an election has lost because their opponent turned out more supporters. It's like saying that somebody lost a baseball game because they didn't score enough points. Thanks, Yogi.

In my opinion the most important large-scale effects that cost Clinton the election are racism&misogyny, thirty years of right-wing hate machine, failure of national institutions such as the media, voter suppression, and, yes, white non-college voters feeling left out of the economy. The most important single event (rather than sociological issue) was the Comey letter ratfucking.

Of those six things only one was in Clinton's control. It is definitely possible she could have spent more time talking about and to non-college working class white people. Would that have been a good thing? Would it have won the election? I tend to doubt it but we'll never know.

Certainly I find it hard to take seriously the proposition that the big problem with American politics today is that we don't cater enough to old white people.
posted by Justinian at 12:17 PM on November 27, 2016 [89 favorites]

I have no trouble giving Trump the same chance the GOP gave Obama

Fair enough.

In fact, I'm really hoping that's part of the strategy for at least the next couple years, and that those of you who live in actual "states" with "elected representatives" are hounding them doggedly about doing just that. I will happily march on over to the Rayburn building and give the rep of your choice a piece of my mind, if I can gain an audience.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

I wonder if part of the reason Trump is so upset at the recount efforts is that, as is typical for him, he doesn't have any idea what the detailed results of the election look like, he just knows that he won, and he believes that he absolutely crushed Clinton from coast to coast.

And his little band of sycophants and yes-people are all hovering around him, saying "Yep, you killed it, boss!" and "You whooped her, sir!" and "Dude, you musta beat her by, like, 40 million votes at least!"

But like most self-absorbed people, he's actually deeply insecure about the traits and accomplishments he has that supposedly make him so vastly superior to the rest of us. The vestige of some voice of reason left in his shriveled heart is whispering, "Man, you know you were mostly rejected by the American voters, right? You know that you only won because America is still dealing with the tech debt incurred by slavery, right?" And he's internally screaming "Shut up, you!" at that voice.

So any examination that threatens to mess up that narrative of a landslide win is met with great fear and anger by him and his cronies because it means that voice is right, and that voice must never be right.
posted by lord_wolf at 12:21 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

and then she tells you that you KNOW she's not racist, so why are you badmouthing people who voted for him and why the fuck am I even talking about it

Saddle up the nopetopus, Hoss, we're peacin' out.
posted by petebest at 12:21 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

> It's back in abusive partner mode: "I've been so gracious to you, now don't go let your lawyers protect the interests of millions of voters as part of a standard legal process or I might have to hurt you."

He's going to try to hurt her either way, but he's going to do it the Trump way:

The New York Post reports that despite earlier reports to the contrary, the incoming Trump administration supports an ongoing legal witch hunt against the Clintons after all -- just not one conducted by the U.S. government:

Foreign governments will be encouraged to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s finances...

A source close to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team told The Post that the new administration plans to pressure the US ambassadors it will name to bring up the foundation with foreign governments -- and suggest they probe its ­financial dealings. [...] “Haiti and Colombia will be key diplomatic posts for this ­because of all the money ­involved,” said the source.

Yeah, those are certainly the legal systems you want to turn to for investigations that are aboveboard and first-rate: Freedom House says of Haiti that "The judiciary is inefficient and weak, and is burdened by a lack of resources, a large backlog of cases, outdated legal codes, and poor facilities," adding that "Bribery is rampant at all levels of the judicial system," while in Colombia "The justice system remains compromised by corruption and extortion."

On the other hand, this makes perfect sense coming from Trump. Where are Trump-branded ties, suits, shirts, and eyeglasses made? Not in America -- they're manufactured overseas, in countries like Bangladesh and Honduras.

So Trump's applying the same line of thinking to vengeance against the Clintons. Outsource it! Compliant governments, cheap labor -- Trump profit! #MAGA!

posted by tonycpsu at 12:24 PM on November 27, 2016 [23 favorites]

"Trump's lost the popular vote, and now he's betraying our courts by suggesting corrupt Haiti and Columbia courts are better to investigate the people that made him a loser."
posted by petebest at 12:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

That Forbes article on Kushner looked like a total puff piece to me. You are going to need an N>>1 to prove to me that web marketers can influence an election at all.

I agree with this. Trump's win was not that big. After every election there is some breathless article about what the winning team did that was so special, and everyone loves to read about Silicon Valley disruption.

At this point it seems like there were an awful lot of things that contributed to Trump's win, and it will probably be argued until the end of time, especially because so many vested interests seem to want it to be something about how it was white working class voters (who were not racist at all).
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

To the posters dismissing the impact of Kushner's operation: how do you explain the fact his techniques rapidly increased Trump's merchandise sales by 10-fold?

I realize people buying MAGA hats were probably already voting for Trump, but it certainly provides some objective evidence of the extent to which his microtargeted messaging galvanized his supporters, and turned what may have been more passive supporters into ones who were (at the very least) more willing to open their wallets.

Saying "Trump barely won" doesn't take into account how he won spending half as much as Clinton, and without a traditional on-the-ground organization.
posted by prosopagnosia at 12:35 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

And here we go. The winner of the election saying the election is rigged.

@realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
posted by chris24 at 12:42 PM on November 27, 2016 [38 favorites]

Doesn't Trump's mirror suggest that there actually was fraud on his side? I mean I know it's just a joke-rule. It's not always the case that when he goes off on something that he must be guilty of it. Of course, voter suppression laws should by any reasonable person be considered election fraud -- no doubt we'd consider a lot of the shenanigans here to be fraud if done in some "emerging democracy". So maybe he's just feeling guilty about voter ID law. Naw...
posted by R343L at 12:48 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

To the posters dismissing the impact of Kushner's operation: how do you explain the fact his techniques rapidly increased Trump's merchandise sales by 10-fold?

There's not enough information to appraise that claim, just some upside numbers that him look good. Did Kushner spend $200,000 in micro-targeting to sell $80,000 in hats? We don't know, that's part of why people are calling it a puff piece.
posted by peeedro at 12:49 PM on November 27, 2016 [13 favorites]

re: Forbes~Kushner~microtargetting is just one of the many failure points in this round of democracy.

Many potential voters are, for whatever reasons, underinformed or misinformed or single-issue. Idiota* has been a problem since the inception of democracy.

The GOP deliberately allowing disinformation and the electorate's unwillingness to actually think about issues directly creates idiots in order to increase their chances of winning. The entire campaign post-primaries were carried out in bad faith.

With W, it was "voting for the candidate I'd rather have a beer with" and this time around it was "voting for the candidate who's as uninformed as I am" (modulo misinformed where misinformed is what one would like to be fact).

Is there a way to counteract targeted manipulation via micro-customed advertising? I'm sadly doubtful.

Given that the current state of the internet is based on advertising revenue and tracking onlinw behaviour, there's probably no technical counterattack. Critical reasoning skills is a step towards inoculating against misinformation, but too many people don't want to exercise critical reasoning cf religion/faith and/or the energy required to exercise critical reasoning.

There was a great article somewhere upthread(s) exploring the role of faith conditioning the faithful to not accept any new ideas or any ideas other than that espoused by their faith. Much of these micro-customized advertising seems to play on this fact - calling out a specific of the other candidate that does not fit their world view, or magnifying a specific of "their" candidate who agrees with a particular aspect that they hold as unassailable fact.

I'm afraid that converting unconvertable GOP voters may be a lost cause - increasing voting access to those who either did not vote or were not able to vote who may be open to thinking about issues/platforms might be one of the few available strategies remaining, idiots be damned.
posted by porpoise at 12:49 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

someone tell me again how this alleged human being is the President-elect of the United States of America jesus h jumped up christ on a sidecar
posted by Mooski at 12:50 PM on November 27, 2016 [23 favorites]

@realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

I feel that we have broken Poe's Law in the waning days of 2016, and we have moved to the weirdness that is Poe's Singularity: Everything is both real and a satire of itself at the same time.
posted by nubs at 12:50 PM on November 27, 2016 [28 favorites]

Well hey, Donald, let's do a nationwide recount if you believe that. I mean, surely you'd have a mandate if you're right, so put your money where your mouth is.
posted by jason_steakums at 12:56 PM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

His little ego is so bruised by losing the popular vote.

@realDonaldTrump
It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4--

@realDonaldTrump
states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!
posted by chris24 at 1:10 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Millions of people voted illegally?!? Why this can only be a job for . . . JAMES COMEY, FBI DIRECTOR
posted by petebest at 1:11 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

Hmm wonder why "President-Elect Asserts Millions Illegally Voted" isn't the lead story on everything everywhere
posted by theodolite at 1:14 PM on November 27, 2016 [42 favorites]

Because nobody believes a word he says. Not even the people who believe him.
posted by Devonian at 1:15 PM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

Seriously though, per the Lakoff article wayyyyyy upthread, a "Strict Father" candidate can only be hurt by accusations of being a Loser, being Corrupt, or Betraying Trust.

Any of those messages (Didn't win the popular vote: is a Loser) attack the heart of his support. So, yeah he's gonna trump down on it.

Lost the popular vote, is a Minority President, Loser.
posted by petebest at 1:15 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

Hey Trump, if you're so sure you won the popular vote, why not help out with these recounts to help ferret out all those illegal votes, eh?
posted by C'est la D.C. at 1:16 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

christers. Is he like legitimately, DSM-V standard, mentally ill?
posted by angrycat at 1:17 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Probably but you'd have to ask his doctor, Dr. Spaceman.
posted by Justinian at 1:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [25 favorites]

@crampell Retweeted Donald J. Trump
Apparently millions sophisticated enough to figure out how to vote illegally, not sophisticated enough to vote in states where it'd matter
posted by chris24 at 1:19 PM on November 27, 2016 [46 favorites]

"We didn't get the candidate who will support us, despite her winning the popular vote", in addition to being true, if it were headlines, would drive him insane. r.
posted by petebest at 1:19 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

The good news is if there are still elections in 16 years, we will get to experience this all over again as a new generation of progressive come of age and are too moral to make a pragmatic choice that benefits them more in the long run than allowing whatever dumb fuck the conservatives are running to get elected.

Wow, I bet this happening for a third time in as many decades would finally spur the Democratic Party into investing some political capital into starting to fix basic problems in the political system that cause the spoiler effect in the first place. /🍔
posted by XMLicious at 1:27 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

christers. Is he like legitimately, DSM-V standard, mentally ill?

I'll just repeat my post from 2 months ago:

I know two people who have worked with Trump on two separate things* and both said he hears voices (their characterization.) Kept complaining about people talking when no one was speaking. On one occasion, my friend went to the door and called out - to nobody - for quiet. That seemed to work and he stopped complaining for the short time remaining.

Obviously hearsay since I wasn't there either time, but they are good friends who I trust and both were concerned by it given his candidacy.

* Sorry for the sockpuppet and minimal details. Given the small industry involved, I don't want to out them or me.
posted by mynewsockpuppet at 1:30 PM on November 27, 2016 [48 favorites]

That tweet chilled me to the bone. It is really happening.
posted by Golden Eternity at 1:38 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

That tweet chilled me to the bone. It is really happening.

Yep. At the point that the winner is trying to destroy the institution that elected him, we're in for the fight of our lives and the only thing standing in his way is a Republican Congress.
posted by chris24 at 1:41 PM on November 27, 2016 [35 favorites]

I’m worried that activists and the press are paying too little attention to Pence. All indications are that Pence is going to the one really driving policy and operations of the executive branch (even more so than Dick Cheney), yet we’ve barely heard about him since the election except for the Hamilton flap. We can’t just look at which Trump scandal is a smokescreen for which other Trump scandal; we also need to consider that everything Trump does can be used as a smokescreen for Pence’s agenda. And taking down Trump won’t hurt that agenda in any way, which means we need to fight on a separate front to stop it.

Last week, Amy B. Wang for the Washington Post: Mike Pence doesn’t rule out waterboarding under Trump administration.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:44 PM on November 27, 2016 [18 favorites]

FYI, the 3 million illegals voting comes from Infowars. Not linking to it, but yeah, fucking Infowars.

And of course, it's bullshit.
posted by chris24 at 1:48 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

He's muddying the waters on the off chance the recounts find something.
posted by fullerine at 1:57 PM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

I wonder what the chances are of a splinter caucus of anti-Trump Republicans taking the balance of power? Low, to be sure, but it's not unprecedented -- look at the Gang of Eight that tried (and failed) to do comprehensive immigration reform).

There are several suspects in the Senate, but I think Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), hardcore libertarian is one to watch in the House. His politics are awful but they're genuinely held and they're not a stalking horse for racism (although of course they would have that effect). He's the son of Palestinian immigrants, actually.
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:57 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mark Hamill Blasts Trump’s Cabinet: ‘It’s a Who’s-Who of Really Despicable People’
posted by chris24 at 1:58 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

2020 is going to be a shitshow. Don't forget that Russians didn't think the leaks were going to work-- they thought Trump was done after the Khan family debacle-- so this has been a complete validation of their tactics. Expect their hacking and disinformation divisions to have more funding and manpower in 2020. Expect wikileaks to be even more aggressive. I fully expect them to fabricate emails or leaks for the next election, to create scandals out of thin air and have it amplified by their disinformation network, as 2016 has shown them the cracks in our media and news consumption.

We know the Russians probed our election systems, but I'm still skeptical they were effective in actually faking votes. The one benefit of our ramshackle election system is there are so many types of voting machines and methods of reporting, many of them relying on manual tabulation, that it's tough to manipulate so many of its pieces.

But imagine the damage that is possible under a Trump administration - under the guise of an audit to ensure election security, they could have an inventory of every type of voting machine used in every state, every firmware version, the manner in which every district reports their votes and so on. They'd have the IP addresses where voter registration databases are kept - which, if manipulated, could force voters to use provisional ballots the day of the election, and those votes might be invalidated in the same way NC is doing so now. If that list were to fall in the wrong hands? If GOP Governors were to cut funding to election commissions so they can't update voting machines or maintain proper security? It wouldn't take much to truly hack our election -- just the right people looking away at the right time.

The good news - I don't think Trump will run in 2020. Maybe he'll get impeached (although I don't put any stock in the GOP having the guts to do it) but more importantly he'll be 75 and hopefully tired of pretending to work for four years. Bad news - I think Ivanka will run. Granted way too early to say this with certainty, but I suspect part of Trump's plan of completely crushing Clinton's legacy is to take the mantle of being the first woman President away from her and give it to his favorite daughter. I'm guessing her sitting in on meetings with heads of state is partially her keeping an eye on him to make sure he doesn't go off the rails and partially giving her "international relations" experience that she can claim in subsequent debates. The interesting thing would be if Pence would fight her for it. Isn't it sad that the President tweet trashing his VP for running against his daughter is a completely plausible scenario? And that this is all a best case scenario because it doesn't involve a radiation cloud floating over from a nuked North Korea, making going outside to vote in California an impossibility?

Well, I need a stiff drink just thinking about all this.
posted by bluecore at 1:59 PM on November 27, 2016 [18 favorites]

The sad fact about the recounts and EC lobbying efforts is that the moment they looked like succeeding, Trump and co. would throw the tantrum of the century and would get their way with veiled or explicit threats of violence. The left will only start winning in this country when we learn to throw bigger tantrums than the right. A fighting left would have called a general strike by now, to be called off only when the EC pledges to respect the result of the popular vote.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 2:01 PM on November 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

Billionaire father and daughter linked to Trump shake-up

The fingerprints of Robert Mercer, a New York hedge fund billionaire, and his middle daughter, Rebekah, can be seen all over the new Trump staffing appointments and other decisions being made by the GOP presidential nominee.
...
Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign’s newly appointed CEO, is “tied at the hip” with Rebekah Mercer...

...his promotion of veteran pollster Kellyanne Conway from senior adviser to campaign manager — also bears the hallmarks of the GOP megadonor family’s influence...

“The Mercers basically own this campaign,” said a source who has worked with Rebekah...

“She identifies as a libertarian. At least she always did,” the source said, adding that Mercer was a big supporter of libertarian think tanks like the Goldwater Institute and Cato.

“With Bekah you always had to prove your libertarian racing stripes,” the source added. “This seems really strange.”

Rebekah Mercer, Daughter of Major Donor, Named to Trump Role

the Mercers are key investors in Cambridge Analytica, a data and analytics company that uses "psychographic" models to target individual voters based on their personality types.

Some previous clients have questioned the effectiveness of the company’s work, but Rebekah Mercer encourages politicians and campaigns that benefit from her family’s money to give Cambridge a try. Originally skeptical of the company’s pitch, the Trump campaign hired it around the same time that the Mercers shifted their financial support into Trump’s column earlier this year.

Cambridge is already bragging about its role in a historic electoral upset.
...
The Mercer family also has a financial stake in Breitbart News...

"America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite," the Mercers said in an Oct. 8 statement. "Trump is channeling this disgust and those among the political elite who quake before the boom-box of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces."

Robert Mercer is intrigued by monetary policy and, in years past, has funded efforts to try to resurrect the gold standard. One sign that his views may get some traction in the administration: in August, Trump added economist Judy Shelton to his advisory team. Shelton is a well-known advocate for the gold standard, and spoke at a Mercer-funded conference on the topic in Wyoming last year.

One thing to keep an eye on during the Trump administration: the resolution of a long-running tax dispute between Renaissance Technologies and the Internal Revenue Service.

posted by Golden Eternity at 2:02 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Remember when Trump pledged, “to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States, I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win”? At the time, I thought that at least was one promise he could keep. Somehow, even that was too much to hope for.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [13 favorites]

Is there a deadline to file for a recount for FL too? That one seemed fishy to me since the early vote was so heavily Democratic.
posted by localhuman at 2:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

All indications are that Pence is going to the one really driving policy and operations of the executive branch (even more so than Dick Cheney), yet we’ve barely heard about him since the election except for the Hamilton flap.

Is that really true though? For that to actually happen, wouldn't Trump need to be telling people ‘Don't present me with any options, just ask Pence what he wants’, and then punishing anyone who tried to directly ass-kiss the President into following their own preferred plan?

I can believe that Trump told Pence something like this but because the VP doesn't really have any power of his own while the President is still around I would've thought that to produce a Cheney-like situation rather than a monumental clusterfuck where every cabinet member and high-ranking public servant has their own little fiefdom within the executive, Trump would need to cooperate in a very specific way that might grate against his nature, as well as any mandarins controlling access to him.
posted by XMLicious at 2:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Is there a deadline to file for a recount for FL too?

In FL only the Secretary of State can call for a recount. There's a petition here calling on him to do so.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 2:11 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

More fun with Billy Bush.

@BraddJaffy:
It's hard to vote illegally. Trump himself was turned away from 3 polling places in 2004 b/c he wasn't on the rolls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOcQEcwFkX0
posted by chris24 at 2:15 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

At this point I'm hoping that the CIA picks Alex Jones up and throws his ass into their darkest dungeon. Otherwise I foresee a Trump White House running around battling monsters and demons. With real nukes.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 2:16 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

@KevinMKruse:
Is the promotion of conspiracy theories hyped by Alex Jones sufficient grounds to trigger the 25th Amendment? Asking for a friend.
posted by chris24 at 2:22 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

I can only think that the Republicans plan to impeach Trump after the inauguration. And now I'm starting to hope that they do, because it would be a normal sort of evil.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:26 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

At this point I'm hoping that the CIA picks Alex Jones up

that sentence was going in a different direction but I would've totally bought Alex Jones as the next director of central intelligence if that Pompeo guy hadn't gotten there first.
posted by indubitable at 2:27 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kellyanne Conway says Trump has been "gracious" by not prosecuting Clinton while she has joined in asking for a recount
posted by Golden Eternity at 2:28 PM on November 27, 2016

I can only think that the Republicans plan to impeach Trump after the inauguration. And now I'm starting to hope that they do, because it would be a normal sort of evil.

Unless it starts a civil war. On January 20, Donald J. Trump will take control of the military.
posted by tivalasvegas at 2:28 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can only think that the Republicans plan to impeach Trump after the inauguration.

Why would they? They're getting everything they want.
posted by longdaysjourney at 2:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

Joe in Australia, couldn't agree with you more. Trump's craziness is going to make harder to fight him because he is just so erratic and bizarre. Pence at least is a more predictable evil.
posted by not that mimi at 2:30 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Unless it starts a civil war.

I honestly see an ides of March sort of thing before a civil war, and I don't think the former is that likely.
posted by Mooski at 2:31 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can only think that the Republicans plan to impeach Trump after the inauguration.

It's amazing that our wishful thinking is Trump will be impeached as if the GOP had a conscience or that Trump is actually insane. I wonder if there was similar talk in Weimar Germany during its demise.
posted by Golden Eternity at 2:31 PM on November 27, 2016 [16 favorites]

Unless it starts a civil war. On January 20, Donald J. Trump will take control of the military.

I don't have faith in much at this point, but I do still have faith that the vast majority of the US military would refuse illegal orders. I also have faith that the Republican powers that be will think that they can keep Trump under enough of their control that they won't impeach him either.
posted by Candleman at 2:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Again non-traditional news doing it better.

@people:
President-elect Donald Trump falsely claims in bizarre tweets that "millions" voted illegally for Clinton: http://peoplem.ag/J7hjf6K

@CBSNews:
Donald Trump: "Millions" voted illegally for Hillary Clinton http://cbsn.ws/2gMRG7t
posted by chris24 at 2:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [38 favorites]

On January 20, Donald J. Trump will take control of the military.

Don’t Wait Until The Trump Administration Gives An Illegal Order To Think About How You’ll Respond

Task & Purpose is a news and culture site geared toward the next great generation of American veterans. We offer an outlet for well-written analysis and commentary on veterans and greater military affairs.

T&P is one of the better veteran-aimed websites out there. They were pretty neutral during the race but have since come out pretty hard against the Dilettante-in-Chief-Elect.
posted by Etrigan at 2:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [31 favorites]

I also have faith that the Republican powers that be will think that they can keep Trump under enough of their control that they won't impeach him either.

"Pence, here's the deal. You get to sit in the big chair, you do what you're told, you get to be the man who saved America from Trump. All you have to do is keep your fucking mouth shut while we take out the trash. Got it?"

"Yessir."
posted by Mooski at 2:38 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I do still have faith that the vast majority of the US military would refuse illegal orders.

All it took last time was a pet lawyer to provide sufficient cover so I am not sure where your faith comes from.
posted by srboisvert at 2:48 PM on November 27, 2016 [19 favorites]

In FL only the Secretary of State can call for a recount. There's a petition here calling on him to do so.

Lulz. Actual Voldemort Rick Scott is very happy with the result in Florida, thank you very much. There'll be a recount once we track down all his horcruxes.
posted by dis_integration at 2:50 PM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

I do still have faith that the vast majority of the US military would refuse illegal orders.

Two words: Abu Ghraib
posted by zachlipton at 2:56 PM on November 27, 2016 [35 favorites]

I don't have faith in much at this point, but I do still have faith that the vast majority of the US military would refuse illegal orders. I also have faith that the Republican powers that be will think that they can keep Trump under enough of their control that they won't impeach him either.

Remember the Reichstag fire. It is not difficult to imagine conditions under which a crisis occurs and the military is ordered by the Commander-in-Chief to cross the Potomac and 'secure Congress'.

If Congress initiated immediate impeachment proceedings (to be clear, I think this is very, very unlikely), a crisis of that sort would be more likely than not to happen.

The 25th Amendment is a bit different question. My strongly-wikipedia-informed understanding of the Amendment allows for the removal of a President without their consent by means of a letter written by the VP, cosigned by a majority of Cabinet members and sent to the Senate president pro tem and to the Speaker of the House. However, the President can write a countering letter to reinstate themself, and if the VP and majority of Cabinet send a counter-counter letter the matter is decided by a vote of Congress. Two-thirds of both houses must vote against the President or they are reinstated.

So this is basically the means for a legal coup, and unlike the 'normal' process of impeachment and removal, it removes the President from power immediately and potentially without his foreknowledge. But ultimately it would require, by my potentially flawed arithmetic, 96 House Republicans and 18 Republican Senators (assuming the GOP wins the LA runoff) to pull off.

I feel the same way about these scenarios as I do about the electoral college "maybe they'll vote against Trump" and, to some extent, the recount efforts.

They are an attempt to bargain and rules-lawyer our way out of the fascism that is coming, and they won't work.

The only way is through.
posted by tivalasvegas at 2:58 PM on November 27, 2016 [31 favorites]

I notice that you don't say "the only way out is through".
posted by Frowner at 3:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

Huh. Betfred are currently offering 2/1 on "Trump not to last a year in office". I think I'm taking those odds.
posted by Wordshore at 3:21 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I notice that you don't say "the only way out is through".

I do not. But I also would also note that empires rise, and empires fall, and so far the world has not ended.
posted by tivalasvegas at 3:33 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

You know, I thought this recount was bullshit until I saw how scared Trump is.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [74 favorites]

I think in a way, people should be informed that these mechanisms exist and so on not because there's actually a good chance that they'll change who's President, but because we have to be able to point later and say that the Republican Congress and Senate could have changed who was president and then chose not to. They have to be made complicit in every step Trump takes from the moment he takes office. They are not just observers with their hands tied. The general public needs to know that someone could have done something, that we do in fact elect the legislative branch to be a check on the executive branch, and that a failure to act is in this case the same as endorsement.
posted by Sequence at 3:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [40 favorites]

You know, I thought this recount was bullshit until I saw how scared Trump is.

Hell, it's 2016. Maybe the recount and/or electoral college Hail Mary is just the politics equivalent of the World Series going to seven games, the Cubs recovering from being down 3-1, and the final game going into extra innings after their opponents come from behind to tie up the game by scoring three runs in the 8th inning. Who the hell knows. Maybe Elvis and Tupac are still alive and the EC will pick them for President/VP in a shocking grand finale to 2016. This fucking year!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 3:44 PM on November 27, 2016 [26 favorites]

There is a world of difference between doing horrible things to foreigners and overthrowing the US government. Abu Ghraib was more a matter of bullies run amok than following illegal orders and the soldiers involved in torture at the black sites have almost certainly been selected for predisposition to such things.

A coup would literally end the United States as it has existed. I know a lot of military and ex-military personnel, some of whom are quite conservative, and few seem likely to even consider following an order to take on the people of the United States. I can't think of a single one, Trump supporters included, that would do so if it was ordered in response to Congress beginning impeachment proceedings against him.

Let's panic about the realistic things rather than the fantastical ones.
posted by Candleman at 3:46 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

until I saw how scared Trump is

Depends.
posted by petebest at 3:48 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I am not convinced that Trump is invulnerable to impeachment. It's not like he made a lot of friends with the establishment Repubs in either the House or the Senate. They have the far more manageable Pence in the wings. My guess is that Ryan and McConnell will have a tipping point where they tire of the ethics problems, Trumps unwillingness to see things their way, and they see his poll numbers dip enough to flip the switch.

I give it a year and a half. Tops
posted by Ber at 3:49 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

Conway on CNN implying that Trump's "magnanimous" decision not to prosecute Clinton (for the thing she was already cleared of) might be contingent on her comportment.
posted by contraption at 3:49 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

Conway on CNN implying that Trump's "magnanimous" decision not to prosecute Clinton (for the thing she was already cleared of) might be contingent on her comportment.

You know the shit where you wipe and wipe and wipe but it's like wiping a Sharpie?

That's Kellyanne Conway's location in the body politic.
posted by Talez at 3:54 PM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

"magnanimous" decision not to prosecute Clinton (for the thing she was already cleared of) might be contingent on her comportment.

JFC, the fact that Clinton hasn't fled to Canada or somewhere yet is all the more reason for her to be president.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:54 PM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

> Conway on CNN implying that Trump's "magnanimous" decision not to prosecute Clinton (for the thing she was already cleared of) might be contingent on her comportment.

Or as Digby puts it, Conway just put a horse head in Clinton's bed
posted by tonycpsu at 3:56 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

""Paul Ryan is clearly signaling that the lower classes need to lower their standard of living." I have been thinking about that all day because I don't know what that looks like."

Two big things that pisses Randian Republicans off about poor people is when they a) own appliances like refrigerators, stoves, and -- GOD FORBID -- washing machines, or b) have cable. Never mind that cable is your cheapest choice for keeping kids in the house when you live in a high-crime, high-traffic neighborhood and they're home alone after school because you're working; if they can afford anything beyond a shack with an army cot and a campfire with a single pot to cook their beans and rice, THEY'RE NOT POOR, THEY'RE WASTEFUL. They (the Randian Republicans) are unrealistic and hateful.

"But I also would also note that empires rise, and empires fall, and so far the world has not ended."

To be fair, those empires hadn't burned enough fossil fuel to end the world yet, or didn't have A-bombs.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:01 PM on November 27, 2016 [62 favorites]

Conway on CNN implying that Trump's "magnanimous" decision not to prosecute Clinton (for the thing she was already cleared of) might be contingent on her comportment.

You'd think he'd have moved on to campaigning against Pelosi and Schumer by now.
posted by Etrigan at 4:04 PM on November 27, 2016

> Two big things that pisses Randian Republicans off about poor people is when they a) own appliances like refrigerators, stoves, and -- GOD FORBID -- washing machines, or b) have cable.

I used to hear the same argument re: cell phones (or smart phones when those were more of a luxury item) but I haven't heard it as much. Maybe the GOP published a list of approved gadgets that the poors are allowed to own without being accused of not really being poor. Or maybe I'm just doing a better job filtering out bullshit from my news feeds.
posted by tonycpsu at 4:05 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

You'd think he'd have moved on to campaigning against Pelosi and Schumer by now.

He doesn't plan, he reacts.

Smart Democrats might use this insight to keep him on his heels for the next four years.
posted by Mooski at 4:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [26 favorites]

He doesn't plan, he reacts. Smart Democrats might use this insight to keep him on his heels for the next four years.

They ought to call in the team of psychologists who helped Clinton with debate prep to come up with a strategy.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 4:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

To be fair, those empires hadn't burned enough fossil fuel to end the world yet, or didn't have A-bombs.

I know, but I was trying to ignore those two issues for the sake of this discussion, since there is already enough existential despair to go around. :(

They ought to call in the team of psychologists who helped Clinton with debate prep to come up with a strategy.

And there it is. Hello darkness, my old friend.
posted by tivalasvegas at 4:11 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Conway on CNN

The rubbernecking.
posted by petebest at 4:12 PM on November 27, 2016

I used to hear the same argument re: cell phones (or smart phones when those were more of a luxury item) but I haven't heard it as much. Maybe the GOP published a list of approved gadgets that the poors are allowed to own without being accused of not really being poor. Or maybe I'm just doing a better job filtering out bullshit from my news feeds.

Mm, probably the latter. I still see complaints about 'obamaphones' pop up in various deplorable corners of my feeds.
posted by tivalasvegas at 4:12 PM on November 27, 2016

The rubbernecking.

Can we still rubberneck if we're sitting in the back seat of the fiery wreck?
posted by tivalasvegas at 4:13 PM on November 27, 2016

As long as the engine on fire is at the opposite end of the vehicle...
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:16 PM on November 27, 2016

Fucking bring it, Trump. I mean it.

I dare him to try and bring charges against Hillary Goddamn Clinton. Want the left to have a figurehead to rally around? Remember her approval ratings after the Benghazi sham trial? Let's stop collectively pretending this is going to be anything other than a banana republic.

Bring it, I say, you small little man. Fastest way to get his dictatorial ass set on fire.
posted by lydhre at 4:22 PM on November 27, 2016 [24 favorites]

Kellyanne Conway

And so he said he wouldn't rule it out. He said it's just not his focus right now. I think he's being quite magnanimous and at the same time he's not undercutting at all the authority and the autonomy of the Department of Justice, of the FBI, of the House Committees, who knows where the evidence may lead if, in fact, it were -- if the investigation were re-opened somewhere.

But this is the president-elect's position right now and I would say he has been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when for whatever reason her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70 plus electoral votes that he beat her by. I mean this -- you know, I was asked on CNN and elsewhere, goodness a thousand times, will Donald Trump accept the election results? And now you've got the Democrats and Jill Stein saying they do not accept the election results. She congratulated him and conceded to him on election night. I was right there. And the idea that we are going to drag this out now where the president-elect has been incredibly magnanimous to the Clintons and to the Obamas is incredible.

A real journalist (any of those about?) would ask her two questions:
1. Why is Trump deciding who gets to be prosecuted and who doesn't?
2. What law exactly did she break?

It is not against the law to run for President against DJT. Not yet, anyway.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [49 favorites]

the guy is a walking scandal. how can he not be impeached?

oh yeah, so was bubba bill. :-(
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 4:30 PM on November 27, 2016

Trump won't do anything to the the Clintons because he understands if the rule against acting against your predecessor in the White House goes out the window then he'll be utterly fucked if Democrats take the White House 4 years from now.

Considering he's made it apparent that he feels the President functions along the lines of the unitary executive favored by Nixon and that Presidents can't break the law the chances that his administration won't repeatedly break the law in the next couple of years approach zero.

Trump is surrounded by vindictive fuckheads and is one himself but I figure the key focus of his administration will be crony capitalism and chasing stupid vendettas against Hilary would be massively stupid.

Trump is most concerned right now about looking illegitimate and finishing over 2 million votes behind Clinton and then trying to prosecute her would look like banana republic levels of incompetence.
posted by vuron at 4:32 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

A real journalist (any of those about?) would ask her two questions:
1. Why is Trump deciding who gets to be prosecuted and who doesn't?
2. What law exactly did she break?

"But if we ask them hard questions they won't come on our show!"
posted by Talez at 4:35 PM on November 27, 2016 [26 favorites]

oh yeah, so was bubba bill. :-(

I know. Getting caught up with someone who ran a shitty business and a blow job. How the fuck did the republic ever survive a President getting caught up in that?
posted by Talez at 4:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

I think Trump's razor comes into play here. He's accusing Clinton of stealing 3 million votes because that's how many he stole.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

A real journalist (any of those about?)

Someone in these threads said the BBC had one. I wonder if they'd let us borrow it.

Alternately, some group on the Internet was working on taping an old issue of Psychology Today to a Press Relations undergrad, but I don't have a lot of hope that much will come of it.
posted by petebest at 4:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

NYTimes Trump Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People’ Voted Illegally

One person who spoke with Mr. Trump over the holiday weekend said the president-elect had appeared to be preoccupied by suggestions that a recount might be started, even as his aides played down any concerns. Another friend said Mr. Trump felt crossed by Mrs. Clinton, who he believed had conceded the race and accepted the results.

Mr. Trump’s aides echoed his concerns about the recount effort in appearances on Sunday morning television news programs. Ms. Conway, who was his campaign manager, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Mrs. Clinton and her campaign advisers would have to decide “whether they’re going to be a bunch of crybabies.”

Check the URL which is "trump adviser steps up searing attack on romney." Looks like they completely changed the focus of the story. This is a preview of the next 4 years as Trump takes offense at some perceived slight and goes on a twitter rant. He will be known in the history books as "Old Aggravated." Or maybe President Donald "Twitterstorm" Trump.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

Trump is most concerned right now about looking illegitimate and finishing over 2 million votes behind Clinton and then trying to prosecute her would look like banana republic levels of incompetence.

"Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

Just in case you were, maybe, thinking he was like normal people.
posted by Mooski at 4:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

@realdonaldtrump: Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

He should request a recount, then.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 4:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [66 favorites]

Getting impeached is highly unlikely but becoming radioactive for the Republican brand is exceedingly possible. I don't have a whole lot of confidence in our current media environment but once the Republican take the US back to the 1920s agenda becomes apparent I suspect even the largely ineffective media in this country will start to report in ways that will make re-electing Trump more or less impossible.

The reality is that Trump only got elected this time due to racism/misogyny and basic complacency by the electorate. Start taking away stuff that the electorate likes like Medicare and Social Security and you'll get a pretty significant shift in the electorate.
posted by vuron at 4:40 PM on November 27, 2016

Trump's secret plan against ISIS? Twitter.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:40 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

> "Trump won't do anything to the the Clintons because he understands ..."

I started questioning your premise right there.

I'm not, sadly, joking.
posted by kyrademon at 4:40 PM on November 27, 2016 [26 favorites]

I am having my first fun in almost three weeks.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:41 PM on November 27, 2016 [19 favorites]

Smart Democrats might use this insight to keep him on his heels for the next four years.

Trying to pin down Trump politically is like wrestling a greased up pig in shit.
posted by Talez at 4:41 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

> "Start taking away stuff that the electorate likes like Medicare and Social Security and you'll get a pretty significant shift in the electorate."

I gave up on trying to predict what the electorate would do when a big enough minority to carry the electoral college voted for the obviously crazy man.
posted by kyrademon at 4:43 PM on November 27, 2016 [35 favorites]

He will be known in the history books as "Old Aggravated." Or maybe President Donald "Twitterstorm" Trump.

I've seen Trumplethinskin thrown around.
posted by supercrayon at 4:43 PM on November 27, 2016 [38 favorites]

...you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
posted by j_curiouser at 4:43 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Voter fraud in Va, NH, CA. OK what proof do you have, sir? Someone told you? You saw something fishy in the polls? You heard a rumor? What? Show us some evidence or else stop tweeting shit.

Jesus I don't expect much from a Trump Presidency, god knows, but out and out lying and conspiracy theory crap is not something I was preparing myself for.

#YouSirAreALiar #InsaneTrump #NightmarePresidency #GoBackToTrumpTower #DumpsterFireInChief
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:46 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

Start taking away stuff that the electorate likes like Medicare and Social Security and you'll get a pretty significant shift in the electorate.

That's why any proposed changes to fuck Medicare and SS consistently don't affect people born before $CURRENT_YEAR - 55.
posted by Talez at 4:47 PM on November 27, 2016 [13 favorites]

Someone responded to my relative's heartfelt anti-Trump facebook message with a note that it was time for Dems to "give him a chance, just like Republicans gave Obama a chance."

I see this everywhere and I am so tired of it. Even if it were true that Republicans gave Obama a chance (it's not), this basically amounts to "When a smart, moderate Constitutional scholar and U.S. senator won in an obviously fair election, we accepted it, so why are you upset that an unqualified racist, misogynistic, narcissistic authoritarian won in an election heavily influenced by Russian hacking, FBI interference, voter suppression laws, and abundant propaganda?
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:47 PM on November 27, 2016 [109 favorites]

i just say, "the Electoral College is in the rule book. So are the recounts. Nothing new here, and all the campaigns knew it before kick-off."

(also does not sway trumpsters)
posted by j_curiouser at 4:51 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Even if Boomers turn out to be selfish fucks (and the jury is still out on that) the reality is that you can't keep the current program working for people over >55 and then give a different program for people under 55 because the reality is that people under 55 are the ones paying the bills for the Seniors.

You really can't privatize a part of it without privatizing all of it. It's just going to be a shell game to hide that fact from Seniors until the Republicans manage to force something through.

I can't even imagine how they think that they can pass a privatization of Medicare through reconcilliation though.
posted by vuron at 4:53 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Look this is all speculative, but suppose Trump truly believes that millions of illegal voters, fed on T-bone steaks and gifted with new phones, are bused around the country, voting for Democrats. Would it not seem reasonable to him to counter with his own illegal vote-rigging schemes?
posted by thelonius at 4:56 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Even if Boomers turn out to be selfish fucks (and the jury is still out on that)

lulwhut
posted by entropicamericana at 4:57 PM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

the rigging was: voter id, weakened vra, redistricting, and comey.
posted by j_curiouser at 4:59 PM on November 27, 2016 [30 favorites]

AARP will still go on the warpath, even if current seniors are guaranteed the old Medicare. And if you want to see anti-Boomer rhetoric reach a fever pitch, just wait until the GOP tries to explain to millenials and X-ers that they're expected to pay for the boomers without getting anything themselves. Not only do the headlines, and attack ads, write themselves, but I can see the collective freakout on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. About how the Boomers left us a broken world, broken economy, and now they want us to pay for a benefit we'll never see.

Almost want to see the GOP try this because the resulting shitstorm will be immense..
posted by honestcoyote at 5:00 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

the rigging was: voter id, weakened vra, redistricting, and comey.

Sure, but the recount is based on suspicions that there was something done to vote-counting machines, right?
posted by thelonius at 5:02 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can't even imagine how they think that they can pass a privatization of Medicare through reconcilliation though.

This is a party who refused to vote on a SCOTUS replacement.

They've already crossed that Rubicon.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

Can we not with the generalizations about a whole group of people? The age bashing around here can get old. (har har)
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

Almost want to see the GOP try this

As horrible as all this is becoming, there's a capering lunatic inside me that wants a President Trump, so that when everything goes to shit and they start rounding up dissenting voices, it can grab my conservative acquaintances by the shoulders and shake them: "SEE?! Do you GODDAMN SEE now?" I usually bring that crazy person inside me to heel by reminding myself that even then, they will not see.
posted to MeFi by Mooski at 8:32 AM on February 28, 2016

Nah, you really don't want to see it. You just think you do.
posted by Mooski at 5:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [30 favorites]

The New Yorker nails it: Facts Don't Matter
posted by chris24 at 5:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [20 favorites]

BTW ... is there still a press pool covering PEOTUS? Haven't heard anything in awhile.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:11 PM on November 27, 2016

Sure, but the recount is based on suspicions that there was something done to vote-counting machines, right?

i say, recount *all* the paper. fuck those machines. if WI finds just one that is undeniably broken or cheating, then agitate for a full paper recount. everywhere.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:11 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

It's all connected. Josh Marshall noticed this at the bottom of a WaPo story
In father’s scandal, the genesis of Jared Kushner’s unflinching loyalty:

Back on Dec. 7, 2013, the day after Wildstein resigned from the Port Authority amid growing evidence that he had ordered the lane closures, Kushner got in touch with him. In an email obtained by The Post, Kushner drew a parallel between Wildstein and his father, who had also resigned as a Port Authority commissioner in 2003 as questions began to percolate about Kushner’s campaign contributions.

“Just wanted you to know that I am thinking of you and wishing the best. For what it’s worth, I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass,” Kushner wrote.

Heller, the Kushner Companies spokeswoman, said this week that the message was a “poorly worded way of Jared trying to cheer up an old friend.”

Is there one awful thing in politics these people don't have a hand in?
posted by zachlipton at 5:16 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

Can we not with the generalizations about a whole group of people?
Speaking as a member of that group, and of most of the other privileged groups ('Boomer' age, white, male), I can attest that we ARE all that bad. I've spent most of my adult life trying NOT to 'be like that', but the pull of privilege is so damned strong and generations of privilege have made us so spoiled and weak, that I can't even say "not ALL people like me" anymore, and Donald Trump is Our Leader and Our Role Model.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:17 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

Can we not with the generalizations about a whole group of people? The age bashing around here can get old. (har har)

I'm not personally bashing the boomers or older. But I'm pretty sure the GOP proposal will usher in a pretty vitriolic response from those under 55. If AARP and many of the current seniors also defend Medicare in its current state, and I'm sure they will, then the inter-generational vitriol can be kept to a minimum.

For the old people in my family, the one thing which really makes them pay attention to politics is when their Social Security and/or Medicare is under threat.
posted by honestcoyote at 5:17 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

We're going to Mexico on December 22nd and I keep suggesting to my spouse that we change our plans and leave the 18th instead, just in case the country descends into chaos after the Electoral College votes. She laughs, but I am not entirely kidding. And I think she knows that and worries about the same thing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

Heller, the Kushner Companies spokeswoman, said this week that the message was a “poorly worded way of Jared trying to cheer up an old friend.”

Of course, this will lead the media to act like the problem is that he used the word "badass", not what he was actually saying.
posted by Sequence at 5:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

I heard rumors on Tuesday that the Trump camp was in blind, mortal panic over the possibility of a hand recount in Wisconsin and Michigan. That seems to be confirmed now that Stein actually pulled it off... Trump is out of his gourd more than usual with the "millions of illegal votes" thing.

Going to be an interesting week.
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:26 PM on November 27, 2016 [32 favorites]

Going to be an interesting week.

Been a lot of those lately.

Next time I'm voting for the candidate who promises duller weeks.
posted by notyou at 5:30 PM on November 27, 2016 [31 favorites]

looks like i picked the wrong week to quit drinkin
posted by entropicamericana at 5:43 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

no this is the best week, every week after this will be worse
posted by thelonius at 5:47 PM on November 27, 2016 [28 favorites]

How fucked up is Trump's claim that millions of people voted illegally and he actually won the popular vote? Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out Breitbart to see how they were covering it. They described his allegation as being presented "completely without evidence."

Not even other the other wackos have his back on this.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:49 PM on November 27, 2016 [24 favorites]

you can't keep the current program working for people over >55 and then give a different program for people under 55 because the reality is that people under 55 are the ones paying the bills for the Seniors

I just turned 52. I've been paying into the system for 35 years. I'm not "entitled." I am fucking owed.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:57 PM on November 27, 2016 [73 favorites]

I too just turned 52, and I will sharpen my walking sticks and head to congress my own self before I let them privatize it for any age. Fuck that noise.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:05 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out Breitbart to see how they were covering it. They described his allegation as being presented "completely without evidence."

That's not how I read it. They took an existing Reuters story (even including the "(REUTERS)" at the beginning), softened the headline and some of the language, then linked directly to the Reuters story to make it look like they were quoting it verbatim. Pretty sneaky.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:06 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Almost want to see the GOP try this because the resulting shitstorm will be immense..

I can understand the sentiment, but I'm still on Team Not Rooting for Terrible Things to Happen.
posted by indubitable at 6:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Yeah we need to stop acting like its charity. We PAID into it. It's our national 401k. Let's act like it. We are all vested.
posted by ian1977 at 6:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [34 favorites]

Next time I'm voting for the candidate who promises duller weeks.


I miss Dukakis. I miss Tsongas. I miss Jack Kemp.
posted by ocschwar at 6:08 PM on November 27, 2016 [13 favorites]

Or as Digby puts it, Conway just put a horse head in Clinton's bed


Come on, Hillary. Get a flat in Auckland NZ and a Twitter app on your phone.

You'll literally kill him.
posted by ocschwar at 6:12 PM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

I try not to get too mistrustful of boomers but increasingly their voting patterns kind of look like they are trying to pull the ladder up after them.

Like others have said people have been paying into the system fir decades and you are going to take away their benefits right before they are due to be paid?

Rage would just cover a small amount if that.
posted by vuron at 6:13 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

I miss Tsongas.

His wife is my now congresswoman. She seems to be doing a reasonably good job of being an east coast liberal.
posted by Talez at 6:13 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Just thinking of Trump's 'psychological projection.' Remember this:

Let's dispel once and for all with the fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he is doing, he knows exactly what he is doing.

Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world... it is a systematic effort to change America.

Or maybe this is more like irony.
posted by Golden Eternity at 6:15 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Come on, Hillary. Get a flat in Auckland NZ and a Twitter app on your phone.

You'll literally kill him.

CHILD, I got a spare bedroom, Hillary can fucking stay with me even Bill can come they can do all their tweeting and then play on my PS4 if they want.
posted by supercrayon at 6:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [23 favorites]

In some of the recent threads people mentioned Obama "Miss Me Yet?" billboards. Before too long we could do those for Clinton.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well one thing is clear: we can dispel once and for all with the idea that Donald Trump knows what he is doing, he has no idea what the hell he is doing.

HUZZAH! CHANGE COMES TO AMERICA!
posted by tivalasvegas at 6:21 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

Now it can be revealed: he originally intended the hats to say "MAKE AMERICA GRATING" but they were changed in SpellCheck.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:25 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

during the campaign i never felt comfortable about wearing Hillary stuff, or having a bumper sticker on my vehicle because i was scared of what some deplorables would do to me or my property. but as this presidency-elect has unfolded, just as bad or worse than i would have expected and as the racism, misogyny xenophobia lies hate and fucking stupidity has been normalized by the media i'm tired of being comfortable.

as a white straight cis male with a good job and all the privileges and graces i could imagine its time to wear my disgust out in meatspace, if not for me but for others who aren't as safe to do so. so last week i decided to make a giant 'holiday' light display. my choice was 'fuck trump', but ms localhuman didn't like that because there's kids in our neighborhood, so we agreed on 'trump is poopy'.

i've been learning how to weld, so this gave me a chance to work with some rebar for the letters and frame of it. i ended up with a 5 foot tall and 22 foot long display lit in LEDS, which i just finished wrapping the lights around.

its going on the roof of the garage for all to see once the rain stops here. if some deplorable wants to report it or vandalize my shit or beat me up or something then i don't really give a shit. what's going on IS NOT NORMAL and i am done acting as if it is.
posted by localhuman at 6:27 PM on November 27, 2016 [131 favorites]

We've already had a preview of how the narrative to 'privatize' Social Security goes: recession, then AUSTERITY for the win.

Toddler is already itching to give some creditor a haircut. That creditor is us.
posted by Dashy at 6:27 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Well one thing is clear: we can dispel once and for all with the idea that Donald Trump knows what he is doing, he has no idea what the hell he is doing.


i am not worried about trump knowing what he is doing, i'm worried about the cadre of grifters and opportunists surrounding him taking advantage of him not knowing what he is doing.
posted by murphy slaw at 6:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [16 favorites]

I'm worried that Paul Ryan knows exactly what he's doing.
posted by zachlipton at 6:30 PM on November 27, 2016 [51 favorites]

I was thinking today that maybe it's time for us white people to come out as what we actually are: vaguely pink or maybe (to steal a line from Bob Dylan) "chicken".
Just because it's a bit harder to rally around something like "PINK SUPREMACY" or "CHICKEN SUPREMACY".
posted by uosuaq at 6:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

They tried in 2005 to privatize Social Security. Went so well Rove's "permanent Republican majority" was gone by 2006. Voters tend to like SS and Medicare.

"Having invested so much political capital in this issue, President Bush embarked on the first of what proved to be a long series of tours crammed with events at which he pitched his plan to the people. It soon became apparent that it would be a tough sell. Within weeks, observers noticed that the more the President talked about Social Security, the more support for his plan declined. According to the Gallup organization, public disapproval of President Bush’s handling of Social Security rose by 16 points from 48 to 64 percent–between his State of the Union address and June."
posted by chris24 at 6:38 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

beige genocide is real
posted by murphy slaw at 6:39 PM on November 27, 2016

Paul Ryan knows exactly what he's doing

I can't say why I know this because it could get someone in trouble (and it's not like we don't know anyway), but Ryan totally knows what he's doing and definitely, seriously, wants the Presidency.
posted by waitingtoderail at 6:43 PM on November 27, 2016 [18 favorites]

Ryan totally knows what he's doing and definitely, seriously, wants the Presidency.

Win-win, as far as I'm concerned, as long as he acts soon.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:47 PM on November 27, 2016

Prismacolor renamed the long used "flesh" color to become a more politically correct marketer. It is now prismacolor number 927, now with the label "light peach".

(prismacolor number 927 with swatch which looks close on my monitor)
posted by bukvich at 6:47 PM on November 27, 2016

In one of the local FB groups I'm in, literally called Resist Hate, another member was flamed hard for voting for Trump. We spoke privately about WHY he voted for Trump, but what mattered to me is that he was in this group, willing to stand up against the worst parts of this upcoming administration, and he got treated to a barrage of insults. I totally understand why people, especially those who will be made unsafe(r), don't want to empathize with the average Trump supporter, but when one willingly stands up against hate, they shouldn't be attacked. That'll get us nowhere, and actively works against us. Ugh, I just hate everything right now.
posted by Ruki at 6:52 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

Well one thing is clear: we can dispel once and for all with the idea that Donald Trump knows what he is doing, he has no idea what the hell he is doing.

This seems to be the consensus reaction, and it's really scaring me. Here and on twitter, I'm mainly seeing: "he's crazy," he's lying again." Yeah, these are the same lies that got him elected, and he's promised to deport three million people. They may seem crazy to us, but his followers believe the lies, or more likely they agree with using the lies to subvert democracy.

Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will also present a severe threat to voting rights. It could choose not to vigorously enforce the Voting Rights Act, instead pressing states to take more aggressive action to combat alleged voter fraud. This could include purging voter rolls and starting investigations into voter-registration organizations.

Does anyone not believe Trump and his people will use voter disenfranchisement, deportation and redistricting to prevent the Democrats from regaining power? I would argue that Trump probably does know what he's doing. And he does in fact want to change America to look a lot more like the rest of the world (less democratic, more corrupt and oligarchical). Granted, I'm not sure what we can actually do about it. I guess not much.
posted by Golden Eternity at 6:54 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

I think Ryan is an idiot personally but I suspect that he and some of his compatriots are desperate enough to use this rare Republican trifecta to push through some truly odious shit. I sincerely doubt that Republicans can actually use reconciliation on Medicare or Medicaid as reconciliation basically needs to be revenue neutral and there is no way in hell that privatizing Medicare would be revenue neutral.

The primary reason why privatizing medicare is unbelievably stupid is that insurers might like to get a piece of that money but nobody in their right mind actually wants to service seniors in the healthcare market. The simple fact of the matter is that they are unbelievably expensive and invariably consume more benefits than they pay in. The only reason why Medicare works currently is that everyone pays into it (huge payment pool) and the fact that most of the people paying in won't get to draw a benefit for x number of years.

Go to a medicare privatization scheme and suddenly instead of having medicare as the insurer of last resort you have private insurance companies being forced to cover end of life care which is insanely expensive. No insurer would ever be willing to be put in that position unless they can deny coverage to the most expensive patients but the reality is that a large number of medicare beneficiaries would be completely uninsurable on the open market.

I could see medicaid getting fucked over because "lol fuck the poor" but the reality is that a large number of middle class people also need stuff like medicaid for end of life care like paying for memory care facilities, etc that aren't covered by Medicare.

The reality is that the vast majority of Americans cannot deal with the costs of medical emergencies as is and that's with Medicare and Medicaid absorbing the costs for some of the most expensive patients.

I think the second anything like Medicare and/or SS privatization hits the public conscience the number of lobbying groups like AARP and the AMA that will come out with all sorts of attack ads will be epic. For Ryan the simple fact that Trump is a complete and total shitshow is actually a good thing because he is distraction.
posted by vuron at 6:55 PM on November 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out Breitbart to see how they were covering it. They described his allegation as being presented "completely without evidence."

Curious. I've seen a lot of random FB commenters on trending election-related news articles quoting the 3 million figure at least a week before Trump's tweet. It was especially memorable because everybody was saying the same number of faked votes. It was never presented with a source; it was always just assumed that the reader shared the context behind it or would trust that it was true.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:06 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't think massive public disapproval will stop them. WWC well be eating dig food and they'll still vote republican so long as everyone else is eating cat food.
posted by Joey Michaels at 7:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I would have previously said that the number of middle-class people whose kids age out of sharing their healthcare plans and still need care but are in terrible jobs, especially in the rust belt, would have prevented them going after Medicaid. But then my mom acted like I was Taking Advantage Of The System for getting Medicaid and actually getting a couple of my old fillings replaced while I had it. I don't have faith in people loving their children more than they hate the poor, anymore.
posted by Sequence at 7:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [13 favorites]

Real thoughts that come into my head: Does he not have family to attend to on the Sunday after Thanksgiving? Where is his 10 year old son? Why can't he spend some time with his wife? Is it too cold to play golf? Why doesn't someone just change his password?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:08 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Curious. I've seen a lot of random FB commenters on trending election-related news articles quoting the 3 million figure at least a week before Trump's tweet. It was especially memorable because everybody was saying the same number of faked votes. It was never presented with a source; it was always just assumed that the reader shared the context behind it or would trust that it was true.

Snopes did some digging into the source. It's some guy on Twitter who once ran a Newt Gingrich super PAC and who refuses to give any sources for his claims, as spread by Alex Jones and Infowars.
posted by zachlipton at 7:12 PM on November 27, 2016 [23 favorites]

Curious. I've seen a lot of random FB commenters on trending election-related news articles quoting the 3 million figure at least a week before Trump's tweet. It was especially memorable because everybody was saying the same number of faked votes. It was never presented with a source;

I posted this earlier, but I'm now even more curious about this Trump guy referring me to a video where FOX News falsely interprets Obama as telling illegals they can vote and won't get in trouble.
posted by Golden Eternity at 7:14 PM on November 27, 2016

Medicare privatization is pretty much impossible without emlininating benefits, because holy cow. Just a tiny example: All ESRD( end stage renal disease) patients end up on Medicare. It's pretty much an automatic qualifier if you are s US citizen. It costs 87,945 per year per person, and there are approximately 650,000 people currently receiving treatment in the USWithout a single payer system there is absolutely no way to recoup these costs. No private company in their right mind would take these patients, that's why they are all on Medicare because basically no insurance would cover it.

Seniors (and people with disabilities) are a giant high risk pool usually on a fixed income. The money has to come from somewhere.
posted by AlexiaSky at 7:16 PM on November 27, 2016 [21 favorites]

I don't have faith in people loving their children more than they hate the poor, anymore.

Yeah that has been the most dispiriting part for me. I can see (if not approve of) not giving a fuck about other people's kids, but your own? That seems like such a basic human thing that it boggles me.

My current assumption is that it's really a delusion; they think their kids WILL be ok, if they work hard, and toughen up, and also climate change and economic collapse won't really happen.

But even that seems like a huge risk to take with your kids' futures.

But then you are also talking about people who refuse to believe the stats about abstinence-only sex ed, even when their own kids end up with STDs or pregnant--people who won't get their kids a shot that might prevent cancer because they have some kind of crazy idea that it will make them more promiscuous. Which is worse than dying of cancer.

So maybe it's not that hard to understand.
posted by emjaybee at 7:17 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

Golden Eternity - that's a scary thought; that Trump is using all of his reality TV tricks and pretending to be utterly and completely incompetent as a grand misdirection to accomplish his real goals of maximizing the advancement of kleptocratic oligarchy to the next level. At least, for him and his.

I recall others saying that the current culture war was started with education 'reforms' in the '70s, it's ulterior goal being to create an unquestioning, unimaginative, and easily manipulated voting populace.

Continued school segragation, the travesty of education funding (local property taxes instead of federal funding), somehow Texas influencing/telling what Pearson Education will publish in their education material, scam Charter Schools, fake Universities, and grarr.

Not going to get fixed anytime soon. This is the endgame of something that started 40-50 years ago.

If I was Philosopher King of the World, I'd work towards legislation that guarantees (and* legislation that makes me able to spell the word 'guarantees' without having to look it up) that grade-school Social Studies teachers get paid like medical specialists and require as much advanced education, practical experience under supervision, and are held to similar codes of conduct with a similar level of censure.

*(and single-payer; "Hey, you don't like the state/quickness of medical care? Pay up through your taxes. Everyone deserves the same standard of care." Not to mention gutting a thick and greasy layer of leaches lying between the real cost of healthcare and the end user.)
posted by porpoise at 7:22 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Seniors (and people with disabilities) are a giant high risk pool usually on a fixed income. The money has to come from somewhere.

Don't worry, the problem can be solved by decreasing the number of people in that pool, and Ryan's plan will help significantly with that.
posted by Candleman at 7:26 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'd do this myself if I knew how, but someone should write a Twitter bot that simply tweets several times a day "@realDonaldTrump has lost the popular vote to @HillaryClinton by [current margin]". We need to keep pushing the minority president meme, plus it would be such fun to see Donald work himself into a frothing rage at a bot.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 7:27 PM on November 27, 2016 [39 favorites]

And he does in fact want to change America to look a lot more like the rest of the world (less democratic, more corrupt and oligarchical).

I don't actually think he cares at all about what America looks like (or is like); he just wants people to cheer for him, and to make money. Being president helps him make money, and gets lots of people to cheer for him. So long as people like him--people he respects, that is--or pretend to like him, he'll just sign anything and agree to anything.

There's no great plan. There's just what he wants for himself (& presumably his family, but he sees his family as a reflection of himself, not as individual people separate from him).
posted by suelac at 7:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

We are getting attacked for participating in a recount that we didn't ask for by the man who won election but thinks there was massive fraud

--@marceelias (Marc Elias, general counsel for the Clinton campaign)
posted by zachlipton at 7:32 PM on November 27, 2016 [62 favorites]

Suelac, I think that's right except I'd swap in "pay attention to" for "cheer for." Good, bad, whatever: the media will be reporting on everything he says and does for as long as this lasts. We are all Apprentices now.
posted by kerf at 7:34 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

We are all Apprentices now.
More like Survivors, but some of the more stupid think they're American Idols.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

pretending to be utterly and completely incompetent as a grand misdirection to accomplish his real goals of maximizing the advancement of kleptocratic oligarchy to the next level.

I'm sure he is pretty incompetent when it comes to running the country. And I think it's probably true that his tweeting behavior is somewhat a product of mental health issues. But it's also true that these lies have been told before and are being used to justify voter disenfranchisement and deportation and that his supporters like them. So I'm not sure these tweets are the best example of incompetence.

Anyway, the question remains, what is the best course of action to take to counter what he is doing and saying? The media just seems to repeat his lies, sometimes pointing out that they are lies.

In the back of my mind, I'm worried about even greater voter fraud happening in deeply Republican precincts that could be used to affect Gubernatorial, Senate, and Presidential elections.
posted by Golden Eternity at 7:36 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Fred Boursier ‏@boursier
Randos: "We're fucked."

Educated friends: "Don't worry, it's illegal to become a dictator."

Very Well Educated friends: "We're fucked."
posted by Talez at 7:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [51 favorites]

Maybe there is something to this as well. I don't know.

NYT publishes damning, deep look at Trump's commercial/presidential conflicts of interests, so Trump tweets crazy fake-vote conspiracy
posted by Golden Eternity at 7:37 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

i don't think the tweets are any strategy on trump's part, i think that bannon et. al. just give him his phone back whenever they need cover fire

also traditionally hard hitting investigations into a candidate's unfitness for office are done before the general election but i guess beggars can't be choosers in the current media landscape
posted by murphy slaw at 7:44 PM on November 27, 2016 [37 favorites]

I do think some of the crazy tweeting is to distract from the business corruption. I also think the president-elect tweeting about bullshit election fraud and trying to undermine democracy is important to also focus on and is not just a distraction.
posted by chris24 at 7:51 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

Trump is going to lose the recount, isn't he? O holy Shit.

I was once afraid I was living in a William Gibson novel, then a Douglas Adams novel, then I was afraid I was living in a Jules Verne novel, because, why not?

I'm living in a John Titor message board thread. Well, I'm OK as I can program in APL and I'm white and don't live in a city. No.

Fuck Titor. Fuck Trump. General Sherman isn't dead while John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave.

Even if America loses the recount? The Truth Still Marches On. Two million plus votes worth of American Truth.

Glory Hallelujah.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:53 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

murphy slaw, I've actually been thinking something very similar. Bannon, Kushner--Trump just does whatever Trump does. But they have no reason to reign him in because he's not saying anything that can genuinely hurt him. I can't figure out what would genuinely hurt him, except admitting to something that could get him thrown in prison. I think they've spent months coaching him to keep his mouth shut about the things that go that far--because I do believe those things exist--but anything else? Literally anything else? "Go right ahead, Donald. You go tell people what you think while we iron out the details here."
posted by Sequence at 7:55 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

NYT publishes damning, deep look at Trump's commercial/presidential conflicts of interests, so Trump tweets crazy fake-vote conspiracy

Ooh, ooh, I know this one! This is where Clinton voters tear out our last patch of hair, Republicans in Congress roll their eyes and turn the page, and Trump supporters wait until the story appears on their preferred media outlet as "New York Times ignores massive voter fraud in favor of running hit piece." Tweet at 11 3AM.
posted by Rykey at 7:56 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Curious. I've seen a lot of random FB commenters on trending election-related news articles quoting the 3 million figure at least a week before Trump's tweet. It was especially memorable because everybody was saying the same number of faked votes. It was never presented with a source; it was always just assumed that the reader shared the context behind it or would trust that it was true.

I just used the 3 million figure today in describing his tweet to other people because I was certain that's what it actually had said. I had gone to Twitter and read his actual output today. But now that I go back, it only says "millions" and holy shit that is spooky and I'm not sure what's real anymore.
posted by indubitable at 7:58 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

> Ooh, ooh, I know this one! This is where Clinton voters tear out our last patch of hair, Republicans in Congress roll their eyes and turn the page, and Trump supporters wait until the story appears on their preferred media outlet as "New York Times ignores massive voter fraud in favor of running hit piece." Tweet at 11 3AM.

Correct. We would have also accepted "Surely this."
posted by tonycpsu at 8:00 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

Trump is going to lose the recount, isn't he? O holy Shit.


i doubt it. he does seem to be on track to be the first candidate in living memory to get fewer electoral votes than expected due to electoral college defections, which should net us another couple of evenings of fun tweets and do nothing at all to actually stop the trainwreck that is his impending administration
posted by murphy slaw at 8:00 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

Trump is going to lose the recount, isn't he? O holy Shit.

TURN TURN TURN CURSE SPIT
posted by dis_integration at 8:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

someone should write a Twitter bot that simply tweets several times a day "@realDonaldTrump has lost the popular vote to @HillaryClinton by [current margin]".

Why isn't this done yet?!?!
posted by petebest at 8:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

I was once afraid I was living in a William Gibson novel, then a Douglas Adams novel, then I was afraid I was living in a Jules Verne novel, because, why not?

I'm afraid we're living in a Stephen King novel because we elected Greg Stillson.
posted by Talez at 8:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

Oh good, then he's only one mis-step away from his presidential aspirations ending.
posted by Rat Spatula at 8:06 PM on November 27, 2016

someone should write a Twitter bot that simply tweets several times a day "@realDonaldTrump has lost the popular vote to @HillaryClinton by [current margin]".
Why isn't this done yet?!?!

Maybe it has been, multiple times, but Twitter just keeps deleting the accounts. (Terms of Service Violation: Not Alt)
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:07 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I feel pretty bad for the psychic coma patient who died to bring us the Access Hollywood tape
posted by theodolite at 8:08 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Trump is going to lose the recount, isn't he?

No. The same people who oversaw the original count are overseeing the recount. No shenanigans will be uncovered. Trump's freaking over this for the same reason he freaked over the Khans: Someone wasn't prostrating and kissing his ring and showering him with praise.
posted by dirigibleman at 8:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

How the fuck do you get to the point where securing the US presidency is a make or break thing for you?


leveraging yourself up to your eyeballs with banks run from oligarchies outside of the u.s. is a good start
posted by murphy slaw at 8:10 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I, for one, haven't ruled out Lewis Carroll.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:10 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I, for one, haven't ruled out Lewis Carroll.


dude humpty dumpty is running the goddamn show
posted by murphy slaw at 8:11 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh good, then he's only one mis-step away from his presidential aspirations ending.

If anyone sees Trashcan Man dragging anything across the desert, run like hell!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:13 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

It's actually a Philip Dick novel, because we have no idea who's making our reality today, nor who tomorrow.

The chances are high that they don't know either.

It's a shame. The futures of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein were rather lovely to the young Devonian, even if there were Issues, but once I'd got onto the hard stuff of Dick, Ballard and Vonnegut, I knew that they were onto something.
posted by Devonian at 8:13 PM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

someone should write a Twitter bot that simply tweets several times a day "@realDonaldTrump has lost the popular vote to @HillaryClinton by [current margin]".

Dave Wasserman has the best ongoing tally of the popular vote and tweets the current total and Clinton lead once or twice daily. Sadly he does not direct them to Trump.

‏@Redistrict
Fact: Hillary Clinton's popular vote lead is 2.2 million (1.7%) w/ 134.2 million votes counted. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19
posted by chris24 at 8:14 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

interestingly, christopher walken also saves us all in my post-election fan fiction
posted by murphy slaw at 8:15 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

dude humpty dumpty is running the goddamn show

More like Tweedledick and Tweedledumb.
posted by Talez at 8:16 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Word is Trump is going to lose WI and MI by the hand count, and by a lot. All eyes on PA... and maybe Obama stepping in once it's obvious what happened in WI and MI.

I wish this wasn't true.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:17 PM on November 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Word from where?
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [21 favorites]

What word? Who's word and where?
posted by zachlipton at 8:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

Word is Trump is going to lose WI and MI by the hand count, and by a lot

would you say that many people are saying this
posted by murphy slaw at 8:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [44 favorites]

"When I use a word," Trumpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Trumpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."

posted by kirkaracha at 8:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

i want to believe
posted by entropicamericana at 8:19 PM on November 27, 2016 [12 favorites]

Well it is 2016. If it was any other year I'd be thinking no way, it's impossible. With this year hey why the hell not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Jalliah at 8:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [16 favorites]

Sadly Related:
Report from the Future: VR Market Soars During Trump Presidency
In a special report from from April 1, 2018, harsh realities spur virtual escapism in a post-truth society.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Presidents don't get to decide who gets prosecuted for crimes. These discussions of Trump choosing not to prosecute Clinton are ahistorical, and genuinely frightening for the number of people that act as if this is normal decision processes for the American government.

And Trump is claiming there were millions of fraudulent votes cast. That seems like something the FBI and Justice department should look into, cause that sounds like a massive crime against democracy. But that doesn't seem to be part of any conversation related to these whack a doodle conspiracy theories.

Why isn't there an investigation into the voting fraud they are claiming occurred?

The people eating this bullshit don't even believe it themselves.
posted by dglynn at 8:21 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

I'd be thrilled to have Hillary and Bill come stay in my guest room and introduce them to the wonders of Skyrim but I'm worried one of them would side with the Stormcloaks and then I'd have to tearfully eject them into the street.
posted by um at 8:22 PM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

There are four words that I wish everyone used when getting news they found interesting - "Who told you that?".

One weird trick... but it works for stuff you really want to believe, and stuff you really don't.

Once upon a time, it was called journalism.
posted by Devonian at 8:22 PM on November 27, 2016 [41 favorites]

Sadly Related:
Report from the Future: VR Market Soars During Trump Presidency
In a special report from from April 1, 2018, harsh realities spur virtual escapism in a post-truth society.

I know it's a joke and all. VR is going to soar big time with or without Trump as president.
posted by Jalliah at 8:23 PM on November 27, 2016

"But then you are also talking about people who refuse to believe the stats about abstinence-only sex ed, even when their own kids end up with STDs or pregnant"

It's not so much that they refuse to believe the stats, but that they reject the idea that government, or schools, should be promoting immoral behavior in any way even if promoting that behavior can prevent worse outcomes. Plenty of them KNOW how many teenagers are going to have sex, and they KNOW that comprehensive sex-ed reduces the rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies and abortions, but they completely reject the idea that telling kids "here's how to do that immoral thing you want to do more safely" (i.e., have premarital sex) is an acceptable strategy for authority figures (and especially not government or schools who are non-avoidable authority figures; they mind less if parents or churches make that decision because you can opt out).

So it's interesting because a lot of harm reduction strategies involve cooperating with the behavior whose harm we're trying to mitigate, and selling harm mitigation is always a hard sell at first. (Remember how hard it was to get anyone on board with needle exchanges at first?) It's party of why heroin treatment right now in red states is such a clusterfuck; a lot of what we need to do is harm reduction, and that's often a very hard sell in conservative, religious states. (Mike Pence of Indiana specifically rolled back harm reduction initiatives like needle exchanges and methadone treatment, giving Indiana not just sky-rocking heroin use but a brand new AIDS epidemic; it's one of the things Pence is fleeing by taking the VP post.)

Anyway you can frequently get them to agree with your factual premise; they just flatly disagree with your method of addressing it, because of the moral statement a particular law or policy is making. This is why, incidentally, it's often more powerful to fight right-wing positions with morality language. Lefties love to be technocrats, and that's not a bad thing, but when you say "we can reduce the harm of heroin with needle exchanges" you are actually making a moral choice that the harm of heroin should be reduced, and that you choose that moral action over allowing drug users to suffer for their actions (as a warning and a punishment) or over the government making a strong moral statement that drug use is always bad and we won't participate in it in any form. The thing is, when you're arguing with right-wing religious people, owning that moral claim and frankly presenting it as a competing moral argument (rather than a pure technocratic harm-reduction strategy) is often far more powerful and convincing. "Look, we have a duty to these people who are suffering and people who work on the front lines of the heroin epidemic (especially use examples of Christian charitable groups if you've got them) know this works better in the long term in reducing drug use, but it's also far more compassionate (and hits these other Christian moral imperatives)."

You're not going to sell them all that way, but "We are making a moral stand for compassion" is the way to fight people who think the law should say "we are making a moral stand against drug use." (And the marriage equality movement used this to great effect, talking a lot about taking a moral stand in favor of families and children to fight against the rhetoric of religious people who wanted to take a moral stand against homosexuality. That was really powerful in shifting religious people to being pro-marriage-equality or at least no longer willing to fight it -- the idea that it was a moral claim in favor of families and in favor of children, rather than the idea that "who the hell cares who consenting adults have sex with, what does that have to do with anything?" which is a functionally amoral claim (not immoral, amoral).) The left likes to make a lot of amoral, technocratic, Utilitarian arguments, and I have no beef with that, but making positive, explicitly moral arguments should be another tool in the toolbox. And most lefties do hold their positions because of their moral commitments! Sometimes the way to win your point isn't with facts and figures and most good for the greatest number, but with a passionate appeal to your moral stance.

(That said, you can't sell a religious fundamentalist on sex ed by making those arguments unless literally their only sexual morality concern is reducing abortion and they are willing to have the government hand out condoms to achieve that. Usually they are ALSO concerned that teenagers just not be told sex is an okay thing to have. Soooooometimes they'll agree that just like we teach financial education to high school students who are not yet legally allowed to have credit cards or mortgages as a vaccination against bad decisions when they ARE allowed to do those things as adults, we should teach comprehensive sex ed so that when they're older and married they know stuff about their own bodies and can protect their sexual health the better to procreate later. But that's a pretty long detour.)

I taught ethics to community college students (teenagers and adults both) in downstate Illinois for 5 years, including lots and lots of rural folks who were members of fundamentalist churches, and I spent a lot of time on the school board dealing with things like sex ed and STD testing in schools and pregnant students and whatnot -- I have spent a lot lot lot of time arguing with people about these things and have zeroed in a handful of strategies that tend to work. :) I also have a WHOLE lot of insight into why my students especially held the positions they held -- I led classroom discussions and graded their papers for five years, after all -- and I think it pays to inquire into the underlying structures of thought, rather than just the bumper-sticker sloganeering, because it's a lot easier to find your point of entry to change minds if you understand what the sticking point is.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:24 PM on November 27, 2016 [164 favorites]

man, fuck virtual reality, i'm gonna need to get a wirehead jack installed to get through this
posted by murphy slaw at 8:25 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

He's afraid he could lose the recount. This is a man who's so insecure that he's trying to convince himself not just that he won, which should be enough, but that he really secretly won in a landslide. Of course he's insecure enough to think that he could lose the recount. I'm not sure that means it's really the case, but I do think he believes it possible and that it's seriously distressing to him. This is the same thing behind him talking about not conceding. He would have been terrible at leading one side of a civil war. He doesn't really want that.

But he can't believe he's the second-best guy. Believing he's the best guy is the thing that justifies every other decision he's ever made. He wants to be liked, and he did nothing with his life worth liking him for. So, here we are. He's got a lifetime's worth of a tantrum built up about how nobody wants to be his friend, and thus we wind up in the President of Gothos scenario.
posted by Sequence at 8:28 PM on November 27, 2016 [20 favorites]

There are four words that I wish everyone used when getting news they found interesting - "Who told you that?".

If you're pressed for time, you could shorten it to, "Says who?"
posted by indubitable at 8:29 PM on November 27, 2016 [23 favorites]

Today I made two trees, the outside of house and a couple of chess pieces. Tomorrow I'll be sticking them into VR and walking all around them. I will also be shooting tomatoes out of my hand.
Next up is taking a zombie model and learning how to change it's face to Trumps.
Then I'm going to walk around my house, trees, and chess pieces and shoot tomatoes at zombie Trumps, all in VR.

As you can see my life is quite exciting right now.
posted by Jalliah at 8:33 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

i don't think the tweets are any strategy on trump's part

That's not quite what I think is happening either. I think they do have some goals they want to accomplish, and voter disenfranchisement to counter demographic changes and hold onto power is quite likely one of them. Getting rich, another. Maybe they do think that "post-modern," "post-truth," "fake news" propaganda is an effective tool that helped them get elected and will help them execute on their agenda. It is interesting where this story about "3 million illegal voters" came from:

Donald Trump’s new explanation for losing the popular vote? A Twitter-born conspiracy theory.

In fact, this claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted is itself the result of a random tweet.

On Nov. 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being 3 million votes that were cast by noncitizens.

@JumpVote:

We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.

We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action.

#unrigged

Phillips claims in another tweet that his organization (it's not clear which organization, but it may be VoteStand) has a database of 180 million voter registrations and he confirms that 3 million of the people in that database who voted are noncitizens. He has been asked to provide evidence for that claim repeatedly, without having done so.

Probably Trump's tweets weren't planned ahead, but they seem to have been taken from a fake news project someone had already created - whether at the direction of Trump's team or not.

Trump likes to hold forth in his rallies telling mostly lies, and not having his rallies anymore maybe twitter is filling the void for him. But his lies are being used to advance and perhaps create his administration's agenda, to the extent that they actually know what their agenda is. Perhaps his rallies were never really part of a grand strategy either, but they just took off and were certainly a big part of how he ended up resonating with so many people and got elected.
posted by Golden Eternity at 8:34 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

If you're pressed for time, you could shorten it to, "Says who?"

You could. It's more confrontational, though. You have to say it in a spirit of genuine curiosity, and mean it that way too.

When it comes down to scepticism versus cynicism, scepticism wins every time. Even - especially when - the stakes are this high.
posted by Devonian at 8:35 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

@monkeycageblog:
2004: Dems must win "values voters" if they want to win any election ever again.
2008: [Dems win without values voters.]

@monkeycageblog:
2008/12: GOP must win over non-whites if they want to win any election ever again.
2016: [GOP wins without non-whites]

@monkeycageblog:
Just a cautionary note amidst the many #hottakes on why the Democrats must win white working-class votes, etc., etc.
posted by chris24 at 8:47 PM on November 27, 2016 [28 favorites]

Ari Fleischer has a WSJ bit Trump vs. the White House Press Corps. His argument is summarized by Blake Hounshell: "Ari Fleischer argues that if Trump cracks down on the press, it will be because we deserved it." Or, as Brendan Nyhan puts it, "BTW, this is a classic example of how anti-anti-Trumpism allows conservatives who know better to excuse & downplay dangerous norm violations."
posted by zachlipton at 8:52 PM on November 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

("Says who" is a callback.)

Ah, so it is. Missed that. But at this moment, I don't know what it actually signifies...
posted by Devonian at 9:07 PM on November 27, 2016

lalex: you can't fly there.
posted by tss at 9:09 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

@carlbernstein:
This factless madness shows @realDonaldTrump to be unhinged. If PresNixon had a Twitter account it would not reflect this much paranoia.
posted by chris24 at 9:13 PM on November 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

I am certain Trump will win the recount. I was certain Clinton would win the election. So there's hope I guess.
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:18 PM on November 27, 2016 [20 favorites]

I heard rumors on Tuesday that the Trump camp was in blind, mortal panic over the possibility of a hand recount in Wisconsin and Michigan.

How about sourcing your rumors or at least adding a bit of context? Perhaps adding "real, fake, joke" to your comments? It's hard to parse what you are saying and hard to respond to.
posted by futz at 9:23 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy. - Donald Trump is winning the war on reality. Welcome to the age of nightmares.

I don't fully buy any of this but it is interesting to read.

It is tempting to suppose Trump built this phantasmagoria by accident — that it is the byproduct of an erratic, undisciplined, borderline pathological approach to dishonesty. But the president-elect should not be underestimated. His victories in both the Republican primary and the general election were stunning upsets, and he is now set to alter the course of world history. If he does not fully understand what he is doing, his advisers certainly do.

I'm not convinced his advisers really do either or that a logical understanding of what they are doing exists at all.

(Surkov's) aim is to undermine peoples’ perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.

Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.

But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it: “It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.”

A ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is undefinable. It is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion, as the war began, Surkov published a short story about something he called non-linear war. A war where you never know what the enemy are really up to, or even who they are. The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.
...
(Now referring to Trump and Bannon)
In a world where nothing is true, the only real choice available to voters is between competing fictions. Trump offered a particularly compelling set of fictions, but he also found various ways to telegraph that he knew what he was doing. Through irony, evasion, self-contradiction, and obviously ridiculous claims, he let his supporters in on the joke. If everything is a lie, then the man who makes his lies obvious is practicing a peculiar form of honesty.
...
“One thing that should be distinguished here, is the media is always taking Trump literally,” said Thiel during an October appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take him seriously but not literally.”

This might work for some things where Trump's lie is an exaggeration but behind it there is some truth. I think people really believed Obama was negotiating bad deals for them and Trump would negotiate good deals, etc. But what do we make of this lie? Do people really believe 3M non-citizens voted? What are we supposed to take seriously here? I wish someone would ask Thiel.

It is tempting to take solace in the belief that, if Trump cannot be taken literally, his extreme rhetoric might conceal a secret moderate streak. But that hope would be misplaced. Non-linear warfare is intrinsically authoritarian. The president-elect is speaking the language of dictators.
...
Consensus is the bedrock of democracy. For differences to get resolved in a properly democratic fashion, there needs to be agreement over the terms of the debate. Interlocutors must be aware of their shared rights and responsibilities, and they need to be capable of proceeding from a common set of facts and premises.

American democracy has always been deeply flawed, but political actors used to at least agree on a set of shared premises and ground rules. President Barack Obama bemoaned the erosion of this consensus in a New Yorker article published shortly after Trump’s election.

I really don't get how any of this is working, but judging by Putin's success, Trump's success, and Brexit's success, it is.

It's fascinating how it has gone from Rush Limbaugh "ditto-heads" accusing their opponents of being "low information voters" to now admitting that Trump is basically always lying and is perhaps not well informed but "should be taken seriously." The Tea Part and Sarah Palin reaction to Obama was another shocker for me. Also seemingly quite irrational.

Perhaps the chaos created by this crazy surge rightward has been a big factor in creating the environment in which Trump has thrived. First by removing consensus and ground rules from the GOP and now from the entire political process. And perhaps the alternate reality created to justify the Iraq War also set the stage for some of this, both here in the US and by convincing Putin and Surkov that they had to respond in kind.
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:33 PM on November 27, 2016 [21 favorites]

I think Trump's razor comes into play here. He's accusing Clinton of stealing 3 million votes because that's how many he stole.

Trump's Mirror, but yeah.
posted by mazola at 9:41 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

What we need now is a second movement toward, maybe, a 20-hour workweek.

We could start with a movement for a 40-hour workweek . . .
posted by flug at 9:54 PM on November 27, 2016 [22 favorites]

It's all social-signaling, i.e. all that stuff Fred Clark wrote about evangelicals bearing false witness

Trump doesn't actually believe the bullshit he says, and neither do his supporters
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:00 PM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

@evanier Hey, if Trump can claim he won the popular vote, we all can! Tweet your victory claim with the hashtag #IWonThePopularVote.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:08 PM on November 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

> I don't fully buy any of this but it is interesting to read. [...] I'm not convinced his advisers really do either or that a logical understanding of what they are doing exists at all.

I think the answer depends on whether you and Resnikoff are talking about his end goals -- what he would do if there were no political obstacles -- or the tradecraft that he uses to advance toward whatever those goals may be. To the extent that he has goals, I don't think his and those of his advisers are necessarily aligned, but I also don't think he's smart enough to know when he's being played by those advisors, so he may unwittingly advance theirs anyway. Since most of his inner circle have no public service record to speak of, it's going to be hard to get a fix on these dynamics until we've seen them operate for awhile, even if we're getting some hints about them in the form of Steve Bannon quotes and Kellyanne Conway Sunday talk show appearances.

Whatever his/their goals are, and they're probably bad, I actually find myself more worried by Trump's tradecraft, which I think the Resnikoff piece summarizes quite well. He has has shown a frightening ability to exploit loopholes in our media and the public's ability to reason, and neither the media nor the public seem to have been able to overcome his denial-of-service attacks. There are hopeful signs, like how some media outlets are using the word "false" to describe Trump's three million voter tweet instead of merely reporting that he said it, but as soon as he senses one attack isn't working he just switches to another. There may be limits to how far he can ride this "throw shit on the wall and see what sticks" strategy, but there are going to be very few limits on what he can do once he's sworn in, so we don't have a lot of time to fuck around here.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:13 PM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'd do this myself if I knew how, but someone should write a Twitter bot that simply tweets several times a day "@realDonaldTrump has lost the popular vote to @HillaryClinton by [current margin]".

I played around with the twitter api a bit and resurrected an old twitter account to do something similar. It updates every hour with a randomly selected tweet with either this statement or some other statement or an old Camus quote. I'll probably clean the source up and post it on github/here so we can all send out automated tweets.

I wasn't able to find a free election results API, so for now I just started the margin at 2100000 and it auto increments randomly.
posted by localhuman at 10:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

Nigel Farage to ask Americans to 'forgive' British people who criticised Donald Trump, in US trip

Didn't he already kiss the ring right after the election? Does trump now need to retrieve the ring from Nigel's colon?
posted by futz at 10:20 PM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

Golden Eternity—the bit about Vladislav Surkov you quote from the ThinkProgress piece is itself a quote from a 2014 film by Brit documentarian Adam Curtis. If you look in the MeFi tag I've linked to there you can see the FPPs about that one and about his latest film HyperNormalisation which aired last month and dealt with parallels between Surkov's propaganda and Trump's campaign. (Among many other things; it's quite long, but I found it worth watching.)
posted by XMLicious at 10:58 PM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

Good night, thread
Good night, orange head
Good night, silent, creeping dread ...
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:04 PM on November 27, 2016 [57 favorites]

@thejoshpatten: Throwing out bait this distracting can only mean one thing: Eric just murdered an escort.
posted by PenDevil at 11:55 PM on November 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

R. Derek Black, Why I Left White Nationalism. This is the son of the guy who founded Stormfront (previous FPP on Derek Black: The White Flight of Derek Black). I'm glad he wrote it, and I wonder if he has the guts to put his ass on the line for real -- like, high-profile interviews with Megyn Kelly etc., to help fight this xenophobia and contempt that he spread and inflamed.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 12:15 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

From the NYT:

"Trump Tower in the Makati City district of Manila is being developed by Donald J. Trump’s business partner Jose E.B. Antonio, who has just been named the Philippines’ special trade envoy to the United States."

FFS. That is all.
posted by jaduncan at 12:24 AM on November 28, 2016 [29 favorites]

That's why he opposed the TPP... he wants all trade channeled directly through him. Cha-ching.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:42 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Special trade.

At least they're still using euphemisms.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:43 AM on November 28, 2016

It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote

That surly addition of "so-called" actually makes me think that he's upset that Hillary is more *popular* than he is - that the election is a literal popularity contest and his brain cannot parse how everyone tells him he "won" the election but that still doesn't mean he's the most popular kid in the class.
posted by jontyjago at 12:47 AM on November 28, 2016 [19 favorites]

Okay I had to go and finish it, so Good Night Thread for real this time ...

In the great blue web
there was a contact link
And a megathread
And a post about a cow who could stand on his head.
And there were three deleted posts full of Trump boasts
And two little catters wedged in a scanner.

And a Democrat armed with a brickbat.
And a Berner bereft
And the liberal Left
And a quiet old moderator who was grumbling, "pest."

Good night, web. Good night, thread
Good night, silent, creeping dread.
Good night, scary big orange head.

Good night, posts. Good night, boasts.
Good night, catters. Good night, scanners.
Good night, Democrat. Good night, brickbat.
Good night, sanity. Good night, humanity.

Good night, corb. Good night, Left.
Good night Wordshore doing his best.
Good night to the old mod grumbling, “Pest!”

Good night, insurance. Good night, clean air.
Good night, tweetstorms everywhere.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:51 AM on November 28, 2016 [80 favorites]

Once there was a user
who wanted to run away.
So he said to the mods
"I am running away."
"If you run away," said the mod,
"The thread will run after you,
Because this is a dystopian nightmare."
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:57 AM on November 28, 2016 [58 favorites]

So much depends
On the large orange hair
Resting uncomfortably
On an empty shell
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:23 AM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Is it possible to recount Virginia? Trump has declared it rigged. I know Hillary won but if there was voter (Trump) fraud, it would be valuable to see. If there is no Trump fraud then all of this exercise is for naught. And it makes for great trolling.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 2:48 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm just so goddamn tired of all of this, everyone.
posted by flatluigi at 2:50 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

Does anyone have insight into why he singled out Virginia, New Hampshire, and California? Is there some Infowars/Breitbart/O'Keefe piece or random social media post he's drawing from, or did he just pick randomly pick them out of a hat filled with states that went for Hillary?
posted by prosopagnosia at 3:27 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Does anyone have insight into why he singled out Virginia, New Hampshire, and California? Is there some Infowars/Breitbart/O'Keefe piece or random social media post he's drawing from, or did he just pick randomly pick them out of a hat filled with states that went for Hillary?

This blog post in support of Trump's tweet links to some pre-election stories that may have fuelled it.
posted by rory at 4:32 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

@localhuman: I recommend putting a . in front of Trump's Twitter name, otherwise the tweets won't show up in "your" timeline. (A thing that confused me for a moment.)
posted by XtinaS at 4:38 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Is it just me or in that photo in the NYT where Trump is bellowing at the media through upraised hands to his pie-hole, and Mitt is standing sideways, like he is about to turn to Trump and go "heh heh" while thinking, my Mormon forbearers suffered much more when they fled across the American desert, come on Mitt, you can do this"

Is anybody else looking at the picture and thinking:
"Don't stop and look back, Mitt! That's when the monster gets you!"
or
"PILLAR OF SALT PILLAR OF SALT PILLAR OF SALT"

mind you, I don't know if Lot is in the Mormon bible so maybe only reminding him of the monster rule would work
posted by angrycat at 4:47 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

One of the newest things to freak me out about the future Trump presidency. Marco Rubio is talking about how Trump will bring "change" to Cuba.
posted by drezdn at 5:05 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Donald Trump's top aide, Kellyanne Conway, on Monday slammed an MSNBC report that said the president-elect was "furious" over comments she made Sunday about Mitt Romney.

Conway called the reporting "sexist" and said she could have any job she wants, according to MSNBC.

Top aides to Trump said they were "baffled" over Conway's comments about Romney, MSNBC reported earlier Monday. A source said her comments escalate concerns that Conway is "pushing her own agenda" instead of driving Trump's message.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:11 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Top aides to Trump said they were "baffled" over Conway's comments about Romney, MSNBC reported earlier Monday. A source said her comments escalate concerns that Conway is "pushing her own agenda" instead of driving Trump's message.

Well it sounds like everything is just hunky-dory inside the Trump camp. Yep, no infighting here, no siree bob. We're all on the same page, moving forward under the clear and unambiguous direction of our leader, everyone understands what their job is and there is no use of the press to backstab and undermine in a frantic scramble to become the chief source of influence with the erratic, mercurial boss who does whatever the last person he talked to suggests. Nope, this is entirely healthy and not at all something to worry about because it's how adults in the world's oldest democracy definitely do things. Elder statesmen, all.
posted by dis_integration at 5:22 AM on November 28, 2016 [45 favorites]

I'm gonna be pissed at myself for getting interested in this recount business if all this Trump/Conway/presumably Bannon wailing is cover for the fight over whether it will Dracula or Mitt as SoS, and further if this Mitt tussle is like the first war between the evil demented children or the adults who have both many copies and, in contrast to the children, an actual motherfucking plan.
posted by angrycat at 5:35 AM on November 28, 2016

To rely on an old cliche, when you look up "gas lighting" in the dictionary there's a picture of Kellyanne Conway's face.

Of all the horrible people I've met through that campaign, I think she's the worst of the worst. Everyone else seems like they are either lying to themselves (Giuliani) or dumb as a rock (taco truck guy.) Every time she opens her trap she lies straight to my face and then laughs about it.
posted by Room 641-A at 5:35 AM on November 28, 2016 [20 favorites]

Cuba has caught our PE's eye.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal.

Great. Now what?
posted by Talez at 6:05 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I kind of feel like if we had time, mass producing Trump/Poop Christmas lights would be the opportunity to make some cash before the apocalypse. I mean there's next Christmas I guess.
posted by angrycat at 6:05 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

If there is a next Christmas.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:07 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

This word art guy is doing a word art piece for the FOX Philly affiliate, and they sent out a tweet asking for topical words to use in the word art. I was like don't respond don't respond then my typey hands went *WHERE IS YOUR TRUMP GOD NOW* which is both nonsensical and not really funny.
posted by angrycat at 6:14 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

@allanbrauer:

Contact your governor's office on Monday, tell him/her you're shocked to learn millions of illegal votes cast, demand a complete audit.
posted by Wordshore at 6:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [43 favorites]

One of the newest things to freak me out about the future Trump presidency. Marco Rubio is talking about how Trump will bring "change" to Cuba.

This is chilling to me too. For Trump this must look like the perfect little place to invade—as a poor nation in transition it's ripe for strongarming into accepting economic conditions favorable to the USA The Donald, it's got major ideological significance to a good chunk of his base, it allows him to posture as a President with the balls to "deal with" enemy nations, and hey, at only 100 miles off our shores it's cheap to invade and way too risky for other countries to try to stop us.

I think the reality would be way messier and bloodier than that, but Trump never loses sleep over something so malleable as reality, so.
posted by Rykey at 6:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Scott Shane posted a fawning article at the NYT, continuing the normalization of Trump. Seriously, he calls this guy a "populist firebrand" and the piece is filled with criticisms that are almost immedeatly downplayed. For instance:

Vociferous critics of his appointment, a diverse group that includes the conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who challenged Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, have variously called Mr. Bannon a racist, a sexist, an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe. Interviews with two dozen people who know him well, however, portray a man not easily labeled, capable of surprising both friends and enemies, with unshakable self-confidence and striking intensity. (Mr. Bannon turned down a request for an interview, saying he was too busy with the presidential transition.)

Shane goes waaaay out of his way to excuse Bannon's bigotry and anger issues, with multiple "some of his best friends" handwaving, but the atom bomb comes near the end:

Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.

“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”

Shane is almost apologetic in how he slips this in. In a normal year, reverting voting rights not just to before the Civil War, but basically to the turn of the 19th century, would be front-page news. Now? It's several dozen paragraphs into a hagiography.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:19 AM on November 28, 2016 [61 favorites]

BAY OF PIGS II: ELECTRIC FUCKAROO
posted by Devonian at 6:19 AM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

Also, let me congratulate conservatives on making this possible. And yes, that includes pretty much all of them. Supported voter suppression in the face of reams of evidence showing racial bias? Joined in the criminalization of race and the racialization of crime? Showed sympathy for neo-Confederate viewpoints through shitty historical lenses and "honor culture"? Kept up a constant drumbeat of the ACA and Occupy as spoooky socialism and othering Obama as some sort of radical destroyer of society? Defended groups like militias and sovereign citizens as merely misunderstood despite growing proof of their radicalization? Refused to see decisions such as Hobby Lobby and Shelby as firmly based in bigotry instead of nebulous ideas of "freedom"? Leaned on "state's rights" arguments time and time again for denying basic human rights?

All of that was part of the American conservative movement as a whole well before Trump came along. Trump is their creation, whether they supported him or not. All that up there? Those are the building blocks of autocratic rule just waiting for people like Trump and his circle to take advantage of them. If that's still what conservatism in the US is, don't expect them to make much noise when he puts it all in action. So far, they've been following the script perfectly.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:22 AM on November 28, 2016 [60 favorites]

If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal.

Of all the many, many saddening, vexing and terrifying aspects of Donald J. Trump's character, one of the things that sticks in my craw most is his tendency to frame any interaction as a "deal," and generally a zero-sum one at that. It's such a brain-dead, reductionist way to understand complex decision spaces in which, ideally, we'd be considering the prerogatives of parties not actually at the table or capable of articulating their interests.

In a "deal," you seek to best your opponent. You inflict the maximum discomfort on them that's consistent with their remaining at the table and considering themselves bound on an ongoing basis by the terms of negotiation. It doesn't matter how humiliated they are by the terms they accede to, especially if you don't really plan on doing business with them again.

In the governance of a state, though — especially of what remains a state with disproportionate global influence — none of this applies. It's such a terribly small, ignoble, shaming way of thinking about the world, and though we know all too well by now that Donald J. Trump is nothing if not small and ignoble and shaming, it still saddens me, every single time I see it in action.
posted by adamgreenfield at 6:25 AM on November 28, 2016 [55 favorites]

zombieflanders:

yeah, that piece was nauseating - like, I physically felt the bile rise in my throat as I read it. I've been looking for newspapers to pay for and was hesitating between the NYTimes and the Washington Post but both of them have infuriated me so badly in the last few days that I haven't been able to force myself to do so.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is either the Times or the WaPo the best of a bad lot? I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, here, but also ARGH! Or should I shell out for something weekly - the New Yorker? I welcome any of your suggestions.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 6:28 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is either the Times or the WaPo the best of a bad lot? I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, here, but also ARGH! Or should I shell out for something weekly - the New Yorker? I welcome any of your suggestions.

Even if you end up subscribing to one of them (I picked WaPo because of Jenna Johnson and David Fahrenthold) a Mother Jones sub is $12/year.
posted by Talez at 6:33 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”

Oh God. Bannon's "My One Black Friend So I'm Not A Racist."
posted by hangashore at 6:40 AM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

I did WaPo and TPM Prime ($5/month). I'll add MoJo. Thanks Talez. NYT can fuck off. Their past Clinton coverage is a huge part of where we are today.
posted by chris24 at 6:40 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

In a "deal," you seek to best your opponent.

Back in the 1990s I asked my dad, an old-timey title & contract lawyer, to look over a contract a company was offering me to do some software development. Watching him read it, I realized it was angering him. Then he told me that he would not write such a contract and that no client of his would ask him to a second time. Wearing the same tight-mouthed look I had seen aimed at me many times, he said it was unfair. Then we went through every word of the contract and made it fair.
posted by kingless at 6:43 AM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

You know, this really is a "first they came for the..." moment. Overnight we see that now it's perfectly acceptable to mainstream people that our leaders think Blacks are genetically inferior and should have their rights restricted on that basis. A year ago, this was not an opinion that a politician could espouse openly, and now it's just one ideological variant. Believing that Black people are inferior is now just a stripe of normal political opinion.

