February 3, 2017

Take a number.

These last two weeks have seemed completely surreal. Like a bad dream. Only I'm wide awake.

February 3, 2017

Welcome to DU, Alpeduez21!

This is a BEEEE-YOOOO-TEEEE-FUUUULLL post!

Yes, YES, and YES!

And also a yes to - be polite. It's just some young kid answering the phones, maybe someone who already has an eye toward running for office. Make sure you leave them favorably predisposed toward whatever you were saying or whatever issue you were calling about. They sure do remember the asshole(s) they've had to deal with. And that leaves a mark.

February 3, 2017

Yep. That's the one! That crowd really reminded him who's boss.

And the answer was - NOT him!

February 3, 2017

You make a valid point. Why was it so bad that she earned some great paychecks after she left

the State Department? What was she? Chopped liver? Don't think she was worth it, having performed beautifully on a world political and diplomatic scale? After being a successful and popular two-term Senator from a VERY big state - one that might not necessarily have been enthusiastic about her at first until she won them over with a statewide listening tour? After being a First Lady who did a LOT more than just bake cookies and have teas and pose with visiting troupes of Girl Scouts? A woman with a podium who wasn't afraid to use it to advocate for the greater good - not just in Arkansas but in Washington DC, the whole country, and the whole world? By the time she'd left the State Department after one term, she had ALREADY still earned Most Admired Woman in the World honors for about a dozen years in a row!

I wished SO badly that, whenever the inevitable criticism came up about how much she got paid for a speech, somebody somewhere would bother to point out what MEN of her stature were getting paid. I saw one set of figures that showed the top paycheck for a speech was paid to a male peer for 600-and-some-thousand dollars. I think it was either 625- or 650-THOUSAND dollars. By contrast, she got 225- or 250-thousand bucks for the same kind of speech. If I remember correctly, there was a list of five or six highest-paid speakers and what their fees were. All were men. Except for her. And she was at the bottom of this list. WHY did nobody EVER point that out?

And I forgot to add in my long-winded rant just above - I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't pay somebody to say they voted for Nixon. Watergate really pushed him underwater. Nixon voters could NOT be found. And he actually won his elections flat-out, popular vote and Electoral College, both times. You could find a winged unicorn in the flesh before you scrounged up a Nixon voter. NO ONE would admit to it. I bet we'll see the same thing about trump. It could wind up being a question of - before IMPEACHMENT? or after IMPEACHMENT?.

February 3, 2017

I hope things don't fizzle.

We've got people in the streets, marching, working, avalanching their reps with calls, emails, in-person visits, I just hope people don't get discouraged by how uphill this battle is. Our professional Dems aren't used to fighting THIS hard, to the point where they're being pushed toward being the new Party of No.

I watched Sheldon Whitehouse be confronted by protesters one evening, I forget exactly where, but it looked like someplace outdoors. The crowd was peaceful but ADAMANT as all-get-out! Their signs said it. Their chanting said it. Their numbers said it. Their individual outbursts said it. These folks were taking no prisoners and accepting no substitutes. They wanted to hear him declare flat-out that he wasn't going to support any of trump's cabinet nominees. He waffled. That crowd was having NONE of that! NONE!!! It was startling! He'd decided against some of the nominees but not all. The crowd was having NONE of that! One of the upcoming nominees' names came up and he waffled some more, saying he needed to look it over more closely. The crowd was having ABSOLUTELY NONE of that! It was astonishing!

Whitehouse was verbally fumbling, and manually fumbling, with a list he'd just been handed, of all the nominees. He'd nixed a few at the top but stumbled on that one. Some guy in the crowd shouted "NO!" to the name he said he'd need to review more closely, and immediately added "Just Say No!" The rest of the crowd instantly joined in on that, and suddenly you had what looked and sounded like at least 40-50 people shouting "Just Say No! Just Say No!" And guess what? Whitehouse gave in! Declared himself a "no" on this nominee. The segment ended with him having gotten a steady hand on the list, reading down the names. Declaring a "no" for this one, "no" for that one," "no" for the next one, on and on and on down the list - and the video segment cut away at that point. I don't know if he said "no" to all of 'em, but there certainly was a strong trend developing there. Besides, that crowd wasn't having ANYTHING but total across-the-board "no".

Astounding. I've never seen a crowd manage a politician like that.

February 2, 2017

Wonder if you saw this -

http://www.shakesville.com/2017/01/i-write-letters.html

The blogger of the above, Melissa McEwan, put it SO well.

More of us voted for her, of course, but there is a reason she is not our president. And it's not just because of Russian interference and James Comey being a colossal wanker. It's also because enough votes for Jill Stein threw key states to Donald Trump, and because millions and millions of people voted for Trump despite his reprehensible platform.

(snip)

She did do something, you ungrateful wrecks. She campaigned for 18 months, the last of them against Trump himself, day after exhausting day, keeping up a ruthless schedule that would drive most people half her age to collapse after three weeks, no less a year and a half. She gave up time with her family, her grandchildren; gave up anything resembling free time; gave up her privacy. She made countless sacrifices on behalf of this country in order to prevent this exact outcome.

You took a hard pass, and now you have the unmitigated temerity to want more from her? Fuck you.

(snip)

I note with all the mirthless laughter in the universe that one of the incessant criticisms of Hillary Clinton was that she was entitled.

She gave it everything she had already. You don't get to ask for even more.

