Month: December 2016
North Carolina: The New Political Reality
This isn’t just hardball politics. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic approach to government, one that says that when we win, we get to implement our agenda, and when you win, you don’t. … To put this in context, perhaps nowhere in the country have Republicans moved more aggressively to solidify power by disenfranchising their opponents as they have in North Carolina.
— Paul Waldman
When You Repeat Trump, You Help Trump
Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message. … Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.
— George Lakoff
You’re Going to Miss Obamacare
Depending on where you live, up to one in three of you could find yourselves without insurance if Republicans are able to follow through on their threat to repeal Obamacare.
Here’s the problem. Without the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obamacare’s official name, we would go back to allowing insurance companies to refuse to cover you if you ever had certain health problems. And it’s not just cancer or heart disease that falls into the “declinable pre-existing conditions” category. Do you, or does a loved one, have:
- Arthritis or other inflammatory joint diseases
- Diabetes
- Kidney disease
- Multiple sclerosis
- Obesity (defined as a body mass index of 30 or higher, such as 5’9″ person who weighs at least 203 pounds)
- Parkinson’s disease
- Pending surgery
- Pregnancy
- Sleep anea
- Stroke
Video of Pres. Obama Saying ‘Merry Christmas,’ Over and Over
It’s part and parcel of the right wing’s bogus “war on Christmas” that Pres. Obama never says “merry Christmas.” In fact, many people in the more fevered swamps of the conservative base believe the president has actually banned “merry Christmas” altogether.
Roll tape…
Interesting Factoids About the 2016 Election
56
The Cook Political Report compiles 56 interesting observations about the 2016 presidential election. Here’s a sample: Trump won the White House by winning 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods Market. This 54-percent gap is the widest ever recorded. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, it was 19 percent; when George W. Bush was elected in 2000, it was 31 percent; and when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was 43 percent.
Trump Is a Threat to Democracy
Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.
— Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Trump Cabinet’s Combined Wealth Equal to 43 Million Poorest Families in U.S.
$9.5 billion
Combined wealth of the 17 people President-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank, with several positions still unfilled, reports Quartz. “This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the U.S. … Affluence of this magnitude in a U.S. presidential cabinet is unprecedented.”
Imagine a White House with No Chain of Command
And you’ll call my people. You call me. It doesn’t make any difference! We have no chain of command around here!
— President-elect Donald Trump, quoted by the Washington Post, at a meeting of tech CEOs.
Help USS The Deplorables Set Sail
I’m usually not much of a joiner or a petition signer, but when there’s an issue I believe in, I will get behind it 100 percent.
So it is with a petition recently posted to the “We the People” site run by the White House. Someone called “D.S” has posted a petition to name the next available U.S. Navy ship USS The Deplorables. D.S. doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but suggests the name is “To honor those citizens who rose up to defend America and The Constitution from the globalists.”