Leaving mere justice aside, how long before the nation is calmly discussing the inferiority of women and their unsuitability to political life, or the idea that gay people should be force-treated, or the idea that Jews really do control international banking? We're about one step away from all these things being political positions that the mainstream accepts as just one totally reasonable set of views that totally reasonable people hold.

And then we're in the shit. I would not be at all surprised if there's an attempt to restrict the franchise - maybe just to men, maybe just to whites, maybe just to property owners. And consider the spinelessness that everyone displays now. What will people do then? Nothing much, I bet.

And here's something I bet: I bet that Black Lives Matter will be literally outlawed - declared a terrorist organization or whatever state mechanism is available - once the Trump administration has finished dealing with the ACA and Medicare. Nobody in power really likes BLM and it will play well with the base. I'm betting on a handful of terrorism arrests for the high profile BLM members - at best, there's nothing that will stand up in court, but it will be a way to jail them for a while and harass them almost indefinitely. (People on the activist left here have been harassed using terrorism legislation for transparently phony stuff - they've always been cleared, but it takes years and a lot of money.) And at worst they will have time to change the law and really start putting people away. There's too many people associated with BLM to arrest literally everybody, but they can break the back of the movement. "Black lives matter, right?" say some people. "We hate you for even asking that question," say white people.

I have no doubt that there will be protests when this happens, but it will be like every other time someone is jailed on fake charges (or "trumped up" charges, of course) - protests will happen and do no good.
posted by Frowner at 6:45 AM on November 28, 2016 [48 favorites]

Nigel Farage to ask Americans to 'forgive' British people who criticised Donald Trump, in US trip

So...he's on an international apology tour?
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:49 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Oh God. Bannon's "My One Black Friend So I'm Not A Racist."

Not only that, but his One Black Friend works for him.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:52 AM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Charles Blow and Krugman are I guess the main reasons I subscribe to the NYT these days. Some of their post-election editorial board pieces have had some real virtuous venom in them. Don't know what the fuck is up with that dude who's like I don't know, both presenting egregious racism and excusing it? But there is still goodness at the Old Grey Lady.

Edited to change post-Trump to post-election, sob, Freudian sob
posted by angrycat at 6:55 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

It does exacerbate tensions between urban and rural areas, but it also can increase diversity within the populations, which is the best way to spread tolerance and understanding between groups.

So I'm kind of aghast with horror at any attempt to increase the education divide in areas that already have resentment over that stuff specifically to change voting patterns, in part because as others noted, when you make the education overtly political in any way, you actually remove people's access to it. People in red areas are less likely to send their kids to the state college if they think it's blue-leaning. They don't want it indoctrinating their children against them.

And honestly - they're not wrong that higher education often skews liberal in this particular sort of filter-bubble way. When I was in college, I was one of the students tagged in to help with the hiring process of a tenured professor (bizarrely, I still have no idea why they invited me and the other two students to this thing). One of the candidates openly admitted that she had bias against her more conservative students and would not give them recommendations even if they were very good students, because she didn't want them succeeding at their chosen goals - she was ultimately the candidate who received the offer, to my horror. That's a real problem.

And it's a real problem for our nation, if the tools that would really help all of us to succeed are being given this kind of partisan conditioning. I talked about this in a kind of jokey way upthread - how I wished climate change advertising sometimes came out with a more rural tinge, with rural mores. I wish the same thing about college. I wish there was a way to have higher education, complete with the critical thinking that often acts as a shield against dictators, without making people feel like there's a hostile environment for them. I wish that college professors, instead of openly mocking these areas in classes, had sympathy for them. I wish that professors would say, "So you believe this. Okay, what sources can you use?" instead of dismissing things out of hand.

I don't think you can increase the tensions and expect it to bring about more tolerance. The more everyone goes to their particular corners of the ring and waits for someone to shout "fight", the more we're going to have results like this, where people vote for Trump out of spite and anger at "those people". We are at an insanely unhealthy level of tension right now - something really does need to be done if we're going to survive this.
posted by corb at 6:59 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

I unreservedly apologise for Farage.

Also, he can crawl right up Trump's rump trumpet and die there.

I'm practising very hard at not being infuriated by these rancid people, because they're so transparently trying to deflect attention from what they're doing by displaying such a panoply of pernicious behaviour, like shit-peacocks spreading their tails made of a hundred kinds of excrement.

We're better than these people. And nobody can insult us or condescend to us without our permission. Permission not granted.
posted by Devonian at 7:00 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Interesting tweetstorm begins here on Trump and the truth. Basically saying that his public easily disproven bullshit is terrible for gaslighting, but good as dominance display. I.e. no better way to show how powerful you are than to get people to say 2+2=5.

@jtlevy
1. Ways of thinking about Trump's relationship to truth.
posted by chris24 at 7:01 AM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

That Powers Boothe speech from Sin City was Trump to a T.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:04 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Want nauseating? Here's Mother Jones of all publications, complaining about liberals overusing "white supremacy" and charges of racism. Who started this "terrible fad"? Pesky PC thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, probably.

You know the window is shifting in an ugly direction when Mother Jones is starting to sound like the fucking National Review.
posted by windbox at 7:28 AM on November 28, 2016 [31 favorites]

I think the Washington Post is a better option than NYT for a couple of reasons, in addition to those mentioned above: they've made subscriptions free for .edu, .gov, and .mil addresses, and I support that. The Capital Weather Gang is fantastic for any weather buffs (and very useful even if you don't live nearby), and the Food and Style sections aren't going to drive you mad with baffling trend pieces.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 7:30 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Here's Mother Jones of all publications, complaining about liberals overusing "white supremacy" and charges of racism.

Well, thank god we have a white guy who's lived his entire life in Southern California telling us how best to engage with racists.
posted by Etrigan at 7:36 AM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Trump loves deals so much ... I wonder if we could troll him into offering a New Deal to the American people, one that would build a Great Society? Create a sort of Social Security for out most vulnerable, and some Fair Labor Standards to protect our working men from predatory capitalists, who will of course be taxed.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:36 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

Trump loves deals so much ... I wonder if we could troll him into offering a New Deal to the American people, one that would build a Great Society?

To the Twitters!

But seriously, we have the most trollable president of living memory. I know I've been disappointed in my hopeful predictions before, but I think it's totally possible, "Liberals don't WANT you to make these civil protections" could actually work for at least something. I mean, that's the hope I like to call "Ivanka's Long Con".
posted by corb at 7:39 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

to protect our working men from predatory capitalists, who will of course be taxed.

Might want to skip the use of the word "predatory;" when you talk to capitalists about predators, they respond with phrases like "culling the herd."
posted by Mooski at 7:39 AM on November 28, 2016

And it's a real problem for our nation, if the tools that would really help all of us to succeed are being given this kind of partisan conditioning. I talked about this in a kind of jokey way upthread - how I wished climate change advertising sometimes came out with a more rural tinge, with rural mores. I wish the same thing about college. I wish there was a way to have higher education, complete with the critical thinking that often acts as a shield against dictators, without making people feel like there's a hostile environment for them. I wish that college professors, instead of openly mocking these areas in classes, had sympathy for them. I wish that professors would say, "So you believe this. Okay, what sources can you use?" instead of dismissing things out of hand.

Okay, first of all this "ivory tower liberals run academia" nonsense isn't really how modern colleges and universities operate. Going to school at, say, Ole Miss (with almost 25k students), isn't like this. Second, I'd put good money that once you dig deep enough, you'll find it's not usually the teachers making academia a hostile environment, or that they're mocking conservatives. Rather, it's students whose own bigoted bubble is challenged, often because college reading material is held to much higher standards than either public or private school textbooks. Relatedly, the "what sources can you use" is itself a bit of a red herring. The amount of disinformation that both public and private schools spew is huge. By the time a student enters college, they could have learned that: the Civil War wasn't about slavery, Jim Crow wasn't that bad, evolution is just as proven a fact as creationism, the separation of church and state is largely a myth, capitalism is awesome and it's your duty as an American to vilify socialism/communism, anthropogenic climate change isn't real, slaves weren't in fact slaves (they're "immigrants" and "workers from Africa"), it's your duty as an American to believe Islam is based on and exists mainly because of violence, the "Wild West" was a place where open carry of guns were necessary (and totally COOL!) and self-reliance and family values won the day over savages, and Mexican-Americans are all somehow connected to drugs and have dual loyalties, to the point of advocating "Latin supremacy." And that's just a list of what's going on already. There are plenty of sources that will tell you all of that. Of course, what you won't learn about the basics of American history alone is enough to fill libraries.

So, no, it isn't that liberals that are undertaking "partisan conditioning" or creating a hostile academic environment for conservatives. It's not liberals who are inventing wholly different Americas and histories and dismissing things out of hand. The tools for fighting back against this thought are already there, but it's not liberals openly mocking people with terms like "PC culture" and "SJW indoctrination" and the like. At some point in time, you may have to realize that a lot--probably the overwhelming majority--of American conservative ideas really do have biases of their own that are rooted in bigotry and other horrible things. Ideologies don't deserve the same weight just because they exist, they have to earn it. Trying to kneecap anything that doesn't give equal weight just because it's somehow "partisan" (instead of, y'know, factual) is part of the problem, not the solution.
posted by zombieflanders at 7:41 AM on November 28, 2016 [78 favorites]

I wish there was a way to have higher education, complete with the critical thinking that often acts as a shield against dictators, without making people feel like there's a hostile environment for them. I wish that college professors, instead of openly mocking these areas in classes, had sympathy for them. I wish that professors would say, "So you believe this. Okay, what sources can you use?" instead of dismissing things out of hand.

I think I agree with this, but it depends on what ideas you are talking about. There are some things, like climate change, where the evidence is all on one side, and students need to know that if they still think it's a hoax, they've been badly misinformed. In my classes, I do my best to be as neutral as possible regarding positions where a reasonable case can be made on either side, but if someone says that the economy got worse under Obama or lower taxes lead to increased revenue or Trump won the popular vote, I think part of my job is to gently acquaint them with reality. If they leave my class and still have no idea how to separate reliable information from propaganda, I've failed in my obligations to them.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:42 AM on November 28, 2016 [39 favorites]

President elect calling into the shows.

@Politics1com:
Joe Scarborough, citing "sources at top of Trump org" for his Conway comments, slipped once and said "I got this directly from Donald Trump"
posted by chris24 at 7:45 AM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

We are at an insanely unhealthy level of tension right now - something really does need to be done if we're going to survive this.


i can't see any way to reduce the tension as long as the conservative identity bundles up defensible political ideas (that i happen to disagree with) with a bunch of regressive cultural baggage that denies the fundamental equality and right to exist of people that i know and love.

my perception is that the right knows that the political ideas aren't popular enough to win on their own, so they bundle them with religious lipservice, racial/class resentment, and xenophobia, which is how the party that has traditionally stood for the interests of capital and the upper classes has come to be associated with anti-elitism.

i'm willing to have a dialogue about the role of the federal government (if unlikely to be swayed), but i can't compromise on the "social issues" - because "social issues" is a way of soft-peddling the the civil rights of racial minorities, the right to exist of non cishet sexualities, and the sovereignty of women over their own bodies. it's just not negotiable.

i don't see any way out of this dilemma without prominent conservative leaders strongly disavowing regressive social politics, and that seems like political suicide given the demographic trends
posted by murphy slaw at 7:46 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

And it's a real problem for our nation, if the tools that would really help all of us to succeed are being given this kind of partisan conditioning.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't understand any way to read this other than as concern trolling. The "partisan conditioning" that acts to undermine free inquiry and critical thinking in higher education most often originates in the needs of capital, though it operates in ways that are far subtler and harder to parody than, say, Melissa Click.
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:47 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I've noticed a cute trick for articles like that windbox :

Anytime you find an article blaming political correctness, wikileaks, the Greens, or anyone but Clinton's own campaign, for Clinton loosing the election then ask yourself 'Why is this author diverting attention from "It's the economy stupid"', meaning Clinton attachment to Wall St., trade policy, etc.

Answer #1 should be "Are they a neo-liberal themselves?" If you start googling the author's name plus anything like Yemen, Syria, Libya, Snowden, wikileaks, Assange, copyright, Guantanamo, etc. then you often find articles promoting absolutely horrible positions.

I just found Kevin Drum attacking Snowden back in 2013 based on your article. Appears he already resided firmly on the neo-liberal end of MotherJones' writers.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:49 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I wish there was a way to have higher education, complete with the critical thinking that often acts as a shield against dictators, without making people feel like there's a hostile environment for them.

Trade schools, unions, and well-regarded civic organizations used to cover a large part of this idea. Not saying people who want a university education shouldn't be able to get one, but it's no coincidence that all three of these instruments of stability for the others have pretty well smashed by The Powerful over the past few decades.
posted by Rykey at 7:55 AM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

Okay, first of all this "ivory tower liberals run academia" nonsense isn't really how modern colleges and universities operate.

It certainly wasn't when I was an undergrad.

Nowadays, you don't have to be a liberal to be opposed to the GOP. The GOP has taken policy stances that are directly against the domain knowledge of the field of engineering, and so those "ivory tower liberals" increasingly include the engineering faculty.

Only one conservative pundit that I've found has taken notice of it, , a few years back, though he seems to have missed the point.
posted by ocschwar at 8:00 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

In the latest blow to the last remaining pieces of liberalism and democratic socialism, Francois Fillon just defeated Alain Juppe in the conservative primaries.

Just a reminder, Fillon promised to raise the retirement age, gut the French social security system, and scrap the 35 hour work week.

So the French now have a choice between Trumpism-lite and the full flavour Trumpism. The French left now have decided on death by a thousand cuts by splitting the vote. Both leftists with an honest shot are deciding to run in the presidentials rather than deciding it in the Socialist primary and getting behind the winner.

We are so fucked.
posted by Talez at 8:01 AM on November 28, 2016 [16 favorites]

Stat News Trump promised to bring back coal. Now some worry he will take away miners’ black lung benefits

At the time, to qualify for benefits, miners had to prove not only that they were disabled because of breathing problems, and that they had coal workers’ black lung, but that their disability was caused by their years in the mine.

It was “almost impossible,” said Phil Smith, a spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America. “The vast majority of people were denied benefits. People would take these cases through the black lung court system and they would be denied because the companies could sow the shadow of a seed of a doubt.”

The Affordable Care Act changed that. Under “Miscellaneous Provisions” is a small section sponsored by a self-proclaimed “child of the Appalachian coalfields,” the late West Virginia Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.

The Byrd Amendments shifted the burden of proof from the miners onto the mining companies. If a miner has spent 15 years or more underground and can prove respiratory disability, then it is presumed to be black lung related to mine work, unless the company can prove otherwise.

Do away with the ACA and you do away with the Byrd amendment. Which means the burden of proof will fall on the miners.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:03 AM on November 28, 2016 [49 favorites]

i'm willing to have a dialogue about the role of the federal government (if unlikely to be swayed), but i can't compromise on the "social issues" - because "social issues" is a way of soft-peddling the the civil rights of racial minorities, the right to exist of non cishet sexualities, and the sovereignty of women over their own bodies. it's just not negotiable.

Oh man, so this is a thing I (and the Evan McMullins of the world) really fucking struggle with, and honestly what provoked me to a lot of alcoholic rage fits at the convention. Because you're right, it's totally entangled right now in a way it really, really doesn't need to be. There's no reason those ideas need to be parceled together.

My best idea - which, it's unproven, because obviously I haven't Solved The Republican Party yet - is approaching these issues from within the morality that is underlying the oppositions to things. Eyebrows talked somewhere about this in one of the threads (possibly this one!) - about how really the only way to argue morality is with morality, and with a morality that people understand and welcome into their morality. (Apologies if I'm paraphrasing badly)

So when I'm talking about minority issues to Republicans, for example, I never use the words "racist" or "white supremacy", because those are unfortunately coded as "liberal language" as a result of a lot of stuff. I use words like "Fulfilling America's Promise" and "Everyone Should Be Free" and "Hard-working Americans Are Suffering". And I can say honestly a lot of the same things, as long as I use different language about them.

Women and their own bodies is really hard, because for the people involved, they really, sincerely, truly, think it's murder. I found this out essentially living with these folks for a couple weeks - it's not a show they're putting on because they want to control women's sex lives, they really think that babies are being killed by people who don't care about the issues. And the people who sincerely believe this often /are/ willing to put their money where their mouth is and adopt disabled babies or what have you, so it's hard to pitch it in terms of "life destroyed", because the answer for them is "I will take the baby and save the life." My techno answer is that I hope eventually we get to a stage where fetuses can be removed from wombs and put in vats, but short of that I think we're screwed in terms of getting people off of that.
posted by corb at 8:04 AM on November 28, 2016 [37 favorites]

Might want to skip the use of the word "predatory;" when you talk to capitalists about predators, they respond with phrases like "culling the herd."

maybe if we say 'parasitic capitalists' it will have a more groady connotation.
posted by ian1977 at 8:05 AM on November 28, 2016

According to Pence's Twitter, he is meeting with Trump today, so there's a possibility something will get done that isn't completely batshit. And possible that Trump will take a security briefing today, maybe?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:08 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

According to Pence's Twitter, he is meeting with Trump today, so there's a possibility something will get done that isn't completely batshit.

... just banally evil.
posted by Etrigan at 8:10 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

Over at WaPo Jenna Johnson has compiled a list of Trump promises: I will give you everything.’ Here are 282 of Donald Trump’s campaign promises.

39) Eliminate the $19 trillion national debt within eight years by “vigorously eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, ending redundant government programs and growing the economy to increase tax revenues.”

60) Make medical marijuana widely available to patients and allow states to decide if they want to fully legalize pot.

67) “Charge Mexico $100,000 for every illegal that crosses that border because it’s trouble.”

60) Make medical marijuana widely available to patients and allow states to decide if they want to fully legalize pot.

posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:10 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him

republican elector finds himself unable to vote for trump, and therefore resigns to salve his conscience rather than actually deny trump an electoral vote.
posted by murphy slaw at 8:13 AM on November 28, 2016 [29 favorites]

My techno answer is that I hope eventually we get to a stage where fetuses can be removed from wombs and put in vats, but short of that I think we're screwed in terms of getting people off of that.

This is the prospect that scares me, because I've known lots of Christians who've said "well we'll just raise the babies" but I suspect this is going to be the solution proposed as soon as it's practical? But I don't think that population is in any way prepared to adopt that many children, and I think it's very, very deeply problematic if we suddenly have a huge population of PoC kids who're being raised by white evangelicals and Catholics who don't think they're racists. And they're definitely not going to approve of government funding to allow those kids to be raised in their own communities. I used to think that sounded like a good plan, but like most things with abortion, it only works if you don't think of what happens to the actual living children, only about what happens to the fetuses.
posted by Sequence at 8:15 AM on November 28, 2016 [26 favorites]

Women and their own bodies is really hard, because for the people involved, they really, sincerely, truly, think it's murder.

I believe you, corb, but one of the problems with people who hold these beliefs is that many of them are anti-choice: they've also blocked access to birth control and sex ed and successfully prevented clinical trials of birth control in the US. If people who held this belief thought of it as murder, you'd think they'd be more willing to prevent abortion through education and access to birth control.
posted by pxe2000 at 8:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [33 favorites]

Women and their own bodies is really hard, because for the people involved, they really, sincerely, truly, think it's murder. I found this out essentially living with these folks for a couple weeks - it's not a show they're putting on because they want to control women's sex lives, they really think that babies are being killed by people who don't care about the issues.

This would maybe (but not really) ring true if it was just about abortion. But their opposition to birth control and the means to acquire it, adherence to abstinence-only education, and the reduction if not elimination of any women's health care unrelated to childbirth/childcare reveals it as utter hypocrisy.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:18 AM on November 28, 2016 [40 favorites]

Using the conservative language at all, even to refute it, is failure. Which is why NYT, CNN, WaPo, et. al., support electing conservatives, even when it's critically important that they not do that.

(corb points it out above as well; it fits the "nuturing parent"/"strict father" dichotomy)
posted by petebest at 8:22 AM on November 28, 2016

Women and their own bodies is really hard, because for the people involved, they really, sincerely, truly, think it's murder.

Nah.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:23 AM on November 28, 2016 [24 favorites]

Just because people lie to themselves about their motivations does not mean that we must believe their lies. I mean, these are the same people whose holy book contain the words "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?:

These are people who gather thorns and thistles, and, were they really concerned about abortion being murder, they would gather different fruit.

No, this is the fruit of people who are trying to control sexuality and punish women for their sexuality. That's the fruit that is gathered, and someone can tell themselves they're gathering grapes and figs, but I know a thistle when I see one.
posted by maxsparber at 8:23 AM on November 28, 2016 [23 favorites]

republican elector finds himself unable to vote for trump, and therefore resigns to salve his conscience rather than actually deny trump an electoral vote.

...thus eternally earning the title of ChickenShit in Mooski's Pantheon of Assholes.
posted by Mooski at 8:27 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

The hypocrisy of the sanctity of life arguments on the part of most conservatives is outstanding. Apparently the concern about the lives of unborn children basically stops at birth. You know because anyone who decides to have a child needs to be able to shoulder the entire cost of taking care of that child until they reach adulthood. You know unless that child is LGBTQ or something and then it's perfectly acceptable to kick them out of the home. The hypocrisy also tends to extend to the Death Penalty issue as apparently all life is sacred unless the government wants to kill people.

Yes there are some conservative Christians that actually walk the walk in terms of all life is sacred but a disturbing percentage have been completely disingenous with their rhetoric. In some cases this has been because of a desire to police women's bodies but in some cases it seems simply as a way to publically claim moral superiority over others. As in before Roe v Wade abortion wasn't necessary a major concern of Christian Conservatives but in the wake of Roe V Wade it became something that they could rally the troops around because abortion is something that even a lot of liberals feel queasy about. It's not that liberals want lots of abortion we just understand it's necessity as a tool when access to birth control is not assured and rape culture is so prevalent.

Honestly I've gotten so tired about bending over backwards to understand the needs and feelings of conservatives. Maybe my well of compassion is drying up and I need to dig a new well but I'm just so frustrated with the increasing desire by some conservatives to not just slow down social progress but to actively punish certain groups of individuals. This Puritan instinct at the heart of our country's psyche is unbelievably destructive.
posted by vuron at 8:28 AM on November 28, 2016 [39 favorites]

Also, a prime example in why it's hard to believe a lot of those people really think it's murder, Rep. Scott Desjarlais:

Two abortions. Maybe three, if you count the one he pressured a girlfriend—who happened to be his patient—to get. Pulling out a gun during an argument with his first wife. Prescribing pills to another patient while they dated. Getting reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for dallying with patients, an ethics violation.

He's entering his fourth term, having won 2/3rds of the vote in his district this year. If the pro-life folks were sincere, then an awful lot of them seem to have voted for someone they believe is a serial murderer. Or worse, actually, since he pressured at least one woman to do it.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:30 AM on November 28, 2016 [31 favorites]

This is the prospect that scares me, because I've known lots of Christians who've said "well we'll just raise the babies" but I suspect this is going to be the solution proposed as soon as it's practical? But I don't think that population is in any way prepared to adopt that many children

This is why for a long time I focused all my (rare) conversations with pro-lifers on frozen embryos in IVF clinics. As in, why do people protest planned parenthood and not IVF clinics, where thousands of embryos are created but unused each year? The current 'solution' here makes parents pay for storage, and the best guess right now is ~1million embryos are just sitting in liquid nitrogen in the U.S. For a while the viability of frozen embryos dropped off precipitously after 7-10 years, so my moral equivalence argument was stronger, but we've gotten better at thawing them without embryos dying; pregancies from embryos frozen 10+ years are no longer uncommon. Still, as a younger deludingmyself would say: if you care so much about the unborn, why don't you put your uterus where your mouth is? Implant an abandoned IVF embryo or three - or seven! - right now, because clearly your age or family situation or whether this choice is right for you and your life right now is entirely irrelevant in your assessment of the morality of the situation.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:33 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

There was also this Atlantic article that examined how often anti-abortion activists will have abortions when the pregnancy is a problem for them:

The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion.
posted by maxsparber at 8:34 AM on November 28, 2016 [17 favorites]

Should Californians request a vote recount based on Trump's statements? I'm honestly wondering what the pro/cons are.
posted by samthemander at 8:37 AM on November 28, 2016

corb: Women and their own bodies is really hard, because for the people involved, they really, sincerely, truly, think it's murder.

I was impressed with the way this blogger squared that circle.
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:39 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

There's also the possibility, which I've had to entertain when dealing with my mother, that they genuinely think of it as murder but they are also genuinely more concerned with punishing the perpetrators of things like that than they are about preventing such things from happening. I've had to confront recently the fact that the evangelical conservatives I've known have been not just not going out to save babies from getting murdered, but also pretty aggressively against, for example, giving better schools to the urban poor. They see "inner city" crime as a huge social problem, but they don't want prevention, they want the death penalty. It's not at all a "culture of life", but it does start to seem fairly consistent in a bizarro-world way. They don't really believe that prevention works. They think the only reason anybody fails to do bad things is because they're going to be punished. Because heaven knows that it's only the threat of hell that keeps anybody from being a total monster, isn't it?

What covers people like Desjarlais is the idea now that the media is unreliable and therefore probably lying, because it's Bad People who do that stuff, and their side isn't Bad People, so clearly he can't have done any of it. "Everybody knows" that people lie during divorce proceedings, especially women. And as with virtually any other type of crime, as a last resort, you come to the idea that if it's an awful thing but it's done by a Good Person, then it's like stealing bread when you're starving--it must have been something done because of necessity that does not apply to Bad People.

This is what you get when you have a bunch of crypto-hyper-Calvinists trying to do what they think of as social justice.
posted by Sequence at 8:39 AM on November 28, 2016 [22 favorites]

Yeah some people firmly truly and righteously believe that homosexuality angers God and causes volcanoes. They're dumb. The end. Work around them. Legislate them out of relevance. No need to convince stupid.
posted by ian1977 at 8:42 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

If the pro-life folks were sincere

So I think honestly a lot of how I handle issues that I don't personally believe in is a sort of Pascal's Politics Wager. I mean, I honestly and truly believe most of the pro-life people are sincere, but there are other issues where I'm not sure if people are sincere or not because I find it difficult to empathize with them, or they seem idiotic to me.

And so what do I lose, and what do I gain, by believing people are sincere? If I wager they are sincere and they actually are sincere, then I am both correct and I have a hope of convincing them. If I wager they are sincere and they actually are insincere, then as long as they believe they are sincere, or want to publicly appear sincere, I still have a hope of convincing them.

If I wager they are insincere, and they are sincere, I am wrong and have mortally offended them and have lost any chance of convincing them. If I wager they are insincere and they are insincere, then I have still mortally offended them because I am publicly calling them a liar, and so they're still less likely to change their views.

So I generally wager on the side of believing people are sincere, or at least treating them publicly as though I do believe them, and asking questions accordingly. It's really hard, and takes a lot of work, and sometimes I fall down, but I honestly do think it's the best way to to go in a world this divided. It's like assuming good faith, but for the outside-Metafilter world as well.
posted by corb at 8:43 AM on November 28, 2016 [19 favorites]

So I generally wager on the side of believing people are sincere, or at least treating them publicly as though I do believe them

I never doubt the sincerity of someone who says they're willing for me to suffer so they can get their own way.
posted by Mooski at 8:46 AM on November 28, 2016 [39 favorites]

Has anyone been watching the Wisconsin Elections Live Feed? Their meeting started an hour ago, but haven't heard anything from it.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:47 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

In a democracy, there are two ways to move your agenda forward. One way is to persuade people that your ideas are worth trying out. Another way is to force them to go along with your ideas. I don't think the hard work (emotionally and otherwise) of persuasion needs to fall equally on everyone, but I prefer an overall strategy of persuasion to a strategy of force. When we start expanding the category of people whom we won't even try to persuade, I worry about continuing ideological radicalization and entrenchment. It's not an easy question, especially as there clearly are some people whom it doesn't seem worth persuading (occasional articles about former white supremacists seeing the light notwithstanding). But dismissing increasingly large groups of people as people we should just work around is troubling to me.
posted by prefpara at 8:47 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

The genius of the blathering of Cheeto Jesus (I cringe at writing it's 'name') is that it eats up all the air in the room. I had a boss once, a malevolent, poisonous, crazy as fuck fucker who regularly, when he was in a losing position, would turn on the crazy. There is only so much time or energy for any argument and he would run out the clock on either literal time commitment or emotional energy when he found himself on the losing side of a disagreement.

So Trump flips out (possibly with real hurt) about the vote recount - the media talks about that for a while and the heat is off his equally insane/suspicious cabinet picks or foreign business dealings (that are blatantly unconstitutional) and we are closer to the E.C meeting and there has been no airing of his lack of fitness for the position.

Maybe expecting a consensus, a national moment of mourning for our self-respect following the very dumb thing we all did, maybe expecting a moment of national consensus is unrealistic. But I worry about the clock running out and TPEOTUS,CheetoJesus, getting voted in because no one had a chance to voice, clearly, the very real problems with him as an actual Gov servant.

It's funny and insane but it's also 11 year old diversionary tactics that should take a backseat to his myriad conflicts of interest.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:48 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

So I generally wager on the side of believing people are sincere, or at least treating them publicly as though I do believe them, and asking questions accordingly. It's really hard, and takes a lot of work, and sometimes I fall down, but I honestly do think it's the best way to to go in a world this divided. It's like assuming good faith, but for the outside-Metafilter world as well.

Meanwhile, they take all that good faith and use it to actively destroy other people's lives, up to and including allowing their torture and death. All for no other reason other than belief that they are evil because of gender, race, sexuality, religion, and a host of other rather arbitrary measures, most of which are either inborn or have nothing to do with how they treat the world at large.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:53 AM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

Assumption of good faith is a finite resource. Just as Trump abuses the media's desire to treat him as sincere, so to do many of our fellow citizens. An initial assumption of good faith is helpful, but when a person or group repeatedly engages in deceptive argumentation and ignores contrary evidence, writing them off as bad faith opponents is essential, both for one's own sanity, and for the causes to which they're committed. What's important is not what someone believes they're doing, but what they're actually doing. It's not possible to read their minds, but there is nothing wrong with making choices about where to expend one's energy, and when you know someone's operating in bad faith, it's not wrong to say so.

The laws of the United States recognize that bad faith exists -- see legal action against TRAP laws that purport to regulate health and safety, but are actually using those as a fig leaf to conceal the end goal of stopping abortion. We need not read minds in order to come to an understanding about whether someone is pissing on us while telling us it's raining.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:54 AM on November 28, 2016 [33 favorites]

So I generally wager on the side of believing people are sincere,

Sincere belief is no reason to legislate the behaviour of your neighbours. Separation of church and state. I'm definitely pro-life but I am as definitely pro choice and I don't think this is at all contradictory.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:54 AM on November 28, 2016 [36 favorites]

I don't doubt their sincerity I just doubt their underlying motivations. I think that conservative Christians have fixated upon abortion as the social ill par excellence as a way of proving their moral righteousness even though there are a zillion other social ills that negatively impact people in much more profound ways than abortion.

I don't doubt their sincerity about their profound dislike of gay marriage, I just doubt their motivations. I don't see how any possible reading of scripture would somehow make it so that gay marriage somehow diminishes their marriage in the eyes of god. Nobody is forcing Evangelical ministers perform marriages. Furthermore the stubborn insistence on using passages from scripture that refer to rabbinical strictures from the Old Testament, aspects of the Old Testament that in theory Christians aren't even subject too to affirm prejuidice is insane.
posted by vuron at 8:55 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

So I generally wager on the side of believing people are sincere,

I do too, until they repeatedly show, by behavior, that they are either lying or self-deluded.
posted by maxsparber at 8:57 AM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

But their opposition to birth control and the means to acquire it, adherence to abstinence-only education,

This is rooted, in a lot of ways, in a moral definition that doesn't get mentioned much outside Christian circles - that sex outside of church-sanctioned marriage is adultery and therefore a sin. Including, of course, sex between consenting single unmarried adults. This is a belief quite common even in moderate/mainstream (non-evangelical) churches and denominations, and even if they recognize that it happens many Christians are uncomfortable with any hint of the government "encouraging" or "enabling" said sin.

Which is to say that America's "conservative Christian problem" is not likely to go away any time soon. It will require, I think, a fairly serious conceptual & cultural shift that almost certainly needs to be driven from within the Christian community - where progressive/liberal/moderate Christians need to make a lot of noise for a long time about how harm-prevention is in keeping with Jesus's teachings, and how the sin of adultery needs to be viewed as a more private matter between the sinners and God, so harm-prevention outweighs an individual's moral distaste at allowing the government to "encourage" adultery via providing birth control and comprehensive sex education.
posted by soundguy99 at 9:02 AM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Oh great, and now there's been a campus shooting at Ohio State U, and I actually find myself thinking, "Please let this be a normal horrific garden-variety violent campus incident and not a Trump's America white supremacy shooting." WTF, 2016?
posted by FelliniBlank at 9:02 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

updated the trump popular vote autotweeter. its not perfect by any means but anyone interested can check it out/fork it/etc here https://github.com/localhuman/autotweet
posted by localhuman at 9:02 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

“I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:06 AM on November 28, 2016 [22 favorites]

Egg on Trump's popular vote insanity.

@Evan_McMullin Retweeted Donald J. Trump
It should not go unrecognized that @realDonaldTrump's effort to inflate his election performance without cause is typical of autocrats.

They do it increase the perception of their political legitimacy, while undermining popular opposition to them.

And, in the process, they do enormous damage to democratic institutions, which is a larger objective they share.

Because it is those institutions and supporting norms that present the most significant check on an authoritarian's power.

When confidence in those institutions and norms has been sufficiently eroded, the authoritarian has a freer hand with which to wield power.

Those wishing not to experience this should speak up every time @realDonaldTrump attempts to walk us down this path. We must not tire of it.
posted by chris24 at 9:10 AM on November 28, 2016 [54 favorites]

Bradley Proctor, Vox: An American “Redemption”? Trumpism fits a pattern of backlash against social progress
posted by tonycpsu at 9:15 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Predictions:

1) Trump will wear a baseball hat to the inauguration.

2) Drones will be used to kill people inside the US during his term.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:22 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Chris Potter of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Breaking: Allegheny County delaying certification of election results as activists file petitions seeking recount in some precincts here.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:24 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

Ari Berman: Donald Trump Is the Greatest Threat to American Democracy in Our Lifetime. His lies about voter fraud are a prelude to massive voter suppression.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:24 AM on November 28, 2016 [36 favorites]

Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:45 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Here's a response to the Kevin Drum "fad white supremacy" article in Mother Jones.
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:51 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Moving Forward: Ideas for the DNC by Ilyse Hogue (NARAL president):

I believe the DNC has a critical role to play in regrouping after 2016, one that fully embraces the Wellstone triad approach to change: public policy that reflects peoples’ needs, grassroots organizing that honors peoples’ lived experience, and an electoral strategy that brings both to bear to ensure victory. The DNC should not just be a force every two years at election time, but it should also be a daily presence in peoples’ lives, relevant in policy discussions and responsive to the ideas and concerns of people where they live. And everyone needs to know that Democrats fight for people, not for big corporate interests.
To accomplish this, here are ten first ideas to shape the way we build our Party for the sustained fights ahead...

posted by melissasaurus at 10:00 AM on November 28, 2016 [11 favorites]

Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him

So brave. "I can't vote for Trump and I don't want to face the consequences for doing the right thing, so I will resign, assuaging my conscience, and let someone else vote for the autocrat, thus changing nothing."
posted by entropicamericana at 10:01 AM on November 28, 2016 [57 favorites]

I think Trump is quite likely to lead to a significant realignment of political parties in various parts of the US.

The small government libertarian aspects of the Republican party are almost certainly going to be abandoned which is quite likely to result in increased movement of western states towards Democrats. I think you are already seeing that in how the moderate Mormon politicians are intensely uncomfortable with the Trump administration. I wonder if they believe that if the US starts down the road of enacting policies against minority religions like Islam will restrictions on Mormons be that far behind?

If Republicans are going to try to transition to a Great Plains + Rust Belt strategy for elections I think they are going to have to change their pitch quite a bit. They are already looking suspect in the sun belt states and the southern half of the Atlantic seaboard is also looking shaky for them. Yes disenfranchisement of voters might allow them to hold onto areas of the old South but their ability to hold onto NC and increasingly GA is looking sketchy as migration of new residents to those states are challenging the established social order.
posted by vuron at 10:07 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

At least he said very publicly that the man is unqualified and that it's possible that even a Republican cannot stomach voting for him. That can't be said too often.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:08 AM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

The "consequences for doing the right thing" could be severe, so I can't really say I blame him, entropicamericana. How many in his position are doing even that much/little?
posted by ODiV at 10:09 AM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Allegheny County holds off on certifying election results

One of my coworkers is an Allegheny County election official and was at the meeting. I only got a chance to talk to him for a minute between work meetings, but he did say that he spoke up in favor of doing a forensic analysis of the machines (yay!), but also had to explain to others that the pre-election firmware verification doesn't count as a forensic analysis because it happened before the election, which you'd hope people would understand without it having to be explained to them.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:09 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

The "consequences for doing the right thing" could be severe, so I can't really say I blame him, entropicamericana. How many in his position are doing even that much/little?

Not enough. But I guess "Give me liberty or I'll resign" has a certain ring to it.
posted by entropicamericana at 10:15 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Give me liberty, or give me what I voted for!"
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

The "consequences for doing the right thing" could be severe, so I can't really say I blame him, entropicamericana. How many in his position are doing even that much/little?

I get that, but the consequences for us are also severe, and he signed up for it.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

The "consequences for doing the right thing" could be severe, so I can't really say I blame him, entropicamericana. How many in his position are doing even that much/little?

Doing the right thing regardless of cost is (or should be) an expectation of appointed/elected office; I refuse to congratulate someone for doing the barest minimum just because everyone else in their position did nothing at all.
posted by Mooski at 10:17 AM on November 28, 2016 [11 favorites]

President-elect Donald Trump is considering retired General David Petraeus to be secretary of state and plans to meet with the former CIA director Monday in New York, according to a senior official with the transition.

So now instead of classified email leaks at State, we'll get classified documents hand-delivered to whoever Petraeus wants to fuck at the time. #MAGA!
posted by tonycpsu at 10:18 AM on November 28, 2016 [37 favorites]

Wait, when that one elector was saying they couldn't vote for Clinton before the election, but would not resign, everyone was like, "If you can't do the job you were appointed to do, you should step aside!"

Now that it's the other way, you want to cast aspersions?
posted by valkane at 10:18 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

> So brave. "I can't vote for Trump and I don't want to face the consequences for doing the right thing, so I will resign, assuaging my conscience, and let someone else vote for the autocrat, thus changing nothing."

It turns out he's also the guy in the firing squad who gets the blank cartridge every time.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:18 AM on November 28, 2016

Now that it's the other way, you want to cast aspersions?

No, we want them to go further and use the power they (nominally) have and vote for Clinton or Egg or Romney or some (anyone!) at least vaguely fit for the office.
posted by jedicus at 10:21 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Now that it's the other way, you want to cast aspersions?

well since you're casting false equivalencies it's only fair
posted by entropicamericana at 10:22 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

As Steven Dennis noted on Twitter: "Comey testified that David Petraeus's actions were far worse than Hillary Clinton's email server"
posted by zachlipton at 10:22 AM on November 28, 2016 [25 favorites]

Here's a response to the Kevin Drum "fad white supremacy" article in Mother Jones.
I found the end of the response article to be noteworthy:

Why does understanding white supremacy matter now?

I hope this is obvious, but in case it’s not, let me offer one other important reason that understanding white supremacy now is more important than ever. In a recent study, researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education found that 82% of 203 students surveyed believed sponsored content was a real news story.

This is consistent with what I found in Cyber Racism (2009), when I asked young people (ages 15-19) if they could tell the difference between a “cloaked” white supremacist site, and an actual civil rights site. Most could not. So, one young person in my study, reading a white supremacist site that declared “slavery was good for some people,” responded: “well, maybe so, there’s two sides to everything.”

I hope you find this as chilling. We don’t want to go back to debating whether slavery was a moral evil or not, do we? If we don’t, then we have to get smarter about the way white supremacy operates, and how we fight against it.

Saying that white supremacy is a “fad” neither helps our understanding, nor the fight against it, but reveals the epistemology of ignorance that keeps white people from understanding the system we, ourselves, have built.

posted by ZeusHumms at 10:24 AM on November 28, 2016 [32 favorites]

Not enough. But I guess "Give me liberty or I'll resign" has a certain ring to it.

Sure, probably not enough. I'm taking more of a glass houses approach to speaking out against Trump and taking action against fascism, but I'm probably less gutsy in real life than most of you.
posted by ODiV at 10:28 AM on November 28, 2016

No, we want them to go further and use the power they (nominally) have and vote for Clinton or Egg or Romney or some (anyone!) at least vaguely fit for the office.

I want this too - so much. I really think that Trump is enough of a danger to the Republic that he justifies uncommon actions.

But I do wish that we could be consistent in our support for "if you think someone's a danger to the Republic, you should use the safety valves that were set up for that very purpose." People were pretty rough about the possibility of that one elector that felt he couldn't morally vote for Clinton. If we want to foster an atmosphere where people feel comfortable taking moral stands in line with their principles, we do kind of have to be consistent with it, or people think it's all partisan posturing and dismiss it.
posted by corb at 10:29 AM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

AP: Writing about the ‘alt-right’ by John Daniszewski, Vice President for Standards
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:32 AM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Wait, when that one elector was saying they couldn't vote for Clinton before the election, but would not resign, everyone was like, "If you can't do the job you were appointed to do, you should step aside!"

Now that it's the other way, you want to cast aspersions?

Interestingly, this is more or less what the Supreme Court's position was on pledges by electors -- the state can require the pledge before selecting the elector, but it doesn't necessarily mean the elector has to abide by the pledge.
posted by Etrigan at 10:32 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

the problem with that is that it presupposes the candidates are in any way equally awful, when in fact, trump is quantifiably the most corrupt and unqualified president in history and he hasn't even taken the oath of office yet.
posted by entropicamericana at 10:33 AM on November 28, 2016 [18 favorites]

But I do wish that we could be consistent in our support for "if you think someone's a danger to the Republic, you should use the safety valves that were set up for that very purpose."

There are no bright-line rules for what does and does not constitute a valid claim of a candidate being a danger to the republic, so there is no hypocrisy. I do not believe that Hillary Clinton was an existential threat, so that elector's moral judgement is wrong to me. I do believe Trump is an existential threat, so I'm fine with using the electors' judgement to override the will of their voters.

I also supported elimination of the Electoral College a long time before Donald Trump was a candidate, but if it must exist, we might as well use it for the purpose it was originally created for. I still hope it dies, and if it was gone before this election, Trump would not be President.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:34 AM on November 28, 2016 [21 favorites]

corb: If we want to foster an atmosphere where people feel comfortable taking moral stands in line with their principles, we do kind of have to be consistent with it

How is that possible though? We're such a large group, and even somewhat diverse.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:35 AM on November 28, 2016

There would certainly seem to be a susceptibility in the electoral college. What's to stop someone from buying off a few electors if the election is really close?

Peter Thiel Insider Picked to Oversee Donald Trump’s Defense Department Transition

Palantir gained notoriety in 2011 after the hacking collective LulzSec dumped thousands of hacked emails from HBGary Federal, a firm collaborating with Palantir to pitch clients, revealing plans to use Palantir’s data analysis tools on a project to spy on labor unions, journalists, and activist groups on behalf of business interests.

God, wake me up from this nightmare.
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:37 AM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

What is this crap?

@JoeNBC Mayor Giuliani is America's mayor and @KellyannePolls did a fantastic job managing media relations in a turbulent campaign season.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:40 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is why the parties are so important, as David Frum pointed out in his podcast with Ezra Klein. The GOP is most to blame here. They never, never should have let Trump get to the general election.
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:40 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

New popular vote numbers via @AP: Clinton 64,429,062 (48.1%) Trump 62,352,375 (46.5%) Johnson 4,419,063 (3.3%) Stein 1,399,376 (1.0%)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:43 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

What is this crap?

Remember when Rnc Prbs said that Rush Limbaugh wasn't running the GOP, and then had to "correct" himself? It's like that.
posted by Etrigan at 10:43 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

i guess the only way to unseat giuliani as america's mayor is to have a worse terrorist attack happen to your city during your administration?
posted by murphy slaw at 10:45 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

or to look more fabulous in a dress. (tw: our president-elect motorboating a crossdressing rudy guiliani)

can we name rupaul america's mayor now, please?
posted by entropicamericana at 10:52 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

New popular vote numbers via @AP: Clinton 64,429,062 (48.1%) Trump 62,352,375 (46.5%) Johnson 4,419,063 (3.3%) Stein 1,399,376 (1.0%)

64,429,062 - 62,352,375 = 2,076,687

2 million people silenced.
posted by dis_integration at 10:52 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

2 million people silenced.
posted by dis_integration at 13:52 on November 28 [+] [!]

70 million... 70 million people did not want the butternut turd
posted by Cat_Examiner at 10:56 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

2 million people silenced.

15 states each have fewer than 2 million people living in them, just saying.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:56 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

.@Delta CEO writes memo to staff over intimidation from Trump-supporting passenger
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:56 AM on November 28, 2016 [16 favorites]

It's possible that some have changed their views regarding what Washington electors say they plan to do when the electoral college vote is taken, valkane. This is a complex issue on all sides. Perhaps we need to examine each elector's reasons for doing what they do, then decide if we support them in their efforts.

In this case, Texas has no laws regarding faithless electors, but I don't know what personal challenges this EC voter would have faced had it become known that he voted for someone other than Trump. I can wish he would have found it within himself to keep his position and vote his conscience, but that's about all I can do. Without knowing his life, I can't judge him.
posted by Silverstone at 10:59 AM on November 28, 2016

Giuliani is a piece of shit whose decision to place the Emergency Command Center in the fucking #1 target in NYC was idiotic and costly. No effective chain of command was set up on 9/11 and firefighters and police worked pretty much without centralized direction. His decision to give Motorola a $14m no-bid contract for radios in 1994, radios that never worked and which were not replaced prior to 9/11 despite multiple requests from the union, cost lives on 9/11 when those NYFD radios again didn't work in the towers and evacuation orders never reached the firefighters. Dozens of firefighters died because they didn't even know the South Tower had fallen. He's then spent the next 15 years preening about it and pretending he almost lost his life that day. I hope he dies a painful death.
posted by chris24 at 10:59 AM on November 28, 2016 [68 favorites]

Ivanka Trump Chinese shoe factory is now moving to Ethiopia where labor costs 20% of Chinese labor

I figure that as each developing country becomes stable enough with reliable electricity and transportation they will move into position as the cheapest place for manufacturing until we are left with nowhere on earth as cheap as USA prison labor. MAGA!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:02 AM on November 28, 2016 [19 favorites]

I figure that as each developing country becomes stable enough with reliable electricity and transportation they will move into position as the cheapest place for manufacturing until we are left with nowhere on earth as cheap as USA prison labor.

That is exactly, and explicitly, the plan. No one is under any illusions that it's anything but the cheapest possible price point, and as soon as your labor force gets good enough at something to want more money, they're out.
posted by Etrigan at 11:04 AM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

No one is under any illusions that it's anything but the cheapest possible price point, and as soon as your labor force gets good enough at something to want more money, they're out.

We live in a world where self-storage is a thing.

That's proof positive that we have reached a near-peak in demand for physical possessions, and that makes it futile to chase the manufacture of cheap goods a policy aim for the nation.

Got to find alternatives.
posted by ocschwar at 11:06 AM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

I know that third party votes are mostly symbolic since they're made with the knowledge that their candidate won't actually be president and thus shouldn't really be taken as an approval for the specific candidate's merit, but it remains very hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that one in a hundred voters went for Stein.
posted by vathek at 11:08 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

 A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats’ - New e-mails released to The Nation reveal ongoing GOP attempts to suppress the vote. (Ari BermanTwitter, October)
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:09 AM on November 28, 2016 [27 favorites]

i find it pretty unsurprising that 1% of americans would rather be "right" than have good government
posted by murphy slaw at 11:10 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

i find it pretty unsurprising that 1% of americans would rather be "right" than have good government

UM, YOU MEAN 46.5%
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:15 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

i find it pretty unsurprising that 1% of americans would rather be "right" than have good government

1%? Didn't Trump get 47% of the vote?
posted by Talez at 11:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Ivanka Trump Chinese shoe factory is now moving to Ethiopia where labor costs 20% of Chinese labor
That's just to compensate for the 35% tariff Donald's going to put on them.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:16 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

i assume that most trump voters thought they were getting "good government" as in "good for them", but anyone voting for stein who thought she could be elected was sufficiently deluded that their ability to find their own polling place is called into question
posted by murphy slaw at 11:19 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

C'mon folks, if you just start thinking of national politics as a professional team sport, peoples' reactions become a lot more understandable.

The trick, of course, is to not throw up at the thought of that mentality running the world.
posted by Mooski at 11:20 AM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

1%? Didn't Trump get 47% of the vote?

47 percent of the 50-some-odd percent of Americans who voted.
posted by maxsparber at 11:22 AM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

i find it pretty unsurprising that 1% of americans would rather be "right" than have good government

1%? Didn't Trump get 47% of the vote?

Trump voters didn't care about facts, let alone what was "right."
posted by C'est la D.C. at 11:24 AM on November 28, 2016

47 percent of the 50-some-odd percent of Americans who voted.

Say what you will about Steinism, at least it's an ethos. Non voters, what are they? Nothing. That is a huge problem, especially when we are literally confronting a fascist.
posted by cell divide at 11:25 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

i dunno, i feel like at least the subset of non-voters who can't even be arsed to register are doing the country a favor by not voting, since they can't even gin up enough interest in the outcome to fill out a form
posted by murphy slaw at 11:27 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wisconsin rejects doing recount by hand; Stein to sue

The Wisconsin Elections Commission set a timetable Monday for a recount of the presidential election but rejected a request to conduct it by hand made by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who quickly responded that she would sue.

Also Monday, Stein filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to force a recount there and her supporters began filing recount requests at the precinct level there. Stein — who received just a tiny piece of the vote —also plans to ask for a recount in Michigan on Wednesday.

Unless Stein wins her lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court, officials in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties would decide on their own whether to do their recounts by hand. That could mean some counties perform recounts by machine and some by hand.
posted by futz at 11:35 AM on November 28, 2016 [17 favorites]

I don't really blame the non-voters themselves, I was sort of joking by hackily riffing off of Lebowski, but I do think it points to just how broken the system is...

The vast majority of people support the policies of the Democrats, but the Republicans control every branch of Government at most levels in most states. Something very wrong here, and 50% of people aren't voting at all.
posted by cell divide at 11:35 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

i dunno, i feel like at least the subset of non-voters who can't even be arsed to register are doing the country a favor by not voting, since they can't even gin up enough interest in the outcome to fill out a form

Conservatives have put up enormous obstacles to voter registration along pretty much racist lines. They've also made it extremely easy to purge people from voter rolls for pretty weak reasons, also along racist lines. They're getting ready to go national with it, and they know that even NeverTrump conservatives are behind it 100%.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:37 AM on November 28, 2016 [36 favorites]

it remains very hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that one in a hundred voters went for Stein.

As with 2000, voters were assured that Clinton/Gore had the election in the bag, and I bet a sizable portion of those voters merely wanting to register a protest against "the system."
posted by Candleman at 11:37 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

I don't know how much of non-voting is apathy and how much is people being struck from rolls of eligible voters, turned away at their polling place, were convinced that they might get in trouble for voting, can't vote because of their citizenship status or status as a former convict, etc.

I mean, I used to assume these were a small minority until I realize just how many African-Americans are cycled through the criminal justice system. How many just can't vote or have been driven away? At this moment, I guess I wouldn't be surprised to discover its most of them. I suppose it is unlikely that Republicans have made it impossible for half of American to vote, but I wouldn't put it past them.
posted by maxsparber at 11:39 AM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

Just to add to my comment regarding faithless electors, I am still uncomfortable with the fact that, when an elector votes against his/her state's will, a whole lot of presidential election voters have been effectively silenced. One should probably come to a decision on whether or not one can support all possible outcomes if called to serve in the position of elector. To do anything else is potentially unfair to a lot of voters.

While this gentleman would have served people of conscience's purposes by denying Trump an EC vote, we must be certain that the gain outweighs the cost. I think it does in this case, but that's an opinion, not a fact.
posted by Silverstone at 11:41 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

No reason I can think of to suspect non-voters, had they cast a ballot, would have voted in a significantly different fashion than those who did vote, if anything, given the lack of importance attached to their preference, they very well may have gone more for Trump than Clinton. The allure of fame and novelty being what it is. We can certainly wishcast they'd have gone against Trump since that's what we would have them do, but in a coin flippish scenario, that isn't particularly likely. Of course, in hindsight, everything looks better than what we ended up with, so I can see where the desire comes from, but I'm not seeing it as a strong likelihood.

The bigger problem with the non-voters is that they, presumably, don't invest in the system because they generally expect things to follow along the same paths as they are used to from previous elections. In normal circumstances that's actually not such a bad thing, but in the case of an exceptional threat like Trump, it can be much worse since the non-voters will be looking to normalize the results of the election and aren't as likely to want to get involved with anything that upsets the status quo, and they'll be more likely, I suspect, to see attempts to oppose Trump as the upsetting element than Trump himself given their interest in continuity. They aren't going to be revolutionaries in other words.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

As with 2000, voters were assured that Clinton/Gore had the election in the bag

The way I remember 2000, was that people said it wouldn't matter which of Gore or Bush won. (I still ended up voting Gore).
posted by drezdn at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, if you want some "fun" thinking, cross-reference "can't vote while in prison" with "federal conviction rates by race".
posted by XtinaS at 11:43 AM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

An estimated 6.1 million Americans are forbidden to vote because of “felony disenfranchisement,” or laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:43 AM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Isn't the relentless "both sides are equally terrible" drum beating, of which Stein was a major proponent, part of the reason so many people didn't bother to vote? Sure, some people who agreed with that voted for Stein, but others surely saw John Oliver bash Stein or whatever and just decided to stay home because they were too disgusted with the whole thing. If people are going to spend a year dumping on the process, they shouldn't be shocked that some people eventually decide they want nothing to do with it.

In any case, turnout was largely up. Yes, turnout was down somewhat in some urban areas compared to the Obama years, which everyone pretty much expected. Meanwhile, turnout was up significantly in rural counties that went overwhelmingly for Trump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
posted by zachlipton at 11:44 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

it remains very hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that one in a hundred voters went for Stein.

I think that there were probably a lot of people young enough to not remember how 2000 went.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:45 AM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

An estimated 6.1 million Americans are forbidden to vote because of “felony disenfranchisement,” or laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes.

That's about the population of Tennessee. I have a feeling that if some crooked mechanism made it possible for all but 200,000 in Tennessee to vote, that would be a pretty significant news story.
posted by maxsparber at 11:48 AM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Did you know the President-elect is having a Cyber Monday sale? Use promo code GREATDEAL (sadly, it's not BIGLY).
posted by zachlipton at 11:48 AM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Just to add to my comment regarding faithless electors, I am still uncomfortable with the fact that, when an elector votes against his/her state's will, a whole lot of presidential election voters have been effectively silenced. One should probably come to a decision on whether or not one can support all possible outcomes if called to serve in the position of elector. To do anything else is potentially unfair to a lot of voters.

And do you know what else is unfair to a lot of voters? Like 2.1 million and counting of them?
posted by entropicamericana at 11:51 AM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

We all know who's really going to benefit from these recounts...
posted by schmod at 11:53 AM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Swing state Florida (home bitter home) is particularly bad at restoring voting rights:

The state of Florida alone accounts for more than a quarter (27 percent) of the disenfranchised population nationally, and its nearly 1.5 million individuals disenfranchised post-sentence account for nearly half (48 percent) of the national total.

It's one of 3 states that permanently remove a felon's right to vote with no formal reinstatement process save each person convicted requesting clemency from the Governor on an individual basis.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:54 AM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

Joe Scarborough has been inspired by Trump's run that he too can run for president, that's what's behind all his personal inanity.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:56 AM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Eyebrows, you buried the bigger insanity behind the link (which is from September and somehow escaped my attention): Trump: The Musical, and he's already made a demo. [real, I guess, who the hell can tell anymore?]

I'm just a simple man
Blessed with this orange tan
I'm simply titanic
Beloved by Hispanics and Jews
I'm huge
Losers don't understand
The genius of my border plan
They call me a fool
Then they dare ridicule my huge hands

posted by zachlipton at 12:04 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Joe Scarborough has been inspired by Trump's run that he too can run for president

In fairness, Trump has in fact shown that literally anyone can become President, no matter how bad they would obviously be at presidenting.
posted by Etrigan at 12:06 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Online radicalisation of young white men. It’s here, it’s serious, and I was lucky to be able to snap out of it when I did. And if it can get somebody like me to swallow it – a lifelong liberal – I can’t imagine the damage it is doing overall.

It seemed so subtle – at no point did I think my casual and growing Islamophobia was genuine racism. The good news for me is that my journey toward the alt-right was mercifully brief: I never wanted to harm or abuse anybody verbally, it was all very low level – a creeping fear and bigotry that I won’t let infest me again. But I suspect you could, if you don’t catch it quickly, be guided into a much more overt and sinister hatred.

This article hits home hard. Articles like these are good to remind me that you play with proverbial fire when you keep an eye on the sewer. I do try to actively immunize myself when I feel it appealing to my baser instincts but it's hard not to get sucked into it.
posted by Talez at 12:06 PM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

In fairness, Trump has in fact shown that literally anyone can become President, no matter how bad they would obviously be at presidenting.

Well, literally any rich white dude.
posted by maxsparber at 12:10 PM on November 28, 2016 [24 favorites]

OSU story updated 2:56pm ET

The suspect in Monday's Ohio State University attack was an 18-year-old of Somali descent, a federal law enforcement official said.

Please no. Jesus fuck no. Just not now. Not with this climate.
posted by Talez at 12:11 PM on November 28, 2016 [18 favorites]

When the guy who wears the rubber boot on his head becomes president, then I will believe anyone can be president.
posted by maxsparber at 12:11 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

When the guy who wears the rubber boot on his head becomes president, then I will believe anyone can be president.

Hey! He has a name you know. Vermin Supreme.
posted by Talez at 12:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

He's not president yet.
posted by ian1977 at 12:13 PM on November 28, 2016

He's not president yet.

Vermin Supreme? Not for lack of trying.
posted by maxsparber at 12:15 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Trump is meeting with an ex-bank CEO who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard

On Monday, Trump will meet with John Allison, the former CEO of the bank BB&T and of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

There have been reports that Allison is being considered for Treasury secretary.

...Allison also suggested that the government's practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished and the US should go back to a banking system backed by "a market standard such as gold."

Another potential wacko. Just great.
posted by futz at 12:18 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Trump has in fact shown that literally anyone can become President

Your periodic reminder that this is not true for naturalized citizens, we're constitutionally barred because reasons. According to our laws, Khizr Khan is less qualified to defend the Constitution than Donald Trump.
posted by tivalasvegas at 12:19 PM on November 28, 2016 [19 favorites]

Well, literally any rich white dude.

Cis, straight, not visibly disabled, Christian or "of Christian stock", I'm sure I'm missing some too.
posted by ODiV at 12:19 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

can we name rupaul america's mayor now, please?

Approved.
posted by petebest at 12:20 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

>So when I'm talking about minority issues to Republicans, for example, I never use the words "racist" or "white supremacy", because those are unfortunately coded as "liberal language" as a result of a lot of stuff. I use words like "Fulfilling America's Promise" and "Everyone Should Be Free" and "Hard-working Americans Are Suffering". And I can say honestly a lot of the same things, as long as I use different language about them.

--

Racist is "liberal language", and you want us to reach out and try to understand them.

Wow.

To be fair, corb was explaining how she tries to persuade racists to be less racist. I don't think she's saying that everyone necessarily should take the time and emotional energy to do so. And we need people like corb to be doing this work, because God knows I can only do it for so long before I lose my temper and/or my mind.

All of us will have tasks to do, and not all the same tasks -- but they are all tasks in the same direction, that of the defeat of neofascism, the defense of our public institutions and the establishment of genuine multiracial democracy under the rule of law.
posted by tivalasvegas at 12:27 PM on November 28, 2016 [44 favorites]

John Allison, the former CEO of the bank BB&T

Ah yes, the man whose donations to universities are tied to them teaching Atlas Shrugged.
posted by holgate at 12:29 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Now that it's the other way, you want to cast aspersions?

Yes.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:30 PM on November 28, 2016 [27 favorites]

Trump aides launch 'defense fund' amid recount efforts in midwest states

...The email from Chris Carr, political director of the Republican National Committee, describes the recount effort, which has so far raised $6m for the three states, as “ridiculous”, “meaningless” and “a political ploy by the left to further divide our country, gin up support from their extremist base, and threaten President-elect Trump’s mandate”.
...“This recount is nothing but a distraction – and a preview of the lengths to which liberals are willing to go over the next four years to try to stop us.

“But now that the recount is set to take place, we need to be ready to fight back and win, just like we did during the campaign. With you on our side we will be successful in once again stopping Hillary and her far-left pals from dividing our country even more. Contribute $10, $25, $50, $100, $200, or more today to help."
posted by futz at 12:30 PM on November 28, 2016

Trump is meeting with an ex-bank CEO who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard

ron paul right now
posted by entropicamericana at 12:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

constitutionally barred because reasons

It seems to me that there was a genuine anxiety, back in the 1780's, that someone could become President but actually have an allegiance to a foreign power. So they threw in the bit about the President needing to be a natural born citizen. How appropriate this remains seems unclear today.
posted by thelonius at 12:32 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

...Allison also suggested that the government's practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished and the US should go back to a banking system backed by "a market standard such as gold."


If Trump is going to crucify labor, seems fitting that he should use a cross of gold.
posted by ocschwar at 12:33 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Trump aides launch 'defense fund' amid recount efforts in midwest states

I'm honestly not sure whether they think they can, like counter-bid the recount costs or this is just a simple grift.
posted by Etrigan at 12:33 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm honestly not sure whether they think they can, like counter-bid the recount costs or this is just a simple grift.

Yeah, it's a tough call - I've spent most of my life using the 'never assume malice where stupidity adequately explains' rule, but these guys are like, ringers or something.
posted by Mooski at 12:36 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

>> but it remains very hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that one in a hundred voters went for Stein.

> I think a productive, actionable takeaway from this fact is that quite a large number of us are willing to go leftward. Democrats, from now on, would do very well to get/remain as liberal as we can, and to continually offer alternative solutions to Trump-based problems.

hey let's try this one on for size:

Mainstream liberalism isn't appealing to America, because of all of the stuff we've spent like two years observing on in the runup to the disaster of November 8th, 2016. Maybe all those critiques are right; jobs where a person can support themselves on 40 hours a week of work are on the whole gone and not coming back, the people who actually have "decent" jobs hate them, and thanks to the hyperconcentration of wealth that's been happening since the Reagan/Thatcher counterrevolution, almost no one is comfortable or safe anymore. And that's the situation for the best-positioned workers; if you're marked as Other in any way, you're made available for intensified hyperexploitation, and mainstream liberals are not willing to do enough to protect you. Mainstream liberalism built the grimdark cyberpunk future we're living in; people are right to be skeptical of it.

but also let's try this on for size too:

Leftism isn't appealing to America either. Bernie Sanders would have lost the election harder than Clinton did. There is a small boutique market in left-of-liberal ideas in America, but it's not nearly large enough to move the country as a whole.

Maybe we've been a majority-fascist country for a long time. Maybe we're not becoming illiberal — breaking toward fascism on the one hand and socialism on the other — maybe we're just a majority-fascist place that's had our underlying tendencies kept largely in check by center-liberal institutions. Maybe those institutions just took a mortal blow.

Maybe there is no solution. Maybe there are no actionable takeaways. Maybe we lost years ago. Maybe we broke it all back in 2000. Maybe we just have to cross our fingers and put our dreams in cold storage. Maybe Americans are, on the whole, genuinely no-foolin' bad.

If we are, maybe it will take generations to make anything decent from this crooked — no, not crooked, rotten — timber.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:36 PM on November 28, 2016 [45 favorites]

US should go back to a banking system backed by "a market standard such as gold."

I JUST USED THIS AS THE EXAMPLE OF AN OBVIOUSLY STUPID IDEA WHOSE TIME HAD RIGHTFULLY PASSED.

DAMMIT 2016!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:42 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Maybe we've been a majority-fascist country for a long time.

Maybe we've been a sizable minority fascist country for a long time, and another sizable minority completely-apathetic country. The solutions to that are slightly different than if we were in a country that was genuinely more than 50% fascists, but I do think it's still very bad.
posted by Sequence at 12:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

The Daily Mail story about Ivana Trump's shoe factory in China led me to this chilling glimpse of global labour:
posted by stonepharisee at 12:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe there is no solution. Maybe there are no actionable takeaways. Maybe we lost years ago. Maybe we broke it all back in 2000. Maybe we just have to cross our fingers and put our dreams in cold storage. Maybe Americans are, on the whole, genuinely no-foolin' bad.


Or maybe we can stand and fight and resist. And listen and encourage and inspire. Maybe our fellow Americans are more victims than villains, conned by a criminal who played on their fears, but who will soon see how empty those promises were. Maybe love can still win. I don't know. But we have to try.
posted by OnceUponATime at 12:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [18 favorites]

Trump ally: Mitt Romney a 'self-serving egomaniac'

New York Rep. Chris Collins on Monday criticized Mitt Romney, a possible Secretary of State nominee in the new administration, calling him a "self-serving egomaniac."

"What do I know about Mitt Romney? I know that he's a self-serving egomaniac who puts himself first, who has a chip on his shoulder, and thinks that he should be president of the United States," Collins, a Donald Trump backer, told host Chris Cuomo on "New Day."

LOL. He just described trump. Have these people no self awareness?
posted by futz at 12:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [29 favorites]

Allison also suggested that the government's practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished

This is... I mean, god, that's criminally insane, right there. He wants people who are customers of banks that fuck up to lose all of their money without recourse. That's just malicious.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [57 favorites]

Wisconsin rejects doing recount by hand; Stein to sue

C'mon Wisconsin, the whole point of this is to see how secure your ballot-counting computers are. Using those same computers for a recount completely defeats the purpose. Don't screw this up.
posted by OnceUponATime at 12:50 PM on November 28, 2016 [24 favorites]

> Or maybe we can stand and fight and resist. And listen and encourage and inspire. Maybe our fellow Americans are more victims than villains, conned by a criminal who played on their fears, but who will soon see how empty those promises were. Maybe love can still win. I don't know. But we have to try.

Maybe abandoning false hope is a necessary prerequisite for resistance.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:54 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

odinsdream: "Racist is "liberal language", and you want us to reach out and try to understand them.

Wow."

What I've found is that we're using two different meanings of the word 'racist'. For many conservatives, racism is literally disliking a person purely because they are of another race. Like, you have to don a sheet and burn a cross to count as a racist. When told they're being racist because of indifference or insensitivity they get all het up because they think we're accusing them of their definition. So I don't use the word with conservative family and basically describe racism as we understand it here and that often seems to go over a lot better. As mentioned previously though; my family, my job - doesn't have to be yours.
posted by charred husk at 12:58 PM on November 28, 2016 [29 favorites]

Leftism isn't appealing to America either. Bernie Sanders would have lost the election harder than Clinton did.

Sen. Sanders' performance in the primaries was a strong hint that our narrative of politics was fundamentally flawed.

I'm not going to rehash arguments about how Bernie would have performed in a general election. However, I do think that it's worth discussing our predictions for how he should have performed in the primaries, because we can compare our predictions to what actually happened. "Socialism" should have been utterly toxic to his campaign, and ended up virtually being a non-issue. Bernie is a career politician, an independent, and isn't particularly telegenic. No sane political observer would have predicted that Bernie would have come within arms reach of a major party nomination, or carried significant momentum into the General Election campaign season.

Americans largely didn't care about "how Leftist" Bernie's ideas were. A Clinton victory was a "sure thing" on the morning of November 8. We need to take all of our old assumptions with a grain of salt, because these assumptions have fallen flat on their face more than once this campaign season.

Early this year, I remarked that we'd need to rethink a lot of our assumptions about American politics if Sanders' managed to scoop up any delegates outside of his home state. There had been absolutely no notable event or shift to suggest that such a thing should have been possible.

In hindsight, I wildly underestimated just how wrong we were.

Increasingly, it's seeming like Americans care about how the candidates deliver their arguments, rather than the substance of those arguments. But that's a different topic.

Sanders should have been a canary in the coal mine, and we all ignored it.
posted by schmod at 1:01 PM on November 28, 2016 [26 favorites]

I have a lot of faith in these left-of-liberal ideas and their ability to improve the lives of humans everywhere. I suspect I'm not alone.

I have faith in them too, but I also think millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump just because he had an 'R' by his name, so I have to agree that leftist politics are a boutique issue at this point.

Also the left's messaging as is is still mostly leaving out so called "identity politics" so I disagree with most of their tactics and messaging to help "most Americans."
posted by zutalors! at 1:03 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is it just living cheek by jowl with a more cosmopolitan crowd? In other words the city vs. the rural vote? Or are Californian rural voters also more inclined to vote Democrat?

Urban vs. rural certainly seems to be part of it. The Central Valley is more rural and its economy is more dependent on agriculture and petroleum; they tended to go Trump, with the exception of the counties containing the larger urban areas within the Central Valley (Fresno, Sacramento, Merced, [narrowly] Modesto). But there are also exceptions. Bakersfield, in Kern County, is a relatively large urban area within the Central Valley and the county is almost 50% Hispanic but Kern County went decisively for Trump. Mendocino, Humboldt, and Lake Counties are roughly as rural as Shasta, Tehama, and Glenn, but the first three went Clinton and the last three went Trump.

I think of Mendocino as much more "hippie VT" rural than "typical American" rural, and I think of Bakersfield (with its heavy ties to the oil industry) as more culturally similar to somewhere like Texas than to the coast, but I don't know how to formalize either of those things off the top of my head.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:05 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

but I also think millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump just because he had an 'R' by his name, so I have to agree that leftist politics are a boutique issue at this point.

I don't follow this at all. Millions of Americans voted for Hillary because she had a D by her name and right wing fascism is ascendent in our country.
posted by Bookhouse at 1:06 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sanders should have been a canary in the coal mine, and we all ignored it.

I've been thinking he would have served that purpose much better if he actually carried out his threat to run in 2012.
posted by FJT at 1:06 PM on November 28, 2016

Sanders lost the primary to Clinton. By 3.7 million votes.
Clinton "lost" the general election, but won the popular vote by 2 million votes.

To claim that Sanders would have done even better against Trump than Clinton in the general election through some sort of paper-rock-scissors logic is silly (and also done to death in these threads).
posted by Roommate at 1:07 PM on November 28, 2016 [34 favorites]

When told they're being racist because of indifference or insensitivity they get all het up because they think we're accusing them of their definition.

What I'd add to this, though, is that they lack a fundamental understanding that indifference and insensitivity can hurt people as much as the cross-burning when crosses hardly ever get burned and a huge portion of the population treats blacks and Mexicans especially like they are just somewhat lesser beings than everybody else.
posted by Sequence at 1:10 PM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

To claim that Sanders would have done even better against Trump than Clinton in the general election through some sort of paper-rock-scissors logic is silly (and also done to death in these threads).

We have no idea what would have happened, which is why the debate is silly. The primary numbers don't mean anything.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

but I also think millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump just because he had an 'R' by his name, so I have to agree that leftist politics are a boutique issue at this point.

I don't follow this at all. Millions of Americans voted for Hillary because she had a D by her name and right wing fascism is ascendent in our country.

Hillary Clinton is a lifelong Democrat and Donald Trump is a come lately swindler. I would have expected voters to be able to tell the difference. Clearly that's wrong, but not sure what's hard to follow in my comment.
posted by zutalors! at 1:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

interesting email from Tim Kaine's mailing list just now:

[ehmt],

It’s been over two years since our country launched military action against ISIS -- without authorization from Congress. This sets a dangerous precedent. No president should be able to go to war without a vote in Congress. I stood up to my own party by sponsoring legislation on this issue before Donald Trump even declared his candidacy for president -- and now that he’s about to assume the Oval Office, the stakes are higher than ever. Will you join me and demand that Congress exercise its Constitutional duty to authorize military force? We can’t afford to let the executive branch carry out acts of war without clear limits on the scope of the mission or defined timelines.

It’s far too easy to imagine a future president using Congressional inaction to justify the hasty and unpredictable initiation of military action. This is precisely why the founders wanted a separation of powers in our Constitution. We don’t know exactly what President-elect Trump will do once he takes office, but during his campaign, he made some pretty cavalier statements about war, bloodshed, and torture. I want you to stand with me if you agree with what I know to be true -- that such a grave decision isn’t the president’s to make alone. In our democracy, it belongs to the people’s representatives, the U.S. Congress.

Please stand with me and demand Congress exercise its Constitutional duty to authorize military force.

Thanks,
Tim

I hadn't realized that this was a Tim Kaine position.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [22 favorites]

@nycsouthpaw: In depo for Trump Plaza bankruptcy case, Trump's own lawyer testifies they often met with him in pairs because Trump lies so much

Court documents
posted by Golden Eternity at 1:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [16 favorites]

What I'd add to this, though, is that they lack a fundamental understanding that indifference and insensitivity can hurt people as much as the cross-burning

See, the thing that makes me lose my pacifistic calm and begin feeling white hot hate that only ranting on MeFi and drinking copious amounts of wine can quench is the realization that they don't lack that understanding.

It simply doesn't affect them.
posted by Mooski at 1:14 PM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

>> When told they're being racist because of indifference or insensitivity they get all het up because they think we're accusing them of their definition.

> What I'd add to this, though, is that they lack a fundamental understanding that indifference and insensitivity can hurt people as much as the cross-burning when crosses hardly ever get burned and a huge portion of the population treats blacks and Mexicans especially like they are just somewhat lesser beings than everybody else.

Alternately: Perhaps they understand structural racism just fine, and like that there is a widespread system of preference and exclusion that promises good things for the group they identify with and bad things for people they don't identify with.

Conservatives respond to accusations of support for structural white supremacy with the complaint that they shouldn't be called racist because that they're not white-hood racists. Maybe this isn't because they don't understand that structural white supremacy is a thing that hurts non-white people, but instead because they think that their flavor of racism is, unlike white-hood racism, genuinely acceptable — regardless of who it hurts.

They don't invoke the KKK boogeyman because they think that's the only form of racism and don't want to be associated with racism, they invoke the KKK boogeyman to reassure themselves that as long as they can find someone worse than them, they're not genuinely doing anything bad.

In public, use whatever language you need to use to persuade people caught in this trap. But privately? Be honest with yourself; most people run off of pure self-interest, and a majority of white people genuinely see the defense of structural white supremacy as a key part of defending their interests.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:21 PM on November 28, 2016 [37 favorites]

In depo for Trump Plaza bankruptcy case, Trump's own lawyer testifies they often met with him in pairs because Trump lies so much

That's an oldie but a goodie. I love it.
posted by futz at 1:21 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

So we're gradually becoming comfortable, or at least conversant, with the idea that when an authoritarian tells us who he is and what he wants to do, we should believe him. We need to start becoming comfortable, or at least conversant, with the idea that we should extend the same courtesy to the people who put the authoritarian in charge. We should believe that they really do want what they asked for.

America has told us who it is. Although we may feel optimism about particular plans or strategies, we must be completely realistic, completely honest, about the terrain on which we implement those plans or strategies.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:29 PM on November 28, 2016 [47 favorites]

Perhaps they understand structural racism just fine, and like that there is a widespread system of preference and exclusion that promises good things for the group they identify with and bad things for people they don't identify with.


U.S. Economic Confidence Surges After Election

After Trump won last week's election, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now have a much more optimistic view of the U.S. economy's outlook than they did before the election. Just 16% of Republicans said the economy was getting better in the week before the election, while 81% said it was getting worse. Since the election, 49% say it is getting better and 44% worse.

The Last Jim Crow Generation loves Socialism for White People.

"Just voting their economic concerns," they said.
"Sincerely afraid for their personal finances," they said.

I'd rather be sailing
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:30 PM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

So in today's meetings, we have Petraeus, about whom Trump just tweeted: "Just met with General Petraeus--was very impressed!" He pled guilty last year to mishandling classified information.

Followed by Sheriff David Clarke, who runs a jail where one inmate died of thirst this year in a death ruled a homicide, not to mention the newborn baby who died; the mother says prison staff ignored her labor.
posted by zachlipton at 1:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [24 favorites]

The gold standard?

Didn't J P Morgan try to organise a military coup using a fascist army to depose FDR over the US leaving the gold standard?

Why yes, yes he did.

Guess it's easier now. You don't actually need the coup, and the fascists are already in place.
posted by Devonian at 1:38 PM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

Every single one of these picks so far has been genuinely bizarre. It's like they're intentionally trying to assert their ineptitude, gormless hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. Petraeus?

If every person floated for a cabinet position is clearly incompetent, unqualified, or literally convicted of criminal mishandling of classified information, is there actually any recourse?
posted by aspersioncast at 1:43 PM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

I am still uncomfortable with the fact that, when an elector votes against his/her state's will, a whole lot of presidential election voters have been effectively silenced.

The electoral college system means that they never actually did vote for the US President; they voted for electors. And just as the electoral college system benefited Trump in one respect (he won despite having less overall support than Clinton) it might equally disadvantage him in another respect: electors may decide to do their job and keep the lunatic out of office. You can't have one without the other, and if you're not concerned about the silencing of millions of voters who wanted Clinton, you shouldn't be concerned about the "whole lot" of voters who wanted Trump.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:45 PM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

Of course we should take people's preferences seriously. The reality is a sizable number of Americans felt like we needed a completely incompetent racist, sexist asshole in the White House because they want a bully who will put their enemies in their place.

The reality is that the WWC likes their government benefits they just feel like other people are cutting in line and that Obama in particular was allowing huge numbers of people to bypass the system and start getting benefits while their friends and families struggle to get those benefits.

Yes a lot of that has to do with some of the states being way more generous or parsimonious than others but these people honestly feel like Obama was allowing Dreamers and Syrians to take precious benefits that should be going to them and their families.

They feel like they've followed the American promise "Work hard and your life and the lives of your families will get better" and that it's not living up to the promise and they are mad and frustrated about that and they want people like the Republican leadership to tell them it's not their fault. That it's the fault of minority X.

I think we all understand what is driving the white US electorate and it's a profound unease with the present and future and a desire to return to some mythical past where various people knew their place.

I think this is why a lot of PoC and other minority groups that have traditionally been given the short end of the stick are profoundly uneasy with the attempts to pander to the WWC because we've been there done that. The old New Deal coalition was built on northern labor interests and the needs of white supremacist south. The Current Republican coalition is built on Northern Capital Interests and the needs of a white supremacist south and potentially midwest. So when Democrats start talking about appealing to a white supremacist demographic by using economic populist rhetoric more than a few people start going "oh here we go again"
posted by vuron at 1:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [31 favorites]

Like where exactly are the checks and balances on presidential appointments sitting right now? Is the assumption that the Senate will simply approve of ingrates like Giuliani simply because they're Republican?
posted by aspersioncast at 1:47 PM on November 28, 2016

> If every person floated for a cabinet position is clearly incompetent, unqualified, or literally convicted of criminal mishandling of classified information, is there actually any recourse?

The law, as always, is the law as implemented rather than the law as written.

As such, the question you have to ask is whether or not a majority of the members of the House of Representatives takes offense at any of this. If yes, then impeachment is the recourse. If not, then there is no recourse.

Which is to say, there is no recourse.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

After Trump won last week's election, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now have a much more optimistic view of the U.S. economy's outlook than they did before the election. Just 16% of Republicans said the economy was getting better in the week before the election, while 81% said it was getting worse. Since the election, 49% say it is getting better and 44% worse.


Good time to go short.
posted by srboisvert at 1:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

If every person floated for a cabinet position is clearly incompetent, unqualified, or literally convicted of criminal mishandling of classified information, is there actually any recourse?

The GOP Senate.

None of them actually like Trump. We have to flood them with calls to put country before party and join the democrats in rejecting unqualified candidates.

Mattis for secdef, Romney for state, Summers for treasury, et cetera.

They can be right wingers. But they have to be qualified right wingers, with a spine, and with at least some respect from the democrats.
posted by ocschwar at 1:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

And if a standoff build over this, the existing cabinet can be invited to invoke the 25th amendment.
posted by ocschwar at 1:50 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

The resigning elector wrote a fairly long post about his decision. I think it's hard to deny that he is taking this seriously and thought hard about his decision. If more people took the process as seriously as he seems to be taking it, it would work better.
posted by prefpara at 1:50 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

I would like to see a reporter interview Trump and say " You don't really expect to believe you are not a bald...[big pause] faced liar".
posted by srboisvert at 1:53 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

That said, he does seem to value his own moral purity more than he values even an infinitesimal chance to save America from a horrifying scumbag so...
posted by prefpara at 1:56 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

So, a Bill Clinton Administration-affiliated candidate is likely to be beaten in the Electoral College, despite winning the national popular vote, by a Way Less Qualified, born-rich phoney-baloney "regular guy," with iffy-at-best business cred, and a green-party possible-spoiler snafu is in-the-mix.

Yuuuuup.
posted by Cookiebastard at 1:57 PM on November 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

I am still uncomfortable with the fact that, when an elector votes against his/her state's will, a whole lot of presidential election voters have been effectively silenced.

Eh, that horse has already left the barn. In all but two states right now, Every single electoral vote is awarded to one person, no matter how close the actual vote count is. In many swing states (Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, etc), Trump won with less than 50% of the overall vote, and within 1-2% of Clinton. Yet he receives 100% of the electoral votes for those states. Can you really say that is the "will of the state"? How is than not silencing the nearly half of voters in the state who went for Clinton? Disenfranchisement is baked into the system, one way or another.
posted by Roommate at 1:57 PM on November 28, 2016 [41 favorites]

Clarke in the DHS is double plus ungood
posted by angrycat at 1:58 PM on November 28, 2016

Sanders lost the primary to Clinton. By 3.7 million votes.
Clinton "lost" the general election, but won the popular vote by 2 million votes.

To claim that Sanders would have done even better against Trump than Clinton in the general election through some sort of paper-rock-scissors logic is silly (and also done to death in these threads).

This reasoning does not make sense. Registered Democrats and any other Democratic primary voters are not a representative subset of the voters in the general election. It wasn't a very controversial argument that for instance, Huntsman may well have outperformed Romney in the general even though he underperformed him in the 2012 Republican primary, in both cases because he appealed more to centrists.

We have very little concrete evidence either for or against Sanders outperforming Clinton vs. Trump. This is especially true because of the unpredictability of this cycle and because of the additional wrench-in-the-system of the Electoral College, which means not only the number of votes but also their spatial distribution are of key importance; after all, as you point out, Trump did not need to win more votes than Clinton in order to win the presidency.

Indeed, this has all been done to death already, but I think it's also unfair to drop inaccurate "proofs" like this in one sentence and then pre-emptively chide people for responding.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:09 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

I have faith in them too, but I also think millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump just because he had an 'R' by his name, so I have to agree that leftist politics are a boutique issue at this point.

And two million plus more Americans voted for the most progressive Democratic platform ever.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:13 PM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

the epistemology of ignorance

I think this is on Kevin Drum's resume tho
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:21 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

My conclusions:

One dimension of racism appears to have an active to passive-aggressive axis.

Donald's actions overall seem to be informed by the Art of War & Norman Vincent Peale as major philosophies.
posted by ZeusHumms at 2:24 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

In a different world, the first thing that Trump will do after Dec. 15 is to make a long, Howard Beale-esque harangue assaulting the state of American democracy, covering everything that brought his rise in the primaries to his victory in the general election. He would name names and list the sins of the system and the voters that brought him here on his platform, and lack thereof. After announcing that he is resigning, he would end with, "...The Aristocrats!"
posted by Apocryphon at 2:27 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

a national moment of mourning for our self-respect following the very dumb thing we all did

F that. Trump voters broke it, and they can figure it out (but probably won't). What's the Klingon ceremony for being excommunicated? That's what is happening to anyone I know who supported Hitl-,er, Trump. I'll help fill sandbags when the deluge comes, but we're done with the chit-chat talky talky.
posted by petebest at 2:29 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

David Friedman, Trump's Israel advisor, everyone (Haaretz link is an annoying-to-bypass paywalled profile of him, but the last paragraph is something special):

Friedman has, on various occasions during the campaign, been asked to respond to charges of anti-Semitism among Trump supporters. He has largely dismissed these allegations, insisting that hatred of Jews is far more prevalent among the Left.

Friedman delivered a particularly scathing attack on The New York Times, after a tape recently surfaced in which Trump was caught boasting about sexually assaulting women. “The New York Times ran with the story with all the journalistic integrity of the worst gossip rag,” Friedman wrote in a column in The Jerusalem Post. “If only the Times had reported on the Nazi death camps with the same fervor as its failed last-minute attempt to conjure up alleged victims of Donald Trump, imagine how many lives could have been saved."

posted by zachlipton at 2:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

" . . . The Kakistocrats!"
posted by aspersioncast at 2:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Maybe this isn't because they don't understand that structural white supremacy is a thing that hurts non-white people, but instead because they think that their flavor of racism is, unlike white-hood racism, genuinely acceptable — regardless of who it hurts.

This is correct. Things like "structural racism" or even the word "systemic" is PC liberal academic talk and hearing the very words causes them to tune out. Whites are poor too, you see! Racism happens against white people too, you see! Mentioning intersectionality induces nothing but an eyeroll or a blank stare.

I saw the movie Arrival this weekend and there's a scene where [not a spoiler] Jeremy Renner, a physicist, is going on about how he's super eager to ask the aliens about how their technology and Amy Adams is like, "whoa there, lets learn how to actually communicate with them before we start throwing them calculus questions" (or something along those lines). Trying to get your common right-leaning person to understand something like structural racism is like trying to discuss calculus equations with an alien who only speaks bleep-blorp.

I was talking to a conservative leaning guy at a party who "held his nose and voted for Clinton" who very genuinely believed - growing up in NYC - he has seen more "racism" from black people toward Asians and whites. He swears this is his experience growing up in Queens. To him, racism = being mean to a person based on bigoted views toward other races, and not much else. So any attempt to convince him that white supremacy is a real thing was to basically deny him his own experiences growing up, and this became kind of infuriating to him. There are millions of people like this guy.

But who has time for a giant history lesson? Do you walk around with printouts of "A Case for Reparations" and hand it to them like, listen, I don't talk about racism with anyone until you've read this - bye.
posted by windbox at 2:33 PM on November 28, 2016 [22 favorites]

That said, he does seem to value his own moral purity more than he values even an infinitesimal chance to save America from a horrifying scumbag so...

The same can be said for every "progressive" who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Clinton. (except for the infinitesimal part)
posted by rocket88 at 2:35 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

This afternoon my wife and I were talking about this awful mess, and she said (paraphrasing) "If there were *any* justice or karma in this universe, at the very, *very* least Trump wouldn't get *everything* he wants," and the first thing that popped into my head was the "Cartmanland" episode of South Park.

I think a lot of people (including myself) feel like Kyle did in that episode, but if things go the way for Trump the way they did for Cartman we will all suffer, not just Cartman/Trump.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:40 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

A gem from future AG Sessions. Source later in tweet thread.

@jessicaesquire:
Money quote: Sessions called inclusion of disabled students “the single most irritating problem for teachers throughout America today.”
posted by chris24 at 2:45 PM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

Listening to Keith Olbermann shout about how Trump is "manifestly, profoundly and dangerously insane" and "not psychologically fit to assume the Presidency" is probably unlikely to make you feel any better, but that's a thing you hear now if you'd like.
posted by zachlipton at 2:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I saw the movie Arrival this weekend and there's a scene where [not a spoiler]

I would consider that comment and the follow up a spoiler, please don't spoil movies here, thanks.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

We could all use a bit of good news: Roy Cooper's lead grows in North Carolina. I hope this means McCrory's re-election bid goes down the toilet once and for all.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 2:58 PM on November 28, 2016 [21 favorites]

The Atlantic Trump Excuses the White Working Class From the Politics of Personal Responsibility

It struck me as I was reading J.D. Vance’s beautiful memoir about his Appalachian upbringing, Hillbilly Elegy. What makes Vance’s book so striking is not the problems he describes: deindustrialization, drug addiction, single motherhood, a definition of masculinity that inhibits academic achievement. William Julius Wilson and Charles Murray made their reputations dissecting these ills 30 years ago. What makes Vance’s book so arresting is that the people he’s describing are white.[...]

Trump never speaks this way. In fact, he speaks less about personal responsibility than any Republican presidential nominee since Reagan. He’s the anti-J.D. Vance. Vance wants blue-collar whites to blame multinational corporations less for their woes. Trump blames them more than any Republican nominee ever has. Vance cautions that government can’t save Appalachia. Trump, by promising a crackdown on immigrants and outsourcing, vows that it will.

This is the real shift Trump is bringing to the GOP. Under Reagan, Republicans demanded personal responsibility from African Americans and ignored the same cultural problems when displayed by whites. Under Trump, Republicans acknowledge that whites exhibit those same pathologies. Trump, for instance, spoke frequently during the campaign about drug addiction in white, rural states like New Hampshire. But instead of demanding personal responsibility, Trump’s GOP promises state protection. Unlike Vance, who speaks about his poor white neighbors in the way Reagan-era conservatives spoke about poor blacks, Trump-era conservatives describe the white working class as the victims of political and economic forces beyond their control.

posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 2:58 PM on November 28, 2016 [27 favorites]

I think "racism" is like selfishness, a terrible part of human nature that affects us all sometimes whether we realize it or not, though we try to avoid it. We're all guilty of banal kinds of selfishness, not giving as much to charity as we could, etc. And most of us are guilty of banal racism too, being more likely to vote for people of our own race on American Idol, or whatever. But then there are the KKK members, the Nazis, the alt-right trolls. They are racist in the way that a mugger is selfish. Openly, unrepentantly, shamelessly, destructively, malevolently racist.

In those terms I guess structural racism is like the structural greed of laissez faire capitalism. The white collar criminal or the privatize-the-profits/socialize-the-losses Wall Street robber baron robs people as surely as the mugger does, but it's a less visceral threat. Both the greedy capitalist and the mugger are selfish, taking what doesn't belong to them, but they are selfish in different ways. The red-lining banker is racist in a different way than the cross-burning KKK member, but still racist.

For white people, who can sort of imagine the visceral fear of finding a burning cross on their lawn, it can be hard, I think, to imagine the more abstract damage of getting turned down for a loan because of your race... so that you never get your own lawn in the first place. Just like people are more afraid of muggers than of Bernie Madoff, even though Madoff took a lot more from his victims than the average mugger does.

Theft is theft and racism is racism, but I sort of wish we had names for the different types and categories of racism (like the apocryphal "100 words for snow") so that more white people (like my own family) could understand what we're talking about. I guess we're starting to. "Implicit bias" "Structural racism" "hate crimes"... Cross burning is racist, red-lining is racist, but they are racist in different ways. In particular, structural racism always benefits white people in the way that laissez fair capitalism always benefits rich people. But poor people can be muggers and minorities can commit hate crimes.

It seems like a useful analogy to me. I've been trying to use it to explain what liberals mean when they talk about "racism" to conservatives in my life who think it can only mean the cross-burning kind.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:02 PM on November 28, 2016 [17 favorites]

bmaz @ emptywheel: The Stein Recount Needle and the Damage Done

If this effort involved intelligent and targeted meaningful “audits” of voting in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, that would truly yield the data we need to answer a variety of questions, I would agree wholeheartedly. But that is not what is afoot here via Stein. These are rote last second “recounts”, likely through the same tabulation mechanisms originally used, and are almost guaranteed to produce the same results, give or take minuscule deviation.

In fact, as close as I can discern from reportage, even in Stein’s first state, Wisconsin, to perform a truly different full hand count analysis requires leave of a court. And it is hard to see leave of court being given without a substantive evidentiary basis being proffered, of which there is, of course, none to date. In Pennslyvania, the outlook is no better, and arguably even more lame and adverse. That is before we ever get to Michigan, which the last second for Stein is Wednesday.

There are a lot of truly intelligent and proper purposes for all Americans, and currently Democrats, to want to test and audit the vote in this country. It is that important, and that germane to our democracy.

By the same token, it is also too important to be driven by a crass vanity project at the last second by a bit player glomming on for self promotion. This is the lifeblood of American plebiscite and democracy, and we deserve better.

But the current action is not just a curiosity that “can’t hurt” or that is suddenly necessary to react to some idiotic tweet by Trump. The stakes are higher than that. Stein’s effort is ill advised, ill counseled legally, ill targeted, ill executed and ill timed by every metric I can see.

My PA election official coworker confirmed that the PA "recounts" are likely to just be repeats of the tabulations that occurred on election nights, and unlikely to return a significant deviation from those returns.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:02 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Final uncalled race: SAN DIEGO (AP) — California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa narrowly wins re-election.

Which means we will hearing more about how the US needs to privatize the US Postal Service.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:04 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm not caught up on the thread yet -- because when someone requested a bot upthread I immediately stopped reading and created this one . Do not worry that it shows 4 posts in a short time. That was testing. Now it is scheduled to run once an hour and about half the posts will tag The Donald.

Thanks for giving me a reason to experiment with making a bot. This is fun!
posted by litlnemo at 3:13 PM on November 28, 2016 [40 favorites]

That's really cool litlnemo. Anyway to add commas to the numbers?
posted by ian1977 at 3:15 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Allison also suggested that the government's practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished

This is... I mean, god, that's criminally insane, right there. He wants people who are customers of banks that fuck up to lose all of their money without recourse. That's just malicious.

I'm no economist, but this sounds like it would be Very Bad for the economy, even for rich assholes like Trump. Won't that cause runs on banks and violence and oh look it's the 1930s again.

Better go withdraw my funds and put them in a can under the bed.
posted by emjaybee at 3:16 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

@KellyannePolls 306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic.

@NateSilver538 Actually way below average for a winner's total: 1984—525 1980—489 1988—426 1996—379 1992—370 2008—365 2012—332 *2016—306* 2004—286 2000—271

I was struck by Conway's remark this morning about the Romney kerfuffle-- she said that she spoke out on the Sunday Morning shows against Romney as "a concerned citizen." Huh. She didn't get asked on those shows to give her view as a concerned citizen, she was asked to give her views as The POETUS's spokesperson. She really is in her own way an amateur and loose cannon. I had hoped never to hear from her again after the election but it looks like she is going to continue on as a stone in our collective shoe. #ThanksTrump
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:17 PM on November 28, 2016 [16 favorites]

Not to make this an ask.me, but could anyone with actual knowledge recommend some good resources on gold standard vs current monetary policy. I don't know why a gold standard would be a bad thing. My son asked about it, because it got raised in his AP social studies class, but I don't know enough to intelligently discuss it.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 3:18 PM on November 28, 2016

In fact, as close as I can discern from reportage, even in Stein’s first state, Wisconsin, to perform a truly different full hand count analysis requires leave of a court. And it is hard to see leave of court being given without a substantive evidentiary basis being proffered, of which there is, of course, none to date.

Wouldn't the precincts with the padded numbers be considered evidence?
posted by furtive_jackanapes at 3:18 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

I hadn't realized that this was a Tim Kaine position.

He introduced this legislation giving explicit authorization for use of force against ISIS with important limitations in 2014. It went nowhere of course, but it's not a new issue for him.
posted by peeedro at 3:21 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

> She really is in her own way an amateur and loose cannon.

It's unclear how much of her attack on Romney is orchestrated vs. freelancing behavior. She may be trying to push Trump in a certain direction, or she might be acting on behalf of the campaign to publicly ridicule him for his attacks during the campaign.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:22 PM on November 28, 2016

> Wouldn't the precincts with the padded numbers be considered evidence?
posted by furtive_jackanapes at 3:18 PM on November 28 [+] [!]

Does anyone have a better source for this? This Palmer Report thing does not seem like a real site to me.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:25 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

What other crazy ideas can they come up with?

Paying immigrants to stay in their own country?

Ending taxation for public services (like firefighters )?

That they should let go the entire national guard because Americas the Greatest?

Restarting prohibition?

Criminalizing nongmo crops?

Advocating for homeopathic medicine because cost?

Death panels?

Banning books on the national level?

Hunger games?
posted by AlexiaSky at 3:25 PM on November 28, 2016

SecretAgentSockPuppet, Atlantic article on why the gold standard is a super bad idea.
posted by emjaybee at 3:26 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Ian, about the commas in the bot tweets -- I don't know, maybe later when I have some time to look into it more. I'm feeding it commas but they are getting stripped out.
posted by litlnemo at 3:28 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Banning books on the national level?

I know it sounds like an overreaction, but I have been very glad I kept my paper books and didn't have anything much on Kindle. In fact I'm going to buy some more basic reference texts and other things I want to have access to. Because if you wanted to ban e-books, it would be trivially easy. Or worse, censor parts of them or change them without notice.

Maybe it's complete paranoia on my part, but we are dealing with paranoid people with no respect for freedom of the press. Or education.
posted by emjaybee at 3:30 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

The Palmer thing links to a local ABC affiliate, Palmer's conclusions are his own.
posted by furtive_jackanapes at 3:32 PM on November 28, 2016

E-books are easier to distribute and hide than paper, generally, so I wouldn't go abandoning them just yet. Kindle isn't all of e-books, as much as they'd want you to think that.
posted by ODiV at 3:34 PM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

I read this article in the Washington Post this morning and it really stuck in my head:

A single chart everybody needs to look at before Trump’s big fight over bringing back American jobs

The relationship between factories and workers has changed over the past decades, and it’s unlikely to go back. Over the past 35 years, the United States shed about 7 million manufacturing jobs. And some industries, such as textiles and apparel, have disappeared almost entirely.