Gotta say, my sentiments EXACTLY. I think we should cut Hillary some slack.

Dammit, she's been almost literally brutalized for a year and a half. If she wants, or needs, this time to recover from that kind of emotional battery - on a national/world scale, and that level of public persecution - at that level of repetition and obsession, then let her be. Far from the madding crowd, as it were. I think she's MORE THAN earned it. And you know the persecution would amp back up the instant she'd step up to weigh in. Haven't heard much from that Utah pipsqueak, Jason Chaffetz, who up til recently was squawking about all his plans to continue persecuting her. MORE investigations. MORE hearings. Seems as though he's kinda quiet lately. Probably has his hands full, moreso than he expected.

I suspect all these monsters simply presumed that some gold-paved road would be laid out before them once they had it all. That somehow trump was loved-loved-loved. That it was gonna be easy force-feeding all their poisonous plans down our throats because the public was with them. Well, SURPRISE! How many of us here, myself included, have stated flat-out that we've never seen this kind of colossal, epic, even historic protest response, this pushback, this #Resistance before? Well, you know who else has never seen it before? The bad guys. The CONS. That's who. They thought making "Obamacare" disappear would be a walk in the park. Well, SURPRISE! So they're too busy to bother persecuting Hillary, thank goodness. Saving their own necks is more important.

But I digress. I think we should cut Hillary some slack. As MUCH as we can. Come on. Hasn't she earned it? I expect she'll be back when-and-if she believes she can make a difference for the greater good, or some issue/cause really pulls at her, while at the same time NOT becoming a ridiculous, incomprehensible distraction all over again, herself.

If I remember correctly, she just recently earned her 21st "Most Admired Woman in the World" honors. I suspect that few will remember how horrid and corrupt she supposedly was after we've had to stomach trump for awhile. There will come a time when some of those who never had anything good to say about her will start finding themselves biting their tongues. We're already hearing confessionals from voters. I saw one while reading three or four comments to a New York Times op/ed. I think we'll be hearing from her again. And I still think she'll be on our money someday.

February 2, 2017

Forgot to add this link:

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a42536/keep-calling-your-representatives-heidi-heitkamp-betsy-devos/

This is popping up in, of all places, "ELLE" magazine. When stuff like this turns up in places like that, you know the editors are noticing - because they evidently see THEIR READERS noticing.

February 2, 2017

Then make sure you vote in the midterms. 2018.

If everybody does, we're likely to replace a few of the bad guys. Maybe MORE than a few.

February 2, 2017

Hell, it took a few days before ANYBODY in the news media started bringing up

the very recent outrage that Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus had been admitted to the inner sanctum of intelligence briefings, DISPLACING the Director of National Intelligence AND the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That news broke over last weekend. Nobody even brought it up until various interview subjects started mentioning it - WHILE they were being interviewed about other topics, the following Monday. Could also have been because the protests at multiple airports around the country bigfooted the news. But it took at least two days before the story even got covered.

February 2, 2017

Well, in their case, you do it to make them uncomfortable.

As we're hearing they are from various reports about what's shared candidly during behind-closed-doors meetings when they think nobody's listening. We've seen those reports here. We've seen how nervous and upset they are because what they presumed would be an easy kill with "Obamacare" turns out to have been a red hot poker in the eye with their own constituents.

Make 'em uncomfortable! Make them uneasy. MY ideal goal is to make them reflexively reach for the Maalox bottle on the night stand, FIRST THING, before they even get out of bed in the morning. I've been in that exact position myself - where I started keeping a bottle of Maalox chewable on my bedside table. It was while I was working at a radio station where there'd been a management change and a format change and freshly severed heads were rolling down the hall (figuratively speaking of course) on a maddeningly frequent basis. There came one day, fairly swiftly, where my alarm went off and just reflexively, without even thinking, I reached for the Maalox bottle. I wasn't even fully awake yet, and that was my automatic response! Well - lemme tellya - when you get to THAT point, it finally dawns on you that MAN-OH-MAN YOU NEED CHANGE!!! And ASAP!!! In my case, that meant: find another job, PRONTO, and get the hell outta there!!!

In the case of a CON "representative", you want to make them extremely uncomfortable. You want to MAKE SURE they know how big the opposition is - on their own home turf. You want them destabilized! You want them worried. You want them unsettled. You want them nervous and mumbling to each other about "shit, all the people out there crowding my office" or as one hapless asshole put it (paraphrasing slightly) - "all these women up in my grill." You want them rendered unable to get away from it, unable to get any relief from it, surrounded and avalanched by it, you want the message sent that - "um - shit, this opposition is REALLY starting to give me heartburn..." You want them on edge, worried as never before that their reelection is coming up and they had no idea how much opposition there is out there, all of a sudden.

You want them uncomfortable and nervous as hell about towing the party line when they know THEIR OWN NECKS are on the block in the upcoming midterms - in 2018, folks!

Destabilize the enemy. They're definitely not used to it. And it knocks them off their stride, out of their complacency, and DEFINITELY out of their comfort zones. They've been sitting fat 'n' sassy and smug as can be, for far too long. They're ABSOLUTELY not used to this. And that's GOOD. You want them to feel like they're on shaky ground now. You don't want them to get a decent night's sleep - for quite some time. And you want them instinctively, reflexively, without even thinking, to be reaching for the Maalox bottle that will find its way into permanent residence on their bedside tables.