Weinstein. Why do Conservatives (and quite a few Democrats think) the D’s have a “Harvey Problem“?
Is it a surprise that Democrats took money from someone who turned out to be despicable? Yes. But isn’t the real question what the Democrats did with the money?
Conservatives want you to believe that Democratic political contributions are like holy water, where one unsanctified drop spoils the whole font. There is no excusing Weinstein, and if the D’s were doing helpful things for this scumbag, that’s inexcusable. But there is nothing inherently wrong with taking/using Weinstein’s money before they found out how deplorable he is:
Trump thinks the press writes disgusting things. His friends agree:
The GOP believes in a few things, more or less:
Iran, DACA, ACA, EPA. Trump’s plans are working just perfectly:
He said he would make America great again. He was elected on a messianic platform, to reform DC from the outside, to create jobs, to drain the swamp, all while saving the social safety net, and ending our foreign adventures.
He promised all of those things. He actually said he would do them − in many places and at many times, and in differing contexts.
The dissonance should be hitting his supporters very hard about now.
In the nearly six months Donald Trump has been in power, he has accomplished only the dismantling of major parts of Obama’s agenda. For example, the EPA announced that it will delay implementation of an Obama-era chemical safety rule for nearly two years while it reassesses the necessity of the regulation: (parenthesis by the Wrongologist)
(Obama administration) Officials moved to overhaul chemical safety standards after a 2013 explosion at a chemical plant in Texas killed 15 people. Their rule would require companies to better prepare for accidents and expand the EPA’s investigative and auditing powers.
Trump and Scott Pruitt will MAGA by ensuring more workers die on the job from unsafe working conditions. Of course, like 90% of Trump’s agenda, this is just standard Republicanism.
Couldn’t the GOP just “lead by example” on the whole “getting killed at work” thing?
Just in case anyone is interested, here is a link to the White House’s list of all legislation signed since the Orange Flake took office. If it weren’t for things like approving the name change for an outpatient VA clinic in Pago Pago, his big agenda items like passing a budget, replacing Obamacare, reforming taxes, or rebuilding our infrastructure remain aspirational.
So, where is the plan to make America great? As Derek Thompson said in the Atlantic:
There is no infrastructure plan. Just like there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health care plan. More than 120 days into Trump’s term in a unified Republican government, Trump’s policy accomplishments have been more in the subtraction category (e.g., stripping away environmental regulations) than addition. The president has signed no major legislation and left significant portions of federal agencies unstaffed, as U.S. courts have blocked what would be his most significant policy achievement, the legally dubious immigration ban.
The simplest summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no policy.
Republicans are held hostage by campaign promises that they cannot fill. The White House is hostage to the president’s perpetual campaign, a cavalcade of promises divorced from any effort to detail, advocate, or enact major economic legislation.
Trump uses public policy as little more than a photo op, and that isn’t going to make anything great.
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
That was written in 2007 folks.
Here is a video of Ferlinghetti reading “Pity the Nation” in 2007:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
We have a president who has done more in three weeks than most presidents have done in an entire administration.
That simply isn’t true, but the thrust of the article is that, when you tune out the noise coming from the White House, very little has actually happened. From Politico:
So far, Trump has behaved exactly like he has throughout his previous career: He has generated intense attention and sold himself as a man of action while doing little other than promote an image of himself as someone who gets things done.
Sorry, but this is characteristic of the gleeful DC narrative that Trump is failing, that he’s bumping up against the institutional/Constitutional realities of Washington. This meme seems to repeat the same mistakes that smart people made during the campaign — misreading and underestimating Trump. They see him challenged on a few things and assume that since Trump thought he’d show up, wave a wand, and make things happen immediately, and is now stymied, therefore he must be frustrated. They presume that clashes with other branches of government, or with the unfawning press, or the “resistance” from the 52% that didn’t vote for him to begin with, has made him cool his jets.
Why should we think it upsets him that his first bolts out of the gate are stymied?
Wrongo thinks that so far, Trump is winning. His fights with what he calls “the Establishment” and the “fake news media” are a win from the perspective of the Trumpets. They figure that’s what he was sent to DC to do.
If he’s not trying to learn the ropes? That goes in the plus column. And if it’s reported that he shows impatience or impulsiveness? Plus column. To his base, the furor in the media makes the infuriated ones, and those who report it, seem like smug elitists, determined to enforce the status quo through the usual DC tactics.
Really, everything Politico says are problems for Trump are the opposite. He’s ginned up a national hissy fit over his ill-conceived Executive Order on immigration, while managing to mostly get his cabinet choices confirmed (sorry Mr. Pudzer) − a cabinet more radical and unqualified than any traditional Republican would dare to nominate.
Dems obsess over each offense and announce “resistance” but have no real strategy. They raise money but can do little, while being viewed as unseemly in Trump’s flyover country.
When the Republican obstruction to Obama took shape in 2008, they assumed a posture of cooperation, only to be “disappointed” by the “extreme” positions of the President. Rarely in Obama’s first term did they announce obstruction in advance of his actions. By his second term, Democrats had lost enough seats that they no longer had the ability to override Republican inertia, and the GOP’s naked obstruction was visible.