Yet American factories actually make more stuff than they ever have, and at a lower cost. Manufacturing accounts for more than a third of U.S. economic output — making it the largest sector of the economy. From that perspective, it’s hard to argue that American manufacturing today is anything but a success.

The issue is that the fortunes of factories themselves and of manufacturing workers have diverged, as Muro’s chart below shows. U.S. factories now manufacture twice as much as they did in 1984, with one-third fewer workers, according to the Federal Reserve.[...]

The economics are unavoidable and irreversible. Although a human welder may earn $25 an hour, a robot welder costs around $8 an hour over a five-year period, according to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group. The group projects that the cost could fall to as little as $2 an hour within 15 years.

My husband and I kicked this around all day. Good reasons to use robots: no need for benefits, don't need time off for lunch or visit to the dentist, no need for OSHA, will work at full capacity all hours of the day, will not make mistakes. Good reason to use humans: they can take over other stations or jobs quickly, they don't need a power supply, do not need a large initial investment.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:39 PM on November 28, 2016 [21 favorites]

Shadi Hamid @ Foreign Policy compares Trump to Islamist democratic movements and the search for greater meaning in politics: "The End of the End of History"

His rallies were more like faith-based festivals. This wasn’t politics as an end — it was politics as a means to something else, although I wasn’t quite sure what. But I did know that I had seen it before.

The differences between ethno-nationalist parties, such as Trump’s new Republicans, and religious parties are of course numerous, which makes the similarities all the more glaring. There is the same sense of victimization, real and imagined, at the hands of an entrenched elite, coupled with an acute sense of loss. In both cases, the leader of the movement is seen as the embodiment of the national will, representing “the people.”

The overlap between Trumpism and Islamism is no coincidence. In my book Islamic Exceptionalism, which discusses Islam’s tensions with liberalism and liberal democracy, I argue that some public role for religion is necessary in religiously conservative societies. Religion, unlike secular nationalism or socialism, can provide a common language and a kind of asabiyya — a 14th-century Arabic term coined by the historian Ibn Khaldun meaning roughly “group consciousness.” Asabiyya was needed to bind states together, providing cohesion and shared purpose.

In less religious or “post-Christian” societies, a mainstream Christianity is no longer capable of providing the necessary group identity. But that doesn’t mean other ideas won’t fill the vacuum. In other words, be careful what you wish for: An America where religion plays less of a role isn’t necessarily a better one, if what replaces religion is white nativism.

Whether it’s nativism, European-style ethno-nationalism, or, in the case of the Middle East, Islamism, the thread that connects these disparate experiments is similar: the flailing search for a politics of meaning. The ideologies might seem incoherent or hollow, but they all aspire to some sort of social solidarity, anchoring public life in sharply defined identities. During the Arab Spring, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood hoped, at least in the long run, to transform Egypt into a kind of missionary state.

The essence of politics then isn’t just, or even primarily, about improving citizens’ quality of life — it’s about directing their energies toward moral, philosophical, or ideological ends. When the state entrusts itself with a cause — whether based around religion or ethnic identity — citizens are no longer individuals pursuing their own conception of the good life; they are part of a larger brotherhood, entrusted with a mission to reshape society. (How can your revamped cap-and-trade proposal compete with that?)

[...] It could prove a definitive rebuke to what liberal democracy had, contrary to the intent of its originators, become — the kind of center-left managerial technocracy that was as uninspiring as it was unthreatening.

This techno-liberalism could, to be sure, improve people’s lives by nudging and tinkering around the margins. But aside from the “poetry” of periodic moments like Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, it offered only the prose of technocratic policy — prose that could become its own kind of faith, offering certainty and even a sense of identity, but primarily directed at elites and wonks who believed that the future of politics was in finding the right “facts.” These facts, objective and unimpeachable, would aid in the slow work of, say, refining a flawed universal health-care system and getting Wall Street to behave a little bit better. For everyone else, it failed to offer a substantive politics of meaning: Hillary Clinton was smart and experienced, and that was good enough for me, but I always struggled to explain to skeptics what all of this was really for.

I am not a beneficiary of white privilege, but I am privileged, in that I am part of a cosmopolitan “elite” that liked, and even loved, what we thought America had become: more open, multicultural, and respectful of an individual’s decision to lead whatever life he or she wanted. A Hillary Clinton presidency meant protecting those progressive gains.

But why would others who don’t look like me, share my experiences, or relate to me believe in some variation of the status quo — of another four years of deepening gains, which, by and large, had little to do with them? Humans need to belong, and so we gravitate toward in-groups of like-minded people. In my case, those like-minded people are of different races and religions, but we share a culture, lifestyle, and a sensibility. We were moved by the kind of joyous diversity on display at the Democratic National Convention. In those images, I could recognize the America that I knew and perhaps the only America I hoped to know.

But most members of the so-called and now somewhat clichéd “white working class” relate to each other more than they could ever relate to me. They see me as different, in part because I am. Is this a kind of nativism? Maybe. But, ultimately, my politics are just as motivated by identity and culture as theirs.

The decline of Christianity in the United States has left an ideological vacuum, and for many, perhaps most, modern liberalism is just a bit too boring to fill the gap. Or, to put it differently, it doesn’t provide the existential meaning that they want and even crave.

In his seminal essay “The End of History?” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama grappled with the victory of liberal democracy. He wrote that “the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

But Fukuyama was ambivalent about this, instinctively recognizing liberal democracy’s inherent weakness before most. He ended his article on a prescient if now somewhat terrifying note: “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

Please, please read this essay.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [46 favorites]

i strip the copy protection and back up all my e-books.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 3:51 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

(not to derail, but a quick comment -- I fixed the commas thingy. As far as I can tell. :) )
posted by litlnemo at 3:54 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

In the wake of the election, some American conservatives are soul-searching as much as American liberals are. Building off of Hamid's thesis-

Jennifer Rubin @ WashPo: "An American renaissance in a nonideological time"

If “conservatism” has shriveled and populism is ethically and intellectually hollow, what replaces it? Millions of people who voted for President Obama twice went for now-President-elect Trump. A GOP convulsed over conservative one upmanship went for the candidate with no ideology at all. It’s not political abstraction but the search for recognition, a sense of belonging that is at the root of most political movements, and that’s where we will find the alternative to scary or anachronistic right-leaning politics.

[...] Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the best spokesman on the right for civic values has, heralded “bedrock” or “foundational” values:

The ones we all want our children and our grandchildren to embrace, like personal responsibility, resilience, empathy, teamwork, family, faith. We all know that those values have weakened and it is essential that we come together and restore them. And I think what some people miss–don’t deal with just the symptoms, deal with the problem. Restoring these values will allow us to have greater courage, to confront greed, to confront frustration, to confront alienation — to protect those values.

It is about re-establishing a sense of community even as (or, especially as) globalism accelerates. In practice that means we have to help others navigate in a confusing, dangerous and complex world. To do that a new political movement would say:

* Character and rationality can be fostered and cultivated with empathy, tolerance and an appreciation of our responsibilities to one another;
* The international liberal order that has existed for 70-plus years (at times unilaterally and at times with willing democracies) can preserve peace and promote prosperity; and
* Individual dignity and self-expression are best achieved within a social contract that offers ample education, social stability and security so as to allow as many people as possible to succeed.

This means rebuilding international institutions to reduce conflict and increase stability (a strong U.S. military, alliances that protect sovereignty, etc.) and enhancing domestic institutions (families, neighborhoods, crony-free government and schools) that maximize chances for success. Ordered liberty — perhaps “humane liberty” — is what we are after. The right has focused almost exclusively on the “liberty” part, which too often sounds like the rich-get-richer and the poor are “free” to be poor. Far more important are the “ordered” and “humane” parts, which the rich take for granted and which provide everyone else with traction to traverse their lives.

In sum, it is not self-evident that “conservatism” matters anymore. Investing in human capital and basic science; lessening human isolation and addiction; reforming big bureaucracies and anti-poverty programs certainly matter. Above that, connectedness matters in a confusing modern world, more so than ever before. It is not unreasonable to think as the left mimics Europe’s social democratic parties and the right morphs into the national front-type parties that the equivalent of Christian democratic parties would emerge in American politics.

posted by Apocryphon at 3:54 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Matt Karp in Jacobin: Fairfax County, USA
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:54 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Heya- Quick note, some folks have asked that people post only shorter excerpts from articles in these megathreads; just something to be conscious of. (More discussion here.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:57 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Remember when national politicians were making fun of Alex Jones and not using him as a source

Good times
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:05 PM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

An important little tweetstorm from Elliott Lusztig:

1. Hannah Arendt in her book The Origin of Totalitarianism provides a helpful guide for interpreting the language of fascists.
2. She noted how decent liberals of 1930s Germany would "fact check" the Nazis' bizarre claims about Jews like they were meant to be factual
3. What they failed to understand, Arendt suggests, is that the Nazi Jew hating was not a statement of fact but a declaration of intent.
4. So when someone would blame the Jews for Germany's defeat in WW1, naive people would counter by saying there's no evidence of that.
5. What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next.
6. Did 3 million "illegals" cast votes in this election? Clearly not. But fact checking is just a way of playing along with their game
7. What Trump is saying is not that 3m illegals voted. What he's saying is: I'm going to steal the voting rights of millions of Americans.

Standing there helpfully fact checking nonsense has not proved to be helpful. If this was an effective tactic, the Washington Post's Pinocchio meter would have ensured the public knew that Trump wasn't qualified to operate a garbage disposal. It didn't work. I don't have a clue what's going to be effective, but having the same voices Trump voters already don't trust going "that's wrong" isn't it.
posted by zachlipton at 4:11 PM on November 28, 2016 [158 favorites]

GSA's Trump Hotel Lease Debacle

The Post Office Lease differs from many of Mr. Trump’s other business arrangements. That’s because, in writing the contract, the federal and D.C. governments determined, in advance, that elected officials could play no role in this lease arrangement. The contract language is clear: “No ... elected official of the Government of the United States ... shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom...”

The language could not be any more specific or clear. Donald Trump will breach the contract on Jan. 20, when, while continuing to benefit from the lease, he will become an “elected official of the Government of the United States.”

posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:26 PM on November 28, 2016 [39 favorites]

I am not a huge fan of Shadi Hamid, but here's a great discussion of his book.

The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…
Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.

Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.

posted by Golden Eternity at 4:28 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Politico Roger Stone: Clinton more likely to face prosecution after recount

Again offering no evidence, Stone told Steve Malzberg that “we have to presume” that the money funding the Stein campaign’s call for a recount is from billionaire donor George Soros or from Clinton, who lost the White House to Trump this month in a major upset.

“Now Hillary, I think, increases her chances of prosecution by acting this way,” Stone concluded.

I don't know what the relationship is these days between Stone and Trump but this fits in with Conway's veiled threats.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

I thought the Jacobin article linked a few comments up was very much worth reading, thanks for posting that.
posted by cell divide at 4:34 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Programming note: Chris Christie will be making a "press announcement" at 11:30 (Eastern, I presume) Tuesday. The event was initially described as a "press conference."

We used to pack popcorn back when we could pretend that this vaguely resembled something funny. What food do we pack for the horror show?
posted by zachlipton at 4:34 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jamelle Bouie: Jesse Jackson's campaigns offer a road map for Democrats in crisis: Against a political movement that defines America in exclusionary and racial terms—as a white country for white people—a renewed Rainbow Coalition is the only defense worth making.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 4:37 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Maybe there is no solution. Maybe there are no actionable takeaways. Maybe we lost years ago. Maybe we broke it all back in 2000. Maybe we just have to cross our fingers and put our dreams in cold storage. Maybe Americans are, on the whole, genuinely no-foolin' bad.

I do not have enough alcohol on hand for this bleak analysis.
posted by corb at 4:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

We used to pack popcorn back when we could pretend that this vaguely resembled something funny. What food do we pack for the horror show?

Bourbon.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [18 favorites]

Kellyanne Conway just tweeted a photo of Trump and her "working late tonight" (dude, it's not even 8pm). He's using a Mac (or at least looking at something on one).

And has an improper number of hats on his desk (0 would be the proper number). Both his in and out boxes are utterly empty and he seems to have multiple copies of the documentary Citizen Soldier, along with a copy of Time magazine with his face on the cover (I think we found the last subscriber). There's also some kind of box next to his telephone; it's unclear to me whether that's an intercom, encryption device, or something else entirely.
posted by zachlipton at 4:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

What food do we pack for the horror show?

Meatloaf made out of Chris Christie?

There's a Rocky Horror Picture Show joke in there somewhere...
posted by Talez at 4:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Allison also suggested that the government's practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished

This is... I mean, god, that's criminally insane, right there. He wants people who are customers of banks that fuck up to lose all of their money without recourse. That's just malicious.
-Pope Guilty

Not to mention that it threatens the stability of the entire retail banking system. Deposit insurance is why most Americans are unfamiliar with the term "bank run". I guess we're about to reacquaint ourselves with it the hard way.
posted by indubitable at 4:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Politico GOP eyes best chance in years to defund Planned Parenthood

Eliminating Planned Parenthood's approximately $550 million in federal funding — most of it through Medicaid — would be abortion opponent's most tangible victory since 2007, when the Supreme Court upheld a ban on so-called partial birth abortions.

That would mean low-income women in Medicaid wouldn't be able to go to Planned Parenthood for cancer screenings, contraception or other health services unrelated to abortion. Republicans say they will redirect the funding that would have gone to Planned Parenthood to community health centers, which do not provide abortion.

posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

>> Maybe there is no solution. Maybe there are no actionable takeaways. Maybe we lost years ago. Maybe we broke it all back in 2000. Maybe we just have to cross our fingers and put our dreams in cold storage. Maybe Americans are, on the whole, genuinely no-foolin' bad.

> I do not have enough alcohol on hand for this bleak analysis.

so I'm torn between wanting to say "welcome to the desert of the real" and wanting to say "metafilter: I do not have enough alcohol on hand for this bleak analysis."
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:51 PM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

About those "padded" votes.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:51 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Not to mention that it threatens the stability of the entire retail banking system. Deposit insurance is why most Americans are unfamiliar with the term "bank run". I guess we're about to reacquaint ourselves with it the hard way.

You forgot the second half. Changing back to gold money will also let us experience the panics of 18XX (pick a fucking year, the economy was either in one or recovering from one). Just like in the old days!
posted by Talez at 4:51 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Trump has a smaller percent of the vote than all but 7 presidents. Those 7 each faced a major 3rd party candidate (6 of whom won at least a state, the 7th was Perot). Trump did not face one. So he's basically the smallest winner.

WaPo: Donald Trump’s political mandate is historically small
posted by chris24 at 4:53 PM on November 28, 2016 [20 favorites]

a renewed Rainbow Coalition is the only defense worth making.

Or a patchwork quilt.

General Petraeus discusses the challenges President-elect Trump will inherit and how US foreign policy might change.

When asked whether it is significant that the US' traditional foes are cheering and its allies are bemused and dismayed by the election result, Petraeus says, "it's not the most welcome of developments" but that American democracy has been robust over the years and the US has seen more divisive politics in the past.
...
He says the battle for Mosul isn't a disaster. It is "unfolding as a textbook example of urban combat where there is a very high degree of sensitivity to damage, to innocent civilians." Demographically-speaking, Mosul lies in "very complex human terrain", and the biggest challenge will come after the battle, Petraeus says.

Thank you, David Patraeus.
posted by Golden Eternity at 4:55 PM on November 28, 2016

Kellyanne Conway just tweeted a photo of Trump and her "working late tonight"

Dog, I fucking hate these people.
posted by chaoticgood at 5:07 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

She didn't use the word late, to be fair. But he's totally trying to join Pantsuit Nation.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:08 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

A friendly reminder to please run links through the Search page to check for dupes.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:08 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

She didn't use the word late, to be fair. But he's totally trying to join Pantsuit Nation.

Oh crud. It does seem to say "working hard." I swear I read it as "working late." Sorry for the misquote.
posted by zachlipton at 5:25 PM on November 28, 2016

Apparently they're both white, and possibly working class?
The Election Has Revealed One Thing Gwyneth Paltrow and Slavoj Žižek Have in Common
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Charles Pierce: Recount? Why Not. This election is more than sketchy enough to warrant it.

All of Trump's Current Problems Can Be Summed Up in One Word: Corruption.
posted by homunculus at 5:35 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Media critic Jack Shafer's got The New Rules for Covering Trump.

He's fairly strongly on what I'll call Team "Trump intentionally tweets outrageous stuff to distract people from negative stories," a contention Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz rejects: "Trump tweeting recklessly and inaccurately is not a political choice he is making, but rather a psychological compulsion." But Shafer's broader points are to avoid feeding the troll with coverage of his tweets and to focus on the leaks that will pour out of the bureaucracies in government agencies instead of fishing for access from the White House.

In other news, Bloomberg has Paul Manafort Is Back. The King of K Street is ready for the new Washington.
posted by zachlipton at 5:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

> a contention Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz rejects: "Trump tweeting recklessly and inaccurately is not a political choice he is making, but rather a psychological compulsion."

Outcomes matter more than intent. His reckless and inaccurate tweets serve to muddy the waters and lower the bar for media expectations whether he's consciously trying to do so or not.
posted by tonycpsu at 5:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

The producers of Celebrity Deathmatch had already begun developing a "what if Trump became President" claymation show before he won the election. Now they're actively shopping "Prez" around the networks as "biting, satirical (and) aimed at viewers 16-35". (See sample frame from pitch reel here)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:52 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's like a dark sequel to "That's My Bush!"
posted by drezdn at 5:57 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is some bleak gallows humor re Castro's death.
posted by prefpara at 5:57 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Isn't the main point of the electoral college to put a buffer of educated, reasonable partisans between a potential con artist and a gullible electorate? Just because that function wasn't needed during the last 250 years is no reason that it's not needed this time.
posted by morspin at 5:59 PM on November 28, 2016 [21 favorites]

Whole bunch of different things:

"that someone could become President but actually have an allegiance to a foreign power. So they threw in the bit about the President needing to be a natural born citizen. How appropriate this remains seems unclear today."

I've thought for a while that we should amend the constitution to say to run for president you have to be a Natural-Born Citizen, or a (sole) US citizen for 35 years (possibly with a requirement they be resident in the country, or working abroad for the military or government, for 75% of the last 10 years or something). Nobody really wants to vote for presidents under about age 55 anyway, and a someone who immigrates as a child, or who makes a commitment to the US as a young adult, should have the opportunity to run for president at 50 or 55 or 60 or 65. Like, I have no personal desire to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger, but that's a man who affirmatively chose the US as his home, contributed a lot as a private citizen, and served in government office for many years, and he's clearly as American as I am, and I firmly believe that whether he is qualified to be president (and weather his birth abroad matters) is a question properly put to the voters, who can decide for themselves if they care that he spent 20 years in Austria.

(Although Schwarzenegger didn't become a citizen until 1983 so under my scheme he wouldn't be eligible until 2018, but you get my drift.)

"This is correct. Things like "structural racism" or even the word "systemic" is PC liberal academic talk and hearing the very words causes them to tune out. Whites are poor too, you see! Racism happens against white people too, you see! Mentioning intersectionality induces nothing but an eyeroll or a blank stare."

Yeah, I completely agree with people above who said that a lot of folks on the right -- including the moderate right -- consider KKK stuff "racism" and recoil when structural racism is called "racism." However, if you can explain structural racism without using the world racism first, an awful lot of them are on board. But you're coming into communities where calling someone a racist is the H-bomb of conversation and it flatly ends discussion, so when you're like, "Your kindly suburban police department that works pretty well and that employs many of your friends is structurally racist," they just hear "racist" which means "KKK" and tune out completely. (And, yes, my patience level for white people who think being called racist is worse than being a victim of racism is at an all-time low, I am with you, but let's assume the goal is to be heard and understood at all costs.) Even just using the words "unconscious bias" can help; A LOT of centrist and religious right-wingers are willing to grant they have "unconscious bias" that, because they are not racists as they understand the term, they feel very guilty about having and would like to know how to combat! Once you find that common ground, you can say, "So when people talk about 'structural racism,' what they're really talking about is how that unconscious bias can influence institutions like police departments in a way that nobody intends but that can be really pernicious and unfair ..." Or you can talk about methods in hiring that combat that unconscious bias. Or whatever.

And we may be good leftists who embrace the less-fortunate and less-educated but there are a lot of lefties who absolutely use that academic language and in-depth knowledge as a weapon of social exclusion to patronize, mock, and exclude people who grew up in the "wrong" sorts of social milieus. Teaching community college in a post-industrial midwestern city anchoring a rural area (with many blue collar students and farm-family students and inner-city minority students), I all the time saw white teenaged socialists from the suburbs with two doctor parents using their language of social justice as a cudgel to exclude and put-down their classmates from disadvantaged groups. It wasn't a language of social justice for them; it was purely a marker of superior social status and education. We're not immune to assholes. So remember when you talk to people outside traditional leftist circles that they may very well have gotten their exposure to leftist ideas from jackasses using it as a way to exclude and patronize. You have to undo the harm before you can build bridges.

There are a lot of hella racists out there and I do not dispute that (and I no longer have time for the irredeemable, I leave that to their pastors). But there are a lot of moderate conservatives, religious conservatives, fiscal conservatives, etc., who agree with a lot of left-wing ideas when they are presented in language they can understand and identify with. As I said above, the marriage equality movement used this to their advantage in locating explicitly moral arguments to target persuadable right-wingers. Karl Rove and his ilk explicitly seek out language to target people in the same way. The left needs to have a part of its movement that is explicitly focused on those persuadable people on the right and on finding the right language and arguments to bridge those gaps. Not the WHOLE THING, not even the most important part, but you've got to have some folks who can "translate" your message, whether that's into other languages or other social milieus. Usually you've got that ONE GUY, like, I don't know, a radical Methodist pastor, who knows exactly how to talk to conservatives to get the message across. Have that guy go do that while the leadership focuses on the main thrust.

"Do you walk around with printouts of "A Case for Reparations" and hand it to them like, listen, I don't talk about racism with anyone until you've read this - bye. "

This is totally a legitimate option that I have totally employed with jerks.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:02 PM on November 28, 2016 [79 favorites]

I've been thinking a lot about how the DNC can lower the barrier to entry into local party participation and engagement. I feel like they need to roll out an app infrastructure, with an app to engage supporters at the base of it, putting people in direct communication with their local party for retail politics purposes as well as presenting people with actionable items that they can perform to help out. News, events, fundraising calls, volunteer opportunities both within the party and for the party to perform out helping the community (I really like what Mike McCurry supposedly said about the DNC presenting a face of volunteerism at the local level), surveys, phonebanking/texting tools, ways to share news items and social media posts, etc etc. And all the engagement with the supporters filters up through tools for media relations, fundraising, volunteer management, etc used by staffers and reps at the city, county, state and national level, to do high level analytics and develop strategies that can go right back down the chain. Imagine finding your next candidate in a district the old DNC would write off because you see that someone there is heavily engaged on the supporter level. Or being a neophyte local candidate with a cash-strapped skeleton crew local DNC office that doesn't get the benefit of highly experienced staff, and having all these tools at your fingertips to help you with your messaging and analytics and put you directly in touch with your voters, and give you a helpline to experienced reps and staffers and volunteers across the country. I would love to see something like that.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:05 PM on November 28, 2016 [30 favorites]

Outcomes matter more than intent. His reckless and inaccurate tweets serve to muddy the waters and lower the bar for media expectations whether he's consciously trying to do so or not.

Intent may not change the effect that they have, but understanding the intent is critical to pushing back usefully. People on the left sometimes believe outcome>intent to the point that it hobbles us.

If Trump is engaging in a clever water-muddying strategy with those tweets, it's incredibly valuable to suss out what that strategy might be.

If, however, they're purely emotional outbursts with no conscious strategy behind them, maybe we can instead determine what makes him react. Folks on our side can then do things to prod him into the kinds of reactions we want (at 3AM, presumably). Or we can determine that "hey, questioning his authoritah on topic X makes him go on a Twitter rant, when he ignores everything related to topic Y. I wonder why that is?"
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 6:10 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

> Or we can determine that "hey, questioning his authoritah on topic X makes him go on a Twitter rant, when he ignores everything related to topic Y. I wonder why that is?"

This isn't impossible, but we've been watching him for quite a while now and he's still an enigma. "Trump's razor" and "Trump's mirror" are nice working theories, but they're not foolproof, and I'm skeptical that this kind of systematic A/B testing you're positing could be done in a way that sheds significant light on what he's thinking.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:18 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

If, however, they're purely emotional outbursts with no conscious strategy behind them, maybe we can instead determine what makes him react.

Isn't the issue here that the press (or at least some of it) responds in long-learned and unhelpful ways, and if he goes full Col. Kurtz, there'll be a bunch of tweets and website headlines saying "Exterminate all the brutes"?
posted by holgate at 6:19 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Well... he's going on a retweet storm again. CNN is the target this time. Guess Kellyanne was getting him set up on Twitter with that laptop.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:23 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Jason_steakums: There is an app called Countable, which I downloaded after the election. I'm still getting the hang of using it, but so far it's easy and fun and really helps me keep on top of issues to contact my congresspeople about. Countable was launched in late 2014. I'm sure there's room for all kinds of political apps, such as the ones focusing on building a party (vs. contacting already-elected representatives) that you are referring to. Apps aren't the solution to everything, but having a quick and convenient way to go political, right at one's fingertips, might get more people to participate.

Eyebrows: I agree with you about some on the left's tendency to default to academic language. Most people are not in academia and don't really understand or use those terms, even if they agree with the actual principles. "Use less jargon" is a great idea in general, when reaching out to people.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 6:24 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Hallie Jackson ‏@HallieJackson 3m3 minutes ago Manhattan, NY
NEWS: Rep. Tom Price expected to be named Trump HHS pick, per source familiar w/decision. He's key House R behind plan to replace Obamacare.
posted by bluecore at 6:27 PM on November 28, 2016

if he goes full Col. Kurtz

"Are you an journalist?"
"I'm a content aggregator."
"You are neither. You are an errand boy, sent by failed grocers, to collect a bill. Sad!"
posted by thelonius at 6:27 PM on November 28, 2016 [20 favorites]

NYT: Challenging the Boss in Public? For Kellyanne Conway, It’s Part of the Job. In which Trump and Conway go to ridiculous public lengths to demonstrate they aren't mad at each other.

Of note, she called two people after Morning Joe reported Trump was furious at Conway: Trump himself, and Jared Kushner.
posted by zachlipton at 6:28 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I've been thinking a lot about how the DNC can lower the barrier to entry into local party participation and engagement. I feel like they need to roll out an app infrastructure, with an app to engage supporters at the base of it, putting people in direct communication with their local party for retail politics purposes as well as presenting people with actionable items that they can perform to help out.

My experience, unfortunately, is that the local party people don't want to lower the barrier to entry into local party participation. They like that barrier. The barrier means that they get to hang out with people they enjoy hanging out with. They get to be in control. They get to do things the way they've always done things. Having new people get involved would be awkward, and they would just as soon avoid it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:28 PM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

@realDonaldTrump: "@FiIibuster: @jeffzeleny Pathetic - you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.
posted by Golden Eternity at 6:29 PM on November 28, 2016

Wait a second. These "retweets" (or copy/paste jobs because he doesn't know how the retweet button works) aren't things that are @mentioning Trump. He's actively seeking them out somewhere, not grabbing them out of his notifications timeline. Did he search on @jeffzeleny and copy/paste the first mean thing he saw?
posted by zachlipton at 6:30 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

i have no evidence that donald trump is not a reptillian from rigel IV either. sad!
posted by entropicamericana at 6:30 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Bad reporter! Bad doggie!
posted by futz at 6:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Trump's total lack of concern for the conventions which underpin US governance leads me to wonder whether the Trillion Dollar Coin strategy will come back to life when Congress denies funding to one of his plans.
posted by Coventry at 6:35 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ok some of the retweets do @mention Trump, but this one doesn't. Where did the President-elect come to find Certified RV Tech Joe Bowman's attack on a journalist and decide to signal boost it?
posted by zachlipton at 6:36 PM on November 28, 2016

i don't know what's worse, the president-elect echoing tweets from a 16 year old, or that he's been on twitter for more than four years and he still hasn't figured out how to retweet
posted by murphy slaw at 6:37 PM on November 28, 2016 [19 favorites]

"My experience, unfortunately, is that the local party people don't want to lower the barrier to entry into local party participation."

I have been complaining about this for a long time, particularly about the high barrier to entry for young women with children ... and thanks to our local Pantsuit Nation we are getting childcare at most Progressive and Democratic meetings locally. I am all hoped up! This is one of the most useful and consequential things I can imagine organizing, and it took, like, two weeks!

It's just a couple younger parents rotating volunteering to watch the kids with a couple older parents' teenagers, and some coloring books and an iPad movie, but DUDE. Suddenly a huge quantity of parents, especially moms, whose participation was an enormous logistical nightmare can suddenly come to 75% of meetings! Oh, hey, equitable school funding and health insurance for children and parental leave matters to you? WE JUST BROUGHT YOUR ENTIRE CONSTITUENCY TO LOCAL PARTY MEETINGS.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:37 PM on November 28, 2016 [84 favorites]

because when someone requested a bot upthread I immediately stopped reading and created this one .

It's perfecto! Thank you!
posted by petebest at 6:41 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

He's not done.

@realDonaldTrump: "@sdcritic: @HighonHillcrest @jeffzeleny @CNN There is NO QUESTION THAT #voterfraud did take place, and in favor of #CorruptHillary !"
posted by Golden Eternity at 6:41 PM on November 28, 2016

Tom Price, the rumored HHS pick, created a fake council of doctors to oppose Obamacare and finesse people
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:44 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

@realDonaldTrump: "@FiIibuster: @jeffzeleny Pathetic - you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.

How are we supposed to feel about @Filibuster's banner image which is a promotion photo from House of Cards?
posted by dis_integration at 6:44 PM on November 28, 2016

I am in love with the bot! But I keep picturing the twitter pic of Clinton as this instead. :)
posted by agregoli at 6:45 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I had largely assumed the recount was a waste of time, but given how he's reacting, I now wonder if there is something to find.
posted by frumiousb at 6:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

He's too dumb to know whether or not there's anything to find.
posted by something something at 6:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

He's retweeting a 16 year old.

I'm not sure I love this new "anyone can have the President's ear" world nearly as much as I thought I was going to if it had happened with literally any other president.
posted by corb at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [20 favorites]

Like seriously HOW CAN HE BE THIS DUMB.
posted by something something at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

There is NO QUESTION THAT #voterfraud did take place

Clear enough. Mandatory nationwide audit! Let's go people, you heard the turd - we've gotta snake out these Russi-aahahaIi mean illegal vote hackers!
posted by petebest at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

Tom Price, the rumored HHS pick, created a fake council of doctors to oppose Obamacare and finesse people

Jelani Cobb (who's a staff writer at the New Yorker and professor at Columbia Journalism) just tweeted: "Sat next to Trump's HHS pick Tom Price on a flight a few years ago. Seemed decent enough til he said he wasn't sure of Obama's citizenship."
posted by zachlipton at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Democrats clinch a supermajority in both houses of the California Legislature after Josh Newman wins state Senate seat

posted by futz at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

How do you even find a kid's Twitter and decide to re-tweet that?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:51 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Tom Price, the rumored HHS pick, created a fake council of doctors to oppose Obamacare and finesse people

I sometimes get him mixed up with Paul Broun, another GOPer physician who got gerrymandered into a district that covers UGA in Athens, and doesn't believe in evolution. Price just represents a white flight Atlanta burb district and doesn't believe in healthcare.
posted by holgate at 6:54 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Jason_steakums: There is an app called Countable, which I downloaded after the election. I'm still getting the hang of using it, but so far it's easy and fun and really helps me keep on top of issues to contact my congresspeople about. Countable was launched in late 2014. I'm sure there's room for all kinds of political apps, such as the ones focusing on building a party (vs. contacting already-elected representatives) that you are referring to. Apps aren't the solution to everything, but having a quick and convenient way to go political, right at one's fingertips, might get more people to participate.

Countable is actually what got me thinking about this! That and the easy access phonebanking tools during the campaign. It's so easy, and there is absolutely a desire for simple slacktivism that could be harnessed and turned into actual engagement. Something simple that makes you feel like you're involved and doing something, even if it's just answering a survey, or chipping in $5 for a local Facebook ad campaign, that integrates that with all of the tools of a modern national campaign and gives these tools to hopeful candidates across the board while the DNC is in desperate need of a full court 50 state press... that would be so cool.

I have no idea how to make something like this or even get the idea to someone at the DNC who could advocate for it (paradoxically, I could with this very app!) but I hope similar ideas are being discussed as the DNC makes plans.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:58 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Obama is stoic in public but in private he must be weeping for this country.
posted by Talez at 6:59 PM on November 28, 2016 [20 favorites]

he must be weeping for this country.

yeah well he's hardly the only one
posted by entropicamericana at 7:01 PM on November 28, 2016 [27 favorites]

the transition from a president of impeccable poise and character to one with none at all is giving me whiplash
posted by murphy slaw at 7:01 PM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

(Interesting rec for Countable, thanks. It might be the nudge I need to get on first name terms with my rep, who was one of the first to endorse Trump.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 7:02 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

As a woman who was a reluctant Hillary supporter turned excited Hillary supporter the closer we got to the election, this essay from Eirene Donohue resonated with me: "No You Can't: Why I'm Still Crying Over Hillary Clinton's Loss."
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 7:11 PM on November 28, 2016 [28 favorites]

updated the trump popular vote autotweeter

I come back in 24 hours and my dream is a reality! That's awesome, localhuman. Hopefully Donald's enjoying it too.

I feel like it might be better to just manually feed it the vote margin so it's tweeting accurate numbers -- what do you think?
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 7:14 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

@realDonaldTrump
.@CNN is so embarrassed by their total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton, and yet her loss in a landslide, that they don't know what to do.

I'm pretty sure they know what to do.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:16 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I miss the taco trucks on every corner most of all.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:18 PM on November 28, 2016 [20 favorites]

Torn between suggesting you feed it real numbers and starting a bot to just tweet random clooose-enough numbers along with text like "lol no mandate 4 u" or "no one likes you" or "you're utterly forgettable".

I should go to sleep. A lot.
posted by XtinaS at 7:19 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm going to be awake all night wondering how and why Trump saw this tweet to retweet it.
posted by zachlipton at 7:34 PM on November 28, 2016

I'm pretty sure they know what to do.

Fold, like spineless commerce-bots and whinge out 8 years of just-barely-concerned "headlines"? Yeah.

It's as inevitable as vodka on the way to an ism.

But hey, this is what the decimated rock music industry needs to get back in front! Get ready for the next Guns-n-Ro*hurl*ses! *spit* Whoo! Reagan-era Rock! Squeeedly-deeee!!!
posted by petebest at 7:35 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Steady, pete.
posted by vrakatar at 7:36 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sorry. It was the tweet . . . The tweet got to me.
posted by petebest at 7:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm going to be awake all night wondering how and why Trump saw this tweet to retweet it.

Jesus, this entire country is turning into the goddamn backwards-ass redneck town I thought I escaped when I graduated high school.
posted by bibliowench at 7:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [14 favorites]

I can't wait for those tweets coming from @POTUS instead of @realDonaldTrump. We should start a betting pool for the first rage-tweet to be subject to Presidential recordkeeping policies.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:52 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Nah. Trump will continue to use his private Twitter, then we'll have a private/public twitter debate, next election.
posted by Archelaus at 7:53 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh my god. That selfie of that child in his little hat and hoodie. That kid is barely thru puberty. @FiIibuster may be a little shit but Trump creeping on him and dragging him into a twitter war is horrifying, I really don't know what to say here. This goes beyond citing nonsense sources for his bullshit and into child predator behavior.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 8:01 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

...not one but two! Thanks, litlnemo :)
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 8:06 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Apparently the Usual Idiots at MAD Magazine (yes, it still exists) are treating Trump as an opportunity. Their "Trump Tweets" have been hit-and-miss, but the latest Cyber Monday collection is more hits than misses.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:15 PM on November 28, 2016

the Usual Idiots at MAD Magazine

Sadly and predictably, they appear to be more qualified.
posted by petebest at 8:24 PM on November 28, 2016

DID HE DELETE ALL THOSE TWEETS? I just thought, "fuck it" and reported his ass to twitter for harassment of Jeff Zeleney and that fiIibuster kid. Reloaded the page and they were all gone.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 8:25 PM on November 28, 2016

Still there for me.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:27 PM on November 28, 2016

I still see them.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:27 PM on November 28, 2016

thanks to our local Pantsuit Nation we are getting childcare at most Progressive and Democratic meetings locally.

Eyebrows, I just mentioned this in my response to my local PN chapter's member survey. What would it take to get this off the ground across the country, I wonder? I don't have kids, but this seems like a concept whose time has come.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:28 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Trump Is Poopy holiday decorations are installed on the garage. There is also an inflatable cheetah with a santa hat, because it was the only non-Halloween inflatable cat we could find. And cats are great.

With the auto tweeter bot, I have to figure out how litlnemo is getting accurate margin results, will update the project after that!
posted by localhuman at 8:31 PM on November 28, 2016 [16 favorites]

Well, that's creepy as hell.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 8:32 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

They are still on the verified android phone @realrealdonaldjtrump page. I can't get over this. A 16 year old criticizes a CNN reporter (without facts or merit)and DJT copy/pastes the tweet and adds "Bad reporter" and tweets it out to his 12 million followers. Not only does he break all the customary rules of politics, he breaks all the customary rules of twitter!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:36 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

‘I want them to understand how bad that hurts me’: Vets slam college for taking down U.S. flag

When the president of Hampshire College decided to remove the American flag from the center of campus days after Donald Trump’s election, the move triggered fiery reactions.
[...]
Soucy was joined Sunday by hundreds of flag-waving veterans from across New England who descended upon the liberal arts college’s campus in Amherst, Mass., to deliver a forceful rebuke to opponents of the U.S. flag. The demonstrators called upon Hampshire officials to reverse their most recent decision to stop flying all flags — including the stars and stripes — on the main flagpole on campus, according to masslive.com.

Demonstrators, the outlet reported, sang “God Bless America” and held signs with slogans including “No flag = no taxpayer (money).”

posted by Joe in Australia at 8:36 PM on November 28, 2016

he breaks all the customary rules of twitter!

surely this
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:39 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

"What would it take to get this off the ground across the country, I wonder?"

Honestly for the local action, just a group of local moms calendaring up the meetings and starting a sign-up (teenagers being volunteered against their will as assistants also helps) ... also a second room in the venue where kids can be, but most evening meeting venues have that! It's not even a loss of time because if two adults sign up but only one is needed, the other can go attend the regular meeting.

It really just needs people in positions of authority to say "Young families are a priority demographic for us, and to involve young families in regular meetings (rather than just parades and special events), we need to provide childcare on the regular." It's relatively self-organizing once someone says it's a priority! Even better if the party will pitch in $50 for crayons and coloring paper and goldfish crackers for the whole year.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:41 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

It's "Trump".
posted by petebest at 8:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's "Trump".

"TRUMP", surely?
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:53 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

For the record, the editorial staff of MAD Magazine has called themselves "The Usual Idiots" for most of the mag's history, going back to the 1950s*... times have never been more perfect for them as now...

* and often even worse things; self-effacing humor has always been taken to extremes there
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:54 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Honestly for the local action, just a group of local moms calendaring up the meetings and starting a sign-up (teenagers being volunteered against their will as assistants also helps)

I think overall this is fabulous. My one suggestion is to make sure dads/men/brothers are involved as well. As someone who was a teenage girl a...few *cough* years ago, I still have some lingering resentment about the babysitting I was drafted into along with the other girls in our local community when our parents were doing the group meetings thing. Because yes, it was always girls. Some of them might be interested in participating in their first real political activity, and I would want to make sure they hear loud and clear that they are valued beyond their caretaking skills.

So if local groups could find a way of saying firmly from the beginning that "childcare and support for young families is a priority for the entire group and we're all going to make sure it happens," that would be easier that trying to fight later against an entrenched expectation that this is something that the moms/sisters/random young women are expected to deal with. I know that a lot of the PN groups are very women-oriented at this point, so it makes sense that they're finding their own solutions to this, but...there's a part that just rubs me a little raw. Men need to step up and make this their issue to fix as well.
posted by Salieri at 8:58 PM on November 28, 2016 [33 favorites]

Barron totally knows dad's twitter password.

You made me realize that if the current situation is bad YA dystopian fiction, and if Trump's regime goes on long enough, it will be Barron who leads the resistance. Though no one will know who the leader is for the longest time, until the girl who loves him finally convinces him to remove the mask and show her his true face.
posted by honestcoyote at 9:03 PM on November 28, 2016 [32 favorites]

So are you telling me that we've never been doing Hamilton; this entire election has just been an unusually racist and sexist version of Urinetown the whole time? Because I can totally make that work with Sheriff Clarke as Officer Lockstock, but we're going to have to start rehearsals all over again.
posted by zachlipton at 9:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

I hope I'm not beating a long-dead horse (I had to take a big break from these threads), but the issue of who Trump's main base of supporters has been dogging me-- particularly the discussion about the white working class. I see so much conflicting stats and info that I vacillate on this back and forth.

At first, even during the campaigns, I thought that Trump was scoring points on job loss and NAFTA, even if they were hastily and sloppily stated during the debates. And Clinton just did not address that at all, she just stood there smiling. And I thought, "oh wow, Trump is scoring major populist points with workers, Hillary is completely dropping the ball. She has no answer for NAFTA. Sure, she's infinitely more professional and composed than he is, but that's not all many people care about". So I first went with the later narrative that it was mostly fueled by workers, specifically white working class, who had been left to twist in the wind by both parties. Then I read that Trump's average supporter made $72k and I thought "ok; that blows that theory" and we saw all the racism, sexism and so on completely flare up. Then I saw an article rebutting that article on the myth of the white working class Trump supporter, stating that though the Trump supporters were making good money, they tended to live in areas that did have drastic economic decline and thus they were reacting to what they saw around them, what they feared. Not so much what they directly experienced.

It seems that it's not a binary choice between racism/sexism and labor concerns but rather both. In hard economic times, people tend to blame The Other because they are visible targets in a system that is too complex to comprehend. Fear brings out a tribal mentality in people- it becomes Us Vs Them, look out for You and Yours. It becomes The Immigrants are the problem. I knew in 2008 that sooner or later people were going to blame immigrants/ethnic groups for job loss/economic decline; it seems to be a pattern...(not wanting to Godwin here but it is relevant). It's easier to blame Random Mexican Guy for job loss than it is to understand the complex web of Wall Street machinations and credit default swaps and all the crap that crashed the economy. I lived in San Diego for years, and when the economy was good, no one cared about Mexican immigrants, they employed/exploited/relied on them. But when the economy goes south, suddenly it's a Big Threat to the Economy* and the reason for all the new trend of unemployment, regardless of the fact that they've been here all along.

* we can add the mythical Welfare Queen to the scapegoat list
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 9:12 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Another grounds for disqualification: Trump will be the first president in 150 years who does not have a pet. (WaPo)
posted by gatorae at 9:15 PM on November 28, 2016 [16 favorites]

" I know that a lot of the PN groups are very women-oriented at this point, so it makes sense that they're finding their own solutions to this, but...there's a part that just rubs me a little raw. Men need to step up and make this their issue to fix as well."

They do. But most of the local power structure where I am is men over 60, who are constantly complaining, "Why don't women come to our meetings?" and I'm like, "Because you don't have child care," and they're like, "But *I* don't need child care, so that can't be it, it must be that they don't care about liberal politics." And I'm like, look, the people you get involved start coming here when they're 25 or 30, and they're almost all men because you don't have child care and you've got a lot of single moms, and a lot of liberal women with conservative husbands, and a lot of shiftwork families, and a lot of women who are just so busy they don't even stop to think about arranging sitters, none of whom are going to find it very welcoming to come to a political meeting where children aren't welcome. And they look puzzled and are like, "But when *I* was 30 and *I* came to meetings, my wife just watched the kids!" I had this conversation for like FIVE YEARS.

Massive influx of women under 50 because they self-organized meeting childcare = step 1.
Making men equally responsible for meeting childcare = step 2.

(Almost all the locally-volunteered teenagers so far are boys, btw, although I know in a lot of communities that will clearly not be the case. I also know several of the younger men with kids do already take their fair turns with their own kids or in the church nursery or PTA and will probably sign up when we start infiltrating the meetings with our ankle-biters.)

Someone told me that way back in the day, it took like ten years to convince a bunch of local parties to move their meetings off Wednesday nights when they were trying to recruit minorities, because Bible study is Wednesday night (and the local power structure were mostly white ethnic Catholics who don't have Wednesday night Bible study). So, you know, baby steps.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:15 PM on November 28, 2016 [38 favorites]

Trump will be the first president in 150 years who does not have a pet.

how quickly we forget chris christie
posted by entropicamericana at 9:17 PM on November 28, 2016 [70 favorites]

Another grounds for disqualification: Trump will be the first president in 150 years who does not have a pet. (WaPo)

What about Chris Christie? Or do human footstools not count.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 9:17 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

It seems that it's not a binary choice between racism/sexism and labor concerns but rather both.

Well, yeah. Trump's election has launched a million "[my hobby horse] is the reason Trump won" pieces, but with such tiny margins, they're really just vanity exercises where people can restate their priors. I doubt that we'll ever have the kind of fine-grained data that could conclusively show one dominant factor or constituency brought people to the polls.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:22 PM on November 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

^true that. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the 9% Dems that voted Trump. I get that Hillary was a hugely disappointing candidate, but damn.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 9:25 PM on November 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Trump will be the first president in 150 years who does not have a pet.

(Psst. Don't jinx it! ;)
posted by christopherious at 9:28 PM on November 28, 2016

@paulisci: I feel like if time travel is ever invented and people decide to travel back in time to save the world, we will find out soon.
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:28 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Trump is telling us what he thinks won him the election by who he's appointing. And with Bannon, Sessions, Flynn, it's clear it's the racists/xenophobes. The supposed populist angle certainly isn't being indicated with lobbyists, billionaires and long-time insiders being appointed.
posted by chris24 at 9:30 PM on November 28, 2016 [21 favorites]

Massive influx of women under 50 because they self-organized meeting childcare = step 1.
Making men equally responsible for meeting childcare = step 2..

I definitely hear you on that, and sometimes you have to start with what you have.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here. There's so much new energy out there right now and it's a chance to do something new, and I'm afraid I'm just feeling perpetually bummed out by what's happened this month. It seems like women's issues in general (which by default seems to include childcare, even for those of us without kids) sort of gets stuck on Step 1, and Step 2...never quite seems to fall into place, unless people keep pushing for it right from the start. And of course, the correct way of "pushing" to get results without making people defensive and angry is a whole other form of emotional labor that women are expected to do.

Did I mention that this election made me tired? Because it really did.
posted by Salieri at 9:33 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

Personal Responsibility and the Infantilization of the American Right

[...] It would have been astonishing if it wasn't so sad. A Republican Congress passes a bill over the President's warnings, then overrides his public veto of the same bill, and then has the chutzpah to blame the President for not doing enough to stop them.

In reality, it was part of a pattern. The American right is fundamentally incapable of taking personal responsibility for its own decisions. Everything is someone else's fault. Everything can be blamed on someone else, usually Democrats or Democrat-leaning constituencies. It's never on them.

Consider the ever-popular parlor game of "who's responsible for Trump's victory?"[...]

posted by Joe in Australia at 9:33 PM on November 28, 2016 [42 favorites]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the 9% Dems that voted Trump.

This is more a relic of the Democratic Party being the former home of southern conservatives than losing true liberal votes. Many in the south haven't changed as the parties switched. Example, Kim Davis in Kentucky was Democrat until she finally switched during her whole gay marriage license bullshit. Obama lost a similar percentage in 2012.
posted by chris24 at 9:35 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

I get that Hillary was a hugely disappointing candidate,

*sigh*

Is it beating a dead horse to point out (yet again) that the only reason she was 'disappointing' was because the left largely refused to give her a chance?
posted by steady-state strawberry at 9:35 PM on November 28, 2016 [25 favorites]

So are you telling me that we've never been doing Hamilton; this entire election has just been an unusually racist and sexist version of Urinetown the whole time?

It might also be Hadestown.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:40 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the 9% Dems that voted Trump.

If it makes you feel any better, 7% of Democrats voted for Romney in 2012. 10% voted for McCain despite the Democrats fielding a great candidate with tons of excellent press, and the general dislike of Bush & Republicans.

Looking at those numbers, Republicans changed sides in almost equal percentages.
posted by honestcoyote at 9:42 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

And with Bannon, Sessions, Flynn, it's clear it's the racists/xenophobes.

It's the fringe nutters, the retreads, cast-offs, kooks, grifters and chancers: a bucket of broken toys. I'm not diminishing the racism and xenophobia, it's just that it was part of how they ended up in the remainder bin.
posted by holgate at 9:46 PM on November 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

^true that. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the 9% Dems that voted Trump. I get that Hillary was a hugely disappointing candidate, but damn.

That's pretty normal for either party. You'd have to get below 5\% or above 15\% for it to be weird or interesting.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Some folks register with the other party, to vote strategically in closed primaries.
posted by unknowncommand at 9:50 PM on November 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's the fringe nutters, the retreads, cast-offs, kooks, grifters and chancers:

They are, but they're also a white nationalist, a virulent racist, and a nutjob Islamophobe. He could've picked others from the island of misfit toys, but he picked the ones that would make the deplorables happy.
posted by chris24 at 9:53 PM on November 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

"You're a democrat who voted for Trump??" "It's not me who changed! It's the party!!!"

Probably more just people whose party ID hasn't kept up with their voting habits, or people who for whatever reason misunderstood either the party ID battery or vote question, or just people who have idiosyncratic reasons for either their party ID or vote. The proportion of Americans who give enough of a damn to think like you described has got to be far, far under 10\%.

Some folks register with the other party, to vote in open primaries.

Surveys almost never care which party you're registered with -- a lot of states don't have party registration at all. They ask something like "Usually when you think about politics, do you think of yourself as a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, or what?" and follow that up with one or two intensity questions to get to the usual 7-point scale from strong D to strong R.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:55 PM on November 28, 2016

"Price just represents a white flight Atlanta burb district and doesn't believe in healthcare."

He also represents DeKalb County, which went 80% for Hillary. And is crazy diverse, at least the part I'm in. (I just moved here in September, though, so I don't have a solid grip on what the whole area is like.) It's that goddamned gerrymandering that is killing us.

You cannot even imagine the fury I feel about my Georgia R legislators, having moved here from the bluest part of blue Washington state. I am using Obamacare and these assholes want to take it away? I am 51 years old, starting to see retirement getting closer, and they want to kill the medicare I have worked for? FURY. Time for action.
posted by litlnemo at 10:01 PM on November 28, 2016 [19 favorites]

Personal Responsibility and the Infantilization of the American Right

Worst Smashing Pumpkins album ever.
posted by perspicio at 10:02 PM on November 28, 2016 [54 favorites]

Resolution responding to the election of Donald Trump and reaffirming San Francisco’s commitment to the values of inclusivity, respect, and dignity.

FURTHER RESOLVED, That we condemn all hate crimes and hate speech perpetrated in this election’s wake. That although the United States will soon have a President who has demonstrated a lack of respect for the values we hold in the highest regard in San Francisco, it cannot change who we are, and it will never change our values. We argue, we campaign, we debate vigorously within San Francisco, but on these points we are 100 percent united. We will fight discrimination and recklessness in all its forms. We are one City. And we will move forward together.

The resolution passed with nine votes in favor, zero against.
posted by futz at 10:03 PM on November 28, 2016 [21 favorites]

the left largely refused to give her a chance?

I voted for Clinton; I support her stances on many things. Of course voting for her was the only right choice. I rooted for her because well, obviously... and I was excited about the prospect of a female president. I'm not trying to demonize her, but she's been in politics a long time and is not an unknown factor. She represents the old disappointing Democratic establishment to a lot of people. ( Personally, I just expect disappointment; I go for the most reasonable option given the choices.) Just as Obama did not clean up Wall Street like he said he would; Hillary probably wouldn't have either. They both rely on the money too much. (She also opposed reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall act, which weirdly Trump, if he can ever really be believed, supports it)

She didn't debate the topic of NAFTA well- or really at all in the debates. She could've at least said it created jobs, (though I've seen conflicting info on what type of jobs it created, ie minimum wage retail, and whether or not its net effects can accurately measured, etc). That mattered to people and she just stood there and smiled. It did not play well and I'm registered Dem & vote Dem.

She tended to focus too much on Trump's repulsive personality which didn't really matter, obviously, to a lot of people. As an example, it wasn't very wise of her to bring up his asshole comments about Miss Universe Alicia Machado in a debate, it just wasn't substantial enough for that platform (and I'm a woman, I get sexism); she should've ran with her comment that Trump rooted for the housing crisis. That's what people cared about and she blew the opportunity to expand on his comment "That's business".. Also, a Clinton using a sex scandal well...sure it mattered a lot that Trump was a predator and an asshole, but I think some people really had a hard time hearing it from a Clinton.

I think even if you support her, you have to admit she dropped the ball at some crucial points.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 10:15 PM on November 28, 2016 [15 favorites]

I think even if you support her, you have to admit she dropped the ball at some crucial points.

No candidate runs a perfect campaign, though. I don't think she made any more (or more serious) mistakes than Romney, McCain, Kerry, or Gore, and she certainly didn't make more than Trump. She was just punished more for them than he was, for reasons that have been covered pretty extensively in these threads.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:25 PM on November 28, 2016 [35 favorites]

@RobertMackey: Trump's rage at losing the popular vote recalls what Mencken wrote of William Jennings Bryan (jpeg)

Bryan was even worse. His third defeat,
in 1908, convinced even so vain a fellow that the White House was beyond his reach, and so he consecrated himself to reprisals upon those who had kept him out of it. He saw very clearly who they were: the more intelligent minority of his countrymen. It was their unanimous opposition that had thrice thrown the balance against him. Well, he would now make them infamous. He would raise the mob, which still admired him, against everything they regarded as sound sense and intellectual decency. He would post them as sworn foes to all true virtue and true religion, and try, if possible, to put them down by law. There ensued his frenzied campaign against the teaching of evolution - perhaps the most gross attack upon human dignity and decorum ever made by a politician, even under democracy, in modern times. Those who regarded him, in his last years, as a mere religious fanatic were far in error. It was not fanaticism that moved him, but hatred.horribly toward 1,600 Pennsylvania avenue, N.W. and its leaky copper roof. In the suffering South his fever lives after him. The damage he did was greater than that done by Sherman's army. He was an ambulent boil, as anyone could see who encountered him face to face. His theological ideas were actually very vague; he was quite un- able to defend them competently under Clarence Darrow's cross-examination. What moved him was simply his colossal lust for revenge upon those he held to be responsible for his downfall as a politician. He wanted to hurt them, proscribe them; if possible, destroy them. To that end he was willing to sacrifice everything else, including the public tranquillity and the whole system of public education. He passed out of life at last at a temperature of no degrees, his eyes rolling horribly toward 1,600 Pennsylvania avenue, N.W. and its leaky copper roof. In the suffering South his fever lives after him. The damage he did was greater than that done by Sherman's army.

posted by Golden Eternity at 10:47 PM on November 28, 2016 [28 favorites]

I hope that the fact that I have never heard of William Jennings Bryan means that Trump's name will also fade into obscurity into 100 years. (Not sure if I'm alone in my ignorance, but assume I'm not.)

His election feels different, though. I don't think we'll be fully healed from the scars a century from now.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 10:56 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

No candidate runs a perfect campaign, though.

Of course not. And for every comment such as GospelofWesleyWillis made there will always be a thousand buts, what ifs, degrees of mights and maybes, and measuring sticks based upon opinions of past and current events. Sometimes a comment is just a comment whether or not a dead horse is involved.
posted by futz at 11:09 PM on November 28, 2016

Would you like an emergency 2,000 words on Tom Price's previous Obamacare repeal plans? Sarah Kliff thought so, and she stayed up late to write one for you.

In short, Price had a real bill to repeal the ACA, including the Medicaid expansion. He would require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, but they could charge anyone who doesn't maintain "continuous coverage" more, plus a few billion dollars worth of a high risk pool for a couple of years as a stopgap. He'd eliminate the list of essential benefits so insurance companies could sell whatever the heck they want and call it "health insurance," whatever it actually covers, and he'd remove the limit that requires insurers to charge older customers only 3X as much as younger ones. Tax credits to help you buy insurance are based solely on age, not income; anyone 36-50 gets $2,100 and we hope that helps you out. Plus a lower cut-off on the tax-exclusion for employer-sponsorered insurance.

In short: "It would replace the law with a plan that does more to benefit the young, healthy, and rich — and disadvantages the sick, old, and poor."
posted by zachlipton at 11:11 PM on November 28, 2016 [30 favorites]

All I can say is "what the FUCK is wrong with him?" He's a doctor, for god's sake. I thought people became docs wanting to help others. This is terrifying.
posted by litlnemo at 11:48 PM on November 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

Radio New Zealand over the weekend: Iran US relations in the age of Trump, an interview with Dr. Rouzbeh Parsi, senior lecturer at the University of Lund in Sweden and head of the European Iran Research Group. He says that the expected way a Republican Congress would try to unravel the deal would be by passing additional sanctions in a way that would put the U.S. in breach of it, but that the overall approach of the Trump administration will depend on who becomes SoS.
posted by XMLicious at 11:55 PM on November 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I thought people became docs wanting to help others.

Some do, some don;t. Back in HS I was talking to a girl in my year who was applying to medical school, I asked her what she had planned if she didn't get in expecting something in the health sciences like Physiotherapy or Biochemistry and she said she would do some business related degree. It was either the prestige of medicine or nothing.
posted by PenDevil at 11:58 PM on November 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Has anyone reputable compiled a list anywhere of things that are in danger along with their probability of coming to fruition? I keep freaking out about stuff that Trump could do or might do, and then realizing that X check makes it unlikely or Y interest group would push back hard. But I'm sure there are a lot of those I don't know about.
posted by corb at 12:13 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Dan Tynan has a deep dive into the Twitter claim that three million people voted illegally, with more on the background of the guy making the claim.
posted by zachlipton at 12:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Okay guys, I need your help. A Republican friend who has seemed entirely reasonable until this moment, and who seems down with civil rights for all humans, and who professes a deep interest in politics, has just expressed befuzzlement at my claim that the Republican Party has engaged in voter disenfranchisement for at least the past thirty years.

I am having problems saying anything but hahahahaha what. Please send me (memail is fine) articles showing this to be true..I wouldn't ask for help if I weren't actually going blind right now and also unable to google due to having to shake my damn head for apparently fucking ever.
posted by salix at 1:21 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

The episode of the Rachel Maddow show I linked to in this comment runs through how Donald Trump's (deceased) brother-in-law was the lawyer for the RNC in a case where in 1981 a fake "National Ballot Security Task Force" showed up at minority polling places in New Jersey and the consequent suppression of the vote was decisive in winning the governor's race for the Republican candidate. The consent decree that resulted from that lawsuit, restricting the RNC from getting anywhere near the suggestion of voter intimidation, only expires next year.

IIRC in subsequent episodes before the election it was mentioned that the DNC took legal actions related to Trump calling for his followers to show up at polling locations "you know where, you know the people I'm talking about" as a violation of the consent decree, but courts decided there was insufficient evidence it was going to be violated.
posted by XMLicious at 2:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

Okay guys, I need your help. A Republican friend who has seemed entirely reasonable until this moment, and who seems down with civil rights for all humans, and who professes a deep interest in politics, has just expressed befuzzlement at my claim that the Republican Party has engaged in voter disenfranchisement for at least the past thirty years.

I am having problems saying anything but hahahahaha what. Please send me (memail is fine) articles showing this to be true..I wouldn't ask for help if I weren't actually going blind right now and also unable to google due to having to shake my damn head for apparently fucking ever.

Yes; I always felt this would be a key, and possibly the largest factor, in the election just gone and was unfortunately proved right. Wisconsin was a clear voter suppression induced flip, and Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida arguably went red instead of blue as well through permutations of felony voter barring, all manner of hurdles to registration, shenanigans at polling stations, limited (or no) early day voting, and a deliberate lack of voting stations in predominantly left-leaning areas. That last one especially irksome as we'll never know the number of people - potential voters - who see a three plus hour queue to vote and have to make a blunt choice between voting, or going to work to make rent/food money.

(As a side point, whenever I saw a poll labelled as 'likely voters' I felt a bit unsettled and wondered if that meant 'likely voters who will successfully vote' or 'likely voters, some of whom will successfully vote, and some who will try but give up through some form of suppression')

Hence in most of the election posts I did there were a bundle of links to stories about various forms of voter disenfranchisement and suppression below the fold. Try these, in no particular order, for links: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9].

It's also all the more annoying as recounting the votes, or reforming the electoral college, does not address these more fundamental issues. As much as I love many aspects of the USA and find it a generally preferable land and society to most other places I've lived in, national elections are simply not a free and fair democratic vote. It is a fundamental - and deliberately engineered and maintained - flaw in the functionality of the nation.
posted by Wordshore at 3:15 AM on November 29, 2016 [75 favorites]

Conway/Mittens/Trump

By denouncing Mr. Romney even as Mr. Trump was preparing for their second meeting, this time over dinner on Tuesday, Ms. Conway was simply doing what she knows Mr. Trump likes: encouraging a public airing of conflicting views when he is unsure of what path to take.

I wonder if a four-year medical coma is an option for me right now.
posted by angrycat at 4:34 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Can someone let me know why Donald Trump is now tweeting about punishing flag burners with jail or loss of citizenship?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:02 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Does Trump realize what would happen to people if you revoked their citizenship?
posted by drezdn at 5:10 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Kevin McCarthy (House majority leader) on MSNBC a little while ago: after a bunch of argle bargle about how they don't burn flags where he comes from—but it's totally a First Amendment right!—but he doesn't understand why someone would want to burn the flag: "If someone was going to use their First Amendment right, I would be afraid for their own safety."

I'm sure he's just talking about getting singed by the flame.
posted by XMLicious at 5:12 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

The way he casually brings up loss of citizenship is chilling. You can be a serial murderer and not lose your citizenship. You can bilk Americans out of millions of dollars and not lose your citizenship. You can be dishonorably discharged from the military for war crimes and still not lose your citizenship. Come on! We don't just strip people of their citizenship because they do things the President doesn't like.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:19 AM on November 29, 2016 [63 favorites]

We don't just strip people of their citizenship because they do things the President doesn't like.

Yet...
posted by Talez at 5:20 AM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

The eternal razor; is that tweet more strategic throwing chum in the water to distract short-memoried jackasses from widespread conflicts of interest and overwhelming incompetence? Or just the ramblings of one such short-memoried jackass?

I have definitely heard this "throw the flag-burners in jail" kind of rhetoric from certain types of Republican before (ditto the incredibly ableist "everyone should have to stand during the pledge of allegiance" to which it's related).

Funny how a lot of these guys seem to be pretty into flying a certain flag with a big X and a bunch of stars as well.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:20 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

is that tweet more strategic throwing chum in the water to distract short-memoried jackasses from widespread conflicts of interest and overwhelming incompetence?

I mean, a lot of us can pay attention to a few things at once.I don't know why he would waste his time on this settled Constitutional matter, but perhaps the best case scenario for the next four years is a waste of everyone's time.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:25 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also, to those people who thought the Hamilton tweets didn't have anything to do with Trump's views of the First Amendment, um, here you go.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:27 AM on November 29, 2016 [28 favorites]

You wonder if that idea just popped into his head, or if people around him are earnestly discussing the possibility of revoking the citizenship of a particular subset of citizens.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:32 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

To me it really seem like Trump has the attention span of a goldfish. Whenever he feels an impulse, he acts on it, no filter or higher brain activity involved.

"I need adoration now! I should say something the nice people around me like, so they can tell me how great I am. Maybe something political, since I am now a politicizer. Ah, I know! 'Flag burning is bad!' Gin-Blossom Bannie always turns that funny color when he talks about it. I should say that it is bad, and that people who do it are baddies. And... and that we should punch them. No, wait, more presidential. Excommunicate them. No, that's those other guys. Dis-en-countrify them? Note to self: ask Meredith for correct term, then tweet."
posted by PontifexPrimus at 5:36 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

a lot of us can pay attention to a few things at once

I'm positive most of us can; I guess I'm assuming that we're not the short-memoried jackasses for whom these things are intended, though.

If there is in fact any intention beyond braindead megaphone racist uncle ramblings, which I suppose we've gone back and forth on in these threads over the last year.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:37 AM on November 29, 2016

You can be a serial murderer and not lose your citizenship. You can bilk Americans out of millions of dollars and not lose your citizenship. You can be dishonorably discharged from the military for war crimes and still not lose your citizenship.

If I'm remembering correctly from some web-based research a while back, for a short period at the beginning of the 20th century, if a woman married a non-citizen it resulted in the loss of her citizenship. No problem for a guy who was a U.S. citizen marrying a non-citizen woman though, of course. Unsurprisingly, this practice ended shortly after women acquired the right to vote.
posted by XMLicious at 5:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Maybe he's Just Sayin' that his justice department might be a wee bit less than vigilant in protecting you when you get your head busted open for exercising your supposedly constitutionally guaranteed rights of free expression. Wanna watch what you say and not step outta line, ya know?

Just Sayin', of course.
posted by hangashore at 5:43 AM on November 29, 2016

All I can say is "what the FUCK is wrong with him?" He's a doctor, for god's sake. I thought people became docs wanting to help others. This is terrifying.


HAHHAHA yeah no.

Every single person I know who went to medical school went because of the money.
posted by winna at 5:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

More Trumpian genius! This is long settled law, a dead argument at best. His bringing it up affects people on many levels. To the chest thumping moron for whom 'Murica!U!S!A! is the greatest thing since *fill in the blank*, it means he agrees with Twump and Twump (a rich and successful American Billionaire!) agrees with him, they think alike!
For the more subdued asshole, it's a quiet head-nodded, "Yes, there should be legal consequences, even those lib-tards won't allow it for stupid reasons." To the more educated/not merely reactive thinkers out there, it becomes a worrying example of a potential short-sightedness and lack of understanding of the nuances that are essential for successfully holding the office of president. For full-on hard left of left lefties who are as often outraged as they are infrequently bathed it becomes another "HolyFuckingShit! Can you BE- LIEVE! This! Psycho! He wants to throw us all in jail and take away our rights! OMG!!!"

It's brilliantly incendiary without ever actually offering any real depth or call to action or - anything. It's just a verbal fart.

Guy is the greatest Troll.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:44 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm still trying to understand why Trump and his cronies want to do away with established programs and institutions like the FCC, the post office, insuring bank deposits, the ACA... pretty much everything that helps everyone on one level or another. This goes way beyond "fuck you, got mine". This is something else entirely.
posted by Servo5678 at 5:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

More on Price: Rep. Price has supported the false claim that "promoting" the "homosexual agenda" has a "tremendous medical health impact and economic impact." He also has said that LGBT equality is "a huge cost-driver to state pensions and other things, many of these areas would significantly alter state balance sheets."

When the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell ruling, Price issued a statement calling it "not only a sad day for marriage, but a further judicial destruction of our entire system of checks and balances."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm just struck with how disparate the offered penalties are. It's a year in jail or I guess welcome to Trump Camps. It's like, look, I can be reasonable here, if you don't want me to pull your heart out of your body through your esophagus I can shove my foot literally deep into your anus. Why am I doing this? Isn't the real question whether you want to die or keep living with my foot up your ass?

Jesus wept.
posted by angrycat at 5:48 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

If you assume for a second that somebody with a sense of cause-and-effect wrote or vetted the flag-burning tweet, you might assume that it's an attempt to goad protesters into burning flags. That shit does not play in Peoria.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:52 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

You wonder if that idea just popped into his head, or if people around him are earnestly discussing the possibility of revoking the citizenship of a particular subset of citizens.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:32 AM on November 29 [−] Favorite added! [!]

You know how a lot of us have been worried about how terrible the next 4 years are going to be? This morning I'm worried that we haven't envisioned how bad it can be-- that a Trump Presidency is going to be nightmarish in ways we can't even imagine.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:53 AM on November 29, 2016 [28 favorites]

Even Scalia voted in affirmation of the right to burn the flag on Texas v. Johnson.

And Egg continues to be my go to sane Republican who I share with Republican Facebook friends as a challenge to them to step up and do the right thing.

@Evan_McMullin:
.@realDonaldTrump, what we are allowed to do is dictated by our God-given rights which are enshrined in the Constitution, not by you.

@Evan_McMullin:
Our Constitution protects our rights to such expression, but it does not protect presidents who violate them from impeachment.

@Evan_McMullin:
All Americans must stand up to @realDonaldTrump's rhetorical and literal violations of our rights and democratic norms.
posted by chris24 at 5:53 AM on November 29, 2016 [46 favorites]

Maybe it's piling on by now, but Chauncey DeVega debunks Kevin Drum's white supremacy fad ideas in Salon today.

All Drum needed to do was to consider the readily available and much discussed work of freedom fighters such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. White supremacy and the color line are not riddles. But to properly begin to grapple with them requires actual work and scholarship — not flippant, quasi-informed opinion.

posted by kingless at 5:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

"That shit does not play in Peoria."

Peoria: Votes Democrat, and not that worked up about flag burning.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:56 AM on November 29, 2016 [30 favorites]

Re, cross party voting, I've voted D for all major elections since the Reagan years, but i often vote in the R primary because Texas is an R state, with most offices being firmly held in R hands. Also, the D hasn't run anyone against most incumbents. Example, my congressman is Pete Sessions. Not Jeff, Pete. And Pete is a lovely man, who has done a lot for his district, but in his district Hillary won by over 5000 votes, and the dems didn't even bother fielding any candidates except the national ticket. And yes, that is the same D party who made it very clear that they don't want people outside of their enclave to try to get involved in the local races they ignore. So, there's this weird dynamic of a population that wants to vote leftish, but the leftish party won't put in the effort to find and train candidates.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:58 AM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Peoria: Votes Democrat, and not that worked up about flag burning.

Hey, blame Groucho.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:59 AM on November 29, 2016

I would imagine Peoria was more concerned about zombies.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:01 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Steve Benen: Why Tom Price is a scary choice for Trump’s HHS Secretary

I’ve been following Price’s career for years, and it’s hard to overstate just how conservative he is on, well, practically everything. The Georgia congressman, for example, is virulently anti-gay; during the BP oil spill, Price sided with the oil giant; and in 2011, he helped create Congress’ Tea Party Caucus. (A year later, Price seemed confused about the meaning of the word “compromise.”)

It was the same year Price considered running against John Boehner for the House Speaker’s gavel – because he considered the Ohio Republican insufficiently right-wing.

But Price, an orthopedic surgeon by trade, is primarily focused on health care – which for the American mainstream, isn’t good news. The Republican lawmakers has spent several years crusading to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and now Donald Trump is positioning Price to do exactly that.

Jonathan Cohn: Trump’s Pick For HHS Signals He Is Dead Serious About Repealing Obamacare

The “Empowering Patients First Act,” as it is known, would gut Obamacare’s regulation of insurance plans, reduce the total financial assistance going to people buying private coverage and rescind entirely the law’s expansion of Medicaid for the poorest Americans.

Insurers could resume some of the practices that Obamacare now prohibits ― like selling bare-bones plans and, in some cases, denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Price’s proposal would offer people tax credits, but there’d be no guarantee the credits could actually pay for comprehensive coverage.

The result, according to one analysis, would be less government spending and regulation ― as well as lower taxes on the rich. Many younger and healthier people would get access to cheaper insurance, particularly if they were comfortable with plans that had minimal coverage or gaps in benefits.

But a scheme like Price’s would also mean fewer people covered and, almost certainly, less financial protection for people with the worst medical conditions.

“It would likely leave many of the 20 million people losing coverage they now receive under the Affordable Care Act without health insurance and going without needed care,” Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told The Huffington Post.
[...]
And Price has said he wouldn’t stop with Obamacare. In mid-November, not long after the presidential election, Price said that Republicans could also use reconciliation to change Medicare, as well.

House Republicans, led by Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have long called for converting Medicare into some kind of voucher scheme, in which seniors would get a fixed sum of money with which to choose a health plan.

Price has also endorsed transforming Medicaid into a “block grant” ― in other words, giving states a fixed sum of money with which to run the program and then reducing the federal government’s spending on it.

During the presidential campaign, Trump indicated he would not cut either Medicare or Medicaid. But language on his new transition website says that he will “modernize” Medicare and give states more “flexibility” over Medicaid. In Washington, those terms are typically euphemisms for privatizing Medicare and transforming Medicaid into a block grant.

posted by zombieflanders at 6:03 AM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

WaPo In Trump’s economy, mammas should make sure their babies grow up to be con men

One of the many underappreciated legacies of the Obama administration has been its widespread implementation of pro-consumer policies. Under the outgoing president’s leadership, multiple executive branch departments and independent agencies have enacted laws, rules and regulations designed to protect regular Americans from, well, the Donald Trumps of the world.[...]

With a Cabinet likely worth tens of billions of dollars, Trump is assembling a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. And the policies his team wants to enact won’t line only their leader’s pockets — to the contrary, if they succeed, they’ll enrich enterprising mugs, pugs and thugs throughout the land, too.

that is to say someone whose character was so alien and foreign, like a Chinese man, you still lost it.

Heh. I did in fact marry a Japanese non-citizen. I wonder if the possibility of losing my citizenship would have deterred me. However I divorced him and now I am married to a white citizen so perhaps I would have become a citizen again? However it does mean that my daughter would have been a non-citizen. No, wait, she was born here so she would have been a citizen. Boy this sure is confusing.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:03 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

And Pete is a lovely man, who has done a lot for his district, but in his district Hillary won by over 5000 votes, and the dems didn't even bother fielding any candidates except the national ticket. And yes, that is the same D party who made it very clear that they don't want people outside of their enclave to try to get involved in the local races they ignore. So, there's this weird dynamic of a population that wants to vote leftish, but the leftish party won't put in the effort to find and train candidates.

I might be beating a dead horse here, but two thoughts:

1. Why aren't the Democrats fielding people here? Why, oh why, did we give up on the 50 state strategy?
2. And if we are going to be that stupid -- why isn't the Green party fielding candidates in these districts? That's a way to build up a stronger third party.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 6:07 AM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

Right after Obama won he dismantled his 50 state org.

So this is a legit "Thanks, Obama" moment.
posted by winna at 6:08 AM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

And if we are going to be that stupid -- why isn't the Green party fielding candidates in these districts? That's a way to build up a stronger third party.

Because much like Trump, Green Party leaders these days are more interested in grift and getting on TV than actual policy. People have been telling them to work on building both Congressional as well local and state campaigns for decades now, so that they have some sort of power base. Why they still insist on nominating narcissistic, self-serving, woo-pandering morons who will suck up all the oxygen (and money) from those Greens actually trying to make a difference is a problem both American leftists and Greens from other countries keep on harping on, but almost no one seems willing to step up and try to fix it.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:14 AM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

This almost surely comes from a place of privilege, but what I can't wrap my head around with the election is how little competence seemed to matter. I mean, yes, the obvious thing to freak out about is the horrendous plans for pretty much everyone who isn't a straight white male, but I'm cynical enough to believe that a lot of Americans are enthusiastic about (or at least OK with) persecuting anyone who looks different than themselves.

But I thought people gave a shit about, y'know, actually being able to do the job. And the entire campaign made it abundantly clear than Trump was abysmally ignorant and unwilling to remedy his ignorance. We all sniggered about Gary Johnson not knowing where Aleppo was but Donald Trump betrayed an equal ignorance of both domestic and foreign affairs every day. Who the hell are all these people who don't care if the person you're hiring can actually do the job? Are they the same people who will hire an unlicensed electrician as long as he has an ichthys on his business card?
posted by jackbishop at 6:22 AM on November 29, 2016 [45 favorites]

Sarah Kliff:

Seema Verma, Trump’s CMS pick, is very experienced in Medicaid policy. Instrumental in recent GOP push to add work requirement to program. Verma is someone who knows the Medicaid waiver process inside and out — and has a clear vision for what she wants to change about it. To me, the Verma pick signals that the Trump administration wants to focus a lot on Medicaid reform. Buckle up.

posted by zombieflanders at 6:24 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

But I thought people gave a shit about, y'know, actually being able to do the job. And the entire campaign made it abundantly clear than Trump was abysmally ignorant and unwilling to remedy his ignorance. We all sniggered about Gary Johnson not knowing where Aleppo was but Donald Trump betrayed an equal ignorance of both domestic and foreign affairs every day. Who the hell are all these people who don't care if the person you're hiring can actually do the job? Are they the same people who will hire an unlicensed electrician as long as he has an ichthys on his business card?

The problem is that decades of insinuation equated competence with being corrupt and self-serving. Trump's clear incompetence just meant he wasn't 'a standard politician', and therefore somehow less corrupt than a career politician.

It's complete bull, but there it is.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:25 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

But I thought people gave a shit about, y'know, actually being able to do the job.

For a shocking number of people, being a straight white dude is being able to do the job.
posted by winna at 6:27 AM on November 29, 2016 [37 favorites]

So apparently the right is claiming that the flag burning thing is a troll that Trump plans to use in order to expose media bias/liberal hypocrisy. They're basing that on the fact Hillary introduced a bill that would have made flag burning a federal crime punishable by up to 1 yr in prison, if it had passed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Protection_Act_of_2005

I normally factor in Hanlon's razor ("never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") when attempting to understand people's motivations, particularly in regard to Trump. However, the flag burning tweet is so seemingly random that I think they could be correct, and he's set it up as some kind of "gotcha!" for the left.
posted by prosopagnosia at 6:32 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

When Trump or Trumpsters talk about historic win or landslide, remember this: He lost by more than anyone else elected except 1876, the infamously corrupt election that ended Reconstruction. He got a lower percentage of the vote than all but 7 presidents. Those 7 all faced a serious 3rd party candidate. Trump did not. And 43 of the 54 election winners got a higher percentage of the electoral college. In fact, the only person who didn't do better since 1980 is one George W. Bush. Trump is truly the smallest winner.
posted by chris24 at 6:33 AM on November 29, 2016 [32 favorites]

> I wonder if a four-year medical coma is an option for me right now.

I do not mean to imply that the death of Sharon Jones is a laughing matter, but when I read that she passed away after watching the election results roll in, I couldn't help but think of this scene from The Simpsons where a man who has just woken up from a 19 year long coma is being interviewed.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:39 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

@MarkHarrisNYC
Hamilton just had the highest grossing week of any show in Broadway history if you're wondering how the boycott's going.
posted by chris24 at 6:41 AM on November 29, 2016 [22 favorites]

Peoria: Votes Democrat, and not that worked up about flag burning.

I fact checked this. It is true. It is so barely true as to be nearly meaningless. Chicago tribune red-blue map here.
posted by bukvich at 6:41 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hamilton just had the highest grossing week of any show in Broadway history if you're wondering how the boycott's going.

I mean, it's funny to laugh about this but the Chicago crew also had to get bodyguards because of death threats, so the hatemongering and bullying tweets still managed to do their job.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [16 favorites]

But I thought people gave a shit about, y'know, actually being able to do the job.

As mentioned above: experience equals taint in this storyline. But also, how would, say, a low information voter judge competence? Trump has an adderall-users brazen confidence even when he doesn't have competence and that shorthand is sometimes all you can go by if you, the viewer, don't have more information.
posted by Brainy at 6:49 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

And if we are going to be that stupid -- why isn't the Green party fielding candidates in these districts? That's a way to build up a stronger third party.

A lot of armchair politics is decidedly anti-incrementalist, they dream of heroic policy change. That's as true of tea party types as Greens, from what I've read from them. They are into purity politics, where they overturn the whole rotten system in favor of their new more ideal version that everyone really wants and will clearly see is right once they get their chance.

It's an easier way to think of politics. It isn't about extending a tax credit to reach a few million more people, or thinking about the comparative benefits and losses involved in a possible trade deal. It's about overturning the table and changing the game to something completely different.

It's a seductive way to imagine the system, with it being the thing holding everyone back and only waiting for someone bold enough to see that and reject the power and influence being one of the corrupt of Washington brings. It's imagining the world as being matched to your exact perspective and denying that others have differing wants and needs. The scary thing is sometimes it actually happens, as we may well see in a few short weeks.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:50 AM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

So apparently the right is claiming that the flag burning thing is a troll that Trump plans to use in order to expose media bias/liberal hypocrisy. They're basing that on the fact Hillary introduced a bill that would have made flag burning a federal crime punishable by up to 1 yr in prison, if it had passed.

Has there ever been a president-elect that felt the need to keep fighting against the person they supposedly won against like Trump is doing? Along with the basket of deplorables, Trump seems to carry with him a basket of insecurities.
posted by tocts at 6:50 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Has there ever been a president-elect that felt the need to keep fighting against the person they supposedly won against like Trump is doing?

He's not fighting against Clinton in this scenario, he's just using her as a prop to fight the media, who he knows are the last people who will be able to hurt him over the next two years. Just like he didn't really give a shit about Juanita Broaddrick, but she was a useful prop against Clinton at the time.
posted by Etrigan at 6:53 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The competence thing is sort of why my eyes are just glazing over when I read the comments here that are post mortems of the election and why I had to tell myself to BE QUIET when a friend was talking about how much the Democratic Party fucked up: competence should matter. We act like it does. And he was manifestly incompetent.

And so my reaction to the ideas that we didn't do xy or z or WWC or be more Bernie or whatever is like basically ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME because look we all thought she had this locked up for a reason. This is supposed to be a job. She exhibited that she was well qualified for the job. Trump is maybe qualified to dress himself.

I mean I know my take on it is that what we really will have to endure is a round of mass suffering to get back to when people gave a shit and taught their kids to give a shit. Unfortunately. Because when enough people vote against their own interests to bring a monster to power, an obvious monster, then something more is needed than a tweaking of an argument or a better candidate.
posted by angrycat at 6:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [66 favorites]

Trump is maybe qualified to dress himself.

Not if the ridiculous way he ties ties is any indication.
posted by maxsparber at 6:58 AM on November 29, 2016 [28 favorites]

That's as true of tea party types as Greens, from what I've read from them.

No, the Tea Party is far, far more powerful and effective. Of course, they've never really been separate from the GOP in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, they're not a "grassroots" movement that is significantly different from anyone else. They were created by GOP operatives, almost all of whom formerly held office as Republicans, and are funded by many of the same people that have long supported the GOP. If anything, the Tea Party is now the conservative/GOP base, what with the tendency to be racist, homophobic, anti-choice evangelicals that hate those they consider liberals.
posted by zombieflanders at 7:00 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

Guys, it's cool. Remember Hillary just planted Trump in the Republican primaries so she could rig this thing and become president. This is all just another phase of her plan.
posted by asteria at 7:02 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

This could be it's own FPP, but it's honestly so depressing that like, WTF.

Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election: In the ten days following the election, there were almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation from across the nation. Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults, making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:11 AM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

All I can say is "what the FUCK is wrong with him?" He's a doctor, for god's sake. I thought people became docs wanting to help others.

Atul Gawande's talked about this a bit: the American system trains doctors in a way that encourages them to think about how to make money from day one, whether it's just to pay back tuition loans or to become very rich and respected. (Though for people of Price's age, med school was somewhat cheaper.) The latter is part of why there are so many physicians elected on the GOP side, and why they often represent the batshit wing of the party. Lots of surgeons, lots of people in lucrative speciality fields. There aren't as many physicians on the Dem side, but they typically come from general practice or emergency medicine.
posted by holgate at 7:11 AM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

Atul Gawande's talked about this a bit: the American system trains doctors in a way that encourages them to think about how to make money from day one, whether it's just to pay back tuition loans or to become very rich and respected. (Though for people of Price's age, med school was somewhat cheaper.) The latter is part of why there are so many physicians elected on the GOP side, and why they often represent the batshit wing of the party. Lots of surgeons, lots of people in lucrative speciality fields. There aren't as many physicians on the Dem side, but they typically come from general practice or emergency medicine.

A friend of mine talks about how her medical school sat down with her and tried to talk her out of becoming a General Practitioner because of the money, and how the choice to become a GP reflected badly on the school.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:14 AM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

FYI, I got an email from Barack Obama (PERSONALLY) last night, saying that DCCC donations will be triple-matched until tomorrow, so if you're so inclined, now might be as good a time as any to throw some dollars that way.
posted by rp at 7:18 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Flag burning? Oh, FFS.

For the record, if anyone within reach of me lets himself be goaded into burning a flag, goaded by no less than Donald "World Champion Goad-ee" Trump, I will hogtie that person, set him up on a chair and read him my poetry.
posted by ocschwar at 7:29 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Atul Gawande's talked about this a bit: the American system trains doctors in a way that encourages them to think about how to make money from day one, whether it's just to pay back tuition loans or to become very rich and respected.

I'm 40, and all the med-school-tracked alumni in my fraternity, for umpteen graduating classes now, have been so sickened by the need to make money to pay back their loans that they are very much leaning the other way.
posted by ocschwar at 7:31 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not only do we have a constitutional right to burn flags, but ceremonial burning of the flag is one of the official ways to dispose of it.

If people want to burn a flag, goaded by Trump or not, they should go ahead. If someone wants to write an essay, goaded by Trump or not, they should. If someone wants to carry a placard, goaded by Trump or not, they should. All are constitutionally protected expressions of speech, and we get to do them whenever we want, for whatever reason we want.
posted by maxsparber at 7:33 AM on November 29, 2016 [27 favorites]

oh no someone is burning this inanimate piece of the cloth that used to symbolize our shared values and freedoms i am so outraged
posted by entropicamericana at 7:35 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: The Washington Post "Blacklist" Story is Shameful and Disgusting
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:35 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

In an interview Tuesday morning Jason Miller, who serves the Trump transition team, insisted that flag burning should be illegal, and just couldn't seem to wrap his head around the fact that not only is it legal, it's protected First Amendment speech as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:37 AM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

Trump: Who is this Connie Stution everyone keeps talking about

[fake]
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:39 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

@GeorgeTakei: I pledged allegiance to the flag every morning inside an internment camp. I would never burn one, but I'd die to protect the right to do so.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:40 AM on November 29, 2016 [62 favorites]

Elaine Chao to be Trump's transportation secretary: The wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Chao is the first Asian-American woman to hold a Cabinet-level position. She also served as deputy secretary of transportation under President George H.W. Bush. Chao was also a member of Trump’s Asian Pacific American Advisory Council during the campaign.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:44 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, Taibbi and Greenwald can go fuck themselves. If they're unwilling to consider the way Russian disinformation and targeted hacks compromised the far left media, then they want to turn a blind eye to their own faults.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:45 AM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

Standing Rock Protesters React to Life Under Trump
"America deserves Trump," says one protester fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. "America is Trump."

So, I'm feeling like a lot of the "oh things are gonna be so fascist under Trump" stuff kind of ignores that protestors in North Dakota, USA are being pelted with rubber bullets, water-cannons in sub-freezing temperatures, and mace, like last week. That's how Americans are being treated currently. This is just a few months after a band of armed white dipshits took over a wildlife refuge with no repercussions. And there is a long, horrible history of indigenous people being displaced for fossil-fuel "interests" and also a long, horrible history of armed, white dipshits never having repercussions.

Barack Obama needs to end it, because which do you think is more likely: that President Donald Trump will solve the situation at Standing Rock peacefully and stop DAPL? Or that President Trump will be cool with pretty much everyone being treated like the Standing Rock protestors if they get out of line?
posted by Cookiebastard at 7:46 AM on November 29, 2016 [49 favorites]

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone

I wonder how many of the listed web sites Taibbi has bookmarked. It would be an interesting spreadsheet to collate bookmarks of the blacklisted.

(I think I have about six which might be enough to put me in the top 20 percentile on the NSA watch list.)
posted by bukvich at 7:48 AM on November 29, 2016

Elaine Chao to be Trump's transportation secretary:

Besides buttering up McConnell, is there any reason she's a terrible choice?
posted by drezdn at 7:48 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

If they're unwilling to consider the way Russian disinformation and targeted hacks compromised the far left media, then they want to turn a blind eye to their own faults.

It looks to me like they considered the evidence but found it lacking. This conclusion leads in the direction of their ideological priors, but that doesn't mean they're turning a blind eye.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:49 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Besides buttering up McConnell, is there any reason she's a terrible choice?

Other than working with Trump during the campaign?
posted by Etrigan at 7:50 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Marcy Wheeler: According to PropOrNot’s Conspiratorial Criteria, WaPo Is a US Intelligence Outlet

In other words, WaPo remains what it was before an oligarch with financial ties to the intelligence community bought it. But we know that reading its content with a critical view, not by mapping out perceived and real connections. Doing that mapping would mark the WaPo as a clear government propaganda outlet that it is not.

This kind of conspiracy theorizing gets dangerous quickly. Even the WaPo — especially the WaPo — cannot afford such games.

posted by tonycpsu at 7:52 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's possible that Russia manipulated our election and that the WaPo report was just establishmentarian Red-Baiting. Both can be true.

Well maybe not "red" baiting so much. Putin-Baiting.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:52 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Elaine Chao was a terrible secretary of labor, but will likely be the least-catastrophic of Trump's cabinet appointments.

Her term will be a disaster, but we're already fucked on infrastructure.
posted by schmod at 7:53 AM on November 29, 2016

Elaine Chao will, amazingly, be the SECOND person to have been Sec of Labor, Sec of Transportation and married to Senate majority leader (NYT)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:56 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

In addition to deporting any Latinx-looking person they can land their hands on I am now worried that they are going to be really gutting the Voting Rights Act and then bringing in some Jim Crow Era- type shit. So I am officially worried about:
1. Loss of MedCaid and food stamps for disabled and poor
2. Loss of MediCare for aging folk
3. Loss of Social Security for everyone
4. Deportation of everyone possible including parents of children born here
4a. Amending the Constitution to remove automatic citizenship to children born of immigrants
5. Placing barriers to prevent nonwhites from voting
6. Privatizing the shit out of everything including schools, Post Office, prisons, etc.
7. Rollbacks of any and every regulation enacted in the past 50 years
8. Increased surveillance on citizens
9. Ramping up the War on Drugs
10. Rolling back all of the protections for LGBTQ
11. Softening or possible elimination of the division between Church and State
12. Repealing all consumer protection laws
13. Repealing child labor laws
14. Elimination of OSHA, CDC, and HUD possibly Dept. of Energy if they figure out who will take over Nuclear oversight.
15. Severe restrictions on women's reproductive rights including birth control
16. Massive tariffs on foreign goods and penalties against American companies manufacturing outside of USA leading to skyrocketing prices of consumer goods
17. A Foreign policy muddled by Trump's own business interests and Islamaphobia

I've probably left some things out but that's enough for me to worry about at this moment.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 7:56 AM on November 29, 2016 [27 favorites]

i know trump is going to double down on auto-based infrastructure, so it will no doubt be terrible
posted by entropicamericana at 7:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

In addition to deporting any Latinx-looking person they can land their hands on

this is like, not a thing.
posted by zutalors! at 8:03 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

In addition to deporting any Latinx-looking person they can land their hands on

this is like, not a thing.

What portion of Trump's campaign and transition leads you to believe that this will not continue to be a thing that, at the very least, he tries to do?
posted by Etrigan at 8:07 AM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

In China they have a yelp for evaluating the citizenship of your friends and co-workers and web conversers. Burhanistan I give you 5 *'s but I don't know if that will help you or hurt you!
posted by bukvich at 8:08 AM on November 29, 2016

In addition to deporting any Latinx-looking person they can land their hands on

this is like, not a thing.

What portion of Trump's campaign and transition leads you to believe that this will not continue to be a thing that, at the very least, he tries to do?

The statement was "deporting any Latinx-looking person they can land their hands on" which no, is not what they said they were doing.

I'm tired of this concern troll resembling hyperbole.
posted by zutalors! at 8:11 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

via daring fireball:

TRUMP’S LEASE FOR HIS BRAND-NEW D.C. HOTEL FORBIDS HIM FROM BEING ‘AN ELECTED OFFICIAL.'

surely this
posted by entropicamericana at 8:14 AM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

I am not a troll, I am concerned. If you look to the past, other attempts by our government to "crack down on illegal immigrants" have led to mistakes in which they deported a few citizens along with non-citizens. How does this happen you ask. Because of their appearance.

I'm not going to fight you on this. I see this as a real possibility and you don't. I hope you are right.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:15 AM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

Looks like the alleged conservative opposition to Trump has already stopped pretending they oppose him, and we're still 50+ days away from him taking the reins.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:15 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

In China they have a yelp for evaluating the citizenship of your friends and co-workers and web conversers. Burhanistan I give you 5 *'s but I don't know if that will help you or hurt you!

bukvich, I give you 5 Meow Meow Beenz for that comment.
posted by Talez at 8:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Why aren't the Democrats fielding people here? Why, oh why, did we give up on the 50 state strategy?

Sometimes the local party's dysfunctional, sometimes there's nobody who wants to put themselves in the firing line, because it's a big commitment of time and money. No reason, though, not to file the paperwork and have someone run a minimum viable campaign.
posted by holgate at 8:18 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Rolling Stone interview: The Day After: Obama on His Legacy, Trump's Win and the Path Forward

Yeah, listen. If you want to persuade me that everything is going to be terrible, then we can talk ourselves into that. Or we can act. It is what it is. There's been an election. There's going to be a Trump presidency, and Republicans are going to control Congress. And the question is gonna be, for those like you and I, who care about these issues, do we figure out how to continue to make progress in this environment until we have a chance for the next election. And will we have mobilized ourselves and persuaded enough people that we can get back on a path that we think is going to be helpful for families, helpful for the environment, helpful for our safety and security and rule of law and civil rights and social rights?

posted by kirkaracha at 8:18 AM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

I'm tired of this concern troll resembling hyperbole.

There is about to be a Nazi in the White House. Hyperbole left town on the 11:08 stagecoach, pardner.
posted by Etrigan at 8:19 AM on November 29, 2016 [40 favorites]

Holy shit

Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
posted by ominous_paws at 8:19 AM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

I'm not going to fight you on this. I see this as a real possibility and you don't. I hope you are right.

i don't think it is appropriate to try to scare every nonwhite person in this country with this type of hyperbole, actually. I'm a person often mistaken for Latinx and I don't think it's appropriate for me to be concerned about being mistakenly sent to Mexico when there are real threats to undocumented immigrants and that should be our focus.

I'd appreciate if that perspective could be considered seriously and wasn't always framed as me having my head in the sand or something.
posted by zutalors! at 8:19 AM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Trump's proposed flag burning penalty is "loss of citizenship or a year in jail." Note that a one-year penalty just happens to be exactly the threshold that makes a crime a felony. So either way this means dissidents would be stripped of the right to vote in all or nearly all states.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:20 AM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

Rolling Stone interview: The Day After: Obama on His Legacy, Trump's Win and the Path Forward

If you look at the data from the election, if it were just young people who were voting, Hillary would have gotten 500 electoral votes. So we have helped, I think, shape a generation to think about being inclusive, being fair, caring about the environment. And they will have growing influence year by year, which means that America over time will continue to get better.

A dim light of hope in a tunnel of darkeness.
posted by Talez at 8:22 AM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

The thing that made Tea Party Republicans successful is that they're still working within the Republican Party, though.

Right, they're better at it in large part due to the Republicans having pushed so far to the edge already and the moderates being swamped by the far right, but the attitude is similar, both among many of the legislators and definitely with their supporters. It's the no compromise, we'll shut everything down before moving an inch belief set and the belief they're dialed in to the "real" problems America is facing and only they have the solutions mind set which makes them "hero" style pols. (I hope it goes without saying they aren't heroes, but they believe they are.)
posted by gusottertrout at 8:22 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

"I'm still trying to understand why Trump and his cronies want to do away with established programs and institutions like the FCC, the post office, insuring bank deposits, the ACA... pretty much everything that helps everyone on one level or another. This goes way beyond "fuck you, got mine". This is something else entirely."

Government. Shrink. Bathtub.
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:26 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm still trying to understand why Trump and his cronies want to do away with established programs and institutions like...

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.
posted by Etrigan at 8:30 AM on November 29, 2016

http://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-tearing-itself-apart-1789406294

I wouldn't say it's tearing itself apart. I'd say it's balkanizing.
posted by Talez at 8:32 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.

The problem with that is that people need to have money to be able to afford The Market's services or else the whole system collapses and The Market is very stingy about paying fair wages.
posted by Servo5678 at 8:33 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.

I know some of these people and I always like to remind them that the free market's solution to the problem of poverty is the payday loan industry.
posted by rocket88 at 8:34 AM on November 29, 2016 [38 favorites]

Obama in Rolling Stone: "So aside from any particular issue, the president needs to recognize that this is not about you."

Oh dear.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:35 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.

And others than don't think it can but know that privatization offers them and theirs tremendous opportunity. It doesn't have to be good for the country, just the people they care about.
posted by Candleman at 8:37 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm still trying to understand why Trump and his cronies want to do away with established programs and institutions like...

Because they would rather be absolute rulers over a smoking ruin than civil servants in a functioning society. Because they enjoy punishing "bad" people but don't want to admit this to themselves, so they gin up a whole legal/moral system to "force" them to starve/kill/deport/immiserate/exploit. Because they're stupid but very rich, so have always had their "ideas" about policy treated like gold-plated genius despite operating at neighborhood newsletter levels of discourse.

It's mostly psychological, IYAM. Social in the sense that social structures create certain personality traits, but fundamentally about the sublimated desire to hurt others. They like causing pain; they think it's fun, it makes them feel powerful, it's exciting, it's stimulating to the ol' glands. It's the same impulse that makes little kids experiment with hurting each other writ large.
posted by Frowner at 8:37 AM on November 29, 2016 [36 favorites]

That Gizmos headline isn't all that accurate. A better version would be something like "The_Donald is taking over Reddit...and no one wants to do anything about it"
posted by zombieflanders at 8:39 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

A dim light of hope in a tunnel of darkeness.

I won't count on a younger liberal generation any more than I will count on changing demographics. Someone earlier linked to an article showing young people went for Carter too, but still we see plenty of conservative adults around today.

The only solution I see is to make the current Republican brand so toxic that people are ashamed to be associated with it. Otherwise it's just a hydra - cut off the head of one deplorable and three more pop up with new buzzwords. I don't know how that happens now that people can get positive reinforcement from their fringe news sources. I'm scared that Republicans would have to well and truly drive things into the ground before they become anathema.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 8:41 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I wouldn't say it's tearing itself apart. I'd say it's balkanizing.

Hairsplitting geopolitical terminology aside, part of me would rather this shit stay out in the open than be pushed off to some obscure chan, while the other part fears for the mods who have to process the insanity.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.

I don't think people are that naive. I think they think the market can solve all their ills more efficiently, and fuck everyone else.
posted by maxsparber at 8:45 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

The only solution I see is to make the current Republican brand so toxic that people are ashamed to be associated with it.

Look, if you're voting for a person that thinks "Grab 'em by the pussy" is an acceptable method of interacting with women, shame may not work the same way for you that it does for me.
posted by Mooski at 8:45 AM on November 29, 2016 [63 favorites]

> If you look at the data from the election, if it were just young people who were voting, Hillary would have gotten 500 electoral votes. So we have helped, I think, shape a generation to think about being inclusive, being fair, caring about the environment. And they will have growing influence year by year, which means that America over time will continue to get better.

Hasn't this been more or less true since the '60s? A lot of yesterday's hippies voted for Trump. Anyway, it's a good thing the Republican party is in a demographic death spiral, or I might be worried about the future.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:49 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.


coincidentally, many of these same people don't believe that poor people dying of treatable conditions, debt slavery, and total lack of education access for vulnerable populations are "ills"
posted by murphy slaw at 8:50 AM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

Anyway, it's a good thing the Republican party is in a demographic death spiral, or I might be worried about the future.


dying things don't care if they destroy the future
posted by murphy slaw at 8:53 AM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

As to the out of nowhere-ness of the flag burning tweet, there was apparently a segment on Fox News just after 6am about students burning the American flag.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:53 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

The Nation:  Donald Trump Is Coming for Your Medicare
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:58 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

> What the Market will do is help people to realize that being poor isn't as "cool" as our so-called "media" makes it out to "be"

I think it's more like that joke about how you don't need to be able to outrun zombies, you just need to be able to outrun the slower people in your group. People who are not (yet) poor will vote for politicians who they believe will keep them from slipping into poverty, even if it means grinding those who are already poor further into the dust.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:01 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

I'm still trying to understand why Trump and his cronies want to do away with established programs and institutions like...

To continue: upon reading that piece about reddit, it strikes me that...huh, what you might call mefite-type people (regardless of our actual politics) don't get that much of a charge out of hurting others or triumphing over others. Not that we never feel those things, but we don't tend to feel them strongly enough to go out of our way, never mind strongly enough to have it be a big part of our personalities. Like, it might be gratifying to see someone we dislike get shamed or lose money or whatever, but we wouldn't go out of our way to have that happen, or actually want something really terrible to happen to someone we dislike, or organize our lives around the pleasure we get from seeing others suffer and lose. Whatever our other failings and stupidities, watching people lose, flail, be shamed, be hurt, etc isn't particularly attractive to us.

And that's where we get the fascist right wrong. (It's worth distinguishing the fascist right from, say, McMullin.) The fascist right actively gets its satisfaction from hurting other people. That's why we keep losing - we're all like "I am doing this political stuff, but really I would rather be home making dinner or on a date or playing with my kids or reading a book"; they're all "I'm out here heckling LGBTQ people and it's great". Racism, violence in general, sexual violence in particular, making people cry or hurt - that's stuff that they actually do because it's fun.

A lot of people who are not part of the fascist right don't understand this and that's why we're just bowled over when we see people doing stuff that's horrible. We can't get our heads around how they could enjoy it and actively want to do it, so we keep thinking that it's some kind of mistake or sign of some personal suffering on their part.

The people who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib did it because torturing prisoners was fun and no one bothered to stop them. There were other reasons wrapped up in it - chains of command, group culture, etc - but the social ground for what happened was that people tortured because it was fun.

We need to get our heads around this and be ready - policy discussion and economic problems are not really of concern to the fascist right and they will not stop just because something is a bad idea or produces obvious social harm. It's easy to be confused or hypnotized by this kind of...well, let's call it evil, because it fills the social function of evil. It's easy to look into the void, right? That's how they get you. We have to give up on the idea that there's some kind of policy or humanitarian angle which will reach these guys (and they're mostly guys), because they are actively motivated by the opportunity to do harm.
posted by Frowner at 9:02 AM on November 29, 2016 [120 favorites]

I Love America, Which Is Why I’m So Worried About Trump - I grew up believing in happy endings but my parents knew these were only interludes between inevitable tragedies. (Chemi Shalev)

I wish I could confidently say that in four years or even eight years time the dialectics of history will correct whatever harm Trump will cause America or pretend to believe that he will surprise us all for the better. That is what many of us thought about Israel in recent years, but at this point in time, at least, we seem to have been proven wrong. A right-wing leadership whose main commitment is to its own preservation can systematically chip away at civil liberties, gradually pervert public opinion, continuously foment hate and preserve incitement, not as instruments of a campaign but as permanent features of government. Ask anyone in Israel today, after so many years of Netanyahu, if the center-left will ever return to power and you’ll be rewarded with shrugs or scorn.

Chemi is leaving his post as Haaretz's Washington correspondent by the way.
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:04 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

We have to give up on the idea that there's some kind of policy or humanitarian angle which will reach these guys (and they're mostly guys), because they are actively motivated by the opportunity to do harm.

Exactly. Gandhi notwithstanding, I'm not sure how you deal with people like this except by being better at it than they are - which has its own perils, of course.
posted by Mooski at 9:06 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

effect wrote or vetted the flag-burning tweet, you might assume that it's an attempt to goad protesters into burning flags. That shit does not play in Peoria.

Yeah. Or as noted, it may play in the actual city of Peoria, but there are a lot of places it won't. If Trump can get footage of Americans burning American flags, he can use it as justification of how everything is chaos and his strong order is needed to put the ship right.
posted by corb at 9:09 AM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

The only solution I see is to make the current Republican brand so toxic that people are ashamed to be associated with it.

Speaking as someone with conservative leanings (granted, Massachusetts conservative), nearly everyone who could be shamed away from the GOP has already left at this point. What remains is at best people who were willing to performatively disdain Trump's baser instincts when they thought he was going to lose, but who are now lining up for a job in his administration.
posted by tocts at 9:11 AM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

BTW the rallies start on Thursday (Cincinatti first).
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:12 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah. Or as noted, it may play in the actual city of Peoria, but there are a lot of places it won't. If Trump can get footage of Americans burning American flags, he can use it as justification of how everything is chaos and his strong order is needed to put the ship right.

I've already seen movements to get people to burn confederate flags instead, which seems appropriate.
posted by dinty_moore at 9:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

Trump wants people who burn the American flag to have their citizenship removed. Great.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:19 AM on November 29, 2016

Trump wants people who burn the American flag to have their citizenship removed. Great.

I understand why all the progressives on Twitter are retweeting him, but I wish they'd stop. He sees every RT as positive reinforcement, regardless of what you say about his post.

With a child, you would actively ignore the attention seeking behavior while lavishly rewarding the behavior you want to encourage. I know the stakes are higher, but rewarding him for his most egregious statements with RTs is just feeding the maw of the beast.
posted by anastasiav at 9:22 AM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

This NY Times article, "How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’", about Yascha Mounk & Roberto Stefan Foa's research on the decline of support for liberal democracies is frighting.

Mounk & Foa's "The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect" is equally disturbing. There is a real and growing support for authoritarian rule, not just in the US but across the western world.
posted by papercrane at 9:26 AM on November 29, 2016 [19 favorites]

Funny thing is, the only thing I can think of that can cause you to lose your citizenship is lying or providing false information on your citizenship application. Like Melania might've done.
posted by chris24 at 9:28 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Trump wants people who burn the American flag to have their citizenship removed. Great.

Trump couldn't care less about people burning anything. He wants attention.

Now his minions...
posted by dirigibleman at 9:30 AM on November 29, 2016

He is the President-Elect of the United States

You can report his words without Retweeting him. I'm almost positive he looks at the RT number and nothing else.
posted by anastasiav at 9:31 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

i want to write a bot that just tweets "you are bad and no one will ever love you" to him immediately after each tweet because i'm feeling utterly powerless and i want to hurt him
posted by murphy slaw at 9:33 AM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Oh, this morning I almost programmed a WRONG!-bot that RTs-with-comment (and maybe a little animated GIF), but I decided I had better things to do.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:35 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Want to think back on old election threads, a simpler time when we'd argue 538 vs Upshot vs PEC? Then you should check out Buzzfeed's Grading The 2016 Election Forecasts.
posted by zachlipton at 9:36 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh, this morning I almost programmed a WRONG!-bot that RTs-with-comment (and maybe a little animated GIF), but I decided I had better things to do.

unless you're curing cancer or stopping global warming, i respectfully disagree
posted by entropicamericana at 9:39 AM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

Donald Trump Is an Emotional Weakling. Here’s How to Manipulate Him.

Or, more simply, one could follow the advice of one of the lawyers who worked with him (if that's the phrase) back in the 90s: "The key to Donald, like with any bully, is to tell him to go fuck himself."
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:40 AM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

House Majority Leader: Repeal Obamacare First Then Replace Late

"My personal belief and nothing has been decided yet. I would [move through] and repeal and then go to work on replacing," McCarthy said. "I think once it is repealed you will have, hopefully, fewer people playing politics."

McCarthy argued that Democrats may be incentivized to come to the table then, but he didn't say what the time frame for replace the Affordable Care Act would be..

"Look we are going to start on this right away. I don't want to get into timeline," McCarthy said.

That's the kind of responsible decisionmaking approach you want from Congressional leadership: set off a bomb and wait to see if everyone manages to disarm it.
posted by zachlipton at 9:41 AM on November 29, 2016 [19 favorites]

ocschwar: I will hogtie that person, set him up on a chair and read him my poetry.

Advocating torture? Not cool, dude.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:41 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've already seen movements to get people to burn confederate flags instead, which seems appropriate.

I've thought about making this a Memorial Day Victory Over Treasonous Slavers Day ritual, but I wouldn't want anyone to think I'd be buying it for the wrong reasons and I'm pretty scared of the mailing lists I'd be put on. Option 2 is getting a 35-star American flag, which was the US flag at the end of the Civil War.

I also sometimes think of the two sides as Confederates and Americans, vs. Union or North.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:44 AM on November 29, 2016

i've lately been splitting my donald tweets between 'go fuck yourself donny' and 'shut the fuck up donny'.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 9:45 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

House Majority Leader: Repeal Obamacare First Then Replace Late

Now it's less "repeal and replace" and more "REPEAL...and maaaaybe replace (but not really) if we get to it, which we probably won't."

Not that this is a surprise, of course. This is the problem when people try to play really fucking stupidly dangerous "Pascal's Wager" games with the prion disease that is the current incarnation of conservativism.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:46 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

we would also accept "forget it, donny, you're out of your element!"
posted by entropicamericana at 9:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

One of my friends has been tweeting "sit down Don, you fat motherfucker" at him.
posted by pxe2000 at 9:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Recently, Michael Flynn praised Milo Yiannopoulos as "phenomenal" and "one of the most brave people that I've ever met." The future national security adviser is praising a guy who has not managed to meet the minimal threshold of responsibility required to possess a Twitter account.
posted by zachlipton at 9:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [38 favorites]

Yeah, I wish there were some non-profit unionized factory that could make Confederate flags to be sold for the sole intention of burning them, all profits to go to the SPLC.
posted by tivalasvegas at 9:59 AM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

Sam Stein dug this up from the archives: Trump Tried To Get Bush’s Labor Secretary To Attend His Get-Rich-Quick Seminar. The Labor Secretary in question is Elaine Chao, Trump's pick for Secretary of Transportation. She got a great big invitation in the mail to attend Trump Institute seminars while she was serving in the Cabinet, and very weirdly, that decade-old invitation ended up with an oppo group.
posted by zachlipton at 10:02 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

The future national security adviser is praising a guy who has not managed to meet the minimal threshold of responsibility required to possess a Twitter account.

While I completely agree that this is a sign of terrible judgment, it's sadly not something many care about. I've had the "fun" of having to explain why Milo is not a "good guy" to older relatives, and as far as they're concerned it's all lies and/or not-really-real-stuff from that not-really-real-place called the internet.

A lot of voters still view stuff that happens online as being somehow not part of "real life".
posted by tocts at 10:06 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Now it's less "repeal and replace" and more "REPEAL...and maaaaybe replace (but not really) if we get to it, which we probably won't."

Not that this is a surprise, of course. This is the problem when people try to play really fucking stupidly dangerous "Pascal's Wager" games with the prion disease that is the current incarnation of conservativism.

What it means is that "repeal, period" will become the Republican position and "repeal and replace with something that hopefully is going to be slightly less shitty than nothing" will have to be the Democratic position.

Unless Dems actually are able to articulate a clear progressive vision for Medicare expansion that, oh, what am I even doing, this sentence is already a trainwreck and I have no way to end it so I'll just keep typing until the existential despair hits, wait for it.... bam.
posted by tivalasvegas at 10:06 AM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

There really are people who genuinely believe that The Market can solve all ills more efficiently and effectively than any government.

See... Republicans say that, but the end result of the free market is a lot of death and misery that benefits the 1%. Societal ills are something to be exploited, not solved. This is basically a rant I had with my parents the other day, but why pay for healthcare, social security, welfare, pensions, etc. to keep the worker bees healthy and happy? They are probably filthy Democrats or potential-Democrats anyway. Get rid of any and all protections for workers so you are beholden to your employer. We are in a race to the bottom - if nobody offers benefits then nobody will expect them. This is playing out now with the attack on federal and state employees' pensions/retirement packages; blue collar people don't have that anymore, so they don't want anyone else to, either. Make people work until they are dead, and since there is shitty healthcare they will probably die younger. Good! Make room for new worker bees. Taxes should not be wasted on retired people who are not lining the pockets of the 1% with more money. Also, those kids attending F-rated schools should really stop wasting time in such a shitty school and should be "allowed" to go work and help out their parents. Vocational charter schools will pop up that are really just skirting child labor laws, until those laws cease to exist at all.

Sounds horrible, right? Well, good luck protesting since that is now illegal. In fact, you're a terrorist if you burn a flag or step too far out of line. Long prison sentences for minor crimes; prisons are for-profit, of course, and they will exploit the pool of free labor. We're a Christian nation, so the church will be an enforcer of norms and will become tied into all facets of public life. Of course, as Christians we revere women - so much so that we need them to stay at home to take care of all those pesky old sick people who haven't managed to die yet without health care, and to raise unwanted pregnancies into children who can go work to support the family, too. Everyone is far too busy trying to take care of their families to protest, but those who do are quickly spirited away.

I could go on and on about how the destruction of our faith in the media and institution, voter suppression, systemic racism, etc. makes all of this more likely, but I'm too depressed. Sounds like a shitty dystopian novel, but looking at Trump's cabinet I'm no longer doubting that this is the Republican party's 5-10-20 year plan. They are chipping away at everything, and the awful picture that is emerging is becomeing clearer and clearer.
posted by gatorae at 10:08 AM on November 29, 2016 [44 favorites]

Recently, Michael Flynn praised Milo Yiannopoulos

It's just con-artists all the way down with these people
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:10 AM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

U.S. Citizenry Admits It Could Kind Of Go For Charismatic Authoritarian Dictator (the Onion, 2013)
posted by theodolite at 10:10 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Looks like there's a guy in the #Trump Tower lobby reading 'Night' by Elie Wiesel out loud
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:12 AM on November 29, 2016 [57 favorites]

What it means is that "repeal, period" will become the Republican position and "repeal and replace with something that hopefully is going to be slightly less shitty than nothing" will have to be the Democratic position.

Or not. That's not how the Dems handled the "turn Social Security into a 401(k)" Bush-era proposals. "Repeal and these specific people will die and we will blame you for it" will have to be the Democratic position.
posted by holgate at 10:13 AM on November 29, 2016 [29 favorites]

That "The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect" linked upthread is some extremely disturbing reading. Let me lay this on you, and then we can all go home and hide in the cellar until the state police come for us:

Remarkably, the trend toward openness to nondemocratic alternatives
is especially strong among citizens who are both young and rich. Returning
to the question of approval for military rule, in 1995 only 6 percent
of rich young Americans (those born since 1970) believed that it would
be a “good” thing for the army to take over; today, this view is held by
35 percent of rich young Americans. Nor is the United States an outlier
among mature democracies. In Europe in 1995, 6 percent of high-income
earners born since 1970 favored the possibility of “army rule”; today, 17
percent of young upper-income Europeans favor it.

I'm a little surprised at their surprise, I admit, since "rich people are all fascists at heart; we're just laying chickens to them" (per Marge Piercy) has always been my deep-seated belief. But it's depressing to see it laid out so baldly.

Lately I've been thinking about how I'll die - homeless and frozen to death because I was too sick to work and lost my house, of a treatable condition that I can't afford to treat, in a labor camp, in a prison camp, shot at a protest? I feel like on November 8 my life expectancy dropped by about twenty five years.
posted by Frowner at 10:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [80 favorites]

Frowner, I favorited that, but it felt awful.
posted by Mooski at 10:22 AM on November 29, 2016 [27 favorites]

It has now been three weeks since we learned that Donald Trump will become President of the United States of America.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:24 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

A Moral Guide to Serving in the Trump Administration: Some people will have no problems accepting positions in the Trump administration with nary a second thought. But there are many others out there who have deep concerns and are asking themselves questions that they may never have considered before any other newly arriving administration, regardless of party. These public servants must now pause to think about their personal moral and ethical boundaries — what administration decisions or policies would be so personally unacceptable that they would feel required to resign. It is impossible, of course, to know exactly what President-elect Trump will do once in office.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:25 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Good luck finding the votes to repeal ACA past a Senate filibuster. Sure the Republicans can do a lot to gut ACA through reconciliation but there are some things in the ACA that can't just be erased with reconciliation.

Repealing ACA plays well with the base but the second people's kids can't be on their parent's insurance as long, as soon as the ban of rejecting policies based upon pre-existing conditions, as soon as the millions who now have ACA and will not under a repeal scheme release that they are getting suckered the pushback will be enormous.

And when you do things via reconciliation there is no bipartisan political cover. Democrats get to run attack ad after attack ad showing how your Republican congressman took away people's stuff.

The Republicans know they can't actually implement a workable replacement so they are going to try to distract the voters with Trump antics and get something passed quick. Basically they have to get something through congress in 2017 because nobody will want to touch it in 2018 (midterms).

If Republicans in the House were smart they would try to pass some stuff that will make Trump popular and then try to expand their Congressional hold in 2018 when the Senate races are largely in their favor and then try to pass stuff in the second half of his first term.

But I guess they also realize that the window for actually getting rid of ACA is rapidly closing (once people get used to a benefit they don't want to give it up) and so they are going to try to do get something done fast and then spin, spin, spin it as being something Obama is responsible for.
posted by vuron at 10:26 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I'm hopeful (is that the right word? probably not) that the Republicans try to go after Medicare first. Maybe. Or maybe they are just going to be able to ram through whatever they want and then send KellyAnne & Co. out to openly lie about what they are doing until everyone believes them.
posted by tivalasvegas at 10:33 AM on November 29, 2016

Frowner, I favorited that, but it felt awful.

I've been feeling pretty awful! I just don't see how the current situation ends except badly, and I'm never going to be rich enough to weather the storm. I don't have any retirement except social security, a pension and the house, and the government is obviously going to take away the first two, even though I've been paying into both for years. So I'll work until I'm too old and sick to work and then they'll throw me out on the street and I'll die, probably like a lot of other people.
posted by Frowner at 10:34 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

Senate filibuster

shh, don't remind them that this is still a thing that exists. Hopefully they gish-gallop their way into forgetting to get rid of it on day one
posted by tivalasvegas at 10:34 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Call it whistling past the grave, perhaps, but I'm less and less convinced that the Republicans will manage to stick with "REPEAL and maybe replace the ACA". Like the dog that catches the car, they will probably have to do *something*, but that might come down to a package outrageous enough that 41 Senate Democrats filibuster it and the Republicans just shrug and let it drop.

The basic problem of the Obamacare tripod (guaranteed coverage, mandate to buy so that the pool is healthy enough, subsidies to help with the mandate) isn't going anywhere - remove any one of those legs and the whole thing falls over. And if I can see that, so can each elected Republican. Maybe they fiddle with some marginal things.

Or - who knows - maybe it's the apocalypse, and nothing matters anyway.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:36 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Think Trump's scary now? Obama is leaving him with broad war powers

…Now, the Obama administration has warped the AUMF even further. As the New York Times reported on Monday, the White House is claiming it can use the 2001 law to go after al-Shabaab in Somalia, another group that didn’t exist in 2001, which the Times openly states in its lead paragraph “will strengthen President-elect Donald J Trump’s authority” to wage war when he enters office.…

posted by Lexica at 10:36 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Good luck finding the votes to repeal ACA past a Senate filibuster. Sure the Republicans can do a lot to gut ACA through reconciliation but there are some things in the ACA that can't just be erased with reconciliation.

They already voted to repeal the subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and the individual and employer mandates through reconciliation last year, and it would have happened but for President Obama's veto. Once those are gone, there's not a ton left, at least when it comes to actually providing insurance to people.
posted by zachlipton at 10:37 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Trump and Bloomberg seek to bury the hatchet in lengthy phone call
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:38 AM on November 29, 2016

Donald Trump Is an Emotional Weakling. Here’s How to Manipulate Him

That was not a half-bad article from Slate. Conclusion:

You don’t talk about ethics. You play the toughness card. You appeal to the art of the deal. You make him feel smart, powerful, and loved. You don’t forget how unmoored and volatile he is, but you set aside your fear and your anger. You thank God that you’re dealing with a narcissist, not a cold-blooded killer. And until you can get him safely out of the White House, you work with what you have. People in other countries have dealt with presidents like Trump for a long time. Can we handle it? Yes, we can.

Also, though, ugh. We have to be nice to the stupid rich white bully or he'll hurt us more. Ugh.
posted by tivalasvegas at 10:40 AM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

Climate change denial will be ‘default position’ of White House says Trump’s chief of staff

Speaking to Fox News, Mr Priebus said: “As far as this issue on climate change – the only thing he was saying after being asked a few questions about it is, look, he'll have an open mind about it but he has his default position, which most of it is a bunch of bunk, but he'll have an open mind and listen to people. I think that’s what he’s saying.”

Watching Priebus try to spin this stuff would be hilarious if it didn't involve the millions of lives that are at risk due to climate change.
posted by zachlipton at 10:42 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

But I guess they also realize that the window for actually getting rid of ACA is rapidly closing (once people get used to a benefit they don't want to give it up) and so they are going to try to do get something done fast and then spin, spin, spin it as being something Obama is responsible for.

People just saw rates go up. The rates went up by less than they were projected to without the ACA - the ACA is working, here - but that's a nuanced view people will tend to ignore. I think that's going to be the spin, rates went up under Obamacare.

This will absolutely be a double edged sword if rates go up even more afterwards. But I bet they think they can repeal, and then hang the failure to replace and any rate increases that come with on the Democrats.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:42 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

> I've been feeling pretty awful! I just don't see how the current situation ends except badly, and I'm never going to be rich enough to weather the storm. I don't have any retirement except social security, a pension and the house, and the government is obviously going to take away the first two, even though I've been paying into both for years. So I'll work until I'm too old and sick to work and then they'll throw me out on the street and I'll die, probably like a lot of other people.

See I'm adding this to my list of reasons why Metafilter should gradually stop being an old-fashioned community blog and start being the First Distributed Republic. We need to lay claim to some amount of real estate so that Frowner can be made unquestioned first-among-equals at one of our major compounds.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [34 favorites]

"Repeal and these specific people will die and we will blame you for it"

As a specific person more likely to die as a result of Republican fascism, I'm not seeing a big improvement in this position. Realistically, I know that options are limited. Still, I would like for "minimal harm" to be the motivational factor going forward. People will be hurt, people are already being hurt, and some Trumpian policies may doom our species and planet; but they have to be fought every step of the way. I think Frowner is right to see them as simply fascists motivated to do harm to others. The rest of us just have to keep standing up to that however we can.

I feel like on November 8 my life expectancy dropped by about twenty five years.

Same. Please hang in there.
posted by byanyothername at 10:45 AM on November 29, 2016 [25 favorites]

So much for "We The People". Might as well start the Constitution with "We, myself, and I".
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:45 AM on November 29, 2016

They already voted to repeal the subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and the individual and employer mandates through reconciliation last year, and it would have happened but for President Obama's veto.

But that was political theater: they knew it would be vetoed and were just playing to the groundlings. Now that their actions have consequences, those groundlings might not be cheering them on.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:48 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

One thing that most of you seem to be overlooking is the fact that a large number of trump supporters live in states like Oklahoma, which never even implemented the ACA. When is it is repealed, it won't change a thing for them. So why should they be upset about its demise? Attacking Trump on the ACA front is a losing battle, at least where his base is concerned.
posted by landis at 10:49 AM on November 29, 2016

One thing that most of you seem to be overlooking is the fact that a large number of trump supporters live in states like Oklahoma, which never even implemented the ACA. When is it is repealed, it won't change a thing for them. So why should they be upset about its demise? Attacking Trump on the ACA front is a losing battle, at least where his base is concerned.

6 Years Later: How the Affordable Care Act is Working for Oklahoma
posted by zombieflanders at 10:55 AM on November 29, 2016 [19 favorites]

Repealing the individual mandate without repealing the ban on being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions would be awful for insurance companies. The second they are forced to absorb only the sickest while not getting the benefit of more dollars from healthy low cost patients the entire system is nonviable.

Get rid of the pre-existing condition ban and people will be angry, make them pay for insurance without government subsidies and people will get angry, etc.

The only "solution" is to go back to pre-ACA broken medical system where US medical costs go up even faster and lots of people are uninsured and people get denied coverage routinely.

I'm not sure that even Republican voters are wanting to go back to the pre-ACA status quo and I'm not sure that it's possible to do that entirely by reconciliation.

Make no doubt, people will get fucked over hard by the Trump administration but the optics on gutting ACA much less Medicare are beyond awful. Democrats are more or less itching for a fight over entitlements because they know it's an awful issue for Republicans to be pushing.
posted by vuron at 10:58 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

One thing that most of you seem to be overlooking is the fact that a large number of trump supporters live in states like Oklahoma, which never even implemented the ACA. When is it is repealed, it won't change a thing for them. So why should they be upset about its demise? Attacking Trump on the ACA front is a losing battle, at least where his base is concerned.

This isn't exactly true -- while Medicaid expansion was blocked by a number of red states (and blue states with red governors), the ACA subsidies are still helping large number of working-class (there's that word again!) folks get insurance. The Feds just stepped in with healthcare.gov when it turned out a lot of states couldn't or wouldn't set up their own marketplaces, which was the original design.
posted by tivalasvegas at 10:58 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

The insurance lobby and the medical industry lobby are going to be our best friends in this struggle. They may not love the ACA, but they've spent a lot of time and energy to reorient everything to fit this new landscape, and they have the power and influence in Washington to peel away some of the Republicans. I hope.
posted by tivalasvegas at 11:00 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

They will do some sort of catastrophic plan thing. It might even be universal. They will find ways to stear medicate/medicaid benefits to their constituents.

I wonder if ACA doesn't have a lot of stimulative economic effects that will be lost when it's repealed.
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:03 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

A good question, though, is: how many people in Oklahoma, or elsewhere, think of all that stuff as 'the ACA' or as 'Obamacare'? How many people actually know that repealing the ACA would directly harm them?

It's not about knowledge. It's about feelings, and I don't know how you talk someone out of having feelings that have been carefully fed and nourished for six years with loving doses of propaganda.

The pressure points are in the Republican caucuses. They have to believe that they will lose their job (or never get another cent from the massive healthcare industry, which is basically working to the same fear) if they do this.
posted by tivalasvegas at 11:03 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I wish there were some non-profit unionized factory that could make Confederate flags to be sold for the sole intention of burning them, all profits to go to the SPLC.

Under our new AG, I'd be willing to bet burning Confederate flags will actually be considered a far worse crime:

After the June 17 massacre of nine African-American worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white racist who revered the flag as a symbol of white supremacy, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley succumbed to public demands and urged that the Confederate battle flag be removed from the state capitol in Columbia. Two days later, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley had four Confederate flags removed from the state capitol in Montgomery.

Appearing on a Birmingham talk radio program, Sessions said he would not criticize Bentley’s decision. He said that “a lot [of] our good citizens feel like [the flag] was kind of commandeered” as an “idea of anti-civil rights,” telling host Matt Murphy that he was “sensitive” to that point of view.

But Sessions said he was no fan of any attempt to “erase history” or “who we are,” recalling his own family’s role in the Civil War. “This is a huge part of who we are and the left is continually seeking, in a host of different ways, it seems to me, I don’t want to be too paranoid about this, but they seek to delegitimize the fabulous accomplishments of our country,” the senator added.

posted by zombieflanders at 11:07 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

the fabulous accomplishments of our country[, the Confederate States of America]
posted by uncleozzy at 11:09 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Twitter thread: Let's go over, once more, what the United States is doing right now in North Dakota.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Three years ago my wife and I had to move from Oklahoma to Oregon so that she could get the medical treatments she needed. Treatments that we had no way to pay for in the climate of the Sooner state. I'm on a crappy phone, so posting is difficult, but I encourage you to Google for information on how the Oklahoma State Insurance Commissioner, working with the office of Governor Mary Fallon, did all they could to fight against the ACA. Thousands of people might have received subsidies; thousands more, like my wife, were left out in the cold.
posted by landis at 11:16 AM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Dan Quayle just came to visit Trump and none of the press recognized him.
posted by zachlipton at 11:19 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

Twitter thread: Let's go over, once more, what the United States is doing right now in North Dakota.

I know this isn't new to anyone here, but it's insane to contrast this to the Malheur takeover.
posted by zutalors! at 11:20 AM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

So when does Alex Jones host the live mandatory television show where they open Area 51's vaults? Cause I got a thing on Wednesdays at 8.
posted by petebest at 11:24 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Dan Quayle just came to visit Trump and none of the press recognized him.

I burst out laughing at this, but then realized... I wouldn't recognize him either.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 11:28 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

One final data point and I'll let this whole thing drop. I'm scheduled for a root canal which the Oregon Health Plan will cover with no out-of-pocket expense for me. My best friend in Oklahoma had to go to the Urgent Care Clinic because of an infection. The visit cost $65 and the antibiotics another 70 on top of that. She's a working mother with two small children. The ACA in Oklahoma as it is implemented there was of no help to her. I'll bow out now.
posted by landis at 11:28 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I know this isn't new to anyone here, but it's insane to contrast this to the Malheur takeover.

@AdamSerwer: If they didn't want their supplies cut off they should have been a posse of armed white guys
posted by zombieflanders at 11:30 AM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Shaun King: Without Obama in the White House, the Democratic Party is painfully and disproportionately white

Now that a black man is no longer going to be leading the White House, we’re are getting a chance to see just how white so many of these houses of government truly are and I’m not here for it. And you should not be here for it either. The Democratic Party appears to have leaned almost exclusively on the Obama Administration for its diversity.

posted by monospace at 11:31 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I just spent a few hours writing a "here's the history of the Supreme Court case that affirmed the right to burn the flag" piece, which I was assigned by one of my outlets after this morning's shenanigans. (It isn't up yet but you can Google my name in a while and it will be.)

Thoughts while writing: I HATE THIS. The flag burning laws really got rolling when 48 states and Congress decided they hated Vietnam War protestors. The man who was charged in the case was a revolutionary punk who was hard to like from the viewpoint of anything mainstream in 1984, but HIS RIGHTS MATTERED AND THEY WERE UPHELD. And the majority opinion in Texas v. Johnson, which affirmed the right to burn the flag, brought tears to my eyes. In part:

If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.

At times like this I am torn between gratitude that I write about history and grief that I have to remind people about this shit—and that it probably won't make any difference.
posted by mynameisluka at 11:33 AM on November 29, 2016 [26 favorites]

U.S. Citizenry Admits It Could Kind Of Go For Charismatic Authoritarian Dictator (the Onion, 2013)

The Hamid article above mentions something like that-

Islamism promised to remove the spiritual confusion associated with individualism and seemingly unlimited choices. I’ll never forget sitting in the back of a Cairo cab with a random guy, who was getting high on hashish and going on about the need for sharia, or Islamic law. He wanted an Islamic state to force him to stop doing drugs because he didn’t want to sin. But he didn’t know how, at least not on his own.

posted by Apocryphon at 11:34 AM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

Maggie Haberman, who has had the inside track on everyone inside the campaign/transition hating on each other, has some interesting tweets on the Kremlinology of Trump's ridiculous Game of Thrones process for who he listens to. They aren't easily linkable as a thread, so I've storifyed them for your convenience.
posted by zachlipton at 11:36 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

A testy John McCain to reporters: "I will not speak about Donald Trump, and I do not want to be asked again."
posted by zachlipton at 11:39 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

"I will not speak about Donald Trump, and I do not want to be asked again."

Like, ever?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

A testy John McCain to reporters: "I will not speak about Donald Trump, and I do not want to be asked again."

John McCain's DC office number is [phone] in case you want to ask him about Donald Trump.
posted by melissasaurus at 11:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [68 favorites]

"President? We have a President? First I'm hearing about it."
posted by Etrigan at 11:43 AM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

He wanted an Islamic state to force him to stop doing drugs because he didn’t want to sin.

the human desire for someone to tell you exactly what to do is very, very strong. i feel the pull all the time.
posted by murphy slaw at 11:45 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Does Shaun King want to run for a thing because I support that
posted by zutalors! at 11:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Remember when national politicians were making fun of Alex Jones and not using him as a source
I recall in a thread before the election that someone was semi-joking about a prospective Trump cabinet and saying "Senior Advisor Alex Jones" or something similar and I laughed and laughed thought it was hilarious.

I'm not laughing anymore.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 11:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

"I will not speak about Donald Trump, and I do not want to be asked again."

Like, ever?

If we all adopted this strategy Trump would probably simply disappear into thin air.
posted by dis_integration at 11:47 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Like the dog that catches the car, they will probably have to do *something*, but that might come down to a package outrageous enough that 41 Senate Democrats filibuster it and the Republicans just shrug and let it drop.

Huh. Maybe this ends up being the reason the Senate Republicans don't kill the filibuster --- they're scared to death of actually having to implement their agenda and would much rather there be a convenient way to dispose of most of it (and blame it on the opposition, for a bonus!).
posted by jackbishop at 11:48 AM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Dispatches from the Alternate Universe where Hillary Clinton Won. Lots of outlets prepared for the opposite outcome. And so, thanks to Trump's unexpected electoral victory, there is now a massive, unprecedented content graveyard of articles celebrating or analyzing Hillary Clinton's would-be historic victory.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:48 AM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

If Shaun King wants Ellison to be DNC chair, Ellison had better stop running away from NYT interviews because he doesn't want them asking questions about Louis Farrakhan. If he can't handle it from the Times, how's he going to handle it live on tv from a Republican?
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 11:50 AM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Steve M.: Yes, Many Trump Voters Are Going to Lose Their Healthcare. No, They're Not Going to Blame Him

After repeal, the Trumpers will get inadequate insurance, or no insurance -- and they won't blame Trump, or the greedy insurance companies that won't cover them adequately. If they blame anyone, they'll blame the usual suspects: Democrats, liberals, "big government" (yes, even if the new system is far more privatized). It's what heartland whites always do. Don't expect it to change.

posted by tonycpsu at 11:53 AM on November 29, 2016 [35 favorites]

Like, ever?

If we all adopted this strategy Trump would probably simply disappear into thin air.

That's what I legit thought would happen when he rode down that escalator and called Mexicans rapists.
posted by zutalors! at 11:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

the human desire for someone to tell you exactly what to do is very, very strong. i feel the pull all the time.

"God was a dream of good government."
posted by Apocryphon at 11:54 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I know this isn't new to anyone here, but it's insane to contrast this to the Malheur takeover.

I think comparing and contrasting the responses to the Malheur takeover and the Standing Rock protests is quite reasonable.
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

"I will not speak about Donald Trump, and I do not want to be asked again."

As long as you have that (R) after your name, it's a legitimate question, John.
It's your move.
posted by rocket88 at 11:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Bahrain to host event at Trump's D.C. hotel, raising ethical concerns
posted by Golden Eternity at 11:57 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Bahrain to host event at Trump's D.C. hotel, raising ethical concerns

To steal a line from Twitter, a kleptocratic family who disdains democracy, and the al-Khalifas, invite you to celebrate...
posted by Etrigan at 11:59 AM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Top German Spy Warns of Political Cyberattacks, Russia Links
posted by Golden Eternity at 12:01 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Shaun King: Without Obama in the White House, the Democratic Party is painfully and disproportionately white

This is not very accurate, to the point that I have to think King is just not acting in good faith. 22\% of the current Democratic House membership is black, 34\% are women, and 12\% are latinos.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:04 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

(which is to say that while the things he says are accurate, leaving out the things he leaves out is so misleading as to be actively dishonest)
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:06 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

the human desire for someone to tell you exactly what to do is very, very strong

Yeah, but then you do something like tax sugary sodas, say "Happy Holidays", or just change the logo on a popular app and people just LOSE THEIR SHIT.
posted by FJT at 12:11 PM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

The Trump White House: a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and babies.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:11 PM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

the problem is that people want to be told exactly what to do and have it be what they're already doing
posted by murphy slaw at 12:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

I know this isn't new to anyone here, but it's insane to contrast this to the Malheur takeover.

I think comparing and contrasting the responses to the Malheur takeover and the Standing Rock protests is quite reasonable.

posted by Cookiebastard at 11:57 AM on November 29 [3 favorites +] [!]

I'm really not sure what you thought I was saying, but what I was saying was that the response to Standing Rock is inhumane and racist. Is that more clear?
posted by zutalors! at 12:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

In the category of "I listen to this shit so that you don't have to", Limbaugh has this regarding the Trump twitter trolls and Conway bashing Romney and &c.:

(paraphrasing) This is the Trump management method. He likes to stir the pot to elevate the energy level in the discourse as a brainstorming seed. No big deal.
posted by bukvich at 12:14 PM on November 29, 2016

like, inhumane and racist is an understatement.
posted by zutalors! at 12:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

> This is not very accurate, to the point that I have to think King is just not acting in good faith. 22\% of the current Democratic House membership is black, 34\% are women, and 12\% are latinos.

Even these numbers are disproportionately white and male, though.

I'd say that King's focus on leadership positions within the party is probably correct; if the leadership and the public face of the party is white and male, it sort of doesn't matter that my own house representative is a Black woman.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:19 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

In Oklahoma, I spent hours on the phone and more hours in various offices trying to get health insurance for my wife. Healthcare.gov, after the application process, told us ( and I'm paraphrasing only lightly), "We have determined that you are eligible for benefits, but the State of Oklahoma has declined to offer them to you at this time."

In Oregon, after one phone call (true, I was on hold forever and the music was awful), she had health insurance. When they found out about her condition, she was moved to fast track approval. One phone call.

But please, tell me more about how the ACA helped poor Oklahomans.

(Sorry, but this a sore spot for me. But I get upset when people throw up links in rebuttal to the lived experience of myself and people I know. Others here might know that feeling.)

And now I really will shut up.
posted by landis at 12:21 PM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

USA Today: When someone burns a flag, he’s essentially saying “I disagree with our government’s policies.” When Trump tweets a message like this, he’s saying “Constitution? What Constitution?”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:24 PM on November 29, 2016 [30 favorites]

He said that 'a lot [of] our good citizens feel like [the flag] was kind of commandeered' as an 'idea of anti-civil rights.'

Gee, I wonder where they got that idea?

This Is Why South Carolina Raised the Confederate Flag in the First Place

“The Confederate flag symbolizes more than the civil war and the slavery era,” wrote James Forman Jr. a professor at Yale Law School, in a law journal article about the flag’s history at state capitols. “The flag has been adopted knowingly and consciously by government officials seeking to assert their commitment to black subordination.”

Why the Confederate Flag Made a 20th Century Comeback

The Confederate battle flag made its reappearance following the end of World War II. A group of southern states seceded from the Democratic party and ran their own ticket, the Dixiecrats, and the Confederate battle flag was very prominent with the Dixiecrat campaign in the 1948 presidential election. Before ‘48, it had appeared occasionally at football games at southern universities, and usually at soldiers’ reunions or commemorations of Civil War battles; but other than that, it really was not a prominent feature of the South.

Once the Dixiecrats got a hold of it as a matter of defiance against their Democratic colleagues in the north and the African Americans in their midst, then the Confederate battle flag took on a new life, or a second life. In the 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement built up steam, you began to see more and more public displays of the Confederate battle flag, to the point where the state of Georgia in 1956 redesigned their state flag to include the Confederate battle flag.

The surprisingly uncomplicated racist history of the Confederate flag

In 1948, Strom Thurmond's States' Rights Party adopted the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia as a symbol of defiance against the federal government. What precisely required such defiance? The president's powers to enforce civil rights laws in the South, as represented by the Democratic Party's somewhat progressive platform on civil rights.

Georgia adopted its version of the flag design in 1956 to protest the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated schools, in Brown v. Board of Education.

The flag first flew over the state capitol in South Carolina in 1962, a year after George Wallace raised it over the grounds of the legislature in Alabama, quite specifically to link more aggressive efforts to integrate the South with the trigger of secession 100 years before — namely, the storming of occupied Fort Sumter by federal troops.

posted by kirkaracha at 12:25 PM on November 29, 2016 [26 favorites]

zutalors, I misunderstood you. We are very much on the same page.
posted by Cookiebastard at 12:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

yes, I basically meant that comparing Malheur and Standing rock was making me feel like an insane person.
posted by zutalors! at 12:29 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Tea Party leader still standing up to Trump. Still amazed by it.

@justinamash:
Nobody should burn the American flag, but our Constitution secures our right to do so. No president is allowed to burn the First Amendment.
posted by chris24 at 12:29 PM on November 29, 2016 [29 favorites]

racist, white supremacist, christian-theocratic, conspiracy wingnut

yay it's all my favorite words
posted by zutalors! at 12:37 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

The MTA took a 1 train out of service on Saturday night after finding 13 swastikas drawn in black ink, according to the NYPD.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:37 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Tea Party leader still standing up to Trump. Still amazed by it.

Amash was a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives when his primary opponent called him "Al-Qaeda's best friend in Congress". Amash is a first-generation natural-born American citizen; his mother and father are Syrian and Palestinian, respectively.

He's a Tea Partier all the way, until it's his not-white-enough ass that might be on the line.
posted by Etrigan at 12:48 PM on November 29, 2016 [16 favorites]

Reluctant Libertarian Calls the Fire Department Acknowledges That the Free Market Offers No Protection From Bigotry
posted by tonycpsu at 12:54 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

He's a Tea Partier all the way, until it's his not-white-enough ass that might be on the line.

An actual anti-big-government tea-partier, though (as in, both end the safety net and dismantle the security & surveillance state). Do I want him at the head of HHS or Treasury? No.

Is he an ally in the struggle against authoritarianism? Yes.
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:02 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

I know this isn't new to anyone here, but it's insane to contrast this to the Malheur takeover.

I think comparing and contrasting the responses to the Malheur takeover and the Standing Rock protests is quite reasonable.

I'm really not sure what you thought I was saying, but what I was saying was that the response to Standing Rock is inhumane and racist. Is that more clear?

Just wanted to chime in to say Cookiebastard was not the only one who misunderstood what you said, so thanks for clarifying.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 1:05 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Ok. That's a bit weird but ok.
posted by zutalors! at 1:06 PM on November 29, 2016

Also I think that the fact that the Standing Rock response is so terrible is exactly WHY it should be compared to Malheur -- which, I guess, is why we misunderstood you. I think it would be insane NOT to compare the two responses.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 1:07 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Also I think that the fact that the Standing Rock response is so terrible is exactly WHY it should be compared to Malheur -- which, I guess, is why we misunderstood you.

That's why I specifically said contrast instead of compare. Which I guess was interpreted as "it's insane to compare Malheur to Standing Rock" because Standing Rock is no big deal at all!
posted by zutalors! at 1:08 PM on November 29, 2016

Vice: The Entire Internet Will Be Archived In Canada to Protect It From Trump
posted by PenDevil at 1:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

Which I guess was interpreted as "it's insane to compare Malheur to Standing Rock" because Standing Rock is no big deal at all!

No, not even close. I think we interpreted it as, the two situations were/are different enough in the specific circumstances that it doesn't make sense to compare them to each other, even before you get to the response. Which is to say, you were talking about the responses to the things, and we thought you were talking about the things themselves.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 1:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A few comments deleted. Folks, further parsing of that one comment about comparing Malheur and Standing Rock should probably go to email for the interested parties at this point.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

The ACA's enforced-capitalism funding method (tax-penalty-forced individual payments to one of many private companies, with labyrinthine administrative hoops if you need further means-tested assistance) is a very strange, very terrible structure we generally don't use for government. Why would we? We have taxes, which is a much more straightforward system: give a percentage of your money to a government, the government figures out how to split it up for everything its citizens need.

Thanks, Romney!
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

He's a Tea Partier all the way, until it's his not-white-enough ass that might be on the line.

Until recently, the Tea Party has not been inherently pro-Trump. Throughout the primaries, Cruz was their standard-bearer. It may just be Amash's conviction to the libertarian aspects of the Tea Party movement are true. Libertarians do tend to be inherently anti-established power; Rand Paul has been attacking all of Trump's Secretary of State choices so far.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:19 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

You know how a lot of us have been worried about how terrible the next 4 years are going to be? This morning I'm worried that we haven't envisioned how bad it can be-- that a Trump Presidency is going to be nightmarish in ways we can't even imagine.

I think that is what you call your unknown unknowns.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:21 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

The individual mandate is the only way that ACA works. Allow people to opt out when they are healthy and you only have a risk pool of the higher cost patients. Have a system where you cannot be denied coverage if you have pre-existing conditions allows people to avoid paying for insurance until they need the coverage. Furthermore by increasing the risk pool to include healthy patients you have increased cost savings. This is compounded by the advantages of offering low cost preventative care rather than forcing people to depend on ERs (who can't turn away anyone).

ACA is a mess and frankly I wouldn't mind seeing it replaced with a comprehensive universal health care system (I don't think that it requires single payer but some would prefer that model). However there is absolutely no way that we are getting a single payer system anytime soon. Hell the Republicans would like to get rid of single-payer for seniors.
posted by vuron at 1:23 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

It's what heartland whites always do. Don't expect it to change.

Yup. This (situation) has ended any desire I may have had to engage on any level about any issues with Trump supporters, Tea Partiers, Libertarians, friends, family, and that guy at work who calls me "Bill".

And now, we will sit in steely silence for four-to-eight years. It might otherwise be very Zen.

*eats tv remote*
posted by petebest at 1:25 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

Cruz was their standard-bearer.

Uh huh.

It may just be Amash's conviction to the libertarian aspects of the Tea Party movement are true.

That would make him quite unique, as a quick cross-reference of this list with the list of Republicans who endorsed Trump shows.

Rand Paul has been attacking all of Trump's Secretary of State choices so far.

And yet.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:26 PM on November 29, 2016

Newt Gingrich: Voice of Reason.

We are living in the end times.
posted by Cookiebastard at 1:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Pennsylvania Obamacare fan remained loyal to Fox News till the end
posted by Golden Eternity at 1:31 PM on November 29, 2016

Amash never endorsed Trump for president, and all I really know about his character is that during his time in the Michigan Legislature, and currently in Congress, he would explain the reasoning behind each of his votes on Facebook, which is a pretty refreshing bit of transparency in governance.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Well I guess after Republicans gut ACA, Medicare and Medicaid maybe just maybe progressives will get an electoral mandate to replace all of it with nationalized healthcare. Of course there will be lots of people hurt in the meantime especially in states that are utterly dependent on ACA, Medicare and Medicaid.

Personally I was willing to lock in the Obama status quo rather than deal with 4 years of regressive government. Do I want more? Yeah but I was willing to go with the incremental approach until Democrats can reclaim some congressional power. I guess we'll be 2 steps forward, 2 steps back instead.
posted by vuron at 1:38 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Right, so the Not Batshit Caucus now includes Congressional Democrats plus Justin Amash. I'm glad to have him on board, but it doesn't really move the needle.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:39 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

That said, currently on that same Facebook page, Amash is praising DeVos, and posing with Pence, so it's possible to praise civic openness, without endorsing the practitioner who practices it.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Personally I was willing to lock in the Obama status quo rather than deal with 4 years of regressive government. Do I want more? Yeah but I was willing to go with the incremental approach until Democrats can reclaim some congressional power. I guess we'll be 2 steps forward, 2 steps back instead.

Like I said the other day, I think we might all be unwilling accelerationists now.
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

John Cole, Balloon Juice: Congratulations, West Virginia

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t keep them from pissing in it and then drowning themselves in the urine.

posted by tonycpsu at 1:43 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

The individual mandate is the only way that ACA works.

True, but that doesn't change the fact that there's quite a few people whose day to day lives have been made worse because they're paying for a high deductible plan that they don't perceive as providing a benefit compared to paying out of pocket (unless they're part of the small portion of young, healthy people that have something catastrophic happen). The subsidies help, but there's still people feeling the squeeze from the individual mandate that might rejoice if it goes away.

I guess we'll be 2 steps forward, 2 steps back instead.

I worry that you're being extremely optimistic on both sides of the equation.

maybe progressives will get an electoral mandate to replace all of it with nationalized healthcare.

After seeing Obama hobbled by how the Republicans were able to sell it to their constituents , the sweep of the Tea Party, and the massive disappointment of this election (nationally, not just the presidency), I'll be surprised if the Democrats are willing to take up nationalized health care within 20 years.
posted by Candleman at 1:44 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

That said, currently on that same Facebook page, Amash is praising DeVos and posing with Pence

Well, yes. He also is opposed to any federal role in education so he's on the same page with her on that.

I feel like we've kind of already done this to death, and mostly come out with the opinion that while MeFi is mostly a left-of-center to far-left group, we also believe it is important to ally with centrists and conservatives (whether of the libertarian or religious sort) who oppose Trumpism. Amash, whatever his small-d deplorable policy preferences, is not a big-D Deplorable, as far as I can tell.
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:45 PM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

forcing people to depend on ERs (who can't turn away anyone).

They can't turn you away if you are critical, but they can turn you away for anything else. And more than one person has died in a crowded ER waiting room.

I mean, it's a given: people are gonna die.

The question I can't answer is: will anyone care, or will hating the Others be such a great drug that they'll shrug and decide the dead ones deserved it for [reasons]?

Guess we'll find out.
posted by emjaybee at 1:45 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

maybe progressives will get an electoral mandate to replace all of it with nationalized healthcare.

After seeing Obama hobbled by how the Republicans were able to sell it to their constituents , the sweep of the Tea Party, and the massive disappointment of this election (nationally, not just the presidency), I'll be surprised if the Democrats are willing to take up nationalized health care within 20 years.

I agree with you, but I thought vuron was responding to the quip about the left lacking vision.
posted by zutalors! at 1:46 PM on November 29, 2016

I wonder if California will create its own replacement for ACA. I can't imagine it will be single-payer.
posted by Golden Eternity at 1:58 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

An ER has to evaluate you or be open to a huge lawsuit. The registration staff can't turn you away. A licenced medical professional has to evaluate you and then tell you to leave.
posted by AlexiaSky at 1:58 PM on November 29, 2016

how the Republicans were able to sell it to their constituents

It's technically really easy. Own the framing and the media.

The Trump Delusions will (continue to) put this on stunning display. Why we suck so bad at it, couldn't say. Actually, I thought the DNC convention was a great salvo, but they couldn't outrun the butternut turd. Hey, Thanks Chuck Todd and Matt Lauer! I bet someday you guys'll be millionaires too! Liz Spayd, keep - whatever it is you think you do - keep doin' it! Compliant press, enjoy those stale cheese puff benefits!

Everything from policy to demographics are after that.
posted by petebest at 1:59 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

hey so if we ever get a democracy in this country, and if we ever get rid of Trump, could we bring back the tradition of Damnatio memoriae? Just take his name off of everything, redact all documents mentioning him, do everything possible to ensure that the string "trump" is henceforth only used to refer to suits in card games and, occasionally, as a fancy way to describe the sound of flatulence?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:59 PM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Trump Pick for Deputy National Security Adviser Outed Brother Dying of AIDS and Refused to Visit Him

I think I'm done for awhile.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:00 PM on November 29, 2016 [34 favorites]

Wow, that WV link. I knew that Appalachia had a disproportionate percentage of people on SSDI and other entitlements but I didn't realize it was quite that bad. I guess dismantling the social safety net will probably do wonders for the economies of Appalachia. Maybe Coal will make a return, ohh wait the Republicans have already admitted that Coal isn't coming back (Natural Gas has basically killed it).

I guess it's kind of a self correcting problem, people will continue to migrate from Appalachia and the Red Areas of the Rust Belt and the Congressional representation will continue to shrink (you know except for Senators) giving these areas who like to vote in self-destructive manners less power to try to drag the US back into the past but it's going to take some time.

It'll be interesting if Democrats take a page from Republicans and start gerrymandering the hell out of various high population states. It seems like it would be possible to create a larger number of Democrat districts in California now.
posted by vuron at 2:02 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

hey so if we ever get a democracy in this country, and if we ever get rid of Trump, could we bring back the tradition of Damnatio memoriae? Just take his name off of everything, redact all documents mentioning him, do everything possible to ensure that the string "trump" is henceforth only used to refer to suits in card games and, occasionally, as a fancy way to describe the sound of flatulence?

No, because by not talking about him we risk getting another version of him in the future.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:03 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

We're gonna Santorum the s--t out of him.

wait
posted by petebest at 2:05 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

yes but if we could actually remove him from the historical record, that would discourage potential copycats who might be inspired to repeat his behavior.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:06 PM on November 29, 2016

I'll be surprised if the Democrats are willing to take up nationalized health care within 20 years.

It's not even vision, it's lack of tenacity. Why don't liberals and the American left be blatant instead of mealy-mouthed about big bold plans? "Yes, we're going to raise taxes, but we're going to pass the savings onto you, the middle class. We're going to bleed the fat cats and the insurance companies. We're going to make the American economy the best it can be on the backs of all the bosses who've fired you, the managers who broke your unions, the rich miserly assholes who never bothered to tip. We will insure you, we will cover you, we will give you the tools and environment to make you rich. Not those company men."

Bernie Sanders' legacy should be bringing some fire and spirit to the Democratic party, for dragging the slur "socialist" into a state of half-respectability in the most anti-communist nation on the planet that has never had an actual communist government in power. His campaign should have been a teachable moment, and the lesson is that you shouldn't be afraid to have some redistributive policies in your platform, and that you shouldn't be ashamed that your message and your rhetoric is further left than center-left. Instead, his legacy is shrouded in a million Twitter fights and dueling personalities and intra-political squabbling and backstabbing. So it goes.
posted by Apocryphon at 2:07 PM on November 29, 2016 [39 favorites]

So far, the teachable moment from the election for Democrats seems to be to move right and stop talking about identity politics. At least that seems to be what they are taking away from it.
posted by zutalors! at 2:11 PM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

From Golden Eternity's linked Chemi Shalev piece:

People of my generation were conditioned to believe in happy endings: from defeat of Nazism to the fall of Communism, from the War of Independence to the Six Day War, from the march of equality to the liberation of nations throughout the world, humanity seemed to be advancing, in fits and starts, but always forward. This is not the way many of our parents felt, however, at least if they were Jews. They grew up in a world that succumbed to its satanic self, that saw Nazi Germany annihilate the Jewish people in Europe, including their own families. In their world, happy endings are but temporary recesses before the new tragedies that inevitably come in their wake.

I am reminded of Tony Judt's comments from a few years ago (which I've probably quoted here before, sorry):

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard. [emphasis mine]

posted by enn at 2:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [22 favorites]

Minor-Key Analogy:

Minor key songs are cheap, easy, and plentiful. They're the most popular, and have been for decades. Didn't use to be - there was a time when pop music's only main quality was to make the listener feel good, or better. It's easy to write in a minor key; almost anyone can do it. And it's effective. Very effective. Also: Woodstock '99.

Major key songs are hard(er) to write, and are slower to "take" with listeners. Major key harmonies are easy to dismiss; they're cheesy, hokey, hippy. They make people happy but no one wants to share them - lest it lead to singing or some other social tragedy. Get a huge crowd to do it though and it's the best.
posted by petebest at 2:18 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

If Sanders can incorporate some intersectionality onto his arguments I'd be more willing to consider him as a standard bearer for the left but it seems like he was one of the first to latch onto the narrative that Trump's win was all about WWC economic angst. Nevermind that the PoCWC has even more economic insecurity than the WWC and voted disproportionately for Clinton. Nevermind that the people at the bottom rungs of society voted disproportionately for Clinton.

But I guess the message is that PoC and LGBT and other minority groups will vote Democrat no matter what so we need to find messaging that appeals to the WWC even though the vast majority of Trump's messaging was basically "Not White People's Fault, it's the fault of the Brown People".

If I start seeing Democrats figuring out how to co-opt economic populism in a way that doesn't sacrifice the needs of our minority populations I would be much happier but what I'm continually seeing online is that Democrats can't have both. Even places I felt were pretty progressive within the left-wing blogosphere are basically adopting language along the lines of minority populations need to stop trying to advance an agenda around civil rights because economic rights are more important than civil rights or some such narrative.
posted by vuron at 2:22 PM on November 29, 2016 [22 favorites]

But I guess the message is that PoC and LGBT and other minority groups will vote Democrat no matter what so we need to find messaging that appeals to the WWC even though the vast majority of Trump's messaging was basically "Not White People's Fault, it's the fault of the Brown People".

Right and if voter suppression continues like it has been many PoC won't be able to vote at all. What will be the Democrats' message then?
posted by zutalors! at 2:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'm starting to think we need to move towards states' rights and possibly massive civil disobedience on a federal level.

Progressives have been living under assumptions that the country always eventually progresses and demographic and cultural changes will always move in our favor. Under these conditions it makes sense to build federal programs for our future. But under our noses most of our government and most of the country outside of big cities has moved to the far-right. It no longer seems true that as goes California, so goes the country. At best it may switch back and forth, meaning we can create great govt programs only for following administrations to undo them. This is Fox News' world. We just live in it.

Perhaps it makes sense to do more on a state level, where populations are solidly progressive, perhaps even lobbying for lower federal taxes in favor of higher state taxes. Avoid federal govt service (including our Trumplania military) in favor of state govt. service. Etc. I don't know...
posted by Golden Eternity at 2:30 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

The Daily 202: Trump leaning on TV analysts as he staffs the government

The Trump revolution won’t just be televised. It will be led by television talking heads.

In August 2015, Chuck Todd asked Donald Trump on “Meet the Press” whom he talks with for military advice. “Well, I watch the shows,” said the former star of “The Apprentice,” another NBC franchise. “I mean, I really see a lot of great — you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows, you have the generals and you have certain people that you like.”

So it should come as no surprise that the president-elect is now stocking the federal government with these generals and other people that he’s seen on TV and likes.

This man is obsessed with cable news. He sees something on Fox News and all of a sudden he's tweeting about flag burning. It's incredibly unhealthy and dangerous.
posted by zachlipton at 2:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [26 favorites]

I guess it's kind of a self correcting problem, people will continue to migrate from Appalachia and the Red Areas of the Rust Belt and the Congressional representation will continue to shrink (you know except for Senators) giving these areas who like to vote in self-destructive manners less power to try to drag the US back into the past but it's going to take some time.

And as I've said a couple times since the election, I would bet (and I'd love to be able to back this up with data, but I don't know if that would even be possible) that those moving away from Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are disproportionately young and PoC and/or LGBT, a set of demographic characteristics that probably means this group will be heavily Democratic-leaning. Now if they moved to NYC, California or Chicago (hi!) that doesn't do much good in terms of Democratic electoral math.

But a lot of them moved to Atlanta and Houston and Charlotte, too.
posted by tivalasvegas at 2:35 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

If Sanders can incorporate some intersectionality onto his arguments I'd be more willing to consider him as a standard bearer for the left but it seems like he was one of the first to latch onto the narrative that Trump's win was all about WWC economic angst.

Though I also am skeptical of the hot take that chalks Trump's win up to WWC economic status given (a) the stats showing Trump voters as middle-income rather than low and (b) the dozens of other margins you can choose from including voter suppression and James Fucking Comey and Stein voters and non-voters etc etc...

Why don't class issues -- including where they intersect white and even male workers -- fit neatly inside intersectional theories of privilege vs justice? As far as I understand them, there's no inherent fight between those theories and what I heard Sanders say.
posted by wildblueyonder at 2:35 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

In such a case I would stop voting Democratic. But then again, as a QPoC, why should I vote for them if they tell me my voice doesn't matter?

Say hello to your newest protest voter. Third party all the time. I may get fucked hard by the Right's win, but if you're going to ignore me I'll make sure you get fucked hard too.

As another QPoC, I'd ask you to reconsider your vote for the sake of the rest of us. I'm pissed at the Dems too but beggars can't be choosers, and we're all beggars now.
posted by tivalasvegas at 2:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

one possible nightmare scenario might be forced individual payments to private police or military forces; those who don't pay don't receive protection.

Gee thanks, Greg Nog; I never wanted to sleep peacefully again anyway.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:38 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Why don't class issues -- including where they intersect white and even male workers -- fit neatly inside intersectional theories of privilege vs justice? As far as I understand them, there's no inherent fight between those theories and what I heard Sanders say.

The problem is that we've all heard 'it's not a race issue, it's a class issue' so often to try to cover up racism that it's pretty easy to be pretty goddamn skeptical if someone brings up class and not race when talking about societal ills.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:38 PM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

So far, the teachable moment from the election for Democrats seems to be to move right and stop talking about identity politics.

If ~100k votes went the other way in 3 states, and everything else stayed the same, the press and Democrats would be talking about how the election was closer than it needed to be, but that overall the public agreed with the Democrats' inclusiveness, wanted to move forward on existing progress, and the country as a whole is continuing to shift to the left and increased tolerance. The 2-3 million vote lead for Clinton would be used as evidence, as would the majorities the Democrats received in collective votes in the House and Senate races.

I don't know how to boil that down into something succinct which would make an impression on Twitter, or wherever, but I wish more people could understand this. Talking about economic injustices more will have a positive impact which will help them do better next time, but what they're doing still got a majority. Fight against gerrymandering, fight against voter suppression, take a stand on inequalities of all kinds, but don't throw people under the bus and don't move rightward.
posted by honestcoyote at 2:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [58 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted. Sorry, we really need folks to not bring even marginally suicide-related comments and content into these threads; we're holding an extra firm line on that in here.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:42 PM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

atrios is mad. me too.
posted by j_curiouser at 2:45 PM on November 29, 2016

Mod note: And as always, keep an eye on your self-care, these threads are hard on everybody and it can be healthy to take a break. If you need to talk we're available at the contact form and there's a listing of hotlines and chatlines for crisis services in the ThereIsHelp wiki page.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:45 PM on November 29, 2016 [22 favorites]

How's that swamp looking? Donald Trump offering huge perks for inauguration donors

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee is offering huge perks — prime tickets, luxurious lodging, access to the president-elect himself — in exchange for six- and seven-figure contributions from individual and corporate contributors.

Donors in the “$1,000,000+” category will receive four tickets to a “leadership luncheon” billed as an “exclusive inaugural event” for donors in that category and featuring “select Cabinet appointees and House and Senate leadership to honor our most generous inaugural supporters,” according to a brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

They’ll also get four tickets to a dinner with Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, and eight tickets to a “ladies luncheon” billed as “an opportunity to meet the ladies of the first families.” In addition, they’ll receive tickets to a series of other dinners and receptions featuring Trump, Pence and other officials, and eight “premier access” tickets to a black-tie inaugural ball attended by the president, vice president and their wives.

posted by zachlipton at 2:46 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

@AndreaChalupa:

1. This is a thread about math, @realDonaldTrump

2. Dear #MothersOfTheMovement, over 2M more Americans voted #BlackLivesMatter and to heal your pain by ending institutional violence.

3. To my fellow sexual assault survivors, over 2M more Americans voted for our right to dignity and to be supported not grabbed.

4. Real: Science & global warming. Over 2M more Americans voted to strengthen the engine of innovation and confront our greatest threat.

5. Over 2M more Americans voted to continue job growth and for America to become the clean energy super power.

6. Love is love is love is love is love is love. Over 2M more Americans voted to protect marriage equality.

7. Over 2M more Americans voted with the conviction that Mexicans are part of our immigrant story.

8. Over 2M more Americans voted that Muslims help keep our country safe. Muslims serve in our military and law enforcement.

9. Education is democracy. Democracy is education. Over 2M more Americans voted to strengthen our schools.

10. Over 2M more Americans voted that all Americans must have access to affordable healthcare. And to protect Medicare/Medicaid.

11. The 1% is turning our country into a kleptocracy. Over 2M more Americans voted to preserve the American dream.

posted by Golden Eternity at 2:49 PM on November 29, 2016 [56 favorites]

Why don't class issues -- including where they intersect white and even male workers -- fit neatly inside intersectional theories of privilege vs justice? As far as I understand them, there's no inherent fight between those theories and what I heard Sanders say.

Because the four-hundred-year history of the development of white supremacy in the United States has always involved viciously pitting working-class whites against working-class black and brown and indigenous people.

I don't think social democracy in Europe had to contend against such an incredibly well-defended edifice; the elites of those nations always saw the proletariat (of their own nation/ethnicity) as their great threat, and eventually labor parties were able to fight them with relatively clear economic and class-based analysis.

This is emphatically not to say that European nations don't have white supremacy and colonialism and racism to deal with. It's just that settler colonialism and formally racialized class structures didn't exist in the same way there, and those institutions withstood the social democratic movement here in the US in a way that they didn't there.

Plus, you know, two generations of industrialized warfare will do quite the number on your governance structures as well, and force you to maybe update those structures to meet the needs of a modern nation-state.
posted by tivalasvegas at 2:49 PM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

Beggars can be choosers. If one side hates me and the other wants me to go to the back of the bus, I'll be honest, I'll choose a third, fourth, or fifth way.

If I am not a person to the liberals or the Dems, the loss of my support shouldn't matter now, should it?

Or you can hold your nose and vote for the most reasonable viable party one day a year, and spend the other 364 days organizing for human rights.

Por que no los dos?
posted by tivalasvegas at 2:51 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

As far as I understand them, there's no inherent fight between those theories and what I heard Sanders say.

Bernie can't go five minutes without stepping on his dick with respect to talking about race, and at this point, there is no reason to believe that's ever going to change. The good news is that he can still be part of the solution by being front and center when Democrats push their populist economic message and deferring to others inside the Democratic causus when class intersectionality with race comes up. He can do this more easily now that he's not running for President or in the position of speaking as a surrogate to one.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:51 PM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

Like where exactly are the checks and balances on presidential appointments sitting right now? Is the assumption that the Senate will simply approve of ingrates like Giuliani simply because they're Republican?

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: The GOP Congress Is Out of the Checks-and-Balances Business
posted by tonycpsu at 2:53 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think qcubed is not talking about abandoning Dems now but talking about abandoning Dems if they backslide on civil rights issues.

The fight for equality is not something that should take a backseat in order to win short term elections. In fact the reality is that the Obama coalition is the winning coalition long term it's just that we've got very unevenly distributed minority populations.

Push for criminal justice reform including pushing back against the idea that having a felony should result in permanent disenfranchisement and we grow the pool of voters. Push for automatic registration of voters and we grow the pool of voters.

the entire republican playbook is about shrinking the electorate because they simply cannot win the popular vote anymore.
posted by vuron at 3:09 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Trump to pick Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary
posted by futz at 3:10 PM on November 29, 2016

Remind me why giving a few speeches to Goldman Sachs was unconscionable but working there for 17 years is swell?
posted by zachlipton at 3:11 PM on November 29, 2016 [56 favorites]

Man.. I've been busy dealing with my anxiety by sleeping, house-cleaning and talking with a new therapist who told me Trump-induced anxiety doesn't count as a disease because Trump is so scary humanity should just stop and meditate collectively for a while to deal with it.

So there are a lot of great insights I'd like to comment on that are way up there.

This isn't impossible, but we've been watching him for quite a while now and he's still an enigma. "Trump's razor" and "Trump's mirror" are nice working theories, but they're not foolproof, and I'm skeptical that this kind of systematic A/B testing you're positing could be done in a way that sheds significant light on what he's thinking.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:18 PM on November 28 [2 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]

This! And I'd like to add: Trump is not an enigma because he is smart and has a secret plan, but because he is stupid beyond imagination and is swayed by all and every movement in the reeds. Someone posted this Slate article: Trump is a Weakling, and I think the analysis is very good and similar to that of tonycspu, but the conclusion is terrible. It is the political equivalent of dealing with an abusive husband/father. That is not what we need to do.

Personal Responsibility and the Infantilization of the American Right
[...] It would have been astonishing if it wasn't so sad. A Republican Congress passes a bill over the President's warnings, then overrides his public veto of the same bill, and then has the chutzpah to blame the President for not doing enough to stop them.

In reality, it was part of a pattern. The American right is fundamentally incapable of taking personal responsibility for its own decisions. Everything is someone else's fault. Everything can be blamed on someone else, usually Democrats or Democrat-leaning constituencies. It's never on them.

Consider the ever-popular parlor game of "who's responsible for Trump's victory?"[...]
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:33 PM on November 28 [37 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]

Those two aspects work very well together - the narcissist, abusive parent and the infantilized (adult) child.

I've been thinking a lot about why I find the appearance of Trump so disgusting. I usually have a high tolerance of human differences and I love people of all shapes and colors. But Trump disgusts me on a visceral level.
The posts/quotes above helped me see how he reminds me of a number of 60-70-yo man-children I know who despite their extreme incompetence and immaturity insist on my admiration, love and respect, just because of their gender, race and age. Nope.
posted by mumimor at 3:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [27 favorites]

Remind me why giving a few speeches to Goldman Sachs was unconscionable but working there for 17 years is swell?

IOKIYAR and/or IOKIYAM
posted by entropicamericana at 3:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Previously: here and here.
posted by morspin at 3:15 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Easy prediction: before the end of Trump's first term he'll get his name added to the company ID of Goldman Sachs. Depending on how happy they are with him, maybe in first position.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:15 PM on November 29, 2016

Remind me why giving a few speeches to Goldman Sachs was unconscionable but working there for 17 years is swell?

Eh, the Goldman Sachs speeches stuff was mostly coming from the populist left. Very few of them voted for Trump, though I'm sure there was some zero-sum stuff going on where they harmed Hillary to the point where some moderates who actually bought his "drain the swamp" con flipped to him that otherwise might not have.

But yeah, with every bit of policy news and every cabinet selection, we're seeing more confirmation that Trump's alleged heterodoxy on economic issues was bullshit, and that he's going to be signing arch-conservative bills to be carried out by arch-conservative executive appointees.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

In fact the reality is that the Obama coalition is the winning coalition long term

I'm not sure there is a lot of evidence for this. I suspect a lot of the demographic changes people are counting on are not happening in battleground states like Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin which have been steadily moving in rightwards.

The first job of any politician is to win elections. Intersectional language is a big turn-off to a lot of people who don't even understand it, apparently. Democrats have to find candidates and messaging that wins. Obama is one.
posted by Golden Eternity at 3:17 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

It is classic Clinton secrecy and insularity and that type of thing is one of the reasons she lost.

exactly, that's also why donald lost when he broke from decades of tradition and didn't release his tax returns
posted by entropicamericana at 3:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [77 favorites]

Donald's finances are now state secrets.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:22 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

'Fascism' is still our #1 lookup.
# of lookups = how we choose our Word of the Year.
There's still time to look something else up.

--@MerriamWebster
posted by zachlipton at 3:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [39 favorites]

Hillary not releasing the speeches, or deleting personal emails, or initially lying about the 9/11 memorial incident reinforces exactly what people don't like about the Clintons. This was true long before Donald Trump was on the scene.

it's fortunate there was a stalwart, upright, forthcoming, and honest candidate like trump to pick up the slack
posted by entropicamericana at 3:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [34 favorites]

Eh, the reason Clinton lost is because her majority was inconveniently distributed in a model first invented to placate racists. So you might say racism beat her twice.

The rest is could've, should've, and would've. I get being mad about it (and o goddam am I mad about it), but there's way too much for the left to do for us to start splintering before inauguration day even gets here.
posted by Mooski at 3:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [47 favorites]

Nah, Republicans opened the door to civil litigation against a standing President back with Bill Clinton.

So even if the AG declines to push criminal cases against Trump it's perfectly acceptable to bind up Trump in all sorts of legal wranglings.

All you have to do is wait for any number of plantiffs that are materially impacted by Trump's inevitable self-dealing behavior.
posted by vuron at 3:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

that's also why donald lost when he broke from decades of tradition and didn't release his tax returns

Wouldn't it be nice, wouldn't it be nice
To have Wikileaks on your side?
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:33 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I've now had to explain to multiple people, including one person who's several miles more leftist than I am, that the Flag Protection Act was indeed terrible but was actually written by people who were completely aware of what the Supreme Court had said about flag burning and wrote it according to that decision--and it didn't pass so it didn't matter, but in particular the relevant section required both the intent to either incite violence or breach of the peace and the knowledge that it was reasonably likely to do so, along with the burning of said flag.

But Wikipedia didn't say that in its summary at the time that people were taking screencaps, and apparently everybody now thinks you can learn everything you need to know about a law from the first couple lines of a Wikipedia article, and I'm incredibly frustrated.
posted by Sequence at 3:33 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

But like, what damning things are we imagining? Seems obvious that the content is probably rich person platitudes--

I actually saw some hardcore BernieOrBusters talking like this fact was itself a smoking gun. Like, before any transcripts came out it was like "what must she have been promising Goldman Sachs in return for all that money??" and then after a couple of them leaked it was like "wow, those speeches were so boring and anodyne, that CAN'T be what they were really paying her for, this proves there was a hidden quid pro quo."

Among certain crowds, she really could never win on the Goldman Sachs speeches thing.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 3:35 PM on November 29, 2016 [19 favorites]

But yeah, with every bit of policy news and every cabinet selection, we're seeing more confirmation that Trump's alleged heterodoxy on economic issues was bullshit, and that he's going to be signing arch-conservative bills to be carried out by arch-conservative executive appointees.

I agree. The thing I'm not convinced Trump understands is how much delegation is involved in the office. He put himself at the center of his company to the point that he would personally sit there and sign every single check that went out, deciding who to pay and who to stiff. That model can't scale to running a country. He's appointing Cabinet secretaries with their own agendas, who are only so beholden to him and who won't clear every word they say with the President. I think he's operating under the impression that he'll be the one to make "deals" on every policy issue, when the reality is that the vast majority of issues will never cross his desk. You can't run the government like you sign every check out of the Treasury, and the people he's appointing makes it all the more dangerous that he thinks he can.
posted by zachlipton at 3:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

the entire republican playbook is about shrinking the electorate because they simply cannot win the popular vote anymore.
And was aided by the Democrats dropping Howard Dean's 50-state strategy. Maybe his cordial handling of Dumb Donald is intended to nudge him away from automatically signing Executive Orders canceling all his Executive Orders, but it still looks to me like the main historical legacy of President Obama will be the election of President Trump.

So even if the AG declines to push criminal cases against Trump...
I can't help but believe that his decision to name Sessions AG was because when he asked him if he would EVER take any legal action against him for obviously unlawful actions, Sessions was the most emphatic in answering "NO, NEVER!" And I suspect you can count on him to intervene, obviously illegally but who cares anymore, on any lawsuits against The Big Boss.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:37 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Where are all the Republicans who scream about states' rights and federalism when flag burning comes up? Even if you think it should be illegal, there's no basis to believe it should be a federal crime, except perhaps if you really just want to focus on national parks and military bases for some reason.
posted by zachlipton at 3:38 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Where are all the Republicans who scream about states' rights and federalism when flag burning comes up?

lol at the idea that most republicans (especially the politicians) are not fundamentally odious disingenuous racist authoritarians at heart
posted by entropicamericana at 3:41 PM on November 29, 2016 [23 favorites]

Where are all the Republicans who scream about states' rights and federalism when flag burning comes up?
Drafting state laws to make burning the state flag illegal?
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:41 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The amusing thing about this whole flag debacle, actually, is that it has massively improved the quality of the Flag Protection Act of 2005 article on Wikipedia, although it's still mostly citing editorials as sources. But at least it's more accurate than it was before. It's like it took this for anybody working on it to actually spend ten minutes reading the text of the law.
posted by Sequence at 3:43 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

lol at the idea that most republicans (especially the politicians) are not fundamentally odious disingenuous racist authoritarians at heart
That was true when I was growing up in the '60s and one of the few outside-the-house activities my racist authoritarian father would allow my mother was to volunteer for the Republican Womens Group.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:44 PM on November 29, 2016

This is interesting. Vice: FBI may have been investigating Trump when Comey announced new Clinton emails

The headline oversells it a bit, but the short version is that Vice News made an urgent FOIA request before the election requesting records about an alleged FBI investigation into Trump's encouragement of Russia to hack Clinton's emails and his statement about "second amendment people." The FBI only responded just after the election with a Glomar response ("neither confirm nor deny"), which is highly unusual in such situations. Vice News will challenge the FBI in court for access to any relevant documents.
posted by zachlipton at 3:45 PM on November 29, 2016 [28 favorites]

Nov. 16 response from Dr. Warren Hern, one of the last doctors in the US who performs late term abortions, to the insistence of Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Chair of the Panel on Infant Lives of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, that Hern is selling baby body parts. Donation links are at the bottom of the linked article.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 3:48 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

Texas to implement rules requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains
posted by melissasaurus at 3:49 PM on November 29, 2016

So even if the AG declines to push criminal cases against Trump it's perfectly acceptable to bind up Trump in all sorts of legal wranglings.

That'll work great until Congress passes a law making it illegal to sue a sitting president.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:53 PM on November 29, 2016

People were looking for excuses to hate Clinton to cover up for rampant misogyny. We like competent women as long as they don't ask for promotions after all.

This was a choice between a hyper-competent female candidate with some baggage due to her long career in public service vs a grossly incompetent bigot. This was between maintaining continuity with an administration that had made some significant progress on a variety of issues despite absolutely refusal to govern on the part of Republican majorities.

Midwestern WWC aren't going to get a return of factories or coal or whatever bullshit issue that we are pretending that they are angry about. Trump campaigned almost exclusively on racial resentment and the WWC decided that they liked what he was selling. Granted the WWC has been buying the Republican package of racial resentment since Reagan but this year was even more explicit than the normal dogwhistles.

I'm not even sure that Trump completely reneging on any campaign promises is going to be a deal breaker for these voters. I honestly suspect some of them would rather do away with government programs rather than let minority population have expanded access to them.

This is why we'll invariably see more attempts to tie government benefits to work requirements. Because even if race-blind policies leave some whites out in the cold it'll impact PoC in a disproportionate manner.

I keep seeing all sorts of opinion pieces from white male liberals about talking about structural racism and privilege turns off WWC voters. This is misguided because honestly we need to get past white fragility in this country if we are ever going to be willing to enact broadly progressive ideals that don't leave some people off the bus. It's hard to work on class based issues if economic elites can easily get the WWC and PoC fighting each other for scraps. In addition saying that the WWC can't understand or follow concepts of privilege and structural racism and intersectionality is pretty classist and buys into the general anti-intellectual trend in the US. Do poor PoC have problems understanding structural racism or privilege? Nope they see evidence of that everyday. So why is it that WWC can't be asked to examine privilege or racism or misogyny? Why do they need to operate in the bubble where they are never faced with discussing anything difficult?

I think conservatives often slam on liberal "hugboxes" but why is it that we need to treat the WWC with kid gloves? Will they really break if they get exposed to concepts outside of their comfort zone?
posted by vuron at 3:54 PM on November 29, 2016 [59 favorites]

Yes, Clinton got 2m more popular votes, but Republicans control both houses, most state legislatures, and are very close to the horrifying prospect of being able to amend the constitution that way. So the problem appears much bigger than anything Clinton did or not do to win the election. The policies of the Democrats are generally much more popular among Americans, and yet here we are, with a less-poplar party ruling every branch of government.
posted by cell divide at 3:57 PM on November 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

You know, i love Texas, and there's a lot of texans that are tops in my book, but I am completely dumbfounded by what goes on there, politically. I guess you could say the same about the entire U S of A.
posted by valkane at 3:58 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

A story about a gay American ambassador who became a reality star Just to lighten up a dark reality
posted by mumimor at 3:59 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Trump and many Trump voters have abuser mentalities - everything he's done (and they've endorsed) is straight from the domestic abuser's playbook. There is no amount of placating that will appease them. They will always move the goalposts and gaslight you and then blame you for it. America was on the verge of, in some ways, "leaving the abuser" by electing Clinton (and ensuring a pro-social-justice SCOTUS for the next generation or two), which is the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship. The abusers have decided that they would rather burn down the country than let us leave them. And now that they know we want to leave (2M popular vote win), we should expect the abuse to escalate. Of course, this is our fault for trying to leave.
posted by melissasaurus at 4:03 PM on November 29, 2016 [75 favorites]

Even if there is a desire to call a Article V convention to propose new Amendments (34 legislatures required) those become proposed amendment processes and still need to be ratified by 3/4 of the states (38). Plus it's completely unclear how such a convention would work. Would it be limited to the subject matter proposed by the states? Or would it have the potential of a runaway convention?

I understand it's a boogeyman but it's not entirely clear that anyone on the right really wants to open that sort of pandora's box.
posted by vuron at 4:09 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Texas' problem, as I've said before, is that it's led by people who don't have to live with the consequences of their own political decisions. Defund and shut down women's health clinics in all but the whitest, wealthiest parts of the state, and that's something that affects not just women, but primarily poor Mexican-American women, so who cares. It's not real. There's a complete disconnect between political reality and political narrative; but it's looking like a whole lot of the US is going to get a taste of that sooner or later. Those counting on shifting demographics to push the country forward need to take a harder look at the South.
posted by byanyothername at 4:09 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

If I'm remembering correctly from some web-based research a while back, for a short period at the beginning of the 20th century, if a woman married a non-citizen it resulted in the loss of her citizenship. No problem for a guy who was a U.S. citizen marrying a non-citizen woman though, of course. Unsurprisingly, this practice ended shortly after women acquired the right to vote.

Yeah, my great-grandmother had her citizenship revoked under the Expatriation Act of 1907 when she married my great-grandfather. She never got her citizenship back, either, because no one automatically got their citizenship back. They had to apply to be repatriated, which meant going through the exact same immigration process as someone who was actually brand new to the country. Gathering the necessary data for such an undertaking was difficult given how often my great-grandparents had to move during the Depression and WWII. Also, citizenship for the wife depended on the husband's eligibility according to the Cable Act of 1922 -- if he wasn't eligible, neither was she. If he got his U.S. citizenship, she didn't automatically get hers back -- she'd have to apply and go through the whole process. Many women like my great-grandmother never regained their citizenship and never got to vote.

You can learn more about the Expatriation Act and the after-effects here.
posted by palomar at 4:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [33 favorites]

An ER has to evaluate you or be open to a huge lawsuit. The registration staff can't turn you away. A licenced medical professional has to evaluate you and then tell you to leave.
posted by AlexiaSky at 4:58 PM on November 29

Yes that is the law now but it can always be changed. Plus there could be pressure from the banks to change the bankruptcy laws as was done with student debt. Right now medical-related debt is the number one reason for filing for bankruptcy, what if you could never discharge that debt?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Even if there is a desire to call a Article V convention to propose new Amendments (34 legislatures required) those become proposed amendment processes and still need to be ratified by 3/4 of the states (38).

If they have SCOTUS they don't need to amend the Constitution. They already possess a combo of (1) power to define "felony" (2) ability to disenfranchise prisoners and former felons and (3) the 13th Amendment.
posted by melissasaurus at 4:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Vanity Fair Steven Mnuchin Ran a “Foreclosure Machine” and Other Fun Facts About Trump’s Shortlist for Treasury

The bank carried out more than 36,000 foreclosures during Mnuchin’s reign, according to the California Reinvestment Coalition, a San Francisco-based nonprofit whose deputy director, Kevin Stein, dubbed the bank a “foreclosure machine.” The group has accused OneWest of shoddy foreclosure practices and avoiding business in minority neighborhoods, claims the bank has denied . . . If Mnuchin gets the nod, the world will hear more about people like Leslie Parks, who found the locks on her Minneapolis home changed during a blizzard in December 2009 after OneWest foreclosed. Or Rose Gudiel, who was evicted from her Pasadena home under circumstances she claimed were improper and inspired about 100 people to march on Mnuchin’s Bel Air, California, mansion in 2011.

The above is a quote from a Bloomberg article on Mnuchin but the VF article delves into the other people on the short list: Wilbur Ross, Jonathan Gray, and David McCormick. Charmers, all.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

it's not entirely clear that anyone on the right really wants to open that sort of pandora's box

It seems clear to me that they want things, can't get them through existing channels, and will use whatever channels they can to get the things they want. Opening up Pandora's box is what some on the right do best!

Regardless of how realistic new amendments are, the basic point still stands-- it's not just Clinton's campaign, the entire party has underperformed all over the country and now we find ourselves in a precarious situation.
posted by cell divide at 4:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I can readily attest to the hypocritical nature of many Texas Republican elected officials. Yes there are actual true believers in office but the vast majority of Texas Republicans seem to focus on eliminating any and all regulations to business and/or using personal connection with political figures to get government contracts.

In private many of them hold onto relatively liberal ideas, they want the various cities in Texas to seem cosmopolitan because that's increasingly necessary to attract business investment. They also understand that a large percentage of their base are bugfuck insane. Resitricting abortion in Texas doesn't really matter to them because if a daughter or niece needed an abortion it would be relatively easy to fly them to a state that has relatively high access to abortion clinics. In general though their daughters and nieces will have plenty of access to birth control at relatively young ages.

In short it's a lot of "This is for me but not for thee" culture war bullshit that most of them don't really believe but they know that they need the social conservative vote come election time so they pretend they give a shit about the culture war issues.

The fact that Texas is sooo damned empty outside of the Texas Triangle and the handful of other Small cities also works in their favor because the Republicans can pack some minority districts or crack Democratic leaning areas into multiple Republican lean districts. This is why you have shit like arch Conservatives representing large urban areas that are much more liberal than their elected officials.

The reality is that the days of Republicans are numbered in large areas of Texas. All you have to do is go to a public school or something like a parade and you realize that large portions of Texas are either majority minority or are very close to it. It's just that the PoC population skews extremely young and rates of voter engagement have been mediocre. The interesting thing will be if white liberals are willing to vote for the inevitable PoC candidates or if affinity to other whites will allow Republicans to hold onto Texas longer than they have a right to.
posted by vuron at 4:30 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

This is a heck of a line (albeit with the gendered attack contained therein) whether it happened or not, from Bloomberg's Trump’s Top Fundraiser Eyes the Deal of a Lifetime:

Mnuchin drove a Porsche in college, two friends say. His classmate Michael Danziger, an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, says he was also tapped to join Skull and Bones but turned down the secret society. “You’re going to live to regret this,” he recalls Mnuchin saying. Danziger, who knew his classmate was headed into finance, says he answered: “You put the ‘douche’ in fiduciary.” Mnuchin says the exchange never happened.

posted by zachlipton at 4:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

I just hope that at least the confirmation hearings of the cabinet appointees point out the appointees' problems. Unfortunately, listening to NPR this morning when Steve Inskeep said that the president was not subject to conflicts of interest (a gross simplification) I didn't get a good feeling about future criticisms of Trump's actions.
posted by Quonab at 4:37 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

@ CNBCnow BREAKING: Trump team and United Technologies reach agreement on keeping close to 1,000 factory jobs in Carrier plant in Indiana - sources

@davidfaber Deal terms to keep Carrier jobs in Indiana include new inducements from state. Deal spear headed by former Indiana Gov Pence.

New inducements = massive tax cuts. The Governor may have even waived all taxes for a certain amount of time. I believe this was a deal that needed to be made at all costs because it provides good optics and fulfills a major promise from DJT.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:41 PM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

Someone posted this Slate article: Trump is a Weakling, and I think the analysis is very good and similar to that of tonycspu, but the conclusion is terrible. It is the political equivalent of dealing with an abusive husband/father.

So, I don't know how much I'd mind if Trump became commonly understood as America's fragile ego shitty stepdad.

But I read the article, and the four models they offered for manipulating Trump kindof struck me, along with this quote. Because I don't think they're just talking about Trump:

That’s how you move Trump. You don’t talk about ethics. You play the toughness card. You appeal to the art of the deal. You make him feel smart, powerful, and loved. You don’t forget how unmoored and volatile he is, but you set aside your fear and your anger. You thank God that you’re dealing with a narcissist, not a cold-blooded killer.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I think the Slate authors are talking obliquely about some Trump supporters too.
posted by wildblueyonder at 4:42 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

We are living in such a fucked up world that I am seriously considering subscribing to Teen Vogue for the political coverage. Ok, that's not quite true, but I am seriously considering subscribing to Teen Vogue because I think they should be rewarded for having kick-ass political coverage.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:42 PM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

It was 2,000 jobs yesterday. So is the plan to send half the jobs to Mexico and have all of us pay to keep the other half?
posted by zachlipton at 4:43 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Four people, including a baby, have died in a jail run by potential Trump nominee Sheriff David Clarke
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:44 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

Since we're on the topic of identity politics and the Clinton campaign, The Foreign Desk podcast recently did a small audio op-ed about identity politics. It does pose a good question to anyone that thinks the Democrats should de-emphasize identity politics:

"Where issues of race and gender came up it was in response to the racist and sexist comments and past of Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump. Should she have ignored his bragging about sexual assault? Should she have ignored his call to ban all Muslims in America, his belittling of the Black Lives Matter campaign?"

Donald Trump went after a lot of vulnerable and marginalized people for 18 straight months (and it's going to be continuing for at least 4 more years). I don't really blame the party for standing it's ground.
posted by FJT at 4:46 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Ugh, this twitter thread on Mnuchin has some stuff I didn't know.

8. Before buying IndyMac, Mnuchin got the government (FDIC) to absorb some of the bad loans. Taxpayers shouldered about $1 billion

9. After all the foreclosures and subsidies Mnunchin sold OneWest last year, making a $200 million profit
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:49 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

BREAKING: Trump team and United Technologies reach agreement on keeping close to 1,000 factory jobs in Carrier plant in Indiana - sources

Ugh. This is such small-ball local politics, the likes of which ordinary governors (and even mayors of larger cities) deal with every day - making shitty tax-cut deals to keep a company from picking up and moving to a different jurisdiction that will make the deal instead. It's ridiculous that this is going to be reported as some sort of huge win for Trump/Pence.

I mean, good for the folks in Indiana who get to keep their jobs, but if he really gave a shit, Pence could've done exactly this months ago and it never would have been an issue in the presidential campaign at all.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 4:52 PM on November 29, 2016 [23 favorites]

Yep presumably massive tax breaks to keep 1000 jobs (not inconsiderable but still). However those jobs staying doesn't necessarily mean that Indiana won't lose employment in other areas. Manufacturing occupies such a minute percentage of our overall payrolls that the disproportionate interest placed on small numbers of factory jobs seems ludicrous. Oh well a win for the WWC I guess.

What will be very interesting if the inevitable truckpocalypse that will happen with automation of semis and the consequential loss of well paying jobs for the WWC will happen on the Trump watch or not. I could see major rollouts of automated trucks requiring more than 4 years to pass various regulatory hurdles but I can't see Trump or Pence not having to deal with massive job losses if they are around for a second term.

I guess the relative stability of the late 20th century might be the exception rather than the rule and we are back to a time of great strife and turmoil. Massive automation plus Climate Change impacts (crop failures and increased migration from the equatorial regions of the Earth) is liable to make things very interesting.
posted by vuron at 4:54 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

It was 2,000 jobs yesterday. So is the plan to send half the jobs to Mexico and have all of us pay to keep the other half?
posted by zachlipton at 7:43 PM on November 29

What I have seen happen many times with these state tax cuts to incentivize companies to relocate (or in this case not relocate) is that the corporation almost always ends up not keeping their side of the bargain. Usually it is something like the state will waive all taxes for 5 years and the company will provide 2000 jobs at a certain salary but in the end the company provides 250 jobs at a lower salary.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:56 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

America was on the verge of, in some ways, "leaving the abuser" by electing Clinton (and ensuring a pro-social-justice SCOTUS for the next generation or two), which is the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship. The abusers have decided that they would rather burn down the country than let us leave them. And now that they know we want to leave (2M popular vote win), we should expect the abuse to escalate. Of course, this is our fault for trying to leave.

Gloria Steinem made a surprise appearance when I was phone banking for Hillary one day. She gave a little pep talk to the volunteers and finished by making this exact point.
posted by aka burlap at 5:00 PM on November 29, 2016 [36 favorites]

Trump Is Trying to Distract Us From ... Something. Or, many somethings.
posted by homunculus at 5:10 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Why Xenophobia Is Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year: The word derived from Greek roots captured the zeitgeist of 2016

Dictionary.com’s 2016 word of the year is “xenophobia.” 2015’s word was “identity.” The 2016 word is a backlash to the 2015 choice.
posted by homunculus at 5:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Here's Trump, Romney, and Priebus arriving to dinner at Jean Georges to a smattering of applause. This is New York City. Even at a three-star Michelin joint, is there really nobody who will stand up and tell Trump to go fuck himself in public?
posted by zachlipton at 5:17 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

the entire party has underperformed all over the country and now we find ourselves in a precarious situation.
The Democrats didn't underperform as much as the Republicans overperformed by cheating and the Dems neither called them out on it nor responded in kind. Or to put it another way, the Rs brought guns to a knife fight and complained "they're trying to take away our guns" while the Ds said "look at the 16 blades on this Swiss Army Knife, a marvel of globalization." Okay, I've hit my limit on analogies for today.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:21 PM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

Well, a chance to control the NC legislature next year.

Federal court orders new NC legislative elections in 2017

"North Carolina lawmakers must redraw their legislative districts by March 15 and hold new elections by the end of next year, a federal court ruled Tuesday.

That order follows up on a ruling from this summer that found lawmakers had unconstitutionally relied on race when they drew 28 state House and Senate districts.

Although lawmakers had told the court they should be given more time to redraw their districts and should not have to hold elections until 2018, the three-judge panel disagreed.

"This gives the State a total of seven months from the time the districts were held to be unconstitutional, which is longer than it took the 2011 legislature to redistrict the entire state," read the order, which was drafted by a three-judge federal district court panel."
posted by chris24 at 5:34 PM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Paul Ryan already benefited from the Social Security fund he now wants to gut

From the age of 16, when his 55-year-old father died of a heart attack, until he was 18, Ryan received Social Security payments, which, according to a lengthy profile in WI Magazine, he put away for college. The eventual budget czar attended Miami University in Ohio to earn a B.A. in economics and political science, and landed a congressional internship as a junior.

Ryan’s congressional ascent, all the way to the top spot on the Budget Committee, began with his Social Security-funded college education.

Got mine, fuck you.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [55 favorites]

Jon Ralston is reporting that there will be a recount in the Nevada Presidential race too. It's not clear to me who is asking for one or why. They were already planning a recount in one Assembly district that came down to 38 votes.
posted by zachlipton at 5:40 PM on November 29, 2016

McConnell says he won’t recuse himself from wife’s cabinet confirmation
posted by zachlipton at 5:42 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Recounts! It's the fun new craze sweepin the nation!


WaPo McConnell says he won’t recuse himself from wife’s cabinet confirmation

“I’ve heard rumors that it should be an outstanding appointment,” McConnell said to laughs at a Senate news conference Tuesday. “Someone actually asked [spokesman Don Stewart] if I was going to recuse myself. Let me be quite clear: I will not be recusing myself.”

Yah but will you go fuck yourself, that's my question.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:44 PM on November 29, 2016 [31 favorites]

Map: Allegheny Co. will recanvass — not recount — these 52 voting districts
posted by tonycpsu at 5:46 PM on November 29, 2016

Did we even find out, by the way, what stimulated Trump into taking a Twitter stand on flag-burning?
posted by thelonius at 5:47 PM on November 29, 2016

A FOX news story that aired that day.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:49 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Did we even find out, by the way, what stimulated Trump into taking a Twitter stand on flag-burning?

Hippie punching is always in season
posted by dis_integration at 5:50 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Bahrain to host event at Trump's D.C. hotel, raising ethical concerns

So this kind of crystallizes something I've been mulling over for a while: other states are making motions in the direction of Trump properties because they understand something that we have been really reluctant to learn: Trump wasn't running as a democratic leader of the free world. Trump was running as a king. That's why other nations aren't even surprised when Ivanka Trump sits in on a meeting, or when his advisors squabble like, well...royal advisors historically have done. Because it's all normal for someone who is behaving like a royal - and who, on a superficial level, doesn't have much stopping him from essentially being one for four years.

And with that in mind - people who are talking about Trump stooping to petty governor level shit are missing the point. You need to think about medieval monarchs. They frequently involved themselves with petty shit, in cities or towns or fiefs, in part because they were petty, but also because it demonstrates both the power of the king, but also the dream of the King's Justice, which I am now 99% sure a lot of people actually voted for. Not the slow march of actual justice, but the notion of Justice that can be awarded from on high if only they can approach the king and petition him for it.
posted by corb at 5:50 PM on November 29, 2016 [38 favorites]

Did we even find out, by the way, what stimulated Trump into taking a Twitter stand on flag-burning?

Fox & Friends story at 6:25am on college kids burning flags.
posted by chris24 at 5:50 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

WaPo Donald Trump v. the First Amendment, Part 5

Disparaging CNN and — more unexpectedly — reigniting the once-virulent debate over flag-burning. Where this came from is anybody’s guess. (Update: Apparently it overlapped with a Fox News segment.)

posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:52 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Did we even find out, by the way, what stimulated Trump into taking a Twitter stand on flag-burning?

@WSJPolitics: Jared Kushner’s real-estate firm raises new conflict of interest issues for Donald Trump.

@julieroginsky: [Julie Roginsky Retweeted Capital Journal] This article went online at 6:49 am. Six minutes later, Trump tweeted on flag burning. Press attention: diverted. Mission: accomplished.
posted by Lexica at 5:54 PM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

The Carrier story is another nice example of Trump playing the press: he gets all the glory for the announcement, but has released no details on how much it costs or how many jobs will be lost or anything else you'd need to know to analyze what's happened and what it means.
posted by zachlipton at 5:55 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

More bogus “new centrism” from David Brooks: America needs this No Labels BS now less than ever

The “new center,” you’ll be shocked to learn, is very much like the old center: It is ill-defined, crippled by inescapable contradictions, and unable to express itself in anything beyond vague platitudes. The only thing the new center knows for sure is that everything will be OK if we somehow get rid of partisanship:

Our form of government, in short, is fundamentally sound. Not so our parties and our politics. It is in this spirit that we make the case for a New Center, one that does not split the difference between Left and Right but offers a principled alternative to both. Its core tenets — Opportunity, Security, Accountability, and Ingenuity — can respond to the challenges of the present and chart a path to the future.

It’s the same twaddle we’ve been hearing for years from No Labels, only now the group is armed with a brand new set of false equivalencies to give it the false patina of moral superiority. “We stand together against an alternative right disdainful of the traditions of American conservatism and a vocal left that blends socialist economics with identity politics,” Galston and Kristol wrote, echoing Brooks’ alt-right/”alt-left” dichotomy.

posted by tonycpsu at 5:55 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

About KT McFarland and her dying brother
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:00 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I know it makes me an awful person, but I had to LOL at this All Things Considered story on Trump's rumored treasury secretary pick of Steve Mnuchin:

Mnuchin spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, ultimately as a partner at the investment bank. More recently, he's headed a privately owned hedge fund, Dune Capital Management. Last April he became Trump's chief fundraiser, and he's now a member of the president-elect's transition team.

But Mnuchin's resume also includes a stint as chairman and CEO of a California bank that's been called a foreclosure machine...

...Facing threats that their home would be auctioned off, the Schaffers finally got through to a OneWest vice president. According to Rex Shaffer, the VP said, "I'm going to get you a 60-day extension on the sale date, so we can work this thing out." That was on Feb. 17, 2011. But the next day, the Schaffers' house was sold without their knowledge. "We didn't even know it — didn't have the faintest idea," Rex Shaffer says.

They voted for Donald Trump, but Rose Schaffer says they're praying he doesn't choose Mnuchin as his Treasury secretary.

HOW'S THAT "DRAINING THE SWAMP" STUFF WORKING OUT FOR YOU FUCKS?
posted by entropicamericana at 6:02 PM on November 29, 2016 [40 favorites]

Tomorrow the ACLU is arguing before the Supreme Court in Jennings v. Rodriguez: In America, No One — Including Immigrants — Should Be Locked Up Without Due Process of Law
posted by triggerfinger at 6:03 PM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

If Trump has a Personality Disorder it may be the “What” in the collective “WTF?”

"The negative effect of NPD happens in stages, and we have watched Trump’s relationship with his supporters, and it is very familiar to us. In a classic NPD relationship. first comes the love-bombing: the narcissist tells you what you want to hear. Then they manage down expectations: doing whatever they want, and expecting or demanding that you accept it without incident. Now, the pathological lying comes full force: you call them out on what they said or did and they vehemently deny it, making you question your sanity. Then comes the devalue stage: because you questioned or criticized them, they discredit you. Now, the discard: the punishment and alienation begins, and any attempts to please them are used to give them more control over you. It doesn’t end there. The cycle continues and the disorder becomes your new normal. It’s not."
posted by bluecore at 6:05 PM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

BuzzFeed This Convicted Fraudster Is Instigating Harassment of Trump Protesters on Facebook

The harassment came after Jonathan Lee Riches posted the 19-year-old Temple University student’s name, two photos, and former place of employment on two pro-Trump Facebook groups containing well over 500,000 members. “Expose the People who are hosting these Anti Donald Trump events,” his post read.

One thing they did was flood the restaurant she worked for with stories of terrible service, however she hadn't worked there in over a year. Her former boss threatened to sue her and her family and "hoped she would get expelled from school."

More about the instigator:

He has served 10 years in federal prison for running a phishing scam. He has filed hundreds of frivolous lawsuits, harassed residents of a Connecticut town after a school shooting, and has costumed himself (poorly) as a Muslim and managed to get selfies with Hillary Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin.

Now he spends his time harassing anti-Trump protesters online.

The virulent need these trumpkins have to defend their God King is striking. Although in this case I think he might be mentally ill. He has quite a long manifesto if you care to read it but his main objective is to "continue to expose & identify who these people are as its my right & duty of mine to inform communities who these people are & give the community a heads up to protect themselves in case these civil disobedience street protests turn violent."
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:05 PM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

Normally I'm glad for the service the Snopes page provides, but Jesus.

unfairly painting her in a negative light

From the letter which apparently McFarland herself didn't deny writing:

“Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?” she wrote. “He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.”

No, I think this negative light is entirely fair. The actual debunking is that she outed him to her parents, not to the press, but the real story is just as horrible. Her daughters had an uncle who died of AIDS, and they were never allowed to see him.

I lost an uncle to AIDS, amid my mother's open disapproval and insistence on secrecy.

Fuck KT McFarland.
posted by Sequence at 6:09 PM on November 29, 2016 [25 favorites]

other states are making motions in the direction of Trump properties because they understand something that we have been really reluctant to learn

They know what it is when they see it. And there's not a massive difference between old-school monarchy and modern celebrity -- especially the "rich person bestows arbitrary grace on peasants" reality show genre -- in part because they're all tied to folk tale narratives.

(The Ivanka thing, though: friends who've done business in east Asia have spoken of "bring a young woman to the meeting as eye candy" being a habit among business types, but also something that's frowned upon at the high / government level precisely because it's a habit among business types.)
posted by holgate at 6:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Trump wasn't running as a democratic leader of the free world. Trump was running as a kingowner.
He was treating it just like any of his other Big Deals, winning approval from a majority of the representatives of the shareholders even though the owners of a majority of the stock opposed him. He's selecting his cabinet primarily based on loyalty to him during the campaign, people who fell into two categories: (1) the alt-right, old-school racists and other deplorables for whom his hateful rhetoric struck a chord and (2) grifters who rolled the dice on Dishonest Donald knowing that no legitimate politician would ever let them in the door.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:23 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Snopes has actually gotten pretty bizarre and untrustworthy in the past few weeks. I'm a little out on them.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:35 PM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Snopes has actually gotten pretty bizarre and untrustworthy in the past few weeks. I'm a little out on them.

They have been hit and miss for awhile imo. Completely agree with bizarre. I can't understand why they are considered the last word on truth. Oh well.
posted by futz at 6:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I feel like on November 8 my life expectancy dropped by about twenty five years.

I feel similarly.

I plan to live well.
posted by perspicio at 6:50 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

*record scratch*

*freeze frame*

"Yup -- that's me. I bet you're wondering how I got myself into this situation..."
posted by Rhaomi at 6:51 PM on November 29, 2016 [24 favorites]

That Romney picture...
posted by moonlight on vermont at 6:51 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

What's in trumps bowl? Mac and cheese? Fancy food is for Romney?
posted by ian1977 at 6:55 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

What's in trumps bowl?

Romney ball soup.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:57 PM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

I guess he finished the Tupperware full of christieballs
posted by ian1977 at 6:59 PM on November 29, 2016

Imagine if the women who were sexually abused by Trump saw that evil smile in the above picture. I cannot believe this rapist fascist conman is our president.
posted by bodywithoutorgans at 7:02 PM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

Aside from Medicare/Medicaid, HHS (Health and Human services) also controls public policy and sets many standards that are enormously important.

Like the federal poverty guideline, which also helps set many financial impacts connected with insurance assistance, food stamps, WIC , TANF, Head Start and more. Lower the FPG, less people are eligible for these things, raise it and more people are eligible.

HHS is also the governing body for Foster Care (CPS, DCFS depending on your state) and sets up federal standards. Same with elder abuse.

The limited child care subsidies that are available in the USA are under HHS as well.

Home services for disabled adults and elderly fall under this branch of government.

There is lots of policy research , and also services for homeless and other minority groups.

HHS also plays big role in emergency response in a public health emergency.

In addition HHS sets policy and training standards for things like violence in the workplace, responding to child abuse and domestic violence, and much of the standard of Care for mental health.

There is waaaaay more at stake than just the ACA.
posted by AlexiaSky at 7:03 PM on November 29, 2016 [28 favorites]

It's the Federal Poverty Guidelines are also referred to as the FPL not FPG.

my braaaain.
posted by AlexiaSky at 7:09 PM on November 29, 2016

I made the Trump/Romney photo black and white, and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish deal with the Devil
posted by Lexica at 7:12 PM on November 29, 2016 [24 favorites]

Engadget: The Internet Archive doesn't feel safe in Trump's America

"On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change," the Internet Archive's blog post reads. "It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions. It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase."

MeFi's own (tm) Jason Scott, Internet Superhero: Back That Thing Up

I’m both an incredibly pessimistic and optimistic person. Some people might use the term “pragmatic” or something less charitable.

Regardless, I long ago gave up assumptions that everything was going to work out OK. It has not worked out OK in a lot of things, and there’s a lot of broken and lost things in the world. There’s the pessimism. The optimism is that I’ve not quite given up hope that something can’t be done about it.

I’ve now dedicated 10% of my life to the Internet Archive, and I’ve dedicated pretty much all of my life to the sorts of ideals that would make me work for the Archive. Among those ideals are free expression, gathering of history, saving of the past, and making it all available to as wide an audience, without limit, as possible. These aren’t just words to me.

Regardless of if one perceives the coming future as one rife with specific threats, I’ve discovered that life is consistently filled with threats, and only vigilance and dedication can break past the fog of possibilities. To that end, the Canadian Backup of the Internet Archive and the IA.BAK projects are clear bright lines of effort to protect against all futures dark and bright. The heritage, information and knowledge within the Internet Archive’s walls are worth protecting at all cost. That’s what drives me and why these two efforts are more than just experiments or configurations of hardware and location.

posted by tonycpsu at 7:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [21 favorites]

I made the Trump/Romney photo black and white, and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish deal with the Devil

you have always been the caretaker
posted by entropicamericana at 7:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

i think HHS is going to have a lot less on its plate (a la brown's fema)...forced-birth, mainly.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:23 PM on November 29, 2016

How to cook quarterbillionaires!

No it's how to cook FOR quarterbillionaires.


Gasp! How to cook forTY quarterbillionaires!
posted by ian1977 at 7:31 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

He's selecting his cabinet

Is he? Some of these picks have sounded more like the happiest dreams of Pence, Ryan, and McConnell.
posted by dilettante at 7:33 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Here's Romney's flip-flop in all its glory. I thought he had some kind of a spine.
posted by zachlipton at 7:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

God the Rom is despicable. He'll fit right in but more likely this is just the Orange Bully Boy getting his revenge and is going to leave Romney twisting in the wind. These people are vile.
posted by futz at 7:51 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow.

@KellyannePolls
"Road to 270" all those fancy maps and graphics said...don't recall any that said, "Road to Popular Vote" [real, not SNL]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:56 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Uggggghh. Romney. I take it back about how it's reasonable to try to join the administration if only to get competent people in there. "Inclusion"?! Though even Romney won't name check Flynn or Bannon as good choices.
posted by R343L at 7:57 PM on November 29, 2016

Bloomberg Politics: Sec of state auditions aren't over, I'm told. Finalists are Romney, Petraeus, Giuliani, Corker and Kelly, who's coming back in.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:04 PM on November 29, 2016

If Romney can ass-kiss his way into Secretary of State, it's probably to everyone's benefit.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:09 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Yeah it's painful and even after writing that I take it back I'm remembering why i thought he was considering it. I guess I didn't expect quite so much ass-kissing.
posted by R343L at 8:11 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I would also rather Romney said something like "I don't apologize for anything I said in the last year, but the fact is Trump is president elect, and if what I said before was true, he is going to need all the help he can get, so it's my duty to do what I can. I'll serve with President Trump as long as I'm convinced I can do more good that way than in any other capacity."

But I'm willing to cut him a lot of slack for being one of the few high profile Republican voices who stood up early on and just said "no, not this guy." He dissented when it counted, and he was not wishy washy about it. I'm not going to punish him for having to do this kind of not at all unheard of making up walk of shame if it means we get someone who is not totally insane heading State.
posted by wildblueyonder at 8:18 PM on November 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

Trump & Mitt ate: young garlic soup & sautéed frog legs, diver scallops w/ caramelized cauliflower, prime sirloin, lamb chops. Thanks, pool

--@epngo

@epngo They ate Pepe? The nazis are going to be pissed!!!

--@marcusocasey
posted by zachlipton at 8:18 PM on November 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

As people are noting on Twitter, Obama was mocked for wanting some arugula and Dijon mustard.
posted by zachlipton at 8:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [29 favorites]

I thought he had some kind of a spine.

hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor-controlled
posted by entropicamericana at 8:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

If anyone should be forced to grovel before the fascists in the hopes of getting a position in which they're constantly having to explain to the world what the hell the Administration is doing and try to clean up the international incidents, conflicts of interest and sundry messes caused by Donald Trump, it's people like Mitt bloody Romney who tried to exploit white nationalism beneath his patina of patrician respectability. There's a basket for you, not of deplorables but of detestables.

I hope Trump gives him the job, for America's sake and for the world's sake, and I hope Romney loathes every moment during which he serves his country in so exalted a janitorial position.
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:24 PM on November 29, 2016 [22 favorites]

Mass deaths of blackbirds in Europe coincided with Trump's election in the US [real, but adequately explained by the spread of a virus]
posted by XMLicious at 8:25 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe that eagle will return and fly at Trump when he tries to take the oath of office. Or Bernie's sparrow will come and shit on his toupee.

(what are the odds that he wears a MAGA cap to the inauguration?)
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

(what are the odds that he wears a MAGA cap to the inauguration?)

I want it to be a fucking blizzard, so probably.

Also, don't burn flags, burn caps.
posted by holgate at 8:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Wow.

I'm not encouraging people to tell her on the Twitters that her children will disown her and deny being related to her once they're grown up, but it may be worth telling.
posted by holgate at 8:35 PM on November 29, 2016

I think he only wears a MAGA cap when his hair is way too fucked for him to deal with and his hair guy is back in NYC. I have a suspicion that's why he wants to keep living in Trump Tower, even.

I think the rumor was that the guy who does his weave has an office next door?
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:35 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here's Romney's flip-flop in all its glory. I thought he had some kind of a spine.

There but for the grace of God. If Romney is willing to kiss the ring to save us all from WWIII, he doesn't need my forgiveness, but he has it.
posted by corb at 8:37 PM on November 29, 2016 [24 favorites]

Ok, but what happens next week if Trump snubs Romney (whether or not this interview is sincere or just an attempt to humiliate him like Christie) and Mitt winds up being both utterly spineless and without a job? Does he turn around again and say "actually, he really was a con artist all along?"
posted by zachlipton at 8:47 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Anyway, if you want to know why Trump asked Romney out to dinner, just ask Newt:

“[The Apprentice] was a remarkably popular show,” Gingrich told Fox News host Jenna Lee during the interview. “[Trump] understands the value of tension. He understands the value of showmanship. And candidly, the news media is going to chase the rabbit. So it’s better off for him to give them a rabbit than for them to go find their own rabbit. He’s had them fixated on Mitt Romney now for five or six days. I think from his perspective, that’s terrific. It gives everyone something to talk about.”

“He does not think of this as chaos. He thinks of this as creativity,” Gingrich added.

posted by zachlipton at 8:53 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

“He does not think of this as chaos. He thinks of this as creativity,” Gingrich added.

Gonna be a long four years.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:58 PM on November 29, 2016 [25 favorites]

it's not like everyone wouldn't happily jump at a reality do-over like a half-drowned dog to a piece of flotsam now.

In the middle of a community meeting, I had this brief delusion that maybe this was some sort of alternative world, like the parallel universe where we all find out who we really are, and that, in just a few days, we'll all be brought back to November 7th with the memories of what might have been in our minds.

I want to believe there's a parallel universe where Clinton won the election. It may be one of the few things that gets me through the next year.

Gonna be a long four years.

It's been three weeks.

Three goddamn weeks.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 9:02 PM on November 29, 2016 [52 favorites]

Ok, but what happens next week if Trump snubs Romney (whether or not this interview is sincere or just an attempt to humiliate him like Christie) and Mitt winds up being both utterly spineless and without a job? Does he turn around again and say "actually, he really was a con artist all along?"

Why not?

Romney's meeting doesn't show he has a weak spine. Just a strong stomach.
posted by ocschwar at 9:02 PM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

I remember fondly a time when I thought to myself, "Hm, thank goodness I'll never again have to hear another poisonous fewmet from the suppurating gob of Newton Leroy McPherson again. Then I moved to DC and, several years ago now, through the course of a job, realized he somehow still had offices and staff here.

Then, this election season. Who is paying this idiot? And why won't he go away?
posted by aspersioncast at 9:03 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

The thing with Romney is, if he's willing to bend this much to Trump now, how useful will he be in thwarting him as SoS?
posted by asteria at 9:08 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Romney's meeting doesn't show he has a weak spine. Just a strong stomach.

Romney's meeting doesn't. All this praising of Trump (though note the phrase "give me increasing hope") does.
posted by zachlipton at 9:09 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Civil rights nonprofit: Election had 'profoundly negative effect' on children

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center showed children have been negatively impacted by the election, with kids' classroom climate suffering drastically.

The Monday report, which surveyed 10,000 teachers across the U.S., found many students were experiencing higher anxiety and there were more reported cases of "verbal harassment, the use of slurs and derogatory language, and disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags."

According to the survey's findings, nine out of 10 educators saw a negative impact on students' mood and behavior after the election. Eight out of 10 educators reported higher anxiety by marginalized students.

posted by zachlipton at 9:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

He understands the value of showmanship.

It's time to get fucking situationist. Don't protest rallies. Do bizarre shit. Make your own fucking spectacle. Break his narcissistic brain.
posted by holgate at 9:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

Mass deaths of blackbirds in Europe coincided with Trump's election in the US [real, but adequately explained by the spread of a virus]

Which?
posted by perspicio at 9:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

Kissing Trump's ass is the price of admission. And none of his picks are going to be the people we'd prefer. So the best we can hope for is that he goes with people who are at least competent to do the job.

Like, Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary -- not anyone I'm at all thrilled about, but he isn't Sarah Palin. So if he drives us off a metaphorical cliff, at least it will have been... intentional and not due to monumental incompetence? Basically all I want in a Trump Treasury Secretary is "someone who understands why it would be bad to attempt to 'renegotiate' the national debt." That's the best we can do.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:15 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Anyone want to help revive this as a protest song?
posted by vrakatar at 9:18 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

How's that circular firing squad coming?

Congressional Black Caucus Furious With Pelosi Over Proposed Leadership Changes
More Than A Dozen Pelosi Supporters Consider Turning On Her

All warmed up and operational, I see. We're so screwed.
posted by zachlipton at 9:19 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Which?

Pretty sure this is how The Walking Dead starts.
posted by asteria at 9:21 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

The word we might need here is craven.
posted by bukvich at 9:21 PM on November 29, 2016

Trump's Treasury pick having roomed with Ahmed Chalabi's nephew at Yale is a little too on the nose.

The writers are just recycling characters now.
posted by zachlipton at 9:23 PM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Re: Trump's micromanaging: if Trump ran the GOP/gov smoothly it'd be bad.

Because everyone will be third-and-fourth-guessing what the hell he wants it'll be catastrophic. Of course he doesn't know. And just said two opposing statements coincident to each other. Again.

It's going to be one long incompetent corrupt coup / Constitution desecration. Like the Cheney reign, but without the honesty or integrity. Jesus f--k.
posted by petebest at 9:24 PM on November 29, 2016

If Romney can prevent a nuclear war, it'd be great. It's all I want, really. I'm serious.
posted by My Dad at 9:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

roomthreeseventeen: Snopes has actually gotten pretty bizarre and untrustworthy in the past few weeks.

Which stories are untrustworthy?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Because everyone will be third-and-fourth-guessing what the hell he wants it'll be catastrophic. Of course he doesn't know.

Yeah, I suspect all the tea-leaf-reading on his Cabinet picks is kind of a waste of time. What's his platform? Whatever he felt like it was when he woke up this morning! What will it be tomorrow? Could be anything! There's no deeper message; the proposed Cabinet picks are just folks he either remembers from cable news, or that someone whispered in his ear five minutes before he leaked their names to someone in the media. There is no big policy picture.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

nuclear war is increasingly looking like the more painless option if you ask me
posted by entropicamericana at 9:29 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

a vocal left that blends socialist economics with identity politics

I wish
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 9:30 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

nuclear war is increasingly looking like the more painless option if you ask me

Yet another case of his base hurting themselves worse than blue voters! All the city folks will die instantaneously in the initial blasts, whereas the more rural districts will suffer from the radiation for weeks or months before they succumb!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:31 PM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

AMA Statement on the Nomination of Rep. Tom Price to be HHS Secretary

Patrice A. Harris, M.D.
Chair, AMA Board of Trustees

“The American Medical Association strongly supports the nomination of Dr. Tom Price to become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). His service as a physician, state legislator and member of the U.S. Congress provides a depth of experience to lead HHS. Dr. Price has been a leader in the development of health policies to advance patient choice and market-based solutions as well as reduce excessive regulatory burdens that diminish time devoted to patient care and increase costs.

“We urge the Senate to promptly consider and confirm Dr. Price for this important role.”

No. Fucking. Way. NO.

I vaguely recall something noxious about Patrice Harris but I can't search for it right now.
posted by futz at 9:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I live in the shadow of NORAD and I find perverse comfort in knowing that it if comes to that, at least it'll be swift.
posted by mochapickle at 9:36 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Isn't the "burn it all down" mentality what got us here?
posted by ODiV at 9:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

In for a penny, in for a pound.
posted by wildblueyonder at 9:42 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Isn't the "burn it all down" mentality what got us here?

At least on my part, I don't want to burn anything down; just gallows humor!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:44 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Dr. Price has been a leader in the development of health policies to advance patient choice and market-based solutions

Shorter AMA: "We want to be rich, and if people die, well, they should have been rich."
posted by holgate at 9:47 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

And that's the sort of statement that should provoke mass resignations from the AMA, just as the APA got hit by its lukewarm response to Bush-era torture.
posted by holgate at 9:49 PM on November 29, 2016 [14 favorites]

Re: Pelosi - I can't say that I'd support Tim Ryan for minority leader over her, but it's more than a fair question on whether it's time for someone else to be the leader of the Democratic House. Maybe things in the House would have been worse without her at the helm, but they've clearly not been good since 2003.
posted by Candleman at 9:59 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

nuclear war is increasingly looking like the more painless option if you ask me

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:59 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Isn't the "burn it all down" mentality what got us here?

Yeah. The "older people with their best years behind them" vote is proving toxic in the developed world.

If I'm part of the ruling cadre in China, expecting to ease gently into superpower status over the coming decades, I'm not sure what kind of foreign policy presents itself. Not the "narcissistic accommodation" mode that we've seen from a lot of states, but also quite nervous that an Iran or DPRK might go straight into narcissistic injury mode. But there's inevitably going to be disdain at the US electing someone with neither the experience nor the capacity to do the job, which is anathema to the Chinese model, which is a curious mixture of meritocracy and oligarchy. I think the approach will be along the lines of "let the US cut its own throat" up to the point that it actively threatens the Chinese economy, But I also imagine it will be policing its own boundaries.
posted by holgate at 10:01 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is consistent with the AMA's position for decades. The AMA is often purported as speaking on behalf of doctors, but it only represents a small fraction of physicians. They did eventually support the ACA, but the AMA was firmly opposed to Medicare in the 60s.

How opposed? Check out this record: Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. My dad still has a copy. It was part of an AMA program called Operation Coffee Cup in the 60s where doctors' wives would hold get-togethers and listen to a record of a certain California B-movie actor with political ambitions lecture on the evils of socialized medicine before writing letters to their Congressmen urging them to fight the program we now know as Medicare.
posted by zachlipton at 10:03 PM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin named vice chair of Trump-Pence presidential transition team

Most recently infamous as the oilfield prayer day woman. ugh.
posted by futz at 10:04 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Good God, it has been only three weeks, hasn't it? I feel like I've aged three years.
posted by corb at 10:16 PM on November 29, 2016 [18 favorites]

Decoding 2016: David Axelrod with Joel Benenson, Senior Strategist for the Clinton 2016 Campaign (YouTube video 1hr13min)

It was kind of interesting to get a glimpse of the inside. Benenson basically claims the polls were right and that Clinton won by 2 to 5% nationally as predicted but States are impossible to forecast and Comey's letter was the death blow to the campaign and that everything else was done right. There is a ton of hesitation and Axelrod does a good job at prodding the assertions. But things are still pretty raw and defensive so self reflection and admitting any miscalculations or strategy failures isn't happening.
posted by phoque at 10:19 PM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

This world we live in. Teen: Trump edited my tweet about CNN

He's not complaining exactly, and he's clearly still a Trump fan, but he wants it to be known that Trump added "bad reporter" on to the end of his tweet and he didn't say that (he did say "shame!").
posted by zachlipton at 10:19 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I love those before and after pictures of presidents where it looks like they age ten years per term.

Prediction: everyone in America except for Trump is going to age at president rate. Trump is going to age four years backwards (since he'll probably be forced to go to a doctor that wasn't an extra in Fear and Loathing).
posted by fomhar at 10:21 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Good God, it has been only three weeks, hasn't it? I feel like I've aged three years.

I'm literally going grayer week by week, and my excellent stylist is demonstrating loads more diplomacy than any of the current Secretary of State contestants ever have.
posted by mochapickle at 10:23 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Shorter AMA: "We want to be rich, and if people die, well, they should have been rich."

The AMA has a long and proud history of advocating against medical care for the poor.
posted by PenDevil at 10:28 PM on November 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

No, he's going to age at the expected rate, unless he completely outsources rapid response to Pence, who is already creepy-old for his age and can't get much older. The rest of the world is not going to honour the bizarre bubble in which this is considered (by 46% of the electorate) a reasonable choice. We're lucky to have President Obama to provide a kind of meta-commentary on what presidentin' is, and either it will will break his successor quickly or his successor will not be actively doing the fucking job.
posted by holgate at 10:32 PM on November 29, 2016

The Way Ahead - Barack Obama
posted by Golden Eternity at 10:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The swamp, it just keeps getting bigger. For $5,000, Wealthy Supporters Can Have Breakfast With President-Elect Trump

Donald Trump’s transition team is offering supporters a rare opportunity: breakfast in New York with the next president for $5,000 — pocket change for many of the team’s wealthy fundraisers.

Wall Street investors and lobbyists top the list of fundraisers for next week’s event, which is expected to raise $4 million, according to a person familiar with the planning.

The event raises money for the transition team (presumably for things like rent that get paid back to Trump).
posted by zachlipton at 10:40 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is consistent with the AMA's position for decades. The AMA is often purported as speaking on behalf of doctors, but it only represents a small fraction of physicians.

I know that and you know that but the General Public has no idea. They are clueless about the inside baseball. All they will see is That the Almighty AMA approves of Captain Fuckface. The reality that there is even a faction of MD's that support this guy is rage inducing.

And omg, I had forgotten all about Operation Coffee Cup. Where are the death panels when I need them? weeps.
posted by futz at 10:48 PM on November 29, 2016

either it will will break his successor quickly or his successor will not be actively doing the fucking job.

Does anyone here actually think Trump will do his job even half-assedly? Obama reads technical reports for hours every evening after a full day of work, and Trump seems to read at about a fourth grade level. The man is ignorant of policy and law at a level that would be fucking comical if it weren't so terrifying. He's probably not even capable of understanding the ways in which he won't be doing the job. The stress can't kill you if you don't feel it.
posted by fomhar at 10:49 PM on November 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

More election analysis;
Mark Blyth ─ Global Trumpism (YouTube 1hr26min) This is an amazing talk basically predicting Trump as part of a larger picture / dynamic from back in September.

Mark Blyth on the 2016 US election results (YouTube 22min18sec) is an extension of the previous talk and he repeats many similar points.
posted by phoque at 10:53 PM on November 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

For $5,000, Wealthy Supporters Can Have Breakfast With President-Elect Trump

This is probably legal in our fucked up world. How much will reporters have to pay to get an audience?

A reminder that trump hasn't held a press conference since July.
posted by futz at 10:54 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

$1 Million Inauguration Package Promises Candlelight Dinner With Trump and Pence

Looks like $5000 is chump change zachlipton! It's like breakfast with candles and more bribing, er, buying power. Yum.
posted by futz at 11:14 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I just thank God every day we won't have a president who ran their own email server.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:19 PM on November 29, 2016 [60 favorites]

I was going to expand on kirkaracha's comment by making a joke about how lucky we are we didn't let a LADY with her LADY EMOTIONS into the White House because she'd be letting her emotions overpower her rational decision making skills but then I, myself a lady, started getting so emotional that this is really happening that I couldn't find any humor in sarcasm like I normally can.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 11:24 PM on November 29, 2016 [24 favorites]

Maybe things in the House would have been worse without her at the helm, but they've clearly not been good since 2003.

They got better between 2006-2010.
posted by asteria at 11:46 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

The comments section in the Guardian article are like Trump is Hannibal Lecter and Mitt Romney has just figured out he is being eaten alive. It would be really hilarious, except, you know.
posted by bukvich at 12:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
Many of his staffers are from an opaque corporate misinformation network. We must understand this if we are to have any hope of fighting back against them.
George Monbiot
posted by adamvasco at 2:11 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

And today's target is refugees.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:28 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is there any sign that the Koch brothers are coming around to support King Frump?
posted by stonepharisee at 3:33 AM on November 30, 2016

Behind "Make America Great," the Koch Agenda Returns with a Vengeance

Despite loud pronouncements from Charles Koch that his network would not support Trump, the Kochs’ massive political operation worked over many months to turn out Republican voters in key states. Above all, AFP was deeply involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, especially in the critical swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
posted by PenDevil at 3:42 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

This New Instagram Account Is Calling Out Ivanka Trump for Her Father’s Views

“Dear Ivanka,” started six days ago, juxtaposes glamorous shots of Ivanka with concerns from people who feel that they will be marginalized under a Trump presidency. For instance, one caption reads, “Dear Ivanka, I’ve been raped and I need to have an abortion"
posted by chris24 at 3:51 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

The toxicity of whatever tweetragestorm regarding the First Amendment we're on is such a fucking twofer:

1) It's a big-ass distraction from the fucking FREAK OUT we should be having nationally about the people he's appointed thus far as cabinet and

2) I totally believe that he would wipe his ass with the First Amendment if he were physically able to. Which leads me to

a) Real resignation that I'm going to get arrested. I'm doing the March on DC or whatever it's called on the 22nd, and yeah, I'll be with people who have permits to march, but I mean is anybody convinced that even permitted protests will not turn into shit shows if say somebody decides to burn a flag (which, were I in my twenties, I'd totally be doing BTW)? I'm too old and physically messed up to look forward to getting arrested. I've also been through it before, back when I was young and spry, and it was a shit show even then (literally: in the Tombs, one of our fellow protestors got projectile diarrhea. Poor kid.)

b) Wonder what the pool of SCOTUS nominees are who would see the First Amendment contrary to established precedent and are also pro-life, maybe it's huge, IDK
posted by angrycat at 4:00 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Oh, I was wondering when he'd get around to the Somali student. He's pacing himself!
posted by angrycat at 4:03 AM on November 30, 2016

He's now tweeting how he's going to legally separate himself from his businesses despite not being legally required to do so. Cuz that's just the kind of guy he is, putting country before self.

I'm satisfied. I mean how could he or anyone know what's going on with a property with his name on it and run by his children.
posted by chris24 at 4:15 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Penn and Teller burn a flag in the Whitehouse





^{West Wing clip via Daringfireball.}
posted by michswiss at 4:24 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

NYT, by The Editorial Board: Mr. Trump, Meet the Constitution: Here’s where we explain what shouldn’t need explaining.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

One of the things driving me nuts right now is the media pretending anything Trump said in the past has any bearing beyond that fixed point in time.

I really want a widget that takes text like "Trump has said he wants x" or "Trump has indicated y" and replaces it with "Trump continued to make farting noises with his mouth." Because it communicates the exact same information.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 4:38 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

The problem with assuming it all is just the farting noises is: markets and national and international relations will live and die by his meaningless farty noises.
posted by Archelaus at 4:42 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a fart noise."

- T.S. Eliot
posted by C'est la D.C. at 4:50 AM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

A Yale history professor’s powerful, 20-point guide to defending democracy under a Trump presidency.
posted by adamvasco at 5:00 AM on November 30, 2016 [26 favorites]

Does anyone here actually think Trump will do his job even half-assedly? Obama reads technical reports for hours every evening after a full day of work, and Trump seems to read at about a fourth grade level. The man is ignorant of policy and law at a level that would be fucking comical if it weren't so terrifying. He's probably not even capable of understanding the ways in which he won't be doing the job. The stress can't kill you if you don't feel it.

Didn't George W. famously only read summaries prepared by his staff?
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:09 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Is there any cabinet position left aside from Secretary of State for Rudy? I can't believe Trump isn't going to give Giuliani a prime spot in his office given how tightly Rudy's stuck with him the entire campaign and even seems to be involved in selecting the rest of the cabinet. He's got to be the closest thing to a "friend" Trump has at this point, so surely he'll end up somewhere with way too much power.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:11 AM on November 30, 2016

That Yale History Professor link is interesting, adamvasco. The original facebook post was transcribed in the previous thread on Nov. 22.

The source is also weirdly illustrative of the problem of news now. Quartz is a subsidiary of Atlantic Media, which is housed in the Watergate and owned by self-described neo-Con David Bradley.

Their model seems to be pushing their "Daily Brief" newsfeed app. They have over 150 staff, and describe themselves as a media startup.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:19 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Didn't George W. famously only read summaries prepared by his staff?

And Trump's will presumably be in 140 characters or less, with hashtags, walked past on cue cards by models.

Sad? I'm Sad.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:21 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Is there any cabinet position left aside from Secretary of State for Rudy

There's also homeland security for the king of stop and frisk.
posted by dis_integration at 5:21 AM on November 30, 2016

Is there any cabinet position left aside from Secretary of State for Rudy

There's also homeland security for the king of stop and frisk.

Given a choice of Giuliani SoS, Sheriff Clarke Homeland, or Romney SoS, Giuliani Homeland, I'll take Door #2 all day.
posted by chris24 at 5:25 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

That Yale History Professor link is interesting, adamvasco. The original facebook post was transcribed in the previous thread on Nov. 22.

Thank you! It was driving me nuts that so much of it sounded familiar.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 5:27 AM on November 30, 2016

Homeland Security might be ideal for the prince of 9/11 and it'd leave Romney out there for Trump to use like Bush did Powell. A moderately sensible face out in front of the lunacy they're going to perpetrate.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:28 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Secretary of 9/11. New position. Does great stuff.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:47 AM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

Given a choice of Giuliani SoS, Sheriff Clarke Homeland, or Romney SoS, Giuliani Homeland, I'll take Door #2 all day.

Yes, I'd prefer to drink urine than eat shit, too.
posted by gatorae at 6:03 AM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

WaPo Donald Trump adds another marijuana opponent to his Cabinet

Hudak said an HHS secretary wishing to make life difficult for medical marijuana providers could “file lawsuits against operators who label and advertise marijuana as 'medicine' because FDA has not designated it as such.” Since HHS has jurisdiction over Medicare and Medicaid, an HHS that is strongly opposed to pot could also theoretically “freeze or limit reimbursements to physicians because of their participation in medical marijuana programs.”

So far, HHS hasn't pushed this issue. But “if Price seeks to test the waters in this policy space, it could have a freezing effect on doctors' willingness to recommend marijuana,” Hudak said.

TL; DR: Tom Price has a long voting record of opposing any marijuana policy reforms that have come to a vote in the House of Representatives including amendments preventing the Justice Department from interfering with state medical marijuana laws.

A combination of Jeff Sessions as AG and Price as HHS could be a big problem for states allowing for medical marijuana use. As a non-drug user himself, I don't think DJT has any strong feelings on the matter and could be swayed by whomever he puts in charge.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

from now on *everything* is 'giant douche v. turd sandwich'. ugh.
posted by j_curiouser at 6:07 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Seriously, people, don't take advantage of the state decriminalization laws to smoke marijuana openly. Trump is looking to fill jails.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:11 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

One thing no one mentions nationally about Sheriff Clarke. Dude is just as corrupt as you'd expect someone in the Trump administration to be. He used department money to add an expensive weight machine to his office, h's used the department to fund "educational" trips to California and Israel. It's my understanding that he is also technically still on leave of absence from the Milwaukee Police Department for pension reasons.
posted by drezdn at 6:13 AM on November 30, 2016

I've heard informed speculation (ie not just from media reports, but from people who have interacted with him personally) that Giuliani has dementia or some other cognitive impairment. I think he might not be up for anything that requires any kind of confirmation hearing.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:15 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think more people are worried that Clarke believes stuff like anyone who protests police action is an enemy of the state and would potentially be treated like one, or that essentially every amendment but the 2nd (for white Christian men, of course; it already no longer applies to anyone else) is up for review.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:17 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sad about Giuliani - but, irrelevant, I suspect.
posted by From Bklyn at 6:19 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Speaking of medicine in politics, HuffPo has a long read on a new bill about to pass which a lot of stuff together, good and bad, to get bipartisan support.

Congress Is About To Pass A Bill That Shows D.C. At Its Worst — It May Also Fix The Opioid Crisis And Cure Cancer

Elizabeth Warren railed against the bill and called it the result of corruption. She called out Mitch McConnell because one of his biggest donors, W. Ed Bosarge owns a stem-cell firm and will profit hugely by allowing stem cell therapy to be given to patients without more research proving its safety (something that the International Society for Stem Cell Research is pretty upset about.)

The biggest problem with this bill is that it does provide 4.8 billion dollars for medical research over 10 years for things like Biden's cancer "moonshot" it is offset by cuts to MediCare and MediCaid and while the spending is tied to discretionary spending (which means it has to be renewed every year) it appears that the cuts are permanent. There are other attachments to the bill designed to please Big Pharma while doing nothing for patients. In short, this bill is a land of contrasts.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:26 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think he might not be up for anything that requires any kind of confirmation hearing.

It would sort of explain why he fell out of mainstream Republican politics and had to hitch a ride to Trump's star.
posted by drezdn at 6:36 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Rudy's convention speech was genuinely unhinged. I'm not even being mean or snarky in any way. I was worried for him.
posted by zutalors! at 6:40 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think he might not be up for anything that requires any kind of confirmation hearing.

That would assume the greedheads in charge of such a hearing have some kind of standards, ethics, scruples, or spines. "Shouty, old, white, male, universally maligned" seems to be enough qualification now.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:41 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

@AdamSerwer: Amazing: WSJ op-ed credits Sessions with reducing the crack/powder disparity, but he opposed eliminating it and pushed to retain a disparity
posted by zombieflanders at 6:43 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Not the point of the article, but boy it sure would be nice if the HuffPo et al would stop using "D.C." as a stand-in for "the government."
posted by aspersioncast at 6:43 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Maybe now that even the president doesn't plan to live here we can finally stop that.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:44 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

> trump seems he's finally turning into some kind of happy goblin.

And why not? Everyone is climbing over each other to kiss his ass and/or beg for forgiveness/a job, but he doesn't actually have any responsibilities yet.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:45 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

An update from the Department of Economic Anxiety, Michigan Division:

GRAND RAPIDS, MI - The latest numbers from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis put Grand Rapids and Detroit at the top of the list for metropolitan areas showing the "most improvement" in gross regional product over the past five years.

posted by tivalasvegas at 7:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

The Case for Normalizing Trump:

But several students of authoritarian populist movements abroad have a different message. To beat Trump, what his opponents need to do is practice ordinary humdrum politics. Populists in office thrive on a circus-like atmosphere that casts the populist leader as persecuted by media and political elites who are obsessed with his uncouth behavior while he is busy doing the people’s work. To beat Trump, progressives will need to do as much as they can to get American politics out of reality show mode.

posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:11 AM on November 30, 2016 [27 favorites]

He's never going to have any responsibilities because no one is ever going to hold him accountable for not doing shit. He'll go to the fancy state dinners and zone out. He'll read enough headlines to tweet about it. He'll claim TREMENDOUS PROGRESS and go sleep in at Trump Tower for the weekend. He'll bid the press to cover him favorably and then shit all over their newspapers anyway.

The government and his cabinet of deplorables will churn out hateful and destructive legislation without his help and he's never even going to have to care about being incompetent or unwilling to work. The Trump Presidency will be like the Trump Brand: he can flounder and posture and steal and lie and fail and it won't matter to him, his ego, or his supporters.
posted by lydhre at 7:11 AM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

In other words, he hasn't so much won the presidency as he has won the ability to Trump-brand a presidency that will be run by others.
posted by prefpara at 7:18 AM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

Brand exposure...

As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account — a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one — has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate.

How to cover a president’s pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early-morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further?
---
As of Tuesday, @POTUS had 12.3 million followers. And @realDonaldTrump? 16.3 million.

If Trump Tweets It, Is It News? A Quandary for the News Media (NYT)
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:21 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

He's never going to have any responsibilities because no one is ever going to hold him accountable for not doing shit.

Maybe I'm way off, but I'd bet he has some promises to keep and debts to be repaid. Just not to the American people.
posted by ODiV at 7:24 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

How to cover a president’s pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague?

Start each story with "President-Elect Donald Trump lied the following this morning:".
posted by Etrigan at 7:28 AM on November 30, 2016 [18 favorites]

But several students of authoritarian populist movements abroad have a different message. To beat Trump, what his opponents need to do is practice ordinary humdrum politics. Populists in office thrive on a circus-like atmosphere that casts the populist leader as persecuted by media and political elites who are obsessed with his uncouth behavior while he is busy doing the people’s work. To beat Trump, progressives will need to do as much as they can to get American politics out of reality show mode.

That is an interesting point - I wonder if there's a "normalizing without normalizing" mode, where people approach the situation as "this is an unacceptable deviation from a working state" rather than "chaos fascists everywhere OMG" (which is how I'm feeling).

Trump relies on the idea of a "state of exception" already - that things are so bad what with the radical Islamists and so on, that any old action is acceptable. In a way, saying that we are not in a state of exception, that the "state of exception" is being used to cover up an exceptionally nasty bunch of crony capitalists, is a useful counterpoint.

I've just started Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, and although it seems like it's a bit "rah rah free market could have prevented this", it does make some very good points about the creation of a phony sense of emergency as a way to let nationalist leaders do all kinds of stuff. Also, it points to the lack of a strong civil society - people who think of themselves as citizen participants in the state, rather than being attached to or totally subject to the state - as one of the things that enabled the rise of violent nationalism. It makes me think about how civil society has been intentionally weakened here in the US and how Trump is obviously creating this phony emergency/exception situation so that everything is just a chaotic mess and no one can stand up to him.
posted by Frowner at 7:29 AM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

Why are we not doing that?

We are; AFAICT it only works the other way, see for example the WaPo story about the fake news org from last week where the guy claims that they tried to run a fake news site targeting liberals and it just didn't get the clicks.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:29 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

The closest thing we had to the right-wing talk radio format was Air America and it failed rather spectacularly despite some solid on-air talent. Keith Olbermann's Countdown show on MSNBC was somewhat of a blowhard-preaches-to-the-choir format, and it was successful enough to boostrap Maddow and Hayes as fixtures in the prime-time lineup, but I just don't get the sense that the target audience for progressive policy wants to be told what to think in the same way that conservatives seem to. I certainly tired of Olbermann's schtick over time -- at first it was great to hear someone with a prominent platform screaming about what Bush 43 was doing to the country, but over time it just gets old. I don't know how the dittoheads do it with Limbaugh, hearing the same thing day after day.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:37 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

That is an interesting point - I wonder if there's a "normalizing without normalizing" mode, where people approach the situation as "this is an unacceptable deviation from a working state" rather than "chaos fascists everywhere OMG"

Normalize him in our minds, but not in our hearts.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 7:40 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo: World, Show Trump (and the Kids) the Money!

The point is that there's no way to sell this operation to Larry Stein and have these gaudy monstrosities become Stein Towers. The value disappears or almost entirely disappears once the name goes. The value of this business is inextricably tied to Trump's (or his immediate family members) owning them and using his name. [...]

As long as Trump or his family owns the Trump Organization and as long as they're hawking building ventures around the world with Trump's name on it, the Trump Organization will continue to be a conduit, actually a firehose of money to Trump. Being President will be the business bonanza of a lifetime for Trump.

And again, let's remember. Trump isn't doing any of this. He's making a big fanfare of turning over running the company, 'operations'.

As I've noted, 'conflicts of interest' isn't really a phrase that works in this case. The Trump family, during the transition, is actively hawking existing and new building projects around the world on the value of the American presidency.

posted by tonycpsu at 7:43 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Recently I saw the following very disturbing thing:
A gas station near me has tv screens above the pumps, so that while you're pumping gas they show you video ads. One of the ads was for an apparently conservative rural tv channel -- guy in work clothes, with an indeterminate Real Murcan accent, with the scowling indignant face characteristic of these conservative media outlets, walking on railroad tracks talking about how the coastal elites try to trick us, and his news show is there to unspin and give us the real story, "so you don't get railroaded". Then: "watch RT.tv". (I think the "railroad" thing is deliberately meant to prime viewers to make a false interpretation of the "R" in RT.)

So, it seems that Russia Times is putting propaganda on the air disguised as a conservative tv "news" channel, with a pitch as more "authentic" and country/rural/non-elite than Fox.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:44 AM on November 30, 2016 [42 favorites]

One of the ads was for an apparently conservative rural tv channel -- guy in work clothes, with an indeterminate Real Murcan accent, with the scowling indignant face characteristic of these conservative media outlets, walking on railroad tracks talking about how the coastal elites try to trick us, and his news show is there to unspin and give us the real story, "so you don't get railroaded". Then: "watch RT.tv". (I think the "railroad" thing is deliberately meant to prime viewers to make a false interpretation of the "R" in RT.)

Is it this ad? If so, that's actually liberal commentator Ed Schultz.
posted by zombieflanders at 7:47 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

That's the ad I saw! Wow, huh.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:48 AM on November 30, 2016

I despair that people are still guessing and suggesting how the media could cover Trump. It's happening on Dan Rather's FB as well. The media has had 16 months of practice, they should just...figure this out? Unless their goal is just eyeballs and not real journalism.
posted by zutalors! at 7:49 AM on November 30, 2016

Like here: I Voted for Hillary. And Now I'm Going to Write for Breitbart. More of this will be needed, I think.

Christ, no. The same logic has been used by Fox News Democrats to defend their presence on the network, but every one of them becomes a punching bag. There is no positive value in participating in a forum that has no interest in fair debate, and much negative value in legitimizing a media outlet that promulgates bigotry. Let's not buy into whatever fiction this guy needs to tell himself in order to sleep at night when the checks cash.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:49 AM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

witchen I've been floating around the idea of crowdfunding an anti-Trump billboard in DC, but I wonder if your way might be more productive.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:50 AM on November 30, 2016

The same logic has been used by Fox News Democrats to defend their presence on the network, but every one of them becomes a punching bag.

Perhaps being a punching bag is better than not existing in that realm at all.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:51 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Perhaps being a punching bag is better than not existing in that realm at all.

If that's what you believe, then make that case. The idea that either Fox News or Breitbart are going to give liberals equal time and latitude to make their case without stacking the deck in favor of the world view of their owners is laughable to me, but go ahead and explain how you think that happens.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:53 AM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

Perhaps being a punching bag is better than not existing in that realm at all.

Following the example of the tremendous influence Alan Colmes had on the body politic.
posted by Etrigan at 7:54 AM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

If that's what you believe, then make that case.

I mean, to me, there seems to be a huge visibility gap. Trump voters aren't watching AM Joy. They aren't listening to conversations about intersectionality. So if someone's willing to publish on Breitbart or appear on Fox News, even if it descends into a fighty disaster, at least these people have some exposure to people who aren't them.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:56 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

I've been floating around the idea of crowdfunding an anti-Trump billboard in DC

I would throw money at that idea if it could be prominently displayed in time for inauguration and cause him to have a hissy fit during his swearing in.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 7:58 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

We are; AFAICT it only works the other way, see for example the WaPo story about the fake news org from last week where the guy claims that they tried to run a fake news site targeting liberals and it just didn't get the clicks.

Be careful with this; the only source for this claim is from someone who openly admits that they make shit up for a living.
posted by indubitable at 7:58 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

"THOSE PEOPLE NEED TO HTFU AND GET A HELMET" -the oh-so-very fragile WWC
posted by entropicamericana at 7:59 AM on November 30, 2016

North Carolina's New Rainbow Coalition: How identity politics helped give Democrats one victory in a disastrous election cycle
posted by zombieflanders at 7:59 AM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

the only source for this claim is from someone who openly admits that they make shit up for a living.

That is a solid point, especially since the guy seemed to excel at validating preconceived notions in his audience, and may simply have been telling the reporter what he thought they wanted to hear.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:02 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

see for example the WaPo story about the fake news org from last week where the guy claims that they tried to run a fake news site targeting liberals and it just didn't get the clicks.

I've seen several people respond to that with suspicion ("He's just saying that to get liberals to share it! Brilliant!") but I believe it. I hardly ever see a liberal version of the conservative fake news and email forwards that I literally see multiple times a day. Plus, as the mandated annoying fact-checker among my Facebook friends, when I do see some fake news with a liberal bias, here's what happens:

Liberal friend: *posts fake news*
Me: Actually, no. See this link.
Liberal friend: Ugh, my bad! I'll take it down and post a correction.

On the other hand,

Conservative friend: *posts fake news*
Me: Actually, no. See this link.
Conservative friend: I can't believe you trust the freaking Main Stream Media on this! They are completely in the tank for Hillary! www.antimuslimpatriotreport.com has been all over this important development since day one!

Every. Single. Time.

I mean, the fact that some liberals are suspicious about an article that makes nice claims about them shows how far they will bend over to fact-check.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:03 AM on November 30, 2016 [58 favorites]

Be careful with this; the only source for this claim is from someone who openly admits that they make shit up for a living.

Anecdotally, whenever someone who isn't conservative posts an article that is full of shit there's half a dozen people ready to give you a thirty page dissertation on why the article is wrong, or misleading, or is intellectually dishonest.
posted by Talez at 8:03 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

every time i get the bottom of this thread i'm confronted with the contention that understanding orgasm begins with a butt plug and i wonder if that isn't also true of republicans.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 8:05 AM on November 30, 2016 [35 favorites]

And to re-emphasize: the intended audience for these messages are not liberals.

How many people who are at all reachable with the progressive message do you think are reading Breitbart?
posted by tonycpsu at 8:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Trumpism loves tokens - look at how all the profiles of Bannon et al mention a black employee or left-leaning friend. They know the media eats up these superficial "complexities." A liberal writer on Breitbart will be used as a pet Emmanuel Goldstein and help an outlet for vile propaganda make their case as a legitimate source of news.
posted by theodolite at 8:07 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

> I'm thinking the trick is in not telling them it's a progressive message.

That's dodging the question. Forget how it's presented -- what percent of the Breitbart-reading audience do you believe could ever be receptive to the policies that would be advanced by progressives?
posted by tonycpsu at 8:08 AM on November 30, 2016

@BrooklynSpoke
Trump is not using Twitter to distract you from his agenda. Bannon & co. are using Trump to distract you from theirs.
posted by chris24 at 8:09 AM on November 30, 2016 [50 favorites]

Trump is not using Twitter to distract you from his agenda. Bannon & co. are using Trump to distract you from theirs.

Most likely both are happening. Trump has his plans, Bannon has his and Pence, god help us, has HIS.

I'm thinking the trick is in not telling them it's a progressive message.

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:14 AM on November 30, 2016

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?

It's the one that got two million more votes on 11/8, just not the 100,000 who are the only ones who matter by the bizarre logic that starts with "if we'd gotten those voters, we would have won" and ends with "the only way we can win is by getting those voters."
posted by tonycpsu at 8:15 AM on November 30, 2016 [18 favorites]

Possibly introduce Christian-type trappings with the progressive messages: "Jesus Christ said [something about caring for the least of us]: won't you do the same?"
posted by XtinaS at 8:16 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Forget how it's presented -- what percent of the Breitbart-reading audience do you believe could ever be receptive to the policies that would be advanced by progressives?

I think witchen is probably right to an extent that if you placed those kinds of stories in the same kind of setting as the right wing stuff, people would read and share it, but the problem is that the right wing sites aren't run by people dopey enough to believe that stuff, they just make use of it so they'd tear it apart and get even more shares. It wouldn't work on Breitbart very well for that reason, just like it didn't work on Fox. And liberals, in a general sense, don't consume media in that fashion, though they can be plenty gullible when one of their preferred sources says something ridiculous.

People don't fact check generally, they just want to trust the info, the problem is largely an aesthetic one over who listens to or reads what and how they want to see info presented. Liberals like different kinds of stories than conservatives and have a different perspective on connecting a story to fact.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:18 AM on November 30, 2016

"Jesus Christ said [something about caring for the least of us]: won't you do the same?"

Liberal Christians I know have been saying this for years.
posted by zutalors! at 8:21 AM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

Seriously, people, don't take advantage of the state decriminalization laws to smoke marijuana openly. Trump is looking to fill jails.

I can understand the impulse to caution, and I'm not sure that's the particular hill I'd choose to die on either. Nevertheless, don't just let him grab you by the pussy. (When you understand that you're not powerless, you don't have to let him do it.)

Bone up on your Henry David. Lead with your conscience, not your fear.
posted by perspicio at 8:24 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've seen several people respond to that with suspicion ("He's just saying that to get liberals to share it! Brilliant!") but I believe it. I hardly ever see a liberal version of the conservative fake news and email forwards that I literally see multiple times a day.

I've been thinking about this, and I think the only counterpoint I could consider is Tumblr, which can be ridiculously echo-chambery and individual posts are difficult to redact by design. Someone may eventually post a great takedown, but finding it within the morass is difficult. Plus, the younger age demographic.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:25 AM on November 30, 2016

Apologies if it was already linked, but good gravy is that a weird ass picture.

"Tomorrow night he is having dinner with Wallace Shawn."
posted by My Dad at 8:29 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Re: the years of Pelosi's leadership They got better between 2006-2010.

True, but how much of that was simply having a huge majority and a massively unpopular president to oppose for the final two years and a historic one to support for the next two?

At the time, a lot of the handwringing over whether health care reform could pass came down to whether Pelosi could get votes in the house. The bad bargains that were struck during those years are part of why a lot of people, myself included, think that the reform was done too weakly to gain mass approval and that's a big part of what's hurt the Democrats ever since.

And in the subsequent years, things have gotten worse and worse under her leadership. Doing the same thing every two years and expecting better results doesn't seem to be working. She's not a dynamic national figure and she doesn't attract admiration and support the way Elizabeth Warren does.
posted by Candleman at 8:29 AM on November 30, 2016

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?

We are NOT insane ?
posted by y2karl at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

We're a multicultural society that lives in a shared reality?
posted by box at 8:34 AM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

At the time, a lot of the handwringing over whether health care reform could pass came down to whether Pelosi could get votes in the house. The bad bargains that were struck during those years are part of why a lot of people, myself included, think that the reform was done too weakly to gain mass approval and that's a big part of what's hurt the Democrats ever since.

The house? What? We had 58 Democrats in the Senate on December 22, 2009. Lieberman said no public option or no cloture.

Guess what the Senate passed the ACA without?
posted by Talez at 8:35 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

I guess it just wouldn't be American politics if a woman wasn't taking the fall for a man's fuckups.
posted by Talez at 8:35 AM on November 30, 2016 [27 favorites]

AP: Trump 3 adult children will "increase their responsibilities" in business as Trump works to avoid conflicts, Kellyanne Conway tells me
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:36 AM on November 30, 2016

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?

The American Dream isn't just for rich white people?
posted by Mooski at 8:36 AM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

y2karl: Seems like you might have identified the problem right there. Perhaps the great philosopher-poet Seal accurately foresaw the future way back in the 90's, when he proclaimed:

But we're never gonna survive, unless
We get a little crazy
posted by prosopagnosia at 8:36 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Why does every single female Democrat need to be compared to Elizabeth Warren?
posted by zutalors! at 8:37 AM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

"Serious question, what IS the progressive message?"

That the last 30 years prove Reagan's inaugural words were a blasphemy against the first three words of the constitution and government maybe isn't the problem and might even be the solution.
posted by klarck at 8:37 AM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?

NOT. FUCKING. MORONS.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 8:40 AM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

That the last 30 years prove Reagan's inaugural words were a blasphemy against the first three words of the constitution and government maybe isn't the problem and might even be the solution.

Yes. Now we need to reduce it to a catchy slogan that sticks in the memory and causes an emotional response.
posted by Mooski at 8:40 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

That the last 30 years prove Reagan's inaugural words were a blasphemy against the first three words of the constitution and government maybe isn't the problem and might even be the solution.

Translation for those with less than encyclopedic political knowledge:
Reagan: Government is the problem
Constitution: We the People
posted by Talez at 8:41 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Breitbart's primary audience is not elderly rural white Christians who have never met a liberal before. It's produced by and for pepe avatar gamergaters who already know what progressives think and they hate it.
posted by theodolite at 8:42 AM on November 30, 2016 [34 favorites]

I do think we need to rally around a positive vision of and for America. Trumpism is fundamentally anti-American and counter to our highest and best ideals. We should plant an American flag in the sand, patriotism is ours to claim. We should explicitly articulate our American values and explain why they are so important and so good. Freedom of thought and speech, equality, the dignity of every person, the rule of law, and the American dream - the pursuit of happiness, of upward mobility, of hard work that is rewarded. I want to see us move away from pure defense and lurching from fire to fire. There will be endless fires during Trump's presidency, more than one every day. We need to ground ourselves in the vision of America that we love and fight for.
posted by prefpara at 8:44 AM on November 30, 2016 [42 favorites]

America is a place that people come to because they fall in love with what America promises to be. We want America to keep that promise.

That is how I feel about my family's journey to America. It's not the country we thought it was, but that doesn't change our devotion to the country it wants to be and can be. America promises that everyone will get a fair chance to make a better life for themselves, as themselves. That's an exciting vision. I feel patriotic about that vision. I want it to deliver.
posted by prefpara at 8:48 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Benenson basically claims the polls were right and that Clinton won by 2 to 5% nationally as predicted but States are impossible to forecast and Comey's letter was the death blow to the campaign and that everything else was done right.

I think it's reasonable to argue that there are other margins on which the election was lost... but I don't think there's any reasonable case that Comey's publicly performed handwashing wasn't one of them.
posted by wildblueyonder at 8:49 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

I do think we need to rally around a positive vision of and for America. Trumpism is fundamentally anti-American and counter to our highest and best ideals. We should plant an American flag in the sand, patriotism is ours to claim. We should explicitly articulate our American values and explain why they are so important and so good. Freedom of thought and speech, equality, the dignity of every person, the rule of law, and the American dream - the pursuit of happiness, of upward mobility, of hard work that is rewarded. I want to see us move away from pure defense and lurching from fire to fire. There will be endless fires during Trump's presidency, more than one every day. We need to ground ourselves in the vision of America that we love and fight for.

You do realize this was the entire 2016 election in a nutshell.

The WWC electorate is quite amenable to burning it down rather than holding hope.
posted by Talez at 8:49 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

> I've seen several people respond to that with suspicion ("He's just saying that to get liberals to share it! Brilliant!") but I believe it. I hardly ever see a liberal version of the conservative fake news and email forwards that I literally see multiple times a day.

Wait though am I the only one who had like two months solid of Facebook friends sharing contentless gibberish from usuncut?

because I had that. I'm pretty sure a bunch of other people did too.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:50 AM on November 30, 2016 [20 favorites]

Liberal friend: Ugh, my bad! I'll take it down and post a correction.

This has unfortunately not been the experience I have had with my Bernie-supporting friends and USUncut
posted by corb at 8:51 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

...and that will teach me to hit preview even if there's only one comment waiting.
posted by corb at 8:52 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

I do think we need to rally around a positive vision of and for America. Trumpism is fundamentally anti-American and counter to our highest and best ideals. We should plant an American flag in the sand, patriotism is ours to claim. We should explicitly articulate our American values and explain why they are so important and so good. Freedom of thought and speech, equality, the dignity of every person, the rule of law, and the American dream - the pursuit of happiness, of upward mobility, of hard work that is rewarded. I want to see us move away from pure defense and lurching from fire to fire. There will be endless fires during Trump's presidency, more than one every day. We need to ground ourselves in the vision of America that we love and fight for.

You do realize this was the entire 2016 election in a nutshell.

I agree. I heard a positive vision of and for America from Hillary Clinton. I said a lot of times during the campaign that I felt like it was written in invisible ink because of how much people protested that it wasn't there.
posted by zutalors! at 8:52 AM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

@sahilkapur

House Democrats have reelected @NancyPelosi as their leader.

Vote tally, per a source in the room:

Pelosi 134
Tim Ryan 63

posted by zombieflanders at 8:55 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

I do think we need to rally around a positive vision of and for America.

I'm going to rewatch the 2016 DNC monthly over the next four years as a reminder of the America we lost.
posted by papercake at 8:55 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

You do realize this was the entire 2016 election in a nutshell.

I don't. I think we have increasingly been asserting things without explaining or defending them. We're all increasingly in our in-groups using shorthand and we've become less clear and less persuasive. I mean we should actually be out there talking about why our American values are the right ones, where they come from, why they matter, what the stakes are, what relevant experiences we've had and the country has had. Not assert them - not say, "I love equality" - but explain them, explain what equality means, what its limits are, what its costs are and why they are justified, what the consequences have been of inequality. I want to see people doing this on the TV news. Not stating a fact and then saying "can you believe this" and moving on, but saying "this matters, and here's why." And explaining why.
posted by prefpara at 8:56 AM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

"Serious question, what IS the progressive message?"

The purpose of government is to protect the (relatively) powerless from the (relatively) powerful, to accomplish community goals and actions that people can't realistically achieve individually or in private/small groups, and to help advance a fair, just, sustainable quality of life for all citizens.
posted by FelliniBlank at 8:56 AM on November 30, 2016 [22 favorites]

Michigan, which Trump won by 10,000 votes, is now trying to ram through strict voter ID law in lame duck session
posted by zombieflanders at 8:57 AM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

And I hear you guys on the convention and the Clinton campaign. They did present a positive vision and rally behind those values. But they didn't explain them, they asserted them. So people who already agreed heard the message. But now I think we need to do more to reach people who don't deeply feel or understand those values and ideals. Or don't value them above other considerations. Who are made to feel ashamed (I'm not saying wrongly) for their patriotism. I think we need to find a bipartisan patriotism.
posted by prefpara at 8:58 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

What do you mean explain? I'm a second generation Indian American and the day after the election white liberals were telling me I needed to calmly explain why I deserve to live in America to WWC who would question that.
posted by zutalors! at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

Does anyone here actually think Trump will do his job even half-assedly?

Nope.

My guess is about a year before he drops the pretense and just becomes Rabidly-Stupid-Rapey-Twitter-Mouthhole-In-Chief while Pence meets with confused wonks.
posted by petebest at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?

I thought Stronger Together was a good summary. The progressive message is that we value diversity, we don't fear it. The progressive message is that we all benefit when the less fortunate are taken care of. The progressive message is that having to solve every problem by yourself isn't working, and that when we join together to provide healthcare, income assistance, education, and basic social services across the country, the nation as a whole is stronger. Republicans want to convince the populace that government programs are ways to steal from hard workers and give to lazy people. We reject that framing. There are hard working poor people--lots of them--and there are lazy, idle rich people. The question isn't "who deserves help?" The question is what kind of country do we want to be? The GOP has been clear about their agenda: continued insecurity for minimum wage works, who don't make enough to even cover rent and groceries, much less emergencies. Continued stress for people who chronic medical conditions, who now worry if their formerly guaranteed insurance will be taken away. Continued debt for college students, as government assistance shrinks and loans inflate. We don't think it has to be that way. We don't think leaving huge segments of our country poor, stressed, and indebted is working even for those who are wealthy, healthy, and invested. So we believe in reasonable taxes for the most fortunate and solid programs for the least fortunate. We believe in looking after each other. And a lot of us know that this year's raise can easily turn into next year's layoff, so we're looking out for ourselves as well. Stronger together.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:03 AM on November 30, 2016 [62 favorites]

What do you mean explain?

I mean I think a lot of people have been let down by their schools and their media and literally don't know a lot about our history and where American core values come from and what the stakes are and have been. And I think the Democratic Party needs to give those people a hand up, because naming the value without more doesn't do enough to give those people the information and context they are missing. I think journalists need to do it, I think people on the news need to do it. Just saying "this isn't normal" is too little, we need to be explaining why we had a certain normal before and what is at stake if that normal goes away, and in a way that is approachable.

And lest I be unclear, I don't mean "we" need to do this as in, each individual person needs to go proselytize democratic values or compartmentalize their personal emotions to placate bigots. I mean "we" the community of people fighting for our vision of America need our leaders and most visible members to add more substance and information to what they say and lean less on slogans and shorthand.
posted by prefpara at 9:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

Wait though am I the only one who had like two months solid of Facebook friends sharing contentless gibberish from usuncut?

Huh. I had to Google what that was. As a white Texan, most of my liberal friends leaned toward Bernie but really didn't care that much as long as anyone won but Trump. I didn't have a lot of Bernie dead-enders in my feed.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:07 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Why does every single female Democrat need to be compared to Elizabeth Warren?

It's not about gender, it's that there's no other nationally admired and recognized senator. (Which is problematic.)
posted by Candleman at 9:07 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

ok that makes sense prefpara.
posted by zutalors! at 9:07 AM on November 30, 2016

Not assert them - not say, "I love equality" - but explain them, explain what equality means, what its limits are, what its costs are and why they are justified, what the consequences have been of inequality.

I think this would be amazing, but I don't think anyone will do it in the current political climate.

At some point in the last decades, we stopped being open - this isn't just liberals, conservatives too - about what the actual negative consequences of the good things we're talking about are. And the problem with this is twofold: first, that when people say the true negative consequences, it's a 'gotcha'. But secondly, the people get out of the habit of talking seriously about "Well, these negative consequences are worth it, because the positive consequences are good." And so the mere perception of any negative consequences often becomes enough to torpedo legislation, and the cycle continues. TAANSTAFL, but the people have gotten used to believing there will be - that good things don't have to cost anyone. And that's just not how the world works. There is no way to raise literally every single boat with any legislation.

So like - if you think the ACA is a good thing, message on "Yes, if you're young and healthy, or already have really great coverage through your employer, this is probably going to cost you a lot more money. But overall, it's necessary, because without taking the money of the young and healthy, these insurance companies won't be able to afford to insure the sick, and we think it's more important that the sick have this access to health insurance than that young, healthy people or people who are already well insured have more money." Make it super explicit.

And if you think the ACA is a bad thing, message on, "Yes, removing the ACA is probably going to strip health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, who have worse health outcomes. There is literally no way to remove the individual mandate without tanking the system, which right now is keeping a lot of people healthy and out of the hospital. But we think the principle that Americans should not be forced to buy a product simply by existing and being born is important enough that it's worth these millions of Americans having shitty health outcomes."

Because otherwise, people feel justifiably lied to when the bad consequences have been elided and then suddenly are happening - because the only serious discussion of the good/bad sides of the issue are red team/blue team discussions. Your team says "this is bad", the other team says "this is great". Who are you going to listen to, when you mentally examine the thing? We need nuanced views from both sides so that people can actually hear them.
posted by corb at 9:17 AM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

> TAANSTAFL, but the people have gotten used to believing there will be - that good things don't have to cost anyone. And that's just not how the world works. There is no way to raise literally every single boat with any legislation.

We don't actually live in this zero-sum world you're speaking of here. There are many policy interventions that produce win-win scenarios. TANSTAFL is not an iron-clad law of the world.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:24 AM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

There are many policy interventions that produce win-win scenarios.

If you can think of a policy intervention where no one is harmed even in the slightest, most trivial, way, I will cheerfully eat my hat and admit you are better informed than me! But it is my understanding that if a thing is universally desired by literally 100% of the populace, it doesn't need an intervention to take care of it.
posted by corb at 9:27 AM on November 30, 2016

> If you can think of a policy intervention where no one is harmed even in the slightest, most trivial, way

This is a significant moving of the goalposts from zero-sum.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:29 AM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

explain them, explain what equality means,

Not that it isn't needed, but this isn't necessary as such - that's what framng is for. We already have concepts like 'equality' hard-coded into words and phrases we could be using. By using those words the concept is communicated automatically without the baggage of explaining.

But instead we chase Twumps Tritter Trail and never get the MSM to pick them up. See Also: DNC Convention.
posted by petebest at 9:29 AM on November 30, 2016

Serious question, what IS the progressive message?

"This machine kills fascists."

But it has to be true. Progressives have to stop bending so far over backwards that they bury their heads in their asses, in service to the false ideal that everybody is include-able in their just and equitable society. Persuade where possible, but accept that you can't reach everybody, and people whose views are dangerously antithetical to the goals must be permanently sequestered.

In other words, if you believe in good, and you believe in yourself as good, then do the intellectually responsible thing and both believe in evil and act on that belief.
posted by perspicio at 9:30 AM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

We already have concepts like 'equality' hard-coded into words and phrases we could be using. By using those words the concept is communicated automatically without the baggage of explaining.

If this were true we wouldn't have lost the election.
posted by prefpara at 9:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Your team says "this is bad", the other team says "this is great". Who are you going to listen to, when you mentally examine the thing? We need nuanced views from both sides so that people can actually hear them.

I'm not so sure about that. The person that won the election was basically a salesman, someone that pushes or inflates the positive aspects of a purchase while omitting or even denying the negative consequences of it. The person that lost is a policy wonk, one that goes into length explaining an issue and often goes into such detail that they're accused of being ALL nuance, and no vision.

To me, the salesman aspect does partly explain why Donald won. It's because we see voting as choosing a brand or product, instead of a communal decision that affects other people and continues to affect them after the decision is made.
posted by FJT at 9:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

We already have concepts like 'equality' hard-coded into words and phrases we could be using. By using those words the concept is communicated automatically without the baggage of explaining.

If this were true we wouldn't have lost the election

Ok I'm back to not understanding what you'd like to have explained. What about equality as a virtue needs to be explained?
posted by zutalors! at 9:35 AM on November 30, 2016

I mean, ffs, what's the negative consequence of:

- Allowing trans* individuals to pee in the bathroom that matches their presentation

I know what bigots think it is, but I'm not going to repeat that here.
posted by zutalors! at 9:45 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I think the trans* thing is a great example of how the "both sides" thing is difficult. A lot of the thinkpieces in the days after the election specifically called out trans* issues and bathrooms as the "identity politics" problem for the Democrats. But like, trans* issues are very obviously about identity.

In a sense I get how people feel upset about being called bigots in that area more than others because I hadn't met a trans* person for most of my life, thought I had liberal ideas about the topic but was aware that I had prejudices and my allyship wasn't good enough.

Metafilter helped me a great deal with that. But still, my views were still bigoted and it's not wrong to say so. There isn't another side, it was literally about me needing to learn how to fully come on to the right side.
posted by zutalors! at 9:52 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

From today's Indiana Daily Student, the local University's student paper:

Newly-elected chair of IU College Republicans: "I just make sure the trains run on time."

I don't know if this is the new face of dogwhistle fascism or just a college kid being ignorant about her cliches, but it definitely gave me a jolt. I guess I didn't expect the shot of banality in my morning cup of evil to be locally sourced today.
posted by Rykey at 9:52 AM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

That there's a "nuanced view" coming from the bigoted side that needs to truly be "mentally examined" in any form other than outright derision and dismissal?

...aaand here's the problem in a nutshell. The opposition has embraced and empowered the holders of the opinions worthy of derision and dismissal in order to further their agendas.

Our agendas by their nature prevent us from using a similar tactic. You can't embrace stupidity if you're trying like hell to remove it.
posted by Mooski at 9:56 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

say "okay, yes, sexual assault is definitely bad; let's talk about where it actually tends to happen (aka not in public bathrooms, by strangers) and how to protect against those scenarios," and get back to the matter at hand.

Do you know, a lot of people have tried this exact approach. I have. You know, acknowledging the other side's concerns and then addressing them with facts.

It has literally never worked for me. I have yet to meet anyone who has had significant success with this.

And I think the reason is this: Hatred is not reasonable. It does not come from a place of facts, but instead collects nonsense and garbage and bad arguments and bad faith to support itself. It's not a creature of reason and so is not amenable or responsive to reason. It's rooted in disgust, in an unreasonable revulsion that the person who possesses it can barely fathom.

Or, worse, it is rooted in craven politicking, in people taking that disgust and seeing it as a political tool, and so encouraging it. And those people have power and have something that for many represents moral authority, and so their support for disgust is going to carry a lot more weight than my facts, which are suspect anyway.

If there is a way to do this that works, please tell me, because at the moment I am at my wits end with being told I need to talk to people who are disgusted by me and the people I love.
posted by maxsparber at 10:02 AM on November 30, 2016 [48 favorites]

Don't give it loads of free airtime or any veneer of legitimacy, but do say "okay, yes, sexual assault is definitely bad; let's talk about where it actually tends to happen (aka not in public bathrooms, by strangers) and how to protect against those scenarios," and get back to the matter at hand.

But this happened! For years this is what activists and allies have been saying, and the only thing it did was embolden the bigots, who also hold the levers of power.

Comments like the one qcubed was responding to are just straight of the David Brooks playbook, where so-called "centrists" (who are actually pretty conservative) keep on telling left-wing activists and lawmakers how to do their job, even when they're doing exactly what the centrists tell them they should be doing. The refusal to admit that maybe it's the conservatives who keeps on putting their thumbs on the scales is exactly how Trump rose to power.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:05 AM on November 30, 2016 [25 favorites]

at the moment I am at my wits end with being told I need to talk to people who are disgusted by me and the people I love.

cosign, completely.
posted by zutalors! at 10:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

I mean, it's funny (in a really dark kind of way) how the very same people who keep on lecturing the left on taking responsibility for the consequences of their policies have thus far almost entirely failed to take responsibility for the consequences of their own.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

I would 100% support (and write legislation for) a progressive version of ALEC. An org that puts out model turnkey legislation for state and local progressive governments that advance progressive interests. Writing laws is hard work and the GOP (and neoliberal Dems) prefer to outsource that work to think tanks funded by big corporations. We need the union-organizing equivalent of that -- people-centered legislation written by subject matter experts with ease of passage (and durability through legal challenges) as a top priority.

I think any effort to convince any Trump voter to believe in progressive values is a fool's errand. Conditioning progress on their agreement gives them all the power -- they will never change their beliefs publicly because then they wouldn't have that power anymore. They like Democrats asking for permission. Democrats have to realize that we don't have to ask for permission -- if we truly think our values are right, then we should act like they're right regardless of whether a Republican believes in them or not (see also: science). "But then they'll call us arrogant elites!" Yes, they will always find something to call us. We should not twist ourselves into pretzels to try to appease them, it only gives them more power and makes them less likely to cede that power by changing their minds. They aren't acting based on reason and logic, they're playing power games. Dems need to recognize this and stop acting like we're children begging for our parents' approval.
posted by melissasaurus at 10:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [70 favorites]

The "actual negative consequences" I've heard all tend to be notions based around pure bigotry.

Because the examples you used are real examples that are ongoing now and hurting people, I don't want to go into any more discussion of it in thread, at a time when everyone is already in a lot of pain - I'd rather use more noncontroversial examples that we now know to be a net good, but that still had some minor harms we can discuss without running the risk of hurting actual members.

But for example - hopefully no one in the thread would argue that women should be able to work in the same jobs as men. That's been happening for decades, and in most of American society, with the exception of military service (and apparently the goddamn Presidency) is pretty uncontroversial.

At the same time, that notion of women's equality in the workforce, over time, also had some negative consequences for some women. Over time, the notion that a man needed to support his wife completely started to disappear - after all, she was perfectly capable of working in a more equal workplace. Women who adhered to the more "traditional" notions of a women not working outside the home started to have more difficulty finding husbands, or more difficulty finding husbands who would commit to being their sole support. Alimony decisions started to become less generous and shorter - the expectation shifted from alimony being sufficient as a sole source of support to a more transitional nature.

At the same time, even those women still received the net positive benefits of society being more equal, and women gaining more respect all around. It was a net good. But that doesn't mean there were no negative consequences for people who benefited somewhat under the previous social order. I think someone termed it "beneficent patriarchy"? And while I honestly don't know what the arguments against it were at the time, if someone had said, "It will destroy the social order I live under", they would have been entirely right, because that's partially the point.

I think what we are seeing in Trump's election in particular is a fear of loss of social order - of the loss of institutions and structures that generally help people who already fit into it. The loss of the power of those networks and groups - of the privilege that they currently benefit from. And while it's certainly 100% valid to say that the loss there is dwarfed by the existing loss of people that are struggling just to exist without harm, I think that you can't really approach these people and convince them without admitting that yes, the end goal is their world disappearing. The end goal is them losing those things that are the privileges that come with fitting into the old social order.
posted by corb at 10:13 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

Breitbart's primary audience is not elderly rural white Christians who have never met a liberal before. It's produced by and for pepe avatar gamergaters who already know what progressives think and they hate it.

This is the problem with the "coastal elite," "media bubble," "get to understand a rural WWC voter," "Hillbilly Elegy" horsehit. The other side--the red hat side--hates you. They feed on your empathy. It's perceived as weakness. It's an authoritarian culture.
posted by My Dad at 10:13 AM on November 30, 2016 [51 favorites]

A negative consequence of marriage equality is that hyperfocus on it overshadowed the need for legal protections for LGBT people that could save lives in high-risk populations which are now a very serious concern, but that's a different conversation.

I have a lot of thoughts on progressive messaging and not much time to write them, so I'll say that I don't really disagree with what others have said, but I find a lot of comments to be without much substance. It is important to understand symbolic and poetic language in addition to pointing to facts and research, though, and being able to meaningfully talk about values is part of that.

There's also an awkward component in which progressives tend to project from an upper-middle class white, cishet bubble, and the issues of anyone else need to be framed in terms of how they affect upper-middle class white, cishet people. Steven Thrasher's pieces on the campaign go into this more clearly than I'm capable, so if you're genuinely curious, check them out. This one is an important but soberingly realistic antidote to despair. I don't have the energy to talk about this much, but you can see plenty of it in the site's history of discussions on gender, race and trans issues.

Right now, I feel the focus on "WWC" is misplaced (but hey, at least we're not erasing poor people of color anymore, I guess). I think this is an appealing narrative because it distracts from how many middle class white people voted Trump. Trump won white voters across class lines. We do need to have conversations about the Electoral College, gerrymandering and voter suppression, but framing this in terms of a scapegoat group isn't helping. We need to talk about racism among poor white people, but we also need to be talking about racism among middle and upper class people as well. This is a step I see too many people being unwilling to take right now. It's easier to pretend that racism is fundamentally a class problem and that class is fundamentally not real.

Phrases like "intersectionality" and "systemic racism" get thrown around a lot in spaces like this, but I'm not sure how well the concepts are understood. It seems like progressives often still react to racism as if it were a matter of individual character flaw, something only Bad People do explicitly, but racism is the air we breathe in the US. It is baked into the culture and history of the country. Reframing it in terms of only explicitly violent racism that occurs in poor, rural areas is a way of denying systemic racism. It's rather classist and, I suspect, more than a little racist, to boot. It ignores all the subtler manifestations of racism in which it's not so much that middle class white people overtly hate people of color as it is that they create and reinforce conditions which simply exclude people of color.

While I'm here, I may as well complete my heretical thought and say that we actually should listen to issues affecting working class people, white or otherwise. Economic inequality very much is a social justice issue, and one that is intrinsically entangled with both race and gender in the US. That this is understood by so many as a capitulation to racism seems to me indicative that, yes, progressives do have some honest-to-Glob issues with classism and racism. Listening to poor people doesn't mean indulging the most racist ones you can find, nor does it mean that people of color have some special burden to talk down racists who want to eradicate them. That so many white progressives have seemed to have this understanding is just bizarre and, again, indicative of some underlying assumptions here.

In case it needs to be clarified, I also think that Sanders or anyone else claiming that lefties need to walk back on "identity politics" in favor of a focus on economic issues are just as misguided. We need to focus on both, and the ways in which they intersect.
posted by byanyothername at 10:14 AM on November 30, 2016 [33 favorites]

I apologize for implying that--I was thinking more of my privileged self and my impressionable fellow citizens. That that burden should fall on someone in who's actively being persecuted would be very wrong. But I do see the hearts/minds efforts as a responsibility for people who are least likely to suffer under a DJT administration.

My problem with this is that it creates an underclass within the left of people who are waiting quietly for a privileged class to fight their battles for them.
posted by zutalors! at 10:16 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

> And while it's certainly 100% valid to say that the loss there is dwarfed by the existing loss of people that are struggling just to exist without harm

Then... it's not zero-sum. There's a free lunch. One side loses, but the other side gains much more.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:17 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I would like to posit something about the eternal racism vs. the white working class debate. Last night I was out with several white coworkers (creative professionals in San Francisco, for context) commiserating about Trump. The conversation turned to this idea of understanding the white working class, that they resent black people because they think liberals give them special attention and sympathy. (My coworkers made it clear that they didn't agree with this or defend it, but they thought it was something we had to listen to and consider.) In between these excursions, my coworkers let off steam by mocking superficial things about Trump - his hair, his orangeness, his vocabulary, his tackiness.

What struck me about this was... well, it was the "tacky" thing, really. I was thinking, do you think Trump voters don't realize that you think they're tacky, too? They watch reality TV and cable news. They might decorate a room entirely in gold if they were rich, why not. But even in the middle of this conversation where we were trying to understand the white working class, there was still this sneering sense of superiority over aesthetics.

There's this whole world of class differences that gets obscured because we've been told that the difference between "us" and "them" is racism, and so that's what white liberals seek to understand, even as they hold on to their contempt for everything else about the white working class. And frankly, a lot of white liberals aren't equipped to understand someone else's racism; they don't even understand their own. And POC get caught in the crossfire. I think these efforts at understanding need to focus squarely on class, and not race or racism.

On preview, I think byanyothername is saying what I'm trying to say.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:19 AM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

This is the problem with the "coastal elite," "media bubble," "get to understand a rural WWC voter," "Hillbilly Elegy" horsehit. The other side--the red hat side--hates you. They feed on your empathy. It's perceived as weakness. It's an authoritarian culture.

QFFT. Thank you for putting into words what I've been trying to get at but couldn't, partially because I kept sputtering with rage and giving up, but mostly because I just couldn't articulate it that well. It's why people repeating "Love trumps hate" just drives me completely apeshit.
posted by holborne at 10:20 AM on November 30, 2016 [15 favorites]

Hatred is not reasonable. It does not come from a place of facts, but instead collects nonsense and garbage and bad arguments and bad faith to support itself.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into 💩.
posted by localhuman at 10:27 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

‏ Shade from the person who runs the verified U.S. Office of Government Ethics account (@BraddJaffy)
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

you should, and I don't mean this to be harsh, but people need to consider that there are marginalized groups in the audience (Metafilter, Facebook, the lunchroom whatever) when they make their claims that both sides need to be heard etc. Because it is really strange to be talking about how to fight for equality and saying "oh, but I was just talking about the dominant class." You can't assume that's the only group in audience.
posted by zutalors! at 10:33 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

So my takeaway from all this is there needs to be a way to make bigots hate the people who are exploiting them more than the people they've been trained to hate their entire lives.

Tall order.
posted by Mooski at 10:33 AM on November 30, 2016 [21 favorites]

Yeah I was just about to post about the Office Of Government Ethics twitter account. And Trump sure as heck never said he'd divest. WaPo has a bit on this:

Following Trump’s announcement, the official Twitter account of the Office of Government Ethics, the traditionally staid federal agency that often works closely with presidential transition teams, celebrated Wednesday that Trump had committed to fully divesting his company stake, though Trump has publicly said no such thing. Among the nine tweets in the OGE’s rapid-fire delivery: “@realDonaldTrump Bravo! Only way to resolve these conflicts of interest is to divest . Good call!”

OGE officials said they would give a statement this afternoon but did not immediately offer explanation. The tweets were deleted within an hour of their first posting Wednesday morning, but returned around 1 p.m. for unknown reasons.

OGE lawyers have been influential in past presidents’ decisionmaking, but their advice has almost always been kept confidential. Brett Kappel, a Washington campaign-finance lawyer who has worked with OGE, said the agency “never tweets about an individual federal official’s ethics issues unless they are announcing the conclusion of an enforcement action.”

posted by zachlipton at 10:35 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

So my takeaway from all this is there needs to be a way to make bigots hate the people who are exploiting them more than the people they've been trained to hate their entire lives.

Tall order.

Maybe start with a remake of They Live
posted by philip-random at 10:43 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Anyone who lives in Michigan and wants to call and express their displeasure about the Voter ID Bill - call your rep, and then call the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Lisa Lyons.

The script for Lisa Lyons is here and there's a short MLive article about the bill here. The person I talked to in my rep's office said that it does have a chance of passing, so it's worth a call.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 10:47 AM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

So my takeaway from all this is there needs to be a way to make bigots hate the people who are exploiting them more than the people they've been trained to hate their entire lives.

Tall order.

Considering the people who are exploiting them are also the ones doing the training, well, there's going to need to be a fundamental break in the system for it to even be assailable.
posted by lydhre at 10:48 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

A statement from @OfficeGovEthics spokesman Seth Jaffe

It sounds like someone there just got really excited about government ethics and took to Twitter to talk about it.
posted by zachlipton at 10:54 AM on November 30, 2016

But like, trans* issues are very obviously about identity.


They're about our humanity, but I digress.


Yeah, I knew I had phrased that wrong but wasn't sure if I should correct. What I meant was that by asking trans* people to set aside their quest for rights as unnecessary "identity politics," we are denying their humanity. Same for all other groups.
posted by zutalors! at 10:59 AM on November 30, 2016

I believe the classic way to phrase the question you are all asking is "what is to be done?"
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:00 AM on November 30, 2016

I don't know if OGE's tweetstorm is funny or horrifying. I guess it is normal now for agencies, Presidents, etc. to just... tweet at each other? I guess it beats having to do a FOIA request.
posted by gatorae at 11:02 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

gatorae, I assumed the person who posted that tweetstorm was leaving the office and wanted to do so with a bang.
posted by pxe2000 at 11:04 AM on November 30, 2016

World leaders beware: a photo with Trump will expose your soul

Trump does this over and over again. Forget about dealmaking or galvanising the white working class; his greatest talent is his ability to make you reveal your true self in photographs. He is such an overt character, and inspires such polarised reaction, that people become totally incapable of hiding their feelings around him. This is my theory: if you’re a public figure of any description, history will remember only what you looked like when you were photographed with Trump.

Romney – sagging and broken as though Trump has ambushed him with a mariachi band playing Tonight You Belong To Me on an orchestra of sex toys – is only one example. And you don’t have to look far for others.

posted by monospace at 11:06 AM on November 30, 2016 [28 favorites]

I don't know if OGE's tweetstorm is funny or horrifying. I guess it is normal now for agencies, Presidents, etc. to just... tweet at each other? I guess it beats having to do a FOIA request.

Will be interesting when someone takes the tweets into court as an "official message from a governmental agency on which they reasonably relied to their detriment."
posted by melissasaurus at 11:07 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I believe the classic way to phrase the question you are all asking is "what is to be done?"

Um. I think there is a lot of important and insightful critique in Marx regarding how capitalism works (and doesn't work). Not sure I'm super interested in his prescriptions for implementing socialism, given... what has typically happened when people tried to do so.

I'll continue to float around happily in the shallow, social-democratic end of the leftist pool, thanks!
posted by tivalasvegas at 11:08 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

barn door, horse, etc etc..

i thought we had left reality when chads were hanging and the SC dumped W into the oval office. I surely thought i had gone insane as i watched the wtc crumble on tv. again i was certain that the this had been thoroughly surelyed when suddenly sadaam had wmd's and we were off to war with the entire media cheering it on. i erupted into a distant dimension at the stuffed-crotch-flight-suited mission accomplished thing and abu ghraib. i sank into an abyss of hallucinatory unreality when W was re-elected and the sub-prime mortgage economy crashed and burned. for eight years i simmered in a birther kenyan usurper broth seasoned with unhealthy doses of the benghazi email server. i'm toast. and it once again boggles my mind that there exist sane people here who think there is a way to reach them. they hate you. with the passion of a thousand suns. they want to grind your children to dust in sweatshops and freeze or starve your penniless parents to death. wake up.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:08 AM on November 30, 2016 [46 favorites]

@blackmarvelgirl
Gonna compile a coffee table book of politicians in the moment they realize they sold their souls to support Trump [pix of Romney, Christie, Cruz]
posted by chris24 at 11:08 AM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

This is my theory: if you’re a public figure of any description, history will remember only what you looked like when you were photographed with Trump.

So now I have to put Trump's camera in with Trump's razor and Trump's mirror. Time for a bigger bag.
posted by Rykey at 11:10 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

After meeting with Trump, Preet Bharara said he "agreed to stay on" as US attorney for the Southern District of NY

Bharara and his office are known for their successful prosecutions of Wall Street figures, such as securing the guilty plea of Bernie Madoff's brother, Peter, for his role in the infamous Ponzi scheme.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:12 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is the problem with the "coastal elite," "media bubble," "get to understand a rural WWC voter," "Hillbilly Elegy" horsehit. The other side--the red hat side--hates you. They feed on your empathy. It's perceived as weakness. It's an authoritarian culture.

I have never agreed so hard with anything written on this site. This is what we need to get through our heads: they hate us and want us to die, will interpret any conciliatory approach on our part as weakness and will leverage it as if it were weakness.

I don't, mind you, much like the static and intractable place that leaves us, because I believe in negotiation and conciliation and respectful contestation and all those other wonderful Enlightenment-project virtues. But at this point I sincerely believe that anything but uncompromising clarity about the nature of the forces arrayed against us is a ticket straight to Dachau.
posted by adamgreenfield at 11:18 AM on November 30, 2016 [56 favorites]

Then... it's not zero-sum. There's a free lunch. One side loses, but the other side gains much more.

Funny definition of "free"... Seriously, aren't you arguing basically the same position that corb said in the first place? You accused her of moving the goal posts, but the one who introduced the phrase "zero-sum" was you.
posted by teraflop at 11:20 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Trump/Romney dinner included frog legs and was over $200? I've killed my own frogs and eaten their legs for free. But I'm a coastal elitist.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:21 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

If this were true we wouldn't have lost the election.

It's true that we didn't use them. Or maybe that they weren't used. We got emails, pussy, and trustability. "Her" instead of "Us". Taxes. "Reality-x" Thats the GOP vocabulary.

Use the other vocabulary to say the same things and we'd be celebrating the first woman president.
posted by petebest at 11:21 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

But I'm a coastal elitist.

"Tell 'em what ya do, Snake!"
posted by petebest at 11:23 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

A handy chart that graphs Trump's "landslide" compared to other winners. TL;DCLick - other than 1824 (went to the House), 1876 (corrupt bargain that ended Reconstruction), and 2000, Trump had the weakest win.
posted by chris24 at 11:27 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

The readout from Pakistan on Trump's call with their Prime Minister is pretty astonishing, just stream of consciousness praise. That's just one side of the call of course, but it displays about the level of awareness I would expect.
posted by zachlipton at 11:29 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Trump/Romney dinner included frog legs and was over $200? I've killed my own frogs and eaten their legs for free. But I'm a coastal elitist.

Yes, but they were eating the swamp.
posted by Mchelly at 11:30 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

It's not about gender, it's that there's no other nationally admired and recognized senator. (Which is problematic.)

Not true! Cory Booker! Don't break my heart and tell me otherwise.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

ABC News Politics ‏@ABCPolitics
NEW: Sarah Palin under consideration for Secretary of Veterans Affairs, sources tell @ABC News.

Looks like we tapped into our strategic word salad reserves.
posted by bluecore at 11:32 AM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

Why does every single female Democrat need to be compared to Elizabeth Warren?

It's not about gender, it's that there's no other nationally admired and recognized senator. (Which is problematic.)

Nancy Pelosi is not a Senator.
posted by zutalors! at 11:33 AM on November 30, 2016

Somebody press the button on the back of the Constitution for five seconds, we need to reboot.
posted by petebest at 11:36 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Mutz: State to offer Carrier incentives, but other factors played bigger role

Carrier Corp. was motivated to retain 1,000 manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis by an incentive package that will be offered by the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and the possibility of losing a “favorable relationship with federal contractors,” according to a prominent IEDC board member.
...
But Mutz said he doesn’t believe the impending incentive package “really is the major reason for the decision.”

That, he said, is likely because of Carrier Corp. parent company United Technologies Corp's desire to keep its hefty federal contracts. United Technologies and its subsidiaries collect about $6 billion annually from U.S. government contracts, making up about 10 percent of its overall revenue, according to CNN Money.

I assume United Technologies will just call the couple million extra they wind up paying to stay in Indiana a lobbying expense. They spend millions on lobbying as it is; what's it worth to be the next President's favorite government contractor?

This stuff is hardly unprecedented. United Airlines operated a commercial flight basically for the convenience of the Port Authority's chairman.

The fact is that it's a one-off. As Krugman put it this morning, "Trump would have to do one Carrier-sized deal a week for 30 years to save as many jobs as Obama's auto bailout." There are only so many companies Trump can publicly bully in this way.
posted by zachlipton at 11:38 AM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

1824 (went to the House), 1876 (corrupt bargain that ended Reconstruction)

Oops, combined my corrupt elections. 1824 was the Corrupt Bargain where John Quincy Adams beat Andrew Jackson. 1876, equally corrupt, was where Hayes was selected under an agreement to end Reconstruction despite Tilden getting more of the popular vote and initially having more electoral votes.
posted by chris24 at 11:38 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is what we need to get through our heads: they hate us and want us to die, will interpret any conciliatory approach on our part as weakness and will leverage it as if it were weakness.

This x1000. The first step in winning a war is to be aware that you are currently in a war.
posted by localhuman at 11:41 AM on November 30, 2016 [51 favorites]

Roy Cooper's lead in NC-Gov race has at least for the moment gone over recount threshold of 10,000 votes
posted by zombieflanders at 11:46 AM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

Every time a new "Trump voter freaks out and yells hateful shit" video shows up I think about Sore Winner Syndrome, as defined by Digby in this Salon piece:

The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable: Right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

I think there are some conservative folks (and unaffiliated folks) who are reachable through reason and conversation; they are often the ones who will approach you, and say, they're sad about Trump too and voted for McMuffin or didn't vote, or can't believe that the Republicans are really doing all these crazy things, and those are conversations I can have.

And then there's the Sore Winners who only want to dominate, who crave acceptance and normalization and affirmation from you. You aren't going to win those folks over. Those are the ones who recognize Trump as one of them, and so his actions only matter insofar as they reinforce the desired narrative. Don't waste your time on them.
posted by emjaybee at 11:47 AM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

>I have never agreed so hard with anything written on this site.

Yeah, my assessment of the situation comes from the fact that I had a Trump supporter as a friend. At first it was easy to ignore his pro-Trump schtick, and I thought it was a schtick, because he's a smart guy and I thought he was being ironic. And I also was trying to "see the other side" and not "exist in a Blue-state Facebook bubble."

I wanted to be open-minded. As well, we had a lot of things in common, from sharing similar experiences living abroad, to kids and language.

But what I took for a schtick was actually the reality of this person. The racist stuff. The sexist stuff. The Mike Cernovich stuff. And it became apparent this Trump supporter friend of mine was a nihilist. A true nihilist. No values, except a big "fuck you" to everyone and anyone that disagreed with him.

And he enjoys reading comments where people say they are afraid about what is going to happen in Trump's America. It gives him delight.

He also started essentially stalking me on Facebook. So I blocked him the night of the election.

I'm not interested in what the MAGA / red hat people have to say. There is absolutely nothing I can say that will change their mind. Based on my experience with this former friend, I can tell you they just want to dominate.
posted by My Dad at 11:47 AM on November 30, 2016 [39 favorites]

Use the other vocabulary

MetaFilter has permeated my brain to the extent that when I saw that the name of the site was "Political Cortex" my first thought was "Huh, I didn't know he had a politics blog."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:50 AM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable: Right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

WEYOUN: If you ask me, the key to holding the Federation is Earth. If there's going to be an organised resistance against us, its birthplace will be there.
DUKAT: You could be right.
WEYOUN: Then our first step is be to eradicate its population. It's the only way.
DUKAT: You can't do that.
WEYOUN: Why not?
DUKAT: Because! A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness.
WEYOUN: Then you kill them?
DUKAT: Only if it's necessary.
posted by Servo5678 at 11:53 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I run across sore winners online, I like to link to this and remind them this sentiment works both ways. Seems to be effective since the sore winner usually has hurt feelings of some sort. About being called 'stupid' or 'racist' or both because of their vote.

Wondering if this is just the nature of the Trump voter, or if a substantial number of them are starting to think "I've made a huge mistake."
posted by honestcoyote at 11:56 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Pakistan's prime minister called Trump . I think Trump may actually be a bot running a markov generator.
posted by gatorae at 11:58 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Seriously, aren't you arguing basically the same position that corb said in the first place?

I was granting that one side is losing for the sake of argument, not ceding the point. I stand by my statement that win-win policy changes exist in politics that make no participants worse off by any sensible measure. If someone believes using a non-gender-specific bathroom harms their sense of how things used to be when men were men, well, that's fine for them to believe, but I don't have to account for it when tallying up the winners and losers. By that logic, we'd have to strike the murder laws, since they harm the interests of people who can show that they would be better off if their spouse or boss were dead.

You accused her of moving the goal posts, but the one who introduced the phrase "zero-sum" was you.

That's a fair criticism, since zero-sum is not the same as saying nobody pays. At some point, though, when we're talking about people "losing" a privilege they never should have had in the first place, the "payment" that's being asked of them is just the settlement of a long-overdue balance, and one that in our society would normally be paid back with interest.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:58 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

corb, I may have genuinely missed it earlier in the thread where you were asked whether there are literally any examples of right-type people "trying to understand" the left, as we're constantly being asked to do for them. Do you have any?

Oh, I think I must have missed that! I'm sorry, this thread moves so fast and sometimes I'm checking it from my phone.

There definitely isn't the same flood of thinkpieces over the past few weeks, in part because there's not the same need to understand - conservatives think they already understand exactly how this election happened, and the thoughtful conservatives who would usually be writing those pieces are kind of consumed with "holy fuck fascists".

I know over the last year I've definitely seen some 'understanding' pieces pop across my feed - most particularly about BLM, but also some other attempts at just understanding various other liberal issues. They don't, from my perspective, seem very good - like, I've never read a conservative thinkpiece that made me say "oh my god I suddenly get liberal thought in a way I haven't before!" but usually if I'm looking to understand liberal thought I go to, you know, actual liberals, who aren't that scary and will usually provide supporting motivations if memailed or offered pie.

If you want I can try to drop them off if I see good ones, though.
posted by corb at 11:58 AM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

> Um. I think there is a lot of important and insightful critique in Marx regarding how capitalism works (and doesn't work). Not sure I'm super interested in his prescriptions for implementing socialism, given... what has typically happened when people tried to do so.

I'll continue to float around happily in the shallow, social-democratic end of the leftist pool, thanks!

1. I don't like Lenin either, or any flavor of Marxism-Leninism.
2. The thing I linked is Lenin's pamphlet arguing that vanguardism is necessary to get widespread support for socialism. It has vanishingly little to do with Marx, even though it invokes his name on a regular basis.
3. Why did I link to it? What we're talking about is how the shitheads who voted for Donald Trump will not respond to attempts to reach out to them, understand them, and change their minds. They like their minds how they are, and take such raw pleasure in asserting and enacting their vile ideas that they genuinely do not care who they hurt — even themselves. And as we have just seen, there are enough of them in America for them to take over the country. And we're trying to figure out how to deal with that fact.
4. Eventually we're going to have to come around to figuring out how to pull the country away from the murderous, suicidal spiral it's in through tools other than reason and understanding.
5. Which is to say, we need to in whatever way baffle them, to weaken their will, to distract them, to marginalize them, to keep them in the dark and feed them shit — our flavor of shit — to buy them off, to reduce their political power against their will, to, in whatever way, trick them over to our side, while diligently making life more difficult and confusing for people who remain on the Trumpist side. Pretending to build mutual understanding and respect is valuable only insofar as it's a tactic to break their unity.
6. This sort of struggle instead requires misdirection, deception, the effective deployment of propaganda without regard for whether that propaganda represents "the truth" or even "our real views." It means doing all sorts of blatantly unfair things that you can't do under liberal enlightenment rules. It means doing the sorts of thing that get accomplished through conspiracy and secrecy rather than through discovery and open debate.
7. and, look — no one has ever run a successful political campaign on liberal enlightenment terms. No one. A political campaign is in some way centralized, with the center knowing more about what's going on than anyone else, or it's roadkill.
8. The conversation we've been having is a conversation about whether or not vanguardism — the establishment of a small central group that knows what's going on and is willing to use low tactics to move the masses, without regard for whether they want to be moved — is a viable (or necessary) tactic, though no one (yet) is explicitly arguing the vanguardist side.
9. If I believed vanguardism was a viable tactic, I'd be in a vanguardist organization instead of running my mouth in public.
10. But nevertheless we must admit, even though it's painful to do so, that winning the day, this horrible day, requires something other than public debate, reason, and understanding. The question we're asking really is "What is to be done?"

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:00 PM on November 30, 2016 [15 favorites]

190+ mentions of "recount," only a handful mentions of "provisional"?

Provisional ballots, provisional ballots, provisional ballots, provisional ballots.

The whole point of any recounts should be highlighting how many provisional ballots were cast, and how many voters were WRONGLY forced to cast provisional ballots.

And it would be more than worth the money if we could make that data public (and front page news.)

When I run across sore winners online, I like to link to this and remind them this sentiment works both ways.

I think that was the Trump paradox in a nutshell. "Fuck Your Feelings" from a campaign whose only consistent issue is Emotional Patriotism. So many disconnects, but that one REALLY stood out. Talk to any Trump supporter about why they'd do something so stupid, and they talk about how they feel.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:00 PM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

> I think that was the Trump paradox in a nutshell. "Fuck Your Feelings" from a campaign whose only consistent issue is Emotional Patriotism.

There's no paradox. The Trumpist stance is not "fuck feelings," it's "fuck your feelings." It's not an abstract statement about the value of emotions in general. It's a concrete statement that the specific feelings of particular actual people are to be fucked.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:03 PM on November 30, 2016 [41 favorites]

Kellyanne Conway in DC speech: "Nobody on TV is ever under oath. Remember that."

What does this mean for the man who considers TV a better source of news than actual security briefings?
posted by lazugod at 12:04 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Kellyanne Conway in DC speech: "Nobody on TV is ever under oath. Remember that."

What.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:07 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm guessing with no context here, but it might be a stab at "the media is all liars who say bad things about us" again, too.
posted by Archelaus at 12:08 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here's the context. Conway was reportedly speaking to a group of students in Washington, D.C., whose Advanced Placement government class was attending an event sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. When she opened the floor to questions, a female student who later identified herself as the daughter of David Corn (a liberal writer and Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief), brought up sexual assault.

According to the Hill, she went on to tell the 17-year-old, “Women are tired of the same argument and the same thing you are presenting to me right now.” She went on, “I’m glad that people looked at [those attacks] and said, ‘You know what? That’s an argument that will not create a single job in my community, not bring back a single of the 70,000 factories that have been closed, will not deter one member of ISIS from doing their bloodletting here or anywhere else in the world.’”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:10 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

By that logic, we'd have to strike the murder laws, since they harm the interests of people who can show that they would be better off if their spouse or boss were dead.

Oh, I think I see the disconnect! I think you're hearing "we should talk about the negative impacts of these laws when we talk about the positive ones" as implying that the negatives and positives are all necessarily equal, or that the negatives should automatically negate the law. I'm not saying that at all! It's more like I think that there should be informed consent for democracy. A medical operation may save our lives, and it's probably beneficial for us, but they still have to tell us about the .01% who have complications with the anaesthesia.
posted by corb at 12:10 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

According to the Hill, she went on to tell the 17-year-old, “Women are tired of the same argument and the same thing you are presenting to me right now.” She went on, “I’m glad that people looked at [those attacks] and said, ‘You know what? That’s an argument that will not create a single job in my community, not bring back a single of the 70,000 factories that have been closed, will not deter one member of ISIS from doing their bloodletting here or anywhere else in the world.’”

can we stop giving this wretched person the benefit of the doubt?
posted by zutalors! at 12:12 PM on November 30, 2016 [21 favorites]

The Sore Winner article is great way to understand Trumpsters. And I think a way to even understand the reluctant Trump supporters. The writer doesn't get much into it in the article, but the subhead of the title is "They won the battle, but the war's not over — and in their hearts they know they've surrendered to ugliness." And I think the "know they've surrendered to ugliness" is really key for some. I have a Republican friend who was a Kasich guy but voted Trump despite admitting he was terrible because "Hillary is worse." And now, even though he had no love for Trump and admitted he was awful, he's posting constantly about the hypocrisy of Clinton participating in the recounts after saying in the debate it was horrible for Trump to not accept the results. And posting bullshit about the popular vote, etc. etc. And I really think it is because he knows he sold his soul and the only way to make himself feel better is to continue to have some boogeyman/liberal to blame and/or attack. The fact that I exist out there disagreeing with him, moral rightness on my side, drives him nuts, even when I'm not commenting on his posts.
posted by chris24 at 12:14 PM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

Conway also reportedly said: "For you to use sexual assault to try to make news here I think is unfortunate, but it also doesn’t matter because Donald Trump promised he’ll be a president of all Americans."

He did promise that. He also said that you have to treat some Americans "like shit" and sexually assault them. But yes, let's scold the high school student who asked the question.
posted by zachlipton at 12:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [32 favorites]

As someone who was once a 17 year old DC suburbs area high school student, I would have jumped at the chance to ask that question.
posted by zutalors! at 12:19 PM on November 30, 2016

> Oh, I think I see the disconnect! I think you're hearing "we should talk about the negative impacts of these laws when we talk about the positive ones" as implying that the negatives and positives are all necessarily equal, or that the negatives should automatically negate the law. I'm not saying that at all! It's more like I think that there should be informed consent for democracy. A medical operation may save our lives, and it's probably beneficial for us, but they still have to tell us about the .01% who have complications with the anaesthesia.

That style of rhetoric is appropriate for cautious deliberation among small groups, or among two individuals (as in the case of a doctor discussing a possible medical operation), but it's completely ineffective at moving large masses of distracted people.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:21 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

Politico: Muslim government officials huddle on ways to survive Trump
posted by photo guy at 12:22 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe they can be taught?

probably not, but honestly schadenfreude is just about the only thing that can get me out of bed these days
posted by murphy slaw at 12:24 PM on November 30, 2016

it's completely ineffective at moving large masses of distracted people.

"And friends, that's when YCTAB reconsidered his feelings about vanguardism."

I kid, mostly. I suppose I think that maybe if people were talked to in this way, they wouldn't be so distracted, and would rise to the level of the discourse. But there is always the "we're all fucked forever, grab a bottle of vodka, tovarisch" option, I suppose.
posted by corb at 12:30 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

"we're all fucked forever, grab a bottle of vodka, tovarisch"

Hey, I don't knock your hobbies.
posted by maxsparber at 12:33 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

> I'm not saying that at all! It's more like I think that there should be informed consent for democracy. A medical operation may save our lives, and it's probably beneficial for us, but they still have to tell us about the .01% who have complications with the anaesthesia.

The example you used was the Affordable Care Act. There were many times during the debate over the ACA in which Democrats up to and including Obama acknowledged that not everyone would be winners. The "Cadillac" tax was an explicit policy written into the law that told some people they'd pay more for their healthcare. The Medicaid expansion was written so that states would have to fund a growing percentage of it over time, presumably out of state funds that came from people who already have good healthcare. Obama even said this during his remarks on healthcare to a joint session of Congress (you may remember that speech as the Rep. Joe Wilson "you lie!" speech):

And unless everybody does their part, many of the insurance reforms we seek -- especially requiring insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions -- just can't be achieved.
And that's why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. (Applause.) Likewise -- likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers. There will be a hardship waiver for those individuals who still can't afford coverage, and 95 percent of all small businesses, because of their size and narrow profit margin, would be exempt from these requirements. (Applause.) But we can't have large businesses and individuals who can afford coverage game the system by avoiding responsibility to themselves or their employees. Improving our health care system only works if everybody does their part.

I've bold-faced the parts where Obama notes that some people will share in the cost.

Now, it's probably the case that the ACA's proponents were overconfident in the its ability to rein in insurance costs, or didn't adequately explain how the increasing cost of medical care means that there's only so much medical insurance reform can do to bend the curve, but when you're trying to overhaul nearly a fifth of the US economy, it's hard to know exactly how much things will cost in the future, so I think some allowance has to be made for people to in good faith expect their policy to create better outcomes than they actually did. There's a point at which accounting for every possible downside risk becomes doing your political opponents' work for them and undermining a policy you believe will do good.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

Politico Trump considering Palin to lead Veterans Affairs

No doubt because of her great work ethic. One teeny problem: Veterans are lambasting Sarah Palin's comments linking her son's domestic-violence arrest to PTSD
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:36 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mentioned above

Pakistan’s surprisingly candid readout of Trump’s phone call with prime minister

Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.

Lavishing praise on the Pakistanis would be a major turnaround for the president-elect. In 2012, Trump took to his favorite social media platform, Twitter, to denounce Pakistan.

On Jan. 17 of that year, he wrote: “Get it straight: Pakistan is not our friend. We’ve given them billions and billions of dollars, and what did we get? Betrayal and disrespect — and much worse. #TimeToGetTough”

What a pathetic loser.
posted by futz at 12:39 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

a major turnaround for the president-elect

when will the media get it through their heads that you can't have a "reversal" or "turnaround" if you have no positions at all
posted by murphy slaw at 12:41 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Teen becomes seventh "faithless elector."

This is the part I seriously don't understand in this article (and apologies, I did search around the word "electors" above and I don't think I saw this particular bit explained):

"The paradox of this year’s protest is that the seven faithless electors all plan to vote against Hillary Clinton, coming as they all do from blue states, despite the fact that the target of their ire is Trump."

In other words, they're from blue states (like Washington), and are supposed to vote for Clinton. But instead they're going to write in some other Republican. I don't see how that helps? It makes Trump's electoral vote count lower (thought not by enough), but it also makes Clinton's count lower, so it doesn't help her either.
posted by dnash at 12:43 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

His core position is that things will be Great Again. Happily, he's never going to change that unless it's for a stab in the back myth to explain why it didn't become so. So, you know, no flipflops on the massively well defined central policy and aim.
posted by jaduncan at 12:44 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

We are; AFAICT it only works the other way, see for example the WaPo story about the fake news org from last week where the guy claims that they tried to run a fake news site targeting liberals and it just didn't get the clicks.

Be careful with this; the only source for this claim is from someone who openly admits that they make shit up for a living.
posted by indubitable at 10:58 AM

It also came up in the story about the Macedonians who promoted fake news to make money. They could not lure the Hillary supporters or the Bernie Bros in with made-up news but the Trump supporters forwarded everything-- the more outlandish, the better.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:47 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Who could even criticise that?

Great. Better than good, great. And just like it once was in an ill-defined time that you look back to as a better period. Like that period! Which was, as mentioned, great. Like America will be Great. Again!

So I hope that's cleared up. I don't know why liberal America *wouldn't* want that.
posted by jaduncan at 12:48 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

But instead they're going to write in some other Republican. I don't see how that helps?

It's a Hail Mary pass. Probably won't work. But if they vote for Romney, or Kasich, then they give an opening to faithless electors from red states. Someone acceptable to non-crazed Republicans who they can all rally around. And then, if there's enough faithlessness to send the vote to Congress, there would be a small hope the majority of congresspeople would vote for the NotTrump Republican.
posted by honestcoyote at 12:48 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Gen. Petraeus, one of the people on Trump's list for Secretary of State, has to check with his probation officer before leaving western N.C. (cite)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:49 PM on November 30, 2016 [32 favorites]

Also, If Gen. Petreaus becomes Secretary of State, his computers and office will be subject to warrantless searches by his probation officer. (cite)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [35 favorites]

i don't see anything in that conversation that indicates that trump knows anything about the country to whose leader he is speaking. i suspect there is a 3x5 card in front of him with PAKISTAN and PAKISTANI written on it in thick black sharpie, provided by a harried staffer.
posted by murphy slaw at 12:51 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Also, If Gen. Petreaus becomes Secretary of State, his computers and office will be subject to warrantless searches by his probation officer.

Interesting. One imagines that they are going to have to get a probation officer with quite the security clearance.
posted by jaduncan at 12:53 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

But if they vote for Romney, or Kasich, then they give an opening to faithless electors from red states. Someone acceptable to non-crazed Republicans who they can all rally around. And then, if there's enough faithlessness to send the vote to Congress...

Ah, ok, I think I see now. So, they are assuming red state electors would never go as far as voting Clinton in order to protest Trump. Therefore suggest an alternative Republican, and then those combined "neither Trump nor Clinton" votes are enough to deny Trump the needed majority.

I guess I was hoping too much for the electors to decide to go with the popular vote overall instead.
posted by dnash at 12:54 PM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

Wouldn't Trump just pardon Petraeus...

I guess so, but it's fun to think about.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:54 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wouldn't Trump just pardon Petraeus...

For mishandling classified information? And look like a fool with no set position on anything whatsoever? And confirm IOKIYAR is truly the law of the land?

Yeah, I could see that happening.
posted by zachlipton at 12:56 PM on November 30, 2016 [24 favorites]

Wouldn't Trump just pardon Petraeus...

Setting up Petraeus to be the SoS they picked on the basis that he isn't the ex-SoS they criticised for potentially criminal security breaches that were found to not justify prosecution, whilst he continues to be a convicted felon who has actually already participated in a criminal disclosure of classified information?

It would be, to quote Sir Humphrey, brave. Trump's razor suggests it might happen, of course, especially given that it might also read as an I'm-so-powerful-I-can-do-it-anyway dominance move.
posted by jaduncan at 12:57 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Secret Life of Gravy: No doubt because of her great work ethic. One teeny problem: Veterans are lambasting Sarah Palin's comments linking her son's domestic-violence arrest to PTSD

Palin's right. There are clear links between veterans who have PTSD and post-service antisocial behavior.

WashPost:

Last year, the American Psychological Association published a study (pdf) looking at the intensification of anger among veterans with combat-related PTSD and depression. It hoped to build on a previous 2010 study in which the researchers found that "among [Operation Iraqi Freedom] veterans not seeking treatment, approximately 40% reported 'getting angry with someone and kicking, smashing, or punching something' at least once in the past month when assessed at three and 12 months post-deployment." They found that "self-rated harm-others risk was significantly higher" among those with a combination of PTSD and depression than among those that only suffered from PTSD.

The Naval Health Research Center looked at (pdf) the relationship between combat and post-service antisocial behavior. "Of 12 demographic and psychosocial factors that were examined in relation to antisocial behavior in a multivariate model," the study's authors write, "five factors were positively and significantly related to antisocial behavior: PTSD symptoms, deployment-related stressors, combat exposure, younger age, and being divorced. Of all the variables studied, PTSD had the strongest association with antisocial behavior."

This exists and is a definable problem. Studies show it has led to a higher than normal suicide rate among combat veterans. It shouldn't be sweeped under the rug out of a misguided urge not to offend veterans.

I think Palin's an idiot who is unqualified to be dog-catcher and should forever be kept the hell away from any job with even the slightest bit of responsibility. But for once, she's not wrong.
posted by zarq at 12:57 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

> when will the media get it through their heads that you can't have a "reversal" or "turnaround" if you have no positions at all.

"In conclusion, Pakistan is a land of contrasts."

You know what, though? As a mediocre white man who thinks he's a good bullshitter, but who in reality couldn't actually bullshit his way out of a wet paper bag, I feel such a strange, disturbing kinship with Trump. When I think I'm successfully bullshitting, all that's going on is people are cutting me a break; overlooking my bullshit, instead of falling for it. I think Trump realizes that his bullshit doesn't really fly either — note how broken he seemed after his first meeting with Obama, the one where he realized how inadequate his bullshit is for the work of the Presidency — but bullshit is the only thing he has, and he's far too old and set in his ways to learn how to do anything new.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:58 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

...see for example the WaPo story about the fake news org from last week where the guy claims that they tried to run a fake news site targeting liberals and it just didn't get the clicks.
...
It also came up in the story about the Macedonians who promoted fake news to make money. They could not lure the Hillary supporters or the Bernie Bros in with made-up news but the Trump supporters forwarded everything-- the more outlandish, the better.

I don't find this implausible at all, but bear in mind that even if we take such claims at face value, they indicate only that this smallish collection of (I'm guessing) middle-class-ish white men did not figure out how to make left-wing fake viral news. It's not good evidence that left-wing fake viral news is impossible. It's not even good evidence that these people couldn't have figured it out, given time and motivation.
posted by Western Infidels at 12:58 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Come on: Trump considering president of Goldman Sachs for budget chief?

First Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, now this [Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn.] Trump’s two top fiscal officers may end up being Goldman Sachs alums, one of them among the biggest cheeses at the firm. This, after months of calling Ted Cruz a Wall Street puppet because he’s married to a Goldman employee and had a small margin loan from the bank. And this, despite Trump’s most darkly memorable speech of the campaign having accused Hillary Clinton of selling out average Americans to “international banks.” Footage of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein even ended up in Trump’s “closing argument” ad as visual shorthand of the evil forces of finance who were pulling Clinton’s strings.

All's fair in love and war. Which is to say that no doubt for Trump anything said in the heat of battle is meaningless now. The chess board has been reset and we start again.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:59 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

kudos to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, though, for so artfully humiliating Trump by repeating his own words to the press. It is such an elegant way to signal to the world that everyone understands that Trump is a naif, someone to be managed when necessary and taken advantage of when possible.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:04 PM on November 30, 2016 [34 favorites]

indicate only that this smallish collection of (I'm guessing) middle-class-ish white men did not figure out how to make left-wing fake viral news.

Teenagers in Macedonia. Over a 100 of them. It doesn't mean your entire premise is mistaken, it just means that over a 100 non-American teenagers eager to make money zeroed in on the best way to do that. It did not involve using Liberals to spread their lies around.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:05 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

You know what, though? As a mediocre white man who thinks he's a good bullshitter, but who in reality couldn't actually bullshit his way out of a wet paper bag, I feel such a strange, disturbing kinship with Trump.

This is a good point, but the fact is that Trump doesn't have to bullshit this one. If he wants to talk to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, he can call up the State Department and get a set of bullet points from a guy who has probably spent his entire adult life becoming an expert on US-Pakistan relations. He could, with less than five minutes of work, have the basic information at his disposal necessary to talk to the leader of a nation with millions of people, not to mention nuclear weapons. But he can't be bothered to do that, so he resorts to "land of contrasts"-level analysis.
posted by zachlipton at 1:05 PM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

10 Things the Iowa Democratic Party Can Do To Rebuild
posted by Golden Eternity at 1:05 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

A President generally doesn't have to bullshit, because of the resources at the disposal of Presidents. But this particular President absolutely must bullshit, because he is too stupid to understand, repeat, or even really follow expert-level discourse.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:08 PM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

10 Things the Iowa Democratic Party Can Do To Rebuild

Is step one "abdicate their support for first-in-the-nation caucuses and primaries happening in rural-dominated white states" so that candidates have to show they can appeal to a diverse electorate to make it through the first part of the primary season?

*clicks through*

nope
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:10 PM on November 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

Six months before he announced his run for President, Trump went on Letterman and agreed that people should be able to burn flags because of free expression.

Just another lack of position.
posted by zachlipton at 1:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

I want to begin with a hearty fuck you to the AMA. Any health professional who voted for Trump or supports his policies has utterly betrayed everything we stand for. History will be their judge, and thank christ I'm not. I think they have demonstrated a lack of empathy so profound I would question their ability to competently perform their jobs.

Going forward, I think we need attempts and understand and reaching out to those who despise us and more coming out in force and systematically taking the levers of power away from the hateful authoritarian bigots who have elected our first true fascist. For far too long the left has allowed conservatives to take ownership of everything from city dog-catcher on up to governor. I want to see progressives dominating every school board, every city council, every state senate. Fuck these people. We've ceded them far too much already. We've ceded patriotism when it always belonged to us. We've allowed them to normalise their views in public while we retreat behind closed facebook groups. We trusted that as long as we showed up to vote every four years that the arc of history and people's innate common sense and goodness would be on our side. This is has been proved tragically utterly untrue. We can't rely on the common sense and goodness of all people because there are those among us who truly who will not be happy until our entire world lies in ruins for their benefit. We need to take every apparatus of power away from them from the bottom up. They will only use their power to harm us. And remember - there are more of us than there are of them. No compromise with hate, no compromise with evil. Hate and evil must be defeated not reasoned with. When you peel back the ugly on authoritarian bigots you only find more ugly, there is no nougaty center of goodness. To paraphrase Dr Cox, they are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.

We all have to find our own source of strength during these grim times. I've been drawing on the words of St Kassiani, "I hate silence, when it is time to speak." I'm not going to retreat behind closed facebook groups. I'm not going to keep silent to keep the peace. Those days are fucking over. The peace is already shattered. I'm going to be out doing the work, and a lot of the work involves speaking up to protect the vulnerable among us. I have never been so glad that I chose to be a nurse, because holy hell there is a lot of work to be done in my own house and I am very glad that I will be kept grimly busy over the next four years.

Btw -
Nancy Pelosi's DC Number: [phone]
Her SF number: [phone]
Call her offices and tell her that you want her to fight.
posted by supercrayon at 1:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

Trump’s Pick for Health Secretary Could Be Disastrous for Women

"He thinks employers should be allowed to fire workers for using birth control.
Price opposed a 2015 Washington, D.C., nondiscrimination law that would have prevented employers from firing workers for using birth control or having an abortion. "
posted by chris24 at 1:15 PM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

"but wait," you say, "if he's so stupid, how come he's President."

To which I respond: a strong plurality of Americans are stupid as well, and he's very good at pleasing them. His words and manner are comfortably unconfusing to stupid people. To them, Trump seems safe, and Clinton and Obama seem tricky.

And so we're left with the question of how one moves a stupid country.

(I hate, hate, hate talking in these terms, because most often sweeping announcements of other peoples' stupidity come out of people who themselves are too stupid to understand how difficult life is for everyone. But — maybe because I am stupid — I can't find any other terms that fit as well.)
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

In other words, they're from blue states (like Washington), and are supposed to vote for Clinton. But instead they're going to write in some other Republican. I don't see how that helps? It makes Trump's electoral vote count lower (thought not by enough), but it also makes Clinton's count lower, so it doesn't help her either.

the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by entropicamericana at 1:17 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

I don't think Trump feels the need to work hard and gather facts and listen to experts because he has spent his whole adult life in a position of power due to inherited wealth. He has conned himself into believing that he is the King of making Deals! because he likes to take on people who are weaker than him (mainly because they don't have his financial reserves) and force them to take less money than was agreed upon. He also thinks he is a tremendous manager and boss because a) his employees constantly stroke his pathetic ego and b) because his reality show role portrayed him as such.

So he uses his position to force people into talking to him and dealing with him and playing golf with him and that makes him think he is the world's greatest bullshitter. I have no doubt his bank managers see right through his bullshit as does his family and his romantic entanglements. As does everyone who interviews him at any length-- like Howard Stern. But they are too savvy to let him know.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:18 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

As another QPoC, I'd ask you to reconsider your vote for the sake of the rest of us. I'm pissed at the Dems too but beggars can't be choosers, and we're all beggars now.

Beggars can be choosers. If one side hates me and the other wants me to go to the back of the bus, I'll be honest, I'll choose a third, fourth, or fifth way.

If I am not a person to the liberals or the Dems, the loss of my support shouldn't matter now, should it?

There are votes that help democrats and votes that help Republicans, there is no third way.

If you're not talking about changing the way we vote, YOU'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT 3RD PARTIES! You're only talking about how your votes affect the two parties in power.

Until we change to ranked choice voting or something similar, there are no 3rd parties. Republicans refuse to admit that there is a race issue and Dems can't do much without a big majority and it appears that they can't do that by talking about race. Economic equality will certainly help a lot of those race issues so the most effective path that I see is to keep voting D while talking up changes to how we vote.

Or if Dems manage to win themselves a nice big majority, then I think it makes more sense to try and change the direction of the party.
posted by VTX at 1:19 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

All's fair in love and war. Which is to say that no doubt for Trump anything said in the heat of battle is meaningless now. The chess board has been reset and we start again.

QFT. Both Dems and GOP have already moved on to the mid-term elections. Trump's ENTIRE presidency will be composed of campaigning for 2020.

We've reached the critical peak of never-ending presidential elections.
posted by mrgrimm at 1:19 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

he can't be bothered to do that, so he resorts to "land of contrasts"-level analysis.

Contrasts? He clearly said every Pakistani he's ever met was exceptional and that Pakistanis are from a fantastic place of fantastic people. That's why he wanted to ban all of them from visiting the US.

---

Six months before he announced his run for President, Trump went on Letterman and agreed that people should be able to burn flags because of free expression.

Just another lack of position.

It's usually a mistake to look for anything true in these statements, it literally is just whatever flavour of bullshit might please the nearest people for the next five minutes. There's no intellectual heft there, which is what makes his choices of advisors so unusually important. He's going to understand almost nothing in terms of policy detail. Stances will quite possibly be picked based whoever talked to him last before a policy is announced, or whoever managed to make an announcement that he went along with. There's very little there there.

There doesn't massively need to be, though, the thing about power vacuums is that there's always people who would love to help steer the ship. I'm sure the people that actually matter here are the people helping him to pick advisors. No idea who wins that struggle out of Conway, Ryan (it won't be Ryan), Bannon or Priebus. God knows he's almost certainly going to put in basically no work into reading briefings before selecting them himself, so it's open season.
posted by jaduncan at 1:21 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Until we change to ranked choice voting or something similar, there are no 3rd parties.

The conundrum there being that Dems and GOP have no incentive whatsoever to change our voting systems, except to consolidate their power.

So how do we support RCV or alternative voting methods that promote more inclusiveness? Who are our leaders?

While I'm at it, who are the Democrats pushing hard to challenge Crosscheck? I can't find ANY.
posted by mrgrimm at 1:22 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

kudos to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, though, for so artfully humiliating Trump by repeating his own words to the press. It is such an elegant way to signal to the world that everyone understands that Trump is a naif, someone to be managed when necessary and taken advantage of when possible.

I'm a little more concerned about it than that. With Trump's cabinet choices and owning 16 properties there, a closer relationship with India and a more oppositional one to Pakistan may appear likely, and the reply by the Pakistanis, with that in mind, may be a signal of their own that they're ready to part ways unless they get some better attention. That would be troubling and could make things very tense in the region, depending on what Pakistan chooses to do next, or how aggressive India might become without the US acting more as a balance of power.

Further improving the US India relationship could provide benefits too if Trump does pursue that route as seems likely, but major changes in support in a touchy area from a completely undiplomatic president isn't giving me much confidence that this will go smoothly.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Voting is necessary but irrelevant. No one cares about your vote.

Enter into your local Democratic Party, get together with a bunch of your friends (a bunch of your friends) to also enter into your local Democratic Party, go to a ton of boring meetings, and gradually steer the group where it needs to be steered by always acting as one (without ever letting on that that's what you're doing). Then network with other people doing the same thing elsewhere.

Become the entryist conspiracy you want to see in the world.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [40 favorites]

Economic equality will certainly help a lot of those race issues so the most effective path that I see is to keep voting D while talking up changes to how we vote.

No, you cannot ask minorities to wait their turn and not talk about race while we do economy. It's inappropriate and it also will not work.
posted by zutalors! at 1:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [22 favorites]

Yeah, uh, about that. Whoever that person is at State, I wonder how long they're going to put up with this bullshit.

Yep, I was just about to link that, because it's crazy important. Jeet Heer on a Presidential visit to Pakistan: With one phone call, Donald Trump might have upturned America’s relationship with both Pakistan and India. Based on the readout, the Prime Minister invited Trump and he said something to the effect of "sure, I would love to."

This is not how Presidential visits work. President Obama has clearly avoided visiting Pakistan for some fairly significant reasons. A Presidential visit is not the same as reading Condé Nast Traveler and going "oh, that place looks nice." You don't just accept one because it sounds like an interesting place to visit; it carries enormous weight. And Pakistan has already demonstrated it knows exactly what game it's playing by releasing this ridiculous readout and telling the world that Trump accepted their invitation for a visit.

He's playing with live ammo and he hasn't even read the instruction manual.
posted by zachlipton at 1:28 PM on November 30, 2016 [55 favorites]

Six months before he announced his run for President, Trump went on Letterman and agreed that people should be able to burn flags because of free expression.


He's not against flag burning. He's in favor of denying voting rights to the kind of people who would want to burn a flag.
posted by rocket88 at 1:28 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

A Presidential visit is not the same as reading Condé Nast Traveler and going "oh, that place looks nice." You don't just accept one because it sounds like an interesting place to visit; it carries enormous weight. And Pakistan has already demonstrated it knows exactly what game it's playing by releasing this ridiculous readout and telling the world that Trump accepted their invitation for a visit.

But Kashmir is so beautiful at this time of year!
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:29 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'd be wary of any explanation for the lack of liberal "news"/agitprop that starts from the position that liberals are just too sophisticated and not gullible enough
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:30 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

No, you cannot ask minorities to wait their turn and not talk about race while we do economy. It's inappropriate and it also will not work.

QFT. a rising tide may lift all boats but it doesn't do much for the ones that are already sinking.
posted by murphy slaw at 1:30 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

He's playing with live ammo and he hasn't even read the instruction manual.

Donald Trump is some kind of even more asinine Ender Wiggin and doesn't even know that he's shooting a gun.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:31 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Fifty years from now, there's going to be ethics classes doing essays about what you'd do if you could go back to when Trump was just on the Apprentice.
posted by Mooski at 1:38 PM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

Uhhhhhh. Trump’s Post-Election Tax Subsidy

Six days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, the federal government finalized a key step toward a tax subsidy worth as much as $32 million for a company that is owned by Trump, his daughter Ivanka, and two of his sons.
...
On Nov. 14, the National Park Service, which oversees “Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits” with the IRS, finalized the second phase of a three-step process.

Technically, it approved an amendment to Trump’s previous plans for the rehabilitation of the building. With that done, the Trump family company that leases the hotel, the Trump Old Post Office LLC, has to go through just one more phase to get the tax credit worth 20% of the rehabilitation project.

“This is a classic or textbook example of a conflict of interest,” said Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University School of Law. “The decision-maker here, the National Park Service, works for the party that stands to benefit from a favorable decision.”

They've been applying for this for a while, but come on, six days after election day?
posted by zachlipton at 1:40 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

You don't just accept one because it sounds like an interesting place to visit; it carries enormous weight.

It carried enormous weight. These signals only work when they're understood by all parties, and the new administration is going to broadcast nothing but noise.
posted by theodolite at 1:41 PM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

At this point, I wonder what would happen if someone called up Trump Tower and pretended to be the President of Antarctica.
posted by zachlipton at 1:43 PM on November 30, 2016 [38 favorites]

Become the entryist conspiracy you want to see in the world

I think I can explain how to do this to everyone here, but first, would you like to buy this newspaper?
posted by corb at 1:43 PM on November 30, 2016 [21 favorites]

oh my god I cannot favorite that hard enough.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:44 PM on November 30, 2016

At this point, I wonder what would happen if someone called up Trump Tower and pretended to be the President of Antarctica.

Yes, hello, this is the king of... auto sales in... Fargo. Phil Baharnd
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:45 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Yes, hello, this is the king of... auto sales in... Fargo. Phil Baharnd

@Pres_Bartlet: ".@butterball If I cook stuffing inside the turkey is there a chance I could kill my guests? I'm not saying that's necessarily a deal-breaker"
posted by zarq at 1:54 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

It carried enormous weight. These signals only work when they're understood by all parties, and the new administration is going to broadcast nothing but noise.

The politics of popularity, approval and humiliation are understood by all, and it's exactly the thing people react to when they don't understand policy issues. It's like the cool kid chose to come to your party rather than the kid you dislike. Obviously, if you openly hate the other kid (and are kind of a dick), it might be tempting to rub it in that kid's face. That's why visits rarely occur to one side in a contentious area where reasonable relations exist with both sides. Pakistan would absolutely love it if Trump visited them before India, because it's a national prestige thing. Why wouldn't a relatively nationalistic leader use that to elevate themselves and lord it over their rival?

It'd be pretty unusual not to take that chance, which is why the apparently possibly accepted invitation was a) made public and b) won't actually have State let it happen even if Trump wanted to do that (which he doesn't, naturally, and Pakistan knowing that is why they let it be known that he said it rather than trying to arrange dates).

It was a dumb thing to do, and he almost certainly didn't realise that because he's intellectually lazy and full of crap. I will again mourn HRC.
posted by jaduncan at 1:57 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think I can explain how to do this to everyone here, but first, would you like to buy this newspaper?

Will it teach me how to draw Snoopy from behind?
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:58 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

From the "Sore Winners" article linked by honestcoyote, above:

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: Who gets that mad after winning? It’s not as if the two women were rubbing the man’s nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a stranger (a woman) in the face?

On an a gut level, I get this. It's yet another way that the topology of Trumpland thinking and feeling matches what I dealt with growing up with an abusive, narcissistic parent.

My father can be a complete bastard when he's trying to get what he wants. He's one of those no-quarter, no-compromise types, to the point where, if he needs to attain a series of objectives A, B, and C in order, and step A isn't coming as easily as he thinks it should, he will escalate and escalate to the point where A is nothing but a smoking ruin, even if that renders B, C, and the whole rest of the plan impossible.

But that's not when he's most volatile.

He is most unstable, and most likely to lash out blindly and furiously, when he's just gotten exactly the thing he wants. He's an anxious, and easily enraged mess then, because generally, he doesn't want $thing for $thing's own merits. He wants $thing because of what he's decided $thing will mean. And since meanings of things are assigned within his own head, with minimal input from the outside world and with zero reality checking, $thing rarely ends up having the impact he thinks it should.

And when that happens, his whole world's in peril: People aren't working right, society isn't working right, nothing is working right, and it's terrifying. Plus, one of his go-to explanations for this kind of failure is that people around him, especially those closest, are intentionally trying to undermine him, so he feels violated, cheated, and betrayed.

Also: For him the only world in which living is tolerable is one in which he is uncontroversially the best, brightest, most powerful, and most lovable person within his sphere. He spends enormous amounts of energy convincing himself and those around him that this is, indeed, true-- but when $thing doesn't do what $thing is supposed to do, the fragility of that cognitive edifice is exposed. To make his world right again, he has to establish dominance. He needs to see people's hurt and fear. He needs tears. He needs to see performances of misery and submission. That's the only way for him to regain his footing.

The fact that he operates, for the most part, in the absence of concrete touchstones means that other people's words are everything. He has achieved many significant things over the course of his life, but all of them can be devalued in an instant by other people's statements, or by their opinions, real or imagined. He can blithely ignore facts and figures, but he can't ignore a disrespectful gesture, or a stranger's joke.

So, yeah: This particular variant of sore winner syndrome isn't strange to me at all. It's a normal, expected, and thoroughly known thing: As familiar as my parents' kitchen curtains. I really wish it wasn't.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 2:02 PM on November 30, 2016 [67 favorites]

>> Become the entryist conspiracy you want to see in the world

>I think I can explain how to do this to everyone here, but first, would you like to buy this newspaper?

You both reminded me of a story I heard as an early 90's undergrad about a small socialist / communist / vaguely anarchist group at Washington University. The story may be just an urban legend designed to spook campus lefties, but I still like it.

This group of campus socialists had a rule designed to encourage participation and embraced full democracy. If you showed up for a meeting, you got to have a vote. Even if it was your first time there.

The Young Republicans got wind of this. Showed up in a group large enough to outnumber the guys in Che shirts. Proceeded to vote themselves into leadership positions. Declared George H.W. Bush to be a paragon of socialist values and endorsed him. Passed various resolutions against abortion, against taxes, in favor of free enterprise, etc. All the while waving the red banner and laughing their asses off.

Kept it up for a few weeks until boredom set in. Have no idea what happened to the shell-shocked true believers afterwards. Anyways, showing up as a group is a very good idea. Wonder if the reverse of this story would work if I could get a group together for the boring local Republican meetings?
posted by honestcoyote at 2:09 PM on November 30, 2016 [15 favorites]

Sarah Palin's . . . son's domestic-violence arrest

A contender for least surprising phrase I've ever read, regrettably. Although, wait, I guess the fact that he got arrested is pretty fucking surprising.

Trump’s Pick for Health Secretary Could Be Disastrous for Women

Come on, writers. This is now officially the world's laziest headline since it applies in Mad Lib fashion to every Trump nominee:

Trump's Pick for ____________ Will Be Disastrous for ___________
posted by FelliniBlank at 2:11 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

It means doing all sorts of blatantly unfair things that you can't do under liberal enlightenment rules. It means doing the sorts of thing that get accomplished through conspiracy and secrecy rather than through discovery and open debate. - YCTAB

Sloan: Federation needs men like you, Doctor - men of conscience, men of principle, men who can sleep at night. You're also the reason Section 31 exists. Someone has to protect men like you from a universe that doesn't share your sense of right and wrong.

:P

P.S. You guys hiring?
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 2:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Come on, writers. This is now officially the world's laziest headline since it applies in Mad Lib fashion to every Trump nominee:

Trump's Pick for ____________ Will Be Disastrous for ___________

Alternate Title For This Thread:

Our First Mad-Lib President
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:18 PM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

Good God, it has been only three weeks, hasn't it? I feel like I've aged three years.

I only have a little gray right now but I feel like the next few years is going to make me turn entirely white-headed.
posted by emjaybee at 2:23 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

You both reminded me of a story I heard as an early 90's undergrad about a small socialist / communist / vaguely anarchist group at Washington University. The story may be just an urban legend designed to spook campus lefties, but I still like it.

Something like that happened at my old college. The lefty organization was originally called "Students for Social Change," but then a bunch of ne'er-do-wells, including a large contingent from the school's Rocky Horror cast, stormed into a key meeting and overwhelmed it. They voted themselves in as officers, officially changed the group's name to "The Slaves of Science Club," and then took a bunch of minutes wherein they recorded descriptions of themselves acting out light BDSM scenes.

I don't know what happened after that.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 2:23 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office.

On being invited to visit Pakistan by the prime minister, Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.

I know this is akin to being surprised by an alcoholic asking for a drink, but I'm stunned by how fucking stupid and disingenuous Trump's words are here. Dude, you're saying NOTHING that indicates ANY knowledge of a specific country, its people, or its "outstanding problems." Is your sentence construction the result of rolling three dice with words on them?

Maybe it's the fact that Trump doesn't even know (or maybe care?) how obvious his ignorance is to everybody else that's surprising to me? But fuck, even W realized the value of relying on people around you to make you sound good.
posted by Rykey at 2:28 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

‏@goldengateblond:

Donald Trump is what would happen if an email with the subject line FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW were elected president.
posted by Wordshore at 2:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [45 favorites]

The President Elect just praised a country and its leader who gave sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden. You want a REAL news story you can feed to the consumers of fake news? "THE TRUMP/AL QUEDA CONNECTION".
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [21 favorites]

Really, where should my vote go? Because at the moment, flushing it towards St Louis seems like it'll have more value.

Engage with your local members of the Democratic Party and try to get them to not do that, and explain that in exactly these terms?

I mean, what you're describing is why a ton of people - especially PoC - already don't vote. It's why Clinton did worse with Latinos than expected - because so much of her message relied on them voting for her just because Trump was racist, instead of giving them a reason to vote for her. Let's keep on pointing this out.

I don't think the 'let's ignore identity politics (aka anyone who isn't a straight cis white dude)' decision is a given. But I do think that there's got to be a vocal push to make our voices known.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:38 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

The President Elect just praised a country and its leader who gave sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden.

Hmm. There was also that time when Trump mused about the World Trade Center having been taller than Trump Tower, but not any more ...
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:39 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Jill Stein files for Michigan recount

The Green Party presidential candidate announced Wednesday that she had filed for a manual hand recount of every vote in Michigan. To do that Stein also had to pay a $973,250 fee. Since the Nov. 8 presidential election Stein has raised almost $7 million in her effort to trigger recounts in three states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Stein filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Tuesday and her campaign is in the process of trying to initiate a recount in Pennsylvania.

Spend Jill Stein's money.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:41 PM on November 30, 2016 [22 favorites]

You want a REAL news story you can feed to the consumers of fake news? "THE TRUMP/AL QUEDA CONNECTION".

Great! Where is it though?
posted by agregoli at 2:41 PM on November 30, 2016

So, essentially, I'm being asked to put my very human concerns about my identity, my existence, my humanity by the wayside to support a party that wants to cast all of those concerns aside in order to appeal to the very people who question my identity, existence, and humanity?

As I said before, the question here is not "do I want liberal policies", it's "do I tacitly accept second-class citizenship or be forced to accept it?" When the answer is "You're getting second-class citizenship anyway," why the fuck would I support either?

So yes, please, tell me how I should vote. Obviously, as a minority, I just don't know any better compared to the wiser majority. I'm just too impatient, and too needy demanding for simple human respect.

Yeah, I'd also require being treated as of equal value as a prerequisite for my vote. It's not a high bar, and I'd really hope it's not one that the Democratic party would attempt to creep under. In fact, I have quite a lot of faith that dumping respect for minorities of various kinds won't happen, but if it did I'd be furious and I'm a white cishet(ish) male. Equality is equality, and we are indeed stronger together.

I just can't see the modern Democratic party thinking the issue is that they need to be more like Trump, and frankly if that's their reaction to the rise of an authoritarian, racist demagogue then they don't deserve your vote in the slightest. It matters if people fuck with you, IMO. It matters most when people are most in danger, and if liberal values are about anything it's about preventing that kind of exploitation and abuse.

I'd really hope the primary voters who picked Obama and HRC aren't likely to be choosing to fuck their voters, their belief system and their moral legitimacy by suddenly not caring about equality though, and it's even harder to imagine the rest of the body of the party not having quite the rebellion if they did. If not, it's hard to know what the Democratic party is for. I don't want to tell you what to do. I just want to say I hear you and agree it would be utterly unacceptable and repellent to ignore that change.

IMO you're worth fighting for, and worth demanding that fight.
posted by jaduncan at 2:45 PM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

Graham preparing 'Dreamers' bill

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is readying legislation that would extend legal protections for previously undocumented immigrants who came here as children — benefits granted under a 2012 directive from President Barack Obama that are at risk with the incoming Trump administration.
...
“The worst outcome is to repeal the legal status that these kids have,” Graham said Wednesday. “Whether you agree with them having it or not, they’ve come out of the shadows.”

Sen. Flake is also on board. Who would have thought Lindsay Graham could be our best hope here?
posted by zachlipton at 2:47 PM on November 30, 2016 [58 favorites]

Repeal and...eventually...replace.

GOP leaders aim to pass ObamaCare repeal by inauguration

House and Senate budget leaders are teeing up a vote to repeal most of ObamaCare by Jan. 20, according to multiple sources.

The leaders of the House and Senate Budget committees are planning the vote for the first week of January, to deal an immediate blow to ObamaCare after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a Senate GOP aide.

Senate GOP Tips Its Hand: An Obamacare Replacement Could Be A Long Way Off

Republican senators who spent years railing against the president's signature health care law are now trying to find consensus on how they want to make good on their years-long campaign promise to dismantle it – and the growing consensus is that it is going to take time to find a replacement.
...
Slowly replacing Obamacare is likely to irritate conservatives who had hoped Republicans would act fast to gut Obamacare, but it echoes what Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, signaled before the Thanksgiving break when he told reporters it might take years to fully repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

posted by kirkaracha at 2:48 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Daniel Nexon, Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Information Warfare and the Progressive’s Dilemma

I assume that I don’t need to spend a lot of time reminding readers of the following:

1. The 2016 election was a breakout year for fake news, and much of that news aimed to delegitimize and demonize Hilary Clinton.
2. Wikileaks not only supplied significant raw material for these efforts, but was also a vector of packaged disinformation on Twitter.
3. Russian information-warfare operations played some role in all this—via hacking and Wikileaks, Russia Today and Sputnik, and paid social-media trolls.
4. Various corners of the online left operated as a vector for anti-Clinton disinformation campaigns. Some of this was related to Russian information warfare. Some of it was not.
5. Some of those on the left who acted as vectors believed they were spreading truth. Some didn’t care. Some probably knew that they were sharing dubious information, but thought that the end justified the means.
6. Many of those corners of the left became part of this process during the primary; the increasingly heated contest between Sanders and Clinton probably made them more vulnerable to disinformation through the duration of the election.
7. We will probably never have a complete understanding of where this disinformation came from, nor the breakdown of the ‘types’ involved.

[...]

All of this generates something of a dilemma for progressives.

On the one hand, we’re committed to free speech. We know full well the dangers that can come from tarring dissidents as foreign agents and ‘useful idiots.’ When Fox and other conservative outlets claim that George Soros is orchestrating anti-Trump protests, we understand what’s going on—and why it should make us very nervous.

On the other hand, we also should recognize that every item on my list is true. We should be deeply alarmed at the implications for deliberative democracy in the United States (and elsewhere). In this respect, there’s an analogy with Clinton’s expanding lead in the popular vote. Neither that, nor the disinformation campaign involving a foreign power, make the election illegitimate. But they both suggest something is broken, and that we need to take steps to fix it.

Nexon goes on to show an example of this dilemma in action with the aforementioned kerfuffle between The Intercept and The Washington Post over the latter's story connecting the rise in fake news to Russian propaganda efforts.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:49 PM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

Secret Life of Gravy: Teenagers in Macedonia. Over a 100 of them. It doesn't mean your entire premise is mistaken, it just means that over a 100 non-American teenagers eager to make money zeroed in on the best way to do that. It did not involve using Liberals to spread their lies around.

I'm sorry to contradict you, SLoG, but the story is: 100+ websites apparently run by a mere handful of teenagers.

In any case, I think the fact that they're teenagers from the "hybrid regime" of Macedonia makes my case stronger: the propagandists had tiny resources, had no experience, and had grown up in a narrow and unfortunately perfectly applicable political/cultural background. There was no state-level effort here to create left-wing propaganda; the kids devised a formula they understood that earned them some money, so they ran with it.

The fact that teenagers who grew up under "competitive and electoral authoritarianism" found it easy to inspire minimal "click here to share this" motivation in angry Trump supporters does not mean that propaganda can't work on progressives. That just does not follow.

There have in fact been a few examples, like "If he wasn't my father, I would spray him with Mace," which has now been mostly pulled from the major news outlets (not Facebook) that ran it, but some residue remains in search engines. The Chicago Tribune and CBS News ran with that.

I believe that creating propaganda that became a viral hit for progressives would probably be harder. But I don't think it does our sense of healthy skepticism any good to get too smug or complacent about it.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Seven senators, all of whom sit on Senate Intelligence, ask Obama to declassify more info about Russian interference in the U.S. election [tweet w/ screenshot of letter that says "We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels."]
posted by melissasaurus at 2:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [41 favorites]

When you realize you got conned too.

@WalshFreedom:
Mr Trump, this is bullshit. Can you hire someone who doesn't work for Goldman Sachs?

What about that swamp? Huh? http://hotair.com/archives/2016/11/30/come-on-trump-considering-president-of-goldman-sachs-for-budget-chief/
posted by chris24 at 2:51 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

If it turns out to be Mnuchin, get ready to hear a lot more about the tax loophole by which government officials can defer capital gains taxes on assets they have to sell to avoid conflicts of interest (it involves our new favorite government agency, the Office of Government Ethics). It allows one to convert, say, millions of dollars worth of stock in Goldman Sachs to Treasury bonds or various index funds tax free, allowing them to diversify without paying capital gains tax.
posted by zachlipton at 2:56 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Donald Trump has made claim after claim calling the integrity of the election into question, but his Michigan campaign had no problem hiring a staff member facing election law charges," [Progress Michigan] executive director Lonnie Scott said. "The fact that the Trump campaign and the Michigan Republican Party embraced Brandon Hall is just one more reason to recount and audit the vote in Michigan."

Michigan Trump staffer convicted on ten counts of felony election fraud (Raw Story)
posted by salix at 2:57 PM on November 30, 2016 [25 favorites]

Who's Trump going to pick to "work on our ghettos"? I'll bet the plan involves moving people to deeeluxe apartments in the sky.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:02 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

These commentators are now suggesting that the Democratic party shuck its interest in the identity politics of anyone who isn't white.

It basically feels like the folks making that argument want American politics and government to look like the dance scene in a bad teen romantic comedy.

Scene: Anytown USA High School, decorated for the Spring Formal. Wordless pop music plays in the background, awkward couples hang out around the punch bowl. A few of the braver couples are dancing on edges of the dancefloor.

DemParty enters with date, PoC.

DemParty: Thanks for bringing me to the dance, PoC.

PoC: Thanks for coming with me, Dem. You know, I was really hoping that we ---

PoC is interrupted as RepParty walks into the dance with date FoxNewsDemographic. They are both loud and brash, brushing Dem and PoC aside, cutting in line at the punch bowl and laughing at people attending the dance without dates.

PoC frowns and turns to continue conversation with Dem, but is stunned to see Dem eyeing FoxNewsDemo longingly.

Dem: Wow, FoxNewsDemo sure looks great. Rep is so lucky to be here with them.

PoC (hurt): You haven't said anything about how I look.

Dem is busy texting his pal Independent: u here? u wouldnt believe how hot FoxNewsDemo is looking tonight

Dem (looking up from phone at PoC): What, did you say something? Sorry.

Independent texts back: Yeah Im here. FoxNewsDemo is so hot!! u here with PoC? lol which 1 of u was more desperate?

Dem (texts to Independent): f u mang. totally want to spit game at FoxNewsDemo. help me ditch Poc.

Poc: Who are you texting? What are you doing?

Before Dem can answer, Independent swaggers over with a smirk.

Independent: Sup, Dem. Sup, PoC. (Sneeringly) Nice outfit. Employee discount at Gingiss?

PoC looks both angry and hurt.

Dem: Come on, play nice, you two. Who'd you come here with, Independent?

Independent: You kidding? Nobody at this school is good enough for me. I'm just here to laugh at the rest of you losers. Anyway, hey, PoC, I'm going to an All Lives Matter counter-rally tomorrow morning, you wanna come?

PoC (cautiously): You're going to protest an All Lives Matter rally? Cool.

Independent: Nah, I'm marching with the All Lives Matter people and Blue Lives Matter people to counter rally against the Black Lives Matter protest.

As PoC explodes at Independent, Dem sneaks away to talk to FoxNewsDemo, who has been abandoned by RepublicanParty at the punch bowl. FoxNewsDemo turns and gives what could be interpreted as a smile to Dem....

Scene: 2 hours later, after the dance has ended.

Indy, Dem, PoC, and FoxDemo are all sitting on the curb, far apart from each other.

Indy: Damn. None of us got what we wanted.

Dem: Well, Rep rode off in a limo with all the money from the fundraiser. So there's that. But maybe there's a lesson here though. If the four of us---

PoC: Fuck. All. Of. You.

As PoC walks across the football field, the opening notes of Don't You Forget About Me begin to play...

FINIS
posted by lord_wolf at 3:06 PM on November 30, 2016 [38 favorites]

Wanna see what Trump sees when he (if he bothers) to check his Twitter timeline? Check your brain at the door and go for it! Courtesy of Robert Mackey.

Be sure you retrieve your checked brain before exiting. Twitter cannot be responsible for lost or misplaced items.

If he actually reads this crap (and I'm not sure he does), it explains a little. It also explains a little that none of the tweets linked to a source of information that could possibly educate the reader. Or provide a laugh. Or any of the other sorts of tweets that remind us that we are humans on a shared journey with all sorts of people as well as all kinds of creatures. Sad waste of a Twitter feed!
posted by Silverstone at 3:17 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

It's not. The strange thing in all the criticism I'm receiving for my position is that it all seems to completely miss the point that I'm making, where there are a lot of "if" clauses. It's a warning that I'm trying to give, saying that if the Democrats do cave my reaction will be as described.

All I'm saying is - don't just tell us. Tell your representatives this, because you are far from the only person who feels this way, and anyone who has ever done a GOTV campaign for the dems has the data on this, but needs to be reminded of it a little more often.
posted by dinty_moore at 3:21 PM on November 30, 2016

When you realize you got conned too.

@WalshFreedom:
Mr Trump, this is bullshit. Can you hire someone who doesn't work for Goldman Sachs?

What about that swamp? Huh?

Two Jewish, senior Goldman Sachs bankers in charge of Treasury and the budget, potentially. Just think how uncoded the more intense alt-right accounts are about this. I don't generally like spite, but such disappointment couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of neo-Nazis. Let's hope they stop turning out.
posted by jaduncan at 3:22 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I read my Twitter timeline, which is a mix of center-left politics and tech, I'm terrified for the world. When I read Trump's Twitter timeline, I'm terrified of the world.
posted by zachlipton at 3:22 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

Just caught up on last night's Daily Show. Trevor Noah has an interesting suggestion on how to handle the Gish Gallop from Trump's Twitter feed. Instead of taking the time and effort to prove each insanity wrong, the media should ask him to elaborate until he ties himself in knots. I think it is worth a try.

Trevor Noah - Trump has the mind of a toddler
posted by obliquity of the ecliptic at 3:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [18 favorites]

Instead of taking the time and effort to prove each insanity wrong, the media should ask him to elaborate until he ties himself in knots. I think it is worth a try.

When does he think the media will get to ask him questions? Trump hasn't held a press conference since July, when he complained about Clinton not holding press conferences and asked Russia to hack her email. Several of his spokespeople, including New Gingrich, have been floating the idea of Trump ignoring the "disgraced" media for his entire presidency.
posted by bluecore at 3:36 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

the opening notes of Don't You Forget About Me begin to play...

She's holding the salami under one arm, and the poodle under the other, and she says-
posted by petebest at 3:39 PM on November 30, 2016

That's not all he's gonna ignore.
posted by valkane at 3:42 PM on November 30, 2016

Trump ignoring the "disgraced" media for his entire presidency.

I'm on board with this. They are disgraced. Putting them out is just about required at this point. They have utterly failed democracy into kernel panic.
posted by petebest at 3:42 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

He announced a press conference for Dec.15 when he will be announcing the hand over of his business to his children. Funny how his per-arranged press conferences can be mistaken for advertisement. I imagine he will spend a good 30 minutes extolling the virtues of his many hotels and golf courses and then end by taking a limited number of questions.

I doubt he will be holding any press conferences before then so...only 2 weeks to go!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:42 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

WaPo Trump is surrounding himself with generals. That’s dangerous.

Our founders embedded civilian control of the military in our Constitution for good reasons: They wanted to avoid a military dictatorship and limit the potential for military coups. “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” James Madison wrote in 1793. And so they formalized checks and balances by making the president the commander in chief while vesting Congress with the power to declare, regulate and fund war.

This principle was later strengthened in the National Security Act of 1947, which mandated that the secretary of defense come from civilian life and prohibited appointment within 10 (later seven) years of relief from active duty. If Trump were to appoint Mattis — who retired from active duty only three years ago — he would need special dispensation from Congress. Teaming him with several other retired officers in the Cabinet and on the National Security Council would not require congressional approval, but it would be similarly precedent-shattering. “Civilian control is so fundamental to the character and the way we think about the United States,” former Pentagon strategist Jim Thomas told The Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe. “It’s something that should be preserved at all costs.”

Again I think this is another example of him coming to the position in complete ignorance and surrounding himself with advisers who know about as much about the White House works as he does. Newt Gingrich would know this sort of thing but I'm not sure he is in the inner circle anymore. Trump seems to be picking people on how loyal they are and how much like him they are (close to his age, authoritarian types, fringe Republicans) and if someone on his team knows them rather than how well they could do the job.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:57 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

Trump Health Czar Tom Price Is a Nightmare for Women

Price helming HHS is a nightmare scenario for advocates of reproductive choice, and a dream for those with a nostalgia for the time before Roe v. Wade, if not Griswold v. Connecticut. During his 11-year tenure in Congress, Price has not cast a single pro-choice vote. His record in issues of birth control and choice last year earned him a 0% rating from Planned Parenthood, an organization that even his new boss Donald Trump acknowledges does some good work (even though Donald Trump has also said that women who have abortions should face some form of punishment, except maybe not).

Likely future Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price has never met an anti-abortion cause he won’t rally behind. In 2005, he co-sponsored a bill in the House that would have defined human life as beginning at the moment of conception. That would have turned many forms of contraception—IUDs, the morning-after pill, and good old hormonal birth control pills—into potential implements of murder in the eyes of the law, as well as outlawing most abortions. In vitro fertilization would also get much more complicated if the government officially recognizes zygotes as just as human and alive as, say, a 10-year-old child or likely future Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price. The concept of “personhood,” as that particular belief became known in more recent years, was so far to the right that when in 2011, when it was put up for a public vote in blood-red Mississippi, it failed by a significant margin.

posted by zachlipton at 4:01 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Buzzfeed: Intel Officials Believe Russia Spreads Fake News

US intelligence officials believe Russia helped disseminate fake and propagandized news as part of a broader effort to influence and undermine the presidential election, two US intelligence sources told BuzzFeed News.

“They’re doing this continuously, that’s a known fact,” one US intelligence official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the sensitive national security issue.

“This is beyond propaganda, that’s my understanding,” the second US intelligence official said. The official said they believed those efforts likely included the dissemination of completely fake news stories.

We had a 9/11 Commission; can we get a 2016 Commission to investigate this horrible year?
posted by zachlipton at 4:03 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Mother Jones is just a little too on point with this one.
posted by Talez at 4:09 PM on November 30, 2016 [27 favorites]

A bit of insidery gossip of no major significance: Teneo, a global consulting firm, was once investigated by the Senate for its ties to the Clintons. Specifically whether Teneo-- which once worked for the Clintons-- had improper access to the US Govt. during her time as SOS. The reason why they are back in the news is because Teneo reps Carrier. They are the ones who put out the press release announcing Carrier's decision to keep 1000 jobs in Indiana.

Insignificant in the grand scheme of things but it shows the intimate relationship between US Businesses and US Government.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Democracy Now: Lawrence Lessig: The Electoral College Is Constitutionally Allowed to Choose Clinton over Trump
posted by homunculus at 4:14 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Matt Taibbi Interviews Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here: Onetime insurgent candidate is now in position to reshape Democratic Party and take on Trump
posted by homunculus at 4:14 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Charles Pierce: This Is the First Step Toward Undoing Some Damage of the 2016 Election: A huge victory for Voting Rights out of North Carolina.
posted by homunculus at 4:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [20 favorites]

I know this is akin to being surprised by an alcoholic asking for a drink, but I'm stunned by how fucking stupid and disingenuous Trump's words are here. Dude, you're saying NOTHING that indicates ANY knowledge of a specific country, its people, or its "outstanding problems." Is your sentence construction the result of rolling three dice with words on them?

As stated above, he's the Mad Libs President. You can substitute the title/personal name & geographic names in the statement and it could apply to literally any other country in the world:

President Trump said President Vázquez you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Mr. President, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Uruguayans are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office.

On being invited to visit Uruguay by the prime minister, Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Uruguayan people that they are amazing and all Uruguayans I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.

posted by zakur at 4:17 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Democracy Now: Lawrence Lessig: The Electoral College Is Constitutionally Allowed to Choose Clinton over Trump

Does anyone anywhere disagree with this? It's allowed to pick whomever it wants among those who received EVs. It will pick Trump.
posted by Justinian at 4:21 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Weird, I was talking about the House for no apparent reason. I guess because I think the point that electors can pick anyone is too obvious.

They could pick me. They are as likely to pick me as to pick Clinton.
posted by Justinian at 4:23 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

As stated above, he's the Mad Libs President. You can substitute the title/personal name & geographic names in the statement and it could apply to literally any other country in the world:

So what you're saying is that Bart Simpson's report on Libya contained more knowledge about the country ("one thing they export is corn") than Trump's call to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, which was entirely generic?

(p.s. There's a story about Kellogg's pulling their ads from Breitbart and a boycott movement. It's insanely stupid and does not deserve a comment or a link, but it's in my head now, so it's only fair that it has to be in your head too, because 2016.)

And here's Eric Bolling on Fox News saying "you have emergency rooms" when asked about the millions who could lose health insurance.
posted by zachlipton at 4:33 PM on November 30, 2016

Clinton passed 65,000,000 votes today and has more than 2,400,000 more votes than man-baby Donald Trump. This is not fine.
posted by Justinian at 4:37 PM on November 30, 2016 [40 favorites]

Eric Bolling on Fox News saying "you have emergency rooms" when asked about the millions who could lose health insurance.

ahh they crossed the talking points and now my head is all exploded
posted by tivalasvegas at 4:38 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

And here's Eric Bolling on Fox News saying "you have emergency rooms" when asked about the millions who could lose health insurance.

Boy that sounds familiar. I'm pretty sure someone said that during the Bush Years. What the circumstance were I don't recall but I remember that same dismissive attitude.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:39 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

No, you cannot ask minorities to wait their turn and not talk about race while we do economy. It's inappropriate and it also will not work.

Oh totally, I did make that caveat somewhere in the comment I think. It's damn near impossible to disentangle the two issues so I think it's better to package them together. Pushing that message (or whatever better message you favor) through the democratic party is going to be WAY more effective than voting 3rd party. The policies that are more likely to solve both are more likely to get enacted by voting for democrats than any other way you can vote. Engaging with the party is how you get better candidates.

Pushing for ranked choice voting at the local level is a start or even just talking about it and none of those exclude doing any or all of the others.

I always vote D but I wish we had ranked choice voting so I had better options.
posted by VTX at 4:39 PM on November 30, 2016

That Matt Tabibi article is really good. I know Bernie is on the outs right now in this community, but it's worth reading what he's saying.
posted by zug at 4:40 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Ya'll, my local Pantsuit Nation told us how to look up what precinct we are in, and also find out if anyone is Democratic chair of our precinct. No one is chair of mine, so I'm going to apply (I will have to get elected but that will only be a concern if someone runs against me). It mostly entails going to meetings and voting, as far as I can see. No special skills required. I am actually more excited about this than making phone calls, and if for some reason I don't get it, I will start going to local Democratic party meetings in my county. Cause I can't sit here vibrating with worry anymore. And prayer vigils aren't what I need right now.

There's a good chance your precinct needs you too; there were a lot of other empty slots in the list for my county.
posted by emjaybee at 4:48 PM on November 30, 2016 [54 favorites]

@kurteichenwald
Oh dear. New HHS nominee is in fringe group Assoc. of American Physicians & Surgeons. It is anti-vaxxer and says Obama won through hypnosis.
posted by chris24 at 4:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

Thanks mattdidthat, it was bugging me.

Bloomberg Wall Street Wins Again as Trump Picks Bankers, Billionaires

It would suit Tilson just fine if voters who backed Trump because he promised to rein in Wall Street are furious now that he’s surrounding himself with bankers and billionaires.

“I can take glee in that -- I think Donald Trump conned them,” said Tilson, who runs Kase Capital Management. “I worried that he was going to do crazy things that would blow the system up. So the fact that he’s appointing people from within the system is a good thing.”

Hey, WWC, how's that vote workin out for ya?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:54 PM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

And I'm sure last night at an elegant three-star restaurant, he was happy to share his version of populism, which involve a little fois gras, a certain amount of superb cooking, but put that in a populist happy manner.

lalex, the weird thing is, I'm pretty sure the restaurant was Trump's choice. Not sure why Romney gets the knock for that. Was he supposed to show up at their arranged meeting and suggest they go get a MacDonalds?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:58 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Come on, writers. This is now officially the world's laziest headline since it applies in Mad Lib fashion to every Trump nominee:

Trump's Pick for ____________ Will Be Disastrous for ___________
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:11 PM on November 30

I say, that's rather eponysterical, eh old chap?
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:00 PM on November 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

It seems like things are shaping up to be a real zoo during confirmation season next year. I don't think the outcome is necessarily in doubt but there is plenty of opportunity for these candidates to be Borked, particularly since so many of the names being thrown around are of people who wouldn't be taken seriously in the past. Democrats have no real incentive to go easy on anyone's record here. At the same time, with the Tea Partiers, unstoppable force meets immovable object when Trump's haphazard expected fait accompli appointments come into conflict with true believer types in his own party, who have demonstrated no hesitation in eating their own in the past. This combination should make for some interesting hearings.
posted by feloniousmonk at 5:00 PM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

Taco Bell seems more thematic
posted by thelonius at 5:00 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Instead of taking the time and effort to prove each insanity wrong, the media should ask him to elaborate until he ties himself in knots. I think it is worth a try.

I've thought about responding like this to Trump supporters in general. Instead of refuting obvious lies and gas lighting, continuously ask for elaboration, and provide innocent rejoinders along the lines of, "But I thought 1 equals 1, not 2. Could you explain again how the sun doesn't rise in the east?"

Hard to think it would accomplish anything, but at least it would have a chance of infuriating them more than myself.
posted by Brak at 5:02 PM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

to be fair, their editorial page was sanctimonious and patronizing about trump before the election. too bad about all the other sections.
posted by murphy slaw at 5:15 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Hard to think it would accomplish anything, but at least it would have a chance of infuriating them more than myself.

My go-to trick is not to lose my temper, just outlast them with calm questions and reasoning. (On facebook, that is -- I've long since been estranged from most of the conservatives in my real life, sadly, since if you're not okay with me being married to a guy, I'm not okay with talking to you.)

Anyway, I don't feel the need to engage typically but when I do jump in, I get the last word. Helps that I can usually out-theologize the evangelical-type trolls. The other day I got called "the left-wing version of a Fundamentalist" by some guy who was mad about Trudeau being diplomatic over Castro's death, and now I have a new epitaph for my gravestone!
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:24 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]

Oh, and I try to keep the audience in mind. If you get into it (gently) with a troll for long enough, they'll show their nasty, bigoted colors. They themselves might not be persuadable, but at least their drive-by, obliquely racist/sexist/homophobic assumptions can be unearthed for the onlookers -- some of whom may be made quietly uncomfortable and may start to rethink their own assumptions.
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:28 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

to be fair, the NYT did more to promote Donald Trump the Celebrity than any other media entity prior to NBC's Apprentice. That's why his meeting with the paper they call The Grey Lady was so much more cordial than his one with the broadcast media. For a lot of years, he grabbed The Grey Lady and she did nothing but giggle.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:33 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Wall Street Wins Again as Trump Picks Bankers, Billionaires

The only thing swampland is good for once its been drained is more swamp.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:57 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Trump Health Czar Tom Price Is a Nightmare for Women

They're installing Czars now? Is there no limit to Putin's control over Trump?!
posted by indubitable at 6:01 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Who would have thought Lindsay Graham could be our best hope here?

2016: A Netflix Original.
posted by corb at 6:05 PM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

2016: A Netflix Original.

I heard that the showrunner was Google's Deep Dream!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 6:13 PM on November 30, 2016

Jacob Bacharach in Deadspin: Who Lost the White House?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

RE: Deadspin - I keep on thinking of this and cannot get myself to give half of a shit about their post-election response.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:31 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

This is interesting. Several Democrats on the Intelligence Committee have sent a letter (led by the incomparable Ron Wyden) to President Obama stating:

We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels.

posted by zachlipton at 6:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [34 favorites]

Also, #BreitbartCereals is now a thing.
posted by zachlipton at 6:36 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Trumpsters getting angry with the Ryan wing of the party.

@kausmickey
Genius @SpeakerRyan strategy: Suck @RealDonaldTrump into Medicare voucher quagmire-so no time/energy for immigration

@AnnCoulter
Medicare IS NOT WHAT THE ELECTION WAS FOUGHT OVER. If Ryan wants to change Medicare, then run for president on that & see how far you get.
posted by chris24 at 7:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Also, #BreitbartCereals is now a thing.

Reince Christies lol
posted by FelliniBlank at 7:18 PM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

Trumpsters getting angry with the Ryan wing of the party.

uh oh spaghetti-o!

Maybe my pre-election investments in Big Popcorn will pay off after all
posted by tivalasvegas at 7:23 PM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

CNN's Cooper clashes with Warren: 'No evidence' Bannon is a white supremacist

CNN host Anderson Cooper and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) clashed Wednesday over whether one of President-elect Donald Trump’s key appointments is a white supremacist.

Warren ignited the encounter by accusing Stephen Bannon, Trump’s incoming chief strategist and senior counselor, of practicing the racist ideology.

“[Trump’s] got as his strategic adviser someone who’s a white supremacist,” she said of Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“Wait a minute, there’s no evidence he’s a white supremacist,” Cooper said, interrupting Warren. "Obviously, there are people who are white supremacists who support Donald Trump and support Breitbart or Steve Bannon.”

Warren audibly exhaled at Cooper’s remarks before defending her criticism of Bannon, who was also Trump’s presidential campaign CEO.

“Steve Bannon has certainly associated himself with white supremacists,” said Warren. "Will you go that far?”

“I don’t know that you can say, though, that he’s a white supremacist,” Cooper retorted.
posted by futz at 7:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Chris Krispies
Special Kasich
Lindsey Golden Grahams
Cap'n Cruz
Raisin Rand
Rubi-os
posted by tonycpsu at 7:26 PM on November 30, 2016 [12 favorites]

We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels.

I have a feeling this is a big deal. Wyden's public comments before and into 2013 hinted at some of what Edward Snowden later revealed.

He raised concerns about secret interpretations of the Patriot Act, which the executive branch construed to grant surveillance powers not evident under a plain reading of the text.

He also asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a hearing whether the NSA collected "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." Clapper denied that the NSA did so wittingly. Soon after that exchange, the Snowden leaks showed that Clapper had lied to Congress.

Optimistically, his use of the phrase "additional information" refers to specifics about what has already been reported on. Russia waged a propaganda and disinformation campaign; I suppose Wyden could want some of the details to be known.

That's the best-case scenario that I can imagine. Pessimistically, "additional information" means basically anything else.
posted by compartment at 7:36 PM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

Sarah Palin for Veterans Affairs? Really?
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:49 PM on November 30, 2016

Maybe this is just crazy talk, but as a voter from a predominantly rural state who wants to see progressive change and is tired of watching the Dems snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over and over..

Maybe, if something has to be jettisoned, instead of throwing women, people of color, and LGBTQ people under the bus, the Democrats would consider reaching out to white rural voters by publicly and loudly announcing an end to further gun control efforts?

It's not that gun violence isn't a very serious problem that ought to be addressed.. but the Dems have lost on this issue, pretty comprehensively, and nobody really expects any of the legislative measures they're likely to be able to pass in the next 20 years to actually solve the problem. Changing America's culture of gun violence by repeatedly attempting and failing to pass the same measures they have been proposing isn't working and in the meantime Democratic candidates carry gun control around like a boat anchor in election after election. Maybe it's time to accept that gradual cultural change is the best hope for improvement on this issue and not an instant legislative solution?

Hardcore bigots aren't going to vote for the Democratic platform. Single-issue abortion voters aren't going to vote for the Democratic platform. But abandon further efforts at gun control, which you're losing at anyway, and convince people that you're sincere about that and I think there are people who are currently single-issue gun voters who are reachable with the rest of the Democratic Party's message. And it doesn't require giving up on continuing to make progress on issues of civil rights and basic social justice.
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

They're installing Czars now? Is there no limit to Putin's control over Trump?!

White Russia will rise again, apparently. Really the Communists had a famously very strong view on Czars.
posted by jaduncan at 7:52 PM on November 30, 2016

They're installing Czars now? Is there no limit to Putin's control over Trump?!

I don't like it any more than you, but whatever czar has been a term for appointed executive branch officials in US politics since at least the 1930s.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:59 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

“I don’t know that you can say, though, that he’s a white supremacist,” Cooper retorted.

what
posted by zutalors! at 8:07 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Chris Krispies
Special Kasich
Lindsey Golden Grahams
Cap'n Cruz
Raisin Rand
Rubi-os

Special KKK?
posted by mochapickle at 8:08 PM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

Maybe, if something has to be jettisoned, instead of throwing women, people of color, and LGBTQ people under the bus, the Democrats would consider reaching out to white rural voters by publicly and loudly announcing an end to further gun control efforts?

I support this. I thought the sit in on the floor of the house over the no fly list was embarrassing.
posted by zutalors! at 8:08 PM on November 30, 2016

Maybe it's time to accept that gradual cultural change is the best hope for improvement on this issue and not an instant legislative solution?

Except this is an election that proves gradual cultural change is... distributed unevenly. Some parts of the US are still as late-50s as Cuba's car fleets. Perhaps that will change when the more affluent Boomers pull up their ladder completely and die.

Americans are collectively shit at guns, and will continue to be shit at guns because being shit at guns is as much a part of their identity as being terrible drivers who expected to get their licenses for reversing in the DMV lot without hitting something. Maybe the Dems ought to advocate for "rural" approaches to "accidental" gun deaths, so that when an African-American or Hispanic kid in a city dies because of some fuckup, it was a terrible tragedy and haven't they suffered enough?

That's to say, I think this is a fundamental error. Obama did not take anybody's fucking guns away; the NRA turned the slaughter of an elementary school class into a marketing pitch for armed school guards. The Dems could make political ads of them spraying off rounds semi-automatic rifles while yee-ha-ing and Wayne LaFucker would still tell single-issue voters that it's a ruse and the single-issue voters would believe him.

Maybe the US needs to stop being one country. Seriously. Maybe it's about fucking time that a nation founded on an abject fear of cities (with baked-in political stifling of cities) where half the population now lives in cities looked at itself and said "no, this pre-industrial agrarian gentry bullshit doesn't fit any more."
posted by holgate at 8:10 PM on November 30, 2016 [20 favorites]

what

I know. I am flummoxed by this. Has he not seen ALL the evidence? Odd. very odd.
posted by futz at 8:11 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

I know I gave Anderson Cooper the benefit of the doubt a bit on some of this Bannon stuff previously but...no. not now, that is totally ridiculous.
posted by zutalors! at 8:12 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Warren audibly exhaled at Cooper’s remarks

I'm not going to follow it, and I'm not going care much, but when Cooper said he was a "big fan" of The Real Housewives, it was very sad. After no small amount of dabbling in the Bravo arena, I thought he had decided to put that aside to get the serious journalist cred back.

Oh well.

Is anyone aggregating the blogs of "serious" journalists? There were some significant feints at it during the latter part of ogodisitover.
posted by petebest at 8:15 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe...the Democrats would consider reaching out to white rural voters by publicly and loudly announcing an end to further gun control efforts?

Maybe white rural voters should stop being such Chicken Littles about gun control after years and years of the Democrats not coming after your guns.

What was wrong with Clinton's position?

I believe weapons of war have no place on our streets. We may have our disagreements on gun safety regulations, but we should all be able to agree on a few things. If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked. You shouldn’t be able to exploit loopholes and evade criminal background checks by buying online or at a gun show. And yes, if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America.

Is that too tyrannical, or does she have to buy the guns for you?
posted by kirkaracha at 8:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [28 favorites]

I don't support the no fly list, but I also don't support expansion of the no fly list's restrictions, so I didn't like the no fly no buy idea.
posted by zutalors! at 8:19 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.

"If a government agency decides you're a threat, you should be subject to greater restrictions on what (rightly or wrongly) have been deemed fundamental constitutional rights. We're Democrats and this is where we're willing to take a stand by staging a sit-in in Congress."

Does that explain why the no-fly-no-buy thing is a horrible idea?
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:23 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Protecting Innocents is better than gun control.

Man, tv news is still clawing at us from (almost) the grave.
posted by petebest at 8:23 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

But abandon further efforts at gun control, which you're losing at anyway, and convince people that you're sincere about that

Gun control isn't losing in California. Prop 63 got passed. Large cap magazines banned and background checks required for ammo purchases. And it coincidentally passed with 63% of the vote, meaning it wasn't even a close vote.
posted by FJT at 8:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

"If a government agency decides you're a threat, you should be subject to greater restrictions on what (rightly or wrongly) have been deemed fundamental constitutional rights. We're Democrats and this is where we're willing to take a stand by staging a sit-in in Congress."

Yep. Awful.
posted by zutalors! at 8:25 PM on November 30, 2016

"Texts From Superheroes" has a lot of fun with DC and Marvel characters and tropes, but usually nothing political. But right now, we obviously were going to hear something from Cap.A.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:33 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

At this point I feel skeptical of the idea that changing policy positions on just about anything will convert the rural white Republican base. Abandoning something as important as gun control in a Hail Mary attempt to convert people whose party affiliation seem to be much more about identity than specific policy sounds foolish. The only policy change that I could see really bringing more rural whites to the table would be a hardline anti-abortion stance, and that wouldn't be worth it for a hundred million reasons.
posted by vathek at 8:38 PM on November 30, 2016 [22 favorites]

Maybe, if something has to be jettisoned, instead of throwing women, people of color, and LGBTQ people under the bus, the Democrats would consider reaching out to white rural voters by publicly and loudly announcing an end to further gun control efforts?

Trump just won the election after promising to literally have police confiscate random people's guns and supporting the same no-fly-no-buy policy Clinton supported.
posted by dirigibleman at 8:38 PM on November 30, 2016 [29 favorites]

Gun control isn't losing in California. Prop 63 got passed. Large cap magazines banned and background checks required for ammo purchases. And it coincidentally passed with 63% of the vote, meaning it wasn't even a close vote.

Direct democracy via 51% referendum is a horrible idea. (Ask the Brits.) Similarly to the no-fly-no-buy concept, it might yield a few good results by bypassing the political class, but it undercuts a hugely important ideal, that of constitutional and inalienable rights.

If we had a national referendum system, my marriage would disappear if I moved 20 miles southeast to Gary. This model only works in a high-trust environment which ends up being a genuinely consensus-based process where the formal vote is a formality. Otherwise it's the proverbial 99 wolves and one sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:38 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Trump just won the election after promising to literally have police confiscate random people's guns and supporting the same no-fly-no-buy policy Clinton supported.

Trump v Clnton doesn't represent what has been going on with Democrats v Republicans on the gun issue on the state and local level, however.
posted by zutalors! at 8:41 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

The gun issue seems a million miles away. Rural whites who voted Trump/3rd party will enjoy the next four-to-eight years; Education and Environment will be severely negatively impacted, many old and suffering will be negatively impacted, war will claim lives it wouldn't have otherwise, and they'll be just as heavily armed as they would under a Democratic administration.

It's a good idea to build together but I don't see a-bazooka-in-every-pot-or-not as being a priority issue the DNC could, would, or should take up anytime soon.
posted by petebest at 8:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

WWC: Donald Trump Jr. hunts down goats in Turkey

Donald Trump Jr., the son of the president-elect, took some time to clear his head following the chaos of the election by going goat hunting in Turkey. [...]

Swamp, drained: Treasury pick Steven Mnuchin was mentored by two of Trump’s ‘global’ villains

Like the post-credits bonus scene in a Marvel superhero movie, Donald Trump’s final pre-election ad added three surprising villains to his usual rogues’ gallery (Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, assorted foreigners): Lloyd Blankfein, George Soros and Janet Yellen.

All three deal with money: Blankfein as CEO of the Goldman Sachs investment back, Soros as a leading hedge funder and Yellen as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve. All three are Jewish.

And now, Blankfein and Soros also have this in common: They both once employed Steven Mnuchin, the man who would be President Trump’s Treasury secretary – and who also is Jewish.

posted by Joe in Australia at 8:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, St. Smedley Butler,you saved us from the Business Plot once. I send an intercessory prayer to you now.
posted by sleepy psychonaut at 9:09 PM on November 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

Does that explain why the no-fly-no-buy thing is a horrible idea?

Thanks! OK, so point taken on no fly/no buy. What about background checks and closing loopholes?
posted by kirkaracha at 9:20 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jared Legum of ThinkProgress has a thread: 1. This was the worst day of reporting on Trump since he started running for office. It's distressing.

In short, Trump got himself hundreds of positive stories about how he'll resolve conflicts of interest when he's done nothing and said only the most meaningless of statements today.
posted by zachlipton at 9:28 PM on November 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

PSA: Hillary Clinton currently has 2,577,037 more votes (still counting.)
posted by bluecore at 9:29 PM on November 30, 2016 [19 favorites]

Direct democracy via 51% referendum is a horrible idea. (Ask the Brits.) Similarly to the no-fly-no-buy concept, it might yield a few good results by bypassing the political class, but it undercuts a hugely important ideal, that of constitutional and inalienable rights.

Well, you're talking more about the referendum process, and you're right there shouldn't simple majority votes on constitutional rights. Prop 8 was a disaster.

I will mention Prop 63 was voted on AFTER the legislature and governor already signed a gun control bill with similar things this past summer. So, in this case the California political class has already agreed with the public. But, there are differences in implementation between the bill and initiative.

But no matter how you slice it, California is pro-gun control. The public supports. Our Democratic controlled supermajority legislature supports it. And our Democratic governor and I think even our former Republican governor support it.
posted by FJT at 9:33 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Maybe...the Democrats would consider reaching out to white rural voters by publicly and loudly announcing an end to further gun control efforts?"

Clinton's campaign had very little in the way of gun control. The problem with the campaign was there was not enough plain language explaining HRC's rather well-thought out platform.
posted by My Dad at 9:34 PM on November 30, 2016

This is from an article about the 21st Century Cures Act linked to by Secret Life of Gravy way back in the thread:

The bill’s supporters are making concessions to Republicans, too. Late Tuesday night, Republicans pulled a bipartisan provision ― authored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) ― promoting evidence-based prevention services to help keep more children out of foster care after Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) demanded it be stripped out.

The bill had passed the House unanimously in June when it came up for a standalone vote, and it’s backed by more than 500 child welfare groups. But Republican leaders backed down Tuesday after Burr, along with Republican Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Dan Coats (Ind.), pressed McConnell and Ryan to remove it from the larger Cures Act.

Every part of me is WTF? You are cutting evidenced-based ways to keep kids out of foster care???

So yes, there is a war against us and by us I mean POC, poor people, LGBTQ, working class people, middle class people, anyone who is not wealthy. It's a war being waged by billionaires primarily using the Republican party but they are happy to use Democrats as needed/when possible. Or, as Bernie Sanders says in the Rolling Stone piece also linked above by someone else (sorry, my laptop is about to die so can't find the original link from this thread):

...what we have to understand is that Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers think Citizens United did not go far enough. Their view is that right now, if you're a billionaire, the only thing you can do is spend as much as you want into independent expenditures. They don't want that. They want you to be able to say, "OK, you're our guy, you're going to run for president, here's your check for a billion dollars, there's your speechwriter and consultant. You work for us." We are moving, if Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers get their way, to a place where presidents and senators and congresspeople will be paid employees of the billionaire class, because they will literally give them a check to run their campaign.
posted by Bella Donna at 9:49 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Also, I'm in Europe visiting family and everyone has either a nasty cold or bronchitis and I haven't been able to sleep since 3 am because coughing and this thread has been my companion through a long night and my goodness, I love you people and MetaFilter so much! Good morning/good afternoon/good night wherever you may be.
posted by Bella Donna at 9:55 PM on November 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

... where presidents and senators and congresspeople will be paid employees of the billionaire class, because they will literally give them a check to run their campaign.
But Donald Trump has cut out the middleman!
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:01 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Really on gun control, the Dems need to identify and amplify the voices within the gun owning community who advocate for sensible gun control measures, these people absolutely do exist. Find people who can talk the talk and get them out there, have them inform the actual policy from a knowledgeable position and talk to the many many persuadable gun owners on their level. Forget the lost cause hardcore NRA types, there are plenty of gun owners who are generally open to sensible control but wary and susceptible to scare stories, have people they can identify with help create and deliver a message of pragmatic and effective legislation to them. Typical Dem spokespeople take so much shit from people on gun control for not having expert-level familiarity with gun enthusiast terminology (the tired, tired old "lol you don't know the difference between a clip and a magazine so your argument is irrelevant" thing). And they rightly take shit when they get lost in the weeds of focusing on cosmetic features. They need to put people with credibility at the front of the issue. People who own guns for protection, hunting and as a hobby, LEOs who can directly speak to effective measures and the need for them, gun safety advocates, the Dems need people like that to be highly visible advocates. And yeah, speak from a place of morality too, as mentioned a few times upthread. And position bad actors like the big straw sale offending dealers as people who are shouldn't be allowed to hurt the reputation of responsible gun owners. And maybe offer some nice, fat tax breaks and grants for certified firearm safety education programs, which has been tried before but repealed in 2006.

Also, a nice side effect of building bridges this way - lots of hunters and outdoorspersons (really needs to be a less clunky gender neutral word for "outdoorsmen"...) in that middle ground of reachable people who would be receptive to Democratic stances on the environment but are all hung up on the gun issue.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:02 PM on November 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Hey, Bella Donna! Feel better soon.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:09 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is interesting. Several Democrats on the Intelligence Committee have sent a letter (led by the incomparable Ron Wyden) to President Obama stating:

Here's the WhiteHouse.gov petition. (Don't forget to confirm your signature via the email link you'll receive.)
posted by perspicio at 10:30 PM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

At this point I feel skeptical of the idea that changing policy positions on just about anything will convert the rural white Republican base.

It has been said before but I believe that there is no way to talk to people like this, rural or otherwise. This is not just a rural problem, far from it. The koolaid has been imbibed and the cult is healthy and prosperous. Truth, logic, and reason are dead. Despite the mantra to drain the swamp these guys haven't raised the slightest alarm that the swamp is more full than ever. It just doesn't matter when you support a god emperor.

If you continue to worship someone who is actively breaking promises that were your rallying cries then you are inculcated. Full stop.

When you acknowledge that your god emperor is going off script but make excuses that it is because he is sooo brilliant and a master of 5D chess, you are in a cult. Full stop.

When your charismatic leader can do no wrong you are indoctrinated. Full stop.

There is no amount of talking that can magically bring these folks back from upside down world.
posted by futz at 10:50 PM on November 30, 2016 [33 favorites]

the Dems need to identify and amplify the voices within the gun owning community who advocate for sensible gun control measures, these people absolutely do exist.

Jason Kander ran that ad where he assembled a rifle blindfolded, and while he came close in MO, he lost. So there's that. I just don't think there are many converts to be had by that approach: on a state level, Dems can scrape out state-level wins in Montana or North Dakota or other big wide-open outdoorsy states where there aren't a) big cities; b) minorities living in them, but I've heard tales for years and years of the rifle/shotgun owners who'd eagerly vote Dem except guns, and those people feel increasingly mythical to me in the wake of [latest mass shooting], at least in red states that have at least one large city and an African-American population with any kind of visibility. Actual responsible gun owners tut and shake their heads when they read about a 5-year-old shooting a 3-year-old with a Crickett My First .22, but they won't fucking vote to stop it happening.
posted by holgate at 10:55 PM on November 30, 2016 [23 favorites]

I wanted to say this earlier, but I've been way behind the thread and have finally caught up by virtue of skipping roughly 1000 comments and only reading the last few hundred.

But on the abortion issue (which is newly pressing here in Texas) what I desperately want to see from the Left is a reframing so that we are in favor of Safe Abortions. What the Right is trying to do is end Safe Abortions. They want restrictions on Safe Abortions. They are going to create more Unsafe Abortions.

Right now they have framed the question as "Do you think abortions should happen or not happen?" and people say "On the whole, not." What we need to be asking is do you think abortions should be Safe or Unsafe?

I mean, there's all kinds of science out there to back up the fact that abortion restrictions increases injury and death from abortions. But the facts aren't what's important, obviously. It's repeating the question over and over and over. Which do you want? Safe or Unsafe? Our opponents want to restrict safe abortions, while increasing the number of unsafe abortions. We want to ensure all abortions are safe.
posted by threeturtles at 11:16 PM on November 30, 2016 [31 favorites]

this has been percolating for a few days, and maybe needs a few more ... but somebody mentioned McCarthyism a while back (maybe the last thread) and how they felt they needed to do some research into what finally brought it down.

A. research is good

B. my own (conducted over at least four decades) has led to the conclusion that no single incident, or person, or action, or group, or strategy brought that nightmare down -- it was all manner of folks working all manner of angles with passion, resilience, intelligence, stoicism, wisdom, virtue, everything they had.

It was nuanced and it was fierce.
posted by philip-random at 11:35 PM on November 30, 2016 [15 favorites]

i don't think the left even needs to convert red voters. let them despise us, and screw themselves. i'm done with trying to win with rationalism against the irrational, done with arguing harm reduction instead of retribution. whatev. i think the money is in activating dems who did not go to the polls, and activating non-voters to see a dem vote as a vote in their best interests(so probably not an establishment/big money/wall street bench). i hope the dnc can do some solid math on that approach and see if it gets the left a winning electoral margin. fwiw.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:00 AM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

The Emoluments Clause, Bribery, and President Trump
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:09 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Guardian has an interesting piece about how Gamergate was something of a trial run for the hateful tactics we've seen from Trump and his supporters.

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'
posted by bryon at 1:49 AM on December 1, 2016 [25 favorites]

dirigibleman: Trump just won the election after promising to literally have police confiscate random people's guns

Not random people. Random people of colour.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:16 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Professor on watchlist of progressives: ‘I will not shut up — America is still worth fighting for’
posted by adamvasco at 3:28 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

In a very long but extremely worthwhile piece at Vox, "Everything mattered: lessons from 2016's bizarre presidential election", David Roberts tries to disentangle the multicausal web behind this catastrophe. I largely agree with his conclusion:

I still think the primary problem in American politics today is the intersection of three trends: 1) Rural and suburban white men resent recent economic and demographic changes; 2) their rebellion against those changes, combined with political institutions distorted to favor rural and suburban voters, has created a dangerously radical major party mixing xenophobic authoritarianism and libertarianism; and 3) trust in American institutions, from media to political parties to academia, has declined for decades and is now in the dirt.

In other words, the total degradation of the institutions that we all hoped would put a check on the most hideous human impulses, combined with a surge in white identity politics and an electoral system that disproportionately advantages sparsely populated rural areas. Running down some of the catastrophic scenarios:

It’s possible that white nationalism is an ineradicable element of American life. It’s possible American institutions have failed so thoroughly that some sort of illiberal strongman is inevitable. It’s possible that further Republican gains could give them control of enough states to start passing constitutional amendments returning the US to the 19th century. It’s possible that a terrorist attack under the coming administration could cause panic and backlash that leads to a police state. It’s possible something as bad as or worse than internment camps will come along, or widespread racial violence.

As he darkly but aptly concludes, these may not come to pass, but it's ludicrous to pretend that this is fine. The worst is now so close that we can feel its breath on our neck.
posted by informavore at 3:33 AM on December 1, 2016 [26 favorites]

Republican operative: What a pathetic thing is decadence
posted by Mchelly at 3:54 AM on December 1, 2016 [17 favorites]

They knew Donald Trump was ignorant and dishonest, and it didn’t matter to them. They knew he was a sex predator who fathered children by various women, and it didn’t matter. Cheating on his taxes, cheating on his wives, consumer fraud, the bogus charity, the sponsorship of the Russian intelligence services, the anti-Semitic associates, cheating contractors who had done work for him, the picking on individuals before massive rallies, the insufferable racism, the continual running down of America—none of that mattered.

No, the only thing that mattered to Republicans of means once Trump was nominated by the Republican Party was that he had been nominated by the Republican Party. Loyalty to party took precedence over loyalty to American democracy, its mission, and traditions. What counted—all that counted—was that Trump had been chosen to lead Our Team.

Yeah, I had said exactly this a while ago in these threads. A lot of people picked Trump just because he has an R by his name. Then they stopped thinking about politics entirely.
posted by zutalors! at 4:53 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

From that Emoluments Clause piece linked up thread,

"Adam Liptak recently wrote in the New York Times about how a newly-elected President Obama sought legal advice from the Department of Justice concerning whether he could accept the Nobel Peace Prize without violating the Emoluments Clause. "

...because it's only been 3 weeks, and I was beginning to forget what normal really looked like.
posted by klarck at 5:01 AM on December 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

No, the only thing that mattered to Republicans of means once Trump was nominated by the Republican Party was that he had been nominated by the Republican Party. Loyalty to party took precedence over loyalty to American democracy, its mission, and traditions. What counted—all that counted—was that Trump had been chosen to lead Our Team.

C'mon, clearly that's a little simplistic. I mean I'm sure a bunch of those people picked Trump because he didn't have a D by his name instead. I'm not ready to assume loyalty is a stronger tie than hate in other words.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:08 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Then they stopped thinking about politics entirely.

This is maybe the piece of privilege which, though small in the grand scheme of things, I most long for right now.

I see (white) people on facebook postin' away pictures of their cats* and little inspirational quotes** like the election never even happened and it's almost worse than the Trumpist brigades, it's like: you weren't even propagandized into fascism, you just don't give a fuck about anyone beside yourself.

*not that there's anything wrong with that per se
**less acceptable
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:09 AM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

DailyBeast: Paul Manafort Is Back and Advising Donald Trump on Cabinet Picks
posted by PenDevil at 5:22 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

No, the only thing that mattered to Republicans of means once Trump was nominated by the Republican Party was that he had been nominated by the Republican Party.
It was the 'third basket' (the other two being the Deplorables and the Distressed-and-Gullible) that put Trump over the top; that there were not nearly enough 'good Republicans' turning against him to give others who went to the polls to vote for their beloved Local Republicans to lose his vote. Of course, it was a decade of Republican rat-fucking the system with not enough opposition from the Democrats that made an Electoral College victory possible while losing the popular vote.

I've seen this election compared to the 1876 election that ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction and realize that that election (and our 140 years of failing to fix the massive problems with our political system that caused it) led directly to this one. When I first became old enough to vote in 1976, I saw enough people of goodwill in the system to potentially fix some of them, but instead, we spent that Bicentennial Year celebrating this mess. And today, even the Liberals with enough money to buy $500 Broadway tickets are still celebrating the fatally flawed creators of this fatally flawed system.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:25 AM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

realize that that election (and our 140 years of failing to fix the massive problems with our political system corporate news media that caused it)
posted by petebest at 5:33 AM on December 1, 2016

I've seen this election compared to the 1876 election that ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction and realize that that election (and our 140 years of failing to fix the massive problems with our political system that caused it) led directly to this one.

Yes. This is the second coming of Redemption.
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:41 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ankit Panda ‏@nktpnd
What does Mike Flynn do if he gets a 3 a.m. phone call that 250 nukes have been launched? http://bit.ly/2gMIcVU

[attached image]

tfw Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, favourites this tweet.
posted by Talez at 5:53 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I see (white) people on facebook postin' away pictures of their cats* and little inspirational quotes** like the election never even happened and it's almost worse than the Trumpist brigades, it's like: you weren't even propagandized into fascism, you just don't give a fuck about anyone beside yourself.