Now Democrats have fewer votes as a minority party than the GOP had in 2016, and have no way to block anything but the most obnoxious Trump moves, assuming that a few Senate Republicans join in the blockage.
Trump has no need to figure out or to get along with Washington — in fact, that’s the opposite of what he wants. He has staked his political fortune on an “own the mob” strategy — which worked just fine in November. He doesn’t need to deliver on his election promises. He needs to let Republicans push through the horrifying agenda they’ve salivated over for decades. And he will.
He needs a riled up Establishment to blame for any stymied efforts. This means the more cartoonish his behavior the better, as the Establishment will be all too happy to jump on his missteps.
Trump won’t suffer if he never comes up the learning curve.
The rest of us, the country, the world, will. We actually need things to work.
Here is Robert Cray with “Smoking Gun” recorded in 1986. With all the Trump people who seem to be on the wrong side of the CIA and FBI, it seems appropriate:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
The article is called: “How to behave in the age of Trump? Five essential lessons for Republicans”. Their guy did win, but even patriotic, heterosexual Conservatives aren’t always going to buy everything that the Orange Overlord is selling, without some instruction. Here are a few of Fox’s commandments:
1 . Don’t help the Democrats
We get it, maybe you don’t like Trump…maybe you are not certain he is a real conservative…Maybe you are right…But this is not about you. The Democrats are busily marginalizing themselves by being shrill, caustic, and vulgar. Give them room to do this…
Show Restraint
Don’t take potshots…One more tweet on the oddity that was the first press briefing by the press secretary helps no one…See point number 1, do not help the Democrats.
Give the Trump Presidency a Chance to Succeed
Trump had no chance of winning. So now, the same line of thinking holds that he has no chance of being a successful president…Every Republican needs to accept this truth — you need him to succeed, for the good of the country, and the party.
Having been the vocal, disrespectful minority for a considerable time, it stands to reason they might not yet know how to deal with success.On to humor.
Hypocrisy was on full display by Mitch McConnell:
Gorsuch’s nomination proves that the GOP knows nothing about irony:
The National Prayer Breakfast showed Trump at his best:
Trump’s call for allowing religion in politics is Islam tested, Ayatollah approved:
Trump fails in his first use of our military in Yemen:
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”– Kurt Vonnegut
Welcome to the weekend, we should be at least concerned, if not terrified. After all, look at who is in charge. Its those jerks you knew back in the day.
We have just driven into a long, dark tunnel in the back seat of the Trump Express. Will we ever see light at the other end? When a president is out of his party’s mainstream by this much, he just provides cover for the rest of them to act out accordingly.
A few things that happened this week that you should consider, none of which will be the worst thing that Trump puts in motion over the next four years:
The House and Senate approved a measure that scuttles a new regulation aimed at preventing coal mining debris from being dumped into nearby streams. The Senate’s 54-45 vote on Friday sends the measure to President Trump. What’s more, the law prevents the executive branch from imposing substantially similar regulations in the future.
On Thursday, the House repealed a Social Security Administration regulation to keep people with severe mental illnesses from buying guns. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee said:
The agency should be focused on serving all of its beneficiaries, not picking and choosing whose Second Amendment rights to deny…
On the gun issue, the GOP is taking away Obamacare, so you won’t be able to afford treatment for your mental illness, but hey – go buy a gun!
To paraphrase Mitt Romney, coal companies are people too. They need the profits from dumping industrial waste in the water supply just as much as a human needs clean water. Why should we prioritize humans over corporate folks? Maybe you’re just prejudiced against legal persons.
Republicans seem to know intuitively that the faster and more boldly they move, the harder it will be for Democrats to change the rules later. As long as Republicans control both the House and the Senate, Trump will leave big, black heel marks all over our democracy.
So, calm down. It’s gonna get worse. Take a break with a hot cuppa DECAF coffee and settle back for half an hour to listen to music. Here is Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto E Minor OP 64 first performed in 1845. It took Mendelssohn six years to write. Today we hear it performed by three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn playing in June 2012 with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Korean Art Centre Concert Hall, Seoul Korea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dBg__wsuo
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
We’ve made it to Saturday, all the while trying to sort through the blizzard of executive orders issued by our Orange Overlord. As we cruise into the weekend, we need to reflect on Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General. The Senate Judiciary Committee will probably vote on the nomination on Tuesday, after which it will go to the full Senate for a confirmation vote.
At a moment like this one, it simply will not do to have someone in the attorney general’s office who was deemed too racist to be a federal judge 30 years ago. It will not do to have someone in the attorney general’s office who launched a dirty-tricks prosecution of voting-rights activists when he was a U.S. Attorney in Alabama. It will not do to have someone in the attorney general’s office who greeted the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 by noting that it was “good for the South.”
Pierce says that no (zero) Democrats should vote for Sessions:
There is no room for compromise or horse-trading. The Democratic Party should stand for the expansion of the franchise and for a greater ease in exercising it.