Yes. I (also white but gender-non-conforming and working class and enmeshed in a social world that will be absolutely crushed by racist, homophobic and anti-immigrant legislation) feel fear under everything right now. It's hard for me to listen to music and read books and just generally try to pick up my pre-election life, because everything feels haunted - "when I last listened to that song, things were okay". I wake up at night anxious and afraid. All I can think about is historical parallels to our current situation. Every time I walk down the street I look at people and think "were you someone who voted against me?" That's how I feel, like this election was (among many other things) a referendum on whether people like me should be allowed. I feel like I'm waiting for something to break - for someone to shove me in line at the store or knock me down on the street while people stand around and ignore what's happening. I feel afraid and sad all the time now and I don't understand why everyone isn't in a constant state of panic.
posted by Frowner at 5:57 AM on December 1, 2016 [46 favorites]

@realDonaldTrump Look forward to going to Indiana tomorrow in order to be with the great workers of Carrier. They will sell many air conditioners!

Except that as many people point out in the comments, they actually make furnaces at that plant.

Think Progress Don’t be fooled by Trump’s deal to save some Carrier jobs
More than half the jobs will still leave the country, all while taxpayers hand Carrier a package of financial incentives.

Fortune reports that the actual sum is even smaller. The company has pledged to keep 850 jobs in the U.S. that would otherwise have gone to Mexico, while also retaining some headquarters and engineering jobs that would have moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Since the company had originally put more than 2,000 at risk — 1,400 at the Indianapolis plant and 700 at the Huntington plant owned by Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies — the difference between those numbers mean that at least some production will move south of the border and more than half of the jobs will go with it. Fortune reports that 1,300 jobs will go to Mexico: 600 from the Indianapolis plant and the 700 in Huntington.

It may sound a bit petty to any Trump supporter because the Trump spin is clearly "DJT has saved American jobs before even becoming President" but when you look at the actual numbers and the large state and federal tax incentives that convinced Carrier to keep the 850 jobs in Indiana then it becomes clear that this was a huge win for the company and its shareholders-- not the WWC that supposedly voted Trump into office.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:11 AM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

From the Vox article just above on why, why $diety, why:

I was overconfident, even more so than most in media.
"We didn't do serious reporting. We f'd around and did reality show coverage about the most devastating event to America in anyone's lifetime."

It was close
"We didn't do serious reporting. We f'd around . . . "

The country hasn’t changed overnight and there’s no “mandate”
"We didn't do serious reporting. We f'd around . . . "

[Dems get ever-increasing minority vote, white men vote drops]But the road to that victory is a lot longer and rougher than the left has been telling itself, and the vaunted “blue wall” is a fairy tale.
"We didn't do serious reporting. We f'd around . . . "

Everyone’s got their own story about why Clinton lost
If only there was some common thread to it all. But danged if we can see it.

The best we can probably do is echo Alex Pareene: Fuck everything and blame everyone.
Mmmmmmmmmmnnnnno?

The most agonizing implication of the narrow loss is that everything mattered.
Let's think, what do we mean by 'everything mattered'? (The article points out all the non-scandals, crappy reporting, and bullshit horse-racery that made up election coverage.)

In the end, though, there was virtually no “vote splitting.” About 90 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump (89 percent of Dems voted for Clinton). He did roughly as well as a generic Republican. The GOP came home.

Yeah home to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the "liberal" media's false equivalencies.
The more the article covers the more refined it appears to me. Reality TV ate our country and it was fascinating. Also: new country, please.
posted by petebest at 6:11 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Yeah. I teach at a community college and before my class I get some coffee and there's a group of kids who are always there at that time. They look like theater types, green hair, clothes, a great admiration for my collection of Doc Martens. These kids play Cards Against Humanity pretty loudly, and yeah it's ironic ha ha laugh at butt cancer but still I have papers to grade so I shut them out with music.

And the other day I didn't have my headphones so was in on their conversation. These are the kinds of kids I was, the misfits, the ones who were engaged and fought against the status quo. That's how I thought of myself, anyway.

And these kids were gaily chatting away and did so for some time w.o. any ZOMG Trump did what? And it's so bizarro to me that 18-22 year olds are not "WHOA MA AND PA LET GO OF THE STEERING WHEEL"

And I floated the idea of showing Threads to one class as sort of an end of year project thing, and after I explained the contours of the movie there was just dead air. It was sort of a silent *CAN YOU NOT*. My Trump supporter student said, "Oh great," and laid her head down on the desk.

So I'm going to show them some other movie that falls into the genre of persuasive filmmaking. Because I don't have the heart to educate nobody 'cept on things such as grammar and citations and the like. I'm tweeting everything that's posting here and keeping my eye on Philly news. (Toomey is asking Trump to cut of funds to Philly 'cause it's a sanctuary city FUUUUUUUUUU).

My friend was all, "You have a ratio of three nice things to one depressing thing." I didn't tell her that there's Hallmark Cards and then there's fucking changing rules on my SSDI benefits and Medicare and maybe the imminent collapse of Western Democracy.

Man by this time after 9/11 the grieving had reached a kind of ick level where we were all, irony is dead, man.

Although I did enjoy poop roomba.
posted by angrycat at 6:12 AM on December 1, 2016 [19 favorites]

> "I see (white) people on facebook postin' away pictures of their cats ..."

Oh, come on. This is basically what I've been doing on facebook and I've been having a slow-motion mental breakdown over the election for weeks. Not everyone uses facebook as a medium of political expression, not every single moment can be spent on panicking, and sometimes in the middle of the brewing nightmare hellstorm that is life right now I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT A GODDAMN CAT.
posted by kyrademon at 6:15 AM on December 1, 2016 [50 favorites]

Show them Threads anyway.

I did not enjoy poop roomba.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:17 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

And I floated the idea of showing Threads to one class as sort of an end of year project thing, and after I explained the contours of the movie there was just dead air. It was sort of a silent *CAN YOU NOT*.

just show them Videodrome
posted by thelonius at 6:17 AM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

i have a cat on my lap RIGHT NOW. i'm a monster
posted by entropicamericana at 6:20 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Full disclosure: Yes, I feel terrible that I am not using facebook as a medium of political expression, not spending every single moment panicking, and sometimes just want to look at a goddamn cat.
posted by kyrademon at 6:21 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

> it becomes clear that this was a huge win for the company and its shareholders-- not the WWC that supposedly voted Trump into office.

Let's also remember that Trump sold the Carrier thing on the idea that he'd use sticks instead of carrots to keep jobs here -- steep tax penalties for when companies leave and try to bring their products back. Instead of that revenue-raising idea, he's just bribing them to keep the jobs here, and once the bribe expires or its terms become unfavorable, there's nothing stopping them from leaving. (And at that Point, Trump doesn't have his Mike Pence loophhole to pay out the bribe again.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:25 AM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

Turns out he's a spineless coward after all?
posted by petebest at 6:29 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Who needs a spine when you have puppet strings to hold you up?
posted by C'est la D.C. at 6:30 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Speaking to that tonycpsu, I think we are going to find that when DJT makes "deals" in the Oval Office it will be deals that either DO affect his pocketbook (tax cuts) or DON'T (incentivizing businesses to stay in America by giving them tax cuts.) He will be very free with tax dollars because he can be. It is not his money. Expect the Deficit to blow up.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:33 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

It would explain the Howdy-Doodying at his rallies.
posted by petebest at 6:33 AM on December 1, 2016

In re Threads: Have you thought of showing one of the other less-depressing (ha!) anti-nuclear movies? Or using some anti-nuclear pop culture? It so happens that I have a powerpoint about this from a couple of talks I did - if you'd like to see it you're welcome to memail me. I have a whole routine where we go through some art, music and film clips (plus a little potted history of anti-nuclear activism, the doomsday clock, etc). I show a short sequence from Threads, a short sequence from The Day After and (if the mood is right) the video for "Party At Ground Zero" by Fishbone.

Honestly, I think Threads is too upsetting for a class unless you have the right group. I chose to limit what I showed from it partly because it is so unsettling to me that I was not sure I could handle being a good guest speaker and I could easily see it being very overwhelming to any student who couldn't get into a "lol eighties fashions" headspace. I felt like a mixture of persuasive pop culture stuff would be better for the group and in general, we had a lot of fun with it.
posted by Frowner at 6:36 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

You could show them the video to Two Tribes as a palate cleanser
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:39 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Maybe someone smarter than me can explain how the fuck the president-elect gets to make any kind of deal about taxes?

He doesn't, right? Pence is the only one with any official capacity to make a deal with Carrier?
posted by aspersioncast at 6:39 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

How about When the Wind Blows?
posted by PenDevil at 6:40 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

I see (white) people on facebook postin' away pictures of their cats* and little inspirational quotes** like the election never even happened and it's almost worse than the Trumpist brigades, it's like: you weren't even propagandized into fascism, you just don't give a fuck about anyone beside yourself.

I have been mostly posting about the election on my social media, but I understand people posting their cats, to an extent. I have posted my cat several times. Thinking about my cat gives me a few minutes away from the "holy hell" that we live with now.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:42 AM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

In re Threads: Have you thought of showing one of the other less-depressing (ha!) anti-nuclear movies?

can i suggest this video?
posted by entropicamericana at 6:42 AM on December 1, 2016

I'm not saying "post all sad all politics all the time, no more kittens!" I'm speaking to white moderates who are burying their heads in the sand and pretending that they can get through this without taking a side.

No one here, AFAIK, is doing that. My apologies if that wasn't clear.

Cat therapy is not a problem, or I for one am even more deeply screwed than I thought.
posted by tivalasvegas at 6:42 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Populism!

Trump Treasury pick made millions after his bank foreclosed on homeowners

"In Florida, the company foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo singled out the lender for squeezing superstorm Sandy victims. This month, the company’s successor, CIT Bank, was accused of discriminating against minority borrowers."
posted by chris24 at 6:43 AM on December 1, 2016 [17 favorites]

You could show them the video to Two Tribes as a palate cleanser

"Tell the world that you’re winning
Love and life, love and life"

Who knew Holly Johnson was a soothsayer.
posted by Talez at 6:46 AM on December 1, 2016

Ah, now I get it. Trumpence can just propose future corporate welfare, and Pence sweetens the deal by actually being governor for a little while longer.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:47 AM on December 1, 2016

Several houses on Pence’s block in Washington’s Chevy Chase neighborhood have put up rainbow pride flags since the vice president-elect moved in, according to D.C. ABC affiliate WJLA-TV. Pence is living in the neighborhood temporarily until he is sworn in as vice president, when he will move into the official vice presidential residence on the ground of the U.S. Naval Observatory.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:53 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Ivanka Trump, climate czar? - The first daughter aims to use the first lady’s lectern to champion liberal causes.

I'm glad she might have her father's ear about climate change, but, as I stated up thread, I think she's probably running in 2020. I expect him to put the sons in charge of the real estate business but keep her close on political matters, giving her a patina of international relations experience. In 2020 he'll be 75 and maybe over being hamstrung by Secret Service, but I'd wager the only way his narcissism will let him give up the White House is if he wraps up "first woman President" as a gift and give it to his favorite daughter.
posted by bluecore at 6:54 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

> "I see (white) people on facebook postin' away pictures of their cats ..."

Oh, come on. This is basically what I've been doing on facebook and I've been having a slow-motion mental breakdown over the election for weeks. Not everyone uses facebook as a medium of political expression, not every single moment can be spent on panicking, and sometimes in the middle of the brewing nightmare hellstorm that is life right now I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT A GODDAMN CAT.

Not only that, there was a lot of Facebook-friending via the Pantsuit Nation group with the express purpose of "all I see in my FB feed is my relatives' pro-Trump nastiness; for the love of $deity I'd just like to see something normal!"

I have been trying to post more positive kinds of things, and it isn't to try to pull the covers over my head as regards to what an impending disaster this presidency is going to be. Even as a straight white cis upper-middle-class male in the middle of Indiana, I'm well aware of it, thank you.
posted by Gelatin at 7:02 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

I think it's weird for people to be jumping all over this cat picture comment. tivalasvegas was just responding to people's perceptions of their various levels of threat, which is evident even if people who are posting cats are secretly scared. Lots of people are going about life as usual, and that's a problem. They're going to need to be reminded in four years what this political thing is.
posted by zutalors! at 7:04 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

it is fundamentally unrealistic to expect people to be in full, wide-eyed panic for weeks or months on end. for the most part, we are largely complacent and infinitely adaptable little hairless apes. it is okay to look at cat pics, still be outraged, and still fight the good fight. that's what woody would have done, and that's what i'm gonna do
posted by entropicamericana at 7:12 AM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

There is one good line from that Vox article on how everything mattered, because it captures something that mattered a hell of a lot and hasn't gotten nearly enough attention:

Clinton bet most of her chips on there being some floor, some violation of norms too low even for today’s radicalized Republican Party. She thought responsible Republican officeholders would rally. She thought at least well-off, well-educated Republican women would recoil in horror.

She was wrong. There is no floor.

The writer points to the force of partisanship, but that blade cuts both ways. Republicans have spent my entire life demonizing Democrats and liberals -- "tax and spend," "tree-hugger," anti-war hippie, dupe of Moscow, (*how times have changed!), potential fifth column, you name it.

Remember John Edwards? He dropped out of the Democratic primary when his affair came to light. Republicans just don't care. And it's long past time to pretend that that putting party loyalty over country, rationality, or basic common decency is not acceptable.

Clinton was unfairly maligned for her "basket of deplorables" comment, but now the entire Republican Party has willfully climbed into that basket, and for the next four -- the next forty -- years, they need to be shamed for it.

*Clinton's hawkish stance is at least in part an effort to shed the stigma of Democratic opposition to the Vietnam War, which is so pervasive that even today, after George W. Bush's massive blunder in Iraq, Republicans are still presumed to be by much of the public and nearly all of the so-called "liberal media" as "strong on defense."
posted by Gelatin at 7:12 AM on December 1, 2016 [66 favorites]

> "I think it's weird for people to be jumping all over this cat picture comment."

Frankly, it hit a little too close to a nerve because every time I post a book review to twitter right now I feel like I'm twiddling my fingers while the world burns.
posted by kyrademon at 7:15 AM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

I have been trying to post more positive kinds of things, and it isn't to try to pull the covers over my head as regards to what an impending disaster this presidency is going to be. Even as a straight white cis upper-middle-class male in the middle of Indiana, I'm well aware of it, thank you.

As a straight, white, cis, middle-class male, I'm aware of it too. But I also know in my bones that I'm not on the front lines unless I choose to be. Which is why I feel a moral imperative not to try to tamp down on the concerns of those who are, or stand aside from what they are communicating, or get defensive when what they communicate implicates me and people like me for la-di-da-ing about our days as though we are having the same experience as them.

We aren't.

And to a very disturbing (but, sadly, not at all unusual) degree, we aren't being dependable allies, either. Otherwise, at the very least, we wouldn't be soft-protesting the outrage they're expressing (the alarms they're sounding). Ideally, we'd be equalizing the risk by assuming some up front. Protesting loudly. Calling out bigotry. Using our privilege to be confrontational in ways that aren't as available (or as safe) to them.

Damn it, people.
posted by perspicio at 7:16 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

> Frankly, it hit a little too close to a nerve because every time I post a book review to twitter right now I feel like I'm twiddling my fingers while the world burns.

That's how everyday life feels all the time now.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:19 AM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

Yea, thanks perspicio. That's it exactly. It's alarming that as soon as white allies recognize some behavior familar to them, they double down on "I'm gonna look at my cat picture" and ignore the larger point, which is about relative perceptions of risk.
posted by zutalors! at 7:20 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Frankly, it hit a little too close to a nerve because every time I post a book review to twitter right now I feel like I'm twiddling my fingers while the world burns.

I think part of the problem is the lack of clear ways for people to get organized and participate. I've joined all sorts of mailing lists for organizations and the Democratic Party and the only emails I get are asking for donations. Throwing money at someone else doesn't calm my twitching hands. At the very least give they need a protest sign to hold.

The Democrats desperately need to organize people on the ground, both for citizen action against this administration and to start cultivating their bench.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 7:20 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

it's alarming that as soon as someone reads a couple comments on a message board, someone doubles down on "i know everything about this person's situation and behavior on- and offline."
posted by entropicamericana at 7:23 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

And to a very disturbing (but, sadly, not at all unusual) degree, we aren't being dependable allies, either. Otherwise, at the very least, we wouldn't be soft-protesting the outrage they're expressing (the alarms they're sounding). Ideally, we'd be equalizing the risk by assuming some up front. Protesting loudly. Calling out bigotry. Using our privilege to be confrontational in ways that aren't as available (or as safe) to them.

I used to have a policy of never discussing politics on Facebook. I still don't post political topics to my news feed, but I have been more active about engaging in commentary, especially to come to the defense of people with allied points of view. Sure, it's slacktivism, but unlike my posts here I sign my name to them, and relatives and friends who may hold pro-Trump views probably see them. Good.

My point is that posting things that give our more embattled allies a respite from the relentless nastiness of the online right, at their specific request, is not the same thing as burying one's head in the sand.
posted by Gelatin at 7:26 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

it's alarming that as soon as someone reads a couple comments on a message board, someone doubles down on "i know everything about this person's situation and behavior on- and offline."

It would be great if people could listen to concerns POC on this site, but I guess that's too much to ask frankly.
posted by zutalors! at 7:28 AM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Clinton was unfairly maligned for her "basket of deplorables" comment, but now the entire Republican Party has willfully climbed into that basket, and for the next four -- the next forty -- years, they need to be shamed for it.

I disagree on this. Being 100% right but hurting our electoral chances only actually hurts us. Enough of these folks voted for Obama in 2008 that he won Indiana. And he certainly wasn't pandering to the WWC along white supremacist lines. It's doable; we know it's doable because we did it!

The Scourge of the Left: Too Much Stigma, Not Enough Persuasion
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:31 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Look, I don't doubt that people are doing things that we don't all get to see. My primary point is that the defensiveness that comes out when someone who is more at risk expresses this kind of concern, coupled with the fact that there seems to be no, or very little, gravitation to common-cause, large-scale action (as C'est la D.C. points out), is indicative of a problem.

Try to get past the defensiveness, so we can make and strengthen unified, common-cause action.
posted by perspicio at 7:32 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Appropos of either nothing or everything, for classrooms and MeFites alike:

Cat TV

Tranquil HD single-cam wideangle shots of birds and squirrels with sun and wind in the trees. Try it, it's great.
posted by petebest at 7:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Holy crap. Trump spokeswoman: There are no such things as facts
posted by Mchelly at 7:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Is Scottie Nell Hughes actually a spokesperson for the Trump campaign?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:37 AM on December 1, 2016

A thought struck me today about the complexity of our democratic systems. We should have noticed the warnings when the teabaggers first started shouting about "government hands off my medicare" that for a frightening plurality of citizens, lack of civic knowledge combined with the many moving parts of a functioning social system are a recipe for disaster.

Remember how the Temple of Ephesus, one of the wonders of the Ancient world, was burned down by a dude who wanted to make a name for himself? And then, anything that remained of it was carted off to line livestock pens? This is that.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 7:38 AM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Oh, god, it's really depressing that I still use the term "Trump campaign."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:39 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

May I please take a moment to suggest again to anybody who hasn't already, please go sign this WhiteHouse.gov petition:

Declassify all information related to possible Russian or foreign-state interference in the 2016 Presidential election.

(You do understand that if it's to be a Trump presidency, we want it to be as weak as it possibly can be, right?)
posted by perspicio at 7:39 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Disagreeing isn't defensiveness.

And every part of our coalition needs to learn to stop making the absolute worst possible assumptions about the other parts at every turn. If one person is able to turn their activism dial to 11, great, but the person with the dial set to 2 is also helping. If we yell at them for only being at a 2, most of them are going to quietly think "ok, fuck you" and go do something more enjoyable.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:42 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

And to expand on that, I wonder how much of the right's strength comes from the fact that so many of them are evangelicals? In the sense that they're used to trying to slowly persuade people to agree with their own closely held beliefs, but they're also accustomed to the notion that it's a long game and a numbers game. Whereas on the left we have a lot of people who may be 100% right, but they're absolutely terrible at selling their ideas and sort of perplexed that they would even need to.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:45 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

She was wrong. There is no floor.

That's exactly how I feel. I don't exactly feel regret about having misjudged the outcome of the election - for not having poured more money into the campaign or done more canvassing or trying to reach out to my friends and family members who didn't vote. I don't feel regret because I did my best with the information that I had. I was operating under an assumption about the world that turned out to be false. If I am going to regret something, it has to be so much bigger than my response to the election; it's my fundamental worldview, and that takes time to revise.

I'm realizing right now that there were a lot of people - especially the people of the Black Lives Matter movement - who were trying their damnedest to tell us about the country that we lived in; who were sounding the alarm, and I just couldn't hear them. My feelings about that guilt are complicated - it's not that I wasn't listening - I was listening! - and it's not that I didn't believe them about their lived experiences...it's just that their words couldn't override this fundamental certainty I had that my lived experience - most of the people I encounter are good! Most people I know are repulsed by people like Donald Trump! - felt realer to me than other people's words. This is privilege, and it permeates me through and through. I lived in this bubble, and then suddenly it burst, and I had to confront the fact that a lot of the things I believed about other people- things that didn't feel like they had anything to do with politics - were lies.

In fact, I realize that these lies also felt realer to me than the data, which said that the race was close. If I'd truly believed that the race was close, I would have acted more urgently. But I couldn't believe that, because I was in the grip of this delusional belief about the reasonableness and goodness of people. That delusional belief is why I simply cannot let go of the idea that the Russians hacked the election - didn't just disseminate fake news, but hacked it. Objectively, I know there's no evidence of that, and that even if it were true, it would put us in a terrifying place - radicalized right-wingers, potential war with Russia - that's more dangerous and scary than the one we're in now. Still, in my heart, I irrationally prefer that explanation, because war with Russia doesn't upend my worldview in the same way as a Trump win. My brain is basically rewiring itself from top to bottom to take in this new information, and it affects everything. Which is probably why I'm so tired all the time.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 7:47 AM on December 1, 2016 [76 favorites]

I think part of the problem is the lack of clear ways for people to get organized and participate. I've joined all sorts of mailing lists for organizations and the Democratic Party and the only emails I get are asking for donations.

That was definitely my experience leading up to the election. In the days since, however, I've discovered a couple mailing lists (I think they're new) that are really helping me get out of panic mode and into action. Each offers a daily or weekly list of small actions like making a call, sending an email, signing a petition, etc., that can be done fairly quickly. It's concrete and very helpful.

Check out:

https://www.reactletter.com
https://www.flippable.org
http://2hoursaweek.org
posted by the turtle's teeth at 7:48 AM on December 1, 2016 [36 favorites]

. If we yell at them for only being at a 2, most of them are going to quietly think "ok, fuck you" and go do something more enjoyable.

The point is that this is a privileged response, which is exactly what the Atlantic piece about Republicans voting Our Team was talking about that tivalasvegas and I were both responding to. And a bunch of people in this thread thought they were being called out personally about their cats.
posted by zutalors! at 7:49 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I just, like, how do you even talk to these people.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:50 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Holy crap. Trump spokeswoman: There are no such things as facts

Can we just all take a minute to laugh at the term classically studied journalist? I am absolutely howling over it.
posted by mochapickle at 7:51 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I just, like, how do you even talk to these people.

"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
posted by Talez at 7:52 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

IF WE WERE GOING TO RIG AN ELECTION WITH ILLEGALS WE WOULD HAVE SENT THEM TO PENNSYLVANIA.
posted by Talez at 7:53 AM on December 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

pretentious illiterate, you just summed up exactly how I've been feeling, so much better than I've been able to. The recounts for me are just a lose-lose -- if they show the election was hacked, maybe we'll get rid of Trump, but at the price of a President without a clear mandate because of how long it took, and almost-certain war with Russia. But it almost doesn't matter since so many of the people I thought I knew - deeply religious people, people who really do walk the walk with charity and volunteering and other good works - are 100% fine compromising their morality to get the SC and other Republican goodies they're counting on.

If they were fighting now, it would be different -- if they were saying, "let me make this clear: I voted for X, but I will not accept Y as the price," I could deal with it. But no. Instead they are to a person posting "the left is worse," "crybabies" and other triumphalist sore winner rhetoric to shore up their guy. There's no floor.
posted by Mchelly at 7:56 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

I think that for most of the center left through progressives, we don't "sell" our ideas well because most on-the-ground people feel like we can't lie, not even by omission. We have to explain the edge cases and the negative aspects and we can't tell people only the part that they want to hear, much less tell people something sort of related to what we're doing but not exactly true. I'm not talking about difference in use of language - I'm talking about something like "our endgame is X" when actually our endgame is X-plus-Y-and-Z, and you might not like Y or Z.

People who do career organizing work do lie by omission (as I discovered as a canvasser, which was one of the reasons I had trouble doing it). Marxists generally have very little trouble having in-group and out-group political positions that are quite different - it's put a cramp in a couple of my friendships because I know that I don't get my friends' real political opinions, which are reserved for their study groups. It's not reassuring and not my political style, and yet we see in this election that as long as you keep it low-key enough, it works.

Evangelicals started out officially anti-abortion, but their endgame has always been getting rid of birth control, legalizing marital rape, etc. "We would like not only to get rid of abortion but also birth control pills and condoms" would have been an impossible sell in the eighties, but now, like white supremacy, it's just one more acceptable political opinion. And that's because they lied consistently and effectively about their endgame. Lying about your endgame is, I guess, what you have to do.

(Also, for pete's sake, don't show When The Wind Blows. That is not less depressing than Threads. The British are very good at bleak. The Day After is grim but has a sort of American frontier [nonsense] optimism that makes it less depressing. Or there's a wacky-eighties Australian movie (new wave costumes! ensemble cast! performances by popular musicians! wacky boy-meets-girl plot!) called One Night Stand (watch it first - check for sex jokes if that's a concern for class. I skipped around in it and can't vouch for anything past the general wacky-eighties-ness.) It's true that it ends with nuclear conflagration, but there's no real gore and no radiation sickness, etc, and it has an anti-nuclear demonstration at the beginning which I think is historically useful. Also it kind of illustrates the pervasiveness of anti-nuclear-war themes in popular culture.
posted by Frowner at 7:58 AM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

I think that for most of the center left through progressives, we don't "sell" our ideas well because most on-the-ground people feel like we can't lie, not even by omission. We have to explain the edge cases and the negative aspects and we can't tell people only the part that they want to hear, much less tell people something sort of related to what we're doing but not exactly true. I'm not talking about difference in use of language - I'm talking about something like "our endgame is X" when actually our endgame is X-plus-Y-and-Z, and you might not like Y or Z.

This. I feel bad just explaining those edge cases.
posted by Talez at 8:00 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

A thought struck me today about the complexity of our democratic systems. We should have noticed the warnings when the teabaggers first started shouting about "government hands off my medicare" that for a frightening plurality of citizens, lack of civic knowledge combined with the many moving parts of a functioning social system are a recipe for disaster.

Kitty Stardust, I think you are right. And it's not just the Tea Party types, either. From my observation, a lot of professional-class whites don't really pay attention outside of Presidential elections, either, most likely for the reason that whatever Bad Things a government can cause to happen, it won't happen to them and theirs. (tl;dr: privilege bubble.)

I'm lucky I was raised by parents who were political junkies and emphasized the importance of voting, even in mid-term elections. So I've always voted, and followed the news, even if I didn't do anything more in terms of direct action. But a lot of people have parents who are indifferent, or misinformed, or disenfranchised, or any number of things that keep them from participating in politics. Add to this that many students only get one year of "government" or "civics," in adolescence when they are much more concerned with their own lives (dating, friends, sports, coming out as LGBT or pagan or atheist and dealing with any fallout from that, dealing with poverty and racism, etc. etc. etc...) than listening to teachers and taking school lessons to heart. And that's normal and understandable! But it means that so many people go into adulthood not knowing very much about how our political and social system operates. And if they are white, cis, and affluent, they don't have to care.

I am worried for a lot of reasons that our US republic has been held together with duct tape and baling wire for quite some time, since at least 9/11 if not before. And the fallout, while probably not Threads, is going to be lots of not-fun for many people, and definitely will not be fun for the not-privileged among us. And I agree that it seems to me that the left, progressives, what have you, is more about the circular firing squad and "woulda, coulda, shoulda" instead of "what do we do now?" though I see a lot more local and on the ground now. I think that once the holidays are over we will see more action. I hope. Now it still feels like the other shoe waiting to drop.

(BTW, there is a new Facebook group for those of us receiving Obamacare to discuss what do we do now. It's called "What's Next? A Community for Obamacare Enrollees by Vox." Feel free to join! We'd love to have you, and you don't need an invite.)
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 8:00 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

> "... a bunch of people in this thread thought they were being called out personally about their cats."

I apologize.

Sorry.
posted by kyrademon at 8:03 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Can we send highly-trained kittens into the badlands to t preach democracy, respect, justice and compassion?

Because I would be behind preacher kitties.
posted by Devonian at 8:06 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I would prefer Preacher kitties, armed with the Word of God.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:10 AM on December 1, 2016

Also, for pete's sake, don't show When The Wind Blows.
B...b...b...b...but it's a cartoon..
posted by adamvasco at 8:13 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think part of the problem is the lack of clear ways for people to get organized and participate. I've joined all sorts of mailing lists for organizations and the Democratic Party and the only emails I get are asking for donations. Throwing money at someone else doesn't calm my twitching hands. At the very least give they need a protest sign to hold.

I know a lot of people who feel this way and my response is: keep trying to find things to do. Don't give up. Do a google search for $issue_you_care_about + "action". Ask your friends if they've found good people to follow or good steps to take. Organize your own actions - it's hard at first but you'll figure it out and those skills will benefit all of us over the next four years.

Here's what I've been doing:

- Every Saturday since the election I've had 20+ friends over. They bring chips and vague ideas about things we could do and we figure it out from there --- we do things like phone bank for Foster Campbell or look up local democratic meetings to attend or write phone scripts for calling your reps. I'm going to keep hosting these until Trump's out of office, and I hope that my friends will treat it like church -- come every week, find the support of your community, live your values. Consider starting one of these where you live. If you live in a democratic area, invite some local reps -- my state representative is coming to a Saturday meeting in January. If you can't commit to doing this every week, consider doing it just once, as a house party, like the Dean house parties of old.

- Speaking of calling your reps... I've got a FB group that coordinates phone campaigns to elected officials. We just launched #ClaimACommittee to help distribute labor: individuals pick a committee/topic that matters to them, and keep track of what important issues need to be called about. They find/create phone scripts and send them back to the main group where constituents of committee members call call call.

- I'm working on a website to help people find and take actions. Should soft launch in a couple of days, but in the meantime I'm always looking for users to test it out and give me feedback. I'll post it to MeFI projects once it's up.

- I've written talk proposals for tech conferences talking about the influence of technology on politics and our moral obligation to address that. If you're comfortable giving talks and your field is related to politics in this way, I encourage you to do the same. Happy to share my talk proposals as a leaping off point for you.

- I've made some symbolic gestures. This is especially vital if you're a constituent of a Republican rep who has wavered on Trump before. Think creatively with like-minded neighbors about highly visible ways to appeal to your representative's integrity.

If anyone wants in on any of those things, memail me. I encourage anyone who's taking action right now to share those here as well.
posted by galaxy rise at 8:18 AM on December 1, 2016 [38 favorites]

Thing is, we need to win elections in a reality where some people are privileged and are going to remain that way. Humans gotta human. Do we take the benefits we can get out of them, or do we alienate them? If we try to distill our side down to only the people with the purest of opinions, we'll never win an election again.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:18 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

IF WE WERE GOING TO RIG AN ELECTION WITH ILLEGALS WE WOULD HAVE SENT THEM TO PENNSYLVANIA.

No no, you don't understand: there's a vast all-powerful conspiracy of liberals to cheat the system, but somehow despite their unlimited power and corruption they can't figure out how to cheat in the handful of states that could actually swing the election.

Yes, of course it makes sense. It makes total sense! How dare you suggest that "my opponent is a skilled cheater on a scale never seen in history, yet failed to cheat their way to victory" is somehow a nonsensical and self-serving lie with no facts whatsoever to back it up!
posted by tocts at 8:21 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Thing is, we need to win elections in a reality where some people are privileged and are going to remain that way. Humans gotta human. Do we take the benefits we can get out of them, or do we alienate them? If we try to distill our side down to only the people with the purest of opinions, we'll never win an election again

There is no victory for "us" if we ignore the voices of the marginalized. And the only plea here was for people to check their own privilege.
posted by zutalors! at 8:21 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I just, like, how do you even talk to these people.

You don't. They're beyond reason, facts or help. Which is why focusing on WWC makes little sense to me. Not that they're all like this, but there's a much higher ratio of this than in other groups. Sane people outnumbered the crazies this election, we were just badly placed by a smidge. We don't need to convert or reach all these people. And not all Trump voters are this out there. So focus on the multi-cultural Dem base and accept those sane Rs who get disillusioned, but don't waste time on this. Win despite them.
posted by chris24 at 8:22 AM on December 1, 2016 [19 favorites]

No no, you don't understand: there's a vast all-powerful conspiracy of liberals to cheat the system, but somehow despite their unlimited power and corruption they can't figure out how to cheat in the handful of states that could actually swing the election.

"We are under attack by an enemy that is somehow simultaneously smarter and dumber than us." This is textbook fascism.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 8:24 AM on December 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

Declining to participate in performative despair on social media doesn't mean anyone is ignoring the marginalized

And not all trump voters are beyond reason facts and help. Obama won *Indiana* in 2008. We don't have to convince David Duke to change his mind, we just need to sell our existing ideas better to lower information voters next time.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:27 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel: Our Industrial Policy Is the F-35

Let’s stop pretending that America’s manufacturing, increasingly dominated by the production of war toys, exists in a a real market, shall we?

Once we do that, we might begin to address the diseases of our defense contracting and — more importantly — rediscover the value of investing in other kinds of manufacturing that our country needs to have. [...]

There was a brief moment when Obama tried to do this by investing in battery factories in MI and other Rust Belt states, an investment justified because the US lagged so far behind South Korea on this critical technology. The investments were badly executed, and then later undermined by the KORUS trade deal. Republicans made them toxic with the Solyndra faux scandal. And so, rather than siting one after another killer app in locales whose older economies had failed, such efforts largely ended. [...]

But this Carrier deal — no matter how much of a gimmick — should be an opportunity to shift the discussion. Trump (and Pence) just federalized the kind of deal every state makes out of desperation, pitting states against each other and Mexico and China. If they can do that, in part by leveraging federal contracting, then they can also pursue an honest industrial policy, one not dependent on selling war toys to our belligerent authoritarian friends overseas.

I doubt Trump will do that. But his Carrier deal ought to at least invite a debate about it.

posted by tonycpsu at 8:27 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I disagree on this. Being 100% right but hurting our electoral chances only actually hurts us. Enough of these folks voted for Obama in 2008 that he won Indiana.

I'm not talking about shaming Republican voters, but I am definitely advocating hanging every lousy thing Trump does around the necks of every Republican politician from Paul Ryan through governors, mayors, and school board members. These people can't actually defend the things Trump does, so let's give them the choice between alienating the crazy base and those persuadable Republican voters who are not yet tribally all in on fascism. And let's by all means signal to the latter group that real Americans oppose fascism.
posted by Gelatin at 8:31 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Declining to participate in performative despair on social media doesn't mean anyone is ignoring the marginalized

This is conflating the point in a fairly disingenuous way. I guess that makes it easier to dismiss though.

Also, then you go on to talk about appealing to low information Trump voters. I don't know why people can't see the irony of not listening to part of their own coalition in favor of appealing to the other side.
posted by zutalors! at 8:32 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Oh yeah, any Dem candidate who isn't holding their GOP counterpart responsible for trump's failings in 2018 doesn't deserve their nomination. 100% agree.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:33 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

In fact, as part of the new 50 state strategy we should get them on the record kissing his ass now so there's good ad footage.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:34 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Trump has had a meeting with antivax fraud Andrew Wakefield.

He is now a bigger threat to modernity than Prince Charles.
posted by ocschwar at 8:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

I feel like we need a threat level notation, because a lot of what is making news right now is serious and worrying but is not something that is actually happening. For example, a meeting with an antivax activist is a serious and worrying event, but it's not legislation being proposed or passing or signed, it's not an appointment being made or approved, it's not a policy being announced by an agency. I have been thinking of it this way: yellow alert, someone says something awful or an awful person is being considered for a position of power or influence. Orange alert, an awful proposal is officially made (e.g. a proposed bill, a proposed regulation, a proposed agency policy, a proposed appointment). Red alert, and awful thing has actually happened (e.g. a bill becomes law, a dissident is arrested, the Senate confirms Sessions).

So far it's been like 80% yellow to 10% orange to 10% red (mostly appointments that the Senate doesn't touch).

But it all still feels terrible.
posted by prefpara at 8:47 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Also, for pete's sake, don't show When The Wind Blows.

This is curiously apt. My other half was very moved by a Guardian video interview with elderly rural Brexit voters, and commented that they seemed exactly like the elderly couple in WTTB - confused, frightened, trying to do exactly what they imagine their betters are telling them to do because they trust them to be telling them the truth, and utterly unable to see what was actually going on.

In the Brexiters' world, all the bad things that happens to them is due to the immigrants, and the immigrants are due to the EU - all the loneliness, lack of hope, loss of community, running down of services, broken promises and societal neglect. They know the latter, and they've been told that the former is the reason, and they understand that, and nobody's talking to them otherwise. They get used and abandoned, lied to and then forgotten, and when the apocalypse comes there's nobody to save them.

The Right is prepared to use them to advance its own agenda. The Left is too caught up in the Right's narrative to see them as anything other than an economic problem to be contained; it's forgotten how to talk to them and how to listen. It can't - or won't - manipulate the media, and it thinks 'ground game' is what you do for elections.

Reconnecting with the scared, the lost and the hopeless is the real ground game. It means putting your on coat, going out of the door, asking 'how can I help?', and meaning it. Otherwise they will be eaten by monsters.
posted by Devonian at 8:48 AM on December 1, 2016 [34 favorites]

, She was wrong. There is no floor.

I feel like this "all Republicans voted for Trump, there was no way to lose them, that's why he won, no ticket splitting" narrative really ignores or minimizes the fact that a full 10% of the Republican Party did not vote for Trump. If Democrats had held to their candidate, even if all of that 10% voted for Johnson or McMullin, Clinton would have won in a landslide. But unfortunately, the 9% of Democrats that voted for Trump balanced out the fleeing Republicans.

There is a floor, and it's important to know that. The problem is there's also a Democratic floor, and it works on a different axis.
posted by corb at 8:48 AM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

I took the book version of When the Wind Blows out of the library, read it in an hour, and bawled as soon as I turned the last page. When I finished it I gave it to Gentleman Caller to read, and he had nightmares.

Don't read When the Wind Blows right now, is what I'm saying.
posted by pxe2000 at 8:50 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

probably going to skip my annual re-watch of Dr. Strangelove this year
posted by murphy slaw at 8:56 AM on December 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

I feel like this "all Republicans voted for Trump, there was no way to lose them, that's why he won, no ticket splitting" narrative really ignores or minimizes the fact that a full 10% of the Republican Party did not vote for Trump. If Democrats had held to their candidate, even if all of that 10% voted for Johnson or McMullin, Clinton would have won in a landslide. But unfortunately, the 9% of Democrats that voted for Trump balanced out the fleeing Republicans.

This always happens. Obama lost 8% of Dems and Romney lost 7% of Republicans. Party affiliation doesn't always tell you the beliefs or voting habits of a person. People can be registered D for many reasons and vice versa. Kim Davis, for example, the Kentucky clerk who refused to sign gay marriage certificates, was a Democrat. There's still southerners who are D thanks to Lincoln, even as the parties swapped ideologies behind them.
posted by chris24 at 8:59 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

The thing with When The Wind Blows is that it is (like Threads) really good and really intense. It's difficult to use really good, really intense materials in a classroom setting unless you have the time to deal with them and a class where everyone feels that they can have strong responses. It's also helpful if you're confident that students have the emotional bandwidth to spare for something intense and upsetting.

Basically, what I worry about when I run classes is giving students something that will provoke very intense reactions in public - are the students ready to have those intense reactions in front of each other? Did they basically sign up for something intense? (I wouldn't want to spring Threads on an unsuspecting student who was dealing with a parent's terminal illness that semester, for instance - if we're watching something really intense and upsetting, I want the student to know ahead of time). Am I ready to moderate a discussion about something that is emotionally intense? Will I do a good job? Will I be able to handle my own reactions in a way that does not give students the impression that I'm a robot but also doesn't overwhelm them?

I'd be more inclined to assign When The Wind Blows for home reading than to show it in class. I watched most of it and stopped after the little old couple start getting radiation sickness because I could feel myself getting overwhelmed. Even so, I slept really badly and felt very off for a day or so.
posted by Frowner at 9:04 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Reconnecting with the scared, the lost and the hopeless is the real ground game. It means putting your on coat, going out of the door, asking 'how can I help?', and meaning it.

Yes, for all the talk about how can we convince Trump voters to change their positions, so much of it keeps circling around phrasing and debate rather than the more important issue of trust. Trust is the reason many of these people who lack information vote as they do; because the people they trust give them reason to, through explanation, however wrongheaded, or simply by example.

To get people to change you have to connect with them beyond arguments on Facebook or even debating in real life. You have to show them you are actually on their side, looking out for their best interests and yours, and that the things they have been led to believe aren't the whole story or the real story. In this, of course, there is need for sympathetic communication, but that only matters if a personal or choice relationship has developed. (Choice meaning not just being related or formerly friends or anything like that, but involved with now.)

Clearly this isn't something people can just randomly do with anyone, but cultivating trust when you can is beneficial and as a group building relationships that let people feel like they are being listened to is what grass roots politicking is all about.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:05 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Trust is a weird thing though, because some of the voters we're talking about have zero if not negative trust in, say, The New York Times, but will uncritically repeat whatever totallytrueamazingnewstotallynotfrommacedonia.com says if it's dramatic enough. I don't know how we rebuild trust in institutions when people are willfully shutting themselves off from the reality-based community.

Of course, as shown in this video, people also trust the President-elect, which is why it's important he not recklessly disseminate false information.
posted by zachlipton at 9:11 AM on December 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

Clearly this isn't something people can just randomly do with anyone, but cultivating trust when you can is beneficial and as a group building relationships that let people feel like they are being listened to is what grass roots politicking is all about

And what if when you listen their chief concern is that Muslims and Mexicans are taking over the US?
posted by zutalors! at 9:18 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

The concern around minorities is a proxy for other issues. My hope is for most of these 'deplorables', it's really the loss of self-sufficiency that's the issue. Something like that.

It helps me, when arguing with folks over politics, to remember that the Republicans don't have a monopoly on racism. Discussing BLM with my lefty friends has definitely calibrated my expectation from other lefties. There's a lot of what I'd call soft racism on the left.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:28 AM on December 1, 2016

And what if when you listen their chief concern is that Muslims and Mexicans are taking over the US?

You nudge them away from that notion. While changing everyone's minds all the way is a worthwhile goal, it's not the only meaningful metric of progress. To win elections and take back the reins of government, what we need to shift is the *average* opinion. So if there's a xenophobia scale from 0 (max hate) to 10 (min hate), nudging someone from a 2 to a 3 is just as helpful as nudging them from a 9 to a 10, even if it feels distinctly less satisfying.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:31 AM on December 1, 2016

IF WE WERE GOING TO RIG AN ELECTION WITH ILLEGALS WE WOULD HAVE SENT THEM TO PENNSYLVANIA.

Also, it'd be way easier to orchestrate large-scale voter fraud using white, native-born people than to somehow try to organize (and conceal) fraud using people with funny names and accents who also risk being thrown out of the country if they're caught. AND even if that way-easier scenario were remotely likely, massive voter fraud would become so goddamn entrenched it would have ruined our system a long time ago. I know thinks are harder than feels, but come on, Trump people.
posted by Rykey at 9:32 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

That's the thing, i don't think it's a proxy for other issues. Not at this level, where we're talking about religious tests and people are afraid of having citizenship revoked.

We need to give these people credit for their racism. And we need to confront how ugly it is that they want to deny people their identity and safety, not say "if they were more comfortable financially they wouldn't do this."
posted by zutalors! at 9:32 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

I had nightmares as a tween just from hearing kids at school *talk* about The Day After. I can't even imagine what seeing Threads at that age would have done to my mind. Nothing good.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:32 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

And what if when you listen their chief concern is that Muslims and Mexicans are taking over the US?

You nudge them away from that notion. While changing everyone's minds all the way is a worthwhile goal, it's not the only meaningful metric of progress

And what if they think you look like one of those Mexicans or probably know a lot of them? How do you nudge then?
posted by zutalors! at 9:34 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

By the way, I'm not really asking for a how to guide, I just hope people think about the complexities of what they're suggesting here.
posted by zutalors! at 9:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'd like a guide for how to nudge, as I said earlier. I'm happy to nudge, but it literally has never worked for me.
posted by maxsparber at 9:36 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I don't entirely buy this trust argument.

Trust is weird, and it's also frangible. We've heard so many seemingly contradictory things about trust--e.g. the paradoxical "he tells it like it is, but he's not really gonna do any of the things he says"--that it's really difficult to figure out what a lot of voters consider criteria for trust.

Especially since those criteria seem inconsistent, illogical, or simply racist/sexist/ethnocentric. It's clear that a lot of people only trust people from their in-group, and if that group breaks down along racial/confessional/economic lines, there's no real way for outsiders to gain trust. Because of that, it's hard for many of us to trust them.

I don't see how that's surmountable, but I don't think it needs to be.

I don't trust anyone who would vote for Trump. Inasmuch as they have one, I am not on their side. I don't really care to build their trust in me. They place what poorly-informed, endogamous faith they have in things I absolutely reject. I would far rather spend energy on making sure qcubed or zutalors! remain involved in progressive politics than spend another second trying to convince a racist idiot that they should trust me. They shouldn't. I am going to do everything in my (very-limited) power to put a chokehold on theirs.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:37 AM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

I've found acknowledging the racism on the left goes great lengths to diffuse things. This is with Texas Republicans folks, so I'm pretty sure this can be replicated elsewhere.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:40 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Seriously, plenty of Mexican Catholics voted for Trump. Enough to make the charge that the right is nothing but racists hard to sell.

An ethnic/sexual identity coalition is a fragile thing. Being bi, and dealing with the bigotry of other supposed allies, has gone a long way towards dispelling any notion I had that other queers are my friends automatically. I still have to judge folks on their own, snowflake, merits.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:46 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Seriously though, don't consume Fear Porn* right now. Go with Cat TV. You'll sleep well for a change.

* Not just movies but news as well. Take 5, relax, eat chocolate. Protect your cool.
posted by petebest at 9:46 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

And what if when you listen their chief concern is that Muslims and Mexicans are taking over the US?

Building trust comes from showing concern about another person's life, not from worrying about their abstract beliefs as such and trying to argue them out of it. If that's what the relationship is based on, then it likely won't develop since the seeds of distrust are sown in the opposition. This doesn't mean you need to wholly ignore those wrongheaded beliefs, but when possible, to set them aside until after trust has been developed where you can then provide a counter example that doesn't seem so threatening.

The point being that, right now, some of the best work that can be done is in simply showing other people you are interested in their lives and in trying to make their world a better place. Once that kind of bond is established, then one can be in a better position to convince people to try a different way or expand their beliefs to something new. It's a model for religious institutions, local politics, and becoming a good coworker.

You don't have to attach yourself at the hip to anyone, but show your awareness, concern, and abilities in whatever position you have that intersects with their lives. It, of course, won't work on everyone, as some will have more deeply held beliefs or fears and some will have other closer companions they rely on for models, but it is the kind of thing that many great leaders used to build networks for success. It's hard to imagine the battle for civil rights, for example, without that kind of trust network being involved. That was a crucial part of MLK's method in bringing people together at extreme personal risk.

For Trump, there is simply the connection to Republicans, celebrity and "telling it like it is" matched against distrust, stoked by media and long history, of the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. The next election will be different, with Trump having been in office and having to govern and a new candidate for the Democrats. As much as trust is important for belief, feelings of betrayal can be even more damaging than normal opposition. So if Trump can't appear to maintain his illusion of connection, then he might well seem very distasteful to the people who trusted him this time, unless they feel they are being too strongly attacked for their beliefs, in which case they may feel threatened and lose faith in any alternative.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:48 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Strange_Robinson could you elaborate a little? How does acknowledging the racism on the left diffuse things with these particular Texas Republicans? I'm assuming it's not just like "oh yeah, both sides are racist" but something a little more nuanced.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:48 AM on December 1, 2016

Nudging doesn't usually look like it's working in the moment -- it tends to work on a microaggression or compound interest timeline.

Think about Ellen Degeneres. Given the size of her audience, we know there are plenty of people who watch Ellen every day who also said "Ugh! Why does she have to flaunt it right in our faces?" when she first came out. And they changed their minds. And they're probably still not perfect allies, but the needle moved.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:50 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Careful with Cat TV. I had to turn it off after a bit because the TV was suddenly under feline attack and I'd rather it not be knocked off its stand.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:51 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

worrying about their abstract beliefs

To minorities these beliefs are not abstract.
posted by zutalors! at 9:52 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Also, people hated MLK at the time. Ellen Degeneres took a huge hit to her career. We can't all be Ellen and MLK bravely taking personal blowback against bigots to 'teach' them, those examples are silly.
posted by zutalors! at 9:55 AM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Careful with Cat TV.

It's true. Now all tv is cat tv.

Down in front!
posted by petebest at 9:55 AM on December 1, 2016

The point being that, right now, some of the best work that can be done is in simply showing other people you are interested in their lives and in trying to make their world a better place.

this is my problem as an effete coastal elite™. i live in a west coast city where less than 5% of the electorate voted for trump. my neighbors are a mix of white leftists and minorities of every description. i telecommute to a company on the east coast that is so overrun with leftist stereotypes that there is a running joke about there being too much kale in the free lunch.

this is my bubble. everyone in my sphere of influence agrees with me on at least the high level goals of government and civil rights for non-cishet-white-males. i don't even feel like i live in the same country with trump voters, i have no way to reach out to them, and if i did i represent everything they thought they were voting against.

right now my activism is pretty much limited to donating to appropriate charities and political campaigns but in the current climate that just doesn't feel like it's enough.
posted by murphy slaw at 9:57 AM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

I don't know how we rebuild trust in institutions when people are willfully shutting themselves off from the reality-based community.


Yeah, I've been thinking about this idea a lot, especially after listening to stuff like this episode of Slate's Trumpcast. Which raises a question I really, really don't like thinking about—are we better off studying how Postwar Germany transformed itself away from Nazism and back into a liberal democracy, than studying the Resistance movements?

I apologize if that's an ignorant question—I'm no student of history—but when institutions can't even protect the truth, I sometimes wonder what's possible within a proactive, non-cataclysmic framework.
posted by Rykey at 10:00 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

are we better off studying how Postwar Germany transformed itself away from Nazism and back into a liberal democracy, than studying the Resistance movements?


who are we going to invite to occupy us and rebuild our infrastructure
posted by murphy slaw at 10:01 AM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

This doesn't mean you need to wholly ignore those wrongheaded beliefs, but when possible, to set them aside until after trust has been developed where you can then provide a counter example that doesn't seem so threatening.

But again, why bother making a special effort to reach out to these people? This is part of the thinking that's been frustrating so many of us in these threads and beyond.

There are a ton of fairly-reasonable people who abstained rather than voting for either candidate, and I'd much rather spend the energy on them.

There are a ton of people now in the party, self included, who are completely turned off to the point of fury about attempts to bring certain voters (especially the WWC) back into the fold, because so many of these attempts somehow seem to come at the expense of inclusiveness.
posted by aspersioncast at 10:02 AM on December 1, 2016 [17 favorites]

There are a ton of people now in the party, self included, who are completely turned off to the point of fury about attempts to bring certain voters (especially the WWC) back into the fold, because so many of these attempts somehow seem to come at the expense of inclusiveness.

Yes, plus it's frustrating to be told to listen to the "other side" when people can't listen to people already in the coalition. It's just further proof that we don't count, that we're not in the tribe, not really.
posted by zutalors! at 10:04 AM on December 1, 2016 [22 favorites]

are we better off studying how Postwar Germany transformed itself away from Nazism and back into a liberal democracy, than studying the Resistance movements?

A lot of mid-level Nazi functionaries were never prosecuted after the war.
posted by My Dad at 10:06 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Or worked for the US government and NASA.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:07 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Trust is weird, and it's also frangible. We've heard so many seemingly contradictory things about trust--e.g. the paradoxical "he tells it like it is, but he's not really gonna do any of the things he says"--that it's really difficult to figure out what a lot of voters consider criteria for trust.

Exactly. In a normally operating notion of trust, just to pick the first example that comes to mind today, someone who agrees that flag burning is a Constitutionally protected form of free expression and who then turns around a year later and starts saying people who do it should lose their citizenship (a punishment not applied to horrible mass murderers) would be considered, well, untrustworthy in his positions. A person who repeatedly cites conspiracy theories without evidence would similarly be considered untrustworthy on the facts. A person who says you have to treat women "like shit" and grab their genitals would be considered untrustworthy on not being a horribly human being.

That process didn't work. Or it's hard to tell, maybe it did--his approval ratings are a record low--, but people were more repulsed by an email server? Whatever the process is, it does not resemble what I've normally thought of as trust.
posted by zachlipton at 10:07 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

who are we going to invite to occupy us and rebuild our infrastructure

Russia, of course.
posted by zachlipton at 10:08 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

To minorities these beliefs are not abstract.

Of course, but to those who are pointlessly worried about things that aren't really a threat, they are abstract, but no less frightening because of that. That's why they can sometimes be changed by providing counter examples through trust if they aren't pushed on too hard from the beginning. The immediacy of their belief, even though there is little or nothing to it, makes it feel vitally true and therefore necessary to protect in order to maintain their illusion of "safety", showing safety doesn't come from those false beliefs makes it easier to, hopefully, rid the person of them over time. It's roughly the same concept as how being more involved with PoC or members of the LGBTQ community makes it easier to accept differences since they aren't how they were imagined in a more fearful state.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:10 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

But again, why bother making a special effort to reach out to these people? This is part of the thinking that's been frustrating so many of us in these threads and beyond.

There's likely no point in making a special effort to reach the deplorables or the die hards, but I was speaking more about the kinds of people Devonian mentioned, those who are scared and more or less alone or isolated trying to figure things out and getting lied to or misled. The people one might reach through church meetings or local events, the quieter regular voters.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:15 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Which raises a question I really, really don't like thinking about—are we better off studying how Postwar Germany transformed itself away from Nazism and back into a liberal democracy...

Unfortunately this skips a lot of... steps. And part of me hopes like hell that someone's coming up with a contingency plan for after the inevitable Reichstag fire.
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 10:16 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

There are a ton of fairly-reasonable people who abstained rather than voting for either candidate, and I'd much rather spend the energy on them.

The trustbuilding exercises don't have to be with the White Working Class. I say ignore those guys (especially if you're not a white dude yourself), but do approach groups who really did seem to believe that their lives would have been equally bad under Clinton.

I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again: the idea that PoC don't have a choice but to vote Democrat is demonstratively false. Some went for Trump, and a lot of them stayed home. And this isn't surprising anyone, and I can't blame them for not voting Dem if the Dems can't seem to appear that they're actually going to support PoC. So it's our job to make sure that a) the Dems seem trustworthy and b) that the Dems are, in fact, trustworthy.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:16 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

who are we going to invite to occupy us and rebuild our infrastructure

Germany, because history is a hall of mirrors.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:18 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Also, you know, keep on fighting to make sure that they can vote in the first place. That's another important step.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:19 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Times has produced some wonderfully clear infographics on Trump's conflicts of interest that are worth looking at and sharing.

But these graphics bring up an important point: they're not setup to go viral. They're behind the NYT paywall (even if the paywall has holes for some social shares) and they don't have share buttons. Why not? Why can't I one-click tweet or Facebook share one of these graphics? If we want real news to do anywhere near as well as fake news, the very least we can do is provide the tools to quickly disseminate it in little easily sharable chunks.
posted by zachlipton at 10:23 AM on December 1, 2016 [28 favorites]

Also, get more minority representation in both parties, so the minority vote isn't a "them" quite so much?
posted by zutalors! at 10:23 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yea, this is where I am gonna get into trouble with the partisans here, but I gotta try. My argument did amount to both sides do it. I think there is a huge difference in how the two sides do it, but it certainly looks the same from far enough outside. To over-generalize, the right would lynch a black man, whereas the left would take his money and leave him in the ditch to starve.

Pointing to the first Clinton's record with welfare helped a lot. Pointing to the continued police shooting of black folks under Obama also did. I wasn't particularly interested in assigning blame for the various reasons for why these things were happening. Racism is all so pervasive that there is no way it could be 'just' the Republicans.

Probably the main take-away was that I did not hedge the faults with Clinton at all. Folks I talked to, even if we disagreed widely on why Clinton was terrible (most of the time), still trusted that I was being forward about my thoughts, and not hedging a lot to push Clinton.

As a side, but related thing, I've been framing the police shootings as cops killing civilians. I don't even touch the racial reasons even though that plays a part. I've also had some success pushing a 'law-abiding cops' argument, that we needed to be very, very careful about the exceptions we made for cops.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 10:23 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

who are we going to invite to occupy us and rebuild our infrastructure

i nominate the dutch
posted by entropicamericana at 10:23 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I started this comment talking to murphy slaw because I feel exactly the same way as an enbubbled San Francisco voter, but maybe it applies to the larger discussion as well. Muslim communities in this area are not in the same bubble that we are. A mosque in San Jose received threatening letters. There have been multiple hate crimes reported inside San Francisco since the election. So in addition to donating and making calls (other people in these threads have done a good job of explaining why this still helps even when your rep is already on the right side of things, and you can call elected officials from other areas as well), I plan to see if I can volunteer with CAIR and make connections in the Muslim community, because to me it's much more important to reach out to vulnerable members of my community and make sure they know that they are supported and valued than it is to search for Bigfoot (which the white Trump voter might as well be to me at this point) and try to get him to think right. Black Lives Matter is another example of an organization that has a lot of work to do even in our liberal bubble. There's a lot we can do where we are. On the rare occasion that I come across someone making apologies for Trump and his supporters, I will (and have) definitely try to explain gently why I disagree, but I very much agree with others that voting rights, GOTV, encouraging fellow liberals to act, and supporting civil rights are MUCH more important and realistic right now.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:25 AM on December 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

Are we still doing Hamilton? I don't even know anymore. If we are, the live mixtape Ham4Ham is happening right now and it's utterly amazing and will distract you a little from the grar of the world for a minute
posted by zachlipton at 10:36 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Instead of focusing on persuading people that voted for Trump, why not focus on getting more people to vote? A lot more people didn't vote at all (115.4 million) than voted for Trump (62.6 million).
posted by kirkaracha at 10:38 AM on December 1, 2016 [25 favorites]

Why GOPs Will Beg Dems to Help Kill Obamacare and Medicare

We are only a few weeks into the booyah! boasting phase of the Trump GOP Era. But we are already seeing a central theme emerging, especially on health care policy. Both on repealing Obamacare and phasing out Medicare, Republicans are now realizing they have to ask Democrats for help, despite the fact that they control every branch of the federal government. This is obviously the case in the Senate if Mitch McConnell maintains the filibuster and thus the need for 60 votes. What's not clear I think is that it remains the case even if McConnell finds a way to push through changes with only 50 votes.

It's important to understand why this is happening.

One key reason is that on both Obamacare and Medicare, the GOP - especially the House GOP - is the dog who caught the car. What do they do now? Paul Ryan, whose genial demeanor and packaging conceals a political radical on fiscal policy, social insurance and almost everything else tied to money, risk and financial security, got House Republicans to vote for Medicare Phaseout for five years straight.

But it was an easy vote since nothing would ever come of it.

Why don't the Republicans have plans for phasing out Obama and Medicare? It's almost like all their railing against those programs was empty posturing.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:47 AM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

It's almost like all their railing against those programs was empty posturing.

Only for the moderates who were posturing to make sure they didn't get Cantored™. For people like Tom Price, having the country made better by a black guy is a SERIOUS FUCKING THING and all traces of it must be abolished and sent to the dustbin of history.
posted by Talez at 10:49 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Are we still doing Hamilton?

I'm not, I sort of blame LMM for jinxing the election with that "never gonna be president now" bit on SNL
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:50 AM on December 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

Ah, written by Conor Friedersdorf. I'll go ahead a skip that article because I have more important things to do, like smell the shit in my cat's litterbox.

He's one of those brogressives who are dead set against identity politics and thinks that anyone to his left, which is pretty much everyone who isn't a Trumpist, is a crackpot.

Conor Friedersdorf is a right-libertarian, not a progressive of any kind. He worked for Andrew "Calipers" Sullivan's blog and wrote a long piece on why he would vote Johnson in 2012. As with Mark Lilla, who reviewed Corey Robin's book on the reactionary mind by tut-tutting its "unfairness" to the storied tradition of right-wing thought, it's no surprise he hates The Damn College Kids and Their Safe Spaces.

I'm right there with you: He sucks.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:51 AM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

"who are we going to invite to occupy us and rebuild our infrastructure"

Germany, because history is a hall of mirrors.

Look, just, don't mention the war, alright?
posted by petebest at 10:55 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Poll: Only About 1 in 4 Wants Trump to Repeal Obamacare

While 52 percent of Republicans say they want the law completely repealed, that share is down from 69 percent just last month, before the election. And more Republicans now say they want the law "scaled back" under the new president and GOP Congress, with that share more than doubling from 11 percent before the election to 24 percent after.

Big surprise, the provisions with support across party lines are the nice things and the unpopular items are the paying-for-it things. What's the solution?

"Once you say that everybody should be covered, can't be denied coverage because they are sick – which most Americans would agree with that – you put yourself in a box. Insurance is about young people who are healthy buying insurance like you all to pay for me and him," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, pointing to the oldest reporter in the scrum. "If you don't have to buy insurance until you get sick, most people won't. That's where the mandate becomes important."

Graham added: "Somebody's got to work through this problem. If we're going to accept the proposition that you can never be denied coverage because you've been sick, then somebody's got to create a system where people participate."

Hmm...that sounds really familiar for some reason. Something something Yourmamacare?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:56 AM on December 1, 2016 [33 favorites]

Nathan J. Robinson on Betsy DeVos and the weakness of the right-wing argument for "school reform" in Current Affairs: Why is "the decimation of public schools" a bad thing?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:56 AM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Reaching out to poor people: good. Many are in positions where they could use the help. Many are farther left on the political spectrum than the average here. Many of them are vulnerable minorities. Even where they aren't, many are decent enough people and the socioeconomic divides that exist in the US are worth acknowledging in their fullness. Democrats have largely abandoned the lower/working classes, and Republicans have an overtly abusive relationship with same. We can use more allies here.

Indulging bigots: bad. Many of them are just fascists who aren't open to dialogue. If you are not a vulnerable minority and you think you can reach someone by appealing to the common humanity of us all or something, please do. But your time would probably be better spent countering harmful lies promoted by fascists and bigots: that Black Lives Matter are not a "terrorist group," that immigrants are not "stealing jobs," that trans people are not "sexual predators," etc. Speaking out against these lies from a position of privilege does help prevent them from being normalized. Vulnerable minorities have no obligation to be nice to actual bigots.

That these two things are getting so conflated is indicative to me that, yes. Really. Progressives/liberals/Democrats/well-off white cishet people actually do have a poor understanding of class, race and intersectional oppression, and many are invested in a narrative attitude that contributes toward direct harm to vulnerable minorities, poor people and marginalized folk generally. This is a real problem.

What would help as a very, very basic first step is to stop assuming everyone in these conversations inhabits the same bubble that you do. You're sharing this space with vulnerable minorities, poor people, people of color, LGBT people, rural people, disabled people and women. Going further, something I'm noticing in allies right now is that they're carrying an attitude of, "How can I help?" Not, "Why should I?" Just, "How can I help?"
posted by byanyothername at 11:03 AM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

"Brogressive", as I mean it, is someone who claims to support things like LGBTQ equality in theory, because that's "acceptable" and "politically correct" in the social circles they reside and work in, but doesn't really give a shit about it when push comes to shove.

Libertarians aren't progressive.
posted by beerperson at 11:06 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Nathan J. Robinson on Betsy DeVos and the weakness of the right-wing argument for "school reform" in Current Affairs: Why is "the decimation of public schools" a bad thing?

That is a fantastic article. Most of the arguments against privatizing public education are preaching to the choir and we need to meet people where they are. Lots of people hear "school choice" and think "well that's better than not having a choice," and sometimes they aren't wrong. But when I hear it, I think of it in the same way most Americans have a choice of ISPs or cable companies: you can go to the Comcast school or the 15-year-old DSL AT&T school, and both will spy on you and have data caps, and thoughts like that are why I don't sleep at night.
posted by zachlipton at 11:09 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

So like - if you think the ACA is a good thing, message on "Yes, if you're young and healthy, or already have really great coverage through your employer, this is probably going to cost you a lot more money. But overall, it's necessary, because without taking the money of the young and healthy, these insurance companies won't be able to afford to insure the sick, and we think it's more important that the sick have this access to health insurance than that young, healthy people or people who are already well insured have more money." Make it super explicit.

It was made explicit. Obama explicitly said that some would pay more.

But your entire framing is false.

First off, you say that Obamacare is harming people who already have insurance from their employer. Obamacare made little to no changes to employer provided health care. Obamacare was about providing insurance to people who didn't have good insurance from their employer.

Second, you say that Obamacare is taking money from the young and healthy to pay for the sick. But this is the way all insurance works. You buy fire insurance for your house but most people never get a dime back after paying years of premiums. The people who never have a fire end up paying for the people unlucky enough to have a fire. Likewise, many people are young and healthy but most will be sick sometime in their life and everyone gets old. The same argument applies to requiring maternity coverage which some say is unfair. But while not everyone will be a mother, 100% of everyone was born by a mother.

Third, while young people will pay a little more now, they will pay less when they get old so it all evens out. In economics this is call "consumption smoothing" and considered a desirable outcome. You don't want to be faced with huge premium increase in the future that you can't afford so you pay a little more gradually that you can afford. This is the same concept as a house mortgage. Very few people can afford to buy a house outright, so they get a mortgage that spreads out the cost over a number of years. By paying a little more now, the young and healthy will have lower premiums when they grow old and sick and can least afford them.

So your suggested framing is not being honest with the voters. When you frame these features as downsides, you are propagating Republican misinformation.
posted by JackFlash at 11:18 AM on December 1, 2016 [41 favorites]

McClatchy: Supporters don’t really care if Trump drains the swamp

Combined with the link above showing how support for repealing the ACA is cratering, it would appear that there's some misalignment between the sales pitch and how it was received. In both cases, it looks like Trump wasn't serious about his promises, and his voters apparently weren't serious about it either.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:40 AM on December 1, 2016 [19 favorites]

This is my . . The same face I've had for three weeks.
posted by petebest at 11:45 AM on December 1, 2016 [27 favorites]

Jesus what the fuck do they care about? Are we really sharing a country with 62 million nihilists?
posted by zutalors! at 11:46 AM on December 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

Jesus what the fuck do they care about?

The letters (R) and (D)
posted by beerperson at 11:49 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Surely they care about MAGA
posted by thelonius at 11:49 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

They care about hurting people.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:51 AM on December 1, 2016 [31 favorites]

That McClatchy piece reminds me of what a former Wisconsin GOP official wrote to James Fallows: "What a pathetic thing is decadence." All the talk of messaging and re-framing and being willing to engage doesn't work when nihilism is the order of the day.
posted by holgate at 11:52 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

tribalists. they don't even know 'why' they voted that way, except the rabbit god people must die.
posted by j_curiouser at 11:52 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:53 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

but like seriously every other thinkpiece is what Trump voters don't care about.
posted by zutalors! at 11:53 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

-le epic troll MAGA u mad bro: 15% of Trump voters
-gas station clerk with weird accent didn't give me correct change and is probably a terrorist: 20%
-completely ignored all election coverage, saw ballot with Guy From The Apprentice vs. Ugh, Her?: 65%
posted by theodolite at 11:56 AM on December 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics

But this is not the identity politics that Sanders recently called on the Democratic Party to “move beyond.” Rather, he and his sympathizers are concerned with a strain of corporate-friendly liberalism that deploys identity-based critiques of class politics as tools for obscuring the divergent material interests of rich and poor Democrats.

posted by Golden Eternity at 11:56 AM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

-le epic troll MAGA u mad bro: 15% of Trump voters
-gas station clerk with weird accent didn't give me correct change and is probably a terrorist: 20%
-completely ignored all election coverage, saw ballot with Guy From The Apprentice vs. Ugh, Her?: 65%

But that leaves none percent for the broken white middle class utterly ignored this cycle who have so much economic anxiety that it makes them racist.
posted by zutalors! at 11:58 AM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

It also leaves none for the evangelicals voing for the Supreme Court seat nom.
posted by jaduncan at 12:01 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm pretty sure we already had the thinkpiece about how Trump evangelical voters don't care that he's not one or his former pro choice views or his divorces and in sum that's another thing Trump voters don't care about.
posted by zutalors! at 12:03 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

A lot of mid-level Nazi functionaries were never prosecuted after the war.


We're already talking about Mitt Romney like he'd be a prophylactic Konrad Adenauer.
posted by ocschwar at 12:03 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

The humiliation continues: Christie throws his hat in the ring for RNC chair

Christie told senior members of Donald Trump's presidential transition team on Thursday morning that he is interested in the post, according to three sources familiar with the talks. One person said the governor had embarked on an aggressive, “full-court press” in hopes of getting the chairmanship.

He is so determined to have some title besides "Former Governor of New Jersey" and "world's biggest Bruce Springsteen fan."
posted by zachlipton at 12:05 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I honestly think a lot of them care about 'winning.' Politics has become so polarizing, so totally two-sided with no meeting in the middle, so completely identity-driven (where you are your party description), that I think 8 years of Obama outright saying "your policies are wrong" - they wanted the chance to turn the tables. This is about [pick your issue where Republicans are different from Democrats], and you won. Everyone was a single-issue voter, basically.

And they put liberals in our place. Which is what they wanted. To be "right."

Maybe the best thing we can do is to show all the granular ways they don't actually agree with each other. Because no matter what the issue, I'm pretty sure Trump will be letting a significant percentage of his voters down.
posted by Mchelly at 12:09 PM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Call me old fashioned, but I think Bernie Sanders should be in the Democratic Party if he wants to have a say in shaping the Democratic Party.
posted by melissasaurus at 12:11 PM on December 1, 2016 [54 favorites]

> What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics

This is a good piece. I don't agree with every position the author takes, but it's a nuanced look at some of these arguments that are dividing the left right now, some tendrils of which I hadn't come across yet.

On the other hand, Bernie has had over a year to get his sales pitch right, and he still hasn't. He may just have it in him to talk about race/class intersectional issues in a way that doesn't divide the left, and at this point he may have failed so many times that people are going to be naturally suspicious of any attempts to do so. I would really like some Democratic speechwriting / PR people to put something together that can get this message across in less than the 3200 words of this article.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

> He is so determined to have some title besides "Former Governor of New Jersey" and "world's biggest Bruce Springsteen fan."

"Federal Inmate #41296-131" has a good ring to it.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:17 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Ryan has begun floating his six-point plan for the House GOP in the next session of congress:

WASHINGTON, DC — Today Wisconsin’s First District congressman and speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, spoke with WCLO’s Tim Bremel about implementing House Republicans’ agenda, A Better Way, in 2017. Outlining legislative priorities for next year: “The first priority is to get the economy growing, get the economy moving. Regulatory relief is a huge part of that. Just go talk to any small-business person . . . and you’ll hear an earful about regulations that are holding them back. So that’s one of the things an incoming administration can bring some immediate relief to, in addition to bills in Congress that we’re working on.” *** “The health care law is really doing a lot of harm in that people have much fewer choices—some have no choices—and extremely high premiums. . . . So Obamacare relief is something we think is really high and early on the agenda.” *** “Reforming the tax code is soon thereafter. That we think is extremely important for economic growth. We’re losing American companies. We’re losing jobs. And we think we can get far faster economic growth and wage growth by reforming our tax system.” “The tax code is so messy, it’s such a special-interest cesspool, and we want to clean that up. And then, we’ve got all these other issues—like foreign policy, rebuilding the military—that we need to address. . . . Securing the border is a high priority. Take a look at the heroin epidemic we have in Wisconsin. Take a look at some of the crime that comes from . . . a porous border. *** “And then while we work on that, we want to work on poverty and restoring our constitutional separation of powers, which is part of regulatory relief and regulatory reform. So those are effectively the six pieces that we’ve been talking about. And the incoming administration, we see eye to eye on these things. And so now, we’re just figuring out how to execute this agenda so that we can get people safe, get people in good jobs, and get this economy growing.” {emphases added}

I count seven there, but maybe he thinks that working on poverty can somehow be folded into restoring separation of powers, which I presume is code for "states' rights". In any case, privatizing Medicare is probably buried in there somewhere...
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:22 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Pres.-elect Trump: "Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences." (video)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:23 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Will those consequences involve being showered with subsidies?
posted by zachlipton at 12:24 PM on December 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

LobsterMitten wrote: One of the ads was for an apparently conservative rural tv channel -- guy in work clothes, with an indeterminate Real Murcan accent...So, it seems that Russia Times is putting propaganda on the air disguised as a conservative tv "news" channel, with a pitch as more "authentic" and country/rural/non-elite than Fox.

On Monday I went to get my hair cut by a young woman from Alabama. I live in rural, conservative Georgia, and when I got to her house she sat me down in front of a big-screen TV that was showing Russia Today. Before the election, this woman would have had Fox on in the background while she went about her business, but not anymore.

We watched Russia Today while she cut my hair and after a while I worked up the nerve to mention that Russia Today is definitely a propaganda tool of the Putin government, and did that bother her?

She shrugged and said, "As long as it's not the propaganda tool of OUR government, it's OK with me."

It was so disorienting that this very Southern, rural, conservative woman was all-in for the Russian media.

And it's true that the anchors and "reporters" on RT have done some significant accent-reduction work. They have indeterminate accents that sound sort of American, unless you pay attention to their vowels. These people are definitely Russians trying to sound like Americans, and lots of Trump voters watch them.
posted by staggering termagant at 12:25 PM on December 1, 2016 [43 favorites]

So Trump promised penalties for companies which move jobs overseas and instead is going to bribe companies at taxpayer expense to only move some jobs overseas. And, one assumes, the bribes have to be renewed periodically or all the rest of the jobs will move.

At least the media isn't buying it. Like the CNBC headline "Despite deal, Carrier still moving jobs to Mexico."

But most Trump voters aren't the most discerning chaps.
posted by Justinian at 12:27 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Take a look at the heroin epidemic we have in Wisconsin. Take a look at some of the crime that comes from . . . a porous border.

He's right! Take a look at Wisconsin on the map. It's got an open border with the UP, plus undefended shores on two Great Lakes where the Canadians can just canoe over the border.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:31 PM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Report: Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan ‘shovels money at wealthy investors’
posted by futz at 12:35 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Snopes: Will President Trump be able to send unblockable texts to all Americans?

Probably not, but let's hope the article doesn't give him ideas.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:36 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Roll Call: Mitchell Rivard, the LGBT Congressional Staff Association’s president, says LGBT staffers will need a voice with Donald Trump in the White House.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:38 PM on December 1, 2016

she sat me down in front of a big-screen TV that was showing Russia Today

What the actual fuck.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

She's just trying not to get railroaded.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:41 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

> Report: Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan ‘shovels money at wealthy investors’

Here's the white paper referred to in the WaPo article. tl;dr:

1. The plan would push state and local governments to use equity capital that can cost 300 percent to 500 percent more than capital raised through traditional municipal bonds.
2. The plan would provide no support for thousands of critical maintenance and recon- struction projects.
3. The plan would raise taxes on middle-class Americans in the form of high-cost tolls and other user fees necessary to satisfy the 10 percent to 14 percent annual returns demanded by equity investors.
4. The plan would leave behind rural communities and smaller cities and towns that are not large enough to generate sufficient toll or other user fee revenues to satisfy equity investors.
5. The plan would not meaningfully increase total economic activity, employment, or real wages.

posted by tonycpsu at 12:42 PM on December 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

I asked the Trump transition if the president-elect still plans to penalize Carrier for outsourcing 1,300 jobs to Mexico. No response.

--@Olivianuzzi

This Carrier story is such a scam and a good chunk of the media has failed in reporting it. I'm happy for the workers who will still have jobs, of course, but how many of the people sitting in that hall with Trump will be laid off when their jobs still move to Mexico?

Applying illegal threats about government contracts and showing a company with subsidies is not a viable jobs plan.
posted by zachlipton at 12:44 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Democrats criticized Bernie a lot for being unrealistic, but being unrealistic was a big part of how Trump won. Now we see Trump possibly going back on many things, though his appointments may say otherwise. I wonder if Bernie would have as well (specifically on economic protectionism), but it's hard to tell. He seems quite serious about dismantling trade deals, which probably would have been disastrous.

Mark Blyth ─ Global Trumpism (YouTube 1hr26min) This is an amazing talk basically predicting Trump as part of a larger picture / dynamic from back in September.

Mark Blyth on the 2016 US election results (YouTube 22min18sec) is an extension of the previous talk and he repeats many similar points.

These are really good. I'd like to see Jacobin respond to Blyth's criticism of the Left which seems really potent to me. Labor doesn't have the power to confront "the 1%" and make real gains for "the working class" the way it used to due to the changing global economy. And creating a huge confrontation between "working class" and "capitalists," is probably not feasible as there is not enough truly leftist support in the US. A large portion of the "working class" is dedicated to FOX News.

An "Obama coalition" between economic classes is a much better way to go. Bernie + Obama + Warren Buffet and other well respected business leaders + Labor + BLM seems to me like it probably is the way to go with some plan to revive the heartland that is believable.

We can see Trump's narrative. He will force the wealthy to make concessions to the working class or else. But he is such an obvious con artist it should not be too difficult to expose him and win people over with a better, more inclusive story.
posted by Golden Eternity at 12:45 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Here's the white paper referred to in the WaPo article. tl;dr:

6. Privatizing public infrastructure like roads is a horrible thing to do.
posted by zachlipton at 12:46 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Jesus what the fuck do they care about?

A sense that their privilege is being taken from them by women, immigrants, and people of color.
posted by maxsparber at 12:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Paul Ryan trashed government deals to help specific companies — until Trump did it

Wanker.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

This tweet: .@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists with the link to Breitbart News sent out to readers courtesy of the US House Comittee on Science, Space, and Technology.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:57 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

An infuriating example of our fake news problem just aired on CNN and stars Trump supporters
posted by futz at 12:57 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

We watched Russia Today while she cut my hair and after a while I worked up the nerve to mention that Russia Today is definitely a propaganda tool of the Putin government, and did that bother her?

She shrugged and said, "As long as it's not the propaganda tool of OUR government, it's OK with me."

*head asplodes*

i would have said "is it okay if i turn to it to al-jazeera then?"
posted by entropicamericana at 12:59 PM on December 1, 2016 [28 favorites]

it looks like Trump wasn't serious about his promises, and his voters apparently weren't serious about it either.

Eh, most of his voters seem to have perceived his promises as trash talk similar to what's dished out by pro wrestlers—it's all puffed-up bullshit, and we all know it, but it's part of the show. You'd no more ask Trump why he backed away from jailing Hillary than you'd ask Randy Savage why he didn't literally destroy his opponent the way he ranted about before the match. It misses the point, for Trump and wrestling fans.

I happen to find this view of campaign promises and what being President entails to be problematic—and it's confounded by the fact that Trump actually is a billionaire-cum-pro-wrestler. But everything I've heard from his most vocal supporters seems to affirm this ridiculous governance-as-death-match mentality. A liar who kicks ass is better than an honest weakling any day.
posted by Rykey at 1:01 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Will President Trump be able to send unblockable texts to all Americans?

Although I can't find it on the Interbits, Nixon wanted to remotely switch on Americans' tv sets when he wanted to make a statement. Reminds me of some mid-20th century novel.

"'Of all the institutions arrayed with and against a President, none controls his fate more than television,' Nixon wrote.

This Carrier story is such a scam and a good chunk of the media has failed in reporting it.

The same ones who spent 19 months whistling through crackers and sold us down the freakin' river, yeah. Expect gross failure across the media board for the rest of the time anyone pays attention to it.
posted by petebest at 1:03 PM on December 1, 2016

@JoeNBC (Joe Scarborough) The SecState process continues. Trump considered the Romney meeting "great" but is expanding options and looking at Exxon CEO RexTillerson.

Yeah sure, why not the CEO of Exxcess as SOS. However would the man want to give up his $27 million a year paycheck? Oh no wait, he is planning on retiring so I guess he will be free.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:03 PM on December 1, 2016

Right-Wingers Hate Blame-Shifting on Terrorism -- Unless They're the Ones Doing It

So: Blaming a Christmas-themed gathering for an act of Islamist violence is bad, according to conservatives. Blaming academic leftism? No problem!

posted by tonycpsu at 1:04 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for secretary of defense
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:07 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

An infuriating example of our fake news problem just aired on CNN and stars Trump supporters

If you're the sort of person to whom MeFi appeals, every one of those people will, should things keep going badly, cheer for your death. They will be told lies about your death, lies about its necessity and its awfulness and about the horrible things you did to deserve it. They may or may not believe these lies, but they will be comforting lies that flatter the way they like to see the world and the way they like to see themselves, and so they will believe them.

These people are the backbone of fascism.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:07 PM on December 1, 2016 [42 favorites]

Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for secretary of defense
hoover institute alum. this is another pence pick.
posted by murphy slaw at 1:12 PM on December 1, 2016

https://trumpgrets.tumblr.com/
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

HuffPo: Both Trump And Obama Moved Quickly To Save Indiana Jobs. One Has Sold It Better.

This is how he will make his shitty Presidency look like solid 24K gold. Trump speaks directly to his supporters via video and twitter and bypasses the MSM so they can't "distort" his accomplishments with facts and reality. The days of the MSM having any sway at all with a certain segment of the population are over. The only thing that will make a difference is when his actions make an actual difference in their lives and even then he will spin it to look like it is the fault of someone else.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:14 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Here's an interesting thread from Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Bernie Sanders/identity politics article.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:14 PM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Duncan Black (Atrios): If You're 35 Years Into Your Career $70,000 Isn't A Great Income

Good liberals like to say the Right pits the poor (white) against the poor (black). Probably true! But liberals (elected ones, at least) are too often only interested in helping the "poor" or the "working poor" or whatever we're calling them that week. Those medical subsidies, tax credits and deductions, college financial aid, and what meager benefits we have all start phasing out pretty quickly once people star to "make it." It isn't just that being middle class is only aspirational for the poor, it's the being "middle class" is largely aspirational for the supposedly middle class. And, yeah, we can always point to people who are poorer and more in need, but that isn't so different from the Republican tactic of always pointing to people who are more "deserving."

Life shouldn't be so hard, either for the poor or the not so poor.

posted by tonycpsu at 1:16 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

An infuriating example of our fake news problem just aired on CNN and stars Trump supporters

I admit, I laughed when they talked about Obama saying illegals could vote, and that Camerota should "just google it." A throwaway line to end an argument, like "let's agree to disagree." I know they thought that would be the end of it, but she really does google it and tells them it's bullshit. The sad thing, though, it didn't matter, they didn't care. They believed what they wanted to believe. Facts don't matter.
posted by papercrane at 1:17 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Why Does CNN Keep Portraying These Two Former NH State Reps as Everyday Trump Voters?

Obviously, what will make this one get much play on CNN over the next few days, as well as online, will be the moments where two Trump supporters claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted in California. They also claimed that you could look on Facebook and Google to find out that President Barack Obama told people to vote illegally. While Camerota tried to convince them it wasn’t true, they insisted they had heard all of this from the media. (Camerota spoke to Mediaite not long ago about how she prides herself on these panels.)

Now, the two women responsible for this exchange with the CNN host — Susan DeLemus and Paula Johnson — are more than just passionate Trump voters who CNN talked to last year. They are both veteran politicians in New Hampshire you were selected as delegates by the Trump campaign and have been featured in the news, and on CNN, over the past year and a half.

posted by tonycpsu at 1:22 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

This tweet: .@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists with the link to Breitbart News sent out to readers courtesy of the US House Comittee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Well, it's not like the official statements are that much different.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:23 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Rather, he and his sympathizers are concerned with a strain of corporate-friendly liberalism that deploys identity-based critiques of class politics as tools for obscuring the divergent material interests of rich and poor Democrats.

It would seem that it's entirely possible for Democratic Party politicians to use the language of social justice while advancing economic policies that do not benefit marginalized groups, or at least not in going far enough to benefit those groups.

After all, the Republicans do the same thing to religious conservatives.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:26 PM on December 1, 2016

i feel like when my daughter is a little older i should pull her aside and show her two charts, one of classical rhetorical fallacies and one of the most common cognitive distortions and say "pay close attention, this is how we killed the planet"
posted by murphy slaw at 1:28 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Re that Duncan Black article - oh, won't somebody think of the unfortunates who still have to draw a salary for a living. Things are tough for them, what with being able to get mortgages and sending their kids off to college and stuff. Liberals are just too interested in helping the poor!

Talk about your fucking white liberal bubble.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:29 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for secretary of defense

Like Trump, Mattis favors a tougher stance against U.S. adversaries abroad, especially Iran. The general, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in April, said that while security discussions often focus on terrorist groups such as the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, the Iranian regime is “the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”

In August [2003] a British official close to the Bush team told Newsweek: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
posted by kirkaracha at 1:31 PM on December 1, 2016

It would seem that it's entirely possible for Democratic Party politicians to use the language of social justice while advancing economic policies that do not benefit marginalized groups, or at least not in going far enough to benefit those groups.

That pretty much describes Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and at least half the Dems in Congress, yeah.
posted by Rykey at 1:36 PM on December 1, 2016

otoh two of the most common cognitive distortions are fortune-telling and catastrophizing so maybe i should take some of my own medicine
posted by murphy slaw at 1:36 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Duncan Black (Atrios): If You're 35 Years Into Your Career $70,000 Isn't A Great Income

Well, in a weird sense this is true - in that even someone who makes $70,000 a year when they are, let's say, 60 years old (especially if they're in an expensive part of the country) is not really making enough to be truly secure in retirement because we have a crap social safety net. Especially if that person has no partner, or has any kind of "expected unexpected" expenses like a disabled partner, or kids who need financial help, or parents who themselves have needed expensive care, etc.

It's way, way more than I make or ever expect to make, but I can see how someone could quite reasonably think "I've worked all my life for what everyone thinks is a great wage and have tried to be financially prudent, but I'm still insecure going into retirement and I don't even get any kind of subsidy on my healthcare so I'm paying $800 a month for insurance and really feeling the squeeze".

Honestly, back when the ACA was first put forward, I immediately thought "people who make too much for the subsidy but under about $100,000 are going to be hurting, because they'll get hit with needing to pay $8000 - $10 000 out of pocket for insurance". Compare that to an employer subsidized plan - even an expensive one isn't going to run you more than $3600 or so before taxes for one person.

I think that middle class people ought to get their act together and push for the expansion of social programs to cover everyone so as to avoid these problems.
posted by Frowner at 1:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [24 favorites]

oh, won't somebody think of the unfortunates who still have to draw a salary for a living.

Yes, that actually is his point -- that things should be better for the poor and the middle class as well. I don't know why this offends you that we note that even people higher up the income percentile aren't exactly crushing it even if they aren't worrying about where their next meal is going to come from.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:44 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

That pretty much describes Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and at least half the Dems in Congress, yeah.

I don't entirely agree with that statement, but that critique can be applied to parts of the party apparatus and leadership, certainly. Maybe the Trump presidency will finally awaken a Democratic version of the Tea Party, a revolt against the party elite's false promises and half-solutions. Whiskey Rebellion, anybody?
posted by Apocryphon at 1:51 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Trump praises Kazakhstan ‘miracle’ in call with president

Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization that monitors conditions around the world, says on its website that “Kazakhstan heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion, and torture remains a serious problem.”

He does love his dictators. Sounds like Trump's kind of place.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I don't know why this offends you that we note that even people higher up the income percentile aren't exactly crushing it even if they aren't worrying about where their next meal is going to come from.

Because of triangulation that made them throw the people worse-off than them under the bus, while voting to make sure that the unimaginably wealthy pay even less into a functional society.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Clinton's PA deficit dropped 30k today. So the final numbers are:

@billscher
"PA margin 46435
WI margin 22177
MI margin 10704
79,317 more Dems show up in these 3 states, person with 65M+ votes elected president"


FYI,
Jill Stein got 49,622 in PA
Jill Stein got 31,006 in WI
Jill Stein got 52,463 in MI

Thanks Greens. Thanks Comey.
posted by chris24 at 1:56 PM on December 1, 2016 [54 favorites]

On the $70,000 topic, the same thing applies to wealth. $1,000,000 is a ton of money, but if you're retired and living off of it at a "safe" rate of 3.5%, that's... $35,000 a year. Which sure isn't nothing, but it's also not going to support the lifestyle one thinks of going along with the word "millionaire"! And in a year like 2008 where the market plummets 50%, that person might be looking at suddenly only having $17,500 in "safe" income off of their drastically-reduced nest egg.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 1:56 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Because of triangulation that made them throw the people worse-off than them under the bus

Who's "them"? Atrios is not the Democratic party, and he's not advocating that we upwardly distribute income.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:57 PM on December 1, 2016

For those who didn't click through, more context:

But you the point I'm trying to make is that shit is fucked up and bullshit, not just for the bottom 20% or 40% but really for the bottom 80%. The "middle class" as a concept was that you could afford a house, two cars, put 2-3 kids through college at a good state school, save some for retirement, go on a modest vacation once per year or so, afford necessary medical care, and not be 2 lost paychecks away from destitution. A decent if modest lifestyle plus a foundation of economic security. Retire in modest comfort at 65. Do close enough to the right thing and you don't have to stay up at night worrying that the banksters and the Repo Men are going to come take it all away.

This is an argument about how we talk about income inequality, not about any specific plan to change the distribution. Nobody's asking for a tiny violin to play for anyone at the 80th income percentile.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:01 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

The plan would provide no support for thousands of critical maintenance and recon- struction projects.


That's what infuriates me. Here in New England, you can see the 2009 stimulus everywhere, if you know where to look:

Bridges and overpasses where the sidewalk railings are prefab-concrete, with vertical slits, and rough whitewash.

They're everywhere. Our DOTs were smart enough to just speed up bridge rehabs for the stimulus, and not look for road expansions. When you see those side railings, you know you're on a bridge that got redone for the stimulus.

This was smart, as it effectively was all maintenance and not new infrastructure with an added maintenance burden further down the road. But it's also the reason people keep asking where the stimulus went. All over your towns, FFS
posted by ocschwar at 2:03 PM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

"Them" as in the people in that exact $70k income bracket who voted for Trump.

Sorry, I probably sound angrier than intended. This just doesn't seem a whole lot different to me than all the articles about how the Democrats need to listen to the WWC more. Is it? Maybe I'm missing something.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:03 PM on December 1, 2016

Clinton's PA deficit dropped 30k today.

FYI, this wasn't from any recount. This was the Philadelphia tally finally being complete and correct.

The total in Philly:

Clinton 584,020 - Trump 108,748

2012?

Obama 588,806 - Romney 96,467
posted by chris24 at 2:07 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Clinton's popular vote margin over 2.5million. She lost MI by roughly 0.2%, and WI and PA by 0.7-0.8%.

Also, the PA finals show that turnout in Philly was equal to or higher than 2012. So the "low enthusiasm" narrative that she couldn't turn out the base is again shown to be bullshit. She lost because of racism and ratfuckery.
posted by Justinian at 2:09 PM on December 1, 2016 [35 favorites]

On preview, I see a little more where you're coming from. I had read the article before responding, but I think the tone and normative tropes (kids, college for kids, "poor (white) vs. poor (black)) kind of turned me off.

Is this a better way to talk about income equality? Like maybe as someone now middle-class-ish who grew up dirt poor I'm oversensitive to this kind of framing, but it would be a better way to approach someone who grew up middle-class?
posted by aspersioncast at 2:09 PM on December 1, 2016

The Invisible Stimulus, 2012

But since the construction signs on Sixth bearing the telltale circular insignia came down, no one would have any reason to suspect the building’s origins. Asked whether he knew that Cedar Gateway was funded by ARRA, resident Bruce Smith said he didn’t really know how the development was financed.

“It’s all publicly funded or something like that,” said Smith. “All I know is, whoever paid for buildings like these, they’re doing San Diego the biggest favor.”

Both Trump And Obama Moved Quickly To Save Indiana Jobs. One Has Sold It Better.

Beyond Indiana’s inexplicable magnetism for newly elected and incoming presidents, these two trips also tell a larger story about the value of stagecraft and salesmanship in politics. While Trump’s jaunt to Carrier is already winning accolades from unexpected sources and praise from the factory workers, the people of Elkhart moved on quickly from Obama.

Elkhart County didn’t vote for his re-election in 2012 and it went decidedly for Trump in 2016. But that is just part of the story. Many recipients of the nearly $170 million in stimulus funding that was sent to Elkhart didn’t even know they’d received the money at all. When I called a number of them back in July, they either flat-out denied such funding existed or assumed that the loans and contracts they’d received had derived from another company or the state government.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Oh this is going great:

Chaos on Chaos: @JasonMillerinDC from the Trump team denied Mattis selected as SECDEF. @DonaldJTrumpJr meanwhile RTs report saying he is.

--@DanLamothe
posted by zachlipton at 2:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm with her. Kali, that is. Bring it.

Oh it's being broughten. I'm not the kind of person who recommends prayer of any sort for anything but. I'm considering it.
posted by petebest at 2:14 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

i know that Temple of Doom isn't an accurate portrayal of Kali worship but if one of y'all could remove trump's still-beating heart on national television that would be grand
posted by murphy slaw at 2:18 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

From Ryan's 7-Point Plan: "we want to work on poverty and restoring our constitutional separation of powers, which is part of regulatory relief and regulatory reform."

Does anyone else read that as anything other than a power grab to hobble future democratic presidents?
posted by C'est la D.C. at 2:19 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

The Kali Yuga is gonna be YUGE.
posted by uosuaq at 2:20 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

> Both Trump And Obama Moved Quickly To Save Indiana Jobs. One Has Sold It Better.

Yeah. Remember those Bush 43 stimulus checks? A flat one-time $300 per person check to everyone regardless of their need doesn't move the needle much, but it sure does send a signal that people are more likely to remember in the voting booth.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:20 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

FWIW Clinton's % lead in the popular vote is now larger than 10 people who were elected President of the United States.
posted by Justinian at 2:25 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

I read that 10 president stat on the internet tho so I don't know how accurate it is. Just a warning.
posted by Justinian at 2:27 PM on December 1, 2016

imagine if some of that lead had been in swing states
posted by beerperson at 2:28 PM on December 1, 2016

Remember those Bush 43 stimulus checks?

republicans hate handouts but they totally understand bribes
posted by murphy slaw at 2:29 PM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

The fact that voters in a few Rust Belt states are so much more important than tens of millions of people in New York or California is a massive bug in the system rather than a feature as far as I'm concerned.

The electoral system is going to fracture the country unless something changes.
posted by Justinian at 2:30 PM on December 1, 2016 [26 favorites]

Obama 2012 / Hillary 2016:

MI: 2,564,569 / 2,268,839 (-295,730)
WI: 1,620,985 / 1,381,823 (-239,162)
PA: 2,990,274 / 2,863,945 (-126,329)

In addtion, Obama's 2012 vote beat Trump's 2016 vote in all these states.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:31 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I agree, they should have at least informed Clinton of how the Electoral College works before they used those rules
posted by beerperson at 2:32 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

(I checked the "10 President" stat myself now, it is true so long as you include Trump.) She's approaching 11 Presidents if she passes Jimmy Carter's 2.06% margin but that seems a stretch.
posted by Justinian at 2:33 PM on December 1, 2016

Already linked upthread, but it's really fun to watch a CNN anchor literally facepalm on TV. Yes, these are the people driving the country now, thanks to their strategic residence in swing states.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:34 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Oy:

As Trump walked past and then through reporters and photographers, chief strategist Stephen Bannon was heard saying, "Who are all these photographrers and why are they here? Hope Hicks replied, "This is the press pool."

posted by zachlipton at 2:35 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The fact that voters in a few Rust Belt states are so much more important than tens of millions of people in New York or California is a massive bug in the system rather than a feature as far as I'm concerned.

The electoral system is going to fracture the country unless something changes.

I think it's a big de-motivating factor for voters in non-swing states.
posted by maggiemaggie at 2:35 PM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

> I agree, they should have at least informed Clinton of how the Electoral College works before they used those rules

You really are in love with your smug hot takes in these threads, but have you considered that participation in a bullshit system ought not disqualify one from raising objections to it? Yes, she knew what states mattered, and she and her staff thought they had a way to win even though she was playing with a deck that was stacked against her. They were wrong. That doesn't mean the fact that the deck is stacked isn't worth discussing.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:36 PM on December 1, 2016 [50 favorites]

The electoral system is going to fracture the country unless something changes.

Yeah, I saw a stat somewhere along the lines of "the states Clinton won represent 2/3 of GDP". And you look at Kellogg's and other companies pulling out of breitbart advertising even though breitbart's candidate just *won*. It's deeply abnormal that a major and nonideological company would be fleeing an association with the president-elect. An electoral system that produces this result is a disaster waiting to happen. (A bigger disaster even than what we have now, I mean.)
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 2:38 PM on December 1, 2016 [21 favorites]

Obama 2012 / Hillary 2016:

MI: 2,564,569 / 2,268,839 (-295,730)
WI: 1,620,985 / 1,381,823 (-239,162)
PA: 2,990,274 / 2,863,945 (-126,329)

Not sure where he got these numbers, but PA is wrong.

@DecisionDeskHQ
Pennsylvania statewide with the Philadelphia tally now complete:
Trump 2,961,875
Clinton 2,915,440
posted by chris24 at 2:38 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

The electoral system is going to fracture the country unless something changes.

"either that electoral college goes, or i go!" -california and new york, maybe
posted by entropicamericana at 2:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

You really are in love with your smug hot takes in these threads, but have you considered that participation in a bullshit system ought not disqualify one from raising objections to it?

Exactly. Trump will be President. That doesn't mean it's not appropriate and necessary to point out how broken the system has become.
posted by Justinian at 2:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

This just doesn't seem a whole lot different to me than all the articles about how the Democrats need to listen to the WWC more. Is it?

Atrios/Black is a lot more paternalistic and a lot less wonkish about solutions. He was at the forefront of resistance to "reform" on Social Security, pointing out that the 401(k) experiment had failed. He thinks healthcare should be funded from taxes. He doesn't like means-testing or tapering: there should be structures in place to protect people from ruination in ways that tax cuts or private charity can't match.

Remember those Bush 43 stimulus checks?

The post-2009 payroll tax cut was done specifically as the opposite of that: quietly giving people more money in each pay packet because that was considered more stimulative than a one-off payment. Politically not as memorable, though. Of course, you're going to see a bunch of single-company or single-town stunts from now on, like Extreme Makeover: Rust Belt Edition.
posted by holgate at 2:41 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

He'll be under oath at least though, right?
posted by ODiV at 2:45 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Extreme Makeover: Rust Belt Edition

Elected democrats really need to work on their grandstanding. I'm exactly the opposite of Bernie's biggest fan, but damn he's good at getting on tv and not running away from his own opinions. Like, sure, do the right thing, but learn to take a victory lap too!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 2:46 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

The post-2009 payroll tax cut was done specifically as the opposite of that: quietly giving people more money in each pay packet because that was considered more stimulative than a one-off payment. Politically not as memorable, though.

I remember speaking with a colleague in 2012 who was INCENSED that "Obama raised my taxes" when the payroll tax cut expired.
I was unable to get him to understand what actually happened.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:48 PM on December 1, 2016 [21 favorites]

Honestly, back when the ACA was first put forward, I immediately thought "people who make too much for the subsidy but under about $100,000 are going to be hurting, because they'll get hit with needing to pay $8000 - $10 000 out of pocket for insurance". Compare that to an employer subsidized plan - even an expensive one isn't going to run you more than $3600 or so before taxes for one person.

As someone who this hits it's not just the increase in premiums, but the decrease in plans and networks that is an issue. As far as I can tell there is no plan for sale that has the best/teaching hospitals available (and by association, the best doctors). Even if I wanted to pay gobs of money to be covered at a prestigious hospital I can not. One plan I looked into on a major insurer's network only had ONE (general) doctor accepting patients in the limited network all of their self-insured plans use for the entire city of Chicago. It's not surprising to me that my out of pocket is going to be $15,000 next year.

As far as I'm concerned we're already back to the days not so long ago of different tiers of rationed care (those covered on group polices and those who are not). With more and more people going out on their own, the gig economy and whatnot... how is this not being talked about more? Is it because a lot of those people are under 26 and covered under their parent's insurance?
posted by Bunglegirl at 2:49 PM on December 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

I agree, they should have at least informed Clinton of how the Electoral College works before they used those rules

They should have informed people that snark about how women are dumb and don't know basic things makes them look like sexist jackasses.
posted by chris24 at 2:50 PM on December 1, 2016 [21 favorites]

"news conferences" from now on, and you should be grateful he's even talking

Hey, they made their bed.
posted by petebest at 2:50 PM on December 1, 2016

Ezekiel Kweku at MTV.com: Dear Democrats: The Election Is Over
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:51 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Are there a lot of people who believe the recount will swing the election? Those people should stop being like H.A. Goodman.
posted by Justinian at 2:53 PM on December 1, 2016

how is this not talking about more? Is it because a lot of those people are under 26 and covered under their parent's insurance?

It's not the right kind of outrageous. Less clicks so very reduced coverage. This is our infosystem.
posted by petebest at 2:55 PM on December 1, 2016

Elected Democrats need to get their shit together and stop DAPL. The fact that very few elected Dems or Obama admin officials are publicly working to stop it is pathetic. Every single Democratic politician should be in ND on the front lines with the water protectors and/or talking about it nonstop. It's such a clear human rights vs corporate profits issue --- it combines native rights, historical oppression/genocide, police power, militarization of the police, corporate handouts, cronyism, climate change, clean water. It's a cornucopia of issues the left cares about. Where tf are Democratic officials on this??? It would be such a slam dunk issue for the base of the party, and if they can't get their shit together enough to realize they need to stop it (before Trump inevitably makes it worse), then I fear there is little hope in Democrats being anything resembling an opposition party.
posted by melissasaurus at 2:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [41 favorites]

Ezekiel Kweku at MTV.com: Dear Democrats: The Election Is Over

The other reason for the angst is that although Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College is a healthy 74 electoral votes, more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump. At last count, the margin was about 2.5 million votes, in an election in which there were about 130 million voters. It feels undemocratic and unfair that the person who got the most votes did not win the election, and that a minority of voters was able to make such an important decision on behalf of the country. Donald Trump, for his part, also seems to be bothered by this. He's tweeted several times about the presidential election, arguing that he would have run a different campaign if the election were determined by popular vote, and that the Electoral College fundamentally changes the way campaigns are run. Trump is correct. (And again, it gives me no pleasure to write this sentence.)

If the election were decided by popular vote, then presidential campaigns would be run completely differently. Campaigns would make different decisions about where to buy airtime for commercials, where to spend time building their GOTV operations, and where to send their candidates. Voters would also make different decisions. For instance, a dying cocker spaniel would win California if it ran on the Democratic ticket. Knowing this fact makes every Californian's vote feel less meaningful, and that means that some Californians might not vote in the presidential election at all. If we had a simple democratic election for president, then their vote would mean as much as anyone else's. All of these decisions would affect which voters turn out where, so there’s reason to believe that a real popular vote would have substantially different results than the raw vote total. In other words, we don’t know what the real popular vote is, because we don’t conduct our presidential election by popular vote, and the ersatz "popular vote" of the raw vote count doesn’t have any special moral authority or legitimacy.

posted by beerperson at 3:01 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

In other words, we don’t know what the real popular vote is, because we don’t conduct our presidential election by popular vote, and the ersatz "popular vote" of the raw vote count doesn’t have any special moral authority or legitimacy.

We don't know the margin but we have good reason to believe that Clinton would have won by more rather than less.
posted by Justinian at 3:09 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

This Carrier story is such a scam
let's see. those 850 retained US workers. and $7M subsidy. so...
$7M/850 = $8235.29 per worker tax-exempt bonus. right?
posted by j_curiouser at 3:11 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

More people selected Clinton over Trump. That doesn't mean she's the really truly President, but it does mean that this man shouldn't feel a mandate to bring in his most ghoulish cronies and promise to double down on his most ghastly promises.
posted by zutalors! at 3:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

> Elected democrats really need to work on their grandstanding. I'm exactly the opposite of Bernie's biggest fan, but damn he's good at getting on tv and not running away from his own opinions. Like, sure, do the right thing, but learn to take a victory lap too!

Bernie Sanders: Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump (via)

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

posted by tonycpsu at 3:17 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Luckily for him he can do it anyway
posted by beerperson at 3:18 PM on December 1, 2016

If the situation was reversed the media and Republicans would be demanding that she include Republicans in her cabinet to unify and heal the country.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:18 PM on December 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

Luckily for him he can do it anyway

Yes but unluckily for all of us? I don't know your point here.
posted by zutalors! at 3:19 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Are "Day 1" promises usually considered to refer to Inauguration Day, or the first full day in office?
posted by kirkaracha at 3:21 PM on December 1, 2016

More people selected Clinton over Trump. That doesn't mean she's the really truly President, but it does mean that this man shouldn't feel a mandate to bring in his most ghoulish cronies and promise to double down on his most ghastly promises.

It also means why the fuck should we blow up the current coalition to pursue fickle racist WWC voters.
posted by chris24 at 3:21 PM on December 1, 2016 [27 favorites]

It matters to me, on a "can I continue existing in this society" level, that 65.2+ million people got up on Nov. 8 (+/- for early voting) and cast a vote for a female president running on a progressive, inclusive platform that mirrors many of my values and that only 62.6 million people, including many in my family, got up and voted for complete destruction of everything I believe in. Those 2.6+ million votes are keeping me just on the side on sanity right now; they're making it so I can engage and organize and act. So, yeah, the popular vote count doesn't change the 2016 presidential election result. But it might motivate folks to impact future election results.
posted by melissasaurus at 3:24 PM on December 1, 2016 [46 favorites]

Based on the groping and Trump's penchant for walking in on nude underage pageant contestants, can we get him registered as a sex offender? It would be sweet to have him walk around the White House with flyers to warn people.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:29 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Paul Jay and Abby Martin The Real News; 24 min. youtube
posted by bukvich at 3:31 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The shitty thing is that now when Dems push for sane electoral reforms like killing the EC with fire, Trumpists will come back with a sour-grapes-and-whiners retort.

Because democracy is great and all, but only if the white bloc beats the multiracial coalition.
posted by tivalasvegas at 3:32 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

So, I'm someone who thinks the Dems need to increase their appeal to just-barely-Trump voters, but I also don't think we should blow up the current coalition. We only need to appeal to them fractionally more, and I think we can do it on economic-red-meat grounds that also benefit everyone in the current coalition.

And rather than thinking about WWC as the demographic to appeal to, it's "people in lower density locations whose votes have disproportionate influence due to the EC, the realities of House districting, and the realities of state legislative districting". (And let's fix districting too, but we can do more than one thing at a time!)

Under Howard Dean, the DNC worked on appealing to rural voters, they didn't turn their backs on everyone else to do it, and we won a supermajority. It's a doable thing!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 3:35 PM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

It also means why the fuck should we blow up the current coalition to pursue fickle racist WWC voters.

Speaking from a devil's advocate position, because white people reliably show up to elections even if it's to vote to fuck themselves. Aside from the Klan rallies the Trump campaign was a literal fucking dumpster fire. White people didn't need to be told repeatedly to come out and fuck themselves, they happily walked like cows going up the ramp to the slaughterhouse.

You don't need to beg/cajole/plead like a rainbow coalition. You don't need to manage 300 different factions each of who are pissed off about a different thing and threaten to fracture the coalition or just vote for Jill Stein if they don't get 100% of their shit. You just point at the brown guy, say "it's his fault", and you get the votes to just go ahead and do the shit that needs to be done.

Like, who the fuck really wants to have to go through the electoral equivalent of a Parks and Rec town meeting every campaign? Especially when we give the most progressive campaign in history and 70,000 assholes in three states go "meh... she's not perfect" and hand the vote to the unstable, unqualified racist anyway?

It's an utterly frustrating exercise to watch every four years and I'm just a grunt. I'm honest to god surprised that Dem campaign managers aren't all bald.
posted by Talez at 3:36 PM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

tbh, is anyone actually calling for change in policies? It seems like if anything the "don't piss off WWC voters" angle is more like tweaking some of the messaging and rhetoric being used. There's no one calling for getting rid of a single plank in the social justice platform. And if there is, please let me know.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

It's not clear to me that the number of people who "just don't like Hillary Clinton" for completely irrational reasons isn't considerably larger than the margins of victory for Trump in PA, WI, and MI. So it's possible that doing everything the same would elect a Democratic President if that candidate's name isn't Hillary Clinton. This is, of course, completely unfair bullshit but it does mean that there probably doesn't have to be a fundamental shift.
posted by Justinian at 3:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

tbh, is anyone actually calling for change in policies? It seems like if anything the "don't piss off WWC voters" angle is more like tweaking some of the messaging and rhetoric being used

Dropping "identity politics" is more than a tweak. And Christ, the whole reason we have "planks" for social justice is because people spoke up about what they need, which we are now encouraged not to do lest we offend WWC.
posted by zutalors! at 3:43 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Like no one got anything because they stayed quiet and waited for white men to give it to them, even if they were Democrats.
posted by zutalors! at 3:43 PM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

What does "dropping identity politics" even entail? If it's about not emphasizing those issues when talking to specific audiences that do not care about those issues, while still keeping those issues in the platform, is that dropping identity politics? Or is that just editing the messaging? You can still talk about those issues to the audiences where minority identity politics matter most. And when talking to majority audiences emphasize other policies.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:48 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's definitely been a centrist/right-wing backlash against "identity politics" from people like Mark Lilla, Jonathan Haidt, and so on, but those guys are idiots. The coalition doesn't actually have to be fractured, and indeed shouldn't be fractured, to run a campaign with a more robust economic message. The point is to rebuild the coalition and strengthen it by restoring real enfranchisement everywhere and getting the non-voters next time. Trying to convince Trump voters back to the Democratic camp is a mug's game.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:48 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

tbh, is anyone actually calling for change in policies? It seems like if anything the "don't piss off WWC voters" angle is more like tweaking some of the messaging and rhetoric being used. There's no one calling for getting rid of a single plank in the social justice platform.

The implication in this though is that Democrats have POC votes locked down and therefore don't need to continue tweaking messaging and rhetoric to appeal to more POC. That POC are captive voters, have no where else to turn, and therefore have to accept the crumbs the Democratic party are willing to throw their way. WWC have another party they can vote for whose politicians at least pretend to think that WWC voters are people deserving of equal humanity. They have choices. They can actually vote on issues other than basic humanity. POC voters have a choice between (a) might think I'm a human being and (b) definitely does not think I'm a human being. There are a whole host of issues that POC lefties care about beyond basic humanity, but those are ignored in favor of WWC pet issues, because what are POC going to do, vote for people who think they shouldn't exist?
posted by melissasaurus at 3:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

What does "dropping identity politics" even entail? If it's about not emphasizing those issues when talking to specific audiences that do not care about those issues, while still keeping those issues in the platform, is that dropping identity politics? Or is that just editing the messaging? You can still talk about those issues to the audiences where minority identity politics matter most. And when talking to majority audiences emphasize other policies.

Yes, this is dropping identity politics, not "editing the messaging." If people want to join the Democrats' tent they need to not be offended by our talking about the issues that are important to us, sorry. And some of those are things that apparently offend WWC, like bathrooms.
posted by zutalors! at 3:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Like no one got anything because they stayed quiet and waited for white men to give it to them, even if they were Democrats.

This wouldn't be so infuriating if these people showed up to elections reliably. If there's not episodes of American President™ (Tuesdays @ 9/8C on NBC) running only white people show up and even then it's a giant hassle.
posted by Talez at 3:53 PM on December 1, 2016

But if those policies are still in the platform, how is that dropping identity politics?
posted by Apocryphon at 3:53 PM on December 1, 2016

duders, they will not stay in the platform if people don't talk about them or only talk about them at the Asian American Leadership Conference.
posted by zutalors! at 3:54 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Like no one got anything because they stayed quiet and waited for white men to give it to them, even if they were Democrats.

This wouldn't be so infuriating if these people showed up to elections reliably.

What people?
posted by zutalors! at 3:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Identity politics is code for dropping stuff that makes white men uncomfortable. White people play identity politics all the time, it's what elected Trump. And even the term is bullshit. Racism is economics, sexism is economics. Racism's function is to create a permanent economic and social underclass to benefit whites. Sexism's function is to create a permanent economic and social underclass that benefits men.

You know what I call politics about economic and social standing? Politics. Identity politics is a fucking bullshit dismissive term.
posted by chris24 at 3:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [65 favorites]

Ah, so previously, when people accused Clinton of de-emphasizing economic issues during the campaign, even though they were still on her website, there was cause to fear that because she didn't talk about them as much, they would have disappeared from the platform?
posted by Apocryphon at 3:56 PM on December 1, 2016

What people?

The single most reliable voting bloc is black women, for example.
posted by Justinian at 3:57 PM on December 1, 2016 [19 favorites]

A discussion of economic issues without a discussion of racism and sexism is incomplete and factually wrong. A discussion of racism and sexism is inherently a discussion about economic issues.
posted by melissasaurus at 3:58 PM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

The single most reliable voting bloc is black women, for example.

Not in mid terms. Not in off-year gubernatorial.

Texas would be deep blue if Latinx people showed up at the same rate as white people. Not even more, same rate.
posted by Talez at 4:00 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Bruh, if we're gonna talk about tweaking messaging, maybe you shouldn't refer to minorities as "these people".

Sorry, there's gotta be a better way to refer to !WWC (maybe I should use that). I stand corrected.
posted by Talez at 4:01 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ah, so previously, when people accused Clinton of de-emphasizing economic issues during the campaign, even though they were still on her website, there was cause to fear that because she didn't talk about them as much, they would have disappeared from the platform?

I find it hard to see this as genuine given how much time you've spent in these threads admitting you didn't pay attention to Clinton's policies.
posted by zutalors! at 4:01 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I've posted a bunch about the turnout disparity between Hispanic and white voters so that is quite true.
posted by Justinian at 4:02 PM on December 1, 2016

Trump has the best people, the best. Medical examiner 'threatened' by Clarke over jail deaths

Brian Peterson, Milwaukee County chief medical examiner, said Thursday that the sheriff called him on Oct. 28 and "verbally pummeled" and "threatened" him over information that Peterson's office made public regarding the deaths of two inmates at the jail earlier this year. Peterson said his office followed appropriate protocol in the cases cited by the sheriff.

Even so, Clarke said he would be contacting the state Medical Examining Board to have Peterson sanctioned or his license revoked.

"I haven't been talked to like that since I was probably 5," Peterson said in an interview
...
This is not the first time that Clarke has lost his temper on the job. He once berated a 911 dispatcher for not being professional, threatened to arrest the new House of Correction chief and called a sergeant a "terrorist" and "cancer" in a two-hour, expletive-filled rant on the day after the deadly accident at O'Donnell Park's parking garage.

posted by zachlipton at 4:03 PM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Some people would consider equal pay "identity politics" but to me it is very much "economic issues."
posted by zutalors! at 4:04 PM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

All politics is identify politics. When people say we shouldn't talk about identity politics they mean we should concentrate on white identity politics. It's part of white people being, historically, the default assumption.
posted by Justinian at 4:06 PM on December 1, 2016 [52 favorites]

Also if a candidate says one thing in a televised debate but another thing to the NAACP they'll be accused of "special interests" even in this fantasy world where white Democrats secretly work toward equality while totally not talking about it in front of WWC.
posted by zutalors! at 4:09 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

The main things that affect women's economic standing are race, pregnancy/childrearing, and domestic violence. These are apparently "identity politics" though, so I guess I should STFU so we can talk about "economic inequality."
posted by melissasaurus at 4:11 PM on December 1, 2016 [33 favorites]

This is Trump speaking at Carrier today and it's crazy

I'll never forget about a week ago I was watching the nightly news—I won't say which one because I don't want to give them credit because I don't like them much. I'll be honest, I don't like them, not even a little bit. But they were doing a story on Carrier and I say, “Wow, that's something, I want to see that.” And they had a gentleman worker, great guy, handsome guy, he was on, and it was like he didn't even know they were leaving. He said something to the effect, “No, we're not leaving because Donald Trump promised us that we're not leaving.” And I never thought I made that promise; not with Carrier—I made it for everybody else. I didn't make it really for Carrier, and I said, “What's he saying?”

He was such a believer, he was such a great guy. He said, “I've been with Donald Trump from the beginning and he made the statement that Carrier's not going anywhere, they're not leaving.” And I'm saying to myself, man. And then they played my statement, and I said, “Carrier will never leave.” But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in because they made the decision a year and a half ago. But he believed that that was—and I could understand it; I actually said [it]—when they played that I said I did make it but I didn't mean it quite that way. So now because of him, whoever that guy was, is he in the room, by any chance? That's your son? Stand up, you did a good job. … Well, your son is great.

He's literally describing how surprised he were that people bought what he was selling and now he's expected to deliver on it.
posted by zachlipton at 4:23 PM on December 1, 2016 [43 favorites]

Maybe undocumented immigrants just need to go on TV and say "I know Donald Trump won't deport us. He's a great guy, I've been with him from the beginning." and that'll be all it'll take.
""
posted by zutalors! at 4:27 PM on December 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

I said, “Carrier will never leave.” But that was a euphemism.

Man this just keeps getting better*

*absurd and awful
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:29 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I said, “Carrier will never leave.” But that was a euphemism.

I give Trump credit for his ability to misuse a word in a way that's more truthful than what he actually intended to say. "Carrier will never leave" is a euphemism, all right—for "Fuck you, little people who pay taxes."
posted by Rykey at 4:35 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Some of the rhetoric about changing the Dems' focus on identity politics isn't at all about reducing the coalition's support the identity groups in question. It's more "can we look at the research on what approaches lessen prejudice and what approaches heighten it, and then encourage the 'lessening' things and discourage the 'paradoxically-heightening' things?"
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 4:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Shouting match erupts between Clinton and Trump aides

The extraordinary exchange came at a postmortem session sponsored by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where top operatives from both campaigns sat across a conference table from each other.
...
“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” she said. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, fumed: “Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?”

“You did, Kellyanne. You did,” interjected Palmieri, who choked up at various points of the session.

Politico also has a story on the event, Clinton and Trump strategists still throwing punches
posted by zachlipton at 4:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [26 favorites]

@SopanDeb "Lock her up!" chants ringing out at the Cinci Trump rally.

It's as though the election never happened. In fact the playlist is the exact same songs that were played at his pre-election rallies. And it is running late as usual. It was supposed to start at 7:00 but it has been pushed back to 7:45. I'm very curious to see what he talks about because he can't talk about how terrible Hillary Clinton is, he can't talk about draining the swamp, and he can't tell people that they have to get up off their death beds to vote for him.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:43 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Clinton and Trump strategists still throwing punches

ugh these headlines.
posted by zutalors! at 4:46 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Read on for Lewandowski complaining that the press took everything Trump said literally.
posted by zachlipton at 4:47 PM on December 1, 2016

From the "Shouting Match" article at WaPo

The strangest criticism of the media, however, was by Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

His complaint: Journalists accurately reported what Trump said.

“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

OK so Cory evidently goes to bars and tells a lot lies. I'm guessing he tells women things like he has an amazing cock and maybe the facts don't back him up. Also this idea that the American People did not take DJT literally? I imagine many people took him literally on things they wanted to believe-- like he wouldn't touch MediCare or he would build a giant wall. You would probably have to ask each and every voter separately to find out exactly which things they believed and which things they thought he was bloviating about. Donald Trump, human Rorschach Test.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:53 PM on December 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

This rally is disgusting. It's not a thank you tour. It's figuring out where best to hold his annual Reichsparteitag.
posted by Talez at 4:54 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

So Trump just said, "there is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. we pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag. [USA chants]...America first."

Boy that does that sum up "fuck the world" as a philosophy.
posted by zachlipton at 4:57 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

@anniekarni The intro speakers at this "thank you" rally sound like they are speaking more at a "everyone was wrong and we were right" rally.

One of the comments: Make America Gloat Again
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:58 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

@AnneHelen: Pence on Ohio State: "in just 50 days, we'll have a president who suspends immigration from all countries compromised by Islamic radicalism"

What does that mean, exactly? I just ... I can imagine what this is going to turn into, and it scares me.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:00 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

"People are constantly telling me and telling you to reduce our expectations. Those people are fools, they're fools. But this campaign proved that the old rules no longer apply, and anything we want for our country is now possible."

Just how many people are telling him he's not a king and he's calling them fools?
posted by zachlipton at 5:04 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Now he's got the audience booing and shouting the press and is mocking "a major anchor who hosted the debate" who "started crying when she realized that we won, tears." I'm sick here.
posted by zachlipton at 5:08 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

He's making fun of our McMuffin now!!
posted by Arbac at 5:09 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

He's gone totally off script to gloat.
posted by zachlipton at 5:10 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Finally, post election he can be more open about his contempt for over half the electorate.
posted by jaduncan at 5:12 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Yeah I have to stop watching this for my sanity.
posted by Talez at 5:12 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

So Trump just said, 'there is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. we pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag. [USA chants]...America first.'

Except for Mike Pence. America doesn't even make his top three: "I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order."
posted by kirkaracha at 5:12 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

His Trump USA Thank You Tour 2016 is only going to states that voted for him. Everyone else gets the Trump USA Fuck You Tour.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

After jokingly getting everyone in the room to promise not to tell anyone, he's announcing "Mad Dog Mattis" as SecDef, "but we're not announcing it til Monday so don't tell anybody."
posted by zachlipton at 5:18 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's the authoritarian leader talking nationalistically about the primacy of the country's flag and making his political opponents cry to a rally of supporters at a time where the leader isn't running for any election.

This is, as they say, fine.
posted by jaduncan at 5:20 PM on December 1, 2016 [22 favorites]

I'm a volunteer observer for the Michigan re-count and I just wanted to let you guys know that Trump filed a stay so the recount has now been postponed until Dec. 7 (it was supposed to start tomorrow). The deadline for completing it is still Dec. 13. An article about it is here. I feel pretty sick about it.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 5:21 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Hm. Trump has filed an objection to the Michigan recount: Michigan's "voters should not risk having the Electoral College door knocked off its hinges all because a 1% candidate is dissatisfied with the election’s outcome," the Trump campaign objection stated.
posted by dilettante at 5:21 PM on December 1, 2016

"We did great with women, can you believe it?" He seems sort of surprised himself.
posted by zachlipton at 5:21 PM on December 1, 2016

He's back on "there should be consequences" for flag burning.
posted by zachlipton at 5:24 PM on December 1, 2016

knocked off its hinges all because a 1% candidate is dissatisfied with the election’s outcome

That sounds soooo mature and what does a 1% candidate mean?
posted by futz at 5:25 PM on December 1, 2016

I'm just reading the comments here and I'm terrified of this rally.
posted by armacy at 5:25 PM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

"Hate to tell you, men, generally speaking they're better than you are."
posted by box at 5:28 PM on December 1, 2016

That sounds soooo mature and what does a 1% candidate mean?

He's talking about Stein having won 1% of the vote in Michigan.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:28 PM on December 1, 2016

Its such a weird mix between him lethargically reading the prompter and just random riffing and gloating.

Fascism watch: "For whatever reason, people in uniforms like Trump. I don't know, it's tough to figure that out."

Now he's riffing on how he can say "generally speaking, men, women are better than you are," but he can't say it the other way around.
posted by zachlipton at 5:30 PM on December 1, 2016

Oh, and announcing that he's putting a recently retired general legally barred from running the military in to replace the long tradition of civilian leadership. This will presumably require a specific waiver from the normal legal protections designed to prevent authoritarian rule via excessive military control. This has been followed by boasting about the degree that the military support him.

Luckily, that waiver will come via the same leader's party, who control the Congress and House and are about to appoint a deciding vote Supreme Court judge after unprecedentedly denying the last President the ability to appoint the judge himself against their explicit constitutional duty.

Again, surely nothing to see here.

I refuse to normalise any of this.
posted by jaduncan at 5:32 PM on December 1, 2016 [35 favorites]

"We are all going to have open arms."

Like, in the 2nd Amendment sense?
posted by box at 5:36 PM on December 1, 2016

Calexit. Now.
posted by entropicamericana at 5:38 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Now he's riffing on how he can say "generally speaking, men, women are better than you are," but he can't say it the other way around.


we have elected a small town open-mic comic for president
posted by murphy slaw at 5:39 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Calexit. Now.

Like Scottish independence, California leaving the union would consign everyone else to conservative rule for a generation.
posted by Talez at 5:40 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Mattis for SecDef.

No word on how they'll manage the whole civilian-control-of-DoD question.

Sign that we've got more war in our future.
posted by dis_integration at 5:41 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Calexit

what if we just quietly start building a wall
posted by murphy slaw at 5:41 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Fin. Exit to "You Can't Always Get What You Want," because he's still crazy.
posted by zachlipton at 5:41 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's nothing about this rally that wasn't shameful. Though I don't know why I'd have hoped otherwise, given how shameful his campaign, the Republican primary, and the election results were.

I'd love a running total of how much more time Trump speaks at these fucking rallies versus how many minutes of intelligence briefings he actually sits through. The conservative media spent the past eight years in masturbatory outrage over how many times Obama said "I" in his speeches; surely at least I can have the joy of similar scorn?
posted by mixedmetaphors at 5:43 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Top contender for defense secretary faces legislative hurdle

Section 903(a) of the National Defense Authorization act requires a seven-year wait period between active duty and serving as Secretary of Defense -- a civilian role -- for former service members. Mattis would need a special waiver from Congress, since he retired from the military in 2013.
...
Mattis wouldn't be the first defense secretary to require a congressional waiver. President Harry Truman appointed Gen. George Marshall to the position in 1950, nearly five years after he retired from the Army. Congress granted the waiver (at the time, the interval between active duty and defense secretary service was 10 years).

As was the case with Marshall, a new law would have to be passed by both the House and Senate to enable the appointment of a military officer who had not been out of uniform for seven years.

posted by kirkaracha at 5:47 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

also there is a big chunk of the center of california that would probably hunt refugees for sport, no matter how we vote at the national level
posted by murphy slaw at 5:50 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I don't think that California has any moral duty to shoulder that burden, but there seem to me to be a number of issues with a potential Calexit or indeed with any state seceding from the union, and given the catastrophe we're now facing, I think maybe we should stick to arguing over scenarios that have any possibility of actually happening.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:51 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I guess Iannucci got out at just the right time, because it's all coming true.
posted by Brainy at 5:52 PM on December 1, 2016

It should go without saying at this point, but if you were holding out some kind of hope for a pivot, there is no pivot. Trump is devoid of pivots.
posted by zachlipton at 5:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I was actually interested in seeing where he pointed his hate death ray and he had the crowd booing John Kasich. That's a good sign to me. I prefer a Trump battling the Republicans rather than a Trump battling Democrats.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:56 PM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

My oldest friend isn't speaking to me because I'm "overreacting." Everyone tells me I'm overreacting. I feel like way too many people are vastly underreacting. I want to grab people by the shirt and shout, "Will you get your head in the fucking game?!? We're on the clock here!"
posted by ob1quixote at 5:59 PM on December 1, 2016 [57 favorites]

> Holy crap. Trump spokeswoman: There are no such things as facts

I hope there are thousands of high school kids who read about this and decide to answer every question with "There are no such things as facts." Please, Generation Z or whatever you end up being called, make this a thing.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:04 PM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

There's an interesting twitter thread from @JoyAnnReid starting here

Trump's speech reinforces what this was: an election not about the economy but about restoring a certain cultural meaning to "Americanness."

Which also ties into Pence's remark tonight at the rally: "We will repeal Obamacare and replace it with American solutions." because I guess President Obama is not American.

It is the same old shit and I am getting very tired of it. G.W. Bush did it. Palin did it. Pretended that "real Americans" are a certain group of people living in certain states. Not Hawaiians. Not Californians (although St. Ronnie is from there.) Not New Yorkers (although Trump is from there.) Wyoming. Or Texas. Missouri but probably not Oregon.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:16 PM on December 1, 2016 [47 favorites]

Generation Z or whatever you end up being called

I've been proposing "The Damned" or "The Inheritors of Dust".
posted by murphy slaw at 6:17 PM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Not Californians (although St. Ronnie is from there.)

Reagan got a pass because he was born in Illinois. You can blame California for Nixon, but at least Nixon signed the EPA.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:20 PM on December 1, 2016

I was actually interested in seeing where he pointed his hate death ray and he had the crowd booing John Kasich. That's a good sign to me. I prefer a Trump battling the Republicans rather than a Trump battling Democrats.

One reason why is that the Democrats are currently less relevant than his opposition within the Republican party.

Aside from that, of course it's directed at maintaining control over and deference from the people within his own powerbase (just like many authoritarian leaders, eh?). See the humiliations or limited approval extended to Christie, Romney or Kaisch, for example.

The Democrats have never unacceptably betrayed him, since they were never expected to support him in the first place. That said, I'm not at all sure that it's a good thing if he just dominates the news agenda with bullshit, because he's well and truly demonstrated an ability to have the media take the bait he's offering and just spend all their time talking about Trump until no other agenda is getting news time. TBH, I wonder if sober policy suggestions from the D side of the House and Congress are going to get much coverage at all compared to a random 3am tweet; for better or worse, it was hard to be a bigger show than Trump even before he was also the President.

It's also not like he is going to do much of the work of governing, so he has almost all his time free for random PR/attention grabbing bullshit.
posted by jaduncan at 6:23 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

They're going to need to be reminded in four years what this political thing is.

Every year. There are elections every year and if there's one thing we should copy conservatives on is that all of them matter. Local, state, fed. They all matter and we need to show up every. single. time.
posted by longdaysjourney at 6:27 PM on December 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

I guess I think the Democrats are going to have to fight for relevance, and I doubt Trump wants to elevate them to adversary status rather than nameless 'haters and losers' or such. He understands celebrity and status very well.

I don't think ideas matter in that as much as spectacle; I worry maybe it's a post-policy political world as well as post-fact.
posted by jaduncan at 6:30 PM on December 1, 2016

They're going to need to be reminded in four years what this political thing is.

Every year. There are elections every year and if there's one thing we should copy conservatives on is that all of them matter. Local, state, fed. They all matter and we need to show up every. single. time.

This is taking my earlier comment way, way out of context. I was very specifically talking about Trump voters who voted R because they always do.
posted by zutalors! at 6:32 PM on December 1, 2016

Fuck Tweetstorms

Tweetstorms have been a subject of ridicule for a while now, and yet that doesn’t stop people from cooking them up, eliciting groans every time they add a number to a post. Even the good ones are worthless. I remember any number of tweetstorms from Elizabeth Warren that supposedly ANNIHILATED Donald Trump. Oh yeah, she really sent him home with his tail between his legs. Did they have any effect? No. Of course not. One good tweetstorm has roughly .00001% of the effectiveness of a live Trump rally. It’s proof that, more than ever, people violently overestimate their own words and thoughts. Everybody wants to think their tweeted musings will lead to change in the tangible world, but they never do. Thoughts are NEVER enough. And everybody should know that by now.

So if you wanna write something, write something. Put it together and put it somewhere where people can see it. Knock yourself out. Get yourself off when someone other than a bot makes a comment. And if you wanna tweet something, tweet it. But don’t try to mash the two forms together into some kind of mutant, asshole form of writing that pleases you and only you. I can smell the vanity from a mile away. In fact, it reminds me of both Doctor Strange and the McKinley assassination. Let me expound on that a bit…(1/?)

posted by kirkaracha at 6:34 PM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

My oldest friend isn't speaking to me because I'm "overreacting."

My brother today asked me why we can't be civil and reasonable to Trump supporters and why we can't give Donald Trump a chance. And now I'm questioning whether I'm overreacting.
posted by FJT at 6:39 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Trump's Carrier speech 'absolutely chilling,' economic analyst says

Trump boasted about his deal to keep about 1,100 Carrier jobs in Indiana, and also took aim at other companies who may be thinking about moving jobs out of the country.

"Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. Not going to happen. It's not going to happen, I'll tell you right now," Trump said on Thursday.

Pethokoukis, a scholar with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, called it the worst economic speech since Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale promised to reverse Reaganomics in 1984.
posted by futz at 6:45 PM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Which also ties into Pence's remark tonight at the rally: "We will repeal Obamacare and replace it with American solutions." because I guess President Obama is not American.

The funny thing is that it's hard to think of an approach to healthcare policy more American than Obamacare besides "please die in a ditch." No other country has looked at this problem and come up with something so convoluted, so rooted in a belief that the free market will solve everything, so oriented around crazy tax policy and income levels and phase-outs and eligibility criteria and subsidies and estimating your income and repaying subsidies and re-enrolling and everything else. The ACA really is uniquely American.
posted by zachlipton at 6:48 PM on December 1, 2016 [48 favorites]

We will repeal Obamacare and replace it with American solutions."

The funny thing is that it's hard to think of an approach to healthcare policy more American than Obamacare besides "please die in a ditch."

WELL, GUESS WHAT!
posted by entropicamericana at 6:51 PM on December 1, 2016 [39 favorites]

GOP in talks about helping insurers after ObamaCare repeal

Congressional Republicans are talking to health insurers about ways to prevent a collapse of the insurance market once they pass an ObamaCare repeal bill.

Republicans are planning to pass repeal legislation as soon as January, but plan to delay it from taking effect for a few years to avoid immediate disruption in people’s coverage. The delay would also buy them time to come up with a replacement.

But industry officials and healthcare experts are warning that insurers might bail out of the system altogether once a repeal bill passes, particularly since many of them have been losing millions of dollars on ObamaCare plans.

Insurance companies are clearly freaking out and will probably pull out of the exchanges as soon as possible if they fear a death spiral coming as a result of a repeal. So now they're talking about bailing out the insurers so some people can still have insurance before they get cut off after the repeal actually takes effect. This is madness.
posted by zachlipton at 6:52 PM on December 1, 2016 [24 favorites]

They really ought to pass a bill allowing the insurers to pay doctors in chickens and firewood. Just like in Granddad's day!
posted by thelonius at 6:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

My brother today asked me why we can't be civil and reasonable to Trump supporters and why we can't give Donald Trump a chance. And now I'm questioning whether I'm overreacting.

They voted for an authoritarian racist who said that he wants to torture again, kill the innocent families of terroristss (said 'terrorists' not having been convicted) ban people from Islamic countries from travelling to the US, build a wall to keep out Mexican migrants/rapists, who boasted about a history of sexual assault, claims he will start breaking WTO rules and economic sanity by imposing a 35% tax on imports, who doesn't have a basic understanding of the consitution or government, has already attacked the validity of the election with allegation of 'millions' of illegal votes, who has appointed a white supremacist to an extremely senior post, has seen a massive increase in hate crimes and open racism, and who ignores or actively attacks many functions or safeguards of government. Oh, and who has been called a massively frequent liar by his own lawyers whilst they were under oath, as well as being deplorable enough that large numbers of his own party withdrew their own endorsement of him for president.

Oh, and he's said he will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, something which threatens millions of deaths at the minimum if carbon emissions start to rise again.

If 10% of his promises are fulfilled it will be quite remarkably terrible, and the risk is high given that he's got the House and Senate. I don't know, anyone else want to fill in stuff I've missed?
posted by jaduncan at 6:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [42 favorites]

> "Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. Not going to happen. It's not going to happen, I'll tell you right now," Trump said on Thursday.

Pethokoukis, a scholar with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, called it the worst economic speech since Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale promised to reverse Reaganomics in 1984.

Does this guy actually believe those "consequences" are going to be negative after watching Carrier shake down the government over a measly 800 jobs? How long before Apple and Exxon shareholders demand that those companies see what kind of deal they can get?
posted by tonycpsu at 6:55 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

My brother today asked me why we can't be civil and reasonable to Trump supporters and why we can't give Donald Trump a chance. And now I'm questioning whether I'm overreacting.

On the subject of brothers, mine reacted very badly to my contention that Steve Bannon is a literal Nazi, going off on a long rant about the fact-free media (he has a personal grudge from his own career as a political staffer). He essentially demanded, over the diner table, that I produce references for Bannon saying 'I am a Nazi'. His feeling was that the media were unfairly demonising Bannon. It was a tense dinner.

I really didn't think that Bannon being a Nazi was a subject that was going to cause contention. But I sent him an email full of references, based around Shaun King's excellent takedown of Bannon. He hasn't responded.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 7:02 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

The new purple map is here!

The green parts of Utah are sure weird looking.
posted by bukvich at 7:03 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

she didn't talk about them as much

I know, right? She just kept going on about emails and not releasing taxes and walking in on naked people. Kind of a weird platform, if ya think about it.
posted by petebest at 7:04 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

He's back on "there should be consequences" for flag burning.

It's a good bet that the Prez-elect also thinks their should be serious consequences for insulting the President. Look for that to be criminalized in the next couple of years.
posted by puddledork at 7:05 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

why we can't give Donald Trump a chance. And now I'm questioning whether I'm overreacting.


Just one last thing. Literally the best case is that he has lied throughout the entire campaign about what he plans to do. The bad future is if he was telling the truth. I find it hard to be entirely relaxed about the idea that he doesn't mean it just because that normalises the situation, even though I can completely understand that people who voted for him heavily want to believe that. If they didn't, they'd literally have voted for the killing of entire families just based on the fact that one of the family is suspected of a crime, amongst many other things as listed above.

It reminds me of climate change. People seem to have a weird belief that nothing will ever really fundamentally change the status quo, even when the evidence clearly suggests that is utter bollocks.
posted by jaduncan at 7:11 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

$1,000,000 is a ton of money, but if you're retired and living off of it at a "safe" rate of 3.5%, that's... $35,000 a year. Which sure isn't nothing, but it's also not going to support the lifestyle one thinks of going along with the word "millionaire"!

You are forgetting a very important Democratic social program called Social Security. In addition to the $35,000 per year you project, the average retiree receives $15,000 from Social Security for a total of $50,000 per year. And if you have a spouse, even if they never worked, they receive an additional $7500 per year for a total of $57,500 per year. And Medicare to help with medical expenses.

Not exactly rolling in clover but living a comfortable retirement thanks to Social Security and Medicare -- which Paul Ryan wants to gut.
posted by JackFlash at 7:12 PM on December 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

Ah, so previously, when people accused Clinton of de-emphasizing economic issues during the campaign, even though they were still on her website, there was cause to fear that because she didn't talk about them as much, they would have disappeared from the platform?

It was never really about Clinton de-emphasizing economic issues if you actually listened to the words that came out of her mouth. She talked about economic issues quite a bit. It was right there in her acceptance speech at the DNC: "My primary mission as President will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States..."

But her policy proposals and stump speech got effectively zero press coverage, as reporters viewed her as an inevitable winner and sought almost exclusively to do coverage about her rather than on her. Meanwhile, the TV networks would just slap up a live shot of anytime Trump opened his mouth and let him blather on about whatever he wanted. They heaped praise on him for his half-baked one-page childcare plan (with no details on how he'd pay for it) and largely ignored Clinton's detailed plan because it was effectively ancient history by the time the general rolled around. There was some good detailed reporting on Clinton's policies and agenda, but it got almost zero attention compared to emails and the Foundation and "what will that zany Trump say next?" Trump's messages were transmitted pretty much unaltered; hers were frequently ignored unless she was attacking Trump.

She was shouting economic messages from the rooftops the whole campaign, but the megaphone was broken. Tactically, it was clearly a mistake for her campaign to not figure out a way for her to get that message out more directly, nor could her economic plan ever compete with Trump's fantasyland plan of magic GDP growth and jobs as far as the eye can see, but it really was a cornerstone of her campaign.
posted by zachlipton at 7:19 PM on December 1, 2016 [60 favorites]

The government giving money to private companies to give money to health providers? Seems like the republicans have definitely got a handle on this no-waste cut-out-the-middleman thing they're so enamored of

You've almost got it. The plan here would be the government giving money to private companies so that they will still be willing to take our money and give it to health providers (after extracting a hefty cut for themselves) for another year or two, after which they won't. The problem apparently is that the repeal of Obamacare would cause people to lose their insurance too quickly (causing people to lose their insurance being the entire point of the exercise) and therefore we must pay off the insurers so people only lose their insurance at the appropriate time.

I need a drink.
posted by zachlipton at 7:22 PM on December 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Thank god the long national nightmare of a public option was defeated.
posted by jaduncan at 7:25 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

a new law would have to be passed by both the House and Senate to enable the appointment of a military officer who had not been out of uniform for seven years
Here's what the resistance looks like: We block f'n EVERYTHING
posted by j_curiouser at 7:28 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Pethokoukis, a scholar with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, called it the worst economic speech since Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale promised to reverse Reaganomics in 1984.

Except that it wasn't a speech. Like every other fucking thing Trump says, it was just some ranty pandering one-liners in a rambling collection of non sequiturs with no bigger design than to get cheers straight from the ids of the assembled mouth-breathing fans.
posted by FelliniBlank at 7:29 PM on December 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Donald Trump, the future president of the United States, scotch tapes the back of his tie to the front. (photo inside)

I'm pretty sure if he tied that tie properly, the little loop there would be capable of doing its job.
posted by zachlipton at 7:46 PM on December 1, 2016 [24 favorites]

Honestly, back when the ACA was first put forward, I immediately thought "people who make too much for the subsidy but under about $100,000 are going to be hurting, because they'll get hit with needing to pay $8000 - $10 000 out of pocket for insurance".

And exactly what was different for people without employer insurance before Obamacare? They were already paying those same high rates for insurance in the public market. Obamacare now provides subsidies for those with lower incomes. And before Obamacare, 20% of people couldn't buy insurance at all because of pre-existing conditions. Or else they were forced into very expensive high risk pools.

Compare that to an employer subsidized plan - even an expensive one isn't going to run you more than $3600 or so before taxes for one person.

Perhaps you are only talking about the premiums that employees pay, but $3600 isn't anywhere near the real cost of employer health insurance. The cost of the average employer plan for an individual is $7000 and for a family $18,000. So if you are paying less than that in the Obamacare market, you are getting a bargain.

The reason that Obamacare plans have such narrow provider networks is because most families don't want to spend $18,000 a year for the equivalent of an employer plan. They want a more economical plan and that means screening out high cost providers.

Obamacare could be better, but that means more taxes. Obamacare, even in its present form, is vastly better than without Obamacare.
posted by JackFlash at 7:51 PM on December 1, 2016 [25 favorites]

Donald Trump, the future president of the United States, scotch tapes the back of his tie to the front.

He has another piece holding down his double chin and some double-sided tape holding his hair down.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:52 PM on December 1, 2016

JackFlash: to be fair, people without employer insurance who make too much for subsides didn't have the individual mandate before Obamacare, and some of them went uninsured and spent the money on something else.

On the whole, it's a net positive (and it's also slowed the growth in costs), especially if having health insurance is important to you, and insurance for pre-existing conditions is a huge deal for many people who aren't eligible for subsides, but there are certainly some people who now have to pay up when they would have rather gone uninsured and got no help to do so, and some of them will be resentful.

That said, the vast majority of those complaining about Obamacare were either helped by it or utterly unimpacted.
posted by zachlipton at 7:59 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

That said, the vast majority of those complaining about Obamacare were either helped by it or utterly unimpacted.

My large family includes a wide spectrum of personal finance situations, from a 10%er financial consultant to on-again-off-again unemployed/homeless siblings. My diabetic brother, very little money, between jobs, avoided the Obamacare exchanges because of all the crap the healthy upper financial tier talked about it.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:10 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

That said, the vast majority of those complaining about Obamacare were either helped by it or utterly unimpacted.

And that really is the bottom line. If you weren't buying insurance in the private market before 2014, then you have no idea what most people without employer insurance faced. Their situation is now much improved.

80% of people either have employer insurance or government Medicare or Medicaid and weren't affected by Obamacare at all. The fury over Obamacare was an entirely Republican invention.
posted by JackFlash at 8:13 PM on December 1, 2016 [26 favorites]

Jewish Groups and Unions Grow Uneasy With Keith Ellison
posted by futz at 8:15 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

a new law would have to be passed by both the House and Senate to enable the appointment of a military officer who had not been out of uniform for seven years
Here's what the resistance looks like: We block f'n EVERYTHING

Sun Tzu advised long ago to pick one's battles with care, and to lay siege only as a last resort.

Mattis is sane.

Do you really want to have a second look at the alternates for SecDef in Trump's lineup?

Mattis is sane. The other candidates, not so much.

If we want civilization to survive, we have to have sane persons for SecDef, State, and Treasurer.

If Trump proposes someone sane for these posts, then FFS approve them.
posted by ocschwar at 8:19 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

His Trump USA Thank You Tour 2016 is only going to states that voted for him. Everyone else gets the Trump USA Fuck You Tour.

Worth noting that Cincinnati was probably picked for strategic reasons (easy to get to from Indiana, Kentucky, and the exurban counties surrounding Cincinnati that went for Trump).

However, Hamilton County (where Cincinnati is located) went hard for Clinton, and Trump lost here by 9 points. This is in a county that in 2000 and 2004, voted for Bush.
posted by mostly vowels at 8:21 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

If you didn't (or couldn't) watch the rally, this bit of the transcript is the peakest of Peak Trump and will give you an idea of the gloating.
posted by zachlipton at 8:28 PM on December 1, 2016

After Trump ranted about the press, the crowd booed the assembled press corps and then went into an extended chant of "fake news".
posted by zachlipton at 8:32 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mrs. Wallflower suggested the perfect Secret Service code name for Trump: Tweety Bird.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:32 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

Oh good grief. Russia accuses Ukraine of sabotaging Trump

A spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday contended that the Ukrainian government over the summer damaged Trump’s campaign by implicating his then-campaign chief Paul Manafort in a corruption scandal involving a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party funded by oligarchs.

“Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump’s election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs,” Maria Zakharova said at a press briefing, according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry’s website. “All of you have heard this remarkable story,” she told assembled reporters.

As Josh Marshall puts it, "Putin basically mocking us at this point."
posted by zachlipton at 8:36 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

NYT: Trump’s Business Empire Isn’t Just an Ethical Disaster (it's a huge security risk)

A building branded with the name of an American president — any president, but perhaps especially Mr. Trump — would be a tempting target for terrorists and other enemies of the United States. Who is going to protect the buildings? Will the Trump organization hire a security firm to do the job, or will the American taxpayer be on the line for the bill?

...Then there is the litigation risk. In Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that the president can be sued in his personal capacity and required to testify in depositions and at trial. Sexual misconduct is a litigation magnet; extensive business operations are another.

...Finally, there are the broader policy issues. How can we expect a Trump administration to rein in loose lending practices, particularly in the real estate sector, when the president himself owes hundreds of millions of dollars to banks? What will he do when a foreign dictator acts up in a country where there is a Trump hotel? The American people should not have to worry about those conflicts of interest — and neither should President Trump.

posted by triggerfinger at 9:08 PM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

The WSJ is less than pleased with Trump’s Carrier Shakedown, as it sort of goes against everything they stand for:

Like the Nixon Administration, Donald Trump’s unpredictable, non-ideological policy-making will sometimes be disorienting for those who claim to believe in free markets. Some conservatives will be tempted to tolerate bad policies that appear to be popular that they’d never accept from President Obama. Many Republicans stayed silent or supported Nixon as he imposed wage-and-price controls and created the EPA, only to regret it later. They shouldn’t make the same mistake with Mr. Trump.

posted by zachlipton at 9:20 PM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Trump’s Breezy Calls to World Leaders Leave Diplomats Aghast

“By taking such a cavalier attitude to these calls, he’s encouraging people not to take him seriously,” said Daniel F. Feldman, a former special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. “He’s made himself not only a bull in a china shop, but a bull in a nuclear china shop.”

Includes some remarkably candid comments from the White House today encouraging Trump to take advantage of the State Department, along with more on that insane readout of the call with Pakistan's PM yesterday.
posted by zachlipton at 9:25 PM on December 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

I'm glad to see that Trump had grabbed the "shittiest president ever" ring right out of the gate.
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:31 PM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

Boy that https://trumpgrets.tumblr.com/... And only two months before inauguration. I want to tell these regretters that if they got fooled by one of the most obvious con men in a century, we're talking a PT Barnum level con job, they should just not participate in an election until they go get themselves a bit of edumacation. Not more TV news, but sign up at a community college and take a political philosophy course that will cover a few of Plato's Republic, the Prince, Hobbes, de Tocqueville, Marx, some Federalist papers or classic US SC cases. Really. Maybe not the full books, just key passages. Not to convert them from R to D -- there were plenty of young conservatives back then who found justification in their beliefs and made successful careers for themselves (hi Tony), but to understand what a government is for, and why we've decided that the best form of government allows the sort of people who think it's okay to yell "lock her up" at election rallies to participate in determining the future of the country.

Of course I'm in a bubble, and have no way of relaying this message to them. Plus the other problem that these are the same folks who started electing people who shuttered colleges or made them too expensive for a working person to afford a luxury course that covers the foundations of our civilization.

I used to think of politicians like Santorum pulling up the ladder. But after reading most of this thread, I've moved over to looking at it as citizen abusers who are electing the folks to destroy the ladders on their behalf. Thomas Frank is wrong–they're definitely voting in their interests.
posted by morspin at 9:46 PM on December 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

Are there a lot of people who believe the recount will swing the election? Those people should stop being like H.A. Goodman.

Unfortunately, yes. I think it's really sucked the momentum out of the Trump Resistance (for lack of a better collective term), actually. I've been helping run a FB group of activists against Trump and ever since the recount stuff there's been this really drop in commitment. (Not to mention a lot of infighting about whether the recount is a good thing or not, because hi, we're the left.) I think there are a lot of people who are still in denial and the recount is their Deus Ex Machina that's going to save them at the last possible minute.

And a lot of people are just sort of holding their breath maybe not really thinking it'll work, but hey, IT MIGHT, and therefore aren't throwing themselves at organizing like they were in the first couple of weeks. Personally, I gave up hope sometime in the wee hours of Nov 9th and decided I was going to make that fucker fight for every single inch so I'm working on that as best I can and hoping people get over the denial and bargaining stages pretty soon.

(It's a secret FB group, and a lot of Mefites already friended me for an invite, but you can do so if you wish. Especially if you'd like to help organize cause we have 10 mods and I'm pretty much the only one doing anything.)
posted by threeturtles at 10:17 PM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

I've moved over to looking at it as citizen abusers who are electing the folks to destroy the ladders on their behalf.

I'be been there for a while. It's the kind of mental hardness where if we survive this, I feel entitled to a personally-addressed written apology from everybody who voted for him, even if some of those apologies are written in crayon.

If we survive this.
posted by holgate at 10:17 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

If you didn't (or couldn't) watch the rally, this bit of the transcript is the peakest of Peak Trump and will give you an idea of the gloating.

How the fuck are we supposed to read that? Does it exists as text, and not a picture of text?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:28 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sorry, 2016 is apparently also the year we gave up on accessible text and decided images of text were an acceptable way to communicate. If you click on the images, they get bigger, which still doesn't help you if you, say use a screen reader. I searched for a transcript but haven't been able to find one yet.
posted by zachlipton at 11:24 PM on December 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

My brother today asked me why we can't be civil and reasonable to Trump supporters and why we can't give Donald Trump a chance. And now I'm questioning whether I'm overreacting.

Gaslighting 101.
posted by mikelieman at 11:45 PM on December 1, 2016 [25 favorites]

Sorry, 2016 is apparently also the year we gave up on accessible text and decided images of text were an acceptable way to communicate.

Some of the more interesting online election threads I've encountered are on sports forums, because they're some of the few places I've found where both sides are continually duking it out. I can confirm, lately a lot of the Trump faction memes have been photocopies of strange looking 'news' releases, always with the BREAKING! BREAKING!

A lot of them are tilted sideways, so you have to cock your head to read them. I'm not entirely unconvinced they're working on pulling in the dog vote.
posted by mannequito at 12:13 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Holy crap... just now watching a Late Show episode from the beginning of October, and I hadn't seen the clip of Trump telling his followers that he doesn't care how incapacitated by illness they are, that even the mortally ill need to make sure that they last until November 8th to vote for him. And then he immediately caved on Ryanizing Medicare after the election, within hours.
posted by XMLicious at 1:11 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Holy crap.

Reality-TV gameshow host rulz!
posted by Mister Bijou at 1:32 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm not entirely unconvinced they're working on pulling in the dog vote.

Make America Crate Again
posted by tivalasvegas at 1:33 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

I always knew I had a mean streak, but I was surprised at how just vicious I got at the CNN video w/ the Trump supporters who were all Obama said illegals can vote google it *here's the truth* I'm going to repeat the same thing. I was just like you have the sweetest, most punchable face, Trump lady.

It's like, she should be collecting figurines. Instead, she's getting national attention for being dumb as a sack of hammers. Nobody should want to punch her in the face, but then she's promoting the rise of fascism, so IDK.
posted by angrycat at 3:25 AM on December 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

Jesus Christ, whenever I hear Trump say "America First" I can hear echoes of "Deutschland über Alles", and as a German that chills me to the bone. This man might be a bumbling fool, but the ideology he allows to flourish is very, very, very dangerous.
posted by PontifexPrimus at 3:50 AM on December 2, 2016 [21 favorites]

I was just like you have the sweetest, most punchable face, Trump lady.

I was with you until tonycpsu posted this. She's a professional Republican - she probably isn't even saying what she believes, just what she got from the latest talking points. The real anger should be directed as CNN for helping spread fake news by giving her a forum as if it's what real people think. No Trump voter is watching that and saying "that lady is ignorant and just got pwned by the journalist." They are seeing someone "finally telling the truth," and the moderator (sorry I won't watch again to get her name) can't accept it so she reads the MSM version of the story.

It's giving more credence to the fake, provably-incorrect viewpoint by letting it have an audience in the first place.

Meanwhile the media is still covering Trump in the exact same way they did during the campaign. They have learned nothing. Showing both sides, when one side is just plain lying, is not journalism.
posted by Mchelly at 3:51 AM on December 2, 2016 [35 favorites]

The real anger should be directed as CNN for helping spread fake news by giving her a forum as if it's what real people think.

Agreed. And something I've spent more than half the millennium saying. But no more. Corporate news is such a cesspit.

Prior to Nov 9 I was happy enough to share CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, and other links. These days I can't even watch TDS clips. Unless the media (incl. news media) moves to open revolt, the alternative is same old same old. ("Are Trump's supporters racist idiots? Some say maybe not.") And with Trump that's gotta be devastating.
posted by petebest at 4:39 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

A small, yet tasty, crumb of comfort from the UK - we had a parliamentary by-election here yesterday in south-west London. The sitting MP, Tory Brexitier Zac Goldsmith, had resigned when the Government decided to allow the expansion of nearby Heathrow Airport (very, very long story...). He'd been elected twice on his promise of opposition, and had said that he'd recontest the seat if that decision happened.

There was a swing of 20 percent against him to the Liberal Democrats, and his previous majority of around 23000 turned into a deficit of a couple of thousand - he lost, and the centrist Remain Lib-Dems won. They are the only unambiguously pro-EU party in England.

It's not very significant, at least not yet - Richmond was the most pro-Remain region in England at the referendum, and when he made his promise, Zac G had expected to fight on the airport issue. But the Lib-Dem candidate was also anti Heathrow expansion, and she instead made it a Brexit fight. Also, although Goldsmith also resigned from the Tory party and stood as an independent, neither the Tories nor UKIP stood against him. (Which was sensible - UKIP hadn't a chance, and any Tory candidate would have split the vote and handed it to the Lib-Dems on a plate.)

Labout barely registered, getting less than 2000 votes in total. Before the Lib-Dems disgraced themselves in coalition with the Tories (and lost all but eight seats as a result), Richmond had been traditionally Lib-Dem,

So even now, the Lib-Dems only have nine MPs (down from 57 in 2010), However, the Tory majority in Parliament is now just thirteen, and there are other seats (including Theresa May's own) which would be very vulnerable to a Lib-Dem swing of any magnitude, so the immediate impact of this result will probably come in any calculations of when to call a new general election (although that too is complicated due to new fixed-term rules, but these are fairly porous).

In short - it's not much of a victory, but it looks great and right now, I will happily take it.
posted by Devonian at 5:08 AM on December 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

Well, this article is disturbing: No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design.

It makes no mention of the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, which was introduced back in September by my Senator Ed Markey in the Senate, and Ted Lieu in the House. I wonder if there's any hope of resurrecting it?
posted by galaxy rise at 5:13 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Jewish Groups and Unions Grow Uneasy With Keith Ellison

I don't know if Keith Ellison is the best person for the job -- I'm partial to Howard Dean, simply because the party needs to be rebuilt, and he's rebuilt the party before -- but I'd hope ostensibly left or liberal voices could find reasons to oppose Ellison other than him being a Muslim.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:36 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

U.S. Unemployment Rate—

Nov 2010: 9.8%
Nov 2011: 8.6%
Nov 2012: 7.7%
Nov 2013: 6.9%
Nov 2014: 5.8%
Nov 2015: 5.0%
Nov 2016: 4.6%
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 5:51 AM on December 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

thanks obama
posted by entropicamericana at 5:52 AM on December 2, 2016 [36 favorites]

I was with you until tonycpsu posted this. She's a professional Republican - she probably isn't even saying what she believes, just what she got from the latest talking points.

To be fair, everyone in New Hampshire might as well be an elected representative. Their state legislature is big enough.
posted by Talez at 6:03 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Jewish groups aren't opposing Ellison because he's a Muslim. They're opposing him because of his defense of openly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and for using the term Zionist as a slur. He's apologized for the defense, but his sincerity about it is in question based on other statements he's made.

I'd appreciate not promulgating a 'Jews hate Muslims' storyline - we're getting hit hard enough from the right right now, thanks. I'd rather stick with Stronger Together.
posted by Mchelly at 6:07 AM on December 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

Jesus Christ, whenever I hear Trump say "America First" I can hear echoes of "Deutschland über Alles", and as a German that chills me to the bone. This man might be a bumbling fool, but the ideology he allows to flourish is very, very, very dangerous.

It's almost worse; it's our own echoes. America First was literally the name of an anti-semitic group prior to WW2, and Trump knows it.
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 6:08 AM on December 2, 2016 [16 favorites]

> thanks obama
Unemployment is one thing. There's more.
posted by farlukar at 6:09 AM on December 2, 2016

Jewish groups aren't opposing Ellison because he's a Muslim. They're opposing him because of his defense of openly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and for using the term Zionist as a slur. He's apologized for the defense, but his sincerity about it is in question based on other statements he's made.

The other statements he made were simply less pro-Israel than the American average. There are many reasons to be thinking that we need to be considerate of other countries in the mideast without being antisemitic, ffs. I'm really sick of this conflation of Israel and all Jews in American politics.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:21 AM on December 2, 2016 [13 favorites]

Top contender for defense secretary faces legislative hurdle

If there is one thing my 40 or so years of following American politics has taught me it is that laws are meaningless and irrelevant when there is no will to enforce them.
posted by srboisvert at 6:22 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Ranking Member Cohen Introduces Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to Eliminate the Electoral College

It won't go anywhere, of course, but it's good to see some action and maybe conversation around it.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 6:23 AM on December 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

The other statements he made were simply less pro-Israel than the American average.

Yeah, I think this is the biggest issue.
posted by zutalors! at 6:23 AM on December 2, 2016

I am so fucking tired of "Jewish groups" acting as if they speak for Jewish Americans. As a Jewish American and an active Democrat, I am strongly in support of Ellison for DNC chair. I'm more in support of it now than I was before fucking "Jewish groups" started "raising reservations."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:24 AM on December 2, 2016 [26 favorites]

California leaving the union would consign everyone else to conservative rule for a generation

This has already happened whether California is allowed to stay or go.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:25 AM on December 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

Democrats will botch the resistance against Trump
posted by T.D. Strange at 6:33 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

As a local who routinely votes for Ellison, my impression is that he is a pretty standard left critic of the Israeli state and its policies toward Palestine. I do not think that this has much to do with his fitness to fill this role.

There are certainly people on the left who are critical of the Israeli state as part of a broader refusal to take anti-semitism seriously or to understand why Israel was established, but that has never been my impression of Ellison.

Also, at least around here, there's a pretty large chapter of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, so "anti-zionist" is a term that is floating around locally from a "Jewish critics of Israeli state policy" standpoint. Around here, in fact, it's a pretty standard way of signalling " I want to distinguish bad policy toward Palestine from the mere existence of Israel".

Here's a bit from that article about opposition to Ellison, referring to unions and not Jewish organizations:

Privately, many in this bloc fear that Mr. Ellison’s ascension to the chairmanship would amount to a takeover of the party by Mr. Sanders and his liberal allies.

I personally think that this is the meat of the issue, because if you know Minnesota/MPLS politics at all you can see that Ellison is not an anti-Semite. I think that people who do know better about Ellison are putting this around because they don't like that he's fairly left.
posted by Frowner at 6:33 AM on December 2, 2016 [22 favorites]

I'm more in support of it now than I was before fucking "Jewish groups" started "raising reservations."

Okay, but understand that it's statements like that that drove a lot of religious Jews to vote for Trump. 'I'm fucking sick of [religious Jews'] opinions on Israel' is not discourse I'm personally comfortable with. The Jewish groups include the ADL. They include active Democrats. A lot of them are on your side fighting Trump. I don't have an opinion on Ellison yet - I'm still paying close attention. But your comment makes me really uncomfortable. And I'm on your side.
posted by Mchelly at 6:36 AM on December 2, 2016

Okay, but understand that it's statements like that that drove a lot of religious Jews to vote for Trump. 'I'm fucking sick of [religious Jews'] opinions on Israel' is not discourse I'm personally comfortable with. The Jewish groups include the ADL. They include active Democrats. A lot of them are on your side fighting Trump. I don't have an opinion on Ellison yet - I'm still paying close attention. But your comment makes me really uncomfortable. And I'm on your side.

Okay, but I'm Jewish, ArbitrarilyandCapricious is also Jewish, and we're both sick of our voices being co-opted as Jews for Jewish groups that don't seem to speak for us. There are plenty of Jews that aren't pro-Zionist.

And, okay. I grew up in a part of Chicago that had heavy NoI influence - anyone who actually got things done in the neighborhood had ties to Farrakhan. It an area that even five years ago, I had to explain that when someone converted to Islam, I meant because her husband was Moroccan, not that she had joined the Nation of Islam. There was plenty of Antisemitism in there, and I get why that happened.

I also live in Ellison's district currently. He has a very good relationship with Shir Tikvah, one of the local Synagogues. I also feel comfortable saying that he is not antisemitic and that he has been a very good representative for me.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:43 AM on December 2, 2016 [23 favorites]

Jewish groups aren't opposing Ellison because he's a Muslim.

So far as I can tell, it's only the ADL at the moment. And while I agree with the ADL much of the time, their characterization around some of his statements comes across more as fear-mongering than anything substantial. And honestly, as a Jewish American, the fact that the ADL responded as quick or maybe even quicker than they did to much of Trump's more blatant anti-Semitism during his campaign is much more of a concern to me. I've certainly found more disagreement in the last several years with Jewish lawmakers like Chuck Schumer* (who has supported Ellison in the past) than I have with Ellison.

They're opposing him because of his defense of openly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and for using the term Zionist as a slur. He's apologized for the defense, but his sincerity about it is in question based on other statements he's made.

I'm not sure what this means. It's been a decade since he was first elected, and almost twice as long since he was involved with Farrakhan. If he's said or done anything that raises doubts that he cares about Jewish Americans, I haven't seen it. In any case, this context-free "leak" seems far more like a hit job than an honest criticism, especially given the politics of the situation. The idea that most of the Middle East policies of the US revolve around Israel isn't particularly shocking. Many Jewish activist and lobbying groups, particularly those of a small-c conservative bent, go out of their way to make Israel the focus of foreign policy in the region. After all, that's largely their purpose as long as Israel considers itself a Jewish state.

As others (and the article, however briefly) noted, this seems far more like an effort to prevent movement of the official party organization to the left.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:45 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

Okay, but understand that it's statements like that that drove a lot of religious Jews to vote for Trump

Exit polls show 24% of Jews voted for Trump, by far the lowest of any Judeo-Chrisitian faith/denomination and lower than that of any minority excluding blacks.
posted by chris24 at 6:46 AM on December 2, 2016 [7 favorites]

I understand your discomfort - for example, I've been uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric around BLM and Palestine because of how easy it is to segue from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. However, as a secular American Jew I do find it frustrating that lobbyists on behalf of some American religious Jews speak as though they speak for all American Jews and that there isn't really any recognition for the validity of some critiques of Israel from those same lobbyists. The ADL's work is undeniably important, and I think it's important to hold policy makers to high standards. However, I worry that these reservations are kind of foolish, especially in a world where a quarter of Jews voted for Donald Trumps. It's basically true that the US has Israel in mind when setting Middle Eastern policy. I feel much more strongly that we need an effective voice presiding over the DNC than I feel someone has to come out strongly in support of Israel in a way that the ADL approves of.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:48 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

Yes, and 39% of Orthodox Jews. It's still way the hell too many.

Meanwhile, Gun-rights supporters call to "Avoid those Jew Jeans"

[edited to get quote right]
posted by Mchelly at 6:51 AM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh, wait, I see that the Republican Jewish Coalition and Zionist Organization of America are two other Jewish groups that are critical of Ellison. Of course, the RJC endorsed Trump and the ZOA works with anti-Islam hate groups and loves Steve Bannon, which should tell you all you need to know. Neither should be used as a credible source or balance or whatever in discussions around an organization for Democrats.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:53 AM on December 2, 2016 [19 favorites]

I apparently can't stay away from the election thread for more than 4 days. Hi, thread.

I've been using Facebook a little because that's apparently how kids these days do their political organizing but holy fucking shit do I hate it. I seriously do not care that a friend "liked" something that has nothing to do with me. Good for you that your uncle's cousin's ex-wife had a nice time on their vacation. I don't care. (Likewise, why should my friends care what I'm up to on the internet?) Is there some way to change these settings or is this supposed to be FB's biggest feature rather than its most horrific bug?

ANYWAY that thing I keep seeing on the book of faces is that we should "reach out beyond our bubble." I am desperately trying to figure out what, if anything, this actually means. Like, what is the action item here? I work at a university (liberal) in a rust belt city (liberal) and I don't really feel like changing jobs or moving to the suburbs. So... what am I supposed to do about this? I don't get it.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:00 AM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yes, and 39% of Orthodox Jews. It's still way the hell too many.

Curious where the 39% comes from since that's not part of the National Exit Poll information.

Also, the 24% was a 8% improvement from 2012. 32% voted for Romney.
posted by chris24 at 7:00 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

"Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. Not going to happen. It's not going to happen, I'll tell you right now," Trump said on Thursday.

"This is what we're going to do." Trump continued. "We'll treat them just the way we treated Carrier. As soon as they threaten to move their production work into another country, we're going to offer them a huge tax cut to keep 1/3 of their workers here. Carrier was going to move 2000 jobs, so we gave them $7 million and now they are only moving 1300 jobs. We really showed them! And now that companies understand they can basically take a few thousand hostages, get a massive ransom, then kill 2/3 of the hostages anyway and CNN will treat this all like a success and I'll come hold a rally, you are going to see this again and again." The crowd broke into applause as Trump raised his voice for the stirring conclusion: "You heard me right! We're going to take tax dollars away from social services and give them to companies in exchange for laying off workers at a slightly reduced rate!"
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:03 AM on December 2, 2016 [44 favorites]

Democrats will botch the resistance against Trump

The article isn't really about the DNC, it's about small-d democrats - those who believe in democracy - getting stuck supporting laws that allow Trump to destroy America. A Catch-22 of sorts.

It does not mention the news media at all, except as context to other examples.

And That's why we're fucked.
posted by petebest at 7:03 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Stat came from here. It was posted in one of the last election threads.
posted by Mchelly at 7:04 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't know if Keith Ellison is the best person for the job -- I'm partial to Howard Dean, simply because the party needs to be rebuilt, and he's rebuilt the party before -- but I'd hope ostensibly left or liberal voices could find reasons to oppose Ellison other than him being a Muslim.

Well, there is the thought that the next person for the job needs to have time to do the job. A sitting representative has a full schedule already.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:07 AM on December 2, 2016 [7 favorites]

ANYWAY that thing I keep seeing on the book of faces is that we should "reach out beyond our bubble." I am desperately trying to figure out what, if anything, this actually means. Like, what is the action item here? I work at a university (liberal) in a rust belt city (liberal) and I don't really feel like changing jobs or moving to the suburbs. So... what am I supposed to do about this? I don't get it.

I've been reading National Review a little at a time. It's not easy.

But mostly I feel like white liberals need to get out of *their* bubble and listen to everyone else.
posted by zutalors! at 7:08 AM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Somewhat late to the party, but I realize exactly where I've seen the whole "progressivism needs to shed its boutique identity politics and court the (white) common man" bit before: it's basically the thesis of the second, more contentious half of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which is this dreadful screed about how English socialism needs to jettison all the beardy weirdos who are its spokespeople and play down or completely eliminate their devotion to noneconomic issues like feminism and pacifism.

Social welfare policies did triumph in the UK less than a decade later with Clement Attlee's victory, and Orwell's alarmism was (even at the time) pretty widely discredited within socialist circles, but it seems like we're it the throes of the latest iteration of a perennial question about how to package progressivism in a way that its beneficiaries can appreciate.
posted by jackbishop at 7:13 AM on December 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

Oh, I get it. Some shady group accuses a whole bunch of media of being Russian propaganda. Now the whole idea of Russian meddling is discredited, again, and RT keeps on keeping on. Well done!

The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda

"By overplaying the influence of Russia’s disinformation campaign, the report also plays directly into the hands of the Russian propagandists that it hopes to combat."

Putin is going to mop the floor with Donald Trump.
posted by staggering termagant at 7:18 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Katha Pollitt, The Nation: An Unabashed Misogynist Is in Charge of Our Country. Now What?

As for feminists, Trump’s victory suggests that we’ve been living in a bubble. We’ve spent a lot of time arguing about things that either just don’t matter to millions of women or strike them as absurd: trigger warnings, safe spaces, whether Amy Schumer or Lena Dunham is history’s greatest monster. Perhaps we had the luxury of those debates because having Obama as president, with Hillary on the horizon, made us feel our fundamental issues were being taken care of—or at least acknowledged. We thought we were stronger and more numerous than we are, and that made us insular and arrogant. As Jeanette Sherman wrote on Facebook the morning after Election Day, “Over the last several years, I’ve heard a steadier and steadier drumbeat of ‘it’s not my job to educate you’ from so-called progressive activists. In many ways, this election shows why, if you are an activist, that is precisely your job.”

posted by tonycpsu at 7:18 AM on December 2, 2016 [14 favorites]

I've been reading National Review a little at a time. It's not easy.

My dad* has terrible opinions (he had a Thomas Sowell book on his coffee table the other day--send help), so I am actually already a bit of a conservative-whisperer. But my dad is also a city-dwelling metrosexual college professor so I'm not sure how far out of my bubble this gets me. I already know why a certain brand of intellectual libertarian/Randian conservative thinks the way they do. I just think they're completely wrong.

*not a citizen, doesn't vote, thankfully
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:28 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'll be honest, my boyfriend is fairly neutral/leaning toward "at least give Trump a chance" and it's helped me at least look at how I frame my arguments when I talk about anti Trump things. I do think one way out of the bubble is to at least try to understand that perspective and not wave it away as gaslighting.

The people who voted Trump, for whatever reason, I really do think they are beyond hope.
posted by zutalors! at 7:33 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

ANYWAY that thing I keep seeing on the book of faces is that we should "reach out beyond our bubble."

I've been peeking at what they are writing at RedState, and they have a pretty thorough hit piece on Keith Ellison that I don't want to link to.
posted by puddledork at 7:41 AM on December 2, 2016

The people who voted Trump, for whatever reason, I really do think they are beyond hope.

All of them can't be beyond hope, or I'd like to think so. Look a that trumpregrets Tumblr, at least some of them are realizing that they got duped. Of course, a lot of them are mostly pissed that Trump is backing off from horrible things he said he'd do, but I guess it's a start.
posted by thelonius at 7:45 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

At this point, I'm paying more attention to Black, Latinx, and Muslim writers than I am to conservatives. I don't think the entire conservative/Republican party is beyond hope, but so many conservative publications have fallen into clickbait and racism that I can't bring myself to follow any of it. I am happy to be proven wrong.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:48 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

Right but there are plenty of people in our own coalition + neverTrumpers + apathetic nonvoters that I don't think people need to subject themselves to RedState to "get out of the bubble."

Like I said, white people need to listen to everyone else, and just talking to someone who says "give Trump a chance" without saying "stop gaslighting me, white guy" has helped me with my own debubbling.
posted by zutalors! at 7:48 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

“Racist, far-right fringe movement": @nytimes issues guidance on how to refer to “alt-right.”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:53 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

some of them are realizing that they got duped.

Most of them got duped because they ignored facts and reality in favor of their hate and bigotry. Not sure they make the best targets.
posted by chris24 at 7:55 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Today's Bloom County on the state of newspapers.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:58 AM on December 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

She's a professional Republican - she probably isn't even saying what she believes, just what she got from the latest talking points.

As Talez notes, NH state rep is more like a pastime available to a large chunk of the population. What's insidious is that it doesn't come across like the recitation of talking points to me: it feels like the conviction of religious belief derived from an ever-expanding canon of fake news. Or like belief in alien abductions.
posted by holgate at 8:01 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

This is going to sound San Francisco as hell, but is there a reason looking beyond our bubble has to involve "the other side"? In the past few days I've been heartened by learning about Dr. William Barber in North Carolina and his Repairers of the Breach/Moral Mondays movement (which just had a glorious voting-rights victory). Watching a 2-hour sermon on Youtube is not something I would have ever, ever done before this election, but damned if it didn't change me. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't really pay attention to BLM, to Standing Rock, before the election, and I probably would have continued not to if Hillary had won. That is an ugly thing but it is true. I support Black Lives Matter, obviously, but I couldn't name the founders of the movement, I didn't know exaaaactly what it was they wanted out of this police-chief debacle in SF, and now I realize it is my duty to research it and find out and offer my support (phone calls, letters). If anything, the ones I have come to understand are the people who didn't want to vote for Hillary or Democrats, not because of a ridiculous Hillary allergy (although I had previously lumped them in with those people) but because they did not believe the Democrats would look out for their interests. I still disagree, but I'm more interested in bringing those people in than in chasing white conservatives like some kind of unicorn. I'm interested in what Democrats are doing in less-enbubbled areas of the country (flippable looks like it could be a good resource for this), in donating and phonebanking for them. If my vote is worth 1/3 the vote of someone in Wyoming then I'm going to have to get creative about my influence.

I think talking to actual conservatives if you have the opportunity is a fine idea, but I don't think subjecting ourselves to their propaganda is going to necessarily do a ton of good. You might learn something, but when there's so much else to learn, why make that your big project?
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:02 AM on December 2, 2016 [35 favorites]

Man it's incredible how odious Trump is on like every level, all the time. Like of course there's a solid chance he'll destroy the country and repeal as much good stuff as he can in the process, but in addition the tacky asshole scotch tapes his tie? That's so weird and dumb and I've never heard of anyone else doing it. Trump's 'fashion' brand apparently sells tie clips, not to mention if he just tied his ties right or got them longer it wouldn't be a problem.
posted by DynamiteToast at 8:04 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Right but there are plenty of people in our own coalition + neverTrumpers + apathetic nonvoters that I don't think people need to subject themselves to RedState to "get out of the bubble."

To be clear, the editor of RedState (Erick Erickson) is a vocal NeverTrumper. I don't read RedState myself but Wikipedia claims "In August 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was disinvited from the annual RedState gathering following controversial statements he made about American journalist Megyn Kelly. Kelly was invited to the gathering instead.[2] Since then, RedState has been one of the main centers of conservative opposition to Trump's campaign for the Presidency, with most of its writers and editors vocally opposing Trump."
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:07 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

All the bullshit about Clinton underperforming with Latinx? Bullshit. *

"In the 864 precincts in which 75 percent or more voters are Hispanic, Clinton won more votes than Obama in 723 of them, fewer votes in 130, and tied in 11.

If we compare Clinton’s vote margin over Trump to Obama’s margin over Romney, Clinton had a higher margin than Obama in 692 of these 864 precincts — or 80 percent. The claim that Clinton somehow “ran behind” Obama among Texas Hispanics is not consistent with the actual precinct data."

* Yes this is Texas only, but a lot of the earlier punditry was based on Texas info.
posted by chris24 at 8:09 AM on December 2, 2016 [20 favorites]

I just griped about "the bubble" talk on another thread, so I won't go fully into it here except to point out how well that crappy analogy is working. It's getting all sorts of liberals to go to conservative sites to "find out what they've been missing", while conservatives get a good laugh and can continue to spew misinformation and out right lies.

I'm here to tell you that there is no one reading this thread who doesn't already have a pretty damn good idea about what conservatives and Trump voters believe. Maybe not every new talking point, but more than enough to rid ourselves of this bubble talk which is just feeding the normalization process and giving shitty sites views.

This has been the case all through the election, with concerned posters looking at every site they can find, listening to Trump's godawful rallies and reporting what they learn, while Clinton gets ignored by the media except for emails and some select anti-Trump commercials. To the extent one can even nod to the idea of there being any "bubble", it's on the side of low information voters not being interested at all in anything except whatever propaganda they stumble across that pleases them. We have never been so connected in the world's history, the problem isn't we aren't hearing the other side, it's that we don't want to believe the crap we hear could possibly fool anyone. It's not too little info, it's too much noise and the fear it generates. Please, enough with the bubbles already.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:10 AM on December 2, 2016 [61 favorites]

U.S. President-elect Trump invited Philippines' Duterte to visit White House next year: Duterte aide (reuters)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:11 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Fair enough, people don't need to subject themselves to Breitbart then, not RedState.
posted by zutalors! at 8:13 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or CNN
posted by petebest at 8:14 AM on December 2, 2016

Michigan's horrid AG is attempting to block a vote recount.
Even if you don't think a recount will change anything, here's his contact info, if you'd like to express an opinion on stopping it. And his twitter is (for real) @SchuetteOnDuty.
posted by NorthernLite at 8:23 AM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

What should we say when we call?
posted by pxe2000 at 8:26 AM on December 2, 2016

@joshledermanAP: Trump supporters file federal lawsuit seeking to halt Wisconsin's ongoing presidential election recount
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:31 AM on December 2, 2016

More from The Hill on the attempt to block recounts.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:32 AM on December 2, 2016

Mike Konzcal/Rortybomb writes about Trump's campaign speeches on his personal Medium page: Learning from Trump in Retrospect
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:33 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Conway: Trump has been 'receiving information' of voter fraud

He still can't face the fact that he lost, possibly that he lost anywhere at all. He's definitely laying the groundwork for both widespread voter suppression, and almost certainly planning to discredit official votes in 2020 if he doesn't win re-election (and possibly even if he does).
posted by zombieflanders at 8:35 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Um. He won.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:37 AM on December 2, 2016

Um. He won.

He lost the popular vote.

Also, he is claiming voter fraud in states that he lost in the EC (e.g. California, Virginia, NH).
posted by zakur at 8:41 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

pretty sure zombieflanders is talking about how Trump can't handle losing specific states, since that is what the article is talking about.
posted by zutalors! at 8:42 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Learning From Trump in Retrospect

Trump talked about jobs. All the time. This gets lost in the coverage,
...
Trump never blames the rich for people’s problems. He doesn’t mention corporations, or anything relating to class struggle. His economic enemies are Washington elites, media, other countries, and immigrants. Even when financial elites and corporations do something, they are a combination of pawns and partners of DC elites.
...
"Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization — moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas."

...when it comes to the economic platform in his speeches he remained disciplined and clear: he’s going to crush undocumented workers, roll back globalization, and cut taxes and regulations in DC.
...
What were Clinton’s three things to benefit workers? There was policy everywhere, but none of it clear for voters.
...
Trump is unapologetically against trade that harms American workers....a certain class of liberals don’t approach job loss from trade with a regrettable sense of the trade-offs, but instead a more cutting sense that Americans don’t have any claim on the jobs that go away anyway. It’s all for the best, in the long-run.
...
Trump also never mentions poverty. And while he talks a lot about reducing taxes, he never talks about increasing transfers, redistribution, or access to core goods. He talks about wages, full stop. He also talks about places. Dying towns that need revitalizing.

posted by Golden Eternity at 8:46 AM on December 2, 2016 [13 favorites]

Golden Eternity, can you elaborate on why you posted that?
posted by zutalors! at 8:49 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm getting real suspicious that they're fighting the recounts so hard. "You shouldn't be worried if you've got nothing to hide" doesn't fly for 99% of the things it's said about, but election recounts are an area where that's absolutely true.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:59 AM on December 2, 2016 [27 favorites]

All the bullshit about Clinton underperforming with Latinx? Bullshit. *

From the same article, they estimate based on precinct data that Trump got 19% of the Latinx vote. So much lower than the exit polls showed in Texas (34%) or nationwide (29%). And lower than Romney got (27%) and pretty close to the 16% estimate of Latino Decisions, the pollster who earlier had a detailed breakdown on the problems with the National Exit Polls number.
posted by chris24 at 9:00 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Yeah, there are all kinds of shenanigans here in PA (and in Pittsburgh specifically) challenging the recounts, making the people who signed affidavits (here, three people from each voting precinct have to sign affidavits to trigger a recount) go to court and on and on.

You want to make yourself look SUPER suspicious? Scream about the voter fraud you insist you won despite and then block recounts.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:03 AM on December 2, 2016 [29 favorites]

Golden Eternity, can you elaborate on why you posted that?

To whet our appetites?

It whet mine.

Here's the opening paragraph...

I’ve started to rewatch Trump rallies from the month before he was elected President. I’ve seen some of them before, but that was always with the presumption he was unlikely to win; now I watch them trying to figure out how he did it, and how the Democrats can rebuild their economic message out of this mess. There’s the virulent ethnic nationalism, but there’s also a way of approaching the economy that sabotages where Democrats are, even when they are strong.

Now I've read the rest. Food for thought.
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:05 AM on December 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

Are the recount block attempts happening because of fears of Trump actually losing, or are they being used to rally and whip up the base?
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:06 AM on December 2, 2016

Are the recount block attempts happening because of fears of Trump actually losing, or are they being used to rally and whip up the base?

Realistically I think they're being used to make money for Republican-sympathizing law firms with a side of irl shitposting.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:08 AM on December 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

The Duterte thing is terrifying: [ ] genuinely thinks that presidential visits and invites are "if you're in town, call me" social gladhanding and not hugely significant expressions of national relations. If I were a senior career professional at State I'd be wondering whether it'd be possible to retire early and buy a bunker.
posted by holgate at 9:08 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

For me, Ellison is a non-starter because he backed out of a NYT interview because they were going to ask him about the Farrakhan stuff. He needs to be able to deal with that if he wants to run the show.

I would also prefer someone who (a) can do the job full-time and (b) who isn't worrying about their own re-election at the same time that they're supposed to be winning everyone's elections.

I also worry that Ellison would have a strong preference for Dems with political views matching his own, which doesn't make sense in every district. I know we all complained about the Blue Dog Dems at the time, but I sure wish we were back grousing about them now!

My pick would be known-quantity Howard Dean. I think he's very tactically focused on winning elections. So some districts will run Hillarycrats if that's what makes sense, and others will run Berniecrats if that's what makes sense, and other districts will run really conservative Dems who give us all heartburn but at least they're not Republicans.

Illyse Hogue from NARAL sounds promising too.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:12 AM on December 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

pxe2000 I'd say wording you could use in calls/emails/on social is simply, it is our lawful right to have a recount, and it should not be obstructed.

Also, people from one or more of the private FB groups that have been discussed here, have encouraged contacting the MI Bureau of Elections to indicate support. That email is [e-mail]. Again, they suggest just expressing support for the recount, and opposing efforts by trump/ anyone else to block or impede this recount.
posted by NorthernLite at 9:14 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Very nice article there Golden Eternity and Rustic Etruscan. I especially loved :

"For the life of me I don’t know why President Obama spent the summer of 2016 fighting hard for TPP when it was clear it was hurting Hillary Clinton, making her promise to pause trade deals not credible, and giving Trump live ammo. But he did."
posted by jeffburdges at 9:15 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

My pick would be known-quantity Howard Dean. I think he's very tactically focused on winning elections.

His past record should be proof of this.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:15 AM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

How to Contact the 17 Banks Funding the Dakota Access Pipeline
posted by jeffburdges at 9:16 AM on December 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Michigan Attorney General's office is getting slammed right now. I barely got through to Detroit and East Lansing has been busy for the last half-hour.
posted by pxe2000 at 9:23 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Golden Eternity, can you elaborate on why you posted that?

I thought it was a pretty good article. Shows key aspects of Trump's populist appeal to flyover Americans and the problems it presents to liberals and leftists. I think it's fascinating.

It may show that some socialist framing can as be problematic as "identity polics." Most Americans don't believe in real social classes and deny poverty exists and piting rich against the poor doesn't work well. But I think piting the middle class against the rich and using govt to expand the middle class is probably a winning narrative.

I don't think we are going to beat Trump at his own game. The good thing is his protectionist Reaganomics are probably going to be a disaster and he is just wrong or lying most of the time.

So I think Dems should stick to a message that the govt has done a lot to help people and can do a lot more and Trump is a con man and sell people on it better.

However, as Blyth points out and this article gets into, trade policy and the changing economy are hurting a lot of flyover Americans. Obama is dedicated to globalization and free trade and I tend to think this is the way to go and we should use taxes to create more jobs - healthcare jobs, govt jobs, etc., but maybe this is wrong and Dems have a real policy problem. Maybe we backed off of protectionism too quickly and it didn't allow the country, the world, enough time to adjust and this is partly why we the world is transtioning away from liberalism and globalism towards ethnic nationalism and fascism.

(oops. Sorry I missed that Rustic already posted it)
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:23 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

From the article Golden Eternity posted, I believe there's food for thought here:

'What were Clinton’s three things to benefit workers? There was policy everywhere, but none of it clear for voters. An infrastructure deal, though would that even happen and didn’t Obama already try that? Anyway, Trump promised to do it twice as big. After that it wasn’t clear what was a priority.

'Stuff that actually got to worker’s lives was technocratic and vague. “Short-termism” instead of the idea that bosses would rather give money to shareholders than invest. “Shadow banking” instead of Wells Fargo ripping you off and the CFPB stopped it. I use these terms — they are purposefully confusing because they need to mimic the nomenclature of microeconomics — but I’m not running a political campaign.

'The sheer volume of it blurred out potentially useful items. When a really important fact sheet on fighting monopoly power was released, it got a paragraph 4,000 words into one speech (“As president, I will appoint tough, independent authorities to strengthen anti-trust enforcement and really scrutinize mergers and acquisitions, so the big don’t keep getting bigger and bigger”). It disappeared into a list of all the policies ever, rather than a clear statement of what was to be done. We need to remember a narrative of what has happened to workers and how we are going to fix it is more important than covering every potential base.'
posted by Lyme Drop at 9:27 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's a good thing past presidential candidates never released super technical platforms that they relied on a strong media environment to relay to voters as is their traditionally understood duty.
posted by TypographicalError at 9:28 AM on December 2, 2016 [16 favorites]

being used to rally and whip up the base?

So, just, continuous frenzy, or something special for the holidays?

I don’t know why President Obama spent the summer of 2016 fighting hard for TPP

I literally don't remember a single thing about Obama and TPP this summer. That means this is all a bad dream and I'm gettin' outta jail free, right?! yesss!
posted by petebest at 9:29 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's a good thing past presidential candidates never released super technical platforms that they relied on a strong media environment to relay to voters as is their traditionally understood duty.

You can have a super technical platform but it's also on you to have a super compelling elevator pitch, IMO.
posted by Lyme Drop at 9:31 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

The interesting thing about Trump's language with jobs and the economy is that it's all so stunningly pro-corporate. We saw this before with Romney's favorite phrase "job creators." Somehow, we've elevated the people we used to call "bosses," "tycoons" "greedy bastards," and "robber barons" not to mention everyone who owns a 7-11 franchise and thinks that makes them king of the world, to an exalted status where they must be coddled protected at all costs because they're the ones with the jobs.

And it's brilliant, because anything can be shot down with "job creators." Anti-pollution regulations? Nope, we can't hurt the job creators. Raise the minimum wage? The job creators will cry. An agency to tell banks to knock off their worst anti-consumer practices? Job creators will stop bestowing their largess upon us.

It's language that views jobs as handed down from on high, rather than something we all create together by participating in the economy. The worker working at that Carrier furnace factory who goes out and buys an American-made truck is arguably far more of a job creator than the CEO of Ford.

I guess what I'm saying is that capital has managed to rebrand itself as an unabashed force for all that is good and necessary in the world, and a huge chunk of labor has shrugged and agreed wholeheartedly.
posted by zachlipton at 9:34 AM on December 2, 2016 [41 favorites]

It's a good thing past presidential candidates never released super technical platforms that they relied on a strong media environment to relay to voters as is their traditionally understood duty.

The more I read that sentence, the more confused I get.
posted by petebest at 9:37 AM on December 2, 2016

qcubed: you're not wrong about that, but "people in China who used to be starving can now afford washing machines" is a wonderful thing for everyone, but a phenomenally bad sales pitch to rust belt workers worried about their jobs.
posted by zachlipton at 9:37 AM on December 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

Damn, the Michigan AG's lawsuit is the biggest story on CNN right now. I can't tell if that's a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it's fucking egregious and should be front page news. On the other hand, kicking people who care about democracy for sport so that you can whip up the frothing blood lust of your base seems like the go-to strategy for Republicans right now, so I'm a little scared his desire to get coverage on this in preparation for his run for governor is actually working. As someone who just finished recount training last night, I kind of feel like I just got punched in the face for the entertainment of a bunch of Fox News watchers.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 9:38 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

A new post-election US political post/thread is live.
posted by Wordshore at 9:38 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Just out of curiosity, why? We've gone way over 2,500 comments before.
posted by zachlipton at 9:40 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Tyndall Report on Big Three TV news coverage of issues in the past eight presidential election seasons:

year (mins) Total ABC CBS NBC
1988 117 36 40 42
1992 210 112 38 60
1996 98 29 53 17
2000 130 45 39 46
2004 203 40 119 44
2008 220 41 119 66
2012 114 13 70 32
2016 (YTD) 32 8 16 8
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:41 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Just out of curiosity, why? We've gone way over 2,500 comments before.

A little bit of continuity in the short term, mostly. As we continue to see commenting pace steady out we'll reevaluate post flow stuff but for the moment Wordshore had a post good to go, this one's up past two grand and ambling toward three, and so, hey.
posted by cortex at 9:43 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

I mean, last night Trump said, "There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. we pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag. [USA chants]...America first." That was in his prepared speech. Not caring about billions around the world being lifted out of subsistence-level poverty is pretty fundamental to his ethos. He believes we have no duty or responsibility to the world at large or anyone besides ourselves. He stands for not giving up 0.001% of anything if it could help anybody who isn't an American.

And yeah, that's horrifying.
posted by zachlipton at 9:46 AM on December 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

You can have a super technical platform but it's also on you to have a super compelling elevator pitch, IMO.

An elevator speech is tl;dr when you're competing with tweets.

Sad!
posted by mazola at 9:49 AM on December 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

soren_lorenesen: Is there some way to change these settings or is this supposed to be FB's biggest feature rather than its most horrific bug?

F.B. Purity allows you to turn off many annoying Facebook "features." I wish it worked on mobile devices.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:51 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

"For the life of me I don’t know why President Obama spent the summer of 2016 fighting hard for TPP when it was clear it was hurting Hillary Clinton, making her promise to pause trade deals not credible, and giving Trump live ammo. But he did."

Probably because he thought that TPP was a good idea. He probably wanted the U.S. to have a hand in shaping Pacific trade, and now it's up to China to negotiate all that.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:55 AM on December 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

I guess what I'm saying is that capital has managed to rebrand itself as an unabashed force for all that is good and necessary in the world, and a huge chunk of labor has shrugged and agreed wholeheartedly.

This is the part of Thomas Frank's (older) critique of "market populism" that I agree with more than his current schtick: stock prices as sports betting; CEOs as heroes; "right to work" legislation. It still doesn't untangle the knot whereby the American worker is also the American consumer, and the American consumer generally does not want to cover the cost of American workers' wages. If it comes out of a state or local tax giveaway -- whether to a Walmart or a hammertruck factory -- it's less visible.

(re zachlipton's comment: more people in America can afford washing machines instead of relying on laundromats, and the response from the right to the cheapness of consumer durables is to say that poverty no longer exists.)
posted by holgate at 10:02 AM on December 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

Since it fell off Recent Activity already: NEW THREAD
posted by mbrubeck at 10:07 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

"For the life of me I don’t know why President Obama spent the summer of 2016 fighting hard for TPP when it was clear it was hurting Hillary Clinton, making her promise to pause trade deals not credible, and giving Trump live ammo. But he did."

Probably because he thought that TPP was a good idea. He probably wanted the U.S. to have a hand in shaping Pacific trade, and now it's up to China to negotiate all that.

That and extending the US IP regime into China's backyard.

Democrats generally stopped considering the domestic jobs impact of global trade deals at the same time they abandoned support for labor, right around January 21, 1992. It was never about real people, just corporate citizens. Obama was just doing what the Democrats have for years, none of them realized the backlash or anger until too late, and to the extent they did, offered only discredited denials and no solutions for the knock on effects of job losses.
posted by T.D. Strange at 10:09 AM on December 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

KidRuki and I are going to the Women's March and we'll be wearing our pussyhats.
posted by Ruki at 10:31 AM on December 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

Argh, wrong election thread. Damn it, tabs.
posted by Ruki at 10:32 AM on December 2, 2016

We've gone way over 2,500 comments before.

2500 or so is the point where it becomes an unreliable pain in the ass on mobile. Atheist blessings upon you, Wordshore.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:08 AM on December 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

I just saw the links above where it's Ed Schultz, "liberal commentator from MSNBC" appearing in the Russia Today ads. Very interesting.
posted by staggering termagant at 12:02 PM on December 2, 2016

Unless Ellison commits to contesting every election from Dog Catcher in East Podunk right up to POTUS, he is not the right choice. If he does, and he will do this by bringing in new voters, THIS IS THE PERSON FOR THE JOB.

I'm kinda worried he bought into the DWS lie that some entire states aren't worth contesting. Mostly because DWS wanted a clear slate for The Hills to run in... no more surprise Obamas! Another sort of surprise happened.

I am not OK until Ellison reveals a 50-state strategy. (I am oddly OK with Pelosi retaining her position - she could keep a fractious, disaffected party in lockstep... to the point where she's got an outside shot as Speaker once Ryan gives up.)
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:31 PM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

To underscore what staggering termagant said, just in case anybody who favorited my comment about gas station ads from Russia Today (for rt.tv) didn't catch the correction:

I was wrong in my interpretation. zombieflanders pointed out that the guy in the ad is Ed Schultz who is not a conservative commentator, but a liberal one. That comment links to the ad itself too.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:27 PM on December 3, 2016