Voting rights will be at risk if Sessions is confirmed. The AG will follow Trump’s lead and focus on a “voter fraud” investigation in the big liberal states and urban areas that do not vote Republican. This is something the right wing has been doing for years. From what Trump said this week to David Muir on ABC, he believes that the problem exists only in places he didn’t win. He told Muir that every one of the alleged 2 million to 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton.
If it isn’t clear by now, this is a powerful new national campaign of voter suppression coming down the road to a polling place near you. We don’t know at this point who will be heading Trump’s “investigation,” or what form it’s likely to take, but Jeff Sessions is just the man for the job.
We could also tell our Senators that they should not vote to confirm Betsy DeVos and Tom Price, but both will probably get a few Dem votes. Wrongo isn’t arguing for complete resistance as the only response to Trump, but we can’t appoint Sessions.
Will even a single Republican Senator have the backbone to vote against the president’s hand-picked bigot? The prospects are not heartening.
Glad that’s off of Wrongo’s chest. Time to grab a cup of Bengal Spice Chai tea, and mellow out with the Saturday Soother. Today we are going acapella with the University of North Carolina Clef Hangers. They have been around for 35 years, and have released 17 studio-produced albums. Here are the Clef Hangers doing “You Never Need Nobody”, a song by the Brooklyn NY-based The Lone Bellow:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Today is the Trump Inaugural. So many preparations, and so much detail for the transition team to worry about. From the no stone left unturned department, comes this from the WSJ:
Workers preparing for the Trump Inaugural have taped over the name of the company — “Don’s Johns” — that has long supplied portable restrooms for major outdoor events in the nation’s capital…Virginia-based Don’s Johns calls itself the Washington area’s top provider of portable toilet rentals. But the name apparently strikes too close to home for inaugural organizers.
Too close to Donald John for Donald John Trump? Of course. Somebody placed blue tape over the company name on dozens of portable restrooms installed near the Capitol for the inauguration. The company says they didn’t do it. But, the company’s name is clearly blocked from the TV cameras:
Once Donald J. Trump becomes the 45th president of the US, he will certainly push the agenda that got him elected. We all will need a way to sort the signal from the noise that we will hear from both his partisans and his opposition (which includes the Wrongologist). When you hear people raising reasoned questions and objections to Trump’s proposed policies, odds are that you’re listening to the kind of dissent that’s essential to our democracy, and you ought to take it seriously. For the kinds of arm-waving, emotional, knee-jerk support (or criticism) that you will hear every day, feel free to ignore that. You will know the knee-jerk stuff, since it will be sung in harmony by all the other partisans. And the media will repeat it often for your consideration.
Wrongo has serious problems with Trump, but is hopeful that his administration will:
Live up to his populist domestic promises, and
Simplify our country’s confusing foreign policy
If he normalizes relations with Russia, extracts us from the messes in Iraq and Syria and if he encourages domestic jobs growth, Wrongo will likely sign up for all of that. If he pushes through a big infrastructure bill that isn’t a wealth transfer to corporations, Wrongo will probably go along with that as well.
Wrongo does not trust Trump or the GOP on health care insurance. He worries that Republicans will throw a number of Americans under the bus, causing a great deal of unnecessary pain.
You can be sure that Trump is going to try to do some terrible things over the next four years, such as appointing ideologues to the Supreme Court. But, Congressional Republicans will clearly attempt far worse things than will The Overlord.
So the terrible fact is, we have to count on Trump to rein in the worst of the GOP’s ideas and instincts.
Needing to trust Donald Trump is enough to frighten anyone.
Trump tweets continually to rally his supporters while simultaneously manipulating the media. It’s unnerving. Saying that Trump is terrifying, while correct, is useless. The most obsessive of his opponents focus on worst-case scenarios that are designed to rally (and raise money from) the anti-Trump troops among us. Sadly, that strategy largely guarantees that the opposition will look disorganized and fragile. It also causes the American center-left to be fragmented issue by issue, and therefore, unable to broadly challenge the GOP, at least in the short run.
The Dems need to coalesce around only the potentially win-able issues. Otherwise, they should “just say no” to any Trump legislation intended to weaken or break our social contract. Sen. Schumer is correct when he says that the GOP needs to own 100% of the pain they cause the average person, whenever they break the contract. Any Democrat that breaks ranks to support issues like cuts to Medicare or privatization of Social Security must be challenged from the left in the next primary.
Democrats did not believe they would be in this political mess. They are trying to find their footing, but establishment Democrats want to simply tweak the message, and stay the course.
However, the battle against Trump and the GOP majority must move from “Republican Lite” to a fight to put social justice and progressivism back on the table as viable options for all Americans.
Otherwise, it will be a precipitous fall from political relevancy for Democrats.
Establishment Democrats who profit from the status quo, have no incentive to come up with an agenda that appeals to people who are suffering because of that status quo. The great weakness of Hillary Clinton’s campaign was that she aimed her appeals at the minority of voters who would benefit from the established neoliberal order, while largely ignoring those who suffered under it.
That decision could cost the Dems for a generation.
Trump’s call for allowing religion in politics is Islam tested, Ayatollah approved:
